The Wolf Of All Streets - Institutions Loading Again. Are You Late? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall episode, the panel discusses a strong green day in crypto with Bitcoin climbing back toward $74K and Ethereum leading alt gains amid renewed optimism. They explore whether this signals the return of altseason, the impact of precious metals money rotating back into crypto, and Bitcoin's resilience as a hedge despite ongoing geopolitical uncertainty. The conversation also covers MicroStrategy's continued BTC accumulation via STRC, evolving tokenomics, AI-driven trading, and why legacy finance's resistance to stablecoin yields and DeFi is ultimately futile in the face of technological disruption.

Well, good morning, everyone. A little bit different. There's green on my screen. Not really sure. I'm used to that, but here we are. There is Ethereum up, you know, over 10%. Bitcoin is doing well. Most of crypto doing well.

Is it a new morning? Are we, is, is this the dawn? You know, what are you guys thinking? I mean, Jamie, you've been toiling, you know, talking about this stuff for, you know, morning, noon, and night for weeks. And all of a sudden, this is, you know, we get this. kind of day when it kind of seems unexpected. What are you thinking? Yeah, well, you know, we talked about this last week. Scott was right on when he was accurate to mention a $74,000

area was key resistance. And sure enough, it hit that and then came back down. We've gone back up and we're ready to that mark again. So, you know, the more times you hit these resistance areas, oftentimes you do end up going through it. So, you know, that's what I'm hoping for is that we can continue to test this area and finally push through to the upside and get some momentum going. I mean, on the macro side, I mean, you know, gold is dropped below $5,000 for the first time in a while. Now it's just slightly above it. Silver, you know, treating at 80.

You know, we've been talking about this for months that a lot of the precious metal investors were the hotball of money and ignoring crypto. And it looks like some of them got bored and decided gold at 5,000 and silver at 80. It's not going anywhere. Let's move and look at BitTet, sir. I mean, I just, you know, just to pick one out that's up like 50% in the last week. You know, it does certainly look like that. And, you know, I don't put a whole lot of faith in that particular narrative.

Certainly we've had no progress on legislation or any of the other major things that are going on. But there's this thought. And I think a bunch of people have said. on the stage, curious, is, is the sector a beach ball being held underwater, or is this a, you know, crypto dead cat bounce because it was just beaten down so badly for, you know, for the last six months that, you know, you're going to see days like this. Do I have to, do I have to call on people to ask? I'll take the bait. Okay, go, go, Carlo. Yeah, no, I think you're, you're seeing an asset that has matured in, in Bitcoin. It has shown incredible,

resilience throughout this war and compared to other assets and other asset classes like the S&P and even gold, you're seeing divergence now. And I think that that is an important indicator for the maturity of Bitcoin. Even though we don't have clarity and even though that seems to be bogged down over this fight about stable coins, we do have great positive indicators because we had both SEC and OCC, I should say, SEC and CFTC, reach an agreement, a mutual understanding that Ethereum should be considered a commodity like Bitcoin. And that, to me, demonstrates positive momentum from the regulators that regardless of whether we get a market structure bill, you cannot deny we have two regulatory agencies that are

pro-digital assets. And I think we're starting to see the makings of an alt season here, because I think everyone knows what's about to happen as we continue to see massive deficit spending devoted toward funding this war. And I think that all points to a more positive crypto market. Well, I mean, the question in my mind is, is that the story? Is that why Ethereum is up, you know, 10% in one night? you know, in 24 hours?

I think to an extent it is because, you know, you had the ETFs go live, especially the staking ETFs. And a lot of the uncertainty about staking over Ethereum was resolution of whether it would be deemed a security or a commodity. Now that you have a mutual understanding from both of these agencies, you do have a little bit more comfort that you're not going to get hit with an enforcement action, at least, during this term. And I think that's an upward positive momentum trend for Ethereum.

I mean, I don't see any of the usual Ethereum suspects up here, but it is, when you see, it is as exceedingly rare. I mean, I'd be curious for those who are market watching, but, you know, Scott and I were talking about it this morning on Macrom Monday. Normally, Bitcoin moves up first, then all its take off. This point, yeah, Bitcoin's been, look, it's, it gravitating up toward resistance. to me is not remotely surprising, given what's been going on with STRC and just the supply demand dynamics. And we definitely could talk about that. It's probably worth talking about it.

But when you look down and you see a day where alts are actually leading the way, that is surprising. And some of them, like dramatically. I mean, Ethereum is 9.76%, right? you know, it was flirting with going below 2000, and now it's at almost 2,300. You know, you're looking at Solana is up 7%. You know, it's funny, when you look at the 30 day, the seven day, and the one day, they're almost the same. You know, it's like, it is, it's, it's, it's, it's basically was flat and then boom. And you're seeing this across the board on a lot of tokens. And, you know, I can't explain it.

I'm curious what, what you guys think as to why. What I will say, and this is important from a listener point of view, what I will say is it is extremely rare that you see a speculative bounce. That's one and done. That is extremely rare. Also remember, David, you had, I think, the Wall Street Journal report on Friday, this massive market that's beginning to develop in perpetuals trading 24-7 on blockchains, especially when it comes to oil volatility. So even traditional markets are taking note of the fact that tokenized assets on blockchains and the ability to trade them on weekends and at night has value. And Ethereum is a huge player in that.

And crypto is a huge player in that. Yeah, I was talking with someone over the weekend who, you know, has their, there has been building trading systems using, you know, using AI. Obviously, it's a Mac Mini-based trading system. And they come up with the signals and they tell the AI to look. And of course, what is the AI going to do? The AI is going to pick whichever asset. It doesn't matter which asset, right?

