The Wolf Of All Streets - Have the Whales Finished Selling? | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

The highlight of this story is the sale of a staggering 115,000 Bitcoin, valued at over $4 billion at the time of the trade.Alongside this dominant narrative, we also explore other intriguing developments in the world of cryptocurrency. From the ongoing regulatory debates to the innovative applications of blockchain technology, this video offers a comprehensive overview of the key trends and events shaping the future of digital assets. Join us as we delve deep into the activities of these influential Bitcoin whales, unpack the potential implications, and discuss the wider context of the crypto industry. This is a must-watch for anyone interested in the ever-evolving landscape of digital currencies.

We got the topic here. Have the whales finished selling? This was obviously based on the article that said, I think it was our topic this morning on Macromanday, $150,000. Was that the number of Bitcoin sold by Wales over the past couple months? Yeah, I mean, it's, look, it's, it's, it's about 200,000 over the, you know, since July, at least. And, you know, I'll repeat for the audience here, what I said on Macrom Monday, which is, if you drew up a playbook that said Bitcoin is going to go mainstream and you're going to start towards hyper-bitcoinization, the first step that has to happen is it needs to broaden its appeal outside of the OG niche community that was Bitcoin into the general public, into the financial. system. And this is a necessary statement of that. And if you ask yourself the question, could that happen at a price like this, at a market cap like this, without any real impact on the price, you know, without volatility being dramatically lower than past sell-offs? Yeah, you know, that's what we're seeing. To me, that's bullish. And it's a long-term thing. It doesn't mean that we're going to go up immediately. It doesn't mean any of that. But it does mean that a lot of

technical analysis might be misapplied. Gorov, do you have any insight on the whale selling and what that might look like moving forward, you know, being a market maker and all given not for Bitcoin, but still? Not really. I don't think that's, I mean, it'll be an counter. It will be a counter argument to what I said on my last phase three weeks ago. Practically, it's a large market with massive liquidity from around the world 24-7. Do you think anyone knows that?

Anyone knows what's happening? Not really. So, but what I would like to say is everybody was expecting these datcos to actively go and blast the market with all the billions that they show they have raised. And by the way, this was also one of my arguments and narratives. But after being in New York for the last 16 days and, of course, before that in the rest of US, including Wyoming, Salt Conference, the reality has sort of surfaced, to me at least for those who know it, probably know it, that almost 80 to 90% money raised in that course is Bitcoin and is in kind. So there is no active purchase of Bitcoin that there was no active purchase of Bitcoin planned for these months. And hence that liquidity hasn't actually hit the market.

But on the contrary, we have started effing the equity markets because now all these equity investors, all these in-kind investors, take the shares that they've got through their in-kind Bitcoin and Ethereum contribution or even, you know, Salana contribution, whatever, to the Datco's. And they, on the day of their stock registration, they just simply dump it and cash out the premium as their profit in arbitrage of token versus equity. Not getting too much into that rabbit hole. So we are missing that equity purchase. I'm not saying there is no cash liquidity coming from the datcoes.

It's just that it takes a whole lot of time to deal through the regulatory and compliance paperwork, registrations, understand the landscape. Not everybody is Tom Lee, who has been in the market and around the circuit, you know, for the last decade and just jumps onto it right away. And so we have seen when just one or two companies bring that massive public market liquidity to Ethereum. Ethereum goes in large circles and good volatility and good pricing, of course, all-time high.

And we should expect that in the coming time while most of our friends get ready with the capital in their datcos and more capital rushes in i'll take a pause with that so just gorov i'm the i'm recognizing your voice you show us a listener to me by the way just anyone who cares uh but doesn't that indicate that the amount of distribution from wales is dramatically underestimated at 200 000 because wouldn't that mean that all of the in-kind donate all in-kind donations, all the incline transfers to Datco's, which then got scooped up by equity investors. Isn't that effectively whale coins that were broadened to new investors via the Datco's? I mean, that's in the hundreds of thousands, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's a churn. And I don't think I have to tell you or anyone that, you know, that Bitcoin is still super liquid and much in demand, even in retail. So while this arbitrage also means, don't get me wrong, they are contributing with their Bitcoins and the Bitcoins stay with the DATCO and they exit their liquidity and then they go buy their bitcoins most of the times, right? So there is an active buy pressure. There's just like, I'm just saying that all that tens of billions coming in week on

weekly basis from global debt goes that hasn't actually started injecting now when i'm on my own no no i i i understand but my point is this it just objectively forget forget everything else okay if you told if you had said three months ago or four months ago that say i don't know i don't know what the number is but it's probably like 500 000 bitcoin are going to be sold by oh gs and that new money is going to come in to buy those, and the price is going to be roughly where it is today, you would be, you would say, wow, that seems unlikely, but okay, that would be very bullish. Now, what I'm saying is, okay, we know 200,000 or so have been sold by Wales as Bitcoin in the open market, right? You know, we know that's just with the numbers and the numbers.

