Unchained - The Chopping Block: World Liberty Financial, Liquidity Risks, and Global Crypto Adoption - Ep. 708

Episode Date: September 23, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week the squad is live from Token2049 in Singapore and joined by special guests Mo Shaikh, CEO and Co-Founder of Aptos Labs, and Arthur Hayes, CIO at Maelstrom. In this episode, they tackle the buzz around Trump’s DeFi projects, the challenges of hosting Token2049 during F1, and the controversy surrounding Iggy Azalea’s cancelled debate. The conversation also covers the macro impact of potential Fed rate cuts, the role of celebrity coins, and the future of global crypto adoption. Don't miss this insightful live discussion in front of the Token2049 audience! Show highlights 🔹 Token2049 Event: Token2049 faced logistical challenges due to Singapore’s F1 weekend, resulting in heavy traffic and delays for attendees. 🔹 Canceled Celebrity Coin Debate: Iggy Azalea’s debate with Eric Wall about celebrity coins was canceled due to conflicts with Singaporean regulations, which prevented her planned on-stage stunts. 🔹 World Liberty Financial Overview: The Trump family’s DeFi project, World Liberty Financial, is scrutinized for its lack of clear direction and concerns over the 70% insider token pre-allocation. 🔹 Fed Rate Cuts and Market Implications: Potential Fed rate cuts and their impact on the dollar-yen exchange rate could lead to liquidity crises and increased market volatility. 🔹 Celebrity Coins and Memecoins: A look into celebrity coins and memecoins raises questions about their value, considering whether they bring meaningful attention to crypto or are merely speculative distractions. 🔹 Korea vs. Japan in Crypto: Korea’s active crypto trading culture and crypto-friendly policies contrast with Japan’s more cautious, restrictive approach, reflecting different market dynamics. 🔹 Global Crypto Adoption Rankings: Skepticism is expressed regarding India’s top spot in Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index, with a case made for Korea ranking higher than 19th. 🔹 Aptos and Mainstream Adoption: Aptos is pushing for mainstream adoption through partnerships in Korea and innovations like the Aptos card, offering integrated cold storage and new financial products. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest ⭐️ Mo Shaikh, CEO and Co-Founder of Aptos Labs ⭐️ Arthur Hayes, CIO at Maelstrom Disclosures Links The 2024 Global Adoption Index: Central & Southern Asia and Oceania (CSAO) Region Leads the World in Terms of Global Cryptocurrency Adoption: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-global-crypto-adoption-index/  Timestamps  0:00 Intro 00:49 TOKEN2049  06:20 $10 Billion FDV? World Liberty Financial 16:10 Allure of Memecoins & Celebcoins 19:06 Beyond Memecoin Adoption 20:27 Global Crypto Adoption Ranking 24:43 Korea vs. Japan's Crypto Scenes 29:19 Macro Trends and Fed's Impact 35:26 Crypto's Resilience Against Regulation 40:00 The Future of Crypto and Decentralization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's just not fun. I feel like if you had tasked me with creating a Trump DFI protocol, we could have all sorts of fun. We could have in like Trump. Trump dot fun, you know, we could own Trump swap. Oh, wow. That was great. Yeah, you know, it's supposed to be like fun and unapproachable. And this is like, whichever one of you assholes starts Trump.com. You owe them. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quons. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm in the trading firms who are very involved. I like that eth is the ultimate POMES.

DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. What the fuck's on your legs? What is that shit? It's shit that gets you in trouble at the airport. That's all I got to tell you. Like you always get a second check. Yeah. Plus toy for them.

All right. Well, hello everybody. Welcome to the chopping block live at token 2049 in Singapore. Every couple weeks, we get together and give the industry insides perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros. First you got Tom, the DeFi Mavis. and Master of Memes.

Hi, everyone. Next, we got Tarun, the Gigabrain and Granpuba at Gauntlet. Yo. We got a special guest, first Mo Shake, the Move Mastermind at Aptus. And then, of course, we've got Arthur Hayes, the High Arbiter of Alpha. That's that I'm Steve, the head, Hype Man of Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto. I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life

advice. Please see ChoppingBlock. For more disclosures. It's very true that this disclaimer matters more live because there's only financial advice at this conference. That's true. That's true. We're getting a lot of

a message today from Arthur. Just saying. Okay, so we're here live in Singapore, token 2049. What's the vibe been so far? This is like the flagship Asia event.

What's the, what's the feeling on the ground? A lot of fucking traffic. A lot of traffic. I had to walk my ass out of my car today to get in here. I was sweating like a motherfucker. What the fuck?

Yeah, yeah. I think conferences during F1, it's a dumb-ass idea. I'm not going to lie. Because the infrastructure sucks. They're closing all the roads. It's just like, It's a nightmare. I don't get it.

I don't know. It gets people to come out, but I agree with you. I actually literally just missed a panel that you were on because I was trying to get a taxi that normally would take five minutes. It was like 45 minutes to get across just like two intersections. I had to sub in and be Haseeb. I was going to go bald for that one, but they wouldn't let me do it. It's supposed to get a ball cap. Yeah. Okay, damn. Well, so one of the things happening at Token 2049 is of course breakpoint.

happens right after Token 2049, which is a big flagship Solana event. And there was just a little bit of drama taking place on Twitter that Iggy Azalia, friend of the show, it turns out she was going to do a debate on stage with Eric Wall. And they were going to debate whether or not celeb coins are good for crypto. Now, everyone was very excited. I was very excited about this debate. Unfortunately, this debate has been canceled. And it was canceled because Iggy Azalia was planning to plant,

strippers in the audience wearing business suits and they were going to jump out in the middle of the debate and start twerking on stage. And apparently this was not allowed by Singaporean regulators. And so she was like, look, I can't actually do a debate. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The whole plan was it for it to be a joke. She put regulators in quotes.

