The Wolf Of All Streets - Bull Market Over? Special Guest Aptos - The All American Chain | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

I can't believe the bull market's over, Dave. Yeah, I mean, we're back to the title. You came up with the title. You were used the word dead, so. Yeah, well, you know. Crazy. I mean, you know, a three-day period in August where we go up a few percent and we go down a few percent, it's all over. I mean, if you look at crypto Twitter, that's what people think.

I mean, I don't know. I mean, I was on the spaces last night before it rugged, and I made the point that people in crypto have the attention span of hummingbirds. I could have used fruit flies because their entire life cycle is a week. I mean, you know, people, it just just get nuts, and it's actually kind of amusing. But, you know, there's a couple of stories that are funny today. I mean, the first one is dissent in the middle of an interview that I don't know how long the interview was. There's like a 30-second clip which caused like a total insane freak out that what he said was completely rationally. Basically, first of all, he was talking about we, meaning U.S. Treasury, who obviously they do what the

president says they do what Congress says. They have certain powers. They don't. He said, well, we won't be buying it. And so therefore, people said, okay, there'll never be a Bitcoin Reserve. Let's be clear, there will never be a Bitcoin strategic reserve funded by buying purchases of Bitcoin in the open market without congressional ability to do so. But he said something else, which was fascinating. He didn't say seized the Bitcoin. He said seized the assets, which is very, very different. And people don't understand the nuance there. Meaning, you know, whatever. They can see, they do a drug bust. They seize assets, you know, whatever. They see currency. That could be converted into Bitcoin. They

sees, you know, XRP. I'm just picking out so whatever. But it's just amusing. I mean, it's just an offhand comment and people go crazy. I mean, the reality is nothing much has changed, except on the macro side, inflation, the inflation print was pretty ugly. That said, you know, this, You know, we can have a deep macro conversation we will do on Monday, but, you know, this is, this is your basic, you know, it must be Thursday, right, in crypto land. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting when you see technically an all-time high or any key level sort of swept, and then you see an immediate reaction to the downside. It just maybe gives a hint that we'll go back to ranging, which is what we should do in August anyways, right? Right. Well, that's Bitcoin.

I mean, you know, Ether is still banging up. I mean, it's, what is it? It's fallen, you know, it went from, I guess it got to his high. Did it get to 49? I wasn't paying attention. I thought, I thought, I think it just pinged 48. Now it's at 46. I mean, it's like, really?

That's what's the freak out. I mean, you know, Solana's at 195. If you had woken up three days ago and said, so long as we were at 195 in three days, you said, oh, okay. Things are looking up. You know, it's, yeah, it, look, people who overreact to short-term things, it really depends on what is your thesis and where are you going.

You know, I thought, I didn't watch Rand's show this morning, you know, crypto banter, but his title was basically, no, all season is not over, et cetera. And generally, I put this up here because, frankly, I want to trigger Gorov, who I see is here. So I'm sure you have plenty to say about this price action. But, you know, it's always good when we can get some, you know, get some contrary opinions going here in Cryptotown Hall. Right, Gorav, how are you? Yeah, and you can get a market maker on stage, Gorov. Well, for clarity, this market maker is a designated market maker for all coins.

I am not making Bitcoin and Ethereum market as much as I wish I would be. But that would already make me an established multi-billionaire, which I'm not for now. So that's a clarity about market making. Yesterday, I landed in New York and throughout my immigration, everybody understood that I was into crypto because I was in calls with my trading team, left, right and center for a lot of things. And we sort of removed all our positions from everything else

and brought it to the top Ethereum ecosystem. So Arbitrum, OP, optimism, and so on and so. So forth, of course, this is not a financial advice. This is what I did yesterday. And then four hours later, by the time we were in the Arbitrum events here in New York, all the side events of Ethereum and YC, these tokens were up 20, 30, and 10%, including at, you know, reaching the price points where I, you know, expected them to be. I wouldn't say predicted, expected is a better word.

And as soon as that happened, you know, I said, okay, guys, let's exit. This is not real. Something has to happen now as much as I wish it would go in a straight line, God candles. It wouldn't. I mean, it just can't. So what you said, Dave, that, you know, on the line of a stupid post that doesn't even, like, makes a real financial impact to the industry, the whole market.

crash. I would just compliment it. The market had to crash. Wow, what a time for him to cut out. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I was wondering if we were totally. I had to glance down and say, oh, did we rug? Nope. Oh, we lost you. I don't know, maybe he got a call from his trading team. I don't know. Probably. We'll get him back up in a minute. We got you back. Go ahead. It was not the market. I mean, I think I said the crash word too loud. X crashed on my phone. So the market, I mean, this is very, very usual. What's surprising is, it seems like even the crypto retail has built a conscious or has built an awareness towards this. Because, you know,

when you, if you go to the last two years, the liquidations usually range somewhere from $2 billion and more. And so far, the reported liquidations are just, you know, north of $700 million. So, I mean, I think we're doing good. And I think the market, either we have, so the only two obvious outcomes or assumptions that I could make on this result. is either we have built this awareness in the crypto ecosystem, or there is this insane bi-pressure from probably the DATCO or somewhere, all the DATCOs, all the digital asset treasury companies, that has sort of retained the price levels through their purchase.

So I think, I mean, it will be good to understand what people think about it. And Dave, a lot of people are pointing to PPI, by the way, but that was sort of the second leg of it. It was already down, I think, 120, mid-120, 100,000, 500 or something before I think the PPI numbers dropped. So that rejection technically had already happened. I mean, it's probably worth discussing PPI a little further because it came in at 0.9 with expected 0.2. And, of course, that comes a day after we had a quote-unquote 100% chance of rate cuts, which is the stupidest thing. How many times we had 100% chance of rate cuts in the last three years that we've talked about on Macromonday?

