The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Are People Giving Up On Crypto??? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

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Scott, can you hear me? I know you're not online today, but can you hear me? Is he online for a bit? All right. Not online at all. I was going to ask him, like, I'm here. They bring up my account for optics. I was going to ask Scott what's the reason his account is gone when he's not here.

I just don't see any value add, Scott, if you can hear me. Let me, Robbie, I can't mute you. I'm not sure why. If you can mute Robbie, that'll be good. You're a team at the gym, having a cup of tea at the gym. But if you can mute Robbie, it'll be good. I just got a little background noise. Robbie, can you hear me?

All right, perfect. Thank you. All right, we're going to kick it off, guys. It's a pretty – it's going to be an interesting discussion today once we know how Robbie's – we fix Robbie's mic. Robbie, can you hear me? Robbie? Robbie Young? All right, Jonathan.

Let's see. All right, so mics are playing up today. All right, cool. Let me kick it All right. So mics are playing up today. All right, cool. Let me kick it off. Today's going to be a fascinating discussion because I want to know what to help people. I feel like I'm in my own little bubble. Robbie, I'm going to bring you down and bring you back up. So Zoe, if you can bring up Robbie again, just DM him, tell him that the mic isn't working.

His mic's having issues. Jonathan, you seem to be the same. It happened yesterday. I had a space with someone people love to hate or love to love. His name is Tommy Robinson. Anyone in the UK knows who Tommy Robinson is. I'm aware people constantly have their mic issues, so I kept muting. Robbie, I don't know what's happening to your mic. You can't. Okay, I think it's muted now. Perfect. Cool. I might kick it off. Let me bring up Simon very briefly because I want to talk about the whole Palestinian Binance issue.

Jonathan, your mic. All right, guys, please. I know it up Simon very briefly because I want to talk about the whole Palestinian Binance issue. Jonathan, your mic. All right, guys, please. I know it's not your fault. I know it's not unintentional, but your mic keeps unmuting, Jonathan and Robbie. So we try to force close the app and mute it because I can't keep muting you.

We're good now. Last chance. And I'll remove you because it must be a glitch. Simon, what's the issue with the whole Binance thing and the Palestinian accounts being suspended? What do we know so far? Is something of concern like i i got pretty worried

about it obviously not related to me but just seeing binance act more and more like a bank i know there's regulations they have to follow but i would love to get your uh your thoughts on the news there simon yeah so the thing with um the binance situation is obviously if you remember back to when we were covering the Binance case, there were several parts to the settlement. The first was the $4.7 billion fine. Then there was CZ was going to get up to 18 months. He ended up getting four months and he recently got released. But the other part is that the US Department of Justice needs to put in their own compliance team to supervise. I can't remember the exact terminology they use. So Binance's compliance team is currently the U.S. government alongside their own. CZ was taken out. The original allegations were that various groups like Hamas had accounts with Binance. And so the Israeli government wrote to Binance saying that it wants a complete asset seizure. They're stating that it was only to certain accounts that were connected to terrorist activities. But there has been massive amounts of Palestinians that are putting up their screenshots showing that their assets have been frozen.

At the moment, the Palestinian Monetary Authority is being restricted from replacing all of the damaged cash in Gaza. The banks have all been blown up. And so the latest attack on Gaza is to make sure that they can't access their finances. And many of them didn't have the ability to cold storage because they're in a war finances. And many of them didn't have the ability to cold storage because they're in a war zone. So many of them were storing it at Binance. And there's been a lot of reports around that. So it led to a bit of a boycott. And there was big outflows of about 44,000 Bitcoin yesterday.

And they're claiming that it was just a connected account. But many people are saying that it affected their accounts. How many accounts was it? We don't know, so they've been very vague about it, and they wouldn't be able to say that because anything connected with your anti-money laundering program, you'd be prohibited from making any type of statement about it. But do you think Binance really had it?

I don't know if they're being boycotted. Do you think they had a choice and have other exchanges done the same thing? As you know, I'm a shareholder in many exchanges and this is the only one I know of that has publicly said that. But it may just be that some exchanges weren't opening accounts from that region.

As you know, it's a disputed territorial region, whether you call it Palestine, occupied Palestine, Israel, it's a subject that's a bit complicated. So I'm not sure exactly what the exchange is. So Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have both had this issue? At the moment, this was just affecting well i think most people when you sign up to an exchange you would have just put it your put of your country of residence as palestine i don't think the many exchanges would have separated between you know occupy gaza and occupy west bank so it's a bit of an interesting question so when you're doing a blanket asset freezer you know you've got a choice between um reporting the suspicious activity reports or just saying the um and you know there are

there are the only people on the the list that you're meant to freeze assets from are those that are actually on the sanction list so everyday residents of gaza um shouldn't be on the sanction list. So everyday residents of Gaza shouldn't be on the sanction list. And so there's no requirement to do that. Yeah, so let me go to Panos. Go ahead, Panos. Zach. Yeah, I was just going to, just a question for Simon. Do you think that the reason Binance are complying to this is because they're worried that they might lose their banking, not licenses or whatever the banking they have do you think they're scared that if they don't comply with israel ask them that they're going to lose their their banking yeah there's multiple attack vectors so obviously it's incredibly hard to

maintain a bank relationship um but having opened up many accounts i've never been asked to have palestine as one of the restricted countries. And there is no additional, you know, there's no additional, I'm not aware of any additions to that list. In fact, Israel has received additional sanctions as a result of their invasion of West Bank over the last couple of days. But yeah, you know, the bank accounts is one attack vector they're also coming after the physical accounts they're coming after the cash they're coming after the central bank and then the crypto exchanges were the final piece but do they have to do it yeah there's consequences if you don't comply with such forces because they will certainly look to probably have some kind of attack on your banking partnerships.

And remember, the compliance team of Binance now is, in fact, the U.S. government is sitting across and supervising everything right now. Yeah, so fascinating. By the NQ coins, I'm going to give you the mic, Zach. I'll just check chat GPT, which major exchanges, which crypto exchanges do not restrict Palestine? The only confirmed one other than Paxful and LocalBitcoins, the only exchange is Binance. And then may offer services in Palestine like KuCoin and Bybit, but Binance is the only one that does. So while it's being boycotted for doing what it did, if this is true,

then I think they should be given the credit that, hey, at least they are offering services in Palestine, unlike other exchanges, again, based on Chad GBT's answer. But Zach, we'd love to get more thoughts on this. But how concerned should citizens be? Obviously, something I've been very vocal about is free speech in general. And one of the ways to restrict free speech is through the freedom to transact and having your money frozen for various reasons. Is that something that one should be concerned about when using an exchange as custody? Is that becoming more and more of a problem as exchanges go through the traditional financial system? Yeah, I think we can both look at this situation in particular, and then we can zoom out to the general problem, like you asked about. I think in this case,

