The Wolf Of All Streets - State Of The Market | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

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Hey guys, DB, are you there? Yeah, yeah, good morning. How are you, man? Good, how are you? Good, man, good. There's not much to discuss. I really wanted to discuss the state of the market in general. Since Scott is not here, I could be selfish in what I want to discuss. And, you know, what I'm really curious about is first just your overall thoughts on the markets and how October has been going so far. And more importantly, just the different asset classes as well. VC-backed projects is probably one I focus on heavily.

I mean, of course, we're pretty involved in, and then obviously talking about the blue chips and Bitcoin in general. General thoughts, open-ended question as we get the panel ready. All about the same as we've kind of been saying for the past couple weeks and october still looks decent and we've had some big plays recently and just what was it yesterday or maybe even this morning the bridge acquisition by stripe is pretty huge that's probably something worth talking about it's definitely going to bring stable coins and web three more into the web2 area so that's big and it just yeah more more talk more about the acquisition can you expand more about the acquisition why it matters

oh just it's going to give stripe more ability to use stable coins and to convert from different currencies and very stable coins so it's to allow much more Web3 activity with Stripe. Yeah, $1.1 billion deal. That's at least rumored according to Forbes. It's interesting. Just going through it now. Yeah, I do want to go to Isabel. Isabel, one thing we haven't talked about in a while

is just the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole. I see my team is still investing in Bitcoin projects and we're building on Bitcoin. We invested in, there's a project called Goat. I know we invested in because I saw them on my show a few days ago. Actually, they were on this show, Crypto Town Hall. It's good to speak to you. It's been a long

time. But your kind of overview on the Bitcoin ecosystem, it's been a while we haven't spoken, so maybe over the last three months, and then the outlook for the next three months? No, I was going to say something that's sort of been interesting to watch over the past six months, and obviously the past year and a half is just watching how tightly correlated obviously Bitcoin assets are to Bitcoin spot price, right? If you're following, you know, runes, ordinals right now, like you're kind of seeing these assets sort of satisfy their promise, which is to kind of move in lockstep with Bitcoin spot at sort of like a leveraged pace, right? So when Bitcoin pumps up even a little bit,

and we see these kind of like smaller, you know, inter month, inter week moves, when Bitcoin pumps up a little bit, ordinals will pump up in Bitcoin denominated terms, right? So you're getting even more Bitcoin when Bitcoin spot pumps in dollar terms. And I think that that's, you know, very bullish, as you know, I think probably the majority of people on this stage see Bitcoin spot price probably doing pretty well over the next six to 18 months. And yeah, I just see the last six months where we've been in sort of this downturn, but got to see a lot of these kind of smaller moves in between as just validating the thesis

that Bitcoin native assets are going to roughly follow and have been roughly following the price of spot. And if spot does very well in the next 16 to 18 months, that means Bitcoin assets broadly are going to do even better. They're going to go up not just in dollar terms, but in Bitcoin denominated terms. And are we seeing more projects building on runes over the last few months? Have we seen that slow down a lot? Because we've obviously seen stagnation on projects in general

over the last few months with a lot of that. Just the whole model was flawed. A lot of that liquidity went to meme coins. Did that impact the Runes ecosystem as well? I mean, I think, again, the past six months have been down broadly for Bitcoin. I think that we are sort of seeing that trend reverse, right? Like we're starting to see, you know, slightly higher lows. And I do think that the sort of six month post happening

kind of correction for Bitcoin is probably coming to an end. And we are starting to see a reversal there. But yeah, during that time, you know, unsurprisingly, given this correlation, runes and inscriptions and ordinals broadly, Bitcoin native assets broadly, kind of got hammered, right leverage play on Bitcoin. I do see that reversing. And obviously, companies and builders that are associated with those projects, they lose momentum when number is going down on the assets they support. So it's unsurprising to me that sort of mindshare was sort of lost in the runes and ordinals and Bitcoin native assets ecosystems over the past six months because nobody likes number go down um but i do see that

kind of picking up as bitcoin you know approaches new all-time highs and um i do want to go to lawyers to talk about originals and ask you that question as well as about nfts in general lawyered i never thought you'd be the one to ask um but just kind of an overview on that in that world does it also just dry as dry as everything else other than the meme coins yeah i think it's all there was do you remember sorry i started interrupting but do you remember that there was an uptick a while ago kind of got a few people excited but that seems to have been short-lived yeah yeah i think it's all the same pattern you're seeing with it which is like so you're talking about like the pfps to come back

like that's going to take a while and what's what's happening i think and what we're seeing is so if you imagine a lot of people like me who are just sort of hobbyists and in crypto and did very well and like defy summer and then basically you got out with what you got and then you had your sort of shirt taken from you right and then you sort of at that point for the years that follow in the bear market you're you're weary right if you make some money in something you're taking those profits quickly and what happens is the idea of hodl is just gone right no one's chanting hodl but what happens eventually is things go up number go up and then it was like oh wait hodl was correct and so that's when you get to see everyone saying well just buy

a thing with attention it will go up and that's going to be true for for runes and ordinals and all those things because all of those people who did hold will have been correct and that'll be true for around crypto in different areas and that's when you'll see i think money flow back into pfps and ordinals and runes when that vibe shift really gets to hey maybe i actually should hold these things number will go up and that's when you just see the euphoria and like axie days and all that yeah and um just talking about going through some of the um um the nfcs the blue chips starting with punks punks have been pretty steady have apes gotten any traction or not i haven't been looking at them at all zero

have they been steady they recover a bit after the bloodbath a few months ago? Yeah, they're up from the bottom, and they seem to be... It feels like... I was joking before that I almost might buy an ape because it seems like it should go up. They now have this ape chain, which is actually really cool. And they're doing meme coins. They're also doing meme coins.

