The Wolf Of All Streets - McDonald's, Meme Coin Wars, ETFs & The Future Of Solana

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Join Austin Federa, the Head Of Strategy at Solana Foundation, as we discuss what the future holds for Solana. Austin Federa: https://x.com/Austin_Federa In the second part of the show, Dan from The Chart Guys will share his market analysis and some trades.  The Chart Guys: https://www.youtube.com/@ChartGuys  ►►PLEASE LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS HERE (THERE ARE NO BOTS ON MY POSTS 👉https://roundtable.rtb.io/shortUrl/wYXYlUf ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► The Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://thearchpublic.com/  ►►OKX SIGN UP FOR AN OKX TRADING ACCOUNT THEN DEPOSIT & TRADE TO UNLOCK MYSTERY BOX REWARDS OF UP TO $60,000!  👉https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=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  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 #Solana 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.

McDonald's was hacked and somebody launched a meme coin and was able to rug pull for $700,000. We have meme coin madness on Tron. And of course, the political season heating up. What a weird season of crypto this is. I can't wait for it to end and get on to season 15, whatever it is. But more importantly, we're going to talk about what's happening on Salada and the future of Salada because we have Austin Fadera here for our seemingly maybe quarterly update on all things Salada we're going to dig into it now of course chart guys at 9 30 let's go.

What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit the like button. And hit it twice because we've got Austin here today. We're both live from Paisley Park, the Prince residence. We both have Purple Rain playing in the background. You just give me purple envy. I say it every time. Hey, it's great to be back. I need better lights. I just need better lights. First, listen, we just got to knock through these things because this one just blew my mind. A lot of people say that this has something to do with Solana just because it happened on Solana.

It's ridiculous. But McDonald's Instagram page hacked by crypto scammers who claim they stole 700K. I know this wasn't really even on your radar, but man, it's hilarious. They literally put in the description, you've been rug pulled by with the guy's name. Thank you for 700K in Solana.

700K actually seems pretty low for a rug pull using the McDonald's corporate accounts, actually. Yeah, I mean, look, rugs are sad. Like we got to get rid of them in the crypto industry. But like hacks are inevitable. And this is not like a blockchain related hack, obviously, like Home Depot is far worse than something like this. But, you know, one of the interesting things here is like, there's two ways to look at this. One is like McDonald's social presence is not as relevant as people think it is. Or, man, we got a long way to go with onboarding because, you know, one of the biggest brands in the world gets hacked for like a half hour. And that is smaller than I would have thought.

Or maybe the opposite is true. And like crypto folks just have pretty good scam hygiene nowadays i know there was like a flurry in a in our foundation slack and like wait there's no way this is real right and we're like everyone's like no this is this is instantly a hack like let's let's see if we can touch with some of the mcdonald's folks um so you know these things happen uh and i think it's one of those things where it's like as an industry maybe we're growing up that there wasn't $20 million that instantly funneled into it. Yeah, I think that's a good point.

I think, as you said, it also hints to the fact that how many people who follow McDonald's Instagram even understand that there are meme coins in existence? I mean, it's all of our future employers, so we should be paying attention. I've already put in my application. I'm sure you have. It is the season, August and September. That's when that's when the McDonald's jokes and the Pepe memes with McDonald's hats come out. But actually, as you and I sort of alluded to, this has not been a quiet August. I mean, this has been quite mad, actually. Yeah. I mean, no lack of things to talk about. I mean, what do you make of the fact that this has been such a crazy cycle, even if prices have been somewhat muted? Yeah. I mean, price action is the least interesting action, I think, in this space. We're seeing a lot of pretty tectonic shifts, though. We're seeing institutions coming and building on Solana in a very serious way. Libra Capital announcing,

you know, a large hedge fund is now deploying a fund on Solana, which is accessible for hundreds of dollars as opposed to a million, a minimum of 5 million, like you saw with the Biddle Fund. So it's really cool to see this sort of expansion of this PayPal issuance of PYUSD on Solana, surpassed issuance on Ethereum. Granted, these are still both tiny compared to USDC or USDT, but it's really interesting to see that there is room for new players to enter this space, even in things that we feel like are deeply entrenched and established markets like stable coins.

