The Wolf Of All Streets - Bull Market Trends: A.I. vs DePin Narratives | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

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Happy President's Day, everyone. Mario, I know you're celebrating. President's Day? Yeah, it's a national holiday. What's wrong with you? Who's President Bush's birthday, is it? Totally. I think it's the day Clinton smoked his first cigar. We're celebrating. I'm not sure. Big day. And Trump belongs to his golden sneakers. Did you buy one? I know you're a big Trump fan. I'm not sure. Big day. And Trump bought his golden sneakers. Did you buy one? I know you're a big Trump fan. I bought 17 pairs.

All sizes, just in case my shoe changes. And I want to make sure that my kids have them for every phase of their life as they grow. Oh, by the way, I did something. You might never talk to me again. Sounds awesome. Yeah, let me tell you what it is. Let me put my AirPods away so they don't disconnect. No. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I officially shielded my first project today.

Does that make you hate me? Really? On my main account, I did a space about them, everything. What? Yeah, and I didn't even... Now I'm going on deep, guys. Yeah, like you gotta...

You gotta... Pixels? Pixels? Look, before you judge, they do have... I'm not judging. I'm not judging. I'm just reading. They launched on Binance.

They seem like a good project. I took a punt and said, personally, I'm going to shield the first project. I wasn't paid for it, so I didn't disclose it. We're investors, but I didn't actually pay for it. They didn't get paid for it. If you want to block me, do it now and not after the show.

Before we kick off the show. i think that there's a for a more serious conversation about this if someone invests in something they transparently say that they invested in it if they actually believe in it shouldn't they be able to share that with people it's it's the it's the biggest trap for anyone who's a personality if you invest in something and you don't tell anyone you've lied, if you invest in something and you do tell them, then you're pumping and dumping and shilling it. Aren't you allowed to talk about things that you like? It seems crazy. One more disclaimer. You can't promote it, talk about how great it is, and then sell.

There was an influencer the the guy that's partnered with logan paul i've got his name he was uh coffeezilla did a video on him the guy that launched that drink yeah yeah yeah and launched prime prime i mean he he got into trouble with coffeezilla because he was promoting projects and then selling within 12 24 hours and so even if you disclose doesn't mean you sell right after you promote it. But now we have, I didn't get paid for it, we have a one-year lock. I love the project, but I thought it would be a fun way to start the show by kind of putting my neck

out there and seeing if you block me or not. I think that it means a lot when you do it sparingly. It means you really believe in it. Yeah. I got the inspiration after you promoted that bold token, bold RAN. Remember that token? My God, what are you talking about?

He's joking. I don't know what that is. Let's kick off the show. I think it is altcoin season. And the project we talked about today is a good example that they did launch on binance but they're sitting at a on ideal price at whatever thousand x on on our investment price five thousand six thousand x something five thousand x your investment price no no at five thousand percent take it easy relax you said five thousand percent dude still oh sorry sorry casual five thousand percent i should not be shocked here right

yeah but just kind of it does it does the reason i'm mentioning it though is it does indicate that outcoin season is here whether whether you hate outcoins i know some people on stage do whether you love them uh ryan was talking in his show about narratives and i told the team i want to do at least one show a week scott will probably not like this but i want to do at least one show a week where we focus on different narratives the one i focus on today yeah it was meant to join he didn't but we had we had actually guys come on ivan on tech come on and we talked about gaming as a narrative ran in his show was talking about ai as a narrative and his argument's like you know we're at the last leg of it um we did talk about the um i keep forgetting names what's that video

the the open ai uh launched for video creation? Thora. Thora. Thora has launched, and then obviously NVIDIA's shilling of AI and decentralized AI and owning your own data. It kind of indicates that AI is still the narrative dominating crypto right now. But, Ryan, you did say it's in its last leg. So I know it's not part of the topic. We are talking about out season potentially.

So maybe you could tell us why you think AI is its nearest last leg and you kind of touched on Deepin as well. So it'd be good to kick off the show with a discussion on these two narratives. First of all, Mario, I want to say congratulations on investing in Pixels, but also don't count your money before because, I mean, and I think it's important that people understand what's going on here. The price looks high because none of the tokens are in circulation. And so, you know, at one point they had a $1.5 billion or $2 billion fully diluted valuation.

And that's an absurd, absurd market cap for a project of that size. And I'm not taking anything away from the project because I think actually the project is fantastic. But I think it's important that people understand that this is a game, and the game is to release a few tokens in the beginning and to pump the price. And slowly, slowly, slowly, the price will come back to equilibrium when the tokens actually get released. So now the truth is, I don't know how much you invested and congratulations for making a 5,000% return, but it's important that people understand

that you can't actually cash out the 5,000%, right? Because you don't have your tokens and you'll only get your tokens probably in, I don't know, I don't know how long your investing is, but- You said a year.

We did a year. Yeah. And we do that with all, and Rand's point is very important. I think when people like us or anyone that invests, when they talk about some of them get, you know, KOLs get an immediate unlock. We try to negotiate more tokens at a better. I had that argument and Rand actually just elucidated what some of the projects said. I had that argument with two or three projects.

It said we're locking up everybody, VCs, pre- except for k-o-l's and guys i mean there's a lot of people in the audience don't know what k-o-l i mean that's key opinion leader it's the dumbest term in the world it uh code for influencer it means all the people who are sharing things on their timeline on twitter and on youtube etc uh for an allocation what the projects are saying to me is they're giving those people their supply early knowing that they will dump and that will create the supply that Rand's talking about. So there's actual tokens for sale. Let me play devil's advocate, even though I agree mostly with you. KOLs get very small allocations. You talk about a few hundred, a few thousand dollars. VCs invest 50, 100, 200K, up to seven figures depending on the project and how much they're raising.