the way to understand what's happened here is to look at the consent order that Binance entered into as part of its guilty plea to various criminal charges, including interacting with sanctions, terrorist organizations. It is true that, you know, on the OFAC list, Palestine or the Palestinian territories isn't listed as a restricted region like North Korea is, but there are various sanctioned terrorist entities that are there. And we know that Binance has done business with some of those entities. And that was part of what caused them to have to plead guilty to criminal charges. And it's a tough situation to be in if you're the compliance team to, you know, make sure that none of that money, some of it very legitimately for

individuals in the Palestinian territories who are just trying to protect their wealth. But it might be hard from a compliance perspective to know which individuals are legit and which individuals are connected to terrorist organizations and how that money can be used. And the way that the sanctions law works with OFAC is that it's a strict liability offense. So it doesn't matter that you're trying to do a good job. If you end up doing business with a sanctioned entity, you're on the hook. And it's sort of like triple word score in terms of how much trouble finance can get into, because part of their settlement, part of their guilty plea is that they had to refrain from any further sanctions violations. And if they were to break the law here, even inadvertently, that could

undermine the settlement agreement that they reached. And the previous charges could come back with a vengeance if they violated their agreement with the US government. So I think that's why they are being particularly careful and scared. Now, the question of like, you know, freedom to transact in politically unpopular areas in general, outside of just the Biden situation, I think that's a very real issue. And I think the lesson that we've learned from this case from, you know, the like tornado cash and samurai cases, is that, you know, you really need non custodial tools, if you're going to interact in politically unpopular areas. And you just can't rely going forward on regulated businesses like Binance that need to follow

sanctions law, that need to follow MSB law. If you're trying to use this technology in a sovereign way, you have to use the technology directly and not use trusted third parties. And I know that it's a lot to ask of someone who's in a really difficult situation. But there are, you know, there are people all over the world who are teaching people to use Bitcoin and similar technology directly. One of my clients, Geyser, uses non-custodial lightning donations, particularly to help families that need medical help in Gaza. There are ways of people providing direct aid, but I just don't think you can reasonably expect platforms like Binance to take risk in terms of what sanctioned entities they might be interacting with.

I appreciate that. Simon, anything else to add on this topic before I move on to the general market? Yeah, I just wanted to say a very active Palestinian cause activist in the UK, Sarah Wilkinson, or is it Williamson? I apologize for that. I don't know her Sarah, but she just got arrested today. Her home was raided. Her children's phone were all asked to be opened. And she's now in prison under the Terrorism Act for speaking out on X basis as a pro-Palestinian. And it was never in support of terrorist groups. UK. Oh, the UK is a whole different beast. You know, I did a space with Tommy Robinson, obviously love him, hate him. One thing I learned is he started giving examples of people being penalized, being jailed for what they've said online.

The examples are terrifying. I never thought I'd add the UK, one of my favorite countries, along with Brazil, Pakistan, et cetera, as countries I would never travel to for security reasons. It's a whole different topic that concerns the hell out of me. And just another reason why that taking the person with the largest following um and then making an example to terrify people into not doing it simon i i didn't i never talked about this um and scott made a joke about it once but um i was invited but to to a country uh by the president to go interview them you know being given a lot of protections amnesty etc but i am uh i was thinking it but I was considering it.

And then what happened in France with Pavel getting arrested when he's going to meet Macron, allegedly. I'm like, fuck this. I'm not going to any country and get honeypotted by the president himself. But yeah, this is the exact reason. Obviously, if you – but the UK took it to another level. I know it's a different topic, but they are jailing people that had – there was a post that was seen by 1,000 people. And it's a post that says something like go to that hotel.

It's a hotel that house immigrants. Go and go with you. Every person and their dog should go there and break the place, something along those lines. I can't remember the exact quote. And he got jailed for I don't know how many, like a year or two. Let me get the exact information to kind of give you guys an idea that this is pretty serious i took it very lightly initially but he said he was jailed for 20 months he said every man and their dog should be smashing the fuck out of britannia hotel um obviously i don't agree with

that statement at all um i'm not i'm not even anti-immigration i'm pretty uh um you know pretty pretty objective about it i just don't take it in actual sense. I've always been pro-immigration in general. So I stand against statements like this, but to be jailed for 20 months for tweeting something like this and only being seen by 1,500 people, I'm like, imagine like, wow, okay, my posts about the UK and the riots and criticizing them, which obviously Elon was doing as well, It's been seen by tens of millions of people, just these posts alone. So I would not be stepping foot in the UK, which is something I would never have imagined to say.

I would say that about Russia, China, et cetera. Yeah, Mario, just a final word on that. Look, this is a really important use case of Bitcoin, crypto. Bitcoin is my preferred. But even if it's, you know, you, everybody, a country like UK, would you imagine that these types of arrests would be happening? Well, maybe you would have predicted it. But here's the reality. Everybody right now needs to prepare by having the ability to own their own money and spend their own money in an asset seizure environment, because that is where the world is headed. And so the time to prepare is now. There's nobody in Gaza right now

that could set up a hardware wallet in a secure environment. And so this does need to be prepared for. So please don't wait till it's too late. Learn self-custody, learn how to protect your own keys and prepare for an environment where your bank no longer works and people are being arrested because it is becoming more of a reality across the world. It is. And again, that's coming from me as an optimist. And if someone disagrees on stage, please do. But as an optimist, it is seeming more and more dystopian. Again, countries I adore, the UK, France, obviously I'm Australian, I love Australia, but there's just red flags in many of those countries, the UK being the most extreme. So yeah, absolutely, and I hope the US doesn't head down that path.

But Jonathan, any final thoughts on this topic, and then we'll get into the markets. Your mic isn't working, Jonathan, unless someone else could hear you. I cannot. So I'm just going to continue the discussion on the markets in general. Jonathan, if you can unmute, please do. Let me go to followers. Followers, how are you? Yeah, doing really well, Mario. How are you? Good, good, man. Let me read out a couple of tweets here because it feels like I'm living in my own bubble where I'm extremely bullish and the markets are great, but it seems that not everyone agrees with me. Let me read out here. Chris Bernice, he says, patience, all the more important. It is in an impatient industry. Then Pseudo says the following, sentiment is nearing despair levels.

Again, that was a few hours ago. Multiple industry friends who survived, just go mute, you follow us and then unmute when you speak just because you got a bit of background noise. He says, multiple industry friends who survived the 2018 and FTX crashes are pivoting careers. I don't understand. Bitcoin's at 60K. Meme coins are still got a lot of activity. Ideals, we just had a project launched. One of our projects launched today, Reformed DAO, just about two hours ago, and they launched it at 5, 6X. Okay, it's not a 20X, and they're stabilized at 4, 5X project and also the 20x that's a really really damn good and uh you know we're in you know we haven't really the real world market hasn't really kicked off we start hitting all-time highs retail hasn't entered and let me read out another

longer tweet here by luca and i'd love to kind of the audience to break it down for us and i'm gonna start with you fellas but let me break and say what luca said here time-based capitulation is the name of the game for Bitcoin. Short thread. The price is the same as it was back in March, yet the sentiment is completely different. That's what surprised me. Again, I'm living in my own bubble. My sentiment is great. Same as my team. At the beginning of March, everyone was euphoric and wanted to buy. They embraced any narrative that confirmed their bias, which is supply crunch, ETFs buying, pump and halving, OTC markets with the lowest supply in

years. So everyone FOMOed in. That's when I de-risked my portfolio and when everyone should. In the present, everyone's anxious and frustrated or even calls for lower entries as they panic sold, which creates the perfect environment to increase the risk in the portfolio. Now, what should we do? Even if the price goes lower, it will be only for a short period of time until it goes back up. I personally don't care about it, and I'm happy to gradually increase the risk in my portfolio. That's what I've been doing for the past months on miners, increasing my total position by 3x, comparative to what I had back in March when I first sold.

