The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto's Next Bull Run May Have Just Started!

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

In this episode, the panel dives into why many investors believe crypto could be entering the early stages of a new bull market. We break down the latest developments surrounding the CLARITY Act, how banks and policymakers are positioning themselves, and why the regulatory narrative may be shifting in crypto's favor. We also explore the future of decentralized digital identity, tokenization, and Bitcoin governance, discussing how real-world applications could drive the next phase of adoption. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, good morning, everyone. Once again, being X before I talk for any length of time, can people hear me? This is a quick thumbs up. Okay, cool. So we titled this, as the Bull Run may have started or whatever, whatever we said, which is, of course, hyperbolic, given the fact we're in the middle of summer and not much is happening. But Ethereum pushing toward 2000, again, Bitcoin, you know, over 65, it feels like green shoots, and it feels like the death and despair is beyond us.

And maybe the biggest sign is, and it looks like it's true in my timeline, that somehow the X algorithm no longer is taking crypto and consigning it to the seventh level or the seventh circle of hell. But other than that, there really isn't a whole lot happening other than, you know, we're going to get, you know, some talk on clarity, et cetera. And the most important thing there, just to be very clear is if the debate is how the debate gets framed. There's two stories that I have my eye on that I think I'd like the panel to comment on. Story number one is, what will the banks do, you know, those pricks who've been, you know, getting billions upon billions of dollars, actually hundreds of billions every year in de facto subsidies by government protection to sustain fractional reserve banking?

They let the, they fell asleep, I guess, and allowed the Genius Act to go through, which creates a real potential competitive. to them and that can give rewards. And in a clarity markup, they get some of that walk back. So the question is, will the people who have been spending the money to go against clarity actually flip to be for it? And I think the answer to that is going to be yes because I think money talks and bullshit walks and they realize what they have to do. And the second narrative, which is the really important one, is the argument against clarity

from the quote, anti-crypto army. And Elizabeth Warren and her cronies is that it somehow encourages illicit behavior, except for the fact that that's not true. And Senator Lomas and her people have effectively realized this, and now they're framing the narrative as, listen, if you knock this down, the illicit stuff will thrive,

it will move offshore, and bad stuff happens. Things like meme coins that you're all yelling about Trump did, was explicitly legal, according to Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren. So now the question is, will the narrative actually change? Because if it does, that's very relevant. And while they may or may not be able to get anything passed because our Senate and our House are so dysfunctional, it will change what the regulators do.

And I think that's where we're at. I think that's what people are paying attention to. And so those are the two things that I think. Curious. Anybody else have any thoughts on this stuff? because I think most of the odds right now are really low. I haven't checked polymarket recently, but the SEC's odds of coming up with tokenization friendly rules

and the CFTC's odds of regulating crypto with a light touch. I mean, Seleague has been more loud about saying he needs clarity to act, but I don't think he necessarily does. Those are all very positive signs as well. David. Yeah, Dave. On the point, whether we're going to get passage on this, I was listening to day one of the Humphrey Hawkins testimony yesterday

by Kevin Warsh and was very much interested to see how front and center some of the concerns around the Trump meme coin were. You know, I think as a result, ethics and an ethics component in clarity, I think is going to be critical for passage. and granted we can talk about, you know, whether the banks relent, whether the banks resist. I think you've got a concern in the broader politic, which is going to get played up, obviously going into the midterms, is just ethics being a critical consideration in what we have by way of government. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to me.

So we have this asset class. You may have heard of it. It's called equities or stocks. and there's no ethics clauses in any other regulation that that single it out. I mean, it's kind of funny. I mean, is it just me, et cetera? Now, that said, should a sitting politician, should a staffer, should anybody be allowed to create a meme coin and extract value from people?

I mean, honestly, the world will be a better place if they couldn't. So, you know, I've been very outspoken that I think that his meme coins were disastrous for the crypto industry and the public perception thereof. So I don't have a huge problem with it. The question is, is will he sign it? Of course, the horse has already bolted, right? He's already done it. Is he going to do it again? No, I don't think you can go back to that.

I don't think there's any money to be made there. So, you know, at least not now until people forget. It takes a couple of years for people to forget that they were dumb. You know, when I was a kid, my parents made sure that I knew how painful it was to put my hand on a flame so that I wouldn't actually go ahead and do it. And I still remember that. But it seems like the investing populace, you know, makes the same stupid mistakes again and again and again. But it does take them a few years, right. Dave, I'm not going to go into the circumstances of your upbringing.

It sounds torturous. But, you know, relative to the question of meme points, you kind of put your finger on it directly, is that, you know, what hath gary, Grinsler rot. It's really Gary's fault. You know, nobody else. They just were doing what they were allowed to do, right? Well, they, I have said before that I think Gary is very smart. I think I think that his agenda was evil, but he's a smart man. And I think he knew what he was doing. I think he knew that if the only thing you allow people to list and get immediate liquidity are memes and governance tokens that have absolutely no path towards economic utility, that you're going to get a lot of crap, and that's going to hurt the industry, which is exactly what he was instructed to do.

So he was instructed to hurt the industry, and he was very smart about the way he did it. I mean, he was also dumb about the way he did it in terms of the legal side, in terms of, you know, like the library case and all the other things. But in terms of what he allowed, I mean, look, I think it was intentional. And I refuse to believe that as someone as smart as him didn't know what he was doing. And I know that that's sort of a controversial call. But, you know, look, if you underestimate your opponents and Elizabeth Warren is an opponent, there's no question about it. You don't do well in life.

So, you know, I don't underestimate. But they don't have to- Hey, Dave. Yep. Dave, when you talk about outline the mean coins, I think is what you're saying. No, no. We're regulating the meme coins. I don't understand.

