The Wolf Of All Streets - Saylor Just Dropped $1.92B on BTC! Top Signal? | Crypto Town Hall
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Transcript
Discussion (0)
Morning, everybody. Happy Monday. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. 10 15 a.m. Eastern Standard
Time every weekday here on X. We are having some glitches getting people up on stage,
including myself as co-host. So apologize for the delay. But I would imagine that you're
all used to us not starting at exactly 10 15 a.m. with the actual conversation at this
point. So we've got quite a bit to talk about today.
We have Michael Saylor obviously buying yet again a metric ton of Bitcoin, kind of his
thing.
I think nobody's surprised by that.
Obviously on Mondays we have the wild underperformance of Ethereum.
The ETH Bitcoin ratio dropped to a five year low of 0.02193.
It's fallen 39% relative to Bitcoin this year.
It's the first time ETH has underperformed Bitcoin in the 12 months after a Bitcoin halving.
So that's a first here.
Making many wonder if the four-year cycle is effectively dead.
That said, Bitcoin also usually does well in the first quarter of the
most having year and was down the most since 2018. So obviously, market not performing as many would
have anticipated worth digging into. By the way, for that number on strategy, Micro strategy purchase, $22,048 Bitcoin for $1.9, $2 billion between March
24th and March 30th.
Where's this guy get $2 billion more?
It's unbelievable.
The amount of dry powder that he somehow digs up to buy more Bitcoin.
I listen, we can talk about sale or buy Bitcoin.
Nobody's surprised.
But is there any point where we scratch our heads and say, how can we keep doing this? Feel free to jump in.
I mean, so long as people buy weird esoteric financial instruments from strategy,
I think he'll keep buying. Yeah, I think that's the case. I guess then the question becomes how many more of these strategies can he come up with
to raise capital?
Yeah, no clue.
I think the thing that is clear is he's kind of the only one who can do it.
Like I know GameStop is doing a convertible to do it.
And I know there was lots of talk about everyone doing this.
But it really doesn't work for anyone else because it's just such a commodity thing.
So it's only the MicroStrategy brand and the Sailor brand that lets him get away with doing
it.
Other companies can add Bitcoin to their balance sheet, but it's not going to do anything for
their financials.
They're not going to be able to, I think, raise convertibles at scale in order to pull
it off.
Marathon's doing another big one though, correct?
Yeah, but they've been doing since they're like a Bitcoin miner.
So it fits in there.
But I'm talking about like random companies trying to give it in and do this.
I don't. So I think he sailor basically gets to take
whatever demand there is for these types of instruments
because people just want to do it through them.
Yeah, GameStop Dave, what did we surmise?
They have about 6 billion cash as of last Friday.
Is that what we talked about this morning?
I know originally was four, but I think they actually raised another
million and a half last week.
Somewhere between five and a half and six.
We don't know how much they're willing to put into Bitcoin, how
much you need for dry powder.
So, you know, who knows?
I don't know.
How much does the amount matter as much as the symbolism at this point?
Look, I think that had they done this in any period of time, when we weren't going through
the macro situation we've been going through, the price impact
would have been substantially more. I think as the crow flies or as the cards lay, they
couldn't have possibly picked a better time because whatever they're buying, they're
probably soaking up at and they're buying it cheap. You know, sometimes better to be
lucky than smart.
You know, I got all in with the ACE King and a pivotal point toward the bubble in a poker tournament this weekend.
And I, uh, I was neither smart nor lucky and, uh, it happens.
Right.
But I think in this particular case, they got in the right situation.
So we'll see.
Brian.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I have friends, uh, trying this strategy in markets all over the Sorry, sailor esque and they're just putting it in front of people and promoting this same strategy that micro strategy is doing and they're doing this in markets all over the world.
I'm also having friends contact me about doing this with Doge and doing this with other coins and just basically leveraging the company's assets to buy more and more crypto to build the balance book.
And it's, they're looking at this micro strategy strategy as a legitimate build.
Wait, did you say that you know people that want to put Doge as a reserve asset on their
books?
Yes.
Like on purpose?
Yeah, you can't make this stuff up.
This is where we're at.
I mean, that was just cool, I guess. But that seems absolutely absurd.
