The Wolf Of All Streets - Exec Order + SAB 121 Bullish—Why Isn’t Crypto Pumping? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

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Good morning, everyone. Happy Friday. Yesterday had to be one of the top five craziest news cycle days that we've experienced on this show, maybe in crypto ever. For those of you who were here in the morning, we launched about 20 minutes early when Cynthia Lummis tweeted big things coming with the Bitcoin B logo. Of course, lots of conjecture that would be an executive order, a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It turned out that that was that Cynthia Lummis would be heading a digital asset committee in the Senate, which is actually still huge news, but not what the market, I guess, was looking for. We had sort of a pump on her tweet, and then Bitcoin went back down. And then we continued the show until it got unfortunately cut by spaces. It was, I think, the biggest audience we've probably

ever had. We had over 20,000 people live yesterday, which was pretty astounding. And then, obviously, we got the news that Trump was going to sign executive orders, that he was going to speak with the president of El Salvador. We spoke about that on the show. And then right after we stopped, I think Trump gave his speech at the World Economic Forum saying that the United States would be the world capital of AI and crypto, which was crazy. And then we got the executive order long after we did the show, which I think is worth doing some further unpacking on today. And if you weren't exhausted enough by the news cycle at that point, the SEC overturned SAB 121. Esther Purse tweeting about it in great fashion.

And that was one of the executive orders people were looking for, and the SEC did it themselves. That doesn't even unpack the entire day, but wow. Alex, you actually had some sort of great takes as the executive order was coming out and how you viewed it. One of the sort of most controversial points was obviously a national strategic stockpile of digital assets rather than a strategic Bitcoin reserve that many were looking for. You sort of alluded in a tweet that this probably meant that we would hold everything we have and list kind of all of the crypto assets that the United States was holding from seizures and other activities. Is that still kind of how you're framing this? Yeah. Hey, Scott. Yeah. I mean, it's not that they will hold

everything they have. It's that, and keep in mind the language in the EO as it relates to the stockpiles, extremely loose, right? It's to evaluate the potential to create one, potentially drawing from crypto assets already lawfully seized, right? So it could, I don't think the EO at all prohibits the purchasing of Bitcoin. And it also doesn't guarantee the holding of Bitcoin or any of those tokens, right? They're going to look at it with the direction to have it potentially include coins that we already have. So I think it's broad language to give the working group and the president leeway to figure out what makes the most sense there was a lot of i'm sorry there was a lot of fear in the treasury world yeah there was a lot

of fear in the treasury world about what a bitcoin purchase would mean for agency debt markets and i think in general the eo signals they're're going to think about this whole thing thoughtfully and come up with a recommendation for the president. I would just say, broadly speaking, it's been a pretty whirlwind week. I know you guys have been covering it, but this feels a lot like getting most of what the president promised. I mean, I know I talked to a prominent incoming treasury official who said that this, you know, the president ran on two slogans in 2016, which was make America great again, and promises made promises kept. If you go down the list, you know, even if you're upset about the inclusion of the term digital assets, rather than strategic Bitcoin reserve, like,

you've got Caroline Pham as acting director of the CFTC, big supporter of crypto. You've got Travis Hill becoming the acting chair of the FDIC. In his release, he said the FDIC is focused on adopting a more open-minded approach to innovation and tech adoption, including a more transparent approach to fintech partnerships and digital assets and tokenization. Yeah, we can. We've got Mark Ueda as the acting SEC chair. He established the task force there, which Hester Peirce will lead. Trump pardoned Ross. They signed the EO. SAB 121 rolled back. Lummis is the chair of a new digital asset subcommittee in the Senate. So that's a lot for one week. And it feels like a great jumping off point. We're needy children. And we have to argue the semantics of this specific language.

Can't just get all the things we want and accept it. No, it's true. And there is a lot to talk about in the specifics of the EO in particular, like there's a lot in there. And there's nuance, you know, I know our mutual friend contrarian Joe Calasar, like wants to say that the EO doesn't mean anything. I think that's totally false. But there's a lot of work to do. But just if you want to do as an exercise as sort of a signpost, go look at President Biden's 2022 digital assets executive order and compare it to this one. You'll see they are starkly different. Starkly different. But I think one thing that was interesting, and Nathaniel Whittemore pointed this out on my show on YouTube, there's kind of two sort of framings for executive orders. One of them is

like, we're going to be the JFK files, right? This is the example he get. Or like this specific thing is happening. And then there's the other framing, which is sort of putting together a plan to start looking at things, right? That's what Biden did as well. And it was horrible, right? He said, listen, the agencies have, I don't remember what it was, 60 days to come back with a recommendation on how to approach crypto. That's actually what Trump is effectively doing here as well, is saying, you know, every relevant agency,

it was a 30, 60, 180-day basically plan that Trump is laying out here for this working committee. So structurally the same, but in a much more bullish framing. And interestingly, as Caitlin Long continued to point out, none of the banking regulators were included in that, which is sort of a shout out to the ending of Operation Chokepoint 2.0 here. Yeah, the banking regulators were explicitly excluded. That was clearly on purpose. You are right about the difference when it comes to like JFK, RFK, MLK. The president has sole discretion on deciding classification of documents, so it doesn't require any consultation. Financial

regulation and policy in America is established by statute and and certain regulatory agencies as you well know have um jurisdiction over that they they nonetheless will be acting in contravention of the president's order if they for example the stuff at the top of the order which is a very common way to frame an executive order the national priorities portion if say the treasury comes out with a rule that makes it illegal to self-custody, they'll be in direct violation of the president's order, right? And unless there is a constitutional or statutory reason to contravene the order, they will be breaking the law. The executive order does carry the force of law, right? So the president is establishing to his subordinates, right? Some of them, yes, are statutorily confirmed or have other rules and

laws they have to follow. But he is saying this is the policy of the United States. So I think it's, yes, it doesn't immediately turn things into durable law and rulemaking and legislation is more durable long term. But this is, I think think this is the president establishing what the federal government's priorities are. And Lamas, to be fair, you know, as much as it wasn't as big of an announcement as she sort of hinted at for the community as a whole, and maybe more for her, her chairing that committee means that she's going to be the one who decides what comes, you know, what bills come to the floor, what gets voted on, things like that. And she is the one who decides what comes, you know, what bills come to the floor, what gets voted on, things like that. And she is the one who's very specifically saying and proposing a strategic

