The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto All Time Highs! w/ @RaoulGMI | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

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We're going to kick off the show shortly. We've got Raoul Paul joining us in a bit. Juan, how are you, sir? Hey, Mario. Juan, how are you, Juan? I'm doing great, thank you. Look, you're one of the few voices of reason. You remind me of Gareth Soloway, one of our regular speakers. We've got Raoul here. Raoul, you're not late.

I was impressed. I thought we'd have a few minutes to kind of roll up the stage but you're here early um one night before we kick it off to kick off discussion with ralph powell um wanted to get like the etf numbers from your end one because they we've just broken new records again um which is just insanity now and i want to also applaud you and everyone a bit wise for coming on the space pretty much daily since prior to the ETF launch, updating the audience. So well done, guys. Really grateful for that. But maybe a quick update on the numbers one and we figure out the glitch with Raoul Pal. He's just dropped, so we'll bring him back up. Yeah, well, thank you for always welcoming us from Bitwise. We love participating. Yeah, it's as you said, it's insanity. Yesterday was another record breaking day with 12x more demands for Bitcoin than what the network produced. Bitcoin ETFs breaking their daily record with 673 million of inflows. Total inflows since launch are now at over $7 billion. Derivatives are also booming with Deribit seeing total notional options open entrance

hit all-time highs of $26 billion. And then we have other developments outside of that. As we've been talking about, this is the initial wave of demand, but as more national account platforms, wire houses go through their approval process, then we'll get more allocations. And the latest news on that is Morgan Stanley announcing that they're looking to approve

Bitcoin ETFs for its brokerage platform. That's massive. And that's one of many that are looking at that. We're talking to many of the largest platforms for onboarding them. And even outside of that, the other thing I was realizing today is that every American with money in the U.S. stock market is going to have an allocation soon. And that's whether it's through their money managers allocating to the ETFs or through something like Coinbase or MicroStrategy being added to the S&P 500.

And at that point, everyone will have an allocation. That's 58% of Americans or more than 190 million people that will end up with allocations to Bitcoin. I appreciate that update. I appreciate it, Juan. And it is craziness. I remember yesterday we did the morning space and then we did the crypto town hall. And then I was going to finally take my daily break and clear my messages. And then Kyle messaged me, Mario, Bitcoin is at 62K. I'm like, okay, that's ridiculous.

Now, 61K. So Kyle, should I say, from Master Ventures, I'm like, holy shit. I start messaging my team, and then 62K, we were doing a space on security and crypto. And I jump in with my account to kind of change the title and talk about the markets. And I think I called it like, what the fuck is going on? And then as I'm changing the title, it goes up to 63K and a 64K and then just plummets down to 59. So it's just been insane since yesterday. And obviously, the ETF inflow is playing a big role in this. Mr. Powell, how are you, sir? Very good, my friend. How are you?

Good. It's nice to speak to you again under different circumstances. The last time we had you on stage, it was a bloodbath and telling everyone to be patient and it's early. I think now it's a very different environment, but the narrative is the same. We're still early. And I would love to get your thoughts on the speed in which the market has not only recovered, but getting close to all-time highs. Yeah. I mean, look, I based my whole analysis of this space on both the adoption effects over time, which has been growing massively. There's 516 million active wallets now in the space. And that's been growing even in the bear market, it grew at 42%. So the space is still growing, but obviously price goes up and down,

that's driven by liquidity. So that's a macro factor that drives that. And liquidity bottomed in 2022. And I started getting bullish from that moment. And last year was a lot of year of disbelief for most people. But I just stuck with the framework of liquidity is rising. This is a forward-looking asset. So it's in advance of the business cycle. And we were in crypto spring last year. And we're now at that moment where we're transitioning towards crypto summer when things kind of go bananas, I call it the banana zone. And we start to see that sort of price action. Obviously, last year was very good, but already, you know, Bitcoin is up 50% as is ETH this year. And this is just the start. I mean, if you remember, the crypto cycles

tend to be year one, which was last year, tends to be a good year. It's the best performing asset in the world. Year two tends to be ridiculous. So that's the kind of 200 to 500% rises in the major assets, sometimes more. And then you've got year three, which tends to be the crypto fall or autumn. And that period, you tend to see again, further price rises. Some of them are blow off finishes. like the last cycle, tend to be shorter and stunted. But overall, it just compounds the growth of the space. So we're now in the best point of the cycle. This is the bit where you don't fuck it up. You just hold on to what you've got. Don't overtrade. Don't use leverage. Don't get caught out in the FOMO. And just be patient. Do you think something we were discussing in the last show yesterday is that we're already in the price discovery stage. So, Ryan, who just got on stage, Ryan, you said once we close, I think it was you or Dave,

