The Wolf Of All Streets - Options for BlackRock BTC ETF Go Live on NASDAQ Today | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

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everyone we can get the music off for a second uh we're as usual we are in the glitch uh i went to co-host and mike didn't work brought me back up now it says can't add a co-host classic x spaces uh normal tuesday here but anyways that shouldn't matter we're gonna just uh roll through you don't need me to be a co-host uh and we have just an absolute insane crypto news cycle right now especially since the election it's almost hard to keep up with a bit of disbelief as to all the things that are happening at one time obviously if you guys didn't see trump media looking to purchase the exchange backed b-a-k-K-T. I remember relentlessly making BAKT that ass up jokes on Twitter in like 2019 or 2020

when BAKT was going to be the key unlock to institutional involvement in crypto. Anyone who's here probably remembers that. There were basically no institutions, no Wall street involvement and back back which was uh backed by new york stock exchange uh was coming and launching institutional grade products well it obviously never gained much traction but now potentially donald trump's uh the company behind his social media platform is going to buy it, which would be pretty insane

if you think about the fact that a sitting United States president, although they're supposed to divest from things, could be basically the owner of an institutional grade crypto exchange. On top of that, Donald Trump meeting with Brian Armstrong, being reported by the Wall Street Journal to discuss appointments to his cabinet and to key positions. Trump, if you remember, in Nashville and since has been saying that he's going to appoint a crypto counsel of sorts to basically advise on crypto policy moving forward and how to approach the industry. Well, Brian Armstrong

tried for years to get a meeting with Gary Gensler, who was suing him and attacking him and couldn't even do that. Well, now he's going to be sitting with the president and advising on cabinet appointments. So very clear that even in just this few weeks since the election, we've had a major turning of the tide from regulators, legislators, and just the general tone from Washington. And now this lead story here for our title, Options for BlackRock ClickOne ETF Go Live on NASDAQ Today. You guys may remember that these were reluctantly basically approved by Gensler only for BlackRock, interestingly, so not for the other ETFs as of yet. And then in this period since the election, the CFTC very quickly saying, yeah, we're going live with these things.

Right. So anyone can jump in. David, maybe you have your thoughts. How big are options here on these ETFs? What does that mean for the industry, for the asset class in general? I think there's two ways to think about it. I think there's the trading piece of it, and then there is the substance of it. The trading piece of it is folks that frankly just trade, trade anything, trade currencies, commodities, rates, swaps, equities, whatever. They are in the business. They now have more to trade with relative to Bitcoin and the ETF.

And so therefore, we will start to see some great brainpower focused on where can I go ahead and are about some money? Where can I go ahead and make predictions based on the way one market is going to go ahead and predict where the next market is going. So I think that that's very good, and we should start to see that pretty quickly. There are people that only trade options and, frankly, will not trade cash. So those people are now welcomed into the crypto universe as well. And then longer term, which is really where the value proposition is, is simply this is the evolution of any financial

product in the annals of Wall Street or TradFi. I know people may not be particularly like TradFi, but at the end of the day, to the extent that they go ahead and slice and dice Bitcoin and its ETFs and its derivatives, and whether it be leverage on them or somehow packaging them in a different way, that all allows for more money to go ahead and find a home inside of Bitcoin, inside of the Bitcoin universe and ecosystem. And I think that that's very, I mean, from a TradFi person originally like myself, that's very welcomed because that goes ahead and brings a lot of brain power to bear, a lot of resources, a lot of capital to bear.

And that's really, really amazing. I'll leave one last thought, and we don't need to get to this now, but I'm starting to think about kind of a couple of years down the line in terms of the powers of Bitcoin, the powers in Bitcoin. Right. Clearly, Larry Fink and BlackRock are a power in Bitcoin and they will continue to be so because Larry Fink has more money behind BlackRock than any other asset manager. But at the same time, you have Michael Saylor, in the case of MicroStrategy, essentially turning the spigot or the tap at the capital markets at will to go ahead and raise money to buy more Bitcoin. And I'm wondering about whether there will ever be a face-off between the two. And if the United States, to think more broadly about Bitcoin becoming a reserve currency

for corporations, for nation-states around the world, and so on, Larry Fink is a well-known commodity to folks all around the world in finance, whether it be at the corporate level or at the government level. Michael Saylor is not a known commodity. And I wonder if people have a choice over who to pick in that war to the extent there were ever to be one. You know, would they particularly place, you know, their preference on Fink over Saylor? What does that mean longer term for MicroStrategy? You know, is sailor a lone wolf

will he always be alone i'm not really sure but that's kind of where my thought is right now that's an interesting take certainly you know who made more money than uh blackrock this year tether pretty astounding and so as powerful i think think, as Larry Fink is, these crypto companies and the amount of money being represented here and what Saylor is pulling off could effectively, you know, become just as large if crypto becomes as accepted in asset class. It looks like it will be. David, were you raising your hand again? more things since you raised Tether. A question of how important does Tether become or not become because of what's going on with Lutnik and the Treasury Department and whether he's in or he's out or he's annoyed Trump or I don't know what. The chairs available at the dais are

finite. And there are going to be winners and losers, I think, at the end of the day. And just kind of keeping a finger on the pulse of what is going on and who is getting a seat at the table and who is not necessarily being a loser today, but certainly over the long term, you know, losing out to someone else is really important, you know, in this contest. And Trump, you know, buying back and, you know, Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr. going to, you know, a venture capital firm.

