The Wolf Of All Streets - Bulls vs Bears: Who Will Win In February? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

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Ryan, I was just saying when I saw the list of guests, how excited that I was that you were here today. I don't think we've had John before. Yeah, glad to be on. I don't think I told you, but our podcast together a couple of weeks ago, I think was actually, it was really well listened to on YouTube. I think 30 something thousand, but it was my most downloaded in history on Spotify. I think over a hundred thousand listens. Oh, it was my most downloaded in history on Spotify. I think over a hundred thousand. Oh, wow. That's great. Congratulations. Yeah. We beat sailor. So that's, that's, that's a, that's a good accomplishment.

People really, really resonated. Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, I think it's a shame what's going on with the traditional brokerage industry, how, you know, I recently found out it's really the SEC and FINRA that's blocking them from allowing Bitcoin exposure. Are we talking about specifically a Vanguard or the RIA platforms? Yeah, I'm not talking about Vanguard or RIA. I'm talking about like Edward Jones, the FINRA regulated brokerage firms. So, um, I just found out last week that,

cause I asked one of the like members of the C-suite of one of these major brokerage firms, why they don't just offer direct Bitcoin. And he said it's prohibited by FINRA and, and, and SEC rules. Um, so to have direct exposure, you know, I was like, well, just prohibited by FINRA and SEC rules. So to have direct exposure, you know, I was like, well, you can offer the ETF and like, they were like, no, you know, we're, we're not there yet. So. To me that that makes me extremely bullish knowing that they'll eventually have to get on board and get there. Right.

Exactly. Right. That's his future buyers. So. I'll take it. If we take it if we're doing this well on a day even you know with with price sort of absorbing all of that gbtc selling over those weeks and things still going well and seeing inflows continue i mean imagine when they really open that to the floodgates to everyone we had matt hogan on from Bitwise and he said, you know, he thinks it's 10, 15% of RIAs even have access still. So I mean, it's really low. Yeah. It's low. Yeah. And it's all about education. So it's just, you know,

just like Larry Fink got educated and he's a Bitcoin bull now. Yeah. As everybody else starts to understand the data and what it means, they'll, you know, like we said, you know, they're being under fiduciary responsibility to add a small amount of bitcoin to their portfolio yeah i kept making the claim that fink was legitimately orange pilled and that he was this wasn't necessarily just talking his book and that he really had been converted people pushed back constantly and i asked uh

recently i asked caramucci about it on one of these on a show and he said that he specifically met uh i think he said he was like i was in the four seasons lobby in 2019 or maybe it was even 2021 and he said i asked and larry fink said hey you're the bitcoin guy right you like that stuff and smooch was like yeah i love it love it. And Fink said, it's a scam. I hate it. It's disgusting. It should die. It's the worst. And then Mitch, Mitch Nick, I think was the guy he hired from ripple, um, came over to black rock and Anthony said that he knows personally from talking to Larry Fink about it, that Mitch Nick effectively orange pilled him, converted him completely. And he's a true believer, you know,

and you can tell what he goes on his, on the road show. And he's talking about it, that he truly understands it but he i think he really is a one of us so to speak yeah well i think most people that come from traditional finance they enter bitcoin as a skeptic i was a huge skeptic you know 10 years ago but once you dive into it and you know you spend the time to understand you know what this is this is, then you get converted. It's just a matter of spending time. Most people don't want to spend the time to understand what this is. They're too busy with other things in their life.

Another interesting thing. Sorry, guys. Brian and I took over. We'll move on to the actual show in a minute. But I was talking to Matt Hogan yesterday from Bitwise again, and he pointed out, which went viral actually yesterday after he and I discussed it, that Fidelity in Canada, which is a separate company, is actually in their most conservative retirement dated funds that they've put together is allocating 1% to the Canadian Bitcoin ETFs and already had been, which nobody seemed to have noticed. Did you see that? Cause it speaks to the sharp ratio conversation that we were having,

obviously. Yeah. I saw a post yesterday where, um, I don't know what fund it was, but it was one of the agility funds allocated 1%. Yeah. Yeah. And it was their, that one of the fidelity funds yeah allocated one percent yeah yeah it was their that's their most conservative like retirement dated funds are putting one percent so really awesome mario i'm sorry we uh took over i'm enjoying the conversation because not much news to discuss other than just a bull versus bear market discussion. What else did you discuss on the pod with Brian? And then we'll start going to the panel.