I mean, if it plays, what's the argument for that? So like, if you want to be micro strategy, ask,
you have to have a belief that the asset that you're buying is obviously going to continue up for the reasons we know that Bitcoin is likely to for the next 20, 50, 100 years because he has committed
to never selling.
You can't view almost any other asset.
Not to pick on Doge, but who looks at Doge and is like, this is the thing I need to definitely
have in 50 years on my balance sheet.
Well, I think they're looking at the mining aspect right now,
whether it's very heavily profitable to mine like coin and Doge.
So they're looking at the near term aspects of it.
But there's some, there's some very weird staying power with Doge.
No one expected it to be, you know, 12 years in the future, you know, where it's
at now, but you know, 50 years in the future where it's at now.
But 50 years in the future, who knows?
Maybe they're at a bad foresight.
I'm not picking on it.
And I'm not commenting on future price action.
I think those will probably go up, assuming that we have a cycle and Bitcoin does.
It just seems like a very strange thing to commit your balance sheet to as a company. Go ahead, Alex.
Well, yeah, they're not a company though. Like they're finding a shell company, they're
pulling in, they think they can get retail people to like dump money into it, not understanding
what's going on and that it'll work like the micro strategy meme stock. And then they're
just going to dump more shares and against that.
Like it's, they're just grifting money on retail. Yeah. There's no trade here.
I'm gonna tell. Yeah. What's ironic about that idea. I'm gonna tell you, your mic is really,
really quiet. Oh, can you hear me better now? Not really. Okay, I'll jump off and rejoin. Yeah, try to take a shot at that and try to fix it.
I mean, I certainly didn't intend to discuss assets
on the balance sheet other than Bitcoin for these companies,
but maybe Ryan, that's just a sentiment gauge
that people are still willing to make these sort of exotic
bets on crypto with balance sheets or companies at this point.
That seems crazy.
That seems crazy.
Well, I think, yeah, I think Sailor was crazy with Bitcoin at first.
Everyone's looking at Sailor going, well, hey, if it worked for him, he took a shot
in the dark and he built this giant vision around this asset.
Maybe we can do it with another asset that has a decent cult following.
Yeah, I agree with that. this asset, maybe we can do it with another asset that has a decent cult following.
Yeah, I agree with that. You just have to wonder that if Bitcoin goes 20, I'm not saying, yet again, not a prediction on price action, but if Bitcoin goes 20% lower and starts to flirt with
sailors cost basis, what that commentary will look like, right?
Does it get happen? Obviously, I'm a tell you want to take another shot.
Yeah, how's that louder?
Good. OK, good morning, Scott.
Morning. Yeah, this is going to come.
The irony of the doge thing is that when we look historically,
it was actually the GameStop madness
that actually led to the doge madness of it actually going crazy after all of
the halts and the Robinhood stuff, which actually led to Doge, which actually led to the meme coin
cycle starting to actually show its potential, which then ultimately yielded into the meme coin
absolute madness that we saw that led to complete
value extraction, which was a huge contributor to where we are now. So there's some kind of irony
in all of that. But I think the question I have here, I posed this last week and I looked at this,
which was, who's actually buying these micro strategy debt instruments. I got a
answer from Dave and someone saying, Gronk it. And I'd already done the research, but hedge funds,
asset managers, et cetera, but there's no like actually distinct disclosures. There's clear
information on who's underwriting the debt, but there's no clarity on who's actually buying it.
And that's just still a big question I have. I'm like, is it debt being used to purchase
debt? And if so, who is actually taking on the risk here? I don't know exactly how much risk
is in this micro strategy trade. I don't think really anyone knows. And it just raises a lot
of questions. And I think for the desire of we hold the most transparent asset in the world,
it should be clear who's holding the debt instruments for them to purchase the
most transparent asset in the world.
Isn't it all traders buying the ball?
Well, just, just as a clarification, this 1.92 billion, only 19 million of it was
the strike instrument, The rest of it
was at the market share offerings. So there was no convertible debt issued in the last week.
Ah, I didn't realize that for this one. This is almost like it's 99% at the market share
offerings at an MNAV of around two. So there's still a lot of people buying micro strategy shares
and doing whatever strategies they want to do with it.
Sorry for calling it micro strategy.
They're still a huge market, like almost $2 billion
worth of shares in the last week
where people are buying as a market and holding the price.
