The Wolf Of All Streets - CPI Data | BlackRock XRP ETF Fake | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

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No, man. If you told me, Mario, there's another fake news that's going to be the talk of the day, I wouldn't believe you. This is really what you sent me? Not my idea. You should be ashamed of yourself. You should be ashamed of yourself for not knowing that there was a fake XRP ETF application. I missed it completely yesterday, to be honest, and then just made a bunch of

stupid jokes and moved on. I think we should just admit the truth. So guys, we didn't have a topic for today, so me, Ryan, and Scott were thinking yesterday what to do to be able to have something to talk about. And then Scott was like, guys, the ETF thing works. Let's do it again.

And here we are. That was me. so but literally somebody apparently actually filed it with a fake name to make it look like BlackRock so it's on the website I'm just looking how much it popped it popped pumped uh from 65 to 74 what percent 65 to 75 you know like 15 ish 17 18 percent something math you know and right what do you mean so you said it's on the website so it's actually what do you mean it's on the website which website apparently it was registered to you know the black rocks the the track they've taken is you registered in delaware and then like after that people found out that they've actually

filed and then you go through the whole process so it's registered on apparently to my understanding i didn't dig in too deep because it's so stupid but uh it's registered on the delaware site and like as the register named somebody basically faked it to say black rock just reported a fake story apparently anyone on the panel here can correct me because I didn't dig too deep, but apparently it was actually registered in Delaware. Did any of the big publications report it as news or no? I saw it going. Apparently, it went wildly around Twitter, but I didn't see, or X, excuse me,

but I didn't see if it was actually published on any of the main news sources. Yeah, but Bankless mentioned it. Bankless? I think a lot of the bigger influencer names and stuff retweeted it and shared it because, you know, that's got to be

first. Don't have to be right. It's got to be first. Yeah, I'm just checking if coin so coin telegraph did not report it um that would make your story a bit more more fun curious uh scott and uh mario thanks for having me up here today guys in regards to the etf or the xrp what in regards to the protocols to get to that point i believe there is even notaries required to get to that to that part of the process is so what's the likelihood yeah i don't know how they pulled this off to be quite frank to your point it seems like

you shouldn't i shouldn't just be able to go call myself blackrock and file for a etf and register an etf in delaware right exactly and but then also in regards to the volume that occurred yesterday for like as you as you guys mentioned from 65 to let's just say 75 i believe there was about 100 million in in trading volume for xrp i mean that's that's not fake so what do you think stem uh triggered that oh well that's i mean the same thing as when coin telegraph had had the drunken intern tweet that the BlackRock ETF had been approved or whatever it was. I think that people are so starved for narratives. And obviously, if the news is reported by someone they trust, they FOMO in to get ahead of it. You know, we saw Bitcoin go 28, 30, 28 in less than an hour on fake ETF news.

So, you know, extrapolate that to a less liquid asset with a passionate community, I'm assuming it's exactly what happened. But I'm also assuming whoever posted the fake ETF is the one who sold at 75 cents. Right. I mean, I don't have any evidence of that. But why would you go through that entire process if not to make money? Yeah. Also, just while we're talking if anyone

could come in from the nft community and anyone from the ordinals community and maybe someone on stage could talk on the on either but uh there's just some good developments there so we got ordinals sorry man so i know you want to talk about the fake story it's covered this there's the the ordinal yeah but was there a fake ordinal etf by any chance because there's an ordinal zt there's an ordinal nft minted um with with the name xrp etf and that pump so on november 12th the number of bitcoin ordinals inscriptions minted reached half a million setting a record high uh so came in on june so i want anyone that could talk on the the ordinals ecosystem please do come up request and anyone that could talk on the, the ordinals ecosystem, please do come up request.

And anyone that could talk about the NFT ecosystem. So there's a piece here by where is it? Coinbase puts out. I know Drew, Drew, you're an NFT guy, right? I am. Hey, I'm friends. Hey, Drew. Yeah. Can you give us a bit of a, do you mind Scott? If I jump into the NFT side of it? He's a Florida man. So we're good. So Drew, maybe it's Scott, are you good to go to the

NFT thing quickly now, or do you want to go through the... I mean, I would really like to dissect this XRP thing. So Drew, no, no, no. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, so Drew, just very briefly, I was just reading a story on Cointelegraph, and the heading is NFT sales volume upward trends continue industry executives say so so some executive says that the recent uptick in nft serves broader more profound interest so there's a recent update seems that the ecosystem sales are picking up can you tell us more what type of uptick what type of nfts is it sustainable is it trading is it some shitty ass

pump and dumps what are we seeing in the ecosystem in the last few weeks and months? We've been seeing a lot of action on the Bordeaux Bioclub. They pumped some money into it, sweeping the floor, and then we've had some other players sweeping the floor on that collection. Typically, when you see Bitcoin pump and the crypto markets go up, it kind of runs a cycle where those main coins will go up and then they'll spin off into, there will be a pump in the secondary coins and then even kind of like shit coins, ERC20s, and then you see it on 721s and NFTs. So yeah, so we're just seeing that kind of spill over into the rest of the ecosystem, which is positive overall.

You do get a lot of, you know, kind of scammy stuff when things begin to pump. And I think that's what we're seeing with this, you know, kind of fake ETF news as well. And the kind of offshoots of like, like you were mentioning, a order notes collection by the same name, you know, that type of stuff. Are you saying,

so it's just the memes that are gaining traction. It's not like, you know, utility, proper projects, gaming, et cetera. Is it just memes again?

