The Wolf Of All Streets - Daily Howl: When To Expect Institutional Crypto Adoption | Guest: James Stickland, CEO Of Elwood

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Is institutional crypto adoption happening? When should we expect big money to flood the industry? What do institutions think about the Ethereum merge and are they planning to stake Ether? James Stickland, CEO of UK-based Elwood Technologies, came on the show to share his knowledge and insight about the industry. ============================================== Sponsored by Bullish. Sign up here https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube Have you ever had your exchange go completely offline during days of high volatility? Of course you have. We've all been through it. Those days are no longer with Bullish. Bullish is a new breed of digital asset exchange that empowers users to trade with deep and predictable liquidity across highly variable market conditions. They also have incredible automated market-making and industry-leading security. I can't get enough of this platform and it's fully regulated. ============================================== JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   TRADE ON THE WORLD’S BEST DEX, BULLISH: ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bullish/youtube  ============================================== Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  ============================================== The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The narrative of institutional adoption has been an inherent part of every single bull run that we've had in crypto. And when you look back, it's almost laughable to look back at what our beliefs were in that regard. In 2017, everyone was screaming that the institutions were coming, the institutions were here. Well, back then, we didn't even have institutional-grade custody solutions so that institutions could buy coins and actually hold them safely. It's kind of funny to think back to our mentality back then. But here we are in 2022. We have the BlackRock's and Morgan Stanley's and JP Morgan's of the world participating. So we certainly do have a certain level of institutional involvement. But are we

once again exaggerating how much that is? Well, I have James Stickland here, the CEO of Elwood, which is an institutional grade trading platform that focuses on those very clients. And he can give us a hell of a lot of insight as to what's actually happening on that side of the market. You guys do not want to miss this one. Let's go. what is up everybody i'm scott milk we're also known as the wolf of all streets as i mentioned before guys institutional adoption has been one of the prevailing narratives in crypto i think there's no question that it is legitimate now something that we're seeing across the board but still what does that mean? And what institutions are we actually talking about? You know, we talked about institutional

adoption in 2020. It was all micro strategy coming in and Tesla and Square, but it stopped there, right? Companies really stopped buying Bitcoin and putting it on their balance sheet, which was sort of the narrative that we were looking for to play into the future. As I talked about yesterday with Dave Nage from ARCA, who runs the Endeavor Fund there, the bulk of huge institutional money seemingly has been coming in through venture capital. But then there's this other, probably the most important, at least for our industry, because we all know that crypto assets are primarily driven by speculation still, whether we want to admit that or not, is all of the hedge funds and family offices and crypto native institutions that are aggressively trading this market. And they're the ones who are borrowing and lending and sort of the underlying driver behind what's happening.

Well, today, as I mentioned before, I have an awesome guest, James Stickland, who's the CEO of Elwood. And we're going to talk about exactly that. So James, did I say anything that was horribly incorrect? No, not at all. I think other than if you're going to fist bump the keyboard, it's going to be quirky. But other than that, I think you were bang on. Yeah. So, I mean, you obviously are focused on institutions, right? And providing a platform, as I described in 2017, that didn't really even exist for, I think, most of them to get past their risk managers and actually touch this market. But now we do have that infrastructure in place and platforms like yours where they can do it. The question is, now that we're in sort of, I guess, crypto winter, maybe I would argue spring, but we've been the depths of a bear market.

Is the interest still there? Yeah, look, it's a great question. And the reality is, yes, very simply. And, you know, I think we see that every day in our client interactions and our prospect interactions. I think, you know, in fact, in some weird twist of fate, and I'll probably get shot for saying it, you know, an element of pulling off in the, you know, in the propensity that we to catch it, trying to get technology deployed, trying to get process in place, trying to actually trade the asset class itself, you know, to your point at hedge funds, asset managers, or even tier one banks. And actually now what we're seeing is this timing is an opportunity for people to put, you know, process, put technology in place so that they can actually set themselves up to be, you know actually far deeper when it comes to long-term trading opportunities. That's interesting because it's sort of become like a meme in the crypto community.

But every single time I talk to anyone who runs any company, they say, you know, the bear market's kind of a nice time to build and we're glad to have it. Right. And it's sort of what you just described. You're not chasing prices. And if you're a savvy investor or trader like these hedge funds in theory should be, I think we've found that most of the people we thought were savvy maybe weren't as savvy as we believed and were just geniuses in the bull market.

