The Wolf Of All Streets - Trade War Shockwaves Hit Crypto Markets #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall episode, the hosts and panelists break down Bitcoin's stubborn $90K-$95K range amid tariff threats from Trump targeting NATO allies over Greenland, sparking trade-war fears that weigh on crypto. They discuss altcoins lagging harder, capital flowing into record-high gold/silver, the NYSE's tokenized 24/7 equities plan (likely permissioned, not public-chain friendly), stalled U.S. market-structure legislation due to bank lobbying against stablecoin yield, and bullish long-term views on tokenization (HBAR/XRP inflows), institutional adoption, and neo-banks challenging traditional finance.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every weekday. Here on X at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard time. I'm locked to talk about today. Obviously, nothing greater than the trade war shock waves hitting crypto markets, if we believe that is what is happening. What is happening will obviously unpack that a bit, but talking about Trump's increased rhetoric about Greenland, threats of increased tariffs on our NATO allies, and the likely, apparently according to some mainstreamia,

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has been taking a beating because my algorithms keep buying it, which means it's been dipping larger than everything else. But Dave, how do we unpack this? Is Bitcoin? actually, and I wasn't here yesterday, obviously, or on Macro Monday, so I kind of missed what was going on. But is this five Bitcoin's moving. It's in a range. It's the same range. It hasn't changed.

It was lots of panic when it was getting towards 84, 85, and lots of euphoria when it gets to 94, 95, guess what? We're right in the middle of the range. I mean, it's like, I'm reminded of the Simpsons, and there are many great vignettes in the Simpsons, but I'm reminded of, but I'm reminded of, of that, the one on soccer, where they showed the American analysts saying they're saying, and he holds it, and he holds it, and he holds it, and he's, like, bored and ready to fall asleep. And the foreign announcer, I don't remember which nationality it was, was going, he holds it,

he holds it, and you know, and people get excited. The reality is, there's not a lot exciting in the Bitcoin market. It's essentially stuck in a range. It has been, and it will break the range, one side or another. But until then, I mean, you could talk about whatever you want, but it doesn't really matter a whole lot. Now, the rest of crypto, all coins, that's different. They are, it is pretty weak. There are some reasons that it makes sense for some of these things to at least be weak in the short run.

And that is, it's, and that's quite straightforward. I mean, you know, we keep talking about all coins as being driven based on potential value. But, you know, you see news and I, and I'm putting news air quotes around the news of the New York's exchange doing going to 24-7 tokenized equities without any anything talking about how they're going to do it probably on a permission blockchain probably nothing to do with any of the existing crypto and that does take away from some people's belief in what the total addressable market for all coins are and so yeah i mean you can see that being a little bit on a little bit of negative news that will drag on a lot of the all coin markets and in fact we're seeing that uh straight up

you know, through up and down the chain, up and down, you know, coin market caps top hundred. I mean, you see it all over the place. But I'm curious what the panel thinks about that because to me that is, I mean, to say that's unsurprising, what do people think? Of course, incumbents are going to pick methods of using crypto that don't utilize, that don't allow for competition such as decentralized finance does. I mean, of course they're not going to use open blockchains until the market forces them to because regulation allows it. So I'm curious what people think, but that to me is what's

happening. Curious. I mean, obviously a lot of other people. Plus the other big question, we have Davos and I see Perri-Anne is up here, so I'd love to get her take on it, given the food fight between Eleanor Territ and Brian Armstrong, and by the way, Perry, and that was not on my bingo card for 26. I had missed that. Was that yesterday? Yeah, it was, you know, she had a quote about how the White House is not being constructive and he came out and directly contradicted or saying, well, the White House is being constructive. Whatever. I mean, you know, look, you know, Davos to me, the last quote is one of my favorite books, arguably one of the best most insightful books ever written. Davos to me and having crypto people there is this final scene from Animal House where

people look from one to another and they go, they look from man to animal and animal to man and couldn't tell the difference. I'm butchering the quote. but you get the idea to me if you're in the world economic forum you're part of the technology of of trust and we're supposed to trust our better as opposed to the technology of truth which is why most of us are in bitcoin but that's neither here nor there anyway i do think that those are the things that are interesting anyway i see mauritio at his hand up hey guys um yeah well just to comment on price action i i think back to i think it was last wednesday we were here with mike mike mcleon from uh bloomberg i think

he was actually saying that until he was wrong, he was going to take a quick short at 95. So I think, Mike, I think you'd take this one for the time being. He's been short since 15,000. Well, like they say, broken clock is right twice. No, not to make it in a bad way. No, I think a lot of us shorting at 94, all of us said, 94, 95 made sense to short. Yeah.