If you read the tweet, just saying. I don't know. I don't know. Thoughts? This sounds like something I would do if I were going to lose a debate and find some bullshit excuse to get out of it. So I'd be scared too if I were going to be going to get Eric. Eric's pretty fierce.

Maybe she just pop her token some more on people wouldn't need the strippers. I don't know. I mean, if that's what it takes to get people to break point, but now apparently not happening, so who's going to sub in now? Is that going to be totally on stage?

Twerking? Yeah. I mean, now Tom Schmidt is the enemy of the mother community based on that comment he doesn't think. Is there a mother community still? I feel like when your token goes down and you're even more of an enemy

from saying that one. I will say, Since we criticized Mother, Mother has actually been kind of down only. Well, I rebounded a little bit, but I think it's like, at the time that we were talking about on the show, it was worth like $250 million. Now it's like $40 million, something like that. It's still above zero, though. It's still above zero.

And to Iggy's credit, she has been grinding. Clearly, she was planning to grind on stage. So it's like, you know, she was really going at it. You were just telling us a story about another celeb here in Singapore. Do you want to recount that story? Yeah, so I get this message from my Keepa staff is like this mother. motherfucker Jason Derulo wants to have a meeting. I'm like, I don't know who the fuck this guy is.

I'm a EDM house guy. So I look this guy in this motherfucker up and said, oh, okay, I guess he's kind of famous. And so my chief of staff has a meeting with this guy. And he's like, yo, I'm coming to Singapore and I want to come to your party. And why don't you pay me $100,000 to get on stage and sing a song? And I was like, how about no? And then I get a message from his man. He's like, yo, Jason had some deal with, you know, some decks and it fell through.

and he was supposed to make 80 grand to come to Singapore. Like, why don't you do him a solid and pay him to come to your event? Like, we'd owe you one. Nah. Is this how business gets done in Singapore? Is this the... I don't know, I guess. All right.

All right, damn. Everyone in the audience wants to know which exchange. I'm not going to play them like that. We're not going to sell them out. Sorry, sorry. We want them to get, we want them to book subsequent celebrities. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

The lesson here is you can't be dependent on somebody. else's decks. You know, you got to do your own decks. You got to do your own token. Iggy, you know, I give her credit for that. No, no Dex partnership is going to fall through her. Yeah. I mean, the celebs at crypto events meta does feel like it's evolved over the years. We went from, I mean, what would you say was like the high points and the low points of celebs in crypto meta? Was there ever a high point? I mean, we're about to hit a new high point with Donald Trump. That is kind of true. Someone was joking that when you see Diplo performing at the

conference that's the top, but you know, Diplo's coming back in. So maybe he's like Evergreen. There's a, there's always going to be Diplo no matter what you do. Diplo's solid. I don't know. Diplo's not like a down bad kind of, you know, yeah, yeah, I don't know. But bear market, there must have been like some really bad celebrity bookings, no? It's always like, do you like to lose money on this stage? I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think any of us do that. Yeah. I'm the wrong person as I don't go to any of these things, so I'm pretty boring. Okay, so speaking of celeb coins, let's talk about the elephant at the room, World Liberty Financial.

So World Liberty Financial, for those of you have been under Rock, that is the Trump family defy product. So they very recently, I think it just as of yesterday, they did a Twitter spaces. So they've been teasing a lot of stuff. They've been kind of hinting that this thing is going to happen, but there wasn't a lot of detail. And so everyone was very excited about this Twitter space that was going to go live by the guys at Rug Radio.

And this happened the day after the Trump assassination attempt, they were supposed to go to Mara Lago to do this Twitter space, but it was delayed by a day because someone tried to kill him. And they were like, oh, just come back tomorrow. It's cool. So they went to Mara Lago the next day, and they did this Twitter space. And so Tom, you listened to the Twitter space. Talk us through what you learned about World Liberty Financial. It was pretty crazy. I, you know, I wanted to withhold judgment because I want, you know, wait to see what they'll on. We'll see what they paper. And I feel like you still have to withhold judgment because it was like two hours of just like no content. It was like, you know, you put, it's like, you know, it's like, you

You know, sometimes people put like five Sims in a room and they start kind of like interacting in weird ways. And kind of felt like that. There's nothing to do. There wasn't like a job, but there was kind of like playing off each other. And there's like this is the most like like asinine like non sequitur like clips of our crypt. Like one that's kind of going right now is, uh, Trump was talking about Barron being like a defy genius because he has like four wallets. And I was like, what the fuck is going on right now? War wallet.

Four wallet? Yeah, it's incredible. Incredible. Does he have an aptos wallet? What did he? Does he have an aptos wallet? I don't know. We don't comment on that.

We don't comment on that, but maybe. So I think everyone is waiting to get more details. And the only good news is, you know, there was this article that went out maybe about a week ago talking about how 70% of the token was going to be pre-allocated for insiders. It's not like that's now flipping. But this is the other weird part. They're doing a reg D sale. Like they're registering with the SEC for the sale of this token, which I don't even know why or how they're doing that.

The whole thing is just like it's from Mars. It should be like a pointless sale? I have no idea. Okay, wow. Who's going to buy it? I'm just going to say it's going to be a very interesting deal memo coming out of that Twitter space from top. I just, you know, I'm hoping for the best. So what does the protocol do?

