Unchained - Bits + Bips: Debate: Is Trump’s Memecoin a Gift or a Grift? - Ep. 769

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

This week, Trump’s memecoin launch had everyone talking—and scrambling for Phantom wallets. But was it a strategic masterstroke or just another speculative frenzy? On this episode of Bits + Bips, the hosts unpack the wild moments of the Crypto Ball, where $TRUMP made its surprise debut. They discuss how Bitcoin maxis were forced to embrace Solana wallets, why Multicoin Capital emerged as the biggest winner, and whether the memecoin launch signals a local market top. Plus, they debate whether Trump’s crypto-friendly stance could shape policy in 2025, why Litecoin might beat Solana to a spot ETF, and what Trump’s inauguration speech reveals about his crypto game plan. Show highlights: 0:58 What Ram can tell us about his experience at the Crypto Ball  3:39 How Ram was so surprised when the $TRUMP coin dropped in the middle of the event 7:51 What will happen with the 80% of $TRUMP that Trump holds 8:51 Why Ram believes Multicoin Capital was the biggest winner of $TRUMP dropping 10:14 Whether the coin was “gift or grift” 17:07 How the $Melania coin was the Trumps shooting themselves in the foot 19:37 How the launch of the coin is a “major win” for Solana 22:49 Whether ETH can have a comeback as the “TradFi chain” 35:28 How the market would react to the lack of a strategic bitcoin reserve mention 43:28 What executive orders Trump could deliver for the crypto industry 48:47 Alex’s experience with the pump and dump of a fake Barron Trump memecoin 53:41 What was notable from Trump’s inauguration speech 56:28 Whether rate cuts in December were a mistake and whether more are coming 1:05:51 Why James believes that Litecoin has more chances than Solana for a spot ETF 1:08:41 Whether the launch of $TRUMP will mark a local top for the markets Hosts: James Seyffart, Research Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence Alex Kruger, Founder of Asgard Ram Ahluwalia, CFA, CEO and Founder of Lumida Noelle Acheson, Author of the “Crypto Is Macro Now” Newsletter  Links Saylor’s parody account’s tweet recounted by Alex  Meme recounted by Noelle Vitalik on changing the EF leadership Josh Stark’s tweet on how the EF “uses Ethereum” Paper on DeFi that Alex talked about: Christopher J Waller: Centralized and decentralized finance - substitutes or complements? Polymarket: Will Trump create Bitcoin reserve in first 100 days? Unchained:  Trump Appoints Crypto-Friendly Mark Uyeda as Acting SEC Chair Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Goes on Token Buying Spree Trump Picks Pham as Acting CFTC Chair Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The stuff that happened this weekend with the meme coin launches and Trump, world literally financial, which we didn't talk about, did buy a whole bunch of Ethereum and Bitcoin and sell some of their coins this weekend, millions and millions of dollars. So that was interesting. But I also like this feels like something that happened. If the top was in, like it would make sense to be like, we're going to, we'll look back this eight months from now and be like, how could we have not have seen Trump launching two meme coins as not being the top?

Hi, everyone. Welcome to bits and bips. exploring how crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. I'm your host, James Safert, Tradfai Archmaister, Lord of Bloomberg's End, here with Rahmalaala, Maister of Wealth, Leader of Lumida. Hey, how's it going, everyone? Also joined by Noel Acheson, high seer and keeper of the Crypto is macro now newsletter. Hello, everyone. Yeah, we're here to discuss the latest stories in the worlds of crypto and macro. Just remember that nothing we say here is investment nights. Please check unchained crypto.com slash bibs and bips for more disclosures. All right, I figure the best way to get

started here is just to get straight into the juicy social gossip side of things here in the crypto world, which there's a lot of it going on in the last week. So, Rob, you were actually at the Crypto Ball, which was the event of the, I don't know, the year so far, I guess. It's pretty early on. So why don't you give us a rundown of who is there, any sort of topics you want to talk about what you learned, what you saw, and then we'll go from there. And who you met, and who you met, want to hear that too. Look, an incredible three days. So Friday was a day that Gensler walked out of the SEC. So they have this event called the Crypto Ball in D.C. About 500 attendees. And some of the attendees include the entirety of Trump's economic team.

So Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnik was there. The all-in crew was there. The Winklevoss twins, Ryan Selkis, Don Jr., governor of the interior. Coinbase executives were there too. Michael Sankle, Taylor, Nathan from Anchorage. Really was an incredible grouping of people in this one rotone. You almost think they kind of needed like a designated survivor for that audience. Satoshi wasn't there. So Satoshi was a designated survivor.

And no, it was really well done. Shout out to David Bailey for organizing this. I learned quite a few things. So one of the things I learned was Trump's orange pill. Now, if you recall in 2016, Trump wasn't a Bitcoin guy. So the three conversations that happened. One was, I guess Paul Manafort had an initial kind of introduction to Bitcoin for Donald Trump.

Then Vivek. So Vivek was the guy who really identified Bitcoin and crypto as a community who was underserved. So he was in Puerto Rico and last Feb around the all-time high party shortly after the Bitcoin ETF. And people were airing their grievances. He said, look, this is a community that is a lot. of a voice. So then he talked to Trump. He got on the train. And then that led to an introduction to David Bailey, who's the host of Bitcoin magazine, organized a Bitcoin conference where Trump spoke

in July. Now, initially, Trump wasn't getting any campaign funding for any of this, by the way. So he got behind Bitcoin. And of course, a few months later, Fairshake Pack gets set up. And half of the pack money flows into that. They win nearly every contest where they feel that a candidate, and history has changed. So I learned that. I thought that was really amazing to see how that unfolded. And then in the middle of the event, Trump coin drops. Were people surprised on the ground?

Were there any, was there? There were some people there obviously who had been in on it. But what was the feeling when the word started to spread? I guess some people are internet. I don't know who they were. I mean, we were all surprised. I was going on Twitter with my phone on the one hand and like a martini, another, and there's soldier going in the background.

Okay? This is like a battlefield decision making. This is so crazy. Right? Like you get ADD all around you and you're trying to figure out what to do. So no one really knew what was going on. I'd say there were a handful of people. I got like a tap in the shoulder.

Someone said, hey, you hear about this Trump coin? and then immediately it's like, well, is it real or it's not real? It's like, well, Trump posted it on his true social and then on X. And then on Twitter, I said, yeah, it's legit. And the funny thing is, at the event, they had a photo booth where they had a mini statue of Trump and he had the fight, fight, fight pose, which matched the imagery of the image on deck screener where you can pull up Trump Beamcoin and a match. which is like a weird form of reconciliation and validation.

So that was run of $3 billion market cap. And so then the next day I woke up, had a $6 or $7 billion market cap. I go to coin desk.com just to see what people are saying. And Coin desk says, this is like 8 a.m. Saturday morning, Eastern time, coin desk says they have still not validated whether the coin is real. At this point, I'm like incredibly surprised because this is called a disbelief. rally. People can't get their heads around the idea that a president posted twice on two different counts and they're saying, oh, maybe he got hacked. It's the president of the United States.

Of course it wasn't a hack, but people were waiting for validation and it reminded me of when China started rallying in February and March of 24, all the economic or all the news reports were just bearish in China despite this double-digit rally. I call it like a disbelief rally. and that was incredibly bullish. Yeah. So I'll say Saturday morning, like I was watching this from my couch in front late Friday night. And I was like, oh, it's at six bucks. I guess I'd miss the train on this one.

Was wrong there, first of all. But second of all, by like when I saw stuff of people doubting whether it was real, like, when I like late in the early in the morning and then like also Saturday morning, I was like, this is definitely real. Like this like I don't like I don't, I'm not, I'm not going to like go out there. I'm pretty damn confident that this is actually from Trump's team. And then you had like Trump, Trump Jr. tweeting his stuff out. I was like, do you really think all of these accounts got hacked? And like, I was like, there's no way.

