The Wolf Of All Streets - Fed & Banks Back Crypto! What’s Next? | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

This Crypto Town Hall livestream focused on the evolving regulatory environment for crypto and stablecoins in the US following a major shift at the Federal Reserve towards a more open stance on digital assets. The hosts and guests discussed the implications of Federal Reserve Governor Waller's comments about granting select fintechs a streamlined master account, which could bolster stablecoin innovation. The group also explored the recent Coinbase and BASE announcements, the importance of zero-knowledge proofs for privacy, how stablecoins may act as a bridge to broader crypto adoption, and the growing debate around CBDCs versus private stablecoins. Additional conversation covered the volatility in traditional and crypto markets, the challenges facing altcoins, and the shifting economics for platforms, banks, and stablecoin providers as tokenization spreads.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. We are glitching again. Scott can't seem to become a co-host. Scott, I see you as a listener. Are you a speaker? Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, I hear you fine. Can't see you, but whatever. You know, take the bad with the good. So this morning is fascinating to me. You know, we dumped a little bit yesterday. We're still cleaning up from what happened with gold yesterday. We had what is going to be. I think at some point in the next few years considered to be a pivotal day occur where we actually went from a Federal Reserve that effectively was either dismissive or outright hostile to Bitcoin and crypto to hosting and basically saying that crypto is going to be part of the mainstream and the market not caring at all. Which at the same time, sorry Scott, you were one of them. I counted five crypto influencers all jumping on Jim Kramer making a statement and actually getting it wrong. If I jumped on Kramer, it was my news team. I don't even know what you're

talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, your news team. Kramer did a post and he said that crypto is likely to surge today, but people are going to get hurt so you should trim. In other words, telling people to fade the rally. Okay, it's reasonable. I mean, even by Kramer's standards, that's somewhat reasonable. but but your dues team and five other crypto influences didn't bother reading to the end of his post and just saw crypto's going to search today and posted it which of course created all sorts of oh no here we go again sort of you know death of the disaster moments and you know i just think it's peak silliness when one tv characters gloviations even even when he actually says the opposite of what people think get more press than the most iconic

We could argue lots of people would say evil, others would say other things, but certainly iconic and powerful body in monetary regulation effectively blesses crypto as having a part of the financial system. And that one doesn't even get talked about. I just find that amazing. I mean, am I alone? What does anybody else think here? What I find more amazing is that beyond meat is going parabolic to the upside. And we might be back into the meme stock cycle of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, of the, I haven't been following the bill gates, like, you know, get now it's, it's all these bugs again. To, to what I understand, it's literally just one of these pumpable, heavily shorted dead stocks. It's getting pumped on the actual stock market.

Yeah, well, that happens, but, but usually a signal. usually well i mean look you know it's like the seasonality stuff is going to die here you know we're in october and you know whether you call it uptober or whether you call it crash tover whatever you know it's unlikely to anything major is going to happen of course now that i've said that watch markets are perverse just to be clear i haven't put any money on nothing happening i haven't done anything so it's it is interesting right you know we get these periods of time when people are so desperate to create a catalyst that the stuff that does get their time gets you know it gets way over exaggerated that's basically what you know what i'm seeing i mean curious i mean i mean i see

i can't tell who's in in the audience versus who is speaking of course but whatever i don't see any hands and you have me as a listener so i don't know yeah so carlo you've given a couple of emojis so you can say your good mornings and get started but what do you think about the, because the other story that that is worth talking about, and I'm sure you're going to care about it, is what Coinbase said in terms of base and stable coins being your main topic. But I think that's actually pretty important also, and I also think people in crypto don't really understand what it means. Well, first off, good morning, Scott. Good morning, Carlo. Glad to be here. I have to share your sentiment, Dave.

Incredible what we witnessed yesterday. Fed Chair Waller, Fed Governor Waller. was very receptive to innovation, very open-minded. He acknowledged in his closing remarks that every time he does these things, he learns more and realizes how much more there is to learn about digital assets. So I love that he's curious. The fact that he wants to open up the Fedmaster account to what he called a skinny Fedmaster account for qualifying payment processors is incredible news for stable coins and for innovation.

Also, I would encourage everyone to check out Eleanor Terrence interview with Chair Waller that she did on her Cryptoamerica podcast yesterday because he kind of went into greater detail about how he views yield on stable coins. And he pretty much regards stable coins as being a payment processing vehicle and that they should not be used for yield. So he defers to Congress on all of this, of course, but he's kind of tilted or at least tipped his hand as how he feels about the subject. I'm also excited to see what Coinbase is doing because I think one of the things we have to solve when it comes to really integrating stable coins as a payment processing rail for businesses is a zero knowledge proof layer because I don't think businesses will be comfortable with their addresses being disclosed their identity. is being disclosed and how much they've got in their stable coin wallets being disclosed. And zero knowledge proofs may be a viable solution to all of that. And then we had the news yesterday from Caitlin Long that I know you shared as well, that she hinted that there is a possibility of having a dual purpose rail under the

stable coin payment solutions where they can weave in and out of being depository tokens and pure stable coins. If she's got the proprietary rights to something like that, I think banks are going to pay dearly to get access to that kind of tech. So that is also very interesting. And then lastly, I launched the podcast, Stablecoin Solutions, and episode one is that big roundtable I had with Caitlin, where she actually kind of shared a little bit of alpha about all of this.

