The Wolf Of All Streets - Trump To Add Bitcoin To US Balance Sheet? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

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We have so much to talk about today that I'm already exhausted. We haven't even started. Politics is my least favorite topic, but I think that's inevitably going to be a part of the conversation today. And has to be, I think, when you're talking about crypto at this point. But we also have an Ethereum spot ETF launching tomorrow, which seems to not even be in the news cycle for understandable reasons with everything else that's going on. We have Bitcoin obviously has moved relatively well, trading back at 67,000 just a couple weeks ago was down around 53.

A lot of conjecture as to what's going to happen with the Ethereum spot ETF tomorrow. But then of course, we have the election cycle, what's happening there, Biden bowing out, Trump continuing to double down, conjecture that Trump is going to announce in Nashville that he intends to make Bitcoin a reserve asset, a strategic reserve asset of the United States, which the implications of are absolutely mind blowing. And then, of course, Elon Musk, although it's a dark Brandon thing, probably not a laser eyes Bitcoin thing, changing his profile photo to laser eyes and the organizer of the Bitcoin conference immediately retweeting it and saying, here we go, or are you ready or something to that effect? Then he gets suspended

for a few hours from the X comes back. That's David Bailey. And we'd already heard conjecture that Musk might be speaking in Nashville or even interviewing Trump in Nashville. That was before all this. And then Musk's jet landed in Tennessee. Anyone on stage want to jump on any of these things? Because I don't even know where to begin to start. Go ahead, DB. Yeah. So do we even know where the whole reserve currency Trump announcing at the conference started? And that seems kind of far fetched. Yeah, Dennis Porter leaked it last week. And he was actually on Spaces when he did so. I can tell you that, and I've said this before, the organizers of the conference, who I happen to be interviewing for The Street like an hour after that,

were not happy about that leaked announcement. And I heard from multiple people kind of loosely that, yeah, that was probably maybe going to be one of the big announcements of the speech and kind of would not have wanted that leaked and there could be implications to that. So it seems likely that that was at least going to be a part of the speech

or is likely going to be a part of the speech uh but maybe people should have kept their mouths shut if they'd heard that rumor that's what i've got crazy yeah that's uh we went in the span of what about six months from it not being discussed and not being a political topic at all to it now being discussed by both sides and now possibly reserve currency. It's that's just it's crazy how fast 2024 is going. Yeah, it's a really good talking point for a Bitcoin conference with tens of thousands of people there. That's some good red meat to throw. And you have to assume, listen, I'm not like nothing against any particular politician in general.

I think we know that to some degree, all politicians are politicians. They speak to the audience that they're speaking to. They're looking for campaign contributions from that audience. And Trump has already made a number of very Bitcoin crypto comments, obviously commuting Russell Brick's sentence. I mean, you know, killing a CBDC, not allowing it, guaranteeing the right to self-custody. It ended up in the Republican platform. Well, you got to imagine that with all of that already on the table, if you're showing up at a conference, you have to raise the bar, you know, come up with some sort of a big statement.

I can't speak to whether it would actually happen, what the logistics of that would be. But pretty wild. I mean, Simon, you're like, you know, you've been here for every cycle. This season of Bitcoin gone wild is bananas. I mean, I don't know what's going to happen in the next episode. Yeah, no, that's, I think, in general,

like we've been used to that in Bitcoin, but I think it's also a testament to the way the world's moving we have hit an exponential um type of world that we live in right now one is the news flow the news flow has come from x i mean let's just face it the president um of the united states stepped down he didn't go on tv he didn't do an interview he tweeted that he stepped down that's kind of do you think he tweeted it sorry do you think he tweeted it yeah well no yeah good point um but that's where the news breaks right so we knew that all of this was going to happen on x way before it happened on the news.

And so we've got this, you know, news cycle that's happening on X. We've got most of the announcements that, yeah, there's a lot of shit that goes out there. But most of the announcements happen on X before they actually happen in reality. we've got this artificial intelligence which is driving an exponential push in you know both automation and then trying to get the intelligence moving forward which is driving the rate of technological development and changes at a fast rate and then we've got our hard money story and the hard money story is just going exponential because the world is starting to figure out that while individuals are trying to protect themselves from inflation, some of the highest performing public companies like MicroStrategy have leveraged Bitcoin. And then now we've got Trump measuring who's got the biggest Bitcoin, where as part of his campaign, as soon as he started saying we're going to, you know, we're going to engage a Bitcoin strategy. He started coming after Bichelli on immigration policy as well. So there's clearly like a real Bitcoin undertone that's entered into politics.

And I think the reason that that big announcement is going to come is because he wants to one up Bokele and he wants to be as popular as Bokele. And now that will lead to a reaction from China. And China is highly likely to undo the Bitcoin mining ban when Trump pushes out his rhetoric of let's have the Bitcoins, you know, made in America. I mean, you've got the chips in Taiwan. That's a geopolitical play with reunification of Taiwan and China. You've got the machines which are made by Bitmain in China.

And then if all of the if, you know, over 40% of the hash rate and mining is happening through public markets in US, China would be a fool to not want to reverse that. And this would really play into many of the largest geopolitical trends that are happening globally. And now Bitcoin mining, as well as, you know, a lot of the miners are starting to diversify into the AI side, we are seeing a really, really significant push towards the importance of Bitcoin in the geopolitical side. And then that's translating right down to campaign financing. So the politicians that are getting ahead of that and giving the freedom that their people need in order to protect themselves from what central banks are essentially creating has fully hit the stage where once, you know, I didn't expect it to go straight from Bokele right to America. I thought that there would be a country like Japan that might be the first to really go and double down on it. But it's a real positive move. The current leader

and world reserve currency of the world may just be the first major country to really get behind Bitcoin. The impact and the consequences are huge. It's really, really big. Straight $2 million. If the United States adds Bitcoin as a reserve asset, every central bank in the world is forced to add Bitcoin as a reserve asset. And they're just not that much Bitcoin. I mean, I don't think that that's an insane, insane assumption. Dan, go ahead.

