The Wolf Of All Streets - Massive Pump Incoming? ETF Approval In 2 Days?! | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: January 5, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Can you hear me, Mario? Are you there? You're forcing me to talk to other people. Good morning, Garrett. Hey, buddy. Can you hear me? Yeah, you sound great. I mean, literally, this is literally Mario's job. He has one thing in the entire world that he needs to be able to do, and you can't even hear him on the space.

He's probably in one of his chambers doing something there. And this, the signal isn't, isn't working too well. Yeah. Our, our mutual friend, uh,

Gaurav or the VC sent me a picture a couple of days. And since, uh, Mario can't hear him and talk about it, uh, sent me a picture of Mario the other day. And so he's in this white, like,

I guess, white chamber. It looks like a rocket ship of some sort and his head is sticking out and his hands are sticking out the front so he only has access to his hands like from the wrists up and in his hands together is his phone and he's like locked in this thing and there's no way like i'm thinking he can't put his phone down right there's no way if he puts his phone down he'll never get it again it'll slide right off the side so i'm wondering how long he's sitting in this thing oh man if he's on spaces and

if he like only has access to his thumbs mario your commitment to uh extending your life is is impressive if you're if you can that was that was uh that was my new year's uh new year's eve while you all were partying i was in that little cabin. That was the first time I do it. Did Gaurav send it to you? Because I tweeted it. Don't pretend you're special because you saw it. It was posted with whatever tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands

that saw it. Mario, do you use like I've used those shield your body type things like when you have your laptop on your lap to keep the radiation from just going right into the body. Do you deal with that stuff too? No, I'm buying it as we speak. Shield your body laptop. Oh, my God.

I actually use that, man. The amount of time that my laptop is on my lap, on top of my you know what, I'm like, all right, listen, let's not risk it here. But, Gareth, since you're here, you don't need any more. You don't need any. No, I've actually been fixed already. So that's not an issue. But it's, you know, I'd rather not have one of my balls bigger than the other.

You know what I'm saying? Mario, what was that thing for you? Gaurav, I didn't see it publicly. Gaurav sent it to me because both of us were trying to call you and we had a call scheduled with each other. So we were laughing that you weren't answering your phone. And then we had our call. Oh, OK. I was meant to. I don't know. I was meant to be on that scheduled with each other. So we were laughing that you weren't answering your phone and then we had our call. Oh, okay.

I was meant to, I don't know. I was meant to be on that call with you guys, but yeah, I, I, I posted it after sending it to Gaurav. So you probably got a sneak peek on early peak,

or maybe I sent him a different photo, but this is like a, it's a different type of sauna. I don't know what type of sauna. And it wasn't in Dubai. I wasn't in Dubai at the time, but it's a different special sauna. But now I'm back to the,

is that basically to prevent your because i've heard that you know sauna is ideal for your body and maybe not for your head so is that so that your body gets the effects in your head no no it's what was just shocking to me was how like small your uh like you had no access to your hands like how long were you in there and could you ever put your phone it was 30 minutes i could put my phone down just like on the spot. Let me pin the tweet for anyone else to see. I'll try to find it. It's actually buried among all the Epstein

tweets we're posting every time. It literally looks like you're being bored. I'll send it. I'll try to pin it at the top. But the since Gareth is... Have you had Gareth every day this week? How often have you had him? Because I haven't... No, we haven't.

That's what I thought. Because I always get, I always said this, I always get like that feeling of relief that Gareth is here because it kind of gives me that very simple recap of the markets in a very easy to understand way without going through all the technicalities. So I'll find that tweet. But in the meantime, Gareth, can you please explain

to me what's going on? Because I have one second, I'm covering the Iran thing. I come back to crypto and what's going on? Because one second I'm covering the Iran thing, I come back to crypto and everything's pumping, everyone's happy. I'm like, great. Then I go off, there's another explosion in Beirut. I go to cover that, come back and suddenly it's the biggest dump since whenever. Yeah. So I think the biggest thing to just keep in mind, people, is that because of the leverage in the system, the algos and the bigger players are having a field day with it, right? So they're able to flush it down and wipe out a bunch of people one way.

Then they rip it the other way and wipe out a bunch of people the other way. And there's so much energy and excitement in crypto that, honestly, it makes people take position sizes that they probably shouldn't. And it makes them easy targets for these kind of liquidations or just emotional reactions, which is why, again, it's always better not to use leverage and trade within your means so you don't get those scenarios. But really at this stage, Bitcoin has had a monstrous rally since October up from about 25,000. We've touched 46 or just about. This is all on that speculation about the spot ETF, which is going to be approved. I know we've had rumors this week that it wasn't. But every morning I tune into CNBC just to kind of get my bearings on what's going on.

And every morning I'm seeing at least every 10 minutes a Bitwise ETF, spot ETF commercial. And they wouldn't be paying for commercials if it wasn't going to be approved. Now, the bigger question is, is price going to go up dramatically? And I think on Market Mavericks yesterday, Scott and I talked about this, and we both agree that over the long term, yes, I mean, it's just going to increase adoption and people investing in it. But the shorter term is the trickier one, right? You have a lot of people that have gotten in long here, a lot of people that expectations are to make, oh, it's going to 100K real quick. I'm not so certain on that. I think that again,

these bigger players are very meticulous in how they pick up and leverage themselves and, and, and accumulate. And it wouldn't shock me to see a smooth down at some point, we might pop to 48 to 50,000. That's kind of my max upside here. There's a ton of levels, including the six, one, eight Fibonacci level up there. But I do think we probably at least touch 38 and maybe 30 at some point this year before it continues to move up. When I finished with my YouTube, I actually tuned into Ran Mario.