You know, it'll trade oil. It'll trade silver. It'll trade, you know, doge coin. It doesn't matter. You know, if it's on hyperliquid, they're going to trade it. So, you know, I think there's some truth in that. Ryan, I see a hand up. Yeah.

So for years and years and years, we would just trade all the other assets against Bitcoin. So Bitcoin was the only. one for a long time that was priced in USDC or sorry, USB and then when we had USDT come about that made everything really nice. But we'd always priced all the alt coins to Bitcoin. So all of the fringe exchanges would have a ton of different Bitcoin markets. If you look at the Bitcoin to ETH ratio, Bitcoin to Solana ratio, you'll notice that all of these major altcoins are down, compared to Bitcoin. So right now, my read on it is they're regaining some ground against Bitcoin and not necessarily

regaining ground against the market in general. I think they just got a larger amount of the sell-off when everything got spooked. I'm very wary in markets like this. I've gotten caught when I see the price pump a little bit. I'm going, oh, okay, we're out of it. and then I want to throw back in or I want to, you know, just kind of dive in again. And a lot of times it's a head fake going right into the summer. I've gotten caught year after year after year and stuff like this where, you know,

you will bounce back up to 60 and next thing you know we're down to 16 over the summer. So a little wary when I see little jumps like this. I'm not sure it's coming back like we think it is yet. Yeah, I mean, one day does not a trend make, right? Jamie? Yeah, just to that point, I mean, again, I agree with Ryan. You know, you definitely have to consider some caution when seeing some of these moves. But I will say that the Ethereum Bitcoin pair, you know, if you look at the weekly, you know, it's broken out of a long downtrend. it's retested in that channel and it looks like it's it's curling back up at least over the 50

in the high time frame on the low time frame it's it's clearly above all you know 50 100 200 and it's it's going up I mean it's outperforming in the near term what Bitcoin so you know will the momentum continue I don't know but it it certainly is indicating that Ethereum wants to break loose and take off. You know, also this week we had the Ethereum yield products that were, I guess, launched or made available was from Black Rock. So, you know, I don't know if that's something that's in the narrative. That's certainly for investors to be able to get some yield from Ethereum

in a traditional product, safe. regulated is something that is certainly bullish for Ethereum in the long term. I don't know if that factors in, but at least in the charts perspective, ETH is outperforming Bitcoin in the near term and it looks like on the weekly. I think the latter part, I mean, I think the ETH is obviously a big deal. That's probably where the buying is coming from today. But, I mean, I look at ETH Bitcoin at 0.03 as a pivot point. I mean, you know, the fact is look at that long term chart, it looks like the chart of death.

but in the short run, yeah, sure, you know, recovery level. Anyway, Rich. Hey, other day. Yeah, I mean, if we're talking technicals, it's coming up to some serious diagonal resistance. I mean, I know diagonals aren't always the greatest technical indicator, but, you know, it is a nice move. I mean, I, we're talking old coins here, which that's nice.

It's a refreshing change. I mean, there have been some solid moves. I think the two that I've been watching, the closest have been Betenso, with Tao, mentioned earlier and hyperliquid. I mean, I think we've said this a couple of times. We probably need an honest flush of wasted market cap attributed to to diner coins and ghost chains.

And if that takes the rest of the year for that to happen for genuine rotation and people just moving, you know, across into real value, I think there's some really good prospects. And, you know, I think Potenza, I mean, there's a lot to be said about, you know, what's underpinning this price move. I think it's largely speculative. If you've watched news on X, all of a sudden there's, you know, big accounts, you know, pushing commentary, which is the usual story. And then what's interesting really is, you know, these subnet coins that have started to follow the narrative. And that's typical, you know, crypto, Twitter, you know. getting a big move from, let's call it, the layer one aspect of Betenza.

And then, you know, there's about eight subnet coins that have started to gain some traction. You know, once again, I think that's going to be speculative. Bettenza's real revenue is not really derived from these subnets. But, you know, they're looking roughly collectively about 20 million. The subnets collectively about $20 million. So if you look at the valuation at $2.5 billion, it's pretty skewed. But I do believe that crypto people are looking for what represents the big winner for AI in crypto.

So that one's definitely on my radar. It always has been a big fan of them all along. And once again, I think Hyper Liquid are proving outright winners in the perpics space, just really dominating. I posted something earlier today. It is a bit of an old chart, but it's quite comical that, you know, last week the top 10 pairs on Hyper Liquid were predominantly trademortem, trades, commodities, metals, oil and so on.

And I think that's a great thing. I think that should have happened sooner. I think people like to just stay on a single venue. Hyperliquid's a good venue rather than have to jump around and move capital onto other traditional trading brokerage platforms. But, yeah, I'm enjoying the move from those two. And nice to see Bitcoin and Heath having such a lot. strong moves and yeah

seeing gold and silver lose their luster for a bit yeah lose the luster well I mean it is what it is I can't see by the way I see Jamie is that a ghost hand or a real hand that's the ghost

okay and Ryan same same question yeah ghost yeah so so Lou you're going to have a wild a wild crypto Monday this you know today after after this action Sorry, I had to meet myself. Yeah, it's Crypto Monday Bitcoin in New York today.

We've got a good crowd coming and should be fun. I mean, every time we get to this, you know, this level, and it looks like, well, we didn't get a 10 a.m. sell off that would we get a 10.20 sell off or a 1015 sell off today in Bitcoin? But, I mean, look, you know, we're at the level, this 74 level is where all the technicians have, like, kind of drawn their line. in the sand now and obviously it's not really a line and you know it'll be interesting to see what happens the real question is is generally today and tuesday is when strategy buys their bitcoin versus uh you know from the styrc inflows so i guess i guess we'll see i guess we'll see what happens oh we have a new hand up so journey man what what are you thinking about all this hey dave morning

how are you man um uh well strategy bought like a 1.67 $1.6 billion worth of Bitcoin this morning. So they already did that. How do we know, you know, whether they're smash buying it or what they're doing? I mean, you know, it's, I know they have the money. The question is, is the thing they announced was from last week. They announced it from last week and then, you know, they announced it on Monday. But we have no idea.

