The Wolf Of All Streets - XRP Dump Ahead? Will Ripple Survive? Should You Withdraw Your Funds From KuCoin? | MetaLawMan

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

KuCoin has been charged with violating anti-money laundering laws by U.S. federal prosecutors, Ripple faces $2bn fine from the SEC, SBF can get 50 years in prison. A lot is going on in crypto and today I am talking to James Murphy aka MetaLawMan as we break down what is going on and why it matters.  Chris Inks will join in the second part to share some interesting trades in crypto and beyond.  James Murphy aka MetaLawMan: https://twitter.com/MetaLawMan Chris Inks: https://twitter.com/TXWestCapital ►► Sponsored by DevvE DevvE is a next-generation cryptocurrency - DevvE addresses Bitcoin’s most significant weaknesses—regulatory compliance, energy consumption, costs and speed! 👉 Follow DevvE on X for Updates: https://twitter.com/DevveEcosystem  👉 Join the DevvE Telegram group to stay in the know! https://t.me/DevveOfficial  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►►OKX SIGN UP FOR AN OKX TRADING ACCOUNT THEN DEPOSIT & TRADE TO UNLOCK MYSTERY BOX REWARDS OF UP TO $60,000!  👉 https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘25OFF’ FOR 25% OFF WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd  ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

The SEC has stated that Ripple should pay more than $2 billion for their sales of the XRP token. What does this mean for Ripple? Is it actually serious or are we now in the part of the cycle where we laugh at the SEC and things go up when they say something negative? I'm a bit in the latter camp. But when I want to unpack what's going on with these egregious SEC lawsuits and everything regulatory and legal, of course, I call my favorite lawyer, metal lawman James Murphy, and have him unpack all of these situations for me and more. Also, Texas West Capital on the back half. You guys don't want to miss this one.

Let's go. What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. Before we get started, please subscribe to the channel, hit the like button, and click on that bell so that you get alerts every time we go live, like 400 times a day now on this channel. The content schedule has been ramping up a bit insane. Yesterday, I recorded a podcast with Justin Sun right before the show. That was really interesting. Hadn't caught up with him since 2022. Today at noon, I'm recording a podcast with Mike Novogratz,

which is kind of amazing. We've been chasing him for a long time, had him on Spaces, but this will actually be the first interview that I've done with Mike. Can't wait to get that one done. And of course, this afternoon, we have Trading Alpha with WIC. But right now, we need to focus on the matter at hand. And that is everything SEC and legal and crypto. And of course, as I said in the intro, when I want to understand what's happening, instead of giving you my own bad and probably incorrect takes, I go to the lawyers. I've got James Murphy. How are you, buddy?

I'm great, Scott. There's never a dull moment in the wonderful world of SEC enforcement. So looking forward to it. Well, you know, a year ago when we had the actions against Coinbase and Binance and the SEC would passively name a million tokens seemingly at every one of their actions without actually having to prove anything, go after anyone, we would see these massive moves in the market and a ton of fear, right? When they passively named ADA and Solana, for example, those tokens went down 25%, 30% sometimes in a day. Now, actually, XRP kind of went up

when we saw this news. So I like to say that price and the market sort of tell us everything we need to know. But does this show us that sentiment about the SEC is that there's very little fear left and we're almost sort of just brushing them off at this point? Well, we may be brushing them off, but if you've got the federal government saying you owe them $2 billion, that does give you pause if you're conscious. So the $2 billion number, originally, Judge Torres said that the amount of gain, the proceeds of the sales of XRP by Ripple were in the $750 million range. And what the SEC has done is added sales post filing of the complaint to get that number up to nearly a billion.

Then there's a deduction for the cost of that revenue. We won't go into that. Then there's a, which brings it down to maybe 800, a little more than that, 800 million. And then there's interest because you got to pay interest on a disgorgement award and that's 200 million dollars almost and then finally it is typical in a case uh like this to have a penalty that's called a one-time penalty which means one x one time the disgorgement so you got disgorgement then So you got disgorgement, then you got one X of that,

and then you've got nearly $200 million in interest. And so that's how you get up to a $2 billion headline number. But I think there may be some problems with that. Yeah, I am looking at some of the tweets. I mean, speaking of lack of fear, I mean, Brad Garlinghouse, the SEC plans to ask the judge for $2 billion in a case that involved no allegations, let alone findings of fraud or recklessness. There's absolutely no precedent for this. We will continue to expose the SEC for what they are when we respond to this and then literally post a meme, you are not serious people. I mean, no fear here, at least on the part of the Ripple side. But as

you said, maybe this should be taken seriously. I mean, what would this mean for Ripple if they literally ended up having to pay, I don't think they will, a $2 billion sort of fine here? Well, the first thing people in the market are going to ask themselves is how would they finance a uh a fine like that you know there's an obvious answer to that sell more xrp um but the intermediate step is they would of course appeal and then they would be in the donald trump scenario looking for a bond to post pending appeal uh and that's going to be a challenge. If their collateral is something that the bonds people have never heard of called XRP, you could imagine another challenging set of conversations where they're looking to post a bond. But I don't think the

judge is going to order a $2 billion penalty in this case. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. I don't generally talk politics. You brought up the Trump bond. But hilariously, Lord Alan Sugar from The Apprentice in England, who's a billionaire from England, happened to be in my hometown on Sunday. And I took him to a diner for his birthday, like the crappiest diner I could find basically in the entire town. And my friend asked him if Trump had called him for a loan, and he said, in my country, if he had done what he had done, he'd be in jail for the rest of his life.