There are a lot of memes that are getting an attraction uh there is you know long-term projects um are continuing to build uh as we're getting into a better crypto market but i still think we're early from a lot of those utility projects getting the type of momentum that they deserve uh that they should be getting during this time fair uh chris mickle anything else we'll get back to the xrp story anything else on the nft ecosystem anything else you're seeing i was just pretty curious because it's it's funny if i see on other spaces as well that a lot of the people from the nft space and i was wondering what drew's vision is on this thing that the next bull run is really all about the gaming side of things and gamify and

bringing that all up whilst and all the big events when you talk with people from the token side i don't know if i can call it that way but like people from that mainly are in crypto and not in nfts they say that rwa is like the next big thing for the bull run right real real world assets uh fractionalization of rwa so i'm just curious what do you think drew from your side and and of course the hosts here as well what do you think yeah i mean i think as new people enter the market there is a need for um for profile pictures so you'll see pfp collections pumping i think what we'll see more of in NFTs are brand new collections that pump. Some of the existing ones from the last full run.

As soon as I hear the word pump, the excitement kind of dies down. I hate that word so much. So much. It's just like exactly what I'm looking for. I use a different word. Raising price, see action. there's plenty of ways to say it but yeah i understand humans are gonna human though yeah drew it's not the wrong word because listen we can pretend that we want people to care about the serious side of it which we do

and the real world assets and tokenization and i do think those things will drive the next, uh, real adoption, but people are humans are FOMO tarps. They're going to just go absolutely fucking nuts over the next stupid picture that goes up in price because the price has gone up. Nothing's going to change. It's kind of like people say, Hey, what's going to be the big winner token of the next market, next bull market. And the answer is probably something you've never heard of yet, that somebody is going to create the next few months before the bull market, next bull market. And the answer is probably something you've never heard of yet that somebody is going to create in the next few months before the bull market. Because there's no bag holders, right?

I mean, it's simple math. And I'm not saying that's a good thing. It's certainly not. But we've heard that this cycle won't be repeated and we'll never see it like it was in the past. I just disagree. I think people love the casino and they're going to go in and most of them will get rinsed in the end. I don't think they should, but it's just going to happen the same way.

And I think that Drew's right. I think that the fact that NFTs are going up right now has literally nothing to do with interest in those NFTs. It's just the money trickling down to the riskiest end of the spectrum. But it's good to see. I'm just looking at the top 10 by sales volume. You've got some good games there those things with utility gods unchained as they've got obviously the apes are everywhere the board apes mutiny but the draft kings is there so rare is there so it's like good to see some collections with utility obviously crypto punks yeah it's

gonna get better every cycle like you know it's it's just like with with uh tokens i just think we're inevitably we talk about it all the the time, but humans expect things to happen overnight. They're really bad at understanding how long something is going to take to gain traction. But then on the flip side, they're equally, if not worse, they're equally terrible, if not worse, at understanding how fast it can go when it does get adoption and the exponential and parabolic growth. So most people come into crypto in that middle phase. They buy it and they expect something to happen overnight. And then they get impatient with time-based capitulation and they capitulate before it actually goes.

And so I think all the narratives of the past cycle will be the ones that maybe start to actually come to fruition. Yeah. Then I see something like the captains and I look at their website, just like meme land, and like, hey, we're a collection of 10,000 or 9,999 PFPs with rarity-powered traits inspired by pirates, internet memes, like, shit, it's in the top 10. Yeah, fuck, the next bull market is going to be the same as the last one.

I can't believe that's in the top 10. Of course it is. Let's get Mikkel's thoughts. Mikkel, obviously, you could tell us your thoughts on NFTs maybe, but can I go back to the XRP ETF story and the response from the community, et cetera? Because that was obviously the focus of the show. Oh, no offense, but I could care less about NFTs.

I just came up to talk about the XRP ETF news. One interesting thing I wanted to say and like i saw the reporting right from the black rock person that it was fake um i'm just kind of interested like it's still on the website which is something i'm pretty shocked about right it's like still up on that website i checked it out a couple minutes ago so i'm not saying at all it's true it's just black rock has outright said it's fake and it's not them i mean they could be lying but they had wasn't that just that one unnamed reporter like i i saw that too it's just this whole story still seems a little weird i would have assumed a named representative from black rock would have came out and put it out and also just weird that's on the website totally agree that not just any

representative mickle but a managing director of BlackRock. Is who came out and said it? Well, to the Bloomberg reporter. Okay, awesome. Right, so we have to trust that the reporter is that. You know, that Bloomberg reporter doesn't misquote someone from BlackRock if they value their job and or life. Yeah, but BlackRock exists. So BlackRock would never say something is fake if it's real just because they don't want anyone to know. It's true from credibility perspective.

It's a public filing. They wouldn't deny it. It's a public filing. Once they've made it public, they know it's going to go public, right? I mean, everybody's watching BlackRock. So it's not like they were trying to be sneaky and got caught and are denying. They're denying because it's not real. And let's be honest, guys, there's nothing against XRP. I think they have their hands full enough trying to get a Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF approved that

I just don't think we're going to start seeing them go further down the curve yet. I would bet if we get Bitcoin and Ethereum at some point, then we'll start to see index funds, like a top 10 or something like that. I'll be very surprised if anytime, even in this cycle,'ll start to see uh index funds you know like a top 10 or something like that i'll be very surprised if any time even in this cycle we start to see individual etfs for smaller uh market cap coins regardless of what they are nothing doing that well how when do you guys think uh scott mickle dave when do you guys think we could you know seriously talk about an xrp etf yeah i mean i don't want to mean i would say never, but maybe eventually, I don't know. XRP, I think you can answer, Mikkel, you know it much better than me, obviously.