Like if that, there's, we have a whole bunch of other issues. If these were all hacked by a bunch of crypto guys and they launched some crazy coins. But yeah, here we are. It's easy to know why. It's easy to see why people were skeptical at first, though, because, I mean, the SEC got hacked and we believed that when we saw it. So, you know, we've been burned on that before. So it's understandable and wise to doubt what we see.

But when he's tweeting it from both of his accounts, it felt real. I think also the disbelief comes from this can't be happening. I think people can't process it. And I think people thought that maybe Trump had moved on from crypto or Bitcoin. But the reality is crypto got him elected. One of the dominoes along with Elon Musk getting behind him in the summer. And then the Joe Rogan interview altogether, which sealed the deal. So he's giving him back.

There's a lot of discussion around whether it's a grift or a gift. I think it was a gift. I mean, it was a gift. If you got involved, you did well. Of course, people that bought up at the top or no lose money. Everyone knows that. But, you know, if you're doing sports betting or you're buying a lottery ticket, that's a negative expected value game.

Or if you play blackshed at casino, this is a multiplayer game where you have a chance to exercise your skill and process information potentially in a different way than someone else and have a different outcome and you bear the full risk and benefit and burden of your decisions. So, you know, he owns 80%, or some wallet owns 80% of the fully diluted value of that. We don't know what's going to happen. There was some speculation that he might air drop to the inauguration attendees, which would be wild. There's so much he could do with that. The first unlock doesn't come until April, but you hit the nail on the head there. We know what is locked up. We know when the unlocks are coming. I mean,

insider trading or insider allocations are not new. They're not unique to crypto either. Most of the time they're under the table. We don't even really know what's going on. This is above board. All the information anyone needed to trade these things was in the public domain. And yet so many out there are saying, this isn't good for crypto because it shouldn't happen. But crypto is all about nobody gets to decide other than the market within the galley.

It's crypto because it can happen. And, you know, in crypto as in nature, if it can happen, it will happen. I agree. Well said. And Alex is going to like this. So this crypto ball had a broad representation of people across the spectrum. But there was a lot of Bitcoin people there. And Michael Saylor was there.

A lot of Bitcoin maxis. So this Trump meme coin launches on Solana. So unless you had a phantom wallet with cash, because it dropped after banking hours. You couldn't move money around. So to participate, you had to have a phantom wallet, and it was a gift to that community. So the biggest win coming out of this is Solana and Multicoin specifically, and Kyle and Tushar. And here's why. In 2016, the biggest winner was Peter Thiel betting on Trump, a non-consensus bet that went in the money.

The biggest winner in this was multi-coin. They contributed to Trump's campaign, whatever the statutory limits, and they maxed that out, I believe. And they returned that many, many times. And they had a massive onboarding event led by the president of the United States. And they forced Bitcoin maxis to get on board a Solana. A lot of faces melted at that event and the day after. That is an interesting take. I didn't know that about multi-coin donating heavily to his campaign.

Makes a lot of sense now. pieces falling into place. I mean, also, I mean, Solano has been the meme coin place, right? For like, I feel like even if you're in Ethereum Maxi, you kind of accepted the fact that meme coins have moved to Solana. I feel like if Joe were here, he'd be talking about this is like a way to test the system. And Salana really got tested. There were some issues which we can get into there.

But I want to keep diving into this. I guess Alex is here now. So Alex Cruz is joining us. There's a lot of people out there who think this is like the worst possible thing in the world. It's really bad. I mean, honestly, I think we can get into the Melania token drop as well a little bit. But I mean, overall, my view is kind of nuance here.

I don't think it's the worst thing in the world. For the most part, this is a zero-sum game. People who are trading these meme coins who had Salana to do this, for the most part, know that this is like, you're gambling here. You're gambling with this. This is not like people telling people like, you know, buy and old Bitcoin, things like that. One of my good friends from the Tradify world, Nate Geraci said, Bitcoin Maxis often say Bitcoin, not crypto.

And he was like, I'm here saying Bitcoin and Crypto. crypto, but not meme coins. Like, this is not like, these are separate things. Like, you're using this decentralized financial ecosystem to essentially gamble on these things. It's a lottery ticket in a way. But that doesn't take away from the underlying ecosystem and technology is there. And I think we're going to see a whole bunch of thought pieces about how Bitcoin is dead because it shows this whole thing is stupid. And I've already seen some of those takes on my.

And it was the same thing with NFTs out there. Bitcoin is dead. NFTs are dumb. This whole thing is stupid. They're going to see so many things out there like this. So I find more new. once, I feel like this is a little bit grifting. I don't know if I fall more on the grifting side than the gifting side, but I'm not nearly as, you know, clutching my pearls like a grandmother at

what's going on here. I think Trump knows exactly what he's doing and what audience he's playing with. And this is Trump. I mean, again, we can complain that someone who was, you know, someone who was entering the Office of the President of the United States was doing things that aren't appropriate. This is Trump. What did we expect? You know, I do want to say there is the word grifting. I think the word grifting is a little bit too strong. Yeah, that's fair. But it's not you. It's like everybody uses, like there's a thing that we do on Twitter where basically we spend too much time talking among ourselves and among the with the same people. And it's interesting. We eventually end up acquiring the language of others. And we end up with our own little language,

right? That it means something different that it means in the real world. So we end up with all these different words that we didn't have before, right? Especially for those in crypto. And one is the use of the word grifting. Grifting is, by definition, is a fraudulent act of basically taking money by deceiving. Or the word ponzi, we call everything a ponzi, right? But it's actually very, very, it's incorrectly used, a poncy. Ponsz scheme is something where in which it's a process in which someone takes money from other people by lying and deceiving about how the money is being used.

So there is a pyramid component in most coins. But they're not really Ponzi's, right? Same thing. Or like everybody's talking about crime season right now. And I find it appalling, to be honest, because. You're right. It's kind of like everybody has accepted that it's crime season and we're all here for the crime. And it's just so bad.

It reflects so cool in us. I think it's envy. People that were caught off sides, they want it to burn, right? Like Bellagie had a quote and the first sentence he says is, the downside risk is tremendous. He didn't participate. You know, people want it to burn. Look, the stratified people judged. Bitcoin Maxis, because they didn't participate, then the Bitcoin Maxis judge the meme coins because

they didn't participate. But if you have a stake in the outcome and you did well, well, your brain finds a way to be okay with it. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. And they're saying that this should not be what crypto is about. Again, they're missing the point because there's no elite that gets to decide what crypto should be.

Crypto is what it is within the bounds of the law. Yeah, crypto is whatever it wanted to be. Absolutely. It's a technology at the end. There were startups building monetization engines for personal brands. Like clout came out 10 years ago. It didn't go anywhere. The idea that you could link to your social media monetize that A16Z backed a Twitter

competitor where they attracted celebrities that can monetize their quote unquote clout. It turns out that product market fit for monetization of personal brand is taking place via meme coins on Flana. That turns out that that's where product market fit occurred. And it's a really cool idea, really, when you think about it. I mean, sure, mean coins are gambling, but they're not just gambling. They're also gambling infused with culture, with community. Everyone around the world this weekend got a chance to bet on Trump's popularity, which, let's face it, given the timing, is a pretty safe bet.

Who knows how long that'll go on for? Who knows what else is going to be coming out, waiting for the barren coin. But it is gambling mixed with community, which is not a closest would be sports gambling, I guess. I mean, some people enjoy going to a casino's, but there's no character really to that sports gambling probably comes closer than the craps table to the mean coin phenomenon. But it's a really cool idea and we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the innovation that can be built around this. There's no one to stop anyone anywhere in the world building apps that can accept Trump coin for either yield or converting it to an NFT with a certain smart contract or

giving access to metaverse events. We don't yet know where this is going, but Trump has put this on the mainstream table. I think that's a very big step forward. I think this is all part of like the attention economy, right? Like this is just another, this is almost like financialization of the attention economy in a way that I think about it. I don't know that I love it. Like I'm not personally somebody that's out there trading and buying and dealing with meme coins, but I kind of get it. But yeah, I guess my question would be, so that was my view in the Trump thing. And I also think a lot of people saying crime and all this stuff, but like they disclosed everything.

