The Wolf Of All Streets - Wall Street, Fed, ETFs — Crypto Takeover Accelerates #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

In this Crypto Town Hall episode, the team discusses quiet markets amid the Bitcoin dip, macro uncertainty, and the explosive Clarity Act markup. They rip into Elizabeth Warren’s 100+ anti-crypto amendments targeting self-custody (Section 604), Fed master accounts, and stablecoin yields, while slamming the desperate banking lobby’s resistance. Other topics include the future of self-custody and tokenized banking, Ethereum’s strong utility vs stagnant price, AI agents & micropayments (x402), and why crypto innovation will ultimately prevail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Cryptotown Hall every other day here on exit 10, 15 a.m. Eastern Standard time. What are we talking about, Dave? What do we got on the docket today? Not a whole lot. I mean, I guess we could be screaming. Oh, my God, Bitcoin fell below 80,000. The world is ending. I didn't even know that happened. Yeah. Our bags are on fire. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yell, yo, yo, yeah. And whatever stomping around. I mean, look, you know, oils back up a little bit. People are worried. about the war, et cetera. Stock markets are doing nothing. Gold is down a touch, silver is up a touch.

It's basically people are waiting. I mean, you know, the spectacle of, you know, arguably one of the most ridiculously oligarchic, I hate to use Bernie Sanders' word, but I can't come up with a better one, trip to China, where effectively corporate America is on Air Force One meeting with the Premier of China to try to work out. a series of trade deals across most industries is a hell of an interesting spectacle. And with the backdrop of the war, who the hell knows what's going on? Boy, would I love to be a fly on the wall in some of those meetings.

And, you know, my guess is that things are going to get decided that none of us, plebs are going to know anything about for years, but is going to really impact us. I don't think any of that has a damn thing to do with crypto. I think that today people are looking at the absolute absurdity of the Herodon and chief, Elizabeth Warren and her friends throwing stupid amendments at the Clarity Act, hoping to slow it down because, after all, why would they want to see progress in financial markets? I mean, you know, I could go on a rant about that. I don't care which direction we want to go. Do you see there are a thousand amendments proposed yesterday?

A hundred, excuse me, a hundred amendments, sorry. A hundred amendments proposed yesterday. 40. Now, this is a woman who has barely gotten a bill passed in her entire career, but the only thing she does is obfuscate. Literally, you're, you know, someone's going to come up with a great meme about just how pathetic it is. But, you know, some of these are absurd. I mean, the notion trying to get rid of Section 604, which is really important for crypto. And if I'm not poking Carlo at this, I don't know, and Austin on this one. I, I don't know what, what I can do, you know, other than insulting their parents, you know, to get them to raise their hand. But, you know, oh, now I see them as listeners, by the way.

Yeah, they were both speakers, and now they got knocked down. And here it is. I'm not going to insult either gentlemen because I have respect for both. But just while they get themselves up or while we get them back up on stage, you know, this is the section that very simply says that if you have no control over the funds, you are not a money transmitter, which, of course, is completely logical, makes sense. But of course, she wants to get rid of that. Why?

Well, because of the 0.1% of money laundering caught under the Bank Secrecy Act and the thought that they need a cudgel to be able to effectively blackmail software developers to work with them to catch the bad guys. I mean, there are other ways to accomplish this. But that is what it is. I mean, you can sugarcoat this as much as you want. I mean, Carlo, am I wrong? I mean, you know, I see you back up here. I mean, no. Look, man.

Perfect. You're sad. I don't like sad, Carl. I like fired up, Carlos. I was like, good morning, Scott. Good morning, Dave. Good morning, Scott. Good morning, Carlo.

Yeah, look, for everyone who shows up here every day believes in this tech and is fighting for this innovation, none of us are shocked by what we're seeing from Warren and her ilk. I just, thanks to my good friend, Claude, did a quick summary and posted what her proposed amendments are, and they're predictably ridiculous. You know, there's several things about this that are annoying. Number one, it's predictable and annoying that they would throw these last-minute amendments on something that's been actively debated for a year as a last-ditch effort to kill blockchain innovation and adoption.

It just, to me, reinforces that, look, this is not a perfect bill, but if you don't get something across the line legislatively, in this session, you're probably never going to have this type of opportunity again in recent history. They are absolutely hell-bent on making crypto a tool for surveillance, and they want crypto to be a tool for control. And they are absolutely terrified at the idea of consumers having options. Just the banks, let's talk about the stable coin component for a second, because you're seeing just how absolutely desperate the banks are, and the audacity of the banks to basically tell Congress that they don't get it after all the backroom negotiations to try and reach this compromise,

and then Senator Bernie Moreno calling them out publicly and telling them that their position is pretty much disingenuous. And they're trying to gaslight Congress at this point. And then they come out and say that they don't want to talk about this stuff publicly. on X because that's not the proper forum, just tells you the amount of elitism that exists in the banking lobby and how they believe that it's beneath them to have to answer tough questions publicly from consumers. Bottom line, mark this thing up, make a record of the votes, and remember that record when you go to vote because the consumer deserves better than this

bullshit. And in closing, today would be a good day to make your wallet your bank, or at least learn how to make your wallet your bank, because it's pretty clear what these people are up to. And now it won't do that, Carlo. It could it be that someone wrote a book about that? Yeah, yeah. I know a guy who wrote a book and it's in his pen tweet if you want to download it for free. That's my TED Talk. Thanks, guys. Okay. Well, we got you fired up there by the end. But, I mean, look, there's a bunch of individual issues here, every one of which is absurd. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, you know, it, Kayla, long and it's too bad that, you know, we don't get her up here. But, you know, she once made a comment