But maybe that's three hours capital. But maybe that's a separate conversation for another day. But you would think that actually if they already had a thesis in place that, you know, this is a market that they wanted exposure to, even if it's only one to five percent and they wanted a long term position, that thesis shouldn't have changed with anything that's happening. So they should actually welcome this opportunity to get in at prices that were left behind when they probably started looking at it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, I think that, you know, our investors even and certainly our clients are, are thinking about this on a tens of year view, not a tens of month view. I mean, there wereize loans. You know, money was was no challenge. There was it was more credit than you could shake a stick at. And actually all that, you know, all of that did was proliferate the problem that we saw when there was a change in the price point.

So I think the long institutional money here is actually super happy that it's all still at the table we're still corralling around the trading opportunities more synthetic to start with because we've still got lots of regulatory question around you know what's the rwa landscape look like and how much do i need to hold for spot trading but the reality is people want to get the the the kind of systems in place that they can at least trade synthetically even if they're not trading in spot and that's more of a T1 banking statement and a hedge fund or an asset management statement who can clearly trade and be involved on a more broad spread asset class opportunity. That makes perfect sense. And I mean, to that end, I would imagine that the conversations you're having, certainly with your existing clients, but probably also with prospective clients, have likely changed, right? I can only conjecture, but after seeing what happened with Luna, Three Hours Capital, Celsius, Voyager, I mean, is this putting maybe more of a focus around

risk and how they manage risk in this market? What's happening there? Because I can't imagine being an institution, seeing this amount of exploits, hacks, collapses and just thinking, yeah, I just want to pour my cash in there. It's like, you know, we were having conversations and basically, you know, we were ringing prospects and having these these sorts of dialogues about what are you doing for risk on a go forward basis and how are you managing your portfolio? Most people are like looking at us like our heads are just falling off saying well we use a spreadsheet and that's absolutely fine because the market goes one way and it's up and right so like what like why even like you know you know get lost um and the

phone has not stopped ringing from may the 6th to this point that says you know those conversations we were having we're running a a billion or five billion or 15 billion dollars of assets on a on an end of day settlement capability using a g sheet to be able to manage that like people have grown up very quickly in terms of the you know the requirements to make sure that that we have sensible traditional finance in some respects and you know again shoot me for saying it you know structures in place that can allow us to access the asset class. So how are you doing real time risk management?

How quickly can you manage that book and shock it and all those sorts of things that we've been doing for FX for the last 25 years? This probably happened in the last two and a half months where people have said, actually, we need everything in place to make sure that, again, it can be sustainable and their LPs will stick around, right? I mean, does that mean that regulation could be a good thing? Look, again, I'm three for three in terms of awful things. I'm probably... I say the same things.

I hate to do it. But even with my bad dad jokes, I tend to be the adult in the room. So there's nothing wrong with that on this channel. Look, I think, yes, absolutely. Regulation is the right thing because actually lack of decision is paralysis of people's investment opportunities. And that's the worst thing, right? You know, we'd rather understand the position rather than have no position. You know, I think there is clearly an element of growing up that the regulator needs to do in terms of understanding how quickly it should be here, aligning it to tech stocks. You know, there is an obvious synergy with RWAs as an example, which we've seen in this, even in this

down market, you know, in terms of how it's reflected and kind of mirrored, you know, the tech ecosystem. So I think they've now got precedent to be able to you know weight things like rwas to think about is it a security or not a security you know how do we you know manage the release of net new coins what do we do with stables etc um so i think that the regulator at the table has got to be a good thing you know clearly it provides a an element of comfort for all the institution investors that don't want to damage their existing revenue streams and existing asset classes. So long may they come, but long may they come with a sensible view, right? Yeah. Obviously, we don't want heavy-handed

dropping of the hammer, but we want something reasonable and reasonable and regulator. I mean, that might be oxymoronic, to be quite frank. But it seems like this will be one of those things that may be, yet again, kind of good for the big guy and bad for the small guy. Right. Institutions will get the clarity they want to be able to pour in. But your average person may now be blocked from trading anything that's deemed a security and will have to retroactively worry about decisions they've made in the past. But I mean, that's a challenge. You brought up stable coins. Obviously, we've seen a lot of metrics of late, a lot that I've reported that there's a massive amount of dry powder in the form of stable coins and otherwise sitting on the sidelines. What are they waiting for right now? Once again, you're having these conversations. Price is depressed. I mean, we're sitting just north of 20,000. Right. We have the Ethereum merge coming up. Why is it still dry powder and why hasn't it been deployed look and again i think

that people are just trying to understand you know have we reached the bottom you know in this current kind of you know market timing um i think there's a lot of you know early conviction that that is the case from you know digital natives people that have got conviction in the asset class and they've been buying in like crazy as we know and we've seen um you know the mining the miners have helped you know there's obviously you know great volatility is some uncertainty as we know that's a great thing if you're trading around it um but actually i think that people have waited a couple of months just to understand whether or not this is truly the you know the bottom of that that kind of uh market position and now they can start you know plowing in and

piling in you know. Clearly, no investment advice from my standpoint, but it certainly feels like there's a lot of people waking up for Q4 and Q1 next year. So good. We can look forward to them buying at 40,000. We know that anyone who's waiting to time the bottom, even when the bottom comes, will still be waiting to time the bottom. Maybe a few percent of them will get it right. And actually, my thinking aligns very well with yours for Q4, Q1. Actually, I was on Yahoo Finance on TV the other day and said the exact same thing.

