The Wolf Of All Streets - Has Crypto Bottomed? w/ Animoca CEO | Crypto Town Hall w/ @DOP_org

Episode Date: July 5, 2024

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All right, it worked. For anyone that cannot come up to speak, you have to crash your app. You have to not crash. You have to force close your app to be able to speak in the space. So it's been glitching just for anyone that is not able to come up and speak

if you've been invited. But yeah, Justin, Mano, Lorman, and Dave, good to have you guys. How are you? Doing well, thank you. Great to be part of one of your spaces again. Pleasure to have you. Well, it's a good time to be here hey hold on did scott change his photo no jesus christ let me bring up scott scott's new photo there's no way is that his original no it's his actual account it is

oh come on scott who the hell told you to put that profile photo? I don't know if you can speak, Scott. I know you're not working today, but if you can, probably not a good time to say yes because your profile photo is rubbish. All right. Let's kick it off. I think it's a prank. Whoever's using Scott's account to join because he can't speak today, he's just changed his profile photo as a prank because he looks like a criminal in that photo. Let's dig into the discussion today. It's a very simple discussion i've made the the title very simple as well i just want to hear um what i'm interested to hear and and that's just an analysis

of the market um what is going on um how concerned if at all should we be or is it just what's expected uh before the the the the rally later in year, as we've seen in previous cycles, as we've talked about time and time again? Dave, you've talked about this multiple times. We've talked about it yesterday. And obviously, we saw even a bigger dump today. Let me see how much – what Bitcoin is that? It's like $55,000-something. So, yeah, I think it's about $55K.

I would love to get your thoughts. And is there any support level that you have in mind now? Well, as I keep telling people, I hate choosing support levels when the issue is supply-demand temporary disruptions. And that's clearly what it is vis-a-vis Mt. Gox. So, you know, who knows? All I can say is when the dust settles, I think that there'll be a tradable bottom will form. I don't know from what level that will be. The interesting thing is I've been developing a thesis and it's and I haven't fully researched it,

but it'll be in my weekly newsletter about divergence and what's going on in crypto, because there's and it's really great that you have, you know, the Animoca on because, you know, my thesis is, my thesis is Bitcoin is marching to the beat of its own drummer. I think that this is completely normal trading range, post-having, yada, yada, but lots of underlying demand that is more patient than anything that we know about. So the liquidations on this very large dump yesterday, still less than half average for the magnitude of the size that we've seen. So even though it works like- Just to be clear, so you're saying that the correction is Brother Matt Cox has $8.2 billion to be sold.

Is it trackable? Are the wallets trackable to see which wallets are selling and how much has been sold already? There are multiple people who are tracking them. I'm not one of them. I just, I'm lazy. I'll read ZachXBT or other people who are tracking them. And what's the analysis?

How much of this $8.2 billion has been sold already? No one can know that because of a very simple point. Probably very little, if any, has been sold. What's happened is people have hedged. Right? So, you know, you say, oh, I'm about to get it. None so far. What did you say?

I thought the answer was none so far. None so far. say? I thought the answer was none so far. None so far. Yeah, I thought the answer was none. Yeah, so they're pending distribution. Yeah, you're right. The question is how much have people sold in the derivative markets expecting to buy that back when they sell their spot, which would then be net neutral to the price? We have no idea. That's really the issue. It's like how many people who needed money or be net neutral to the price. We have no idea that that's really

the issue. It's like how many people who need needed money or wanted to lock in their price. And it could be zero, although I doubt that. But the point that I was getting at is what happens at these tops. We've had this cycle many, many times where so-called all season, where Bitcoin goes into a consolidation phase because people are taking their profits from Bitcoin and pumping them into the hot money and the hot money stuff goes higher. But what we had here was a musical chairs sort of deal where the hot money was going into memes

and AI tokens and lots of stuff, lots of alts. And Bitcoin just did what it was doing. And then in the world of the Fed raising rates, all of a sudden the music stopped and people were like, uh-oh. And then the route goes on. So we have all these coins that are down enormous amounts because their valuations got way ahead of themselves. I mean, my thesis has been Bitcoin's value is close to its head of itself. Yeah. And then we've made this argument a few times here on the show just about the FTV of all these tokens that launched this year.

Before we continue that discussion, Zach, I want you to dig into the whole Mt. Gox situation, the distribution that's happening and what that could mean for the market. Can you elaborate exactly what the story is there? Yeah. is there? Yeah, so so far, I mean, this has been a many year saga at this point of Japanese bankruptcy court, paying out claims to creditors that had dollars or Bitcoin on Mt. Gox. They recovered a large amount of Bitcoin years ago that they thought had been lost. And that Bitcoin is going to be distributed to creditors. And I think the total number that we're looking at is something like 100,000 coins. I don't know exactly how much of that is to be distributed, but 8.2 billion. Yeah. And the coins have been moving from wallet to wallet, but have not been moving

to exchanges yet. So definitely the market is anticipating that they could be dumped. I think Dave's right that there probably is hedging activity based on that. That's definitely a big fight item. Also importantly, it looks like Germany has been dumping coins onto the market that it seized from a large fraud action. And they had a large amount of Bitcoin that they have been selling on multiple exchanges. But the Mt. Gox situation, it's, you know, look, there's a large number of coins that will be released to the market. It hasn't happened yet. And the question is, you know, when will that happen?

How quickly will that happen? And how much will people sell? Why is that being factored into the market today or now, these last few days? Because that's been known for a while. Is there any new development in the whole bankruptcy proceedings that happened in the last few days? I think this is one of those things where the market moves because of supply and demand and people like to attribute a specific cause to it.

I don't. Yeah. So it's like a fight item. Yeah, go ahead. I don't. Yeah. So it's like a fight item. Yeah, go ahead. I don't think it's technically impacting the market yet, except maybe for some hedging based on anticipated

selling in the future. And it seems like it is going to happen soon, which is, you know, people have said for a long time, but it seems like might actually be true this time. Okay, now I understand.

Okay, so timing of these liquidations that people are pricing in. So I appreciate the summary there. And Dave, I want you to continue that thought you're talking about earlier. I think the last point you made is about all these different tokens launching at high FTVs. So what do you expect to see as we continue throughout the year? Do you expect more liquidations? Do we expect us to, I know you don't want to give a price target but is there any any number in mind and any time frame in mind well i mean look there we've seen this before right i mean at least in terms of bitcoin we've seen it before i mean right before i mean people forget what the summer of 17

was like for example right you know people forget that the china fud comes out in august and you had you know a correction makes makes this one look mild. Can you tell us more about that correction? I want people to put things into perspective, especially people that haven't been there in the previous cycles. I have to use memory here because I'm not – That's fine. We won't hold you to the numbers. My memory was somewhere around a 30% to 40% correction in the end of July, August timeframe, uh, before it based in, in September,

we all know what happened in October through December, uh, which was depending on which, when you measure it from a six X or a seven X, uh, to the highs, right. You know, which is, would be, if you think about it, even if that happened from this level, if we went from 55 down to 35 and then 6X, you'd be at 250, right? You know, so it's like people need to understand. I'm not saying that that's going to happen. I frankly think that we are more likely to be more restrained on both the downside and the upside, but people have to put that in perspective, right? You can look more recently to 21 for what this might look like, right? We had a pretty big correction this summer of 21 also based on China.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the difference is this is more of a post-halving sort of cycle-y kind of thing that matters. Well, I guess that's true there too. So yeah, look, however you want to look at these cycles, the simple fact is when, and I say when, not if, when the world, you know, when these supply imbalances come off, all of a sudden you've ticked off. What are the bad things? People forget this. This is market psychology.

When there are potential looming bad events, people always overvalue those bad events. Whenever there are potential looming bad events. People always overvalue those bad events. Whenever there are potential looming big events or good events, people always undervalue them until they happen. So bad events tend to be things like, you know, oh, my God, they're going to dump all the Mt. Gox stock, Mt. Gox, Bitcoin in the market. It's going to crash 50 percent is definitely been a fear. China banning Bitcoin, banning bitcoin miners was a fear

and yeah it took down you know if you look at the the hash rate you know it took it down 50 briefly now it's 5x where it was at its bottom so you know you have to look at those things and know them and it's it's important to understand that it's also this is going to be an incredibly important uh precedent people have made the claim that the etf buyers are going to panic and sell even peter schiff once again came out this morning and said that he said oh my god they're going to sell and it's going to be over it's going to zero okay great well that was one of my tells as i said yesterday for the market being short who said peter schiff said that now yeah he said that this morning they're still they're still i again i don't i don't check

the news much anymore but so they're still continuing with their narrative of bitcoin going to zero they still haven't given up he does i mean what he's he's on the extreme side the point but the whale wire guys are back too which is also a local bottom signal when they take victory laps. Yeah, exactly. It's definitely the bottom. It's definitely the bottom. But bottoms are formed when the sellers are exhausted. And we don't know if the sellers are exhausted yet. What we do know is that the buyers are more,

the more money that has come into the market has been on the long-term side. People who are sticking in at 401ks and holding it. And yeah, there's some people who are going to have buyer's remorse. But if you look at the amount of allocations for most of the big players, they're so small, they're not going to notice it. Let me give you some perspective there. I just did a whole show where I broke this whole thing down. Let's analyze it by numbers, okay? So, Mt. Gox has 141,000 Bitcoin that they need to distribute. If you look at their distribution plan,

distribution plan is broken up into three parts. First part is 71,000 Bitcoin, which is about 50%. And it is distributed between July and August of July and October of this year. That is 71,000 Bitcoin. Let's get some perspective 141,000 Bitcoin, which is all the Bitcoin that are held by Mt. Gox is equivalent to 16.34% of what the total ETFs have accumulated in the last six months or seven months. It is equivalent to 63% of all the Bitcoin held by MicroStrategy

and is equivalent to 46% of all the Bitcoin held by BlackRock. Cool. If you have that, which is what's going to be distributed in the next four months, then it's 31% of the total Bitcoin held by MicroStrategy, 8% of the Bitcoin held by the ETFs, 23% of what's held by BlackRock. Cool. But there's two classes of people that hold the Bitcoin here. Class number one are claims agents, people that have bought the claims in the last 10 years from people, right? Those claims agents are usually risk neutral. In other words, they are long the claim, short the physical.