you said that once we break all-time highs, we'll be at price discovery. No, Dave is the one that said no, anything above 60K is price discovery because we haven't spent much time at those levels. And I've got some numbers here. We spent between 60 and 62K, we spent 21 days, less than a month. 62 to 64K, 10 days. 64K to 66K, which we broke yesterday, broke 64K yesterday, or barely broke 64K, I think, seven days a week. And if you add 66 to 68, two days. So above 64K, we spent nine days. Above 62K, where we are today, we spent 19 days. So is it fair to say, based on the volatility, based on how close we are to all-time highs,

and the small number of days we've spent in those ranges, are we at price discovery now? Well, I think you saw it by yesterday's Coinbase breaking you know they said that they got their system to deal with 10x increase in volumes and it was above that so it feels like you know people have been saying where's retail it feels like that started happening yesterday because of the factors that you talk about i mean what's really going on is this etf has created this reflexive cycle where all of these big firms, Bitwise, Fidelity, BlackRock, pre-fill order books. They pre-filled the order books for a successful launch of the ETF. That drives Bitcoin higher, even though people have been front running that anyway. It drives Bitcoin higher. That brings in the RAAs who look

at it and say, oh my God, Bitcoin's going up. So they buy more. That makes the number go up. That brings in the RAAs again, because, oh my God, I need to do this. And you end up with this reflexive loop that can go on for a while. And the next phase of that is obviously the ETH ETF. So there'll be two games that the RAAs can play in this kind of reflexive cycle. And we haven't had this before. So yes, we've had the reflective cycle of retail, but now we're unlocking the $8 trillion RAA market in the United States. It's a whole different game. And we've got one here from Bitwise. We've talked about this at length. And at one point, you guys have made a Bitwise with your research paper that we've got one here from Bitwise. One, we've talked about this at length. And one point you guys have made at Bitwise with your research paper that we've all referenced is that we're still very early.

Like, Raoul, you touched on retail finally entering the market yesterday. And I agree with you because we had – I think it was Dave again. Dave did a lot of coverage with us yesterday on this. But, Dave, you said that institutional clients, you and Travis were talking, that they didn't have any issues on Coinbase. So Coinbase itself didn't break. It's the front end, the retail front end, the website that broke, which shows that it was retail.

And I think someone also said that KuCoin and one other exchange, I think, I can't remember what it was, Gate maybe or BitGet, it broke as well. A few exchanges were actually down last night. KuCoin was down, I think, a little bit as well. A few of the exchanges.

And I think, Mario, for anyone who's been here for more than one cycle, we actually celebrate when exchanges go down because we know that's the bull market signal. Retail is finally entering.

Exactly. So I think yesterday, and I agree with Raul, yesterday is the day that, in my opinion, and I kind of made a joke in yesterday's space, saying, you know, retail, welcome back.

Because I think that's what started. But prior to this, to get to the level, like we're almost at all-time highs, Raoul. And it was led by institutions. It was led by the ETFs, which, according to Juan and their research paper, they're still in the very early stages, despite the records being broken and having another record-breaking day in terms of volumes. So, Raoul, and I'll go to Juan, I see his hand up, but Raoul, what's next? What type of numbers could we expect to hit? Could we hit all-time highs prior to the halving? And then what happens next?

Yes, look, I think we are going to. I mean, the halving normally, sometimes it's hit all-time highs before the halving, sometimes afterwards. So, you know, it's not something that's written in stone and it's driven by the macro cycle. And then we've got this new inflow. So I don't see any reason for it to stop for the time being. I mean, we're seeing the same thing. Now there are some month-end effects as people are adding it into their portfolios for month-end. So we have to get used to how these kind of asset allocators do allocate assets. It's somewhat different than retail who tend to be, you know, they'll trade

on the weekend, they'll trade in the middle of the night. These guys tend to be driven by month ends. So here we are in month ends. So we've seen this huge run up. And again, don't confuse this with institutions. It's not actually a lot of institutions playing this. It's the investment advisors in the United States for their customers. The institutions themselves have not been that active yet. We will see more of that over time. But really, you have to be a brave portfolio manager to add this to your portfolio because you need to get investment committee approval, all sorts of stuff. I mean, some of them who are brave will just try and lie to their risk committee and just say, well, I've just bought an ETF. It's just an equity.

