The Wolf Of All Streets - Pre-Halving Dump? Why Are Memecoins And Alts Crashing? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

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

everything going to zero now, huh? Ren it's over, pack it in, we'll market. It's finished. That's it. Backed up.

I'm retired. I'm not, I can't believe it. You know, I thought we had so much more to go. I, you wonder sometimes people know when we're being sarcastic. So I guess I should preface that with the fact that I'm not too,

uh, concerned here. I think what's happening right now is just sort of the range of boundness that a lot of us thought was coming sort of tightening up remember remember that we spoke about uh remember we spoke about last time i said i wasn't convinced that the tip was over because the fear and greed never changed so fear and greed was still at 70 but this is the first time where i'm actually seeing the fear and greed actually do anything actually if i look at the fear and greed indicator now it went from 83 on yes on sunday and it's now at 57 so it's the first time in a long time that the fear and greed's actually done anything where are you checking it i see 79 but what am i missing something you're looking at

the one that only updates every 24 hours but if you go to trading view and you actually download the fear and greed indicator which is like an indicator you'll find you'll find a more live one so now it's at 57 so it's down like uh 30 points or something just under 30 points so to me it's starting to feel a little bit more like like a correction you know what i mean yeah that's what you want it's crazy to me that it's starting to feel a little bit more like a correction. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's what you want. It's crazy to me that we were at 83, right? Very, like you said, within a day or two without making kind of a new high. So it's almost like if you look at this, the market got more greedy without actually price complementing that.

So what do you make of it? I mean, yeah, I think that we need a correction because people are just throwing money at cat coins and dog coins and that's just the way it is. I mean, for as long as people are going to have, you know, for as long as this is going to be overheated, we should expect some kind of correction. A lot of people are blaming it on the manufacturing data that came out yesterday.

But the manufacturing data came out and Bitcoin only moved 12 hours later. That's not normal. We need to assign. It's just how this market is. People need to assign the blame for any dip to some sort of news event. It's just absurd to me that that's what they're doing. Yeah.

I saw it on Bloomberg or something, right? Was it Coindesk or Bloomberg? One of them had that article. Yeah, I mean, most publications have had a coin. I think Coindesk also had one. Yeah, that's wild. I mean, maybe we should go to the panel and see how concerned people are with this dip or if they're seeing any quote-unquote reason for this dip.

Lucas, it's been a while. Obviously, what are you seeing into the block? You guys are obviously digging deep into on-chain data. Is there anything you can see that might be explaining this? Yeah, I guess if you compare this to previous halvings, we've definitely front run the halving. And so first time we hit all time highs before that, which is a bit unsurprising because the market saw the halving as a catalyst. And of course, the ETFs led the way. We're now about two weeks away. And I think about 90% of addresses, 95% has dropped a bit recently.

We're in profits. So we do get that typical pre-halving correction. But as some people were saying, speculation has been, you know, going up the risk curve. And so I think with funding rates being as high as they were at some point, like 150 percent annualized, we were doing a correction. And so the market is good to calm down. I don't expect it to fall precipitously from here, but mostly range sideways to maybe a bit lower. Because then the next second half of the year will probably be just as accelerating as it was the first quarter. Yeah. So my sort of base case not long ago,

and I got a hell of a lot of shit for it because Bitcoin was above 70,000. But I said, would we be surprised at least to see a really long sort of consolidation period and chop for a few months and then return into the halving cycle sort of after the summer? So, I mean, when you're saying consolidation and sideways chop, are you saying in the very short term, longer term? And what time frame do you sort of view that as?

Yeah, it could be like a full quarter. I would be surprised if more than that. My understanding is the ETF selling is ramping up, selling in the sense of like the institutions offering this to other institutions to buy. The good kind of selling. like BlackRock selling that to its clients to buy. So I expect that to continue. Like the first quarter was definitely much more inflows than expected. And now that it's sort of proven itself as a product, I think it's likely to carry on maybe in as soon as May or potentially more closer to the summer.