So with your permission, guys, I would love to share a link to that first episode. Now, go ahead, put it up above. And then I will mute because I think that's enough. And that's all good stuff. I would say also to the Caitlin Long side of this, those who have been following the custodia bank saga, she tried to get a master account for a fully backed, non-fractually reserved bank and was rejected and has actually been suing the Fed for years. So this is pretty crazy vindication for her, for Cracken, a lot that are trying to get master accounts that there will likely be some sort of connection to the Fed system for fintech, crypto, and others without them having to go through the regular role of getting that full master account. I mean, she felt very vindicated. I could tell clearly getting a lot more patents, I think I saw as well.

So this hopefully will be a huge win for her and for Custodia, and she can stop suing the Fed now if this actually happened. Try, Carlo. Yeah, look, I think she acknowledged that she was very happy to see Fed Governor Waller expressed this interest. And she actually kind of discussed this possibility of access to non-bank entities to the Fed master. And Waller has seemed to be receptive to this. So this is encouraging because this is going to mean that you just don't have qualified banks and bank charters that can get access to this. Now, they can't get access to the full suite of services. He made that very clear, but he's open to a fast track option and a simplified streamline option for payment processors, which does create an interesting paradigm shift here.

So how do you look at the base announcement? you know in parallel with that or along with that i know what i think but i'm just curious from your perspective and it feels to me like stable coins the underlying tech for stable coins is going to ultimately be something you want to value the same way you value utilities which are not terribly exciting don't get really great multiples but you know they're their assets they are they are they are but it feels very much like stable coins will that the tech underneath staples at least and a lot of this this payment rail stuff will be utility, should have utility style valuations because that is literally where

the market is, is kind of pushing it to. I mean, am I crazy with this? Because certainly the crypto market, the crypto market doesn't look at it that way. By the way, this is not a bad thing for lots of assets. Certainly the companies that operate it and certainly the ability to invest. One of the things that people don't understand is once this utility is built and once this all actually works. It means that platforms will easily be able to offer payment services, meaning you can have your, whatever, your Zell, your Venmo, whatever, tied to an account. You can pay your bills on auto pay, do whatever the heck you want, much lower fees, much lower costs, and at the same time with your excess cash, save in whatever the hell you want to save

in, including anything that's tokenized anyway, including obviously Bitcoin or funds or you know, whatever. And it feels to me like that is a major force multiplier, both economically and for part of the crypto space. But other tokens in the crypto space, one has to question what were their valuations because the technology itself would be commoditized. And so it's really a question of differentiated versus commoditized tech that in crypto you need to figure out. I don't think a lot of people are looking at it. Certainly most of what you see on X about crypto doesn't even think about trying to figure the difference out. I can't disagree with anything that you're saying because I think what we're seeing here

is we're seeing the plumbing being laid for consumer to consumer movement of stable coins, which is then going to translate to B2B, and it's going to be a viable alternative. If you integrate this stuff into everyone's wallets, and look, we're already seeing that. I mean, you have stable coin options and things like cash app and PayPal and so forth. So it's just further reinforcing that moving money is going to be digitized, and it's going to move faster, cheaper, more efficiently. And the banks and fintechs that adapt to this are going to win, and the ones that fail to adapt are going to lose customer deposits because there's going to be much more attractive options. And that's why I'm out there preaching this very thing. Why are you still processing payments the same old-fashioned way when you can expedite this entire thing?

And like I said, adding that ZK layer to this is what I think will be very appealing because nobody knows what's in your bank account. And I think businesses would like to have that same layer of anonymity when it comes to what's in their stable coin wallets when they're paying vendors and moving money around because that's just proprietary stuff that they don't necessarily want the whole world to be able to see on chain. I mean, that is not a trivial point. It's not just about money. It's also when you talk about real world assets, right, on chain, and particularly equities, there's an entire structure for obfuscation of ownership in equities for very, very good reasons, right? When someone's acquiring a large position, they don't want the world to know about it until they're done for obvious reasons. There's rules like 13F filings where at certain thresholds you have to declare, but that doesn't work if everything is 100% transparent. So all this technology is necessary for lots of reasons. It helps liquidity, it helps capital formation, et cetera. And what's interesting about it is these are solved problems from a tech point of view.

I mean, maybe not the finishing touches, the UI, US, et cetera, but they're solved problems. And yet people in the traditional financial markets go, oh, well, this won't work because, and they don't even know. So it was incredibly interesting to me that of all people have fed governor, or understood the underlying technology that can make that kind of systematic obfuscation by design work, right? I mean, it's funny to think that there are people at the Fed who actually understand this better than the average person who runs electronic trading or does research or quantitative trading on Wall Street.

But there we are. And I love the fact that he's curious and that he gets it and that he understands that there's been a complete change in the tone towards this sector. It's not about stifling and killing it and pushing it offshore. It's about integrating it and bringing blockchain technology into the banking system and revamping what is really antiquated tech that we've been using since the 70s is just amazing to me. I could not be more excited about the future of stable coins and what they can do. I agree.

I think it's worth playing devil's advocate, though, On the other side, I think the adoption is incredible. I just find it a little uncomfortable cheering for the Fed. Oh, yeah. And I also think that Fed adoption of blockchain technology does not necessarily mean a ringing endorsement of crypto assets for retail. So that's not necessarily investable and does not necessarily make your assets go up as retail. And C, and I'm not one of the dooms about this,

but it's definitely a step towards a central bank digital currency if ever they decided to pursue one. Yeah, look, I don't think it'll be called a CBDC, and we've talked about this, Dave, and Scott, that this is not technically a CBDC platform because you have private issuers, but you also do have steep regulation, steep oversight, KYC, AML. So it's not too far to say that you're going to have a heavy hand. approach to monitoring this stuff and to tracking it. But the thing is... And it's just laying the plumbing is what I'm saying. Exactly. That's the intention.

