The Wolf Of All Streets - XRP Continues To Moon, ETH ETFs Have Massive Inflows | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

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Hey, everybody. Topics, obviously, today, XRP continues to moon. Ethereum ETFs continuing to skyrocket and leaving a lot of people, I guess, like myself. Well, I don't think that's necessarily true, but scratching our heads as to fundamentally why this would be happening. Nothing surprises me as far as crypto cycles and seeing dinosaur coins moon out of nowhere. But, you know, regulatory clarity for Ripple, in the first case, didn't really move the token tremendously. But now we have XRP trading at $2.70. I mean, the low today alone was $2.20. This thing, absolutely massive move. So in three weeks, it's effectively up from like $0 so i would love anyone on the uh panels answer to why this is likely happening beyond just the fomo cycle kicking it kicking in here for twitter alex you've been here for a while what do you make of this xrp move

the prices are made up and nothing actually matters oh man i mean i, same deal. Like it's up five X in the last month. Al Grand is up five X in the last month on it. I get like. I don't know, the conventional explanation I've heard so far is like it's the older coins have the clarity and will do well, but like there's no reason to pick these particular couple ones i mean the xrp guys are close to trump so maybe it's just folks being like well he'll do something to favor them um there was a proposal floated that came back out last week to exempt any coins that are issued by a u.s company which like in the case of ripple would be the case um along with some others uh exempt them from capital gains tax we never saw that clarified by the way though that came from one account on twitter and went wildly viral but i've never heard that from anyone in the actual sure there's also no there's also no way that that would actually be made into part of an actual tax proposal that's just that's not going to happen um but i don't know again this, like you don't really need more than a one account on Twitter saying something

for people to pick it up and run. So yeah, I think it's just, you know, there's been a lot of connection between the XRP guys, um, and the Trump team in the past. It's, you know, I think God, yes, it's got the idea that like, as things are legitimized, I think it also fits in well with just the general story right now, the amount of institutional adoption that's going on in crypto and the fact that, you know, from day one, XRP has been a very heavy kind of institutional enterprise financial system bank play. So that and then the final piece is it's the coin that was already closest to the top on these things.

And like, you know, someone's going to go and just look at the top few coins it's already pretty high up there and so it's the kind of easy one to pick out so i think i did the way back machine with dave on uh macro monday this morning and this is the same you know top three is like 2016 2017. yep everything that's old is new again. Yeah, so the XRP surpassed both Solana and then obviously Tether. It's a head-scratcher, I think. Yeah, that's why. Listen, it's nothing against XRP or Ripple. It's just like, you know, you definitely try to parse in this market why certain things happen and when.

And I'm finding it a little bit hard to find a direct explanation for why. As you said, it's these specific ones that are flying. I mean, does it mean Litecoin's next so it can become number four? I mean, their social media kid on Twitter is really trying to mean that and to happen. Litecoin. Yeah, Litecoin. Yeah. I mean, that was, I think I will admit, I think Litecoin, no, I bought Bitcoin first. I think Litecoin was the second one back in the day when like, that I ever bought back when, you know, Coinbase literally only had Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin on it. And people thought they'd like never add anything else. There was also two cycles ago, the prevailing narrative I remember from people coming in and looking at Coinbase the first time was I can't afford a Bitcoin, but I can afford a Litecoin. Do you remember that?

Yep. But those things are dead. That's not the reasoning here anymore. That was just early. I don't know. Apparently nothing in this industry is ever dead. You did see the brand that is coming back out with either an NFT or a shit coin play as of uh this morning right i did not i just saw news about uh ethereum nft is catching a bit again oh and ron's back baby someone someone bought n run.com and is uh they're about to run a crypto pump and pump i just put it up there there is no better use case for crypto than n run it is great this is exactly this is the most meme of all meme coins out there is enron you have to watch the video i would not tell people this is the return that no one asked for and i am i'm buying enron tokens i'm just kidding i'm not

please don't be stupid i was gonna say uh i can explain why xrp is mooning please do it's funny scott the my my descent into degeneracy continues i i went long xrp i know it's crazy i know it's crazy i did last like last couple of weeks. I've been like exploring it and there's a very clear narrative that actually makes sense, which is it's an American company. Yeah, that is behind that is behind to be on the xrp ledger but also on ethereum which will then allow for siphoning some of that activity the rl usd and most importantly we're seeing a change in regime that will incentivize american companies to bring more of the crypto business into America, which is why XRP has a running start. That is the underlying narrative.

And it actually makes sense, which is if there's going to be a change in regulatory regime, which we know Gensler is out, obviously we're going to see a new head of the SEC. We don't know what Trump's going to do overall. This is not just a Bitcoin story. It's an American story, which I think is interesting. And so just to be very clear on disclosures, outside of the fact that I am now way over invested into Bitcoin, like way, Scott, I never thought.

I will tell you, I'm writing an article right now called The New 6040. You can make, I know, Scott, it's insane. I love it. There's a new 6040 coming. It includes Bitcoin. I think we need to have a conversation around that someday. But the thing about XRP that's interesting is XRP is betting on there being a new regulatory environment that will incentivize, and that's an important word, incentivize more of these companies to be built in the United States. And Ripple has a running start. I love that a few months ago, everybody was so extremely angry at Ripple because Chris

Larson gave so much money to Kamala Harris, right? And now apparently they're pro-Trump and that's going to benefit them. Yeah. Again, Chris Larson was betting, was not betting on a Kamala Harris administration that was going to be pro-Crip. Wanted to make sure there was a seat at the table if there was a Kamala Harris administration. Exactly.

