The Wolf Of All Streets - Buy Bitcoin Now! | Raging Bull Market Is About To Explode!

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is now yet another good time to buy Bitcoin. I think it's always a good time to buy Bitcoin. But Matt Hogan from Bitwise, one of my friends and our favorite consistent guest, says we are in a raging bull market and that is only getting ready to explode further as we see more inflows into institutional products like the Bitcoin spot ETFs. On Fridays, we do the Friday Five. Today is a different twist because NLW, Nathaniel Whittemore is off gallivanting on a beach in the Caribbean somewhere, which means you have to

Starting point is 00:00:30 listen to a underprepared Scott Melker. I can't even say my name. An underprepared Scott Melker rant and rave about the five biggest stories of the week. We've got Bitcoin spot ETFs. We've got Ethereum ETFs. We've got Qcoin, Coinbase, Ripple, and of course, SBF. You guys don't want to miss this one. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. It has been a hell of a week with news about the SEC, the DOJ, foreign exchanges getting shut down, Ripple, Coinbase, all the big Google search keywords getting absolutely smashed. If you're looking at crypto, you're going to get a whole lot of very interesting searches about things going on in this market. That's the first time I think in my life that I have mispronounced my own name, especially

Starting point is 00:01:45 on camera. Scott Melker. I said Scott Melter. Middle name Panty. But guys, yeah, I'm alone today. NLW is not here. He usually is consistent with the hot takes and the coverage of all the news. I'm just a guy who reads the stories, man.

Starting point is 00:02:03 So today we're going to try to dig a bit deeper into everything happening in this market. As I've promised, we start first with coin market cap. Bitcoin, super flat, super flat, right? Just trading at 70,000, not doing much, but the big correction down to like 60, that seems to be a thing of the past. The move to the all-time high of 74, also seemingly a thing of the past for now. Seems like we're trading sideways, waiting for the market to figure out what comes next. I think up comes next because that's what happens generally in bull markets. And it seems like we're in the new paradigm, the most dangerous words of all time, new paradigm where everything, stocks, gold, dollar, Bitcoin, risk on, risk off, value, tech, it all goes up together at the same time. Now, yesterday, if you watched Market Mavericks, you would have seen us talking about the big Bitcoin options expiry today, the biggest in

Starting point is 00:03:05 history, over $9 billion, $15 billion total notional between Bitcoin and Ethereum. We were going to see massive upside volatility. We talked about it. Mike McGlone said, that's on my list of things not to care about. And frankly, we clearly didn't have to care about that. Those expired at 8 a.m. UTC time and absolutely nothing happened. But let's dig in. First, we got this title, Buy Bitcoin Now. Raging bull market is about to explode. Usually these are not my opinions.

Starting point is 00:03:34 They're the opinions of people that we trust. I guess maybe 8 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Either way, long gone. Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hogan said institutional investors would likely inject as much as $1 trillion into Bitcoin through exchange-traded funds as they slowly move in to crypto. And this is what he said. Long term, we believe Bitcoin is in a raging bull market. Not only is it up nearly 300% in the past 15 months, but there are strong reasons to think that will continue. Where's that $1 trillion

Starting point is 00:04:06 number coming from? It's basically just saying that a certain percentage of RIAs will allocate 1% of Bitcoin into their clients' portfolios, and that's over a trillion dollars. Imagine what a trillion dollars does to an asset that's market cap is, I don't know, slightly over a trillion dollars. Obviously, if you're looking at these Bitcoin spot inflows, you fundamentally pay attention to how fast money is coming in, but how little of the potential money is unlocked. This is the most viable, obvious, obvious explanation for why price has gone up and obvious reason to believe that it will continue to go up. It seems that we have obviously preempted the four-year cycle at this point and that we're

Starting point is 00:04:51 hitting new all-time highs and we still have the halving. So between the Bitcoin spot ETF, between the halving coming and between general wealth effect of people who have been holding Bitcoin for all this time, seeing their number go up. We're having absolute mayhem in the market. We'll get into a bit of that in a moment. I just wanted to highlight this one thing. Coinbase sees third largest Bitcoin withdrawal in a year with 1.1 billion moved in a day. So we saw 1.1 billion in Bitcoin moved off of Coinbase just yesterday. And all three of those massive withdrawals that we've seen, they're talking about the third largest in a year. All of those have happened in the month of March of 2024. So very clear that there are some large institutional