So that's been really interesting to see. I think on the flip side, like looking over at the other side of the pond a little bit, Ethereum is having a scaling war and they're going through like a version of the Bitcoin block size wars debate about should we actually make the Ethereum L1 faster or were L2 fragmentations kind of a bad basket of trade-offs. You know, very much the answer there is we'll see. But then at the same time, you have MegaEth and you have Monad coming on the scene, both I think trying to launch early next year. So this is kind of, I think we're at the beginning of what I hope is going to be a renaissance where there are many places that you can build fast consumer-facing applications, not just Solana. And some people will be like, oh, it's bearish.

Solana's losing its moat. But I think it's hard to say that the launch of the iPhone made Android apps worse. These things are very much compatible. And I'd rather have 10,000 devs banging on keyboards trying to come up with consumer applications for fast blockchains than 2,000 devs banging on keyboards trying to come up with consumer applications for fast blockchains than 2000 devs banging on keyboards trying to come up with consumer applications for fast blockchains. Yeah, listen, I mean, if in 20 or 30 years, all the sort of value in building accrues to one chain, so be it. But there's no way we're big enough right now that anyone would cheer against development anywhere. Right?

I mean, we just need more hands on deck, more boots on the ground. Right? And so... Is anyone mad when Windows starts shipping good laptops? Right? That was great. Microsoft finally decided you could build a good Windows laptop and now people are doing it.

ARM processors on Windows is great for the whole ecosystem. Things are all there's this really interesting like bag mentality of competition that is usually entirely divorced from the business realities of competition and the technology realities of competition. Yeah, I agree 100 percent, but it is interesting to see sort of the carnage over in the Ethereum ecosystem. I'm quite sure it'll actually play out well, but the amount of layer twos still from sort of the previous cycle that are competing and trying to find value

with those sort of heavily hyped names you just mentioned, Monad, MegaEth, coming online, there's definitely not enough for everyone right now. Yeah, I mean, the original thesis there was kind of one that was like very interesting which was like eth is too precious to scale it and so what we have to do is build a bunch of l2s that if they fail if they're compromised if they whatever it isn't detrimental to the core vision of ethereum which uh is interesting right it's basically a colonial model

right where it's like oh the home country is the thing that matters, but we're going to go out and do all these little outposts in other areas. And I think we're kind of seeing that thesis play out where there's a bunch of like big name L2s from the 22 cycle that have basically faded to irrelevance. And we've seen a lot of new people building on new technology stacks come in. It's a very interesting, it's very interesting to watch this thesis play out in real time and compare that to sort of the Solana centric thesis of how you build a scalable chain, you build a strong economy. And I don't think one is right or wrong. They're just very different approaches to how you accomplish this. Yeah. And I think at the end of the day,

the value in time will accrue to the one that works best regardless of where they start experimenting. A lot of people are making that argument for the Bitcoin ecosystem. Like nothing had to happen in Bitcoin. And now people can go build all the things that were tried elsewhere. We haven't really seen adoption there yet either. We will see. Yeah, we will see on all of it, which is funny.

It kind of hints to this narrative. You see it constantly and you on the inside, obviously know that these things are true. Like there was this narrative that all the value on solana's meme coins right and then you have the meme coin casino sort of shifting a week at a time it was on base and it's on solana although i would say it's had pretty a pretty good base on solana regardless no pun intended and now tron we launched sun pump and a few uh you know sundog goes to 250 million i had to read about all these things by the way yeah so off my radar unless i try um sundog on sun pump tron so now apparently

the uh meme coin casino is moving if you read twitter you would think that was like the death of solana but I would have to. And when I mentioned Sun Pumped, you said, what's that? Yeah, I mean, look, I am not super plugged into the meme coin craze side of things. These things, I mean, I think people forget that like Pumped.fun was originally like a base project, basically. Right. And what they found is the user base is on Solana. And if someone has now found that there's a very rabid user base for meme coins on Tron, great power to them. Right. I think what

we what we see here are a few interesting dynamics. One is that fast networks attract fast products and the rate that you can innovate and the rate that you can sort of churn through and pivot and build new things. I mean, there were months where there was over 500,000 unique new tokens being launched on Solana. And, you know, there's a lot of ways to look at that. One way to look at that is like, oh, what a waste, like all this spam. And the other way is like, well, no one charges you to create a meme or a tweet, right? Like how many tweets go out every day that get no attention and no likes? And it's a few that go super viral. And this idea that like, one of the weird contradictions of