Do they explain what the protocol does? No, no. That was not part of the discussion. They've got that part of crypto right. You don't tell them what it is, what it does. Just launch it. Yeah, I look it. Well, did they at least say before the election or after the election?

When's the launch? I think it's coming up. Well, no, no, no. So there's a polymarket market on whether or not Trump will launch a token before the election. And before the Twitter space, it was trading at 80%. And after the Twitter space, it plummeted to 25. Maybe people are skeptical of the overall sort of shape of it. I mean, we know it's going to be a lending protocol.

Initially, there was some teasing that it's going to be somehow RWA, real estate related. Seems like that's not likely to be the case. Seems like it is going to be this kind of like Doe Finance Ave kind of fork. but like why now, why this is kind of unclear. Yeah. I do kind of like the, they have this kind of like populist message, though, to World Liberty Financial, like, you know, the big banks, they're ripping you off, and we're going to, you know, give finance back to the people.

So they're leaning with that, which I guess is better than nothing. That resonates. Yeah. Yeah. I can feel that. So, so, okay, how, what do we think? Let's say World Liberty Financial were to drop tomorrow. Let's say fully diluted valuation, there's 10% floating, you know, standard crypto crypto launch.

What do you think the fully diluted valuation would be, Arthur, pursue. 10 billion. 10 billion. 10 billion. So a billion floating, a billion floating. Billion floating. Okay. Moe, what do you think?

Oh, man. I mean, 10 is really 10? People are Muppets. But it's a meme coin. Like what meme coin hit 10 billion? This wouldn't be the first one. The on launch, wow, that's crazy. I don't know.

I'm dumbfounded. I guess based on Tom's DD, I think I'll go with seven. Seven. Seven billion. Yeah, I'll go along to that. Well, I have to play price's right rule, $6.9 billion. It's just tanking. It's not a million.

We're like $2.5. We call that MEP. Well done. There's some jokes in that one. I'm going to be a little bit more bearish. I'm going to go two. I think part of the problem is, It's just not fun. I feel like if you had tasked me with creating a Trump DFI protocol,

we could have all sorts of fun stuff. We could in like Trump. Fun, you know, we could own Trump. Oh, wow. That would be great. You know, it's supposed to be like fun and unapproachable. And this is like, whichever one of you assholes starts Trump.com. You owe them to royalty. You know, I'll be an advisor. We all get 20%. Just make sure Shrekly is on it. It's going to do well. Yeah, be a little whimsical with it. It's just a little boring, you know.

Okay, okay. Yeah, I guess I'll go in the middle. I'll go at like 400, 4.5. It feels to me like, so Trump, to be clear, is the most famous man in the world. Maybe Elon must, but, you know, Trump is more famous than Elon. That being said, it doesn't feel like he's trying that hard. And that's the thing that feels like the most disappointing about this is how lazy it feels. You know, he's doing, like, one Twitter space every, like, month and then one tweet a month.

And that's about it. And besides that, it's just like, oh, Bannon. Compared to most other meme coin creators, he has a lot more going on, though. To be honest, right? Like, Jason Drell doesn't have shit to do out of the message jar. That's fair. That's fair. Okay.

Same as people don't have to work as hard, man. This would be lazy. Yeah, all right, all right. So the interesting thing also is that we've seen this parade of advisors for World Liberty Financial. So a few of the advisors who have been announced so far, one of them is Sandy from Scroll, CoFender Scroll. Another one is Cryptoagle, who's a Cryptoecurity person who's been on the show before. Third person is Luke Pearson? I think it's a different Luke. Oh, different Luke. Yeah. Some Luke from Polychain. Any other advisors have been now?

I think it's Luke Pearson. I think it's Luke Pearson. Oh, it's like kind of a random hodgepudge of people. And I remember I was chatting with somebody who was one of the, who was one of the advisors to World Liberty Financial. And where they told me was that the advisors to World Liberty Financial, the way they're The way they're thinking about it is that they know the project is kind of shady, but they're joining because they see the other advisors all kind of feel the same way. So it's a Keynian beauty contest for advising? No, no, no, no. The way they described it is like, we're sort of the adults in the room.

And as long as we have like these people around the table, we can nudge the project in the right direction. And if it's not nudging, then we can all walk out and make that like a signal to everybody else. I'm like, okay, get away from this thing. I too have seen an episode of Rugrats where all the kids convince themselves they're the parents. Like, what? This is a ridiculous kind of like fallacy.

I'm not defending it. I'm just saying that's, that's what my understanding is. Okay, would you have been an advisor if someone, like, suppose in a world where you could say yes, what would make you, what would push you over the edge? I mean, so we have a kind of blanket thing of drug, probably we don't advise anything. Yeah, sure, sure.

But let's say that wasn't true. Let's say that wasn't true. I don't know, man. I just feel like it would just shave years off my life to be advising World Liberty Finan. I just feel like it does not invite good juju in your life to be associated with somebody. Now let's go to the other side.

Arthur, what would it take for you to advise World Liberty Financial? Billion. Yeah? Billion? More 10%? More 10% of the token supply? He's already done this math.

10 billion FDV. I don't want 10%. I feel like Jason Drewillo might be a value player there, you know? Bring on. You didn't ask the right question. What's my cut? Yeah, yeah. All right. You need 100 Derulo's and then you're in.

All right. Donald Trump, Jr. If you're listening, Arthur's lines. It's for sale. What about you? What about Tarulun? Huh? What about you? Would never do it. Really?

