The Wolf Of All Streets - Cramer Says “Own BTC”—Is the Bear Market Here? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. Every weekday at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time here on X Spaces. As usual, getting all of our guests up to discuss the big topics of the day. Perhaps the biggest topic of the day is that we are officially in a devastating, never-ending bear market because Jim Cramer has stated, if you want to own Bitcoin, own Bitcoin. I own Bitcoin. You should own Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a great thing to have in your portfolio. Isn't it over? Isn't it over? Let's go to the panel. I would love your opinions, guys. Listen, it's a humorous topic it's the title we'll move on to more serious things we all know it's not over but jim has been an exceptional counter indicator how are you guys uh viewing this andre what do you think jim cramer the harbinger of doom death

and despair for bitcoin usually is i mean his track record record, his inverse Jim Cramer track record is really amazing, right? I think it's on par with Nancy Pelosi's calls, right? But that's a different topic, I think. I think maybe a couple of observations on the market. So I think what we've observed more recently, I mean to be honest we had relatively high correlations right between major crypto assets like bitcoin and ethereum and the s&p 500 going into this market correction i think the rolling three months correlation between both bitcoin and ethereum

and the s&p 500 was around 0.5 0.? So relatively high. And judging by the performance of Bitcoin, there was certainly some de-risking in crypto assets as well, right? But that being said, I think there are some interesting observations that are worth noting, right? First, the BTC price stabilized while Nasdaq futures continued to make new lows. I think that was yesterday during the US afternoon trading hours. So this implies that the downside, so that Bitcoin had some limited

downside, right? There was some decoupling evident already, right? Some buying, dip buying, which actually supported Bitcoin while Nasdaq futures, S&P 500 futures continue to slide, right? That's definitely worth noting. I think the second point is the crypto asset sentiment has already declined significantly, at least based on our indicator. So sentiment's already as bearish as during the last correction below 90k, right? And I think this also implies that downside risks are relatively limited already, which would increase the probability of decoupling

if US equities continue to slide today, right? Which is, I think, as of now the case, right? I think Nvidia has paired all gains in the pre-market. Maybe last point um so people often stress uh i think people often stress that correlations um are high right and between crypto assets and and equities but i mean history shows i mean short-term dips often leads um often lead to long-term surges right um long-term rallies and i think this was also demonstrated by a great study by one of my colleagues at bitwise so usually bitcoin as market theorists, right, S&P 500 declines by more than 2%, right? Bitcoin usually also declines, right?

But during recoveries, Bitcoin usually outperforms. So it's definitely always a good time to buy, right? So but taking all this together, so first signs of decoupling, sentiments already relatively bearish, and history shows it's usually a good buying opportunity. I mean, yeah, I think downside is relatively limited. That's just my take on it. Bitcoin's at 103,000 right now. I love that. Yes, we hit an all-time high of 109,350 that day.

We went all the way to 109, but closed at 102. So our highest daily close ever is effectively 106,170. Somewhere like that, depending on the chart. And we're talking about bearishness. I know we're joking with Kramer, but there was a lot of concern, obviously, this week with DeepSeek and what that can mean for tech. And we saw this sell- down to nine to seven thousand. But what's notable to me is we've had these fundamental moments where we become very temporarily correlated. Like to your point, I know that the correlations have been large generally directionally.

But like on I think it was the 13th, I think Monday, January 13th, we had that big day where, you know, Bitcoin kind of opened at 94, dropped below 90 and closed right where it opened. And yesterday we had a dip effectively, you know, from 103 down to 97.7 and still closed above 102. Right? So like these dips are being bought instantaneously in size.

And we're seeing, you know, you look at the candles, there's long down wicks every time there's a significant dip. I think every market technician will tell you that intraday recoveries, they tell you so much about support, right? And buying interest in the market. And as you said, I mean, we recovered like a couple of thousand dollars within one day, right? So these intraday recoveries,

I think they're also, they support the hypothesis that there's so much buying interest still. But I'm still worried about Jim Cramer. Gotta worry about Jim Cramer. You have to. Carlo, my official legal counsel, sir, how are you? Good morning, Scott. Yeah, look, man, if you've ever seen the movie The Bronx Tale, you know that famous character, the moosh, everything he bets on, he loses.

Moosh. Yeah, the moosh. I don't think even Cramer can mush Bitcoin. And you look at yesterday, and I have to agree with Andre, you look at yesterday where the entire NASDAQ got completely cooked on speculation about this China AI revolutionary technology that's going to drop exponentially the price of what it costs to run AI. And it killed NVIDIA's price. Bitcoin dipped.