Bitcoin reserve through legislation that she's already presented. So to be fair, an executive order could be sort of purposely vague and we're working on it while she takes the better route, right? We would rather have legislation passed in the Senate and House and go to his desk even than an executive order. So I think we just need to be patient. But it was interesting that, you know, the market sort of absorbed it and nothing really happened with price. And I think that that shocked a lot of people. You know, there was a sentiment that if we got a strategic Bitcoin reserve, Bitcoin goes straight to like 150k. And the language just didn't allow, you know, people to sort of buy it on any sort

of confirmation. Yeah, it's true. I think they didn't need like, I've been very cautious on the SBR because I was very, I mean, we published predictions on December 31, saying it won't happen that a stockpile would happen, but it would happen. And I don't think that it will happen personally. And I don't think the president has the authority to order without legislation. And I don't think that it will happen personally. And I don't think the president has the authority to order it without legislation. So I think the market got a little bit ahead of itself on this and it's you're good. Tom, you had your hand up. Tom is currently seeking that button and wondering why it's glitching.

Cause that's what happens on spaces. All right. I'll go to Amateo. You had your hand up as well. Awesome. Hey, Scott, what a monumental day everyone yesterday was, and just an incredible week. Agree that Trump is delivering on his promises. I think you mentioned it at the start, but we also got the banning of CBDCs, which might have been one of the most significant events that we've seen. I think that's been such a talking point here. There was a lot of concern actually through Trump doubters that through the implementation of in support of AI that we start to see CBDCs and some kind of financial control mechanism rolled out and it just didn't happen. In fact, it's banned. I think that's really significant. I think David Sachs, who was there at the signing of the executive order, had some

really good thoughts on the nature of this. And really to what I think we've all been speculating on, he was very clear that the actual reserves in the stockpile is something that they're going to look at. And obviously, the fact that he said that we're still looking at it caused a little bit of market shock. It's very clear that they needed a strategy to this. And I think the thing that we've been talking about this entire week is that they also need a strategy for an SBR. They're not going to let the market front run it. They're not going to let other countries front run it. It would be incredibly hasty for them to just all of a sudden announce this, be able to

keep their Bitcoin stockpile that they have, but then be priced out of some kind of acquisition strategy if that's actually going to happen, which we'll see. I think we need to break these things out. Obviously, Cynthia Loomis is working very hard on getting that SBR pushed through, but it's going to be a separate matter. I think everyone's scratching their head going like, why did the market not react to this? And I think that there's a couple of reasons. One, just greed. Everyone wants more. And I think that that's just pure insanity and just shows

the immaturity of this market that you look at what happened yesterday and you think, oh, that's not enough. I just don't get that. There was clearly plenty. And I think there's just so much coming ahead and so many bullish catalysts. You don't really want to unload the entire momentum all at once right at the beginning. What we actually want to see in this market is a series of regulatory clarity, different efforts being passed through so that we can have ongoing, exciting, bullish catalysts for the adoption of these assets at an institutional level, including banking. Yeah, just to give you the David Sachs quote, which was on Fox Business when asked about the strategic stockpile, strategic stockpile. Yeah, we're going to evaluate that. We have not decided to do it yet. We need

to study that. So that was about as like vague and noncommittal, I think, as you could get, which also speaks to why the market wouldn't react so positively, I think. It makes a lot of sense. Not that anyone should be surprised or should be discouraged, but that kind of answers the question. David, you had your hand up before. Yeah, very simply, you know, buy the rumors, sell the news. And obviously,'re looking at commercial banks holding Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies on their balance sheets, you got to see what the input is going to be from the Federal Reserve, because at the end of the day, the Fed's going to backstop the system. So I think that there's a lot more to be done. I'd be curious to see after coming after next

week's Federal Open Market Committee, if anybody asks Jerome Powell what his thoughts are on this matter. Obviously, it's going to be taking a long time to make this more institutional. It's all good news. Happy to see it, but a lot more to be done. Yeah, I think to some degree, it's like plumbing, right? It's amazing to have SAB 121 reverse, but now you have to actually see the action that the banks take, right? Because we know that this opens the door to a full suite of financial services by banks with regard to crypto, right? Lending and yield and all the things that we have with every other matured, legitimate asset. But we have to actually see it happen. Just because they can doesn't mean that they will yet, even though we believe they will, right? Yep, exactly. And the other thing is, is that nothing's going to happen unless Jamie Dimon's happy about it. The same thing could go for David Solomon over Goldman Sachs or government Sachs, as it's often known. So, you know, from that standpoint, yeah, they've opened the door, but the incumbents are going to probably hold things up until they're in the lead. Yeah. Bank of New York Mellon had already gotten the exception and has

pushed for quite a while to get, obviously, some access. We'll see what they do, but they seem to want it. They are the largest custodian in the world. But once again, that could just be taking some of the ETF custody from Coinbase's hands and putting it in Bank of New York Mellon and not going beyond that, right? So there's a lot of ways this could sort of shake out. Precisely. Anybody else have thoughts here on how important it is that SAB 121 has been repealed here? For those who don't remember, but just to give, we do this every day, but just to give

