The Wolf Of All Streets - Saylor Buys $600M BTC | FTX to Sell $744M | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

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Carlo, you got a new avatar, buddy. I capitulated. The scales of justice now. By the way, that video of you singing was amazing. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we come to this space from different backgrounds. And you got me reminiscing when you put that video up of you DJing.

That avatar is actually an nft that i dropped a few months ago it's a totally free mint no royalties it's just anything and anyone that supports uh crypto lawyers in the space it's kind of like just a great little avatar that i put out there how long did you sing for oh man i did that all through college and law school um that was always my weekend side hustle like casual opera weekend side hustle kind of thing going on it was a lot of fun definitely gave me a whole different perspective on the world and actually believe it or not you know sinatra is obviously a influence, but Sinatra and the way he approached lyrics and interpreting songs gave me a lot of tools to use in the courtroom when it came to juries. His presence, that ability to captivate an audience was a skill that I definitely am grateful I learned.

Yeah. Mario, Ren, you guys might have missed it. I posted randomly a video for my DJ days and he responded with, this is what I used to do. And it was him singing. It was amazing. You tweeted a video of you DJing? At some point there was a video that Emmy found of me like scratching at something. And I posted it yesterday. Like it had been posted before and he responded with that.

I said, this is what I used to do before I'm doing this and then uh i was like this is what i used to do people are multi-talented man it's crazy nice big in japan big in japan huge for six months um gone but forgotten but gone but also forgotten. Yes Should we put the sailor and the sailor purchased in the title? Probably I mean the guy is relentless right? Biggest purchase is ever made There's pretty major. Yeah, I would change and below the occur below the current price, you know, that never happens Everybody loves to say that whatever the price he says he bought at, it's usually above whatever the price

is currently, and it was in the 36s. Good job. Yeah, I'm just adding in. Yeah, that's a bit unfair. He's always buying. Of course it's unfair. Absolutely ridiculous. Did you say it was his third biggest?

This is his third biggest purchase ever. In Bitcoin or in dollars? In dollars. Third biggest purchase ever. I didn't really dig into it because it happened right before I did YouTube. Was this a result of that $750 million that was announced he was raising a few months ago is that where the money came from because it just seems like there's unlimited dry powder i don't know but i mean i guess it's that maybe plus some company profits

it's unbelievable like just casually buy 600 million worth of bitcoin on a you know random tuesday you know the best feels like the best thing is we kind of know that sale is never going to sell so it's like we know whatever's in there is in there to stay but do you remember the narratives of all like all the times he was going to get liquidated or he was going to be forced to sell and if it went to 20 or if it went to 17 it was finished and it was just yet another just complete nonsensical thing that everybody covered and talked about for months that just wasn't true and didn't happen crypto bear market twitter fun bro no but it's no i wouldn't say it's fun he He gets liquidated. He gets liquidated. He doesn't choose to be liquidated.

He couldn't get liquidated. But he couldn't be. Couldn't be. That was the point. Yeah. It was people doing bad napkin math who didn't understand how he had actually purchased it that became like a massive mainstream narrative and story about what was going to happen. And then when he clarified, I think he said he couldn't get liquidated unless it went

below like three or four grand at the time. Right. So it's 3000, but you know, a lot of people don't understand the micro strategy business. They think that micro strategies just buys Bitcoin, but they don't. Cause what they do is they borrow money cheap and they, they buy Bitcoin and then they pay the, they'll pay like a six or 7% interest or 3% or 0% interest or whatever they took their loans at and they leveraging it to buy Bitcoin. So it's like, it's like the best business model in the world. It's

like a leveraged ETF of Bitcoin. And most people don't understand that. Yeah. The first time I ever interviewed him must've been, uh, mid 2020. It was right. The first week nobody knew who he was and he bought bitcoin and you know he went on his podcast roadshow and became like the uh captain of all bitcoiners um he basically broke down for the first time i had heard it so sort of clearly stated the playbook for billionaires which you just sort of described but you know he kind of laughed about how easy it is for him to get uh basically sub one percent loan on his yacht that's floating across the planet where they can't even uh couldn't even take it back if they wanted to and basically if you're wealthy you can just get you

know extremely low interest loans uh carry them forever never ever sell anything and never have to pay taxes and just ride into the sunset it's really incredible one said to me it's i think it's quite a common saying it's like if if you owe the bank a million dollars that's your problem if you owe them a billion yeah you broke up but that's correct yeah so so how how how so, how, how, so right. How important, how it's going back to the purchase today. How important is it in your opinion? Do you guys, do you talk about it?

I mentioned it, but I mean, listen, say they're buying Bitcoin is not a story anymore. Like you always know that say let's buy in Bitcoin. He doesn't move the market anymore. The market's too big now, especially now with all the ETF buying. I saw that the Bitto ETF is at an all-time high to one and a half billion. Bitto is the Bitcoin futures ETF. It's got 1.5 billion in the ETF.

Now, just let me just do that. If Bitto, if futures ETF has 1.5 billion, I mean, you'd imagine that the SPAC ETF would be way bigger than the futures ETF. So that could give you an idea of how much money is going to start flowing into the ETF when the ETF actually happens. Yeah, Mario, do you just quickly want the numbers on the micro strategy purchase just so people know what we're talking about? It's micro strategy has acquired an additional 16,130 Bitcoin for 593.3 million, an average price of $36,785 per Bitcoin as of 11-29-23. MicroStrategy now holds 174,530 Bitcoin acquired for 5.28

billion at an average price of 3030,252 per Bitcoin. I mean, it is way up now. No joke. But this is a big purchase. You're talking about, just to be clear, the purchase today is 10% now. It makes up 10% of the entire holdings. It is a big purchase, if my math is correct.

Yeah, what does it say? They hold $174,000. So yeah, 8.9%. Yeah, and I put 16K, so it's about 9%. Yeah, it's meaningful. Wow, total side note. I just got a text while I was reading that from one of my best friends. His best friend was randomly one of the hostages in Israel and was released yesterday.

Wow. Congratulations. Good news. Absolutely incredible. Yeah. Wow. What good news. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. That was just a hell of a hell of a text to get in the middle of that. So, yeah, I think there's a pretty meaningful purchase for him. But, you know, like Fran said, we can talk talk it to death but we just know where this goes he's going to buy the price doesn't matter and he's not selling it uh james i want to yeah we can

yeah just uh you know i was going to say sorry my my headphones my apple headphones always fight between my phone and my laptop because anyone who has a solution to this problem please come on stage and tell me how to stop. Just disconnect your laptop Bluetooth. I do it all the time whenever I'm in space. Surely there's a more elegant way than disconnecting your headphone. Yeah, don't turn on an iPad also because then you get the three-way battle. It's really fun. I mean, I'm willing to pay good money to solve that problem.

And the other problem I'm willing to pay really good money to solve is when you lose your credit card. Like, surely you should go to one app and put your new credit card when you get your new credit card into one app. And that should spam it to all the applications. So you don't get a notification from 900 subscription services that you've actually, your credit card, that you haven't changed your credit card. I lost my credit card that you haven't changed your credit card. I lost my credit card. I think I've got like a hundred apps that I have to go now. Uber, Amazon, Masari,

crypto, trading view. I have to go and change my credit card and every single fucking one of these things could just cause I lost the credit card. And it's like the third credit card I've lost this month. I spent like 30% of my month updating. Why do you lose so many credit cards? Can we dig into i mean you sound like my wife now scott i still don't know where all the credit cards are going are they being left at restaurants or is it like they get washed in

your pants or something i mean if i knew i wouldn't know where to go look for them i don't know i'm just in careless i have lots of i know i know it's a dry news day guys okay sorry it's not that time it's actually not that drive a news day and we do have james here we were just talking about etf so you'll like that i think it would be a good idea just thinking james uh the question i had for you is what rand was saying earlier comparing the the bidder numbers with uh with the spot et ETF when it gets approved. Can you make any comparisons there and try to predict what the inflows will be? Yeah, so the BIDO is at a record.

