The Wolf Of All Streets - WLFI Drama Heats Up #CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: April 13, 2026

In this episode of Crypto Town Hall, Scott and guests dive deep into the ongoing World Liberty Financial drama. What started as a Trump-backed DeFi project promising to help the "debanked" has turned into a major controversy, with massive token locking, high utilization on Dolomite lending pools, and over $150M reportedly extracted in stablecoins while investors remain locked out. The conversation explores the project's questionable origins, governance issues, and the broader implications for crypto's reputation and upcoming legislation like the CLARITY Act. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every other day here on X 1015 AM Eastern Standard Time. Dave is hosting some panels at the conference at the New York Stock Exchange. Today, I think he's actually going to be traveling for the next couple weeks. So you are all stuck with me and it appears to be three guests and the ghosts of Mario. Of course. I don't think that it's worthy of our time anymore to spend. endless hours talking about oil or the Straits of Hormuz or geopolitics or things that much more equipped people are probably more qualified to unpack than us. We can give the brief updates on it. Obviously, the United States is double-stamping the triple stamp on the blockades and blockade and good times had by all. But otherwise, I think the only real topic here is,

World Liberty Financial drama because this is crypto town hall and I don't think there's anything more crypto than what is happening there because I think it's indicative of a lot of the issues that people have with our industry that we have amongst ourselves, the own goals that we continue to kick every time it seems like we're making some progress with governments and regulators. And so I think we should start and maybe even end there with the conversation about what's happening with World Liberty Financial. Luke, I just got your message. You're invited up or you can request.

I know you wanted to talk about it and you're in the audience, if you're listening, Luke. But otherwise, here's the very quick and dirty summary. World Liberty Financial was launched to accredited investors, actually. It was done, quote, unquote, the right way for those who don't remember it. And effectively, the Trumps and the Whitkoffs and everybody were on the website. They were, you know, promising that this was to save the debanked and a new world of finance because they had been debanked by the big banks. And, well, now 80% of investor tokens are still locked up,

and there hasn't been a vote on how those come out. Justin's son effectively saying, hey, I got debanked. They had a backdoor in the back of the contract that allowed them to freeze all of his assets. Sounds a lot like the banks. And more importantly, the World Liberty Financial has moved a ton of tokens over to Dolomite, which is a platform owned and started by an advisor

to World Liberty Financial. that is a lending borrowing platform, and they've basically used all the World WLFI, World Liberty Financial token, which they created themselves, and have deposited it there at a extremely, basically draining the liquidity pools entirely, to a point of 93% utilization,

and have extracted 150-ish, depending on how you look. Million in stable coins, and nobody knows if those will get paid back. What does that mean? It means anyone else who has money there can't get it out. We'll never be able to get it. out and who knows. I read something today, which I can't completely vet, but if they were to try

to liquidate the entire World Liberty financial position there, I think the deepest liquidity pool has like $2.8 million in ETH or something. So they would get basically $2.8 million for $300 million. So then, of course, now nobody's on the website anymore. That's the situation. I'm sure because I said Trump's name in a negative light, I'll be getting the TDS comments, but it's actually what's happening. And I think you have a pattern with Trump, Melania, NFTs, and all of this that clearly, you know, maybe the intention wasn't to pump your bags endlessly. Jamie, go ahead. Yeah, so we had a Carlo on a space yesterday. We kind of went over this exactly. I think it's kind of, it's interesting. Like, I think the theme of the weekend was the rug pulling and the

credibility of people with these kind of things. So, you know, know, the whole point, I think, the fairness of memes in that they're not illegal, you can, you could, you know, launch them. You can, you know, as a founder, you can, you know, take your portions, failure or unfairly. That that's certainly a choice you can make and affect your, you know, ability to do things later on. This wasn't one of those. Like the Trump token, like I, I, it's funny, I was thinking about it. I woke up from a nap. I remember the Trump coin launched. I remember seeing Mario Norfolk Post saying that maybe Trump's account had been hacked.

So I went back to sleep, woke up, found out that it was real. I bought the Trump coin and then I sold it and then made a little bit of money. That's it. People that held it keeping on, they lost a lot of their money because it went down, obviously, right? This is a different thing. Like, this is a, you know, you know, Carl and I would kind of like, is this this. kind of like the FTX kind of idea well kind of because I mean if it's your token that you launch and then you use that to back it for other for collateral for other things that's where it gets

kind of dice right and obviously a little bit that's what FTX did yeah and then now your family's involved in it and now but the biggest problem you know that I think I think the difference between memes and this was the part you just brought up earlier you you locked people out you didn't allow them to... You're credited investors. There's nothing meme about this. The whole pitch was that they were doing it, quote, unquote, you know, the right way. These people have rights in theory as token holders.