Alts dipped. Bitcoin recovered nicely. Alts are still a little bit down. But I think we're starting to see a little bit of decoupling here, in my opinion. And I don't think we're anywhere near bear market conditions. I think this is just very typical progress. Yeah, for sure. I don't think it's fair to say, actually, maybe we're seeing evidence if we're looking

at Bitcoin and crypto as a whole, like as one market, which I do not personally. But I think Bitcoin is an entirely different asset class than the rest of crypto. But maybe, Carlo, to your point, it's fair to say that crypto and altcoins are trading more like risk assets and tech stocks and Bitcoin is not. Yeah. And what is Bitcoin dominance today? I know you cover this very closely. What is that looking like today? 55%, 59.16. Yesterday, it went as high as 59.57, but we are generally seeing a local trend up since January 16th. It's been nothing but up, basically. We know that that's going to probably break at some point, and we know what follows. So my thoughts, I'm going to stick to the script. I'm not going to pax out here. Agreed. Agreed. Dave, go ahead. Yeah. I mean, all I'll say is markets climb a wall of

worry. And I said it yesterday or two days ago, whatever. When this sort of stuff happens and you see the shakeout with a bid, that is extremely bullish. And it's really important to understand that it's hard for markets to go straight up. Straight up, you know, can happen, you know, blow off top when there's euphoria. But I don't think we're anywhere near that. And, you know, it's actually quite healthy that more of the bears come out of the woodwork. And that's where the supply is. I mean, you know, people were talking, you know, about, you know, 75 or 70,000 price points to enter back into Bitcoin from the crypto sphere. And all the TradFi folks who are just relentlessly buying are basically saying, hold my beer.

And that's what's happening. And eventually, those same people who are looking to buy at 70 will be FOMOing in past 150 to some number in this cycle. I laughed this morning. You were talking with Andrew about what will be the NGF Park, what will be the catalyst. And the catalyst is going to be the price going up. I know that sounds absolutely tautological, but it isn't. Because there are people out there who have made a lot of money having Bitcoin for many, many years who just look at it and trade it

in and out. And if you're holding it because you think it's going to be over 500,000 or a million someday, then you don't trade it. Well, that's the people who are buying today are people like that. And the people who are selling are the ones who are trying to make a quick turnaround or maybe make more money in altcoins or doing whatever they're going to do. And that's going to stop. And when that stops, supply and demand takes over. And, you know, people keep saying, where is the supply? And, you know, you can't ignore the fact that a lot, that 60% of the supply hasn't sold in a long time, right? You know, there are a lot of people sitting on major profits and people like to take profits and they like to go buy nice things. You want to buy a car, you want to buy a house, you want to, you know, do whatever. And so that's what we're churning

through. All this other stuff is noise. It really is. Because at the end of the day, all we really care about when you're investing in Bitcoin is will it reach escape velocity and eventually catch gold and go beyond it? And if the answer you believe is yes, you're going to buy. And we're seeing that bid play out in the market. The market dynamics are very structural. Every single time we start to move to the bottom of this range, there's a bid. And, you know, we all know where it's coming from and whether it's – and that's before corporations really start to en masse ape in. And that's before all the states and other small sovereign governments, you know, come in. You made a great point this morning about meta. I mean, it doesn't take much for meta to say, let's startorrent on the balance sheet. What's the price the day after that?

I was thinking about that. I know I was joking and you're alluding to the show this morning, and I made a joke basically that Zuckerberg has probably the same, almost an equivalent level of power over his company as a sailor does over MicroStrategy not quite but he can unilaterally make this decision unlike a microsoft and since he's like on his redemption arc you know like i think that what i said on the show is that you know fellating trump and elon musk uh behind closed doors but i don't know the exact quotes but you know what would make him cooler uh in the eyes of trump and and Musk and a community that despises him and make a bigger statement than him just adding a little bit of Bitcoin to the meta balance sheet. And they made the point, Andrew or Jeff, that obviously he was in his first foray. They did Libra and DM,

which eventually became Aptos when it spun out. But they tried crypto, right? They tried making stablecoin effectively for Facebook. That could happen. And those kind of catalysts, you just can't price it, as you always say, Dave. Yeah. And look, and we haven't even gotten to the obvious fact. I mean, I've been saying this forever. You know, Scott Bassett got confirmed yesterday, which is great news. Not that it was really in doubt, but still important. And Scott is not a fool. Nobody, if they're going to accumulate an asset to try to make themselves look good, talks about it until after they've at least accumulated their first tranche.