They said who owns it. They said when it's going to be unlocked. So we know all that. So I view some of the other issues with these meme coin launches, celebrity launches, where they just rug everyone immediately, which at least that's not what happened here, as far as I can tell what I've seen. So that'll be interesting to watch. But like, what are you guys' thoughts more on, you know,

them doubling down, which obviously it was a different group. Like I saw a whole bunch of threads out there about what happened with the Melania drop. That was like way more last minute, way more, you know, I don't know who was actually involved. Maybe that was Barron. He was like he saw what happened with Trump coin and just figured everything and did the same thing for Malania coin. But what are your guys' thoughts on them like just, you know, fully doubling down and really leading into this and dropping a Malaniacorn? It was a broad orchestration. And they shot themselves in the foot.

because what a rally going is sustained attention. And by launching Melania token, people rotated from Trump token to Melania token. And the second pump is never as good as the first pump. So it was a mistake. And I'm sure they I'm sure they regret that. Trump token would be doing a lot better but for that maneuver. There was a joke by a sailor that I thought it was quite spot on. I mean, I think it's the first time I ever see Saylor joke on Twitter.

And the joke, I'm fighting it right now because it's just way too good. Briefly on the meme coins, one way to think about this is I saw this other post on Twitter. It says, imagine a George Forman grill, the value of a George Forman grill. Now, remove the grill. That's what the meme coin is. That's what a meme coin is. Now, is it worth $7 billion FTV? No, of course not.

but no one no one told you to go buy it yeah and it comes down to the what is value anyway it's what the market will pay exactly hey i i used to use the george fridman girl pretty regularly when i was younger it had a lot of utility to me for $36 at the fdv on that or what you know as the non-american here i don't even know what one is i'm going to go and look it up as soon as we get off okay the joke is it's actually a part of the account so that makes it It wasn't sailing. It actually launched it. It says,

When you support your wife's business, knowing it will cost more than it will earn. But hey, keeping the piece at home is worth every penny. There are a picture of the chart, basically collapsing 40% in... Keeping the piece at home. In five minutes.

There are so many funny memes with Baron Trump showing Trump, like the iPhone, have you seen this? There should be like a top 10 list of the baron memes. Like, look, if you have 80% of $65 billion. Yeah.

And the other one I saw, which was, here's your phone back, Dad. Thanks very much. Mom, can I just look at something on your computer quickly? Right. So, I mean, all of this sent Solana to all-time highs. I mean, if you look at the amount of volume that just went on those deckses, the amount of transactions that happened, there were a lot of failed transactions. I have multiple people who have, like, dabbled in Solana and they're really not involved in

crypto too much that, like, went out of the way to try and buy this and they're like, why are my transactions failing asking me for help? I'm like, I'm not the expert to be helping this, but you probably need to pay up a little bit more in your transaction fees and things like that. So there's all this stuff out there, you know, about how many requests there were. I mean, to be to be honest, it did handle it pretty well. It didn't go down. It just looks like there were a lot of issues with different things on the Solana ecosystem. So, I mean, if we're really going to onboard billions of people to doing these types of transactions, I think this kind of showed that the tech isn't fully ready yet, but they are showing

tremendous improvement over the last few years, particularly with Solana. Do you guys have any thoughts on what this means for Solana specifically? I mean, we've talked about this before. It's kind of like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana seem to be the three things that have kind of pulled away here. And I think this just solidifies that even more in my mind specifically. What are your guys' thoughts on Solana? Alex, I agree.

It's literally the only two things I'm bullish about right now. What two things? Bitcoin and Solana to put a... Yeah. It's an incredible win for Solana. As we talked about earlier, at the Crypto Ball, the president put his personal brand in a Solana meme coin that ran up to tens of billions of dollars.

And we don't know what he's going to do with that. He might apparently use it to pay off the U.S. national debt. He might air drop. So it'll still be in the news. And it, I believe, will have more longevity than most. meme coins because it's the president's meme coin. I'm not saying buy here or sell it here. We got in, we got out yesterday. But it's a major, major win for Solana. I had a chance to catch up with Kyle at the crypto ball. He was in a joyful mood, I suppose, to be the right adjective. He was in good

spirits. So we don't know what Trump will do. Trump could burn the key to the 80%. We don't know. A lot of things he could do to keep this interesting. But, you know, I agree. I think Solana is just a big, big winner here. And there's some other comments on Twitter around, I think Ryan Selkis made a comment around Vitalik and saying, like, he, you know, needs to be more testosterone, more masculine, something like that to that effect. Again, with the vibe, like a vibe rehab.

Like, you know, it's, you know, I think that is, that's where it is now. Tactically, I think what happens here really depends on. what is in the executive order? Because right now, crypto asset prices, including Solana, are priced for very favorable executive order, right? The EEO needs to have the term strategic Bitcoin Reserve. If it doesn't have that term, then I expect that you get correction. If it does have that term, then it depends on the context around it. Does it say, explore the development of, or does it say establish? Before we do get to the Bitcoin Reserve stuff, because again, for everyone who's listening,

We're recording this on the 20th, so literally the day of Trump's inauguration. So apparently today and tomorrow we should see a whole bunch of executive orders. But I want to go back to the Vitalik thing real quick because he put this long Twitter thread out there. And I feel like I've been hearing for like four years on Twitter, people saying we need to change the way the Ethereum foundation is run. It's not doing enough. All it does is sell Ethereum and like all these things out there. And I think they are probably worried about being like using whatever Ethereum foundation was against them into saying Ethereum was security. So I will give them a little bit of a benefit of the down on that front.

But Vitalik is like out here basically saying they're planning to change a lot of different things here. I guess we'll see. Do you guys have any more like this goes to what you were talking about with Rom with like what Ryan Selkis said? I saw Nick Carter say some things along the same lines. The Ethereum Foundation seems to be extremely idealistic, which is something I've heard Joe on this podcast talk about like they're not pragmatic enough about different things. They're super idealistic about the way things should operate rather than like kind of just going out and doing things right now. Do you guys have any thought? Do you think this is a positive thing for Ethereum and the Ethereum Foundation?

I know Alex, you said the only thing you were bullish on right now is Bitcoin and Solana. Do you have any complex thoughts on this? Does this actually matter on anything for Ethereum in your view? I'm just going to quote a tweet by Josh Tark. Basically, he works for Ethereum Foundation, right? To keep it simple. And it says Ethereum Foundation uses Ethereum all the time. He's being asked basically on Twitter, like, you know, use,

does the Ethereum Foundation use the chain? And he replies. The Ethereum Foundation uses Ethereum all the time. For instance, one, swap ETH for stables, usually cowswap. Two, to pay people, grantees, team members, instables, and ETH. And three, we run events like DevCon and DevConnect and we pay for them on chain. And basically the three use cases are to. dump ease.

So I would say, I'll say this. Look, crypto is about momentum assets and momentum assets need attention. That's their velocity. And Solana has it. Bitcoin has it. And that's certainly consensus now. The play for Ethereum is to be Tradfai chain, which is a weird way to say it. Because Ethereum was about going bankless, but it's actually to bank trotfy, right?

If there's a chain that can handle decentralized settlement without a. counter party risk, you know, there's an opportunity around Ethereum there. So it could be an institutional play. So I wouldn't dismiss that. And there's a lot of capital and a lot of motivated parties around Ethereum. And Ethereum is a very broad ecosystem. So if Solanis is as decentralized as Ethereum in, say, five years, why would anybody use Ethereum?

just just you know rhetorical question or food for thought i mean i i can give you like my the way i think about i mean if honestly if if everyone wants to have their own l2s and they've really set up a way to you know um expand the usability and um i'm trying to i'm blanking on the word but essentially to uh increase the throughput via layer two's i mean that's if every like if if you're Black Rock and you can launch your own Blacklock layer two and Ethereum is set up to scale, scales the word I was looking for it, to scale using that way. I mean, there's plenty of reasons why people would want to use Ethereum for finalized settlement and things like that.

