The Wolf Of All Streets - SOL Leads Majors, DOGE ETF Delayed! Alts to Explode? | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

This episode of Crypto Town Hall brings together several crypto experts for a lively and candid roundtable discussion on current market conditions, the state of major cryptocurrencies, institutional adoption, the future of tokenization, macro trends, and the social impact of meme coins. The group analyzes recent developments such as Solana's strong price performance, the potential for a DOGE ETF, and high-profile IPOs. Conversation weaves from serious philosophical debates about money mechanics and savings to lighter topics like meme coins as a cultural phenomenon. The episode wraps up with friendly banter about poker games and reflections on both the state and the future of the crypto industry.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every day here at Exit 10.15m. Eastern Standard time. Dave, I think we have to start with the market today, right? We've got Solana Leeds majors, Dozy GF today, Alt to Explode. I've seen a lot of tweets with the alt season indicator hitting 69 and it needs to hit 70 and then we're magically an alt season. So I have no idea if that's worth discussing or not because I don't use an all-season indicator. I just look at the prices of things. And if they're going up, generally think that we can gauge the sentiments.

Solana obviously leading here, as we've been discussing, was possible for a very, very long time. Apparently a Doge ETF hitting today. We had the figure markets IPO, which did exceptionally well this week. And Gemini IPO today, there's a lot going on. Yeah. I mean, look, Salana in particular, you know, the news is just, it's actually muted. I mean, compared to the response to Oracle, compared to the response to, what was it, Open Door, compared to what we're likely to see in the Gemini IPO, so Solana still in towards its previous all-time high that it's like less than one-fourth

the value of Ethereum with the power behind the people talking about it. I mean, Novogratz came out and said yesterday something very specific. He said, and this is the reason why I own some Solana, is that it has the capacity to handle all the transactions in the world equity markets, more or less. I mean, so you could go dig up the quote and find out exactly what you said. That is an extremely important point. So, you know, there's Ethereum can't. Ethereum could with level two, layer two's, but it's not the same.

And so if you're really talking about the total, the use case of being the underpinning for new modern financial markets, Salana is one of the ones that could actually do that, right? That matters. And, you know, if you look at that, And you say to yourself, okay, you know, what could that mean? And why is it one quarter where Ethereum is? And at the same time, holding the thought in your head that Ethereum might be undervalued relative to everything else, one could see very explosive growth. So I'm actually surprised that Salon is only sitting around 240, to be honest.

Dave, who said that that it could handle all the? I read it on Twitter quickly. That's what I saw Mike Novigrat saying. It might have been taken out of context, so take it with rain and salt. So that's why I asked if someone else about that interview. But the truth is that the holy grail, for much of the crypto ecosystem, is to underpin a new, more modern version of the financial markets. And that total addressable market is really, really large, right?

And so that's really the point. And look, you could take into, you know, take valuation metrics however you want to take them. I mean, the fact that it's TVL is at all-time highs, is transactions, all times. That doesn't mean anything to me because what you really care about is what could it do. So, you know, in terms of hype, it's actually, in my mind, very, very muted relative to what we've seen in the past. And so I'm not saying that's right. Did you see that the pipe for Ford Industries, which was trading as forward? the that's the galaxy multi-coin jump crypto was all cash what you know one

plan's one point six five billion dollar raise and everybody assumed since it was multi-coin galaxy and jump that it was in kind they were all going to be contributing their very large bags of Solana that we know they've had forever it was raised entirely in cash no no in kind zero so explain so once again I repeat my statement. Sorry. So they raised $1.65 billion in their reverse merger with Ford Industries. Everyone assumed that because multi-coin obviously led the first rounds of Solana, this was a way to effectively transfer exit Salana positions for large entities, which has been what Treasury companies have largely done. Pyle Samani, who will be the chairman of this and is the head of multi-coin,

clarified that this was all raised in cash, meaning that is $1.65 billion that will be used to buy Salana rather than $1.65 billion of Salamah being transferred into the treasury company. And with that information, it's up a few percent? Yeah, right. That's my point. My point is that those who think that crypto is in the middle of a hype cycle, all you've got to look, yeah, crypto stocks might be the traditional world wants it. There's, you know, look, it's obvious that there's needs for it, but it's pretty clear

that the crypto world itself for the actual tokens is not an hype cycle. I mean, I'm not saying it's not bullish, but it's not, we are so far from Euphoria is not even funny. And that to me matters. I mean, I keep like jokingly, not jokingly, I tweeted yesterday at some crypto influencer saying, this time when we see you get a rally, you really have to take profits. And, you know, we're hearing a lot of that. And that is the opposite of what you would see in a hype cycle. And that's the wall of worry that all I can say is this. When the four-year cycle is completely debunked,

many things, you know, can happen at once. And, you know, we always talk about, you know, how you need to be in the market for the 10 most important days. Well, we haven't seen any of those days yet. Not in a while. Okay. So now that I've said this, we're starting to get some hands. You have that.

You do it. Yeah, that was great. I couldn't agree more with what you were saying. I just want to add some perspective from the usability side, from the experience of using and making markets on Ethereum versus using and making markets on Solana. So a lot of people might think, you know, Ethereum is superior.

