The Wolf Of All Streets - Is The CLARITY ACT dead? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: January 15, 2026

The latest episode of Crypto Town Hall dives into the dramatic postponement of the Senate Banking Committee's markup on the Clarity Act following Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's public withdrawal of support. Panelists, including Scott Melker and guests like Carlo and Tom, unpack key controversies: recent amendments imposing a de facto ban on tokenized equities, restrictions on DeFi and privacy, erosion of CFTC authority, and a banking lobby push to block stablecoin yield/rewards to protect deposits. While some view Coinbase's influence as a bullish sign of crypto's growing DC power, others see it as evidence of entrenched banking interests stalling innovation. The group debates the bill's near-term viability (likely dead or heavily scaled back before midterms), its broader implications for tokenization and competition with traditional finance, and why Bitcoin's recent rally appears resilient despite the regulatory setback.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Cryptotown Hall every weekday here on X at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard time, as usually have quite a lot to talk about, but nothing bigger than the postponed indefinitely markup of the Clarity Act. Of course, that was in advance of the markup from the Ag Committee, which was still a couple weeks away. But the biggest news surrounding the Clarity Act, obviously, is Coinbase very definitively pulling their support for the current iteration. of the bill. Before we unpack all of this, we do have an awesome sponsor today, which is ZeroG. You can tell you a bit about them.

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That's it. Perfect. Yeah, there's so many things in here, but I think that if you reduce it to its most basic form, this is the clear, and I mean clear proof that the banking lobby's money is controlling the Senate. And it is something that from, if I was sitting in the White House, I would be bathing the living crap out of Tim Scott right now. I mean, this is the sort of thing that, you know, it's one thing for arguing about AML and KYC on DFI and how you want to control the rails. It's a very complicated system. You know, Austin Campbell, who is too bad,

I don't see him on the list here. He would be great today. You know, unpack this a few days ago. There are issues that are complicated issues that are difficult that you can understand that smart people and people of good moral fiber could have arguments over. It is not possible to make the argument

that banks should be subsidized over a hundred billion dollars a year at the direct expense of the average American consumer and have make that argument that this is somehow a good thing without ever looking at the data because the data shows that that's not true. And, you know, if I'm sitting in the White House and I know, and, you know, the same human being, you know, Donald Trump, who's claiming that he wants to help the individuals with some dumb ideas like capping credit card interest below, you know, at levels that, frankly, you know, Michael Saylor is paying higher interest to buy Bitcoin. So, you know, that level is insane. You would think that from a populist perspective,

a act that would literally take $100 plus billion a year and put it in the hands of people other than the banks would be something that's obvious. Yet that here we are. And that is what's going on here. And so, yes, you know, Coinbase looks at this. and says no. Honestly, Coinbase has a huge vested interest here. So ordinarily, I would look at this and say, well, maybe this is because it's their vested interest, but they don't like it.

But I don't think that's the case here. No. So listen, there's a huge, the vested interest comes obviously with the rewards, quote unquote, or yield on stable coins, which obviously Coinbase wants to do. And the banking lobbyist pushed back against. But looking at Brian Armstrong's tweet, he also pointed out a de facto ban on tokenized equities.

I spoke with Jake Chavinsky everybody, listen, if you want to actually unpack this, not to pump my own show, but this morning, Jake Chavinsky is the actual lobbyist and lawyer who's working on this on Capitol Hill. I had him on 30 minutes. He unpacked this. A de facto ban on tokenized equities, and that was not language that they saw until within the last week. So when you hear Atkins talking about Project Crypto and tokenizing everything and the DTCC talking about tokenizing everything, that's effectively being banned now on the Clarity Act in language that wasn't there before.

Next, DeFi Prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy. This is going back to the debates we had about wallets, having to, you know, KIC everybody and Defi and all the impossibilities of that literally can't happen logistically. That's back in the bill. Erosion of the CFDC's authorities, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC. That one we can debate all day. But it's not, just to be clear, it really is not just about stable coins. And as I talked to Jake and as I did my research this morning, this thing was never going to pass. I've been smoking absolute crack opium the entire thing.

There's no chance. It is not happening in my mind. I could be wrong. Maybe, as he said, maybe Coinbase comes back with New. This was never happening because these issues are things that the politicians are so deeply entrenched on and politically are so unpalatable for different parties that they're not reaching the agreement on these one day on a markup. Oh, no.

Say it's dead is interesting. I mean, look, so let's unpack those two things. So you have an answer. Let me rephrase that. Dead for now. I'm not saying we will never, ever get a market. I don't think we get it before midterms, and I definitely don't think we get it once the Democrats take the House. But I want to be very clear about something, Scott. The reason

that there's a ban on tokenized equities in here in the fine print is because the banks are the ones who control the equity market and the last thing they want. Hell, DTCC is less, who actually does handle the back end right now. You know, they're not lobbying against it, but you're seeing the big banks because once you have, and this is the point that people need to understand, and maybe we can make it obvious to the politicians, once you have everything that is tokenized, it immediately introduces competition into every nook and cranny of the financing businesses that permeate Wall Street.