So it just seems that the sentiment I was going through some of the YouTube videos, it's just very, very negative. You'd look at the sentiment. If you don't know the price, you wake up from a coma, you look at the sentiment like, shit, are we at 10, 20K? And you look at the price, we just hit 60K today. Again, we're over about 60K, above 60K recently. So follow us. We'll just get your breakdown on two things, just the markets in general. And second, why are people just, why is there such despair? Yeah, it's a fascinating question and one that I've given a lot of thought kind of this year in particular. I mean, if you look at where crypto was two years ago, 2022, the post 21, let's say bear market, the euphoria of the 2021 run was over. to believe it's hard to remember a time where we had weekly binance foot tether foot uh we had

voyager we had celsius we had uh three arrows capital we had luna of course we had ftx and i think in that environment it's it's hard to appreciate truly how much money how much capital left crypto and never returned and and most likely won return. I think that's something that people are underestimating is, I mean, it's very easy to say deploy capital, you know, during the bear market, deploy capital when BTC is, you know, at 20k, deploy capital when alts are down bad. But, you know, I think people misunderstand that when there's no capital to deploy, when people are, when people are forced out of the market it's very tough to force themselves back in both from a financial perspective and a kind of a mental perspective

so with that in mind people asking today you know why we're you know btc is you know it's only 20 something percent down from the high or even less um you know it's it's down 18 percent from from where it was in in in march um people asking where is the money where is the capital the new capital entering the market where is retail i think the answer is that the we're not going to see that explosive entry of new capital into the markets like we saw in 2021 purely for the reason that there's a level of hurt that happened after that market cycle that is still healing, that is still repairing, and people are reluctant to dip their toes in the pool, right? And I think

you look at the altcoin market, right? Total three is down 30% from the March high. That bottomed out at minus 42%. So that's almost a minus 50% drawdown during the crash at the start of this month. You know, BTC, as I said, is still minus 18% from that high. But it's indicative of a market where the vast majority of participants are overexposed to alts or, you know, on the flip side of that, underexposed to BTC. Right. And you're saying you're talking about sentiment. You're saying it's at an all time low. Why are people more bullish? It's because people hold a lot of altcoins and a lot of altcoins are down bad i know a variety of altcoins uh because i hold them are down you know down 50

or worse from the from the march highs and i think that creates this kind of it creates this this paradigm whereby you know people are hurting uh people are looking at let's say the btc max season thinking well gosh i wish that was me um you, and they're wondering when is retail going to come? When is when are the new when's the new capital going to return to the market and buy my bag specifically? And I don't think it's going to be that simple. I think it's going to take something pretty big in terms of moving the markets. You know, nothing will into the 80, 90, 100 Ks before we see a massive influx of new capital into the market to beat the current supply crisis that's being caused by, you know, Pump Fund and all these altcoins being launched. And, you know, just to make a final point on that, if you look at the Google search analytics for crypto and Bitcoin, we're currently now at the same level that we were in the 2022 bear market

lows, which is wild. That's absolutely crazy. But I think it's indicative of a kind of a macro global environment where crypto isn't necessarily seen as this exciting, you know, put your money in and it'll double, it'll triple, it'll quadruple because people are more wary after what happened in 2021. I was myself pulled into the market in 2021 and I literally longed the top on everything and almost lost all my money. So I know what it feels like to be in that position, you know, late 2021, early 2022, you're down bad, you join because everyone said crypto is, you know, the best way to make money and you lost all your capital it's very tough to to bounce back from that and say okay here's an opportunity here's a market where there is you know incredible opportunity incredible potential i'm going to make the most of that

so what we're seeing is is is a variety of factors that kind of lead us to this position where yes not only are people kind of uh you know, as you mentioned a couple of minutes ago, time-based capitulating, but there's also a lack of new capital coming back in, which can give this sense of stagnancy and maybe not, you know, not as much growth as we're used to seeing in previous quote-unquote bull markets. Let me go to Jonathan, Dave and Zach. Go ahead, guys. I'm looking at some of the metrics, by the way. It's just a lot worse than I thought, Follis. I just don't look. I just saw granular in the operations of the business. I never just take a step back and look at the markets and the people's sentiment. The more metrics I look at, the more concerned, the more surprised I am, not concerned. But

go ahead, guys. Dave, Zach, Jonathan. I think there are two things to explain this phenomenon. One, the people who are from the industry who are leaving, I think it is this story we've been talking about again and again, where the quote unquote, real, you know, utility projects have been dislocated from both meme coins and the major, like layer one crypto assets like Bitcoin and ETH and to some extent like Solana and stuff like that. And I just think there's a pretty, even though Bitcoin is at a good price, I agree with you, all things considered. And, you know, I'm bullish long-term. I'm still, personally, I'm very bearish on like the VC-backed projects and the people that are trying to build crypto tech. And I think that like tokenomics in this cycle uniquely, as opposed to previous cycles, are broken.

And that probably needs to be fixed before you make money. Yeah, no, you've talked about this. And you've talked about a few reports as well in previous spaces, which thanks for sending him through. Um, you're still right. One of the metrics I was looking at is I'm like, we invest in a lot of those VC backed projects, how many of them that launched this year, dozens and dozens of projects, how many are sitting at a forex or more, not from the from the seed round, but obviously from the ideal round, from the latest round. That's

how they measure our crypto rank. And I saw nine projects so far this year. We're in, what are we, end of August. Nine projects only, which includes today's reform DAO. I'm not sure what they settled that, that are right now sitting at an ROI of Forex or more, which if you're not in the VC game, it's an atrocious performance. Now, many of them hit quick all-time highs. Sorry, quick highs when they first launched. We saw a lot of 10, 15, even 20x launches. But now they've just corrected crazy levels. Even quality projects, Binance Launchpad projects did really badly. And Zach, essentially, are you seeing a shift now in the tokenomics of startups, of projects to adapt to these new market conditions that are more wary

