The Wolf Of All Streets - Jupiter Airdrop | FOMC | FTX Customers Made Whole! | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

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testing i think it's working we get dave up uh peter juan can you hear me yes i can hear you hey mario perfect hey man hey we got dan is joining us as well just give us a bit of an overview uh dave would be great to have you as well just on the fnc meeting today scott can't join us so it'll be good to get the uh uh the other experts on stage got peter he got chris as well just to kind of go through what we can expect today. We did discuss it yesterday. Dave, you were there yesterday.

I think you gave us kind of an overview of what was discussed yesterday. Danish will come and give us an overview of what was discussed in the finance space earlier today. And then Ran will be coming in to discuss the Jupiter launch

that was hyped as an airdrop. It's the biggest DEX on Solana. I think it's the biggest DEX period. I think it's doing more volume than Uniswap. Correct me if I got it wrong. And then we'll dig into the news. I want to focus on the ETF. I think we've got inflows for the first time.

And we'll get a couple of ETF experts to kind of go through that as well. Maybe, Dave, you can give us your thoughts on that. But let's kick it off. And Juan as well. Juan, you can go through the numbers when it comes to the ETFs because suddenly no one's talking about them. But I still think it's the most important thing, one of the most important things in this cycle. But let's kick it off with Waheed. It's been a while. We haven't had you on stage. Today's FOMC, I think the decision is not what everyone's waiting for, but it's what's said in the speech.

What can we expect? How important is it? What are the predictions by the analysts, the experts? And what do you think it means for risk assets and for crypto yeah um so i think this is a very tricky one um you know uh the first week of december basically but you know we were under the auspices of we are not uh looking to cut rate soon this isn't in consideration we are stopping you know raising rates and obviously two weeks later a complete 180 where we see dot plots that at three and and now you know the market going all the way to six cuts and now retrenching a little bit to five or four and three quarters and you know

since that time financial conditions have have have eased so much that it literally rendered almost 200 basis points, 175 to 200 basis points of rate hikes, completely ineffective. So we've actually been, in terms of market financial conditions, we've essentially eased 200 basis points, just in terms of that measurement. Now, they finally put a close to the biggest ARB out there in terms of the regional banks, you know, tapping into the bailout program and picking up 40-50 basis points of risk-free interest in terms of the difference between reserves and the BTFD fund. So I think we're going to expect a lot of discussion about that shutdown, I guess March

12th or somewhere around there. And to answer your question very specifically, Mario, I don't think he intended for financial conditions to get this easy. On the margin, inflation numbers haven't really crashed. They're sort of stabilizing, but there's still 100, 150 basis points easy off of the 2% bogey. I think he's going to try to keep his optionality there, but maybe try to rein in financial conditions a bit. And then to contradict myself completely, you just put out a tweet showing maybe the first victim of the regional banks and so are we going to rear our ugly head in four weeks with

the regional bank crisis um can you can you go through what that is so we'll put out a tweet of the the the bank uh let me try to get the name here it's a small regional bank uh relatively small if you look at the big guys but it's a new york bank corp it crashed 40 the stock was halted for a bit then it resumed trading afterwards but that was that's nothing to do with the contagion i was speaking to danish about it offline okay is that related to the contagion and i'll tell you exactly what he said maybe get your thoughts on it um let me get danish up and he said he said it's pretty major but then he said it's uh it's the aftermath of the theout of Signature Bank, but it's not systemic.

Do you agree with Danish? And just for anyone listening, to go through one of my latest tweets that the team put out, New York Bancorp crashed 40% and trading was halted about half an hour ago and then resumed again. So bank reserves have actually crashed in the last nine months. Janet Yellen has issued so many T-bills that it's basically sucked out all the equivalent reserves from the money market funds. So essentially, part of the reason why I think the Fed pivoted is because he's trying to preempt any regional crisis happening in regional bank crisis happening, call it March or April. So this is a little bit earlier than expected. Ominous that it's on big deal because we still have the mortgage-backed security crisis out there,

the CMBS debacle, and real estate, commercial real estate hasn't really improved. If anything, it's gotten a lot tighter and weaker in the last six months. So I really don't know how they sort of square the hole. So are they going to stop QT? Are they going to slow it down? There's already been hints to that. What are they going to do with bank reserves going down to, I think, sub-500 billion now?

Sorry, not 500 billion. I'm talking about the reverse repos. We're at that point now where bank reserves are probably not going to be adequate. How does that dovetail with the closure of some of these bailout funds in March and forcing banks to go to the discount window? So all of this is coming at a crescendo. And then, of course, you've got the elections in November. Is it going to cut into the elections? Is it going to get political? So I go back to

the original statement I made. It's a very complicated, very complicated Fed decision today. Not going to cut rates today. Is he going to hint to March? Is he going to keep his optionality? How is it going to rein in financial conditions? How is he going to preempt the whole QT thing? What about bank reserves? What about news of some regional banks teetering on weakness again, if not implosion?

Very complicated. I don't know how he threads this needle. The question after you, and I'll go to Peter and Dave, is I remember the times, kind of scary times a few months ago when you were coming on stage in the finance spaces and the collapse of Silicon Valley and all the others. And we're talking about a banking contagion. And then we were worried about a hard landing as well. Has that ship sailed? Have we avoided that and the Fed has done the right thing and we're out of the woods? Or you still think there's a possibility we could get back to these levels?

And then maybe go through the PMI and PPI numbers as well, or CPI numbers as well. They did very stealth QE, right? If you remember, they had like $300 to $400 billion expansion of their balance sheet just in the weeks following Silicon Valley. They introduced the whole alphabet soup of bailout programs. They quintessentially allowed FDIC insurance to go beyond the $100,000 just by the fact of giving banks access to these bailout funds. So they patched it. Now, what are the underlying symptoms? What are the underlying conditions that generated these symptoms? Have they been resolved?