They invested properly, SEC regulated, very different than a meme coin. Yeah, 100%. But just the idea of not allowing people to be able to liquidate themselves before a period of time. And then in the meantime, you're doing it before them. That, to me, is the worst part about this. You know, there's no point in us to that. Yeah. And we did dig into it a bit more deeper, I guess, on the show last week.

But, yeah, I mean, we didn't have the Justin Sun part back then. I guess we could take it to further. Luke, I know you wanted to jump up. Feel free to jump in, man. Yeah, hey, Scott. Thanks for having you, buddy. Hey, buddy. It's been a little while.

Good to hear your voice. Yeah, look, I was following this from the start. And I remember going onto the WF website. thinking what's going on here and read their gold paper, not the white paper, but the gold paper, which was probably all the four pages long and said nothing except for what, you know, we're changing the face of defy, looked into a little bit more and saw that this was really a governance token, but they're only selling 20% of their supply, pointing onto 70, 80 or so. So anyone who bought it was governing nothing. Obviously, even if they sold all 20% to one holder,

they would only have 20% of the votes. They'd have no power in actually doing anything whatsoever. I thought, this is interesting. Obviously, with the Trump name behind it, a lot of people gave it some credence and credit for what it's worth. So I had a bit of a look into the founders behind it, Zach Fulkeman and Chase Hero. And I just checked again then to make sure that it was still there.

And it is. You can go and find Zach Falkman's Facebook page, which is public, and post back in 2019 where he's literally shilling drop shipping. Like these guys used to sell Chinese hair extensions

via Amazon and Ali Pei, Alibaba drop shipping. And then they were doing master classes in LA on how to do this. And their track record is sketchy at best.

These boys have got a bit of a history of, I mean, frankly, grifting. Let's just call it what it is. Now this is a bit of a a rumor, but I heard that they met Trump on a golf course. Got in his ear, they're obviously very persuasive, charismatic guys.

Got in his ear and managed to convince them to set up this WFI and get the Trump name behind it, where the Trumps were getting 75% of proceeds and Zach and Chase were getting 25% and then using that name and a very poorly written light paper, which I believe the whole sort of the product behind it is actually a fork of one of their original. Ave, I think. I thought there was like an Ave fork or something, but I could be wrong. Doe finance. So back in 2020. Oh, yeah. That's right, which was itself a scam, right? That's right. I was explored. Or got rubbed. Yeah. Right. So they went, they went quiet. The TVL dropped down to a couple of grand.

Some investor tried to sue them. And, and then I think it was like six weeks later, they actually announced what Liberty finance. Same code, new name with Trump behind it, which you know, it just, I mean, the signals that it sends. And then obviously, you know, talking about the meme coin just before, just before the inauguration, launching that and then Malaya afterwards. Like, it's just this, this cluster of opportunism, which, I mean, sure, grab the money why you can, but, I mean, these guys are really motivated and sort of poor ways. The thing that gets me, and I can say this because I heard from the horse's mouth personally,

because I have some connections to obviously some top market cap projects. And I was getting approached by representatives from WF saying, can you put us in touch because we want to do a token swap? The whole idea being you give us $10 million of your token, we'll give you $10 million of WF and do a swap less a fee, like a broker fee, 10, 20% of whatever it was. That's what they were essentially doing, It was taking their totally worthless shit coin and swapping it for stuff that had actual liquidity,

real followers potentially, you know, real utility and real value. And actually building a treasury. It was a pretty smart move, if you look at it, to turn what they had, which was pretty terrible, and actually acquire all these other tokens, which did have value. But they ended up getting called out from now. I think Movement Labs got embroiled in it. The room has sort of got out, and people realized what was going on, so they put stuff to it. Yeah.

I have a question. Sorry, you can finish if you had more. And this is not specifically just to you. I remember actually in the early days of World Liberty Financial, they were building a significant crypto treasury, right? They kind of were writing the treasury narrative. There were all these tweets over and over again. We just bought X amount of Eith, X amount of Bitcoin, right?