So you can't have a VC unlock 10% of $200,000, $20,000 versus a KOL unlocking $1,000 or $2,000. So selling pressure is there. I'm understanding of the strategy as long as it doesn't become too extreme. We called out a project you all know a few uh a few weeks ago we called them out very infamous or famously um i'm doing the strategy but i think if the unlocks are small it's like paying them fiat you pay them with your own token put selling pressure you're going to disclose it i'm not i'm against the strategy but i understand it but when you have vcs getting a big unlock 10 20 and you have kls getting a big unlock you're just dumping on retail um so the

good news is that the trend is the trend in general is towards locking up a lot more tokens for a lot longer so i mean that that's a positive then the last bull market exactly and we're kind of proactive in it so if like let's say we're investing 200k and then we say look and we're gonna you know get extra tokens for doing spaces or promotion and we always say look uh lock us for longer do it another two years instead of one year, but just give us more tokens, give us better terms. And the project generally appreciates this. There's a project that just contacted me and they said, hey, we have allocations opening. And guys, you should see my telegram. It's comical. I'm sure

you guys know. I don't have a person who handles these things mostly, so I just ignore 99% of them. And, and it was like, you know, we had some allocation opening from the KOL rounds. And so obviously, right, that sparked my interest. So my natural question was, well, why? I mean, this is a heavily hyped project, tons of people are in it. And they were like, well, we, you know, on behalf of some exchanges, we had to change our tokenomics slightly. So the influencer unlock, the KOL unlock, whatever it was, went from like 20% upfront to 18% upfront. And because of that 2% drop, a number of influencers backed out because that meant there was 2% of their tokens less that they could dump, which is just insane. What's disgusting about this is that these

influencers are actually promoting to their followers that they're meant to gain their trust. They're promoting those projects, which is good. All right, no problem. But if you're promoting it and as you promote it, you're selling it, I don't understand how these guys still get credibility. I hope regulators catch on. I know, Ryan, you're pretty strict in your policy. I think even stricter than I am that when you invest, you don't offer anything in return for that investment. We do.

We would never accept investment in return't offer anything in return for that investment. We do. We would never accept like investment in return for spaces or in return for, like we don't do shit like that. Like we, because then you can't be, you can't be unbiased

in your coverage because, because, you know, like people are going to start wondering are you running a spaces or you're doing a show

because you've got tokens or because you actually have an interest in the project. And so we just made a decision not to, not to do stuff like that but then you is it but but the two are mutually the two are mutually exclusive why would you get tokens if you're not interested in a project we don't we don't take tokens we don't take it by saying the people's concern and i know we're going to kick off the show scott we almost finished it back and forth i know you hate that

but people's concern ran is you said people are people are concerned that there's a conflict of interest. Are we pumping it or are we promoting it or talking about it because we have tokens in it or because we like it? But I'm saying you can't have tokens in it if you don't like it. We don't accept tokens in return for

views on the show or views on spaces. We would never do that. That's against our code of conduct. That's it. You charge people for sponsorship and if we do, we label it very clearly as show sponsor and

it's always listed in the YouTube description and people know that it's a show sponsor and as a result they've paid to be on the show. That's what a show sponsor is. It's someone that has paid money to be on the show. Do you accept we take 90% on the show so that's what a show sponsor is someone that has paid money to be on the show um but do you do you accept do you accept so we take 90 percent talk do you accept tokens or fiat or mix if we i think you're more fiat focused we take fiat and if we do take tokens or if we do pay it in tokens obviously it's going to be liquid tokens that we can sell on the market immediately

uh because again we don't want to be seen like sponsors can pay us to appear on the show but you can never you can never, you can never give us an investment and say, listen, if you invest in my project, I expect to be on your spaces. I expect to be on your show. We don't accept those kinds of terms.

We never accept. We brought the turn down on your investment and we have, we've turned down tens of millions of dollars in investments. I'm different. So we accept and then we kick off the show. Scott, last point is that we'd accept, we try to avoid fiat, we try to take tokens, and we do the opposite of you. We try to get

a lockup rather than immediately unlock. Just because the project is more open to give us more tokens. Yeah, the lesson I learned in the last market. None of the above. Well, no, it's not even that. I mean, I think all three of us in the past have, you know, if you invest in any of this stuff, eventually people are going to accuse you of these things. I took it a step further after the last market. I literally just don't talk about any of them, period. Like my show eliminated, well, never had it, but my show is about basically like large gaps in macro.

I still talk about it at all, right? You're just not going to hear about a small project on my YouTube channel. It just doesn't happen. So you never have to worry about it. Yeah. I don't, I don don't i'm against that strategy i think if people attack you for a ptsd i know you're being emotional not logical but let's let's kick off the show ryan i'd love to give us a recap um of the the narrative the ai narrative nearing its end and why deepen is exciting and for the panel thanks for being patient with us today. We kind of have a back and forth.

But go ahead, Ren. I don't know if you guys... Yeah, I mean, let's talk about it. So I don't think at all the AI narrative is finished. I think the AI narrative will continue to... If you watch my show, what I said is I think the AI narrative will continue to run based on headlines in the real AI world. When I say the real AI world, the non-crypto AI world.

So for as long as NVIDIA posts good results this Wednesday, then AI will run on Wednesday. And for as long as they keep making announcements about Sam Altman raising $7 trillion, which is, of course, garbage, then AI, the narrative, will run. My concern about the AI narrative here is that there are very few crypto projects that really have anything going for them when it comes to AI. And so I think a lot of them are just hot air and you're basically catching a free ride on the narrative pump. That's what it is.

You're basically catching a free ride on the AI narrative pump, which is great. In a crypto bull market, there's nothing better than a free ride on the tide, but it's only great if you can get out before the tide pulls back because the higher they go up, the quicker they come down to zero. We've seen this before. I think we saw it last year,

last season with crypto gaming where, you know, there was a million crypto gaming projects in the, in the bull market. And they all did really, really, really well. And then the tide went up, and then what happened? Anyone that was involved in crypto gaming basically saw their battles. That's kind of like where it was. So I would be very careful, but that said, I mean, you know, it's a crypto bull market. In a crypto bull market, you should play the narratives because that's, you know,

a great way to make money, and you don't need to look for fundamentals. Just make sure that you get out early and don't hold these things too late. And by the way, just before you answer the question, just for the audience, I'm actually curious on the debate me and Rand were having earlier regarding anyone that has reach promoting a project with lockups or not accepting at all accepting fiat unlocks what do you think of the debate we had earlier i'm happy to have a debate with you one on one on this basis where we can discuss a separate one yeah separate one so let's talk

about so the ai but the question just back to the back to the question i have for you on the ai's point just it was something you mentioned earlier first the seven trillion dollar uh headline uh by sam alman i haven't looked into it, so obviously it's not believable. So what's the twist? What's the actual story? And then also, what led to the current AI pump? So the AI pump is pumped by the $7 trillion headline, by the launch of Sora, which is the new,

you can call it the chat GPT, but for video. So you basically say to it, make me a video of Mario dancing naked in the snow, and it makes you a real life video with camera angles. You can then say to it, move the camera left, move the camera right, pan the camera in, zoom the camera out. And it basically creates you a real life looking video. So you can basically make a whole, not yet, but soon you'll be able to make a whole movie just by writing the text. So just think about that.