But, you know, it's actually quite difficult to do. So it is retail, but the retail of the equity market, which is a whole different crowd. And Juan, maybe you can give us a bit of an update on the appetite when it comes to the advisors. And how do you compare the interest now to what you expected from your research paper prior to the ETF's launch? And are we starting to see some sort of, I know it's very early, but could we start seeing advisors start to form a win like the rest of the retail market? Yeah, no, what Raul says is exactly right. It's right now still the RIAs, the advisors that are allocating. It's not even the institutional investors yet. Before we launched, before the ETFs launched in our last survey that was done in November,

only 11% of advisors said they were allocating to client accounts. 11%. And now that number is going up, but I can't imagine we're even at 20% yet. Even if we are, there's so much more ahead of us. And to your point or to your question about how we're seeing the interest pick up, this cycle, since the ETFs launched in the last couple of weeks,

it's the first time that we're getting unsolicited, unsolicited solicitations for the approval of our ETF on national platforms. Normally, how it's always been is we have our people from national accounts distribution go out and solicit meetings, solicit, talk to the investment committees, the compliance departments in order to get approval. Now we're getting unsolicited requests to get approvals for our ETF and the others as well. So it's really changed. The game has changed completely. And Raoul, the next question I have for you is, what are your expectations when it comes to the ETH ETF? We've had conflicting

opinions on stage over the last few days and weeks as we're covering this. Is that going to be the next narrative? Is that going to lead to an ETH and an L2 narrative? Yeah, I think that's, to me, that seems to be the case. It seems that, you know, the people I speak to think that the ETH ETF will get approved. And those are the people who are putting the applications in. So now whether it gets delayed or not, let's assume it will do. But at some point that comes in. And that means that firstly, the kind of fast money, the traders will start front running that once they start to assess probabilities.

And we're starting to see ETH outperforming now. That should continue as we get more clarity around the dates. You know, May, I think is the first date. Now, it'll get delayed, but if it gets delayed and not rejected and we're hearing the right talk from within the SEC, then I think we'll just see more and more money piling into it. And that will just push up, obviously, the price of ETH until we get the ETF. And ETH will just have a different narrative to Bitcoin. One feels like a tech platform, the other feels like pristine collateral. They're two different things. So

I think they will both gain traction over time. I mean, obviously, the ETH futures ETF didn't really work, But I think people are just waiting for this one to come as well. And then that means people can hold two different assets in their portfolio. I think we'll just see more and more people coming into the space. And overall, as people understand the breadth and depth of this space, it'll spill into the altcoin market overall, whether that's the layer twos, the other layer ones, or some of the application layers like deep in stuff like that. I think it just brings people in. You know, I think of this whole ETF really as a Trojan horse. You know, the SEC might think

it's great that they've got it within their kind of remit. But I think of it as, you know, we've got this now huge path to bring people into crypto land. So this is more like a free trade deal we've set up between Fiat World and crypto land. And now the normies, as you'd like to say, can flow through their money into this space. And over time, they'll end up setting up wallets or opening a Coinbase account because they want access to the broader space. So overall, it's going to bring more and more liquidity into the space. So I'll be asking you more about you're kind of rotating into altcoins, talking about Solana and the rest of the ecosystem. But before that, is it possible to play devil's advocate? Is there any possibility that we don't

even reach all-time highs this year, even though we're about to close? Bitcoin, I have put out a tweet that, Ryan, you covered on your show, is that we will have, we're about to close. Bitcoin, I have put out a tweet that, Ryan, you covered on your show, is that we will have, we're about to close the biggest dollar gain on a monthly candle in history. And it's about 20K for this month. So it kind of gives you an idea of the size of the spike over the last few weeks relative to others. I think 20K for this time around, the second largest one was back in 2020, September 2021 at 17.5K, early 2021 at 13.5K,

and late 2020 at 12K. It's comparing now to 20K. But Raoul, is there any possibility that we don't reach all-time highs and what could cause a reversal? No, I don't think that is the case. I think generally there's nothing that sets us apart from any of the other cycles. Yes, we've got this different source of demand.

There's no real reason to see the liquidity cycle, the macro cycle changing anytime soon. Our forward-looking indicators suggest that this goes on well into 2025. So 2024 feels like it's a bit of a shoo-in in terms of direction. Now, how I think about it, I'm a probabilistic person. So I would say 60% chance this is a kind of regular crypto cycle. There's a 20% chance that this is left translated or a front-loaded cycle which means that the demand peters out uh in 2024 and we're kind of done early but it could still be you know a decent size rise you know multiples of the all-time high um that would might catch people off guards if people expect 2025 to continue the other the flip side of, I give an equal weighting to that this

ends up being kind of a full bubble cycle, much more like 2017. And in which case it goes on longer into the end of 2025. And a price is much higher than people expect now. I think people are quite cautious because of what happened in the last cycle, where it seemed that we were going to have the accelerated end of the cycle and it topped out and i think that caught people off guard it certainly caught me off guard not that i was going to trade around it or change my portfolio but i expected a further leg higher we didn't get it you know remember the laser eye movement if it's going to go to 100 000 never got there um so there's the 20% chance of it happening

