The Wolf Of All Streets - Michael Saylor Buys $347 Million Worth Of Bitcoin | Prime Trust & TUSD Saga | Celsius Altcoin Dump?

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Join Joshua Frank, Michael Maloney as we discuss TUSD and Prime Trust saga, while Chris Inks and Crypto Birb join me to share their trading ideas.  Follow the guests: Joshua Frank: https://twitter.com/Joshua_Frank_ Crypto Birb: https://twitter.com/crypto_birb Michael Maloney: https://twitter.com/Blockchain_Mike Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►►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  ►►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   ►►COINROUTES TRADE SPOT & DERIVATIVES ACROSS CEFI AND DEFI USING YOUR OWN ACCOUNTS WITH THIS ADVANCED ALGORITHMIC PLATFORM. SAVE TONS OF MONEY ON TRADING FEES LIKE THE PROS! 👉 http://bit.ly/3ZXeYKd  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   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.

Last Friday, I did a long video on Prime Trust, the fact that they had likely lost private keys and then bought coins to fill the hole. The fact that Prime Trust was likely fraud and would end up in receivership, and here we are now, and the hole is much bigger than we expected. But as you dig in deeper, the story is just absolutely insane. I've spent probably the last 15-16 hours, minus 2 or 3 hours of sleep. Try to dig into TUSD, TrueUSD. Haven't really come to any grand conclusions, but we're going to discuss everything that I'm seeing. Also, quite a bit of other news. I have four guests today. We've got Josh Frank from the Tide, seemingly always here.

Of course, Mike Maloney. We've got Chris Inks and CryptoBurb in the back half to share their favorite trades of the moment. We got a lot to cover, guys. Let's go. Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before you get started, please subscribe to the channel and hit that like button. As I said, guys, this is just insanity. Yet another trusted and regulated institution in the crypto space that turned out to be basically an outright fraud, seemingly. But now it's time to dig into what the implications

are. Luckily, as I said before, it seems that they didn't really have much assets that they were custodying at this point because everybody had left. Makes you wonder why everybody seemingly left this custodian over the last year when this news is just breaking now, wondering if they knew something that we don't at some point, or if it was just they didn't like that the business was being managed in the way it was. They had some turnover, obviously, in executives. That's all conjecture, not even worth figuring out.

But before we dig into that later, there's quite a bit of other news I want to discuss. I'm going to bring on my friend Josh Frank right now, and we're going to talk through some of the bigger stories that are happening right now. What's up, man? I just think the funniest thing today is that we're talking about two companies with the name Trust in Them blowing up or having issues. Got to love them. Sorry, I just had to lead off.

Oh, man. Listen. Talking the greatest. You're wondering how. Take a quick look at the market. I always just look at the tie, obviously, which is your platform here. Bitcoin down about 2% at $30,000. Everything just kind of flat 2% to 4 platform here. Bitcoin down about 2% at 30,000. Everything just kind of flat 2%

to 4% here. Kind of seems like things are moving sideways. We had that big move up from roughly 25 to 31 and seems like the market's now just absorbing that. Now we're going to talk about why that may have happened. Obviously the first story here, MicroStrategy has acquired an additional 12,333 Bitcoin for 347 million. These guys have endless dry powder. An average price of 28,136. As of 6-27, MicroStrategy has 152,333 Bitcoin acquired for $4.52 billion. An average price of $29,668 per Bitcoin. They're only up about 350 bucks here for Bitcoin at this point.

It's really impressive. I mean, they've made like a couple hundred thousand dollars or whatever, a couple million dollars off their multi-billion dollar investment. But they're up. They're up now. I think it was down for so long. I mean, they were down for so long. It's nice to see this cost basis coming down.

But interestingly, the 8-year, which you also have the interest expense, right? They borrowed a lot of money. So presumably, they're not as up as it is. Yeah, maybe down. And this is a funny take. Saylor bought almost twice as much as all so-called institutionals together. And this is the chart. As you pointed out, this is all the ETFs. But I mean, it's kind of hilarious that when you look at how much he bought and that massive price rise, that maybe he was the bid in those US hours that we saw massively going up for the last few days. He probably was part of the bid. He continues to be the bid. When no one else is bidding, he's bidding. But look, I mean, right now, the narrative is flipped entirely on Bitcoin, right? Everyone is bullish Bitcoin. You have the BlackRock ETF in the waiting. You have the Fidelity ETF, which is seemingly

about to be announced. All these large traditional ETF issuers launching ETFs. The narrative has switched from crypto to Bitcoin over the last few weeks. Seller right now is like a genius. He couldn't go out and buy $4.5 billion worth of Bitcoin today without moving the price up to probably 50 grand, right? So he's in, he's got his cost basis now. So for whatever you thought of him for the last couple of years, he looks a lot smarter today than he looked six months ago. Yeah. I mean, I think CZ tweeted dollar cost averaging works or something to show the point. But I just wonder now if when you look at the volume, because obviously the books have been thin, there's historically low volume of trading and liquidity on the actual exchanges. Did this 400 million significantly move price? I mean, still, there's 50, 60 billion in trading on Bitcoin a day. It's not a huge amount. I think the buying, the announcement was it started April 13th-ish or something like that.

