Unchained - Bits + Bips: What Iran, Oil Shocks, and No Rate Cuts Mean for Crypto

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Bits and Bips the interview, the show where crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. My name is Steve Erlich, head of research at Sharplink and also your host. We've got a terrific episode for you today, but before we begin, let's take a brief moment to hear from some of the sponsors who make this show possible. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create $50 billion in enterprise value for 80-plus clients. over the past four years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multi-chain ADV.com. Quick note before we get into today's episode.

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Starting point is 00:00:58 Be sure to subscribe to the new feeds at Unchained Crypto.com slash bits and bits. Welcome back. So my guest today is Lawrence Frauson. He is a research analyst at Kiko, and we're going to discuss everything from market collapsing across all asset classes in light of the surge in energy pricing, as well as some news that has popped up over the last couple of days that actually should be bullish for crypto, namely the launch of Tempo's main net and sort of the agented commerce wars that are coming.

Starting point is 00:01:32 And we're also going to touch on tokenization, NASDAQ, getting its long-awaited clearance from the SEC to begin offering tokenized versions of stocks alongside its traditional order book. So much to discuss. But before we begin, and I introduce my guest, just as always, everything that you hear on the show, none of it is financial or investment advice. Please see Unchainedripto.com backslash bits and dips for full disclosures. And with that, welcome, Lawrence. Thank you, Stephen. Thanks for having me on the show. Happy to be here. Yeah, thrilled to have you as well. So let's really dive right in. As I was preparing the show a few hours ago, I was sort of debating whether or not to characterize Bitcoin as sort of remaining as a safe haven amidst this geopolitical crisis in Iran.

Starting point is 00:02:23 It dropped yesterday along with most other assets in light of the Fed holding right steady and sort of cautious commentary from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell about the impact of. persist or the potential for persistent inflation because of everything happening in the Gulf. As we are recording now, I believe Bitcoin has dropped under 69,000, even though it is still beating metals and some of the other assets that are doing even worse. But let's just start right there. I mean, what are you seeing and kind of like, how are you monitoring all of this on Kiko's platform? In terms of how we're monitoring Bitcoin, we usually look at liquidity and

Starting point is 00:03:02 how that's changed over the past couple of months. And what we can see is that since the 10th of October, which was obviously a huge hit for the market, liquidity has dropped from 25 million on average at 1%, from the mid price to 15 million on average. And because of that, we also see that there's a lot more volatile moves happening in the past few months. like we saw this short squeeze rally from 60K to 70 to 74-ish-K in the past two, three weeks. On top of that, we've seen 30% to 40% in reduced volumes. And this, of course, has a lot of impact on how investors are approaching crypto right now. Is it the safe haven asset or not?

Starting point is 00:03:49 We can discuss that later as well. Currently, I would say that BTC has been outperforming gold, purely because gold has had a rally, has had a very aggressive rally earlier in the year, whereas now it's leveling out a bit, comparatively speaking. And yeah, I would say that in terms of infrastructure, there's a lot of good things happening in the cryptosphere. You have to see FTC and the SEC finally giving clarity as to how major should be presented. They're not securities anymore.

Starting point is 00:04:25 Some of them are commodities. and that's all very good in terms of how institutions should approach crypto. Okay, yeah, a lot to kind of unpack there. So let's kind of get to it piece by piece. I want to go deeper into what you're saying in terms of Bitcoin and sort of, I guess, it's a relative buoyancy compared to other traditional safety events, at least over the last week or two. It briefly touched on 76,000 just a few days ago.

