The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Explosion: Bitcoin Bounces Back & Meme Coins Soar | What’s Next?

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Haseeb Qureshi, the Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, a global crypto investment fund, joins me today to discuss the latest in crypto, global macro, and venture capital.  Chris Inks will join us in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond.  Haseeb Qureshi: https://x.com/hosseeb Chris Inks: https://x.com/TXWestCapital ►►INTERACT WITH ME HERE! ITS BOT FREE 👉https://roundtable.rtb.io/shortUrl/B1zE3hB ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► The Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://thearchpublic.com/  ►►OKX SIGN UP FOR AN OKX TRADING ACCOUNT THEN DEPOSIT & TRADE TO UNLOCK MYSTERY BOX REWARDS OF UP TO $60,000!  👉https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code 'TENOFFSALE' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd  ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

We had Black Monday for markets, especially Bitcoin and crypto. Then I guess we had Bounce Back Tuesday and we have Sideways and Wait and See Wednesday. But it was interesting to see what bounced, how hard it bounced and what was leading the charge back. I was a bit surprised, honestly, that it was the thing we never talk about here, which is meme coins. But Bitcoin's still down big over the last week. I think people are holding their breath, waiting to see what comes next. But what I want to zoom out a bit, not just talk about price action, but talk about what's actually happening and being built in this market. I invite Haseeb. Luckily, we got him on the East Coast for once. So he's here to chat with us at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Of course, we got Texas West Capital on the back end. Guys, I couldn't be

more excited for this show. Let's go. Eastern Standard Time. Of course, you got Texas West Capital on the back end. Guys, I couldn't be more excited for this show. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of Wall Street. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel. Hit that like button. I don't Let's good. I think we're at like 2,000, 3,000 shows by now. If I can't manage to spit a few words, you know. I think we figured out that just on long-form recorded podcasts, we're at like 450 now, and that doesn't even include daily shows. So it's been a while. You were in there. You were close to 10,000 hours.

I was. I was. Yeah, that's right. So listen, man, we've had this kind of wild few weeks here. Obviously, a big pump sort of into the conference. Trump announcing a potential strategic reserve and then this hangover and sort of then macro providing a lot of headwinds at the same time as that hangover and a big dip. You wrote a great tweet from one of your LPs yesterday and how

you're responding. And you kind of hinted at this for Bitcoin. Interest rates, geopolitical instability, retail having more discretionary income, stimulus and regulatory wins. So you're still seeing a lot of potential tailwinds, I would imagine, here for crypto and Bitcoin specifically. Yeah, I think it's important for people to internalize what exactly was the catalyst here, because I think crypto is often the tail. And sometimes we're the tail wagging the dog and people can get the sense that like, oh my God, we have so much agency in how all this turns out. And if we just believe hard enough, and if we just really buy the coins and hold them, everything's going to be okay. And the reality

now is that crypto, part of what it means to get institutional mainstream adoption is that they now own you the way that they own everything. And so when everything starts moving, you move too, regardless of whether what's happening in the world has anything at all to do with crypto. And so very obviously, the rates on the Bank of Japan have nothing to do with crypto and so very obviously the rates on the bank of japan have nothing to do with how good of digital gold bitcoin is or how good ethereum is or how good solana is or how funny your dog coin meme is uh but all these things were naturally affected by just this massive draining of liquidity outside the system because of what happened with the with the bank of japan so i was actually explaining I was explaining this

to somebody yesterday who's like not a finance person. And I guess a lot of your audience is traders, but most of the people who I talk to are founders and kind of entrepreneur types. So the best way I can explain what really happened, because the funny thing is that the Bank of Japan situation is so crypto, it's like such an obvious crypto kind of thing that would happen, you know? So basically what happened was the bank of japan like well everybody else is raising their interest

rates because they're like wow it's just such a different environment today we should not have our interest rates as low and the bank of japan was like well actually i think my you know my economy still is kind of under stimulated and i actually think that we need really low interest rates so the bank of j Japan was offering zero interest rates while everybody else in the world was jacking up their interest rates to like, you know, 20 year highs. And so basically what that means,

if you just imagine that, right? There's basically, imagine you're in DeFi and there's one lending market that it's, you know, let's say it's MakerDAO, okay? MakerDAO is offering free money, 0% interest. You do not have to pay anything to borrow money from me. I will just give you money. If you have an idea, here's money, just go do it.

And everybody else is like, well, I will just pay you to give me money. That's great. And so everybody was like, well, awesome. I will just borrow money from MakerDAO and then I will give it to everything else in the world, which like anything will make money off of that spread. And then the Bank of Japan finally, unexpectedly,

was like, actually, you know what, guys, we're gonna start raising interest rates. I think this has gone on long enough. And everybody was stuck in this trade of borrowing from the Bank of Japan, MakerDAO, and making money off of these, basically yield arbitrages. And they were forced to unwind that gigantic trade, which led to tons and tons of people getting their, getting margin called or

having to go and make up the difference. And now, you know, because the Bank of Japan thing is denominating yen, you know, imagine if all the loans from MakerDAO were denominated in some magic currency. Well, all of that currency had basically got bit up in people trying to go pay back their loans all at the same time. And that's what causes huge crunch in just kind of capital supply chains, if you can imagine it that way. So that's slowly unwinding now, but it unwinded really viciously on Monday. And that's basically what blew everything up. And a lot of that, turns out, was part of the capital sources going into crypto. And into everything.