So it was over the last two months. This wasn't right now. This was the accumulation of two months. He could have been buying 10 million bucks a day. But I think the great thing is he keeps buying and MicroStrategy just had an awesome quarter. They just made like $400 million in the quarter. So they keep adding off. Forget that actual business. Yeah, it seems like it. Apparently they had lost $100 and something million in the previous, the same quarter last year. And they had a good quarter now and were able to use those

proceeds to buy Bitcoin. So keep doing it. It definitely helps. QCoin Crypto Exchange introduced mandatory KYC in July. Is there anywhere left on the planet that you're not going to have to KYC to trade besides DeFi, which the SEC is going to come after next? Well, I think soon you're going to have to KYC for DeFi as well. I think one of the cool innovations of crypto is having or that has been talked about, which obviously does not play well into the privacy part of what some people like about crypto, is the idea that you could be KYC'd by a centralized entity and then have something attached to your wallet. And then anytime you interact with the platform, you don't need to individually KYC, but you can

use it, which is great to get widespread institutional adoption of digital assets. But I don't think that there are... Look, everyone needs to offer KYC. KuCoin definitely has American customers. They're trading about their trades all day. It's the end of the party, but there's still more exchanges like uh there's there's still lots of exchanges you don't need a kyc on but few that i would trust yeah i think that's the problem is that like now if you haven't offered kyc it's almost an impediment because people are going to be like dude how shady are you that you don't have anything yeah and i wonder how many market makers are going to feel comfortable trading on the exchange as well. And I think, you know, there'll be dry liquidity. Yeah. Makes

sense. Okay. Here's the one I want your opinion on because I've been so outspoken about it. Breaking. FTX is moving ahead with efforts to revive its cryptocurrency exchange per Wall Street Journal. Come on, man. Come on. I have no different of a reaction than you do. Who is going to use it? Who's going to trust it, right? Like maybe you have some crypto native folks that I love that first, you know, tis but a flesh wound Monty Python meme there. But it's like no institution is going to go within000 miles of an FTX 2.0. But they're saying they would rebrand and the technology is good and that, you know, they could get money back for creditors by accruing value to the token.

First of all, like FTT. So are you going to make a new token? You can still use FTT. Also, any token you issue or FTT are going to be unregistered securities according to the SEC. Well, undoubtedly, it's definitely if it's accruing value, if that's the pitch. Yeah. But maybe the only more damaging letters to the perception of crypto than FTX are SBF, but it's still the same, right? But I mean, can you imagine literally like every person on the planet would think that this new exchange and the entire space was a fraud if they relaunched this? I can't wrap my head around it. There's no way their tech is so superior to anything we've seen in other exchanges that

we need FTX to relaunch. Well, also keep in mind, I mean, what the SEC has come out and said is they want people to separate the exchange from the custody, from the clearing, right? FTX was holding customer assets, which is how they were able to draw down $9 billion of customer assets and use it for personal reasons or investments in AI companies and things that had nothing to do with crypto. Gary is not going to be happy with this. Well, he's not going to be happy if they find out that one of those luxury estates in the Bahamas is his. I'm just kidding, guys. If they could give him one house, they'd give him a whole community. He takes offense to thinking they'd only give him a house.

That's right. But that was, I think, the funniest Bruce Fenton tweet. I once tweeted something like, I really wish CZ had hired Gary Gensler. You know, looking back, it's obviously all deceit. And Bruce Fenton responded to me that FTX had hired him instead. It kind of made me giggle. This is one that obviously we discussed yesterday. You kind of sent me the word discussing. Grayscale's estimated revenue reaches record levels.

So basically, GBTC and ETH, even though there's no redemptions and basically no inflows at this point, are making record money now. Curious that they're trying to convert to an ETF, which would eliminate all of this earning. So is that smoke and mirrors mirrors or is that something they're actually trying to do? It sounds like they're actually trying to do it. I mean, they're suing the SEC. So I think the

belief has to be, look, they're taking 2.5% of the NAV in fees, which is giant, presumably, I think they'd have to move to like 1% or 1.25%, maybe even less with an ETF. And I think what they're betting on is if they sue, they win and they get the ETF first, then maybe they get enough inflow that kind of overtakes that number. And I think- 10 times the AUM, they can charge a 10th of the fees and make the same amount of money type thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think also, look, at some point this party is over because these shareholders are so pissed and they just sue and sue and sue and sue and sue Grayscale. So I don't know. I mean, I think they kind of, I think they feel like they have to do it. They could allow

redemptions now without converting into an ETF, but the problem is every single person would redeem. Yeah. But I think the belief is if it moves to an ETF, maybe people will sell the shares as opposed to redeeming. They can continue to earn margin fees. Maybe it's not as high, but I think the important thing here is 44 million in revenue is humongous. It's a 60 person team. I have to guess their cost is less than, I don't know, 20 million a year, maybe. And so 20, 30 million a year. And so you model that out, that's 500 million revenue business that's got 30 million expenses. You're making 470 in profit. The reason that I think it's important is DCG has a lot of money that they owe and at this continued rate, they can pay that money back. Yeah, it's the only way. I mean, you can see GBTC just looking at the chart really quick. It's up

way more than Bitcoin. I mean, on that first Bitcoin move up, I think Bitcoin was up five or six, 7% in a day and GBTC was up like 17%. Clearly, this is the discount closing. If they get back to NAV, right? You made an extra 44% if you bought a plastic. You don't make an extra 44%. You actually

don't. They're charging the percentage on NAV. You actually don't make an extra. I was just thinking that, but you don't. A percentage of that, Right. Correct. Sorry. Even if that discount went to 90%, they'd still make $44 million. For that. Right. But I'm talking about the... I wasn't talking about Grayscale. I'm talking about people who are buying GPTC anticipating this discount closing. And then obviously at the same time, because of all the BlackRock ETF hype and

Fidelity ETF hype and everybody else ETF hype, weekly imploded crypto investment products hits 199 million largest since July 22. This is mostly specifically to BITO, I think we call it BITO, the futures ETF, the first one that was launched ahead of Valkyrie's BTF. And then obviously we saw the 2X leverage ETF launch this week. So there is some real action here, right? Yeah, I mean, it's real money. And look, I think it shows that there is demand for an ETF, right? The fact that people are putting money in Biddo, I think shows that there is demand for an ETF, there will be a lot of buying when an ETF launches. And I mean, I think on on on, you know, the Twitter spaces that you hosted yesterday, I think one of the guests said that they had heard rumblings that there was already single digit billions in demands for the BlackRock ETF that BlackRock had had in the couple of weeks since the announcement or since the filing.

