The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Falls Despite US-China Deal! What’s Going On? | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

This episode of Crypto Town Hall is a candid, in-depth discussion about the current state and future of the crypto markets, with a specific focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and the rise of institutional adoption. The hosts, Scott and Dave Weisberger, lead a roundtable-style conversation with regular guests and industry insiders, covering recent price action, market sentiment, critical macro events, and the intersection of crypto and AI. The show also features a special segment with Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn, who provides expert insights into the growing Bitcoin-backed lending industry and the impact of institutional involvement.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall and happy one day to those who celebrate. We are here every single weekday at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. The show is hosted by myself and Dave Weisberger, who I see as a listener, but I'm going to assume as a speaker. And it's also hosted by the ghosts of Mario Knopfel and Ran Nooner, who have probably not graced us with their presence in half a decade. Their faces are still there. that looking good. You know, like, it's the faces that really are the draw on the flyer. They deemed Dave and I not attractive enough to be solo on the header. I'm sorry, Dave. Are you actually here, Dave?

Because I have no idea. Yeah, and for the record, my wife always makes jokes. I have a face for radio, so there you go. My mom made that joke, which is even worse. Yeah, that actually is worse. Your wife, you know, it's in Jess because she chose you. My mom didn't, you know, she just had me. It's terrible.

Yeah, well, there you go. So are you in an elevator right now or sitting in front of the vestibule? For those who missed Macro Monday this morning, which is the best hour of the week, hands down on my YouTube channel, Dave was somehow sitting in the vestibule where the people were going in and out of the elevators in his hotel or office building, and he showed us at the end, he turned it around, and he was literally just staring at the two elevators where people were clearly just going up and down the entire time. And you weren't like in the lobby. No, because the lobby is noisier. They play Newzac. So, you know, the elevator area where they had a nice little chair and table, I just use that. People kind of gave me funny looks, but big deal.

Yeah, I just want people to know how deeply committed Dave is to all of us and to these conversations. So we have another, we have another schizophrenic day today, in markets for people who care, you know, with most crypto assets getting pummeled. And most everything else doing okay and anything to do with AI, including former crypto miners like Iron and Cypher, exploding. And they had very specific deals today as well. So they're not just riding the coattails of the market, you know, the very specific deals that are, you know, I think Cyphers with AWS and Iron, was it Microsoft? I think that's right. Yeah. And, of course, then Amazon itself had a huge deal with Open AI, which has sent Amazon stock absolutely flying. I think it's fair to say that AI has some catalysts.

So, you know, we always joke that our markets, you know, when there's a big move, they go, well, you know, it didn't discount future this or future that. Or, you know, I made a joke earlier, you know, on Friday how the markets are, you know, obviously have made the fundamental decision that Bitcoin's not going to be a store of value or this. that of the other thing or crypto is not going to be relevant you know look when you have hotballs of money running around things happen that don't make any sense and you look back at them and you say well yeah this makes this was a perfect time but generally the times that are that you when you look back historically and say this is a time to buy while it may seem obvious at the time is when everyone was thinking oh my god i'm fearful i have to sell and the same thing is when you think that it's the best time to sell and take profit.

That's when everyone's getting incredibly greedy and it's like, ah, well, it's going to go a little bit further. You know, and, you know, we talk with McGowan about this all the time. He thinks the crypto market is bullish. I mean, if we could do this space, if we had a... It means sentiment. Sentiment, not price action. If we could do an instant vote of all the listeners of this space,

are they fearful or bullish? You know, what do they think is going to happen in the short term? Gun to your head, you're going to win or lose money on this. There are some people, there are some people who, who are bullish on Bitcoin, and there's almost no people who are bullish on crypto right now, as all. Right, but even the bulls on Bitcoin,

people like me, I'm bullish, but I also have no leverage. And I'm not selling anything, so it doesn't really matter. So I'm talking, I'm cheerleading, I suppose, but I don't really care what happens in the short run. If you watch even the Bitcoin community before you finish your point, like there's massive infighting, tons of drama, half of them love Sailor, half of them don't like him any more.

more because he tapped the ATM below price. All of them who invested in Bitcoin treasury companies saw the stocks pump massively, but by the time their pipes registered, which hasn't even happened yet, they're largely down on their investments. So it's been a very confusing cycle for anyone who's done anything other than dollar cost average into a few key assets, right? I won't say just Bitcoin, obviously, Ethereum has had a massive moment. Solonda had its cycle. There's been, yeah. But the point is, this morning's news, you know, a triumvirate of massive deals to expand compute and need for rations need for electricity, that has a huge impact on Bitcoin. And people ignore the fact that we learn. You can't have new grids going up

and building new grid infrastructure without some way of stabilizing those grids. And there's a disconnect happening here. And it's pretty obvious. The other thing about Sailor that's interesting is there's another disconnect happening, which is, while the banks jumping in, he has a massive lead in being able to be the leader in a completely new area of finance. So when you think about crypto and you think of people, well, they're buying this because what's going to happen the next five or 10 years, well, you can make the same argument about strategy at this point. It's like it's MNAB should be much higher than it is if you actually believe that there's going to be a major financial move using Bitcoin its pristine collateral. So, you know, whatever, but those things don't happen overnight. And frankly,

the Mnav could collapse further before it goes back up. So, you know, like, we all had opportunities to buy Grayscale at 50% discounts. And it lasted for months, many months. And there was lots going on. But, you know, anyone who did it, two years later was very happy they did it. I think you're going to see the exact same thing with strategy. I'm not saying this is the bottom. Yeah. I'm just saying that's it. There you go. I can't see any hands, by the way, Scott. I'm on it as much as I can be. I don't even know who's on stage, but at least I see William on stage with his hand up. Go ahead.

