The Wolf Of All Streets - Will Meme Stock Liquidity Pump Crypto? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Tom is a solo show, just you and me. We're going to do a full two-hour podcast. Sounds absolutely fantastic. Can't wait. Yeah. Do you think you could find... I'm getting an echo. I don't know if that's on my end or coming through yours.

But yeah, I think it was coming through your mic. Is there anything you can do to fix that? Yeah, let me toss on my headphones. Yeah, I think it was coming through your mic. Is there anything you can do to fix that? Yeah, let me toss on my headphones. Yeah, I think that'll help. Matthew's here too now. Saved us. Got two people. Awesome.

I don't think we could find an hour or two hours worth of things to talk about unless we want to talk macro. What a dead time in this market. Yeah, it's a very weird market, right? You got the dollar down yields down meme coins up miners up but btc still down it doesn't make any sense to me right now i'm not sure i'm not sure what's going on yeah i i was sort of going on a tweet rampage earlier today not so long ago but yesterday you know obviously roaring kitty came back everybody saw that and gamestop went nuts

nancy went nuts and we had a few select random like small meme coins go crazy and my entire feed was all season now we're so back bitcoin to a hundred thousand i don't i mean i'm sure we've seen it many times but like it's funny when we revisit these times when people are so starved for action that every little nothing causes them to just completely freak out and think that... Or hope, I guess, that we're about to have this massive bull market alt season. To me, there's zero confirmation that anything is going to happen anytime soon in crypto. Yeah, agreed. You wonder if all the money that would have went into Bitcoin or Ethereum is actually just going to these other assets, right? Well, quote unquote assets right now. You also had a ton of long liquidations.

So like 900 million in long liquidations in the last seven days. So a lot of people just got flushed out, which might be the reason that the major assets are still down. I just don't understand how almost a billion dollars of longs can get flushed in a market this choppy. Usually you see that with time, but over a short period of time when we've simply dropped, I mean, what, we went to 63 yesterday? It's not like we're making 5%, 10% moves on a daily basis here. It's crazy. Yeah, for sure. I guess the biggest thing that's been surprising to me outside of Bitcoin not catching up here is just the ETH meme revision trade has just not played out at all. I think a lot of people were looking for that. I mean, I certainly was.

And it's just continued to lag Bitcoin. And I don't know what ETH Maxis are doing, but it's almost like all that money has just went into Solana instead and people are onto just the next L1. So I'm still hopeful in the back half of the year, but it's been really surprising that hasn't taught up. Yeah, definitely. You know, Ran came on here yesterday and gave a soliloquy on why he's finally finished with ETH

and sold it all to buy other things. I was hoping that was going to be a bottom signal. So we'll see. Yeah, that's usually... I remember the last time that ETH BTC really, really bottomed last cycle was the exact same day that there was an entire Twitter spaces of a bunch of Bitcoin maxis saying

that Ethereum was finally dead. And it was the deadest of dead bottoms. So maybe we're starting to get to see some capitulation, which could be a signal that Ethereum is bottoming. But there are a lot of valid reasons for people to not be, I guess, that excited about it. But there's a lot of valid reasons right now to not be excited about anything. Specifically, we're doing exactly what we should be i think people just got really comfortable with bitcoin obviously rising all the way to 74 000 in these select sort of sector pumps you know the ai pump and this brief rwa thing and stuff but if you look at the market as a whole i mean

i was tweeting about this as i said i mean bitcoin dominance is almost almost at multi-year highs. And I think since 21, I'm trying to look at it right now, but exceptionally high. And that's even with adding all of this new liquidity and new tokens to the market, which should, you know, rationally, if you're adding a bunch of market cap of new tokens, you should see Bitcoin dominance dropping. Bitcoin dominance has done nothing but go up since September of 22. Most tokens from last cycle that were hyped are still down 90% plus from their highs.

And we've just seen these few sort of sectors, like I said, and then memes, right? But the meme, the meme is a, is a player versus player, you know, a zero sum game where if you don't rotate fast

enough, almost everyone's losing. So there's just not been that much money made in this market, in my opinion, unless you've been either you rode the Solana wave really hard or you've been in Bitcoin, which is generally the safest thing. So I don't expect anything to happen for a while. I think it's just hopium that people are just screaming every time we get a small move. That was my diatribe for the day. I mean, well, Tom, but you know, before we jump to other people, is that kind of how you view it as well? Or am I being a little too bearish? Yeah, I think that's pretty much the line with what my thoughts are. The other thing I would point to, though, is we got a poll the other day that Trump is up in six of seven swing states. You've seen a ton of crypto people

come out and support Trump. And then you've had him actually lean into crypto. If we do get a Trump presidency, that is enormously bullish in the back half of the year for the space. And it doesn't seem like the market is really reacting to that or picking up on it yet, maybe through meme coins, but not through the majors. So, and plenty of time to the election, but that's just another thing that's feeding into this. Yeah. And then obviously today, I think inflation PPI came in hotter than people expected, which once again, sort of delays the idea of a rate cut, which anyone who's been paying any attention knows there's been no reason for the Fed to cut rates for over a year. But yeah, so I guess, you know, we have this title calm before the storm. What's

next for Bitcoin? If I had to throw out my prediction, I would say four months of chop and us having the same conversation i think the biggest news the biggest news that's happening in the market right now is the wall street's page news and the that it's migrating onto crypto it's not about bitcoin like we could all give a about bitcoin today it's it's not even it's only my but it's only migrating into crypto in a very select few very small market cap meme points i mean meme coins in general aren't even you're not getting it then you're not getting it scott you're not you're not getting it and i think i think we should maybe spend five minutes talking about it we can always go into what's next for bitcoin which has been at the same place for the last like

