The Wolf Of All Streets - With BTC at New ATH, Are Alts About to Join the Rally? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

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Guys, happy Tuesday, November 12th, 1018 a.m. Eastern Standard Time and welcome to yet another Crypto Town Hall. Yesterday morning, I think when we were doing Crypto Town Hall, we were all mind blown and in disbelief that we were celebrating prices around $82,000 or $83,000. Well, price made it to almost $90,000. I'm looking actually on Coinbase. I hadn't checked the exact top, but $89,993.69 on Coinbase was the top. For those who are not paying attention, that was actually not by percentage, but by sheer movement in price, the largest Bitcoin candle that we've ever had. And that doesn't even account for the very top. It accounts for the open and close. Price yesterday opened at $80,427.69, closed at $88,770.73. That was a daily move of $8,343.04. The second largest in history was on February 8th, 2021, which was

$7,576.67. Once again, this isn't the largest percentage move. And as price goes up, obviously, you know, if we're trading at $250,000 Bitcoin and we have a 10% move, that's going to be a $25,000 candle. And I think that a lot of us believe that one day we will see things like that happening. But just wanted to put in perspective just how big yesterday's move was. Obviously, I think a few reasons we can point to and we can discuss with the panel here, of course. So we saw a lot of this movement, sort of the breakout after six or seven months of consolidation on election night. So the Trump trade, very clear there, was the largest volume candle that we had had bullishly when price broke through that 73,835 previous all-time high

from back in March. And we've seen sustained volume and momentum since then for, I think, a number of reasons. One, obviously, being anticipation of Trump. Two, being that the longer you have consolidation from a technical perspective, the larger the move is going to be the upside. And once you got that break, you were going to get a hell of a lot of FOMO and buying power. Three, maybe speculation of sovereign nations that are buying. We talked about it yesterday. There's a lot of people who have been hinting at the fact that they know that there are countries out there buying.

Obviously, Dennis Porter was also here yesterday and said there's a huge announcement coming tomorrow or Thursday with regard to Bitcoin. I think something political of the United States. So watching for that. And then if anyone didn't see it yesterday, we also had the Bernstein report. I want to bring it up for their exact comment, because it was pretty incredible from one of the largest, I think, asset managers or investment companies in the world. They said, welcome to the crypto bull market. There's an official from their head of research. Welcome to the crypto bull market.

Buy everything you can. Which that was at about $82,000 yesterday morning on the way up to $90,000. So that's a few of the catalysts and obvious reasons that price is so high. Notably, even though price went as high as it did, there was about $600 million yesterday in liquidations. And that was almost split evenly between shorts and longs. So people who were right about Bitcoin going up because they were using leverage still lost all their money.

So maybe don't do that, you donkeys. Okay, we're going to go to the panel now and talk about this Bitcoin move, what's happening here. I mean, Matt, we got you here. You're giving me the funny face, hopefully not because I said your name, because I've called people donkeys. But what do you make of effectively one of the best days in Bitcoin history yesterday? But there's one more thing that I would add, which I think people aren't talking enough about, which is as much as it was about new demand, it was about the vanishing of supply. I think everyone who was selling Bitcoin into new all time highs or into the all time highs between March and October realized that the new floor of Bitcoin is something like one hundred thousand dollars and simply stopped being willing to part with their Bitcoin below that price. I also think even though we saw a lot of liquidations, Bitcoin became significantly harder to short because we can wake up at any moment and the U.S. could be building a strategic Bitcoin reserve or another country could be front running the U.S. to build a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So I think as much as it was about demand and i think there's still a ton of demand coming i think it's also about supply and we just saw a lot of people

step out of the market and be unwilling to sell um yeah the other thing i would add is i don't think we've seen the bulk or even much of a down payment on the real net new demand. You know, the real net new demand that this new era of crypto, this golden era of crypto is going to build in is institutional demand coming into the market. We've seen a trickle of that. But institutions move slowly. You know, people are still calling us to set up meetings to discuss the election. And I think that's going to be a multi-quarter bid. So those are my two thoughts. I think it's just a down payment. I think we're going higher. And I'm pretty excited. Yeah, I mean, this is just the first catalyst that opens the doors to all the things that

actually matter in the future, right? Which is all of this access and everybody. I mean, what percentage of retail would you say right now, Matt, even has access to Bitcoin spot ETFs in their portfolio still? Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but still less than half is my guess, or maybe around half. We still haven't seen the major wire houses turn on full Bitcoin exposure. You can bet that those meetings are accelerating. I know that we're having discussions with folks. You know, it's still a news story when an endowment allocates to Bitcoin. I tweeted yesterday that, you know, we're still early until Bitcoin gets to a million dollars. And that sounds ridiculous. But at a million dollars, we equal gold. And until we equal gold, you could still say that the world is discovering and deciding if Bitcoin is a mature store of value asset. So yeah, I think there's still gates to unlock on Bitcoin ETFs. There's

still committee meetings that take place quarterly. Again, this is a multi-year trade, I think, not a multi-day trade. Yeah, even if you just believe in the cycle, this is just the breakout right this is that uh 2020 you know october november breakout or the 2016 2016 breakout we all know that 17 21 were the two biggest years not 16 and 20 that's exactly that's right and people who have lived through those big years know that it gets uh you know it's been pretty exuberant the last few days to be sure but it gets a lot more exuberant than that. I've had a few advisor friends who have touched base with clients. And it's not overwhelming demand yet.

