The Wolf Of All Streets - IDO Hype Is Here | What’s Hot This Bull Market? | Crypto Town Hall
Episode Date: January 23, 2024Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ... ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK. 👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000! 👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/ ►►NORD VPN GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey, Scott.
Hey, man.
Getting moved over to co-host.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, yeah.
I just told the team to co-host Ran, but he's not here.
So I guess I'll have to take duty today again.
I tried.
In my defense.
Man, ideal season is back, isn't it?
I think it's been back for a little while here,
but it seems that it's
happening uh brc20 which is totally like been off my radar i mean not off my radar obviously i've
seen it but like i'm assuming you're talking about this savm whatever satoshi virtual machine
yeah yeah so we it's it's back ish like it wasn't back before I'm talking about, similar to 2021. And it's doing well.
We're investing, others are investing. But the craziness that I thought would never happen again
is starting to happen. I think Satoshi VN peaked, I think for IDEO investors, it peaked at
two, 300X. For private investors or seed investors, you're sitting at three, four,
and maybe 500 X.
I never thought you'd see those numbers again, especially not so early.
So that was so stupid.
That was, but I, I, I, I never gave up on the, uh, the narrative that it would continue.
Right.
Since the very beginning, even at the bottom, I said, we'd see it again because humans are going to human and the opportunity is there for for people to to make
those profits i i really believe that um not to be critical of this project or any other specific
one but i really think that unlocks for pre-sale investors and stuff should have a really extended
cliff do they have do these do these guys have any do you know what these guys cliff is i i don't
know i don't i don't know what it was because usually um usually usually a big project farcana there's a big gaming product that launched
today or yesterday called farcana pretty pretty exciting one and i know it's a six-month clip
yeah like you know people are trading it on buy it on the open market but those investors don't
have tokens that they can sell so if they want to participate for the next six months they literally
have you know people don't understand i guess the mechanics of these things, but they won't have anything in their wallet for six months.
And then, I don't know, maybe it becomes 10% or something.
But the sort of standard of 21 was to give a huge tranche to the early investors.
And for, you know, that could be people you could have invested last week, right?
Somebody said to you, like, do you want to be a part of this?
Last week, a week later, it launches and you get 25% of your tokens, you're up 100x, right? Somebody said to you, like, do you want to be a part of this? Last week, a week later, it launches and you get 25% of your tokens, you're up 100x, right?
Yes. So I think that was...
I don't think that structurally makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. So that was the issue last bull market. So last bull market, you had quick unlocks. But the
thing is, with early unlocks, when a project launches, you can easily tell because obviously
it dumps relatively quickly.
So you see that massive spike when it launches and hours later when unlocks start to kick in.
I'm talking about immediate unlocks.
It starts to dump.
So, yeah, we've been very critical of this model.
I hope it doesn't happen again, even though it's probably better for anyone in the industry, especially people early like us.
It's better for us, but it's worse for the retail investors.
So I hope it
doesn't happen again i thought it won't happen again now i'm questioning that belief i'd be
very surprised if it happens again it's gonna happen every single cycle unless it in some way
uh in some jurisdictions is made to be illegal obviously you know it's questionable for people
in certain jurisdictions to participate uhs generally won't even outright accept Americans at
this point and things like that. But yeah, I think structurally, it's probably too enticing for
projects to do it that way because it gets a lot of hype really early. I don't necessarily blame
them. I just think that it's kind of misaligned incentives for retail who might be buying it.
Yeah. We'll go to the panel, but Dan, just a quick question.
From regulators and politicians, I know everyone's talking about crypto in general and Bitcoin,
but is there any talks about these small projects, that small industry of startups launching and dumping their tokens
or NFT projects launching and dumping their tokens?
It's way too small for it to even be on their radar.
I mean, the concept around ICOs and the token dumps,
I mean, that's been going on for years.
I mean, primarily with the SEC,
a lot of these projects have been listed as unregistered securities.
A lot of them have paid fines over the last probably four, five, six years.
The SEC has a long memory.
So we've seen a lot of these projects that were initially launched
back 2017 era, that ICO era, are coming, they're facing the music. But it hasn't really
been too much of an issue, at least from what I've seen. There haven't been a lot of conversations,
at least happening in Congress on this topic. There's so much more focus right now on,
well, they're back in session, the way um so this this week next
week senate's back house is back they're definitely more focused on getting as much as they can done
before the election season starts um obviously conversations around damla can see market
structure stable coins you know we'll see what happens there but uh the the ico conversation
yeah at least i'm not seeing it yeah um yeah so so sorry just going through the
the news of the day actually i want ran to come up first before we dig into the news we've got
an incredible panel we've got some news uh guests that we've never had before we got yannick here
we also have scott here as well pleasure to have you both thanks for joining us um i wanted before
we kick off the discussion and the agenda if sc Scott doesn't mind, I wanted to get Ran's thoughts because he was the one talking about.
Ran, what the hell is that?
It's already pumped.
I never thought IDOs would start pumping to that level so early on, especially with the current market conditions.
What do you mean?
The current market conditions are amazing.
It's like we're in the middle of a bull market. We're 20% down from the all-time highs in one of the top,
in one of the corrections, which are absolutely normal.
And as soon as we are done with this correction, we move on to Valhalla.
And I mean, I did a show now where I spoke about how I think this thesis plays out.
And I mean, if it plays out like I think it plays out,
then I think it's, I mean if it plays out like i think it plays out then i think
it's i mean it's definitely ideal season so for if anyone doesn't understand ideals are essentially
projects that are that raise money privately um with vcs and then they do an ideal like a private
sale and you could do that through launch pads and then they list and the issue with them and i'll
i'll talk i'll let you talk about your thesis briefly, Ryan, before we dig into the agenda.
But the issue with them is that the unlock schedules are pump and dumpy.
So all the VCs and private investors get an early unlock, and then the retail gets dumped on at least late in the bull market.
Your thoughts?
No, I mean, as I said, I think that the IDO season is coming up now.
I think that if you're not invested in launchpads, probably now is a good time.
If you want to get in, probably now is a good time to get into launchpads.
I actually did a whole show on it yesterday.
And I mean, I broke it up into two parts.
I broke it up into two parts.
And I said, like, the first thing is you've got to get into the launchpads because you've got to get into the IDOs.
And the reason why I want to get into the IDOs and not the private sale is because that's the one advantage that retail has over the influencers, right?
So the one advantage that retail has over the influencers is that if retail buys the tokens in the IDO, so they get a full release of the tokens because usually IDO tokens are
released immediately.
Whereas the influencers and the VCs,
they get their tokens with certain lockups.
So they can't lock,
they can't spend their tokens for the first year,
two years,
three years,
because they have a lockup and a vesting schedule and stuff like that.