I mean, Brian can tell you, but we really, you know, we sat down. We've been planning to have the conversation for a really long time. But I said, hey, what do you want to talk about? You know, I don't do much prep. And he said, I really wanted this to be a conversation with the RIAs out there and explaining to them why, regardless of their feelings about Bitcoin, they need to have this in their portfolio. I've got a question for you. You did say something in your back and forth about only 10% to 15% of RIAs having access to the ETFs.

Why is it so low? Is that just education or regulatory hurdles? Scott, that's for you. Matt's point was that they've done their 20,000 phone calls in advance of this approval, getting people on board. But nobody was doing the due diligence or even having these conversations at these platforms or in these companies until they actually saw the approval. So he said, I think, six to 12 months is what we would have assumed before we'd start seeing any of these RIA platforms coming on board. And we're actually seeing it now a month later. Now, I think three to six months but effectively until the product existed there was no point in them even having the conversations as to whether they were going to offer these now there's 10 or 11 of them they need to decide which ones they're likely to offer so they're probably waiting to see how the dust

settles afterwards and i think just it's gonna take time and, and then to Brian's point, a lot of them are just blocked. They just can't, you know, Michael. Yeah, no. I mean, I think it's really exciting just to see how the narrative has switched from 2020 to 2023 to where we sit now. I mean, we were going through a time period where essentially we had this entire industry having a credibility crisis. We had massive issues with FTX, Terra Luna. And if you told me at that time, we were going to see a Bitcoin ETF passed in the next year or two, right? I would have thought you were absolutely crazy. So I think it really bodes well for this industry showing institutions, right,

that this thing is going to have long-term staying power and now we just have these long-term flows coming into the asset class as the biggest financial institutions in the world are essentially selling their customers into it i think that's really bullish over the long term right i know you and mickle were going i had it back and forth yesterday everyone was talking about before the the space rug let's start it yet don't start it yet no no i wasn't gonna start it i was gonna go to ran and say gran um i was going through your agenda as well maybe give us a quick market update the markets are doing well today and there isn't much new i do before before we do that though i do want to say after he's done we should go back to this conversation because we have james

here who is the king of uh explaining the flows and dave raised his hand and i think there's still an interesting conversation there go ahead uh market's up xrp is down um uh i'm kidding now uh yeah i mean i mean great pump i mean a little bit of a short squeeze going on i think a lot of people were short you saw the shorts actually starting to close well not close get forcefully closed liquidated so i think that's one of the things you saw and then i think a very good inflow yes a very good inflow day yesterday which was net inflow day which was very very strong so i think net net all's uh all's bullish and i mean on my show today i covered this whole airdrop narrative and how the airdrops this year since the the beginning of the year, have actually brought more money into crypto than the ETFs combined.

If you take the net amount of ETF inflows, net meaning X-ray scale, $1.7 billion has flowed into the crypto market via via the etfs and if you take the total airdrop uh the total inflows into the market because of airdrops dropped onto crypto users it's actually slightly higher so i think where everyone is isn't that apples to oranges i don't want to interrupt but isn't that apples to oranges new money versus a quote okay, I call it helicopter money. I don't really give a shit, but a transfer of value, right? Isn't that just value going from a crypto, from the crypto platform into the market? Isn't it horizontal?

Not at all. Let me give you an example, right? When there was just Bitcoin, and let's say Bitcoin had a market cap of a billion, right? Then we added ETH and the market cap of crypto went to 1 billion for Bitcoin plus the market cap plus ETH. So it's new money that came into this closed ecosystem, right? And so just think about it like that. If you had a ring fence around Bitcoin, you said, okay, the market cap of Bitcoin was a billion dollars.

Then we added in the new protocol and we gave all the players in the ecosystem ETH. Now they had a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin plus they had whatever the value was of ETH. So it's new money that actually came into the market.

New value-adding protocols that distributed wealth to their users. So while everyone is focused on the 1.7 billion that has flowed into this market by ETFs, I'm starting to say right now we're in airdrop season. We have a lot of airdrops that are coming out this year that we have wormhole, we have layer zero, we have eigen layer, we have

all these amazing, amazing, amazing protocols coming out, the best protocols, and they're going to be airdropping money onto the users. And to me, when I look at that versus the ETFs, actually more new money is coming in from these airdrops than is coming in from the ETFs. Dave? Yeah, I think that the important point here is to kind of reconcile between, you know, I'm skeptical in the helicopter money as well.