Yes. Yes, I was just to answer your question. Tom Lee was on CNBC this morning, 630, quite early, and he was quite bullish, as usual. He, again, reiterated Bitcoin at 150 by the end of the year and Ethereum at 7,000. And again, I've said this before. There's a complete disconnect between what's. going on in the crypto market specifically and the prices. Prices are just a reflection of macro, of anything, but anything that has to do with

crypto specifically. I saw an interesting headline this morning that monthly Ethereum stable coin volume hits a record of 2.8 trillion. Yeah, that is trillion. It's not a typo. trillion dollars in one month up 45 percent and I didn't know that that was surprised well kind of most of it is coming from USDC 1.6 trillion on the SDC versus 900 billion on USDT almost half so that's that's an interesting

development the the thing that I'm not sure about and I think stable coins are going to have a market fit in the business to business side, in my opinion, or in large purchases, large dollar amount purchases. I don't think stable coins are going to make a dent in the retail consumer payments side. But rather, they might be interesting when you're sending a big, like to replace big wire transfers. That's my opinion, but again, I don't know if this is going to take us into another side conversation, but... I see Carlo as a listener. Carlo, are you a speaker?

I don't know if he is. I don't see him waving his hand, but I don't know what that means. We can't get anyone else on stage right now, so we're full. I said, yeah, Gary, I see requesting as well. I don't know. I can't add anyone. Oh, I love spaces. It's ringing.

Well, let's just say that you don't. don't know. I don't know that there's an amount of money that I wouldn't bet that you're wrong on that one, William. And unfortunately, I've already won the bet because you already saw Zelle, which is the most popular bank protocol used by retail to transfer money or already adopting stable coins to go in international. So now that's going to happen. But PayPal has a stable coin. And most of that volume is coming from retail. Yeah. I mean, We talk about stable coins here too much. There's a bunch of stories that we should go through before we go down that road.

Despite the gloom in the market, I don't know, did anyone else here notice that the Secretary, the Treasury Secretary of the United States on Friday, using it to poke fun at the Democrats, lauded Bitcoin's uptime. And celebrated White Paper Day, yeah, and he said, never, never shuts down and took a shot of the Democrats. Just consider for a second where we were. when we were at 69,000 in 2022 with a network that was one-sixth as strong and an administration that hated Bitcoin. And now we have the most powerful financial person in the administration effectively, you know, celebrating Bitcoin White Paper Day and making comments about it. Now, does this move price? No. Actually, didn't do a damn thing. Should it? Well, you really want to bet against the full power of the federal government? Yeah, I mean, as I pointed out on six, I think it was

60 minutes, but Trump said yesterday to make things clear, he wants the United States to be number one in crypto, like in no uncertain terms. I mean, Adam, I can't imagine that you don't have a comment of that. Well, I'm just wondering, you know, with the talk of two trillion dollars being traded on USDC or whatever, on stable coins. How much did Ethereum actually make from all those transactions? Do we have that number? Is it $50 or $100? I just, I don't know. I just don't see how it's bullish for Ethereum at the end of the day. I don't believe, no, that's not true.

I mean, don't think, let's not exaggerate. Tell me how much they made, Will you? Well, there is Ethereum revenue. There's another chart there. It's in the millions. I mean, come on. Come on. Come on, man.

You tell me, these guys are all doing. They're all doing their separate chains. They're all doing their separate chains. I don't see how this value. Look, I'm a big Eith holder, but I don't see how this value pushes in. I just don't see it. Everybody's going to run their own chain. They're going to run their own stable on their own chain.

It's going to be completely centralized. I just don't see how it's going to push to Ethereum. I don't see how that model's been flushed out at all. By that logic, Adam, man, I don't even want to go down this rabbit hole again because I just do it. Do it, Scott. No, no, I was just going to say, like, what token does value directly accrue to to justify current prices?

None. Yeah. I'm just making it clear that by the same rationale, it's not, this is not just an Ethereum situation. A hundred percent. And I think that's why nobody believes in crypto right now. I think that's why we have this like big disconnect of Jesus. We're getting all this adoption.

We got the full stable coin. I mean, it's happening. And yet we don't feel like these chains and these underlying tokens are really going to accrue value. And they're basically, at that point, they're a meme coin. And it's like, shit, should I get out of this? Because it just doesn't feel like the value is going to accrue to them. The minute Tom Lee started bullposting Ethereum a few months ago, when Bitminor was announced,

you know, he went on TV and did something brilliant, which is that right after the genius act, he was able to explain Ethereum in a way that all of Wall Street would understand. And that was the catalyst for Ethereum. day he said it, I disagreed with it and said, wow, brilliant narrative, obviously false, but he knows exactly what he's doing. And his narrative was all that the stable coin value will accrue to Ethereum, right? I mean, that's what he said. He said, we have stable coin clarity. Ethereum is the chain for stable coins by Ethereum. And we all know that the real outcome of the Genius Act was going to be everybody trying to get their piece of stable coins

and the private chains that you talked about, and J.B. Morgan, coin, or whoever, which ones we're getting. Those are just, you know, false examples. Circle, launching their own chain, Stripe, launching their own chain. Everybody wants the piece of that. So it's not going to all go to one place,

but it was a brilliant narrative that he created, obviously, that people would understand. But it does just go to the root of the problem, which is that crypto kind of operates in reverse. You know, you launch a token. it goes up on speculation and then the founders get rich and use that money to quote unquote build things and it's all by selling tokens that retail buys and then the value never catches up so it's all on future speculation of what utility might be there or of what price will be there i think it's very

confusing for people well the real key is the the bridge from utility that value is going to be the key and it hasn't made a damn difference so far in seven years of since the ICO boom of 2017 when many of us said most of them are bullshit the real question is let's say you gain utility does value accrue to the token holder yes or no that's the important question probably not enough is the problem because it'll probably be commoditized and there'll be a raise to the bottom of fees. There are tokens out there explicitly because of Gensler's rules that became governance tokens, which by explicitly said, no, we're not going to pass any value through.