So let's just give a simple example so people know what the hell I'm talking about. Imagine right now there's a market. I'm going to pick on a really simple one. Stock loan. It's a multi-billion dollars in profit. So we're not talking about small numbers. It is controlled almost completely by the large prime brokers or draw banks. The banking lobby's primary interest. If you are a lender, i.e. you are a fund and you have, and you control a lot of equities, you get a percentage of the stock loan revenue made by the prime brokers around 10%. At the same time, if you're a borrower, you're paying a fee that is effectively set by an oligopoly. So the fee you're paying is much higher. At the same time, there's this

structure of locate and borrow within the system that creates all sorts of pathologies, two that are obvious. One, it allows for what some people will call naked short selling, because once you do a locate, you don't necessarily have to find it. And guess who doles out the ability to do that? It's the prime brokers. The second pathology is it means that larger hedge funds that are funds that pay more fees have a huge competitive advantage in sourcing boroughs. And so the arbitrage mechanism are broken and the banks make more money. It is, you can see how all that exists. Now, the instant tokenization happens

and you're gonna have tokenized equities. There is no longer locate and then borrow because effectively you're gonna have to source it, it's gonna be in real time, it's there just like crypto is. Well, that means no favoritism anymore. Plus, you get full transparency on what the price that it costs to lend or borrow. And that will introduce competition,

meaning that the economic rent, the extraordinary profits are being made, goes away. That same, so that's what tokenization does. And that's why Paul Atkins is so bullish on it because it is massively bullish for the overall users of the equity market. It is massively bearish for the people who are the current gatekeepers that are making profits. That same sort of analysis could be done on a ton of other businesses, from interest rate swaps to, I mean, you could go on and on. We're talking trillions in businesses. That is why, the banking lobby is pushing so hard. So when I talk about the banking lobby, yes, stable coins

is part of it. It is not all of it. That's why I made that point. So I'm sorry for the diatribe, but I'm pissed off. Yeah, let's go to the panel. I saw Carlo and then Tom's hands out. Yep. Good morning, Scott. Morning, Carlo. Okay. So, yes, disappointed. I think what was jammed in in these amendments is definitely a full-blown attack on defy and privacy, unacceptable. what was jammed in with respect to adding an extra hurdle to the tokenization of assets that will already have gone through the full SEC scrutiny and qualified as securities. To now require this additional layer to tokenize an asset is clearly a unnecessary hurdle that's being implemented to stifle growth in the sector. and that clearly hurts Coinbase's primary bags

because they want to jump into this space and they are a for-profit corporation that answers to stockholders. I've been very vocal about the fact that banks are really pushing hard to protect themselves in the aftermath of the Genius Act and to force Congress to, in a backdoor effort, not amend the Genius Act or rewrite the Genius Act,

which is not going to happen. but now trying to do a stealth rewrite of the Genius Act through clarity so that they can maintain a monopoly on this notion of rewards and yield because they're terrified, they're going to lose deposits, and it's just strictly protectionism. Now, I would love to put up in the nest something that I put together today, which was kind of my thoughts and impressions on this, which is that I think this is actually an interesting change in the paradigm here, because this is clearly a battle between the banks, and the Tradfai sector and what we now can conclude is the crypto lobby. And the fact that one company in one ex post from the CEO was able to completely shut down the legislative process here is an interesting thing that's happening because we've been very well aware of the fact that banks have a strong, strong lobbying. influence over the bank sector, over the banking committee and over legislators. We know that

traditional finance has got a lot of influence. But short of J.P. Morgan, I can't think of another company that could literally completely shut down the process. I mean, within minutes, or let's say, within an hour of Brian Armstrong's post, Scott had paused the scheduled amendment hearing today. They have essentially paused the one that's supposed to happen in agriculture, and now everyone's back to caucus. So I'll close with a positive note. I think that this is actually, in the end, a positive thing for the crypto sector. I know that there are a lot of other adjacent crypto firms like Cracken that are not happy with Coinbase and how they have derailed this process. However, I think it ultimately confirms that the legislative process has to take the

crypto lobby serious, and banks are becoming, I think, a little bit more marginalized in this whole thing. So I remain hopeful. Unfortunately, we have a pause next week for Martin Luther King, so nothing's going to happen. Then we're going to revisit and see if the Senate Agriculture Committee and their markup goes forward. I caught your interview with Jake. I thought it was outstanding and he did a great job of covering it. But I think ultimately this reinforces that the crypto sector is a force to be reckoned, and definitely Coinbase has a lot of influence in Washington. Tom, I think you're up next, and then I see Kelly's hand out for that. Yeah, I think we covered a lot of the major points here, yield being the most salient one,

and this is near and dear to Coinbase's heart, right? They make an absolute ton of revenue off yield for USC as a circle, obviously. And this is where the banking sector is, you know, bread is buttered, really. This is where they make all their money. So if I give away their potential interest revenue to someone like Coinbase and these Neo-Betka, banks, I mean, they're in really big trouble. Now, in terms of this bill, there's actually a lot of support. So Cracken has supported it as the speaker just noted a second ago. Ripple for whatever that means, supporting it, A16Z, the biggest investor in the space

in crypto, but one of the biggest tech investors worldwide, Chris Dixon supported it. And there's a number of others who have actually supported this bill. So it does go to show you how far Brian Armstrong's voice does carry when he speaks. Now, I think it's very, very unlikely we're going to see any movement on the yield portion of the bill because, as I mentioned, banks really need that, and there's no way around that on their side. But what I think these others who are supporting the bill see is that there are some workarounds and there's still the ability to get some rewards and have some cute language in there that can pass revenue back to customers.

And there's still a lot of rulemaking to be done, even if this version of the bill did pass, subsequent to its passage. So I think there's a lot of wiggle room there, and it seems really where Coinbase sort of stopped and dropped there. The hammer was when the on-chain securities portion of it and the RNWA portion came out because Coinbase is moving towards in everything exchange. So if there can be some sort of clarity there, I think that's really what can get this thing over the line. The other issues in terms of privacy and who as jurisdiction, CFTC or SEC, I think, are all sort of in the background to these two major issues of tokenized equities and yield, which I feel pretty optimistic we can get towards just because there is so much momentum that

is in time and effort that has been put in this bill. And you don't see bills with this much time and effort just completely go by the wayside, right? They usually get passed in some form or fashion. So I'm still optimistic for 26. Kelly. Continuing on there, this is nothing new. Hey, Kelly, your mic is really quiet.