I'm just saying if they ever decide to turn it on, it ain't going to take long. Exactly. Especially if, as we're seeing in other sectors, you have the White House, you know, sort of bringing private sector into the fold and sort of cooperating with private sector, you could easily see something like that happen in a worst-case scenario. No question. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm on record as saying the CBDC would be his financial, is the most dystopian thing that could possibly happen.

Thankfully, there are some people in our government to agree and a lot of people in America who don't want cash to go away. And honestly, you know, we'll see how this all plays out. But what does need to happen. And there was a good post about this by someone. I've seen it before. I've said the same thing. If you want to understand what gets you to the steps that are required to get to Bitcoin as the base layer for the Internet of value. If you want to know what's going to be there, one of the things that absolutely has to happen is all monetary movements and frictions associated with buying, selling Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin, et cetera, go away.

Has to happen. Hey, Dave. Yep. Just real quick, just go back to a second. What about a CBDC is more dystopian than USDC today? The fact that the government, without any disclosure, can program it such that you can, what you can spend it on. In fact, they're talking about doing that in Europe right now. They're basically saying your carbon allotment, which you contract by a social credit score.

And so you can't, oh, you've driven too many miles this week, you can't buy gas. Or you've driven too many miles this week, you can't, you know, in my case, use the charging station on your car on, you know, for this currency, or you've had too much beef this week, you know, to why you try beyond beef, which is maybe why, you know, whatever. Anyway, I don't want to go. And the CBDC is going to track how much beef you eat? I don't understand. Well, it can, you know, once you have a centrally controlled currency that's programmable, they can absolutely track what you're spending it on, 100%. And so you don't think that they know what you're spending USC on. My point is, we are already, whatever you think, is possible under CBDC is possible today with USC. And I think by shitting on CNBCC's, you are sitting on what is likely to be

the biggest educator of crypto to most of the world. And I'm all for crypto education, even if it's CBDCs. Well, we can agree to disagree. I think it's actually an interesting conversation. But there is a very, very large difference between private competitive stable coins.

The government can tell you, the government can tell Circle whatever it wants and Circle will do whatever the government wants. Hold stop. Circle has never said to the government, no, we will not do that. No, but it becomes, it is a hell of a lot easier for that.

They could if they wanted to see your purchases, Lou. It's a little different than, I'm not saying that you're not saying that you're right. They can see all your purchases on your MasterCard, on your Visa. So this dystopian future that you guys are talking about, but they can't block it. Yes, they can. They can take your USDC if they want to.

They've taken USC before. You say they can't block it. They can block it so fast. Exactly. Like, if they want to turn you off, they turn you off. They've turned entire countries off with a click of a switch. like Russia. Look, I think

this is an interesting conversation because, I mean, what's this gentleman saying is, hey, look, we're saying CBDCs are bad. Personally, I think stable coin is no different than CBDC. One, the name alone is grossly misleading. It is a linked

coin. Immediately when they call it stable, I'm like, why are they doing that? They're trying to hoodwink people and believing this is stable. It's not. It's a link coin. Any linkage to anything else should be described, like, in great clarity. Hey, I am linked to this, you know, project and it could fucking fall apart. So, you know, I agree, man.

I think Circle, Coinbase, finance will do whatever they're told to do by the U.S. government. We're kind of pretending that that's not going to happen. I don't know. I'm not, like, just to play devil's advocate, I think that Circle, obviously, and Tether have complied with the United States government when there's been fraud or criminal activity. I'm not sure that Circle would open your wallet to the government for every single transaction if you're on a dex. And I just, I'm not sure, peer to peer, I'm not sure if they would do that. I can't say that they necessarily won't, but I don't think we have evidence that they have.

do we am i missing something look yeah i think the question though is the peer-to-peer market that big because i don't think the peer-to-peer market is as big as people say it's fair well what define peer-to-peer market carry i mean like we're not italy okay uh in italy at barring people will basically tell you that the black market the peer-to-peer market the cash market whatever is as much as 50% of GDP but that's because of the insane regulatory structure and tax structure I have no idea what the overall cash market is the United States, but it's definitely an integer, and it's probably double digits. Well, what they did in Europe, though, is they've removed, I think the largest note you can buy now is 50 pounds, sterling. They're going to get rid of that.

Okay, once you get rid of those big dollars, big denominators, you really stop the, you know, peer-to-peer fraud that you're referring to. I mean, I love cash. See, I think cash is our friend. It's Bitcoin's friend because cash is the real problem around fraud. It's not crypto. But Scott, I just think this is a very good conversation. CBDC, stablecoins versus Bitcoin, like, are they going to coexist? I don't see Bitcoin doing this without stable coins and CBDCs.

You're going to just get blocked and dropped. And it's going to be a world where we live in. I just think it's a transitory space we're going through right now. It shouldn't be frightening. And I think CBDCs will educate, because one, they're coming, but they will educate the user. I agree with that. Over digital assets. And that will be good.

So I've had this debate in that side of the conversation as well. And there is a world where CBDCs are not like this dystopian tool. Chris John Carlo, who was obviously the head of the CFDC, many called it. Crystal debt, crypto dad, trying to remember the name of it, the digital dollar product project, something like that. He has a not-profit going around the world trying to educate potential issuers of CBDCs on how to include the same kind of privacies that you would have from normal fiat money or cash. So there is a world where we have a central bank digital currency, but the proper people put the proper privacy protections in place. It's just hard to imagine that that would be the environment where it happens. So I do think that there's a big jump from a private stable coin to the fully dystopian CBDC

where they're air dropping you, your stimulus checks, or like Dave said, they're penalizing you social credits, which we know they will do in China for the things you spend on, or they're literally just saying, hey, this is your tax bill that we've calculated for you and remove it from your wallet. Yeah, I mean, Gary, I think this might be. interesting Tuesday evening conversation. You know, you're Cardone debates. I think that would add.