I mean, there's just a lot of stuff going on that you really need to be aware of. I mean, Lutnick is the head of the transition team, so he clearly is having a role whether it ends up being a cabinet position or not. We unpacked it quite a bit yesterday here, actually, that he is not the most popular person on Wall Street in general. So there's probably a lot of pushback to him taking a position that large. But for those who don't know, he's CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. And basically, the person who put a final end all of the Tether FUD by saying, hey, I love Tether and Cantor Fitzgerald is custodying it, right? And it's been a huge Bitcoin bull and Tether supporter. And I think that that's made a huge impact on the way that that asset is viewed. And now if you have a lot coming in and becoming a part of the government,

well, I think it becomes a lot more likely that Tether is accepted in the United States and doesn't end up on the Alps, which a lot of people were anticipating, I think. Lawyer, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really good news um because we had you know we trump was saying a lot of stuff before the election and we all knew like as much as it's like great to be pandered to um it was we were being pandered to and then there are a couple things made me nervous even though we know we've got like vance in there who's a bitcoiner and all those guys i know that trump can be turned off to something pretty easily and then when baron like verifiably launched that djt rug um like so verifiably that i actually got refunded by polymarket when they said the opposite and then you know there's some

others that they tried to raise like a billion dollars and couldn't raise any fraction of that i was worried that trump got turned off to it but i think this is proof that he isn't he hasn't been and you know it's really hard when you're talking to people and you want to say this time is different because you've been saying that for like a decade. But it really does feel like this time is different. You know, we were pushing it all time high when we were thinking maybe Kamala could be president. And now we're seeing like a little bit of a bump because the entire world has changed and become more friendly to people like us i think this time is different worth mentioning we've talked about microstrategy before it just passed 400 making yet another new all-time high for looking at microstrategy stock

and i looked and it just surpassed 300 last monday so eight days to go from 300 to pass 400. And it was only a couple of weeks before that, that it passed 200. So MicroStrategy going fully parabolic here, bought over $4 billion worth of Bitcoin that was announced yesterday at $88,000. On the same day announced that buy, he also announced another $1.2 billion convertible note being raised. And all of that while still raising $42 billion more to buy Bitcoin. David, go ahead. Yeah, I know you tell your audience this all the time, but I'll go ahead and say it as the guy that's not here every day.

This isn't normal, folks. It's really important to just be aware of that. Not that it can't keep going for a while, but at some point it does have to stop with respect to microstrategy. Also, MetaPlanet raising money on a one-year piece of paper, one-year piece of debt. Oh, I think we lost Scott. One-year piece of paper over in Japan yielding less than 1% um is also you know pretty astounding that those folks whether it be meta planet or micro strategy or similar scientific um or whoever else can go ahead and you know ring the register right now is going to go out there and raise as much capital as they can as they should uh to go ahead and just buy more. What do we do now?

I don't know. Anyone else want to say something? You go ahead and take over. I think the microstrategy phenomenon is really interesting. I mean, there are elements of it that feel a ton like a meme stock, like game stock. And if you look at the sort of Twitter community around microstrategy people, there's all sorts of just craziness happening. You also have a lot of people convincing themselves that MicroStrategy has somehow found an infinite money glitch. And, you know, this accretive dilution is this magical thing that can keep going on forever and price targets in the thousands of

dollars for MicroStrategy. On the other hand, right, it does seem like there is this dynamic in the market right now, which is pretty interesting, where MicroStrategy is able to get very cheap debt because it's good for bond traders and people who are in that market. And then they're able to pay off that debt by doing at the market equity raises. And, you know, who knows? I've personally not been participating in that market because, you know, who knows? I've personally not been participating in that market, because, you know, I don't think I'm a good trader. And I don't really understand the dynamics well enough. And it feels too good to be true. But there is a huge community of people that are

just completely focused on micro strategy now. And I feel like it's almost sucking the, you know, energy out of the room that would otherwise go to other high beta stuff like meme coins or alts. Yeah, as a holder of some micro strategy, it's one of my larger positions simply because it's grown that much. I'll say two things. First of all, curiously, you know, the folks that have done the most capital raising for MicroStrategy is Citi, is my understanding. And they have not been loud or proud about it. They've been very quiet about it, despite the fact that Citi is. Sorry, can you hear me now yeah yeah you're back i'm sorry i didn't hear anything for the last five minutes i'm trying to get back up so thank you for thank you for continuing to talk if you did so city has done the majority i as far as i understand it of the capital raising for

microstrategy they have not been loud about it, despite the fact that they have a pretty tarnished image and they could use any good press that they can get at this point. And really, the folks that have been loudest about MicroStrategy and being involved are kind of the, I would say, even the third tier shops that, you know, like Canaccord Genuity has done a fair amount of placement, maybe Stifel as well. So to me, it's just interesting how this incredibly strong train moves on, but nobody in the class A investment banking space is attached to it except for Citi, and Citi has been super quiet about it. The other thing regarding MicroStrategy is I don't think Saylor, although being a huge advocate for Bitcoin generally and for his stock, I don't think he has yet overstepped his bounds in terms of making a move outside of his lane know, we're just a Bitcoin accumulator. I mean, he has thrown out some, you know, future, you know, dreams of being a Bitcoin bank. And that's not far in the future, potentially. But, you know, he hasn't been outlandish. And he may