Yeah, it's just times times recently are crazy right like i've been involved in crypto for a very long time probably even longer than simon and the stuff that's going on right now this whole u-turn of the u.s and trump saying about reserve currencies and all this kind of stuff it's it's honestly blowing my mind right now because this was kind of a bit of the dream back in like the early 2010s of bitcoin will become the global currency and if these things happen as you were saying right you know politicians speak to their audience a lot and say things to acquire votes and all this kind of stuff but if this is legit then 2025 is going to be absolutely insane not just for bitcoin

but just for this entire space in general it will have what i guess legitimacy right because there's a whole portion of the population views crypto as you know a bit Wild West and a bit scammy and all these things. But if the U.S. is moving forward and actually does move forward with some Bitcoin on its treasury as a reserve component for the U.S. dollar, that's legitimacy through and through. And I think the whole narrative of crypto from that point forward will change dramatically. And maybe we'll start to see actual real mass adoption, which we've obviously as a space been striving for for a number of years now. And yeah, like the next three, five years is just going to be an absolute roller coaster if it wasn't already. So very excited to see where this is going and it feels like we're finally getting to the point where we all speculated where we might get 10 years ago give me very very cool very excited dan go ahead oh yeah first time uh hearing you dan sounds like

you're from the same part of the uk as me uh two days with the exact same voice yeah yeah exactly where are you from? I'm from near Mansfield. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm just in Stoke. So not too far. Oh, yeah, not too far. Wait, wait, wait. Dan Clark said not too far. Then Dan Hughes said not too far.

Yeah. Oh, not too far. I used to live in Manchester as well, guys. Yeah, yeah. We're pretty local right i've i've lived overseas for like 12 years like speak three languages so but my accent's kind of kind of gone quite a bit well i was going to come out that um i lived in germany for five years um speak german so i got a lot of time for germany but dude imagine being the german government if america yeah that's all i wanted to say i had nothing really insightful to say but to be fair to the if America adds it to its balance sheet right now. Oh, man. Completely mad.

Yeah, that's all I wanted to say. I had nothing really insightful to say. To be fair, Dan, the United States government is also still selling Silk Road Bitcoin. Right? Yeah. And we all know that the easiest way to add it to the balance sheet

actually would just be to stop selling the Bitcoin that the United States government already has, right? Wouldn't it be typical of government if one department was selling and another was buying rather than transferring? Well, we have one department selling it on Coinbase with another department saying Coinbase is an illegal exchange. That's the thing in Germany. It was local government in Germany that was selling it. It's not like a regional level. It was some Bundesländer under their local law. They were forced to dispose of it. Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.

What I find kind of astounding, I was talking about this morning on YouTube, is that there's been this debate as to whether all of this is priced in. Obviously, the answer is no. But for further evidence of that, if you guys look, which I found is really interesting, how strong this part of the cycle is, the summer doldrums

and the four-year halving cycle that you just predict this sideways chop. But think about it in this context. I think Bitcoin is either at the same price or maybe even slightly lower right now than when Trump started pivoting pro-crypto, when we saw a thawing on the other side. All of this political news, all of these tailwinds have happened in the past few months, and price is still $67,000. It may have been in the same...

Yeah, there's no way this is priced in yet, right? Like the whole price then thing, this over duration of maybe a month, maybe two months at a push, but this isn't even locked in until November, right? At the early. Right, but we went down as low as 54 with all of this news happening.

Just really shows, I think, I would love to hear Peter, just shows that how strong the charts can be if there's a right part of the cycle. Go ahead, Peter. Yeah, just pointing out that relative to gold, if we compare Bitcoin to gold, Bitcoin is 24% lower relative to gold than it was in April 2021. Despite the fact we have ETFs, despite the fact that we continue to hear the narrative about the collapse of fiat currencies,

despite the fact that we're in the back half of a halving cycle. So, you know, I still see Bitcoin as being a massive trading range, at least for this year. I mean, I'm impressed with the performance, the ability of Bitcoin to rally here off the recent lows. But when you look at Bitcoin from a longer term point of view against gold, against U.S. and also on a U.S. inflation adjusted basis, Bitcoin is lower than it was three years ago. Which, Peter, like from a purely technical perspective, right, when you adjust for inflation, it's lower. But that's where take the ETFs out, all of this,

that's kind of where Bitcoin should be at this point in the cycle if you believe in it, right? Because the parabolic move usually comes six to eight months after the halving. So that shouldn't necessarily be a surprise. I think what's a surprise is that with all this news, that's still the case. Yeah.

I mean, you know, Train the Bitcoins up. I own Bitcoin. I'm 80% committed in the money allocation I have to own crypto. So I'm extremely constructive. But at the same time, I have to be aware of shadows in the alley. Yeah. Scott, isn't it a little confusing though? Like all the stuff you rattled off at the beginning there with the tailwinds,

which like I'm really glad I already booked my hotel in the happy hour in Nashville. But isn't it a little, I feel like it's a little confusing that we're sitting here at 66.8 when like our job is to price everything in, right? And like we're all sitting here saying like oh my god look at where the market's at compared to what the news cycle looks like and um it just it feels a little there's something that's missing for me in this market knowing that like we are you know markets are 24 7 it could be priced in instantaneously these announcements are coming out

the speculation is coming out but maybe maybe we're waiting for that news. And just like a little tidbit here, I had Brandon Green from the Bitcoin conference. He puts together the conference on our live stream on June 19th. And he said, his quote was, if we are successful, you will remember this conference for the rest of your life. But that was before they announced Trump or that Trump was going to be there. So I'm kind of wondering, are we getting like a double whammy with two kind of

major announcements now that kind of Trump has got there? So I mean, Musk and Trump are arguably the two most recognizable faces

on the planet. Yeah. And maybe they're just going to walk in with, you know, physical Bitcoins and we're all going to use physical Bitcoins as cash now. Who knows? with the switch but i mean you're talking about the two arguably highest ticket people on the

