The Wolf Of All Streets - Whales Buy $23B BTC as Markets Rises? #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Crypto Town Hall is a daily livestream focused on dissecting market trends, news, and narratives in the cryptocurrency sector. The goal is to make sense of recent price action, whale movements, key technological developments, and broader macroeconomic shifts affecting crypto. The hosts and panelists discuss market sentiment amid Bitcoin trading sideways, altcoin struggles, institutional involvement, and major news—like Coinbase's push into stock trading and customized stablecoins. The conversation mixes data, personal anecdotes from international conferences, and speculative macro projections examining where real growth, adoption, and liquidity may come from next.

Oh, good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall. Every day at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard time here on X. We like to keep it very interesting in the intros. Sometimes we just want you to hear our personal conversations in foreign languages. So let's dive into what's happening in the market today. Let me pull up a coin market cap since I wasn't quite ready yet to start talking. We got Bitcoin trading at $88,000, Ethereum 2936, B&B,000.

41, XRP, a buck 90. Salana, 126. 66. It looks like we're kind of chopping sideways. You know, markets have been really uninspired, I would say, the bulk of the year, but certainly for the past couple months, we haven't really gotten the blowoff top that we were promised and maybe many people to wonder what the hell is going on with price action. But as, you know, we talk about every single day here, still a lot of massive fundamental tailwinds and huge news happening. We have sort of this title today was picked, Wales Buy 23 billion Bitcoin as market bleeds. Coincidence, I don't think that one has much to do with the other. But we have sort of some conflicting on-chain data that I find interesting.

So there's one thing that says we have 23 billion in Bitcoin buys in the last month. by whale wallets while we have conflicting stories that there's been 300 billion of whale selling, including over the past month, this year in 2025, $300 billion in Bitcoin has been moved from whale wallets that were long dormant. Joe, I don't want to put you on the spot. I mean, do you see any of this in any of your data or anything? I mean, do you have an ability to track these wallets or take a look at them? Because we have one narrative that it's been the whale selling massively, but we have another,

that of late they've started buying again. Or maybe it's just different wallets, the dormant wallets selling and new whale wallets buying. Yeah, I mean, that's been the narrative that the kind of the old school guard is leaving in the new guard is coming in. You know, I didn't see any of that as a recent right here with this volatility. The one thing I did see is some rumors around winter mute, you know, cycling or moving a lot of capital around to finance.

So not sure if that has anything to do with this, not sure if that's rebalancing, you know, not sure if that's selling, not sure if that means any sort of instability there at all. Obviously, all just like rumors, but that's what I heard. And, you know, I think it makes sense. I think people are trying to figure out, you know, I'm kind of surprised we're all even here every morning, Scott. What are we even talking about at this point? Bitcoin's at 88, you know, there's no I would say sign of any sort of narrative for all coins coming up in the future. So it's at this point, we're in some sort of odd psychosis that we just like love it here and we love the pain. But I mean, Coinbase had a bunch of big announcements. Yeah. And those announcements were kind of like we're looking at things other than crypto. We're so jaded.

We're just so jaded. We're looking at stocks. We're looking at prediction markets. We have five stories. We have five stories. the day now, though, that would have been entire shows two years ago? 100%. Yeah, they would have shaken, like, the market to the core upwards or downwards. We would see like 15, 18% moves in Bitcoin with some of these stories a couple years ago.

And it shows the maturity, right? Like, you know, Kathy Woods talking about everyone's like, oh, the four-year cycle is dead. It's dead. I kind of agree with that, you know, but the fundamentals of Bitcoin will still come in place. You know, we're still two years away from the next having. but those fundamentals will come in place. At some point, it will become twice as expensive to get Bitcoin. And so, you know, in a way, it's still all hard-coated in. God, I want to buy so bad at lower prices. I'm a glutton for punishment for, you know, short-term pain for long-term gain.

But now that we've got the 80s, I'm feeling greedy. Give me 70s. Let me buy some more. I'm still buying now, just in case. If it's 70s, I mean, the size of the buy, It will just be unbelievable. I will mortgage my children. I love you guys.

