The Wolf Of All Streets - Everyone Hates ETH... Is This the Ultimate Buy Signal? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Join Dave and guests for a lively Monday Spaces as crypto markets rebound strongly, with Ethereum outperforming Bitcoin and altcoins surging. The panel explores whether this is a liquidity-driven bear market rally or the start of a real turnaround, diving into Ethereum fundamentals, the escalating AI arms race, decentralized AI narratives, prediction markets, and regulatory updates including the Clarity Act. Packed with insights on macro risks, censorship resistance, and the future of sound money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, good morning, everyone. Before I go too long, someone give me a thumbs up to make sure that you can hear me. Okay, cool. Got it. So here we are. It's a glorious Monday, at least for those of us who are long-suffering nickmands. And it looks like the market seemed to like it, too. Now, all kidding aside, you know, we pick this title because of what Ethereum was doing on Friday.

But this morning, it's rocketing, and it's probably because of Bitmines, referred shares raising money to be buying when there just isn't a lot of sellers out there. But certainly markets, risk markets are up and everyone is once again believing that, yes, this war is going to end, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And without regard to what people think, just curious. Because if you look, you'll see that Bitcoin dominance has actually fallen a bit today. At least Ethereum has outperformed Bitcoin despite this rally, which has been going the other way. And at the same time, we're seeing, you know, other more speculative crypto assets up and down the line having a very, very good morning.

And so the question is, is this because liquidity is coming back in or is this a bull market or a bear market rally? So, you know, curious what people think. I don't want to pontificate too much. I mean, generally, I resident Ethereum bull is William. I see you up on stage. So what are you thinking? Do you think this is a bitmine thing? think that that bottom needed to be held, it held, and so here we go.

Yeah, hi, everybody. Definitely, I think the bottom was tested twice last week, which is typically what needs to happen before a rebound. Obviously, I personally was not seeing Ethereum going anywhere lower than 1,500, which was the theoretical low. I can't say I'm excited because it's at 1800. I mean, not too long ago, we were in the 2,500 range. It's going to be a tough road back.

Obviously, the bitmine thing is a positive. I mean, the story is the same. That's the thing. I mean, the markets do what the markets want to do, the war, all of that. In the meantime, Ethereum is chugging along. You look at any metric in terms of adoption, in terms of value settled, stable coin, transfers or issuance, tokenized assets, you name it, pick any segment and the numbers are up there. So what keeps puzzling me is when are we going to start to evaluate these crypto tokens based on fundamentals or based at least on some semblance of metrics that have to do with adoption? not just with liquidity on liquidity off.

So it's a refrain that I'm echoing here. And I hope for now, at least that the market will attract investors that see value and not just look at liquidity and macro factors to determine what moves these prices. Dave, I see on Mateo's hand up. Yeah, I did too, and I said it, but I didn't realize I was muted. Right on Mattow. Go ahead. Good morning, everybody.

Happy Monday. Congratulations, Nick's fans and anyone who enjoyed watching USC 250 the way that I did. But overall, it just seems like there's a couple primary things here, and a big part of this, it's just the macro response to the Iran deal, starting to create a, maybe a steady, but a testing environment for risk appetite. I feel like there's a little bit of a pitch here on, is it safer? Are we heading into an environment where we can take on more risk? And I think this is just a testing of the waters.

But I think to your point here, Dave, as you're kind of starting this off, and it's good that we're seeing a bit more activity in these altcoins. I think we've had a lot of time to build and establish a variety of different theses around these coins. I think some of the overarching larger concerns around how the value accrual comes back to these assets is still something that needs to be worked out. But I think overall, where the industry is headed from a purely adoption standpoint from the progress that we're making and the fact that eventually there's been so much

downward pressure for so long that there might be now the time where people think that we're within a six-month, even 10-month range where this will turn a corner and we will start to see some activity on these other assets. And I think we're probably seeing some purchasing and some averaging in on these things that have some promise to ride this trend as eventually it starts to finally turn a corner. I think that that's right. I mean, I, in a world where, where they need to increase liquidity, you have to understand what's going on. Someone posted, I think was Eric Balcunis posted something about like, where would Elon's, you know, would he be a trillionaire if we are still under a gold standard or a sound money standard? And the answer is no,

but relatively where would he be? You know, I think that that's much more. important you know like a trillionaire and I can remember I'm I'm old enough to remember when someone would say oh my god that guy's a millionaire and it was a big deal you know it's kind of like the old Austin Powers thing you know one million dollars and everyone's kind of looking like what the hell's that you know but that that's real that's the effect of monetary debasement that's what's been happening and that's a lot of why we're bitcoinsers or a lot of people on this space are bitcoins because we understand that that's what's going on when we talk about fiat money that's what we mean.