I'm too afraid. What are you afraid of? Imagine there's a rug pull on that shit. You will get chased down by the people who threw shit at Citadel's headquarters on fire after game stuff. You're going to get like the craziest people falling. I don't want to be anywhere near that. For a billion dollars, so I'll live there. You're buying a lot of lawyers, a billion dollars, man.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, you were mentioning, so on a previous show, you were talking a lot of shit about the Trump family coin, the Trump family meme coin, as you put it, or a meme coin with a lot more steps, I think, is the way that you described it. Talk a little bit for the audience about what that experience was like afterwards.

My DMs were just filled with a lot of Anons telling me how much they think my... opinion suck. So I was just like, all right, you know what? I got to like stay the fuck away from this asset class. Asset class. Deserve its own category. The DMs, they just, they hurt you so bad. Yes. I don't know if there were 10% of the supply, maybe. Yeah. I got to get to your level. All right. So the asset class being celeb coins? The asset class being presidential celebrity coins. Presidential. That's a pretty narrow, yeah, pretty narrow asset class. Yeah. Okay. Arthur, what's your take on celebrity coins as a category?

They're great, but I guess most of them aren't doing so well price performance-wise. Yeah. So why are they great? Attention to the space, activity on chain, new people using stuff. It's great. You don't think that attention is like, okay, short-term it's good, long-term it ends up reflecting badly? I mean, if we convert 10% of people who, you know, logged on to one of these chains and we've done something valuable or whatever it is. All onboarding is good onboarding. Exactly. Okay. All right.

Okay, so what's your celebrity coin plan now that now that, now that, for Feraptus? Well, I did. Are you talking about it? Yeah. I thought I thought I had a celebrity coin for aptos coming up. I mean, I agree. I think they are good at capturing attention, but they all have, I mean, we just talked about the price appreciation for Iggy. And like that lenders a lot of people, too.

And so I think, like, what is, is there a net benefit? Because if the people lose money, like, yes, you can. captured a couple, but the rest of the mob crowd that's sliding into your DMs, like, that to me is so net negative. And we haven't pursued any celebrity coins, but no plans in the short run, but we can't stop anybody. I'm waiting for dollar sign Arthur, because like clearly you could, you could get one right now. One billion. I'll take the other nine. I'll take the other time. He's a very cheap price. If you watch any coin. As they say, don't get high on your own supply. That's right. All right. What is that, what does that breakup? Breakup

like on the pie chart. Greater than 100%, you know. I feel good at math. It's a square. Yeah. So a while back, we talked about this on the show. There was all this drama about, you know, Anselm being this kind of gateway for a lot of celebrities coming into crypto.

And I remember, I think it was Kobe who was criticizing Anselm and saying, you know, look, if a celebrity wants to get into crypto, is the right way to get a celebrity into crypto to get them to launch a token with their name on it? Or is it just do what everyone else does and just like buy Bitcoin? ether and like do the normal thing that everybody else does is like invest in the space. Mo, I want to get your take on this as somebody who runs an ecosystem. What do you think about the healthiness for an ecosystem of getting, you know, people from outside who are like, oh, I can make a quick buck, I can monetize my fame, coming into an ecosystem

saying, great, you know, the sort of Jason DeRuas of the world, pop in and say, yo, will you do me a solid and like, you know, what do you think about that? Anselm's backstage, right? I think he's coming up next. He's listening. He's listening. Don't worry, you can't box. So it's okay.

I did moitai, so I'd be down to explore with him. But I guess, like, what's the question? The question is, how do we get those people on board and then convert them? The question is like, you know, with respect to meme coins, there's a lot of criticism now of meme coins as well. It's got the same category in that when you get into the late cycle of meme coins. In the beginning, it's like, oh, it's fun, it's getting people in the space. Late cycle of meme coins, people are like, oh, pumped out fun, it's kind of extractive. It's pulling money out of the ecosystem.

How do you think about that as somebody who's trying to cultivate an ecosystem? Yeah, I mean, I think what's fun about it? I think what's fun about meme coins is like you see price going up and people piling in and people talking about things. And sure, you get some fun components on Twitter, but that's really the fun is making money, right? Like, let's be honest. And so how can you actually achieve that beyond just doing, you know, meme coin activity, celeb coin activity, NFTs, ICO, you know, go back to every cycle. I mean, for our perspective, we think applications, whether they're defy applications that offer

economic incentives, those are much more interesting for us. They show demonstration of our protocols performance. They bring in people that get economic value. They're having fun trading, right? Like making money. And that's awesome. From there, like, how do you cast a much wider net from a distribution perspective? I mean, you were in Korea with us, right? We're working with South Korea telco. 30 million phone subscribers. They built T-wallet. It's going to be, you know, potentially million devices. If you think about that, like, and Aptos is the preferred blockchain, of course, I've got to do the plug. But imagine all those people having fun making money on Aptos's products. Like that is a little bit more sustainable and I think far more interesting. And then you can,

of course, pile on and bring in all the meme coin stuff, all the fun, NFT stuff. But there's so much more beyond that, right? Like Webtoons, for example, I don't know how many people in the audience or listening to know about Webtoons. Webtoons is a comic strip that just, you know, It has an episode every week, a bunch of different artists contribute to it. If you have a mobile device that allows you to make money and also take that money and deploy it into your favorite artist that has the next cartoon episode or a comic book episode coming, you can make money off of that too.