I imagine some people in the panel are a bit more bullish than I am, but I wouldn't be surprised if we chopped for like a month to three months top since we are ahead of schedule. In the previous halvings, I actually covered this on my show today, but in all the previous halvings, if you look at the period after the halving until about August, it was just sideways chop so like this is this is uh this is i mean we could be chopping for a long time if we were

to follow the previous harvest that was kind of my point is you get a halving and then you get sort of a dip and then the summer is miserably boring chop right and then it's like up only in september october i'm not saying that's necessarily going to happen and this cycle has been different Summer is miserably boring chop, right? And then it's like up only in September, October. I'm not saying that's necessarily going to happen. And this cycle has been different in that we've got a new all-time high. But if you look at the four-year cycle chart, that's sort of the classic move. Having itself is a non-event. It's not meaningful because nothing happens.

And six months later, all of a sudden, it actually matters that the supply has been reduced and price tends to head up. And then you basically rip until, you know, through the spring and boring summer as always. Peter, you have your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah, Ryan, let me agree with you and kill the sacred cow. This idea that we correct into halving, if you take a look at the past four halvings, we have corrected actually just once. The pattern is you just kind of chop around, you go flat or you go up. There have been halvings in the past

where markets launched before the halving and after the halving. So this whole idea that we correct into a halving, let's kill that for the widely known belief that is little worth knowing. Great insight. Great insight. Thank you. I mean, any of the other panelists have any thoughts on what they think might be coming based on past cycles? You know, I think we had quite a few signs of froth here.

We've talked about this. Have you guys, have you guys analyzed the, I know I'm a few minutes late, not too late, but have you guys analyzed just the dip that we saw in the last few days? Like, is it the healthy dip? Cause we did have one of our regulars,

I can't remember who it was, talk about that being a positive thing. If we see Bitcoin kind of stabilize, even drop a bit rather than continue running, then the bull market could last longer than what we all were fearing. That could be a very short-lived bull market. I mean, the idea behind that is the longer you consolidate, the bigger the breakout. Exactly. The larger the expansion.

So healthy consolidation. I think we just get really impatient in this market. People see Bitcoin go from 15-something to 74, and they think that means you have to levitate to 150. It just doesn't work that way. And so a lot of sideways chop in a very large range, I think, is healthy and normal. But that's when people get destroyed. Yeah. Ryan?

Yeah. I mean, I think that markets that run too fast get people ripped and i think we've been running too fast i said it in the last correction and everyone was like angry at me like how can you say the market's going down reality is we're you know people are throwing millions of dollars into crazy meme coins with no into cats and dogs i don't know if you saw ansom's post but he took a photo of a cat his cat a video and then 10 minutes later like there were about 100 new cat coins launched with that with that icon okay that's not that people are people have started

to come here not to invest they they're coming out to trade only meme coins and that's that's the signs of it and don't get me wrong i love meme coins but that signs of an overheated market and overheated market need to correct it's simple as that talking about meme coins and i was scott we won't talk much about meme coins but i was it's okay it's okay it's okay i was speaking to one of the i was speaking to one of the people i trusted the most you know in terms of you know kind of predicting the market you know pretty high profile person in crypto and um you know last but he's the one that got me to crypto punks. He's the one that actually bought my first crypto punk.

I just sent him the money before going to a cryotherapy chamber. And then I'm like, Hey, just buy me whatever one's good. And he buys me the one I have now on my other account. And that was my entry into the NFT world and to crypto punks. So I was talking to him. And he was really early into AI tokens as well. And I'm like, I don't know, out of no way, we were just talking, kind of brainstorming the markets.

Like Mario, I really think the meme coin narrative and it's just being underplayed right now and the value of meme coins is decentralized community. So it was a bit of a surprise to me to hear that one of the people I trusted the most, um, to kind of, you know, kind of give me insight me insight into into the into the space and kind of being ahead of the curve talk about meme coins and having massive exposure to meme coins yeah there's a bifurcation there again that we keep coming back to i don't disagree with you i think that there are meme coins that with time and you're you and ryan are going to end up fighting so i don't even know if i want to do, but there are meme coins that with time build a significant community, right?

Like, I mean, I think Bonk has hundreds of thousands of wallets holding it, you know, some of these that sort of meme themselves into relevance, but still what's primarily happening in this market that Rand just referred to 99% of these is they're quick pump and dump casinos that do not build a community. They're just people flipping them for fun. Yeah, I agree. The same thing, the same thing, the startup, the startup hype, we're seeing IDOs similar to the last bull market.