We literally mean money from nowhere, right? I'm going to tell you, are those new hands coming up because it's like hands going like flashing at me. I do not have disco hands on my end. I wasn't trying to get your attention. But I will say kind of to just add one piece there, which was I thought it was pretty remarkable how accurate hyperliquid was in predicting

the actual pricing of SpaceX. I think that that was also a huge, indicator of the fact that we are entering a territory where these on-chain 24-hour markets can settle accurately to where things will even happen in public. I thought that that was quite remarkable. And some of the alt-appetite that we also saw fueled in this was the sudden takedown of Claude Fable and Mythos and it driving the narrative again on the importance of decentralized AI. So, you know, there was a couple additional factors that started to increase the appetite here with strong balance on bit tensor and near starting to show some signs.

So I think overall, you know, the decentralized thesis continues to get hardened whenever some of these headlines hit and slowly but surely is going to continue to draw attention back to the ecosystem. Yeah, I think that that, yeah, I noticed that as well. I mean, we're talking about, you know, like significant, like 30 some odd percent moves over two days in the BitTensor, for example. It was under 200, you know, last week and it's a 270 something now. So, yeah, I mean, these are, this is the sort of moves that people used to be trading in the crypto space, but it feels more like trading moves than it does anything else, you know, and not just that with that one, but with a bunch. You know, as far as hyper liquid is concerned, I mean, there is, it.

enormous demand for, you know, globally for markets to be 24-7, right? You know, the fact that that we, we all kind of just shrug our shoulders and say, yeah, Bitcoin is the macro predictor on the weekend because it's the only thing that's trading. I mean, Bitcoin is 0.2% of the global capital allocation. It's tiny. So why should that be? Well, the answer is it shouldn't. I mean, we should have the ability to trade everything that matters over the weekend and see it. And then at which point, you know, then Bitcoin goes to what it should be, you know, not, not this, you know, macro tip of the spear nonsense that I have to hear from, you know, although Mike didn't say it this morning. But, you know, most of the time he talks about, well, you know, Bitcoin is showing

that the stock market's going to crash. It's like, no, Bitcoin's going to show, it has been showing that it got over levered and the crypto market got annihilated last October, you know, one day proximate of disaster and it took a lot of people out of it. It's totally different. Oh, come on. That has to trigger somebody. I mean, not one hand. Do I just start calling on you people? Okay. So, you know, we can talk about a bunch of different things if we want. Okay, Carlo, I see an emoji there. I was going to start to keep a... I'll take the bait. Go for it. Well, good morning. Yeah, look, man, I think we're witnessing nothing short of an AI arms race that just started with this weekend's

Anthropic announcement. And I think it does create a bid. Is it a buying opportunity today because it's part of a news cycle event that's not at all uncommon in crypto, but I think it's also part of a bigger conversation that we cannot ignore that people are waking up to the fact that centralized models, centralized business entities, they have a bottom line. They have very soon shareholders, when these companies. companies go public. And when an AI model gets to the point where intelligence is throttled

in the interest of national security because a government has put pressure on a private company to limit access to that knowledge, to throttle that knowledge for the purpose of protecting society from the dangers of that knowledge, it opens up a conversation, which is very interesting. I've said on many shows that I think the economy layer of AI is crypto. And I think now that narrative is becoming even more important as we see what just happened with Fable 5. It's going to be a game of whackamol, Dave, going forward because you're going to have open source versions of this. And I see lawyers in the house, and I know he knows what I'm talking about. You're going to see, you know, very decentralized open source versions of these things that are going to be

possible to shut down, and it's akin to trying to shut down the internet when we have VPNs. So I don't know how this is going to play out, but I think there's definitely a narrative to be built around the blockchain aspects of AI and how the two absolutely go hand and glove. I mean, I think that's absolutely true. Ryan, is that a hand or is that you're just agreeing with it? Yeah, the Android app still does not give me a hand feature here. so I'm just waving at you. Okay, well, the floor is yours.

Morning, Dave. And, yeah, I've been in the decentralized AI push for the last three years now, and this is squarely the narrative we've been talking about is government censorship and pulling back. And what's wild with these companies, Anthropic, Open AI, they're in a race against each other, And rather than slow rolling things, kind of like Apple did with the iPhone, right? Every year they rolled out a different version of the iPhone was just a little bit different.