Gary and Gary's coming to my house tomorrow to record. We talk about it. Yeah, you certainly could. But the one thing that I think we all agree on, and this is what really matters here, is that as these technologies advance and the UIUX improves, the user experience improves, and the ability to transfer from a payment account

to an investment account, It isn't, anyone who does this at banks, you know, if you have city or whatever, I mean, I have city, just transferring money from one to the other can take days. I mean, literal days, because they wait for everything to settle, et cetera, you know, whatever, it's hard. You change that to be instant and or automated, and now all of a sudden people can invest in whatever they want to invest in and they can do it even with automated sweeps. So it will 100% open up investment opportunities for a variety of assets, obviously including Bitcoin, obviously including a lot of other crypto, and in fact takes away the need for kind of Me Too treasury companies and the ETFs where you have to pay a management fee because all of a sudden,

instead of paying a management fee, you have a much smaller, if any, custodial fee for the same asset. So, you know, people forget, and you know, it's like everyone says, Well, ETS. Oh, my God, look what it's done. Well, the reason people want ETS is because they can own it in a brokerage account and they don't have to worry about, you know, they lose their treasure. They lose their, their ledger, you know, whatever. They have to use a counterparty that they don't trust. And they're happy with that. The reason for the ETS disappear almost completely, you know, when it becomes ubiquitous that you can have it in the same sort of the same account and actually do payments, et cetera, off of it, you know, and not have. to worry about settling and all this stuff. So the frictional costs in ETFs are lower, much lower than we used to have, but the new world that we're going to in the next five, 10 years will be much lower than that. Now, and look, I've said it too, Dave, I agree. Look, stable coins are going to be the Trojan horse that are going to open up

exposure to crypto because if you get consumers comfortable with moving fully regulated, fully audited, one-to-one backed digital dollars that are going to be stored in wallets, it's going to to then transition to interest and curiosity and things like bitcoin which is why i always say gary stack and sats spend in stables because we still have to spend with fiat no one wants to sell their bitcoin to pay their bills but they're going to be interested in borrowing against their bitcoin taking that allocation i was pitched last night for an hour about code developers that we should be using bitcoin for potato chips and i'm like wow you guys really no way it was it was funny gary That's the problem. You have developers that don't understand market adoption.

I mean, you've been on multiple, you've been on multiple sites, Gary, like, you know, some of the Bitcoin today is where these guys are saying, well, you know, everything is going to be denominated in Bitcoin. You should opt out of the system. And you're like, yeah, dude, but, you know, I want to buy houses. I want to buy cars. I want to buy food. I mean, you know, what are you talking about? It is kind of amusing, right? That's a developer. That doesn't even understand the theoretical maximum of how many transactions can happen on Bitcoin in a year. year. There can only be like 400 million in a year visa is doing a billion a day. Like you just you can't like that's just not like a physical possibility. It's against the laws of physics. So don't invest. Well, I mean, so yeah, except for if you look at if you look at Fedwire, you'll see that Bitcoin actually is probably faster. And so, you know, it depends on how one does

things, but you know, whatever. I mean, that's that's another debate and that could be had. And Justin, comparing settlement to transit. Exactly. I saw Constantine at his hand up before. Oh, I didn't see it. So thank you, Scott. You know, it's actually fascinating to listen to you guys. Yeah, I know what turned up.

But honestly, like, I know that there are different opinions about it. I just want to praise, like, US government what they're doing. If you think about it, like we're comparing ourselves to something like China and digital Iran, where it's like, like literally fully centralized like you know 100 percent controlled by a people's bank of china uh they do everything like you know there there's zero kind of innovation from private firms is just literally impossible right you know so um they like in our case like you know here the skinny master account like you know yes fedores are limited access via private firms and

of course there's going to be limited firms who will be able to even afford to go to the level of, you know, like trust banks or SPDIs, like, you know, so, yes, of course, so we're going to have, like, maybe Circle and Coinbase of the world who will be able to do. But, like, to the point of Scott, like, you know, Custodia Bank and Cracken, like, who are pioneers in Wyoming, like, and they have SPDI status, they will benefit a lot. And I think that would inspire more firms to get federally recognized licenses instead of relying just on state money transmitters approval. So just the fact that we have a constructive conversation about it,

you know, like, and there's support, and there is like, I'm sure we all understand that after the July, like, Genius Act was signed, like, you know, that will help even further to recognize payments, like in stable coins as something like, like, the clear federal framework. I think it's, like, incredible that we're having. Like, I could not imagine in the, like, previous administration to you. even have this conversation or to even like, you know, think about like even before that. So I know we're not always happy. I know that like there's maybe some going to be opposition

from OCC. But overall, I think like it's an incredible fact that the private sector and the government are trying to find this middle ground. So I just wanted to add some positivity to the constructive conversation. Yeah, no, I think I think that's right. I mean, but but I just want to go back to the one thing that people, if you want to understand method to madness, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, right? I just think that people act smart. So if you want to know why it was at the same time Larry Fink was pushing the Bitcoin ETF, pretty much immediately in the same breath, he started talking about tokenization, despite the fact that his own people are smart enough and have told him that in a truly fully tokenized world, that the ETF structure is not going to be nearly as desirable. Why?