I mean, generally what you look and you see a week before, so they bought it at 70 last week. so we kind of know where they bought it, it then fell back and then came back up. But it's not that easy to tell, is it? No, I don't think it's that easy to tell. I'm not too sure what the answer is there. But I was merely going to suggest the fact that, you know, we've seen a lot of just bad news so far. And that's all we really know is bad news. And most of X has just recycled bad news.

And I think that's very priced in. So now that you've broken this line in the sand that you talk about, we're kind of, I think we're just going to really chop between like the 74 to 85 level. And if you think about any other news, like we don't really know if there is any other bad news. So I think you just stay there. And then if you flip kind of at the 85 level, you've essentially flipped the bear. And STRC is probably a big reason for that because all they do is buy more Bitcoin, you know. Didn't they buy like 11K worth of Bitcoin from STRC last week?

I think that's the number. or something like that. I mean, it is interesting for people, for those who don't understand, STRC is a really interesting bet. You know, I get into on some Bitcoin spaces, a lot of Bitcoiners like, well, why the hell would you buy that? You're not getting the upside. But there's a lot of money in the asset management world,

and I don't think this is readily appreciated, that is fixed income money, i.e., the only thing they're allowed to buy are yielding instruments. They can't take principal risk. You know, they can take credit risk, obviously, because you buy a high-yield bond, and it could go to zero because the company defaults. But, you know, effectively, STRC is being treated by a lot of asset managers as a high-yield product. Then the question is, well, what's its risk of default?

Well, they have two years of dividends in coverage already. And they have, it's around 11% collateralized. I mean, 11%, you know, it's almost, you know, somewhere between 7 or 8 to 1 over-collateralized based off of Bitcoin. So effectively, STRC is a vehicle, which at today's ratios is really the only way you lose your money if you put it in there is if Bitcoin, it fails. And then there are a lot of people who think Bitcoin will fail. And so it's like, okay, cool. And that's why it's such an attractive, it's an attractive high yield instrument because there's a lower risk of failure than a lot of really high yielding bonds. And it has that high yield.

And so that is a totally different class of investor. than the people who would own Bitcoin or own crypto in general. And that's where, that's so effectively what, what Sailor has done and Fongli have done is tap into an enormous source of capital that cannot, that wouldn't be, would not be Bitcoin investors and turning it into Bitcoin. That's where it comes from. And, you know, this is, this is a non-trivial thing because we're talking about numbers that are significantly more than the mining supply.

So we used to worry about the halving and the miners supply, but now the equilibrium price of Bitcoin is higher. It's just that simple. Now, that doesn't mean equilibrium price doesn't mean dick if the markets are crashing, right? Right. You know, things can crash of it. But if you want to understand what it's doing is it's putting a multiplier on the chart lines. So when you're looking at a price, understand that over time, you expect the price to continue to go higher, you know, whether 8 to 10% a year or so. And if that's the case, then looking at a chart from five years ago,

you really have to, you know, adjust that. And so a lot of people haven't. And so that's what we're seeing here. That's what I think anyway. I think that's the easy mathematical way to understand it. But let's see if there, you know, so David, you're up here and, you know, you've been around markets a while. I mean, what do you make of all this?

Well, you know, just given the conversation earlier on, I went back to kind of look at what the volumes have actually been over the past, you know, week or so in terms of Ethereum and obviously noting that it's a somewhat less liquid market than we've seen historically and clearly when you have thin markets. I don't know if you want to call it a thin market, but let's say on a relative basis it is, that yeah, we could see exaggerated moves. And I would kind of just go back to a comment that I made last week, which was looking at the portability of cryptocurrencies and looking at the people trying to get out of the Gulf and

trying to take their money with them. And I have seen some comments where people were basically going in with cash in Dubai and trying to get as much USDC as they could to get the money out. And what was slowing them down were the payment rails on the banks. So I'm still looking at the flight capital trade here as something that supports this market. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. I think Dave is glitching. Yeah, he's never tongue-tied.

Yeah. We'll wait for Dave to come back. Well, I know. There is. I figure you're going to talk longer. Dave? Yeah. Dave, Dave, that's true.

Is anybody in Dubai right now that's on the panel? I guess that's a no. On the panel? No, I don't think so. I'm curious if anybody, anybody who's up here is actually there to get a, a firsthand account of what's going on. I mean, Ian is in Hong Kong right now. So I don't, I lost my eyes and ears on the ground there to know, you know, what the situation is.

But definitely, when you get travel like this, I mean, Bitcoin takes on a new and, and USDC, you know, table coins take on, you know, new. Hey, Dave, I don't, I don't know if you see them out there in the audience, but we have someone who's a regular on the finance show, Timothy V. I believe he actually lives in Dubai, if I'm not mistaken. and he gave some on the ground conversation about what things look like in Dubai if he's able to come up and speak yeah well if you requests we'll certainly get him up here but in any case uh yeah journey what what's on your mind um i was actually like like looking at um the the btc dominance chart today uh i haven't

i haven't seen anybody talk about that for a while i mean it's almost it's almost going towards 60 so so my my question is how you how do you guys think ethereum's going to respond to that you know I don't I don't if if btc dominance is up do you think ethereum follows um i here i see a lot of chatter on the timeline that that alts are kind of dead well i mean they were until today i mean maybe i mean yeah that 59 uh has been that that's been like a a stable range for a long period of time like uh it it briefly broke down uh over the last month like on like around 58 uh but it wouldn't break back up to 59, you know, it hasn't really changed much at all, even through the, it's going to its all-time high.