And they just kept the consumer buying the next iteration. But right now, we're jumping from Opus 4 to Opus 45 to Opus 46, 47, 48 in a matter of weeks. And then they're launching Fable. And it's just this crazy acceleration. Meanwhile, you have the Chinese labs that are spinning out GL LM5, 51, and 52, and now 52, which is open source, is tracking where a lot of the Fable benchmarks were. So if you're pining for Fable because they pulled it offline, look up to LM 52 that's already

been released. So we're already seeing just this crazy battle between open source and closed source, and yet the closed source companies are trillion-dollar companies. with free products right on their heels. So it's a wild scenario we have. And then AMD is announcing their new products for the consumer to run your own internal models. And what we're really going to see is Nvidia and AMD

eating the lunch of all of the privatized models using open source models and local inference. And that's going to keep scaling until we start figuring out how to do basically ASIC versions of LLMs and have our own robots to talk to. Lawyered. Yeah, I'd like to find out what it is that they're afraid that Mythos is going to allow people to do and then just prepare for all those things happening because these open source models

will be comparable not too long from now. I don't know if it's virology or, you know, hacking, security, but there's something that either it's all just great marketing, or anthropic or there's something that they're genuinely worried about and they're all they can do is get ahead of it by a little bit right in a matter of a blink of an eye we're all going to have open model lLMs that are capable of whatever it is they're concerned about i think that's almost certain and you know look at the other news that no one's mentioned but i'm dumbfounded by you know having you know my you know ian was born in the u.k uh and we lived there we were well in our way to being you know to to

literally living there, you know, back in the 90s, to see the UK going to ban social media for under 16-year-olds. I mean, ban. I mean, look, we'll see how well that works. I'm going to guess not terribly well. But it is easy to understand why, and I think that it is absolutely accurate that our youth are being, you know, there's serious issues with social media with children. but the notion of trying to ban, all I can tell you is I'll tell a story.

When Ian, you know, who everyone knows, you know, co-founded coin routes with me, was 11. My wife basically said, well, why don't you put parental controls on the internet? He's staying up too late at night and it's too hard to wake up in the morning. So I went on the router and I put parental controls and locked him out of the internet. And the next day I came home from work and the internet was not working. my wife was like, the internet's not working, what's going on? And I realized what had happened. Ian had hacked and figured out how to reverse the parental controls and lock us out.

So we eventually had to agree on Dayton's and, you know, whatever. It's like, look, at his 18th birthday, I was very happy because it meant that I was no longer responsible if he actually hacked anything. Now, the truth is he never did do anything unethical. But all I could tell you is the likelihood of a ban at sick. forget 16. You're not capable to ban 12-year-olds if they're if they're precocious and smart and technologically enabled. But what does this mean for crypto? Well, they don't have money to buy it, but you know that that's going to be the method of transacting. And all I have to see is the more states try to do stuff that they literally can't do, the more it's going to encourage

people to go towards censorship resistance and using assets and and trading this way. I mean, I don't know, am I nuts? I mean, Carlo, I see you give me the 100% of me. What do you think? No, that's absolutely the case. It's going to be impossible to put limitations on knowledge. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, and now that we have access to infinite compute and knowledge power,

to suggest that we're going to somehow throttle the access to that. Even for national security purposes, it's very difficult, because this is not protecting society or hedging a government by limiting access to some technological advancement. This is knowledge. And this opens up a really difficult dilemma for governments. I understand that they're in an existential race with China to continue to be ahead of the curve on this. But this is all being commoditized at scale.

And I don't think that's going to turn off. and I do think the decentralized response to this is going to be the interesting play going forward. I mean, yeah, I think that that's right. I mean, Ryan, you tell me. What would you say? I said, I was waving at you again. The waving works.

I see it. That's cool. All right, all right. I love the fact you brought up the kids because, you know, my 15-year-old is, you know, very fascinating with electronics, right? now and using GROC and chat Gpti, he's doing advanced microelectronics designs right now, stuff that I learned in college.

And yet I'm watching the stuff he's soldering together on the floor of my office. I'm just like, holy cow, like it's crazy. And if you think about how much of the systems in our country alone are not encrypted, we have an entire next generation of hackers with a ton of information. at their disposal. For example, the water meters in a lot of cities that are wirelessly read by the water company are not encrypted signals. So you could hack those and you could fake the signal for how much water you're using. You can get a flipper and you can start copying signals, reading signals, jamming signals. And now you combine that with AI. Now every single high

schooler in the country is going to have the ability to bring down just even municipal systems. So fable or not, like, we already have enough intelligence to cause a lot of damage. It's just a matter of applying it. We just need better parenting, to be honest. Yeah, except, well, yeah, don't get me started there. But yeah, the risk, there are real risks, is no doubt. I mean, we all know our electrical grid is incredibly, uh, vulnerable. We know that there's a lot of things so you can sell it. But the thing that is

most concerning, I guess, to me is every single time we get any security risk, the government uses this to overstep. I mean, that's why we got the Patriot Act. That's why, frankly, in the beginning, we got the Bank Secrecy Act. And we all know that these things don't really work. I mean, they just don't. And it's, I mean, it leads us to some of the stupidest things imaginable. you know, Jamie Diamond blaming crypto for money, you know, allowing money laundering and therefore using it to justify not regulating crypto so that you could ban money laundering at the same time as he presided over literally billions of dollars in fines for money laundering. I mean, you can't make this shit up.