You're going to put actors out of work. You're going to put cameramen out of work. You're going to put movie directors out of work. Maybe movie directors will still have some kind of role directing the AI. But I mean, that's what this new AI innovation is, which was launched by OpenAI. So I think for as long as these narratives... The trillion-dollar headline as well? The trillion-dollar headline saying, you know, it just meant that if he wanted to develop a chip project

that he needs to develop, he would need $7 trillion. And, you know, like there's no $7 trillion raise. It's just that's the amount of money they would need to do what they want to do. But that's not the point. The point is that AI is going to continue to pump. There are real narratives and not real narratives when it comes to crypto AI.

One of the real narratives, which I didn't think was a real narrative, was decentralized computing power. So there is a big shortage of decentralized, of computing power around the world for these AI models and one way to bridge the gap between the number of the amount of computing power that is available and the amount

of computing power that we need is probably using decentralized computing power so these projects are really getting traction maybe even you can say render so those are three projects those are getting real traction. You can go watch my show.

I covered them pretty much all on my show. The next one that, the next narrative which I covered on my show is that you actually need decentralized file storage. And so it's not only about decentralized compute, but you actually need decentralized file storage. And so I covered the whole narrative of decentralized file storage on the show, saying, look, the AI narrative is

run, but the file storage part of it hasn't run yet. And so the next narrative that could run is actually this decentralized file storage, which is Filecoin, Arweave, Internet Computer, Storage, Seacoin, all these decentralized file storage narratives. Let's see, Danish these decentralized file storage narratives. Let's see. Danish has put his hand up. He's going to come here with some left wing. They come here with some left wing complete.

This will never work in crypto. Danish, just give him the microphone and let him do it. Just let him do it. Let him do it. Why does crypto ruin all beautiful things? Like, i don't understand why crypto just keeps ruining this beautiful thing one unlike crypto ai actually has utility for the end user uh so that's uh that this is the difference instead of just a bunch of meme coins ai and honestly like ai is the only

thing i've seen to date that actually makes crypto relevant in terms of utility outside of the store of value stuff that you've seen with Bitcoin. So I don't know. I think it's so interesting to hear like you guys using the words AI narrative instead of like AI is real. They're actually building new products. Those products are actually solving real issues and reducing one of the most important things, which is FTE hours or improving productivity for any task out there. So the only thing I'll push back with is it's not a narrative. Yeah, he's not saying that.

He's saying it's a narrative in crypto. He's not saying AI is a narrative. He's saying that in crypto, you see 50 tokens that probably have nothing to do with AI pump because chat DBT or open AI launches a video service. That's just what we see in crypto. No, that's what I was trying to say, which is like crypto ruins all ideas by putting it into a narrative around AI. That was my original point. Sorry, I was not clear. And I guess that's what the point. I missed the point that AI narrative represented crypto AI narrative, but all these companies trying to say that crypto is somehow going to add value for AI is kind of foolish. Number one, decentralized compute is an incredibly challenging problem. It is not an easy problem. And no offense to the crypto bros, but like, that's not what they're known for is solving these technical problems. I think there's a lot more that needs to happen before decentralized compute really occurs. And it's not no offense, again, cryptography,

a generalized ledger does not solve this, you could just have a decentralized compute without any of those other aspects of crypto. That's the thing that's so confusing, which is, you have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. So that's the only thing I was going to say is I actually don't know if compute makes any sense. Yeah, you're not wrong. You may not have been around sort of in the peak of the last cycle, but we see this a lot in crypto, what Fran's talking about. It's nothing new. A lot of people might remember when Facebook changed their name to Meta and anything in crypto that was even superficially metaverse went absolutely bananas for no reason, except for that. And none of the metaverses in crypto actually work even to this day,

except, you know, I mean, none of them, none of the metaverses that we had in the previous bull run actually work at all. Like if you think about all theaverse projects that they work, not a single one of them has any meaningful number of users. By the way, same thing for gaming. I've had many arguments with Mario about how... That's happening now.

Gaming is happening. I'm not convinced. You could just do it without cryptography. Tell me why not. Because you don't need cryptography. Can I ask you a question? You don't need cryptography. Alright, Danish. Just give them ownership. Do you miss the part? All right, Dan. Okay.

So first, you're going to probably hate me today because today I was just talking to Scott about shilling my first project. And it's actually a game. It's done really well. So yeah, I know. Before you resign or no longer work with me, we'll talk offline on why you probably would agree with me. But let me talk to you about ownership. You said give them ownership. How can you own something?

How do you own things today, Mario? You don't own them. In a game, you don't own your assets. The game owns it. The aim... So you're talking about a smart contract? Then just do the smart contract. You don't need all three?

You don't need the generalized ledger? You don't need cryptography? No. This is the fucking problem. You guys have done everything... But my question is, you own something in the physical world through the physics.

You put it in your pocket, you put it in your house. In the digital world, how do you own something? YouTube says you own that video. Mario, what are you talking about? You don't own it because you can put it in your pocket. We have contracts. You can literally have contracts. I mean, this is not complicated.

