The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Soars As Jamie Dimon Says “Close It Down" l Friday Five

Starting point is 00:00:00 When asked about crypto by Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon simply said if he was the United States government, he would close it down. But crypto prices continue to soar and don't seem to care at all. It's Friday, which means it's time for the Friday Five. We're going to review the most impactful news stories on the crypto market myself and Nathaniel Whittemore, a.k.a. NLW. This is quickly becoming my favorite stream of the week. We tell you guys everything you need to know. So you don't need to go through every single news source and watch

Starting point is 00:00:30 a hundred YouTube videos. We've got it all here for you in probably under 30 minutes. Let's go guys. what is up everybody i'm scott melker also known as the wolf of all streets before we get started please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button i'm going to go ahead and bring on NLW now, another big week with a lot going on here. I like it. These big weeks have been good. Yeah, it's great. Let's first just talk about what's happening in the market, right? Bitcoin obviously trading about $43,600 right now, went all the way up to $45,000, overshooting, I think, what most people thought could happen in the short term. If you just take a look right here at these seven days, you're up 14% on Bitcoin, almost 13% on Ethereum, Solana, 21%, Cardano, 37%, Avalanche, 22%. Bull market, isn't it?

Starting point is 00:01:39 I mean, it's getting harder and harder to sort of have this, oh, we're just in the middle before the bull market has really begun. I think now we are firmly in that territory where we're so sort of cautious that we're not willing to call it a bull market if you've lived through it. But when we look back historically, it will obviously have already been the beginning of a bull market, some probably meaningful period of time ago, right? Yeah, totally agree. I mean, you look at this. This is banter bubbles. I mean, it's just a whole lot of green bubbles every single day floating around there, making you want to FOMO into the market badly, right?

Starting point is 00:02:16 But there's more than I think just the narratives and the bull market and retail buying and people FOMOing back in. To be frank, I don't think that's happening at a great degree. What I do think is happening is we're starting to see some real institutional interest in the space, right? Crypto fund inflow streak hits 1.76 billion as Bitcoin Ether reach 18-month highs. I think we saw like 346 million, something like that last week. We talked about it. I don't know if that number is exact. Another 176 million this week in inflows. What's happening here? I mean, is this FOMO ahead of the Bitcoin spot ETF? Is this FOMO because prices are going up? The institutions are clearly interested here. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't feel very FOMO-y to me yet. So one, to your point, and something that I think has been the most notable part of this, and certainly the most notable part of the conversation is, this is not retail coming back in. This is not people getting text messages from friends. There's none of that so far. And so you're left with this situation where it sort of feels more legit or organic in some

Starting point is 00:03:30 ways. Now, I think that the broad sense is that it's positioning in advance of an anticipated ETF approval or a slate of ETF approvals, which at this point, I think people are sort of looking to that window in January when the comment periods for all of them are closed as the opportunity for the SEC to sort of batch approve them all. And so the sort of simplest explanation, the Occam's razor explanation, is a lot of people thinking that there might be something meaningful that happens at that time, and they're sort of buying in advance of that. And to the extent that that's the case, we'll get a lot more information in the days following the launch of that ETF to see how that behavior shifts or not.

Starting point is 00:04:16 Yeah. I think as a part of this sort of first story, institutional adoption, market going crazy, crypto soaring, we should just give the very quick update and just say US Bitcoin ETF issuer talks with SEC have advanced to key details. Fidelity spot ETF, Bitcoin ETF listed on DTCC. I think the story here is that all of the I's are being dotted, T's are being crossed right now in advance of an approval. These are very, very, very advanced parts of the process of getting an ETF approved that would not likely be happening. The SEC likely would not be spending the money, expending the resources, using their staff for these things if there wasn't a very, very real chance that this is going to happen. It's interesting. Up to even a couple weeks ago,

Starting point is 00:05:02 you and I were talking about how it seemed clear that the ETF had not been priced in, not fully at least. It seems to some extent like that's maybe what's happening now, is that it's actually being priced in. Institutions are sort of figuring out what their positions are going to look like in the world that that exists in terms of what it represents. And especially if we sort of hang out here for the next month or so or somewhere in this range leading into that, I think that will lend credence to that sort of analysis. Totally. I think our next story has got to be Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon. You guys might have seen in the amazing thumbnail, Elizabeth Warren screaming and she's holding a balloon with Jamie Dimon's head on it. I think there's debate at this point as to whether Elizabeth Warren works for Jamie Dimon or Jamie Dimon works for Elizabeth Warren. Hard to know, or maybe there's just some