He called me for a loan, and you can imagine where I told him to stick it. So that was a pretty interesting anecdote there. I'm hoping that's not what happens here with Ripple. So is there anything I might be missing on this case before we move on to talking more about KuCoin, maybe SBF? I mean, this just seems like a series of events in Ripple that's going to continue on sort of endlessly. But, you know, we have the clarity on the security, which was the biggest thing. Yeah. So there are two things, I think, Scott. Number one, the SEC's filing says nothing about the location of the sales of the XRP. And so if they were sold to people outside of the country in a way that sort of evades the jurisdiction of the United States, then it should not, those sales should not form the basis of a disgorgement order.

So I think we're going to hear that from XRP. But the bigger argument here, in my view, is Ripple caught a very, very lucky break recently. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled at the end of last year that in order for there to be disgorgement, there have to be victims of the fraud, victims of the securities law violation, there has to be something called pecuniary harm. And that means losses, actual losses. So when you read the SEC's filing on their damages theory, they have a heading saying, hey, no problem. There's pecuniary harm here, but they don't actually identify a single purchaser of XRP

who lost money. What they say is some purchasers, and remember, we're talking about sophisticated institutional buyers, hedge funds, VCs, whales buying XRP, and they bought at discounts and then presumably sold not the next day but periodically and so the sec says some of the buyers got a lower discount than others and therefore they were pecuniarily harmed which does violence to that term there have to be actual losses and they do not identify a single quote unquote victim institution that lost money in their deal because they bought all of this XRP at some significant discounts, which is an irritated, of course, a lot of retail XRP holders. But this has been known since the beginning.

It was in the original complaint filed by the SEC. So we knew that happened. So I believe Ripple is going to come back hard. This case is called Goville. It's a second circuit. Judge Torres must follow the precedent of the second circuit. And so far, they have not identified a single victim who lost money from their transactions directly with Ripple. And OTC discount deals and these institutional deals are par for the course all across crypto.

Even in the FTX bankruptcy, we're seeing funds raising to be able to buy Solana at a massive discount with vesting on locks. There's nothing unusual here. And in the VC world, people pay different valuations in different rounds. It's not really that different. Yeah. And just to tie a bow on it, this concept of disgorgement, while it is a party who's done something wrong, issued an unregistered security, is supposed to give back their net profit from doing that, that money is supposed to go to victims, not to the treasury. And so, if there are no victims, the entire rationale for the disgorgement goes away. And so, if there's no disgorgement, by the way, Scott, then there's no 200 million in interest. Interest triggers off of disgorgement. And so that would go away.

Now, caveat is you can still have a penalty in the absence of victims and a disgorgement judgment, but it would be weird for an $850 million penalty in a situation where there's no disgorgement, no victims, no restitution fund, no nothing, that would be pretty odd. And so the court then would have a lot of discretion in establishing what the penalty might be. And I think it'd be substantially lower than that $850. What I hear is that the SEC is way out over their skis on all these cases. And I think the best take of all is funniest part of the, this is you, of course, funniest part of the SEC's damages brief and ripple has to be the 29 pages of tweets that hurt their feelings after Judge

Torres issued her summary judgment ruling. You can see that you have the PDF here in the filing. This is kind of reminiscent of Gensler's reluctant approval of the Bitcoin spot ETFs and then two days of crying on TV about how he only did it for the courts. And he doesn't support Bitcoin, even though he lectured on it at MIT. It just seems like, pardon my almost French, but it seems like the SEC is butthurt and is fighting back any way they can. But it's just feelings. They're just hoping that this will somehow annoy the judge that what they were not hearing from Ripple management and the XRP community was, gee, we're really, really sorry. We lost the case. And that was not how people took it. With XRP being declared not a security, I think it was rightly termed a win, particularly for that huge

group of people represented by John Deaton, who are the retail investors in XRP. You are good to go on exchanges. That was a really, really big deal and a big win. And so they're hoping that the judge will somehow be miffed, you know, that there isn't, you know, apologizing and all of that in the tweets. It's kind of funny. Yeah. So let's move on. I think we've rippled this one to death. Let's move on to KuCoin, because it's kind of the big news of the day. Crypto exchange KuCoin violated anti-money laundering laws, US charges.

Now, I believe this was announced by the Southern District, but coming from the DOJ. So this is criminal charges against both of the founders, I believe, and even a claim that they effectively, I mean, we've got that they money laundered $9 billion, right? It's a pretty massive claim, this kind of reminiscent of finance, frankly, right? And to me, this probably is a continuation of the United States' cleanup on foreign exchanges that allowed Americans to trade when they weren't supposed to. I don't know if this was actively happening now or if this like Binance was in the

past, but this has to be a massive warning to basically every exchange that's allowed non-KYC Americans to trade there. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It looks a lot like Binance. You hit the nail right on the head. And, you know, this is interesting because it's a second bite out of KuCoin. You know, KuCoin was sued by the New York attorney general in a case that sort of didn't get enough publicity, but I think it's going to get some publicity. And there she said that they were allowing trading in Ethereum, which is a security, according to her, Letitia James. And so now, you know, the U.S. government has sued KuCoin. And basically, the problem was they should not have been allowing U.S. residents to trade on their platform because they were not

allegedly complying with the U.S. law. Bank Secrecy Act means anti-money laundering, those kinds of things. Meanwhile, the CFTC also sued KuCoin yesterday. And there they very explicitly said, Ethereum is a commodity, which they've said forever. So it's just so crazy that we are here in 2024, Scott, with different regulators saying different things about the status of the second largest digital asset on the planet. It's just it's really crazy. We as Americans are entitled to clarity about what is permitted and what is not permitted under law and we have anything but. And it's coming to a head, as you know, on this Ethereum ETF deadline in May. I think what is so shocking to your point is that not only do we not have clarity from our two largest regulators as to what some of these assets are, but they're having a pissing contest in lawsuits to try to deem what these things are.