Because what he thinks is that his firm and asset managers will be well positioned to be able to take advantage of tokenization to get to collect more assets and money flows. And understand that there's reasoning behind these things are not completely separate. And nobody really seems to understand that. But just the fact that you could have tokenized funds, you know, and those are starting to develop, that's a very big deal. I mean, I'll tell you, I talked to a lot of people, very senior people on wall. street last week and there was a panel on tokenization that unfortunately they had the wrong

people on the panel i don't want to insult them but they they were asked you know by the the moderator which is brett redfern who's you know my friend brett he knew the answer but he was not he was surprised where they gave it he asked question what's a benefit of the tokenization and a woman who is brilliant in terms of understanding the technology from securitize and you know Edward from zero hash started talking about how beneficial it will be to them to have tokenization as opposed to telling Wall Street the fact, which is it'll cut your back office costs in half, if not 75%. By the way, those are huge numbers for people on Wall Street, right?

You know, and it will dramatically decrease overhead and frictional costs. That's what's going to get them there. But we're so early that even the people given the stage to promote it weren't promoting it. And so yeah, it's going to take time. Stable coins are the, I think you're right. You call it Trojan horse. I'll call it an entering wedge. Call it whatever it is. It's the start. And this is something that's going to play out over years, not days, not weeks, which for a crypto market shows is, oh, my God. I've just broken the Cardinal said that we don't have the flashy headline.

But, you know, but that's what's going on here, right? Does that make sense to you, Carla? Yeah, I 100% agree. And that's why I'm hyper focused on this because I think. think this is the thing we've been looking for that's going to be the bridge. We've always tried to find that L1 that's going to be the bridge to the mass adoption, but I really think it's going to be stable coins that are going to be that bridge, because once you have consumers comfortable with moving dollars on digital rails, it's inevitable. They're going to have

curiosity into moving other things on digital rails, and that's going to bring more adoption of Bitcoin. Well, yeah, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient, is the big deal. I think if you're, like, I think Lou's point is just kind of like, if you're just replacing the current activity that's just digital dollars right now, which they currently are, like, in your bank account, if you're just replacing that with a CVDC, it doesn't really matter, right? Like, that part of the economy is already functioning in a way where there's a lot of oversight. They can garnish your wages. There's so many things that they can already do. And so it just actually brings people a tiny step closer to utilizing the other parts of the economy. that we know potentially work better, like USDC or USDT or die or potentially Bitcoin. Just moves them a little bit closer. But there's a couple of other topics I think are really interesting. I don't know that you guys saw over the last day that I think affect the overall market is, you know, one of them, you know, is Cadena failing. And obviously it's, you know, if people still create blocks and there's nodes, people can still utilize a chain.

But Kedana was a L1, at one point worth tens of billions of dollars, basically just the foundation said, like, we're done. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that in different parts of the market. You know, I think we have a – there's a very serious problem in the alt-coin market around what actually drives price, right? Like I could say, people say, oh, we just need a killer app, right? And then I could say, well, look at Polygon and look at Madik and look at Polymarket, right? Absolute monster success, tons of money. It's done nothing for Madik, right? So nothing for the underlying token appreciation of that chain, right?

So what I can kind of point to and say is that a killer app doesn't matter for a chain, right? And so now we're back to what does matter for that. So that's a huge thing that's happening and will continue to happen. And I think people should keep an eye out for that. The other one that I know Scott wants to talk about is, a beyond meat short squeeze. He was dying to understand what's happening. So someone, if, you know, if I got, I bought, I bought seven pounds of fake meat this

morning. That's how you, because I was hungry. Maybe it moved the stock price, I'm thinking. So, but a couple days ago. I took physical delivery of oil when it goes negative. I bought all the meats. There was, there was someone named Copybarra Reborn that was posting onto Reddit about the, like, 62% short float.

Those posts were for some reason getting deleted off of Reddit. So they started to kind of cross-post those onto X. On like the 14th, 15th, the 16th, like, people started to really amplify it on X. Then it was kind of going viral saying like Penn Griffin was the villain again. And then on the 18th, it was basically, you know, they were thinking that Roaring Kitty was actually Capybar reborn. And so that's when it just started to go crazy. And so that's why you're seeing the game stop, nostalgia, retail versus Wall Street, narrative playing out in Beyond Meat. And then what kind of amplifies a little bit more is Reddit, if you're kind of paying attention, X leans a little bit more right.

Reddit leans a little bit more left or a lot more left. And so when you're talking not eating meat, it's just amplifying it even more. So that's what you're seeing in that market. So tread very lightly. It will probably go up and come down. very quickly. Why the hell is Coinbase tanking this morning? Just out of curiosity, guys, why is Coinbase tanking this morning?

It's down 20 bucks. Absolutely no idea on this end. Didn't even notice. Give me a second of letting the AI agents tell me. Are they telling you to buy or sell and they tell you to eat the bugs or not? Hey, may I ask a different question? that's even more profound. Why is Amazon stock going up when they're down two days

and no one's talking about cloud being completely fucked? I think it showed market saturation. The entire internet is dependent on them. They have such a stranglehold of a monopoly that it proved that people are fucked unless they're utilizing it. It's a pretty wild conclusion, but accurate. It's all down, but you need to buy us because we're the only ones who can provide it. Pretty wild.