Starting point is 00:04:55 It's obviously down since then. On my show last week, we had Andy Baer from GSR, and he sort of mentioned what you just discussed, too, that sort of the competing narratives as to whether or not Bitcoin's functioning as a safe haven because people now see it as a safe haven, or is it just sort of the reversion to the mean from gold just surging over the last year, a year and a half and Bitcoin being punished along with tech stocks that had been hammered over the last few weeks because of AI fears. And again, maybe it was just things sorting themselves out. I'd love for you to just go a little deeper and sort of explain, like, how did you see the last few weeks? And then how does that play into what we're seeing right now where Bitcoin is sort of teetering? It's straddling the $70,000 line. I'm seeing some analysts predicting a drop back down to $65,000, perhaps further, especially if energy prices

Starting point is 00:05:50 remain higher for longer. So maybe please just provide a little more context. Yeah, so what we also saw in the past few weeks is that when we bottomed early February, we saw open interest finally stabilizing in the perps market. And because of that, a lot of force selling finally stelt that bleeding that we previously saw. And because a lot of shorts also jumped into that or started betting on a breakdown in that 60K region, we saw funding rates going negative slightly and immediately saw whiplash back upwards, namely after the first part of the, let's say, the geopolitical conflict in Iran was concluded,

Starting point is 00:06:40 alongside with oil prices rising and switching a lot around compared to BTC. And what we could also see is that due to... institutional flows kind of stabilizing us around that 60k region with ETF flows finally flipping positive after I believe three months of negative outflows that has helped us stabilize in this 60 to 70k region and whether or not this is the bottom liquidity metrics would say we still need to reacumulate and slow down a little bit and make sure that things are settled properly before shouting, oh, we're going back to 100K, right? And that's going to need time to rebuild that investor

Starting point is 00:07:38 confidence. Like I mentioned earlier, if you look at market debt, it's down 40 to 50 percent. Volumes are down 30 percent. And that all needs to increase in order for us to say like, oh, hey, actually, Bitcoin is a safe haven asset. We can use it as an inflation hatch because because right now it's more functioning as a high beta tech stock rather than a inflation hedge which you can well buy to hedge inflation. And what we also see is that since yesterday after the Fed announcement, the SMP finally started moving a little bit, which obviously is because of growth fears and inflation fears. And as a result of that BTC also sold.

Starting point is 00:08:24 off a little bit after seeing a brief deviation above 72 to 74k. I'm curious, I mean, you track retail and institutional clothes, but are there any notable differences or divergences in behavior geographically? Do you see more of a bit coming from Asia versus the US? Or are there any ways, any particular subsections of the crypto buying community that are worth pointing out. Yeah, what we saw in the past three months is that Asia used to sell a lot in the past six months in general and that has now shifted from Asia as actually buying in the past three months with cumulative returns per session being up 0.2 percent. But compared that to the EU and the

Starting point is 00:09:17 US session, which is down minus 11 to minus 12 percent. So we're seeing some buying from Asia finally after selling off a lot, whereas the US and EU are still selling consistently. However, important to note is that we are still very dependent on Coinbase flows. And whenever the Coinbase premium comes back, we do see an uptake in BTC price. And we do see that BTC moves more favorably to the upside, as opposed to when that Coinbase premiums. isn't present. Okay. That is interesting.

Starting point is 00:09:58 I mean, we've spoken about the Coinbase Premium before on the show, but for people that may not be familiar with it, I mean, can you just talk a little about like what are the ranges for the numbers and where is it right now and what kind of is, where does that fit contextually in history? So usually when we speak about a Coinbase premium, what we mean is that the price on Coinbase's spotting change is higher than. or Bidspot exchange that can range from $50 to $500. Currently, it's only a 0.2%, or it was only a 0.2% increase, I believe, from Binance's spot books.

Starting point is 00:10:38 But we do notice that traders are actively looking at this premium to position themselves into the market, be it short or long, which is a very interesting thing to keep monitoring as well. And something I forgot to touch upon earlier as well in terms of liquidity. If we compare open interest six months ago before the October 10th, we had $35 billion in open interest across the market, whereas now it's $15 billion. And that also needs to recover for us to signal, okay, hey, we're recovering here. Things are looking up again. Maybe we're going to break market structure here and move back to the upside above $70,000. to 74K and we can take it from there.