But if it's really easy and really efficient to build L2s on there and you can stay decentralized, I think that's like a definitive use case that we're already seeing now, you know, base, what have you. So, I mean, most of DFI still happens on Ethereum. That would be the bullish case. I wish Joe were here to really tell me how stupid I am. I think you're right. Look, defy on chain is a great opportunity for Ethereum, banking on chain, payments on chain,

institutional activity on chain. But Solana got the correct general North Star, which is applications. Get apps working, make it easy for users to onboard, which any entrepreneur going through Ycom, and that's what you learn day one, is make the user happy and then work backwards. versus the incredible amount of focus on the merge, the verge, the plurge, the spurge, the plurge, highly technical. Beam chain. All right.

Highly technical ideas and like ultrasound money, which is, it's trying to position against Bitcoin, but at the same time trying to crowd out Ethereum and getting caught in the middle. So, but they do need to refocus. And I thought Vitalik's refocusing is a step in the right direction. I agree. And I'm much more skeptical about. Tradfi going onto Ethereum than you are around because they just see the regulatory hurdles are huge. I mean, just even in the information structure, I don't see the regulators being comfortable.

Unfortunately, and I say very big, unfortunately, I do see Ethereum being right now, again, depending on what happens in five years, as Alex points out, I see it as being the network for DFI. And yes, we will see tradfi start to experiment with defy, but there are big regulatory holders just for data collection, really hard to get to be on that. The CEO of Fireblocks, for those I don't know, it runs the leading institutional multi-sig MPC wallet. So Michael is his name, and he's at the party. This crypto ball had lots of insights.

It's awesome like this. So I pulled them aside. I said, hey, what's the pipeline look like? And he said, the banks are back. The institutions are back. The pipeline is there. And the regulation is going to change. In 2016, Trump put in Brian Brooks, the former.

head of legal at Coinbase. They're going to get a crypto-friendly bank regulator. They already have a libertarian poll running the SEC. So all that stuff is going to go away and people are going to get on board. But one thing is getting on board in terms of holding the assets and offering services to clients who want to hold the assets for investment purposes, totally see that coming and fast. Another thing is the whole of tradfai markets going on chain and thinking all tokenized assets there's going to be everything. The organization is going to take over tradfai markets. That is more complicated.

I do think we're going to see Tradfai using stable coins once we get stable coin regulation in the US, but it's the Tradfai markets moving on chain that I do see more problematic. Because regulation isn't going to help unless there is a concerted global effort to be able to harness some of the advantages here. And right now everyone's building on the private chains, unfortunately, because that is something they can do. I think it's enterprise versus consumer. Salon is very well positioned with consumer and gaming and high-speed throughput and delighting

user experiences and Ethereum is going after enterprise and, you know, start with taking out the DTCC or the options clearing corp or State Street or custody banks, bank in New York, Mellon, et cetera. So, you know, there are paths to travel there. Yeah, and we're starting to see that. I mean, Luxembourg passed a law just a few couple of weeks ago in which they're starting to remove the middlemen that regulation has. mandated still duplicate processes in the Tradfied Wales, even when they are talking about tokenized

securities. But Ethereum is still the network for that because of its broad, broad, broad ecosystem, including the layer twos. However, as Alex points out, five years from now, who knows whether Solana will have caught up? Who knows if we'll even be seeing Solana L2s, although that doesn't make much sense, but it's the flexibility that we have to keep an eye on and also the development of bridges, because I doubt we're going to end up with just one monolith. You know, there is also plenty of competing chains that can deliver the technology for anybody to build their custom chains. It doesn't have to be an Ethereum L2 or L3.

They could even work with even Ethereum players like Arbitrum or the Hederas, Algorithm, Ripples. There are so many players out there. I just don't see the Ethereum mode. And by the way, I do want to say, it's like, I'm, like, you know, I do hold some eth, right? It's not that I'm derrish, but I'm just not excited about it. I think there's going to be a trade this year at some point, which is going to be around the ETFs staking. And it's going to be very fast and rabbit.

But that being said, yeah. I think one thing to do is take a step back, given so much hype that has happened in the last three days. And I got the inauguration. I imagine we'll get there in a moment. but the thing about Trump is you get these accelerated rallies, these compressed rallies. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. I think we may have accelerated closer to towards the intermediate top because of just that, that pump and animal spirits.

I want to see liquidity come back now Tuesday. Yeah, I just would say, I tend to be with. Noelle. I'd like that these people, a lot of people think like everything used to be tokenized on the blockchain in like four years. But I'm with ROM though. I think things are going to change rapidly. I mean, I know for a fact, some of these big banks, big Tradify firms put a lot of work on the back end years ago to start doing custody, start doing things on chain that were basically, they were forced to stop. They were literally told they can't do it. So like there was a lot of money that sunk into this. They'd be probably, they kept on to all of it. Now things are going to change.

I'm assuming if SAB 121 isn't out by executive order by the time this podcast comes out, it's going to go through the House and Senate again, it'll be done. So you're going to see banks come on chain. We already see BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Wisdom Tree, Vanek, all these Trad 5 firms that are already doing things in both directions. They're building those bridges. And they've been testing some of the stuff for a long time in many cases, like where they're, you know, doing stuff with DTCC and all these things and a transfer agents, but also using the blockchain at the same time to make sure they don't have any issues using the blockchain. And so far, as far as I'm aware, everything's been good.

So I think all this stuff, people are building towards this on the back end. How long does it take before like a lot of these, you know, ecosystems are set up to handle all of Tradfai stuff? I don't know. But I think it is happening. It is. What is happening and where the excitement comes from is that we're starting to see new things built on blockchain, which is the whole point.

I mean, what's the point really of replicating traditional. markets on this new technology. It's much like uploading PDFs in the early days of the internet. It's cool, but it's not what we really can do. What we're seeing is tokenized money market funds now whipping around like money and being used in collateral in new types of application. That's the kind of new stuff and only scratching the surface of the new stuff, as face it, that we're here for. Why try and repeat what has been done pretty efficiently elsewhere? Blockchains about doing things that we haven't been able to do before. Yeah, so I have a piece in front of me by by Fed Governor Waller

from this is from October and it's I think it's exactly on the topic and it's a Fed governor so it's very relevant it's a piece titled centralized and decentralized

finance substitutes or compliments and he basically talks about like a few bullet points defy what is defy defy enabled a blockchain smart contracts and tokenization allows trading without

intermediaries promoting in transparency and control without reducing reliance on trust. Then he explores complementary use cases and goes something like technologies like distributed leisure technology DLT and smart contracts can improve centralized finance by enhancing record keeping, reducing settlement risks, and enabling faster transactions. Then he goes on onto stable coins, limitations of DFI, regulatory risk, et cetera, but this is a governor covering in a very, very clear and specific way how centralized finance, the current banking system can incorporate and benefit from Defi. And it's out there. It's fascinating.

All right. Let's go back to what Rob kind of mentioned before with the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. I mean, Trump just got inaugurated, gave a speech. We saw a few different speeches. I didn't listen to all of them. But, I mean, there was no mention of Bitcoin or crypto at all in what he said. So one, I want to go back to what Ron was saying. And if he does do some sort of Bitcoin stockpile, strategic reserve, or does nothing, what do you think the impact is of that on the market? I mean, my personal view is, I think the market is, for the most part, I don't think the market is fully expecting like an actual Bitcoin reserve.

