Unchained - Why the Crypto Markets Seem Down Bad as Bitcoin Dips Below $100K - Ep. 939

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

Bitcoin’s bleeding again and sentiment is collapsing. But if you’ve been around for a few cycles, this kind of pain might look familiar. In this episode of Unchained, Laura sits down with Yann Allemann, Co-founder of Swissblock, and Joe Vezzani, CEO of LunarCrush, to unpack the latest market wipeout, and whether it’s a signal of exhaustion or opportunity. From retail’s record-breaking bearishness to the unwinding of crypto’s DAT mania, they explore why the market feels bearish and what that might mean for what’s coming next. They also dive into the likelihood of a blow-off top, the resurgence of privacy coins, the risk in digital asset treasury companies, and even why some think we could see new all-time highs before the year ends. Thank you to our sponsors! Mantle Guests: Yann Allemann, Co-founder and Chairman of Swissblock Joe Vezzani, Co-founder and CEO of LunarCrush Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 📉 2:13 Why Bitcoin’s crashing again and whether DATs are to blame 💥 10:43 The consequences of the October 10 liquidation wave 🔄 18:48 Is the four-year crypto cycle finally dead? 📊 25:00 The unraveling of the DAT trend: end of the mania or just a pause? 😶 29:32 Why markets feel eerily quiet and deeply bearish 🐻 32:55 How this became the “most bearish bull market” ever 🥇 40:49 If Bitcoin is digital gold, why hasn’t it followed gold’s rally? 🎯 47:09 Are prediction markets stealing attention from crypto? 🚀 53:30 Why Yann thinks a blow-off top is still coming 🕵️‍♂️ 55:51 The privacy coin comeback led by Zcash 💫 1:02:00 Why ETH’s relative strength could surprise the market ⚠️ 1:07:36 Why Yann says there’s “no reason to hold speculative assets” 💰 1:12:59 Bitcoin price predictions and what smart money’s really doing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, everyone, just a quick note before we start, that last week, in our stablecoin episode, Sam McPherson of Phoenix Labs talked about how Spark was one of the biggest depositors into Athena early on, but exited this past summer because starting in July or so, it seemed to them that Athena had maxed out on the capacity for the basis trade. He then said, quote, Furthermore, with the integration of, say, Binance with the 12% guaranteed yield, this was funneling most of the yield into these deployments, which was disadvantaging depositors into S-USDE. So since then, Spark has exited entirely.

End quote. We released this as a clip on social media, where it gained some traction, and Guy Young, the founder of Athena, reached out and said that this was actually factually inaccurate. He said, quote, we paid for the 12% with the budget of cash the foundation has, not from taking yield from other users in S-USDE. Thanks for setting the rest of the rest of the cost of. record straight guy and now onto the show i'm going to go in a crazy way i think that we we do hit an all-time high the metrics are out there i mean something we're seeing with just retail you know we follow at

lunar crush like how many people are talking about bitcoin how many people are talking about crypto retail is like the lowest and bearish most bearish it is like almost ever been since we started tracking we're tracking 50 million posts every hour i think what people need to understand is that the the likelihood of a blow off top is more the case than a rounded or kind of more prolonged just because of the fact that you've seen this. For those that haven't been around in previous cycles, this is normal. We've had these types of situations. I remember even in the run-up of 2020, we had a 35% correction within two weeks before

it actually went to ultimatize. Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unchained. You're a no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Mantle is pioneering blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of Tradfi and Web3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Today's topic is the crypto markets.

Here to discuss are Jan Alamann, co-founder of GlassNode, and Joe Vazani, co-founder and CEO of Lunar Crush. Welcome, Jan and Joe. Thanks for driving us. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. So you guys, we booked the show last week, but we are recording now on a day when the Bitcoin price has dropped from 104,000 this morning to 101,000 in just the last couple hours. So why don't we start with you, Joe? Why do you think this is happening? What's there to be bullish about right now, I guess?

I think we're going to fall below 100K. I think we're almost there right now. And, you know, I think we're in an interesting spot in the market. And I know we'll talk about a lot of those things today with regards to just, you know, I think some introspection on, you know, the market and utility and where we've come from. I mean, you know, following Bitcoin now since 2014, it's pretty, I think, you know, I couldn't even imagine today, you know, how far we've come, you know, looking back if I had to look forward 10 years from where we're. we were back then with just adoption, institutional adoption, ETFs, companies, DATs, I know we'll get to it.

But I think we're a little overcooked with the DAT trade right now. I think a lot of that stuff is unwinding. I think you're kind of, we're seeing some companies having to sell some Bitcoin. I think we're seeing outflows from the ETFs. I just think you're seeing the market trade, knowing that that's that's going to unwind a little bit more. I don't think we're going to see any sort of like major capitulation from, you know, people like strategy. But when you're looking at companies that are buying tens of thousands of Bitcoin, you know, now their stock prices down 70, 80, 90 percent,

where do they, where do they get the leverage from to continue down that path? And so I just think I think we're seeing that unwind right now. And when you said that you thought we're going to drop below 100, do you have a point in mind where you think Bitcoin will bottom? It's tough to say. I mean, man, is this an epic opportunity, though, if you save a little cash. I posted today that I'm starting to take a couple nibbles. You know, I think we can fall five percent further. I think it's tough. It seems like what's the trade with Bitcoin is, you know, stock markets moving up.

Bitcoin doesn't seem to be kind of correlated in the same way with the big tech stocks that are just sucking up tons of, tons of capital. And then you have down days in the overall broader market and then Bitcoin gets pushed on further. And so in the market trades like that, that's not a good, good place to be. But, you know, we'll see 90s. We'll see mid-90s for sure. And then, you know, we'll see how long we kind of chop sideways. But, you know, I would say be prepared until you kind of see Fed funds rates come down.