Nobody. So I don't know what's going to actually be happening, and I don't think any of us do. But were there to be the U.S. in any way accumulating Bitcoin into a strategic stockpile, absent a congressional bill getting put to Trump's desk to sign, they're not going to talk about it. There's not going to be an EO saying we're doing that. They'll do it first because they can. And everyone who says they can't, I know, Carla, you said they can't. I think you're wrong. Because I don't, I didn't see anything ever authorized for the for the Fed or the Treasury to buy MBS, you know, mortgage backed securities during the global financial crisis. They just

fucking did it. I think if they want to do something and say, hey, look how much money we made for the government. I mean, it's the most obvious trade in history. And we'll see. I mean, I never really expected anything to happen on that. And yeah, so, you know, we're still, quote, languishing just below the all-time high because people are like, oh, they're depressed that they haven't heard anything yet. Well, I never expected to hear anything unless there's real momentum for the Lummisville. And we'll see how that goes. Yeah, I think, happy to be here, guys. Interesting market conditions. I think Meta is actually a really good conversation because they just tapped all-time high on

Meta. And the irony of that is they're probably the one who stood to be disrupted the most by the DeepSeek announcement because they are competing in the open source AI model world and they got probably disrupted the most as well as chat GPT but we're not seeing a huge market reaction there we're seeing it on the actual like hardware costs so I mean I think to Dave's point he's absolutely right who Who's buying? Every time we get close to the 100,000 mark, there's clearly quiet buyers that are stepping in. There's enough infra where this stuff doesn't have to happen on chain, visibly, out in the public. There's market makers

achieving all of this. I think due to the regulatory change and migration here, I wouldn't even be surprised if Facebook reboots the Libra program and starts to look at that again, because that was obviously an administrative attack through the banking sector where the banks were warned that they would be attacked by the government very verbally if they actually went through with this. So, I mean, again, I'll kind of come back to these spaces where it's like it's all about the rails. And I think I would imagine everyone is looking at this when there is now a financial rail layer that is allowed to be able to be implemented across these social properties from X to Facebook to Instagram.

It only makes sense for global commerce, and they actually have support to implement these things. And I think when you look at that, it's probably going to be coupled, maybe not in X's case, but like with a Bitcoin strategic reserve, to your point, Scott, to win over the community as they go to implement these financial rails, because that's really important that they have the support of the community as they try to implement some kind of cryptocurrency mechanism to stimulate global commerce within their own ecosystems that, of eventually you know settle to the dollar so i mean x payments are coming right if x payments include bitcoin what does that look like yeah go ahead simon show your hand yeah i was just gonna say like um you can't underestimate we we have

already innovated everything in like so much in the bitcoin community already but we just weren't able to execute it so you know imagine when all of this um pro innovation environment comes so you know just a just an example so yesterday nvidia crashes if bitcoin continues to be you be somewhat of a different type of asset where you immediately go risk off and you go into the dollar within your brokerage account, or maybe you go stocks to Bitcoin ETF is something you do under a set circumstances, and then there's the approval ETF to in-kind redemption. And then you have a service where you're able to borrow against your Bitcoin, put it on a Bitcoin debit card. And now there's a network of stable coins that are connecting all of these different technology companies. All of that is how people have been operating outside of the financial system for a long time anyway. But now that is all going to be possible as more and more of these different types of financial products come through in a pro-regulation environment. So you're just going to be able to live completely outside of the traditional financial system from brokerage to stable coin to bitcoin to self-custody to debit card to um you know uh back you know leverage on on your bitcoin as well i'm not saying whether you should be doing any of those things but but the whole infrastructure has already been tested

we just haven't had a pro you had a pro environment to execute it at scale. Yeah, and I'm going to tell you, literally, as we were talking about payments, you sent me a tweet behind the scenes via DM. It's just above, literally announced two minutes or four minutes ago, X partners with Visa to offer direct payment solutions on the social media platform. I don't know what that means for crypto, but I mean, we were literally just talking about that. It happened. Exactly. So we were just talking about the financial rails coming to social, and this announcement drops as we're talking about it. XM Visa launched a digital wallet as a power move. Mario also posted this. This is a long awaited digital wallet system. So far, the deal allows users to link debit cards, send money instantly and transfer funds directly to bank accounts.

So, I mean, cool, but like, we're going to have remittances, there's going to be fees, it's visa. And then you also have just the rabid crypto community on X who are going to go after this when it comes to the X payments and financial solution and want to be integrated in this. It's going to be more borderless. It's going to be more competitive. Naturally, I would expect them to use traditional global rails in Visa first and foremost. It's going to help them do the test case transactions Etc um that's kind of a logical step but I would expect crypto to follow here because it's just going to be more competitive I don't imagine this is a exclusivity agreement yeah I don't think that the Visa news eliminates the chance that we get uh you know, Doge payments, which we know is all we all know is probably coming.

Right. I saw one piece of news. I want to talk, I guess, a little bit more about price action and what's kind of happening behind the scenes. I want to talk about World Liberty Financial. They bought, I believe, another 10 million dollars of Ethereum on the dip. Now, they've bought a bunch of assets. I think that people watching very closely to see what Trump does. What do people make of the fact that they've been focused on Ethereum? I mean, in my opinion, and I've been willing to go out on a limb and say this for quite a while, Ethereum is in a very key buy zone. There's maximum FUD. It's going to zero. Ethereum

Foundation, reorganization. People think those are bad things. I think those are bottom signals, personally. In my opinion, ETH-BTC ratio back to the key support on the chart from 2021, quite literally, all the way back. And insiders are obviously buying ETH here. Some saying maybe they're going to up port or duplicate Trump token or something else on the Ethereum blockchain and we need to provide liquidity. But it seems like they're heavily focused on ETH.

