The Wolf Of All Streets - FOMC Tomorrow, Will BTC DUMP? | Solana Pump Analysis | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

I'm a co-host of the space, which means that Scott, you're not making it. I literally just messaged them to co-host Rand. So he doesn't say anything about not being co-hosted. And there you are. Good. See, but that, that means, that means, that means that you're not getting co-hosted because Mario, Mario's team always co-hosts Mario. That's fine. I think we get more eyeballs with him. Your thumbnail today was awesome, by the way.

Which one? I don't know. The one where you Your thumbnail today was awesome, by the way. Which one? I don't know. The one where you look like you're in the Matrix or something. Oh, thank you, sir. Like you have a green angled chart and it looks like you're holding. It was really cool. Yeah. Thanks.

Made me look. It made me look. Thank you, sir. That's very cool. I think I did a good show today. Altcoins to erupt. Even I did a show that had an altcoin title. So, you know, I must agree.

Every one of my titles is Bitcoin cool today. Bitcoin cool tomorrow. Bitcoin cool yesterday. Those are my titles. Your thumbnail game is getting better. I mean, I know you've been very, you've been very, what's the word? Conservative in the past. Reluctant.

Yes. It's getting better, bro. It's getting better but you're starting to play the youtube game a little a little your mouth is opening a lot more you know like you know mouth is still closed permanently nobody wants to see me with my mouth open man literally nobody anywhere ever where's mario so you're gonna join us today, you think? Maybe? Brace us with his presence. He said he would. Seems like Solana is kind of the topic right now again, right?

I mean, a little price action. Remember I said yesterday that it's not the price action, it's that there's a Jupiter airdrop tomorrow, and that Jupiter airdrop is going to bring huge liquidity into Solana. And I think everyone's trading the airdrop narrative, which is this whole Jupiter airdrop narrative.

Maybe I will wait until we get more people, but I would love you to break that down for me because literally I have only a very superficial understanding, but basically no idea how that works or what's happening there. So Jupiter is the, Jupiter is like the biggest techs aggregator on Solana. And what they've done is they, you know, they, they, they for all the users that use the platform, they're doing an airdrop and it's a massive airdrop. It's like, I mean,

we don't know exactly what the number's going to be because it's all dependent on um on what the on what the price opens up but all indications are this thing's going to open at a seven or eight billion dollar market cap fully can you can you explain when you say someone's trading the airdrop narrative i've never done that and i feel like i'm one of the minority now what i don't understand though is how could this strategy work shouldn't the market be efficient enough that it's always priced in so if you have ten thousand dollars worth of solana there's an airdrop worth of a thousand dollars then then the solana will go up ten percent then the benefit is no longer there how does that whole strategy of an airdrop narrative still work?

Will you hold a token to get an airdrop and then you sell it? Let me make it simple for you. So right now there is, if you look at the entire Solana ecosystem, right? The entire Solana ecosystem is valued at a number. I don't know what the number is, but that's what the number is. Tomorrow, they're going to airdrop, and I don't know what the number is, but call it they're going to airdrop $800 million or $500 million or $200 million on the Solana ecosystem, right? So now all of a sudden, what you've got is you've got money that didn't exist before.

Everyone who's on the chain now gets automatically richer. So then the question is, what are you going to do with your money? And what people generally do is they end up buying either Sol, some of them sell their Jupiter because they think it's too high, and then they buy, they end up buying Solana, or they end up buying other Solana projects. And so generally,

we saw this with Blur, we saw this with Pist, we saw this with, I've got all the airdrops listed, but you, so, yeah, this with PIST. We saw this with... I've got all the airdrops listed. Every time that these airdrops happen, we get a pump primarily in the underlying ecosystem, but generally we also get a market pump

when there's airdrops, when there's such big airdrops. I thought we were in crypto because money printing was bad. No jerome as jerome powell said as jerome powell said uh uh crypto not jerome powell it's just brad sherman that said uh crypto bros print money whenever they want and uh you know we also print money whenever we want cobra coin mongoose coin yeah uh brad br Sherman. But I mean, this is just money being created out of thin air with nothing behind it, right? I mean, this is not money being created with nothing valid. We're bringing a new exchange

onto the ecosystem. And the exchange is actually creating value for its users because... Yeah, it's money it's money it's money backed by an actual product with utilities that's not like literally money printing it's actually just adding value to the ecosystem if again i'm not the guy that trades airdrop you know narratives and i'm not how to do it scott but i'm saying the concept itself it's not just coming out of nowhere it's not like a meme coin that's being airdropped there's something with utility behind it it's a product with utility those tokens have value well they should yeah exactly exactly so it's almost like it's almost like you can think about it about like an economy and in the economy you don't have a certain um

industry or a certain company and then you add a new company to the economy and it starts to add incremental value to the economy yeah but usually those companies don't uh randomly distribute shares in their company to the general public for fun yeah but if they're doing it it's not for fun it's building a community but if they doing it would you say it's printing money out of thin air or do you say it's not it's actually distributing value i'm going to use it distributing my point. The value was all owned by the devs and the DAO. And now tomorrow with the airdrop, what they're saying is the value is not going to get distributed to its users. So it's just a distribution of value.

That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. They're decentralized. Think about Scott, the liquidity infusion that happened when Uniswap did their drop. I mean, it's going to trickle down across everything. I'm still holding that one oh yeah still holding my 1200 dollars from that one before scott digs into the agenda like one

question i had can you give us a quick overview on solana in general i remember that it was dominating the narrative just a few weeks ago still killing it still killing it uh highest highest DEX volume in the industry, Solana DEXs, Eclipse, Ethereum DEXs. Solana also, so let's look at a couple of metrics. Solana DEX volume, Eclipse's Ethereum DEX volume. Great, great metric to look at. The next metric to look at is that USDC trading volume on Solana bigger than USDC trading volume on any other chain. So why is this happening? Because Solana is one year with no downtime. So it's a critic saying, oh, but downtime, downtime, downtime.