We're seeing IDOs, IELs, whatever you want to call them. Token launches that we, you know, many of us on stage, including us three investing, you're seeing them launch at 10, 20 X on a daily, daily basis. That's not sustainable. Most of them will fail. It's the same shit, different market or different cycle. But yeah, I just really think the current market narratives,

obviously RWA's AI in gaming and then the meme coin narrative are things that interest me significantly. But you know, I know we're discussing the markets in general. So, so William, maybe, actually William, you were in one of the meme coin shows debates and you kind of offered a lot of great balance there. So it'd be good for you to jump in on talking about meme coins, but also shifting back to the market before Scott kicks me off the space. Sure.

Two thoughts. I wrote a blog post yesterday about meme coins, basically saying that there are three characteristics. One is the mojo. This is how it starts, the spark, the buzz, the energy. Number two is the community, obviously, the momentum, the mindshare, the creativity. But then the third one, which is the utility,

and I keep going to it, which brings legitimacy to some of the meme coins. Now, you can run on mojo and community without utility up to a point, but eventually I think there will have to be some utility to the meme coins that will emerge and stay. And we're seeing all of this play out right now. I think the Warpcast forecaster playground is an excellent place, and Zora,

to see how these meme coins are becoming more into utility types of use cases and apps like Dracula and Pearl and so on. So maybe these are new names for everybody, but you really have to hang out in the Warpcast and Zora communities to see what's going on there. In terms of the market, I'm not a trader, but I'm more of a market startup kind of guy.

I'm not too worried because the quality of the project that I'm seeing is continuing to increase so that there are more projects coming in and that's really what I look for in terms of what's going to happen later. So that's a positive sign. And I talked to Scott, I was talking about the consolidation

and you kind of confirmed it, consolidation being a positive thing for a prolonged bull market. And the person that said this first on this space was Dave, who's been my go-to person the last couple of months whenever we talk in markets. Dave, are you happy to see the current consolidation or kind of the ups and downs in the market?

I mean, I don't like the word happy, but, you know, because I've been saying it, that, you know, sideways kind of consolidating price action, flushing out leverage is ultimately what's necessary to create the fuel for the next bull run. I the difference between Bitcoin and meme coins and layer twos or layer ones like Solana are extreme. However, I mean, I think there's three different things going on. I mean, I think Bitcoin, this is extreme. I have not been more bullish in recent history because what gold is doing is telling you that that's kind of the foreshadowing.

If we were watching a movie, that's the part where, you know, you see where the ending gets foreshadowed and then you have to go through twists and turns. You know where you're going. We know Bitcoin is going higher. And because the actual reason for buying Bitcoin is getting stronger and stronger. The same could be said by the collective crypto universe for a variety of use cases, as William was just talking about, many of which have very strong reasons. The meme coin casino, I mean, hell, we have a meme stock casino, which is huge. I mean, we've seen game stock. There's still people playing with AMC theaters. I mean, it is what it is. But, you know, the reality of the SEC, who has legally made it necessary to have, if you want to have a meme coin, you can't have utility, is a problem.

And that needs to change. And only when that changes do I think there could be a sustainable rally in some meme coins that won't, when it gets flushed, turn traders into long-term investors. Because that's the thing, and Scott and I have joked about this. When you're a trader and you know you're in a casino and you know you're buying something because number go up and number stops to go up and rather starts to get flushed out, when you turn around and say, you know what, I'm going to put this in my bag and hold it because I'm a big believer in this cartoon. I mean, it's more or less the same thing that happened to people who bought Beanie Babies toward the end of that mania. Yes, some of them may very well develop into real

communities. And those real communities could be very powerful. But in the United States, at least, because of the stupidity of our regulation, you're not allowed to have that the token itself have value. The community might have value, but the token can't. Until that changes, I don't see any sustained rally in meme coins. I think there could be huge short-term trading rallies, no question. But I think that's the difference. I do want to make that distinction. To a quick comment, I'm curious. This might be a weird take. I actually think this is one of the areas where the regulations work pretty well. Because I think, look, it's one thing if you're buying a meme coin and you know it's a meme coin and it's a joke or you're gambling and we all know what it is. But if you look at the... There's that great Beanie Baby documentary on HBO and you get people