25 years and no one actually agree it's a stupid title i'm going to change it yeah good okay cool so let me tell you what i'm seeing anyway i may i may be right i may not be right but it's worth maybe talking about it right so if you watch what's going on on wall street right now second day in a row that gang stuff has been halted yesterday got halted like 10 times today it's been halted i've seen it halted twice i don't know i haven't been watching it all day but it has been again you're getting this resistance again the same resistance which happened in 2020 or 2020 when there was the gangstop uh um shorts that liquidated melbourne capital and a whole lot of other funds kind of seen the same pattern again which is a resistance i don't know if you remember but keith the guy that that is roaring kitty on twitter he went and

he testified in front of Congress about how he basically did nothing wrong when he was acting with public information. And then he actually said something like, he said, I like the stock. And he gave like this bullshit explanation, which is like, you can see it's bullshit of like why he likes the stock. And he said, it's preposterous to think that my tweets and my engagement on social media basically started this revolution right now in that period we didn't have a meme coin resistance trading ground we didn't have a resistance right we you couldn't go and trade mean coins on ethereum which is too expensive we also didn't have all the fun meme coins that were part of the resistance now one thing we have in crypto that

they don't have one thing that they have in traditional markets is they have an infrastructure to protect in inverted commas investors but in this case that that infrastructure is protecting the hedge funds from getting liquidated much quicker right because hedge funds are getting liquidated therefore they keep stopping the trade, letting them reload, stopping the trade again, letting them reload, stopping the trade again. We don't have those fail-safe mechanisms in crypto, right? And so I have a feeling that the meme frenzy will start in stocks, but they'll realize that the stock market closes at 4.30 and they'll realize that they can go and trade the meme coins after 4.30 on Solana without circuit breakers.

And I believe that you can see the first signs that we're getting a massive, massive, massive migration into into crypto and specifically the big custodian of all of this has actually been solana right so um i'll quote you some stats just as soon as i can let me just open let me just try and find these stats but i've got a whole lot of stats somewhere uh here it is so i'll read you some stats of what's happened in salon in the last couple of hours over 852 000 wallets interacted with the salon networks 29 000 one 21 985 new coins were launched just on pump the fun in the last 36 hours um pump that fine annualized revenue uh looking like it's going to be over $150 million. That's one protocol on the Solana network.

Solana's on-chain trading volume surged over $1.7 billion in the last 24 hours. Over $107 million being bridged to the Solana network from using just two bridges, wormhole finance and D-bridge finance. So I think that we shouldn't underestimate what's just gone on and that there is a catalyst that may actually pump this meme coin super cycle even further. Now, on top of that, we have our own resistance in crypto. Our resistance in crypto is the VCs because the VCs have been launching these low float, high FDV coins and then dumping their releases onto retail. It's the same as what the hedge funds have been doing to retail investors in the stock market, just different mechanics.

And so I think that what you're starting to see now is you're starting to see all the fundamental coins completely red and all the meme coins where the retail believe that they have advantage go green and you're actually starting to see like a massive migration from what we call the quality stocks in the traditional market or from the quality projects in the mean coin in the in the in the crypto market to the meme coins and i think it's i think you've got to pay attention to what's going on here. I would love other people's thoughts. I have a lot of them. Go ahead, Dave. Dave, you raised your hand, but we can't hear you. There's two halves to what Rand said. I'm in complete agreement on the back half. But the first half, I mean, look, I will have to admit this. I was on the SIFMA committee that designed limit up, limit down in the first place, which is the rules, the, quote, circuit breakers you're talking about that's causing GameStop to get halted.

I can categorically tell you that the intent of those rules has nothing to do with protecting hedge funds or any other crap. And we could talk or dig into that if you want. But these halts are happening because of a desire to stop flash events. Unfortunately, uh, several of us, myself, you know, included got ignored when we designed this rule. And the net result is it's not asymmetric, which is what it should be. It should be much less on the way up than on the way down for a variety of reasons. Uh. It doesn't widen the band. There's lots of flaws in the rules, so it ends up doing this stupid shit that we've seen.

