The Wolf Of All Streets - "Crypto Is DEAD" - Bitcoin's Silent Exodus Continues As Markets Bleed!

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Bitcoin faces one of its most critical moments yet. The crypto market is reeling as Bitcoin ETFs sink underwater, creating a $100 billion liquidity crunch not seen since FTX. Analysts warn that many new crypto ETFs could face liquidation just months after launch, even as the SEC opens the door to hundreds more under new listing rules. Meanwhile, Grayscale predicts 2026 will mark the dawn of crypto’s institutional era & DTCC begins tokenizing U.S. Treasuries.

Crypto is dead. There was a great think piece about this that we're going to dive into today, and Bitcoin's silent exodus has continued as whales exit the market. The numbers are pretty astounding. About $300 billion worth of dormant whale wallets have opened, sent coins to exchange. Those coins have moved and have likely been sold. That's what has been driving this exodus from the market, the Bitcoin sell-off, the absolutely excruciating price action that we've seen. We're going to dive into all of that today and everything bullish that is happening behind the scenes in the market with one of my favorite guests, Sadiate Powell, from Maple Finance. Let's go.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to see. time square in new york city where i'm obviously sitting right now i'm definitely not in florida uh before we get started please like and subscribe to the channel oh look we were no longer there now i'm in front of a gray screen sid how are you to see i just uh i showed my i showed my cards i'm square i'm good scott i'm good it's good to be back i thought i had you fooled and then uh we went dark for a second. All right, man. So listen, let's dig into the topics at hand. This first article, I know that you read it, it's going viral. I think it's pretty good. Crypto is dead. Not exactly what you think when you read this, though. He's not saying that we're all going

to zero, that the chains are going to die. There's going to be no transactions. He's basically saying that crypto as its own standalone industry is dead. I think that's something you would agree with because you've been at the forefront of this transition for a very, very long time basically saying you can't look at this through a singular lens anymore to being interwoven it's just payments it's just banking it's just finance it's not a standalone as we used to see it yeah i i tend to agree i mean he's got a provocative title there with with crypto his dad but essentially what he's what he's saying is that the industry or the startup sector has kind of matured to the extent that you no longer need to refer to it as this tiny subsector it's now kind of embedded

in broader financial services or, you know, gaming or prediction market, prediction markets, or betting payments, et cetera, and that, you know, and that you essentially need to build great products that just kind of rely on crypto rails rather than a product that's sort of geared more towards crypto Twitter, essentially. So I agree with the broad sentiment of the article, and, you know, and it's what a lot of us have been saying for a long time, which is you can't build punsy schemes, you have to build real products that people want to use that either lower their costs or allow them to make more revenue somehow. So to be clear, crypto is not in fact dead. Correct. Correct. Okay. Just checking.

We're not. We're not out of the job. No, hopefully not. And it is interesting. I was even talking to Dante Disparte from Circle yesterday that hasn't been released yet. And I sort of made the point and he begrudgingly, I guess, agreed. I said, you know, listen, nobody wants to. to know if they're sending USC or USDT and if they're doing it on avalanche or Solana or Ethereum. He's like, this actually doesn't become truly mainstream or adopted until somebody just goes into their bank or whatever app it is and sends USDA to someone. And whatever happens in the back and the plumbing, it doesn't matter. It can be any stable coin.

They're interoperable. It goes on whatever chain. It chooses the fastest, cheapest one. And it just looks like any other transaction. And he agreed. But I think that's kind of the same sentiment here is that we're, slowly getting to the point where it's just the rails and the plumbing. Yeah, exactly. It's like if I said money to you or you're a merchant, you don't care whether

the money comes through via credit card, debit card, ACH, or a SWIFT, and, you know, stable coins and crypto payment should be the same kind of way. You just care that the money reaches you at the end of the day. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, before we dive more into these topics, I just want to show the fact that U.S. inflation data surprise, you pointed this out to me. It was actually lower than people expected. So a better inflation print, which apparently means that the Fed could have a chance of cutting, which apparently means that markets go up, right? It's hard to parse what is good and what's bad anymore.