Starting point is 00:11:27 And what about longer dated derivatives, long term derivatives, just to kind of span out to the further out into the year? How are traders positioning themselves? Especially, I don't know if there's been any interesting or recent movement because of how volatile energy markets have been in particular over the last 12th, this is 24 hours. There's a two billion options expiry tomorrow,

Starting point is 00:11:50 which isn't long dated, of course, but that's something that needs monitoring here, because it's a big options expiry in the sense that Max Payne is at 70K and currently we're at 69K, which means everyone's losing money based on T3DK, right? But looking at longer dated options, we can see a lot of people are still betting on BTC going to 100K over the next six months,

Starting point is 00:12:18 especially the December options expiry is a very interesting one watch which is usually heavily traded a year months in advance as well as puts heavily betting on the on us going to 40 to 50k something we're also seeing in prediction markets even though those markets are a lot smaller right so it's either 50k or 100k in terms of the price that we currently are and where we could go it's it's more focused on on short-dated options across the market. And I know crypto markets in general tend to be highly correlated, especially during acute periods of market stress,

Starting point is 00:12:59 but are you seeing any interesting behaviors for assets beyond Bitcoin, E, Solana, XRP, or even, I know, I know hyperliquid, what hype token has obviously been doing well because of so much activity on that platform, but are any other assets that are worth kind of calling out that are either doing particularly well or have been struggling in light of everything going on. Like you mentioned already, hyperliquid, of course, which has seen tremendous increase in terms of volumes, mainly due to equity perps launching on their HIT3 block, right? Other than that, I feel like the overall crypto market is struggling pretty heavily and

Starting point is 00:13:45 everything is super correlated. People are focusing more and more on stable coin chains. You have paradigm and paradigm and tempo launching stuff. Argus launching their circle is launching their arc blockchain, right? And in that layer Yosef plasma, which is super interesting. But I feel like layer one blockchains are kind of moving away from this traditional way of building a chain and they're now more focusing, okay, we're going to build an app centric chain in the sense that we're going to build a chain that only does stablecoin payments.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Or we're going to do a chain that only does defy. And that's an interesting development as opposed to how crypto was approached a couple of years ago in the sense that it was super cypherpunk. We wanted to be decorrelated from the financial system, whereas now everything is converging. and we're trying to get on these traditional payment rails. We're trying to use stable coins for real-world payments. We're trying to launch US tokenized treasuries and getting guilds on chain and making sure we can use money market funds as collateral.

Starting point is 00:15:05 So I would say that's another interesting development in the crypto market in the recent last, let's say, three to six months, which is accelerating. And I think the infrastructure for that is being built right now. and we'll definitely see use of that in the future as well. Yeah, and we're going to get a lot more into stable coins and sort of the agentic payment wars, for lack of a better term, in just a few minutes. But I just want to tie the bow or tie the knot on the macro markets discussion that we're having here.

Starting point is 00:15:40 As we're talking, it's been a big rate week. I mean, the US held rate steady, ECB held rate steady, Bank of England, held rate steady. I think Australian Central Bank actually raised rates, but everyone is sort of changing expectations, factoring in, or anticipating zero cuts, perhaps this year, even some rate hikes, just given how fears of persistent inflation because of energy, and heightened energy prices. It's just really kind of causing a lot of fear and panic as this war, which I think is entering its third week is going on longer and longer and expanding geographically. Do you see anything else?

Starting point is 00:16:22 Do you have any other big predictions? Are you, I know your platform, your company, you track how the smart money is moving, positioning. We're going to get into stable coins in a section and how people may or may not be moving into those. I know that a lot of traders, I think there was a Bank of America survey that pointed out that fund managers have moved into cash at the highest levels in quite a long time. Is there anything else that you're seeing related to the current market dynamics today and how the positioning in the future that's worth mentioning? Yeah, we've had all this positive news, right? Like we mentioned earlier with the CFTC and the SEC finally properly mentioning and stating what crypto assets actually are and how we should use them. And personally, I expected a lot more of a positive reaction from crypto side.