which has stuck with me in her fight to try to get a Federal Reserve master account for custodia. She made the point that most of the time when they make a decision one way or the other, it's two or three pages and that's it. But when somebody has really bad quality of arguments, they tend to make lots of them. And you understand that. Now, as a debater, I sort of know that because one of my skills when I used to debate was I could speak faster than everybody else. That's not going to surprise most of the listeners, but you've never heard me do my 350 word a minute, you know, machine gun speaking. And so, yeah, you would throw out a lot of crappy arguments, hoping to hide the good ones in the middle. The difference is here, they have a lot of crappy arguments,

and none of them are good. And so the quantity is a tell that they know their position is bankrupt. So one has to look to see what they're trying to do. But there's two basic flavors here. Flavor 1 is trying to get rid of privacy because they want government control. They want the Panopticon. They want central bank digital currencies. They want to be able to use whatever they can to know whatever we're doing. They don't want you to be able to use cash. They don't want you to be able to use crypto as a method of cash.

They like Zell because they could find you if somebody uses it a lot. They don't like cash. And it's sort of the difference between the UK and Italy. for example. The Italians, left of their own desires, will never vote for the, you know, the stuff that the rest of the European Union was. It's very different. Italy, there's ATMs everywhere, and everybody prefers cash. And we all know why. And, you know, I used to trade Italian equities. And I, at one point, half their economy was black market, you know, it was the cash market. But people like their privacy. And America is very much the same way. And so they don't want that.

And they don't want crypto to enshrine it. They're hoping technology, we'll get rid of cash and allow them to control. So that's thing one that you were talking about. But I want to unconflate thing too, Carlo, because the other thing you were talking about was consumer choice, not privacy, but just choice, the ability for the banks to control yield so that the government can control the banks

and that the banking lobby gets what they want, which is, you know, more and more of this cronious notion that they can be, that they can own the economy and own these verticals. that's going to be lost. They have zero chance of succeeding in that. All they're doing is delaying. And so there's all sorts of actions going on here.

So to me, those are two very different things. The second one, however, is why I believe clarity will pass. And I haven't been betting on prediction markets, but frankly, I'm very tempted to throw some money in there and just bet on it because it will pass. And the reason it's going to pass after all this, this show trial shit goes on from Warren and her friends. is the banking lobby has a lot of money and they want to undo what happened in genius.

And they're going to because the crypto community knows that it doesn't matter. And so I think that that's what's going on here. But to me, seeing this theater play out is why the crypto market is off today. And it's irrelevant because the most important thing that happened this week is going to happen today, I guess, is Kevin Warsh being nominated and the Powell era comes to a close probably on Friday. and Warsh is the new head of the Federal Reserve. Am I getting that right, Scott? That was a very long-winded monologue.

Yes, you are getting it right. He was confirmed to the Fed Board yesterday, chair votes today, Powell's out Friday, and what a mess, Warsh is inheriting. I don't know. So, PPI came in hot. CPI came in hot yesterday. It's a pretty ugly situation he's actually inheriting. Yeah, I, yes, there's a lot to be said on the economic side, too.

So, anyway, did Tom, did I see his hand up? Yeah. Yeah, I thought I saw that. I thought I saw a brief hand in and it disappeared. Yeah, yeah, I was just going to comment on the bill. I don't know if we wanted to move on. No, no, don't move on. It's important.

I think it's probably the only real story today. Awesome. So I just retweeted this tweet. I tweeted a few years ago about Elizabeth Warren's track record. She's had 338 proposed bills in her tenure in Senate here, and she's past zero. So, you know, I wouldn't be too concerned. And, you know, the worst thing that chat GPT and Anthropic and all these others really did for the same people of the world as it gave Elizabeth Warren an even easier avenue to create

a lot of noise and bills and waste a lot of paper. So, you know, I don't think we should be concerned about any of this stuff. But I do think there are some legitimate kind of pushbacks from the banking community here, right? Like, if I think there do, there does need to be a little more teeth around what constitutes activity, which is the key component of this stable coin. you know, legislature here. You know, if you presume, if you do some level of activity, then you're able to get rewards, which, you know, they talk about being similar to credit card activity. I'm just envisioning Coinbase basically having a button that says like,

hey, you know, make one transaction, quick round trip trade on your USC and you can qualify for rewards. So I think there is an upholds for folks to be a little bit concerned. And there's also the ethics issue, which it seems like Trump is sort of pushing back. against on having anything in there about that. But the reality is they're going to work through this stuff over the next day or two. It's very likely this bill is going to advance out of the Senate. And then they're going to still have to rectify it with the other bills that are out there, you know, namely the congressional bill.

So once they have to marry those two things, I mean, a lot of things are still going to be in flux. And I bet those two provisions are still going to have a little more ironing out. Yeah, they still have to do agriculture and Senate banking before they even get to Congress. to merge those two. Yep, exactly. Exactly. Crazy process. It's still a long way to go, but, you know, hopefully about the 4th of July will be there.

Yeah, I, I, look, my, my vet vote, what I was trying to get at in my, in my, my, my, my, my, my, my diatribe was I think that the banks are going to successfully, going to successfully block pure holding of stable coins from getting yield. Now, honestly, this whole thing is bullshit. I mean, I'm, I'm going to make it very clear. It is complete bullshit. it makes no sense whatsoever. It is giving them something they think they want. The reason why it will happen is because all the smart people understand that it doesn't

make a damn bit of difference. When they first did, and there's history here, and the banks only know the last war, right? You know, the banks are effectively like the French in before pre-World War II, who believe the Maginot Line, those big-ass cannons that they had, you know, would protect them from a German invasion, not understanding that the Germans had these things, called airplanes and they can jump over the cannons, disable them, and then kind of march the infantry and the tanks pass them. But, you know, whatever. It is effectively the same exact thing is happening here. The banks think, well, when there was brokers having money funds,

uh-uh, Scott glist and dropped. Well, anyway, when brokers had money funds, you know, it made it impossible for them to compete with the banks who had the payment accounts. And so deposits weren't really impacted. They were impacted a little, but broker money funds weren't the same thing. It takes days to get money out of a money fund back into a payments account. And it's not very easy. You know, even today it takes days back when it was first passed. It took a week, literally a week for them to settle because there's securities. Well, with tokenization, you're going to get instant settlement if you want it. And so with instant settlement, you could have very little in a payment account and just instantly have an automated process.

