The Wolf Of All Streets - The TRUTH About Algorand l US WAR Against Crypto

Episode Date: November 21, 2023

Last week, my guest Invest Answers claimed that Algorand was a CBDC chain. Staci Warden quickly messaged me, accusing me of not doing my journalistic duty. So I invited her on to clarify.  Also, the SEC charges Kraken, Binance in the crosshairs, and Bittrex Global shutting down. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►►TAP A super-powered money app - an all-in-one investment, money, and trading platform. Coming to the U.S. soon, with tons of bonuses. 👉https://referral.withtap.com/scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=453131... ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The United States war against crypto seems to be continuing with a potential $4 billion settlement between the DOJ and Binance, which I actually think is a good thing, and an SEC enforcement action against Kraken, very similar to the one that they had previously against Coinbase. We're obviously going to talk about all of that, but more importantly, I've got Stacey Borden on today from Algorand. Some unfortunate things were said on my show last week, and we want to go ahead and just set the record straight about what is going on at Algorand. You guys don't want to miss this show. I've got Wick at the back end to share some charts, look at some requests for

you guys. It's going to be a great show. Let's go. like button. As I said, I've got an amazing guest today, two amazing guests, but first I'm going to bring on Stacey from Algorand and we're going to talk about what unfortunately happened last week and what's actually going on with Algorand. We've got the truth about Algorand there, Stacey. It's the big, my big headline. The most amazing guest first, and then the second most amazing guest second. Yeah, you know, we know how to do this thing. Even when I don't have a producer, I know how to produce, right? So this is what happened last week.

I believe I had Invest answers on. And he very passively kind of, for no apparent reason, said, well, we've got these dead chains like Algorand. I mean, they've moved on to a full central bank digital currency chain. And then he asked me what I thought about central bank digital currencies, not in the context of Algorand in any way, shape or form. And I went on my own rant about CBDCs and we kind of moved on. You sent me a message and said, come on, man, be a journalist, ask a question. What's CBDC? Right. And and then I quickly said, hey, let's let's talk about it. Right. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, my board chair actually is the one that called my attention to that.

So you are widely viewed, I think, is the is the silver lining to put on all of this. Good. So listen, I think, you know, some of it stemmed and then I questioned him and he sent me. You guys had this report on your blog that said issuing central bank digital currencies on Algorand. And I think that you were very specifically trying to show how the tech could be used, which is very different from potentially the ethos of the Algorand foundation, et cetera. Is that a correct assessment? Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at it from the point of view of a central bank, it's not clear to me the central bank is ever going to put the nation's currency on a public blockchain, right? We have, I mean, you know, ZK proofs are getting better and more widespread, but I think that's always probably

going to be a side chain. And it's true that Algorand Technologies, who builds the protocol, would be open, I think, to, you know, building a side chain for a central bank or anybody else. And what I like about that as the kind of matriarch of the public chain is that the side chain is only going to be as good as the public chain. So the more we, you know, the more we invest in that public chain, and the more we kind of build forward on our roadmap, you know, the better that product is going to be. And if somebody wants to use that underlying technology to build a side chain of any kind, then, you know, God bless, but that's not what we're about at all. And that's not what our ecosystem is about. I mean, what do you generally think about central bank digital

currencies? Was my rant somewhat accurate in a vacuum? Yeah. You know, I liked your rant. And I have actually, this is my chance to plug an article that I have on payments coming out of the Milken Institute review next month, which talks a little bit about this. I think, you know, I agree with what you say, although I'm not quite, I would say, as paranoid as you, as you, you know, characterize it in terms of your money will only work at supermarkets, they won't work at liquor stores or whatever. That was my worst case scenario, for sure. I don't think that would happen in the US, by the way, but yeah, in China. But I do think there's a couple of things. One is I think it could be very bad for financial stability more broadly, right? So we saw with Silicon Valley Bank, how easy it is to get

deposits out. And if you can very easily move your money into a central bank digital currency and out of the banking system, I don't think that's going to be good for financial stability more broadly. This is, of course, not my unique notion. But in addition, if people become more comfortable holding central bank digital currencies, then banks need those deposits in order to issue loans. And so it could have a negative effect on credit creation in the economy more broadly. That's number one. And number two for me is this idea that you can tax savings by putting a negative interest rate on your savings account. And from a policy perspective, you might decide it's good for people to spend money, the central bankers call it increasing the velocity of money. This will be good for the economy. But from an individual perspective, I don't want somebody telling me that I have to spend my money right now,

or you're going to tax me if I keep it in my own savings account, like stuff like that, I find very troubling. And, you know, and of course there is also the kind of stuff that you talked about. Yeah. Okay. So let's talk about what is happening at Algorand, obviously, because we also need to dispel the dead chain notion, I think is what he said. So I think he sweepingly thinks most things are dead chain. Yeah. No, but you know, look, we have 600,000 active addresses per month on the chain. We had 800,000 in August. We have 23 million transactions per month. That's just after Ethereum, Near, and I think Polygon, well ahead of Cardano and Avalanche. And of course, I don't like to diss my frenemies on this, but it is true that we have a lot of transactions on-chain. And of course, we can do 10,000

