The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Fueling Drug Trade? China Loves Crypto Again? WTF Is Going On!?

Starting point is 00:00:00 The anti-crypto army is back in full swing. We talked about it a bit yesterday, but it feels like we need to talk about it again because Elizabeth Warren claims that crypto has funded enough fentanyl to kill 9 billion people. That's not the only news we have today. Of course, we have a debt ceiling deal that is done and about to be signed. We have China coming right back online for crypto as the United States is obviously heading in the other direction. We have PulseChain and HEX not doing so great. Some trouble at Binance and more. Yes, guys, I'm 15 minutes late. That's just because I wanted to build up a bit of suspense. You guys don't want to miss today. It's Friday. We review the news. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:00:42 I hope you guys are having a lovely Friday. I am late 915 instead of 9am. We are still a 9am show. But as is tradition at the end of the week, one of my children has to be sick and go get tested for strep throat. So that's where I was. I was at the doctor's office and I had to rush back and do the thing and do the stuff and be at the place. You guys know how we roll. You can probably hear them in the background. I've got two sick kids home today. Awesome. Hope you guys have been listening to the Twitter spaces. The first one from a couple of days ago already has 300,000 views, which is like six months of views on my YouTube channel. Yesterday, I think we're almost at 100,000. And today's conversation is going to be even more epic because we're going to be diving very deep into FTX 2.0, whether that is a good

Starting point is 00:01:31 idea or a bad idea. And we have people on both sides. We've got Anthony Scaramucci, Mark Yusko, John Deaton, man, we've got a killer lineup with myself and Ran and Mario. It's going to be awesome. But that's not what you're here for today. What you're here for today is obviously you're here to talk about OKEx, right? We'll talk about it actually in the news today. Binance seeing a massive decrease in deposits. One of the only exchanges that's seeing an increase in deposits right now is OKEx, who is going to be my longtime partner here, guys, as you know, if you sign up using the

Starting point is 00:02:07 link that's down below in the description and make me look really awesome and good like you guys like me, then you can get up in that mystery box. And we all know that everybody's trying to get in the mystery box, get up to ten thousand dollars in crypto rewards. We are going to be announcing some other huge things. But go ahead, guys, sign up for OKEx. Let's take a quick look at the market first before we get started. Actually, guys, quite a bit of green. Surprising amount of green. I hadn't really looked because I've been, you know, doing the thing.

Starting point is 00:02:38 But I think Bitcoin's kind of flat, though, right? I mean, we took a look at Bitcoin. Here you are in the weekly chart. Doesn't get more boring than $27,000 Bitcoin for't know one two three four five six seven ish weeks at some point yeah we got up to 30 but like this price that we're trading at right now we live here guys 27 000 but it has cause for some all coin action if you guys were watching my stream on wed with Chris Inks, then you were prepared for some of the moves that are

Starting point is 00:03:08 actually happening right now, which I noticed this morning writing the newsletter. I wasn't planning to talk about this right now, but check out Injective, right? Guys, remember I drew this parallel channel and said we were retesting the 50MA, retesting this as support. Here we go. Nice, big pop there.

Starting point is 00:03:24 There's one of the other ones uh that we were looking at i think it was ocean uh and that one also i noticed uh this morning kind of had some alarmies going off same idea right had that descending line 50 ma increasing volume my guy showed you had increasing volume right into this descending line right here. And I said, this is probably going to break out ocean now breaking out. So if you were catching that right there, you're up 10%. Not bad. But yeah, we are seeing some movement on the altcoins, particularly on the AI altcoins. And that's why we chose to dig into those on Wednesday. Finally, guys, we can talk about a couple charts and have things going. Yeah. Bird flu. Check the title. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. What the F is going on? We're going to dig

Starting point is 00:04:12 into that right now because she's coming, guys. Our favorite. The loveliest lady. Loveliest lady in town town United States Senator Elizabeth Warren calls for shutdown of crypto funding for fentanyl in a Senate hearing a top US Treasury official said Chinese drug makers have found crypto payments appealing probably

Starting point is 00:04:38 and Warren cited elliptic research to back a push for legislation okay first she's not wrong she's not wrong. She's not wrong. The precursor to fentanyl being made by a number of Chinese companies, almost all of them, according to research by Chainalysis Elliptic, accept crypto payments. Okay, fine. It's a payment method. They also accept credit cards, renminbi, yuan, dollars, but that's obviously not the story here. Not the story here.