I'm talking about what do you want to happen? I'm saying that if they put in an ethics provision, that's as simple as no sitting politician, no elected or appointed politician or their staffers, can issue a financial asset that they raise money from from the public while they are in their position. I mean, that would be better. I would rather it be not just a. meme coins, not just tokens, it should be stocks, bonds, whatever, if they outlawed that, that would probably be a good thing, knowing that they like to focus only on what's at hand,

that would be tokens. But it's about issuance, that's all. Now, my guess is that that's not what they're going to do, they're going to do something stupid, but we'll see. We're going to see the markup soon, right? That's what I think, Lou. But I personally don't think we should ban anything. I just think that if you stop sitting politicians with power from raising money from the public, that's a different, that's a very different kettle of fish. I agree. Right. And by the way, it sounds lovely wherever you are.

You in the middle of a park someplace? Actually, yeah. I'm at the Maryland blockchain boot camp. It's a week-long program in college park. Oh, cool. Yeah, and they actually have a lot. I'm surprised they've got a number of politicians coming through on the state level. And obviously they're coming to a blockchain conference, but, you know, they're deeply knowledgeable about the Clarity Act.

It's very impressive. That's good. That's, well, look, you know, there's a lot in this technology. I think we should, we should get back to that about, you know, because what a bull, what does a bull run look like in crypto? A bull run looks like, in my mind, narratives that have to do with real world. So, I mean, a lot of the stuff that you're probably, I don't know what you're learning in, in block. chain boot camp, but there's probably a bunch of things that are relevant. Yeah, actually, the highlight for me so far has been Scott Stornetta.

I'm not sure you've ever heard him speak, but he is, A, both the inventor of the blockchain and B, the most cited person in Satoci's white paper at the three, three sidings. What did he talk about? He's got a new company around decentralized ID that sounds super interesting, peer-to-peer, decentralized ID. That is interesting. That is interesting. Yeah. And actually, I'd like to take a moment, you know, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of micro-strategy's all-time high.

And so to celebrate, I gathered three of the smartest analysts to share their thoughts on a webinar, you know, about kind of where strategies is at today? and what its evolution kind of into a digital asset platform looks like. That's now kind of the verbiage that they're all using about it. And I've got Jeffrey Kendrick from Standard Charter and Lance Vitanzah from TD Securities, who's, you know, their main banker. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to learning a lot from these guys. So if anybody wants to join, I just tweeted about it

from, you know, my profile. Okay, cool, it sounds interesting. It's funny, I had a conversation. with a reporter yesterday about a lot of those issues. I'll be curious if your analysts agree with me. But I don't want to spoil that. We can talk about it if that's what people want to talk about. Anyway, that's cool.

David, is that a new hand or an old hand? I'm going to go with old. Hey, Matt, you threw up an emoji on digital ID. Oh, I'm just loving Scott Serenna, man. Yeah, OG, and I do love digital ID. I think that's something where we're probably going to need to to explore a lot more. But yeah, shout out to Scott, man. He's one of the best. And, you know, Lou, appreciate your comments on that. I'm going to have to go and look up that digital ID. That's

something I did not find out. So thank you for sharing. That's why I love these spaces. I mean, the thing that's interesting is I think that in terms of real world problems, I mean, that's always been, to me, one of the holy grail things that blockchain do, because the notion of being able to verify, but not, you know, but say pseudonyminous or whatever. I mean, If you look at the way email works, and I am not an expert. I mean, I know enough about technology to be dangerous, but I also know enough not to assume that I know the inner workings. I had an interesting experience. I had my email account, my main email account, you know, blocked yesterday.

And the reason I got blocked was because somebody was using the name of my email, you know, my, you know, Dave at Weisberger. They were using it as a, they were attaching it to fishing. Now, I wasn't sending anything. My email was totally secure. I talked with my email domain managers. I use a very professional one who is, you know, it's industrial strength, business strength, not personal. And they said, yeah, you're fine, but someone obviously complained about it.

And he explained to me that a lot of people run email services that don't block fishing and that there's all sorts of stuff that gets attached to it. And part of the problem is because you can't tell who you are, there's no notion for it. So digital ID is a very big deal. And even on things that affect people's lives that they don't realize. Brian, I see a hand up. Yeah. This is an area I've been watching for a long time.

And it just seems like between Civic and so many other plays, like no one's really correct on digital ID. For emails, Dave, I'm sorry, that happened. not a lot of people realize emails are when you send an email you could really put any return address you want on it so it's equivalent of you know writing a return address on an envelope you can put anyone else's email address you want I realize it now I you know I've been getting emails from a bill at micro you know Bill Gates at Microsoft.com for years well you are important I know yeah clearly um But the digital ID thing is fascinating because a lot of times those conversations happen outside the auspices of a government issuance.

And I don't think we're going to get there with a peer-to-peer system. And I know this isn't necessarily the topic of the morning, but every single system I've seen seems to leave out the government part of it. And most of the time the government is the issuance of ID, the arbitrator of ID. the authenticator of ID. So the whole ID is the whole ID is to not have that be anymore. Right. Why should, you know, because one of the things, you know, along with getting debanked, you know, they'll take your passport away too.

Right. So it's really weird. You can't even travel, right? You don't have any ID to travel with if the government doesn't like you. So having, you know, and it's not just digital, but. decentralized digital identity that I think is, you know, because at the end of the day, nothing is really decentralized if we don't have decentralized ID. Yeah, I just don't know if it's ever going to happen in the way we want it to.

We have a better chance of, you know, forming a better foundational government than we would have any global digital peer-to-peer ID take root. Those are pretty long odds, I'd say. Yeah. Yeah, those are pretty long odds. But, you know, whatever. Anyway, I think Tomar, you're the next hand up. Yeah, just a little bit more on the digital ID thing.

I think it's one of those things that really conflicts with the real world because, as was said, governments exist and they have the monopoly over violence within a geographic territory. And that includes restricting you from movement or not to digital ID right now. is not government issued is usable on non-government-controlled platforms. Like Noster is this popular thing, at least among many bitcoinsers, where your identity is a public key that you've created attached to a private key, and you just need to keep it secure, but that's your identity.