the quick recap on what SAB 121 was, it was a bulletin from the SEC that effectively said that anyone who wanted to custody any bank, specifically that wanted to custody Bitcoin or digital assets had to list it as a liability rather than an asset, which meant that if, let's say you wanted to hold a billion dollars of someone's Bitcoin in custody, they had to have a billion dollars in cash on the other side of the balance sheet to equal it out, which obviously nobody in their right mind was going to do. But this actually was overturned by Congress and Senate and then vetoed by Biden. So very quick for the SEC to take care of this. Very encouraging. But once again, we'll see what happens after that. I mean, Simon, what do you think of it? Yeah, so first, I just want to say what an amazing day. This really is a sign of

things to come. Whether you like it, love it, hate it, this is happening. And there is going to be a really, really big shakeup in the financial system as a result of this starting point for America effectively becoming the crypto capital. And so what does that mean? Firstly, I'm just as excited about the JFK files. I'm really happy that everyone gets the confirmation that Lyndon B. Johnson, the CIA and Mossad killed JFK and look forward to getting that confirmation. And also, there is a battle of ideologies. And so I think it's very poetic that Trump and, you know, Bichelli got to meet or have a call yesterday. I don't think it was anything to

do with Bitcoin. I think it's going to be more about immigration, as we discussed before, and saying, yeah, we're about to send, are you ready for mass deportations? But I think what we have seen now, and what we get to experience over the decade, over the years ahead as a result of this is el salvador setting the model for being the bitcoin capital of the world and freeing itself from dollarization and the international monetary fund by building by owning a bitcoin every day and doing it on chain where the people can actually see what happens and everyone's accountable to the Bitcoin being accumulated and how eventually that could be used to restructure the economy now that things like Tether have moved over to El Salvador

versus America, which is going to be the crypto capital of the world, owning things via ETFs where BlackRock gets to determine whether it can be an ETF or not and the other power players like Fidelity it gets to be custody based upon who the SEC said can go first and then they get to hold it and then banks get to use it on their balance sheet and all of the the pushback that will come from the Fed. Because the reality is that America is the dollar, the dollar is the Fed, and the Fed shareholders, the banks, decide what happens. And so that is a crypto narrative because crypto can

now be used to support the IMF while countries like El can now be used to support the IMF, while countries like El Salvador will be able to fight the IMF using Bitcoin. So I really look forward to seeing this. It's good for everybody. It's inevitable, predictable. You know, the market of Bitcoin and crypto will continue. And this war of ideologies and what countries can do to free itself from the dollar as the dollar either becomes a central bank digital currency or a stable coin and the Federal Reserve fighting back against that and ending up with a stockpile of crypto assets versus the Bitcoin strategic reserve strategy. I think it's going to be really interesting to watch. Tom. Tom, is your mic working? Round two. Jacob, go ahead.

Just on Simon's point, I just kind of wanted to open it up and kind of ask what people thought of the language around the strategic stockpile holding stablecoins, because that was in there. And so my big thoughts on the stablecoin thing is, in terms of, Trump's going to back the dollar as hard as he's going to. So the strategic Bitcoin reserve makes sense, but how is he going to use the US dollar for all this? And so my thoughts are with lending and just remittance, backing one of the stable coins that exists like USDC with Circle makes the most sense to create this global liquidity because we know that we need to do something to push the dollar for more trading, especially with all the sanctions that happened and us putting our foot in the mouth with the dollar. So what do you guys think in terms of what they're going to do with the strategic stockpiling

and stable coins when they're not backing a CBDC now? How do you guys see that playing out? Simon, that's red meat for you. Yeah. This is, again, one of the most interesting radical types of reforms where the world suddenly starts to realize how does the dollar actually work? And so obviously, a central bank digital currency is removing the power from private banks to create the digital dollar and the Fed gets to take interest as the Federal Reserve Act and the income tax all happened on the same year to cover the interest. Now, when you have Treasury holding a strategic stockpile of stablecoins, you start to ask

yourself the question, why are we holding stable coins and essentially paying tether a yield to buy bitcoin and supporting tether in el salvador that is actually growing a strategic bitcoin reserve as a result of using the yield that we're paying on our debt when actually we could just issue our own stable coin debt free without actually having to pay debt to ourselves to hold it in our strategic pile. Why are we actually borrowing that? How does that factor into the debt? And now everyone gets to ask the original questions of monetary reform that were asked before the Federal Reserve Act was passed. And stable coins gets to be the story. Now, the Fed and Treasury will fight over that battle because Trump will want to issue more money to push the stock market.

And the Fed may not have the same policy goal in mind. And therefore, this gets to bring that conversation to the front. And if there is ever a systemic risk event with the dollar, it gets to actually hedge itself and be ready, which was the whole purpose of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. And stable coins are a direct competitor to the fractional reserve credit based model and call into question everything if we ever were to move to such an extreme circumstance. And it's going to be really interesting to watch again. Do you think that by pushing the stable coins into DeFi and opening up kind of global liquidity,

it strengthens the dollar? Because the dollar, instead of being like the petrodollar where all oils, you know, denominated in the US dollars, do you think that by being the US dollar as all oils, you know, denominated in the US dollars? Do you think that by being this, the the set, you know, the US dollar as the default that everybody trades in, in DeFi, which, you know, in five to 10 years, who knows what that looks like when they open up the flood gates for us. But do you think that that strengthens the dollar? Is that like the intention? I think it strengthens Treasury's balance sheet.

And it also can strengthen the dollar. But if you don't correspond a banking reform where banks have to increase their reserves, at the same time as issuing a stable coin, you can actually create a run on the banking system if it was trivial and easy for someone to convert their bank deposit into a stable coin because essentially you're deleveraging and taking money out of the credit-based system and converting it into an asset which is full reserves but the reserves of US government debt. So that challenge and that friction would have to be carefully managed and my question is, is Treasury going to manage that? Or is the Fed going to manage that? Who wins that question will actually be the future

of whether we continue on the credit debt-based Ponzi scheme or we end up with a monetary policy that's not backed by banks essentially taking all of the profits from the dollar's creation. Just really interesting. Sorry, you can finish Simon. I thought you were done. I'm done. Go for it, Scott. I just wanted to kind of pivot back to, I think it's a great conversation. I just want to pivot sort of back to the executive order and the wording.