I joked earlier that like for crypto news, it was better when Gary Gensler would do something negative than it is when our current administration does something positive for price, apparently. But yeah, here, we're almost at 89,000 here on Bitcoin. But like speaking less about what's happening in the market, moment. I mean, yesterday we saw what, Bitcoin went from 87 to 90 to 86 in an hour. So it's kind of hard to get really excited about these moves. Is this idea that there's been a silent exodus, like I said before in the intro, 300 billion in coins in 2025 alone that were

long dormant have moved. We know there's been whale selling. This has been probably the bulk of the sale pressure. I think you might have unique insight on this. I don't want to put you on the spot, but because you're actually, a lot of people who have a lot of Bitcoin come to you to not sell that Bitcoin, right? Or to put it to work. So, like, why when there's products like Maple Finance, when we know that, like, the biggest banks are going to start loaning against it? Why do we continue to see this sort of massive selling pressure from these large wallets? Well, I think, I mean, for a lot of these wallets, you know, they've held the Bitcoin so long. They might be thinking of things like, you know, a state.

planning or, you know, passing wealth intergenerationally, we see, you know, a lot of our clients hold Bitcoin. They don't want to sell it. They don't want to give up the upside. But we do tend to be more of an institutional base of borrowers. We do have a number of family officers who might borrow against Bitcoin or ETH in order to make real estate purchases or, you know, substantial investments. But I do think, you know, for some of those long-dormant wallets, I guess the The positive side is that, you know, it's effectively kind of releasing a lot of, you know, pent-up inventory of Bitcoin, and you're not likely to see something like that repeat each year. So it's probably more like a shakeout in terms of supply hitting the market rather than something

that you'll see regularly. And, you know, Bitcoin is becoming more institutionalized. So in a lot of cases, the buyers of that Bitcoin that's been long dormant are going to be institutions who will then pledge it to borrow from folks like us. And so, you know, it's going to be held, you know, probably held for a long time from here. Or at least that's what we hope in the market. Yeah, I mean, you have to assume that it's just moving from the hands of one kind of holder to another. And it's sort of a transfer of a new floor, I would say.

Like somebody's buying it. I mean, sailors buying it. Yeah. The other thing that I've actually seen or observed that might be interesting and may not be known to a lot of people is that actually, often what we find is that some of these really large holders, they're not necessarily. necessarily exiting into cash, they might actually just be converting into the ETFs. Yeah, exactly, because they just find it easier from an OPSEC perspective to hold, and then they can pledge it to JP Morgan or other large banks to accept ETFs as collateral. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

So I want to pivot to clearly the main topic of the moment, which is tokenization, right? Not that that's anything new, but the tokenization of real world assets has gained another round of big press. of late because Paul Atkins at the SEC has been talking about it quite a lot. I've said it every day, but the outrageous claim that in two years, the entire United States financial system will be operating on block. Quite an eye-opener, and I'm assuming that you heard that one and said, oh, really, right? But then I think even the bigger news was that the DTCC came in. This is the giant, obviously, in settlement.

Give us hit like T-plus-2 settlement and T-plus one. saying that they're also going to basically be tokenizing now that they've gotten a no action letter from the SEC and that this is the future of settlement for all markets. And then the DTCC announces, here you go, 100 trillion trad-fied giant just gave crypto a huge boost, never seen anything move as quickly, that they're doing it with Canton. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I heard that. Yeah, Canton's really, you know, make it play to kind of cement itself as the institutional chain. I know that they do a lot of repo business.

there with players like Citadel. I think Citadel also invested in them this year. So, yeah, they're definitely making a play there. Apparently, the key differentiator is the privacy aspect that they think is going to be favored by institutional players. You know, we've definitely heard that before with other chains. The key angle for getting Tradfai on board in size is that you have to be able to offer them privacy.