So I don't know where all that money
is coming from. It's all then getting plowed back into Bitcoin. And then we're still seeing
the selling pressure, which that to me is the big question. If MicroStrategy is buying and GameStop
is announcing it's buying and all these other people are making modest announcements of buying,
who's selling the billions of dollars so that the price is staying flat or even going down?
I have quite a quote here from Larry Fink that kind of just dropped in his annual letter
to investors on Monday.
This one is pretty astounding.
I want everybody to listen to this.
So BlackRock CEO Larry Fink warned that if the US doesn't get its debt under control
and deficits keep ballooning, the country risks losing its world reserve currency status to digital assets
like Bitcoin. Here's the quote, could undermine America's economic advantage if investors begin
seeing Bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar. That is Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock saying that the dollar could lose its reserve status to Bitcoin.
That string that was attached to it, if Americans begin to see Bitcoin as a safer asset, I can't
remember the exact wording there now, but it's like all you have to do is study Bitcoin. It is
intrinsically, I hate to use that word, but it is intrinsically safer because it is intrinsically uninflatable.
But what an astounding statement from the man who controls the largest financial institution by AUM in the world. Go ahead, Dave.
Yeah, I mean, look, you know, he had previously called for 500 to $700,000 Bitcoin. What he didn't want to say in that letter would be if that occurred, that he would have been under reporting or under predicting by probably an order of magnitude. So, you know, just consider that and understand what he's basically saying is, listen, you know, if you don't realize that inside the halls of power, people don't see Bitcoin getting
towards gold as an US leading in that doing is a good thing, but don't let it overshoot
too much because if that happens, then then we lose a lot. And that is, it's an interesting needle to be thread,
but it seems to be de rigore for the people
who are running this particular administration.
And I'm not saying that I think it's smart
to run in the administration,
but if you don't think that he's able to talk to dissent
and others, then you're not paying attention.
Yeah, I mean, speaking of the administration,
we'll jump to you in a second, Ryan.
There was news today that the Trump sons,
Eric and Don, I think are launching a mining venture
with Hut8 and that they're on the board of a wealth manager.
I don't have the name of it in front of me
and that wealth manager is buying iBit for its balance sheet,
which is BlackRock's Bitcoin, ETF. So
no question where that family stands right now on Bitcoin. Go ahead, Ryan.
Yeah, actually, that dovetails really well because when I started seeing BlackRock getting into
Bitcoin and one of their biggest holdings were going into a publicly traded miner,
I do firmly believe that BlackRock takes very educated bets and they're not going to lose
on this.
It was kind of the changing of the tides with Bitcoin when BlackRock started getting involved,
especially on the mining side.
Now that's seen that the Trumps are getting into the mining side also, what people don't
realize is you can own all the Bitcoin in the world, but if you don't own mining capacity, you really have no control of the
network or transaction processing.
Okay.
The flip side of that, do the same argument really quickly, Dave, before you
jump in, okay, I'll let you go because I want to pivot.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it is worth understanding the history of what real estate
investors, which are that were the Trump family, what they're always
looking for is to be vultures. And anyone who's and you had
Mike Alfred on your show recently, anyone who's invested
in miners knows that the premium that they're definitely not
trading expensive right now. You know, so them looking to get
into mining now is two things. It's yeah, okay
You know mining is probably been beaten that crap out of when we look at the hash rate
We still globally competitive it is but it also is indication of hey, you know
we kind of we think we have an edge here and
Ask yourself the question. What could their edge be and you don't have to connect the dots too far to understand that
This is a that we are at and I've been saying it for three weeks.
We are at a tradeable bottom part of the range.
You know, you can pick up nickels here and there, shorting, buying, shorting, buying.
It's nowhere near confirming a breakout, but we definitely feel tradeable bottom around these levels.
The pivot I wanted to make was based on what Ryan said, obviously, about Larry Fink and the Trump family and both of them, this ramping commitment towards Bitcoin.
They're clearly starting to get it.
Well, at the beginning, I read to you all the negative metrics about Ethereum.
I think the original title here was that they're doing less than $100,000 in transaction fees
or something absurd in 24
hours. Is Ethereum dead? It's at its lowest point on the Ethereum Bitcoin ratio has wildly
been underperforming. Well, Trump's World Liberty Financial has been buying Ethereum
massively. And Larry Fink is tokenizing BUIDL on Ethereum and has in those same investor letters where he obviously becomes
more Satoshi every day, has also been talking about the fact that every asset in the world
will eventually be tokenized and points out the fact that that's being done on Ethereum.