But it looks like at least 300,000 Bitcoin were transferred into Datco's, which then new money equity investors bought shares of the Datco's. Am I missing, am I getting that wrong? I mean, because maybe I am. Maybe my numbers are totally wrong. I don't know. I'm just curious. Probably, Dave, probably not all of the Bitcoin has been that's been transferred into

these companies, has been sold by the people who receive shares in return, right? They still are the overwhelming majority shareholders. Yeah, I mean, there are some incredible investors. One of that I've got to know, of course, we cannot name out bad participants. We can definitely name good participants. Tim Draper happens to be holding all of his DATCO holdings. So there are good people, no doubt. Right, but Tim, he's holding his DACCO holding.

Yeah, but investors have bought into the DACCO as well. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, so I'm just saying that it'll take time to deploy. It's part of this distribution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll take time to deploy. And then let's not miss the fact that for some reason, I mean, not some reason, and I mean, people still live by technical charts.

So 100K and anything around 110K is a big selling point. It's a big mental barrier. Haven't we seen that with Ethereum 2 around 5,000? So yes, there is a lot of sale in coming. There's a lot of contemplation. A lot of people, can you hear me? I would have muted Dave's Mike, but he's listener. So I got a good a shit there, which was funny.

Yeah, exactly. I was like... Are you okay, Dave? He said he was in the car. It might just be traffic. I thought it says spilled coffee. The ocean wasn't like fully spilled coffee, but just a little. Dave, what are you doing, Dave?

I was thinking that Dave had road rage. Okay. So I think I've covered the point unless you want me to speak more on that. Dave? All good? Okay. If I can pick up where Dave was it? I think we lost Dave, but it's over, have it.

Yeah. No, I mean, I think there's stuff that's clearly been sold, Scott, which is what you're referring to. A couple of hundred thousand Bitcoin appeared based off of on-chain activity to have been transferred to exchanges and over the counter desks and been sold. And there were public announcements. And this was a, we're talking billions and billions of dollars of Bitcoin. and the point you're making is the price is still well over $100,000. So Bitcoin has been dispersed to other hands without a price shock. You know, it's managed to absorb it.

And that's really intriguing. You know, like that is probably largely unexpected. And especially since all the hoopla over the ETF launches as well behind us now, we're a year and a half, basically, into the ETF existing, and it had been a success. So we keep seeing, although we don't know exactly where it's from, we do keep seeing significant inflows of cash into Bitcoin, and through all these, and through many different mechanisms, I think if again, we zoom out on time, we see the ETF inflows, we saw the debt market inflows through the convertible debt offerings that strategy was putting on.

We're now seeing various different types through strategies preferred shares that each target a different source of capital. And they're not all gushers that never stop, but they're all significant amounts of capital as compared to the size of Bitcoin's daily volume or Bitcoin's total market cap. I'm also in the glitch now, so good luck. We can hear Dave's car again. You can hear my wife yelling at me to put the phone down. Yes, that's right. Yeah, that was exactly, it was well articulated, Tover, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

Yeah, yeah. And probably I was not able to, like, articulate my response clearly, because I was, like, more focused on discussing why aren't we already at 200K? but almost the same thing, which has been established. Large supplies were moved, but large supplies were moved because there was a promise of it not moving further, which is the DATCO promise. So a whole bunch of, this is one more detail probably you guys would like. Who are the biggest DATCO investors?

These are the same guys that have been backing miners and investing in large mining operations for the last decade or so. So essentially, if you see large holdings of Bitcoins that haven't moved for a decade or eight years or six years moving today, they are moving on the promise of Datcoe that it won't move further. So yes, while the movement is real,

you're counting 200,000 bitcoins, the Bitcoins are just changing hands and moving from one party to another. Right? So it's not really hitting the liquid market or exchanges. Yeah. But what else can be? Bitcoins do besides moving from one hand to another.

Exactly. That's amazing. I mean, I was meaning hitting the exchange liquidity. Sorry. I meant exchange liquidity. So the price fluctuations that you would expect either going down because of that liquidity hitting the liquid market, I mean, that amount of Bitcoin hitting the liquidity market didn't actually occur. So it was just probably, again, I started by saying nobody knows exact if you just

contemplating, but it is probably just about a very small percentage going to the liquid market, which was, of course, bought out, and we are waiting for the next wave of buying pressure for us to hit 150. What about on the digital asset treasury side, not the Bitcoin treasury side? Who's had the huge announcement here? Well, it was announced last week, Galaxy Jump and Multi-Coyne. I think they were raising 1.1. I think they ended up raising $1.6 or $1.7 billion for a Salonan a Treasury company.