I think a lot of people think they're going to have, do this through, you know, the, the currency stabilization exchange actor. I don't remember exactly what it is. But Alex, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Like if he just says, we're going to hold the Bitcoin that we already hold, aka like the Silk Road Bitcoin, do you think that sends Bitcoin down? Or do you think that's kind of what people are expecting and anything above that sends Bitcoin going wild?

Like what are your overall thoughts on, you know, what we could see here from Trump on the SBR? Well, it kind of like already happened. The market dropped 5% on the speech and the absence of any mention of SBR. Polymarket odds or basically priced in probabilities dropped from 65% last night to, I think, like 37% right now. That being said is any, I think if he delivers on basically creating a strategic reserve or stockpile, called it with pre-existing coins held by the government, which is not that simple. It requires some legal finessing. I think it would be extremely bullish. I think we should shut up, straight up to 115, 120, very fast. The order book is very liquid at the moment up here.

Volatility is very high. We've been like doing ping pong between 100 and 110 in the last few days. we're basically waiting for those executive orders, right? Yeah. I think if there is such a mention, we're going to go up very, very fast. And unfortunately, if there is none, it's going to be exactly the opposite. And we are going straight back down. I think then we're going to be seeing 85K pretty quick. We're going to know very soon.

So be ready to act. He's going to mention Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. I think that's a high probability. I don't think the market's pricing that incorrectly. By the way, there's three different bets on polymarket around the Bitcoin reserve. Will there be any in 2025? And the question is going to be like, what's the nature of the reserve, right? Is it an order or an instruction not to sell Bitcoin reserve and move the existing holdings into a Bitcoin reserve?

I think that is my base case. I expect that at the very least. If he doesn't do that, then yeah, I think I'll be. Alex is right. It sells off. If he does more than that in the structure to accumulate, I don't think he does that. I don't think he will do that. But if he were to do that, well, hey, it's lights out. I mean, that's like, it's a good game, game over. See, guys, Bitcoin 150, right? You know, but I don't think that's going to happen. But it's, you know, everything's going to run in the next 24 hours. The question is going to be, supposing the strategic Bitcoin

Reserve is mentioned. And suppose, it's established, not merely explore. Explore is not that interesting. Supposing it's established, and you do get that run up to like 107, 110 plus, then what do you do? Is it going to sustain, or do you fade it? Because what's happened is the last three to four key events, the move was to fade those rallies. When Gensler resigned, Bitcoin rallied, when the new SEC chair, was appointed, Bitcoin rallied, et cetera, et cetera. But it's been trading in this range from the low 90s to the kind of mid-100s. Another question is, can he say that even or does it need Senate approval? The sensible thing would be to use the word explore because he's going to need political

support here. Can he say what? Can he say what exactly? He can say, don't sell it and I'm going to put it in this thing called the Bitcoin Reserve. Why not? Why can he say that? I have no idea. Again, I'm a genuine question here. Is it something that he can do via executive order or unilateral action or does he need political support? I don't see why not. You can ask the GPT. We can fact check there.

But he just comes up. He gives a label to a container of Bitcoin, right? So I think he will deliver. He will deliver. Like, if he set up a Trump meme coin on the inauguration, which was a face melt and beyond kind of the Overton window of many people's expectations, then you should expect something around a strategic Bitcoin reserve in this executive order.

Yeah. I mean, the one way that he could do it without anything from Congress, based on what I've heard from people who do this are much smarter than me, is use the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which is through the Department of the Treasury. And basically, you could say you're doing it to stabilize the U.S. dollar. Like typically the asset holds as dollars, foreign currencies and some other different things in there. And you could argue, I guess, theoretically, that Bitcoin is a foreign currency.

might be able to swing it in there. So that's the one way I've heard that he could sort of unilaterally actually go out and buy Bitcoin. And that would be through, you know, Besson running the treasury. I don't know. I tend to lean with Rom. I think my base case is he's basically going to say, I'm doing an EO. We're not selling any of the assets we own at the DOJ or the Marshall's office or wherever

it is. And we're going to hold it. I don't know exactly how that. That's my base case. I think he's going to do something like that. And I think if he does something to actually go out into the market and buy Bitcoin for the U.S. government, I'm with you guys. I think that's, I don't think that's definitely not priced in, and I don't think it should be because I don't think that's going to happen. I'll go

on on the record as saying, I don't think that's happening. I agree with you on all of that. Do we know that the U.S. hasn't already sold some of its stash? There was talk a couple of weeks ago about it moving. Yeah, I mean, I'll go on record here and say there's, I highly doubt it. So it was like, there was like six plus billion dollars that they were like officially cleared to sell. I mean, the way, I mean, theoretically, it's possible. But for the most part, when the U.S. government sells these things, like, they just got cleared to sell it. Like, it's not like they go out and they dump $6 billion. They're not the, you know, the country of Germany. And when they do this, they'll do it in legs and tranches and things like that.

So, one, I think that one, the government moves really slowly, so I don't think it happened. And two, it's just a bad look after Trump is on the campaign trail saying he's going to keep this stuff. And then for the last, like, month of the Biden admin, they go out and dump it, theoretically it's possible, but I wouldn't bet against it. I bet on, you know, government bureaucracy. I don't know if you guys have a different thought. Concur. Ram, was this something that was talked about at the ball that you ever heard? Yes, it was. It was a hot topic at the ball. So, yeah, it was. You know, it seems to be the case that different groups have sent pre-drafted executive orders regarding the Bitcoin Reserve.

So there's an attempt to shape what that looks like. And you've got David Sachs. Again, he hosted this crypto ball. He's undoubtedly in receipt of many of these pre-drafted pieces. And how is that conversation going to play out? Trump is going to say, David, what do you think we should say here? Isn't that how this plays out? You think David's going to be conservative around this?

I don't think David's going to be conservative. All right. So what, what's, let's get into these executive orders that are supposed to be coming down the pipe. Do you guys have any thoughts on what these executive orders are going to be outside of, you know, a Bitcoin Reserve as it relates to crypto or really anything. If you have any hot takes or even cold takes, I'd love to hear him. Alex, do you have any thoughts on like what you're expecting to see him do this week, I guess? Well, not much aside of basically touching upon the promises he's made. There's a few promises. Mrs. He's made that haven't been yet delivered. He's delivered on basically firing Gensler. Day one, not directly, but same thing. He's established an advisory council for crypto that's done. But then things he's specifically talked about that we're basically waiting for

and need clarity on the end of the crypto crackdown. He talked quite a few times about making the U.S. a global crypto capital of the world, whatever that means. supporting the establishing the sBR that we talked about and supporting domestic domestic bitcoin mining so those are the things i think he would he would be touching upon would make sense and what actually what the market is expecting uh and right now moot is so bearish incredibly um that i think if he delivers and all those points even it superficially um the market is going to be very happy.

Yeah, I agree. And commuting the sentence of Ross Ulrich, which is just a sign of good faith. Yeah, I mean, he promised that at the libertarian meetup. So, like, I don't know, I feel like he has to do that. I think, I don't know if he's going to do it. I don't know if he can do it via executive order. But I mean, SAB-121 has got to be gone in the next week. I said that already.

So I feel like that's the one thing that I would add there. I don't really have any other thoughts. I'm going to be watching. I mean, it's going to be fun to watch at the very least over the next weeks, if not years, to see the kind of stuff that comes out of here, whether it relates to crypto or not. Noelle, what are you going to say? The macro stuff does relate to crypto also, though, and this is perhaps a good segue into macro because, as we know, crypto market, especially Bitcoin, very much react to macro animal sentiments,

and they are going to be influenced by whether or not we're going to get big tariffs day one, or whether they're going to be gradual, whether or not they're going to be massive deportations week one or whether they're going to be gradual. This sort of stuff is going to matter for the overall market of which Bitcoin over the weekend has been the only liquid representative. Yeah, it looks like immigration control is going to happen immediately. It's already happening now. They're going to focus on deportations of criminal activity.