And we're in bizarro world when it comes to a lot of this stuff. I see you agree, Rich. my my yeah i'm sorry how's it guys yeah i tell you the one thing i really enjoyed you said earlier i think might have been on a different core was touching on the jamie diamond thing was you know the the hypocrisy around Elon's wealth and uh just this politicizing of of his you know becoming a trillionaire moment and it's almost like the attention shifted away from from these bankers who have been you know, hiding all of these, like you mentioned, these fines for fraud for decades. And yet everybody's, you know, quick to Russian and overlook, you know, all the good that

we know Elon's done. You love him, my hate to him, whatever. That's not the point. Look at the facts of what he's doing. I mean, he's an incredible advert for America's innovation. And they should be celebrating it right now when there is so much division. So, yeah, I mean, I was on fire on rants this morning. But one of them is that every single one of the people who are complaining about Elon being worth a trillion dollars,

when he's literally built robots that we can drive in, it cut costs for NASA for getting stuff into space massively. I mean, I love how they say, oh, well, the government is why he got it. Yeah, it's because he cut NASA's costs is why he got that government money for SpaceX is potentially going to solve the transportation problems and some of our densest areas with the boring company. There's so many things that he has actually done. Meanwhile, who's actually gotten the biggest government bailouts, the two industries, and it isn't even close, are the bankers and the insurance companies, who have extracted literally trillions from the American people because of their political influence.

And the bankers, because they almost destroyed the economy in 2008. So, of course, all the subsidies and subsidizing regulations we put in still exist. you know, 20 years later, great. And so, and that's what they're fighting to keep with, you know, all the stuff over the Genius Act. But I mean, you know, it's, it's, there's no one on this panel who cares about any of that stuff. And then when you talk about why our health care system is so fucked up, and in America, we pay twice per GDP, you know, per capita GDP, uh, for health care than everybody else in the world and have less of it. And that's because we've given the insurance companies, this massive gift, you know, 20 years ago, uh, that allows,

to be oligopolis. And yet these same people complain about Elon who's actually built shit. I mean, you could argue, you know, all sorts of things in terms of relative wealth. You could make arguments. But the fact is, is that there's never been a greater engine

for lifting people out of poverty than capitalism, and all Elon has done is build shit. So, yeah, I get, I just find it funny. I mean, people, to me, it's an IQ test. If you could, anyone who's complained about Elon being a trillion dollars, you know that person's a functional moron. And I don't care for. who they are. You know, it's that simple. But, you know, to bring it back to our audience, I mean,

look, you know, what's going to be the base layer for a lot of this stuff? And that's really what we're talking about. We think that the rails of crypto was built. And frankly, people like me believe that Bitcoin will be that value layer. Anyway, Ryan, I saw the wave. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, Elon being a trillioner, I think it is a fantastic narrative with the way he set a goal and he set a vision. was bat-shit crazy 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And I get a point to that with my kids and say, look, just because people have done something a certain way for so long does not mean it's the best way to do it.

And you have to boil things back. You have to rip it down to first principles. And when you see a problem that you want to solve when you have a vision, you can literally just ignore everything else around you, ignore all the things people are saying and just stay singularly focused on that. And I mean, it's such a great narrative.

And the guy got rewarded for it. Like time and time again, he's gotten rewarded for it. And he's making good changes. So as soon as someone has a vision for the healthcare system, someone has a vision for decentralized AI, for, you know, spaceships, for, you know, the USS Enterprise. Whoever's going to latch onto these visions, I think it's an amazing narrative for our kids in the next generation.

Last thing we want is, you know, Maxine Waters and, you know, all these, like, terrible politicians driving the narrative for our youth. Like, they're fucking insane. Like, you said it yourself, Dave. Like, these people are insane. And we need to either drive them out or go around them with technology. And right now it just seems easier to go around them with technology. I mean, it is very clear that anyone saying these things is one of two things. They're either morons and quite a few of them are.

This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. Dumb. I mean, just really stupid human beings who shouldn't be entrusted to run anything, yet they're leading our country because they, you know, they get votes. Or they're evil. And they know that they're wrong. And they're doing so just to gain power. There really is no other option. It just, it drives me kind of nuts. But, you know, and that's why I'll get on a rant on this stuff, you know, all the time. But it is, that's the world we live in. And all I'll say is, you know, when we talk about what will be the base layer of value, it's really, it boils down to a simple question. Will Bitcoin fulfill its promise

of being that at some point in the future, yes or no? If the answer is yes, it's 95% plus undervalue. And if the answer is no, okay, well, then there you go. We're going to have to come up with something else because society needs it. And that's the way that I look at it. And by the way, both are possible. I mean, anyone who thinks it isn't is kind of crazy. I mean, Gary and I were having this conversation this morning about where the buyers are going to come from, like, where is all this stuff? And that's really the key question. The same is true for all of this. If everybody chooses, I forgot in the Matrix, the Blue Pill or the Red Pill, chooses to be plugged back into the Matrix and believe that dollars have inherent value, well, okay, cool.