Maybe it's just for me, but I don't know if there's any way to. Yeah, it's like it's way. away from you can you hear me better way better yeah sorry it was on the wrong mic uh yeah so there's nothing new here right this is a story of technology uh displacing power structures of the old system moving to a new system i mean you look back at the late 1800s when the cars came out in london and there was regulation for the cars to have a driver a stoker with the flag somebody had to walk ahead of the car uh in order for you to be you know to have licensed and to meet regulations to drive that car, of course, that completely ruined or limited the ability to use the car for what it was

worth. And a big part of that had to do with people not understanding technology, but also the power structures that were in the horse strong carriage, you know, sort of ecosystem. Now looking at crypto, what's shocking to me is, and it's exciting, that we're in a place where there's a lot more transparency and discourse on a mass scale with things like X and media and social media and stuff like that. But how obvious it is of the disproportionate advantages that blockchain is ushering in while simultaneously really shining overwhelming light on the sort of flawed controls that the banking system has had. And those controls also limit the democratized access to your money when it's in a bank because it's no longer your money. And they're basically profiting

off of you and your money. And here we are with the better technology that's faster, more democratized, more people can have access. And you can also make money being a liquidity provider and staking things and securing networks. And yet at the same time, it does. I do understand that the government part of this and that they do worry about the flight from one system to the other because it could cause some disruption. But I think we could all agree that we're in a place right now where I think everybody would be okay with a little bit of disruption so we can get to a better system. I hope especially with Brian Armstrong and some other voices that are up at the top of the helm here, that they do move more quickly than a five to eight year period to make this happen.

Maybe sometime this year, but I'm right there with you, Scott. It's feeling like the promises of how effective things we're going to be and move, especially when we have a president and the House and the Senate all with one party. It's kind of surprising to see that in control. I mean, it's kind of surprising to see that they're not very effectively moving forward and getting things done. And it feels like we're in a very limited window. So I would hope that they would get these things sort of sorted out before the midterms.

But we'll see. Yeah, I think there's also an element where the staffers were dealing with the lobby and talking about it. And the senators actually probably took a look at this for the first time and said, what the hell am I signing? Well, that always happens. And that's the dirty secret of American politics, that the staffers are the key. And without getting annoyed or trying to get political, when staffers don't have, as limited as we are in terms of the ethics of members, whether the House or senators, it's even less so on staffers in terms of, you know, where the revolving door goes, et cetera.

and so it makes the lobbies that much stronger and people need to understand that. You know, it's just that the trick to all of this is crystallizing issues. I mean, unfortunately, where I start to, even though I don't agree with you, Scott, I don't think it's dead and I think that we have a lot of a shot of getting somewhere,

it's going to require, and I hate to use the word, because it's a pun, you know, clarity on the two key issues, which is really how, you know, how will this block, progress on tokenization and will this entrench the banking, you know, profit margins the way they are. Those are the two things. But here's the problem. The problem is the Republicans are looking at getting wiped out in the midterms, meaning in particular, if you're Trump, two years of having to deal with impeachment bullshit and everything bogging down in his agenda. And his own party

deserted him yesterday on a totally different thing, the National Endowment for Democracy. So that's an issue. So maybe, and this is sad, but maybe if you're the Republicans, you want to be able to blame the Democrats and make this an issue and see if you can energize the crypto lobby in the midterms. I hate that, but there's got to be an element of that going on. It'd be interesting to hear what Ron Hammond would say about that. Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts, but I want to go to the panel. Hey, guys. So a fascinating discussion. I think what stood out to me from this whole thing, and I mean, Just from a market's perspective, if you look at the price section from yesterday, you know, Bitcoin had a phenomenal day.

And if you look at the movements broadly and all the other tokens, there wasn't anything major. In fact, I think Ethereum was also up, which is sort of a defyproxy. And I see that as some of this, in my opinion, I think, was already priced in. I don't know that the market really expected this to turn out differently. Again, just by looking at the reactions and the price section. And the other point around the relative strengths of the lobbies, and again, for this, I'm not a banking expert. I want to bring this up for the discussion or for the, for the hearing of everyone else's thoughts.

But the other point that I don't think it's spoken enough is the leverage that banks have. So banks, and again, I'm just looking at GROC now, banks are holding four, $4.6 trillion worth of treasuries with about two trillion of that being agency securities, mortgage back securities. So I think that as frustrating as it may be, if the powers that be don't play ball with the banks, I think they do hold leverage to basically exert some pain, I would say, in markets as a result of this. And I don't know that the crypto lobby has a similar sort of implication because banks could touch not just deposits, but they could touch equity markets. They could also touch real estate, which I don't know that. that Trump wants to, you know, poke that bear before the midterms, but I'm curious to hear other

people's opinions. We can jump around. I don't know if anybody has a specific opinion. I will tell you that politically, I don't know if anybody saw Blumenthal's op-ed on Fox, Senator Blumenthal, but if you wanted any clarity on, no pun intended, on where this is headed or who's going to capitalize on it, well, the anti-crypto army never left and they're coming back stronger than ever. Blumenthal basically said that we need to slow down.

that crypto is an existential risk, but he went on to use Silicon Valley Bank and signature as examples for why clarity should not pass and should not even be considered, which is the most disingenuous bullshit that I've ever heard in my entire life. We all know that Silicon Valley Bank failed because of interest rate duration and the way that they managed their balance sheet, literally nothing to do with crypto, and signature bank was literally murdered on a Sunday when they weren't insolvent, had no issues just because they were involved with crypto. So, We're getting the same crap arguments now coming back to stifle this from a certain side of the aisle. And it's not going to pass.

There's no way they're getting seven Democrats now on the Senate side to pass us. Well, I don't know about that. I mean, you know, I'm not sure that Elizabeth Warren Wing is that powerful. But, you know, who knows? I mean, there are a lot of Democrats out there. Wait until November. Oh, I know. We will see.