I did me too. Yeah, I don't usually get to watch his show. It's funny. First of all, I tuned in and he was showing my wife's tweets about taking shots every time we mentioned the etf which was kind of a surprise but and he was doing shots of vodka but uh actually i saw on his show that the january options expiry is 50k uh so uh at least the you know the futures are expecting yeah yeah so so the premium i want to ask about the cme futures as well what does that indicate garrison and also maybe touch on the volumes as well has that picked up yeah drastically is enough because because you know the volumes are still thin then then it wouldn't be too hard for the price to fluctuate yeah and i think that's part of it right i mean volumes have picked up a little bit but they're not astronomical at this point which makes price very vulnerable to these

quick moves up and down uh and easy to to hunt stops and liquidation prices as well. And I think, yeah, like Scott's saying, that it's interesting that you have that options expiration target of around 50K. What that tells me is that price probably is going to be below 50K because the bigger players that sell these options, they don't want to pay out. So you probably have a pretty strong level at 50K of resistance. And the other question I had, so we're talking about volume. Okay, so one thing you've talked about, the long-term price increasing. And Scott, I apologize if I'm asking things you've already covered, but maybe in the audience, it'd be good to recap for them along with me. But you talked about in the short term

and Rand. So Scott, I did watch watch ran today just to recap on everything considering i've been off for a bit um and um you know he had a similar i probably copy you gareth but he had a similar expectation he expects the price to pick up a strong weight to 50k and then back down uh as that gets priced in people are like all right cool now that's it's already approved when you're going to be approved how much money is going to be coming in and i actually watched kyle's show yesterday as well. It's going to get a recap, Ryan and Kyle, who's on stage with us. But Gareth, you said the same thing. And there was a quote by somebody, it's a quote I've always used, but never for crypto, or never at least for the price of Bitcoin. But it's like people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of things, but underestimate

the long-term potential. And I think it applies perfectly for the ETFs. People are expecting Bitcoin to pump when the ETF gets approved, but it probably do potentially do the opposite. And once it gets priced in, people might be disappointed that the initial slow influx of funds into the space, but then over time, it's going to be everyone's expectations. Yeah, I think that's dead on, right?

I think that, you know, if you go to someone who's not a believer in Bitcoin, you know, they're going to hear, okay, the spot approval was done. It's not like immediately they're going to be like, oh, well, in that case, let me throw like 50K or 100K. And it doesn't work like that, right? It takes some time. People are going to have to learn more about it. You know, we obviously deal with kind of this bubble where everyone here that's in this is probably hardcore

crypto and we live in this bubble. But if you go outside the bubble to, you know, the mom and pops out there, they're still very skeptical about what the heck is Bitcoin? What is crypto? What's this scam? And I see SPF on TV going to jail, like, like they don't necessarily differentiate between Bitcoin and what he did. And I think that creates, they need to be more informed. And that will happen over time. It's just going to take time. We touched on it yesterday. It's not in front of me, the actual numbers, but the Bitwise RIA survey I thought was a real eye-opener yesterday for those, at least who think that the approval is priced in long-term, right?

We can debate what's going to happen to short-term price endlessly. I think we all know that this is a good catalyst and a positive catalyst for Bitcoin and crypto long-term. But when you looked at it, and RIAs, they are the great unlock here for the Bitcoin spot ETF. I don't think there's much debate about that.

These are your registered investment advisors. A, they have a fiduciary duty to their clients, and therefore they literally can't tell you, even if they want you to gain exposure to Bitcoin, to go buy it on Coinbase and put it in self-custody. They have no control there, so they won't do that. They need a product that they can put people into. And the more cynical view, obviously, which I've said before, is that they'll make fees on now recommending Bitcoin via the ETF to their clients. But basically, it said that 39% of them in the survey, it was over 400 of them surveyed, this yearly survey just said that they don't think that we'll see a Bitcoin spot ETF approval in 2024. Now go against the experts who are saying 90% by next week. That means you have a huge gap there in the expectation of whether this product

will even exist. And by the end of this year, and then when you dug in further, I believe 88% of them said that they were waiting for a Bitcoin spot ETF to gain exposure to Bitcoin. So it can't be priced in if literally only 12% of them are willing that want to, to buy Bitcoin without this product. So I think that long term, it's really, really clear. Yeah. So why do you think they don't? I had one quick question. I'll give you the mic, Simon.

So if you said 88% are waiting for the ETF to enter Bitcoin, what's the process like, Scott? I'm not sure if you've discussed this in previous spaces. And kind of the point you made is a point that we made even prior to the New Year's and Christmas break. And we had one of our speakers say, within our circle, everyone knows the ETF is coming. But when you go outside our little crypto bubble, the TradFi world, not everyone knows, not everyone's following crypto as closely as we are. And they might be surprised by the ETF approval

where we won't be. So that might be priced in crypto, in crypto terms, for crypto investors, but not for traditional investors. But going back to the question is, if they want to enter crypto with ETF, how quickly can they do that? I mean, they can do it quickly. But I think that my expectation here is that the approval is a trader's event and that most people are positioned. And I think that aligns with what you and Gareth were saying, but I think that most RIAs they're not wasting their time right now, having that conversation with clients yet, right. They're going to wait to see that it's approved. Like I said,

39% of them think it only 39% think they'll see it in 2024. So that means that at least 61% of them aren't bothering to talk about Bitcoin at all with their clients, right? So what do you have a client call your RIA every six months to rebalance and talk about your priorities. So my expectation is that over the next year, they'll start to tell their clients about this if they are interested in Bitcoin, and then it'll take movement. But yes, in theory, they can put the money in right away. I don't think that there's people sitting on the sideline dying to buy Bitcoin who aren't doing it today that are waiting for tomorrow.