He's exactly right, $1.5 billion. That said, most of that money flew in right away when it launched. So it went down and then came back up. It's seen significant inflows largely because people are betting on this spot ETF announcement, right? People are looking for exposure. And one of the ways they're doing it is through those futures ETFs. So talking about flows, I did write a note not too long ago about what we can expect flow-wise. Galaxy is very public.

I love their research paper. Alex Thorne and team over at Galaxy Research covered this. They're expecting $14 billion in the first year. I personally think that's a little high. I think it'll be closer to $10 billion. But a lot of things depend on what happens with GBTC. People were talking about GBTC and the FTX basically being able to sell their exposure GBTC now. There's a lot of people that are likely potential to sell that. So it's hard to know exactly what's going to happen. So one of the things I like to do is compare it to the size of

the Canadian market and the European market, which already have crypto ETFs, and then look at the size of the US market and say, how big is it going to be? So if you just look at the European market, which I do not think is the best way to look at this, US crypto ETFs should be around 32 billion. Right now, if you include Bitcoin futures ETFs, Ethereum futures ETFs, and the Grayscale Trust, you're already at 31 billion in assets in the US. But in Canada, the number's closer to like 70 billion. And I think that's slightly inflated because I think some of the money that would come to the US has gone to Canada. So I think in the first year where it's likely to be billions that would come in, our number we estimated was

around 10. But like the main, I've said it on the stage before, the main thing here is more so that like the people that are going to get access to this, yes, I think there will be hundreds of millions that could flow into these things if they launch in January. But I don't think we're going to see the same sort of hype potentially that we saw with the Bitcoin futures launch that launched at like the height, the height of a bubble bull market and Bitcoin mania in late 2021. But the main thing here is that over the long term, people that want to allocate to this space, this those are the products they're going to use. So there's likely to be like, I don't want to say steady drumbeat, but like a more consistent pattern of allocation into these products from people like institutions and financial advisors that want exposure to Bitcoin. Yesterday, Mario, you have to clarify for me. We had that guy on stage. What's his name? Hector? Is that the guy's name? Not the guy you talked about. The guy who we brought up.

He was mocking us. That wasn't Hector. That wasn't Hector. I know Hector. That wasn't Hector. Well, somebody came up on stage and was like just crapping all over Bitcoin. And he had Bitcoin in his bio. But then somebody messaged me afterwards.

Oh, Green. Michael Green. No, it wasn't Michael Green. It was, there was a guy who said Michael Green. Oh, Hector, yes, yes. Yeah. Hector, I like Hector, yeah. Yeah, but is Hector like a huge BSV guy?

Because somebody T-M-E-S-S-E-D? Yes, yes, yes. Oh, it makes so much more sense. How did nobody give me that context before that argument? It's in his bio, man. It's in his bio. No, it just it's in his bio man it's in his bio it says bitcoin in his bio oh which is which is which is the which is the misdirection that all the bsb and real bitcoin he means the real bitcoin but yeah he's not he's even gone a step beyond the real bit you know the quote-unquote real bitcoin from uh cash the bsb

it's fine i'm just I didn't mean to, because he was like all over everything that we said against Bitcoin. And I'm like, you're a Bitcoiner. It's in your bio and nobody. Yeah. I think there's still the biggest misdirection we have in this entire space is that Bitcoin.com is a Bitcoin Cash website.

But hey, go ahead. Dave, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. I just said somebody was literally dming me yeah yeah but before what is it if you're telling us about every one of your dms you get a second one today um before we go to dave just quickly james on the on the inflows 10 billion dollars it's not gonna but if you look at the the market cap of bitcoin and you look at the inflows it shouldn't have much of an impact on price like i don't say what we're pricing it's like

the value of the the tick of approval the stamp of approval seems to be more valuable than the inflows is that fair to say or am i missing something yeah so i've i've been staunchly in the camp that yeah i mean theoretically it's not like one thing that people need to realize is when you're buying these spot etfs right now the sec and the issuers are like haggling over exactly how the backend plumbing is going to work, basically like figuring out all these very specific details, right? But at the end of the day, when you buy this ETF, you're paying exposure to spot Bitcoin. If these ETFs want to create new shares, they're going to have to hold spot Bitcoin. So theoretically, if you're buying these things and we're way off and the numbers are more bullish and more flows coming than we think,

then it will impact the price. But I tend to agree with you. I think the impact of the SEC approving this and basically greenlighting, giving, it's not really regulatory clarity, but it is a little bit of regulatory clarity in a way. And I think the value of that is greater than the value of the money that's going to pour in. Because I think people are underestimating the fact that there's already 23, 24 billion dollars in GBTC itself. So I think I really do think and I've said this multiple times. I think what you said, the fact that the SEC is approving this is a bigger deal than necessarily the money is going to come in, at least particularly over the short term, over the long term. And we could be talking many more billions of dollars.

But over the short term, it's just it's just what the sec's decision is what numbers what numbers over the long term so like i i like to look at like all right gold etfs have been around since 2003 right i think bitcoin etfs can ultimately pass them but i think like getting past that asset level is going to be not like that's not something to trifle with. And gold ETFs in the US have about 100 billion. So if you're looking at Bitcoin ETFs in the US, in five years, if if Bitcoin ETFs have 100 billion, that would be an extremely successful situation. Maybe if you could float up a little bit, because the number tends to go up over time because markets grow but um but yeah

i'd say like i i don't think we're going to see them cross 100 billion anytime soon unless you see bitcoin go like parabolic after it takes in billions of flows terence dave yeah my only push back to james is the sec already approved right uh the futures bitcoin etfs and that did not cause this rush of cash in the bitcoin that stayed from institutions and financial advisors so i think it's also that fidelity blackrock and vesco and franklin templeton all of which manage over a trillion dollars fidelity and blackrock manage way more than that that they're legitimizing bitcoin and i think that's what's going to cause the price to go up over time i don't know about the short term yeah so i agree with that actually i think it's both the sec and these large trad five managers legitimizing it the one thing i would say is that

um the bitcoin futures etfs futures ETFs, they blew my expectations out of the water for the amount of money that we thought would go into them. Advisors, a lot of institutions, those products that roll futures are not products that people buy for long-term buy and hold exposure. They use them really for short-term tactical allocation. So these spot ETFs will be much, much, much more suitable for long-term buy and hold investors looking to just have Bitcoin exposure in their portfolio. So yeah, Bitcoin futures ETFs, I'll just say again, drastically outperformed our expectations when they launched. So yeah. So I think that's a good segue to a couple of points I want to make. The first point is that while I agree, James, and I think you know I do,

that the longer term impact is far more important than the shorter term in terms of legitimization, because after all, you know, global adoption of Bitcoin, digital gold is, you know, 15 to 20x from here, even at the most conservative valuation. And in order to get to that, you've got to reach critical mass. This is a step on that road. But economics matter. Cost of buying and selling Bitcoin for the average person is still very expensive, right? Whether it's retail spot Bitcoin through platforms, generally the cheapest you're going to move in and out is just under 1%.