One year with no downtime. Then two is that it's cheap and it's fast. So if you want to trade stable coins, you want to trade on a reliable network that's cheap and fast, Solana is your number one choice. It used to be Tron, but it seems like Solana is now overtaking Tron.

And the third thing, and probably the most important thing is that, so no, the fourth thing. So the third thing is that you also have deepened projects. All the major deepened projects, which is the decentralized physical infrastructure projects, which is like when you take physical infrastructure and you create a decentralized version on it, exactly like, for example, Helium, which is a decentralized virtual mobile phone network. So they're all being built on Solana because of the speed and transaction costs.

And then the last point, which for me is the most exciting point, is that when people trade meme coins on Ethereum, the problem with trading a meme coin on Ethereum is that the gas fees are so high that you can't actually trade in and out of meme coins like a trader. Because if you want to buy $100 of a meme coin on ethereum is that the gas fees are so high that you can't actually trade in and out of meme coins like a trader because you're not if you want to buy a hundred dollars of a meme coin but you're paying 28 in gas to trade that meme coin and 28 in gas to get out of that meme coin you can't get out and so what solana has created because of their low fees is that you're getting these actual meme coin intraday jobbers and traders, high-frequency traders on meme coins. And with this whole meme coin explosion,

you've now got them all trading on Solana. So they've created a new industry of jobbing meme coins, of trading meme coins. And the UI, if you look at the wallets, I mean, look at Phantom

and how easy it is to swap in and out. There's very little slippage. I mean, it's really revolutionary. Hey, Ren, Mario, we have... Go ahead, Ren. Phantom, by the way, is the most downloaded crypto app. It's actually Eclipse Coinbase. That's wild.

Yeah. We have Pavel here. Literally literally he and i just happen to be talking and you guys mentioned you wanted to talk about solana and he's launching mix mob on solana but very deep in the ecosystem so he can probably also speak to why you know given the oh and you had blue's elf first obviously which was not on solana so you if you had a choice here with ecosystems so probably the person who actually made that decision is the best one to speak to this. I've just brought up

Pavel. Pavel, are you there? Hey, hey. Yeah, GM, GM, everybody. I see a lot of familiar faces. Yeah, we've got... You see Pavel and Sonny here. We've got two Solana and we're going to dig into the FOMC and Bitcoin. Gunny, you got up here, man. I messaged you. Awesome.

I thought a little late. Thanks. Pavel, the mic is yours. Yeah, I mean, I approach it on the product side. So for Mixmob, obviously we're a game built on Solana, backed by Solana. But why Solana,

Pavel? Why Solana? When did you make that decision and how is that decision turning out? Why is Solana the blockchain? Why Solana? And when did you make that decision? And how's that decision turning out? Why is Solana the blockchain of choice? So the team, Simon and the other co-founders in June 2021, they were checking all the stuff. These guys worked on Halo, Battlefield, all these things. And they're like, the only system out there that gives the consumer experience,

the usability and the speed that a gamer is going to want and is used to is solana uh he's they're like there's nothing else even close to do the stuff and even to now uh even the things that we're doing on the nfts like you know you can remix them do this stuff the cost is low that you can get creative um we were able to run an entire incentivized test net with a token live on chain and because of the soul bound it could stay within the system and run like a real token we were able to test a lot of token economics out so you're saying but but but essentially is it the speed path without digging into too much details the speed seems to be the main benefit and uh but were you worried about that choice in the middle of the flood about a year and a half ago oh all our investors were just like hey you got to get off what are you

guys going to do um and we're like for us the challenge was building a game is just really hard so you got to balance the game play we're like to start thinking of other chains right now and the game's not even balanced is double risk on so let's just get the game balanced stay on the same chain if it works on that chain and it's still not going we can we can then go and switch to another chain but we focus just on that but even realistically throughout the year simon would i mean he was on we did a call with raj and we're telling him he was like and i asked him i was like what about arbor trump he's like not fast enough matic not fast enough he goes this honestly he goes it's only solana and um just the usability of phantom what ren was saying was it's just so fluid what you can do on usability and cost issue

and speed um and they end up working that bet end up paying off um i don't know if you saw i don't know if you guys mario i don't know if you saw the new game on solana which is called g. I don't know if you saw, I don't know if you guys, Mario, I don't know if you saw the new game on Solana, which is called GG. I don't know if you've seen it. I think it's like one of the coolest things

that I've ever seen. And when I say coolest things that I've ever seen, I don't actually only mean on Encryptor. So how the game works is you've got to think of it almost like a Pokemon game, which is an augmented reality game where you can basically walk around your streets with your phone and collect what they call G-boxes, right?

So that in itself is pretty much like you can say very much like Pokemon. The twist that they've got is that if I'm playing and you're playing and Scott's playing, then users can bet on which one of us is going to win. So it's like playing Pokemon, but actually having like a betting market on who the users are going to be. So they've launched that now. The domain is gg.zip. And I mean, this is actually one of the coolest things that i've seen not even you know even remove the crypto element of it and forget about the fact that you're probably collecting i haven't done too much research but i think you're probably collecting nfts or whatever you're collecting

um but the fact that you can now bet on who's going to collect boxes, who's going to win, et cetera, et cetera, I think that that's game-changing. That's going to be – imagine like you could – you're literally betting on your mates collecting GG boxes in there or G boxes in the area. Have you looked at L2 alternatives to Solana? Obviously, you mentioned a few, Pavel, including Matic. But have you, Ryan, Donnie, Pa Pavel looked at L2s as well?

One interesting one to consider is the Psy chain. It is supposed to be twice as fast as Solana, and I think it's considered an L1. So it is an L1. It's a Cosmos. It's built with the Cosmos software developer kit. Stay is part of it. It's built using the Cosmos SDK.