And that's being banked or the company, I know it trades under Ford. I can't remember the exact name. I don't have the news in front of me. But do you have any more insight into the Al-Poin treasury market? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I am building the largest alt-coin basket. I mean, do I have an insight? Who else has? Thank you for bringing the attention to me. But are you talking about the one set up by multi-coin and galaxy?

Yeah, multi-coin galaxy and jump. Yeah, and I think that just started trading today on public market under Ford, I believe. But I'll look it up to make sure. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay, I didn't know that they have already started because, I mean, last time I checked, Kyle was raising. But most of the cash capital is basically the FTX sale that was purchased. So those Solanas have gone in. And then, of course, Maltekwine is a seed and early investor of Solana. So those Solanas have gone into that. And Jump, we all know, was like there are three large contracts of Jump that the word knows about.

And that's Terraluna, Solana, and Sui. So the secret is out there. we know how a billion dollars worth of Solana have been assembled. So I've got the story here. It's just to be exact, Ford Industries Incorporated announces 1.65 billion private placement and cash and stable coin commitments led by Galaxy, jump at multi-coin capital to initiate Solana Treasury's strategy, Kyle Samani, who you just mentioned, will be the managing partner of multi-coin capital to become chairman of the board of directors.

So, yeah, it's Ford Industries and it trades, I believe, under Fort, F-O-R-D. So does that mean, Goro? You can hear me, right? Yeah, we hear you. Yep, yeah, I can. Yeah, I can't. I had a look at my phone, but I can talk. So last, was it last week or maybe it was the week before, there was a story from the typical, you know, sleuths that said Galaxy Digital moving, you know, big slug of Solana from wallet to wallet.

And, of course, Salada dropped on that on the theory that people who were expecting that meant they were going to sell on the open market. Are you effectively saying that the risk of that is now basically zero because they've moved it into this treasury company? And so that overhang is gone now? Exactly. Yep, yep, yep. That goes that not evil at all. For those listeners you want to understand, that is much more bullish for long-term Solana than, you know, that they're going to, then some nebulous, we're going to, going to go buy it from people because effectively people have been pointing to that

overhang as the reason that's kept you have to live in its price and why it hasn't gone back to its all-time highs. So just speaking as a salon-a-holder, I kind of look at that as, oh, that's really good. And you made me smile when you were describing what was going on. So that's Yeah, yeah, yeah. Man, look, I am telling you, and now I can speak with so much more confidence and real detail. But the problem is in the public markets, you can't go out. with details. So up until, you know, last month when I was joining the space, I had slightly less confidence, but I had a louder voice. Now I have a whole bunch of more confidence in data, but I can't speak anything because we are getting into these. Privileged. Yeah.

Having lived my life as running three broker dealers, I am well aware of what you say. So now I'm communicating that my taxi is under the building on emails, which is stupid. But coming to the point, the amount of liquidity, I was just explaining this phenomenon to somebody yesterday in crypto, I mean, who are our investors. The initiation of that goes happened with crypto investors that were like large holders or backers of other crypto companies. So the numbers that we saw were largely in kind and then, you know, some institutional investors started coming in. But all thanks to the participants, like so far, we are blessed in the Datco space that everybody doing a Datco is like not everybody, but almost everybody, is very reputed, is here for the long run, has been in crypto for like a very long time, most of the times, you know, and has good intent. So we haven't seen the wave of fraudulent, you know, and bad actors who would come and destroy the Datco reputation. And because of that, most of these are well overperforming, or let's say, actually performing.

And so the word is going out into the institutional space that this is an industry worth looking. I mean, look at what, you know, ether mine has done. Tom is just incredible. He took a company with 40 million or 20 million. I don't have the number to $8.5 billion in Ethereum's, right? It's insane what you can do if you know how to play in the public markets and the amount of liquidity. So the amount of like cash now ready to gush in and coming in every day is insane and we'll see that increasing exponentially almost every day. And let's not forget, this is not NASDAQ. We're talking about one datk launched somewhere in the world every day now, right? And maybe two. I mean, I don't know. So that's a massive amount of liquidity across that goes. We'll have an incredible old season in the next six months. David, if you have another comment.

Yeah, I'm going to hop off. I have something, but I'm just somebody has last questions. Thanks, man. Go ahead, Alex. Yes. Yeah, I was just going to talk about the old season as well. But just to piggyback on what everyone is saying and to give you guys some specific data that we see across our exchange, the old season, which I now call a fundamental season, is really reflecting within the Swiss War Gap users. And I wouldn't define them as whales, guys. Sorry, because I don't know what a whale is.