Starting point is 00:05:08 The story here, as Elizabeth has pointed out, this group sold enough precursor drugs in exchange for crypto to produce 540 billion worth of fentanyl pills, that is enough fentanyl to kill nearly 9 billion people, all paid for by crypto. 9 billion people, guys. There's only 7.8 billion people on the planet. We're going to kill the next 1.2 billion people on the planet that don't even exist. So hide your tits. If this doesn't get any more observed, she has effectively created a fud sandwich of three of the things that Americans fear the most all at once. Crypto, fentanyl, and China. We now have nine billion people dying because of the fentanyl crypto chinese connection that none of you were even thinking about until elizabeth warren had a senate hearing the anti-crypto army here is in full force guys we have to fear elizabeth warren i mean john f kenney literally said it said it in

Starting point is 00:06:18 a famous speech he said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself and elizabeth warren and crypto uh crack china fentanyl and crack dip dive dodge dive dodge dodge crack fentanyl but yes guys have you ever seen a fud sandwich bigger than this like i said on twitter yesterday and in twitter spaces the next announcement from senator warren will inevitably be that crypto payments are hacking the red button of the United States to launch nukes into unicorn filled daycare centers where they're having kitties and puppies over that are cute. There's nothing crypto can't kill. It can even kill billions of people that don't even exist yet. What I don't understand is who is this playing to who reads this and listens to her and is like yeah man like she's really you know she's really hitting on the issues

Starting point is 00:07:16 that are important to me you know like like if we don't kill if we don't stop the fentanyl crypto China connection, then America is going to be dead. I need to vote for her. Like, I've ranted about this so many times, but shouldn't crypto, Bitcoin at least. Okay, listen, we have a lot of problems with the crypto industry. The meme coins are fully insane, so stupid, making us look bad. We, our industry, Voyager, BlockFi, Celsius, FTX, we heard a lot of people, man. I get the anti-crypto sentiment. I do. But what voters is this appealing to? And Bitcoin itself, stable coins, cheap payments, banking the unbanked. Shouldn't that be the very ethos

Starting point is 00:08:05 and idea that progressives and far left liberals enjoy? And by the way, this is not the Republican Democrat divided bipartisan issue that we're making it out to be. This is a very, very, very loud minority of a woman who has a lot of control screaming from the mountaintop. There are plenty of Democrats who quietly, unfortunately now after SBF, support crypto in a very big way, a lot of them. And there are also Republicans who hate it. One of them, by the way, his name is Donald Trump, if you guys forgot. So this shouldn't be a partisan issue. And I don't understand who this talking point is appealing to. Are the people of her

Starting point is 00:08:45 constituency or jurisdiction that anti-crypto? Seems like there's something more nefarious going on here. I don't generally do tin hat, but we know that she takes a lot of money from banks, and this is a threat to banks. It's not really that hard to figure out. But yes, guys, Elizabeth Warren, after claiming that Bitcoin can literally do anything, now says that we're going to kill 9 billion people with fentanyl funded by crypto. Moving on to China, Binance loses $1.8 billion in deposits this May as banks curb exposure to digital assets. There's a lot going on here. First of all, $1.8 billion is a lot of money, but always an interesting narrative to me to be able to say, let's not accept these cookies and let's close this. But always interesting to me But listen, guys, there's a major regulatory crackdown, a lot of trouble with banking

Starting point is 00:09:49 relationships for Binance in the United States, in Australia, in the UK. They just pulled out of Canada. Things are difficult right now for Binance. I hate it. I like Binance. No problems here, right? But between the loss of banking partners and the regulatory crackdowns, of course, there's going to be people who are less inclined or just unable to deposit money. As I mentioned in the intro, and I'm not playing one against the other, this is in the article, OKEx, a rival exchange, saw deposits jump by 1.9% in the same period. Maybe they just haven't gotten the attention yet, but it seems like people who are more likely to deposit into Binance are doing so into OKEx at the moment. In case you're wondering, more than $13.2 billion has left Binance since last November.

