The Wolf Of All Streets - Trump Goes All-In On Crypto – Is A Bitcoin Supercycle Starting?

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

►► Sponsored by Aptos, check it out here: https://aptosfoundation.org/ Trump’s crypto empire is growing fast – from ETFs to stablecoins to multi-billion dollar deals. I’m joined by Sidney P...owell from Maple Finance to unpack their new partnership with Cantor Fitzgerald and what it means for institutional Bitcoin lending. With $2 billion in BTC-backed credit now in play and Trump’s Truth Social ETF filing making waves, the crypto market is heating up fast. Don’t miss this breakdown of the moves shaping the future of digital finance. Sidney Powell: https://x.com/syrupsid Chris Inks will join us in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond. Chris Inks: https://x.com/TXWestCapital ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities! 👉https://archpublic.com/ ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trump 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.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 It's looking increasingly likely that soon you will be able to sign up for Trump exchange to trade Trump meme coin, and you'll be able to go to Trump bank to deposit funds using Trump stablecoin. It's very clear that the Trump Organization and all of the hangers on that are involved in Trump crypto are going all in on crypto. Some of them don't even know what the other ones are doing. There's controversy as to who's launching a wallet and who isn't. Either way, very clear that the Trumps are all in and it's probably going to buoy crypto for the foreseeable future. We're going to talk about this, of course, treasury companies and everything RWA, Bitcoin back loans and such with one of my favorite guests,
Starting point is 00:00:43 Sid from Maple Finance. And of course, we've got Chris Inks on the back end sharing some charts and taking a deeper look at the market. Another amazing show coming, let's go. Let's go. What is up guys? Give us a like and subscribe. We're contractually obligated to say that if we're going to be on YouTube, even if we don't deeply care whether you like or subscribe.
Starting point is 00:01:18 I don't know if it actually matters. I don't know if I actually care. I know someone who definitely doesn't care and it's today's guest. Sid, you don't care if they like or subscribe, do you? No, I'm kind of indifferent, but I want to see you succeed. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not sure if it helps or not, but let's actually dive into the show.
Starting point is 00:01:38 I want to start actually with what Maple is up to, obviously, because you guys had a huge piece of news here. Cantor Fitzgerald's 2 billion Bitcoin back lending arm makes first deals and reads the fine print Falcon X and Maple Finance. I saw that Falcon X actually is already drawn massively from this credit facility. Maybe you can just tell us what the deal is, what this means. Yeah, for sure. So Cantor has launched a $2 billion facility where they're effectively lending against Bitcoin. So, they announced last year that they wanted to get into the
Starting point is 00:02:13 Bitcoin back lending space and this is kind of the fruition of that. And so, in this case, both Maple and Falcon X are posting Bitcoin to borrow dollars or stablecoins from Canter. So we're really excited about it because Canter obviously has a terrific brand and they have a large balance sheet. And so for us, this is a form of wholesale capital that represents the entry of traditional finance into the space. But what it allows us to do is really grow the loan book that we do. So we are today sitting at just over 2 billion in AUM, but when lending companies want to scale, they try and access wholesale facilities like this because it allows us to do more lending and eventually it leads to getting your cost of capital down. We're hopeful that this just marks the beginning of TradFi really beginning to participate
Starting point is 00:03:08 in this space. Do you get better terms when you have a large credit facility with a single actor than you would if you had to go piece this together to increase your loan book? Yeah, it's much more scalable. I come from a debt markets background. Initially, when you do like the first one of these, you're typically paying what's called like a new issuer premium. And so things get a little bit more expensive at the start. But over time, what you do is you show a track record, you add other wholesale providers in, and you build kind of a name and a reputation in the market that allows your cost of capital to come down and the facilities that you get access to, to scale. So, you know, this is, Cantor's got a appetite to do $2 billion
Starting point is 00:03:55 of this kind of lending, which is good for us because it will allow us to scale the business significantly from here. So who then are the customers on your side? Like what's the path here? You have a institution come to you, they wanna borrow, then you go borrow from Cantor and sort of middleman. In a nutshell, the way to think about it is,
Starting point is 00:04:17 Cantor has, they're obviously a large diversified operation. And so they wanna be in the wholesale funding space, which means they wanna deal with a smaller number of counter parties and do larger loan sizes. They don't want to staff out hundreds or dozens or hundreds of people who are individually negotiating smaller loans. And so what they do is they effectively use parties like us and Falcon X for distribution. So we take a larger amount, we then break it into smaller loans and put them out to our customers and Falcon X does the same. The type of customers we deal with, we're more in the institutional side anyway, so we don't really touch retail. So we would be dealing with primes, OTC desks. Marketers, I would imagine.