The answer is no. The commercial mortgage-backed market is still very weak. Lending is extremely tight, much tighter than it was even six months ago. And so they haven't solved the underlying problems. Meanwhile, we still have $2 trillion that we have to borrow in the next 12 months. OK, deficits have to be met. Where are we going to get all that money? I really don't know.

I'm just sort of thinking that they have sort of these dark clouds ahead of them. Inflation hasn't come down enough. But it's come down. But we're here and Danish is in as well. But guys, it's come down despite October 7th, despite the war in the Middle East, despite who sees and what's happening there and despite the Ukraine war continuing. So the rate of growth has come down to sort of the 3% range, okay? And then they keep X-ing out food and energy and shelter and all these different gimmicks.

Structural inflation, admitted, is not in the 5%, 6%, 7% range anymore, but it's at a 7.3%. And we all know that that last 100 basis points is the most difficult to get rid of. Now, do they sort of wink and hint that this is kind of the new normal? If that's the new normal, risk assets are going to fly. If we're really coalescing to a 3% long-term inflation target, which is what I've been arguing for the longest time, because that's the only way you could stomach this monstrosity of leverage globally. If we all sort of admit to that and that is the tacit sort of guidance without them actually saying it, then I think we're gonna be okay.

But right now, you know, we're still in this conundrum. They haven't solved the problems in the mortgage market unless they really lower rates. the regional banking crisis I think can revert in in in March April you know he's pivoting but can he really lower rates 125 150 basis points with employment where it is and inflation sort of not 100% taking care of I don't know I think he's I go back to what I'm saying he's between a rock and a hard place. Danish, I want to go to you and then we'll go to Dave and Peter.

You host the finance spaces every morning just before this space. What's the sentiment like in those spaces and then your personal opinion as well? The sentiment in those spaces is, there's significant disbelief of what the market is doing. Being this close to all-time highs or at all-time highs seems wild.

And earnings are showing us they're beating on top line. They're beating on bottom line sometimes. But outlook is negative. We saw Google come out with that. We saw Microsoft come out with that. That was surprising for a lot of people. And, you know, they're not really paying the price because Microsoft is just hitting it out of the park. But across the board, there is some concern around earnings outlook.

So that's on the earnings side. On the job side, there's a lot of disbelief around what the employment data is from the government. I know I've been very vocal about the fact that I think a lot of it is driven by government employment. When you look at private payrolls, ADP data came out today, significant miss, 107,000 versus 150 expected. That is a significant private payrolls data miss on ADP. I think that the market has to digest that information. On the inflation side, two big things. So Waheed's commentary around what's happening in the Red Sea, Waheed's commentary, just in general, Mario, your commentary on October

7th, and now Iran, there's a lag. We're not going to see that data immediately. There's there's gonna be a lag. We've seen oil rise over the past month. It's come down today a little bit. But overall, we've seen oil rise, we're going to see the impact of WTI rising, play out into the rest of the economy. So the answer is, we are uncertain. I have to say I this this is one of the you know, for people that come to our shows every morning at 8 a.m., you know, they know that there's been a lot of certainty around this inflation, like this inflation is happening. They will do whatever they can to get inflation lower. And there was a lag effect of that. What we're seeing now is that the Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

They're backdoor quantitative easing, which is essentially flooding the market with liquidity. They've been doing it behind our backs with the BTFP program, which they're essentially giving banks the ability to borrow at better rates than what cost them which is freaking nuts and they're able to flush the entire market with liquidity that ends on March 11th we don't know what that does number two you know we can they can they can they extend it Danish that's what I think most people are hoping for but look it well they now they know if they're not and they closed the ARP... Well, they announced they're not, and they closed the ARP window a week ago.

But they announced they're not. They said that they're not going to extend BTFP, but people are hoping that there will be an alternative program that kind of serves... Of course, there's going to be a new... It's called the discount window. Yeah. There's going to be a new stimulus package,

because otherwise the banks are just going to go. Look, look, look, look, look, look. Yeah, I mean, 100%. But I was going to say that, you know, I actually don't think they're going to be able to get away with that. But it'll be interesting. It's an election year. It's very confusing. It's a very confusing time. It's an election year. So that's number one is what happens with the banks on March 11th. We don't know.

Number two, there's a lot of uncertainty around earnings with all these companies that have been flying high with really high PE ratios. And then, you know, to me, inflation and the uncertainty around that they don't, you know, right now the Fed doesn't know what to do. So today in the FOMC we're gonna see some of that everybody is gonna be a freaking clinical psychologist today looking at how he touches his hair how he touches his glasses how much he's sweating like all of that stuff I think we're gonna see an uncertain a very uncertain Jerome

Powell he's gonna talk about being data-driven he's gonna talk about all the same old stuff that we saw on the way up. It's very confusing where we end up with this now. Let me give you a thesis. Let me give you a thesis and let's see if my thesis plays out. Let's break up the FOMC meetings, the last couple of FOMC meetings into three parts. The first one was everything before September last last year and then the question before those fomc meetings is when is the fed going to stop raising rates we eventually got our onsen september right so like you could say that all the fomc meetings before september we were with a bearish mindset because we were saying is he going to increase rates or are they going to remain the same and our best case scenario was that they were going to remain the same. And that was the pivot in inverted commas that we were looking for.

And then the market was actually fixated with negative news in past comments, not positive news in past comments. Then we had September. September was the first FOMC meeting where the rates were held steady. And so we went from a bearish outlook or a negative outcome to a neutral outcome, right? We said, okay, good. We've pivoted. This was the beginning of the pivot. We're now neutral.