Listen, I may be according to Twitter, I mean, I have a 65 IQ, but I've been pretty consistent. I've been pretty consistent about saying that whatever predictions we're getting on rate cuts are almost always wrong. Well, I mean, look, and the short rate isn't even what matters the most. What matters is the direction, and what matters is the total money supply and whether or not we're going to end up in a form of QE of some sort. And, you know, all of those things are likely, but, you know, markets are markets, and people will continue to fixate on, you know, on those things. as far as crypto is concerned, the two biggest things that matter are in the Bitcoin case of Bitcoin, and really in the case of all crypto, it's really adoption. And it's really, you know, there's a lot of other news. And every other piece of news is positive, right? You know,

Goro could probably go through, you know, seven, eight, ten, you know, an N number of alts where there's positive adoption news. I mean, we talk about Bitcoin all the time. You know, it's the one piece of negative news, weirdly, for, you know, some altcoins is the, you know, what I will call the short term, but we kind of knew it would happen. You know, what's the word I'm trying to think about? You know, I'm thinking of the Tower of Babel effect on stable coins where everybody's going to try to launch their own layer one. And, you know, that, it just makes the free, the ultimate free-for-all, you know, important, you know, in terms of what layers will happen. But other than that, pretty much every other piece. And by the way, that's also ridiculously positive for Bitcoin

if you actually think through where the chessboard's going to go. So, I mean, look, there's a lot of stories that we could talk about. You know, PPI, CPI and PPI are, we're going to see revisions. We're going to see all sorts of stuff. They're going to figure out ways to screw out with the data. The thing that people, and it's so politicized, it's crazy. The thing the people continue to forget is the BLS has been expert, well, not expert, they've screwed up a lot, but they have had a methodology of changing the numbers or smoothing the numbers. In CPI, they call it hedonics, which is substitution effects. They do this, and they've been doing it for 40 years now in order to make the headline reported number look better than it actually is, and we know this is

true. And so don't expect that to change just because we have a new person in who may very well be instructed to make it even more. So who knows about all that, that sort of data. But look, there's nothing major different today than yesterday with the exception of a lot more doubt in people's mind about whether the U.S. government is going to smash by Bitcoin, which, by the way, they would never in a billion years do. But now people have come up and the Treasury Secretary said they're not going to. So they said, okay, so this is a big deal. That, to me, is the story, and it just takes people down up and down with it. I just jump to the panel, see what they think is going on. Austin, you got a new,

you got a new face, dude. Technically, well, I mean, I guess it's your old face. Now it looks like Austin. It does actually look like me. All of the credit goes to my head of creative who actually made me look good here. So thank you, Shirley, because I normally. It says very hard for me to recognize people when they change their avatars. I'm actually not an 8-bit cartoon character. I know that's shocking to many people thinking I'm the caricature on the internet.

But, okay, so, alt season. I'm going to give everybody one indicator I'm watching to tell you that I think the current rally is not dead, which is we literally are in a span of having a new L1 launch every single day. Right. Like, we're at the point with all these news releases that if on Friday, day, like, you know, we have Powell come out and say the Fed's launching at L1. I'm just going to laugh and shake my head because we've gotten to the point where so many people are now fucking around with adopting this technology.

And let's be clear, most of it's not going to work, but that's fine. That's the way experimentation works, that it's hard for me to think there's not a lot more interest coming if you've got like Stripe launching at L1 and now Circle is going to launch an L1 and wait, you know, somebody else will be doing it like tomorrow. and the amount of people who are getting interested who were not previously interested is significant. The other part is the public narrative is shifting. Like yesterday, everybody probably noticed the, let's call it, conspiracy theory around Google banning self-custodial wallets, which not true. I know they're head of crypto over there, Rich, that I'm going to give my take.

Rich didn't directly tell me this, but I'm reading tea leaves. I think this was a junior lawyer who didn't talk to the crypto team. before publishing a policy. But even Google now had to come out with a statement saying they're very in favor of self-custodial technology. They're building their own L1. So if you look at all of the data, there should be more and more capital coming.

And Dave, it's something you and I have talked about on here before. All of this takes a long time, right? This is six to 12 to 18 months. So there's gonna be a lot of chops here, but there's more firepower than people think coming behind a lot of these things right now. Yeah, I mean, look,

Austin, my thesis and you and I have agreed on this is that the entire rail, the rails underneath the entirety of the financial system are being rebuilt. And ultimately there will be winners and losers. Ultimately, there will be some very major things that happen. The banking lobby is delusional. I mean, you know, in terms of thinking, and you had an interesting post yesterday about stables, which, you know, in terms of workarounds in the banking lobby, et cetera, et cetera. But look, the truth is, there's $6 plus trillion in trap deposits that are held in banks at 0.5% or lower interest.

That number will get cut, I believe, by 80 to 90% within two years. It's going to take most of those two years, though, for the rails to happen to do that. But I think that's a very big difference. And that's a lot of more money that's going to flow back into investment products, whether yield chasing or Bickrower. or whatever, that matters. And that's just on the, that's just the top end. You know, there's also CDs. Who needs a CD and lock up for a defined period of time of a year at one to two percent below market because that's the best thing that a bank can do. And that's another big pile of money. So, you know, there's a lot of trap money in our economy that's going to

get, that's going to flow free. And that's the good news. The bad news is there's going to be a lot a competition, right? And to see where, you know, which protocols win or lose. And I think that's your point. Do you agree, Austin, before we go on to Tony and that? No, I do agree. And, like, I'll remind everybody, you know, technological innovation is nonlinear and somewhat chaotic. Like, I would just tell everyone, go back to like 1995 and look at all of the internet companies that existed then and how many of them are big today. Like, like, yeah, every, AOL. Um, and all. And all I'm saying here is the net benefits will definitely accrue to the economy and the consumers, but picking specific winners and losers out of like all the blockchains, tokens,

companies, et cetera, is more difficult than people think. Yeah, well, that's why people like Gorov and others are so important in the space and why the market's not efficient. I mean, there's a lot. I mean, it's sad. It really is sad when most of the people on crypto town hall have to go to history books to know your answer. And when you mentioned 1995 and 96, I can actually flash at where I was, what I was doing.