Can you do that? I don't even know if that's the thing. But I saw a hand up. I think a lawyered and Andre. So lawyer then Andre, keep on this topic. Go ahead. Yeah, I think more and more now it's becoming obvious that at least going forward, there's the narrative for Bitcoin and the narrative for like all coins,

at least a vast majority of them are very different, right? You know, if you're looking at buying Bitcoin, like there's a lot of interest. And if we see Bitcoin go that low, it's probably, Probably because someone, that's someone who, like, that's an institution that died and we get to eat their blood. But, you know, if, like, a token that was airdroped to NFT holders that's been struggling goes down, like, that's just means more people are worried and selling, right? So I think the altcoin narrative right now is very shaky. I don't see anything that makes me excited to hold long term because you don't really have, like, a retail adoption or anything to drive a narrative of something that already exists. Maybe you can hope for something new to drop and you can get in early.

but all coins are you know i would be you know could be a great time to buy some of them but outside of the majors i'd be pretty nervous but bitcoin's a whole other narrative maybe it is a whole other asset class personally and i've said that even when we've gone through all coin booms i just don't think they're particularly competing andre go ahead yes sure thank you so um i just want to say on like the way it's a little hard to hear you it's a little hard to hear it's a bit echoy is there a possibility you can change your mind is that better yeah it's way better yep okay thank you yeah so i just want to say on the whale versus like one long-term holder topic i think what you can see right now but transfer volume is still

quite large so we're seeing still around 10 billion dollars per day so a lot of values still changing hands and i also match as a cell so entities are picking up volume inside And that of that volume, 78% is actually originating from transactions larger than $1 million. So I think institutions are dominated or large players whales are dominating. And I think what's the confusion around that topic is all the key confusion is there's a difference between whales and long-term holders, right? They're not like identical. Right. what you've seen is long-term holder selling, that was like the key narrative.

But what you're seeing now is like whale buying. And whales, they actually tend to be short-term holders, just like retail. But they tend to be more counter-cyclical in their behavior. Yeah, so I guess that does clarify what I was pointing to at the beginning, is that it's a different class, both huge, in size, but a whale then, to your point, to someone who could be new in buying and a long-term holder of those old wallets unlocking that we see move not the same people so that makes sense so the long-term the long-term holders kind of price agnostic very rich just want to get out for whatever reason but there's some big

money and smart money that looks like it's buying all markets are down yes hundred percent and i think um my my personal assumption of i think it's most likely cryptocurrency funds because what we've seen over the past couple of weeks is what we're actually looking as like the aggregate beta of like global crypto hedge funds to Bitcoin and that beta is some kind of position proxy positioning proxy for these global crypto hedge funds and that has been increasing steadily right and it's now close to one they used to be like extremely underweight relative to Bitcoin but now they've they're now in sync with like Bitcoin again.

So they've increased the exposure, counting cyclically into this correction. Anyone else thoughts? We can talk specifically about the whale wallets. And I guess if there's no specific thoughts on that, Joe, we did have all the Coinbase news. You kind of tipped your hat to one of the stories that they're rolling out stock trading.

So I mean, that's, seems like a big, big deal for Coinbase. The other, which is kind of blowing my mind is that they're offering basically custom stable coins. So I can read what they said in the announcement was Coinbase launches custom stable coins. Users can now issue branded stable coins backed one to one by Coinbase custody collateral. It's like an affiliate marketing for stable coins. Like I can have a Scott coin that's a stable coin and share in the fees. seems pretty epic panos go ahead yeah i'm not sure if you covered this i've got joined a little bit

late but just to go back to those whale wallets were they new wallets or were these uh older wallets that have been trading do you know i guess that's what andre was just pointing to so we kind of have it seemed like they were conflicting stories but the 300 billion has moved from wallets that were dormant and whale wallets is non-specific to the amount of time, it's just based on size. So we don't really know. They don't necessarily have to be long-term holders. I think what's slipping in with there. Okay, cool. Thank you. Lou? Yeah. Hey, guys. I wasn't on the listening to the show last week because I was at BTC Mina. I don't know if there was much chatter about that on the show. We talked to almost a, you know, we had some people

that kind of called in from Breakpoint and various places in Abu Dhabi, but Mina, actually somebody was here. I think Mark was at Bitcoin Mina, and we asked him a bit about it. Yeah, we did get that, but still would love any further insight. I think it always gives a vibe on where the market is to see how international conferences shake out. Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's where I go. And, you know, the last, the previous Bitcoin conference that I'd gone to was BTC Vegas, which was mod, you know, and I think that was like 20% bigger than the previous year when it was in Nashville. And while, you know, I've found BTC Mina to be very impressive, you know, it was a nice sized venue, lots of great companies, all of the folks who had been there the previous

years said that it was dramatically smaller in terms of the number of people who are there. So just from, you know, again, anecdotal, the feeling was not nearly as positive in Abu Dhabi for BTC Mina as it was in Vegas. Did you go to breakpoint? I did go to breakpoint. What did you notice at a, let's just say, I don't want to be so general, but an all-coin conference versus a Bitcoin conference in United Arab Emirates? Yeah, you know, I mean, personally, I don't consider Solana an all-coin unless everything is

an alt-point. Yeah. But, I mean, undoubtedly, it was electric just in terms of how excited people were to be there. you know, Solana has a core competency in putting on these shows. This is the third one I've been to, and it was, you know, the most professional one. The speakers obviously were incredibly well trained. You know, for me, though, the most, and if there were tons of people there, it was hard to compare it to the previous year because it was a dramatically different venue. But, you know, I will say one anecdotal thing that I took away from it, which I thought was interesting because when I first got there, it was actually.

