The Wolf Of All Streets - Bullrun Running: Can BTC reach $70,000 TODAY? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Yesterday, we had the great debate as to whether yesterday's price option counts as an all-time high or not. Chris, we were just talking about this. I say if you print a higher price, then you have an all-time high. It doesn't matter where the candle closed or what happens afterwards. What do you think? Yeah, exactly. I mean, just look at what the phrase is, right? All-time high.

It means a price high. It doesn't say a price close. It says a price high. So I mean, I think it's really kind of silly to say, oh, no, it's not a new all time high because we didn't close above it. The fact that we made one is what it is. The best part about crypto anyways, is that depending on the exchange, depending on the the time you get a different all-time high anyways so it's a exchange exchange to exchange dependence i watched coinbase it broke 69 000 to me uh that means we got there um and then obviously as we were talking here yesterday saw the massive drop afterwards did that surprise you at all no, you know, anybody that's that's following me there next the day before, I said that my preferred scenario would be this rally between whatever the high was

that he may have been like 67,000 or whatever I said between there and the all time high to see a rejection that carries us right down around 59, 5, 6, 60,000. And of course, we got like 50,000 some change down there. So that was my preferred scenario. And with that, we got like 50,000, some change down there. So that was my preferred scenario. And with that, you know, again, I'm looking up there toward for this next kind of move to get us up there around 98,000. So we'll see if we can get that now. People seem to freak out when you throw out numbers like 98, or 100 000 or 150 000 and i mean not if you look at historical precedent not really that big of a jump even if that happened in a much shorter term right i mean no you we've seen uh we talked about it yesterday but i think you know three of

the four times it's made an all-time high something like that in less than a month it's doubled basically in price yeah exactly you know we're at that acceleration phase of the cycle. Um, you know, this usually happens after having toward the end of the year, we just happen to have it before having this year, due to, you know, due to the the spot ETFs and whatever coming in. But you know, the general idea of the cycle doesn't change because of that, you know. So once we're doing this break of the all-time high, again, even to 98, I mean, what is that? That's a 50% run. That's it. I mean, so when you start thinking in terms of percentages

rather than absolute figures, because, you know, as again, as I mentioned on your show this morning, you know, as human beings, we tend to be very emotional, it's part of what makes us human. But if you don't have the experience of spending and collecting, you know, 100 $200,000 on a daily basis, you know, to where it's your normal way of life, you know, you're maybe used to, you know, much smaller numbers, it seems like, you know, a really large thing. But again, you know, when you look at it in terms of percentages, it's 50% from here. It's really, I mean, in terms of crypto and Bitcoin, it's really,

you know, a spit in the bucket. James, obviously, anytime I have questions about inflows and outflows and what's going on there, I ask you, it was interesting, we saw, and of course, there's a delay for ETF buying. But on a day where we saw Bitcoin rise to 69, drop to 59, settle at that point around 64, 65, we saw massive inflows, especially into BlackRock for the ETFs, right? Over $700 million yesterday in the midst of this crazy volatility. Yeah, I think we were discussing today in our team meeting, there's quite a lot of, there's about a billion dollars worth of calls on the Bitcoin market, 70,000. So we could see some real moves on there.

But then we were also discussing the fund flows. And it's quite difficult to reconcile the two. You know, with the fund flows flows i've worked out on average since launch there's been 4 300 bitcoin demanded a day versus obviously the 900 produced so it's got to source that bitcoin from somewhere else and there's that extreme buying pressure um you know this week so far we've seen 1.4 billion dollars worth of inflows alone which is massive um where does it stop particularly when we have the ria, which is massive. Where does it stop? Particularly when we have the RIA market,

which is just opening up in the US. We've got the Carson Group that's just allowed it. Where does it go after that? We've got Vanguard and a few others that will eventually allow the acquisition of Bitcoin ETS. It's a little bit hard to see when the demand stops at the moment. Yeah, interesting. You would think, James, you've got a bit of background noise as well there.