I'm not sure. They've lost their version ofed Up Fun, like what Tron did. Yeah. I did all the legals for Apexpress. They're my client. It's a really exciting project. And I'll tell you why. It's because... So I played around on DgenChain. I don't know if you remember that,

but it was like an L3 for Dgen, which was off-base. And that was fun for like a day. But what happened there... Sorry, can you hear me? Yeah, I think Thomas muted by accident. Yeah, go ahead, Lloyd. Yeah, so what I was saying is

the Dgen chain was really fun, but nobody cared about Dgen and it just sort of went to zero and then the chain died. What's cool about ApeChain is that these apes have been sitting on this token, watching it go down with nothing to do with it. And now they have something to do with it.

And now they can go gamble it. So I expect it to do actually pretty well. It had a big bump at the beginning, and I think people are wondering if it'll stay. But I think for that reason, you have all these bored apes, no pun intended, looking for something to gamble. And I think they're going to find it over there. Yeah.

And let me take a step back. Just got to look at the macro picture. We do have, oh, she dropped out. We do have Plasma here. And we had also, I think she just dropped out. But Plasma, just kind of taking a step back, look at the macro picture as well. Stocks hitting all-time highs. Crypto, you know, close to 70K today.

Not a great day. But, you know, yesterday was pretty, pretty, here you know i think we hit 69 point something yesterday and maybe taking a step back away from nfts and and the bitcoin ecosystem and even meme coins so we get crypto in general and the the general macro um outlook would love to get your general thoughts honestly for the life like the last six months I'm not paying that much attention because things are kind of boring. Inflation keeps going up. The elections is coming.

The end of the year bullish season is coming. But yeah, apparently stocks keep making all time highs all the time while crypto has been falling behind. Why do you think crypto is falling behind? I'm a bit surprised on that front, especially with Trump with such a massive lead. From a political perspective, like the argument before was that,

hey, the regulation, regulation, the uncertainty on what happens after November 5th. But as we're seeing Trump in the lead on betting platforms, wouldn't that be enough to have crypto hit all-time high, similar to stocks? It should be and i have been looking everywhere i cannot see a reason why bitcoin has been behind especially with gold gold also is like making all-time highs all the time and it is falling behind like why is

it falling behind it doesn't make any sense to me yeah yeah because dave from a simplistic perspective there's two ways of looking at it, obviously, moving away from all the other news that we've seen started with a Bitcoin ETFs and going from there and everything that's happened over the last few months. Even you talk about John Deaton and his chances against Elizabeth Warren, not sure if there's any polls or anything show if he's improved, since Elon's quote unquote

endorsement. But if you look at it from a store of value perspective, gold is doing extremely well. So shouldn't Bitcoin do well from that argument? And if you look at it from a risk asset perspective, shouldn't it also do well considering what the equity markets are doing, the all-time highs that equities are hitting as well? Considering both those two factors, I just don't know what's causing crypto to lag.

Not only this, we... I'm sorry, should I... We also got Donald Trump saying that he's going to use Bitcoin as a reserve currency, just stockpile as much Bitcoin as he can. And still, I have no idea what's going on. Yeah. Well, it's pretty simple actually uh and that is and you can see it even though i mean look anyone who plays poker if you look at calci and you see a 60 40 split uh no one's investing on a 6 and 40 split i mean people don't you know i guess you know, the degens will be happy

to if you know, they got the 60, you know, throw your chips into the middle and say and hope for the best. But the kind of institutional investors, the kind of asset allocators that you want to move into Bitcoin, you know, from a US perspective, there's no conviction. And pretty much all the polls are still calling it a coin flip. Yeah, I think that Trump's odds have improved. And maybe, maybe as we get to, you know, within days of the election, maybe you'll start to see some of that effect if these numbers hold. understand about conservatives and libertarians, there is such enormous skepticism that the election, that things will happen, there'll be a surprise, there'll be, you know, whatever. You know, it depends on how far down the rabbit hole you go. I don't subscribe to the stolen election theory. I do subscribe to the media potentially concocting stories or surprises to try to influence the electorate,

because they did do that last time. I mean, that was the whole 51 intelligence analysts said the Hunter laptop was fake when we all knew it was real. And had the world known it was real, probably the election goes a different way. But so who knows what will happen? I just think there's a lot of intense skepticism. I do not think that a Trump victory is remotely priced into the market. And I also think that the way that the media is playing up the economic analysis is also making a difference. Now, the only place where Trump, where the election is priced in is in the bond market. Sorry, you asked me a question. All right, Dave, I was just wondering, what do you think is going to happen day one? You think Trump is going to day one do something for crypto? I think that, you know, the attention span

of people in the crypto sector need to lengthen a little bit. Trump made, if you're at BTC, Nashville, or you saw the speech, what he said was very specific and actually incredibly bullish long term for a lot of things, which is that in the first hundred days, he wants to have a team put together to create the skeleton of rules, kind of a la Fit21, but with industry input to actually be able to regulate crypto in the United States, full stop. That's what he'll do. The one thing that will happen. And what do you think the odds if he wins of that happening? I think the odds are a hundred percent that the team will be put together.