The focus on Chicago, sanctuary cities, they want to create a symbol of that. So they're going to triage and prioritize. that's what I'm hearing. On the crypto front, it looks like the SEC will stop in all enforcement actions, except those that are fraudulent. So that's going to happen immediately too. That's going to lead to a proliferation of meme coins, which for the overall market, I would agree, is not the best.

It's a funny timing thing. You know, meme coin proliferation did mark a top in Bitcoin last year, right? other things, obviously energy, he's going to enable permitting and offshore drilling. He's halting electric vehicle mandates. So, you know, these are components of inflation reduction act. So I think that's, you know, that should hurt Tesla, actually, which is kind of funny, how Elon has caught up in this whole thing in multiple different ways. he said in his inauguration speech that there will only be male and female on

recognized by the front by the way like I had to file for passport renewal and it did have a male female I had like this third option I got to find the form I'm like huh so it was it was kind of that's at least one felt way that would be impacted at the very least he he extended kind of a moratorium on banning TikTok he said on Saturday night that the U.S. government would own 50% of TikTok, which is not nothing, right? Met as a trillion-dollar-plus company. TikTok's worth some fraction, hundreds of billions of dollars. I thought it was interesting. It wasn't 51%. It was 50%. But so, yeah, he's going to get a lot done. And the other part is disclosure, right? He

mentioned disclosure Saturday night. He said, we're going to disclose the JFK files, the RFK files, and quote, other matters of great public interest, which I think refers to these UAPs, which he referenced several times that he would provide disclosure around us. So our heads are going to be spinning. Like even more than they already are. What are we going to talk about next Monday?

I have no idea. UAPs, obviously. People are going to be launching a lot of meme coins around those things. Yeah. I like your pair. Alex, I like your pair. I think the baron meme coin is going to outperform too, totally. The baron, I don't know if you guys, can I,

something happened last night, which is kind of like a crypto trenches thing that you don't see much of. It's basically because of the baron thing. In fact, a few minutes after I tweeted about baron, I think it's a coincidence, but still, somebody launches a baron meme coin. And this baron meme coin is rumored. to be backed by by baron himself and i'm looking at that and i'm telling the people who is

shilling it to me or like sharing with me and saying guys this is zero chance this is baron that's a pump and coin like why would you launch why would he launch a pump and coin when he has all the resources in the world you want to control the lp to get the fees you do it right this doesn't make any sense but yeah it's a baron coin is tied to shrekly whatever that's what what people are saying. And suddenly, this was incredible. In like almost no time, I have most of my trading chats that trade min coins, like trenches. Everybody on this baron coin and this thing shoots up to $400 million market cap. You owned it, right? You bought it when the first guy told you, right? No, no, no. I said, no, no, no, no, I did. No, no. It's. Was Melania pumped off

fun or no? No, no. Millennia was not fun fun. Okay. But sheer insanity, everybody's in it. And then suddenly some guy finds out, and then this thing drops basically 80% and at some, a very good researcher puts a tweet online covering why and how exactly this is

basically a farm. And yeah, everybody got scanned. So how long did the pump last? Half a day. Like four hours? Four hours? Interesting. Yeah.

Like absurd like 30, 50X in very high volume. This was really, really massive. So yeah, as usual, people, well, as usual when you get scamp, people lost a lot of money. And by the way, I do just, sorry, I thought this is something I wanted to add on the Trump coin at the beginning. It's true that actually most meme coins are grifts. But the thing about the tram coin is that the launch was extremely well executed. I'm really impressed about how they, yeah, perfect, brilliant execution, hundreds of millions of dollars. It was an immaculate conception meme coin, wasn't it?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's, well, the Hawk 2a thing was different because insiders had the coin and they were dumping. Yep. These guys, they have, so if they cheat and they start dumping inside their coins, then it's a grift. But it hasn't happened yet. It may not happen.

And the allocation, one may hate it, 80% inside their team, whatever. But it was very transparent, you know. So rules of engagement are very clear. And Trump's reputations on the line. I got ragged for saying that. They're like, what do you mean reputation? Like reputation is multifactorial. And Trump is betting on his legacy.

We should shift here to inauguration. I think he's staking his presidency on legacy. That was one of the key themes popping out of his inauguration speech today. Yeah, I was going to say real quick, there was also like one of the Ryan Fournier, he's the chair of the students for Trump and advisor. And like he got pulled into a TikTok rug. And I just want to point out this, I'm pretty sure this quote, like, based on what it seems like is that somebody reached out to him said they were doing this to try to keep TikTok in the U.S. And he literally said, I literally sold because it was good. going down increasingly, I don't know who wouldn't do that.

Which to me is like, I tweeted this out. I was like, that's the new. There were mistakes made in a wallet that I controlled because, I mean, that's just another example. So I think we're going to see that's grifting, right? We're going to see a whole bunch more of that type of stuff. I was grifting. If Trump had done that and Melania had done that, I would be like up in arms with everyone

else. I mean, I don't think it's the greatest look for President Trump to be involved in this. Like, don't you have better things to do? Do you really need the money? But I don't know. I'll let it go. I sit more in the middle ground there. I'm not like super pro like Alex and Ron you seem to be,

but I'm also not negative like I've seen plenty of people on Twitter acting like it's the end of the world. This Ryan guy, you mentioned he dumped 800K on his followers. Yeah. For a couple of tweets, $800,000. Just like that. Oh, it's going down. It's like, yeah, but it's not for you to sell.

You're literally shilling to your followers and then you dump $800,000 in that. Right, right. What's your thoughts in the inauguration, Rob? So one is, it's a dramatic contrast from 2016. They both led with America first, but Trump has a renewed swagger, really since November 3rd in the election day where he knew he was going to win. He just conducts himself with more ease. He's got his team.

He's had four years to think about things. And a few things popped out. One is legacy, legacy, legacy, right? He referenced Mount Rushmore, and he referred to President McKinley, who was a businessman. He talks about manifest destiny. He talks about expanding the United States. He was referencing, like, concept like salvation and mission. He talked about American achievement that, you know, the United States is the first to get a rocket that can fly up in space and land with a pair of chopsticks and not Russia and not China.

He talked about American accomplishment on railroads and winning world. World War II, talk about winning. So the key and all that is his legacy. He is, I believe, really wants to create a legacy for himself and go down as a generational president. That's one. Now, on others, you know, there was no mention of crypto, which of course, as Alex pointed out, led to a 5% selloff. Some of that rebounded. and he said the age of America decline is over.

So I think if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a small business owner, if you're a corporate executive, you're going to make more investments. You're going to do more hiring. Trump also had a rally, I guess, or a pre-inoguration speech the night before. 25 million people watched it on X and the inauguration day happened when everyone had the day off because of MLK, which historically doesn't happen. So Trump had free blue sky passage to deliver his message to the American people. So I think what you're going to see is a continued increase in consumer confidence, small business confidence, and animal spirits as well.

I agree. The question now is going to be if indeed we have companies, hiring at the same time the size of the labor force is shrinking, what does this do to not any wage growth, but also inflation and expectations of rate cuts and therefore animal spirits. I'm of the view that, yeah, we're not going to be getting any more rate cuts, but I'm also of the view that that doesn't really matter for animal spirits. They're going to be with us anyways. I agree. I don't think you need rate cuts. We shouldn't have had the rate cuts in mind. We shouldn't have had the rate cuts. Exactly. This is the new normal. Right.

I'll actually go. I disagree. I think the rate cuts were necessary. I don't think they did anything harmful in the long run. And I think we could, depending on what happens, particularly with Trump's policies over the next six months, I think it's good that the Fed is pausing. I talked with Felix from Blockworks about this on his podcast. Like the Fed always says like they don't take into account politics and stuff. And Powell even said that like being interviewed, we're not take into account. And then you get the Fed meeting minutes and it's like they're like obviously talking about the things that Trump could do in office. So like it just makes sense that they would pause when they did. Obviously the data shows that they don't need to keep cutting rates right now.