Sorry. Yeah, I look, I think that when you look at Bitcoin dominance, it's, it's lagging, right? You know, so, you know, is, as I said before, it's like the 0.03 on the ETH Bitcoin ratio, it tends to be an inflection point, and we'll see. I mean, that chart, as I said, it's been dog shit, but it could vary. It's way overdue for a little bit of a bounce, you know, just, technically. I'm not saying, you know, that it will, that that's sustainable. But, you know, if people believe in the yield idea, and, you know, we don't have anyone from Bitwise up here,

at least I don't see anybody, uh, to talk about what they're seeing from institutional flows. But to me, that, that's a large part of it, right? You know, it's when you look at the market today, I mean, there's like a relief rally in the stock markets or all the indices are up. What are we about? About 1% give or take, uh, you know, on, on the stock markets. So risk assets are generally okay. Oil is down. little bit, which I think shocked a lot of people. I think that caught people offside. You know, I was expecting, you know, not,

and what the hell do I know? I know anything about oil. I mean, I see, I saw Gary up here before, he could talk about it, but when oil opened up this weekend based on the kind of, if you believed X, you know, you would believe that the oil markets would be going nuts. And of course, what happened, it opened, you know,

a little bit over 100 and then started fading. And that's kind of where we're at. And so I think markets are kind of de-digest, this stuff without really caring. You know, it's almost that, what's the word? Markets get numb to this stuff and say, well, you know, how are we going to invest? And so I guess we'll see. No one's seeing good news.

It's just lack of bad news, right? So, you know, Rudo, what are your thoughts? I have to agree with you. I think the funny thing is what I see from trading on the smaller timeframes is that you will have a day or two worth of really good momentum buildup and then for some reason the US market opens and then basically you get it deleted in a few hours time. So it's an exceptionally hard place to be and, you know, the alts itself showing a little bit of relief I think might be just because people are turning their backs on it. So there's not that much activity. So it's a tricky thing.

I'm exceptionally bullish on Bitcoin with the hope that we're going to reach that 80K. There's a CME gap there. There's imbalance there. So, you know, if you imagine Bitcoin just as a, take the weekly and, you know, imagine it as a five-minute chart. How would you trade it? You would wait for 80 before you start shorting again. So it's a, it's just going to be a choppy ride. And I think that's that nobody knows kind of thing.

It's just going to keep on eating you up if you want to try and leverage straight this thing. Hey, Thomas, I saw you throw up a hand. Oh, I did get you up as a speaker. I tried to. And it worked. Wow, amazing. X worked this morning. That's awesome.

You there? Yeah, I just had a, you know, I had a question. I spent a lot of time listening over the last couple days to guys like Robert Papp, who was on Diary of his CEO. I thought he had a very interesting interview, a bit of an Iran expert. He's basically studied his spent 20 years studying this kind of scenario, what's going to happen. And then listening to oil analysts like Honest Al-Haji, and then reading through some of the issues with some of administrative issues outside of the military ones with the respect to oil flows through the

straits with insurance and and things like that. And so when I listened to all that, and then I see, you know, so I'm thinking going into the weekend, you don't want to be short oil because you just don't know what's going to happen. And then I was surprised to see, you know, you know, overnight it opened up a little bit higher, like it dipped over 100 and now it's fading back. And I'm just trying to get a sense. Is there a mystery to the situation here? Like, it's not that bad? Or is the market in a form of denial about how long the duration risk is for the oil markets? I mean, you know, it, as I said, not an expert. And I see Tony with his hand up. So I'm not going to say it. All I'll make is one quick comment, which is this is not until something

happens. Oh, is it car? I don't, I'm going to pronounce it badly. But until unless something happens on that island, this is all about transportation. It is not about production, meaning people bidding against each other for scarce oil that they can get their hands on is very different than bidding on West Texas crude because there's no problem getting West Texas crude out of the way, you know, out of the ground, none at all. So it is a, when these sorts of things happen, they tend to be very temporary. And I think that's what the market is basically saying. That said, if they were a massive decrease in production capacity or ability to get oil from the Middle East, that means all the other sources of oil where you might be able to get it will go up in price. Yeah, Dave, I'm by far next. I've just been reading and observing as best I can. And you know, you don't, you don't want to be overly naive, but at the same time, you want to make sure that you understand what's happening. And if there's 20 million barrels coming out of the Gulf and only a little bit is now,

coming through the typical classical straits. They have the pipeline offsets, but let's just figure for round math that only 10 million, there's a $10 million hit to the global supply. I guess that can be adjusted somehow through supply chains and mitigations and things like that, but it takes time and you have this duration risk.

Like, how long does this last? And the broader question I really have is, is the damage to the infrastructure have impacts that last months, quarters, or years, meaning that they're impacting the way business is getting done in the use in the Gulf, the GCC, the Gulf area with impacts refiners. Now, is this, or am I misreading this because this is all FUD on social media? And I just, I honestly don't know. Yeah, I certainly don't.

Can you guys hear me, by the way? Yeah, we're going to hear you. Okay. Yeah, I have no idea. Anyway, Tony, is that a real hand? Yes, it is. I was actually trying to get on when the topic of Bitcoin and Alcoins, but X is not working this morning. I just want to share some thoughts on Bitcoin.