And you see the billions, you know, or trillions of dollars sitting in those money market accounts come back into the market. They have to find, they're going to find alpha in some way there. But it's not going to come in until those rates come down. And, Jan, what are your thoughts on what is happening? with the Bitcoin price? Yeah, I think it's trading like the macro asset that it is. And I think what is interesting in terms of Bitcoin today is that I think for the first time you've had U.S. markets and I think global markets pricing in the actual effect

of the government shutdown. So today there is actually the first release of the actual numbers, the actual impact. And if you look at some of the, let's say the, let's say, the, let's say, betting platforms and also things like Polymarket, you're seeing a shift in expectations of a resolution that has now become more relevant. So basically from first to mid-December now being potentially a resolution being relevant even mid-November. So I think there's a refactoring or repricing of that, of that, let's say, real-world effect.

I think now I saw as well that I think they were expecting a 200 basis point hit on Q4 GDP. as one example. So now these things are becoming real. They're not just, you know, they're not just visceral things that people talk about. And I think that's obviously gonna have to work its way through the way that risk has been priced into the system. When it comes to Bitcoin, specifically,

we're not seeing any major structural shift. I mean, what we've seen today is what you would call a walk down, somebody's walking down the price. You have quite a bit of demand, or let's say a lot of limit orders that are moving, moving in right below 100K. But to Joe's point, I could definitely see 94 and 95, but this is in no way, at least from where we stand,

this is not the end of the journey. Structurally speaking, if you look at Unchang, there's a lot of very strong structural, I'd say indications that actually there's a lot of accumulation. I think the key point here is that the shift from old hands, or let's say the OGs to the new Gs is happening, in a different way that you would expect. OGs are probably more pressed to sell.

NUGs are not in any hurry to absorb that actual selling pressure, but there definitely is demand. There's underlying demand that you can see. And what did you mean when you said you were seeing certain things on chain that indicate we're not at the bottom yet? So for us, we always look at liquidity, right? So liquidity is the ability, let's say, to sell without moving the price, right? to keep it very generic as an explanation.

And we look at liquidity from two different vantage points. One is the velocity of money. So how fast does money change hands? And also the incoming new, let's say capital comes into the system that can come through ETFs, you know, indirect place like treasuries, right, that then have to buy, let's say the underlying to be able to meet obligations and also sell,

like Joe mentioned. And basically combining those two things, we actually see that there's a lot of movement underneath the surface that is not necessarily reflected in price. And there's probably a good point to be made at the risk reward given where equities are, where gold was a couple of weeks back, that Bitcoin wasn't as attractive, especially not all coins where, you know, there were better, better ways to allocate capital, especially in tech stocks. That is probably starting to change.

I think that risk reward, that opportunity cost is going to swing in a different. direction, but for that to happen, we need clarity. I think the government shutdown is a big question mark or basically open-ended point that I think needs to get resolved as soon as that is out of the way. Given where we are in the macro situation, I think there's a good chance that we see more upside. And I don't even know if I fully understand what connection you're drawing between the government shutdown and the Bitcoin price. So can you just be explicit about that? Yeah. So in terms of Bitcoin as a macro-

asset, it's on the, let's say, if you look at a risk curve, it's on the furthest part of that risk curve, right? So you're not going to buy Bitcoin if you don't expect a positive next three to six months in terms of the economy where the financial plumbing is, right, liquidity, so on and so forth. And right now with the government shutdown being not clear and the impact being actually very real and very, very extreme in some cases, it puts a large question mark in terms of how that impacts the underlying economy and also financial conditions. From what I understand, I think over the last 36 days that the government has been shut down 35, they've borrowed around $600 billion, right?

So that now has some sort of net effect on the ability for also the Treasury to potentially pay back interest rates on the on the outside in debt, even as the TGA is fully refilled now that the repo has been drained, right? Okay. And so when when you, you know, look at all the these factors. that you're considering, how low do you think Bitcoin could go? So I think structurally speaking, even if you go to 94, 95K, I wouldn't see that as a break in the structure.

Now, that would be fairly extreme given obviously where we came from a couple of weeks back. But I can see 95K. But at the same time, I think there's a lot more demand that would come in at those levels. Well, first of all, I don't know if you guys saw, but Chris Berniske got a lot of hate right after the October 10th. liquidations when he said that he thought Bitcoin could drop as low as 75K. But, you know, despite that, like, I noticed that the Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index is at 27, which is very much in fear territory.

So, yeah, it looks like, you know, even if it does fall further, like already, it's at a point where, you know, certain people might look at that and say, like, oh, this is a buying opportunity. But let's talk more about those October 10th liquidations. because obviously those that day was the largest was the day of the largest liquidations in crypto history. So what impact do you think that's had on this market since then? And what impact do you think it will have, you know, for, I don't know, the next six months to a year? I think it had a pretty big impact to just people's psychology around what they're investing in. Any sort of kind of flash crash like that makes you look at, you know, the underlying

structure of how people are trading, what leverage looks like. I know we're in a pretty degenerate economy here in crypto sometimes, and people were very quick to put leverage back on after that. You know, you mentioned like going even lower than 95. Like if a flash crash hit right now, where would we, where would we be? Right. And, you know, not that anyone, you know, could really buy at those levels. It was very tough to get in trades at those levels when it was actually happening. But I think it shook people a little bit. I think people are especially, I would say, in the all-coin market, even some of the top layer ones, I think people are just a little, little sheepish right now. They're very cautious with where things are at. The all-coin market specifically,

you know, like stocks have been rallying. Some of these top tech stocks are hitting all-time highs. You know, Bitcoin's now, you know, 15, 20% off all-time highs. So a lot of these all-coins are 20, 30, 40% off all-time highs. So we're just seeing this, there's not as much correlation that's happening. And I think a lot of that or some of that money that otherwise would have maybe come to some of those all coins is now going to other places. And some of that money that was going to go to Bitcoin is potentially going to other places just because they're like, I can't get flushed out like that, at least from a trading standpoint.