And I remember Lycos and all the, all of the various search engines that were coming up in the late 90s, that were going to be the next big thing. And it's just, it's deja vu all over again. Anyway, enough from me reminiscing. I couldn't tell Scott. Tony, I'm Tony and Andre. So go ahead, Tony and Andre. Right. Thanks, Dave.

Thanks, Scott. With regards to the Bitcoin Reserve and Scott Besant's comments about not buying Bitcoin, I was talking about this since the beginning of the year. That's going to be a hard sell to Congress. And when we haven't even gotten market structure legislation passed yet, like we can't put the card before the horse here. And why would the United States look to buy near the top of the market? I think it would be smart if they wait for prices to go down.

I think they will eventually buy. But I think people are overreacting and not really thinking logically about what's been going on in Congress, trying to get the genius bill, trying to get market structure through. And we'll see how the market structure vote goes. I'm hearing a lot of Democrats are, you know, ready to put up a fight. But we got to get that in place before we even get some sort of legislation that allows us to buy Bitcoin. And in regards to all coin season, I mean, this is just one of those whales playing the market. I mean, it's your typical, you know, flush out. we saw the flesh out of the shorts recently, now the longs. I think we're still on track.

Treasury companies are buying all coins. And then you look at Bitcoin dominance and USDT dominance. Everything is still on track. Yeah, but that presumes, Tony, what you just said, presumes that the United States government thinks that crypto is going much lower. What's that? Oh, for buying? You're kind of saying that the United States government wants to buy a dip from here, right? Well, I'm not saying, I think in the bare market, in a sense, like, why would, why would the Treasury look to go buy Bitcoin now? Again, legislation has to be put into place. You have to sell Congress on it.

But why the hell would you go by near the top, right? Versus waiting until late 2026 or 2027. Well, I think by 2026 or 2027, we might be triple the price. Right. But, I mean, the thing that you have to understand, regardless of timing markets. The one thing that is most clear is there is zero probability that someone like, like our Treasury Secretary, would ever tell people they were buying anything until they were done by, ever. Because if there's one thing you know in the world of hedge funds, and I have a lot of experience here, is you don't talk about a trade until the trade is done. And I mean done.

Now, am I saying he would lie by saying, well, we're not buying? anything while they were buying, that could do, particularly if it was an offhand comment and you can take it and you can parse the words differently and who the we is, et cetera, you know, but the idea that they would actually admit that they were buying or going to buy is just total fantasy on the basis of a bunch of crypto Twitter geeks who don't have a clue how trading works. So I just like to be really clear that. Absolutely agree with you. And just to confirm to Scott and Dave, you guys do believe a bear market coming, right? It sounded like you guys are thinking

this is going up forever. I think bear markets come, but like presuming this is the top and I mean, the next fair market, this could be the bottom the same price, right? I have no idea. So I'm not sure that they're trying to like time the market and buy the dip as much

as they're just getting their ducks in order and not saying anything, but what do I know? I just have a 63 IQ. I'm happy to be provocative and disagree, but I'll it's a much longer conversation and you know we can talk about it on monday anyway andre you had your hand up a long time ago so you don't want to listen to me blue there no no worries yeah

thank you dave um i actually re with you with uh with the cpi and the inflation on this i mean you had this outside positive surprise in the ppi number but as you said i mean like 35 percent of the cpi numbers are imputed right like at an all-time high the number of impute the percentage imputed of computed data, right? So I wouldn't read too much into this. It's like they're actually throwing dots right at the wall and then they come up with any kind of number. But if you look at alternative data like truflation, I mean, the true relation number is still below 2%. And if you look at data surprises in general, inflation surprises, they've been trending down since mid-2021. And since the Fed halted its rate cutting cycle in December,

Like, these inflation data surprises actually have turned more negative, right? So I think the Fed generally remains behind the curve. And if you look at labor market prices combined with inflation data surprises, it's the same story. I think you just need some kind of renewed capitalist, like a negative July print, revised July print, right, for these rate cut odds to move towards 50 basis points in September. And I mean, if the Fed does cut or doesn't cut in September, it's not really important. If the Fed cuts in September, what's more important is you'll have this kind of lorry of repricing of rate cuts expectations, right, to the downside. And it's a re-steening of the yield curve, which actually implies more money printing, right, an increase in money supply growth. I mean, you've probably seen the latest Chinese numbers.

I think Julian Biddle from GMI, he's just posted it, right? Credit impulse in China is already accelerating, right? So China's money supply growth is accelerating. We know global money supplies at all-time highs, right? Now, US money supply growth starts to re-accelerate. If you have pet rate cuts in September, even more so, right? So I think the overall macro picture remains so very, And at the same time, I mean, talking about tactical price action, I mean, we saw some signs of throth, right?

I mean, Scott, you've commented on my Google search tweet, right, on Alpoint, if you're probably all seen these Google search trend charts, right? So there were some signs of drop and even like crypto ETP flows. I mean, they've been through the roof for Ethereum, right? highest daily net inflows ever on Monday, right, more than one billion into U.S. Ethereum ETFs, right? And over the past five weeks, it's been like, Ethereum ETP flows have been three times bigger, close to $3 billion U.S. dollars than Bitcoin ETP flows. I've never seen such a huge gap, right? It's crazy. And how many of those people do you think, how many people buying Ethereum ETF or, you know,

Ethereum ETPs have any clue that the Ethereum use case they're being sold is impacted by the fact that Stripe and even Google are building their own layer ones. Yes. I mean, I think the fact that you've seen this spike in Google search trends is consistent with these flows because, I mean, we know ETFs, that's definitely increasing institutional adoption, right? but like these flows are still dominated by retail messes, right? And so it's totally consistent in my view, right?