Starting point is 00:17:14 like a good trader once told me or actually a trader I still speak to regularly is that the reaction to the news is more important than the news itself and as of right now we haven't really reacted that positively but to dive more into the macro aspect is what I also think is important to consider is that financial conditions matter a lot more than than fat rates and financial conditions are driven by geopolitical issues or like geopolitical clarity sorry or lack thereof and which in turn is largely driven also by market performance and what we can also see or what we saw is that financial conditions started tightening long before the fed started hiking and they started loosening long before this hiking cycle was was getting into stride so looking at CME options as

Starting point is 00:18:13 well, odds of no cuts jump to 33% from from 5% in the past 48 hours, I believe. And yet the SMP is still only down, let's say, a mere 45%. It was 2% prior to yesterday's Fed meeting. And I think one of the reasons of extended hold raise is that the market, the market price long term inflation expectations, they seem to be stable. But despite expectations of oil prices rising and staying there for quite a while, I still think it's quite concerning how the US market is seemingly, or at least the indices like TSM are still pretending like the traders positioning

Starting point is 00:19:10 into them are still pretending like nothing is happening. Like, for example, here in Europe, rate hikes are showing up the market expectations like you already mentioned. And if this causes any issues in global stock markets, we'll probably also see any impact on U.S. indices, as investors will just likely try to sell what they can. And banks don't really ease into oil shocks because it increases inflation and it decreases growth because spending goes down. Yeah, I mean, a lot to discuss there. I mean, it's kind of curious that divergence between the U.S. and the EU that you mentioned, because one of the things I'm watching too, and I'm sure you are as well, the U.S. is more self-sufficient when it comes to energy, whereas Europe is highly dependent on

Starting point is 00:19:58 like natural gas in particular. So it would make sense that at least like U.S.-based indices might be a little more resilient than in Europe. But, I mean, also just like the nature of flows, like passive flows, to some of these big ETFs and stuff. It's just not, sometimes they're just not as reactionary as perhaps we may want. And you're sort of the idea that you mentioned

Starting point is 00:20:22 about credit conditions, liquidity tightening before we actually see the associated impact in indices. That's pretty curious too. I mean, it makes me think, maybe things aren't entirely related, but it makes me think of just everything that's happening in private credit, especially in the US.

Starting point is 00:20:39 I think the Bank of America actually just to walk back a memo where they recommend the clients assorting, I think 17 different stocks, European stocks that were exposed to private equity, private credit, I mean, and just kind of waiting for more dominoes to fall there. But I know whenever we start looking for conditions tightening, we look for defaults, et cetera, et cetera. So that is something, that was a good point that you brought up. All right. So we're going to turn the page to a few perhaps bullish catalysts for crypto. But before we do, let's just take another quick break so we can hear from some of the sponsors who make the show possible. Multi-chain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients, like Pith, Moon Pay Commerce, and Wormhole.

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Starting point is 00:22:00 We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel, focused on the Fed, macro, AI, and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure you're following Bits and Bips directly. We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one. You can find the new Bits and Bips channels at UnchainedCripto.com slash Bits and Bips. You can also find us by searching Bits and Bips on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Starting point is 00:22:34 All right, and we're back. So for a year, I think really since Chad GPT exploded on the scene a couple of years ago, people have been trying to marry crypto and AI and talk about how they go together, the synergies, et cetera. But it looks like it's finally happening. We are, Coinbase made a lot of waves. I think last year, November during one of their product demo days. And I don't even think this was one of the big products that they were launching,

Starting point is 00:23:01 but with their X402 payment standard for agenda commerce, Tempo just went live with the main net with its own machine to me machine to machine payments protocol and everyone is talking about agenda commerce and bots transacting with each other at the best of humans for all sorts of reasons and use cases so I'd like to just kind of throw to you kind of open-ended Lorenz I mean what are what are you seeing in terms of of agenda commerce like what are your expectations for how this sector can grow and perhaps most importantly, with many different offerings now out there, what do you think is going to sort of

Starting point is 00:23:42 delineate or demarcate the winners from the losers? Great question. I would say that something very important to note here is that if agentic commerce is going to, let's say, revolutionize the way we're doing things, is that they need robust pricing and proper. pricing mechanisms because some of these agents they operate at their own per real and if they if they start doing transactions that are worth a dollar at three cents you're going to lose a lot of money or you're going to make a lot of money regardless of which which counterparty you are and in terms of how the market can grow it's it's i think it goes hand in hand with how stable coins are growing and how they are being used

