The Wolf Of All Streets - Czech Central Bank To Propose $7bn BTC Reserve | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall, the largest X spaces in crypto every single weekday at 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Hope all of you are having a wonderful day. We have quite a lot to talk about today, and we will dig into all of this, obviously. But our main story here, which may not remain the main story for long, is that we have the Czech central bank governor proposing to invest 5% of their 140 billion euro reserves in Bitcoin to diversify his assets. Hilariously, his quote was, I like profitability. That's what he said. But this is actually being pitched to the central bank tomorrow. So this is not just a bluster or a random idea. This is one of the actual central

bank governors proposing it potentially in bigger news or arguably we can discuss is that it was just announced, I saw it on Watcher Guru, that Donald Trump is launching Truth.Fi. This is under the DJT umbrella to buy Bitcoin and other digital assets. So basically, their corporation will be potentially adding Bitcoin and other digital assets to the balance sheet. And on top of that, we have Utah, I believe. I'm looking for the news right now. Utah moving forward with a favorable recommendation from the House committee to make them the second U.S. state to pass legislation through committee for, once again, Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

We saw Arizona yesterday moving forward, potentially adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. It seems we have a real arms race here to get Bitcoin on the balance sheet by United States states. So a lot going on here. Sorry, I kind of mumbled through that reading the news as we go. Here is the official news, by the way, on Trump. Trump Media and Technology Group is announcing the launch of the financial services and fintech brand TruthFi. $250 million will be invested in SMAs, ETFs, Bitcoin, and similar cryptocurrencies or crypto-related securities. TruthFi will enter the field of decentralized finance. Simon, let's talk about Czech Republic first, right? I mean, we've obviously talked

about the potential for central banks to add Bitcoin, the game theory of them seeing the United States talking about it and wanting to be ahead of the curve if they think it'll get approved. This seems like a slightly at least more significant story than the other rumors that we've had because he's an actual central banker and is governor and is proposing it directly tomorrow uh yeah i mean you know bitcoin is a free market so anyone can participate but this was the story that i was looking forward to least that was inevitable and gonna come where central banks members of of the International Monetary Fund, and the Bank for International Settlements, which is a terrorist network in my book, that has co-opted currencies

all around the world, is now deciding to hold on to its power for its bank and shareholders to create debt-based Ponzi schemes by holding Bitcoin on their balance sheet. So I was way more interested in states gaining freedom from the Fed and the possibility of treasuries adding Bitcoin on their balance sheet. But we've now hit the central bank phase. And, you know, Bitcoin is for anybody that wants to utilize it. And unfortunately, a central bank can use it in order to prop up their Ponzi scheme a little bit longer at the expense of their people. Robbie, what do you think of the potential sort of game theory now of central banks trying to get ahead and at it and states as well? I mean, all I could say, also, we had the announcement, by the way, that Metaplanet saying I think they're going to buy another 21,000 Bitcoin this year in Japan. So there are clearly some big buyers in the markets that are trying to get ahead of this trend. Go ahead, Robbie. I guess this is where I have to believe,

hopefully, in something that hasn't really worked in practice, but I have to hope that trickle-down economics works to a certain extent. Because I think, you know, in this case, I think it's great. Obviously, anybody who's interested in buying Bitcoin, I'm all over, right? I'm in the space and this serves my interests. I think these kind of big players coming in and potentially taking a big stake is great, of course, for everybody, you know, likely on this spaces who owns Bitcoin. But I also think it's great to the extent that we can bring new capital or different capital into the space, whether it's from state actors or otherwise. And hopefully that then filters down to the rest of the ecosystem. Because I think the only sort of caveat to seeing these big potential investors in Bitcoin is that obviously they're not going to be builders, right? They're not going to go out there and build things with smart contracts and Ethereum

and all this kind of stuff that helps grow the space. They're just plugging down a bunch of capital and letting it sit there. So to the extent that the rest of us who are building in the space can actually then make use of that capital, I think this is definitely a win. Interestingly, this is kind of a pivot, Robbie,

but we've seen obviously the crypto natives who probably traded all of those utility tokens in past cycles find their way to memes. I think we all know that as much as we love to think that the reason that certain things have gone up and down in the past in utility, mostly it's still speculation and people trying to get into the hot thing and out of something that's about to drop. So we have, for example, 37% increase I saw in active wallets on Ethereum. Ethereum doesn't move. And we know that this kind of Bitcoin buying, if it's in ETFs into central banks, as you said, is going to be holders so that money may not trickle down the same way

it has in the past. So it feels like we have a really bullish narrative for Bitcoin right now, but that the rest of the market is potentially really trying to find some actual liquidity in action. I think perhaps another way you could look at it is, of course, this kind of attention for Bitcoin is also a net positive for crypto in general, because it's one of those things that the information economy does trickle down. So when, you know, whether it's Trump talking about it, or other world leaders or states, etc, talking about acquiring a Bitcoin reserve, that does validate the asset class in the sort of traditional man on the streets mind. And I think that's great, because the more mainstream people understand crypto to be, then, you know, it opens

up the doors for us to have more exotic things like, oh, look, here's gaming on chain, or here's DeFi, here's, you know, all the other great stuff we can do with this. Because actually, now that I've got you interested in Bitcoin, guess what else there is? Perfect gateway drug, right? It's just that I think in previous cycles, we would have expected that Bitcoin makes a new all-time high, $108,000, and then consolidates. We would have anticipated that altcoins would be going up, not bleeding out 50%, 60%, 70% in five to six weeks, some of them down to bear market lows. Even some of the most hyped and the ones with utility and actual adoption, it just feels like there's still this Bitcoin meme barbell and everything else in

the middle is looking for a home. Matthew, go ahead. I do think there's an interesting point that a lot of liquidity is just being cycled through, say, for example, the Trump coin and through a lot of the meme coins. And because of this, and because a lot of the utility projects haven't actually become profitable and haven't actually broken through, we're seeing sort of, I think, a bit of a flight to safety with Bitcoin dominance being so high. And I do think that it's really good that we are actually seeing more world leaders take it on. I mean, small countries, yes, but also US as well. It should be bullish news. But I think at the moment, there is not enough people who provide liquidity to crypto getting their money back yet. And hopefully that changes soon.