It is probably as fast or maybe a little bit faster than Solana. So I think they have a 0.340 millisecond time to finality or time per transaction. Also, the difference between Say and Solana is Say allows for gaps that are built in EVM, in other words, Ethereum virtual machine to actually be you can transport your code

theoretically with very little effort and move from Ethereum to say. So from that point of view, I said it say is you know, when you want to talk about Ethereum killers, I think Solana is a different language and it's a different skill set. But if

Dapp wants to port from Ethereum to another chain, Say is probably the easiest chain for them to port to. The downside with Say, and I don't see as much of a downside, is in order to achieve their speed, they have less validators. So theoretically, it's slightly less decentralized,

right? but you know like for me i don't think we need i think this descent this whole decentralization thing is very much an obsession um and once you get to a certain point of decentralization i think that you know like unless you're dealing with like crazy crazy crazy shit like maybe bitcoin type store of value type stuff i don't think you always need like to be so decentralized that you know like it just so i think their pros and cons full disclosure i'm an investor i'm an investor in in say i think it's an amazing amazing chain i think one of their founders is an ex-robin hood uh, and they're all about speed. So that's the... Is it ex-Robinhood or ex-NASDAQ?

One of the two, I don't remember. Pablo? Yeah, one thing, I mean, you can go to the technical speed might be just like differences between everything. I think the one thing that what grabs us and people forget is Solana actually has a really cool culture and community. I saw it in Breakpoint in Lisbon and you saw it all through 2023.

It was basically, it was a team, the basketball team that says they don't believe in us spirit. And if you go to these events, you can tell like in Ethereum, EVM crowd is like Silicon Valley, you know, vests, stuff like that. Solana is like Los Angeles. Subcultures, they're into entertainment, what they wear, how they dress. It's just more of a vibe. And if you're going to do entertainment products like music, gaming, these type of things, I think Solana is the brand that also cuts across. So it's not just on the technical aspect, it's on that.

And I think if you're aiming at, you know, year olds and up that are coming up that's going to be the place that they probably gravitate towards that attracts them to do build products on it's like the apple thing like hey that's the cooler one to go to between all these technologies so that's the part that a lot of people miss on the technical side i agree with you pavel i think that that's the part that a lot of people miss. On the technical side, I agree with you, Pavel. I think that that's really well said, but a lot of people do choose to build on Solana also for the technical side and not just for the cool factor of gunny. You're literally lifting your mic because you know what I'm talking about too. That was my segue. Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you, Scott. And thanks for having me. You may go. You may go. Thank you. Yeah. You know, we've been building on Solana. We've been building Hero Network on Solana since early, early 2021. derivatives trading background and wanting to build derivatives trading infrastructure,

you know, kind of how do we rebuild the guts, the infrastructure of something like the CME or ICE on-chain. You know, pre-Solana, there was really no blockchain that you could do it on. And once Solana came online, once we saw Serum built and saw that you can do it on and uh once solana came online once we saw serum uh built and saw that you could run an on-chain order book uh that was actually usable even in the early days of of solana uh it it was pretty groundbreaking and you know it's interesting like if you kind of look back to the beginning days of Solana and even like the Solana pitch deck, Anatoly, you know, his pitch was NASDAQ settling at the speed of light, which was really referencing Solana's ability to provide low cost, high throughput solution that could, you know, that could ultimately be a blockchain that you could build upon to compete with, you know, that could ultimately be a blockchain that you could build upon to compete with,

you know, some of the larger incumbents, you know, over the long term. And obviously the size and scope of the derivatives market, you know, $600 plus trillion is a prime candidate for disruption. And, you know, our team, along with some of the largest proprietary trading firms on the planet, who invested into, you know, became part of the Hero Network community and provided engineering engineers to our project. we were able to build what we built and now this infrastructure is live in market and there are several applications building on top of it all sharing liquidity and again these are things that are truly only possible on Solana I too went through a similar thing through the whole FTX and the knock on effects that Solana received from that during the last year and a half prior to the turnaround of everything.

And it was not easy. Most investors, most VCs, most people in the community turned their back on it. And I think we were one of the few teams that were left that just were saying, look, at the end of the day, you guys could call me, you could say whatever you want, you can say what you think you need from your ivory tower. But, but ultimately, we came to build this infrastructure. And it truly is only possible and doable on Solana. And that case still holds true. I do think one thing that maybe Rand, you spoke about it yet or not, there is a new validator client that is coming online somewhat imminently called FireDancer that was built by the,

it was kind of brainchilded by the person who, kind of the chief, I think they call him the chief science officer or something at Jump Trading, the guy who really built their ultra high speed trading network. And that is that validated client fire dancer is going to be improving the throughput of Solana, which, you know, right now runs in the thousands. They, they, you know, the claims are, are 50,000 has capacity for that. And it hasn't been tested to that level, but, but I know fire dancers running on the order of, well into the hundreds of thousands,

which is greatly going to increase the capabilities for the amount of transactions that are put through, you know, in 400 millisecond slots. And I think, again, it's going to be another step up. It is truly, you know, while Pavel was talking about, it's a very cultural community at the consumer layer. I would say that it is a very, very, when you get into the inner workings of it, it's a very developer-rich community.

And I think that is a lot of what got it through. It's, you know, it's kind of rough period. And now I think we're really gonna see it yeah i'm going again the comments comment speak for themselves i'm going through the comments solana has a hell of a community we never get comments like this whenever we're talking about a theory of any other protocol so uh you know it kind of supports your point there um but scott um yeah i'll let you kick it off with the agenda we've got a pretty sick panel um so the mic is yours man you're muted scott i muted you because i forgot your call you're not a cause kick it off with you, Jenna. We've got a pretty sick panel. So the mic is yours, man.