So I do think it's a longer term catalyst, although there may be some of those people. Yeah. And Scott, give Tom and Simon the mic just for the audience. I want to go through the comments. Do you think the, the,

this already all been priced in? Do you think the markets will do well once the ETF gets approved? Will it pump? Or will it be stagnant? Or will it actually dump? And everyone will just sell the news. I'm curious what everyone in the audience will think. Just let us know in that purple bubble on the bottom right corner. Sorry, Tom, sign. Yeah, I just wanted to hit on a bunch of the great points that were made here. So, you know, at Gareth's point about marketing, these guys didn't spend all of the time and effort and legal resources not to market the shit out of this thing, right? You're gonna have 12 of the biggest names in finance, not only putting commercials out like a few of the smaller players have done, but BlackRock and the bigger guys haven't even get involved yet. Like, I am not looking forward to watching Super Bowl commercials this year. I'm not looking forward to turning on Fox News or CNBC over the next two months because

it's going to be a Bitcoin bonanza. To the RIA point, you're going to get folks that now can charge their 1% of fees. And as Scott mentioned, those meetings occur every six months. So that rebalancing is going to occur towards the back half of the year. We're going to see continual inflows. So initially, we might see a little pop down, but you're going to have a steady influx of capital coming in, not only from the RIAs, but those 401ks. So for those unfamiliar with the US setup, you put money into your 401k every paycheck, every two weeks, it goes into a set data of funds you've allocated to, whether that be the S&P 500 or bonds or whatever, Bitcoins now could be in those lineups, right? Fidelity is one of the biggest 401k brokers in

the US. There is no doubt they're going to put the Bitcoin ETF as an option for folks to buy. And the second step is actually putting it in target date funds. Those funds are pre-packaged funds where you say like, here's my equity, here's my fixed income allocation based on my age, and it automatically buys a package of those again, every two weeks. And this is actually what's propped up the stock market a lot of the last decade or so is that you have price indiscriminate flows coming in to actually purchase assets, no matter the level. So we're going to start seeing that a lot for Bitcoin in the back half of the year. And as these things start to become more normalized, so we're going to have a that a lot for Bitcoin in the back half of the year. And as these things start to become more normalized, so, you know, we're going to have a, and the Bitcoin market is still really thin, right?

So these things are just going to have a continual background bid into the back half of the year. So any dips, people are going to be really, really, I think, disappointed in and buy as we get to the end of 2024. And I think the, I think the point to kind of add to that is, you know, the inflows are super critical. Kind of the piece to add to that is we have the Bitcoin halving coming in, you know, roughly 100 days. And that reduces, you know, the amount of Bitcoin being created from about, you know, $1.2 billion at this current price point a month of Bitcoin that, you know, is being primarily sold into the market by miners to, you know, around $600 million. So you have, you know, a huge reduction in kind of selling pressure. And then

you have this sort of, we'll see kind of what level of inflow by pressure is created by, you know, the access to these vehicles that people are going to have. I think a lot of people have pointed to this sort of perfect storm for Bitcoin right now. And, you know, I'm hesitant to continue to point out all the things that line up cyclically here. But we had this Bitcoin spot ETF catalyst, obviously started by BlackRock that we've been talking about ad nauseum for the last six or seven months, that sort of preempted the existing four-year cycle with the halving coming that you just mentioned. I mean, you have this increase of demand that even if it's not huge, even if it's a trickle, it doesn't really take

that much more increased demand for Bitcoin to go up. And then you count the you know the having and the supply new supply being cut in half and then you get a likely liquidity cycle coming into an election year it's you know anything can happen it just does rationally seem to line up very well here for a bullish bitcoin setup and more importantly than all of that literally you have every catalyst in the world but the most important thing is that dr donish bought bitcoin and he's here and he bought it and i don't know if that's top signal actually that might be kramer-ish but uh donish man are you a proud happy bitcoin holder now i see you on stage i had to go there i know i know so so just to clear, I did not buy it over some beat. So I put up a tweet up there. Again, just to be clear, my thought process around Bitcoin is on as a long term holder, because I think and Scott has been very good at convincing me that it's an uncorrelated asset,

you start looking at the data, there's no single thing that it's correlated to, which makes it really helpful in any portfolio. And that's the thought process. And I will be gathering Bitcoin as things go up and down sideways. And that is my thought process. But beyond that, putting that aside, I have to ask, you know, people are putting together some very compelling conversations here, but none of it adds up. And I want to remind people that in the short term, don't be other people's exit liquidity. I just want to be clear that all of this sort of, you know, the bull run is here. The Bitcoin ETF is coming. There's going to be billions pouring in. You think people are stupid? You think you're the only ones that can think like this? This is obviously clearly not what

the market's doing. The market's not even close to all-time highs. You would think that we would have passed all-time highs if that was the case. At that time, there was no conversation around ETF. There was no conversation around inflows. Halving was farther away, and yet the numbers were higher. We had futures ETF. We had a futures ETF, which marked the top at that point. And CME futures and CBOE futures in the previous.

You have to admit that it does not add up that if it was so bullish and everybody knows this, there's nothing hidden here. Right. The ETF, according to you all, is a guarantee in the next week. Like a guarantee. But according to us, Dan, it's not according to the TradFi guys. Yeah. But according to us, Dan, it's not according to the TradFi guys. Yeah, but that's what I was saying earlier. In the traditional world, I don't know more than the regulatory capture TradFi people. I am sorry.

Almost, almost. No, no, no. Almost, almost. They don't care. They don't care enough. They don't care enough. Zero sense. Because you know what?

Jamie Dimon is the highest paid government employee in America. I'm telling you, these people know way more than you do. They are in those rooms. They know what's going to happen. They know it before you do. Yet no money is pouring in yet. That makes absolutely no sense. There's something else here.

I don't think this is going to be this crazy event that completely changes Bitcoin. I think we should caution. I think 150% in a year isn't no money pouring in. It is no money pouring in when you think about scale. Think about BlackRock. Think about Vanguard. Think about the scale, the fidelity. Think about the scale that we're talking about. That level of scale is just not happening. And I'm sorry to burst the bubble. I know I'm the bubble burster that comes up here and everybody hates on me and I love playing villain. I have no problems playing villain. Again, I now own Bitcoin and not a small amount, a decently large size amount. And I'm going to make it about 1%

of my portfolio. I'm letting you guys know exactly what I'm doing, but I'm not doing it because of some bullshit around having some bullshitting around these narratives. I'm doing it because again, it fits into a broader portfolio that makes sense in the long run. Everybody's got a different approach. That's my approach. Just want to be clear. You also the data. Yeah, I remember, obviously, you and I had the conversations about idiosyncratic risk. And I kind of was trying to hammer that point. But you also I will remember the day that you finally decided was a Fed meeting, and you couldn't believe Powell's words. That is true. I had and this is what I'm trying to say, which is I just don't believe people