And it's different from having a Gmail address or an email address from some other place because you're not relying not only on any government, But you're not relying on any entity to confirm your identity. Your identity is just a number that you've made up that is very random and high entropy, and so nobody else can figure out how to generate the private key for it. So it uses essentially the same security as Bitcoin. But with that said, you can create as many identities as you want. If it's sovereign creation of identity, there's no way to restrict someone to having one identity

and having to use it consistently. So this notion of a digital ID that's sovereign is detached from the idea of one ID per person. And the idea of an ID that is attached to one ID per person requires some central administrator and some potential biological confirmation or knowledge confirmation from the individual that they are who they are. And they become two very different concepts in practice.

So I just thought it's, first mentioning since we're talking. Oh, I think that that was exactly where my brain was going is that, you know, there's this incredible dynamic tension between people's desire for freedom of, you know, and the governments who want to, who claim they want to know who everybody is. I say claim because most that there's, I mean, in our country, there are quite a few politicians who benefit rather dramatically by having no ID because they can, you know, they can do whatever the hell they want in terms of elections and voting.

I mean, that's the obvious. I mean, if you want an application for ID, for a digital ID, for verifiable blockchain voting with biometric confirmation for, you know, because I don't think anyone would argue that that use of ID is fine. What we don't want is that you have to go buy a, you know, a can of beer. But in the same way that we talk about, you know, if, there's someone in charge of printing money, they will print dollars and give it to themselves. If there's someone in charge of printing IDs, that's also corruptible. I mean, they can issue a lot of IDs.

And I think that's what we have in the case of alleged voter fraud, right? That there's a lot of non-legitimate people who are issued legitimate voting rights through various roles in the plot. They do it sleazier, but yeah. But that's where self-generated digital ideas don't. solve the problem, don't solve the problem because I can generate a billion IDs. And digital ID to, you know, with, you know, basically we have this stupid eye, the dumbest system ever, we have this thing called a social security number that anyone in the world, you know, there have been so many hacks of social security numbers from companies, you know, from, you know,

where you put them in, that there's no security on your social security number. There's no security on your driver's license as much as you might want to think of it. There's probably virtually no security on everyone's passport ID. Everything named by the government is the opposite of what it is. So social no security number. That's right. Yeah, exactly right. It's a complete, it is oxymoronic.

Let's just use that word. But they could tighten that up and they could make it right. And it would actually be cheaper. But there's all sorts of implications in that. And people don't want to do it. It really is a question. You use the word entropy. I think it was you, Tomer.

I don't know. Someone used the word entropy. Yeah, I used it. The entropy of politicians is to keep the current system. It's towards the status quo. It's in debate, you know, they have this, in policy debate, they have this word they use. They use the word presumption to basically mean that it has to be large enough, important enough, to overcome the tendency to keep everything the way it is.

and our politicians, that that level of presumption in our political system is really high because everybody thinks that the way it is benefits them. It's only when there's an external change that things happen. And why am I saying this? It's like because we have this technology that is, I think, overcome presumption in the stock market and bond market. I think people are starting to understand that there are absolute tons of money to be saved in the back offices of Wall Street and that the ability to handle, you know, that tokenization handles multi-currency in a way that is way cheaper and way better than a lot of the other

processes, that it could increase competition against certain companies who are making money, but free up and make the financial system better. And that's why tokenization is taking off. It's not taking off because, oh, it's cool. Well, sure. cool, but it's taking off because it can save people money. People, technologies take off when they matter for people. And things like ID is, I personally am interested in it because we have huge problems with that right now. But I think that your point is right. I hate to say it. Anyway, I see Matt your hand, Ryan's and Tomer your hand. I don't know of any of them. Yeah, this is a, this is a great discussion. I'm glad Lou brought this up because we've talked about this in some

of the other spaces when we're talking about ID and digital ID. And I'm certainly a fan of it, but I think it needs to be implemented in the right way. And I think that sometimes that we've seen throughout history, whether it's been with taxes or other regulation or anything, it's always kind of been a slow creep. And I think way that might look, and I'm just kind of spitballing here and riffing at about 740 in the morning here on the West Coast, but I think age verification for children really can become one of the easiest political and technical entry points for something like a broader digital ID. Protecting children really is a widened. acceptable goal, right? So governments can introduce like an identity infrastructure under the narrow

label of, quote, let's say, age assurance rather than proposing a universal digital ID from the start. Just curious your thoughts on that. I can't. I must have a crazy, crazy mind. But my first thought was that everybody would sort of have a virtual QR code and that, you know, before you go out with someone, you get to know how old they are, you know, by whatever. You know, you're talking about. You know, about the world of consent, but you know, that's just the first thing that I thought of, which I don't know, is kind of sad that that's where my brain went first thing this morning. But look, I think that the tension between wanting to be able to keep your own privacy, yet wanting to make sure that you control everything that is you is extremely important and needs

to get resolved. And there's lots of different ways that people can think of. if you drew up the ideal world, the ideal world is everything is biometric. And when you need to prove your idea, you can prove it. And you should have an anonymous modality for many of the activities we do. Sort of like we allow cash. And in America, take cash away from people to get pretty upset. I mean, cash is making a comeback.

I don't know if anyone has noticed this. But certainly, you know, I have noticed in the places that I have been much more use of cash being encouraged by vendors and business. than a couple years ago. I mean, not a small number. I mean, much more. I mean, I've used cash this year. I'd say cash use is up 50 to 100% if not more.

And that's a perfect example of a pseudonym and his transaction. And so the world is going to need to figure out a way to allow for that. That's really the point. So within crypto, probably the biggest story. And Tomer, since you're here and you actually understand this better than most, one of the stories that probably the big story in terms of Bitcoin is the whole BIP 110 debate. And I'm curious your thoughts on it. I mean, I saw a word from, I knew you'd have an opinion. That's why I'm sorry I'm putting you on the spot.

But you're one of the more intelligent voices. So I'm curious, I'm curious what your thoughts are. Because to me, my naive opinion is it feels. feels like an over-engineered, centralized solution to a problem that the market is solving. But I'm curious what you think. The question becomes what problem is trying to be solved. And I think that there's two very different problems that are being talked about. One is there spam on Bitcoin and is it existential?