Starting point is 00:24:34 in terms of on-chain capabilities. And it's a trillion-dollar market. There's multiple research is also done by McKinsey, I believe. There's probably more out there. We've seen CoinBases X402 processing at $34 million in volume. Google is launching a payments protocol. So everyone's trying to jump on the hype train. And it's going to be very interesting to see how that converges

Starting point is 00:25:03 alongside stable coins because in 2025 we saw 33 trillion in stable coin volume that was all done by humans or probably mostly done by humans. So it's very interesting to see how that is or very interesting to observe how that's going to grow as we see more agentic payments launch and how that's going to slot into Tratfi as well as crypto as well as just, e-commerce in general. Yeah. It's one of the things that I'm trying to track, and I would imagine you might be as well, is really figuring out how to get a real sense of activity, like uptics and activity when it comes to these types of bots. Because if you create some basic bot on Cloud or chat GPT or whoever, I'm not a coder, so I'm

Starting point is 00:26:02 really able to go too deep into this. You might create, like, I'll make a task for something I'm doing in Sharplink, and it'll create 10 different bots for me, doing 10 different things simultaneously, and then once it's done, it goes away. We'll look at something like network addresses. That's a common metric that we try to use to understand actual usage of a blockchain, like Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, whatever. I could see like an exponential increase in new wallets, new addresses, but they're not persistent,

Starting point is 00:26:37 and they don't go on forever. And when it comes to stable coins, too, like, you can make a quite, you could say, well, these new types of blockchains with micropayments or stable coins, a lot more payment volume, but the value may, like, unless there's going to be new use cases that were not priorly, viable before agenda commerce. You may not necessarily see a huge surge in volume. How do you think about this problem? What are some of the numbers or metrics that you think will be really helpful

Starting point is 00:27:11 in sort of getting a sense of true adoption of agenda commerce? I would say looking at unique addresses, looking at how these transactions are conducted, where they're going. Is it just like spam being conducted to inflate numbers, right? I saw a paper saying recently that the volumes on, well, the unique addresses on USDT are a lot different compared to those on USDC. So that's all metrics we are looking at via blockchain monitoring, a solution we build to look on chain. But what I would also look at is how can we use these agents to actually, like you mentioned, do something that previously wasn't possible, right?

Starting point is 00:28:06 Do we really need these agents right now? Is it actually useful for us to use them? Because I might just do it myself. I might just order whatever I want to order myself. If we're talking about trading, that becomes a whole other thing, right? because you can start automating your system, you can start automating strategies. You can do a lot more things on chain,

Starting point is 00:28:29 especially the way blockchain is interoperable with AI. So that opens two different pathways in the sense that from a, let's say, a retail perspective, is it useful for me to put an agent on this? Does that agent need to do transactions for me? And on the other hand, you would have to, let's say, from a trader perspective, how can I automate this strategy? How can I make sure that agent isn't going to make any mistakes for me?

Starting point is 00:29:00 And how can I make my life easier and more, let's say, put it on autopilot from that point of view. Yeah, because the last thing you ever won is one of your agents, like accidentally revealing a private key or for, or, I was reading some things about like, at some point that Nigerian print scams are going to come for AI agents and some, some benevolent an agent is going to want to say, here, I'll help. Here's $500,000 of USDC and what do you do then? So it is kind of fascinating. I do want to ask you a kind of a more, I guess, like foundational or theoretical question about this debate, because it is coming up now. I mean, we're seeing like Coinbase X-402, I believe it's on Ethereum and Solana, but correct me if I'm wrong, where it enables payments. and it actually shipped a couple of big upgrades either yesterday or the day before to sort of make it so that almost any ERC 20 token can be used in these types of payments as opposed to, I think, just before it was USDC. But Stripe, tempo, I mean, their protocol, it's very different. It's much more efficient, but it's sort of like batches transactions instead of like settling them on a gross level.