There's more interest than there was a week ago. But it's still a fraction of clients. People are still waking up to the new era of crypto. Outside of our little crypto bubble, people are thinking about other effects of the election. And those are top of mind, they haven't even turned their attention to see and re underwrite what's going on in crypto. So yeah, it's, it's, it's still the right part of the cycle. And we're just getting to make a statement. Obviously, she's the senator behind the Bitcoin strategic reserve bill. She said that it's her intention to make it a priority in the first 100 days so we'll see if that happens but

i don't think you could even price in what would happen if all of a sudden we we decided that it was going to be a reserve asset for the united states and what kind of buying that would be from other countries no you can't imagine that and And the thing I would note, two things on that. You know, one, it doesn't even have to be the US first. The fact that she has said that means other countries are on notice. And there's an element of like Pascal's wager here where the downside of being a first mover for another country is relatively low, maybe zero. And the upside is really significant. So even just talking about it, I think could catalyze things. And I know there's

a lot of skepticism out there about whether the administration will make good on its promises to crypto early in the new administration. My view is that they're going to be well incentivized to do that. Crypto played a big role in this election politicians are already starting to think about the next cycle they're going to want to demonstrate that they heard from the crypto industry loud and clear so i think there's a chance to surprise on the upside in terms of how fast we move in washington on some of the key priorities yeah and you mentioned obviously sort of the institutional adoption that's just starting to happen or is likely to happen i mean we have some anecdotal evidence um that those's just starting to happen or is likely to happen. I mean,

we have some anecdotal evidence that those things are starting to ramp up. There were a couple articles today, Bitcoin hedge fund, just about risk-free trade is roaring back, talking about, obviously, the basis trade, which is buying spot Bitcoin and shorting the futures. I believe right now that's basically an 18.6% or 18% annualized, according to November expiry. So there's this huge opportunity for institutions to effectively short the futures and be long spot Bitcoin, which also tends to drive price up and effectively just earn the yield in between there. So that trade definitely happening. Bitcoin options showing traders betting on 100,000 by year end is another headline that we have here. So obviously, people more inclined now to make much bigger bets on the future prices of Bitcoin. And then finally, we don't even have the options yet on the ETFs,

which are coming. And that's when the volume should absolutely explode. And by the way, Matt, I see you jumping in, but right before you were talking about gold and Bitcoin catching up to gold, just as an aside, I saw a story yesterday that BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF is now larger than their gold ETF. Pretty crazy. Right. How about that? Yeah.

And still miles to go. I think that's right. And remember that this institutional adoption was already taking place in Q3 before the election. I think we're going to see that when the 13F filings are finalized for Bitcoin ETFs this Friday. I think it'll show a substantial uptick. The options were already in play before the election. You know, a lot of people thinking they'll be approved this year. I don't have any special insight on that, but it's certainly possible. So these trends were already in place and just accelerated significantly by what happened last week. So it's pretty exciting. I mean, speaking, I guess, about price action, maybe Foles, you're obviously deep in the charts. You're watching this. You were giving me all the

smiley laughing faces when I talked about the leverage wipeouts. What do you make of this price action now almost hitting $90,000? A lot of people thought $100,000 was impossible this year. I mean, now when you see it hitting $90,000, another $10,000 is a day of price action when Bitcoin is extremely volatile. And how do you really sort of now, from a technical perspective, look at the chart and say, oh, here's where resistance is. Here's where a target is when price has never been here before. Price discovery is when things get really, really interesting. Yeah, absolutely, Scott.

Thanks for having me on. Yeah, just to touch on that liquidations point, just always boggles my mind when I see that, you know, Bitcoin is trading at the price it's trading at. And meanwhile, we have $1 billion of liquidations in the last 24 hours. The biggest position that was liquidated was $15 million on Binance. So you can imagine like there's some dude out there who just got liquidated for $15 million while everyone else is euphoric and everyone else is printing money left, right and center. So, yeah, it's

everyone always talks about spot and chill but you know practice what you preach people um then to touch on the the price action yeah i mean it's it's it's super interesting and at a certain point i think uh particularly around the trump trade maybe it comes back in now but technical analysis can only take you so far and i think particularly around the election i was actually advising people just to take a backseat from not necessarily to be trying to plot out support and resistance and where is it going to go to. But just actually just watch the price action unfold and see what an illogical market, an illogical, relatively illiquid market can do when there's a major bullish catalyst in the water um so i mean now yeah we're pulling back a bit um there are logical support levels we can look at you know around 80k maybe even lower if we get a proper oi flush 74k but i'm i'm actually the the

chart that i want to talk about is total three which is i don't see many people talking about about it but meanwhile it's you know while btTC has done this crazy upside in the last week, total three, the altcoin market cap is up almost 40 percent in nine days, which is super exciting. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. I think also one of the notable kind of metrics of yesterday was at that point, total crypto market cap, not total three, obviously, including Bitcoin, Ethereum surpassed three trillion. Yeah, which is wild.