Starting point is 00:05:06 Interestingly, market makers were the biggest borrowers of last cycle, but because they don't want to post collateral, almost none of them are really borrowing in size this cycle because they really only want to borrow when they can get it unsecured. And so if you look at it, like for a market maker, it almost never makes sense for them to say, I've got Bitcoin. What I'm going to do is post the Bitcoin to access dollars, because they're effectively the most efficient people at swapping Bitcoin into dollars. They'll just go and do that. So it's actually, it's family offices now more and more, like you might have a ultra high net worth individual who wants to buy some real estate or make some investments. We have on chain, on chain hedge
Starting point is 00:05:49 funds who might be running a yield strategy or they have a liquid token position. And then also some of the centralized exchanges now looking more and more at this. They want to provide lending and it's like banks. You remember like in the nineties, banks went through this big bundling process where you could get insurance, investment products, and now the exchanges are kind of doing the same thing. You can trade there, you have an earned product there, you can also borrow from them, and so that's also a good kind of customer set for us. And then the other one we'll talk about soon is these treasury companies I'm pretty interested in as well. Yeah, that's the next topic before we dive into the Trumps.
Starting point is 00:06:32 I'm curious how many of these people do you think are lending Bitcoin to borrow stable coins to buy more Bitcoin, assuming that Bitcoin will outpace their interest rate? Well, I think all of them will consider this type of strategy. I mean, effectively, it's like they have a capital, they have a layered capital structure, right? And at the bottom, you have your common equity, then you have prefect equity, convertible bonds, and other types of debt instruments. And my view is that if you have a well-managed capital structure, you can slip debt in there, where you might borrow against Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin. And the appreciation of Bitcoin, I mean, empirically Bitcoin compounded at what, 54%
Starting point is 00:07:08 or something like that over the last five or six years. So it does, the growth in capital does outpace your interest rate. But the main thing is, yeah, you gotta have good timing. 60% drawdown in between that number, yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don't wanna be, there's a saying, you don't want to be the six foot man
Starting point is 00:07:28 who drowned crossing a river that was five foot deep on average. And so that's the spot you want to avoid as one of these treasury companies. It's worth noting, Sailor had a facility, I think it was from Silvergate or SBB. Very early. There's like 300 million or something
Starting point is 00:07:44 back when he was like making just tiny bets. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It was very early on when he was starting out. It was also before the banks kind of collapsed in 2023. And so I view it as like for these companies, there's an intelligent way to use a facility like this,
Starting point is 00:08:01 which is it's smaller in size. It has a low, you It has either a low LTV or something that reduces your odds of getting liquidated. And you use it to opportunistically buy Bitcoin or whatever asset you're hoping to purchase. But then you pay it back. I think you want to be regularly paying it back anytime you issue instruments into the capital market. So if you do a round of pref equity or if you do common equity or converts, you use that to pay back our facility. And that's because when you tap capital markets, it's expensive in terms of the fees you pay investment bankers and also takes a while to roadshow and do a deal and settle.
Starting point is 00:08:42 and also takes a while to road show and do a deal and settle. That all makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of retail who do loans like this view it as a lifestyle loan that they're never gonna pay back, right? As long as they outpace it, even they use it to go live their life without having to sell and take taxable.
Starting point is 00:08:57 And you just assume that over time you keep up 35, 40% LTV, you'll generally be safe, never get liquidated. Yes. Never pay back. Yeah, yeah. It's actually different than how an institution would approach this. Yeah. An institution has to use it to somehow grow the business.