Starting point is 00:05:54 mutual interest here. But it's very clear that the rhetoric of the anti-crypto army and the actual attempts at legislation to stop this industry have continued and been pushed and nothing that's happening in the courts or in the narrative is going to change that at all. We have bipartisan anti-crypto terror financing bill heads to US Senate. Legislation will crack down on terrorist organizations like Hamas by applying sanctions to foreign parties that facilitate financial transaction with terrorists. I'm going to say on this one, when you dig down deeper in the weeds, it talks about crypto very specifically. But I don't think anyone's against laws that make funding terrorists more difficult. I think the problem is that they then basically surreptitiously name crypto in a way to control it in other ways

Starting point is 00:06:42 that have nothing to do with terrorist financing. But I don't think anyone's against, hey, let's sanction people that are funding terrorists. Well, the issue with this type of thing has always been not even about whether it's sort of secretly targeting crypto. It's the specifics of which parts of crypto infrastructure is it targeting. Ever since the infrastructure bill battle a few years ago, there has been this recurrent theme of lawmakers who don't like crypto trying to say that validators and node providers and all this decentralized infrastructure needs to report on transactions. And they always say it in terms of, look, they're part of the mainstream ecosystem now and everyone who's a part of the mainstream ecosystem has to comply by the same rules, completely ignoring the fact that they don't have any meaningful customer information

Starting point is 00:07:29 on the people that are using the infrastructure that they're supporting, because that's just not the way that it works. If all of these rules were written for just updates to what exchange responsibilities were, specifically centralized exchanges, no one would be batting an eye at this. The issue isn't crypto. The issue is that it's always a guise to sort of have more extensive control on crypto. And it's not just an error or a misunderstanding. It's a specific tactic. And listen, it's on the one hand, something that we've seen over and over again.

Starting point is 00:07:59 Like I said, it has a legacy with the Treasury Department in particular going back to the infrastructure bill. On the other hand, it's very hard not to watch the proceedings of this week, and have it feel very last graspy, you know, it really reads like, you know, one, Warren is going to be a lone holdout, she will always be, even if the anti crypto army is just her, she will be in it until the day that she dies, right? That's fine. But the whole sort of affair, it just feels forced. Like everyone else is moving on, right? The markets and sort of the Wall Street is certainly moving on in terms of its relationship with crypto. All you have to do is look at the price charts and look at any

Starting point is 00:08:42 comments from some Wall Street bank or investor on any of the CNBC shows. The legal system is moving on. It's cleaning up the parts that were bad and it's proceeding through settlements with sort of the medium actors. And it's sort of, in spite of regulation by enforcement, trying to sort of figure things out in court decisions. It's only this very small subset of this anti crypto army that's not moving on. And it's no surprise that the thing that they fall back to with that is cryptos for criminals. That is the thing that you can always come back to. And in particular, right now, they've got sort of the narrative juice of heightened tensions in the Middle East as a

Starting point is 00:09:22 backdrop to make it feel more pertinent. But it's nothing new. It's nothing new in terms of the, the sort of the, the assessment or of the remedy, you know, with the possible exception of Elizabeth Warren now claiming that half of North Korea's nuclear program was funded using stolen crypto. But it's a, you know, it, it, it feels like I said, last Gaspi is the word that I keep coming back to. Yeah. The problem is that the anti-crypto army could come down to being one person, but she happens to be the most powerful person in Senate when it comes to finance and banking, right? Here she says, Elizabeth Warren, update Bank Secrecy Act to address crypto threat.

Starting point is 00:10:00 U.S. Senator linked crypto to terrorist financing, drug trafficking, and North Korea's nuclear weapons program. As you said, what I find interesting here is CZ literally, we'll get to that, pled guilty to the Bank Secrecy Act. So clearly, it's updated enough to go after anyone who they think is doing something illicit in crypto. But I want to actually play a clip really quickly of what she said, because you brought it up. This North Korea thing is a just mind blowing that she can get away with saying this without providing any evidence. It's right out there. It's crypto and it is being used for terrorist financing. It is being used for drug trafficking. North Korea is using it to pay for about half of its nuclear weapons program. We can't allow that to continue. Okay. So now maybe to be fair, we do know that Lazarus Group, the North Korean hackers, have