We did get a relatively soft CPI. I think like everyone's expecting 2.5. We got two, but really it was 2.3. So like I don't know. We we we did go a little soft. CPI is kind of cooling down. But I think depending on what Trump does with his policies over the next six to ten months, I mean, we could see a different ecosystem with the Federal Reserve later in the year. I mean, everyone back in July, I mean, Joe was on here pounding the table that the Fed needs to cut rates. And things have completely changed. Everyone's flip saying there's no more rates than cuts that need to happen.

And we're priced for essentially maybe one cut later this year, potentially, even then, arguably, you're not really priced for much of anything. So I don't know. I'll see what happens. I think the Fed's going to pause and see what Trump actually does. And I think there's a case to be made that we could see cuts very late in the year next year, depending on what happens. We'll play it as a come.

I will say like not everyone was calling for rate cuts. I know I wasn't. I know others weren't. The long end of the curve has gone up 100 bips. Yeah. We have not seen that happen in other Fed easing cycles. Druck Mill has also pointed this out. You know, the market is saying, what are you guys doing?

You have indices at all time high. You have credit spreads at all time tight. You have record employment. You had 200,000 plus jobs created. Trump winning is equivalent to call it in rates and rate cuts. And the inauguration speech he gave and the speech on Saturday. It's 50 bips more in rate cuts. More rate cuts.

People are excited. And I think the mistake these economists make is they look at these linear regression models. And this is very basic. It's about confidence. and psychology has strengthened. You had the same arrangement of matter and molecules in the world, except the synapsies fired it differently. They're reprogrammed in the last two days,

and people are leaning in with more excitement. That's going to boost real economic variables. They're both in terms of spirits, but also in terms of actual investment. We're going to start to see capital investment again in the United States for the first time in quite a long time, and different types of jobs. That's going to make a very big difference

to the rates outlook on the longer term. Alex, what are your thoughts on macro and rates? Well, rates are restrictive right now. Yeah. It's not about us agreeing or disagreeing, is that every single Fed official, without exception, believes they are restrictive. Therefore, for as long as inflation,

is not an issue, which at the moment is not, is very consistently trending towards 2% that has been around 2% for the last six months. Therefore, rates have to come down. The question is when? Right now, I've been kind of like away from the market macro in the last... The moment has pushed back and said, you shouldn't have cut rates.

I'm in her camp. Yeah, yeah, there's a couple ones. Yeah, yeah. But it's, I think, it's happening. But the fact that everyone says, all the Fed officials say one thing, as we've seen in the past, doesn't necessarily make it true. I'm sure maybe this tightening is transitory. But I agree that all financial conditions indices show that conditions are as loose now as before the Fed started hiking even.

So the tightness is dependent entirely on where the neutral rate is. And given the investment that's likely to be coming in the United States, that's likely to continue climate. Yeah, I would say the only mark, the only thing that's broken right now is the housing market due to mortgage rates and things like that. Yeah. And I think more of, I think more of that has to do with supply and demand and the fact that we aren't building enough houses. And so I don't know how much, you know, what the Fed can do to solve those problems. But I would say the housing market is fundamentally broken in the regards to, you know, purchasing a home or renting a home that that payoff structure. Right now, it's like very hard to argue.

It makes sense to buy a home in most cases, unless you have significant cash. already owned home and things like that. So I think that's one problem with the rates where they are. That's an excellent point. It's the bond yields are restrictive, especially at the long end, which is what influences mortgage rates. Those are restrictive. And it's, we've only, I don't think we've ever, ever seen bond yields shoot up as federal funds are coming down. So right now it's the bond yields that are giving us the tightening that the Fed was unable to give us with its Fed funds. And maybe this is just a new monetary phenomenon. Yeah. The bond vigilantes are pushing up the long end of the curve.

So now the Fed's got handcuffs. It happened immediately after the 50 Bips cut in September. You don't get random clinical control data in markets, but that's pretty close to cause and effects. So what do you think the cause of that is, though? Do you think that's, they think the government, the economy is going to grow hot? We're going to see more inflation. Like, is that what you think that? Okay.

The market is saying inflation expectations are going higher. If you look at inflation expectations surveys, consumers about that, Alex's points are right on the mark, by the way. If you're like at real-time shelter data, they are trending lower. But, you know, you know, drug has got the short bonds trade on, less than size. But there's, you know, that is that trade is out there. People are talking about 5% rates. I think we're closer to the top. We should get back to inauguration, though.

There's still more drama, I think, around that that is quite interesting. Like, if we can go there, like, do you guys, do you see all these CEOs that were there? Yeah. It's like a trillion dollars in net worth sitting behind Trump. like six of them in this one. I mean, they need a designated survivor for like all those companies too. Jensen wasn't there. And Satya Nadella from Microsoft, Navidium Microsoft.

Of course, neither of those companies have antitrust issues or FTC issues. So they weren't there. Elon was there, fist pumping when they talked about having a mission to Mars, putting people on Mars and putting American flags on Mars and manifest destiny. I mean, it's a different way to think about Mars. You got Greenland, you got Mars, you got Pan McIcanal, you got Canada 51stay, Manifest Destiny, Interstellar version. So, Zuck is going to get a hard time from his wife, clearly.

I don't know if you guys saw that. I mean, Zuck, keep your head out of the gutter, man, really. It's unfortunate as kind of effects of everything being filmed all the time. I'm really, right. You know, it was really interesting seeing Biden and Harris. Like, I wish there was a camera just trained on that while the speech. Because, you know, Trump was sharing his remarks, several which were highly critical of Biden. And the guy's like two feet away.

It's like right there. You know, there's a point where he says, we're going to rename Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Like Hillary Clinton starts like laughing visibly. Yeah. She almost lost it there. The tension was just so thick. Yeah, in that room. So I thought it was, that was really enjoyable.

Wish we had more camera angles. I didn't watch it. I kind of listened to it and was doing other things around my house while I was going on. So all of my stuff that I saw, I saw from my Twitter feed, essentially the clips, the videos and things you're talking about, Rom. So, yeah. I watched the whole thing and couldn't help but think, wow, that room looks crowded. What's it? A small space in which to fit.

lot of people. Yeah. So is you good there on inauguration, Rom? Oh, good. I will see. The other things I want to point out, Caroline Fam is now the acting CFTC share. So she is somebody that's been pretty pro-crypto at the CFTC.

I don't know who's going to be the full-time chair. I mean, I think she's up for possibly ending up being the chairwoman. We also got notice very, like right before we started recording here that Mark Eueda is acting chairman at the SEC. which very much surprised me because usually it's the tenured, the tenured commissioner that gets it, which would have been Hester Perce. So I tweeted out, I'm surprised. I thought Hester would get this.

But apparently I've heard from multiple people in the know that she basically turned it down, which makes that she said many times that she doesn't want to be chairman. She said that in multiple different areas. She has no interest in doing that. She doesn't want to play politics. She wants to just be a commissioner. And I guess even interim chairman is something she didn't want to deal with. So Mark Iueda is going to be the interim chairman at the SEC who joined Hester in a lot of her dissents of Gensler and the Democratic commissioners at the SEC.