I love that you said it's the most crypto thing ever, because for anyone who wasn't watching last cycle, this is highly reminiscent of the GBTC trade, which ended up sort of being the widowmaker for our entire industry. Very similar. People would effectively, but GBTC at this huge premium, right? It was offering a huge premium at the time and then they would go take that money, buy some underlying Bitcoin,

some other things, and then in six months when they could unlock, they would get this huge basically benefit of having Bitcoin at a huge discount via GBTC, but then it went negative. That's right. Premium went to a dip and they were all stuck and their GBTC

was worth less than it should have been. I mean, this is like tail as old as time, but it's the Bank of Japan this time. Exactly. So I mean, whenever you have this amount of leverage in the system, and we know that a lot of deleveraging happened on Monday, which is why things were so violent. But there's still some leverage in the system that needs to get worked out because, you know, if you have the balance sheet to absorb it, you know, if you have to unwind a carry trade, you can do it in an orderly fashion

as long as you've got the time. If you don't have the time, that's when things go crazy, right? So there's still, you know, like 30% roughly, I think, of this carry trade that's still outstanding, that likely is gonna get unwound in the coming week or two. And if you can afford it, you're going to wait for markets to stabilize, right? And then it stopped down 12% and then came up 10% the very next day, which tells you like, okay, something insane is going on and markets are not sufficiently

patient. But now I think you will see the final part of this unwind probably over the course of this week. And then it's kind of back to, okay, what's the Fed going to do about this? And that's kind of the next big, the next stop on this train basically is to see what's going to happen with other central banks. Did you get any like insight calls as to what was happening with Jump? I mean, a lot of people conjectured that they either, it could be one of two things sort of, right? Either they got a margin call, as you described, they were using that yen trade to go buy a bunch of other stuff, and then they needed to sell what they could sell on a weekend, which is always crypto. Hence why we get the dips on Sundays

in crypto and at local market. But then I don't know what their business is. I heard another sort of story that maybe they had actually lent it and they were under unwinding someone else's margin. So like, you know, they had someone had lent them, you know, they had lent out and they were clearing someone's ETH that they had used as collateral. So I can't, I don't know. And I've heard various things just like you have. So yeah, the reality is no one knows for sure. What's, it wouldn't surprise me to be clear, speculating. It would not surprise me if Jump themselves were in the carry trade

because like the yen carry trade is just the cheapest source of capital in the world, right? That's why everyone was doing it is that it's so weird to have one central bank with a pretty stable currency offering basically free money to anybody in the world. Like you'd kind of be stupid not to look at that and say, wow, I should go take that free money and do stuff with it.

And Jump is very good at taking free money and doing stuff with it. That's like kind of the business model, right? It's like you take money and you use your balance sheet to do stuff. So it would not be surprising if it were Jump themselves who were in the yen carry trade and then it moved against them. But it's also possible they were doing it as an agent on someone else's behalf, selling all that money. So we just don't know at this point.

But either way, it doesn't really matter whether Jump blew up or didn't blow up. I don't know if they blew up. Yeah. Right. But as sort of you hinted, the boj got scared really fast right they hiked last week everybody got panicked they sort of hinted they would keep doing that but now they've gotten dovish i think they saw the pressure from around the world so i think to your point we're not going to be talking about the japanese carry trade for much longer what i do do find interesting here, as in the title, and you always

give me great insight as this, is that I noticed obviously that Solana bounced the hardest and first, right? So we had sort of a, that was the leading indicator, even on Monday, how hard Solana bounced, huge wick down, never really lost its range. Technically, if you're looking at a chart, I mean, we could do that really quickly, right? Kind of stayed in the same range, huge bullish engulfing candle, all the things you'd want to see. But the Solana ecosystem also bounced massively. I mean, these meme coins went absolutely nuts. What do you make of that? Because you would think that there'd be sort of a flight to quality in a situation like this. You would see maybe the Bitcoins and the Ethereums. Solana now, I guess, counts. I mean, what do you make of this huge bounce in the memes?

I mean, what I would guess that is, is that people are buying the things that they think the most about and that they feel the most confident they can sort of front run the broader rebound. So my guess is that probably what you're going to see, I mean, I could be wrong. So, you know, I'm not a trader, so take it with a grain of salt. But sometimes what you see in these big washouts is that there's a chance for dispersion to increase. So it's kind of like the market can be more discriminating in times like this and say, actually, these things that were valued very highly, they should be valued highly. And now we have the chance to correct prices. And the things that shouldn't have been valued highly, they were kind of stuck there and nobody really wanted to kind of do the selling in order to get them down to where they need to be. Now we can kind of reset where they ought to be. So the stickiness of prices kind of goes away. That sort of one story you could tell, which is that, well, you know, everything was kind of overvalued relative to Sol and WIF and this basket of Solana meme coins.

Another story you could tell is that, well, the only people who are rushing back into the market are retail. And retail loves Sol and they love the meme coins. So that could be the bigger story. And then once you see macro stabilize and more of the big boys coming back into the market, they're likely to kind of pull things back up

to where they were on the basis that, well, I mean, fundamentals haven't really changed from a week ago, right? It's like nothing here was endogenous to crypto. This is all just external macro stuff. So there's no reason why the ratio between Sol and ETH or the ratio between ETH and Bitcoin and blah, blah, blah should have changed in the last week. So I could see things going both ways, I think still underdetermined. We have to wait until things stabilize and they're definitely not stable yet. Yeah. You talked about at the beginning how everything, basically all

correlations go to one in a risk off event like this, right? People could play, why is Bitcoin go down? Well, it's institutionalized. And when liquidity is sucked from the system, once again, people have to sell the things that they have to sell. It's not what they choose, especially on a weekend. But then we get this narrative every time. Bitcoin has digital gold thesis undermined by crypto sell-off. And I hate this. I hate it. First of all, Bitcoin, in my mind, has never traded digital gold. It can be digital gold without trading like gold, in my mind. It can have the properties of a gold and superior properties to it, but that doesn't mean that it's going to trade in lockstep on every single trading day when something bad happens. Yeah. I think the way that I understand the concept of Bitcoin being digital gold is that Bitcoin will become

digital gold. It is a bet on an asset that will someday have the reach and the universality of gold, but it doesn't have that today. And obviously it doesn't have that today, right? It trades more like a risk asset. And that's to be expected because to say that Bitcoin is digital gold says that, okay, slowly but surely it's going to usurp the place of gold in the global monetary system. But it's not going to happen overnight. And it's going to happen unevenly over time, right? So it's going to be, you know, some early groups, whether they're institutional, whether they're retail investors, or high net worths that are treating Bitcoin like gold today. But most people who think about gold, or sorry, most people think about Bitcoin, they're thinking about it, well, it's going to take like 15 years for it to really get the kind of reach and the kind of integration into the world economy