Starting point is 00:30:17 And it raises the same debates, I think, that came up when Tempo was first created or ideated or sort of revealed to the world. That is it really a blockchain or is it just some sort of, is it just a permission database? And we might be seeing this battle between the permission database and then the permissionless databases are permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, et cetera, going after these, these agentic payments. And it's not just an educational or academic debate because investors who are listening to this show, and again, this is not financial advice, but they're going to wonder where should I put my tokens? They should we buy into these protocols? But how should they think about allocating assets to, in light of this big divide in different agenetic payment offerings?

Starting point is 00:31:13 I think it very much depends as to. what you want to use your assets for. As you mentioned, EADs permissionless, some of these other blockchains may pose as permissionless, but actually they're fully centralized. That's a completely different debate, of course. And I think it also will depend as to how well the infrastructure of said blockchains is integrated

Starting point is 00:31:41 into the financial system or into Visa or into MasterCard, right? You don't want like I think the average retail user doesn't really care which tech stack is underneath it. They just wanted to work. And I think Luca Nets mentioned it on one of your podcasts a couple of weeks ago as well. Like I don't care if Instagram or Twitter is built with Python or any other coding language. I just want it to work. And I want to know. And I want to be able to use it on a very.

Starting point is 00:32:18 in a very easy and understandable way. So I think the infrastructure layer is very important and it needs to be robust. Pricing needs to be correct. All of these mechanisms need to be in place. But once I start using the app or once I start doing payments, be it agentic payments or not, it needs to be seamless and it needs to just work the click of a button or two things.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Like, you don't want to be entering a complex EVM address and also to your point earlier with AI agents going rogue, right? Some of these AI agents, they've been susceptible to address poisoning. I'm not sure if you're familiar to the topic, but for those that aren't address poisoning is when you get sent at a token. that ends in the same few letters that your address ends, but the things in the middle, so the address in the middle is completely different. And some agents have been able to getting tricked by that. So that's another extra layer of security.

Starting point is 00:33:35 You would have to add into these agentic payment bots, let's say, before you can fully ship them and start using them. Yeah, and those are all really, really good points. And I just want to, I don't know if correct, but update something I said before. So Stripe is a private company. It's a partner of Visa and the card networks, but it's a private company. So the choice isn't buying stock in Stripe or one of the other blockchains. But I guess maybe buying the Visa or some of the card networks that might utilize Tempo.

Starting point is 00:34:11 But and the other point you mentioned too is kind of interesting as well. I mean, AIs are not going to necessarily, I guess, have the same type of brand loyalty or blockchain loyalty that humans will. Perhaps theoretically, you could tell your AI to prefer one over another the same way that, like, I have certain prefaces for payment rentals for different types of financial transactions that I agree in. But for the most part, they'll probably try to do it as cheaply as possible. So perhaps, like, they might try to use Ethereum L2 one day, then. They might use Sue another day, Solana, et cetera. So I guess whatever you tell them to optimize for it, that's what it's going to be. So it's going to be really fascinating to kind of see how sort of the wars,

Starting point is 00:34:57 or I guess the winners, the breakdown between the winners and losers when Magenta Commerce really becomes more mature than it is now. Okay, so we just have a couple of minutes left. I want to touch base on two other topics. One you mentioned sort of the muted reality. to the market from sort of the interpretive guidance jointly issued by the CFTC and the SECC. I actually have a take on that that I like to share with you and maybe you could react to just have the discussion.