I think it will depend on what they put together, whether or not there's something that ultimately could work with Congress to get legislation passed. I think that you will see accommodations in the CFTC and the SEC. I mean, to be blunt, I mean, I spoke with both Republican CFTC commissioners, and I asked the question, which no one here is focusing on, but it is the question, which is if someone other than Sam Bankman-Fried came to them with a proposal for perpetual futures with auto liquidation, not mandatory, but allowing FCMs to be able to provide credit to their customers if they want, how would that go? And they both kind of smiled.

They said, we're waiting for someone to bring it to us. We're just not sure that our votes are enough, which is a very nice way of saying that with Trump there and a Republican running the CFTC, that you will start to see modernization in the derivative markets. Now, you know, if you've been reading anything that both Ueda and Peirce have been saying, it's pretty clear something similar would happen on the SEC side. But the real question is how they want to not regulate by enforcement, but create a reasonable pathway. And I think that that's certain to happen under Trump. And I think it's

almost almost impossible to happen under Harris. And to me, that's that's the biggest difference here. Bitcoin price. Honestly, I don't think it matters. I think they're both going to spend like drunken sailors and people are going to say, OK, well, nothing horrible happened. Let's we can we can go in and buy it. And so, you know, but that's two questions. Mario asked a specific question. Why isn't Trump's lead in the poll making a difference? And the answer is I think that the people who have the money are incredibly skeptical and are waiting because it's only two more

sort of that but would it be fair to say and I know we've discussed this already kind of moved back on get Dan's thoughts on this and then go back and maybe house of crypto sports on this and then go back to the to the panel but it does that mean if Trump wins you'd see a massive running crypto on day one exactly you know what was the most likely scenario the most likely scenario Mario is a large rally that overextends itself in a correction when the real money doesn't follow the speculators it's a tale as old as time we We've seen it so many times. I don't know if Scott's on or not, but I could see him smiling because we see it every time. Humans

are going to human. It's that simple. Dan and House of Crypto would love to get your thoughts on this as well. Lou as well, so you can jump in. Hey, morning, Fuzz. Good to be back. I've been traveling a little bit back in Singapore. I launched my book on Friday, so I've been really excited about that, pushing that a little bit. Anyone who hasn't got a copy, it's on my pinned tweet. Yeah, I think the only thing that I can say for sure is during the election, as the results come in, the price of Bitcoin is going to whip around like crazy. The implied volatility on the options is really large. I think trading that is like rat poison squid. I think that's really going to be very risky. As early results come in and it swings one way and swings the other way, I think it's not going to be just a one-way move. I think as it gets confirmed that Trump's won, I think there's going to be quite a large rally. I don't think that's going to be institutions. I think that's going to be degens kind of doing that. I can definitely foresee that ripping up and blowing through an all-time high literally on the day, you know, as the results start to come in.

That would be my estimation of that. Yeah, that's what I think that's going to be. And just quickly to NFTs, it's kind of weird. I was talking about that today with my buddy. We looked up, you guys remember EtherRocks? Yes, yes, yes, of course. EtherRocks, we were taking a look at that today. The last transaction that we can see from an Ether rock traded was eight months ago, which kind of underlies one point.

A lot of people think that the way that they're going to lose money and stuff like this is the price goes to zero. It's not. It's liquidity dries up, right? Nobody's buying these things at all. I'm sure if you slash the price massively, it would. But I think just to underscore a point we we think about price going to zero much more than we think about liquidity going to zero um it's not price going zero people don't care anymore yeah i'm still getting if the rocks right now

see how many uh oh there's only a hundred out there though so it's kind of counter-argument to that is that you know maybe this is it it's a two-two arguments either one either one one is there any listed i think that's what matters not this any sold any listed. But then I mean, these guys are gonna chat together point to Yeah, I think the highest but he's talking about you're talking about only 100 ether rocks in existence 100. Yeah, so it just could be a bunch of people. Yeah, like, it's some big names.

If you want to be in there, you're not looking to sell it for $250,000. You just stick around. A quick question then. Would you lend against that if that was the collateral? And if so, let's say they're trading at the price of $200,000. How much ETH would you lend against an ETH rock right now? It's like you look at – probably not the best example. But if you look at, let's say, some rare diamond or some rare painting

or some rare painting or some rare artifacts, and only 100 of them in the world, you'd expect one sell every month, or expect one every every week, you'd expect one maybe every three years. And you'll still get the value. I'd loan I'd loan that to you for at least 100 ETH I think you'd find more. Because like when the bull market comes back, there's someone's gonna want to pay a million bucks to get into

that room with those guys. I think maybe, maybe, yeah, maybe. Yeah. What's the, um,

is there any listed, um, and Lloyd, maybe you could check quickly. Is there any listed right now? I don't think so. Yeah. So it means there's no sellers,

let alone, not just no, but is there any, any bids? On open sea, I think you can, I think you can bid, but I think the bids are, from what I saw, really below. There's no bids kind of in the region towards it.

It's like a 0.2 ETH or something. Yeah, the highest bid is 0.2 ETH. There's not even people putting bids out there in demand. It could be, you're right, that this is quite a closed community, and if you want to buy it, you don't put an open bid in there. But the fact that there's not even any bids out there north of 100, the highest bid out there is 0.2. People aren't even putting it out there.