transactions per second. So we can handle the scale of that. We have 20,000 accounts participating in governance, 35,000 developers registered in our developer portal. We've got a billion algo on chain in TVL. And the interesting thing about that is that's 13% of total supply. And that is ahead of Solana, Near, Cardano in terms of that activity. So we have a lot going on. We have a lot going on in terms of the building that we're going to be doing in 2024. It's a pretty exciting time. And our

protocols are also doing pretty amazing things, you know, all of which I can talk about. Let's talk about it. All right. Well, I remember you were one of my first, I mean, you might have been, I had a couple of like CNBC type NASDAQ money, but you were my first real long sit down in person interview, which we did at Consensus. And I remember you very well saying to me, so these things that you're talking about that are incipient, well, let's check back in a year and see. And I remember thinking to myself, geez, I really hope I hope things progress over this year, you know, and I am pleased to report that they have. And a couple of things. And this really just recently occurred to me. A couple of things, a couple of companies have taken the time to get regulatory approval and that has taken time. And now they're

seeing the benefits of that. Right. So one good example is Control Alt, which is an alternative investments platform, which has now taken the time to get regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. And they are they are now the tokens on control all are registered as securities. So, so they have, you know, they have this sort of that regulatory certainty that what you are buying is actually a security. Another good example is Quantos, which has now spent a couple of years and is now regulated by the Dutch central bank. And they are And they got an electronic money license

regulated as an EMI. And that is not a stable coin. It is not a CBDC, but it is an electronic money that enables programmable money in digital form. And this is very exciting for things like, for payments, of course, but also for things like machine- payments, of course, but also for things like, you know,

machine to machine payments, right? Which you can, which is, you know, part of this defin, the next, you know, part of this growth narrative coming forward is going to be this defin. And so this idea that these distributed networks can pay each other, machines can pay each other for the work that they do is, are two pretty exciting ones that

I highlight because they took the time to go through those difficult regulatory hurdles. The other one that's really exciting, though, is, of course, Travelex. So Fly Bondi, which is partnered with Travelex, they just last week opened their secondary ticket sales marketplace. And you can go on this thing. It's in Spanish, but you can go on this thing and all of these tickets are now for sale. You buy an airline ticket, you decide you don't want to take the trip, and you can sell this thing on a secondary market instead of having to turn it back into the airline and pay the fee, right? So stuff like this is pretty cool, right? I think I mentioned HasabPay, the payments platform, last time. They are now up to 100,000

electricity bills, for example, in Afghanistan. They are now up to 100,000 electricity bills, for example, in Afghanistan. They're one of the most important ways that nonprofits can get money into Afghanistan. And this is really very much aimed at women and aimed at bypassing the Taliban government. And they're pretty excited about their success and now thinking about rolling this out to things like refugee camps and other countries. So this is a pure payments play. So I think we tend to attract these real world use cases, impact type use cases. And they're, you know, they're doing pretty well. Would you say that there was a benefit to actually having the bear market and prices being down and less attention on the space for you guys to actually be able to

put your heads down and focus and build. It's something that I've heard sort of across the board. I was just curious if that was your experience as well. And for all of these, obviously, projects. Yeah. I mean, one thing is that when your token price is lower, you can't do as much, right? You have to be much more careful about who you hire. You have to be much more careful about how you spend money. And we've seen that protocol after protocol that start thinking, oh, you know, this pay to play stuff that has really been juicing our performance is not something that we can afford anymore. And we never really did that to begin with. So we were in better shape that way. But so that's the kind of the negative part about it, which I feel is, you know, pretty

obvious. But on the positive side, I think we were not getting enough attention. And we didn't really know how to get attention at the time. And we in particular, as a chain needed a little bit of like, no hype environment for us to kind of get our act together, you know, particularly at the foundation. And also, I think our protocols needed some time to kind of grow a bit and to have a story. And so the key thing is to, you know, when the bull run comes, and I'm not talking just about sort of the price of Bitcoin, but the idea that institutional money is going to come into the space, and you've got to be ready for that. And I think we have used this time very wisely to build and to be focused and also not to waste money. There was some money wasting before I got to Algorand and that's hard to turn off

actually. And so the bear market gives you a little bit of cover for that, that I may have needed actually to take some hard decisions. Yeah. Well, I'm pretty confident that we're heading into a bull market. So I hope that everybody spent that time building really well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we know how the distractions start to fly in as prices unfortunately go up. It shouldn't be tied to it. But I think that's just reality. But did you see that the open interest on the CME is now higher than the open interest on Binance? I mean, that is like institutional money. That's, I think, that's very, it's a very good sign among others, among others.