We have Fefe here and Followerstrap hasn't spoken at all. And you guys are kind of, you know, you look at the charts and the analysis. What do you think of ETH here? You know, very, very very very interesting to say that because i'm giving a lot of thoughts to eat to be honest with you because what if this time is different right so we're all wondering about like i knew when we talked with ren and in november you're like i'm long in eath and then no and then in december long in eath and january is like i'm not gonna long and i rather miss the trade i'm back and forth i am with you on this i i am long beneath and i and i and i do think that we're gonna bottom out what i really want to see is relative strength compared to bitcoin if we can see a higher higher in the

ebtc chart on the daily this is basically what i've been really waiting for and we got quite close to it a couple of times already but we didn't see that that v-shaped recovery that we would be expecting now also going back to the fact that you know a lot of people say that trump is buying it and i i have doubts on that i'm not even sure he's not actually no i want to be clear world liberty financial is buying it and that's the duty trust with crypto stuff right exactly exactly and also we've seen we've seen on-chain data of how these guys manage stuff that they they're trying to get orders on chain and they are being front rows i'm not even sure that they you know i don't want to i don't want to say that they're thinking like oh let's buy eve because that's the second biggest like i don't

think it's that that but but but but it's also not it has to be calculated at some point now i've seen you know baron trump launching a real estate empire i could imagine that to be tokenized through it like i could see something in the background unfolding with this thing. And that's the reason why they're loading up on ETH. But I definitely want to see relative strength compared to Bitcoin. And when we see that, I think that's when I'm really going to take a heavy ETH position. Hey, Scott. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head there talking about ETHBTC.

It's the shark to watch, right? If you're trading an asset and you're looking to capture upside, in my opinion, it makes zero sense to trade an asset that is downtrending on the BTCc pair for like over 800 days now we're almost at three years it's like two and something years that btc has just been bleeding out now i am i am not anti-ease by any stretch of the imagination i own a big eat bag that i bought in the low 1000s. I do think that it trades higher this cycle. However, lots of guys I see longing it and buying it and taking scalps on it. And I just think it makes zero sense to do that when you have another asset very similar to ETH, trades a bit cleaner than ETH called Bitcoin.

And it is capturing more upside. It has captured more upside over the last two years. And you can see that the evidence is there in the BTC chart. Now, I have been trading ETH like pretty much, you know, on and off for the last couple of years. So I have been around for the various times and it happens kind of like once every month or two, everyone on my timeline starts saying that the ETH BTC bottom is in and things look good for about, you know, five days. And then the whole move retraces. There have been like, I don't even want to count them. Uh, how many times that my

timeline is called the bottom on ETH BTC. So at this point I'm done, i'm done trying to time the bottom trying to guess where the bottom of btc is i would rather be i would rather be crazy late to that move rather than trying to guess when it's going to occur and buying an underperforming asset rather than rather than basically any other altcoin but also uh because a lot of them on the ETH pairs look, so a lot of the, let's say, altcoin on ETH pairs look very bullish. Rather than trying to guess the bottom, I think I've made this point on the show before. When you're trying to log into a downtrend, especially a high time frame, multi-week or multi-month or even multi-year downtrend, there is no point trying

to guess where the asset in question is going to bottom right wait for the market to tell you wait for the structure to break wait for the actual evidence of buy pressure uh um of buyers stepping in to happen and then you might be you might miss the first like 30 or 40 percent of the move but that's fine you're still capturing the meat of the move. Those are my thoughts on ETH. And I want to just touch on something you mentioned at the start there, which is the sentiment in the space at the moment and how it's so bad,

considering that BTC is trading above 100K. I think it's not rocket science. I think that the vast majority of crypto Twitter, of the people that we engage with on a daily basis, they either have very little exposure or no exposure to Bitcoin. What they do have a lot of exposure to is underperforming altcoins that are bleeding out against btc that have not done what those holders thought they would do this cycle um and what has become abundantly clear

um subject to change of course but thus far this cycle the tactic uh that worked in previous bull runs in 2021 and 2017 of just holding random altcoins and hoping that they would go up with the rest of the market, a rising tide lifts all ships kind of thing, is not a viable strategy in the same way it was in those previous cycles. The market has become much more PVP for alts. We obviously have, there's a supply and demand issue now. I saw some figure the other day, it's like something, there's like 36 million tokens today. There's a million tokens being created every week or something like that. We're on track for close to 100 million tokens by the end of 2025, which is just wild, wild statistics.