I mean, it's election season. We have a long historical precedent of markets doing well during an election season, even with a hawkish Fed in the tightening cycle, every single time. So this would be a departure from history, which is totally possible. Maybe this time is different. Maybe inflation is higher and they have to continue. But generally, we see them let off the gas in Q4. People like to I don't know, politicians tend to like to keep their jobs. Right.

There's an amazing synergy between between elections and the ability for people to spend more money and feel more confident about the kind of currency they've got in their pocket. Yeah, absolutely. So if you had to take just a wild guess as to the split of the money in crypto retail versus institutional, what would you give as a just sort of general percentage? Oh, currently, it's it's you know, it's clearly, you know, wildly aligned to the retail ecosystem, you know, wildly disproportionate. When we we've been running a study for the last few years with hedge funds and asset managers and and it's grown from like 2% of assets

being allocated into the digital ecosystem to seven know seven eight maybe even pushing 10 percent which is a huge number um still a monstrous number so look this is still a retail driven ownership at this point or an individual ownership even you know you know call high net worth individuals retail if you know if you dare but it's still an individual based ownership strategy um disproportionately but like even with 10 percent ownership in current form or 15 percent in institutional, that that will grow. We've seen billion dollar hedge funds now, you know, specifically built on digital exposure. You know, those markets will turn and liquidity will be there. And let's argue in the next three years it gets to 50 percent. Like we take that all day,

every day for the long term stability. Right. Yeah, then we're talking about, you know, 10, 15, $20 trillion market cap for the crypto asset space, if that can happen. And historically, at least, we don't really see those numbers go backwards, right? Doesn't mean it can't happen in the future. But once people sort of gain exposure, once they've gone through the risk management procedure, once they've done the due diligence for three or four years, a simple downturn in price doesn't make them exit the market in fear right then so it's really once they're here they stay absolutely and and you know they can find the the margin opportunity in the immediate term and you know there's some institutions that have been you know on you know kind of unhappy about the fact they were making 150 bit spreads that they could drive buses through over the last kind of six months. And, you know, sorry, sorry, it's become more

efficient. Sorry, guys, you know, it's now sub 100. But like, you know, FX is one or two bits, right? So there's lots of, you know, wealth of opportunity here and, you know, to go. And I think that, you know, that provides a great opportunity over the next few years. And something I know that you've been talking about is sort of the transition from the idea or the nomenclature, whatever you want to call it, the name crypto, which, by the way, I rail against all the time. I think cryptocurrency is the most damaging term that we have in the space, maybe stable coin for all the ones that are not stable. But I mean, 99% of these things are in no way attempting to be currencies. And it gives the ones that are not stable. But I mean, 99% of these things are in no way attempting to

be currencies. And it gives the impression that they're trying to compete with actual currencies. But you've talked about the idea of sort of posing the term digital assets to make people more comfortable than using the term crypto. Do you talk about that? Yeah, look, I think that, you know, if you're a 125 year old tier one, you know, bank, investment bank, and you're talking crypto still at a board level, there's still such a misnomer about the utilization of what crypto is, to your exact point, the currency viewpoint and its competitive nature with existing currency stats. So there's been a reemergence, certainly in the last few months of the use of the digital ledger, the reemergence of the use of tokenized assets, and, you know, therefore capturing it as a digital asset type.

I think there is a lot more comfort, understanding, and also engagement on things like, you know, how do you trade, you know, tokenized carbon? You know, how do you, you know, create a tokenized ecosystem where you can buy real estate? There's mass inefficiencies in all those parts of the you know the uh the kind of corporate environment today and you know cryptocurrencies and tokens and coins are one part of a much bigger sort of digital economy so i think the good news is for you know for for firms like ours and others you know and custodians to your point, is they all need this next generation technology. And, you know, Web 2.0 wasn't built quite for this market.