The trade. I don't think anyone really disagrees with that. it's been in a range. And, you know, until proven otherwise, you short the range and met with a tight stop. Yeah, no. And that was fine. Totally. And I just, I remember that part of the conversation from last week, and it just seems to be

playing out, you know, pretty much range bound, like you said. And I don't disagree. I think a lot of it is just part for the course. In terms of narrative, one thing that I've noticed, and I bring this up to the panel for discussion, because I speak with a lot of Bitcoiners that obviously, you know, work with us and take loans, et cetera, to buy more Bitcoin or use our structure products. And there is a, there's a real overlap between some of the more sophisticated Bitcoin investors and precious metal investors. And I think this is true across the board. If you look at some of the

biggest voices in Bitcoin, you know, outside of Peter Schiff, of course, a lot of them are gold bugs or silver bugs. And I think what's, you know, one of the things that's, that's, in some ways, creating some attrition from Bitcoin is this crazy positive narrative that's happening around precious metals because I hear more and more Bitcoin investors basically actively positioning and moving between gold, silver, and Bitcoin.

And again, look at the markets this morning. Gold, another all-time high, up 3%. Silver up another 4%, another all-time high. And this is, you know, these precious metals are very much moving like Bitcoin, like Bitcoin should be moving or with the volatility and price velocity that Bitcoin should be having. And I think that's drawing a lot of people away from other markets, including Bitcoin and even stable, like, not stable coins, sorry,

altcoins into this precious metals rally. I'm not, you know, I wouldn't call myself a precious metals expert, but I'll be curious to hear if anyone in the panel has any type of insight or sees something similar in the market, where, you know, the amazing rally that we're seeing in precious metals is sort of stuck in the air of the room from some of their asset classes. I don't want to be the only one to speak, but, you know, my theory, Mauricio, has been that the Bitcoin rally will take place when we find a level that is more or less static, and the momentum excitement in silver, in particular, in gold, decrease. I mean, I think, and historically, Bitcoin has followed. You know, silver is more interesting than gold, and sense, but I'm on record. I'm uber bullish on silver. For the very specific reasons, I think that silver

will go to at least the mid-30s. I mean, I was on Macromunday yesterday. I mean, Larry Lepard was saying he thinks it goes to where it is in the Earth's crust, which is 20 to 1. Now, keep in mind, it's in the 50s now. So you could easily see almost a doubling of silver with gold at these prices without too much trouble. And there is an enormous amount of leverage trading that happens with silver and gold via the contract for differences markets and a lot of the people who used to play all coins,

that's exactly where they are. And so, yeah, you know, that money is there. Now, money has a funny tendency. I mean, as Scott pointed out yesterday morning, we still had in crypto, and Bitcoin was less than a third of it. Well, less than a third, actually. We saw it in crypto on the failed breakout,

out, we saw almost $800 million get liquidated. So there is plenty of animal spirits in Bitcoin. If, in fact, it gets there, it's just very highly leveraged that tends to get wiped out. So I think you just have to be watching, you know that. Anyway, Gator, I see your hand up. Yeah, I fully agree with what you said. And I think you have to look at how in the past, the movements in the crypto market place. Usually you saw a rise in Bitcoin and Ethereum first, and then afterwards, the large caps would go and the midcaps would go.

and then small caps would go. And the rotation that you saw in the crypto markets with crypto, the big caps leading and then the other one's following, I think now that there's more institutional adoption of at least Bitcoin, we are seeing that Bitcoin is entering into that mix and that the relation of capital, as described earlier by one of the other speakers, I didn't really see because X was glitching, we were speaking, but was also mentioned, you know, like is this run of,

is it sucking out the liquidity basically of crypto assets currently, the run of silver and gold? I believe yes. And I believe this relation of capital is basically now also including gold, silver and commodities. And I believe the more adoption

we will see of different platforms, traditional platforms, trading platforms and exchanges accepting both crypto and traditional stocks and assets, the more of that mix up we will see. And at the end of the day, everyone is looking to maximize their gains. So the capital rotation will continuously take place. It's just very obviously now that it's in the commodities in the gold and silver sector and not necessarily in the crypto sector.

So, yeah, it's a very interesting time. And I think that relation will come. It's just a question of when. Hey, I've got an opinion on price. Probably not so much on the precious metals in. I think precious metals are going to continue to move, not at the rate that it has, but as governments and people around the world

see the continued debasement of the dollar and other currencies, they will continue to buy gold and silver. over follows gold onto central bank balance sheets. As far as Bitcoin goes itself, I've been very vocal against the mainstream narrative here that we're still in a four-year cycle that October was the peak, and I wouldn't expect anything to happen until either after the World Series this year or after midterm elections. But the price of Bitcoin, again, another unpopular thing I'm going to say here,

is the reason why it's been so range bound over the last year. And a lot of people have said, yes, it's having its IPO moment. And I actually agree with that. What an IPO moment means is that, okay, you know, this was something that was high-flying. If you think about equities for a moment, there's a really big multiple to what its actual value is. and where Bitcoin tracks is global into monetary supply. And there's been a lot of great models that have been built, and even my own model shows Bitcoin should be around 150.