get to a point where he can easily be outlandish if he wanted to. Brian Armstrong saying before he's meeting with Trump that he may want to go ahead and suggest that we do away with income tax in the United States is certainly a step outside of Brian Armstrong's lane. Maybe it was asked of him. I don't know. But at the end of the day, I believe, you know, Michael Saylor, you know, he's got permanent capital. Brian Armstrong runs Coinbase. I mean, yes, it's, you know, he's got permanent capital. Brian Armstrong runs Coinbase. I mean, yes, it's, you know, it's unique in itself. But at the end of the day, it is a broker for all intents and purposes and exchange and custodian. But at the end of the day, you know, Saylor, if he wanted to be, you know, loud and proud, he certainly, you know, would have the right to be.

And he hasn't yet. And I'm wondering if he will get to a point where right to be, and he hasn't yet. And I'm wondering if he will get to a point where he will be, not currently. I see Simon's up, by the way. We spoke a little bit about some of this stuff earlier this morning on the Daily Finance Show. Simon, that was your invitation. All right, cool. Yeah, what i find absolutely fascinating is that all all topics seem to be merging upon one um so the finance stuff is becoming increasingly more uh bitcoin and crypto uh bitcoin and crypto is being deeply integrated into the financial system um and you can't help but talk about all the the the politics um and the geopolitical. We just seem to be merging.

And I think that's a reflection of Bitcoin taking its place at the center of the stage of many different issues. And so now with options, we were discussing earlier with David that, you know, this really opens up the next wave of kind of what we were doing in DeFi, where we were taking Bitcoin and we were wrapping it into Ethereum. And then we were allowing people to borrow against it in the smart contract. And, you know, and then allowing people to generate yield on their Bitcoin, while getting upside by taking all of these different counterparty risks and smart contract risks. Well, now TradFi are going to do it.

So you're going to have covered calls on top of Bitcoin. You've got income and yields that will be generated on top of Bitcoin from being able to provide liquidity to short sellers. And some hedge fund is going to get it completely wrong, blow up at some stage, completely over leverage, and create cascading liquidations within the market at some point during this cycle. So we're kind of setting ourselves up for the same game that we've always seen. And I think options is the next stage of being able to build a wave of structured products that involve Bitcoin and wait till real estate investors start to think about how could we take the income from real estate, convert it into Bitcoin, then use it as collateral in order to borrow more against it to buy more real estate. And this is just the next wave of Bitcoin almost by default becoming a bottom up with no government, you know, Bitcoin standard for certain structured projects, products.

Yeah, interesting, Simon. I think just to be clear, because there's some nuance, all of that would be in theory on Bitcoin ETFs, not on Bitcoin itself in this case. Yeah, which is built upon Bitcoin. You're right. I'm just saying that these products, interestingly, it's going to explode, especially it's only BlackRock right now,

is going to absolutely explode the interest specifically in the ETFs that have these options approved on them. Right. Which is a, there's some nuance there. But then also add to the equation that we've now got a Trump administration, a new leadership, hopefully within the SEC and a wave of brokers and financial institutions that will now be able to apply for the license that would allow them to engage in these different types of products. So there is so much to come, so much growth, so much more liquidity. And the same mistakes we made in our market to come in the traditional market as well.

The good news is those mistakes are being made on other assets in the traditional market as well. So it won't be just us. It's not something that will be unique to Bitcoin. These options exist on almost every legitimate asset on the planet. So even if they blow up, this should be different than a three arrows capital and the contagion that went through three arrows through all of these CIFI lenders and such. It should be much more controlled if we do see those events from TradFi.

And it's not going to be the largest hedge funds on the planet. The difference is they probably borrow it all from the Japan carry trade and the Fed will bail it out. As opposed to borrowing it directly from Genesis, who's actually creating the GBTC that you're borrowing. Yeah, we know. Right. We had that show for two years, it feels like. So we don't need to go back down. But I do think that the contagion would be much more limited in this fashion.

But I do think, to your point, there's going to be a lot of ways that people are going to find to utilize this to create yield, right? I mean, even right now, I think I saw it was like an 18% opportunity on the cash and carry trade or something based on how far into contango Bitcoin futures are versus spot price. And that's a trade that almost everyone's going to take. Go ahead, Matthew. Hey, good morning, everybody. Yeah. And just want to focus here on the fact that it's basically a foregone conclusion that this is going to happen with anything that has now been given an ETF. So you're going to think that this is going to come with Ethereum pretty soon. You've had Solana and