so yeah it's going to it's going to be interesting to see i'm you know i see i see takes like you know everything's going to be on chain in two years and i think of it like an s curve where at you know it's actually slower than you expect at the start and then but then probably after five or six years we'll have way more on chain than we expect and then it kind of peters out again um i think andrew that two years seems early two years seems early if you're talking, you know, like five or seven or ten years. But I think, you know, you have to remember, like the technology trends play out over decades. Like, you know, we're still watching the, you know, the internet was still growing at a ripping pace in 2020 when it started in 20, you know,

sorry, in the mid-1990s. And so I think crypto is still going to be growing at a phenomenal pace 15, 20 years from now. It's not all going to be done in two years. So is that Canton? Honestly, I'm such a. crypto boomer that I was like, what's Canton network? Canton was incubated by, yeah, I mean, Canton was incubated by DRW and Cumberland. So it is set up to be kind of purpose built for, you know, high frequency traders, market makers, and kind of regulated participants. So I think the, you know, I think the key in adoption is, you know, where is the liquidity going? And, you know, the larger.

established chains like Ethereum and Solana, you know, they still kind of act like, like gravity sinks for new business. So it's not, it's not going to be easy to disrupt just because you have a large number of institutions kind of coming to a single chain. Right. But I think that like Ethan Salonamaxis are giving a humongous WTF to this, because it seemed like, you know, you had this sort of directionally that, you know, Black Rock would choose, you know, one of them or Galaxy would choose one of them or, you know, all the big institutions clearly were making their moves. And something adjacent to Ethereum and Solana seemingly before this, I mean, I guess Franklin

Templeton's done some stuff with Stellar. There's been some random ones, but I think most of the value accrual of tokenization in real-world assets was to Ethereum and Solana ecosystem, and this comes out of nowhere. I mean, I assume Canton, listen, I haven't even done my research on it, to stand-alone chain. Yeah. As you said, it has, you know, privacy aspect to it. And you got to imagine if they're about to, you know, clear four quadriloly. does it say an annual transaction?

But they might become a major player. Yeah. Well, I think, and, you know, it's interesting. You remember way back in the day, right, you had the FAT protocol thesis. And, you know, not just because I'm building more of an application, but I do think that, you know, value actually accrues to the, to the applications themselves rather than the protocols. And you're not seeing L1's kind of command the same valuations that they once did.

and there's a lot of questions around the ability of L1s to actually generate, you know, revenues that drive meaningful valuation growth. So, like, it'll be interesting to see where even if a lot of institutional business goes to some of these new chains that are pitched at tradfai, whether, you know, value accrual actually happens for the token there. Yeah, I, this is kind of an issue that I have. Like, Grace Gale just did there, you know, 10 big predictions for what the market. will be, and everybody's talking about utility is going to matter, right?

And we're going to have to start valuing these things based on actual transactions and revenue and such. I think that's accurate. But you kind of hinted at the point that if we start doing that, I would make the argument that everything right now at current value is wildly overvalued. Wildly overvalued. Yeah. Definitely, definitely want to agree.

All of our favorite assets down 95% and then see what wins from a transaction and utility perspective because that seems like a terrible scenario. Yeah, well, it's terrible, I mean, it's terrible for certain assets, like in particular the L1 sector. You know, maybe the larger, more established L1s are kind of immune to that. But I think most L1s probably should be revalued down 95% if you look at their actual earning capacity. If you see nowadays, what I see behind the scenes is that the actual real power is with

the applications, you know, if Avey goes and pitches. you know, five chains, like partnerships with five chains, it's commanding incentives from those chains, payments to launch on the chains. Like, that's because the users come for the applications. They don't come for the chain specifically. Right. But by that argument, shouldn't we be more excited about the price action on Ave than we should be about the five chains that. I agree. I think we should. Like, I think, you know, we don't get excited about the valuation of the SWIF system or the ACH, I think, you know, we get excited about the value of Apple and Google and VDIA. And so I think in the same way, we should actually be more excited about the