Starting point is 00:10:50 stolen a hell of a lot of money, right? Obviously, they're probably the most effective hacking group. But where does this claim that 50% of the nuclear weapon program, which has been around long before crypto, is funded by us? We do know where it comes from. Once again, it's a dubious reporting where, you know, listen, I think the funny irony of this or the funny reality of this is that to some extent, our indignation is just us discovering how mainstream American politics works because we're on the receiving end of it. But there's nothing uncommon about cherry picking a statistic from a dubious report and then using it to sort of beat a point into submission. Just so happens that she's doing it for crypto now. So this was a report that was not

Starting point is 00:11:33 even an on-chain report, right? She sort of misinterpreted elliptic reporting before with the Hamas claim that was then debunked, that showed up in the Wall Street Journal and was used as justification for the last couple months. This one is an even less robust report that basically just aggregates the amount of money hacked overall, and then compares it to the overall amount of money spent by North Korea on its program. So just to be clear, they're saying, here is one pile of money over here that was stolen. Here is another pile of money over here used for something by the group that maybe was involved in that stealing. Those are the same thing.

Starting point is 00:12:14 She's saying that those are the same thing, right? So again, it's not that necessarily that all of those Lazarus hacks have gone straight into that nuclear program. It's just someone identifying that the amount that has been hacked is roughly 45% of the amount of money that we think North Korea spent on their nuclear program, which are entirely different things. But again, the problem with the nature of politics and media, which is a much larger thing than we can solve, is that the clip gets repaid over and over and over again. And even if a correction gets issued,

Starting point is 00:12:49 which there's no real accountability for, the sort of narrative is stuck. Yeah, she's still beating the Hamas drum watch. I also want to show the clip of her talking to Jamie Dimon because it's really important. And she's still using the debunked fake news about Hamas, the same numbers that were in that Wall Street Journal report. She's never going to stop. But an estimated 20 billion dollars in illicit crypto transactions funded every kind of dangerous criminal. North Korea

Starting point is 00:13:17 has funded at least half its missile program, including nuclear weapons, using the proceeds of crypto crime. And Israeli officials have confirmed that Hamas received millions of dollars through crypto transactions, including, quote, large sums from Iran. Mr. Diamond, you've been CEO of J.P. Morgan for almost two decades. Can you explain why crypto is such an attractive financial tool for terrorists, drug traffickers, and rogue nations? I've always been deeply opposed to crypto, Bitcoin, et cetera. You pointed out the only true use case for it

Starting point is 00:13:58 is criminals, drug traffickers, anti-money laundering, tax avoidance, and that is a use case because it is somewhat anonymous, not fully. And because you can move money instantaneously and because it doesn't go through, as you mentioned, all these systems have built up over many years. Know your customers, sanctions, OFAC, they can get bypassed, all of that. If I was the government, I'd close it down. Okay. Yeah. I mean, if I was the government, I would close it down. We know. But JP Morgan's heavily invested. They have JP Morgan Onyx. To me, this feels like they want to kill the public

Starting point is 00:14:32 side by utilizing Elizabeth Warren's narrative so that they can control private blockchains and Wall Street can utilize it at their own leisure without any decentralization or allowing us to have our piece of the pie. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. It's so frustrating to listen to. It's also just like, so my read on Diamond is a little bit different. Yes, I think that one can make the claim that this is self-serving from the standpoint of crypto being a competitor for banks. But Jamie Dimon just fucking hates us. He's hated us forever. This is nothing new. He has had to occasionally through gritted teeth, pretend that he doesn't hate everything about us because ultimately he's a business money-making machine more than he is a person with opinions. And so at the peak of crypto markets,

Starting point is 00:15:25 he has to acquiesce to the fact that this is happening. But yeah, man, if I'm sitting in Onyx, at some point you have to ask yourself how much more of the person who is ultimately your boss or your boss's boss's boss are you going to deal with before you say, I'm not going to help make you money on this because you are just ultimately an enemy of this space. Okay. I know it's going to take two minutes, but there's an amazing song of the day that I think we have to watch that just absolutely displays the hypocrisy of everything that Jamie Dimon just said there in context of what JP Morgan has done. Is that okay? Can we play it? Go for it. And et cetera. You pointed out the only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers,

Starting point is 00:16:10 anti-money laundering, tax avoidance. Criminals, drug traffickers, anti-money laundering, tax avoidance. Criminals, the largest corporate fine at the time. Criminals, the largest corporate fine at the time Criminals, 13 billion dollars, that's billions Criminals, for selling that secure time Criminals, ruining people's lives, taking their clothes Criminals, drug traffickers, anti-money laundering, tax avoidance Criminals, drug traffickers, anti-money laundering, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers, anti-moneylons, tax avoidance, criminals, drug traffickers anti-money tax avoidance criminals, drug traffickers

