The Wolf Of All Streets - Can We Trust This Grayscale Pump? Crypto Town Hall W/ Blockchain Assoc.

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Crypto Town Hall is a daily Twitter Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in the crypto and bring the biggest names in the crypto space to share their opinions. ►►OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $60,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►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    ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    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.

Scott, can you hear me? Yeah, good morning. Good evening for you, but good morning for me. I want to thank you for something. Nothing major, just appreciative as I invite the speakers. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'm on pins and needles. Yeah, I just want to thank you for...

I know that we haven't met in person despite all this time because I'm pretty introverted and you've got a family to take care of so we don't really go out to events much so i do want to thank you that you are going to singapore which i'm avoiding to go and i'm trying not to go and through while going to singapore you're stopping by dubai to change flights and you did not consider maybe taking a few hours in between and seeing me quickly for a coffee as you continue on your way to singapore i think Singapore. As I've informed you personally and not in a public forum, the tickets are not yet booked.

Ran, do you think we should get him to Singapore really? Mario's an introvert, bro. He likes to sit at his castle in Dubai and not leave the castle, bro. And Ran is a pervert. He likes to go into my room and see what supplements castle, bro. And Ryan is a pervert.

He likes to go into my room and see what supplements I'm taking. You call that a room, bro. You can't call that a room. There's nothing there. It's just a mattress on the floor. It's like those migrant workers that come from, I don't know where they come from, and then they land up living 18 of them in one room

and then like on a mattress. The only thing in your room was a mattress and water bottles. Scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. The supplements

that we sat there dissecting. It gets very thirsty. It gets very thirsty. But guys, at least Ryan visited me where Scott, despite him blocking me. I visited you a few times, bro.

I visited you a few times bro i visited you a few times yeah i know i know you took the time to visit played golf i did play golf right outside uh your apartment building at night in february yeah yeah it does if you actually looked into my um i've moved now i'm in a different place for security purposes but if if you back that in february if you looked into the apartment, because I have the lights on every night. And no joke, I didn't know that for months until Gaurav told me. You can actually see me clearly from the golf course. No joke.

You put your phone, you zoom in, you can actually see me at night. Probably at daytime too, according to Gaurav. But I've moved since, so now I don't think it's possible anymore. Then if that works in reverse, you should get out a telescope and find the 47 balls that are together in the middle of the night. You know about my telescope, do you? No, but I'm not surprised. I have a telescope for bird watching. Look, man, we all deal with the bear market in different ways.

I watch birds. You could do whatever you do, avoiding hurricanes. Oh, you have internet today, so I'm grateful for that, by the way. Yeah, I didn't expect to be connected today. It's, we just got very lucky. I mean, we have like 50 mile an hour winds outside right now. We've got some sideways trees, but we really missed the worst of it. So pretty, pretty happy to be able to say that. And pretty sad for anyone who did get directly hit. It's a pretty massive storm. Really, really bad. I'm glad you're okay. Did you want to. What I wanted to try to do guys today is

maybe give a, so the team does a quick recap. I'm going to try reading the quick recap for the audience. And then I'm not sure if it's going to sound really boring. It's going to sound interesting. And then we dig into it. Do you want to give it a shot? Yeah, go for it. All right. So it's a lot of points. I'm actually not sure if it's going to sound cool reading so many points, but it could be an interesting recap. So we have cryptos pumped after the Grayscale announcement yesterday. We've got a bunch of ETF approval deadlines in the next few days. It'll probably be delayed. The discount window for GBTC narrowed to 18% of NAV. Davidson called for Gensler to get fired again. You've got the licenses, and Rand, you've covered that in your show, the X obtaining license for crypto payments.

I think it's pretty big news. Others think it's a bit of a nothing burger, and I think, Rand, you're on the nothing burger side of that argument, I think. I could be wrong. We've got smaller news, a lot of news that's been buried with the grayscale news. You've got Coinbase has partnered with X to launch the hiring feature. Again, it just shows X getting deeper and deeper into crypto. Opening trips jumped to a billion dollars um and then funding goes negative 100 million dollars of shorts are liquidated sec has filed a secret motion against binance which we'll dig into a bit

and i think ran you've covered that in your show as well that's actually really interesting because sec doesn't usually file secret motions so it's usually two reasons from what i understand one is worries about the a certain witness second is not to interfere with the doj investigation these are you know this pure speculation by john reed stark who will try to get on the show today and we've got four more five more you know small bits of news the crypto banks seba and one approval to operate in hong kong and we've been talking a lot about the news the bullish news from hong kong recently tether added britannia as a banking partner. Talking about Tether, Nick Carter had an interview where he said Tether won't last three years.

But he's got a history of having Tether. We should get Nick Carter on the show to talk about that. Yeah, let me get Nick Carter. I'll put a note after I finish. They've got three more pieces of news. We got Cyber and Say. Cyber is up 120%. Say is up 40%.

Both of them are Binance Launchpad coins. Two more pieces of news. The BitBoy calls the abuse allegations diabolical. I don't want to cover BitBoy too much more. I think we've covered it enough, but I thought I'd mention that point here because he finally responded. And lastly, we've got the crypto fear and greed index is up to 49 out of 100. So we're in neutral territory now, better neutral territory than before. So that's a quick recap.

But guys, I'll give you the mic. I'll dig deeper into the news of the day before we go to our panel. I think the obvious is the diagram. Go ahead. I think the one thing is around these cyber pump. The one thing that we covered today on the show was we spoke about all these pumps have actually got one thing in common, that they use DWF as a market maker.

So DWF is this company that came out of nowhere and is now a massive investor slash market maker. And if you remember the YGG pump, and if you remember the Dodo pump, if you look at those parts, those were, in my opinion, coordinated pump and

dumps uh that happened and they all share the same thing that they've got dwf as a market maker so i mean you know you got to be careful when you hear the name dwf if you can get on the right side of it you can maybe catch the pump but it will inevitably these things these things then dump so um i think i think that's the interesting thing here. Yeah, and I think quickly, Mario, since obviously we have seemingly half the blockchain association here. Incredible panel, yeah. Amazing. I would really like to dig into the importance and meaning of the Grayscale news.

We can talk about what it means for price action after. I think that's a lot less interesting. I think that, you know, I was talking to John Deaton this morning, and I think, and Jake Chervinsky from Blockchain Association wrote an amazing thread yesterday, sort of speaking to not only the fact that Grayscale won, but the manner in which they won, how aggressively the SEC was effectively dismissed in this case from start to finish is really notable and very different than the previous actions we've seen before. Kristen, I know it's your first time here as CEO of the Blockchain Associates. It's awesome to have you. Is that an accurate assessment? I mean, you guys are in

Washington. How are you viewing this and does it change anything moving forward? Yeah, great. Hi, Scott. Good morning. And thanks for having us all on today. Yeah, no, I think I think this is a massive embarrassment for the SEC. It wasn't as if the court was considering a very sort of nuanced and complex policy question. Siri just talked to me. Sorry about that. It wasn't as if, you know, the SEC was considering some complex policy question. This is really more simply a process question. And the SEC was so careless in their process and their analysis that we had three judges unanimously side with Grayscale and call the SEC wrong. And I think it's important

to remember, too, that this isn't like this was three Trump judges. This was a Trump judge, an Obama judge, and a Jimmy Carter judge. So it's very rare for something like this to happen. And I think what it shows is that not just was Grayscale right and the SEC wrong in this instance, but it really undermines the credibility of the SEC on some of the more complex policy issues, because we can't take their word and their analysis. It really harms what they're saying, which is good news for crypto because those of us who've spent time looking at these policies and the rules and the laws have a different interpretation than the SEC and Gary Gensler. And so I think it's a huge, huge loss for the SEC, huge win for the crypto industry.