I looked on Arkham. And so I obviously, I am not competent enough to know if that's every single one. wallet, but it effectively shows that now, like, 99% of their holdings are the remainder of World Liberty Financial. They don't own any EF. They had, like, rounding error positions in Salana and a whole bunch of other things, like sub-a-100,000. So I guess the question is, at what point did, I'm sure we can look at it, you know, through the wallets, but clearly they at some point dumped or maybe utilized on Dolomite all of those positions that they were, like, accumulating and very publicly say, hey, we believe in this stuff, we're buying. Does anybody

have any more information on that by any chance? So that's what confused me. I thought they had this big treasury and they don't. Well, they raised quite a bit of money from what I remember. I think it was something to the tune of $100 million. And they were around a $2.5 to $3 billion at one point. And you may recall, I actually ran a KOL campaign for them, which ended up being an absolute disaster and everyone had to get refund. They didn't pay anyone. I heard that they were offering people, you know, like it was, you know, $100,000 or something worth of tokens vesting over a year and then they ghosted everybody who promoted them.

But I mean, listen, I DJed once for Donald Trump at a golf course and never got paid. So I'm not surprised. No, it wasn't quite like that. Like it was a legitimate, like, very normal OTC campaign for K-WILs, which often, you know, they happen frequently where they were, all these K-Wills were offered a few. 50% discount, where I think it was four-month besting terms. But that was when they were at about $1.10. The problem was that the price just started going backwards and backwards,

and so the strike price had to kept getting renegotiated and ended up, you know, the original strike price was, what, 50 cents versus $1, $1, $0.10, wherever it was. It kept going down so many times that everyone ended up just getting refunded. So no one was out of pocket. No one, they, movement labs at least did the right thing and gave everyone their money back. And it was just a failed effort, failed campaign. But that was at the same time, they were trying to, you know, get an ETF, which they were accused of paying for. And obviously, everyone has to pay for that.

But, yeah, they were embroiled in their own little situation there. And I guess they got sucked into the whole WF orbit as well. And that deal was publicized also, which wasn't good for them. The anti-crypto army is going to come back so hard in November. It's going to be comical. That's the part I look at this. And I'm like, you know, everybody's. being distracted by all of these articles about Brian Armstrong versus Jamie Diamond and the banking

industry versus crypto and stable coin yield. And at the end of the day, is there literally any way a Clarity Act or any legislation could pass that does not have the ethics clause that they haven't even debated yet? I mean, this is like all of the ammo you could possibly ever need to make sure that crypto is, you know, persona non grata for the remaining next couple years. It's crazy to me. It's like such, like I said at the beginning, just so many own goals. Correct. And exactly what the industry did not need. You know, I think anyone listening here and people that have been in it for as long as you

and I have a firm believer in the underlying technology of blockchain is a game changer. There's no doubt about it. And while, you know, you can argue that most utility tokens have zero utility, and it's all just a speculative casino. There is some real paradigm shifting technology in space. And the problem is we just get tarnished with this. brush because of actors like this, these bad actors in the space that are in it for the cash, doing nothing but trying to line their own pockets and drag us down, reputationally with

it all. Hey, Scott, I just sent you to your DM just a breakdown, that question you asked about the holdings and the treasury, just in case you want to take a look at it. And it looks like there is some there, but it definitely looks definitely different than advertised. but there's definitely some things there. Yeah. Goravia, thank you, Jamie.

Goravia had your hand up. I, I, I, obviously this is, this is a very clean plot and everybody has their point frame, point framed. And I, simply for the sake of entertainment of this conversation, I want to point towards a perspective that if not useful might be entertaining. I saw this post from CoinDesk last month that gives a report on the holdings of FTX and the investments of FTX that are now valued probably 90 times of the initial investments, obviously of those investments, and is able to cover, if not all, then at least a large portion of all the liabilities of FTX. if, I repeat, this is just for entertainment sake, and this is purely speculative. But being a marketmaker, it's my job.

And I've been a loud speaker about DATs and how these things are framed and how smart player will play it. Regardless to mention, I spend some time with Trump, the Wilfie Trump. So the thought is, if all of this liquidation and all of this encashment is, a smart move to create as much cash as you can when everything's dead and nobody believes in crypto and just make smart investments and, you know, hold things for a bit of a time. And then crypto comes back in whatever, 2028, 29. And you beat everybody like FTCS, obviously, passively. Does anyone have thoughts around that? Because these are not scammers. I mean, yes, sketchy profiles,

and whatnot, but these are pretty credible people, and the least they would do is scam people off a few hundred million dollars. And yes, Trump meme coin was an absolute money grab, but hey, I mean, why not if you're in that position? Right, but they made the money on the fees, not on the token, right? I think that's the interesting part. I kind of alluded to this earlier, but I think people bought all of this stuff because they thought that, you know, the most powerful man in the world would pump their bags

because he would have a shared incentive to see the value go up, but actually they just wanted the fees, right? So everything going down and selling it actually was maximum extraction, if that's what happened, and they made billions without ever having to have a single one of the assets that they owned going up, which I think is just a very interesting. I mean, yeah, and then, I mean, just think about it for a second with a clean mind. I mean, they can use all this money.