generally anymore. I think the Fed is completely making up data. Look at the data today. If after what came with the jobs report today, if you watch the jobs report today and you're sitting there asking yourself, it doesn't add up. It doesn't add up. It sounds incredibly political. By the way, if you look at the, out of the last 12 jobs reports, they've all been brought, they've all been revised down. Why is it that headline numbers look great? But then, so I'm losing faith in our government and our government entities to be able to give us real data. And so when that happens, you start saying, okay, things are not correlating correctly, things are not going correctly. And people are pumping and dumping and trad five, which is has

happened for years, but at a level that we've never seen before. So, you know, again, I'm thinking more in the long run, and everybody's got a different approach towards this, you all are free to go after and chase this one time event. But I will tell you that this concept of one, it's priced in, it's not priced in, if it was priced in, we'd be past all-time highs. I don't care what any of you say. If it truly was not priced in. Long-term, it's not priced in. So it's not priced in. So that's number one. No, no, no, no, no. There's no chance. So then the ETF, either people that are trading crypto are idiots. I can believe that maybe know like either they're idiots and they don't see that or maybe it's not as much of a slam dunk as people think it is that's number one number two

it's actually not going to be as cataclysmic of an event afterwards and three the having may or may not matter it's not like something doesn't add up that's all i'm saying all i'm saying is something doesn't add up that's all i'm saying well i'll get kyle what do you think of uh of damage his thoughts there? Well, he says that he's not subscribing to any of his narratives. But I think what he's failing to understand is that the narratives that he's not subscribing to are the narratives that define Bitcoin mathematically. So it is the halving priced in, the halving that mathematically reduces the supply of Bitcoin. It is a fact that it is, you know, an evolving asset class that's brand new that Wall Street

has never had an opportunity to come into before. It is all of these things that he said wasn't the reason that he was buying it for. That is exactly the reason why he's buying it for, whether it's now considered an uncorrelated asset or not. The reason it is the way it is, is because of those things, right? If we didn't have a deflationary type of supply, if we didn't have halving, if we didn't have global adoption on a massive scale, like it wouldn't be uncorrelated anymore.

It wouldn't make a unique asset that it is. So I think that like a lot of things that you said are true. However, I think that maybe you've just failed to realize the actual reason that you're buying the asset. Well, my point was very, very different, which is if you take that into account, then you would see, again, you have to assume that the market is at some level rational at broad scale, right? There's nothing that's stopping people from getting in or out into

crypto. There's no regulatory issues here. So assuming free market principles, I know that that's not the case exactly, Dave. I know, I know. But I'm just saying, if you make that underlying economic assumption, if you make that underlying economic assumption, then the market should be acting accordingly. And I don't know, Kyle, but TradFi people, they know a lot more about what the government's going to do than crypto people. No offense. They do. I'm telling you. I agree. That's why Jamie Dimon, when he was telling everyone that he was going to fire them for trading Bitcoin, was at the same time buying it through his European entity the whole time. And yet we have not passed all-time highs. Something doesn't add up. But in the same kind of study that Scott was referring to earlier, another statistic in there was that only 19% of advisors said that they're able to buy crypto for their clients at the moment too.

So there's still a bunch that just haven't been able to. And then there's just a huge majority of people that are afraid to go buy it. They don't know how to do it. Take my parents, for example, or take anyone else. However, my mom did actually convert her 401k via Fidelity into Bitcoin in 2015. So that was interesting. But yeah, anyway, I definitely think it's not priced in for sure. But regardless, we have the halving coming up.

We have a normal market cycle we're coming into anyway. And I do think, though, that on some of the discussion earlier that scott you're talking about and things like that and and um and tom um while i do think that there's a lot of people that like you know i worked in sales for a long time and i know that these all these uh rias and people that want to make commissions off of selling this asset class, like their biggest, their biggest sales tool they have right now is literally talking about the historical data and seeing exactly what happens every single cycle without fail post halving and how the price reacts.

Right. And so this, this conversation shouldn't be happening from an institutional perspective to their clients in six months from now, the way for them to optimize the opportunity is a sense of urgency. And in six months from now, you won't have the same sense of urgency as you do today, right? Today, you have all the tools you need to go and pitch a great sales pitch, right? And close a lot of deals. And we know, all of us know, we've seen the commercials, we know the marketing, we've talked about this time and time again, that it's going to be a massive race to see who can get the biggest AUM. That's how they're going to make money. Dave and Simon.

Thanks. So I want to address both points that Dr. Danish makes, and he probably is going to guess about one of them. But I want to talk about the narrative second. But just on the why are we not at the all- time high, I think it's really kind of funny. You know, we have to remember some history. A year ago, we were at 16,000. We had just suffered the collapse of FTX. There were people who thought, you know, many who's I don't know how many times with Bitcoin's obituary has been written, but it was a big deal. There are a lot of people who have that have that memory and at the end of the day the one thing we've learned over the last week and we've learned it before we learned it multiple times is that on the margin pricing is being determined by

crypto speculators and yes it's a bigger universe than it was a year ago but it's still a small universe relatively speaking in the global economy. And we saw it. You know, Reuters comes out with a story, wham, $3,000 up. Some ridiculous report from some matrix board analyst, you know, wham, you know, use it to flush the leverage out of the system. It's still a relatively closed system. The issue that matters, however, is will there be new money coming in? And yes, there has been new patient accumulation for the last six months that we've all seen

during this rally. And it's patient accumulation. And every time, how many times have we seen rallies only to get faded and faded the entire amount? So we understand that. But the ETF narrative is not priced in 100 percent. I mean, a couple of pieces of data. First, polymarket. Right now, even today, there are people that it's only 82 percent chance on polymarket that it will be approved within the next, you know, by the end of next week. When most of us think that or the end by the 15th, I think it's sitting at, you know, by the end of next week. When most of us think that or the end by the 15th,