Starting point is 00:05:36 buyers that are buying on Coinbase, moving their coins off either into Coinbase custody or some form of custody of their own. But this is just yet more supply leaving the market, a trend that we've obviously been seeing throughout this run. I also saw, I believe it was CryptoQuant that sent a tweet today. You guys can tell I'm a mumbling mess without Nathaniel today. That there was about a billion, I believe, in USDC deposited into Coinbase today. Now, generally, people don't deposit stablecoins into exchanges unless they're planning to buy something or they're trying to get that sweet, sweet yield that Coinbase is offering on USDC. But either way,

Starting point is 00:06:19 massive outflows of Bitcoin happening and massive inflows of stable coins happening at the same time. Guys, anything can happen with price in the short term. But the point that Matt Hogan was making when he said we are in a raging bull market and he expects a trillion to come in is that you need to play the long game. Dollar cost average, buy Bitcoin now, buy Bitcoin before, buy Bitcoin later. Not financial advice, but anyone who's been dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin is up on every purchase they've ever made ever, except for maybe the one or two that they bought above 70,000, right? It's really that easy.

Starting point is 00:06:58 So yes, buy Bitcoin now, exclamation point, raging bull market about to explode. I believe that is the case. Second story of the day has to be the continued momentum that we're seeing in the meme coin market now. Of course, we did see a sizable dip in the interest in Solana meme coins. That reached a fever pitch right when Bitcoin was around 74,000. I gave you my case for why I was a bit concerned with that. I thought that was a bubble that was going to at least pop in the short term. We saw Bitcoin retrace at that point down to about 60,000.

Starting point is 00:07:33 And we, of course, saw a lot of the meme coin action on Solana start to slow. But it is still happening. It is the casino that's open 24-7. And people apparently are having a great time gambling in it. I am not one of them, but I have been making the case of late. My new theory, and you've heard it and I'm going to share it with you anyways, because you're watching and you can't get away, is that mainstream attention to crypto returns once again this cycle when Dogecoin starts to move massively and when Dogecoin makes new

Starting point is 00:08:05 highs. I don't make the rules. I'm not a passionate Dogecoin advocate, although you know that as a joke, I do have a Shiba Oven mitt, this little toy, and a pooping Doge that's on my desk, in case you guys were wondering. But yeah, the fact is that the last cycle, Bitcoin, of course, was raging and made its highs at $69,000. And everyone said, everybody's here for Bitcoin. But the reality is that most people who entered crypto last cycle from the mainstream were not crypto native people buying Bitcoin. They were people buying Doge because they heard about it from Elon Musk. And of course, people who were buying NFTs, which made its way to Saturday Night Live as well. So you've got to think about it in this manner, in my opinion. Are most of the people who are down still, even in this raging bull market from last market, are they holding Bitcoin and upset? Or are they holding something like Doge and starting to say, hmm, this thing is starting to come back. If it makes an all-time high, imagine how many people will be excited again about crypto because they're holding Dogecoin or one of these memes.

Starting point is 00:09:10 That's my base premise. I don't necessarily like it. I don't think that's the reason people should be here. I am a Bitcoiner at heart, as you guys know. But the reality is there's a ton of people waiting for Doge to come back. And Doge bets have jumped to $2 billion as price reaches highest level since 2021. So highest level in effectively three years. And the bulk of this coming because of speculation on X payments. We see it every single time, every time Elon Musk or anyone says anything about X adding a payment feature, you get speculation that Doge is going to be part of that. He makes a joke about it, price goes up. And that's sort of what's driving it now. I mean, take a look at the Doge chart. You can see it hit a high of over 22 cents here. We could have bought Doge not so long ago down at about

Starting point is 00:09:53 five cents, but of course, still pretty far off those 74 cent highs. If I had to guess, I do think it will get there. But now Dogecoin is not alone in the meme world. Can't believe we're talking about things like Dog Whiff Hat, which, by the way, apparently raised enough money to put an ad on the sphere in Las Vegas. But Dog Whiff Hat, W-I-F, Whiff, becomes third largest meme coin as Bitcoin clings to $70K. Dog Whiff Hat apparently passed Pepe.

