The Wolf Of All Streets - Liquidation Hunting, Wash Trading & 50x: Inside Crypto’s Risk Machine | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

In this episode we discuss a wide-ranging roundtable focused on trends and controversies in the crypto market, with particular discussion on the implications of Coinbase introducing 50x leverage, issues of trading volume authenticity on centralized and decentralized exchanges, tokenization of stocks, and the launch of decentralized, peer-to-peer gaming and gambling with Decentralized Gaming Network. The panel included both hosts (such as Scott) and recurring crypto market experts, alongside guest speakers from Decentralized Gaming Network. The event's goal was to dissect current crypto developments, their impact on markets and users, and spotlight new projects in the ecosystem.

Coinbase often offering 50x leverage, Dave, is your topic. Yeah, well, you know, it's a slow news, Dave, but it's kind of, it's funny. People forget that FTX of all platforms cap their leverage at 20X. So, Coinbase going to 50X is pretty damn obviously trying to go after retail punters and looking for people looking at lottery tickets, etc. I actually don't think it really means a whole heap, but it is a little. a sign that, you know, even Coinbase gets, you know, in their attempt to compete with finance, they think that this is important, you know, to attract, to, you know, to attract people to their derivatives platform. I, you know, I worry about leverage in all markets, but it's,

it's amazing to me that this is the direction they went in. I'm curious what other people think, but, you know, if you read and go back to, you know, read reminiscences of a stock operator and and understand how important leverage was to the bullshit that happened in the 1800s, believe it, and I mean that, 1800s, and up through the crash of 29, and there's no way that the U.S. regulators will allow anything close to that for that reason. It is amazing to me that, just even from a PR point of view, that they would do that. But I guess they figure it doesn't matter. I'm curious.

Adam, what do you think? You have your hand up. Yeah, I'm just wondering if this is a reaction to the success of hyperliquid and just, you know, them leaning in quickly to try and, you know, jump on that bandwagon or try and get ahead of the train a little bit to cut off hyperliquids, you know, success, really. Yeah, you know, obviously, and we've talked with some lawyers who are part of Coinbase. And I think the general feeling is that it's the time to move fast and try and. and grab real estate and then just move fast, knowing that the regulators aren't necessarily going to come in during a Trump presidency. And so what might not be allowed with the next president, you're just kind of leaning in and trying to grab it now, if that makes sense.

There's also non-U.S., right, Tim? Yeah, yeah, it's non-U.S. It's just, look, I personally think that it's just, that you're probably right. Hyperliquid is probably the motivation. It's, look, there's a gambling culture. we understand it. It's one thing to have it on Bitcoin or Ethereum where it's pretty clear when liquidations happen. And while you can manipulate, it's hard to manipulate. But when you consider it across the board, there's going to be a lot of crap's going to go on. And for those who don't understand what I mean by that, I'm talking about the fact that, you know, that you can move with not a whole lot of volume, you can move spot prices a few percent either way,

and the lesser liquidity, all coins, you can move it many more percent. And the ability to trigger liquidations becomes a critical part. And, you know, that's a large part of why people, you see as many liquidations you do even on crappy days soon when there's nothing happening. So it's just, it's yet another sign that people are pushing down the curve. I personally think it's just the crypto community gets bored faster than anybody else. But, you know, it really is that. I mean, 50X as high leverage.

You're talking about a 2% drop to get liquidated, really less. Yeah, yeah. You're talking about five minutes of volatility. Five, I'd think. Five seconds. It's 30 seconds in this market. I mean, you know, it's even Bitcoin, right? Yeah. No, it's true. It is just, it's, it basically takes a investor and, you know, or a trader and turns them into unabashedly a gambler.

And, you know, a lot of people don't understand what does that mean. It's, there are entire firms who will set up if there's a lot of this that they, their trading strategy will be looking to trigger liquidations, right? for them. I mean, it already happens with stop losses and other things, but, you know, if it actually became a big deal, you know, on a mainstream, you know, platform, uh, it would be, it would not be great, you know, for, you know, confidence in the industry. That said, it won't be a big deal. And, you know, not that many people will use it, I don't think, but it's, I think it's, I think it's all this marketing. But anyway, that was my thought this morning. Kind of boring, but it is, it is what it is. I don't know how much they're going to be competing with hyperliquid

unless regulators force hyperliquid to KYC their users. So I think it's a step towards competing with Binance, but the fact of the matter is people love hyperliquid because it allows them to trade in a way that they can on centralized exchanges without dealing with all the bullshit, which comes along with operating on a sex. Yeah, bullshit and or inability. you know, depending on what jurisdiction you're in.

Yeah, but that's right, Noah. But by the way, I see Noah as a listener and David as a listener. I thought I saw David's hand on. Good times, but I think David did raise his hand. Yeah. Yeah, I was just going to throw in two cents here, which is to say that the opportunity set in terms of available gambling venues, obviously is expanded.

You have the CFTC's approval of polymarket for prediction markets coming out. And then last but not least, we have this evening the start of NFL football. ball. A gambler's den, if ever there was one. So, you know, just got to be competitive. So why not 50 to 1? Hell, let's go 100 to 1. Yeah, well, I'm a jet fan, so, you know, you know, you know,

I'm going 50 to 1 against the, yeah, I'm going 50X leverage against the Jets. Yeah, well, you know, but see, that that's a lot safer than 50x leverage on any crypto. Dave, Dave, at least. Justin Fields. We usually make it to the season to be, you know, excited. we didn't even make it to the season, right? It's like a couple days even before it starts. We did our, you know, it's so good, man.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not to worry about Aaron Rogers anymore. Well, that's true, but, you know, only the Jets could have, you know, one of their top 10 players, you know, have a season ending injury in a one-on-one drill the week before the season opener. I mean, I don't know that that happens any other team, but it happens. So, there. Glass hands. Yeah, but whatever.

Anyway, we will see. I still have some hope, but then again, you know. Hope is not a great strategy. It is, however. Dave, can I ask you a few questions, grow? Yeah, of course. So obviously, like, since you're working with coin routes, you said something that's really important,

which I think the masses don't fully understand, is what is the real trading volume versus the reported trading volumes? Because as we know, a lot of this trading volume is absolutely fake. You know, I've seen some statistics from, you know, 70 all the way up to 90% relative to exchanges. So what I do usually, Dave, to look at real trading volume is I look at Coinbase because it's a public trading company and they cannot cheat or inflate the numbers. And also they cannot put zero maker fees and zero taker fees to wash trade all fucking day.