As opposed to in your brokerage account, now you get exposure and it will be free from a commission point of view with spreads that are a microcosm. You know, literally 95% less than the other. And yes, there'll be a management fee. And the question is, is what competition will do to that management fee. So that's going to matter. The fact is, when you talk about the futures launch, remember, the futures launch, yes, it allowed people to speculate in Bitcoin going up. But it also was the first time people could short Bitcoin that were in the United States first time. And as a result, it marking the top was completely

rational. There is no such thing like that. In fact, shorting Bitcoin via futures right now is dirt, dirt cheap because of the last fact I want to mention, which is that the premium that the futures trade at compared to spot fluctuates wildly right now, but is actually was very high. So last week, when the futures ETF had to roll their futures now for the audience, just to explain, if you're holding futures, you were holding November futures as under the ETF, you needed to roll them to the December future because the November was going to expire and you can't afford not to be in the market. That ballooned to a significant premium, almost a 2% premium at the worst point last week. And then it happened again yesterday. When that happens, that's going to translate directly to underperformance. So when you made the point, James, or Terrence, I can't remember which one

of you, that it's not a good, the futures ETFs are not a good long-term strategy. That's the reason why. It's because you are paying a tax to be able to stay in futures. It also is indicative, the fact that futures premiums, even now, today, when the market sold off a little bit, the premium dropped to around 320 bucks, which is about 80 basis points. Somewhere around, based on today's prime rates, interest rates, it should be somewhere between 60 and 70. But right now, it's back up to about 1%. And as I said, it's been as high as 2% over the last couple of days. So people, there's consistent buying pressure into the Bitcoin market from people buying, going long, Bitcoin futures. And that, to me, is indicative of people trying to get ahead of all this and having no other

way to do so. So the question becomes, obviously, when it becomes a lot cheaper to do so, more and more people will get involved. Yeah, I have no notes. I agree with literally everything that Dave said. The one thing I would also add is that those roll costs and what he was talking about is the reason that Biddo is underperforming spot by over 10% so far in 2023. It's that process of rolling those contracts that has made these futures products inefficient, like he said, and that's amounted to over 10%. So like, yeah, granted, this happens when Bitcoin tends to go on bull runs, and 10% might not seem like enough. But if you're investing in these things, and I told you upfront that this ETF is going to cost you 10% a year, everyone would like, their head would blow

off. They'd be like, absolutely not. I'm not using this product. So that's why these things are inefficient. When it launched, there weren't even enough futures contracts, or at least short dated futures contracts for them to fill the demand. So they were forced to go out to further dated contracts. I mean, it's just completely broken. And if you went to tens, you couldn't go to tens of billions with the futures ETF and have it remotely track the underlying asset. Yeah, that had a lot to do with the way that the commodities market and futures market set up with futures commission merchants. Basically, they also ran out of balance sheet room. Like these futures commission merchants that facilitate this like creating of new futures, like they literally literally ran out of room because Bitcoin futures,

specifically Ethereum futures, they have the highest leverage requirements or basically the way that you create these things, you have to put up more collateral than you do for other things. So the whole process, basically the flows that went into Biddo on day one and day two

basically broke the entire system for the better part of a month. Yeah. Carlo? Question for the panel. I noticed that Coinbase stock appears to be dumping at the moment down 3%. And is that because of this sell-off that happened yesterday, or is there something else on the horizon that you all are seeing? I mean, I wouldn't call 3% a dump. And specifically, I wouldn't call 3% a dump when if you look at Coinbase in the last month,

let me just give you accurate numbers. I just want to make sure that I give you really accurate numbers. If you look at Coinbase in the last month you have a move up of 75 to 126 yeah 65 65 so i think you know if the stock goes up 65 and then comes down three percent in a month we have to remember that it's you know it's still a stock. It's not a crypto token. I think that's a good enough performance for me. Yeah. So basically just a top off. Yeah, I think historically it was, I mean, historically overbought.

Technically, if you're looking at daily RSI, it was at 88, I think, yesterday or two days ago. And it just broke sort of, if you're looking at the chart, above 116 really broke a range that it was trading in for about over 18 months. So, I mean, that was a really big deal. I think that it kind of got above that level. I think, I mean, I would be bidding 116, not financial advice, I should say, and bidding 116 to add to my position if it comes back there. I just think that it's one of those massive charts that finally blew out and it's going to need a little time. But yeah, Carlo, I don't think there's anything fundamentally happening with Coinbase today. I would say the only negative news that we somewhat have is that the, now I'm going to look at, I don't want to misquote his job, but Wally Adiemo from the Department of the Treasury

had made some very, very strong statements yesterday about stablecoins at the Blockchain Association Summit. Dan Spooler from Blockchain Association sent me this privately and they tweeted it. And so

I think there's kind of a quiet sentiment that there's going to still be a hell of a lot more coming from the United States government. But I don't think that's necessarily rocking Coinbase today. Well, there's definitely headwinds. Of course, we don't know what's going to happen with the SEC lawsuit. And the future is still not clear. But I tend to agree with your thesis that this seems to be like a temporary sell-off in the sense of a lot of profits that were realized in a very short window. Yeah. I mean, Cathie Wood is a mega Coinbase bull. That hasn't changed at all. I think we talked about this yesterday, but if you're a fund, you're going to trade around your position

and there's going to always be a time to take profit, even if you have a huge position. So even she, I think, was trimming above 120, 123, 124. I don't want to misquote the number, but she sold quite a bit of Coinbase over the past few days. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't view it as investable long term or doesn't still have a massive position. You just, you know anyone and by the way and rand's been saying this relentlessly anyone in crypto or in any market when you're up massively you take some off the table no matter what you think is going to happen next you don't make binary decisions like i'm going to buy everything or sell anything just sell 10 20 of it and like go about your life and enjoy your games otherwise you're going to lose it all them do you want to tell them the story of how i learned that list i mean we've i think we've talked about it quite a bit but yeah i mean rand was all in

luna obviously you know and uh i was on his show and it had nothing to do with luna i had no insight on luna specifically was it two weeks before maybe the collapse three weeks something like that and he said hey man you know i'm i was on banter and he said you know i'm all in luna i think this thing whatever and i said dude like i literally i think i used expletives i said you gotta sell it like sell some dude i don't i don't know it could be uh it could be a fraction of uh you know jesus's crown i don't literally care what it is you need to sell some you know and and get some money off the table. And obviously, then, you know, Rand shared the story later that he had lost over nine figures on Luna. But we've all learned that lesson. You happen to learn it, I think, on a scale that most of us can't comprehend. But I

think that almost everybody who's been in this market or any market has learned that lesson many times. But listen, the Bitcoin can go to 150,000 tomorrow. For all I know, some of these altcoins that were massively overbought that have pulled 10x's can pull 100. But like be happy with your 10 and take some off the table. And I think it's the same lesson. And if you can watch Kathy Wood do it and she can beat the drum on how bullish she is on Coinbase, but you see publicly that she's selling, that should be all the example you need. Don't forget, Kathy Wood she says we they rebalance their portfolio i think monthly and sometimes you know they look at their portfolio monthly and they rebalance and you know if you had a stock that's gone up 40 50 then it does cause an imbalance in

your portfolio you've got to rebalance there's nothing you can do yeah absolutely right absolutely Absolutely right. Absolutely right. I know Bitcoin OGs, maxis, who do what you said, which is every time Bitcoin 10xs, they'll sell some Bitcoin. They'll sell 10% of their stack. Yeah, I mean, it just makes sense. And I think, you know, a lot of people, I'm a perfect example. You have a number or percentage in mind of how much exposure you want to a certain market. And then that market blows out and goes 10, 20, 30x. You look one day and you're like, I'm 80% crypto, right? Maybe I want to be 20% of my net worth in crypto or 10% or 25. And then all of a sudden, you're 90% in crypto and it's the top, right? You need to

rebalance no matter how passionate you are about these things and that doesn't necessarily mean you sell your bitcoin but my god if you're like in a meme coin and it's up 100x and you're not selling i'm sorry you were dropped on your head go ahead james uh i mean guys can we spend two minutes i can't hear mario i don't know if you want to take me down bring me up but just before you take down he's not talking so i think we might be all right um can we just spend two minutes talking about this Elon thing? I missed. The what thing? Sorry.