Yeah, it's wild. Yeah, it's great to see. And I think that is, you know, everyone has been talking for the last, for the whole year, the word that I keep hearing again and again is alt season. You know, everyone, it feels like the market or at least the market that i've known is is very under exposed to btc and the net result of that is people who are kind of waiting for their time to shine waiting for their alt bags to run i think that now more than any time this year so far probably more than any time in the last four years it really feels like the

stage has been set for a proper uh i don't i don't want to even use the word alt season but let's say an alt run where total three starts putting in new highs um new capital comes back to the market right because that's the key point here is that we haven't really seen new capital come back into the market at least retail capital right differentiated from institutional capital in a way that is driving uh all coins to new highs and there's also there's this supply issue because of uh the myriad of of new alts that are being created this year and there's a there's a there's a supply demand mismatch whereby any new capital that is coming in and existing capital is being diluted so yeah really really exciting place to

be in the markets i actually woke up this morning like as soon as my alarm went off and i was like extremely excited to just jump on my desk and get on my computer and that hasn't happened in a while so i'm i'm i'm in a i think it's it's a fantastic. It's a fantastic time to be in crypto to have any exposure to be watching charts to be trading. And yeah, I'm excited for what the next few months brings and a pro crypto presence in the US, at least on paper for the next four years. So yeah, crazy times. Really interesting. I just brought up the total chart. So market cap, including Bitcoin and Ethereum and tapping three trillion actually tapped the all time high of total market cap from November 20 from November of 21. So, you know, three trillion was the top there. And now we're at three trillion when arguably the cycle is just starting so without

all tabbing made these huge moves are coming close to the all-time highs across the board already because largely the power of Bitcoin and just the market being larger already hitting that same total uh market cap number go ahead yeah one of the basic facts that we might be missing here is all these pump.fund tokens and a million meme points being launched and quickly hitting a large market cap without the supply really being out, like barely 5%, 6%, 10% supply being out, 90% bought out by whales, never to sell um so so the three trillion market cap um i don't think it's the same as you would or call it i don't think it'll have the same depth as you would have expected uh in the last cycle uh this is all like a massive multiple of the basic algorithm of coin

market cap and coin gecko, simply multiplying the number of tokens with the price of that meme coin. So I'm really not even counting the 1,700 pump.fund tokens minted in the last six hours. Most of them don't even count, and they shouldn't. But I mean, you might have 6 million launched in April.

There could be tens of millions of dollars basically lost across all of those or sitting there with no liquidity that aren't being counted in the market cap. Yeah, so this 3 trillion is not that dependable is what I wanted to imply simply. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, obviously. Juan, what are your thoughts right now on where the market stands? I guess, you know, we kind of have this title with Bitcoin new all-time high. Are alts about to join the rally? I mean, I would argue that alts joined the rally, right? I mean, Bitcoin dominance did not go up while Bitcoin was making that run. That's right. Alts were definitely participating. And you look at something like Doge was up 40% while Bitcoin's up 10, right? Yeah, as Bitcoin rallied over the past week,

it did hit peak dominance at, I think it was 60%, but it hasn't continued upward. And as you said, we've now seen some of those altcoins take on bigger price moves, bigger percentage price moves. So I think we're starting to see that shift a little bit. I think there's still more room, definitely a lot more room for those altcoins to run. As we've seen in prior cycles, it's multiples of what Bitcoin does, multiples of what Ethereum does. Ethereum is just getting into the passing of the baton from Bitcoin to Ethereum in the current rally. And then that, as we know, moves on to altcoins. And I think it's well supported by the market. I mean, in terms of the ETFs for Bitcoin and Ethereum that now have a ton of liquidity.

Yesterday, we saw the biggest day of inflows for the Ethereum ETFs, almost $300 million, which was huge. We saw $1.1 billion for the Bitcoin ETFs. So we're seeing huge volume and huge volume also in micro strategy, in coin based stock. So the retail participation into what traditionally is the altcoins, I think, is coming. And we're still very early on in that. Yeah, with that market cap kind of pushing highs, I mean, it just makes you wonder how high this can go. It's hard not to be euphoric at this point in the market, but if we get a proper cycle, we haven't even started.

Exactly. Yeah. Go ahead, Juan. The anxiety we had for the last couple of years of the bear market and those discussions that tiny little wickick, um, has a sort of, uh, induced that euphoria, uh, while we are still living in a, in a tiny little bubble of, of crypto enthusiasts, I would say. Right. Um, so, so while, while this has just triggered the crypto enthusiasts, we have probably not even entered or touched upon the the next uh

layer of this bubble right which is people have been watching on the side right and then there's a whole world of you know uh people who have to who still have to be informed so yeah I mean we are clearly looking at a multitude of uh exposure and hence explosion in the total market cap and purchase of crypto. Now, when you take a look at this market, Gaurav, Foles, Juan, anyone who's actively looking at altcoins, how much does the narrative that we've had, obviously, before this push, that there's going to be just too much supply with unlocks and new tokens coming on? How much does that affect the way that you view what's likely to come for altcoins? Do we think that it'll still be like the seasons of old where you kind of threw a dart and just waited and everything eventually went up? Or I mean, can we make the

argument that a lot of this stuff from past cycles, certainly, and a lot of the new things that might not be that overly hyped could wildly still underperform. Do you need to be positioned in specific buckets or places to be successful in this sort of upcoming rally? I mean I think, sorry, I was just going to say yeah the the the new shiny coins thing is absolutely real and I think anyone who has traded the markets at all this year will tell you that there are such easy trades to be taken on coins that have just launched, coins that have just been listed, coins that got Binance listings or Coinbase listings, because people are attracted to those. And there's a built-in narrative to those coins. There's a built-in catalyst. But then just to touch on the the the altcoin point

