The Wolf Of All Streets - Fear Maxed, Volatility Shrinks #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

In this episode of Crypto Town Hall, hosts and guests vent frustration over the crypto market's prolonged stagnation, low volatility, extreme fear sentiment, shrinking altcoins, and repetitive headlines dominated by Trump, political gridlock, and regulatory uncertainty. They dissect the stalled Clarity Act and related bills, criticizing banking-lobby influence, ethics clause deadlocks, yield restrictions on stablecoins, and clauses that hinder tokenization and innovation. The conversation critiques elite control, Europe's regulatory self-sabotage, and the need for crypto to prioritize simple, user-friendly retail adoption over institutional capture or tribal infighting.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every day here on exit 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard time, I should say, every weekday, because we take Saturdays and Sundays off. Frankly, we could probably do this show once a week and cover everything because it's the same old news stories every single day. What does Trump say? What are the politicians doing on clarity? Why is crypto completely fucking dead? Sorry, I should not f-bom that. And why has Bitcoin got no volatility? But, before we dig into all of those compelling topics once again today, and obviously the quantum threat, that's a hot one. But before we dig into all that, we do have an awesome sponsor today, which is ZeroG. And they're going to be very thrilled, I would say, with the way that I led up to that. AI is reshaping the world, but right now it's stuck in the hands of just a few big players. But what if AI can run openly, verifiably, and on-chain? That's what Zero-G is building.

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I know I gave a very compelling intro there as to why people should listen to this show every day. There was a bit of sarcasm there, but it is obnoxiously, repetitive that not because of the show but because of the lack of topics beyond these very top level things like the Clarity Act and politics and you get it right so and and uh if if the if the price would move it would be a lot more exciting go ahead Taf yeah I mean look you know it's funny because you you read crypto you read you know on X you know crypto Twitter or the hell you to call it. And there's despondency. And you look at the Greer and Feed, the Fear and Greed Index, you know, hitting extreme fear as people are terrified that nothing is happening. And basically,

you know, we're seeing the same thing. I mean, Bitcoin is sitting in the middle of its range, bouncing around, you know, is it going to go higher? Is it going to go lower? Is it going to stay there? And everyone's going to and all coins kind of shrinking and all the stuff that's happening. And And then you see what in the real news, what people are looking at. And you get, it's like, remember, was it blue and yellow? I can't remember that stupid picture that was circling the internet a few years ago where, you know, half the people violently was said the dress, the dress, the dress. Right.

And that is, is the Trump. He was blue. That's, that's the Trump Dabo's speech. You know, people, you could just forget the, the delivery and forget his personal idiosyncrasies. forget the ego and all the other crap, and you actually look at what's being said. And what's being said sounds a fuck ton like what a lot of the cypherpunks are saying about governments, right? You know, different, obviously pro-America's pro-Central, you know, American government, you know, tilt. But effectively calling out the stupidity of the, the quote, elites for trying to build their little ivory tower and take advantage of the cantillion effect until there's no pop.

population left and no wealth left to extract. And that's a large part of what's going on. You know, a lot of us are in, you know, believe that Bitcoin will become like gold sort of is, but really isn't, a check on rampant spending. A lot of us really believe that crypto is a way for people to create self-sovereignty. And what the World Economic Forum is basically all about the vast majority of them, the insiders, is about control. It's about control over populations. And if you think about where the technology is going, their ability to control, if they can cement political power, is unparalleled in human history. I mean, you know, between central bank digital currencies in Europe, surveillance tech, the social media, what's been

the engineering of social media algorithms to push people, all of that is going on. And so here you have someone stands up and basically says, okay, Europe, you've been screwed, you've done stupid shit. By the way, Europeans know they've done stupid shit. The Germans realize that listening to these Weft people for years is why they have no nuclear power. It's why their energy costs are more than double the United States. It's why they haven't created a damn thing. If you go over the European Union, people don't realize this, but, you know, those of us who make fun of Europe and it's it this isn't based on we don't like the French people or we don't like the German people there's none of that this is based on the fact that when the Eurozone was created

the actual GDP of Europe and the United States were the same today less than was it 20 some odd years later the U.S. is double the size double now and if you go out another another 25 years the U.S. will probably be eight or ten times the size because Europe unless they change has literally crushed innovation completely. And look what they're doing in the Netherlands with wealth taxes. It makes California seem quaint because California, people can move without friction. You're in the Netherlands, you know, you have to literally leave Europe completely. And so, you know, it's funny how these narratives matter. Ultimately, crypto will matter. Ultimately, the technology will matter. Ultimately, Bitcoin will matter. And this is the stuff

that's going on. And so I think it's funny that we sit in on this show and we talk about, you know, the stuff that we talk about, apart from Bruce Fenton, who he's amusing in some of his rants because he's so extreme. But the truth is, directionally, if you want to, if you understand that private business is where wealth gets created and government is where wealth gets extracted, then this space is going to matter because it is one of the ways. And the fact that the Trump administration and the people he has, like Secretary of percent, et cetera, all understand this. It's a big deal. And so, yeah, you know, we're at this

moment in history. History is going to look back at these years, and it's going to go one of two ways, and we obviously don't know which way it's going to go, but it's going to be considered pivotal. But the market right now couldn't give a crap. The market is stuck, and the market will stay stuck until it isn't, and I have no freaking clue when that will be. Okay, that's my morning. I love the blue yellow dress analogy. No, but I mean, you even get that when you watch the video of somebody dying in Minnesota. Oh, I mean, well. Like politically, half the people see it as murder and half the people see it as, you know, like self-defense.

It's the same video. And why with that? It's social media. It's literally the algorithms in social media. And, you know, there's a scene in one of my favorite movies of political satire or religious satire, There's Monty Python's life of Brian. And my favorite vignette out of life and life of Brian, which is totally applicable today,

is the scene where I don't know if you saw it, but where he opens the windows after he's just had sex with this girl and he's stark naked. And there's this multitude of people out, you know, saying, you know, Brian, the Messiah. And he says, no. I'm not the Messiah. I'm not the Messiah.