that gold has. So really, it's more of a long dated asset. And any kind of long dated asset is going to be treated like, well, okay, I'm not looking to make 15 year bets right now. Fuck that, you know, and they dump Bitcoin off their their balance sheet and then they go buy treasuries. So it's unsurprising to me that something that people are thinking about as digital gold, as this bet on an asset that will someday be universal, they're going to treat it for now like a bet on the future, which is obviously correct. Obviously, Bitcoin's a bet on the future. Ethereum's a bet on the future. Everything in this category is a bet on the world changing. And a bet on the world changing means, yeah, it's not going to change overnight. It's going to change over time gradually. Bitcoin's been doing that and its volatility has been decreasing,

which is why it suffered the lowest drawdown of most of the things that you see on page one of CoinMarketCap. But nevertheless, it's still not going to be anywhere near the flight to safety asset that gold is in times like this. So when you see macro stability, Bitcoin actually has had periods of time where it trades very close to gold. So if you remember, there was a period of time, I think it was like 21 when it was actually very correlated with gold. But then that correlation just absolutely disappears in times of macro instability. And I expect that that's going to continue for quite a while. What I did find interesting and something I think about a lot and actually happened as I expected, boomers, TradFi investors in the ETF did not sell off.

These things had net zero for iBit, which is obviously BlackRock's ETF. We saw about, I think, 148, 158 million total across them, most of it GBTC, but then they bought back yesterday. So maybe a narrative people didn't expect is that the boomers buying BlackRock ETFs and putting them into their retirement accounts don't react at all and are actually more diamond-handed than passionate retail bitcoin investors or traders i mean they literally did nothing this did not sell off at all yeah yeah i mean it was and it was a record day for the exchanges so we know that the um you know the sort of the the crypto pills uh you know skeezoids and djins they they, you know, panicking during this time. So as much as as much as Twitter gives you the impression that everybody's like just sadly holding their coins,

that was definitely not what was happening, according to the exchange volumes. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think the ETF, the ETF complex is very, very good for crypto in just bringing some stability to the holder base of these assets and and to some degree some counter cyclicality yeah but it kind of gives us this bifurcation like that actually did trade like gold the etfs and wall street did trade like gold no matter what these people say because nothing happened you know that is true that is true when you don't mark the books uh over the weekend,

I guess that does kind of trade like gold. They're telling me to stop the ETF fund yesterday, $169 million, Monday, $149 million. Yes, specifically to BlackRock, which is arguably the one. We saw that GBTC sold off. Who holds GBTC of all the ETFs? A bunch of crypto natives. The same dudes that buy and sell or are interested in spot Bitcoin. That is the degen.

So I don't think that it's a false narrative at all. Interestingly, I don't know if you saw this, but the whale wallets did buy this dip. So between 1,000 and 10,000 Bitcoin holders bought. And as we just expected, people who held less than one Bitcoin were sellers. And in stocks, you also saw hedge funds buying the dip. So it wasn't just primarily retail driven. Seems like people are not really worried that this is going to turn into the next Great Depression. No, I mean, I think this is largely underscoring the same story, which is that any moment of panic, the smart money is sitting

there trying to figure out, is this endogenous or exogenous? Because if it's exogenous and the world is going to go back to normal in a couple of weeks, then yeah, who cares? This is a great opportunity to buy. So we were buying a little bit as the market was panicking on Sunday. I wish we had more cash on hand because we were waiting for wires literally before we could try to buy more. But it was just so obvious, I think, if you understood what was causing this, that this has nothing to do with crypto. If you think of just the overall setup of the last year, if you rewind to a year ago, a year ago, it was like we were in the wake of the banking crisis. We were talking about Operation Chokepoint 2.0.

SEC was coming out suing Coinbase and Binance. And we were still waiting for the SBF verdict. We just had the CZ indictment. And we're like, oh my God, when's the DOJ going to come down and destroy the biggest exchange in the world? We were in such an awful place a year ago. And then you fast forward to today. And it's like, okay,

Trump is now declaring himself the presumptive crypto president. He's going to do a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We've got interest rates coming down at a really rapid clip. We've got this massive ETF complex sponsored by BlackRock and Fidelity, two of the most successful ETFs in history. And add to all of that, you've got PayPal and Stripe and the complete reversal of US policy towards crypto. It sort of could not be better if you imagine what we were waiting for a year ago. And we're still quite far off from all-time highs. And the question you're asking is like, oh, is it all going to zero? It's like, no, of course it's not all going to zero, right? Things are great. Things are objectively in a really awesome place for the industry relative to what you could have possibly expected in six months ago to a year

ago. So I think any panic because the Bank of Japan is raising interest rates, I'm like, dude, you don't have a sense of perspective if you're worried about that. Yeah. So every dip is a dip to buy right now if you believe that this is exogenous, as you said, unless you literally believe the global economy is going to melt down tomorrow, then I can see you trying to get to that. And look, even in the case of a US recession, obviously, US recession is going to impact demand because as we see from these Bitcoin ETF flows, these flows are pretty big and it's driven mostly by US retail. If US retail doesn't have money,

then that's going to make it harder for the marginal buyer of Bitcoin to come in and buy some of these dips. So I think that does matter. But even still, most economists are forecasting the likelihood of recession as less than 50%. Yeah, and shallow and short if it does happen from economists. So

I'm going to ask you, as far as the four-year cycle goes then and what we usually see in this part of it, this was all expected in my mind, right? In March, I said, we got meme coin madness. We got the having six months of boring chop. Get ready. Still seems terrible when it's happening. But do you still believe that with all these tailwinds that we start to ramp up in the coming months? You know, another repeated fall up. Finally, altcoins catch a bid. 2025 is amazing into the summer.

Repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Yeah, look, I'm a venture capitalist, not a trader for a reason, because I suck at trading. That means that you're deploying capital with anticipation of gains. True, true. And I'll caveat as strong as I possibly can, not investment advice. I have no idea which way markets are moving in the medium term, it seems pretty clear to me that Fed dropping interest rates is going to be good for risky assets. And the riskier you are, the more you're going to benefit from the marginal decline in interest

rates. This whole situation has likely increased the Fed's timeline, or I should say decreased the Fed's timeline for getting interest rates back down to the neutral rate. And they're feeling the pressure. And we're going into an election year, and this Fed probably is going to be feeling at least some degree of pressure that, hey, we want the stock market to be doing well going into the election. So I anticipate that that is going to be net good for alts, just because of the fact that

alts are risky. So alongside anything else that's risky, you expect it to do well when rates come down. That being said, every bull market in crypto has multiple pit stops where we take a breather, we kind of reset some of the leverage, and everybody at that moment panics and says, oh my God, is it over? Is it over? It's not over until people run out of things to talk about. And people are still talking. So I don't see this market ending soon. But what do I

know? Yeah, well, we saw this flight to Solana. We saw a flight to memes. The thing we're yet to see a flight to at any point in this cycle, which I think is normal if you take Bitcoin ETF buying out. This is where we should be in the cycle. But altcoins from a few years ago have not caught a bit. I mean, you're looking at 52 week lows on a lot of the most hyped projects of past cycles, L1s, L2s. You know, I think people are left asking, do we get those alt seasons where everything rises, where's this new money going to come from when we have thousands of coins launching that are on hold until the fall and supply just hitting the market and new unlocks. We're going to need some serious retail FOMO, in my opinion, to kind of have one of those everything catch a bid situations. Yeah, I agree with you. And every period of time when Bitcoin is consolidating and it feels like there is very little of a waterfall of flows coming down to the alts, people always up and everyone's like, wow, Bitcoin's up 5%, everything else is up 15.

Fuck it, I'm getting out of Bitcoin, I got to join the party. So that's always how it looks. It's never a question of like, well, now the flows of fees accruing is going to the alt L1s and that's why everything is moving. It's just, you know, it's just, it's just the market is very animalistic. And when it sees that the game has changed, everybody gets up and dances to the new music. And it takes like one day.

It's like all of a sudden you catch this one bit and then it's like the six months of depression is gone and everybody's fully euphoric and FOMO and things go flying. I mean, we got like a few minutes left. What are you most excited about then that's coming in the next few months? We obviously have talked about the tailwinds for the industry in general, but there's so many narratives bubbling. Do you think any of them are going to really stand out, you know, in the next six to 12 months. One of the things that I think this cycle has

taught us more than anything is Solana has been the star performer of this whole cycle. And a lot of that story has been... In the past, people used to make fun of the idea that, oh, do we really need high-performance chains? Who is this for? Who cares whether we have high-performance chains? And a lot of whether we have high performance chains and a lot of the evm based chains that were trying to get retail adoption were kind of like well but you know uh we're just competing with ethereum and solana has now told the story very very clearly and very persuasively that no actually users really do care about performance about latency about ux and you need to step up your game if

you want to be able to get real mass adoption. And I think what this is catalyzing is the new generation of blockchains that are going to come live in the next six to 12 months. They are all answers not to Ethereum, but to Solana. So I'm very excited about... I know this is very passe at this point to talk about new token launches or new blockchains, but I'm very excited about, you know, I know this is very passe at this point to talk about new token launches or new blockchains, but I'm very excited about Monad and about MegaEth, which are two of these new EVM compatible blockchains that are conceived as different ways, one on an L1 and the other one on L2, to be super high performance in response to how can we create a Solana-like UX with Ethereum-like affordances and part of the Ethereum ecosystem. So you can use MetaMask, but it feels like Solana. And that now is the bar. If you cannot create a Solana-like experience, then it's kind of game over for you. There's just not enough room in the market for anything besides... It's basically like Ethereum on one side, which is like, okay, this is this max decentralization, max kind of

purity. And then it's Solana and there's going to be very little in between. And so unless you can really differentiate in some use case or some storyline, like something like Nier is going after AI, okay, maybe that's something orthogonal. But if you're just saying, look, I want to be a consumer chain or a DeFi chain, you need to have an answer to Solana. And right now, most chains do not really have that, which is why Solana is excelling to the degree that they are. And I think it's great for the EVM ecosystem because it raises the bar. Because it tells you, look, you have to be this tall to ride. Otherwise, nope. Why would anybody use your chain? That definitely scares me for the question I asked

before about old coins catching a bit. If Solana becomes the bar that needs to be achieved, we have a whole lot of layer ones that have not caught up and a whole lot of layer twos that have not really attracted any TVL. Why would those coins go up besides retail trading if they're not needed? We just have way too much stuff. Yeah. Look, I think it depends a lot on the ecosystem. And I think what you're going to need to see more and more is more differentiation. And on some level in the last cycle, you kind of didn't have to differentiate to be valued as a serious contender to maybe become the base or the arbiter. We sort of didn't know who was gonna become that.

And it's kind of correct in a market where we're not there yet and we don't really see all the TVL and all the action happening on chain to say, well, anybody has a shot, right? It's a horse race. Well, it's less of a horse race now. We kind of know where things are shaking out,

where the capital has flown, where the users have flown. And it's tougher now for the seventh L2 to make a real claim like, well, no, no, I have a shot at becoming base. It's like, you kind of don't at this point. So I think what we're going to have to see going into this next cycle is that people really find a niche. And if you don't find a niche, if you don't find something that you do better than other people, that's going to be a big, big, big challenge for you to kind of reclaim that bid that you had in the previous market. Yeah. So what I hear is that we will have still massive movement in the altcoin market, but you're going to have to choose wisely.