But the reality is that was based on a very high multiple into global monetary supply. And now that the adoption curve is coming to a peak, a lot of people own it, a lot of, particularly now in their 401Ks and in their brokerage accounts, because ETFs have been available for so long now. The adoption curve is slowly, as far as increase goes, is slowly coming to an end. So the percentage of increase of people that can be onboarded into the Bitcoin network, I mean, there's just not enough people to continue that accelerated. which means that the multiple goes down.

So what I think Bitcoin is finding right now is what is the true price, what is the true multiple into global monetary supply? And it feels like it's settling into where we are today at about, you know, probably the real price is probably somewhere between 90 and 95. And then once you have that as the basis, then as monetary. supply continues to grow, which right now it's about a 7% clip. That is how Bitcoin's going to grow. Now, there is still speculation. There is still, you know, a larger network effect where people can still be onboarded, but just not at the regular pace. So it's probably in the long run,

somewhere north of 7%. And it's probably somewhere in the low double digits, is my guess. And I know that's a pretty dismal view because everybody wants Bitcoin to run to a million dollars in the next five years. But, you know, we're there. And I hate to say it. But, you know, we've come to that moment. And what needs to happen now is greater usage on the adoption curve. And, you know, so, look, 2026, I believe is going to be the year where there's going to be a lot more interest in tokenization. I mean, you know, New York Stock Exchange just announced yesterday that they're going to go 2026.

24-7 utilizing protocols, blockchain protocols, to run their back-in, which is amazing, right? This is what everybody's been working so hard for for a very long period of time. So the tokens that are going to garner interest in 2026 are the ones that, frankly, are deeply involved in the financialization of assets. And from my chair, you know, I mean, you know, I'm running several single token ETFs, where I'm seeing the greatest number of inflows right now is HBRP. And they're the two groups that are doing the most on financial tokenization, in my opinion. I mean, you also have all the open source protocols, which is great,

but the ones that are really delving in and partnering, those are the ones. And that's where I'm seeing the biggest inflows from ETFs. Even today, we're seeing continued inflows even in a down market. Gator? Yeah, I fully agree with what Stephen said. I think currently we're finding that equilibrium with Bitcoin. However, I do read a lot of news nowadays about other countries wanting to adopt Bitcoin on their balance sheet.

And I think as soon as that starts to happen on a larger scale again, maybe 2026 is the year for that. We will probably exceed that range at some point again. Even if it's not just because of the country's accumulating, of course, when that kind of announcement comes, it will bring hype with it, depending on the country. And I believe that is possibly one of the reasons why the range could be broken this year. And when I'm looking at the tokenization of the stock markets, I think it's very interesting what Stephen also said about HB and XRP, seeing inflows in the ETFs there, despite the current market condition. I was also watching Canton Network because they're into tokenized real-world assets and seeing that they are also moving sort of against the market currently.

Same goes for, it's probably related also to the New York Stock Exchange news as discussed here earlier. But I do believe that these things might pull it out of that range later in the year if that is going to happen. All I did you see any hands up? Yeah, go ahead. I was just, I just saw a tweet and I or a post and I couldn't. I couldn't refine it again from Max Kaiser talking about how the debasement trade is alive and well. It's gold and silver.

And he made the comment that Bitcoin is not in the party. And to me, you know, hearing, you know, hearing these, hearing this and seeing that, you know, Steve, your post on, you know, comparing into 2022, you know, sans the, all the liquidations, which cause people to be forced selling, is, is music to my ears. I mean, that's all I can say is if when you start making allowances for relationships to money supply, you either believe Bitcoin has the potential to become digital gold and or beyond, because gold is a smaller percentage of money supply than it ever used to be back long before 71. It is a simple question of belief in terms of that, and you should value it that way.

Now, my mental model and Scott, people are probably tired of hearing it, but I want to revisit it because it's very relevant, is Bitcoin will trade like an option on that adoption. I will point out that Bitcoin's network, you more than anyone else on this panel, are well aware of this fact. Even despite the fact that the hash rate's down 15% since October 10th, it's still 6x what the hash rate was in 2022. So to expect the price to be the same, well, probably not. not so much, right? And the fact is that the market is morose. And the more people and the longer people capitulate either in time, because they just say, I'm tired of it and let Sailor and the ETFs buy all the Bitcoin from the crypto folks, or in price, and so we see a serious correction, both capitulations are creating fire for a bull run when it happens. And I don't know

when it will happen. I'm not in Ostradamus. If I did, I'd be floating on a yacht instead of sitting in a condo in Miami. So, you know, it's, but it is important for people to understand that we, there's, there are bulls who talk about this stuff in terms of where they think it's going to go, but there's not a whole lot of money being committed to it from the crypto community. That to me is a really important distinction. And, you know, I think that that matters. Perian, I see you lifted your mic.