You are individuals. And to a person, every single one of them coordinated, And he goes, we are individuals. It's one of the funniest things that you'll ever see. But that is literally what's going on today in, you know, the two sides of America. Now, I think those of, there are a lot of people who would say that it's worse on one side than the other. And it's probably true because a reasonable person looks at the Minnesota thing and says, okay, wait a minute.

You have a guy who literally was sent to the hospital with life-threatening injuries for being hit by a car, now has a gun in his hand and some someone's being you know someone is driving that car with her wife basically telling her you know to drive the car and and he shoots now was it right or wrong i mean probably a bad judgment in some sense but understandable bad judgment and you know it's a tragedy it's literally a tragedy the fact that there are so many people who want to take advantage of that tragedy to make points to try to, you know, impede law enforcement from arresting pedophiles. And the other side wants to use the tragedy to say, this is why we need to crack down even more, is absurd.

Rational people should be able to agree that it was a tragedy, that law enforcement should be able to operate, and that law enforcement shouldn't be able to go out of their fucking, you know, go into people's houses and demand their papers. I mean, but you literally get that. So now yesterday, you have Trump basically talking to a bunch of people. who objectively have been trying to push the world in a direction, and the one set of governments who listen to them are the Europeans, and it's failed, objectively failed.

But the media, of course, would sound like, well, Trump's. And it's crazy. I mean, to me, that's a lot of what's going on in crypto. There are people who look at Bitcoin on the Bitcoin maxi side. The Bitcoin maxis, you keep seeing every single day, I see five or 10 posts from old Bitcoin are saying, we've lost the plot, it's been co-opted, it can't work anymore. Without any understanding of the fact that for Bitcoin to succeed,

it has to get mass adoption. And mass adoption is going to mean it's going to have to end up inside the system one way or another. And on the same time, you have people from the traditional financial side basically trying to figure out, okay, like Montgomery Burns sitting in their ivory tower, I use that analogy yesterday, but it's true. How can we co-op? it. Meanwhile, we have a government today in the United States for at least the next three years

and agency heads who all basically say, no, we don't want you to co-opt it, but we do want to promote it. And you would think the crypto community would latch on to that. And that's what we should be caring about. So yes, you're right, Scott. There's all this bullshit going on. Man, I was just trying to make a joke about the video and you really went for it. Well, you know, what the hell? I mean, what else are we going to talk about, really? You know, Palacarity Act is super dead and even bipartisan supporters failing. It's, but Trump says he wants it to fail because the Democrats have been coal. And look, it's too bad.

Oh, God, I did it again, didn't I? Too bad Austin's not up here because he's, you know, one of the most reasonable Democrats out there. You can't be a reasonable Democrat anymore and not understand that even the most moderate Democrats are bowing in fealty to the extremes. And understand what they're supporting, and they're doing it knowingly. If you want to kill the Clarity Act and you're a Democrat, what you're basically saying is we prefer there to be no regulation because we want this industry to die and move offshore. That's what we want.

That's what you're supporting. You're not supporting protecting people, because obviously a lack of regulation means more people will get rug pulled. More people will get scammed. It's that simple. You know, it's like, and they already agreed to the genius act. And so, you know, you're going to get stable coins in the middle of the system. It is going to matter.

And the question is, what are other tokenized things that people, once they have stable coins ubiquitously, where are they going to go buy them? Well, are they going to use offshore exchanges? They can use defy? Yeah, probably. And we'll see where that goes. But it's interesting. I mean, I see Carlo up here.

I mean, surely I had to have triggered something. Hey, it's been a long time, Dave. I feel like we haven't talked in ages. Good morning, Scott. It's been like three days, dude. I know. Good morning. And crypto, that's an eternity.

Yeah, I can't disagree with anything you all are saying. We got the clarity amendments out, and the Senate Agriculture Committee has put out what is pretty reasonable on surface level approach to defy. And I think the banks have sufficiently scared Congress into believing that if they allow any yield slash reward on stable coins. So we agree that they didn't scare them, they paid them? Well, yeah, okay. I'll take that.

Yeah, fair point. So, yeah, they've convinced them that there'll be a flight of deposits if they let exchanges hold stable coins in a passive way. So you have to now create this paradigm where you are actually doing something with the stable coin in order to justify paying yield. and I don't think that's going to improve. I think they succeeded in doing a slight end around to the Genius Act, and I don't think that's coming out.

But the biggest problem we have is there's no Democrat support for what's coming out of the Agriculture Committee. And I think still, like you said, Scott the other day, the biggest hurdle for this thing is going to be the ethics clauses, which are going to be non-negotiable for the Dems. And I just don't see Trump ever boxing himself in. and limiting his family's ability to profit off a crypto. Yeah, it didn't happen in.

I mean, it's not happening. The absurdity of that is that if you ask the population, you know, the voters, should there be ethics about all investments, i.e. what, you know, Pelosi watch, et cetera, right? You know, should it be stocks? Should there be crypto, whatever? If you said, should people, you know,

should the families, you know, should there be, policies to you know on ethics for all investments the answer with absolute certainty is I think you're going to get 60 70% of the world if not more saying yes but the fact that they're putting something where there's no ethics requirements whatsoever on on on this massive asset class called stocks and they have to have one to have any regulation in crypto is is beyond absurd I mean it's just it's it's it is pure political grandstanding and they should be ashamed of themselves because it makes no freaking sense but you know of course that's the way politics works these days they want to create an issue and that's their only issue i mean they're literal democrats only issue you're all you have to do

even even the mayor of new york the some of the stuff he's doing which is just i mean it's actually worse than i anticipated it's it's new york's turning into a shithole but you know even he just announced this he literally said that we need 10 billion dollars in our budget to quote, and I quote, Trump proof the city. I mean, Trump is basically an issue. The one benefit of 2028 is we won't have, you won't have to hear the word Trump out of the Democratic Party anymore.