And then we started asking in the next two FOMCs, the question was not how long will they hold it neutral for, but rather how soon are we going to get the first dip. Now, the psychology behind that is that if you look at the last, and I actually analyzed, I broke it down on my show, I analyzed the last couple of FOMC meetings and what happened in the FOMC meetings. And what you can see is in the last two FOMC meetings,

the market ripped during Powell's statement. And the reason why the market ripped during Powell's statement is because in an environment where we're looking for affirmations, we're looking for affirmations. We're not looking for – we're looking for something to affirm our thesis that rates are going to continue to drop. And so every time Powell said something, and I think if the aliens came down and started listening to the last FOMC meetings, they would have said, look, Powell actually said nothing. He just said,

we're going to rely on data. But what the market was looking for was the market was looking for positive affirmations of their thesis. And that's a bias that markets actually trade

is in bull markets, people look for positive bias to give their, and in bear markets, people look for positive buyers to give their... And in bear markets, they look for negative buyers. Now markets are at all-time highs. There is... Markets are looking for confirmation of their positive buyers, and that's the majority of what they're actually trading at.

So unless he comes out tonight with something that is direct and opposite to rate cuts happening in May, or if he comes out and says, look, we don't think that there's going to be rate cuts for the next six to eight months, then I think we get a sharp decline. But I think anything short of that, the market's going to try and cling to the positive information because that's the mindset that we are. In the last two FOMCs, that's exactly what happened. That's how we got a pump for the next day or two. And then we started to come down slightly, but we made a higher low if you're looking at the charts. Yeah, go ahead, Dave. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple of things that are important

to keep in mind. The first, and Powell knows all this, right? The first is when they start cutting rates, historically, that has been absolute disaster for markets, right? If you look at the market, the talking about the rate cut is good for the market. The actual rate cuts happening, not so good. Markets are at an all-time high. Is that because the markets are always forward-looking? Well, there's lots of reasons. I mean, Scott and I and James Lavish and Mike McGlone, we always talk about this. But the fact is, is if there's one chart, and I'll let Scott bring it up in terms of the veracity, but the fact of the matter is, there's lots of reasons. Generally, the Fed starts cutting rates after things look really bad. And so

they are trying to thread a needle here. They're trying to thread the needle, as Danish was talking about, that the reason they'd be cutting rates is because they know something is breaking in the financial system, right? You know, they can make an argument that inflation is down, and so they really want to go to a neutral rate. I strongly suspect that what he's going to try to do is continue to signal that they believe there's a need to go from restrictive, not to accommodative, but getting closer to neutral. And I think that new normal of 3% is they're not going to actually say it, but that's kind of what they're moving towards. Because the big piece of information here, the thing that everyone has to eye on the ball is the long end. And Fed short rates don't control the long end. The fact is they can't afford the long end of the curve to keep moving higher.

They just can't. At a trillion dollars of interest payments a quarter, there are a trillion dollars of interest payments a year, excuse me, at today's rates, it's already the largest component of the budget deficit. And it becomes a vicious circle. And they can't afford that. So they're trying to do everything they can to manage the long end. So I think that, yes, he's going to want to preserve optionality. Yes, he's going to want to say they're vigilant. Yes, he's going to want to say all those things. But ultimately, I expect it to be a nothing burger, meaning I don't think that we're going to get any new information. And I tend to agree with what Rand was saying that I think the markets will ultimately kind of flip around, but take it somewhat positively. I'd be surprised if anything other than that happens.

The only thing I would say is maybe the quarterly refunding announcement might be more important, but I still think the market is looking for a reason to waffle. I think the sentiment has been, this is not real. We're hearing it across the board. Even the Tom Lees of the world are saying, hey, there might be a gap here. There might be an air pocket. When people like Tom Lee are saying that, that means that things are not looking too good since I think he wakes up in a bull suit every morning. So I think it's, you know, it seems as though the markets are looking for it. For people that are not aware, the QRA for Q1 is due on January 31st. And so, aka today. And so, you know, I think that's going to bring more liquidity in the market. And I think that's something that people are watching out for.

I think that's right, Danish. And I think the other point is, and I think Tom Lee is looking at the same thing as I'm looking at, which is we've seen this before. I mean, this is it feels a lot. I've said this before. It feels a lot like the 2000 election year. And in the 2000 election year, people don't remember this, but March was really ugly, particularly for the high-flying tech stocks, like 15% correction in one day. It all came back by the summer, and then obviously we slid into oblivion going into 2001. But

the reality is there's a lot of people who have to pay taxes on capital gains from the last year. And that's generally a March effect. And so here we are in January. We've got kind of a month to figure it all out. That's also interesting on the market. The other thing is we heard from Claudine yesterday that, you know, at these levels, they don't care about the stock market. I mean, obviously, they would care about the stock market if it dropped some, you know, if it was a crash, they would care. But I don't think the Fed is trying to manage toward the stock market. I think they've made it very clear that if the stock market drops, that's not what they care about. What they do care about are bankruptcies and banking contagion. Dave and Danish and anyone else could jump in afterwards. How would you link that with Danish's jump off? Dave, how would you link that to crypto and risk assets in general? Well, I think that the most important thing to keep in mind is risk assets in general.

Some have performed extraordinarily well. Some haven't because crypto kind of delinked a little bit last year, right? And certainly in 22, delinked a big time. So it really depends. It's asset by asset. The real question is, will liquidity conditions improve or will they get worse? And I think pretty much everybody believes liquidity conditions will get will improve, but it might very well be that there's a reckoning in the pricing of risk assets. So if it's kind of a gentlish sort of decline or then, you know, honestly, there could be continued delinking. If the one thing that always happens, and this is something that everybody needs to, it's just there in a crash, in a massive down move, correlation goes to one because everybody starts selling everything they

can sell, not what they want to sell. So, you know, will that happen? I think the Fed is going to try to be as proactive as possible. That's why in December he changed the tone. Right. I mean, if you think that that wasn't because they're afraid of a of a cycle downward. Well, then there's a bridge I could sell you. You know, I think it's really clear. Remember, this is an election year. The Fed does not want to be, you know, accused of affecting the election by doing anything. They don't want to be too accommodative and they certainly don't want to be too restrictive to cause the, you know, basically to cause the economy to go, you know, kerflunk. And I want to kind of link this to Peter, unless you have something to add to this,