who buy these Beanie Babies and they're like, listen, this Humphrey the Camel Beanie Baby, I spent $300 on it. One day, it's going to put my kids through college. And it's that level of delusion that I think causes people to lose a lot more money than they do buying collectibles or gambling with funds they know they're gambling or trading a meme. And I think that if something is genuinely a meme coin, and its reason for being is that it's a meme coin, adding utility, which A, legally makes it more likely to be seen as a securities offering, but B, it also gives people the permission structure to put a lot of money into it that they can't afford to lose and trick themselves into thinking it's a long-term bag when really it's a picture of a dog. When you guys say, just a quick question, when you guys say adding utility,

isn't there two ways of adding utility? And I'll go to Jeff and Smiley right after. One question I have there. There's founders creating utility, which makes it more like a startup and a security. Or there's a meme coin that becomes decentralized. We're talking to one project that we could have on our show, which the co-founder of YouTube wants to back as well. And we're talking to them, doing some sort of deal

to invest in the project OTC. But there's no one to talk to, we're talking to them doing some sort of deal to invest in the project OTC. And, but there's no one to talk to when we're talking to a startup, there's a founder, there's a founding team that has tokens sitting there in their vault that we could do a deal with. But when it's a token, it's a community led project. So like the biggest token holders might do some sort of deal, might come together, the community might come together. So I think there's two ways of adding utility,

a centralized way of doing it, which moves away from the whole concept of a meme coin, versus a decentralized way of doing it. What do you think, Dave? Well, the point that I was trying to make has to do with neither of those questions. It could be either. The issue is, does the token holder have defined economic rights? Full stop. A token holder could have an economic right to future revenues that get generated in the network because of advertising, because of gas fees being paid into it, because of other projects like what people try to do. Defined economic rights for token holders would unfortunately trip up. And I'm not the attorney here. You've got plenty of attorneys

on the panel. I'd love to hear what they have to say. But without defined economic rights, it's hard to see value, right? Because it's clear. Now, the only way they can get away with that is if you have a token that is scarce, that gets burned, that gets used, where the only thing your economic right is, is you own the token, and the token is going to get more and more scarce and it has some need for the token in the network. Those are the things that matter, right? You know, it's not the same thing as owning equity. It's different and we don't have good rules for it, but that's the issue that I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with the ownership or the promotion, although those are issues. I'm talking about defined economic rights for token holders so that you know what the asset is worth. So almost no tokens have actual formally

defined economic rights attached to them. I think I can count on one hand the number of projects I've ever seen that do something like that. And look, that would, I think, literally make it into a security, which is different than the conversation we normally have about tokens, which is this imputed security-ness based on the expectations of the people who are buying the tokens. And Mario, what you said about centralized versus decentralized utility that's being added, that may or may not, that might make a legal difference if there's no particular group of people who are necessary to add this utility versus it's the community. But in terms of this question of like, are you going to trick people into thinking this is a long-term investment? I don't know if it really matters whether it's

like the community of people that are incentivized by their desire for number go up or a team that's incentivized by an allocation they kept for themselves. I think the result ends up being the same, even if the legal answer is different. Zach, you weren't here and I'm not sure Mario was listening. Yesterday, we had an here, and I'm not sure Mario was listening. Yesterday, we had an interesting sort of nuance to this similar conversation that Tom Dunleavy brought up. And it was that a lot of these end up with these projects and memes, but also kind of dead protocols that nobody's using or big projects from past cycles end up with these massive treasuries that they

have no idea effectively what to do with. Right. And so that is a reason that a lot of them try to quote unquote, add utility because they literally have had hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars for something that's effectively a zombie treasury that they need to then figure out what to do with. Yeah. My favorite example of this is the Telegram coin, TUN, which the team that created that was, the Telegram team was sued by the SEC.