But I don't know. I just, I don't see that happening unless there's major, major adoption and traction for XRP, which could happen. Mikkel? Yeah, well, I was just going to quickly say, like, based on what used to be the GBTC trust, XRP was the third most valuable trust. If you couple that with the fact that Bitcoin and Ethereum both have this sense of clarity from the SEC and they're not being a security and we'll use that broadly because they constantly

give the crypto community whiplash on their thoughts. But I mean, you have a court ruling that XRP isn't a security. So to me, it just seems like as asset managers continue to roll out these products and want to give their customers exposure, it just seems to me like the next one up in line. It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me to think that right like ripple a company that's probably gonna ipo in the near future using one of the cryptocurrencies that's been around the longest been around a lot longer than ethereum would be pretty high up on the decision to actually get this thing up and rolling also i'll put out another reason why i thought it was possible the filing was true, was that the head of BlackRock's digital asset strategy group

is actually an ex-Ripple employee. So to me, it doesn't seem so far-fetched that this thing could be right around the corner. I think probably it would make sense that the case was fully wrapped up between Ripple and the SEC before anything really happened. Where's that case? Maybe you could use this opportunity to discuss the case and where we're at. What's the latest? Yeah, I'll just answer that quick because funny enough, I remember there was all these different lawyers coming out saying that

the SEC was going to have an immediate appeal, and that's why they dropped the charges against Brad and Chris, right? It looks like the SEC won't be able to appeal this case until late 2026 based on the current schedule for remedies. Right now, the SEC and Ripple have to essentially decide, hey, for the sales that Ripple sold to institutions, right, that were deemed securities transactions, how much of a fine does Ripple have to pay for those specific sales of XRP to institutions? The SEC is coming into a massive predicament here because one, none of the XRP was sold in the United States. So the SEC doesn't have jurisdiction over those sales. But two, even

funnier is the SEC has to prove that the institutional investors were damaged because of that sale of XRP. And almost every single institutional investor who bought the XRP is actually in profit. So right now, they're just deciding, hey, what's Ripple's fine for the subset of sales to institutions. And once that's decided on, essentially, the case is closed. People are going to be screaming at the SEC is going to immediately appeal in the next three days, like they have been, but there's people have continued to be wrong. And it doesn't look like it's happening until 2026 if it ever happens because there'll probably be a completely different sec at that point with regulations that would probably prevent a trivial lawsuit like you saw uh dave go ahead oh sorry yeah three really important points on this case

and stuff but people should understand guys is dave cutting out yeah i'm coaching bad i thought yeah you know i think it's dave is exhibition back chris jump in chris while we fix dave's mic yeah i just wanted to to take a step back on that because i think you asked of course why Dave is existing back. Chris, jump in, Chris, while we fix Dave's mic. Yeah, I just wanted to take a step back on that because I think you asked, of course, why this came and if there will ever be an XRP ETF and why, of course, it was fake in the start. I think, of course, the news from last week

where XRP was, I believe, the fourth ever virtual asset to be approved by the Dubai government or the Dubai regulators officially makes a big change in this, right? It's a big win for XRP there, seeing that Dubai or UAE is such a leading example in the world or in the crypto world. I think that's actually a big reason why we saw this fake ETF, basically, and why people expect that to be an ETF, because you see XRP being improved as one of the main crypto tokens out there.

And yeah, I just wanted to add that to the conversation here. I think that makes a big difference. Can you guys hear me now? Yeah, we can. It's perfect. Okay, good. Yeah, I just, I don't know what's going on with my AirPods. Yeah, so there's three points. One, the fact that filings like this are so impactful is basically an indictment of the entire notion of our regulatory approach, where it's not a market sort of thing. It's a question of whether you're going to get this stuff done. But more important, this fake filing is literally exactly the kind of thing that market professionals expect regulators to investigate and prosecute.

As Scott said, if you could go on a website in Delaware through a shell company and file something, having bought perpetual swaps and then selling them after the pop, I mean, that is literally the textbook definition of manipulation that in other markets would be a major focus of investigators. But the third point is because the U.S. regulators have pushed most of the volume overseas and the U.S. regulators don't have access to most of the exchanges where the stuff gets traded, it's really hard for them. It literally is about as clear an example as I've ever seen as to why the notion of regulatory clarity is so goddamn important and why people should be pushing for it because people are able to make a lot of money on these things by screwing around because of what's been created by this regulatory vacuum. I'm sure Commissioner Peirce would express it better than me without profanity. But the fact is, it's really frustrating, because it's exactly the bad things that we all hate in the crypto community. And it's exactly one of the only cases where you think regulators should be doing something. So I think that is really important. As far as all the other side stuff, look, I think XRP in a world where we weren't

dealing with this nonsense, where it was clear what was the security, what isn't, how it could work, et cetera. I mean, people would be filing for XRP. They'd probably be filing for Solana. And I agree with Scott. They'd be filing for indexes because that's what investors really want is to have an index of the top large cap coins. And so I think that all of that is true. Yeah, Ray, any other thoughts on this? I've got to piggyback off of that comment, David. In regards to, you know, obviously the ETF is to track the indexes, commodities or other assets, whatever the pool is. But why would somebody want to,

and we're having this discussion with some iTrust Capital representatives last night at a meetup, and so why would somebody want to invest into the ETF when you can hop on over to Uphold.com, create an account, and invest right in the underlying asset? Well, there's two reasons. Reason one is it's going to be cheaper. With all due respect to Uphold and they're a good firm and they've been providing incredible service, the spread implied is dramatically higher than investors pay on ETFs representing just about everything. of this is HYG. So if you were an investor and you wanted to buy high yield debt before that ETF came around, you were paying multi-percent spreads. And it was very, very difficult. HYG came around and all of a sudden it went to free zero commissions and microscopic spreads. And so investors were able to invest in trade high yield debt. I think that is exactly the same thing with crypto where the average retail pays upwards of a full percent, as opposed to, you know, a couple of basis points for ETFs and

equities, or maybe it's five basis points. So it's like 95% cheaper. So that's reason one. Reason two is the ability to handle things like estate planning and whatnot. So, you know, how many people have wallets or buy on, whether it's Uphold or any other, you know, Swan Bitcoin, doesn't matter, and want to make sure that their wives or people who are less technologically capable are holding it, or if they want to put it and bring it to their own wallet, which is what most of us on the stage probably do. You have to actually make sure you can do estate planning and stuff like that.