trying to scale blockchain is everyone has it baked into their head that everything is a cost center, that transactions must be expensive, they must be scarce, it must be expensive to launch a project. And they almost feel cheated when someone can just spin up a meme coin for legitimately $2 worth of state and they can distribute it out and they can launch the thing. I think that's great. The printing press did incredible things for the spread of knowledge. Now, obviously, I wouldn't equate meme coins to the spread of knowledge. But every time you get order of magnitude reductions in prices, you open up entirely

new types of business models. And so for me, like the meme coins are emblematic of what else you can build on networks. And you know, going back to the whole fast blockchain thing, if a network like Tron or if another type of fast network that's launching is capable of supporting 500,000 new token issuances a month and, you know, 2,000 traders per second trying to ape in to coins that have $250 of liquidity and DeFi applications that can handle that. That's a great test of a network, right? The launch of meme coins in, you know, 2022, back in that phase, stress tested the network and it stress tested it in ways that found areas that we could improve. The launch of Orr, which was this crazy proof of work coin on Solana, caused some issues

on the network, but that actually made the network much more robust and strong a few weeks later. The same way that when inscriptions launched, it broke pretty much every L2 because the entire data structure systems couldn't handle arbitrary JSON being written into the chain. This is great. These are actually incredibly low risk, incredibly low cost ways to stress test networks. And so, yeah, if people lose money, that's not great. But also, people lose money all the time. It's just called entertainment, right? No one subscribes to Netflix and thinks it's going to be an ROI positive positive activity and so if you think of meme coins as entertainment value as opposed to investing it's

a very different structure to look at the world yeah 99.9 of them literally fall flat and do nothing nobody lost money on those yeah or if they did they had fun in the process right and i think we we sort of discount um there's this like very serious trader like narrative that everyone wants to have about what they're doing and a lot of people are just having fun and fun is okay we should allow people to have fun i i agree listen i don't participate in meme coins and you you but you hinted at the biggest problem, but that's a problem of perception, which is when people start to view them as investments, right? If you think that something that's launching is something you should be holding for the next hundred years to pass on to your grandchildren, you probably need a bit of a lobotomy. Yeah, but people do this with all sorts of things.

Like how many people have told you like, oh, you should buy a $5,000 watch. It'll be a family heirloom and might be more valuable. No, it won't be more valuable. Now, there might be sentimental value, but acknowledge what you're doing is buying something that you like and don't try and wrap it up in all of this, oh, someday it might be worth more money type of thing. Just embrace the fact that you want something and you are going to buy that thing and that's okay. You don have to spin a narrative for yourself about why you're buying it i love the comments sometimes here two days ago i put 1500 worth of trx into sun pump tokens they are now worth 300 bucks lol i'm assuming that you didn't view those as fairly family heirlooms debased and that you knew exactly

what you're doing but yeah that's what you expect and you expect that you go to if you go to a casino with 1500 bucks you're going to get some free drinks and have some entertainment and play with your friends. And it's going to be a expensive night out that you anticipated. Right. So I don't have a problem with it. Actually, we can move on from meme coins. I think we've probably talked it to death because there's so much that's actually being built that you hinted at. And I don't think it's getting attention. I will just say I have some very early Solana history NFTs that are worth functionally nothing, but I love them because they were great hinted at and i don't think it's getting attention i will just say i have some very early solana history nfts that are worth functionally nothing but i love them because they were great examples

of how not to launch projects well and so they have sentimental value if they have zero economic value right that that makes sense so you you hinted at some other things that are being built. I'd like to talk about the real value that's coming. So yeah. What else has got you excited at the moment that you're seeing that you think can bring some sort of meaningful adoption, or at least will be different, I guess, in the coming years than what we've seen in the past?