And I think in terms of liquidity, it's very obvious that it is. But the problem with Ethereum versus Solana is that Ethereum is slow. And when it gets busy, the gas fees are outrageous. I mean, just to provide liquidity in some pools could cost a couple of hundred dollars to execute those contracts when we're in the middle of a real bull market. With Solana, things happen very cheaply and very quickly, but the tradeoff is sometimes, you know, they have to reset the chain. And it's 32Eth to validate, but the stakes are pretty high and the hardware and technology education is pretty high to validate on Solana. So those are some of the tradeoffs so that the community. you can understand what's happening here, but ultimately, my feeling is, what does it take to get

mass adoption? What does it take to onboard a billion people? It takes ease of use. And the state at which defy is in right now, it's not ready for a billion people to join. And the question becomes, is it going to be a forward-facing UI-U-X that comes from an application that plugs into Ether? or is it going to be a UIUX that plugs into Solana? And I think the speed and ease of use is just not understood because not many people are making markets and using Defi right now, but that's the big advantage for Solana. And I think it's relative to Ethereum, it's underpriced.

Well, I mean, look, I think we can get a lot of people to debate that. I mean, that's my thesis pretty much as well. I don't really care about what's happening today. The biggest news that we've seen recently is you know, NASDAQ putting $50 million into Gemini. And as the big exchange groups and the big brokerages and the big firms start to move towards tokenization, what are they going to use? And we've seen a lot of, you know, statements Tom Lee has told everyone who wants to listen that he thinks that Ethereum will be the institutional blockchain. Maybe he'll be right. Maybe he

won't. This has got to be one that a lot of people have opinions on. But to me, that that matters in the long run. In the short run, if we're talking about markets, you ask yourself the question is Solana with the big, remember, when Solano lost its all-time high the first time, it was because of all that FTX Solana being sold and all the major unlocks. All that's, I'm not going to say it's gone, but it's unlocked. There's no more shoes to fall. And if what we're now have is a treasury company supported by actual users on a strategic basis, you know, it feels a lot like the, the micro strategy, you know, moment in Bitcoin, you know, several years ago that Saylor has described, much more than anything else. Just like Tom Lee, you know, going into

Ethereum, he's trying to do that, but it's not nearly as much in terms of how it will get used. In his case, it's as a strategic asset. So to me, it feels like that's a big deal. And all I'm saying is I'm not seeing froth or euphoria yet. And a lot of the coins in the crypto world really rely upon that sort of euphoria or animal spirits for them to get moving. And so if we think that will happen, then sure, you know, Scott, you always talk about the dartboard. You know, you could just throw a dart at a board and whatever it is going to go up, whatever, huge. We are very, very, very, very far from that. And whether or not this will get there, I think it's going to do.

matter, you know, in terms of macro stuff and what's going on in the main markets, etc. But the truth is that it feels very muted that the market isn't really, you know, exuberant about this. That's really the point that I was making. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And as stable coins being the first iteration of real world asset tokenization, kind of being the proving point, the starting point, that is really what's going to accelerate us into eventually that psychology of the market cycle, euphoria stage. And yeah, I agree with you right now. We are nowhere near that.

Yeah. But it's a positive day, no matter how you want to slice it. Right, Scott? Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin is trading 115,000 above the 50MA on the daily again, clearly holding for two to three days now above 112K, which technicians were obviously pointing at. Like I said, you've got IPOs left and right. They're all doing well. And it seems all systems go right now.

Plus, I mean, we didn't even talk about the fact that obviously the S&P and NASDAQ are trading at all-time highs. Well, yeah. I mean, it seems like every, and I mean every asset is moving up at the same time. I mean, it's, you don't see this very often. Obviously, the reason, you know, if you think about it, is are these assets moving up or is, is the dollar being debased, and people are just kind of reflecting that in the prices of assets. We'll see what actually happens. But, I mean, it's hard not to look at this and see, you know, and see yourself, you know, with the 10-year, even on the long end, the 10-year is still under, you know, what, 4.067 is the yield.

I mean, whatever. I mean, it's under 4.1. People were worried about 450, you know, not too long ago. so it really does feel like like money is kind of sloshing around here and so we'll see i mean we've seen this in september to have to be met by october surprises before uh it's definitely i know on your show yesterday you know you got to hear mike i'm sure i didn't listen i'm not going to lie but i have a pretty good idea that he said that and uh yeah you know and and it is there's lots of barometers that are saying okay there's crazy shit going on but the truth is if there is

crazy shit. At this point, will the reaction to that crazy shit be good or bad for Bitcoin and for coins like Solana and Ethereum and the, I don't want to call them quality. I don't want to call them blue chip. We'll just say large cap memes. I see Mark with your hand up. Mark. Hey, Dave. Yeah. Hey, Dave. Just some data. I think one of you guys, other Dave or Scott might have put out the $7 trillion money market fund stat. I think Balcunas from Bloomberg was promoted. And it's absolutely true.

You know, T-bills and chills sounds great at four and a half, five, but at two and a half for three. You know, that three is going to be the number. You know, the whole yield curves globally have pivoted around the two-year point. Two years haven't really moved much. That's right out about CPI. So I think we're going to have some bleed out of there, and there is money sloshing around. But the more Wall Street gets involved, the more volatility we're going to have with all the alt coins, because it's still so underowned. I mean, the world financial, going back to that, you know, quote, failed ICO, which was far from it.