Web 3.0 technologies clearly are. And if we move to this truly tokenized environment over again, let's say three, let's say five, let's say 10 years, you need the infrastructure, you need the execution, and you need it to be in place so that you can interface. Do you believe that we get to that sort of tokenize everything world? I mean, that's obviously the sort of crypto maxi dream is right. You're trading stocks as tokens, real estate, car title, mortgage, right? Everything is tokenized, transferred directly, decentralized. Now, as much as that's an amazing dream to me, I always have to think about how many of the biggest legacy sort of platforms and companies and governments have to be removed for that to happen.

And I don't think that they're going to give up that easily. But do you think that just because the technology is so superior, we can actually get there? Or they'll just find their way to get a piece of it. And that's where it goes, right? And I think you're right. I think on that second point, I think there are pieces of it that are obvious, like remittance, like credit card, like mortgage, like, you know, there's no point hiring 500 more people into an organization to move pieces of paper around an environment, which is a very much a truism having come from that ecosystem, you know, myself, like you can use technology effectively. And that should be, you know, a good thing and enablement for the existing technology providers not to feel threatened, but to actually get focused on real, you know, real value add, you know, as opposed to, you know, service culture. So I think that there

are real obvious elements. And as I say, you know, remittance is a very obvious one where you can actually, governments value the benefit of that because they can understand tax credits and they can understand how they avoid the loss of taxation, et cetera, et cetera, by having true, authenticated and true kind of executed and irrefutable executions of movement. Seems like we need to sneak all the things we like in through the back door by speaking a language they understand at the front door. Right. We kind of talked about regulators changing the terminology from crypto to digital assets. Sort of we'll start by tokenizing things they understand and can capitalize. And then at some point we'll just sort of take over everything and they'll never know that it was coming, right?

That's the way you boil a frog, right? You know, you got to turn that temperature up one degree at a time. I think, look, you know, institutions get frightened by maximists because it feels like, you know, a kind of dream or a vision that they can't understand or control. So I think there needs to be a maxim of dream or a vision that they can't understand or control so i think there needs to be a maximus to paint a future and then to your point there needs to be like pragmatic elements that people can actually see value in and then they can see real world returns so if it's like

i don't know reducing positive you know creating positive jewels for banks by taking out some of this you know kind of unnecessary cost opportunity. And that's done in a tokenized and a digital fashion. Like they will buy order every day. And that's just then the start to your point of cracking open the door and getting on this journey together. So obviously, the kind of prevailing narrative, we can't seem to stop talking about it here, obviously, is the Ethereum merge coming. Is there what are you seeing,

I guess, from your own company and your clients as far as interest in staking? Is that something you're going to do? Is that something you think that they will do? Are they going to view this sort of as a safe yield bearing asset? Because there's obviously been an argument that that's the bullish case for Ethereum long term. Yeah, look, there's there's been a lot of preparation a lot of hesitation around you know a the timing of this how successful it is what will that do to the pricing um you know over this next you know sort of two three weeks um i think to your point about dry powder as well i think people are kind of holding you know holding tight you know current price point you know is it 1700 is it 1500 like where does this thing kind of drop and finish and then re-rise i think staking is is an obvious value in terms of

finding you know finding returns there's still um you know lots of opportunity lots of lots of buyers it's something that we will enable on our platform not something we will deliver ourselves you know we you know we'd rather stick to our skis and be be great at building the railroads um the beauty with the rail you know solid railroads is you can put great solutions on top of that so yes staking and lending will obviously form part of that but i think done in a in a way in which people are a little more comfortable with the counterparties this time around right yeah and listen let's say we're right in q4, Q1, at least our bullish six months there, hopefully continuing from there on out and not just a major dead cat bounce or something. How big do you think institutional involvement can become in the next year or two, considering how many people are sitting here just waiting for that turnaround?

Look, I think what are we talking at the latest point, $1.3, $1.4 trillion a day traded market at this point. Compare that to $30 trillion a day in FX still, so there's a long way to go. There's a huge opportunity as part of a long way to go as well. There's no reason why this thing doesn't get back to a $3 trillion a day traded you know asset and if that's the case then again you just can't put this thing back in the box so yeah i think you'll see in the next six months you know five or six tier one banks and then unsurprisingly the rest of the market follows trading synthetically they're already doing it as we know it's all public um but then then they they need the trading counterparties in that kind of world as well.