But believe me, halts during the day from limit up, limit down have nothing to do with protecting hedge funds that have made bad bets. As far as market makers, we could talk about that. The market makers, look, I ran one. We could talk about it, but I think that that's overblown. Generally, they make money in these situations, not because they're doing anything nefarious, but because there's a lot of volatility and market makers tend to do well. Okay, rant out of the way, the meme coin frenzy, I tend to agree with, Ran, and we can talk through it. But the thing that people need to understand is everyone says in

crypto, well, it's so much better because we've got AMMs and we don't get halts. But we do have rug pulls and we do have flash events. That's why my company, CoinRouts, we built a smart stop algo that people can use that only triggers their liquidation when a group of exchanges all go down together because we have all these kind of weird events. And we could talk about the market structure, but the simple reality is there's flaws on both sides. I tend to think it's better to let the private market sort it out than these stupid prescriptive rules. But, you know, it's not nearly as nefarious as people keep talking about. Who's in for a question right now? David.

So I want to go back real quick to what Rand was saying. Rand, are you basically saying that you're expecting now a flow of liquidity coming into these? Did I lose everybody? I can't hear anything now. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, we can. I think it's just Dave. I'll take Dave down and up.

I'll take Dave down and up. Go ahead. Roger, roger. So, Rand, yeah, are you saying basically you're expecting now a flow of liquidity and that's kind of what you're seeing into Solana and that this is going to cause a bigger run? So I'm assuming if I got everything that you said, you're assuming that now with GME going up in the stock market, we'll continue seeing that in the stock market as liquidity starts to realize, hey, it's kind of dumb for us to do this in the stock market and starts flowing into these other platforms, like starting with Solana. That's where we had the big meme craze already,

and possibly into other L1s. Do you think that that's going to take over into other platforms too? I think the first thing is you got to remember what happened last time that this meme coin mania started. People started making TikTok videos. People started making... I don't know if you remember. I was around and I remember very clearly what happened and a lot of that flowed into the the crypto meme coins if you go look at the charts i actually spoke about i'm not sure but if you go look at the charts that was really when the second part of the bull market started was the 25th of january 2021 and if you go and draw a line on the charts on the 25th of january 2021 you can go and see that that is actually when the next leg of the Bitcoin market actually started.

Now, what happened last time when this GameStop thing happened was there were a whole lot of like memers on TikTok, a whole lot of content creators on TikTok and on Instagram creating amazing content. And it was all about GameStop. And then that started flowing into, you know, like then it started like, cool. GameStop showed that things could go up really quickly. And then people went to the place where things do go up and down really quickly, which was crypto. I remember at the time, majority of the trading was actually taking place on ETH and it wasn't fun to be taking place on East right? It wasn't fun, it was expensive, you couldn't trade the meme coins. Now, just imagine if the same thing starts happening and

we start this whole tick tock, like movement. And it starts off with GameStop and a whole lot of others, where's it going to go to next? And I reckon what it's going to go to next is it's going to come straight into crypto and straight into memes. Got it. Okay, so it would be a safe assumption then what we could see, right? If we're just looking at where the money is flowing. We see a decent surge of money now coming into the stock market, transitioning its way over to crypto, mainly going into alternative assets, not Bitcoin, right? And then we see a Bitcoin surge

later in the year, possibly as Fed starts heading towards rate cuts. I mean, eventually, I think the end of the day, you know, Bitcoin is probably going to see massive surges towards the end of the year and the next year. I just have a feeling the Fed just can't keep not cutting rates forever. They're going to have to do something next year. Do you think that we're going to see Bitcoin surge anytime sooner than we see a meme coin surge? Or are we basically now in a position where, okay, you're safer in Bitcoin. You know, this is your largest holding, whatever,

if that's what you're doing. But if you want to make larger gains, now's the time to start thinking about where you start expecting this liquidity to flow over the next three to six months or so. I'm not sure when we're going to get Bitcoin search um I mean the charts are telling me it's imminent but I don't believe it I can't see any fundamental data that's going to drive it imminently but I think in the interim remember for for Bitcoin to surge you need billions of

dollars to flow into Bitcoin for meme coins to surge you need a couple of hundred thousand dollars to flow in a couple of million dollars to flow in, right? And so I think like, whilst the market is waiting for direction, I think the action is going to be in the meme coins. Yeah, but isn't that action extremely low volume, low liquidity on a grand scale of markets really irrelevant? I mean, even GameStop and AMC,

what's happening on the stock market is an exceptionally small cross-section at a time when we've actually had historically low volume in the last week on SPX. If you dig into the data and volume traded over the past few days and into last week, we literally haven't had this many consecutive days of stocks trading at such low volume, specifically SPX, etc., SPY, in decades. I mean, there is nothing happening. What happened to that? I take the comparison that you're making almost the opposite. I say that people are so bored and there's nothing to do that a few tiny things will

catch fire, but it doesn't translate at all to more overall volume or liquidity i think the meme coin casino will continue to go on solana i don't think you're wrong but i think it'll be a washing machine with effectively the same participants and almost the same volume and i don't even think there's anything to come from the stock market to crypto right now well i think you i think you just gotta look what happened last time um and also just remember that small money for last time we had last time we had elon must tweeting about doge and that's why dom coins went went nuts on ethereum i think that's causation correlation i don't think that those meme coins and that cycle had very much to do

