The Wolf Of All Streets - Will Bullish July Repeat Again For BTC? w/ @DEGA_org | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

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Morning, everyone. Happy Monday. I know a lot of people in the United States are kind of taking this week very chill with July 4th coming in sort of in the middle of the week, but still quite a lot to talk about. Carlo, I'm glad you're here. We only unpacked it a little bit on Friday. Dave Weisberger and I were talking about it quite a bit this morning on back from Monday on my channels, but holy crap, did the SEC and the regulatory state as a whole, for better or for worse, take a hell of a beating last week from the Supreme Court? Yeah, this Chevron decision obviously has huge implications and is a reshuffling of the power distribution between the administrative state and the courts. So

it's a hot topic and there's a lot of hot takes on both sides, but I think long-term it's good for crypto. Yeah. Let's talk about that because I personally can't get into what it means for the EPA or the FDA or other regulatory regimes. But I think we know that in crypto is one of the specific cases where we have an overzealous regulatory environment, enforcement, regulation by enforcement, the passive naming of assets as securities, those being defined sort of haphazardly by the regulator, Gensler and the SEC, obviously. And I said this morning on my show, the greatest irony, I think, of Gensler's bad week, which was horrid last week, obviously, was that the Chevron deference decision came down. And I think two hours later, the SEC announced

their case against consensus. And once again, passively named, you know, Matic and a few other assets as securities, which we know they never go after those actual projects or clarify, they just name a few in each action, when the Chevron decision literally says they can't make those determinations themselves, correct? Yeah, so the timing of that was actually classic, and it made for a crazy day on the crypto Twitter legal front. But, you know, Chevron is a pretty straightforward case. It basically what it basically held was that it required courts to defer to an agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute as long as that interpretation was deemed reasonable. So there was kind of a two-step dance there. And administrative cases had to kind of ride the line there.

And then this Loper case comes along. And the Supreme Court had a pretty massive day of announcements on Friday. But basically, they delivered a decisive decision, pretty much dismantling the Chevron doctrine. And now when you're in an environment where we have ambiguous laws as applied to crypto when it comes to securities laws and an overzealous SEC that's regulating by enforcement action, this is now potentially kicking it back to the courts. And the fact that we are in this ambiguous zone is really going to motivate legislators now to clear things up because now the SEC's worst nightmare may have come true and the courts may be hashing this out

in the absence of regulatory clarity. It's really interesting because I can see, listen, I think you cheer it, I think long term, it's obviously a very good thing for crypto that, that maybe we force the hand of legislators to give some clarity for the courts. But I mean, there's also really valid arguments, a lot of people would say where maybe Supreme Court justices aren't the most qualified to make nuanced decisions about certain regulations and industries, right? So yeah, the argument on the other side of it, you nailed it, Scott, is exactly that,

because people will say, OK, if the regulators shouldn't be making these judgment calls based on these ambiguous laws, then what if we get a judge who doesn't really understand crypto, who makes some really off the reservation rulings because they're capitalizing on this ambiguity? So again, in the end, I think the ultimate remedy here is we need the legislative branch to do their job and to update the Securities Act to include a set of laws that properly account for this new technology. Short of that, we're going to continue to have just more ambiguity.

And then that puts the onus on those legislators to also understand the industry and properly create laws for things that they can't foresee in the future as well. So it just becomes a really interesting sort of cat and mouse for getting ahead of what it'll look like in the future either way it's a huge decision undoubtedly for the crypto industry and has certainly kneecapped everything that gennador has been trying to do for this long stretch uh yeah i would say i think certainly in the short term this doesn't it won't be quite as monumental i think as a lot of folks have been predicting on either the left or the right and not just for crypto but across the

board um because fundamentally like number one congress can still delegate authority at least to an extent to the point it doesn't violate uh non-delegation or major questions doctrine. So they can still delegate a lot of the rulemaking to agencies. And number two, especially like the big issue, I think, for crypto is what does or doesn't meet the Howey test, which is, of course, a court created standard. And that always involves people getting dragged into court to fight the SEC there. So if you're a crypto project that is worried about having to spend $10 million fighting the SEC in court, you still have to be worried about having to spend $10 million to fight the SEC in court because they can still say, hey, we think your project or whatever, that this thing is a security under the Howey test.

And we're going to sue you over it. And you're going to get into court with them, you're going to have to plead your case. And even without an explicit rule that says, hey, courts need to defer to the judgment of an agency like the SEC, they're still going to give a lot of deference to federal agencies. They did that before Chevron. They did that during the reign of Chevron, even without explicitly referencing Chevron, and they will continue to do it after. So I have a question for the lawyers. So when you're trying to evaluate judges, when judges are trying to evaluate questions, how much does congressional intent and statements matter? So we just had a bipartisan in the House passage of the FIT Act, which makes very, very clear distinctions between what's a security and what's not. It's not passed the Senate,

forget signed into law. But, you know, but the question is, does that matter? Is that relevant? You know, we also saw Judge Jackson basically, you know, corroborate or argue that Judge Torres was right in the Binance case yesterday. But, you know, obviously, this is just an evolving, it's an evolving legal spat. The real question here is, how much does any of this matter? And where does it go from here in terms of, you know, SEC action, if Congress is unable to actually do anything to rein in the SEC? statute, it is definitely something that lawyers on both sides will argue. They'll look at the legislative intent. They'll go deep into the floor debates and into what drove the bill forward and got it passed to try and get some clarity as what the legislative branch intended. It's kind of the opposite analysis in this case because we have an absence of clear legislation. So there isn't much that the courts can look to as far as the legislature. I guess they could theoretically look at bills that have been proposed and arguments