I think there's a notion sort of that Gary Gensler didn't care if it was going to be legal or not, because he thought that he could just regulate by enforcement and there would never be pushback. And now we're seeing the pendulum swing pretty aggressively. Marissa, Dan, I guess Marissa first, you're a lawyer with the Blockchain Association, right? So from a legal perspective, viewing this, do you think that this takes the wind out of the sails for future actions that the SEC might consider? Because I think we all understand the implications of it now, but we want to understand what it means for the future. I think that it does. I think that Gary Gensler is going to be a lot less likely, obviously, to pursue things like this, unless he's very sure he's on the right side of the law before he does it. Hi, thanks so much for having

me on. You guys can hear me, right? Yep, you're good. Okay, awesome. I do tend to agree with you. And I'm hopeful that it does, you know, force the SEC to question themselves a little bit more, especially since it takes a ton of resources to fight these battles when you know, the companies are fighting back against them. I also think it's like very important to recognize that this is a circuit court decision, and the DC circuit nonetheless, which tends to be very deferential toward the agencies. So the fact that the DC circuit was, you know, critical of the SEC and found that they couldn't coherently explain their reasons for the denial, I think just says a lot. Yeah, and I've heard that this is a higher court, obviously, than even the Ripple decision, correct?

Right, exactly. So the circuit court is sort of right before the Supreme Court. So if a case from the circuit court gets appealed, it would get appealed to the Supreme Court, which, of course, like sets the law of the land. In my conversation this morning, talking to John Deaton and I was talking to Dave Noddy, they both made the point that the outright aggressive sort of tack that the judges took with the SEC means it's very, very unlikely that the SEC would appeal this. And also, they made the point that if this was appealed or went to the Supreme Court in any way, shape or form, it actually could put the entire regulatory regime of all regulators in the United States at risk because it would be questioning, and I'm not a lawyer, but basically something called Chevron, they discussed where you can literally see it go the wrong way and have the FDA removed or something like that, that basically, this could have wide implications way beyond the SEC if they decided to advance it. So that's a risk they probably wouldn't take. Right? Yeah,

that's exactly right. And I think the composition of the Supreme Court right now is one that is probably more likely to strike down Chevron, like out of any of the recent courts that we've seen. So I think they would have to think very, very long and hard before appealing this to the Supreme Court. Let me, Scott, I want to mention one thing, I would love to get some thoughts from anyone on the panel, is the wording that was used. I know we've talked about this briefly yesterday. But I'll tell you exactly what the court said. The denial of grayscale's proposal was arbitrary and capricious

because the commission failed to explain this different treatment of similar products, talking about the futures versus the spot. And I want to look at the definition of these two terms. Arbitrary, I think we all know, based on random choice or personal whim. And capricious is given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood

or behavior or changing according to no discernible rules, unpredictable. So these words, and again, I'm not a lawyer and I've never studied cases and I get bored from this stuff, but based on the people I've spoken to, it's very rare for courts to use terms like this. Can anyone break it down and how important this is? Because we had Ryan Selkis yesterday highlight this as well. The court literally said, go home, Gary, you're drunk. And they said it from the first day. If anyone watched and remembers that the first moment that this Grayscale case was even proposed, the judges were extremely dismissive and used very similar language. So it was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

But we should go to the lawyers, obviously, or Dan Spooler. What do you think? I mean, do you think that terminology means and why is that important? I'm happy to jump in here. So basically, arbitrary and capricious is the standard by which a court analyzes an agency decision under the Administrative Procedures Act. And it essentially, like the question then becomes whether the agency's decision was reasonably and coherently explained. So when an agency does make a decision, they have to do it in like a reasonable manner. And if they're denying Grayscale's petition, they can't just say, you know, denied, they have to explain why they're denying itayscale's petition, they can't just say, you know, denied.

They have to explain why they're denying it. And here the court found that they didn't explain why they were denying it. So that's why it's arbitrary and capricious. But it is sort of like a term of art that, you know, courts use just to analyze whether an agency's decision was proper. Is it common for them to use terms like this? Yeah, unfortunately, it is, because I think, like, the plain reading of it is sort of hard to understand. But there are a lot of terms of art that courts tend to use. And it gets, like, very specific when a court, like, a court has to apply the standard that is set by the higher court, in this case, the Supreme Court. So arbitrary and capricious is like an indicator of that standard.

Yeah, I'd love to, Scott, when you're done with your questions to the Blockchain Association team, I do want to go to Gareth and Benjamin to kind of talk about the market's reaction and whether the sentiment, we could say the sentiment is changing. You know, make a comparison to the pump we saw with the regional banking collapse and the BlackRock filing for the ETF. And now we've got the Grayscales win.

So I wanted to make some comparisons, but I'll do that after you're done, Scott. Yeah, Dan, I just want to go to you because I'm still trying to dig into what this means moving forward. And I think, obviously, that both Kristen and Marissa have given great answers there. But I mean, in your mind, you're so deep in the notion before this was that the SEC effectively never loses. I mean, that's what people believe. People don't sue the SEC because they live in fear. And it seems like they're just taking loss over loss, loss after loss against our industry. Yeah. I think there is that perception, especially just in the last 24, 48 hours.

I'm down here at an event in Texas, and the industry folks that I'm speaking with are talking about it. And then some of the non-industry folks, like this group I'm with, a compilation of a bunch of state treasurers and state financial officers that really aren't of Washington, but even they were asking me about the situation with Gary Gensler and with the SEC. He's had a pretty bad August. I mean, it just hasn't really been a good summer for him at all. And I think there's a lot to be said with what happened. And I know Chris and Marissa explained the legal side, but just the industry side, I think the tide's turning. And it remains to be seen how some of these other projects

that are building ETFs see it and where it's going to go forward. Yeah, I'm wondering how much this increases the odds from our Bloomberg analysts. We should get them on here from Eric and James of the approval of an ETF. They were already pricing it at 65% before that we would see a BlackRock ETF approval or any spot ETF approval, excuse me, in 2023. So those odds have got to have gone up dramatically. I mean, Kristen, what do you think? Do you think that this is really now a matter of when and not if? Yeah, I mean, I do think this is a matter of when and not if. I mean, it's important to remember the court didn't, you know, force the SEC to grant the application, but directed the SEC to go back and revisit the

application. And so the SEC would have to come up with a different type of reasoning for denying the application. So essentially, before they were saying there weren't enough protections against fraud and manipulation. And then that was the excuse they've been using to deny ETF applications or spot ETF applications for the past 10 years. What we've seen, though, is the SEC has approved future ETF applications. And it's, you know, arbitrary and capricious to grant those and not the other ones, given that the markets for those two products are so closely correlated. So the SEC would have to come up with some sort of new reason to deny not just Grayscale, but the nearly dozen other pending applications that are out there.

And so it'll be interesting to see. There's a bunch of deadlines by which we could see a decision. Some of those are as soon as next week, but they draw into March of next year. So I do think at some point they're going to grant it. There are some different things they could do, like maybe pull the futures ETFs off the market. I don't think they're going to do that once it's out there.