So you're over, you would be overdrawn. You know what? You have an investment account. You gave me permission, we're going to sell the thing in the investment account immediately and move it to the payment account. Boom. Now, that technology, which is what crypto allows, is something the banks are not considering, which is why it doesn't really matter. Carlo, I got, I got someone tricky. Yeah, look, you're absolutely right. This is, this is the banks desperately trying to preserve a moat around an antiquated way of moving and custodying money because they are afraid of losing their toll booth economy. That's what I wrote about in my book. They're afraid of losing their toll booth economy where they can extract money from consumers if you don't have a sufficient balance in your account,

if you move your money, if you receive a wire. They hit you with a fee at every single turn and they justify this because they are a bank. And what they fail to realize is we don't need banks anymore in the current way that banks exist. So what you're seeing is the end of banking as we know it. It's going to all go to zero fees, whether they like it or not. And the sooner consumers and merchants understand this, the better off they'll be, because the longer they continue to park their money in this antiquated system, the longer they're playing this game with the banks where they're giving up money they don't have to and control they don't have to to the banks. They know they're finished. And their desperation sending 8,000 last minute letters and trying to, you know,

arm twist Congress into changing this is clear evidence of that. I've never seen banks weaker and more vulnerable than I do right now. Well, I want to push back on one thing you said that I disagree with. I don't think that fees go to zero. I think banks will ultimately move from a deposit money, you know, deposit based economy to a fee-based economy. I think that the notion of deposits, funding, lending, where most of it goes away is ridiculous. I think you will say, see banks, you will see there is a business where you can accept money, ring fence it, and invest it, and take a spread, you know, that, that, you know, that makes sense, right? And community banks, given the fact that it's just, just a simple stat, community banks make,

made last year on their loan portfolios around 5.75% where the average bank made their money on their investment portfolios around 4%. So obviously, people will pay community banks to invest their money and they will take a nice spread and they'll make money at it. And then they don't have a lot of the other stuff. But the notion of a bank being able to take money have deposits of zero, you know, paying their client zero. And investing it in treasuries is, well, that's not really a very good business. Good for the banks.

Bad for the consumer. Right. So I think that you'll end up with more of a fee-based model and a spread-based model, which makes sense, right? I think what I mean is the fees to move your money are going to go to zero. and that's where they enjoy a lot of revenue. I agree with you. There are community banks and there are credit unions that do give consumers value on their money

and they don't gouge them with fees. And I don't dispute. I've never said I hate banks or I'm anti-bank. Banks do serve a purpose. However, banks, just like everything else needs to evolve and that's where they're fighting tooth and nail. They don't want to give up an inch. Yeah, I think that sort of true. Tomer, we got another hand.

Hey, guys. What I'm about to say is not intended to try to disagree with what's been said, but to add another pile of information. I was actually just before this show listening to a podcast by a well-known Bitcoin developer who's spending all of his time on the technology called Noster, which most people see as a decentralized form of Twitter, but it's really a lot more than that. It's a whole decentralized platform besides the money platform, which is Bitcoin. And there's a lot of venture funding or just donation funding from like Jack Dorsey to developers who are working in cohorts

on making this stuff work. And it's amazing how diverse all of the initiatives are. Many of them relate to some of the stuff that we're talking about here, like different ways to pay people, different ways to charge people, rather than making everything a subscription, being able to create, like one example that one of the developers was talking about, this is going to sound small,

but like to create a virtual jukebox where you can put in 200 Satoshes or something and choose the next song to play, and people who are in the same area can listen to it, and it's a social thing. I'm not saying that's a killer app or anything, but there are dozens and different, dozens of initiatives to make payment easier.

And I think this is what relates to the comments that were being made before, where you don't need an email address and an account number, so it's easier for the developers to develop and have security. They're just relying on the Bitcoin rails and the lightning rails and the cashmints rails. And so there's just a lot of interesting stuff going on. I don't expect anything to happen quickly. But my background, I came from the newspaper industry and I watched the internet take it apart and destroy it.

And I've always felt that there's so much similarity in the banks. I'm finally making my point here. The banks are these deeply integrated jack of all trades. They do everything. Just the way that the newspaper gave you news, it gave you national advertising, it gave you local advertising, it gave you classified ads, it gave you local news, it gave you sports results, car results. It was everything all integrated.

and it was because they were the only entity in a given geography that had the infrastructure to distribute all of these things. And then the Internet came and took it, took it apart. Craigslist took away the classifieds, and the job boards took away the career ads from the classifieds. And auto trader came and took away the auto ads from the classifieds and all the different news things, slice and dice it. And I think this is the fate of the banks. And whether they know it or not is a little bit irrelevant because even if they know it, they're going to fight it. And if they don't know it, they're going to resist it through inertia.

But it's coming. And it doesn't happen all at once altogether, you know, different things, different things on the Internet when it went to media, took over at different points in time. But gradually, everything settled in. And I don't know, the last time I saw anybody reading a newspaper, it's been years. But, you know, 25 years ago, these were enormous, dominant, powerful entities. I'll stop there. Yeah, I mean, look, I think the analogy is a really good one.