Yeah, we have a lot. Yeah, and I've been talking about that quite a bit. Really surprising. Obviously it's sort of two ships passing in the wind. I think it's institutional interest increasing and Binance being marginalized, obviously, by all the problems they've been having. But I want to talk about that really quickly.

US is seeking more than 4 billion from Binance to end case. Resolution could come as soon as the end of this month. Binance and founder CZ would face charges in US. So that's potentially, I haven't seen that that's actually confirmed. That's conjecture. I see this as a massively bullish resolution if this happens. A lot of people are like, oh my God, $4 billion, it's over. I think anything that's above Binance going out of business is good for the industry. Totally. I think they should settle. I think they should take it. Of course, it's not my $4 billion, so it's easy for me to say, but get it done. $4 billion here, $4 billion there, but get it done, move on, and operate properly. I think people were pricing in the worst case scenarios in all of these situations. And there was just this sort of sweeping assumption that DOJ charges were coming. They were going to try

to shut finance down. I'm just curious how $4 billion... I don't see how you get to a settlement in something that's criminal. Just as sort of an indictment, I guess, of the DOJ or how the United States, that feels like a, I know you can't say this, but feels like kind of a payoff, but I'll take it. No comment. Yeah, no comment at all. But something that I know you can comment on is the other major action that we saw yesterday, which is Kraken accused by SEC of operating on registered platform, improperly mixing customer funds. You have the this is the actual SEC charges. It's the same thing as Coinbase.

So I think there was an expectation this was coming. But what I want to ask you about is that the SEC has made a habit of passively naming different protocols and chains and coins in these actions without actually ever contacting those people or raising suit against them. Algorand was named in this crack-in suit sort of passively as an unregistered security. You know what I call it? I call it a drive-by shooting. You know, we were just like walking down the street. There was a couple of gangs out there and like, bing, we took a stray bullet. You know, we do not believe that we're security. We also don't operate in the United States though. So whatever is determined in the United States

does not really have an effect on us. We're a Singapore company. We don't issue algos in the United States. We never have. So we stay out of the US regulatory perimeter. So does it have a material effect on us? No, but it's, you know, it's not accurate. We're a utility token. And I think that's pretty well proven by all of the building that's happened in our ecosystem and the things

that our rails are being used for. Yeah, I think the market agrees with you as well, right? I mean, some say that price determines everything. I know you don't care and don't talk about the price, but when we saw these actions with Coinbase and the ones in the past, you would see tokens drop 20, 30% overnight just on the mere mention in an SEC suit. I think that the world has just moved on from their deep concern about the SEC's power here with all the losses they've sort of taken in court. But this didn't even affect the price of the assets they named. I know it was you, Matic, I think some others, but it seems just like a nothing burger at this point, which to me is just incredible. Like that also is extremely bullish and positive. Yeah, I think we all are far more focused on whether the Bitcoin

ETF is going to come through because that is really going to be, if the SEC can find its way to approving a Bitcoin spot ETF, I think that will be very good for the industry more broadly. And markets are often more about expectations than they are about reality or expectations can weigh more heavily. And I think the crypto ecosystem is now broadly in sync around an expectation of a Bitcoin ETF this quarter or at least next quarter at the latest. And if that doesn't come to pass, I think that's going to be bad for us more broadly. I agree. It's sort of the opposite of the Binance situation is when you're expecting the positive news, it could be somewhat devastating in the short term if you don't get it.

Do you have any particular feeling on that process? It's really interesting to me when you take the fact that, obviously, the SEC is the one who has their actions like Kraken still happening. But I do think that Gary can probably differentiate those two or even use the spot ETF to say, listen, I'm not against the industry. I just want to clean up whatever he believes, and here's your phone. I don't think he's ever going to say, I'm not against the industry. I just want to clean up, you know, whatever he believes and here's your phone. You know, I don't think he's ever going to say, you know, I'm not against the industry, but I just want to, is my prediction. But I think one thing that may be making it not harder, but a little bit more time consuming for them is just the number of applications. And so they are really going to have to kind of decide who they're going to give this license to,

or this, you know, this approval to and who they aren't and on what basis and make sure that that decision making is clear and understood to everybody. And I think that they're going to want to make sure the process around that is done properly. So there's probably going to be a bit more back and forth on that. But look, if you look at people kind of my age, they do what their RIAs tell them to do and with their money and RIAs buy ETFs. And that's a lot of money out there. And one percent to four percent allocation to this ecosystem. That's a lot of money, even though it's not a large percentage. Right.