So shows that there is clearly demand and with an ETF with iShares name on it, I presume there would be a tremendous amount of demand that exceeds that. All right. The last thing in the title before we start talking about Prime Trust TSD is Celsius and Robinhood altcoin dump? Obviously, everybody knows, I think that as of yesterday, Robinhood, and we've seen screenshots of Robinhood liquidating people, Solana, Matic, ADA, basically, Those are the three that were named in the suits. And now we know that Celsius is going to liquidate those into Bitcoin and Ethereum. Hilarious, because it's probably when Bitcoin dominance is the highest and they're worth the lowest versus Bitcoin. Not hilarious. I'm sorry to Celsius creditors.

And Robinhood is liquidating. Do you think this meaningfully impacts the altcoin market, especially for those coins? Well, I mean, it sounds like Robinhood sold yesterday, right? That's what they were supposed to have, yeah. So we didn't see it. 2%? Matic's down 5%? If that's it, it's not.

Maybe it's OGC anyway. It's not like they're dumping it on their own platform, right? Yeah, they could be selling it. Look, potentially some of the tokens could be buying back out of their own treasury more of these tokens to soften the blow. I don't know how they're selling it. I assume they're probably selling it through Coinbase OGC if I had to guess. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the impact has been insignificant.

And in crypto, we have a lot of buy the rumor, sell the news. In this case, it could be sell the rumor, buy the news. I think there's been a lot of... I mean, if we look over the last 30 days, for example, Bitcoin's up 8%, ETH is only down 2%. But if you look, Solana's down 22%, Polygon's down... I mean, just that day where they all dropped 30% and Bitcoin was like flat, right? Two Fridays

ago or whatever it was, the absolute bloodbath. Great. So, I mean, they've already, look, just because things down 90% doesn't mean it can't fall another 90%. We know that. We've seen that in crypto many times. But with that said, I think I will, I mean, I think we still have the Celsius selling to come, but if

the selling for Robinhood already happened, this is a pretty good sign that the impact is going to be minimal. All right. Now, listen, we're going to shift and we're going to talk about Prime Trust. So listen, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go through all the nonsense that I've seen.

I'm going to bring on Michael as well here. What's up, Michael? How are you, man? Doing well. How's it going over there? Good. You look like you're in the Matrix. It's cool. are very i need to like blur my backgrounds i feel like i'm not in the right how does he know how to blur my background i think it just blurred itself

but you did it cool you're literally in the matrix it's like inception dude that's actually what josh's room looks like guys that's not a that's how many facebook's metaverse there's no one else in oh well you also which means you also have no legs. And so, listen, you and I have been talking kind of in a couple WhatsApp groups, trying to dig into what's happening here. I haven't come to any firm conclusions. I know that you haven't either, but I want to share kind of what we've been going through here. You guys can just comment at any given point here. So, obviously, guys, the Devon and FID filed a petition to place Prime Trust into receivership.

And the allegation here, which I've effectively been making for weeks, FID alleged Prime Trust lost access to legacy wallets in 2021 and used customer assets to buy back crypto. Basically, if someone wanted to redeem, they would replace those assets without their customer funds and hope that the music never stopped in this game of musical chairs, right? And then Prime Trust owes customers $85,670,000. That's about $60 million more than we thought because they were looking for $25 million to avoid bankruptcy. They only have about $3 million, 2.9. And then as digital currency, Prime Trust owes $69 million to its clients. By the way, it is a custodian.

There should never be a hole. That money should be there regardless of how poorly they operate their business. But they only have $68,648,000. The fucking crazy part, pardon my French, is that the bulk of that, at least $61 million of that $68 million is in one coin, which is audio. And they hold 33% of the supply. Can somebody explain to me why Prime Trust, which has $68 million in assets, has most of that in one altcoin when they're supposed to be a custodian? Any theories on that, guys? Because I have nothing. Mike?

Well, the audio part of it is really interesting. I want to shift back to the Nevada one because the Nevada claim is that losses are all in fiat and that they spent it all. And I want to point out that that means that they deliberately took advantage of a gap in qualified custodian rules. The SEC maintains that you have to keep all crypto assets for each customer separate. That appears to actually have happened, but then they dipped into the Omnibus account and drained possibly up to $120 million at the time,

back in 2022, 2021, and then bought a whole bunch of new assets. Maybe some of those assets they bought were audio. Did somebody come to custody? a whole bunch of new assets. Maybe some of those assets they bought were audio. There's just somebody did somebody come to custody? Yeah, I'm sure they did, but why that? Did they think they had some inside insight that this was

going to pump massively and it was going to fill their hole? Because, I mean, anyone with a brain knows that if you own 31% of the circulating supply, no matter how high the price goes, you're never going to be able to get it out. Well, I mean, there's been plenty of people who have thought that if you hold over 31%, you'll be okay. But FTT, Ripple, maybe we don't need to go into all of them, but it seems like somebody made a fundamental error and went all in on audio.

I think if we went through the marketing team and who was over there, you might see some over. Yeah. And so I think there was also some question as to how the private keys actually got lost, how this happened. Josh, you and I discussing this before, but effectively, I mean, you can say the basics. I have this story from Coindesk here if you want me to share it. Yeah, please. I think I might have it too. Is it this one? The Nevada places... I should know your better.

No, it's this one. Nevada files to place crypto custodian Prime Trust into receivership. Well, I'll take it. Prime Trust entered an agreement with Fireblocks to have the latter company manage its crypto assets, which was completed in 2020. In 2021, after Prime Trust saw new management, it set up legacy wallet forwarding for wallets that were either on

Fireblocks' platform or set up to forward to wallets on Fireblocks' platform, the filing said. However, in December 2021, Prime Trust, quote unquote, discovered that it was unable to access its legacy wallets or cryptocurrencies held in those. You have one job. Yeah. Well, the timeline on that is also really interesting. So they brought back the legacy wallet after they had completed the Fireblocks integration. I want to be very clear here.

