The Wolf Of All Streets - BTC open interest hits 2024 Low TradFi leaving? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

In this episode of Crypto Town Hall, hosts and guests dive into the current Bitcoin market stagnation around $66K, debating cycle comparisons (Bitcoin vs. gold-adjusted drawdowns), retail vs. institutional sentiment gaps, and why institutions with dry powder are quietly accumulating despite fear & greed at lows. Discussions cover ETF inflows/outflows, long-term adoption timelines (2–3 years for RIAs/wirehouses), tokenization/stablecoins as rising priorities, privacy concerns in regulations like the GENIUS Act, AI's disruptive potential (e.g., agentic tools and risks), and Coinbase's Q4 earnings miss offset by revenue diversification. The conversation blends macro views, on-chain insights, and optimism for eventual upside as fundamentals improve.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every weekday here on X 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Dave, I completely missed the last two days. How was it? Maybe it doesn't have his mic. Yeah, whatever. It misclick. Well, I don't know. We had, you know, some interesting conversations. Look, the market has, you look at it's the same price it was two days ago when you left. So, you know, how exciting could it be? I mean, we did have an interesting conversation about the Epstein.

and what does it mean? And Gary had some really interesting commentary on why things aren't being released, you know, et cetera. You know, I actually then follow that up with a video basically said in a world of lies, you know, what's the value of truth, you know, talking about, you know, availed a reference to Mark Yusko's analysis that Bitcoin is the technology of truth.

But, you know, look, this market is bouncing around here. I read your, you know, your newsletter. and your commentation is Benjamin Cowan, and I think it's interesting. I think it's worth talking about. I just published a quick article because I did some quick analysis on the fact that you need to compare this cycle, the past cycles based on Bitcoin in gold, not Bitcoin and dollars. And when you do that, the gap shrinks rather dramatically.

So, you know, if you look, this current peak to trough is 67% versus 70-some-odd percent in the last one. And that 10% difference is much easier to explain via the rotation of OGs to new investors via the ETF than the difference between 50% and 27%. So, I mean, 50% and 77%. So basically or 50% and 85% or whatever we've had in. Well, whatever. I mean, you know, whichever one, but I mean, the fact is, it explains a large part of the potential delta. It's easy to look at the rest of it and say, well, the amplitude of the up move was much less, so therefore, it's fine. I mean, in short, I think that you wouldn't be violating a structure if such a thing were a universal constant. Now, remember, three data points is not exactly statistically significant,

but it makes it a lot easier to say this time is different. I hate, whenever someone says this time is different, it makes my skin crawl, but there are things that change. Like, AI is a change for a lot of stocks and if you look at software companies, you know, they are certainly feeling that that it is different this time for a bunch of reasons. You know, there are changes that have happened. Dollars have been printed. Gold is up much, much higher, you know, back up over 5,000 today. So anyway, I mean, that's my thought. I mean, as far as the title today, you know, the open interest being lower, that is not necessarily a less demand. That is less, that is necessarily less hedging. It could very well be. It doesn't mean there's less buying, although there is a lot

of there's less hedging of derivatives. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think that's bullish or bearish. If anything, I'd lean it to being, you know, less bearish. But, you know, I'm curious what other people think. So far, we haven't been able to get anybody to throw their hands up. So we're going to start calling on people like in class, Scott. As is tradition. Yeah. I mean, I can, I talk about, you know, I was obviously at Bitcoin Investor Week in New York, and there's a gaping hole in I think what we see in retail sentiment that, you know, Crypto Fear and Creed Index at five and what I saw on the ground, which is that a bunch of people who actually have dry powder or are institutional or lovingness price action, like loving, loving, loving,

Tillman, I think, put it the best on my show yesterday, and then he said it actually on stage with Pomp. He said, right now you're depressed if you have no dry powder. And if you actually have money on the sidelines right now, you're ecstatic. And that's actually the, you know, bullish, divide for vibe. Well, I mean, I'll tell you I was his hand up. So let's go there. But all I'll say is retail are followers, institutions, not some are, some aren't, but retail are followers, meaning that Retail will get excited when price goes up and retail gets morose when price goes down. You know, it's literally the, there's a reason why companies like the one that I started at 2 Sigma called, you know, that takes the other side of retail makes money.

And it's not because retail gets trends right. Retail follows trends and exacerbates them. Anyway, I'm going to tell you had your hand up. Sorry. Oh, you're good. I actually, Scott was going to ask you to drill more into this because I think that there's a huge disconnect happening in the perception of Bitcoin and crypto right now. And obviously in this kind of price action is to be expected with down bad sentiment,

but everything from this is the last cycle and that Bitcoin is outdated tech, quantum resistance, all these confluence of negative signals flying all over the place. But I think that what this is completely oblivious to is the enterprise institutional development and interest that's actually going on to embrace this technology. And since you are at the ground floor of that event, Scott, I was just wondering if like the actual outside of just like the buying interest, the real like development, embracing of the technology and onboarding into the space side of it that you were getting some intel on.

I would just say that every single institution and wirehouse, is coming to conferences like this, hungry to figure out exactly what their plan should be, where they should allocate, and how they should be able to do that. I think Brian can probably speak to some of this as well in a moment, not that he was at the conference, but obviously as, you know, running a salon of treasury company. And the way that they're approaching it and none of them are concerned at all that it's going anywhere. There's no talk of going to zero. There's no concern about the government.