And I think that will help both Bitcoin and will also help the altcoins as well. And we've seen a little bit that news effect. Yeah, of course, it's lifted all ships as we've sort of seen it once Bitcoin really got past 31,000, I think. It's a great point about RIAs because there's the part where right now they just, with fiduciary responsibility, can't recommend Bitcoin. They can't tell somebody to go buy it on Coinbase or do one of these things that's not in their minds regulated or that they don't have control over. I think the more important point there is that they don't get paid. So an RIA will now be able to actually make money by recommending you buy Bitcoin or crypto and make it a part of your portfolio. I mean,

I know how humans operate. I think that's the bigger story. Yeah, you're right. You're a you're a you know, one one could call you a little cynical, but you are right. I think that's that's true. Maybe maybe. So we have we have Bitcoin spot ETF proposed. We have Ethereum spot ETF proposed. We have a number of futures ETFs. My guess is next we start to see BlackRock indexing. So maybe we get a layer one index or the top 10 index or something. I won't jump to conclusions, say we get a pure Algorand spot ETF immediately. Totally. But I do think this extends beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. What do you think? You know, I think that's true. I do think an index is going to be a little tricky because there's different supply dynamics for all the different layer ones.

And so technically, I think that's going to be hard to do. But you could see. Yeah, I could see it, but I don't think it's going to be right away. I mean, like some heads are going to have to mash together to get a kind of a coin index. And then how are you going to do the weighting of that? And how's that weight going to evolve over time? But, you know, I do think another interesting trend, though, will be maybe not so much an L1 index, but an RWA type index. So if you can get tiny slivers of more illiquid assets, then you're going to see much more liquidity in those assets. And you're going to be able to see a much more of a household level kind of not accredited investor in the US participation in investing in those assets, right? So this is something we're pretty excited about. And we're seeing this in a couple of different companies

in the prop tech space on Algorand. But this idea that you could, so one is, for example, it's called Vesta Equity. And you can take money, you can sell equity in your home instead of having to refinance it. And nobody wants to refinance now, right? Because interest rates are so much higher and people are hanging onto their houses because they had good mortgage rates on them. So now imagine that you can sell the equity in your house without having to do that. Well, the product market fit issue there a little bit is, are retail investors going to invest in that? It's more of an institutional plan. What is an institution going to need to do? They're going to need to buy this across many different properties in many different regions, many different geographies, because they're going to want that diversification. So that kind of thing leads itself to indexing,

right? Another, you know, and if you take it to sort of the reductio ad absurdum of it, you know, one of the fundamental notions of corporate finance is the cap M pricing model, right? And the basis of the cap M pricing model is that there's this market portfolio. And it's how you are against this market portfolio that determines this is where the concepts of alpha and beta come from. Well, you've always had to have a proxy for the market portfolio in the past. But now imagine you could take a little sliver of all assets and actually have the market portfolio, like the real market portfolio, if it was all tokenized and if everything was tokenized and kind of on chain. So this is, of course, very futuristic, but it's a little bit the way that you can imagine seeing things going over the medium term.

That kind of stuff, I think, is super exciting. I agree. Absolutely. What's Algorand's major involvement with real world assets? I think that's the RWA has been the catchphrase of the next run, I think, already of the next cycle. We've seen, obviously, JP Morgan, BlackRock settling on private chains, but real moves. Franklin Templeton has already tokenized $300 million of T-bills, right? I mean, this stuff is really happening with the institutions. Do you think that that's a big wave and how will Algorand be a part of that? Yeah. I mean, we have a couple of things still a little bit under NDA in this area, but we've got, as I mentioned, a couple of good companies building in the prop tech space,

one called Lafty AI. Now they have, you know, they are completely decentralized. There's a DAO per property and you can get rental income from these properties. And, you know, these DAOs have gotten together. One has actually fired the property manager of the property, et cetera. And so this was kind of chugging along very nicely, but now they have started to list these properties on Airbnb. So these DAOs are like, I know, it's really cool. And, you know, if you go to their website, you can see how many times was the apartment shown in the last week and what is the rental rate and who's the plumber and, you know, all of this stuff about it. So, you know, PropTech, I think, is a well-used example, but we have a couple of good use cases there. And I just think these platforms,

like the one that I told you that is regulated in the UK now, Control Alt, I love that name. That's why I keep using them. And, you know, they are just trying to bring liquidity to alternative assets, be they, you know, wind farms or larger industrial kind of properties to anybody that wants to buy just a little piece of them, right? And then, you know, to talk about the Qantas thing again, I think this is going to be really, really interesting. This decentralized physical infrastructure network, right?

Like this DFIN, which I do think along with R RWA and AI, is going to be one of the core narratives going forward for this next run. There's this thing called the holdup problem where people don't contribute the data. They don't do the work unless they're compensated for it in a group setting. This idea that you can have machine-to-machine payments in very small increments that can fuel a decentralized kind of infrastructure play, I think is absolutely going to be a really big piece of the narrative going forward. And now you've got to let me give my two cents on this because we are so performant and because we can do 10,000 transactions per second

and because we have instant finality. I mean, as you do the transaction, it's already final. There's no waiting for the fork and the long end of the fork to, you know, and the short end of the fork to fall away. Those kinds of things and the lightweight, you know, carbon footprint, you know, I always use as in my example of how we are environmentally friendly, that Algorand takes the energy that it takes to charge a Tesla for one year. And as I think about saying that, I can't help thinking about how you have mentioned that your car has tried on multiple occasions to kill you. It only really once tried to kill me. I loved it for 18 months. It was recently. My wife, literally the other just yesterday, my wife was driving and we were coming

back and dropping the kids somewhere and the car just started accelerating. And then she tried to, you know, usually when you let off the gas on a Tesla, it has regenerative braking. So it starts to slow down, just kept speeding up and the brakes worked what you tried and then got a steering warning and the steering went traction warning and all this stuff and we kind of like slowly luckily there were no cars right in front of us right they slowly pulled it into our garage called them to tow it away and hopefully it'll never come back and i love that car but yeah i'm good on that and you didn't have it on you didn't have it on self-driving mode or anything have self-driving she's driving the car and every little went off and then when we like the guy towed it, we saw that the traction,