of any project that has a high FDV and short lockup periods? By and large, unfortunately, no. I mean, this is something I talk to founders and investors about all the time. And there are a few projects I've worked with that specifically we've designed different types of warrants and really limited the number of tokens that insiders get. This is getting a little bit into the weeds. But just for those who are familiar with the private crypto markets, generally, you'll have this concept of a company reserve where half of the tokens go to VCs and the team. Or you'll do a FTV quote-unquote based warrant where it'll be like a one-to-one or one-to-two ratio with equity to tokens. Instead of that, some of the projects I'm working with have shifted to what we're calling like an investor reserve model, where you take a small slice of the tokens that launch, you allocate those to each fundraising

round and you just cabinet to that. So like if you're 50% of the seed round, you get 50% of that small token pool, but it's not a commitment as to the total number of tokens. I think that is a good way forward, but that's still a minority way of doing it. But no, the problem is VCs want to fund projects where they get a big slice of the supply. True, true. But don't exchanges set the rules. If Binance says, hey, we're not going to accept projects and they did that, we're not going to accept projects that don't fit certain criteria, then projects have to abide by those rules to get those top tier exchanges. But it takes a while to get those top tier exchanges, no matter what. And teams and VCs can make a lot of money on an IDO on a DEX before it ever gets to Binance. Like, yes, by the time you get to Binance, you're already winning

a lot. But if you're making all of these bets, I bet even Binance would be willing to bend the rules if a project was popular enough. And so I just don't think that there's a strong enough incentive. I think the incentive will come from pain, like real pain, maybe at the end of this year or early next year. That will be a forcing function. And they're not in real pain. These ideas are already down 80%, 90%. And it's not even a bear market.

So I don't know what real pain means. That's a pretty… But there's still optimism, right? There's still uh who are investing in early stage stuff vc still money to deploy but yeah because we are in the bull market like even like now i'm looking at i was looking at it two weeks ago uh one of our after one of our spaces where you brought this up i went to my team and a lot of these vcs are just not even selling they're not even liquidating their unlocks in these market conditions people i know i won't name, but VCs I know dump everything when they get it. They're not selling because they just know that the market is underpricing those projects.

I just think we're at capitulation. I don't expect it to capitulate any further. But I could be wrong, Zach, because I know you're still at it. I would take the other side of that. I think VCs still at my deploy. Early-stage deals are still happening. I think we'll feel capitulation when there isn't the sense of optimism among investors like that, that to me will feel like the bottom. Just quickly separately on the retail side, I just don't think retail is as relevant as it

used to be first, because at least with the major tokens, we need more money than like retail collectively has to like really meaningfully, for example, move Bitcoin at this point. And like, retail has had now two cycles to get burned. Retail does not do well in investing in crypto. They always buy the top. And the fact that people are not searching for the price of Bitcoin, that the Google numbers are not up, we just might be in a different phase than we used to be with that stuff. So I don't know that retail is going to come in and save us from this problem. I think we'll know capitulation when we feel it.

And hopefully that will lead to a different fundraising paradigm that's like more sustainable. Dave? Yeah, I have very little disagreement with everything, with anything Zach said. But the way I'm looking at this market is, frankly, Bitcoin is likely to lead the next rally when the rally happens. And it's important to understand what's going on with Bitcoin. And I know it seems very simplistic, but I think sometimes simple is good. If you go back and do the basic Bitcoin hash rate versus price chart going back to the beginning there have been you know three actually one two three you know we're about to enter the fourth we're in you know the fourth uh having cycle

effectively bitcoin exceeds dramatically the hash rate increase in price uh followed by a retracement and a long consolidation period and it looks set to happen again so if you look you know james safer made a tweet the other day that he's often i don't see him up here now but you know he's often on this on this channel uh that is exactly what i was thinking which is it feels exactly like the 7 000 to 10 000 range that started with paul Tudor Jones saying Bitcoin was the fastest horse when it had recovered. Remember, this was post the end of 2017, 18 high. It got to 11,000 and change in July of 19. It then proceeded to trade down to as low as 6,000, but effectively got back to 11,000 right around October of 2020, so 14 months, and then went on the epic run from October through to April that took it to 61,000.

During that period of time, what's interesting is that when it first went to 11,000, it exceeded where the hash rate was. Hash rate was down well below 100 million exahashes. It's over 700 right now. So the network is seven times stronger today than it was when that was happening, and six times stronger than it was at the peak when it hit 61,000. So understand the dynamics. Now, we've been going sideways since March. There's a couple of reasons to think that there are some potential catalysts that could happen in the fall. There's three that I want to talk about.

But max pain in my mind, and I tweeted this this morning, is it breaks to the downside in the beginning of March, flushes out the rest of the leverage, and then it's an incredible buying opportunity. Now, that's max pain because I think people don't believe that will happen. Now, maybe I'm wrong, and maybe we don't get that flush out because to be blunt, every time it's gone below the levels that it's at now, it's rebounded fairly strongly. Now, what are the three potential catalysts that I'm looking at? Well, the first is FTX. There's a lot of money that's about to get refunded to people over the next quarter or two, if you believe it. And that money will probably end up in crypto. And people aren't talking about that, but it doesn't take a whole lot of marginal money to matter. The second is the coming online of the wirehouses into the Bitcoin ETF.

I mean, Morgan Stanley announced it, but that just means that their employees are allowed to start soliciting. That will matter. My brother's a financial advisor. He called and asked me about Bitcoin in the last week and is starting to dip his toes with his clients into it to get to get off zero, as it were, as Mark Yusko likes to call it. That will start this fall in earnest. And so that's not a small deal. And the third that people aren't talking about but should is you may

remember that in January, the accounting rules for corporations changed. The fact is that Michael Saylor did what he did in MicroStrategy. There have been a couple of cases, but very few companies have done much. The fact is the rules changed in January that said starting the following fiscal year for every company, you can then, starting in that fiscal year, account for Bitcoin in your balance sheet without having to take the adverse accounting treatment that you used to. You can then, starting in that fiscal year, account for Bitcoin in your balance sheet without having to take the adverse accounting treatment that you used to. You can market to market. So basically what that means is this fall, because most companies' fiscal years start in the fall, companies that are interested in putting cash into Bitcoin all of a sudden will be able to do so and no one's talking about it but there are there were there were multiple thousand ce you know ceos and cfos at sailors participating in his various things uh they're capable of doing

so starting in the fall that's a major catalyst what month does that start how long does it take it is it started in january but your fiscal year has to be the next fiscal year. Very few clients, very few companies start their fiscal year calendar year. Most of the fiscal years are starting in the fall and you'd have to go company by company that might consider it. I don't know the answer, but it's important to understand these are all sources of demand. Now notice, I didn't mention the election because I just don't want to go down that road because that's all we'll end up talking about. But that's the other thing. There's a lot of other things that could happen.

Point being here, whenever it's despairing and people are unhappy or antsy and we are below fundamental values, that's when you're buying or that's when you should be accumulating. And if you look at the market action, it feels like we are grinding out a shift from weak hands to strong hands. And that could continue easily for another three to six months, but probably won't. It would be my guess. Yeah, let me, Jonathan, I'll go to you and Robby when I have a back and forth. But Jonathan and Mike, we'd love to get your thoughts on the discussion so far, but also any comments. I'm not sure if you've been watching. And if you looked into Nvidia's earnings yesterday, the wild moves we've seen in the stock price.