Are you there? Yeah, jumping in here. I've, I'm just going to keep saying. what I've been saying when I've joined this spaces previously, which a piece of the price action has to do with the rehypublication that's in the system now. One thing that's very different about Bitcoin today versus the last cycle or even just a couple of years ago is we now have these Bitcoin treasury companies and there's paper Bitcoin. So, you know, I'm on the board of Nakamoto, Kindly MD, which is rebranding to Nakamoto,

and we've had a couple of different loans where our Bitcoin is encumbered. And this is, you know, I'm not sharing anything that's not public. But we've seen this with many other treasury companies or even just companies that have Bitcoin on the balance sheet. They take that Bitcoin, they put a loan against it. and then that Bitcoin can then be loaned out again. So that is impacting the price of Bitcoin. And I think that is one reason why we're not seeing the type of price action that so many people thought we would have.

But I still think it's coming. I still think it's coming. Demand, you know, it's great to see Stephen here. I've known Stephen for a long time. He's a true crypto and Bitcoin OG. I think everything he says is right. Demand is an important point. but also as we're seeing that maturation and the institutionalization of Bitcoin,

we're also seeing these types of Wall Street products entering the system as well. Dave, I wanted to come back to what you mentioned at the very beginning of the spaces, which is what's happening in D.C. with the market structure bill. And you talked about Brian Armstrong and Ellie Territ, their little back and forth on X. So I'm happy to kind of give an update on what's going on with the bill. So last week, as it was widely reported, the Senate Banking Committee decided to pull their markup. So we had a very strong legislative pathway for the bill.

This is extremely important. We hadn't really had a pathway like this open up. And over the 12 years, I've been doing Bitcoin and crypto policy. And I was the first person in the country to become an advocate in Washington, D.C. for this industry. So I've been there since day, negative one, working on this. So to get a bill passed through Congress, you've got to get it through the relevant committees. You've got to get it to the floor for a vote. We did not have the votes to get it out of the Senate banking committees markup last week.

Why is that? What exactly happened? Well, the banks had lobbied very, very hard to create a new provision in the bill that really had not been previously discussed or was widely debated or was a part of the conversation at all. And this is a bill we've been working on for over five years. This isn't something we just threw together this year. This is many years in the making. They decided that they would be against the bill if it did not ban crypto companies. from offering yield on stable coin deposits.

I find this extremely egregious. And the little spat you saw between Brian and Ellie, I don't think is truly fair just to defend Brian Armstrong. What I'm seeing is that you have banks coming in who really have nothing to do with this bill. They're not a part of the scope. They're not the ones being regulated. It's crypto companies.

It's crypto exchanges that we're talking about. And they don't want crypto companies to offer yield on stable coins. So I've been doing quite a bit of digging on what is the history here. And just to give you a little bit better insight, banks and particularly the big banks, they earn interest on their deposits at the Fed. So since 2008, big banks or banks, they keep interest on deposit at the Federal Reserve. And right now, the banks are earning 5.7% risk-free on their deposits at the Fed. What's important to understand about that is that those are funds that could be used otherwise.

Those funds could be used to reduce the federal deficit. Those are funds that otherwise would have been deposited at the state. This space was downloaded via spaces down.com. Visit to download your spaces today. U.S. Treasury, but they went to pay the big banks and they have been receiving trillions and interest on reserves since 2008. What does that mean for us, for users, for consumers, for anyone that has a bank account? Well, right now, banks are paying anywhere from 0.1 to 0.5 to 1 to 5 basis points on savings. a very, very small amount. I actually got my interest thing in the mail last week.

I have to give to my accountant, and I made $87 on interest at my bank last year, which, you know, isn't much at all. So banks are earning 5.7% from interest on deposits at the Fed. You're getting 0.1 to 0.5%, 1 to 5 basis points. So what's left, that's the yield that goes to the banks. The smallest number, Perriand, as I've done the math, the smallest number is $180 billion a year of a subsidy that the federal government is giving to the banks. But it's actually way worse than that because it's not a subsidy they're giving to the banks out of the taxpayers, which would be bad. But far worse, it's a penalty that the savers are subsidizing bank and bank bonuses. And so that's what's going on.

I mean, honestly, politically, it's terrible. It would be the world's biggest losing proposition if people knew it would actually be a massive lunch pail issue. I suspect that the Republicans know this. They do know this. Part of the reason is they want that. But I could ask you one other question other than that because this topic is one, you and I could just beat on banks for a while. I mean, a whole point of fractional reserve banking. I mean, you've talked with Caitlin Long.

You know her point of view. you know what happened when she tried to introduce a fee-for-service model. The whole thing is a morass because it's all dependent upon flawed assumptions and lack of technology. But there was one other part of the bill that I found problematic that I could see why Coinbase would hate it more than anybody else, which was, and frankly, it doesn't even make sense. And there was language in the bill that would stop the SEC from granting exemptive relief for securities that were tokenized. that were different than in others, which to me is insane because tokenization implies a very different structure underneath.