Exactly. It won't be everything. A gaming chain, a DeFi chain, an NFT chain. If you can differentiate, make it clean and specialized, then you have a fighting chain. That's right. That's right. And I think we're going to see, you know, so much of the, so much of the contest over the last 12 months has been basically people trying to all copy each other. People all try, you know, say, oh, Avalanche does Avalanche Rush. I'm going to do Avalanche Rush. So this person does this, I'm going to do that. And I think what we're going to see more,

and you know, Blast, everybody started copying Blast over the last six months, right? And I think what you're going to see more is people realizing, I've got to do something really different from everybody around me, and actually start diverging in my code base, in my op codes, in my, you know, the kind of projects that I'm subsidizing and attracting my chain. That's going to be the way that these things fundamentally win, is that they look less similar to each other, not more. Love it. Well, thank you for getting up early, even East Coast for us. I know you've got a crazy busy schedule. Always love to have you on. You going to Singapore by any chance? I will. Yeah, for a token. I'm looking forward to it.

All right. We'd have to do one in person. Can we do another one in person? We did it last time. Always. Always, man. All right, man. I'd love to. yeah for token i'm looking forward to do one in person can we do another one in person we did it last time always always man all right man i'll see you in singapore guys you should absolutely be following hasib really the greatest uh greatest insight that we get from anyone in the industry in my very humble opinion and his uh x account is right down in the description so go follow him and have a good time at the uh conference today I'll see you soon. Great to see you. Take care. Thanks, man. All right, man. What a great guest. So smart. Makes me bullish every single time. It's really important, I think, to remember to zoom out and not get caught up in the nuance of the daily trade and what happened. Nothing has changed for me. I'm going to talk to Chris about this in a

minute, but every guest we have on, maybe it's scary that everybody sort of agrees, but everyone's like, yeah, whatever, man. Cycle's the cycle. It's going to be fine. Nothing has changed. It's just a retrace. We see them in every bull market. Stop panicking. I mean, is that kind of how you're thinking about it? I see you nodding back there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, my sense of it this weekend as it kind of went through appeared to be more of the it didn't seem to be like a big like something was really happening. It seemed to be more like an overreaction. And so I think we kind of saw that, you know, again, I keep pointing to you. I've been on a lot of shows already this week, but I keep talking about the same thing, which is if this was as big a deal

as everybody was trying to make it be, we should have seen when New York opened on Monday, we should have seen Legacy immediately just selling, right? We should have seen that because they couldn't do anything on the weekend, right? You can't do anything. You got to work with your books there on Monday when it opens. And we didn't. Instead, we got this big reversal coming off. And so when you look at that, you go, okay, well, things aren't quite what everybody was freaking out about. And this chart here that you're pulling up, this is a really interesting chart. I didn't do this myself.

Actually, one of my followers, I can't remember his ad at the moment here. I love when you get good ideas from other people that's my favorite thing yeah yeah there's only so many things we can look at all the time right and sometimes our creativity isn't there but this is bitcoin versus the vix right and what it's shown is every time we've had these um these spikes in the vix here with big you know uh with the vix bitcoin has reacted along kind of this same support level. So, you know, does it mean anything? You know, maybe not. But it does seem to say that, look, look, you know, we're kind of catching that bid right there again at that kind of support line coming up there. It's been there for the last,

you know, almost 10 years now. So, you know, it's just another one of those things when you kind of look at it and go, OK, well, you know, what are things doing? How many different ways can we possibly look at this? Uh, you know, and, and kind of get the same answer. So, you know, big, big, uh, VIX move, uh, you know, with all this, when it happened and, um, you know, we're not seeing any follow through yet. And we, you know, here it is Wednesday now doesn't mean we can't have it. It doesn't mean we can't have it, but, you know, again, when we're trading in there, um, you know, again, when we're trading in there, you know, we trade along with with what is most probable at that time. And then you use proper risk management to protect yourself in case you're wrong. I mean, it really is as simple as

that. I always say trading is simple. It's not easy. It's not easy because our emotions suck. And so they make life tough. But yeah, that's a I love that chart right there. Pulled it up. It's great. But Bitcoin itself. So I've had this alternate account, which I've talked about a few times over the last few months. In case we got a real kind of breakdown that maybe this is more of a four off the swing low here, off the bear market low. So we get a one and two, and then we get a three and a four here um you know if we measure this out it actually comes out where it should about 1.618 right there so you say we kind of get that one that's usually we look for that first

you know wave three target so right now i'm kind of looking at this as a four pullback by the way it pulls back 38.2 exactly where we would look for it to do as a four as a fourth wave. Um, we've got an ABC, uh, and then an ABC again gives us this, this, uh, uh, WXY here correction. So, I mean, you know, again, we're looking at everything. We can look at the fact that, uh, we finally got this big push down. There's no, if you look here, there's no actual expansion of volume as we came down. So what do we look for? When we're looking for, is this a distribution? What we're looking for is we're looking for the market

to join in on the drop down. So we should see volume expansion, you know, as we get down there, you know, as you break down. Instead, all we got, you see volume here is just pretty much level here, the same way it's been through this entire run over here. All we got was this huge spike of volume on that one candle that broke down. And then it didn't go anywhere, right? There was no follow through.

Instead, we rallied back up. And a day later, we'd recovered almost everything that we lost that first day we did close above this swing low here so we've got this potential bullish sfp printing right here or again potential spring in this range um what i'm looking for with this is i'm looking for a daily close above that drop above that big candle there because if we can get a daily close above that drop of above that big candle there. Uh, because if we can get a daily close above this without actually breaking down, what that tells us is that's like 58,200 ish, right? Just for people at the top here on this chart, it's a, yeah, about 58,300, 58,200 depending what charts you're looking at, but it's that day, it's the swing high on that day.