Dave, you're about to jump it. It's crazy to me. Coinbase is down 6% and Amazon's down one. I would think Coinbase might be getting hurt because it's been down. I mean, look. It makes no sense to me. Makes no sense. things markets are strange that way carlo i mean look you know there's all it takes is in in these

stocks is one significant rebalancer uh making a change particularly this time of year it happens all the time so it doesn't take much and then the market reacts to it right now i mean i don't know i don't know that this is happening but cryptos kind of feels you know what's what's the word i want to use boring and when crypto gets boring people money comes out of coin base and it goes down and then it gets exciting and it flies back in and the liquidity is never that much on single stocks i mean amazon is obviously a bigger market cap so it takes more to move it but you know there's it's all the stories out there it's like you could look at at you know some of the high flyers recently it's it's nothing more than possibly profit take i mean look at the performance

of some of the best performers things that i own for the long haul like iron you know we talk about that, you know, part of the AI revolution. It's had a pretty bad two days. You know, how you want to slice it. I mean, it's, it's getting absolutely destroyed today, right? Again, yesterday it got destroyed. Down what? I'm just looking now. That's the wrong one. Sorry, but I don't really care because I'm not selling, but, you know, it doesn't matter. You have to understand what it is if you own something for the long run. So, Iron is down, yeah, I mean, down basically over 10% in two days. You know, these moves happen, did anything to the thesis for investable data centers

and need for AI models go down? Well, no, of course not, but momentum stalls. Momentum stalls. People start selling to take profits. And when they do that, it wears the bit, right? And that happens with everything. So whenever you start looking for reasons, understand that there are, there's a lot going on, particularly this time of year. Remember, and I've said this before, we are nine days away or eight days away from the books being closed on fiscal year for a lot of financial companies. And a lot of companies, a lot, want to have their portfolios adjusted by the end of October as they go into their year end reporting. So October is always kind of squirrely for that reason. And by the way, it could be up and down. This is not necessarily only down. We're talking like it's all gloom and doom, but, you know, whatever.

you know that's what happens when markets get boring liquidity decreases and moves are exaggerated on individual assets it is a story as old as time and then gary i assume you this is not this is not new to you what i'm saying yeah no no and that's why a lot of people consider this a huge opportunity right for exactly that reason may ask you questions like i have uh people who DM me, like, and off you're listening to this, like, bigger conversation about the FedWire and everything, like, what, what do you think will happen with banks, like, you know, when the stable coins will actually be, like, you know, like, the rails, like, which, you know, they're faster, better, cheap, for selling, than FedWire and ACH. What do you think was going

to happen with the FedWire and ACH? Personally, I think that, you know, FedWire will just morph the technology. It's just a tool. They don't make money off it, but they don't really care. They just want to, so I don't think that really matters. ACH will, they probably leave the way technology ends up being done. They'll leave the wrapper on top of it, but it'll just be replaced by stable coins. The bigger difference here is that banks' business models are going to need to change. Now, the large banks, they love the subsidy of having deposits, not having to pay on deposits. It is a subsidy.

It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, 30 billion in subsidy. right, that they're getting a year for that. Anyway, sorry, someone just came to the door to fix our air conditioning. Anyway, sorry about that. But the bottom line is that their business models are going to change. Banks that are investment banks will continue to do extremely well. There'll be investment banks. Banks that are community banks are going to have to order a few fee models.

It's a much larger conversation, right? that that's really the point but you know all technologies cause change i mean any people have seen it brokers are totally different now than they were 30 years ago and so don't expect any of that to be different hey dave yep yeah uh the person with the door those are alt coins are going to crash at your place yeah you got you got the wrong door dude you got the wrong I would add to that, is this pocket that deep? We know it is. But I would also say maybe Coinbase is down, basically,

because the pressure on the alt space and the news about Kedana, obviously should be raising people's questions about, you know, what about these tokens outside of the top 10? Yeah, that sounds like. Having followed alt coins for last. last eight years, you know, having interviewed over 100 founders that started these things, having watched the adoptions, you know, the adoption skyrocket come down, skyrocket again, watching people kind of close things down. You know, what I can say is certain projects, you

know, have just, they still have war chests, right? Some of these people are some of the largest Bitcoin holders out there. They, you know, made some smart moves and they, they bought a bunch of Bitcoin. You know, some of the things that we know don't make any sense, you know, are the valuations, right? I did a post the other day about, like, I don't know if you guys have heard of, like, Del Taco, but Del Taco got bought for $150 million. They have 500 locations.

They just kind of like throw off cash. That's like worth one-tenth of what Bonk is worth. right? And so it's like, would you rather own balk or 500 locations of like a restaurant, right? And so I think people are kind of understanding that the valuations are still just cannot be validated. And the other problem is a lot of these chains, it's they don't know how to make money outside of, you know, selling their own token, some staking mechanisms. And then what ends up happening is they have to issue more. And if they don't have the correct mechanisms and, place. And the tough part is a lot of what happened in the early days is that they would do pretty good deals with these market makers and they would basically share in the upside of the arbitrage of the tokens across all these markets. And that's why they wanted to get listed on a lot of these centralized exchanges because that's where they could profit the most was off the trading activity. What's kind of happened is that the margin there have gotten squeezed and they're

not actually making any money off of the market making. So there's really no profit center for these foundations at all. And so the foundations have kind of just bled these things dry. And so you're just going to start to see some fail. Some will survive, you know, if they're kind of thinking a little bit differently about revenue, but a lot of these will die. And so we always kind of said, you know, the majority of the tokens that you see today will not exist in the future, but there will be many more tokens in the future than exist

today. And that's, you know, go look at the way back machine of coin market cap back in 2016 and the top 100 coins versus what's there today, and you probably have a 6% retention rate, right? And you'll see that again and again and again, you know, obviously if Bitcoin continues to exist, the rest of the market will continue to exist, but just in different ways. But yes, I wouldn't be married to your, to your bags for life. I mean, I'll go further. I mean, you mentioned Del Taco.