He wanted more regulatory capture. By the way, the one huge risk for Ripple is if they make it easier for anybody to start a next Ripple, then Ripple's value could go down. Right. And so it's not hard to build a Ripple. That's what I'm saying. What is a next Ripple? Like, this is what I don't understand.

So XRP, the token, was obviously the original use case was faster cross-border payments, right? This was pre-stablecoins. Yeah, replace them. So a stablecoin on Tron or a stablecoin on Solana easily solves that, right? And it's a stable thing. So Ripple getting a stablecoin, I guess I understand why that would be positive. But Howard Lutnick is going to be in the cabinet controlling trade and tariffs, and he's now a partial owner of Tether. Isn't that a bigger story for the use case of stablecoins?

Let me give you the other side of it, which I think is important. I can't believe that I'm having this conversation out loud. The reason why XRP is interesting is because the reason why it interested me is because I know how hard enterprise sales is from my day job and having built another company. And having done enterprise sales in ed tech first, then in health tech, I have not done enterprise sales in fintech. So if somebody can educate me, that'd be great. But I know how hard those sales cycles are and how long it could take to get a bank to adopt something. Currently, Ripple has relationships with these banks. They've been talked about a long time. Also, enterprise sales don't end at the sale. They end at utilization. So it takes a long time for people to build that muscle. And Ripple has been in with

these banks for some time. And so I actually think that there is something interesting by the fact that they can now onboard all of these banks to stablecoins, which by the way, all the banks are incredibly worried right now. People don't know this, but Stripe's acquisition of Bridge has put a lot of banks on notice. And they are worried that they're going to be left behind in the payments game. And so there is a lot of conversation around,

look, we already have this API built into our systems. We've already tested out cross-border payments. We've already tested out payment models. Can we just board with the same partner and anybody that has done enterprise sales knows that upselling is way easier than closing the new deal because i'm not even saying like a little bit by like 30 40 higher conversion rate on upsells than on new deal and new closes so again this is an enterprise sales play i find that fascinating and I think that's

why I'm actually, I know it's going to sound crazy. I'm actually holding XRP for the long term. It's a very, very small portion, still super heavy on Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is the store of value, but there is a play here that is interesting. Absolutely love it. That's a fair point that they have established these banking relationships and partnerships for, you know, more than half a decade. That gives them a head start, depending on where things head. Dave, go ahead.

Yeah, Don, it's funny because I was asking the question, my spidey senses are going off last week on XRP. And my question, which I've never been able to get an answer for, maybe you can answer it, is I absolutely understand what you're saying about Ripple Labs. I think that there's undeniable truth to the enterprise software at fintech scale. You know, it is definitely a, we used to call it elephant hunting because it's it's it's not the it's you're you're not doing it quickly but my question was what does the xrp token have anything to do with it i.e what would be the the demand for the tokens themselves as opposed to their software else or uh underlying or the the blockchain that underlies the stablecoin.

And I've not been able to get that question answered, which is one of the reasons I can. I can I can actually answer that one day. Right. It is in its people buying this thing on the expectation of profit being returned to them. OK, well, that's not what I... It's crypto. The answer is it's so crypto. Thank you, Alex.

I'll push back strongly. The point is that there is an underlying incentive for Ripple Labs, which owns most of XRP, about 40%. It's the largest single holder of XRP to continue to get utilization of their token. By the way, the more utilization there is, the more XRP gets burnt, right? We know this because it's their version of their utilization token or whatever you want to call it.

I think ultimately, the more utilization of XRP, the lower the supply of XRP. I know there's a massive amount, but as that continues to get utilized, the value of the token increases, thereby incentivizing the devs and the teams to continue to build. So that's the thought process, which is Ripple Labs has an inherent value proposition to continue to build on XRP.

And not just Ripple Labs, others do too. They're highly encouraged to pump their token is what he's saying. I totally understand that. I'm just asking about the math, which is, let's say Ripple Labs replaces Swift, because I think that something's going to replace Swift. It could be stable coins, but Swift is horrible technology. Stable coins are good technology. Good technology will win. I don't know which one will win. But let's just say that they get all of it.

At that scale, what's the demand for the XRP token? What's the supply contraction? You know, what kind of market cap does that imply? And the reason that I ask the question specifically like that is Tether is rather large by comparison to their current stable coin. And Tron, which powers most of Tether, is one eighth of the market cap of XRP. Now, understand that I think your point about being an American token, other than I kind of want to laugh as an American, you know, is true. And I think there's definite truth to that. So I'm just curious, you know, you know, what do you think is the is the terminal velocity of XRP, you know,

based upon that the size of Swift and interbank transfer? What's what scares people, and I'll stop after this, I was gonna say what scares people is that people don't realize that America will make sure that if there is a new Swift, that it's built in America. That is the thing that I think people are not putting. Dave, you're putting, you were alluding to it. I'm going to say it very explicitly. So if they were going to choose an American company, wouldn't they choose an American company that clearly is open to regulatory capture? Yeah. Oh, I'm saying it. I know you're right. What I'm saying is, OK, let's assume you're right, because I think that's exactly the thesis that I had in my head a week ago.

So you and I are on the exact same page. My question is, OK, let's say Ripple Labs replaces Swift. Other than the hype cycle, what's the actual demand for Ripple tokens as opposed to equity in Ripple Labs? That's the question. Yeah, that's a much more complicated question. I don't know the exact answer. The point that people were making was RLUSD will be built on top of the XRP ledger. So therefore, it will get burnt as that stablecoin is used. But again, I'd have to... Michael, I think you're better. Dave, I think the more layman's way to say that is that Ripple Labs can become a successful company

and XRP can theoretically go to zero and those two things are not mutually exclusive. Right, but you're also basically telling me like many times when I trade, I'm overthinking it and being too overly skeptical. And I should go with the momentum and shut the hell up. So, OK, I'm going to do that. Ride the wave.