Starting point is 00:09:12 You'd hope it's not for lifestyle purchases by an institution or for throwing big parties. But for individuals who do these types of loans, often it's for lifestyle purposes. They might have a cash flow issue and they want to either fund a holiday or a wedding. Sometimes and more and more, I think we're seeing people use it to like take down money to say, put a deposit down on a house because they don't want to sell their Bitcoin. And interestingly, I've
Starting point is 00:09:40 actually seen the retail products evolve to where there's now a couple of people or a couple of firms who are looking at doing quasi-hybrid Bitcoin-backed home loans where you put down Bitcoin, you get enough for a deposit and then a bit extra for the home loan. But for the lender, they have both your Bitcoin and the real estate as security for their position, so they're in a pretty good spot. Nice position. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:05 They have the most pristine capital in the world and home, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And the reason that market exists, like I feel like you're getting paid pretty well to take on that risk. I mean, the reason that market exists is that banks still will give zero credit
Starting point is 00:10:20 to Bitcoin savings or crypto savings when it comes to, I think, yeah, which is changing and should change. As you said, it's the most pristine collateral in the world. Yeah, that's gonna change. That's a good segue, I think, into Bitcoin treasury companies.
Starting point is 00:10:34 My new favorite topic that I can't stop talking about on this show with every single guest. And you're probably the best one of everyone because you're gonna be participating in the back ground. Yeah. I mean, this credit facility is going to be one of the back ground. Yeah. I mean, this credit facility is going to be one of the tools I would imagine that these Bitcoin treasury companies are going to use to add Bitcoin to their balance sheets. So I think it's important maybe to once again, discuss the
Starting point is 00:10:56 nuance or the differences between the different kinds of Bitcoin treasury companies that go, I think, all the way from we're just going to take 5% of our cash and buy Bitcoin and put it away forever to hedge the hedge inflation all the way up to financial engineering, the strategies and the others that are going to find creative ways I think to raise debt and add Bitcoin to the balance sheet. And then the question in the title here is this, is a Bitcoin super cycle starting? I literally get hives when I hear the word super cycle. So if that's in my title, it's probably the top. But what does this mean for Bitcoin if we have all these buyers in the market? I think, yes, there's a lot of nuance in that topic, but I think broadly it's good for Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:11:40 if you have more of these newer buyers coming into market. And another way to think about it is that in some jurisdictions where it's harder to launch ETPs, effectively, this is a way to kind of create a synthetic Bitcoin ETP or ETF in those markets. Exactly what micro strategy was for all those years. Micro strategy was the first before. If you didn't have an ETF to buy, people would buy micro strategy for Bitcoin exposure. Yeah. Yeah. And was the first before... MSDR. If you didn't have an ETF to buy, people would buy MicroStrategy for Bitcoin exposure. Yeah. Yeah. And often the question comes up, why would you pay effectively $2 of NAV for $1 of Bitcoin? So you're effectively paying, you know, when you buy MicroStrategy, you're effectively paying $200k to purchase one Bitcoin. And the more intelligent answers I've heard
Starting point is 00:12:25 have been basically that they have an ability to compound Bitcoin per share in the same way that Warren Buffett used to look at book value per share. And Warren Buffett would be obviously unhappy to hear his company and investment strategy kind of likened to Bitcoin. But effectively, the proposition is they can compound your Bitcoin per share faster than you could in an ETF.
Starting point is 00:12:48 And so it's worth paying a bit of a premium. I don't know if a 2x premium is kind of still justified. And probably what you're saying is that the market is still trading at a 7 or 8x. Some of the new ones are at 6, 7, 8, 9x premium already. 100%. And the market's kind of correcting because more supplies coming online. So effectively, if there was a higher NAV premium, you're seeing that get hopefully arbed away by having more supply come online to serve the market.
Starting point is 00:13:16 But I think for some of these companies, it is just kind of a poison pill. You buy some Bitcoin. I've heard Jeff Park from Bitwise kind of expressed it nicely, which is if you have short sellers, adding Bitcoin to your treasury is a bit of a poison pill, where your company may not be doing well otherwise. But having Bitcoin that's appreciating in the treasury
Starting point is 00:13:39 kind of makes it very hard for somebody to short your stock, all the way up to the micro strategies of the world who are using very sophisticated financial engineering to accumulate more Bitcoin per share. And then now we've seen one more Bitcoin copycats and replicas of this, as well as the ETH version with the gaming company. I think it was, was it Sharelink or something,
Starting point is 00:14:06 it was announced the other day? I talked about it yesterday. That went immediately like in one year out the other, to be honest. But it's interesting, I think the consensus is actually participating in that with them. Yeah, yeah. And I generally-
Starting point is 00:14:18 They got a lot of XRP, yeah. And then you saw the XRP one, I think, was announced this morning, Weibu, a Chinese company. And then we've seen three or four Solana versions. Generally, I'm finding it's the same investors who are participating in all of these. I think they've identified what they think is kind of a short-term pocket where there's an opportunity here. And so far, the market is kind of rewarding them with these NAV premiums.