Yeah, the Doge all-time high, I've been saying for like two years, would be the signal that retail would come back because they would all look in their wallets and go, holy crap, I'm actually not underwater on this thing that I bought at 75 cents or whatever it is. And that would get them interested and be a catalyst. But it is interesting that we have all these tailwinds, all this bullish news,

all these incredible things, but prices just generally aren't going up. And if you look, I mean, to your point, the Trump token, I think it was a 75 billion market cap at its peak. Total market cap did not rise, right? So what does that tell us? That tells us that all of that 75 billion, that was FTV. So we can call it, you know, whatever it was, you know, 7.5 or 14 or 15 billion actually in actual liquid. That was just coming out of everything else. That was not new money. There was none. Right. And that's not what we want to see. We don't want to see things cycling through and the same money just getting washed. Go ahead, Dwayne. Yeah, sure. Thanks. Good morning. So, I mean, I think, you know, just speaking about the Czech situation here, I think it

really is an underappreciated, like, catalyst or a tailwind for Bitcoin in the sense that this is the first Western country that seems to be fully committed, you know, to basically adopt this. So the governor, you know, to echo some of your comments here, the governor was calling himself a pioneer, if you will, someone who's making a four-way into the jungle, so to speak. These were his words of basically getting into this. So some of the things that we're watching here, of course, was the inflows for Bitcoin ETF. So overall, in the month, we've seen, you know, we've seen net inflows positive, I think, as of today,

I only checked, let me say like an hour and a half ago, but I think it was just I bit that was had positive inflows for today. But on a monthly basis, we can see that it has over overall, in the green here. So I think institutional adoption is very big. The FOMC meeting is today, which would have most likely pulled back in regards to sentiment as well as the overall prices here, because, you know, most people believe that the, you know, that the Fed is going to hold fast for some time, and we're going to pay attention to their comments. So I think the overall themes that we have here of institutional adoption, as well as just overall interest for the average person on the street are going to hold fast. And,

you know, despite the fact that some of the Trump trade, at least for the moment, is priced in in regards to sentiment. So I think overall, you know, there isn't anything to really worry about, so to speak, and that we're not going to necessarily see too much of a strong pullback, but we're going to see prices progress over the next three to four months here. Douglas, we love your thoughts there, obviously, as you're looking at the macro as well. Yeah, everyone's kind of on pause today to see what the Fed does. And it does look like the Fed will stay on hold,

even though everyone wants them to cut. But I think that maybe the most exciting news today that I picked up was Robinhood saying that they're going to go to the SEC so they can offer private equity in tokenized form. So pre-IPO stocks and like the SpaceX's of the world, the OpenAI's of the world the open ais of the world because that really shows you know if you can get what is there 25 million private companies in the

united states if we can start essentially having them not create meme coins but create securities that can then be traded with the liquidity of public stocks that would be quite something um and i think you know robin hood's sort of the biggest name that would be quite something. And I think, you know, Robinhood sort of the biggest name that's leading that charge. But I think that that's very interesting in terms of central banks, in terms of states. I think we all understand and everyone in this call probably knows that, yes, it's going to happen and it's going to go through. But the buying might not happen as soon as they sign the documents. And so I think what it does is it gives us support on the downside in Bitcoin. And, you know, you've got some folks calling for a pullback to 75,000. Okay, great.

That'd be super. We can buy more. But the reality is that Bitcoin is just going to continue to climb higher over time. And I think that when we have these calls on a daily, weekly basis, you know, we get anxious about time. And because we're essentially putting a microscope on time. But the reality is that we all know and we all understand that over time, you know, in a year's time from now, we'll look back when it's a 250,000 say, well, of course, it was going to go up. You know, we're not looking at every single news headline. But yes, it seems like most states will end up adopting it and the states seem to be doing it in a bipartisan way which I think is very important I think Senator alumus is doing

everything that she can to make sure that Bitcoin is a large part of this crypto Reserve that the U.S is going to happen it's exciting to have the Czech Central Bank say yep we're going to move into doing this as well and you're going to find adoption by all central banks once the US really tells the world what they're doing. But it's very hard now to be a central banker anywhere in the world when you understand that the US Treasury Secretary and the US President are both now fully bullish on crypto and specifically Bitcoin. And I think that that's going to be echoing throughout every central bank and they will start to pick it up and you'll see more and more folks. Now, it's much easier for the younger central banks like the Czech Central Bank to come in and say, you know, we're going to adopt this. But you've already seen it, you know, obviously in El Salvador, but we're going to see it everywhere.