Actually, I lied. There's three reasons. The third reason is there's literal capital trapped in brokerage accounts that are retirement accounts or other ways where the people involved, the only way they can trade it is if you can actually buy it in a brokerage account and you can buy ETFs. That's the reasons. It's no more difficult than that. Scott, another thing I wanted to ask, if you're done with the ETF story, Scott, just from a market's perspective, and I'm going to let you, Scott, you can go first on this one, we'll go to the rest of the panel. Gary, I appreciate you coming up. I just want to dig into it a bit further. We've got to see the stablecoin supply, the inflows finally kicking in.

So for the first time in a long time, stablecoin market is increasing. We have also for the first time in one and a half years, the 90-day change in stablecoin supply has just flipped positive. So how important of an indicator is that? And we're looking at the markets and whether we've reached the bottom, guys. Scott, do you want to go first on this one? i don't really have a clear answer on that to be honest because i'm not sure how much the mechanics and how stable coins are minted and redemptions uh play play into that i mean at the end of the day market cap is increasing across the crypto sphere and that's clearly bullish right and i think that any more capital that's coming in to potentially buy dry powder is good but you know i can't really

i've looked at that chart and kind of scratched my head because i don't know exactly you know what that really really means maybe someone has more perspective dave what was your stance on this one? Dave, Chris. Guys, can you hear me? Yeah, Dave hears you. Go ahead. Dave. I think he's glitching on my end. I can't hear anybody. I'm sorry. Sorry, I actually was staring at the volatility and the spread between CME Futures and SpotBitcoin when it did this last dump.

So, because we have clients who trade that spread and we have, you know, whatever. So, I didn't hear the question. I'm sorry, Mary. I was just talking about the – so, we're finally seeing net inflows when it comes to stablecoins. I remember last time we talked about this as net outflows and we're complaining how this is the same. It just shows that the same money is restocking the industry. Are we finally getting fresh money? Is that exactly – for me, it just seems like this is – Well, it's very clear.

Go ahead. Yeah, it's pretty clear that there is. I mean, look, all you have to do is look at last week. The story that caused the market to rally was an ETH ETF, yet everything rallied, right? Bitcoin rallied too at the same time, so it wasn't rotation out of Bitcoin. I mean, obviously, Solana and several other coins rallied even more. When you see money going into stable coins, the use case, the reason people are willing to put money in stable coins, earning zero interest when they could otherwise be earning 5%, because they're going to buy stuff with it. So when you see money flowing into stable coins,

it's because people are buying coins with it. I mean, it really is that simple. I don't know how else to express it. Either that or you expect that people are – the only other reason is people buying stable coins to transfer remittances out of countries with really high inflation. Right, but that's not going to be enough size. Right. Exactly. That's not going to be enough size. I just wanted to say that before a troll came out on the internet and said, well, no, there's another use for stable coins. But no, no, that's my point. That's more or less consistent. And so you wouldn't see it as a major change. So a major on where we are right now in the cycle.

We're seeing new money come in. Obviously, we've seen the market do really well. Greed is picking up. I think the fear and greed index, that's 69. And you've got the stock market doing pretty well as well. Crude oil just closed above its 200-day moving average. Your thoughts on the general sentiment for the rest of the year and next year? I mean, look,

my thoughts are pretty straightforward. You know, the stock market today is like jamming. I mean, Russell up 4% is just a huge move. That's the small cap index in the United States. When it comes to crypto, I think Bitcoin, you know, has been proving uncorrelated. Sadly, today, it's

slightly on the downside. We had a dump, but whatever, you know, this is, you know, Bitcoin and crypto climbing a wall of worry, this literally looks a lot like the consolidation before another move higher, is how it feels to me. I think that people are and when you look at alts, it depends on which kinds of alts you're looking at. But there are some very, very positive sentiment news within alts, Solana being the most obvious one. You know, Ethereum, you know, looks averse. I mean, Scott pointed it out, looks oversold against Bitcoin and the chart formation for Ethereum versus Bitcoin looks very good. I mean, from a fundamental point of view, you know, I'll let others comment on that. I mean, I think that generally speaking, it feels like the early stages of a bull market where we just had the relief rally. Remember, we're coming from, remember where we're

coming from. We had 2022 and we all know what happened and I don't want to receive the litany. We are yet to get back into the trading range that was established before all the events of 2022 unfolded. And so that one would think that a year and a half later, with a lot of the metrics on on chain, you know, tilting dramatically higher than they were last year, that we go higher. And we go back and approach all time highs in Bitcoin. And as far as altcoins go, I mean, look, I'm not calling for all time highs on altcoins that are down 90% but you know there's going to be quality there and there's going to be crap there and it's up for people to figure out which is which michael yeah i just wanted to point out something fascinating i saw the other day was that actually inflows are when it comes

to the top two stable points are really going into tether and coming out of USDC. And it was something I was pondering for a bit, right? Like what was causing that? And my initial guess or my initial speculation was that actually what we're seeing is liquidity pickup all around the world, except in the United States. I look at USDC as kind of the United States' stablecoin market. And that market is decreasing while the rest of the world is taking off. So I think what we're likely seeing is the rest of the world getting their act together and how to actually bring this asset class forward and the United States trailing. But the good news is, I think the rest of the world is actually the leading indicator here.