I don't know if you can get to somewhere a bit quieter. But you'd think on a day where price drops $10,000, you might see people also selling off the ETF and you might see outflows. But I guess that would be slightly delayed, right? Yeah, I'm just going somewhere quieter. Yeah, I mean, it's possible. But a lot of that could be explained by just those. The positioning in the markets a lot was at 69,000. And there's a lot of now 70,000. So we just saw a lot of those,

those, those aren't a lot of those trades unwind at that point. 69,000 is such a psychological level. So it didn't surprise me when we saw that sell-off. What was amazing was just how quickly it's rebounded. And I'm not really seeing any evidence. Sometimes when you see these sell-outs, you might see one provider see a lot of outflows. I'm just not seeing any evidence of any providers seeing outflows in the US at the moment. Yeah, it makes sense, which I think points to the fact that this was clearly a leverage flush. And interestingly, Ran was up here yesterday saying, listen, funding rates are exceptionally high. I don't count this as an all-time high,

he said. But we're going to see a big flush here. And he was right. Hopefully, he's going to be... Oh, I just see him requesting. It's like you ran. It's like you... I don't know if you can hear me while you're connecting, but it's like you heard me summoning you. But yeah, I mean, you literally said yesterday, if you can hear that, guys, these rates are exceptionally high. These alt rates are historically high. This thing is going down.

I don't know if you could hear that. That's what I said. I said the leverage was ridiculous. And I said, what I think is going to happen is we're going to come down and we came down. What I didn't expect is the V-shaped recovery as quickly as we recovered. That was a bit of a surprise. With that said, I still don't think that it's finished. I think that there's another leg down. The leverage

is still high. The funding rates aren't high, but the leverage is still very high. Yeah. So actually, I looked on CoinGlass and the funding rates were even jumping back up in this period pretty high. So as much as that shook the open interest or flushed the leverage, it didn't shake the spirit of people trying to get long. I would just add that in a real bull market like today or the last few months, a lot of people, the traders are playing the basis trade between the spot and the futures market.

And so actually what you find is in a bull market, certainly on the CFTC and the CF the cftc the cme you see um there's a very big net short position at the moment that's not necessarily a bearish thing it's just people are really playing that that basis trade yeah i think this was yeah i agree i think that's on the institutional side but i think rand's talking more about retail you know perpetual swaps on binance and BitMEX and whatever else just effectively getting flushed. It's the easiest trade in the world for a whale to basically make a ton of money by doing that. And now we're seeing $10,000 candles on those moves of billion dollars in

liquidation. What I didn't actually notice yesterday was that what actually made me start buying up the dip yesterday because I wasn't actually planning on buying this kind of dip. But I saw that the CME open interest hardly closed. It's closed a little bit, but very, very tiny. And that BlackRock was just buying and buying and buying. They had their biggest day yesterday. And then I was like, this is literally just a leverage flush out. It's not even a real correction.

It's just a leverage flush out. You literally just look at the data. And the database says you leverage flush out. It's not even a real correction. It's just a leverage flush out. You literally just look at the data and the database says you leverage flush out. Like read between the lines here. Yeah, I mean Solana, coins like Solana, I mean, went down to 105 and was, I don't know where it's at now, I'm not looking, but it was like

128 an hour ago or something, right? So in a bull market, if you are an altcoin trader, you get a 10 or 12 plus on bitcoin you get three times that on fundamentally strong altcoins the opportunities are ridiculous on a drop like that yeah yeah i mean i'm just i'm just looking i'm just putting up a spreadsheet that i did um this is in time on my show. And if you want the spreadsheet, you can actually just go to my show on YouTube and you can actually go get it.

But we actually modeled all the tokens and we looked at how far they dropped and how high they jumped up. But I'll just give you some examples. Like in the AI sector, the drop on the six or seven coins that we were watching was 16%. But the recovery was 30 percent um and you know if you look at the meme coins the drop was 31 but the recovery was 65 so what the market's kind of telling you is that showing you which narratives are going to be the narrative of the next of the next run you know and i mean the narrative that you can look at are it's the meme coins it's the ai coins and it's the AI coins, and it's the ETH coins.

It's Solana, Phantom, and the ETH coins. Because of obviously the Dencoin upgrade, which is happening in eight days. Ron, one question that I've been wondering is why do you think meme coins are such a... Specifically, that subcategory is doing so well this cycle? I'll tell you. I'll tell you. It's because of a phenomenon that we have in the market. The phenomena is, it's a phenomena called retardation.