We talked about the fact that Genzer or the SEC would passively name a bunch of things, securities in these suits without ever going after the projects or saying why they were just sort of this vague language about the Howey test. Now you have the CFTC without going to Congress or passing anything, sort of passively saying, in this lawsuit, Ethereum and Litecoin are commodities. It's like they're jabbing at each other. Exactly. You know, that's what Congress is for,

to settle this stuff. I just cannot explain why we're this far down the road in this nascent industry and have no comprehensive regulation. Well, I can't explain why it happens. We can't agree on anything pretty much in this country anymore. But, you know, we should have had by now a comprehensive regulation like MECA in the EU, where 27 countries got together and agreed on a very comprehensive regulatory scheme. And as a result, a lot of innovation, a lot of businesses, a lot of good jobs, you know, migrated to the EU. And we're stuck here waiting for the next

lawsuit to drop to see who thinks what with respect to any given asset. And it's just, it's not the way it's supposed to work in this country under our constitution. Well, I have minimal belief that we're going to get any clarity from lawmakers anytime soon, especially in an election year. So I think we're just kind of in for more of this jockeying for position from the regulators for now. But also, I think that kind of puts us in the lurch where we have the XRP ruling and all these projects are just going to continue on as if the SEC has no valid opinion. So maybe it's actually a good thing at this particular moment that we don't have that

much clarity. Is there anything else to this KuCoin case that may be different? I mean, I have to assume that if they find them and get them to the United States, the two founders are going to have some legal troubles. They could potentially be facing jail time, serious fines, something like CZ, but CZ was very cooperative. And this seems like these guys are not in the public eye. They're not big celebrities on social media. It feels a little bit different. And is there anything maybe hidden here that's beyond just, hey, you allowed Americans, right? Because I remember there were some loose allegations that finance had allowed Hamas to utilize accounts on there and all these sort of other narratives.

Yeah, we don't know everything they have in terms of the identities of those who might have been engaging in money laundering. You know, the data point we have is when the New York Attorney General sued them, they just settled. And so if it's possible, and they openly said, hey, we don't want to do business in the U.S. with U.S. citizens. So, you know, sorry that our geofencing didn't work very well. So this could be a situation of a pretty quick settlement. You know, the jail time component can really gum up the works in terms of a settlement in a case. But if they could pay money and get out of it, I think that's what they will do.

I guess we'll have to see how much money they have because Binance paid, what, $4 billion? That was quite a fine if that's setting precedent. And I think sort of the story in the background is there's an update on KuCoin withdrawals. At the time of writing, which was 5.43 this morning, over the past 24 hours, there's been an outflow of over 842 million on Ethereum

and 930 million on EVM change for initial 6 billion base and holding. So 15% drop in assets held by the exchange. So people are clearly fleeing and that actually increased over the past few hours. No surprises there. But the good news is I have not heard reports yet of people unable to get their funds out. Right. There was also the big question about Binance as to whether they were solvent and had the funds.

Yeah. So we're not hearing we're not hearing that problem yet. So that's that's a good thing. Yeah. So I guess we'll keep tracking KuCoin. I would imagine that effectively every foreign exchange that has allowed Americans one way or another is going to pay some sort of fine coming down the road. And these are just setting precedent for more of that. You talked about the geofencing. It's interesting now with AI and fake KYC and all these things. I think it's actually, and VPNs, of course, it's almost impossible for these exchanges to keep all Americans off. Now, I'm not saying that was the case here. I think they just passively allowed it. I decided for a VPN, not a Vist

account, no KYC. It's different. But I think these are going to be issues for exchanges indefinitely as technology improves to get around these things. We've already seen that AI can KYC very easily, even with, I think, the video in some way, shape or form. Yeah, you know, there's a distinction. You're absolutely right. There's a distinction between what they have on allegedly on Binance, which is emails, coaching people how to use vpns to evade you know as opposed to you know what there appear to be holes in my geo fence that these americans are slipping through unbeknownst to me that's negligence which is not a crime but coaching people on how to evade um detection as american. That, you know, that is a crime

if they're money laundering. And so there is an important distinction there, and we'll see what they have on KuCoin. We can't talk about the legal system this week without this guy. How Sam Bateman Freed's sentencing hearing may play out. He faces decades in prison. This is happening this week. We're going to find out how long he's going to sit, rot, stay in jail. A, I guess, what do you think he deserves? And B, what do you think he'll get? So the bidding, the bid ask spread here is his people want between five and a half and six and a half. So on six, the government wants between 30 and 40. So call that 35. That is the spread. And I believe this is a tough judge. And so I think the Senate is going to be a lot closer to 35 than it

will be to six. And then I don't think he helped himself that much with all of these letters that came in because the judge feels like he doesn't really recognize the damage that he did and that it was his fault. You know, that really bothered the judge. And he didn't like Sam in the trial. He didn't like that he wouldn't answer questions the way a normal person might answer a question. He's Sam.