Yeah, I agree. I like both. So it's nothing against either. But obviously, all of the years of FUD against USDT, which may at some point have been true, I can't speak to that. But they've remained or have maintained a clean sheet the entire time, even though it's heavily regulated. And a lot of people actually want to avoid the heavy regulation of USDC. When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, USDC had had three billion dollars there whatever the

number was it didn't end up being a issue because of the backstop and such but i think that actually there was some legitimate if only temporary flood against usdc and since that day we've actually seen uh just major dominance from usdt so michael i think you're absolutely correct that listen the worldwide stable coin is tethered it always has been. That's what people are moving and they're doing it not surprisingly, I guess, at this point on Tron because it's faster and cheaper. I think that Solana will probably grab a lot of that. But I think Tether, since that day of Silicon Valley Bank, has been viewed as the, ironically, the less centralized option and has just done exceptionally well it's

captured a ton of that market share from usdc go ahead i mean scott occam's razor simplest reason though there is at least 10 and probably closer to 100x more liquidity in altcoins and even in ethereum in the usdt pairs and perpetual swaps across the major exchanges as there is the usd pairs. And people who want liquidity will therefore use USDT. I don't think you have to look very much further than that. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I

do think that, well, I'm afraid that a lot of the growth from investment from the rest of the world is fueled by what's happening in the US, right? Because I do think the whole world looks at what's happening in the u.s with this whole etf based speculation that's going on there now um and and i i'm just curious to see i feel that because everything is pumping right now it's not really new money and new people coming to the market but it's more the people that are

already here putting in more money no but no no no no hold on chris two points you made that i want to understand further so number one you said the world is watching the u.s and acting on the u.s i don't get it so when there's good news in the u.s the rest of the world pops but not the u.s there's no inflows from the u.s we're gonna and that same question also applies to mickle i don't understand we've got all the positive news that are happening in the u.s over the last few months xRP included. Yet inflows are coming in outside the US. So I just don't understand how this adds up. And the second point, Chris, you said that it's the same money. No new money is coming in.

Well, if it's the same money, we don't see the entire market pump and we don't see net inflows when it comes to stable coins. So I just want to push back on the two points. There's definitely new money. There's definitely new money. There's definitely new money. I meant it's the same people spending money. Obviously, it's new money, but it feels like the same money because it's diversifying.

I don't know. New money is... He's basically saying that the people who have been sitting on the sidelines are bringing their dry powder back into the market. Is that correct, Christian? We can't know that. Is there any indicator that kind of points to that? Because I don't know if any indicator tells you what new money is coming in. I think it's both. But yeah, I don't know. Spe indicator tells you what new money's coming in um i think it's both but uh speculation all right mickle what do you think especially on the second

point like why would inflows come in from the rest of the world it's a very good point you've made by the way but why would it come in yeah well another speaker just said it and it's like other places in the world are just getting their stuff together like dubai is putting together a comprehensive framework we see uh very positive things coming out of Europe, it just seems to me like the rest of the world is starting to push forward and actually giving institutions the ability to start stepping up in this asset class in a big way. Now, when I made that comment, right, I said that I thought it was a very interesting divergence between the two stable coins. And I was just speculating on what was creating that. Because typically, if you look at the past, right, both of these stable coins tend to see similar flows,

when liquidity comes in, you see the stable coins rise together. And then when people start exiting, you see kind of the stable coins start getting burned. I was just pointing out that for the first time in a while, there seems to be a pretty big divergence between them. And I was just speculating on, hey, what's causing this, it seems like the rest of the world is starting to push forward and adopting this technology while the United States lags behind. And I take your point, Mario, about wins in the United States, but there's no question there's still significant, significant pushback against this industry. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said it the other day. He said, despite the fact that we got a massive win for XRP not being a security, he said the U.S. environment is still make up arbitrary rules, but we're still in an environment

where there's not a lot of clarity on how traditional institutions can actually interact with this ecosystem in a compliant way. Ray? You got to unmute Ray. And Ray, I think, hold on, while you're unmuting, you're raising money, aren't you? I don't want to talk about Link2, but the reason I ask this is I ask this question a lot. It's like, what's the sentiment like on the ground when you talk to investors? Because what I'm hearing over the last couple of weeks is that we're starting to see that change when it comes to startups raising money. And the sentiment is shifting beyond just the market pumping. Oh, we're bullish, I linked you across the board.

Ask the team. Bullish as in just you're feeling bullish? Or no, you're seeing like when you talk to people, it's different. Is it different when you talk to people that were sitting on the sidelines? We're seeing new investors come to the platform. different when you talk to people that people that were sitting on the sidelines we're we're seeing new investors come to the platform we're across various demographics which is very exciting uh we are i mean even speaking in regards to link to ourselves a platform we're scaling uh we've just i'd say consistently over the past month we're seeing or registering about, I don't know, somewhere around 10,000, 15,000 new users a day.

And we just succeeded past 307 million. What were the numbers when you – last time we spoke, what were your numbers per day? And again, I'm looking at that more. I don't want to talk about it. That's a good question. Let's just say we were – I think the last time we spoke, we were somewhere around 350,000 registered users. And today we have 100,000 more. And so that was – how long ago did we speak, Mario?

Probably about a month, two months ago. Okay. So we might have had less than 300,000. But regardless, we're seeing some serious growth. One more question. Are you seeing more checks being written as well? More investments being made on the platform or no? Absolutely, because we reduced our minimum investment to $2,500.

So we're seeing a high volume of smaller transactions, but are definitely driving the needle on growth for Link2. So I believe, and just for those on the call, you know, our minimum investment at Link2 used to be 10,000. We'd reduced it to five and now we reduced it to 2,500 bucks and we're just starting to see some-

Let's go, let's go. The reason I asked you a question, Mario, okay. Yeah, you can ask me. I gonna ask you mario if you're seeing more deal flow you know that i'm i mean listen i i don't i don't pay much attention to but like uh all of a sudden my dms are full of uh most of them are probably scams but i'm seeing a lot more things obviously people either attempting to raise or people that are now willing to launch that have been holding off on things they already raised for over the past year are you seeing that yeah um yeah so so

there's two metrics that uh i don't talk to projects myself obviously because i'm sitting there talking about war the whole fucking time but the team was telling me that two things i picked up um it was a few days ago number one is a lot more people coming in to sponsor the show and i think you've seen that with your show as well so so pickup and sponsorship numbers and again that's projects wanting to market wanting to get investors a lot of interest on the finance show which indicates you know the finance audience that we do is investors so whenever we see a pickup there that means projects seeing um investor sentiment shift enough that they want to present to investors so that's metric number one metric number two is when we projects we're incubatingating, they're starting to get checks a lot quicker,

at least the discussions are moving forward. A lot of the pending discussions are starting to close. Yeah, a lot of the pending discussions are kind of closed. So these are the two metrics that are interesting. And that's why I was asking Ray these similar questions. It's not more, it's not talking about LinkedIn, but more just to, I mean, obviously his platform is a perfect indicator of the sentiment and whether investors are writing bigger checks.