Basically, there is a disease going around that there are so many retards at the moment. When I say retards, I mean degens. And all they want to do is gamble. And someone said it very beautifully today. I'll actually read you this thing. What we're going through is a phenomenon. I'm going to read you this tweet because I think this tweet is actually quite profound. It says, we're going to reach some serious levels of mental retardation for the meme coins in the cycle.

Think of meme coin ecosystem as essentially a skill-based global lottery platform. Players get to decide which lottery brand they want to buy tickets in. But the payouts and odds aren't the same. That's where the skill comes in. The jackpot winners don't come from pure luck, but the ability and everyone believe that they can find the next winner. And the more likely and the more people that they can get to buy the same ticket as them, the more likely it is that them and their friends will win.

That's the best feeling, winning together. It's a multiplayer money game with virality built in. That's pretty much why it's happening. Did you just describe craps? So basically what you're saying is with each cycle, we've seen less and less sophisticated participants join. With each down cycle, we've seen sort of the more sober people get flushed out. And it's really, as a result, we're evolving towards an even more degen, more gambling environment.

I think part of that is true, but part of it is not. I don't think it's a dumber, I don't know exactly what you said at the beginning, but I don't think it's a less sophisticated new entrance to the crypto market. I think these are the exact same people who are gambling on meme coins in the past market. I don't think that this is new retail. This isn't like when we saw the Doge run with Elon Musk, that was the meme coin rally of old, where you had millions of people trying to sign up for crypto exchanges and getting put on a waiting list for three months because they literally couldn't get it just because they wanted to buy Doge. This is, dude, this is a bunch of the same degenerates that have been gambling on chain over and over again, just pumping and dumping coins back and forth. I would argue

there's absolutely no new entrants to crypto that are participating in this meme coin rally. Joe, we talked about that a bit yesterday, right? Yeah. And it's early here in California and my brain's not working fast. So, Ran, I was all waiting for you to give me this epic answer. And then you just stunned us all. Good job on that um yeah i think you're seeing a little bit of a cool down on the the meme token rally um you're still you know we still see pepe up there which was kind of flat while um you know pork and pond and doge and everything was running um but that started to run last week. So did Floki. They're still running. But the overarching narrative here is still, I think, the most fundamental opportunity is in the L2 space. four hours. Aptos is moving again. And then even DEX token like Uniswap. Uniswap has made a lot

of announcements lately. They still have a war chest. They have such a lock on that market. And they've added some of the lower gas networks to the DEX there. So it's bringing over... I think they've outshined on Polygon like crazy. They've taken and stolen a ton of share from things like QuickSwap that were out there. So you're going to see, I think that will be probably the narrative for the altcoin market, I would say, from a fundamental standpoint is a lot of these L2s that are out there and L2s on Bitcoin and Ethereum are both going to continue to kind of push and run. And that's where I think people are finding some outsized, but I would say less risky opportunity. And what do we make of the fact that Ethereum, once again, sort of on one of these Bitcoin

flush situations or some big news around Bitcoin, arguably outperformed, right? We had a fake SEC ETF approval a couple months ago, the day before it happened. And ETH BTC rocketed up on the actual ETF approval. ETH outperformed Bitcoin. And yesterday, ETH didn't drop nearly as much and was already back making new highs hours ago, while Bitcoin has somewhat languished in the middle. I mean, Joe, what are you seeing from a sentiment perspective? And then Yago, I'll go to you after Joe. Yeah, I mean, sentiment continues to push higher. You know, 85% of the posts on Ethereum right now are positive, which is really high. And, you know, all that sentiment's coming from people

have the playbook. You know, they just saw what happened with Bitcoin. They know that there is some sort of percentage chance that an ETF gets approved at some point this year with everything else that's happening. And also, it's still, you know, it's still the base layer for everything else that's being built out there. And a lot of these meme tokens and everything else and people always kind of come back to eat. So it's just a safe play for a lot of these meme tokens and everything else, and people always kind of come back to ETH. So it's just a safe play for a lot of people. And again, they saw the playbook. If the ETF gets approved for that, they probably think that it does even better than Bitcoin and it doesn't take as much money to push Ethereum even higher than where Bitcoin is at. And so I think that's really the sentiment out there is people are waiting for that trigger. I agree. Yago?