But we'd love to get your thoughts on the discussion, Jonathan, and just a bit of a macro overview as well. Your mic still isn't working, Jonathan, unless someone else can hear you. Mike, how are you, sir? Good. Good morning. Hello, everyone. And one thing I appreciate about Dave is we have some good banter and we typically disagree. The key thing I like to point out is what Dave mentions with the hash rate are things I used to like to point out four, three, two, five years ago. And they were good, bullish indications for Bitcoin when you're in that space and when you had so much to look forward to. When I would get those calls every other week from someone who'd

say, hey, Mike, explain this to me from someone I knew who was running big money or running big economics departments. And there was a lot to look forward to. What was the next big trade? To me, that all stopped when we launched the ETFs. And I don't get the calls anymore. Just letting some of the inside scoop. I'm just not getting that type of oomph anymore. And the key thing is I do is I wanted to point out the big elephant in the room and the max. First of all, in the big picture, I'm very bullish that overall outlook for Bitcoin definable diminishing supply, increasing demand and adoption. But the elephant in the room, I'm completely indiscriminate about Bitcoin is what I see happening in equities. I see what happened in commodities.

There is a great reset happening in commodities. Gold going up 30% since when commodities peaked 30% higher in 2022. And everything heading lower is a big problem. And then I, so I look at copper. Copper has to go higher. What it needs is a stock market to go up. For crude oil to go higher, it needs a stock market to go up. But you get that beta, the number one measure of risk on the planet this expensive say 26 above 100 week

movement average there's so many things i can use the highest ever versus a blue you know the rest of the world's commodity indices 25 year high versus bloomer commodity next there's so many measures we can say how expensive you a stock market i look to that and say okay that to me is a problem if i'm running money, if I have anything that's a higher risk than beta. So that's the way I tilt over to Bitcoin. I think that high we put in March was significant. It's going to last a while. And I always like to compare it to two key things, gold and S&P 500. So right now at 11, it takes basically 11 S&P 500s to match one Bitcoin. The peak in 2021 was around 15. The high this year was 14.

It's tilting lower. It's heading downward. And it should go back to seven. That's not a big deal to say that if you look at what's happened in history. Seven was the peak when futures were launched in 2017. That was a significant for the real money to get into space is when ETFs were launched. So getting that ratio back down to seven means nothing in the big picture. It's just what I'm pointing out right now.

One key thing that'll make that happen is just a little back and fill in the U.S. stock market. So I look at a Bitcoin versus a gold. Basically, it's 24 ounces of gold to one Bitcoin. That peak was around 35 in 2021. It's heading lower. And you have to overlay that and just say the U.S. equity market. You see, okay, stocks have to go up or this is going to tilt lower. So what I see for Bitcoin is everything is tilting downward.

And I think also then you look over what's happened since ETFs were launched. Okay, we've had $16 or $17 billion of inflows. And the average price since we've had inflows is right where it is right now. So that's great. The problem is we need more and more inflows. I just see divergent weakness in the asset that some people call the fastest horse in the race. I'm completely indiscriminate about their assets. I think the same problem I see in copper, I see in crude, and I think gold and treasury bonds will remain the best performers. I'll end with this.

There is not one, there's a thing on the terminal, Bloomberg terminal called economic surprise indexes. I looked at a dozen of them this morning. I look at Japan, the US, global, there's a thing on the terminal, Bloomberg terminal, called economic surprise indexes. I looked at a dozen of them this morning. I look at Japan, the U.S., global. There's not one of them on the planet that's negative at the moment. So those are leading indicators. Yes, they're wrong, but it's a key thing that we do in markets. Can't focus on the past so much. What's the last best trade

the fastest horse in the race is indicating that there might be the race might be over for a while if you want to respond before i go to jed i like to be snarky and say if they want to hear my response let's listen to macro monday we're on scott's channel but but i will say this uh mike and i are at the core of our disagreement is timing. Every time we look at these indicators, I think that cherry picking the 2021 high is at unbelievably ridiculous exuberance today, roughly speaking, Bitcoin would be somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000, which could happen, but I don't expect it. I think that understanding that the core is, the question is, Bitcoin, is it going to achieve enough acceptance to be digital gold, which is still a measuring stick against fiat currencies in a world where we have fiat printing as far as the eye can see, it doesn't matter which party wins that that doesn't matter. And I think the answer to that

is yes, it's more and more likely. I think that you have to understand everything he said makes sense. I mean, I think that there's a lot of exuberance, but piggybacking and not understanding that the day before BlackRock first announced the Bitcoin ETF, it was trading at about, you know, 25,000. And so what are we more than two and a half times that price right now in settled into this range. So it's outperformed from that point not from the other point and so that's important in terms of looking at bitcoin when you talk about divergent weakness you're getting into technicals and technicals matter uh when you pick your time periods as far as everything else he said i think that the real question for

bitcoiners and it will always be the question, is when will it delink? When will it switch from being a potential option with massive asymmetric upside to, which of course is being treated like a risk asset on the margin, to an asset that is going to basically follow the money supply? And the answer is it's been remarkably correlated to the money supply, but that's because the people who are buying or selling it, you know, have to find liquidity on the other side. The incoming liquidity from the Bitcoin ETFs has definitely masked a lot what would have happened. I mean, people keep saying, well, you know, Bitcoin has done well. I mean, you know, it's only 20% down from from it we're in this trading range you

know you never didn't fall 50 when everything went bad well yeah of course not because 16 billion dollars moved into it on the margin into the into the etfs you know it's supply and demand guys and so but but there's no reason to believe that's going to change if anything that's going to accelerate so that's what that's part of the deal is people, you know, bottoms happen when sellers get exhausted. And sellers feel like they're getting sort of exhausted these days, in Bitcoin, at least. That said, if Mike is right, and we have a massive, you know, stock market crash and all assets get killed. And by the way, that tends to happen when the Fed starts to cut not not preceding the cuts.

You know, that's also something that's worth talking about. But if that happens, all correlations go up in those scenarios. Assuming that doesn't happen, I'd see sustained outperformance starting sometime in the fall through the spring. That's my thought. Follis? Yeah, just two points I wanted to quickly make. One is in relation to, I suppose, market expectancy for Bitcoin post-halving. And just something that I've been looking at for the last few days is the kind of the scaled price of Bitcoin post-halvings.

And this is, by some margin at the moment, the worst performing post-halving performance we've we've had were about 120, 130 days after the halving now. And Bitcoin is struggling to hit the same levels of Bitcoin in 2020, would mean that we would be looking at something like 81K BTC. And in 2016, it would be 71K BTC. So there's an element of underperformance there that I think is kind of factoring in when people are talking about, you know, people are talking about like maybe a lack of excitement in the market or a lack of reason to draw retail in. I think a point that was made to me recently, which I thought was fantastic, was that if people want to draw retail in, we need a product that can bring about user adoption in the same way that ChatGBT brought user adoption to AI.