I mean, you're right. I mean, look, at the end of the day, there are so many Democrats that are in our space or that you talk to who continue to make the claim, oh, the extremists aren't in control of our party. And the thing is, is that you can do that if you don't look at really specific issues. But as soon as you dig, you know that they're wrong. And it's sad to a lot of people. But the point here is that the banks and like Silicon Valley using those arguments literally look like, stupidity to people. I mean, because it's just dumb. But the tokenized equity ones and the interest ones are really, really obvious. It's a question of, could depositors make money or banks?

Now, Mauritio, one thing you said, I totally disagree with, right? The banks leverage for the fact that they own treasuries. It's not about that. If the banks lose deposits and it goes to stable coins, the stable coin holders will, you know, the people who issue it, will, you know, the people who issue it, be holding treasuries. So we will just move from one hand to another. So I don't think that's a big deal. But what about the agency? What about the agency bonds like the mortgage back securities? And does that, well, I mean, yeah, that's an interesting question. Right now the way, if it's under in stable coins, you can't own it. So what do you need for that? There you need to be able to have tokenized money market funds and other funds that can be argued that could be issued. You know,

the banks own this, this crap and they own a lot of it. And all of the, you know, all of the, And I mean every single time the banking lobby writes something that says, why do we need to have this no-club competition for our deposits? It's not so that they can own all of what you just said. It's so that they could, quote, make loans to, you know, inside communities and help small businesses. It's the most disingenuous argument ever. And so what you just said is literal proof of how complete bullshit their argument is. But yeah, you're right. I mean, but there's no reason to believe that whoever has money that there would be,

that the banks are more likely to buy agencies. I mean, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, sure, that's why Trump is pushing them. But the banks, I mean, there's no reason to believe that the banks do this out of the goodness of their heart. They do it because they can make more money, right? No, I think there's a pretty sinister partnership between the banks and the government where whenever the government needs stuff to get bought or needs to make. make exemptions or need to plug holes or duct tape around the financial system, they can basically

call on the banks. And the banks of, you know, for better or worse, have a reputation of being a, you know, being there when they were needed and sort of playing ball with whatever they need. And I think that might be more of the reason, right? Like, again, these mortgages, I personally, I'm in the lending business, right? So I pay very close attention to the cost of capital, right? And I'm not sure which sort of, if you look at the markets today and you look at what SDRC is doing and the type of opportunities that exist in other lending markets, the fact that mortgage rates are still where they are, and I think of them as artificially low, it leads me to believe that there are some other incentives that are basically scratched my back, I'll scratch yours.

I'll protect your regulatory mode, and I will basically let all these people, I'll protect you from competition as long as you allow, you know, you continue to do these things that you wouldn't otherwise do like buying my mortgage back securities or keeping my mortgage rates at a particular level, right? That's my argument or my thinking. Yeah, I mean, we'll agree to disagree on that. I think that the much more sinister thing is we'll give you, protect you from competition as long as you continue to contribute to my campaign, hire my relatives, hire my staffers, and et cetera, et cetera. Well, tomato, but I think it's similar sort of structure, right?

One is greed and corruption, and one is you could argue, you know, if you were right, then I would feel better because at least they're trying to do something that's good for the American consumer, but I don't believe that, not even slightly. You sound like me talking about the Venezuelan regime. Well, I mean, just to be fair, I mean, I did spend close to a decade at Morgan Stanley and 14 years from Solomon Brothers through Citigroup. So it's not like I am unaware of how the, and sat as a managing director at Citibank for years.

So I do understand how these people approach things. And it's nowhere near as monolithic as you think. And the people who are buying mortgage-backed securities have absolutely nothing to do with lobbying people. They don't care. They're buying it specifically for yield. They're not even involved in those decisions in all likelihood. I'm just telling you that.

I mean, it just, it is what it is. But we're way off the topic. Scott, with their other hands up, because I don't see anybody. I don't see any at the moment. Maybe listen, I mean, with the Clarity Act, I think we've unpacked it. Maybe we should talk a little bit about the Bitcoin move because we did have, or just markets in general, unless anybody else has takes on clarity, because I think it remains to be seen.

But obviously we had Bitcoin making a nice mover the past two days, basically trading from, we'll call it 91 up to, you know, almost 98. I think it surprised a lot of people and actually happened on decent volume. And it looks like today is kind of a normal, you know, retrace or reset. But, you know, is this our moment? Is there anything meaningful here? What would be the catalyst now the clarity I'm saying is dead, potentially have for it to consider you out? Well, I mean, I hate that word catalyst because I, and you know, I've said this many times.

I think that, yes, there are sometimes catalysts, but more likely, the rally that I believe that Matt Hogan and I were talking about yesterday will be a slow grinding rally that just because the sellers are exhausted and they're still buying demand. And that's Bitcoin. Today, if you look down, you know, what's going on, I mean, Ethereum and Bitcoin are tracking. They're almost exactly the same down 1% or a little bit less than that, almost all of which after the clarity news got digested. Although Brian Armstrong came out yesterday, there was a dump right at the New York Open from 97 down to below 96. And Ethereum had almost exactly the same chart. Some others, a lot of the other all coins are getting absolutely hammered down significantly more. And that actually makes sense.

And I haven't looked through all the RWA side, but I would imagine that people who are banking on that massive TAM coming soon are disappointed today. And that makes sense. I mean, is it, you know, you could say it, whatever. But as far as Bitcoin is concerned, I don't think that clarity has a whole lot to do with Bitcoin. Most of clarity has to do with opening up the plumbing for the rest of crypto. And I think that people will start to see that. I think that, however, the most likely scenario is something gets passed,

and it just gets scaled back, right? And we'll see. And so, you know, I'd be really curious what people think about, you know, what will happen and why markets care. Because explain to me when the SEC and CFTC both... This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. Say Bitcoin is a commodity.