People are literally just trying to figure it out. And I had a conversation with Matt Hogan yesterday. And I asked him a lot of these questions, and he said, you just have to look at the way that these institutions generally operate in their timeline. So if you go, you know, they specialize obviously in registered investment advisors, RIAs. So he said, there was a tweet yesterday from Hunter, the CEO of Bitwise, that said, you know, we've been talking to this one institution for two years. they finally allocated $11 million yesterday.

They're really excited to be buying in the 60,000s. And I asked them about that and he said, well, you have to realize, like, if you're looking at an RIA, which is their primary business, the first thing that RAA does is they, you know, they do their research, they wait for the clarity, and then when they're finally allowed to do it, they buy. And then they hold it for a year. And after that year, what do they do? Well, they have, you know, I asked him if you have a hundred clients, you know, what does this look like? He said, well, 10 of them have probably been rabidly asking for exposure, and you've told them to just wait, you're kind of experimenting.

Then you allow those 10 to allocate. And then you wait a year. And after those 10 allocate, you can start pitching to the next 100. So it's a two to three year process, and the wirehouses are just coming online in the last three months. So they're not even looking at the price action. Like I talked to Dan Tapiero, Gary, I talk to your brother, everybody, same thing. We have a 10-year fund. Nobody gives a shit if it's 120 or 60.

Like a bunch of retail people who can't stand watching their balance drop in U.S. dollars are freaking out. But everyone else with a long time horizon, it's a rounding error if their thesis is right as to where price is going. And even if it's a rounding error would rather be buying at a 50% discount. And that's really the consensus across the board. Yeah. Thank you. Scott, I think that's interesting, though, because it feels like you touched on two different themes there. You started with the technology, and I couldn't agree more.

That's where I see quite a bit of conversation and adoption still to this day, and especially, like, my thesis around agentic economies of the future, blockchain is tailor-made for the scale and voluminous. of transactions because traditional banking visa master card rails just won't be able to facilitate that in a cost-effective manner. And then as far as like institutional adoption or, you know, high-net worth people actually accumulating the asset and more specifically accumulating Bitcoin, I think this is a story that we've seen play out in various asset classes for quite some time where, you know, they'll, the powers that be the large behemoths, if you will, will do their damnedest to depress the price or tell, you know, anyone within earshot that the asset is garbage. But in the background, they're quietly putting together the puzzle pieces to be able to

accumulate and accumulate at scale. And I think that, you know, as you see, you know, headlines of micro strategy being underwater on its costs and things of that nature, All this is is fuel to the fire of institutions and high net worth and family offices buying into the space. And I'll just end with this. Like there were two different family offices that I've talked to over the course of this week, and they are both aggressively looking to buy into Bitcoin. They had dabbled in the past, but this is their first foray into serious allocation. Exactly.

And I also asked him, and Amatea and Brian, I want you guys to speak as well. But I also asked then, you know, what's the other narrative? Because Matt and I, Matt's like my guy I check in with, you know, once a month just to see where the institutional adoption is coming. And, you know, it used to be that they bought Bitcoin and then they started asking about the Ether and Solana ETFs. He said, now our only two conversations are Bitcoin and tokenization and stable coins in real world assets.

And nobody has an answer yet how to invest in that side. So that has changed to some degree. but they will buy ether or salana exposure to gain exposure to that, but probably that the future there is some sort of index, you know, of layer ones and publicly traded equities that you can gain exposure to. I'm going to tell you, I had your hand up. Just to kind of tie up that conversation, then I want to go to Brian. Go to Brian.

I was a ghost hand from before. I asked my question. Yeah, Brian, obviously, you know, you're running things over at UPECC is the chief strategy officer. you're very deep in the weeds on all of this. Yeah, appreciate it and appreciate having me on. I had two thoughts, really. One is, I think now is such a great entry point. It's easy to see why people are confused and disappointed.

Obviously, like the underlying fundamentals are just improving. The U.S. is down a 180 in terms of like their view on crypto, institutional adoptions only accelerating, and many other asset classes are dear all-time high. versus BTC, which is roughly 50% below. So this in my mind is what has led to this atrocious sentiment. If you look at fear and greed, it's basically at its lowest since 2022. And crypto kind of trades on sentiment, not fundamentals.

We don't really have any fundamentals that we can throw into any sort of like discounted cash flow valuation model. But what gets me so excited is these fundamentals continue to improve. So prices down, fundamentals up. It means more potential upside. And over time, prices have to follow the fundamentals. And so that's why I am still supremely optimistic and bullish. Point number two is I think so many people just let price inform their view of the fundamentals.

When BTC is at 125, it's the best monetary asset out there. And then when BTC is at 65, like the thesis is dead. And I actually am having a hard time pinpointing exactly what's changed since BTC hit its all-time high in October. other than price. And I think that letting price inform your view of the fundamentals is the exact opposite of what you want to do. And it's actually the perfect recipe to buy high and to sell low, which again, we want to avoid.