So, you know, more drives more in that instance. So, yeah, I'm a buyer, clearly, you know, vested interest of being a provider in that space. We all have it. Yep. Call out. But the reality is, you know, it's real people putting real money to work. And, you know, and if they can't trade the spot action, they're trading the synthetic at, you know, at kind of a scale. Awesome. Well, James, thank you very much for taking the time. I know that we've taken more of your time probably than you intended. You're very good at this. You can come back anytime. I absolutely love the insights and value your perspective in the future. So

I hope you'll come back. Thank you for having me. Thanks, James. So now moving on to the news, that actually what James had to say there kind of confirmed, I think, a lot of our beliefs of exactly how institutional involvement is evolving in this space. And there's actually some news kind of, of course, around the challenges that we put forth there and discuss. First of which we have here, crypto prices are fanned by flawed economics and

conspiracy theories. Central bank digital currencies are immune. Bank of Finland governor. Well, first of all, let's just point out the fact that this guy looks like a Bond villain from the 70s. In this photo, I'm not sure that that's actually the case in real life. But would we be surprised if he was wearing an eye patch and hanging out in a floating casino on a yacht somewhere or in a volcano? No. But I don't know. Listen, he's obviously the Bank of Finland governor. His opinion on cryptocurrencies, you could have probably predicted in advance of him even opening his Bond villain mouth. But what he's basically saying here is, guys, central bank currencies are safe,

fiat or digital or otherwise, which by the way, I mean, historically, you can't blame the guy for saying that. But he says here that the volatile prices of private cryptocurrencies are, quote, fanned by popular misunderstanding of monetary economics and even conspiracy theories. So basically, I don't know, are we implying that inflation

is a myth or that people are too dumb to understand that central banks have allowed this train to run completely out of control? Here's what else he had to say. Some have joked that a central bank digital currency, CBDC, which, by the way, just sounds like a marijuana extract. But anyways, is a solution looking for a problem? While I may not be an outright fan of CBDCs, I think the detractors unfairly downplay the potential merits. This is Olli Rehn. He's a governor of the Bank of Finland. Of course, the potential merits of a central bank digital currency are obvious for the government, right? I mean, we all know that a central bank digital currency is a wet dream for any central banker for a number of reasons.

Want to drop stimulus on you? We don't need to send a check or a bank card or a wire. We just airdrop that shit right into your wallet. We've seen it in crypto a million times. There's nothing we love in crypto. By the way, I'm just going to touch on this cognitive dissonance. There's nothing we hate in the real world more than money printing, but there's nothing we love in the crypto community more than a free airdrop and some free coins. Totally different, guys. Totally different. Anyways, we'll skip that little cognitive dissonance there. But yes, of course, central bankers think that a CBDC would be good. Want your taxes? Take them right out of your wallet. Want to track your transactions for

taxes? I mean, we know that the United States government now is going to tax you if you find $5 on the concrete. They've got a camera on you and probably going to track you and come after you for the $2 that you owe. I mean, transactions on Venmo over $600 now are going to track you and come after you for the $2 that you owe, right? I mean, transactions on Venmo over $600 now are going to be taxable. Yikes. You're going to have to report those somehow. Well, stop using, just send $599 over and over again, I guess. But the point being here is that they will have exact perfect control of the money supply and they will know exactly what you do with all your transactions, effectively eliminating privacy. So no big surprise that you would have a central banker,

Bank of Finland governor here, talking about the merits of a central bank digital currency and the myths, fallacies, and problems with crypto. He's obviously not talking to us here. Anomalous Ether futures pricing condition is likely to revert after the merge. Big words. The current state of backwardation reflects the general market view that ETH will fall following the merge, but this could be short-lived one observer set. Now, if you don't understand what any of that was saying, backwardation is the idea that futures contracts are priced lower than the current spot price of an asset. It's not something that we see very often in the crypto market because there's

generally almost always an expectation that prices will rise. But we have seen it in the past. It's generally viewed to be a bearish signal. But there's a lot to actually unpack here. And James probably would have been able to comment on this because he has an institutional trading platform. But the fact is, there's basically free money trades that exist because of the inefficiencies in the market. For a very long time, we saw the cash and carry trade. We've talked about it endlessly. That's how BlockFi and a lot of other institutions were actually effectively earning that free yield that they were passing on to you, right? Well, in this case, the reason likely that we're seeing backwardation on Ether is because there's a trade like that that exists in the market. And that trade is buying spot Ethereum, right? Buying spot Ethereum, which you can either stake, but more likely they're buying spot Ethereum now because they believe that they'll get free coins when it forks, right? So basically free money, you'll get one-to-one Ethereum proof of work chain will continue in whatever form it continues. It'll eventually probably die, but it's free money for now as the main coins go to proof of stake.