I mean, newspapers haven't gone away. Sadly, the New York Times is still available to spew the garbage that they're doing. You know, Pulitzer's on articles that are completely fabricated, yada, yada. I subscribe to the New York Post because I love their sports coverage. So, you know, whatever. I mean, it's just that you're right. It's democratized it. You don't have to pay for the whole thing.

And I can't remember the last time I, held a newspaper and got newsprint on my hands. So yet to that degree, it's gone. But banks, the functions of banks that matter will survive, the, you know, where they provide value. The other ones won't. Matt, welcome. Good morning. Good morning, guys. Great space. Carlo, continuing to kill it, the book, the stable coin, all the information you're putting out on the timeline, man, flowers and kudos to you. My question, though, guys, is what happens to self-custody? I mean, And I think that should be the big question because the bill seems to focus heavily, like, on the exchanges and the brokers and the dealers and the AML rules and, you know, the regulated digital asset intermediaries. Well, that's the whole point of Section 604.

That's why I started with it. Okay. 604 basically says that if you build code, that you're not a money transmitter. And so it explicitly, it explicitly cars out. It's not perfect. There are lots of people who have criticisms about it, but effectively the bill protects the right to self-custody. It does. That's exactly why the amendments are being pushed to be because people like Elizabeth

Moore don't like self-custody. They want you to have to use someone that she could put her thumb on. Yeah. So will the banks sell access while discouraging actual Bitcoin ownership? You know what I mean? Like, hey, we want you to buy Bitcoin. We'll custody for it for you, but you can't hold it, right? Is that kind of the end game?

I mean, you know, when I hear words like that, it reminds me, you know, just keep in mind. I spent almost 10 years at Morgan Stanley. I spent 14 years from Solomon Brothers through Citigroup. So I spent a lot of times within these organizations. They don't work the way that the Internet thinks they do. So inside the organization, you have the people at the top at the strategy level who want to delay everything. They want to slow everything down. But then they have one level down where they tell their people, listen, we're probably only going to be able to delay this shit.

So we better figure out a way to compete. And so they try. And they're not very good at it. I'm not going to lie about that, but they're doing it. So what you're going to see, forget the policy conversations where it'll be delay. And then if not delay, at least get what we want. And then if we get what we want, we'll participate. When they offer a custodial option, I think the market will force them to allow self-custody.

But there will hope, just like Coinbase does. Coinbase has a lot of people using them. Coinbase gives you the ability to pull your Bitcoin into self-custody immediately after you buy it. But a lot of people don't. So let me ask you a question then, Dave. So if we get to this point, what is going to be the incentive? for me or anybody who has Bitcoin to go to like Bank of America and say, okay, Bank of America, here, custody my Bitcoin. What's going to be the incentive that I get back? Are they going

to give me their own stable coin? Are they going to give me some sort of reward? No, the incentive for custodying Bitcoin at a centralized custodian that is safe is if you die, probate's not going to be difficult for your, your assignees. If the person that that inherits your wealth doesn't know how to use a Bitcoin wallet, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, So probate is clearly a big one. Another one is no one can wrench attack you because it'll be reversed, right? So they can't go in and say, give me your keys or we kill you. And so, you know, it's the same reason why people don't leave cash in their stuff in their mattresses in their houses.

I mean, some do, but very few do. They leave banks. And they get screwed for it because when they deposit money in a bank, you know, banks often used to charge fees for that. The Swiss banks still do. So, you know, it's really security and safety, and then people will make their own decision of where to hold. And would these crypto deposits be FDIC insured then? Do we know? Well, you don't need it.

That's the thing that's interesting. People forget, and this is, I'm about to trigger Carlo again, and I still see your hand. I don't know if it's a new hand carlo. That's new. But the only reason for FDIC insurance is because of fractional reserve banking. It's because when you give your bank a hundred bucks, chances are they only have $5 in their reserves of it. The other 95 are lent out or spent or done whatever for people to the guys who are floating on their yachts and going to, you know, traveling with with Trump to see the premier of China.

Those people get their bonuses. I mean, they don't hold it. So you needed FDIC insurance for runs in the bank. If you custody Bitcoin, if the banks lend out the Bitcoin and do fractional reserve banking on the Bitcoin, that's a real effing problem. Carlo, am I? Yeah, no, no. I just wanted to add to that. You know, I run my stablecoin solution show every Friday on X live, and then I repurpose it as a podcast.

And I try to bring in my co-host, who, Dave, you had a great conversation with John Wingate over at Bank Social. And I like to bring John on because he talks about this very thing. He is building the back end for regional and community banks that you can self-custody your crypto and then seamlessly move in and out of your crypto back into the bank economy. system all in one banking app. So I agree with everything you're saying. It's a hybrid situation where you can have the best of both worlds if you want it, but you can't have any of this if we don't get clarity because you have to have the clear regulatory framework for how custody of crypto works within the banking infrastructure. So check out John at Bank Social if you want to learn more about that because he is doing very innovative stuff in that world. He's a, he's a

big believer in self-custody. Yeah, I think that, I think that what he's doing makes enormous, enormous amounts of sense. And in people need to understand what that means. I mean, the title of the show today is about, you know, crypto takeover accelerates. The truth is, it's not really a takeover, nearly as much as it is, the technology's promise is being adopted. And how much of that is investable is a totally different question.

But that's important. David. Yeah, Dave. It was an interesting topic that you just touched on here about, you know, custody, self-custody, but I was thinking more broadly about building investor trust in terms of intermediaries in the system. I was at a Boston blockchain event two days ago and talked to a guy, Chris Rice, who advises VSEC on markets and trading and just raised the idea. I've known him for 20 years.