So I said,
look,
the one part is you've got to get into the launchpad,
and the second part is remember who you're playing against here.
So I knew when I did the show, I knew I wasn't going to make friends,
and the feedback that I got after the show just reaffirmed the position
which I knew was going to happen.
But the reality is that all too often, when a retail investor sees a lot of
posting by large accounts on Twitter, they think it's because it's a good project. And what the
reality is, it's not that. It's that a lot of influencers do deals where they have to promote
the token in order to get their allocations.
And to me, those are the worst kind of deals.
We'll never agree to a deal like that.
And I hate the fact that other people are doing it
because it's bad for the industry.
So what happens is you say, okay, I'm going to get an allocation
in a certain project.
And in return, because they let me into a very early round,
I'm going to show the project on Twitter and on YouTube and whatever your medium is right and that's
what usually happens now now when retail get into ideas on the launch pads they
have an advantage over the influence a while because the influencer gets say 10%
their tokens in the launch and then they only get the rest of their tokens much
later so the one time where the retail investor actually has an advantage over say, 10% of their tokens in the launch, and then they only get the rest of their tokens much later.
So the one time where the retail investor actually has an advantage
over the influencer is if the retail investor gets the tokens
unlocked on the IDO.
Ran, do you know if Satoshi VM had an immediate unlock or not?
We were asking before you got on.
I prefer not to talk about individual
projects if that if that's okay yeah that's fine i just didn't know if you knew specifically about
their unlock maybe yeah not i saw tom just came back up yeah tom came up we were just casually
talking about it tom you had your hand up and you got knocked off stage obviously you know uh you're pretty deep in this industry and in in uh
this uh structure so your thoughts
he doesn't show us we lost him no yeah he doesn't show a speaker he does he shows a speaker to me
yeah not to me i think it's a glitch so tom's got a force closed x and then reopen it but i think it's
i think while we're talking about i think while we're talking about the idea i want to talk about two things but while we're talking about the idea like i i've got to
i have to quickly maybe just highlight something to to retail investors that are listening and i
did highlight this on my show yesterday and as i said i know it's not going to make me many friends
in the industry but the truth is i'd rather protect the retail investor first and that is
um if you understand the game and you can play the game understanding what the rules are
but really understanding what the rules of the game are the the undercurrent of rules then then
it's fair game and i think unfortunately right now people don't understand that it's fair game
right so so let me just like run you through it so as a retail investor you want to get into an
idio you or you want to buy something you typically can't buy unless you get into the launchpad,
which by the way, I think are very good investments specifically in this part of the market.
I think the launchpads are very, very, very good investment because that's the only way that you
can get into IDOs. Then the problem is that what you'll start realizing is start looking for a
pattern. If you see a lot of accounts talking about the same token
around launch day a day two days before a day two days after and you see you'll see a lot of
accounts and over time you'll start spotting that it's actually like a collective of of accounts
that and it's the same accounts talking about the same tokens over and over and over again
then what you need to understand is that,
A, probably they all got early stage investment.
And B, some of their early stage investment is still locked up.
Okay.
So, and the second part of what I said is the most important part.
Because the influencer then becomes scared that they're not going to get the second part of their allocation,
or the third part, or the rest of the allocation, because they haven't shilled enough.
And so what happens is you get situations where they all start shilling the same token,
and to the retail investor and the untrained eye, that feels like and looks like this must be the best project in the world,
but what's happening in the background is that it's a bunch of influencers shit scared that they're not going to get the balance of their allocations and so you've got to start looking out for it and then if you want to know what to look
out for potentially going forward look out for the token unlocks so go go to the tokenomics
look out for the token unlocks and start seeing if hype starts to come out of the same accounts
on the token unlock date.
And that is them trying to pump the market before the token unlocks so that they can dump their tokens after the token unlocks.
And to me, I think it's bad behavior.
We don't do it.
We won't do it.
We won't get into any investment that has any strings attached in any shape or form.
But I think it's important to educate the public that these are not good projects.
And I'll give you one more anecdote.
One of our researchers came to me a couple of weeks ago, and he said, wow, this project must be a really good project.
And I said, hold on, you're telling me this because you've seen this account, this account,
this account, and this account shilling it.
He says, yeah, it must be a really good project.
So they even managed to fool one of our new researchers.
He's obviously new.
He doesn't understand how the game is played.
But it's important that people look out for it
and then start marking the Twitter accounts that are doing this
because at least then you know who you can trust
and who you can't trust.
I'll add one thing before going to Tom.
I'll add one thing.
So this is something we've been –
so before I got into the media game, before the spaces and everything else we're doing
now, we were heavy on the incubation side and worked with a lot of IDOs.
And there's a very ugly side to it as well, a side I thought would never repeat itself.
And that's the structure.
The game itself is very flawed.
Rand made one example, is that all these influencers will keep shilling those projects because
they want to get their unlocks. So So you got projects that might not unlock,
might not distribute the tokens that they're legally obliged to distribute because a lot of
people don't have the financial resources or the time to chase their tokens. And by the time they
go through the legal process, you know, it's the bear market tokens are down 90%. That's floor.
Number one, floor, number two is retail. Retail got screwed in the last bull market,
all these VCs including very credible respectable
VCs that I respect and they're still active today they were stuck in a game that they had no choice
but to play it for because they have a responsibility for their LPs so they would when
they get their unlock if they don't sell they try to do the right thing like Anamoka and others did
then it backfires on them when the token drops 90, 95%. And they've got a responsibility to their LPs.
So then they're forced to sell along with everyone else.
And who gets hit? Retail.
I'm hoping in this bull market, and that's why I asked that question earlier.
And Tom, I would love to go to you.
And maybe you can answer the question on the unlock for Satoshi VM or Satoshi EVM,
whatever it's called, is what their unlock schedule is.
Because like the first big, big successful idea of this season um with massive numbers um there'll be many more but this is the
beginning and i'm keen to know their unlock um but it's if you play if you get involved yeah
i mean just i mean we should actually analyze uhoshi VM just for one second. So, I mean, you know, in terms of a narrative, the Satoshi VM is an amazing narrative. It's the layer two on Bitcoin. It's EVN compatible. Very, very, very good narrative. Probably a very good project technologically. It was launched on a launchpad, which is called Ape Terminal. It's a new launchpad, you know, is, you know, I kept telling people, look at getting into launchpads.
Maybe that's one to look at because you see that these guys
know how to play the token game and the hype game.
And very important to understand that people who got Satoshi VM tokens
on the launchpad, they were able to sell 100% of what they bought
onto the market and they could have capitalized on the 300x
that it did, right?