The point here is that you can… The problem is that you guys are taking all of the different aspects and all of the... Actually, interestingly, each one of those things is valuable in a specific use case. For some reason, the crypto industry has decided that it all has to happen all together all the time, which makes it a very heavy protocol to actually execute on. That is actually the main... And by the way, you guys will make fun of me, but five years from now, crypto will actually be valuable for people because people

will unbundle it and solve real problems. If you want to solve... Last question, Danish, before we go to Tom. Sorry, one last thing. If you want to solve the problem of ownership, you can literally just do smart contracts on their own. By the way, there's a company, I can't remember the name, but the founder of Google, Sergey,

he's actually backing it which is only focused on smart contracts like only focused on just taking that part of crypto and making it viable that makes way more sense to me the utility does not come from all of it all together that made sense for things like currencies and and you know mining all of that stuff is completely separate what we really want is to be able to get the utility out of this incredibly interesting technology and apply it to the specific use case. You have a problem, you use your tools to come up with a solution. You just don't throw everything at it. That was the only point I was going to make. We got Steven from Ethereum and Tom, who's invested in a lot of games among other projects, other narratives. Steven,

Tom, maybe you'd like to respond to danish instead of me yeah i mean like well actually my background is more ai than it is crypto and so i mean i hear what you're saying but like the problem with meta is that they're building out like the whole metaverse themselves crypto allows you to like incentivize people to help build out the metaverse so like we're actually launching something that's a digital twin and we're incentivize people to help build out the metaverse. So like we're actually launching something that's a digital twin and we're incentivizing people to use their phones in their car or whatever. And then we're actually doing the processing on the edge. So nobody's ever done that before, but they'll get rewards for doing the processing on your phone.

And then I'd get sent up to the cloud, but let's small vectors, but that machine that's machine vision, and you wouldn't really be able to do that as a single company. You need a force of millions of people to do that. So is the crypto, I wouldn't say it's the best utility for it, but you wouldn't be able to accomplish that scale of a project without incentivizing the crowdsourcing of such a large number of people. Do you need all of the things but just tokenization, Stephen, for that?

Don't you just need to unbundle tokenization to be able to incentivize people? I mean, like, wouldn't that just be the easier thing to do? You're already trying to compute at the edge. Why would you add other aspects of the technology there? Like, How is that valuable? Well, it depends what you're trying to incentivize. I mean, you're incentivizing it because you need computing power all around the world. So Rain was talking about decentralized storage, but this is like decentralized processing on your iPhone or your Android.

And then we're cutting it down into very small bits so it's actually manageable in the cloud. How else would you be able to incentivize people to do that? Yeah, you use tokenization, just like what you're saying. My point is that specific, again, the main point that I'm coming to is this entire industry has been based on a sham, which is that you only have one protocol and that one protocol will be involved with every single thing.

And I'm just not convinced of that. I actually think there's utility that's missing right now. And that's the point that I'm at. All right. So that's a separate point. Now, your point is that we don't have any, we don't have a killer DAP, right? Like, and I agree with that point because nothing scales. So if it doesn't scale, you can't put a killer DAP on it.

10 years ago, the number one paid app was FishCoy this screensaver and nobody thought apps were going to work. Well, like Instagram and whatever, they proved that wrong. So like once a killer app that comes in, that's you. I mean, I agree with your utility argument, but at the same time, there's so much, let's take another example. And AI, you want to like train models. The easiest way to train models is to have people like clicking. Yes, this is, this is a car. This is not, this is this, you know, that's like a really complicated thing to do.

But if you have a million people doing that and you can incentivize them to do it, you know, you can do things in AI that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Yeah. If I, if I could hop in. Just jump in. Yeah, go for it. Thanks. So yeah, a lot to hit on here. I raised my hand because I just assumed I was going to immediately agree with Dinesh before we started talking. So that was why I first started raising my hand. But for me, it's pretty simple. Crypto and AI are synergistic, right? And you don't need tokens for everything. You don't need smart contracts for everything. Every platform

certainly doesn't need a token. But it's very clear to me in decentralized physical infrastructure, particularly in AI, why you need tokens for decentralized compute and others. And it's all about incentives, as Stephen mentioned, right? If you want to, you know, BitCenter improves AI models by offering, you know, people can offer up and train models, decentralized and those benefits stack on top of each other versus like chat GPT, doing it in its own silo, right? Decentralized compute protocols, I can offer up my latent compute capacity from my laptop or my phone, get token incentives for it. And a range of different providers can use that directly on the network.

Again, incentives are aligned because I get token incentives and the protocol gets compute. Could you do that through USDC payments or other payment roles? Potentially, but it's more efficient to have a direct smart contract-based crypto protocol with incentivized tokens that aligns all of the different parties. It also brings in things like censorship resistance that we know, right? All these things have to be housed within Google or otherwise. There's just a number of benefits that make crypto and AI synergistic rather than antagonistic with each other. I mean, and I didn't even touch on identity and decentralized province and all those different things that I think are really going to be the unlocks and use cases for crypto, right? So there's so much that crypto helps with AI,

and it's not even a narrative. It's just actual economics. So this is the problem is that when you, so for example, ChatGPT was the fastest growing app to 1 million users. How much was ChatGPT paying you to use it? Can anybody answer? Nothing. Zero. Nada. The point is that the only incentives that people in crypto see is cash, speculation, all of this stuff. And that's what's actually killing you is that you can't use utility and experience and product and solving a real fucking problem to actually make crypto worthwhile and if you guys just got rid of the money for a little bit and focus on utility maybe you all would be further along it's about the best product and what i'm saying is the next best product is going to be a decentralized open model because of the

different ways you can actually improve it based on improved computing power, having more access to GPUs, having, you know, it's back to capitalism, right? Having a million people attack the problem rather than one person or a team of engineers at Google. So the best model will be built in an open source fashion and crypto incentivizes that. That's a simple fact. I think there's a lot of other open source AI companies, tools out there, Lama being the best example of it, obviously. And, you know, we're seeing this right now, which is crypto is not leading the AI revolution. If anybody here believes that crypto is leading the AI revolution, they're losing their minds.

They're just piggybacking on it to try to make themselves rich. Rand is 100% right. This is just a narrative. This is just, you know, on the AI side to make themselves rich. Rand is 100% right. This is just a narrative. This is just, you know, on the AI side, I was wrong. He's right that the crypto part of it is just a narrative. There is nothing that's happening. I still have not heard a cogent. Decentralized compute makes a lot of sense.