The Elon thing. I didn't even see it. Well, he told Bob Iger and other – you didn't see the Elon Musk go fuck yourself? Oh, he told Bob Iger. Any advertisers that want to blackmail him and not advertise to kill X to go fuck themselves? And then later in the same interview, I posted the whole video, he says something along the lines of anyone that will do that. You've got the clip. Do you have the clip as well, Ryan, of him saying?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear it. Yeah. I play it. You don't want them to advertise? No. What do you mean? If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising blackmailing with money go fuck yourself so it was a five-minute clip it was a five-minute clip where um andrew ross

sorkin's interviewing gun and elon says uh if people are gonna not advertise in the platform and because of because of his behavior they must go fuck themselves and he carries on so and then andrew russell king asked him about you know what's this going to do for me he says it's going to destroy the company but earth will know that this is what happened and now yeah i've got the exact quote let me read the quote right now you could go fuck yourself don't advertise what this advertising boycott is going to do it is going to kill the company x and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail but this is fucking mental i swear i don't know how he thinks but it's amazing i mean you're going after disney uh i live in florida so we we've seen that playbook

uh already so i don't think people are afraid to attack Disney, but the guy's got balls the size of watermelons. It's incredible. So now thousands of users are canceling their Disney Plus subscription after Elon Musk told Bob, I get to go. Yeah, I mean, he brought a sub pennypenny Dogecoin to 79 cents. We all know the power of Elon Musk. But I mean, it's crazy.

He's really not playing by anyone's playbook, clearly. I mean, what does that mean? Mario, I mean, you know the guy. Like, do you think that that's going to be massively impactful to X? Do you think that he's actually tanking the platform? Do you think he just says what's on his mind? He says what's on his mind. says what's on his mind and i'm not just guessing anymore and it's probably the best example of uh or the kind of could prove this to me is when i spoke to walter isaacson when i interviewed him the guy that wrote the biography and i spoke privately and publicly to him and he

said mario he just speaks his mind like. Like, you think he's analytical? Like, sometimes we think, like, how does he respond to tweets or messages he puts out? Is there a strategic meaning behind each one of them? He's extremely smart, but he's also very brash. Like, he does speak his mind. It's as simple as that. I don't even think there were, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't even think there was a strategy behind buying this platform. People, like, say he was playing 4D chess and whatever. I literally think he sent a tweet saying...

I literally think he sent a tweet saying he would buy it and then the lawyer's like, you know, you have to buy it now, dude. I read the book and that's exactly what happened. I think it's a very, very, very good book to read. One of the books that I really, really, really enjoyed. I didn't read that. You should read that.

I just give you an insight as to how this person thinks he literally let's do the same right let's let's do the same right so any advertisers that will tell us what to say on this show what do we say to them right please send money uh please send money to mario i'm telling you to go fuck yourself telling telling potential sponsors to go fuck yourself is like literally my favorite activity this is so scott actually i just forgot this is like what scott would do for a hobby like he just doesn't go fuck himself for no reason like hey guys hey scott what's up look

thanks for renewing your members some guy walked past my house this morning and i ran outside the front door and i just door. Go fuck yourself. I wonder if anybody in the panel has any feedback. To me, it looks like Elon is tired. It looks like Elon is under pressure. He called Andrew Ross Sorkin in the interview. He called him Jonathan. He says, Jonathan, you know the only reason why I'm here is because you're not a friend,

but he's talking to Andrew Ross Sorkin. And he says, Jonathan. And Andrew Ross Sorkin felt really awkward about that. Yeah. I mean, I interviewed Ben Mesrick, uh, for the podcast maybe two or three weeks ago, right when breaking Twitter came out and that ran, that was effectively his main sentiment of that book, which I'm yet to read as well, but he obviously told me about it and was on his road show,

but he basically said the book's called breaking Twitter. But in reality, his catchphrase is that Twitter broke Elon Musk. That, that that's what he says. I don't necessarily share that, but that's the premise of the book is that basically like he got out over his skis and it's just kind of been too much and it's messing with Tesla.

Let's open it to the panel. I see James's hands up and I want to hear other people's views. Yeah. I was going to comment on the, kathy wood stuff but i this i i will the walter isis soon book on elon musk was one of my favorite books i read this year so i don't remember which one of you said it but full endorsement on on reading that book it was me yeah full endorsement yeah i was going to say on kathy the fact people always like to look at her stuff and be like, oh, she's selling this, buying this. You guys hinted at it. I can't tell you how many tweets and articles I wrote downplaying the media acting like her selling her Tesla stock means that she's not believing what she's saying. So she has limits on how much of a portfolio a certain stock can get.

So once it goes over those limits, she sells it as it goes high. And then once it goes below those limits as a percentage of her portfolio, usually around 10%, she buys it. So that's what's happening with these names. It's almost like she knows what she's doing, James. It's almost like she's done this before. Yeah. There's one of the big critiques of her. She has no risk control.

But that is a blatant risk control and then i have so you have people both on the bitcoin inside of things saying it's ridiculous that she's selling stuff she should just keep her full exposure here and then you have trad five people like freaking out about tesla and stuff about how big of her exposure is and all these things but she trades around she they trade around their positions that's all that's happening with with kathy and r um so i would i would just echo and reiterate some of those things you said there um but yeah the elon musk stuff is just he looks haggard uh it's i really hope it doesn't go the way that it looks like it's going over the next few months because he's not gonna fight stuff right he's still fighting stuff i don't know but no no that was but j, you know that this is nothing new for Elon.

Like, this is nothing new for Elon. Elon often gets himself into these kind of situations, and then he recovers. It's not the first time it's happened. Dude, I bought so much Tesla when he smoked weed on Joe Rogan and the stock went massively down. It was like one of the greatest trades of my life. Going back to, I know I got to run soon,

so I just wanted to highlight something. Last few times I've been on here, Mario has asked for like timelines. I was talking when he thought that we might see approvals in December. We saw a couple of delays earlier this month on Hashtags and Franklin that the only reason the SEC would do that

would be that they're lining things up for january um essentially um we can get into the weeds if you guys have questions but that was a public question the delay was though i think a lot of people skinned it as like bad news was actually the public commentary period correct correct yeah exactly so what it does is basically they were due for decision on January 1st. Global X and potentially some others, they didn't come out of the comment period till December 29th, which is a Friday. So basically, if the SEC wants to approve all 12 of these at once, which I've been saying for a long time, we think is what they want to do. There was no period for them to do it because if they there was no time because January 1st is a holiday, so they can't do it on that day, right? So essentially, by going this early, that's when the deadline was for these. They went super early. We're talking more than a month in advance and delayed these things. And within a couple minutes of looking at this, it's pretty blatant to see what's happening is that they're lining these things up. So we had been saying there's a possibility that things could get approved in

December. This move basically makes it so I don't think approval is going to happen in December. There might be leaks that it's going to happen or like confirmation, but it's not actually going to happen until January. If it does happen, obviously there's not guaranteed it's going to happen, but the window is going to be somewhere. We don't know exactly.

It depends when this filing gets posted to the Federal Register. I'll know in a few days, but it's likely the window that for approvals is going to be somewhere january 5th ish to january 10th that we'll see these these approvals james wasn't there a new filer yesterday or this week a swiss pando perhaps his name something like that another one yeah yeah they have three etfs in europe they're pretty small uh they have a bitcoin etf and ethereum etf and then uh like a crypto index etf that holds six uh digital assets six cryptocurrencies um yeah they came out of nowhere so we have 13 filers now i personally don't i can't imagine that they're going to be ready to go

in january when these things are when we're expecting them to launch but yeah there's a 13th issue i mean i don't know what they're i i would love to talk to these guys because, I mean, they're coming here to the US filing to go up against Grayscale and BlackRock and ARK and all these guys. So it takes a lot of balls to do that in my view. Maybe they just need a quick five.