Yeah. If you look at different kinds of pockets in the market, like the alt season index or crypto dispersion, like how much alts are correlated amongst each other, there were definitely some pockets of growth. But that being said, I mean, you've now seen the opposite with the most recent correction with the spike in long liquidations, futures loan liquidations right to the highest since February so I don't think we'll see a lot of downside famous last words but like Dave interestingly I mean just to the point of the

Ethereum inflows Andre that you just made and looking at the charge right now Bitcoin dominance is still dumping even as Bitcoin has corrected down I'm not saying Bitcoin goes further I have no idea but I mean Bitcoin has retraced to the downside everything it gained yesterday Ethereum, Solana, I mean, almost backed to today's open. And Ethereum, Bitcoin up still big. I mean, Bitcoin dominance is just making low after low the last few days. You don't usually see Bitcoin correct down with some sort of impulse and see all coins go up first Bitcoin. I mean, yeah, it's fascinating really to look, you know, that in the 20, this is the first time I've ever seen this.

If you look at coin glasses liquidation heat map, you know, so there were 750 million, you know, liquidated. Seeing the bigger box of liquidation on ETH at 318 million of it versus Bitcoin, 217 million, is fascinating. It's telling you all you need to know. Given the relative size of the assets and relatively speaking, the symmetry of the fall between the two, that Ether had 50% more liquidations than Bitcoin tells you there's a lot more speculation going on in Ether's and. there is a Bitcoin. And that tells you all you need to know, unless you think that it's a one and done and it's over and I don't, that backs up everything you just said. I mean, there was some sign of buyer extortion, right, in terms of ETB flows, because they've been so excessive, right? But now you've seen quite the opposite. There are now more signs in the short term, right?

more signs of cell extortion, right, with these long liquidations and so on. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's an interesting event, but, you know, when you, you go back and you look, I mean, the last time, what was the last day that we had? It was July 31st, where we had, oh, was the last time we had a larger liquidation, right? Is that right? July 31st, yes. Yeah, but these ones are higher than, it's high since February, right? So it's, no, July 31st, that was $922 million in a 24-hour period. Okay, I'm looking at glass notated. Yeah, I'm looking at coin glass.

Whatever. Anyway, we could quibble over which is which. What's interesting is if you look at the periodicity and you look at what's happened, you know, these things are like clearing, like I was asked by a reporter to comment on, well, what happens if Bitcoin crashes or what happens if crypto crashes? And I basically said, listen, the biggest difference in crypto in the stock market is Crypto has real-time liquidation engines, which clears the froth out periodically. It's sort of like the difference in a forest fire.

You know, they always say clear out the brush and all the other stuff. In crypto, that tends to be the case. And the stock market, that's not the case. If there was ever a major crash in the stock market, there's no limited loss in crypto derivatives. And we all take that for granted. We all kind of look at these numbers and, like, ho-hum, $750 million, who cares? But the truth is that this methodology that our industry uses has less systemic risk, which is probably a really good thing because it's a more volatile asset class in general, but it tells you a lot about the global economy. And if you think their rates are going to permanently go be high with that kind of a risk in the stock market, because, you know, what would happen if the MAG-7s all had the same sort of reevaluation down?

it would be front page news, everyone would be panicking, you know, it would be a much bigger deal. And don't underestimate the impact of that. That's the way I would look at it anyway. There's only one circuit breaker in crypto, which is when Coinbase is down. Yeah, well, that's a different story. Is that still a thing? It's still a thing, isn't it? Well, I mean, look, the problem, and look, I co-founded a company that deals with all the market data and crypto.

can tell you that there is more than, it's two orders of magnitude, more market data per instrument in crypto than in traditional finance. And for a lot of reasons, it's their geeky reasons, but there's a lot more market data. What does that mean? That means that the volatility of births when markets move in crypto is dramatically higher. And so all systems are hard. It is very hard to manage, you know, an infrastructure where your peak could be a thousand times more than your average, whereas in traditional finance, maybe your peak is 10 times more. And those numbers are not crazy.

Those are actual real sets of numbers in terms of burstiness of market data. So, yeah, you know, it's not just Coinbase. It's all crypto exchanges are vulnerable to peak load issues, depending on how they handle it. And it's more under the hood than you probably care about people, but, you know, it is there. It's not, people think it's intentional. There's only one time in the entire history of crypto that I think something was intentional. And that was, on the night of that, that's a faithful Sunday night during the pandemic when Bitcoin might have gone to zero on Bitnex. No, they had a, they had a very convenient service outage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone kicked, someone kicked a plug out of the wall. I mean, come on. Yeah, Bitcoin was at 3,800 and there were precisely. zero orders to zero dollars. And they were liquidating 10 million position clips. Crazy. But outside of that, I don't think any of the outages have been intentional. And by the way, that was the smart move. Oh, yeah. Thank you. We can't send it to zero. Hey, there's a story, actually, I want to ask you guys about this. This is really interesting. I didn't mean to pivot

the conversation, but I find this interesting. This was a tweet. This is how it's framed. Dragonfly investor Omar said 100 BIPs rate cut would slash circles annualized revenue by 618 million, roughly 23%, growth profit by 30,000, and margins by 3.3 points, raising its valuation from 42xEV annualized growth profit to 60.4% higher. We really talked about, it's one thing, I guess, to be a private company and you absorb it. It's another to be highly valued. and publicly traded, and if interest rates simply go down your main source of revenue drops? Well, that's true, 100%. But if you think that that's not a motivating cause for Circle Management to build their own layer one,

to try to become the rails for all stable coins as opposed to just their own, then you're not paying attention because they're well aware of how interest rate sensitive they are. Austin. Austin, we can't hear you. I'm guessing you're talking. Your mic went away. I see him, though, and his picture's great. Yeah, I see you, Austin.

I see your hands raised, but we, can you hear you there? Uh-oh. We're in the glitch, Scott. We live in the glitch. That might be his glitch and not our glitch. I don't know. He was talking earlier. I don't know.