I mean, which is, it's insane that that's an issue. And people have been motivated to consider it an issue. I mean, it's silly, right? You know, the amount of money that's been made in Congress and in their families and everything else, from the NGOs through, there's so many unethical things that are going on. It's insane that there's no ability to push for ethics writ large, but they're going to make

crypto ethics the issue. I don't know. I don't even have words for how stupid it is. Anyone on the panel, Clarity Act. Jump on in. Awesome. Good. Do we have it? Wait, I'll jump in. Anybody who sees the dress as gold is obviously a psychopath, right, Dave. So, you know, it's funny. You mentioned that there is no dress. There is no dress. It is funny because what Dave's saying is actually true, where you literally see the other side is that's impossible, right? How could you possibly see it that way? Right. So it's a perfect analogy, Dave. Great way to start the morning. And I just don't think you're going to get, you know, you're not going to get that side to see your way because they literally can't. Right. And I mean,

that's what I think that's what crypto should be talking about right now is that there is no fixing this. You can't fix them because they literally don't see it the way you see it. And so I think, you know, crypto fixes this. It's going to be a bumpy road, but there's no, there is no fixing it, right? There is no, to Dave's point, like, they should be ashamed. They'll never be ashamed because they don't see it the way you see it. And, you know, at the end of the day, it just takes, it's going to take time to wind down. And I said, yeah, playing devil's advocate to that, though, Adam.

Like, so listen, I'm an unaffiliated voter. I will once again say this, and I'm trying to spark conversation. It's very clear. It's very clear here that the Democrats are the ones who are not in favor necessarily of the bill. But if you take Brian Armstrong's view that no bill is better than a bad bill, can't you then naturally say that a lot of Republicans are willing to vote for a bill that's effectively backed by the banking lobby that's actually really bad for crypto? Absolutely.

I'm actually pushing all politicians into the same boat. I'm not saying Republicans are better than the Democrats. That's, I think it's government versus free men. I mean, I really believe it's at that point. It's, you know, the- Right, because if you listen to Brian Armstrong, he says for, you know, the token, they literally snuck in a clause banning the tokenization of assets into the Clarity Act. So, shouldn't Democrats not want to vote for that?

Let's be specific. The clause that they objected to, and it was when I was talking about to Perry Ann about yesterday effectively would put handcuffs on the SEC and CFTC from adapting rules. One of those rules which Gary, your brother, pitched about this morning correctly, like violently, is the accredited investor rule. And, you know, there are a lot, which by the way is literally wealth transfer from the poorer to the richer. And so, you know, effectively that clause makes the whole bill a non-starter. That clause makes me say better no bill than a bad bill. But when it comes to yield on sale, we'll all do respect to Carlo, it's annoying that $180 billion

in subsidies to the banks is considered a good thing by all the members of Congress who are taking bribes. But the truth is, in five years, it won't matter at all because technology is making it so that once you can do payments, once you can have a payment, once you can have a payment, platform that can handle your bills, pay your electric bill, pay your rent, do all that at the same time as invest. And investing is via, and everything is tokenized on that platform. So you could save in Bitcoin and have automated sweeps that sell your Bitcoin to pay your bills and or whatever other, whatever thing. The fact that you're not getting yield on the actual stable coins won't

matter at all. Now, it's going to take a few years for that to be true. So that's not my broad line issue. The bright line issue is the one that will stop the innovation. And make no mistake. When you get to, you know, even the most dyed in the wool capitalist, the bare-knuckle person who builds a business and makes billions of dollars and creates millions of jobs, those people, with the exception of Elon Musk, virtually all of those people and people like David Sachs and others, there are a few. But the vast majority of them, the ones that are parading around the World Economic Forum, they also, once they have their power, they want to keep it. And so they're erecting moats and gates. Instead of it being castles, you know, with, you know, crossbowmen guarding the ramparts. It's used governments to create blocks against the next wave of competition that could challenge their status. And that's what this is all about.

I mean, you could look at everything. That's what this is about. So what Brian Armstrong is saying, and in this case, I agree with them. He's saying, listen, we built this fucking thing. We will continue to build this thing. We're already here. He doesn't want those blocks. Now, in his case, it's because of naked self-interest.

He wants to be able to out-compete the banks. And he already believes that with no bill, he can do so, because he'll get his banking license under this administration. But the broader point is a bill that blocks disruptive competition from taking over is a bad thing. And so to there, you know, I agree with them, even though in his case he's saying it, I think, for naked self-interest. Bruce, I know you agree with this. It's the one point you can I always agree on. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think that the point, it's not that the Democrats are the enemy.

It's that the Democrats and the Republicans are the enemy because they're all two sides of the same uniparty status coin. And they're just a bunch of, you know, big government tyrant grifters who grift in their own different ways and market to their own base of morons in different flavors of, marketing. So, you know, I'm against all bills pretty much. I, you know, this idea like, oh, no, bills better than a, you know, bad bill. I think all the bills are bad. I haven't seen a good bill, at least not anything that had any chance, you know. The minute I saw this thing, you know, Zach Shapiro was giving me a hard time saying I hadn't read it. I'm like, I don't need to read it. I don't need to read your religious texts, bro. You know, the minute I see that it's 278 pages and I see all the statist authoritarian shes.

shills lining up for it and I glance over it for five seconds. I can tell that it's a steaming pile of crap just like the genius act and just like the Lumasgillabrand act and just like every other steaming pile of crap that they foisted on us going back to the bit license when a bunch of clown idiots in our industry went down to New York City and sat in front of Ben Luskin and said, oh, we want clarity, man. We just want to be regulated. We want rules. And then we end up with this never-ending path of tyranny.