that have been made. But until those bills advance and become law, they don't really have any binding effect on the courts. So the courts are kind of put in a real catch-22 here where they don't have clear legislative intent to really hang their hat on. And they have agency interpretation. And now they have to determine where they're going to draw that line. And is it a judge's job? Like we said before, do they have the knowledge to do that? Right. And so I think it's extremely complex, and maybe is going to be fraught with landmines, but not the crypto. I think I think this was an exception that was carved out. Sorry, Rand, I just want to make that point. Yeah, it was just an

exception that was carved out to try to alleviate that balance of power. I think the bigger problem, not the bigger problem, the bigger play is what happens to the SEC by the time these things actually land up going to court things actually land up going to court, if they land up going to court. Because I kind of think that if Biden wins, and I use Biden as a proxy for Democrats, so if the Democrats win, then we keep the same SEC. And if we keep the same SEC, this goes to court and it goes all the way in court. But I think if Trump wins, and, you know, I think the first thing he changes, or one of the first thing he changes,

he changes Gary Gensler. And then I think a lot of these court cases may actually get settled out of court. You know, I just think, I'm not sure that, let's just, I know that this is not going to happen, but let's say that a Hester Peirce became, you know, chair lady or chairperson. She would, by the way, she would become at least the interim chair before trump appointed somebody mostly i don't know i don't know because because as far as i'm going for a month or a week oh yeah i'm saying but but i think like as far as far as i understand um uh as far as i remember i only remember the sec under jay clayton and under gary gansler because I really wasn't excited about the SEC or didn't actually feature in my life before that. And as far as I understand, generally when they select the SEC chair, they don't select the SEC chair from one of the sitting commissioners.

It's usually someone from the outside that's recommended and bought in by the president. And so, like, I'm just imagining a world where a Hester purse comes in, and all these court cases are open. And I recommend in that case, what happens is that they settle the court cases out of court. I don't think that the SEC just walk away from the court cases, but maybe like a 10, 20, $30 million fine, just that, you know, everyone's like, okay, you know, you know, don't let us lose face, but just let us win or whatever. And then we move on to a much better SEC. So I think, yeah, we can, like, one scenario is we carry on playing out these court battles,

but the other scenario is that there's actually a fundamental change in the SEC. And I think that that's something that we, we're not that far away from it. We're, we're, we're in July, July, August, September, October, November, we're five months away from it. And I think there's no chance that these court cases get resolved in five months. Yeah, for sure. And Rand, there's something I was talking to Dave about it actually this morning. But I think what's interesting here as well, as we talk, we've been sort of conditioned now for us to talk about, well, you know, the SEC will be better under Trump. Anything's better than Gensler. What will happen if the Democrats win and we continue with Gensler?

I think it matters a lot less today after those Supreme Court decisions, because this Supreme Court will not be, I mean, this SEC will not be able to behave in the same manner that it has in the past. Like if regulators are just generally kneecapped and can't go after everyone. But Scott, we thought that and then last week they gave us three in a day. I mean, like, you know, just as we thought like, you know, they've got egg all over their face. Yeah, I think they're just like, they're making it, it's like a PR move. There's no, I agree with you. i just don't think

there's any like thirst action go after these at any point you know it was you know it was interesting and i heard i mean i was obviously i was in the states when this happened but but um it's almost like they're really trying to get biden out and like someone said to me yeah of course i was like don't you think the timing was so strange that on the day after the debate, they went for three in a row? Like, I mean, why would you want to do more damage than was already done last night? And I mean, is this maybe like just a ploy to just get the rating so bad that they have to get Biden out so that they can bring in Michelle Obama or Gavin Newsom or someone? I don't know, Rand, because, yeah, the court arguably could be a political tool in this, but these cases have been argued and these have been sitting with law folks for so long.

I think that these holdings were largely, you know, sketched out and written, and I don't think that the timing could be correlated. I just don't think the court works that way. You don't think there could be a settlement, like a court settlement? No, no, I think so. But when you look at the timing of the disclosure of these holdings by the Supreme Court, I don't know that that was necessarily in any way timed on the debate performance, because I think those decisions were written by the law clerks and the judges have gone through them and finalized them.

And I think that the timing of that is probably, I don't see a correlation there, I don't think. Anything is possible, but I just don't see that. I don't see a time that way. Okay. I think we can make it. Go ahead. I would say traditionally the largest thing that controls when Supreme Court decisions come out is the complexity of the cases. That's why sort of you get the most controversial, biggest split ones almost always later in the term towards the very end of things.

Like today is supposed to be the last day of decisions coming out. And, you know, you're going to get the Trump immunity case. And that's because they're doing multiple drafts. They're negotiating back and forth people are changing their positions whereas all the easy cases they can just you know unanimously write up 9-0 at the very beginning yeah matt did you have a point yeah this conversation the other matt oh there's two matt's here again hey matt nice to meet you yeah matt k has his hand up but matthew you can comment anytime you like too because we love you man go ahead matt k here just gonna jump in it's the conversation's way above my pay grade but ran

ran is like making a really good point that i felt very weird watching the the debate the other night and then all of a sudden there's panic after being told for years that everything's fine and it just seems like timed and decisions were made behind closed doors to try to lower ratings and swap out biden uh but we'll see i have no crystal ball here and again this is above my pay grade so i'm'm just going to like take a seat here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we could, we can circulate political theories all day.