fairly, you know, it wasn't nearly as many people as I thought when I was wandering around. And then I went in to listen to the speakers and see what was going on. And that room was totally packed, which, you know, I must say is different than most of the Web3 conferences I go to where, you know, most of the people are, you know, ambling about with kind of their community members instead of listening to talks, which they could listen to, you know, on replay when the conference is over. Yeah. So it's interesting, though, I mean, Bitcoin Vegas was a bit of a circus, right?

And we had digital asset treasury mania. So Nakamoto, well, that was the narrative of that conference, in my opinion, right? And I've said it over and over again. Obviously, we had like Nakamoto and 21 both announced immediately before that conference. And the minute you walked in the door, like seven people were pitching you 10 new treasury companies, right? That was that. That was a moment. I assume that was slightly diminished already, seven months later.

There was none of that, though, I mean, that I heard of it's like digital asset treasuries were a bad word. But one thing that I did learn, or I did hear people talking about, which I had heard before and maybe I just wasn't paying attention, was that, you know, the expectation is from the folks that, you know, BTC, Inc that, you know, Nakamoto was going to buy BTC ink. And I had never made that connection. I just had a conversation with David Bailey just over two weeks ago. It was on my channel about, I think, a week and a half ago. And he was very clear. He didn't specifically say BTC, Inc. But that their new focus, when I asked him about it and the focus he believed that

Treasury companies should have is buying cash flowing businesses, right? Yeah, I guess BTC Inc is one. Right. So that makes a lot of sense. and they can do that, obviously, with minimal friction, I would imagine. Yeah. You know, that one shouldn't be too hard to get through and pass the lawyers and bankers. But that was kind of the, I certainly and many others were harping on the fact that I love the idea of a Bitcoin balance sheet company.

I hate the treasury term because a Bitcoin, I think there's a differentiation. I think everybody, individual institution, government across the board, should just buy some Bitcoin instead of holding. cash with money that they've actually made in the real world, using financial engineering to try to beat Bitcoin has been proven exceptionally difficult since the beginning of Bitcoin. And so the treasury company part, and so I guess the point is even Nakamoto and the treasury company, the most treasury of treasury companies are saying maybe we should own cash flowing businesses to buy Bitcoin. Exactly.

Which I personally disagree with. I mean, I love the idea of being able to stack stats faster. I don't personally want to mess it up with other things. I just want to stack stats faster, but, you know, obviously, yeah, they're smart guys and they've got another opinion. And I will say what was super impressive was watching David, you know, walk around the floor with a posse of shakes. Yeah.

I've not seen that very often. Not at all surprised. I wonder, I know this is off topic, but it feels like we've had deeks in those conferences all conferences, but obviously one of them was, you know, I guess it was 22 when they moved it to Miami, when they moved it from Manna Winwood, which was a few thousand people to the convention center when there was like 35,000 people and getting across that conference was like walking terminal and terminal at JFK. Then obviously there was a...

That was the peak. Yeah, that was the peak. That was still the peak. Right. Yeah, exactly. But then you had 25 and Donald Trump speaks. Like, what do you do next year? Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I've got to say, though, the show itself super impressive, you know, and what he was able to do there, so. But what are people talking about? If not digital asset treasury account, like, what are the, what are people excited about? You know, it was a bunch of companies, I'd probably say of the companies that were on the floor. I was maybe familiar with half of them. So it was fun for me to go around and meet some, you know, different companies in the ecosystem. probably say the highlight for me actually of my whole week was I met the folks from Web 3 TV

and you know the owner is an impressive billionaire and he invited me to come to his facility in Dubai and I went and I grew up in Hollywood so I spent my youth on the on the different movie lots but you know it's it's next generation what I saw you know the future of you know of video production and how AI is going to be used to do everything was really mind-blowing. And the volume of content they're going to be producing there. So there's still quite a few things to be excited about even if prices are down. I don't know about in the all-coin space, but certainly in the Bitcoin space. It's been eight years of every single day. There has not been, you know, one piece of news that's

changed my view. That makes sense. Try to anybody else thoughts. I don't think anybody else on stage was at any of those conferences. I would imagine, from what I've heard, though, that Salada Breakpoint, because, I mean, I guess it made sense. Like, because it's a layer one and people are building all these things, there's always excitement at a conference like that, right? I mean, because you just have hundreds of companies or protocols or projects that are building things presenting. So they're always pumped. Like, I feel like you can go to, if the market's down, a Bitcoin conference is really depressing, and then you can go to token 249, it's always exciting.