XRP filings earlier this year. So the more legitimacy that we get from a Bitcoin perspective and see these options start trading, the more as a we get from a Bitcoin perspective and see these options start trading, the more as a foregone conclusion, we're going to see this with other assets as well, which is just great for the overall sort of macro condition of the space. I will say too, that as somebody who has to go try to find options on Bitcoin and natively, which is difficult to do in the United States for some structured products. It's considerably expensive to do with native Bitcoin. So seeing these ETFs come out with option trading is very good just because it's a much cheaper way to engage in building these products. So

just excited to see it from that perspective. And certainly another great way to stack yield on Bitcoin aside from like Babylon, for example. Yeah, I mean, shouldn't the relative volume surrounding Bitcoin, not on trading Bitcoin specifically, go up by, I can't even guess the multiple, a 10x multiple because of these options? Like all these people that weren't necessarily going to trade Bitcoin itself who now find ways to sort of, you know, to do it, even just for strategies that effectively have nothing to do with Bitcoin, just because the opportunity is there. This just should bring insane amount of volume to this ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. And just the exposure that the regular retail person can get, you know, even on Robinhood, for example,

you can now build Bitcoin ladder or Bitcoin structured derivatives in your own portfolio using Robinhood. So the retail investor who's savvy enough can start pulling yield on this stuff pretty quickly. And it's awesome to see. I'm glad you're segwaying to Robinhood because I have a personal reason to talk about it today. You guys may have seen that a few days ago, Robinhood, obviously with the shift in regime in the United States, decided to relist some assets and also to list XRP. So Robinhood clearly making huge moves here and not waiting for Trump to be in power to kind of make the statement that they're not in fear of the regulators anymore. But there was a huge piece of news today. And it's actually one of my very closest

friends' companies. But Robinhood purchased Trade PMR, which is a RIA. Good that we have you here, Matthew. A registered investment advisor platform. They have about 40 billion assets under management. So obviously, a huge custodian, also a software company. But what is so interesting about it, besides the fact that it's one of my close friends, he was basically the last privately owned RIA standing of that size, which is why obviously it made such sense for Robinhood to purchase them. But Robinhood now, you've seen opening credit cards and trading platforms, and they've long said that they want to get involved in custody, more involved in custody and institutional trading and adoption. Well, by purchasing this custodian and RIA platform, now Robinhood can effectively handle any institutional

volume and client that comes their way. So Robinhood really putting their money where their mouth is on making themselves the everything platform for finance, institutional and retail in the United States. So, Matthew, kind of what you're talking about there. they have a registered investment advisor and also custodian and now another 40 billion assets under management with an institutional grade custodian. It was a $300 million deal. It's a pretty large purchase, but it was pretty much the only one they could purchase at this point. So really, just an incredible move, I think, by Robinhood. I mean, Matthew, in your eyes as an RIA, how do you view Robinhood's sort of wholesale move into every space now? Well, certainly this is hugely bullish for the RIA space in general

because there's so many of these institutions that just don't do this. I personally went around January earlier this year and asked 25 different wealth managers in my space what their crypto strategy was, and one of them wanted to talk to me. So my plan is to go back in January this year and asked 25 different wealth managers in my space what their crypto strategy was. And one of them wanted to talk to me. So my plan is to go back in January this year, knock on the same doors and have that conversation because so many of these different RIAs exist, wealth managers exist, family offices exist, and they're allocating half a percent, maybe 1% of their assets to this or seeing that kind of client demand.

And coupled with people's IRAs or their retirement accounts that can now be moved into Bitcoin or other pseudo derivatives in this sense, the wave of capital that can come into this ecosystem that is on the sidelines and not legitimized by RIAs or advisory is just massive. So great, great news to hear from this perspective. The wholesale move is the way to go. And for those that aren't necessarily aware, qualified custody is really, really important for institutions because you can't just hold your crypto on an exchange or on ledgers. That's not a very good way to do it. So there's a lot of tri-party agreements that are going on between institutions, the custodian and the end client that allow them to engage.

And yeah, not your keys, not your crypto, but it's a much safer and secure way for these institutions to, or institutions, pension funds, endowments, whatever, to provide custody that's secure and insured. So if anything does happen, they're made whole. Yeah. And also, Matthew, a conversation we've had privately, and I've been slow, obviously, to move on the things that we discussed, but Robinhood has 24 million

customers, right? So Robinhood has 24 million customers. That's all retail. That's obviously largely SKUs,ws younger. We know the clientele of Robinhood. RIAs are in this forward position of basically only custodying or managing boomer wealth and not being able to answer questions about Bitcoin and crypto. And there needs to be a solution for that. So think about what happens now when you have 24 million customers and growing on Robinhood, who at some point are largely going to inherit some wealth from their parents. What's going to happen to the registered investment advisors that have been handling their parents' money when Robinhood is now an RIA?

Right? I mean, don't you think that that service being offered by their trusted exchange and platform is going to be where they're going to go? This is just a brilliant move by Robinhood. Yeah. And if they can start to automate some of this, I mean, the truth is you still want that white glove service. You still need somebody there to talk to you about your investment goals, your risk status, like where you're trying to be from that perspective. And they do need to help people better understand that. One thing too, that's like an interesting opportunity that we're seeing. So many of the clients that come to us are already fully allocated into crypto. We've onboarded between 80 and a hundred million dollars in assets under management, and 98% of

that is already allocated to crypto. But the brilliant thing with Robinhood here is from a financial advisor perspective, as a fiduciary, it's your job to say, maybe we should look at some less risky things in your portfolio. Maybe you should just have a slice of the S&P 500 index, for example. Wouldn't that be an interesting flip of the coin? So now we're saying to pension funds, put 1% in Bitcoin, and we're telling retail people, maybe put 1% in the S&P 500 index, it's our job to help them de-risk away from some of that too. So being a platform like Robinhood gives you the ability to engage with all of those assets in a wide variety of ways that you can build a portfolio that helps people generate and sustain wealth for the long term.