everything is down to shit. And obviously the father, the president, has all his plans, you know, now bombing the ships that would pay tolls to straight-of-o-four moves. And you can simply see the intent. It's to bring the world economy down in one way or the other, or at least the markets down.

And so if somebody in their position in the same house has their, you know, 10 fingers and their head dipped in the crypto world, why wouldn't you want to make all the cash now when you know that there's a fall imminent or even a bigger fall imminent in the coming days and then keep that cash ready to swipe the floor off just a theory obviously just a theory I'm a TAIA. Hey Scott. Hey everybody. Yeah, so put it in a quick rock search on how much World Liberty financial raised and it

I don't know if this is accurate but it says 540. 50 million to 590 million as of March 2025. I mean, this is just a staggering amount of money for a D5 protocol with no proven IP. So, I mean, it's really wild to see. I agree with your sentiment, Scott. And it feels like there was this idea as Trump was getting into office and all the campaigning around crypto. that crypto was this economic opportunity, but then everything surrounding it made it just cheapen the whole ecosystem as a get rich quick scheme that was easy money for everybody. And the meme coin launches and World Liberty Financial, what it actually did is it stopped the easy money train in the entire market.

and it's been that way for the entire administration. Now, I think that the ecosystem, the market needed to mature regardless, but it clearly put a stop to the seriousness of capital flowing in and has only led to mass value extraction. Now, I think one of the things that I've been seeing a lot is that the ties of World Liberty Financial to the Trump family is going to ultimately lead to a bailout. They're not going to let this thing blow up.

They're not going to let it go down in burning flames. There's too much risk here. But it's actually the removal of the Trump family, the removal of the association. There's no advantage. Everyone. This is really concerning. It's really concerning.

because you can remove an about page all day. We all know how this got here. We all know how it was structured. It's pretty damn clear that 75% of the net proceeds from token sales went to a Trump family affiliated entity. This is bad guys. And look, I think the risk here is that it's already associated with this. but if they step in and bail this out, because who knows where $550 million went,

that is going to create an even more entrenched association. So I think that this thing is really just cracking down the middle. I don't know how it all shakes out, but I think everyone has a right to be spooked. David. I like the idea of a bailout, but my only question is, with whose money. The Trump family and Trump senior has a very successful record of going bankrupt. He's done it six times.

He's done it with casinos. He's done it with airlines. And in other businesses, he's been found to be a fraud with Trump College or Trump University, I think he called it. So, you know, where is this money going to come from? I mean, there is no safety net under World Liberty Financial. And, you know, I'm sure that the holders of World Liberty Financial tokens, you know, may very well end up marching on Mar-Arlago and burning the fucking place to the ground. Here's the thing, David, like, I guess the question, sorry, I didn't mean interrupt,

but it opens more questions, which is if they took $150 million, and some say 80, 90, where is that money? Because they could just pay back the loan, and then there'd be no question here, right? Yeah. They're saying it was the mechanics of creating high yields for their holders, which to me, like saying that out loud is... Yeah, I mean, I haven't reviewed the loan agreement itself,

and I don't know if anybody has a copy of it. Well, I'm just saying, in theory, they have to pay it back, but I don't know, you know, people default on loans, and like you said, you go bankrupt, So, like, the question is, if they're solvent, they should, like, right now, if I was them and I'd taken the money out for some reason for business purposes or something, I would just pay off the loan and get the pool back to a level where people would shut up, right? Yeah, no, I mean, I hear what you're saying. I just, I haven't, I don't know what's in the loan covenants, you know, to the extent that you have a privileged person involved in this, you know, the covenants might be very lax. So, yeah, it's an aspiration that there be a bailout, but the track record's not encouraging.

David, and to your point, and sorry, Scott, I don't even know how to put my hand up. I'm not really experiencing these expectations. No, you can always jump. David, you kind of nailed it in terms of the history and the record of Trump. And he's an interesting polarizing figure. But we're in a post-truth world right now where people are getting away with everything. you could possibly imagine. And there seems to be just an absolute lack of accountability.