Yeah. Cause they're raising themselves and then they have people who are investing in multiple things. So yeah, from both sides. Yeah. But no, we're definitely, we're definitely seeing, we definitely see, I'll be, I'll be, I'm finally speaking at an event. I think there's more excitement.

It's clear. It's all sentiment driven. And I feel like since there's positive sentiment in the market, since there's new new money coming in people are just willing to invest or willing to take a shot at actually launching in this market which they weren't for the last year and a half you know people had great ideas they raised money and they said listen we can't launch something into this market right i mean it just doesn't make any sense i think that's going to change soon for better yeah um by the way do you know about the event blockchain jungle in costa rica i forgot to ask you at the beginning of the show yeah you invited me and then i literally laughed

my ass off because we can't get you like out of your house to go to a restaurant i was like you're gonna fly into the middle of the costa rican jungle to speak at an event instead of like doing it on twitter spaces and you invited us but isn't it like this week yeah i was going away for emmy's birthday this week yeah i'm flying out i'm flying out in a few hours apparently uh fuck like very soon i had no idea sounds amazing yeah yeah i i so first you know first i usually say no to events but this one's in costa rica i've never been but look moving away the reason i want to ask you is like like i could give you an idea yeah i know i know i'd like yeah look long story i'll talk to you offline but they um the reason i mentioned is like because obviously i'll be able to give you an idea of the sentiment there um but i did speak at an event here in dubai the gaurav so when gaurav on an india sorry when gaurav advised me i always say yes

um and uh yeah so i i spoke there i think their first event they do in india and um yeah like it was it was packed um the indian market is killing it the indian market is incredible um but i think everything outside the united states is packed it's crazy it depends not all of european countries but yeah obviously asia um ray uh you were kind of shifting the discussion to your thoughts on the stable coin inflows yeah that's right i mean we're talking about old money new money and i just want people to recognize the fact that uh obviously the the creator of usd is Circle, a LinkedIn portfolio company, but their key investors are BlackRock, Fidelity Management, Sequoia Capital. go to. I had the opportunity to attend Circle Forum NYC in New York, which was held around the same time as the Ripple proper party. And Jeremy Allaire, their CEO, came out on stage

proudly and said that, well, one, he acknowledged all of the talented and decorated personnel that were in the room, may they be money transmitters, financial institutions, applications, investors, D for all the above. But it was a proud room of entrepreneurs and go-getters. But where I'm getting at is he proudly said on stage that USDC, since the inception of the coin, has processed over $12 trillion in transactions. And at the time of June, 2023, there was over 1.7 million holders of USDC. And so, I mean, this is obviously what this is still a fledgling market, but these are some big, these are big league numbers. So I believe that, you know, as we pick, pick up speed, we're going to see more from Visa. We're going to see more from BNY Mellon MasterCard come out, which are enterprise

customers of Circles USDC. So I think we're, I understand the fact that we've heard Brad Garlinghouse and everyone say that, you know, the US is behind, but I, my gut's telling me these guys are ready to go. I think we're just waiting on that flip of the switch moment, which could be regulations being passed from the Stablecoin Act or the Fit20 bill. And so I'm just there's there's things going in the house right now that I think can drive the needle in real time. And so I just. Yeah, I think they're ready to go. And right now, the ETF, if that wins and gets approved, that's just where it's going to go. Right. So I think that U.S. investors are ready to go and they'll take a Bitcoin first strategy until there's clarity on everything else. But maybe I'm wrong.

I don't know. I'm thinking if XRP is the only digital asset with clarity right now in the United States, that could be a leader. But we'll see. Dave? Yeah, I just want to be clear. I mean, I am not at all uh suggesting anything negative

about usdc actually you know we have a circle account we i think that everything you said is accurate i was just reporting on the facts on the ground which are you know we've seen close to two billion dollars of trading in tether-based pairs and very, very little trading in USDC-based pairs because the liquidity is more in the Tether-based pairs right now, particularly in derivatives. I think that when USDC derivatives take off, I think that that will be that use case. But the other use cases you mentioned are absolutely accurate. I think you're 100% right. So this is not me being a fanboy to Paolo and Tether. This is me just telling you that at CoinRoutes, look, we help people trade and our clients tend to trade the more liquid instruments. That's all.

No, 100%. And on that comment, Dave, curious, I believe I recall reading the fact that Binance removed USDC trading pairs from their platform. What do you think that had? What kind of effects or impact would that have had on those types of trading figures that you're referencing? By the way, Ray, that was before even the BUSD failure and stuff. So that was actually, you know, Binance was making a move there to convert, force convert USDC into BUSD at that point. And that was before BUSD then got on the radar regulators and got in trouble and basically died, you know, killed it with no due process. Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, I mean, the answer is that's significant, because binance has a pretty healthy market share in global derivative markets uh and so you know it's what what are we at you know in terms of perpetual

swap trading i mean on our platform this month uh big numbers and it's like it's over 40 percent of of trading uh you know it's down from where it used to be, which is, frankly, good for a variety of reasons, nothing against CZ, just more diversification is probably better for people. But yeah, it's just, it's liquidity begets liquidity. It's one of those axioms in trading that we kind of all take for granted. And it is, look, if there's an issue with Tether legally at some point, I think USDC will step in and Binance and everyone else will be forced to create USDC pairs. And I think it will be, if not seamless, it certainly wouldn't be a disaster in a long-term sense. Of course, in the short term, it would be.