Yeah, no, no, he gave a great presentation. And we had a nice chat afterwards. But I kind of just raised a broad point is that, you know, we remember bank runs back in the 1930s, the Great Depression, you know, obviously the market crashes as well. We've built up organizations like the FDIC for the banking system. We have SIPC for the security system. You know, I'm just thinking about looking at intermediaries

and the extent to which people get their crypto just taken from hacks. I come at this from a security angle. What would be your thoughts on? on setting up a similar organization with regards to digital assets? I personally don't think it's necessary. I think that what's necessary is clear bankruptcy laws, clear rules that if somebody commits fraud, they go to prison, right?

So in other words, if a crypto, the market will be fine if, in fact, you deposit your Bitcoin in an intermediary and it's ring-fenced, and if they ever attempted to do anything with it, without disclosing it, such as re-hypothicated or, you know, use it for something, they go to jail. You know, that tends to stop most of the fraud. People ignore the fact that a lot of manipulation and fraud happens because people think they're going to get away with it, but it's really a teeny tiny percentage, you know, in things like that.

So I don't think you need deposit insurance. I think what you need is a clarity bill. What you need is the fact that, you know, people like Elizabeth Warren is, the question that she'll never answer is so, you want to keep the system where FTX was allowed to steal money from FTX as well as as many others, right? You know, I won't go through the litany, steal from Americans by lying to them because they were offshore entities that Americans used. You want to keep that, as opposed to having an American regulatory system. And she'll never answer that question. She'll divert away for it.

But the fact is, that's what she wants. Why she wants that I couldn't possibly tell you other than the fact that I think, well, I don't know, that's speculation. but the fact that that's what she wants and matters. But does that make sense, David? Do you understand what I'm getting at? Yeah, no, no, I do. I do. brokers have CIPIC because the reason that CIPIC exists, it's not the FDIC.

They have, you know, the securities industry protection corporation, and it gives you the same sort of thing. But the reason for that is because broker dealers all, but not all, but a lot of them have principal, principal trading operations, et cetera. And because that when you have securities, you don't own. So you have your account at Charles Schwab. You do not. You think you own 100 shares of IBM.

You don't. Street name. It's in street name, which means that Charles Schwab has a claim on assets that are owned by DTCC effectively. And therefore, in a bankruptcy, it's not, it is non-trivial to retrieve those. So they have specific, which gives you the explicit confidence in this convoluted thing that they built, because you don't actually own what you own, you know, it matters. Now, in the case of Bitcoin, you're going to own it. Right?

And so you don't need that. And so it could be done that way. Now, to the extent you want to allow the bank to operate a digital credit stack like Microstrategy does, as long as they disclose it and you know that in the case of a bankruptcy that, you know, you are in the pecking order with the bank because now you've opted to get an enhanced yield product or something, that's fine, as long as you know what the risks are. That's the important thing. It's all about knowledge of risks.

Yeah. Well, I would just say that when you mentioned fraud, you know, we know the wheels of justice grind slowly. They caught up with SBF. What about World Liberty Financial? When do we get justice there? It's a great question. It's a really great question. Look, I am not an apologist for anything. I just haven't seen World Liberty Financial is literally doing exactly what a lot of other crypto projects done. I mean, you have a governance token that gives you bupkis, right? I mean, I've said on this space, and I'll say it again, I think Gensler is an evil genius. I think he was told by Warren to sabotage the crypto industry, and so he created this loophole, knowing he was creating this loophole called the governance token that gave investors no rights because they were not securities, and by doing so, knew that people in the crypto world would use it to fleece investors. So it became a legal way to take advantage of people, and I think it was terrible for the industry. I think it was awful, and I think he achieved exactly what he was trying to achieve, because, as I said, Gary is a very smart man.

And when a very smart man has the incentive to do something bad, they, and it's legal, they'll do it because there's no morality, you know, in our government leaders. They, you know, there have been studies. I was reading one yesterday that goes back and talks about it. I mean, people act in their own perceived self-interest, you know, these public servants that we have, quote, elected or appointed, very few of them act against. against their own self-interest vis-a-vis, you know, the public good. Some do. There are a few. There aren't many. I mean, our friend John Deaton would be one of them if Massachusetts is smart and puts them in the Senate.

But, you know, there are very few. So, I mean, it's a big deal. But that's what went on there. I mean, let's make no mistake. Excellent. Thanks. Matt, I see a bunch of emojis. Anything to add on that?

No, I just thought that was a really great point. though. Yeah. Sorry. I got a call coming here. I got a call coming here. I got a great. Okay. Sorry, guys. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, when we, when we look at what's going on, it's a lot of theater. I mean, but, you know, if you look at the markets, I mean, it's a really interesting dichotomy. I mean, you know, there's green shoots in a lot of places, but Scott mentioned and others said that Bitcoin dominance is much higher. I mean, I look at the Bitcoin ETH ratio and it's getting back down to low levels. I mean, you know, Ethereum is looks kind of sickly here. relatively speaking. But most everything else is kind of hanging out. I mean, William, you haven't talked about this yet, but I know you care about Ethereum and the ecosystem. I mean, how much of this do you think is just the calm before whatever happens when we finally get somewhere, knowing where the crypto industry is going to go? Yeah, I think that's what you said. I agree with that. It's in a sitting mode. It's unfortunate. It's almost at the same place that it was five years ago from a price perspective, whereas from a market share and an adoption, use cases, utility, you name it,

and I keep writing about this day in, day out. Can people hear William, or can you hear me? If I was a dog sensitive to high-pitched sounds, perhaps, but no. So you guys can hear me, but William, stop. He probably got a phone call or something. It usually happens when you get that. But I think the point that utility is increasing. is kind of the point.