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's always been sort of my feeling about it. But I think Lou just dropped, so I can't continue that conversation. We've had this talk as well before, but, well, let's go back to Coinbase, actually. So Coinbase launching custom stable coins. I would love people's thoughts on this. It seems like stable coins are just going to become a massive commodity. and everybody's going to have one. I've, you know, I, isn't it?

I let other people talk, but I think that I look at them like credit cards and, you know, everybody's going to be issuing them. It's just, it's really another way to make contact with your customer and give them value and have a unique relationship. Yeah, it's marketing tools and it's fees. You know, there's a lot of, and this is where, I think what you're going to see is a, and this is why they did the big partnership with Shopify. is you're going to see a lot of these app developers on Shopify.

What they're going to do is they're going to issue their own stable coins. And then, yes, it's just a marketing tool like points and rewards, but the fees are lower. And it's something that they would do regardless at some point in integrating their own stable coin. But this is where it's pretty smart for Coinbase and Shopify to get way out ahead of that because they can still capture those fees and the credit card fees. So at the end of the day, this is actually really big.

bad for credit card processors. And it'll be interesting to see how that actually all unfolds because we are just, I mean, it's like all the technology is there. It's kind of like, you know, when MySpace came out and then Friendster and everything and like Facebook, it was like, it was just time for social media to kind of take on. It's just time now for stable coins to really take over and get rid of the fees and, you know, give people back the billions of dollars that gets squeezed out for like a very simple technology. But again, there's got to be transactions, right? Like billions of transactions

coming through every single day by these credit card processors. Like everyone's like, oh, we're going to use Bitcoin for payments. It's like Bitcoin's theoretical max is like 640 million transactions or something a year. And these processes do billions a day. So stable coins need to happen. But again, I don't know if I'm calling that like people aren't going to jump from their like Shopify app stablecoin like into some meme coin. So I don't think this like helps the market anyway, but it isn't an adoption of the technology. But where does the value flow?

It flows to USDC and Circle and Coinbase and the public stock markets. Yeah, I mean, do we launch Cryptotown Hall? C-T-H-U-S-D and let people tip us? Doesn't hurt you. I mean, do we get to make money? I'm already doing the paperwork. Thank you.

We could track, Scott. We can track everyone that comes in and then they post about it. And then we can take, we can incentivize everyone with how much social they post. Right. But is this, like, is this a, I guess, is this a thing for companies, right? Is this saying to, you know, every company out there, you know, when we tried to launch Libra from Facebook years ago, it's saying, hey, just come white label this from Coinbase.

You get your own stable coin. It's safe you don't need to build from the beginning. Or is this literally like every person launches their own means? coin but it's a stable coin or is it both i don't really know what this looks like i would imagine i don't think there's any value in a launching a stable coin for like it's it's stable right unless like you know and it's probably all us dc backed so it's like all the other liquidity's all locked around coin base so it's not like you're out there creating a liquidity pool you know on uh ape swap you know, for whatever meme coin that you're trying to create.

You're just utilizing a branded stable coin that's USDC that the value flows back to your business versus somewhere else. But it also continues. So Coinbase is basically getting ahead of the trend of everybody starting to launch their own stable coin and trying to capture some of the value of that. This space was downloaded via spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today. Yeah. Probably from corporates and institutions. Yeah, I got a lot of friends that have like,

decent sized Shopify apps, you know, they're doing 50 million a year in revenue. And, you know, they pay three to four percent or more, like, depending on how many fees are out there to these credit card processes. And they're kind of wondering like, you know, man, how do I get like a million dollars back a year or $1.5 million back a year at that size of business is like, you know, a pretty big 5% back. And so they would love to hop on this if it was proven and it had the backing of someone like Coinbase. Like they probably wouldn't like hire a team of of six to launch their own and do something very special there, they're focused on their core business. But if it's plug and play, it's something that they'd probably be interested in.

Yeah, I wonder how much Coinbase keeps probably like a 50-50 split or something. I have no idea. Tony, go ahead. Yeah, I think this is a very smart move by Coinbase because if you see what they've been doing lately, they've been working with a lot of banks like JP Morgan City, PNC, and they use their crypto as a service platform to help those banks to launch crypto trading and customers. and we know they've been partnering with BlackRock. Well, the banks, if we've been seeing the rumblings from the Fed, they want to launch stable coins. Well, what do you do?