And that's not actually the main problem that it's trying to solve and also technically what it's not able to solve. The bigger issue is a Bitcoin governance issue, and it comes down to what changes to the Bitcoin client are made by the Bitcoin core loosely formed organization, and is their judgment consistent with what the Bitcoin consensus wants to be? So they made a number of chain the ability to write these

inscriptions and ordinals like to put JPEGs on the Bitcoin blockchain was something that came that someone

discovered essentially an exploit for a few years ago and it took off and there were bitcoiners who wanted an

intervention to make it harder to do that and that didn't happen and then later on actually this for people

don't have to know what this means but the policy the policy which isn't the consensus rules

but the relay rules of Bitcoin was modified by core to allow larger, larger transactions that were arbitrary data and not movement of money around. And that's what has a lot of people very upset and frustrated. They also don't like how the discussion was held. So there's a power grab, which in Bitcoin ultimately leads to no change, ossification. And if we, If this BIP-110 thing is successful, it'll mean that outside contributors who aren't blessed by core, in fact, are viewed with hostility by core, have been able to make some kind of change to Bitcoin, in this case, with the support of a large part of the community and a large percentage of the miners. If not, it doesn't make the issue go away that people are concerned about the judgment of the Bitcoin core.

team and you can expect that there will be political tension, you know, over direction there, which isn't surprising. You know, the fact that for its first 10 years, with the exception of the hard, the block-size war, there was general peace and agreement and unanimity on how to govern Bitcoin. The fact that as Bitcoin gets bigger, there's more disagreement on it and there's a lot of political and technical and judgment nuance is just it's not surprising and it's probably going to be what sustained it's probably going to be that case for a very long period of time just like in america there's different political opinions and you ask any two people even who are voting who vote for

the same party they'll have very different opinions on various aspects of what's going on and whether what they're doing is for a lesser even or for a greater good or whatnot. So I'm sorry for the long and rambling thing. I just think Bitcoin's governance is what this Bitcoin 10 is really all about. And it's more indicative of how Bitcoin is hard to change and will remain in a status quo position unless you have a large consensus or some kind of emergency that causes people to. So to get to get to the, and I'm sorry for diving.

Yeah, no, please. I see Ryan and Matt's hands up before I go in. But I think this is an issue that actually matters for whether, you know, Bitcoin's will go through another bull run right now. So that's why I wanted to go at it, right? You know, either of you guys are the other names, new hands or old hands. Yeah. Well, no, mine's a phantom. Mine's a new one.

Okay. I would love to talk about this. Go ahead. Cool. So go for it. I just have to lower it now. You know, it's fascinating. about about Bitcoin because people forget that Bitcoin has a lot of layers of governance in it.

And the Bitcoin miners and the mining pools is what we could think of like the electoral college, where the miners are the voters, but at the end of the day, the pools are the ones that do the real signaling. And the pools are the ones that actually will adopt a protocol and change things. but at the same time for things to get into core it's a whole different layer of governance with the developers and what they're actually willing to let into the code base and there's this weird you know the bitcoin community ever since i got involved in it has been one of the most toxic communities i've ever been involved in like back to you know the bitcoin talk forums they would just rip you apart and it was just some of the most unhappy people i think i've ever interacted with um And now they're just incredibly wealthy, unhappy people. But there's still this idea, this purest mindset, that Bitcoin can only ever be a ledger of value and the transfer of that value. But even though there's room in every single transaction, you know, with Off Return and adding, you know, extra data in there.

And we've used it for, you know, anchoring everything from factum chain to root stock to, you know, you know, name your second level chain or second level protocol on top of Bitcoin, all of them have failed. No one's ever really wanted to use Bitcoin for anything other than just, you know, holding it on cold storage. No one even wants to spend it anymore. And yet no one wants to change it or upgrade it. So it's this weird, like, quasi-cult that's emerged over the years. And I've literally sat in the room with Luke Jr.

As he's argued with Dave Schultz from Ripple about, uh, you know, the ordinals being a virus inside the Bitcoin network. Like they were literally shouting at each other about it. You know, the funny thing is, there are two facts that drive me crazy here, but let's just talk about one. Ordinal value has dropped 96%. That's just the number.

I mean, you can't debate it. The market cap of ordnals was at its peak, 2 billion, and the market cap now is like 70 million. That is a 96% drop. That is the simple. expression of free markets healing that I've ever seen. And yet, people are claiming that there's this, if we don't do BIP-110, the thing will be spammed. And you're like, no, that's just not the way markets work for people. That, this is so true. And, you know, the day after the, on Discord,

the day after the Discord launched for Ordinals, I was in the Discord helping people set up the inscription programs. I was going through and helping them set it up. You're the bad guy. I was the bad guy and a lot of people were like complaining about it and even luke was complaining about it and i said look it's bitcoin it's open protocol if this is what the majority wants to use the chain for then that's what it's going to be used for but guess what it fizzled out just like everything else yes of course and and that's exactly what's going to happen you know mara has a slipstream they have a entire side service where you can embed any type of media anything you want into the bitcoin network where someone actually uploaded a video. There's actual video embedded into the Bitcoin chain.

They did that a couple summers ago. So there's services from miners that will let you do this stuff. But guess what? It just never catches on because it's an inferior way of doing things. It's too expensive. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's always about the market and it's always about freedom. And so this notion of existential risk when we literally saw the existential risk get defeated by the market makes no sense. But that's one thing. The more important part to me of this debate is what you were talking about, which is about the governance side. And that is there are people, I mean, we'll call them the people that Gary Cardone was talking about on Monday. And he's not wrong that are in Tradfai who understand the basic story about Bitcoin.