Although what is real is everyone in crypto and the people, listeners here are used to Bitcoin runs up, gets stuck in a range. We go to alt season. Bitcoin kind of languages in the range as the hot money goes to alts and every place else, and then cycle, rinse, repeat. I think that what people need to understand is the world is now different. With a dramatic increase in the number of people who are interested in Bitcoin now, it may very well be that you can have an alt season where Bitcoin isn't stuck in amber because essentially it doesn't need the hot money to go up. What it needs is the hot money not to short it or the shorts to get carried out in a body bag. And the fact that we retrace to the thinner

of the Fibonacci levels, and I've said this many times on your show, but it's very relevant. People, everyone we talked to two weeks ago or a week and a half ago, were saying, oh, well, you know, we need a retracement to the 30s. You know, guys like Mike McClone were saying 20, but whatever. I mean, you know, a little dig there. But, you know, and then there are people like me saying, I don't know if it holds this level. What ends up happening is the new money, all of a sudden, there's just not enough Bitcoin for that new money and people are going to stop. And so you're going to see you're going to see a much you're not going to see a God candle. Well, maybe you will, but I don't think so. But what you will see are things like this morning.

I mean, I tweeted that we went to price discovery when we jammed from 44 up over 45 and people like, oh, it's already retracing. It's like, no, it's already retracing. It's like, no, it isn't actually. Price discovery literally means trying to find a new level. And we may stay at this level for a while. Who knows? But the fact is, there's new money coming in. And what you're saying, that matters because, you know, economics 101, supply and demand. Where's the supply? I also think that what's going to happen is that if you think of hodlers like us we've all been holding our Bitcoin I think that you know we have been

selling it I've been selling my Bitcoin to you you've been selling your Bitcoin to Scott and to Mario and to whatever else I think now what a lot of people aren't appreciating is that you know there's a Bitcoin ETF which means that the Trad5 is effectively coming to buy Bitcoin from people like us. And the new money that flows into Bitcoin is actually us selling our Bitcoin to them and using the proceeds to potentially buy altcoins.

So I think that's also going to spark a huge altcoin run where, you know, we're looking for returns that are bigger than Bitcoin. We put our profits into Bitcoin. Ran, you're right. And, you know, and you're right for a couple of reasons. But one that's really important, we always keep saying, well, tradify this and tradify that. Look, I spent 35 years in traditional finance and most of my life in traditional finance. I was the guy who was unemploying people by doing automation of trading so it's funny that you guys refer to me or a lot

of people would as the tradfi guy in bitcoin the truth is i basically spent my entire life trying to no we've accepted you as one of us yeah well but the guy voted the guy voted and um it was uh it was EIP-1667. And the DAH took a vote. And we said, can we accept Dave as one of us and not one of them? And the overwhelming majority said you're one of us. We had a draft. We drafted you.

Cool. Glad. But I want to make a point. Everyone on crypto Twitter, and I loved it. It was a great post this morning showing kind of how insignificant we are relative to the entire world. TradFi is not this monolithic thing. It is all the normal people that you talk to in your everyday life who now have the ability to buy stuff. And then it is no different than anything else.

It's like a gateway drug. I mean, yeah, you start by buying an ETF in your brokerage account. And you look at it and say, OK, wait a minute, let me do some more reading and let me do some more whatever. Oh, it's not really all that hard to open a Coinbase account or, you know, if you're sitting in some place where you can, you know, in a Binance account or this account. Oh, wait a minute. What is this DeFi stuff? You mean I could go on Phantom? Oh, wow, this is really easy. And, you know know people start getting into it so it is not this monolithic thing people think larry fink controls this monster you know you know corporation that that moves investments no he controls a corporation that offers investments to this

this large crowd of people that that are now being introduced to crypto and that's a very big deal that people don't appreciate. I think you do, Ren, because I've heard you say similar things. This is why we accepted you, because you speak of phantom wallet. This is why we accepted you as one of us. This is why the Dow overwhelmingly voted that you're one of us. Ren, something interesting on this. I actually talked to Sid Powell from Maple this morning, and obviously they're very involved in lending and yield and tokenizing of real world assets. But he said, which will confirm your point, that the bulk of lending activity right now is people borrowing, for example, Ethereum to stake it and restake it in Eigen layer in anticipation of an airdrop.