I'm happy to look into it, but it actually does not exist today. And they've not even done it on a small scale. So I think it would be very interesting to see how decentralized compute will beat centralized training. Again, remember, we can do that. There's two parts of this. One is training and the other is inference. By the way, my background is in AI, not in crypto. So just to be clear, one is training and the other is an inference. Training requires a ton of GPUs. Inference does not. Once the model is trained, you can actually do it at the edge with no problems. And so the point here is that what you guys are talking about is decentralized compute of training the model. I just don't see why you could do it with crypto when NVIDIA couldn't do it, trillions of dollars. It just, it makes it today. It just does not work. And the on-ramp would be really hard. Sorry, Scott,

go ahead. Alex, it's a great conversation. Yeah. I think, look, the, the use case is aside, the decentralized compute given the shortage of GPUs is an interesting narrative. I disagree. They do exist at small scale today, small scale. And there are huge challenges I think for these projects to get any kind of big, you know, access to GPUs. But I think that's an interesting narrative. It's not the only one, though. I think if you think about the, you know, Dinesh is talking about trillions of dollars of compute. I don't know if you've already seen the legislation against and proposals for legislation against the open

sourcing of AI, I mean, which OpenAI and others have supported to create a regulatory mode, you've also started to see the electricity usage narrative come to AI the same way it had to Bitcoin. I think one of the main longer term visions is that a decentralized way of doing this would, of course, make it more resilient to various types of attacks. You're right. It is inference and training, but there's also interesting stuff that is pretty much only being thought of right now in the crypto world that is based on technology that really only the crypto forefront has developed, which is zero knowledge machine learning, which also could be an important part of making AI accessible to people all around the world, which is some privacy and security around, uh, you know, confidential training,

training your own models in a confidential way. Um, so, and, and, you know, the zero knowledge, uh, development community is heavily focused on cryptocurrency. Why? Because of the incentives. Um, so I, you know, look, Dinesh likes to come out with these extremely bold and negative positions. And so, you know, they play well. I'm not a very, I'm certainly not a massive bull on crypto AI,

but I think there is some interesting stuff there. We wrote a report about it last week. Check it out on diplomacy.com. And I think that there's a happy medium between the two. And what we've seen consistently in crypto,ish which we were talking about before is first you see the ridiculous speculative degenerate gambling around a narrative that fundamentally has no reason to be pumping which is the example of open ai launching a video platform and everything even superficially connected to AI and

crypto goes absolutely nuclear, including WorldCoin, who's scanning your eyeballs for Sam Altman, right up like 40% a day or two. I mean, that's nonsense. We also see that people in the crypto space get extremely excited about these narratives early. And we know that human beings, you know, we think something's going to happen exceptionally fast. but on the tail end, we also are really bad at understanding the parabolic growth once it actually does get adopted. So we're always a cycle or two, too early. So Alex, kind of to your point, and I think even what Tom was sort of hinting at, I think it's really early for crypto AI that doesn't make the ideas bad. It just means that they're not going to be functioning tomorrow. Right. And maybe this is a next cycle narrative, just like maybe last, you know,

how excited we were about DeFi or NFTs or Metaverse in previous cycles took four or five more years than people expected. Go ahead, Alex. Yeah. I mean, it's like a, it's, you know, cryptocurrencies are global, open decentralized networks right and and anyone can come up with these ideas and launch them that has access to other you know that can create a network which is fundamentally just the internet right so you see crypto speed running plenty of narratives and whether or not some of them are long-term viable like it remains to be seen i think defy you know if you think back to like august 2020 so-called defy summer like a bunch of absolute junk but like you did get protocols and applications that

have had longevity so like i mean i think it's just a doomerish position it doesn't surprise me that dennis drops off the call as soon as he says his negative stuff he did the same thing last week after saying the economy was going to collapse. And then, you know, stocks hit all time highs, literally several hours, you know, 12 hours after he said it. So I just, I, I'm extremely skeptical of egregiously bullish posting or discussions and extremely skeptical of doomerism in the face of, you know, accelerating technology adoption. I think AI obviously on its own is going to be a very powerful thing for the world, but you know, I mean, do we not think that he's talking about bringing real utility? option. I think AI, obviously, on its own is going to be a very powerful thing for the world. But, you know, I mean, do we not think they're talking about bringing real utility? What real utility?

I mean, you know, it is actually even here today for AI, too. I mean, it's also extremely nascent. I think, you know, people fact checking and spell checking and cheating on their college papers is probably the main use case. Some help with coding, perhaps, but I've seen AI make terrible mistakes with coding. So and, you know, I use mid journey and it's cool for making images and graphics. You know, I don't think it's you can see where this world is going, but to suggest that it somehow is so much more utility than crypto is, I think, totally, totally made up. But anyway, yes, I mean, look, AI, as a narrative trade, it's obviously hot. I don't think we're in alt season now, by the way, I think,

you know, it's the cloud where historically alt season, if we just want to look at the charts has been Bitcoin leads a giant rally hits an all time high, then Ethereum follows and hits its all time high. And then you have a protracted sort of alt season that layer one rotation and in fall 2021 was sort of like the pinnacle of that example. But it happened also in 2018 after the 2017 Bitcoin top. So I don't think we're actually there. But you know, anytime that Bitcoin, you know, goes sideways in a bull market, you start to see, you know, people looking for other trades to do. And obviously, altcoins the last couple of days have been, you know, really performant. But I just think people need to recall that if you're going to try to trade like low cap altcoins, you are trading against, you know, influencers, insiders, professional market participants,

it is the equivalent of penny stock trading for for the most part i think you got to keep your eye on the prize and think about fundamental narratives and how crypto can be long-term valuable i mean you don't see if you look at the bitcoin chart over time you see multiple giant booms and busts and it keeps returning you don't see many alt coins keep returning right so be be prepared for the fact that by the time you hear a lot of chatter about a project you might already be the ex of liquidity and you got to be cautious you use defy severance the best example of that right because the first iteration of defy was literally farming tacos and yams or whatever the hell else it was that's all dead but defy is here but none

of those tokens are higher than they were back then right exactly i mean even the defy tokens themselves like yeah that's what i mean like even even the ones that survived and succeeded they don't usually reach the peak of the initial like huge hype cycle yeah i mean i i think or they do early and don't haven't yet right that's right like it's sort of even though people are using those applications right applications, the compounds and makers and unis like Aave, people use these. They're widely used. But again, you look at the same thing. It's so funny. It's like concentric circles. A new L1 launches, then you see DeFi and NFT