You're muted Scott. I muted you because I forgot you're not a co-host. You got to unmute Scott. You got to press the button. Thank you. You have to unmute me so that I can unmute. See, you get to put it. Like I was pushing the button repeatedly. Smash. I was smashing the mic button, which is like smashing the like button on YouTube for anyone who's wondering, I don't know if you ever smashed a mic button, but I was doing that. Yeah, I mean, obviously, the original topic before we got the Solana guys coming on was that we were going to talk about FOMC tomorrow. What's happening with Bitcoin price action?

Obviously, I think we've seen a pretty nice recovery here in Bitcoin. It's trading now. I'm trying to open my screen screen but trading uh back above 43 000 actually 43 600 right now wow so pushing towards 44 000 uh already um and you know solana was kind of that became the topic because off the lows for solana it's up almost 30 percent you know in about a week so it looks like the market market generally has shrugged off the GBTC selling, which is seemingly flowing. And I had James Seifert on actually this morning, on my show to talk about the ETF specifically. And he said that we saw massive inflows versus

outflows yesterday for the first time since basically the first week. I think now BlackRock ETF sitting at $2.4 billion, which is an astounding market cap in a couple of weeks. Fidelity now far behind at $2.22. And each of those did over $200 million in net inflows yesterday. So really just getting started here. I guess if we're talking just for the really quick ETF update, you guys probably noticed that yesterday, Google Ads policy finally changed. We saw that happening in the lead up to the ETF approvals, they were going to allow this marketing and immediately Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, VanEck, notably are all over the top of Google Ads for anything Bitcoin related marketing these ETFs. And we know that that's just going to massively increase with time, especially as these platforms

actually allow people to buy them, which isn't happening as of yet. So I think a lot of tailwinds right now still even after this dip, in my opinion, I think the charts look good, market looks good. And I'll probably be wrong. That's usually what happens when you get humbled. But Bitcoin trading right here almost at 44,000 when it was down in the mid 38s, I think really, really nice bounce giving the market confidence and probably leading to those inflows. The idea that the best marketing campaign for Bitcoin is higher prices. So I think once we saw the price start to bounce, I think we really start to

get more implos and more interest in the space. I mean, that's sort of my top line take. Oh, and then there's one more news story, obviously, that the fee war is still happening with ETS Invesco Galaxy just filed with the SEC to reduce theirs to 0.25. I think they were at 0.39. So you're still seeing these companies race to the bottom. No chance of being profitable on these, by the way. Racing to the bottom on these fees just to attract some of this AUM that's inevitably coming in. Does that cover it, Mario? What else you got? Hey, man.

You know I'm the one that's been off the grid for two days, but we've got a pretty sick panel. Travis, we'd love your thoughts. Michael, Mike, Dave, we'd love you to jump in on this one um i mean all the solana conversation is super interesting um you know pretty incredible that that project and ecosystem was able to come back from you know i think like the the sam bankman freed overhang that's you know that's a good thing um and it seems like the you know that that competition of what solana is going to do versus ethereum is probably going to be one of the kind of headline situations for you know the coming bull mark over the next you know two years or so um and then kind of what some of these other...

But do you think, Trevor, do you think we'll have different blockchains for different use cases or do you think we'll all congregate to one blockchain with different layer twos and multiple use cases? So we'll all congregate similar to TCP IP? I don't know. I don't think...

It doesn't strike me that this cycle is going to be the cycle that we get like that much of an answer to that, because I don't think this cycle strikes me as a cycle that we're going to have a step change in use cases or use cases that drive a step change in mass adoption. Like, I just don't, I don't see things on the immediate horizon that are going to like, just lead to a, a, a, a big influx in, in users for actual use cases for people using crypto. Um, you know, and if people feel differently about that, um, you know, curious to hear that, that, that opinion, but, you know, crypto gaming, like it's probably going to do something this cycle, but, you know, I don't think it's going to be like a step change in user adoption. You know, NFTs, I think are still floundering. They're the general form that they take right now doesn't strike me as sufficient to gain

mass adoption, you know and like just defy primitives not that interesting to people um no deep i would say deep in uh is probably the general vertical that i think can actually show real user can you just briefly can you briefly briefly explain for the audience what you mean by what deep in is yeah decentralized physical infrastructure networks which is just kind of a catch-all term for you know using a token economy to incentivize real world behavior or activities of some sort and people think of of Helium, which was mentioned previously. Helium is kind of the poster child for this, which Helium is objectively one of the most successful crypto projects ever.

It is, you know, they shipped like, you know, I don't know, 1.3 million pieces of hardware, these hardware units. And then these hardware units are now being used to create a 5G mesh network. And late last year, Helium partnered with T-Mobile. And now you can get a $20 a month 5G Wi-Fi plan through T-Mobile powered by Helium. And crypto just has, this is an incredibly short list that crypto has of projects that are like actually delivering on like a real world value proposition, like a $20 a month 5G Wi-Fi program. And so, you know, there's other ones like Render, for example. Render is another one that people talk about. This is, you know, decentralized GPU compute you can use to, you know, like render, literally. And there's some other ones.

There's this thing called Hive Mapper. There's like this, you know, GPS mapping, decentralized, you know, incentivizing people with tokens to, you know put a gps mapper piece of hardware thing in their car and drive around you get tokens for mapping and this sort of deal so people are like trying trying these things out and you know render and helium in particular you show some real user adoption statistics that are rare to find in crypto. And that has people rightfully excited. And it's easy for me to imagine those statistics being, you know, one of the real bright spots in this coming cycle. You know, and I think just to be balanced in the pitch here, my assessment of the token structures of these things is that it is not clear to me that they accrue value in a sustainable way.