It was found to be a securities offering. The official project shut down. It became a zombie coin. And then the community came together and resurrected it in the last cycle, which I thought was fascinating to see. I don't know the numbers. He mentioned it yesterday, but EOS

obviously, block one, they have billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Right? The EOS foundation or whatever it is. Billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. And effectively nothing to do with it. I wanted to hear, because I said earlier, Smiley

and Jeff, kind of going back to the discussion maybe on the markets, and I've changed the title to why are meme coins and outs crashing, but I think the pre-harving dump as well was something we should talk about. Smiley, Jeff. Who's starting Jeff or me? Go ahead, Smiley. Okay. Thanks for having me. So yeah, there's a lot of touch on, I just want to say one quick thing about meme coins and then I'm just going to move on to global like general market stuff i disagree and this might be a like a hot take i disagree with william and whoever else was saying that we need utility and meme coins i think utility in meme coins and i'm speaking about actual quote unquote blue chip meme coins right pepe doge with uh shiba

and stuff like that i'm not talking about the rugs on solana that that go to zero in 24 hours right i'm talking about the actual staple meme coins right i think utility is bearish why is it bearish because if team promises something and they do deliver great it goes up but it will go up either way because liquidity because btc is going up and as long as btc is going up mean coins are going to go up people are going to gamble people want to people want that lottery ticket but on the flip side if there's utility to a meme token and the team fails to deliver or the product is underwhelming it just it just isn't there what happens it's negative it nukes so i think utility on meme coins is, is actually bearish.

It's not good to have it's for me, in my opinion, and I'm big into meme coins. Like I actually have more than a quarter of my portfolio all into meme coins. I didn't know that. I didn't expect it. Would you say it's very similar to the, I was talking to someone two nights ago and we're talking about CryptoPunks, something I've said before, the worst thing to happen to Cryptoks is the acquisition by you guys.

Cause now you're adding utility to something that didn't need utility. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the narrative behind crypto punks was utility itself. If you wanted to call it utility, would you say the same thing with the meme coins, like the community itself and the decentralized aspect of it is the utility. And as soon as you start building on top of that, at least from the get-go, then you're moving away from that value.

Now you've got something more easy to measure and that could hurt the valuation. Exactly. There's room for failure then. Otherwise, there's no room to fail. They're just going to run as long as BTC runs, as long as stocks run, as long as risk assets are running, meme coins are going to run because long as BTC runs, as long as stocks run, as long as risk assets are running. Meme coins are going to run because they're a casino, right? As soon as you attach some utility to them, they lose their sense. They're not meme coins anymore.

They're actual projects. And a lot of things can go wrong. And then community is confused. Hey, is this my lottery ticket? Or is this an investment? Is this a trade? I don't want to go deeper into it. I want to talk general markets because I guess we're straight into the meme coin discussion for the past 15 minutes

but yeah that's my opinion on meme coins and that's coming from someone that more than a quarter of my or my portfolio in meme coins like they've pumped so much i think one third of my entire crypto portfolio is in meme coins and i feel very comfortable with that like a lot of them are up 10 20 x they're the staple ones obviously pepe and stuff but like that's that's just my view that's just my opinion i think it's controversial because people want utility people want to invest into something no i'm just gonna dump it at the top of the bull run because it's a lottery ticket for people and i'm gonna sell that lottery ticket but i do want to touch on general market stuff in general like the correction and everything because i kind of want to go swim i'm on vacation so you know if you guys would let me i would i

would express my opinion go ahead i think it's good time to pivot to the markets we'll go to jeff okay so regarding having i'm going to quote myself and just in short having in short term is a literal non-event. Trying to extrapolate what happened in the past halving months, days, or weeks of it seems extremely insignificant compared to the last cycles, right? Pricing in concept of the halving is so complex, you can't pinpoint it to anything other than a yearly or a higher timeframe. So basically, that's it regarding regarding having and regarding general markets i mean a year ago when i was telling people to buy it 20 25 30k people were hesitant now at all-time high breaks and 65 70 000 everyone is betting on cat coins everyone is leveraging up coins and bitcoin and ethereum and they all want that run 200 000 in the next couple of weeks in the

next couple of months i do not think that's happen. I do think we have a second quarter and third quarter of chop. I'm not bearish. I'm not going to doom. Of course, I do not think it's over, not even remotely over. But I do think seasonality and macro look slightly shaky for the next month or two, and then summer comes. for the next like a month or two and then summer comes so the thesis is that u.s tax season begins now fully in april so two days ago right that means liquidity gets drained out of the money markets to pay u.s treasuries that means money is depleted from the liquidity so will the fed will the fed offset that i do not think and my macro experts i'm not a macro expert they do not think they and my macro experts, I'm not a macro expert, they do not think they