Starting point is 00:14:43 Longer term, what you don't want to see is, to my earlier point, so if these companies borrow and then they have the possibility of getting liquidated, debt is a tool. It can be used poorly or it can be used well, depending on how skilled the handler is. And so what you want to see is that they have effectively low LTVs and a lot of margin of protection from getting liquidated. And also healthy equity balance. Yeah, so that sort of speaks to the different ways people are going to do this. And I think the idiots who are going to come in at the top and do it wrong, but I guess that's a projection to the future. So we'll see. I mean, you have a sailor who effectively is just raising all this debt and convertible notes, but at the end of the day, it shouldn't be micro strategy shareholders. It's going to be the people who hold this debt
Starting point is 00:15:33 who are really at risk. Right. And so like, or I guess the shareholders of micro strategy, but they shouldn't have to sell Bitcoin in any of those scenarios. And I think that that's the ones that are structurally built like that. You're taking risk by either buying the debt or being a shareholder, but you're really not worried about it affecting the Bitcoin market long term. But if people start using credit facilities and taking 60, 70% LTV loans and Bitcoin drops 30%, they're going to puke their Bitcoin and that could affect them. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:03 Yeah. That's where you want to have, that's where my point earlier was that I think it's fine for companies to use debt intelligently. They'll naturally want to get higher LTVs when they talk to financiers like us. But what they should be doing is repeatedly paying down those facilities anytime they tap capital markets. So you can use it like a revolver, draw it when you think like if Bitcoin drops, that's actually when they should be drawing the facility, not when Bitcoin is hitting a new all time high. And then they use us to opportunistically add Bitcoin to their
Starting point is 00:16:33 stack at favorable prices, pay us down when they go and tap the capital markets and tap the capital markets with longer term capital that is more issuer friendly. And so if you look at some of Sailor's instruments, he has preff that pays a dividend, he has preff that pays no dividend or only when declared and it's non-cumulative, and then he has converts, which just convert into equity, right?
Starting point is 00:16:59 So he's not on the hook to sell big. Yeah, he's launching a new one every week at this time. Yeah, it's pretty, I think what's interesting though the differentiation between Sailor and the access these other have, A is the first mover, right? I think people trust it, they understand what he's doing.
Starting point is 00:17:15 I think what's always been brilliant about his strategy when you look at it is that he finds these new pools of capital with each instrument that can't get access to Bitcoin otherwise. We talked about it. MicroStrategy before the ETF was a retail way to buy it. Now he does these things where an insurance company can go buy his debt, but they can't buy Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:17:34 to put it on their balance sheet. Or some sort of like super risk managed large pool of capital that still can't buy Bitcoin, they can find their access with one of these products he's creating. I don't know that everybody else can do that or that there'll be a thirst for it since he's already done it. That's, yeah, I think that's where he's had the kind of the genius of evolving what he's offering. So as you said, initially it was a retail access play when there was only the
Starting point is 00:18:01 GBTC trust and there was no other ETFs. And then increasingly it's become more of an institutional play. And that reflects the fact that he's now got over 500,000 Bitcoin. So he has a scale where he needs to tap institutional players now to raise meaningful amounts of capital. But also institutions don't want to do a bunch of DD on an instrument unless they can put, you know hundreds of millions to work. And so that's where it's kind of, it's mutually beneficial. But also he's at a scale where he can use the best investment banks and distribute his, you know
Starting point is 00:18:39 distribute these instruments because you've got hundreds of millions, if not billions to to play with in terms of each issuance. But I do think, I mean, the converts were super interesting, right? Because he found a way to raise the capital. And then when he was issuing them, he was effectively pricing them at a lower volatility than they warranted. And so it meant that they were actually cheaper for the convertible debt guys and hedge funds to buy in market. And so that's why they were all ended up totally oversubscribed.