I think Alex, you mentioned earlier, Joe and Joe's here. So Joe, you were kind of calling, I didn't actually see you say it. But Alex alluded to the fact that maybe you were not so enthusiastic about the executive order and didn't. I'm very enthusiastic. I just think it's important people don't misrepresent what it is. I mean, they're largely terms of aspiration. And, you know, the large focus of the bill is that we're going to have the old more open minded towards digital assets, which by the way, we already knew, right? The president said that in like a dozen different stump speeches. There's nothing really mandatory about the bill or excuse me, about the EO, other than the fact that, you know, this is now an official act saying like,

okay, what we said in the campaign trail is still our policy. And the biggest takeaway, obviously, is this working group that is required within 120 days to submit this working paper. And, you know, there are some interesting tweaks. I mean, I think the biggest news here, all the sources I talk about it focused on this issue of the transition from describing it as a strategic reserve to the stockpile, which there are legislative reasons for that, because, you know because calling a reserve has certain mandatory reporting requirements. And digital asset versus Bitcoin. And digital asset versus Bitcoin.

Yes, absolutely. Broadening out to digital asset. That's a huge, huge deal for them. But broadening out from reserve because various portions of the Code of Federal Regulations have embedded reporting requirements with reserves. And it's an effort to sort of sidestep that. Also, some reserves have budgetary oversight so you have more administrative flexibility and reducing those statutory regulatory constraints that would sit on a reserve

versus a stock. So that's meaningful. That's an important distinction. But, you know, the big takeaway is that they're following through with their stated intention. They're going to study it carefully. They want the crypto czar and the working group to come to terms with, you know, recommendations and proposals. But like, like, let's not, I think it's inaccurate to claim that an EO that lacks congressional authority can ban a CBDC because the Congress is our legislative body that actually passes laws. If the Congress had overwhelming support, they could pass CBC tomorrow and they could actually override the president's veto. So to say that like,

oh, the EUO prevents CBC or it safeguards mining rights or these things, no, this is the stated intention of the government, which we knew the federal government, the executive branch isn't going to be as hard-handed, heavy-handed with these things. And that's great, right? It's positive. It definitely is following through with the campaign promises, but it's not law. And for people to claim it's a law is inaccurate. That's totally right, Joe. But just to be clear- Also exactly why the market didn't react, right, Alex? I mean, that's why we're sitting where we are. Oh, for sure. It's a very broad language. And in general, yes, it does not. It's not like we were saying before, like you can, the president has sole discretion to determine the classification

of documents, he can immediately declassify something that's a different power. But to be clear, like under this executive action, could the Treasury Department announce a CBDC tomorrow, Joe? No, but they couldn't before because they said under Biden, they lack legal authority to enact a CBDC. That was Janet Yellen's position. They said it would need to go through Congress. But couldn't the CBDC just be another Federal Reserve tool? They launch tools all the time for monetary policy. No, no, because the same thing goes with the Fed. Jerome Powell has said in about a dozen different conferences, and they have put it on their website,

the Fed, under their current reading of the law, lacks authority to put in place a CBDC. But that's their interpretation of the law, right? If this new Secretary of the Treasury said that actually we can launch one and we plan to, that would be in direct contravention of this order, which requires, to the extent required by law, that the agencies are prohibited from undertaking any action. So it does prohibit federal agencies from doing a CBDC. It doesn't mean, Adam, you're totally right, that a federal law couldn't change that.

Yeah, but it's kind of silly because like the Treasury Secretary serves at the pleasure of the president. We had a president openly say on the campaign trail, I'm not going to do a CBDC. So for him to appoint a Treasury Secretary that would be like, well, I don't care what my boss says. I'm just going to do it anyway. Well, he legally could do that, though, is the point. This is a legal document. It's only going to happen under an emergency tool. But Joe, just a question.

Was Congress required for the Fed to do quantitative easing? No, absolutely not. It's part of their open market operations. Actually, no, no, I'm sorry. I phrased it. I'm incorrect. Yes, they were required because they passed the Federal Reserve Act. And their interpretation legally of the Federal Reserve Act gives them powers to do quantitative easing. Okay, so in a systemic risk event, because it was never going to happen organically, but in a systemic risk event, could a CBDC be a proposal just like they use a new tool

in order to stabilize America? Yeah, 100%. So here's the thing. For years, right, there were people that interpret the Federal Reserve Act and said, you can't buy MBS at a high clip, you can't buy junk bonds, right? An emergency hits, and suddenly the rules change. This issue with the CBC is really no different. If there was a desire among Trump, and because of an emergency to transition and say, oh, just kidding, we're going to not call it a CBDC, but it's going to be a digital stimulus token. There's nothing that would prevent a reinterpretation

of law. That's why executive orders, in some case, I view them largely as aspirational, and they're giving clear direction, but they're not a law. And that's my only point. You're definitely right about that joe definitely right i'm surprised nobody here is willing to say that he is not following through i agree with joe and a lot of things on regarding this but he is not following through on this campaign promise and i think we all should have known that when he chose david sacks as the crypto ai czar um first all, AI is big enough to have its own czar, I feel. But crypto AIs are is pumping his own bags. And I think it's OK to say what is he?

What is he not? I think just by talking about, well, one, this executive order has no teeth, like therefore you have the government forming a committee like keep it real, like let's be honest, there's no teeth. You have the government forming a committee. Keep it real. Let's be honest. There's no teeth here. And two, when he was at the Bitcoin conference, he may have used words that were perhaps vague enough because he doesn't actually understand the difference between crypto and Bitcoin. I will venture to say that he probably does since he makes more money on crypto than real estate now.