Starting point is 00:10:19 Somebody was on here yesterday. They called it Peep, which I thought was funny. Passing Pepe to become the third largest meme coin by market cap. This being a Solana meme coin, somewhat meaningful because you can see that the casino has moved from Ethereum to Solana, at least for now. Take a look at the whiff chart. I've never looked at it. It is on finance. Hasn't been there long, only launched. I believe this line would be way down here if we looked at it when it's trading on DEXs, trading at over $3 market cap flying. Pretty interesting to see the return of meme coins and the strength that they've showed because it's clearly not necessarily related

Starting point is 00:10:56 to spot ETF inflows. We can talk about the Bitcoin spot ETF and how much it's doing for the market, but we know that people buying a spot ETF and putting it in their IRA or investment account are not then selling that to buy dog with hat. So once again, it's the wealth effect of people who have been in crypto before finding ways to gamble with their newfound wealth from everything going up in this raging bull market and having a good time trading memes. I don't blame them. Just not doing much of it myself. Speaking of the spot ETF, look at Frank there. Spot ETF, ETFC, fourth consecutive day of net inflows to end the month. We knew last week that we saw net outflows only because of GBTC hemorrhaging cash, right? GBTC in the first week, 600 million, 700 million, 800 million a day, that had reduced to 60, 70, 80 million a day. And then all of a sudden last week,

Starting point is 00:11:45 massive spike once again, and we saw huge, huge outflows coming from GBTC. Now, I'm assuming we're going to see some news this week or next saying that one of these bankruptcies unlocked a whole bunch of GBTC, which they sold to give money back to creditors, maybe a Gemini Genesis, something like that. But once again, those GBTC outflows diminished a bit and the inflows to everything else outweighed them. Even when we had net outflows last week, it was only GBTC seeing outflows. Everything else was still seeing inflows. Really important to realize that. And really important to see that with Bitcoin going from $74,000 to $60,000, those retail people who added it passively or bought the ETF, they were not selling because the ETFs were

Starting point is 00:12:30 still seeing net inflows outside of GBTC. I'll take you a quick look at the Thai terminal here. IBIT now, where is our market cap? Right here,91 billion absolutely insane will pass gbtc which is on the way down at 24 billion or so and fidelity already at 10.28 you gotta love that uh you know arc already uh excuse me arc is it here at 3.14 bitwise 2.25 I believe that's Bitwise right there. For a crypto native company that launched and was bet on to be one of the smallest, to be at over 2 billion right now is absolutely astounding. That's testament to Matt, who I spoke about before and his team out on a constant roadshow. I talk to Matt about once a week. We do Zoom calls. I love to catch up with him. He's on this channel. I talk to his team. Those guys are on Spaces every day, on mainstream media every day,

Starting point is 00:13:28 on podcasts every day. And he's always in a hotel room somewhere in this world because he's at an RAA conference, an investor conference. These are the guys who are pushing this thing forward, pushing this narrative forward. And we actually saw news reported, potentially, I believe it was either Bank of America or Merrill, both are apparently going to unlock next week. But one of those, I believe it was Bank of America, only approving Bitwise, which will be launched in the next week or two. So you can see that the work that they're doing, absolutely massive. Now we have to then move on to the narrative of the Ethereum spot ETF, which has cooled dramatically. We saw when the Bitcoin spot ETFs were approved, the first thing that happened was Ethereum went up massively

Starting point is 00:14:08 because people started speculating on the idea of an Ethereum spot ETF getting approved. Well, Eric Balchun is now saying 25% and he'd go lower if he could. We do see Bitwise finally filing for an Ethereum ETF, which they had not done at all. That was a signal that these things weren't going to get approved because they obviously have inside baseball in this SEC process. But 25% based on the fact that there's basically been radio silence for a few weeks out, seven weeks until that first deadline, SEC is not really engaging, not really asking questions like they were with the Bitcoin spot ETF. Now, these will eventually get approved. The question is if Gary can kick the can down the road far enough or is just waiting to get sued again and to lose. Now, Grayscale made a great case for why they would potentially lose. Bitwise

Starting point is 00:14:52 now in the mix after putting out a great report on why Ethereum spot ETFs would track the futures market in the same manner that Bitcoin ones do, basically, you know, poo-pooing the arguments of the SEC. But it's very clear that right now, there's not much expectation that these get proved on the first go-round. Another hint to that, in my opinion, Fidelity takes another step towards spot Ether ETF, but hurdles likely remain. That step that they took this week that many have taken before, like ARK, was to add staking, was to add staking to their application. Now, we all know that adding staking to the application rationally makes it materially