And think of it and say, look, I use the word option, but think that it could become digital gold. But for it to become digital gold, it has to be safe. And they worry about quantum and they worry about when they see these sorts of toxic, you know, food fights, for lack of a better word, they get turned off on the protocol. And to me, I don't think that there's really a huge amount of threat a protocol with this much inertia unless you believe that they will not be able to react to the quantum threat to me that's the literal only real implication here i mean am i out of my mind i

mean toomer you know ryan what do you think there's only patterns to overcome the quantum threat right like there there's been so many proposals of using a two of two multi-sig one of the signers being a hashed a key, right? So a quantum can't go through a hash because it's clockwork math. So there's, there's so many proposals already for dealing with quantum. It's just none of it's been like formally adopted by core. So to me that's like, I don't know. Here's the, question and then Tomer can answer is do you think that the fact that we get these, The debates like this, do they have any bearing on the fact that Bitcoin core and the node operators and the minor operators are not going to be able to get together? And that quantum will, in fact, be able to crack the security of all the old wallets and threaten the chain existentially.

Do you think that there's any implication here whatsoever? I think there's too many eyes on it. I think that honestly, pushing a, no, pushing a core update is not, it's not hard. It doesn't take very long. And honestly, there's two mining tools in the world that need to agree, and then they'll get adopted. Cool. Tomer. And then Mauritia. Yeah, I think this is instructive and educational, and you take something away from it.

But what it ultimately instructs you is a better understanding. of the layout of Bitcoin governance so that you can actually make changes for existential threats like a quantum computing thing. Like when it comes up, and I guess in a sense it's already up, but the conversation is slow about it because the focus is on price and BIP 110 and a bunch of other things. But as it comes up, you know, there will be multiple solutions offered, which is a problem that needs to be resolved. like do you implement all the multiple solutions or some of them in conflict with one another and there will also be people who for various reasons don't want the problem solved and you have to be able to filter that noise out and move without complete consensus because there are people whose interests are in destroying bitcoin so this is all part of how the community grows up and learns one of the things

i am certainly learning is that there's there's people who behave more adult like and people who behave very immaturely on both sides of the debate. There are people whose motives you might question, and I think there's people questioning each other's motives on both sides. But with something like quantum, reason is going to take the, is going to be able to be arrived at by a lot of people. I mean by that rationality. While people may disagree about when this thing is coming or even if it's coming,

they'll be able to agree on the different proposals. Like there are proposals that simply proposed a new address type that is quantum resistant, but larger, which would need to be there. And then there's all sorts of, and there's other ones that propose different addresses type, which are larger. But then you have all these solutions like, well, we're going to force people to move, or we're going to confiscate Satoshi's coins, or we're going to do a bunch of other things.

And I think those things won't survive a very long debate. There will be some vulnerability to certain coins, but out of the principle of backward compatibility, they'll be sustained. But there could be a long debate on some of those things. And you might actually see some chain split going with parties who want to confiscate Satoshi's coins, for example, and parties who say, well, if he comes back, they're his, so don't do anything about them. But I'm not worried that we won't be able to figure out a way or to implement quantum resistant signatures and addresses. And I think a lot of people will have learned a lot, actually, from the BIP 110 debate. Just as many of the people who are involved in the BIP 110 debate most intensely are the ones who were around for the block size war. And the last user-activated soft fork and saw the details of that.

And we all, and anyone who has any memory of those days, remembers. if you put it in my terms, is as Bitcoin Cash went live, which was the last big fork, and it's still there. Turns out that I actually own a few dollars worth. I mean, literally a few dollars worth somewhere in the dust of a wallet. I found it yesterday. It remembers what happened to Bitcoin during, you know, as the fork happened. Yeah, and you had like both sides calling the other side bad actors.

So pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of good history to read there. If people want an article I wrote about it, it's on Bitcoin Magazine and probably the Swan website as well. It's called Cyber Soldier Freedom Fighter. And it was written in a highly stylized version of like a soldiers account. You want a minute in the next? That sounds like I'm going to have to look it up.

Yeah, I'll send you the link. Cool. I think the next hand was Mauritio. Then Matt. Yeah, no, mine will be quick. I wouldn't extrapolate the political tension that you're seeing around Bit 110 to the quantum issue, because in my opinion, at least, it comes down to incentives, right? And while you may agree or not agree with the whole premise behind Bit 110,

and I think that's what leads to the difference in opinions, I think most Bitcoiners would agree that they don't want their Bitcoin at risk, right? They don't want their Bitcoin at a quantum-pack risk. And so that will rally the consensus. And I think there's been different upgrades in Bitcoin where you've seen a very high amount of support. There's been some that haven't shown it. But broadly speaking, when you have consensus around

this is something that makes the network better and this is something that benefits me and my self-interest to keep my Bitcoin, it's much easier to rally support around that versus something that is, I would argue, a lot more nuanced or subjective as is BIP 110. So I don't, I wouldn't extrapolate this to, because there's been a political battle around

Bip 110, that means we won't solve quantum. I would disagree. Right. Well, look, I throw it out as a straw man. I want to be really clear. I do not. I am in complete agreement of what you just said, Maritio, 100%. I just, I think that, however, when people allow arguments to fester without debating them,

without exposing them, they metastasize. And, you know, if anyone that's listening is. an investor who is afraid of this debate. And there are people who have claimed that that's one of the reasons that they're not buying Bitcoin. Look, I actually think what's happening is sellers are exhausted. The quote bottom that everyone was expecting, you know, based on, you know, micro strategy blowing up or whatever, isn't happening. And, you know, the same people who were, you know, screaming that, you know, we need to go way, way lower will be the ones that that decide to buy much, much higher. And I think that all this other stuff is arm waving. But that said,

you know, it is a narrative and there are undeniably investors who did not buy Bitcoin last year and haven't and continue to be worried about things like quantum and things like the sanctity of the network and over centralization or in the case of, you know, Scott did an interview and I see Scott, you're back with the most bullish Duke professor on Bitcoin, claiming Bitcoin could be easily 51% hacked and paid for by shorting it in derivatives, which is there's so many flaws in that. You could have seen, first of all, he talked so slowly. I didn't even want to engage because I knew it would be 17 more hours of conversation.