In other words, they buy the claim and they hedge out their price so that they don't have to carry price fluctuations. To close their trade, they're going to take possession of the Bitcoin, sell the Bitcoin, close the short. The second class is people that actually didn't sell their claims and they just held Bitcoin. Now, these are probably hardcore Bitcoiners. They are up a lot of money. The Bitcoin was, I think, $400 or $500 when Gox went down. And these guys are now selling, are now getting these Bitcoin. Now you're going to make an assumption of how many of these people are going to sell. So I just, on my show today, I broke down the assumptions and I said,

if 50% are sold and 50% are held, in a nutshell, it's 15 percent of the total bitcoin held by micro strategy and four percent of the total held by the etfs now the question is can in the next four months can the etfs absorb the additional four percent of what they have bought up until now that is the perspective that you have to have when you're looking at this mind-goxing. Yes, it is the biggest Bitcoin liquidation in history, or unlock in history, but it's a known unlock. When I say a known unlock, there's no new information here. Everybody knew it was happening. We even knew it was happening now. This is my question. Wouldn't it have been priced in a long time ago and has no impact on the market today? That's why I think the market's overreacting. And also, i think that

the the liquidator did something quite strange where they dropped it on fourth of july or fifth of july where the the the biggest market in the world was closed like it's just it's ludicrous um like i'm not i'm not saying it's a conspiracy i'm just saying it's probably maybe slightly careless or or whatever maybe maybe they even paid no attention to it. And I think that in time, this is a non-event. I just want to say one other thing. In this period of every single cycle in the halving, we get a capitulation event.

In the last cycle, it was COVID. And it happened in like March or April of 2020, which is in this post-harving cycle, we got the COVID correction, which took us down. In the previous cycle, we had the Bitfinex flash, the Bitfinex flash crash, and that took us down. And in the 2012 cycle, at exactly the same time, there was a Chinese Ponzi, which was uncovered. I don't know if anybody was here, but there was a Chinese Ponzi, which was uncovered, and we had this capitulation week. In every single halving cycle, we've had a capitulation week, and we've just had the same capitulation week in this cycle, and it's nothing new. Lastly, before I go, because I have to go, unfortunately, every cycle has corrections the average corrections per cycle is 30 percent

this correction brings us down 25 percent there's nothing to worry about we just keep on keeping on we keep our heads down and we carry on with the cycle nothing is wrong we're still in a bull market there's still the catch-up trade the nasdaq there's still the risk on trade but just this question right right you started you started off by saying he you think we've bottomed But I was just looking at your thumbnail now on YouTube obviously thumbnails not guide on what the video says But the biggest Bitcoin dump just started is that referring to just a mountain gox dump? We're talking about the cut today's dark. Okay, okay Let's not talk about the list of talking about the sandal

So essentially what you're saying is that you think we've bottomed, and how long before the market starts to recover again, we start hitting all-time highs? Can we go lower? Sure we can, but can we go a lot lower? No. Can we go like 5% lower, maybe 8% lower? Yes.

Can we go 20%, 30% lower? I don't see it happening. No chance. No chance, but low chance. Does anyone disagree with uh ryan does anyone think that we could still hit you know 20 30 percent lower from here anyone at all justin db it depends on on a couple of things i mean i i on bitcoin i tend to agree uh on alts it depends i mean if you know look it let's face it a lot of, a lot of this has to do with the idiocy that's going on in the U.S. election, which, you know, on a global space like this, as an American, I'm embarrassed.

Let's just leave it at that. And not, you know, I'm just embarrassed just in general. But if there are scenarios where that Standard Chartered wrote about, and I don't agree with their analysis, but they made the statement. They were focusing on Bitcoin. They made the statement, though, if Biden drops out and Trump and some other Democrat comes in, that could be very bad. And so there are people who are worrying about that. And a lot of this stuff coincided with those sorts of thoughts. I personally think that that's going to turn out to be silly analysis, but political wins do influence in an ordinarily low volume summer market. That's what happens. And so, yeah, there are political things that could happen. There's

geopolitical things that could happen, et cetera. But barring, I think business as usual, I'm on team Rand on this. Yeah, no, Justin, you're trying to come up, I'm on team Rand on this. Yeah, no, Justin, you're trying to come up. I'm not sure if you disagree because I know you want to jump in on this point. Let me go to DB first while Justin, you fix your mic. Justin, is it working? Can you speak now? Yeah.

Yeah. Would love your thoughts because I know you started. I think you started trying to speak after I asked the question, does anyone disagree? So maybe you could jump in on that point. You don't have to disagree, but we'd love to get your, and if you agree with Ryan and Dave, maybe you can give us kind of a devil's advocate perspective. Sure. No, I actually, I don't disagree, but also feel like I'm not really qualified to disagree with Ryan. I mean, I'm not a, I'm not a trader. I'm an, I'm a long-term investor. So I thought, you know, maybe it would be helpful to give that long-term investment outlook.

Cause I think as a long-term investor, you know, looking at the fundamentals, things have never been better, like objectively. I mean, I've been in this industry for over a decade now, and, you know, the politics are incredible. The technology is incredible. The community keeps growing. The usage keeps growing the usage keeps growing so you know if if you're a long-term investor and those are the things you care about then you know a little dip like this in the market is really nothing at all to fret over um and and i think that's that's really you know the difference between investors and traders can you give us some of the metrics that um to kind of

to show us your perspective on the fundamentals being stronger than ever? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think in terms of TPS figures, like across all layer twos, across Ethereum, across Solana, across several other blockchains, we're approaching easily 5,000 TPS now in terms of like what the blockchain industry is kind of producing. And I'm also deducting like, you know, any type of, well, most of the fake numbers here, right? And if you think about what we were doing just say a year ago or two years ago, we were barely doing 100 TPS as an industry in terms of the number of transactions we were doing. It's massive. The growth is just unbelievable and i think there's there's so many more metrics to look at at just price and i think that's that's really the point

that i'm coming down to here is that um that it's incredibly bullish and if you believe in cryptocurrency then you know we can look for reasons for why the price goes down but i think ryan was spot on when he said that this is actually just following a typical uh boom and bust cycle and and this seems like it's you know not investment advice but this feels a lot like a bull trap i mean sorry a beer trap to me yeah let me go to db db i think you agree as well since everyone on on the on the stage here agrees that we're close to seeing a bottom uh db would love your take on this yeah no i'm with the rest of them ran kind of nailed it i think i was saying on this space a few weeks ago when we were still around 64 65 that i wouldn't be surprised to see low 50s or right around 50 which if you look at rand's eight to ten percent figure that puts us right around

50 to 51 so i could definitely see that being the bottom. But yeah, none of this really surprised me. It's the typical post-halving stuff that's just going to take us into quarter three, quarter four, the election cycle and everything big coming up. Yeah, talking about fundamentals, I'm glad Buzz is here because I do want to look at not only Memecoin buzz and d5 the d5 ecosystem but also i want to discuss hamsa combat so while everyone's looking at the price of bitcoin in the mccock story which i found to be pretty uninteresting hamsa combat the game on ton on telegram they've just hit i think it's the third fastest growing app ever and they've hit a gaming app and they just hit 150 million users, I think, just a few days ago. So it gives you an idea, or even maybe today, gives you an idea of the fundamentals across various aspects of crypto.