Yeah, so there's sort of two lenses to look at this from. So on the base layer, which is where the Solana Foundation and Anza work, what we're really focused on doing are generic systems level improvements that help scale the power of the base layer. And so the thesis there is pretty dead simple, which is if you can do a 10x reduction in cost or you can do a 10x increase in throughput, you're going to open up new types of economic activity that no one could have predicted previously. And so that's what projects like Firedancer are all built around. Firedancer's goal is to hit a million transactions

per second on mainnet two years after launch and it's launching this fall. So that's kind of that first major step in that process. Firedancer is a net new validator client built in a new programming language. So that I would say, like, look out for that launch. It's going to it's very interesting from a technical side. And then we'll slowly see the network sort of ramp up in speed and performance going in after that. There's other base layer frameworks that have been built out, like token extensions and Solana actions, which are also designed

to sort of create these new spaces for developers to build new types of experiences. On the user and developer side, the things that people are building are actually quite interesting. So we're seeing everything from something like Baxus, which is like a tokenized whiskey marketplace. They're adopting token extensions and they've used Blink, so they actually released this limited edition, I think it's called Tears of Goldman Sachs, you know, Tears of Lehman Brothers, that's what it was, anniversary whiskey bottle. And they sold it as a Blink on Twitter. You never had to leave the

website. You could just click the button and they would open your wallet. You could pay for the thing. You put your address in and, you know, it'll show up at your house. And so that is like an e-commerce revolution that you don't even have in web 2 for anything that powerful um and you know that's like a new core like user level primitive at this point there's a lot of very cool stuff like that being built out and on the institutional side you hinted at it earlier but do you see obviously we have like the endless back and forth on the Solana ETFs. Yeah. That kind of doesn't matter to me at all.

Yeah. I was going to say, I think ETFs are probably the least exciting traditional finance thing moving into crypto. Yeah. They were approved. I mean, it's nice that they were approved in Brazil. I saw that they have two of them now. I think that they approved the Solana base ETF, Brazil's second etf approved yeah that's great that's great that's great but but

it's not like uh you guys were hinging your future on whether the sec surprisingly approves a solana etf before the election right yeah i mean there's also all of these long term so so first off would love to have an etf Solana, of course. All that being said, ETFs are a little bit antithetical to the vision of crypto, right? Like we're going to take a bunch of coins that, you know, your keys, your crypto, not your keys, not your crypto has always been the mantra. And so when you're putting in an ETF, like an ETF is vastly superior to a centralized exchange, right? you're putting in an etf like an etf is vastly superior to a centralized exchange right if we

had had well-regulated etfs for major currencies ftx would not have happened and it would not have caused such a massive loss of value for users because those would have been regulated qualified custodians that were holding the bitcoin and the soul and the ether and all these other assets and yes like the meme coins trading on ftx like like sure, we probably wouldn't have an ETF for those things. But like the protection that comes from a regulated institution is really high. Now, I think everyone should just learn how to use a ledger and learn self-custody. And that's actually what it means to be in crypto. If you're holding your tokens in a centralized exchange, I'm not sure you're really participating in crypto. But if you're going to hold them in a centralized exchange,

I wish we had ETFs because those are more secure and more stable from a custodian perspective for those long-term investors than a centralized exchange is. Right. It's just a different kind of investor and different kind of person, to your point. You can't participate from your ETF. Right. And I think that that's why a lot of people have been surprised. Why did Bitcoin make an all time high? And most things are still down 99% because someone who buys a BlackRock ETF and puts it in their IRA can't quickly flip that into the flavor of the month when they get bored. Totally. Totally. Yeah. So that money has to be somewhere that it can actually be used and that's what's happening on solana like people are actually they have it in a you know a hot

wallet ready to go yeah i mean so one of the things that i i love that just launched a few days ago is the drift prediction markets um so this is you're familiar with poly markets this is pretty much uh uh you know your typical prediction market for the election built on Solana. But the cool thing is, because it's built on top of Drift, your positions are generating yield because that capital that you have in your positions is actually making markets and it's going to work to support the prediction market. And so you are now able to make a bet on the outcome of the U.S. election. And you also are able to make make a bet on the outcome of the u.s election um and you also are able to generate some yield during that process you're not locking up capital fully and those are the types of like composable d5 experiences that i think are just so compelling to people nowadays and that's

not institutional but that's you know it's one of those things where it's like that starts to look really really attractive to people who are not in crypto at all. I mean, it's not the same, but that's why perpetual swaps have become so incredibly popular in crypto and that people are looking at them elsewhere. If you're on the opposite side of the herd, you're getting paid to be longer, you're getting paid to be short while you're doing it. Yeah. How efficient is that market? Like, that's incredible. Yeah, it makes an incredibly efficient market. I think those are the kind of things that when they mature, which will take years, are really going to set the tone for kind of the future of DeFi and the future of crypto, when