They'll pay the 10 to 15 percent knowing they'll make 20 25 that's kind of the new trade right now with the very crypto focused institutions is that they will park they'll borrow eath again at a at a relatively high yield and then go stake restake and then collect airdrop i found it surprising that we were still sort of seeing all that activity once again. Yeah, I agree. Also, I don't know if you realize how revolutionary this ETH new token standard that launched.

It's complicated, but like what they created on ETH, to me, kind of represents like a new era for ETH, like a new, I don't know how much you know about it. This ERC 404, I think it's called. It sounds complicated. I'll try and break it down for the listeners because it is quite a complicated concept, but let me try and break it down for you guys. But it's, it's, it's going to create a new industry on Ethereum. So let me try to break it down.

And if it's too complicated, please let me know. But it is quite complicated. So generally, if you understand what a non-fungible token is, it's a token that's not the same as another token.

Therefore, it's non-fungible. The thing with non-fungible token, it's also not really divisible. So if you think about Mario's ugly CryptoP punk, the one that Mario owns, it's expensive, but it's not divisible. So it means that if I want to buy like a tenth of a punk, it's actually not possible. Like I can't buy a tenth of a punk. And that's quite prohibitive because if you think about Mario's ugly punk, which costs a lot of money, it means that a lot of people kind of get excluded from trading these NFTs, right? But now what a bunch of devs have done is they've created a new token standard, which combines a non-fungible token with a normal token. So imagine if Mario mints a punk or creates a punk or buys the punk.

When he does, he gets the punk and he also gets a normal token, like a normal, call it punk token, which is not an NFT. It's just a normal token. Now, you know that if you have an ETH token or a normal token, a normal token is actually subdivisible. So if you have an ETH, you can buy 0.1 of an ETH, 0.001 of an ETH. You can buy half an ETH. But you can't do that with a PUNK. Now, what this new token standard has done is it creates a PUNK and a normal token and if if i want if mario wants to share his punk in inverted commas or split his punk what he does is he sells a portion of the normal token so he says okay

i'm going to sell a portion of my normal token then in essence what happens to nft is in inverted commas the nft gets destroyed and it only then comes together, or a similar NFT comes together when the pieces of the token are put together again. So what does it mean? It sounds complicated, but let me break it down for you. I buy a punk,

the punk is worth $10,000. I want to sell a piece of the punk. Instead of selling a piece of the punk, I sell a piece of this other token. I subdivide my token and I sell a piece of the punk. Instead of selling a piece of the punk, I sell a piece of this other token. I subdivide my token and I sell a portion of this token. It destroys my punk. And only when I can put together one full, one of these punk token things,

does the picture come back together. Does that make sense? So it's like, it's a way to subdivide NFTs. Does that, I mean, it's, it mean, I try to break it down quite simply. I wonder if you actually understand. Making a non-fungible token fungible. Yeah. I was looking at doing this a long time.

I was one of the first people that wanted to do it, Ryan. And it essentially allows you to build a community around your punk. So one punk could be tokenized or punk or whatever NFT, but punks are the best example, could be tokenized. punk or whatever nft but parks are the best example could be tokenized and anyone that wants to be part of the community could have one of those tokens and then those tokens you can create utility for those topics if i want to create my own community that's exactly what they've done they've just done it slightly differently so instead of actually token so instead of tokenizing your punk your punk ceases to exist as soon as the normal token is subdivided.

And I remember if a lot of people are subdividing all their punks, right? If a lot of people are subdividing all their punks, when the pieces are put together, as long as you put together one token from any pieces, a new punk is created with completely new traits, right? Does that make sense? Hold on, so once you merge the tokens back together, a new punk's been created?

But you don't, exactly, because you're not merging the same so let's say that let's say I subdivide my punk into 100 pieces and you subdivide my punk into 100 pieces and you subdivide your punk into 100 pieces, right? That means that in order to create a punk, you have to put together 100 pieces to get a thing, right?

But what if some of the people that bought my pieces and some of the people that bought your pieces come together and they put 100 pieces together? So it because half of it my punk half of it your punk exactly oh come on this is cool so what is it is cool it is cool my pocket ranch punk make a baby that's adorable come on because both our punks dissolved disintegrate, cease to exist. And when you put any hundred,

whatever, you're talking hundreds, as long as you put together like the value of a token equals one, so as long as it's like if it's half, half, quarter, quarter, point one,

as long as it comes as one, a new punk is created. So we have, so we have all three of us, Scott, Miu, Miu, and Ryan will merge all our punks and make a crypto-type whole baby punk. If all three of us scott me you me you and ryan will all will merge all our punks and make a crypto townhole baby if the three of us had kids uh together it would definitely be a punk i think we could all agree on that uh one way or another that's pretty much that's pretty