But Vinny, I want to go to you first. We'd love your thoughts on the markets. I think a lot of people are pretty scared right now. So maybe getting your take on things would be great. And maybe if you can also, you've been in crypto for a while, and Dave, you've done that already. But if you could compare this, what we're seeing right now, the same time, the same period in previous cycles as well, how does that compare? How does the current correction compare to previous corrections? So, Mario, I just joined, so I don't know what has been said before me. But, I mean, as you know, a few months ago, I said that we topped out at 74K, and it was a triple top inflation adjusted all that stuff

and um yeah it appears to be the case uh for now at least for the cycle we also haven't seen the ultra and we were expecting and so you know it's just a situation right now where i think this time could be different um for some reason i just think the pullback is going to be a little bit deeper this time I think we may go and visit the 40s again oh wow why do you think that? well so one of the biggest issues I had with this run

was the centralization of money in the ETF pools and so the more decentralized the crypto is the better the more centralized it is the worst right and so when you when you're piling all these Bitcoin into the ETFs um I think there's a bunch of risks that that we haven't really thought through that start to emerge and ETF sellers and the funds that are sort of playing the the two-way game where they they trading spot plus etf when there's a gap down like

yeah and i think we haven't seen a big enough gap down right now but if you see a 20 drop on a weekend while the etfs aren't trading then these guys are scrambling because monday morning when the market opens they've got to figure out what to do um and you know this is what i've said six months ago when it first came out. And I've actually said this about ETFs for a long time. I just don't think it's the best thing for Bitcoin to have such a huge amount of centralization and liquidity in the markets that it's open to manipulation. But with the massive flows that we've seen with the ETFs, I thought that would kind of – that pump in liquidity in the ecosystem would mitigate the correction. The same way we saw the speed in which we hit all-time highs

be a lot faster than previous cycles. I would expect, and I'd love you to kind of count on me, I would expect the correction to be milder as well, unless we start seeing a lot of fear within the ETFs, as you've kind of hinted at. Yeah, so again, the issue is that Bitcoin trades 24-7. well, unless we start seeing a lot of fear within the ETFs, as you've kind of hinted at. Yeah. So again, the issue is that Bitcoin trades 24-7 and the stock market trades, whatever, eight hours a day, five days a week.

That's a bug, not a feature. The fact that you don't have full-time trading on the underlying assets there is the big issue here. You've got this sort of disparity between coins that are contained within ETFs and coins that are trading in the open market freely. I've always said Bitcoin will be most successful when held in small amounts by large numbers of people. And the ETFs kind of go against that ethos because even though you could argue

the underlying holders are… Exactly. I was going to make that point. Yeah, you can argue that. The problem is it's not liquid. It's not available to trade. And then sometimes it's just held with people who are running – But isn't that a good thing? Like if the market is closed on a weekend when it dumps or after hours, doesn't that allow traders time to

kind of absorb the information and make a more rational decision when the market's open? So shouldn't that reduce volatility? Well, if people are using leverage, it's a different discussion, right? So if you're using leverage to buy ETFs and then you have to do margin calls on a Monday, that's going to be a problem. So again, we haven't seen a big enough down day or down weekend. I think you need to get to the 20% plus mark where things start getting a little wonky. So we haven't seen that.

But it's plausible, conceivable that it could happen on a Friday to Monday scenario, especially with the long weekend. And then Monday, everything's gapped down and now people are scrambling. Especially, you guys obviously discussed the Mt. Gox situation and German government. But you just need some more news like that to come out on a weekend, and all of a sudden, you're going to have a gap down, and people are scrambling because – that's the problem. But if the ETF coins are traded 24-7, I'd have no issue with it, but it's not, and that's the issue. Okay. Unless anyone else has a point on that, I'm going to go to Follis, get your thoughts on everything that's been issue okay um unless anyone else has a point on on that i want to go to follow us get your thoughts on everything's been discussed for us and then i'll go back to alt alt

we haven't talked enough about alt we didn't see that pump earlier in the year and we'll see them continue to bleed and so we'd love to get to get a discussion on that as well follow us yeah hey mario how's it going guys um yeah i mean my thoughts and i gave much many of them yesterday hasn't really changed i still think this is well within the normal parameters of post-halving volatility, summer volatility. I don't think there's any real cause for concern yet. I'm seeing a lot of sentiment on the timeline suggesting that it's over. Bull market has ended. Bear market is here.

Shorts are going to be favored. Let's short this thing down to the 30, 40 Ks. And I just don't see that. At least we haven't seen enough data to suggest that is the case yet. I'm not saying we can't go lower, but I do agree with Ran or I tend to agree with Ran on the idea that maybe the bottom is in or close. I could kind of see another drop maybe, but I don't see bitcoin doing this minus 10 minus 15 minus 20 percent thing from here if you look at the data from previous halvings now obviously we don't have a huge amount to go on a data set of three isn't isn't fantastic but the second

having in particular we saw like a 33 or 32 percent drop after the having before bitcoin kind of did this up only uh you know, like 3000% gain over the following year. So I mean, this is within the normal parameters of that kind of post halving, choppiness, sell off kind of a thing. What are those? Can you elaborate on those? What are those parameters? So as I said, we only have three previous halvings to go on. But in all three cases, people kind of have this rose-tinted goggles perception of the post-halving bullishness. But in all three cases, there was weeks and months of choppy slash bearish PA before we got up only.

The first halving was actually the most bullish. I mean, we only got six weeks of kind of choppiness before up only but the second and third having had approximately 20 weeks each of sideways choppy even bearish pa before kind of going to these these you know getting this big upside going i just think that uh you know the the having is an event was talked up so much and everyone's saying just survive until the halving and then it's going to be up only. You know, I just, I think people maybe underestimated kind of where we were in the cycle and what to expect.

You know, low volatility summer coming up. The fact that retail hasn't really returned to the market in as good numbers as in previous cycles. I spoke about this on one of the town halls a couple of weeks ago but if you look at the the google search analytics for bitcoin and crypto they're at the same level now that as they were in in the bear market of 2022 when bitcoin prices at 20k yeah so it's i mean the indication there new capital price but then the price yeah sorry to interrupt i want to continue the thought but the price, yeah, sorry to interrupt. I want to continue the thought, but the price, so essentially that disparity between the price and the searches,

does that mean that institutions are in and retail isn't? And retail still obviously hasn't entered the market. I definitely think, so people are talking about this event, people are saying, well, we've just got to wait until retail comes back. I genuinely think that 2021 did so much lasting damage. 2021, 2022 did so much lasting damage to the space that there are going to be a lot of guys who were interested in crypto back then,

who had money in crypto, who lost, who maybe blew up their accounts or lost a substantial amount of money, withdrew from crypto and won't be returning. I think there's a lot of capital there that will never come back to crypto. If you think about what we've had since peak 2021, we had FTX, we had Binance FUD, we had CZ going to jail, we had Voyager, we had Celsius, we had Three Arrows Capital, we had, you know, constant

Tether FUD, constant USDC FUD. We had many altcoins, you know, that looked like good buys in 2021 went minus 85, minus 90 percent. So I just think that there are a lot of jaded investors out there who will never come back to crypto. And if you look at the search analytics, it kind of matches that. The peak interest, according to Google, in crypto and Bitcoin was 2021. And since then, it's just been sloping downwards. And as I said, now we're equivalent to a bear market in terms of how interested the the lay person is in our space that's really that's really bullish for me and i will go to we're early we're early we are um and i will

dig into mount gox again for anyone that just joined with meta lorman and zach but let me go to ages protocol ages we don't usually bring up people on stage before sending to the team so i have no idea who you are but I hope you can add value to the discussion I'm taking a risk thank you for your trust

I appreciate it a lot not at all so to maybe explain who I am I'm institutional so I have my own hedge fund and I manage

nine figure numbers so maybe that can give me some credibility i've started my twitter account uh like two three weeks ago and the first thing i called was the short on the 14th of july or june better to say uh so maybe that should give me some credibility and i think to come to the original question uh i think it might go another 10 20 20% down on BTC because my algos work on price action and on fundamentals, whatever has been mentioned right now has been fundamental analysis

in the sense that all these events should influence the market, which I personally believe they don't. It's like Mt. Gox with 3 billion being distributed. It might do something in the span of a day or maybe a week or two. In a great scheme of things, it won't do anything because all big positions that actually do matter are being hidden by institutional players via dark pools or OTC trades. They are not visibly to the public whatsoever uh so i don't think these

things matter and for my august they still point max short actually they might reverse um they're like zero minus 0.875 so they're almost completely all the way um and yeah i personally don't believe that's the case uh i might be proven wrong or might be no but i like we need we need more bearishness on the panel because i think everyone was kind of calling a bottom earlier not everyone but most speakers were calling for a bottom earlier zach do you want to jump in on this one before i go to oh yeah i mean i was i was gonna make that same point is that i mean i agree with most people this seems like a bull market correction but it worries me a little bit that that seems

to be basically the 100% consensus among everybody. Not with me. I'm a little bit more bearish than that. Yeah, Vinny's with ages, Sam. More bearish. But Vinny, you've been bearish for a while.

I've been bearish since 74K, yeah. Oh yeah, true, true. But you were bearish before the bull run as well? Or no? No, I wasn't. I've been buried since 74K, yeah. Oh, yeah, true, true. But you were buried before the bull run as well? No, I wasn't. No, I wasn't. I actually called at 32K. I said, at 32K, I posted a tweet saying we're at the start of a bull run. All right, cool.