I think it's sitting at, you know, there are a lot of people who are very skeptical, you know, whether or not you agree with the matrix board analysts, there are a lot of people who are skeptical. Second, broker dealers are not allowed to touch Bitcoin. They can't. And that's why you have the cash creation redemption. I've written an article about why that is not that big of a deal and what it does mean, you know, on Bitcoin Magazine. But the fact of the matter is that it really isn't a big deal, except to know that it's not priced in because all the people who you would think would be buying can't. And if you're an employee in those places, the PA accounts, personal accounts of people on the street, probably some of them are, but there's some career risk there if they're doing something

that they're not supposed to do. Financial advisors, the Bitwise report, we've already talked about it. But the most important thing to understand is the narrative. And the narrative is Bitcoin, and I've said this a million times on this space, well, not on this space, but on others, that Bitcoin trades like an option on its own adoption. If Bitcoin is to reach digital gold, it's going to do so at a price somewhere in the neighborhood of 10, 15 or 20 times where it is today. It's not there now. That's really the question. Why isn't Bitcoin digital gold?

Well, it's not digital gold because it doesn't have a critical mass of adoption yet. And by creating it as an ETF, it creates the possibility for global adoption. And that's what matters. So here's some data for you of the global equity markets in the United States. Somewhere around 28.2 percent in the last quarter is is equity trading volume of ETFs. And it's somewhere between give or take. Where was the data? I think it's 12.7 percent of equity assets in the United States. Now, think about 12.5% of Bitcoin assets being taken offline in a world where we know that over 75% of Bitcoin assets are being huddled. Just think about the marginal impact of what that could be. Now, is it going to happen immediately? Of course not. It's going to be much, much slower. And so this is a sea change in the narrative, but it's going to play out over a cycle. And that's really the point that I'd make. Simon, and then Austin. Yeah, Donish isn't just a Bitcoiner now. He actually sounds like a Bitcoiner. He doesn't

trust government. He says, I don't trust the data. Don't trust Verify. He's got the whole Bitcoin mantra going on. I look forward to seeing it. But yeah, you know, like if you try and think about throughout Bitcoin, you had the market manipulators, the speculators, the traders, they would play every kind of game out there. They would send, you know,

thousands of Bitcoin to an exchange in order to panic sell people and then they'd take the opposite side of the trade. So all of those games have been playing all along. On the other side, you've got the Bitcoin investor that doesn't care about the game and just accumulates every single month. Then you've got TradFi, right? Well, TradFi market manipulators are already in. They've got their futures. They've got all the games that they've been playing with CME. That's been going on for years. So the hedge funds have already been playing all the games.

And so the part of JP Morgan that engages in market manipulation and all the games and the short-term stuff is already in. So now you've got the new volume, which is the investor, is the pension funds that just buy no matter what every single month through an ETF in a tax-efficient way. You've got all of the registered investment advisors pitching what we've been pitching for the last 12 years about the maths and code, the halving cycles, the historical data, legitimizing it from the perspective of somebody that thought this was a currency just for drug dealers and terrorists and human traffickers. They're unwinding all of that narrative. All of the previous pricing was based upon a massive percentage of the world having that

understanding. And now the narrative is going to be changed by everybody. And that final bit of volume is those that are the investors, not the manipulators, not the speculators, not the hedge funds. It's the patient money that's just going to buy every single month and rebalance based upon what's happening. So that's interesting. Yeah. And Simon, interestingly, in that Bitwise report, once again, I'm not looking at the actual numbers, but one of the final key points was that people who buy Bitcoin statistically don't ever sell it or continue to buy over time.

And so that's not an audience that when they come from the investment side really leaves. Yes, the question I had for you on the report, you said that most, you gave a stat, I forget the stat, but you were saying they're 88%. Yeah, they're waiting for the spot Bitcoin ETF. Why do you think they wanted the spot Bitcoin ETF rather than another way of getting exposure? It's a great question. My instinct says they want the name BlackRock, unfortunately.

And also, it's funny. I've been sort of playing in my mind the scenario for what Gary Gensler's speech is going to look like when we get these approvals. How will he cope or justify all of this? And my gut instinct is that he says basically just that, that, you know, we were waiting for our quote unquote, trusted Wall Street institutions that we knew were safe and would track this accurately and would not manipulate the price to come in and, and, you know, take ownership of the asset. And now we have, you know, BlackRock and Fidelity. And so of course, now I'm willing to approve this, but also everything else is trash. He's going to take victory laps, Scott. You said when, and I'm going to say if still, I still think it's an if.

I will say, I will say if. It's still an if. And by the way, it's an if because of Gary Gensler. And I think that there might be the official federal rug pull that might occur here. And I really am. I would not be surprised if this does not happen under Gary Gensler's reign. Yeah. Dave, I do agree. Dave, I do agree.

It'll be a victory lap. That's what I'm saying. He'll say, listen, I understood this asset. I've understood it from the beginning. I needed to make sure that investors were protected before I gave them this product and that it was with trusted entities that we get it right. And that to me is going to be the coping mechanism and justification. Understood, but never purchased or used it. Sorry. I was just going to say to Danish this thing. The thing that you have to understand is Gary is not dumb. He's actually a very smart man. We may not agree with what he wants to accomplish, but he's smart. And politically speaking, if he says no now, it goes right to the courts and he looks like a monkey's uncle because he'd have broken all precedent from the institution. They don't – when the staff – and it's very clear the staff agrees with this,

when the commissioners override the staff, it's big news. When the commissioners override the staff and they are in violation of the courts, it's even bigger news. Meanwhile, on the flip side of that, he can take a victory lap here. I wrote this months ago, but the fact is he can say, look what I've done. I've made it go through this process. I have surveillance. I have the biggest names.