much exactly what it is basically if you think about it like a like a the way i imagined it is you know when you go to a dog pound and you go to a dog pound and you get all these like mixed breed dogs and you look at them and you go, I don't know how you came alive, but that's what you are. That's exactly what it is. Basically, it takes the traits and it creates a whole bunch of traits,

so to speak. Dude, this is people in crypto having way too much time on their hands who could be... But it's created a massive industry. It's created a massive industry. David, what do you think, David? Do you want to join our baby punk with Merge All of Us? hands. It's created a massive industry. It's created a massive industry. David, what do you think, David? Do you want to join our baby punk? Would you merge all of us?

No. Speaking seriously, there's going to be a real-world application for this. I can't think of it right away, but certainly somewhere in the healthcare field, in the financial field, there's got to be real world application that is going to be valuable for this order of process proposition. I believe so. In the meantime, isn't it in the meantime, just drumming up extra kind of revenue for the CryptoPunk Foundation and no one else? It's just a sort of scam, well, not a scam, just a way of increasing interest in CryptoPunks. It wouldn't be Punks, it would be, I mean,

this is a new token standard, so you can't apply it on old tokens. It's a new way of launching sub-divisible NFTs, if required. And there's definitely going to be ways to use this in Tradfire where, I don't know, maybe you've got one portfolio which is filled with X and another portfolio which is

filled with Y and you subdivide something that's not provided and you put it back together and it creates something else. I think this is the CryptoKitties moment. You know, CryptoKitties was the moment when we created NFTs. This is the CryptoKitties moment for a new industry. And what we'll use that industry for, I don't know.

Yeah, Ran, I was going to say, this sounds like a next cycle thing, like where we get really excited about it right now and then it has its month. And then in four years, we actually see if it matters and then you gave the crypto kitties uh sort of uh analogy and i i agree entirely i i think this is it's cool i have no idea right now why it would be used or how it could become vastly popular especially as we'll go into a bull market and people's attention will just be sadly focused

on prices it's cool let's talk about two more things one is i can see the shorts are being more squeezed and getting liquidated as we speak which is fun um second thing is i wonder if there's any etf experts here there's a question that i had around the etf the etf specifically um i saw that there was an amendment by i don't know if it was an amendment or refiling but they're going to now include each staking in their etf i don't know if it was an amendment or refiling, but they're going to now include ETH staking in their ETF. I don't know if anybody picked up on that news. Yeah, yield-bearing ETF was always a really interesting potential for ETH. I would be so surprised.

Also, I think they moved to Cash Create to get in line with what was approved for Bitcoin Spot. But I would be very surprised if the SEC allows them to stake within these ETFs, but that would be awesome. This is what I was thinking about. So we've been discussing this internally. And actually in Europe, they already have staking Ethereum ETPs, or ETCs technically. The same as an ETF, just a slightly different name legally. But there are implications from a tax perspective in that it could trigger a tax event.

So, you know, in traditional equities, you have a fund that is a distribution class and an accumulation class. And the equivalent for a staking product would be, in this instance, it would probably be an accumulation class. In other words the dividends get reinvested and in this respect it would be the staking gets reinvested so you would essentially see your coin entitlement let's say you bought one ether at the end of the year if the yield was four percent over the year you would have 1.04 ether. So that wouldn't necessarily trap Tigger at a tax event. But from an SEC perspective, I actually can't see there being an issue with this because a lot of the staking kind of issues that they've had been staking as a service. And if it's in an ETF form, it is a security,

and that's fine. And it's under all the regulatory kind of purview that you would need. If you look at something like Kraken, it was offering staking as a service. It was based not on the efforts of others. Do you not think that ARK maybe threw a spanner in the works for the sec because you kind of say to yourself well the east etf was almost a sure thing because there's an east futures etf and so the sec couldn't deny it or decline it but with this they can kind of say no no no no now you've got staking and that's hold on no no this is a different thing this is not the same as the future vta but in most futures based products there's no yield that's exactly it so yeah i mean i i just can't see the sec having

an issue that you know of the one thing the sec when they've been talking about staking as a service the one thing they've not been talking about it's been ethereum and bitcoin uh and then being security so i can't see why they're just going to suddenly turn around and say that an ETF, by definition, is a securitization of an asset anyway. So why would it be an issue? I think it's been blown up on the Internet and I don't think it's going to be a big issue. I think that we've given the SEC enough. We've given the SEC enough. The only reason why they approved Bitcoin was because it was a Bitcoin futures ETF.