Compare that to previous cycles. In 2017, we had something like 3 000 tokens in 2014 we had less than 500 tokens so there is a supply and demand issue here and i think there's an increasingly fine margin this cycle between you know holding on to coins that you believe in and having conviction and having the kind of overconfidence that's just going to result in round trips. So, yeah, the sentiment question is very easily answered to me. It is a result of people who are overexposed to underperforming altcoins and guys who maybe made a bit of money last cycle, who made a bit of money in 2017, who are not making money this cycle because the paradigm has shifted. It is a more PVP market now.

The hot ball of money is rotating very, very quickly. Narratives only last days or weeks. We saw the AI agent narrative was going to be the narrative of 2025. And it seems to have lasted all of two weeks. And now those coins are all down 60%, 70%. So, I mean, yeah, just things have changed, and a lot of people are failing to adapt. And I think, yeah, a lot of, you know, you look at Bitcoin now, it's 103K or 102K. Guys don't have exposure to that coin and therefore do not care.

And that's the basic fact of it. Yeah. Dave, go ahead. Well well lots unpacked there um ethereum when it came out was the promise of the world computer and everybody literally almost every altcoin in the last few cycles was based on ethereum but if you look and compare ethereum to solana in this cycle and i'm not talking necessarily about only meme coins, but it is what it is, Solana is kicking its ass in pretty much every single way. And the fact that Ethereum moved to proof of stake got rid of its real claim of decentralization. So it's hard for

me to look at Ethereum and say, hey, it's going to outperform Solana. That doesn't mean you don't want to hold some of it. It doesn't mean, you know, whatever, you know, it'll have, it has an ETF, yada, yada. But the truth is, at some point, technology, people who invest in technology invest based on momentum and based on the shiny new toys. And, you know, NVIDIA has done extraordinarily well. But when you look at other tech investing, the one thing that people always forget about tech is tech can become obsolete and can be, you know, effectively can be surpassed. And we will see what happens with regulation and whether or not utility tokens are all going to be on Ethereum or not. But, you know, talk to programmers and find programmers who say they'd rather program in solidity than rust. If you could find one of those, that would be the first one I've ever heard of.

And as a result, you know, I look at all this and I say, well, the reason Ethereum is falling compared to Bitcoin is because Solana and to some degree things like Sui and others, I mean, are to Aptos, whatever. You can go through the whole list are effectively the piranhas eating, uh, at what Ethereum's promise would be because the metrics underneath Ethereum just aren't that great. And now that doesn't mean that it has to go down. It just means that it is less likely to perform unless the new, uh, upgrade that's coming out, I forgot when, but it's, it's in's in the spring, is significant. And I guess we'll have to see what that news does. And, you know, these sorts of fundamentals do matter. And, you know, you said it right. I mean, you know, it's been, someone said it's an 800-day downtrend against Bitcoin. But the reason is it's also even longer of a downtrend against

its competitors, you know, in the L1 space for smart contracts. And I think you can't ignore that fact. That doesn't mean that people that indexes, which are coming in crypto and people who are closet indexing and buying everything won't buy a piece of it. So it's not necessarily bad. But in terms of the kind of big performance, it needs to see something that is going to get excitement into its community. And I don't mean excitement around people like the XRP army, who I laugh about how cultish they are, but I mean excitement about, okay, here's how we're going to use it, and this is where it's going to be important.

Because if they capture a large percentage or the largest percentage of the utility token market, which I do believe is coming in the United States, then there's still significant upside there. But it really is going to depend upon that. Yeah. You know, I think we're talking about a lot of things in a Bitcoin dominance uptrend cycle for over two years that has kind of given us a perspective on the market, expecting these things to stay the way they are. Taking a step back to World Liberty Financial, when you look

at the purchases that they're making, ETH, they're also purchasing W, you know, Wrapped BTC, Aave, Athena, Link. I think TRX is more like Justin Sun lobbying these guys to be included in the mix here. But I think what you see here is a DeFi product in the making and liquidity reserves of a multitude of different Ethereum functions being acquired for something that we can't quite see yet. That's really apparent to me. And you can't ignore that even though the leading stablecoins are multi-chain as a whole, the majority of the liquidity of USDC and USDT is on Ethereum. So I think that that is the purpose of these acquisitions. And I think we're going to see something that emerges out of it that kind of

is going to look obvious in hindsight with the way that they're purchasing ETH and other things, whether ETH will actually be able to compete with these other L1s. I think there's going to be a category of its own. And then I'll just sort of wrap by saying, I think what we're seeing right now is obviously a lot of people just desperate for alt season, as others have spoken. Bitcoin dominance has sort of reestablished a trend. The question here is, is this a sort of double top that we're reaching on Bitcoin dominance? And then the market conditions change. And once they do change, I do think they'll change really quickly. I think ETH, regardless of its tech, is going to start to