I mean, you know, we were, there have been a bunch of conferences. I was at consensus, you know, right after my trip to Italy, which, by the way, Carlo, uh, uh, I forgot which one of your recommendations we followed. Oh, I remember. Yeah, you gave me one really good recommendation. That food hall that's kind of tucked away was amazing, by the way. Uh, so, uh, so, so thank you for that. But, you know, at consensus, the one thing that was the most important thing that I saw was a lot of

friends like, you know, someone mentioned, you know, Chris Rice. Chris Rice, for those who don't know, was that, you know, we lost you at like, I don't know, right in the beginning, William, it went away, so you may want to repeat your point. I was just trying to fill in. I think I dropped out, right? Yeah, but I can hear you now even though you show, you show as a listener. Can you hear me? Can you? Yeah, we hear you. Can you hear us? I can't hear anything. Okay, hold on. Well, sorry about that. Then I'll just shut up. until I hear can't hear William

okay I'm gonna do this let me see if I can try to do the thing and I don't I want to I don't remove from speakers okay removed him and now I go down the listeners and I ask him to speak we'll see if this works we'll see if that works okay then we can hear what he has to say if he could come back up William

yeah yeah can you hear us now Yeah, yeah. When did I drop off? What was I saying? I think you said about three words and you went blank. I mean, this platform is always adventure. Sorry about that.

I noticed later when I was rambling. What I was saying is I agree with what you said, David. It's mind-boggling as to why Ethereum hasn't done well. From a price perspective, many have pointed out. It is about the same place. It was five years ago from a price perspective. but when you look at its adoption from utility and usage point of view, it's easily five to ten times more than it was.

So it's really mind-boggling. I wrote a post yesterday comparing ETH to the U.S. dollar. If you want to think of ETH as money for those that do, which is part of it. It's a component. Why is the U.S. dollar so valuable, as we well know? It's not just because it's being used in the U.S. It's because it's a currency of choice for pricing oil, for pricing commodities. It powers the largest stock market in the world.

You name it. It's denominated in dollars. So the analogy could be said for ether in the on-chain economy. ETH occupies a large share of the cryptocurrency, economy from the velocity point of view, meaning how much, where it moves and how much of it moves, it's currently in the order of $2 trillion on a manualized basis. And when you look at stable coins only eight trillions in one quarter of 26. So there's a lot of movement of ETH, the analogy being the U.S. dollar moves and ETH moves as well. So it should be valued more,

and I'm mind boggled as to why it's not. Well, I think my, I'll give you my answer, and then Carla, my answer is it's very similar to what happened in the internet bubble. So you had this, the situation where people were valuing companies based upon absolute complete bullshit metrics, but they were those metrics, you know, eyeballs, yada, yada, yada, stuff that didn't make any sense, you know, but there was value there. So if you look at companies that actually were able to build a network that got people to look at their stuff and keep them looking at their stuff, eventually they were able to monetize. But if you look at the actual assets, they went up huge. They crashed huge. And then the ones that actually were able to start monetization did extraordinarily

well. So investors learned from that and so they start billing those things up again, et cetera. So in the first crypto bull market, you know, five years ago, a lot of things, Ethereum among them got up to crazy heights that needed to grow into where they're going. And now they're in that grow into it possible situation. The fact that it hasn't crashed anything close to it did in the Internet bubble is because people see that they can have a chance to grow into it. Where it grows into it, well, that's the issue. And honestly, I think Ethereum would have crashed significantly more. I think Ethereum would be like somewhere less than a thousand probably about 5 to 800, somewhere like that,

if Tom Lee didn't jump in and do what he did. And nobody else did the same thing. But that doesn't mean that it belongs there. That doesn't mean that it might not be an incredible asset if, in fact, it continues to grow. But I think that's what happens in markets. So I saw Carlo and then Tom, but William, you're free to comment first.

No, I mean, it would be a bit of a stretch to say that if it wasn't from Tom Lee, Ethereum would be $5,000 to $1,000, And as you said, I mean, if you believe in that, what would, where would that put the others? Imagine, I mean, Solana would be at 20 bucks if you want to take the ratio. There's nothing peculiar. No treasury. We bought it and nobody jumped in when they did. I don't know where it would be, but it would be.

It was not just Tom Lee. It was Sharpling. And, I mean, it's part of it. Black Rock is also supporting it. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, stretch.

I think. It's a little hyperbolic. I get that. Okay. It tends to get people's juices flowing, and that's my job. Yeah. Good job. Okay.

Carlo, then Tom. Yeah, this is kind of out-of-the-box thinking on ETH, but I've been studying a lot lately on the X-402 innovation. For those of you are familiar, you know, the Internet was created with several H-TTP protocols. 404, 403 for a bad site. 402 was supposed to be the payment component of the Internet, and it was impossible to implement it because you couldn't do it with traditional credit card payment rails.

You couldn't adapt micro payments. So then Coinbase innovates and comes out with this X402 built over base, which is obviously an L2 of Ethereum, and now you open the door to autonomous agents being able to pay themselves in micro payments. And that, I think, is going to be the future of movement of money and exchange of money over the Internet protocol. And I think ETH needs to pivot from being, quote, sound money

to being much like we are now starting to see funds that are valuating compute in the AI sector. ETH is the plumbing. ETH is the delivery mechanism. And I think it's core value and the way it needs. needs to gain revenue is from that component, from being the core key smart contract, executable, battle-tested railway for the entire agentic AI business model that's about to come on very strong.