But, you know, I kind of hinted at that that's ridiculous and moved on, which is what I do. but I was like, you know, how long, how transparent and obvious would be if someone was building a short, that big, buying all that equipment, everything. But, man, he said he had every piece of data sported, and I let him, I let him cook. Well, I mean, there are people at Duke who have been, you know, look, there are at least three different professors who have testified in front of Congress. And they all say factually, ridiculously dumb shit to the point where they couldn't suffer any debate. They have to be prepared testimonies with only congressional people asking questions. They could never suffer an actual debate because they literally invent their own facts. But these are the things that real people listen to and hear.

And so that's why I always want to get through it. In any case, Matt, I think you were next. Yeah, thanks, man. Just off what Ryan and Tomor were saying, especially when it comes to the quantum piece, one of the things that I think we were in another space talking about this, but it was a different BIP, that one being 360 talking about post-quantum signature schemes. I'm curious if maybe there's any more information than anybody else might have on that or some of the other BIPs that could be proposed for that.

Well, I personally don't. Look, my view on the quantum debate and the quantum narrative, let's not call it a debate, because I think that Mauricio is right. I think there's two pieces and you need to break them in, you need to analyze. them separately. One, integrity of the network for people who are current, people who are either, you know, who they're not lost coins, et cetera, just the future integrity of Bitcoin transactions. Can I send Bitcoin from me to you and without it being exposed to a quantum threat? That, the answer to that is almost certainly, I mean, to a ridiculous degree of likelihood based on

incentives, yes, it will stay safe because people, that, that will not be. be an existential risk, that will get solved. I don't think anyone debates that anymore, seriously. And if you do, then you're not really paying attention. The other, just before I go back to Ryan, the other is, well, what's the risk to Bitcoin's asset value if some number of older coins that are dormant get taken, for lack of a better word, by new owners, which making them no longer dormant. And to me, that threat is massively overblown for lots of reasons. And you could even make an argument that it's long-term healthier for 21 million to be reestablished as opposed to 16 or 17 million. And I know that that disturbs people, but considering I think I spent more

time than probably everyone else on this panel combined analyzing market impact and free float versus, versus, you know, held float and the impact on asset prices. I'm pretty confident in that in that statement. Anyway, Ryan. Yeah, and after Ryan, Dave, I've got to go to Mauricio. Go ahead, Ryan. You're piling up here. Okay, so one, Matt, David Chom dropped a paper back in February

about quantum, post-quantum signatures and how to solve all this. It was a really, really simple pattern. So definitely look that up. to talk about what Scott and Dave were you talking about. So I sat on a panel a couple years ago with a Harvard professor at Bitcoin, Paris, and it was a crypto conference, and Lou was actually the one that was leading us in the discussion, and he asked a question about Ethereum gas prices, and the Harvard professor started to addressing the cost of oil in the discussion

because he didn't understand what gas was at a crypto conference. So just to kind of show you, like, how out of touch the Ivy League can be with, like, you know, what's going on. And then three, you know, what we're seeing right now is the musings of a board community over a sideways summer. There's no real, you know, news happening right now. There's nothing. Everyone's just kind of a, kind of sleepy right now. So we're looking for things to fix it on. we're looking for things to worry about.

We are literally just following the same 2022 pattern. This is always the best time to accumulate is when people are bored and looking for things to fixate on. You know, we haven't had really a huge blow-up, you know, like Tara Luna or the other blowups other than GPT naming their last couple of models, Terra and Luna, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. but and soul and soul yeah we had sold there but you know right now we're just bored and and the price is low everyone's saying oh it's the end of crypto yada yada yada this is the accumulation time

yep there's 700 guys there's 713 people here not 4,000 yeah last I checked YouTube videos are down 90% across the board if you take the look from two months ago this is the This is it. This is the time. If you look at a, yeah, if you look at the four-year cycle of summer pre, you know, summer of this part of the bear market cycle data on social, as you'll see the exact same pattern. Yep. Over and over and over again. It doesn't mean it ramps up again magically in October, although people seem to start,

seemingly are starting to be convinced that'll happen. But like the signs are across the board, right? Right. I think, by the way, spaces is broadly down, but, you know, even beyond crypto. really interesting here, and I know we want to talk with Mauritio, but it actually feeds directly into it, is if you think about all of what's happening in terms of normalizing Bitcoin in the financial system underneath the, under the covers, it's happening. And that is extremely relevant. And that matters for the asset price. That matters for the businesses, et cetera. And all the reason that I brought

this up in the first place is because I've heard normal people, like random people at poker tables or whatever, ask me about this shit saying, is this really something to be worried about? And it's just one of those things that needs to get resolved. That's all. So that was it. But anyway. The last point, Dave, sorry, I forgot about is the whole $16 million versus recouping Satoshi coins and all that stuff.

You have to remember, this is divided down to the eighth decimal place. So even at 16 million coins, that's 1.6 quadrillion units that we can trade around. No, I understand. I don't have a strong opinion there. It's just, well, whatever. It's a topic for another day. Absolutely. At least with BIP 110, we got to get a new word.

I learned a new word today. I didn't know the word iatrogenic. But we'll leave it, which means, you know, effectively the cure is worse than the disease sort of thing. But anyway, Mauritio, how you doing? I'm doing great, man. Enjoying this chat and enjoying being higher than 60. I think about a few spaces ago we were chatting about being the lonely bulls. It seems like the market is not, well, it's holding up, I guess, is what I would say for now.