He can't help himself. But in any event, I think it's going to be high. I wouldn't be surprised if he hit the number like 30. And then I believe that there will be a major effort directed at the Biden administration to try to commute that sentence. If Biden does not win, I've said this to you before and you've shook your head before when I've said it, but I believe that you're old enough to remember what happened at the end of the Clinton administration, his second term, and they were handing out pardons and commutations like candy canes at Christmas. And, you know, this effective altruism group has a lot of money, got a lot of influence, could come up with a big

bag of money. And so I think there is some, well, I think it's highly likely the effort will be made. And I think there's some possibility that Biden would commute the sentence on his last few days if he's headed out in January. Yeah. The end of Clinton was like a Oprah episode. You get commuted and you get commuted and you get commuted. And I can't argue with you that it would possibly happen. I just remember months ago, we were talking about 150 year sentences like Madoff, right? And seemingly now because, and this by the way, holds no legal bearing, the fact that people are going to be made whole,

which is nonsense because it's made whole the day that the market was completely bottomed, right? Voyager creditors like myself know what being paid in the prices of July, 2022 means, right? Voyager creditors like myself know what being paid in the prices of July 2022 means, right? But they're making the argument that because everybody's going to get paid back, you did no harm. We actually had Martin Shkreli on the Twitter spaces once and he was like, that's nonsense. All of my investors made money and I went to jail. Right. Yeah, that's exactly right. And here, yeah, that make whole narrative is just so false. And, you know, I was a creditor of FTX. I sold my claim. I'm sure as hell not whole. You know, so in any event, it's not surprising that they're trying that narrative. But I don't think that's going to sway the judge. I think he's going to get multiple decades of time.

I think so. I had the opportunity to sell my Voyager claim for 65 cents on the dollar. And we actively were in the process and 24 hours away and FTX collapsed the same day. And then they pulled any offer for claims and any bankruptcy when the market dumped. But so, yeah, it's a crazy market out there. One last thing before we move on, because we talked about this last week, but this was the most egregious, I think, SEC overreach we've seen yet. And I think this speaks to our entire 30 minutes of conversation before the debt box scandal. Because it was a small company, it didn't get the kind of press, obviously, that a Ripple or a Coinbase or a Binance would. But this was, as you said,

I mean, number one, a criminal investigation is warranted. I've shown your thread on this show already three times. But I mean, the SEC lied, cheated, and was corrupt in a manner here that's almost unprecedented to do meaningful damage to these people and to their company. And seemingly the judge pushed back hard, sanctioned the lawyers, which I'm still not quite sure what that means, but seems to have stopped there. And this was as much of an indictment on the SEC's behavior as you will ever see, in my opinion. Well, it's the worst thing I've seen in my career, and I've been around for a long time. It's just shocking for me as a lawyer to hear

a federal judge say, these lawyers came in and lied. And when they got called on the lie they came in with other lawyers who doubled down on the lie instead of admitting you know that they had that they had lied and they also misrepresented what the applicable law was about sanctions and so the lies do tie to sworn declarations in the case. And that was my point with respect to the first element of accountability that I think needs to happen. I believe the U.S. attorney for Utah should open an investigation because you have a federal judge who's already ruled that they lied intentionally. And those lies do tie to sworn statements and that's perjury. And so, you know, something needs to be done. This is so shocking. It goes well beyond

Scott, like not having a faithful allegiance to the law, which is really bad. It goes well beyond acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner, which is bad. Lying, doubling down on the lie when you're caught is really, really bad. And the judge really focused on the context here. And this is so important. They lied and convinced the judge that these guys were so bad and were right now taking their assets out of the country, going to Dubai, that it was so bad we couldn't tell the other side what was going on. We've got to keep them out of the courtroom and make sure they're not here to hear this. So now when you understand that this is built on lies, you understand the motivation to keep them out. Because if the opposing counsel was there, they would be saying, Your Honor, that's a lie. And

here I can prove it. Then they would say something else. And they would say, the opposing counsel would say, Your Honor, that also is a lie. And we can prove that as well. So they had to keep these people out and say, you know, this is imminent harm to all these investors, and they're taking all their money to Dubai and close all their bank accounts the last 48 hours. All of that were lies and really, really offensive. And the fact that nobody's resigned, Scott, is shocking. What I want to see, what ought to happen is these former senior SEC officials who are no longer with the commission should be coming out and saying there must be resignations at the top because the judge ruled that it's a bad faith organization that goes to

the integrity of the commission as a whole. Not a few bad faith organization that goes to the integrity of the commission as a whole. Not a few bad apples here, rotten to the core, and nobody is coming forward. People aren't going to listen to me, but if you get some senior SEC people to come in and say, resignations need to happen, I think that would ratchet up the heat on this situation, and it certainly deserves it. Where's John Reed Stark when we need him? I don't know if he's defending this. I don't know what he's doing. He's actually, I think, pretty measured when it comes to the SEC, even after his, you know,

multi-decade career there. I always enjoy talking to him, even though he's so anti-crypto, but he is at least, I think he would be probably online to hold them accountable. I've seen some private firms, A16Z notably, and a number of others saying, listen, this is the first time that we would say any lawyer who's ever worked on crypto at the SEC, we would not hire privately, which is interesting because I think a lot of government lawyers obviously are looking for that big payday when they leave, many in the crypto industry. And now this is sort of getting in line with Gensler is breaking the law, right, for these lawyers. You can't really say like, I was just doing what I was told because the law is very clear. This isn't like, right. Yeah, Scott, look, if there were a few, it was just a few bad apples. That's not what the judge said. So now if you're a lawyer who had nothing at all to do with the