So what you do if you're an institution or a whale or big money there to basically capture that free yield in between is you short the futures contract, right? You buy the Ethereum and then to hedge, you short the futures contract. That's likely what is happening here and why they think that this will happen, will not stay in backwardation for very long after the merge, because those tokens will be received and obviously probably sold off. So it's basically a hedge, right? And a lot of people think that Ethereum, different than a lot of other assets, could remain in backwardation or have less contango. Contango is the opposite. Contango is when futures contracts are priced higher than the spot price

of an asset. That's called contango. Contango and backwardation are opposites. So we'll have less contango for a number of reasons in the Ethereum market moving forward, right? And the reason for that is a lot like actually what was happening with GBTC. Here's a quote from Joshua Lim, the head of derivatives at Genesis Global Trading. Ether will have POS yield attached to it after the merge, and stakers will be unable to unstake coins for months. Therefore, there will be demand to sell futures forge on Ethereum to hedge Ethereum. Sort of the same thing, right? Sort of the same idea. If you're buying your Ethereum and you're staking it and you know you can't unlock it from staking for a long time,

then you're at major risk, right? You're at major risk of a huge drop while you're staking the token, right? Even though you're earning that yield. but let's say you're getting an 8% yield annualized. That means over 12 months, if the price of Ethereum drops more than that 8%, it's actually losing even though you've got the yield. So what you have to do in that case is short the futures as a hedge, right? So this is setting up an opportunity for there to be a much more efficient market, actually, and to close that gap between the futures pricing and the current pricing. I know that's a lot to unpack, but it explains why we're in backwardation and why that's not necessarily a bad thing in this case.

That's what's happening here, if you were curious. At a sophisticated level, people always hedge. Individuals, we don't generally hedge. You buy the shit, you wait a really long time. But if you're an institution, you have a risk management strategy, you're trying to be at zero, you're always hedging against it, which means if you're buying an asset, you're shorting it in futures. Anyways, on to the next piece of news. News, really, I don't know. John McAfee is still alive. Ex-girlfriend claims in documentary. This Netflix biopic comes out today. His former partner, Samantha Herrera, says that he faked his

death. His actual wife, who's not a probably a meth head lunatic, says, nope, he was in prison in Spain and he's definitely super dead. And he ain't hiding in Texas because why the fuck would he be hiding in Texas? But Running with the Devil is the biopic documentary that comes out today. And I think that it will probably be really, really entertaining to watch. I don't know why I'm reporting this as news, to be quite frank. We know he's not alive. And his ex-girlfriend's a whack chap.

But still, fun. Fun. Fun to look at. Things that are less fun to look at. Three hours capital. Liquidators get Singapore nod to probe crypto fund. Everybody loves a story about a good probing. Liquidators will be able to request access to local records.

Creditors say owed more than $2.8 billion in unsecured claims, millions of which is mine because of Voyager. But anyways, that's neither here nor there. Not triggered by it at all. Not triggered by it at all. Anyways, what's basically happening here is that the liquidators to NEO out of the British Virgin Islands, those islands are not full of virgins. I went there once. Weird. But they've been basically trying to figure out what the hell Three Arrows Capital still owns.

They're in Chapter 15 bankruptcy in the United States. These guys job is to liquidate their assets and they haven't had the legal standing or the ability or help from the countries that actually. Figure out what assets are held in Singapore. I don't know. Suzu has at least two luxury mansions. We all know that they had a yacht called Much Wow that never got finished. But probably a lot of things are tied to Three Arrows Capital that are sitting in Singapore. Because as of yet, as astounding as it is, with $2.8 billion in unsecured claims, unsecured claims, liquidators have only gained control of $40 million of their assets. Listen, maybe they lost everything and they only have $40 million in assets. Oh God, kill me. That's all they've been able to get. But considering they were based in Singapore and this is where they were operating out of, the hope here is that they have a lot more assets that can be secured and later liquidated. Oh man, I just accidentally dropped something on my

Kindle, which was there, and it just scrolled through a whole bunch of pages. Now I have no idea where I was in my book. That happened right in the middle of this. Anyways, so this is maybe a potentially good news unless, of course, they waste a whole lot of time and money searching for assets that do not exist. Finally, Coinbase CEO says exchange is cutting costs focusing on subscriptions. Does that mean that we're going to get like a Game of Thrones remake starring Brian Armstrong that could compete with Disney Plus and Netflix? No. Brian Armstrong wants Coinbase to shed its U.S. lens

and be the most regulated in crypto. Coinbase to shed its US lens and be the most regulated in crypto. Coinbase has been under a lot of fire of late, of course. Insider trading allegations, being sued because their platform goes offline when people need access to their money and their trades. We've all seen that in crypto for a very long time. And now he's saying, listen, during a bull market, we make a, I think the politically correct term is fuck shit ton of money on trading fees. But when things go down, we can't really rely on those trading fees to sustain the business. I mean, they reported a $1.1 billion loss, right? And so now they're moving towards subscriptions, which would things like, I mean, they already have one of them. What's it called? I forget the name of it. Coinbase One, which you

can pay a monthly subscription fee and it provides higher level customer support and other benefits. And by higher level customer support, they mean you actually might get customer support because anyone who's tried to reach out to Coinbase directly, who does not obviously pay for it, gets roughly, I think, statistically 0.0001% of a chance of getting help from customer support. But either way, they're looking to create this basket of subscription models that can help buoy the income and earnings of the company. It's probably a very good idea in the future. They also talked about the fact that, oh, shit, we've been basically only US-focused, and maybe this is a global market and not just a US market. Good insight from the CEO.