And there are rules like transfer agent rules, et cetera, that effectively can't work in a tokenized world. So the SEC needs to. And in fact, like I've talked with some of them. I'm having other talking with others of them. The SEC is well aware of the fact that they need to either change rules or have executive relief against archaic rules.

And it looks like at a cursory read, this bill blocked that. And that was what Coinbase was objecting to. Have you heard that too? Or is that just a trial balloon that some idiot put in that was going to, it's going to quickly leave? No, I think that's another negotiating point and another negotiating sticking point. I mean, the more leeway the SEC has or the ability to issue exemptive relief to specific crypto, companies or projects, the more power the SEC has, which is a controversial point. But that one I think actually goes both ways because I can argue it on both sides.

On one side, well, what if Democrats win and you have another Gary Gensler-like figure at the SEC, we can make an argument that we really don't want the SEC to have broad authoritative powers and just be able to say you're in or you're out. But on the other side, the whole point of the bill is clarity. We need clarity. Projects need to know when they're in the SEC's jurisdiction or not. So they know who their regulator is and how to bring products to market, how to get through the regulatory process.

So I don't think that's what this really was about. That was a sticking point. I think the big theme here is the banks. And this is not a new theme. This has been the thorn in our side since the beginning of Bitcoin. You know, the banks don't want competition. They definitely do not want you to be able to earn interest on your reserves. Not only will they not pay you to be a customer at, you know, their institution, they're not going to pay you.

They're going to take the spread. But they won't allow you to get that elsewhere either. So this really has very little to do with policy. This has very little to do with safety. You're hearing things about deposit, flight risk, whatever. That's not what this is about. This is about protecting a very, very, very powerful monopoly. That is what we're up against.

That is why it is so contentious. And that is why it is so important for people to speak out and to vote. That's all we have left. I saw Stephen and then Gator. Yeah, hey, good to see you, Peryan. It's been a couple of years. It's been too long. Good to see you.

It's been way too long. I've got a dozen questions for you, but I'm not going to bore everybody. I'll reach out to you later. But, you know, there's two things on this bill that I was very interested in. And again, one of them was the distribution of yield. And that competes with two different industries, right? The first one is the banks, and you've already kind of gone into that and really appreciate that. The other group that stable coins, if they indeed have a yield,

competes with our asset managers that run mutual funds. And essentially, one of the ways that I'm looking at this is if USDC is allowed to not register as a security and distribute a yield on platforms like Robin Hood, Coinbase, Cracken, even, where they're There's competitive, they're now onboarding ETFs, which are a form of mutual fund that has a yield that is registered. There's competition there too. So I'm curious, behind the scenes, are you seeing asset managers like BlackRock and Schwab step in against the bill,

or is it only the banks? I haven't seen that. That doesn't mean it's not happening. Yeah. But the asset manager is like BlackRock, A lot of them are, well, I mean, Black Rock has all of their Bitcoin ETF held. Their custodian is Coinbase. So they have a very clear and inextricable partnership with Coinbase.

So I would think they would be more on the side of supporting what's best for Coinbase, not what's best for the banks. But the mutual funds in the banking industry on this exact issue were at odds several years ago when that issue went through its own. policy formation. And I wasn't there for those fights. That was before my time. But for the folks in Washington that do remember those fights, one of the quotes that stuck with me is that, look, the banks remember when they lost that fight and mutual funds were able to be regulated through the SEC, not in the banking system. The banks lost that. They had fought for that. And the banks have not forgotten that. And they're not going to lose this fight on stable coins. They're not going to lose this fight on crypto because they've lost out on a lot. And it's not that they've lost

out. It's just that there's more competition in the marketplace. This is the United States of America. This is the center of the free market. We believe in free competition. This should not be an oligopoly, a cartel, a monopoly. There shouldn't be one group, one small group of companies or people that control the markets. We should have competition. That's what's best for the people. That's what's best for the markets. That's what creates the best products. And that's what's being blocked here. And it's really disappointing to me that you have members of Congress that don't see, either they do see through that and they don't care or they, they don't understand that. They're beholden to the incumbents.

And it's a real problem. It is a very real problem. And it's us, the people that take the head. Yeah. One of the interesting things that I saw was, you know, you had rhetoric from Trump against the Fed, tapping interest rates on credit cards, and then even slowing down or trying to prevent corporations from buying single family homes, all the things that benefit Americans, even though some of them may not be necessarily capitalistic, but all those things affect the banks.

And of course, the Clarity Act, too. And it seemed to be a very concerted effort to push back utilizing their puppet, you know, Ronald Powell and other members of Congress to do their dirty work. But it does seem to be a very concerted effort to push back against all of this on the bank. And then, of course, the Fed, which is, I'm glad you said what you said about the Fed, because what would help most Americans right now is actually lowering rates because then your credit card rate, your auto rates, your student loan rates all start going down. But instead of doing that, they increased, they kept rates at a fairly high level, in my opinion, and have increased the size of the balance sheet to support the banks, to give them the interest that they need on their deposit so they can make the spread.