Is it someone who's in the millions or someone in the 10 millions or in the 100 millions? I guess a VTC well is different from a crypto whale. But if we look at people who have like six digits of wealth, one trend that's really, really interesting, guys, that what we're seeing is a lot of the diehard fans of the previous cycle. So let's talk about the Cosmos ecosystem. Let's talk about the Pocodot ecosystem. Let's talk about Algarand. near a lot of the people used to have six digits in some of the coins that performed extremely well in the all coin cycle of 2020 2021 are actually offloading guys a lot of them are offloading to tokens like the hype token that have very strong fundamentals are offloading to ave that once

again has very very strong fundamentals are offloading to curve are offloading to all the tokens that actually have very strong fundamentals and so is someone dying? there or someone's having a reaction to what you're saying someone really hates all coins here but anyway scott i just want to piggyback and just give you like some of the data that is within our exchange that is confident not confidential but it's not public to show that there is a change in spirit and that it really feels like this all coin season as of today right and if you look at the general market data and you compare all of the coins that outperform bitcoin so bitcoin is roughly 95% up year on year. And since the beginning of the year, it's roughly up 35%.

If you think about all the coins or tokens that have outperformed Bitcoin, so at least doubled it, all of them are fundamentally baits. So there's some sort of maturity and also some people who are jumping ship, regardless of all the pain they've endured, you know, across, you know, let's say the three to four years that have passed. David? Yeah. I was just going to add into the comment. about Ford, the Solana Pipe. Yes. Was a very interesting announcement that came out just before the open is NASDAQ filed the SEC

to basically trade stocks, tokenized stocks, and they indicate that they'll do so by the third quarter of 2026. The question comes down. If you're looking in a real world application, it's going to be supporting stocks and the volume of that, the transaction throughput per second, obviously it favors Solana more than Ethereum. I would also say, going back to a call I think we had last week, Dave, you had said something about Novagrats, you know, obviously positioning himself for something like this to the extent

the galaxy is participating in what is now going to be the largest Salon and Treasury company. Very interesting move to look at here. And I would also just say, you know, don't want to rein anything on the alt season here because we work with a lot of these companies. But, you know, the players who are getting involved in the space have much, much deeper pockets. So it's going to be very, very interesting in here. But, yeah, for the meanwhile, it's all up and to the right. I mean, may I ask a question? You know, like, we talk a lot.

I hear a lot about stocks moving to the blockchain because it's open 24-7. And I guess it's not just because it's 24-7. I mean, faster, cheaper, no. third party in between, but yes. Okay, but, but you know, again, for me, I think the question when we move to stocks in there is, and I don't want to sound like a Luddite, so I want to be careful, but I want to sound like a healthy skeptic. As far as the 24-7 is concerned, if there's a new channel that's going to move these things 24-7, wouldn't NASDAQ, New York Stock Exchange and others, just like all they have to do is not shut down their databases at 5, at 4.30 p.m. every

day. And if it's looking like it's going to move, then the regulations should be able to follow suit. So there's another competitor to Solana here, which is NASDAQ itself. And I guess the question becomes, are people at, you know, one of the things we see with the big liquidity area, which is Bitcoin, is a lot of the liquidity has come in and maybe way too much of late through non-self-custodial solutions where people are counting on BlackRock and their stockbroker or micro strategy and their stock broker to all these assets. So there seems to still be a very strong preference for custodial managed solutions. I don't know exactly how it all plays out, but I just don't, I think that it's dangerous

to analyze the market while playing a blind eye to. what the incumbents might do. I don't think they're going to be big winners. I think there's a lot of potential iterations that we're not even discussing, right? Because I would say that if it actually ends up that the NASDAQ wants to adopt all tokenization, it'll be on a NASDAQ blockchain that is fully centralized and controlled in the same way as what we see now, right? So it's not, I suppose that that would be on a decentralized 24-7, 365 blockchain

with no, with minimal guardrails, I think is maybe not going to happen. But also, I will say, Tomor, to David's point, one thing I think, maybe you didn't add or maybe you did say it, but Galaxy actually tokenized their own stock on Solana, and not a wrapped version, like the actual stock, which was the first time we'd really seen that happen last week. So that's another sort of data point in your theory there. That's correct. Boyard, do you add your hand up? Yeah, hopefully there's not too much background. noise here. But, you know, I think there's something to be said about normalizing this thing, even if it's held centralized, you know, in this way, the idea of normalizing the 24-hour

blockchain trading is still beneficial. You know, there's a lot, even if we could do it both ways, if we had both options, people would still use the NASDAQ centralized one because we like paper trails, people who are not just fucking around. You know, usually you want to have those in place so that you can, you know, for lots of reasons. and it's legal in accounting and otherwise. So I think even if everything moves to a centralized NASDAQ blockchain, that still opens up, you know, like a pink sheets of things that are not on that that do trade freely. And just normalizing, you know, self-custling stocks like they used to do when they first invented them,