I think it does relate to what I said earlier about new capital because what we've really seen I mean I saw there were so many rotations this year you know we saw AI running and then there was a rotation into memes and then we rotated into uh deepin and then there was a rotation into orwa and then went back to memes it really was just like this hot ball of money rotating from from catalyst to catalyst and then each time it rotated out the the previous catalyst the coins would die uh and that's not that's not an alt season right that's not a that's not an alt run in my opinion an all run is like what we got in 2021 where random coins were doing like 20%

moves by the time you went and took your shower in the morning and got back to your desk. The coins that were doing 2x on a Monday and then another 2x on a Thursday. There was just such a crazy influx of new capital coming into the market in a way that we haven't seen this year at all, or at least retail capital. And I said it on one of my streams this week. I really think that the catalyst for that is going to be 100K Bitcoin. I think the headline writes itself, right? 100K Bitcoin. If you bought Bitcoin two years ago, you'd be up 5X on your investment. 100K Bitcoin. I don't know. The retail catalyst is 100k Bitcoin, in my opinion, that's what's going to cause people to start, you know, either slowly or quickly drifting back in to into crypto, maybe people who have been out of the game since all the the shit show that was 2021. Or maybe people who have just been kind of waiting on the sidelines, maybe crypto wasn't in their mind share. Crypto wasn't in their day-to-day. So they weren't really paying attention to it.

But 100K Bitcoin is that headline. I think that's going to be the catalyst. In addition to the existing catalysts that are out there right now, the main one of which I believe is the Trump presidency. That's going to be the thing that brings new capital to the market, new mind share to crypto. And that's the thing that's going to drive alts in this next leg. I think it's just going to be a doge all time high.

I've been saying all this time. But I mean, I hope so. I say I say it every single time here and people laugh and maybe I'm being redundant. But if you are like intellectually honest about what happened in the last cycle, the bulk of people who came into crypto came in to either trade NFTs at some point or because of Doge. And Doge was the reason that centralized exchanges couldn't onboard people fast enough and had to hire more customer service. And there were three and four month waiting lists. And now, you know, those people, in my opinion, who just fought Doge because of the hype are going to at some point look down here and say, wow, this isn't dead. I'm actually making

money. You're going to get interested again. Right. And it's going to be catalysts like that, I think. Gaurav, you and I actually, I mean, Gaurav and I had a chat this morning about business completely aside from any of this. And I asked you a very similar question privately, I'm remembering it, and about what you thought it would look like and strategy. And you sort of made the point that it's going to depend on certain huge hype projects in maybe each sort of genre or bucket being successful

that would lead to a run of that sort of category. Like we pointed out, I think we talked about Godzilla. Everybody talks about Godzilla off the grid, the game, because it's a real AAA game on PlayStation and Xbox. It was like the most streamed game and it's crypto-based obviously, right? So if that fulfills its promise, you said to me this morning,

then we see a gaming run, right? I mean, is that kind of how you're framing this? Yep. So it's probably my ocd uh for being organized i i have all the topics lined up since the last 20 minutes i'm going to touch upon each one of those and and definitely yes i said that uh but to touch upon how all-time high is always a trickle-down effect to alls and and like super super agreed um i don't see the name of this gentleman uh who's been speaking before me um that huh bolus follows with an f yeah it's it's in there yeah okay okay so so like you said it is indeed the headline the

tagline of crypto that we've been waiting since eternity. I mean, which is five years in crypto. But yeah, 100K will bring in a whole new set of capital that would trickle down from Bitcoin and Dogecoin and Ethereum and Pepe and whatever has been the entry of this retail audience. And it's not just doge it's all the all the nft all the memes that have onboarded uh literally hundreds of millions of users um uh scott i don't know if we discussed this but today i i visited the first ever meme conference in my life and i'm going to send you some videos which uh which will boggle your mind but i actually saw 200 people

sitting on a chair watching the content of uh of the stage like that never happened i don't even remember when that happened last time in the in a crypto conference so you can imagine that's the interest and these guys are onboarding um users so no matter what has been the onboarding of a retail to crypto, as the bull cycle arrives, as it starts moving, they would come back and like you said, they would see, oh, this isn't actually dead and my investment is doing well. Let me see what else can perform. Because remember in institution world, if you do a 2X in four years,

you're already already beyond crazy. So that's going to be the driver. Now, I think the same thing applies to all the gazillion airdrops. They also onboard a lot of users. And these airdrops include GameFi, include DeFi, include bridges, include hamsters, and whatnot of the world. Actually not being the pun in this conversation. That's all going to happen. And what that essentially means is fresh capital.