have the tools for that. So in the very, very, very short term, so that's like a month or two, I think liquidity gets depleted a little bit. That means that stocks are going to correct themselves. Dollar looks pretty fucking bullish on the charts. That goes well with my thesis. BTC looks tired. People are betting on cat coins it all it all goes well then we have etf narrative right bitcoin etf i think the etf flows are going to slow down they already been slowing down and over the summer seasonally every summer every single year it's slower in a sense so now more than ever we depend depend on TradFi. We depend on ETF flows. We depend, we depend on that money from TradFi to flow into crypto to pump us to a hundred thousand

dollars because we ourselves cannot do it. People betting on cat on cat coins on Solana are not going to pump Bitcoin to a hundred thousand dollars. That's just not enough money, right? That's obvious. We need the infos, my humble opinion. And I haven't missed so far like on higher timeframes. It's been since I've been on Twitter is, we pick up back in September and of course in Q4 and we go absolutely bad shit. Crazy then until then, I think April. Yeah. I agree with Scott. I agree with Scott. Scott was making that point like 15 minutes ago when I joined the space,

I completely agree with him with everything he said. Uh basically liquidity issues for for the next month or two and then summer summer seasonality i think that's that's what five months of let's say ball market i'm not gonna say bearish i don't think we nuked the 40 000 or something 45 i just think we chop we get seasonality it's a bit slower a lot of people get, slow down, and a lot of people give up. And then we run it, run it up in Q4. That's my opinion. Jeff, I know Scott, you want to go to Jeff as well. And kind of Jeff, if you could do me a favor and just kind of go through the ETF performance in the last two weeks, I know we discuss it daily, but I kind of,

obviously you want to talk about the markets, but just looking at the ETFs now, compared to the early days and the crazy inflows we saw in the early stages, what are your thoughts on the inflows we're still seeing now, inflows and outflows, depending on the day? Sure, happy to kick that off. It's true, the ETF flows have slowed down a little bit, though I think there continues to be incremental demand. I think you did see for the first time ARK, in particular, had a net outflow redemption event. So you're definitely seeing a slowdown. I do think that it will take a little more time for the actual outlets to turn on for much of these platforms and RIAs to unleash the wall of capital sitting on the sideline. But rest assured,

we're at the front line here doing the work and seeing tremendous progress there. So I do think it's going to unfold over the next few months. On the macro sentiment with the downturn yesterday, I really do think that there are times when the macro dynamics overtake the importance of the crypto narratives, and yesterday was one of those. I do think that the fact we saw dollars strengthened with the 10-year yield rising by 10 bps was pretty big as a move to think through what risk assets would perform through. And for the foreseeable future, I imagine this is going to weigh a little bit more than the generic dynamic of bottoms up crypto fundamentals and flows. Being said, today we are seeing DXY come in again a little bit. And I think that will give some

relief. I see the tenure still rising and those dynamics are important to paying attention to. In specific to the timing of the halving, I try to think about what's different this time around versus the cycles we've experienced in the past. And there are two things for me that are salient. The first is, this is the first time we're entering the halving where we're anticipating rate cuts. So back in 2016 and 2020, the environment was a little bit different in how in 2016 rates were rising into the halving. And we also saw Bitcoin perform alongside half through the rate hike cycle. And 2020 obviously was a totally different story in the injection of liquidity that we're experiencing. So that dynamic, I think,

is important that we have having an event entering into what is likely to result in great expansion of liquidity in the future. The other dynamic is, this is the first halving we're having post-Bitcoin having experienced the taproot upgrade. And I mentioned that as something worthwhile because the chance of allowing these inscription activities for minor profitability is new for this dimension versus the prior cycle. Combine that with the exciting things that are happening with stacks and other utilities around Bitcoin, what activities would rise. Those things create a different opportunity for the miners in a way that I think is worth paying attention to, that will look different than 2020.

And just one more thing. I know we don't want to talk about meme coins and whatnot, but just listening to Dave and then William talk through some of these things around utilities. I think sometimes we do a little bit of a disservice in crypto in being narrow in how we try to think about the Howey test because that's, of course, what the SEC keeps insisting on. But I always remind people, there are so many things that fall under this interpretation of an investment contract and a common enterprise goal where it's completely arbitrary for us to

be narrow-minded in that argument. For example, I still think it's incredible that the SEC refuses to acknowledge whether the loan market is actually part of the securities framework. It is mind baffling to me that we have loans as an investment contract at a commercial level of the trillions of dollars of size where the SEC refuses to opine whether that actually might be a security or not. So, you know, just important to remember, this is ultimately a question of registration, the form factor in which these things come to market. And I think it's not nearly as critical as thinking about, you know, some of these utilities and other things in the way that the SEC has struggled, frankly, even defining whether loans would be a security, which that, by definition, I think has more touchpoint to the common enterprise and endeavor of others towards an investment contract. Douglas? Thank you. Thank you, Scott and Mario.