That's what I'd like to see more of. But Luke, to your point, hasn't Trump himself been someone who's sort of shepherdessed into this post-truth era? Absolutely. Yeah, sort of a post-truth child for post-truth fake news. There's your 4D chess, David. Right? I always claim they're playing 1D chess or checkers, but if you want to do 40 chess, you can just say that they destabilized truth over enough years

so they can do whatever they want. They've got the money. They're happy. And, you know, next thing, they'll leave the planet because everybody else is going to want to kill them. You look at all the things that are happening. There are so many distractions. We have so many things happening at the same time simultaneously

that it's hard to focus on any one thing. And I think this will just get buried. You know, it'll pop up for, you know, a brief minute. I agree. And then aliens took the treasury. the aliens, correct. I would say one thing is that Trump is known with respect to

trying to manage the new cycle about flooding the zone and it's been something he did back in his first administration and what we're seeing now. I mean, obviously yes. You create a lot of distractions and no one's really paying attention to what's going on behind the scenes.

Carlo, good morning. Good morning, Scott. Well, yeah. This is kind of kind of carries over from the narrative that was pretty persistent in the last market cycle. Every time we see something like this go down, whether it was FTT or TRLuna, you'd get the response. This is why we can't have nice things.

And one of the interesting observations from my perspective, we talked about it Friday, the fact that this does give a narrative to the Elizabeth Warren wing, that crypto is bad, and it just reinforces that narrative on the eve of passage of the single most important piece of legislation to give market structure for crypto. So the timing of this could not have been worse, and it was an absolutely avoidable move. So I don't understand the judgment. But one of the things that stood out to me is, you know, there's this guy in the space, Peter Gurnas,

and he's put out a couple of... Yeah, a very, very scathing commentaries on this thing. And I made an observation in the most recent one he put out. I've been a criminal defense lawyer for nearly 30 years, and I've seen a lot of victims come forward and make victim impact statements in financial crimes and in all other manner of crimes. And I think that this is largely a, it's a fictitious victim narrative from this person. But in the 30 years that have been hearing them, this is one of the most compelling I've ever read because we can dispute or disagree on the facts about how it all unwound. But it makes a very scathing case for just what impact this had on people who believed in this platform and who believed in this, this, this, this, this, this liberty financial thing. And I think what we may end up seeing in this is world liberty may just.

just end up having its game stop moment here because the DGens in the space are not happy and they know how to how to respond to something like this and they could really take down this token if it gets to that point of a of a consumer revolt. And I just don't understand the optics of this. I don't understand the judgment this close to the midterms, this close to the most important piece of crypto legislation we've ever had to drop something like this makes utterly no sense to me it makes perfect sense they don't care about any of that they just want to make money i mean occum's razor you know yeah i'm just saying the simplest conclusion is like that all of the

narrative and i'm not saying this trump trump specific whatever but like the pro crypto narrative uh won the election obviously right i think no nobody here disputes that it was the uh you know, fawning of the crypto lobby, which I fully support because we had to be done, you know, obviously couldn't be Gary Gensler for four more years. But Trump realized there was an opportunity to get a ton of money from this industry. And we know that any politician, non-exclusive to Trump, you know, panders to the biggest money that in an election. I mean, that's how it's built, right?

And so being quote unquote pro-crypto was the best thing that could possibly happen for them politically, and they had the other side, which they can make a ton of money on it while still being quote-unquote pro-crypto from the White House. But do you really think they care for the Clarity Act passes? I don't. I'm beginning to think they don't because this is just... I think they're all just narratives that allow this to keep going. Yeah.

Well, I don't think you're, like you're, you know, I think we're thinking in terms of 3D chess, like why at this time and how can this happen and the legislation's coming. The simplest answer is that this is just when it's, you know, coming to a head as they've extracted maximum value. That's coincidence. Right. I can't see how you spin this any other way. I've looked at the responses from the team and, you know, we talked about it Friday.