So, yeah, it's really just about liquidity. That's all I'm talking about there. Gary. Thank you, Dave. Hey. I'm sorry, I was muted. Yeah, Garyary i wanted to go to you look man without talking about ens and i promise you i'm being serious without talking about ens how just as objectively as possible please for once how's the nfc ecosystem doing where is the money flowing into uh not talking about ens right correct got it yeah so uh this whole black rock and uh current market cycle is is really fun the new cycle uh comes with new narratives but the old narratives still carry through so the the old narrative for the last cycle was the coinbase

listing things would get a coin we get listed on coinbase and then the coin would blow up and what might be interesting this cycle is if the the black rock gets involved and then you know either directly uh the coin blows up or you know black rock gets the bitcoin ETF, the Ethereum ETF, and then that money cycles down with the blessings. And so with the regulators, I think people hit the nail on the head with the regulators, with the ETFs, there's a line of perfect dominoes falling down in place. And just BlackRock is perfectly positioned. I don't hear anyone talk about BlackRock, Fidelity, others investing hundreds of millions of dollars of USDC stable and directly in the circle or circle restarting their purchases in the BlackRock managed USDC reserve funds. And, you know, from the traditional banking sector, you know, there's being a lot of,

you know, concern from their perspective about the USDC reserves that may be parked at the Fed, and how BlackRock, you know, manages the majority of USDC stablecoin reserves through money market funds. And that, you know, kind of like BlackRock potentially applying for a Fed Reserve reverse repo. You know, I mean, the USDC is perfectly poised to become the dominant, you know, CBDC. You know, USDC is poised to become essentially the Fed coin of America with the backing of, you know, major trusted financial institutions like BlackRock and Fidelity and the like. And so once that happens, then that plus the regulators

gives the green light for grandma and grandpa to buy on Coinbase. And then just everything. I don't know. First, I don't know how that has to do with the NFT market. But yeah, look, it could happen. I think we're seeing centralization of the ecosystem. I just don't think that's exactly how it works.

But yeah, man, I'll ask you for once not to talk about ANS, talk about NFTs. Then we go into the BlackRock controlling crypto. But look, I do want to go to Gordon. Scott, why didn't you even talk about the CPI data today, Scott? Why didn't we? Because nobody cares anymore.

Why? Because I think uh people have fatigue from talking about uh fomc inflation cpi ppi you name it we obsess over it every week to two weeks there's some massive announcement it doesn't fundamentally change anything you get 19 fed speakers an hour telling you what they think and I think there's just a general fatigue where people don't care unless you see anything massively shocking. And I think people also understand that. I mean, it's a difficult thing to calculate. And when you look at CPI, it's not actually about what CPI does, but it's how CPI does versus the expectation of pundits who have told you what they believe CPI should do. And I think that most people just eventually have tuned out and it's become a bit

of a nothing burger. I mean, at the end of the day, right now, it seems that inflation is continuing to drop. And so we're seeing the efforts of the Fed in the past, the lagging effects of previous tightening. And we'll see what happens. We have much smarter people, Michael and Gordon here, probably to speak about this. So I'd love to just hear their perspective. Gordon. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah, so the data today clearly came in better than expected.

And I think that clearly that's having an effect on yields and as a result, having an effect on stocks. You know, I guess my overall viewpoint is that the majority of economists now think that there's going to be a soft landing. I think the majority of economists are wrong. I think that, however, given that we've crossed the key level on the S&P 500, I think that the market is looking to take us back up to the highs of the year. So that's 460, roughly 459, rather, on the SPY. And then I think that, and I think a lot of that is driven, too, by a lot of hedge funds and just funds in general. People who manage money are not looking to get in front of, quote, the freight train that is the markets right now.

So I think that, however, by mid to late December, I think people are going to start to think about Q1 earnings and how bad they're going to be. And I think that the soft landing is going to increasingly be taken off the table. And I think that then the market reverts back down. One other thing I'll note is, you know, the market today is celebrating, you know, year over year growth in CPI being lower than expected. And that suggesting that the Fed is going to cut rates, right. But the Fed has said that they're going to be longer for higher and they're not going to cut rates from 2000 to the trough of 2002. The Nasdaq fell 82 percent and the S&P 500 fell 50 percent over that entire time frame. The Fed was cutting rates and CPI inflation was declining. So you had deflation, which was setting in.

So while the market's celebrating this dynamic today, I think when the market takes a breather and thinks about what this actually means, you can see some of this actually in the Home Depot earnings today. And one of our companies reported today, Canadian Solar, was down 15 percent pre-market, I think down 7 percent now. But the earnings were horrific. But when you take a step back to think about what all this really means to company earnings, I think the reaction in the market is going to be very different. Thank you. Yeah, the yield curve normalizes and the Fed pivots and then the market crashes because the Fed only pivots when the market is starting to crash or when things are really broken, right? So that's happened every single time. You pointed out the perfect example of 2000 to 2002.

That's what happens every time. Yet somehow people think that if the Fed pivots, all of a sudden it's good news and party time for markets. I tend to agree with you. And I think that the scary consensus on the soft landing or that the Fed has mission accomplished is not a trade you necessarily generally want to be on the side of dave weren't we looking at uh dave weisberger we were looking at with mike on one

of the macro mondays on bloomberg the correlation between google searches for soft landing or no no mentions of soft landing in the mainstream media and recessions do you remember that yeah i mean i wish i had the chart but basically this is highest, like every time there's been a massive spike in mentions of soft landing by the media, it has every single time been right before a major recession and we're at the highest ever. Yeah, I mean, I just want to point out that anyone who is surprised that inflation, quote, metrics are below expectations, who forgot that they've actually undergone this year a change in how they measure inflation, isn't paying attention. They're not paying attention. But what's funny is, I'm looking