spring up on it. Or maybe a second cycle L1 sees a resurgence like a solana and you see activity there obviously like like jupiter is an nft platform nft is huge there but again like you don't know if like how how much longevity do these things really have that's why i focus on you know helping people understand like the actual revolutionary nature of public blockchains and can they be long-term valuable and i i think they can and and so playing the game of like you know which rotation trade i mean that everyone's welcome to do what they want with their own money but that that is a very tricky game and it is it is in many cases a zero-sum game um and you're trading usually against people with

more information than you depending on who you are. So that's just something to be very cautious about. Yeah. The casino is always open and the house always wins, right? Ran and I have had the conversation. It is a global casino. It is an internet scale casino where anyone can launch anything. In some ways, that's one of the most beautifully capitalistic concepts ever created, right? And that does lead to huge innovation because when money flows in, right, you get a giant pile of investment and a giant pile of entrepreneurs. And some of those will be literal scammers. Some of them will be, you know, well-meaning

entrepreneurs who fail. And some of those will create durable long-term products, right? And without that wave of investment, you wouldn't get those durable outcomes. Yeah. Ran and I, I wish he was here, but he and I, and we've talked about this before. We had a conversation. It was a consensus either a year ago, a year and a half, but we were sitting, I had a few too many drinks and, you know, I sort of broke down how in the last cycle, my biggest, I guess, crime against myself and humanity was that I deeply believed in all this shit. Right.

And I was investing in everything and I was buying it and I was sharing it. And I thought it was going to go up forever. And Bitcoin was going to 200,000 and all season. And then obviously like, it all dumped in most of those things I held to 90 down 99%. And it makes you realize that even if you fundamentally believe in some of these things, like we were talking about with DeFi, that doesn't mean that the value accrues to the token or that the token has to go up.

Right. So holding the token doesn't even mean betting necessarily on the success of that platform, which does then make it the huge global casino. And when you're in that global casino, man, you've got to walk before that last drink. I'm not talking about Bitcoin, by the way, guys. But, you know, you do have to leave and you don't you don't take the free room the next night when you're up because they're just banking on you coming back and losing everything. And so I think on the token side, largely, like you said, like we said, it's a casino and the house always wins. And it's going to be very, very, very hard to find anything that beats Bitcoin or is

safe longer term. It's just sort of become my base case premise for this cycle and gives you more of a trading mentality and a bit of an edge to not assume that everything's going to go up forever. Yeah. I mean, that's how I view it. I don't know if anyone else has a take on that. Rand's not here. We could talk about it. But I actually do because we have Dan here. Dan, I know you're sitting here listening and thinking we've got more important things to talk about. I would love an update. Dan, for everyone, Schooler is the head of industry affairs at the Blockchain Association. On the regulatory front, is there anything that we should be closely watching right now?

Yeah, thanks for having me again, Scott. It's actually Monday, so most of Washington shut down today for the holiday. But we're watching quite a bit. I wanted to actually just chat in on a few of the political items coming up. Quite interesting. Last week, I think some of us on the call saw that John Deaton quasi-announced interest in Senator Warren's seat. That'll be interesting. I think you'll get a lot of support from her industry.

I think that'll be really a wake-up call to Warren as well because she's never really had a bona fide opponent since she was first elected. It would also be a good opportunity for our industry to really coalesce around a candidate. Now, whether or not he's viable, I mean, it remains to be seen. But I think he could really raise awareness for our issue specifically in Massachusetts. We're also looking at a few other races. Quite a bit of candidates actually are going to be coming to ETH Denver the next week, next two weeks, which really, if anybody's been gone to those over the years, that's pretty unheard of.

And I love that conference. It's one of the better ones of the year. But the fact that now there's a lot of just elected officials and interested parties coming to that in one way, shape, or form, I think is just a testament to the industry's growth. And also just let's talk about the Ethereum ETF. I think that's something else to be looked at over the next 12 months. We'll see how that plays out. a lawsuit similar to how grayscale did it but i'm sure that'll affect the price um going into the next year um and then we're hosting quite a few folks here just in washington at our office a lot of candidates that are interested in our ecosystem um that are interested in really building up the congressional blockchain caucus and the crypto caucus uh going into the election so that's just an update from our side uh industry side you know know, a lot of this conversation about AI, I mean, super exciting. I definitely think it's going to have, you know, an impact on our crypto ecosystem, but we're not really going to do too

much on the mission creep. I think it's fantastic technology. But it could be similar to how we saw, as you mentioned earlier, some of the trends that we've seen, adjacent to our ecosystem, like the metaverse, like the ICOs, like GameFi. They're all crucial, but we're going to keep focused on the greater blockchain top talking points right now. But AI, especially with WorldCoin, is getting a lot of attention, that's for sure. Hey, Dan, is it fair to say that just because they flew a flag in the name of Satoshi Nakamoto,

Elizabeth Warren did not magically become a fan of the Kinko space. It was probably one of the greatest trolls we've seen in a long time up here. That intern probably got in a lot of trouble this week. But brilliant idea. Oh, we cracked up at that. Actually, I've got to print out a copy of that certificate and put it on our wall here. Yeah, you're going to have to do that one in, like, full poster size.

You know, maybe movie screen size. Awesome, man. Dan, thanks for the update there. And I think we should probably also pivot and just talk a bit about markets. We have some great technical analysts here. Chris, I mean, what are you looking at right now? We obviously, it's funny, I noticed this weekend that there was this sentiment that the market was really boring. I guess that's because Bitcoin traded around $52,000 for all of three days. But if you literally just zoom out to two weeks, it was $42,000 two weeks ago. Bitcoin itself up like 25% in two weeks. So what are you thinking?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, for me, nothing's changed. This weekend, we had a little dip down and I posted an update that said that we're going to be breaking out of that descending channel, the little local kind of bull flag thing. And we got that. And, you know, we're sitting we're sitting right on that that large ascending channel coming off the bear market low. So, you know, we've got the breakout of that. We've come back. We've retested now been sitting on that for, you know, almost a week, almost a week. And so, you know, all of a sudden, we start looking, okay, well, I at, you know, this close count, which says, okay, we've got wave three of three of three coming up there around 55,700. Or, you know, do we all of a sudden take off? And here's the thing. Usually when you're breaking out of a channel, you know, through the resistance there, usually price takes off.