So can you ask the Oracle what you expect to see when it comes to alts now? Are we going to see alts rebound as well along with the rest of the market? Are we going to see alts bleed along with Bitcoin as well? Yeah, I think alts are going to bleed. I don't think... How much more can they bleed? I'm seeing some projects, some reputable projects

that have already dropped 80%, 90%. Here's the problem. The problem is there's so much unlocks to come with a lot of these projects and there's so much inflation. It's very uncontrolled with a lot of these projects. And it's actually undisclosed as well. I mean, look at WorldCoin, for example. People are dumping it like there's no tomorrow. I mean, WorldCoin is going down and down and down because they've sold all these forward SAFs and whatever else. And people are just dumping it. And there's like no bottom on it. And it keeps going down. And at the same fall, I mean, there's just so many of these out there, guys. Like there's an infinite supply of altcoins, like near infinite supply. You know, if anything, Bitcoin dominance probably goes up,

maybe goes to 60% or 65% as it slides. You know, because I think the fundamentals of Bitcoin are probably better than any other coin right now. But we're still, I think, in the throes of a bear run or bear, maybe a short bear market, but it's a bearish sort of segment of the journey, in my opinion. And you're looking at all the alts. I agree. A lot of these alts look hammered.

But, you know, who wants to, like, again, the one speaker said like people who, who got burnt in the last round are not coming back. And so where's the fresh capital coming from? And what about the unlocks? I mean, I know we've all sort of been a broken record on this, but that seems like a really important part of this cycle is yes, there's a huge supply of alts, but there's about to be more and more and more and more at ridiculous private market valuations.

I don't see how that's anything other than hugely ugly. Who's going to buy it? Where's the money coming from? The money will come in when the valuations reach a ridiculously low level. Where's the money coming from?

All the VCs that raised all the money you know but they're still raising capital the vc but these are utility tokens right the demand for these tokens is supposed to come from people buying them for some purpose and if they're just going to be down only because everyone is selling no one's going to buy them to use them and like i think that the projects die because of that before they get any retail traction. Exactly. I agree with you. Here's the fundamental issue. When I say where's the money coming from, as you noted, I've been in this space for a long time. Back in the days, we even had Namecoin, Feathercoin, all these other coins back in the 13 and 15 era. What happened was, as Bitcoin went up,

we would buy these other coins with the profits from Bitcoin. And we would basically try to accumulate some sort of higher beta opportunities to basically buy more Bitcoin. And we did that in every run. So every run, you see this diversification from the crypto base, from the crypto holders that are generating profits in their core holdings that go and buy other stuff. The same with Solanaana by the way the solana meme coin craze was a lot of solana people who basically saw solana go from eight bucks low to 100 or there was 200 plus at one point diversifying saying well

i can drop a couple of soul into this project that project etc but when the market's in a compression phase where you start losing in your core holdings. You're not putting money in. Now, in the 2021 era, we had Zerp, and we had all these people from retail coming in with their cash and dumping it into their Kraken and Coinbase and whatever else accounts around the world, and buying these coins because we had this altcoin mania frenzy, and everyone thought they're also going to go to the moon, and we had the bubble.

And that mania is gone. We don't have Zerp right now. So where is the money going to go to the moon, and we had the bubble. And that mania is gone. We don't have Zerp right now. So where's the money going to come from? And those people got burnt on coming back. Where's the money going to come from if people who have core holdings in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, for example, don't want to diversify into other alts because they see more value in those core holdings than in the alts?

It's worse than that. What we didn't have previously is also this private market infrastructure that we have now. Just like I think last cycle, retail got burned on liquid tokens in a way that some people are never coming back. This cycle, it's going to be people burned on private rounds. And look, I work in crypto venture. People are still raising and people are doing series A's at ridiculous valuations. and these things are going to hit the market and just be down only like i i don't know i can't express how bearish i am about the vc i agree i'm as bearish as you are and and with ton for example there's saffs going around at 50 discounts right now solana i mean ftx sold the solana uh the solana saffs is a 20 unlock in about eight months to nine months time that comes

onto the market. There's an infinite supply of alts, guys. Like there's literally near infinite supply. And even in seed and pre-seed rounds, like people have convinced themselves it is normal to go out and raise your first money on a safe with a warrant at a 50 plus million dollar valuation. That is normal because there are tokens attached. Like all of a sudden that makes a startup incredibly valuable because anyone can make a token. Yes. These valuations are nuts right now. Sorry, just to bookend that. I'm seeing the same thing. These founders are coming with valuations like double,

triple what Solana's original FDV was. They've got nothing behind it as well. Here's the other problem. You've got a ton of VC money that was raised in 2021 that was deployed in the past couple of years and they're looking for the unlocks and the liquidity. They're looking to dump on someone, retail, whoever, but the market can't support it. Bitcoin is still not above its 2021 all-time high. Even you adjust for inflation and never got past that.

So we don't have enough capital that's been built up within the core holdings of, you know, call it the OG or at least the core crypto base. And we don't have fresh capital coming in. And we have high interest rates. And we have an excess or infinite supply of alts. Tell me how this turns around. Oh, and also think about how they're structured. Another big difference between now and 2021 is the standardization of lockups and partly this is like market expectations partly this is the fault of lawyers but like everyone has a one-year cliff right and then a big unlock

and then coordinate so it's it's a huge overhang that all unlocks at the same time and these projects were raising roughly at the same time and And I think like Q4 this year into next year, when these like one year post TGE stuff starts unlocking, that's going to be really rough. Yeah. And funny, Robbie, that's probably perfect time for you to jump in.

But before that, Dave, I've sent you a co-host invite. If you can accept that. So we have one more space on the panel and I can bring up William. Justin, jump in. And then Robbie,

I want to go to you, kind of discuss with you your thoughts on the, all these tokens launching on the high FDVs. We've talked about it a lot on the panel and i can bring up william justin jump in and then robbie i want to go to you i'm going to discuss with you your thoughts on the all these tokens launching on the high fdvs we've talked about it a lot on the show um and all the unlocks um the inflation inflationary pressure that we'll be seeing this year but justin i'd love you to jump in first yeah thank you thank you so um i mean as you all know i disagree with uh vinnie on the fundamentals of uh bitcoin i think Bitcoin has the worst fundamentals, but that's not the subject of today. I think Vinny, you know, we've both been in this industry for a long time. And actually, I do entirely agree with you on the really messed up state of the VC market right now. Like it's massively, massively oversaturated. And generally,

when it comes to fundamentals, I've seen really constant improvement across the board or across most metrics. But one area where I have not seen improvement are the supply distributions for new cryptocurrencies. Like it used to be the case that Ethereum was heavily, heavily criticized for its pre-mine. You know,, it's pre mine makes up for like less than 10% of the total supply today, right? As of today, like it's normal for like new VC coins, or whatever you call them to have like 70%, 80% of the distribution actually go to the VCs, which or founders, the average is 50% among both the team and vcs um i mean it depends how you count it a lot of these things have like community or um you know

core group or if you count i'm counting these things as well because anything that is not part of a say a public distribution i would i would pretty much consider a pre-mine because they can still control where those coins go. And they often do still go within those same groups of people. I mean, I don't know if that's an interesting conversation for people to have, but I actually don't think that that's legit. I think you need to separate out treasury coins and ecosystem coins that are really there to support the ecosystem and ultimately support price as opposed to team and investor

allocations where people's basis is zero and they're incentivized to dump. I think that's a really important distinction between those two. And generally, the fundraising documents will draw a line between those two. You'll have what's called the company reserve, which is the half of the tokens, which are for the team and investors and advisors and stuff like that. And then you'll have the other half, which is like airdrops, public sale, ecosystem fund, et cetera, et cetera. I don't think people appreciate the role of market makers in how these SAFs play out either. I mean, the market makers out there, when they get, especially short-dated SAFs, they're able to orbit out of the market before it even hits the market.

So this is why a lot of people don't realize when the unlocks come, they're like, oh, look, nothing happened. But you look at the previous three months, whatever, you saw the price sliding. That's because the market makers are just hedging it out. They were doing borrowers. They were working with Binance, getting borrowers, paying whatever lending rate it was, and then just arbing the difference between what they paid for the SaaS and what the unlocks were at the time. And so this is a pretty big business. Market making is a huge business, and they love the SaaS and what the unlocks were at the time. And so this is going, I mean, this is a pretty big business. Market making is a huge business and they love the SaaS business. And I've taken part in some of these and I've made money on them because, I mean, it's easy

money because a lot of people are just unsophisticated. So when they sell the SaaS at a discount, they don't do the math around what it's actually worth on a net present value basis. Is there much liquidity in that secondary market for safts uh yeah yeah there's there's a ton of people selling safts and you can go buy them and you can you can buy them at a steep discount because the people who's selling them don't know how to obit out themselves or how they don't have the balance sheet to do it to get although i will say u.s based agreements typically do not allow you to sell them on the secondary market

like most token warrants that are from u.-based projects will forbid that and there's been recent reporting that the sec is specifically investigating crypto vcs based on their secondary sales of unlocked or of locked uh pre-launched tokens any any um any marketplaces i know there's a few any what are the marketplaces have the most liquidity i mean the i mean, Binance is the most. But, Zach, to that point, you can still run a forward against a lock theft. It depends how it's worded. The ones that have good lawyers tend to call out all of the ways that you could hedge or do forward contracts. Sure. Fair enough.