I don't think Fireblocks is the issue. Fireblocks is the backend for most of the custodial industry and they all prime trust but yes i'm not fighting fireblocks at all but yes that's the key right yeah yeah prime trust didn't take them up on it it appears but the hilarious part is they brought back this legacy wallet from 2021 that had been mothballed in 2019 we know that there were a number of network upgrades on btc that would have made that a very bad decision between 2019 and 2021 they lost control in december october the founder scott purcell left and started fortress

that's same which is where everybody's now custodying who left prime trust yeah and Al left under a cloud of fraud with lawsuits saying that he had stolen all the intellectual property and taken a whole bunch of NFTs because he had pivoted their business at bank not at prime trust into NFTs and then left went to fortress

and now that's the guy who's running it and all these platforms that are bragging about the fact that they escaped prime Trust have gone to the same guy. Okay. So here's my next question, though. And this is something that I tweeted yesterday, because I don't really know the answer, although people have given it. Now I'm getting a glitch here. Interesting question. Prime Trust was regulated and presumably audited, right? And we'll get into how that's through one link oracle. But this is a federally and state regulated company. Even though they lost private keys, could they still provide proof of reserves as the coins were still in the wallet? Is there a proof of keys required to prove access to the wallet? Because

if they're just showing an auditor, here's the wallet, the coins are there. They've lost the keys, not the coins, right? But then I quickly got a response from CKB. Auditors may request management to transfer a specified amount of cryptoallets ballots during crypto wallets controlled by the entity and inspect the blockchain record for the occurrence of the transaction. So apparently it's very common. You send one sat from one of your wallets to another. It proves that you have ownership. This is a year and a half, almost two years, and no auditor caught the fact that they didn't have these assets. How can that literally possibly happen? So there's two things that happened over that 18 month period. It appears

that they didn't comply with any of the state or federal regulations for a public audit. And as a result, they lost over seven licenses during that time. The other is they got their SOC 1 and SOC 2 certificates at the end of 2022. So there was an audit firm on site ensuring that they actually had the technical capabilities to maintain keys. But it doesn't clearly... A SOC audit doesn't have anything to do with your... I mean, we're SOC audited. It doesn't have anything to do with... We're not a custodian.

I mean, a SOC audit just says that you have controls in place to protect data and information and things like that. So I don't, I mean, whoever SOC audited them wasn't doing it. But that's what Mike's saying, right? I mean, they could prove that they have the technology or the ability to make a transfer and not have to prove that they could do it. I don't even think a SOC auditor would look at that. Well, you know, they're looking at documentation and papers.

They're not actually looking at it, which is going to call into question SOC audits for the crypto industry. Maybe we need a SOC 3 or a SOC crypto or something like that. But yeah, look, I used to be at a Y. I started their distributed ledger technology practice. The partners that have been elevated there for the audit side would 100% have demanded at least two transfers of every

single coin. Yeah, they just don't understand how this didn't happen if they're regulated. It just makes no sense to me. Now we can get into like... Who was their audit here? Was it? Who was their audit? Oh, we'll get into that. What's their name? New... I have that here somewhere. It's branded the first object to you in the metaverse. Oh, sorry, Josh. What's their name? New. I have that here somewhere. It's branded the first office team in the metaverse.

Oh, sorry, Josh. It's the FTX guys, but we'll get into that. It's the guys who failed the audit on FTX, then rebranded their name, and were the ones who audited 2SD. That's where we get into the really fun part of the story here. But here, let's get into some of the weird shady stuff. So now we're going from Prime Trust into 2SD, by the way, guys.

So TrueUSD, one of their major custodians here was Prime Trust. To be clear, only 26,000 of funds were left at Prime Trust. That's being reported. So originally people were like, holy shit, TUSD can't be backed. Millions of dollars lost. It's $26,000. So hold your horses. But obviously it's causing people to go down the TUSD rabbit hole like myself. TUSD announced on June 22nd they had no exposure to Prime Trust. I talked to you guys about this. Literally, the day before or the next day, these dates are backwards, informed customers that due to a letter Prime Trust received on January 21st, the customers could not mint or redeem TUSD. So they said, we have no exposure, that a day later said, hold up, we can't mint or redeem to USD. So they said, we have no exposure that a day later said, hold up, we can't mint or redeem right now

because of our exposure to Prime Trust who we have no exposure to. Then to USD accounted for most, the most Bitcoin volume on June 22nd, right? So here you go, suspended all deposits. That was after. And then they said, oh shit, no, we actually do have exposure.

Then to USD, the most volume on Binance, right? I can go out of order here. I can show you this, which is really interesting. And I think Mike has some more color on this, but we saw a billion coins on June 15th, just the week before that of TUSD minted on Binance. Mind you mind you guys it's a billion coins the total circulating supply of tusd is three billion so at that point they went from two billion to three billion a 50 increase in market cap and circulating supply of tusd and then after that mint this is where that happened i'm not making a conspiracy theory but my tests of evidence and we've seen some correlation between these moves.

The deadest bottom on June 15th at the exact same time as that mint alert was the deadest bottom of Binance of the move of Bitcoin at 24,721 before. All right. Right.