So why is Ethereum getting absolutely disproportionately smashed here?
It doesn't seem to make sense by the same arguments.
I mean, Robbie, you're obviously looking down this rabbit hole.
What do you make of Ethereum continuing to underperform so massively?
Honestly, I don't know.
It doesn't make any sense to me given its obvious utility and community and the world
of projects there.
So I think it's just that maybe there's a disconnect in terms of Ethereum as an investment
proposition as a token as opposed to the pure utility that it offers.
But to be honest, I haven't been paying much attention to it because as you might know,
Godzilla has been launching their token today.
And I think that's a good bellwether for where we are in consumer stuff.
Yeah, I haven't looked,
but that's one of the few things I personally invested in.
I think it's incredible.
Didn't intend to talk about it,
but I did see it launched over a billion FTV,
which is pretty decent.
Yeah, for sure.
I think the main thing is that it's really touching nerves in all kinds of Web2 places
in traditional gaming circles.
And it seems to be a product that's kind of cutting through, so to speak, to non-crypto
audiences who are coming around to the idea that it's providing utility and functionality in the game,
that the blockchain infrastructure is providing that, and doing things for gamers that gamers
want to do to create UGC content and stuff like that without thinking of it as being crypto.
That's been kind of a holy grail goal for the game industry, at least for a while,
to figure out how to get traditional gamers not paying attention to the tech, but just enjoying what it does for them.
Sorry, my mic is glitching. Amiteo?
Yeah, I was looking at the Ethereum data today. And I mean, we're down on active wallet addresses.
We're down on active wallet addresses. We're actually even down on stable coin transfer volume.
And stable coin wallet addresses are only at 30 million.
It's actually just the supply.
So, I mean, you're seeing the big players
use stable coins more and we're seeing adoption,
but not in any significant way.
The actual activity is lower. Obviously, TVL has
dropped significantly. Dex volume, fees, revenue, everything is just on such a steep decline.
But I think when you combine the regulatory news, you combine the infra, you combine the rails,
I think the benefit of this is that we're seeing
a lot of the crap that congests Ethereum just really start to fade to oblivion, while the actual
real utility infra is being stabilized and being built faster than ever with AI. So I think between RWA and everything else that's happening, Ethereum still
has the promise to be the sort of de facto reliable financial rails and the market is
just not reflective of what's actually happening. Yeah, I think that for everything but Bitcoin, a lot of the value is moved by speculation
narrative.
And because of what's happening to Bitcoin now, all the speculation narrative is moving
to who will institutions own?
And so a lot of people are concluding, well, it's Bitcoin and that institutional money
is moving in.
So they're taking their speculative dollars out of Ethereum and putting them into Bitcoin. But I think it's also why you see
something like XRP outperforming Ethereum because XRP is narrative. I don't know that it's truth,
but its narrative is, oh, it's for banks, it's for institutions. This thing is going to do well
when the institutions arrive. So again, speculative dollars move out of Ethereum and into XRP on the basis of narrative
rather than fundamental values.
And we'll see, I mean, I think all these issues
with where exactly Ethereum is headed
is are problematic for Ethereum.
It's not exactly clear what its vision is
or how it's going to get there.
So that also is probably cooling a lot of people's enthusiasm. the So a lot of people have been moving their trading over to Arbitrum, moving their trading over to base.
I think base is actually one of the main hubs for trading now.
And the fees are just non-existent over there.
So I think that's taken a huge slice out of the Ethereum block fees.
But I'd also say that people are moving into a lot of stable coins
as kind of a safe harbor when there's
uncertainty with these different crypto assets. So they're moving into USDT, USDC.
And I really don't think the Ethereum price reflects the utility of the network at all.
On the AI front, you know, we're building out Morpheus and we're building out all these different
agents. And I know there's just off top of my head, a dozen or two dozen different projects that
are building out all these different AI systems that are all running on top of Ethereum.
And they're using the stable coins on top of Ethereum to do interactive commerce between
agents.
So all that's kind of this ground swell that no one can see.
So I think the price right now is kind of dormant.
It's not doing anything, but when it moves,
I think it's going to move very, very quickly
and take a lot of people by surprise.