So they're looking to expand further. Obviously, I mean, if you're Brian Armstrong, you can't watch what Sam Bankman-Fried and CZ are doing and Binance and FTX eating the entire world and think, I'm just going to rely on the United States where maybe the regulators aren't that friendly. And we have a shit storm of potential obstacles coming to face. So yeah, I think it would be a very, very good idea for them to try to expand beyond United States. 3AC should go into personal property, Susan. Start with that yacht. They never paid off the yacht. They never paid off the yacht. They never paid off the yacht. They never got it.

They're actually looking for a buyer for the yacht right now. So the only people who actually got any money out of 3AC was the deposit on that yacht. Those people now will sell the yacht and they'll make out. Yeah. Yeah, this explains the push for Coinbase One.

That's right. They want to get you subscribing, low monthly fee. You know, yeah. The new CB Advanced Trader is legit. I'm sure it is. I'm sure it is. Who's going to pay off the yacht, man?

It ain't going to be me. I mean, MuchWow is kind of a dope name for a yacht. It is. I'm not mad at that. It's going to be the greatest yacht, bigger than all the yachts of the billionaires in Singapore, says Suzu, who is now not having fun, staying poor. Yeah. As Architect Jeff says, it's a shame Coinbase has had outages at inopportune times. User interface is really friendly for beginners. It's a great user interface. I actually used to use, what was

it, GDAX and then Coinbase Pro. Awesome, very intuitive, very clear. But if you're trying to close a position and the exchange is offline anytime a coin moves 2%, that's something you would hopefully have solved for by 2022. And they're still having problems. And of course, they're going to get lawsuits. If someone's sitting on a $10 million position, they're like, I want to close that. And then they lose 5 million of it before the exchange is online. That's a problem. Not a problem inherent to crypto because we've obviously seen that with, I don't know, Robinhood and others in legacy markets. Montana Comey says, thanks for being you and doing what you do. I can only be me and do what I do. It's a part of

being a human person. Yeah. Well, yeah, their customer support is abysmal, though. Billions of dollars in profits, and they can't hire a call center, at least. I think we underestimate how difficult it is to service the amount of customer complaints that come in. But yes, that's my point. You can actually pay for better customer service at Coinbase. And they know that. So it might be a feature, not a bug, so to speak. Might be a feature, not a bug. Yeah to speak. Might be a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, Miguel would like me not to be someone else. Like, I'm trying to be me and do what I'm doing. And every time I try to be someone else, I wake up and, sadly, still me, guys. Still me, guys. So tomorrow we have yet another, I don't know, epic roundtable of earth-shattering proportions. Not going to tell you who the guests are yet. It won't be Raul Paul, Scaramucci, and Yusko. That's sort of like a once-in-a-lifetime.

But we've really, really, I don't know if you guys have noticed. Listen, so, you know, the views maybe don't reflect it. And we're always sort of evolving. But to the credit of my amazing producer, Mike, who you guys have talked to before, certainly in his escape from Russia, I feel like we have done a very good job and are doing a very good job

of continually trying to be the adults in the room, as I referred to earlier, even as I make like bad dick jokes. I can't be the adult in the room. But at least our guests, you know, try to bring in actual experts, eliminate the FUD and nonsense stories and the things that are sort of rumor. And we're going to have to apologize for, or just pretend we were wrong about two or three days before. We're really trying to bring

in the brightest minds in the space and actual experts to talk about these topics. So I know that to some degree that makes, and I know that for a fact, but to some degree that makes like our conversations less boring, right? I'm not being hyperbolic. I'm not trying to exaggerate. I'm not talking about 100X altcoins. I'm not begrudging the people who do that. Shit works very well. It gets you an audience and you need the audience to actually be able to present them with this kind of content. I'm not doing this in my thumbnails, right? And I'm not bringing on a bunch of people who are controversial just to get clicks and views and likes. We're really trying to present factual information from people who

actually know what they're talking about, have been in the industry for a long time, and who are the brightest minds that we have. And so we're going to keep doing that. We're going to keep doing that. And frankly, for me, that's a hell of a lot more interesting. I'm learning. We bring on the guests that I want to ask questions so that I understand what's happening, and then I can regurgitate that information later and sound smart, right? Right? I mean, listen, one of the news stories that was in my list for today from our research team was the lawsuit between BitBoy and Atozi. I don't want, like, now I'm bringing it up, but that's not what I'm going to talk about. All right. That's between those dudes.