But we have to just follow spade to spade, which is he is not following through on what he said at Bitcoin 2024. You haven't said anything. You haven't said anything, Ganesh. My point is, it was very clear. He followed through with the free Ross, right? That's absolutely followed through. He followed through that the official policy of the government.

Joe, I'm going to finish and then you can talk, buddy. But I was going to say that at Bitcoin 2024, after his speech, he made it very clear that we're going to have a Bitcoin strategic reserve, or at least he made promises to that effect. I think everybody walked out of that event saying that that was going to... Again, lawyers will use different... He never said strategic reserve. Yeah, you're wrong. That's not true. Yeah, I remember the speech.

What he said is that he would be saying it would be the policy of the U.S. government to never sell your Bitcoin, right? To do what all Bitcoiners know and create a national Bitcoin stockpile. That's what he said. Following the speech, Cynthia Loomis announced her bill. I'm so sorry. One second. Did he form a national Bitcoin stockpile? Or a national...

No, no, no. Hold on. He didn't say it wouldn't include... That it would only include Bitcoin if you're reading the text literally. But do you see what you're doing? Like, this is the most ridiculous... Hold on.

Let me just finish before people cut because I know you're going to. So the point that I'm trying to make is it was clearly... It was clearly vague on purpose and if you don't call it vague and you don't say that he is not following through then nothing actually happens it is okay to tell your lord emperor trump that he did not follow through on the one i mean we did call it big then to be clear like it was vague then hold on bitcoin

sorry trump has always been a shitcoiner. He's never thrown an allegiance to Bitcoin. Simon, but the point that I'm making is to just say, one, Saylor is changing his point of view, and he is not really a Bitcoiner. He is a crypto renaissance person, a renaissance man, which is fine. If that's who he is, that's who he is.

Stop trying to lie about it. If he adds it to MicroStrategy, I highly doubt he'll be adding crypto to MicroStrategy. Hey, he's changed his mind before, Simon. Simon, he's changed his... He was just like me. He was anti-Bitcoin.

Like, just like me, to be completely fair. He was anti-Bitcoin. Everybody's allowed to change their mind. I'm seeing him change his mind right now. We'll see what happens. He would get eviscerated. Oh gosh i can't even imagine i don't trust me i've been there it's okay sometimes you do it because the right listen i didn't say he wouldn't i'm just saying the uh oh my gosh his tweets are speaking for themselves right now his tweet

saying crypto it would be such a bad strategy. If micro strategy started adding Michael Shannon is already a bad strategy. So Michael Shannon is already a bad strategy. The worst strategy. The thing I was gonna say is the fact that people in this community were so excited about the fact that one, the suits entered. It's a decentralized store of value. You suddenly are super excited about BlackRock. And then now they were super excited that the US government was getting involved.

Number go up is not the point. That's the point that I'm making, which is it's a good thing that Trump is not following through. I don't let them do the shit that they've been doing and let them fucking burn to the ground. Bitcoin will be fine. That's the point I was going to make. Janice. Hey, everybody. Lots of great points made. You know, if you want to take a hard line stance, Dr. Danish certainly could resonate with some of your points. But I think everyone else has had great points as well.

And I just want to talk a little bit about the working group. I'm certainly a huge fan of working groups, and I think it was really smart of them to have it be a government official working group versus some, you know, industry group where, you know, everyone is jockeying to get their guy into these working groups. Government-led working groups are very powerful. In fact, as someone who's worked on putting these things, helping to put these things together through legislative efforts, they are a really important stepping stone to get to where we want to go. Now, are we getting what we want first 100 days? Unlikely, obviously, given that this working group is going to have a report in 180 days. But working groups or task forces that are led by government officials are a very, very powerful tool for aligning interests and also making sure

that everybody knows the direction that they want to go in together and that you have an understanding of really what your target is and what you want to hit. I think it's prudent and completely pragmatic to get into office and to take a breath and say, okay, let's bring everyone together and let's decide what we're going to do on AI. Let's decide what we're going to do on crypto. You know, for us at Satoshi Action, whenever we can't get a bill passed into law, which has been, you know,

a number of our bills have not made it into law. We've had four of them passed into law, but when they don't, the next thing that we want to do is immediately, we're like, all right, let's not just stop this effort. Let's form a working group. Let's form a task force. We've actually even had lawmakers that we've been working with where they'll convert a bill into a working group is going to be a valuable to an effective tool for helping this new government figure out what they want to do instead of having a bunch of

people on Twitter, YouTubers, bloggers, nothing to say negative about the super intelligent people in here who are running shows. But just that, I think it's very smart for them to make the decision based off of their own research. Essentially, they're doing their own research on Bitcoin. And I think the interesting component about of their own research. Essentially, they're doing their own research on Bitcoin. And I think the interesting component about them using the word digital asset, I'm very much a Bitcoin guy, super focused on Bitcoin. I like stable coins. There's a couple other things in this space that I find interesting,

but highly focused on Bitcoin. And yet I still appreciate the fact that they said the word digital asset. People have sort of... The very Bitcoin-focused people have rioted on me for a long time for using the word digital asset in our language and our model policy. But in my opinion, this is just smart and prudent policy that is in alignment with the way that most lawmakers and most people in government understand policy to be, and that is that they follow a tech-neutral approach. I don't mind that they want to go and take a look at everything and make up their mind on what they want to pursue.

Would I love for it to be Bitcoin-only? Yeah. And would I love for my language and the bills that we work on to be Bitcoin-only? Sure. But ultimately, it's much more prudent and pragmatic to approach it from a digital asset perspective. It reduces a lot of political friction when you're trying to get towards your ultimate outcome

of making the United States the best place in the world to be a Bitcoiner and to hold Bitcoin and hopefully have the United States be one of the largest holders of Bitcoin in the world. So I don't have a lot to hate on. Obviously, here, you're going to want to see follow through once this working group comes out and they come up with this report. We're going to want to see clear action because if they don't, then yeah, Dr. Danish is right. They did not fulfill their promise. And if they did not fulfill their promise after all of this and everything that we went through and having Trump speak at the conference and having his team be able to raise what I think it was like $25 million at the Bitcoin conference, then yeah, I think that's at the point when we can say that they did not keep their promise.