That's effectively what's always happened at the past, right?
I think people are just frustrated that it keeps dipping
and that this was, quote unquote, supposed to be the time
based on the four-year cycle, right?
This is when Ethereum usually outperforms
and it just doesn't happen.
But I agree with you, I'm dumbfounded generally. Amitayu? on the four-year cycle. This is when Ethereum usually outperforms and it just doesn't happen.
But I agree with you, I'm dumbfounded generally.
Amitayu?
Yeah, I just wanted to double click on that and agree.
I think what we're seeing with the rise of AI agents
is we're actually abstracting away
a lot of the chain interface
where the agent's just gonna execute on the chain
where whatever the task or the project or
the infra lives.
So right now, while it's currently a manual process, very fueled by users, obviously fueled
by fees, that's all being abstracted away in real time.
And I think what we're going to actually see during these bear market conditions is the
technology for those agentic applications be deployed usable?
We've seen some interesting experiments
like BankerBot, Eperium,
we've seen AI Wayfinder is on its way.
Like the abstraction of the actual crypto experience
is coming, which is also gonna lead to a lot more automation
from institutions.
And wherever the info lives, where it's going to execute.
And I think that's just going to continue to be the case.
And there's enough infra on ETH to provide so much value to that process.
I just don't think people will see it coming.
Alex, not sure if you can hear. Go ahead.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think it's just, you know, markets are very driven by sentiment
and themes and utilities very off brand right now. So you can have whatever debate you,
you know, you want over what chains we think will end up as the basis of stuff, whether it's East,
Solana, something else, whatever. But, you know, Solana is also off 36%. I think I saw yesterday,
relative to Bitcoin from its high.
Like, it's, nobody's really just looking for that right now.
I think folks are looking for one of two things, which is either the relative stability of
Bitcoin, as they don't know what's going on, or to, you know, how can I 10, 20, 30x pump
in six hours or something, which leads to another interesting dynamic where,
because I think those cycles have gotten so fast around meme coins and other assets and things that
you don't even feel like there's any particular thing coming up the charts and doing well,
because it's the agglomeration of like the different things that might be a challenge,
but they're just kind of popping up lasting for a day or two, dropping back down.
Yeah, I mean, if you blink, you miss it, right?
The 100 Xs or 10 Xs or whatever of previous cycles
took time.
They're saying basically you can 50 X in two hours
and it's the whole life cycle of an altcoin
in a matter of hours instead of months or years.
Exactly.
Brutal. Robbie, let's talk more about Gunzilla and just generally about gaming.
Do you think that this can be the catalyst for us to finally see real adoption and that
angle because it's an interesting conversation on the tail end of what Alex just said, right?
We know that the interest has been on Bitcoin and memes.
Can something actually show
some staying power and give us a bit more hope? Yeah, I think it can. And I think it can for a
couple of reasons. I think on the one hand, obviously, they've built a great game. And
people just love playing the game. It's one of the most popular shooters in the market, full stop,
even when comparing it to all kinds of Web2 products
out there. It's literally just a game that people who love shooters love playing. So
they have like two and a half million MAUs, I think, if I'm not mistaken. And they were
also the first ones to break through onto traditional console platforms as a blockchain
game, right? Or as a game with blockchain infrastructure.
So I think that part, they've kind of, you know,
they've created a brand halo to show that,
yes, it is possible for a game to hit that quality bar
and hit all of the seemingly impossible metrics
that Web2 gamers were expecting
when they came to Web3 games,
but found Web3 games had not previously delivered on.
And so it shows that actually it is possible to do it.
And then the second part of it is obviously they're on Binance Launch Pool.
They're widely listed. I think they have perps out already. And so, you know,
for the Web3 native community,
there's a lot of products there to get them excited as well
as just the gameplay itself.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I was just going to add that the actual gaming industry is also down bad, tremendous.
There just hasn't been new games that have come in to the fold that have really sparked
interest. You've got
viewership, sponsorship, down on Twitch, on Kik. I mean, there's a few outliers, but not a lot.
So I think that there's a real built-up interest and demand for disruptive gaming that starts to
gain a lot of market traction. And there's obviously millions of young streamers
and gamers ready to jump on to anything that's exciting.