And now we've given them an art to say that you know you can you don't need to approve this one because we've actually over complicated it. Maybe it delays things maybe they just have to start thinking about coin entitlement and how the yield the staking yield is distributed but

that might delay things a little bit but I just yeah we've not picked up anything specifically from the SEC talking about this point. ARK also isn't first in line, right? So the forced approval in May wouldn't necessarily be ARK. So I think, Ran, it'll be more interesting to see if the others update with the same ideas.

Because in this case, at least for now, I would say they could approve other ones and not approve ARK, right? I lost Ran there. I don't know if everyone else did. Dave, did you have a comment if he can hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. I mean, two comments. First on the NFT subdivision, that is the model for share registries in the distant future. And you can think of a lot of reasons as to why. Significantly more efficient than pieces of paper buried in a vault below 55 Water Street. But you're right, that's in the next cycle. As far as, you know, as far as the other conversation, I mean, look, we all said the news of this Promethean people claiming that Ether is a security. And honestly, until that's resolved at this point, I'm not sure how the SEC navigates

this because they've twisted themselves in knots. And, you know, and I think it's on purpose, but they're twisting themselves into knots. You know, if it's a security, there's one level. If there's not, it's another. There's all sorts of implications of that. And that's a whole other rabbit hole. I think that you nailed the use case for this ERC404, which we were studying.

It is probably the only way to do a share registry on all tokens in the same standard, but for a different company. That's the way to do it. Because if multiple shareholders come together with one-tenth of a share each, when they put them all together, they finally get a share.

Yep. And this also allows you to do different share classes because it's underneath the NFT. The things such as, I don't want to report my holdings because of, you know, there's all sorts of reasons why companies want to be able to obfuscate for a time their holdings, and then afterwards they're not obfuscated there's there's lots of good reasons why that wrapper makes sense will be dramatically more efficient we'll get there uh it's just going to take time i've actually also seen a lot of use cases for this on rw on the rwa side on actually fractionalizing the fractions that you already own of real world assets

to make it more accessible and create a more spread out portfolio of RWAs. Good. I mean, yeah, just my mind is spinning with all the different applications of this. I did it on my show today. Yeah, so, Ran, I mean, I think that this, the whole Ether as a security thing from Promethean is kind of weird. And I don't know a lot of the details because I didn't read the filing.

I'm curious if anybody knows, are they planning on offering staking? You know, what are they doing with it? Do they have an actual custodian? You know, how do they get around the rules? And what's the implication of that from an ETF perspective? Because obviously, if they can do it, then it's almost impossible to say no to an ETF as long as they follow the same sort of template. I mean, I just want to know why Chrometeum is actually even relevant.

I know who they are, but they came out of nowhere. They mean nothing to no one. I mean, like, who the hell are you guys? I'm with you, Ren. I'm with you, Ren. There are a couple of guys against the entire industry. It's awful. Yeah.

Look, to be very clear, I think that he's straight out of central casting from an 80s Wall Street movie. So, you know, it's not that I'm supporting him. He's the government prop. He's the government stooge. Yeah. Right.

He's the government stooge. But the government allowed him to do it. But that stooge has a template for how they want things to be, which, of course, they're covering it up and making it as clear as mud because they don't want there to be a template. So it's really – it's actually quite fascinating. I mean, it could be that the stooge exposes a problem. Like I tweeted this morning, think of it this way. FINRA, since 2018, has

basically frozen every broker dealer who wants to offer trading to their clients of Bitcoin and Ether or other non-securities. They've approved nothing. You know, if all of a sudden Ether's a security, don't they then have to start approving all those? That's kind of a big deal, right? You know, at the end of the day, there's some rule of law in this country i i know that we don't seem to feel like it it feels like we need to go to the courts every time but it's kind of a big deal you know one way or another this has to get resolved yeah hey i just want to step in so ether's already a security through the grayscale ethereum trust the, it's an SEC reporting company. So Ether is already trading as a security.