Starting point is 00:15:32 different from the Bitcoin spot ETFs that were approved, right? So when they add staking, to me, it's almost like them saying, well, these are going to get approved eventually. We want staking in them because they would be yield bearing ETFs. If they're not going to get approved now, at least let's do the right thing and get these filed. Now, Eric Balchunas agreed with me when I said that to him on the show last week. And so that is what I'm leaning at. These guys know they're probably not going to get approved now. They're certainly not going to get approved with staking and they're all

Starting point is 00:16:02 adding it. Anyways, you can take a look here from James Seifert at where we stand on the dates and all of the filers right now. We're really looking already for Fidelity. It could get kicked down the road two days ago, but the first meaningful deadlines are in May. That said, Larry Fink from BlackRock never passes on the opportunity to take a poke at the SEC and specifically Gary Gensler. You see Gary do something negative. You see Larry Fink on TV saying the dead opposite. He's saying BlackRock says an Ether ETF is possible even if ETH is a security. Now, you might have missed the security commodity debate raging once again this week, not that it ever went anywhere.

Starting point is 00:16:50 But we have the guys from Prometheum saying that they can trade Ethereum on their platform. The only thing because it's a security and they're approved. And then the CFTC and the KuCoin case coming in and saying very clearly Ethereum is a commodity. Good luck figuring out that one. Speaking of the SEC, the DOJ and all of those, moving on to the next series of stories, Ripple. The SEC seeks $1.95 billion fine in final judgment against Ripple. Guys, whatever. I did a show on it. Nobody cares. Nobody's tracking what's happening with Ripple. Nobody's taking the SEC seriously, and they're not going to end up paying $2 billion. So let's just move on to Coinbase, which does matter. The SEC can sue Coinbase for offering unregistered securities. Judge rules. I had

Starting point is 00:17:28 met a lawman on to unpack this. He did a much better job. You should probably listen back to that. But listen, we had the SEC asking to have the entire case thrown out. All of the crypto people were in the courtroom cheering on the Coinbase lawyers who apparently did an incredible job. So we had all of the pundits and crypto Twitter saying, oh, man, this thing's going to get thrown out. Yeah, Coinbase. And all the lawyers saying, dude, they did a great job, but there's just no way this thing is getting completely thrown out because that's almost impossible with a judge. Well, the judge came back and said the wallet side of it is being dismissed. That's a stupid claim. But the SEC can sue Coinbase for

Starting point is 00:18:03 offering unregistered securities. Now, why didn't the market move massively on this? This is going to take years. The lawyers I've spoken to said that discovery for this alone could take two or three years because now the SEC effectively has to go out. I believe it was 12 projects, maybe. You know that the SEC passively named a number of all coins and protocols as unregistered securities in these actions. Well, they have to go out and prove that these are securities, right? And so they're going to be doing discovery, going to all these projects, Coinbase. This is going to take absolutely forever. They probably only need to prove that one of them is an unregistered security for this to become a meaningful case.

Starting point is 00:18:42 But the fact is, we're not going to see a resolution on this at any time in the near future. We're going to have a different administration, probably certainly a different chairman of the SEC by that time. So this is a massive can kicking down the road that shouldn't matter. But it is meaningful that the judge said, listen, this is a viable case. This could be the case that they did not register as a broker when they should have. Yeah. And this is Paul Graywall, obviously from Coinbase. You guys should just read the thread. I'm not going to read the entire thing right now, but he pointed out for many reasons why they are not listing unregistered securities. And obviously we all talk about the

Starting point is 00:19:22 fact that the SEC approved Coinbase to be listed on the stock market. Where were they on the unregistered securities claims at that time? The next story before we get to the final story, and I do have a guest, Zach Guzman, who's going to help us unpack the SBF story right after this. Prominent global cryptocurrency exchange, KuCoin, and two of its founders criminally charged with Bank Secrecy Act and unlicensed money transmission offenses. We've talked about this this week as well. This coming from the Southern District, of course, Damian Williams, who loves getting big press for going after the crypto industry. Well, KuCoin, a foreign exchange, allowed Americans with or without VPNs and with or without minimal or maximum KYC and AML to trade on their platform. We all know this has been happening for years with foreign exchanges. Binance really did stop this actually