And what it tells us is because of this large spike of volume, you know, again, it was this attempt to push price down and to get it going and continue. But it was met with demand that shot it right back up. So if we overcome this day here, what it says, it basically nullifies what happened here. It basically says this does not hold the effect it does, we first did it. So if you're concerned about it going down further, getting a daily close above this should take a lot of that, alleviate a lot of that concern. Again, nothing's guaranteed in trading, but these are one of the things we look for as we do it. So I like it, again, reset and oversold with RSI,

stoke RSI oversold. Again, 38.2 pullback, what we would expect for fourth wave. No follow through lower, large wick, bullish SFP, spring. I mean, it's just, it's so much going on there.

But as I've been talking about since we made this swing high up here, this is still bearish market structure. This is a high, a low, or a high, or a low. Yeah. So, you know, we were talking about, even though we were looking at potentially getting this move up and what it would look like, we still,

as I kept saying, had to get above this point and we never did. Now it is this point here. It is this 70,000. So if we can get above that, that'll break this bearish market structure here. If you're just looking at market structure and should then look for higher based off the low here uh we've got a target of around 95 000 uh just simple quick target based off the height of this pullback so you know if we're getting the breakout above this wave x here which again is about 70 almost 72 000 um that should have us target at least at 95 based on that height there. Yeah. I mean, this is what I drew this morning just as an idea that I'm always looking for.

Right. This is the daily it hit oversold RSI. If we get another dip, unless it's way down into the forties, it is very likely we'll get a bullish divergence. So any close on the daily, basically below 54,000 here, you know,

and it wouldn't be a surprise. I don't think to anyone to retest the, not the lows of the whole candle, which was below 50, right. That's the wig, but the lower close, man, it would be hard for me not to want to plow into this very, very aggressively if we get that. Oh yeah. No. I'm kind of watching weight at 57. I didn't get 50, right. So at 57, I'm kind of watching weight, but one more dip with stronger RSI

and I'm very, very confident we're ready to fly at least back to those kind of 70. Yeah, and I agree with you on the divergence like that. Often, if we're going to get that, that's what we'll get. We'll get that bullish divergence down there. The other thing we look for is the volume on this, what appears to be a spring here, is so much more significant than what we had on our initial drop here, as you can see right down here.

So what that really requires most often is a retest. Now, again, that doesn't mean it has to come to the swing low here, but it just means a higher low on lesser volume. So those of you that are watching, this is all you have to do. If we get a pullback here on the daily, you're watching it to make a higher low on a lot less volume than what we have here. If you can do that, that's a successful test. You better be in because the odds are significant. Yeah, that it's going to break out there higher.

Yeah. I want to ask you a question, though, because obviously you taught me a lot of this, right? You addressed it. So it's Wednesday. This would have been a better question for Monday because we've seen you kind of got the big move, the huge volume. I mean, that was the biggest volume candle we've now seen in years on a day. So usually when you get a range breakdown, you obviously kind of have it drawn more like a channel since descending. But if you're looking at it as a horizontal range, if you get huge volume on the breakdown of a key support usually that indicates there's more to come right that the bottom isn't necessarily in i know that it's in context of what happens afterwards but like let's say you drew it as a horizontal range which you know i think the

lows are honestly here but let's get generous and put it here we are back in the range but if this gets rejected here and it was huge volume breaking that support, maybe that's just filling the wick that you're talking about. It doesn't mean lower lows are coming. It just means you're going to go back down and test. Yeah, exactly. You can think of wicks on candles, if they're below the candle, as demand that's waiting. If they're above candles, you can think of a supply that's waiting. That's why often you can see there at the that's waiting. So that's why often, you know, you can see there at the prior where I have the A, you know, July 5th, you know, again, we ran it there and we pulled back into this wick. There's waiting demand sitting here,

pulled back into it again, caught it back up. The biggest thing for people to really pay attention to, it's not just that it broke down, but it's okay. Where does the candle close? Had this candle closed much closer to the low, it would be much more likely that we would have seen follow through coming up the next day or two or whatever. The higher that closes back up there, the longer that demand wick, it shows the more demand that was sitting there. And it also indicates that other people bought after they saw the reaction of that demand. Because the original bottom, you push through that demand. Those are sitting bids.

But then the follow through that makes the WIC longer is people actively jumping in as well. Yeah, yeah. So we can look at that again. You see that long demand WIC. It signals the strength of demand in that area versus the supply. And then again, the fact that we closed above that swing low was the other big thing, because, you know, again, that gives you that bullish SFP swing failure pattern there potentially setting up. So again, with the big volume on here, generally it doesn't have to, at least not right now. I mean, it could actually rally up here and

pull back and then go, but generally the first thing I look for is there's a bit of a rejection here and a pull back into that wick. But again, it doesn't have to. It could rally potentially all the way up here toward this pivot and then pull back maybe to the S1 and then go. But at some point, you're going to get a pullback. And on that pullback, you're looking for a higher low with a lot less volume than what we had right here to give that. So what else are you looking at now that we sort of have this nice bounce we're kind of chilling here i think people

are watching and waiting but what is it i i can't stop looking at this a lot of chart i brought oh man it's been a monster of a move back up i think we're up something like 40 somewhat percent but also never lost the range there as you can I mean, that was a sweep of the range lows. This is as bullish as it gets if you're just looking at the chart in a vacuum. Everything else I said there, you know, big candle, large lower wick, huge volume, swept the low. So, again, bullish SFP in terms of the range, it would be a spring. Basically hit the EQ of what was left over the weekly demand structure here, which works perfectly. S1 pivot, we closed back on that.

So basically S1 pivot has held the support. So we've got a pin bar on support here. The next day we closed above. So when I was talking about Bitcoin, where we want to see that daily close above that big candle swing high, we got that the next day there. It's continuing to rally up. I mean, how you could not be bullish on Solana, I don't know. But based on the height here, we've got a generic target right there around $315. So, you know, I think, you know, the same people that have been crying about Solana in this range

are the same people who, you know, didn't believe this was happening down here and cried about it here. And, you know, oh, the VCs and, oh, they're dumping on you and all this nonsense. You know, people get caught up in all these stupid narratives that nobody, well, especially them rarely understand really. And I say this because hopefully it'll really connect with people and they'll go, oh my God, I got to stop that and just start reading the chart because look at how much money you missed. If you bought down here around $9 on the 30th of uh of december of 2022 i mean man you've been so far you've been up 212 right now you're up to 152 that's huge it's huge all you have to do is buy and hold on that um but yeah solana just been absolutely a monster move back right back up love watching it look at that volume on solana as well absolutely insane amount of volume there. So yeah, Solana, another one. Coin.