planet going to a bitcoin conference in a smaller city than it's been in in the past i mean the potential for insanity is beyond even i think my comprehension uh dan clark not that we'd be able to tell which dan was talking um yeah um i think sim was a little bit for me, but I'll jump in. I just think the idea of Trump announcing that Bitcoin is going to be a reserve asset, I haven't processed it. I don't think we all really have actually processed the reality of that being announced on stage and that being a genuine thing to the point where this cognitive dissonance where I think like, I can't believe it's going to happen so i sort of think like i don't want to think it's going to happen i mean i'd love it to happen but i think it's not going to happen it's just too big it's

like looking directly at the sun i just i can't get my head around it does anyone else feel that way it does but maybe the you know maybe the market reaction come think about this way you know when would it actually happen? So I think people as big of an announcement as it is, we haven't seen the market move on these sort of announcements. And I think that there's a inherent mistrust, maybe not anymore, strangely, of Bitcoiners for politicians, whoever they are, right? I mean, Bitcoin's never been supposed to be, we don't need saviors and politicians for Bitcoin to succeed, right? I mean, that's always been this sort of core ethos. But I think then maybe if, you know, Trump actually gets elected

and we're in the parabolic part of the cycle, if that happens, and then the United States actually adds Bitcoin to the reserve, like that announcement comes out. Because, I mean, first of all, as a trader, like you're not going to front run yourself and tell everybody what you're about to do, right? The smart thing would be to do to accumulate the sum of bitcoin and then make the announcement the united states has added it to the balance sheet right um but i i just i like i'm having

more trouble fathoming that the all these people could be in one conference at one time talking about bitcoin go ahead simon and then dan you know it's because the reason it's not priced in is if you speak to people outside the Bitcoin world, barely anyone knows that Trump's coming to the Bitcoin conference. I don't think the media coverage will be there unless you get an announcement like that. So the announcement of that Trump would like to do that will get worldwide global media.

It will bring in a lot more people that are interested in Bitcoin. And that's not factored into the price if this announcement comes. The reason it's not factored into the price is because the vast majority of people probably don't believe it's going to happen. And you're right to be conservative, but most people just think it ain't going to happen if you're involved in the Bitcoin community. Yes, Simon, you're absolutely right. So like we hear that, right? It's a tweet that he sent got like 12,000, you know, like likes or something. I mean, that's big for our echo chamber, but nobody knows anything about that. And just picture, you know, I'm not saying this will happen, but if you got Musk and Trump on stage together and that announcement happens, that is

international mainstream media and sticky. Yeah. And not only that, it's all the other countries' reactions to such an announcement that will be, you know, that's the trigger event for everyone saying, well, why aren't we doing this? And if you play the game theory as it keeps going now, we're years and years away from, you know, this actually becoming like the the U.S. government selling some of its dollars to buy Bitcoin. You know, that would take years to play out. But you're starting a new four-year cycle um trump's smart as hell uh we have to keep him accountable to if he said that that's what he's going to do it that's what he's going to do um but this will take a long time to roll out but if you roll it all out with the upcoming cycles it's just clear that if more and more countries are using it as a reserve asset when they need to clear between each other the natural choice would be sell fiat buy bitcoin

uh buy you know receive bitcoin sell fiat so that that is a closer and closer to a bitcoin standard it's not the full it's not the full vision of what it comes into yeah but it's organic and that's the whole point of it that when you gave people the ability for the supply and demand economics of bitcoin to roll out one by one everyone would figure it out and eventually every central bank figures it out as well as every treasury figures it out um and so it's it's all it's that organic move we've got years and years to go. And so that's why everyone always says, you know, every single year it's too late, I've missed the boat. It's just never too late in Bitcoin because it's just got all of these news flows and all these adoption cycles ahead. Bitcoin just needs to do what it's always done. It doesn't need all this mass appeal, new application. It's already got

the killer app and more and more people will discover that they need it over time. Yeah. Central bank FOMO was not necessarily on my immediate bingo card, right? Central banks rushing to beat each other to get Bitcoin cheaper. That's a scenario that I think we can all get behind. I would go ahead and maybe, no, not financial advice, but maybe buy a little more now. Go ahead, Dan. Yeah, just like echo a lot of what Simon says, right? Like this isn't going to happen on January the 6th when if and when Trump gets into office and suddenly the US

has got a load of Bitcoin on its balance sheet it's going to take some time, some latency to figure out but at the same time we've also still got I think a little bit of fear in the market as well, we've just had Germany dumping a lot of Bitcoin the Mt. Gox Bitcoin have just

been distributed, Kraken are doing the distribution of that at the moment. So people are maybe a little bit apprehensive. What's going to happen to those Bitcoins? Are they going to be held? Are they going to be dumped in the market? There's all the Celsius stuff that's still going on. You know, we're still suffering quite a bit from all of these catastrophes from the last cycle.

And we still made an all-time high, Dan. How crazy is that? Yeah, yeah, we still made an all-time high, Dan. How crazy is that? Yeah, yeah, we did hit the all-time high, but I was quite surprised when it didn't keep going. And that kind of told me that, okay, there's still some caution in the markets because of all of the stuff from three or four years ago. I think once we get through paying off that debt so to speak

is is a market i think then all of these positive actions from trump um you know u.s treasury other countries will start to take interest and take note as well i think that will be the time when we've cleared the balance sheet we're back zero. Then all of this positive news can really start to get some traction. So, you know, that's going to be 25, maybe leak into 26. But on the upside there, the bear market of 25, 26, if we finally get a proper ball run, maybe won't be so deep because there's all of this good pressure backed up, ready to just let rip as soon as we've got through all of this dregs of the past,

end of the ball market with all of this kind of bad news and catastrophes that we had. So I think the next bear run won't be anywhere near as strong and as long as we've seen i think this is maybe the point where the very regular cycles maybe change a little bit for a while because the the whole landscape from here looking forward it's just very different to what it's been before and couldn't there be an argument that the upside is also capped in the same way as the downside as it becomes more institutionalized? Potentially, but I think that's at least 2x from where we are. So it's fairly healthy in terms of, like, you know, if you think where Bitcoin is in terms of value right now,