Starting point is 00:20:10 in the last cycle, but still had a claim against them, a case that they paid $4 billion for allowing Americans to trade on the exchange. Now, Binance has went a bit deeper. Obviously, there were the texts and WhatsApp messages about intentionally allowing Americans to trade on the exchange. Now, Binance has went a bit deeper. Obviously, there were the texts and WhatsApp messages about intentionally allowing Americans to trade on the exchange. Claims that Hamas was using it for terrorism, all the normal flood that we've seen in the past. But in this case, up to $9 billion basically money laundered. But that just means, as you read into it, that they allowed Americans to trade there. But I think QCoin was still allowing this to this day. I think this is another signal that foreign exchanges that have allowed Americans are going to have to get in line and pay their fine. That's probably how this will conclude in the end. But you've seen a billion

Starting point is 00:20:53 dollars in withdrawals from KuCoin since. Good news is they've been able to handle those withdrawals. And now I've got Zach Guzman from Coinage going to come on. He's been doing amazing coverage of SBF. And of course, people don't seem to remember that Doquan is literally in the same building at trial, right? I mean, Zach, nobody's talking about the fact that Doquan is there and going through that trial because we had to get a resolution on SBF here. But first, let's just unpack this, right? I think there was an expectation that maybe SBF would get 150 years like Madoff, right? And that expectation seemed to diminish to, oh, maybe he'll get 40 to 50. Well, they got 25 and an $11 billion fine, which I find ironic because

Starting point is 00:21:37 apparently he only has like $12 skittles in his pocket, $11 billion fine in 25 years. What do you think of that? Yeah. And I mean, in general, we chatted with Bernie Madoff, former prosecutor, and a lot of comparisons have been made to Madoff and SBF, very different cases. And we heard that at the final sentencing. But Scott, it was pretty high drama, to be honest. I mean, Judge Kaplan had made the trial pretty high drama itself. And then day of sentencing really stretched it out before he landed on that. But in general, kind of in line with what Bernie Madoff's former prosecutor Marklett had told us at coinage,

Starting point is 00:22:12 which I would encourage everybody to kind of think about or go watch that to hear how he was thinking about where this would fall. He had said before the sentencing that 20 to 30 would be about the range. So he nailed it. When you go through kind of everything we heard at the sentencing, to me, it sounded pretty fair in the way that Judge Kaplan was thinking about it, given what the defense attorney said, given what the prosecution said, who wanted 40 to 50 years. So it was pretty in line with, I think, where it should have been.

Starting point is 00:22:38 I think Kaplan had like a Hollywood writer scripting out the way that he laid this out. We were covering it on spaces randomly and we were following inner city press. So it was like one tweet at a time and we'd read another one in two minutes. And he really played both sides. Kaplan, you could, you, you got the idea at the very beginning that he was setting you up for a massive sentence. And then you had that line. I don't have it exactly in front of me where he effectively said that would be too much, you know, and in 25 years is where he landed enough punishment that SBF can't really do damage for a long time, but he does get out in his fifties and potentially can have a bit of a life afterwards.

Starting point is 00:23:15 I think this is a pretty, still a long enough sentence to be a massive warning flag for anyone who attempts something similar. But what struck me in reading it is that the thread, you know, and listening to it, SBF had his chance to speak. He didn't have to. And he basically just pounded the narratives that were already disproven in the trial. He didn't show very much remorse, minimal remorse. Now, given he's autistic, you know, or at least that that's the claim there. And his brother says he can't make eye contact. You can't hug him. And he's a vegan. He was a complex puzzle who just loves people, right? The guy showed no remorse and basically said we had, he literally said we had the money and just

Starting point is 00:23:57 needed a couple more weeks. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think to me, it was kind of interesting. A lot of people jumped on, if you were following kind of the live transcript. A lot of people jumped on the idea of his defense attorney calling Sam a beautiful puzzle. I know that that's also been a quote people have leaned into. But I do think there is some truth to that. I mean, if you are going to accept that he is on the spectrum and does have kind of problems, I think we would all agree, have problems communicating. It's interesting to kind of unpack that. And that's kind of where Judge Kaplan landed in his final sentencing was, this is a guy who does think in probabilities,