I've made it safe. And by the way, he can distinguish it from, to help even from Liz's perspective, he can distinguish Bitcoin. He's not a Bitcoin maxi, but maybe he is. He can distinguish Bitcoin from the rest of crypto. And that's another thing that's important here. Exactly right. Austin, you've been waiting patiently. Sorry. Yeah, no, it's totally fine. I was going to say, one of the things that's interesting to me listening to the debate on

priced in versus not priced in is as somebody who has worked extensively with the RIA community and investment management, you also need to think deeply about the timeframe on which these things are going to show up, especially now that we're in a non-zero rates environment. We live in a world where if the ETFs are approved today or on Monday, and you think about what does it do to get these things integrated into model portfolios for RIAs so that they can go to clients and actually try to get them to allocate to this in a sustained way. If you think about the framework that needs to be built at most of these places for what are you allowed to say to clients? How do we pitch

this thing? What research do we have? All of the policies, procedures, making the sausage to do it takes a lot longer than people think. To so to me watching the market price, if you're say an informed trad five person looking at it, I think a lot of what we're seeing is people do think it will be big, but not right away. Like this is a snowball starting at the top of the hill that's going to need to roll for a while to get to critical mass. And if you take that view, especially because it's not free to put money into something, if you don't think anything's going to happen for a while, then the price action actually makes total sense as to where we're currently standing with the ETFs coming,

right? Because anybody who's a hardcore Bitcoin person has bought it already. You can just go buy it yourself. There are other ways to do this. That means the addressable audience we're looking at bringing in are not the like deep believers are less sophisticated about this thing. That means they take time. That means they need advisors. That means they need trust. All of those things take time to be built up. I really do think people need to slow the roll on immediate adoption, but in some ways be more optimistic on very long-term adoption because of that. I think those are absolutely great points, Ark. Hey, what's up, guys? Mario, Scott, first-time

speaker, long-time listener here. I'm Gen Z, so a lot of us and Gen, and I guess millennials, we solve custody of our own funds and things like that. But I think that the majority of people with the wealth out there, they don't actually are interested in solve custody. They actually want to have their RIA take care of the Bitcoin for them, but they want to have exposure to this asset class. So this is the first ever time, obviously, that we have a asset that has a maximum fixed supply, even deflationary, that's going to be, you know, finally bridging the gap with, you know, TradFi. So this is going to be a long snowball effect, having probably like, you know, trillions come into this space over time. Obviously, I think that, you know, we're probably

going to reach, I would say, like five to ten trillion dollars of market cap for Bitcoin in this cycle. But this is not going to go away. You know, I had the epiphany with Bitcoin six years ago. You know, this is a hedge against inflation. And if you look at the spot ETF for gold in 2020, in 2004, and you look at gold's price right now, it's just continuously going up into the right. Yes, inflation goes into it, but it's still going to keep going up because it's just a superior asset than something that's going to be printed into a gazillion. So we have something that has no middleman that you're going to be able to, you know, have all these people and all these people on the streets that you can talk to,

you know, they have no idea about Bitcoin yet. You know, they still think it's magic internet money. You know, we've all learned about this a long, long time ago. But the majority of people have no idea how to even utilize this technology. When you just wanted to jump in, you said five to ten trillion dollars market cap. I'm very bullish on crypto, very bullish on Bitcoin. Where do you get five to ten trillion dollars from? I think that just be like from looking at last cycle, Bitcoin almost reaching three trillion dollars of market cap. It makes sense that this this cycle coming around is going to be even higher than last cycle, you know, but altcoins as well. I think altcoins will have a trickle effect.

You know, ETH will might even reach a trillion and in market cap, you know, you have other things like CASP, other things down the line. I think that Bitcoin, you know, realistically with the ETFs, the having a bullish U.S. presidential candidate coming into Q4, most likely on both sides of the aisle. I've heard verbiage, you know, we're probably need some positive regulations coming into space, you know, eventually. So I think, you know, it's just inevitable that this is going to, you know, keep getting bigger and bigger. I'm way more bullish on Bitcoin than a shiny object called gold. You know, there's really only one use case for gold. It's jewelry and it has a $10 trillion market cap. Can we, Scott, maybe one thing we could do is look at the scenario.

What happens? What are the possibilities of an ETF not getting approved? Why would that happen? And if it doesn't get approved what happens to crypto you know we can guess what happens but maybe we're good to get some thoughts on that and then the second one is go ahead no please i forgot the second point so go ahead yeah i was just saying the quick answer there is we had one of those days that gave us hints two days ago right right? When a matrix port analyst news goes viral. Listen, we all know that that was a leverage flush, but like if even somebody sharing the

idea that going public at the ETF might not get approved, uh, sends price down from, you know, 45 again, not the catalyst, but I'm saying that's what the news point to 45 to 40. I think we know that an outright rejection, uh, would be really, really rough for the market. I do think that the bulk of the move that we've seen to the upside of crypto at this point in the cycle, even in advance of the halving is all because of the Bitcoin spot ETF approval anticipation. So I think a rejection would be really, really bad for price. By the way, I just want to say that people that are looking at this as an uncorrelated asset don't automatically assume it's going to go up into the right. We actually don't want that because that doesn't give you any opportunities to buy and improve your portfolio. If you are actually

thinking about this long term, I will say it's nice to hear young people still being super optimistic about everything. It's incredible. It's actually kind of nice to hear young people still being super optimistic about everything. It's incredible. It's actually kind of nice to hear. But I was going to say that we just have to be a little bit careful about the fact that we've seen this before. People have made narratives before and people have been rug pulled a million times before. This is not the first time that everybody's on one side. And when everybody's on one side, it's always better to be sitting. A lot of people made the comparisons to the gold ETF and what happened to gold prices when that got approved.

Dave, I think you talked about this in one of the spaces. Can you make that comparison for the audience and whether we're going to see the same thing now with Bitcoin? Austin, Dave, anyone else? Simon, maybe you can help. I think it's important. History doesn't repeat. It rhymes, right? The gold ETF was the first way that people could buy gold in brokerage accounts, in IRAs. And in that respect, it's the same. But there was never an issue. You could always, there were still gold

trusts and papers. You could own gold coins, et cetera. And frankly, around the world, I mean, if you look in India, you know, the person before, the reason I bit a thumbs down on gold's only use case is jewelry, I actually disagree with that. Platinum can also be used for jewelry, used to be more valued than gold, and now it's half the price of gold, because frankly, the jewelry use case is nowhere near as important as the monetary use case of gold. And in fact, if you look at, you know, the Diwali, you know, buying of gold jewelry in India, a lot of it isn't to wear. It's as a store of value.