I think the charts were screaming oversold with sentiment in fear. So I think this relief rally was certainly due. And the charts for certain all coins are screaming the same thing, like Solana and E. theorem and so forth. So I think Bitcoin runs to about 80 to 85K hits heavy resistance and then rolls over. And I think ALTS have a mini rally and outperform

Bitcoin, but I don't think the bottom's in. I think there's probably one more downturn, maybe to 55K or so for Bitcoin, and we'll see how the rest of the year plays out. Yeah, I could barely want to prognosticate beyond a week, much

less the rest of the year. I mean, you know, given everything that, given everything that's going on. I mean, you know, we could talk about, and I'd love to talk about ALTS. You know, there was some fascinating conversation that Austin Campbell had started, and he often is up here, but he's not here today, where he was talking about, I think it was cello token, CELO, where they've achieved dramatic gains in use, et cetera, and all the utility that people were saying would be there would drive the price higher has happened, except for the price is 95% lower. And I look at that, and my answer to that is something I've been saying, and you guys are probably

sick of hearing me say it, which is what goes to the token holder versus the issuing foundation or company. And that is a very important point. And it's like you get this, the response when I actually respond to advice in some way. And someone said, well, you have to understand that most tokens are unwilling to take the risk of giving clarity, not to use the word from the act, but giving. clarity to investors of what the token is worth because then they'll be called a security and then they'll go to jail or they won't really go to jail, but then they'll get fined or shut down.

That needs to change. And I strongly suspect, strongly suspect that if in fact we did get that sort of clarity and it did actually work that quite a few tokens, the bubble would pop because people would say there really is no, they're there. And then there are a few where people would say, okay, great. Now I understand this is going to be worth a lot of money and here's why. And we can talk about which ones or which, you know, but I do think that it will cause changes. Ryan, what do you think? That is this. I think, especially with the alt coins and maybe more of the fringe alt coins, a lot of the traders aren't looking at the tranches of tokens and the unlocks.

and a lot of it is the sentiment of the community. And the way some of these tokens trade, it's like they've never looked at the cap table or who's holding what tokens. I know Salana had a huge unlock, and there was this looming cliff with Solana. I've been a part of a lot of projects where there's looming cliffs, and it almost feels like the more fringe of the project

is the less people actually pay attention to this stuff. This is why I think token man like Eric I have to give a shout out to Eric Vorhees on this one because Eric has created

several token systems over the last decade or so and each one gets more and more sophisticated and they seem to function better and better with each iteration that he does and right now he's using Venice and DM with his AI

compute systems and he has a paired with a with a company that's actually cash flowing and this entire model that he's created if you look at the chart around the venice token the DM token it's going crazy and when you look at the the mechanics that he built around the token and the issuance around the token it's like he took all of the hard lessons that everyone's learned over the last decade and kind of built him into his new tokenomic model so i think over the next couple years we're going to going to see a renaissance, if you will, of better tokenomics where people are going to start looking at the hard lessons learned from 2016, 2017, 2018, all the way through probably

just what we're currently learning right now. And I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see way more sophisticated tokenomic systems that just function way better, especially in this new agentic trading economy that we're going to have. Everyone has an open claw trading now. These these token systems are going to get crazier, crazier. Yeah, I think, oops, yeah, okay, I thought it was muted for a second. Yeah, I just, the ones that I'm mostly concerned with are, or some of the, look, I don't want to pick on anything in particular, but there are tokens that purport to have major sources of revenues incoming with absolutely zero clarity of how much the revenue goes to token holders,

either by burning tokens because there's scarcity or et cetera. Like ask someone, I have these conversations all the time just because every once in a while I'm a glutton for punishment. And so I'll poke the XRP army and I'll say, okay, great. So let's say everything you say is true. How many XRP will institutions need to buy? And you get two flavors of the conversation. flavor one is just clinically insane, which is that, well, XRP is an intermediate asset for providing liquidity, which you don't need anymore.

I mean, it's just like the whole world used to be used Bitcoin to trade, but everything trades in stablecoins now. So there's literally, and why would anyone insert a volatile asset into the middle of a trade between asset A and asset B? You don't want a volatile asset. You want something that has no volatility in between the two. So there's still this collective delusion that that's going to drive demand. But there's another piece, which is perfectly reasonable, which is okay. No, you know, we have our own stable coin and XRP will be used by all of these people for all of these things because of whatever. And then you have to figure out what's the actual demand.

Well, how much will they need? And you start modeling it. And there, there are a few people who will do that. But unfortunately, if you do that, you can't get the price predictions that they want to be able to claim, right? So it's just, it becomes almost impossible to get at that. Similarly, if you look at Chainlink, I've always said this. I mean, Chainlink is being used more and more. If it was a company, when we were talking about revenue potential, I'd say, oh, okay, cool, I understand that. But what do you need the token for? And how much will go to the token? It's the same question. We ask it time after time

after time. Ondo finance is another one. Same thing. Lots of potential. Who knows what the token holders will get, right? And this is, this has been going on for so damn long. I'm tired of the conversation, you know, but the truth is, is that if you listen to what Austin was saying this weekend, and I see Gore of us up here, so you probably care about this, is that, well, are we in a situation where as soon as we get clarity and as soon as token holders could start demanding things or the issuers start doing things, that people will say, well, wait a minute, the emperor has no close. We thought it was going to be worth X and you're telling me that I'm going to get a hundredth of X right now. And all of a sudden, well, that's not very good. It's the same

problem that internet companies had during the bubble when they first started showing revenues. And Scott always points to the show Silicon Valley where that was, you know, that there was a scene in there. It's like, oh, revenue, that's the worst thing you can do because it distracts from the story. Is that, Ryan, is that a shadow hand? Yeah, no, no, I wanted to jump in there because, you know, Bringing up Ripple is a great point of this because, you know, 2013, 2014, we were just issuing tokens. I'm not putting up Ripple.