valuations of the bigger DFI protocols, whether it's AVE or Athena, rather than the chains themselves. Hyperliquid, interesting case and point, because the app is the chain. Yeah. It's not looking good for a lot of the dinosaurs. If I mean, if you look, accurately value them based. Well, if you, like, if you look at like Maple, for example, you know, we make roughly 25 mill sort of annualized. We make more revenue than most, most L1 chains. But, and indeed, I think over the next 12 months, most DFI protocols will make more

revenue than most L1 chains. And so I think that at a certain point, the market is going to, is going to flip in, in which sector it assigns higher values to. Okay. there's an interesting conversation then you're obviously making real money which gives you a real valuation a i would say generally not non-specific to you when a company makes money in crypto how does that value accrue to the token holder when there is one because that's a huge problem and then also which verticals are you most excited about since you make money in a number of ways

which ones do you see growing the most for 2026 uh it is it is actually a good question so when uh when a or an application makes money, how does that value refer to the token holders? Up till now, the main mechanism for that has been buybacks because you can't pay dividends to token holders legally. You can't assign economic rights to token holders. Notwithstanding, you know, I've seen Medidale in this concept of ownership tokens. However, if you have a token that has legal rights attached to it,

you would instantly fail the regulatory checklist on every exchange. So you wouldn't actually be able to be listed on any exchanges. So you would have a token that would have economic rights for holders, but there's no venue to trade it. So it's like having a fantastic company, but you can't get it listed on NASDAQ or New York stock exchange. So what liquidity can you get on it? But I think buybacks will probably continue to be the main way

that profitable defy and crypto companies try and return value to token holders. I haven't seen a better way kind of come along yet. And maybe we'll see better opportunities once Clarity Act passes where maybe we can pass dividends to customers. In terms of what sectors, I think, will benefit over the next 12 months.

Like I think, you know, I'm kind of most interested in the core DeFi sectors. I think prediction markets will do well. I think perplexes will continue to do well. I mean, even the small perps dex is still print money. Like whenever I talk to the to the teams, there. Some of the revenue numbers those guys are doing are astronomical. Exchanges you've never heard of with like a few thousand customers somewhere on planet Earth and no KYC or making a lot of

money. And then lending and borrowing and then stable coins. So I think, you know, 2026 is going to be very good for defy. And those are the sectors I kind of pay the most attention to and, you know, naturally we, you know, focus our attention on kind of the lending and borrowing sector. Yeah, I mean, I had Bill Barheight on yesterday from Abre. They're launching a very similar product to this. I think that these are becoming very popular, right? But you obviously have a liquid yielding dollar. You're not allowed to call them stable coins, right?

Yeah, go ahead. I would say, but, you know, whether a name or otherwise, it's a yield-bearing stable coin that, like, you earn this 5.2% yield, but you can still use this, you know, in the same ways you would use a normal stable coin. You can, you know, post it as cloud. Yeah, well, I mean, with it, I mean, yeah, you can use it in a lot of similar ways. We don't pitch it as a stable coin. We actually view, the way I would view it is like you have the underlying layer of infrastructure, which is a stable coin.

So in the case of that product, it's USDC and USDT. We don't want people to use our product for for payments and we wouldn't pitch it as a stable coin itself we pitched it as a savings product for holders of stable coins and but then you can post it as collateral you can loop it you can sell it on a secondary market you can fix the interest rate and so we want to be that layer above we like working with all the stable coin providers right but we don't you know we don't want ourselves to be a stable coin is very difficult business and very competitive but but the advantages of having this in defy and that's actually been our fastest growing source of capital right and our

cost of capital is now actually very competitive with wall street so we're coming under when i go and talk to some of the community banks and asset managers who are trying to come into the space and because we can source capital from defy our cost of capital is actually lower than there so we can undercut them on pricing and that helps us from from a competitive perspective but that's because of the composability of defy because you can take syrup usDC and you can use it in avay or morpho or oiler or uniswap or pendle man i'm old enough to remember when crypto was simple i remember when i remember when defy was uh was like five teams yeah i mean wasn't defy just like farming taco to get ham to get yam to uh to put it in pickle you guys are like real companies

doing serious things with a whole lot of money it was like a whole other level I think I want to zoom in a bit more on the stablecoin side, not specifically what you're doing. I don't know if you saw this announcement from Coinbase. I just ripped the video as it was coming here, but we got Coinbase launches custom stable coins. Users can now issue branded stable coins backed one by one by Coinbase custodied collateral. I ripped the video so we can watch it really quickly in this case. We're announcing that you can now create your own custom branded stable coin with Coinbase backed by USDC. I think it's interesting.