So I thought I'd share both. 100% agree. David aligns with what we always say. I always say it. Nothing is a better cure. Nothing is a better catalyst than higher prices. Every story that we're missing right now, if Bitcoin goes up $20,000 will be the biggest bullish

story of all time and we'll be going to a million. Right. I mean, look, the Wall Street pathology is narrative follows price instead of price follows narrative. And there are investors, probably all the famous investors, all basically say the opposite, say, listen, invest based on narrative is probably too strong a word, but invest based on fundamentals, based on narratives and price will eventually follow. But, you know, we've all added in the crypto world, don't over leverage yourself so you get washed out when inevitably you time it wrong. Right?

I'm going to tell you had your hand up and then it just disappeared. Was that in a ghost hand or did you? Was there something you want to. I think my hand is completely schizo today. But I'm happy to jump in here and actually ask a question. So there was an interview that I'm sure everyone here saw between Shemoth, Pala, Hopatia, or whatever's last name is. and NCZ.

And towards the end of that interview, this isn't a commentary on either of these gentlemen. This is just a commentary on Bitcoin, which was Shemoth, even though he's been very early to Bitcoin, talked about privacy being a critical component that he sees being a hurdle for mass adoption of Bitcoin as a whole. I think obviously the privacy narrative is very hot right now,

but it's also strengthening as a thesis. And I just wanted to get everyone's takes here on their thoughts around privacy and relationship to Bitcoin and maybe a response to the clip. So I can tell you something anecdotally before everybody jumps in. I had this conversation yesterday. So I was at this conference, but I was just shooting my own content basically in the corner with anyone that we could grab. And Chris John Carlo is one of my favorite people literally in the world,

like we've become friends. He was the ex-chairman of the CFTC and since then has basically advised every exchange, all these public offerings, everyone in the industry and is very close to the politics. And he was the first person that I heard say this and all he wanted to talk about was privacy. So I asked him about the Clarity Act. He put it at 6040. He thinks that it gets past. But he very clearly said, I think it gets past 6040 and all of us absolutely hate it. and it's a disaster. And I said, why do you think that? Because the banks and the politicians will win, A, he's like, but B, it's just they don't get it.

But he was like, and then he said something that I had never heard. He said, well, look at the Genius Act. And I said, what do you mean? Everybody's been celebrating the Genius Act this entire time. He said, the Genius Act is a disaster? I said, well, why is a Genius Act a disaster? And he said, well, you know, I've been working on the digital dollar project. For those who don't know his background, he has a non-for-profit and his thesis.

was that central bank digital currencies are inevitable. And he was going to create basically a non-for-profit to advise on adding privacy to them so that we didn't lose the aspects of cash if central bank digital currencies ended up being inevitable. So basically making sure that privacy was a part of it. He said the Genius Act has locked in every fear the United States that we've had as an industry about surveillance and the worst parts of central bank digital currencies. and we all just cheered it.

He said, not only do you now have government surveillance locked in because it has all of the features of the Bank Secrecy Act are included in the Genius Act. So the government has full transparency into any transaction that you make with a stable coin period. It's not just law enforcement, which it should have been. He was like, but we also have given private companies

full visibility into every one of our transactions, which is the double worst case scenario. So definitely made me kind of think about the reason we got into this in the first place, the privacy and the original ethos, and that we're cheering a bunch of shit that's literally horrible for us and horrible for the future. And Chris is the most measured, reasonable, honest person I've ever met. I won't even say in this industry, in our government, and then in our industry. And he pointed all this out. And we've never had that conversation here, Amateo. Like, we've never talked about the privacy of stable

coins because we were just happy to get something done. Gary, I said, yeah, go ahead, Dave. Yeah, go ahead, Dave. Well, I mean, look, I hate it. It is, I'm not rendered speechless often, but I think that there are two pieces. And this was a classic one where hell, even I admit to it, where we're all focused on one thing, namely control and ignored privacy. And that is, that is a big deal. I mean, he's not wrong.

I mean, I'm not disputing anything that you just said. the only difference between what we have or are getting, assuming the banking industry allows it by their, you know, the amount of money that they're throwing at the politicians. The only difference is, is it can't control what you buy. The government can't control. It's up to, you know, and stable coin issuers, it'll be so competitive. If they do start trying to control what you buy, those stable coins will be the ones that people will avoid. So, I mean, it's a control thing, but privacy is. But he thinks that in a world where the pendulum swings to a different kind of government that we currently have right now, that there's nothing in the Genius Act that protects us from that happening. No, there's nothing.

The only thing that protects anything is up to the Supreme Court to talk about the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. That's pretty much it. Right. And he said if we had a central – and he literally said if we had a central bank digital currency, he's like, which we all feared so much, including myself, we would have Fourth Amendment protection. and we do not with private stable coins in the Genius Act. Yeah, well, that's true. I mean, I think it's interesting. It's definitely an interesting take.