They didn't even call a lawyer. It's unbelievable. Yeah, but it's even, it's worse than that because it's just, you know, putting FUD in the first sentence and, and, and just trying to suggest that this is all going to work out really gives that FTCX vibe. and for people who have been here and have seen it all, we see right through this. Was that me, Scott? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, well, I, uh, I don't know, Carlo and I were speaking about this yesterday on spaces, and I think it was just an interesting discussion, like, and I kind of paused because I wasn't sure if color was going to mention it, but, you know, like, he mentioned that the genius act, although it's been approved, it doesn't start until January 18th to 2027. So there's a gap there. It also, you know, kind of highlights maybe some of the issues that's holding up with the Clarity Act because of something like this that they're in the background. Like, look at what's

happening. Like, we have to address this when the Trump is doing a thing like this. You mentioned earlier that, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the Welfi, like it was a traditional finance. It went through the proper channels, right? So it's like, It's a different animal than just crypto and tralfi. Like there's legal and ethical lines. You can do things legally and there can still be some ethical ways that may not be best for people. And then the balance of the discussion is- Bernie Madoff.

I mean, like you look at Bernie Mett, right? I mean, it's not like this is unique to crypto. People have been scammed or found ways to extract money legally for ages, right? I'm not saying Madoff was illegal, but doing it through the- Yeah, 100%. And then the balance to what you're alluding to is, you know, You know, before you had Pelosi grifting her way, now you have Trump grifting his way. I think the overall end, you know, of the discussion is they're both sides are doing the same thing.

You're extracting from the people. And it doesn't matter who your favorite actor is that you will want to extract from them. Like, we have to start looking at us versus them and really putting into context that we have to start protecting us versus them because that's their ultimate goal. I see Luke's hand up. We had a bunch up and they disappeared. I got a question for you, actually, just to reframe this a little bit, because this is just another iteration of the typical scam action that we see in this space. And yeah, of course, we've seen it in Tradfair, and we continue to see it,

and we see it in politics. We see it everywhere. There are grifters, there are opportunists, there are people that have, you know, zero moral compass, but this particular industry seems to attract it at a exponentially greater rate just because of the way that it's structured and set up. I'm curious if, you know, if there's a path out of this, if there's a way that we can, we can rebrand the industry, what it would take in order to do that. We're going to say, you know, we need to call it AI.

It's going to be great. She'd call it AI. Yeah, AI is going to be scamming. AI is going to be scamming all of us, right? You know, it's going to happen as well. But, you know, we're all firm believers in the underlying tech and, you know, TCIP didn't disappear because of email for the internet. end because of dot-com fraud, the technology will persist. But we've got to get through this phase.

And I think, you know, over time, regulation will come in and tighten things up. But still, we have this path to travel. And I just wonder what it will take in order for people outside the industry to take it seriously, because it's these things that just keep setting us back. It's these things where you talk to people that are non-crypto-native or they're just, what they hear about is the scammy side of it. It's like every other, you know, even in the real world when people are being scammed, it ends up being... Well, Luke, I think the flip side is that, like, with Bitcoin and certain assets, I mean, you do have the largest institutions on the planet as cheerleaders out there, right?

We're talking about one side, but then you do have the, like, Larry Fink and BlackRock side, and that's going to persist, and I think continue to outweigh it. But I think that crypto, like the non-Bitcoin, maybe non-institutional side of it, which is the part we were all here for in the first place, is in a large well we need that real consolidation don't we and I think we even spoke about this last cycle when we had this proliferation of ICOs

and these tokens were just launching and launching and raising money and they had zero purpose in the same way the dot com boom we had all these companies launching with a dot com address and no business model behind them and they were disappeared and then out of the ashes came same good there yeah exactly we have the same thing there as well

and we still need to see that consolidation And I think that we're starting to get a little smarter, but I still feel like the number one use case of crypto is speculation. And until we sort of move past that and see the application of the technology in realways, beyond stable coins, beyond sort of resetting the swift, you know, payment rails globally. We really need to see that user experience change. Like one thing that just drives me nuts. You know, I'm working in Kassu and Nato Youe, as you know, Scott.

And the user experience is so hard to get people, normies, on board. hey guys, we've got private credit, 16%. But trying to get them in, the user experience is terrible. There's so many little battles we still need to fight to normalize this industry. Grave, I think you had your hand up, but disappeared, but... Yeah, I forgot. Welcome to my... I mean, yes, but you have a setup that could write and maybe prompt.

I mean, congratulations on the new office. I never, a studio, never got a chance to do that. And so please add this prompter in front of you that keeps a note of everything going on on life spaces, keeps, you know, making notes and suggesting you smart information about what to speak. I can build it for you. And we can tokenize it and sell the token to accredited investors. That is what I was talking about.