Starting point is 00:19:12 Yeah, I mean, I think it's clear that Michael Saylor is leading the charge here and we're gonna get a big wave. The question is how important is the eighth or the 10th or the 12th one of these? And where does the methodology break? And you mentioned obviously, it's all the same pool of investors
Starting point is 00:19:29 and they've done exceptionally well. I mean, that side of it is ICO 2017 all over again, just skinned into public markets. Actually the same people who are making the money on ICOs in 2017 are the ones funding these treasury companies. That gives me a little pause, but you know. Where it's really good for Bitcoin
Starting point is 00:19:47 is that he's bringing in new pools of capital, right? Like insurance companies, previously not doing anything in Bitcoin, and he found a way to create a structured product. And they will find their way, by the way, with time into, you know, the more Bitcoin direct products, ETFs or spot products eventually.
Starting point is 00:20:02 100%. There's somebody else who's clearly all in for reasons we can discuss. We've got the Trump family's net worth has increased by 2.9 billion thanks to crypto investments. No surprises there, but it's Trump everything right now. Right. So there was this huge report yesterday that Trump, as I kind of joked about the beginning
Starting point is 00:20:18 was going to launch his own exchange for the meme coin. Then we, I guess we get to that story. Trump meme coin wallet spurs divide among family's crypto camps. So then Donald Trump Jr. said, this isn't the Trump organization. That's Magic Eden with the team that launched the Trump token, launching a wallet. We're going to launch our own wallet at World Liberty Financial, right? And then you, so there you go. And they sent people a stimulus check and he got Trump stable coin, which Which is off to a rocky start and of course we have Trump launching a ETF
Starting point is 00:20:49 I mean this family for better for worse. They're doing it all There they're mirroring everybody's crypto journey, you know, try everything first See what sticks? Listen the Treasury companies have their risk This has its risk but it's got to be a net positive when you have the most powerful person in the world sort of all in crypto. Yeah, I wish I wish my NFT journey had been as good as theirs. It sadly wasn't. I didn't stick the landing. But yeah, I think- That's because you weren't the most powerful man in the world launching your own NFTs. You were buying other people. So there you go. Correct. Correct. So yeah, I'd say, look, it's net positive for the space that you have the most powerful man in the world showing an interest in it and pushing it forward from a policy perspective.
Starting point is 00:21:35 I think certainly they've kind of blitzkrieg my headlines. I can't go on to Wall Street Journal or any of these places without seeing a Trump crypto related headline. But what I would say is it's worth kind of keeping in mind, it's not one uniform faction, right? There's different people with different individual interests kind of behind the scenes. And so, when you have that many people and that many kind of cooks in the kitchen, it can be very hard to separate the signal from the noise. And what I would say there is there's probably a lot of people involved, whether it's in the truth social side or the meme coin side or the NFT side, or the world liberty side who have different conflicting, not always aligned interests,
Starting point is 00:22:19 who are each making their own plays. And so it's probably a mistake to just view this as like, this is kind of the Trump family, you know, making one uniform push for crypto. I think they're very interested in crypto and that's good for the space. But yeah, it's a mistake to view this as like one kind of uniform organization and not a bunch of different individuals with different interests.
Starting point is 00:22:43 I mean, I wonder how much appetite there'll be for a kind of Trump branded ETF, right? It's just gonna be a Bitcoin ETF to my understanding. We have a number of these. This is trying to compete with BlackRock. I wonder, I mean, maybe it's just, you know, listen, this to me is great. It's a publicly traded ETF.
Starting point is 00:23:02 Maybe it'll bring a bunch of like Trump fans in. I'd much rather than be buying truth, social Bitcoin ETF and Trump token. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we wanna see, as people in this space, we wanna see more new entrants participating and that kind of grows the pie for all of us. And so to that extent,
Starting point is 00:23:24 if it can capture the attention of people who are not presently in crypto and get them involved somehow, I think that's a good thing. If we see a Trump token 200 ETF, then things are probably going a little bit far, but I think Bitcoin as a starting point is reasonably conservative.
Starting point is 00:23:44 So there's one more huge piece of news that I think is worth discussing with you obviously and that is that meme coin platform Pumped out fund pursues one billion dollar token sale Obviously, I think we know that yeah, there's been the Bitcoin side and there's been the meme coin side and a lot of things in the middle have suffered but this is a this is a A lot of things in the middle have suffered. But this is a clear indication that there's some thirst still, or at least perceived, that the meme coin cycle will continue and that pump.fund has a ton of value.