And we just have to be patient. I agree with all of that. I think, Douglas, I think the struggle, you know, listen, this is crypto town hall. Obviously, I'm a Bitcoin first believer. I believe there's Bitcoin and everything else and they're completely separate asset classes, but it's crypto town hall. very little conviction at this point, or a lot of questions about what happens to the rest of the market. I think that that's just kind of the issue that we're having here is that people are not just holding Bitcoin, and probably are fearful, you know, that those other things won't rise. I mean, Robbie, I'll ask you, I know I'm gonna tell you I had your hand up, but Robbie, I'm just gonna ask you quickly, you know, you guys, obviously, we talk about this all the time investing across the ecosystem, you obviously don't have any doubt

that we're going to see major altcoin movement i mean listen we just you know xrp had and eight and cardano and all these dinosaurs at one point just a month ago moved like 7x so we know they can't move but it seems like you have to be more discerning and selective this time yeah and i think um you know as has already been said on the call, I do think that we're seeing, I don't know, I like to call it a flight to quality personally, but I was going to say a return to utility. Because I think that people are starting to recognize that, you know, there is value in utility and in a world where there isn't so much capricious, you know, regulatory enforcement, utility can have a value without the fear of arbitrary roadblocks coming in its way.

And so for that reason, I think definitely we're going to see more. We're going to see it across gaming and DeFi and RWA's deep end and a ton of AI stuff. And there's going to be a meme aspect to all of this because I think memetics are great for user acquisition. They're great for building communities. They're great for viral marketing. And so similar to on a previous Crypto Town Hall, I think we talked a lot about Telegram. Just like I think everybody should have a telegram app to build the

top of their user acquisition funnel, I think everybody should think about what their meme strategy is, because it's another way to reach out to online communities. But I do think that the focus will be on utility. Right, you can say their meme strategy, which is really code at this point for community strategy, right? Because that if this was three years ago, you'd say we need an NFT strategy, right? I mean, is that accurate? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Except the difference is I do think that there is some intrinsic

value to NFTs only because you do get the digital property rights, which is the first thing. And I think that we're going to see a lot more products coming out this year that will focus on that idea that we can have digital ownership of IP, whether that's us owning a collectible or it's actually using on-chain mechanisms to enforce royalties for the dissemination of copyrighted materials. I think all of that is going to blossom this year. Right. And I think, interestingly, those are narratives that bubbled last cycle, right? And we always see this sort of hype cycle that happens and then sort of come back down to earth. And then in the next cycle, we see the things really start to happen. Yeah. Well, and it's not dissimilar to kind of the web 1.0 days where we were all excited about what you could potentially buy in e-commerce. And then

not all the ducks were lined up. We didn't have cheap drop shipping and we didn't have lots of good online payment methods. So e-commerce didn't really work in the late 90s. But by 2005, you know, it started to become something that was a reasonable proposition. And then, you know, five years later, people are wondering why, you know, it never happened earlier. Yeah, I mean, ride sharing was proposed in the early 2000s and failed because people didn't have iPhones. It wasn't ready. But it was a great idea. Uber was just at the right moment for the right idea. Amateo, go ahead. Yeah, great thoughts all around. So if you look at Polymarket, it's got a 98% chance that

the Fed doesn't cut rates today and they hold tight. So we've definitely been in this bull market in a liquidity constrained environment that I think is a big reason that it's affected kind of the perceived risk. But we're still seeing liquidity move in, right? The supply of USDC and USDT just hit an all time high. We also have obviously the Bitcoin move to the upside. So we're still seeing liquidity come in from a multiple amount of venues. And I think we're just seeing the kind of holding pattern on when do we actually have a risk on environment. I think when it comes to like the central bank

and the states starting their reserves, it's very clearly a classic, no one wants to be first, no one wants to be last situation. But I think the reality is people now realize that there's an inevitability coming. And, you know, whether you have some questions on to like the ethical legitimacy, the control mechanism that Simon outlined in terms of the actual act of these countries and central banks starting to acquire Bitcoin reserves, there is the seal has been broken and now

people are trying to move in because they don't want to be last. And I think that that trend starting to pick up speed is only going to accelerate. And I expect a lot of headlines on that. I mean, look, I think there's a reason why this flush hit meme coins the hardest. It's to be expected. Memes were a tradable market when we had these weird asymmetric Bitcoin and Bitcoin dominance conditions where you still had potential gains. You still had tradable markets that that didn't necessarily always adhere to the Bitcoin dominance that was affecting the majority of other alts. But now that is changing. Liquidity is being coming well positioned.

And I agree with Robbie here that that as these meme coins flush out, as this liquidity comes in, we are going to see a return to utility and assets finding valuations beyond speculation and a flight to quality. I think what we're looking here right now is the ability to say, okay, when do we have more risk to enter these things and for valuations to start to settle and liquidity start to flow down. I just saw on the news when looking into it now that the Bank of Canada has announced an end to quantitative tightening just for the liquidity maxis out there. However much that's going to

help, it should be interesting to see how that plays out, especially as we kind of have the Fed making their decision. I mean, consensus, obviously, that the Fed is going to do nothing. Does anybody have a feeling on what that will mean for markets when you do have it priced at 98% that the Fed's going to do nothing? Are we now back to waiting to see

which way Powell sneezes during his speech to decide if he's dovish or hawkish? Matthew, you're laughing, but I mean, that's really where we're at, right? I mean, it's going to be about... Yeah, it's like Kremlinology. It's like Kremlinology where you just don't know. I mean, I personally think that the amount of change that's happened in the US has caught everyone by surprise. Like Europe, as always, is lagging behind's what's to come um and i do think that um people are actually underestimating the size that the pie could grow so i would be i mean everyone's

going to say he's going to do nothing but i mean a little cut here could um could make could make a huge difference to our industry anyone else any particular thoughts on that penos i saw you were kind of reacting there with the laughs as well but we all know that you know the way palace says things are almost more important than the actual news yeah it's kind of funny how that works um yeah i mean typically what happens in these things when nothing happens is you just see a spike up, spike down, liquidation wicks and then continue sideways until the next news event happens or whatever's next on the menu for fundamentals that will move the market. So I just think that's what's probably going to happen today. You'll just see some wicks up and down and then continue sideways. Who made the Robinhood points?