The only difference under clarity is that Bitcoin will then be regulated... Spot Bitcoin training will be regulated by the CFTC. Right now there's no regulation on spot Bitcoin trading. Okay, good. We've got a couple of hands up. Kelly, what do you think? I mean, I think the broader market doesn't really have a deep insight on the distinction between Bitcoin and crypto. And that's kind of a bizarre thing to say.

But I think the majority of people out there, I think the impact here is seeing Brian, seeing the bill that was supposed to go for markup and discussion and Brian Armstrong coming out and posting what he did and having it essentially, you know, within hours killed. I think as bizarre as it sounds, I think that's very bullish because it signals a very entrenched and sort of powerful voice within the DC space that has impact there. So the fact that he had issue with this

spoke about it and it wasn't some behind closed door from another source. Brian Armstrong posted and then we saw that that impacted that bill not moving forward. So I think the power of the crypto voices in D.C. I think is the bullish signal here. And I do think that we're going to move

forward. And I agree. I think it's going to be scaled back a little bit on both sides from the bank control, but also from everything we want. But everybody knows a good negotiation, a good compromise is when everybody leaves a little bit unhappy and moving forward. But with where we're at right now in price action, I mean, I couldn't be more bullish. I think everybody's just so used to looking at the previous cycles and expecting, you know, 25% candles at some point in the cycle. And we may get that, but I agree with you, Dave. I think it's going to be a slow grind to the up, you know, sideways consolidation, bore people out again, continue up, bore people out again. So right now, Plan C put out a great chart the other day showing the previous cycles with these banana zones

that we've seen in this cycle, kind of being more institutional in some ways, a controlled sort of lift off that never feels like lift off. It's just now, this is where the rubber meets a road, where time in the market beats timing the market. And I think it's going to become more and more true as we move forward. But I do feel like a lot of the OG selling, we see it in on chain, is starting to, you know, reduce dramatically here. I think that rotation into the institutional class for the most part is probably near done. So I think that control to move upward is imminent. Mauritio, is your hand up a phantom or is that a new hand? Phantom, phantom.

Okay, yeah, you can never tell. We've got to let Mike tell us what's going on with the markets, right? Hello. Can you hear me right? Hey, Mike. Hey. I hear you. Yep.

Yeah, so I look at the market very simplistically. I would just want to point out the stoic example of a disciplined trader is the all the moving averages 200 days are tiny low. and we bounced. And it's early in the year and there's a lot of opt-in as my site. See myself as a worthy short. Bitcoin starting at 94,000. If it closes above 100,000, I'd start worrying. And the 200-day movement averages 106. So if it goes there, people can say them stopped out. And then we can go down. But to me, these are fair markets. The Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, 200-day moving average is rolled over. I don't see all the bullishness in markets that have rolled over. Now, you can

use other formats. But for me, this is a stage of the market where you walk into the gear and you walk in flat and you look for opportunities because my base case for this year is we will see a pickup in stock market volatility. I mean that 180 day volatility now is running around 11% historical average state team. That will go up. You'll give us some opportunities and you look for opportunities. So for me, so far as an ex-trader, I look at it, maybe if I'm sitting at a hedge fund, okay, copper just went above six. Test ashore, get started. Bitcoin got above 94, test a short, get started. Now, if we stop out, stop out and reassess. If we start tickling, down below those levels, then add to them. And to me, that's what's going to happen here,

is this market is so overdue for that. And it's just like saying, just prove the strength, prove me wrong, prove those bare markets are not bare markets. And maybe we can, the key thing like last year was kind of was a great signal. You know, we all knew Michael's strategy was silly. And it gave us a great signal to go down. But it did drop to like a 55% discount to its 200-day movement average. It's got a way oversold bare market, but it is a bare market. And you know, we all know what happens in bare markets. They have short sharp short covering rallies, a lot of false hope. So I think anybody bullish crypto is in false hope mode. You have to have the stock market go up. It's a bare market.

It's just started. And to me, the downside is much more worthy than the upside and wasn't the tested at these levels. I'm going to defer, Scott. I saw Tom's hand up, I think. Yeah. Good. Excellent. I did. Yeah. So I'll just piggyback off that a bit, but also pivot slightly. I think we're seeing a broader proliferation of crypto into financial and almost all of fintech infrastructure, right? You've seen this very saliently with just polymarket odds being placed everywhere and integrating with a number of financial exchanges. You've seen a number of IPOs that are coming up this year, Cracken and a bunch of others. You're seeing real-world asset expansion and interest from everything from mortgages to equities. And, you know, this sort of everything exchange is popping up, not only from Coinbase, but from Robin Hood and a bunch of others.

And crypto is sort of fading into the background of a lot of these things. I mean, and you're going to start to see folks who want exposure to that and have been sitting on the sidelines. We've been saying this for years, but, you know, even silly announcements like, you know, Bitmin are investing 200 million into Mr. Beast and his company now. Like, there's obviously something there that Mr. Beast is going to start marketing or talking about crypto or having it integrated into his products. and he's the biggest creator in the entire world. So you're just going to continue to see these broader crypto partnerships until crypto just doesn't seem like it's rat poison anymore and it doesn't seem like it's speculative tech anymore.

It just becomes part of whatever you're doing and whatever you're offering is. So I'm seeing things like that and then just the rumblings behind the scenes and we start debating about these silly things like kind of where are we going to get this last push momentum on the clarity act? It sounds like we all think we'll eventually get there. or, you know, where are we exactly in the market cycle? But, you know, there's, in my view, at least, a very strong impetus for the Trump administration to put their gas, put their foot on the pedal throughout this year, notwithstanding all the things they did last year, the big, beautiful bill, et cetera.