Starting point is 00:24:29 he thinks in math and not in emotion. And if you think about what that means, you know, what happened in FTX, I think was a miscalculation. And Sam, you're right, he wasn't exactly remorsefully didn't do himself any favors in his like 20 minutes of rambling. But his defense attorney certainly helped him out with what he said before. And I think that that really is kind of what this case boiled down to. And Judge Kaplan nailed it. He reread Caroline Ellison's testimony. And before the trial even started, Scott, I was at Sam's house while he was under house arrest and recently published a little bit of kind of our conversation. And going back to Sam's mental framing before he decided to go to trial, there wasn't a plea deal on the table, but he was

Starting point is 00:25:11 very much looking at this as a zero years or 18 years was his estimation around 20. So he's pretty spot on and assigning probabilities to whether or not he's going to get convicted or not. And his estimation of a plea deal was about the midpoint at like 12 years. So it was very much fitting that Judge Kaplan identified this. And we're all identifying Sam as a man who's making cold calculated decisions here, not really thinking emotionally. And that's kind of how this sentence was handed down was, look, this is a guy who thinks in math, he would probably commit a similar fraud. That was the best part. Like if he's calculating and he thinks in math, well, if we let him free, we're going to be having this conversation again in two years because the probability will I get caught? Will I not get caught?

Starting point is 00:25:53 How do I balance that versus the potential profit? But at no point did he really in his rambling say, I stole everyone's money, right? Yeah. And Judge Kaplan also kind of agreed. He's like, look, it's within your right to not have to say, you know, that you committed a crime here. You don't need to sit up here and say, look, I did this. You're already going to jail. And he basically said, I understand why you wouldn't because you think in math and that's not the way you're looking at this. But everyone else, the guy who was sitting in front of me in the courtroom was clearly agitated and

Starting point is 00:26:23 annoyed that Sam wasn't saying that. And so obviously everyone's still going to be angry because he didn't sit down and plea for mercy. But, you know, I think in general, you're balancing a lot here. The defense basically said, look, 21 years is what a recidivist child sex offender got in a case that Judge Kaplan also knew and understood. And if you think about what Sam did and compare it to that in the criminal justice system, is 25 years fair against that? That's basically kind of what we heard at the sentencing. What I'd like to compare it to is Ross Ulbrich from Silk Road, who got two consecutive life sentences plus 40 for hosting a website. Now, it goes a little deeper than that, but I think people

Starting point is 00:27:06 like to make that comparison because obviously it's close to home being Bitcoiners and being in crypto. But listen, Sam's life is ruined. 25 years is a long time. I keep seeing people in the comments here and on Twitter saying he'll do five years and he'll be out on good behavior. That's not what happens with federal cases. He will do at least 20 years, probably 23 to 25. They say you do at least 85% of the time minimum on a federal sentence. So unless he somehow gets commuted by Biden, which I don't see, people have said, I don't think it's happening. I want to go back to something you said about Carolyn Ellison though, because he basically crushed his case by releasing the diaries and trying to manipulate witnesses.

Starting point is 00:27:48 They said he witnessed tampering and perjury. But it was basically going back to what Caroline had said as a function of SBF somewhat releasing all of it that really buried him. Yeah, there's some irony in that, Scott. I mean, if you think about Sam's plans ahead of this, remember, he leaked the diaries to the New York Times and then got thrown in jail before the trial even started, which certainly didn't help his case because he had leaked those diaries. And for it to be the last thing that Judge Kaplan read before he handed down the sentencing, I think was pretty fitting. And again, reading her testimony specifically attached to what she had said at testimony, which was Sam calculates things and expected value and probabilities. And that kind of

Starting point is 00:28:30 led to the iron in the coffin, which is he would do this again. So it was kind of full circle in terms of how bad that plan backfired. Because you're right, it was what Sam was trying to do. He was essentially trying to help his case and wound up hurting it infinitely by going down that path. And same thing could be said about him in those texts that were seen as witness tampering when it came to him texting FTX's former general counsel and saying, hey, maybe we should align our stories and be on the same page. So Judge Kaplan, again, I give him credit in this case because he got a lot of heat, I think, maybe potentially or could have definitely leaned the other way. We've seen a lot of judges misunderstand crypto.