So there's fun, there's actual entertainment versus like chasing the hype of a meme coin or entertainment coin that we think is shorter-fueled. Right, right, right. Yeah. Okay, you were mentioning what's going on in Korea, and I wanted to switch subjects a little bit to talk about a recent report that was dropped by chain analysis, which was the global crypto adoption index. So every year, chain analysis, they rank all the different countries in the world,

using a bunch of signals from both on-chain data as well as, you know, website and kind of online visits, to try to get a sense of how different countries are adopting crypto with respect to total number of users and total amount of online activity. Now, I somewhat have my doubts about their methodology, but here's the list of countries that they had by ranking. Okay? Number one, anyone want to guess what the number one was? Do you know, do you know know, is it percentage penetration or nominal, notional number of people? It's kind of unclear. They don't actually specify exactly what they're doing, but it seems like it's mostly about people. Okay. It seems like it's more about people. Does anyone want to guess what the number one country was?

Philippines? No, good guess, though. Number one was India. India was number one. So I'll go on the list. India, then Nigeria, then Indonesia. Number four is USA. Number five, Vietnam, six, Ukraine, seven, Russia, eight Philippines, nine, Pakistan, 10, Brazil. 19th is Korea, and then 20th is China. 19th is who? Korea. Wow. 19th is Korea.

So, no, I'm kind of doubtful that this methodology, like, that just doesn't, like, really seem true to me that India is, like, the number one country for crypto adoption. I mean, they put a 1% tax on treating and volume with the zero, so I don't know. Yeah, there's no volume there. I have no, look, I have no idea. I'm just telling you what the report says. So I think Nick Carter recently did a piece, like, analyzing some of this. But it feels like it may be that they're over-indexing on, like, website visits.

It's like the raw number of people in India. And the fact that China, you know, China, everyone has to use a VPN. Maybe this is really an index of where developers of all this shit are. Not actual users. The website clicks. An index of click farms, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, interesting. But so you were in a Korea blockchain week. Did you also go to Korea?

Yeah, I was. You did. Yeah, okay. So what was the vibe that you guys saw in Korea? How did it differ from what you're seeing here in Southeast Asia? I mean, the Koreans love to trade. The Koreans trade the most of any country per capita for crypto in the world. It started with traditional financial markets. The Kaspi Options Market was the largest options market in the world until the regulators banned it because everybody was just gambling like crazy motherfuckers. And so they love crypto. As much as the politicians want to push back on it, the young population wants it so bad that they have no tax on it yet. They've been keep delaying it. You know, they basically introduced some new rules to codify how listings happen on, you know, the upbits and the bit thumbs of the world.

And, you know, from Mailstrom's perspective, we get a lot of questions from our portfolios, like, how do we get on a Korean exchange? Because that's where the traders are. That's for the people who want to own these assets and trade them at liquidity and all that sort of stuff. So I am very surprised that report's at 19th. I think they've got to be top three. Yeah. I think we definitely need to look into the asteris and how they calculated this thing. That has me.

I mean, India is not a surprise just by share volume, but I would say Korea probably definitely should be higher. I mean, we had Aptos experience there last two weeks ago, and we've been really big in Korea, right? Like you, and you've seen all the momentum that take place before over the last five years. So we have not only the largest corporate sponsors or partners, working in that region, but we see a massive sense of appetite in terms of volume and, you know, propensity to try new things. And so, I mean, Korea, like, the vibe is completely different on the ground. Like, you were there. We were out every night. Everyone is interested. We launched something called the Aptos card, a cold storage that ties to your Petra account.

You get APT on it or USDT now that USDT is available. And people were lining up trying to get a card because they knew that there's so many cool things that they could do with it. And so, like, the interest, the young generation there that's so open to trying new things is rampant there. And so, and I would say India is probably very similar, right? Like the consumer behavior, the propensity to try new things is really high in these markets. So that's not a surprise for India, but Korea. We've got to talk to Sergey about that. I mean, one thing that's always confused me is that Korea and Japan are kind of similar culturally.

Like they're both like, you know, sort of these conglomerate-driven countries, low-birth. rates, you know, it's like you're both kind of similar type economies. Korea loves crypto. It's like, you know, 15 to 20 percent of adults. Only one of them had magic the gathering online exchange, though. Let's be real. Like, what the fuck you're talking about? But the weird thing is that Japan, like crypto is just like not nearly as much of a thing there. It's like 3%. Japan used to be a massive crypto trading market and the regular is there put a tax on trading and destroyed the market. And so that's why you don't see the...

Is that what it is? I see. Interesting. Interesting. So why does Korea have no taxes on crypto? Because the population is so agitated for crypto that a politician proposing that is not going to get reelected. Okay. So it's just like you...

What's the theory of the case there? If you had to make the crypto germ spread more through different countries, like how did Korea end up there and Japan ended up totally in the opposite direction? Like, what's your theory of the case? I don't know. I mean... Yeah, let people trade and they're going to love it. It's fun, as Moa was saying.

I think pensioners got burned out on all the Cardano and XRP they were buying back in the day. Like, let's be real. Like, that's like the Japanese pensioner meme thing is a real fucking thing. Anything you was choice of coins that led them in different routes? I think they were just a little too early. Too early. I feel like Korea was all about the IPO boom. Japan was like a little too early and so then they bottled the dog shit.

I see. Okay. And then they lost non-exie-revelling. Gox, come on. That's true. That's like seared into national memory. Maybe, maybe. I mean, it was so tiny at that time.

Like, not that many people. It made the news everywhere there. Sure. Well, so I heard, I heard. Mark's launching a new exchange, too. So this might be, uh, coming back. Yeah, yeah, second act.