I need to process that. But what I would say about clarity is, my guess is we'll hate it. I think that the banks will put lots of poison pills against defy in there. The fact that the banks have the ability to do this at all is disgusting, but it's disgusting because we have so much money in politics right now that the politicians are bought and paid for. I mean, the banks shouldn't even have a seat at this table. They've been stealing, literally stealing $100 billion a year from their depositors for

quite some time now. And so the fact that that's okay and that they can take some of the, in all likelihood, the north, I mean north since the financial crisis, well north of a couple trillion dollars of effective subsidy and then take. a small percentage of that and put it into the coffers of all the political campaigns that they have the influence is one of the biggest travesties out there. I mean, it's not as emotionally, it's not as emotionally horrible as what you're seeing with Epstein, but arguably it's worse in terms of the impact on society. So, you know, it's a crazy world that we live in. And it's not like

anyone disputes these figures, Scott, either. I mean, that's the funny thing. I mean, you just, you don't hear it. Nobody disputes it. I mean, it's, it's, like J.P. Morgan and the banks, we know that it was $100 billion in net interest difference, of which the vast majority was not in business loans. It was in things like Fed deposits and Treasury. So it's a crazy thing, but that is what's happening. So yeah, it's, I can understand being negative. That said, if what you're talking about is number go up versus number go down, I think that passage of a clarity bill, which will validate and be a starter's flag, essentially, for all the traditional firms to move much deeper into this space, it will push the number up.

It may not be, it may be, you know, what's it, a Pyrrhic victory, but it will push the number up. And I think that that's something that people need to understand. I personally think it's interesting that people are saying 60 and, you know, higher percent chance of getting passed. I think our market has given up on it or had given up. I thought it was less than 10%. Now it seems to be higher. So I'm just curious what other people think. Brian.

I was just going to comment on the privacy point. Not an expert here, but I'm a little bit less worried about it. Two reasons. One is actually I'm not so sure the average person really cares about decentralization or privacy. People use blockchains that are not fully decentralized. people are willing to give up their privacy to Google or Facebook for the ease of single sign-on. And so I'm not so sure like it's a big deal for a lot of people. And then the second thing is, is a bit more toward smart contract blockchains outside of Bitcoin.

But there's just been tremendous advances in the use of privacy technology like zero knowledge proofs. So pretty soon. And even now, I think like we can prove compliance with existing laws without actually revealing any information. about the transaction itself. And so I think as that technology continues to move from the theoretical to the practical, we'll be able to comply with laws and still enable privacy for a number of different use cases. I mean, one thing is certain, Scott, is that Paul, or Brian is right about one thing. People don't give a crap, right?

You know, the average human being will put everything they have into an iPhone and tell and, you know, effectively not care. People want ease of use and safety. I mean, if you look at how popular, just to put it just as, even in our industry, if you look how popular Dubai is because of the low tax rates, I mean, and safety. I mean, I'm not going to lie. I love being there. I mean, we have an office there.

You know, Ian lives there. It's a great place for business. But do you have privacy? No, 90-some-odd percent of the entire country is covered with cameras. So do people really care? I'm not saying it's not an important thing. I'm just saying that people vote with their feet, and Brian's undeniably right there. Come on, that had to have triggered somebody.

I definitely agree that nobody cares. I just think they will if it ends up being their money. I'm going to tell you, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, look, it's not about, I think the question isn't about whether retail cares. It's about whether businesses or enterprises want wallets that they control exposed with wallet balances and having transactions on chain that are visible to other people, right? And whether that's a security risk for individuals, which we've already seen become an issue. Ultimately, I have a lot of belief in the space and the development and engineering in the space

that if you've got a multi-trillion dollar asset in Bitcoin with the ability to build and innovate on it, it's not impossible or crazy to create a privacy layer. on top of Bitcoin more natively, or even if it's a side piece that that settles on Bitcoin, side chain, whatever it may be. However they achieve the tech, I think that it's ultimately solvable. And that kind of falls back into the BTC5 world where I think you can, there's more value in building that kind of thing. When it comes to Bitcoin on a hardened protocol like Bitcoin,

rather than trying to create Bitcoin private, which obviously exists out there. But I think having it natively on Bitcoin is something that's solvable, but is something that we'll see continuing to have demand for as Bitcoin scales into the more institutional and enterprise level adoption. Even these family offices that may not, you know, if they get wallets that are tagged and associated with them, they just may not want all that stuff visible in how they're moving their money or whether they decided to sell some or buy more.

Well, there's two things here. First, there's within the financial system, there are, it's, there's an obfuscation layer that is baked into the cake. Now, it's a costly obfuscation layer, but, you know, if you buy an ETF, you know, your BlackRock knows who you are, or Pitwise knows who you are, or Fidelity knows who you are, et cetera, et cetera, but nobody else does. So that, that's thing number one. Thing number two is inside of crypto. I mean, you know, Bitcoin native, if you have the optionality to take delivery, that's important, but a lot of people won't. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today. For all the reasons you said. The other thing that's worth interesting is if you think about in the

financial system, you know, people talked about why is, I'm not going to shill the coin, but I will, but I will mention some technical details. If you want to know why Canton Network was one of the ones that was, was picked by DTCC, it's because Canton Network, allows for, you could call it permissioned blockchains. It allows for you to create permission blockchains. And you need that in the financial system. It's not like it's a question. Nobody, nobody wants to buy stock having the entire world know that they've just bought stock. You know, there's an entire process by which we obfuscate less people who buy less than a certain percentage and then even after that you have 30 days to report you know the reason for this is simple

if you're trying to buy you know a controlling stake in a company you want some time to be able to acquire it before everybody else knows you're trying to otherwise they'll just run in front of you and so you know things like that are necessary in the financial system now that is not necessarily true when it comes just to moving wealth around you know but but even there you know we have this idea in cash and 10,000 dollars is stupid because 10,000 dollars when the rule was past compared to $10,000 now is a very different thing. But the idea that transactions under a certain threshold don't have to be reported, et cetera. But if you're on a blockchain, everything is effectively there. And so there's a lot of things that need to be worked out. The reality is