We're fine. Anyway, Scott, I'm going to turn it over. Yeah, I see so many more bottom signals than, you know, bear market goes deeper signals. But that's the topic for another day. Because, yeah, Marisa, I did want to chat with you, obviously, about everything you guys have going on at Leden. I mean, I think last time we talked, we talked about, obviously, that you're starting to offer gold. I guess you can first tell us, you know, why you're doing that now when you've been Bitcoin only, but then I would love kind of the comparison between paper gold and what you're doing

because it's something that we've long kind of discussed in these spaces. Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, we announced support for Tether Gold on the Lennon platform. That's X-A-U-T. The thinking around it is a couple of reasons, right? The main reason we offer and launch new products is our client. and many of the Bitcoin clients that we have today also have gold positions and precious metals positions. They, in particular, midway through last year, when the metals rally was going on,

a lot of our clients hold the physical gold in vaults, and they also hold Bitcoin, and they use Lenin to get financing for their Bitcoin. Actually, quite a few of our clients use Bitcoin back loans to get into precious metals sometime last year. And they did very well with those positions. So a couple of that, well, not a couple, quite a few, kept asking us, can I roll over my gold into leaden so that I can borrow, I use it as collateral the way I use my Bitcoin. My vault is not an easy process for me to do it at my current vault. The financing terms are not as clean.

It's not as simple. And I would much prefer to use you guys. And that happened enough times that we got together and said, is there anything that we can do? Of course, as you know, last year, we also, announced an investment from Tether, who is the issuer of Tether Gold and also UST. Their product, their XUT product was the fastest growing product last year in terms of AUM. And they, as we were chatting, which eventually led to them investing in the LERN,

they were telling us about Tether Gold and the opportunities around Tether Gold. We connected the dots between that product and what our clients wanted, and we then decided to essentially launch X-A-U-T on the Lennon platform in order to, to let people buy and sell gold or hold gold with us and eventually borrow against their gold. In my opinion, gold is the physical reserve, non-sovereign reserve acid king. It's held by central banks, et cetera. And so it's proven its value over the last 5,000 years. And what Tether is doing to gold is very interesting.

On your topic around paper gold versus physical gold or versus Bidder. What tether is doing to gold is not dissimilar to what it did to dollars, right? It takes a bunch of dollars, puts it in a reserve, and issues you a token. So in some ways, you have a paper dollar per se that represents a real dollar. And as you can see from sable coins, it's a widely popular product that made a US dollar much more versatile, much more usable. And I think the same thing will happen to gold when you put it on the same rails and giving people that ability to complement their portfolio with digital gold and Bitcoin or stable coins

is a big win. And I see it more so as a complement to the core Bitcoin services we offer. And one that from our clients' feedback is something that they really appreciate. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So we've also discussed this before, but worth diving into you, issued the first S&B investment-grade Bitcoin-backed bond this year. So I guess why is that that matter beyond Lennon? And I'd like to talk about sort of digital credit and the relationship there with what's happening at STRC. Yeah, a great question. So the bond, and just to give people some context, Lennon issued earlier this year the first asset-backed securitized bond into the public market that is made up of Bitcoin-back loans. So the way it works is we took $5,000 plus Bitcoin

individual Bitcoin-backed loans, we put them together in a $200 million offering, we securitized it, and we got S&P to rate the bond offering. Importantly, this is the first time S&P rated any Bitcoin-related bond, and it issued an investment-grade rating. It's the first ever investment-grade rating issued to any Bitcoin paper out there. So it's a higher rating than micro-strategy bonds. It's a higher rating that Coinbase bonds than any other Bitcoin bond in the market. Why this is important is because in the asset-backed securitization market, 90 to 95% of all issuance, issuances in the investment-grade bond market,

in the bond market, have to be investment-grade. If you look at the news going around this year, the investment-grade sector of the bond market has been exploding. It's really important to hit that rating, and it's very, very difficult to get that rating because it is the highest bar in terms of, institutional rigor that you have to meet. But we were the first company to ever get the investment grade rated from the bond.

This is the first ever Bitcoin ABS. And the reason we did it is because we believe Bitcoin-backed loans is going to grow into a trillion-dollar market in the next five to ten years. There is no single balance sheet out there that can come up with a trillion dollars worth of liquidity. You have to start securitizing that debt. And so we wanted to be the first movers into that market because the longer you've been an issuer, the longer your bonds have been trained.

the better cost of capital you can get. And we expect to do that and drop rates for all of our Bitcoin back loans over time. Okay, so more specifically, how is this different, you know, a Bitcoin bond from Leden different than something like STRC? And I love your answers on these kind of things, but, you know, which one? Is it really credit? Yeah. So a preferred equity and a bond are two very, very different instruments.

A bond is true credit. A preferred instrument is not true credit for several reasons. When you think of credit, there should be an expectation from the person you're lending the money to to return that capital to you. When you invest in a lettered bond, it has a maturity date. You will get back the principle at that date, even if the bond trades below part. That is not true for preferred equity. When you buy a preferred equity, there is no obligation from the issuer to buy that back from you at any given point in time. And so if your instrument, your preferred, starts trading below par, you don't have the option to wait until maturity to get the same face value. And with a bond, you can do that. With a bond, even if it's straights below par, you hold it to maturity, you get back to face value at the end of the term.

The other difference is we have a fixed coupon. Our coupon cannot change. Our board cannot tomorrow decide that we're going to change the rate on that bond. SDRC or any other preff, most of them can do that. They have the ability to change the yield or even stop it if they wanted to. In some places it accumulates and some other upperts it doesn't, but it is not the same as a bond. And the other one is the Lenin bond is a bankruptcy remote facility.

So if Lennon were to get hit by a bus, The bondholders would still be able to hold their bond to maturity and get back to face value. If you hold SCRC and Microstrategy gets hit by a bus, you don't have the same benefits. And so, in my opinion, the Lenin ABS bond is a true expression of Bitcoin credit. I would argue the cleanest expression of Bitcoin credit that exists in the market today. So I've heard you say that this market can reach a trillion dollars. How does that happen? Well, it's actually, so if you look at the data today, you have the retail Bitcoin back loan market today.

We estimate to be at around $3 billion. And if you extrapolate the percentage of the total Bitcoin float that's being used as collateral for these types of loans today, you get to sub 1%. It's about 30 basis points of the entire Bitcoin float that are being used for loans. if you look at the rate at which equities are used as collateral, you see that that's 2%. When you go to real estate, that number goes to basically 60 to 75%. And the same when you, and cars is the higher than that.