Starting point is 00:10:36 And the $1.8 billion that just left is 3.3% of their total deposits. I mean, look, you could click on DeFi Llama here. You'll see, though. I mean, Binance still has $64 billion in assets, and Next is OKEx at just under $10. So we're still talking about a massive, massive dominance in market share. But now, apparently, Binance, because of all this, is looking into alternatives to traditional payment systems like purchasing their own bank or making small investments in other banks. Basically, securing banking relationships by owning those very banks. And who could blame them, guys?

Starting point is 00:11:15 What are they supposed to do here? Tough situation. Tough. What you also might have seen about Binance this week was a whole lot of FUD, which CZ quickly said was for, right? Ignore the FUD, that Binance was laying people off. Now, we know that Binance has been on a hiring spree over the last year while everybody else has been laying off. Binance has been massively expanding. Not big news here.

Starting point is 00:11:41 But what they're saying here as the reason for this is that they are reevaluating their workforce to ensure that it has the right talent density and key roles. Basically saying, man, we might have overhired in certain areas. We got some incompetent people doing a bad job and we need to get rid of them. Meanwhile, there's actually 300 job openings still listed on finance's website. So that would be curious if they're doing a mass layoff here. But it does say that this could be 20% of their employees, which is 8,000. So kind of a confusing story right here, but seems that this is just Binance moving people around, getting rid of the extra people they don't need, and then hiring into key roles that they found to

Starting point is 00:12:19 be more important. CZ said in January, that's only four or five months ago. It's June now. That's weird. That the company plans to increase its staff by 15 to 30% in 2023. So going to be interesting to see what happens. Is this layoff of 1600-ish people, which of their total 8,000, is this a result of those deposits going down that we discussed before, regulatory crackdowns, banking issues, or is this simply just Binance improving their business at the moment? Now, guys, the next topic, it was sent over by Misha. I'm hesitant to even talk about it because it triggers some kind of weird emotional reaction anytime we talk about it. And I don't have a passionate opinion about hex or pulse chain. And every time I say either of the words, I get attacked by 7,000 people with like hashtag hex in their thing and whatever, whatever. But I think objectively right now, things not going that great. As I say here, and I like this first paragraph

Starting point is 00:13:30 because it's so true of things in crypto. One of the perverse truisms of crypto is that for a certain kind of founder, the clearest path to success is to never actually build anything. Token pre-sales incentivize infinite delay because you can cash in so effectively on grandiose promises. And the reality of what you create is always going to fall short of those fantasies. We've seen plenty of projects rightfully or wrongfully accused of the same thing, right? I mean, people have been talking about what's happening on Cardano, which I think everyone intellectually thinks is a great ideal idea huge promises but still in development that's been one of their major criticisms we've seen it with countless countless countless projects but pulsex finally pulse chain launched which

Starting point is 00:14:18 basically to my understanding just a massive copy of ethereum So like you get everything you had in Ethereum just duplicated there, but with lower fees, right? But we've seen high fees instead of low fees, a lot of bugs, and a sell-off in related assets. Now, this is interesting. In the week since PulseChain's May 13th launch, as laid out by Protos, the system has seized up and failed in a variety of ways. That included high fees, despite the entire rationale for the Pulse Chain project being essentially Ethereum, but with lower fees. After Protos published its analysis, another devastating bug was discovered, which is thought to have robbed liquidity providers on the PulseX decks of millions of dollars worth of fees. In another index of how busted the economics of the system