case, but you're in enforcement at the SEC, you now have a federal judge saying it's endemic, you know, to this organization. It is a bad faith organization. It's not a few bad apples. You need to decide, is that the kind of organization that you're going to continue to work at? Or are you going to resign and make a little bit of a statement of why you resigned, you know, because of what's going on here? And, you know, this failure to, you know, follow the law and all this, Gensler is a politician. His benchmark is what can we get away with? How can we achieve what we want to do? Whereas a lawyer, he's not a lawyer. So a lawyer's orientation should be very different. You have this duty to the court. And when you see the court say your whole organization is rotten, you really should think about if someone said that about your law firm that you are working. You'd never get a job again. Yeah. And it blows my mind. And listen, you said Gensler is not a lawyer, but it's very clear that his directive comes from higher because getting absolutely annihilated this many times by the court system, you would think you'd stop pushing and nope, just keeps on going.

Right. Yeah. All right, James, thank you so much. Always a pleasure to have you. We got to do this more regularly. because I think you get these news stories, you get the press, and we don't really get much clarity on what it means or if we're being completely hyperbolic, as I said, or it's bad takes. But, I mean, it seems that it's very clear that most of this is egregious at this point. Yeah, and if you'll give me 10 seconds here,

my parting shot is the solution to this may be at the ballot box. And they're coming to the end of the first quarter for collections of campaign contributions for John Deaton. So if you can make a contribution, go to John Deaton's website and do it before March 31st. Because there's going to be a lot of publicity around how much has this guy actually raised for his campaign. Is he a legitimate threat to Elizabeth Warren? And the way our society works, the answer to that question is in terms of dollars.

So let's try to raise as much as we can for John on or before March 31st and get him off to a really good start in his campaign fundraising. Yeah. And you can donate both here. It's John Deaton for Senate dot com. You can donate both in crypto or, of course, in dollars. He has all of that set up and, you know, taking out Elizabeth Moore, besides our love for John, which I think exists in a vacuum regardless, the fact that he's going against public enemy number one for our industry is just poetic. You and I have talked, I know you're going to be also doing a fundraiser at Consensus, correct?

And yeah, so I'm hopefully going to be joining you there to help push that and get everyone out, but he's got to win. He's got to win. We love him. Yep. All right. Everybody follow Matt along, man. Go ahead. We got to do everything we can. You can't let that November election date go, and we didn't do everything we can. So it's not just you and me. The billionaires, the titans of industry have made a lot of money you know in in this industry really need to step up in a big way and give john every every chance um yeah and even even if you're of

the false belief that he can't win because i truly do believe that he can win every penny you spend is another penny that takes him farther making negative statements and outing elizabeth warren for what she is so that's the best money I think you can spend in politics. Guys, follow Metal Lawman. Promise we'll have him back very soon. James, thank you so much. Thanks, Scott. Awesome. Guys, before we move on to Texas West Capitol, I'm going to tell him he's listening in the background, bring up an XRP chart because it's in the title and we're going to have to look at it. So I could see you giggling back there. But of course, guys, we got to tell you about our amazing sponsor. Been with us a

long time now. So I'm sure that you have all checked out Debbie by now. They have their completely rebranded website. If you guys still somehow don't know about Debbie, the hyperscale blockchain platform that is flexible to be regulatory compliant in every legal jurisdiction in the world. As I've told you, these guys have regulatory approval in jurisdictions that nobody else does as a layer one blockchain. There's the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, the guy who invented the Kindle, CIO of Starbucks, insane team. Devia is orders of magnitude faster, cheaper, more scalable, more architecturally flexible than other layer ones. It has specific patented solutions for fraud, theft, loss protections, privacy protections, regulatory

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I haven't heard you be bearish in quite a long time. Well, there's been no reason to be. I mean, you know, once, once we got down there and, you know, depending on what charts we're looking at, June of 23 or November, December of 23,

I mean, it's been all up, up, up since then, right? So definitely no reason to be bearish, though Lord knows a lot of the other accounts out there are trying to convince people that the top is in and a whole bunch of other silliness like that, which I think is pretty awful for the new traders out there. But that's why, you know, you're in the market. You got to learn. You got to learn it so you're not, you know, pushed around by stuff like this. Because I'm the worst.

I promised everyone at the beginning of each show I would do a market update and I've forgotten 90% of the time. But here is a coin because I'm just in my flow. I see the guests and I get excited, but here is coin market cap, Bitcoin trading right at 71,000. I mean, we're up a percent on the hour, which is a percent on the day, but up 11.5% on seven days. So it makes you kind of think, hey, what correction, right? And I think all coins have been performing right alongside. We've had sort of these RWA tokens and these narratives that have been blasting off. But I'm not seeing anything scary, even on that correction. We didn't get one of those 15% Bitcoin corrections that gives you a 50% correction on alts.

It just didn't happen this time, right? Right, right. Exactly. And that's something we've been talking about for a bit now is this idea that, you know, if you've only been in crypto, all you've known is the crypto cycle the way it's been. It's generally played out the same way. But with the institutional money that's coming in and potentially quite a bit more as we get, you know, into like the end of summer, beginning of Q4 this year. I think, you know, again, I think you're going to get alts rallying alongside Bitcoin because it's a different type of money coming in for Bitcoin.