And I do think that if we've got these AAA games
coming to market that have a crypto value layer,
which we know that the gaming community loves
the crypto value layer,
and we're a huge part of the meme coin cycle,
it's gonna be really significant
in driving attention and activity back into the market.
And I do think it holds promise.
I just don't think we've seen that killer games start to rise up.
Maybe Gunzilla is it.
There are some others that are sort of there, but I do think it shows promise.
You broke up there at the end.
I guess the next question then is it can show promise for adoption, much like the conversation
about Ethereum, but does that mean that it will be investable for people looking to speculate
on the tokens associated?
So I was going to say for the Binance launch pool, I think about two days ago, they were
up to four and a half billion dollars of stable coins locked up for the Binance launch pool, I think about two days ago, they were up to $4.5 billion of stable
coins locked up for the launch pool. So clearly there was some market anticipation there. Obviously,
that's playing out in real time now that the token has launched. But I think the other side of that,
which is interesting from a gaming industry perspective is, GTA 6 is going to launch in the second half of this year. And it is going to be by far and away the biggest media industry event of the year, and perhaps of, you know, one year either side of it as well. I mean, it's going to dwarf anything that we see in, you know, in gaming and film and music, you name it. And so I think that is actually going to draw, have a waterfall effect
on everything else in the game industry. And so I think what will happen is people will look around
and they'll be like, Oh, I'm really excited about games now again, because I've been playing GTA 6.
What else can I play? What else can I do? And Godzilla and everybody else is going to
benefit as a result of that.
And do you think that these will benefit the underlying chains that the tokens are built on? Yeah, for sure. Because if we look at guns already, if you just look at activity on guns,
it's one of the most active chains, just because its community is so active. And also,
just because its community is so active. And also, the important thing about
like the North Star metric of gaming is retention
and people coming back and playing day after day
and measuring what your day seven, day 30,
day 15 retention is.
And so because you're designing the products
for that kind of retention,
it's also conducive to chain activity
because you've got people who
are using a product that's designed to retain them and keep them active.
Yeah, that is a great answer.
But I was actually trying to get at if it's built on Solana versus an Ethereum versus
an AVAX, how much will it bring to the ecosystem as a whole?
And how much value will accrue to the actual token that the actual chain the token is on?
I mean, I guess this is on its own with avalanche framework, but...
Sure. I think it's difficult to say how direct the correlation would be, but my rule of thumb
is always that we call it attention, I like to call
it activity. As long as you've got a good active large community there, then value will follow.
As I think we found with Ronin and the AXE community, that has been a very durable community
that has been very active for the last several years and continues to support what happens on Ronin,
even though, you know, there's no DeFi, there's not meme, no meme coins,
but that gaming community is very active.
Makes perfect sense. And Ronin had a brief period even sort of in the bear market about
performance, right? Where it started to see some traction once again.
Yeah, for sure. Well, because the people who love to play those games just keep playing them forever.
I mean, just like people still, you know, play Minecraft as adults because they love it.
I'm really hoping that we start to see interest come back to utility, whether it's gaming or
elsewhere. You know, I find meme coins a bit exhausting and I did see that PumpFun was
somewhat popping off again here and seeing renewed interest and pretty annoying.
But I guess that's the nature of the beast here. Is there anything that anybody on the panel is
looking at that they're equally excited about a launch that's coming or a potential catalyst that they think could
somewhat bring a larger focus back to utility
and actual use cases beyond what we've discussed here.
I mean, Robbie, I was looking for Gunzilla
for a very, very long time.
I mean, maybe you have other answers
since you guys are exposed to so many things.
I think honestly, it's the usual narratives, at least the stuff that I've been seeing lately.
There are some interesting RWA projects coming out and some interesting stuff going on in DSi,
but I wouldn't say like on a timeline of weeks as opposed to months,
I don't see anything in the next couple of weeks.
Yeah, weeks is fine. I'm gonna say I'll go ahead.
Yeah.
I think that the big thing that we're going to see is AI agent based defy being a huge trend in addition to like the things we've already talked about RWA and gaming, but I think the AI agent defy trend is going to really take things by storm.
Gaming itself is abstracting the chain away, automating everything within the ecosystem.
And we'll see how value accrues in the under layer.
But I think when anyone's able to interact with chat bots that automate trades, that automate algorithmic trading,
that automate APY pool distributions on the fly,
can do really creative things.
People launching tokens directly from X for really creative purposes.