Right, there you know. You learn double entry bookkeeping accounting. You know, he learned something. So I heard, I was chatting with somebody today who's like this Korean, you know, guy who's very connected in Korea. And he was telling me that, so apparently, Korea retail, the sentiment in Korea shifted a lot after

terror collapsed, but even more so, not actually Terra so much as Clayton. So Clayton, if you remember, it was Kakao's, you know, blockchain in Korea. And Clayton, apparently like the chairman of Kakao or something, like some CEO of Kakao, do you know this story? Basically, he was

embezzling money from Clayton, and he was like indicted or something, and like, it's like this huge scandal in Korea. And as a result of that, Clayton ended up rebranding and, like, fusing with some other Korean blockchain, it's like a whole thing. And I had no idea that any of this had happened.

But, like, yeah, Clayton is no longer Clayton, and now is a new name because of this scandal. Do you know the story? I mean, we know a little bit of the story. I mean, it's the reason Aptos, I think, ends up becoming an exciting option for everyone. But, yeah, there are probably these types of stories across not just Korea in many markets. I mean, we talked about, you know, other. New products that are coming out of words.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm getting sweaty up here, huh? Okay. But, you know, I do think going back to the point of just like, you know, consumer behavior, I mean, you've seen Korea come out of a war many decades ago and go from, you know, one of the lowest GDP-producing countries to one of the top, where they're top 11 now. And, you know, I think there's definitely a lot of pressure from the young generation to continue to allow for crypto to participate in these economy and be part of the economy. But I think what's more important to any political system or government system is to make sure that they're in that top tier ranking when it comes to GDP.

And there's no denying across the globe that crypto is a big part of GDP now. And so whoever continues to facilitate the right structure, the right setup is going to win. And I think Korea is doing a piece of that. And I'm probably a lot more when the elections in the U.S. You know, materialized. Okay. All right. Fair enough, fair enough.

I'm sure there's a group of Korean crypto podcasters who are discussing World Liberty, financial similarly incredulous. Did you hear about this president and he's doing defy in the US? Well, I have to say your description of the Clayton's story actually did remind me of Terra because I don't know, this is a deep cut, but I don't know if you remember D-Gen Box, which the Tara Foundation borrowed against and sent to Eiff. That was the same type of embezzlement as the Clayton embezzlement. That's kind of true. Okay, well, all right, well, speaking of embezzlement, let's talk about macro and the Fed. So, Arthur, you have you've become now kind of in your, I'd say you're sort of this like this elder statesman

of crypto at this point and you write these long treatises talking about macro and given the moment that we're in right now, so just for, I mean, this show is probably going to come out on the podcast and probably in two or three days and by then everyone's going to know the size of the Fed rate cut and how the market responded. Right now we still don't know. So there's a lot of speculation that it's going to be 50 basis points as opposed to 25. But you wrote in a post recently that the story maybe less about the size of the rate cut as the other channels of liquidity entering into the economy. Talk to us about what your thesis is of how people should be thinking about macro that they're ignoring. So as I said today on stage in my keynote, the only thing that you need

to look at is the dollar yen exchange rate. And so if the Fed's going to cut 50 or whatever it is, that's narrowing the differential between the Fed funds rate and the BOJ deposit rate. And the faster that the market believes that that rate is going to narrow, the more of the yen is going to strengthen, the more traders who borrowed yen to buy assets around the world, you know, U.S. stocks, treasury bonds, real estate, crypto as well, they're going to have to cover. And so what they can, as fast as they can, buy back yen to not lose a lot of money. And so if the Fed comes down and says, yeah, 50 basis points and the dot plot is super

aggressive, I think that maybe the initial reaction is, yay, red cut. And then it's fucking slaughter. People are going to get absolutely carried out as yen goes through. 130 because people are like, oh, well, what the fuck? Why do I want to own this, this pair, have this trade on when I know that they're converging and the rate, the yen should strengthen? And so I think that's going to be a big problem. And the response is they're going to cut more because they believe that that's the response to everything. Oh, if something's fucked up, oh, this is cut some more. But the reason why it didn't work, it's going to be didn't do enough

of it. So just do it more, which obviously is good for us, you know, in a medium term perspective. but I do believe that crypto could be a bit correlated with all the other assets if we do get a generalize sell-off to do everyone now knowing, okay, the Fed is cutting rates. They cut maybe it's 50, right? That was aggressive. They said the economy's weak or jobs are weak or whatever. They're going to cut more. Ghaly-in goes fucking, you know, 200 at some point, which again causes financial calamity. And then bad girl yelling to the rescue. Let's print some fucking money because Kamala Harris needs to win the election. So how do you position for this? Let's assume. that they, let's do in the audience completely believes you.

What's the portfolio positioning they should do? Wait, I thought we're saying no financial advice, buddy. We said for the four of us are not giving financial advice. I don't have to do it, just double checking it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one, obviously, I'm long as fuck, and it's more like, okay, do I want to take a tactical position while I'm at the bar all fucked up? I'll just go short some Bitcoin into the, into the Fed announcement,

and wait for a few days. if yen responds or I think it's going to respond, then wait for the market to drop and then go long as fuck. Because the response is more money. We know what the response is. If there's any sort of hiccup before the election, they will print more money.

Right. Okay. Trun, what's your take on this story? Do you believe this? All I have to say is that Elizabeth Warren letter that asks for the 75 basis points. Describe this letter? So I guess Elizabeth Warren wrote this letter

to Jerome Powell that was, I want to say, groveling almost. for a 75 basis point cut and said it was needed in a lot of ways that we're just like we can't win the election without this cut that would be my summary if you like asked me to summarize it

which is funny because this might actually be the first time there's like bipartisan support in this direction for anything like this macro wise I don't know I feel like the market's been pricing this in forever like I mean you just like look at, you just look at all the implied spreads.

It's like everyone thinks it's 50 basis points at least. So I don't know. I don't think you're going to see some like shock type of thing because I feel like the market's been feeling like this is going to happen for the last month. Tom, what's your take? Yeah, the Warren thing was that was very weird. I think I don't remember like a time in my adult life when people have been this focused on the Fed,

which is also very kind of unnerving. Like you have senators, you have random retail people, kind of like watching like FMC like every you know every single month I'm like this feels a little weird to me like I don't but they should be watching it it's so important it's so yeah maybe maybe that's a fucked up sort of way yeah yeah yeah

but I don't know I think it's always bizarre when it's becomes kind of like kind of like kind of like kind of top of mind for everybody again yeah yeah that is very true Mo what's your take I mean Arthur said a well I think and I think I agree what Tremu is saying too it's it's bizarrely a good thing for us short term

and then maybe not medium term, but maybe longer term. And so that's, yeah, that's kind of my view. Okay. Yeah, I mean, it does feel like, so, you know, this rate cut aside, obviously a lot is going to be dependent on this election. And we're now getting closer and closer to November. And it's a story that everybody around the world is now talking about at this point. You know, it's just dominating headlines.

We just saw Trump have a second assassination attempt against him. And it feels like, we still don't know what Kamala's platform is going to be for crypto. So, Arthur, again, as the kind of macro guru guru of the industry, how do you think about a Kamala presidency and how it's going to end up playing for risk assets and for crypto? Well, first, I don't understand why crypto bros and gals are so pro-Trump, because Trump was president for four years, and he did fuck all.

And so now he wants a bunch of crypto donations, and so he says the right things out of his mouth, launches some D-5 dog shit or whatever he's doing, right? And all of a sudden, people were like, oh, yeah, you were president before you. You had all this opportunity to do all these things and you did nothing. And so all of a sudden you're going to do something now? I don't think. So you don't believe it?

You think he's just going to get a shell scripted down the river? Zero. And so then if you think what's the opposite? Like Kamala Harris, well, the Democrats in their administration has been hostile to crypto. And my point is, who cares? It doesn't matter, right? Bitcoin went from zero to whatever 1.5 or 1.2 trillion, whatever the market cap is, with no regulatory clarity, with no support from any government regulators, we don't need them.

Why grovel to these people to, like, beg for scraps off of the table? Like, continue building the stuff that you should be building. Fuck them. Okay, all right. So it doesn't matter at the end of the day, because the Republicans in the U.S. are going to cut taxes without cutting spending, so the government deficit widens, and then the Democrats are going to have more welfare payments, and the government deficit widens. So at the end of the day, the U.S. government will borrow more bonds,

and we'll have to print more money to finance that debt. And so crypto will benefit. It doesn't matter who wins. It's just a popularity clown contest on TV. So you think that all the stuff that happened in 22, right, of Operation Chokepoint and the SEC going after all these companies, you think it didn't matter and it didn't slow down the propagation of crypto? No.

Absolutely not. Yeah, of course it impacted some individual people and their individual projects. but we still have more wallets than today than I were in the past. We still have more people building. We have 20,000 tickets sold at this conference. 10,000 were sold last year. So more people are coming into this ecosystem. They don't need Gary Gensler or someone to give them a stamp of approval.

Like, yes, you can invest in crypto. Fuck you. All right, let's get it. The only thing I'm disappointed about is you didn't use the word Muppet, which you usually don't. I mean, it is an interesting thing. like people didn't stop building, people continue to build. We launched, right, in 22.

And so despite all the sort of confusion around what is right, what is wrong, and the gray area, like we continue to build. I think the sad thing is we did slow down, though, right? We slowed down in the U.S., and we were forced to, you know, I came to Korea eight times. I was in Singapore four times, Japan four times. And so, like, you just kind of took people that are in New York and California and, like, pushed them out to 19-hour flights to Singapore. And everyone loves it here.

So that's going to continue to happen. I think that's good for the globe, though, because now this innovation is disseminating in pockets where they can take things forward in much more interesting, more creative ways than we would have typically seen if this would only happen in Silicon Valley, although we're based in Silicon Valley, or only in New York, which was obviously the hub of crypto for a bit. I think that's kind of good, right? If the basis for your business is that you require to suck on the government tea to survive, then you shouldn't be doing crypto.

Go buy the Tritfi. That's how it works. Very profitable. You don't knock in it, right? All right. What's your take on the ETFs in that case? On the what? The ETFs. The good things, make the price go up, you know, more buying pressure. But I think if we will see how the ownership changes in the next, was it the 13F or whatever.

I think a lot of the buyers of the ETS for basic as delta neutral basis trades. And so if the Bitcoin basis comes down, they've unwound their positions. And so we'll see the Millenniums and the .72s. And those sorts of folks have probably reduced their, crypto exposure because they never really were in it for the price appreciation of Bitcoin. They're in it for a basis trade. Yeah. But I mean, the reason why I'm asking is that the ETF was a result of, you know,

basically sucking on the government teeth, as you put it. Right. Yeah. And that's Larry Fing's business. Hey, we want to buy Bitcoin, let you use your retirement account and put your money with us. It's just as if, you know, BlackRock and Vanguard, another arm of the U.S. government, just like any other asset manager regulated by a domestic entity, is it arm of their government. And so if you want money to stay within your system

and not be in the hands of the people, then let the same tread, find Muppets come in. There you go, Muppets. Come in and take your money. So we'll give you this piece of paper. Here's this Bitcoin thing. It goes up and price, goes down in price.