So you're still going to have your, you know, your DJs and your crypto bros and whatnot trying to cycle as they've always done. But Bitcoin, I think, is just going to continue going up along the way. And they'll end up having to buy in, you know, higher instead of buying, you know, some sort of pullback that they're used to doing so um right now you know we had a good rally uh pulled back here we got rejected to get this local range up here on bitcoin uh so we rallied up for me you mind zooming on that for me just zoom in on it so we get a better yeah we both have the

big screens so yeah yeah so it's right there around the R1 pivot Here there's a nice aggressive move into the pivots I like this if we can see You know this looks like this should hold here So if we rally out aggressively more That gives us a you know The idea that we should be rallying up to the R4 Here on the hourly

Which is right around 83 470 Or even the R5 up here At about 88 300 I've got with my count here I've got the local around 83, 470, or even the R5 up here at about 88, 300. I've got with my count here, I've got the local wave three up there at around 86, 920. And so, you know, again, very small pullback, 17, whatever, 17 and a half percent here. No surprise where it pulled back. Again, pulled back right into the triangle here.

So usually what we're expecting. Some interesting stuff. You know, again, hedge funds around 15,000 net short in contracts versus institutions, which are about 20,000 net long. So there's the possibility that sets up a really big short squeeze. Coinglass says if we hit 75,000, there'll be about 3.85 billion short positions liquidated. I saw that. Scott starts smiling really big.

Yeah, so, you know, and you're hitting something like that. There's no reason that you're not hitting 80, 82 probably at least. And then that just sets up further rally toward, you know, again, what I've been talking about, 100,000 getting up there not too difficultly. The Bitcoin ETFs yesterday had a great day. Overall had 418 million inflows, net inflows. And that's versus GBTC having 212.3 million outflows itself. So, I mean, again, it's hard to be bearish, right? Yeah, it's really, really, really hard to be bearish. I was looking at the Bitcoin chart kind of like this, and I didn't even see because we were on the, I guess, this stream that we had

pushed almost to 72,000. We kind of had this inverse head and shoulders, clear breakout, big volume on the break. And this just looks like it's consolidating for the move up to that target, right? And that's only 76. And you're talking about the 80s. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, pretty, pretty clear if you're a classical chartist, this pattern. Now, maybe you don't think this is really a negative reversal, because, you know, it was only up at 74. But to me, that looks pretty, pretty clear, especially when you get this volume in this candle spread breaking. Yeah, yeah, that's always the important thing. Are you getting large candle spread and a spike of volume and then a close above that resistance? If you are, as I always talk about, you're much more significantly likely to be a legitimate breakout and continuation in that way. And so

we do have quite a bit of volume, as you said there, big candle spread closed at the top. And I mean, it's just a beautiful breakout. That's what you're looking for if you're if you're a breakout trader. That's the kind of thing you're looking for. Absolutely. So listen, you know, Bitcoin seems to be consolidating. I mean, I don't love that it just got slapped down from 71.8 right back down to like 70. But I don't think that's a big deal.

We know what we're looking for there. Listen, assuming we get this kind of slow, steady march up, which is a strong assumption, what do you think is going to happen in the altcoin market? What else are you looking at? Oh, man. Altcoins, geez, oh, is there all... There's so many that are looking great. They all look good, man. What was that?

They all look good. Every time I look at a chart, I'm like, it's hard to find entries on some of them, but they all look generally good. Well, you know, last week we were talking about, about well there were some few here but you know we were waiting for some more to happen it wasn't looking all that great it was a guy against consolidation pullback this week though i mean um things are really starting to shape up a bit especially when you're getting out to the uh like a three day on a lot of charts you can see these big resets down here in the stoke rsi, you know, resetting fully down there.

And then RSI pulling back about neutral, still bullish on there, setting up these larger movements. So like I've got banned USDT here. We've got this large accumulation range, which has been in process here since October of 22. It hasn't even finished accumulation yet. It has not finished accumulation yet.

We had a more local accumulation down at the bottom of it here as we were printing the spring on that. And this went from, what was this? This was June of 23. And then we broke out around October of 23 there. And then we've continued rally up here. Just these, again, three-day here, right? So you've got the daily pivot. You've got this nice, um,

pin bar candle right around the S1 pivot support and a little doji. And then here we go. Right. And so, um, I'm looking up here toward $5 and 34 cents. We're sitting at $2 and 21 cents or so right now, but yeah, I'm looking minimally up there. I've got some larger targets, but right now that's what I'm looking at as far as locally what we're doing here. And that'll give us the breakout above this, you know, out of this accumulation range here. So I think that's a really good setup in progress there. I've got Iota. I think you know that one.

Oh, man. Chloe, I love when we bring out the classics. It's my favorite. Classic. Right. Yeah. So again, June 23. And then you had your jump across the creek here. This is your indication that accumulation is complete here. November 27th of 2023. So you had your accumulation here rallied up your back at the edge of the creek, which is just a retest of resistance as support. And here we are rallying out. I've got a local target of forty five point four cents. We're sitting around thirty five cents right now. And then I've got a bigger target up here of ninety one cents on that as well.

But really, really looks pretty good. I like I like the structure. You go from a from a pretty steep decline. And then you start kind of, you know, kind of flattening out a bit, right? So you've got a great degree of straight like here, and then it starts easing up and easing up even more. So what you end up getting is this thing looks like that. And as you get into the bottom and you bottom out and so you should be looking for that rally up higher now and i think we're set to do that again this is the three-day here reset down and oversold on stoke rsi rsi itself staying bullish at above neutral there heading back up so again liking this iota us I love this, by the way. What does IOTA even do now?