I'm looking really quickly. I happen to be looking. That is the biggest volume candle, even bigger than the bottom at $12. I'm trying to find it. So the only time it was here, I'm trying to look here. I can just look up up yeah right there around november 11th and 10th of 22 right around there i mean that is wild and that's when it went for i mean that's ftx this was as much volume basically slightly less so ftx was more but the most volume since ftx including when it went to eight bucks absolutely significant right i mean that's you that's, it's nothing little that, you know, when you get that kind of, that move, and especially in here, it wasn't really that far a move overall, you know, below this, this swing low here was a very little move.

I hate to be talking this to death, but just in context of Bitcoin for people who are watching, like you look at the Solana chart, A, it had a longer wick, but B, yesterday you already had bullish engulfing that he's talking about what you're looking for on Bitcoin. You want to see a close on Bitcoin higher than that candle. We already had that a day later on Solana. If you zoom in, I mean, I can show you because I just have it zoomed. Compare this to the Bitcoin candle. We're trying to see Bitcoin get above this level if it was Bitcoin. That already happened and is way outperformed already to the upside, testing the 50, 200 MAs back to the range EQ. That's a crazy move. I don't care what you emotionally think about it. If you're trading, you have to be paying attention to that. Oh, yeah. Again, what you're looking for when you

get pullbacks across the market is, especially when you have the altcoins attention to that. Oh yeah. It's, it's, you know, again, and what you're looking for when you get pullbacks across the market is, uh, especially when you have the all coins and whatnot, is you're looking for who responds, who responds, who's, and who really responds, right? Uh, those are your leaders. Those are the ones you should, you know, that you generally want to be in. Uh, you don't want, you don't want to, you know, be too excited about the laggards. Look for who really catches that bid first and hardest when you get that pullback because often they are going to be the ones that are going to continue to lead higher. So, you know, in this case, I think Saul is a great candidate, continues to be a great trade overall with that.

Coin, just to show a bigger pullback here. This here, I've got it as four of this three heading up here let me see if i get this out of the way there but it could potentially be this could be three here either way we should be heading up toward 400. uh we've got kind of the same structure here that we have on um on bitcoin i've got it as abc but probably wxy as well yeah you see abc right here but again you know opened up monday And like I said, if things were really into the world recession coming in, everybody thought that it should continue down lower. And instead what happened was the minute it opened,

the minute the market opened, it ran back up, almost filled in the gap completely, uh, coming in. Uh, and so, you know, here, that's been a great rally up there. 38, two retracement again, kind of like Bitcoin. That's what we would expect. First target for a wave four initial target, usually. And, you know, again, we're back up, you know, again, trying to fill in this gap right here. If we can, you know, from here, you know, we could see a pullback into this. If we were to break down further, we'd look at the 50% retracement, which is about 140.5. That's our secondary target for wave fours.

But as long as we can continue the rally here, impulsive breakout and close above this daily pivot at around 235 should signal the bottom's in and we're headed up. Breaking out above wave B here at 272. a half is going to add confidence to the account. At that point, there's little reason to believe it's absolutely not going up here to, you know, $400. So those are kind of the levels I'm watching to add more confirmation to this being done here. But again, if it does break down further, 50% retracement is where we'd look for the target on that. And of course, we have to talk about Monster, Not Monster. I always want to say MicroStrategy. Monster Energy Drink, a.k.a. MicroStrategy. Oh, man.

MicroStrategy. They're doing a 10 for 1 stock split today after the market closes. And so looking here, again, the idea that we're doing a wave four. We've pulled back 38.2 already. I can zoom in this a little bit here uh you know 38-2 here uh as it is it I don't like the count I mean I can maybe finagle five waves up here and say okay this is three this is four and then this is one two of five we'll see how it plays out here but it's close enough to potentially just be a flat

here as well for the four. So based on the, uh, the height here, we've got a target of about 3,052 to come up there. Uh, that would be my initial target based on the height here. Once again, impulsive breakout and close above the daily pivot here at $1,555, uh, should indicate thatback's complete. Further breakout here above $1,837. Doesn't have to close, just breakout above $1,837. Should add confidence to the count again and says that we're on our way up here toward $3,052. So what you're noticing, if you're looking at Bitcoin, if you're looking at MicroStrategy, if you're looking at Coin, these things, they're all kind of got that same count, right?

They've all still got that kind of like that fourth wave moving up to the fifth wave next. So I like a lot of what that's showing there. Let me see here. I've got a couple more charts here real quick. Let me pull this up here. I've got Seapool. And we've got what appears to be a throw under of the channel support. Let me just zoom in here a bit.

There we go. A throw under of the channel support here. Basically a bullish SFP below this January 31st swing low. Pin bar candle here. Just want to see some follow through. You know, we've got a large fair value gap here smaller one right there But if we can uh impulsively break out and close above this channel eq here, so probably somewhere right around 11 cents or so 11 to 12 cents

Uh, like I said impulsive close out a breakout above it and close Should give us a target Of that channel resistance up there probably around 17 cents impulsive breakout and close about that gives us an initial target of 26 cents prior to that swing high there and then we've got and once we get that next target up would be a dollar 24 so that's kind of how I'm watching this one play out just want to see that follow through I do like here with the volume I like that we have this spike of volume with this big candle larger volume but just a long demand wick enclosed higher than where

it opens so uh more effort absolutely zero result for supply here in that secondary candle and usually that indicates a reversal. So I'm liking what I'm seeing so far off that as well. Whiff, you guys like dog with hat? Name has bounced the hardest, man. It was crazy. Man, I'll tell you. Solana bounces.