Starting point is 00:29:09 We've seen a lot of judges fully lean into kind of how the government wants to prosecute these things. But in general, it was pretty fair. And again, the takeaway there for Sam, just maybe doing less could have helped him a lot more in basically the entirety of this trial, because almost every time he tried to lean into, I can solve this, never really wound up helping himself at all. Worst, literally the worst defendant ever. You could see it in his lawyer's faces, the entire trial. They probably coached him in advance, and then he would just go off topic and do his own thing because he's so narcissistic that he believed he could solve it. And I'm sure that his lawyers are just really excited to be done with this as well. Is there anything we're

Starting point is 00:29:50 missing on this trial? I do want to touch on Doquan right after this, but is there anything else I'm missing here? I mean, the guy's going away 25 years. They're going to tell him where. We're not going to hear from him for a very long time. No, I mean, I think, you know, again, I would point people to kind of our coverage, digging into the defense case. Like you said, he wasn't this was very much Sam running the show, by the way, in ever since I've known Sam and been reporting on this over the last two years and going to his parents house and everything. He had notes basically in his parents home for months going over all of this. The plans you already saw Scott in terms of him talking to reporters and Michael Lewis, like this was Sam's fingerprints all over his own defense. And so I do think it is kind of interesting to think about where we ended up and how fitting it is that he predicted these probabilities of how much time he might get at trial anyways, 20 versus 25, pretty close to maybe where he was thinking about all

Starting point is 00:30:39 this. So it's a bit of a charade, but you're right to connect the dots because the hubris piece is, I think everyone talks about the FTX case and Tara. And it's interesting to think about having two huge collapses that are essentially equivalent in size, but very different when you dig into them. And the idea of kind of a centralized entity and FTX collapsing versus what Tara was trying to do and just talked about in the same courtroom and two floors apart now, Scott, in New York, just a few kind of blocks from where I am, wild to think about these two cases now in the same spot. Yeah. What do you think the conclusion will be for Doquan? I mean, the difference there being SBF was obviously in a criminal trial. This one's just civil fraud being tried by the SEC. But the DOJ has been in the courtroom basically circling like vultures waiting to see like, okay, what is the jury thinking about this piece versus that piece? And of course, Do Kwon's not in the US, he's still in Montenegro and we'll have to wait and see where he gets extradited. But in general, I mean, all of

Starting point is 00:31:34 these cases are tried on very specific things that have nothing to do with crypto. Right now, they're kind of focusing on what Do Kwon said in terms of fraud, overstating the facts, maybe potentially misleading investors. When it comes to Chai and the payments company he ran with his kind of focusing on what Do Kwon said in terms of fraud, overstating the facts, maybe potentially misleading investors when it comes to Chai and the payments company he ran with his co-founder. So I think it's kind of interesting that you and I both talk about crypto a lot. I do it at Coinage. You do it on your platforms. And this idea of so many people in crypto pay attention to these cases. When they're trying to trial, right now there's nine jurors who have never touched crypto, never bought crypto, now deciding the fate of Do Kwon and Terra.

Starting point is 00:32:10 And, you know, the jury and the trial's focusing on misrepresentations of fact when it comes to payments technology that didn't have anything to do with blockchain. So I do think it is kind of interesting. We've got another maybe week and a half of that trial and we'll see what the ruling is, but it's

Starting point is 00:32:25 civil not criminal so at the very worst it will just be fines um and potential learnings for the doj to come back for for maybe potentially criminal proceedings later on all right man well it was a pleasure to have you on here thank you so much for giving us the recap uh look forward to having you on again great insight thanks scott appreciate the time man guys follow zach it should be below in the description so follow him on twitter x whatever we're calling it these days. Thanks, Ben. Right on, man. Watch out soon. All right, guys, we cooked through it here. Friday five without NLW. Didn't have much to rant about today, going to be honest. There's a lot to be happy about in this market. I think we're closing the chapter on a lot of the contagion and bad actors. I'm sure that

Starting point is 00:33:05 we'll see more, some pretty scathing articles out there about Barry Silbert from DCG. If you guys haven't seen that, holy crap, worth watching that or reading that. But otherwise, I think we're tying a bow on that last chapter and the ETF and inflows and having this is the new chapter for Bitcoin. A lot to be optimistic and excited about. Guys, there is no spaces today, actually, because a good Friday, all the guests are apparently at church. So I'm going to be back at it with you guys next Monday for Macro Monday, my favorite hour of the week. I know you guys won't be missing that. That's all I got for you fine folks today. See you later. Have a great weekend. Peace. Let's go.

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