Starting point is 00:17:11 anti-money tax avoidance 20 times cocaine now that's what I all drink with a cake on a boat you oh Jesus fucking Christ Now that's what I call gratification On a boat you own Jesus fucking Christ, bro

Starting point is 00:17:29 Criminals, drug traffickers Anti-money laundering, tax avoidance Criminals, drug traffickers Anti-money laundering, tax avoidance Criminals, drug traffickers Anti-money laundering, tax avoidance I think we get the idea. It's in the Pantheon. My two favorites are the regulatory capture one around Sam and Caroline, which is just an epic song, and one where he accidentally sold a board ape.

Starting point is 00:18:19 Those are my two favorite Song of Day Man songs. Yeah, and I think he has basically just done this entire section for us. I could have probably just played that song and skipped this altogether. So I think we now know, regardless of the song, that Elizabeth Warren and Jamie Dimon have an agenda and they're going to try to crush crypto and prices don't care. So let's move on to the next story, which is that the French bank, I can never pronounce appropriately because I'm an American. Societe Generale. Back to Eurostablecoin. EURCV starts trading on Bitstamp.

Starting point is 00:18:51 This matters because the listing marks the first time a Eurostablecoin issued by a fully regulated bank is available on a cryptocurrency exchange. Is this meaningful? I think it's one of those meaningful as an indicator of a trend, not that in and of itself, it's some huge thing. It's meaningful because it represents something that is increasingly inevitable on multiple levels. One, the shift of stablecoin behavior to euros, I think is probably an inevitable thing as there are more questions around the US dollar, or more specifically, the US government's relationship with digital US dollars and how active it's going to be in trying to tamp down on stable coins. It's a very natural thing to move to a stable euro. of sort of starting to get clarity around regulations, as has happened in Europe, you have these sort of very mainstream actors, you know, moving into the space in sort of fairly

Starting point is 00:19:50 obvious ways, but still meaningful ways, right? So it's kind of like these, you know, it's a great contrast, I think, to the Jamie Dimon hearing, where the eight heads of the biggest banks are all kind of sitting there ragging on crypto, because it, you know, it's, it's, it's over in Europe, you've got banks who the first chance they get are just sort of creating crypto related infrastructure. And you know what? As soon as the stable coin bill passes in the US, it's going to happen here too, regardless of what those CEOs are saying to Elizabeth Warren to be complicit in her little soundbite. Yeah. I guess the question then becomes whether Circle and USDC will sort of become the

Starting point is 00:20:25 de facto version of this, or if we'll literally see stablecoins issued by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. I think USDC's play is to try to get such a meaningful portion of that market that it makes it a very difficult space to jump in on. But given that PayPal went after that, it's likely to happen. But PayPal has also been targeted by the SEC for doing that. So it's the whole thing. So the story of 2022 and obviously late 2021 was that SBF was literally just making it rain money on politicians. We all know about his massive political donations to Biden and Democrats, the dark money donations to the Republican Party, the other donations being made by Salome and other people, basically with the interest of FTX in mind. I think many people will be very surprised

Starting point is 00:21:17 to find out crypto firms have spent more money in lobbying in the first three quarters of 2023 than they did in 2022, even counting all of the money that was spent by SPF. This obviously coming after we had the Blockchain Association Summit last week in DC, but here it is. 18.96 million over the first three quarters this year spent compared to 16.1 million during the same period in 2022, when about 22 million in total was spent, including money from FTX. We are lobbying the hell out of these guys. One thing that I'm not sure of from this reporting that I wasn't able to figure out is whether they actually counted the full range of FTX employee donations, or if this was explicitly donations to lobbying organizations. Because a lot of Sam's strategy was just pumping money into individual campaigns, and I'm not sure that that was included in these figures. In fact, it feels to me like it was not. That's true, because I

Starting point is 00:22:19 think, didn't we see numbers that were north of 100 million that he spent on individual political campaigns? Yeah, exactly. So that's worth keeping in mind. The other thing worth keeping in mind, so these numbers came out and, you know, I don't know, speaking of questionable statistics, pretty soon thereafter, you had the Stephen Deals of the world and all these sort of anti-crypto critics on Twitter blasting around that we were lobbying, we were spending more on lobbying than any other industry, which is hugely untrue. Just for reference, defense industry spends over $100 million a year. Insurance industry spends 120 million plus a year.