Was that Douglas? Was that you? Yeah. Yeah. I saw today Forbes released a ranking of the most trustworthy crypto exchanges in 2025. CME Group was first, Coinbase, Bitstamp, Binance, and Robinhood. It's interesting to see, first of all, how far we've come and the fact that Binance, Coinbase, Bitstamp, Binance, and Robinhood. It's interesting to see, first of all, how far we've come and the fact that Binance and Coinbase, who are still actively being sued by the

SEC for basically listing unregistered securities, Binance, who was in a lot of trouble, but clearly has cleaned up being on that list. But I think that Robinhood is going to be a, and this wasn't the topic I intended, but Robinhood is going to be a massive leader in the next cycle. I can tell you anecdotally, because like one of my closest friends, his name is Rob Baldwin, called Trade PMR. And they just, in big news about a month ago, it was announced that they sold, he sold his company to Robinhood for $300 billion, $300 million, excuse me, $300 billion would be a lot more exciting as his friend. But he sold to Robinhood for $300 million. Effectively, he'll become the second guy and shareholder at Robinhood running the institutional side. But what we have here is Robinhood is wholesale, obviously, into crypto, as you said,

tokenization, all these things. And now hiring and buying more AUMs, that's 40 billion more now they'll have as custodians. But really what they're doing is buying a custodian, buying an RIA, hiring one of the most talented RIAs in the world and converting those 25 million retail customers they have into real long-term adult investors who are actively or passively managed. And crypto is going to be a huge part of that. I mean, it's hard to understate just because I happen to be close to it and have seen some of the conversations, how big this will be for Robinhood as a company, but for crypto because it's so fundamentally integrated into what they do. Go ahead, Matthew.

I was just going to say, I mean, Robinhood is literally the most normie stock device possible. I mean, you can just go onto the Reddit subreddits like WallStreetBets, one of the most popular subreddits. All the GME stuff was all around Robinhood. Robinhood is probably the easiest way we get liquidity into the crypto market. It's full of savvy investors, Gen Z investors. And when they see the sort of comparative returns on crypto and potentially some of the bigger crypto plays there versus what they're used to, stocks and options, which come with a lot of risk and downside. I think it's going to definitely accelerate adoption in terms of putting liquidity into our space. Assuming they're successful when Robinhood makes a full institutional push as will be arguably one of the largest custodians in the space, wooing institutions over and pushing their retail clients into more serious products like the ETFs and these tokenized crypto assets. That's what they want to do. Whether they'll be successful, I can't say or not, but they have now a huge lead

with basically this acquisition. Amateo? Yeah, one thing that we haven't talked about today is KuCoin pleading guilty to US criminal charges that happened yesterday. They agreed to pay over $297 million in fines and forfeitures, and also agreed to cease U.S. operations for at least two years. Imagine there's all sorts of VPN workarounds, not financial advice. I was just going to say, did they have U.S. operations? What's the two-year thing? I didn't know that they were available to U.S. Am I wrong?

I mean, I think obviously those workarounds were very telling and very easy to identify because they were servicing U.S. operations. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been jurisdiction and the ability to actually go after these guys for this purpose. There was nothing that I saw and I could have missed it. But around like anyone. Yeah, there's some deferred prosecution agreements in the mix and stepping down in management roles. But what does that actually mean? Is anyone getting arrested, et cetera? I think that remains to be seen.

But I think that we are seeing kind of like what is the on-ramp, off-ramp musical chairs situation that we have here, both in institutions and within retail. So like we're talking about Robinhood, that's obviously going to be increasing as an on ramp into crypto through retail and to institutions. But we're, I think we'll see more of this. But I think what's the bigger story here is that a lot of these concerns, the SEC concerns, we're starting to put this stuff to bed. And that is the kind of headwinds and clear skies that we need for people to have more confidence in the market. I mean, when you talk about KuCoin, I didn't dig so deeply into it. I remember, obviously, when the charges were kind

of brought, it's kind of like Binance Lite, right? I mean, it's the same idea, allowing Americans to access the site, unregistered securities, potentially some questionable market making and liquidity. But, you know, once I think Binance was resolved, you could tell what was going to happen with most sort of offshore exchanges, which is come kiss the ring, pay the fine and get compliance, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think the other piece of that is Coinbase announcing that they're going to be changing their entire listing framework because of the sheer velocity of tokens that are coming on board and that whatever they offer to consumers doesn't need to be

made visible, whether it's happening on a DEX or a SEX. So I think when you look at that, clearly everyone's fed, and they just want to open the markets, they're tired of restricting things, they're tired of jumping through hoops. And I think that they're willing to take on the challenge and the risk with the anticipation of whatever regulations come, they'll adhere to it when the time comes. But the fear of actual penalties is also being put to rest. I mean, this exchange makes so much money. If their really downside is 2025 to pay a couple hundred million dollar fine, I don't think they're even scared of that. And I think that a lot of them are going to be

wholesale making moves into the United States to compete as well. But hard to tell what's coming sort of in that arena. I'm trying to look through the rest of the news. I do want to talk about sort of this Trump story, Trump's media, New Financial Arm, Truthfi, to invest in crypto and other assets. As I said, they plan to invest up to $250 million, which will be managed by Charles Schwab, interestingly, and customize ETFs, crypto and other investment vehicles. So that's actually interesting. We have to dig into this, but if Schwab is managing it, how will they be investing in crypto? I'm assuming that means Bitcoin and ETFs, or through companies that invest in Bitcoin, convertible notes maybe for micro strategy.