The bottom line is this fresh retail capital. And 16 years of investing, and I've been like a massive hyper retail investor. And I can tell you, nobody bets against retail. Nobody in the VC world, nobody knows how this world works. So as soon as somebody comes up with a WeWork phenomenon and says, you know, this is going to work, and they show a little bit of proof on that, people like VCs start offloading their money on them.

So retail is magical. What we are seeing right now in meme is hardcore retail capital. What we saw in the ICO era was hardcore retail capital. What we saw with NFT and the magic around that stupidity, whatever it was, I never believed in it, was all retail capital. So never undermine the power of this fresh retail capital. And like I said, the $3 trillion that we're looking at today is not as real, but that is backed by retail capital, and there's more coming. So one bottom line to each cycle, as I would say,

ICO retail went into ICO tokens, like call it utility uh 2021 defy and nfts this year this time maybe memes and whatever comes next but guess what most of the times we have seen the assets of the older cycles actually being revived and making more value for themselves. So I don't think none of these so-called dead trends would be dead. And I think Matt said in the beginning of the talk that right now the money is rolling from a trend to trend, but sooner than later, it won't be a trend anymore. It won't be a ball trend or a segment trend or a subcategoric trend everything would start moving uh you know when you go to shower it'll

be 2x and when you come out it'll be four uh and and and that's the power of retail that we're all waiting for yeah absolutely love that anyone else thoughts on what this next cycle might sort of look at look like uh before uh versus previous cycles if not it's totally fine um but yeah i can yeah i i can simply i mean maybe summarize the binance rise of meme report that they published uh seven days ago please which is basically i'll i'll send it to you. But that has been life-changing for me. So like NFTs, I never touched NFTs.

Mario and Yat have been constantly trying to onboard me. I finally ended up buying Ton Handles, but nothing else. And similarly, we had a strong narrative against memes because they didn't have an intrinsic economic value until I saw this finance rise of meme report and the basic point it made is that retail hates vc like crypto retail has a specific i mean the og um crypto audience and the new upcoming crypto audience they already have an anarchist attitude towards finance which which is no institutions, nothing at all centralized.

And that is what brought the ICO megacycle in the past. And that brought the NFT megacycle last time. And this is exactly what's happening for me. A lot of people articulated it as the value of attention that we're capitalizing on means. I think it's beyond that. It's not just the value of attention. It's the fact that retail finally can depend on a supply system, build upon pump.fund,

build upon fair launches, and stuff like that. They just don't want to be the exit liquidity. They've understood that, and they can see fair launches and they can bet on it. So this cycle, what I anticipate and what we are advising our portfolio companies a ton, by the way, is to create tokenomics that are not giving away exits

or releases in the first six months, one year. And so to the VCs, if they really want to succeed and win the heart of their crypto retail audience, like basically retail audience, because I think this narrative is going to lead the path for the next one or two years or this cycle, I think. And last, I think the bottom line of this is everybody right now is tracking. I'm looking at a ton of solutions that give a retail audience a clear data-oriented bird's eye view on the holdings, whale holdings, institutional holdings, and so on. And that's why the winner, the ultimate winner of all these things is, are the tokens that have a fair distribution altogether. If you simply check the bubble maps winners, I mean, the first thing people do is check out the distribution of a meme point and you see a straight rise there.

So I think that's going to be the ultimate winner of this. That trend is going to be the ultimate winner of this. That trend is going to be the ultimate winner of this cycle. Yeah, I have a bit of a contrarian take. Scott, I know that you've been involved in Bitcoin for a while. I think 100k Bitcoin is actually going to be the strongest resistance point that Bitcoin has ever seen, probably since October 2014, when you had the bear whale who was selling, I think it was 30,000 Bitcoin at $300. And I think psychologically, for a lot of people have been holding for years. And when we look on chain, we're seeing more wallets holding their Bitcoin for and not moving it over the course of several years that 100k is is stapled into a lot of

people's minds saying, Okay, that's my target. That's where I think Bitcoin can reach. And I think it's about to be one of the highest resistance points. I mean, I think that anyone, which was not me, but anecdotally, who was around in the sort of early days, anyone who was an early Bitcoiner, I always share these stories that almost everyone sold at $1,000. Right? Kind of just the same phenomenon i'm just saying like i you know uh yeah i can't believe my ten dollar investment went to a thousand bucks i'm out of here um but that said you know i think that a lot of those people are going to sell and i think that the institutions that matt and juan have described coming in later are going to be aggressively buying right through that. So

I think it could be an initial resistance, but nothing would surprise me as far as blasting much higher. And I think everyone here probably has much, much higher targets for it. I mean, Simon, listen, you've been here forever. 100k is just a number in your mind, I'd imagine. Yeah, well, I'm at the stage where it's like, where do I want to park my money? And there's nowhere better to park it than Bitcoin, because if I were to buy dollars with my Bitcoin, then I'd have to lend it to the US government and I don't like the Fed. Or I'd have to buy some stocks and I don't necessarily want to support the military industrial complex. And so for me, it's a freedom place to park money. It's a way where I'm able to spend it wherever I choose and can be innocent until proven guilty rather than guilty until proven innocent. And it is also what I believe to be the best place to park money that the world has ever seen, that's ever existed and will ever exist.