And I think maybe in the same way that certain video games made mainstream the concept of spending your time gaming. And I wonder when crypto gets to that point, when will it get to the point where we're drawing the average user and we're drawing the man on the ground in to use this product by virtue of the fact that we have an incredibly accessible means of adopting new users and drawing retail in. Let me go to Robbie. Robbie, how are you? Hey, I'm good. How are you? Good, good, good. I know you don't comment much on the markets or make too many predictions, but one thing I always ask you, and your answer has always been consistent, not sure if that changes. It's actually a pretty important forward-looking indicator, in my opinion. Is that your strategy at Animoca? I know i asked the same question again and again and but especially every

time it's you know yes it's the same it's long term hasn't changed but i'm sure if markets capitulate i remember the last time when marcus really capitulated um i know that animal and other vcs completely put all softs on hold and obviously started cancelling if you to adapt with the with the sudden um market collapse of the markets i think when luna happened or ftx come i know during ftx i think so my question to you is uh with the discussion hearing now with the especially what zach was talking about earlier and the metrics that i've mentioned the underperformance of vc back projects has that shifted your strategy are you focused more on on projects that have different vesting schedules for anybody is not

a good indicator, frankly. And we always try to make sure that everybody's aligned, you know, be it team or investors who have provided capital to a project, or frankly, the community participation in a project. I think all projects needs to be, you know, carefully managed to make sure that the token holders are all swimming in the same direction with regards to vesting schedules. So I think that's kind of a fundamental underpinning. But in terms of our strategy, I don't think that we have, like our long term prognosis is, is frankly unchanged. And it's really the market fluctuations are more, they're more influencing how we think about maybe valuation or how we think about our negotiating position in any particular deal at a given time. We were not players in meme coins or things like that because we try to be a little bit more fundamentals driven as far as at least what we perceive as Web3 fundamentals, which is things like aligning interests through tokenization and long-term interoperability of content. But you mentioned something interesting that we do as well.

You do start negotiating down valuations and trying to get better terms because of the market oh yeah of course of course and that's just that's just trying to you know we're we're asian we like to save money where we can right so if the pure business as well but it's pure business as well because it's mitigating your risk especially with the amount of projects that are failing and we've got projects literally failing hours or days after launch that doesn't happen during hype phases. Yes. And I think that, but our hope is that, you know, especially projects where we're involved in a hands-on, you know, capacity, advising them, et cetera. You know, we try to avoid that as much as possible. And you can see, you know, we even proceeded ahead with our launch of our Mocha token about a month ago now,

despite market conditions being less than optimal, because we felt like it was an important, you know, it was important to the community to follow through with our original schedule and not be subject to the winds of the market and say, look, you know, this is a community and a long-term project and an investment that we're making in building out a community around the Mochaverse ID system and collections. And so, you know, we're going to do this because we want the community, we want to honor that promise to the community. And, you know, we've been very fortunate that they've, you know, been supportive ever since.

Yeah, let me just see the project that launched today. I was very surprised by it. You probably saw the countdown spaces that we do for projects that we believe in. There's a project that we did one today. We did one for today, which we haven't done one like months. During the hype phase in the bull market, we do countdown shows, which is, for anyone that doesn't, hasn't seen them. It's actually, we start counting down for the listing of a project. And then, you know, we all make predictions before launch and like how many x's it will do it's just fun and we talk about the project of course and valuations and all that and you know you'd have

projects hitting 5 10 20 x live on spaces and we do it we're very selective on who we do it for but despite being selective in the bull market it's like what sometimes we do like two a day i've had one day i did three but generally it's one every day or two in the bear market i haven't done one in weeks because all projects are just delaying their launch um but we had one day I did three, but generally it's one every day or two. And the bear market now haven't done one in weeks because all projects are just delaying their launch. But we had one do their launch today despite market conditions. And I asked him the question, are you doing the launch today? Why?

And the project's called Reform DAO. They hit a 6x on IDO price, about 15x on a seed price. They're sitting at 4x now, which is very healthy, very healthy place just considering market conditions. In the last three months, there's only four projects, three projects, including this one,

that are sitting at a 4x or more. It's very impressive. But I had a similar discussion because you guys with Mockiverse, you know, similar launch, a very healthy chart, very successful launch. And, you know,

you've even seen Binance back projects, Binance launch back projects drop by, I don't know, it's called, drop by 60%, 70%, 80%, even 90%. So my question to you is, you've got these projects that are still launching despite market conditions, some long lock-up periods. What is your recommendation for these projects? Do you recommend they still launch now despite the conditions, or it is better to delay for when there's more demand? It's very hard to give blanket advice in this case.

I would say to everybody, though, one of the things that we always try to make sure when we're looking at launching tokens is to understand the makeup of the holder base and to try to understand how we can make sure that everybody's interests are aligned. And some of that you can do through mechanical means like locking up the vesting and others is just to really know who is in your community. That's why it's important to have strong leadership who spends time in the trenches, getting to know as many of the holders as possible, because then you can really be assured that interests are aligned. I think the most

challenging situations are when tokens are distributed just sort of amongst either short-term investors or people that the founders don't really have much of a relationship to and you don't know if these people are going to be flipping out of your token at the first opportunity or if they're genuine long-term holders. I think for something like Mochaverse, we actually, as you know, we gestated the project for well over a year. So I think by that point, we had gotten to build kind of a core base of support amongst the community leading up to the TGE. Yeah, I agree. I was going through some of the comments to the audience as a good discussion and um any new narrows that are interesting to you that that you know that came up in the last

couple weeks obviously uh nvidia's earnings are positive for um for any ai projects i'm sure they would have gotten a bit of a bump from that i haven't been looking at the markets anything else that's interesting how's the ton network doing despite uh pavel's uh arrest i think um from our perspective obviously we love ton um i think it was you know as surprising to us as anybody else the news of what happened with pavel and um so i think that um anybody who's looking at the ton ecosystem from an investment standpoint would most likely be awaiting further news or information for clarification because typically that's just you know smart due diligence on making a new investment um but i don't i don't see that that affects um you know the platform as it exists now and

and obviously we'll see if uh the ton price is is widely affected by some of the activity that they've had over the last couple of days. Obviously, there have been outflows and lots of volatility. But fundamentally, we think it's a great ecosystem. Yeah, I cannot disagree there. I appreciate it, Robbie. And I'm going to pivot the discussion to a bit of back and forth. We're talking a lot about the Binance, the Bitcoin ecosystem. How are you guys?