Starting point is 00:15:06 are, RappBitcoin briefly spiked to $70,000 per token on PulseX, more than twice its open price. Sounds like it's not going that great. Honestly, not something I have dug deeply into because I have just not been interested and I don't want to get fought. Right. But it seems like the promise of Pulse was much better than the reality, at least to this moment. Will says, will you interview Charles Hoskinson again? I absolutely will. We were supposed to have him on Twitter spaces, but we had a scheduling conflict that will absolutely happen. Real Raid Boss says, lick the thumbs up button if you hate E. Warren. Go ahead and just lick that button if you're not into Lizzie. If you're not into Lizzie. We're going to move on from this. All I can say is that right now, objectively, it seems like it's not going that great. I hope for all the hexagons and pulse chainers out there that it gets fixed and it's great. You guys see this story? Bitcoin ATM robbery in Houston, seven arrested, footage

Starting point is 00:16:10 shows suspects ramming a truck into a store. So these guys stole a truck, slammed it into the window of a smoke shop, tried to steal a Bitcoin ATM, which is really stupid, by the way, to steal a real ATM. Got probably a lot more cash in it. But as I said, even if there's no cash in a Bitcoin ATM, they can be sold on the secondary market for a significant amount of money. Okay. But apparently they did $10,000 worth of damage and stole a bunch of tools from the truck owner who they stole it from. These guys, seven of them just slammed a truck through a window, tried to steal a Bitcoin ATM, completely failed and got arrested. What idiots. I mean, I'm just here for this story because it's hilarious. There's not really much of a story

Starting point is 00:16:59 here, but I mean, what do you, why did you think you weren't going to get caught like doing the whole, let's ram a truck through the front of a store thing which one of you guys was this seriously who did it one of you is here right are one of the seven of you here if not I'm going to move on I guess we're gonna have to move on week week hey guys debt ceiling deal past congress past senate off to biden's desk to be signed great deal everyone's excited super exciting amazing so now they're going to suspend the debt limit through 2025 guys great great it's amazing we raised the debt ceiling. We can have a jubilee of debt and print another trillion in bonds and go out and lend those to people. Who

Starting point is 00:17:52 the buying knows, by the way. I have no idea. But the deal includes provisions to fund medical care for veterans. I think we can all get behind that. Change work requirements for some recipients of government aid and streamline environmental reviews for controversial pipelines and other energy projects. Okay, but here's what is happening. So basically, they're putting a bit of a spending freeze, but the deal would keep non-defense spending roughly flat in the 2024 fiscal year, which makes Republicans happy because it means Democrats can't go just spread their spending seed all over the place, right? But we'll increase by 1% in the next year, but that's after the next presidential election. The agreement would fully fund medical care for veterans at the levels included in Biden's

Starting point is 00:18:37 proposed 2024 budget blueprint, including a fund dedicated to veterans who have been exposed to toxic substances or environmental hazards. That's great. The agreement would rescind about $30 billion in unspent coronavirus relief money that Congress approved their previous bills. Good. In the first ever case of the government actually using their brain, they said, hey, let's actually go ahead and take back that $30 billion that we didn't spend. Although, guys, now we're just going to start popping it off over to Ukraine, as we all know. Anyways. The agreement would expand work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps, a longtime Republican priority, but the changes are pared down from the House past debt ceiling bill.

Starting point is 00:19:20 Guys, we can get into all this. Do you care? Do you care? Oh, the pause in student loan repayment. Good. People aren't going to get their student loan repaid before the United States government pays back their debt. The real story here is that both parties are a little bit unhappy, which usually means they've got a good deal, right? And the government's not going to default and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But none of that's really the story. The story is they just, that was me kicking. They just kicked the can down the road

Starting point is 00:19:51 another two to three years of a problem that's only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and be yet another debate next time. Unless, of course, the Republicans are in control because they just raised the debt ceiling without negotiation. People don't realize that. Republicans have raised the debt ceiling far more times than Democrats. And the only time this is ever an issue is when there is a Democrat

Starting point is 00:20:14 in power and Congress's Republican. Sorry, not trying to play politics, but there's only a political issue when you have that combination of power when either is just in control the debt ceiling goes up nobody pays attention to it because that is what we do there's a couple of hidden stories here though one is that eventually this is going to become a massive problem is going to have to be dealt with we've now done it 79 times but when you have 31 trillion dollars in debt maybe we're new up to 40 ish here We've now done it 79 times. But when you have $31 trillion in debt, maybe we're going to go up to 40-ish here. Eventually, and now is that time, you can't pay that debt. The debt service now on that debt is more than our military spending, which has long been the largest budget item for the United States government.