it's never going to have another 100x, right? Because that would just be ridiculous in terms of global markets and gdps and all that kind of stuff but i think over the next 12 24 months there's there's definitely at least a 2x maybe a 3x there um that's very that is very muted for big question i mean that is muted yeah we had 16 17 X's in previous cycles sometimes. Yeah, but there's just no upside capacity for that at the moment. I agree. I think maybe over the next 10, 20 years, you can maybe see a 10, 20 X. But that's obviously over a number of cycles, right? But for the market cap that Bitcoin is at and the potential where it can capture value, a 2 or 3x is extremely healthy at this point in its life cycle. And I think that if all the dominoes fall in the

right way, you know, we get rid of this legacy death from the previous cycle trump is elected the u.s starts to put bitcoin on its treasury all the countries follow suit then yeah there's a really strong upside here and it really then starts to perform as a very very good store of value competitive to gold over the over the macro there's two more news events in the Bitfinex DOJ coins. They just got moved on-chain, 95,000 Bitcoin. I can share a bit about the economics of that one.

But also, officially, Dr. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, proven in court and as tweeted by himself and put on his website. He tweeted this? He had to. No, come on.

He had to. Really? He had to. It was a court order. Court order and pinned, yeah. Oh, you know, so unfortunately for me, I'm enjoying a bit of a birthday vacation over the past few days, so I'm missing all this really meaty stuff. First thing I'm going to do after this space is go and find out.

You're not allowed on a holiday in Bitcoin anymore. It's like allowed you'll miss something maybe no no it's impossible you're just juggling all the time yeah uh but the bitfinex ones are a bit interesting because bitfinex and the doj have like outstanding settlements um the coins were every all of the creditors settled with Bitfinex when they accept the BFX security token. They could either hold it as debt converted to equity or sell the token on the market. So that was resolved in 2016. But they had the issue where they filled the hole from the crypto capital government seized funds where they had $850 million missing. And they filled that with their Leo token, which is their exchange token. And also creditors in the original hack received a recovery right token. So officially, those Bitcoins belong to Bitfinex.

So they hit Bitfinex balance sheet and then they've got to be used in order to recover the recovery right token people. Then they've got to be used in order to purchase their Leo token in line with the white paper. And then the rest will be on shareholders balance sheet as well. So they don't actually go to the original hack victims because they settled. But at the moment, the DOJ is just keeping them. I think they're trying to keep them at the moment. So there's an argument around that.

I just want to know if Rosal Khan is going to make a video about the, rap video about the Bitcoin coin, Bifnex coins moving. Yeah, what was the outcome? She's in prison now, right? I think so. Look, she should have just been in prison for her rap videos. I don't even know what she did with Bitfinex, but I think that was enough.

Go ahead, Dan and DB. Yeah, a couple points. I think Bitfinex have to make holes, people. They have to buy back the Leo tokens, they have to do X, Y, and Z. But there's not necessarily a requirement that they have to sell the BTC to do that, right? They could use other assets on their book.

They could, you know, they'll have cash or whatever. So I think that may be somewhat muted. There's a chance, yeah, they'll probably have to sell some of that Bitcoin, but I don't think it's as bad. Even if it is as bad, $850 million is not, you know, insurmountable. We just saw Jeremy sell, you know sell tons and tons more than that.

The other point I want to make is I think whoever wins, and it doesn't look like it's going to be Trump. I would prefer it to be. I think he's better for all of our backs. But whatever regime comes in, you know, Gensler has, I think, said today he's going to step down. I saw that. That might be unconfirmed, but I think he said he's going to step down. Just for clarity on that article, it was a stupid article that a guy was saying that historically, if a party switches, you see the SEC chairman step down within

a couple of months because they're no longer, and they were conjecturing that's what would happen. But I think we do all agree that Gensler would be toast if Trump was president. Yeah. So if Trump comes in, Gensler's toast. If it's Kamala or whoever else, there's a chance. Whoever comes in after Gensler is going to have to be a lot more accommodatory towards crypto and Bitcoin, 100%. The SEC got such a bloody nose with all of these, everything. They tried to sue Ripple.

They've gone after Coinbase. They lost in the appeals call, all that kind of stuff. bloody nose with all of these you know everything they got you know tried to see ripple they've gone off the coinbase and um you know they lost in in the appeals call all that kind of stuff whoever comes in has to be more accommodatory than gensler so come what may i think whoever comes in next is going to be a lot better for crypto i i can't see it being the same case gensler's just doubled down and doubled down and not knowing when to stop once he's out whoever comes in is going to be more commentary, surely. Yeah, I think it's interesting, Dan, when you talk about Gensler,

because people might remember that when he was appointed, we, as an industry, cheered him, right? We couldn't wait for Gary Gensler to become the SEC chair. He was teaching about blockchain at MIT. He understood. He was one of us. He loved it. He had said that a lot of these things were commodities and not securities and then went completely the other way.

So this is not a statement about any specific politicians. But as a Bitcoiner, I would just like you to remind you that what a politician says before they're in office and what they do after do not always align. So temper your expectations of any of them. Yeah, I was just thinking about a question along those lines. But you are of them. Yeah, just thinking about it. Along those lines, but you are right. I mean, it can't get worse. It has to change tack. I mean, look, look how they've lost a lot of standing in everything. You know, they have been on the losing side of lawsuits brought against them. You know, I think it has to change.

It's just changed. Yeah. I mean, it's just become politically unpalatable to palatable to be anti crypto for now. Right. And that's the most important point, regardless of who's there. I think it's important to also remember you brought up Ripple. Gary Gensler gets a lot of shit for that. But that was Jay Clayton under the Trump administration. You know, Gary Gensler inherited it, but he didn't start the Ripple case. I despise Gary Gensler, by the way. I'm just saying it's politics or politics on both sides to some degree.