I don't think anybody know, any of us know what happened. I will say it was kind of astounding when they then came out, I think the next day and said, you know, Biden's good from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. And then it's like rough at night. He's like only good during stock trading hours or something. But he showed up at the rally the next something but he showed up i mean the next day and he showed up at the rally next day and he was coherent and could speak so why would they do this they were trying to get rid of the guy he answered all the questions he answered all

the questions i don't know if you saw that but that was the part too i mean i must say like that was embarrassing as a non-american watching that i was like wow that was embarrassing as a human person on this planet who has ever been in a situation where they've been embarrassed. That's it. That's it. That's it. And I covered it on my show. So look, there's no doubt Biden lost that debate and embarrassed the U S and made like, I don't want to get into all of that, but I think another thing that we, that like, I don't think Trump was amazing on that

debate. And to be honest, I listened to Gavin Newsom afterwards in an interview. And I kind of think that if Gavin Newsom was debating against Trump, and I'm not a Newsom fan at all, at all, at all, at all. I would be like, like, I think Gavin Newsom would have destroyed Trump on the day. He's a very smart speaker. That dude's been lurking in the background. Like, see him in photos hanging out. It's like very odd how all of a sudden he's popped up on the short list of heirs apparent, whether it's now or in the future. Right. So I don't think that that's a surprise at all.

Other Matt, did you have a comment? No, not really. Just a note, too, that we've been talking about from a regulatory perspective that this, you know, a lot of the changes that have been coming coming through are going to really make a lot of the different pieces of the crypto ecosystem kind of vibrant. I think that some of the things that have happened are certainly positive in this direction, but we should also be kind of weary about the sort of deregulation from like the Chevron perspective as well. You know, one of the things that was kind of a little bit concerning is if you have a whole stacked system of legislators and folks that are, you know, kind of looking to deregulate everything, you might, you know, get what you wish for, which is always a little bit scary. So just always just an interesting question from a legal perspective, again, not my circle of competence, but just a digital thought. Yeah, I think that's what we alluded to at the beginning. I mean, I think this very clearly in the short term, you know, helps the crypto industry, because we've been the victims of

the most aggressive version of what they're trying to stop here. But that doesn't mean that you can sweepingly assume that that's going to be the case with every regulator everywhere in every single law. I mean, I think we've unpacked the Supreme Court side. We have the topic here. Well, bullish July repeat again for Bitcoin. Actually, until I looked into it this morning, I wasn't actually aware of how generally good performance has been in July. Only one of the last nine years has been down.

It was like 2019, and it was down about 8%. Every other single July since then, eight out of nine have been at least a 10% rise in Bitcoin price. We have boring summers, but July at least tends to outperform the rest of the boring summer. So I think from a price perspective, is there a reason to believe that will repeat again? Is there a reason to believe that it won't? Dave, I know you had some thoughts on this before. Well, I mean, it certainly seems to line up, right? You know, so June was down.

People close their second half books, they go on vacation and you know, we're, we're at the, we find ourselves at the end of June. We found ourselves the end of June, we found ourselves at the end of June towards the bottom of this trading range that you and I keep talking about. And so is the most likely scenario floating back up towards at least the middle of that range, which would give you your 10% rally? Yeah, probably is. I mean, is that anything for it to get excited about?

Not really. It's still a range. It's still a range with lots of tailwinds. And, you know, we can talk about regulation, but regulation, that year. A lot of people will do it before announcing it. And those companies that have done so have done well. So you have that cross-current. The ETFs are still in their cycle of trying to get big people to RIA networks to invest. Everyone involved in that said it would take six to 12 months before you start to see it really hit its stride. And lo and behold, in the first six months, it outperformed. Well, does that mean that it moved it earlier? Or does that mean there was just a lot more demand?

I tend to subscribe to the second part of that, not the first, but we'll see. So all those things sort of line up, but that doesn't really, you know, that's not a rocket ship rally. That's just kind of, you know, stay in the trading range and kind of verbal back up toward the top. And then we'll see what happens when there is a true catalyst or when something, you know, really does clarify itself. I mean, Rand, we always talk about like bull market, bear market, performance. I mean, I'm fully on the side of I can't believe anything until we either break this range up or break this range down. I'm encouraged that if you draw a trend line from the beginning of June to the end of June, we broke out on the last day of June

and we are above the trend line. But, you know, it's been 100 and let me measure it just so we talk accurate number 124 it's been 124 days of sideward movement okay so when i say sideways i mean uh bottom of the range 60 or 59 something and top of the range 74 like that's it you know what i mean like march 4th yeah but that's but the but the real question i had is that i think uh if you looked at the past not cyclically because we preempted the having with the bitcoin move everybody does that but when you look at the past you would expect it if Bitcoin makes this huge move, right, and then goes sideways, you would see extreme confidence in the rest of the market, money flowing down to altcoins, etc. But you look at like total three, you know, Bitcoin, the total market cap minus Bitcoin, Ethereum, it's like 600 billion.

The high was like 1.1 trillion last cycle. Altcoins have not done a damn thing. I think we've been distracted by certain altcoins in certain sectors popping off, but they've done nothing. So we have a Bitcoin bull market. And I think you can even argue not a bull market for the other rest of the market or that they're actually where they should be in this cycle if Bitcoin had never gotten the ETF pump and was, you know, where would Bitcoin be right now without the ETF in this part of the cycle post having 35, 40 and ranging? Yeah. You know what it is?