And so to me, 100K is just more of a congratulations to the community, what we have achieved. We have created so much disruption and it's just a token of here's where we are. We've got a lot more work to do. There are still really bad things happening in this world, and I think Bitcoin can have its role in leveling the playing field. So no, I won't sell one Bitcoin at 100K, but I certainly will buy it if it is the time of the month when I buy Bitcoin with my fiat currency. I love that. I bought the all-time high at 74 breakout just to say I did it and that's gone perfectly fine.

There's really no price that worries me. I mean, speaking of people that price doesn't worry, I mean, what did a sailor buy that has his biggest buy since December 2020? Basically in the first week and a half of November. I mean, so in the way for the power of dollar cost averaging and not being concerned with price at all, right? I think his basis for this buy was around $74,000 a coin. I don't have it exactly in front of me, but he bought 27,200 Bitcoin for $2.03 billion. He is not stopping.

I mean, this is absolutely astounding to watch and it shouldn't be surprising preston i mean yeah you've obviously been watching this the whole way it shouldn't surprise us but it still puts a smile on my face every time i see it what what exactly puts a smile on your face michael saylor is relentless buying through micro strategy of bitcoin regardless of the price and at billions of dollars a clip. I mean, it's, I don't know if it puts a smile on my face. It's just like the guy's a killer. He was committed to his vision and he's been executing it with alacrity.

And, you know, there are other people in the market who've done the same. It's, I think this was inevitable when the ETF approvals happened in January, February. And there were some conversations, maybe it's temporary, maybe it's not. But the inflows have been coming day after day, every single day without fail, as long as the markets were open. And it doesn't really surprise me. They've been tightly winding and coiling this spring. And that spring finally snapped and it's unwound itself. And we've seen what's happened with the price action.

So, yeah, I mean, I'm not, it's interesting. I haven't been euphoric this cycle, weirdly. I know some people are, but like yesterday, it was, oh my God, Bitcoin all-time highs. I just kind of shrugged and we're like, okay, cool. Let's keep building stuff. Finally, VCs are going to deploy capital. We're going to start seeing crypto return to the US. I don't know what it is, but I am oddly calm compared to past price action. Maybe it's having been on the roller coaster for so long that you just get used to it and you're like, oh, well, price is going up again. Great.

So, no, it's good to see. I'm really encouraged. My clients are all really encouraged. And it's I think it's going to be great for crypto in America, what we're seeing. And this is just kind of, you know, up only from here, in my opinion. Yeah, I mean, anecdotally, I'm not getting that many calls still, right? And the people do seem much calmer than in previous cycles, to your point, which is why I think there's so much further still to go. That's usually what happens when retail, that's exactly right.

You start getting lots of calls. I usually would get phone calls from my friends who are lawyers, who would be like, you know, most of my friends are lawyers. That's just kind of how it is when you're in the law because the law is such a jealous mistress but like the phone hasn't been ringing yet i haven't been hearing people say hey what's going on like haven't haven't spoken to you in three four years blah blah blah so we're it's still very early innings i think in this cycle um and people haven't figured it out yet, but they will. Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, anyone else here not surprised, I guess, have thoughts on Michael Saylor's buying?

I mean, he bought right into literally the last all-time high price. And those buys are already up 10 something percent. I think that he is now 2x'd his entire stack by simply dollar cost averaging through all markets. And I think even as an aside, I think Tesla's Bitcoin stack I read is now worth a billion dollars. So I guess maybe Matt, I'll ask you, when do we see other companies

finally just have to do this? Because it's, you know, it's embarrassing not to have a not to have a position. I think we're going to see a slow and steady increase of companies following sailors lead, I don't think it's going to become a major trend. But I do think we're going to see a slow and steady increase. It's not the business that most companies are in. But, you know, to be sure, there are boards, you know, waking up and looking at the success that he has and looking to follow suit. And there are people who are increasingly concerned about, you know, the fate of the U.S. dollar, who are going to want in on the trade. But it's not

central to my thesis. But I do think I think we're going to see it on the edges, you know, starting now, you know, I think it'll happen. Yeah, I mean, you know, what I think is very unique about Michael Saylor is his ability to raise finance at the pace at which he raises finance, and then just make an announcement. Yeah, we're raising two billion. Oh, yeah, two billion is done and we bought Bitcoin. I think that is very unique either to the setup of the interest in Bitcoin from the, you know, the fixed income investors or it is Michael Saylor or probably both. But what I don't think we'll get another one like that. Maybe we'll get a few more. But I think that's a one a one time thing. But I do think people will look at what, you know, Microsoft

are doing. Let's get some votes to figure out whether we want to put some Bitcoin as treasury and kind of ease their way in rather than do it Michael Saylor approach. But, you know, if you look at the famous chart that I often track, that we all track, is looking at Bitcoin relative to all the assets in the world. And so we just flipped silver. That can be, you know, so we're now the eighth largest in the world. So what have we got our sights on next? Well, we've got Saudi Aramco. I personally believe that we're going to be