DB, then Jonathan. Yeah, so I wanted to touch on the predictions that Dan was mentioning a little bit ago. He mentioned two to three X, which two to three weeks ago, I would have completely agreed with. I think most of us probably thought similar. And now my question, though, and this might be a good question for Peter, if Trump is honestly considering this as a reserve currency, isn't the gold market cap possibly a reasonable target in the next few years? Yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, my target for September 2025 is, you know, 140 to 150. And that would end this bull market cycle, you know. And a normal, typical correction in Bitcoin has been 80%.

Although I don't think we see 80% declines anymore, corrections, you know, more like 30 to 40%. So, yeah, I'm not sure that the next two years but definitely in the next four years i would think a half a million is probably a pretty good target love that um jonathan go ahead dan go ahead yeah yeah so uh my two to three x was for this cycle, right? So I'm talking the next 12, 18 months, because we are kind of in the run-up to a bull. So with all this positive news, reserve currencies, et cetera,

that will, I think, get priced in somewhat over this cycle. But as I said, there's going to be a lot of latency between trump being elected and then that actually becoming fact on the u.s government's balance sheet so i think in in the next cycle if these things happen then there is a much greater potential upside for for bitcoin in the next bull run and you know crypto in general as well right um i would imagine that at some point the u.s treasury will after they've acquired some bitcoin for their balance books we'll start to look at all the cryptocurrencies as well and as a means of diversification um so you know ethereum and some other top 10 cryptos will probably end up on there as well.

But I think that's for the next cycle. And in that instance, I think the upside there is definitely huge. Yeah, I mean, you can't dismiss the possibility that you hear about it at the conference and never hear about it again. Sure, yeah. possibility that you hear about it at the conference and never hear about it again sure yeah i i just think that like governments move slow right governments move very slow so the announcement now doesn't it's not going to happen this cycle it's going to happen during the next bear in the next cycle which is also why i think the next bear cycle will not be

as deep either because if this all comes to fruition then this will be going on there'll be a lot of positivity even though we're in a bear market it won't go as deep and then we'll feel the effects of that not so deep bear market in the next ball and it'll just be stratospheric all right jonathan yeah just uh just to go back to Gensler I mean I despise the dude but in his defense when Clayton brought that suit against Ripple like the day before he left so I mean

but Gensler I don't know if that was like an institutional FU to Gensler but but Gensler, he basically said, hold my beer, and we are where we are now. Yeah, that got thrown at him the day he started and the day after Clayton left. Yeah, savage. For sure. No question there. But it's just important to remember that you know some things are inherited from previous administrations either way um you know i just like i keep hammering

the point home and it's nothing against any politician or any party or whatever but the point of bitcoin is to not have to talk about any of this right uh just opt, self-custody and live your life. So I think anybody else have a strong opinion on what would happen if we have Bitcoin added to the balance sheet? Andrew, quickly, I own a ton of it already. Right. So they own a ton of Bitcoin. I think just generally in life and absolutely in politics and in finance, you know, nothing is ever as good as it seems or as bad as it seems. Reality kind of is somewhere in the middle. And so, you know, whether or not there is an announcement at the Bitcoin conference, you know, quote unquote reserve asset, I don't think we'll probably get anywhere near to the actual term and an architecture of Bitcoin as a reserve asset for the United States. Now, we'll probably be in a position with Trump where, you know, there's no chance that Bitcoin is going to be sold. There may be more Bitcoin, quote unquote, added to the balance sheet, but turning it into a reserve asset, that's an entirely different conversation that you're now talking about

competing with the dollar as the global reserve asset. That is, we're far, far, far, far afield in terms of geopolitics, the power of the United States, yada, yada, yada. So I think we should probably be cognizant of the realities of the idea of what does Bitcoin as a reserve asset for the United States actually mean. Now, that doesn't mean that the value associated... Strategic reserve, right? Yeah, right. The value of having Bitcoin held by the US government and not sold, right? So, you know, there's a version where Trump loses. He's not going to be against Joe Biden anymore. That's gone. There's going to be a different candidate. There's a version where Trump loses and the process by which we've been dealing with regulatory issues currently may subside a little bit, but it's still going to be a negative atmosphere. So,

you know, while currently all of the quote unquote boogeymen associated with downside risk with Bitcoin and crypto overall have been mostly taken off the board. That doesn't mean that new boogeymen can't find their ways into the conversation on a go-forward basis. But we are in a unique spot. This is going to be a very, very unique week. There's going to be new and increased eyeballs on Bitcoin based on the conference and Donald Trump's presence there. I'm going to be there. To what level I'm going to actually try and show up at the conference on the 27th, I'm not entirely sure. Nashville being able to handle 50,000 Bitcoiners and a bunch of Trump people, that's going to be absolutely wild. And Secret Service getting them in and out of the conference two weeks after the assassination attempt.

I mean, absolutely. It's going to be nuts. I thought the conference in Miami two years ago with 32,000 people was crazy. Miami can handle that. Nashville is not Miami. So we're going to find out. But in terms of a reserve asset, that's a bit rich for me. But at the same time, you've removed so many of the downside risks associated with Bitcoin. And you've seen that over the past three months. Bitcoin has traded in a range. We were at 54K 17 days ago.

We're now at 66, 67. So the price action has materially changed. You have huge, huge institutional players that get on TV and claim their fealty, quote unquote, to Bitcoin and call it a meaningful, institutional financial instrument. So the narrative has been reset. Price action isn't going to go meaningfully lower um but it's just a question of what is the upside associated with the narratives we'll find out you know we'll find out mario you're here what's i am scott i'm always here man lurking when i'm not meant to be here judging yeah yeah enjoy enjoy uh looking like

hopefully it won't go to to nashville and after hearing andrew speak i'm kind of glad that i'm not going to nashville it sounds pretty you've been glad the whole time let's be honest yeah did you guys discuss much um i wasn't there for the early stage but you discussed biden dropping out much we i mean we didn't get too deeply deeply into it. But you saw what the markets did because it's nothing major, but it's like dropped by 2K, just under 2K and then picked. And then right after Kamala Harris was picked.