You launch a stable coin as a platform or service to help them to do that. So I think it's a smart move on their part. And with the stock trading, they're going to be able to compete with Robin Hood. So they're making some very smart moves. Yeah, I mean, there's clearly a few forces leading the race for being everything apps for finance, right? Robin Hood, Coinbase, et cetera. And these are the, in my opinion, the Schwartz and, you know, and Morgan Stanley's of the future. But I think that to your point and what we were saying is that why there's this kind of bifurcation in the way people are approaching stable coins post-Genius Act.

I actually asked Dante Desparte from Circle about this yesterday. The conversation hasn't been released. But it's either like reinvent the wheel and try to do it yourself. But then you have much more, I think, upside in how much money you make or just partner with your. USDC or Tether or something. And it seems like USDC is capturing most of that because they have the most regulatory clarity in the United States. I don't know if that's true, but it feels that way.

What's going to be interesting, we look, sorry, go on. I was just going to say, what's going to be interesting is when Tether launches their U.S. approved, if you want to call that in quotations, stable coin, which is, I think, USAT or something like that. It was supposed to launch this month, but maybe they're holding back a bit. But it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Lou? Well, I've long believed first that Circle USC was going to be eventually the U.S. digital currency.

CBDC. It just seems like that it's just, and it's more so every day, it feels like that to me. And I think when we look back on 10 years at Stable Coins. today, like the innovation has just started. I mean, a dollar is still literally, you know, basically just a dollar, other than that, it's now digital. But now it can be anything. And I think when we see what stable coins are in, you know, a lot less than 10 years in a

couple of years, all of our minds will be blown away with the amount of innovation that's brought to the table. And it's probably not going to be brought to the table by U.S. you know, by circle. Tony. Yeah, to add to what he said is, I've been talking about this for years. I think this CBDC name has been replaced or it was made to be this bad thing.

We're going to ban CBDCs in the United States, but stable coins can do the same thing. I remember having these conversations with Chris John Carlo, the digital dollar project. And he's like, look, everybody's seeing the CBDC as a boogeyman, but they're just letting the stable coins walk into back door, right? And if you guys recall recently that CBDC Ban Act failed to be passed in the defense spending bill, I believe it was. So we got to watch us closely. Privacy has become more of a narrative. I mean, the SEC even was talking about how these things are going to need to be private. It's interesting also.

I think DTCC, maybe it is worth discussing for those who have better knowledge. We saw that crazy announcement by the DTCC last week that they'd gotten a no action letter from the SEC, meaning that they can move forward with tokenizing and then said that by the end of 2026 that most things would be settling on blockchain rails and tokenized, ETFs, index funds, et cetera. And then we saw the news that it was either yesterday or the day before that they had chose Canton Network to do all of this, much to the dismay of, I think, Solana and Ethereum homers. But Canton Network, one of their biggest, I guess, selling points is privacy, right? But this is way out of the bounds of my knowledge, by the way.

So I'm giving the broad point. Yeah, I interview you, Alruz, of digital assets. That's the name of the company. They've been working in the Canton Network. And it's backed by Citadel, Goldman Sachs, a bunch of Wall Street firms have invested in this. They funded it from the beginning, right? So they were the initial investors, not even just, yeah. Yeah, so it's built as a public blockchain, but privacy built in.

doesn't need a third-party ZK integration or whatever. And purpose, and I learned all this today, but purpose built effectively for high-frequency trading and such as well, right? Yeah, so it's pretty groundbreaking. Obviously, I just need to do a bit more research on, you know, some of the details of the blockchain and functionality, but I think more details are coming out now, but that's something to pay attention to for sure.

They have a token. Is it CC? Is that Jant to Network's token? Yep. I mean, I'm looking at the chart, like, it's up 8% in this week, this week, the largest, if this just shows where we're at in the market, and we're up 3% in 24 hours, the largest institution on the planet, talking about trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars, the DTCC that settles literally every securities transaction in the United States just announced they're using this blockchain. and it's up, it's not particularly liquid, and it's up 7%, 3%, depending on the time frame. How is that humanly possible, Lloyd? Yeah, I mean, I invested OTC in this a while ago, and you can see if in the chart hasn't

performed very well. I think the reason might be that there's a question of whether the value will flow to token holders. And with all these big banks being the major supply holders, you know, will, do they have an agreement not to dump on each other. I mean, we don't know exactly how this will go, but there's a lot of market cap already. So, you know, it's over time, I think it's probably a good investment. It seems to, like when I've been, I've been on this show saying, you know, a lot of the

things that will go on chain will not trade on Solana on Ethereum and things like that. They'll trade on proprietary blockchains. And this is sort of what I had in mind. But I'm not so I'm not fully convinced that any of that value will flow to token. They'll even allow that value to flow to token holders such as us. Nothing like an OTC deal in 2024 or 2025 where you thought you got a 50% discount and are now down 99% from your 50% discount. It's been a really good time.