I learned yesterday, a guy that I know got into, got bought into it right at the election. So I think it was a penny. It was a penny. Right. It was one and a half. Yeah. So the first round, I think it was one and a half. I don't want to misquote, but the second was in the ballpark of five cents.

And that was last October. Yeah. And it was, I think, surrendering Heath is how it was. And Heath was in the hole. So it was a huge boon for those folks. It was more than a 15 bagger. It was 15 bagger in, I think, ETH terms, and it was more when you talk about dollar terms. So I think we are early innings, every indication, as Dave said, about where we are with froth, not there.

But it's all Wall Street. You know, call the financialization. We still have so few people talking about even Bitcoin, let alone Solana versus Eith, you know, modular versus monolithic. all those discussions, 50 million from NASDAQ is basically firing one consultant and taking money from one pocket and delivering it to another. So the investment is still way early on it. And as far as is it Ether, Solana, I think that's going to take a long time to figure out which one carries the rails of Tradfai assets. Yeah, I kind of default to the very, classic meme of the little girl shrugging that says why not both you know yeah i think that

each may catch the main institutional involvement but salanna could catch up and capture another entire part of the market i think it's clear that there is place for both of them and also i mean you just have the playbook right and matt hogan and i discussed this not long ago when we were bullposting salana at much lower prices and saying if this was the likely rotation whether you like it or not you have you know, the ETF, Salana will get an ETF, right? Of course. You get the, uh, or futures trading or whichever one comes first, then the ETF, then you start to get the proliferation of treasury companies or treasury companies then ETF, which gives you the flows, which gives you the bullish narrative, which price goes up, right? And we saw it with Bitcoin, we saw it with

ETH, we're seeing it with Salana. Pretty straightforward. Yeah, lawyer. Scott, what are we seeing with NACA and Metaplanet? Sorry to interrupt you guys. Where is Napa trading today? I mean, I know it went four bucks to eight bucks to four bucks. They're at $3.3.10, they drop 28% today, 20%, 21% today, and that's down to 8%. You're seeing that the market really does not like Nakamoto's model. And you're seeing that people are now aware that their second raise was five bucks. And it's trading under that.

It's not trading under NAV, to be clear. There's people saying that. But, you know, they raised a bunch of money. I think one or $2 the first round and the second was five. trading below that. I think that it's confusing, but maybe there's just not a thirst for the model of a treasury company that's buying treasury companies. I mean, that's what they did, right? They bought Metaplanet stock and then they dumped 50%. Is that accurate? Yeah, fund of funds. That's what it looks like to me.

Question is, when does it become valuable if it ever does? I mean, are we going to have failures right out of the gate? Yes. I don't think it'll be down. But yeah, I think that I think we're in this interesting situation where there was a lot of hype, a lot of money raised, and then a lot more roadblocks to actually buying the Bitcoin than was anticipated. I actually don't know how much Bitcoin does Nakamoto own. Do you know? I don't know. Anybody? I'm having a hard time keeping up with all these guys, quite frankly, is coming so fast. Does anybody know? Because I think that's a great question. And what is there now? No, don't know. But this is where first principles come in on this guys. And it brings to mind a plaque at my in-law's

shorehouse that says, friends of friends cannot bring friends. So the further away you get from the Bitcoin, I think, is not really where you want to be. A little bit attenuation happening. That's an absolutely incredible, incredible plaque. Boyard. Yeah, I saw an article yesterday about BlackRock talking about tokenizing. I don't know if this is just old news. No, it's new. Yeah, it's new.

It came alongside with the NASDAQ news that the NASDAQ was applying to basically tokenize stocks, and then BlackRock very quickly announced they wanted to tokenize the ETFs. I like to imagine myself as like being the nerd, like top nerd at BlackRock, the guy who gets to ultimately decide guy or girl who gets to decide what blockchain they use or do they make a blockchain for all this because that will be ultimately where this all goes, right? If they were to use Solana or Ethereum or Blackchain, BlackRock chain, that will dictate the entire future of on-chain tokenized real-world assets and stocks, I think. Paul BlackRock.

Can we get an ETF of the tokenized version of the ETFs of the... I mean, I don't see why not. That's exactly how the existing... We need rappers for our rappers. We can give them really cool names, too, like, not based on the quality of what's wrapped up in them. We could basically mimic the entire financial system. I mean, like, with a little bit of serious... It is we've got two different competing technologies that do, that are promising to do what each other does with various trade-offs.

And so you've got, you've got an ETF of tokens that are on blockchains, and then you've got tokens on blockchains that are meant to represent what's traded in the traditional system. One of these systems is going to go away at the end. And I don't think it's blockchain that the blockchains that are going to go away because you can't make them go away. I guess they could lose adoption. They could fail to have the critical mass of adoption. Or someone could just say, you know what, blockchains are really only, they're so inefficient. We can just make the database is really efficient. And then you lose a distinction between which one was what, you know.