Any influencer or any early stage investor, and I don't know what the cap table looks like i don't even know if they
had an early stage round or whatever else they can't sell into the 300x hype the initial type
because they locked up so you see this is where retail has an advantage if you can get into a
launch pad then you have an advantage where you can beat the influencers.
And this is what, in 2021, Tom, I know you're dying to jump in because you have a lot of insight into this.
But in 2021, that was the biggest flaw is that VC's got an unlock on day one.
And I'm glad it seems, based on what you said, Ryan, Satoshi doesn't have that.
And I hope other projects follow suit.
The projects we're investing in or we're working for, so we offer services, media or incubation, we get tokens.
There is no unlock.
And we go to projects even that are already listed.
We do an OTC deal.
Sorry.
Yeah, there is no unlock.
There's a long lockup period.
So we're playing the long game, especially considering we're very early.
And I recommend everyone does that.
We're just getting started.
Lockups are good now.
At the end of a bull market, lockups, you have to understand you might be hit hard because those will drop 95%, 99%, including very good projects. So you have to make sure you're liquid
and you're comfortable with your portfolio dropping 95%, 99%. But this early on, lockups are
good. And I hope projects continue not offering unlocks on day one. And generally, good projects
that are hyped don't offer those big unlocks. Only projects that are desperate for money
offer unlocks at the beginning because they need VCs to write those checks. But Tom, maybe you could add more
to this because I know you're in the game as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, you guys are
really prolific angels and investors and you guys do things the right way when you invest in
projects. So great to hear your insights as well. A lot to add here. So apologize if I'm a bit
long-winded, but let's just start from the ID, right? If you're a project and you're looking to list, the first step today is probably
to go to a launchpad prior to going to an exchange. Only the really big projects can go
directly to an exchange. And most times those are kind of second tier exchanges, right? You're not
listing directly on Binance or Coinbase and others. There's immense fees for listing on
those exchanges most times. So you generally go to a launchpad like a coin list, like in eight terminals, a new one.
We have our own launchpad paid, which is why I understand a bit a part of this game a bit, as well as the VC side.
If you're going to something like a coin list, you're going to be able as retail to participate if you're not in the US.
Thanks again, Gary Gensler. But the unique thing about those
platforms is generally the allocations are capped at 1 to 2K per user, maybe max 5K with some
stipulations. You actually get really good distribution and generally favorable vesting
terms. So to what you were saying earlier, that's great for retail. They're able to actually
participate in that stuff. In terms of how these projects are thinking about allocating rounds, they need to allocate
some of their supply to these launch pads or to exchanges.
But as they're thinking about what to do with the other equity they hold, they allocate
it to what's called like KOL rounds, like rounds for people who are going to talk about
their project, market their project.
Now, the good ones will go and say like, okay, I just want this thought leader in
the space. They're very aligned with my project vision. I'm going to allow them an allocation
in hopes that they'll talk about my project or give it better publicity. The, I guess,
less savory ones, the less savory key opinion leaders will say, hey, pay me this much money
or give me this much allocation and I'll do this many tweets,
this many pin posts, this many videos. And it becomes more of a parasitic relationship rather
than a mutually beneficial one where the KOL actually believes in the project.
Yeah. So I want to put a disclaimer on this particular point. I wouldn't put all KOLs in
the same basket. So you got to make sure you trust the right people. And we're not going to
sit there labeling them. But there's KOLs that- Mario k i think it's also yeah go ahead sorry yeah so there's chaos that you know ryan is obviously one example
of this that are very they only talk about projects they like so they might write a check and
i don't know ryan if you're investing in satoshi vm i'm not so we have no no no uh disclaimer here
yeah but but i know for a fact there's projects i invest in but i never talk about because i'm
not comfortable talking about them there's others i invest in, but I never talk about because I'm not comfortable talking about them.
There's others I invest in, I might not even invest.
I might have missed it, but we still talk about it.
Let me make it simple for you.
And I'm going to be quite honest.
I'm going to be quite open and honest here.
I've been in this industry for a long time.
In my first cycle in this industry, I was in CNBC.
I invested in a whole lot of projects.
And by virtue of the fact that I was invested,
I felt kind of an obligation to maybe talk about them. And it was the wrong thing to do.
And the market punished me for it. And I lost a little bit of credibility doing it. And I made a
call after that, that I'll never, ever, ever do it again. I won't take advisory positions on
projects. And I just generally don't want to mix the media company and the fund, right?
And so, you know, a lot of people come to us and say look
you know like you invest in these in you invest in projects but you also have a media company and
to mitigate that we do two things the first thing is we have a conversation with every single project
before and we make it very very very clear then that just because we're invested doesn't mean
that we're going to talk about it on the media company because our community comes first and
we'll never talk about something because we have an obligation
or because an expectation or whatever else.
The second thing we do is we actually even make projects on a document.
And on that document, it literally spells out and says,
look, we're allowing you to invest in our project knowing full well
that there's zero obligations.
We're not going to talk about you.
That said, though, though naturally the project that we
invested in we do land up doing slightly more research on because you know we want to we
research our thing and we say look if the project is doing well and we are doing research on it
anyway we share our research with our with our community but we never ever ever into in into
any kind of investment agreement when there isn't when there is a any kind of investment agreement when there is any kind of string attached. We make it very clear to the projects.
It's a trap.
It's a no-win situation because, A, so first of all,
you made the point. If everybody's shilling the actual TGE, the token
generation event, the launch, that's very clear what's happening. But the trap is
that there's people who only invest in projects, they say no to nine out of 10, and one out of 10,
they really like, and then you actually probably feel like you can't talk about it.
Because you'll be accused of shilling something. And in reality, if you're actually investing in
something, because you believe in it, there should be nothing wrong in theory with discussion. So'm right so i think it's just the way you discuss it what you discuss and at what
point in it's i'm less extreme than you right just quickly i'm less i'm less extreme than i'm
less extreme than you i'm just gonna comment on the first point you made i'm less extreme than
you so we're selective but we i don't mind if there's a project i believe in then why not offer
them to come on the show why not offer to talk about them because you genuinely believe in them as long as you disclose that's what i
that's what i'm saying that's the trap because people think you're doing it just because you
invest unless you disclose unless you disclose mario mario no if you have if you have something
to lose by asking tough questions you're not going to ask the tough questions right no i i disagree i
i i disagree So the disclaimer
we have is we tell projects, if you
go on a Shark Tank show, there's projects that paid
us in tokens and we were
extremely stripped of them. That's different
because the show format is such where you say
look, you're paying to go on a show and then
it is what it is.
That's different. I think one other thing
just to give you an idea of how serious we are
about it is that whenever we talk about a project, either on Twitter or on our YouTube channel, etc.,
you're not allowed to sell the token within 24 hours of the mention, right?