I wish more people understood that. And once you really think about it, it's truly disgusting. I mean, Perry, and you. I can't think of any other way to really explain this. I mean, this is. All I could tell you is I worked at Citigroup in 2008. I was a managing director. I was one of the people who didn't survive it and ended up on the TIGMA, and it worked out for me.

But the average human being believes that TARP, you know, that facility is what rescued the banks, as disgusting as that was. But that was what the flashy thing that they were holding out in front of them. But what they were really doing was doing what you said. And so allowing banks to earn a risk-free rate that's above market at the Federal Reserve. and lever the hell out of it is how they bailed out the banks. I mean, Citigroup, without a doubt, was insolvent at one point in 2008. I mean, and I don't mean a little insolvent. I mean a lot insolvent.

So they took the debt, they moved into another place, and then they turned on the spigots where they could literally earn hundreds of billions a year every year and have been doing so for 17 years. Now, obviously, they donate, and it's not just Citigroup, they donate a lot of money. They donate a lot of money to Congress. And so, you know, look, until we do something about slush funds and campaign donations being actual bribes, it's really hard to believe any of this stuff is going to change. I mean, but you're right. That's exactly what happened.

Not a lot of people focus on it. Both parties benefit. So there's no way either party is going to say boo about it. And so that's that's where you're at. The thing that's interesting here is, is the actual rhetoric they're using, is, and this is the rhetoric, is the community banks. It's not the big banks that worry about it. It's the community banks. So basically, they're trying to tell the politicians are trying to tell people that you're protecting, you know, George Bailey's savings and loan, you know, from It's a wonderful life. And that's what these evil stable coin issuers are going to do is bankrupt that. And so you won't have the community banks. I mean, that, which is a completely nonsensical. It doesn't survive any scrutiny, but it is the rhetoric. That is literally what the ABA, American Bankers Association letters say.

But anyway, as I said, we can talk about this until whatever. This will get resolved. The interesting thing is the Genius Act already passed. Holding it hostage for a Clarity Act is kind of, it feels like desperation to me. And, I mean, we'll see what happened. To me, it feels like the gloves are off. You know, this isn't the banks working behind the scene. that you know i think the playing field has really shifted dramatically since trump has taken office

several years ago you know before we had the crypto president the banks were were doing everything they can to try to stifle the growth of the crypto ecosystem and why do you think there was the war on crypto why do you think you had the elizabeth warrens the shared browns of the world trying to you know, demonize our industry. I do believe a lot of that was pieces being moved by the banks, but that was happening behind the scenes. You would have never seen any of those moves, these chess pieces on the playing board. You would have never seen a bank move that piece. Now we're in a different era where you actually see them take these moves. You see them take these hits. It's very obvious. The gloves have come off.

It's happening in the open now. So that's why I'm saying. I think it is important that we use our voices because that's really all we have left if you don't get to banked because I probably will get debanked for everything I'm saying right now. I was debunked the last year. Who knows? I'll be debanked again this year.

But this really comes down to our fundamental rights to be able to use what we want to exchange our good and services with one another. We shouldn't be beholdent to one particular system. We should be able to use what we want. That's what's really at stake here. And if they take that from us, you're taking a fundamental right, which should be protected by the First Amendment

because software is code and software is protected by free speech. We lose the First Amendment. What's left? Well, we have 15 minutes left, but that would be a great mic-trock moment. Seriously. Yeah, look, I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, but I think you know that.

But, you know, it is, it is interesting. I'd like to circle back and see if anyone cares on the all-coin thesis, because the New York Stock Exchange news, look, I know these people well. I've known them for years. I go back decades in TradFi with working with exchanges and doing a lot of things, but there's like no details there. And I'm curious, is anybody else think that? Because I've made the statement, I believe this for seven years now,

that the entire financial system is going to go digital. I don't even know if the New York Stock Exchange proposal will be pairwise, meaning that instead of everything being nominated in dollars, that everything is denominated in something, and it could be a stable coin, it could be a currency, etc., which is a hallmark of how crypto markets work. We don't know if there's any fungibility between what you would trade in New York on their tokenized exchange,

and if somebody else wanted to compete with them, such as in the stock markets, actually, you know, if you trade in the national market system, you buy IBM on New York, you could sell it on NASDAQ, right? You know, that's easy. We have no idea if that's going to be supported or if it's going to be a completely closed system. So I don't know what it is. What I do know is that the very large at ICE, the parent company of New York, NASDAQ, and SIBO are all going to fight like hell to be able to offer every asset and compete with Coinbase. And one of the reasons that they are aligning with the crypto folks on clarity because New York specifically made the point they needed regulatory clarity to be able to do this is they want to be able to compete. So the question is, do they want to