where it's two steps forward, two steps back for 12, 13 years now of, you know, every single time where a frog in the boiling water where things get worse and worse and worse with every single one of these stupid bills. You know, what the bill I want to see is a thing that's actually deregulatory. How about we cancel the accredited investor thing? A one line bill. No one in the United States is required to have any AMLKYC. No one in the United States is, you know, accredited investor rules are hereby,

repealed, you know, the, the Jobs Act, you know, Reg C.F is hereby increased to $1 billion, you know, $1 billion cap. I mean, those are the kind of bills that I'd like to see, but no, you're never going to see that. You're going to see a bunch of grifters trying to, you know, lobbyists on one side, trying to do their own self-interest for their crappy centralized stable coins and their grifty pre-mined centralized projects. And then on the other side, you've got just the pure status, Elizabeth Warren types, who are going to try and be showing for the banks and pushing their own little... Yeah, that's a different thing in between.

But, you know, rather than go down that rabbit hole second, you know, Dan, what do you have to say? Just real quick. You guys remember there was previously a crypto company that was like super pro-regulation. They're like, yeah, we've got to be regulated, really, really pushing the pro-regulation stuff. The little company you might have not heard of in a while called Gemini's. And they were really pushing. I used to work there.

So I was working there when they were very pro-regulation. It was like, yeah, we need all this, we need all this. And what happened? Binance at their lunch. And then Coinbase came and took it. What happened was the SEC sued them, right? They played the ball. They said, yeah, do all this kind of stuff.

You know, permission first, or that kind of stuff. They got sued by the SEC, finance at their lunch, and now they're nothing. Well, I mean, it's actually a little, the one where I thought you were going was the company that was most pro-regulation was the one that, thank God they blew up, was FTC. because he was going to get a bill, he probably would have gotten it past. People forget how ridiculous the, what was it, the DCC, DCPA. Yeah, everybody was lining up to support him. He was the most loved guy on the street. And a whole bunch of people in our industry were singing his praises for his bill.

I don't remember the name of it. Defi entirely in the United States. Yeah, everybody, a whole bunch of crypto-twitter influencers. We're all back in Sam. and that's not unprecedented. The biggest fraudster, their second biggest fraudster in history, I think, is Sam, and he was extremely tight with the regulators. He was the only person in our industry to ever have an audience with Gary Gensler.

But the biggest, there was one fraudster bigger than him. His name was Bernie Madoff, and he was head of the largest regulator. You know, so I don't get how anybody sees more regulation as a solution. Well, I mean, we could debate that, but it's not more regulation, it's the types of regulation. I mean, if you actually sat in a room and I have many times with Paul Atkins, you would know that what he believes is that, and Hester Perth says this actually, you know, all the time quite eloquently, that the best regulation is disclosures, is disclosure-based regulation and holding people's feet to the fire. And frankly, that is, in many respects, you would consider it deregulatory. Because you would say, well, yeah, fraud is bad, right? You know, if people lie, they should have their feet held in the fire.

And it is helpful to have that. Anyway, Dan, I mean, I think I cut you off. I'm sorry. No, that's all good, yeah. You're right by FTX. But I was just saying that, you know, Gemini went as very, very regulated path, and it blew up on their face. So getting into bed with regulators is not necessarily a good thing.

But I agree with you, yeah, Sam was very much in bed. the regulators. I think at the time, though, I mean, I'm not sure you supported him, but they were a good bulwark against finance at the time, is all I would say in the defense. Well, I mean, bulwarks not what's any. Paul. You know, I don't think asking for regulations actually ever created any form of innovative technology. I mean, if we asked for clarity, if there was a clarity act before Uber got built, we wouldn't

have Uber, if there was a clarity act needed first before we can actually create the internet. which bypassed a lot of the telco rules. We wouldn't have the internet. Same thing with being able to transfer money globally across border. We wouldn't have Bitcoin. So fundamentally, yeah, have all of these regulatory, you know, acts die and walk in the gray area. Go ahead and build in the gray area

because that's where you actually will build things that matter and that actually have people adopt them. And really, your only protection is not an act by Congress, by, you know, as Bruce loves to call it a bunch of morons. It's actually adoption of the tech. then government can't squash it. They actually have to shoot themselves in the foot if they want to squash technology that we're all using. And so unfortunately, we're not all using this technology. And don't tell me that institution adoption is using the technology because institutions are

basically in bed with the government. You need access. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today. People using the technology, the people are going to actually cheer and back companies like Uber. They were the ones. People, the users of Uber were the ones that said, no, you cannot squash Uber. We will revolt. They will. They will. wanted it that bad. They wanted the product. They used the product. Nothing other than use and utility is going to protect the technology against the government institutions. So if you want real protection, use the damn thing. And we don't have that yet. So what is it going to take? I don't exactly know. But I know that you, Dave, have said, like, oh, well, you know, people don't

want to spend Bitcoin. They want to use it. Well, all right, great. Then we're going to die on that hill. Whatever it takes for it to actually come to the consumer, not institutional adoption. You know, Scott, I listen to a part of your podcast this morning with John Wu, and he mentioned how Avax was billed for institutions, and I couldn't have been more depressed to hear that, you know, as his definition of adoption of crypto, because there's... That was always their pitch to be there. It totally was. I hear what you're saying, but that's what they were building. No, exactly. But the thing is that they've got a huge amount of visibility in the space on that pitch, and that's a sad pitch to hear, because it doesn't touch the individual.

And I know it's been said multiple times that, you know, the consumer will come, reach, retail will come when price goes up. Actually, I feel like retail will come when it actually touches them, when it's a product that they can use. If you look back into the past decade of crypto, there was always a retail narrative when they got involved. So early on with Bitcoin, oh my gosh, we can actually spend and use Bitcoin. That was a retail narrative.