with gamestop i think we already had memes popping off before GameStop, didn't we? No, absolutely not. Seth, I'm actually going to go into what date was the Elon Musk tweet? Well, I mean, he tweeted about it for months and months and months. But Dogecoin was the singular main driver of our last cycle, for sure. And I think that if GameStop had happened but Elon Musk had not been tweeting about Doge, I would argue we would not have had a

meme cycle like that last time. If this meme cycle continues, I mean, look, this could be a two-day event and that's the end of it, but if it actually continues, I can almost guarantee you it's going to flow into crypto yeah but my question is what we're right but what we're seeing in crypto right now is a very select few very low market cap coins that are themed specifically around gamestop

and otherwise going up and the quote-unquote main meme coins outside of Pepe have not, right? I mean, it's not like we're getting this sweeping liquidity and huge move across all meme coins right now, unless I'm just missing. Well, it could just be that it's just beginning, right? I mean, the GameStop thing just started happening over the last 24 to 48 hours. If this brings in more liquidity in the stock market and starts flowing over, I mean, it could exponentially grow the amount of liquidity coming into these markets within even a week, right? Imagine how it could go in a month. I see what Rand's saying. I mean, it's definitely possible. I don't think it's possible.

I see it conceptually, but yeah, do you think that people are going to make the jump from the stock market to Solana in a week? There's a huge architectural difference between trading main coins on a Solana decentralized exchange and flipping your thumb up on Robinhood to buy some extra GameStop and AMC. There's a Grand Canyon size learning curve to be able to do that. So, you know, I don't I don't see the crossover in any meaningful way. I mean, you can buy GameStop or AMC in on summer vacation versus MetaMask, decentralized exchange, Solana, yada, yada, massive difference. Now, if you're crypto native, you know, and you're an Ansem, you know, believer and it followed everything that he's done over the past six months and already figured it out. Well, then you probably don't care about GameStop and AMC anyways, and you're just a meme coin guy already. It's very, very difficult to go from one to the other in an actual functional way. Yeah, that was a way better articulated version of what I was trying to say. Although I don't think Rand is wrong necessarily, or Div for that matter. I just think like that can't happen quickly. We always think these things are going to happen

quickly and people are going to rush to crypto, but they don't even know. It's just us. Go ahead, Dave. Well, I mean, there's two bits to that. I mean, first, you know, maybe it's because I have 20-something year old daughters, in addition to my 30-year old son, who obviously are all crypto native. But they basically tell me that pretty much all their friends know and play with PancakeSwap, Uniswap, etc. I am sure I am not the only... Look, I have a phantom wallet, right? I mean, I was told about Jupiter. I've been told about meme coins by the younger people. And they already know about this stuff. They're already

playing. The real question is, is there liquidity for them to push behind? And that's really the question. And if liquidity is being pushed into the market, it will find a home. I mean, yesterday was basically just proof that the animal spirits are there and they're just waiting for triggers. And so I tend to agree with Iran on this one because it's much more, it's not like it's functionally hard. You're not moving money from Robinhood to PancakeSwap. But the fact is, is people want to gamble, right? You know, there's a reason Las Vegas is the way it is. There's a reason virtually every state has gambling now, right? And so, yes, I know we don't want to call,

you know, meme stock investing gambling. There's lots of people who mean it. But it's not that hard. It's not that big of a gulf is what basically I'm saying. Tom? but it's not that hard. It's not that big of a golf is what I basically I'm saying. Tom. Yeah. So I would say it's certainly hard, but not as hard as you might think, especially if you have, so the Solana saga, which I have, I literally just bought Poden in four seconds because it hasn't made a wall on the phone. There's 500,000, I think, or so pre-orders for the Solana saga two that's coming out. And then you have all the younger people who already understand this stuff. It was actually easier for me to buy Bowden than it would be for me to

buy something in my brokerage account from my Solana Saga phone. So I think stuff like that, it doesn't happen overnight. But these things are coming a lot quicker than you might imagine. And it's going to make it really, really easy to continue to trade these things. It's just kind of a depressing conversation to me that the net positive of what we've developed over all these cycles now is liquidity will come into meme coins. That's my pessimistic view. I mean, Vinny, what do you make of this? I know you've been somewhat bearish since 74,000. You believe even that the top could potentially be in. I don't know that that's your base case,

but do you think that the meme coins is a signal of anything or you think it's just people having fun PVP? Yeah, I always think, I always talk in percentages. you think it's just you know people having fun pvp yeah i always think i always talk in percentages i think there's more than like 50 chance the tops end for the cycle just because i think there's lots of uh storms on the horizon and things can get worse so but you know there's a chance obviously that it's not so i'll put that aside um mean coins and irrational market behavior is always a function of excess liquidity and, you know, and basically very loose monetary policies. I think we're going to see rates go up. And that's what I've been saying for a few months.