Well, okay, those should be worth zero until such a time, or very low, until such a time is, unless they can change it. There are others, like Ethereum and Solana, et cetera, where, yeah, there's value. I mean, you can state it that's needed for the validators. There's going to be revenue there, et cetera, but will it be enough? That's a very different question. I mean, I think for me, Dave, just to chime in a sec here, I mean, for me, the most concerning part right now is that there seems to be no appetite to use decentralized systems or very

little appetite, which is like I, you know, it's not like we didn't see this kind of coming. But from Wall Street side, kind of the theory was, oh, they would use this like underlying decentralized technology as like a settlement layer. and there doesn't seem to be that compulsion at this time. I'm not saying it won't flip. I'm not saying it won't change. But at this point, it really, really feels like, you know, we've just moved into this blockchain area of complete centralization.

And that's what's concerning for me. To summarize for you, Adam, we have created some incredible solutions to problems that we thought might exist, but that institutions don't want to solve because let's be real. it's very difficult to assume that if mass adoption has to go through the biggest institutions, that the biggest institutions who obviously want everything controlled and centralized would adopt the technologies that we thought they would in the beginning. They want their own ledger that they can control. Go ahead. Go ahead, Richard.

Yeah, just to add to the Pity Party while we're here, I mean, look, I think 10-10, that liquidation event was, absolutely disastrous. I think we're suffering a severe hangover from that. And, you know, when you're sitting there looking at the almost non-existent liquidity on some of these old coins, so for most people that have been in crypto, you know, you always have a flavor for anticipating however short old season, you know, and that's just always been the modus of for Randy. But, you know, you chat to people over the last couple of weeks, everybody's been heavily rebalancing if they've chosen to remain in crypto into the majors.

I mean, you've got to ask yourself, you've been doing this for eight years to have yourself go back to such a narrow appetite for risk. And all the while, you're having this complete heyday with AI, which is just shooting the lights out. Ultimately, that's equated to our old season. If you look at crypto's performance this year in comparison to the stock market and bullion, it hasn't been a great year. So, yeah, as much as there's a lot of zoom out macro optimism, which I think might take a bit longer to permeate into our future, if you happen to be employed in this space. And this is a tough moment for crypto once again. Yeah, before I go to William, I just want to be clear. I'm not saying all tokens will go to zero.

I'm just saying that it's going to always buoy price is going to be speculation. So, I mean, everything's a meme. Everything is a shared belief in this world. So if there's a shared belief by a strong community that a token is going to do well because of X, Y, or Z, it probably will, whether it happens or not, William. Yeah, I just did a quick search. The current Ethereum revenues per day are about $50 million, of which 18%, 17% from layer twos. So a lot of it is the intrinsic L1, and you can do the math. That's probably, this may be a big month, one.

and a half billion and I'm not sure somebody else said that there's no interest from the corporates of these about decentralization and decentralized systems I'm not sure what the evidence for this is I'm seeing the opposite I mean if if you don't believe that blockchains are about having a public infrastructure which is that's where that's where the benefits are going to come from the benefits are not going to come from having a thousand private ledgers Each company running their own, what have we done if we've done that? And we might as well stick to databases and go spend millions of dollars to try to connect them together. The beauty of the internet is that you don't have to worry about connecting with each other.

It's already part of the system. And the blockchains, the public infrastructure blockchains, are already connected by default. So when you connect to one of those, the big ones, starting with the big ones, ones. The bigger they are, the more connections you'll have intrinsically. And that's where the market is going. I don't disagree with that. But I just think that the institutions themselves are less concerned with our ethos and what we were trying to build. This is my point, William. Yeah. I mean, they'll connect that there will be, I mean, let's not confuse the on ramps and the off-ramps with the infrastructure itself.

So, yeah, the on-ramps and the off-ramps might be proprietary a little bit. That's fair. Because, yeah, you want to add some K-Y-C. You want to add some controls. But then at one point or the other, you have to get on the freeway. I think the good example of that is like the UIDL or all of these companies that are tokenizing real-world assets on actual public blockchains, right? So I was speaking more very specifically to stable coins when I was talking about.