We're doing well. How are you? Good, guys. Good, good. What do you guys think about the whole VC-backed market, VC-backed tokens? Yeah, I mean, look, we are raising like everybody else. And we take a very conservative approach. We're not looking for some insane percentage when

it comes to what we're raising versus what our valuation is. We try to be reasonable. We say, okay, this is the runway we have. We don't need to exploit people, but that's not necessarily the norm. It's often a cash grab in this industry. And you can only hope that you have founders that are willing to be reasonable and try to return value to their investors as opposed to just trying to scam people, unfortunately. Yeah, let's dig into what you guys do. I appreciate you coming on the show. I want to dig into what GOAT is and try to simplify this without getting too technical for the audience.

How would you describe GOAT's solution? Well, no problem there because I can't code a ham sandwich, so we're all set. So the way that I describe – There you go. So GOAT's a Bitcoin L2. And what we strive to do is basically to deliver sustainable yield on BTC, which is ostensibly impossible, right? You can mine BTC. And there's not much else you can do, but wait for it to go up or, you know, sometimes write that when it goes down. So our economic model is designed to create

basically like a BTC bond market, really cool, really different. Nobody else is doing that. And if we succeed, then we will have achieved our mission of sustainable yield. And then aside from whatever ecosystem we build, that creates a very interesting USP. Nobody else is doing that to this point. Okay, so Bitcoin L2. I've got a few questions on that.

We're invested in a few. Obviously, there's a few. I won't name any that haven't done too well. There's too much hype. And there's a certain sentiment around Bitcoin L2s right now. And there's L1 solutions that are available as well. So first,, yeah, some of them are gaining more attention than others. It depends on, you know, what you're looking at. What we strive to do is to be different, right? So the first thing that I'll say is, if you look at actual

ecosystems, they're not necessarily that robust. Like, go to the Ethereum space. Think about how many dApps are on Arbitrum or Optimism. Think about how many dApps are on Solana, right? You don't really see that in BTC, where it's a great borrow lend, a great king dex, a great meme launch or whatever. You don't have that. That's one. That's what we try to separate is we want to build that great ego. And two, again, is that economic model. You have an L2 and they're scaling Bitcoin.

Okay, then what? What is the reason to go over there? In our case, the reason is lock your BTC, earn more BTC. That's it. Simple. Okay. It's a very simple solution. But then why do you think there's so many L2s launching anyway? Because people go where the money is.

And if you think about market cycles, you look back to the last one and you had Ethereum and you had a bunch of L2s, right? You know, Arbitrum comes out, Optimism comes out. Since then, we've had Base and Blast and so on. That's a little saturated. And so people say, OK, what's next? Well, Bitcoin's the king, right? Bitcoin is the number one asset. It always has been.

Maybe it always will be. And the network remains not all that scalable, at least on L1. So you're looking for ways to make Bitcoin itself, the network, more scalable. And you're looking for use cases that go beyond that. And so I do think it's a lot of the same reasons that you saw when it comes to Ethereum L2s. But in this case, perhaps the stakes are higher. And maybe the upside is even higher, too, because the asset itself is unbeatable, right? It's Bitcoin, nothing better than Bitcoin. Yeah, I remember, and I've said this so many times, people getting sick of it. But Brock Pierce's quote without pat on me, it's called, when you're king, you don't give a fuck, you take your time, you don't have to hurry.

And Bitcoin is king right now, and it's like the year of the Bitcoin, the year of Bitcoin. But just before digging into what you guys, what Go is and kind of the Bitcoin-fied services or solutions or projects that are building on your L2. There's a few others who are invested in a bunch of L2s. We're also invested in a few solutions building on L1 on Bitcoin layer itself. Wouldn't that be a better solution? Why do we need an L2 if there's solutions that are progressing? Some people are not too hopeful about them. Others are progressing directly on the Bitcoin layer. I would say that it's a big boat. You know, there's opportunities for lots of projects to be built on L1 or L2. Again, let's go back to the rest of the space, right? You have great, whatever you want to call them, alt L1s

that are succeeding, and you have successful Ethereum L2s that are succeeding. So I think it's just a matter of doing something different. As far as the specific reason for Bitcoin, it's again, the network hasn't quite worked at all out when it comes to scalability, when it comes to speed of transaction, cost of transaction, and so forth. It's not to say that Lightning, for example, doesn't have a great business model. It does. There are obviously dApps that are building on L1. Those are good too. This is a different way to go about it. But I do agree with your main point. If it was just a Bitcoin L2, oh, we made Bitcoin faster. Okay, lovely. What comes next? It's got to be something else. And that's why we keep coming back to our econ model. It's that, yes, it's very nice to have dApps and an ecosystem or whatever, but tell me the why. It's such a busy space. People could do whatever they want with their money, including put it under their mattress. There's got to be a reason. I have a stack of Bitcoin. I can have a bigger stack of Bitcoin. That's a pretty compelling argument. So the solution itself is pretty simple, kind of a lend-borrow protocol.

So it allows anyone with Bitcoin to kind of stake it and earn yield. Is that essentially the solution that you guys are focusing on? I mean, it goes beyond that. So, I mean, you know, we could do this in phases. I don't want to kind of dump a six-minute answer on you. But basically, you know, we built this model that has TradFi elements to it, which is basically you come in, you have Bitcoin. It can be – you can have a staked Bitcoin model. You can decompose it into different assets, and you can create this bond market that we talked about.

The big thing for us is it comes from having a decentralized sequencer. I'm going to give, like, a 20-second intro on what sequencers are. Yeah, I was going to ask you exactly what having a decentralized sequencer. I'm going to give like a 20 second intro on what sequencers are. Yeah. I was going to ask you exactly what exactly was a decentralized sequencer. Let's do it. Let's try to keep it simple. I'm curious. I'm not that smart either,

Mario. So not to say that you're not, you are, but look, the way that a sequencer works is that when you have an L2 on Ethereum or Bitcoin, that's what's processing transactions, right?

So the transactions come into the ecosystem and that's where the money is made. So those sequencers are earning fees. Now every L2 in the universe has one sequencer, which is the foundation, the arbitrage foundation, whatever. Respect to them, no problem. What we're doing is we're decentralizing it so anybody can run a sequencer. You can run a sequencer. Anybody can do it and you compete for a share of the revenue that comes through our network. So going back to what does that mean? How does the money come in? Our gas token is a wrapped version of Bitcoin, GOAT BTC. So every time there's a transaction on our network, the sequencer processes the transaction, they earn one to one wrapped Bitcoin. So you're actually generating more Bitcoin just by actually processing transactions. There is staked Bitcoin that comes into our ecosystem. That's where the initial supply comes from. And then that trickles down to the rest of the ecosystem by virtue of each transaction being processed, more Bitcoin is earned. Then you can stake it, then you could decompose it, then you could do fancy stuff with it. But this is something that nobody else is doing. Again, to this point, it's unless you're a miner you can't grow your stack other than obviously you buy more bitcoin

okay um now the the other question i have yes uh is the uh let me go through the questions i have you because i skipped a few uh please no problem and we're bouncing around. That's all good. So go through the sequencer. But what I'm trying to understand is that why is that? You said no one else has worked on this. Why is that? Because other L2s have got

a lot of them work on the same solutions, offering Bitcoin Fi on their L2. So what makes Go different? Why are you guys able to create that sequencer that others don't have? Because there's no will to do so. The thing about giving up control of your sequencer is you give up operational control and you give up the ability to control 100% of the revenue stream. So if you look at an existing L2, they control their own sequencer. They batch the transactions. They put them together.