So anything on Solana, the DGNs grabbed it. Yeah. So we dropped into this demand structure over here hit the eq of that bounced back out uh you know the first day back up i gotta zoom this in a little bit first day back up almost took out the swing high here today clearly doing it looking well bouncing out of oversold on rsi stoke rsi is just now starting to push out of what we're sold. I love what I'm seeing there. Overall counts a little odd here, but it looks like maybe a one with a large flat here. So three waves down for A, three waves up for B, and then, you know, ending diagonal here.

So ABC1, 2, ABC3, 4, ABC5. So again, based on that, that would give us a minimum expected wave three target up here about $8.18. What are we looking for along the way? As always, impulsive breakout and close above that daily pivot should signal we're done here. According to the count, to add confidence, we'd need a breakout above wave B, which is $4.86. But you know, this is a wedge coming down here. So if you're breaking out of that wedge, you know, you, in terms of, you know, probabilities, you should be long, at least at that point, like I said, probably even here at the, at the pivot. So a lot of room to make still pretty good money on the next move up. And this is only wave three.

So we get a three, we can pull back for four, and then we get a wave five up, based on what i'm seeing here at the moment so not looking too bad there but man that is a big pull back there off this swing high up here on march 31st i don't know if anybody's really still holding that if they are i think people are still trading it um jasmine here j Jasmine is another one people were talking about for a while. Uh, again, same idea, descending channel, throw under, we should expect a sharp move up, which we're getting again today. We're breaking out already above that big candles, um, swing high there. You can see that we just, where we hit here with our wick is the same where everybody

else was hitting with wicks all the way through here so this continues to hold this february area here continues to be demand central it's continuing to push price up there looking for a nice impulsive breakout and close above that channel eq gives you a target of the channel doing the same breakout through there get you a target up here of at least four cents or so. And then based on the height of this pullback here, we've got an easy target of about 8.2, 8.3 cents up here. So it's starting off pretty well, looking pretty decent. Just need to get that follow through and continuation there. And let me see here real quick. Ah, suey. which makes me feel like i'm calling the pig suey

real like the pig boy and then our generation knows the movie deliverance exactly exactly where i was going with that all right uh so we got this uh looks like potentially a wedge going on here. Again, throw under. We've got a pin bar candle there. Love that it closed back above the daily S1 pivot. That's the kind of stuff you want to see. Right here, we've got bullish divergence right here between these lows.

And so I think you need to be long here already, but again, looking for an impulsive breakout and close above the daily pivot, which should also do it above the leading resistance, should indicate that the low is in. We got initial target of $1.41 and a half, and then $1.7165 or so to get us back to the top of this wedge here. So it's a pretty good setup. I think right there,

kind of just brings us back up here to the top. And if we can break out of there, things really look good. But for right now, I'm just focusing on these closer targets right here, as far as Suey goes. So that's where I'm at, man. I think that's all the charts I got. I like it. That was a lot. Good. Everybody here just wants to know if you hear banjos run. That's right.

All right. Well, everybody follow TX West Capital. Of course, Chris, thank you as always for your insight. And we'll see you next week, man. Sounds good, man. Take care. I want to show you guys something funny after Chris goes because I didn't expect this.

And I'm very impressed with AI because I don't know how they nailed my voice. You guys may have seen this Tucker Carlson shit that Rand Nooner has been behind. I just actually found this hilarious. It's like they make fun of me. Lark, Bankless, Wendy O, Guy from Coin Bureau, George, we are all George. I think his name is Hillary. I don't know if you guys saw this video, but like, I just don't know. AI is so good at

voices. I just had to share this. Really funny. So why do you want this job? And exactly how do you believe you'll contribute to upholding and driving the legacy of this iconic brand? Well, for me, McDonald's isn't just a fast food chain. It's an emblem of global enterprise. I call it a towering beacon of American capitalism, which is why I envision myself not just as an employee, but a custodian of its remarkable legacy. You know, this wouldn't be simply a job for me. This would be the opportunity of a lifetime for us. A chance to join one of the greatest companies of all time.

To pioneer industry-leading initiatives that set new standards for innovation and cultural influence. By bringing value to the McDonald's family and helping propel the Golden Arches to new heights. You are aware that this is an entry-level kitchen crew position we're trying to fill? I just don't want the public seeing my fucking face, okay? Well, you've got to start somewhere, right? Absolutely. Now, looking ahead, where do you see your journey with McDonald's leading you?

I like to think that I descend to a position of strategic leadership relatively quickly. Maybe regional manager? That'd be cool. Or assistant manager. Marketing. Or maybe digital advertising. Logistics, provenance, supply chain stuff. Maybe HR. But I think true growth is something internal, right? We're big on sustainable practices. I used to be a DJ, actually. So maybe vibes manager. And what would you say is your biggest weakness? Some people say I'm a bit too driven. I can be stubborn. My friends actually call me diamond balls.

I'm a perfectionist. If I'm flipping a burger, I want it to be the best. Weaknesses are for pussies and Cardano holders. I think we're both too empathetic. We cry very easily. And lastly, tell me something surprising about yourself. My name isn't really George. Believe it or not, I used to be a DJ. I once got over 2 million views on a video I made. It's Hillary. Well, thank you so much for your

interest in joining the McDonald's family. We'll be in touch soon. Please, sir. I'm begging you. I really, really, really need this job. I mean, I guess I'm just going to have to call myself five manager for now on. I love it. Love it. I actually thought that was really funny. It caught me by surprise. So good. All right, guys, that's all I got for you. I got to run and go do spaces in 15 minutes. I will be back, of course, tomorrow. Now I'm gonna check my calendar, see if we got tomorrow. Don't know yet who the guest is. And then of course the Friday five on Friday, but man, that, that made me laugh.

All right, guys. See you soon. Bye.