Don't you? You said that you now can look at the three last major mints and all of them preceded, what, a 20% they're a market leader for that. So for TUSD, Feb 17, we see that they start and they move on to Binance platform, only $50 million minted. Next month, they issue $700 million new TUSD. Market goes up 35% over a seven-day period. The next two 20% plus moves, including the one you saw on June 14th, preceded $500 million and $1 billion issuances. Now, it's entirely possible that a large group of people all simultaneously decided they wanted TUSD to purchase a lot of Bitcoin, but there's starting

to be a little bit of a labor here where we're seeing the only place where you can exchange TUSD is preceding the pump every time. And this is going to be bad for regulators to not only hit Binance again, but also to start regulating all of the stable coins. But to be fair, BUSD basically was eliminated by the United States government right in their action against Paxos. And Binance very transparently said, well, since we had no fee trading on BUSD, we're going to move to TUSD. So there is a very good, very logical reason there would be tremendously more demand for minting this by Binance, because this was basically the main place they were telling people to go after BUSD. So that could very well be the reason that we're seeing something like this. That would have been BUSD or another coin. But I mean, the coincidence is just crazy. Now, listen, now we got to get into

the auditor. This is from Adam Cochran, who he offered that these great threads. He's been wrong in the past, but still some great threads. Wait, the auditor who has been attesting to the TUSD audits in PrimeTrust was the old FTX auditor who set up under a new name after the FTX schedule. These guys literally audited the biggest script in history and just renamed themselves. They went from the name Armanino to the network firm. And their chain link Oracle is just 17 different nodes all pulling from the same source. Okay, their account last posted they had multiple rails on June 23rd,

the same day they sent an email to users saying mint and redeem was paused. I mean, we can go so far down this, guys. It's got a lot of the things that we've already discussed here. Can't redeem, apparently. People are saying that they can't redeem and that TrueUSD actually sent them to Binance

to go trade the coins out. Just go trade it for USDT or something, but you can't redeem directly. I mean, this is such, I don't even want to spend the time, honestly. Guys, there's so much here. But we're famous for being the first audit firm in the metaverse, which is an absolutely ludicrous idea. Look, if we want institutional controls, go to an institutional audit firm. Yes, the big four is expensive. It's going to cost you $300,000 to $500,000 to audit.

If they'll do it. They're not touching crypto outside of Coinbase, but yeah. I know for a fact, big four, they were on the scene when FTX went under. They would have been there auditing. You bring a $9 billion client in, people will figure out how to onboard them. But I've worked with firms that have under a billion dollars of assets and we've been able to get big four. I've worked my own company, we've approached big four and they've had the conversation. They gave us a check size or a bill size

that would have been like, do it or go away. But it's not impossible. These firms are there. You don't have to go into Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse to go out and find an auditor. You guys are living there. Circle is audited by Deloitte. Yeah, it's possible.

This is the gist. You have a stable coin that won't tell you it's banking partners. The only one they've announced is Prime Trust, so nobody knows where the rest of their assets are. The one known partner is BankRash. Has audits from a former FTX auditor. Is it tested by an oracle run only by that auditor? Doesn't

seem to be redeeming and pumped $2 billion into circulation after knowing they had issues. I would just be really careful around True usd here guys i don't know this one's hilarious i don't know if you guys saw this they deleted the tweet saying to usd is 100 reserved right you can see here if you look at their tweet thread that's not there and then you go back to the screenshot which was taken before and it says that uh proves they're 100% reserved. They literally deleted the tweet. It seems like they don't do these things. They announced that they hit

a new high watermark of traded volume today. Oh my god, it's my favorite tweet of the year. My favorite tweet of the year is that somebody clearly, as someone said somewhere, the intern just didn't get the notes and tweeted that they had hit a high watermark of trading volume today. And it was like a new milestone of $68 billion.

I mean, while everybody on the planet is looking at them for wash trading and potential fraud and their ties to Prime Trust. I mean, can you get any more colorblind than this? I mean, and you forgot that it DPEG. Yeah. Yeah. It's like yeah it was like 9.9985 a very minor d-peg but guys i mean what do you make of this in general i mean what's the conclusion here before we move on like i said i wasn't going to do the deep dive prime trust because a lot of this is fun these are for man for man-on-accounts. But when you put it all together, it's pretty clear that they're not being very transparent, at the very least. Well, the interesting thing is the DPEG hit almost $0.70 on Binance US.

But in DeFi, it's not even in the top 40 coins for exchange. So this is suggesting to me that this is institutional trade desks taking advantage. And in that case, it'd be US-based trade desks taking advantage and in that case it'd be u.s based trade desks so so they're shorting it they're basically de-pegging it by taking advantage of an arbitrage opportunity or yeah absolutely just look where the blood was uh right after ft and taraluna i'm thinking we're gonna have the usual four and five letter trade desks coming in scooping up a bunch of money and probably paying a fine in a few months for doing it.

Just like they did with the Terra Luna DPEG and SEC violation. I mean, Josh, you heard it all. I, I, I, I don't know about that.

I, we'll see. I mean, a lot of those guys aren't trading crypto right now because of US regulatory related issues. Basically, the market makers, all of them are our clients, so we know them very well. If they had an offshore entity, they continue to trade. If they didn't have an offshore entity, they're really not doing much anymore. But a lot of these guys had already moved off offshore. Yeah. I mean, this is, well, this is back to, this is the same auditor thing. I didn't realize somebody had already kind of scooped this up,

but this is pretty funny. This network firm has had a LinkedIn for a few years. There was one employee at it. And then all of a sudden it went up to 13 in March of 2023. So that's pretty great. The web site is just laughable. It's so funny, the language you were showing me. What is it, true USB?

Just type it in and make Google it, yes. They use pixelated in YouTube. Guys, this is like, these are supposed to be regulated, but we'll find it here. So Josh is pointing, like, you have bettering sent off. Operated by a regular operator. But I don't understand.