And your registered investment advisor will be able to basically optimize your strategy with all of the things robin hood has to offer you know and all the things you're familiar with i think it's just a huge move and all of this you know we talk about this institutional adoption and the government it's all at this point it's all just one huge story to me which is that bitcoin and crypto have officially made it and now is sort of this two-year opportunity. I'm not saying that Democrats will take the House or the Senate in two years. I don't know. But generally, you see sort of a swing back in the other direction

after one party is fully in power for two years. But at least two to four-year period here, where we can sort of prove that this industry is worthy, because it's like all bets and rules are off. All the things we ever dreamed of seeing are happening right now. I mean, Preston, listen, you're a lawyer in crypto. I had Haley Lennon on my show this morning and it was an interesting conversation because she said, you know, it's been years and years and years of effectively having to tell clients, no, you can't do that. I don't know. Probably can't do that. The regulator might come after

you to this sort of what seems like could be a free for all. I mean, how does this change for you as a lawyer who operates in this space advising clients? I mean, that's right. And not only it's really annoying because I'm actually qualified in two jurisdictions, but the US, a couple of US states, the District of Columbia and England and Wales. And so it's annoying because you see that the rest of the world figured this out, right? They understand how to have crypto business happen, you know, on a normal regulated basis, and the United States hasn't. So I think it's very encouraging to see the changes that have been proposed by the Trump administration. You know, obviously, the proof will be in the pudding. And

I think the fact that TMTG is considering buying back is a sign as to, you know, certainly where people who are adjacent to the president, I think it's like, I think he turned over, if memory serves, he turned over day-to-day management of the family business to his two eldest sons some time ago, and it'll be in a blind trust when he's the president. So he won't actually have any influence over that, but it tells you who's around him, right? And what their thinking is. And we know that from his appointments, you know, J.D. Vance was a co-sponsor of, or he was developing a companion bill to fitIT21 in the Senate. I think FIT21 is dead. We'll see what happens and what that gets replaced with. Vivek

Ramaswamy is obviously very plugged in with crypto. He paid homage to the libertarians up at Porkfest three years ago or two years ago. And that's kind of ground zero for Bitcoin's use by normal people. Although if you can call libertarians who go to Porkfest, of which I am one, normal people, that's a matter of debate. But no, it's really encouraging. There was a lot of saying no. It was really annoying over the last couple of years because usually what you want to do is you want to say no. But here you can make some changes here, here and here. And if you do that, right, like that'll be different.

But to be blunt, for example, staking, right, is a prime example, you can't do pooled staking in the United States right now. So despite the fact that a lot of the rest of the world you can, and the fact that pooled staking isn't really an investment contract or a security, or at least it shouldn't be, it's helping someone interact with the protocol. And then you take a slight fee, and then the fees get paid back to you. It's the protocol that's doing the work there, not some capital at risk. And so they've labeled pooled staking platforms like Kraken, for example. Coinbase was going to have a platform called Earn, which they shut down. And they've said that those are unlawful securities, and you can't operate them here in the US. And so you can say, well, you know, you could offer, you know, something where you're providing

just a software as a service. And economically, you can put together the exact same deal, except you use or you need to be operating the node yourself. And we're just providing a bunch of IT tools. But economically, the outcome would be exactly the same. And one of those things in the United States is not lawful. And the other one is. But of course, the one that is lawful is impossible for users to use. It means that you can't use

institutional third party custody services, like BitGo. So you're actually exposing your users to more risk. So like, it's one of those things where the law is creating this perverse arrangement, which is actually worse for crypto market participants than better. So it remains to be seen what will happen. But yeah, lately, the answer of no, no, no has turned to, well, actually, the likelihood is that we are going to have market structure regulation. Trump said he's going to do it in the first 100 days. We don't know whether that's the case. But it's reasonable to suppose that, you know, given that he's taking meetings with Brian Armstrong, in particular, that we're going to

see some pretty significant changes in the US in the very near future. Right, Preston, even on top of that. So I'm assuming you obviously have to tell clients, yes, we could see regulatory change, we could see legislative change and action. But I think there's also a sentiment that even if we don't get that, at least you're not going to be attacked for trying things. I don't, I don't actually, that's not generally speaking the advice that I would render. Yeah, I mean,'t, I don't actually, that's not generally speaking the advice that I would render. Yeah. I mean, like, I can't tell you what I advise individual clients, but like trusting that government forbearance is going to save you, right. Because Trump's in power is not a good strategy. Um, so, and like poly market, I think is a prime example of that.

Um, a lot of people have looked at polymarket and said, oh, it's political. It's a political hit job. If you talk to practitioners in the industry, they're going to give you a very different answer. And they've had a very different answer for a while as to what was going on there. So I think if there is a regulatory violation, I don't think any responsible lawyer will say, well, Donald Trump being in office is going to change that. You know, if you can do if you if it's a questionable issue, right? Yeah, I think it's going to break more in favor of entrepreneurs. Now, whereas in the last three years, it's broken more in favor

of the enforcers. But ultimately, the the real, you know, the real meat, right, the meat and potatoes here. The question is, are we going to get legislation which legalizes this activity in the United States? I think the answer to that is yes. But no, I mean, I'm not playing, you know, you don't play fast and loose with the current. Yeah, I was more like devil devil's advocate being like, for example, a Robin Hood relisting things that were passively named in enforcement actions against Coinbase and Binance in those suits, right? Like the, I don't remember the specific assets off the top of my head now, but we know that every time the SEC

would bring an enforcement action, they would list a number of things as unregistered securities without actually ever going to those companies and telling them they were unregistered securities, right? Or taking any sort of action directly against them. I think that now people are going to be a lot more comfortable, I should have said,

just operating in the United States, considering launching things, getting prepared for that legislation and regulation. I'm not saying that we should have wholesale-like scams being launched in the United States. I just think that people are confident that you will be able to do things that are normal in other countries in crypto here. Yeah, I think that's already started, though, because if you look at Robinhood, they relisted as soon as... Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Exactly. Exactly. They didn't wait. They just said, okay, these things obviously aren't unregistered securities. I mean,