That would be... That feels like scorched earth at this point. Yeah, yeah. That would be incredibly... Exactly. That would be incredibly destructive. So, yeah, I think it's inevitable. I mean, I think for kind of the reasons Marissa lined out, an appeal is very unlikely. So, yeah, I think it's a question of when, you know, not if. And they may come in with some suggestions that, you know, allow them to sort of save face

and improve some of these applications. But, but yeah, I like to think one is, I think the approval will be viewed as their saving face, to be honest, I think they'll say, look, you know, we're doing the right thing. We're giving you a spot ETF, and then they can continue with their sort of aggressive. Yeah, or like the rest of the industry. Yeah, exactly. Or they, right, they do it. They're like, we don't agree with it. But you know, we feel our hands are tied. And you know, I don't know, we'll see. But yeah, I think we've got one coming pretty soon, which by the way, is like, I think a huge win for investors and consumers, right? I mean, I think that there are different people that, for different reasons, want to have exposure to Bitcoin as part of a portfolio.

And the way that those of us who are more native to crypto do it doesn't work for every single investor out there. And so I think, you know, having more choices and more options is, you know, a positive thing. And, you know, I think it's good for consumers. And there's a whole lot of disclosures that these ETF applicants would have to provide as a part of that. And so I think it's a positive development when it happens

and what big of an effect it happens. That's kind of A, hard to predict and B, sort of beyond the scope of what we do. But yeah, I think it's going to be a hugely positive development. Mario, before we move on to markets, which I know you want to do, I do want to focus on one more question here, because we still have the two looming major SEC enforcement actions against Binance and against Coinbase. I think Binance we can separate into a different bucket. But the Ripple decision certainly helped Coinbase, right? Because the deeming of secondary sales is not unregistered securities really takes the wind once again out

of the SEC's sales. Do you think there's a chance that we could see the Coinbase case completely dismissed or that Coinbase now is in a major position of power because now i think so much changes on that case no ways no ways i mean it's you know the secs this is a different this is a completely different ruling to to the ripple case like the the the merits of the case are completely different there's no way that the sec just abandons the case there's not a chance oh i don't think they're going to abandon it. I'm saying that potentially the judicial system could throw it out or that they basically have no case anymore.

No, they do have a case. I mean, it probably needs to be argued. It probably needs to be argued. I think it's actually to our benefit for it to be argued. I mean, before we move on, Marissa, you're a lawyer. I mean, what do you think?

I mean, that would be the best day ever if it was just like dismissed right, right away. And, you know, they got no leave to amend their complaint, which means that like basically another chance to plead validations. Courts rarely do that. So I'm not sure it's possible that some of it will be dismissed dismissed and then some of it won't be. But it's really hard to predict at this point. Although the same judge ruled very favorably in the Uniswap class action or the class action against Uniswap. That decision came out yesterday. And there was some helpful language that indicates the judge gets it, gets the technology.

And I think that the analysis will be like very, very thoughtful. So I'm that made me a little hopeful. If that happens, Scott, that'll be weird. It's just hard to believe that just because of the XRP ruling, all the tokens on Coinbase would not be considered securities. It's for me just doesn't make sense. But then again, I have zero legal experience. Marisa, is it even a possibility before going to Alex and then getting to the price action? Is it even a possibility worth considering? Or it's extremely unlikely that it's not something worth discussing? I think that Coinbase's motion was one of the best investment contract arguments I've seen. So I think this case probably is more likely than any other case

for the court to find that a digital asset in and of itself does not represent an investment contract. But I think I mean, I love like hypothesizing about these legal theories, so I would consider it. But you know, like, I don't i can't say like how likely or unlikely it is but i'm like hopeful that the court will give it like a very very thoughtful review because i think coinbase's argument was fantastic yeah i want to get alice's thoughts and my next question alex which i'll go to benjamin right after you and just for the we got some incredible names requesting to speak so we'll be bringing you up as speakers as the show continues. I appreciate you requesting to come up.

Alex, what I really want to focus on is the sentiment in the market and how this news compares to previous reversals where we saw the BlackRock application, the regional banking collapse. You know, you talk about XRP to an extent. I would love some comparisons there as well. And then we'll go to Benjamin, because Benjamin was talking about one final bloodbath when it comes to altcoins and see if this is still possible or likely, according to Benjamin. But Alex, the mic is yours. Well, I was surprised by how modest the reaction was, truthfully, at least in crypto assets. A lot of the equities ended up way outperforming and particularly Coinbase up 15%. What I actually wanted to do is just sort of share some unique insight that I have because I'm in the Canadian market where we've actually had Bitcoin ETFs for two and a half years. And I think a lot of people rightly are trying to understand, well, if an ETF does get approved

and Grayscale is able to convert and others are able to understand, well, if an ETF does get approved and, you know, Grayscale is able to convert and others are able to launch, what is the impact actually going to be? So in the lead up to, so the Canadian experience is actually quite similar to the US experience. However, in one specific difference, a company called 3IQ was trying to get the OSC, which is our regulator, to approve a closed end fund, which is not an ETF, but a trust that holds Bitcoin listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange. They were steadfastly refusing. Finally, they appealed the commission, which is made up of, you know, people who are senior people in business and law who basically said categorically that there's no reason why 3iq couldn't launch a trust product.

And then that launched. The reaction to the trust products was was was good but pretty muted um we launched one in 2021 in january and uh gathered like 180 million dollars and so the whole combined trust market was maybe 300 million dollars but what we failed to anticipate was that once the trust got approved the etf wasn't far behind it. And a company called Purpose launched a Bitcoin ETF a few weeks later. Now, it was the most successful ETF launch in Canadian history. It raised a billion dollars in day one and got to two billion dollars pretty quickly. Now, if you're thinking, well, maybe that was just U.S. and international buyers.

The Canadian law says that only 50% of the net asset value of any mutual fund can be held by foreign holders at any point in time. So in other words, like up to a billion dollars of demand was coming from the Canadian market. As a general rule of thumb, the Canadian market when it comes to almost anything is about one 12th to one like 15th the size. When it comes to to crypto we're probably about the same in terms of adoption and interest and know-how so like this is all back of the envelope but it's very reasonable in my opinion to assume that um if and when an etf does get approved you're looking at you know 10 to 15 billion dollars of demand from those mainstream investors

where they weren't investing before so like to put that into context, that would be like doubling the nav of Grayskills. Yeah. Right. So that's- And when you're talking about BlackRock, they're not just going to launch something into the market willy-nilly and hope for the best, right? They've got billions in AUM already lined up, assuming they get approval. Well, that's another important point.

Purpose is a somewhat well-known company in Canada, but it's a rounding error compared to BlackRock, the amount of effort and interest and money that they're going to put into that launch. Another way to think about it is the whole total trust market, the closed-end fund market, which is roughly analogous to GBTC. And the lead-up to the ETF approval in Canada was like $400 million. And the ETF market was five times or six times that size in a matter of months. So again, what's the multiplier effect here from there being an ETF? Every advisor in the United States, there's so many advisors. There's so much money.

They're more millionaires in California than there are all over the country. Really quickly, Mario, we have actually something. Our Southern news. I was going to say, the judge overseeing SEC versus Coinbase, going back to us talking about Coinbase. The judge overseeing SEC versus Coinbase just dismissed a class action against Uniswap. Notice the language. Due to the protocol's decentralized nature, no identifiable defendant. The fact that the current state of cryptocurrency regulation leaves them without recourse.

This is the judge overseeing SEC versus coinbase throwing something out because they're saying that uniswap is decentralized you know the u.s court system the u.s court system is actually our savior here the fact that the u.s has a good court system is actually our savior here because the court system is keeping like some kind of sense of logic and and and uh sameness in this whole thing. It's funny how just not long ago, Ryan, me and you were debating how trustworthy is the US judicial system. And now we're seeing it in action.