where the value would accrue and Tom Lee's points, but I think there's a whole world of crypto things where they may actually focus almost directly on public blockchains, like you've been sold for tokenization. Yeah, I mean, I think that you have to be careful about a couple of things. So I do agree with William on the sense that the current banks, which have an oligopoly and are not necessarily I'm going to keep that oligopoly, and one of the reasons that this administration wants to see crypto go well and do what it's going to do is to open it up for innovation and more jobs and more things in the United States, which is the exact opposite or synthesis of what the

bank oligopoly wants, and we can talk about, you know, why. So, you know, that's a whole conversation, but let's just say that, let's just stipulate to the fact that the dominant players will want to control it and they will fail in the same way the dominant players wanted to control the internet and electronic trading and they failed and i lived through that and we could talk about that at ridiculous length probably worth a long form podcast but let's not talk about it now but where it gets really dangerous william is when you you talk about breathlessly ethereum making 50 million a day in revenue that's sales that equates the current market cap to a price to sales or somewhere around 30. Keeping in mind that the NASDAQ is somewhere between 7 and 8, it's dramatically

higher. And when you get to the S&P, it's lower. It's closer to 3 to 4. So it's very expensive at current levels and much less at Tom Lee's levels where it will be double that. And so you have to assume that those revenues are going to 10x and 20x. And if they do, cool, it can grow into that. But that's the bet you're making. No, but that assumes that you're looking at revenues as the only metric but that's not that's not the right way to look at it that's only one narrative okay maybe one other metric which doesn't look insane based on traditional financial modeling just one i don't care you said there are there are there are many other metrics you have to look at the uh including the um uh look at the market cap sorry the there is up

revenue, there is intrinsic revenue, there is velocity of the money, there is the market caps of the stable coins, there is the value of the real-world assets. Let's drill down, but you mentioned stuff. The issue is, if you're an Ethereum holder, is Ethereum going to be the only thing that makes money from this? No, because there are going to be companies, you know, have applications, software companies, infrastructure companies, real world asset companies, whatever, that are going to make a lot of money using Ethereum. And if they don't, they won't use it. So a lot, all the revenue you're talking about

is going to the securities of those companies, not to the extent that they're public or that you can invest privately, not to Ethereum the base layer. The base layer is the base layer. And, and, but you see, but that's the thing. I mean, the crypto world grew up in a world where the SEC effectively made it impossible to be called securities, but security is not dirty. word, right? That's where revenue gets passed through. And our current SEC chairman, and I'm watching Fox business in the gym. And I've seen Paul Atkins talking about crypto. I've seen tokenization on Wall Street advertise. I know it's, I see Larry Fink is right now on the screen talking about BlackRock's going to tokenize every asset. This is the single largest trend. And the people

are going to make money from it are the ones who participate in it, the companies that get better liquidity from it, the intermediaries, et cetera. It's not only. need the tokens. There are going to be tokens that are going to be worth a lot of money as a result of all this. The question is how much? But David, if you're looking just at that metric, the revenue, then in that case, Bitcoin would be valued a lot even less than Ethereum. Bitcoin is, you're right. What's Bitcoin's revenue? What's Bitcoin's revenue? You don't value based on revenue. If you want to know why the Bitcoin Digital Gold narrative is so important at Bitcoin, you just hit the nail on the head. Now, there are people like Yago that can talk about

specifically what Bitcoin can be used for and how it can be done with Bitcoin OS and others on Lightning, et cetera. But really, really, if you're, most of the people who own Bitcoin do it because they think the world needs a sound money that works in the digital age, full stop. That's it. And if that fails, then Bitcoin's going to go, kaboom. I personally don't think it's going to fail for all sorts of reasons, but that's it. But the problem is you have to be very specific. And that's why I and lots of others make the distinction. And that's why you've heard me deride people in the Ethereum world or the XRP world who say, well, you know, Bitcoin is old technology. It's not going to work. Well, okay, it's not about the technology. It's about what do you believe as a store of value?

Full stop. And you're right. The market's basically pricing that it isn't going to be that way where there's only a small percentage chance that it's going to be that way. Yeah, but Ethereum has a lot of activity, has a lot of activity, and it's fairly close and following Bitcoin in terms of store of value. I mean, all of the stable going activity is on Ethereum,

the velocity of money, the defy lending, the trading, all of the collaterals. A lot of it is on Ethereum. The layer, all of the bidirectional flows between the layers that are growing, now 130 layer two soon to be 200 the real capital formation across apps you can't just ignore the activity i'm not ignoring it i just think it accrues to the token holders but that doesn't matter let's i see dan's hand up there so i want to get other voices in here he's the first one i've seen

hey guys you hear me yeah um yeah i'm just listening to uh someone list off reasons of why Ethereum's going to do well. And I was thinking, are you trying to convince us or are you convincing yourself? I live on stable coins. That's been clear for a while. I've been here a few times and lived my entire life on stable coins mostly. Don't use Ethereum. Use Solana.

I use Solana for almost all of my Ethereum. So all of my stable coin transactions. I remember when Ethereum came out, it was this big thing. We're going to have DeFi. It's this thing that can do smart contracts, et cetera. That's what separated it from. Bitcoin. And then Salama came along and did it better. Polygon came along and did it better. I'm always reminded when I hear people banging the drum about Ethereum and saying it's

going to be the new Bitcoin, it was Udi Wirtama that said the following phrase, sticks in my head a lot. The thing about Bitcoin is Bitcoin is an asset that has a blockchain. Ethereum is a blockchain that has an asset. And when you view it that way, the difference between Bitcoin Ethereum is very clear to me. I'm not an Ethereum fan. I hold less than $100 worth of Ethereum. And I saw recently that there's a new EIP where you can pay gas fees using stable coins. So then why would anybody call Ethereum? If you own

$100, you're a maxi. Good job. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thank you for owning Ethereum. That's what I heard. But yeah, those are my points. I don't think Ethereum is great. The more I hear somebody try and convince everybody how amazing Ethereum is, it comes across as desperate.

Those are my thoughts. If you don't like them, I have others. Carlo Good morning, Scott. Morning, Carlo. I heard the call, but I couldn't jump on. So thanks for bringing me up. Look, I think stable coins are great.