I think people are just full of breaths. And I think that I think when the market's going up, everyone's celebrating. market deviates from the equilibrium line we get into uh people get into excitement mode when it starts to come back towards the equilibrium line they start to like get salty about it and we just got to remind them that we're still way above the equilibrium line like we're still way above where we should be in the cycle like it's like a spoiled kid where like for everything you're just for bitcoin for everything you're just for everything for everything for everything i see it in crypto all the time i see it in crypto all the time. I see it in crypto all the time.

It's like you give your kids one hour of iPad and that hour is like a bonus. They shouldn't have got it. And then when you take the iPad back, they're angry with you for taking the iPad back. You know what I mean? It's just we overshot. We overextended the cycle because of the ETF. And now we're not even back to the cycle levels. We're actually still above where the equilibrium should have been theoretically had there been no ETF.

And people are complaining about where we are in the cycle. Yeah, they just get bored. Yeah, they just get bored. But I think, you know, objectively, there's some people who are like, are these things going to ever move? You know, when you see things that are still down 95%, there were highly hyped projects, large market caps from last cycle. I think they will. But just for the record, I think this is sort of time-based capitulation. I think there was just an expectation that altcoins would follow the Bitcoin move and they just haven't. Yeah, look, my thing is patience,

my friend. Patience, my my my thing is patience my friend patience my friend practice patience i don't i don't care i don't care but i i speak for that we have to ask the hard questions here for people that uh are not you know even you know even even if you're leveraged even if you're leveraged you're actually in some in some cases getting paid to hold which is ironic you know like in some cases, the funding rates are actually negative. I think just chill, like just relax and wait for the market to make a move. There's so many factors that indicate that the next move is up.

I mean, it could be down, but we have a catch up to the traditional markets. We have the liquidity cycle. We have the rates. We have the rate cuts coming almost inevitably as the next move as opposed to a rate hike. You know, we have an ETH ETF on the line. We have people like Michael Dell.

You know, Michael Dell has got the Michael Saylor virus, where he's now tweeting the most ridiculous tweets about Bitcoin. He has one tweet. What do you think will be the next breakthrough in tech? Please vote and share your thoughts. Quantum computing, AI, blockchain, or space tech. Obviously, blockchain was the winner because the crypto dj's are the most active we still haven't vote man we show up and yeah and then and then he went you know then he started getting the michael sailor virus this is when i knew he got the michael sailor

virus and he said the most important thing is ai bitcoin loving relationships none of the above and obviously bitcoin won and then i realized like when he's comparing bitcoin to love and relationships none of the above and obviously bitcoin won and then i realized like when he's comparing bitcoin to love and relationships then you know he's got the michael saylor virus you know and i'm like i just think like you know i i struggle to be negative okay germany's gonna sell okay mount cox is gonna distribute i'm still struggling to be negative i don't know there's nothing but tailwinds for the industry there's nothing but tailwinds especially if you go back a year and look at where we were. Everything has improved. Literally everything that was bad has improved dramatically.

Matt, go ahead. Matt K., go ahead. Thanks. Yeah, call me Matt K. It'll make things so much easier. I can't help but think about your newsletter, Scott, from last week. It really struck a chord with me because you wrote something like, the market is going through a lot of fatigue and people are bored. And there's two major takeaways from that.

Like, yeah, I was fatigued as hell last week. I was trying to, and I speak for a lot of degenerates out there too, I'm sure. Like there are people jumping into pump.fun, taking a bunch of Solana, trying to, you know, beat a dead horse out of a CTO of a CTO of a CTO. It was a community takeover for anyone that doesn't know what a CTO is. Yeah, you just educated me. I had no idea. I was like a chief technology officer.

Yeah, exactly. I always have that kind of confusion as well. well but yeah cto is a community takeover so you have a shitty meme token that launches and then the dev rugs and the community is so you know feeling empowered about the whole situation they they make a new uh twitter account and they and they you know relaunch the token and they all have their own bags and then they try to make it, you know, pump from there. But it gets to a point where it's like, you know, a community takeover will create another community takeover. It's just the absolute degeneracy. And folks definitely were feeling the fatigue last week, okay, new month, we have a breather, like let's reassess here. It's nice to hear that there's some bullish sentiment in the air again. And, um, but also at the same time, ran as, Oh no, ran left, but ran is making a great point. Like just go outside, find a hobby. Like you wrote in your newsletter, like go find a hobby, just like be yourself, let the time pass and, and, and, you, and try not to let the market affect you. It's insane if you fall into the rabbit hole.

Agreed. Now we have three Matthews, by the way. Go ahead, Matthew. Matthew with the hand up. Go ahead. Because it's such a fantastic name. I want to echo what Matt Kay said. With these community

takeovers, and like all these communities just itching for pump and dumps, and just liquidity in this ecosystem is really astounding. It's really sad, like to just see people try to like get communities together to rally and get a token to go pump and dump it, or pump and try to enrich your bags. It's just kind of a sad state of affairs when everybody's running around in a sandbox and there's no toys or sand really in the sandbox. But I'll just say two quick things. Jeff Bezos asked Warren Buffett once, hey, your investment strategy is so simple.