I mean, what can they really do if this is being managed by Charles Schwab? Does anyone have any thoughts on that? Of course, this is conjecture. But this isn't like World Liberty Financial that's just buying Ethereum $10 million at a time on chain, right? I mean, anybody have any thoughts? I mean, Simon, what do you think? How can they even approach this market through Charles Schwab? Sorry, I was a little distracted. Do you mind rereading the story? Yeah, sorry. I was just saying that Trump Media Group is basically going to invest $250 million into crypto and other assets, but it says it will be managed by Charles Schwab and customize ETFs, crypto and other investment vehicles. To my knowledge, and maybe I'm wrong,

but there's not many creative ways to invest in crypto beyond the etfs through charles schwab okay yeah that that is uh bizarre so uh let's think through that so uh trump media is a public company djt right the actual public company not correct this is his company that's launching an kind of an arm called truth., which will be the investment arm focused on crypto and other investments. Yeah. So maybe it's a play with micro strategy. I don't know why you would need Charles Schwab in order to manage that. You know, more likely you'd be using a crypto native type of regulated financial institution. But that is interesting. Maybe there's something we've missed around custody. Maybe, as you said, it's just ETFs and corporate debt.

But yeah, I think watch that story. But I do think it's fairly interesting that we've now got another public company. So let's look at the Trump empire. So that's right. We've got Bitcoin strategic reserves. I'm sure he earns a shit ton of Bitcoin. He's got NFT collections. He's launching a stable coin. He's got a meme coin for himself and his wife and his pastor and many others. He's got a DeFi platform built upon Ethereum and he's got a governance token that has sold half a billion dollars, including the largest investor being Justin Sun. Very, very interesting. I think this is an indication of what being the capital of crypto for America is.

And I think he's lining up to become very wealthy out of the whole thing. And I think, I guess that's just the way it is. I mean, on a very positive note, he's obviously putting his money where his mouth is, right? Like whether Tim or his investment advisors or whoever he's with, he's not only doing this through executive order for the country, he's doing it with all of his own properties. So yeah, I do believe in that. I do believe in that concept. this through executive order for the country he's doing it with all of his own properties so yeah yeah i would say we could argue about what he should be buying you know which assets and of course there's nuance most people would say should just do bitcoin uh on the balance sheet but he's definitely following through at least his team is paul go ahead so many people forget there's

actually quite a lot of stocks that can give people a huge amount of exposure into crypto obviously coinbase backed marathon digital a lot of the mining stocks are easy exposure to crypto kind of indirectly and as well you know even before the etf so you did mention the etfs but even before the etfs we did have grayscale and they allow exposure into things like not just Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also not anyone would want this. But Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Solana, I think even Zcash. So those are different opportunities that I think don't really cross people's mind. But if you're restricted into what a traditional brokerage would be able to offer, those are definitely options. It'll be interesting to see if they kind of go beyond Schwab and find more interesting ways to get exposure to the market. But it seems

like they're doing that through World Liberty Financial already. So maybe this is just a separate approach. But either way, as Simon said, the real story here is another publicly traded company in the United States putting Bitcoin and crypto on the balance sheet. And I think we can all expect a major acceleration in that arena this year. Those are going to be the stories, right? The central bank stories like Prague, the corporate adding it to the balance sheet. And of course, has anybody dug deeply into MicroStrategy's new security offering, SDRK, which is, I think, generally preferred stock?

Anyone here taking a look at that? Because it's yet another way for Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy to raise capital to buy Bitcoin. Paul, Douglas, either of you looked into this? I don't know. You guys? Douglas, yeah. Well, I've looked at it in a cursory way. I mean, it seems to me these are largely out-of-the-money calls that you can buy that pay you a nice yield of 8%.

And so it's non-dilutive in a way, but allows him to raise capital, again, through a vehicle that some companies that can't invest in equity or can't invest necessarily in Bitcoin can invest through this. I think that what he's doing, he's an absolute genius of financial engineering, and he's surrounded himself with folks that say, look, here's where the pockets of capital are. Here are the rules with which you can invest in things. Some guys are looking for lower volatility. This is going to be obviously lower volatility than the common equity. And so based upon different rules that people have for capital allocation, he's finding products to fit that and products to fit that in a way that he can buy Bitcoin

at a much cheaper rate that's accretive towards the common stock investors. Yeah, I mean, that's really the story is he sort of micro strategy was a proxy for an ETF before there were ETFs. When the ETFs were approved, he started doing convertible notes, which are like debt instruments he could sell to insurance companies and such who couldn't buy a micro strategy stock or Bitcoin. Now he's just finding more and more novel ways to open the doors to everyone to get exposure, right? I mean, Simon, obviously, we'd rather everyone just buy Bitcoin, right? But to that end, it's still, I would say, a net positive to have people gaining exposure through these novel sort of products, right? Well, not everyone can buy Bitcoin. You know, if you're a pension fund manager, you're not you can't necessarily buy Bitcoin today.