Operating under the operations of an operating operator. Who are they regulated by? I can't figure it out. I was, like, trying to figure out who they're regulated by. Look, I mean, I'm not trying to, like,'re regulated by. I would think that Binance would know better, especially after... I mean, the thing that's crazy, by the way, about US regulators is that Paxos was a trusted real entity that they just shut down and now people's assets are being moved to this. Paxos had a New York trust license. They were regulated in New Yorkork state they were federally

regulated as well and they shut that down because you know but only on busd not on usdp which is paxos his own stable coin yeah which is the same thing um right literally the same thing so the difference is that the usd had 50 billion and PUSD has like 50 cents. There's just such a huge discrepancy. But I mean, look, you'd think Binance would do their diligence and their homework, especially with the regulatory crackdown and not work with somebody who has all... I mean, this website is ridiculous. I could build a better website in Wix.com by the end of this call. So Josh, you bring up a really interesting point on the regulator. So the federal regulators are doing these actions that force investors into shadier and loosely regulated, loosely guided products. The state regulators are doing a fantastic job. Nevada shutting down Prime Trust. Texas, they just made their filing against Abra, which Abra now has exposure to Prime Trust and TUSD. But remember, Texas and Nevada were the first ones to file against FTX. So while the federal regulators were courting FTX and trying to push this forward,

the Texas regulators came forward and said, we think you're offering illegal securities, we think you're doing illegal marketing, and we don't see any proof of reserves of what you're doing. So I don't know what's happening that the state regulators, often states that people would think are quote, business friendly, but they're really regulatory friendly, are doing such great jobs. You even point out New York. New York is an onerous pain in the ass to do regulation here. But it's a lot better than just going up to the federal level and getting shot in the face for trying to do something right. So we're seeing a clear divide growing.

We do. I think it's I agree with you. I agree with you. I think it is a state by state basis though because you know the Alabama Coinbase thing is a little ridiculous right? So I think it's clear the states though in general

if anyone is doing good it's at certain state levels. I think it shows look politicians are not you know, you know, they're individuals, right? And at the end of the day, they operate individually, right? And the same thing goes with regulators, right? So within the SEC, Hester is great, right? So it's an individual by individual basis. There's just a lot of individuals who are not doing a good job.

All right. Do I have to move on to, I see Chris and Burb waiting in the wings. Michael, Josh, thank you so much. Josh, you're going to be on Spaces in 30 minutes. So I'll just continue on the conversation. Michael, man, thank you so much for digging into this with me behind closed doors and trying to figure it out. We're going to go deeper into this once we get more. It's inevitably like every 24 hours, I think this story is going to grow. So just a final thought. If you see a crypto company and it has the name Trust in it, you should definitely trust it. That's my theory. Totally. Totally. Prime, no trust. That was going to be our title. I think Misha had prime

no trust, but we pivoted it. No trust token. No trust token. Prime no trust token. Yeah. Perfect. All right, guys. Thanks trust and no trust token. Yeah, perfect. All right, guys. Thanks. Speak to you soon.

Hey, guys. Okay, cool. Now, obviously, this next segment, as you guys know, sponsored by... I still can't do the direction. OKX, where you can trade all the stuff we're about to talk about. We're running a couple minutes late. Chris, you know, usually I got you on here earlier. Man, I'm sorry. We were waiting in the wings while we were flooding stable coins.

I can't hear you. Chris, I can't hear you. I'm not sure if anybody can hear you, but I cannot hear you. Let me see if I can hear Burp. Can I hear you? Or is it me? Lift your mic. I can hear you.

Go. I can't hear you, Chris. I can't hear you. Go. I can't hear you, Chris. I can't hear you. God. You guys are just humbling my beards on a level that I can't even imagine. Well, I got you, Burb. So listen, we're going to start talking here. The idea, obviously, guys, as you know, we'll see if Chris, can we hear you?

You're muted. Guys, we do big tech checks here. It's very important. You have yourself muted. He'll figure it out. There's a mute button on the bottom there. It says mute. Can't hear him. So, try restarting, hard refreshing, or restarting the browser, and maybe it's just a new kind of like you know update to the google chrome or whatever process cool just in the meantime burb i know that like guys that the criteria like i said now for the trading section is we just get like the three best ideas or three most compelling things that someone has so that's what we're going to do with you i know you got bitcoin xle and i think xly xlp so do i go ahead and share your screen let's take a look first at Bitcoin. Correct. Right on. Yeah, so should I share the screen? Yeah, please. Okay. Very good. Let me get it up.

We're ready for everything here, guys. Always. Heavily prepped. Okay, good. I see myself in your screen. Correct. Let me find it real quick. So it's going to be this one to start off. Perfect. Let me find it real quick. So it's going to be this one to start off. Perfect. Can we see it?

Yep. Excellent. So long story short, I'd say that Bitcoin is right now in the, well, first of all, bull market. Understanding that, it's critical. And it's not my opinion, it's a fact, and it's a fact because the market trends tend to tell so. So it's not debatable anymore.'s a fact, and it's a fact because the market trends tend to tell so, right? So it's not debatable anymore. It's something that we cannot deny. Anybody denying this is a bull market is basically caught in the wrong biases,

a.k.a. forcing their mind to believe in what their eyes see at the time, right? So it's a psychological game there uh otherwise again just looking at a straight line representing the bull market line or a bear market line under the moving average it climbs up continuously and even more aggressively over the time ever since mid-march or early march right and this has been a lagging indicator this is insensitive to the price fluctuations that are recency bias it's not biased towards recency uh which uh which which arguably again has its own process costs right so this is insensitive insensitive data and it insensitive data climbs up consistently for three four months on average uh more and more aggressively this has nothing to do with the

bear market right 200 days of price action bitcoin averaged out and they continue to move for 130 days or so upwards with no change right uh to the upside so it's it's very it's very plain it's very simple and straightforward so i'll let this is just to set the facts right from the very beginning anything else again that is just discussing that is just denying that is uh is an opinion right and opinions suck because they lose money we cannot rely on opinions in our trading because we lose money consistently uh now has ever proven that trading out opinions uh you know can be beneficial over the longer period of time you make unlucky once in a while you may roll a dice and

get you know five times in a five times in a row the same result you may you may flip a coin you know 50 times in a round maybe 10 out of 15 you get heads but it doesn't make you the biggest genius coin clipper in history right so if we're in the bull market here then like i mean we should move to like what do you expect next right obviously we know this move up this massive move up from 25 to 31. Okay. Right. And by the way, in the newsletter today, instead of doing my own Bitcoin analysis, I just shared your thread from yesterday. I was like, this is way deeper than anything I'm going to do. And I said, just listen to Burp. So I'm on board.