you can really put your money and your tokens to work. Yeah. And I wouldn't say they're impossible in centralized trading venues but they're they're very different in centralized trading venues too in part because you have market opens and closes and like perps are hard from that structure um so it's really interesting to see the areas where like for years i think defy has been trying to replicate tradfi too much as opposed to trying to build stuff in DeFi that you literally cannot build in TradFi. Yeah, you said something really interesting before that I want to kind of zoom in on while we have a few more minutes, which is that ETFs are sort of antithetical to the ethos of crypto in

the first place. We have a lot of things like that happening right now. Right. So obviously, if you were an original cypherpunk Bitcoiner, you might have a problem with BlackRock controlling a certain amount of crypto. You probably should be looking at politics and saying, maybe we should be skeptical of politicians and not being really excited that now we're a hot button issue. How do you sort of like parse that mentally? Like, and we have this story literally yesterday, Kamala Harris signals interest in friendlier stance on crypto. Like, okay, okay. Right. And Trump obviously did it first.

And both of them were sort of like not that positive for crypto when they were actually in power. I give people the right to change and actually show action. But like, just where do you stand on the like, us becoming so political and becoming a part of this process when we know that crypto was not invented for this purpose yeah i mean

i think crypto was invented inherently politically right you go back to the the genesis block of bitcoin it has a political message in the genesis block but its political message is not here's who to vote for it's very like eric vorhees right here is a moral framework for which to look at the world and from that origin i mean like eric for his like more people should listen to eric for his right he's a he's a true og in this space his speech at coin center this year which i'm sure you can find on the internet, is incredible. You know, when you're looking at this sort of thing, if someone's telling you you should vote for a politician because they're pro-crypto, that is – you've lost the ball at that point, right? What we need to be evaluating are what are the parties and systems that are going to be supporting the next generation of crypto and the current generation of crypto?

What value structures are important for that? I think if you look historically, that was maybe the Republican Party. It's certainly not the Republican Party of today. It's certainly not the Democratic Party of today, right? The Republican Party of today in the United States is much closer to the Democratic Party of the 90s where they have lots of strong social opinions on how you should live your life. The Democratic Party also has lots of strong social opinions on how you should live your life. And that leaves all of us in crypto, I think, politically homeless.

And so if what we're now arguing about is the worst of two weev that is that is not really the place that I think we want to be in. And, you know, that's not to say if anyone's voting for a specific candidate, you should you should vote your conscience. You should vote. Crypto may not be your only single issue voting. And there's tons of reasons that it shouldn't be your single issue voting, because at the end of the day, like you need to live your life. You have to look out for your family. You have to, you know, make sure that the life you're living is not about the balance in your in your wallet. Right. All that being said, I think there is something a little unfortunate about how we haven't seen any Democrat like small d democratic country embrace blockchain yet. Most of the countries that have

started embracing blockchain are fairly authoritarian. And that's unfortunate because I think there's nothing about this technology that needs to be left or needs to be right. It really is a technology for like classic liberal, like classic liberal libertarian philosophy is the heart of crypto, that you are fundamentally a smart, capable human being. You can make your own decisions. If you lose money, that's your fault. If you make money, that's your gain. These systems require careful consideration. They require you to be an active mental participant in the systems in which you choose to engage and to choose to engage very carefully. I think this is incredible for like civic education. It teaches people that they can't rely on the government to solve their problems. There's so much about this space that is so much larger than just U.S. politics. I am skeptical of both parties actually embracing crypto.

That being said, i'm practical and if what we're seeing is we're seeing two two major parties in the united states pander to the crypto vote i'll take the pandering if it means that this industry can stay in the united states all day i think it it goes back to another sort of original ethos of bitcoin which is lover's high time preference, obviously. Like, how do you live your life? What what time frame are you living in on? What know how wide is your view? So I think that viewing this election as the linchpin and what will happen for this industry forever is a false hyperbolic view.