And that's crypto Twitter banter and nonsense. You know, that's not news to me. And there's a time when I would have talked about that and made jokes, but the fact is, I don't care. It has nothing to do with us and it has nothing to do with crypto. Things like that, and I'm not criticizing any of them. I have no knowledge of the situation, but a lot of what we spend our time focusing on here are wildly distracting from what's important. Right. Like it's we allow this community sometimes to become this like massive soap opera. Right. And especially in a bear market, everybody just wants to shit on each other and tear each other down and, and make each other look bad to try to prop themselves. Misery loves company.

So if you're miserable, well, God damn it. Everybody's going to be miserable with me. Right. And that's just not really like what we're here to do. Oh, people want the air horn. Which one's the air horn? Yeah. We'll do it again. Yeah. We'll do it again. air horns says jeff i forget that i even have those man there was a

time when it was a little more light-hearted around here but man bull markets you know bull markets bull markets when we used to make one inch jokes all the time the fact is here that like you know there's a lot a lot of that. And again, I'm not hating on it. And maybe I won't get as many views or as many people engaging with it because I'm not playing the algorithm. But I think in the end, like, I just really want to provide accurate, beneficial content that helps with mainstream adoption, but also helps to educate you guys to make good decisions moving forward. And so we try to bring on the voices that do that, right? And sometimes that's going to be the Mooches and the Raul Pauls and the Mark Yusko because

they're brilliant and it brings likes. And sometimes it could be smaller names who might be actually smarter or equally smart in the know. And That's kind of how we're going to move forward. Yeah, I mean, here you go. Voyager and Celsius put a damper on the mood, too. Right. I mean, listen, this time retail like it's one thing for retail to get fucked because they like bought dog coins and they went down. Right. It's another thing to like park your money in a quote unquote bank and to see it all lost. I mean, we've really lost a lot of faith. Um, and frankly, I've lost a lot of faith, right? Listen, we're all evolving. Like, I don't know how many people go on Twitter constantly or self-deprecating and YouTube and talk about how they were wrong. Like

I've blown it left and right, but the difference between me and other people is if I've blown it, I've paid for it. Maybe you've paid for it too, but I've paid for it. I squarely, firmly, even with the warnings of the Caitlin Longs and the Mike Alfreds and the Jeff Booths who came on my channel and said, we don't need to take loans against Bitcoin and yield. And by the way, I still think those things will happen and can happen in a secure environment. I still had millions of dollars parked on Voyager. I knew them. I believed in them. I trusted them. Happens. I was wrong. And now I will pay for it. But all we can do is live and learn and try to move forward. And that also applies to the way that we sort of proceed with our content.

I know it's fun to make jokes and stuff, but we really want to be a very more lighthearted but serious content that can help you guys move forward. Anyways, I didn't expect to go on that rant at the moment, but here we are. Well, I try to report real news, but then we find out that half of it is not real news. Is it Uranus or Uranus? Yeah, I made a Uranus joke in the newsletter this morning. Got to keep it lighthearted still, right? Yeah, I'm really starting to miss

my 7.5 ETH on Celsius. Rob blinds. Yeah, and then the question becomes what happens at the merge? Do you get your free coins if you have these coins parked somewhere? I've reached out to people at Voyager to ask they said there's a chance we will get our coins for the merge I don't know to be fully transparent

I have over 500 ethereum on Voyager cool cool uh your anus you are you are an Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. Anyways, guys, I got to go. Got to go. Mad money. Yeah, man. Mad money's mad money. It's only part of what I got on there. Not a good time. It's not great.

Not great. Not great. It would definitely hurt if having Eve Park there also makes us miss out on the free coins if there is a fork. That would be forked up, I dare say. I would dare say. Oh, and guys oh guys listen we got this banner going but uh what as always you know bullish bullish bullish you know very very fortunate to have them uh as an anchor sponsor love everything they're doing you guys have obviously seen sir and come on here every other wednesday and talk about all the amazing things but you should definitely check them out at certain come on here every other Wednesday and talk about all the amazing things,

but you should definitely check them out. At least click on their links and stuff and show them that you're paying attention. Uh, looking at your last comments here. I have underneath. Yeah, man.

Yeah. Not many board apes. I could have bought by now. That's joke. Not buying any board apes with that money. Anywho, that's all i've got for you today guys thanks for listening to me especially when i go on an emo weird rant at the end of the stream that was on plan see you guys tomorrow Let's go.