That's a really good point. Yes. Go ahead, Dave. Now, that's no different than all of the Bitcoin ETFs are trading as securities as well. Well, the difference is that ETH, it doesn't have daily liquidity with redemptions because it hasn't been uplisted as an ETF. So it's a close in fund. Yeah, I own some waiting for it to get converted as well. So yeah, no, I'm aware. I'm just saying that

the actual underlying commodity isn't trading like a security, and the SEC continues to not answer that question, despite the fact that the CFTC has answered the question that it's a commodity. And most of us think that that's the case, but who the hell knows? I mean, it's really sickening that a regulator whose job should be to make things transparent goes out of their way to make things uh you know non-transparent opaque but that is where we are yeah i agree that yeah i agree the sec is making things more difficult i I mean, I think we all agree with that. And back to the Pantherium guys.

I mean, Kaplan, he seems... Promethean. Yeah, Promethean. He just seems creepy. That CEO. He's like Steven Seagal. It's crazy.

Yeah. He has no idea what he's doing here. And his bosses just told him that he needs to represent and he's representing. And I mean, who the hell are you, first of all? Number one, who the hell are's representing and i mean who the hell are you

first of all number one who the hell are you number two what the hell are you doing here number three like why why are you allowed to talk with not a single person i've ever heard of in crypto has ever used your platform let brian armstrong talk you can't use the platform there's nothing available on it ethereum would be the first thing that you can trade on it. They're SEC approved with no assets that are allowed because of the SEC lack of clarity. You want to do a conversation. Let's have a conversation with Brian Armstrong. Don't bring me that guy from Promethean who's a government agent, government spy. I don't know what he is, but he's a

doll. I don't know what they are. but he's a doll. I don't know. I don't know what the rest. Stooge. He's a lawyer, Ran. He's a lawyer. Makes sense. Go ahead, William. No, no. I just wanted to talk more about the

season that they Dave referred to. Can we switch to the old? And have we beat this to death? You can go. Have fun. No, I was wondering, Dave, you mentioned that we go from one thing to another, to another old season. And I'm thinking that the next old season might not be the same as the previous one. And my theory is that it used to be the new L1s, some L2s, DeFi, NFT gaming, all of that was

considered to be alt. But my thinking is that the next alt season may not be the same as the old one. And I'm seeing a new segment emerge, though it's not too clear yet. It's what I call blockchain middleware. It's anything kind of that sits between the infrastructure and the apps, all the software services and products that app developers need to use. And all of these abstract the blockchain and make it easier to develop apps. So this is the flavor of if you go in the Solana ecosystem, it's like the metaplex there. In the Ethereum ecosystem, it's like XLR, the bridges, layer zero if you want, or XMTP, Privy.

And not all of them have tokens. That's the thing. But I'm wondering if people agree or any thoughts about the fact that the next alts may not be the same as the old alts. I'd like to just jump in here. So I've been in the space for 10 years and I was Bitcoin only 10 years ago because that was the only thing there. And then I did the alt thing and then came back to Bitcoin and did the alt thing and came back to Bitcoin. did the alt thing and came back to Bitcoin. You have about 4,000 listeners on this basis right now.

It's just been my experience. It's better to be a Bitcoin maxi than dabble in the alts. That's just from personal experience. Take it as it is,, that's just my experience. It's better to take your time, your energy and your talents, create dollars with it and just save that in Bitcoin. And, you know, I have a simple portfolio instead of trying to outthink these alts and a lot of them go to zero. And, you know, it's just, you know, I think there's a lot of risk there. Can I make a point here about altcoins? I think technically some of them are brilliant, like Tezos actually I do think is a really impressive altcoin, but it's not enough. There are in this world things that are technically not so great. I mean, the US dollar is technically not so great. I mean, the US dollar is technically not so great. You've been eroded by QE over many, many years until we've had QT recently.

It's technically not the best, but it is the largest and most used. Sorry? I can hear James, Mario. Yeah, it is technically the most used, although it's not the most functional, not the best. I think it's the same in the crypto world. You can critique Bitcoin and you can critique Ethereum and say things are better, but they have the largest networks. And it's that network effect that I think gives it such a leg up on everything else. And you look at some of these other

smaller cryptocurrencies, which are technically great, they're just not gaining any traction. And that's one of the biggest problems for them. they have these airdrops left right and center to try and bribe people to come and use the network but it doesn't seem to be having the desired effects quite often yeah you mentioned tezos um yeah i did the ico on tezos what five or six years ago and you know i would have had more bitcoin if I would have just kept my Bitcoin instead of converting into Tezos. Yeah, but you can't really say... Yeah, that's been the case

for a vast majority of coins. Go ahead, Rand. Sorry. I'll say you can't really... I mean, you can't really say that because, I mean, if you would have done that with Solana,