Robbie, I want to go to you on that point. Obviously, we've been discussing else for a bit now. And going to the original question, and Brother William, good to have you on the panel. Going to the original question of the selling pressure, we're seeing the alts, the bleed out that we're seeing there. And the blame that's being placed on all these tokens launching at high FDBs. You guys invest a lot. I don't know, Mocha, what's your strategy? What are your thoughts about the valuations in this cycle versus previous cycles?

Are they warranted now because the technology has evolved a lot more, especially considering that we're seeing a lot more tokens launch? I feel like given the, you know, kind of relative maturing of the market, we're definitely not mature yet, but we're more mature than we've seen, obviously, you know, they are, I think they're a little bit more rational now than they were a couple of years ago. I mean, at least the market window has been open for the first half of this year. Most of the stuff that we see, I think, varies widely in quality. I think it's important not to bucket. Like I find actually this whole idea of alts to be unhelpful because it's a massive bucket that includes UGC meme coins and Solana.

There's lots and lots of stuff in there, and there's definitely a very distinct difference in quality of different things. And we find the same thing when we look at projects that we want to support in our own portfolio, which is why we do very, very thorough analyses with our tokenomics team and our market team and everything to make sure that we're comfortable with them. And it's one of the reasons that with our portfolio companies, we work with them in everything from tokenomics all the way through to liquidity provision, because you need to be able to give them good advice and help and partnership across that whole thing because you can mess up one bit or another bit along that whole chain and and the whole thing falls down because it just becomes

a poorly composed deal but then how do you compose a token that has to launch that has all these vcs that get unlocks pretty quickly because they expect short-term liquidity because that's like the game the name of the game now and then um how will utility demand Vinny was talking about it earlier how would demand from a utility perspective come in if the token is sitting there dumping why would people buy the token to actually use the token which is why we we wouldn't we wouldn't support anything where there you see lots of people insiders and stuff, unlocked in the first year. Forget it. I mean, I think we can definitely talk about what happens 12, 24 months down the road once more general unlocks come to market. But I think that's why also we find ourselves, we used to just be involved at the beginning of the process

with tokenomics. But now we're very clear that we want to understand the go to market strategies, and the token table and what everybody's unlocks are, because that part, we've seen so many deals and projects fall apart, because they weren't properly managed, and everybody's interests weren't properly aligned. So I think that's really important. I think one other thing, just as a side note, and this is maybe, you know, from the retail and consumer side, because somebody was mentioning earlier about where the new users are coming from. I know a couple of weeks ago, we briefly talked about games on Telegram. So a fun update. Some of you may be familiar with a game called Hamster Combats on

Telegram. Insane. Insane. 239 million users. And so the thing to remember, whether you think they're all real people or bots or whatever, is that each of those accounts is associated with an active wallet now. So even if you think they're half bots or 90% bots, then that's still 20 million wallets. So I think that's an incredible number and gives us an idea of what's possible with real mobile distribution. What led to Hamster? So anyone that doesn't know Hamster Combat is a game on Telegram. But can you tell us more about what Hamster Combat is, what the game mechanics are, and why do you think it went viral to that level?

Because it's one of the fastest growing gaming apps, period. Because what they've done is they've used a lot of traditional, quote unquote, traditional methodologies of growth hacking, user acquisition, and cross promotion within a network. These are things that like in mobile gaming, we've been using for quite a long time. Everything from offer walls to incentivized actions, et cetera. And so they've gamified the whole sort of token farming mechanic, core mechanic of the game. But all of those ways in which you go and perform activities to generate tokens add to compound the virality of the game. And so when you can do that within a loop of the Telegram platform that's very user-friendly, you can see the game. And so when you can do that within a loop of the Telegram platform

that's very user-friendly, you can see the results. Yeah, but then if you're talking about gaming in general, we saw gaming tokens bleed. I was talking to someone earlier that was, I think Amar.

Amar was on stage. Amar was telling me yesterday, today, earlier today, he said, Mario Portal, we're investors in Portal. We did their launch as well. They dropped 90%. It's a great project.

And other gaming projects are just suffering heavily right now i would love your take on this are you still as bullish as you were probably the answers yes but why are you still bullish on gaming and is it meeting your expectations for the year uh robbie uh well i'm i'm bullish on gaming because we've invested in people like ammar who really know how to make great games. So I think, I think, no worries. But, but I think we're, we're bullish on gaming because we don't think the thesis has changed at all. And I think that just like, as we look at the, as we look at what's going on in gaming, generally,

we see so many different examples of bright spots, whether it's, you know, the continued durability of the core audience in pixels to what's going on in the Telegram ecosystem. Now, gaming is just so big that we'll continue to see innovation in different segments of gaming. And I think it's always going to be percolating in the background. Then why do you think tokens are not meeting those kind of meeting those those those? Because I think it depends on the timeline that you're looking at like everybody's complaining about the floor price of a Bored Ape but you know if you minted a Bored Ape you're up

90 times so it just depends on the timeline you're looking at yeah Justin William jump in DB Justin William I got cut off before so I don't have quite enough time to respond. You're welcome to. Go ahead.

Thanks. Yeah, I just, I don't know. I do disagree with this idea that it's all fine and dandy the way it is right now with these extremely high evaluations and these distributions that really favor insiders very heavily. I recently wrote a thread actually about- Can you elaborate? Sorry, quick question. When you say insiders, can you elaborate what you mean by insiders? Are you just talking about VCs that invest privately?

This would be a combination of VCs and the founders themselves. And all of the people really connected loosely with the core team. I would say, worldly speaking, you know, I would say like, I agree with Vinny, strictly speaking, VC investment is around 50%. It usually exceeds it now. Just something we've picked up on

in our research pretty heavily. But if you include some of these other metrics, like say community or core distributions, you know, you're just paying it to the same people again, right? So I do think that it's very oversaturated right now and we don't need this many VC chains, right? I mean, I'd love to see all of the innovation,

but when the crunch comes down, you know, we only need so many L1s in my view. So I do think there is a serious issue here in this industry where things are getting, you know, they're getting a bit icky. And that's what I wanted to provide a bit of pushback to that since I got... Robbie, go ahead. Sure. I was just going to say, I agree with you completely, Justin. And that's what I meant by how we look carefully at projects, because I think I completely agree with you that we wouldn't support projects that have, you know,

big proportions going to insiders of the token table or early unlocks or things like that, because those are just constructs that don't make any sense. So I think, you know, from our perspective, we're just looking for projects that are properly constructed. And I think that that's how I view the market because people who don't construct proper projects will never fail. That's irrespective,

will never succeed irrespective of market conditions. All projects have big insider allocations at this point, right? You're not going to, like there are some very few exceptions, but it is very unusual to have less than 50% of the token supply going to team plus investors. Yeah. And this is why I've been saying, and you're right, it's pretty much all of the new projects. We used to have a standard that we would never invest in a coin with more than a 50% pre-mine or 30% pre-mine. We upped it to 50 and now we just up that because if we have that rule there's nothing we can invest in anymore in new chains so that's just the state

of the industry today i recently wrote a thread about about actually you know it's not entirely us that's the blame for this i think part of the blame actually lies on regulations because we used to have a thing known as the ico which i actually think compared to what we're doing today was actually a much fairer way to distribute or at least partially distribute these chains and get them in the hands of consumers who actually care about the blockchain. But it's because of regulation, actually, that the ICO has become mostly illegal, I think, for most people. And I think that's just that's horrible because ICOs were just this beautiful democratizing thing that just gave everyone this equal opportunity. Now it's now only the elite VCs get that opportunity.

Is that more equitable? Is that more fair? Let me post on that as a crypto securities lawyer. I 100% agree with this, that a lot of the fault of this is the way the securities law work. And a pure ICO actually is a lot fairer than what goes on now in the name of complying with Regulation D and Regulation S. I agree. Could I just add one quick thing? Go ahead, Dave, and then we'll go to William, back to the markets. Go ahead, Dave. Yeah, I just wanted to add that Mark

Uyeda, is that how you pronounce his last name, one of the SEC commissioners in a dissent recently, was the first one to actually publicly talk about this. But the issue why the ICO had to be illegal is because there's literally no way in our current securities laws for the disclosures of issuers to fit because they don't have corporate structures. There's all sorts of reasons. And many of us have been making the point for a very long time that if you did give the ability for proper disclosures and a principles-based regime that would fit with DAOs and the types of things that are doing it, that it could work and has literally fallen on deaf ears. In point of fact, they're openly hostile to the idea. And that's why when you start seeing dissents like that, that matters. And that's one of the reasons that a regime change, you know, in the United States could literally unlock this market. William, I want to go back to the original question that we were debating earlier, just the state of the market that you were trying to come up earlier.

Yes, thanks. I was off for a bit. So let's step back with some perspective, because what's going on is that crypto is increasingly becoming a liquidity play. We can talk about fundamentals as long as we want, but there is a disconnect between the fundamentals story and what's really going on in the liquidity aspect. And my interpretation of what's happening in the last couple of days is that the market, the big players, those with the big liquidity, are starting to discount the fact that there is going to be an imminent interest rate cut that is looming. And that takes money out of crypto. That's been the friend of crypto lately, the higher interest rates, but that's going to potentially come to an end at least in the short term. So that was my interpretation. When you look at the charts, Bitcoin could easily touch 50 before it rebounds as a technical support level.