I think Ripple Labs company is doing really well. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. The company's doing really well. But if you think about the trajectory that we've had in this entire ecosystem, originally we were just happy that we were issuing tokens, right? So we had Bitcoin, we had all the script alternatives. 2013, 2014, we were.

just happy to get a token out the door. And then we just started mass copying them and forking the GitHub repos. In late 2014, 2015, we started introducing this idea of utility. And then we started asking the question, but what does your token do? What's the point of it? Right? 2017, 2018, this was huge. Like, what's the narrative? What's the reason for having a token? Then we got even more critical in 2021, 2021, we started saying, like, do you even need a token? Why do you have a token? What's the real use case here. And we started tying it into like app tokens and started tying it to like real world use cases. And then 2024, 2025, we started tying it to more revenue flows where it's like, okay, now it's tied to a company. It's tied to a revenue. And each iteration, we're trying to justify

the token more and more and more in our own economic system. So now we're issuing stable coins. and we're issuing all these different layers on top of whether it be EVM or our own smart chains. And we're trying to justify it more and more. I think it's going to get to a point where, you know, we might have this huge pendulum swinging the other way to where we don't even need a token anymore. And we're just using stable coins for everything. And a lot of the original ripple and light coin and every coin but Doge coin, somehow Doge coin, somehow Doge coin is like the cockroach that will survive every apocalypse. But I think all the other original tokens will eventually just kind of phase out.

But it's going to take time. I think people are just kind of tired of the narrative of I have a token. Now what does it do? Yeah. I mean, I think that is absolutely the key is I've always asked. And look, I started in crypto in 17, right? You know, that's when I mean I started building towards, we started building coin routes.

And the first question I always asked people when I was trying to figure out what was going on, because at that time, I didn't know anything about, you know, crypto. I mean, I knew roughly, I read the white paper. That was pretty much it. And so my education started that year. And I would ask, well, why do you need a token? And most of the time, when you asked an issue or why you needed a token, you got some version of homina, homina, hama, hamama, because they start arm-waving and talking about things.

And there was no need. The reason they needed a token was because it was a way to create an extract non-dilutive capital, which is another way of saying, you know, get rubes to give them money to build their business. And that's not sustainable. And we kind of know that's true. So then, you know, it evolved. And then we got, you know, had the Gensler, which I actually think that just to be clear, I think Gary Gensler was if his goal was to destroy or set back crypto as an industry,

He was devilishly intelligent by forcing crypto issuers to memes and things like governs tokens that have absolutely no value other than people's feeling good about themselves because they couldn't vote themselves to revenue. That's exactly what he did. And so understanding that his goal was to set crypto back for years, I would say he was brilliantly successful at it. I know that, you know, you could take that with. however you want to take it, but I think it was very smart.

And so if you want to understand the real damage that the anti-crypto army did, is they use, this is what we call jiu-jitsu finance. They use the greed and power of the industry against itself. And so all the own goals that we've had since then, you know, kind of derived from that stuff. So I think we've seen a lot of it, and we have to come out of it. And it will. I mean, that's why this fight over the Clarity Act matters so much, not so much because of the specific,

and yes, there's some things that are going to end up getting past that we're all going to hate. There's no doubt about that. But if the one thing it achieves is allowing founders and allowing people to design assets that make economic sense, then it's a massive win. That's the way I look at it. Clearly that was designed to be controversial. I see no hands up. So, okay, I'm going to call on Carlo to start. I mean, what do you make of that sense?

Because I know that, forget stable coin yields for a heartbeat. you know, all the other issues with defy and everything else, what do you see as the big deal going on with clarity? Or do you think that the industry is starting to say, you know, screw it. If the regulators aren't going to kill us, we'll still try to build. I think that's exactly what's going to happen. And I think that this push by the banks,

and you came onto my show Friday, the Stablecoin Solution Show, and you were very gracious to share your thoughts on this. But I think the fact that the banks are fighting so hard, against Healed. And a lot of people are starting to jump onto this narrative. I'm seeing more and more stories in the news cycle talking about this. First of all, there is no stopping this train, especially when it comes to AI agentic payments. I don't think people understand the tam of what's about to happen, the massive volume of payments agent to agent that's going to be built over

stable coins. And I still maintain blockchains have a place here because stable coins need fast blockchains to run on, especially when you're talking about micro payments on the AI agenic scale. So chains like Polygon, Sue, Base, Salana, these are all going to continue to see adoption, but they're going to have a different profit model and they're going to have a different revenue stream because they're not going to realize the prior windfall that they had in previous cycles, they're going to have to adapt. But what I think is going to backfire badly for the banks and all of this is that I think they're going to drive more and more adoption of Defy. And I think they're going to drive more and more interest in self-custody by being so adamant about restricting yield opportunities on these centralized exchanges like Coinbase.

You've already seen Coinbase pivot and they're now paying in Bitcoin yield for custody of USC. So this is whack-a-mole for the banks and I don't think they're going to win this in the end. Yeah, my opinion on this subject is rather, is rather well put by saying the banks are film camera companies trying to outlaw digital cameras. And they're not, it's not going to succeed. And so, you know, the ones who are, and look, they kind of know it too. I mean, the bigger banks understand that that's true. So they're just going to, it's just a delaying tactic. It's just, you know, when you run, it's like the movie where they're running down.

and the guy's coming after them and they're throwing chairs at them. And you know it's not going to stop the guy coming after them, but, you know, it doesn't mean that it's going to change. I mean, eventually everything gets sped up. I mean, Cracken was out and their CEO was talking this weekend about how they will be able to do exactly what I've been talking about, which is offering an integrated platform that gives payments and investing, the speed of light, as opposed to wait a day, wait a day,

oh, did my wire go through? I mean, there are many inefficiencies in the system. And the neo-banks like Cracken are coming. They may not be full-fledged banks, but you know what? If people have enough exposure to other alternatives in D-Fi for yield and for lending, you're kind of losing the narrative for banks in a lot of ways. And I think when consumers realize that they can on and off-ramp through something like Cracken, put their money in self-custody and do defy and other things,

they're going to start to think there's no point to the toll booth economy that is the current banking regime. And the banks that adapt to this, I spoke virtually a recorded session for a conference that's coming up for the Bankers Institute, where I had to talk about use cases and making stable coins sticky for banks. And I wrote a piece that I'll be happy to put in the nest where I basically talked about this very thing. These community banks are at a crossroad. they need to pick whether they want to stick to the old way of doing things and become marginalized and lose market share, or do they want to be nimble and adapt to stable coins and give consumers actual options that I think in the end will retain depositors, will grow their lending base, and will take business away from the big banks?