Now, we only make a couple of exceptions.
We make an exception for the traders who are trading something and it hits a stop loss or a take profit you know they could say hey i'm buying phantom uh here and i'm gonna sell it at
10 high end and hits the 10 then they're allowed to sell their tokens because that's a take profit
or a stop loss but otherwise any member of banter like if i go and mention let's use satoshi vm if
i mentioned satoshi vm on my show now no member of Banter is allowed to sell their Satoshi VM tokens for 24 hours.
For us, one thing we can do, and Tom, I'll go back to you.
And by the way, just for the rest of the panel,
we were going to go back to the agenda,
but this is a really cool conversation.
And I'm going through the comments.
So the audience is enjoying this.
One thing we do is we're very strict on lockups.
Like I love locking up my tokens.
So we got a project.
So we had a project recently come to us
and say, hey, we want to work with you guys. XYZ, we'll go into details. And there's smaller locks
after three months, bigger lock after six months. We're like, hey, we want more tokens, but we want
to do a one to two year lockup minimum. So I think that, especially when you're early in the market.
So this is our strategy. So the way to play it, in my opinion, will be every bull market,
you invest for the next bull market.
I think this is a better strategy of doing it.
So Animoca obviously is one of many examples of this.
I've got Scott here, Andreessen Horowitz, very similar in having that long-term approach to these investments.
But let me go to Tom, and then we can open up to the panel after Scott.
Yes, sir. I won't monopolize the conversation.
I just want to add two more key points that folks should take away on the panel is that there are KOL rounds, and they're happening.
You guys are doing things the right way, but there are others who may be doing things not as savory.
So it's just important for investors to realize these rounds do exist for almost every project. And these rounds traditionally have a shorter vesting period
than other investors and usually lower than the IDO as well. So it's just something really,
really to be mindful of. Yeah. And I think any influencer that does that and panel,
I'd love you to just jump in on this one. Maybe Scott getting your thoughts on it.
I know you're not deep into the ideal market but just on the discussion
in general but just one point any influencer so there's two types of kols and it's you put them
in more buckets but i put them in two one that are building a long-term business they actually
care about their business model which is all based on credibility um and the other one they just want
to make a quick buck and we've seen that happen happen. I remember in 2017, I won't give a percentage,
but I'd say the majority of thought leaders in that bull market didn't even exist.
They lost all credibility before the next one.
A lot of key opinion leaders of the last bull market don't even do,
barely do videos right now and are barely involved.
And it's going to happen again.
A lot of the thought leaders in this bull market,
they'll either do the right thing and continue playing the game, or they'll fuck up again,
they'll lose their credibility, and that will impact their business. Financial could make more
sense, genuinely, like they could make so much money that they don't care about their credibility.
But then hopefully, that's where regulators come in. But Scott, maybe you could open it up to the
panel, and then we can shift to the agenda when you're ready. I'd say we go to the panel, but
I'm pretty sure we might have
exhausted this conversation unless anyone
I'm glad if anyone has
any further commentary on it.
I want to get the audience's
thoughts actually. I'm going through the comments
to get an idea of
how do you guys determine who
to trust, which thought leaders to follow.
Not only thought leaders, also VCs.
There's different we put VCs, sorry, just one last thing we put vcs in different buckets as well
and we give them a score based on credibility and then we we we look at projects that have certain
vcs on their cap table and they have a higher score on their on our on our sheet but rand go
ahead ironically ironically back in the day if someone told you that alameda had invested
probably you would have said you know that's a very credible investor.
Like, I remember, to be honest, I remember in the peak of the bull market, you know, we kind of like, hey, Alameda's invested.
We don't need to do much more of a due diligence.
This thing is sure to pump.
You know, we knew that any token that Alameda, we thought that any token that Alameda was invested in was a good token. And then, I mean, in hindsight, when you look at Caroline,
who was obviously the one doing the DD in most cases,
how wrong we were, how wrong we were.
No, no, no.
Let's be honest.
To their credit, they actually had a great analysis team.
So the analysts did a great job.
They had some great project they invested in,
but high level, they just screwed those projects.
So obviously they fucked it up there.
But the analysis was great.
They had a great team.
Yeah, true, true.
But I mean, we now know that their controls
and their processes.
Oh, criminals.
So it was criminals that hired.
Yeah.
When we finish this discussion,
I want to talk to you about my theory
about this grayscale thing
and why this dumped me actually.
But let's finish the IDEO discussion.
I think we're going to move back.
Yeah, we would love any,
any panelists that wants to chip in on this, anything we missed,
any other thoughts from anyone that hasn't jumped in yet before we,
we open it up to the, to the market markets.
All right, cool. Scott or Ran,
do you want to kick it off with the market discussion and we'll go to the
panel.
So I think we're getting, we're getting a bloodbath.
The grayscale bloodbath continues.
Every day we see more and more outflows.
Yesterday was the biggest outflow day.
Right now, this is the center of attention.
I think I have a little bit of a theory about how to think about this.
I broke it down much longer on my show, but I think it's pretty interesting.
I'd like to talk about it here for a second.
The way I see this grayscale event is I kind of see it like a crypto black swan event.
Now, why is it a crypto black swan event?
Because it's an unnatural event.
It's not an event in the natural flow of the market.
You know, it's very unnatural that all of a sudden you'd get such a massive, massive, massive unlock of the biggest buyer or the biggest holder of Bitcoin in the world, other than I think Satoshi,
actually now getting their tokens back on the market.
I think someone's Mike's one.
It might be Scott.
Scott, if you could mute yourself.
So I think what's happening is you've got to try. No, no, he meant Scott the co-host, but it was actually me.
Go ahead, Ryan.
Not you, Scott.
Oh, sorry.
Oh, good.
Go ahead, Ryan.
So I think we've got to think about this like a black swan event.
And I think what you've got to realize about how the market digests all big black swan events is that the beginning part is the worst part. So if you think about COVID, the beginning part was the
worst part. They put us into lockdowns. They locked our houses. We saw people dying, et cetera.
That was the worst part for the markets. If you think about wars, you think about the Ukraine war, you think about the Israel war, et cetera.
You can't look at it and say the beginning is always the worst part of these anomalous events on the market, right?
And I think what we're experiencing now with Grayscale is exactly that.
We're going through what I believe is we're going through the eye of the storm of a black swan event in crypto. And I think that very, very, so what happens with these,
when you're in these black swan events is that in the beginning,
that's the worst part.
So that's the most selling, that's the most people trying to,
that's the most uncertainty in the market.