It could be one of those guys needs liquidity, needs money, and is forced to sell it. I would agree with Dan on this. There's a similar type of community where there's 100 of them, on Solana, high net worth founder type individuals. They sell about one a month or they transact about one or so a month and they go for 250K. So if there's activity and if there's interest,

they sell. There's no activity. There's no interest on EtherRocks. There's none listed. There's none offers either. So it's like both. So I'm looking at the right one. It'sc.io so check on the ether scan see when was last time that one even moved uh not even sold just when was that time it moved wallet like that could be a private otc

whatever yeah yeah true true but i yeah for me that one i think is more if any is listed if not i listed this bullish if there's no offers it's bearish they're both the truth i don't know what to make of it uh but i think I think if you look at NFTs in general, it's dried up anyway. So even if you throw boxes, maybe it doesn't make the best argument, or we can debate it. I just said, if these are pretty, pretty dried up, and but the point you make that is really important. What the floor price is, is there any liquidity? I don't know if

there's any on let me see my beautiful punk and I'm not looking at selling it for another decade or so. But if at all, but I'll just check it out. If there's any liquidity there but just going back to the discussion i wanted to get uh alan's thoughts out there getting your thoughts oh how's the crypto first sorry i forgot to go to you and we'll go to alan uh how's the crypto have to get your thoughts on the discussion so far sure hey man how are you thanks for having me on um i mean obviously right now moving towards the election i think things are going to be hanging in the balance. Like, while it looks to be going one way right now, I think we can never really be sure. And a lot of people who are willing to kind of get involved, the big money, like someone said earlier, that we need to kind of drive us over the edge, will be sitting there in the waiting in the wings.

But I do think there is kind of like a global liquidity that is building kind of behind it. The momentum is kind of getting stuck and pushing in something. I saw something the other day which was really interesting. Currently in China and was on a flight the other day reading a magazine like a kind of a wealth magazine for Chinese people. And it was talking about Bitcoin, which I found to be a pretty interesting thing. Talking about Bitcoin and the opportunity for investment and the price predictions for bitcoin which were pretty outrageous price predictions considering everything in china has to run through like global uh through government regulations and things like that it does seem like the kind of the government is letting a lot of this information through i

think the markets outside of the us are now starting to have a bit more kind of a prominent push uh towards crypto and Bitcoin as an investment. It'll be interesting to see, obviously, in the shorter term, the effects of the election will be kind of unknown. But yeah, what happens beyond that and the effect of the kind of global markets and liquidity drives that are happening everywhere else pretty much right now will have a big part to play, I think.

So yeah, in the short term, I think it's gonna be difficult to know what's gonna happen. But I think if Trump gets gets elected, we're gonna see an almighty push because all of that pressure that's been building, we can see it happening in the stock market, etc. is waiting to kind of flood in. Yeah, I do want to go to either I by the way, I'd agree with that analysis. I think just a lot of people,

let's suppose that shows something different. Everyone's just going to wait until November 5th. I think that's after November 5th is when we'll see the major move or the down or up. But I saw that the Ripple co-founder, I forgot his name, donated a whole bunch of money, $10 million to Kamala's campaign.

Yeah, yeah. I was a bit surprised there, Lou. Is he just left leading and that's it? Or does he perceive Kamala to be more crypto-friendly? Because there is a portion of people in crypto that do believe Kamala will be more crypto-friendly than many of us think. I know you don't agree with that, Lou. No, I actually, for me, my favorite tweet that I've seen about the election is if Trump wins, Bitcoin's a million in 2030, if Kamala wins, Bitcoin's a million in 2030. That's what I believe.

I think it doesn't matter who wins. If there is a winner on the 5th, which I think there's a better than 50-50 chance there won't be a winner for a long time, That's declared. But if there is, I don't think it matters who wins. I think it goes up. I think that the market, a lot of people think Trump is first. When he gets in, he's going to focus on rounding up 20 million illegals. It's going to take a massive government effort to build all those camps, to put all those people into camps, to manage all of that. And, you know, a lot of people think

that's going to take up the mindshare and they're not going to move on much else other than that. And I actually believe that, you know, that it's much more important, actually, what is happening in China. I think they're going to start driving it. It's anecdotal, but I went to Crypto Monday's China. Crypto Monday Shanghai twice in 2019. It shut down in 2020, and it's starting back up again in a few weeks. So undoubtedly, the government is opening things back up again. I think for most people in China, that was the anticipation.

And as that opens up, I think that's going to be the major driver of pushing Bitcoin forward. And by the way, I had a quick question. One of the earlier speakers said that he thought that degens were going to pile into Bitcoin. And maybe I don't know what the definition of a degen is, but I always thought degens, you know, are looking for 10 X, a hundred X, not for 10% or 20%. Let me clarify, because what I was talking about where Mario was specifically, I was in the context of Mario asking specifically why the markets are still languishing as Trump seems to be doing

better on polymarket and other polls? And my answer is that you have to be, you're basically coin flipping or gambling with a minor edge if it's an all or non-binary option on your outcome. And so I use degen in the sense of poker playing degens, not of crypto degens, which would back issues up. But let me be really clear about something you just said, because while I agree with you about ultimately where Bitcoin goes by 20, you know, 2030 is a good number. I think that's probably about right. I mean, I just tweeted this morning, you know,

the base case for Bitcoin is this. As inflation is raging, gold is an investment that will maintain your purchasing power parity. Bitcoin, because it is still yet to become accepted, is a potential 10x or more of increasing your purchasing power parity by that, your purchasing power by that much. But there's risk that it obviously fails. And the market is pricing that risk right now at over 90%, which I think is insane. And therefore, I think it's the largest asymmetric bet there's out there. And no politician really is going to matter about that,

because they think Bitcoin's a hit escape velocity. There's a huge but. John Reed Stark gave the best soundbite for understanding why everyone who listens to this should vote for Trump. I mean, he gave it. Now, honestly, I don't think he meant to, but he did. He said, and I quote, that the day one Trump comes into office, all regulation by enforcement will come to a screeching halt. That was a direct quote on Crypto Town Hall last week. I was listening. I was driving down, you know, so my people complained about my mic, yada, yada, but that's what John said. And I am quite certain that he knows what he's talking about. Now, think about what that means. That means Coinbase, Kraken.