But having two different systems trying to do the same thing. they eventually become the same thing because of where they're done. You worry less about the underlying technology and more about what's the thing getting done and what's the best way to do it. Yeah, but the difference, I think, is if you had everything, if you have sort of a centralized financial system on blockchain, you then normalize the sort of non-centralized transactions and assets, Whereas when it was all on the, you know, just centralized ledgers, there was no other way to do it.

It was just, I mean, I guess cash and barter. So now we have this, at least if we normalize the blockchain, even if it's all through some sort of centralized NASDAQ and BlackRock system, it still normalizes what we are all sort of, many of us are believers in, which is the transactional freedom and the ability to start something up that competes with that. Yeah, I'm just like, there's a lot of, like, categorization and distinguishing to be done. Like, you know, the reason Bitcoin has a blockchain is because it's meant to be, it has no issuer. It's issued by its own network and the rules are there and nobody can change the rules and nobody can interfere. When a company issues stock, the company is the issuer, and the company has the right to retire stock, suspend stock, issue more stock. it doesn't make a commitment at its inception of what it will be for all eternity. And so the requirement for many of the elements that are in blockchain as it was designed for Bitcoin,

the rules are enforced by everybody and therefore hard to break by anybody and also hard to stop by anybody. You don't expect that want it, need it in securities. You expect it to be new things issued, all the time and issuers and that issuers actually do have some degree of control over what they're doing with it. So I think this is where the different classifications of systems needs to be clearer in some people's minds. Otherwise, you end up making bad comparisons of what a system is trying to do. Like, just as a straw man, I would say, you know, if you could get the regulate, you know, whether you're going to get the regulators in on the securities being traded on

blockchain or get the regulators out of the database that is the current stock exchange, when you do that, the two different technologies become indistinguishable from one another from a utility point of view. And I guess that to me is where this point lies. And I think this will be the back and forth the battle regarding the kind of joke that I made. It's like, will these systems coexist where you can actually buy a share either on one of these blockchains or through an exchange? Can you trade one for the other? How do you trade one for the other?

It's going to be an interesting transition. And it probably won't take more than a decade or 15 years tops, kind of like how it took all of telephony to become voice over IP. But you still have, you know, You still had the telephones until people realized they didn't want to talk to each other. They wanted to send text messages to each other, which might be another breakthrough that none of us can see coming in stocks. I would also argue that what Tom was saying about the kind of the distinction of things, I think when you step back and you ask like what is the role of the financial system, what is the role of crypto? I think many people are trying to escape a system that no longer protects our purchasing.

power. And so there's a distinction between saving versus investing. I think when money is broken, we can no longer save. So everyone's pushed to the world of investing and taking risk. And so if we just had an asset that preserved our purchasing power, I would argue that the financial system would be a minuscule fraction of what it is today. And so a lot of these discussions wouldn't be being had because our hurdle rate would be 40, 50 percent or less if we had mass global adoption. And I think a lot people would just be saving in Bitcoin as opposed to trying to escape this debasement. I think that it's important to understand that there are two or three things in what you just said. I mean, the average human being, sadly, doesn't even understand that when they're saving in a 401k or they're whatever, that they're escaping debasement.

In fact, it's the percentage of people who understand that that dollars or fiat and not, you know, backed by something, you know, in the actual, in the actual real world is staggeringly low. I mean, you know, we have a lot of innumeracy and economic illiteracy, but look, even among mainstream economists, they don't look at it that way. We do, but they don't. So that's point one. Point two is that there's a track record here.

And if there's one thing you learn when you talk to pension fund consultants and pension funds, used to run transition trading. So I did the tour of all the state capitals to talk to all the state pension funds in the United States. All is probably wrong, but probably 25 to 26 of them, a little bit more than half. What you learn is that one of the most important things people care about are track records. And Bitcoin isn't a phenomenal track record for 15 years, but it's small. What they care about is the track record of multi-billion dollar assets.

And they'll look at it as one asset. They're not looking at it as an opt-out for an insurance. entire system. We are a long way from that. I'm not saying we're not going to get there. I actually think that there's a pretty good shot that what you're saying 20 years from now may be true. But today, we're not close. And the kind of price that you're implying for Bitcoin in that is orders of magnitude higher than it is today. And so the real question is, how do we get there? And what happens? And are we likely to? What's the market doing right now? And I'll come back to this. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I'm

compared to, you know, the, in, in a, in a, in a euphoria situation. I, I, I love the direction that, that we, that, that, Tomer and, and Seb took this, because it really is two different use cases altogether. The, you know, you know, you know, Bitcoin is helping people preserve wealth through, massive debt derivative dilution, this fiat currency just being printed to infinity all across the globe. So it's solving that problem. But institutions are coming into Ethereum and Solana. And I think this, you know, we had that guest last week from Ando Finance, you know, globalizing and opening up the realm for access to U.S. capital markets. So what do they see in it? They see faster transaction and settlement times. And they see more access to a global audience, more way to raise money and tap into global liquidity.

And then the Bitcoiners are a whole different group that are looking to avoid dilution from the abuse of government deficit spending. So two different use cases. And I think sometimes we can conflate that these systems are competing each other. But honestly, nothing can compete with Bitcoin. It's engineered money. All of these other tools, Ethereum and Solana, as to, Tomer brought up, you know, phone calls, but then we had text messaging.