all a bit too soon, and maybe the macro change in 2025. But again, my forward looking stuff doesn't suggest that there is the chance of a bigger bubble as the AI narrative fits with the crypto narrative fits with, let's say something happens in the banking system, there's liquidity coming or China has to try and bail out their economy, that brings more liquidity in. But really, let's just assume it's going to be a normal cycle, in which case, sometime in the second half of 2025, at prices like three to five times above the all time high, it stops. Okay, so my question was before moving to the rest of the market, and talking about, talking about other layer ones, talking about different narratives and obviously NFTs, you're still rocking your crypto punk. So I'd like to see that. The question is any targets that you have for Bitcoin and ETH if you had to speculate for this year and for the next all time high before the next correction um no i've learned it's there's no value in doing that because people people you know if you're right you never get any praise for it if you're wrong

people just go you said it was going there you said it was going there like you know we've got a crystal ball so i tend not to do that um you know the range is you know who knows if it's a short stunted cycle it goes to 150 if it's a complete banana cycle goes to 500 000 so that's a very wide range and i you know i'm not going to get in the game of trying to predict the exact level because it doesn't really matter yeah exactly i think ranges is a much better way of predicting it um so the next question i have for you is before getting into nfts and going full dgen is any specific narratives that interest you so i've talked i've been talking about gaming for way too long and i think me and you talked about gaming last time you were here um we've also had to talk about ai even though it's an area that i'm not as deep as gaming not as deep as i am in

gaming um we had portal we did the launch space for Portal earlier, which we're investors in. We did Pixels a few weeks ago. Both of them launched on Binance and had a great launch. We'd love to get your thoughts on first Web3 gaming. We had Yasu early on as well on our show. And any other narratives that are interesting to you? So, my view on this cycle is over $60 billion went into VC in the last cycle. Now, some of those won't survive, as we know, and some of them are building incredible products, including some of these new layer ones that are unlocking abilities that didn't exist with the existing technology. So, I think the probability is here that this isn't everything everywhere all at one cycle. I think we will see the further growth of Deepin. I think we'll see some huge gaming breakthroughs. That cycle takes long. So that's probably not until

2025 before we really see something there. I think we'll see different applications for NFTs. I think we will see supply chain use. You know, I only found out the other day, you know, I was at a meeting in Switzerland speaking to one of the world's largest commodity trading firms. And the girl I'm speaking to, she's an agricultural commodity trader, physical stuff. And, you know, again, for one of the largest firms in the world, I'm like, what are you guys doing with blockchain? She said, oh, we've been using it since 2021. All of the massive agricultural commodity houses use blockchain for letters of credit. They lose blockchain for all of the transactions and it's been much more efficient. What's incredible is nobody's ever mentioned this to me before. So we don't even know half

of the stuff happening. So that's part of this real world asset side that I'm for NFTs to faster, cheaper technology that will unlock stuff like the ability to have exchanges on chain. I think we'll see obviously the rise of CBDCs. That will happen in this cycle as well. We don't know what chain that's going to be built on. So there's a lot. There's a lot all going to happen. And it's going to be like this AI whiplash that we get where it's going to be hard to follow. I mean, the other one is, I mean, I feel stupid. I completely mid-curved it. I saw WorldCoin. They were in Cayman recently. And I interviewed them in a panel. And this is before WorldCoin took off. And I was talking to them, I said, listen, I think you launch really badly

with the idea of the orb and stuff. And they said, yeah, but it sticks in people's mind. I said, what's this project really about? And they said, well, really, it's about digital ID. It's like Sam Altman saw that what was going to happen with AI and knew that we had to prove we were humans. And I'm like, why the fuck didn't you give that as the narrative? Because it's so perfect. Sam Altman develops the digital ID. Now the market started to catch on to that. Digital ID is a big deal. And I've talked about this a lot in the past. We're going to go through this election and we have no understanding of how AI is going to affect all of this and people are going to lose their

minds and we're going to have to prove who we are. Now, if we don't, and I don't think we'll get there in time, my view is that the tech companies are going to get prosecuted, whether it's X, whether it's Google, whether it's Meta, they're going to get prosecuted for all of the false information that's driven by AI. And they're going to be forced. A, they'll be fined, like the banks were fined after 2008, and they'll be used as a cash machine for the treasury. But also, I think they're going to be forced to adopt a standard. Now, if there's going to be a standard, maybe it's WorldCoin.

I don't own any because I completely mid-curved it. I should have just realized the answer. So in answer, the long-winded answer to your question, everything, everywhere, all at once. Yeah, I'll throw that down. I'm going to go through the audience questions. Anyone that has questions for Raoul, you can put them in the bottom right corner in that purple bubble.

I'm going to go through some of the narratives you've talked about here, but I'm going to start with gaming, which is one I'm very bullish on. You said gaming takes longer than others. others obviously games take years to develop everyone expected gaming to blow up in the last market we invested heavily in in in-game assets in-game nfts which obviously did not materialize and they still haven't materialized um but i'm still bullish on in-game in-game assets we're invested in a whole bunch of games so i'm very bullish on the ecosystem so can you tell us a bit more how long do you think that will take for gaming for web3 gaming to really start getting traction why do you think it won't be till next year even though it started gaining traction with axi infinity and play to earn in the last bull market and maybe kind of

link it to the metaverse and the open metaverse which i know you've talked a lot about um from what i understand i'm not a real expert on gaming but seeing and talking to people there are some mega games being built um and these mega games built off existing ip franchises they just take time to build as you said so you know does something come out later this year it's possible but really i think we'll see the full force of game by 2025. If not, they're going to miss this cycle. So I think they are definitely going to materialise. And I think it's going to be kind of shocking to people how advanced these games are.