You know, I personally wouldn't, but, you know, we'll see how that goes. I mean, that's really the issue. I mean, Gary, you know, we were talking about it this morning. I mean, you know, your feeling is it's going to take a while for people to actually raise their heads up again, right? Well, I think so. Or to get them to look this way because they're chasing a bunch of glittery objects that seem to be working pretty well. Yeah, I mean, you know, we spent how many weeks where Scott kept calling this Meltter Town Hall because we're talking about gold and silver? I mean, it's like it talk about glittery objects.

I mean, you know, but if you look at gold and silver, I mean, there's silver's back up over, over that 70 level, which is where this all started. You know, it started actually well below, but it got into the 70. And that's where all the margin stuff or talking about all that crap. And we're kind of right back there. Now, what will happen? Who the hell knows? Right. You know, to me.

Well, this would be the question. Like, if Bitcoin's going to run, are we really saying that silver and gold aren't going to? No, I actually think Bitcoin and silver are going to be correlated with both. I agree. Well, okay, so you're throwing gold out, but I'm just saying I think that outperform. I didn't say. Oh, outperforms, yeah, yeah, yeah. See how I misunderstood that.

See, I even misunderstood that. I'm like, oh, wow, does that mean gold is going to go down? But you're just saying it's going to help. See, I think they all go up yet a bunch of Bitcoiners are all saying gold and silver have done. They're going to puke out. I don't see how they can puke out in Bitcoin. does well. It seems contradictory. Yeah, I think that I'm on your side.

Look, I think gold's equilibrium price. I've been saying this for months. And we still need new buying. Right. I think, yeah. I mean, I've been saying gold at 4,500 and silver between 70 and 80 are their equilibriums. And if we get speculative juices, they'll both do better.

I think Bitcoin's equilibrium is somewhere between 100 and 140. And it will get there. And then once again, if we get speculative juices, it will go. further. I mean, that's just what I think. I mean, I could be wrong, obviously. I, this is not financial advice. I'm just saying that's where I think the natural supply demand sorts of equalizes with what's going on until there's new, new narratives. And we'll see. What would that mean? What would the, what would it look like for you to go, oh, wow, I think this might take longer than I thought. Um, Q day or or approaching Q, I mean,

something where, or Bitcoin just, the Bitcoin, core developers can't protect the you know can't protect the blockchain that's that's really it you know to me that and i don't think that that's terribly likely in the next six months but you know we'll see amatoa is that a new hand yeah um i just wanted to add to kind of the conversation of this piece so i've been trying to think about like the timeline here a little bit and you've presented this in terms of like what kind of market are we in dave and i think i think the current state is you know we're in a we're in a bounce and we're engaging risk appetite. But, you know, as I look forward maybe six to eight months and Gary, this is kind of the

inverse of your question, I look at this and I think to myself, like, where does Bitcoin catch a trend, right? Where does it catch a narrative? And I think that if the pattern sort of plays out and we get a little bounce and a summer lull and then we get kind of a capitulation bottom in the fall. You know, Benjamin Cohen has been talking about this. I'm not saying that it's 100% accurate, but let's just say that plays out theoretically. And we get kind of a bigger flush out, maybe a little mini recession, something along those lines across markets.

I think that there's a reality here that potentially the private credit bubble having weakness and bursting could, just like we saw the Silicon Valley Bank and, you know, all of all of the banking institution failures that were powering the startup and investment world, fail, drive Bitcoin, be a catalyst for Bitcoin. And just like Bitcoin always does, I could see it recovering faster out of that kind of larger scale sell-off. And that, in combined with that correlating piece, be a thing that starts to get momentum in the right direction and setting this up for really a new cycle. trend around Bitcoin and crypto.

I agree with that, by the way. Yeah, I think, Ryan, I see the wave. Yeah. So the ups and downs of Bitcoin are like, I guess overall, just a signal of incredibly healthy ecosystem. Every single system on the face of the earth universally propagates through oscillation. Without oscillation, you don't get propagation.

and when you look at any market or any chart, if it just goes up, up, up and up, it's not indicative of a healthy system. So the fact that we're getting this push and pull, we're getting these pullbacks, and we kind of reset the table, and then we go up again and we get a pull back, it's incredibly healthy.

And when you have a longer time horizon, and we look at the actual technology and the ethos of Bitcoin and the soundness of money in general, I think the reason we're all here is we know that it's going to keep going up and it's going to pull back around. And there are buyers for this technology and everyone's just kind of waiting with faded breath for when people are going to jump on the next up cycle. So it's not if, but when. Yeah, that waiting part is the interesting thing. I think that there is a lot of speculative.