Why doesn't anybody copy it? Why doesn't everybody copy it? And Warren Buffett replied because nobody wants to get rich slow. And Charlie Munger, his partner in crime, always said that like the easiest thing to do is just sit on your ass and do nothing when investing. And that's really what you should be doing. Activity and hyperactivity is what takes money out of your

pocket. It's really bad for compound interest. It's really bad for tax implications. It's really bad for efficient portfolios. People in this space don't want to sit down and do nothing because it's such a hyperactive space. And the truth is the most money is going to be made by the people who do the least amount of things. I love that. That's always been true for investing, by the way, and first trading. Most people who trade and think that they're making money then go back 10 years and say, what if I just bought an index fund? They realize that they could have done nothing and made a hell of a lot more money. It's almost across the board. Very, very hard to beat the market.

Juan? Yeah, no, just to your point, Scott, and Matt's point, a lot of those fund managers, well, all fund managers get paid a fee to deliver results. And so when you have the alternative of investing in a passive index, then yeah, what is the incentive for them? They have to do things. They can't just sit on their hands, which is what they should be doing. So that's the disincentive there. And it's why so many managers underperform. I think it's over 70, 80% of active managers underperform their benchmarks over periods of five years or more.

I think, too, that talking about the dichotomy between the major assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then the meme coins and the performance there and the short-termism of a lot of the retail traders that focus on the meme coins, it's just the market has gotten used to short-term price action. And the liquidity this year has been concentrated on the top assets because of the Bitcoin ETF, now the impending Ethereum ETF. And that's a longer-term minded capital that's coming in from larger investors. And I think the market has to, you know, the retail investors in the space have to recalibrate and they're missing the forest for the trees. This is, you know, these assets are now becoming institutionalized. That money is just starting

to flow, even though we've seen big inflows. And we're seeing other huge developments, too. I mean, I think the partnership between Stripe and Coinbase last week, where they're going to integrate functionality for USDC on Stripe via settled on base, the L2 on Coinbase, to, you know, the customer, that extends functionality to over 150 countries in the world. That has huge implications in the potential to mainstream stablecoins finally into the payments commerce system around the world. And that will have positive tailwinds for the industry. So things like that. I mean, you look at the miners. They've started announcing these partnerships with AI companies. You know, just like NVIDIA never thought before the AI boom with the GPUs that, you know, they were just a gaming processing units company, GPU processing units.

They didn't they didn't expect to find themselves at the center of the AI boom. Well, who thought that Bitcoin miners would now have a big piece to play in that as well with the infrastructure? And now that's providing new revenue opportunities for them, diversified revenues and an opportunity for growth that wasn't there a year ago. So I think there's huge tailwinds in the industry that, especially the retail traders who are frustrated by the lack of momentum in the meme coins are missing. And I think these are things that are going to propel the industry forward. And then eventually, as those things will trickle down into more valid meme coin projects,

and then maybe some more liquidity for just meme coin pump action. But I think people have to look beyond the very short-term price action. Matthew? Matthew, hi. Hi. Yeah, I think it's simple mathematics.

The number of cryptocurrencies or legitimate cryptocurrencies listed by CoinMarketCap has grown from just seven in April 2013. And it's gradually increased every year. In fact, every single year it's increased. Last January 2023, it was 9,002. This year, March 2024, it's 13,217. And if you look at the overall market cap, it really hasn't changed. From the previous high, 67,000, whatever it was, 67, 69 or whatever, a couple of years ago, the overall market cap just hasn't changed at all. So we're actually just got the same amount of money spread across a lot more cryptocurrencies. And so obviously, that's why they're not pumped. It's just been spread out more. And all the new cryptos coming out, they actually do the same as what a lot of the old ones do, but better. They're more advanced. You know, look at Ton, for example, it's got much higher transaction speed

than even Solana. And, you know, there's advances with all these layer twos and everything all these other cryptos big advances and just more and more and more of them so there's just the same amount of capital spread across more cryptocurrencies and we need to do something about getting more capital across into crypto if we want if we want the whole crypto market to to improve and that's going to be a product, obviously, of regulation apart from other things. Sorry. Yeah, where we just did like Elon Musk to tweet about a new meme coin or something that we really want to talk about how we got retail last cycle, you know, was Doge and NFTs on Saturday Night Live. Right. And I think that we need some sort of spark to your point like that to get that

demand. I mean, you look at I mentioned this earlier when I was asking Ran about the cycles. We've had this sort of Bitcoin cycle, but we're still, you know, 40% down from the highs of total market cap when you exclude Bitcoin and Ethereum. And that's with all of these coins being added that you mentioned, Matthew. Right. So it's kind of like that gap is widening, not getting, getting closer at the moment. And I think as Rand said, there needs to be some sort of spark some sort of impetus to bring new capital to the market, and whether that's going to be interest rate reductions, and more QE, or just more, you know, more marketing from crypto, I

don't know, but something needs to be done to change this. Otherwise, it's going to continually decline as we get more and more cryptos coming to market absolutely joe what do you think what's our what's our big or it could be just a 10x in bitcoin right like and that money flows in and we we're all invested in the you know like highest appreciating asset in history and that could flow into the rest of the market. Yeah, I think this month, you know, when you think about it, it's, you know, we got the Bitcoin conference at the end of the month, Trump's, you know, potentially going to speak at this thing in like, we could potentially have a little bull run into something like that. I mean, it's kind of like all eyes on Bitcoin. You know, I mean, even when you think about someone like an open AI, like the reason that