I think that's a great example. FTT token, FTX token, is still. worth double del taco. Explain that. Please. Explain how it has a value that goes beyond zero. I have never heard one, but yet it trades four million bucks a day. It has a market cap of $257 million. And effectively, it has less value than trading baseball cards. In fact, a lot less than baseball cards because people collect baseball cards. It's just, you know, their means, right? And it's people, at some point, the music stops. I, I, actually my personal belief what will happen this will drive people nuts is that if you know

congressman davidson yesterday talked about the accredited investor act if they're an accredited investor rule if somehow congress could get their shift together to understand that if you got rid of the accredited investor rule and told the SEC to get rid of all the plumbing around it that would eliminate which would be which would be really good for a lot of reasons right because the and credit investor role really enforces wealth inequality. It allows firms to be able to package for retail to sell private companies at like 25% markups. I mean, just absolutely ridiculous shit that hopefully will happen. But if you got rid of that, then being called securities would all of a sudden not be a death sentence. In fact, the rules would be easy for tokens. And it would be

and it would just require disclosures, et cetera. And if you put everything, all assets on level playing fields, I think you would see some really interesting changes. I think some crypto assets would be worth a lot more and some will be worth nothing. And that kind of value discernment is what's going to matter in the end. At least that's my belief. I mean, we'll see what happens. But that seems like a lot of what you were just saying, right?

Can you guys hear me? Because I couldn't hear you. Yeah, I hear you. I thought they'd respond. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, I couldn't even tell who was talking because I can't see it. Everyone looks like listeners to me, so I think it may have been Joe, but I'm not sure. I see David up here as a listener.

Hey, guys, sorry, I got a phone call. Dave. Joe is Joe Taco, yeah. Yeah, I thought it was Joe because I thought I recognized his voice, but you look like a listener, so I couldn't see. All good. Sorry, what was your question, Dave? The question is that if you put tokens and securities on a level playing field, that it would be incredibly powerfully good for a small subset of tokens and absolutely god awful for the majority of tokens yeah and we're

kind of seeing it happen in a non-fluid way with the with the treasury companies right like all of the top um the top tokens have some sort of treasury strategy right and they're accessing capital markets in a way that other tokens are not and and the retail bid has completely moved there and then into things like prediction markets, right? And it's moved away from, you know, the number 400th, like layer one that's out there and the tokens on top of that. Obviously, you'll, I think you'll have meme coins that continue to exist in interesting ways. But yes, if you broke down that barrier, you're breaking down the function that's kind of already happening in a, not overt, but just in a backwards way by launching on the NASDAQ, right? And you're seeing these companies launch. And

some of these things have held their value pretty good through all of this, right? Even compared to the tokens, like, you know, even look at DefCorp with Solana and what they're doing with staking and, you know, so you're seeing some things there, but then you're also seeing things like NACA just get absolutely obliterated because, you know, they're getting punished for the strategy, right, and trying to kind of say, we're going to have these things in every single country and that's the strategy. It seems like the market's not rewarding them and the rewarding people that are going deeper into a singular focus like staking and, you know, fundraising and potentially launching companies on these chains that make sense.

But yeah, I just don't think, I think it would be amazing to have it knocked down and then these markets coming together. But I, you know, like you guys said, the regulatory area, it's so gray and odd right now with this administration where it's like the U.S. is probably the place where you would want to launch a token just because there's no it's like it's just free game right now but it also does kind of create this world where it's like you're not you're you're kind of unsure about the future because you just don't know how long it's going to be free game and is another administration going to come in and crack down in other ways around tokens but

obviously not bitcoin with the ETFs so I just think it's a you know people have made a lot of money even we're talking about coin base coin base is still up what on the one year 100 percent. They're 50 percent, right? So people still did pretty good, probably 100 percent off the lows in April. And people are just taking, they're taking profits and they're unsure. The one thing Dave, you probably know better than me is, you know, just like rates coming down and the amount of money that's in these money markets. Like, I feel like people at some point should be betting $7.5 trillion. Yeah, it's $7.5 trillion. Yeah, it feels like that's a lot of money on the sidelines still that needs to come in that's not being accounted for.

Well, it's not, I think people on both sides of this, the truth is when rates come down, some marginal people will say, I'm not getting enough interest I need to go out on the risk term. It's really a question of this risk. Right now, you can get paid. And Michael Jones is the famous for years. If you can get paid 5%, people will take 5%.

You'll get 4%. A few less people will take 4%. And you're getting 3%, a lot more less. people will take it. It goes to 2% all of a sudden, probably virtually nobody wants to take it and they go out on the risk curve. So it's really that.

I mean, you'll see. They've as much cleaner hands now. Can you hear it. No, no, that was the air conditioning guy vacuuming the block. My image was that you were washing your hands and had your phone like up against your shoulder. So Gary,

you and Scott understand that in Florida, when your air conditioner, when the condensation line gets blocked, your air conditioner turns off so you don't get flooded. It is a very big deal here. And so you need to watch that because people do not want to have no air conditioning. The wet drive acts he was going with, yeah. Bro, it happens three, four times a year. I paid $200, $300. So we're down to you and get this clear. Today is the day. We actually haven't had this happen for three years. It's been clean. So maybe I'm taking, maybe I'm doing a better job with my

filters, but also I'm in a building. I don't have a palatial estate like you do, Gary, so we don't worry about that. And I'm sorry, I apologize for letting the conversation straight to NACA because I know that triggers it. Yeah, we NACA talk about that. But whatever. Anyway, any other final things that people want to talk about today? We're getting, we're coming up to time. I think we covered it.