And maybe you can't buy micro strategy because the volatility is too high. But maybe you can buy this this new preferred stock because it's got a much lower volatility. So in that way, you've got indirect access to Bitcoin and price movements. And it's all allowable based upon the rules you have as an investor. Yeah, you know, as I've always said, Bitcoin does three things. It allows you to earn your money without a bank. It allows you to spend it

without having to get permission first. And it allows you to historically beat inflation and every other asset class. And so if there is only people, pensioners, gaining one utility from that, which is the third one, then it's better than nothing. What is, I think, interesting is that there has been an application for in-kind redemptions to some of these Bitcoin ETFs, which is actually an incredibly interesting concept that you could come. I mean, even just imagine you're doing it through your pension fund. You buy an ETF and then you're able to get an in-kind redemption.

How does that look? You know, then are you needing, you know, almost like a multi-sig wallet with some of the more crypto friendly and Bitcoin friendly retirement plans that have been set up with self-invested pensions and various other things. So all sorts of interesting questions. But yeah, you know, at the end, I think the true power in Bitcoin and is that you own your own money, and you harness all of the power of it. But if this is your gateway drug, then welcome to the party. By the way, Fefe, you show as a listener for me, and I was just told by the team that you're

a speaker. So welcome to the glitch. Can you actually hear me? You're a listener for me. So I kept by invited you like 50 times to come on stage and I was wondering Yeah, but I tried to log in 50 times honestly, it's like you're here. Yeah. A speaker or listener. For me, I was trying to unmute and then I left and I came back and I don't know it was for me I see I didn't hear some but uh but if you hear me fine yeah here we'll find it straight jimmy thoughts here i know we're gonna move on in a minute but specific thoughts yeah i think honestly

i'm very happy i wanted to reflect on the first half but then when i managed to get back in i was uh i didn't want to interrupt the flow but i was actually wanted to say that i'm very happy to see these things happening with the central banks and the Czech Republic and whatever, or even having a serious conversation about adding Bitcoin as some sort of reserves. And I think we really are going to see. And this is why things can get really silly really fast, because supply shock is going to happen. So what you're going to see is that more and more governments and central banks and companies are going to realize that there's 21 million Bitcoins out there.

Two of those are already lost. And whatever, about 4% is held by only the US ETFs. I think it's going to be very clear, very fast that it's the first come, first served. And that can really send the price higher of all of our expectations in the coming years ran are you joining us live from satoshi roundtable i'm joining you live from dubai sir live live and in the flesh sir i'm having a little fomo is it today the first day

how is it no it's not it's a day before so i haven't actually seen anyone i've been actually working most of the time in my room um yeah it's it's you know i'm still uh still getting up there uh i don't think too much for most sir okay okay well you haven't been listening but anything uh you're dying to to share with us before i know we move on to a sponsor you guys have no i mean uh i guess uh i guess a big fmc today uh first time with Powell versus Trump. I guess we're going to see a little bit of posturing by Powell, but just maybe digging in his heels to just remind everybody that he's independent. I don't know.

I think that's pretty much what we can expect today. What do you think? I think it'll be a big nothing burger. We were talking about before that at some, he'll say something with some tone and the markets will, you know, go up and down with wicks in both directions and everybody will realize it's kind of nothing and move on with their lives to the next story. But do you remember when these FOMCs, it was like, do you remember these FOMCs, Ram, when we used to do shows

and it was like 30,000 people showed up hanging on every word. Yes. I remember that. I missed the bull market. I missed the bull market. I mean, you can say this is a bull market, but it's not actually, actually, um, I, uh, it's not the bull market. I actually did a show today and I spoke about, um, why people are getting shaken out. And actually, I looked at some data points. Retail is completely out of this place. The only people driving this market are and the ETFs. And that's not retail related. And that's only Bitcoin related, actually. There's actually only Bitcoin inflows at the moment. And it's just not enough to prop up this altcoin market. Actually, if you look at Solana relative to Bitcoin,

it's the same price relative to Bitcoin as it was exactly two years ago, believe it or not. So even Sol, which has been one of the best performers in the market on a major level, that is now exactly the same price relative to Bitcoin as it was two years ago. Yeah, we were talking about that before. It's this barbell. You know, like the same DJs who have been

here for 10 years are trading memes and the institutions are buying Bitcoin and there's almost nothing in between. Yeah, there's nothing in between. And that's very, very, very frustrating. It's so frustrating. Because the problem is that a lot more tokens are launching.

Yeah, I mean, you got Bitcoin hit an all-time high, over 100,000, holding above 100,000. In the past cycle, this would have been an absolute altcoin fiesta during a period like this. I mean, one thing I would say is that we have like 500 million altcoins now. We have so many altcoins. It's kind of inflation for our industry in a way. I mean, if you count meme coins, if you count the millions of coins that are launching every

day, the liquidity is getting thinner and thinner spread. I mean, when everyone was locked into meme coins on Ethereum, you had gas fees, you had actual technical knowledge to stop people launching chains. Now we have a proliferation of chains, we have a proliferation of supposed utilities, the NFTs, there are now a billion NFTs, there's now 500 million chains. There's so many things now that we're actually probably in the biggest bull market, but there's no liquidity individually. There was a smaller participation, but all of those people became richer from being in it. And I think it's definitely the case that we have more participants, but there's

way more ways to actually spend your money and spread that liquidity. And I think the bear market was absolutely worse than a lot of people imagined. Recovery from that was harder than some people expected. And they didn't actually have the liquidity to make that money back. I think that's actually been part of it, that people who would have participated couldn't actually get back in. So we've seen prices rising and the liquidity still has not been there, I think. That's just my personal take on it, not financial advice, of course. I think it all comes back to attention, though. Like, if you really look at it, yes, there are 500 million, 2 million,

or whatever coins out there, but if you look at that liquidity on those coins, they're basically nothing. So that's why I believe, you know, there was a very good saying that 2025 will be traders' paradise and investors' hellos because it's all a rotation market. We've got Bitcoin, we've got Solana, because we've got AI agents in Solana, we've got memes in Solana, and that's been the major player. We are hoping for an ETH rally, but in general, it's been the rotations.