they want to go public is to get access to people like BlackRock and Fidelity, right? And to bring those massive, you know, asset managers in and like, we have that, right? And like, we're already down that road. And it's just maturing, right? I think in any other market, you'd see Bitcoin off 20 to 30%, maybe more off some of the highs with how quiet it is. Like we keep talking about it every day on Lunar Crush. I mean, we have the least amount of social activity of the year every day, and it's slowly shrinking. And it peaked when we talked about the ETF in January, and it's just going down and down

and down. And every day, it's like 1% less. It's kind of like Philip Morris's, you know, revenue, like losing 1% for the rest of their eternity because no one's smoking anymore. You know, it's kind of interesting to see that. But yeah, I mean, talking about Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, you know, I'm still looking at the top five, you know, talked about assets today. It's like Popcat, you know, Dog Go to the Moon, like Runes. we've got brett up there cats in a dog world mew we have bonk we have punk right like these are the tops this is what people are trading is that like right now like get a cousin it's like an e i don't know if it's a french or something it could be punky but it looks like a small monkey with lipstick on oh it's a punky yeah

so whatever that is uh cocky new number 19 so you know it's gotta get a little cocky gotta get a little cocky in you i hear that's what yeah that's what you're saying but i i think everything is getting sucked up it's still getting sucked up into Bitcoin as it should. And I think, you know, hopefully, you know, maybe we're an older generation in the industry now. But, you know, I still tell people the first thing to do is get out, you know, get some Bitcoin, get your Sunday morning, you know, reoccurring buys in and, you know, start to kind of learn from there. And if you do want to dabble, like start to figure out like how the wallets work but i still think the ux with the wallets is just so bizarre to the point where it's like hey like i'm just going to connect my entire bank account to this like random website every time i want to it's bizarre so i think we're going to have to fix some of those things um but i'm just surprised joe that when you're like childhood friends call and say man listen i know you're deep in this crypto thing um i really like

some advice you don't say hey man you just gotta get a little cock in you yeah i might have sent the cocky new around a little bit to friends but more as memes i don't think it was a buy reco hmm so we're very serious people florida you're a pretty serious person you know like, like when you hear all of this, you know, Bitcoin and metals guy. I mean, you know, where do you think we're at in the cycle before we jump to? Well, thanks for having me again. Yeah, I think, first of all, stock markets, tech stocks and Bitcoin are strongly correlated. We have to sell in May for the stock markets.

Everything went up dramatically since last October, not only Bitcoin and some of the altcoins, but also the tech stocks, also the precious metals. So yeah, it's summer doldrums. I wouldn't stress myself for the next two or three months. Seasonality-wise, Bitcoin should find a bottom somewhere in September, October, and that's where I want to be ready to jump into the sector again and until then i think most likely we're going sideways maybe a little bit up it's pretty oversold so we might get a bounce over the next few weeks but overall i don't think that we are ready for the next leg up so um yeah take it easy it's summer lorian do you own cock you know huh say it again see that's right it's the asset we were just talking about it's a meme coin it's called cock with c-o-q-c-o-q-i-n-u i was wondering if you've heard by chance yeah no i honestly i dropped out with the meme coins that

was at some point too much for you and um i don't see any sense in this i mean it's certainly fun but it's not serious investing at all in my opinion i think that's the exact right approach dig i've got you guys here okay go ahead sorry go ahead before i go i'm not much of a fan of meme coins but every now and then i like to put some cock in you in there uh myself yeah i mean people are going to be offended by this space but i just want you to know that this is this is the reality of crypto and we're just saying the name of something that is wildly popular um and uh you can choose whether or not you two would like a little i'm not going to say it again multi anyways yeah i can't complain multi-million dollar market

cap i think you can keep it going keep it going yeah yeah let's i still wear it when they're bonk bonk stonk uh stonk we gotta launch stonks scott when are you gonna let your kids start listening they do unfortunately my kids often uh yeah they're just not old enough to understand luckily so i'm gonna have to actually i would have to stop them from listening soon it's gonna be the problem not starting them um so yeah they still think that uh being on youtube is actually like a real tv thing and that that makes me somehow important so i gotta keep that uh strange illusion hanging over their heads indefinitely for as long as I possibly can.

But anyways, I'm still trying to get over and chat to Carlos over here at Day Guy, man. I'm glad you guys are here. I'd love to obviously get the updates. We've had you guys on before, but I don't want to take for granted that everybody knows who you are and what you guys are up to. i i'm a huge fan of it obviously because we've talked privately but maybe i guess give us the quick quick and dirty background for those who haven't heard you here multiple times hey there scott happy to be here yeah sure thing on our side you know dega carlos renecio and founder of Dega by the way everybody happy to chat anytime you'd like um Dega it means decentralized gaming and essentially our vision

is to empower anyone to be able to design deploy and monetize games in minutes at low cost our flagship product Dega Realms you can think about it as a Wix or a Shopify for gaming in the essence uh you know you can show up with no technical knowledge and deploy your product globally. That's kind of like Dega in a nutshell. Yeah, so I've never asked you this. How complex of a game could someone who has no sort of blockchain knowledge launch, theoretically?