Starting point is 00:24:12 Yeah, I think, I mean, early on, I kind of viewed meme coins as a bit of an inverse DeFi, where as long as DeFi was doing badly and you were going to get cracked down on by regulators, people switched from doing DeFi was doing badly and you were going to get cracked down on by regulators. People switched from doing DeFi stuff to meme coins because there was no expectation of profit. There was no business. There was no possibility of it being considered a security.
Starting point is 00:24:34 And I'd been hopeful that things would shift the other way. Now that we've seen a more pro-innovation regulatory environment, I think you can see that, you know, you can see that kind of meme coins have definitely had their moment and certainly Pumped Up Fund has been extremely successful from a revenue perspective. So I think they're opportunistically capitalizing on doing the token now. A $1 billion token sale is,
Starting point is 00:25:02 you know, if that's a primary issuance and that money's going to their treasury, that's, that's pretty massive. And I don't know, I actually tend to think like, surgeries can become slow and sloppy and lazy if they raise too much capital. Like I, I was perusing coin gecko the other day, looking at all the L ones that raised at $2 billion valuations a couple of years ago, and they'd raised 200, $300 million checks. These are all now for lack of a better term,
Starting point is 00:25:33 kind of zombie hedge funds. There are these treasuries sitting on $100 million of cash with a token that now trades at two or 300 million, no customers, no users on their chain. And they got lazy and sloppy and- But they're rich. But they're rich, but they're rich. And maybe they can go buy an exchange or something later on
Starting point is 00:25:53 as we saw a few of the 2017 ICOs do when they raised a bunch of money in Bitcoin. But as a team, if you're building, I think having that much money in the treasury kind of becomes a bit of a crucible, which prevents you from shipping quickly and continuing to be innovative on the product side. Yeah, I mean, I looked it up to get the I think they raised $4.2 billion in the last cycle, right?
Starting point is 00:26:21 I've seen people say it's high stakes, but I think it was 4.2. But block one, 140,000 Bitcoin. Block one, if they were like publicly, it becomes a Bitcoin treasury company, would be one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world. And it's literally money that was just raised from retail investors. And then they didn't have to do anything. It died and they just had to keep the money. Does that seem fair? Yeah. Didn't they have to like return that?
Starting point is 00:26:42 anything. It died and they should keep the money. Does that seem fair? Yeah. Wouldn't they have to like return that, you know? Yeah, it seems crazy. Like there should be, effectively, a sunset clause on it where the money has to get returned if you don't ship a product after a certain period of time. Because you just end up with these zombie companies. There are these massive treasuries. And I know a few of these now that just go around. Now they effectively just manage their treasury like a hedge fund. There's no products. There's no team building anything. And, um, you know, just the, the insight is taking exorbitant fees and salaries on it. I mean, but that's crazy because, you know, I mean, you're talking about.
Starting point is 00:27:21 Raising in Bitcoin in 2017 at those prices and now you're sitting here trading at a hundred and five thousand So it's not even like the more recent rounds of the last five six years where people raised in Tether or whatever in dollars for a token launch that you see they also Multiply their Bitcoin holding by ten eleven twelve times probably. Yeah. I don't know what point in that cycle, what price of Bitcoin was, and just get to sit on it. Yeah, 100%. It's broken and it's a distortion of market. If the Bitcoin Treasury companies pull that off, I'll be... Yeah. But coming back to Pumped Off Fund, I think it'd be interesting to see whether this marks the top,
Starting point is 00:28:02 or maybe not the top, maybe the issuance of Trump coin was the top for meme coins, see whether this marks kind of the top, or maybe not the top, maybe the issuance of Trump was Trump coin was the with the top for meme coins. But whether this is, you know, marks a high point in the market, you kind of bet, I guess you kind of bet yes on that. Yeah, given that like, Trump token showed us the ceiling of what's possible with a meme coin, for sure. Like, yeah, I think Trump token was definitely showed us the ceiling of what's possible with a meme coin for sure. Like, I don't think you ever see a meme coin launched by a bigger name that goes to a higher market cap than that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Maybe like a Doge or something returns, but like as for the meme coin market. And this is kind of the, I guess this is the peak of the pick and shovels play on meme coins. I guess the pick and shovels play was Go Pump.Fun as the major kind of platform for launching these and then that can be expressed in purchasing the token in this launch. So we'll see. I mean, $4 billion for a token is pretty frothy. If they can keep up the revenue stats, who knows how high it could go.