You know what it felt like it felt like friction, right? It's like, oh, this is a really cool project that the banks are doing and it's kind of hard to get tokens. So that alone was like, I'll take a shot. But yes, it's been disappointing. I've made quite a few mistakes in that arena. I think I'd rather take a shot. It's like, wouldn't it be great to go. Go ahead.

Sorry, Scott. I'm stepping on you there. No, I stepped on you, sir. It's like, wouldn't it be great if you could have went long, like, tether's market cap? Yeah, please. How can I just get long, tether, making more tokens? Just printing, printing, printing. And it's the same thing with USDC.

It's like, again, you know, part of the promise of, it felt like part of the promise of this market was that the average, everyday person could get access to, you know, interesting technology or new companies at an early stage, right? Like, you know, we didn't, I mean, love Gary Tan, it's great, you know, but did his 25K from Coinbase or whatever need to turn into 400 million, right? Or could everyone have put like five bucks in and got a new house? And like thousands of people, you know, gotten, like, taken advantage of that. And that was part of the accredited investor rules. And that's what everyone was like kind of fighting back on was hey like oh you need to have like a million dollars or you know you need to make 200k a year for a couple of years in a row in order for you to quote like qualify

to be smart enough to invest in new technologies and like that's obviously just bullshit um and so it unfortunately it feels like we're kind of I mean obviously there'll always be an asymmetric advantage for an institutional investor or someone that's building something from scratch like that's fine but part of this promise was to get some of this money to flow down to and, you know, the middle class, and I'm just not seeing it. And, you know, Elon, like, obviously, he's, like, you know, amazing. But, like, I don't know if that guy needs $680 billion, right? Like, I just don't know if he needs it.

It's like, you know, do, once he gets to $250 billion, do we just say, like, hey, dude, you have to build, like, 10 airports and, like, you have to build some roads. You could decide do you build airport or something else, but I don't know, it just seems like it's getting a little out of control. Do we allow people to keep their money because they need it? Is that the test? I need it. I need all of his money. Send it to me. I'll put it. It'll be in good hands. But yeah, I don't think we need to go on the debate about billionaires today. It's funny, you reminded me of a story. And while you were talking about that, Joe, I threw up an old tweet, I guess, from two years ago, that a friend of mine, speaking of Gary Tan, was in Y Combinator with

Brian Armstrong when he was pitching Coinbase and apparently Coinbase was like far from the darling of that Y Combinator and Brian Armstrong sat my friend down and said, you know, please just invest 10 grand in Coinbase and my friend had only 10 grand to invest and chose some other Y Combinator thing that went to zero in like 18 months. It's right above like it. I'm sitting with him in this in a bar in Aspen I think. He's telling us my wife and I had a story of how he would have made $40 million, like, right off the rip if he had just given Brian 10 grand. Oop. Wow.

And, yeah, I mean, I was doing the math that's in there. Doing the math at some point on, like, how much Doge I once owned and used to trade to, like, make $5,000 when it would go from 15 sats to 10080s. And, like, if I had held it to the top, it would have been, like, $40 million or something. So, yeah. So Elon can send us each, me and my friend, each 40. just for our losses before just toss us a new LAX something right uh but uh it's uh yeah there there's there's a lot to unpack in all of that and I'm just still really surprised that we're at so bad on sentiments that even lawyer like I understand what you're saying like who owns the tokens

blah blah blah but like things used to pump when there was good news because nobody dug into that stuff I mean, maybe it's good that our investors are more educated, and they actually then now take a look at tokenomics and say, yeah, there's a huge deal, but like, is this going to actually accrue to the token? But, like, the DTCC is the largest financial institution on the planet and chose a out-of-nowhere left field network, and the coin doesn't even move. This leads me to believe that most all coins, there's nothing in the world that could ever pump them again. Maybe that's the bottom signal, but we're cheering. It's kind of like, be careful what you wish for. We're cheering for all of this adoption, and all of this adoption is making this asset class uninvestable for the average person because the value is just not going to accrue.