And they remind me kind of a lot of Axie Infinity for people that were paying attention to Axie Infinity last cycle. And Axie Infinity had a token structure that was not sustainable. It was a token structure that led to, kind of facilitated a big bubble being created. And then the bubble bursts. And then, you know, you have this massive crash and the whole kind of token economy stops working. It strikes me that these tokens for these deep end projects are probably structured the same way. Would love to hear arguments, you know, against that view. You know, but I think in the short term, you know, they're probably set up to really outperform and to pump. And it would be my base case that a basket of deep end names would outperform the market broadly over the course

of this year. You know, and then sort of these chickens coming home to roost about these these token structures maybe not working that well you know that's going to be a problem for a later day basically yeah michael i see you jumping in i want to go to claudia afterwards yeah first of all uh axi has had a big comeback and uh i was wanting to mention also in terms of like alternatives to solana for gaming uh ronan which is the same uh sky mavis developer team um many of them are based here in puerto rico with me um has been on fire they uh they gained like a million users for their evm you know gaming chain i mean i'm seeing all sorts of developers wanting to develop on it now so i think that there isn't one blockchain sort of

super cycle. I think it's several super cycles that are going up and down independently that then add to sort of like a linear increase. I believe the last number I heard was we've now passed a half a billion users. That's pretty close to like, we will get to a billion by the end of 25. And that's no longer a niche market. I would just like to say there's there's no way I believe 500 million users. There's absolutely no way I believe that. But, you know. I think they count anybody who's got a token of anything.

I mean, it's got a Satoshi of anything, but I've seen those. No, no. I mean, they're they're probably doing something with wallet creations and then using some heuristics that are probably badly off because there's an insane power law distribution of wallets relative to actual users. Okay. I guess we'll just have to see who has real metrics on that. Obviously, there's wallets as well as that. But, I mean, other than power users, I think many people only have one wallet for each currency. At any rate, if we're going to pivot to the Fed, I think that it's very important that it looks like we're going to end up in the green for the month since we're over 42, 250.

And we'll probably stay over 43 for the day. So that's five green months in a row. And so traders, you know, like those things. And we're going into the halving. And I think that the fact that GBTC, as we've all mentioned, is seeming to like you get past the dump and the and the SBF bankruptcy dump. I think we're you know, I think we're being overly pessimistic about, you know, where it's going to go in the next month or two. And I still think we're going to be at least 45 at the halving. Yeah, Michael, as you mentioned, we have FOMC tomorrow. We happen to have Claudia with us, who's a former Fed economist.

So probably nobody better to speak to what we might see from the Fed and what's happening with the economy than her. And, of course, Mike McGlone here as well. So I do want to shift a bit to the macro and talk about FOMC tomorrow. Claudia, what are you expecting? Great. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on. Sorry to pivot you all to something a little more boring of the Fed. So one thing I would warn everybody tomorrow, and this goes for me too, be very careful of your confirmation bias. So all of the action is going to be at the press conference. The statement is going to be as boring as it ever is. So but we have to listen very carefully to Jay. And we have

to be very careful not to hear Jay saying what we want to hear. And and the Fed is renowned. I mean, I have a very good Fed speak decoder ring. But at this point, I mean, I really have to focus, too. They're always very subtle. They do not want to box themselves in. They're likely to signal pretty well that the cuts are what's up next, right? They're not hiking anymore. But it's like, duh, right? Inflation is already moving well towards the 2%. Jay said multiple times they will not wait until 2 to cut. And yet,

I mean, they're basically going to be there because they're dragging their feet. I think it's useful to think about what the Fed should do, given their mandate, given the economy. It's also very important right now to think about what they're likely to do. So when I look at the macro economy that is really in a good place and we're getting very close to their dual mandate, they should be cutting. I mean, frankly, they should be cutting tomorrow. They are not going to do that. They should be cutting in March.

I don't think they're going to do that either. My base has been May at the earliest. And there are definitely members of the FOMC that have been signaling past May. Jay is the spokesperson for the FOMC. He can only go out so far. I still think May is very reasonable. I think that's where we'll be. Markets have kind of moved away from March.

It's more like split down the middle. People that are like diehard March, I suspect they're going to be disappointed tomorrow. I agree. I agree. I agree. There's no way that they reduce rates as quickly as March. But I do think that they've got to think about the fact that they've got a $1 trillion a year debt interest debt repayment, interest repayment on $34 trillion worth of debt, which is growing exponentially. So, I mean, I think.

To me, there's been a very, I think, dangerous rhetoric out of the Fed. I hope to God Jay does not repeat it tomorrow, though I think he will, where they talk about, oh, the economy is so strong, the labor market, GDP. We have the luxury of time to wait and see that inflation really, really is 2% going to 2%. The problem is in financial markets, they do not have the luxury of time. The Fed, I mean, you're talking about the balance sheet, but the high interest rates, they went high, it was unexpected. That put a lot of pressure on various parts of the credit markets, including the banking system. They've largely held it together, but they don't

necessarily have the luxury of time there. And the next Silicon Valley bank or whatever it is that blows up, the Fed might not be able to get it under control as quickly. And then it comes back and hits the real economy. So I think they're being very short-sighted or very siloed in how they're thinking. So hopefully I hear something from Jay this little bit, like what you just said. So how does Powell tomorrow, or when he speaks tomorrow, how does he reconcile the following? You've got markets at all-time highs. Markets at all-time highs make consumers spend more because more people are in profits. You've got a GDP growth rate of 3.3%, which is much higher than

anybody expected. I think we saw that in the last GDP reading. You've also got the potential of significantly higher inflation on imported goods because of the stuff that's happening in the Suez Canal. I know you can say America's a little bit more immune than Europe to it, but it's, I mean, there is a huge cost implication to goods that are coming in and out of the States. So all those are like,

you know, under normal circumstances, you should consider keeping it, maybe even pushing interest rates higher, given the fact that there's extra inflation, the economy is clearly overheating, the markets, well, certainly the markets are overheating. How does he reconcile it? Right. So on the stock market, what's called the wealth effect, so the translation from people get more wealth, higher stocks into what they spend is extremely low. I mean, I was a lead on consumer

spending. And part of it's like the inequality piece, like rich people have a lot of money. They, I mean, they spend a lot, but that increment in their stock portfolios is not a big deal. But there's something there, but that is one, the Fed does not care about the stock market. I mean, like just, you know, knock yourselves out. Like it's as long as something doesn't like blow up, it's not a big deal. I mean, they do pay attention to it, but that's not a reason for them to hold off on cuts. The. Everything about what the Fed does this year is about inflation. So the risk, and I would expect this to be mentioned tomorrow, are the disruptions in the Middle East, particularly as they've hit into commodity markets, the shipping lines. Not only is the U.S. more insulated, the demand for goods is much less than what we had when the supply chains broke down and inflation took off and firms are not as able in the U.S. to pass on these price increases.