Coinbase custom stable coins offer the ability to embed your brand in every transaction, rewards on balances with best-in-class economics, and a seamless issuance process managed by Coinbase. We're working with innovative partners like SoulFlare, FlipCash, and R2, all who are launching with Customs Stablecoins in the coming months. I mean, do I need a stable coin? Like Scott, Scott, Scott, Scott. Scott.

Scott. We're running a lot of letters and words to put on the end of USDA. Yeah. We've gone through just about the entire alphabet. Interesting product. I would say it's interesting as well. It's probably actually second to market, right? Like if you look, Anchorage has been doing this with Athena for,

I think it was Jupiter or one of the other Solana product. products was going to have its own stable coin that was effectively backed by USTB, which is the Athena stable coin built on Biddle and an anchorage custody as well. So, you know, interesting competitive dynamic that stable coins as a service is kind of becoming the next big service. I think it means effectively the economics as a stable coin issue, we're probably going to get a little bit worse. I was going to have to be sharing revenue. If I launched my own stable coin for tips or, you know, whatever it is, then I wouldn't do that unless I'm obviously sharing in the revenue, right? It's kind of an affiliate deal for USC. Yeah, it's, yeah, exactly.

That's exactly right. So the question is, you know, if you're, you know, Coinbase or a circle on USC, you know, the calculation you're making is that you can get the market larger such that even if you're giving up some of the economics and taking a lower margin, it's a much bigger price. You're still going to make more money overall. You know, same kind of question is, you know, do you want to be like Walmart or do you want to be a boutique with higher margins? I think the instructive thing to look at would be to look at the history of Visa and MasterCard and those payments networks where initially they were probably clipping larger margins and then you see branded cards come out and then they give, you know, interchange fees. and other cashbacks and rewards to the users.

So theoretically, they're taking a smaller piece of each transaction, but they've expanded it to a much larger audience. So it's affiliate marketing. I think the only thing, you know, it's like Warren Buffett said that, you know, when there were all those car companies in the 20s and 30s, he didn't know,

you wouldn't know which car company to buy stock in and pick, but you didn't know to short horses. And one of the things, I think is like, I don't know which stable coin is ultimately going to win. However, I do know, you probably want to be short, Visa and Mastikard. Yeah, and Western Union, right, except for they're going to be using Sondia. But just to what you said right here, total stable coin supply is up 33% this year to over $304 billion, with monthly adjusted volumes now exceeding Visa and PayPal.

Yeah, right? So that's, they're going to leave Visa. You don't even need to, you don't even need to guess, like stable coins are crushing these things. I think last year, I don't know if it was a 12-month calendar year and pegged to what date, but there was a story a couple weeks ago that we were basically the half of ACH on stable coin transaction volume, like dwarfing Visa and MasterCard in total volume and like actual VIT transaction volume, but halfway to the entire basically, like core of the banking. It's going to leave it in the dust.

Like it's going to be multiples of what currently happens today and, you know, all of Vezzo master card and the banking system transactions. Yeah, I think that the difference this time around with a new innovative technology is that the companies, I would say the incumbents are well aware that they're about to be replaced and are actually trying to participate or to adopt the rails. I mean, I showed this recently, but YouTube now that's eligible U.S. creators receive payouts in PayPal's P-YUSD stable coin, the worst. You can put any letters around U.S.D by the way, P-Y are the worst.