Comment. I have no idea. We're looking at the charts. I love when people say it. I hate to say it, but in crypto, don't care. Nobody else does either. You don't. It doesn't have to do anything.

Here's the thing, guys. Don't trade based on what you think something does. Don't trade based on what you think, does. Don't trade based on what you think, you know, whether it's legitimate or not. Trade based on what people are going to do. And people just, this is crypto, man. People get in. You know, it doesn't matter what it does. You're going to end up, you know, missing out a lot of opportunity because you're like, oh, it doesn't do anything. The next thing you know, the things will have things with or everybody was so dead against xrp right when i came in uh and i got in at six what was it 60th 100th of a cent and rallied that you know rode that up to almost three dollars i mean

stop worrying about what it does or doesn't do just if people are gonna buy it if the chart says people look like they're gonna buy it buy the stupid thing That's some of the best advice I can give you guys love it. What else again more accumulation here. This is a Zill You know Zill USDT another classic there from December of 22 We had a spring back down here in September of 23 Just great movement since we broke out we pulled back to retest As support here We should be heading our way out I've got a local target of .064

.0604 But overall Like the other ones, expected to continue higher Overall as well, that's just my next kind of target On this one Let me see, what else we got Oh, I've got A, what is this agld usdt now you're just making up letters i am i've just thrown them together and they're all little things

on the chart here rnq this is the new ai coin with the meme token nomics yeah this one looks great from the three day as well again reset down and oversold, crossing bullishly, threatening to break out. RSI holding bullish above neutral, rallying back up, threatening to cross bullishly. We got this pin bar candle, this doji, finding support on that pivot. A little bit of a hammer candle there, and then we got this nice move up. We should continue up. Right now, I've got a local target of $2.50 cents we're at about a dollar fifty eight dollar fifty nine right now but that gets us right up into this next kind of uh support resistance area but you can see

volumes pretty low up here so uh you know they've spent very little time up there it's almost like getting into uh all-time highs without actually hitting all-time highs as far as little resistance. While we're talking about it, can I share one before you move on? I want to just show you this one because I saw it this morning. I wrote about it in the newsletter. This is, I guess it's SUI, is that how you pronounce it? Oh, yeah, SUI. The new hot layer one blockchains. But A, I don't count these WICs at the beginning as all-time highs a day,

but it still is breaking blue skies on that. But if we count the all-time high from february you're breaking blue sky breakout here into price discovery rsi is still not even overbought and if you really zoom in i mean even if you look at it like on a four hour you have clear cup and handle maybe we get another handle here but like you know we've got the old coins that have like 80% back up to there, which I like. It's fine. A lot of potential. But then you get these new ones that there's not a, you know, there's not a point of resistance ahead on something like this.

Yeah. Literally just blue skies already at an all time high today and pushing with that rounding there. Man, I love that one. Anyways, back to you. No, exactly. Exactly. You know, like I said, I said, they just all are really starting to look good again. I've got auction USDT here. Huge, huge. Look at this. May of 22 until it's finally breaking out here in November of 23. It's like a year and a half of accumulation here. Gives it this nice strong

breakout, this pullback locally here. I've got a local target right there, just a slightly new all-time high there at 49.75. But ultimately, throughout this cycle, I think this goes, you know, quite a bit higher off that. But we're sitting at 23.72 right so um you know if we can break especially if we get up above this uh this pivot here on the daily at around 29 42 i think that really opens up at least that target there and moving it up higher but that's a huge bit of accumulation it's a long accumulation there so you know the longer something accumulates guys the further you should expect the rally to go off that so that's right i want to address two things before you move on to the next one first because something accumulates, guys, the further you should expect the rally to go off that. That's right. I want to address two things before we move on to the next one. First,

because there's an argument in the comments, Mike, why would alt pump as hard as Bitcoin when there's a Bitcoin ETF and other ETFs coming to cycle? I think that's a great question. I don't know why you guys are giving him hell for that. The answer, in my opinion, is the wealth effect, right? Bitcoin goes up. The ETF may be driving it, but the people who've been holding Bitcoin and participate in this market all the time are getting much wealthier and that money flows into alts. So it's the wealth effect of Bitcoin going up. So it doesn't need to be the ETF money directly flowing into alts. It's that the people who are in this market have now made a ton of money and are always looking for ways to move on. And then I just want to address this one, Jake Fever. That wasn't the best advice. It was the fucking worst advice. That's why they say not financial advice,

but giving advice. Don't buy because it looks like people going to buy. That's dumb AF. Jake, we're talking about as traders, not as investors. We're trading on a chart. It means you're going to also sell. If your intention is to buy and hold it forever as an investment, then this is terrible advice we're giving. We're being very clear. You're trading it on a chart. You have a target. You have a stop loss. You're exiting. That's when the narrative doesn't matter, just to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, you know what you said about the wealth effect, exactly what I was getting at the beginning there. You have a new type of money coming in and the ETFs that are going to continue to propel Bitcoin further, as well as some other stuff, you know, other people.

But like you're saying, that's what I was talking about, the DGNs, the crypto bros, whatnot, they're going to cycle out, right? You make money in Bitcoin, you cycle it out in alts, you make money in alts, you cycle it back into Bitcoin. But those, I think, are still going to have to buy Bitcoin higher as it's going there. As far as terrible advice, yeah, sorry, Jake. I understand you don't get it. It's okay, man.