And they essentially used the Bitcoin space as a tool for them to not only gain more votes and gain more money, but even to an extent to profiteer off of it as well. David? Yeah, I was just going to say, how well mechanics work out, we're going to have to just sit back and wait. But I would say a bigger picture thought for people out there who are investing around Bitcoin is to say, look, if this is going to become institutional, and you're going to have to have the various institutions, Federal Reserve, Treasury, who have you, other central banks, backstop the financial system as it holds Bitcoin, we're going to have to see this asset become less volatile. So if I was looking out maybe a year, two years, I would think about selling off long-dated calls and just kind of harvest the volatility that's in the asset now because arguably for everything I see here in terms of its likely path, less volatility is going to be out there in the future. You can capitalize on that now. Joe. Okay. Sorry. I just want to wrap this up. I completely disagree with the take from Dr. Donish, who I respect, about this issue that he's not following

through. Let's look at the record so far. Number one, he freed Ross, which he espoused to do, and he did it relatively quickly. I know it wasn't technically day one, but that is a massive symbolic action on his behalf. Number two, if you understand how our structure of government works, and I've said this for multiple years, to truly tackle and make this industry have sense and have a lot of clarity, you're going to have to go through Congress. You cannot do this exclusively through the SEC or the federal agencies. You need an action passed through Congress to truly give us the clarity, I think, that we desperately need with a growing industry like this. So because of that, he's approaching it in a very smart way. He's not coming in

haphazard. He's doing what Dennis is alluding to, having a working group that's going to do this very carefully. They're going to put forward something that comes out in the form of the bill that will be the push on Congress. And that's the right way to do it, frankly. So the folks that thought that on day one, we were going to get some sort of regulatory clarity by EO, I'm sorry, that's not the way EOs work. He's basically saying, this is our policy. This is our intention.

This is part of our platform. And we're going to channel all the resources on an interagency basis to get it done. That is massively important. And I know that, you know, Bitcoiners are upset that it's multi-asset. That's like the big development. I said that initially. But that alone is not using that, Dr. Donish, to represent that he's not following through with his promises, I think is just wrong.

And by the way, it's not a mistake yesterday that we got the biggest news of the day that I don't know if you covered, but rescinding 121, a staff counting bulletin 121, is massively important. And that was done within the first week of his administration. For people to say that he's not following through, I don't know what you're looking at.

Don, do you have any response before we move on? Did he drop? Oh, we lost Donish in the middle of that joe you're responding directly to him and he just he doesn't want to hear what i have to say that doesn't want doesn't want all that all that heat uh yeah i agree joe we did talk about sab 121 earlier and i agree that that was the biggest news of the day and kind of as i alluded to at the beginning before you're here it's just kind of, I think the market was exhausted by the news cycle by that point today.

There was just so much that happened between, obviously, the executive order and Lummis before. We're going to move on in a minute. But Dennis, just to kind of circle back to Lummis, and we talked about this a little yesterday, but I think it's important just to reaffirm the fact that that actually, while it wasn't huge news for the market and prices necessarily, it is the perfect step and the perfect, there was a line that came out, I'm paraphrasing, but essentially David Sachs said that they did not have their mind made up about creating a strategic reserve. If that's true, then we should consider anyone who is interested in seeing a strategic Bitcoin reserve or stockpile, which circulate publicly that had stockpile language in it. And we really think that that's the right prudent step as well, given that a stockpile is much more reasonable of an approach. I think Joe had said earlier something about the effect that we would need language. We would need legislative efforts to be able to look into this at all is really important, especially if they're saying they didn't have their minds made up. So this gives us an extended period of time where we're able to help them make up their minds and come to the conclusion that this is the right move. So I'm very excited that we were able to get it, that there was some skepticism from David Sachs. I'm not sure who

close to him was the one that inevitably convinced him to have the working group within it. But, you know, and again, going back to sort of the drafts that we put together, we even in some of the executive order drafts that we had put together, we pushed for there to be working groups to transition from an EO into a legislative effort. So this is just all very prudent, pragmatic approach. And yes, do we not get what we want on day one and Bitcoin pumps to 500,000? Yeah, that's possibly true, but at least we're also going to be having an administration or a government that's looking into this thing and building conviction around what they're doing so that the sort of the effort to put this together doesn't crumble beneath their feet as they have little to no conviction to continue to hold the Bitcoin because they didn't really actually look into it. Because as was mentioned here, Trump is not a Bitcoin maxi. He is not a Bitcoin bitcoin only clearly um and neither is his administration uh so i think this again i'll just i think this is all good and head of the right direction and i

think people should be very excited about the fact that we get this working group put together and we'll have folks in the government studying bitcoin you'll the most powerful government i tweeted this out the most powerful government in the world um is studying bitcoin for the purposes of putting holding it. And I think that's a massively bullish on its face. I totally agree. Great conversation today, everybody. We do have Oasis Protocol up on stage who we're going to have a bit of a chat with here to end the show. I want to thank all the other guests for their participation. Oasis, it's Mark, though, behind the account, right?

Yes, it's a pleasure. How are you, man? Yeah, so listen, I want you to give us the quick TLDR and breakdown on what Oasis is so we can dig in further. Yeah, of course. I mean, Oasis is a privacy-focused L1. We launched quite a long time ago. We kind of wanted to build our own chain because we wanted

to do some things a bit differently than for example ethereum for so in our case compute and consensus layer are separated the consensus layer is incredibly clean there can be no congestions and then the compute layers anyone can of course build one you can kind of think of it as roll-ups and we have built some ourselves and one of those is kind of think of it as roll-ups. And we have built some ourselves. And one of those is kind of our flagship product. That's what everyone is currently building on. That's called Sapphire. And this is our confidential EVM. And it was the first confidential EVM that was launched.