I have a question for you, James. Yeah. What are you going to do after the Bitcoin ETF is going to be approved? Have you got anything planned for your retirement? What are you going to do after the Bitcoin ETF is going to be approved? Have you got anything planned for your retirement or what are you going to do after? Yeah, it's been nice. I went from like being like just crypto hopeful people following me because they liked that I was bullish and everyone else telling me I was an idiot and it's never going to happen to now being kind of like the consensus that these things are going to happen. And there's other people on this

stage I've seen that have been in the same camp as me. But that said, it's going to be absolutely fascinating the first couple months that these things launch. We're calling it the Bitcoin Derby. We're trying to figure out a better way to the Bitcoin ETF Derby. We're trying to figure out a better name for it. But it is going to be cutthroat. People are going to be fighting hard for assets and liquidity. You saw a little bit of it with some advertising around the Ethereum ETFs, but this is going to be an order of magnitude bigger. You have a lot of big asset managers that are going to be jockeying for position. It's possible that some of these issuers back down because the SEC seems to be really forcing cash create and redeems only. So we might even see some of these issuers ultimately not launch because they don't want to deal with the cash create process. It's just fascinating.

So like I would say after the first month or two, it'll be very interesting to watch just to see how this all plays out. Like I'm very excited. We've never in the ETF world. You don't see like seven. You don't see multiple products, let alone 11, 12 or 13 launch at the same time and try to compete with each other that are doing the same thing. So it's going to be fascinating. What's your probability that an ETF gets approved in 24? So we're still 90% by Jan 10. Oh, I said ETH. Sorry, James.

Ethereum. ETH and I'm saying by 2024. ETH by 2024. We don't have an official number yet, but I'm probably over, I'm over 50%, I would say. ETH is different. The SEC is a lot more wishy-washy.

They've implicitly, I've written articles, I got blown up by Bitcoin Maxis for saying that the SEC has implicitly accepted Ethereum as a commodity, particularly when they allowed the CME futures to list as traditional futures. When they allowed Ethereum futures ETFs to launch, all of these things are basically implicit acceptance that they're not going to fight and call security in the courts. So that said, it's not a guarantee that that's the situation. So if the SEC and Gary really do want to fight and call this thing a security or glom on to the proof of stake part of this, they could be, so it's nowhere near as confident as Bitcoin. But my view is that the more likely scenario is that we do see approval, but I know plenty of other people again, that think the

opposite, uh, in this space, but space. But so I'm kind of on my own here. But yeah, we're probably over 50%. But it's not we're not official on anything yet. I will after this Bitcoin ETF stuff gets done. I will probably have to come up with a number because that'll be the next step. It'll be watching the Bitcoin ETF Derby, and then actually trying to figure out and handicapping whether or not we're going to get an ETH spot ETF. But we have a bunch that are due for final decision in the May 20 something, May 23rd, I think. So it's possible that basically would be the equivalent of ARK's Jan 10 deadline, but for Ethereum spot. And I think probably more likely than not, I think the SEC is going to let it go. I've said on here multiple

times, I kind of think the SEC has, they're fighting, they're fighting really hard against this space. They think a lot of this stuff is securities. And I think they're smartly, in my view, they've kind of accepted that fighting Bitcoin and Ethereum is just not, it's an uphill battle that's not worth fighting. It's just too much where they can go after, like they had a hard enough time with Ripple. Like I think they're going to be fine just giving up on Ethereum kind of and focusing on all the other stuff in the space that's that's my view but yeah james if you're getting attacked by the bitcoin maxis for simply sharing the word ethereum and the facts about it then you're doing something right congratulations thanks I appreciate it. So I may be the closest to Bitcoin Maxi on stage.

James, I remember your post about why the SEC was basically considering Ethereum not a security because of the Ethereum futures ETF approval. And I thought it made sense. What I will say is that there's one more issue that the SEC could hang on to, to delay. I think it's inevitable that eventually get an Ethereum ETF, sadly, because I think it's pretty scammy. But they can say that, you know, a lot of these Tether is based on Ethereum, even though it's mostly based on tron these days and tether with their allegations that they've been involved in financing tamas and other organizations the u.s considers to be you know terrorists and money laundering and all that stuff with a crypto

cleanup that's happened with binance and and everything i feel like like that they could delay the Ethereum spot ETF some more and maybe also argue that, hey, we want to see how the Bitcoin spot ETF goes. Let's kind of do one thing at a time. Yeah, Terrence, I don't argue with the premise of what you're saying at all. I think that your take on it is accurate, but it's just funny that, you know, as if Bitcoin's never been sent to anyone, you know, to quote unquote fund terrorism, or if you want to take that a step further as if like a terrorist has never used a, I don't know, iPhone to do terrorism, right? So we should probably ban all iPhones because a drug dealer once did a drug

deal using their iPhone. It's an agnostic technology. I think, I don't think anyone here believes that Tether is purposefully empowering, especially when you see literally... Didn't the DOJ thank Tether last week for helping to freeze the wall? Yeah, Tether's been coming around. Yeah, but they don't necessarily allow the money laundering or funding of terrorism or whatever,

but just not doing enough is enough to get the regulators pissed off. But maybe you could link that to the news today about another mixer yet targeted. Is it like the death of mixes? Is there any mixes that are still legal to use? And should there be? I think they're not legal here, right? But that doesn't mean people can't use it. Is it just the US that's blacklisting them? How does so is it just is it just the u.s that's blacklisting them how does it work so when it's added it's not it's not blacklisting

it's a particular word that you're not allowed to use it what's the legal term well it's on that yeah right right is that only for u.s citizens yeah but does that mean just purely for u.s citizens and that's it does anyone suit if these sanctions apply to any other country? Someone muted you, Carlo. You've got to unmute again. Who's playing with the mute? Scott, you're the only one. Go ahead, Carlo.

OFAC generally would control what US citizens can do with respect to sanctioned countries or, in this case, sanctioned providers. So I don't know the extent to which that would that would apply internationally. But I could see OFAC going and reaching out to people who are transacting on these platforms, if it any way has a nexus to the US, just like they did in Binance. Dave? Sorry. Yeah, I think that you need to, when you talk about Tether, you really do need to look at the modus operandi of the way the U.S. government approaches things. I mean, I was actually just commenting about the administrative state on X about something else. But the fact is Tether

is one of the largest holders of U.S. treasuries. Tether is a place they can go when they have concerns over wallets, and Tether has proven to be very cooperative with them. If they did do something to break Tether, and the use cases of stable coins for crypto split into multiple places, that would make it harder for them, them being the DOJ, the FBI, etc., to track down bad guys with their cooperation. It is a feature, not a bug, of Tether that they can go in and work with law enforcement as much as people in the crypto space don't like it, it is a fact. It is also a fact that we know, the devil they know, they know Tether is buying US treasuries and holds a lot of it, which is definitely something the government likes.

I think that people continually underestimate that. I mean, look, this is a government who has worked with all sorts of people over the years in governments that we would look at and want to hold our nose when talking about them because they thought that from a geopolitical point of view it made sense. Pure Machiavellian politics is working with Tether makes sense for the DOJ, and therefore killing it probably makes no sense for the DOJ. I didn't... Yeah, go ahead. And I think it's interesting because the DOJ

could have pulled the rug on Binance, but they didn't, right? So they sort of want to regulate the infrastructure providers like banks. And I think that it's probably going to be a similar outcome with Tether because they don't want to kill the space. I think just kind of rectifying maybe the illicit activity is their main angle.

And that's fine. That's a good thing. I think the only significant thing recently was that in a press release that Tether put out, they mentioned that they're onboarding the FBI and the Secret Service. I don't know if that's for cooperation. Maybe it is. It probably is. But the only reason why it's significant is because the Secret Service also focuses on counterfeiting. Now, there's an argument that Tether does kind of counterfeit the dollar.

And on the Treasuries part, like, yeah, they own a lot of Treasuries. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a $25 trillion market. I think they have like $74, $75 billion in Treasuries. So it's kind of a rounding error. I don't think that would be the reason why the DOJ wouldn't do anything. I think the DOJ will do something. If they do do anything, it's probably going to be a similar case with Binance. Yeah, there would be a huge fine, right? I mean, you're saying it would be somewhat similar to what happened with Binance. And I think that's...