be able to compete or they want to be able to exclude? Well, we know what they want to exclude, whether they'll be successful or not. But I do think that that as a whole is a driver into the all-coin markets and why things are kind of particularly soft today. I'm curious if anybody agrees, disagrees, or if this is just my lone wolf opinion. Scott, have you talked about this? What do you think? I actually blanked out. I got blocked there and was trying to get back on, so I missed the last part of your state. What I was asking is, is does the fact that the New York Stock Exchange under ICE trying to go completely tokenized without mention of Ethereum or Solano or XRP or

whatever else. Is that part of why you think that some of the hot money and some of the performance, because the performance is pretty difficult today, is going on. Yeah, I mean, I have a couple of reasons. So, A, like you, as you kind of mentioned before, I'm not sure that all this fundamentally good news for blockchain technology and adoption is fundamentally good for retail investors, because, as you said before, I'm not confident they'll do it on public blockchains, we'll see. So it may not even be investable all of this adoption. Also, I just think, as you've said

repeatedly, the hotball of money is just not in crypto right now. So news doesn't matter. They're trading silver and gold and all the gamblers that used to pump all coins are in prediction markets. So there's just nobody here to move prices of anything. Which feels a lot more bare markety than it does anything else. It does. It does. The question is, what brings those people back. I'm not saying that it won't happen. There's always an narrative. There's always something new. But beyond Bitcoin, it's much more challenging, or I should say beyond Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, XRP, I think Steve mentioned it. Anything that has some level

of institutional adoption, ETF available, treasury company, you name it, like coin number 47, even if they have some big piece of fundamental news, who's going to buy it and move it if it's not the speculators and gamblers who were buying to sell it higher. Yeah. I mean, yes, I think that's exactly right. I mean, it's, look, it is always, what's the old expression? Buying when you're very, very uncomfortable doing so is always what's the most profitable. Of course, that's, that's only true.

Unless you're buying you use trash can. Unless you're buying. That's why I was, I was chuckling. It's exactly right. But I mean, you know, it's, as I said, the markets look. you know, Ethereum about to fall below 3,000 is kind of one of those things that gets people's attention. Salana below 130, yada, you can go up and down. Or we can talk about Zcash, you know, you're down below four.

You know, so it's been cut in. Yeah, I mean, I just kind of look across the board and, you know, we had a lot of things, I think, that are priced in and actually have some reverse momentum on those, right? I mean, I don't want to beat dead horses, but like people, myself included, for a very long time, thought something like the Clarity Act was a foregone conclusion. Like if I was a gambling man, now I would say there's less than a 5% chance clarity passes anytime soon. Well, you should be going on Kalshi then or on Polly. Well, you can't. Yeah, but I don't know.

So since I'm an American, I don't cheat and use VPNs and stuff. I went on Polly Market to make that bet. It was like at 65, 70 cents or something. And by the time I went, it was like, you're blocked as an American. I was like, I've never done this, whatever. And then it was like at like 40 by the time I even revisited it two days later. Yeah, it's funny. I thought lawyered.

I saw you making some emojis. I mean, what's up, dude? Yeah, I mean, I think like I'm definitely in the mode of now of buying back bags of majors. And like, I really just still fundamentally believe we're way before the adoption of these things. and we've seen that at least a handful of them, like you mentioned, we'll be here for that adoption. And, you know, honestly, I have some worries about Ethereum. I think there's some competition there.

But we've seen that Solana, like, when a company, it's the retail brand, you know, when a company launch it, there's going to be activity there in the future as crypto in general gets adopted. I think it's inevitable that crypto will be more ubiquitous. You know, I've been right before. Everybody was using blogs. And I said they'd be using the internet and they were saying BRB and nobody knew what that was. And they thought I was a nerd and they were right and now they say it. And I think whether it's two years or 10 years, crypto is going to be run the rails for everything.

And it's very unlikely that those things like Solana where we know they'll still exist and be on the forefront, it's unlikely to me that that won't be a good buy now looking back. Gator, is that a new hand? Yes, actually. But if it's okay, I agree, by the way, with what lawyers said. I wanted to circle back to Perian and what she said about the banks. And the banks actually fighting against Bitcoin because they can't earn from it in the same way that they can from traditional money. I was actually wondering what you guys, all of you in the panel here, think of the NeoBank development where you know, you have these crypto banks nowadays.

that are trying to include these services, trying to cater to the people that are not familiar with their own hardware wallet or their own funds being held in a wallet digitally. I do feel like there's a big market out there that can be catered to buy these neobanks. And I'm wondering actually, and that's also a question to Perian in particular, how you see that development, like what would be the role or should be the role of banks or neo-banks in the crypto space, in your opinion? No, since I don't see Perry Ann jumping in, I will say this, the big fight that's happening,

forget the obvious, the yield fight. I mean, it's huge. I'm not downplaying it. But the big fight, the one that matters the most, is will we have a future where all investments, whether it's a mutual fund, whether it's a stable coin, if it's all tokenized, and it's all available from a single platform, whether it be Coinbase Robin Hood, Morgan Stanley's, you know, the remnants of e-trade, Charles Schwab, it doesn't matter. If all of these platforms can offer all of those investment options to be freely swappable,