And actually, this was 18 months ago. And it's still the only confidential EVM in production. So obviously, we're very proud about it. And we just kind of love to explore with projects about their applications that utilize on-chain privacy, because it's still such a new thing to crypto builders. And we have to do lots of educational efforts here. So obviously privacy is very important to you because that's sort of the differentiator and the focus. So why is that so critical?

And, you know, how do you address that uniquely with Oasis Protocol? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's difficult because crypto or all blockchains were built on the narrative that it needs to be transparent. We need this radical transparency so that everyone can verify. But then finally and slowly, some other tools came into place. Lots of people are working on ZK because you can also use mathematical proofs to prove that something was correct. You don't need to show them everything. And in our case, privacy actually comes from TE, so Trusted Execution Environments.

So you have this hardware at the stations that verify that all the compute was correct. And why this is so important is because lots of use cases that you would love to build on the blockchain because for whatever your reasons are but you want a decentralized back end that is trustless that has all the kind of benefits that you would have with building on chain but you cannot do it because you're simply kind of lacking some privacy. This radical transparency is suddenly a bug for you. So for example, you want to build voting applications. Like I remember when I first joined into crypto, we were talking about putting government elections on-chain,

but realistically it doesn't even make sense because you would always see what someone has voted. And this is like the most basic and simplest use case of privacy. But with on-chain privacy, you can just do things and you as a developer that kind of builds your application, you can choose which parts of the transaction should be private. Generally, this is metadata. So you rarely want to obfuscate who sent something to whom, how much was it.

Of course, there are some reasons for this too. But most of the projects that are building on our chain, they are keeping metadata private and kind of building their business models around it. Sorry, I have a mic issue. I was trying to lift my mic there. That's really, really interesting. So what are the, I guess, the key features that make it so different? You've addressed it a bit, but to give that privacy and make it different from other EVMs. And why is kind of your plan

the one that's going to be the best specifically for privacy and confidentiality? I mean, we don't want to kind of compete with all the other L1s and L2s. We just want to enable privacy for everyone to use. So we focus a lot on interoperability. Like if our builders, they want to utilize users and TVL on base, we obviously welcome them to do so. And we just tell them, hey, these smart contracts that need on-chain privacy, they should

be built on our chain. Regarding features, what makes it different? I mean, as I said, it is still the only confidential EVM in production. So if you want to build with solidity and you want to utilize on-chain privacy, there aren't really many ways that you can do it unless you kind of skip some parts on-chain and leave them off-chain. For example, Ocean Protocol, they built natively on our chain, their prediction marketplace, for a big reason because Trent McConaughey, the founder of Ocean, he is a decentralization maxi. And he was like, hey, no, I want most parts of my stack as much as possible on-chain.

So he was like, hey, I need on-chain privacy. There's Oasis. It's the only confidential EVM. That's what I'm going to use. And in general, since day one, we were always focused on decentralization and verifiability and, of course, security. And that is simply something that's still unparalleled, even in the TEE space, the way we do decentralized key management, utilize MPC protocols for sharding keys.

So we just put lots and lots of effort into security, which might make us slower in releases. But at least, you know, whenever something is released, it is secure and you can use it from day one. Is that how you sort of ensure that you guys are the go-to platform when people want to build, I guess, decentralized applications? Because you've been very specific that that's one of the core like tenets that you're very passionate about and also privacy. I mean, I guess I'm asking, you know, why do people come build with you instead of somewhere else when there's so many options? Yes, that's pretty much it. If you want to build on-chain and you need privacy and you want to build in Solidity, you kind of have to come to us.

And then you will quickly realize, damn, they actually have thought about everything that's necessary for me to build without touching TEs. Because still, it's not that easy for developers to utilize trusted execution environments. I mean, in our case specifically, the whole network is built on Intel SGX. So that's kind of the old version of Intel trusted execution environments. But it's old, but it's the most robust one. It's more than enough to handle on-chain transactions. So all smart contract execution that happens on our chain happens within those Intel SGX CPUs that are run by our network.

We have expanded actually into TDX, which is the latest version of Intel CPUs, because those can do some really cool things. They can spin up virtual machines. They can actually connect to GPUs, which is very interesting when we're talking about AI applications being built on our chain. But yeah, we have thought about lots and lots of things that could go wrong and have implemented methods for defense in depth to kind of avoid any potential vulnerability. The one thing that is very difficult to skip is the hardware trust assumption. Like, yes, the system is built currently, at least we are very open,

obviously, to use other hardware providers, but currently it is Intel. So in the case that Intel would have a backdoor, there isn't that much we could do because they would be able to fake the attestations that come from the hardware, participate in the network, et cetera. We do try to minimize it, as I said, with defense in depth, but some things are simply unavoidable. But again, that's a very big if, considering that Intel would kind of risk their whole reputation just to kind of create a backdoor into hardware. Yeah, that doesn't make much sense. So one of the biggest narratives, obviously, in crypto right now is AI, AI agents specifically, but sort of the intersection between crypto and AI.

And I've read that you guys are kind of positioned well for that. So maybe just talk generally about the agent narrative that's happening right now and sort of been persistent for the past few months, and then we can dig into how that applies to what you're building and the focus on AI. I mean, when AI first or kind of the first decentralized AI story came out, I was very excited because it made lots and lots of sense because suddenly, hey, there is a lack of compute. Crypto is amazing at aligning incentives.