Starting point is 00:21:02 Think about it like a person. If this was your credit card debt, it's like, well, I usually spend the most money on my house and food and car, but now I spend more money on paying my credit card debt than my house, food, and car. What financial advisor would ever tell you that that's okay? Kids, if you're out there, save your money, get a job, don't spend more than you have in the bank, don't carry credit card debt, don't take on any unnecessary debt.

Starting point is 00:21:34 In other words, do the opposite of whatever they say. Mark's saying, Scott, doing it again, OK, X, not researching enough. Those are the facts. They're from these articles. What are you talking about? They're up in deposits by 2% and they have 10 billion and whatever. I thought you were saying I wasn't researching something else.

Starting point is 00:21:56 Whatever. Anyways. Yeah. As Miguel says, that's future me problems. Not now. Mark, I'd be happy for you to go ahead in the comments and tell me whatever problems you have with me. It's my favorite thing is to read the problems you guys have with me. Yeah. So anyways, guys, we're now paying more for our debt, which is only going to increase. And by the way, in two years, we have to refinance a bunch of that debt, which was effectively financed in the first place in a 0% interest environment. Now interest rates are about 5%. So we already can't afford to pay our debts or the interest payments. And now those are going to get refinanced to a much higher level. Have you guys seen the math on what happens if you take out a mortgage at say 2.5% versus 5% or 6% or 7%? Your payments literally more than double

Starting point is 00:22:41 on a monthly basis because it's amortized over such a long period. This is bad news bears. And eventually the piper is going to come a piping, right? You're going to come calling. We can't do this forever. I'm not saying that they should have blocked the debt ceiling, but I'm saying there has to be a more responsible way than just kicking the can down the road and saying, Hey, it's fine. Whatever, man. Raise it. Don't worry about it later. And the other question is like, who's buying this debt? Who's buying this debt? Are central banks, do you see them buying treasuries anymore? No. Foreign central banks are buying gold. They're buying gold. We've seen the reports. So somebody has to buy these treasuries. Who's going to do that? Want the short answer?

Starting point is 00:23:26 Who do you think, if you had to guess, is going to end up buying these treasuries that the United States government creates? There's trillion in bonds. I have my own theory. The United States government. It's going to be the Fed. Nobody wants them.

Starting point is 00:23:54 People are scared of the dollar at the moment. So I think through yield curve controls, which is when the Fed, what they've done in Japan, basically just buy up all the treasuries to smash down the yield curve and keep it low. It's going to be the Fed. And what does that mean, guys? You motorboating son of a bitches. That means we're going to money print our way eventually out of this problem. We're going to print the debt. J-POW and the printer are going to come in. We're going to buy it.

Starting point is 00:24:23 What a sham. What an absolute sham. ap so yeah guys it's good news for us in the short term for an american person who would have been really screwed if we default on our debt but eventually they're gonna have to solve this problem and as predatory they're gonna inflate it all the way baby they are they are they're gonna motorboat it right out of here what's our next story waiting for it to load oh this was another this wasn't a story just some uh data i brought up if you guys want to know how spastic we are since we were talking about debt ceiling i wanted to bring up the Fed and the chances that they're going to raise rates. Guys, this is like schizophrenia. You have no idea. So a few,

Starting point is 00:25:10 three weeks ago, it was priced in at a 0% chance of a 0.25 rate hike. 0% chance. Two days ago, 65% chance on CME. Today, 25.2% chance. So guys, I know it's fun to say that what's priced in and the market thinks that this and that, it changes every day. It's not news anymore. It's impossible. It's so frustrating. They're going to raise rates. They're not going to raise rates. They're going to stop raising rates soon because they're going to have to. And eventually they're going to pivot and start printing money. I don't know if that's going to happen this year. Probably not, but it's going to happen. Now let's talk about China. Why are my things? Hong Kong retail investors to start trading major cryptocurrency tokens