I think the speculative money is out and won't come in until they, you know, they see key levels or whatever, which generally means you need a, a grinding rally first for that to take place. But I guess we'll see. Rich, I see your hand up. Yeah, I think just to add, I agree. I think there's a lot of change going on. And we got a bit of the noise out the way. I think if you circle back to what happened with Pump Fun and memes,

and not to say memes are going to reemerge in the next phase of how things progress. But look what happened last week with Canton, raised $255 million from some of the top names in. you know, in trade fire. I think the new narratives are starting to establish themselves, as we know, they very well do in crypto, but, you know, on chain, we've seen shoot the lights out with what happened with Hyper Liquid, another massive name, but also just opening the floodgates for, you know, 24-7 trading globally, which had been markets previously limited to certain

jurisdictions. We know predictions is a highly competitive and buoyant narrative that's driving blockchain usage. But this privacy thing, I think, is also starting to emerge as a real contender. We know that stablecoin infrastructures has kind of opened up things and the entire premise of clarity centers around this. I'm pretty excited about the way things are going. We're starting to have a lot of maturity come back, and the adults are coming back. and the adults are coming back to the table to have serious conversations. And I genuinely think it just causes founders to rethink a lot of their strategies

about how they've gone about business in order to survive in this very, very dog-eat-dog industry of crypto. And I'm hoping that it matures in the sense that we don't allow bad actors or weak founders to exist. you know, if we find ourselves three, five years down the line and we're in a cloud of controversy because of some bad acting, we're only to blame. We can't keep tripping over our feet when I think a lot of opportunities been handed to us on a silver platter at the moment. Yeah, I have a problem with that a little bit because greed is one of the fundamental human conditions and there are always people willing to push the line too much. It's the notion that that an industry can, you know, is only as strong as the weakest, most evil, disgusting people

is a problem. And, you know, look, I'll say it, you know, I've been in markets for many years. I mean, I literally, you know, Scott knows this. I just, I wrote a book. It's going through the publishing process or doing the copy edit now, but it won't actually be on shelves until February, even though it's, you know, the main editor has basically said they like it. And I chronicle how electronification, how automation has changed Wall Street. And lots of funny stories and stuff. But the one thing that I will tell you, it does not matter. There are always people who will always try to find a way based on any rule set. And when you don't have rules, it goes even further. So in retrospect, it's not surprising. It's more surprising that someone like Sam Bankman

Freed would have done something at that scale. But there's nothing that happens on Pump Fun that would surprised me. And the fact that the president of the United States did it is significantly worse. And I think one of the things that set the crypto industry back more than anything else over the last year, and I will continue to say that. But, you know, you're not going to get good actors. What you're going to, what you need is a robust system that can, you know, at least discourage bad actors. And some of that, that's really the point. I want to just add to that. So I agree with you, but I mean, this exists in business in general. But we can't have as bad actors driving our industry forward.

They're going to coexist. But what we had previously was it was center stage. What I'm saying is I think we're starting to see more prominence move to the front. You know, Pump Fund's going to come back. There's no doubt. Memes are going to come back. Predictions betting is going ballistic. People love the casino.

And Cryptos offered that hand of the first. year and year out. So I'm not saying that at all that bad actors aren't going to exist. I just think we've just got to try and shift the dynamics a bit. Yeah, by the way, for those who care, you know, there's a huge battle going on in the United States over jurisdiction on prediction markets and sports betting, etc, where the CFTC wants to deal with it and the states want it. This weekend, Saturday's game, where the Knicks won the championship, was an incredibly strong piece of evidence for the federal government. And it will get used.

You should understand what that is. And just to explain, because this is very esoteric. So I know people who had tickets, Nick tickets, for game six, and they were selling for just insane amounts of money. So, you know, maybe you paid 200 for your ticket and you could sell it for $20,000. And if you had two tickets, that's $40,000. So what did those people do? those people bet on the Nix, getting money, because they were actually underdog on Saturday,

bet on the Nix to hedge their $40,000 windfall. So they bet $20,000 on the NICs, and that way they locked in a $20,000 profit. Now, the fact that they could do so via prediction markets means that they are a bona fide hedge by the legal definition. So watch the lawyers. And I got lawyers up here and Carlo up here. You tell me if I'm wrong. But I'm going to bet you that lawyers are going to use that argument.

for the federal government. And that's a really hard argument to win against. Now, obviously, very, very few games are like that. But the question is, does it have to be all of them? And that, by the way, who wins that regulatory battle matters because when you have to go navigate 50 individual states like you do with money transmitter licenses and everything else, it's much, much harder. If you can get a federal license, it's much, much easier. And so you'll see a lot of these casinos and things going on it. But that's neither here or there. I would tell you, is that a new hand? Nope. That's historic.