You know that I'm probably the biggest stable coin bull in the space right now. But I think we can't lose sight of the fact that layer twos are still going to have a relevant piece of the puzzle because there has to be a liquidity layer. there has to be a structure for moving assets around via smart contract execution. We're talking about the real-world asset sector. We're talking about all securities going on chain. I think we're just stuck in a rut right now where we're seeing overbuilding of these networks and under-utilization right now, but I don't think that's going to last much longer.

Stable coins were an essential part of the puzzle that had to be solved, and now they're live and they're on board and we're seeing mass adoption, but we're still going to need a liquidity layer to run all this because stable coins don't grow. They're simply for strictly moving money in a safe, pegged one-to-one fashion that gives finality to transactions, but you still need that execution layer. And that's where I think the L-1s will still have relevance. Although right now it's choppy it's frustrating they're down we're failing to see use cases for them but i think we're losing side of the long game there i can't see any hands up anyone who would like to jump in please feel free um now i'm seeing half of you as listeners again good times i will defend william

a little bit like william i i'm totally with you like this i believe in a decentralized future It just feels like at this point in time, we're just on the losing end. We're getting our asses handed to us. Not to say, to Carlos' point, like eventually maybe we win. But right now, there's too much incentive for these companies to build their own L1s, their own blockchains to hold their stable coins. I just think we have to be honest with that and see where it is right now. Not to say that, you know, the base layer, hopefully, you know, in my view, will be a little. Ethereum or will be a decentralized platform, maybe Solana.

But it certainly isn't where we are right now, William. I mean, I think you have to see that right now. Yeah, but a lot of these L1 that are being built by these companies, they aren't really L1 in the true sense. They are alternatives. They are private blockchains. And right now, the biggest footprint, whether you like it or not, just look at the numbers. I'm not going to argue emotions.

Just look at the numbers. Look at the volumes that the Ethereum is doing. And right now, they have the biggest footprint. So the analogy is that Ethereum is going to be the highway. And sooner or later, you have to get on the highway. Whether you have an on-ramp or an off-ramp, you're going to have to touch Ethereum in the same way as you have to touch bitcoin whatever what you do and so are you saying like the network that you feel it just captures it because it has the network effect right now absolutely there's no denying that when

you look at the numbers and i'm not sure why somebody said that if it's going to be a decentralized future then it's going to be solana i mean come on look at the numbers salana is not as decentralized as Ethereum by any stretch of the imagination. Users don't care. Users don't care about how decentralized it is. Yeah, I have to agree with Dan. I have to agree with Dan on that. I think institutions don't care so much about decentralization.

I think it's critical to preserve defy and to give the consumer access to defy but nobody in TradFi wants to build on decentralized rails. They want predictability. They want consistency. And just like stable coins are centralized, I think, I think we're going to see more centralized chains win the day because that's what businesses tradfai have an appetite for. They don't want pure decentralization. We'll see.

We'll see. I mean, whether you like it or not, decentralization is creeping up. The fact that it's a lot easier to grow an ode on Ethereum than it is on some other blockchains, that's going to continue to creep up. And before we know it, the network effects will be there. And there will be many different places where you can settle. And you can't escape a big footprint that continues to grow right now. But William, every conference for the last, you know, since basically the dawn of crypto has had a panel titled the next billion people coming on board to, you know, defy, crypto, etc. And honestly, that's going to be done by these larger institutions, and they're all looking for ease of consumption.

And that, honestly, at least for right now, is not via defy. And so you talk about, Dan talks about Seoul. I think he's right. Like, I actually didn't like the move by Sol, the Solana Foundation, but they strove to check to Western Union to be embedded into their stable coin ecosystem because that's where the people are. right now. That may change over time, but right now you just have to look where the money is flowing, and everything that seems like it's getting large-scale adoption or large institutions are going, these are around centralized ecosystems. And I don't know what would be a catalyst to really fundamentally change that. Perhaps there will be one, but thus far, I think that this

is a story that continues to grow. And so if you want to answer the question of this forever, panel of what's the next billion people is probably through the likes of these centralized ecosystems versus what's being built in defy at least as currently constructed i'm not sure about that i mean you the i wrote about this last week a lot of these deals have been pushed on those companies and solana has had from day one a culture and a philosophy of incentivizing and funding and if you want to call it bribing, whatever, their way into adoption. So we all know that when you push yourself into a particular situation, then there might be a rejection.

So an announcement is not an adoption. All of these Barney Miller, Barney statements, I love you, you love me kind of thing. Yeah, they all look great when they're announced. Let's talk about this in a year from now, two years, when we want to see the real adoption. I mean, Ethereum is not being pushed. It's being pulled.

It's being pulled. And pulling something into the market is more organic, is more natural. It means that I really want it. It's not just, it was imposed on me. So I did not too long ago a computation. The top 10 apps on the Solana generate $2 billion. The top 10 apps on Ethereum do $4 billion. dollars. Now, do we have consumer apps in the range of millions and billions? No. But we don't

know. You cannot say that they're all going to be on Solana. That doesn't make sense. They're going to be wherever they're going to be. We're going to be, we have to wait and see until they emerge. And there is a lot of activity on the Ethereum as well in the consumer space or base. You look at an app like Blackbird that's doing loyalty for restaurants. You don't know that there's a blockchain behind the scenes. It's a very good looking app, and you just scan your phone on an NFC thing, and then you earn points and tokens and so on. And there's base in Ethereum behind. They don't even know it. And there will be other examples like that. William, I think you make a great point, though. But the question that spurred on this conversation would be,

is the value ever going to flow back to Ethereum? And I don't know that even the examples that you gave see any clear path that that could ever possibly happen. And then the only thing I'll go back, and I don't disagree with you, that the Soul Foundation has been great about buying exposure for themselves. But if you look at the partnership or the deal or whatever you want to call it with Western Union,

the unfortunate truth is the average Western Union user, is not financially savvy enough to know of the other options that are available to them. They're going to go to the same path that they've used for years and years and years, and they're going to be agnostic to what it is as far as the rails that drive it. They're just going to use what they're being told to use. And so that's where I think a partnership or a deal like that actually ends up being massively beneficial to the sole ecosystem because that's hundreds of millions of global users at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder who are now embedded into Solana.