I mean, it's certainly possible. I personally think that expertise in localities to a, evaluate creditworthiness of businesses is important and expertise in understanding, you know, where how to, how to source within communities is useful. Community banks can profit from that. It's when they get bigger than that and become outside their expertise, they can't. And why this matters for crypto is, and for even an agentic economy, is there's some knowledge is that, I mean, LLMs are based on, you know, training on large data sets, but there's always idiosyncratic data.

And idiosyncratic data is something, there's going to be advantages. And so you can, both things could be true. Anyway, Jamie, you've been patient. I've seen your hand up for a while. Yeah, no, just, I think it's important. Like, you know, we talked about this a little bit before. You know, the Clarity Act is, you know,

the Republicans have the majority, but, you know, they need 60s. So they're seven votes short. So, you know, that they can overcome the potential filibuster, right? But, you know, what's it is, interesting, and we kind of talked about the idea of them kind of pushing it down the line. Maybe they have no incentive right now. You know, there's nothing that could benefit the bank to lobbying and the people who support

them in voting this in right now. But, you know, as we get through the midterm, as we get into the next election, this could shift where it goes back to the Democrats, maybe the administration actually gets voted in. And then now, you know, you have another opportunity. What I find interesting is that the CBDC bill was passed. It was overwhelming 89 to 10. But that one was a ban just until 2030, which is kind of ironic where this is kind of like positioning the bills that we're trying to get real clarity and locked down. But it's getting moved to this next administration opportunity.

And I think people need to be aware of the nuance of that and how that could really affect. how these get approved when they get approved, and depending on which administration has the majority, when they have the opportunity to vote on it again. Yeah, I mean, I really, how do I phrase this? It's sickening how often we have to end up talking about politics. I think the most important question really is, will the Democrats continue to be marshaled by Elizabeth Warren

to try to block innovation and push everything offshore again? and or is it, okay, we're going to adopt it. We're going to, you know, we've slowed it down enough, and our friends, the people we can control will run it. And this notion of banning a CBDC until 2030 is essentially, let's just, let's ban it until 2030 for now. And the people voting for it fall in two camps, the camp that says we really want a CBDC,

and this is perfect because we won't have the White House until 2028 anyway. And the other is saying, okay, well, maybe we can get this and make it permanent later. So it really, in other words, it's essentially a waste. It means nothing because, you know, it's if you want government power and pure statism, you want a CVDC. And honestly, you know, if as stable coins grow, given the the amount and the ability of control that are built into it, I'm not sure it's that big of a difference anymore, although I see BDC definitely could be worse. That's about the one thing. Anyway, but we're talking about all coins. I mean, And Gorov, you've been up and down a bunch.

You know, I wanted to get you up here before we close. I mean, what are your thoughts as to what's going on today on any of these topics? I've been dealing with, I don't know, X application because, like, my last time what was with the browser and this word. So I have no idea what's been going on in the tourist space today. But I'll go back to the topic. that you said we have discussed Azealium times and you know we have discussed Azealine times,

probably just the two of us, which is to economics and why is nobody interested in tokens anymore? And I think there were incredible points presented, though I didn't hear them all through this cracking connection. But I want to quickly, you know, as a concluding summary of today's space, would go back again to why did we?

we started liking the crypto ethos in the first place. And why did ICO succeed in the first place? Because we were looking at an economy that though was new and had a promise of the future and was a small part of the larger tech stack and did not come here to change the world. In its initial claims, of course, Bitcoin came to change finance, whatever. Was the fact that bigger, small, the promise was transparent. The economy was transparent. was perpetually rewarding as it grew. So if I was to take a small piece of it represented by a

token, I was at least sure that my bet winning or losing would be transparent and I would know that. And that very promise faded away. I would go back to somewhere around YFI for the first time where we created waltz and defy returns and yields were though, you know, shown as if they were transparent but hidden behind this operating AI or operating logic. That was the first time something. I mean, I know you can call me out on that statement, but, you know, that was sort of the emergence. And I'm not saying before that they weren't broken toconomics.

That was like, that was the beginning of silliness when people started raising capital over WhatsApp messages and maybe even just, you know, I messages, whatever, two liners. And I'm sad that every single high quality conference or assembly from Satoshi Roundtable to alpha gatherings across, you know, Davos or you name it. Everybody talks about this. Everybody understands this. And everybody's passionate about this topic. And these are really, really powerful people. and still even with the smartest people like Anatoli, you know, co-founder of Solana,

making a statement around Jupiter's recent buybacks or actually advocating against the buyback and keeping that capital is surprising. Like how can you advise or how can you even think about holding your capital at your will? I know the reason is noble they're saying that you need that capital to survive. the winters. But dude, like, you raised capital from the people in that ICO and even the VCs on the promise of a decentralized economy. And it's stupid how everybody's so passionate about it and nobody's doing anything about it and nobody's able to make an impact strong enough to get us back to the same transparent economy. So I'm left with questions usually when this

topic strikes. Yeah. But like Dave, you know, when you, I'll not stop speaking about it. about it because my reason of being in crypto is my extreme conviction that we'll be able to restore the same ethics of the of the toconomics. And sooner than later, I think VCs are largely responsible for getting this implemented, not submitting or not surrendering to whatever, broken toconomics and making sure that there's a pipeline of implementation.