Not necessarily riding the wave, but at least at least understand that that's my bad and we'll move on. Yeah. Douglas, then Storm. You know, over the weekend, I got sent a video that I think that's had like two and a half million views. And in there, I was talking about XRP and Ripple. And I think this was done in 2018, this interview at Delmonico's when I was very much in trade, FI and foreign exchange currencies. And I think that we've all forgotten. But in 2018, XRP or Ripple was really the one name that institutions were talking about when it came down to cross-border financing. And it was very exciting at that time. It seemed like that was

the one that had sort of broken into the banks. Now, obviously, with the SEC coming down on them, all of the projects and all the relationships they had with the banks were kind of put to the side and shuttered for a while but I think that uh Dr Danish made a really good point in that that now that that's sort of clearing they've gone through a lot of work in terms of onboarding institutions and I think that that's the exciting part now does that mean that the price of xrp should be rallying no probably not it's probably overdone itself but it does mean that this is something that was like a beach ball was held under the water very very for a very long time but it already had made a lot of relationships and now that the hands are coming off holding the beach ball underwater it's going to pop and it's

going to jump so the jump makes a lot of sense i think we've just forgotten how xrp was seen as sort of could be a base for the u.s financial system and, there's been a lot of competitors that have come in since 2018. But I think people are just kind of brushing off their notes, reviewing what they saw in 2018 and jumping on the train. Yeah, you know, I look at XRP and I was the early adopter of XRP from years ago. And so I'm very familiar with the whole XRP community. And I think going back to the original question of why is XRP pumping, I think XRP has always notoriously been seen as a coin that's kind of pumped on speculation, like over speculation.

And I don't necessarily think XRP has proven to me yet that it has real utility, especially when you talk about things like replacing the Swift Bank. And I think a lot of the reason people are buying XRP right now is mainly just on the basis that I think Bitcoin is going to start slowing down. Not that the cycle is over necessarily, but I think we're getting very close to the time where money is going to start flowing into altcoins and utility coins. And XRP seems to be kind of the most popular one in previous cycles. And I think simply that's a lot of the reason why XRP is pumping in these other utility coins is I think money and inflows are going to start flowing outside of some of these high caps and then to these bigger utility tokens and mean coins. I agree. It's the rotation. So I mean, this is just the cycle cycling, right? I mean, Bitcoin makes a tie. It's the rotation. I mean, this is just the cycle cycling, right? I mean, Bitcoin makes its high.

It's seven months after the halving. The big dinosaurs move first, and then we trickle down. I mean, it could be that easy. That's exactly what I think it is. And I don't think there's necessarily always like a quote-unquote reason why a coin pumps. I mean, like I said, XRP hasn't really proven anything to me yet. And again, I've been following XRP, you know, since 2017, 2018. So XRP hasn't really proven

anything to me yet. I think it's just notoriously pumped on extreme speculation. And, you know, that's not to kind of shit on XRP at all. I think it could have great utility. But to me, it's just, you know, I think money in general is going to be start to start flowing outside of Bitcoin into these altcoins. And XRP is kind of the top of that list of, you know, over speculated altcoins. So. And people seem to forget that it was 2017 and 2021 that were the huge across the board dart throwing alt cycles. Right. And it's and, you know know if you just extrapolate four years ahead that's 2025 and the tops of bitcoin dominance in the past were cycles were december 2020 and december 2016 it's now about to be it is now excuse me december 2024 i mean it's like yeah i

say this all the time you could just fall in on your head had amnesia we could have never had a conversation about macro or politics or literally anything. And you just look at the four year cycle chart and do that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And if you look at the Bitcoin dominance chart, actually, too, it's, you know, the first time I've seen it kind of have make some really sharp candles to the downside. It looks like we're starting to see some serious outflows outside of Bitcoin for the first time really this cycle. And if you look at historically previous altcoin seasons, it's very obvious on the Bitcoin dominance chart. You see a massive spike to the downside on the Bitcoin dominance chart. And like I said, I think this is the first time where we're really starting to see that move down. Totally aligned. Simon?

Sorry, go ahead. Someone else else someone just wrote my doorbell alex and then uh alex stop ringing simon's doorbell so you can talk go ahead never um i think there's actually some very good cogent points here about xr but i think what was just being said is really what it goes back to i don't know i i think the more interesting thing to me is there's at least a story you can think around xr, but XRP is still only the third best performer of the dino coins over the last 30 days. It's done like 400% increase, but Hedera has done 500 plus and Stellar has done 500 plus. So I'm really curious if anyone's got any theories on why those you know it's funny if you look at past cycles the joke among the trading community was always that stellar

followed xrp i don't know if people remember that or have been around long enough but it was always like xrp moved and then xlm moved it was just for for whatever reason um but i think it's probably the same rationale just xrp is much bigger. So I'm assuming it's getting more attention because XRP has now surpassed USDT and Solana to become the third token once again by market cap, third largest. So I think it's just gets more attention, but maybe I'm wrong. Simon, did you answer the door? No, you didn't answer the door yet. Gareth, what are uh thinking about all of this since we got you here hey guys yeah good to be back and i actually did a video about this

earlier and i was trying to dissect it a little bit last night and like really just think of the prevailing kind of macro reasons why xrp might be might be uh pumping and pumping. And just to jog everyone's memory, Ripple announced that they're launching their stablecoin this year. And I see that some people are saying that it's actually going to be as soon as the 4th of December. Obviously, that's pretty big for XRP Ledger, which is obviously the blockchain upon which XRP operates and within which Ripple uses to, you know, power up and, you know, provide its payments platforms. And then, of course, we've seen Donald Trump win the elections. Gary Gens is out. He's going to be departing office on the 20th of January. So that bodes pretty well for the regulatory aspect of XRP continuing to, or XRP ledger and Ripple

continuing to operate out of the US. And then of course, we had the final piece of the puzzle, which is the winding down of the SEC's lawsuit against Ripple. So they've agreed in, you know, to settle about $120 million fine, which was a fraction of what they were expecting to pay in that settlement. And of course, the can has been kicked down the road a few times, and we'll probably only see the final resolution of this lawsuit sometime in 2025. But these are three really big reasons, in my mind, why XRP is having a big boom at the moment.