Yeah, he dropped down, so we'll get him back. Okay. Yeah, now you're here. So, Guarov, you're not alone. Yeah, it seems like X is trying to comprehend the crypto crash. Yeah, all of us. So I was going to say, people got very angry with me previously when I asked why is a bond trading with this price to earnings ratio.

But what you guys have hit on is that Circle is essentially just a bond from an earnings perspective, right? Like, it's got interest rate sensitivity. It's going to trade that way. and it is very, very sensitive to forward rates environments. I really think this is very poorly understood in their current profile. Dave, like you said, they should be trying to do everything they can to get away from that diversified, but the TBD out if they can.

Yeah, obviously. I mean, look, and frankly, I think it's a pretty strong story. If you think about it from a crypto point of view, I mean, you know, look, there's so much appetite for crypto. I mean, we haven't even talked about what arguably one of the most important stories of today is, you know, my friend Tom Farley and his company bullish IPOing and soaring on its IPO as a crypto exchange that can't offer services to U.S. investors, I thought is a fascinating story. It performed as well as Circle. I did not expect that at all. I mean, I think they, what, they raised a $1.1 billion. That's ballpark of Circle. I think it was trading free IP. you know, about 30 bucks, which is right where Circle was, I think. And it went over a hundred

bucks on the first day, which is just what Circle did, I think. Yeah. I mean, it makes me think that, well, I mean, you know, speaking as someone who owns it, I mean, you know, maybe CoinRout should, you know, as a small company go public because the valuations would be, you know, we are now in the world where the public dollar market valuations are well above the private market evaluations. And generally that doesn't last, but it's a very strong indicator of demand. And so people who think all season is over and not seeing that ratio are not paying attention. I meant to lead with that earlier and somehow that diverted. But, you know, I'm curious. I mean, Gorov, I don't know if you're behind the mic now, but I mean, surely that that has to be an indication that that you guys

look at. I mean, when public market equities that are related to crypto are the highest value and the valuations go higher than what VCs or P.E. people are valuing private companies at. Surely that's somewhat of a tell, right? I guess he's not there. It's one of the things you can never tell. Anyway, that's my thought for, for, you know, whatever it's worth. But do you think it's a sign of froth as well, like cycle top indicator or something? I mean, look, we are all, guard in the world of crypto by four-year cycles and whatever. I mean, you know, it's funny. I will be, when people stop talking about and stop asking that question, Antre, that's what

I'm going to turn bearish. I won't turn bearish until people stop asking that question. The S&P has been an unrelenting bull market more or less since 2009. You know, certainly, you know, measured by the way, we measure crypto corrections. It's been, we're literally going on on 16 years. And yeah, there have been a couple of just borderline close to 20% dips that quickly got back.

Except COVID, of course, were 38%. Yeah, but like a very brief dip. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like if you,

but if you look at the history, it's nothing remotely like a four-year cycle or anything like that. And why crypto needs to be in a four-year cycle anymore as opposed to the way NASDAQ trades. Someone, someone who is either understands math far better than me or literally ignores math is the only way you can justify that.

So I don't know. But what I do know is that the stock market, you know, is potentially vulnerable. And that it and my friend Mike McGlone always talks about if the stock market does finally come down in a crash, yeah, okay, then all bets are off. Do I expect that to happen? Not really. but could it happen, of course. And so that's how I answer it would answer your question.

Right. I haven't even looked at the stock market today. It's funny. I forget some days it even exists. What's the market doing after the PPI? I really didn't even take a level. Well, it's sound as well, Lou. Yeah, I figured it's flat now.

Yeah, it looks flat. I mean, I happened to open on the weekly, and it looks like literally sitting at an all-time high on the S&P. So I completely retraced that move up, and Bitcoin's still right around 119. So there was something else going on with Bitcoin, I think, technically, before the PPI brain. Yeah, it was the percent thing that people started freaking out of it. Oh, my God, there's not going to be a Bitcoin reserve immediately. It's like, okay, sure.

And, well, whatever. You can say whatever you want to say about it. The only notable move that I'm looking at or that I see is the 10-year, you know, starting to yield creeping up a bit. you know, but not huge. I mean, you know, what is it, you know, 0.04%. It's up to point, you know, 4.2, just under 4.27 instead of 4.25. So it's like, okay. You know, that's the biggest news.

Yeah, I just think that, you know, it's very clear right now that crypto's kind of doing its own thing, you know, which I think is a very, very, very good news here. I'll take that any day of the week. to see any other big stories of the day. I know we have the guys from Aptos actually about to join. This is pretty crazy. Hyperliquid AOM reaches approximately $6.2 billion, surpassing me $6 billion for the first time in history.

Gorav, this thing is wildly popular. Man, seriously, man. Like this came up in front of us and just took the world, you know, with a storm. And it's just like not slowing down despite of a few, you know, few crashes that we observed that was not a crash essentially like somebody exploited a structure and i think you know the likes of google's and and facebooks are exploited and and had 10 years after they're there they've been a unicorn so it's only natural progression of thing and then um and then these other competitors that that have existed for three and four years uh came up

with the logic of, you know, having built robust systems for the last five years. And like, seems like the retail just doesn't care. It seems like even the institutions, because hyperliquid is known to have massive institutional volume. And it seems like nobody cares. They just love what hyperliquid is doing. And the ecosystem just keeps adding a few hundred thousand users per month. they have something that others don't. And you're looking at the likes of exchanges that, you know,

tried their retail play and then sort of rested back on their institutional game. But man, every time I look at hyperliquid, I'm so surprised. Having said that to the audience of the tourist space and something that, you know, Dave gives me a lot of credit for, so, you know, to add that value to the Twitter space, don't over-speculate on the hyper-liquid token. Like, don't. Only take short-term trade because one thing that people don't know about hyper-liquid is that most of the supply, like most above 60%, people also claim the rest of the 30, which makes a total of 90% of the supply, is fully controlled. So, like, as incredible as the platform is, as brilliant, the valuation is, just don't take long-term trades on hyperliquid because there could be one or the other reason the supply would hit the market and, you know, what happens thereafter. So, yeah, love hyperliquid for all the good reasons. Can I add something to that? A lot of the supply that's not, quote, controlled is held by market makers and people.

platforms on hyperliquid in order to get partnership rewards. And so it's one of those things if the platform, you know, that is very, very stable as long as the platform's market share is doing really well. But it creates an accelerant. That is the 10% supply, you know, you see as liquid. Yes. What I'm trying to say is it is self-referential good as long as the platform does well. If they, if a new competitor, I mean, because we've all seen this, right?