you would have made a thousand times your Bitcoin. You know, I think it's just... It's VC investing. You've got to just look at it as VC investing. Yeah, I... it's just it's it's vc investing you're going to just look at it as vc investing yeah i i i i 100 agree i mean there'll be a few winners but if you take you know the entire ecosystem and take your you know take your winner subtract your losers i think you're still better

off just owning bitcoin no No, I'm like, if I would have just held my wealth in Bitcoin versus what I've managed to do with my Bitcoin, I think I'm about 50 times higher or something. It's like the numbers are ridiculous. So I think it's just, it's just a case of if you're, if you, if you, and I'm not claiming that I'm a very good investor, just, I think if you did manage to get some of the right alts, the returns have been way better than holding Bitcoin.

Okay. Well, some of the best portfolio managers in the alt space out there, and I'm not going to name names, but the largest VC firms in the alt space, they've underperformed Bitcoin after fees. I don't know where you're looking but i can tell you for sure that pantera polychain multi-coin our fund that we've all out we've all outperformed bitcoin by by a country mile i mean like i don't know where you're getting these stats from maybe you're taking your cherry picking a small number of funds but i think the majority of good early stage investors have way way way outperformed

the bitcoin performance i mean you're talking about bitcoin you're talking about bitcoin doing a 20x since the beginning of 2015 sorry 40x from the beginning of since the beginning of 2015 that's i mean i think most funds have outperformed it okay so just you know i was the very first investor in polychain fund one i'm a i'm part of the general partnership at polychain um i helped olaf build the business model at polychain when he left coinbase and i'm telling you that polychain underperformed Bitcoin. So, you know, I have the data. Doesn't make sense. Okay, well, I'm the first investor in the fund. Since when?

Since September of 2016, I was the first investor into the fund. And I could tell you the same thing with Pantera and Paradigm and A16Z. They've all underperformed Bitcoin after fees. I don't know. I've invested in multiple funds, including Multicoins Fund. I don't know if it's Fund 2 or Fund 3. And I've way, way, way outperformed Bitcoin.

And I know personally, our fund has outperformed Bitcoin way, way, way outperformed Bitcoin. So, I mean, I don't know. Something doesn't add up here. Yeah, I mean, you want to talk about what time frame as well. I mean,

if you want to, if you have a trader mentality, sure. Stick to Bitcoin and then you can sleep at night. I think this is it. Anything else Brian, Ryan, can you hear meet me mario you're not hearing william oh sorry yeah now i was going to say that the innovation is outside of bitcoin so if you if you have a question a lot brian can you hear me mario mario can you hear us oh okay

okay it's glitching i won't speak because it's glitching a lot for me yeah well yeah you can't hear william who's been speaking. Yeah. Sorry, I'll just finish my point quickly. So yeah, I was going to say, yeah, if you have a trader mentality, Bitcoin, you can sleep at night and stick with it. But then the innovation in the ecosystem is not, is outside of Bitcoin and that's where the exciting stuff is happening. And so that's, I mean, otherwise we might as well go home and just look at Bitcoin only. Yeah, guys, I think we're having some pretty big technical issues behind the scenes.

So I think we're going to wrap it up. And I think we all agree, William. I think it's going to be interesting, though, like as a last point, maybe we're about to make the same one of what's going to be built on Bitcoin in this cycle. Because I can certainly tell you that I'm getting 15 messages a day to invest in something I don't understand, but that's being built on Bitcoin in some way, shape or form. So I do think that a lot of the innovation is going to come back there. Rand, do you agree with that? I mean, I know you're seeing deal flow.

Yeah, I agree. I agree. We're seeing a lot of, yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, I mean, I think also the days of the Bitcoin returns are pretty like, you know, I think that there's decreasing cyclical returns. And I think that if you want to make real returns, you're going to need to be out of Bitcoin. I think you will get returns out of Bitcoin, but they're not going to be super normal returns anymore. So you're going to make a decision as to whether you want to stay in Bitcoin or you want to go into something a bit more aggressive. Why not both? Like the meme says with the little girl. Why not both?

All right, guys. Thank you so much. We'll be back, obviously, tomorrow. We're having trouble hearing various guests and stuff. Apologize, but it was happening yesterday and we got completely rug pulled yesterday. So space is obviously having some glitches of late. We will see all you guys tomorrow. Thank you, Rand. Good to have you back. Later guys.