You could have chosen anything. Unless I get free marketing with us talking about it. Yes, I talk about it a lot. Maybe I got played. And how digital dollars moved through creator monetization. So, yes, there's a story that YouTube is adopting stable coins, but the bigger story maybe is that PayPal, which launched PYUSD a long time ago, is really trying to find ways to get it used because they know that this is what's happening.

and Visa and MasterCard also both have their own stable coin plans, right? I think they're victims of their own success in that, you know, PayPal wasn't the top leader in the space, right? So I could take a bigger risk without it having to cannibalize a larger, more profitable business. Whereas if your visa, you know, it's like the institutional imperative. Every positive thing they do for a stable coin internally comes at the expense of this profitable cash cowing business. is one of the best businesses business models of all time and so institutionally there's just there's just so much resistance to setting up a new product that cannibalizes that internally and so i think they are really going to struggle and it's just they're they're a victim of

their own success yeah i i think everything's going to move to stable coins i really do and you can see that the banks agree because they're fighting so hard to like stop it yeah yeah on the yield side Don't, don't, don't let the stable coin issuers pay rewards out to people. But I did see, was it, the OCC granted, what, five charters last week to the, to the, to the, Circle, Betco, Ripple, Paxos. Yeah, Paxos. Coinbase? I don't know who the fifth one.

I'm just guessing. No, I actually can't remember who the fifth was, but yeah, that was the group. I asked Dante about that yesterday, being able to really be a trust and custody these assets safely. Well, means they can custody assets themselves. So it makes Circle, allow Circle and others to be more vertically integrated. They now don't have to outsource custody. So it's a positive step for them. And then the next step from there would then be being able to take deposits.

And, you know, I think, you know, it's open to debate whether the government or the regulators will allow them to eventually just become banks themselves who can take deposits and originate loans. Or whether they want to keep them kind of pure, you know, in a more pure form as just. stable coin issuers who take, you know, only hold T-built assets and super safe assets. Yeah, I mean, I asked Dante about this kind of yesterday, obviously, because it was such hot news. And I think some of them will really want to be banks. I think maybe a circle and others will want to, are perfectly happy to stop at the trust and then integrate into the banks and make money actually from the lifting banks rather than compete. I agree. Part of their potential income is to be the company that a huge bank decide to work with to launch their own stable coin

or to handle yield or all of these things. That's probably a more profitable business than being a bank themselves. I agree. Being a bank isn't necessarily a great business. I mean, J.P. Morgan is a terrific business, but for the average bank, it's not super profitable. And you have regulatory capital constraints. You have liquidity restraints. Most of them don't make more than a 10 to 15% return on equity, whereas, you know, a stable coin assure, you know, tether is the most profitable company in the world per employee, you know, Circle makes software like margins, you know, it's a better business being that rather than a conventional bank, I think. I'm really wondering what's going to happen to a lot of stable coins when rates inevitably come

way down. You know, I mean, you're betting on a stable coin company, especially, I guess a public traded one, is just kind of like a interest rate bet, isn't it? Potentially, unless they start introducing like interchange. So mint and burn fees, transaction fees, that type of thing. I think potentially that's a race to zero. However, that would be the other angle. They just kind of look to what came before in the payment processing companies. Or launch a blockchain, right?

Yeah. I mean, stripes do that. That's the other thing, but again, it's unclear to me that the blockchains make the money. Yeah. Why wouldn't blockchain fees get competed to zero? I think blockchain fees get competed to zero. I at some point triggered the XRP army in a comment about that recently. And Joel Katz, David Schwartz, I don't know which one he goes by, but the CTO, I think, of Ripple basically came in and made that argument. That it was like when we were talking about the value of XRP is like, well, you think that eventually this becomes commoditized and arbed away where the fees are zero and tokens accrue nothing on that side.