And everyone thinks I'm wrong. And I'll be Vinny the Bear for a while. It's okay. But I just think that we've created this distortion field for the world where the Fed's been, you know, load up the balance sheet. Now they're trying to tighten it and lower it. They can't do it. They even had to slow down the pace of QT. And we've got this problem with, like, distorted principles and values around

investing. And, you know, meme coins is just like a function of, like, you know, excess liquidity in the system um in my opinion so you know if there's excess liquidity it's going to get drained so yeah that's an even scarier view because if it gets drained well i mean why weren't we getting it why weren't we getting meme coin craze in 2022 but like why would you say why why we didn't get it in coin crazy yeah why didn't we get them at this at this sort of scale in 2022? The market was depressed.

Liquidity is being drained out of assets en masse. We had massive crashes, Bitcoin, FTX, everything else. There's no money. People didn't have money to do this shit. And all of a sudden, the money's coming back. So you have to ask yourself, why? How?

Rand, did you have a ask yourself why how rand did you ever well i mean i i i think that you can't you in 2022 we're in the midst of one of the most brutal bear markets i think that now we're in the midst of a bull market i mean even though we are chopping sideways i think you can't deny the fact that we're in a bull market also if you look at global liquidity global liquidity is on that like i mean, the Fed can threaten whatever they want and rates can be high for longer. But if you look at M2 money supply and if you look at global liquidity, global liquidity is on the up.

Yeah, conditions are loose. They're just not loose at the Fed on the monetary side. But if you look at the fiscal side, I mean, we're adding a trillion dollars every 100 days in debt from the Treasury. So just because the Fed isn't cutting rates doesn't mean we don't have... I lost you for a second there. I mean, guys, let's not forget. So there's a couple of things. Money's flowing to the system through lots of ways. I mean, every month, hundreds of millions of barrels of oil are sold by OPEC and the producers.

And that cash finds its way into the system. So every time we're buying oil, they're getting cash. They're trading oil for cash. It's a simple equation here. Then what do they do with that cash? Well, they're long-term holders and investors. So they're going and saying, well, what do we buy? We buy maybe some U.S. treasuries, so they're going and saying, well, what do we buy?

We buy maybe some U.S. Treasuries, which they buy a lot of. What are the safe investments? They're not buying. Maybe they buy some equities here and there. MBS, I think, is visiting Japan soon. Japan's trying to figure out what to do about oil because inflation's going up. I mean, there's cash. The money that's going into the system right now

is from people's, your current, whatever you spend money on, a small portion goes into energy and everything else, and that money's finding its going into the system right now is from people. Whatever you spend money on, a small portion goes into energy and everything else, and that money is finally going into the system. The point I'm trying to make right now is I think there's still, and you can see from the inflation numbers, PPI came out today. Whatever they do to try and fix up March doesn't really matter. PPI was 0.5. CPI is coming out on Wednesday.

There's too much cash in the system still. And the Fed, from the 1st of June, they're dropping the $60 billion taper every month down to $25, which is going to be very inflationary now. They're basically slowing down QT and effectively doing QE because now they're going to be buying $35 billion net bonds a month more than they were before. So all I'm saying is monetary policies are loose and we're going to see a tightening somewhere and the meme coin craze is going to go away. Lucas, you're looking at this stuff on chain every single day. I just want to know from Lucas, what are you seeing on Chain to support any of these arguments? How much liquidity are we actually seeing move into meme coins?

Is it just a washing machine? No, we're actually seeing some liquidity flow into crypto. As Vinny was saying, we're definitely seeing on a global scale monetary policy begin to ease. And in crypto, one very interesting pattern is that stablecoin market cap has continued to increase despite Bitcoin topping in March or so. We've seen this total aggregate stablecoin market cap increase by about 20 billion. And it's been trending sideways for the past couple of weeks, but, you know, 20 billion since March. That is up. And unsurprisingly, seems like a lot of those new stable coins are entering through some things like Pepe and other meme coins.

And if we're in this path where global liquidity tends to accelerate, I think we're likely to see stable coins continue to grow. And a lot of that earns ends up going into meme coins and more risky plays. So that's the main indicator I would point out to be able to track how much is transitioning into crypto, and then ends up flowing into the system. Yeah, just to add to that point, I just retweeted a chart the other day from Artemis, 3 trillion in stablecoin transfers in April alone. So these numbers are getting very, very crazy. And that's up from 1 trillion just at the end of last year. So what does that tell you considering we're not seeing a dramatic market cap increase in the actual token? It just hasn't moved yet. It hasn't moved into the assets. But

once the dry powder is there, it's got to go somewhere eventually. Once these things come on chain, I'm very hopeful they will stay on chain. I don't think people are moving off to invest in bonds or invest in stocks. I mean, maybe they're going to buy some GMA, but I think if it's on chain, liquidity is pretty sticky. So it's going to eventually flow into crypto assets. It's just a question of when. Ran, you remember our conversation, obviously, at dinner and consensus last year. I think what you're saying, where I basically had a few too many drinks and said that crypto was just a massive casino and that most things didn't need tokens, seems what you're saying now is solidifying that idea. Because if we're now a year later, we're in what you said is a bull market, and the things that actually have utility are not moving at all,