And then even with ICOs, oh, we were going to have all of these, even consumer apps. And granted, some of these narratives are absolutely idiotic. But there was a plethora of garbage, but there was the narrative of, oh, I can build this app on crypto. It could be a freaking, I saw dating apps with a crypto narrative. Whatever.

Either way, it still had a consumer and retail narrative where it's an app that I can touch and I can use to some degree. Even trading with defy, a lot of retail can actually use that, even though it might not go, and that might not be that exact product for your average everyday user. There are a lot of retail traders. NFTs, art, that's something that touches the retail. Once you start saying institutional adoption and it's just something,

that we put in the treasury and governments and banks, it doesn't touch retail. They're not as interested, right? That's why AI has really swept the rug out from underneath the crypto because it actually, AI has been around for quite some time. People don't realize, you know, like when I worked at Nvidia in 2005, I was already working with professors at MIT, UIUC, and they were building and using AI. And this is as early as 2005. Now, granted, it was slow, was untenable. It was used for the under the hood algorithms that enterprise used. And so therefore, retail wasn't investing in companies that powered AI. As soon as they could touch it, Chad GPT came out. And suddenly your mom is talking to chat GPT. Boom, investment in that sector flew off. It just skyrocketed. And that is my little rant

as far as what's missing in crypto and what I try to drive to build and what I think people should be driving to build and what we should be talking about and highlighting the projects that actually bring that level of retail adoption, not institutional adoption. And so that's my little version of like my, you know, libertarian rant because the libertarians are the ones that are closest to wanting this kind of use case and not just what we see in these acts in Congress and banks and institutional, you know, under the hood adoption. So hopefully we can get that in 2026. If not, you know, I'm kind of on hold until I see that.

And we'll get excited about the end of the end of the industry. when that starts to show some glimmer of hope. Alex. We got, oh, sorry. It's right on top on this topic really quick. And this is the one thing that like, and you've heard me say it's got, we got the app in 2025, Paul. It's called Polymarket. It has Polymarket.

It has Polly in the name, right? What we've realized is that utility doesn't drive price for crypto. Substance doesn't drive price for crypto. Mainstream app. largest thing talked about last year online for retail users across the world doesn't drive price for Polygon. It's down 90%. It's done nothing for it. So it's not, I know we've all been talking for a long time about trying to, you know, it's retail, it's retail adoption. We just got it. But Joe, the problem is, is that so many people in crypto ignore that it's not just about adoption,

you have to have value, right? You know, the token has to be worth something. And you know, it's like people always do this and it drives me absolutely out of my fucking mind. It's like if the token doesn't give you a piece of the revenue, then why do you think you should own it? Right? You know, it's that simple. And the reason for this, which of course perversely is because of all regulation by enforcement is every single token, every token quote foundation. The fact their foundations is equally ridiculous, right? You know, there was no way.

There is a way. Let's be really clear here. There is a capital markets structure where tokens could pass on value and become worth a lot as it gets built. But until companies aren't worried about being dragged and orange jumpsuits and perpwalk by miscreans and misanthropes like Gary Gensler, you can't do it. And that's what this is about. So let's not lose the thread here. The thread is. Yeah, I just want to separate utility.

owning the Polygon token, what percentage, what does it buy you? Yeah, the reality is you don't need, you don't need the native token to trade on polymarket, right? So it's a little different. I was an idiot. I bought board, I bought, you know, the board apes token, you know, ape coin at one point. That was one of my, my worst investments ever. Why? Because I thought, oh, greater fool people will buy it.

And in fact, it went up after I bought it. And like a MOOC, I didn't sell it even though it hit my price target. So, okay, my bad, I learned. And I just won't do it again. Right. And a lot of people are looked at that. And if you want to look at the all coin market, I mean, we have this all the time. I'm going to pick on Scott now just because it's easy. But, you know, you've done multiple interviews.

It is easy. You've done multiple interviews with people like Sergey from Chain Lake. Chainlink has an amazing narrative with one problem. They've never, ever clarified what percentage of the revenues of the link ecosystem will go to link token holders. and or even a path for the governance tokens to vote. The exact same thing is true about Ando. And all of these tokens that theoretically have value, they're going to go to token holders.

And so when you talk about Polygon, they never even attempted it. So I'm sorry. I mean, I shouldn't be angry, but if you want to understand what needs to happen, now, this could either happen in one of two ways, either with regulatory clarity, and most of that will be fought over and be micromunusia, or if the regulator say, you know what,

caveat emptier, do what you want, deregulate. But either way, that's what needs to happen. But in this middle ground where people are worried about regulation by enforcement, they'll go to Dubai and they'll ignore the U.S. market. And if you know that there's a risk of U.S. people buying your token, you're not going to give that. And so it's a ridiculously perverse situation. Okay, sorry for the record.

Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that there is crazy adoption. Every time you're logging in, you know, you're moving to polygy, USDA or something on Polygon. Every one of these markets as a resolver that's on Polygon, right? So I just wanted to be clear there's a ton of utility that's wrapped into, but you're exactly right. It's not a security token, right, where like the value is flowing in. But I just wanted to be clear and delineate for people that tons of utility doesn't

necessarily mean the token price is going to increase. Right. It's the way that these things are structured. Resolve to value. Right. It doesn't have to be a security, although being a security shouldn't be a dirty word. I mean, people ignore this. I said this five years ago.

I said that the biggest problem isn't whether it's a security or not. It's what the hell is with our securities rules that are so fucked up that make it impossible that being a security is a death sentence. That's the issue because there is a you should be able. I mean, Bruce nailed it before. And one of the things he said, he was talking about reg CF and all this other stuff. I mean, are you kidding? You know, you know, Grant Cardone was on here. and he basically said it's like $60 million to go public.