I've been doing this about 30 years now. I've been quite successful in crypto since 2017. I don't worry about fundamentals. I never really talk about the ETF for the first thing I've talked about just because people need to understand it's a different type of money coming into the, to the Bitcoin. But again, that doesn't mean that you don't get people still cycling, you know again wealth effect making the money in bitcoin cycling into alts coming back so um you know i understand people aren't going to get it but man oh man people need to take a break right they need to relax and ask a question rather than get all bent out of shape doesn't help themselves any um if you don't understand something guys ask ask don't don't uh i'm not gonna go okay anyway um yeah so um i got celsius usdt here um and so this one man this one's got some great lower or higher lows here into resistance

so you know kind of if you're thinking about big or Ethereum, right? Wow. Now you're really going to trigger them. Celsius token. But it is what it is, right? It's a chart. People trade FTT. But it is, you know, again, you've got clearly higher lows into this resistance here, this low volume node in this orange range. Man, I see a breakthrough that I see an easy target of 55 cents. We're at 2396 right now. If you hate Celsius, if you lost some money with it, you want to go shove it in their face. Maybe you get involved in it. I don't know. That's up for you to decide. Or maybe you weren't a part of it and you decide, hey, it's a

chart worth chart trading. There you go. But, you know, this is I bring this up because people get very married emotionally to what they think about markets and what they think about specific projects and coins and stuff like that. And at the end of the day, as I always say, a rising tide lifts all ships generally. And Bitcoin is that rising tide. And if Bitcoin is rally, if it's a Bitcoin bull market, generally speaking, your alts, whether you like them or not. I'm not a fan of BCH or BSV. All right. I won't trade them just because I don't like the people that created them. Right. But that doesn't mean they won't go up. They're going to go up and they're, you know, sometimes even outperforming or often outperforming Bitcoin. But it is what it is. You know, markets are markets. People are people and nothing changes

no matter the market. Whether it's Forex, whether it's futures, whether it's equities, whether it's crypto, whatever it is. Yeah. All right. What else? We got four minutes. I pulled up the XRP charts and you said I needed to bring it up here.

Sorry. It's in the title and we got to talk about it. Basically, I've got this xrp charts you said i needed to bring it up here i'm sorry it's it's in the title and uh you know we gotta talk about it um basically i've got this as a one and a two here working its way up ultimately based on this we need a breakout above uh a dollar 41 1.4162 if we do that that's going to say okay wave three's in progress um that'll That'll get us up higher than most people probably want to think. It's just been a lot of, I mean, the trend is up clearly, low, high, higher, low, higher, high, higher, low, potentially a higher low here looking for a higher high. If we zoom out here toward the weekly, you can see that we're right here around this weekly pivot.

So really what I'm looking for at the moment here, I want to see a nice impulsive breakup kind of above this 75 cent area. I want to see a nice impulsive breakout to follow through with the apparent. It looks like it's finding support on the pivot here. There is still people selling, as you can see here, coming in. But we did get kind of caught here without dropping too low, you know, at this previous resistance as support there. So, again, looking for an impulsive breakout. If we can get that, there's little reason to believe we're not going to at least test, you know, locally here this this dollar 96 and a half level. Um, and you know, as far as the weekly goes again, doing that, you'd probably end up running through the R5 at $2 and 23, 25

cents at least, but that really opens up the much bigger move. We just got to get that first. And again, that, that main area we're looking for as far as the count goes is this, uh, dollar point one, four, uh, four, one, six162 area there. You really want to break out above that. But I mean, it doesn't look terrible as it is right now. We've got, it looks like some accumulation going on here. We've got a great bit of volume dropping off as we're doing it. We just want to see some bigger candles,

see some volume expansion as we kind of break out through this area here to kind of seal that in as done as a reaccumulation area right here continuing up. So people love to hate XRP. They have for many years now. But again, like the Celsius chart, you know, if you don't like it, don't trade it. That's fine. But don't assume because you don't like it that it's not going to do something or because you don't think it should or because you don't think it makes any or because you don't think it makes any sense or because the government is doing this or that, that it'll do it. The charts kind of show you the way, but most people don't really learn that. So it's hard. It's hard to believe it.

Yeah. I totally, totally agree, man. I guess we ran out of time. I know you probably had more, but we got to go. I have to ask you about one more very important thing. I asked you, I saw this on CNBC, owning cryptocurrency may make you more desirable on the dating scene. Either this is accurate or this is propaganda. I say propaganda. It's written by Jessica Dickler. I love that. You know, I'm not going to comment on that, but yeah, you know, what do I think? Sure. Why not? Wealth makes you more desirable in the dating scene. Right. And if people attribute crypto to wealth, then yeah, I don't see why that doesn't work. Don't go around telling people how much crypto you own, folks. They'll come find you.

They'll come find you. They're not going to get you. I posted that and I tagged my wife and she said, and I can't even find it, but she basically said, I don't think they like me for my crypto. I think she flipped it on us that girls own crypto too. We forget that. We assume this is all about men,

but what about the attractive women who own crypto? Anyways, guys, that's all we got for you today. Obviously, Crypto Town Hall in 15 minutes on Spaces and then this afternoon trading alpha with Wick. Give TX West Capital a follow on the Twitter machine. Check out everything he's got. Check out Debbie, the sponsor. And that's it.

We got to go. 10 a.m. Thanks, Chris. Thanks. Let's go.