And Ethereum might have a support at 280000 so that's kind of my interpretation of what's going on db now i was just gonna go back to the previous discussion basically and point out i put up top there as we were talking about the fully do the fully devu oh come on fdv fdv and you can see all these tokens that have been launched in the past 6-12 months with insane valuations 5-10-20 upwards of 30 billion dollars and it seems the new standard for tokenomics is 10-12-15 circulating And it's just, it's not sustainable. And that's what Vinny and I think some of the others were pointing out earlier, that we've got all this money that's tied up and all these tokens that are tied up, and they have to go somewhere.

It's just, they're going to keep dumping. You got Saga, DYM, and all these Cosmos tokens, and so many more that are down 80 90 percent since launch and still only at 15 circulating supply and money's not going to come in and save these projects because they still don't even have a project there's there's nothing to them so there's some of these are launching with 5 10 billion dollar valuations with nothing but a white paper so it's the past 12 months of the market that has just been ridiculous. It's going to really cause us a lot of harm going forward in the next 12 months. Robby, your thoughts on this and also the question going back to Alts, how much more do you

think they'd bleed? I know you're not a short-term trader. Again, you can always use the long-term or long-term investors, but I'm sure you have those discussions internally because if you do OTC deals, should we do them now? Should we do them in two, three months? How do you make that decision? Sure. I mean, I think for us, we're always looking at the long term. And it was interesting because of the comments made earlier. I was just sort of looking back at some of our recent projects.

And at least for us, you know, none of the projects that we create, you know, we generally keep our position of team and investors and everything to 25% or less of the project because the point of it is to be community-owned and widely distributed. But I think for us, we don't feel any selling pressure because obviously we're long-term investors and builders in the space. So I think at the moment, our focus is really just on investing.

What am I going to... Yeah, but on the investment side of things, how do you determine that? How much more do your team, I know you're not a trader yourself, but your team, when you ask them the question, hey, should we start making some of those OTC deals now? Should we wait another couple of months? What feedback do you get from the team?

I think we generally take it on a case-by-case basis. I don't think anybody, at least on our team, has a good sense of what's going on right now because there seems to be a little bit of unpredictable volatility over the last couple of weeks. But the interesting thing is I'm hearing a lot more noise from people about feeling quite positive about October. I don't know why they've hit upon October and not September or November. But I think that there seems to be some consensus that we'll have positive market movement in October. Yeah. And we had Buzz here earlier. I would have loved to ask him a few questions. And Gareth, I saw you come up as well before going to DOP,

DLP. I'd love to ask your thoughts on the markets as well. I have Cointelegraph open in front of me reading the news of the day. So if you've got any thoughts, we'd love to hear them, Gareth. And I would have loved Buzz to be up. I'm not sure if he glitched out. Just kind of get your thoughts on the meme coin market and also the whole celebrity token meta. I was interviewing Jason Derulo. It's pinned on my profile if you want to watch it. Yesterday, last minute interview, he's kind of talking about the whole concept of a celebrity token. He's pretty sincere about building a community, 100% float, celebrity token, try to build utility to it. And he owns a very small amount of that token.

It's a pretty cool story. And after that, I started looking at the concept of these celebrity meme coins becoming kind of a social token linked to the celebrity's brand. So it's a great discussion with Jason. And Buzz, if you're there, come up. I'd love to go to back and forth on that. Or we could do it on Monday. But Gareth, good to have you. Would love your thoughts on the markets.

There's a lot of people in the audience right now saying, hey, all right, cool. Should we get back in the market? Should we hold our bags? Is the bleed going to continue? Would love your thoughts. Not financial advice. Yeah, definitely not financial advice. Yeah, definitely not financial advice,

Mario. Great to be here. Obviously, always listening out to you guys. And yeah, thanks for having me involved. Obviously, it's been a very interesting week.

Managing editor of Cointelegraph, obviously you're reading everything that our writers are putting out there. And for me, the two things that have stood up as the biggest market movers are Germany's plays to sell all the Bitcoin that they've been seizing over the years. And then obviously the Mt. Gox news, the creditors moving those coins and lots of people looking to sell them.

So obviously I think that spooked a lot of people. No one can really tell me why people are actually just looking to offload everything. I think all the Bitcoin maxis out there are kind of licking their chops at all the cheap sats. So it kind of just depends if you're a glass half full or a glass half empty type of person. And I think it is probably a good opportunity for people that are looking to buy Bitcoin in particular. But obviously, the rest of the market's in the red and it's painful for anyone who's got some positions open. I've got a couple of our writers trying to speak to people in Germany and figure out the main reasoning behind the government actually just wanting to offload their Bitcoin. And I remember having a chat with the former IRS head, Chief Jim Lee, about a year and a half ago. And he was kind of explaining to me how the US went about it.

And obviously, they went through the Marshall service and they would try to sell the Bitcoin that they've seized over time. And the real rationale behind was that the US was hard pressed to figure out how best to go about custodying all this Bitcoin, who takes care of it. There's a lot of overheads involved. I mean, I know you could just say that this stuff should just be thrown into a hardware wallet and put in a vault somewhere, but

you know, they've had their own sort of regulatory takes on Bitcoin, and I think in their interest, it was just, let's sell the Bitcoin as we seize it and as we go. And maybe the German government is just taking a similar approach and they've copped some flack this week. So that's been pretty interesting to me. But I think those two factors, Mt. Gox and Germany selling their Bitcoin is the main driving factor of where we're at now. And it's been a pretty interesting week for us at the publication.

Yeah. And I'm going on your website now and I see one of the main Josh. You know, send a quick thank you to Joshua Sullivan for putting out the headline, Bitcoin will crash to 50K, according to 10X Research. So thanks, Josh, for the good news. Also, Gareth, I also sent the message to the team. Just come up with an idea. If given a great recap and obviously being the managing editor at Cointelegraph, it would be good to do quick 10 minute recap uh on the show um be good at the beginning of the show if you or any of your other editors can jump in and do coin telegraph updates of the day and do like a quick 10 15 minute overview of all the updates i think it'll be good you know exposure for you guys and we'd

love you and if you can be you personally you're a great speaker i think these updates will be great i think you've done a great job oh no definitely keen to get involved thanks mario and yeah like uh all our writers are working pretty hard um it's a very interesting time in the space and uh robbie also just touched on hamster combat and i've actually told us more about this yeah i was reading yeah can you tell me more about hamster combat i was just reading on it again on your website i was reading about hamster combat how did they grow to these levels? How's the retention like? How are the game mechanics? I haven't really given it the attention it deserves,

but I've also kind of become a lot more bullish on, obviously, Telegram and Ton. Yeah, exactly. Well, I think the main takeaway is, yeah, Telegram and Ton are – Telegram in general is just the main leader, right? I mean, they've got a massive social graph, 900 million users. The way these games work, essentially, it works like a web page within Telegram. So a key reason why they're so popular is that you don't leave Telegram, you know, you play the game on Telegram and it's a very smart sort of mechanics

and social referral systems to boost their overall metrics. So Pavel Durov mentioned them in his Telegram post yesterday. I wrote a really extensive feature for Cointelegraph. You can find it on the editors' choice tab on our website. It's a long read if you're into that, but really, really interesting game. It's pretty simple. It's a clicker, right? So it's a clicker game, an idle game. You would load in interesting game. It's pretty simple. It's a clicker, right? So it's a clicker game, an idle game.

You would load in the game. Your avatar is a hamster. And you basically signed a contract as a CEO of a crypto exchange. And you click on the screen to earn coins. And you use these coins to buy upgrades for your exchange. The more upgrades you buy and the more your profit per hour goes up which is essentially just a um you know like a an idle um mechanic to to earn more coins and um the main driving factor of their social growth so if you look at their youtube

they've broken record for the fastest channel to 10 million subscribers and essentially what they do there is they offer you a lot of in-game coins to go and watch youtube content there's a certain amount of coins that you can earn for referring your friends and then if you refer enough of your friends you can buy some upgrades that are only obtained if you've referred a certain amount of people so obviously these referral mechanics are a big part of why this game has so many followers. And I mean, in terms of the numbers, people are basically telling me, you know, Yatsu from Animoca, Robbie's good mate, a good friend of mine as well now, you know, he was telling me that their numbers are just absolutely unreal. It's probably up there between the third and fifth fastest growing mobile

platform, whatever you want to call it, in the world. Threads got to 100 million users in like three days. Hamster Combat did it in three months, which makes them the third fastest to 100 million ever. So, you know, we're trusting their team and the metrics that they're giving us. But essentially, all these different social referral mechanics that they've done have allowed them to grow their platform to unbelievable numbers. Now, I'm just interested to see what happens when they do the token airdrop. You know, is there going to be a huge drop off of of users once they've received some of these tokens um what's going to happen i i honestly don't know um it's going to be really interesting to see but i went on the game now just so you know i've been clicking it i thought i expected