I want to go to Juan, Alex and the rest of the panel on the ETF numbers and just the latest there. I just had three quick things on stuff we've been talking about is one, I think he's got to be really careful today because the Fed loves job owning. Right. The Fed loves Fed speak to kind of manipulate rates throughout the period. No one in the market paid any attention to what anyone said from the Fed this past month. Right. Basically, when Powell did the about face in December, he neutered all Fed speak. Basically, all the Fed speakers have come out saying they've got to be cautious about cutting, blah, blah, blah. So if he does anything against that, he really risks using Fed speak and jawboning as a tool going forward. So I think that's one reason he might actually have to be a little bit more hawkish than he wants, because he kind of

screwed all the other Fed speakers for the last month. Literally, we've ignored them all. You know, we keep talking about election year. I think we're going to start having to talk about a campaign year. And by that, I mean, I think this campaign is already starting. So the election normally, right, we'd be figuring out who the candidate's going to be. We'd be talking about the primaries and the conventions. That's almost already all over. And I think social media, et cetera, is going to be very, very ugly this year. So I think everything's brought forward and it's going to be something that does have to weigh against the Fed because monetary policy is going to become a quote unquote campaign issue. So I

think we keep talking about this being an election year. I think it's even worse than that. It's like almost this campaign year that is starting immediately. And the only thing I'll say in defense of CRE, one of my theories is being 2024 will be the year of work from office again. IBM just came out with some stuff. So I think that could help stabilize commercial real estate across the country if we really do get this push back towards work from office. And I think CEOs are getting tired of the work from home and any kind of slipping, easing in the employment area lets them push on workers coming back here. Juan, are you with us? Yep, I'm here. So I want to pivot this more to crypto. And I know that I think it's yesterday or the last few days for the first time on Tuesday. So BlackRock and Fidelity's volume outpaced Grayscale. So are we slowly seeing a shift of

a slowdown in Grayscale's outflows and inflows picking up. I think we had the first day of inflows in a while this week as well. Is that true? Yeah. So last week was the first week of net outflows with the Bitcoin ETFs in aggregate, seeing net outflows of 417 million, which was starting to get the speculation that things were slowing down. But things have picked up again this week. Thus far, we have 500 million in net inflows this week, with 255 million on Monday and 247 million yesterday. So it's looking like things are still having momentum. In terms of volume, what you mentioned is true. The volume of iBit and Fidelity's ETF as well, all the Bitcoin ETFs volumes have been growing, but those two have been getting near. And in one or two days last week, I forget which days exactly, they matched or slightly

surpassed the volume of GBTC, which was over the course of time. That's what was expected given the high fees on GBTC. A lot of we've seen the net inflows and rotation into the other Bitcoin ETFs at lower fees. And the volumes because of that are picking up as well. So I think that's very positive for the ETFs. Since launch, the ETFs now have combined net total flows of $6.6 billion, which have been offset by net outflows from GBTC of 5.5 billion. So does that mean GBTC is still sitting on about 20 billion? Is that true? Yeah, it's sitting on about 21 billion. So, you know, still a big, a massive fund,

but they're continuing to see outflows. The pace of outflows from GBTC has slowed. They were in the $450 to $600 million range the first week and a half. And now they're more in the $250 to $350 or so million a day. $1.2 billion, and it's still been a massive success. The Bitcoin ETFs combined, AUM ranked in the top of all ETFs launched since 2023. So the total volume since the launch is at $27 billion. Now, if you take Grayscale out of this, what would the volume be and how would that compare to other ETF launches? Yeah, if you take the volume out of Grayscale, you're still sitting at volumes of about $6-7 billion, which still ranks them in the top 20 or top 15 ETF launches.

Based on what metric? So when you say top 20, top 15, is that based on the volume in this specific period of time or what exactly? How did you measure? Yeah, based on the volume in the specific period of time, I actually think that puts them in the top 10. I have to check the stats again,

but it puts them up there in the most successful launches of all time. Okay, that's impressive. Alex, we'd love to get your thoughts on the ETF numbers, maybe the FOMC as well, and just the market. Yeah, yeah, everyone. Well, yeah, right now today, in this market day, both FBTC and IBIT are trading more volume at the moment. FBTC just barely than GBTC, but IB bit a significantly larger amount. So I think that's quite encouraging in the scheme of things. I think the big question remains how far lower can GBDC AUM go? I definitely agree that the magnitude of outflows has been receding since the high on January 22nd of 640 million. So I think that's positive in the scheme of outflows has been receding since the high on January 22nd of 640 million. So I

think that's, that's positive in the scheme of things. You know, I'm looking at other, you know, if we think about GBDC as an overhang to the market, right, the idea that they're a net seller, we look at others, right? And we think about Silk Road coins, there's still a fairly large amount, maybe $3 billion worth of government held seized coins from Silk Road and, there's still a fairly large amount, maybe $3 billion worth of government held seized coins from Silk Road and James Young. I saw in Germany, they've just seized 50,000 Bitcoin from some, I think, movie pirating site, effectively from 2013. And there was another one in the UK as well. So I continue to... How did they start interrupting? It could be a side question. How do they seize their Bitcoin? How do they get access? Yeah, so in that case,

in the German case, it said one of the criminals sent it to them. So presumably as part of some kind of confiscation agreement or something, so not clear exactly what they would do with it. I don't. Yeah. So in that case, they the criminal actually sent sent the law enforcement the 50,000 coins. Sorry to interrupt you. And you were going through to, you're talking about the various overhangs that might be pivoting to the market and the FNC expectation. That's something I look at. I think obviously you have GOX and GBDC is probably the biggest ones.