Right. I think that crypto will be fine no matter what. You might just have to wait a little more time. But if you're very focused on what happens in the next year or two, I can see why you would be passionate about one party over the other, if you believe what they're saying. Yeah, you know, I'll go back to like, we hear a lot of like, this is the most important election of our lifetimes. And also like, our politics has never been more divisive and it's like man we had uh

what the a vice presidential candidate and the treasury of secretary literally shoot each other once they made a musical about it like we're doing okay guys you know like i think everyone can just relax a little bit and focus on on building stuff that's compelling enough that we're going to win over politicians on the merit and the broad-based support of the stuff that gets built on blockchain, not on the philosophical grounds of it. Because at the end of the day, politicians are, and this is not a criticism of politicians, but they're pragmatic, right? They see where the wind is blowing and they run in that direction. And so what we need to do is we need to get more people onboarded. We need to show more people the power and potential and build a super strong voting

block around crypto and not voting block in the sense of one party. But hey, look, if you're a Democrat and you're pro-crypto, I'm going to vote for you over the other candidate. If you're a Republican and you're pro-crypto, I'm going to vote for you over the other candidate. Or if there's two Republicans running, I'm going to vote for the one that is more friendly to crypto. And just that little bit, that 5%, 2% vote swing on the margins, that's going to change the country in a few years. Do you think that Burr and Hamilton really rapped when they had their duel? Oh, absolutely. You can go back and read the original transcripts. It's incredible.

Yeah. Lin-Manuel Miranda gets a lot of credit for writing that, but shouldn't it go back and read the original transcripts it's incredible yeah i like uh you know lynn manuel miranda gets a lot of credit for writing that but like shouldn't it go back to the originals who rapped and sang those and danced those songs in the first place uh you know i think we should have a you know unfortunately we can't have justice scalia on to tell us what the original intent of uh not going around my shot is but you know someday maybe. Austin, I love having you on a very pragmatic view on things. I think it's shared. I hate talking politics here because the chat goes absolutely nuts. They call me either a communist or a fascist on any given day, depending on how I cover or what story I bring up.

But I think it really is important for people to remember that we're going to be just fine. We might not be just fine tomorrow. And one party may be better for the industry, but there are a lot of reasons to consider who you're going to vote for and what you're going to do. I, for one, would rather not have to concern myself with unrealized capital gains anytime in the future. So that is also on my radar beyond who says something about Bitcoin, right? Well, Scott, i personally consider you both yeah thank you appreciate it unaffiliated thank you very much guys please follow austin um you won't get uh updates on meme coins mcdonald's or sun pump if you do but you might actually uh get some really great information uh on life and on the future of solano, certainly. Thank you so much, man. Always appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on again. His purple is so good. Like, I just need better purple. It's so embarrassing. So embarrassing. Like, you set a tone. You're like the purple guy. And he just shows up.

It's funny, the McDonald's coin was Grimace. That's purple, too. Should have been talking about that. It's a missed opportunity. And while we're missing opportunities on purple, we have the opportunity to at least take a look at some charts we've got dan here good morning sir how goes goes real well nice transition grimace to charts that was flawless i don't you know something i don't even know i feel like you need to make that trading view neon in the back purple though. All right. I'm on it. That can happen. What color is it when it comes on?

Glaringly bright blue that blurs everything out. We could put some sort of filter on it that makes me look like a supermodel and makes it look purple. It'd be perfect. All right. So let's take a look at some charts, man. How are you viewing the market here? So, Chuck, these are the two levels I care about right now.

And again, just to say a statement, if neither of these levels are breaking, nothing is changing. So we're closer to resistance than we are to support. 62.8 is that level up there. If we break that level, the weekly bounce is underway. We then zoom out to the weekly, well aware that it's possible that weekly bounce may result in a lower high. But what I would like to see with this current setup, I always want to lay out what would be the ideal setup for the most clarity if it were going to shape up. And I would want to see a weekly inverse head and shoulders here, break this bull, get up to the upper 60s. Maybe we fail 70 again, that's fine. Set that weekly higher low and then go. That would be my ideal, whether it happens or not, 50-50. but every day we'll get more information as to whether that's shaping up or not.

But I know that would be the most profitable setup for me is I would buy that weekly high or low, have a nice clear stop level to go off of. But first things first, we do need, we're tight here, multiple inside bars on the weekly, and that's got to break bull to get this weekly bounce a bit more follow through. What you just described would actually put us probably into an uptrend in October, which aligns with the cycle as well. And the election cycle, the halving cycle, the crypto four-year cycle, all of it. I would take it. Yeah. I mean, we got sentiment back like that in the broader market, which was nice because there was fear, a big wave of fear.