I think is cool and a huge paradigm shift. Yeah, I agree with that. We had sort of a similar conversation when Circle announced they were launching their own layer one, right? A lot of people were appalled that they wouldn't be using a decentralized permissionless network for the future of their stable coin. But kind of the example that we discussed is if you have Peggy, who's 71 years old in accounting at some random firm in the Midwest, who is now told that she's using stable coins to settle invoices and accidentally sends USDA on Solana instead of USDC on Ethereum, there's no customer service for her to call. So it's not going to happen. They're not going to use it. But for better, for worse, if you're using Circles Layer 1, you'll probably have someone

to call in a way to reverse the transaction. And to your point, Larry, that's still in the right direction, but it's certainly not the ethos of a fully decentralized blockchain. But there are certain institutions that are never going to settle in stable coins if they don't have recourse, right? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's hard to quantify exactly why and how, but it is in the right direction. And even with the ethos in mind, like it just normalizes the black market for that or the, you know, the gray market.

Exactly. Let's talk about the, since speaking of markets, let's talk about the market. We've got Mish here. Mish, can you give us the quick summary of how you're viewing Bitcoin in context of everything else happening right now? Obviously, we have PPI this week, ZPI this week, you know, I think expectation of cuts in another week. Where do you see Bitcoin right now in context of all that? Well, can you hear me? Let's start with that. We can.

Okay, good, because I'm in my car. Well, before I even say anything about that, you know, I have been trying to learn. I mean, the things are happening so fast. It's difficult, I think, for many of us lay people in the crypto space to learn. And listening to all of you this morning has been an incredible education for me. Just want to mention that. Because I'm, like, committed to learning about tokenization. and stable coins. And I was asked, I was interviewed in China last week, and they asked me about

tokenization because China's already using it against real world assets in real estate. And I'm, and so listening to try to see how we're doing it practically here in this country has been fascinating. And I also wrote a whole article on Circle, so I was so happy to hear you talk about that because I know that there's been, especially, who's obviously, that stock has crashed, but it looks like it might be bottoming. So now I can switch. So last week when I was on with you all, I said, you know, I thought Bitcoin might have bottom at around 107. Right now, I haven't looked in last half hour, but it was trading it around 112. Yeah, almost 113 last I checked about 12.7. Good. Yeah, I'm bullish. I think 114 is a good

barrier for it to cross. That's kind of where the 50-day moving averages, if you like to look at charts. I also over the weekend bought more Ethereum and bought more chain link, and now I'm listening to y'all about Solana. I'll take a look at that as well. Yeah, I'm very bullish in the space. I don't necessarily, like I said, have the knowledge that you guys are all providing, which is just fantastic. But that's my plan, is to do all this research. Well, one thing that is interesting to me is that I did, when I did some research about stable coins and tokenization, a couple of companies came up, obviously Robin Hood, Coinbase, but also what came up was IBM. And if you take a look at IBM today, it's up on the day. It cleared a major moving average.

It had gone way down and bottomed. So that's something to look at. And if we're looking, it's back to circle just from a technical standpoint, because you guys know, I'm a trader. I know just enough to be dangerous about some of this stuff. And Circle, if it clears Friday's high, which was, I think, somewhere around 118, then it's probably worth a little bit of a nibble. In terms of the overall market, you know, I always say you've got to watch it the weakest link. The market is as strong as its weakest link, yet at the same time, that weak link doesn't necessarily have to be concerning unless it becomes an anchor. So I'm watching transportation. That's really, I think, going to be very key if it holds that whole transportation sector needs to hold. Number one.

Number two is obviously we're seeing a rotation a little bit back to growth today, which makes sense considering all these headlines. I did see the one about NASDAQ, by the way, that you were talking about. So I wanted to learn more about that. And yeah, I mean, I think you have to be very selective here. Obviously, you know I've been a big bull in gold and silver. So the way I'm looking it's silver more than gold, if that starts to go parabolic, I think the one thing that can shut this rally down in equities would be if people start to get really spooked about inflation. And with CPI coming out, that could be able to think that I really think that number is so key. But speaking of energy, I mean, oil obviously rallied after OPEC more raises on

production, and so that tells you about that. And natural gas definitely looks to me like It's bottom. So I think that's kind of how I'm looking at things right now. I've got a bunch of positions, but I've already trailed up my stops because if we do see anything to spook the market, it would be inflation and equities that that could be good for some things, not so good for other things. Yeah, two things. Mish, take a look when you get a chance. When you're looking at the Salana chart, look at Salana Bitcoin chart, Salana denominated, slana over Bitcoin. And I wanted to hear what you think at some point because if you're in this market sometimes you can find the next runner by seeing how things are performing relative to Bitcoin and that chart looks a lot like a look I would