You do have Bitfinex coins that the SDNY sold, but I think it would be likely that those would be returned, sorry, that they seized right from the crocodile of Wall Street, if you recall. I think those, my guess is those would be returned to Bitfinex and not sold. So anyway, this is something I think about GBDC in a similar way to these other sort of overhang things. And there are some still, and we really, I don't think can truly go to the moon with Bitcoin until some of these are resolved and they are some still. And we really, I don't think can truly go to the moon with Bitcoin until some of these are resolved. And they are being resolved. So I think that's quite positive. I think GBDC is a positive story at this point. FOMC, I mean, I think I agree mostly with the

commentary that everyone else has said in terms of the Fed's intentions, language. The question is really, I think, you know, are they going to start lowering rates in March and May at all? I do think politics will play a decent role in that. It always has. I think more specifically as it relates to crypto, one of the interesting dynamic I'm watching today is what impact the ETFs, the Bitcoin ETFs have on trading around the announcement and the commentary from Chairman Powell. In the past, you do typically see Bitcoin trade with interesting volume and reaction to language and the release. It's been probably mostly people, hedge funds and some savvy retail trading, either spot or derivative-based ETFs. But now that we have these giant access vehicles, I'm intrigued to see if we see volume spike or what reaction there is.

On the other hand, I think you should really be... You don't see gold trade that heavily around these sort of FOMC meeting announcements. More perhaps the balance sheet, what the Fed decides to do. This could be a time when you might, FOMC meeting announcements more, perhaps the balance sheet, what the Fed decides to do, this could be a time when you might, depending on signaling to see people trim or add to positions. But in any case, we have a giant, you know, access vehicle and people do trade Bitcoin around these announcements. So I'll be looking to see volumes around, you know,

2pm Eastern will be quite interesting to see what happens. So a couple of insights that I've got for you on that. So I think I agree with everything that you've said. Number one, I know a guy who tried to buy, two guys that tried to buy through their banks to try and buy ETFs, specifically the BlackRock one. And one of them was in a Swiss bank. One of them was in a US bank, I think, funny enough, based in the US. So one was definitely a Swiss bank and one was in a u.s bank i think funny enough based in the u.s so one was definitely a swiss bank and one was in the u.s and when the the swiss guy wanted to put through the the transaction the bank wasn't set up to do it yet like the bank just couldn't put through the

transaction yet so i think that's a lot of the rails that allow clients to buy and sell the etfs you know i don't think that they're as clean and simple as we think. I think that there's still a couple of onboarding problems. I don't think that it's as easy as just buying an ETF. Maybe unless you're positioned in the United States, maybe that's the difference there. No, totally right, Ran. We've talked on this spaces a lot over the weeks about the advisor market and how their IV is really the target for these products and how they're mostly not turned on yet either. Yeah, you see a fair amount of this. Broker-dealers in general are not all set

up for this. I think the big brokerage firms, though, like the Fidelities and the Schwab's, you can probably buy these there without issue in the US. But yeah, I agree. I mean, I frankly, I think that's part of the positive story to see these volumes and inflows into these products when large parts of the infrastructure aren't yet turned on tells me we have, you know, exciting times ahead. Jupiter in a bit as well. But just your, maybe quick over before going to Jupiter. I saw you actually for the first time, I saw that live trading where you get your audience trading with you. It was the airdrop.

I didn't know you do videos like this. It's actually entertaining. I'm not a trader, so it's like all fascinating for me. But the question, before going into Jupiter, which is something that interests me, I think the audience would like it as well. Just a market update. I think you're talking about the trend line on your show. I want you and Chris to kind of give us an overview there. Breaking through the trend line.

Are you there, Ran? Yeah, so for me, we're trying to break through this trend line. We've been fighting it. We're trying to get back above the trend line. We're fighting this trend line. If we don't break above the trend line, we're going back down. Probably around 36 is probably the next stop. I'm going to start calling levels, but we deserve a correction.

We could go up. The problem is that we're lacking the rocket fuel to power us up. And maybe the FOMC is the make or break. Maybe if we get a good FOMC, we go way above the 43,300. And if we get a bad FOMC, we actually start the leg down. And that starts us into the next decisive leg of the trade. We need a catalyst because as it is, we're just hovering around this trend line. And it's very hard to make any decisions because this is the trend line which has been running

since November, where we turned super bullish. It was a continuation of the earlier trend, but we turned super bullish in November. And so, you know, we need to break above that line. And again, I think we need to look at what Powell says, and if my theory is right, we go up tonight.

We'll go up tonight, we'll go up tomorrow, but then we'll start coming down again after, if we are to repeat the last two bullish FOMCs. I don't know if that makes sense. Chris, I don't know if you've got anything to add. Can you hear me, guys? Yeah, we can.

Oh, perfect. Chris, if you have anything to add, I'm going to jump in. Yeah, I mean, no, I was i was just gonna say i mean uh for me right now you know we hit the target we were looking at which was that daily s1 pivot um that's also the eq of the channel if you draw the channel off the um off the bear market swing low there uh and so that was a good move off that and we've got this local range uh that we had there from basically the beginning of the second week of December, and we've almost recovered that entire range. So for me, I think if we get a bit of a pullback, more of a pullback right here, I think we'll probably be looking maybe

around 41, 150 or so. But if we're breaking out higher from where we are right now, I think we're looking closer to like 44, 841 and a half and then pulling back kind of toward that area and then going up. I don't locally here at the moment, the structure off that recent low here back on January 23rd, a couple of Tuesdays ago. It's a very bullish structure coming off that right now. And so until something comes up for me that says something else other than that,

I think we continue to overall look higher still. All right, Ryan, you there? I i'm here sir all right man so i watched just for the audience if you haven't seen it um i've watched ran do a live trading session with his audience it's the first time i watch even i've been in crypto for a long time first time i watch a live trading session a bunch of solana guys on stage i know it's glitching for a few people my mic is glitching as well but essentially what happened is ran goes on the juice know it's glitching for a few people my mic is glitching as well but essentially what happened is rand goes on the juke so it's a pretty big airdrop and that we talked about yesterday but then rand opens up a screen waits for his airdrop because he owns a bunch of solana and then i said the audience is waiting for him and he's telling him when to trade i'm like all

right let me let me see what what rand says what the price does so i can call him out in the space um and then rand's like guys buy when it's under when it hits under 70 cents it launched at $2 like short it short it you couldn't short it it's not perpetual but he's telling

audience to short it I'm looking at the price now it's at 76 I actually went as low as 68 63 just above 60 so about 63

64 so Ryan I have to give you credit even though I'm planning to give you shit you actually got it pretty right but tell us more about Jupiter why the 8- is interesting, and how you come up with your price targets.