Trump is out here launching a World Liberty Financial. I think you're good. Yeah, the ones they listed was XRP, Cardano, Solana, and Pepe, I think. Yeah, and XRP, i think they had never listed actually remember you xrp also has that favorable ruling from judge torres in the southern district um whereas judge torres said the you know the the thing basically was lewis cohen lewis cohen's a very prominent crypto lawyer arguably the best transactional crypto lawyer alive. And he wrote a very, very long book. He wrote a law review article. And then he wrote a very long book length treatment of the subject, where he went through every single appellate decision regarding the Howey test, and tried to establish whether the subject matter of the

transaction, right, whether that be oranges, in the case ofie or beaver pelts or whatever else, GPUs, I don't know. So any the actual subject matter of the investment contract was itself an investment contract, and you couldn't find a single supporting authority for that. And that book and that work was actually cited in Judge Torres's decision. It was cited by both parties in the litigation, and then Judge Torres alluded to it in her ruling. So there are stronger arguments to be made now that a secondary sale of an XRP token doesn't constitute an investment contract. At the moment, there are two views of this. We had a decision out of the District of Columbia regarding Binance, which concurred. It wasn't a formal concurrence, but it concurred with the conclusions from the Ripple case. And then we had Judge Kaplan, I believe, in the Terraluna case, who took a different view. And now, of course, we've got

the state court ruling in California from yesterday about DAOs, where they said that holding a DAO token is holding a partnership interest, which, of course, would break the other way, that break in favor of a finding that it was security. So we've got this genuine dispute among the courts of this country as to what the legal classification of these things is. And so I think with the prospect of market structure regulation and the fact that the courts don't agree what the legal treatment of the underlying is supposed to be, Robinhood would look at that and they'd make a risk-weighted decision as to whether listing it is a good idea or not. And I think right now the factors would probably weigh in favor of a listing decision rather than

against it. Lawyer, did you have your hand up before? Yeah, I think that the... Sorry, I lost my train of thought. I'll come back. Welcome to my life. Anybody else thoughts specifically on this? Simon, you were obviously jumping in there as well. I think I'm done, actually. I think I've covered everything I wanted to say. Perfect. Well, I think we largely have covered a lot of things. Buzz, I know you wanted to take over.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. We also have Blast Royale, who's here today. They've joined us on the show before, but are coming today to do a bit of an update on how they've been. So Blast Royale, why don't you open the floor and just tell us what you've been up to since your TGE. Yeah, hey, everyone. Thanks for having us on the show.

So yeah, we launched our token last week. We managed to get it to as many people as possible. I have to say that it was maybe not the smoothest sailing. So we've come on here to do a little bit of a mea culpa and explain to everyone who's followed us what's happened and why and what we're going to do to address it. So actually, it's kind of funny because right now crypto is absolutely pumping. And that's amazing. But actually, it had some kind of ramifications for us, which caught us unexpected. And that was high gas fees on ETH. So what happened is we had a lot of people who were playing our game, they managed to claim our token. But when they wanted to try and get that token out, they were presented with some

really high gas fees, which is not something that we anticipated. We did think that the market would improve, especially with Trump's election results. We didn't expect to be hitting crypto all-time highs four days in a row. So kind of caught us unawares and it's something that we're working on. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to smooth and optimize all the processes in our game as fast as possible. We're going to try and make sure that everyone in our community is well rewarded for the efforts that they've put in and we're committed to making the best possible game that we can. That said, we're working on more updates. We are going to be announcing what's coming in a new update quite soon. We're going to continue to make lots of new content. We're going to continue to add utility

to our token. We still really believe in Web3 and gaming. We think it's going to be a big player in this upcoming cycle and we are determined to do it with our project. And yeah, we're going to continue going from strength to strength. We've got a great product. We've still got tons of people playing our game. We've got around 400,000 monthly active players. We're looking forward to rewarding those players with bigger and better things as time continues. Yeah, I mean, as a Ethereum holder and longtime believer,