It's not as bad as people like to make it out to be. But let's go to, so with this news, and Benjamin, I'd love to go to you. The news of Uniswap and the judges overseeing the Coinbase case, case but more importantly the grayscale announcement and justin as well a few minutes ago watch a guru posted that etfs according to to uh bloomberg analysts etfs have now 75 chance of being approved i'm not sure if that's been priced in or not by the market but would love to get your thoughts benjamin since we last spoke sure i mean so i mean there's definitely two markets here right there's bitcoin and then there's also the altcoin market um with regards to crypto so if you actually look at a lot of the altcoins they've already completely retraced the gains that they had um following the news

yesterday obviously bitcoin has not uh there There are some similarities, I think, in some of the price action, at least at this point, following sort of this Bitcoin news as there was with XRP. And obviously, Bitcoin and XRP are not, you know, they're not the same thing. And I don't expect the sort of the market to play out the same way. I think the bigger, I think the thing to sort of acknowledge is that all these things are huge wins for crypto, right? They're really great things for crypto. And it is validation in my eyes, right, that crypto does have a future in the United States. issues are immediately solved. For instance, you know, a very aggressive Federal Reserve, interest rates above what most millennials have ever seen. And, you know, until we turn those macro headwinds into tailwinds, you know, I still think there's going to be a liquidity issue in the cryptoburst. But that doesn't mean that these are not big wins. And it's sort of the same thing.

Like in downtrends, people don't really care about good news. In uptrends, people don't really care about bad news. It doesn't mean that it's not a great win for crypto. I don't necessarily think that it's going to change the sort of the immediate liquidity issues that we face. Just like with what we saw with XRP last month, or, you know, two months ago, whenever it was, I think it was mid July, I believe, you know, I mean, sort of that that news came out. And, and I know a lot of people were hopeful that it was going to completely change the game for altcoins. But you know, XRP completely retrace

that entire move. And a lot of altcoins went on to drop 30%. Yeah, and Ben, I mean, Bitcoin retraced the entire BlackRock move before this news. Exactly. So it's not, I just want people to understand, like, I'm long-term really bullish on crypto as an industry. And, you know, the news coming out of the courts are very optimistic.

I think we have, you know, great times ahead for crypto, but we still have these macro headwinds and the sec case rulings are not going to to change that um scott just quickly to um follow up on what i was saying earlier um i think that like when it comes to price action there's sort of two things one is like vibes and then the other is flows so like with the vibes like there's lots of headwinds and i think that people are not yet comfortable with you know diving in back into the asset class for a lot of the reasons that have been well articulated here but i do think if an actual etf gets actually approved there's actually a fun flow like factor here where there will be we like we

have a reasonable sort of understanding that there's like money on the sidelines that cannot invest in this space for the simple reason that they don't have a tool that um they either understand or they're allowed to invest in like that's something that has what's a problem in canada like just like the canadian experience is is indicative of what happened in the u.s what could happen in the u.s so i do think like the the decision it's not only that people will feel better about bitcoin and therefore buy it you know have custody themselves in the u.s what could happen in the u.s so i do think like the the decision it's not only that people will feel better about bitcoin and therefore buy it you know have custody themselves or buy it through exchanges or what have you it's that there will be like an actual

fund flow that goes into into the space so i think that actually could be the material catalyst the ctf i think is is probably how much but the question the question is alex to you benjamin and gareth and anyone else is how much eric is there as well, how much of this has already been priced in? Like, if you read the other story that I read earlier, 75% chance of an ETF getting approved. Has the market already priced this in? Or is it pricing it in now? Because the market doesn't seem to be reacting as I would have thought. Well, I mean, look, the market is a, you know, a voting machine in the short term, a weighing machine in the long term. Like, I think for all of these other reasons, like the market may not be pricing it in properly because it's thinking about like those other factors which are weighing on the price more

in the short term. Right. So I just think we don't totally. And just to be clear, like the closed end funds that launched in Canada launched in a bear market and gathered very little assets. Purpose also happened to launch when Bitcoin was going from 30 to 50 grand. Right. So like the context, the market is also really really important so i'm not saying it's an apples

to apples comparison i'm simply saying that like we don't we don't really know till you know with these kinds of things like you know how many are you really want to own this thing i ran a analysis uh back back then i don't remember exactly the date of when i ran it but i worked out what percentage of the canadian Canadian ETF market sits in the purpose ETF. Because I kind of said to myself, let's look at a market where an ETF has been approved, and then let's look at the amount of money, what

percentage of a total ETF market actually flowed into the ETF. And I think the number was 0.3%. And then what I did was I doubled it because I said, okay, was 0.3%. And then what I did was I doubled it because I said, okay, if 0.3%, if the US approved it,

it's seen as a bit more of an endorsement plus the US is a more diverse ETF market. And I said, even if you double or triple it, you're talking about 0.6 or 0.9% of a, I think it's a $10 trillion market in the United States. And that's kind of like what the inflows, that's how I did like a couple of models to show what the inflows would be into an ETF.

But I don't know if you've ever done an exercise like that. Quickly, really quick. Also, just seeing from our ETF experts that yesterday, and James Seifert tweeted this, while everyone is, was talking about GBTC, BITO, which you guys may remember was the first futures ETF, went wild with trading yesterday. 800 million yesterday, the second largest day it's had

since the billion dollar day the first day. Astounding volume for the futures ETF just on the news of the grayscale win here. Joshua, let's break this down a bit further. Joshua, I'd love to get your thoughts on this before we go to Gareth and Eric. And Mike, I'm glad you're there because I do want to dig into a bit later, I want to dig into the Binance story as well and the secret filing by the SEC. And by the way, Mike and I talked about two weeks ago and he said, watch the end of August, something big is going to happen. So, yes, just giving my thoughts on this, I think you have to look at kind of where you personally are investing or trading or speculating, because a lot of people

are looking at like short term day to day. And that's going to be almost all speculation of who's moving what, where. At the big picture, when I'm looking at things, I'm trying to look at this not as a single variable equation, meaning each thing that's happening plays into a larger overarching ecosystem. So you got to look both positively and negatively. And on a positive side, you're going to see if there is an ETF that comes out, you're going to allow institutional funds to finally have access to cryptocurrencies. Because the reality is like pension funds will never do a seed phrase, they're never going to do a multi-sig. It's just risk compounded on risk, you've the risk of the actual asset, and then you've the risk and the security that like, if you understand how these

large institutional players work, that just almost can't happen from a liability standpoint, and you need a way to ensure it. So if you have an ETF that has exposure, that's very good. You have to also realize that that may take two to three years to play out in a full capacity. So just an announcement of it, you're really playing more off of the speculative standpoint. Josh, I'm just going to jump in just because your audio is really bad. I know you're out. So I will go to Joshua Frank in the meantime as you fix your mic, Josh. Joshua Frank, I would like to hear your thoughts on kind of moving, again,

the same question I asked earlier, especially with what Scott just mentioned with the $800 million into the futures ETF. You know, the markets tend to be forward-looking. So have they priced in the inflows that the approval would bring to the markets? So I think that's a really difficult question. But I think there's a few things that we're not talking about here. I mean, I think there's things that we're hitting on. But I think there's other things we should dive into more depth on. I think the first

thing is the fact that there are still so many people stuck in that GBTC trade, they're going to want to get out, right. So as GBTC, you know, if GBCT converts into an ETF, I think you're going to see a huge amount of outflows, right, that that's naturally going to come, right. So yeah, maybe we do see x number of billions inflows, but that's going to be met with some, you know, billions in redemptions that are going to happen as well, which could potentially put some pressure on the spot market, right? There's people that borrowed Bitcoin, you know, and, you know, to enter into that GBTCs trade when it was trading at a premium to NAV. And there are still billions of dollars stuck into it, right? That's why BlockFi blew up. That's, you know, part of the reasons that Three Arrows and others blew up. And, you know, those positions have to be exited and unwound. But I will say, in 2021, in 2022, before the FTX collapsed, a large number of the