And if that happens, all of a sudden we start looking at the alternate count, which says we're in wave three with a target of 77,000. And, you know, I think, you know, if you need narratives, I think you look at all the Bitcoin ETF inflows that continue to accelerate even as GBTC has dropped off. And, you know, all of a sudden things start getting really interested. We've had a lot you've mentioned on your show a few times, you and I've talked about it, how, you know, there are things that are different between the top of the last cycle and uh what we've had since the bottom of this cycle of what we've had previous cycles um in terms of structure uh you know the chart and so you know i you know until it happens i'm going to look locally as those targets go but

man i i'm open to the idea that maybe it takes off and leaves everybody behind and all of a sudden you know that that causes a lot of emotion and it causes people to um to start you know to hang out for a while and then jump in at the most inopportune time um and probably get caught okay Chris Chris Chris and Scott question for you I saw a tweet somewhere talking about leverage being at an all-time high is Is that true? I don't think so. No, I don't think I saw that, no. I think actually this is an extremely heavily spot-driven rally, obviously. I think that one of the, I don't want to quote wrong, but 75% of the buying effectively for Bitcoin right now has been driven

through the spot ETF. I mean, people forget that, you know, you're basically by putting a ton of the liquidity into ETFs and that being the trade that you're now trading during market hours, right? As opposed to 24-7. So I don't think anyone would be particularly surprised that Bitcoin has effectively stayed sideways during the weekend and on a holiday if right now the bulk of the flows are coming from ETF buying and selling. But I think that right now actually leverage is exceptionally low. I think funding rates are pretty flat. I don't think that there's much going on, which I think is a bullish

scenario sort of to the upside. Because usually, you get the blow off top when open interest goes parabolic and you have insane funding rates and people are paying exceptionally high rates to be long. That's what was happening when we saw those flushes right before the Bitcoin ETF actually got approved. Yeah, I'm going to try to find that tweet. And another thing as well, something I think is ran or you Scott talking about in your shows, guys, regarding the Bitcoin halving correction, the pre-halving correction, and

that we're past that date already. What are your thoughts, Chris, Scott? Do you think we could still see that? I think Chris, I like Chris' talk, but this is the first time and certainly closest to the halving that Bitcoin has pushed this high and certainly passed technically the golden pocket, like past that 61.8% Fibonacci, which by the way, when it wicked up on the ETF approval, it hit that level and then dropped pretty significantly. This is the first time we've been here. It doesn't mean this time is different.

I have no idea. But we are in a much higher position relative to where it, quote unquote, should be in the halving cycle coming into the halving. By the way, just to make a point before Chris jumps in, you guys who I might remember, the last time we were at 50,000 on the way down, even though we'd hit 69 and we're kind of at this level, it was like still Lambos and LaserEyes and million dollar targets and all those things. And now we're at 50,000 and it seems surprisingly quiet,

you know, anecdotally, in my opinion. And not only that, I think you can make a very clear argument that Bitcoin fundamentally what's happening underlying the market is exceptionally, exponentially more bullish than what the market actually had at 69,000 highs in the last cycle, when you consider the ETF and all these other things. The fact that we're at 50 and sentiment seems relatively low, there's still some disbelief. It's a bit surprising to me, but I guess humans are getting human. Chris, I'll let you go since I interrupted then, Tom.

Yeah, no, definitely, man. I mean, I agree all the way through. You know, it's just, you know, price is doing these things a bit more than what it's done previously. And, you know, I posted, I reposted somebody that I follow. They follow me back on February 16th, the chart where they showed the monthly hike in a sheet candles for Bitcoin. And the one thing I noticed is after the bear market lows, you got one set of red candles

on the pullback. And then it rallied into, you know, basically into the all-time highs. And we've had that. We had that on that six or seven month sideways that we had, you know, last year. And so, you know, if this continues to hold through, I mean, I don't know, you know, you look at it, there's another bit of technical evidence that might suggest, hey, you know, the pullback that we look for is already done. And all of a sudden, it really starts kind of pushing us toward this idea that maybe, just maybe, we do get this, you know, this sudden takeoff, this sudden rally, this big candles going, you know, forward. I'm not saying it has to happen. I'm watching to see

if it happens. But I am aware that, you know, I'm positioning myself so that if it does, you know, I can take advantage of this. But you know again until it gets going you know we've got to wait and see if it does that's the short that's the short way of saying it's probably a bad idea to be sidelined right now yeah it's been a bad idea to be sideline the entire uh last year what are you talking about man yeah absolutely but there are plenty of people still waiting for that tip go ahead tom yeah yeah just real briefly on your point on fundamentals um the one thing i don't Yeah, absolutely. But there are plenty of people still waiting for that tip. Go ahead, Tom. Yeah, just real briefly on your point on fundamentals. The one thing I don't think we've really talked about is just the emergence of a number of L2s on Bitcoin. So, you know, we've seen, I just tweeted something the other day, I think there's 40 plus L2s building on Bitcoin right now.

And, you know, this was just in a chart, just from the private market side, I think I've seen more. It's crazy how many things are building on top of Bitcoin as the biggest economic settlement layer by weight. And we're going to see that as the next narrative, is all of these protocols that are emerging, having their launch campaigns, etc., that are pumping Bitcoin up and above the kind of store of value use case. So fundamentals have never looked better for Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. Interestingly, though, with the hundreds of Layer 2s being built, I also see a lot of the sort of initial pitch decks and stuff. I literally have no idea how anyone can tell which ones of these are real

and have any potential and which are just complete cash grabs. I mean, you're a VC. Maybe you have an idea, but I just dismiss them all. I wouldn't know how to invest it. It's just like, dude, I have no idea. Yeah, I think we talked about this on the side. I have zero idea. There's going to be one of them or two of them or a few of them, but there's going to be speculative ones that flame out. But someone's going to win and the mindshare is moving that way. So the uh, you know, the dollars will follow and the fundamentals will, will certainly follow, but yeah, we have not invested in one yet because it's just so hard to pick a winner right now. I probably moved towards, towards wrapping soon, but Matthew,

David, you guys really haven't had an opportunity to speak. I mean, Matthew, what do you think, uh, about, about the market, what we're talking about at the moment? Yeah. Thanks so much so much for having me. Awesome to see everybody. It's just been really exciting to see some of these fundamentals play out. Really been interesting on a weekend perspective to see these be a little bit, you know, kind of lower key. I think people even were fitsing and starting a little bit that it's a holiday in the U.S. and that these ETF inflows aren't going to come.