Sorry. I need to jump in there. Like, what tells you that it's not? You know, and it's all of the above. I'm not saying it's not one or the other. I'm not saying it's not sound. I'm not saying it's not sound money, but I think if it's looked at as the plumbing, the infrastructure, I think there's more value to build on it and increase its token price based

on the fact that it is what it is. I mean, it is the backbone of smart contract execution and it's battle tested, but I think it is more of a compute layer than a currency layer, if that makes sense. And I'm just, this is something that just popped in my head. I agree with you, but I don't want to jump in. And Tom's been patient and has had his hand up. Yeah, you guys know I've been a Eath Bowl for quite some time. So I echo a lot of what William feels and Carlo is sort of expressing there.

You know, in my mind, this is really just sort of a mental model shift on how we value these assets. I think it's absolutely hilarious that we invent a new asset class, but we want to go back to the old valuation models that we've been banging the drum on for decades. You know, DCFs were invented, what, 70, 80 years ago? Is it weird to think we can build a new financial model for some of these esoteric assets like digital assets are? You know, I think it's fundamentally silly to look at them on a cash flow basis, particularly when adding more cash flows is increasing fees for users on the network and reducing network effects which you're trying to build with these assets, particularly in an area where

you have, you know, race to zero fees, particularly in sort of AI and agents and all those things. So, you know, I honestly just, I had a... I had a reflection the other day, I am very surprised, almost in disbelief, that Tom Lee could buy 5% of all ETH, and 32% of all ETH outstanding on exchanges, which is an even bigger number, and the price go down, right, or basically be flat. And the only reasons I could really think of were, well, one, this is sort of the exit liquidity for OGs, which the data sort of bears out. And then, two, it's really this mental model framing. You know, we have to start thinking of new ways to buy these assets. And I propose one in just the broad strokes, it's really understanding that ETH secures X amount of value, say it's a few hundred million today. The asset itself, because it's a blockchain and it's proof of proof of stake, you have to use it as security on the network to secure the network as sort of an attack vector, it has to be worth ETH the asset, some portion of that total aggregate value that the network itself is securing.

So, you know, you could dive in and say, okay, if, you know, ETH is securing a trillion dollars, it should be worth maybe, you know, a third or a fifth or an eighth, whatever it is to potentially acquire the amount of ETH needed to attack the network and gain some level of control over those assets. And it's not always as clear as that, right? I mean, it's not always I acquire enough ETH. I can attack the asset directly. But, you know, there's some logic there that I think makes a lot more sense than just saying,

like, okay, we need to do a DCF on the fees that Ethereum is making today. So, you know, for me, it's a lot about, you know, a mental model shift on how we think about these assets and then, you know, understanding that, you know, there's a new framework that's needed here. And I think, it's just kind of coming up around to that reckoning. And, you know, I think, hopefully not going to want a lot of the OGs who needed the exit liquidity and wanted it probably used Tom Lee's purchases to actually facilitate that. That part seems seems very, very clear. I can't tell Carlo and William, I see both your hands up. I have no idea if they're new. Mine's legacy.

No, just a quick one. I mean, I think you have to think of Ethereum as many, many things. It's not just one thing. The same as the Internet. It's not just one thing. And it's all of the above the money aspect, the infrastructure aspect, the smart contract aspect, the agentic aspect, and it's on and so on. And that's where the difficulty lies in terms of understanding it. and it took a while again going back to the internet for being to have it understood the way it is today and it's going to take a little bit longer for us to understand a general purpose multi-purpose blockchain like Ethereum is because it's not just a one-trick pony it is it does multiple things at the same time and depending where you touch it you will again the elephant analogy depending

when you touch, you'll describe it in one way or the other. And that's really the main thing. Yeah. No, I think that's all true. I mean, we could go out, you know, you could go out and start looking at valuation points of view. But the truth is, the market doesn't, isn't going to evaluate the supply demand dynamics of Ethereum until it's very, very clear. I mean, it's, you know, it's always been on the hope and the momentum. Your point is that momentum is manifesting, and therefore you should be more certain of it. And that's okay. I mean, I have no problem with that, but it's a question of models. And it's a question of, you know, what's the value of this thing? And the conversation about money is what gets, that's what gets the Bitcoin maxis,

it's called ether a shit coin, right? And I have a problem with both. I have a problem with people on the ether side saying, well, it's money. Money is something that, you know, most people believe should be divorced from the state would be a better thing. And that's a very large part of Bitcoin's credo. But would you trust something that was created by a foundation and distributed? You know, the interesting thing about Bitcoin is a digital commodity. And that's why the whole thing about Satoshi is such a big deal is that it's truly decentralized. And no one is really decentralized.

Yeah. None of this stuff is money. I think we just need to look at the mirror. Anyone who's still saying that in 2026, I think it's just calling themselves out. I mean, the dream and the vision of being able to spend a Bitcoin or Satoshi or whatever or even an Eath to buy something is, you know, maybe useful in certain settings. Like, okay, NFT is great, but, you know, long-term, sustainable. I think it's very much proven that these assets is way too volatile to make that happen.

So story value, yes. I couldn't agree with you more. We could actually go down this. But, you know, look, my mental model, Tom, and you've heard me say it, is that Bitcoin is an option. trades like an option on its own, on its own potential to become money, to become a stable store of value. Until it actually gets to that point, it's not there. Like gold today. No one's spending gold, right? Why? Well, because it's a pain in the ass for starters, right? You know, you're not bringing your gold bar and shaving off a little bit to buy a cup of coffee. It's just not happening or you have these little tiny little gold coins. But it's because it's a pain in the ass.

but gold was money for thousands of years. Yeah, but we've certainly evolved beyond that. And I would even say it's not the portability of the asset. It's the volatility more than that. I mean, if I hand you my gold ring and you know exactly how much it is, you have to worry about all the, you know, intrepancies of the price dropping 8%, 10% today. I have to liquidate it. I have to do all those other things.