What is the next thing to come? We don't know what it is. We don't know if there's going to be a new chain. As lawyers said, what if it's BlackRock, an independent chain? These things can be replaced on a whim. Bitcoin cannot be replaced. I wholeheartedly agree, C.J. And I think that Dave, like, absolutely agree with every single one of your points.

And I should preface kind of what I said previously with the fact that, like, my expertise or my interest doesn't necessarily lie in crypto it lies in bitcoin and it lies more in the philosophical discussions and the big picture discussions and i would say that um the world we live in today unfortunately everyone in their dog has to become an investor and try and figure out this complex market because money doesn't hold value and i think that what does the world look like when we have an ability to save when we no longer have to worry about what our money is doing and then we can direct that capacity towards our family and our hobbies and the things that challenge us in our career. And I think the world looks like a profoundly different, more connected, more

collaborative world than the world today. I think that when everyone is worrying about money, the amount of stress, the amount of tension that underpin everything is just, I think that is why we're seeing a lot of the decay and the divisiveness. I think that's exactly right. And it's one of those things that it's sort of like, you know, when you see one of my favorite memes, it's not really a meme, is, you know, what the hell happen in 1971 memes where, you know, you show whether it's, and it doesn't matter. I mean, there's multiple versions of this. There's the one that shows, you know, housing affordability. There's the ones that shows the wealth gap, you know, et cetera. And, and people say that. And the average human

being doesn't have a clue. Now, we all know that it's because that's when Nixon finally closed the gold window and the Fiat era, you know, in full steam was born. And there's all these pathologies that the average person has no idea. When you start talking to people to orange pill them, and I do this a lot, you know, you always start with that. It's like, you know, do you know what's backing your money? And they say, well, Fort Knox. It's like, well, really? You start talking about it. It's, it's, and it's this idea. It's like the two pillars of American society financially are housing ownership and stock ownership. And in both, the point is made so often that it's almost like religious dogma which is these investments will go up right you know

over the long run they go up and you know you need that wealth and and and while that is absolutely true we all understand that part of the reason for that a large part of the reason for that is because we're printing more money so of course the denominator is changing of course the nominal value goes up right and that's the philosophical point that you were talking about correct absolutely and like so i live in the little ski resort of uh whistler British Columbia and it's mind-blown because we have 61% of houses empty while the average house price is three and a half million dollars and we have a housing crisis and so you're wondering you're just like how is this possible and it's because when money no longer stores value people

look for other things to store that monetary premium and so house prices go up farmland goes up people no longer use farmland for its utility value growing crop and providing for their community instead they use it to store purchasing power and so you end up taking all of these assets that but once utility pieces for society off the market, pushing up prices. And so you can see a lot of the issues we face today stem from broken money. And I agree with all your points, Dave, absolutely. Yeah, one thing that I like to throw out, since we're getting a little bit philosophical here, the very quick point is Bitcoin has no other utility than being money.

It doesn't have an opportunity cost. You can't live in it. You can't grow food on it. You can't use it to store something else in other than value. And so in demonetizing or de-financializing all these other things that have become financialized and therefore had their utility taken away or their pricing rocketed up above beyond where the market demand for the utility of the thing is if we can get Bitcoin to be the money, we can liberate all this utility.

And Seb's example of $3.1 million houses, 60% of which are unoccupied or whatever his statistic was, just really lands home the point of the monetization, taking away utility from things that can be used as financial stores of value, but ought not in an ideal world be used that way. By the way, since we're having a philosophical conversation about the importance of Bitcoin that we all agree on, I would sadly like to report that the Doge ETF has apparently been delayed. Oh, my goodness. I know. What a tragedy. I know. I know. I know. I know, I know. It's almost like, that's one of those things that is like the world is Monty Python, right?

This joke coin somehow became something that Wall Street is now, you know, as it embraces crypto, it's trying to create an ETF of a literal joke. And it's a bit of a relief that it's been delayed, although it'll probably still happen. I mean, there are a lot of, there are a lot of jokes out there, right? you know, and we always make fun of them, but, you know, Doge is the only one that's in the top 10. So, you know, so be it. It's like, you know, it's like as long as Doge is $40 billion or just pushing up against it, you know, I get every Monday to hear Mike McGlone talk about how it's proof of the insanity of the 20 million cryptos and all the other crap that we get said. But

it is sort of like that sharp stick in the eye to, you know, not Doge in itself, but the fact that there's this whole meme economy that's worth more, almost, there are dozens that are worth more than the average Russell 2000 company, which are the, that's the small cap index that is considered investable by institutions. And that just drives people in financial markets. Do you know it's so interesting, Dave? On that note, obviously, listen, zombie tokens, memes, dead, zombie companies exist everywhere in the stock market and here. What's actually I think what's put a huge spotlight on that is how many of these empty shells treasury companies have been able to find to merge into.

It's like infinite dead companies publicly trading. Yeah, that's true. I mean, well, look, but those infinite dead companies aren't like, let's see, where the first, the first big one is, I'm looking for Bitcoin Cash. I mean, is anyone using Bitcoin Cash for anything these days? Does anyone remember that Bitcoin Cash was airdrop to everybody for free? Yeah. I remember because I got a couple of Bitcoins.