biggest hedge funds in the world, growth equity firms, VCs, even in some cases, I know of sovereign wealth funds that purchased crypto and were holding it on their balance sheet. Once FTX collapsed, a lot of those guys sold out of their positions. A lot of them were like, I want to get my money the hell off of Binance. I don't want to be on here. And a huge number of funds that maybe were trading GP capital rather than LP capital, just totally pulled out of crypto. And so some of those guys have been like trading CME futures, but a lot of them are like absolutely petrified to touch spot at this point. They want nothing to do with, you know, a number of the different exchanges, custody or anything else. And I think there's gonna be a huge amount of, you know, whether or not that's only buying activity and not, you know, people just buying and selling and shorting,

you know, the ETF once it's launched, there's going to be a massive amount of interest from hedge funds to start trading this, which I think is going to create an incredibly liquid market. So I don't really know how priced it is or isn't. I don't think anybody knows what the inflows are, but I think there is going to be outflows. There's definitely going to be a lot more volume in crypto. Yeah, Peter Schiff literally tweeted that yesterday.

And of course, because it came from the mouth of Peter Schiff, the crypto industry absolutely freaked out. But it is a very, very fair point. I mean, GBTC, you have not been able to get your money out for how long now? Yeah, I mean, it's been underwater for, I mean, probably two years or something. I know people that have personally told me how ecstatic they are to finally be able to withdraw their money. Don't forget that this GBTC discount was one of the biggest reasons for the entire crypto collapse. Because remember that funds like 3RS Capital, Celsius, BlockFi, all entered this GBTC trade where they were buying the GBTC shares at NAV, at the net asset value of the fund, they were then waiting six months for the issue and then selling them at a premium because the premium had gone on for so

long. When the premium became a discount, all of these lenders actually started coming underwater. So let's not forget that actually GBTC and this leverage premium discount trade was one of the biggest reasons why we had the massive collapse last year. And ran Genesis had a major role in that. Yeah. I mean, Genesis had a major role. There was a massive conflict of interest. Celsius had a massive position. BlockFi's entire business model was that.

The only way they could offer yield literally was with that trade. Exactly. I remember taking on Zach at the time and saying, I think you're taking a massive chance. But at that time, it was a time that Pump had just invested into BlockFi and BlockFi were the blue-eyed boys in the industry. I kept calling them out publicly on the show. I said, I'm not going to work with them on my show because this is a huge risk and i mean the risk the risk materialized and i mean i

actually predicted there was there's actually one of the shows that i did where i actually predicted that block fire would land up at zero because of this trade one of the few corrections that i actually made that actually happened hey man if you're if you're hitting 50 50 you're doing better if you make if you make like like i do a daily than I was. If you make – I do a daily show. So that means let's say I do 200 shows a year. And then let's say on each show I make like three predictions. So that means I make like 600 predictions a year. And that was like one of 600 that came true.

And I think that's like my best – I've only had one of 600 come true. It was that one. That's literally the reversed statistics of BlackRock ETF approvals. They're like 575 for 576 with one miss. Go ahead, Gary. Yeah, exactly. Hey, guys. So, yeah, I just wanted to comment on the price action.

Yeah, and, Garrett, if you can compare it as well, just the price action. If you can compare it to the other news, we saw the application, BlackRock's application, what happened to the market as well. And the Silicon Valley era and the banking collapse as well. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that a lot of people and a lot of retail investors just aren't quite understanding is that, you know, this news, the Ripple case when the GBTC stuff, it's good, but it's fundamental kind of building blocks for crypto, right? And so there's a difference between short term moves, which are more technically based, which technicals rely on human emotion, versus fundamental, which is the same as planting a seed in the ground, and it takes some time for it to kind of, you know, form and give you fruit

from that tree. And so what we're seeing here is, is there's this short term kind of this kind of gruntled nature in in crypto, where people are getting disappointed, right? You had the highs at 30, almost 32,000 when the ripple news came out. And then people watched and they were like, so sure that was going to be the next bull market. And we were going to be heading back to 65 69,000. And instead, we went down to 25,000. Right. So now this news comes out yesterday, and you get this immediate reaction, short covering, whatever it may be. But people are just honestly skeptical. And that creates the fact that this 28,000 28,000 level is resistance. And that's your short term technical psychological reason for why you're seeing this pullback. So

so people are just kind of in this in this mode yeah, this is great news. You get the immediate reaction. But at the same time, the general mindset of crypto right now is still negative. And it's got to have this full-fledged kind of turnaround before we start to break out from these levels. So I think that was one of the key points there. And just going back to some of these previous news pieces, I still think Bitcoin long-term is going way higher. But you are seeing, again, like you were mentioning, Silicon Valley bank failure, that was one of the key movers. So anything that creates kind of this uncertainty in the financial system, the fiat system, you are definitely seeing a bigger move over towards the cryptocurrency markets.

Yeah, really quick, just it remains to be seen of course because those pumps to be clear we're not in an hour right i mean the gray scale it moved very big in a very short period of time it took a week obviously for that black rock news to set in for it to go up but on the flip side of that price went basically from 29 down below 25 in less than an hour and we haven't even retraced that entire move and there was no news for that move yeah can i ask you so scott can i ask you the retrace we're seeing now because i don't look at charts i don't care about charts or at least i don't understand charts and gareth and scott if look at retrace today that we saw it's a very small retrace how does that compare to the retraces we saw once they were the black rock news if you can jump in on that. I mean, I would say that after a large move,

you always get volume dropping, consolidation before a move up. That's exactly why you get bull pennants and bull flags. I'm not saying that's what it is. I'm not even looking at the chart at the moment, but you get the initial huge move, then things set in and then you see what's really going to happen. You know what? I'm going to agree with Gareth here because I know that this is what he's thinking. He may not have said it, but it just feels like every bounce that we get has less and less steam. So it's like, you know, the bounce we got before took us up to 31,000. Then, you know, it's Arthur Hayes used an analogy once where he said it's like dropping a bouncy ball. And every time you drop the bouncy ball, it bounces up just a little bit less and a little bit less.

Yeah, that's exactly how you get descending triangles. That's the pattern of descending triangles where you have equal lows and lower highs until you finally break down. And that's the psychological aspect where people keep getting burned, right? So every time you had the BlackRock news and price went up, and then you had the Ripple news and price went up, and then everyone that bought on that factors, those factors, those bullish factors are now getting burned when we saw the dump out from 29,000 down to 25. So there's this natural being of saying, oh my gosh, price went back to 28,000. I'm basically break even. Let me sell my Bitcoin and just say, wait a minute, let me reevaluate this market.

And that's what happens in bear markets. Bear markets beat you down. It's not necessarily the price will just continue to go down. How much good news do we need to turn a bear market into a bull market? I think it's just the four-year cycle. I mean, I don't know if Gareth is going to agree, but I think you can only do so much in the third year, which is 2015 and 2019 and 2023. We see this every single time. The news doesn't matter because we'll get the halving next year. And a year from now, price will be up double from here. And we'll all go, wow, we could have had those spaces.

So what month is that approximately i know it's a range you know having will be april may and then it usually takes four to six months for it to kick in so one year from now things will be skyrocketing and uh we'll uh regret spending all this time talking on spaces you know i would i would agree with you under normal circumstances but you know what worries me about this halving event and this halving cycle is that I'm starting to feel like when Plan B was calling for the $100,000 Bitcoin and everybody was just counting on this one. Everybody's counting all their predictions on one model.