Just think about that. And you have to wait, you know, what, a year? Whereas in crypto, you could go public with hundreds of thousands of dollars and be liquid in weeks or months. I mean, obviously people are going to want to use crypto if, in fact, that's the case. But once the regulators came and said, oh, but if you do it, we're going to put you in jail. Well, that stopped it. Anyway, sorry, Alex, you've had your hand up.

and you've been patient, so sorry about the ranting. Not at all. I want to kind of contribute to the ranting. By the way, just for everyone to know, Polymarkets trading volume is very, very small relative to what's happening on other competitor chains. So it's not $200 million a day that is going to actually bring stats that are as good as what's happening on the dexes on Solon and other chain.

So I think that's why the utility is not reflecting Polygon's price, because it's significantly lower if you look at all of the on-chain. metrics. But I want to go back to something that Bruce was saying and Dave that you were saying, which kind of is connected to what's happening at the WEF. And obviously, I think Brian Armstrong spoke very eloquently. I thought he was very good at showing diplomacy when debating with the central bank of Europe. And one thing that I realized, you know, with regulation and innovation, and these have always been in conflict. But we all know that technological innovation always comes first and regulation is always after. That's a concept that we know. And there are many sayings like regulation

needs to catch up with innovation. But what's happening right now with these new bills is that regulation is not just having to catch up with innovation. It's regulation is helping the followers catch up with the leaders. And that's my biggest concern here. It's that, you know, if we're creating free markets where everyone should compete, you know, we shouldn't have something that benefits the banking cartels, right? It shouldn't be something where this regulatory in particular is going to keep the same industry in power, regardless of how much innovation is coming from the actual private sector. And this is one of my biggest concern when it comes to what Web3 is developing right now and how they will use many of these laws. We see what's

happening in the UK with the FinProms policy, which is an absolute scam, where you have to go through a licensed company in order to just make a tweet to target UK users, even if you're not listing any type of action. And this costs like anywhere between $10,000 to $15,000 for a single email on an updated feature just to be able to communicate to your community in the UK. So think about how much of a scam that is. You literally have to pay to communicate and someone who's saying, okay, wait, this article itself, you kind of talk about two features. So guess what? We're going to charge you twice the amount to be able to communicate like that. So for example, the UK policy regulators are really giving that money back to those with banking licenses so they're protecting

their cartel and they're stifling innovation and once again the regulation there is helping the followers or the banking cartel catch up with the leaders and the true innovators and this is a big big concern same with what we're seeing in europe with micah and same with what you're seeing currently with the the bills to and all the acts that are that are being passed so it is a concern it is a concern But I just wanted to say that I do think that eventually if the cryptocurrency in our world keeps on innovating to a point where the lag is so, so far ahead, it's going to be very difficult for the others to catch up. And so we just really, really need to keep pushing innovation, widen that technological gap. So that eventually, you know, even if people are using regulation to stifle innovation and keep the ball in their court, we can eventually make the gap so wide in terms of the U.S. in terms of how easy it is to, which is our biggest issue right now in crypto, that it will be

impossible for others to catch up. I think that's what we're seeing right now. Yeah, I think that's a, I just responded because, you know, my son just responded to that there, you know, obviously he's listening. So Ian, if you're there, just requests to come up. I'd love to hear, you know, what's going on at Davos. But yeah, he made the point that there are productive meetings that happen there. And that's true, of course. I mean, you know, I think all of us on this space believe that builders, such as the people building what you were just describing Alex, are the most important people in society. I don't think there's a whole lot of disagreement on that. And clearly when you get top end people who are the best and the brightest

together, there will be businesses, there will be deals done that makes sense. The point, I just want to distinguish between the top levels and what actually ends up where the rubber really meets the road, right? I think that's super important to understand, you know, the fact that The Wef, the literal actual world economic forum, the management of it for decades, has suppressed, you know, nuclear energy, has done, they've done all sorts of things. You know, they're the ones with the famous let them eat bugs stuff. You know, that is very different than when the top builders all throughout our industry and all the other industries get together, that very important deals will get done. I think it is important to make that difference. And so, you know, I'm thanking Ian for pointing that out. But I think that's what you're talking. about, right? You know, you and Paul are basically saying the same thing, which is as things get built that get product market fit, that will drive adoption and that will drive value eventually when the value is allowed to be given to the people who are basically there's a way to invest in it,

right? Isn't that, can I, you basically summarize it? I mean, Paul, I assume that's what you agree with. Less of that they can invest in it, but that just by simply using the product that is driving value to it. And so Polymarket was brought up. And yes, it doesn't really have a token. And I would barely even claim Polymarket as being something that drives any of the crypto utility and adoption. I mean, Polymarket at launch restricted U.S. users, right? Like, where in the ethos of Bitcoin did it say, you know, I'm sorry, if you're in this country, you can't use Bitcoin. And, oh, by the way, in order for you use Polymarket, just swipe a credit card. Right. So nowhere there was there any inkling of crypto. Sure, there was something behind the scenes, but given the fact that they

already restricted users, took fiat payments, this could have been a fully centralized service. There was nothing other than maybe some appeal to the crypto community that made this need to be a crypto product. And so the talk of that as being actual true adoption and it's here and it touches the retail user, I would say, no, it simply isn't. It's another product kind of on sort of crypto reels as almost an enterprise play that, sure, retail users can use, but so restricted and so tied to tradify that there's not even a tie, even if I was using it, I was in another country and I was in Dubai and I was actually allowed to use it, would not give me an inkling of wanting to invest in or need to use any form of cryptocurrency. So that's not what I would define as utility. Now, granted, I think what you said, Dave, is partially right in the sense that, heck, if you look at all of the largest companies in like the U.S. stock market, right, most of them are ones that build a product that has some inkling of touching the consumer, especially some of the early large ones. You know, like Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, they all touched the consumer.