I think we saw the roadmap there for sure, right? Because I think that they... I mean, with Binance, they clearly had telegram messages or signal messages and a lot of smoking guns that even in all these years, we haven't necessarily seen with Tether. And we do see Tether cooperating massively, clearly. As you said mean if you're onboarding secret service and doj and all the fbi the tether is doing all they can at this point regardless so we can you know litigate the past but regardless at the present they're clearly

trying to make sure that they uh stay in business and continue to operate yeah but it's bst is bst guys it's just sorry quickly i forgot to ask yesterday, Tiger is BSD essentially dead? I think the Binance was delisting it then asked a couple of days ago. Is BSC is no more? Yeah, BUSD. I don't think that's really a surprise. Like that thing kind of died a while ago. I am interested to see how they handle BNBs. Like I don't know if the exchange tokens in general, I don't know if the government finds them kosher or not.

It is sort of a way to bet on the success of an exchange. Coinbase has their shares, which have done, I mean, they're not doing great today, but they've done really well in the last month. I think there was a big narrative change. And look, I was a notable bear at one point on Coinbase, but I changed when Senator Loomis gave her speech to Congress. I don't know if you guys remember that, but that was kind of almost an indirect nod to Coinbase and Circle. And I think what will most likely, the base case of what will eventually happen is like

USDC will become more of the stablecoin for the developed world and tether might be this like offshore like stable coin where it's you know has a high penetration rate in the global south and emerging markets because like here's the thing you can't pull the rug on this like there are you know like okay maybe there's been a lot of illicit activity particularly on the Tron usdt's but like there are very innocent people who hold usdt right there are very innocent people who don't know like about this stuff so you can't just rub those people right so that's i mean yeah i don't disagree i think it's been interesting.

Well, I think it's mostly since Silicon Valley Bank, but Tether, I mean, is absolutely dominating. I mean, they're about, I think they're at 90 billion market cap now. We'll be at 100 very, very soon. And nothing against USDC, but they're down 60% in market cap. What's USDC here?

In the 30s, I think. I haven't looked. Maybe high 20s, low low 30s but i mean i think they they topped you know where 60 ish either way i mean they're down the top of 50 billion 55 billion no it's 24 yeah somewhere in that ballpark so i mean there's clearly been uh there was this moment i remember it was either fortune Fortune or Forbes that said, hey, USDC is about to, you know, is within 10% of Tether. It's imminent that they're going to, you know, the flippening of Tether and USDC.

And then I think the banking scare here and then just maybe people viewing Tether as safer than they used to. It's just gone completely the other way. I mean, talking about being a third of the market cap now of Tether, it's not even a competitor. I actually think there needs to be more stablecoins. To be honest with you, I don't think it's healthy to have a single stablecoin being, you know, 70% dominance. Like, I don't think that's healthy. I think eventually,

but then regulators cause that regulators. Yeah, yeah. Cracking down on BUSD. That'll change once the stablecoin bills get put into law. And they have, you know, like if they want more stablecoins onshore, they have to make these bills, you know, accommodative, right? Like, you don't want like all the stablecoins going offshore. You don't want that, right stable coins going offshore you don't want that right because that's my question tiger but what's interesting i i don't disagree with you actually on on getting more but at the end of the day no matter how many are created or pushed there has

to be traction and demand right i mean we have a paypal stable coin being launched there's other like you know paxos has what is it, USDP, right? I mean, there are a ton of stable coins, just the fact is kind of nobody's using them. And for BUSD, you guys, we all talk about obviously how they were sort of wrongfully attacked by the United States government or rightfully, depending on how you view it. But BUSD somewhat shot themselves in the foot early by when Binance made the decision to convert everybody from usdc to be usd automatically when you entered the platform and basically fired a shot across the bow of other stable coins specifically usdc right i think that that uh was a was probably a poor

decision in hindsight yeah yeah well i. Well, I think so. If you're a market maker and you kind of don't have a choice because if you just... They all trade on offshore exchanges and on all the offshore exchanges, that's primary distribution for USDT. It's like 70 plus percent trading pairs so it's like and market makers would love to trade in us DC pairs but the thing is like you can't you can't really do it there's just not like everyone thinks there's a choice but there's not really a choice like if you're on an offshore chain kind of Yeah, tether is just huge. Yeah. Simon, I want to go to Simon. Simon, the adoption of PYUSD is surprising me as well.

It doesn't surprise me that it's being so slow, almost non-existent. It's surprising that with all the FUDs and the fact there's still a lot of unknowns when it comes to tether, still people happy to to kind of put all the trust become it's probably the only single point of failure for crypto right now that still exists or the closest thing to a single point of failure yeah i don't quite see how you achieve that whole tether being used in global south and usdc being used in North, because the whole point of the stable coin is that once you've got it off exchange, you're able to send it to anybody.

So if US says, all right, you have to be registered with us as a securities business because there's securities underlying this, or they have some kind of virtual asset service provider regime, but they say some kind of virtual asset service provider regime. But they say you have to register with us if anyone receives the stablecoin, in which case, in order to ensure that the US person doesn't receive it, you'd have to have so much innovation

in terms of on-chain KYC with zero knowledge proofs that then you have white listed addresses and it would just destroy the use case and so all they have to do is like all the us has to do is say if any us person receives a stable coin then we consider that the jurisdiction of the us and then you just destroy the whole thing i don't know how you'd achieve without putting massive amounts of centralization, in which case you just have a tokenized bank deposit at that stage. And that would be whitelisted and most likely treated as a security. So it's not as simple as that. And the implications are large. What about digital ID? Well, there you go. You might as well say we've got a private company issuing something that looks like a central bank digital currency. You can have digital ID, but then without the centralized person.

So you've got to have the stablecoin issuer now doing everything that a bank has to do. Then you've got to have, once you get digital ID, you're then into transaction monitoring, and then you're into filing suspicious activity reports based upon on chain data, you're so far into the future of what we need to achieve on in blockchain technology that it just destroys it immediately. Because there's so much more. I mean, essentially, we've been trying to do all that in the security token industry since 2017 and we're still right at the beginning and no further along. TradFi are all trying to do it.

They're trying to own the rails. So it's so disruptive to the stablecoin that we understand and it's got the adoption. With regards to PayPal, that's probably the same reason why, because they're a large financial institution incumbent that suddenly wants to issue a stablecoin, so they just fire it up like anyone else would, like Binance does on Paxos. But you've got to think about the adoption might be slow

because you've got all the people that have their balances on paypal few of those would may would probably understand what a stablecoin is yeah so you've got to wait for them to educate themselves they've got to very aggressively market it and then you've got someone that has tether i mean they're not going to swap their they're not going to swap their tether i mean mean, who makes a market from USDT to PYUSD? Is there even a market? I haven't seen one yet. Is there a swap market? Can you do that on Curve in decentralized?

Literally no idea. That's a great question. I mean, does PYUSD exist? What's the market cap of PYUSD? There you go. It's not even on, can you it on coin market cap? Like 160? Yeah, it doesn't exist. Right. Yeah. So we just got to understand the issuance model. Is it that you I don't understand enough about it and to know what their adoption is.

But I mean, they've, you know, immediately, they've had so much pushback. I'm sure they're just not ready to market it yet because they're just fighting a bit like um you know facebook was or meta whatever we call it now yeah i mean pyusd was kind of a train wreck i mean even on day one i remember there was a bunch of fake ones that were made with wrapped Bitcoin, wrapped ETH. So I love the thought of PYSD. I think it's awesome that you could get your money out of PayPal and then just clear it on the Ethereum rails with anybody else. But again, it comes now.