I'm not a trading expert. The rest of the panelists here will tell you a lot more behind the actual volumes and what's happening in the markets. But I think from a macro perspective, these are the three big news items that I was looking at last night and briefing our team this morning when we started figuring out how we were going to cover the XRP news for Cointelegraph today. It's hugely interesting, though. I don't think anyone saw it coming. And I'll be honest, I've been following pretty much all of the big influencers. A lot of them are here on this space right now. And I can't remember anyone in the last four to six months saying, look out for XRP. This thing is going to smash it by the end of the year. Yeah, Gareth, I mean, in fact, I'm sure there were some who will now go back and point to some tweet that was sent right after a tweet where they said XRP sucks or something, right?

And you got both of them and you just delete one and then tell everybody you were right. But I would say that it's surprising even more in the context of the fact that when XRP got the regulatory win that was so huge that changed the entire industry xrp didn't really pump right so i mean on the yeah the huge news stories that we're alluding to are not new today right or this the last three weeks i i think it's uh i big it's what storm and I think it's the cycle, you know, I think it's just the flow of money. I'd love to see, you know, some some really great blockchain analytics in the next week or two, maybe, you know, Zach xbt and some

other really smart people will go and look at some on chain dots and, and tell us where you know, the real flow of funds has come from, and why some people are keen on it. But like you guys say, a lot of people are switching between different tokens right now and just cycling through. And maybe XRP is just the beneficiary this weekend and it might dump, it might pump even further. I was reading TradingView last night and they were quoting the analyst. I'm sorry, I forget his name right now but he was um you know suggesting that the next big resistance for xrp was around the four dollar mark a little

bit higher and then the highest resistance that we could maybe see is six dollars uh which would just be crazy you know there were people that were buying xrp for less than 50 cents not not too long ago so I saw someone sharing videos from TikTok about xrp going to like ten thousand dollars a coin and then some that were like 500 the coin usually that's uh pretty pretty decent uh top signals here but uh I yeah I think it's I think it's just the cycle man but uh we're gonna see it's gonna be interesting the stable coin news kind of makes me laugh because I I mean, PayPal launched a stablecoin. That's bigger news than Ripple launching a stablecoin, right? And it's not a meaningful level of adoption.

VanEck launched a stablecoin. Cardano had their stablecoin. I mean, to me, like I said, and I'm going to repeat it, like, Lutnick is going to be the, what, Secretary of Commerce? He's going to be controlling trade and tariffs and is now a partial owner of tether and custody is it okay i mean that you know that that to me is a much bigger story go ahead simon yeah go ahead i was just gonna say i had the the pleasure of chatting to david schwartz earlier this year when they launched the stable coin and the most interesting thing for me here is that it's simply a business move. And Ripple anticipates the stable coin market to be worth in excess of $2 trillion by

2028. And there's a slice of the pie to be had there. So like, at the end of the day, Ripple's a business, they're here to do business. They know that USDT is probably in the last five years the most successful and profitable company there is worldwide. And if they can even have a percent or 5% of the stablecoin market and their blockchain protocol can operate that really efficiently, why not? And the only question then is that they have XRP, right? And I asked David Schwartz this, right? Like, okay, but you've got XRP and you guys have been billing this as a payments token, but now you're going to launch a stable coin. Are they going to compete? And he was kind of like, no, listen, at the end of the day, they complement each other because there are some institutions that simply cannot use XRP and a stable coin will be a

better option for them. So it's kind of like you know nobody in there right now yeah the xr like i said that earlier the xrp use case for cross-border payments when the price can change 10 percent in five minutes is utter nonsense like stable points already replace that whether they're on ripple or not but uh yeah it's it's so funny but listen doesn't you can cope as much as you want the price is up simon uh do they have amazon in the isle of man or was it a personal visitor yeah we do have a we do have amazon that's never now but um what i was going to say is that um i i do not remember the narrative that the banks were all looking at xrp i do remember a series of press releases and it was definitely the token that they would look

at most but all of them were talking about distributed ledger technology and private blockchains and the one they have been building is r3 and all the other technologies that were competing with r3 and the number one reason that they wanted to do that is because they all wanted to be a node operator on a federated network that they controlled and they didn't want a token to get in the way of of the whole process because they they it as unnecessary. So for me, competing with Swift is all about centralization. And if you want to distribute it, then you do a distributed ledger where the people that compete in it will be node operators. But the likelihood of deciding that they need a token

in the middle of the future of the payment system has always been, it would be very, very surprising. So that's why they had to pivot to stable coins, because stable coin is the use case. And CBDCs, you know, they're all building their technology through the Bank for International Settlements and the Enbridge, and none of it involves a token in the middle. And so the stablecoin use case of if you can take some market cap from, you know, stablecoin started on Bitcoin, then they moved to Ethereum. And then suddenly, people started to use them on Tron and various other things. If you can take some of that use case, then that's the thing but i think the whole story is a typical xrp pump cycle we've seen two of these um and last time it never returned to all-time highs maybe this time is

different for all the reasons that people gave um but to me that's it's a it's just a hype cycle again of unadopted technology a lot of fun though it's a lot of fun it begs the question is what's going to happen with ethereum which has kind of barely seen a balance it's the original dinosaur token obviously but has had a lot more hype uh throughout the time that a lot of these others have not legitimate building i think you know obviously has been the base layer for DeFi for years. For the first time on Friday, Ethereum ETFs actually had more inflows than the Bitcoin ETFs. So we were net outflows, obviously, on Ethereum for a very, very long time, starting to actually see inflows. Now seeing them on certain days surpassing Bitcoin spot ETF inflows. Also a lot of conjecture that staking will be added to