I just think it's a wellspring of
interesting ways to interact with this market that completely
removes the complexities at a level that we've just never seen before.
And I think it'll carry the trend really strong.
Yeah, I've seen a lot being built on the AI agent side.
Just seems that the hype has diminished over the past few months.
Kind of had that very brief moment. But to your point, I mean, I know there's AI exchanges
coming, there's a lot.
And we're gonna see AI everything.
I'll just add real quick,
is that those were really conversational.
They were just sort of like chat bots
that you could talk with on X that would just repeat stuff.
This is a much deeper utility level
that I don't think we've fully seen the user interfaces,
but agree that this prior trend, I think it was the test run.
What other areas do we think that we're going to see a major crossover between crypto and blockchain and AI?
I mean, is there anything else that Amateo on your radar that you think is coming in that arena and then 21 million after
Yeah, i'll pass it to everyone else I want to hear their thoughts 21 million go ahead
For me, I think one of the biggest things if you saw avax I believe is working with the state of california
When it comes to like the I think it's driver's license, right? The DMV system basically.
So for me, I think we're gonna see more
just governments adopt what they can do on blockchain.
Now with blockchain, I'm really not sure.
Obviously we see many states kind of having a reserve
when it comes to Bitcoin.
But I think that number one, I'm a big believer in gaming,
but I feel like, you know, think about this,
if we have like your city hall, right?
You have these two homes, what people own, what taxes they pay.
If you saw a few, I think Miami was one of the cities that I actually adopted a few years
ago.
To me, that's going to be one of the biggest things that kind of forces people to get onto
blockchain is when there's, you know, local city hall does it.
Their local town government, their city government, or even at the state level, kind of has them
to be on there to make transactions, make payments.
And especially when it comes to taxes, I think that the people will eventually want to see
more things on blockchain because, hey, I paid $1,000 for example, you know, random
number last year or last month.
What exactly did that money go to?
What did you guys use for it?
I think, you know, I'm from New York City.
We spend a lot of money just on any type of, you know, I'm from New York City. We spend a lot of money just on any
type of, you know, old tax, New York City tax, New York State tax. And sometimes we just question
ourselves, like, where is this actually going to? Who are we funding? Because our roads are shit,
the schools, you see my language, are not great. You know, so it's one of those things where I think
the transparency level that people don't like, we don't understand what we're gonna get from this.
You always heard about Bitcoin early on,
people use it for money laundering.
But the truth is, this is actually the anti money laundering
because we can see where every single dollar
down to the second where it's going,
how it's being invested and how it's being used.
So to me, when we start seeing like people's card titles,
like you said, the house deeds, NCD Hall, just all personal information, and it might not be the greatest thing, but at
the same time, I think we'll have something that's going to be on there that's going to
make that big difference.
Now, how is it going to maybe be on a decentralized chain because we don't want our information
out there?
I get that.
I get a lot of people don't want it, but tell you what it'd be a lot easier to transfer a title or a deed
You know to somebody if it is all on the blockchain, but that's my point of view
Yeah before we pivoted I was just gonna make a couple of points first
Now is the time I always say I don't give investment advice, but I will give this kid bit
I always say I don't give investment advice, but I will give this tidbit.
Now is the time to actually be looking for projects that create utility,
figuring out and doing the deep dive and putting your money into those projects
before the time when everybody is doing it,
because that is going to be a different part of the cycle. I mean,
forget four year cycles because you all it's bullshit, right? You know,
and by the way, the four year cycle was doomed was certain to become less and less relevant as
having as you approach, you know, the terminal state. But look, build thousand times for
building and investing in this is where money is made by finding those projects. Utility
will matter. Remember, the government is literally about to unleash builders to raise money and get the regulatory framework.
They're still not in the seats yet. They're running very close, but they're not there.
And so it's really important to understand that the questions you're asking in this town hall will be incredibly relevant for people a year or two years from now in my guess. That's the first thing.
The second I want to make a quip that I want to know where the data of Bitcoin to the NASDAQ
is right this particular second.
Obviously, Bitcoin is back to where it was on Friday and NASDAQ is still falling.
I mean, I think that Larry said what he said is extremely relevant.
And the third point, which we haven't talked about,
but is worth discussing, is the big battle politically that's going on right now is about
stable coins. And in particular, whether or not you can have yield on stable coins.