And so I think that there's a lot that's similar. What's different is there wasn't this sort of impossibility of something being in the financial system. And it wasn't kind of a curiosity. And gold was bigger to start relative to other assets and was still seen as an uncorrelated asset by traditional finance before it. So if anything, the narrative change here is much, much larger. But I totally agree that this is a wave. It's a long-term thing, and it doesn't happen immediately. I believe in terms of price action, by the way, Mario, it was up for two or three weeks after the ETF, something like that.

And then actually a slow bleed out for many, many months before gold actually went parabolic with the ETF. I have to look for the exact timing, but yeah, it was a short, short move up bleed down well below where it was before the ETF, kind of a choppy sideways down for 10 months, something like that. Not looking at the chart again and then parabolic. Yeah, so do you remember the time phase? Like when it spiked up? I'll have to look it up.

I'm just, yeah, I'm not looking. I'm not exactly in front of my chart, unfortunately, but somebody else may have some comments. That's the general gist of how it went, though. Up for a little bit, down for quite a while longer than, you know, obviously from just what happened. So the long-term

impact being underestimated, which we talked about earlier, short-term overestimated, long-term underestimated. In gold's case, it was long, long-term that was underestimated. But Joa, you wanted to comment on the gold comparison. Joe, are you there? Joe Sopcich Yeah, I'm here. Not the gold comparison, but the

cycle comparison. Every single time, since 2012, been trading this thing, there's always a mid-cycle top a few months before the halving. Typically, you could see it with the stochastic. I never say the word right, but the stochastic always shows there's a mid-term top. And this is why back in October, when you're asking, will we see above 36? And me and Rand, I think we're the only ones who said yes before the end of the year. And that's because it was that fair market price. It wasn't ETF was not priced in. I think there's people who are front running it now.

The fact that Danish bought it now, you know, new people in the crypto feel pain. So that's even more of an indicator to me. But every four years, there's always a mid cycle top. It's always a few months before the halving. We're at that time right now. I don't see this being another rally. I expect 20% to 30% pullback, 36% between 32% before we start to see a steady climb up. Long term, super, super bullish.

Short term, I don't think it's bullish. Short term, I don't think it's bullish. I think the media is going to run on the fact that maybe half a trillion, sorry, half a billion dollars comes in and they're going to be like, oh, see, it's not that popular. They're going to play that narrative like crazy because that's not who pays them. And that's not going to help it either. And like one of the speakers said, brokers have to adjust portfolios. That does take time. That does take approvals. It's not going to be something automatic like a lot of people are expecting.

It'll take two, three months, four months before we see anything. And that's why I really don't think, I would not expect some big pump up here. And if we see 50, I think we'll be lucky. But I don't even think we'll see that before we see. Yeah, I'm getting going to Simon. I'm trying to get Kyle back in just to kind of have an out point.

Probably Ryan will do it with Ryan on Monday. Kind of an out point discussion. What we see with out points. Ryan was pretty bullish. And I think, you know, he's been right as well. And when it comes to out points, Joe, what do you expect when it comes to else? They always suffer more. Right. So if there's a pullback on Bitcoin, bitcoin there's gonna be a bigger pullback on alts right these alts are people have made a lot of money uh i've been very extremely lucky this year

and yeah i've gone into riskier things than i normally would would have right um because i've made money through bitcoin. I got Kyle. Kyle, that was quick. I just pinged you to come on seconds later. You're here. I wanted to ask you because I know you cover Alts on your show significantly. What do you expect to see with Altcoins once the ETF gets approved? And if the market does pump in the medium to long term, do you expect the same correlation as always?

Yeah, I do. I think we know how the capital rotation works. I think that when we get this announcement, probably Monday, Tuesday, it will, I think I'm already starting to see it actually right now is sucking a lot of liquidity out of alts. And that's where the focus is going to be on Bitcoin leading up. But then I've talked about it in many other videos.

I do believe that we're going to have a strong narrative back as soon as the ETF starts trading on the stock exchanges. We know this from market psychology. It's like once you have an altcoin or whatever that eventually gets listed on Binance, there's nowhere else for it to go. So it just loses all steam at that point, usually, depending on if that thing has a lot of value or not.

But that is the run up usually to an exchange listing. We've seen this before. And it's kind of bad to give you an example of like Pepe and Bonk, but we also saw that with the futures and the CBOE and stuff like that. And also, yeah. So I expect that once we have, like once the Bitcoin is listed, the spot ETF is listed on the exchanges, like that's the end of that hype cycle where Bitcoin sucks equity. Then it filters to ETH. Then we see ETH and other large caps start to pump after that

and then rotation into like smaller, medium caps. So many, many people know you from YouTube now and covering a lot of different altcoins and meme coins. But I want to ask Kyle, the master ventures VC, Kyle, what about VC funding? Has that started picking up? How lagging will it be? And are you seeing a lot more projects launch and how's their performance? Because that usually takes longer. It's like more midway throughout the bull market that you start seeing that to be picking up no yeah so we're seeing um more more funding coming a bit easier now it's it's definitely like uh

actually a lot more deals are coming every single day to me like in in masses and uh and then as a launchpad too you know we're on next week, we will be announcing everything that we've been doing over the past two years as a launchpad. But that interest is starting to show up a lot too. So people are,

what has been happening is that like a lot, if you're not a huge VC with $100 million plus funds, you've essentially like ran out of liquidity over the past two years. And so people are just waiting for liquidity events events we've all deployed a huge amount of capital from this second half of the bull run where projects ended up not launching because they wanted to

launch in better markets holding all of that uh you know momentum and a lot of projects failed through the bear market and now we're coming into our first liquidity events in like three years where we actually have some liquidity to redeploy. So so people are getting ready for this. Some people have been holding some dry powder on the sidelines and we're starting to see them start deploying that now. But people are looking for more favorable vesting terms as well. And so people are having to restructure to get capital. And can you can you can you compare to how do... How do you see this bull market?