I think there are three factors. One is that Ethereum just generally has lagged behind Bitcoin and has a lot of catch-up growth to do for close to a year now. And so it's starting from a relatively low base. The second is, as Joe points out, there's the sense that maybe an ETF is coming. And that's fueling some speculation. And then the third thing is there's an overall thesis that has developed over the years around how these bull markets play out. So the classic is first Bitcoin goes up then ethereum goes up and then the outs go up and then everything goes crazy um the question that i have in my mind is whether or

not that remains as true as it has been in the past for a number of reasons so first of all, what we're seeing is a extremely unusual sort of bull market start here. We've never seen an all-time high broken before the halving before. We're way, way, way ahead of schedule. We're also, another weird thing that we're seeing is what we were talking about earlier. We're seeing almost the reverse order. So Bitcoin's been going up and then it's sort of like skipped eth skipped a lot of outs and going to the crazy which is the meme coins that is a bit unusual um so there are two pattern interrupts that we're seeing here and then the third is that um bitcoin has always been the nexus,

sort of like the gravity point around which everything else circulates. But all of the other plays have been beta, high beta plays on Bitcoin, right? So Bitcoin can't do this, so we'll do this. But now we're seeing NFTs on Bitcoin. We're seeing tokens on Bitcoin. We're seeing actually Bitcoin starting to bring more side chains and roll-ups.

And so the very high beta plays are on Bitcoin this time around, which is something we've never seen before. So my view of, you know, I've seen every single cycle that has happened so far. And my view is that this is the most different one that I've ever experienced. Yeah, the meme coin rally, I think, is usually a local top. So maybe even though it wasn't in order, I think it maybe makes sense with sort of the euphoria that was building into that all-time high yesterday and then the flush. That's the only way I could explain that. But yeah, I agree that I dare say this time is at least slightly different. Actually, I just saw a story. I don't know if this is exactly breaking at this moment, but it's from Bitcoin Magazine. So hey, Bailey. Arizona State Senate considering adding

Bitcoin ETFs to retirement portfolios. The bill has passed. The Senate is now being reviewed by the House. So, talking about a state adding the ETF, not something that should be a surprise, by the way. We saw, obviously, BlackRock announcing that they were filing to add the Bitcoin spot ETF to one of their funds. This is something that I talked about with Mike Alford on my show this morning. We all had Matt Hogan on here talking about Fidelity in Canada, putting it even in their conservative fund because we all know that Bitcoin is mathematically a benefit to the

Sharpe ratio of any portfolio in small amounts. I mean, this kind of thing is the massive unlock. It's one thing to get a spot ETF approved. It's another thing for it to start being passively bought and added to every fund without someone having to make that decision that they want it in. Dave, go ahead. Yeah, I think I just want to try to put some context around, you know, the price action yesterday, last night and now, because effectively people are out there and I use an analogy in response to Eric on Twitter this morning, but I think it's war analogy of the cavalry charging. Because basically what happened yesterday was very simple. There was a significant amount of inflows, more than any of us could have imagined. Because at the end of the day, we all were surprised by those numbers. But a significant amount of inflows driving the price higher. What people need to understand about TradFi and the way it works, and for those who don't know, I used to run two Sigma securities and we used

to take the other side of retail trades. So we kind of understand these flows. Somewhere around 60% of all retail flows, at least, if not more, have limit prices. And those limit prices would, in general, not be up 20%, you know, from where, you know, where people place their orders. So effectively, the inflows that came in in the morning and that were being executed throughout the day probably were limited around the 66 to 67 range. But what happens is that momentum was so significant that crypto degens put on highly leveraged

short-term positions trying to FOMO the whole damn thing up and poke it into the all time high, which they did. The problem was there was no orders, there was no spot on the book to back that up. And even today, I just looked and for about at about 500 Bitcoin on the US exchanges, it's a bit that the order books are relatively imbalanced. I mean, it's not not a big one. But from 500 to 1,000 coins, it's massively – there's just no bid there, right? You know, the over 500 coins, there just aren't any bids. I mean, the people who are trading aren't leaving out of the money stuff out there. And so it looks major imbalanced.

Now, what does that mean? That means if someone ends up with a position that's long spot and short perpetuals, collecting that basis Rand was talking about, it's a very profitable trade. If you have enough of it and you can sell the spot into that kind of environment before you do anything with your perpetuals, you could potentially create a liquidation cascade, which is quite literally exactly what happened. And so it's not surprising that it happened, but it was the violence of it that I think caught a lot of people by surprise. But the most important point is what that didn't do. People like, I think it was Jim Bianco kept saying, oh, when there's a down day, you're going to see the ETFs are going to be a big outflow. It's going to exacerbate volatility.