That was like the best weekend ever because I was fully in my trading degeneracy. And like all of a sudden, you know, all this money appeared in your account. And the swings hourly were 300%. Like violent, just short any rip and long any dip. It was one of the most fun trading environments ever. But what nonsense. Well, I mean, I think this is where it comes down to is it entertainment or is it reality. And some of this stuff that's comedy going to become a tragedy like in the real

world for people or some of this stuff are going to become a horror. What's the genre of entertainment I think it's a very fine line. But if you're buying a Doge ETF with the expectation of massive returns, I would assume you either know what you're buying or you're functionally, I'm not going to say the word, but you know, dropped on your head too many times. You should know exactly what you're buying if you're buying you're buying the ETF of a meme Yeah, you should. It goes right back to what you guys were just saying, though, which is about coming from the philosophical angle, people are forced to do this. They have to gamble to get ahead.

They don't understand Bitcoin. They don't have a savings technology. They're forced to gamble. And I think it brings us full circle back to Mark's original comment, which I think went a little bit too low. And Scott, I know you know this, but I've been shouting this from the rooftops. That's seven plus trillion dollars in money market funds. is a very big deal. And it ties into what we were talking about philosophically

because right now at 425 to 450 basis points, people feel comfortable that they're keeping up. I'm not sure they feel like they're getting ahead, but at least they feel like they're keeping up and perhaps real rates of return are keeping them even. But as the rates come down, those savers are no longer going to be incentivized to save. And that's going to turn them back into investors.

And when that money floods into the market, it's going to rush out into stocks, real estate, Bitcoin, gold, silver, and goods and services. And what's interesting about the four-year cycle is just at the time that we would anticipate to be heading into the depths of a bear market, Powell's term is going to end. And Trump is going to put in a printer. We know that. And rates will probably fall further. We may even go back to ZERP and the liquidity will flow.

And the four-year cycle, I think, will break down. and we can get, you know, the last couple of cycles, we had the China mining ban, throw a wrench into the cycle. And then in the next bull market, we had the lowering of interest rates, throw a wrench into the euphoria part of the cycle. And now we're moving into a time where finally there is a macro element, which is going to be the lowering of rates that delivers a boost rather than a wrench. Mark. Mark, you're up. Hey, thanks. Back to the Doge thing.

I forget the name of the gals that you have on Scott sometimes. The global crypto is. Noel Atcherton. Yeah, Noel. She's, yeah. Crypto is macro. I like her background and her approach. She favored, she in a discussion, said, you know, I'm all about Bitcoin.

And she goes, and I think Dogecoin. And she went into it because what Doge Coins represents is, you know, is like the, I'm going to bring in the Pink song, What About Us? The people who are lost, you know, you talk about the, you know, the dead money, like the FTT coins that are worth 300 million Scott. And I kind of understand that. You can't push things to zero. But something like Doge, which expands with it and maintains a certain dominance, it reflects, people want to belong to. something and for some you know and doge has it i'm not supporting its value but i'm reflecting that i'm not going to say it's a it's it's an indication of the lack of connection in community and

you know fall of family and all that although by a little bit of that but it it's something to listen to and understand and bitcoin also offers that but that's why doge is there and it's it's a lesson that people should, as a market and everything else, I think it's an indication about community that for some reason people are embracing. I came into crypto in late 2016, kind of early 2017, simply trading, and Doge was my first love, right? I backed into Bitcoin, but those Doge cycles where you can only trade it versus Bitcoin and you bought it at 15 to 24 sats and it pumped to somewhere around 180 to 200

Sats, you sold it, you waited three months, and it did it again. It was such an incredible joke and such easy money that that's what brought me in before I really went down the rabbit hole and was orange-billed, right? So I have, Doge has been doing this for a very, very long time, and, you know, it's more similar to Bitcoin than most all coins as well, but not making the case for it. one of the like the worst conversations of my entire life was when my when doge absolutely blew up of nowhere right you could have never known we didn't even know its value in dollars or in usd when we were trading it but when it went to a penny and then you know all the way to 70 cents

on Elon Musk one day my wife was like you know go back and look at your doge trades you just held the doge that you bought for you know a few thousand bucks here and there and it was like $60 million at the peak or something yeah but I mean a few grand and had a good time. What price can you put on good time with friends, trading memes? That's it, like the MasterCard commercial. Right. Nicholas. That's, God, I felt that one in my heart because, yeah, I had, I had, I did the same thing, went and looked back at my very old Dogecoin wallet, only to be completely dismayed by the millions I squandered. But just to the, to the meme coin point, you know, one of the things that I have

discussions about, you know, in this, in, in my technical circles where everybody's kind of like just absolutely dismayed at the, the amount of meme coin activity in, in crypto, and they want to see, you know, more serious development, et cetera. I just think about as I, you know, I have kids that are growing up, you know, in, in middle school and elementary school and see really the, the internet native generation growing up and then try to extrapolate that into the future. And honestly, honestly, what I see happening is meme coins really not going away and becoming kind of like a cultural phenomenon of the of the internet native generation. And we're seeing the beginnings of this right now.