Yeah, I mean, look, what I did today was not magic. It was just a little bit of experience in trading these airdrops. Not the first airdrop I've traded. So, I mean, it wasn't genius, although I'd love to claim that it was. So I'll give you the logic behind. First of all, what is Jupiter? Jupiter is a trading platform. It's a decentralized trading platform on Solana.

It's a DEX, decentralized exchange, or a DEX aggregator. It aggregates liquidity across DEXs. It is currently by far, by far, by far the majority of the trade on Solana. When I say the majority of the trade on Solana, probably 80% to 90% of the trade on Solana. When I say the majority of the trade on Solana, probably 80 to 90% of the trade on Solana. Solana is also becoming very much the trade, the trading. So you're almost like investing in the DEX that is on the chain that is now home to the most trading. We spoke about that because not only are you trading Solana ecosystem projects, you're trading meme coins, which you ordinarily wouldn't be able to trade because the gas fees are so high, but now you can trade meme coins.

And then you're also trading, you're also trading, yeah, so it's the trading platform. Now, what they did today was they gave an airdrop to anybody who had used the platform by a certain date. They started airdropping you free tokens. And you know, we were anticipating these free tokens for a while. I think we've had a couple of shows about it. That's the history to it. Now, one thing that I've learned where you can make a lot of money is trading these airdrops. And let me explain the logic to you behind trading these airdrops so that you can understand what happened and why my logic took it. And if you guys want to see this in real time, go and watch my show.

I did it on my show. It was live. It was amazing to watch. So the airdrop happened. It started trading on all the exchanges at the same time. And it started trading at $2, which gave the protocol a fully diluted valuation of $20 billion, which is, I think, three times the multiple of Uniswap,

just to give you an idea. That's a crazy valuation. The reason why that happened was because no one had their tokens to sell. Very few people had managed to claim their airdrop tokens because you don't just get the airdrop tokens. You actually have to claim them. And very few people actually managed to claim their airdrop tokens. And so because very few people were able to claim their airdrop tokens, no one had any tokens to sell.

And buyers who were buying into hype and didn't know anything about- The team in the back channel just said, sorry to interrupt you, that Jupiter will drop on Binance in four minutes. I'm not sure if that's a... Yeah, I mean, it's pretty much on all the other exchanges. So maybe in four minutes we'll see a bit of a price. Probably we'll see a price pump first and then a little dump. But anyway, let's carry on.

So there was no one to sell. No one had their tokens. And then retail buyers come in and try and buy it. And a lot of buyers landed up paying $2, which is a ridiculous valuation. That's when you probably saw me saying, guys, if you have your tokens, sell them, you can buy them back cheaper. And if you can short them on any of the perpetual exchanges, short now. And then I said, look, where would I be comfortable buying this? Because as more and more and more people are managing to claim their tokens, more and more people are managing to sell their tokens, and that will

put sell pressure. And so initially I had a target of buying back the token somewhere between 60 and 70. And then that would be like the beginning of my buy zone, even though I don't think that's cheap, I think that's fun. You buy it there, you sell it at 80, again, you buy it, it's going to go down again, you buy it back. And then it comes down to saying we're at fair value. And I think to be honest, right now we're at fair value. I think this trade is dead at this level. I don't think there's too much value. I don't think it's cheap.

I don't think it's expensive. And so I've got no interest in this trade now unless it dips or it goes up. If it goes up above a dollar, then I go short. If it goes down below 40 cents 50 cents i buy and then i just land up holding it because i just think the thesis of owning some of the jupiter usdt or the jupiter which is the biggest exchange on solana is a great thesis to be playing i'm actually curious from the audience i know we have joe here to give us an update on solana in general but anyone in the audience let us know in the comments if you were actually, but I'm not a holder of Jupiter.

I'm not a friend. Do you still hold your Jupiter or you sold them all? Well, to be honest, I didn't manage to claim the airdrop during the show. You saw it was taking a long time to claim.

Yeah, yeah. So to be honest, at this price, I'm not a buyer and I'm not a seller. So it's not even worth me claiming a token because I'll wait until tomorrow

to claim it. So there's no, like, unless this thing goes back to $1.20 today, which would be very, very, very unusual, I'm not selling. I'm also not buying because it's not cheap. If it goes to $0.50 or $0.40,

then I'll buy. But at these prices, no excitement. Ruder? Yeah, so a bit of background. I'm Ruder, the founder of Solend, which is a Solana project. And yeah, we've been dealing with this Joop airdrop just now. We just had a war room because just the size of this airdrop is quite big,

and we're all anticipating potential issues on the Solana network, just because way in the past, there have been some network issues, but right now seems to be smooth sailing for the most part. It's kind of interesting. You guys were talking about the Bitcoin ETF a bit earlier. And I was kind of thinking like in the same way that that was the biggest event of the month for crypto Twitter,

this Jupiter launch is the biggest event for everyone in solana um just to give a sense of like yeah how much this means to us um yeah so from for myself actually i've been using jupiter for a while for a bunch of work stuff and with a bunch of different wallets and i was extremely lucky to get like 165 000 juke tokens in an airdrop which comes out to around 115 000 um at current prices so pretty pretty nice thing to wake up to and and see in the morning um and what does that what does that do to Solana guys? Once again, I have a very important question. So what are you going to do with your airdrop tokens? Are you going to keep them? Do you have any intention of dumping them? And if you take if you have any intention of dumping them? Maybe