One of the things I think that I heard was, you know, obviously meme coins have tremendous communities. And I've been talking to a lot of retailers recently that want to dip their toes into Web3, into crypto, trying to figure out how to do it. If you've got a community that likes a dog, why wouldn't Petco say, you know what, we'll accept Dogecoin now for payments and you'll get a discount on when you make a purchase. So there are specific meme coins out there that might be very interesting to retailers, that retailers could then accept that for payment. And that then creates demand for the meme coin. And it's not the meme coin or their management or their

decentralization that makes it interesting, it's the fact that there's a tremendous community. And I think that that's something that's going to be explored in the next couple of months. And we'll probably start hearing about something like that um where stores start to accept some of these meme coins because they want to attract the community to them and i think that might be quite interesting right i think those are the ones that have crossed the chasm right maybe i mean that's the point is like can we compare dogecoin to like, you know, a cat with glasses or, you know, whatever launches and is gone 24 days. So we almost need like multiple classifications of meme coins by either market cap adoption or, or some sort of, yeah. Yeah. Size of community. I think that the mature meme coins will at some point attract retailers.

And I think that because they want the community, you know, you want to fish in a pond where you know that people are interested in something. And I think that we're going to see a lot more of that. And that makes it exciting regarding Bitcoin and the halving and, you know, people finding causality or correlation between economic numbers or this, that, and the next thing, it really is a fitting in the narrative where someone at CoinDesk is told, write an article on why Bitcoin's fallen. Well, economic numbers came out today, so maybe it's that. And so a story is written. I think the reality is over the last couple of weeks, everyone sat down with pencil and paper and said, wow, they're buying $500 million a day. If that continues for the next year, then Bitcoin is going to be at XYZ. And I think that that's obviously silly

math. It's not math that makes sense in an investment perspective. And so there has been a lot of froth in the system. People are now feeling that maybe there's a slowing of the ETFs buying. But that doesn't change the fact that the halving cycle is here and makes it exciting. And I think it's time to accumulate rather than to throw in the towel, obviously. I think someone said earlier, one of the first comments was, we all know it's going higher. And I think that's very true. If I bought a townhouse in 1900, I'm sure there were ups and downs in that townhouse in price based upon rights in New York City or goodness knows what. And the price moved up and down. But that townhouse I bought for $15,000 in 1900 is probably worth $25 million today. So looking at the very short-term moves,

hurts your psyche. If you really believe in Bitcoin, then you have to assume that it's going to be much, much higher going forward and look on the longer picture rather than looking at it on a day-to-day basis. Absolutely agree. William and Dave. Well, this is very confusing because we're mixing behaviors of public markets with private markets, and they are very different. In the case of the meme coins, the first thing you see is the behavior of a public market because they are traded. And it's very confusing

because private markets are much slower and a startup takes a lot longer to develop. So that makes it even more confusing to define something. I'm going to still defend the utility aspect of meme coins because it depends how you define utility as well. I think the case was, yeah, can you use those coins or whatever to buy something? Yeah, this is kind of loosely defined utility.

It doesn't have to be something that's very embedded. But in the future, it's going to be a lot easier to swap from one coin to another. And maybe I have so many Dogecoins and somebody wants me to pay them in Bitcoins. What if I can just push a button and then boom, it trades it and automatically it pays in Bitcoin. So it shouldn't matter in the future as to what you hold, as long as you can pay in crypto. So those lines will get blurred. And the last thing I would say is that in the realm of meme coins, price goes up.

It's not a business model. It's not a valid thing. Yeah, now we are living in good times. And when you see something doing X25 and you say, why not another X25? But from experience, every time you think that the sky is the limit, that is when the sky is not the limit because there is an end to anything. If you've made 25 or 50X on meme coins, I think count your blessings and cash out as much as you can.