That means Cumberland. That means MetaMask. That means OpenSea. All these cases die. It also means that every entrepreneur who has refused to take risk of building businesses around anything in crypto in the United States, all of a sudden don't feel that risk anymore unless they're doing something that's fraudulent because fraud will continue. And that kind of explosion in entrepreneurial availability should not be underestimated by anybody. There's a lot of

other second order effects that we'll talk about if it comes to PassMario. I think there's some very important ones from an investment point of view, but it's too early to talk about it. But that's the distinction. Bitcoin, yes, Trump will probably push it up sooner if, in fact, there's a strategic reserve. But the reality with BlackRock and Fidelity being able to hold Bitcoin and people like John Tudor Jones, you know, pushing it again, I think that you and I are on the same page about where that goes. But so the difference is really in things like, you know, I saw, you know, Isabel on here, all the derivative businesses around Bitcoin that US entrepreneurs are terrified of getting regulated upon, that fear goes away terrified of getting regulated upon. That

fear goes away. And don't underestimate that. So I think it's the derivative businesses that matter. And it's not just a Bitcoin. It's obviously Solana Ecosystems, the Aptos emerging ecosystem. Hell, if you believe Charles Hoskinson, the Cardano ecosystem. Although take that one with grains of salt, I'm sure a lot of people here will laugh about that. But that to me is the difference in the election. And that is not priced in. It's not even close to priced in. Before going to Alan, any comments on this, Lou? I hear what Dave's saying, and I have a lot of respect for him. But personally, I don't think anybody in government is our friend. And I'm here because government for my whole fucking life has fucked everybody. And I've heard thousands of times, oh, when this new administration comes in, then they're going to be really good for people.

And that has never come to pass. Can we agree on less bad, Lou, Because you and I are on the same page. No, I can't. I can't. Because personally, I mean, as somebody who's lived in New York and has watched Trump be Trump, Trump does what he wants. He says something. But what he says has no relation to what he does. Right.

And he, you know, and this is what people want. This is what people are voting for right they're voting for somebody who's going to blow the system up and he doesn't give a fuck about bitcoin he doesn't understand bitcoin he doesn't know what bitcoin is but so to say that trump is our friend i think is a massive joke no i i don't agree with that at all i mean you can just look to to the first four years of his administration and did he keep every campaign promise? How much Bitcoin did he buy? He said he didn't like Bitcoin in his first administration. Let me finish the point and then you'll understand what I'm talking about. During his first four years, he kept the vast majority of his campaign promises. And so you can expect...

Oh, okay. So blah, blah, blah. That's not true, but that's not true. I'm not going to let you say something that is just blatantly, blatantly false. It is true. The vast majority. Okay. So show me something. Show me, go to Venice AI, which I think is a real AI and saying what percentage of his promises did Trump keep? I don't know what that is so you and i can blah blah blah about it let me finish the point and then you can but his main promise was i'm going to build the wall of mexico is going to pay for it that is the promise he said the most you remember that yeah let me get alan's response alan go ahead yeah so the point that i'm making is that he tends to be someone who, when he campaigns on

something, will make it a part of his next administration. Do I think he's a Bitcoin genius? Do I think he wakes up every morning and thinks about Bitcoin? No. But he has made it a point to attract a portion of the crypto community to be part of his base. And I do think that he will make it. There's always something for the people who support him. And so I would expect crypto to be a part of his next administration in some form. I don't expect it to be a top priority, a number one priority. But he has shown in the past that the people who support him, he does usually give a care to.

But does he really need to be pro crypto? Does he just need to be not anti crypto? No, I think there's a real advantage to being pro crypto in this race. comma has seen that and has tried in her own way to show that she's pro crypto in the last three, four weeks. I think she's done a bad job of it. I think like she won't fully commit like Trump has and that that will hurt her. But I mean, Coinbase has done a ton of work, and I don't have the stats off the top of my head, but Coinbase has done a bunch of work

with their advocacy arm to show that there are a lot of crypto-only voters out there. And remember that this election is going to come down to a very small number of votes in a small number of states. It's very reasonable to think that being pro crypto could flip one of these states. surrounded himself, his VP is a Bitcoiner, JD Vance. He has Vivek as an advisor, and he is massively pro crypto, digital assets, et cetera. And I think a lot of us here have talked with him about that. He's surrounded himself with RFK, who's got his endorsement, despite being a lifetime Democrat and wanting to run as a Democrat candidate in this cycle. And he is a Bitcoiner. So, and his son has been, and now his other sons have announced projects in the world of crypto. I mean, this is vastly different than we're going to protect black men to be able to hold crypto because her aides told her the truth, which is that Bitcoin creates a more inclusive financial system.