So we're starting off with what you would call top-down 2D games. So think about the original Pokemon, the original Zelda. The reason we're going with that and not with, you know, 3D or AAA and all of that stuff, it's because of speed to production, simplicity. And on our side, we, you know, we want to go wide, right? So we want our games to be able to run on a hundred dollar smartphones right and eventually even create the games you know from a 100 smartphone so yeah kind of like the original pokemon that that that style of game and then different types

of gameplays within that yeah that makes perfect sense so you could obviously create this probably outside of web3, right? So why the focus on Web3 gaming instead of going the traditional route, you know, trying to launch Candy Crush or Angry Birds? Yeah, you know, I think that the thing is that games, for the creation and creative aspect of it, yeah, we could definitely went web two, but the reason that we're,

we believe that web three is going to be essential is because of emerging markets, right? So, you know, somebody in the U S or somebody in Europe, you guys can set up online payments very quickly, very easily,

like 30 minutes, right. With Stripe people in Sri Lanka and Nicaragua, even though they're creative people there, you know, they can't, maybe they can't even own dollars, right? Dollar accounts are not available to everybody around the world. That is actually the case for the majority. So we see Web3 crypto as essential for these creators to be able to monetize their games, to be able to crowdfund their games. And for many parts, many regions in the world, crypto is the only option for venture capital.

There's literally nothing else. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think Axie Infinity kind of showed the promise of that model, right? I mean, it got this massive groundswell in the Philippines because people were actually able to make money and it wasn't particularly a great game but it showed like how much potential it is there is i think for all this interestingly i think right now we've just talked so i i'm gonna ask you about this whether you like it or not but how do you compete with the meme coin hype you know we're trying to do something real here give people the opportunity

to launch their own games, make money. But everybody wants that other thing I'm not going to name again. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, everything in the industry is about hype and cycle. So I'm sure that, you know, we're having one cycle right now. Things change. We've all seen it here in the sense that everybody believes in something one week, and then literally the next week everybody else believes in something else.

But for the time being, as that meta is going on in the industry, we have no problems working with them. On our side, we're reaching out to both, let's say, more formal conventional teams for gaming partners just to mention a few gaming.io ancient aid and several others which we're about to announce in the coming days and then we heck we're even work we're even building a game for venus protocol which is the largest defy protocol on bnb and then we're also in conversations we're now with a few meme communities right we're going to generate characters for them we're going to allow them to buy in conversations right now with a few meme communities, right? We're going to generate characters for them. We're going to allow them to buy in-game assets with their meme coins.

And that's actually a very powerful growth tactic that we can tap into because love them or hate them at this point, all the meme coins combined have something like the GDP of Guatemala, right? It's a considerable force now in the tens of billions. That's a wild, wild framing for it. It's interesting then because this allows a lot of these projects you mentioned, some of them memes, obviously, to add some sort of utility or sort of create deeper community and actually make it more than just a meme, right? And then these other projects, it gives them sort of another vertical to engage community and potentially make more money and go more viral right so the gaming side can add so much to these other projects it sounds like yeah and at the end of the day it means memes are about fun right you share me because it's funny uh and uh we've taken it to the other the next level with

crypto but uh it's all around playfulness, right? And not being serious all the time. So of course, games are one of the best things for that, right? It's particularly the games that we're going to enable, that we're enabling already with Dega, right? They're casual, playful games. You don't need to go and take a two-hour tutorial to learn how to use it.

To give you guys an example, our first game, it's a survivor-type game. It's inspired on vampire survivors. That game made like $100 million worth of revenue. And it's super simple, 2D pixel art base. You can play it with one finger, right, on your mobile device. And the way we've built it, it's web-based. So you won't even need to download an app.

You don't need to go through apple or anything so you know that's kind of like something casual fast simple and fun for all of these communities yeah that makes a ton of sense so what's new since we had you on here last um what have you guys been working on what updates are coming you know just give us sort of the timeline progress. Yeah, yeah. So last time we came here, we didn't even have out our trailer for our gameplay right now. That's already it's pinned actually in the DECA account. We're doing a private alpha test with our partners gaming either this week or the next at the latest and we are already integrating communities from injective from bmb from polygon from ethereum to be able to come and play within dega with their own themed characters right so if anybody listening to this conversation if you're interested of having

in having your own brand or your own style of characters and do a special drop for your community and use those characters to play within Dega, we're happy to have a conversation with you and also integrate your token as well. So people can use now your token within Dega games. So that's been probably the most exciting thing that we have coming up. And our token generation event

will be towards the end of this month, July 25th. So there's a lot of work and a lot of hype that's going to be happening right now. Okay. So then I guess speaking more specifically about the token, like what's the utility, how does it function in the ecosystem? You know, why would people own it?

Do you need it to create games, et cetera? How does that actually work? So there's two aspects to it. Let's say the utilitarian aspect and then the economic aspect. So let's start off with the utility side of things. So obviously everything that we built in Dega, we're going to have a free base tier. But as you need more services like AI and others, you're going to have to pay for them with the Degat token, right?

Or have one of our elements NFTs to be able to access some of the, let's say, higher tier services. Because to give you an example, if you're running a generative AI system, that's going to require GPUs, right? That's expensive. So we'll be able to abstract all of those complexity away and allow you to use the Degat token across the board for all the systems, game creation. There will also be special drops. Right now we're onboarding one of the largest esports teams in Latin America. We'll be announcing that next week.

And they will be doing airdrops for the DECA community, for the DECA token holders. And there's also all the games that are being developed with Dega. Well, they don't have to, but all of them are doing partner airdrops for us. So that's kind of like on the ecosystem access product side of things. Now, on the economic side of things, why would the Dega token be relevant to hold over time? And what we've done is we've taken the deflationary model that Ethereum uses, but instead of just burning transaction fees, we burn all the fees across all the modules in our platform. So say somebody trades a in-game sword, right, an asset or an NFT.