And the way I'll tell you how I interpret it, getting your quick thoughts on this before we move to the sponsor. So when it dropped by 2K, I'm like, you know, there were fears that maybe trump won't win because obviously trump winning is positive for crypto so then the immediate fear is that trump may not be able to win and then when kamala harris was picked the market picked you know kind of rebounded

pretty quickly obviously i'm just speculating he rebounded pretty quickly as people assuming that hey kamala doesn't have much of a chance against trump obviously agree or disagree on this the polls i have there's not too many polls um especially post-assassination there's one apparently by cnn yesterday that showed that is pretty much neck to neck um but that's a separate discussion but that's how i interpreted the the news and the impact it had on the market but it was a lot weaker than i think it was a lot less than i than i than i would have uh i would have predicted maybe because it was expected as elon said yeah we sort of just we did uh talk a lot about how we've had all this news and price is basically

the same. Yeah, politics, no matter what. The political discussion is fascinating. It's, you know, politics is an absolute circus. You know, there's a Showtime show about it being a circus, oddly enough. But it's hard to quantify, at least in my mind. I'm in my 40s. So two things um, that quote unquote narrative is being aggressively pushed off the board as quickly as possible. Um, and then at the same time, as it currently stands, can somebody let me know who's the current commander-in-chief of the United States? Yeah, no one knows.

There's a lot of people posting memes that Joe Biden stepped down from the race as a joke. So it's for everyone to speculate. Some people say it's the establishment. Some people say it's the close family and friends. But that's never been a meaningful question in my mind. And again, I understand the reality of the deep state, understand the reality of politics, you know, understand the reality of all of those things. My eyes have been wide open, you know, my entire adult life. But at the same time, I've never had to, you know, openly ask the question, if there was some sort of mass tragedy that occurred, who would be at the helm right now? That there, you can't, who is that?

I don't know. You're Jill Biden. Yeah, so that's why people were calling out, calling for him to not only pull out of the race, but step down completely for the same reason. But yeah, I think it's, think it'll be good for another discussion. There's the hearings today. There's an interview about Trump tomorrow.

And Kamala Harris will probably be giving a speech, I think, today. But yeah, we'll go through it a bit more tomorrow. But let's get into another industry that's a lot more exciting. Not more exciting, but at least more positive in the political landscape in the US. And that's the AI more exciting. Not more exciting, but at least more positive than the political landscape in the US. And that's the AI world right now, Web3 AI.

Fede, Fyde, how are you guys? Doing great. Thanks for having us. That was a fantastic conversation, by the way. I know that I should be really excited about getting to talk about us, but that was just... You're talking about... I'm in next time, jump in. to talk about us but that was that was just uh you're talking about you're talking about the conversation that you talk about the conversation that 80 percent

that scott was talking about the 90 95 so the five percent that i was talking which was i think the interesting one but yeah both of them there i mean also just the what happens when you add a non-kensian asset to a kensian economic system and then, stand back and see what happens to the disruptions and, you know, the political fallout right there. It's just a, what a time to be alive. But yeah, but I think, I think people are ignoring how, how, how AI is not ignoring, but people are forgetting. I was thinking about it a few days ago. We're doing all these spaces on, on, on, you know, the assassination attempt, Biden stepping down.

And now we're going to do a lot of spaces and coverage. And in general, a lot of news coverage on the political development. But then I'm like, all right, so I needed, you know, my partner was feeling sick. My girlfriend was feeling sick yesterday. We checked chat GPT to see what's wrong before asking, you know, the doctors that we work with. I wanted to check what seafood has um the most um um what is it mercury the hell most mercury and then we use chat gpt

like it's just everything i do now i can talk to chat gpt and everything i do and this is like the most basic stuff the most basic basic stuff and it's already so integrated in our lives and that and no one no one's even talking about it. And then one of my team members calls me, he's like, Mario, there's an AI company that they focus on education. We should look at acquiring them. They've got X, Y, Z deals. They've grown at this speed. And I'm like, wow, we're all obsessing over the political side of things. But what really matters is what we're going to be talking about now, well, AI in general.

But I just think people are getting distracted by shiny object syndrome, the exciting stuff, the important stuff. So, yeah, that's where I stand. And I message my team, I'm like, guys, we need to pick up our AI shows again because we need to triple down on those. But, yeah, man, it's not about us, not about the AI in general, but it's about you guys. So tell us how you leverage. First, how do you pronounce your name?

But then second, how are you leveraging AI? What are you building? I think the best way I describe it is essentially you're going to leverage AI to spot alpha and web three. Correct. There's other people doing the same thing, but that's a really interesting concept. Yeah.

So, so thank you for the, for teeing it up. The first thing I would say is, you know, everybody that, that says that they're, you know,

looking into AI, whether or not you think, and you're running a company, whether or not you think you're an AI company, you already are an AI company. It's all, it's everywhere. Just like you said,

the, the way I would describe FIDE AI, or you can call us FIDE, we're global, we're okay with everybody's pronunciation. But the way we do what we do is we help people, hedge funds in particular, enter and exit trades based on a series of neural network predictions. So we use convolutional and recurrent neural network predictions to generate spot price predictions for where we are right now. And then what we do is we have a token in market. We actually just filled our IDO this past weekend with Nova seeds of the first one. We're going to do another one soon, but you'll be able to take our token and then humans can participate in nudging those predictions

one way or the other. So it's one of those things where if you just have a hard technical solution, you build in systemic risks. So you don't capture the human psychology and the non-rational actors in the market doing non-rational things. And as long as people are pulling the levers, you need a people signal to have a working model. So we'll generate a series of AI predictions. We'll predict which one of those is going to do the best. And then we use the data in our games to move those predictions one way or the other to generate a final prediction to, to, to provide guidance.