that Bitcoin transactions, small ones, no one's going to care. The big ones are the ones that people are going to care about. And that's exactly, that's kind of the way we want it to be, right? Yeah, but it's private. I think the fear there, and I think you're absolutely, correct is obviously Citadel can't have their like block orders broadcasted and need privacy, right? As you said, but it's yet again a, the rules that we desire exist for the big players and the institutions, but maybe not for the individual. I think that's what he was getting at. Yeah, they'll have privacy, but you might one day be living on a social credit system where you need to spend your money on groceries or can't get on the bus. I'm not saying that's going to happen,

but that's the fear with what he was saying about the Genius Act and privacy. No, true, absolutely true. I mean, look, I mean, is anyone here not seeing that Black Mirror episode from a few years ago? You know, it's on social credit score and then knowing that it's happening. I mean, it's horrifying. I mean, it's horrifying when sci-fi shows start predicting reality, but they do tend to do so. And we've seen quite a bit of that. AI is causing lots of fear there, right, Scott?

A ton, and I think I'm starting to believe it's justified from the conversations also that I was having there. Mostly from Bill Barheight, who if anyone doesn't know, he bills here all the time. He's the CEO of Abre, but he was one of the early, like, internet coders, like ran Netscape, like really deep, deep in the weeds. He said he hasn't slept in the last 10 days because he got his hands on Cloudbot and his coding again for the first time in decades. First of all, he said anyone who's doing that that does not have coding knowledge, you're going to hack yourself and maybe, like, I don't know, Skynet's going to kill you. But he put up a, you know, he was able to put up a firewall.

and control the VPNs and do it. It's really expensive. You know, it's like $1,000 a day if you're doing the stuff. But he said that in 10 days, he could replace basically everyone and everything in his life and that's coming for everybody. I mean, he said, you know, he was showing me. It's his chief of staff. If there's an emergency, it calls him on the phone and talks to him.

It tells him that something's happening. You know, if something happens with an account or there's like liquidation events or something, it will call him. It processed every legal document, full financial health. history, everything he's ever had. It knows the code names of things he never shared with anybody and discusses it with them. I mean, it's absolute insanity and it's a couple weeks in. There's the, I made a point on Finance Daily this morning, which might help you sleep a little bit better. That is that if you look at the difference between coding and building systems, the people in most

companies that are actually doing the coding are the lower priced people, many of which from the U.S. have been outsourced to cheaper jurisdictions, but that the real value are the people like Bill who know exactly what to code. It's not the translation from human speaking to computers. That is the most valuable. It is the, what are the instructions, what do you want it to do, and how do you set it up to do? Now, that doesn't change the fact that code. is becoming much less important. It doesn't change the fact that the ability for people like Bill to do it will be real. But that's...

Yeah. So now he was making the exact point. He was like, don't touch this stuff unless you're extremely experienced or you're just going to open yourself to complete disaster. He was like, it's very, very challenging to allow whatever I want to go out, but nothing to come in to the closed system, you know, to allow this thing to go out and utilize. And he also said, like, you know, the whole singularity and self-thinking and all of that,

it's still very far from that. None of that. That's not what it really is. It's able to anticipate. But it anticipates, you know, in the morning, it's like,

these are the things you need to do. These are the things you should do. These are things you should be looking at. It anticipates. He's like, it's like having 10 of the best chief of staffs ever. Yeah, I saw the show where he said that.

I thought it was, it was fascinating. It was great. For people who don't know, that is up on your YouTube site already. So, yeah, it was great yesterday live. I'm a tell you.

Go ahead. Yeah, I've been getting my open claw all configured, trained, and set up. And there's various ways to make this easy for people, simple claw and all these tools. There's also employing it on a Mac Mini. I mean, oh, you guys saw the posts. But I would say that there's ways that you can get this set up and configured. You don't have to connect it to your entire business. You don't have to connect it and give it credentials to your Google Docs.

you can just train it up on the things that you want to do and automate and start the process of testing it. So I just wanted to let people know that there are ways that you can get this running. You can start the process of it automating different things. You can give it a personality. You can educate it on your personality. You can talk about your goals, your aspirations. You can ask it to interview you to get a clear understanding of everything that you're working on and everything that you're doing. And then you can set automated jobs for it to provide you notes every morning for Cryptotown Hall.

You can train it on all of the past Crypto Town Hall transcripts or anything else that you want to do. It's unbelievable. And yeah, to exactly what you said, Scott, there's people who have multiples of these going and running and they're serving different roles within a company. They're meeting with each other several times a day to talk about next steps and action. actions and it's unbelievable. I mean, this is just a couple weeks in. It's completely shocking. And having played with it some myself, I am blown away by the utility and functionality of this. And I'm not doing the risk. He wasn't fearmongering me. He was more complimenting exactly what it does, but a cautionary tale of what it could do, if you're not safe with it. So I agree with

what you're saying there. I would never give it access to all those things, even if I knew it can run my life better because I'm an idiot. Like, I have no idea what I'm doing. Seems like a terrible idea. But for someone like him, it can run his entire life in 10 days. Eric, I don't hear Eric. Do you guys hear him? Nope.