Ethereum spot ETFs once Trump is president. Of course, that's conjecture. Ethereum had a nice little move, but imagine a 5x move on Ethereum like XRP. I mean, I'm very bullish on Ethereum still. Might be the last one standing, which I like. I don't know what anybody else here's opinion is is it ethereum time i mean you would think that if xrp is starting to move this could be the time in the cycle when ethereum starts to catch a big bit would love all your guys opinions storm you're giving the hundred what do you think yeah i mean i just i think it's always the best time to buy is when when people are most doubtful you know and it's the same thing for xrp like

like someone someone up here said um you know no one three four months ago was talking bullishly about xrp um and you know it kind of seen regular regularity clarity and um had some of these news events but it wasn't really moving in conjunction with bitcoin and some of these higher caps um yet it still ended up moving and having a really big move despite that and i think ethereum has kind of been it's kind of been shit on this cycle you know it's all the all the hype's been around solana um and and bitcoin and i think ethereum will will have its time like like all these other coins will i mean it's the bull run you know and so ethereum's still great token still got a lot of great utility and use case and i'm bullish as well on Ethereum. Anyone else? The less people have an opinion on

it, the more bullish I'm going to get. So if you all stay silent, that's completely fine. I'm never going to give up hope on Ethereum. I mean, if you've been to any of the major Ethereum developer conferences, there are so many good things being built on Ethereum. I mean, obviously, the price concerns a lot of people. And I've had the chance to actually ask some really high up people in the Ethereum sort of foundation what they think about Layer 2's taking a lot of the profitability away from Layer 1 stakers. And I think that there are a lot of questions to be answered around that. But if you look at the market cap alone, I mean, XRP went on a run and it briefly tipped USDT, you know, earlier today and went into that third place in the market cap. But it's still,

you know, the Bitcoin and Ethereum show whether you like it or not. And I think this cycle in general has just been so crazy to call in terms of what is happening price-wise. And again, XRP has just proven it again over the weekend. Bitcoin has been crazy, but the macro factors that have influenced the price of Bitcoin have been really interesting. But at the end of the day, I always look at it as a journalist from a utility perspective, what protocols are actually doing important things and have a load of use cases and a lot of things being built on them. And Ethereum still, by and large, has a massive flourishing DeFi ecosystem.

And that's why there's a lot of liquidity there. There's a lot of ETH locked up. So it's not all doom and gloom, despite everyone wanting to see ETH pump like crazy. I mean, it's got an ETF. Last I checked, it's only Bitcoin and Ethereum that have ETFs. You got Larry Fink out on the roadshow talking about building on Ethereum and tokenizing the entire world. I think the bid is coming, but I've been saying that for a very long time. So it wouldn't surprise me if it took a while.

I think it, go ahead, Simon. Yeah, I do agree. I still think if you are a large financial institution, I think at this stage, you have three choices. You're either going to do something as a Bitcoin play. You're going to build your own technology and do a distributed ledger or a private blockchain, or you're going to build something on top of Ethereum. I don't see at this stage, and there is a lot of appetite for people to want to build stuff at the moment, like BlackRock's already doing the tokenized treasuries. And while they are going further down the blockchain curve,

and I think they're expanding with Securitize the number of blockchains that they're supporting, but I still think Ethereum will be the number one choice for any institution looking to do real-world assets or build anything using a public blockchain. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Simon, I'm curious, did you hear, pivoting to Bitcoin a bit,

but did you hear Sailor's three-minute pitch to Microsoft? Oh, no, I didn't see it. I missed that. Was that over the weekend? It just happened. James Lavish made a great point this morning. Dave and I were obviously on YouTube with him, and he said he did like the three-minute pitch,

but he gave them, Dave, do you remember how many slides it was? I think 40. It was around 40 or 41 in three minutes. Yeah, he hit them with 40. He hit them with a slide or something. It was crazy. Yeah, he hit them with 41 PowerPoint slides that they can go back and digest. And James Lavish basically said now, you know, they have a fiduciary duty to dig into all 41 of those slides. So he basically just blanketed them with them so that they had to deal with it. Like, yeah, you gave me three minutes. F you like have fun, you know, going over this with your committee. But it was interesting.

He didn't just make this sort of sound money argument, obviously, of what it's done for his treasury and what it does for maintaining purchasing power and the dollar losing value over time. He also did talk about it as the next technological play. And with only three minutes, I thought it was interesting that he pushed that in there when he could have just said,

OK, look at MicroStrategy stock. Look at what MicroStrategy stock could do just by adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet. It was interesting. I just think that he gave a three minute pitch with 41 slides was pretty humorous. Is anyone here of any expectation that we see Microsoft add Bitcoin

to the balance sheet? I think zero. What's the actual timeline and process? I'm actually not sure. So I only saw that there was the pitch. Gareth, you might know, you probably dig into this. You're giving all kinds of faces. But do you know when they have to actually make a decision? I don't. I'm sorry, I don't. I wish I did. And I'm doubtful that they will really consider it. Yeah, the annual shareholder meeting is on December 10th, which is when like the non binding shareholder resolution goes up for vote. So the board doesn't ever actually have to vote or even discuss this.