Sorry, that's it. Hey, could you hear me now, Scott? Yeah, Dave, and I do show you as a speaker. Maricio is supposed to join in a couple minutes. I was going to chat him about Lennon. I don't see him yet, though, so we should just keep going. But yeah, I saw you and a lawyer with your hands up. Yeah, I just want to make the point that, you know, everyone keeps saying TradFi wants to be centralized.

Yes, there are key firms in Tradfai that desperately would want to be centralized because that would give them power. They also wanted the same firms wanted to control trading on the New York Stock Exchange and in NASDAQ. Now there's 20 exchanges or will be soon. They also desperately wanted to keep their market share, which they've lost to the Citadel's, the Jane Streets, and the virtues of the world. The truth is that what Tradfai want doesn't mean a damn thing. Markets will determine. And unless there's regulation that forces centralization, I'm sorry, it's going into decentralized. world in exactly the same way that some microsystems thought they were going to own Wall Street

with their own proprietary version of Unix, and almost everyone on Wall Street runs Linux now. It's the same thing. So, you know, we've seen this before. Sorry, there's only one aspect of Wall Street that is going to have some element of centralization or auditing, and that's the dreaded AML regime. And yes, there's going to be a need to have some transaction. and some reversibility of transactions for some applications. Those are two things, but neither one of those have to be fully centralized. And you just have to understand, you have to look at first principles. So all these kind of theoretical arguments, no.

I mean, but what they are going to care about is scalability, is reliability, and those matter a lot, and cybersecurity. Those are things that matter a ton. And so do your own analysis, do your own work. but this notion that somehow J.P. Morgan and BlackRock are going to be able to say, oh, no, no, we need to control it. They may want to, but they won't be able to. Because people who don't know, 20-some-odd years ago, 30 years ago, BlackRock was nothing. It was actually a Wells Fargo company that was just starting an index fund

alongside State Street and Vanguard when index funds were tiny and nobody considered them important. And they'd grown because they offered a better product. Same thing will happen in the next generation. There will be new products and new companies and some protocols will benefit. So the secret is going to be figure out which ones actually work the best, not which ones are being touted by the most important people. And so, and I actually think that generally it's going to be inverse. So we'll see. And, you know, just we could go into it. I'm not going to, I'm not going to stir this off now, but we'll talk about what I think, you know, in terms of the token wars later. Yeah, lawyer. It's important to know.

Yeah, lawyer had his hands up for a while. Yeah. Sorry, Lawyard. Yeah, no problem. I was just going to say that, and I mean, you kind of added, it did say this, but I think the level of security is hugely important, right? And, you know, I imagine, I remember that Gavin believed that in the future, that would be, there would be a world where institutions would be able to say, look, you know, we have, we think we need to be really, really secure, so we should use this sort of chain. And then otherwise we would use Kusama. I remember they had. that other blockchain, you know, and I think there's truth to that, right? Like, I think there's something on some level where you'd be fine to use Solana, and then there's something you might be doing, or at least if it were me, I would say, no, we need Ethereum. You know, I don't think it's, it was sort of the thought back then was, the more money backing the chain, the more secure it was.

I don't know if that's still true on a technical level, but it rings true to me. And I think it will ring true to a lot of institutions. And so never mind where it's safe to hold the fund. but where it's safe to actually run billions of dollars of infrastructure, to me I wouldn't even dream of doing it on Solana. Dan, I'm going to give me some last words, then I want to chat with Maricio, because I invited him specifically. Just to know, I got my emojis wrong.

I was agreeing with they want security, but I actually think that you're wrong about Solana, but we'll see how that goes. Sorry about that. Dan, go ahead. Yeah, not that. I think my hand was a phantom from before. Phantom hands.

Well, that gives us perfect timing because, yeah, let me just clarify. I mean, I agree. I think Solana can, I don't know, I don't know this Solana is not there. But if I was, you know, an exec and I was taking, you know, reading the tea leaves, I think I'd be more nervous about it. Great conversation. Great conversation. Maricio, you're here basically every day anyways, but I want to invite you to have a bit

of a longer chat because obviously you're very, very deep in the Bitcoin back lending. And we've seen huge announcements over the past couple weeks from some of the major banks, institutions, custodians across Wall Street about opening the doors to this. And specifically, I pinged you, I guess, a week and a half ago when the JP Morgan news dropped that Bitcoin and Ethereum are going to be used as collateral. And then I had my conversation a week ago today with Saylor about digital credit and all these things. And like, you're obviously the go-to guy. Levin, I know you've had your biggest year yet. We've talked about really being very little liquidations, even on these huge moves down. So I was just hoping you could offer some insight as to where you guys are at,

but then the path you see as the institutions start to come into this market. Yeah, hi, Scott. Hi, everyone. It is definitely an exciting time to be in the Bitcoin back lending space. I would say, you know, to reinforce what you just shared, we just had a blowout Q3. we did $392 million of originations in Q3 this year, put that in context. That is almost all of our originations for 2024 in one quarter of 2025. And the, you know, October, which just closed was also, I have to double check,

but I'm pretty sure it was our best month on record. If not, it's very, very close. So the momentum is definitely there. You're seeing, as expected, a lot of talk and chatter from, companies of all sizes, big and small, everybody is trying to position themselves to be a player, I would say, in what they believe to be a massive growth opportunity. I think what you're seeing, and I think there's, listen, there's benefits to having more reputable players in the industry. And I think as this matures, we all expected this to happen. What I think