Am I wrong? Am I, like, too bearish here because, like, we can cheer for all these huge things to happen, but how the hell does that, like, it's the technology is getting adopted. How does that, you know, help your average person who wants to invest in this? stuff. Tony, go ahead. I see your job. Yeah, I think you're right on in the short term. I do think long term, you know, based on different macro factors like liquidity returning, being a better spot for retail being in a better spot. Right now, you know, you look at inflation and layoffs and so it's not the same environment that we've seen historically with the bull markets

where you have retail participation. So I think, you know, that's putting a bit of a damper on on everything that's going on. And I do think that this is the direction we're headed to where everything is running on blockchain rails, right? Whether people know it or not. And I think price, I don't want to get conspirator or whatever, but I think price action needs to happen to drive more people into this market. That's kind of their pathway to learning about blockchain and adopting and being comfortable

with using stable coins and being comfortable with using crypto. know, that's just my thesis on it, long term. But yeah, in the short term, it's painful. And I don't know the timing of all this and what's going to happen. Maybe next year is a bit better. But it's a very different environment this time around. Yeah, Lord, I think you were jumping in there on that as well. Yeah, I mean, look, it's just not alt season, right?

But I do think that all these things bring more money on chain. and more eyes and all that's good for Bitcoin, which ultimately is what drives the eventual alt season. So hold on. Right, I guess. But alt season was always like the catalysts were stories and narratives and nobody cared about economics. And then do we get there again or people actually smart enough to look and say that? So here's my problem is we are clearly moving into a phase where fees and utilities should matter, right? People are going to start looking at projects and trying to value them in the same way that they value other companies. Problem is that everything that exists right now, if you actually value it that way,

is probably overpriced and needs to go down 95%, just to find the base of where you can actually value it based on those things. People will stop caring again. When certain things start to feel like crash game again, yeah, and then they jump in and that causes more jumping in because there's two things that are happening, right? There's people buying things that are actually things that people will want to own for some purpose, and that's not very many things. And the rest is just crash game. Price go up, and we all buy, and then it go up more until it doesn't.

And now we're in, it doesn't, but that'll change. Yeah, we've been waiting a really long time for it to change, Panos. I mean, the problem here is that retail have no money, and old season is very much driven by retail money. and it's just not here no one has money that that is the issue like if you look at the state of just society right now

there isn't as much money circulating like if you think about last cycle when everyone was getting stimulus checks because of COVID we had crazy alt season and then the cycle before that was a complete different time as well it was like crypto was very new

or like alt coins were very new and there was a lot less money in the market as a whole so it was very easy to pump a lot of these assets. This cycle, it's just been driven by institutional money, which has gone directly into Bitcoin. And retail, the retail money that has been here, has gone into pump fund shit coins and all these meme coins,

and most of it has just been blended up and, you know, gone. So the question is, what is going to bring retail into the market? Where is that money going to come from? $2,000 stemmy checks from tariffs, right? Yeah, I was just about to say that. Sorry. Military guy is going to get money. Like if they fire up the printer and start, you know,

throwing cash out of the helicopter, then maybe that's the catalyst we need. Do we believe that's going to actually happen? I don't know. I mean, how else does retail get some money in their hand? Midterm elections are coming. Politicians are going to do it. They're going to do it.

do it, the markets tend to be really, really unpredictable and kind of all over the place in midterm years. So I don't know. It'll be interesting. But if it is going to happen, then you'd imagine it will happen within three months of the election. Not now, right? Helicopter money now, everybody would forget that they got paid for their vote. Yeah, exactly. It feels, again, like, I know the charts and all that showing bearer signals and the four-year cycle and all that, But it feels like certain things, the timeline has been pushed into 2026. I think starting with the release of the tariffs that crashed the market at the early this year, kind of breaking that timeline a bit.

So it feels like there's another leg left. You got the macro. You got Trump with a Stimmy checks. You got QE started. So I don't know, crypto companies are looking to do IPOs, AI companies, tech companies looking to do IPOs in 2026. So that doesn't align with people saying four years. cycles over, liquidity is going to dry up.

I think they're going to step in with the money printer and that it's going to continue. Anybody else thought on where our liquidity may come from? If we believe alt season is dependent on free money, any idea is what could be a spark for an alt-to? I think the, I think prediction markets need to cool down a little bit, you know, and I think it's probably sucking up a little bit of the capital in the market, but I think what retail will realize is that, you know, you can't, like, betting on which word Trump is going to say next isn't going to, you know, potentially get you like a new house, right?

Like being able to invest in early stage technologies and watch that investment and make an educated decision and feel good about that and the long-term value that that brings is a different value proposition. And so I do think we see that capital rotate back at some point. I think people are degenning so hard because they think that there's not, they're just like whatever. There's no options. That's how the YMAR Republic was, by the way. Yeah. I mean, it's not a good, it's not a good situation. But people are being squeezed right now, big time. Most people that, you know, they, especially like Gen Z, it's like they don't even like Buying a house doesn't even seem like a, like that's just not even like a, it's like a pipe dream.