So we, yeah, did you go ahead? No. So if I'm a user, can you, can you take me down the process of, of,

of how it works step by step from the, from the beginning to the end? Sure. So if you're, if you're a user, what you do right now is you go and you get, you know, tokens from the faucet or you pick them up on the market um you go to spot.medified.io you go in there and you play the tokens in the game

and what you can do is we'll publish say the predicted price of bitcoin at 66 535 in five minutes what's the what's the website spot.what i'm actually actually going to as a speaker oh yeah spot.meta fight.io and as long as you have mantle tokens on the mantle mainnet and for gas fees and you have uh tokens which you can actually get right now anybody listening can get them uh can get free tokens at faucet.medified.io you can just go there and just to be clear metafied is meta as in the company meta and then fired your name okay yes okay that's okay continue faucet.metafied.io and you you can just get as many up to 100 per hour if you want right now so you pull the tokens down i'm on the on the spot.metafied.io all right what are you doing so what you would do is is you go through there and you look at the game that's open and um there'll be a predicted

price for Bitcoin. And what you can say whether or not you think that prediction should be higher or lower. So you'd take the over or under, right? So you're looking at 66,258, right, is the AI forecasted price. And the real-time price is 66,697 right now. So you can take those two signals and say, all right, I think because of the market, the way it is, whatever my intuition, whatever I'm feeling as a human, I think I'm going to choose over. So you choose the over, you authenticate the wallet. And as long as you go through that process, it's okay. Again, you have to have mantle tokens on mainnet to be able to do it. But once you've selected your position, the game runs. And what happens at the end of that game, you can then take, if you win, 80% of the losing sides tokens are distributed to the winners and 20 percent of the tokens get

burned so it's a deflationary signal it incentivizes people to not only play to win not just play to just run up you know the number of games but you really should invest in the quality of your signal and make sure you're making a good forecast because there's real value to be won if you do it correctly and when you have people playing to win and trying to beat the AI prediction, you get this really great signal, this alpha, that then we can apply not only to operate the treasury for this game, because every 90 days,

we take 25% of our gains and buy back those tokens and burn them. But we also use them for our institutional partners. So we have Ethos Digital and Dchain Capital and some of those folks are hedge funds partners that we use. We'll use that signal on behalf of them as well as the treasury that we're operating for this game. So we use our own signal

and we take the people and what they're saying and sort of bump the prediction one way or the other. And it creates a really accurate feedback loop. All right, I'm just going through the platform as we speak. David, go ahead. I'll see you on mute. Oh, yeah. I actually have a question for you guys. We see a lot of AI companies coming into the blockchain industry lately. And I'm always curious as to what the motivation is.

Why did you guys decide to what the motivation is. Like, why did you guys decide to create the FIDE AI token? Why didn't you just stay in Web2, working with hedge funds and make all this money that way? Well, it kind of ties in with your earlier series of conversations. I could just go into an AI company. I'm currently an advisor for Glasswing Ventures out of Boston. I was their first technical advisor. I get to see a lot of AI deals for them. I'm very familiar with AI. My last company was Tala AI. I sold that. Prior to that, I co-founded SocialFlow, which we use to score and distribute news. And it's the largest media distribution company in the world. We use AI for all that. But the answer to that question is, I think there's nothing more

important than ensuring the viability of the crypto markets right now. I think it's probably the most important thing I could do with my time to be able to help create a fair and free economic system. I've been buying Bitcoin since 2010 for the reasons Satoshi put in the Genesis block. And I really feel like we need to have something that's inclusive and open to the participation of the average common market participant that provides value and gets them integrated into this economy. And I think that blockchain is the best way we can do that. And until we have that system, we're never going to have the kind of world that I think I'd be satisfied to live in. So I saw this opportunity as a chance to help, you know, take some of the systemic risk out of the crypto markets, you know, make money as we're doing it.

And also, but share that with the users of the system so that the holders of the FI token, if what you're saying is, oh, I think AI applied to financial markets is going to be a net benefit. Then what you do is you just buy and hold the FI tokens as the def black swan events and you know freakish things that we've kind of become acclimated to in crypto and helps helps reduce the likelihood of those things happening by getting people involved with the mathematical modeling a quick question on my end um is the token you've launched a token already haven't you not long ago uh yes that's correct we we only have it available through the faucet right now we're about about to list on MEXI and possibly Bybit. We're going through the thing right now. So the token is only available through the IDO and the faucet right now. When did you launch it? Last week. Why did you launch it? The markets are not doing that well for VC-backed projects. You raised a fair bit how much did you raise from vcs uh about a million and a half right now um but that's a

great question the reason why we launched it is because i want the signal of the people who literally care the most about using the token when it when it's not i want the true believers we marched we launched at a time when we weren't aiming for maximum economic benefit for the company's fundraising, but to try to find the right set of users who are going to use the token in this game and help us create a clean early indicator and alpha that we can use for everything that we're doing. I think the market will get there and we'll benefit from it, but I just really believe in what we're doing. So it was better to get it in the market when sort of there wasn't a lot of noise and we can just do what we have to do.

How much is your strategy moving forward? My strategy is to move off. So as the spot price game continues to go, we're going to stand one up in a couple months here to let people predict the boundaries of a perpetual. And then we're going to do one that helps people select the open interest on options as those windows start to open up. We're going to extend probably to Ripple, Chainlink and Solana because the market will sustain those. There's enough signal to do those models. Then we're going to move to Forex,

and then we're going to move to all commodities. So we're going to be able to use this platform that we're doing to essentially help nudge the market for all commodities and derivatives. So that's up to $45 trillion. Isn't Master Backy like, look, Joe is on stage. We've worked with joe he you probably know of lunar crush the analytics model oh yeah he knows that we share an investor blockchain founders fund invested in best oh they these guys are everywhere all the good projects that's one of

the reasons we got involved as well they're pretty epic but yeah i want to get joe's thoughts on this i'm sure he's got some questions as well. Yeah. Shout out to Mansour and Ali, I guess. Yeah. Quick question. Like, how do you, how do you think about,

you know, when you're kind of looking at your roadmap, you're looking at the product and you're trying to figure out, Hey, like we've saturated, we've got product market fit here. Then we're going to kind of expand to something else. Like when you think about different chains and expanding to different

chains, you know, how do you, how do you make those decisions? You know, it's like you fish where the fish are. So I think we're looking at what's going on. I think without getting too far into the conversation, I think one of these things, it's not a viable thing to bring to ETH mainnet. So we'll probably put the token there, but not the game because the transaction fees are so high.