I tend to love high gas fees because to me that means, oh, people are going to need to be able to purchase more Ethereum because they're going to need to pay their gas fees. And I tend to see it as a pretty bullish indicator for Ethereum actually going up here. And I'm anxiously anticipating that as well. But I can certainly see the challenges for a game whose settlement is on ETH to be launching in an environment when ETH gas fees are kind of going in a matter of a few weeks from 2Gway

to even up to like 40Gway. So just with that in mind, what else did you guys learn from the TGE and the launch that you guys are going to be carrying forward? Yeah, it's a really great question. So I think we learned that in order to sort of optimize demand, you kind of put a point out there that I think using ETH as your main token is maybe not the best approach to do that maybe we need to consider having a sort of

sub chain or layer two helping us out to make it smoother for people playing the game. At the same time, I think it is important that you know, the big chains like Ethereum have a lot of liquidity on there, which is one of the major reasons we chose to launch our token on there. So I think it's finding this middle ground for everyone in the space is important. I think that's about the really big learning that we've done. And so yeah, trying to really smooth out the flow, making sure that your Web3 natives are able to access the full liquidity of the ecosystem, but making sure that your gamers are also able to access the game in a smooth way and the two worlds don't collide but work well together. I mean, I still think that in the space, it's maybe something that's missing, like a really

smooth layer two to work between two spaces. We ourselves are working with Immutable. We're also maybe considering some other options, but I think there's not quite the right time to fully utilize those systems in-game yet. But it's something that we're looking at, because I think it's something that's really important for everyone going forward, that we find that solution, as that's going to really help take games mainstream. And that's what we're really trying to achieve with our title. So what's next for the game?

I assume with players who have tokens within, it's kind of a waiting period for gas fees to go down for that settlement. But maybe talk about what's next for the game, but also what's next for players that may hold tokens. Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a new update that will be coming out quite soon in a few weeks time. It's going to have new game modes, it's going to have new special events. Some of those events you can actually only access if you hold the noob token. That's something that we really wanted to do. We wanted people to sort of understand that that was really pivotal to the experience to get the most out of it and have a lot of fun doing that we've

got two new weapons coming in the game to have fun um we've got certain holidays coming up as well so we're going to be tying some things up into those holidays um there's gonna be sort of certain currencies and special effects and special events that will take into account both Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is coming up. So people will be able to have fun doing that. And we're going to continue

from going from strength to strength. We actually run live streams for our game every week. We've got one actually at five o'clock today. We'll have one on Thursday. We're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue rewarding everyone who participates in our community,

keep building the game and make it bigger, better and more badass it's a great uh great outlook to have i mean it's gaming in general and web3 is so nascent so i i feel like it's very important for builders to just kind of roll with the punches and be solution oriented rather than seeing things as a challenge that they can't get past. So kudos to you for that. Are there any other results that you kind of want to share from your launch? Like maybe the number of users or token holders or any results that you wanted to brag about? Yeah, I'll tell you what, I think I might get my co-host Rennie to come up here and say something on this regard.

Hello, hello. Can you hear me? Yeah, you're good, Rennie. Loud and clear. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, no, so it's been an absolute adventure, but I've got to say with our TGE ramp-up, we've certainly hit some nice milestones. I'm not sure if i'm going to repeat anything and it was just said here but uh during our tge ramp up we we hit a a peak of 85 000 daily active players uh and we managed to uh sink uh about 3.5 million noob tokens inside the game via

a a a loot to airdrop campaign which was uh yeah uh, yeah, quite, quite a, uh, a fun, uh, fun time for people to kind of be able to spend the token that they are about to get before it's even launched. Um, and, uh, yeah, some, some, some real nice traction. I mean, we already hit sort of 800,000 installs before we even got to the, uh, to the TGE hype. Um, so now sort of we're working towards that, uh, 2 million mark, which would be our next milestone. So yeah, right now for us, it's all about continuing those efforts, building out the token sinks inside of the game before we get closer to that global launch. So yeah, it's just been a really chaotic, but yet a very exciting time for us over at Blast Royale right now.

So Renny, first off, congratulations just on the number of users that you guys have been able to get. I feel like users, especially for DeFi projects, because that's kind of my background, just being a developer and very deep in DeFi, 85 daily active users in one day sounds incredible for Web3. How does that compare to other GameFi projects? Like, where does that compare to your competitors

in terms of user base? Yeah, I mean, look, Eddie, we were, before we got to this ramp-up period, we were already seeing sort of 10,000 to 15,000 daily active users in our game, specifically on the Web2 front already. But yeah, hitting that peak of like 85,000 DAU. And even after the loot to airdrop campaign is finished, we're still in the

range of 40 to 50,000 daily active players, where, you know, a lot of those farmers have moved on. So we're certainly up there in the top five of all game projects at the moment in terms of actual real users playing our game without high, you know, massive incentives and earning mechanisms directly right now. So, you know, adding a few of those on top, you can imagine how not easy it's going to be, but how, you know, how much more traction we are going to be able to attract in the coming months as we develop out those features. That's impressive. I'm not sure how granular you guys are able to get with your data, but one thing that really gets me excited about GameFi

is just this prospect that it can be excellent at bringing new people into Web3 and expanding that pie. We talk a lot about on this space, speculating on what's next for Bitcoin, the new Trump regime, is that super bullish for the industry? But one thing that I feel is missing is just that that catalyst to bring new people in who may otherwise not be investors, maybe they're not buying Bitcoin, but they do play games, and we could onboard them. So do you have granular data on maybe how many of these active users are new to Web3? Maybe their assets that they've earned in-game or their first ever crypto assets or any estimation in that regard?

This is actually something we take quite a bit of pride in. And over the last three years of developing our game, with all of the beta stage and now getting closer to that global launch, we brought in so many people from Web 2 that had to interact with our game. We've always made it very easy and super free-to-play experience where they just feel like they're playing an absolute, just a normal game. But yeah, we've been prioritizing understanding how many people have been onboarded into the Web 3 side of our game. And we have just over 55% of all users, that's now up to 1.2 million total installs,

have engaged with a Web3 layer of our game. So that's included the NFTs, the noob tokens. And yeah, it's quite high considering we haven't fully developed all of the login systems where almost, I mean, it will be 100% at that point where they are instantly involved in Web3, even without realizing. That's great.