Starting point is 00:22:56 So the financial sector as a whole spends over $100 million a year. So listen, we are not 20% of the financial sector in crypto. So the fact that we are spending 20% of the overall financial sector, it is disproportionately high, but it's still a very different story than the one that was being presented. I think that this is a real hate the game, not the player kind of thing for me in the sense that I do not like that American politics are so dictated by money and lobbying, but they are, and we participate in American politics and we have to. So I don't know, it doesn't feel out of sync, especially given how disproportionate the amount of attention and antipathy towards this industry we face relative to other people in DC. Hate the game, not the player. I love that.

Starting point is 00:23:44 There's literally no way that the crypto industry can advance our narratives or even protect ourselves without spending tens of millions of dollars in Washington. Just literally no way to do it. Also, the people who stick around in Washington are a hell of a lot better than the people who are lobbying in Washington for us on the whole last year. It's a better crew. It's a better cohort. They've lived through the FTX thing. They've done probably countless hours of cleanup work that we will never get to see to, you know, remind people that it's not all Sam's. And so, you know, I'm certainly not going to, let's give them more money. Yeah, the amount of damage control they've inevitably had to do is probably beyond even our ability to comprehend.

Starting point is 00:24:28 I guess the next inevitable question will be when clawbacks. But I guess we'll see if any of those political donations we talked about do get clawed back in the FTX. But we can talk about that on another day. But speaking of SBF and criminals, we have updates on quite a few of the quote unquote bad actors in crypto to round it off as our fifth story today. Of course, first, we have CZ's guilty plea accepted by judge has yet to decide if finance founder can go home. But Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act last month. This is basically just them saying, OK, we accept your guilty plea. He thought he was

Starting point is 00:25:05 going to go home. It seems that maybe they're not going to allow him to. This has actually been updated. He is not going to be allowed to go home. It's official now. He's definitely not going home. I would just say that I almost feel guilty now about that little intro segue because I do not want to ever place this guy in the same bucket as SPF. Yeah. It's no. So, so ultimately, so a magistrate judge, this decision just came out late yesterday and the,

Starting point is 00:25:31 the initial judge who had ruled basically said it was a very close call. But that I think he was swayed by CZ showing up in the first place and coming to the U S to sort of, you know, basically turn himself in, in Seattle around the, around the initial hearing. And so ultimately he decided of, you know, basically turn himself in in Seattle around the initial hearing. And so ultimately, he decided that, you know, CZ wasn't going to be a flight risk, and he could go home, but that he was going to have to come back two weeks in advance of the

Starting point is 00:25:54 sentencing. The Justice Department freaked the hell out about this, which led to a lot of questions around why this wasn't part of what was negotiated in the settlement. It seems like a strange thing not to have sort of determined in advance, but whatever the case, the Justice Department basically argued that although CZ had agreed not to appeal any jail time up to 18 months, they could decide to try to push the judge for the full maximum sentence of 10 years. And should they decide to do that, the economics or the sort of rational decision-making that CZ might face of coming back to the US to face 10 years might look really different than 12 months or 18 months. And ultimately, this new judge agreed specifically because he basically said this guy has effectively infinite dollars or resources and no real meaningful ties to the US.

Starting point is 00:26:53 So it continued to be a close decision, but he sided with the Justice Department rather than CZ. I get it. I just think the guy showed up of his own volition, made the deal, paid the fine. I think that they can get to him if they need to. But yes, I guess if you do have unlimited resources and one morning wake up and say, F this, that was a terrible decision. You could theoretically just flee and it could make it very difficult for them to get you. Someone who can't flee, obviously, is Do Kwon. He's been in jail in Montenegro, as we know, but he will be extradited to the United States. This is meaningful because South Korea also really wanted him, right?