It's just it goes up for a shareholder vote. Something happens and the board ignores it. He should have sent them 400. Why wouldn't they, they like, honestly, if, if that decision has to be made,

it will create a load of attention to what people see as an incredibly successful, but kind of stagnant type of mindset in terms of what it means compared relative to apple um and it's only one percent um it's not going to impact the share price in a michael saylor way um i just think it would be such a bad decision to to not do it and the only explanation i can come up with that is just a bunch of old gits that um that haven't quite caught on yet or um because now all the financial institutions and players are all you know on board with trying to pump their bitcoin bags as well microsoft actually i can't i can't see the lightning sync why they wouldn't microsoft actually has been into bitcoin for a

really long time they had had an entire decentralized identity unit that they were researching, a guy named Daniel Booker. I think his name is he's CSU Wildcat on Twitter was headed up the unit and he wound up getting poached by Square because basically Microsoft was just not doing anything and they built the whole thing on Bitcoin. Right. So which is so it's really bizarre that they're not like that they have the institutional like inability to engage with the tech when like they had the

right idea about how this stuff should be used. And they've been doing it since like 2018. So I agree with you. It's it's completely it's just unbelievable that they haven't managed to figure out how to interact with our space more directly, because they've been doing this. They've been looking at it for 10 years. Yeah, 14, they announced Bitcoin payments. Crazy.

Danish? Yeah, I will say I think a resolution like this basically guarantees that they won't. And I think something to your question of like, why wouldn't they do it at this point? Because boards hate being told what to do by shareholders and setting the precedent that like these kind of movements will actually cause them to do things because it'll just uh you know introduce basically more activism and people

being annoying to them in their minds so i think the fact that this is the way it came out basically guarantees that they will fight it just out of like, we think we're smarter and better and don't want to deal with you. Oh, well, we might have to deal with our share. We might have to do what our shareholders want. God forbid.

Go ahead, Danish. Yeah, so this actually has more to do with, again, I hate to use enterprise sales, but Microsoft compared to some of the other players are seen as a more stable company. That's incredibly important because, you know, people talk about healthcare, for example,

which is an area I'm very familiar with. Microsoft has been the fastest growing company in the healthcare space. People don't talk about that, but it's something that we know on the backend. So there's this medical record system called Epic. A bunch of people use it. But Microsoft with Teams has come in and disrupted the entire industry. They also bought a company called Nuance, which does like documentation for doctors

and it has gone on a tear. So you start thinking about the industries that they're involved with. Microsoft, for them, this would be a PR thing more than anything else which is they have to now they in this situation they'd have to choose between onboarding a bunch of you know um uh enterprise types onto bitcoin or onto ai and right now they're putting all their chips in ai because they want to focus on that gravy train and i think that's what we're going to see uh you know this is

a really important aspect of this that people are not realizing which is if it was not like for example tesla would be a better example because they're going to the consumer. But to see an enterprise-focused company, especially an enterprise-focused company that represents governments and healthcare and old tech and trying to onboard them onto the AI revolution, I think they're just going to be a little bit more careful. I think this has a lot to do with that. Awesome. I think we're gonna go ahead. Yeah, I'll just say, you know, final comment. If you look at those, I forget what the website is. But there's a website where you can see the largest assets in the world ranks. And you've got gold number one, and then you've got all the tech

companies, it goes down to Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google. And Bitcoin was there, and then it's now flipped. It flipped silver, and it flipped Saudi Aramco. Yeah, and so now the one that can not be taken, you know, or have a better chance of not being taken over by Bitcoin is the one that could use the balance sheet strategy. So I think, I think it's just, I think it's a crazy decision. I think it's great. I mean, maybe they see something we don't see.

Maybe they're going to add XRP to the balance sheet, Danish. Microsoft adding XRP, you heard it here first. Don is just going to advise them. You know what would be interesting is Microsoft actually adding bonds, MSDR bonds. That would be interesting because it gets rid of a lot of the downside. But it's just the problem is, again, they're not in the business of holding bonds, corporate bonds. I think that's the issue right now is a lot of the law.

I'll give you a simple example. We raise a bunch of money. We don't want to keep it in fiat, right? But what do we do as a company? Do we hold it in other assets that tend to grow? And so there's all, but there's a lot of regulatory oversight once you start holding Bitcoin in the treasury. So I think that there's, so do you hold ETFs? There's a bunch of questions around this that we haven't seen corporate policy

really develop here. And whoever takes the first shot really can't be usually the largest, most established companies. It's going to be, you're going to see it kind of work through the normal, it has to cross the chasm and all that stuff. So I think that's really what's going on. I think they're going to see smaller companies do this. A bunch of small companies will show that this is an effective policy. They're going to have risk management teams that will about, again, this is corporate. Think like loose suits and those people are the people that are sitting there saying,

is the risk worth it from a PR perspective? Will customers drop us because now they have exposure to Bitcoin? The climate change perspective there, you don't want to believe ESG is still out there, but there's a lot of companies that are still functioning from that. And Bitcoin is seen as high energy expenditure. So, like, there's a lot of random things on the corporate level where a lot of these efforts will get in the way. I know we want to believe that Trump changed everything.

We're not there yet. It'll take time. That's the thing that I think we should caution. Yeah, this time BlackRock doesn't care about the energy inefficiency. Now he sees it as a good energy play where you can repurpose renewable energy i think i think the top will come when a major company adds smoking chicken fish to their balance sheet that's going to be our ultimate top signals when one of the largest memes hits microsoft's balance sheet we were talking obviously before about the Ethereum use case and the likelihood of it kind of catching a bid after XRP You guys obviously just had a mainnet

and launched effectively a blockchain built specifically for this, right? So hey, congratulations on doing that. And also your token has gone up 9 trillion percent. You have to, well, it's got to be the ohm. I mean, it has to be like the biggest performer of this entire cycle so far. So obviously there's something there, but amazing that you had your main main net.