Yeah, I think that's why Mario is scratching his head and saying, why hasn't this happened? Right, Mario? I mean, that's the point. I agree with you, Simon. Yeah, I'm not sure, but I don't know if it's already fully launched or not. Simon, let's see some coin market cap. If you search the headlines, the regulators came at it. So they're probably calming down and trying to figure out basically we've got to get the stable coin regulations and It is it is a it is a coin market cap. Oh, is it what's the market cap? Yeah, has it deep egg? Deep egg to 2.99 as low as has been Yes a few couple weeks weeks ago but let me see what trading pairs has it got and what exchange market gap is 100 150 160 million and what trading pairs so it's on it's on coinbase yes i mean where would it even have a trading pair

on coinbase i mean where where yeah it's on it's it's got usd trading pairs on qcoin kraken coinbase and what was that yeah so you can convert your py usd hold on hold on look hold on easy uh you can you can convert it to usdt on uniswap and yeah and what's the volume okay so there's no trading pairs yeah yeah i've got to get there. So Uniswap. Get out your microscope. You need your magnifying glass. $33,000. And on Curve, it's $30,000.

So that's where we're at. Okay, so it's nice. I think your take was the right one, though. I forgot that they sort of became in the headlights. They were in the headlights of regulators. So you got to imagine they kind of did this launch and then said, we're going to have to just wait, right, to push it. That makes perfect sense. And I think stablecoin legislation will come and then probably because it's it's such a long shot to expect the regulators to allow for people to just send stable coins to each other peer-to-peer as we do today and i think the us is going to have to do a re i don't know where the lobbying effort is and how far that is but it's actually a really really important piece of legislation

for our industry and i'd be absolutely amazed if the stable coin that we know today is what the us signs off on in the end because it just goes against every agenda for tax collection anti money laundering but if if you can get i think they're just going to go along the lines of, you know, Microsoft's digital ID and trying to figure out how you integrate that in the technology. And we'll just be sitting here for six years trying to do what we did with security tokens. Oh, the Treasury took a very aggressive, well, I should say Wally Adeyemo. And then Ryan, I see you had your hand up right after. But I guess the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, effectively, I guess Janet Yellen's right hand. Man, I mentioned this at the beginning. But Dan Spooler from Blockchain Association sent me a DM

today. We're going to get him on maybe tomorrow to talk about this, but had some very, very, very strong words on behalf of the Treasury clearly that they're still uh going aggressively against the quote-unquote you know terrorist financing here's what he said i'll just give you a quote of what he said and this was to the blockchain association at their conference yesterday over several years binance allowed itself to be used by the perpetrators of child sexual abuse illegal narcotics trafficking and terrorism across more than 100,000 transactions. That was his quote. And in Fortune, it says, Treasury's Wally Adeyemo wants to crack down on illicit finance enabled by crypto. This is a quote, a clear and present danger for national security,

and went on to talk specifically about stable coins. So, I mean, that's the Treasury, right? So, I don't think we're out of the clear yet for stable coins, unfortunately. No, we got, I mean, you know, clearly there's something with all this Tron, Huobi, Poloniex, Mass, and then that ties into the number one use case for Tron, which is usdt it feels like you know there's there's those two there's those two final hit lists and we can kind of see what's happening with binance of how they're kind of they're favoring an orderly wind down um by death by 100 cuts from regulators and then the us says this is what we're doing and then every other regulator says you're not licensed in our country you're not licensed in our country slow bleed yeah ryan uh you had your hand up and then carlo please oh yeah i was just gonna say when it comes to

stable coins i think we're extremely early in the market like i don't think that i think we're so early in the market stable coins it's kind of impossible to even say who will be the winner if you had looked at at the market cap split between the top stable coins a year ago busd was you know significantly higher, obviously, than it is today. And I think it's just an evolving market. So I do agree, we need stable coin regulation. That'll create a lot of clarity around what stable coin issuers can and can't do in the US. But I mean, today, the total stable coin supply or market cap is really low. It's at 125, 126 billion. I think the height of the last market was like 230 billion.

And so I think that we haven't even seen the fire hose turn on for stablecoins in this next cycle. And that could be one reason why PayPal stablecoin is sitting at such a low market cap. It could be because they were subpoenaed earlier this month by the SEC. That probably has something to do with the way they're marketing it and the way they're showing on their platform. But I just think it's too early in the lifecycle to really call a winner. And they launched in a bear market, right? I mean, to your point, right? We were talking about the ETFs before.

BITO launches at the peak, peak, peak of a bull market. Of course, you've got these massive inflows. Maybe it's comparable if PUSD had launched when Bitcoin was $69,000. It might be a very different story. Exactly, exactly. So I think we're going to see a ton of capital flow into stablecoins over the next year or 18 months. And I think it could look a lot different. The market cap split, I think right now Tether is about 70% and USDC is about just under 20%. And then a bunch of others fill the remaining 10%.

So I think that that could shift dramatically over the next 18 months and be fun to watch. Yeah, I just hope they don't break the product. The way stablecoins work right now is perfect. You know, when these activities happen you can you can suspend the wallet address so you know you've got that you've got that ability to do what regulators want you to do but at the same time this is bleeding edge in terms of being able to speed up the way in which you transact versus you know large bank transfers and stuff. So I just hope I just hope they don't redesign it. Because I think if we had regulatory clarity on well, if we keep it as it is,

I think just the market cap will just go up and up and up. And you'll have competitive issuers. And you'll say, Do I trust JP Morgan? Or do I trust BlackRock? Or do i trust blackrock or do i trust twitter or do i trust you know tether or binance and you just kind of pick between who you trust um and then it would just compete with cbdc's and you'll say now screw it and you trust the fed but if we can get that competitive market and keep it like this it would just be awesome because then it's like we got the Austrian economic stable coin free market, free banking market. I'd love that to be. I'm just not sure we're going to get it. I doubt it. Carlo? Yeah, you know, I got to jump off shortly, but I wanted to jump on what Tiger was saying. And he made very good points. And I think it's important to distinguish when you look from

the regulatory side, SCC and CFTC and how they approach blockchain technology, obviously, it can be argued that they want to kill it in this country to an extent. But I don't get that impression being in the trenches on the law enforcement side. If I look at the majority of the crypto cases that I'm working right now, I have to agree with Tiger, I'm seeing more secret service cases being done. And I don't, from my conversations with prosecutors and investigators, they don't want to kill blockchain. It's a forensic investigative gift to them. I think they want to obviously be able to, quote, collaborate with these providers. And they enjoy having the ability to subpoena and communicate and get their

cooperation. But they're not necessarily of the camp that they want to see blockchain and crypto eradicated. It is a tremendous tool for them to use to track transactions. And I don't see that stopping. No, I don't. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I don't think they want to kill anything. Right? Because there are like, I don't want people to lose their shirts, right? And there are innocent people involved.

But I think that they want to have more control over the exchanges and the stablecoin issuers. And, you know, I think that that's just a healthy process, you know. And I think we're still in the early stages. I mean, even the other day, the CFTC said they're going to go after other offshore exchanges. You know, so I don't think it's – I think we're just beginning, to be honest with you. I think we're just beginning. I just think that the effect on the market will just always diminish as the bigger names have been somewhat reconciled. I think it's a really interesting market for selling treasuries.

So I think governments are just, and that's where this whole stability thing comes in, because once people figure out that you're just going from government issuing treasuries to a blockchain asset, then that's very destabilizing on fractional reserve banking, because you're moving to full reserve, kind of like in a slow free market way, but it will destroy banks in the process. So they've really got to manage that as like an orderly, an orderly process. And that's why they're so concerned about it. And it's also fascinating to see how this finance

thing is unfolding. Because the government has now got really tremendous oversight over Binance, which is going to give them access to all those transactions. And if this is a pattern that we're going to see going forward with these offshore providers, then this is going to be yet another tool in the toolbox for law enforcement, because they're not going to be able to go in and do tremendous deep forensic postmortem audits of all these transactions. And that could prove to be a huge windfall for DOJ when it comes to building cases. Do you want to go, Terrence? Sure, real quick. So I think a lot of this is because of the heavy lobbying by Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, and others. I don't really like these altcoins. I'm a lot of this is because of the heavy lobbying by Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase and others.