and the best we can talk about is memes, then isn't this just one massive casino outside of a few assets? I'll ask you, Dave, you have your hand up. I was having a very personal moment with Rand and he wasn't there. Yeah. I mean, look, I'll take Rand's side on this one because I think the answer is yes, sort of. But anyone who understands the meme, what's going on in the stock market, understands that there is a huge amount of the stock market that is no different from a casino as well. That stories and narratives dominate, that free cash flow and cash flow discounting and Graham and Dodd, yeah, I mean, that's all well and good, but no one is going to claim

that AMC, their potential increased by what it did over the last day. I mean, it's the same crap. I mean, whether it's Wolf of Wall Street, Stratton Oakmont crap or not, the difference is in crypto, it's significantly less barriers to entry. There's a lot more information. People can make up their minds, you know, based on communities and what they're seeing. Whereas in the stock market, it happens. And with the advent of Wall Street Bets and Reddit, I mean, there's also,'s also quote communities but what the hell are they are they talking about i mean i don't i think it's a difference without a distinction really okay uh sorry i don't want to pronounce your name wrong is it nylish or neilish you can correct me and

then i'll get it right next time hi hi everyone actually, everyone talks about the memcoin. But I want to tell everyone why the dodgy pump in 2020. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Whenever I remember, during the January 2020, Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla price was too high. And that time Tesla price was around $50. And what happened after six months? After six months Tesla price jumped to around $250.

$250 means 5x from January to July, January to I think in next four to five months, Tesla price will be higher. Go ahead. Your mic was breaking up, so I couldn't hear you. Yeah. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

So what we saw in 2020 and 2021, Tesla price was high within three to four months. After LMS tweet, the Tesla price was too high. And after that, what we see, the Doge pump. And then we noticed that in February to March, Doge price is around more than 20 to 30x. And after that, we saw the meme token. Right now, what we're seeing, they're in a many years... I mean, you're breaking it. Can you fix your connection? What I mean...

Hey, buddy, your mic is... Hey, oh my God. We can't hear you. Your mic keeps breaking up. Can you please drop down or fix your mic? Thanks. Go ahead, Div. Yeah, so, I mean, a couple of things that we mentioned, I'm just going to give you my take on them if I put them together, right?

What Rand was saying about liquidity coming in, that plays into, I think, the fact that we're also seeing so much stable coin liquidity just sitting on the sidelines, right? In reality, I think what people are waiting for is just the trigger, right? The catalyst, something to show us that the markets are about to boom. I think everyone knows we're in a bull market. But like you said, Scott, we're basically in a phase now where we're seeing the casino perform better than the actual utility tokens. And that puts me in... Yeah, I mean, we technically always have been.

We did see that first cycle where a lot of them did well. But this is also a very different cycle too. In 2020, you had a monetary environment where everyone had money. No one was spending money on everything. Even people who didn't have jobs had free money coming in. And pretty much everyone I knew was investing. And whereas now, there are a lot of people I know that are struggling just to pay rent or pay their mortgages and stuff because they got screwed into 7% rates, right? They didn't lock in when they should have. And I think that's playing into it too. A lot of the people that did come into the market with excess liquidity and just look to start investing haven't done that yet. They still have money just sitting on the sidelines.

They don't believe that the bull market's actually kicking off. And I think Bitcoin kind of superseded everything this time by, you know, with the ETFs. ETFs came on earlier, liquidity started flowing in, a lot of the market knew what was going to happen, like month or two after ETFs went live. So you started seeing all this liquidity come into Bitcoin. And now a lot of this liquidity doesn't transition off, right? Whatever's going into the ETFs, if people want to sell, like, it's not like it was before where, you know, you would see Bitcoin surge. And then when Bitcoin goes down, if people want to sell, it's not like it was before where you would see Bitcoin surge. And then when Bitcoin goes down, liquidity flows into alt surge. And you kind of

have this balance. That balance is kind of gone, at least for now. I think we've kind of reset the baseline of what Bitcoin is. It's kind of evolved in its lifespan as an asset class. And now we're looking to crypto to see, and when I say crypto, now I'm talking just DeFi, right? We're looking at this other asset class, essentially, to see a similar cycle to last time. I don't think we're seeing it, but I do think that there's enough liquidity on the sidelines that when there's a trigger, I think a lot of what we saw boom last time is going to boom. It's just when is that going to happen? You made an important point that's worth zooming in on.