getting announcements at some point, whether it's imminent or in the future. You know, the Bitcoin's catching up and these large oil producers are going to be looking at using some of their energy and really harnessing Bitcoin, which they have been already, but making some announcements. And then we're just looking at, you know, number six, Amazon, number five, Google, number four, Microsoft, number three, Apple, and number two, Nvidia. Interestingly, if they put some Bitcoin on their balance sheet, and they actually went, then they could just rise with us rather than Bitcoin taking a spot. But we've got our eyes on number one, which is the Peter Schiff moment,

the moment when probably Peter Schiff buys Bitcoin, which is when Bitcoin actually flips gold. So that's what we've got to look forward to. Plenty more to do, plenty more to build. And it's still a very exciting journey ahead. Totally agree. I love that the sentiment is so high for Bitcoin. I don't mean to be bearish in saying that 100K is going to get you up under resistance. I do think that we're going to go a lot higher, and I think all your points are correct, especially what Scott was saying just about Michael Saylor's conviction.

I think there are certainly a lot of institutions that keep buying, but just transitioning here, the last 15 minutes today we're working in AMA with EWA. So EWA is a cross-chain trading protocol. They use the curve pools for settlement, and today they've've actually wrapped up over $2 billion in TVL. And I believe they also have Michael Agorov, who's a DeFi legend of his own, right, advising on the project. And he's the founder of Curve and someone that I really like because he really drinks his own Kool-Aid as being one of the largest users of his own product. So I just want to turn the floor over to Ewa. I know you guys are at DevCon right now,

but can you give us just a little bit of an overview about what the project is and what you guys have been able to accomplish thus far? Yeah, thanks a lot, Bas. Yeah, Ewa is a cross-chain ecosystem, and we basically work together with Curve Finance on the consensus breach approach, where we believe that every breach on the market, regardless of how big it is, is semi-centralized. So the team has access to liquidity or access to the protocol core to be able to stop it or to be able to do something with the code or in case of multi-chain, retrieve the liquidity out of it. And this way we decided to partner up with major bridges

to allow for any transactions to be secured by multiple bridges at the same time, which we believe is a real innovation in the space. And this all is securing our cross-chain DEX called CrossCurve. As you rightly mentioned, we have Michael Yegorov, the founder of Curve Finance, which is the second largest DEX in the world. And also, 70% of all decentralized stablecoin swaps is happening through Curve and yield is happening on the curve itself so we are aggregating the curve liquidity and we also aggregate through curve

technology the liquidity from different chains and ultimately bringing this chain abstraction that everyone is like trying to fight for for the users so So users and traders do not really need to understand where the pool of liquidities is located. They just can buy the token with any asset from any chain, bridge it back, deliver it, have it in their wallet. So we want to have ultimate simplicity, bring ultimate simplicity for users, and cross-curve and cross-curve dex is basically the ultimate solution for that.

So that's a short intro. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Curve. And for those who haven't used it, it's certainly the most efficient way to trade with a really low slipping rate. It's like two to three bits on a single coin. So I'm actually surprised that other protocols are not using Curve as a settlement layer.

But I know that there are other cross-chain protocols out there similar to your product. What makes you guys specifically very unique in the market and allows you to stand out? Yeah, as you mentioned, the swap actually efficiency is super low on Curve and for the cross-chain, it actually will be lower. So the Curve DAO just went through with a proposal to reduce the cross-chain pools fees

even 10 times lower. So it's going to be super low for our users. And the unique features, as I mentioned, includes the innovations on the security side. So each transaction can be secured by multiple data protocols at the same time. So if someone wants, it can be secured by Layer 0 and XLR, like two major bridges on the market currently on the datarum. But the liquidity from eight chains, it's actually united to help your transfer

to go with the lowest possible slippages. That's what we actually let happen with our innovation on the aggregation of the liquidity. And we believe that having the lowest rates on the market will allow us to get both retail and B2B traction quite fast. Thank you. I'm going through your Twitter right now. I see that the TGE date is set for, it looks like the 5th of December. What's the utility for the token? So utility, it's governance. So we believe that the protocol's future is in the hands of the DAO and token holders.

So this goes back to the inflation rate, the protocol bridge itself, and the rules for the bridge also will be governed by DAO. The governance is a major part of it. Another one is the V tokenomics of Curve. The token utility will allow for direction of the inflation or basically the treasury like unlocks that are happening so the more votes you have the more tokens you have locked in the higher your yield will be so the entire defy space grew up in 2021 because of this invention that you can actually play a lot with those votes and increase your utility. So basically, the hardest believers of the protocol are rewarded for locking your votes

for like multiple years. In Curve, for example, you can vote up to four years and get two and a half X boost to your base liquidity yield. And that's what we also allow. Apart from that, it's like trading discounts. You can in future pay for the gas with Ava, et cetera.

But the key element, of course, is governance and yield boost. I love that. Similar to Aerodrome as well. I think they also have a similar model. And Aerodrome is a project that I've been following quite a bit. They performed really well. But in this new paradigm that we have now, what we're kind of seeing is even new pump.fund coins are starting to get.