And I can only anticipate that it's going to grow and become these like collectible things just like, you know, Pokemon cards or baseball cards before it. So I do think that they, what they represent is, is more of a deeper cultural phenomenon and not necessarily an asset class for gambling on. Although that's kind of like the undertone of the whole thing,

I definitely think that they're just going to continue to multiply and become just kind of like a mainstay in everybody's daily life. I beg to differ. Like what we saw with NFTs, there's like fashion, they're like fashion, and fashion goes in and out of style. And so, you know, what may be a popular meme today, may not be a popular meme tomorrow, maybe to try to stretch the analogy, Doge is going to be like the Levi-Strauss. Yeah, I think Doge transcends that a bit. Yeah. Just because of its staying power, it's tied to Elon Musk, and it's been there since the beginning.

Right. And it may stick around, but like other fashion symbols, it may go through hard times when whatever happens to it, you know, It's like, I don't know why Levi's at one point went out of style after being a mainstay for a hundred years. But it is, it's like it doesn't have the fun, none of it has a fundamental sticking point of fundamental value proposition. The value proposition is it's cool now, but we all know that what's cool now is going to, by the definition of cool, not be cool in a generation, almost, almost certainly. So that's, that's, so what might stay is the churn of having, trying to do fun things. things and having them be purely financialized fun things. Like there's no actual fashion element. It doesn't make you look good.

It doesn't make you high. It doesn't do whatever the style thing of the time may be. But now that you can create something that has nothing but financial value in it, if you can hype it up enough, it can be in style for a little while. But that's certainly, you know, that's the tragedy of, I mean, Scott lost $60 million worth of. I did not lose $60 million, my friend. Right.

You never had it to begin with. Taking profit, okay? I made $10,000. Opportunity cost is not the same as lost money. And you had a good time. That's so much fun. It's kind of like if you traded hockey cards and you had a rookie Wayne Gretzky or something. You had fun trading.

It's the same kind of thing. By the way, I don't know. We actually know people who lost $100 million. So it's not even a serious stuff. I don't know what part of their simulation we're in, but I just happened to be scanning Polly Market. And Pollymarket has tweeted, breaking Nepal elects interim prime minister via Discord vote

after Gen Z overthrew the government. Did anybody see this? Like literally Discord bots just elected a prime minister because there's no way there's humans in a discord. Are you reading the onion? No, that's Polly Market's actual Twitter. I have no idea. Yeah, no, this actually, this actually happened.

And the government is choosing, they held a vote in Discord. Obviously. And the government is choosing to support it. Yeah, they're actually going to build the, I heard they're going to build the new prime minister's house in Minecraft. What? The fuck is happening right now. Hey, Noah, you have something more substantive than this, is this fun stuff? I'm sorry, it's just, we're talking about memes while literally reading that a government was, elected likely by non-humans in the discord chat. Well, I mean, let's face it, Scott. New York's

about to elect a meme, right? You know, what else is there? I mean, we've, our society, you know, has lost the plot in so many places for so many reasons. And I say it that way. It's because, I mean, if you would ask someone 20 years ago, could forget the views. I couldn't care less. This is not about, I'm not going political here. I'm just saying, elect some, you know, a 30-year-old who has literally never administered even, you know, small company, anything. No administrative experience, no governing experience whatsoever. You just said it's impossible. But these days, you know, some of our biggest or most powerful congresspeople were, you know,

were effectively human memes also. So, I mean, it's definitely where we're going as a society. Anyway, you know, be that as it may, Noah, you did have your hand up. Yeah. So on the, on the memes, I'm old enough. to have been a kid in the late 90s and collected a lot of Pokemon cards and I'm young enough to have been told by my dad and my uncle and the boomers around me that I'm wasting their money by begging for all these booster packs. I opened my binder a couple of weeks ago and I didn't

get through the whole thing, but I went online and I checked and I did my own estimates. I need to get them graded, but about halfway through the binder, my cards are worth like $70,000. And so with the meme coin thing, I think a lot of them, and back then in the late 90s, we had a lot of different cards. We had Dragon Ball Z cards, Digimon cards, Magic the Gathering, and there's so many different cards, and most of them are Ugiocards, and a lot of them are just not worth what Pokemon cards are worth. But to Nicholas's point, I think that we're going to see in, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, whenever. The same thing with specific NFTs and even specific meme coins.

So, yes, while most of them are meaningless, or I guess they're all really meaningless, Pokemon cards are meaningless, people will down the line find certain meme coins and certain NFTs to be very nostalgic and they'll be willing to pay a lot of money for them, just like they're willing to pay, you know, 100 grand or 200 grand for a first edition. first-generation Charisard Pokemon cards. I just, I don't think you should completely throw the baby out with the bathwater. I don't think any of us are. I think we all, we all kind of understand that this is, this is a sign of the, of what's going on. It's just the financialization of social trends. I mean, what's the difference? It Birkenbad.