So I don't expect that to be a big deal. It is a risk. The longer it goes on and if it were to spread in the Middle East, then that's, yeah, that's a problem. I mean, that's a problem, right? I mean, that's a problem on a lot of dimensions. The thing is, is the Fed, I mean, GDP, this was a good thing Powell did. I was thrilled to hear him finally say this. They, the FOMC no longer says, considers, thinks that you have to have low GDP growth, like below trend GDP growth, 3% is well above trend. They no longer think you've got to have below trend GDP growth to get inflation down. So that's saying, hey,

we're okay with this. Productivity is high. There are reasons we could have growth. And yet you outline all of the risk factors. And these are things that will be mentioned. They're things that I think the Fed for history reasons, the 1970s, Arthur Burns, I think there's a lot of reasons they're going to drag their feet this year. And they're going to grab onto anything, right, to do that. But inflation, when inflation comes down, they're done. That's the dual mandate. Inflation, 2%, and unemployment, low. And they should be out of the way by then, in terms of rates being at kind of a quote-unquote neutral place.

And what about the Fed tightening of the balance sheet? Do you still think that the buybacks and all that, I mean, do you think that the Fed is still going to continue to tighten their balance sheet? I'm less of an expert on the balance sheet. And the person to listen to on the FOMC is Lori Logan. And she's given some talks about this recently. She is absolutely point on the balance sheet because she ran the desk at New York Fed. And it's very clear from what she's thinking and has talked about, and some other FOMC members have hinted at this too, they're going to ease off on quantitative tightening. That's the one that I could see happening in March. I think they're going to ease off on quantitative tightening. That's the one that I could see

happening in March. I think they're going to get the balance sheet. They want the balance sheet. They want no one to pay attention to the balance sheet. They want to do all the policy through the Fed funds rate. And I mean, they get it. The quantitative easing and quantitative tightening, if we never use those tools again, it would be amazing. They just cause all kinds of havoc. So I think they want to get out of that game as quickly as they can. I mean, they'll be slow and deliberate. The Fed doesn't do anything quickly unless it's a crisis.

And that's where I worry, too, that the biggest risk from the Fed comes on the financial side, not on the real economy. And, yeah, the balance sheet is a piece of it. But I do think they're going to start the, you know, easing up on the quantitative tightening pretty soon. And Lori, that was very much I think she was laying the groundwork for that. Peter? Yeah. One quick comment, and I i gotta run to the doctor's appointment on fed rates you look at the december 2024 soper contract secured overnight financing rate it has already built in six rate cuts of 25 basis points and so yeah we can talk about what the Fed's going to do, but the free market has already cast a vote on that.

And that's six basis points. Now, whether they do it in six different meetings or they come out with a whopper of a 50 or 75 basis point cuts, I personally think December 2024 SOFR contract is way wrong and really want to be short there because I just don't see six cuts in the next 11 months. And I got to run with that. Cool. Can I piggyback on that one? This is Mike. Yeah. The key comments from Claudia, much appreciated. Confirmation bias. That was a lesson in the commodities last year. Everybody just expected China would come back and U.S. production wouldn't. And it was failed. The confirmation bias right now in cryptos

is so extreme. And Rand touched on it. Markets are all-time highs. At this point last year, Bitcoin was cheap, GBTC was cheap at a discount, and the S&P 500 was at a 25% discount to its all-time highs. It's the exact opposite now. And as Claudia says, it's just this silliness of right now 150 basis points priced in of cuts for the next year has just changed. And that's the world that we have seen. Rates used to go down on the elevator and up on the escalator. Now it's the opposite. There's no reason to go raise hikes rapidly, yet the market's prices are so much extremism.

Now I think you have to take a look at it and be very careful. So first of all, I'll tilt over from a commodity standpoint. This is a severe deflationary recession on a global basis. Virtually all commodities are down and heading lower. You look at natural gas, it's the same price as 33 years ago. Crude oil is just catching up. Grains are dropping. Industrial metals are dropping.

The only commodity that's really going up is gold. That's a global deflationary trend. I just want to point out the key thing I noted in our morning meeting was the Chinese 10-year note yield at 2.45% is the lowest in two decades. So every morning you come in, we have to know what's going on in China. It's basically doing what I remember being working for Japanese firms 30 years ago. It's imploding.