It went from, you know, DYDX to vertex to hyperliquid. I think I missed one in the middle. You know, you know, what? Many, but it's okay. We're only jumping from five billion market caps to another. Yeah, but you know what I'm saying. I'm saying, you know, what is the number one casino in the world today in crypto? And it goes from one to the other.

If hyperliquid starts to fade a little bit, its volatility of its token is going to be significant because people will say, okay, I don't need to own it anymore. Now, do I think that's going to happen? Actually, no, but it doesn't matter. It's just your point about being careful and using it as a trade is extremely relevant, and people should understand that. Yeah, thank you. Another important part of that is, and that I can, I mean, all of us can appreciate hyperliquid

for every other exchange or Dex has existed as a Dex most of the times. like every single name you took. Hyperliquid, however, I mean, of course, appreciate their intelligence. They've evolved as an ecosystem. There are hundreds of wallets that are routing their traffic and have built utilities on the hyperliquid chain. That is the sort of liquidity and trading chain empowering the hyperliquid platform. And then, you know, hundreds and probably now reaching to thousands of depths around that. Now, think about it.

All these apps and DAPs have their own ecosystem. To give you an idea, the number one exchange of India, after, of course, was X-Hack, Coin DCX, they make most of their revenue, current revenue, from their hyperliquipro, the wallet, tractor or something, I know, Fracto is the medicine app, whatever. Now think about it. Like large ecosystems are being brought to hyperlipro. liquid. So the crash, I don't think it's going to be a crash overnight or even over, you know, less than a year to the next shiny object, because they've sort of tried to cover

this aspect of the business. Probably makes sense. Yeah, I mean, without going into trading strategies, because I was asked about this one, I was basically like, you know, the range between, you know, 50 was where the hype was, you know, it got down below 42 and found really strong support there. I mean, it feels pretty solid in that range unless something's major, major changes and it doesn't look like that. I mean, I think we're running out of time. Yeah, that's because I want to talk to the

app to us guys who just jumped up on stage. We've got Solomon and Ash. I've talked to like Avery and Moe like a thousand times, but somehow I've never been two guys in all these years of chatting and talking. I just changed the title above. So when we have a slow

news day, I just like to invite my friends. to have a chat at the end of the show and thought this would be a perfect day to break down everything that you guys have going on with Aptos. I've been working with you guys. It's been like nine or ten months now since Singapore last year, which is really crazy. But clearly there's some new narratives, I think, forming. Let's just start maybe at the beginning because I don't think many people know about Aptos's roots with meta. So I don't know who more appropriate to ask each question and discuss, but you guys can just take the floor

and kind of run with the history here. Go for it, Solomon. Go for it. Tag team. Let's do it. Let's do it. First of all, thanks for having us. Solomon testified, Chief Business Officer here at Aptos. Just to answer your question, really, the underlying technology at Aptos was incubated within META's DM program. Our CEO and founder, Avery, was the actual head of blockchain and led the blockchain initiative at when he based on that we weren't able to actually and Solomon cutting in and out to you guys we're always blotching here so I don't know

yeah it's a little glitchy yeah that space is it could be his mic Solomon maybe jump down and we'll bring you back up and Ash you can kind of continue from there while we're getting his mic fix yeah let's run it so So, yeah, to the question, I'm a head of ecosystem at Aptos Foundation, but to your question, Aptos was incubated at M as part of the Libra and DM project. And Avery, the CEO of Aptus Labs and the founding engineering team were all part of that project. And the idea around that was when, if most of you remember, was how can meta move value across this billion user app economy?

WhatsApp to Instagram to Facebook. And so when you think about the necessary architecture and first principle thinking of what a blockchain needs to do to do that, there is a lot that goes into it. So the smart contract language and move was built uniquely at Meta to be able to move potentially trillions of dollars and trillions of transactions across different apps. And then the blockchain itself in terms of its speed, performance, reliability, there had to be no compromise in terms of how this worked. And, you know, meta looked around the industry and said, hey, we, you know, we obviously believe in this, although maybe a bit mistimed on their side. But we can't rely on any of this technology that's there. So we need to build it ourselves. So that's Aptos's origin.

And the beauty of that is now it's an independent organization. for the past three years, an independent open network for the past three years. Now everyone gets to benefit from it. Perfect. We're trying to, Solomon, if you can hear us, if you just drop out or come back in or we sent you another invite, but we get these glitches. I've got you invited to speak, or you could try to request and we'll try to bring you back up.

But yeah, oh, there you are. Can you hear us? Yes, I can on my side. all right perfect yeah you were just it was like you would say three words and then the next seven words would be cut out and then you'd say three words so who knows but uh around two so obviously we landed uh where you are now aptos born of that uh DM project which uh you know I Libra DM I don't ever even know what to call it anymore but man so far ahead of your time there because if that had happened now uh probably a very different story right

It was just like such headwinds when that was happening and tried to get through congressmen. Those days, I don't even want to remember them, I think, at this point, but I'm sure you guys do. But we have sort of last I spoke to Avery, we were talking about Aptos really emerging, I believe the term that he kept using and was the global trading engine that really you view the main purpose as fast, cheap, incredible utility for trade. trading everything and all value into the future. I mean, can you kind of break that down and talk about that a bit more? Absolutely. So when we talk about the global trading engine, really thinking of three different pillars. One is trading.