And that includes minorities of all sorts with a higher percentage. So there is a big difference. Now, on to your point, Lou, Grok, here's the, I asked Grok the exact question you said to ask. And Grok's answer is a rough synthesis might suggest that Trump kept or made significant attempts at around 40 to 60 percent. So basically half of his promises, if we include both fully and partially fulfilled promises. So basically he tried on half of them. That's what you got. So yeah, you're right. You know, he missed a lot, but he also did a lot of what he said he was going to do. And this one has much more strength around it because of the people he's surrounded with. So I do think there's a difference. And my point, which is the same as Alan's is, you know, there are a lot of

voters who are listening to this show. I wanted to be really clear if this is your issue. And by the way, there are other issues in your book that are completely valid. I'm not telling people how to vote. I'm telling you if your issue is crypto and you're a single issue voter, then there's no question. That's all I'm saying. That's a very big F. So I want to make sure it doesn't get misinterpreted.

Isabel, go ahead. I was just going to pop in. I mean, I definitely agree with what Dave and the previous speaker were saying. I think if you just fundamentally assume that Trump is just self-servicing, right, and that, you know, all politicians are kind of slime bags who are just doing what's in their own best interest, the incentives are just better with Trump. Like, Trump has aligned himself with donors who are pro-crypto. Kamala has aligned herself with donors that are pro-fiat, right? Like, Kamala has, like, embedded herself in the traditional legacy system. Do you think Project 2025 is pro-crypto or pro-

Oh, please stop. What are we talking about? Stop. Give me a break. What are we even doing here? Have you read it, Lou? Have you read that? And do you know who wrote it?

I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just, I just asked the question again. You guys, you guys can all laugh at it. And that's fine. The Project 2025 is from the Heritage Foundation. And there are hundreds of ideas in there. Let's just move on from it, Dave. Let's not talk about Project 2025 for the next 15 minutes. Yeah. The point is this platform, which the Republican National Committee passed, has moved the Republican Party toward the center. Everything else is just noise. That's all you need to know.

Mario, can we take it back to your initial question? Yeah, exactly. I was going to go to you as well. I want you to answer the question, and then I want you to sort of pivot back as a fellow investor as well, just the state of the startup industry as well that's been lagging.

I've been looking at a lot of projects because obviously we invest heavily. That's our biggest, you know, our biggest structure in the business is investing and incubating those projects. In the last two weeks, we've seen an uptick, especially in the last 10 days. A few projects have been doing well.

I think we see some sign to get excited sort of to get your thoughts on that as well. So the first part, not to just agree with everyone and repeat the exact same thing,'ll take the other side uh i i don't expect a massive rally in crypto uh if trump wins the reason for that is because i think i'm someone that believes that markets are are largely efficient uh and ours might be a lesser efficient market than say something like the the dow s&p 500 but i think that largely we have rational actors and so when you talk about the polymarket odds being at something

like what 64 as of this morning for for a trump win i think that polymarket odds are treated like a derivative of the expected outcome and so you know if the polls are showing us a 51% chance of Trump winning, it's not crazy for the betting odds to sort of accelerate past that. And so, that's what I think we're seeing. Obviously, the polls don't suggest a 64% or sorry, a 60-40 split, but they don't need to. The polls just need to show a point or two of advantage and then the, the betting markets will accelerate. So, um, if, if we believe that. Why, I don't know. Why do you think the betting, the betting, the betting markets is just showing

some big, big, big discrepancy relative to polls and, and, um, what's that guy? What's that pollster? The one that has a third three, eight, five website with three, something. Uh, Nate, what's in that five, three, eight, separated from five 38, I believe. Right. Okay. Yeah.

But yeah, Paul's just in general, all of them say it's a toss up yet, but betting platforms and we've discussed this already at left, but never gone. Your, I think it's like, think of it like sports betting. If you think your team has a 55% chance of winning, which is where I believe Nate Silver has put Trump's odds at a 55% chance. Think of it like a sports bet, you know, an upcoming NFL game. You think your team has a 55% chance of winning. It's not crazy that you pay 65% or 64% odds on that because there's some consensus around, yeah, I think he's going to win.

And so you have to incentivize money to take the other side of that. But that's why betting odds in an election would run past what maybe the actuality or the actual outcome will be. All right, cool. Going to the second part of your question, I think we actually saw something really, really important in the startup ecosystem when it comes to crypto companies and the interest that crypto companies get from VCs. As a bit of background. I've raised money in several companies that I've started. The most recent was a $35 billion Series A. So I have a little bit of experience pitching VCs and raising capital specifically for crypto companies. It got real cold for the last two years. 20 and 21 was peak euphoria. And I would say the majority of that came from a lot of hype. And you had a lot of inexperienced managers come into the space.

There was a lot of first time VC funds and GPs that started and were able to raise a fund that were throwing darts. And that changed. So a lot of money left this space because there weren't good exits. But what we saw yesterday or the day before was that Stripe bought Bridge, which is a stablecoin infrastructure company for $1.1 billion. That's a huge, huge acquisition. And it would not surprise me if a lot of the more like generalist VCs, the ones that have maybe dabbled in crypto in the past, but sort of turned their back to focus on AI or whatever else was attractive to them at the time,

SaaS probably, start to give crypto a second look and specifically infrastructure companies. This was a massive win that we needed. That one win will now encourage probably hundreds of millions of dollars of new investment into various different ideas. And so I wrote just a short tweet yesterday or the day before when the announcement happened about Bridge that this is good for the space. Not only will it increase the number of VCs who are willing to look at the space, but it's going to bring in additional talent and founders who might have experience in quote unquote, the real world. They might be interested now in looking at releasing a crypto product because

of this $1.1 billion acquisition. It shows that there's some interest in exits. So hopefully that continues. Yeah. So what about your? What are your thoughts on the just general state of the, or the general incentive model of the, of the startup ecosystem? We've got all these different tokens that launched at a high FTV. Yeah. I think that's just a downward trend since is that shifting? Are we seeing projects launch at more logical FTVs?