But it is a fundamental event. I mean, it's a fundamental event. But it's only a fundamental event that's occurred for, what, 12 years or 13? I mean, it's not like you can look back at 100 years and be like, wow, that's a hundred year cycle type action. I agree with that. You have limited price action, but I mean, you're literally talking about cutting half of the new supply. And if demand is simple, it's the beauty of this cycle is that you don't really have to annualize it. It's simple math. I mean, anyone who understands supply and demand, obviously, in economics, it should work that way as long as demand does not cut in half, which we rarely see. And also then, I mean,

Mike Alford will be able to speak to this, but the effect it has on miners, how many miners have to kind of capitulate because their machines can't keep up once you have the halving and it becomes unprofitable. I mean, anything anything can obviously happen there's a million things of news but like it's well you're yeah and what you're referring to scott is like the fundamental side of it which is 100 dead on what i would just propose is like so a couple things my history as a trader 24 years trading every time i was like if i buy this it's a guaranteed win i've always lost right so that's what makes me nervous about that right is everyone i go on twitter and i'm like i see people saying that and it's like, oh, just buy. Yeah. And then the other side could be is like, I mean, think about this possibility. What if we

hit a recession next year, right? Early in the year and the stock market begins to tumble, right? We start to see inflation sticking around, things are getting really nasty and you see actually a collapse in Bitcoin around the halving, but then once that's over, then the fundamentals take over and take it up. So my point is that I do agree with Scott that it'll end up happening. It's just I could see them fooling everyone who's buying on this region. I agree. The halving itself tends to be actually a sell the news event because people don't understand, see the halving, and they expect some magical thing to happen because, hey, it's the halving. It takes literally months for the effects of that on the actual fundamentals and supply demand dynamic. And yes, we could be in a recession. Yes, the market

could crash. The flip side of that, something I talked to Caitlin Long about last week, she said, if the halving cycle does happen and we're in an election year, imagine that in September or October coming into an election in November, we're in a election year imagine that in september or october coming into an election in november we're in a raging bitcoin bull market how that would affect the election how much it would be talked about by each candidate who would then have to have a very bullish uh basically position because so many people cared about it i would also at this stuff you got to be really careful because we're getting to a place of almost like the shoe shiner is giving uh stock recommendations where when you think about things being priced in meaning that

the money is already in scott scott hold on i just i love this josh i'm gonna clip this team please clip this uh scott is a as a shoe shiner giving uh crypto tips and recommendations thank you so much josh how did he know i was literally shining shoes? No, no, no. But I'm just saying this is a pretty widely known event. So, I mean, I think the halving before had a material impact because even in the last cycle, but for people that were really paying attention to crypto, I don't think they realized that was coming. So this is the first time we're going to see a halving with a higher interest rate environment. This was the exact same narrative in 2019, just to be clear. Was there high interest rates in 2019? Everybody was expecting the halving in 2019, the same thing.

Did we have high interest rates then? I'm not saying the environment's not the same if we're talking about sentiment. If we're making the point that nobody saw it coming and nobody was talking about the halving, it was literally exactly the same. Well, the entire 2016-2017 bull market was during a period when interest rates were going up. Well, the interest rates in that market were like sub 2%, right? So right now we're looking at 5.5%. So look, and I could be wrong. I'm not saying it's not going to happen. But I think the idea of just saying like, well, it's going to happen. You look at the stock to

flow ratios, the amount of Bitcoin that's currently out versus well, it's going to happen. You look at the stock to flow ratios, the amount of Bitcoin that's currently out versus the amount that's going to be kind of cut in half. I just think you want to be cautious with this because everything, in my opinion, is going to depend very simply on whether Bitcoin gets deemed a risk on or risk off asset. If in a higher interest rate environment, people see it kind of like as a substitute for digital gold, I think you'll be very, very positive. And you'll see like a big wave and you'll see a big upswing. If it gets deemed a risk on asset, typically in higher interest rate environments, that's a very challenging asset to sell. And so if you have a falling off the stock market, I think that's where everything is going to hinge. Do financial advisors, do these big funds

come in and say this is a flight to safety and this is a advisors, do these big funds come in and say, this is a flight to safety, and this is a digital gold? Or do they come in and say, this is more like a tech stock, this is more like a high-risk investment? And I think that's going to be the one point that hinges on everything, like no charts, no anything else. And again, this is just my opinion. I'm not a financial advisor. But I think if it's deemed safe in a high-interest rate environment, big push for it. If it's deemed high variance, high risk, I think it's going to get sold off very aggressively. I think we should also consider, too, that, I mean, there's the halving that's going to happen next year. But something that also will probably happen next year at some point is, you know, going back to some form of QE.

I don't know at what point it will occur, whether it'll be mid year, whether it'll be late year. But one of the reasons why like the altcoin market has done so poorly for the last two years is because liquidity is leaving. And the way that we get that liquidity back is for the Fed to finally have to, you know, flip over from QT to QE. And so, you know, if we do get a recession and liquidity returns courtesy of the Fed, then that could also go hand in hand with a halving and we get our typical bull market. The question that I have is what's more important, macro news like the general liquidity market, the equities markets or ETF approvals or the halving news history? People just anticipating it and becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Which one is more likely to impact the market get us out of the bear market yeah yeah mario let me let me jump in here because i think this is a time horizon issue because if

you're very focused on the short term then you care about news flow if you're focused on a point to point basis you know one two three four years out then you're focused more on the mathematical certainty of the having because we could argue all day long about what the impact of the having is, but it's kind of stupid, right? Because the having is very simple. There'll be 900 Bitcoin a day in this environment. And after mid April, there'll be 450 a day. So no matter how distressed the miners are, they can't sell more than 450 a day, that's going to have an impact on the supply demand balance, we just don't know the demand side of that equation. So it's really a time horizon issue. I've been listening carefully to what everybody's been

saying. A couple of things I want to address real quick. One is this idea of liquidity being an issue. There's plenty of liquidity out there. In fact, these higher rates are actually providing a subsidy to the wealthiest savers in the U.S. The wealthy people have massive STEMI checks coming every month now from these higher treasury rates. And that's why we're seeing all the hotels are to the wealthiest savers in the US. The wealthy people have massive stimmy checks coming every month now from these higher treasury rates. And that's why we're seeing all the hotels are full, all the restaurants are full, right? People are booking private jets on charters. Like everything is busy because there is not a liquidity issue at all. And actually, it's going to get worse for the Fed if they break the treasury market. And as Ben was just saying, they have to revert to true QE. But I view QT right now as a form of closet QE, but it's just

QE for the rich. Let me just finish my points. I haven't gotten to say anything yet. I've listened to you speak several times. So the other things I'd say is the ETF thing is much bigger than just short term sentiment and flows. It literally legitimizes the entire Bitcoin space with institutional investors globally, custodians, miners, etc. It's going to have a massive impact. And then the last thing I wanted to say is just about the DXY because I haven't heard anyone mention it, but it's literally the most important factor at this very moment. If you look back to early July, not a lot of people were paying attention to this because

it happened over the July 4th holiday. But Bitcoin and Bitcoin related proxies literally took off all the proxies, all the equities that are levered to Bitcoin took off for about 13 to 15 days in late June, early July. And it was entirely tethered to that DXY fall that was happening. We're seeing that happen again now. DXY just flipped over a couple of days ago. And I said in a tweet three days ago, like, you should be watching this. Not enough people are watching it. It turned over. And if it can continue to turn down here and the dollar can continue to weaken, then it doesn't matter what the news flow is.