Starting point is 00:29:02 And I'm certainly not best positioned to opine on how meme coins will do from here. But I assume that- You don't have a meme coin credit facility with Pump.Fun? We looked not at meme coins, but NFT, lending back in the day. But the market's not big enough, in my opinion. It's too thin.
Starting point is 00:29:22 It's very hard to pick winners. It effectively just becomes like kind of throwing darts at a board. We've kind of focused our core around asset management on chain. And you can see in our loan book, we're trying to just concentrate on lending against Bitcoin, ETH, Sol, XRP, the large caps that we're comfortable with. And they can take 50 or $100 million loan sizes now. Whereas I don't want to spend two weeks underwriting a $1 million loan sizes now, whereas I don't want to spend, you know, two weeks underwriting a $1 million loan against a meme coin. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Anything else I might have missed or anything worth mentioning before I let you go?
Starting point is 00:29:56 No, I think those are the main things. I mean, the other thing we're kind of continuing to keep an eye on is kind of, you know, we touched on it before about the Bitcoin structure products, but I think Bitcoin DeFi is kind of continuing to attract market interest over the course of this year. We are, you know, we're looking at launching an LST of BTC to come later in the year. But I think the core thing that we see from all institutions is when they come into the space, they look at Bitcoin, they want to buy Bitcoin, and then the next things they think about after that are how do they get a yield on Bitcoin or how do they borrow against Bitcoin? And you're kind of seeing
Starting point is 00:30:27 that natural progression with some of those treasury companies we talked about earlier as well. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Well, everybody give syrup, Sid, still the best name on X, I say it every time, give syrup, Sid, a follow, check out everything at Maple, of course. And thanks as always, man, for joining. Really, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me, man. It was a pleasure. All right. Take care. Have a good one.
Starting point is 00:30:47 All right, guys. I'm waiting for Chris to arrive to break down some charts. I think he's having some computer issues. But of course, on a Wednesday, worth noting our awesome, I did, I pointed the right way, Aptos, obviously, the sponsor. So I think something I want to highlight because it's happening literally, I think, in 25 minutes. Pretty awesome. I was just with Avery, obviously, in Dubai. We just published the interviews I did with him for the street. So you should check that out on our
Starting point is 00:31:14 channel. We have a section, Street Interviews, now where we're going to be adding a ton of new content. But on Wednesday, June 4th at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, it's in 26 minutes, Avery will testify in front of Congress, the House Committee on Agriculture. They obviously play a critical role in market structure policy, so people are always surprised when you're like, why are we talking about the House Committee
Starting point is 00:31:35 on Agriculture for crypto, but they're actually the ones who oversee the CFTC and therefore who oversee derivative markets and such. But Avery will be testifying in front of them. Here's the topic, American innovation and the future of digital assets. Maybe we'll live stream this on my channel actually. From Blueprint to a functional framework that is today.
Starting point is 00:31:55 So getting market structure legislation correct, huge. And I'm glad that we have people like them that are going to be contributing to that. Meanwhile, obviously we've talked about the fact that Aptos' new focus is on creating this global trading engine, basically bringing all trading, all TVL to blockchains and specifically to the fastest, cheapest, and most powerful blockchains by Aptos. Well, that's obviously massively growing, as you can see from this chart. The daily DEX volumes on Aptos have now broken 100 million for the third time with total on chain trading surging over three and a half times since January
Starting point is 00:32:31 There's nothing to sign up for I just want you guys to have aptos on the radar check out everything You're doing if you're looking to build in this space. You should deeply consider building with them Chris I think is having some technical issues at the moment, unfortunately. So I'm going to call it now for the show. Thank you all for attending. Thanks to Sirup Sid for coming and offering his insight. I really think that the Bitcoin Treasury companies, everything Trump's doing, all of this is going to be the thing that we need to continue to watch because it's going to make or break, I think, the next cycle on how high Bitcoin goes. Whether we have a super cycle or not, I will be honest, I have my doubts,
Starting point is 00:33:14 not my favorite topic or term. That's all I got for you today. I will see you guys back here tomorrow.

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