perform well. And we'll see that bounce on ETH BTC. But I think the one thing I'm eyeing, and I'm actually curious about your perspective on this, Scott, and some of the other more sophisticated traders here, is just this RSI on Bitcoin on the weekly. You know, when we have dominance starting to reestablish the trend and we still have the RSI on the weekly that I'm seeing at like 70, that looks like it could use a reset. And why we're seeing sort of liquidity flow from alts as a whole as there may be some anticipation or fears around this as people want to be positioned carefully. Maybe it doesn't need that because maybe there's enough corporations, entities, countries buying quietly to grab this liquidity,

but it's something that I'm eyeing. I'm just curious. Others thoughts. Anyone specific thoughts on that? I mean, RSI on the weekly for Bitcoin tends to stay very overbought for a very long time. So only at 70, I don't think is a major concern. You tend to see it stay there for the entirety of the bull market, which is interesting. But anyone else specific thoughts on kind of the weekly chart or that idea? Also, for me, for me, I've been I Also, for me, I've been quite vocal about this. I think the dominance will not make a new high in the coming months. I think the dominance has peaked, and I do think that it is a retrace.

If you look at the formation that is happening, everybody's calling for a breakout on dominance and higher and higher. Now, obviously, I think a lot of things are dependent on the National Reserve obviously i think a lot of things are dependent on the national reserve announcement and a lot of things are dependent on trump now now bitcoin is i'm not saying it's moving as a mean plane on on on on an x tweet shield but but if you look at really how how bitcoin traded with uh trump announcements and and everything else i would definitely not be surprised that all ta goes out the window the moment trump announces a national reserve or or whatever that might be and that the same goes not only for bitcoin but also for eth as we discussed with uh with the uh with uh someone just mentioned uh with the serious efforts of the chain and whatever so for me i do think that short term i think everybody

is looking for a catalyst on why we're dumbed and and that're dumbed because of deep seek. And it is most likely. And there is a decoupling. But if we look at alts, alts are literally like they're dead. So if you really look at most of the alt charts, and I'm not even talking about just the AI agents that, you know, being the biggest thing just 30 days ago. I'm looking at major, major protocols being down 60%, 70%. That's insane. So that means that at some point, we are going to get a rally. But I do think that the believed alt season that people say, so people look at the dominance

and they say, once dominance starts breaking down, we get an alt season because this happened last two cycles. And obviously, if the dominance of Bitcoin coming down, the dominance of altcoins needs to go up. But if you look at Mindshare, for example, it's clear that the Mindshare is not equally divided among DeFi tokens and AI tokens and memes. And there's always a narrative that is leading. And this is exactly what we see here as well. So we see AI dominating now, but you don't know if there will be a shift in something. For example, a very good example could be, again, Barron Trump launches a real estate empire and it launches on

whatever, ETH and the whole DeFi summer rise. And everybody will talk about DeFi. No one will care about AI. So I think it's not going to be an old season that we've seen in 2017 and 2021 where you close your eyes, you throw darts, and next morning you wake up and you made 50%. I don't think that's happening. I think it's going to be a rotation market. And Jordy Alexander said very nicely that 2025, and I agree with him, will be the hell for investors and traders' paradise. And I think that's very much it.

Thanks for that, Fef. We do have a sponsor today. It's Primex and Vlad. I know we're joined by you as well. So thanks for coming today. But before we get started with that, I just want to put out a bit of a disclaimer. So Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing. Sponsors on this show are sponsors working directly with IBC and not necessarily Crypto Town Hall, Scott, or myself specifically. And IBC is also hiring for writers, journalists, and moderators.

So if you're looking to join a great team or your project, wanting to work with Mario or IBC, just DM the Crypto Town Hall account up there and somebody on Mario's team will get in touch with you. So Vlad, why don't you kick us off just with a primer of exactly what Primex is. Hello, guys. Yeah, great to be here. My name is... Everyone, Mitri is also here, yeah actually yeah yeah two of us are here uh yeah and actual primax is a protocol where you can amplify your earnings in d5 uh you can either trade with leverage on spot taxes uh mm based ones like uniswap balancer curve uh or you can farm yield as leverage pretty high uh leverage for uh low risk assets uh such as LRTs, LSTs, and so on.

So that's what Primax is still about. And how does Primax differ from some of the other leverage farming or trading protocols in the market right now? Yeah, so the difference, I would compare Primix to other lending protocols. And the goal for us was to achieve under-collateralization, meaning that you can borrow more value than you look when you are using a lending protocol. And that's what we do, essentially. So we provide the possibility to use that lender liquidity that we have in the protocol to access different kinds of assets on chain. And one of the, I would say, the competitive advantages is that we can enable

leverage and limit orders for those tokens that are not traded on centralized exchanges at all. So that's a unique value proposition. And this way, you can also trade meme coins or even AI agents that are not yet even listed anywhere else. Yeah, so that's the key difference. There is not so many leveraged protocols in the space yet. So yeah, the competition is not that

high. But yeah, there are definitely some landing protocols in the space already. So in terms of... In other words, it's a modular protocol that allows us to integrate a lot of other DeFi protocols that we are amplifying with leverage, including leverage trading,

leverage farming. Yeah, that's the idea. So in terms of the lending aspect, I mean, Aave, of course, comes to mind. And I assume that the key differentiation from that product is the undercollateralization? Yeah, that's right. Because the way how we use the liquidity provided by lenders is that it allows us to enter specific, let's say, white-listed strategies, either trading pairs or farming strategies,

and this liquidity never goes directly to the wallet of the borrower, so we don't need to over-collateralize it. Additionally, we have automation thanks to the network of keepers who are involved in such actions like stop loss, take profit, other conditional orders, and liquidations as well. Yeah, this is the difference. So I know WorldLibertyFi was talked about earlier on the show. How has that changed for you guys to see WorldLiberty a product like Aave or using other other DeFi products?