I mean, I've been pretty vocal on these spaces just about, I'm not somebody who games on a daily basis, but I love that it can really expand the pie. And actually last night, I downloaded Off the Grid for the first time and played it for like five minutes just to kind of see, okay, what's the experience going to be like for a new person coming into GameFi, playing a game that they perceive as fun and see what that's like. And so I'm interested to hear if there's been any feedback from these new users, like, are they appreciating the Web3 features and the NFTs and things like that in the game?

Like, what have they been chatting about? What's their experience? Yeah, absolutely. I think this is again, like, the way we've been doing all of this is actually at the forefront of how we develop our game is that you are not going to download our game and be hit with Web3. You're not going to be hit with a crypto term, any blockchain technology. You are going to be hit with a good game, a fun game, as long as you enjoy this type of game. And then there are going to be options and new experiences for you to get involved with. So, you know, as it stands, a Web2 user who just likes mobile top-down shooter games uh might download our game and it could take

them days it could even take them weeks before they they even notice you know that we've got some some interesting kind of currency that then they check out the info tab and it actually you know brings them to understand that you know they can actually do something really cool with this uh this uh currency inside of our game more than just collect the currency and buy some standard cosmetics. So yeah, honestly, the way we've been doing it, our community of gamers that are gamers first, most of them now have crypto wallets. Most of them are now buying the NFTs and bringing them cool characters into the game. So honestly, I think when we first started three years ago, when we were just kind of kicking this off, people were like, whoa, what on earth is this? But now, even the Web2 gamers are explaining

it for us. They're helping new gamers set up their wallets and stuff. So honestly, I'm not seeing any friction at all at the minute. And I expect it to get even easier as we improve that login flow and the adoption of getting their own wallets and things like that, or however that actually becomes. So yeah, really, really positive from our community thus far. That's wonderful.

And can you tell us a little bit just about what that onboarding process looks like? Like if somebody's downloading the game, like what are the steps that they take to actually touch Web3 for the first time? Yeah, so right now we're still in beta, right? So we haven't even, you know, fully added all of the login flows, which where we have the wallets seamlessly within that login flow, and it's all done automatically. So actually, right now, people just go to the app store, you click download, you play the game. And the easiest way for people to get involved

right now, it would be a case of they're going to be earning some of our new tokens inside the battle pass, or they're going to win some tokens or maybe even NFT in one of our leaderboard contests throughout the month. And then when it comes to getting access to them, they can either just use them directly in the game straight away, or they would come over to our Discord and they would create a wallet with everyone else inside Discord. So right now there is a slight friction in terms of they do need to have some sort of setup and they do need to actually consciously do it. But again, there hasn't been any actual friction and negative feedback from it. But what we're looking to do is just go ahead and solve all of that by making it all in-app and making it just a few clicks of our button, especially when it comes to integrating an actual marketplace where there are every single cosmetic inside our game becomes an NFT and it's all tradable with our Noob token.

And you don't have to come outside of the app and all of the wallet and everything is seamlessly done for you. All behind the scenes, no terminology, just click, click, click, and you can start trading. And then if you're super curious and maybe you're actually interested in the speculation side of things, or you are already crypto native, you can very easily identify what that looks like and how to, you know, take it even outside of the game and get involved with the Web3 world outside of the game. But these are all steps and, you know, down the line, you know, we're still at that beta stage and one thing at a time is being developed.

Wonderful. Well, congratulations on the launch and uh i assume there's probably some listeners here who maybe didn't hear your last ama so maybe if you could quickly give an overview on exactly how the noob token token is used and and then also touch on some called actions if anyone in the audience wants to download the game and then how they can follow along yeah absolutely so i mean right now um noob token basically what you can do inside of our game is you can buy uh cosmetics so you can go to the shop you can use your noob tokens to buy exclusive or very limited edition cosmetics um we are going to be adding a feature in the next update and i'm happy to share this out with

you guys but essentially what this is going to look like is that you could enter a specific game mode where you actually have to pay with these noob tokens to compete against other gamers in a PVP scenario. And you bet that the winner takes all. And if you don't win or you don't come in the top ranks of that match, then you might not come off as wealthy as when you started, which adds a sense of risk, but excitement in the game mode. So that's just a little sneak peek of what you can do with the noob already, as well as the big plans we've got for noob token inside the game. But if you want to get involved with it, very simply, you can go across to some marketplaces to buy noob tokens,

and then you can get straight involved by downloading our game. It's that simple. And we also have NFTs, which have various different benefits related to the token itself as well. Excellent. Well, thanks, Rani, for joining us today and also the Blast page. And thank you to the audience. If you guys are tuning in, make sure that you give Blast Royale a follow. I certainly am keen to follow along

on how this goes and all of your traction because I am pretty passionate about just Web3 gaming, bringing in new users to our industry. So thanks to the speakers as well. Make sure that you give them a follow. And we'll be back tomorrow with another episode of Crypto Town Hall.

So everyone enjoy their Tuesday. Have a wonderful day. Thanks, everyone.