at the yield curve. I mean, the rally in the bond market is spectacular. I mean, it is huge. You're talking 20 basis point moves in the 2, 3, 5, 7, and just a shade under 20 basis points in the 10-year. These are not normal moves for the US Treasuries, the benchmark asset class of the world. You know, it's, you know, this is the second week in a row that we're seeing treasuries trading with a volatility of meme stocks. And, you know, we've gone we've gone now from, you know, whatever the percentage was 30%, like a month ago to zero percent of a rate cut, I mean, of a rate rise in December and January, and now pricing in some percentage of a rate cut in March. I mean, basically, people are just kind of throwing darts at a board. The fact is, is, you know, you and I have talked about this a zillion times, the Fed is trapped. They can't really, if they try to raise rates

anymore, if something's going to break, they know it. And we have a fiscal situation where, you know, the government has to put money in, I would encourage everyone to read Arthur Hayes's last, you know, missive, actually, most of his missives, you know, on Subst to put money in i would encourage everyone to read arthur hayes's last you know missive actually most of his missives you know on substack because he goes through all the liquidity that's being put in the market a little bit more surreptitiously but that's what you're seeing today but this rally today looks like a bear market rally it just feels like it when it's really this sharp that's generally what it is now is it is it for sure i don't know but that i'm talking about in traditional assets, not in crypto, which I think is decoupled. And actually the fact that it's somewhat down today and muted

is important on its own self. 100% agree that for anyone who believes it's correlated and benefits from these sort of moves, that Bitcoin should be massively up today on the CPI data, and it's not. Gordon? Gordon, I thought I saw you raise your hand. Yeah, go ahead. Thanks. I just wanted to highlight on the liquidity comment, maybe Mike has some views here as well. And maybe Mike, I don't know if Mike agrees or disagrees with this, but we look at liquidity in the US as Fed balance sheet plus reverse repo plus

TGA, Treasury General Account Balance. And I was on the phone with a client today and he was talking about how the Fed is doing $95 billion of QT a month. And that's really going to hurt stocks. And I just reminded him, you've got to look at all three of these things. And when you do that, since the Fed began QT, really, and since Janet Yellen has been building back up the TGA, the drawdown on the RRP, reverse repo account, has nearly offset that. So if you look at liquidity in the U.S. since the Fed began QT, or more recently, rather, it's been really flat. So the QT that the Fed is doing is being offset by either a workdown of the TGA or work down the RRP. However, you look at global liquidity and we measure that by like the 11 largest central banks in the world just add up their balance

sheets and look at the week over week change. That is thoroughly falling. So one of the questions on the mind of my client was, even if I'm right, he didn't necessarily agree with the U.S. We said, even if you're right and U.S. liquidity is flat and global liquidity is down, where is all this incremental money coming from to buy stocks? Because we don't know where that's coming from. So that's another thing that I think is a risk to this rally that it continues, i.e. you're not getting the money printing that you were before. Michael? Michael Green, you there?

I think he's having mic issues. Scott, you there? Can you hear me? I can't tell. Yeah, Michael can't hear me, Scott. Can you tell him? Yeah, can you tell him? He can't hear me.

Scott, you can take over. He can't hear me. I can hear Michael. Go ahead, Michael. Yeah, I mean, so the quick answer is, you know, I have expected inflation to retreat. Unfortunately, I think what we actually have done with the very aggressive and changeesting itself in lower prices, or more accurately, decreases in price gains. And we have a lot of imputed components, things like owner's equivalent rent that are continuing to overstate. I mean, this number is actually pretty remarkable when you consider in the core components,

but we still printed a year over year 6.8% in owner's equivalent rent, which makes up about 40% of the core, right? So it gives you some idea how weak the rest of the market of the inflation basket ultimately has to be for that to occur. The problem is, is that we've just set up incredible shortages going forward, right? We're not building the properties that have to be built. We're not building the automobiles to solve the problem. We're not building the factories to adjust the system, et cetera. We basically chose a very short-term solution to a problem that I think we probably have ended up making structural now. And, you know, in every possible way, we've tried to smooth that, right? So owner's equivalent rent itself is

actually an attempt to reduce the volatility of the data that's coming in. We just did the same thing with health insurance. A lot of the inflationary metrics that we're seeing are going to retreat simply because they're tied to things like interest rates themselves, right? So things like banking services, banking deposits, the cost of those is measured as the spread between the yield that you get on your bank savings and the three-month rate, the risk-free rate. So we're dealing with a data set that is not designed to do what we want it to do. We're trying to centrally plan an economy as compared to enforcing the rules of competition and making sure that the economy is actually functioning as it's supposed to, we're trying to manage to outputs as compared to the inputs into the system.

And I just think that the whole thing is kind of a mistake, that we're going to end up destabilizing a system that was broadly stable for a very long period of time. We destabilized it once by shutting down the world and then trying to reopen it. And now we're probably destabilizing it by causing a radical swing in real interest rates. That means that significant fractions of the economy are teetering, even as other parts of it are benefiting from a dramatic increase in income. Gordon, did you have another comment? No, thanks. Cool. Saw your hand up. Yeah, it must have another comment? No, thanks. Cool.

Saw your hand up. Yeah, it must have been from before. Mario, could you hear Michael? No, no, I can't. I heard what he said. Yeah, he couldn't hear me. But yeah, I think we've covered everything pretty well. Anything we missed, Scott?

No, I agree. And we're going to figure out tomorrow. Yeah, we'll figure it out. I think we're all traveling. We're on the move. But we'll figure it out. We'll see everyone tomorrow somehow. on the move but we'll figure it out we'll see everyone tomorrow somehow i think i'll land in time so it should be fine um but yeah otherwise uh good show i can't hear mario is mario talking yeah he can't yeah he's wrapping it up yeah michael i've just brought you down brought you

up so you can hear me say great space good to have you uh scott final words and i'm gonna end oh shit i can't end I can't end anymore. I'm no longer the host. So I just have to wait. I have to wait.