Last time when we had this massive GameStop run and AMC run, everybody pointed to the fact that we had free liquidity and stimulus checks. That's very different this time. And I think it's worth noting that this is happening again in the last few days, at least without that backdrop. So they can't use that excuse anymore and say it was just a result of people having this money. To Rand's point, it does seem like that means it is more of a movement and less just that part. But the conversation I had with Rand at ConsenSys last year, I don't know if he's here,

did the other side of your point is, yes, you said we've seen these utility coins pump before, layer ones, all these other things, but they were pumping because they were being treated like casino games and they eventually all went down. And that's my problem with it is, yes, the meme coins are just a better version of the casino because before you only had L1s and L2s and other things to treat like a casino. The people saying that are pumping their own bags, to be honest. And look, I'm going to run and I'm going to leave you with one final thought here.

Saying what specifically, Vinny? Sorry. Oh, no, no. Like most of the narrative around meme coins really comes from people who are holding a bunch of them. Like Ren. So, you know, it's really about how high can we get these coins up? And everyone knows it's a game of musicals is that not the same every other token in the world do we not all talk about me because we're all holding the same hold on hold on hold on vinnie vinnie i have to call you out here because i love you to death but but i mean you talk about render because you're

invested in render and you talk about how coin because you invested in file when you talk about Renda because you're invested in Renda. You talk about Filecoin because you're invested in Filecoin. You talk about Bitcoin because you're invested in Bitcoin. And that's just how crypto is. That's the beauty of crypto, isn't it? No, but Ryan, those are long-term positions that you hold, okay? Those are long-term positions. With meme coins, it's always a short-term trade. We all know this, okay?

But put that aside for a second. That's a short-term trade for We all know this. But put that aside for a second. That's a short-term trade for you and for me. You called Dogecoin on my show two years ago. I'll play you the recording. But Dogecoin is still a long-term hold. Dogecoin, I don't think, is a meme coin per se. We just said meme coins

aren't a long-term hold, didn't we? What? Yeah, we can't hear you. It sounds like a big mumble. Hold on. You said that meme coins weren't a long-term hold, right? Yes. But Dogecoin is a meme coin, and you just told me it's a long-term hold. No, no, no.

Hold on. Hold on. Run. Would you put 25% of your wealth in a meme coin versus Dogecoin? I wouldn't put 25% into any coin. Okay. But any large amount of money, if you had to choose one meme coin and I said to you,

you put in 20%, you have to put 20% of your wealth into one coin in the meme coin category, would you choose any other coin other than Doge? Yes. In fact, the only one I wouldn't choose is Doge. Because why?

Because my thesis around Doge is that it's fully priced and that it's actually not a meme coin anymore. It's a payment system which may or may not be integrated into twitter and to me the price of the option is too high okay so i think that i would put more money into than i would put into doge that's that's the question i wouldn't because wolf is extremely like controlled by a few a few people we all know this okay I'm not going to get into the debates on meme coin, but the point I was trying to leave you guys with is the world's greatest investor of all time is sitting on $182 billion in cash,

earning about 5% a year, and he's very comfortable doing that right now. You have to ask yourself why. Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. So I've got to run, but think about that for a bit. Okay. I mean, there is something to that. There definitely is something to that. Yeah, I think there's something to that.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that. I spoke about it on my show last week. We said, like, you know, what does Warren Buffett know? What does Warren Buffett think that we don't know? You know? Yeah. I, you know,

I think that that was good. He couldn't leave. Go ahead, buddy. Are you leaving? Is that a wave goodbye? Okay. I mean,

listen, Warren Buffett though, has, he is the greatest investor of all time, but he has, doesn't mean he's always been right. You know, and it is nice to make 5%,

but he's also missed out on a raging bull market while doing that. But, you know, to the point, the capital that the cash is raising now, I think, should be the eye opener at this point. But I think that to some degree, he was wrong, you know, until this point. Andrew, you got your mic up. Yeah. Over the last 20 years, Warren Buffett has been an opportunity investor as opposed to a trendsetter. He looks for very, very favorable opportunities, whether it's Goldman Sachs type of opportunity during the meltdown or Apple at a certain number in and out of those types of stocks. So it's been opportunity-based, not being a trendsetter. Everybody knows here that I'm a bit of a Larry Fink fan, and for good reason. Talk about Vinnie and Rand going back and forth about kind of pump your bags. I don't know. Larry does a pretty good job of pumping his bags running around on Fox News and CNBC and Bloomberg, you know, talking about his Bitcoin ETF. Right. So everybody does it. It is what it is. It's part of the quote unquote game slash circus. Liquidity associated with meme coins and sloshing around in the crypto markets.