Starting point is 00:27:30 This is US one, South Korea zero. Yeah. And apparently he also wanted South Korea, not US, which maybe played a role in the decision. Well, to be clear, the decision, this is being reported by the Wall Street Journal with people who are sort of been inside these closed door meetings. Technically, I think they have, or they've given themselves till the 15th of this month to make the final decision. So, you know, it's not outside the realm of possibility. I think at least from what I've read so far that, that, that shifts, but it looks like he's coming back to the U S and we'll face justice here first. Yeah, that's what it looks like. And then the next update, because they just keep on going, we've got BitsLotto. Remember the huge DOJ announcement

Starting point is 00:28:10 press conference? We're cracking down on the crypto industry. BitsLotto. And we all said, what is a BitsLotto? But the co-founder pleads guilty to processing $700 million in illicit funds. This guy's name is a real tongue twister. Legdomikov, Legkodomov, Legkodomov. I think we're at Anatoly Legkodomov, but the Russian co-founder of Hong Kong registered virtual currency exchange, Bitslotto. Had you ever heard of Bitslotto before it was named in that action? No, I being a person who lived in the world had not heard of this thing. I remember that January when everyone thought it was, that January when everyone thought it was Binance. It's the only thing that made sense. It's another sign of where we started, which is that there is a real symmetry to what's going on right now. And as arbitrary as these things are, humans respond to patterns.

Starting point is 00:29:11 And November 22 saw the surge of chaos and agony. November 23 saw the cleanup and finalization of a lot of those things, even as new buds were blooming. And so everything that they put in the column of now resolved, even something as silly as Bitz Lotto agreeing to a $23 million disgorgement and shutting it down, just further confirms that signal that we're really on to the next thing. And it makes it feel people who are clinging to the sides of the plane, hoping to still drag it down to feel ever more desperate. Yeah, this may not have been the biggest name in the media, but it is certainly part of this massive cleanup of all of the waste and destruction of the past

Starting point is 00:29:50 cycle, which I think can only be good moving forward, obviously. And we have one more guy. I won't put him in the same bucket either. But of course, Zusu here was in jail in Singapore. Now, I don't think he was in jail for criminal reasons in Singapore. They literally stopped him in the airport and said, dude, you haven't been responding to the liquidators. We're going to sit your ass in a chair for the next three months and get all of our questions answered. That's literally what it felt like to me. But here he is. Run it back turbo. That's his tweet that he's had since he got back out of jail.

Starting point is 00:30:21 And of course, that was enough to send, you know open x flying and such because this is crypto no comment we got nothing on you got nothing on zoo no i do but he he's probably his next tweet will probably be deeply philosophical about how he's spending his time surfing and watching people drown and his philosophical cues on that. I'll throw down a gauntlet a little bit stronger on this. The number one question in terms of this cycle and are we going to do things differently? Of course, a new version of one of these guys could emerge. In fact, it's highly likely. It always happens. Someone new who's willing to skirt the rules and play really fast and loose, that's inevitable. But one of the major inflection

Starting point is 00:31:13 points, I think, for the crypto industry will be whether Sue and Kyle are welcomed back with open arms and just looked past because we don't care anymore, or whether they actually sort of have to, you know, kind of live off in ignominy. I mean, they're around, right? Their thing exists, but it certainly hasn't shown a lot of signs of people being very excited to participate in whatever it is that they're doing. So yeah, I'm curious if that's a symptom of the bear market, or because of them, I mean, launching something this summer in crypto probably was doomed to not get at least immediate traction. They've gotten pushed back, but I've said this before and I'll say it again. Anecdotally, when I was in Dubai in February, I witnessed in real time, in person, their roadshow raising

Starting point is 00:32:01 money for this and selling the token. And I can tell you that at least the biggest names in the industry were more than willing to sit down with them and send them some money OTC to get their hands on what the time were, I believe, flex tokens because they saw an opportunity to make money and didn't care who it was coming from. So my gut instinct is that retail won't welcome them with open arms, but behind the scenes, they'll be able to still make plenty of money in this industry. Yep. And that will be a sign of our utter irredeemability. But what are you going to do? Nobody ever claimed that the crypto community was redeemable, and I'm not going to try to argue it right now at the very end of the show, man. Thank you so much, guys. That is the Friday Five. We cooked through it there. We went a little over 30 minutes, but that's because we had to play

Starting point is 00:32:45 an amazing music video for you. I have no regrets. Worth it. Yeah, like the guy with the tattoo, no regrets or whatever. That's us. Everybody follow NLW, obviously. NLW, it's an easy one on X

Starting point is 00:32:58 and check out the breakdown, his shows every single day. And you can listen to this one, I believe on Saturdays on audio channels as well. All right, guys, that's all we got for you. Going to be on Twitter spaces in a bit.

Starting point is 00:33:09 And then we will see you on Monday. Thanks, man. See you guys. Bye.

The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Soars As Jamie Dimon Says “Close It Down" l Friday Five

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