I guess it was misaligned when it went last time, but the traction on the inside of the tires was completely gone. I don't know. The car is pretty messed up. Did you say anything about Elon Musk on Twitter by any chance recently? Probably. I don't know. I have my moments.

I don't know. I think it was just, listen, I've had other cars where, like, all the lights go on and stuff and things don't work. It happens. That is terrifying. That is terrifying. That is terrifying. It wasn't great.

One more thing before I let you go. Yeah. I think we talked about this in the past, but there was a sort of notion in the last cycle, I think, that crypto wasn't ready for the limelight. Blockchains weren't fast enough. You had them going offline and having their problems. Now I feel like we've actually flipped completely. I think now we have so many apps. So do you think we get the killer apps in this cycle? Do you think we get that thing that, you know, all of a sudden brings in 500 million people that need to use this technology? Yeah, a hundred percent. And what I think is going to be, I think the smaller hill to climb

was to get to be fast. And we kind of came out of the gate and we were pretty good there. But I think the much more difficult hill to climb is to get back decentralization once you've got speed and performance. And so I think we will have the speed and performance that is required to do the kinds of things that we know that this ecosystem is capable of doing.

The trick is to not lose our souls in the process. Right. Not to become super centralized and just a couple of enterprise grade servers, you know, tossing messages back and forth amongst each other to keep our soul and to work on the very, very hard problem of performance plus decentralization. I think that's the challenge for us going forward. But absolutely, I think we can prove our worth in this cycle. And look, I mean, it is so young, crypto. It's young. 10 years is nothing. It's absolutely nothing. And we're going to stumble and we're going to go a little bit off to the side. It's like a heat-seeking missile. We're not going to just right there. We're going to kind of have to feel our way still, but we'll get there 100%.

And Algorand will be there right at the forefront. I couldn't agree more. Once again, I apologize that I let that slip on that last show. I appreciate your willingness to come on and school me. Sometimes we need it. Dare I slip as a journalist there.

I'll always do anything you get on. It worked. You didn't invite yourself on. I did invite you. You're welcome back absolutely anytime. We've got to get you on Twitter Spaces too. Yeah, that'd be fun. We've been doing those daily and that's really a lot of fun. Thank you so much back absolutely anytime. We got to get you on Twitter spaces too. I guess it's called. Yeah, that'd be fun. But yeah, we've been doing those daily and that's really a lot of fun.

Well, thank you so much, Stacey. Everybody follow Stacey, check out everything that Algorand is doing. Is there anywhere you'd like to send people? No, yeah, Stacey, Stacey W underscore DC at Twitter is kind of where I hang out. My New Year's resolution though is more Discord and Reddit.

That's my next year goal because we're really putting developers first, of course, in our ecosystem. So I plan to be spending a bit more time there going forward. But, yeah, it's always so much fun to talk to you, Scott. And I really appreciate it. And I think I speak on behalf of everybody. We really appreciate what you do for this ecosystem. You're such a credible voice. And you're balanced. and you're smart. And we appreciate you having you on our side for sure.

Thank you so much. I really do appreciate it. Thanks, Stacey. All right. I guess we had one more story that Stacey and I missed, but there's not much to talk about. But I do have to mention Crypto Exchange, BitTex Global to shut down. For anybody who's been around for a long time, it was really sad when we saw BitTex US file for bankruptcy a few months back because for the whole, I think, community that came in in 2016 and 17, there was a huge swath of us that were just traders. And you would buy your Bitcoin on Gemini or Coinbase and immediately send it off to Bitittrex to trade because that was the only place that you could trade all coins back then. Basically, if you're the US, Binance didn't even exist. You were trading on the Bitcoin pairs, you know, so everything was in sats. And man, it really sucks to see them go. And now Bittrex Global shutting down. Really sad.