give me some insight as to what you would move them into? Yeah, so what I'm planning to do with it is actually deposit them onto Solend. So Solend is soon going to be listing. So Solend is a lending borrow protocol on Solana. So people can deposit assets and borrow them and you get yield when you deposit and you can do over cloudized loans, kind of like Compound or Aave on Ethereum. So basically, Joop is going to get listed very soon. And they're also going to be incentives. And I'm anticipating to be quite a bit of borrowing activity

because a lot of people are going to be shorting in order to hedge. And so I think interest rates could be maybe like 50% TBD to see what it'll actually be. But yeah, and Solana is also we're running incentives. So yeah, I'm planning to hold my bags. Big supporter of the Jupiter team. So we'll kind of wait and see what happens. Yeah, I think by the way, this is Joe, I just want to comment on a couple of things here. So first, this isn't an airdrop where you just get to buy it or sell it. That's just absurd to think about it that way. Number one, to Reuters point, you can deposit in Solent. Number two, you can deposit it into Drift. And now you can actually use that as

cross margin collateral for trading perps or other spot tokens. The utility of this airdrop is way bigger than, oh, i got a free stimulus check let me dump it at some price that's just the dumbest thing you could possibly do with this airdrop i'm actually buying more because this thing is dramatically undervalued for the actual roadmap that you got these guys actually you can say but hold on but we say dramatically undervalued for the roadmap i think you say this about any every token that exists is undervalued relative to the roadmap. But the question is, can they deliver the roadmap? Can they can competitors eat up their piece of their pie? So I'd say, would you say it's undervalued based on where they are today,

excluding the roadmap? It could be bullish on the roadmap, but just where they are today, you say you're bullish or bearish? Oh my God. Yeah, of course. I put out a Twitter thread last night specifically covering this topic. Like a lot of people are trying to compare Jupiter to Uniswap, which is just categorically wrong. There's no comparison between the two. You basically have a constant product market maker, DEX, versus Jupiter, which is an entire platform and suite of products. The team is lights out. They've been shipping nonstop through the prior bull, the bear, and now, and just executed the largest airdrop in the history of Solana,

and it's going off without a hitch. In fact, if you check the bird eye chart right now for Jupe, this is a straight DCA program that's just going straight up. There is no selling here. And so this is, again, like the idea that this is some, like everybody gets an airdrop, it's going to dump

and then it's going to rip and then it's going to dump and it's going to rip are just completely missing the product suite that they're actually have, they have delivered on and will continue

to actually deliver on. Joe, Joe, help me out here. Why is Jupiter a project that you wouldn't want to hold tokens for? Balance it out, Joe. I can't hold it. I hold it. And Ram, you need to go claim. I would not wait till tomorrow

because when they ran a test with when, they had a time limit on it. I don't know if Joe would know because Joe's like the OG of Solana. End of July. You've got plenty of time. It can't be a 24-hour time period. You've got plenty of time. You've got a long time. It can't be a 24-hour time period. It's got to be a reasonable time period for you to claim.

So it's not going to be 24 hours, that I can promise you. Guys, it's till the end of July. You have plenty of time. You have plenty of time. Listen, we've missed the trade. Just a quick one. I just read something

which I think might be amazing for other people to hear, but FTX just said it expects to pay crypto customers in full. All their crypto customers in full in the bankruptcy liquidation, which I think is fantastic. Hold on.

So essentially, Juan, I'm going to go to you. Are you saying everyone that had money in FTX would get all their money back? Correct. Now, they haven't elaborated as to whether it's going to be crypto or USD or what needs to be. So Sam was right when he said that all customers could be made whole. And probably he's referring to the AI investment as well.

Yes, but I think all customers will be made whole. And that's after paying all the legal fees as well. That's after paying all the legal fees. But don't forget that the equity holders will probably take a bath. And I think maybe the debt holders will probably take a bath. But remember that they've had some great trades. That AI one, remind me the name. Anthropic. But then also in the same announcement, we also heard that they are not restarting the exchange, which means all the speculation around the FTT token, which I did say at the time I was very short, shouldn't have closed my short, but I did close my short. They're not restarting the exchange. So that exchange is now not restarting. Zach, you just came in.

If you've got comments on just the FTX story, because I know you want to talk about Jupiter as well, that's when you put your hand up. But Zach or Juan, any more insight on the FTX story of all customers being made whole? No, Zach, go ahead. You probably have more insight on that. I was going to comment on Jupiter and the impact on the Solana ecosystem,

but I can do that. That would be great. Yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on that, Juan, afterwards. Zach, any more insight on the FTX story? I don't think it's quite fair to give sam credit for what he said before he did not know that the ai equity was going to go up as high as it did he was talking specifically about the amount of crypto and fiat that ftx had and look you know they got remarkably lucky on some of their venture holdings but this is uh you know i think this is just a stroke of luck and not in any way exonerating of the leadership at ftx exactly

can i can i say yeah just to be clear it's definitely not exonerating someone breaking the law they broke the law a lot of you know equity holders got screwed other people are unrelated to ftx got screwed so yeah definitely not that but i was just kind of giving credit for the trades they've made Yeah, but it's not... I agree. It is, I mean, I think it looks like to be a positive outcome

for, you know, creditors who are still there in the end. But like, this is like, you know, where did he get the money to invest in those companies, right? Like, we believe he stole it from his users.