Okay, so, Carlo, I think I'm right on what I'm saying? Yeah, I do because I think there has to be a uniformity to this stuff. The traditional online betting industry got absolutely shaken and disrupted by on-chain prediction markets. And they are, they're reeling at this point. And the first natural intuitive response is to try to litigate the new threat on the block out of existence, but we know how that plays out. It's better to adapt than to try to resist. And frankly, on-chain predictions is a new and very, very compelling thing that is not going to go

back in the bottle as well, just like AI. The fact that people can now predict on virtually any event has to be regulated, of course, because there will be bad players, there will be abuse. but it's also baked into the nature of tokenized assets that we're going to see real-time on-chain settlement of anything and everything. It's better that we regulate it and keep it here, then we do the opposite, which is over-regulated and over-enforce it and send it offshore, which with VPNs and all the clever things people can do to arbitrage,

is not going to fix the problem. It's just going to move the profits offshore. Right. Well, that's the biggest issue with what Gensler and Warren were doing. And that's, but the ultimate irony, of course, is that what did it do? Well, it allowed FTCS to happen. Right. You know, and it will continue to and others.

And that's the funny part about all this. I mean, it's like you wonder if this isn't just reflexive. Trump wants it, so we therefore have to oppose it sort of stuff at this point. Because it really doesn't fit the narrative. I mean, there's no reason. why clarity is anything other than bipartisan. I mean, okay, Warren has a, you know, whatever, whether it, I won't call it a defect. I think she's just, you know, once she gets her.

She's lost the narrative, Dave. She's become a meme of herself. Well, I mean, she says the dumbest things, like, you know, really, really stupid things. I know she's not a stupid person. So I just attribute it to evil. You know, maybe I'm wrong. But it's almost indefensible to make an argument that says, okay, well, we think crypto is bad and people get ripped off.

And so therefore, we want to make sure we don't regulate it. And literally that's what she's saying. So I don't understand, right? It's almost, it has become, it has become silly. You know, Eleanor Territ, her reporting, and she does an incredible job, by the way. Her reporting basically says there's almost no way they can get this thing, you know, done just on the calendar before the recess. And so the only way it's going to get done is if the banks kind of push and push

Democrats to say, you know, look, you got to go along with this because we can't allow, we need this compromise, you know, if you're versus what we have for genius, that's literally the only way because I can't imagine they're going to get this thing done, you know, as we start moving towards the midterms. But, you know, once again, what the hell do I know? You know, I don't know, but that seems to be the case. But what is very clear is, and this is something that we started talked about last week, we didn't really get a chance to. But the SEC and the CFTC are clearly moving towards a more coherent regulatory structure that embraces digital assets. And that can happen without clarity.

So that's interesting. William. I was going to say if history repeats itself, I want to remind everybody, last year, at the same time as we are right now, Bitcoin was about 103, and it ended up at 125 in October. And Ethereum was barely 2,300,

and it reached 5,000 in August. So we may be on to something here. Traditionally, at the end of June, things quiet down. But I really would love to see a repeat of last year. I mean, look, it depends on what happens, right? I mean, you know, there's all sorts of things going on here. Like we started to talk about at the end of the day on Friday, but it's worth mentioning, you know, this reg NMS thing that Paul Atkins came out with

and a bunch of people in the crypto space and oh, that'll make it much easier for crypto securities. And the answer is yes, that's true. This is near and dear to my heart. I have been an outspoken critic of what the rule that he's talking about. It's Rule 611. It's called the order protection rule. It's the one that basically says,

you can't trade at a price on your exchange, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, somebody else's price that's away from you. Now, crypto obviously does not have that. Crypto, the market is literally every single second crossed. Like, right now, the best offer in Bitcoin is 66 623. And the best bid is 66.631. That's OECs against GDAX. So it doesn't matter which ones it is. It's always. It's always. GDax being Coinbase, just on our system, we kept it with the original. It's always crossed.

But when you put fees into account, it's not always crossed. And the markets are actually relatively efficient. So Ian and I submitted a letter to the SEC. We did a study on this. It turns out that for when you control for market cap and volatility, it's dramatic. That crypto is way cheaper. It's even spot is way cheaper to trade than equities, way cheaper for institutional size. It's not even close, by the way.

It's like we're talking like haunts. And the reason is because liquidity is much more diversified. And if you know how to go get it, you can do it really, really cheaply. Whereas in the equity markets, you have an incredibly over-engineered market where the high-frequency firms that have colos at the data centers that can go through it have such a huge advantage that the average institution has to pay a toll to get through to the market. And Paul Atkins wrote, he basically predicted that what happened in 2011. when he dissented from the original rule.

So he's going to get rid of it or going to try to. And we'll see whether he succeeds or not. But if you do see that, it's going to be part of an overhaul which could make markets. It's one of those rules. And there are a few that have made securities, being called a security a death sentence for crypto. Get rid of those rules. And all of a sudden, you have a much healthier market. And that's what we started to talk about on Friday.