something more interesting is it just literally i'm just going to have to combat it's very easy go to the website guys click on it do you just click on that fucking hamster and that's it am i missing something so so it looks like that at the beginning you just click on the hamster and that's it am i missing something so so it looks like that at the beginning you just click on the hamster and that's the core mechanic to initially get coins but as i said the fastest way to grow is go and do these referral mechanics so if you go and watch the youtube video um or if you refer a few friends you can get 10 000 coins 50 000 coins and the the base mechanic that they're telling users they need to focus on is not the amount of in-game coins you have it's the profit per hour

that your exchange earns that will be taken to account when they do the token airdrop so i mean it's an idle game mario like there's nothing special about it i mean i think in terms of what it is it looks pretty good and you know you know, you can kill 10, 15 minutes of your time, but it's not a triple A game. I mean, by any rates of the imagination. But I think the promise of the airdrop and what happened with NotCoin is massively influential to the amount of attention that they've been getting. And, you know, 200 million users, that's nothing to scoff at you know yeah i'm just literally my fingers are dead i'm trying to press because i think you have to count it down from a thousand i'm up to 41 40 30 my fingers are dead trying to figure out what happens when i click

on the thousand whatever it is to get to a thousand there goes zero oh that's it okay nothing happened okay i don't know how the hell that went viral i'm gonna check it out a bit further uh robbie and then yeah i will i will I'll try to find out what it is. But Robbie, we'd love your final thoughts on this. I know we kind of moved away from the markets a bit. It's got some pretty exciting. And I think that's a lot more exciting. You know, Habsicombat's growth is a lot more exciting than whatever's happening in Mt.

Gox or the German government, even though those impact the market or impact the sexy headlines. But Robbie, I'd love your response to... Sure. I think Gareth is spot on because it's about this sort of hacking the viral growth mechanics. And the exciting part is that even if you take kind of a pessimistic view and just think, okay, you've got 200 million people out there who are now tapping away on a hamster because they want to farm some tokens and then they're going to get an airdrop and then they're going

to dump their airdrop. That would be the pessimistic view. But what's going to happen is they're going to take that airdrop and they're going to look for other stuff, at least in the ton ecosystem and say, okay, so what do I spend this airdrop on? What can I do with this stuff? And so when you think of it as building a user acquisition funnel, there's a percentage of those users who are going to become hardcore retained users. There's a percentage of those users who are going to become hardcore retained users. There's a percentage of those users who are going to put

more capital into the platform because they're like, ooh, I used my airdrop and tried this and this is fun and I'm going to do more stuff. And so that's actually kind of the gateway that I see here that's really exciting. Yeah, Amar and before I go to William, more thoughts on

because that's a good example of fundamentals being better than ever. Yeah, if we go way back, we would remember Kakao. Well, they still exist, Lion and WeChat. They developed this economy before, outside crypto, right? What I'm really liking about the TAN ecosystem or Telegram is you're onboarding Web 2 players as well. And when they retain, eventually you'll see people spending in those games. And that is a massive ecosystem. And it's only going to be cheap for a certain while. And then it's going to get really competitive. And I think that is where early players like Hamster

Combat, a lot of other guys, are really going to be able to take advantage of the user acquisition. And William, we'll give you the mic and then we're going to go to Data Ownership Protocol, which I think guys, first, thanks for partnering with us today. But more importantly, you guys, despite all the bearishness

that we're seeing today, you guys went ahead and went with your launch today. So I'd love to go through the process, the thought process there. But before that, William, I'd love to give you the mic. Yeah, quickly. So just something to think about is that all of this traction that I've been hearing about, and this is great to have so many million users come in and click on whatever. But I think there is a big emphasis on gamification and that's a bit worrisome to me because gamification is not a business model gamification maybe is the lever is maybe the spark is how you start things how you attract users

but long term what happens after that we cannot assume that gamification is an infinite game that's going to come back and bring benefits over and over again. It's going to run its course. So my advice is that what happens after gamification, I want to see higher quality use cases that are not just silly ways of earning tokens by just doing silly things yeah yeah data ownership protocol will lead how are you guys

we are good we are good great to be here thank you for it pleasure to have you man well you've been on the show since the bear market uh you guys have been built a massive community create a lot of hype dealt with a bit of fun as. It's been a pretty crazy journey. And now here you are, you finally listed the token on not the best day. How was the experience? Well, you know, it's not a secret that the market is bleeding today. Yeah. We can see Bitcoin, we can see Ethereum, basically everything is bleeding. And the biggest challenge is to launch big projects when the market is bleeding because you need the demand, you need the liquidity. And that's a huge challenge. And we've seen in the, I don't know, in the last two weeks, a lot of major big projects having this challenge as well but for us at dop it's very important you know as a project

to communicate with the community that's the reason why we are here by the way like crypto town hall to communicate with the community to share the roadmap to give updates tell us more about the launch itself i think it launched on a few exchanges including right but let me see the exchanges right here but also i want to talk about the launch itself. I think you launched on a few exchanges, including Bybit. Let me see the exchanges right here. But also I want to talk about the token distribution, the lockups. A third of your tokens are already out there, already floating? Right. We have one, like 30 is unlocked, but 1.5 billion tokens are staked.

Even more, I think even about two billion out of around seven um and yeah like if you'll go through the tokenomics you will see that it's it's much less than a third that is actually released and we've we've put a lot of efforts to lock a lot of tokens but still the the market condition was very challenging yeah but i think the the unlock is having a big unlock is not necessarily a bad thing i think it's a good thing just so that distribution is there there's not going to be too much inflation repression i don't know what the lockup period is like but what did you was there a discussion behind the scenes like amar who's next to me me now Robbie we're invested in revolving as well and um you know you just can I share what you said Ammar just very briefly about the launch or no I don't think it's pretty yeah sure people yeah yeah so Ammar said like you know we're thinking

about delaying the launch and pretty much every project is doing that that yet you guys went ahead and launched anyway uh what was the discussion like uh in the office like why did you guys decide to launch anyway today it's not a big deal like in the office? Why did you guys decide to launch anyway today? It's not a big deal. In the grand scheme of things, the launch date doesn't mean much. But in the short time frame, it does. So what was the thought process there? Was there a debate at least?

So, you know, Mario, it's almost impossible to time the market. You can speculate about the date, if it will be a good date, a bad date. But when you go with big exchanges, like Buyabit, for example, you need to sort the dates. You need to get everything done. You need to get everything done with the market makers. It's a very long process.

It's a very long procedure. And you need all the exchanges to list you at the same time. So you will have high liquidity. So postponing the listing can cause a lot of problems to a project. And timing the market, sometimes it looks easy, but it's very complicated. Yeah, I agree. Well, let's dig into the technology itself. Again, you've been on the show many times. It's been a pretty crazy journey. So let's talk about data ownership protocol.

I think the name speaks for itself. And you address a problem that's being talked about more and more, especially with the rise of AI. But let's kick it off at the beginning, the basics for anyone that doesn't know. What is data ownership protocol? What is DLP? So data ownership protocols, basically trying to every person that receives assets from our crypto wallet will have access to all of our financial information, like transaction history, holdings.

For some reason, if we had the same things for our credit cards, we would never use them again. So we believe that in the upcoming bull run, when people will want to use their crypto assets for normal payments, not only for buying tokens and to speculate about them, just actually to use their assets for payments, they will be afraid to use them, to use their crypto wallets, because the other side will immediately know everything about them. And that's not ideal for us as a user experience. So that ownership protocol allows users to transact on top of Ethereum privately, yeah? And to control exactly what they share and with whom. So let's say you have 10 Ethereum, but you want the other user to see

that you have one Ethereum and above. You don't want him to know the exact amount. You can do it even with NFTs, yeah? The idea is to give you more one Ethereum and above. You don't want him to know the exact amount. You can do it even with NFTs. Yeah, the idea is to give you more possibilities, more options. I want to dig into this further, but I'm going through the comments. A lot of people are asking back

to your tokenomics, your race. So every time we've had you on the show, we've always been focused on the technology, which we will now. But I think I've got a few questions about the way you've raised capital and the way you've listed, because it's a bit unorthodox in the way you've built your community. First, you raised a shit ton of money.

Congratulations. And you've also listed with a pretty big unlock at the beginning. What was the strategy there? So, you know, the crypto market is very unique. During bull market, everything grows and expands. But when the bear market hits, you can see 60, 70 percent of the projects just vanish, disappear. So why? Because in bear market, there is less activity and fewer people around. It's really hard for projects to survive. So the goal of our private sale was twofold. First, to bring as many people as possible into our community. And it worked. We had 380,000

token holders, which is like top 15 holders communities on Ethereum, which is really big. And second, to raise enough money to survive at least four bear markets. So this way, DOP can achieve its vision no matter what the market does. Even now, we can run and to develop for 10 years front and to create and to develop and to bring DOP to the top. Regardless to the market conditions. So that was our strategy. And regarding the tokenomics, yeah, it's very easy to do market conditions. So that was our strategy. And regarding the tokenomics, yeah, it's very easy to do vesting. It's even our interests

or most of the investors' interests, they like to see the vesting. It makes them more relaxed. But we believe when you vest users, you become ATM. Every month when the time comes, they just take the tokens and they sell them. But when you don't lock them,

when you just give them their tokens, so yeah, you might have like one, two, three challenging days, but then you are starting to grow in a healthy way. One of our founders is Koji Irokado. He's one of the founding teams of Cardano. And he told us that one of the best decisions in Cardano was not to lock the users, to give them options to stake their tokens, but not to lock them. So yeah, it might be challenging for the first week, but for the long run, it's very healthy. What was the unlock schedule? What can you

share about the unlock schedule? Because you did have and how much did you raise how much did you raise what percentage was unlocked because it's an interesting argument that you're making is that when you're unlocked there's a big selling pressure at the beginning but then you don't have that race that inflationary pressure that overhang for months and years to come right you. You're fighting bottom and then you don't have the ATM effect that every end of the month people are getting their tokens and sell them. Getting the tokens and sell them almost immediately. We raised about $138 million and we didn't lock any of the tokens.