I mean, I think triggering Gary on Naka is a good way to end the show for today. Hey, hey, no, seriously, they all that. Hey, before we close, though, Scott, or anyone on the audience, if you're NACA or even Metaplanet, what are you doing right now? Like, if you're running the company, what would you be doing and what is the exit for this? Launch a meme coin, I guess. I really don't know. Now, Scottie, come on. Gary, we're going to talk about this a lot more tomorrow, but I mean, you really got me thinking about it the other day in a way that I wasn't, which is that if you're out of money you're just they're stuck there's nothing to do they could it's just management change it's

like let David go back and do what he does really well which is put on really awesome conferences and use that brand to to grow what's happening and then break David won't David won't like that happen too big of a crush for David but that's what makes companies move forward right swallowing yeah exactly I was going to say this and bringing someone that's so connected that they could just inject shit tons of cash and buy Bitcoin and then it'll recover should I hire Bow Hines well here's here's the deal you know David already has the connections he doesn't need someone with connections he needs someone who actually knows how to operate and understands capital markets and understands what he's trying to do that's what he needs

correct and you know I look I've been very critical of things they've done you know I but turning around a company and you know I have friends who have done this professional right you know I've done this in multiple examples and the one thing you know if you're trying to turn her company around is it's you really need to have a deep dive you need to understand what are and you have to be honest with with yourself and your board of directors you need to know what are the fundraising opportunities what is the edge that you have what have you done that's right what have you done that's worked and it's a very complicated question that we I

personally don't have the information what I will say is it what it starts with is if you're the CEO, if you're going to be publicly making proclamations about it, you better damn well be right. And you need to understand that investors don't want to hear pom-poms and cheerleading. They want to see actual stuff. It's a reason why some companies, we always say, are very PR-oriented, but the ones that are PR-oriented, they still try to get, even though they're not worth the paper they're printed on, you know, LOIs or letters of, you know, indication or MOUs memorandums of understanding and they still try to get these things done so they can say something but if you're in the habit of constantly telling people what you're working on

in vague terms as a CEO the market thinks that you're drowning and nobody wants to be the one to throw the life to throw the life preserver to you and that's clearly where they're at now that doesn't mean that that all hope is lost because it isn't right you know someone's going to buy them below you know from below NAV for sure because they have real assets but But we don't even know how much of their assets, you know, how much of their credit lines have been exhausted, what they've done, what the rates are, how they could use it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot there, right? And, you know, Gary, you're a major shareholder. I don't know if you've gotten good information.

But to understand how a turnaround situation goes, it requires actual analysis and not, you know, I'm not going to be the one to pontificate because without the analysis, I wouldn't make that statement. But you need an operator. that people in crypto are so overwhelmingly focused on connections and media cloud that that's not that's not what actually works it helps don't get me wrong but it's not it's not sufficient okay that's my rant for the day i've had i've had a few of them already i'm just gonna have yeah go ahead joe yeah i mean it's it's not that it like if you if you talk to any ceo or that things aren't working you know in this case it It shouldn't be an ego hit. Like, it's not even like, he didn't invent the idea of Bitcoin treasuries, right? So it's not like that's a hill to die on, right? Like, there's other companies that are doing this and have done it before. So he's kind of hopping on another, you know, strategy.

And, you know, he's good at other things. If you're good at other things, that's great too. It's not a knock on, like, your ability to not do something. So you probably can do those things a lot better than other people can do those things. It's just this thing and this market. Hey, it was your first shot. Joe, you're come back around and do something else. You're far too rational.

Oh, man. It's just so easy in my mind to say things by not, you know, knowing that it's about you, that like when other people can't see that, it's just so blatantly obvious that, like, it's okay to say that you're, not that even you were wrong. It's just I can't do this right now. You might even be able to do it in the future. And, hey, you learned a lot, but maybe it's time to let someone else come in. They have no ATM, correct?

Like, Gary, is it true that there's no way for them to buy more Bitcoin right now? Is that accurate? Well, dude, they bought the Bitcoin. They've got 5,780 or so Bitcoin, and they've raised $750.50. They have $2.50 of debt. Like, I think they spent the money. But the question is, right, one shot, and they bought $15, or maybe they, I don't know how they acquired the 15% of meta, and then meta goes down. Well, the question is.

Wasn't there other companies, too, Gary? Weren't they like... Yeah, I know that they've done other investments. No, they have... I think $30 million with Roundtable, which I haven't dug into it, but like I have done a lot of content with those guys and stuff. There's other investments, but I just don't know how much dry powder. Yeah, see, that's the other thing.

Part of it's a media company. So it's just, you know, I think it's a... Look, I certainly needs a different management company. I think actually the solution is somebody just picks it up for 90 cents on the Bitcoin valuation and go and let's get this thing corrected and does the same thing with meta. Consolidate them. I think there's a good play for strategy because it's hard to get into Japan, dude. I don't think, sorry, I don't think strategy can launch in Japan quite easily. I just wonder if strategy could directly buy meta.

I mean, the signal would be wrong, but they could directly buy meta planet as well, right, without having to go. through the nonsense of doing NACA to get it. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, exactly. I'm just saying the NACO owns 15% of meta. And it's not a big bite, did? Like, these are not There's a rounding yours for Sailor with

Oh, my God. But you'd have to buy it at a discount. Because he's buying the market. Well, he is the market. But he'd have to buy it. And hell, I'd be, I would sell my shares right now at, you know, 85, 90 cents on the dollar.

sailor, deal with it. Yeah, good times. I'm wondering when we're going to see if, when we'll see a bounce back in the treasury market in general, but I'm not sure there's a need for it. That's the thing. Well, it depends on the treasury for what, right?

You know, like what's, what's the edge? Obviously, far coin. Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you don't know the edge for a far coin treasury, I'm not telling you, man. Yeah, well, sorry. I'm just not with it enough to understand. I don't get the joke. Anyway, we will see what happens tomorrow, right? Good show. We'll run it back tomorrow. See you guys then. Thank you, everyone. That was awesome.

Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.