Long gone are the days of Sandbox and Decentraland, and now we're going to be living in this kind of much more immersive space. Also, you know, don't discount Yuga and what they're up to as well. So I think other side will also become something it from many, many places and from big leading franchises because they're seeing different ways of creating value by using Web3 as opposed to existing gaming technology. And I think that's going to be a big driver because once people realize that the assets have value within games, then the games builders themselves can see different revenue streams. So that itself drives a loop of more people developing games on blockchain technology, which will be, again, it'll take three years for the game to come through. So that will be the following cycle where a larger amount of gaming,

I think, goes onto blockchain. Yeah, and I expected gaming to lead this bull run, but obviously AI kind of took the limelight. And we're going to talk about AI in a bit, but there's a lot of comments here. Let me ask the team to give us the handle. Handles, please. Handles, please.

So whenever someone comments in the bottom right corner, I'll read out your handle as well. But everyone's asking about Sui. Seems we've got a lot of Sui fans in the audience. And I can link it to the two questions I have here. What are your thoughts, Soral? What are your thoughts on Sui? It is a leading blockchain with potential in this market, in this bull market. Why did you get into Sui? And where do you see it go next? So, Raoul, what are your thoughts on SUI? It is a leading blockchain with potential in this market, in this bull market.

Why did you get into SUI? And where do you see it go next? So I kind of, you could talk about SUI, but maybe link it to the broader L1 versus L2 battle, especially with the Ethereum upgrade coming in and the massive success of Solana post FTX. What are your thoughts on that? So, again, I have to be careful here because I sit on the foundation. So I'm not doing this to shill it. And people say, well, you're just shilling stuff you're involved in. I went on the journey of layer one because I wanted to understand how that whole process worked. And this is an incredibly credible group of people who have proven experience. So I'm not shilling here,

Sui because I'm in a position of being on the foundation. It's a very interesting technology. You know, I was a big fan of what the Facebook team at the time had built with the quality of what they built. And then the, the team split into two, which was the Aptos team using the same move language, and then the Sui team. Sui seems to have some breakthrough technologies in terms of both speed, cheapness, efficiency of the chain. But in addition, the object-based language allows them to do different things.

And we'll see. It's for them to prove out to the market what they can do. I mean, they've got a large TVL now, but, you know, TVL is just a small part of the story. You know, really what happens is narratives catch on very quickly, but things that survive are the things that build real projects on top of. You know, that's why Solana survived the last bear market. And, you know, we would see how these technologies are used. Because we've seen other great technologies that have just failed to get that traction too. So there's no guarantee.

So it really is about, you know, the business development teams. Do they get the right projects? Do they cover this everything, everywhere, all at once strategy? Do they find that they get breakthroughs? You know, how does it work with things like Celestia? You know, who's going to get what share of what pie? It's all to play for. You know, Avalanche looks like they're playing very heavily in the gaming space as well. So we don't really know. It's early days to know how well they do. But, you know, I'm very interested in what Sui are doing.

The quality of the people is extraordinary and how they think through the spaces is very good. And I'm sure many of the others are the same. Yeah, we've had the founder of Sui, Evan, come on the space a few times. He's been a very approachable, great guy. I don't know if we've had the Aptos team on stage previously, but I'm going to read more.

There's great questions in the audience, so well done, everyone in the audience. You've got better questions than I. The next one here is something I've asked previously, and you already touched on it, Raoul, but for anyone that missed it, a lot of people are speculating that because of how quickly the cycles is, we didn't have a pre--harving correction and the bull market started earlier and was a lot more aggressive than everyone expected so a lot of people are speculating that this cycle will be shorter than previous cycles and we could see a peak

um end of this year instead of running late into 2025 now i think you did hint earlier that no you should repeat um the same cycles the previous cycles and the reason we kind of broke the the pattern of a pre-having dump is the etfs which is the inflows from the etfs um would like to get your thoughts on the length of this cycle versus others um if it's a weird world if everybody expects it to be a short cycle, you might end up with a correction towards the end of this year and then a face-ripping rally that everybody misses out on. If everybody thinks it's going to be a long cycle, it tends to be short. You don't get it that way. So how I'm thinking this through is, listen, we don't know. So the best thing is let's assume that 2024 is a good year. The best thing for most people to do is take some off the table in 2024, take some lifestyle chips

off. And then if it does fall from that, you've protected yourself. If it does rip higher, you're going to do fine. And if it's a normal cycle, I mean, you'll do spectacular. And if it's a normal cycle, you'll do well. So it's kind of a win-win-win in that kind of environment. So again, it's part of this, don't fuck it up and don't lose your mind in the middle of this. Because who knows what the end of the year looks like and what people are calling for? Because you're already seeing some people saying, oh my God, there's not going to be ever a cycle ever again because of this money. That's not true because all assets have cycles. But you can see that people are starting to over extrapolate.