So, I mean, it's like if you rob a bank and then you happen to make investments that after you get caught, go up enough to pay back the bank like that, that is not OK. Or you go to Vegas and you put it on the roulette wheel. Yeah, exactly. So, like, I don't know, there was an article that two friends of his parents, two law professors at one of them at Stanford, the other one who's a member of the National Bureau bureau of economic research literally argued that this was exonerating and that if the the public had known then they wouldn't view them the same way and that

that is just total right this is it is a crime to steal money from people it doesn't matter if you happen to make good investments with that money and just to be clear for the audience so that doesn't impact the criminal proceedings against salmon yeah the sentence he'll get. Isn't CZ getting sentenced too? Yeah, we were just talking about him earlier today. He's in the US. He's still in the US. I don't know what the date is. Zach, have you been following that? Yeah, I don't know the exact dates,

but this is a pretty common thing to argue when you have a high-profile, very wealthy defendant about whether they are a flight risk if they leave the country. And his latest argument is that he is a family member who's having surgery and he needs to be there. But the court is skeptical that he will ever return to the United States if he's allowed to go to Dubai. I'm to be worried that because we were talking earlier that he probably won't go to jail for too long. So for the court to be skeptical, when does the sentencing happen, Zach? I think

I don't know the exact date. I think it was late this year. Like it's months from now. No, no, the sentencing is in February, guys. It's in February. It's in February. Yeah, I think he's scheduled to have a sent in February 24. So I don't know when

he would actually start in the sentence. But I would also not be surprised if that gets pushed back. So in a case like this, especially where the defendant has a lot of resources, the defendant does a very lengthy sentencing submission, the government, the prosecutors do a submission, and then essentially the Department of Corrections do a submission, and the judge reviews that, and this is a pretty high-profile thing. I would be pretty surprised if it's all done in February, even if that's the current date. Right. Juan, you were jumping in on the Jupiter airdrop, the impact on the Solana ecosystem. I think it would be a good place to kind of end the space. I apologize for interrupting you earlier, but I love when breaking news happens.

Yeah, no, that's amazing to hear. Good for the depositors getting their money back. On Jupiter and the Solana ecosystem, yeah, I'm very positive as well on Jupiter. They're doing an amazing job. I mean, just this week, they've topped the charts of DEX volume and with 480 million on Monday, that even topped Uniswap. So that's an incredible traction that we're seeing on Jupiter. And I think that reflects very well on the traction we're seeing on the Solana ecosystem. It's actually, the fundamentals are on fire. Transaction volume on Solana has surged to $950 billion for the month of January. That's up 30% month over month and up from just $40

billion in September 2023. So it's really catching fire. New addresses on Solana have hit their highest level ever as well as a result of the traction on Jupiter, the WEN frenzy, meme coin frenzy, and a lot of stablecoin trading as well. We're seeing this month is January is on track to be the second best month for Solana signups ever and December on third place. And they're up more than 10 million new addresses and counting for January alone. So you're really seeing strong fundamental traction on Solana, which I think is reflecting

well for the ecosystem. We saw it top at about $120 in December and had since come down to about 80 and is now at about 100. But I think it's going to have another fantastic year. Obviously, it was up 939% last year. And there's also the lag effect of people chasing the price action this year. But I think the fundamental support continued as well. Yeah. And by the way, let's be clear here. This Jupiter airdrop is the biggest test of solana's network in history a lot of the the futters and people that are you know eth maxis or anti-solana fans they have been talking about

the reliability of the network for so long this didn't even cause an issue whatsoever yes certain people may have had delayed but that's with rs. And you should expect that with high activity on the network. But the network didn't fall over, the network didn't, didn't pause, the network didn't stop. So this is extremely bullish from the technology perspective of what Solana can actually do and provide to Web3 and crypto more broadly, that just isn't possible on any other chain today yeah definitely and i want to add a couple things just a quick note about the uh ftx thing i was just thinking like oh man i'd rather talk about jupiter who's giving away a bunch of free money to people than ftx stealing people's money right um i'm just trying to forget that i had a bunch

of money in there as well but um but well. But you're getting that money back. Yeah, I guess so. I don't know why you want to forget it. So congratulations on that. Well, yeah, hopefully. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah, I think Jupiter launch is just the beginning.

There's so much more good stuff to look forward to on Solana. If anything, there's going to be a lot more airdrops soon because people are seeing the success of this and trying to replicate it. So yeah, there's a lot of projects with no tokens yet that are yet to launch.

Actually, Solend is recently, we announced an expansion to SWE, which will be launching a token and doing an airdrop to Solend users and token holders. So yeah, I'd definitely say there's a lot more airdrop farming plays

to be made, and this is just the beginning. Yeah, I think Solend is getting a good way to finish off. Yeah, I just want to add one last thing, like a little tip for people who are claiming jupiter tokens um if you have like a lot of different wallets uh like i do and if you're trying to dump it not like me i'm trying to hold it put in so then but um one interesting thing you do you can do is you can short the perks on avo um and then you can just go and claim it

later so you basically hedge and then you can like, cause it takes a long time to actually go through all your wallets and, and you know, if there are RPC issues or whatever, you can kind of delay that for later. And Julian, the founder of AVO is here. So it would be cool to hear him speak a little bit later as well. Now we're going to wrap up Julian, but we welcome, we'll do another Solana space. We'll bring you up. But otherwise I think we've covered this well. I think Solana is getting a lot of attention now, such a different type of attention to when FTX collapsed. Who would have thought a year ago that a year later,

whatever, how long it's been, FTX customers will be made whole and Solana will be where it is today. So congratulations on people like Ruder that are in the Solana ecosystem and have money on FTX. Probably a good day for you, man. But I think that's it. Ryan, anything else to add, Ryan? No, FOMC meeting later.

If you guys want to join us, we're going to be trading it live on Banter+. Also, I mean, if you don't mind, let me just do a plug for one of our products. You saw that I had a very quick access to the breaking news. That is because we have a product called Banter Bubbles. Now, Banter Bubbles, on the one hand, is a bunch of bubbles that show you how the prices are moving.

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literally watch the news scrolling while the bubbles are moving go and go to mario bubbles.com i think this is a different so banter bubbles is for market analysis mario bubbles and it's a bit more fun you press on the bubbles and if they pop in time i think you win some money so if you want to play a game with mario bubbles go there banter bubbles if you want to play a game with Mario Bubbles, go there. Banter Bubbles if you want to trade and get some news. I think that's it for everyone. And what's Scott Bubbles, Ran? Just click on the bubble and get a depressing note or depressing quote for the day. This is Scott Bubbles.

But I think this is it. We'll wrap the show. Thanks a lot, everyone. We'll see you again tomorrow. Bye, everyone.