And okay, we have to have stimulus out of there. So that's a deflationary bent on markets and potentially a wealth destruction, clearly having wealth destruction. And the major source on the planet, as we saw from data recently from economic growth in europe is basically stagnant is the u.s stock market and it's an all-time high so i look at this as just

a little bit of risk just a little speed bump this little bump in the road of this on you know this rally since the powell pivot that left the gap in the s 500 around 4600 is should be expected and and as what scott said earlier I think the key thing you need to expect from this space for RIA is your traditional investors on the who have done so well in the stock market, for them to add an asset that essentially has a three beta to the S&P 500, a two beta to NASDAQ. And I can check this on a quarterly basis, I've checked it every year going back to you can do the last two years, last years last 10 years it basically has a three beta you have to be careful they're adding a high to expect them to add a high volatile high beta acid um that's not um that's not negatively correlated is a problem

and particularly it's going to become more negatively correlated and less and have less volatility every day that people are involved so that's when we have to be careful about bitcoin the good thing about it is we've had this massive hopium rally to 50 000 it was too extreme we've had the dip to 40 000 that was pretty swift and now we're just in the range i think what's happening now is the market's waiting on the next move from the stock market it might come from the fed and what's claudia says they're not going to be there to save you there's no reason for the cut to cut rates fast yet everything they've done is fine right so inflation has collapsed and part of reasons collapsed it just went up too fast and that's what's happening commodities so the way i see this right now is um for the um expectations

for massive inflows to etf to happen you have to see what your traditional investor and money manager on the planet wants first of all all, it doesn't have earnings. So that's where gold has a problem. That's where commodities have a problem. But you have to see a lack of a high volatility, high beta performance, the S&P 500. So this is where I like to end there. You need to see the beef.

Last year, Bitcoin had a great year. So did the stock market. Now we're at record highs, as Rand says. If the stock markets can start trickling down or actually go fill that gap of 4600 and the s&p 500 e-minis and bitcoin can outperform that would be your first sign my suspicion is the risk is it does what it typically has been doing in history and that's continued to be just a high beta leading indicator for the stock market. That makes sense. Go ahead, Dave. Well, we all know I disagree. Anybody who watches Mike and Dave and myself on Monday knows. Yeah, go ahead.

A couple of things. The notion of Bitcoin as a three beta of the S&P is horseshit. The correlation in 2023 was borderline zero. So, yeah, Bitcoin's more volatile and anything that's an infant asset. And for those who haven't heard me say this, I always make the my mental construct for Bitcoin is it trades like an option on its adoption of digital gold or beyond, which, you know, Scaramucci was out this morning talking about. Well, you know, if it gets to half of digital gold, it'll be, you know, about $400,000, yada, yada, yada. I mean, at the end of the day, you're talking 10 to 20x is the asymmetric upside if Bitcoin gains adoption. So the other statistic I love to look at is the hash rate is the price divided by the hash rate. The all time high of 60, depending on how you want to measure it, let's go 65,000 was at a hash rate of around 150 terahashes. We're now at 500, so more than 3x.

So realistically, a new all-time high based on an understanding valuation of Bitcoin based on where its network is would be over $180,000 this cycle. Do I think we'll get there? I doubt it. That seems a bit extreme to me. But at the end of the day, that is divorced from many other things. Now, it is true. Why is $180,000 a bit extreme? I mean, if you think about all the previous cycles, are you saying that you're going to get less than a two and a half X from the previous high, and that would be the end of the cycle? I personally think there is a very real chance that the four-year cycle is going to die a death.

We have a grand total of three data points, which for as a quant, that is so far from statistically significant, it's insane. I think the halving cycle, I kind of equate it to one of my favorite books, although I don't really love the TV series, Foundation. I think of Satoshi as Harry Seldon predicting a monetary policy that will work. But I don't see the need for a four-year cycle of people saying, oh, it's going to go up to 180, then down to 50. It could happen. But as you get more and more towards adoption, a switch will get flipped. I don't know whether it will happen in the next year,

two years, five years, but I'm fairly willing to, and I have made the bet that over the next 10 to 20 years, yeah, I think we're going to get there. I think Bitcoin will demonetize gold. But for this show, we're talking about what's going to happen in the next 18 months. And while it wouldn't be unbelievably surprising for me to see it get to that level of exuberance, as a trader, as an investor, I tend not to want to be hyperbolic. That's all. But no, it's definitely possible, Mario. That's what I'm saying.

But anyway, the point that I was making, when Mike talks about what's going on, I tend to believe that there's a lot of merit in the notion that the stock market is irrationally high. And but the thing that Claudia said before, and I thought it was brilliantly stated, was that you have to look at who owns and where the wealth effect is coming from. Right. If it's rich people who have who don't need to sell, then the question is, what will happen to the stock market is interesting. People who have been doomers over the last year. And I'm not going to lie. And I've been fairly neutral to to bearish on the stock market through this whole rally. I just haven't been shorted. But I've been bullish on Bitcoin and crypto is for different reasons. I just think that when you look at it, it's an uncorrelated asset, but it really trades like an option. And so when you do that, when you look at it with that mental construct, you have to ask yourself the question of what's going on. And

the narrative of the ETF is so much more powerful than people are giving it credit for. You know, at the end of the day, we now have two, if not probably the two most important financial institutions that talk to retail. There's one that isn't, it now have two, if not probably the two most important financial institutions that talk to retail. There's one that isn't, which is Vanguard and whatever, but Fidelity and BlackRock now trying to orange pill the entire investing public. And the message, if you've ever read anything Fidelity's written, they get this very well. And BlackRock, Larry Fink has been telling it, is this is an uncorrelated asset that allows you to hedge against your distrust in the government. Now, if anybody believes that that narrative won't resonate, given what's going on politically, given what's going on in the

economy, I think you're trying to pick up pennies in front of a steamroller. I don't know what the right analogy is, but that is a very powerful narrative. And that is what is about to start being pumped into the brains of, you know, effectively most of the investing public. So I really do think that is a very big deal. And to underestimate that or by looking backward at correlations from 22 before, because 23, there was no correlation, is a problem. That's why I disagree. David? Yeah, I'm going to piggyback on Dave, although not knowing what he was going to say.