How have things changed for you guys since that news broke or those actions rather? Not much yet, but we actually anticipate some. Yeah, we see it as a really, I mean, this year, this is a bullish momentum, I would say, for DeFi in general. So we actually are pretty optimistic about the Ethereum ecosystem. I mean, all the else is. And we think that there will be more on-chain action in the next few months. So, yeah, that's a broad answer, but we are pretty optimistic, actually. Yeah, being an evm uh protocol yeah i

mean it's hard not to be optimistic when when you see the the president i mean i know that we were corrected earlier on the space that it's not necessarily trump that's making these plays and it's world liberty fi which are his folks that he trusts to make crypto actions but it has to be a really promising indicator for you guys i have another specific question just about the under-collateralized lending. Does that add more risk to the user? Actually not, because the protocol is separating the risk of the trader and it's not propagated to the lender. So if we compare this type of risks to, for example,

the risk of an LP in a PERP protocol, there it's a zero-sum game, and all the profit that is generated by a trader is automatically a loss for the LP pool and for liquidity providers. In our case, it's different. Lenders provide liquidity in a passive way. And the trade happens when the position or portfolio is open or closed or rebalanced. The trade happens against the whole sport market where we wrote uh this uh these changes the this uh this trades and

uh yeah um in in in this uh in this implementation the profit that the trader can get or a loss uh is exchanged with the whole market yeah uh if we can compare it in such a way so uh of course while keepers are working correctly and are liquidating a position that is entering a potentially risky level uh this risk isn't uh affecting lenders yeah and the uh i mean that first off that was a great answer. But I know that you guys have some of the highest APYs, like in terms of a protocol, especially an EVM protocol. What's underlying those APYs? Like how do you sustain those rates?

So it's, yeah, it's made available thanks to our architecture. We did have pretty high leverage for, for example, eSPECT tokens like LSTs, LRTs, and we also have pretty high leverage for yield-bearing stablecoins. And this APY is a result of that high leverage multiplied by the base APY of that specific asset. So if you look at the market, for example, there is a few great, yeah, many great opportunities. And those assets by E-Cina, for example, are among the most popular ones. We have pretty good leverage for those. You could actually access this leverage for basically yeah you can open a position with

leverage and long has seen us stable coin for example and that's how the api is achieved yeah yeah like also to add here that uh the way how it's achieved is um uh the maintenance margin that is needed to in a lot of other protocols to incentivize a potential liquidation because the role that is liquidating normally takes the position with a discount and this is something that is making the value at the liquidation moment of a position still quite high. In our implementation, we are incentivizing keepers because we are compensating their gas fee plus some small interest on top.

So this is something that allows us to make much smaller levels of value in a position. And this is the leverage that is increased. This is the reason why the leverage is high and it's multiplied by the original APR of, for example, an LST or LRT yeah this is the the total interest that such a leverage farmer can get so and another one of the features that that's highlighted in your docs is uh unlimited trading pairs including meme coins and of course what's really hot right now is is ai agents why is this important for you guys to have those unlimited trading pairs? And how does that kind of set you guys apart from other SEXs or DEXs and things like that? Yeah, definitely.

So for some protocols like PERPS, DEXs, or simple exchanges, sometimes it's more difficult to add a new asset that does not have any you know previous uh trading history for us it is possible to provide to add leverage for assets that have at least 100k of liquidity on an uh in a desk pool and also provides uh all these uh features like stock plastic profits and position management which is pretty cool so for us i mean it's one of the advantages because we have more flexibility being a DeFi protocol compared to fully centralized or semi-centralized, if you can call them that way, platforms. So that's something that we can offer as a protocol. And we also have pretty convenient interfaces to trade these tokens on a few chains. Yeah. Yeah, the idea is that there are great new tokens that represent innovative projects,

and markets should not be exclusive just to the big players. This is our mission to allow all the long tail of assets get access to advanced trading capabilities. And in our implementation it's much easier to list such an asset because the risk of

even a potential manipulation of its price doesn't directly generate a risk and a loss for an LP. Because our lender is just passively providing liquidity. So the profit that is generated by a trader in this case is the loss of the whole market across the sport DEXs where such a trade is routed. Did you guys also want to touch on the AI-powered DeFi agent that you're building?