It doesn't matter how much we argue in the space. Bitcoin and Bitcoin proxies are going to go up. And I'll just pause there. Yeah. And I want to give the mic back to Benjamin. Just one thing, Mike, and I want you to touch on the Binance news as well before going back to the market's reaction. Just before that, for anyone listening, we mentioned it earlier. We do have a partnership with one of the top exchanges.

We'll be announcing who it is soon. So if you do have a project or you've got a fund with a bunch of portfolio companies, do message us. It's a pretty close partnership, not just an affiliate partnership. It's a pretty close partnership with that exchange to help projects list there and uh um pretty good terms pretty quickly as well so if you have a project we are a project to have a project in your portfolio make sure dm any of the three of us um and if you want to come on the show as well or the shark tank show we're launching in september so in a few weeks um if you want to pitch on there and make sure you dm us too it's called token tycoons bro it's called you called it token tycoons it

means i have no no i did it i would never call something token tycoons do i look i called it exactly is that is yeah all right cool that makes more sense now mr avengers which means and all token tycoons okay it's true i i okay it is called so if you want to come on token tycoons and make sure you hit us up. It's a Shark Tank show. It's going to be video form. And if you want to come on this show, make sure you DM us as well.

I didn't pin the emails. I probably should start doing that again as of tomorrow. So I want to continue back with you, Mike. Mike, can you tell us more about the Binance news that we saw as well on the secret SEC filing? Because it kind of went under the rug. No one really talked about it. From what I understand, the SEC doesn't usually do this. david could touch on this as well the sec doesn't usually do

this unless there's a good reason to do so either protecting a witness or potentially interfering with the doj investigation which we can't confirm 100 there is one but there's a lot of speculation around that mike if you've got more clarity on that would be great i don't have specifically more clarity because i've read the same things you've read and john reed stark's tweet probably should have had 20 000 likes and a whole bunch of reposts but it barely got any attention again part of that is it was masked by this great scale news and all the speculation about bitcoin etfs but as i've said here for more than a year now and it's been very un and actually ran, unfollowed me because of my negative

Binance tweets. Like Binance is a much riskier institution than the consensus view. No, no, no, no, no. I unfollowed you because the stuff that you were posting was sensationless garbage. And the reason why

I said that is, and I was very open about it, I said, you're comparing Binance to FTX, except Binance doesn't have the token leveraged in the open market. Okay, you're getting into esoteric details, but the reality is that everything that Binance... It's the only detail that matters. Hold on, hold on. Everything that CZ told you a year or two ago about how Binance works has been proven to be wrong now. That's it. Like, I don't really have to say anything else. Everybody can see it now. It doesn't even matter what the SEC and DOJ does. Like the armor has been pierced. Everybody can see that he did actually loan out customer tokens. He did re-denominate tokens. He did have an

under-collateralized stable coin, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and go on. There are hundreds of things that Binance has done and he lied to the public that whole time and that's just that's just the truth it's just true you're sensationalizing it mr alfred you're not sensationalized at all i know you get a kick out of sensationalizing shit because it gives you likes and it gives you follows but it's not true but that applies to all of us i don't care i don't care about likes or follows i've never cared about social media i didn't even use Twitter until a couple of years ago. Being on here was literally an accident, right?

So unlike you, I'm not pursuing this for any particular purpose. I don't monetize any of this in any sort of direct way. I only care about the truth. I care about the safety of the consumers that use the Binance application, just like I cared about the safety of the people who use BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, whatever. You may have made one out of 600 calls right. I made a lot of correct calls over the last two years on which one of these firms are actually risky. And so you can continue to poo-poo it and you can continue to say CZ's a great guy and

people aren't going to get screwed. But that's just false now. I'm not saying that. It's just false. I'm not saying that. You're throwing up smoke screens. You're this sensational comment. It's a smoke screen.

Sorry, buddy. Look, I have no I have no incentive to back him. I just I just want to make sure that the people get the facts and that we don't we don't sensationalize things, which factually cannot be true. So moving away from Binance, and obviously, we have to see what the DOJ investigation or what the details are. But moving back to the discussion we're having now, David, I want to get your thoughts,

maybe if you have any comments on the Binance, on the SEC secret filing around Binance, and also back to the comments around the Grayscale decision. We haven't spoken since. It's been a while, David. Yeah, no, I apologize. I have to work a little bit,

but I'm going to back up Mike for one second because one of my favorite taglines in crypto since I've been here since 2012, yesterday's crypto heroes, tomorrow's crypto felons. And we are seeing that in Binance. First of all, it's not a secret filing. It's just a motion to seal a document, which happens all the time. But it's a high threshold to seal a document. And look, I'm a big believer that Binance has either been indicted criminally through the DOJ and it's just a sealed indictment or it's coming down quickly. Just from the stuff we've all read publicly, we know the US government is going after Binance. I've said this from day one, the Binance lawsuit and the Coinbase lawsuit could not be more different.

The Coinbase lawsuit is just a question of law, whether or not Coinbase is doing something right or wrong legally by selling what they're selling. But they are not accusing Coinbase of anything criminally. They are not accusing

Brian Armstrong of doing salacious things. Binance is a completely separate case. And we are going to find out soon enough what's going to happen with Binance. I kind of do this. I believe that, and I'm with Rand on this. John Deaton and I were going back and forth on Twitter about this this morning and yesterday. I'm a terrible investor. If anyone follows me, I told them to sell Bitcoin, Tezos. I've been in Bitcoin again since 2012. I've made horrific investment advice and no one listens to me on this town hall for my investment thoughts. All I can say is what's going on with

Binance is very different than what's going on with Coinbase. We can all cheer about the SEC getting clocked legally, but here's my warning. I am not part of the echo chamber. When God wants to punish you, he gives you exactly what you want. And right now, what's going on in the lawsuits with the SEC, we all think we're getting what we want by the SEC getting their clocks cleaned. It's going to change. And when I kind of chuckle listening to everyone talk about QE, mining, the halving and all these other things, the biggest thing in crypto next year is going to be the 2024 election, because if the House goes Democrat, if the Senate gets a couple of more Democratic votes, if Elizabeth Warren

gets more power, these are things that are going to impact the macro of crypto and the SEC, what they're doing. The SEC is going to get better if the Democrats get more power. The SEC is not going to be offended by the fact that they lost the first couple of rounds. They're going to change their arguments. They're going to get better. The law is going to change. So the election is really where the focus, and I give Ryan credit when he talks about this on Messiah Capital. He talks about this all the time. Who we support in the next election is going to have such a profound impact because the law is going to change for years i remember

when rand and i first met in like 2015 we were talking about like you know everyone was like i was like you know i'm just waiting for you know regulatory clarity and regulatory clarity was like the big like big discussion but we're past that point now. The Ripple decision, the Grayscale decision, the Grayscale decision was so probably right and so probably wrong for what the government did. But moving forward, the question's got to be, what is going to happen in the election? Who's going to gain more power? Is the fight going to continue of people who hate crypto to try and make laws to stop the growth? Or are we going to see an embracing of it? I can't tell you again, I'm a terrible prognosticator of which way it's going to go. But I think those are things that

on the macro long term level really matter. Because as the SEC starts piling up these losses, they're going to change their tactic by who's in control. And that's a real question for smarter people than me to answer. Hey, David, do you have a view on Gensler getting removed before the election versus a change up in leadership afterwards and any implications on crypto from there? And I would like to hear Dan's answer to that as well after David. Go ahead, David. So one of the things that, you know, my early legal career when I was at the largest lobbying law firm in the world in Washington, D.C., they always told me lobbyists are more important than politicians. And I think it's important to know that people want Gensler doing what they're doing

until the moment he's not. But Gary Gensler is not making a single decision without people above him giving him marching orders. So I think that we're going to see. I don't believe right now there is anyone who cares that Gensler and the SEC are losing at the moment from the power struggle that's going on in D.C. If the Democrats weaken, of course he's going to get fired. We've got to see in 2024 how the public and the support for candidates surrounds and swells. I do anticipate as younger voters start getting more involved, we're going to see more pro-crypto candidates on both sides of the aisle. So no, I don't expect Gensler to survive

2024. Whether he gets fired beforehand, I don't think that's particularly important. Half the world is going to disappear from government spots in roles like Gary Gensler in six months before the election. Dan, what do you think? You're in Washington. Maybe Dan's not there yet. So, guys, well done. Ran, are you there? I want to kind of mention one last piece of news that I think is worth discussing before wrapping up for the day.