And I'm like, scratch in my head thinking it's not exactly a great. case for anyone's talking in this situation, right? Yeah, yeah. They're a little ahead of the curve of everyone else, though, because they've been investing in other businesses. So they have, you know, they have diversified revenue streams. Yeah. So you mentioned this earlier, and I don't want to, I want to make sure that we talk about

it. So you brought up the Clarity Act before and said that that can be a potential catalyst. This story is just another in a series of similar ones, but crypto industry Insiders met with key senators, a market structure bill negotiation. So we know this is not getting done this year. It was originally supposed to be done by July or August. That was punted. Then we had a government shutdown. Obviously nothing was getting done. Now we're getting to go time because if they don't get this done, we're going to hit midterm season and a lot of other bigger stories are going to be in the news and it's going to get forgotten. But in the past few weeks, we've had not only crypto

industry insiders meeting with key senators a number of times. We've also had actually, like Moynihan and the CEOs of major banks meeting about crypto legislation. How important, I guess, is the Clarity Act in your mind? I mean, you guys dance around this regulatory, like, situation constantly. So how important is the Clarity Act? And do, more importantly, do you think that could actually be like an alt season or a crypto bull run catalyst? It's a good question. I mean, potentially it could be a catalyst. I think, I mean, a lot of the catalyst we've seen and tend to be kind of bottom up rather than top down. But the legislation itself is super important. The conversations I've had suggest that it could get done in Q1

next year based on, you know, based on what insiders are saying and some of the meetings happening. I mean, I understand it's, you know, it's already gone through the House. It's in the Senate and then I think it goes back to the House and then once the two forms, the bill are aligned, then it can get signed into law. But it's extremely important for allowing. traditional institutions to come in and also for players like us to offer our more defy native products in the US or at least to have a pathway to offer those in the US whether it's what kind of disclosures need to be provided risk controls sandbox treatment what have you but it's worth noting much of the US has been kept out of the defy market they're blocked from using the websites they're

they're blocked from accessing most defy products and ultimately they're the you know it's the biggest capital market in the world and it's where everyone wants to be. Yeah, I think the Clarity Act is really, really important, obviously, maybe for price. I don't really know, but I just think that we're inevitably going to see. I think it's important for fundamentals as well. I think it'll drive a lot more profits and revenues in the sector, which hopefully if we're moving into a world of fundamental investments helps price. Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. And then I guess the kind of third level of that is we never know what the political environment in the United States is going to look like more than a year ahead or two years ahead, right?

And so like if the pendulum swings and we just have executive orders and some statements from regulators and we don't have a irreversible law in the books, things can become very, very problematic. Again, I mean, we've seen this movie before. We saw people that were willing to try building in the United States when it was a bit more Wild West. And we got a very contentious sort of regulatory regime. Everybody left the United States. Now they're like dipping their toes back in and cautiously coming back. But imagine like you bring all your operations back to New York City, you know, for crypto.

And then Elizabeth Warren gets back in power and we get another Gary Gensler and all of a sudden everything you did for the last four years is like illegal. Yeah. Well, I think, I think, you know, that's where things like no action letters or guidance and statements by the SEC are still helpful, even if they're not law. but definitely the best thing that can happen, you know, during this administration is to get some kind of law in place to govern all of this so that we can't have, you know, a reversal and a return to, you know, what did the court call it, arbitrary and capricious behavior? Great capricious, yeah, the gray scale or ripple, one of those. Yeah, great, great term.

So Clarity Act could be a catalyst. I mean, as we kind of wrap up the year, it's obviously been underwhelming for a function of price action. I think a lot of people just very unhappy with the October and November that we were supposed to get, the cycle we were promised. I mean, how do you kind of frame 2026 in your mind? I'm not asking you to make like grand price predictions or anything, but just, you know, I'm quietly optimistic. Look, I think, you know, we're seeing things like the inflation print that the macro picture is getting a little bit better. I think we spent most of the year under the poll of, you know, tariffs and geopolitical strife.

So I think seeing a, seeing a return to more stable conditions in 2026 would be beneficial. I can see more rate cuts coming. And then I think if we get the Clarity Act and, you know, and we get more movement from Tradfi into crypto, then I think you can see, you know, I can see Bitcoin pushing north of 150 into the 150 to 200k range. Now, that's not necessarily what it's all about, but I do think, you know, everybody talks about, is the four-year cycle dead? I think as it, you know, as we kind of institutionalize in space, it's inevitable that that four-year cycle is, you know, going to become less important. And, you know, and it'll just be about, as the crypto is dead article said, it's just going to be about fundamental companies that make strong revenues and have products that people like.