But again, there's most people I would say expect a shorter cycle and are less bullish than they would have been if we didn't have this kind of stunted cycle in 2021. So let's see. My guess it sometime in 2025 late 25 yeah i'm horrible at trading i'm horrible at making predictions um you know we just invest vc's type investment invest and just wait a few years um but whenever people ask me about the markets my answer is just so dumb but so basic is like hey everything just first history repeats itself second if everyone's saying something it just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so if that narrative of a self of a shorter cycle really gains traction maybe it's

not meant to be a shorter cycle but we made it a shorter cycle because we kept thinking it will be a shorter cycle so that could end up materializing could be as simple as that. But then how big of an impact do you think ETFs will have on this cycle as well? Because the other side of the argument is that because of the ETF inflows that will continue well until next year, we could see a longer cycle as well. Do you expect the inflows to continue hitting record highs as one and others have said on stage earlier? I do, as long as the macro backdrop remains benign. Again, my everything code forward looking analysis suggests that we'll have nothing but the upside of the business cycle. As long as something doesn't change, the forward looking liquidity indicators into 2025 look very positive. I don't see any reason for there not to be continued buying on all fronts, whether it's via the traditional crypto exchanges

or whether it's via the ETFs. But if something happens and people start to feel concerned about the future of not so much the economy, but the amount of money that they have to spend and invest. You know, we saw inflation last time, eight into people's pocketbooks, plus the tightening of liquidity by all of the central banks. If something like that happens again, well, then you'll see people not being able to put as much money into the ETFs. Now, the other thing that could affect the ETF flows is whether they start going into people's 401ks. If they do, then you get that kind of passive flow effect that we've seen in the NASDAQ and the S&P, where every two weeks, a fraction of people's paychecks just go straight into those.

And that creates a less volatile downside because there's always a structural buyer to the market and less structural sellers. So it's going to be very interesting to see, and maybe Juan knows this, is whether this is driven by those kind of 401k flows or is it just driven by more speculative RAA flows. That's going to make a real difference. If it's structural flows of people of long-term savings, I think the volatility of this whole Bitcoin market may change and it'll become less volatile. Juan, have you got any thoughts on that? What kind of flows we're seeing, whether it's going into pensions or not? Yeah, right now, it's not much of the flows are going into pensions. We do, from conversations

we're having and our expectations as well is that those kind of really large institutional players will onboard, but that'll be a little further down the line. I'm actually thinking more of the self-directed 401k stuff as opposed to the pension plans themselves. Oh, I see. Yeah, we're seeing some of those flows. We've seen some platforms onboard. And so we're starting to see some of those flows. It's still more what you said, the more speculative early adopter RIAs that we're seeing right now, and more of the RIA crowds that are really the ones having the conversations right now to approve. But we are starting to see some of those self-directed 401k flows come in as well, start to come in.

Yeah, makes sense. And first, I'll just give a shout out to Larry Wildman in the comments for asking the cycle question. We've got another two good questions I'm going to ask. I don't have much longer, so I'll try to sneak in those questions before asking mine. In terms of retail interest, so you talk about institutional interests. What metrics can we look for to gauge retail interest? We talked about the ranking of the Coinbase app,

which was at 390, I think two days ago, became like 270 yesterday. I don't know what it is today. So just shut up 100 points. And just kind of for anyone that wasn't in yesterday's space, the Coinbase app was number one on the App Store three weeks before the end of the first bull market and three weeks before the end of the second bull market. Other people like to look at Google Trends, which I think is just not a great indicator.

We had someone on stage give us some social indicators, like the mentions of Bitcoin and other terms on various social media platforms, which are still at very, very low levels. What indicators do you look for other than Coinbase crashing rather to gauge retail? Yeah. See, Coinbase going to the number one of the app stores is difficult because Coinbase got downloaded. Coinbase has 110 million accounts. So, you know, yes, there's about 10, 12 million active accounts right now. So for them to do the same again, you know, you're covering two thirds of the population in the United States. So it's unlikely to be at the top of the app store unless their global push becomes more successful.