Right. Rampant speculation on everything, you will largely buy desperation or indifference has been, has preempted many depressions and absolute end time collapses. So good times. Well, hopefully not end times collapses. But I do think that we will see some sort of alt-coin rally at some point. I mean, you know, it happens in the stock market still. I mean, Palantir is trading at 450 times earnings, right? It doesn't mean that things can't be overvalued.

So I think that people will rotate back in at some point. Obviously, there's winners and losers like every time. But a lot of these foundations still have a ton of money. They're just waiting. You know, a lot of them that you think are dead, they're still like hiring. They're capitalized. Yes, they have less than they had before, but some of them have made very good decisions to rotate into Bitcoin.

to rotate some of that into stable coins, and, you know, they're going to come out with a bank. So, you know, I think that'll be a, it will happen. It's just, you know, I think that, you know, unfortunately, I think Dems get midterm elections. You're kind of seeing that go down. There's a lot of people that were in the center before that have, aren't happy with the way that things are going. And I think they vote the other way, and the money printer comes on and Wall Street gets stoked again because they get to push people around and do whatever they want. But both sides are going to put money equally. There is no political party has any claim to fiscal responsibility.

I don't know if you were saying, but like if it goes left, you're saying they're going to print more money because last night checked, it's the right that's literally talking about $2,000 to every citizen. Yeah, I mean, they're saying they're going to try to pay that with like tariff money. But again, I don't think it matters. I think that Wall Street pushes the left around more than they get to push the right around. Yeah, well, that's true. And I think that their capital markets seem to be unlocked in ways there. And they seem to be more apt to work with that side. And that way, you know, again, I'm not saying I agree with it or anything else.

And I think that, you know, a lot of things need to be cleaned up. But that would, hence we would get some sort of interesting rally in all markets. Yeah, I mean, when you look at actual fiscal and monetary policy, it's like the twin Spider-Man meme just pointing at each other. André, and they're the same. Andre, go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, I hope I'm not glitching too much. But I think what could surprise to the upside, though, is retail participation.

I know, I mean, retail has been largely absent from the market this cycle. If you look at Google trends for like Bitcoin or search terms like crypto, they've been like cycling around, but they've never really crossed like 30%. And so retail has been largely absent, but I think what could turn this around is the labor market, right? We are already seeing an acceleration in U.S. leading employment data like the ASA staffing index and temporary help services, right? And so actually, I think that could be one of the key upside surprises, kind of out-of-the-box scenarios for next year. And in terms of semi-checks, I mean, we're already seeing simi-checks, right? I don't know whether you've seen that announcement of the Warrior dividend, right?

$1,700,776 dollar stimulus check for each U.S. soldiers, I think it's 1.45 million U.S. soldiers. So, I'm about billions in Stimmy checks already. And as far as I know, and as far as I've understood it, the checks are already on the way. Yeah, I was honestly not even on my radar. Somebody else had their hand up, I can't see. Now, I'm not sure if I'm not seeing the panel correctly. I see Andre Lawyer and Joe. Do you guys see anybody else on stage still?

No. Okay. Lawyer, did you have your hand up? No, that's all. Yeah, I went into the glitch for a second and then you come back and you never know. I was not even aware that there was already stimulus checks going out. So it shows how on top of this I am. But I mean, yeah, I'm just wondering.

Yeah, the Kobayi letter, they posted this that it was also confirmed by the White House. They announced this kind of warrior dividend. So we have like the warrior dividends left soldier dividend, which is a Stimich. And then we have these tariff dividends, right? Interesting, interesting. Yeah, listen, it's easy to be. be bearish when prices are down, but there's always seems to be some catalyst that comes,

right? The Clarity Act could be it. I mean, do any of you three think that the Clarity Act could be that next catalyst for real interest in all? Guess not. Yeah, say I let lawyer answer that. I'm sorry. No, I don't

think so. To bring Altseason back? I don't think so. Yeah. Well, you know, I've thought maybe more regulatory clarity on what all of these things are could do it. But I agree with you now, even though people are saying it can be a catalyst, because we've had the SEC really clarify these things. We have Paul Atkins literally saying he doesn't think anything is a security unless it's a tokenized security. So I think we're getting that clarity. All right, guys, I think we're going to go ahead and wrap it. We've cooked through all the topics. And so we will be back tomorrow, 1015 AM Eastern Standard Time for the next. edition of Crypto Town Hall. Thank you guys for joining. Appreciate it. Have a great day and we'll see tomorrow. Bye. This space was downloaded via Spacesdown.com. Visit to download your spaces today.