So, I mean, all this means to me is, you know, more and more excitement for this year and 26. And I think we got to wash out at the end of 25 that we needed. And, you know, we're going to continue up. Yeah, I'm generally bullish, too. It's just not because of clarity. Yeah, I think that I think it is, I think silver is something that, that I know, I know we're smelting town hall now, but I think understanding where the animal spirits are, the fact, today silver is consolidating down like 3%, and it's, it's consolidating at the 90 level.

You know, two weeks ago, we were talking about silver dropping below the 70 level. So, you know, just just the magnitude. Now, the reason I mention it is because everyone who says that Bitcoin has matured and you won't see volatility anymore is on serious hallucinogens. Now, why do I say that? Silver is a much larger asset than Bitcoin is at these prices, and yet we're seeing 20, 30 percent moves in a couple of weeks. To think that Bitcoin, which is far more, far newer, traditionally has longer, much more volatility measured by weekly and monthly. I mean, to say that Bitcoin is going to stay with this lack of volatility, I think is crazy.

And that's the important thing, because where Mike and I differ is, I think that there's real buying. People like Matt Hogan kind of corroborate that thesis. And the speculators are pretty much aligned on the short side. And when that flips, that's when things change. But do I think that it's a worthy short, you know, from a tactical trading point of view?

If we get that first move to 100, yeah, I think it fails there. I absolutely do. Do I think that anything at the level that now is relevant? No, I don't. 94 was relevant. 96, 97, 98, 99 aren't. And so what you see is lower volume moves on these things. Now, as far as the Galaxy Crypto Index, which is predominantly Bitcoin and Ethereum, I mean, look, roll over, however you want to look at it, stock market's still at all-time highs,

right? And corporate profits are projected to go up another double digit, you know, this year. So yeah, you may see something that happens that's bad, but you may not. And the endumerism is problematic, but I'd prefer to watch to see what's happening in the stock market. If you start seeing divergent weakness, that's bad. But what have we seen this week? Actually, the opposite. The Russell 2000 is the better performer, right? So to me, you know, when you look at markets, you have to look at all of what's going on and frame it in context.

I just got to follow up on that, Dave. Absolutely. Remember the time of year this is this is this is a time. Typically, we get the seriously overly optimistic new positions going on. And as a trader, you just look at, okay, what are my opportunities? This time, around this time last year, crude oil peaked around 80. It was seriously silly. Corn peaked around five.

Seriously silly. Just what happens is sometimes you get those optimistic positions going on. And typically it's the best to just, okay, pick up my levels and look for the right trade. And so far, we've had that optimistic bounce in all risk assets, crypto, and everything. Just a simply trade. Stop me out. Prove it wrong. And then move on.

No, from a trading point of view, I understand your point. I mean, I don't necessarily agree with you. It depends asset by asset. I mean, you and I, like, I was much more bullish silver when it was in the 70s, and I said we're going to get to 100. I still think so. You know, but it's because I'm looking at the momentum trend and what's going on. That's the only difference.

But from a trading point, you're right. Well, just explain how silver works. I had a good friend and colleague I spoke to yesterday. He's had silver in his account for a decade. It sucked. It was just a big rock. finally went a good 3-4-X and it did nothing, 3, 4, 5x. And this is someone who's traded it back in the 70s,

and he asked me what I thought. I said, we agreed. It's not going to be different. If you've been longed, like a lot of us have been ever, loads of us loved medals, and you took the pain, you got the gain, do not double down. History says doubling down at these levels and buying silver at these levels. So my prediction, I'll look at it from the future,

is silver will put in a high this year that will last maybe a decade if history is a guy. Well, we'll see. I mean, I told you, just for those who don't know, my prediction is the silver gold ratio will ultimately end this move somewhere in the 30s. It's in the 50s now. So do we think gold is going to put in an all-time high here and it's going to revert back or not? If the answer is not, then I'm going to disagree with you. If the answer is gold drops back to 2,500, yeah, okay. Then silver does have an enduring high. Do I think that's going to happen? No. But to me, that's a, the more important things going on there. Now, why do we care in the Bitcoin market about silver? I'll tell you why. It's because silver is alt season, literally, enormous amounts of speculative money from particularly outside the U.S., particularly the same people who play in the PIRP markets, are betting in the contract for differences markets on very high leverage on silver. And when it becomes non-interesting, that's the rotation that a lot of people are waiting for. And so that's why I care about it. I don't know if other people think about that. Come on, Buzz. I mean, you care about

the meme coin casino a lot. I think we've got to go to Buzz right now anyway. It's so good time. Yeah. Yeah, that is good timing. But we do have a sponsor today. It's market profit. And we have Igor here from Market Profit. But before we get going with our sponsor, just a disclaimer that Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing. And sponsors on the show are sponsors working directly with IBC, not necessarily Cryptotown Hall, Scott, Dave, or myself in particular. So, Igor, as we get started here, why don't you test your mic and tell the audience what exactly market profit does with social copy trading? Hey, Buzz, can you guys hear me?

Loud and clear. All right. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Great to see you again. And Scott and, you know, everybody that I know on the spaces. Let me tell you what market profit does. So we are a financial technology company, and we process X data, crypto-related tweets, actually stock-related tweets as well, speaking of tokenization,

but we'll focus on crypto. And the unique part about what we do is we score crypto Twitter accounts that make posts about crypto prices. objectively and quantitatively. And by doing that, we treat them as traders. And we don't care about social metrics. We don't care about popularity. It's all about just like on Wall Street,

where I grew up, like many of the speakers here, it's about performance. You either make money or lose money and, you know, how did you make it? That's how we score accounts. by taking that approach, what winds up happening is you find people, and they're on our website,

and it's free to go to www. www.marketprofit.com. Profit is P-R-O-P-H-I-T. We show leaderboards for thousands of cryptos. And what you'll find, if you go to our Bitcoin page, just type in a ticker, right, BTC, you'll find the top three predictors. on crypto Twitter.