I don't see the speak. I don't see the mute button, but I can't hear him. Hey, can I go back to where we started, which was your conversation with Hogan and saying, like, there's a, it seems like there's two markets here. There's the new institution. buyer, which is confirming what I like it. That's been my sense. We do not have organic purchasing here. And we need these outsiders. So I love the time frame you gave also, Scott, because I think that's very realistic. It takes these people two years. How long has the ETF been lit up? A little over two years. About that, but he made the point that it's really not even the ETF approval. It's the wirehouse like Morgan Stanley. These guys are coming online literally now. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. I think that's the right timeline. These institutions really, you know, unlike us, we're always chasing, hey, how can I make some money tomorrow morning? These institutions don't really think that way. The first thing is, hey, let's make sure we don't get in trouble. Let's make sure we don't get sued. Let's make sure we have all our documents in place. And we'll make the money in three years. We're not going to, you know, blow our entire business on racing to the start. So I think this, and I think our community doesn't understand how they move or how they think they have to go through committees i mean

it's it's a process that's that's true gary but but a couple things i mean first of all you're a hundred percent right as it applies to volatility in the way trading is done i mean you know have look i i was in the belly of the beast for for many years right so i i can tell you categorically what you said is true i I think I told the story on this station, how I was designated by the Internet Operating Committee in 2000 to rebuild the technology stack for inside Solomon Smith Barney because of this internet thing. I mean, literally, that was called the Internet Operating Committee. And this was in 2000. So to understand how far behind the curve these organizations could get, it's crazy. But once they get moving and once it all happens and the starter's pistol goes boom, they move.

Now, does they move mean they're going to jump in and push everything up immediately? Of course not. You're 100% right. But it becomes they're not going to stop. And so once they view their vested interest being in something, there will be investments. You will see a flurry of M&A activity. And there's a lot of things that go into it. But you're 100% right.

And the point that you're making, I think, is critical for people to understand. You don't get FOMO chasing rally type stuff. that's just not happening. You know, advisors won't say that. They will potentially recommend. They do tend to recommend stocks that are moving. That is true. So if Bitcoin, they're not in that respect.

They're not different than anybody else. But the mechanism that they buy is far more controlled, right? You're not going to see these ridiculous wicks from, you know, coming from TradFa. You just won't. Anyway, now we have three different hands up. Eric, I think if your speaker's working, you were up there from before. Nope. Can't hear Eric.

Eric, just drop off stage and it's, and just check, check your mic is what I would do because sometimes I push that button and bad things happen. So I don't know, Amatoa or Brian first. I can't, couldn't tell. We're back to ghost hands. Go to Brian. I was just going to say, like, fully agree that opening up Bitcoin and crypto as an asset class and it will lead to more buying over the long run. It takes a lot of time for folks to get comfortable, allocate a material port. other portfolios to it. So I think that this is a long-term underlying tailwind. But what I was going to say is I actually think like there's some short-term headwinds here. And this is just looking at the BTC ETF inflows. So 2024, total inflows were 35 billion.

2025, like a lot of folks that wanted to buy via an ETF already did. And so those inflows actually fell to 22 billion. So that was a 37% decline. And then so far this year, BTC and ETF inflows have been negative 3 billion. And so I actually think like that new demand is falling quite significantly and fully agree it will build up over time as more folks like do their research and understand what BTC actually is and why they should own it. And they will certainly do that.

But I kind of think for like the near term, like there's, you know, it's hard to argue there's less demand from the ETFs versus at least that first year. I will point out, Not that I like dancing on people, you know, and doing Victory Labs, but we might remember a bunch of people, you know, coming out with the notion that when there is a drawdown, when you get the next drawdown,

when you see these 30, 40, 50% drawdowns, expect the ETFs to magnify them because people will stampede for the exits. Jim Bianco, who I know was on your show, basically said that. I'm not going to ever let that one get forgotten because that was just wrong. And I knew it was wrong at the time,

said it was wrong at the time, because most of the investors, not all, but more than not, the investors in the ETFs are making long-term allocations. And in fact that we're only down $3 billion, given the fact that we literally hit an all-time low on Bitcoin sentiment is, I think, a really good result. So I think that that's important, right? I mean, I'm curious, saying you don't think so, Scott, or you do think so, or what do you think about that. I absolutely think so. Matt Hogan told me he was like, you can look at,

you look at the numbers overall and then he lost in the weeds. He said last week that Bitwise had 200 million in inflows. If you looked at them on that huge drop where all the news was about outflows. So I think it depends on the product. It depends on what's happening behind the scenes. So yeah, I agree. Generally. So, you know, I think that that's important. You know, I also think that the macro news is, is, all I can say is strange, you know, not strange in the sense of unpredictable, but strange in the sense of people don't know what to do. It's like there was a long conversation on Finance Daily this morning about what happens that the Fed is likely to cut rates are going to come down.

And only one person, and I often criticize them. So, you know, that's fine. But on this one, I think he's right, is David Levinson was making the point that you've made many times, Scott, which is the beginning of a rate cutting cycle is usually really bad for the stock market. Yeah. And he was going through his reasons. And I agreed with half of them. I mean, I'm not going to, it's not worth going to revisiting the whole conversation. You can rewind and listen if you care.