And just want to talk about that real quick. The S&P 500 futures chart here, all time highs back in the picture, but trading crypto and Bitcoin in 2017 prepared me for this because Bitcoin would do this all the time. What happens is a grind up full bull control. Everybody's long, everybody's over confident and over leveraged. You flush out the leverage real quick and you V-shape and see all time high continuation and traded that all 2017. Bitcoin would hit an all time high, drop 30% in a couple of days and then be back at all time high next week. And that liquidity flush out from overconfident bulls, it prepared me in my trading career for things like this. We don't see it as often on this macro scale, but here it is. We've seen it, but we've seen it a lot more

over the last year. When you can see 30% overnight moves on a meta or 15% move on NVIDIA, you're talking about the biggest companies in the world behaving like altcoins. It really is different than I remember it from the past, certainly. You can point to, many people point to, and I'd probably agree, zero-day options, options that expire the same day, just spike in that volatility big time in markets. But again, if we keep this in an ideal world, we keep all-time highs grinding through the summer into the fall. And that helps sentiment for Bitcoin to try and finally break from this consolidation pattern to new all-time highs. So again, it's nice to have this new longer-term high or low. And I'm doing a webinar later today, free on our YouTube channel, talking about what I call this a sucker punch. And it happens all the time and there's ways to trade it. So I'm going

to go in-depth about it. V-shaped reversal. So what else are you watching while this is happening? I mean, it's so crazy that a couple of weeks ago we were talking about Black Monday, yen carry trade destroying the world and here we are back at prices higher than when that happened. It's really- Nick Huber Yeah, just capitulation. I mean, what the VIX did, I would say in that day, if this isn't the top for the VIX, the markets are in big trouble longer term. And so very likely that's going to be that top just with how significantly it's spiked up there. And we keep seeing things that have never happened before.

I mean, a month or two ago, we had the Russell 2000 highest, I think it was highest four hour RSI in its history on that big breakout. And then we had very quickly after the NASDAQ lowest hourly RSI on the futures chart ever. Now we have the VIX, the biggest nine day percent drawdown ever. And again, I think it's those zero day options and just we're seeing so many things that we've never seen before in the trading world as things constantly change. I mean, Twitter changed the game in trading and it's just this constant evolution and adding volatility is certainly part of that evolution, at least in the here and the now. So in the meantime, what are you specifically looking at? Let's talk crypto miners. So right now we have MARA testing. They've been lagging behind

considering the broader market V-shaped bounce, considering Bitcoin had a pretty solid bounce as well. They are a much weaker bounce, but here we have MARA right now testing 1780. And it was interesting, you know, I'm sitting behind the scenes while you're interviewing your guests, and I'm looking at the miners. And I noticed recently, you know, a month ago, the low cap miners were outperforming the large cap miners, which I wouldn't have expected. I don't follow fundamentally these companies as significantly, but I figure, you know figure the halving, consolidation of the space, maybe it's the larger companies buying the smaller. And I guess that makes sense because I was looking at MARA here and I look at CLSK and I say, okay, their charts are very similar, tightening range,

weak bounce at this point. Then I pull up Wolf, W-U-L-F, smaller cap name, and its bounce looks way different. There's a lot more follow through there. So, okay. Why is that happening? And I was just digging around and I saw, oh yeah, BITF bought or is planning to buy SDIG. So SDIG gets the big gap up and the market is pricing in a premium for potentially, you know, anytime there's a buyout in the space, whether it's biotech, cannabis, whatever the other smaller companies that didn't get bought out, see a bit of a premium for the potential that maybe they're the next one to get bought out. And so this news for SDIG is adding a nice little tailwind to the smaller cap crypto miners in the stock market. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's

great. People price in that the same exact thing is going to happen to another company. I love that. Yeah. I mean, one small miner got bought, the rest of them got to get bought. Let's buy those. It's all probabilities, the markets. And so if one happens, it's just a little uptick in probability, which the market has to then price in that future probability. So definitely keeping an eye on these names, bigger picture. I need to see a clear sign that Bitcoin is, okay, it's go time. We're heading back to the all time high. We're back to blue sky breakout. And then that's the kind of move where these miners see these insane short-term gains.