Starting point is 00:35:27 I personally wasn't surprised at much of that the market kind of shrugged for two reasons. One, a lot of what was already in there, I think has already either been common expectations, common knowledge or has already been issued under prior guidance or through sort of those conclusion of various legal entanglements of like lawsuits against the SEC for like whether or not like eth is a security the SEC had already issued guidance highlighting how like sort of updating what garry gansler put out or the SEC undergansler that staking isn't necessarily a security so a lot of those types of things were already kind of in the in the air supply the same thing with nfts that nfts assuming that there are just nftes or meme coins are not securities that also wasn't

Starting point is 00:36:12 new so i wasn't surprised by that and then i mean that's the same thing that's as I'm sure you know, interpretive guidance is kind of the lowest level of sort of a statement that the SEC can make. It's not like a formal rule that went through kind of a process where they solicited feedback from the community. And while this was a positive step forward, and it was a nice signal that the SEC and safety are playing nice together, although they've been doing it for a year and a half or so at this point, everybody wants clarity, everybody wants the law. And at some And I know I think Senator Lumas said that, I believe she put out a statement yesterday the day before, highlighting or saying the clarity is going to pass out of committee by the end

Starting point is 00:36:56 of April, which would be tremendously welcome news. But there's still two big issues that need to be worked out. One is the yield question, which really should have been handled under genius. But that ship was sailed. And then two, I guess the question of whether or not President Trump, his family, close advisors are allowed to participate in crypto during this whole process. And those have been largely intractable issues. And as you know, rules and guidance, they can be reversed like that when there's a new,

Starting point is 00:37:30 whenever someone new enters as SEC chair. So that's kind of my take. I'm curious if you have any reaction to that. I was particularly surprised to the muted reaction because with the current administration, I feel like we've been in a, to coin it, a headline super cycle, right? The market has been very reactive to headlines. So in terms of that, I was quite surprised the market didn't really react to. Maybe it was partially priced in already because we did move from 60K all the way up back to

Starting point is 00:38:07 72, 74K, right, which could have been that preliminary positioning. So yeah, that would be my idea and my take on it. And to add on to your point of the Trump family being allowed to do what they're currently doing, I think we can all look at it and be like, yeah, that's not right. In a recent research report, what we did, we could see that we're Liberty Financial, started selling off 6 to 12 hours before the end of October crash. So before Trump announced his terrorist back then. So from a speculative angle and also from a regulatory angle,

Starting point is 00:39:01 it's very much of a gray area, it's kind of a red area as to how people are operating or how the administration is operating currently. Yeah, so it will be interesting to just kind of see what happens with everything there. I know we're all hoping for clarity to, or market structure, if it's clarity or some of the bill to pass into law, so that the roles of the game can't change from administration to administration. And we'll just have to see what happens there. And related to your kind of like, buy the room or sell the news point of view, it is kind of fast. Usually when I see news that people sell off or buy into, it's almost like a surprise,

Starting point is 00:39:46 like when BlackRock filed for it's Bitcoin ETF. But like you said, a lot of other things like the actual trading of the ETFs, like just the big one example, those are have been pricing because they're well telegraphed. And I know that this interpretive guidance was also coming. So who knows. All right. Well, we actually have to leave it there. But before I go, Lawrence, I just want to give you a chance to provide any final thoughts,

Starting point is 00:40:10 anything that we didn't get a chance to discuss before we move on. I was thinking about the fact how I'm very excited about how we're moving forward from a regulatory perspective and how that's all super positive for the industry, which makes me very optimistic, right? If we just wait for the market to slowly recover here, I think it's going to be a very exciting few years into the future, right? not intraday or in the next two, three months, but all this clarity being built by US regulators, by regulators across the world. We're also seeing regulators in Korea and Japan

Starting point is 00:40:53 trying to fully embrace Bitcoin and crypto as a whole, trying to integrate it into their financial system. So that's all very positive developments. And yeah, I'm excited for the future. And I hope we can contribute with Kaito to build that financial infrastructure, which is something we're very busy with right now and I'll like to leave it at that.

Starting point is 00:41:14 Okay, great. Stephen. All right. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thank you for coming on bits and bips. And that's it for today for bits and bips, but please don't go anywhere. Next, we shift to Unchained where Laura will speak with Adenye Abiyo of Miston Labs to explore a new push to bring Bitcoin into on-chain finance and whether Bitcoin can finally be used for lending, credit, and yield at scale. Thank you, everyone.

Unchained - Bits + Bips: What Iran, Oil Shocks, and No Rate Cuts Mean for Crypto

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