So I think it's rather coming down to attention. I don't necessarily think that it's a liquidity dilution, because it's a dilution for a little time. Look, AI agents has been here, you know, the past three months, 30 days ago, they were like the biggest thing ever. Everybody was talking about them. Now, most of the AI agents down 80%. Will they come back? Absolutely. But it's going to be a rotation market. And I think it's rather the question, who can get the most attention? What catalyst can we find in these that will eventually cause rally? I think one thing that I really have my eye on, which I think could catalyze at least Bitcoin and tokens on Bitcoin are the suite of L2s. That really hasn't hit the market to the

degree that I think people are expecting. But as mentioned by I think Matt, in the early days of the meme coins and the alt coins on Ethereum, it at least created gas fees for Ethereum. Bitcoin, its story in the L2s has primarily been Lightning, which has by and large not functioned. And when we got a huge influx of tokens on, not tokens, but NFTs on Bitcoin, it was short-lived because they were so expensive. But being able to put those on an L2 as well as put DeFi on a full EVM compatible L2, fundamentally, I think will catalyze the next wave and it will do so specifically on Bitcoin.

Whether or not that trickles down into other chains and other altcoins is yet to be seen, but I feel like this is easily one of the next big catalysts that could change the market. Yeah, I agree with that. Fefe, I know that you wanted to have a chat with Andre. Yeah, yeah, we've been, Andre under I see you. Are you are you hearing us because just we'll make sure that you're also here

and can you hear us, Andre? I see. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I can hear you guys. Yeah, good job. It's a miracle when we can get to actually work for everybody. Good job. Next time, I'm not even going to... I'm just going to unmute and ask for the first second if you guys hear me. Cool. Andrei, welcome, welcome, welcome out here.

I hear, and we've been having a discussion, I wanted to talk about these Falcon Finers that you guys are building out. On October 10th, 2024, last year, we started talking about this yield bearing synthetic dollar. Can you tell me, tell us more about it? What it is? How does it work? Why is it interesting? Yeah, first of all, hey, yeah, thanks for inviting me today. Falcom Finance, we started building this last summer in 2024 and we built another company and another team for this. And this is synthetic dollar. Why synthetic?

Because it represents a dollar value, which comes from spot and hedging strategies, which generates staking and funding rate farming yield, which is going to the liquidity providers. And also we apply some other form of strategies, such as delta-neutral arbitrage and other delta-neutral strategies in order to generate yield for those who stake their assets in order to mint our synthetic dollar. That's how it looks for NET.

So we have USDC, we have USDT, we have Athena stable. What makes you guys different? I would say that the closer competitors and similar projects would be Athena, not USDC and not USDT because USDC and USDT are backed by fiat currencies. Athena is also a synthetic dollar. Our differentiation is that we accept various assets as collateral, not only stables btc and if but also very liquid altcoins and almost all the coins that have finance perpetuals which allows us to cover like larger part of the market and also we are planning to apply some technized real award assets and currencies in the future for example like original

Fiat currencies like dirham or peso or whatever is not dollar So for me what is interesting and especially when it comes to stable coins, especially now you see with regulations, Mika coming in, USDT, you know, having majority of the market share, and then obviously Thena and USDC coming up as underdogs. How do you position yourself? So what's, again, the competitive advantage? How do you position yourself in the market? We focus for now the crypto-native holders and we don't have and other in order to be licensed at the best jurisdictions. Now we start with proper audit firms and with the proper legal setup that allows us to serve clients from most of the world countries.

You said there will be two types. What does it mean that there will be two versions of the stablecoin? The first version is the stable itself, which is stable, which is one-to-one to USD. And the second version is a staked version of the stable, which represents generated yield. And this version is representing the yield that is generated by the Falcon Finance

and can be distributed to the staked version holders. For example, you stake 1,000 USDF, Falcon Dollar, and then you receive, for example, 1,000 staked Falcon Dollar. And then, let's say, in a few months, because of the yield, your staked Falcon Dollar will cost more than one dollar it would be something like 1.2 for example and then you would be able to redeem 1.2 dollar for each stake dollar something like this it's like the defFi version of the original synthetic dollar. So a lot of times the question comes back to, you know, when you want to use a stablecoin,

obviously you want to make sure that you use something that is stable and it is trustworthy and whatnot. And you guys, obviously, DWF, you invested in 700 projects, one of the largest liquidity providers, market makers in the space. How do you see the go-to market for falcon finance like how will you get people using this table i think you know that there are like three important parts of it that i believe right there's people confidence that it is really over-clateralized or collateralized and liquid, then it's transparency. And the other one is yield, right? How much money people can make from this, right?

And here we solve these parts like this. We use third-party custody to make sure that all the assets are available at any point of time and have no counterparty risk. Then we also use on-chain wallets and third-party auditors that will issue audits on a monthly or quarterly basis to ensure that collateral is enough and covers all the issued dollars and also we will have and we're ready and have insurance fund insurance fund will be used for instant liquidity to redeem medium and small amounts of synthetic dollars instantly and to be liquidity for liquidity pools on DeFi markets.

Regarding go-to-market, we see that we go with internal testing, which is ongoing now going now with our team members and then I think in one week or so we will open it for our partners who are working with DFF Labs and they will contribute TVL. We will have a kind of hard cap. We have a hard cap of 100 million USD value of TVL for this period of time. And once we are ready to roll it out to everyone on the market, we will do it. Approximately, this product will be available for everyone on 1st of March. And USDF will exist on DeFi markets in February. Where does the yield come from? So how do you generate the yield?