Too soon. No, exactly the opposite. It's too soon. I mean, I think Jim Bianco is right. But I don't think that anybody's buying into an ETF to job trade an ETF. I think they're still in the accumulation phase. I can imagine that in two or three years when there's much more stability, when the market goes down, people are going to cash the ETFs, just like we know that when the NASDAQ goes down, people cash out their QQQ shares. That's right. But from what price level, Rand? That's the issue. The thing that is important is the people who are buying ETFs as asset allocators are doing it on the basis of an asymmetric upside bet dramatically higher from here. And so these prices and this volatility, they're being told, unless you're

not paying attention, that this is, I hate to use the word normal because there's nothing normal about this, but that's what they're doing. And so it's increased, at least for this year, it doesn't feel like the ETFs will do anything other than actually suppress volatility. After yesterday, that may seem hard to believe, but actually it probably did. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think you are right. But I think we need to get to a point of slightly more maturity in the market. Yeah, Ran. I think there's maybe some nuance here between what happens in a day and what would happen if there was significantly sustained downside. Because I don't think one day shook people was 59. Your average person who bought the ETF doesn't know what happened, right? I mean, it happened so fast.

They may have checked and come back a day later to see how their idea was doing. And it's down slightly and bounced massively. I think if we got a serious like bear correction and Bitcoin dropped, you know, 35, 40% over a couple of weeks or something, you would start to shake people who would then sell the spot ETF. So I think you're kind of both right to some degree. Look, I think, to be honest, the way that I see this cycle playing out is I think that now with Bitcoin being an institutional asset,

the entire crypto market is going to move very much like the macro cycle, like the S&P or the NASDAQ or whatever else. I don't think that it's going to be, and I also think that what that means is, we're now, as they carry on buying more and more and more of these assets, of Bitcoin and putting it into the ETFs, I think the market is going to start dancing to the same tune as the S&P 500. And therefore, I think that the bear markets are going to be a lot shorter.

If you go back and you analyze the average bear market for the S&P, and I only went back to about 2008, but generally they last about a year. And when I say about a year, that is from the high until you get back to the pre-dip high. Well, I mean, we had the highs in there earlier. Mike will talk about it, but we did have the highs like in the early 2000s that took, I mean, we had the highs in there. Like Michael talked about it, but we did have the highs like in the early 2000s that took, I mean, we've had highs that took decades, over a decade to take down. Right, Mike?

Yeah. I went back to 2008. I didn't go much further than that. I mean, you could say it was a very different world. I mean, the 2000s was the dot-com bubble. And we were high on QE like we were since 2008, obviously. very different world. I mean, the 2000s was the dot-com bubble. Yeah, we weren't high on QE like we were since 2008, obviously. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know. I just think that to me, that is the metric that I was looking at. I think we're going to start doing, I think we're going to start very much following the S&P cycle now. Yeah, that makes me think, and I would love people's opinions on that,

but that makes me think that the action is going to be in the altcoin market. Like if you believe that that's going to happen with Bitcoin, I still think the humans are going to human and the degens are going to degen. And that explains things like meme coin madness. Yo, can I just weigh in on that topic real quick? Yeah, please. I think you joined. Weisberger, can you hear? Dave that's joined. Can you hear Dave Weisberger?

Can you hear David Bailey? No. Go ahead, Bailey and Dave. I'm going to bring you down and up. Okay. Go ahead, Bailey.

I'll, I'll keep this quick, but I agree with you, Don. Like, I think this, this cycle is different than any past cycle that we've had. I don't think all of us are going to perform in the same way because the market has structurally changed.

The business model has structurally changed. Now flows flow into the ETF. And, you know, the the managers are incentivized by AUM. They're not incentivized by trading volume. And so, you know, the money is not going to flow out of the ETF and the people running the ETF. The ETF providers are not incentivized for the money to flow out. So it's structurally different than fiat flowing into an exchange and then aping into whatever trading pairs are on that crypto exchange. It's quite a bit different. I think you're right and wrong.

Because I think you're 100% right in the fact that that specific money won't. But I think the wealth effect and the cyclical FOMO effect that comes with that will bring more people who are crypto native who will still do it. So I think it can still happen without the ETF money necessarily going into it. I agree. I agree with what you're saying. There will always be a part of the market that is looking for high beta Bitcoin and is looking to catch up. But the problem is, now there are alternative places to find beta that are going to outperform other layer ones that are further away from the liquidity coming into Bitcoin. Do you mean like you mean in the equity market, like miners, for example,

or are you talking about the L2s in Bitcoin? I'm talking about shit coins on Bitcoin. I'm talking about meme coins on Bitcoin, layer twos on Bitcoin, NFTs on Bitcoin. The closer you can get to the money, the closer you can get to the liquidity, the better your asset is going to perform. So meme coins and altcoins will still perform. It will just be different meme coins and altcoins that are on a different base layer. Exactly. It will be something that you can buy natively with Bitcoin.

And so I think meme, like the shitcoin season and altcoin season, it will take off if an ETF is approved for Ethereum, because then that dynamic changes. Now, Ethereum is the source of liquidity again for the shitcoin complex. But until that happens, it is going to be a desert. And the hot money flows that are coming from crypto VCs, coming from people who are really just looking for beta, they're going to follow the market. And if the market is saying the best beta is on Bitcoin, they're going to flow there. It's not a conviction play on whatever layer one that their ecosystem they're investing into. I'm sure that every VC and angel

in this space can attest to the fact that they're getting pitched disproportionately large amounts of things built on Bitcoin right now. A hundred percent to align with what you're saying. And by the way, and by the way, they're 99% utter hot garbage, trash, cash grabs, just like anywhere else. That doesn't make them better. A hundred percent. Scott, there's billion dollar valuations going around on some of these L2s. It's outrageous. Yeah.

I mean, Rand pointed out not long ago that there's been airdrops that were worth $5 billion within five minutes. All right. Well, I'm out of here, guys. I just wanted to say this cycle is different. The old playbook, you're going to have to evolve the old playbook. And, you know. And don't midwit it. The avalanche is coming. Just long Bitcoin. You can't go wrong. Peace.

I agree with that. I agree with that. I'll go ahead. Yeah, I think I've been seeing a lot of the same things that David is seeing. Starting in February, we had we had ordinals which is nfts on bitcoin um that became the hottest like overnight it went from nothing to the hottest nft market uh larger than any of the other nft markets brc20s which are terrible technology but allow people to start playing with tokens on bitcoin we had the first meme coin go to a billion dollars in value back in march um or maybe it was april uh so when the market was dead it went to a billion before even being on an exchange and now the second largest tvl on a roll-up happened overnight to an affinity scam almost, from what I can tell.

But basically, a roll-up called Merlin, which pulled in more than $2 billion in TVL overnight because it's a Bitcoin roll-up in terms of its branding. So we're already seeing this and we're seeing Bitcoin plays simply speed running. Everything that has been built on Solana and Ethereum is being copied over to Bitcoin and just doing it much faster. So, you know, I love Bitcoin. I love its purity and the fact that it provides us a sound money for for many many years um and so I have very mixed feelings about this but I think it's unquestionable that it's happening it's kind of I think it's it's hard it's hard to to say that altcoins or other layer ones are missing out on this rally right like Bitcoin in the last six months up 157%, right? Below that, Dogecoin is at 150%. Ethereum 131, Arbitrum 122, BNB up 100%. Matic has actually lagged like the

most. I think they're even flat on the year. But then above that, you've got Avalanche up 300% versus Bitcoin 150. You've got Stacks up 479%, Solana up 530%. Then you've got, like Ran is saying, AI narrative things like BitTensor up 1200%. So it's just really hard to say that this is just a pure Bitcoin rally. But I think what we're seeing here, again, is that the market can't figure out the killer app as much as they, what they do understand is infrastructure and layer twos feels more like it's infrastructure and it's go, it's go, it could potentially build this next big ecosystem, but you're not finding, you know, people would rather go own Doge than finding.