You know, and but there a lot of that will be, you know, are they getting market share against Binance? So I think it's, you know, one of the good things is if you look at the Coinbase quarterly statements, they talk about how many active accounts they have. And looking at that number grow, you know, if it's at 10 million now, I haven't checked the latest number, but let's assume it's around 10 million. If that 10 million is at 60 million, okay, then he's starting to say, okay, there's a lot of active accounts there. So we can see that. And I think that Google Trends, underlying volumes, you know, I think you just have to look at a combination of all of these things. Social media listening, I think, is another strategy as well. Where the Bitcoin ETF lands in terms of volumes versus others, I think will be another tell. Obviously, it's huge right now and is only being beaten by a few. Let's see if that continues. And if it ends up being the largest, most actively traded ETF in the world for a significant period of time, that's going to tell you something that there is an excess amount of activity in the space.

Yeah. And just for the audience, we were talking about it earlier. The numbers are just insane. We have volume at $7.5 billion yesterday, which is I think two and a half times the last record. So we just broke the record again. IBIT isis at 612 million so just insane numbers that we see here the total inflows let's see if i have the number do you have what's it what's yesterday's inflows one yeah yesterday's flows were 670 673 million net inflows um which was the largest day on beat the day one uh flows which were the biggest what were the numbers in day one 655 oh wow that's crazy when why why do you think that was do you think there's month end effects like ra is putting it into portfolio allocations

you know they want to get it in for month end, because it just felt like it was very month-ending. There's no particular reason, apart from price, obviously. I don't know if you've got any insight into that. Yeah, it seems to be a combination of the price reflexivity that you were talking about. More of these RIAs onboarding now we're, you know, seven or so weeks in. So there's more awareness because as you probably know, Raul, most of these RIAs still, they're unaware of crypto. 2022, most of last year when we were talking to RIAs, they still thought even as Bitcoin was gaining 40, 50, 60, it gained 157% last year.

And even through the end of the year, people were still thinking we were in the FTX days. Because crypto, as much as for us that work in it, is all we think about. It's still a very small part of the economy and still a very small part and not widely allocated to. So it's people becoming aware. It is, I think, month-end reallocations in model portfolios that are now embedding the ETFs now that they've launched and they're aware. So'll leave it with a final word for the audience, kind of words of wisdom. But my question is about yesterday. What the hell happened? I expected volatility to ease up, obviously, with institutions coming in and with retail still lagging. But yesterday's price action, are we going to see volatility continue despite institutional involvement, despite the ETFs? Because I expected it to ease up.

Again, it's not institutions. It's just retail using RIA channels. So that's financial advisors. So again, if we go back to that Coinbase number, it's a staggering number. People need to get their heads around it. 110 million accounts of which 10 million are active. So you're going to reactivate something like another 30 or 40

million people into this space over time. And so with how retail tend to trade, it tends to create volatility as opposed to dampen it. So I do think it will remain a very volatile space. You'll have these massive air pockets where the thing drops, you know, 35% in a matter of two days, and then suddenly it's up 100% in a week. You know, we've seen banana stuff before. You know, we saw, I think it was Doge did 10x in a week, and that was its second cycle. So we're not prepared for the madness that comes.

You know, we kind of think oh yeah that yesterday was a mad day we haven't seen anything yet the complete lunacy of this space is something to behold and enormous amounts of fun if you've got the stomach for it and you can accept that the volatility is there and uh you know it's part of that whole thesis i've got is just don't use leverage you just don't need it in a space that whole thesis I've got is just don't use leverage. You just don't need it in a space that moves as much as it does. And the worst thing is, let's say you think you're being really conservative and you have a three times levered bet on Bitcoin and Bitcoin many times can correct 30% in two days and you're knocked out of your entire position. I mean,

that's the end of the world. That is how to fuck this up. And I know I use this a lot, but it's really crucial because I desperately want to help people in this space how to navigate this because people really don't understand it. There's a lot of trad-fi people don't understand the volatility of this space. They don't understand that this is not cyclical. It's a secular trend that it goes up over time. So you can just set it and forget it and even if you have an 85% drawdown if you've got the right high quality assets you'll make money over time in fact you'll make tremendous amounts of money over time and I've you know been in this space since 2012 and I've had many of these big drawdowns and I've learned that those are the opportunity

to add into them the other thing that's going to happen in this space that I'm trying to warn everybody, and I can see it happening already, is FOMO. Yeah. Your friend, the bloke on Twitter, somebody else has got the 100x token that you didn't get, the airdrop you didn't get. They've got the points that you didn't get. And you want to do it. And before you know it, your 80 or 90% allocation to the

high quality assets starts drifting lower as you start chipping away and using that money to try and find the next coin. Now, if you think about how Twitter works, let's say your Twitter feed has 300 people who are active in crypto that you kind of follow. Each one of those may get one of these things. So somebody, one person you'll see get 100X in one thing, another person gets a 10X in another, another person gets a 10X in another thing. To you and your timeline, it looks like everybody is making all the money and you're not. What's actually happening is they're getting one bet right, several bets wrong, and your timeline makes it look like everybody's winning and you're the loser.