I actually, Oliver Lynch and I, the CEO of Bittrex Global, have become friends. We also hung out at ConsenSys the same year, I think, that I saw Stacey there, and also this year. So I reached out to him. I think we'll probably get him on the show early next week when we can start talking about what's going on there. But just sad to see a player like this go under because they were such an impactful platform for the industry before. And now without further ado, I got Wick as we do on every Tuesday on the back end to look at a little trading alpha, look at some charts and try to get a feel for where we're at in the market. What's up, man? How are you? Hey, Scott. Thanks for having me again, man. I'm happy to be

here. Let's do some charts. Yeah, we missed last week. All right, man. So you got to share your screen. Let's see what you got. Let's look at some broad strokes, I guess, for what's happening with the market and then dig into some specifics. I think we have this massive sort of run there for a little while and it feels like things are cooling off. Yeah, no, absolutely. In fact, I think I talk about this. I actually have an alert set every year around this time to remind me that when the holidays are up and coming, we do see a thinning of liquidity, at least since about 18 onward, we've seen this play out. We can go over that. I've got it, as you can see on my screen here. Right now, it's showing me on your screen, which is why I haven't brought it up. I think you have to share out. So we can go over that. I've got it, as you can see on my screen here. Right now it's showing me on your screen, which is why I haven't brought it up. So I think you have to share. Oh, sorry, Scott. Sorry, Scott. We're going to go over, let's go over the total market cap. We can go over Bitcoin dominance and then a few charts that I like, some requests. And yeah, let's start with this Bitcoin dominance here. So the Bitcoin dominance, as I said, it's

been, hold on a second, let me get set up here, Scott. Yeah. So as I said, it's been, hold on a second, let me get set up here, Scott. Yeah. So as I said, it's been- This is total. So, right. Okay. Oh, sorry, Scott. Yeah, you're good. There we go. Okay, perfect. So here on the Bitcoin dominance, you can see that we've kind of just broken out all the level of Bitcoin and then we've kind of consolidated along this line here, right? As we've seen alts kind of pick up again. And then right now, of course, this week we're seeing liquidity kind of die down. I think also, Scott, what do you think? I think it also has a lot to do with that news we got on Kraken about a lot of those securities being listed or those assets being listed as securities. I think that's maybe scared a few people that might've been in some profits. We've seen mainly altcoins come down a bit. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I don't disagree. I mean, I was just talking to Stacey about that before. I think that it's a very mild impact versus other times we've seen this happen. So I view that as a positive. But yes, I would say that that and Bittrex Global, because there are quite a few coins actually that either only traded on Bittrex for years or that that was one of their major exchanges. So I think, and then we have the Binance News as well. I think there's just a little shakiness in the alt market for a very brief period here. Man, that makes sense. And when you're saying that, I get sad myself.

I think we all bring ourselves back to 2017 where Bittrex was one of the places to be, baby. That was, yeah, no, absolutely. Very, very sad. But as you can see here on the chart, we are seeing a little bit of pullback, but it's not bad. We still have green dots. I still think this is a very healthy market. I think just along with the holidays coming up and then a little bit of that scare with Kraken, I just think we've paused for a bit, right? If we switch here to the total market cap, we're kind of seeing the same thing, right? The market cap's been picking up. And then as you zoom in here, actually, you know, let's go over this a little bit. Let's go over and see what actually happens most times come this mid November. Okay. And let's, if we go back here,

we can kind of analyze these right all the way back to, 18 right so this was right right where we are now you know kind of right in the middle of November we see a little pull back it doesn't always pull back but within liquidity you definitely have a little bit of time before it usually starts picking back up right that that market the market cap liquidity so then we see it here again kind of you know again it doesn't have to fall but but either it drops or goes sideways, the market cap. Let's see here. Now, this time here, this was in 20. So when we look at this and we say, okay, well, how come it did kind of pause for a couple of weeks, but it resumed

pretty well. It didn't even look like anything happened. And I think the reason why on this particular year is because this is also when we started to get QE from the government, US government in March, right? So I think this was still in play. It was very strong. Look here again, mid-November, we do see a downtrend start, but I think a lot of it happens when a lot of these prop shops and firms that have been coming into the market more and more ever since 17, I think that's when they really kind of started to pay attention for the most part. We do see that we do either go sideways or pull back during these times just before the holidays here again. Now, I don't think we'll see

a huge pullback because of this. I really, really am not expecting that at all. We are seeing a little bit of a sideways move after move up, right? And this is to be expected, in my opinion. So I think everything is healthy with both total market cap and Bitcoin and alts. But I do think alts particularly right now, as you see, are having a bit of pullback. That does lead me to my next chart. Render is one that I'm a huge, huge fan of. I've been really getting into the project, which for me, most of the time, I'm just a trader. I let other guys educate me on

the real details, but this is the first time I'm meshing what I think and my opinions on projects with price action. I did get some people in over here when I started mentioning Render and it has broken out of this level here, putting us into a stage two uptrend. This is the most important time for me personally when I'm looking for long positions as we're getting to these stage twos. Again, just so unfortunate now that we're approaching holidays as it breaks out. Right. And with this new zone crack and I'm expecting this to maybe retest, and I'm hopefully looking for a good reaction, right? Because as traders, that's what we do. We don't anticipate what's going to happen or start predict what's going to happen. We kind of look at the market price action and trying to anticipate if we see a high probability set up. This is one of them, Scott, and it did start with green dots here, just as