I think are some interesting notes I would share from some of the players. You're seeing basically a barable approach. You're having big banks and you'll start to talk about their plans for the space. You're seeing smaller companies also announce products around this space. I think there's points to pro and against both of the proposed offerings. So, banks' perspective, the benefits are, I think they're bringing obviously a lot of capital and a lot of fairly priced capital. They've been doing this for many, many years. Some of the challenges on the banking side, though, is they are used to not being collateralized.

They are used to re-hypothication. That is basically, you know, traditional banking is 10% collateralized at best, right? They're used to lending everything out. And I think some of the questions I still have around the bank offerings are, Are they going to commit to no rehypothecation? Will they re-hypothecate? How comfortable are they re-hypothicating assets that don't have a sort of printer offload that cannot be, you know, FDIC insured? That's one question.

The other one on the banks is they're not used to a 24-7 market. They are, you know, physical Monday to Friday, close at five type of operations. In some cases, they do have some services available over the weekend. but definitely not all of them. So those are questions I have for some of the bank models. And then on the other side, on the newer companies, I have the same questions and concerns as anyone that's been observing this industry for some time, which is you can offer very sexy rates, very sexy apps, no KYC, etc.

But it opens up a different type of risk in terms of sustainability and the robustness, I would say, of the point. platform and their ability to offer those types of terms consistently over time. So maybe that was a bit of a rant to start, but I'll pause. Yeah, a few things that are interesting to me. If October was your best month and we had the Red October when everybody expected this massive up month. So it doesn't sound like your business is aligning with sentiment because clearly there's a lot

of Bitcoiners who are very bullish and willing to take loans against it even in what sentiment would say is a fearful market. Also, I guess the second question I had from specifically what you said since I asked about banks and bigger institutions, do you think that maybe a net benefit of them coming in will be that some of the higher rates that you guys are forced to charge will be arbed away as there's competition and rates can come down? Absolutely. I think that's probably the major benefit from all of this is as capital, a better

understands the risk profile of lending against Bitcoin, which is fantastic, by the way. You know, Lenin has been lending since 2018 Bitcoin-backed loans, and we haven't had a single loss or what they would consider a default. And we've been returning near double-digit interest to the people on the other side of that trade. So it's an incredible opportunity for the banks from a risk-return perspective, or anyone really with capital. And this is why I think you're seeing things like SCRC become so popular. And I think this idea of earning interest on your dollars by having those dollars deployed to fund Bitcoin back loans, which again, offered by reputable operators are a fantastic risk return. I do think those rates are going to come

down. I do think that's going to make these loans exponentially more attractive because the hurdle rate for that capital is going to be much lower. And I think that's what everyone is seeing, that people are seeing the running on the wall. And if borrowing against your Bitcoin can be faster, more effective, globally available, and cheaper or as cheap as borrowing against physical property, then it's going to revolutionize slash eat the world of asset back lending slowly over time. And I think that's exactly why everybody's so excited about this. Yeah, Dave, what you that was saying that this morning, basically?

Like, good luck liquidating your house. but bitcoin is much easier i mean it's pristine collateral i think everybody understands that that's probably why your business has been humming along so successfully for so long i just do find it really interesting that you're growing so fast even in this sort of consolidation period when everybody seems to be kind of freaking out do you think that a lot of that has to do with um the way that you you know share your proof of reserves and the transparency like do you think that it's a differentiation between you and others and the way that you act Do you think it's a rising tide that's lifting all ships because there's just the barry market is growing?

I mean, how do you view that from your, from Leiden's perspective? Yeah, it's a great question. And I do think a lot of the growth that's been that's been sort of concentrating around Leiden, you know, the only other models that I have sort of visibility into because they're open is this hybrid sort of morpho slash coin base model. But I think what people are coming back into the Bitcoin bank lending and just generally speaking, digital asset loan space, they look back at 2022. 2022 is a year that people will never forget, especially those who were in it. And the hallmarks or the trademarks of that collapse or wave of collapses was a bunch of companies that seemed to be moving really fast and slick and were saying all the right things and had very attractive terms and rates. But it ended up that they were at best misrepresenting, at worst, it was fraud. And so people don't want to take chances or prefer not to take chances when they're going out and putting their Bitcoin as collateral trusting somebody to safeguard those assets.

They're trying to look for things that have already been battle tested, tried and proven, and they're coming and they're finding leaden, right? Like there's a plethora of new companies coming out. Nearly every day you have a new Bitcoin back lender coming out and offering you sexy terms or a slick app. But people are smarter than that now. And they're putting a lot more value in proof of reserves. They're putting a lot more value on your track record. And this is why I think you're seeing a lot of this growth concentrate around Lebanon. I think there's – to the comment you made around why Bitcoin's –

back loans seems to be growing so fast where there's been, you know, muted price action. And there's been this article that's making the rounds that I found super interesting around Bitcoin having its IPO moment. Are you familiar with it? Yeah, Jordy Visser, it's got to go in viral. It's pretty good. Yeah. And I think this plays into that because what Jordy is saying in his article is there's this