So I would love to hear from you, Dave, like, because you're with coin routes, you probably have a really good insights on what is real versus what is fake. I think the majors are all real. So, you know, Coinbase for sure, cracking for sure, what was, you know, Robin Hood, what it was BitStamp. Now, Robin Hood for sure, Gemini, for sure. None of those firms are going to take any liberties whatsoever. From what we understand and what we see and what our algorithms see, Binance, which has the DOJ kind of sniffing up their butts are taking no liberties. But as you say, policing is a different thing. So there's two things, real versus fake, fake. I'd say Binance, OV Kex, by bit, et cetera. They're all real, but are people cheating? Now, and so it's really important to understand what I mean by cheating. So I think Bitcoin volume is real. Aetherium volume is real. There's no, there's no edge to watch trading in those. But there are firms out there who are, who will break up their accounts across multiple entities in order to pump volume on, on alts to give the appearance of more liquidity than there is for a variety of purposes.

It's not a money machine per se, but it does happen. Now, the only time that there is, the other thing you will see wash trading for is you will sometimes see wash trading for people who are trying to sniff out participation algorithms. So when you build trading algorithms like we do for a living, you know, a client will come to us and say, okay, I want to get into a $20 million. position in some some all coin and they'll put an order to do that and participate in a certain percentage of the volume if you don't if you don't build that algorithm correctly and most of the people's algorithms that do this are shit uh you can by creating volume by trading with yourself

or training with an affiliate and you could see if bids or offers are mechanistically following and so there's still wash trading that happens because there's no real regulator to stop it I think most of the exchanges have. In fact, I know they do. They all have wash trade detection within the same entity, but the wash traders have gotten more sophisticated and it gets harder and harder to find it. So there is some of that, but I think that as a percentage, it's really small now because, you know, as a percentage of volume, the all coins where it's profitable, it's small. But that is not defy by the way. That's all the large centralized exchanges. As you get down the curve and centralized exchanges, it probably becomes more and more possible.

And that's not surprising. Coin market cap's been doing that research for years. Does that answer your question? That does answer my question, Dave. But you just talked about defy, which I also have concerns, because there are some chains. I'm not going to cite them here because I don't want to create enemies and politics and all that bullshit. But, you know, as you know, name names.

I have a lot of, I have a lot of. I have a lot of these exchanges, like guys, high, like MD, high level management following me, so I don't want to get into trouble. But honestly, like, even for the dexes, for instance, guys, there's one or two blockchains that are just going to, when they set up the AMMs, and just for everyone to know, liquidity on dexes, on AMMs, is completely different from liquidity with an order book on a centralized exchange. So a lot of people, they look at trading volume for dexes, which has nothing to do with liquidity. liquidity is based on the depth on a dex and not on the daily trading volume. So you need to measure liquidity differently, and that's why automated market-making pools are different from what you see on an order book with maker fees and taker fees. But my question here, Dave, is, are you also concerned about Dex's because what they do is, for instance, if they create a trading pair, I was about to give an example, but I'm not going to give it because I'm going to call the chain out, but when you put a training place, some of them, what they do is they literally put zero percent. fees or maybe 0.01% fees. And then they use that on chain to once again wash trade and pretend

that there is interest and trading volume for all coin launches and all that kind of stuff. How do you feel about that? How do you feel about, you know, people getting ripped off or, you know, fake trading volume, as you were saying earlier? Look, I am a very staunch critic of the AMM model as it currently is constituted for Spot Dexas. Not going to lie. I mean, it's a vehicle that only works for the market makers, not for the investor, except for the fact that if you're trying to avoid taxes or trade outside of a jurisdiction, you do what you can do. And so, you know, it becomes an extraction vehicle. I mean, you know, M.EV, there's so many different reasons that's true. Now, that is not true with the decks exchanges that have an order book because the model

is a terrible model. I mean, it's just the market structure is god-awful. And if there wasn't a regulatory and tax arbitrage, there would be no volume. So, yeah. Can you explain, Dave, why you think that? Well, because it's the economics. You know, you don't know, you don't have any, the word that every trading algorithm or every trader will tell you if you're trying to minimize your trading costs that you care of it is determinism.

There's no determinism. So when you go to put an order in, it is exceedingly expensive to try to figure out what the cost is going to be. you get that order done in an AMM system, whereas an order book, you can calculate it with precision. That's if you're taking. And if you're making, you need in an order book system, it's simple. You place an order.

You know, it's easy. In a Dex, with an undeterministic trying to make, it is hard. And for lots of reasons. It's just not designed for that. It's designed for the market makers to be a maker. So if you look at the old OTC markets that used to exist back when dinosaurs worked the earth and I was trading in London, Ciac International, and I could describe this, but nobody really gives a shit. But just understand that you had a choice.

You could either lift an offer or you could hit a bid. No one gave you the choice to place a bid. You know, that was non-marketable at the time. Well, in the Dex world, that's kind of true. If you place a limit order, you're only getting filled when your bid basically is effectively. being, you know, becomes higher than the prevailing offer. It doesn't really work that way, but it's more or less a reasonable thing. So it is not an efficient trading strategy.

It's never been designed to be. That's why so many of the most popular dexes these days on derivatives have order books because it gives that determinism. You can see what the hell you're doing. And frankly, I think there will be, and there are, there are multiple models and dexes, multiple decentralized exchanges that are going to, you know, multiple decentralized exchanges that are going towards an order book or deterministic model. Even Uniswap is adding, you know, pieces of that through the various algorithms.

So it really, so when Alex asked me a question, my prior is, yeah, you know, you're playing in the Wild West. You're going, there's going to be a trading cost that's excessive, but you're doing it because the profit potential. Well, Dave, when you say the trading cost is excessive, I, this is like, I guess, where I'm, maybe I'm missing your point. But it's not going to be the same as a centralized exchange, but the slippage on a lot of these decks is, especially if you're using a decks aggregator, like Lama swap, is negligible. You can trade $100,000 and you're not paying substantial amount in fees. Define not substantial. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I can try to do a demo trade right now and get back to you, but I use decks as all the time.

And I, no, I, I hear you. I understand. But when you, when you normalize 50 basis points as not excessive, understand that the average cost of trading on centralized exchanges with coin routes is single digit basis points or less. And so it's true, it's all a question. It's all relative, Noah. That is Noah, right?

You know, because I, as I said, I can't. Yeah, no, that's a good point. I recognize that is a good point, Dave. So look, my brain understands, you know, we traded. Just to put this in perspective, Coinrout's clients on orders that were huge. We're talking multiple millions of dollars of orders in spot in July where I think nine basis points was total slippage for orders that were defined at over $200,000.

Under the smaller ones, it was like three basis points. Net, that's including fees. So, you know, if you can make your costs really, really low if you're using sophisticated products on on aggregated centralized exchanges with algorithms. So my brain is wired that way because, look, I ran Quant Trading for

2 Sigma Securities and before that for Citigroup. And you know, you understand that this is a very competitive game. So it's not that I don't think Dexas have a place. In fact, I'm very bullish on Dex's becoming very important in terms of custody

because separating a exchange from custody makes an enormous amount of sense. But the model that grew up in order to do this was based on interesting assumptions. But the truth is, the reason that you trade on spot dexes, Noah, not to be mean, is because you're sitting in America and it's your only damn way to trade many of the assets that you want to trade.

And that's the regulatory arbitrage I was talking about. That's not a bad thing. I'm not accusing anything wrong. I think it's multifaceted, Dave. I think that could be one reason, but I think the other reason is a lot of, a lot of us just don't want to give our keys away, right? No, no, that's fair. I'm the same way. When I trade on Dexas, it's because it's out of a wallet, right?

And it's, I don't want, it's, I want to keep control of it. You're right. So it's regulatory and asset control. That's fair. So anyway, it was a, we went off down a rabbit hole. I'm sorry about that guys. That's a good one. Yeah, my bad.

Yeah, yeah. And I try to avoid, you know, advertising coin routes, but it's kind of funny because the other thing that's come out over the last couple weeks is with the, we talked about it yesterday, is with the SEC and CFTC telling all the Wall Street firms that they can start offering crypto trading, they don't understand what they, they don't know what they don't know. And all of them are going to need a suite of Algos that understand crypto. So I kind of laugh, but I'm waiting for the phone to ring.

Because if they're smart, they will be picking up that phone to ask because it does matter. But anyway, anything else on this topic before we talk about this lovely market? Any other features out there? We can talk about the market or we can talk about the American Bitcoin launch briefly. Either way. Okay. You know, there's not that much to talk about. I think it's just yet another data point in the, clearly, the Trumps have a lot of power in the crypto market and are heavily invested.

And obviously, we had that launch yesterday, doubled in price in an hour. This is the mining company that went public to the Trump's American Bitcoin, ABTC. And doubled in price, multiple circuit breakers. I think it settled in yesterday. And I haven't checked today around 16% above the launch. But some classic, you know, looked like an all-coin launch volatility on public markets with a Trump-backed miner. You know, it's funny. People think of that as unique.

there are lots of IPOs that have that feature. I always tell people that if you're in the IPO and you have an allocation, okay, cool. Otherwise, buying on the open is borderline insane. I mean, you know,

and trying to buy into that the liquidity, you know, hype cycle. It's crazy. For everyone that that actually works, there's probably a dozen where you just get your face hands. you know, your face is handed to you. You know, it just happens all the time. So this is no surprise to me.

The more interesting question is how politicized it gets. I mean, it feels like there's this bifurcation that, you know, half the country, you'll effectively will say, oh, my God, this is like the worst thing in the world. And the other half of the country is saying, oh, my God, this is the best thing in the world. It just seems crazy to me. I mean, David, I'm going to guess that that you think it's equally silly. There. Yes.

It's in the sanity. It's also a sign of a market top, if you ask me. Well, it feels, yeah, I mean, who the hell knows? I mean, look, it's like all this to talk about, the other topic that gets, you know, you were talking about this morning, Scott, you know, on your show about the Bitcoin Treasury companies and Microstrategy. They own a million Bitcoin now, by the way. Yeah, it's, uh,

It, it, there aren't, there isn't enough Bitcoin, you know, when investors want to get into it. Just think about the amount. I mean, the penetration into pension funds by, you know, if you look at the ETFs, it's, you know, that's a pretty big, it's a pretty big amount. It's still a tiny percentage of assets. And, you know, if you're going to have companies locking this stuff up as a vehicle, it's, to me, it's just, it's crazy. I mean, it's, it's, it's crazy in the sense of that. It feels like this rotation of OG selling has been, you know, had to meet this. Otherwise, the price wouldn't be the price there where it is. But it feels it's all exit liquidity, Dave. Who's exit liquidity for the OTs?

That's clear. Kaiser, Max Kaiser tweeted something about, you know, $100,000 being the inevitable point where, you know, the whales would exit and the transition from store of value asset to a medium of exchange. But I think the staty was looking at was that whale holdings of Bitcoin are at a seven-year low or something. So clearly, and fell off a cliff.

So clearly that is who's been selling. Right. And that is the most bullish possible thing that one could ever imagine happening. Because if Bitcoin is to become a global store of value and achieve the dreams of the Bitcoin Maxis. The only way that can happen is if the largest pools of capital become the dominant owners. You may not like that, but that's a fact. But isn't there a transition period where you've got these companies, you know, the treasury companies that have levered up? We've got 166 of them now, of which about, you know, 26% are trading in a market nav of less than one. You know,

if this thing falls apart, it could fall apart. hurry. You've got, you know, a bunch of Bitcoin out there being held by these names. And are they necessarily really diamond hands? No. A month ago, people thought that they couldn't trade it a discount. That was the prevailing narrative. How could you possibly trade it a discount to the net asset value of your Bitcoin? Well, keep in mind that, of course they can. And I've said this. Of course. I mean, Scott, I made the point, and I'll continue to make the point. There is no reason in the world why Bitcoin Treasury companies or any other treasury company, for that matter, won't trade the same way banks trade to net asset

value. And banks have gone as low as 0.5 and have been as high as 2, right, you know, in the main line. And nobody blinks at either of those things. Banks go below net asset value when there's perceived slowdown and costs, et cetera, you know, when their enterprise value becomes negative because they can't make money and goes higher when the opportunity set for the banks are higher. Why should that be different in these companies? In fact, they shouldn't be. The issue is if you look at all strategies, all trading strategies, you can break them down to long volatility or short volatility strategies. People who trade, you know, range trade, technical traders are effectively long volat strategies. This is a long, the Bitcoin treasuries

are long vol strategies. They are looking to profit from volatility. When volatility collapses, they make less and they should trade it a much lower MNAV. When volatility explodes, their MNAB should explode. It really is that simple. And so it's a question of degree. Markets always overshoot. Just remember that in both directions. And don't expect this to be any different. Now that said, as far as David's point about Diamond Hands versus not, I mean, You need to look at each individual company. I mean, what would it take for micro strategy to have to sell any of theirs? And they are 60 plus percent of that one million, right?

The answer is significant price degradation, like significant. Not, we're not talking about it. What kind of numbers are we talking to, Dave? I mean, it would have to go well below their cost, which is 70, well below. That doesn't seem entirely far-fetched, though. What about, like, a hundred? Yeah, but. The point is the equity holders could be wiped out.

Like, you literally would have to get all the way to Chapter 11 not to distress. And even then, a good Chapter 11 takes so long to sell off assets. I mean, it's just, for all intents and purposes, what you would end up, what would happen, and I hate to say this, but it's the same thing that if the Satoshi coins came on the market. If the Satoshi coins came on the market, it was handled the right. way, which would be probably via an auction of people who are interested in being long Bitcoin, but don't believe it's as investable and don't want to try to move the price. I don't think it would be nearly as catastrophic as people think.

In fact, I think that, if anything, it could, it would be a long-term bullish thing. I think the same thing is true for all of these hordes. There's a point upon which, unless the network itself is failing, the network itself fails, that's fine. That's the damage. But it's a very, very, very, very much of a tail risk. Yeah, Dave, what about liquidity right now? I mean, if we were to basically go out, we've got about 19.9 million Bitcoin that have been mined.

You know, say we get, you know, 5% of that crosses in a trade. What do you think the market impacted that would be if it's a sell? 5% of supply is a very different. is in one trade isn't the way it would happen. I mean, let's put it this way. Galaxy, and I know a lot about this trade, I can look at the Galaxy trade of 80,000 Bitcoin, which had, you know, single-digit basis points of total cost.

Think about that for a second. So you're talking, you know, so if you had that much to trade, what would you actually do unless you were forced? You'd piece it out. What'd you say? You'd piece it out. You'd piece it out. And you'd use technology like coin routes, which has proven to be able to do that.

I hate the advertisement, but I've seen it and I know it. I mean, you know, our platform is, and there are others like our platform. I mean, Coinbase has one, you know, Talos has one. But, you know, there's, you can do so, you can trade far, far less impactfully than just dumping it on the market. at least kind of smash, the notion of a smash buyer or smash sell is just monumentally dumb. And so you have to think about it that way. You can't look at markets in the simplistic notion of, I'm just going to sell it. Now, it is true that if there was a forced liquidation, that's a different story.

Before, like when FTX brought the price down to $16,000, the reason that happened was they were forced sales. And nobody wants to buy, when you know that all of that, that Bitcoin's going to get sold. you're going to pull your bids and you're going to wait until you're getting a significant discount. And so that's why you get these V-shaped bottoms, right, on force liquidations. But to have force liquidations on Bitcoin treasury companies, we're a long, long way from that. That is a tail risk. There are much bigger tail risks than that in Bitcoin or any other asset for that matter. I mean, it's much more likely that we get, I hate to say it, that we have a war event or we have a,

we have a catastrophic, you know, market sell-off, you know, because of a carry trade unwind or something, you know, that causes contagion, then what you're talking about. So I'm curious, how would you kind of rank the tail risks now? I know you tossed a couple out right now. I don't know. Anyone who tries to do it, that's fool's errand. Not to be obnoxious, although I can't help myself sometimes. But the truth is that the biggest tail risk is something we are not thinking about.

It always is. Yeah, the things we don't know, we don't know. That's right. Which is why I wanted the title of this to talk about leverage, because if you don't understand that there's always tail risks that you're not looking at, then you know, then you're going to use excessive leverage and get yourself wiped out and be right in the long run and wrong enough in the short run that you're, that you don't get to reap the rewards of what you're doing.

It's the old expression, the parable of Icarus flying too close. to the sun. And that's why I always warn people about leverage, because if there are things that happen that you're not expecting, boom, right? Nothing like losing all your money right before you find out that you were right. That's right. Oh, it happens all the time. It's happened to me. I mean, and I'm one of the people who teaches about it. It just, it's, it is, it is endemic in our, in investing. You can be right. You can be absolutely right and not make a dime or worse. So anyway, anybody else care on the, on the macro side that everyone was screaming about bond yields, you know, a couple days ago and the U.S. long bond is back under, let's make sure that it still is. Yeah.

There's nothing worth screaming about right now. I mean, it really is funny, right? There is nothing worth screaming about, right? And I guess we'll see what happens. I mean, interviews for new Fed chair, you know, starting already. And as Trump did get charged by the DOJ or something or is officially being investigated. But that's not really a topic for this show, I don't think. No, but it is a topic that I just find anyone who thinks that they, who defends the makeup of the Federal Reserve is just has been brainwashed.

I mean, just think about the hubris of a Fed governor. committing a crime that is specific to rates arguing that they can't be fired by the president of the United States. Think about that. I mean, to me, it's just, it's, it's, it's crazy. I mean, the most important price in the economy is the price of money. And, you know, we've outsourced that. And you wonder why.

But anyway, that's, there are probably other topics to talk about other than polemics. that although bitcoiners love it i addem i see you you i know you agree with me yeah i get the hundred percent well hundreds yeah lot long stream of hundreds so anything going out in asia you know we got we got dan out here you know it's up on us yeah um coinbase 50x i just checked because um i have coinbase um the rems is available um yeah it's already available 50x I can already do a 50x trade right now. I checked it as soon as you said it. So what are your 50X shorting right now?

I'm not shorting anything. I have no money in my Coinbase, thankfully. But they didn't email me saying this is new or anything like that. So I don't know if this has been available for a while. As I mentioned to you before, having an overseas account, I have account out of Singapore. I also get 12% on my USDC in Coinbase, which is something that you don't get in America, is it? No. Yeah, up to 100K, you get 12%.

I would be getting it if I could. Yeah, it's pretty good, pretty good. So that's interesting. And another thing I saw today, a segue, crypto.com have removed all fees. If you, so I've been with Cryptocom for eight years now. I was one of the first people to get their cards or whatever. They rolled out a new thing where if you're like a VIP tier,

you have zero fees on your trading, which is quite interesting as well. Is that a subscription? Like a monthly subscription to be VIPT or is it basically? So they offer it as a monthly subscription. I saw it earlier. I think it was like $40 a month for like unlimited or whatever. But because I'm a VIP tier in their system already, I get it for free. It's really interesting, completely free.

So I did a small trade today with CribD.com. No spread like or, I mean, as a tight spread or is one of those free, but you pay 1% more. They'd probably get you on the spread. The spreads have typically been very bad on CribD.com. But, well, it's it today. Because I get some CRO every week as part of staking, just a small bit. So I flip that into Bitcoin. Zero fees.

Pretty interesting. Yeah. We've seen these before in many different markets. I mean, the thing is, is that when you run an exchange, the most important thing is you tell yourself, the most important thing is you need to build liquidity in the books so that people can see it. And then, of course, you realize that the actual most important thing is you tell yourself, the most important thing is you need to build liquidity in the books so that people can see it. And then, of course, you realize that the actual most important. important thing is to get people who come and just take liquidity blindly and because you can always attract market makers to provide that's why the cryptocom app is a blind

taker so you just say I want to sell this and sell you there's no bid off or anything that oh well the default isn't to make a bid offer that's right so they get you completely with that right and so if you're a market maker you are happy you know get less rebate or pay fees when you can post and and you have blind takers I mean trust me, I ran a market maker who paid for order flow for years. So I understand this, but it is interesting to see how the competitive sides will develop. One of the least understood points for those Coinbase Bulls, and I am very impressed by a lot of things of Coinbase is doing, but their margins are still incredibly high in the United States. Just expect Robin Hood and

others to really push into this here. And we'll see as the regulatory scenario changes. But that is a shot across the bow. It just hasn't shown up here yet, but it will. One of the cool thing that I want to, while we're on a roll, you see recently a few days ago, Ondo started doing stocks on chain. I thought that was really cool. I think that's the way things are going. I've always thought that.

And Galaxy tokenized their own stock and salonite. That's always going to be a regulatory issue. The technology has existed for, you know, a decade now to do that. But I wonder how it must be a permission. It must be why this and wallet, something like that. that because having, look, wanted to move some out of Bitcoin into some other stuff recently. It's a fucking nightmare to go out of Bitcoin. I almost, I very, very nearly bought a house this week.

It was like a half a million dollar in Bali. And then looking at like, okay, now how do I get the Bitcoin into like the bank's fucking nightmare, mate? Absolutely nightmare. There's partly one of the things that put me off. But if I could go, you know, on chain into equities, into not necessarily single equities, But if I could go into ETS and build out like a properly nice, balanced portfolio, that would be amazing. I think it's going to come, but I think it will probably be a few years off now. What do you guys think?

Well, I think two things. I think if I was going to buy a house, I would use, you know, I would use, you know, like Lendon or someone to buy it to get a mortgage and back it with Bitcoin. But that would be different rather than trying to actually sell the Bitcoin to buy the house. But that's neat. But I often have made the point that, and we've talked about this with Stables, when stable coins become ubiquitous, what you will see is a growing number of platforms that allow you to very quickly and efficiently switch between tokenized assets, regardless of whether they're crypto or equity or bonds, etc. That is going to be the future. But as Gary and I were talking about yesterday, I can't see if he's up here or not, there's a lot of things that have to happen first. So it's going to be a couple years before, you know, this stuff goes in reality.

I think that Galaxy is doing this. I personally believe, and I have no knowledge of this, I'll keep saying it. But I personally believe that Galaxy is doing this specifically to gain experience to understand where all the bodies are buried so that they can push. because their goal, and Novografts has said this many times, their goal is to be the Goldman Sachs of the digital age. And so they want to be able to offer full service for crypto, but they would like crypto and digital assets to become all, just be assets.

And so if they know where all the bodies are buried, they have huge edge in that. And so, and that plan, by the way, has worked before at Various and Sundry. If you look at where Citadel and Virtue line up in the capital, markets in variety of traditional assets, bond stocks, et cetera. You can see that by being number one in technology, you manage to gain huge market share and be very profitable. So they're trying to play that play.

So I think that's what it's about, Dan. So Dave, do you see an opportunity to do an arbitrage between stocks going on chain and basically stocks on the exchange? Where is the spread going to be the least? No, I think that they're going to do everything they could. SEC is going to work hard with them and believe me, the lobbying is going to be intense to make sure it is that the pricing of these things is in line and that the settlement is happening on the back end. I'm not sure how they're going to do it. I mean, in the stock market, there's a thing called reg NMS, which the current SEC chair wrote one of my favorite dissents ever, and it was brilliant for.

But effectively, there's a rule that says you can't have locked or crossed markets. And so when you publish a price, you can't, and as long as that exists in equities, there will be no arbitrage. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it because there is, and I don't want to go into the actual details, but it's bound up with high frequency trading and all sorts of stuff that no one cares about. But if the rules change, well, then all of a sudden, then you're going to have market makers, just like we have in crypto. In crypto, there's arbitrages all the time. I mean, right now, Robin Hood is, I kind of do the math quick. over a dollar where are we in 109 883 87 yeah it's about seven dollars you know the bid is below the offer or the bid is above the offer between robin hood and and others uh i'm just looking at bit stamp here

but yeah it's just it's almost always locked or crossed and that's that's that's important you know it's funny like day because you know what what used to happen back in the day with tokens and speaking of ondo and launching stocks on chain so they were actually asking us the other day because we run a MetExchange, which, as you know, Dave, is very similar to coin routes, but for retail. But long story short, the sad thing about this whole stocks on chain is that all the centralized exchanges and platforms, they actually need a securities broker-dealer license. So it's really hard to increase the adoption. And a lot of people are kind of playing with policies and regulations by launching these stocks on their non-custodial

wallets. But eventually, they're going to get, you know, spanked for that, unfortunately, because As Micah moves forward, there's going to be regulatory implications on decentralized exchanges and non-custodial platforms as well. So I'm just, you know, for me, it's very, it's really sad because we want to distribute these type of products. And there are so many cool securities products that are being launched on chain on Solana, whether it's, you know, a yield type of product, whether it's some sort of fun type of product, whether it's stocks on chain. Because we all know the power of this, right? like bringing stocks on chain and bring all these assets, it's really a game changer because you can finally create some sort of utility by doing some sort of liquidity provisioning with stocks and making them modular and doing things that you cannot do in traditional finance, where if you're lucky, you get a dividend, but most of the companies nowadays are doing buybacks. But my point here, just to come back to Ando, Dave, you know, back in the day in the previous altcoin cycle, whenever a company would release a product as big as that, which is, a pretty massive release.

The tokens would pump, right? But this is really sad for Ando, the token actually barely moved and even leading up to the... But I'll take the other side of that. First of all, there are two things you said, I think are bullshit. The first is that it's that...

I think that going on chain doesn't necessarily do a damn thing unless two things are also done and neither of them have happened. Number one, you have absolute price transparency. Right now you don't. Now I think chain link which is another token that I do actually believe in, for different reasons, is working very, very hard to create that, but it's not clear.

You know, we've seen several of these products happen where the arbitrage has become huge, and whenever that happens, it's a problem. The second is it has to be real. And I think Ondo is fixing that, where you know that there's actual stock tokenized as opposed to a shadow, you know, that you rely on. upon market makers to create like paper versions of whatever the stock is, right? So you got that. Now, but as far as why is Ondo token not moving, it's the same problem. I've said this a million times. I mean, Scott, how many times have we had the conversation?

If you own the Ondo token, what do you own? Right now, you own the right to govern how Ondo works. You don't own a fraction, a scintilla of any revenues that they make. So let's say Ondo finance becomes the most profitable exchange in the world. trading this and you own the token, cool, you know, it's like owning an autographed picture of the people who run the exchange, but you don't... I think the biggest problem, Dave, is that... Guys, we're going to have to move on in a second, but, yeah, no, I'll make your comment.

Yeah, yeah, there's so few employees, so a lot of these companies, like Pump Fund, for example, are using revenue to buy back the token, and I think if Ondo commits to that, then you can start seeing, or if you see the Clarity Act, there being proper legislation around how crypto companies can share fees, then that faucet will potentially turn on. 100%. I'm not against Ondo. I look, I know the people who run it, and they're good people. This is not me. This is not an anti-Mondo. This is a, if he asked the question, why did the token not move? Now, if they made an announcement that said, hey, X percent of revenue is going to go in here and the governance token will have the ability to define it and we're going to do

this and that and or we're going to do a buyback and a burn mechanism. Yeah, you're right. But we haven't heard that yet. But Dave, I need to time to counter that. Guys, really quickly, we have to move on. So final comment, Alex. Just one, because Dave, I completely disagree with what you're saying. In terms of liquidity, I agree. I understand that there is also every stock needs to be proven on chain that it is actually issuing a security and that it has property within the company itself. But what you said about no advantages of stock on chain is absolutely bullshit because there's one thing, if you look at, for example,

an aerodrome finance or some of the latest dexes and the V33 model, what you could do if you're bullish stock, not only you could LP it, you could do liquidity provisioning for it, but also you can get the fees back. So you can get not only the fee within the trading model, but you also could get a fee from the decks directly itself for providing that liquidity. So, you know, if some people want to create strategies and they find some sort of... Alex, we should have this conversation elsewhere.

I mean, seriously, because I think there's very few people on the same way in Tradify right now. There are pieces to it. But I am probably the biggest bull on tokenization of equities. So I don't not want to say there's no advantages. I just don't think that we're looking at it the right way right now. That's all. Yeah, awesome conversation, everybody. glad we had it. We do have a sponsor up on stage and want to make sure that they get their time

decentralized gaming network. Are you guys talking from the account or is that too new speaking from that account? Hey, how's it going? We do have both of us speaking if that's possible. Yeah, perfect. It just didn't know who to direct questions to or who would be speaking primarily. So obviously, listen, when we start these decentralized gaming network, give us a TLDR. What are we what are we talking about okay my name's nico and then this is chuny um with some of the founders of decentralized gaming network it's uh the first peer-to-peer um on-chain uh gaming and gambling bought that's all within telegram also what does that mean exactly yeah break that down

so uh it's a as you see most people they like to sort of gamble with their friends within crypto. A lot of them require decentralized applications to open up. We're the only bot currently where you can, you have a sort of hub that you can game and gamble, hoker, peer-to-peer betting, sports betting, all within Telegram, anonymous, and all on chain. Very cool. So why do it with Telegram specifically? telegram is a hub for crypto a lot of people use it it's one of the best to build on because globally anyone who likes sort of gaming and gambling can use telegram for the most part without a VPN that's the that's the sort of benefit of having it within telegram yeah and just to kind

to add to that it's like the best way to kind of break into the mainstream with over a billion users right who are already on that we want to break in the mainstream the best way to do it through a telegram bot and just try to work on that marketing angle that way i mean telegram bots obviously have have been huge how long have you've been working on this when did you make that decision to roll a telegram over a year now actually it's taking a long time to build it's really hard finding good developers that can code you know telegram bots so it's been been in the process of building for over a year yeah and the bot isn't as simple as most other telegram bots so there's a lot of complexities

and a lot of hurdles that we have to go through development-wise to make it as flexible it as it is because the main thing is that we give group owners the power to kind of create any sort of bet that they want. So the group owners can create anything that they want on literally anything. So, you know, how many push-ups can you do? Who's going to win the UFC? You know, it just kind of adds a layer of gaming to the telegram chats and a layer of activity and communication as well. So what inspired the idea here for DGN? I think what inspired the idea was just like our experience. So I would find myself in groups where, you know, people are sports betting, but they're always doing it on stake or somewhere else, right? And sometimes, you know, people would, you know, bet amongst

themselves and just kind of do it on the side. So I thought, hey, why not make this a bot where the group owners can create bets on anything? For example, like, will Eath reach 10K by the end of the year, right? Some people are going to be bullish. Some people are going to be bearish. They can actually put their money where their mouth is now. And it adds a layer of kind of excitement to the thing. And then the idea kind of grew to the point where we said, hey, we could even do this with poker because if you think about it right when people in groups want to play in poker play with poker they usually have to invite them to an external D app and there's all these complications and one thing that you lose when you go to an external D app is you lose the community within that

telegram group so you know they can't see you play you know they can't join in really quickly if someone leaves the table for example so it kind of opens up another realm of interactions and you know, being able to have fun with your community and making it an actual place where people want to stay and play. What's the specific use case then for the token within the ecosystem? This is a, this word gets interesting. It goes back to you guys' conversation just earlier. There's a lot of tokens out there where they're a utility token and they have a utility out there, but they don't necessarily connect. What we have is a stringed ecosystem to where the people who use our bought, the fee that's taken out, which is around 3% that goes back

to the project, is distributed as revenue share, a large portion of it distributed as revenue share to the token holders. And that's starting right now. And then later on, we're going to implement the token for discounts, for users, sort of a token to actually gamble on. So we've taken a long time to make it make sense. So the token isn't just a sort of standalone meme, but has a place within the ecosystem to provide benefit to the people that buy it, not just the people who use the ball. And how is this different than, I mean, I guess you touched on it by not going to a D-app and such, but how is this different than other, you know, Telegram-based, like Telegram Casino,

for example? Yeah, so some other ways that it's different is that there's no house. So we're not really involved, you know, in the decisions and in the different types of probabilities are winning, just like how a house would be. We leave that power to the telegram owners and to the community and how they want to do it. So it really does bring like a completely new paradigm to social gaming.

We're just simply bringing a centralized process and house onto like a different platform and eliminating that house. So there's no middleman. You know, we built a peer-to-peer system that allows, you know, users to directly bet against each other, which we haven't really seen. There's no sort of tool on telegram or anywhere else that really lets you do that with the basically of betting.

Most betting softwares, there's a house involved because, you know, they want to make the most amount of money. They want to rig the system. So we're kind of against that and just kind of giving power back to the community. This way, say, for example, you know, you're betting with your friends and say you bet a little bit too much, you know, because there is such a thing as a gambling problem and you bet a little bit too much. You can actually talk to the community and the people that you bet. show talking about a gambling problem. Yes, I think that's a fair step. Yeah, exactly. So you get, you get a chance to, you know, talk to your friends. Maybe they're on the other side of the winning

side. It's be like, hey, man, I kind of began a little bit too much more than I can handle. Do you think there's a way we could maybe work something out? So it's not like a house where they're just going to take your money and, you know, just goodbye. Is it more decentralized from that perspective? Like, how does decentralization work? I mean, you're literally called decentralized gaming network. so yeah yeah yeah that's exactly that's exactly one of the reasons why i think nico's going to touch in a little bit on the more of the decentralization aspect it decentralized um in the way that number one it's on telegram two you can be completely anonymous while you're playing not only through

telegram but through the the betting bot itself and uh it's all on chain so there's no you know connect you don't need to connect it to exchanges you don't need to go through any kyc you don't need to really do any of that stuff so yeah the decentralized aspect that's true and you just went into it's not like you step into a casino and you're you know you're under total scrutiny of the law it being all done on telegram means you know everyone's safe to gamble however they want to it's based on eath is that correct currently yeah so do the fees affect you obviously fees have been really low on eath but is there any concern you know like we saw in last like over fees spiked massively if someone wants to make a tiny bet yeah um so it's uh there's there's no um

there's no gas fees the the only gas you pay is when you go in and you go out um and then it's going to be it's going to be cross chain too which be the same the same sort of outcome you're not paying anything while you're playing so when you're playing poker when you're playing custom betting there's no individual fee for every bet you set Yeah, and we made this possible because, you know, there's such a problem with fees, right? Like, you can't really bet $5 without paying like $10 in gas fees. So what we did was solve that problem, all the betting and, you know, all the probabilities and everything, they happen on a database, and it kind of stores it on a database and it knows who is taking what.

So when you withdraw, for example, you see the number on the telegram thing and it knows exactly how much. to give you so there's no fees for playing just depositing and withdrawing kind of opens up the avenue to a lot of you know different um types i think you can even bet zero dollars if you want if you want to just bet for fun you know you're allowed to do that um but yeah i think that's pretty cool and we're going to open it up to solana multi-chain betting as well so we're going to make sure that we capitalize on um as much as possible also i think going on ton is very important given that it's a telegram coin right and we're on telegram so we're going to think about expanding to there as well that's yeah i imagine that would be sort of a natural like next step so i read that there's a

five percent payout tax so what happens with that is that that's that's actually how you guys make money but what's what's that on yeah so the five percent payout tax is mainly for incentivization so of that three percent of that five percent three percent goes to the project but it doesn't go to us it goes to revenue share working on the product building the product things like that servers things like that and then the other two percent one percent goes to group owners so say you know you're playing in a group right and your group is very active you know you guys are pushing volume on bets on like poker plays the group owner will be making or 1% of all the fees, which is about like 20% of total fees made from the group, and say that you refer a project, right? So in the bot, you can actually go in and refer the project and get your own referral link. Someone clicks through that. You also get 20%, which is the 1% of the 5% fee for, you know, for life as long as the bot is being used. So it's just, it's mainly to incentivize our holders as well as the people who are helping to, you know, push the bot into groups.

So obviously, I'm assuming these are sort of in their first iterations right now. What, I guess, future plans do you have? What features are you going to add? What's on the roadmap? So the main thing, obviously, is cross-chain. So going through and adding all the different networks. But we've been really lucky in the fact that we have a lot of ambassadors, gamers, and gamblers that have helped us sort of refine the bot down.

One of the advisors for our poker is Jamie Gold. If you guys are familiar with poker, you'd know who that is. and one of the largest public pot winners. He basically helped us redo our whole poker system just so that it would actually appeal to people who play poker on other sites on Telegram. Because obviously everyone knows telegrams a little bit clunky, a little bit harder to use than just going on an application.

So, yeah, it's a lot of quality of life upgrades, going cross-chain, and then also implementing different games. It's decentralized gaming network. So we're just working on acquiring a few other decentralized applications that haven't really been gone off the way they expected to so we can add them under our network. We want to be the core hub for gaming and gambling on Telegram.

So, you know, in the future, looking at hundreds of games, not just the big ones like blackjack and poker and higher or lower, but everything. And how does this, I guess you're based on telegram, telegram's growing massively, so that's part of the answer. But how does this appeal to the mainstream, non-crypto, not telegram audience? How do you make this, I guess, go completely viral and mainstream, you know, and get people maybe that are from other platforms or using these kind of things elsewhere? Yeah, so I can't really get into names right now. We're still figuring out the deals and kind of solidifying these deals.

But one of the things we have is some of the biggest streamers are going to be streaming our game. So when poker does release, we feel like that's going to be the very, very mainstream part of the project. Because everybody plays poker, right? Like custom betting and they all play poker on their phones online, right? Exactly, exactly. So they're all playing poker. They love poker. There's a lot of gaming people online who gamble on, like, stream.

stream. The streaming community is huge and they're very, very active. So if they see, you know, their favorite streamer, you know, playing poker on Telegram through this new method, they're going to be interested. They're going to want to know, you know, what's happening. Also targeting not just the big screamers, but, you know, the very, very small niche gaming and sports streamers as well. Because we have to think about it in terms of volume. You know, you could focus on, you know, a lot of the big streamers, which we are. But you can focus on a lot of small, streamers as well and get those like very you know dedicated audiences those very niche dedicated audiences that love who they follow um to get to you know as a way to get it you can basically bet on anything right yeah yeah pretty much that's the that's the custom betting side so the poker will for the mainstream will kind of be an introduction to the custom betting side whereas the people in crypto who have a better knowledge of you know how to use the blockchain how it works how to deposit how to withdraw and all that stuff, they'll be more inclined to use the custom side first and see that poker is coming, you know, as a catalyst for their groups in the future. So I guess, like, you know,

as we kind of move towards the end, like, what's the long-term vision? Where do you see yourselves in a couple of years with this? You know, who's using it and how big do you think it can be? So a lot of us on the team originated in Web 2 marketing and sort of scaling. We've been in crypto a long time, but we're a big fan of decentralization and a big fan of global adoptability. And this is where we see the bot really growing in that we're going to bring the sort of house games that people like to play with their friends and with their families or even in casinos. we want to bring them to Telegram and bring them to decentralization. No VPNs, no decentralized applications, no KYC all over the place. Someone in China can play with someone in India, can play with someone in the UK, someone in America.

We want to be the global gaming and gambling hub on an easy-to-use like Telegram. And we're going to do that through mainstream adoption, like Cheney said. We're going to do it through live-streamers. we're going to really connect to the targeted audience that uses these kind of things. And just to add to that, I think there's some hidden components that people aren't aware of as to why it can help raise adoption. For example, when we were, you know, reviewing the game with Jamie Gold and kind of getting his opinion on this, one of the reasons he loved this so much was because of how much monopoly there is around poker and the restrictions to play. So he can't play with a lot of his audience and audiences in like third world countries, right, because of the laws and the barriers between them.

So telegrams are very nice kind of intermediary between him and an audience that he can't reach or you can't play with. So we got some good feedback in that terms. And I think there's a lot of like things like that the decentralization helps with. Very cool. Anything else I might have missed before I let you guys go? Can I ask the question, Scott? Sorry. Yeah, so, you know, as a, as someone who suffered from the ultimate bet scandal back in the beginning of online poker, you know, being cheated, that is obviously the real key thing here.

And I'm assuming you have a really good answer for this, you know, how in a decentralized world where you're obviously going to lock up your assets to the chain as you're playing. So I understand that, you know, that mechanics makes an enormous amount of sense. I get that. But, you know, where's the, you know, where's the safety and security that everything is on the up and up coming from? And how is that? And how do the players know that everything is that way? Yeah, I can kind of answer that. So one thing that we do to minimize risks, right, we have a database.

And instead of using one hot wallet, we make sure we diversify all. the funds between five to ten hot wallets. Let's make sure that if anything happens to one wallet, we're still covered in terms of... You misunderstand me. I believe you have that figured out. No, I'm talking about just the actual random number generation, you know, poker, making sure people can't predict cards, making sure the integrity of the game itself. You know, in a decentralized world, you're going to go and you're going to sick people

on somebody. There's legal avenues, not necessarily good ones, but there's least something. thing and you know who to trust in a decentralized world how do you know that that you're not being cheated or that there's no you know collusion etc there's all sorts of things like that that that's the question that I have and I assume that's something you have a good answer to because I assume that's something that you know right right I wanted you to be able to say it to people so they understand it because that's going to be the thing people are most concerned about yeah so that's somewhat still in the process right so poker's a future catalyst

so we're still building out that um that ability but also there's no reason for us to kind of game the system, right? Since we don't have a stake within the game, like how most poker, like most casinos do, there's no reason for us to really be unfair, right? Because all it would do is affect the different telegram groups that are playing against each other. So in that sense, we have no stake really in doing that.

So, you know, why would we really do that? We'd try to make it a step. I understand you wouldn't. Yeah, yeah. Doc can give you my contact information, you know, with all due respect to Jamie. I mean, I've never met him. I used to play a lot of poker,

and I met a lot of people who at that level. But I think there's some stuff here that we should talk about because I would actually like to see you succeed, to be honest, you know, for a lot of reasons. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Yeah, the reason we did this was because, you know, we've all been screwed in casinos, right? We want to make it a little bit more fair, you know,

no more black boxes. Just the rake alone compared to your... model you're going at it's a winning product but it has to be done right that's all i'm saying i i'm bullish on what you're trying to do i'm not this is i wouldn't even bother asking the question if i wasn't i just want to understand whether there's our resident poker pro i'm not a pro but i i my father was a local pro a long time ago but i play enough and i understand enough so you know it's just these are interesting questions and i think we could take them offline but i think it's really cool what you're doing no that's that's good to know uh we would actually love

to maybe have you on once the poker is fully complete just to kind of get your idea of, you know, how you like it, how you like the process and system and everything. So we'll keep in touch. Thanks. Sorry to interrupt, Scott. No, that's great. It's a good question. I think we finished it all.

I hope we covered everything for you guys. It was a great conversation before and during. So thank you guys for joining and telling us about the product. Sounds really, really promising. I'm down to play as well. So just let me know how I'll go up against data. even lose some money no problem it would be my honor to lose somebody for dave yeah thank you guys and everyone else will be back obviously tomorrow with the next crypto town hall appreciate it have a good one

bye