And the consumer did have a way to invest in those companies. and that was a bit separate, right? The investment is separate from the use of the product. Crypto, they can kind of be the same. And Bitcoin is one of the one true ways. If Bitcoin actually became, like, for example, a payment method, then using the technology actually is kind of very in line with investing in the technology. But products like polymarkets separate that,

but they've separated so much that there's no even understanding that you are using a technology that's investable or that is necessary. that there's even a token necessary for its utility or that it's even tied into this entire industry of crypto. You know what's funny, Paul, is like when I first moved to England three decades ago and realized that in the British stock market at the time, companies routinely, routinely had, gave utility or discounts or stuff to shareholders. You know, and that was part of the deal.

Now, understand that the UK was not an equity culture. Europe was not an equity culture. It was much more of a fixed income culture at the time. And the UK has had legal gambling basically forever on every street corner. But what's amusing is that token and blockchain technology allows for that so much better. And my suspicion is when equities get tokenized, you're going to see a lot more of that convergence. It's just, this is worth pointing that out because I do think that it matters. And the technology that enables it, and it is going to become relevant. But understand that blockchain rails has some very interesting implications,

you know, for the total market capital be there. But we don't, you know, it's not, it's not necessarily what the tokens are today. And that's something that you were talking about with John Wu this morning. So, oops, Scott's gone. Hey, guys. If I can bounce in here, I, Paul, the comments Paul made earlier on about organic adoption like that, That is so, so important.

I think we need to recognize, I mean, I've come to grips with this is a very, very, very small market. The crypto bros have done everything they can to create 10,000 different products. When you go buy a Bitcoin, if you buy enough of it, you're a bad Bitcoiner, if you don't completely self-custody. I mean, we have, we have had a horrible, and we still have a horrible marketing program here, because we confuse the user. We don't launch an AI project and go, hey, it's free. Take it, use it. Play with it.

No, what we do is we say, oh, you can't buy I bit. You can't buy a bit white. You can't do this. You can't do that. You better be careful. You're going to lose all your shit. This is the horrible way. You don't, you know, if you're selling drugs on the street, you don't look at someone and go,

hey, by the way, you know, you could die from this shit. No, you give them a free sample and they come back. they dig the high and they buy something from you. That's the way this marketing needs to happen. And we are making it so difficult to ramp people into the system. We make them wrong for coming into crypto. Then we make the institutions wrong for being here, which, by the way, without the institutions, but you don't have a fucking market.

Okay? Like, I'm starting to get a little irritated with, like, I have so much volume in this play now. And what I think is we're 10 years away from really getting where we need to go. And it's just, it's such an amateur. Like the enemy is outside of us. Yet the enemy really seems to be internalized. Like our group seems to be, you know, oh, they're bitching at Coinbase.

Like Coinbase spent tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars, helping lobby this thing. So, you know, we're going to have to bring some external players in here and support the fuck out of them and get away from our almost religious kind of almost tyrannical religious viewpoint about how this works we need this adopted we need people using this and it's not been easy man yeah now on a good note if i could on a good on a on a better note i was with my bankers yesterday and they loaned me a lot of money and uh i'm

I said, hey, look, guys, I'm in this bond thing, this little treasury thing that's getting, you know, 400 bibs. It's dragging down my return badly. I want you to go to your risk management team. And I want all that switched into STRC. I can go from three and a half percent to 11. You're totally secured. It's millions of dollars, okay? Like just sitting in bonds.

And none of them, three of them, okay? or at the table with me, a trader, a trust guy, and the head of the bank. And I'm like, look, if you look at your, if you go to your risk management team, this is fully collateralized, 11%. I'm so much better off putting the bond structure in there. It's more solid than the treasury notes. And then they started laughing. I'm like, dude, it's fully secured with Bitcoin. So the cool thing is they're actually going back.

they did not know about STRC, and it's only six months old, seven, eight months old. So that'll be a problem. There's not a massive amount of liquidity. It's building. But, you know, for me to be able to have that conversation, they're like, hey, that makes a lot of sense. And they know the comma that I didn't have to mention was, hey, look, if you guys can't do this, I'm going to have to find somewhere else to go. Because it's just too big of a spread, 11 to 3.5. Like, you start putting that on, you know, $5, $10 million.

it starts to add up. So some of these products, see, I like the products being, all these different products being launched is going to hammer the institutions into, because we're going to find ways to arbitrage any rules they write anyway. That's the way regulation works. We will arbitrage rules. Now, I'm a big believer. Don't get a crypto bill if it's got something that you don't want. Don't sign it because you're never going to get that back.

I mean, it's going to be impossible to get it back. Anyway, I just thought I dropped some commentary on we might be much smaller than we think we are, and it may require a longer period of time for us to. I mean, silver and gold are showing us that the old money goes to the old money sources. It doesn't go to the new money. And we got to figure out a way, how do we make the old money more comfortable with coming into this industry? And once they're here, we probably shouldn't piss all over them. Thank you, guys.

Gary, words of wisdom. I mean, I have a follow-up to that, but Dwayne, I see your hand up. And by the way, for those who wonder, Scott is having connectivity problems again, got to love this app. Duane. Oh, thanks, thing. Good morning, everyone. Yeah, I agree with a lot of Gary's statements here. One thing I find, and it's probably just because our Overton window is different where I live.

But, you know, inherently, just to make some basic comments here, there's an inherent. very strong libertarian ethos within Bitcoin, and that's just a feature of the technology and the culture that builds around it. So, you know, one of the big issues that are going to probably be a permanent issue is, number one, like Gary was saying, you have a smaller market or community, so to speak, and then how do you sell that to the other side, to Democrats, et cetera? So, you know, you're going to have some sort of regulation, exactly how that shapes, because you know, if the argument is that no, you know, no sort of regulation is better than a bad bill,

well, you know, maybe not, not necessarily. If I can make a comparison, maybe this is not an apt comparison, but a loose comparison to say things like Sarbanes, Oxley, and other sort of, you know, other sort of regulations or compliance. I mean, it does, it does in a way create work because you have to go through all of this process in order to comply. but at the end of the day, you're trying to sell to the rest of the world, so to speak, or investors that really don't have a lot of knowledge or a knowledge base on crypto.