I think the people that have kind of bought and hold or buy and just huddle like their lives away, I think those people are just going to stay forever. and they're going to keep, you know, I'm getting the text messages from the friends right now. Hey, like, I think is now a good time to buy, right? So I think some of those people are starting to kind of come back a little bit and saying, like, okay, we're hitting some levels here that Bitcoin's starting to feel cheaper. But to your original point, none of those, like any of those events, which make that much of an impact.

I mean, that was like probably one of the, like, the craziest days we've ever had in this industry. That's not good for us long term. definitely not good for us short term in people's confidence. And like Jan was saying about the government shutdown, there's just too much insecurity and there's a little too much volatility and having something even like the government shutdown and kind of continue in the way that it is, just creates more uncertainty.

And that's the number one things that markets don't want. Yeah, and also blatant, I think, to add to that as well, the blatant kind of realization, again, that from a plumbing infrastructure perspective, we're not really at the level that we need to be compared to traditional markets, right? Where you have things like circuit breakers that kind of avoid this kind of snowballing effect where kind of to Joe's point you are not even able to execute. Even if you get the price that you would actually want to execute that, you're not able to

because there's a complete meltdown of the system. And we're obviously hearing the reverberations of that with allegedly some of the, let's say the falling outs between winter mute binance and some of these other market makers that are now, you know, maybe becoming vocal in certain areas or let's say in certain circles. And it's going to be interesting to see what the aftermath of that is going to look like. But I think also from people that we know, there's definitely been quite a lot of carnage. And I think it's maybe done a, on the short to medium term, there's an immediate impact on the type of trader that has now vacated the premises, that has now maybe moved on to equities

and other opportunities short term because there's more potentially more stability and even similar types of upside like treasury companies, right, things that are more Bitcoin linked that have some sort of utility value that underpin it. But I do think those types of traders will come back as soon as there's momentum again. There's nothing better. Nothing that creates positive, let's say, a positive externality in terms of how people feel about the ecosystem, then prices that move higher. Nothing better for sentiment than higher prices.

And one thing that I wanted to ask you both is, do you feel that what happened on the day of those liquidations is that a certain type of crypto believer or even, you know, a D-Gen crypto believer was just sort of wiped out of the market? And that is like part of the reason also that we've seen, you know, this kind of very choppy and not, yeah, well, we didn't see the October that people were expecting. So do you feel like there was some segment of the market that just got demolished, basically? They might not be coming back. Yeah. A lot of people got wiped out.

And I think you hit some level of exhaustion, you know, as a, as a trader, where you decide, you know, I'm not going to succeed in this market. And maybe a lot of people got wiped out there. You know, Jan and I are these founders, you know, operating businesses in this space. And, you know, as a founder, you just keep going forever, right? You're never going to stop. It's different when you're a trader. And, you know, you have such a liquidation where maybe you're thinking, okay, there's a. somewhere else. I'm going to restart somewhere else. I'm going to go take a breath.

And I think we're seeing that in the space. I mean, we're, you know, you're seeing like cadena, you know, basically say, throw their hands up in the air. They said, you know, we give up. I think you're going to see a lot of that from other, you know, the chain will just like continue to live. If there's nodes like that, you know, that's the interesting thing about crypto. Community can revamp it. I mean, Terraluna is still around like, you know, in a way. But those things can continue. But I think we're going to see more of that. We're going to see a lot of, you know, people that you've heard of that, you know, maybe you traded, you know, in Defy Summer 2020, 2020, 2021, you know, whatever it is,

a lot of those names will capitulate in some kind of major way and not go to actual zero, but effectively go to zero by teams, not, you know, not getting funding, teams giving up, teams saying, I can't, you know, we can't continue to sell our token into oblivion. The price is, you know, price is so deflated. You know, they have really crappy deals with the market makers that they've had over the years. The market makers have sucked pretty much all the, you know, the margin away from a lot of these foundations. And so they either have to issue a large amount of token to continue or they have to find some sort of utility and some revenue somewhere. But even as we're kind of seen with polymarket, which is, you know, by and far the most successful DAP in our ecosystem,

it's not nothing for the Matic ecosystem type. Everyone always used to say, like, oh, we need just this killer app. I can't wait for this killer app. Killer app does nothing for the actual underlying ecosystem. So what does it mean for all of these protocols? If the killer app's not going to save them, what's going to save them? I think we're just kind of coming to that moment right now in the market. Well, I did also want to ask, you know,

you probably have heard like even before October 10th and all the stuff that happened that there had been a lot of chatter about whether or not this cycle was going to be the first time that Bitcoin breaks out of the four-year cycle. You know, I heard that so many times from different sources. Just, you know, anybody who watches the show regularly or listens regularly will have heard it from multiple people. And, you know, here we are about a year and a half out from the last Bitcoin having. And I'm sure everybody knows the traditional pattern is that the Bitcoin price would rise for, you

know, maybe roughly year and a half, maybe a year and nine months after a Bitcoin having. And traditionally, the Bitcoin price, when it is in a bull market, will rise quite a bit in Q4. But, you know, we're looking right now at a situation in which the Bitcoin price is pretty much, or at least, yeah, the market cap. I actually didn't check the price, but the market cap is at $3.5 trillion versus $3.4 trillion at the beginning of the year. So I just wonder, you know, do you think that we're going to see the same old four-year cycle again? And we just, you know, had our high already. And now it'll be, you know, bare market time.

Or do you agree with, you know, a lot of these people that had been saying in the past few months that actually they think, you know, this is the first time Bitcoin will break out of that? Yeah, I think it's a more nuanced point, I think, around the four-year cycle, right? what we have to remember is that we are, as Bitcoin chugs along, we are becoming a macro asset, right? People are figuring out, or asset managers, especially now, they're trying to figure out how to incorporate this into their thesis, right, into their portfolio construction. And they're trying to figure out what it is that Bitcoin actually is and what it actually does, right? Bitcoin has been fairly schizophrenic over the last, let's say, two years, maybe since the ETF launch, where it has traded sometimes more like gold,

other times more like a tech stock. And I think that creates the foundations of a more kind of more of a longevity type of asset, right, where the volatility comes down, it becomes more of a boring asset, so to say, right? It doesn't have the crazy implied vol that it used to have maybe three, four, and five years ago in the last and the last major bull cycle. And I think that obviously is a positive thing. And I think that also means that we have to start looking at Bitcoin from a different vantage point, right?

Where it is a macro cycle where macro factors are a lot more important also on the short term, not just on the medium to long term. And they have a bigger effect on how the underlying asset trades than let's say the net effect of a supply shortage caused by a reduction in Bitcoin issuance or, let's say, the net effect of a supply shortage caused by a reduction in Bitcoin issuance or, let's say a draining of Bitcoins out of an exchange, right? Which used to be kind of the major metrics of people or that investors would look at to get a gauge of any potential kind of dislocation between supply and demand would actually happen. So I think we've just evolved as an asset and I think we're just going to have to look at it in a more holistic way, right? Which is obviously some will be well equipped to do this. Others that are not familiar with TratFi with macro and how gold trades against all of these

different assets within their portfolio, they're going to have to get up to speed. Yeah, I agree with that. We still have a halving, right, every four years or so or so, where, you know, for the same amount of effort, people are going to get a half the amount of Bitcoin. So I think that that will always, you know, there will be some positioning for the companies and a lot of the miners that are out there in that moment. I hate to be a minor, you know, right now with a stock being deflated price moving down a little bit. I know a lot of them are, you know, obviously set up for, you know, the tolerances are

pretty incredible of what they have and to stay in business. But again, you know, around the edges when things like this happen, you see blowups. And then it's just, you know, how deep does that go? You know, it's the same thing like with a mortgage crisis when things went down in 2008. It was like, oh, this one, you know, a little lender over here went out of business. Oh, everything's going to be fine. But how, what is the cascading effect of that? And where is the leverage and how much, you know, have maybe some of the top miners invested in some of the other smaller companies that are out there, you know, whether maybe we're getting like higher margin. And that was, you know, bolstering up earnings. And then suddenly earnings goes down and people

don't want to own the stock. So I think there's going to be a lot of moving around. But I think we have matured as an industry, at least within the Bitcoin standard, where, you know, Tesla, some of these big companies holding Bitcoin, these are not short term, you know, bets on what's happening. These are long-term infrastructure bets on what Bitcoin is. And, you know, I don't see Saylor suddenly saying he's not going to buy the top forever. You know, I think he's going to continue to do what he's going to do. He's probably the single most important person in, you know, that market right now in Bitcoin. So leadership there. But again, you know, what does that stock look like right now down 30, 40 percent? Where do,

where do some decisions have to start to be made? How much revenue is micro strategy actually making? That's why you're seeing a lot of the smaller companies get punished right now. That's why you're seeing knockup, probably get punished a little bit as the strategy there around, you know, hey, we're going to have like a company in each market, you know, around the world. The market didn't reward them for that, right? So you just have to kind of look in the mirror and say, what do we do next? So I just think there's a lot of things that are kind of shaking out right now.

And, you know, it's TBD how low we go. I'm looking at the chart right here. It just keeps bouncing off of 100K, 100R2. So we'll see if it diverges down below. We'll see 97 like that. So you've just got to be prepared for those moments. And hopefully, you know, you got your finger on the trigger and the buy button. Yeah.

When I was researching in advance of this interview, I did see. So these are two kind of hypotheses I had from why the price dropped, like right before we started recording. One was, I guess, last week, the audience. of a rate cut by the Fed in December was at 95%. And this morning, Reuters reported that expectations that dropped as 65%. But then the other thing, Joe, you know,

you just mentioned the Dats. So there is a Bitcoin debt called Sequons, which I actually hadn't heard of this one. There are so many now. But it announced that it had unloaded 970 Bitcoin, making it the first Bitcoin Treasury company to sell Bitcoin to pay off some of its convertible debt. There is another announcement that was made yesterday, which is micro strategy,

did a new capital raise for STR-E preferred, which is a Euro-denominated perpetual preferred security. And for the first time, it included a clause that said, if it didn't have enough money to pay the dividends on STRE, it would dilute holders of its other securities to come up to come up with the cash in 60 days. So, you know, we've already seen like the debt mania has been kind of coming down off of its highs. You mentioned NACAD. I mean, there's just so many of these where, yeah, the MNAVs are dropping below one. There's a lot of chatter about what's going on there.

So where do you think this dat trend is going? Like, do you think this is the beginning of the end? Are we going to, you know, are we in the verge of some big shakeout? Or like, what do you see for that area of the market? I can take it, yeah, if you want, you can pop in. Yeah, either. Both of you should answer this. It's complex.

I think there's a lot of mechanisms to play here. Yeah. Yeah, so either one of you can go first. Sure, I can take it. Yeah, it's overcooked, like I said. You know, if you went to the Bitcoin conference last year, you know, you basically just had to like cover your eyes and hold your hand up that said you want to like launch a public company and you could probably find the people to do it. You know, and then there was like bidding wars for these shell companies and those shell companies thinking that they're worth, you know, 100 times what they were.

Now they're probably wishing they would have taken a lot of the deals that they could have. I think there's going to be some winners obviously there. I think that there's actually in some of the large L1s like Solana, there's some staking infrastructure that some of these companies have built like a DFI DevCorp, I think is doing a good job. And I think that there's this weird convergence of the kind of on-chain world and tokenizing of stocks that's coming together. And all of these foundations and all these top L1s,

they will probably need some sort of D8. They don't want it to probably be too distributed. You don't want 500 Solana DATs, right? But if you have three or four that have some slightly different strategies, like one might be more staking oriented, one might be some sort of kind of like accelerator acquisition, Berkshire type feel to it where it's like, hey, we're anyone that's building in Solana, we're going to kind of bring in outside capital markets and help kind of fund these companies. You might have one that's more like marketing oriented that brings the community together

in some way. But it needs to all be very cohesive to that kind of on-chain community. You saw Avax, you know, with the Scaramucci kind of working on something there. Like you're going to see one or two of these with each of these ecosystems. And I think it's a necessity, right? If someone wants some exposure and they're sitting on, you know, Robin Hood and they're just like, I just want to invest like in the stock where there's like a person behind that, that probably will work. But to have 500 of them only focused on acquiring Bitcoin coming up with new.

metrics and imagining up new metrics, which means the stock should go up or down, right? Which I agree, like earnings per share is also just like imaginary in a way, right? Like if it goes up or down, there's a target and if it meets that target or doesn't meet that target, it goes up or down to kind of what's happening. But that's kind of the consensus for the way that the stock market, you know, moves. The only way the stock moves is if you beat earnings consistently over time. But I think they were trying to invent too many metrics and it looks like that's not going to pay off for the stock. People need to see revenues.

And if you don't have revenues in some sort of way, you're not going to get funded in perpetuity. And so that's taking the wind out of the sales of the market. And they say, wow, look at all this Bitcoin that was just acquired. How much of that is going to unwind over the next quarter or two or three versus, again, what's being mined? So the metrics are out there. I mean, something we're seeing with just retail. You know, we follow at Lunar Crush, like how many people are talking about Bitcoin, how many people are talking about crypto.

Retail is like the lowest and bearish, most bearish. Most bearish, it is like almost ever been since we started tracking. We're tracking 50 million posts every hour. Like we see what's out there. It's a very bearish time to be in this space. And so all of those things together. And wait, I'm sorry. Are you talking about just for Bitcoin or what are you referring to?

Everything. The entire market, we do Bitcoin alone, everything. So we can look at Bitcoin. We can look at the rest of the market. And it is quiet. The most quiet and most bearish. we've ever seen it. And so that's that's saying something with where we're at right now and we're right about to drop below 100 in about 10 seconds. So we'll see what happens. And I'm sorry,

what, so what time frame when you say that you've ever seen it? Like does that include like 2020 or what? Oh yeah. This is going back. I mean, we started in 2018. So looking back, even through that kind of 2019 level, it's just the it's the relative to where we've seen things, like the down basically like we've decreased the most in sentiment the fastest over the last couple of months i mean it's it's been it's been the most bearish bull market ever right if you were not heavy in ethereum and bitcoin you've been out underperforming in a major way so it's not a surprise um but i think to your point i think treasury companies are kind of the new ico nfti type of situation where there's you know many flavors of of the same thing but there's no real

cohesive value proposition that kind of underpins most of them beyond like the classic variant like micro strategies which I think has a fairly good alternative as a vehicle right where it makes sense to buy it versus holding spot or an ETF but I think there's a lot of there's a lot of hidden risk there and I if I had to to give a kind of a guess on the probabilities I would say that this is a precursor for what's to come because once you have the

unwinding of these major positions when you're in an actual downtrend from liquidity perspective and it's in a credit crunch in a solvency crisis, right? Not just in terms of actual liquidity crisis, but an actual solvency crisis, you would want to be very far from cryptos as much as possible. I don't think we're just, we're there yet, but that is definitely the clouds are forming on the horizon, right? If you look three, six months down the line, yeah, a lot of things. things that are starting to look more concerning. Mantle leads the establishment of blockchain for banking as the next frontier. UR is the access layer that transforms Mantle Network into a purpose-built vertical platform,

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The most bullish, or I don't know about most bullish, but as we all know, you know, post-Trump being elected, suddenly the crypto markets were just up and up and up and up and up. And everyone, you know, was just, yeah, riding high on euphoria. And, you know, we have our first bill here in the US covering crypto, which is the stable coin law, the Genius Act. And we have a bunch of apps that that have gone mainstream. Polymarket is, and well, yeah, I guess I was going to say Cal She, but you know, I understand there's a dispute over whether or not Cal She is actually crypto. But anyway, point is like, like there's a lot of ways you can slice and dice this where this

is easily, you know, like just look at all these ATFs and like the SAIL ATF that launched last week, you know. So there's just so many things you can point to that are really markers of success. So why is it that you guys think that this is the most bearer? full market. I think positioning. If you look at people's portfolio composition, they were spread out over many, many different assets that were underperforming.

I think that was one. Usually from a portfolio construction perspective, it's better to have a couple of really high quality assets versus kind of a variety or pepper spray of different shapes and colors, especially when you don't understand the underlying driver of the, the, the value at, right, or the narrative of the community. I think that's definitely one, one key one. And the other one is just a shift in terms of how the market has been moving. If I look at early 24 and early 25, those are two different planets completely.

Like you could still buy and hold in the early parts of 2024, very different composition of market participant. If you look at 2025, even from a pure volatility respect, if you look at intraday and interday volatility, they were, it was a complete. shift in how that dynamic happened. So it's been inherently much more range bound and very volatile. So it's just very difficult to have an opinion on momentum when most of the things that you're seeing are actually driven by volatility.

So it's just energy of buying and selling, but no real definition of where the trend is going. That's why we have shifted a lot more on the liquidity side of the equation for the medium to long-term view. because again, if you're not systematically training like we are, it's better to consolidate and to just wait for opportunities, right? I still think there is going to be upside just because of how other assets have been training and how risk usually propagates through the system from a macro perspective cross-asset.

But it is really pushing people's convictions. For those that haven't been around in previous cycles, this is normal. We've had these stages of situations. I remember even in the run-up of 2020, we had a 35% correction within two weeks before it actually went to ultimatize. So, yeah, I think going all in makes no sense. I think it always makes sense to be opportunistic. You always have a reserve or cash on the side that you build up as you move higher, right?

You take profits off the table. Something that, for instance, income sharks, I think does a very good job at for the retail investor, really forcing yourself to take 10% 20%. percent off of the table as price moves higher and to be able to be in an opportune position and to set deeper limit orders or to accumulate at these types of events yeah laura you asked you know why is this the most bearish bull market ever you know when you know trump was getting elected you know and what we thought we were getting was you know strategic strategic bitcoin reserve right we thought you know we were going to get better you know regulation you know for

you know, launching tokens here in the U.S. or launching protocols, right? But really, it all kind of stems from Bitcoin, right? And the concentration needed to be on Bitcoin for, I think, a while before then it can kind of get out to the rest of the market. And, you know, what we kind of got instead was like, if you guys remember, like the night before like the inauguration, I believe it was, like Trump token was launched. And we were like, is this real? Is this not real?

Like, we were all freaking out. Like, is this a real thing? And so we thought we were getting strategic Bitcoin reserve. Instead, we got Trump token, right? Which is fine, right? That we, you know, the adoption and they're playing in the market. But I think that that just sent a signal of, oh, it's not about Bitcoin. It's about like just kind of going crazy in the market with everything.

Yeah. I don't know if it's like fine. I mean, it would have been fine if it was done, I think in a way of building and builders. And like how are we building DFI and how are we building? rail in a different way. And that's why even the Genius Act with stable coins, sure, you know, what is it actually about? It's like so Coinbase and Shopify can then, you know, do a deal early on and they can suck up the 3% that Visa, you know, is sucking up right now and say that you're going to get that 1% back, but they're really going to get 2%. Right. So like that's

the other part. It's like it's, it's great that there's going to be adoption there, but, you know, you're even seeing a lot of people that are like, oh, whatever, CBDC is fine now. right and like because most of the dollars are already digital and i think that that's where we we're in a different place and i think a lot of people thought we were going to be you know when this all started which is like just a u.s government amassing bitcoin like buying bitcoin ets continuing to buy companies with revenues buying bitcoin adoption of the bitcoin standard in a way you know and instead you know now here we are and you know there's still tokens being launched all over the place without any regulation.

People can kind of do what they want. And now we're even moving further into the DGen economy with you can bet on anything, you know, with with polymarking and calcium, which again, I think open market is great. It's interesting. It's, you know, but it is people just betting. And, you know, you saw Brian Armstrong on his earnings call the other day. There was a bet out there where it's like, would Brian Armstrong say these three words? And then he's like, oh, he's like, hey, show me the sheet.

real quick and he's like, yeah, Web 3, this, this, this. And those like markets went to 100%. It's like, is anyone looking into that? I mean, he didn't say all of the words, but anyway, not. Yeah, I think that kudos to him to kind of, I think it was like a small call out a little bit to like, what's happening guys? Like what's happening over here?

Like, I can just go do this and affect a market. And I think that that was important for him to do. And I hope it gets looked at because there need to be some sort of rails on what's happening over there as well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I don't want to go down the whole Trump token. Yeah, but let's just say. I think that's why things are, we went like one degree direction this way,

where I thought we were going to go one this way. And if you go one degree in the wrong direction. Yeah, it's not even one degree. It's like, yeah, let's not talk about the number of degrees. But I do like to my mind, that was the moment when a bunch of rabid Trump supporters during the run-up to the election, I saw their first tweets being skeptical and sort of, yeah, like shocked and kind of a little bit questioning

what was going on. So yeah, I do think that was like the first hint that what they thought they voted for was not what they were gonna get necessarily. And then when Melania happened, then I definitely saw like a big swing and sentiment from a lot of pro-Trump people. But so, you know, we talked about, I can't remember what it was that one of you said, but I remember thinking this is the perfect

segue to talk about also the fact that gold has been near all-time highs. It reached an all-time high like a few weeks ago at about $4,300. It's now just under $4,000. So why is it that you think that in this environment where, you know, I, so this is how I think about it in my head. It's kind of like people are looking at what's happening geopolitically and they understand there's like some sort of shifting going on, right? And I understand, you know, I do think some portion of this demand for gold is being driven by China. And you guys, I don't follow that part of the world very closely. So I'm not sure what's going on there. But I can just see that generally, when you look at things geopolitically, it does feel like, oh, you know, the US dollar has fallen 10% this year.

You know, there's a lot of kind of weird things going on internationally. Trump is, you know, sort of an erratic person, you know, even the way you he's like trying to affect the Fed and, you know, the Fed's supposed to be independent, like all this stuff. So it makes sense that people are looking for alternatives, but why is it that you think that gold has really taken off and that Bitcoin hasn't yet, even though it's supposed to be digital gold? Well, it's actually the net, the marginal buyer of gold are central banks. So I would say that the second part that you mentioned about, let's say retail, I think that's a, not an insignificant, but it's a very small portion of a much wide.

situation or much broader point. And I think there has definitely been a geopolitical shift, right? We've definitely, we're at the pivot point between what we knew as globalization or the globalization of the world, right? That started, let's say, with the annexation or the incorporation of China into the world trade organization in the early 2000s. And I think we're now at a point where we're kind of seeing the atomization of that process in the opposite direction, which which is inherently, if you think about that and you think about the medium term implications of the basic acceleration of people going to, or basically going to retirement, right, globally speaking, in terms of the baby boomers, that is a inflationary scenario, short term.

So taking away the deflationary impacts of technology like AI, the fact that the marginal, let's say, impact of a dropping birth rate and all of these things 10 to 20 years out, or definitely deflationary, the immediate impact is definitely inflationary. And I think there's definitely parts of that. And on the other side, you also have the geopolitical tensions with the uncertainty that Trump brings to the equation, right, where the net safe haven effect that the treasury, or say the marginal treasury by hand 10 years ago is not the same as what you have today. So I think that's definitely part of it. But it is definitely central bank driven. I think it became a narrative as people were looking for the next best thing.

And I think gold lent itself very well to that, especially in the buildup towards Trump's election in 2024. Yeah, a lot of uncertainty out there. You know, naturally, if something has a higher market cap, it should be less volatile. You know, gold is probably a safer, less volatile asset than something like Bitcoin, obviously right now. You also, you know, if you go back five, six years, you know, like if one of the top five stocks and the S&P moved four or five percent, that was like a monster move in the market, right? Go back even further, that would be like you would be like calling everyone you know, letting him know like something move six percent.

Like this is like you're taking screenshots. And now we live in a world where, you know, Amazon go up 17 percent as like one of the top. companies are down 17%. Overnight, right? And I don't think that there's a lot of people that are, people are just like, where do I go or it's just like one to two percent swings when like the worst thing on earth happens, right? And if I don't want to be in cash.

And, you know, it's not Bitcoin. It's not the top three stocks in the stock market. It's not the broader index. It ends up being something like gold unless you want to just sit in cash and get deflated away, even if you're getting three, four percent. And so I think you just saw like huge funds. It also you can just take so much capital with the market cap. And so I just think all those things combined, people were just like, I might opt out for a little bit and just hang out in gold.

I mean, did the de, let's say the decoloration or the unwind on the correlation between gold and Bitcoin in a big way to Joe's point was also the marginal trader that then shifted over and to basically trade or let's say to chase the gold. old price as well, right? So there was a shift in the underlying composition in people's portfolios as this is all happening. But there really aren't that many things that you can buy, right? If you look at traditional, even, let's say, if you're a large family officer, large, let's say, direction allocator, and if you were using the endowment fund approach, that has basically gone out the window over the last two to three years as well. So who is the marginal buyer of these things? right like how do you actually look at portfolio composition in an environment where you have Palantir at 300x revenues or earnings right it's just absolutely wild so we talked about bitcoin

mining stocks briefly and AI and that that is a whole thing you guys we wrote this article about that because basically the Bitcoin miners are being kind of lowered away to AI we're actually having a separate show to discuss exactly that on Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. So please, you know, mark your calendars and tune in that time. There's many other topics I want to cover. I just wanted to reference that because I know, you know, that could be part of the conversation here, but we actually have so much else to cover that I'm just going to make this plug for that, because if you're interested in that, that's going to be a great show. We did just write an article on this recently, like last week, I think. So you can find that on our website. But let's

now talk about prediction markets because we, you know, have been referring to this like throughout the show. So, Joe, you kind of seem to say something like this before. Do you feel it's that almost like attention in the crypto world is splintering and shifting toward things like prediction markets and that maybe is like sucking some of the air away from, you know, trading in crypto itself? Absolutely it is. And people are, you know, I was just at a pretty interesting data the conference up in San Francisco and talking to a lot of different hedge funds. A lot of these hedge funds are investing in stocks, but then they, you know, they might dip into Bitcoin, Ethereum a little bit. And, you know, I would assume that I would see new hedge

funds launching, investing in different crypto products. But what I was seeing was new hedge funds launching that are just working on prediction markets. And so not, you know, not looking at, they're like, hey, we know, we're not going to invest in stocks. We're just going to, you know, use alternative data to figure out where the arbitrage opportunities are across some of these markets, and we're going to trade in prediction markets. And so I think it's a zero sum in a way where the prediction markets are either ending at some point, but you can, you can liquidate out of a trade. So, you know, like the big thing right now is the New York City mayoral race right now.

And so there's like a 93% chance. Um, Dondini wins. There's like a, you know, a 7% chance. Cuomo wins, but as the day progresses, you know, if, you know, some news potentially is going to come out, or there's some information from one polling station, or people are looking at lines in different parts of the city, there's interesting data that can come out of that that might swing, you know, Cuomo to 14 percent or 20 percent, which would be a 100 percent return from where someone is at with just a little bit of information, which doesn't seem super risky in a way to people that know those

markets and have the correct information and data. And so I think you're seeing that, you know, the, you know, if you go to like a local gym and it's a bunch of Gen Z years, they're not talking about pump fun, right? They're not talking about any of that. They're talking about prediction markets. And so I think we're going to, we're going to see the rise of that. We're going to see the rise of more, more decentralized prediction markets, more centralized prediction markets.