Things like that within a month or two of their TGE. Can you talk a little bit about when you guys are actually launching the token? I think I read December 5th, but after that, have you guys spoken to some exchanges? What's kind of the future of the token look like in that regard? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, within two weeks after the TGE event, we plan to launch the listings on different major exchanges. So there are a number of exchanges that we're in touch with and in talks with and final negotiations.

So I'm sure that our community will appreciate our selection of the top tier one bridges that we'll be coming up with. So this allows us to have a proper liquidity, proper amount of traders that will be able to trade the token from the day one and accumulate for the hedge funds and those that are going after the yield to accumulate the token to be able to increase their yield, increase the governance of the protocol and we work with our partners to have like a strong demand from day one as well. So we will be partnering up with Curve, with Convex, with Stakedow and other players within the Curve ecosystem that are working on a so-called bribery market where the new projects are coming in. They're giving their token to the DAOs.

It could be Convex, it could be Curve, it could be us. For example, if they need cross-chain pools, and currently with lots of new chains coming up, every chain would like to attract the liquidity to their chain in a cross chain manner from Curve itself. And that's why we got like 500k grant from Tome Foundation. So there's a partnership there. We have our own Telegram mini app with more than a million users to bring some education to the masses and on board we have two users into Web3.

So there is a very, very strong narrative actually coming up. The traction is super high. We've got like 100% increase in TVL over the last month or more than 100% in the active users over the last month.

So the traction is there. We're very close to the launch in the token. So everything looks very, very hopeful for us. Thank you. You talked a lot about the demand drivers for users. The use case is pretty clear. Like it's this chain abstraction sort of protocol. So with some of the lowest footage on the market but can

you talk a little bit about the supply side as well like what are the benefits for projects that are choosing to list cross-chain with you guys yeah i think that's that's one of the main key things that were not only the retail uh bridge uh or retail like DAX that anyone can swap their token like cheaply really. We actually are also a B2B solution where any protocol and any project that would like to bring their token listed in a decentralized way across all connected chains can do so. And they only need to have a single pool of liquidity to do so. So they basically select their own chain. They have the stable coin of their choice. And then all the users from any chain with any token supported can buy their own token.

So for the project, that brings ultimate simplicity. If they choose our hub chain, they even can earn on provided liquidity. So this creates a very symbiotic relationship actually between us and the project. They keep their liquidity with us. This improves the slippages. It enhances our protocol, our bridge.

And at the same time, the project earns on the yield on the provided liquidity in our hub chain. So that's basically creates a virtuous loop where the more projects we list and more projects decide that they would like to actually become our partners earn more become the liquidity provider and get the ava rewards and then basically select to lock the ava to get the even higher yield so in the long term they become our partners they become like basically co-owners of the protocol and they always need their token to be traded they can start having an influence on which that to actually

provide incentives for their own pools so the projects that would like to kind of reduce their own cash reserves they can just you know incentivize the pools with their token and this way you know bring the liquidity providers to provide liquidity for their pools so that's actually a lot of innovation that we're putting in i believe that in the future um us addressing the security element that any cross-chain move and any bridging for the token actually secured by multiple bridges at the same time. And also at the same time providing the lowest slippages for the final traders. That creates a very, very powerful combo for our protocol to become a protocol of choice for new listings for the projects. Thank you.

And as we wrap up here, just in the final few minutes of the AMA, I have two quick questions for you. The first one is, what's upcoming on the roadmap? And then the second one, if you want to wrap up, is really for all the listeners that we have here,

there's thousands listening right now, what would your call to action be to stay involved in the project? Yeah, so for us, there are a few community rounds that will be there. So please go in and follow us on Twitter. So you will receive all the latest information about the community rounds that are upcoming. So this will be in form of providing provision of liquidity or getting a chance to get a token early.

And the launch of AvaDAO. So that's going to be an interesting new chapter in our development. So once the DAO is out, the vTokenomics will be launched, similar to Airdrome or Velodrome, et cetera. So this will stimulate the demand of AVA token form with the projects and the creative providers. And also, you know, we will be increasing our collaboration with Curve Finance.

We'll be addressing more and more incentives. So there will be more partnerships that will be coming up. So definitely stay tuned with our Twitter. We'll be continuously working with our various partners, increasing our moves in the Tone ecosystem as well. As I mentioned, there is a collaboration with 500k grant announcement and the recent blog post on the tone.org just proves how important cross-curve to the entire Tone ecosystem.

So yeah, there are so many announcements that are coming, so just stay tuned into our Twitter page and you'll see them all coming within the next few weeks. Thank you very much, Faraj. So for any of the listeners, if you're tuning in, make sure that you get the project. I see the emojis. Make sure that you give them a follow. Give the speakers a follow as well. This is a great conversation with Crypto Town Hall just about what the next steps

for Bitcoin can look like and what this new paradigm post-election looks like for Bitcoin. I appreciate everyone for coming. Thank you to the speakers. Thanks to the audience. And we'll see you next time on the next episode of Crypto Town Hall. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everyone. Thank you very much.