Cars are somewhere between 30 or 45%, if I remember correctly. And so even at the current prices, if you had more of the Bitcoin or a similar share of Bitcoin being used as collateral, as equities, or even as real estate, without changing the market cap, without Bitcoin going any higher, you can be at a very high amount. I don't have the chart in front of me. But in essence, if you get 5 to 10% of Bitcoin to be used as collateral and the price goes

back to 100, 120, you can start getting really, really close to a trillion dollars worth of demand. We believe that's going to happen based on the numbers we are seeing and how, how close. quickly these products are growing. And we are in the business of lending dollars. So if we believe there's going to be a trillion dollars worth of demand the next five years, we need to have line a site to be able to get that liquidity. And that's why we did what we did. That makes perfect sense. Okay. So I would love to hear some insight on the behavior that you're seeing in the book in real time with flows and how people are behaving versus previous crashes, I guess. You know, we can even

go back to maybe February, right, when we saw the market down, kind of going back to our whole conversation about the broader environment right now here in the summer of a bear. Yes. So I think I've mentioned this, I think it was in an interview last week, but the first time we got to 60, which was in February, we did see people get caught off guard, some people, right? Like, we did have some liquidations. We had some people coming in and making voluntary partial repayments to their loans, many people topping up their lows to keep them healthy.

It was more of a sense of distress the first time we hit 60 because it was a big drop from the 80s or mid-80s, I think, into the 60s in very short order. And some people got caught. They weren't expecting a drop that big. We had a bit of a rebound between February and between March and April, and I think we tested back the lows sometime last a couple of weeks ago. The experience or the behavior we saw, and this is why I made the point to Dave, I think a few weeks back, that I don't think we're going lower, is that when we had February, we had some people get, like I said, get caught and get liquidated. This time around, we had virtually zero liquidations at around the 60K level, and we had a big number of new clients coming in to take on new loans.

oftentimes they were taking B2X loans to buy more Bitcoin. And so that's what's been treated. And again, we estimate we hold about 30% of the Bitcoin back loan market share retail globally. So when we see our flows and the behavior that we see, historically, we didn't really extrapolated it into a broad market sentiment. But now, given the coverage and the reach we have, you can start to see some trends. And the trends that I'm seeing is that the forced sellers, the people that were taking Bitcoin Back loans and we're going to become forced sellers due to a liquidation have already gotten caught off guards. Those who are going to get caught of guard were already caught off guard.

What we're seeing now is actually much more proactive, not proactive, but bullish positioning. And that, to me, signals that the market is, the sellers are basically, the fourth sellers are out of this by now. So a harder question. There's a camp that says credit betrays what Bitcoin is actually for. How do you respond to that? I think, listen, Bitcoin, in my opinion, is permissionless. And it is unstoppable.

The whole core, or the whole point of Bitcoin is that you can use it. for whatever benefits you. And I don't believe in this idea that there is a way to be a Bitcoiner. And if you don't hold your keys in self-custody at all times, you're not a Bitcoiner. I disagree with that. I think Bitcoin is what works for you. And you should be able to use Bitcoin for whatever it is that you want to do. And if that means you want to use it as collateral to get a loan, then that's great.

If you want to use it to put it in your company treasury and issue more shares, go ahead. If you want to use it to pay for coffee, great. Go ahead and do that. But I think it's not, I don't agree with prescribing, you know, if you do this or do that when your Bitcoin, you are or you are not a Bitcoiner. I think that's actually the most anti-Bitcoin thing you can do. Yeah. I have a question just as a personal one because I've never asked you.

So obviously you became a Bitcoiner because you're, well, I can't say because you're Venezuelan, but we've talked about that quite a big coin. what was it like watching Maduro fall? Oh, fuck, man. Watching Maduro fall was, I mean, when I just saw the tomahawk or the Apache choppers flying over Caracas, dropping moms, I was confused. I didn't really know how to feel because I didn't know what was happening.

Then the next morning, when I realized that they had taken Maduro, the entire country in private, we can't go and celebrate in the streets because they shoot us. In private, everybody was shedding tears of joy. I was calling all of my friends. It was a true moment of relief for the country. The country, obviously, taking out Maduro doesn't solve everything in Venezuela. In fact, I would argue that a lot of work still remains.

Some of that, there was a bit of a lull after Maluro was taken because the interim government, Elsie Rodriguez, cozy it up to the Trump administration pretty quickly so that she could remain in power and kind of stop the regime change process. This actually has hit a wall now with the recent earthquake.

The Venezuelan population is up in arms by the lack of response from the regime. And the streets in Venezuela are getting very, very heated right now. So much so that yesterday, Jorge Rodriguez and Delci came out with a proposal from the National Assembly to say that they're going to revamp every institution of Venezuela, including the electorate council, in preparation, many people think, for the election we're all waiting for. So obviously, Venezuela is going through a lot right now, but I think that finally this is going to be the the sort of straw that takes us through proper democracy back to democracy

back to freedom awesome man is there anything i missed no man we covered a lot um but you know i'm excited to see how this market plays out yeah man you know i was not a four year cycle again this time but man it feels like it again you've been here a long time it really does kind of feel like it It does. Sad, but true. Yeah, it's really sad. Dave, anything else? No, we'll see everyone Friday,

and we'll see if anything changes between now and then. It feels, as I said, exhausted sellers and reaching for narratives. And it just, that's what it feels like. It's the summer. Meanwhile, it's hot as hell here, but we're going to go out for a bike riding. So I encourage everyone to enjoy the weather. to the extent you can. Enjoy the sweat.

And stay cool if you can. I don't know where you are, but here in the eastern United States, pretty much everywhere you go, it's hot. Yeah, it's crazy. All right, everybody. Well, it's been fun. Dave, thanks for carrying the water as usual.

Appreciate it. Maricio. Thanks for all the insight. And everybody else, we'll see you guys on Friday. Thank you.