I don't know, Carlo, if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Friction, excuse me, friction is always the problem. And the SEC still is working off of traditional stock trading infrastructure. And of course, we're still working off the Securities Act. We've made incredible progress in this administration in undoing the fear mongering and the overzealous regulation by enforcement. end of the last administration that nearly killed this sector and took it offshore. And every major player wants access to tokenize trading 24-7. And there has to be a clear rule book, which circles back to, like you said at the beginning of this, you know, Eleanor Tarrant, you know, she's been watching this. She thinks that the runway, the possibility of the July 4th signing ceremony for the Clarity Act

is procedurally not possible at this point, but that does not rule out. a summer passage of this bill, the market needs it for regulatory certainty. The question is, will the people that have vested interests in resisting it, will they prevail? They tried this before and they chased innovation offshore. If they do it again, history will rhyme. That's my take. Yeah. William, is that a new hand?

No, no, that's the old one. But I was surprised there. Basically, you have some doubts as to whether clarity might pass in the next 25 days or whatever they gave it. Well, I mean, it's not about doubts. It's that there are people out there who are so, we're in this ridiculous situation where an entire party is literally putting their narrative as opposing Trump. Well, Trump's kids, and they have two businesses that are in crypto. World Liberty and American Bitcoin. And so by definition, opposing Trump means opposing an industry.

And literally that's the other side. I mean, when Carlo made the statement a few seconds ago that people who's vested interest, I mean, unless you are, even if you are supporting the banks, the banks, I mean, Jamie Diamond's stupidity last week or two weeks ago, notwithstanding. I mean, the banks, if there is no clarity act, genius is the law of the land. And that's a win for stable coins. And that's a win for stable coins, it's a loss for the banks. So the banks need it too.

So I don't know what vested interests are against. Unless your vested interest is to oppose everything that has the name Trump on it, I don't know what the vested interest that opposes a regulatory environment for crypto. In fact, if you think crypto is only for criminals, you should want it because then at least you have clarity on who's regulating it. So it makes no sense. but it is we live in a bizarre world that that's all I meant was Ryan were you waving at me yeah yeah waving at you there Dave I was wondering if you we could put that on polymarket and just ask if they think

clarity X is going to pass well it'll probably give us a good indicator I always thought that was very interesting with the prediction markets polymarket's been around for a long time and yet now it seems to be the hot thing the prediction market and you wonder how many other successful projects have been around for a long time in the Ethereum ecosystem are going to be the next wave of cool kids stuff. And I got to imagine, like, that's going to be what drives the market next year or next summer. It's, it already exists. It's existed for several years now. It's just no one's really taking it to the end's degree.

Well, let me ask you because you're an expert on this topic, but when you start talking about open source compute for an open source inference for AI. It feels like, I don't know if there's an asset that implies it, but it feels like that is going to be explosive. Oh, you know, I wasn't gonna ring my own bell here, but I think Morpheus, Venice, BitTensor, they're driving, they're gonna be driving the next narrative. And these inference markets, I mean, I launched an inference market three weeks,

ago, we already have over a million dollars of inference tokens tied up in it. The inference markets are going to explode. So I really think as we start decentralizing the models more and people start bringing up more of their own compute, they're going to want to monetize their compute somewhere, and it's naturally going to go to decentralized markets. Well, I mean, the whole point of virtual compute was always that that it was always right, right? You know, it's like we have an absolute metric shit ton of compute

that's sitting not being used in people's computers all around the place. But Bitcoin, which was originally, that was the thought, right? Bitcoin mining would just use that kind of stuff. It's like, but no, it became a race, and therefore it needed to be, and obviously A6, not even GPUs and not just kind of spare compute. I don't know how virtualized compute can work with inference models. I'm not an expert.

you know much more than I do and certainly with uh probably not with training but with inference for sure is much more on demand but you know it feels to be like we that there's a lot there right and so yeah you know it's very hard it's very hard from an asset point of view to to delink from the project point of view i mean like polymarket as a market is a major success probably market But there's no asset there, right? You know, we've seen that before. Yeah, we're seeing like such a huge rise in like DM and Morpheus token and near token. The value is going up substantially.

And a lot of it's just the new agentic systems that are coming online. And people are realizing more and more what they can do with OpenClawe and Hermes and these other agents. And they're hungry for compute. They just use it nonstop. And they'll run 24-7. and my inference bill or my API bill through Anthropic was getting insane. And that's why I had to solve my own problem. So that's why I launched a site called Mortium, which solved my inference problem with OpenClaas.

So now I can use frontier models. But everyone's going to be running into the same scaling issue because they're building their startups on AI. They're building their startups on the API keys for Brock, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Anthropic. And it's going to squeeze their margins down. going to have to go looking for cheap inference somewhere else. And I think that's going to drive the next crypto narrative is these decentralized compute markets. That makes a lot of sense to me. But here we are. We're getting close to time. I don't want to pivot to another topic as a result. So anybody else have final thoughts? Or should we call it here and see everyone on Wednesday?

Okay. So with that, enjoy the rest of your day, everyone. It's a beautiful day here in southern New Jersey. I'm going to go. I have some gardening to do. We'll take care.