I think some are, I wouldn't say that that's over. I think there's still a lot of people that are following the low float, high FTV sort of playbook because unfortunately it works for the really early investors. It doesn't work for retail. But I hope

that retail will continue to smarten up sort of on that trend and stop buying those assets. But at the same time... And are we seeing exchanges? And brother, I probably shouldn't be asking my team and telling everyone what my team says. But are you seeing exchanges be more meticulous?

Some are. I can speak from an experience that I had a couple of weeks ago speaking on behalf of Binance for a portfolio company of mine. They are very involved in the tokenomics. They have, not only do they have expectations that you need to meet certain expectations before you'd be listed, they will ask you to go back and change things

like your vesting schedule or the allocation of tokens to this bucket or that bucket. So yeah, I mean, I think exchanges are getting their hands dirty and that's not necessarily that. That's Binance, but are we seeing that with other exchanges? Binance is doing that. Obviously, they put out that letter a few months ago now and telling everyone that that's

what they're going to do, that's what they're going to be looking for. But are other exchanges following suit? Not the low tier exchanges. I mean, they're interested in one thing and that's a volume. Uh, and then they're also taking in, you know, payment for listing fees. And so it's a revenue source for them. Yeah. Any specific sectors that are doing better than others? On secondary markets?

Both. Trying to think, I mean, the companies that are making money in crypto right now largely revolve around trading and making trading easier which has not changed over the last three four years telegram bots terminals um account abstraction they are making a ton of money uh but they don't all have tokens i I don't have a good answer for you. Yeah. And last thoughts, Dan, Alan, sorry, just on meme coins in general.

I'm not sure if that's something you dabbled into at all. Do you think that the current meme coin hype will continue? Will we see a meme coin super cycle? We've got to get, there's a guy, Murad, who's done a great presentation.

I think everyone's probably seen or heard of it it's a great presentation talk of 2049 about the kind of eye going for a meme point super cycle and why meme coins are are better than uh a better investment class than uh than vc back projects obviously many of you probably would disagree with that um but uh yeah not sure if you've seen that presentation i'm gonna have them on the show but yeah we'd love to get your thoughts on that. Yeah, I mean, I think that meme coins have the public's attention right now. And so you can argue whether it's right or wrong, but it doesn't really matter. The market's telling you that there's an interest in them.

And so you have to listen to that and respect that from some standpoint. I think that one of the large... But the markets can obviously be very wrong. Sure, sure. And the money is when you know when the market is wrong. So do you think the market is wrong right now? We see that kind of flipping back into utility projects. If it was up to me, what I would like to see is some split between real utility

and then an area of the market where it's meme coins, let's have fun. I think the right split is something like 80-20. Let's have 80% of the market be driven by tech advancements, infrastructure, products that are doing good and are being used, and reserve 20% of the market for gambling on cute pictures of frogs. I don't have a major issue with that because people are free to do whatever they want. But I do think as an industry, we should push for a large majority to, to be real and,

and economic producing, you know, products. Thomas, any, any final thoughts on this is by the way, before Thomas speaks, everyone can have a wrap up with Thomas's thoughts on the discussion.

For anyone listening, whenever you don't have a sponsor, I'll probably just talk about something else that's interesting. We're heavy as hell in incubating projects and working with utility projects. We invest on a pretty much daily basis and collaborate with projects. We've been doing this for many years. It's got a massive shout out to our incubation team. We had two projects become first and third in the, man, I should remember these names,

the one that Brock Pierce and the other two judges are doing, Bit Angels, they got Bit Angels like a shark tank type show. And there's a hundred projects that went on there competing. And we came in, our portfolio companies came in first and third. Shark Tank type show. And there's 100 projects that went on there competing. And we came in, our portfolio companies came in first and third. So the other judges, I mentioned this yesterday, are Brock Pierce, Michael Turpin, our regular, and David Chalm, the founder of Cryptography, OG OG. So massive shout out to them. But if there's any VC-backed projects that is not getting enough love, no liquidity in the industry, and everyone's getting into meme coins, which obviously we're involved in. A lot of us are still very bullish

on the ecosystem and want to work with you. So definitely hit us up. On that point, Thomas, before wrapping up the show, we'd love to get your thoughts on the discussion in general, especially the last back and forth between me and Alan.

My Wi-Fi was a little in and out, but I just want to make sure you can hear me mario before i start talking perfect yeah okay okay uh well i i didn't i might have missed that because i was my my headset was going in and out but i i'm kind of like on the same drum beat um you know from my landscape working all the crypto restructurings it's kind of my background if anybody's curious so our vantage point is again very similar like all the deals have dried up you know all the estates have really almost completed selling there's a lot of only little tertiary things across the dockets and you're going to start seeing some distributions i mean not just ftx which everybody knows about but

there's also kind of off the run dockets like you could look at things i guess like even terra luna celsius and voyager have uh second and third distributions kind of to make you've got hold or not bold babble you could keep going down block fi you know and there's all these other dockets and even cryptopia and big cornico which are going to start um i wouldn't say selling so much as well cryptopia is probably more towards distribution. If any of you guys have ever been touched by any of these cases, you'll kind of know where some of them are. But with all that money being distributed out