So again, my mindset is I don't need to nail the bottom on these miners. When there's momentum and it's a lot more clear, there will still be opportunity in them because they're so volatile. So just I keep reminding myself, you know, when it happens with Bitcoin, don't forget to watch these miners as well, because often they outperform Bitcoin's percentage gains. And just keeping that in the back of my mind. Yeah. And quite a bit of, you know uh information will be given as to which ones survive and which ones don't i'm not saying that like some public miners won't but like the halving cycle usually really washes out or at least makes clear who's poised to really profit through the rest of the cycle so another reason not to necessarily rush in unless you've done a really fundamental deep

dive into each of them yeah uh we've got to check in on ETH, BTC, this downtrend, so nothing changing. I mean, we could bounce for two weeks and still just be at that resistance. So again, until this changes, ETH will be weaker than Bitcoin. And I, as a trader, love when I get something like this because it's just such a clear longer term guide. And you can just make a simple statement. If this is resistance, I'm not going to choose ETH over BTC. When that changes, I will. And it's almost like a clear signal for you to change your perception of the market. And, you know, the longer the longer the term, something like that lasts, the more likely you get significant follow through. And you know, that's how I found the TLT bottom was the first confirmed daily uptrend in however many months.

And that's how you know, natural gas right now is in a two year weekly downtrend. The next time it confirms a weekly uptrend, pay attention. But until that happens, you just got to remain patient. And ETH is definitely in that boat. Yeah, I think. Yeah. I've been saying it now for so long that maybe I've lost my credibility, but I still think ETH has a big day ahead of it. Yeah. When this changes in an ideal world, we get Bitcoin all-time highs, get up over 100,000, rotate to altcoins, ETH plays catch up. And that would be the... We always as traders want to see that happen because it's the playbook that has happened multiple times. We've experienced it multiple

times. This time has been a bit different as far as the persistent weakness with the altcoins, but we also don't have any massive Bitcoin all time high breakout at this point. So that's definitely what I'm going to be watching for when it happens, but it's not happening yet. Not happening yet at all. You got anything else? Last one, just the metals. Metals and miners, simple statement. If weekly EMA 12 is support on gold, I'm bullish gold, silver, and the miners. And GDX, these miners just hit two and a half year highs earlier this week. And so just again, just a nice clear guide, simple statement. If gold weekly EMA 12 is support, I'm bullish those names. When we lose it, I shift, I pump the brakes.

I step back, I size down, but it's just a nice clear guide. And again, I don't have to be constantly every day, you know, flipping my decisions. Am I bullish? And should I change? No, just a simple statement and wait for that to change. Yeah. I totally agree. I don't know if you saw in the Bitcoin chart when you were looking at it, but the 50MA, this blue line has been really aggressive resistance here. It's stopped every single move. A lot of people watch that line.

So I'm just keeping my eye on that for any sort of one more indication that maybe at least we'll go up and set that other shoulder, the neckline. I don't think it's an indication that we're going to new all-time highs or anything, but every move goes right into that. You don't want to get long slamming into the 50MA for the seventh time. Yeah. I'm also preparing though. I mean, there are times where we just wake up and wow, Bitcoin is 8% over the last two days. And so I'm watching for it, but it's not

going to happen without volume. So you got to see a volume spike for anything. It's just a sleeping giant right now. And for that giant to be awoken, you need a big volume alarm clock. Absolutely. So, hey, quickly, you said you have a stream this afternoon. People should be checking out your channel, guys. Absolutely. If you're watching here, you should be watching there. But so maybe you could just tell really quickly a little more about that or others that you do that are similar so they can check them out. Sure. Yeah. Just a webinar. I'm going to crack a beer and talk about markets. And we're going to talk about that flush, that sucker punch strategy. I'll give examples on the shorter term timeframes, the longer term timeframes, how to trade it, how to

recognize it. And again, that's going to just be on our YouTube channel, The Cherk Guys. We'll post about it on Twitter beforehand. And it's worth checking out. I've been observing it for years at this point. And the more I observe something, the more I can tweak the little criteria, the more I can explain it with words better to you all. And I've now got ample examples to do that. Ample example. Poet didn't even know it. Love it. Perfect way to end, guys. Listen, the reason that Dan is here is because he's excellent at analyzing and teaching you guys things. So you should be there listening to him analyze and teach you things. That's all we got for today.

Obviously be back tomorrow with Friday five and Dan. We will see you next week, buddy. Thank you. All right. Have a good one. Thanks guys. Bye.