I think there was a comment, I think there was a comment made about them being useless or something. Maybe, maybe I misinterpreted, but I just, I'm not at. advocating for going out and buying meme coins, but I do think that some of these things down the line. Dave, I think Berkin bags might be a better store of value. Sorry, no, I didn't mean to interrupt. I think Bergen bags might have proven to be a better store of value than Bitcoin so far. So, yeah, there you go. Well, certainly a good store of value anyway, but lots of other bags are, well, I know,

bags are a great store of value that my wife may be the ultimate investor. So, you know, who knows? Mine, too, but crypto bags could be a good investment. We'd all be doing a lot better. I think that we should actually start a meme coin back then. Yeah, exactly. I think we should vote for the mayor of New York City on Crypto Town Hall. I mean, as long as Nepal is doing it, can we, like, do a meme coin and vote or something here?

Is that possible? I don't know. Seems like a good. By the way, I know we got only a couple minutes left, and Gary's here. Gary, are we playing poker tonight, dude? Damn, he's not here. his face is here. Yeah, I'm playing.

I'm playing. I might play heads up with you. Bring your salana. Is it just us? No. We got a full table. It'd be fun. Be a lot of fun.

Bring your car keys, buddy. Bring your salon. Driving home. Driving home on your car. Bring your fucking salina, boys. You see what we need is Dave Weisberger. What stakes are you guys playing, actually? You know, what are the lines?

It starts at 510. Starts at 510. and then what, you're allowing straddles? Well, you know. Don't let him fool you. They go all in. It is cordoned. I'm not at that table.

I'm yet to join the game, so I look forward to, you know, to the carnage. By the end, hopefully we're playing, like, completely nonsensical games that require absolutely zero skill like Gary and I did in Vegas. What was it called? Double-down blackjack? Let's do that. Bring your Philana, son. You're doing, you're doing, you know, two-board. Yeah, two board, you know, Omaha.

We're not playing that, but Dave, I'm happy to play a game called three-card brag with you anytime you want. I don't know what's that. Is that like pineapple or is that something different? It's a British game, dude. Shoot pontoon. Yeah, don't know. And three-card brag. Three-card brag, I think, was the game played in lockstock and two smoking barrels.

Oh, yeah. Fucking brutal, the most brutal card game ever invented in history. Have you ever played the game? I don't know if it's the official name, Clump, K-L-U-M-P, King Little Multiplying Pot. King Little Multiplying Pot is basically poker, but the lowest card in everyone's hand they get to use as a wild. So if you have two of them, they're wild, and Kings are wild. Oh, wow. Straight pluses beating bigger straight-flusches.

Yeah, well, you know, whatever, just easier just to play, you know. Well, never mind. Pick a card. Yeah, exactly. But why not play war? Oh, yeah. Ends up war. Let's do it.

It's on. Sorry, guys. I didn't mean to hijack the space. I just saw that, you know, we were at kind of coming to the conclusion of time. It's your space, bro. You could do whatever the fuck you want. Yeah, you know, but it is emblematic, Scott. I mean, you know, a lot of this stuff is we're kind of waiting to see what's going to happen.

And, you know, it's like we keep talking about, you know, will Bitcoin break out? And the technical side guys are like, well, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, take profit, do this, do that. It really is a question of all, when the money spigot starts to flow, what happens? And, you know, who knows, you know, is the data, like, you know, I was just looking at polymarket. Where is it? Where is polymarket? How is it? Oh, there it is. Fed decision, right? You know, it hasn't budged. You know, markets are acting like, you know, like it's budging, but the December decision seems pretty damn close to obvious. It's going to be 25. I mean, there's a smidge that's at 13, which means if you get 25, if the tone of the press conference is even neutral, one would think the market will sell off, right?

You know, just based on expectations. Now, that said. But 50 also could be an indication, which won't happen, but it would be an indication that Hal is panicking. Right, which he won't. But, you know, look, the real question is, there's a Goldilocks thing. And you won't know it until the press conference, but here's the funny part. So anyone who's trading at the time, so they're going to announce whatever they're going to announce. And in between then, the half hour between that and the press conference or the 15 minutes or whatever it is is literally like playing Blind Man's Bluff.

Because it's all about what they say. That's all I got to say. It's like, you know, so I would say whatever the move is immediately, fade it. If it's a big move, it's not a big move. you know, wait, you know, et cetera, but the press conference is only thing that matters. And so we're going to talk about it a lot more next week. Yeah, maybe we should live stream it. What time is it at?

It's usually like a 2 p.m. thing. We used to do that. We used to actually join up. We used to like launch the spaces to listen to the press conference and heckle him. It's fun. Scott, bring you Solana and I'll live stream our game. We'll put the entire thing on YouTube. I wouldn't even know that.

Bring 20,000 in Solana. and we'll just, you know. You want me to bring 20,000 salana or 20,000 American dollars worth of salonada at? I'm thinking 20,000 salana would be funner. Yeah, well. You got it's your house. If you get kicked out and I end up with the keys, that's not on me.

I have a house. You bring your salana. I'll bring my house. You bring your house. I got it. You guys are funny. We did it, Dave. Yeah, I think we're going to go ahead and wrap.

It's been one of those weeks where we could all use the laugh. Yeah, it was a good way to end. Perfect. I can't wait to lose some money. Be a Monday. Yeah, guys, we'll be a Monday. Thanks for joining Crypto Town. I'll all.

Everybody have a good one. Later. Bye. Thanks, guys. Thank you.