Don't say a thing, Scott. Sorry. I just recall my topic. So is it Carlo or, yeah, I think Carlo said that the Trump involved in Wilfie has an amazing track record of going bankrupt? And so I'm not American, clearly. Do you think, Carlo, or whoever made this case, these guys are, will absolutely not respect an institutional fundraising or, oh, yeah, it was David. Yeah, David, yeah, so straight question to you. Do you think these guys would just like straight away cut a scam out of an institutional offering,

a brand that they voted as a crown jewel of their crypto underworld and everything that was associated to that? And it's, while it's super easy, I mean, forget 550, even if they were to redeploy all the cash that they have taken out, I mean, recently or in between, maybe a couple of, of $100 million. Wouldn't that, like, think of it from a dad perspective, a digital asset treasury, which, you know, basically no digital asset treasury right now is doing amazing, and they all need money,

and they all wonder if they would have done the right thing, selling everything they had until six months ago and then buy everything six months later from now. Do you think this thesis doesn't stand a chance, and these guys would like simply, choose to go bankrupt and lose their reputation in one more industry? If past is prolonged, I think the answer is yes. So, you know, wish I could say different, but I think that, I don't know, the tiger's stripes don't change.

Yeah, David, I mean, wouldn't we assume when they took out? I mean, when they took the loan, the loans, I mean, it's not like they don't understand the mechanics. of the very platform that is their own on how the loans work. I mean, if you extract all of the current value of World Liberty Financial in USC and move it to Coinbase Prime, it would seem that you actually have a plan. Well, who knows what the plan is, except to maybe line their pockets again. I just go back. No, that's what I'm saying.

I don't think you're concerned about the optics of going bankrupt. I think you're forcing an effective bankruptcy. see I'd take. I mean, look, you know, given the way the litigation works, yeah, the lawyers are going to get their cut. And this will remain locked up in the courts for years. Good times. Yeah, I think to your question, Gorow, it's like, it looks like the flight is already taking place. And that's where it gets really sketchy. Because like, with the amount of money that they have, why would you take such a hedge position on? alone that is so visible and so asymmetric to blowing up. It just looks like it's just pure liquidity extraction with not a lot to back it up. And then you start to disassociate the people. I mean, we've been here before, right? But I do think that it's more than just another bankruptcy in lawyers. I mean, I think that there's. I mean, I think that there's. To your original point, Scott, this is going to get the ire of everyone who's been up against this industry.

And this could lead, if it does go belly up, right? And like, who knows if there will be a bailout by who, quietly, publicly, who knows? But ultimately, if it does go belly up, it's going to be a poster child for Trump family. Yeah, as I think about this, though, like, I don't understand the bailout narrative. It's not like they were in trouble as a business or installment. They literally went and took the load. It's not there's like, usually when you get bailed out, it's because you made a mistake or there's a hole in the balance sheet or something.

There's no argument that they purposely took these actions, right? So I don't think that, maybe there's a bailout. I don't know, but it feels like they just take all the money. The token trends to zero over time. they never pay back the loan oops sorry and uh life goes on they get civilly sued in some way shape or form it locks up forever nobody wins we don't even know how much retail money's in those pools right we just know that they're able to somehow withdraw a lot of stable coins or had to be at least that much i just don't think that i think that this is intentional that's all i'm saying like i'm

not saying there's a grand plan or anything it's just free money maybe they're just shaking out the paper hands. That's right. Is this line backed by stable coins? What just? Is this line back by stable coins? Or is it backed by their own token? No, it's backed by their own token, but they were still able to withdraw like 150 million in stable coins, you know, like actual money. Yeah, real money. Yeah, good times. They're on stable coin. So we don't even need to talk about that, right?

I wonder what the fees are. Do we know what the, it was. It was something. I saw it somewhere, but they also earn a disproportionately high amount of fees from USDA 1 versus other stable coin issuers. Good times. Gorav, you have, I have a bit of a rant. I've gone through, what, three bear cycles since 2015 in the beginning of this journey. Why does this one sound and looks and feels so hard, man? This is so bloody hard and it shouldn't be. You know, everybody in finance was being, you know, my coach, a mentor or somebody that I've, you know, exchanged notes with.

And they always told, you know, as you grow into this industry, you'd, like, mature and you'd have your plans and whatnot. And it'll only become easier to go through tough times. This one is not a paper handshake. It is like, it is a human shake. It's the biggest passive layoff of. of practically everybody who participated in the industry as a builder or as a contributor. Like, there's so many people leaving.