As I said, there are three sources of yield. This first one is staking APY and thanks to wide range of assets that we accept as collateral, we can stake not only blue chips but also top assets, but they generate more than a few percent, yield can be like 10% or more. For example, top altcoins from top 30, top 50 coin market cap without the names then third second source is funding rates farming it's when we have spot position right and we short per position and we collect funding rates fees and third one is data neutral arbitrage when we do arbitrage between centralized and decentralized exchanges thanks to

large amount of assets in the treasury and this is the third source of the yield and of course everything will be audited How do you see again I'm going back to the adoption And of course everything will be audited.

How do you see... again I'm going back to the adoption, right? So I think it all comes back to adoption and people support brands, people support trustworthy partners. And of course you guys at DWF, Bento Partners as well, a long time. How do you see you integrating and having advantage over here because of the projects you're involved in, because of your involvement in the space. How will that help you? How will you leverage that to obviously gain adoption for the project? Definitely, we will cooperate with the WF Labs portfolio in order to get access and partnerships with reputable and good projects that believe in us,

that trust us and want to have their assets as a collateral for the step-by-step minting. For projects it's also good when their token holders put their spot positions not on secondary markets to sell and impact the price, but into, let's say, Filecoin finance, and then these assets are locked there and the token holders have a synthetic dollar that they can trade, but the project token prices are not being affected, which is also good. And we pay also a lot of attention on DeFi markets, especially Curve, Uniswap, Airdrome. And we are also in talks with a few markets on Solana. And we will contribute liquidity there because adoption on DeFi is very important

because most of people who use this DeFi yield bearing strategies they usually combine as few strategies in one portfolio in order to maximize their yields for example they have usdc and then they put this usdcs or usdt in some lending protocols uh borrow some altcoins and then put this altcoins in some staking pools borrow another stable coins right and then they have a kind of skin that generates some passive income to them right and we would like to be a part of this game this is for crypto market right uh for uh very short term uh plans right for the long term plans why i mentioned this rwa right and traditional finance because uh we are targeting we're already working with a few uh energy producers who produces electricity power and we started steganizing it and this steganized electricity fields and

plants and also for example commodities or gold or Securities can be used as collateral to mint these stable coins, right? It could be a breach for people who has who have Reward assets to the crypto space right right? Without losing their underlying assets, they don't need to sell, let's say, securities. They can lock the securities and the yield will go to us, to the protocol, and then mint stables. That's kind of our plan, you know,

to cover both worlds, crypto and DeFi. It's always interesting to see when something like this launches, and obviously it's the underdog, right? Coming for the big pie. It's always interesting to see when something like this launches and obviously it's the underdog right coming for for the big pie. How do you see the next steps before we round up? So what's next if anybody wants to get involved with calls but like what's next in the next you know like two months, four months, six months, one year? What is the roadmap? Yeah, to roll the protocol out to the whole market. And our plan is to capture at least 5 to 7 billion TVL this year. And to be in top 30 coin market cap in terms of

Market capitalization of our stable coin. This is our plan We can talk a lot more. I have one more question because I'm just interested about it What other why ETH and what other chains are in pipeline? We're starting with ETH because it is frankly, it is the simplest way to start. And the most liquid venues are still on ETH because Solana is a bit for another type of markets, purely trading. But Yodbearing strategy is mostly on ETH. And then we're in talks with Laird Zero. I know, sorry, I have to because I wanted to round up but I have to know this.

So we always talk about ETH or Solana and all that and you say that Sol is for another type of trading and you say it's the easiest to start with ETH and that's not the perception that we all get, right? Because we all get, okay, ETH is clunky, it's expensive, it's slow, it's like... and then we all get the expression that Solana is easy going, easy to get in, easy to get on board, fast, cheap. Can you elaborate a little bit? Yes, definitely. Look, I completely agree that from user experience, Solana is the best, right? If we compare it with ETH, because it's fast and it's cheap, right? But it's mostly a retail-focused chain, right? There are a lot of retail activity, and it's mostly like digital trading and some form of gambling, right?

And having fun like pump fun. If I'm talking about ETH, it's mostly like large holders and large liquidity. And if you, for example, check what would be your slippage if you would like to trade, let's say, one or five million USD value of assets, let's say from ETH to USDT or from Solana to USDC, you would see that ETH would be cheaper for this amount because of liquidity. Do you think ETH would be cheaper for this amount because of liquidity.

Do you think ETH is going to catch a bid? I think ETH is kind of, you know, is a chain for like large holders now because large liquidity sits on ETH. Large retail liquidity sits on Solana. Because if I am big, I am fine to pay large gas fees, but I am sure that everything works and I have a lot of options to generate some yield or to stake or lock my coins, right? If I am small, I don't care how much I can yield from staking because I don't have a lot of funds for this right

but i mostly care if i can do digital trading and here's a lot of appeals yeah andre i appreciate you uh anybody wants to find you i see that you have it all in your profile so they can just click on there thank you so much for for uh for uh do you have any final thoughts to this? I don't know. To the moon. To the moon, yeah. Market is really good. Market is really good.

And I think we have a very good entry point, especially for major assets. I agree. Thank you so much, Andrew. And thank you so much, everybody who's listening. Follow everybody up on stage. Come back. We're live here every single day, bringing you the best alpha. And yeah, thank you so much for everyone participating and listening. Andrew, thank you so much. And we'll see you in the next one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys.