The Wolf Of All Streets - Mark Cuban Sells His Bitcoin - Is He Wrong? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

On today's show, the panel analyzed Mark Cuban’s full Bitcoin sale as classic capitulation and a potential market bottom signal, strongly defending Bitcoin’s long-term role as digital gold and an asymmetric inflation hedge. They discussed heavy Ethereum bearishness, highlighted by Bankless co-founders selling their last ETH and declaring the “First Era” over. The conversation also covered Hyperliquid’s explosive momentum, the booming AI/agentic economy with privacy-focused tokens like NEAR and Venus, DeFi hacks and risks, and LetIn’s regulated Bitcoin lending model. Overall, speakers acknowledged the current crypto winter but remained optimistic about blockchain infrastructure powering the future tokenized AI economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we just had a fake Gary Cardone up here, Dave. Yeah, I like the real one. I don't know much about the fake ones. It's a clone of Gary Cardone. The thing is, his voice is so distinctive. You can tell it from a mile away, so I don't understand the point of that, but whatever. It would have been pretty funny, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, the topic is funny because I'm putting together a post thread, which I'll do in the middle of this show as when someone else is talking because I already have it written. I just got to get it out on X. But effectively, I wrote an article in February explaining my thesis that Bitcoin is an option. And the fact that Mark Cuban is selling to me is almost classic capitulation behavior. And it's funny because I have a lot of respect for Mark's investing acumen. But using recent price action to talk about whether Bitcoin will be an inflation hedge when it's effectively trading at a five percent probability of becoming an inflation hedge is both, I mean, it's kind of stupid, to be

honest with you. I mean, it's at least short-sighted, but it generally is the sort of thing that happens at market bottoms, and these sorts of capitulation signals. So, you know, I find it amazing, in a way, the timing of it. As Bitcoin's rallied, you know, what, 20-some-odd percent off the bottom, it's actually done better since the Iraq War, since the Iraq, since the Iran War started than any other than anything else, although that's mostly because it changed. Yeah. Did I say something? His video looked edited.

Like there was a glitch there. I played it this morning. Because he actually says since the Iran War started, gold rocketed up to $5,000 and Bitcoin did nothing, which is just obviously like everyone knows is not true. Like gold was trading, I mean, gold was trading at $5,000 before and is actually down 11%. So I don't know if they edited that wrong and it sounded like you said it or if he really believe that, but it looked like almost edited to say like that to make that narrative, because we all know, I mean, literally you just have to look at any chart. Bold went up long

before the year on war. But the point, the real point, forget editing or anything else. I mean, the real point is if you buy something, if you invest in an asset because you want to be protected against long-term inflation, then looking at short-term prices, then looking at short-term price action is rather silly, particularly, you know, in, you know, in an asset like Bitcoin. And we could talk about, and I'm sure people will bring up, I mean, I see a couple of people who will want to talk about power law, for example, and understanding the waves and why investor psychology, you know, makes it volatile, et cetera. I obviously have my theory on this, et cetera. But the timing is really odd. It's just, it's odd. And one, it's, it's, it's,

It's funny because people look to see the, you look to these people like Mark Cuban as signalers. And it's like, okay, sure, you know, but most of the money that he's made is by, and I triggered Panos on the power law. So great. That's what I was hoping to do. Most of his money is made by patiently buying things that are undervalued and then waiting. That's how you make real wealth. You had Mike Alfred on last week, Scott. And that was his point.

You can, he said a lot of really good things on your show. But the truth is that's the most important point. The most important point is find something you believe in, stuff it away when you buy it really, really cheap. Accumulate more when you can buy it cheaper and then wait that patience. Anyway, Panos, go for it. Did he make like a public announcement or did he say anything about selling? Like, is this like just a podcast? Sorry?

He was on a podcast and he said that he sold all his Bitcoin and he was like, okay, almost all of it. And so he just did it because it didn't perform well during the Iran work. So is this like a long-term play for him? Like he's out for like a while Or is this like a short-term trade Because he thinks he might buy back cheaper What do you guys think? No, he's out

He's out You have to watch what he said Yeah, he's like I've lost faith in it He's like it didn't say It failed to perform What did he say? I think he said it lost in there He lost the plot

Lost the plot That's what I said Interesting I'm going to have to go back And watch that podcast Yeah, that's quite interesting I mean he's not wrong about Like the performance

has been pretty shitty as far as like if you compare it to other assets you could be making a lot more money in other assets right now but to capitulate and be like well I'm out because it didn't perform well during the war which I don't think that it's that's totally true

that's kind of weird he also said he was not disappointed in Ethereum as much just for the record okay he's out to lunch yeah just for the context because I was like wow have you watched like how many people are exiting the Ethereum Foundation and everything's happening there and how much it's underperformed. So, yeah, good time. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah, I'd like to, I mean, look,

I on this show basically told, I don't remember when it was when I sold most of my Ethereum, because I think it, if you're basing your, your Ethereum buying on the use case of its use, I just think it's overvalued compared to its competitors, just in terms of where it is and TVL, etc. If you think it's going to be digital money, I think you're smoking something. So, you know, but, you know, but I said that many, many months ago, I mean, almost a year ago now. So it's, it's okay. Well, the people who are, the people who are pushing that super sound money narrative, by the way, I think that started with bankless.

They just fired like half their staff and David Hoffman, the head of bankless, which was the biggest ETH podcast and company said he sold all of his Ethereum and he's done. So, so there you go. I mean, now it's too bad, William. not up here but you know Carlo you're you're here but Ryan at his hand up first and then we'll well that will let you defend defend your turf yeah I just I just say like Cuban I don't think he really had his finger on the pulse for quite a long time I think I think he got rugged by a stable coin called Titan early on and the only reason I

know that is because I was your CEO of a company called Titan and we got mixed into that on accident. But he doesn't seem to have super good instincts in the crypto space to begin with. There's a big NFT guy. It was a big NFT guy. Yeah. Yeah. So and then when it comes to Ethereum, like Ethereum's always lagged to Bitcoin. So, you know, Bitcoin makes a move. Ethereum typically stutter steps for about three months. And then we'll see the Ethereum play. And that's just typical market patterns. When it comes to a usage of Ethereum, we've spent so much time to develop flipping out these layer twos and layer threes, and everyone's moving on to things like base, which is highly centralized. And the tradeoff is they get low transaction fees, which Ethereum

is only really used in these layer twos for transaction fees. So we've spent a long time, you know, a couple years now, building systems to not use Ethereum. So, you know, the long-term, you know, flight path here, it looks like is less and less. dependence on the token Ethereum and more dependence on these centralized transaction, you know, indexers, essentially. So it doesn't mean that the EVM's not going to be used or the Ethereum technology is not going to be used, but no one wants to be dependent on the actual token Ethereum. So it does seem to be a downward trend. Yeah, good morning, guys. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago, actually with William

on one of our spaces where I think that Ethereum is, it's, core value is in its infrastructure as a plumbing layer. And I agree. The token price is kind of secondary to that. And I think just like we are seeing marketplaces emerge for compute tokens, I think you could see something similar to that happening on the Ethereum network where the true investment value of it is in its resilience as a smart contract platform. Now, on the Cuban thing, I don't understand what his thesis is. Like, if you listen to someone like Saylor who has a very clear thesis on why he thinks Bitcoin is what it is and why he's 100% committed to it, and then you listen to Cuban

saying, I just dumped all my Bitcoin because I think it's lost its narrative. But what is he saying? Like, what's the alternative to that, Mark? Are you going into fiat? that's clearly lost its narrative. And unless I hear his underlying thesis for why he sold the way he did, I can't really judge his decision because I don't know what he thinks is better than Bitcoin. Is it gold?

I can't believe that being he's a technologist. He said gold was better. I mean, he did say that gold performed, but he was wrong. That just makes no sense, Scott, because that's kind of the opposite of everything that he's been building his whole career. He knows everything is getting more digital and gold is not. Dude, he took Gashcoin as payment for the Dallas Mavericks. Exactly. If you remember, it's not exactly a bitcoiner.

Yeah, but even if he's not a bitconer, he is a fundamental believer in blockchain technology. And first of all, how does an entire decentralized network, which is the biggest, most secure, most pristine collateral that the world has ever seen lose its narrative? Like, what does that even mean? I think he lost the plot, maybe. I mean, it is, but the thing is, is people are like jumping on it. I think that if you look at and if you expect Bitcoin to be trading like a mature asset, then you're going to believe what Mark Cuban believes. There are many people who keep acting like that.

They keep forgetting that Bitcoin is, you know, yes, it's a trillion dollar asset. Okay, cool. So it's not, you know, we're not talking about a small cap stock. Now, you're talking about an asset that is designed to be what gold could be, and it is still trading at less than 5% of what gold is in terms of value, which makes it an extremely immature asset in terms of where it's going to go. I'm not saying it's binary, but it is, it's not, not binary, right? You know, the fact is, Bitcoin at its success looks like a dramatic price of

from here. Its failure might actually be staying here. You know, that's a kind of asymmetric bet that people, you know, always, you know, spend their entire investing careers looking for. I mean, yeah, it's not the same as buying Shibi Enu and watching it go up by 100,000 X. Yeah, sure, it's not a lottery ticket. But when you have a 10 to 20 bagger that could be at scale, that's a big deal. And, you know, people go, a lot of investors, go their entire lives without finding that. So to me, that's the thing. And if you're looking at short-term squiggles to make the decision that it's not no longer that, that is losing the plot. I mean, it's almost impossible to look at it any other way. But it doesn't mean a lot of what

people are saying, right? People, there are too many bitcoins or too many people who claim to you bitcoiners that I've heard that actually have lost the plot. I mean, the one saying, oh, I could buy it back at 30. You know, it's like, no, the plot is buy in slowly, don't don't try to time it because if you do you can miss it i mean what's the old stats got you miss 10 days you miss an entire year entire year price action if you miss 10 the best 10 days and and we've all heard you know many people on these faces i mean hell i've taken a lot of crap over the last six months for being quote a permable i find that amusing i just have a i have a thesis and i'm going to stick to my thesis i mean a lot of people say the same shit about

sale or they say the same shit about a lot of others now you know, you can make arguments and that's fine. You know, you can be smart and say it's going to be that 126 and after 10-10, you know, bad things are going to happen. But now, after having survived the liquidity flush and have basically being, as your friend Mark Yusko says, we are in crypto winter, the only reason the price hasn't moved is because Sailor has been able to tap into the fixed income market to bring extra capital and it's kept the price of higher.

But the truth is, is we, you know, pretty much every other metric says winter. I mean, just look at the volatility. It's way down. Look at the volumes, way down. And so, you know, it really is an interesting scenario. And so to me, this is kind of, it feels like a capitulation of that. You know, it's kind of like one of those things. This may be his Paul Krugman moment, you know, with the facts machine in the internet.

Anyway, I didn't see Ryan if that's an old hand or a new one, but I say I'm I think that old hand okay yeah hey guys uh yeah i think we're just seeing full-blown capitulation events across bitcoin and eath um i don't want to get too deep into barcuba but he definitely has a troubled past in terms of his involvement with crypto that i know firsthand um from the days of the maverick so it's it's very very uh dicey for him i i don't think that the The plot has changed significantly.

But I do think that we're just reaching peak irrationality, not even just in Bitcoin, but also in Ethereum. And I think that the memos that are being put out there, look, I understand that it's very difficult for market performance to not dictate the thesis. That's how theses are developed. but we've clearly been in downward pressure for a very, very long time. And I just don't think that with how much AI has dominated the narrative, how much data centers have dominated the capital expenditures, now robotics and getting into quantum,

I think that the entire industry is looking to find its place within this entirely new technological environment, just because crypto and blockchain were the forefront of everything for, you know, the last cycle. And now it just hasn't been. However, I don't think that this is bygone. I don't think that it's over. I think that it's going to be a full circle moment where it's very clearly determined that it is the rails that are being built today. And Dave, we talk about the rails a lot that are.

going to be the financial infrastructure of where all this technology ultimately resides, transacts, and subsides, and will continue to dominate the market share of where all of this lives. So I just expect to see more of this. I don't think it's over. I don't think it's rational. I think people who have a lot of capital exposure are talking to their friends who are just ripping on all these other things and they might feel a little stupid for holding and believing in this stuff that has underperformed since the recent Trump term. And so I think it's justified to feel the way that they feel. But I think that, you know, we would be, it's not the best use of all of the minds here to just get super caught up in this irrational decision-making.

and propaganda when the truth is that the rails are developing extremely quickly and adoption is not actually slowing down from the peer user and institutional standpoint. Well, I agree. I think that's that more or less is, I literally just posted this thread. I'm trying to figure out how to put it into the nest because it used to give me a button. I don't see how it is. I'm just going to copy it and put it as a reply to here. maybe someone else can figure out how to post it.

But the reality is high-profile capitulations are often, you know, signposts to where things go. And I'm not saying today is the day. I don't really care. But the thesis and the rationality just isn't there. And that's important. You know, when we talk about ETH, it really boils down to the token. economics of Ethereum, which is let's just let's let's talk about it and say, okay, 10 trillion dollars of value is going to flow through Ethereum, what's Ethereum going to be worth? Well, Ethereum's market

cap, you know, I have to look it up. Let's let's ask the question. How what's Ethereum's market cap compared to the market cap of DTCC? Now, it's an important question because DTCC price processed quadrillions in value, but I don't think DTCC is incredibly valuable, right? You know, as an entity. Why? Because it's a utility. So the question is, is Ethereum going to be priced like a utility or is it going to be priced as something where it gets a big piece of the action? That's really the question with Ethereum to me, in my mind. It's always been that question. And I honestly don't know the answer. I'm not bearish on it. I just, I'm not sold on it. That's really the difference. Bitcoin is different. The Bitcoin investment thesis is it will be

digital gold or more. and gold has kind of lost its ability to do what it does. It's followed purchasing power parity pretty well. It's followed investment returns very poorly. And if you think about it, gold is really structured, or it used to be the denominator for all investments, and it isn't anymore. So, I mean, it really, it boils down to that.

And I know this is very basic, and I guess it's good that we're talking about it today because the market's doing absolutely nothing. You know, it's been between 70. That's why I wanted this topic, because I, not because anyone would agree with it, just because it gives a point of something to talk about. Yeah.

Well, you know, there's something else to talk about too. Even though the market sucks right now, what the hell is going on with hype? Well, I mean, that thing's just going crazy. I think that there's 12 people still trading crypto and all of them are really interested in hype. Well, I mean, going crazy, it's funny. Think of what we're saying.

I mean, hype in the last, you know, in October was trading pretty close to this level, right? It's doubled. Yeah, it's doubled off the bottom. But it was trading between 40 and 50, most has been its average price, you know, for a while. So now it's at 60. Consider that we're talking about a 20% rally, you know, from, or breaking out of its range as going crazy.

I mean, going crazy would be hype at 600, not at 60. Well, that's when we were spoiled. We were so spoiled. Well, no, but the thing is. is if you look at a price to cash flow basis, hype is essentially structured, or it would be better structured if it really did have profit participation quite directly,

but it's close, right? I mean, you know, the behavior is for the hype token to be a proxy for owning a piece of the hype network, and the hype network is earning a shit ton of money, right? I mean, you look at it, I mean, hell, you know, if you want, people are trading, you know, gold, silver, oil, S&P all on hype and the model is a really good model. I mean, there are flaws in it, sure, but the notion of being able to trade whatever the

hell you want to trade with assets that are locked and kept by yourself and the token is a great model. There's no two ways about it. Ryan, is that a new hand? Yeah, new hand. Good. One comment about the previous conversation real fast. where it's, you know, Mark Cuban selling at this point in the cycle is the equivalent of, you know,

him selling a spring of 2022, where it's like, oh, we had this crazy high in 2021. We came off the bull cycle. Now we're going into the summer of 2022, where we're, you know, we're bottoming and out at like 16 grand or a little bit below. We're at the same point in the cycle. We're 26. We just came off a crazy high in 2025. And we're probably going to have a sideways down.

if not really down summer if we follow the same pattern and I know everyone wants to say that we're following different patterns now because there's different you know things around the world and all this stuff but you know a pattern is a pattern and we'll see if it plays out but at this point in the cycle it's just pushing a penguin off the cliff and how many people actually want to follow them when it comes to like watching these other markets like pipe and these other chains like one I'm super focused on right now is and obviously my background is Venice and Morpheus and these decentralized AI tokens. If you bought Venice five months ago, you would have been under a dollar token. Now, today, it launched over 20 bucks. All these different AI networks are going crazy. And that competes with Bitcoin in the mining arena. Did Venice token just launched today, like there was openly available? No, no, no, no.

Venice token launched like a year and a half ago. Right, yeah, 40. right yeah 40 yeah over the last 40 days it's gone from you know four bucks a token and now it's 20 bucks a token um but i think what's gonna happen you could have shared that uh before it happened here ryan apologies yeah i mean i mean you know what do we what do we have to do you know talk you know four days a week you know constantly for for how long and and you know you wait on this stuff i mean shit this is not this is not investment advice nor Just disclaimer, watch all the AI tokens right now.

Anything that is tied to inference. So like BitTensor is tied to training. A lot of these models are very well trained. Now it comes down to long-term inference play. So anything around like Morpheus NIR, any BitTensor subnet that is around inference, like everyone and their mom cannot get enough of this inference right now for these AI agents and all these different AI platforms, they're realizing they can't afford the API costs,

so they have to go to the tokenized networks to save money. But long term, over the next six to seven months, what we're going to see is all these different compute facilities have switched over from Bitcoin mining over to inference, and what that's going to do is it's going to drop the difficulty on the Bitcoin network. It's going to make mining way more profitable, and then you're going to start seeing margin, margins widen up for a lot of these miners.

So all the publicly traded mining stock is, you know, their revenue is probably way better. And there's AI stocks, which are oversold, which will also. I'm saying the miners are just, yeah, I'm saying the miners are just becoming AI stocks, right? Oh, bro. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's a weird. You said near?

Yeah, like Morpheus and near are the two ones I'm watching right now because I think they're way under. but there's there's a handful of other ones I have a near bag that's way under I have a near bag that's way under so it piqued my interest that you came on here pumping my bag so thank you sir no problem

I still own not investment advice thank you thank you for the clarity yeah I was not actually aware of the performance of Venice but I think you know I looked at it as a platform and what Eric Forge's is doing and think he's incredible so I'm not surprised, but I had no idea that the token had done that.

That's really astounding. Like, why isn't everybody talking about that? You know, he's like this wizard when it comes to tokenomics, and he has this platform now with Venice, where they have over 3 million users, and they're using a lot of their cash flow to buy back and burn the Venice token, and then they have a bunch of people locked into the DM token, which is that daily reoccurring inference.

So this double-binding. model that he built is locking people in and then also creating upward momentum on the token through buyback. So it's a crazy model. And I think we're going to see a lot more token projects actually copying Eric's model to create the same flywheel. I wonder how many people just went into Claude right now and we're like, show me Venice's token model and how I can replicate it. Exactly. I could hear the typing. It wasn't me. I'm on my phone. Abateo, you're up.

Yeah, I was going to touch on what Ryan said. So we kind of look at the current state of our economy as a whole, and you see that it's pretty much going from an asset economy to a tokenized AI economy where everything is powered by AI tokens, right? And all that AI tokens is essentially inference that's powered by compute, that's essentially this hardware and these things. data centers and then electricity, right? So that's like the full stack of this.

And so essentially it's been kind of ironic that we're existing within a modern token economy, but none of that actually correlated to tokens on the blockchain. There's been a disconnect between the token. Everyone's talking about AI tokens, but they're not actually talking about crypto tokens. And this is actually what's being bridged right now is through Venice and through other inference providers.

There's a couple of benefits to this. So as a whole, if you're a service provider that's providing inference, you can actually essentially route that inference in a way that gets that cost down and still is multi-model. So Venice, every time there's an AI model that's released, they're essentially being able to introduce that bottle on Venice. You can access the latest Claude, the latest codecs, whatever it may be, the open source models.

This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. All in Venice. And then they also are not actually saving any of the prompts. So there's a privacy layer to it, which is one of the benefits of crypto and one of the benefits of running this. So it's combining this privacy element with AI. I think it's really exciting that we're starting to see this bridge here between AI

tokens and crypto tokens. And I think that this is another way that the entire AI economy will continue to move towards decentralization on chain. And then with NIR in particular, like what we're actually saying, and this is something that we achieved here at our project as well, is really the introduction of on-chain privacy and the ability to move these private tokens in a way that is completely obscured and is totally accessible.

So I think that this is the crux of where the sweet spot is. currently within our market. It's inference and compute made tokenized, adding a privacy layer so that we can access uncensored AI so that none of our data is being tracked and that we can open up this entire private economy, both for users to protect their privacy and for institutions and enterprises that need it, but that need to build with AI to deploy faster towards this goal. So I actually think that I'm glad we're talking about this because this is the real story that's happening right now in our industry. It's not getting enough attention.

And the market is recognizing this in all of these niche activities. But this is going to be an enduring trend. Yeah. Josh, did you have your hand up, Joshua? Hey, yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me. My first time joining you guys. But yeah, I come from more of a trading background.

run the trading desk here at FalconX. And just hearing a lot of the topics that you guys are talking about regarding the major L-1s and their tokens, I think we've obviously seen a lot of activity on hype. And I just want to point out there's a lot of really important near-term catalysts for that, right? In particular, in the last week or so, we've seen real inflows from the ETS that have recently launched,

both Bitwise and 21 shares, which is a portfolio company of ours. launched ETFs and have attracted 50 million plus in AOM. On top of that, you have like the digital asset treasury that launched on that asset last year, and it's starting to really accumulate assets a meaningful way and start staking it. So it's really creating another sync for that asset outside of the protocol itself buying the tokens back. And then, you know, if you look at it from a price, like price to earnings ratio type metric, It is expensive, but most people are looking past that to some of the upcoming product launches, right?

In particular, there's been a shift in the way they handle their stable coin and sort of redirecting it back to USDC, which is allowing them to capture a lot of the revenue generated from the net interest on stable coin that's basically parked there in perpetuity to support the perpetual trading on top. It's collateral that's sitting there. And then you have HIP4, which is allowing people to build prediction markets on top of hyperliquid. And eventually there's going to be a full suite of options markets on top as well. All these things are really going to be additive to revenue for the protocol. Our view is most people are viewing this as analog to Solana, like when Solana had a bit of a sell-off post-2020 and sort of the market crash.

that was sort of the low for hype in around the 20s. So people are kind of thinking like now is a good time to accumulate. In terms of like some of the theses around Bitcoin and Eath, you guys were talking about, like, we think like Bitcoin has a lot of near-term headwinds. The maybe the biggest point towards Cubans statements are just that Bitcoin has become much more of like a U.S. aligned asset over the last couple of years. And so, you know, if you think of gold as much more of a neutral asset that people universally can hold as a store of value, it's been much more challenging for Bitcoin, especially as you've seen like China and other other superpowers like deplete their Bitcoin holdings or ban activity there. Can we take into that? Because that's the first time I've ever heard anyone say Bitcoin is a U.S. aligned asset.

Is that because of the launch of the ETFs here and the size and strategy being here? Or is it because, you know, Trump has grabbed the narrative? How do you really mean that? I really think it is a combination of all those things. Like, in particular, the political environment in the U.S. has shifted much more favorably, regulatory environment as well. But it's also mostly an effect of other countries running down their participation in Bitcoin. Maybe China's like probably the best example.

Like they've been net sellers of the asset. and net buyers of gold, right, throughout this whole cycle. And our view is like, that's just a reflection of how much U.S. companies and, you know, U.S. ETS, asset holders are dominating the Bitcoin cap table, basically. So we think that's a big driver, and it's actually probably been a net decrease in, like, addressable market for Bitcoin in this cycle. That's one factor. I mean, there's a couple of other factors, like, for instance, the IPO calendar just probably is going to be net depleted towards, like, capital coming into Bitcoin and crypto assets this summer. So you think it will be depleted even of capital coming into other AI and tech assets? I mean, my view is that SpaceX and if open AI comes behind is going to suck liquidity from literally everything.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's generally true. That's why I think we've seen, if you look at Vol on Bitcoin, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's going to suck liquidity. At the lowest level, it's been in months, if not yours. And a lot of that is being driven by vol selling, call selling, call overrides primarily. People are basically saying like, Bitcoin upside is very capped right now. The IPO calendar, China, I mean, even the comments from Saylor most recently about his willingness to test the market and sell some of the Bitcoin that he has, that's also been a big overhang for price action. Yeah, he had to say that.

these things. Yeah, of course. He had to say that eventually at some point. I mean, that's what we're seeing. So hype, I mean, to some extent, Zcash, Venice, these are favorite assets of liquid funds to hide in in these types of names while, you know, the majors have a little bit of a range bound market. So much there. Yeah, I agree with a lot of that. Actually, it's interesting, I guess, because we've seen charts of massive institutional buying of Bitcoin relative to the retail exit, right? I think there was a chart from River last quarter or something. I think $69,000 Bitcoin had been bought by institutions.

Or 61, I think it was bought. I don't want to misquote it, but $69,000 sold on the flip side by retail. Right. So I think you're right that the net addressable market is clearly shrunk. It's just, you know, a bunch of bigger buyers are buying, and the kind of breadth of the market is shrinking as, you know, the smaller holders capitulate. I don't know if capitulate or sell, but it aligns, Dave.

Yeah, I mean, it's exactly that. I mean, look, retail has been absent. I mean, I made the statement before, and Josh, you know, you could just look at the flows. Take STRC and SADA out of the equation and where's the price? The price is probably somewhere between 40 and 50, right? You know, maybe it's between 50 and 60, but probably 40 and 50, just in terms of just, supply demand dynamics. So, you know, in a in a sense, we are in, you know, we are clearly towards the, the end of the cycle, but we are certainly been in a winter cycle since 10-10.

And I don't really think it's, it's even all that arguable. I mean, and so as a result, at the same time, by the way, you know, we know what's been going on with global money flows and money supply and all the various things that normally are correlated that aren't, because the investor psychology is, is awful. I mean, look, I've been talking about SpaceX and the IPO, the IPO as sucking liquidity out of everything on the risk asset side. And if that's true, and obviously it's certainly correlation-wise true, you would expect more of it. The real question is, who's left to sell in Bitcoin that isn't locked up? And Sailor, what he said was he can't have Bitcoin as an impaired asset on his balance sheet. That doesn't mean he's a net seller. In fact,

his exact words were, more likely they'll have small selling. Yeah, it's going to be a net buyer, but some selling, farming tax losses, et cetera, et cetera. So all that's true. So there's a lot. And if you don't believe, Dave, it was the two of us sitting there when you said it. I was literally there. Yeah. But by the way, Josh, I think you still have me under my old. I actually wasn't following you weirdly, even though we've known each other for years. So my, my original account got hacked if you didn't know it back in February. So I gave up trying to get X to get me control of it. But that's a side.

Anyway, I see Carlos hands up. You haven't talked in a while. Was that an old hand or a new one? No, no, it's a new hand. I mean, I think, first of all, it's fantastic to see what's happening with hype, considering it's an 11-person team, $15 billion market cap with no outside capital. And I found it to be a fascinating thing to look at around the, the start of the Iran War because I just saw the oil perpetuals market exploding.

And I actually pivoted out of some underperforming coins and looked at hype around that time for that very reason. And I think that that narrative is playing out pretty nicely, not financial advice, of course. Another thing that I've been thinking about is, you know, we've been talking a lot about the AI market. And I don't think people are fully pricing in the AI agenetic market as it relates to stable coins. I wrote a piece today that I put out, which built on something that was written by one of the more brilliant thinkers in the space, someone who's been on the precipice of a lot of what's happening in blockchain technology, and that's Professor Aaron Wright. And Professor Wright's been talking about the fact that

we're going to be seeing massive, massive infrastructure development. when it comes to the AI marketplace. And it got me to thinking about, you know, stable coins are supposed to be this big force multiplier for treasuries based on global demand, people wanting digital dollars. Then I add on to that the layer of AI agents transacting in stable coins. What is that going to do for the global demand for U.S. treasuries? And I think it just creates an infinite, potentially infinite, totally addressable market. when you got agents buying from agents using stable coins and those stable coins are regulated under the

Genius Act, that's a flywheel for Treasury demand. I don't think anyone's priced in. And that's a thesis I've been really kind of unpacking of late, and I find absolutely fascinating. My mic glitched. Yeah. Brian. Yeah, go ahead. Was there more hands in a couple minutes? I'm going to chat to Maricio. But yeah, Ryan, go ahead, please. I was just going to say exactly what Carlos said. They just spot on. Like, we don't even realize the onslaught that's coming.

You know, once we solve this inference piece, right, the scalability problem with the API and the inference, and this is why, like, Eric's model is so crazy is because it does give scalability to access to inference. That's the only limiting factor on people spinning up millions of these agents. and these agents are going to be handling everything from ad campaigns to marketing to DevOps on servers to purchasing to acquisition, like peer to pure to commerce, like everything. And you're not going to be giving these agents credit cards. You're going to be giving these agents stable coins and on-chain resources. And once they start transacting with each other, I mean, that's when the layer one tokens really start pumping because now you see any, network that has proper transaction

flow that can handle the peer-to-pure agent economy, that's the network to watch. Anything that's throttled that has very limited transaction flow, the agents are going to avoid it. It's going to be too expensive to use. But that's like the coming tsunami that

no one realizes. Once the inference piece is solved, stuff like Morpheus, stuff like Venice are just going to it's going to be crazy. It really may get me think? Because the lot of that was totally off my radar, to be honest. Oh, Maricio, you're here. What's up, man? Hey, Scott. I'm just baking some notes here because that was also awesome.

Yeah, I always invite Maricio and I want to figure out what the hell's going on and Defi and Lending and such. So I want to ask you, I saw, I think, I haven't looked since the 19th, but on the 19th, we had like 15 more, I think, Defy Hacks. in May. So we were 15 out of 19 days. We'd had Defy Hacks. Do you have the updated numbers on how much capital flight there's been? I mean, I remember it was 12, 13, but I've heard as high as like 20 billion since Kelped Al. I don't have it. Let me just pull it up because I got, I got, I think it's just from Abe, actually. Let me, I have it right in front of me, but I think it's, the number I was watching yesterday is 25 mil has left just from Abe after the attack. and Navin returned.

And so there has been a bit of an exodus of capital in the defy space. And I think, you know, my view generally around that is that even today, right, like if you go to Abe, a protocol that, you know, was long thought of as the blue chip and experienced this hack, the hack's not fully resolved. But as of yesterday, I think Ave was paying 3.92% on Tether. So that's 30 bibs over overnight funds rate. And so clearly, I think what the market's signaling is that this isn't a pool of capital that is appropriately assessing risk.

It's acting like a pool of capital that is trapped, that doesn't really have anywhere else to go, and they're happy taking an absurdly low rate for an incredibly high amount of risk. and what I see, what I interpret from that data is that that capital is trapped. It doesn't want to leave or it cannot leave defy. Maybe it's because of reporting issues. Maybe it's because people using these protocols don't necessarily have access to other traditional financial investments. But I think over time, this will get arbed out. I look at this today almost like simplistically, remember the

kimchi premium between the Korean exchanges in North America because it was so hard to arbit out. I think you're having a very similar setup with defy liquidity. There's just there's a pocket of liquidity trapped in there that I think now Michael Saylor and others are identifying as saying, hey, if I can tokenize STRC and I can do and I can basically get it into defy, people will much, will be much more willing to buy tokenized SCRC and earn 115 than to get 3.9 to what And I think sooner or later, some of these traditional financial products are going to come in and basically vampire attack that defy liquidity to the point where they are about that defy discount or that, you know, the negative kimchi premium. So there's definitely a lot happening in defy. There's a lot of risks that's become pretty clear.

And the rates are not reflecting that. And I think that that is a 10-0-0 set up. money in DeFi right now for sub 4%. It makes very little sense, right? Especially when SDRC is risky. It didn't just get hacked for 500 million in a month, right? So I made it. No, 100%.

And I think I wanted to make a comment on some of the discussions. They're really a part of the conversation around Mark Cuban, selling his Bitcoin, et cetera. And listen, you know, I've said this a few times here already, but we've been building in this space for over eight years. I've been in Bitcoin for almost, you know, over a decade now. And we've had periods like this before. Bitcoin, I think of Bitcoin often as the sort of real estate equivalent of digital assets, right? It's going to be an asset class that isn't always exciting.

It's not always the fastest rising, but it has the most sound fundamentals out of anything out there. And it over time, with enough patience, it is an investment that has paid out historically. And we are seeing some of that in our book today because one of the interesting things that led it now is that we have, we estimate a third of the Bitcoinback loan market share. So we see a lot of the flows.

And again, it's consistent with what everyone else has been saying. We are seeing positions from small retailer, no, retail clients get closed out because they're not patient enough. And you're seeing much larger, more sophisticated people coming in and start doing, you know, proactive or not proactive, but like taking on new positions. And the people that are coming in now, you can see the shift in maturity. You can almost feel it. These people are older. They're better capitalized. They read the terms and conditions.

It's almost like the changing of the guard, as I would describe it. Yeah, I want to go back. Yeah, I agree with everything you just said 100%. I want to go back a bit to the DFI side because we've talked about this, but it seems like they just kind of had this patchwork coalition that came together to try to make people whole. But there's absolutely no precedent still as far as I'm aware of on what that would look like in the future, right? So I think we've also talked about the fact that, like, if that had been a $5 billion exploit, it might have looked very different as a solution, right?

So, I mean, we talk about kind of institutions coming into defy. It doesn't it seem like they would have a major problem with that sort of improvised after-the-fact strategy? It's a huge issue. And just to kind of recap, you know, there was a loss in the AVE protocol, right? There was a big hack. Somebody borrowed an immense amount of hundreds of millions of dollars of stable coins with assets that did not exist. So there is a hole in the protocol, right? The protocol doesn't have enough assets to give everybody else their deposits.

In traditional finance, what would have happened is the protocol or the company would have been deemed insolvent. They would have had to pause all activities for the people that were inside. They would have clawed back any withdrawals that left within the preference period. And then they would have divvied up all of the assets minus the whole. to everybody that was in the pool fairly. And Defi, of course, none of this exists, so it didn't happen that way. Those who were able to get out fast, got all their money out. Those who weren't living on Twitter got stuck and were going to be left holding the bag,

right? There's a big problem with this because there was no precedent for this in Defi before. So the solution would have been, if there had been no bailout, somebody at Abe was going to have to decide who was going to take the losses. And that, you know, the very uncomfortable part about that is that that would have become a political exercise. And once you attribute those losses, even though DFI is not supposed to have, you know, courts or anything, I think what would have happened is you would have triggered a series of

lawsuits of why are you assigning the losses to these people and not those people. And it would have just created a disaster that would have. have highlighted a lot of the problems. And so you had a bunch of people scrambled together to close the hole so that no losses would have had to have been assigned and stop that conversation. And that might have worked now. That might have worked today. But if you're a serious capital allocator, you are, the worst thing you should be fired if you are thinking of allocating capital, assuming there's going to be another charity bailout. Yeah, for sure. And like, there's this interesting kind of nuance right now where open source code and defy is sort of auditable by attackers,

right? So like, do you think that they were at a point actually where the transparency could make defy structurally more vulnerable than regulated lenders? I mean, it's so anti-the thesis of crypto, but it seems like that's where we're at. Well, I just think that there's fundamentally different values for the two different propositions, right? In the centralized finance, it's supposed to be unstoppable, permissionless, right? And it could be accessed by anyone at any time anonymously. Right. I'm not supposed to know who's in there. I'm not supposed to know where they're coming from or who they are or what transactions they're doing. How then can I determine if at the moment of a hack, how then can I determine who got out or who didn't, right? Like there's this absolute

privacy concept goes against a lot of the guardrails and protections. that you need in traditional finance, right? And so if you value your privacy, the lack of guardrails, if you think that these types of guardrails are a bug and not a feature, then you're better off using defy, right? If you think that you can move faster than anybody, if you live on Twitter, if you have the fastest, you know, instructions to process your transactions,

then you might feel like you have a leg up and you're better off in defy. most people that are not professional traders or investors don't do that. They don't actively manage their investments or accounts. Yeah, you're not looking to be the first out the exit on top of every single exploit or risk, right? Plus, you have a job, right? You have a normal life. Most people do. And so most people actually look at these protections, and I know they're not perfect.

I know it comes with a lot of privacy issues, but they do in many ways protect you. the littlest person when some of these things happen. Now, again, we can wax poetic or talk all day long about how governments abuse these and banks take advantage of this and they get bailed out all the time.

I'm not saying it has no issues, but I'm saying one system has guardrails and has processes for bankruptcy. Another system has nothing. It's a free-for-all. There's benefits to both, and I think people can decide what they're more comfortable using.

I mean, you guys survived all of the 2022 Contagion. Now I think you have a rating from the S&P. I mean, what did you do to survive when everybody's collapsed and now going through all these defy wobbles as well? Well, we're very, I don't think there's any other lender out there that shares their book size every month. So we share our book size every month. We were the first company to ever do proof of reserves.

So I let in all of our loans, all of the Bitcoin that's held a qualified custody at all times. We are very proud of our transparency. We just launched a bond. That was the first ever Bitcoin ABS bond that would be rated by S&P. It got an investment grade rating by S&P. That is actually the highest investment quality digital asset instrument in the market today. And you can see it. Everybody can Google let an S&P bond right now and see all the details of that.

of that facility, how big is it, how many loans are in there. It's a $200 million facility. You can see what we pay for it, and you can see that the cost that we pay for our capital is lower than what we charge for our loans, so you can see that our business is sustainable. We try to operate and take the best of DFI, which we think is the transparency, and we layer on the best of CFI, which we think are those guardrails and protections that allow us to source capital from banks, bond markets, U.S. public markets, et cetera,

Because our view has always been that in the lending space, we win by offering you the best loan experience at the best possible price. Who has the cheapest cost of capital? It's these very regulated entities like banks, pensions, insurance companies. We had reinsurance companies by our bond already. And we're going to keep getting more and more of those players funding the loans that we distribute to our clients. And I think another one of these, one of the things that I'm most proud of, is just to show you how Bitcoin and this technology can transform even the traditional structures. So Lennon's ABS bond is the first bond in the ABS market, in the history of the U.S.,

that has loans from clients of more than two countries. Lennon's bond has clients from 30 countries in the facility, more than 30 countries. And it's the first time that the S&P has rated a bond with, with loans from 30 countries as investment grade. Why? Because historically, if your loan, if your car loan of your mortgage was in Canada or Australia or another non-U.S. country, it was perceived to be more risk. And now in our bond, they're actually saying, because the collateral is the same for these

people, the risk is the same. And so we were able to put in loans from people in 30 different countries into this facility. So now we can source capital from the U.S. debt markets and deliver it to Bitcoiners across the world. And so I think that that makes me really proud. Incredible. I lost internet. Can you guys hear me? I just say that I lost Wi-Fi.

Hopefully you can still hear me. Can you guys hear me? Okay, good. And so, Maricio, before, I want to go back to the panel for a second because we had a couple of hands before I know it's kind of time to wrap. But where can people check this all out? You can check this out. Leiden that I owe. Lenin is here in the chat at Hutter with Levin.

I don't do over anything about this. Sorry, guys, I think it glitched. Did everybody glitch? Or are we done, Scott? I think we glitched. I'm back, but I don't know. I just heard you, Dave. Okay, yeah, it seems to be working fine. David, did you have your hand up? Yeah, yeah, I just wanted to go back to the earlier comment about the use of agents and stable coins,

and I agreed, basically. But I did throw something into the chat, which might be worth taking a look at, which is essentially the cost of using AI models is actually going higher. from prior versions. We're seeing effective price increases to users of, say, roughly about 60% from one model to another. There's a good chart in the note in the thread that you can take a look at there. But obviously, I agree with the long-term goals. Stable coins and agentic commerce are going to be great, but there's some speed bumps on the way.

Maybe that's a good spot to end. I think we lost Scott. It's 1115. It's Friday afternoon. And everyone have a good weekend. And we'll see you all on Monday morning. It's Memorial Day, Dave. Oh, you're right. I guess we'll see you on Wednesday morning. Enjoy your long weekend. Yeah, yeah, we just heard here in Miami on Memorial Day, they do the air shows and the overflight.

So I've heard during this, I had my mic muted multiple times because we had these massive sonic booms over our heads. So it should be a fun weekend. Anyway, let's hope that nothing bad happens. But we'll see. Anyway, I guess we'll see you all on Wednesday morning. Take care.