So they're going to have to think about, you know, basically regulations and safety and all of these different things because there's a lot of a lack of understanding on that side. And then how do you communicate those things? Because, I mean, that was really exemplified in Davos, if you look at the comments from Canada, from Europe versus the comments from America. So this is going to be a prolonged issue. And you could look down, say, a decade from now, and you still don't really have clarity or any kind of regulation

that's basically going to help the industry move forward. But that's just some random thoughts for you. Yeah, I think that all of this boils down to how do you get a technology like Bitcoin, the technology that enables trustless value transfer, with absolute provable scarcity to be adopted as a standard, which would imply it participating in the way gold and silver is. And the answer to that is not, as Gary points out quite clearly, by yelling and telling people who are buying it by a I bid or whatever,

that they're wrong. The answer is embracing the optionality that everyone has to use that technology the way or, invest in that technology based on what they think. And that's why I make the comment that it needs to be a bigger tent. And a lot of these stupid bullshit religious zeal kind of wars don't do anybody any favors. But the truth is it's cyclical. We've seen it all the time.

I mean, my working theory is we're in crypto winter right now. We're still in a fringing range at around 90,000, 88 something, whatever. If that's the worst that's happening because of this transition we're going through, then eventually we emerge from Crypto Winter and people get excited about something again. And I don't think any of us know what that something is. Alex, I think I saw your hand up next. Yeah, I wanted to comment something, Dave, on what Gary was saying earlier, which is extremely, extremely important because he was talking about the issue, like solving real world problems.

And I think, Dave, and this is going to sound really vulgar. I'm really sorry, guys, but there's too much intellectual masturbation in Web3, as in we're trying. trying to focus on little pieces of tech that really don't fucking matter sometimes, other than the grifters that we all know exist, rather than focusing on real-world problems. And, you know, we kicked off Web3. I remember seeing Web3 relative to Web 2 adoption on a curve. And back in 2021, we were roughly five to seven times faster in terms of adoption.

Why? Because Web 3 is kind of like a layer built on top of Web 2. And so people who know how to use a computer, if they're just a little bit tech savvy, they would be able hopefully to manage a non-custodial wallet. Obviously, there are many mistakes, lots of money lost, and we shouldn't be preaching people on how to use their money, but why this space matters and how we can improve the U.S.

And what we've noticed recently is that we've stalled. We've been at half a billion dollars since 2024. Adoption is not going up on the contrary to popular belief. While when we compare it to AI, how many users do you guys think we have in AI as of today? We have 1.4 billion fucking people in AI and we're still stuck at half a billion in crypto. And Chad GPT and GROC have only started truly like a year and a half ago.

And we're already more than nearly triple the times of adoption in AI than we're having in Web 3. And it's all because we're trying to build all this very complex tooling that is completely useless from the masses standpoint, rather than solving problems that truly matter. Do we expect everyone to understand what multi-sig is? Do we expect everyone to understand how to manage their private keys? Do we expect everyone to fucking bridge from one blockchain to the other,

having two gas coin fees from two separate blockchains? It's an absolute disaster. And so it really reminds me as an analogy of the early days of the railroads in the United States, where you'd have one railroad go from A to B, but then to get to C, you would have to go from B to N and then N to Q and then Q to C. And so it's very, very complicated. And I think because people have this kind of personal need to build something better than the other,

rather than focus on open source and build on top of each other and try to own everything and dominate the market, we don't have the right mindset and we're not thinking about the end user. And I think that's a massive, massive problem, guys, that we really, really need to fix. if we want to reach more than one billion users in crypto by 2030, as all of us expect. I think that that is a great, almost a mic drop. But, Dwayne, was your hand up from before, or is that a phantom from before? I'd want to cut you off. Well, that's a phantom from before.

I was surprised you saw me in the first place because it's like kind of glitched. So just, I think that Alex's point is kind of the mic drop. Basically, and people in Bitcoin don't understand that, like, there's, I would say, 90% of the world. It wants to, you know, is perfectly happy to use their credit card to swipe and pay. It's perfectly happy to go on a website and let somebody else handle all the, all of the internals. And the 10% of the world who needs, and maybe my percentages are wrong, I don't care, who wants the opposite. to be able to take their wealth and hold it themselves because they feel they need to leave their country or they want to be able to just they don't trust anybody should be catered to as well that you need a big tent

and the you know having applications where you can manage your succession so you can do estate planning you can do everything that you need to do and make it easy to use and never worry about the security thread of, oh, my God, if God forbid my wife clicks on an email and downloads an attachment that the next time I use the same computer to do a crypto transfer, I'm going to lose all of it. That needs to be fixed. It needs to be solved. And to be blunt, the vast majority of people aren't going to want to manage that risk themselves. They're going to want to outsource it.

And they're going to be willing to pay a little bit for it. Now should they be paying 3% for every credit card transaction for that? Of course not. I mean, that's just usurus because there's no real need for it if you're not using credit. But people will pay for it. And there are a lot of builders in our space that are trying to do that. When those are the conversations that are happening, that's when you know we're not in winter anymore. That's when people are getting excited again. And that's really the point. I mean, I think that's what you're saying, right, Alex. Sorry for putting you on the spot again. Yeah, okay, I got the heart. Well, anyway, we are at 1120. So since Scott is not here to give the normal disclaimer,

please follow every speaker up here who gives their time for this. We'll be back tomorrow morning at 1015, and we'll see if maybe we have some news that is not because we're stuck in the middle of a range and nothing else happening. Take care, everyone.