All right. Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you. Yeah. So like I said, I love focusing on the five switches on the left hand side right anything regarding you know the right hand side of the chart is basically the unknown is uncertain future so it's subject to biases is it subject to uncertainty right however what we know is that if we rely on the fact the fact that trends tend to persist more likely than they are to reverse then we're most likely looking at a continuous climb higher, regardless of what's happening here in the short term. So there might be a chance right now, we are obviously stuck in the overall range spreading between 24.8 and 31.4. We've made new highs, which is good, which is positive. Eventually, the bull market is a sequence of higher highs and higher levels that eventually accelerate right this is the beauty of simple technical analysis classics and and

crypto so uh again arguably it's a matter of time until we're supposed to climb higher of course on unless you know some regulatory stuff pops up etc right so so just only discounting what we see in the chart uh and assuming that assuming that non-nuclear war globally will burst, etc. We are looking at the fairly positive context. On top of that, the year is the most bullish setup you could ever get.

You could ever ask. I want to do this. Correct. That's it. Chris, I just want to hear real quick this is your mic working yeah okay so you're allowed to comment now on what burb's saying and take that would take the pressure off me burb do you mind if we flip to chris's bitcoin chart real quick and then we'll go on to uh i will for the next 12 minutes run to xle and the other ones

you got what do you got here chris yeah so this is a chart. I put out a few charts over the last, I don't know, I guess this year, longer term looking charts, kind of looking at different things because again, when you look at Wyckoff, most people don't understand it. They don't understand the idea of accumulation and distribution. They talk about it a lot. So I've tried to kind of show all these different ways in which, uh, we can probably tell that the bottom is most likely in. And so this is one of those charts and we kind of look at these, uh, bear to market to bull market stages here. And so, uh, you know, going back through time, uh, basically, you know, step one is you print that swing low, uh, step two is you cross above the, uh, the 20 MA step three is this

pullback. And usually either you're going to have this real strong move up, which just kind of pulls back locally and continues, or you're going to have a pullback to the 20 MA right here. And that's your three. And that's a retest there. Four, then the fourth stage of it is the rest of that rally. And that rally is usually up to at least 61.8. So if you were to retrace the entire bear market here, it gets up to about 61.8% of that. And then that usually is completing there around the Ichimoku cloud's highest point. So you can kind of see it right in here.

You can see it again right here. I've got the square around each one of them showing here. So, you know, again, it's continually doing that. Look at that as it repeats over and over again, um, you know, again, that gets us up here into that, basically that kind of, um, upper forties, lower fifties kind of target area, uh, before we actually get a real pullback. And so, I mean, for me, uh, just, just another way to kind of look at it, you know, uh, where people maybe are a little bit more comfortable because there's a little bit more patterns uh you know i think burbs talked

about it before where uh where you know as human beings we tend to uh find patterns we tend to even if they're not really there we tend to find them pretty easily uh and so you know again you got wedges and you've got you know uh the same kind of pattern of movement so i reposted this chart here recently because it's it's still holding through. Again, there's one other one here. And by the way, notice on the weekly Stoke RSI here, we're just now breaking back out of oversold. So there's still a lot of room to go in as well as with the RSI here.

But the other one here that I thought was interesting, there's another one I put out a few months back. And the big idea here is this purple line, this resistance from December of 2017. So that all-time high over there. And then it comes up here, and you get a retest here in August of last year, a retest again here in February of this year.

And then we broke up and came down, and here we are retesting it as support. And now, you know, again, busting right up here as as uh as adrian was saying there you know two months downward you know in a week we took it all back out so i mean you know again the same kind of line you're holding through in the process i mean i'm getting going 10 weeks other people talking about you know oh i'm still bearish and, you know, my invalidation level hasn't been set, but they can't ever tell you. You ask them over and over again, well, what's your invalidation level? I mean, they don't give you one. And I'm going to tell you-

Some number higher that I'm going to change. Yeah, and they'll keep harboring it, right? I'm like, listen, guys, if you're traders and you talk to somebody and they're like, oh, you know, well, my, it hasn't been validated yet. And they can't tell you what the invalidation level is, is because they don't honestly have one. It makes it easier for them to emotionally continue to move the the goalposts there and the boundaries and keep on going on and it's a really dangerous way to trade you're going to lose risk management is absolutely the most important part guys period end of sentence absolutely agree so listen we're all bullish on bitcoin i think it's very clear burb you

wanted to take a look at an XLE premise of a potential energy reversal here, right? Your mic's muted. Correct, right on. There we go. So, Chris obviously uses 100% correct and right, and I just love listening to it.

So whatever Chris says out there. Yeah, long story short, I'd say that there is a very decent chance that we are looking at a historical reversal in the energy sector of the S&P 500, right? And again, take it with a grain of salt. I may be wrong.

Like there are so many stuff that we cannot predict. There's, of course, wars, war on the site going on. And of course, Russia is a big part of that, you know, about the energy set, you know, energy supplies, et cetera. So take it with a grain of salt. However, just by looking at the trend slowly, you know, we are probably most likely losing the edge of the bulls anymore. Right? If you have a look, we spent about two months already below the joint at the moving average, which has slowed significantly.