What does this mean for, I guess, RWA, you know, in context of us having these conversations and all these other chains where things can be tokenized? Yeah, well, first I just want to say, I appreciate having me on again. Always good to be here. Thanks for the support throughout this year. It's been a, definitely a crazy one. Just for everyone on the space, we did launch our mainnet L1 in early October.

So we've officially put the mainnet out in the market. And it's been obviously a big milestone for us to accomplish. We have always believed that real world assets needed a purpose-built blockchain that was not a you know a derivative of a sovereign layer one blockchain but its own standalone layer one to maintain its sovereignty um and ability to effectively comply with international um and ever-changing crypto regulations. I mean, if you take the US election as an example, I mean, literally almost overnight,

the sentiment surrounding the US market has flipped on its head. But if you go back a couple of months, it was not the same. So the ability to kind of upgrade and enhance at the consensus level is quite important. So we have a permissionless blockchain, meaning that anyone can read and write to the permissionless layer on the blockchain. But at the same time, we have a permission layer, which is effectively a gated or walled garden area

for issuing and distributing compliant real-world asset tokens. And we're really excited that we're now finally at that next stage of actually being able to deliver, you know, real world assets on chain on mainnet rather than having to kind of continue to build on Ethereum or other solutions. That, I think, explains kind of why you need this purpose built layer one. But the next question then is, if liquidity is on the other chains and is all over the place, how do you solve for that and make sure that it actually comes to your chain? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I find that liquidity is relatively agnostic, and it generally chases yield and opportunity and quality of assets. So obviously, that means that we need to make it very easy for it to come over from other chains. But I do feel very strongly that, you know, when you're talking about reordered assets,

you're not talking about existing on-chain liquidity. You're talking about bringing, you know, external sources of capital and liquidity on-chain. So by default, we're actually dealing with people who've never been on-chain before in their life. So a lot of the assets that we're tokenizing and a lot of the people who are honestly buying them today, you know, don't have an on-chain, you know, presence. So anything that they're bringing on chain is new capital. And I think one of the things that we're also focused on is this idea that, you know, once you're coming into our ecosystem, instead of having this idea of farming and leaving, because, you know, let's just say you make money on a trade, you make money on an investment, you want to go out and then put your money into treasuries or microstrategy bonds or anything like that.

Why do you have to cash out and go to your bank than to your brokerage if you could do everything that I just mentioned on-chain in tokenized form without having to leave the mantra ecosystem? Because it's all just there. Why would you not do that? So you can effectively take profit within the ecosystem, but maintain within the ecosystem because you have this effectively a smorgasbord of investment opportunities to be able to participate in, whether that's real estate, whether that's micro strategy bonds, whether that's private credit or whatever, we'll have a product available for you. So we feel like that is one of the key things that's differentiating. You talked about, obviously, this compliance-focused approach. And obviously, the reason for having sort of a layer one is so that you can comply in multiple jurisdictions.

But how do you actually do that? I mean, you and I have talked about this quite a few times. We've talked about it on the street. But it seems like approaching every single regulator to figure out what you can and cannot do is an extremely daunting task. Yeah, I mean, it's not even possible, to be honest, to go every single place all at once. So we do have a specific focus. The blockchain itself is a Swiss association. So, you know, we comply with Swiss regulations and rules as it pertains to the protocol itself. But where we would operate platforms or applications, we do need to be careful about how assets and tokens and RWA's are distributed, who's buying know we feel comfortable with the risk um because we're aware of the the local rules and regulations and there's other places where we don't know but we're still comfortable because we're not operating

there actively um and there's other places where it's an absolute no-go and that's always an ongoing changing place but we do have an international strategy on particular markets that we're heavily focused on. And I would say, you know, one of the key markets that we're actively looking at, and engaging in is the UAE. You know, we spend a lot of time in Dubai, we spend a lot of time in Abu Dhabi, and some of our biggest backers and supporters are large institutions in those places. The global institutions have footprints in the UAE. We're obviously going through licensing processes there as well. We've really put a big bet on the UAE as a market

for real world asset opportunity. I think the US is another one that we feel very strongly as a significant... It's the holy grail of capital markets. Right. But at least from a perspective of where there is present, like progressive regulatory frameworks and opportunities, honestly, there's no place better than the U.E. right now. So, you know, we're obviously excited to partner with other platforms that have licensing in other jurisdictions, whether it's the US, whether that's Singapore, whether it's the UK. So that's kind of the way that we're able to tackle a lot of places, but be also very intentional about where we're operating.

So I remember we talked about a huge partnership you did earlier this year, which I believe is in Dubai, the MAG Group, M-A-G, right? Is that right? Yeah. Okay. So you talk about the fact that you're focusing on the UAE. So what does that look like? A partnership like that for Mantra, what does that exactly mean? What are you going to be tokenizing for them? How are they going to be utilizing your blockchain?

And then how do you expand that? You say you're focusing on these sort of jurisdictions. What does that expansion look like? Yeah, absolutely. So for for the viewers or listeners context viewers listeners context um we entered into a strategic partnership to tokenize uh 500 million dollars of off-plan real estate with one of the leading uh conglomerates in the ue called mag group effectively we're doing this via like a tokenized note that's over collateralized with prime real estate assets that's paying a significant yield, both in stable coins as well as home tokens. They're doing it on Mantra Chain.