Second one is really money movement. And the third one is data on chain or you think of infrastructure. All three of them we view is very, very complementary to one another. On the trading side, really the movement of any asset, whether it be traditional assets, which we now call real world assets, or whether it be a blockchain native product. And then on the money movement side, at this point, we're moving $100 billion of stable coins on a monthly basis. So we are heavily focused on cross-border transactions, remittance, microfinancing. And then the last piece is data, whether it be putting disclosure

on chain, intrinsic value on chain, like net asset value, or actually providing what we have is basically called Shelby, is that the AWS decentralized, essentially, where we're actually enabling, basically a hot storage on chain. So those are the three areas of focus, really all complementary to financial services. Ash, I have anything to add on that one? Yeah, no, that's absolutely correct. I mean, I think if we look at the multiple cycles, where is crypto-frowned product market fit? And it's been through trading.

And I think it's gone through many flavors, right? Like I think, you know, in 2017, the ICO phase, people were bullish on permissionless networks and product visions. And then you get into 2020 and people are financializing attention markets, whether they be NFTs, their meme coins. And I think that we're in the phase where the financial industry is really embracing, you know, embracing Web3 and embracing this industry. And so it's really about what's kind of going to push everything forward. And I think, obviously, speculation is the core underlying feature of crypto.

And I think that brings a really high value set of users into our space that doesn't exist in any other technical sector. They're high signal. They're motivated. They're almost like a board of directors influencing protocols, roadmaps. They have a loud voice. But we think that we need to expand that sphere, right? And so we think crypto gives better rails for money movement, but bringing assets that are highly liquid off chain, on chain, and adding a crypto flavor that makes it more interesting is kind of where we're focused. And there's really two big, you know, our opportunities here, right, for the industry and the world.

One is emerging markets getting access to things like U.S. capital markets, instantaneous, right? If you go through a user flow of someone in Nigeria wanting to buy Tesla stock, you'll break your brain. You know, it's completely burdensome and misses the point. And that's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, right? And that's something crypto solves. The second axis, I think, is global retail markets getting earlier upside into technical innovation. I mean, if you think about the IPO process right now, you know, companies are staying private longer. And then when they IPO, I mean, look at, look at Figma most recently, you know, a bunch of

insiders get in and no one really kind of has, you know, think about if you were using Figma like five years ago, right? You're a power user. You get the IPO. You have no upside, right? So I think these are two in tremendous opportunity. So I think a lot of people talk about trading and how it's a focus. I think we're uniquely positioned because of our blockchain.

And as I mentioned, the security architecture, but there's tons more room to grow and a trillion dollar opportunities that only thing that I think Aptus is positioned to do. And really on that last point, it really comes down to capital formation. Right now, you've seen a lot of focus, of course, on just different token offerings. But Avery brings up, well, sorry, Ash brings up a great point that when it comes to actually just traditional equity offerings, you see what Crack and Bact are doing with X-stocks and providing synthetic exposure to public equity. But as more capital comes on chain, since we're supporting a significant amount of stable coin volume on a monthly basis through trading and payments and whatnot, we, of course, it seems very intuitive that they're going to look for diversification on chain and look for yield on chain.

And so what we're really trying to position basically any investor or any participant within the Aptos ecosystem is where they don't need to move that capital off chain to get access to traditional assets or just a broader set of yield exposure. And so that's what we're heavily focused on. And obviously the new sort of world of crypto now means you have to be attractive both to retail and to institutions. And clearly to become a global trading engine, you have to be very, very institutionally focused on that one side. You guys, I mean, obviously I follow very closely Franklin Templeton, Blackprop, Brevin Howard, ETF in review. So I guess how do you kind of first service and focus on both sides of that market to make sure that you win? And then I guess more specifically, you know, what does it mean to have this level of institutional adoption? What are those partnerships or however you're pushing them look like?

What does that actually mean? So really at this point, different counterparties, especially on the institutional side, are being a lot more thoughtful around which blockchings they want to actually adopt. You could actually see in the market that some folks are getting a little bit fatigued in terms of integrating way too many blockchains at this point. And so to really strike that balance, we kind of look at, one, where is there a demand? At this point, kind of going to my previous point around as capital formation comes on chain, mostly through trading and payments, we're mostly focused on yield and then providing exposure to already traditionally liquid products, like public equity, for example. and then making, prioritizing those particular opportunities. With Black Rock, of course, we have their money market fund, Biddle.

With Franklin Templeton, we have Benji, their 40-act money market fund. With Apollo, we have their diversified private credit fund. So we have an example of a very liquid products on the money market side, and then across the board, yield-oriented products. And then really private credit and money markets are really driving our RWA momentum. Right now, we're third. at RWA.XYZ in terms of assets on chain. We have a little over 700 million of assets on chain at this point. But it is basically striking that balance. And then on the private credit side,

specifically, that's actually mostly driven by private credit within microfinancing. So short-term debt in emerging markets is actually driving that particular narrative within APDUS. So that's, of course, more retail and SME focused. It's Ashaddy frame sort of the institutional side and adoption here. It's this weird place for crypto now where like we're, you know, we were all a bunch of libertarians, but we're, you know, we got to cheer black rock and the government and stuff. It's a good time. Yeah, well, you know, my promise to Solomon is I'm always on the other side of the cypher punk side. So, you know, the way I kind of look at it is institutions are here, right?