The problem is, well, not the problem,
but what usually happens after that is that once the worst part of the storm subsides, the bounce is actually quite aggressive.
You saw it with COVID, where once the worst part of the storm had happened, the bounce was actually pretty aggressive.
And I think that that's what might happen here.
Right now, the market is very much concentrating on the bad, the outflows of GBTC, the outflows of GBTC. But I think in a couple of days, and I say days, probably a week,
maybe less, maybe two weeks, the market would have said,
okay, we're used to this kind of situation,
just like we're used to the fact that there's a war going on in Israel,
we don't talk about it as much, and we're used to the fact
that there's a war in Ukraine and we don't talk about it as much.
And it will become like the main part would have sold,
the desperate people,
the GBTCs that wanted to exit,
they would have sold.
And then I think that the sentiment is very quickly going to shift to the
buy side. And they're going to go, oh, hold
on a second. There's now five, by that time, there's
three, four, five billion dollars in the
ETFs. Holy shit.
Hold on. There's five billion dollars that is now locked
up in non-grayscale ETFs.
And then I think the market shifts into that mode. Now you take that and you couple that
with the fact that at that time, there'll probably be a great short squeeze. The first
bounce will probably give you guys a great short squeeze. I think that in a week or two,
when we pass the eye of the storm, all else being equal, we start getting a, we get an epic bounce.
When I say an epic bounce, like a crypto bull market bounce, which happens very, very, very quickly.
That's the way I see it.
I broke it down further on my show if anybody wants to go and watch like a much longer analysis.
But I thought I'd share it with you guys because I just thought, I just spent a lot of time thinking about it.
I just thought this is exactly what it is.
It's a crypto black swan event.
It's unusual. It's not going black swan event. It's unusual.
It's not going to happen again for a long time.
There's no other buyer.
There's no other holder in the world that has so many Bitcoin other than Satoshi that could probably dump them.
I don't even think Grayscale is going to dump it.
And I think very, very, very soon this narrative ends.
And when it does, I think that, you know, and this, all else being equal,
and assuming that the mount
cox trustee doesn't start dumping tokens at exactly the same time and i don't know the government
doesn't start dumping silk road i don't know bitcoin and all that crap all else being equal
i think we're we've seen the worst of it and it's maybe time to start looking at buying this market
together but we're only trading at like 39 nine thousand dollars it's not really that volatile
of a dip if you or dump or whatever people want to call it if you think about it that was exactly
my show today wendy i mean today i spoke about on my show and i said the dip hasn't even been
able to scare wendy oh so until people have you noticed that in this people aren't scared
like i don't see any fear on twitter whatsoever we We're 20% down off the all-time highs,
which is a respectable dip. Well, not really respectable yet, but almost respectable.
Not a single person on crypto Twitter is scared. That's why I think there's still another leg down.
But I think in a week or two weeks, that other leg down has happened and we start buying.
But right now, this has been the most boring dip that I've ever experienced. I don't
see a single person on Twitter calling for 12K. I don't see a single one telling us it's the end of
the world for Bitcoin. All I see is some people saying that the ETF launch wasn't as good as they
expected. Now, that's not a real dump. That's a shitty dump. Well, it is kind of the end for
Bitcoin in a sense, because we have traditional finance coming in and we all know what their motives are.
But I mean, that's up for debate.
Yeah.
Ryan, I see your hands up.
Yeah, I tend to agree with Ren here that I think this dip is really driven by some unique market dynamics. And they are unique
to the spot Bitcoin ETF. And a lot of people did think that prices were just going to pump after
spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved. But I don't think a lot of the market was taking into account these
specific factors. So you had the inflows across all DTFs around $4 billion over the first five days of trading, six days of trading.
And then you had outflows from GBTC of around $2.5 to $3 billion.
So the net inflows into these ETFs, when you take into account the outflows of GBTC, was really around $1 billion, maybe $1.5 billion.
And so that obviously
has a big impact on the market now some of the gbtc outflows were likely rotating into lower
cost etfs especially those in retirement accounts where you you don't have a taxable event if you're
switching from one etf to another but a handful of those could have just been selling out of the etf in
general and so that dampened the impact of the flows into btfs that's like just wait wait hold
on just one second if you're switching from one etf to another there's no tax consequences in the
u.s if i was holding you inside an ira he's saying if you're inside a tax advantage account if you
have a retirement account there's no taxes until you're 65 or whatever. So you can basically trade.
I mean, I literally trade Bitcoin in my IRAs because it's tax free.
And wait, hold on.
What percentage of GBTC do you think is earned in IRAs?
I think it's a high hand.
I know.
Lots.
Investing in GBTC and IRAs.
And 401ks.
Yeah.
Because I'd imagine that the IRAs,
the stuff that's in IRAs would be the first one to get out and get into.
Yeah.
So those guys.
Yeah.
I think there's three people who sold.
There's the traders, GBTC specifically.
There's traders who were playing the discount,
don't care about this market at all.
They were simply playing the odds that there would be an ETF approved
and discount to NAV would go to zero. They'd make the money from whatever discount they
did. Second are obviously all of these people, the FTXs of the world who literally couldn't sell
and they finally got unlocked and had the ability to do so. And then the third is people who are
willing to, who want to go from a 1.5% fee to one of the lower fees, but that's the calculation
GBDs they had to make.
They probably have a much better idea of how many people could do this
basically tax-free.
If you're paying 1.5%, you want to go to 0.2%,
but you have to pay 20% taxes.
That's a calculation someone has to do and is unlikely to change, right?
I saw something, Scott.
I saw something today, and I'll try and look for it.
I'm just driving home now.
But I saw a calculation of someone who said look if you if you he did a calculation between if
you held four bitcoin worth of of gbtc and you you sold to save the 25 in taxes and then you
you had to recoup it back uh in the change of fees and he kind of he made a compelling case
for actually most people to actually sell and get that lot.
I don't have it in front of me because I'm driving.
It just depends on how long you intend
to hold, right? If you're
doing it, yeah. There's obviously
math on how many years it's going to take
to offset the
difference. If you're going to hold that
long, it makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah. The other bucket, I agree agree with scott there on on the
buckets of people selling gbtc and the the ftx estate and these other estates of the centralized
crypto lenders who were holding gbtc also largely liquidated their positions last week so you have
all this to say you have all this spell pressure pressure coming from the unlock of GBTC against the buy pressure from the ETFs.
And I just think these dynamics are, I agree with Ren, this is a very unique event and will settle out over time.
And I think that's why we're seeing the price fall.
I think the more important thing is to say that you say it's a very unique event.
It's almost seen as a black swan event.
It's completely unnatural.
I define the black swan events as unnatural events.
Which is funny because we've pointed to these theoretically happening so many times, right?