say so definitely I think worth a look and when you see that kind of buoyed by all this treasury company news on Solana the spidey senses start to tingle I think and I think the other point I would make it in talking about circle and maybe there's a general conversation I know we only have a few more minutes before Buzz jumps in. But a stock-like circle is effectively just a bond, right? I mean, you're just buying interest rate exposure because Circle's primary revenue is buying treasuries, right? And so I wonder what happens to sentiment around a publicly traded stable coin stock when rates start to drop. Because if there's a sentiment that, you know, the Fed's going to start cutting and that later, obviously, Powell will be gone and will really start seeing a cutting

cycle, there goes all, you know, 75, 80 percent of the income of stable coins as a company. Yeah, and also, and there's a dollar exposure to. Yeah, so technically, I guess, like if you're speaking, they're fully exposed to dollar because they're just a digital representation. I think I don't want to miss quote. Does anybody know exactly what percentage of stable coins are backed by short-term treasuries versus cash? It's minimally cash, but mostly treasuries. I just don't want to get the number wrong. But yes, Mish, you are correct.

Okay. Because, yeah, because that would be the concern for me, too, because the dollar obviously looks very vulnerable here. And I think DXY, if you're looking at that, as your indicator, under 97, starts to feel concerning. I guess the good mood is a digital dollars trade against dollars. So there's parody there. Right. Exactly. It doesn't matter. Scott, I think one point before we go back. It is something that Tover said and actually Mish asked about. So look, I'm happily will bet that NASDAQ's not going to create their own blockchain for this or if they do, it will fail.

And I know the people at NASDAQ and if they ask me of my advice, I will give it to them. And the reason is because the major benefit of tokenization is cross, is effectively to be able to be fully multi-currency, fully on demand, and fully interoperable. If you do something that's not interoperable, you're controlling it, that will create that friction where it will lose. If you, Tomer asked the question, why the competitor isn't the current system? Because the current system is based upon batch computing code that is handling stock certificates It's under 55 Water Street that are still in the vaults of DTC.

DTC is trying to develop their own blockchain technology to be able to replace what they currently have to be able to do this. But keep in mind, the goal here is a full multi-currency, full on-demand settlement, and significantly cheaper interoperability, being able to settle between all of the various players. And all you have to understand about NASDAQ is the vast majority of their volume and even in their own listings, they don't have dominant market share, right? You know, there are many exchanges, even in the United States, that trade all of NASDAX equities that they're listing.

What they want to do is make sure, because they make more money from listing than they do from anything else, that and market data. So they want to have their piece of the pie. What they don't want to do is try to go down the road of creating their own ecosystem that is, because everybody else will then shoot against it. It's just not, it's not smart business. They're better off from a business perspective having, you know, the protocol. And keep in mind, they don't own DTCC.

They don't have anything to do with the settlement right now. So why would they think they would want to try to expand into the settlement side as much as get at the trading volumes and profits that are being made by the coinbases, Kraken's, Robin Hoods, et cetera? I mean, that was a long diatri, but it's a longer conversation. And it's one that definitely is worth having. But it's just, be careful because it's not the same thing as stable coins when you're talking about when you start tokenizing equities. And I've said it before.

It's going to take a long time to make it all happen. But it's extremely exciting. I don't know if I agree with that. Can I challenge those ideas here? Yeah. Quickly. I think we're going to buzz is going to be jumping in soon. Go ahead.

First of all, like all the major banks on Wall Street are developing their own blockchains. And I know many of them, including Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, including Goldman Sachs. behind the scenes with the Canton network. And I really don't see it like that. I think what's going to happen in properability is that eventually you're going to have systems that are going to be bridgeless. You're going to bridgeless systems where liquidity

will be balanced across the different chains. And you'll be able to go cross chain, without having to use any of the bridges. The bridges are all rethinking their models. But long story short, why would a company like Goldman Sachs want to go on another person's chain when they can create the loan chain and then just have all the data. sit on top of it and then absorb all the fees that will actually be generated by that

because one thing that is generating lots of fees these days is the blockchains right the layer ones and twos and then you have the dexes of course that generate a lot of lot of fees and then you have of course the asset managers like ave and all three of these specific verticals can be owned by Goldman Sachs can be owned by different of the the banks and I think they're going to find a way to for adoption of course us natives to crypto we're not going to be really intrigued or attracted by any type of their value propositions, but they can bring in the current clients that they have. They can bring in the institutional clients to interact on their chain,

which is going to be way more volume than what, let's say, a community-based chain or someone that raised funds across a few VCs can bring in. So I would challenge that, and I think they're cases for everything. But I do think that the megabanks, if they really want to own the entire infrastructure, which we know that's our playbook since the creation of Wall Street, I don't think we're going to see them adopting other chains. I think they're just going to be playing with them, fiddling, and then coming in to take over the market share, as they always do.