But the TLDR is that that when rates come down, the financial complex suffers. for a variety of reasons. That said, out on the risk curve, things tend to be okay and do well, but it's usually after it falls. So who knows what's going to happen, you know, when Warsh gets in and things go. But the morning data, you know, inflation moderating is generally making people think it's more likely. I don't think anyone thinks anything's going to happen before May.

Do they? I mean, I haven't checked Polly Market in the last two days, but I think in general there's no expectation there. Yeah, Patrick McHenry, I think, said Memorial Day, and that's kind of become consensus. for clarity. Yeah. That makes sense. So I have my doubts.

So the other, where there was one other topic that I thought was interesting. Oh, well, not Bhutan and not. Coinbase earnings, I think was an interesting one. I don't know if anybody dug in, but that was kind of the story of the last two days, I think. Yeah. So basically it was a $600 million plus loss, but that's obviously. on trading volume and retail and you know so people freaked out about their loss but then they said that they had basically had 100 million revenue and 12 different other verticals

so I think the real story is then becoming an everything company much like Robin Hood has talked about and being less dependent on the retail consumer trading you know beam coins yeah the other other other story that I was curious about because I'm still I still don't know what it is, is the Ave governance, you know, sending 100% of the revenue to the Dow. I don't know what that does for token holders. Is that good or is that bad? But it does show that what do you say? So above my pay grade. Yeah. Brian, you have a comment on that one? Because we always talk here about value going to token holders. If you want to see a renaissance in any crypto, people are going to have to understand what the hell they're going to get. What do you

think. Oh, sorry that I think the hand was delayed. I was going to comment on Coinbase earnings. That's okay. Go for that. Yeah. So, I mean, everything I was reading said they missed earnings. Analyst cut forward numbers, but obviously it's not versus where like sell side analysts thinks it's where the street generally came out to and where the sentiment was prior to that. And so if everybody thought that they were going to miss. Maybe the miss was less bad than everybody thought, which I think is what is probably leading to the stock up 14% today.

The second thing is like everyone is pointing to exactly what Scott said. So having this big positive be this revenue diversification. And so in my experience, there's really three things that determine valuation multiples. One is profitability, another is growth, and another is earnings visibility and volatility. In the Coinbase several years ago,

was completely predicated based on trading volume, which was also predicated on crypto prices, which is this exogenous variable that they can't control. And so just because Coinbase puts up this really great quarter basically says nothing about what their revenues will look like at a year, because that's again determined by crypto prices. And so I think what you're seeing is then put forth

this big effort to diversify the revenue sources, and that's going to significantly help this earnings visibility and volatility and help the multiple. And so I think like that is my sense of what the market is cheering for of today. I didn't even realize it was up 14% today, to be honest. So that's hilarious. Well, I mean, look, there's no doubt that Coinbase and the whole reason that they've angled where they have on all these acts is they want to compete directly.

They want to basically make sure that they don't get flanked by the traditional financial firms, right? They want to own crypto in the sense of being on the edge and having the first critic, maintain their first mover advantage. And that's why they went into defy and many, many other things. But at the exact same time, they want to make sure that as soon as they can offer investments in pretty much everything and, you know, all the services that financial services firms do, that they can.

And so, you know, they're trying to be the first one-stop shop. I'm not saying they're going to be, but that's what they want. And that's when investors care about. At the same time, their profit engine is crypto. And so obviously, if crypto looks like it's bottoming, people are going to look at Coinbase as the word leverage is not being used correctly in this sentence, but I can't think of a better way. A high beta play is probably better to crypto.

And so if people start getting expectations of the market improving, they're a high beta play way to play it. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at the chart right now, actually, because I hadn't opened it in quite a while. And, I mean, it swept the April low, if you're looking at the weekly on that news yesterday, right? On the earnings and then pumped off of it today. I mean, that might, I'm looking at the stock market

and you want something crypto-adjacent. I mean, 142 was a better price yesterday. But, you know, in this area, it's a gratuitous buy if you're a chartist and you actually believe the narrative of Coinbase's growth. Yep. I don't say that often, but that's a hell of a chart right here. Yeah, well, no, there are a lot.

I mean, look, it won't take much for quite a bit in the crypto sphere to have charts that look the same. I mean, you know, all the negativity is, is there. I keep making the point that there's, I think a lot of selling, I think selling exhaustion happened. I think it happened on the fifth. And I think what we've seen since then is showing that. Now, does that mean that there isn't some new old wallet that's going to say, oh, wait a minute, I meant to sell it 100,000. I don't want to sell at half that price. I mean, maybe, but it seems unlikely.

I see my friend grain of salt up here, you know, being one of the only other people who have been saying the same thing as me over the last couple of weeks. I'm curious, you know, what do you make of what's going on today? Going on today? You know, I'm not really, it's so hard to predict what's going to happen on any given day. But what I do want to ask, and I've been listening for about 15 minutes here, and I posted a chart in the Nest showing the CME open interest, which, changed in June of 2024.

And then what's happened recently with the I-Bid options, I think my view is that the institutions have been here. I think they've been here since 2017. But they've been here at size after the spot Bitcoin ETFs got approved in January 24. That's what Gary Cardone said earlier. And so I think the market is, so looking at the on-chain data, I don't really think helps you for predicting the price of Bitcoin.