We have to remember that, you know, we've gone from, and some of you haven't been around long enough to remember this. But, you know, I was around when there were like a total of 800 tokens and then it went to like 2000 or 2200. And that seemed like a lot. Like, wow, there's 2200 tokens. What in the world are we talking about? Now we get 2000 a week. Yeah, there are hundreds of thousands, right? So there's your, you know, quote unquote liquidity. We don't need to talk about stimulus checks. You know, there's liquidity sort of being created out of thin air and it's going to continue until it doesn't continue, right? It's just a cycle right now. And, you know, I think there's value in listening to a

guy like Ran as it relates to kind of how this cycle is going and how to benefit from it. You know, I'm a pretty Bitcoin focused guy, but, you know, there's things happening around the system that are of interest. The other thing that I will say associated with the amount of capital going into Bitcoin, I forget who mentioned it, but those billions of dollars that are going into Bitcoin ETFs, right? One, that money largely stays there. And then two, the state of Wisconsin pension fund at no point is going to be investing in meme coins, okay? So there's a bifurcated, you know, sort of system of liquidity and movement in crypto right now. But at the same time, there's money to be made on both sides of the highway, so to speak. So yeah, my two cents. Yeah, Rand, I don't think you're wrong. It goes to the same point that we've made so many times. It's just a huge casino. I just have my doubts that that much money is going to move into that

side of the casino. Here's a question. I guess Render would be a good example of something that has, to some degree, moved up massively this cycle on some sort of utility, I guess. Although I think you could say it was riding the AI wave. Rand, maybe you have an answer for this outside of this meme coin casino what's the last time that we had something genuinely go up huge and stay there as a result strictly of its utility or use case one second i'll get you a list of things just give me one second okay so are we so are we because of the improvement in the supercomputer. So if you look at the chart of Rweave and you look at it,

let me pick a timeframe. Like, let's take it from January. Give me a date. Like from January, price was $8.90, trading today at $40. It's gone up to its highest, $47, trading at $39.40. That's pretty good performance um if you look at the decentralized compute plays like um akash for example uh quickly give you the stats on akash in the last month it's up 41 percent if you look at it since again let's go i'm going to i mean you

give me a time frame but let's say january it's trading at $2. It's trading at $6 now. So you've got a 3X there. Cap 1, just another one off the top of my head. I think Near Protocol is one of them where I think in the beginning of the year it was at – I mean, I think there's a lot of them that have actually done pretty well. Beginning of the year, Near Protocol was $2 or $3, and it's trading now at $7.30. There's

quite a bit. If you know where to look, there's... And Solana is the best example, by the way, obviously. Yeah. I mean, Solana is a little bit of an unfair example because Solana was the hardest hit because of what happened in FTX, right? So there was some mean reversion. Yeah, exactly. So I think, Solana, I have a chart in front of me. Just give me one second. I just want to open it.

It's actually quite a cool chart, and I think it actually tells a very good story. So the chart is, it's my trading view from a year ago, okay? Bitcoin, $28,914. Ethereum, $1,933. BNB, $322. Matic, $1,08. Solana, $22.64.

Arbitrum, $147.99. Lido, $2.25. Okay. Now, Matic is lower than that. That's right. point six four arbitrum one forty seven point nine nine lido two dollars twenty five okay now right now it is lower than that that's right that's jumps out so hold on so so there's actually a lot in this okay so let's actually i'm going to say the names again and then i'm actually going to tell you the story that i'm seeing in the numbers here so again one year ago bitcoin was 28 914 ethereum was 1933 bnb was 322 matic was 108 solana was 2264 arbitrum was 147.99 and lighter was 2.25 so what did we learn the first thing that we see is that ethereum has grossly grossly grossly underperformed because bit bitcoin's almost 2.5x and Ethereum is probably added on 30%.

So how badly the Ethereum narrative has underperformed the Bitcoin narrative. The second thing we look at is we see that the BNB narrative was probably bottomed at that point in time. And if you look at BNB, BNB has almost doubled since that point in time. So you could almost say that BNB performed nearly as well as Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin has overperformed BNB slightly more. If you look at Matic and Arbitrum, they tell two stories. The first story is how Matic has fallen out of favor because it was a bunch of hot air partnerships that Matic kept announcing. And ultimately, none of the partnerships actually stuck

and that's why today if you look at matic today you'll see that matic is trading at um 60 something cents 60 something so half of the down 30 40 from that yeah down 30 or 40 percent correct then you got arbitrage arbitrage was trading at um uh 14799, trading just under a dollar today. And that is the story of the VCs who got into the token and basically screwed retail. And now there's no retail to buy their bags. And unfortunately, now their investment in Arbitrum is up. And there's a good story in looking at where we were a year ago to looking at where we are today, who's been punished and who hasn't been

punished. Makes a lot of sense. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but it does clearly show that we still have yet to even sniff a real alt season where everything just irrationally rises and maybe we can't get

that with the amount we would need an insane new amount of retail for a lot of these things to even approach the old hot right exactly to come in otherwise the vcs are just gonna look look look look look look look yeah well we've been a fascinating conversation today as usual. I guess we'll see. It's going to be interesting to see how far this meme stock trend continues and if we'll actually see that trickle down. Because if that meme stock trend doesn't continue, we'll really have nothing to talk about if it ends up being just a few-day thing. Unfortunately, I have to go to a dentist appointment, which means I got to wrap. Thank you, everybody, for joining. And we will be back, obviously, tomorrow morning,

10.15am Eastern Standard Time. Thanks to all our guests. Great conversation. See you guys tomorrow. Bye.