And then this just never ends. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it's the same, but it's funny that, like, seemingly every cycle have some, like, great hero that collapses. Like, people forget, I think that SBF, not only was he, like, ended up being the biggest fraud of the cycle, but he was the guy on Capitol Hill that everyone was looking to,

to bring crypto into the mainstream and to give us credibility. And the pain of FTX wasn't only what actually happened with FTX. It was that the very person who was testifying on Capitol Hill and taking pictures with politicians and making the donations was the one behind it. And this echoes of that, right? Although even on a much bigger scale, the pro-crypto president and his pro-crypto family are the very ones that are committing the acts, behind the scenes that will likely hurt the industry down the road.

So we short American BTC now? I think you're short. I mean, I see, listen, I would never give financial advice and I would never do it, but there's a lot of people. Carla, I think you sent me a tweet at some point, right, that someone said if you want to get them back to short World Liberty Financial until it gets liquidated, right? Yeah, I don't think that works because they have the dollars. It's got the dollars out right. It's like the G, yeah.

It's a runback of the GameStop movement. If it gets enough traction, I mean, yeah, that's that's a plausible. response. Gross. For some reason, the market maker in me, I don't know if it's the market maker or the stupid, bullish

investor keeps thinking of why shouldn't this go belly up? I mean, for all the good cases where we've, I mean, we've had a few portfolio companies of 2017-18 that were nothing

in comparison to the multi-billion dollar raises of EOS days. those and so on. I can't name them, but my portfolio is pretty, pretty public. We're able to become the 10 billion coins of 2021, 2022, all because of certain strategies, which were obviously not as aggressive and scummy looking like these, but basically, you know, trying to make all the cash possible from here, there, and wherever, keep it for when something large fails, buy your own token and then keep building so that when the time is right, you go belly up. And that doesn't even cost much because your supply is like entirely out.

Paper hands are out. So is this the stupid, ultra bullish investor in me or I don't know, the market maker in me that keeps thinking about that theory? Can someone answer a question for me? USD1 market cap 4 billion WF raised 550 million and they're taking out of $75 million loan what's the motivation here enlighten me

which motivation I'll be talking about Is it just circular Borrowing? Yeah they pay you know I've picked out my own money yeah I mean that that's an extraction machine it's a washing machine of funds that always end up back in the same

this is my point there's there's no way of hiding from that really you can't escape that fact that this is so blatantly obvious and it's all on chain and it's all on chain and when you lose the midterms and and elizabeth warren gets the gavel again this is going to prompt uh hearings and oversight and this is just all going to be a net bad for the sector oh and just a friendly reminder we're supposed to have a markup on the Clarity Act and the people have yet to see what the hell's in it. What day is that, by the way? We don't know yet, right? I think it's supposed to be. Yeah, I think it's supposed to be maybe Wednesday or Thursday.

And we're still yet to see what this revised backdoor compromise on stable coin yield is, which is, frankly, at this point, man, there's so much lack of trust in our institutions. And this just continues to feed that same narrative. The consumer gets fucked every way, and it's just another example. Yeah, totally agree. Gentlemen, I need to cut it just a bit early. For those who don't know, I'm launching a new show on Yahoo Finance, which at the moment I think will be the only mainstream media daily crypto show in existence,

and it launches on 420 because, of course, it launches on fucking 420. but this week we're running dress rehearsals and tests so I have to somehow maintain doing my morning show and Crypto Town Hall and then take 45 minutes to pretend that I'm actually prepping and not completely just winging it every day. So I'm going to go take that 45 minutes now to get ready for that dry run. And we will be back on Wednesday. You're at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard. What will you talk about? This. You guys are my, you see, like, my goal is every morning to you.

There's Crypto Town Hall and my guests to think of smart things to say that I can steal and then stay at noon. It's going to work great. We're all so net negative, man, on this industry. What are you going to represent in a crypto show? I don't know, but I have to, you know, I have to balance my, you know, the negativity with obviously the fact that we got that two. Yeah, talk about the good stuff, buddy.

Yeah, I was going to say there's 200 million people. Payments, Bitcoin. It's just a big confrary and buy signal. That's right. That's exactly right. So everything is a buy signal. I just say, you know, at the end of the day, you know, you know, we'll say, that's good. Yeah, thank you.

So we'll have a, we'll have 200 million monthly viewers on Yahoo, which is like three times bigger than the second CNBC listening to me rant about the Trumps. It's great. It's going to go perfect for our industry. So I guess I got to be careful there. All right, guys. Thank you very much. We'll see you on Wednesday. Go get them. Good luck, Scott.

Good luck. Thanks, guys. Bye.