And they never do.
It's the joke of bullish unlocks.
In this case, there was legitimate supply hitting the market for once.
Yeah. I really think that you got to... That's what I spent last night doing. And I was like,
let me think. If this is an unnatural event, how does the market usually deal with unnatural
events? And usually, they reach the point of before max pain. And then the market usually
rebounds very, very, very very quickly and you can see over the
all like i mean i'll give you some examples so the one one example is is covered um the other
the other example is is uh stock markets when the russia ukraine war started then i actually
analyzed the israeli currency um i'm sorry i see i see i'm getting onto a wi-fi one second
can you guys hear me
yeah you're good oh man you're good i don't know if you can hear us
i can't hear anybody yeah so the other one that i actually rationalized that i looked for the
israeli currency when this war started and the israeli currency went to like 410 4 420 or something
to the to the dollar and then it went all the way back down to like 410, 420 or something to the dollar
and then it went all the way back down to 360
and happened very, very, very quickly.
And Matt, I see Matt
just jumped in on this point as well.
Matt from Bitwise.
He's just loading now.
It's perfect timing.
Okay, he's connecting. Hopefully he can come up.
Matt, can you hear us?
Hey, I can hear you. Man, what a day.
Ah, perfect.
What a day to have 10 million issues. So sorry, guys.
All good, all good. I see you just popped in as soon as Ren was speaking now.
Yeah, I've been listening to the call. I think great insights. The one thing I would add is I'm not 100% sure that it's a GBTC-led sellout.
There's certainly large inflows from GBTC, but they're offset and then some by the other ETFs.
The ETFs, it doesn't feel like it, but the ETFs have been net buyers i've been looking at you know all the other
front running that took place as being unwound right now you can see that in the annualized basis
on finance futures you can see it on the skew on deribit options so there was a lot of people
expecting uh the run-up in prices and that's being unwound.
I think that points to sort of this volatility coming to an end at the end of this week.
We have big sort of derivatives expiration on Friday and then we're into a new market.
But I just think that's one nuance worth noting is, though, even though it is true, absolutely, that GBTC is dumping a huge amount of BTC into the market.
You know, right now it's being absorbed by the other etfs it's still depressing the market but it is being
absorbed and then a little bit but i'm seeing a lot of unwind in derivatives positions that were
put on in in december and early january ahead of the bsc launch and i think that may be worth
watching and it is notable that it sort of comes to an end on Friday.
Yeah, I think Dave Weisberger was here
and he was saying that he was watching
how fast the sort of futures were unwinding
and a lot of the bets that were being made to your point.
Also, I talked to David Jung this morning
from the head of institutional research at Coinbase.
And he also pointed out,
he kind of said the same
thing as you. He said, GBTC is a part of it, but it's not the whole story. And he thought that a
lot of it could have to do structurally with the cash create and how the authorized participants
have to behave in the background to get this done with T plus one, T plus two settlement and the way
that they have to then hedge their positions. And when they may or may not have purchased the spot Bitcoin for, you know, to see the funds and stuff.
So it could be a lot that's just forced poor mechanics because the SEC effectively made it not in kind.
I think there's a lot of that.
And I do think you can see in the data a lot of early positioning, you know, in the explosion of CME open interest and the explosion of some other derivative open
interest in the maybe week ahead of launch. And so that's also contributing and that's getting
unwound. We are going to get to the end of that. It makes me feel really bullish about where we're
going because at some point relatively soon, all that mess is going to become much less of a factor
and then I think the underlying fundamentals are really strong.
Right. I mean, you know, at the most simple level of supply and demand,
if we actually have a legitimate supply overhang,
it's somewhat unnatural or temporary.
The demand hasn't gone anywhere.
So if you remove the selling,
the same demand is underlying and price should quickly rebound, sort of as Rand pointed to.
Yeah, that is right.
Just one more comment.
And there is new demand.
I mean, we talk to advisors, financial advisors every day.
There are a lot of people buying Bitcoin for the first time.
And that's going to be a steady drip, a steady nudge that will continue over years.
So I know it doesn't feel like it, but there is new sources of demand. It's just we have to unwind all this unnatural sort of holding first
before we start to feel that is how I feel about the market. Yeah, once everybody follows me in
Boycott's Vanguard and gets to a place where they can actually buy it, we'll be good to go.
Scott, go ahead.
So I'm an economist, but I'm not a macro economist. So I can't speak to the macro trends, much less, you know, sort of, you know, sort of the short or long run financial estimates.
But the other thing that really, the thing that really strikes me about the ETF is a huge
milestone for the space. but it doesn't directly
change any consumer's individual access, right? Like it changes their access to Bitcoin exposure
financially, but it doesn't change their access to the technology. And so I think like also
thinking about the long-term, right, as more and more technology gets built on top of crypto rails
with real consumer applications and real consumer
access to the to the actual use cases. I think that's going to be sort of like a long term driver
that we should be thinking about. And I think it's so easy to get lost in the price action
of the product approval, but we really need the mainstream adoption of the technology.
Sorry, go ahead and continue. No, exactly. And, you know,
sort of, to me, right, like, it's things like Starbucks Odyssey, I see by my co author,
Steve Kaczynski, was in a few minutes ago, you know, Steve, Steve, and I wrote a book about
NFTs. And he's community lead at Starbucks Odyssey. And they're seeing all of these
individuals, like get their first crypto wallets in order to collect coffee rewards.
And this sort of thing, I think, as people get that type of exposure, start owning digital assets, understanding their value, understanding Web3, then that all, of course, percolates
back into driving up the value of the underlying infrastructure.
And of course, that includes the base chains.
That makes a ton of sense. I love that point. And I think we're all sick of talking.
No offense, Matt. I think we're all sick of talking about ETFs for the moment. And it's
to get back into the part of the cycle where we actually talk about the adoption and what the
next likely killer app will be that sort of drives the narrative.
Yeah. Can I ask in turn talking about
adoption yannick you were at wef is at davos yeah yes exactly how was the narrative i was there
last one and the one before just supporting one of our portfolio companies and meeting a few
investors but how's the how's the sentiment there um because i remember the last one crypto was like
non-existent and depressed the one before
everyone was talking about crypto the the best booth not booth the best locations were crypto
companies how was it this time around yeah so um i mean of course compared to ai um blockchain
um was a bit smaller um but i think we had a lot of great panels and discussions.
But was there any talk about decentralized AI
and the overlap between AI and blockchain?
Yes, that as well.
So I think the most interesting discussions we had,
and of course, I'm going to be saying that as a cryptographer
and someone working in privacy.
But that was having an open market.