Yeah. I was just going to say, I was just saying, I don't, I, I've, I came to the conclusion long ago, Rand and I sat at consensus last year and had a conversation about dinner. I came to this a long time ago. The market, as you put it, doesn't give a shit about the killer app or infrastructure. They want the memes. They want the casino for better or for worse. That doesn't mean new participants will think that, but the market as it is and has been, you know, I love that people scratch their heads and

are confused every time meme coins pump left and right, but nothing's changed, right? That is not going anywhere. And that's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. I'm convinced that that meme coin market cap is going to expand exponentially this cycle, whether it's on Bitcoin or somewhere else or both. Exactly. And why can't Bitcoin just be the killer app? And stable coins. And stable coins. Exactly. Yeah, I think that that's a fair assessment. Mike, since I've got you here, and we didn't get to talk for Macro Monday, you know, you've called Bitcoin obviously a

leading indicator a number of times in the past. It's pretty divergent at this point. I mean, what do you make of the move to the all-time high? Yes. Well, I appreciate listening to Macro Monday's yesterday. I can comment on that later. The key thing to think about here now is Bitcoin is basically all-time highs. The S&P 500 is basically all-time highs the s&p 500 is basically all-time highs and gold is basically all-time highs so what's the differences gold has at least had at least decent correction early in the year you know down six percent below two thousand made people really think about it bitcoin had a wonderful chart pattern when it went from 40 to 50 about on that etf of launch and then back down to 40 and then back up to 50. That was a

classic, really bull sign. I mean, it just flushed them out. I was really concerned, and boom, it went right back up. You just can't fight that tape. The thing is, the big thing is, the main beta in the planet has not had a decent correction since, what, September, October. If the S&P 500 just keeps marching higher, sure, everything is going to go up. But every time it is higher, to me, it's becoming just like commodities were two years ago. It's becoming its high price cure. Every day it ticks higher. You see the Fed easing coming out of the market. And we all know what happens. This market needs to have some form of drawdown. And that's my key problem is I just need to see that drawdown and see how this highly speculative risk asset responds. And we're seeing the beef now, as Dave and I, and we talked about

macro monies. Bitcoin is showing the beef that it can potentially be the diversifier outperformer when we have a drawdown in the stock market or when we have potentially a bear market, which will come someday. But right now, we have to admit, they are all going up, and it looks like the fastest horse in the race is winning. And just like James Butterfield mentioned, the ETF flows are strong. And I really appreciate what Dave said. The FOMO is in and other things. And what Iago says, the key thing we have to remember is this is a different market.

And that's one thing I'd like to point out since the beginning, is now we have futures and we have our but we can do spec we can do um we can trade the basis and there's a lot more people involved and i just think on dips these ets you can't mess with these fund flows they are pretty strong and i don't see what stops them all right dave yeah's funny. I love hearing you and Mike making advertisements for CoinRest because, you know, being able to see everything and all the various products at once and being able to react to that is so important in this market. It's actually incredible the divergences that we've seen at multiple times over the last two days between exchanges. But the important thing is what's going on kind of to sync up. I mean, in my heart, I agree with Iago on a lot of what he says about Bitcoin

being the epicenter. And I think that it will probably end up there as a base layer. But the truth is, as we've seen this before, except for the differences, this all season where the people, the hot money tends to ignore Bitcoin, the hot money is not ignoring it. It just kind of sits, waits and watches. And when it goes into a consolidation phase, it jumps into something else. And, you know, it's remarkable that there were a billion yesterday and today you wake up and it's like it didn't happen. And, you know, that I don't think you see generally when there's a big liquidation event the market takes a breath but it hasn't and that's telling you that there's

new money coming in and there's more money sloshing around for people to lack of a better word gamble with i think that's a large part of why the meme coins and the other crap that i don't understand the intrinsic value. I don't like sounding like Peter Schiff and talking about intrinsic value because I do believe in the intrinsic value of Bitcoin for a lot of reasons. But the fact is, there's a lot of hot money around. People are chasing stuff. And in this environment, traders can make money. And even if you get liquidated, if you're doing well on the other side, it doesn't matter.

And so people need to understand that a billion dollars liquidation doesn't mean a billion in losses because somebody made money on the other side of that. Yeah, I agree there as well. I mean, James, does that align, all of this align with what you were saying before? I mean, effectively, you know, these funds are just going to keep on flowing for now. Yeah, agreed. I mean, particularly the RIA market picking up, I just struggle to see where the drop in demand is going to come from. It's going to come at some point, but the hype and the story now is very much ETFs driving prices.