They process them. They could perform MEV opportunities by themselves. They have all that stuff. We're saying, no, no, we're going to share this with others. Now, that's not to say that we're entirely altruistic. Obviously, we want to make money as well. So the way that we do it is we're sharing, but then it creates this competitive market. And by the way, you want to run a sequencer, you have to bring in at least 100 BTC, which right now is 6 million, probably more in the future. So we are basically revenue sharing and control sharing

with outside entities, be it Bitcoin miners, be it infrastructure providers, what have you, and not for nothing, it's going well. So far, we have five committed sequencer node operators, they've got 5000 Bitcoin on the line, they've already brought that to our ecosystem. That's better than a kick in the pants when you're starting a network with 5,000 Bitcoin. So we're optimistic that this model has legs and that more people will be interested in running sequencers and that more users will want to use it. So the narrative among most of L2s and even L1 solutions is actually turning Bitcoin, it's been kind of a passive asset for all these years, finally turning it into an active asset. That's been the narrative for a while now, especially earlier in the year. How has that been going?

What do the metrics show? Is there life, is there liquidity in the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem? We think so. I mean, look, we're not mainnet yet. We're talking to you a little bit before. We're going to have testnet on September 10th. Mainnet is going to be in October. So we're a couple months away. But what we're seeing from the early interactions is that there's something there. So you look at some of the top BTC five companies that are in this space, we've talked to solve, we've had very good conversations with them. There's hope for, you know, a path forward with them. We've talked to a great provider for a king decks that could do cool things for BTC, a great borrow land, a great kind of pump dot fund, but for BTC model, all that stuff. So they're all buying into it. They're saying, yes, there is an opportunity. And, you know, going back to your first point about VC money, I do not want to name names, respect to all

competitors, but let's just say that it is conceivable that you could be a BTC L2. You could get a gigantic stack of money from VCs. And maybe you're not so interested in bringing on board great dApps or having them get built out. You're like, we've got our money. We're putting a lobster on every plate. There's no problem here. We don't believe that. We want this to be a sustainable model that people tune into.

And they're interested in getting involved in the ecosystem for years to come. As you said, turning it from a passive asset into an active asset, BTC. Yeah, but this year hasn't been too exciting for DeFi, especially in recent months. All the hype is pretty much meme coins. I'm just trying to think of anything else that's getting the same hype, maybe AI tokens as well. But meme coins are going to dominate the current cycle.

How do you bring that kind of, I wouldn't call it hype, but how do you bring that excitement to DeFi, especially when it comes to Bitcoin, which is probably the least exciting? I think that's fair. And obviously, Bitcoin has become sort of an institutional tinge to it, right? A regular person might think, well, I can't even buy a Bitcoin. I don't have $61,000, what have you. Memes are exciting. They're easy to get into.

What we say is anybody can participate. So if you have even 0.001 Bitcoin, you can actually earn sustainable yield. That's pretty cool. But in addition to that, you're right about fun and hype. And so what we're looking at is having a meme culture. We actually are launching a BRC20 DEX that will enable anybody to launch any asset that they want, BRC20, runes, ordinals, what have you, free, no gas. So anybody could just come on, come to our L2 and do that. Well, that's great. That gives you a lot of opportunity. You can mess around. You could try something. You could launch something. It's not difficult. So we like that idea of leaning into the culture. Look, we're called GOAT, right? I mean, obviously, we are a project that believes in tech and believes in

sustainable yield and all these big words, But we're GOAT, right? We're not bleep-blorp chain. We really do think that there's something there to be said for the culture. And we like the idea of retail coming on board. And we hope that they respond. Just a couple more questions. What was your name? Sorry.

Dane. Sorry. Dane. A couple more questions. First, the utility of the token. I know you touched on it a bit earlier very, very briefly. But if you could expand on that, that would be good. Sure.

So if you think of – we'll use BounceBit as an example. We like to shout out, by the way, our rival L2s. We think that there's a good business model. Who are the best rivals, would you say? Okay. So let's start with that. So we'll get to the utility token in a second. One of the things which we are excited about is the Bitcoin staking is always tricky.

Hopefully the SEC doesn't respond to this. We call it Bitcoin locking, okay? But Babylon refers to it as Bitcoin staking. So they just launched. They just went live a few days ago. That got a lot of response. They filled their cap really quickly. It's a little bit of a different model than what we have because they're looking at interacting with other ecosystems, whereas we're building our own. But the fact of the matter is that people have Bitcoin. They want to find a way to stake it and make more Bitcoin. That's great. So I would use them as one example of a viable and really interesting L2. And BounceBit is another one. So what BounceBit does is their token is like an extra kind of yield booster. So if you think about GOAT, sort of in a similar model, if you hold GOAT, you could be a sequencer, you could

be just a guy who has some Bitcoin or whatever. you hold GOAT, you could be a sequencer, you could be just a guy who has some Bitcoin or whatever. By holding our token, you actually boost your yield. The more GOAT tokens you hold, the more Bitcoin you can make, which is an interesting model. Now, there's obviously balance that has to be had. We don't want to emit our token to zero and so on. But it is a proven model where if you look at this yield boosting use case, it creates a very interesting approach. Again, our gas token is still wrapped Bitcoin. So it's Bitcoin in, revenue in Bitcoin, and so on. But to really get the most out of it, yes, the Go token offers that additional utility. And the last question I have for you, man, is going to wrap it up. Is your roadmap,

what do you have? You said your main net is in October, test net in September. Any other interesting announcements as we get close to ending the year? Yeah, it should be TGE at about right about end of the year in January. We figure world domination by Valentine's Day. That's good. What exchanges do you have? So we haven't yet. Obviously, we're not live yet, the token. But let's say that we have contacts with all the biggies.

We do expect a list on all the centralized and major decentralized exchanges, and we feel like it should be a nice update. Any interesting investors you can mention on your cap table? Yeah, so in terms of pre-A, we had OKEx lead. We have a relationship with OKEx Ventures going back a ways. Crypto.com was on. Polygon Ventures was on. Amber, a very large infrastructure company. And we're raising our A round right now.

Actually, we're just opening it. So we're looking for, you know, tier one to come in and do that. And we expect a lot of our pre-A investors to join as well. I appreciate it, man. Well, congratulations on what you guys have built so far. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you coming on the show. For everyone else, it was a good discussion today, talking about the markets,

talking about the Palestinian accounts being banned on Binance, but mainly talking about why everyone's freaking out on the markets. It was a good discussion. We'll see you again tomorrow, same time as always. Really appreciate it. Stop being so pessimistic. Things are pretty damn good. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thanks a lot for Goat Network for being today's sponsor.

Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye. Thanks, guys.