And you'll be surprised as who they may, they are. They're small accounts, complete unknowns, but they crush it with, you know, speaking about prediction markets, you know, they're predicting, they're commenting, they're posting, they're putting out sentiment, which we have as well, free sentiment signals. And those accounts are small. Sometimes they're huge, too, by the way. You know, there are really big, you know, crypto Twitter accounts that crush it, right? For example, give a shout out to Scott, who I know, look him up and he crushes it on crypto Twitter.

And he is a big account. However, however, there are a lot of small accounts. And using our unique approach, we surface them, we identify them. We call them out. There are leaderboards. And what we're doing is providing a lot of content and, you know, kind of an arrow as to where you can find potential alpha as you do research. It's not always the people with the biggest microphone. That is what we do.

Our mission, by doing that, we provide trust to social media, right? Trust is so important in any financial market. Who do you trust? How do you trust? Right. And given, you know, all the activity and, you know, and the rub poles and, you know, and the volatility too, how do you find the people you trust? So we surface, you know, small accounts as well. And we don't do it.

The analytics do it, right? you know, the stats speak for themselves, Buzz? The first time I went to the market profit website, I was quite surprised by the sheer amount of data there. Like, for example, my account, I'm not somebody that's posting signals or anything like that on a daily basis, but I did have a profile there. It was analyzing my tweets and kind of giving me a score of how I was,

how much of a market profit I was. And I was surprised. I was doing better than I thought, Igor. Yeah, you are. Actually, you know, you absolutely are, right? And by the way, I'm going to give a call to action. After this call, right now, look yourself up if you post. Look somebody you follow.

Who you post? Check them out. A lot of people immediately do that. That is the first reaction. We're a search engine. You know, we're like the, you know, as an analysis. We're like the morning start, ratings. When you look at who to invest in a mutual fund,

or where do you place your money? Where do you put a bet on? Where do you allocate your capital? Who do you trust? And you got to look up their track record, their ratings. If you're a hedge fund manager and you're raising money, you show a track record to institutional investors. When you're copy trading people,

you look them up on a leaderboard on exchange. We are a leaderboard, right, for crypto Twitter. We have all the stats. It's free. You know, P&L like reports, track records for crypto Twitter accounts. How do they do? Where do they crush it? Where are they not doing so well?

It doesn't matter. And, you know, we also show accounts that don't do so well for whatever reason, right? We can't possibly. Igor, that's the way that I first used it. When I first went to market profit and for people, People who do want to go to the website, I have pinned up a post in the nest from market profits. So anybody can click the market profit account and follow the official links there. But I first went to the site.

And what I did is I looked up some of my friends on crypto Twitter to make fun of them and to find out what their potential P&L was with the calls that they were making on Twitter. So I did find that to be quite an amusing way to first go to the website. but that isn't exactly how a user can use it to the fullest extent, right? Maybe describe a little bit how a user could show up to the website and use it to actually create value for themselves beyond just looking at some very interesting data. Absolutely. So now, now let's go beyond the data. So obviously, when you're doing research, right, you see who to follow, where do you all,

your capital. All right, that's step one, that's free. That's all on our website. Look up any handle that you know, and if you want to bet on them, we allow you to do that. And I'll talk about social media copy trading, right? Our application, that is live. So now let's talk about copy trading, right? And this is for everybody, really, but especially retail. Copy trading is on most exchanges and it's the best way or the most popular way that retail investors allocate capital. They copy trade, you know, professional traders with track records. Great. That's a retail version of a hedge fund manager. Okay. We allow uniquely to provide, to potentially get alpha any user to copy trade an X account, right? You can actually,

copy trade the signals that our AI generates from their predictions, right? And allocate your capital, right? Now, the way it works is you just go, you hit the blue copy trade button and then you sign up, right? And we're giving it away for free, right? So there's going to be a free code. I'll mention the second. We are not in exchange. Okay, so we're a smart execution engine, you have to currently have an account with Binance, ByBit, or MECC, and then obviously, you know, any exchanges that we're going to integrate later. So let us know what a change you want, right? You have them an account there. And then you provide us, you know, your API keys, right? Read only because, you know, we have to be able to execute orders in your wallet. Great.

you put in the amount you want to bet on or copy trade in a positive way on an X account. And then you subscribe and we'll give it away for free. And what it does, and this happens all the time, there are quantitative bots that people write, even on exchanges or for themselves or privately, right, even at a hedge fund, right? Quantitative hedge funds execute based on signal. we you can think of we are a quantitative hedge fund a very you know kind of unique one but we allow you to bet on x accounts now there's another feature okay um which is you can inverse copy trade a negative scored account too and you know it's not to make fun of it there's alpha there right

um those accounts are negative for a variety of reasons right we don't We score all kinds of accounts. We don't know who they are. Again, the money, the stats, the objective scores speak for themselves. But we let you know who they are. All right, so inverse copy them. So if there's a positive signal, we go short or sell. If there's a negative signal, we reverse it.

And you get the negative of their negative returns. So that feature is unique and typically actually does not exist in real trade or copy trading. But on our platform market profit, we enable it because, you know, we have the stats. So why not also and, you know, get extra alpha? We have one final feature. You can actually copy any crypto. So let's say you just want to kind of in a robotic quantitative way, copy trade, we call it Bitcoin or a meme coin, anything. That's another feature.

What does that mean? Well, there we actually go deep, right, into, you know, our stats, right? We don't show all of them for free. We show a lot of data buzz, like you said. They have a lot of free data, right, for research, discovery, and also alpha. And there, we get more than three accounts, right? And if any one of them, you know, post a prediction, a signal, sentiment, you know, long, or bullish bearish on Bitcoin.