And that was actual central bankers from different central banks
and also from the Bank for International Settlements, talking about having this kind of open market
between CBDCs and stable coins
and not wanting regulators to step in
and just prioritize CBDCs, I guess.
And also, finally, having open discussions and seeing the openness of central banks to have privacy in CBDC.
Privacy is getting a lot more.
One of our sponsors, DOP, was talking a few weeks ago about how privacy is now starting to get a lot more focused, a lot more attention.
Just want to go back to Scott.
I know I interrupted you earlier before going back to Yannick.
Is there any other narratives, Scott, that you find interesting in this bull market?
Well, I think the CBDC discussion should be had.
I'm not sure we should have it today. I mean, I obviously have my doubts
that they'll embed the same
sort of cash
equivalent privacy properties into
central bank digital currencies, but I will say
there are people working really hard on
pitching that. Like Chris Giancarlo,
who is the ex-commissioner of the
CFTC. People used to call him Crypto
Dad. Remember those days when we had favorable
regulators for crypto? I think it was a nonprofit think tank. I believe it's called the Digital
Dollar Project. And basically, he's made it his mission with the view that CBDCs are inevitable
to go around the world to everybody who's effectively pitching it at CBDC and convince
them to make them private and behave
like cash as opposed to being a surveillance tool for the government. But like I said, that's a
pretty, I think that's a pretty ambitious mission. I mean, if you want to then move on from that,
Mario, and talk about the exciting narratives right now, I think that people are really excited
after Satoshi BM, as you were talking about, about the BRC 20 and building on Bitcoin side of things.
I still think that the,
uh,
all of the narratives of past cycles will come back harder,
uh,
this cycle as they mature.
And I definitely think,
you know,
real world assets is going to be another major driver,
uh,
in this cycle.
But,
uh,
you know,
what do I know?
Just,
uh,
just a guy on the internet uh making predictions with
my crystal ball scott anything else that excites you uh i'm sorry i was muted i was oh i'm sorry
the other the other yes yeah it's so yeah yeah it's the interesting scott anything else that
interests you this market so basically he didn't want to know anything I just said.
Go ahead, Scott.
Sorry, Scott.
You know, we're going to be doing this all morning.
I can see.
Go ahead, go ahead.
Wait, wait, wait.
No, I got to check.
Wait, so am I the interesting Scott or the boring Scott?
No, you're the interesting one.
You're the interesting one.
Definitely interesting.
Let's go.
Look, as I say, I think a lot of it is about consumer applications.
And one category is very mundane, ordinary consumer applications, right?
Digital tickets.
If you think about ticketing, ticketing is a $40-ish billion industry.
A huge fraction of it is digital.
And then in practice, the vast majority of digital tickets are QR codes and emails.
And there are all these questions about like trust and safety in the secondary market and and the platforms that manage them take huge margins.
And like, you know, NFTs are just like a strictly better technology for that type of application.
And there's lots of other stuff like that, you know, lots of data records, you know, sort of, you know, individual credentials from finishing online courses, stuff like that. And so one category is I think they're like extraordinarily mundane.
This is just like a better, more interoperable way of defining assets and like, you know,
giving people control of them digitally. And then on the other side, the digital brands,
both, you know, sort of novel inside of crypto space, as we've already seen, and also sort of
large scale established brands
coming into the space and building their own digital identity around crypto assets and
producing a mechanism by which people can own a token as part of your brand attachment.
I think all of those are going to be very powerful.
And again, they let brands do something they've never been able to do before in the same way.
You can now enable third-party value creation on top of your brand assets and use both the value
you drive to them and the third parties do. If know, if you have a ticket to a Celtics game or something of the sort,
you know, a local restaurant can give, you know,
can airdrop you coupons or something of the sort in the same way that they
might, you know, verify a physical ticket when you walk in.
And all of that like drives people to really become, you know,
more attached and more active users of these individual digital assets and the crypto
infrastructure and form into communities around their favorite brands. And then the infrastructure
layer, you mentioned things that are being built on top of BTC. I've personally been really excited
to see all of the innovation with Ordinals and these like various like you know bitcoin based um again
consumer trending applications right it's like the crypto infrastructure becomes maximally valuable
when it reshapes the way we interact digitally and you know and not just we i mean we already
you know pretty much probably everyone in this space already you know sort of has you know has
onboarded and interacts digitally in this way. But we have so many digital interactions with people who don't. Once they all come into the
ecosystem, you know, it's just a completely different scale. It's right. Think about the
total number of companies that use Amazon Web Services versus the total number of companies
that have built software on blockchains, right? That, you know, there's orders of magnitude and
difference. But for many things at least i
personally believe web3 is such a better technology solution um you know sort of more powerful for the
consumers more powerful for the brands that we're going to eventually see a lot of that shift which
which puts even more value into the infrastructure itself um if i can jump in here real quick. And I think that's also something interesting we've been discussing,
or I at least have been pushing for at the WEF,
and that's basically having a third kind of economy sector, right?
It's not just the public sector building a currency or the private sector.
It's actually something different.
If we think about blockchain infrastructure,
we have non-private companies building those technologies.
They become permissionless and trust those technologies.
So I think that's the important thing to push to,
that it's something completely new.
100%.
William, you have your hand up.
Yeah, I was going to respond and say that I don't think that Bitcoin's
destiny is going to be when it gets in the hands of consumers.
That's going to be a very, very tough sell. I think it's
going to be more of an institutional product before it gets to consumers.
It needs to find itself more into new financial products beyond ETFs. I mean, let's be realistic.
ETFs is only the tip of the iceberg. And we've been waiting for them for 10 years. So there's
nothing new. So now it's done. Let's move on. And I want to see now Bitcoin infiltrate into new products.
It's good at mimicking traditional finance, but doing it more efficiently, doing it better.
And it's very simple.
We need more and more products now that are based on Bitcoin.
Even transfers of stablecoins. I mean, that's a big sleeper.
I think the next segment, we should see more of stablecoin applications.
The Bitcoin to stablecoin pair is probably the largest.
So there's lots of activity there. Bitcoin is good for big items.
It's not to buy a cup of coffee anymore.
Forget about it or brands.
It's, yeah, maybe I have 10 Bitcoins.
I want to buy part of it to buy a house.
Sure.
But how do I do it quickly?
Converting to stable coins and doing it without jumping through three hoops.
These are the things that we have to look forward to beyond ETFs.
Yeah, I agree with that.
Go ahead, Scott.
Yeah, exactly.
Completely agreed.
And for that to become a reality, right, the consumer on-ramps have to become much more
accessible and easy to use and also need to gain a lot more of the protections we're used to in other parts of our digital experiences, right?