it started before, once we formed that basing pattern this was also a stage two so that's it for uh for render we have and i think they did a kind of and very recently they had big news with solana so it was already looking very bullish and then they yes you know jumped on the solana which was also clearly the solana ecosystem looking extremely bullish and i think it really took off from there and that gives it, should give it legs. Yeah. And, and, and for, for disclosure, you know, Solana and this Render are two of my, my bigger positions and alts. So, you know, I, I do expect them to do well,

but only time will tell on how this all plays out. Right. But for now we're in a bull market and Render is one of my favorite, favorite alts, even where my money is. TRX, this was one of the requests, okay? So let's talk about TRX here. We're on the daily chart. We do have our alpha trend with dots and trackline.

Once they do get green dots and go above the trackline, you usually have the trend telling you that it is very, very strong. Micro dots are, are, are telling you on the micro scale, the trend is, is, is picking up and the green bars are the macro trend, right? So once we get above the track line, above the track lines telling us momentum is in our favor. So when we have the trend and momentum in our favor, it is a high probability setup. These don't always work. You do get fake outs, but you know, if you're trying to play high probability, this is probably as good as it gets right now where we are. Let's look at this. We did lose, start to lose the dots. I mean,

one, two, three, four weeks ago. Um, so we do see this trend even at least on a micro scale, starting to get a little bit weaker. We also see the momentum in the track line turning yellow. Okay. So when it does that, it just kind of tells you that, uh, you know, things are weakening a bit. So I would start to pay attention here for whoever I did ask me for, um, to chart this request. Uh, I think it's had a really, really great run. If you're in a lot of profits, it's never a bad idea to take profits in what I consider a stage three basing level and possibly trying to go below the track line. And if we get red dots, this will be a stage four downtrend. So not a horrible time to consider some management, right? Again, it's not financial advice, but if you're in profits, it's never a bad thing to consider taking them. What do you think?

I agree. I did notice, I've been scanning through a bunch of things as well, using training alpha. And I did see not really red dots hitting, but a lot of less green dots or the green dots sort of subsiding. Absolutely. Absolutely. And what I tell them, what I tell everyone, right, is that when we go into like parabolic moves, this is when really the dots are at its most value, right? Because when we go in parabolic, you know, any type of change in that trend is letting you know that some important dynamic is changing, right? So this to me does look like a parabolic move. So for me, seeing the dots kind of start to go, you know, off here and on here and on, you know, this is telling me that this is stage three, This is a basing

pattern. And this is usually where I do some management on at least half my position and maybe raise a stop loss on the other half just to find my risk or lock some profits. So absolutely. Perfect. I see you have Algo there and we just had Stacey on. So perfect timing for that. Yes. So I actually really enjoyed listening to Stacey. You know, a lot of times, you know, if I'm doing a trading an asset or looking into it, I'm obviously looking at the founders. I didn't know about Stacey and it was really nice hearing her insight and just how passionate she is about Algo. Algo, sorry. I'll tell you what though, Scott. And it was really nice hearing her insight and just how passionate she is about Algorand.

I'll go, sorry. I'll tell you what, though, Scott, we all do know that the most amazing guests do come on second, though. Absolutely. Come on, man. That's why we keep the training because then, you know, the crowd builds. No, absolutely. Absolutely. You have to have an opener and a closer, man. Come on.

No, I just thought it was funny that I just, if Stacy's hearing what you're hearing, which is probably not, uh, I like that. So, okay. So let's go ahead and turn some stuff on here. Okay. So I've got some good news for Stacy. Um, you know, at least from a charting perspective, from a TA perspective, uh, as you can see, right. Uh, green dots start above track line. These usually are our stage twos. If it comes from a basing again, right? Green dots start above track line. These usually are our stage twos if it comes from a basing. Again, another base, green dots, they go above the track line, stage two. So let's look at where we are. You know, Stacey might've had a lot of trouble.

I mean, bear market. Once we go red dots from a stage three after stage two, okay? I know this is hard to keep up with, but I go over all of this on the discord with my members. Once we go below this track line, right. And we have red dots after a stage three sideways pattern. This is called a stage four downtrend. And you stay out of a stage four downtrend, no matter what the whole time we're under the track line. Okay. But as you can see, we do have red micro trend dots,

red macro trend bars. The trend is telling us this is becoming much worse. Okay. You never buy in a stage four. Okay. We even got a little green dot here. Fake top couldn't even close above the track line. Okay. So you don't consider that nothing is going above the track line. And remember Scott, we always look for a basing stage one after four. We want that basing for a healthy pattern to break out. Now let's look at where we are. Zooming in Scott, what do we see? It's based for a little bit. We've got green dots. They've now broken above the track line. They have retested the breakout, which a lot of times is the track line. And we've kept green dots throughout. We're now seeing a little bit of a pullback again, as people get fearful over cracking, um, you know, who knows what's going to be listed as a security.