We're trading on all those signals. So think of that as the best Bitcoin traders in the world, right? Again, their ex accounts are managing your money. That is a team of a quantitative hedge fund in your pocket. So that's another feature we have. And I've been on, you know, a couple roundtable shows with UBuzz. And after this, I'll post the recordings of the shows where I show live. results of copy trading um x accounts inverse copy trading copying coins and i can tell you and i show

screenshots on by bit um who happens to be one of one of our partners it crushes it right the stats uh the execution is uh is uh you know uh really amazing right uh because there's a lot of information that we surface and it's predictive and i can tell you and we we all lived through speaking of volatility Dave what you mentioned we you know we went through like an extraordinarily volatile time and it was uh you can see the screenshots right I'll post it afterwards it was nailing tops and bottoms long short and especially on the short side as well and as everybody knows or many people may not know it's really hard to be a you know a short seller trader and and you know nail markets, right? Very hard, but it was very balanced, right? And the win-loss ratios were

really, really excellent. You know, we made money, right? Copy trading made money, for example, on Bitcoin itself through the mass of volatility that we experience. And I agree with Dave, right? I think we're just going to be in a really choppy market. So, and retail gets wrecked in volatility, right? So we are giving hedge fund institutional quality execution to the masses for free, right? So yeah, that's copy trading. And again, you can copy. Igor, one thing I just wanted to mention that I did for you in the audience is a few days ago, when you were on the roundtable show, you shared your screen and did a really great in-depth demo. of how all of these features work.

So what I've done for the audience who's tuning in is I've pinned that video up into the top of the space here. So if anybody wants to follow along with a video, I would say after this, that would be an excellent video to watch where you can see Igor on screen go through exactly how the product works. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And for anybody even afterwards, right, pang me, right? And we can do like a very detailed walkthrough of the platform, anybody, right? You know, happy to go through that. The other thing, so let me give you the free code, right?

Because I want people to subscribe and try it. So the code is M-P underscore 100 LWP. Okay? That's a free code. So just. Igor, can I ask you if there are one, if there's one W or two, because the code that I have has two Ws. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that was, it's LWP, LWP.

That's the code. Got it. So M. L. L. But the full code that I'm going to read out for the listeners who are tuning in. If you go to the market profit website, the free code that you can use is MP underscore. 100 LWP.

Correct. That's correct. And I could even drop the code, I think. Oh, well, yeah, that's the code. So, so yeah, anybody, by the way, you know, a lot of users that we call out every day. Everybody wants to be on the leaderboard. It's hard to become a big account, and it's hard to service, right, alpha.

In fact, I saw a lot of comments, buzz, to your roundtable posts where people are like, how do we discover? How do I get discovered? Right. It is so hard. We are your brain, you know, your prowess, your good calls. That's what gets you discovered. We just have a platform that calls you out.

It is so hard to make it to the leaderboard, right? So, yeah, that's what we. That's another thing that we do. By the way, follow Market Profit at Market Profit, P-R-O-P-H-I-T. And, you know, we call out every day who nailed some call on some crypto or meme coin, long or short. That's also a discovery tool too. There, we are constantly, like, identifying people, and some of them go bananas. So, like, oh, my God, you know, I'm a market profit, right?

You know, maybe that's the new word for KOL. you're a market profit and they're grateful right they're like wow and then their followers are are you know supporting them saying yeah this guy nails it i can't believe an ai smart engine found so you know go there to find and discover right who's nailing different calls on different crypto we also pose real-time you know signals right um what's bullish what's bursing talk about the fear of greed index we have two fear of greed index we have two fear of greed and disease for a variety of coins. One is the crowd sentiment, which is your normal, you know, kind of sentiment. And then we have smart money, like Scott Melker, or like the number one guy, for Bitcoin,

you know, on our site. And there, that's all the smart money signal. So we have two signals, and maybe they agree, and maybe they disagree. And when they do, you know, the smart money is picking those tops and bottoms, which is what we execute on, right? We're executing based on smart money. Igor, as we wrap up here, I do want to remind the audience about the code. So what I've done for the audience is I've pinned up the market profit profile in the nest. There, you can access the video where Igor on screen will walk you through exactly how to use the product. And you'll also be able to access the official link to the website, to go to the market profit website. When you're there, Igor has generously offered a free code to sign up.

This code is M-P-U-H-U-P. And if you don't want to write that down, you could also DM the market-profit account and Igor, and he would be happy to assist in onboarding you. Igor, how is that as a summary for what people can do today to help you out? Yeah, listen, that was great plus, as always. But yeah, I'll just end here. Anybody can just ping me, DM me, reach out, and we can do a bigger walkthrough for you, for you, for your community,

you know, after this call. I'll also pin that recording that's pinned to the top of this space on my pen, so you can watch the recording and the screenshots and all that. But definitely subscribe, copy trade to help you get out for. Wonderful. Well, Igor, it's always a pleasure speaking with you. I love how passionate you are. I love the amount of sheer data that you're looking at with AI. And I hope that I get to talk with you again soon because I like going on the market profit website to check out how I'm doing, check out how my friends are doing, maybe make fun of them, maybe give them a pat on the back for making some good calls. But it's a great product. And I encourage people to go check it out on their website. So with that, I hope everybody, has a great day that we have a green day and Igor any final words here yeah um so first well thank you and uh yeah i wish everybody like alpha and um you know uh with our platform and you know and to be for small accounts especially uh to recognize that you know they are smart and our analytics

the stubborn and surface, a lot of creators, right, in the world of AI. They're market profits. Definitely, all market profits. Well, thank you, folks, for tuning in. Thank you, Igor, for bringing us to this segment. And everyone have a great day. Cryptotown Hall will be back again tomorrow at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Time with Dave and Scott. So see you then. Take care.

Thank you.