I think it's one of your videos that you said this will be the last crazy bull market we see in crypto before things finally mature. Do you expect this bull market to be crazier than last year? Because we had a debate

a few months ago whether this bull market means cut and run. Whether we're going to see a similar bull market to last year or things are going to be a bit more... a bit less...

less scammy. There's already altcoins going thousands of X and we haven't even started. Listen, I know Ran was of the, we'll never see altcoin seasons like we did in the past. I think he survives that. I think that you guys, not you guys, but people generally underestimate just how degenerate these TradFi guys that are going to be coming into this space are and just how much capital they have. And they are going to literally lose their fucking minds when they find out about altcoins and get past Bitcoin, which they inevitably will. Yeah, that's true. This will be the largest, in my opinion, the largest bull market we've ever seen. And that's why I also made that statement that I think it'll be the last bull market where we're able to make insane gains. And there's

going to be the freedom to do the kind of things that we're doing today and the opportunities to make money. There's going to be a lot more regulatory restrictions around the world in four years from now in the next cycle that won't allow this. But mostly, we're going to get a huge influx of capital. And that rotation of capital is going to go from Bitcoin into alts. And so we're going to see a massive, massive altcoin season. But I do think that the law of diminishing returns will kick in on the following cycles. This one, I believe, will be exceptional cycle.

That's what we subscribe to this idea of the following cycles. This one, I believe will be exceptional cycle. This is what we subscribe to this idea of the super cycle. And then we will see the law of diminishing returns kick in subsequent cycles after that. Tom, what do you think? Yeah, maybe I can just hop in here. So just for an overview, so, you know, Kyle started master ventures and built a broader organization. I now run the VC arm. So just wanted to add a bit more color there. We work on deals together every day. So, you know, we're seeing that.

Sorry, Tom, this is time for master ventures as well. Correct. Formerly of Masari. Formerly of Masari. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. No. So just wanted to get more color on the market. So we're seeing rounds close extremely fast rounds that would take weeks and months to close and trying to

sort of hoover up capital or basically picking us and say, Hey, we're oversubscribed right now. We're closing in the next few weeks. We're seeing almost every project that had TGE in Q, so token generation event in Q2, Q3, pushing it up to February, March. So just looking at our portfolio right now, we have 30 plus investments. I think like 8 to 10 of them are going to do token generation events in Q1. And you're seeing this across the venture space. So my mental model is we're going to see an influx of all these new tokens. And it's going to be a crazy bonanza on Twitter, on YouTube, trying to figure out which of these projects make sense, which is the new kind of hot alt L1, where are the airdrops?

And you're going to have not only the Twitter DJs that are wanting to get in on this, but you're going to have like those TradFi guys who are seeing like their nephew make a 10, a hundred X, like, Oh my God, what am I doing? How am I missing out on this stuff? So that's just another backdrop here. It's like, once you see all these tokens come out, there's money to be made. And you better believe like the TradFi folks want to make money, whether it's in freaking bonds or whether it's in Shiba Inu. Like it doesn't matter. These guys just want to make money. I think I think what we should do is gotten on Monday.

I'm not sure if you did it this week, but on Monday, we should do the kind of narrative discussion. What narratives will lead this next bull market? We've covered it a few times. Just a few bits and pieces of news that happened. I think we should just do a quick recap of the news. We do have the Twitter account, the ex-account of Cetric got hacked. The auditing firm apparently got hacked. Cetric, yeah. Okay, they've spelt it Cetric, so my bad. Cetric got hacked, got Celsius to unstake thousands of ether. We have the Australian Treasury to question regulator of a hyperverse. Do you know much about hyperverse? Does the crypto scheme? Nothing. seeking to ban a ban on crypto purchases with credit cards. We've got Cathie Wood selling another $4 million in Coinbase. And lastly, Logan Paul and the saga with the NFT project CryptoZoo.

There's a bit of back and forth between him and the YouTuber, CoffeeZilla. So Logan Paul's committed $2.3 million to buy back CryptoZoo NFTs. Now that the bull market is here, to make he wants to kind of fix his path mistake so he could do it again i guess in this bull market yeah there's a contingency that you uh side that you get a refund on the purchase price but you can't sue him yeah yeah but it's kind of and then um in the agreement you'll have to buy his next nft or there'll be 2.3 million dollars of nft equivalents of his next project. But I think that's it. We've covered everything. Scott, anything else on your own? No, I mean, I just hope this thing gets approved

so we can stop talking about it. You're dying. Just don't. I'm over it. Yeah. I put out, I wasn't the only one. I thought I was. A few of us got a lot of information that the approval could come in today, but it hasn't happened yet. But I put out a post. I thought I'd be one of the first. And I think two others, one of our regular speakers, what's her name? She put out a similar post. Eleanor. She was supposed to be here today. She's too good for us now. Yeah, so Eleanor, we'll bring her on a Monday.

But she put out a similar post. I probably should go see what her sources are, but we have the same sources on this one. She put out a similar post that could get approved today. I think it's any day now. But yeah, I think that's it. I just don't want to... I said to NLW on our show today on Friday,

I was like, you literally kill me if we're talking next week about when the Bitcoin spot ETF is going to be approved. I mean, we've been waiting long enough. I think we need to get this thing done. Dave, what are you about to say? I was going to say, you've got to watch out for your wife. She's even more tired of it than you, obviously. Oh, man, she's killing me. Oh, okay, yeah, about the shot. Well, she tweeted, basically like Pulp Fiction, say ETF one more time, I dare you,

and then said we have to do a shot every time we say ETF. And then I guess Ran kind of ran with it on his show and was literally doing vodka shots every time he said ETF approval, which is, you know, Ran can do that on Friday in South Africa time. I can't do that on a 9 a.m. show in Florida. Cool. I guess I can't do that on a 9am show in Florida. Cool. I guess I can, but... Happy New Year, everyone, and

we'll see everyone on Monday.