The rise of of me, memes is the biggest example of the same. Ryan wants to say something, so I'll take a quick stop. I'm speaking more because I see Scott isn't here. Who would call my speech a monologue. But I'm going on. Before we go to Ryan, I do want to make one point. And that is the reason capitalism...

Are you speaking, Ryan? Dave's going. I think that he can't hear us. Can anybody hear me? You guys can't hear me now. I guess it's glitching again. I'm going to go on me. I can hear you, Dave.

It's just, it's just, Garav, we can't hear it. They can't hear you. Yeah, okay. So, you know, all I was going to say, for the record, I can't hear anyone. You may need to drop them down and bring them back up. Yeah, I'm going to have to. Okay, well, sorry, Gorov. The one point is, is the reason free markets work, when free markets work,

it's when all the information is people understand what's going on. They can price it. There's whatever. Greed is good as the famous expression from the movie Wall Street, right, Gordon Gecko. greed is only good if there is a way of channeling it. So when you have when you can raise money because people are dumb and just because finance or lists a token, it gives it an imprimatur and people think it means something, look, the VCs are never going to discipline themselves. So discipline themselves when they can't raise money anymore, right? You know, and move on to the next one. And that's the

real issue here. So I keep talking about disclosure and about tokenomics because ultimately that's what makes an investment sustainable. Because if you're not, if there's no way to, no path to value, and that value doesn't have to be revenue. The value could be scarcity. It could be a lot of things. But the truth is that has to be something. And VCs got trained in this space that they could just extract money from exit liquidity

and live happily ever after. And founders did the same. I mean, founders actually were able to do to raise before they built anything. And then once they had that war chest, why would they waste it building? You know, it's like the incentives are completely fucked up. And, you know, I think Ryan, I think you've made that point before. But anyway, you have your hand up. So you have toward the line.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he was talking about decentralization, how we believe in these decentralized economies. And then all of a sudden a founder or a founding team steps in and changes things. People forget that just because it says decentralized on the cover of the book doesn't mean it's actually decentralized. And, you know, we're in the space of decentralization, but behind every multi-sig, behind every white paper, there are people. And those people can override things. And just because they say they're going to do something doesn't mean they're going to do it.

And very few protocols have actually just launched themselves into unimutable smart contracts. Most of the smart contracts for a lot of these ERC20s and tokens can be upgraded and changed. So even though you read a white paper that has a tokenomic model does not mean that's what they're implementing or even what they're going to stick to. And a lot of times they've actually changed their wording to path to decentralization and not decentralization. I will add into this as well that I believe VCs and investors are getting smarter with the advent of being able to drop a white paper into Chad GPT and actually doing a BS check. before I used to do the BS check on behalf of investors. They would send me the white papers. I'd read through them and I'd say, yeah, no, this is fake.

You know, or, you know, just for fun, take the BitTenser white paper and drop it into ChatGBT and ask it a few questions. Not saying anything bad about BitTensor, but just do it. It'll be interesting. A lot of people passed with, you know, two guys, a dog and a white paper in 2017 and raised millions and millions of dollars because no one was actually reading or understanding the white papers. Now we have AI for that. And now I think investors are becoming more savvy and they're not just throwing around their money at every single token that has a white paper.

But all that to be said, just because it says it's decentralized doesn't mean it is. Well, I'll make two predictions. Prediction one, whenever there's a major bull market, not like a day or two, but something that starts to rampage higher, investors aren't even going to bother putting in a chat GPT. They're just going to buy based on momentum them because that's what they do. So that's prediction number one. It will happen. Now, it may happen from Bitcoin being 20,000 and it starts rising again, or it may happen from here. I mean, I'm not making that statement. Obviously, I think that, you know, I think that short term, at least, I think that we have hit a, we have seen the bottom, but in Bitcoin, but on the all coin market, it's different.

People don't learn. Anyone who believes that investors learn, I mean, there's a bridge I used to able to see from my old New York apartment that I'd love to sell you. It's just that simple. So I'm very skeptical. But the other is when there is, if there ever is disclosure rules that work, you will see analysts that will start to outperform and pure momentum buying and selling will be a part of the market, not the market. Because right now it is the market. But it will, if you look in stocks, it's in the equity world. It's certainly a part of the market. There are lots of people who buy and sell stocks don't even know what they do, right? And then there are others who actually are called value investors and they can do well too. And people wonder how could growth and value investors both

do well, but that is in fact the case. The good ones do well and the bad ones do badly. It's pretty straightforward. So for what it's worth, that's where I think we're going. Dave, I want to ask real fast. I don't know if anyone knows this. Does anyone know how many stable coins are currently in the the queue for being reviewed. Because I know there's a timeline that if they don't get reviewed in a certain amount of time to get automatically approved, I was curious how long that queue is right now. I have no idea. Carlo might know, but he dropped.

So I don't know. We'll have to wait for another day. Topic for another day. For another day. So anyway, you know, we, during this show, we saw Bitcoin go from 742 to 744. It touched 73,000. and now we're at 73-8, so we're right in the middle. So who knows what tomorrow will be, but we will see everyone on Wednesday,

since we're doing this every other day now. I think I'm still hosting, so you've got to deal with me, Scotts in Costa Rica, enjoying spring break with this family. So everyone stay safe out there. Those of you who will be on other spaces, I may see or speak with you at some point soon. Follow every one of the speakers up here. They give their time and effort.

and, you know, at least more people are smiling today. But that's it, unless anyone has a final thought. Once, twice, sold. Okay, have a great day, everyone.