And it's just kind of interesting to see people kind of on this boring spectrum right now. And I definitely think that there's like, like we've like folks have said, the fundamentals are in a great spot. I think we're, you know, like the like you said, past the point of sort of any particular dip you might see from from the having perspective, I am from a TA perspective, like I'm not a huge TA person. I'm not a huge active trader. But I do find it interesting that we look as traders for patterns when we've only seen two or three of these cycles. And we sort of assume that these things are always going to happen or happen, you know, rhyme, you know, history, it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. So looking for the patterns and things that have happened previously, and also looking for the

differences and what have happened are all very, very interesting pieces to me. So again, all great things moving forward from here. You know, I really do like to see that we haven't seen a ton of leverage get taken out. That's always kind of a precarious sign. So I'm eager to see that as well. And I'm frankly happy to see this be kind of boring at 50K. Yeah, boring on Bitcoin. But like we said, there's all these other sort of narratives and things popping left and right. Yeah, boring on Bitcoin. But like we said, there's all these other sort of narratives and things popping left and right. Matthew, I love your point. I think it's important to note like the four-year cycle is exciting. We all look at it. If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. But statistically and mathematically, it's nonsense to look at two or three times,

especially when the market was completely different, smaller, more nascent and think that it has to happen again. I mean, if someone said, hey, let's do a statistic model on two instances of something and predict if it's going to happen again, you'd get laughed out of the room. Right. Yeah. And just one quick quote from a favorite Buffettism of mine, which is, when it starts raining gold, don't get a thimble, go get a bucket. So be aggressive in this space.

Now is the time to be loading up. Get it while it's hot. Go ahead, David. Yeah. So, you know, to add to the conversation, look, in terms of funds we manage, we're kind of slow and steady, you know, love the boring nature of, you, love the fact that fundamentals are playing out, the ETF momentum will continue, not necessarily looking for another major catalyst other than the halving during the course of the year. But what I am finding, I had a couple of conversations over the weekend since it's a long vacation weekend with some allocators, LPs, endowments, foundations. The majority of the capital that we manage is high net worth individuals, some family offices. But previously in life, I was a distressed debt manager, you know, where endowments and foundations,

you know, where the bulk of the capital and those folks are still on the sidelines, hard, hard on the sidelines. I think the folks that that got involved in an earlier stage of crypto got burned really hard from some of the yield farming and staking that went on with some lesser known coins. And then, you know, I think a bunch went in hard on some of the biggest names on the VC side of things, whether it be FTX or otherwise. And they're not yet participating. They're not even contemplating participating. To me, that's a good thing. I think that, you know, taking all of these, taking the growth of the asset class in stages,

I believe is much more healthy than it being, you know, all in at once. And I think that the crypto industry or the crypto asset class, and especially Bitcoin, is showing its grit these days in terms of, you know, being uncorrelated. And I think that that one aspect, coupled with the fact, you know, with the technology, which is the important part, but the uncorrelated nature coupled with the fundamentals will eventually bring these people around. And it may be a boring part of their portfolio one day, but it will have to be a part of their portfolio one day. And being a part of their portfolio behooves billions, if not, you know, trillions of dollars that eventually have to make their way to this asset class. So to me, I don't mean to sell, you know, a very beautiful narrative for the long term. But

I really don't think that those institutional investors are looking to get off of the sidelines very quickly. Right now, also, you know, just in the macro picture of things, you know, a lot of those folks are sweating bullets around their fixed income, you know, related investments, private equity, VC allocations, and then commercial real estate, obviously. And so I don't think they have the bandwidth, frankly, you know, to think about an asset class that a lot of people have been burned by over the past couple of years. And that is still nascent and in their minds necessarily not yet a necessary part of their portfolios. Matthew, I'll let you comment.

Then we're going to wrap up after that. Thanks so much. Just two quick points. One from an RAA perspective, it's kind of an interesting thing to see sort of the staging of people accepting this because RAAs can't necessarily as a result of the riskiness of Bitcoin go out and sell this individually to retail clients, because it kind of goes against some fiduciary standards. And so what I'm seeing is that some people, clients actually have to come to the RIA or their wealth managers and pound their fists on the table and say, I want Bitcoin. And then they're going to sort of have to get like an unsolicited checkbox from this wealth manager saying that

they're not selling them something super risky. The other thing I was going to say is I just joined as a treasurer for an Episcopal church down the street that manages about a $14 million endowment. And it's a three-year term. And I kind of tongue-in-cheek joke aside that like, by the end of this term, I will have them into a form of Bitcoin from an ETF perspective. But even before that, I'm noticing on their balance sheets and some of the investments that they have, they're not earning the yield they could even on the dollar, on money market instruments and things like that. So I'm trying to think of ways to introduce them even in a more risk averse way to say there's ways to digitize or bring in digitized assets that are backed that are providing a little bit more of a yield and maybe we can dip our toes in that way as

well. So interesting ways for RIAs and wealth managers to think about how to approach those institutions and endowments as well. Yeah. It's just so early, right? So early for this process. Mario, I think we covered it for today. Hopefully it'll be a big week. I think we have a lot more to talk about when the market opens again tomorrow. I hate to say that, but it seems to be the fact that we track these inflows. I agree. And I'm actually going to go back and I'm just making this up. I'm going to go back and re-listen to the AI debate between Dhanush and the other panel. I'm going to actually sleep to it. I'm just going to get a looped recording of it.

I was trying to be serious. I think it was a good space. And I want to do more narrative space as well. Yeah, that i think it's i think it's important we used to actually do it quite a lot you know and sometimes there's just not that much breaking news that needs to be parsed on any given day and with this audience i think it's uh people be really interested in getting opinions from both sides on all these narratives yeah i want to get a do a gaming one you know i'm obsessed with gaming get yatsu he's meant to join us my space earlier couldn't make it so we'll probably bring him into to town who makes me so

bullish on everything i love listening to that guy meta metaverse in gaming yeah cool all right thanks everyone thanks bye