regardless of where it is, 24-7, and they are able to incorporate payments because stable coins give you the ability to offer a payment so you could pay your bills from them, then what happens? The obvious answer is the $7 trillion that are saved. sitting in bank deposits that are there specifically so people can pay their bills over a period of time without having to worry that it takes days. And it literally does take days. Like if you're in a bank and you have money in an investment account and you want to move it to your checking account, it could take two days. And that's with T plus one settle, assuming it's in an ETF or something like that. You get rid of that, then all of a sudden you can, these neobanks can start offering

products such as sweeping, such as being able to make payments and being able to sweep into investment products. Once that is true, that is a, first of all, it's a far better system for investor savers for humans. It is a much more competitive and less profitable system for banks. And that's really the smart firms, what they're fighting. But what's funny about that is a lot of the smartest firms already know that and they just want to stake out their claim to being one of the first people to offer that because, you know, that primacy gives you an advantage. We saw the exact same thing, by the way, in the late 90s with electronic trading and equities. You saw the wirehouses get adopted.

I mean, if you think it's a surprise, Charles Schwab is the only one that survived. Everyone else was bought, whether by Morgan Stanley or somebody else. So it's interesting. I mean, but your neobank question, I think is very relevant. Ten years from now, that's all there will be. That's my suspicion. Well, I think, yeah, no, just real quick, I think it's the kind of the same thing on NeoBanks. I mean, why, I mean, a NeoBank is, you know, essentially a digital first banking company.

It's a Fentac company and a banking charter. The purpose of going through a bank charter is so you can, you can get to market and offer these products to market through a federal charter. Well, ideally a federal charter. But I think it's going to be the same themes. If you have, there is no entity where the banks want to lose control of their monopoly on yield. You mentioned Caitlin Long, who's tried to bring forward a full reserve, so 100% backed deposit bank to market that's been blocked over and over again. There were attempts to do that before Bitcoin, before Caitlin Long, before Crypt. there was attempts to bring in full reserve banks, those were also blocked.

I think if you have a neo bank that's trying to do something similar, there's going to be a big fight to protect the banks from being able to have a monopoly on that yield. So you're seeing the market try to bring, to try to compete, but you have a regulatory system that's protecting the banking system from having any competition. So it's, I mean, it's quite frustrating to see this play out where there are better products for consumers. There are better products that could be brought to market. And the only reason they're not available is because regulators are preventing that

and they're protecting incumbents. So, I mean, yeah, I wake up every day and I feel great. I'm grateful that I've chosen to work in an industry and I have the opportunity to work in an industry where we can compete and that I don't spend my time lobbying politicians to protect my monopoly. It just seems like a very sad way to live. Your only way to compete is by paying off politicians, not actually creating better products and services. So I feel strongly that we're on the right side of history here. But these are this, whether it's neobanking, crypto companies that want to pay stable coin companies that want to pay interest on reserves, whether it's a full reserve bank, it all comes back to

that same thing. Yeah. Maricio, and then this will be kind of final thoughts as we wrap here. Yeah, sure. So I'd like to just share a brief comments on the point of neobanks, just because Leden does take in stable coin deposits from clients. not in the US, not in Canada, but broadly speaking from most other international countries. And we see great adoption of that account. We pay up to 8% on that account, 6.5% on the first 100K. And it's been, the adoption we're seeing in emerging markets is pretty strong

because the way we generate that yield is we lend those stable coins to our Bitcoin by clothes that do not, the Bitcoin just stays in custody. So they are fully protected. and we're seeing more and more adoption around that model. We're obviously paying a close eye to how the Clarity Act shakes out and what potential doors that opens in the U.S. market. But I'll say even on the stable coin yield world, the cost of capital for us, you know,

if you look at what you're getting at a bank, which is basically zero, and then you look at what you can get with treasuries, it still pales in comparison with what you can get with something like STRC. And so SCRC is still acting as a bit of a, I would say, a black liquidity hole because they're paying 11%, which when you're competing against that type of capital, you know, doesn't, I mean, and again, this is why I think it's super interesting this idea of stable coin yield, because it is a very attractive product. And we did see a lot of demand for stable coin yield when we had the runups and BlockFi and Celsius and all those guys. Like even, Even the evolution of stable coin yield has shifted tremendously, even after the SEC went after BlockFi and those other players. So I do think these neobanks are, this model is going to thrive. This idea of using stable coins more and more is only going to pick up. And companies that offer great yield or good services around stablecoins are going to continue to do well.

It is, I think, going to be a bit of a fork in how that plays out in the rest of the world versus the U.S. Points well taken. I am glitching hard here trying to be able to talk. Sorry about that, but we are here right at time. I think we covered everything we intended to today. And so we will be back tomorrow with yet another crypto town hall 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Give everybody on stage a follow. They deserve it. They're the best. And we will see you tomorrow.