And then maybe leave some in case it keeps running. But there are some credible projects. There are some that have teams behind them that are trying to push the envelope and be creative because we're still innovating in terms of what the token can be used inside of a blockchain. Nobody has figured that out totally yet. The playbook is still being written. There were some examples early, like with Steemit, where they would pay you for content,

and now it's coming back with content being rewarded. But it's easy to get a reward. It's a lot more difficult to get you to spend the reward that you've just earned. So in my opinion, the most vibrant economies in the token spaces are going to be the ones where you can earn and spend as well. And the same way that we have our economies today, we talk about the dollar and the spending powers. It's going to be the same. Spending is going to be as important as earning.

Dave. Okay, I got to jump pretty quickly, but I wanted to make two quick points. One, every time I hear things like, well, we don't need utility, this time is different, I think back to the most classic example, which is during the internet bubble, when the first time a stock that had gone crazy starts showing earnings, the stock cratered, because all of a sudden people started looking at fundamentals. That will happen. Now, that said, the point that was made earlier about communities being valuable and being monetizable by retailers, etc., is 100% true.

Vibrant, strong communities that may have started with a meme could easily be used to create monetary value for that community. The issue will be whether or not they're legally allowed to do so, which, of course, is absurd that that's the issue, but it truly is an issue. But I'd also agree that the whole notion that the Howey test should actually matter is crap. Basically, if we just ended up with decent regulation, that really should be light touch, just hold people accountable to if they're an issuer of a coin, to making true statements and giving people the ability to understand what the value is, that's where you get. And so I'm not anti-meme coin. I'm not anti-meme. I mean, hell,

you know, if GameStop's management was any good, they could have levered the GameStop meme phenomena into building a real company. They just chose to cash out. So, you know, they didn't do as much. But even there, it's still higher, I think, than it was then before the whole mission got started. So it can be a useful phenomena. It doesn't matter that it's crypto. The real question is how much of the oxygen does all this stuff take from the rally? And does it mean, as one of the previous speakers, that a rally has to wait three, four, five months before it resumes again because it needs that oxygen to grow? And that's going to depend upon basically RIAs and other sort of people entering into the

crypto space for Bitcoin via the ETF and other things over the course of the next few months. We'll see how that plays out. And it's perfect sense. Anybody else have thoughts on that specifically? If not, I think we can go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I think just kind of echoing what Dave said, you know, when the NFT market was booming, it started with art and innovation in art.

And then as it started to go and the art started to be produced in mass and the quality became a race to the bottom, it became increasingly important to be about community. And I think in meme coins, we saw some really exciting projects. We've seen some interesting concepts and some things that came on. But then we also saw this sort of race to the bottom. And as people come in late, the importance of community becomes increasingly important to justify the lack of tangible value. And I just think that that trend is something that we see repeating and repeating. I don't think that meme coins are

pointless or worthless. I think they're fun and exciting and they have a place, but I think that you can sort of see that trend. And I think that you may see that there's a towards the end of a trend and a pivot starting to occur when people are preaching loyalty to a liquid asset. It's just not something that you see. If people are preaching loyalty to a liquid asset. It's just not something that you see. If people are preaching loyalty to a liquid asset without underlying tangible value, perhaps there's a trend pivot coming in the near future. I also just wanted to harken back to something earlier, Scott. Block.One owns 164,000 Bitcoin. They are the second largest private owner of Bitcoin, representing 0.7% of the total supply. It's a pretty staggering amount. And I have no idea what they're going to do with it.

But it's something to really behold some of these private groups, what they're going to do with these Bitcoin holdings, and what will their loyalty be? Absolutely. And then obviously, a lot of them have treasuries that are in their own tokens as opposed to Bitcoin like EOS. I mean, EOS literally block one should just pull a micro strategy and go ahead and just be like

an actively managed Bitcoin fund, right? But you would think they'd become that instrument. Yeah. Yeah, which would make a ton of sense. So, I mean, I think we've basically covered everything that we had in mind today. I think the market sort of doing its thing and we'll see how that shakes out over the next few days. So I think great time to go ahead and wrap Mario.

You're good. If you're there. See, he left us. All right, guys, we'll see you all tomorrow. 10 15 AM Eastern standard time. Thanks. Bye.