That's something that I'm pretty obsessed with right now is agents, especially just with the launch of Operator last week. I feel like the general public is starting to really understand what these are, which is exciting. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Dimitri? Yeah, I think I just wanted to say understand what these are, which is exciting. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Dimitri? Yeah, I think I just wanted to say that, you know, AI agents,

in our case, AI, I would say, simplifies the way how people interact with the protocol because in our version two, it will be possible to enter a portfolio that consists of multiple different positions with AI helping to build this portfolio, if that makes sense. So you can basically use a ChatGPT-like interface to open a new portfolio consisting of multiple different positions, and you can hedge that way within that portfolio.

So that's pretty exciting. And it sounds pretty basic. There are two directions that we are working on related to AI. The first one is a significant improvement of the user experience that just simplifies the way how the interaction between the app can happen using prompts. And in the end of such a communication Transaction is created

This is also quite interesting, of course because it allows us to both trade or entering a farming position or selecting some Opportunity with some values for stop-loss and the profit in in other settings but another direction is not about the communication between there but with the real automation and intelligence uh like rebalancing uh portfolio to um try to improve for the p l and yeah it's something where we have some small but still valid improvements in our backtests, comparing a similar portfolio without rebalancing, and the one that is constantly readjusting the proportion of the assets, following some algorithms. None of them are really machine learning based. Some of

them use some deterministic but still efficient statistical algorithms. But yeah, it's something that we are planning to introduce in the next version that is about automation. And PrimeX has a token that's launching soon. Do you want to go into that a little bit, talk about some of the utilities and benefits of the token, how it's used? Yeah, definitely. It will be possible to pay fees in the token, which is pretty basic. The token is it also it can be staked because we have some protocol, some protocol fees that are aggregated to our treasury and we have staking for users. It is also part of our incentivization for keepers because the keepers are partially paid with these PMX tokens on top of the position, if you can call it that way. So, yeah, it has quite a few utilities.

It's also part of our rewards program, of course, because we just concluded our mainnet beta stage and we are attracting new lenders and traders to try the protocol and participate in it. So we have a few programs going on now. Yeah, so quite a few. Yeah, there is staking now starting from the day one after TGE

that is backed by protocol revenue. And yeah, different utilities in the app itself, like tiers for all the roles. Yeah, the token has value because it compensates different activities in the roles. The token has value because it compensates different activities in the app. So is there a concrete

TGE date that we could let the listeners know about right now? Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Okay, so the listing is 31 of January on Gate and Max and at Dexpool in the base network, Unim3. So three markets for now, but more to come.

And we have an ongoing sale now for the early participation on our website, directly in the app. And that's somebody that anyone can participate, even if they're listening in and maybe want to do their own research? Yeah, of course. But please do your own research. Definitely. There is a lot of information about the protocol, all the security audits, also legal information about the token. So all is on our website. Sounds good. And for anybody who is listening in, if you click the Primex official account there, it's Primex underscore official. It's got the beautiful logo here up in the speaker spot. Their website is linked in their bio. So it's Primex.finance is the official website. Make sure that people are not navigating to any scam sites or anything like

that. Just want to make sure that listeners tuning in are safe. And so, guys, Vlad, as we're wrapping up here just at the top of the hour, for new users, what's the best way for them to get started with Primax? Are there any incentives or like a big reason for them to get involved right now?

Yeah, there are. Okay, go on. Yeah, thanks, Vlad. So, yeah, we have a few programs going on. We have, it's called Primix Rewards Program. You can participate as a lender, trader, or yield farmer. And you can earn either points or you can participate as a lender

for even more lucrative rewards. So yeah, we also have a referral program fully on-chain. So yeah, you can check it out. We have quite a few programs, and I think they'll be running for a couple months from now. Excellent. Well, I commend you guys for what you've been able to accomplish thus far.

I know you and myself during the call have been tinkering around on the website and seeing how I might use the product. So definitely going to learn and read some more. But appreciate you guys both joining the show. And if anyone's tuning in, make sure that you give Vlad a follow. He's the co-founder and CEO of Primex. He's up here in a speaker spot as well.

And the Primex official account as well as Primex underscore official also up in a speaker spot as well. And the PrimeX official account as well as PrimeX underscore official, also up into a speaker slot. So Vlad or PrimeX, any final words for the audience? Thank you. Thanks, everyone. It's great to be here. Thank you for having us.

Excellent. Well, thanks, guys, for joining. Commend you guys for the success you've had thus far. And good luck with the TGE at the end of the month here, just a few short days away. So with that, I hope all the listeners tuning in have a wonderful Tuesday. Make sure that you check the pin posts, advertising some job opportunities. Or if you want to do an AMA just like this one, just DM that Crypto Town Hall account and give Primax a follow.

So thanks, everyone, for joining and have a great Tuesday. Thank you. Bye.