They believe in the technology. The technology is more than a flaw. now. But the next question is what happens? And that's really about utilization by retail. And so I believe that, you know, I believe that innovation in Web 3 from now until eternity is going to come from the people that are highly convicted in permissionless networks, open financial networks, and have a strong opinion. And so I think that, you know, with institutions here, it's validation and it's amazing. And also it brings regulatory clarity, which is great for users and founders and builders. But I think the thing that's going

to drive the adoption and utilization by retail is going to come from startups. And it's going to continue to do that. And so I think there's tremendous, tremendous money to be made and tremendous amount of money to raise to build transformative products from founders now more than ever. It's interesting. You talked about obviously decentralized and permissionless networks. And for the first time right now, maybe not the first time, but I think we're seeing this bifurcation of approaches by institutions where a lot, I mean, circles announcement of their own layer one two days ago, for example, it seems like we're going to have those who adopt the blockchains that we have now, like Aptos, and those who are going to try to reinvent the wheel.

How do you guys kind of frame all of that? Because it seems like some people are choosing to do it themselves, but others realize it's much easier to use what's built. I don't know if either of you were able to answer Ash Solomon. Can you guys hear me? I can hear you. I was going to let Solomon go in. Solomon, you there? I'm here now. But so I review that as validation that essentially this technology is going to be adopted. A lot of those use cases are basically one track, though. So at this point, we don't view that as anything in terms of preventing our growth in any capacity. We view that is essentially a catalyst just for just broader adoption within the particular space.

But when we think of just the builders, which Ash is primarily focused on, oftentimes they're looking for multiple variables whenever they look to a particular chain to build on. and they're looking more, not just, you know, in the case of Stripe, money movement, they're looking for, okay, what's exposure from a real world asset perspective? Am I able to build within that space? So if I'm moving money, I want to also be able to facilitate RWA basically for yield or we're looking for some kind of trading capability. So we believe that creating a broader ecosystem of complementary work streams actually is going to be more conducive for builders.

But we are encouraged, if anything, when we see different. institutions look to bring their own chains into play and also look for ways to still collaborate in some capacity in terms of interoperability and so forth. Yeah, that's absolutely correct. I think it's extremely bullish. You know, I think about kind of the difference in terms of being a quote-unquote open network versus more of a private network. And, you know, these companies validate to me that this technology is extremely purposeful and it is ready to be introduced to billions of people. But they're going to be highly opinionated. And they're going to have to, you know, that's going to be buttoned into their other

technical stack and their business and corporate priorities. And by nature of that, you know, you have a big opportunity in the market today to work with stakeholders who need something different, as Solomon mentioned. And so we're excited about the pie completely growing, but, you know, my perspective is they're going to have to be highly opinionated and it's going to have to fit into a network stack on their side, which blockchains like us don't really don't really have to focus on too much. Yeah, listen, I know I've kept you guys long with that I was supposed to, but I do want to know, like, what are you guys most excited about in the, I guess, immediate kind of short term by the end of 2025? Anything you're hyper-focused on.

on kind of to make sure that you get to that vision. Ash, you want to go first? Yeah, so I'm super focused on these two things. And, you know, as a head of ecosystem, you know, my job is to find the beautiful harmony between investors, builders, the network, and everything in between. But something that kind of sticks in my head is, Aptos is really forming in a way from an ecosystem perspective.

where we have a thriving DeFi bottoms-up ecosystem. We have products that need a high-throughput blockchain like Aptos to actually run their business packed protocol is a micro-lending protocol that is driving a ton of RWA value on Aptos. K-Gen is the highest revenue-generating non-D-Fi protocol on the Internet. and I'm very excited about onboarding what we call real world applications to Aptos. Now, it may look a little different, but it's something that we can uniquely serve. But other than that, when I think about like the boiling point of what we want to offer to both sides, users as well as builders, you know, users in order to scale, they need simplicity, right? And so I'm very excited about products like Decibel, which is coming into the ecosystem where you can come in. You can be risk on and trade or you can earn yield, and it's one venue that's clean.

And if you talk to someone on the street of how to make money in crypto, they can look it up on their phone and get in there. And then on the other end, Solomon mentioned Shelby, which really opens up value creation for crypto. And so I'm very excited for builders to kind of come in and say, I have one API and dev platform to build any sort of DAP I want from a live streaming product to anything else. And so that's kind of what I'm very excited about 2025 setting up. And then I'm excited about a number of different things. One, within the three pillars that we focus on, trading, money movement, and really on-chain data. We have either builds, co-builds, or we're incubating different builders on Ash's side that are really gaining tons of momentum within those particular verticals. And the unique thing about the Aptos ecosystem is, as Ash mentioned,

real-world applications. We actually have businesses that are actually, you know, profitable. You know, they're generating revenue and they're profitable. The financial profiles look very unique relative to other blockchain ecosystems, which is really solidifying the fact that they're actually have product market fit, which is surprisingly unique within the Web3 space. And then also I'm very excited about a lot of the Aptos linked products that will be bringing to market. Of course, we're actively pursuing an Aptos. ETF, alongside, of course, a bitwise, which is, of course, the issuer for that particular asset. We have a number of ETPs in Europe. We're actively pursuing CME futures. And, of course,

any of these kind of, whether it be the digital asset reserves or any of these types of initiatives, of course, we're actively exploring all these different types of products. So also providing indirect exposure to just the Aptos ecosystem to basically amplify what we have going on and the builders that are building within our space is just very exciting from my perspective man everything all at once it's crazy how fast everything is happening right now for you and for crypto in general man but it's really wild how much you guys are building and how fast you're doing it 100 percent really appreciate it full speed full speed always sorry I know I invited you like to 1115 I'm sorry I kept you for like eight extra minutes but I'm hard to stop once I

going. But Salvin Ash, it was a pleasure to finally get a chance to speak with the two of you, and I hope that we will be able to do it again really, really soon. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having us. Bye-bye. Awesome. And guys, as you know, thank you to the whole panel that was here before. Many of them have obviously stepped down while we were having the conversation. We always have the evolving panel. And we got one more thing before we go that was just said to me. So here we go. Hey, folks, a quick disclaimer. This last segment is brought you by a partner of Cryptotown Hall. Imagine front-running Wall Street on the world's fourth largest crypto, a deflationary powerhouse that yields staking rewards and fuels one of the most

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