The only argument against allowing yield on stable coins is that it will hurt the banking industry,
and more specifically hurt fractional reserve banking and the
dinosaurs out there who believe that that's important think that the
internet will not come up with ways or and watching a lot of ways for people
to be able to fund mortgages when you start talking about AI agents in DeFi I
mean look more more crypto internal youmasturbatory trading isn't going to matter.
But what will matter is AI agents searching or being used to allow people to buy mortgages
and sell mortgages, right?
Creating investment pools based on mortgages and allowing mortgage shoppers to be able
to find mortgages from unconventional places, which will become necessary as banks lose what's going on.
People building in that arena,
and I know that I personally have some knowledge
of some people who are,
is that's going to be a big time part of the future.
But it's not investible in weeks,
it's probably not even investible in months.
It's a year sort of thing.
And I think that that's the sort of stuff that matters.
But this battle is a very important one.
Tomer, then Ryan.
Yeah, really quickly, I think to Dave's first point,
which he kind of circled back to at the end,
whatever is gonna happen with AI and blockchain,
the barriers to entry are gonna be relatively low.
There's gonna be so many
people competing and entering, so many people announcing projects. It's going to be really,
really hard to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in these early days. And so
it ends up being a very, very risky proposition to try to wait, place a bet on something and expect
positive returns. There may be a wave of capital that comes in and
raises all ships, but that which can't sustain is going to eventually get drained out. These things
can happen very quickly. I don't want to cast a verdict on what the long-term impact of AI and
blockchains is going to be, but I think it's going to be really wild up front
in the end.
It'll because of the nature of the space, it's going to be filled with failed projects, some
which just didn't have the skill or the value proposition, many of which are probably just
going to be scams without the full effort behind them, as we've seen in wave and wave
and wave before and everything that's touched blockchain.
Yeah, so hard to find the signal through the noise or what's just that not an outright them as we've seen in wave and wave and wave before and everything that's touched blockchain.
So hard to find the signal through the noise or what's just that not an outright scam when you're trying to invest in some of these things. Go ahead, Ryan.
Yeah, two things. So one, keeping your head down and building is typically a sign of a bear market.
You know, we, you know, as engineers and, we'll typically push through the bear markets to build
and then bull markets, we're scaling our teams, we're marketing, we're pushing to conferences,
that type of thing. I've been very heavily focused on the Morpheus ecosystem and building out AI
agents. And Dave's exactly right. These financial instruments that we're building out the AI agents. And Dave's exactly right. These financial instruments
that we're building out the AI agents, they can consume so much more information than humans can.
It can make so much more complex decisions than humans can. And as it dovetails with gaming,
before we pivoted in the conversation a few times, on the Morpheus ecosystem, there's several games
being developed, everything from role-playing, role playing games that are real time content through AI engines, you know, building out all
the different characters to, you know, there's a project called only cats, which is literally
generating cat NFPs and using AI to make them fight against each other. And it's just getting
more and more complex where you know, soon you're going to have real
time rendered videos of these different fights. But it's called only cats. But there are there are
so many projects out there that are building on top of the AI ecosystem that are merging into
blockchain for the real time economics, and then getting yield on stable coin, getting yield on all your different
meme coins, like that's all coming.
And like I said, it's, it's a groundswell that no one can really see unless you're
actually in the builders communities.
But it's, it's going to come fast.
I'm a tail.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I just fully agree with that.
I mean, I think the thing that maybe is not being highlighted enough is that the entire
front end UI UX of the crypto experience is about to completely change.
And that's something that we've desired for a very long time.
And it's very close to being completely ready and available for anyone.
And I think that that is a dramatic step function
of evolution for this entire market and industry.
And it will come faster than people think.
Right, everyone, that was a great show.
We're gonna go ahead and move to wrapping now.
Please give everybody on stage a follow our amazing, tremendous,
stupendous guests that show up every single day and grace us with their free time
to discuss all of these important issues.
It's an honor to be on stage with them every single day.
And so tune back in tomorrow.
See what we have at 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.
Thank you, everybody. Let's at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thank you everybody.
Let's hope we see a sustained bounce here.
Should be an interesting week with the tariffs coming, which we didn't even discuss today,
and we'll probably dive into tomorrow.
Thanks everyone.
See you tomorrow.