The lack of correlation and the ETF education, coupled with the fact that the overwhelming majority of investors are chasers, and we have an election cycle that I think is only going to go ahead and either make this market stronger or even stronger than stronger in terms of the choices between Biden and Trump. I'm hoping, frankly, that the use case narrative doesn't come to the forefront this year because on the basis of just the bitcoin etf education chasing you know trying to replicate to go back to mike mcglone's point frankly i think investors are going to try to find an asset class to replicate last year's gains they're not going to find it in the stock market they're going to need to look to a new asset in order to go ahead and do that. In fact, this new asset is just minted with an ETF. It's uncorrelated and they could go ahead and chase it while it seems to be going up now, I think is

going to drive Bitcoin to, I really believe, well over 100,000 in this year. And then, you know, in terms of the fundamentals, certainly, I'm in this for more than just, you know, the hype and the push up in price. You know, I think use cases are yet to come. I hope that they don't come to the forefront until 2025. And then we get, you know, an even bigger leg up, then. I just think that the circumstances have been set up so well at this point. I don't mean to over pump this, but the circumstances are incredibly strong at this point, especially for the United States in terms of the economy, in terms of no one thinks a recession is in sight. But at the same time, you know, we've reached the top on fixed income yields. We're probably going to go down from there. And, you know, how hard we go down from there and therefore the additional pump to the equity markets, I don't think is going to be all that great. And so therefore, I think that this asset class, particularly Bitcoin in this year, is going to provide the only outstanding returns available in the market. And that's why I think

that we're going to see a lot of investable dollars get channeled towards this. You're hired to market crypto for us this year, David. Good job. Thanks, man. Thanks, thanks. We need a new PR agent, Travis. Yeah, yeah, just a couple of things. I mean, so for Bitcoin, I mean, I just would not overthink this right now. We just got spot BTC ETFs, and that's unlocking safe access to Bitcoin for literally many trillions of dollars that hasn't had access to that previously. We do have a halving coming up.

And more importantly, the Fed is likely to cut rates multiple times this year and stocks are at all time highs. And like Peter Brandt had a hop off, but like in my opinion, from a TA perspective, stocks look like they're going higher as well too. And the halving is probably the least important one on that list that I just gave. And I think that it's kind of ironic that we are now shaping up for another halving year, which is just like 2020, where you're not going to be able to answer the question like how important is the halving for price? Because it's going to be obfuscated by central bank actions, which in my opinion are much more important than the halving at this point. So that it's like in 2012 and 2016,

Bitcoin was so tiny that the halving did really make a difference. That supply also, obviously the stock, like the stock to flow, the emissions rate was much larger and now you're just getting the smaller and smaller emission rates relative to the circulating supply of the coins. And so that

aspect of in and of itself is kind of diminishing the importance. But like 2020, you had a halving, but the halving happened right after the Fed ripped $3 trillion of QE in six weeks. And it happened right before Paul Tudor Jones, one of the most famous macro investors of all time, wrote a letter calling Bitcoin the fastest horse. And so the ensuing price action that you had on Bitcoin, like assigning that to the fact that the supply rate got cut in half, like there's not there's no way that you can do that. And it's funny because the setup is the exact same in 2024, where this halving is sandwiched right in between Bitcoin spot ETFs, a tremendously positive unlocking of capital flows, and right before likely multiple rate cuts from the Fed. And an election year. Yeah, and an election year. And the summation of all that, in my opinion, is essentially a free walk to all-time highs for Bitcoin. And what I mean by that is I don't think you have to worry about how Bitcoin is going to garner the inflows to get to all time highs. I think it's just going

to kind of happen because of the mostly because of these ETFs combined with rate cuts. You know, if the Fed was embarking on a rate tightening campaign right now this year, you know, the sort of the polar opposite of what they're doing, it would be a totally different setup in my view. You know, there'd be way, way more risk around it. And I think you can, you know, reasonable minds can disagree about the timing of when we're going to hit all-time highs, first half this year, second half this year, first half next year. We can have a conversation about that. And then I think reasonable minds can also disagree about how far beyond high 60s we're going to get or 70s, 80s, 90s, 100, 120, 140. It's like we can argue about that as well too. I would be on the lower side of that. But I think more or less, you're going to get a free walk to all-time

highs in Bitcoin. We've never had a setup like that before. And then further to that, I think that we're about to run the exact same trade back for Ethereum for the exact same reasons. You're going to get spot ETH ETFs. Again, we can argue about the timing of it. It's actually kind of interesting that there is such a wide swath of disagreement about the timing of spot ETH ETFs. Having them come sort of earlier is certainly not priced in right now because a lot of people are saying, oh, it's not going to happen this year. It may not happen at all. Oh, it's a very long slog. We'll see what happens there. But I think that ETH, for the same reason, more or less is going to have a free walk to all-time highs as well, too.

Never, ever, ever had a setup like that before, where the top two headline names in the crypto space kind of have a free walk to all-time highs. And in my opinion, that's going to lead to a magnitude of shitcoining unlike anything we've ever seen before. And it's not going to be with the assumption that it's going to come with mass adoption. I think there's a lack of pretense at this point in the cycle about any of this shit doing anything or ever going to do anything. And that's just, if that's true, that's going to make this cycle, it's going to get really wacky. You just laid out my entire base case. I don't know what else we can even say. Mario, maybe I agree with that. So thoroughly the trade that humans are going to human, and we're going to see

the biggest cycle ever, and that's really exactly how I'm thinking about the next year and a half, it's going to be wild. That's a good place to end it. But yeah, you've been saying this for months. So I give you credit there, Scott. Umott um but yeah i think we've covered everything it's been jumping from solana to f1c back to sonoma back to f1c um anything else to cover oh man i think we nailed it that was really great it was uh cool having claudia here since she was actually a fed economist to lay out what we could possibly see tomorrow i don't think we've uh had that before. I think we should do a big ETH versus Solana space.

I think that will be the next planet for next week because those get very contentious. It reminds me of the Bitcoin versus... You just want people to fight. It reminds me of the big Bitcoin versus everything else spaces. But I think we can... Yeah, you do literally a Bitcoin versus... Just choose that we can do that to just get a couple

laser eyes on stage, anyone else and just let them all yell at each other and we can like WhatsApp in the background. I'm down for that space. All right, guys, thank you. Thanks. Bye.