and really the lack of selling out of these estates, I just think it's kind of perfect timing for a Q4, Q1 move. That doesn't mean other macro events won't affect them. But from our vantage point with all the data analytics, you could, you could pull together. They're all signs of like a lot of capital coming into the market that either wants to buy back in or probably would, would need to buy back in. So selling's done. Um, I don't know what,

if that's what you guys were talking about. Could I ask you in your opinion, or maybe you have direct knowledge on this what percent of those claims that are happening are uh going back to individuals who who originally owned them versus how many of them have just been bought by third parties which case right so cryptopia like no almost zero percent of the docket move uh mount cox over the course of 10 years maybe 20 of the case moved and ftx since it was a u.s case and all the big distress guys showed up and john ray sold everything that wasn't nailed down a lot of guys bought so about half of that docket so there's 16 billion dollars of assets probably eight of that has moved so you

got about eight still going back to uh what do you want to call it you know or i want to call it individuals you know crypto focused investors yeah individuals you know sometimes crypto businesses i mean we ran across a lot of in uh vc back companies that had their i mean uh their treasury on on ftx or using ftx as a bank account we ran across countless number of startups and even 501cs that were human rights focused, things like that, that had exposure in FTX. Who are the buyers of those dockets? Distressed funds? Well, yeah, FTX brought out the big and the bad, all the big distressed firms. I mean, from an Oak Tree, Silverpoint, gosh, Apollo looked at the case from time to time,

you know, Fairlawn. These are all the biggest names in distressed investing. But, you know, they got very uncomfortable when you start looking at other cases. I mean, FTX stood out because it was all... We can argue about the legal points of whether it should have been dollarized and whatnot, but the estate itself took the position that they were going to sell everything that wasn't nailed down, so to speak. So that made the distressed firms very interested in buying claims. Because if you can buy something for $20 that's worth $40 and it's dollar denominated, or you think you're going to make $40 plus you get a crypto-free option, that's a distressed investor's dream. When it comes to something like Voyager, Cryptopia, other cases, they weren't necessarily dollar denominated.

And it was harder to buy claims because it was more retail focused. FTX had a lot of large customer, like a lot of pretty large whales on there. I mean, if you look through the customer base of Voyager, it's all very small claims. So, I mean, barring a few here and there, larger whales. So, it's harder for the distressed guys to get interested in actually buying them. Yeah, the reason I asked the question is because I think it's been talked about a lot online. Like, oh, the $16 billion is going to be coming back into the market. But as to your point, what about you?

I think you said about half. Probably half of that. So the half that was bought by distressed firms, my assumption is, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, those firms aren't interested in crypto. That's not their business. They're interested in getting a dollar out. And so that money likely isn't coming back. That'll, that'll go to LPs. A hundred, a hundred, a hundred percent. But I will say that, you know,

what is, what is the old phrase? Price action will make a believer out of anybody. You know, we talked to a lot of the, all the big dist distress firms from time to time and they're like much more crypto curious than they were before i mean the idea of having a conversation with oak tree the mighty oak tree uh about you know crypto distressed five years ago is almost unheard of and now it's like hey what are you guys looking at what do you look what are you seeing what do you like like is there any way for us to get involved in this? Do you guys need more capital for that?

So, they've all made a lot of money on the trade. And, you know, like I said, you know, that makes you very curious. How can we do it again? What else is out there? Is there a way to hedge it? But generally, they're willing to take lower returns for lower risk. You know, I mean're they're professional investors with a ton of capital and a ton of resources and so you know for you you're trying to knock the cover

off the ball make 30 returns they're trying to make 20 15 and do it in a way that's less risk averse so like they'll almost lend you money and hedge it to make 15 or 20 then try to not cover off the ball go totally unhedged and make 30 40 returns yeah so it's not that they're but they're not but that money's not going right back into buying bitcoin if that's your question on the ftx side where did you see a majority of the volume happen obviously claims started somewhere down 25 cents on the dollar range they ended you know as high as what 85 92 like where did you see a majority of the volume fall between that range uh i would say volume really started picking up in the mid-20s uh and then all the way up into the 60s that's where probably the bulk of the if you look at across their cost basis so like the

earliest buyer was probably uh not fair line what's the name of the firm i'm trying to remember um a tester and balfos were probably the earliest lookers and buyers and they were probably buying printing stuff in the teens maybe in the single digits there were some things that went off single digits but there was not a ton of volume but i just i think your question is more like where did all that volume trade most of it was between i would say everybody's average cost base is probably in the 50s because they bought all the way up and you know claims now are going for 120 plus um you know not convenience class claims which are the sub 50k claims but over 50k claims are going for 125 plus um and that's just a function of there's 10 billion dollars of customer deposits or 11 but let's just make the math easy 10 and you got 16 billion of assets well that's 160 cents

right so it's 100 that's a dollar 60 for every dollar and so if i buy for 125 to make 160 and it's dollar you know i'm basically getting dollars because there's about you know uh about a dollar 20 cash in there in the estate right now so i get like a free a little bit now it's not a free option on on crypto but uh that's a good trade for a big distress firm. And turning a dollar into a dollar 25 is really their goal.

They're not really trying to be heroes. Cool. On that point, guys, I appreciate you coming in. Thomas, Alan, I appreciate the back

and forth. We'll see everyone tomorrow morning. Tomorrow I want to go get some more VCs on stage to continue the discussion we were having earlier. Alan, I'd love you to come up tomorrow

as well. I'd be happy to. Thanks a lot everyone. We'll see you tomorrow, same time as always. Thank you. Bye-bye.