So that's a huge plus. I'll move on to the next thing I wanted to point out was obviously you guys said Gensler left on Friday. I mean, last week we saw a whole host of crypto ET related filings. Van Eck filed for an on-chain economy ETF. There's a whole bunch of other like debt securities in the crypto industry that's going to hold a bunch of things, ETS specifically related to crypto. We had Salana futures ETFs from pro shares and XRP futures ETS from pro shares filed, both leveraged and short. Basically, everything was thrown on Friday before Gensler's walking out the door and people are just filing things

left and right. The one thing that's interesting about the XRP and Salana filings that I saw was that their futures filings and they basically talk about CFTC regulated contracts. And the only ones out there that I'm aware of our coin base. Like, CME doesn't have them yet. So I think I've been hearing rumors for a long time that the CME wants to launch XRP futures and Solano futures. So I have a feeling they know that their CME is likely going to launch futures and maybe they'll use, you know, other CFTC regulated contracts. So that's interesting. And then like coin, obviously, also got filed, which is something I've talked about on here for a while. They actually filed a 19 before, which is more than just filing an S1 that's going through that clock process. So we'll know if

that's going to be accepted. And I think that has a better chance at the current time than then spot Salana and spot ripple. So, or XRP, I should say. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that, but I just thought it's funny that like the door hasn't even hit Gensler's butt on the way out and people are just like done with them already. Even like all Tradfai people that I talk to who not necessarily even care about crypto, for the most part are just like so rejuvenated that Gensler's gone.

Even like people that don't have nothing to do with crypto, like I think crypto people know it, but I don't think you realize how many people, even in just Tradfai, just hated dealing with what he was doing at the SEC. Yeah, I agree. And that's also one of the reasons this is very bullish, because most of the mainstream investors didn't realize how awful things were for crypto under Gensler. Sure, they knew that he was difficult to work with on Wall Street,

but they didn't realize how bad things were, which is why the changes that are coming are not priced in. Well, I would say, look, rapid new product releases are short-term bullish, but usually six months after you see like double-levered, triple-levered launched then market price start going down. You know, we saw that with like triple X, NVIDIA, NVDAU and all the rest at that time. I think things have that's shaken off and it's kind of recovery now. But, you know, issuance, rapid issuance is a sign of a late cycle in the same way like when you have an IPO market.

You're going to have an IPO market and mean coins now and other things. But it's something for people to be conscious of. I think you have a parable that accelerates in time. Trump accelerated the market dynamic. Right. When are we going to see Made in USA spot crypto EDA? I mean, there is some like, there's some plans out there like that are tagging Bitcoin that have been mined with like renewable energy and like tagging them as ESG Bitcoin.

So there's that stuff I know for a fact that's happening in the back end. So we could potentially see something like fixated around that. I don't know how far they've gotten on that front. The one thing I would say on something you said, Rob, like in my mind, the stuff that happened this weekend with the meme coin launches and Trump, World Liberty Financial, which we didn't talk about, did buy a whole bunch of Ethereum and Bitcoin and sell some of their coins this weekend, millions and millions of dollars. So that was interesting.

But I also, like, this feels like something that happened. If the top was in, like, it would make sense to be like, we're going to, we'll look back this eight months from now and be like, how could we have not have seen Trump launching two meme coins as not being the top? We also had record volume in Solana, which hasn't happened since mid-September, 2021, which was a local top for Salana. another there was a difference there back then and joe mccann and i went a little back and forth on this on twitter but joe rightly pointed out that in 2021 leading up to that you know 10x in salana

here you have salana bouncing off a moving average more like a breath thrust yeah however um if you look if you pull up a chart of salana now i would put trailing stops on that's what i would do yeah because a lot's going to turn on that executive order which comes tomorrow and Alex, any thoughts? Any thoughts on I have a million thoughts. On all the ETFs launching that I was talking about and what they mean and just stuff in general about potentially being at a local top. That's my thought. Do you think we're anywhere near a local top?

Well, a little bit of me is concerned definitely if there is no SBR mention, it's definitely a local top right now. it's news dependent. That's the thing. If there were no news on the horizon right now, I would be very concerned about a local top, like being around, say, one, 10 days out, based on the fact that implied volatility has skyrocketed and is getting a lot of people very antsy.

You saw the same pattern, by the way, in first week of March, end of February, first week of March of 2024. So implied ball can drive both an increase on volatility can signal both. It's usually a bottom, but it can also be a top. That being said, I mean, under normal circumstances, I would be concerned about a local top around here,

but is news dependent. The news doesn't care about this kind of thing. I would say suppose the news is positive. We ramp higher. I would agree. We'll ramp higher to new all-time highs. However, you'll still get a local top. It's a question of, you know, the timing of your off-ramp.

I think you're one to ten days is correct. I think it's maybe like one to five days, one to five days. And yeah, so look, after euphoria, you get the hangover. This was euphoric. Was it not this whole weekend? The three days was euphoric. It was crazy. I was glued to my Twitter timeline.

I didn't really tweet or say anything much about it, but I couldn't stop watching and just looking at markets and prices. I think long term, it's very constructive, just to be clear. We're talking about tactics. But in the long term, the future is very bright. You can't get a better backdrop, more regulatory in a policy and a president launching a meme coin. So it's a question of time horizon.

So, Alex, to you, you're the trader here. I mean, you said you threw out 85,000. Like, if, like, what levels are you watching for to, you know, be a buyer in the short term? I can't talk about price levels, but I guess you can theoretically. Like, what are you watching on Solana and Ethereum and Bitcoin, for example? Like, what are some price levels? If you think we're local top, we dove to, what are you looking to start going the other direction? Or do you wait to see what it happens?

I'm, I'm long. I'm very long. So actually, I'm expecting good news, you know. So I'm very long Bitcoin and Seoul quite specifically. I am waiting very, very intently for positive news. And if I see them fast enough, the idea is to add and press. If things go bad, I think if we go down to 100 again, I think we break. there is a lot of

walls. There's a lot of basically traders. I mean, I mean, putting, buying pressure around 100 in the last in the last few hours, specifically in the last, actually in the last few days, three days.

Next time we go down on bad news, that breaks and as a technical trader, then you round down 100 stops, you go down to 97, and then you can get into basically like her behavior and try to get ahead of what people is going to be

thinking if that happens. And if that happens, people are going to start panicking and start imagining that there is the cycle top and mass fear. And then we go down to the support, which is basically

89, 92. You can see this basically because basically between you can see this on the order, but between 192 there's nothing. So I can't really answer. It goes. It's a good. It's a great analysis.

One thing I want to add to that is in addition to the EO order, tomorrow bank system, bank wires will be open. So how many wires happen from Coinbase to fund? 100%. We don't know that. We've got to look at that. It's another event. Just quickly, we've last year with the ETF. specifically. The ETF we saw was January 10th last year. I think it was a Wednesday.

When the ETF came, the day before, we ran up into it right before, 24 hours before we had quite a very significant dip. Then on the ETF launch, we ran up 10% again. And then we dumped. And that was the dump. Right? We went from what was it, 48, 49 to 38, something like that. But let's wait for the news. I just want to add two quick things here for the audience. One is when crazy price action like the weekends happens, I get a lot of messages of people asking me what to do. And what we saw basically on Saturday was Saturday and Sunday was a very large,

what I saw, a very large number of people asking me basically, should I finally dump East and buy soul? And when that happens, I think it's important to understand if one is not a short-term trader, what one is doing? Is it following the herd? Are you following emotions? Usually it's best to actually make up a plan for that kind of action when not trading news. And the next pullback or the next move, we adjust the portfolio rather than just go with a sentiment. That's one thing I wanted to say. My answer was actually, no, do not dump Heath right now. just for salt, just wait, then find your time. The other thing I wanted to say is on rates, I do think we're going to see two or three cuts this year. I think the Fed is going to go more dobbish. I think the neutral rate is lower than what the Fed is talking about right now. And that's going to be good for markets a few months out too soon, way too soon right now.

But yeah. Two v2. Alex, Alex and James think we're going to get rates cuts later in the year. And Noel and Rom think we're pretty much done for a while. Yeah, certainly not three. We'll bet one salon on that. Deliverable win. Yeah.

One, it's one. 10 trumps. We're going to start measuring bets and trump coins. Yeah, yeah, yeah. December 31st, 2025. All right, guys. Thanks for the advice, Alex, to wrap up. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Bits and Bips.

We'll be back in one week to discuss more about how the worlds of crypto and macro are colliding one basis point at a time. Until then, everyone. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you guys.