I'd love to respond. We do have time because whoever buzzed is a speech is not on stage. So speaking of someone who was literally responsible at Citigroup for their adaptation to technology and responsible for Solomon Smith-Barnie before that, involved in all of what happened with the ECN wars and everything with the electrification of Wall Street in the early 2000s no that's not no wrong Wall Street tends to understand that there are certain areas where they want to work

together it is possible that that the Wall Street firms will cooperate on blockchain technology and in places but you can't oversimplify a hundred percent you're right I mean you know they're going to try to compete and build things that are low cost. But what will happen is the actual underlying mechanisms for clearance and settlement is something that they're going to be extremely protective of, not because they own it, but because it needs to work and they want to lower the cost of it. Everything they can do to lower the cost of settlement.

And this is true not in the U.S. and this is only in the U.S., by the way. It's actually more important in Europe and in Asia where the costs for settlement. is significantly higher, they're going to want to drive those costs down relentlessly. And the best way to do that isn't to have teams of technologies working on competing blockchains. And so understand you have to follow the money. This is not a univariate situation here. It depends on the vertical and what it is.

To the extent that owning a blockchain is where the fees are going to be, yeah, you're absolutely right. But I don't think so. I think most of the use of blockchain for the nuts and bolts is going to be commoditized, i.e. not, it's not going to generate enormous amounts of fees. Where the fees will come in are in the value-added service, the securitization. So businesses like stock loan and interest rate swaps, which are massive businesses, you know, repos, those sorts of things. Those are massive businesses that even small fees can generate large, large TAMs,

our total addressable markets for blockchains. Yeah, there you may be right. But in the stock market, you know, DTC doesn't make that much money. I mean, it's a utility. It's worth a lot less than Solana is worth, much less Ethereum right now. So why would we think that they would care that much about, you know, about that? It's just illogical. And it's not where they're going to put their money. What they don't like and what they're caring about, what Wall Street really cares about

is they look at Robin Hood and they say, wait, 33% of their income or more is coming from crypto, which is a small fraction. of the total overall market you know total or investable universe that they want to change and that they want to go after so they're going to care about the consumer side and robert had just joined the s mp 500 of course well it probably overdue in a sense uh given you know what they were doing you know given how dynamically and importantly they've changed the investing landscape i mean after all commission free trading is now everywhere that doesn't happen without blad pushing that envelope.

Yeah, absolutely agree. We're trying to figure out in the back end if someone else is joining here, but we can continue this conversation. I mean, Alex, did that jive with what you're saying in conflict? What do you think? Yeah, I think there's some really good points. So I think what Dave was saying is that they're different verticals in finance, right? So, for instance, as he said, if BlackRock wants to create their own chain and they

create an asset management firm on chain, they could absolutely blow away Aves, you know, $64 billion. It's a joke for them, right? And obviously, like, bringing all the AUM there, then if all of a sudden you have the AUM, they're going to want to create their own decks as well. If they are going to tokenize securities, which we know that BlackRock will obtain all the licenses necessary before any other crypto company, simply because they've been in the game for so long, is that like step by step, what I'm trying to say, Scott, is there are going to be a lot of the banks that are going to want to absorb really maximum value extraction by creating a chain for specific purposes. And then there's all the privatized side of things, right, where a lot of these banks,

they move really, really big amounts of money. They can't go on a public, you know, blockchain, like, you know, hyperliquid, where you can see, you know, the different openings and you can see all the transactions. So there are a lot of plays, I think, a lot of verticals and niches, which I think Dave and I will agree upon, which can really, really, really. be once again taken from Wall Street, unfortunately. And I'm not pro Wall Street. I wouldn't use a Wall Street blockchain per se. But listen, if they have the best yields, if they have the T-bills, they have all the liquidity that people need, eventually we may be using their instruments for some purposes to reach our financial goals, of course. Yeah, I think it's the important is the

devil's in the details on all of this stuff. Look, in the past era that I was describing, what ended up happening was the following happened. New York Stock Exchange had 80% market share, 80, 8, 0, before electronification. It dropped dramatically, right? You know, you look at the futures markets. The company that we now look at, you know, called ICE, which owns a New York Stock Exchange and got in, they were new. They were a tech company, and they just came in and totally changed it. If you look at the world of stock trading, the two largest stock trading firms in the world now effectively didn't exist before electronification. What's now Virtue, which is a roll-up of a bunch of companies and Citadel.