You get this thing. But if you actually want to, like, I don't know, buy some coffee from a single origin producer in Guatemala who doesn't have a bank account, this is not for you. So, again, it's okay. You know, price number go up, cool, but you're not actually using crypto.

Yeah. But it's still good, though, in a way that it's at broader access and distribution and awareness to people that typically would not be willing to or may not feel comfortable going to an exchange, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm not knocking it. I get it. Passive investing is a thing. If you have money in a retirement account and you can't get it out, this is the only thing you can buy, then, okay, cool, makes sense. Tom, what's your take on this claim that Arthur's making that crypto, it's basically path independent, it's going to get to the same place out of the way, government's a distraction? I was going to say, it reminds me kind of of your blog post, Kaisaki. The destination is known, but the journey is not. And I kind of agree with that to a certain extent. I think you can't really kill crypto at this point.

But I do think GDP creation, value creation is a fragile thing. I don't know if you saw this report from former Italian prime minister, basically talking about all the different ways that EU has kind of destroyed value and kill the innovation and what they can do is for sort of change it. And, you know, people can say, oh, you know, regulation in the grand scheme things doesn't really matter. That is kind of true, but there is a very sort of practical, potentially negative downside to having a bad regulatory environment.

You can basically destroy value or stop value can be created. And so, you know, I agree with them in the sense that, yeah, it's, this whole thing is designed as to be, you know, isolated from government. That is sort of the whole thesis. But everything else that sort of accelerates it and makes it maybe that path faster, I think the government can actually meaningfully slow it and sort of destroy value there. Yeah. I think, yeah, the point that you just made resonates with me in that, like, it's definitely true for Bitcoin.

That Bitcoin, like, it's there. We all know what it is. It has its role in the global kind of financial firmament at this point. And it's a little bit like, you know, when China bans Bitcoin mining and, okay, there's no more mining in Sichuan, and it just pops up now in Kazakhstan or in West Texas or whatever. You can't kill it, right? It's like whackamole. It just pops up somewhere else.

But that's not true for companies. It's not true for founders, right? If you basically go through and do a sweep and just say every single one of you motherfuckers is dead now and we're finding you for all the money that you're worth, it really does slow things down and make it more difficult, that the marginal entrepreneur is just going to be like, all right, well, I'll just go build the fintech thing

or I'll just go in AI and get easy money over there. And it does feel like it's not guaranteed that we all get to the same place with respect to the total amount of new things, applications, use cases that people end up building in crypto. Maybe it's true that we get to the same place eventually, but it does feel like it really matters whether it takes like five or ten years longer.

We don't build stronger applications, right? So if you survived because of a favorable funding environment or whatever, you built a product based on your own personal gravitas or whatnot, and then you get sliced by the regulator for whatever reason, I mean, is that really decentralization? And what have we built? We just built another way of building centralized companies, but they've got this funny token thing that rides on chain, right?

I don't think that's what I were here for. We value decentralization in projects that preach that and back it up with, you know, real vigor are the ones that are most successful. And I'm sure in your portfolio as well, it's same in mine, right? But the guy who's like, yeah, I'm really good at raising money from the traditional Silicon Valley VCs. And as soon as the wind's changed and I went to AI,

And then, I mean, okay, you got a zero in that, but you probably deserve to get a zero because that wasn't really about what we're trying to do here. Right, right. I mean, the decentralization part is a very important one, and I think that really matters. But, you know, looking at the Nakamoto coefficient at the same time, you also have to look at what are the use cases? I think you're, I mean, not only can you not kill crypto, I think all these large companies, not all, but like some of the large companies that have put their roots down are really starting to see things come to, come to fruition, right? Take a look at someone like BlackRock, right? They have the Biddle Fund on Eath, and that is a pretty significant, you know, stake in the ground for them. And, you know, you have Larry Fink going out there talking about what crypto can do.

And so not only is there products being built that add value to financial products or underlying infrastructure that reduces, you know, costs, and so they have margin improvement or potentially helps them with distribution of new financial products, helps them grow top line, that's P&L impact. And so I think a lot of these larger companies, whether it's BlackRock, whether it's PayPal, whether it's South Korea Telco, all these folks are going to continue to push crypto forward because there's real business value and they're going to continue to push their stakeholders and constituents along the way, too. I don't think there's there's no way you're killing crypto at this point. Fair enough. All right. Well, we're running up on time. So we're going to wrap it up. But I just want to ask real quick, anything that you want to plug, Arthur, for folks who are in Singapore or people in your portfolio that you want to shout out.

Well, I'm going to plug my party on Thursday. The location's coming out tomorrow. It's going to be fucking lit. No, Jason Derulo. No Jason Durillo. Let's get ready to go. Gates you're excited. He's not going to be there, unfortunately.

Bo, anything you want to plug? I was going to plug my party, but my party conflicts with Arthur's party, and I'm trying to figure out which party to go to. We have our party at Salee v. So go to Arthur's party after my party, because I think there's going to go much later, probably. But I think, you know, the only thing to plug is probably what everyone cheered about, right? like you got to keep building and I think that's just like a really good message and if you want to build build on aptos love it okay that's it from us thanks everybody