But the savvy traders are seemingly sort of coalescing around Mantle and Arbitrum. And so we'll probably do Arbitrum soon. And then we'll sort of just see where the market shakes out. But I think the ETH ETFs are going to create, they're going to bifurcate the market into stakers, and then brokers and buyers. And it's going to create like a block space premium crunch. So you're going to have L2 sort of the beneficiary of that. And I think we'll look to see as the market plays out. And then we're going to go to where the best, most knowledgeable people

that understand the value of what we're doing. We'll just follow them there and make it available right now. We're teaming up with Mantle. They've been great to work with and um they've been helping us out we're part of their chain reaction uh contest that's running right now so uh they've been they they just really understand what you can do with this and and so they're they're great i think we follow the the market where for the other chains though i know that's not a precise answer, but it's just, you know, the reality. That's all good. And when you think about AI and how you kind of

interweave AI into what you're doing, you know, are you like, are you guys building your own models? Are you outsourcing some of that right now? Like, how do you think about just, you know, and I know like every company in the Valley, like if you're not utilizing AI in some way right now, you know, whether it's like productivity boost on your own or, you know, utilizing, you know, like Claude or open AI, like you're probably falling behind. So you should kind of look at figuring out how to utilize it, but like, how do you guys actually kind of build that into your product? We have a continual series of, of sort of recurrent neural network, convolutional neural network calculations going. We use convolutional long short-term memory, gated recurrent units. Most of those are TensorFlow, and we have just clusters set up and running them. I've built two of the other models myself. And it's basically recency biased moving averages that sort of lend

themselves to crypto trading patterns. But yeah, I think we're not outsourcing any of it right now. We're just, we're, you know, we're pretty research focused in what we're doing. We look at ourselves as a tech company first, and then sort of a fintech company second. But we want to make sure that we're in control of what's going into the models. So we're pretty focused on that. We'll probably add X-boosted machine learning regression analysis soon. And we'll just continue to, as sort of the market has a need for these different techniques, we'll just add them and stand them up. And whatever it for these different techniques, like we'll,

we'll just add them and stand them up and whatever it takes to get into those we'll do it, whatever the best, you know, predictions we can bring is like, we'll, we'll make those steps. But right now we're probably right on the leading edge of,

of the way people are doing these types of predictions and time series. I've got an interesting question, a bit half relevant it just feels like a lot of people criticize bot traders anyone that leverages bots for trading or sniping

but I start to feel like with platforms like Metafind human traders are going to be rendered useless with AI-powered bots replacing them in the next few years. Human traders just won't exist anymore. Is that too extreme or is that a fair statement? I think that's directionally correct.

I think it's probably a little too severe because I think anytime you have non-rational actors, like at the end of the markets, like at the bottom of the financial underpinnings of it, you have people making subjective decisions on what to buy, where to live, how to spend their time. And that's not automated, even though whatever you think of Sam Harris and what he says, I think even in a deterministic world, you can still pick the sequence in which you do things. And therefore, I think there's some what looks like randomness or subjectivity to it. So I think what happens is AI trades in normal

market conditions very well. And then the more erratic, non-rational input that you're getting from people, the more people exercise in varied subjective decision-making, the more you need a people signal in the market. So we think we have the right way to do it, which is the people signal in normal market conditions is weighted pretty low and just bumps the predicted prices a little bit. But in markets where, for instance, somebody gets assassinated or assassination attempt, the markets are going to react strongly and in some cases, not rationally to what should happen. So you have to pay attention to that signal and what the people think if you want to land on an accurate prediction. So I think it's a symbiotic relationship where the waiting of the

people and the AI sort of shifts back and forth but for the most part I think under normal conditions the AI is going to be driving within the next couple years yeah I think anarchists will become just more and more efficient as you take out emotions you take out we think that's really important to what we're doing here too by the way is to help take these wild swings in the crypto markets. And so let's make some sense out of it, because as you start to get the markets to normalize, then you can have people making investments in them. You can get long term investments like bonds written against the assets. And you can start to bring the big chunks of the economy over to the blockchain. Right. So we think we're fulfilling a pretty important market perspective or market

function by what we're doing, not just in the sense of trading, but in the sense of like setting the market on a good course to build from. So, yeah. No, I appreciate that. George,

you have any, any last question? No, I think that's a good, good comment though, where it feels like the retail investor is just going to kind of buy and hold. Right. And then the rest of the market kind of has, you know, trading activities where people can kind of snipe or, you know, you want to you want to allocate a little bit of 5% of your portfolio to, you know, bot trading or some other strategy. You have the option to do so. But I mean, even in today's market, you market you know 95 of the volume is institutions you know

and hedge funds or cooperatives coming together it's not necessarily like the robin hood investor retail investor like buying and selling constantly it just doesn't make sense for them to do so um so you're going to need strategies like this and then you're going to need the injection of ai and then like he's saying like you know people are going to kind of just put it in the direction and say hey here's what this AI is intended to do. Here's the prompt. Here's what this other AI is intended to do. Here's the prompt.

And then whoever has the best, fastest, you know, most well-trained data wins. That's right. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you coming on the show and appreciate you having us on the cap table. So anyone that wants to check you out, I think go to there, go to your profile and there's a Linktree link at the top or just go to Metafide. So Metafide, F-I-D-E.

Google that and you can check out Metafide as well. But yeah, man, it's been a great discussion and congrats on what you built. Congrats on the investors that you have including BFF and hope to speak to you again, man. Thanks a lot. Take it easy. I appreciate it, man. Thanks a lot, everyone. We'll see you again

tomorrow, same time.