So we were able to kind of build these systems like Aether, Akash, Ionet, GPUnet that can provide these idle resources and compute to AI researchers that are outside of crypto. They don't even care about crypto, but they just need compute. So the space was able to kind of cater to those people, which was amazing because for me, honestly, it was the first proper use case after stable coins that made sense. Like, hey, this is solving a real problem in the real world. And we as an industry are very well positioned to do so. As I said said like incentivization

to share your resources then incentivization to actually share also your data because this is another big problem that's becoming now more and more apparent we are or the big companies are running out of data to train their models on so there's lots and lots of crypto projects that are currently trying to kind of cater to those. But you asked about agents, like when I'm looking at the past few months, there wasn't that much innovation to be honest. Like of course there's virtuals, there's Eliza, they built amazing frameworks. I'm still impressed how well they made it so that it's catered to non-devs. Anyone can launch an agent, those agents can have a token.

So anyone can gamble on the agent that you simply created by filling out some character information. But it wasn't super innovative. These are bots. We had bots for a long time. What was kind of special was, hey, these were very public in our crypto Twitter feeds. Everyone saw, hey, these are some bots doing stuff. They sound smart because they are utilizing LLMs and they are getting better by the day. But the innovation part was very lacking.

So I'm kind of glad that we have passed this and everyone is focusing on actual utility agent use cases. I know we have this new narrative of DeFi, however you should pronounce it, where you utilize agents for DeFi use cases. I know we have this new narrative of DeFi, however you should pronounce it, where you utilize agents for DeFi use cases. And honestly, when agents first became a thing, what excited me was the potential for automation. Use agents to automate stuff that you are just annoyed by. For example, I'm paid in USDC. I get a part part in USDC, a part in rows. And whenever I get my salary, I obviously need to do some things. Like I need to still pay my rent.

So I have to exchange it into euros in my case, then off ramp it into my bank account, pay those invoices. The rest of the USDC that I have, some part goes into trading, not meme coins, but other things. And the other part is just used for stable yields, for example. And all of this needs to be done manually by me, but it's very basic tasks that can be automated. So that's what I'm looking forward to in this new era of agents, where we actually have some automation tools, agents that actually do some things for you.

But a big problem here is that once those agents start to actually move your funds, you really want to look behind the scenes and see what's happening with this agent. Like who's controlling it? Where is it running? Because with the current agents that you have, there are no guarantees at all that there's not a human in the back. And specifically, whenever there is an agent that does stuff on-chain, this agent obviously needs a private key. It needs a wallet. It needs an identity to log into services, to sign messages. And this key needs to be created somewhere. And it's very difficult to do this in a trustless manner. So that's kind of our big narrative for the past eight months, trying to tell people, hey, these agents, they should be running in TEs.

That's why we expanded into this new TDX environment from Intel, because there you can easily spin up virtual machines. So you just need your agent Python framework. You containerize it, and we host it for you in a TE. It's still a decentralized system, decentralized key management, but the agent was created within the TE. So you have some guarantees that no one actually can access the private key of the agent.

And whatever the agent is doing is actually what the agent does. Like, yes, there is an API, I assume. Currently, most are building with LLM APIs. So this API provider is the one trust assumption that you still have, but that's it. At least you're sure there's no human manipulating the output of the agent and there's no human in control of your funds. So I am really, really bullish on agents moving forward, but I think all of them will be running in some trusted environment. We think it's going to be TEs. I know there are other attempts with ZKTLS,

for example, to verify the inference. Let's see what's going to prevail. And so with all that in mind, what's next for you guys? What are the big plans? Obviously, you have to be planning for what's coming with AI in general and then what's coming in the future to remain private and confidential. We are really happy with all the partnerships we've done recently. So we have all of the groundwork ready for a flourishing agent ecosystem. In general, like decentralized AI. If you need compute, we have all of the groundwork ready for a flourishing agent ecosystem. In general, like decentralized AI, if you need compute, we have partners.

If you need data, we have partners. What is next for us is just reducing the friction of utilizing TEs as much as possible. So improving the DevEx, likely building quite a few demo applications, might be even like proper products with tokens, et cetera, just to show how it should look like, how an agent can be run in a TE, how you can verify that it's trustless, that the key management is decentralized, that there is even some sharding of keys

if you want to, et cetera. So that's definitely on our roadmap for the next three months, just kind of showing how easy it can be done and then onboarding anyone that wants to run the agent in a TE. We will do it for you. We will provide you the infrastructure to do so. We have our partners.

We will build this whole ecosystem around it, a marketplace where, hey, you have your agent code, you just want it deployed. There will be someone that would love to deploy it for you. They will get some fees from the network, et cetera. So this whole system is being currently built. I'm just saying, is there anything that I missed? Anything final you'd like to share before we close? We obviously still support anyone building on our network.

So if your use case can benefit from on-chain privacy or confidential compute, confidential compute I'm just meaning like off-chain compute jobs that you need to run off-chain because on-chain is just like not viable for it because it's big workloads, it's LLMs or something, you should reach out to us. We are happy to support you. We have a grants program where we give out grants of up to 50K, but depending on the development effort, it can also be way higher. And we will support you along the way. You don't need to understand TEs. You don't need to understand

remote at the stations. We have built a network that handles all of this. Amazing. And how can people actually get in touch with you, keep up with you guys, follow what you're building? So it's very easy to reach us on the website. You have the grants application form. There will always be someone checking it and reaching out to you. So we're easy to find. And we will also be at most major conferences this year, actually in less than a month, I guess we will also be in Denver. Hey, it's Denver coming up very soon. All right. Well, thank you, man, so much.

Really appreciate you coming on and sharing everything you guys are building. Everybody obviously can see Oasis Protocol on stage. Give them a follow and keep up with everything they're doing. Love what you guys are building. I think it's exceptionally important. So thank you, everybody else. Thank you for joining to our amazing guests. Great, great show today.

We'll be back on Monday, 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thanks for listening to Crypto Town Hall this week. We'll see you on Monday. Bye, everyone. Thanks again.