You know, Citadel didn't really roll up. They just kind of built and built and built. They were the first electronic market maker. Now they're in every asset class electronically. So Citadel and Virtue are companies that basically ate the lunch of Wall Street. They're antecedents or places like get-go and night and ITG, etc. But, you know, you will see those things happen. But the traditional firms will lose market share.

The biggest difference with crypto is the potential for breaking down cartels by creating open access to certain businesses. And they're going to fight those tooth and nail because they make a ton of money on things like stock lending and the ones I keep talking about. You know, stock trading is an interesting one. What we're seeing with the public markets of the DACCOs is there's a lot more money that's available in the public markets for stock trading. necessarily than there is in the crypto world because people trust it more and you're right

about that and so they're going to be very careful there but what they want to be able to do is bridge and offer all the products remember these companies have not been allowed to offer crypto in any sense for a very long time and they've seen a lot of they see the valuation of coinbase for example and it drives them freaking crazy sorry Alex did you want to finish one up or good no I think it's really really good and one thing you know Dave we had a little bit of the beginning of a little battle in the previous session I think last Friday but you know coming back to specific stocks on chain you know what I was trying to explain the other day is that obviously there are many many issues before this actually happens as Dave was mentioning he's worried about

liquidity he's worried about real securitization and real smart smart contracts that give you the ownership of the stock so there's still many hurdles to go through But what I was trying to explain essentially with the whole stock idea and why it's fucking awesome to have it on chain and be modular as much as the decentralized world is, is that one thing that I really want to see eventually, Dave, is to be able to swap anything to anything. And I think that's going to be the ultimate Wall Street trading experience that they'll want to do. So if you could go from Bitcoin and swap to, let's say, one of the NASDAQ 500 or the Magnificent Sevens, that those are, there's some use cases there that you can do, probably. that nowhere else in the world you'll be able to do without you know having to go through multiple hurdles so one day if we see bitcoin and you can swap to apple and then from apple you go to i don't know bitenser and then bettensor you go to gold i think eventually you'll have like

unlimited type of trading pairs in the future you know once everything has the of all the requirements and pillars to do so so that for me is an amazing experience and then on top of what you mentioned scott you know just all of the benefits of the blockchain real-time 24-7 transparent no middleman and all these typical traits. But then one thing that I was trying to explain, and then Dave kindly, we took it actually in our DMs to kind of continue the debate, which was a lot of fun.

And by the way, I'm always trying to tease you, Dave, because it's just for the fun of the conversation. But, you know, one thing that I think is really cool is nowadays you guys may know there's a V22 type dex model where, you know, once you, the dexes are starting to fight for liquidity, right, to, for you to deposit pairs. But let's say in the future, on top of liquidity provisioning, if I want to provide liquidity

on one pair, let's say Apple and, I don't know, Microsoft, for instance, because I think that there are more positively correlated, first of all, the impermanent loss would go lower because there's less volatility than there is when you're, let's say, putting Solana on USDA, right? The crypto markets are very volatile. So the impermanent loss problem, first of all, it will soften a little bit. It'll still be there, but it should soften a little bit. But then on top of that, you know, the way DFI is working now is nowadays, on top of getting fees from the liquid of provisioning, you have an extra layer of earning protocol fees. So the tokens from the specific decks via the V22, which I find extremely exciting.

So anyways, I just wanted to cast some positive light on why I think on chain stocks makes so much sense in addition to all the core blockchain benefits. And I look forward to that future of having, you know, unlimited trading pairs and being able to go from anything to anything. in a simple click. Yeah, I agree with that. I think the future of how that will manifest is still uncertain. I still lean towards maybe my cynicism that Wall Street will just try to capture as much of that value as human in the gospel. But at the moment, it does seem that they are,

Dave, I know you disagree, but at the moment it does seem like they're using the public platform. No, no, I don't disagree. They will try. I think they will try. I think they will succeed in some places. and, you know, it's going to depend on the battles are going to be fought in the halls of Washington, D.C., as well as in the market. The stuff in the market, the markets are going to end up in a reasonable place, and, you know, we'll see what happens in the halls of power.

Well, it's already happening in D.C. over stable coins, right? We can see it. We had the genius legislation. Now the bank, Citadel's freaking out. The banks are freaking out. We see these, yeah. Yeah, of course. It's completely, it's totally predictable. But, you know, I think we've covered it for today, don't you think? I do. And I know I think there was supposed to be an IBC sponsor, but they weren't able to get on stage. So I'm assuming that will be rescheduled. But otherwise, I think we covered everything we had for today. So we'll move on to tomorrow. Thanks everybody for tuning in to Crypto Town Hall. And we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.

Cheers. Thank you.