We were going through a number of different tests for offering this product as we speak. And these are just one of the many partners that we're operating with in the UAE. It's an international shop, but they are based in Dubai and the UAE. Dubai is one of the hottest real estate markets in the world. It's a place that we have very strong relationships and networks with many of the leading real estate developers there. So it's been an asset class that has been one of the more lower hanging fruit opportunities that we've seen and one that we're seeing a lot of traction in both from the developer side on the supply side, but also from the market side on demand. So that's one of the areas that we're heavily focusing on. Another kind of asset focus is just generally financial

assets, whether that's, you know, tokenized funds, money market, private credit, private equity, etc. Or the third one that I think is a little bit more unique is IP. So these are kind of like the three areas of focus. And honestly, outside of that, the numbers just aren't big enough. Real assets is a pretty big opportunity. And by big, I mean in the trillions. So we really do have to go after nine, 10-figure deals to even make a dent. So outside of real estate. There's just a lot of opportunity in the UAE, honestly.

So yeah, it seemed like you could have, uh, you could just focus on them and be wildly successful. But I guess the next question is besides real estate, then are there specific markets you've identified where you think not, not even specific to you, but where real world assets will become a huge narrative uh you know this cycle or in the coming few years yeah so honestly like the two ones that we're seeing the biggest uptake with would definitely be tokenized funds um and in real estate uh that doesn't mean that you couldn't tokenize watches that doesn't mean that you couldn't tokenize cars you know luxury cars wine whiskey. These are all assets can live on chain. But if you're going

after, you know, these smaller, I would call them slightly niche industries, you're not going to get the volume, you're not going to get the size, and you're going to have to go through too much of a distribution process that it honestly is going to, it's not a scalable thing for your business. And it's going to be very, very challenging. So where we're seeing uptake at literally all levels, at the supply side, as I mentioned, there's a lot of issuers who are, you know, very high quality in nature, the leading, you know, leaders in their category, both in real estate space as well in the fund space. We, you know, we recently announced that we're tokenizing a BlackRock money market fund with

our partner Libre. So high quality issuers, there's legitimate demand side. These are asset classes that in general, people are already buying in the real world and in non-tokenized form. That doesn't mean that we don't have to give them a reason to come on chain. And that in many cases does come with some sort of subsidy, but that's a way to bring liquidity on chain it's a way to get people used to the concept and you know it's a starting point um and then i think the other thing that's quite uh quite important to to realize here is that you know um these are all novel products and right now the people who are buying this stuff are are primarily you know institutional uh investors whether that's funds um you know asset managers uh trading shops high net worth individuals you know there's not a ton of retail product market fit yet we're kind of playing towards that

that longer term ambition but you need to you know bring this like reflexive cycle of hey bringing high quality assets on chain that people are already interested in buying in the real world with a little bit of incentive, then brings this flywheel of retail who hasn't had access to those products before. And then vice versa, just keeps going, keeps going, keeps going. That's what we started to see a little bit. So, you know, my job as the CEO is to, when you see traction, double down. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. So before I let you go, I guess,

any other exciting developments, anything that you guys are working on, maybe people don't know about that you can share? Can we get the breaking news, basically? The good alpha. I'm not sure what I can say publicly yet, but we will be, know now that we have made that launch you know one of our you know our biggest focuses for you know the next month is

really um you know ecosystem development and that will come with you know more main net exchange integrations you know we're listed on a number of different exchanges um so any new exchange we're not listed on those will be immediate main net integrations any exchanges that we're currently on whether it's binance okx etc you., these are integrations of the mainnet for deposit withdrawal functionality. So big, big, big focus for the coming months. Dapp ecosystem development. We have a number of different Dapps that are going to be coming out in the beginning of next year that will also be issuing their own tokens on-chain. Hint, hint, if you're staking OM, there might be some benefits in doing so for these ecosystem

projects, not financial advice. Do your own research, just saying. And I think the other thing that we're really focusing on is actually taking all these deals that we've been able to win that we haven't announced, whether that's MAG or some of these other much larger deals, frankly, and actually getting their assets on chain, you know, 10-figure type deals that we're excited to bring on chain and allow people to actually interact with and start getting used to, you know,

playing with RWA tokens, you know, on Mantra. Any final thoughts before I let you go? I mean, I think we're all pretty excited about what 2025 has in store. You know, 2024 this year has been honestly insane for Mantra. You know, one of the better comeback stories in crypto. I am a little biased, but, you know, we went from like a $12 million market cap in October of last year to I think we're sitting at like six point something right now. And it's just been, you know, honestly, a true honor to, to be part of the journey.

And I just want to say thanks to everyone for, for supporting us along the way. It's been, it's been incredible. Yeah. I mean, we talk about XRP, but you guys pulled many multiples more than that XRP, by the way, 280 right now, even since we started up another, I think 15 cents. Absolutely crazy. So guys, I'm going to follow, you can follow JP, obviously his accounts on stage, JP underscore Mullen, I'm going to follow. You can follow JP. Obviously, his account's on stage. JP underscore Mullen 888.

Great follow. And then in the audience, I see Mantra underscore Chain. Also here, you should give them a follow to see that everything these guys are doing. Next time we come on, hopefully you can tell me what that new alpha is that you're being so tight-lipped about. Yeah, for sure, man. We will. Absolutely. So John, it's always a pleasure, man. We got to get you on the street again soon to talk about this stuff. It'd be great. Yeah.

I'll talk to you privately. All right, everybody. That's all we got for you today. Great show as usual. And we will be back tomorrow, Tuesday, December 3rd at 10 15 AM Eastern standard time. Thanks to all our amazing guests. Thank you, John again, and to mantra and we will see you tomorrow.

Thanks everyone. Bye.