You know, they have to, you know, both it has to be easier for consumers to access crypto
technology and it has to be the case that, you know, you're not worried about loss of
your, you know, sort of you're not worried about like complete loss of your account in
the ways that, you know, you wouldn't worry and, you know, you wouldn't worry about losing
access to, you know, your online shopping account or something of the sort.
And of course, at the same time,
there's like a really careful balance that has to be struck
between managing to make these consumer accounts
protected and accessible,
but also making sure that people still maintain
the same degree of ownership that Web3 is all about.
Yeah, and I think what really ties into that aspect people still maintain the same degree of ownership that Web3 is all about.
Yeah, and I think what really ties into that aspect is not only having this ownership over value in the sense of owning your assets, but this new component that we've never seen before,
which is being able to own your data. So being able to actually eliminate surveillance capitalism,
I think that's one of the big advantages that Web3
with our new cryptography can offer,
which also is an aspect of safety, right?
So social engineering, data correlation risks exist
without having privacy.
And at the same time, if we just naively implement this privacy, we face other safety concerns, right?
So in traditional finance, but also in decentralized finance, we have this problem of illicit finance.
So just slapping privacy onto it isn't the full way to go.
So at Elusive, what we attempt to do,
for example, is to combine both
trustlessness, but also safety.
About illicit finance,
maybe it's a good way to pivot to Binance,
probably the news of the day.
And before we wrap up,
we've got David here.
I don't really have a summary.
David Silver, our resident lawyer,
do you have any updates for us on what's happening with Binance SEC today?
You know, there's nothing new today,
but really we saw a stark difference between the SEC versus Coinbase
and the SEC versus Binance hearings.
Most importantly, the difference being that the judges are so much better prepared for
the arguments that the SEC has started to make.
But the judges are also not buying necessarily what the exchanges are saying either.
And the Coinbase case, which is just a legal question, versus the Binance case, which includes fraud and all the criminal actions,
the tone of the two judges could not have been more different in the two hearings.
I came out, Coinbase, it sounds like
Coinbase won. It looks like Coinbase won. I don't think Coinbase is going to win ultimately,
but everyone walked out of there saying, wow, you know, Coinbase's team did such a fantastic job
and Coinbase might actually get out of this on the motion to dismiss. The lawyers are saying,
take a deep breath and hold on. But listening to the Binance hearing,
it wasn't as, you know, everyone walked out of there saying, wow, they really pushed back
on the Binance lawyers. They really pushed back on and gave the SEC a little more breathing room.
And I think that just goes to aesthetics. I think judges, they know how to read polls, read the room,
and they know what's going on. And in Coinbase, because there's no allegations of impropriety,
whereas the allegations of impropriety, you kind of read that in the judge's tone where he was
a lot more cautious in just accepting everything Binance lawyers were saying,
because some of it was, oh, we did all of this right.
We did everything correct.
And, you know, bad SEC.
And the SEC was able to say, well, they also had all these other bad things.
And I think the judge read the room.
It made me chuckle when Ram was talking earlier about black swan events.
I remember a couple of months ago when we were talking about potential black swan events
before everything with Binance happened. And we said, oh oh binance was going to be the black swan and everyone said the
good things were going to be all of the etfs being approved now we've had the black swan event of
binance and bam nothing bad happened and we hit all-time highs we're not all-time highs but we
got higher in the marketplace and bitcoin was ripping because of the ETFs. And now it's the ETF,
this crazy thing that's happening. And we're still seeing where I do think in the next two
to three months, we're going to see the motions to dismiss are going to be denied. We're going
to see some survival like we did in Ripple. And then we're going to have another six months to
a year, maybe a year and a half, where we're going to have crypto, Twitter, and all of the associations
providing paperwork to the judges. Because I thought the craziest thing in this entire process
over the last week, and I was in New York with a lot of the crypto, Twitter lawyers who do this
for a living like myself. I think the craziest thing was all of these associations
were submitting what's called amicus briefs, where friends of the court and John Deaton kind of made
this famous in Ripple, where they submitted all of these briefs to the court so the court could
be educated. And the courts really read them all. And they're doing a fantastic, the crypto
lobbying industry is doing a fantastic job of trying to convince judges that it's not just the two parties arguing, but there's this third group of people out there.
And it's all the people who are saying all the things on crypto Twitter right now.
And they're getting this in front of the judges.
And the judges are buying what these third parties are saying, whether that's the Blockchain Association, the Digital Chamber of Commerce, they're all getting to weigh in on these things, which never happened
historically. And I think that's fantastic and going to yield positive results on how the judges
rule in these cases, which means it's good for crypto. Good for crypto.
Mandy, I don't want to get the invoice for this segment of the show.
That just cost $47,000, but it was really good.
Yeah, it was an incredible overview.
So on that note, David, what I'm going to do, Scott, if that's okay with you, is I'm
going to ask everyone in the audience to listen to the replay of this particular space.
One of my favorite, I think we've talked about two different topics starting off with the
ideal hype, which is something we don't cover a lot and we call it ideal hype i hate that
term it's more the vc investing um uh vc investing sector and that's something i've always liked to
talk about scott and ryan especially scott makes fun of me about that but we we kind of dug into
it and that was the first half of the show first 30 minutes and then we started talking about
different narratives and then david wrapped it up with oh we talked about the And then we started talking about different narratives. And then David wrapped it up with, Oh, we've talked about the markets.
Then we talked about different narratives and then David wrapped up the,
the, the, the, the legal summary focusing on Binance. But I think Scott,
that's a, it's one of my favorite spaces. Not sure if you liked it.
That was a great summary, man. You should do that at the end of every space.
Tell them to go back and listen. And, and, and what we talked about,
I forgot what we talked about at the beginning.
Yeah. We're playing we talked about at the beginning. No, but it's probably, no, man.
Yeah, we weren't planning to talk about ideals,
but every space like, hey,
we're guessing if Bitcoin is going to go up or down.
And I said, they're muting my mic and let you guys guess.
This is what people want to hear.
And our panel is pretty damn good.
They usually get it right.
But otherwise, I highly recommend you all listen to this space.
Really appreciate you all for joining.
Scott, final words?
I loved Silver's summary there at the end of
how basically stupid we are
and how much time we waste
making predictions about what's going to
be good or bad for the market. They're never true.
So thanks, Dave. Thank you.
We paid
you to make us feel bad,
which is like marriage
alright that's all I got
you need to stop ending
the spaces on a negative note
we need to work on that
I thought this was amazing
Mario you look
great you sound terrific today
all of our guests you're the most handsome people
in the world
and everybody should follow.
And listen to the replay,
retweet and comment and hit the subscribe.
No, hit the like if there is one.
Whatever you just said. Come on, let's go.
Do all those things. Bye, everyone.