I think what does help you is looking at either I-Bid or CME futures. because I think that's where the market is controlled by the big players, not the retail. But I do have a question for you, Dave. Did you catch Jordy Visser's presentation yesterday at Bitcoin Investor Week? No. Is there a link for it? I don't know if there's a link for it, but I'll give you the summary here in 30 seconds. So what he said was he said that AI caused the re-rating of SaaS companies.

And he said, basically large asset managers or hedge funds, they rotated out of those. And that's why those companies have taken such a big drop. And we saw what happened with I bid options also. And so what he then said was that sell-off has to basically end by the end of February. He didn't give a specific reason why, but he thought that it had to end by February. And I thought that was odd timing because if a 13F is published, I'm assuming 30 days after a quarter closed, that would be March, and then that would happen sometime around May. So I don't know.

I didn't look up when 13NFs are published, but he said they want to reposition. So these rotations now are happening, but he seemed to think the bottom, either we seem to hit the bottom pretty quickly if we're not there. And I thought that was plausible, but I didn't really figure out, he didn't really wasn't specific why that sell-off had to end pretty quickly. Do you have any insight to that? Not a clue, but I do think that the narrative, and I thought Jeff Park was the one who first published it,

but Jordy is basically saying the same thing as Jeff, which is that the recent correlation of Bitcoin to SaaS companies effectively sweeps Bitcoin lower when the SaaS companies go, get caught, sort of like being caught in the wake. I mean, because there is a tendency in finance to overfit recent correlations. And so you get these crowded trades, which cause all sorts of supposedly unexplainable moves,

both up and down, by the way. It's something that I've seen in history. I mean, I will never forget 2007. Now, you people were thinking, 2007, that's a long time ago. For me, that's not even all that long ago, which is kind of sad in itself. But in 2007, we saw companies, there was a collapse of a Golden Sacks funded hedge fund that was a deep value fund.

And it started a run on, quote, value stocks that, believe it or not, created so much turbulence in the market, you know, in the internals of the market in terms of what was correlated and what wasn't, I had at my own, my own team would come to me and say, boss, this is a 14 standard deviation event. It's so unlikely. Now, of course, that's absurd. anyone who knows statistics understands that that's more or less the likelihood of an individual standing on the street being killed by a flying meteor and nobody around them being killed. I mean, it's like it's a once in the universe sort of thing. But the reason that these things happen is because so many people run the same models that the world's not normally distributed. It's not normal.

These crowded trades create really interesting effects. And sometimes, you know, just completely, theoretically, unpredictable effects. I think that's what we saw in the fifth. And I think that's what's coming to an end now. You know what, Dave, because we're similar in age. But I have seen, I don't know, since 2000, since Y2K in the internet bubble, I don't know, I would say about once every two years, I have a once in a lifetime, you know, I watch in the markets once in a lifetime events every two years.

Every time we say this, like, oh, this is a, I look this up all time. This is a six standard deviation thing. And like, this should only happen once every, you know, thousand years. I'm like, why does that keep on, that goes back to exactly what you just said. Why do these once in a lifetime events seem to happen every 18 months or every two years? And you're like, like, how many times can the yen carry trade blow up? It blew up in August of 2024 and then it blew up two weeks ago. Nobody talks about that anymore.

It's like, oh, remember the yen carry trade? I'm like, I don't know, that thing keeps on blowing up. And so I think it's kind of, I don't want to say comical. I mean, I don't do the yen carry trade. So does it? But the important thing, you know, the important thing is not that individual events are comical. It's why does it happen? And the reason it happens are crowded trades.

And crowded trades, meaning that more people are in a position than would be statistically likely if you just took a, if you just, you know, where everyone was coin flipping. And so as a result, that's why. the industry focuses obsessively on things like gamma squeezes. That's why the fact that there's a shit ton of covered call strategies is really important. It may not matter ever, but if you get a move to the upside

that surprises these things and people think, all of a sudden lose their Bitcoin exposure and they want it their Bitcoin exposure, you get much more violent moves. And that's why on the downside, we've seen it, right? You know, when you see all these embedded put strategies, the same thing happened. a large part of why we saw the fall that we did.

It just, it means that that volatility, the volatility of volatility is going higher. And it's been higher. And so everyone says, well, this can't happen. I don't think that there is a more dangerous set of words in the world for investors to say, well, that can't happen because it occurs, it creates people to do things like lever to that point.

So just to be specific, someone says, well, it can never fall below X. So I'm going to use leverage that says, I'll give myself, if it falls 25% below X, I'll get liquidated. But that can't happen. Right. Every person using leverage things that I don't mean to interrupt, but we got a message that we need to absolutely be done in the next minute. Okay. Sorry.

No, no. Hey, real quick, Dave, are you going to go on to another space next? Because I have a really cool theory that I want to say publicly. Great, buddy. Buddy, DM him. We got to go. sorry um we got to go ahead and wrap guys we will uh be back on monday thank you so much for tuning are we doing monday or with with the holiday or are we not question maybe not we'll be back

maybe not monday uh maybe tuesday i forget that there's the holidays here but uh we do have to run thank you guys for listening uh we'll figure it out and we'll let you know bye