All of them of the private cell, of course. But you can see that almost 2 billion tokens are being locked, are being staked. And that shows us how the community trusts us. They lock it and it's not flexible yet. If they want to claim their tokens, they need to wait. So you're saying 100% of the private raise was all unlocked? Yes, correct. Okay, that's a really interesting strategy.

And now that you've launched, are you happy with that strategy? Would you recommend it to other projects? Yes, we definitely recommend it. I know it's too early, obviously. I'm not saying you you just hours ago. So there is a lot of experience to our founders and the founding team. Of course, it's not ideal, this market condition that we launched our token into. But yeah, we believe in this strategy.

We believe that from now on, when we will release all of our partnerships, collaborations, new deployments that we're going to do, we have a lot of great stuff to share with the community in like the following 30 days. And we believe that when we will share this news, we won't share them in bleeding market. We will share them in better conditions and the market will react to it so yeah we believe that from now on we will when we will share this positive positive news the effect will be good but no one will be worried about the unlocks anymore no we and we we believe that even more and more users will lock their tokens will stake their their tokens And we can see this effect. We started with only 1 billion tokens staked. And slowly it's going up, up, up. Like in two weeks, we already managed to lock 2 billion tokens.

And we believe that this is just the start. I'm fascinated by everything you've done, to be honest. Because it's, and I genuinely mean it. Because like the race was massive everything was unlocked and your community was how the hell did you build the community that you have yeah because at the beginning i'll tell you internally we asked a lot of questions internally before working with you guys like all right cool they're doing a massive race shit everything's unlocked uh they have a massive community how the hell did they

build that community within a few weeks like Something must be off. We started looking into it a bit further. Obviously, we decided to work with you and it paid off, so we're glad we did. But can you just tell me more about what did you do? Because you don't tick a lot of the traditional boxes with the projects we invest in or work with. So one of our strategies, we had two major things that we've done. The first one was the structure of the private cell. So the private cell was in a web structure that user can invite only his community. He can't invite any external people, just his internal community.

And by doing so, we imported communities into DOP. We swollen them. And we managed to bring almost 40,000 people like this. And then we developed our testnet. And the testnet structure was brilliant. It has a nice affiliation system that managed to bring 2.5 million users to our testnet. The user experience was fantastic. No one had to pay gas fees for our testnet. And eventually 500,000 people finished our testnet. And the feedbacks were great. And by doing so, we managed to create a huge community. And now, for example, and of course you can go through our page, you can see how strong and engaged our community is. For example, our mainnet,

more than 80,000 people, okay, went through zero-knowledge KYC for no reason. It's not mandatory. And they just went through zero-knowledge KYC just to try and to test our new features. They are super engaged. And you can go to Bybit announcements, for example. Scroll down on Bybit's Twitter page.

You will see that our announcement is the most engaged one, and it's all organic because our community is very, very engaged. So, yeah, it's all thanks to our strategy with the private side, with the testnet. But then going to the strategy, the private selling with the testnet. But then going to the strategy, like if you look at the launch, I think the raise you did was at 0.08 and then I think the token now is at 0.01. So obviously the people that invested privately, they took a risk and the token dropped significantly.

So what is the counter argument to that? Would you say like, hey, they took a risk, the market, et cetera. They didn't do well, anyone that invested privately, but at least the community is doing well because VCs, the lockup here is – because you've kind of avoided that long – like it's a – so essentially what I'm trying to say is that this is a bad thing for everyone that was involved before, but a good thing for anyone that wants to get involved now because the project is at a heavy discount from the private raise that you've done right so you know the launching price we always we always say like most of the the exchanges decided by themselves the listing price but you can see that there is no liquidity in the listing price you just it it's immediately changed immediately you can list it in eight cents or one cent. And the only difference will be how the graph looks like. If it's green or red, there is no liquidity in this, in this prices. So the market decides the price within like the next 10 seconds. Of course, we hoped for higher prices of course it's as i've mentioned before it's a

big project it's a high valuation evaluated project and it's far from being ideal for us to launch today far yeah but we we couldn't time the market It's impossible to time the market. And it's very sad for us that people got it in this price and now it's this price. But we can promise one thing. You know, DOP offices, it's three floor. We have here tens of workers, all of us working 24 seven on BD,

on product, legal, finance, everything, just to improve DOP. And we can promise to the community that we are not going to play. We are going to work like we worked until now, 24-7 to create value. And I will share with you later on our news and announcements that are over the corner. And you can see that there is a lot, a lot that we're going to share, a lot of developments,

a lot of partnerships, a lot of expansions of our protocol. And this is true value because when people want to use DOP, they need the DOP protocol, they will have to use DOP token. You can't really use the protocol. You can't get access to all of these features without having DOP protocol, they will have to use DOP token. You can't really use the protocol. You can't get access to all of these features without having DOP token. And by improving the technology and expanding the technology,

it will immediately affect the demand for token. Now, look, I think anyone that's going to get involved with the project now and anyone in the community, they should be happy with the way things are. I think anyone that invested privately would probably not be happy considering the launch was at such a big discount from the private rounds. But if I said this a few months ago, that would be bad. But if I say this now, because you've already listed at this price, it's a good thing for the project because you've already got so many of the tokens already out there. So maybe we can kind of wrap up this incredible journey we've had with you guys by talking about what are the – and by the way, we have tokens in DLP as well.

So we're part of those early guys. But the question I have is what are your plans moving forward? What are your announcements? Because you've kind of proven a lot of the FUD wrong with the launch you had today with some top tier exchanges led by Bybit. Your team has proven that the community is solid. You've listed the token as sitting at, I think, $100 million market cap. I was just looking at it earlier. You probably know, you're probably looking at it 24-7 uh will lead and uh and whoever's behind the doppelkamp oh there it is yeah 100 million dollar market cap i'm right um so and the volume is at

44 million upon listing and a pretty bad day for crypto so then my question to you is what are the announcements that are coming in for people that are watching your project and wanting to learn more yeah so there are a lot of big announcements around the corner. I believe that half of our quarterly roadmap will be completed in about a month. So firstly, we are going to announce major collaborations with big blockchains. I can't unfortunately share the names yet, but we will share it by, if I'm not wrong, on the 22nd, we will share the first one. So this will include endorsement and will make DOP accessible to hundreds of millions of new users, these blockchain users. On top of that, we are doing listing collaborations,

which means that together with other big projects, we will announce support for encrypting new tokens on our mainnet. If I'm not wrong, we will announce the first one today. It's a nice collaboration with one of the biggest projects today. Now, in addition to encrypting ERC20s, we will allow users to encrypt NFTs. So imagine being able to send NFTs from your wallet to other wallets without disclosing your personal information. That will be implemented in about like 25, 28 days from today.

And of course, we are going to have some big announcements regarding upgrading the security of the protocol. We have a nice collaboration with Haken. So we're going to have a big bounty with them and a protocol monitoring. And we're launching developers grant. So we're going to give grants for developers to create and to develop applications for DOP. So yeah, that's all planned for the very short term.

And that's basically why we wanted to get listed on as many exchanges as we can, because people will need to have access to the DOP token in order to use our technology and the new features that we are working on. Congratulations. Which exchanges do you list on? Gate, Mexi? I'm guessing. I'm not even looking. Gate. Let me guess.

If you went on Bybit as the number one, so it would have been Bybit, Ku been by bit q coin gate maxi and some of the smaller ones correct right correct oh perfect cool congratulations guys you know it's been a cool journey and having you on the show for so many months since the bear market and now you're listed um and uh crunch time is here you've got a listed token now that will represent the community's um trust in what you guys are. So real pleasure to have you on stage. And thank you for partnering with us. And for everyone else, really appreciate today's show. It was a pretty big show because everyone's scared about the market. Let me change the title back.

We'll see you again. I don't know. We'll do a weekend. If the market crashes on the weekend, we'll do an urgent weekend space. By the way, check out the interview with Jason Derulo. I think you'll enjoy it, guys, on my channel, on my profile. Talking about celebrity talk. He's going through his phone live on the show to kind of see.

He's saying some things that a lot of people in crypto were not believing. So I'm like, hey, let me see your phones. Let me see your DMs. So it was a really good chat. I think you'll like it. Otherwise, yeah, we'll see you again on Monday if the market doesn't crash on the weekend. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much.

Thanks, guys. Thank you.