Starting point is 00:25:57 from June 1st as new virtual assets regime kicks off. This is from South China Morning Post. Not so fast, guys. Listen, we talked about it yesterday, so we're not going to get too deeply into it. But everyone was saying, we're going to get a Bitcoin bump on June 1st because every Chinese person is going to buy Bitcoin because they've been sitting on the sidelines waiting for their opportunity to buy Bitcoin. Yeah, first of all, any Chinese person who wants to buy Bitcoin has probably done it with a VPN, let's be real. And B, June 1st was the day that they're taking applications from exchanges to maybe be able to offer these services in China. Hasn't really happened yet. OSL can do it, I think. They are an institutional exchange in

Starting point is 00:26:39 some hash debt something or other. Everyone else now is applying to get their license, which could take weeks or months. So this is not really that big of news yet. Yet. That doesn't mean it won't be though. Because China's doing a lot of other things here. Right? So I guess really the question is, what's the angle here? What's China ready to accomplish? Well, we have Lizzie Warren in the United States with her anti-crypto army. Joe Biden tweeting about made up loopholes for rich, wealthy crypto traders as if anybody made any money in crypto last year, right? We have an uptick in rhetoric from Gary Gensler, enforcement action. and then coincidentally

Starting point is 00:27:26 china goes brian armstrong wrote a whole op-ed about how this is a threat to national security to crack down on crypto in the united states because it's giving china an opportunity well now china city launches government-backed metaverse platform next hong kong zia bank wants to be the go-to bank for crypto startups instead of Signature and Silvergate Bank. All the ones shut down in the United States. China goes, okay, we'll do that. China's state-backed firm launches two crypto funds in Hong Kong. This is the Chinese government.

Starting point is 00:27:59 This is not, right? This is the Chinese government. State-backed. And China's National blockchain research center aims to train 500 000 blockchain professionals we also saw that they wrote an entire web 3 paper and said they're going to put 14 million a year into development of crypto god man we're giving it all to china right right? So yeah, it's not that exciting, I guess. The retail could theoretically on June 1st start to be able to do crypto things. But there's a whole lot of

Starting point is 00:28:37 stories here about China reversing their entire position on crypto. And it's because the united states are being humongous assholes brockade would like you to know that he won a treadmill while in a wheelchair can't make this stuff up folks i mean you could you could but yeah guys like if we want to tell the real story of what happens happening here it's not that like retail will maybe be able to buy some crypto okay great that's cool it's that china is putting in some serious resources here in blockchain technology and is ramping up their efforts as we continue to crack down and that means they're going to likely be on the right side of history as we are on the wrong side of history. Guys, that's all the news I got. Brock Tate says it's ludicrous. I don't know if he's talking about what I'm talking about or if

Starting point is 00:29:32 the fact that he wanted to treadmill while he was in a wheelchair. I don't know. Did you try to wheelchair on the treadmill? Yeah, I don't know. Anyways, guys, so that's all I got for you here but in exactly 30 minutes from now is going to be an epic spaces let me pair let me open the thing I can tell you all the people now who we've got confirmed we got James Lavish Dave Weisisberg, favorite of the channel, Weisberger, Haseeb Qureshi, that guy's awesome, Paul Barron, Bruce Fenton, John Deaton, Justin Rezvani, Mark Yusko, Anthony Scaramucci, Travis Kling, Bill Barheit, Brian, it's going to be epic. It's going to be epic. Today it's on Rand Nooner's channel. And then I think we're probably going to just commit to Mario's channel in the future.

Starting point is 00:30:27 But guys, yeah. Ran's channel, 30 minutes, Twitter spaces, I will see you there. The guy who said I was spreading misinformation never came back. I was going to address him. Sad.

Starting point is 00:30:43 Sad. Anyways, guys, that is all I have for you. Jeff says Dave Weisberger's the goat. I agree. I agree. Guys, please come hang out, see the spaces. And if not, you know, have fun staying uninformed. I will see you guys on Monday here for Macro Monday and in spaces later today. Peace.

The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Fueling Drug Trade? China Loves Crypto Again? WTF Is Going On!?

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