And even though this is a logarithmic chart, you know, it is clearly to be seen basically that the whole chapter of 2022, the energy was the best performer. 2022 was the year of the energy. It was the best performer, the energy spike aggressively also with the Russian-Ukraine war burst, etc. So the narrative has cooled down a little bit, of course. It's still sensitive to the use. However, the trends argue, you know, have flipped, right? We are not bullish anymore.

We're moving in a side risk, like a rectangle maybe a little bit. There was some slip on top, you know, maybe like a double top right there, overfrown. You know, you get a situation when the resistance is overfrown and the market just turns back to the resistance. This causes this major reversal pattern more often than not. So arguably what is more relevant and more important

more indicative of the future is the Relative Strength Study. The Relative Strength Study is basically dividing one price of one security by another. And in this context, we can tell which one is the leading sector or the lagging sector. So by dividing XLE versus SPX S&P 500, we're looking at a continuous relative strength ratio decline ever since 2023 started or even prior to it. So October and November, when the bull market started for the stocks with the bottoming process around the S&P 500 for October, etc. Ever since the S&P 500 has continuously outperformed and beaten the XLE, the energy is actually the worst performer right now. You can go ahead and look at the numbers. It's one of the worst performers among other defensive sectors.

So the boomer has clearly come in to the stocks as well. The energy is no longer a preferred choice by investors, right? And the relative strength, again, ratio, it continues to make and put in lower highs and low lows. We continue to print lower lows on the relative strength ratio. What it tells me is that there is a continued dislike and this lack of interest, the decline in the interest of investors, among investors to prefer energy over the S&P 500. It means that the investors are clearly far more risk-offense-oriented than well done in the last year.

So there is this arguable lack of demand shaping or slight significant decrease in the amount of energy for something that is defensive or something that is recessionary in a way uh for the setup right and uh and there's a strong tilt towards the risk on side of the market right s&p 500 so uh and again we're spending 60 days almost calendar days without the moving average which has not been the case for many many years until the bull market started for the silly right uh within the copy covered year so arguably again not only this the trend has slowed we are we've lost the steam off the actual bull that lasted from 2020 all the way through 2020 uh to mid right and we continue to stay and reject and kind of like make ourselves comfortable on the

energy side uh below the 200-day moving, which represents the bull market or the bear market. So right now, it seems like we are probably not in the bull market anymore. The related strength ratio continues to decline, which again proves the validity of this kind of like a shift on the preference that the investors do not prefer energy prepare energy anymore right and on top of that well overall energy is not doing well in the inflationary context right so whenever that there is this inflationary uh thrust from the feds eventually potentially after the coming you know optional to to hikes you know this may give them um well even more risk offense right to pumping the liquidity into the market the markets to better the risk assets to better the risk defense the risk of

defensive stocks to worse uh and that's also one of the reason to believe that there might be a major major turn confirmation right uh as the related strength often leads to price same way we had the breakout here when the energy was at the bottom of a symmetrical triangle Right there at the boundary right the the energy the relationship ratio often meets the price So you allows continued the printed no new laws on the price just maybe we made We are yet to see the new laws of the energy that would We only got a few minutes left obviously because I have to go to Twitter spaces soon So Chris, do you have a shared thoughts on that um i don't have a chart with me at the moment here but yeah i mean

i agree you don't need to yeah yeah do you have pulled up there do what i see you have a chart pulled up there though and oh yeah i sit the e-minis s&p yeah let's take a look at stocks really quick because burr obviously said stocks bull market energy bear market bitcoin bull market right Bitcoin, bull market, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing different here. Same thing. When I talked about the bottom of Bitcoin there, again, same idea. I hit the low in June, mid-August swing high has always been the thing across all the charts to get above. Then we had this, here it was October swing low. And I've been talking about it, break it out above that gives us an ABC down, break it out above locks it in as corrective. Based on this kind of ascending barrier triangle here, we've got a pattern target right around 46, 41, 50. Locally here, it looks like we should break out higher up to at least 45, 72, 25. So those are kind of the two

targets I'm looking at. I think once it gets up around that area, then we finally get a bit of a pullback. And then, you know, it just continues up higher from there, I believe. I'm going to have to get Mike McGlone from Mondays on with all of us to tell us about the depression that's coming and how this has to all fail. Well, you know, everybody's got to have something to say, right? I just look at the charts. Of course. I can't blame you guys.

Sorry it was a little shorter today. We got a little carried away with the TrueUSD Prime Trust stuff. But, yeah, we'll obviously be back next Wednesday doing it again. Let me take that out. Guys, listen, we're going to keep digging into that TrueUSD thing because, you know, we've got to get ahead of these insane stories because they're not good when they come too late. And yeah, I agree with you guys both on the general sentiment there. Energy being down, stocks and Bitcoin up.

I mean, I think Bitcoin is still going to rip faces. I really do. I still see people saying $25,000 they're going to buy and we were there last week. Yeah, well, you know, you get get there Everybody wants to buy at the lower point It's like well nah why don't you buy a little bit lower there Well man again it's $25,000 I was literally there Like 10 days ago or something

It blows my mind Unless you're missing an entry by $1 right Yeah yeah I don't know I'm not financial advice But yeah and next time we're going to talk About all coins too because I'm going to be honest I'm about ready Yeah, yeah. Just buy, man. I don't know. Not financial advice, but yeah. And next time we're going to talk about all coins too because I'm going to be honest, I'm about ready. Very close. Once we see that impulsive move, then I'm ready.

Guys, thank you so much. Going to be back, obviously, tomorrow morning, night. Which show is it? 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on YouTube. See everybody on Twitter. Spaces, I got to take this banner off. Thank you, guys. Always a pleasure.

Burb, Chris, you're legends. Bye, everyone. God bless. See you, guys. Let's go.