rotation right now from the old school. OG bitcoinsers that have, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, but they hadn't had the liquidity to effectively get out of that trade and not hurt the market. And I think if you extrapolate that a little further, you as a person that's sort of rotating or taking profits from your stack, yes, there's a lot of people in a position where they can sell $10, $20 million worth of their stack and still be okay. A lot of these, there's a lot of people that haven't reached that. top of that mountain yet. And so they would prefer to take profits or take cash by way of a loan

as opposed to selling. So I think there's some of that too, because if you look at the profile of our borrowers, many times, particularly the larger borrowers, are clients or people who have been in the space for quite some time now. And these are relationships that a lot of times we've been nurturing for several years. And they're coming to fruition now. It's just the right time for them to do this. And I think Lennon, or Bitcoin Back Lending in general, Lennon being a big player in it, that's at this other avenue to get some liquidity and get some cash without necessarily parting ways with your position. So I think this is, in some ways, this is an extension. And I wish there would have been some element of that in Jordy's article that I didn't see it, but I felt

that just because of what I see in the market. And I think that's why I reasoned. Lennon and Bitcoin-back loans are becoming so popular now, even in this muted price action. Let me ask you this, what do you see jurisdictionally, like different parts of the world? Is this Rader in Latin America where perhaps people have more exposure to crypto because they're using it on a day-to-day basis? This is mostly U.S. customers. So, like, where are you seeing this massive growth? Great question.

So a lot of the growth is coming from the U.S. I think why I believe that to be the case is because, well, not surprisingly, the U.S. now has a massive tailwind on the industry. People feel positively about their outlooks of holding Bitcoin or digital assets if they're in the U.S. They feel like regulation is going to get better, not worse. I know this sounds like almost a given for a lot of us talking here, but keep in mind, the only real regulatory change that's happened over the last two, three years is the U.S. Right? Like, Europe is still, you know, that's set on its ways, and so is most of the world outside

of the U.S. So one reason for that is this idea that things in the U.S., if you're a consumer, if you're a builder, everything in the U.S. is going to get more clear and slash better for you. This isn't really the case in many countries outside of the U.S., so that's why I think that feeds into the excitement. The other one is the United States understands collateralization. lending a lot better than everyone else in the world, largely because they've done phenomenally with their mortgages and they're used to things like borrowing against their stock and, you know,

leasing their car, etc. Most of the world is not as used to operating in credit, largely because it's not available to the majority of them. And they're just not as, they're not as comfortable right away, like off the gate. In America, you know, if the prospects of Bitcoin look good and you feel that you can borrow against your Bitcoin with a reputable operator at fair terms, it's a gimmee to you, right? Like, you've already done it with your stocks. You've already done it with your house. It's very simple. But for someone that's never done it before, the learning curve is a little bit steeper. So by the way, it's not to say that it's not growing in other parts of the world. It's just that America, just also because the quantum size of their holders,

right? Like, if we get, you know, at Latin, we get an American trying to buy a couple million dollars to get a cottage, that's very different than the profile of borrowers you get in a place like, you know, Venezuela or Colombia, where people are borrowing $10,000 at a time to upgrade their computers or to pay or to meet payroll, et cetera. So it's familiarity. It's excitement, and it's also the quantum size of the borrowers. I know we're kind of at time here, but I want to keep going. Let's talk about, I guess, the future. How do you view Bitcoin back credit moving forward as you're obviously having tailwinds and growth?

How big does this get widely adopted? I know that you kind of had said it was a new financial primitive. Yeah, it's a great question. So right now, based on the metrics we track, and we follow on what's publicly available and also our internal data, we pin the size of the retail, centralized finance, Bitcoin-back loan universe, roughly at around $2.5 billion today. Lennon, as over Q3, we hold about 33, 35% market share in those,

one out of every three loans, roughly, give or take a little more, goes to Lennon from this industry today. I believe this is going to become a $10 billion market in the next two to three years. And I think Lennon will be in a position to capture more of that share. So I think this is a market that is going to probably five to 10x in the next two, to call it five years. Because again, you know, what feeds into that as well is hopefully more regulatory clarity. Importantly, the rates coming down.

I think as the rates come down, you're going to see a, it's going to be basically a, exponential effect between rates coming down and more people taking out these loans so i i think this industry is in its infancy and and i also think that's why you're seeing so many players try to move their chips on the table as quickly as they're trying to right now awesome man thank you so much for taking the time for the conversation anything i missed and guys you get it led in l-ed n uh you can follow maricio obviously but any final thoughts no i would say i encourage everyone to check out our latest proof of reserves at the station came out that was as of september 30 if it came out last week it shows our book size now our average collateralization

ratio so we're trying to move the bar higher for transparency uh across the industry again i think you know please demand proof of reserves if anyone's considering bitcoin back loans i would argue that's the number one thing you should look for um and the other one is just stay tuned because we have some pretty amazing things cooking, and you won't want to miss it. Awesome. Yeah, it's Ad Hottle with Lennon. It's in the title. We changed it up there so that people would see it.

You should give them a follow and give Maricio a follow. Fascinating conversation. Like, when I saw the metrics you guys had for the last month with the price down, I really wanted to dig into that. And, you know, I think that I agree with you that the legacy competition that's going to come in is just going to boost the native providers like Lennon massively because I think people are going to want that choice and they're going to see that it's superior. So love what you're doing and keep it up, obviously.

Everyone else, we're out of time here. So thank you for joining. We will be back tomorrow for the next Crypto Town Hall. All right, guys. Have a wonderful day. Thanks again, Mauricio. Cheers, man. See you.

Bye. Thanks. Thank you.