I don't really like these altcoins. I'm a Bitcoiner. But you guys have been very effective at lobbying politically. And even Senator Lummis, who is kind of a hero to a lot of Bitcoiners, she's been talking about crypto and other things. So, yeah. She's pretty negative, though yeah she's pretty negative though she's pretty negative yeah i i i don't disagree with you but loomis i was actually surprised how aggressively she just came out after right we obviously know the story wall street journal printed the amas terror terrorism funding article and then elizabeth warren and 104 senators and congress people

sent the letter and then very quickly chain analysis proved it was wrong Wall Street Journal retracted and then Loomis came out of kind of left field when like you said we kind of she was viewed as an advocate and said the DOJ needs to crack down on Binance and Tether wrap it up and charge right and so uh yeah i was actually kind of on the flip side i was surprised that she as an advocate for this came out so aggressively against all of it even after it had been proven fake news using that narrative well like what's interesting is that was yeah sorry real quick um i'm gonna find she did say something i'm gonna find it and post it in the comment section or maybe a dm it to crypto town hall but she did say something. I'm going to find it and post it in the comment section or maybe DM it to Crypto Town Hall.

But she did say something at another time that was very pro-crypto, I thought. And I was kind of surprised. But yeah, the bottom line is the bottom line is crypto working. And regulators are going to let kind of crypto survive in some form, I think. It's just going to be cut down to size and some of the extremes will be cleaned up. I think it's important to understand what she was saying. You know,

she was not attacking crypto. She was attacking the illicit actors. Right. So she's not right. So there's a difference. I agree. I'm just saying that she did it in the guise of terrorist financing on the back of an article that had literally just been proven untrue that's what

i found sort of i think that there was a lot of political pressure uh but i also think that that speech that day right on october 26th and that's why i flipped long coinbase very long because that was you and me both but yeah that was an indirect nod at coinbase and circle right because it's basically like okay here's the bad guys offshore cleanup for sure right and who is who who do you think made that phone call to her? It was BlackRock. Who do you think is in her camp or in the DC camp? It's BlackRock, it's Goldman Sachs, it's A16Z. Who are they all LPs in? Coinbase and Circle. So you have to understand those things as well so i think that those companies on some level are going to be all right um it's just a matter of right which comes down to which comes down to the point before where maybe it's going to be

a stable coin for the world and a stable coin for the United States or platforms for the world and platforms for the United States. And that'll be how it is. Right. Dave, things are evolving. Yeah, I mean, I think that that's overly simplistic. The fact is that people who are in government in agencies tend to care about expanding their power more than anything else. And so you get these crazy scenarios where someone in Treasury talks about national security, despite the national security experts saying, no, no, we prefer them to use blockchain-based technology because we can find them faster, better, et cetera. But I think it's worth understanding that there's a lot of different use cases with stable coins. I was talking with one of the largest and another top 10 asset manager who has developed, and they'll tell you, a product. They will not call it a stable coin.

It's Franklin Templeton, the Benji. was that it's dramatically more efficient to run a money market fund on chain than it is to run a money market fund the way you currently run it, where you track who it is and how you pay things. It's much more efficient. It looks and feels like a stablecoin with yield, but they won't call it that way. Why? Because they know it's a security. They know the SEC is going to regulate it. And if they went down the rabbit hole calling it a stablecoin, they'd never be able to get it to market. That's because of the regulation, not the way it should be. So when people talk about regulatory clarity, why a lot of people in Congress want real stablecoin regulation is to provide that umbrella. Because if you think about what you can do with it, you can provide for people who don't mind being known, who don't care about

privacy the same way they go to a bank, but want a very fast, efficient way of getting higher yields and being able to move in and out. Well, that's a perfectly reasonable use case. Now, there are other people, as Simon correctly points out, around the world that are much more interested in being able to move small amounts or reasonable amounts of money efficiently across borders dramatically cheaper than the current methods. And that's another use case. The point that I'm trying to make is there's multiple use cases here. And there should be a way to handle all of those under the law. But right now, everyone gets bound up in the broader fight,

you know, the anti-crypto army, basically saying we don't want to allow anything to create clarity. That's really the problem. Terrence and then Simon, and then we're going to head towards wrapping up. Terrence. Yeah, real quick. So Scott, you're absolutely right on Lummis.

But she did also say some pro-crypt pro crypto stuff which to me as a bitcoiner proves that she's not a real bitcoiner she's a politician first and i posted that in the nest i hope it's okay some evidence yeah what what did she say exactly i can't see it on there dude did you know yeah just that things like crypto isn't the problem it's like the people some of the actors in crypto are the problem crypto assets are not the enemy bad actors are sec overreaching on crypto guidance right like i think a lot of listen i don't disagree with you but i think you're getting i think you're getting caught up in the semantics and the nuance. Like it may be like, I'm sorry, but you know, we get to, I know that the judge jury and executioners of the Bitcoin maxi

cat council literally will deem you not a Bitcoiner for the rest of time because you said the word crypto, but I think that's wildly unfair. I think she, you know, I think her body of work as in support massively outweighs her unfortunate, I guess, for Bitcoiners usage of the word crypto. You know what I mean? Like, they're pretty interchangeable words for anyone who's not a hardcore Bitcoiner at this point. And I don't think they like using the word crypto. I mean, it's been fun watching the mental gymnastics for people over Larry Fink, you know, because he's saying crypto is a flight to quality instead of Bitcoin is a flight to quality.

And then Bitcoiners say, oh, he can't say Bitcoin legally. So he's saying crypto because it would be Tafia's book. And then like a day later files for an Ethereum spot ETF. Right. So I think that, yeah, I get what you're saying as a Bitcoiner, but like, give the lady a break. She's done more in the government for Bitcoin than arguably anyone else. I think that's a massive positive. Simon, then we're gonna wrap up. Yeah, I just wanted to point out that I think with Binance, we've seen the playbook of how you come after these large companies so

if you're if you're a stablecoin issuer outside of the united states and you you want to bring you want to pull it in so if anyone does a peer-to-peer transaction and then you can connect it to a breach of some kind of anti-money laundering connected to terrorist finance, then you can blame that on the stablecoin issuer. And then once you're in the AML side, you're in a criminal case. And so once you're in a criminal case, you then make it a fine that is so large that you now need to come into the United States and try and plea. And then it goes through the orderly wind down process of a solution.

So I think what we have just seen with Binance is the playbook for how they would try. So many people try and theorize what would happen if Tether imploded. Some would say, well, great, it would be loads of people would buy Bitcoin, which I think is true as well. There'd be an initial shock.

But what we have seen from the US is they've given us a playbook for how to execute an orderly wind down and how to bring some of the larger players into the jurisdiction, provided they can connect it to something really criminal. Yeah, I think it's just, it's interesting because most of the quote unquote illicit activity that Tether is being used for is not, it's not like that's happening directly from Tether through the people who are minting and redeeming, right? You're talking about something that's happening on exchanges where Tether doesn't theoretically have the control. went down and all the FUD around USDC happened, I very publicly, exactly what I did, I bought Bitcoin, right? I converted my USDC into Bitcoin, thinking, by the way, not to say I'm a genius,

because I'm not thinking that I was buying 20 or $19,500 Bitcoin and oh, well, it's going to go to like 17, 16, 15 on all this bad news and it went right to 25. So I got very lucky in that regard. But that was my knee jerk reaction anecdotally was, well, if USDC is not going to be safe for a couple of days, I'm getting into Bitcoin. You're correct. I think you're absolutely correct. Yeah, guys, I think, Mario, I think that we did a great job here. Wrap it up and run it back tomorrow. So everybody, thank you so much for joining. Pleasure. great guests, and look forward to seeing what the market throws at us so we can discuss tomorrow.

Bye, everyone.