And those companies don't need to be worried about where we are in a four-year cycle for how they're going. going to be valued. Yeah, I guess that the question mark for the people who've been here for a long time are used to, you know, being able to yolo into a token and make 100x gains. Like, how does that trickle down to the investment side for your average crypto enthusiast? I mean, it's really exciting to see the DTTC adopt blockchain technology and Canton and SEC's comments, but can I make money on any of this? Well, I think the retail investor was a little bit screwed over the last 12 months. You had meme coins. If you set up an account on an exchange earlier in the year, you were going to get flooded with 50 or 100 different meme coins and you're going to lose money

on pretty much all levels, just a casino. So I think, whereas I think now, you know, for the new investor in 2026, they should focus on just investing in leaders in each category who are you know, who are going to have strong revenue worth of the next one that's already the VCs and the liquid funds are starting to focus more on revenue rather than overall TVL or AUM or just kind of what's a hot narrative. So I think for the average retail investors, they should just focus on investing in the category leaders in any given sector, whether it's defy or perps or or prediction markets. Yeah, maybe it's just going to be buying a bunch of index funds from Bitwise and such that are like, you know, D5 blue chips and top 10 market cap and

things like that and people will just look for broad exposure and not try to take individual winners by token. Warren Buffett says, you know, just buy the S&P 500 for most people is kind of the best option and dollar cost average. Yeah, I think with it, we've seen a lot of be careful what you wish for, like all the years of cheering for this level of institutional adoption and a lot of people who've been here from the beginning sort of got left behind financially. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like what I say, I mean, the pioneers or the explorers end up with the hours in their backs. That's right.

Good job for us. So that's so absolutely true. I also happen to believe that, and you even sort of kind of passively said, you know, predictive markets making a lot of money, perplex is making a lot of money. so clearly, like, speculation is still where the money is made in crypto. I have a very bad feeling that predictive markets that are non-crypto-native are going to steal a hell of a lot of the liquidity from crypto that people used to use to speculate.

Like if back then you couldn't really gamble if you were a 19-year-old kid somewhere, but you could go find a decentralized exchange and flip the coin or something, now you can go gamble on like the game or the weather or the pop. Or what word I'm going to say to end the show, right? I mean, these things are, it's completely nonsense. And probably the sign of end times when people feel that compelled to speculate on everything. The financialization of everything. It's, yeah, it's nihilistic.

It is nihilistic. Anything else I might have missed? Anything else coming from Maple that you want to mention before I let you go? No, for us, I mean, look, our, you know, we're talking about fundamentals before. our targets for 2026 are you know we're shooting for 100 mil error and expect to see from us we'll have more partnerships you know we've done a lot with arve lately so more partnerships on the defy side expanding to more chains and then we are always working to bring tradfai more into the space we're working on a securitization type deal at the moment but i'm you know i'm very interested

in using things like that to bring traditional investors in which ultimately grows the pie for the rest of us. I think it's fair to say that Safe Yield is back and maybe we can finally not consider it a four-letter word and think about yield only in the context of Celsius blockfi and Voyager, right? Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you, Sid. I forgot to put the names up there. I totally blew it. Look, I'm going to do it really fast. Sometimes I forget if I can figure it out. So you see guys, Sid Powell. There we go. Sir up, Sid. On X, I'll never. Like, you know, I was joking this yesterday, like, technology has basically abstracted away our memory and ability. Yeah, yeah.

Like, when I was a kid, I had to remember everyone's phone number. Now I don't know anyone's phone number. I always remember your ex. I love it. I love it. Always. And I joke about it. I think every time it's probably becoming redundant.

All right, Sid, man. Thank you so much. I hope you have a good old day. I can't wait to have you back in 2026 and see how many of our thoughts and predictions about what's likely to come or true. Yeah, beautiful. Love it. Thank you. All right. Take care.

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