Sure, I'm here, bro. Sure. Thanks, Ran. Thanks. Always there. My ass, you're always there. It's a surprise you're here. Ran, question.

Regarding the X News, you covered that in your show. I think you were leaning more, it's like more of a nothing burger but for me it just seems they're taking pretty big steps into the okay that i'm misunderstood they are positioning them they are they are you know elon elon's passion is to if you look at like elon's passion is this this app that can that can do anything and connect people and whatever else and one of the key components in this anything app is the fact that you have to facilitate payments. And what they're doing is they're going state by state, license by license,

and they're getting all the required licenses to make them a money transmitter, currency transmitter, depending on which state the license is different. And they're going one by one and they're getting all the required licenses to do what needs to be done. Now, what that means is that at some point

they're going to implement payments. And when they do implement payments, chances are, if you look at the licenses that they're getting, there's going to be some kind of crypto component to it. And, I mean, we looked at a scenario where your Twitter handle becomes your wallet. People can pay you by just sending money to at Scott Melker, at just sending money to you can just send

you can just send money, you can tip money you can tip on spaces so it really makes sense and I think that we shouldn't discount that this could be one of the big tools for mass adoption of crypto, you know if there's someone who wants to put it off and can put it off it actually could be Elon

Yeah and I'm just trying to get our Crypto Town Hall account so I can show that as we wrap wants to pull it off and can pull it off but actually could be Elon. Yeah and I'm just trying to get our Crypto Town Hall account so I can shill that as we wrap. Yeah I think this another another question I have for you Rand is that the PayPal news has just it's just kind of died out. It's like we have incredible bullish news but then just gets forgotten. Has there been any talk about the PayPal stablecoin? No I mean it's happening it's happening you know that I think it's called P usd i think it's it's definitely happening how's the adoption though well i don't know if it started yet i think it's it's very much where it's happening in in development i'm not sure if it's if it started yet i haven't seen it um but i mean it's yeah there's i mean there's a lot of good news and i think what you'll see is that in bear markets, well, not bear markets, but in boring markets, there's very much lots of news of building and building and building.

And then you get the explosion of what it actually all means. Cool, man. Well, on this point, guys, we're trying to get the Crypto Town Hall account, but we'll talk about it tomorrow. I think this is it, Scott. Anything else to add for today? It's been a pretty exciting 48 hours. Like the impact theory, or the settlement with impact theory

just kind of disappeared. No one's talking about it anymore. Even though I thought it was going to be pretty major news, especially for the NFT ecosystem. So that's gone. Everyone's talking about the ETF. I think it will be major news. You know, I think it was just overshadowed.

But I think that the sentiment, at least from everyone I'm speaking to in my general feeling is that we're going to see the sec go after less huge players that can afford to fight back like the ripples coinbase's binance but they're gonna i would be very surprised if they stopped going after the low-hanging fruit people that will settle where they can get their quote-unquote wins very easily without having to go to court and be embarrassed by the court system because most people can't afford to fight back i mean one thing is what nft probably what nft project could fight the sec in theory and first of all those probably are securities so but but b like yuga labs baby but can you

imagine a world where the board apes settle and uh you have to go burn all your apes and send them back no i think it's it's a bit too far i just don't see that happening especially that's what happened with impact theory right it was that they made 30 million dollars on the offering and now they have to destroy them hear that silence that's fear david last question i have for you as well uh you did you don't think that all these losses all these blue eyes on for the sec getting destroyed in the courts you don't think they'll change course it just it's confusing to me that you got when you said that it's just a bit surprising to me i just don't understand how they won't change course no i think i said the i if i did say i meant the opposite i think that they are getting their clocks clean and they're

eventually going to get better at what they're doing. They are going to change course. But that, again, goes back to who's in charge and who's in power. But they're going to keep going there right now. And I think that goes to Mike's question to me. Do I think Gensler is going to get fired? Gensler is just a is it works for whether you call it Elizabeth Warren, whether you call it Joe Biden. He's just he's a political appointee. He's not making these decisions against the administration. This is what the administration wants. This is but they are going to get better.

They're going to stop losing. The pendulum has swung so far in the favor of these decisions at the district court level, which is fairly insignificant. It's fairly insignificant except in our world in our world it is very significant but in the real practical reality is they're going to have to change because they're losing losers and losers have to learn from losing and become winners so here they're going to start doing things a little bit differently i don't agree with scott where they're going to i oh they always take low-hanging fruit so that's not going to change but really that's what i yeah sorry if i wasn't clear i was saying they're going to continue taking that low-hanging fruit because it's so easy

exactly but like who else is the big fish that they can go after from an exchange perspective tether i don't i'm not saying i'm not a tether futter but but a lot of people would say that tether would be the next huge entity they would go after. I don't see it. I would have bet my life they were going to go after tether five years ago, but I could tell you that all of my whistleblowers that I filed in 2014 and 2015

have all expired. It is ridiculous to me that none of those ever happened, none of the ICO whistleblowers ever. So I am shocked. But I mean, between New York investigating Tether and everything that happened, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're legitimate. Maybe they won't fall into yesterday's crypto heroes, tomorrow crypto felons.

I do think it's important to note, though, that all of these companies, everyone I have sued. And look, I don't think there's any lawyer in the space who has sued more crypto exchanges than I have and lost more times than I have. It's incredibly hard for me to find culpable people to help people who have been scammed in crypto. And my dad, when he wants to make me feel better, always does that Babe Ruth quote that everyone talks about Babe Ruth 714 home runs. No one talks the fact that he struck out like 2000 times. So I compare it to tobacco litigation. Look, I lose a lot, but we've changed the focus. We're going after people.

And I do believe the SEC, whether it's Gensler or not, is going to continue this path. They're going to get better. They're going to stop doing some of the broad stuff. I mean the ETF applications. They're going to have to give real reasons now. But this isn't going away. I think that's why I fall back on. The election next year

really matters. We should get Nikado and do a sorry go ahead Scott. I was going to say we should get Nikado. I'm just going to rename David Babe Silver. We're going to get Nikado and do a uh sorry go ahead scott i was gonna say we should get i'm just gonna rename david babe silver so we're gonna get nikata and do a space on tether um i think it's worth a discussion and maybe when there's some news or fight again around tether um and the town hall account the red logo is back up on stage so make sure everyone in the audience just do me one small favor do us one small favor go on uh go on your phone check the panel you'll see a red logo that Ran thinks is good-looking.

I think it's not good-looking. Follow that account because we'll be hosting the show from that Twitter page. We also post a lot of breaking news. So if you want to follow one page, follow that red logo and unfollow David Silver. So I appreciate it, everyone. Really, thanks for another great show. David, David, David. It's good to have you,id scott any any final words man

yeah i think we're good cool appreciate it everyone see you tomorrow everyone bye everyone thanks