I think I also heard Stacey mention that she was uncertain. This is for everyone in alts. It's not Algo specific or any other company, but you are seeing a pullback here, again, ahead of holidays and with that news. But I like this chart, Scott. Yeah, it looks really good to me as well. I've been watching it actually pretty closely, and I know that ETH was another request that you had.

So let's take a look at that one. Yes, yes, yes. So I call this my sleeping monster because ETH did so well. It's done so well for us in the past. I just can't wait for this thing to wake up, right? It's almost like the probabilities are so high that this thing will just explode in the bull market, right? It's almost like the probabilities are so high that this thing will just explode in the bull market, right? That it's hard to kind of watch it here as it kind of puts in a little support, kind of confirmed support a couple of times. In fact, let's go ahead and we can turn

on these. Okay. As you can see, red dots, where's the track line at? Okay. Maybe I got the wrong one on here. Sorry, Scott. Let's see. Okay. Here we go. Red dots below the track line. Okay. As you can see, red dots, where's the track line at? Okay. Maybe I got the wrong one on here. Sorry, Scott. Let's see. Okay. Here we go. Red dots below the track line. Okay. Stage four, we go and start basing. We make a little support, confirmed support a couple of times. Then we start to possibly go into a stage one, a phase one, right? Because we can't get into stage two unless we break that basing support, which is this right here. So we did get rejected there. We did have a little fake out riot resistance, uh, again of the resistance range. And now we're trying to break it again. I'll be very honest, Scott. Um, I was very much hoping on this, uh, uh, second retest. Yeah.

I was hoping the next couple of weeks, this week, last week, or this week to see a breakout of these levels. And I am very disappointed to see that because as you know, the more times something kind of tests resistance, you are eating up some of that demand each time. And again, we're going into the holiday, so still very big hopes for ETH. I'll be charting it, paying attention to it. But I got to admit, I'm a little disappointed that this hasn't taken off yet. Yeah, I tend to agree. I think right now we're just going to chill for a bit. Honestly, I think the more I look at these charts, we just had this massive run. I think we just need some consolidation. And I think there's actually a lot of skepticism about the stock run as well. Yeah, absolutely. As I said,

I see a lot of volatility coming to the market this time of year. I did make some tweets about it last week and again yesterday, but it even catches me off guard most times. It is what it is. I'm sure we'll have a great 2024 with everything setting up an election year and even stocks. I'm sure you've been paying attention to stocks, NASDAQ and S&P, everyone calling a recession and that's done nothing but prove everybody wrong every single day, almost it seems like. Yeah, I absolutely agree. Any final thoughts before I let you go? Anything else you're watching? No, no, Scott. I am, you know, I'm looking forward to my food coma on Thursday.

I don't know what you're doing, but, uh, my family, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I actually, you know, since, uh, uh, I don't cook that well. So I look forward to any times that I get to go to family and just kind of, uh, you know, get have a trip to fiend hangover. So no, I'm not watching anything. And thank you for having me on Scott. This has been a blast as always. Dude, always.

And guys, we're going to like this morning, I had forgotten to do it last night to take your guys requests on, on Twitter X for this. So we just did it this morning, but is it cool with you? I wake up next week. We do it the night before and give us some prep and then we'll be able to share a bunch more charts that people are looking for. Yeah, no, that sounds great.

Listen, if anyone's listening, if you see Scott before these Tuesdays, if Scott makes this tweet on his page, please feel free. You know, if you're stuck in positions and you feel a little bit anxious, go ahead and make those requests and, you know, always pick two or three of them if I see him and I'll be happy to do that. Scott, that sounds great. Awesome, man. Well, have a great holiday.

I'm glad people showed up this week. Of course, we'll have another weird week with two shows off, but then we'll be back really at it, I think, next week then. Thank you so much. Cheers, Scott. Thank you so much. Cheers. Guys, you probably saw the indicators.

He's using Trading Alpha. You know by now that we did a partnership. So he shares some free setups amazing in the newsletter. And obviously, we have them here on Tuesdays to share that. You can sign up down below. You get two months for free if you do that. It's the way I've told him. I've told you guys a million times. You can see I literally, I mean, it's just, I was looking at alluvium, but it's how now I used to have this long process of scanning different charts and going through coin market cap and stuff. Now I just go up here, I type them in, you know, I keep it on the daily or the four hour. I just type them in, cook through a whole bunch of charts, see where the dots are, see

what's happening. It saved me so much time and effort and helped me to confirm really the setups that I'm watching. I use it literally every single day when I'm charting. So if after all these years of using my own system, I've now pivoted over to using that as my first line of defense, you know that I really, really love it. Guys, that's all I got for you today. I got to head over to Twitter Spaces in a little while. We'll have one more show tomorrow

and then taking Thursday, Friday off because of the holiday. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you to Wick and Stacey for being amazing guests. I'll see you guys for tuning in. Thank you to Wick and Stacy for being amazing guests. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Bye.