So all the secondary market fees generated from that go to buy and burn Dega. If somebody trades one game currency for another game, right, like swapping on a DEX, those fees go to buy and burn Dega. If somebody does a pre-sell of their characters or some form of fundraise through the Dega platform and ecosystem, the fees that the platform takes will go to buy and burn Dega. So we'll be creating consistent deflationary pressure across the board. Very, very, very cool. So, I mean, it sounds like this is more than just gaming when you really dig into it. There's quite a few things that you got to part here.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would say, you know, compared to most of our colleagues and of course a huge respect so several teams out there working hard but you know most of our colleagues are either doing one of two things right so they're either doing one a sdk or an api right and that kind of like it's focused on developers right and of course we need those can you tell people what sdk means so we don't take it for granted by the way just quickly sure thing happy to do so so sdk means software development kit in essence think about it kind of like you know a piece of software or library that we call the programmers use to be able to quickly integrate or develop a system right so for example i may

have an sdk for open ai to easily use their services or i might have an right? So for example, I may have an SDK for OpenAI to easily use their services, or I might have an SDK for Google, right? To use the Google Cloud. So that's what that means. So some projects are using, are creating those, right? For Web3. And that's fine.

We need that. But, you know, pulling in hundreds of thousands or even millions of developers, it's a very, very hard task. It's like herding cats, right? Like try to get a hundred thousand cats to do something. That's how it is with developers, right? So that's one focus that our colleagues are doing. The other one is making one specific game or one specific IP, right? And there's nothing wrong with that, but making one game or one IP, that's a huge risk because in the sense that it's like making a movie,

right? You can do everything right and your movie can still flop there's the same thing with games so on our side we're like no we are the providers of the tools think about us like a factory like an assembly line right where people can create thousands and eventually we believe millions of games so a bet on Dega is not a bet on one game but on a future ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of games coming out across multiple ecosystems and different platforms. Yeah, that all makes perfect sense. So how can people who have not gotten involved or have not heard of it until today, how can they start to dig deeper and get involved? How can the crypto community help here to get this launched and successful?

Yeah, that's really important. You know, for us, we've been a very bottom-up approach from the start. We're very grassroots. Like, most of our support has come from our own community. So, you know, definitely appreciate anybody that wants to jump on board our tribe and get to know us and grow with us.

Right now, don't miss the chance to earn some free Dega. I just pinned it here on the space. There's an active Galaxy Quest. Super simple steps to follow. Just follow us on Twitter, Discord, and you'll earn some free Dega. Then on top of that, if you join the Dega Discord, you'll stay up to date with all the news. You can meet the rest of the community. You can create your own tribe to start working and build with us.

And to be able to get early access on the Dega token, right now we have several ways that you can do that. One of them is staking on our stake pool. So if you have Ethereum, if you have MELD or you have Cardano, you can stake that. Keep it, right? You keep your tokens. And we keep the yield that those stake pools generate, and we will give you Dega rewards in exchange for that. That's one way. The other way is you can jump into our website as well and buy the Dega Elements NFTs.

Think about that like the equivalent of the xbox game pass well that's the game pass for the ecosystem and it has a deca token allocation as well as a reward and finally you can also refer people to buy deca elements and you will also win 20 of whatever they buy you will get in deca token rewards so four ways to do it right quest st Quest, staking, Dega elements, and referring people. So get on that right now because we're going to be doing token generation event on July 25th. Really soon.

So let's say anything, any final thoughts, anything you want to share before I let you go that I might've missed? Oh, well, there's one other cool thing that we're going to be doing after tge which is going to be a pre-sale of the first ever crypto native smart glasses right so we've partnered up with a company that generates um smart glasses that are ai powered and conversational right so the closest thing to the you know the tony stark smart glasses that he had that he gave Spider-Man in the Marvel universe, right?

So those guys have created a great device, great hardware. It's not a theory. It's not a prototype. It's built. It's ready to go. And we're going to be their main Web3 partner and their main gaming partner, right? So we're going to be creating a whole host of integrations and solutions. And if you buy it through Dega, you'll be able to get a special style

of those smart glasses that are only going to be sold through Dega in terms of colors and also access to our products and services. So if you want to be Tony Stark, this is going to be your chance to be Tony Stark.

That can't end any better than that. I want to be Tony Stark. It's awesome. I'll be. We should all be Tony Stark, this is going to be your chance to be Tony Stark. It can't end any better than that. I want to be Tony Stark. I'll be Tony Stark. It's going to be amazing. Well, thank you, man. Carlos, always a pleasure to have you on here. I hope we can do this again as you get closer and keep us updated. All right. Sure. Thanks, Scott. And thank you guys for having me here. Much love to everybody at the Crypto Town Hall team and all the speakers as well. Awesome, man. All right, guys guys everybody please uh check out uh they got their tag in the title there so at they got underscore org they org obviously on on the uh on the panel up here

you can check them out that way so please give them a follow keep up with everything that they're doing otherwise guys we'll be be back tomorrow at 1015 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Thank you to all of the Mets who decided to show up and grace us with their presence, two of which are still on stage. Two Mets. We got the three Mets. My goal tomorrow, four Mets. That's all I got. Four Mets. Cool. That's all I got for you guys. Thanks. Have a good one. Bye.