And that gets you into FOMO. And before you know it, you're doing all the dumb shit you shouldn't be doing. You've got a wallet full of, it's a wallet of shame, full of shrapnel at the end of it, of stuff you should never have owned. And we've all done it. I mean, I've done it.

And it's so easy to do. I just think, oh, you know, here's the next narrative, the next narrative. Let's jump on that. Before you know it, you've lost out when you could have just done better owning Bitcoin, Solana, or ETH. On that point, well, I had one more question if we could sneak it in. And that's the question I've seen in the comments a couple of times. Go for it, yeah.

The rotation into ALT. So this is a Bitcoin-led rally, obviously. Bitcoin ecosystem is killing it. ETFs are helping bringing the inflows into Bitcoin. Could we see the same rotation? Could it take longer? Or could we not see the same rotation we've seen in previous cycles? So we've got two rotations to come that are all going to be fun and games.

The altcoin rotation starts when ETH starts outperforming Bitcoin. I think that is in play now. And I think that narrative will drive longer. That is also actually driven by the business cycle and where we are. Crypto summer is when alts start outperforming. And that's when the ISM survey, the Institute of Supply Managers survey starts pointing higher. Global liquidity starts going positive. That's when alts start outperforming, which is why we're starting to see the signs of that now. That is going to get bananas. You know, think dog coins, meme coins will rip people's faces. I mean, they're just going to be extraordinary. I'm not saying that's an easy thing to do. And it's not really a bet for me, although in my DGEM bag, I've got a few of

them here and there. But I think that's what we see. So that cycle is starting. It's just warming up. All of this year should be that. Then the other cycle is the NFT cycle. The NFT cycle is also driven by roughly the same factors. NFTs, think of them as assets in crypto land. Assets like in the traditional economy tend to lag the markets. Markets are forward-looking. Assets tend to reflect current price action. If you go back and look at when NFTs really take off, it takes off once the markets start making all-time highs, particularly Ethereum. So once Ethereum starts making all-time highs, that's when you start to get to the silly season of NFTs. We're starting to see NFTs basing now. High quality art is based. Crypto punks have started rallying. They're probably a leader of the space and we will see more and more activity as people recycle gains

of out of token world into NFT world and then that really accelerates in 2025 once you're at new all-time highs and people you know either flexing with high value NFTs or they're recycling savings into longer-term savings, much as art is used or real estate is used in the traditional economy. This is what we've got in the crypto economy. That's our long-term kind of savings assets. So first alt season, basing of the NFTs, alt season starts accelerating, then NFTs come. And then it usually finishes off with the main contenders in the layer one, layer two space in 2025. I think it's a great place to end it.

I've brought up, I've asked my team to come up with it. My CryptoPunk, which I still have, and we're using it from other accounts. I've put it by your side, Raoul, and both CryptoPunks. An ode to the punks, which I think reached a floor of $200, whatever ETH that is, 58 ETH floor. So we're above $200 for CryptoPunks. But it was a great chat, Raoul. I had so many more questions, but we'll leave it for another time. Always a pleasure to have you. And hopefully in the audience, if you've got further questions, I highly recommend.

One thing I've kept listening to throughout the bull market and the bear market is Real Vision. So I don't consume a lot of media. It's probably a handful of shows that I listen to. Obviously Scott's show next to me and Ryan, I genuinely listen to them

and reference them. And yours, Raoul, and one of the others, and Yatsu. It's probably four of the top 10 shows and people that I listen to in the space. Yeah, really appreciate it. Look, Real Vision, go to realvision.com.

It's free. Just sign up with your email. There's incredible content. There's AI to help you navigate the space. There's written research and there's ways of connecting with all of the tens of thousands of Real Vision members across the world. You'll see, you know, there's people in 121 countries.

You know, I'll be in Dubai at some point. So, Mario, hopefully we'll get together then. But I'll be in Dubai and then we'll have Real Vision meetups. I've just done a Real Vision meetup in Switzerland. So, go to realvision.com. It's free. It'll change your life. I mean, I know that sounds hubristic, but literally the quality of the content who's been there. I mean, Scott's obviously been on there. You know, everybody from Bitwise has been on there. I mean, everybody from the space is on there. So, you know, and there's a fantastic interview with Beeple on there.

If you're interested in NFTs, it's one of the funniest, most outrageous and most thought-provoking interviews of all time. Yeah, I've just pinned it above if anyone wants to hear that interview. And again, this is not paid and I'm just a paying customer. I'm just giving it a shout out because I've just pinned it above if anyone wants to hear that interview. And again, this is not paid and I'm just a paying customer. I'm just giving it a shout out because I've just been listening to it for so long now. Raoul, again, pleasure to have you.

Thanks a lot. And Juan, thanks a lot for filling in as well. Appreciate it, everyone. I will see you again tomorrow. Take care, everyone. Thanks so much. Thanks, everyone.