I think it's more of the volatility. And if you want Bitcoin to stay at one relative, relatively stable level or ether, whatever, yeah, I think, you know, that's totally fine in calling the money at that case. But then I think it degrades a lot of the other properties that make the asset actually useful. So I personally have never thought of these assets. Well, it's not the reason, look, most people who buy Bitcoin believe it's dramatically undervalued. And therefore, they don't use it to spend it because you have capital gains, you have all, you have all sorts of things. The volatility, I mean, look, what you're basically saying is the only thing that

be money as something that's manipulated to have low volatility. The dollar would have enormous volatility, has had enormous. I don't think that's wrong. I don't think that's wrong. Right. So you want something that's manipulated. There is a reason why so there, there are a lot of countries out there that have dollarized their currency. They do it specifically for that reason. But what does that mean? That means they are forced into manipulation. Is that good or bad? I mean, I don't know. I mean, you can have that discussion. I mean, in their cases, most of the places have done so, reap benefits from doing so. So that would argue that you're right. But that it's a really interesting conversation and it's much it's not it doesn't really impact most of everything else we

talk about, which is what's the utility and what's going on and who's going to own it and who's going to control it and where is it going to manifest. William, is that a new hand? No, no, that's an old one. Sorry. You can never tell. So I mean, yeah, but I mean the the money conversation is different than the utility conversation for damn sure. And I think that was Carlos' point. Carlos point is that the plumbing, the infrastructure that's being built, that's getting used by pretty much every firm. I mean, you know, I was on this space and we were listening and there were people a year ago saying, you know, there's no way big institutions are going to use public blockchains because they're going to build their own. And we saw Circle, you know, they're, they launched their own, but that's a very specific case. The reality is most big firms don't want to build something their own for a couple of reasons.

They don't, they want to be deniable, right? You know, they want to say, listen, if it breaks, it's not my fault. And it's very expensive, right? It's a lot, people, they don't want to spend money to build something when they don't have to. So, you know, that's really the question. And in here, now we're kind of in the situation where we've already seen the financial firms have pretty much all said, listen, we're going to build on Ethereum. Some are building on Solana. Some are building on a few other things, but they're not really building their own.

Right. And that, I think, is Carlo Williams point. and yours as well about where Ethereum is going, because a lot of people are opting to use it. Am I getting this right, guys, because you're more the bulls than I am? Yeah, I would say directionally correct. There are more challengers than I think, you know, William sort of led on to or that we all appreciate. I mean, Canton, you know, really strong traction, tempo, you know, strikes blockchains that are coming out. I mean, there's a number of others that are seeing Stablecoin, RWA level adoption and trying to grab a

piece of the pie for themselves. Now, I don't think any of those solutions are really credible because they're not decentralized and they are captive to this one party. So if you're a competitor, why would you want to use that network unless you form some sort of consortium, which has failed a number of times here in crypto. So I don't think those are legitimate challengers, but they are out there and they are accumulating a lot of assets today. Yeah, well, I mean, Canton has a specific thing, which is they, there are lots of use cases. I'll give you one. So let's say you're talking about stock ownership. Nobody who in place, well, I shouldn't say nobody.

The big players in the industry like the fact that you can accumulate a position without the world knowing you're accumulating a position. That is extremely helpful for two use cases. Use case one, I'm an investor. I'm going to, my plan is to buy 100,000 shares of something, or let's say 10 million shares. Let's make it easier. I want to buy 10 million shares of this company in my portfolio. I bought the first million. I don't want the price to ramp up like crazy because people know I have $9 million left to buy.

And so that's an important use case. And we all understand that one. Second one, I want to buy, I am looking to buy a control stake in a company. I don't want the world to know about it until after I have completed the acquisition of my control stake. And so we have rules that do that in the equity market. And I don't think anyone's arguing that there's anything wrong with that. That's the choice of market participants. Canton allows that a lot easier than using a public blockchain that does.

that isn't permissioned completely. And so, yeah, I mean, but that's different. And, you know, Scott had interviewed Arthur Hayes this morning, and he was shitting on Canton because he said, well, it's not really private, like Zcash. And that's true. But that's not about privacy in that case. It's about a very specific thing.

But there's all sorts of use cases in finance. And Tom, you're involved in a lot of them. And so, you know, that's why you will have differences. And that's why there will be more than one blockchain. Don't you agree? I do. I do think we'll eventually coalesce on Ethereum or Solana or one of these decentralized networks being the preferred asset ledger base just because they are credibly neutral and not favoring one individual party, but I still think we're in the kind of shakeout phase as we've got to re-explore this. Let's call it corporate blockchains 2.0, which I classify Canton as even though I might get a lawsuit thrown at me. how litigious those guys are. But yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think we're still, unfortunately, in another shakeout phase again, which, you know, William brings up a lot of good points, but I think people won't clear very simple narratives, which is where Bitcoin is won. And Ethereum, Solana, and all these other assets are still extremely muddled and nuanced.

And anytime you have nuanced, particularly in an age of hot takes and quick hits, it's really, really hard to explain that to people. So we're still on the path. Yep, I agree. I agree. Well, I think we're kind of at time. So unless anybody has anything else to say, we're going to call it for now. Anybody have any last words? Carlo, anything else you want to say other than...

No, but I think tomorrow will be an interesting day as we see this markup hearing at, I think, 1015 Eastern. Yeah, it'll be, it sounds like it's going to be contentious. So I guess it should be interesting theater. But that's what it is theater. Well, let's see. Anyway, everyone have... Stay safe out there. You know, it's... I guess Bitcoin is falling. People are panicking, but, you know, whatever. Anyway, we'll see you all again on Friday morning, and hopefully we'll have something to talk about from the hearing that's about to happen.