You're going to see what Robin Hood is doing. You're going to probably see people like ESPN and Fan Duel and all of these companies kind try to figure out how to get into that. They do have the, it's the same thing. You can just see it on a chart with the prediction markets. But if you go to FanDuel and you're betting on the Dodgers to win the World Series, you can clear that bet at a point in time. There's a cash out button, right?

So it's the same exact mechanism. So all they have to do is show that on a chart and people will start to use it on those as well. So I'd be a little worried if I was polymarket. But again, like all of these things and a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today is just sucking more air and more air. out of, you know, these other markets where, you know, there's not a lot to be excited about, right? Like if you're looking at your, you know, run in the mill favorite L1 that you followed for a couple of years and you're like, oh, sweet, there's this, you know, this decks now move from V2 to V3,

right? Like, what is that doing? What is that doing for the underlying ecosystem for revenue for that protocol, for that foundation? And so there's just not a lot to, I think, get excited about. And meanwhile, you're sitting down 70, 80%, just like holding on, you know, and now you're just kind of a bag holder. And what do you do from there? So just a, you know, it's an interesting thing. And partition markets are, you know, you've got Kalshi kind of going one way. Like they said that they're, you know, regulated and more and centralized.

And then you have polymarket, which, like, can't have U.S. citizens utilize it. But like, where's the three times the volume coming from? I bet VPNs, if, you know, if I had to. So we'll see kind of what happens there. But when you get a couple billion dollars from ICE or the New York Stock Exchange, that's a huge signal into like where our economy and where the degenerate economy is going. And we'll see, we'll see what happens. There's also, I think, a segue into more traditional venues with options.

You're also seeing kind of a rise of a more kind of proliferated usage of options contracts, which is also very interesting, even by more novice traders that are basically taking more directional extreme bets with small sizes on different outcomes. So it seems to be a general, not a niche, kind of localized effect, but more broad-based effect across, let's say, all the different platforms that we trade through as well. On the point, I think, though, on altcoins, I think you're definitely correct. I think it's definitely not as exciting anymore as it used to be back in the day.

There's an opportunity, but at the same time, nothing big bets priced like higher prices. So what you do need for these types of resets and reloads is people to chase. And how does the chasing happen? You get disenfranchised with the situation. You get pissed off. You basically dump your bag. And then a week later, it goes up 30, 40, 50 percent. And then you do nothing.

And then it goes up another 30, 40, 50 percent. And then before you know it, you have kind of a trend again in people chasing the narrative. So these things are visceral. I think we aren't in an economy where people have very short. short, you know, shorter memory. And it seems like it's always the next new thing. And things are very cyclical, right? So people kind of revert back to the thing that they know.

So I think there's a good chance that, you know, it's not a coincidence that things like Zcash, dash, et cetera, kind of re-igniting because it is a old narrative that is now resurfacing with the community that was, to some extent, has been disenfranchised with the ETF coming through, right? kind of the OGs that were maybe much more hardcore or extreme about the way, the way that they look at Bitcoin and Bitcoin's place within a larger community or within a larger kind of tradable asset universe. So it's definitely going to be interesting to see.

But I think what people need to understand is that the likelihood of a blow off top is more the case than a rounded or kind of more prolonged just because of the fact that you've seen this now. If you look at Nifty, you look at the even the Dax, you look at gold, you look at some of the, let's say, the tech stocks, right? They've all gone, they've all had a very similar pattern as people chase the narrative because they're looking for the next big thing, which I think is a very interesting kind of pattern that we kind of see over and over again until you kind of get to that ultimate climax, right? And it still remains to be seen what that looks like, but it definitely will

require a catalyst, maybe in the way that we saw back last year with the pretext. presidential election, like something that is undeniable that nobody can basically say isn't happening. It could be the government shutdown, maybe a resolution of that. I always remind people as well that we have a fully, basically a full TGA. We have the largest money market fund build up in history. And there's been, if you look back at, let's say, macro history, even with a, you know, three to five percent move out from those, from those markets into. to say the general financial system has created potential massive dislocations as well. So it doesn't take a lot at this point.

There's a lot of pent up energy everywhere. And I'm sorry, I didn't understand. So you were saying that you think that a blow off top is still likely? I think given, let's say, if you have resolution on things like the government shutdown, it seems to be the more likely pattern that has been consistent with this cycle. If you look at, you don't have to go further than, you know, Nifty, so Indian stocks. any of the major tech stocks, right? You look at the Dax, you look at even gold, right? NIC-K as well. If you look at the NICA's progression over the last three, four weeks, it's been fairly

exponential. So, yeah, there's something about the chasing narrative that kind of culminates with shifts, shifting wins in terms of how portfolio managers allocate, right? Because to Joe's point, everything is elevated, right? Everything is overvalued when you look at the historical mean, that's over the last 15, 20 years, right? So what happens when you look at, you know, things that are overvalued? I think you go back to the same type of behavior that we saw in COVID, right?

Where one rational decision by a single investor, when everybody does that one, the same or similar thing becomes irrational in the collective. And that's how you get these kind of exponential trend lines. Okay, so let's a talk now about privacy, coins because you mentioned that. I was going to move to Ether and Sol before we touched on that. But let's talk about that right now.

As we saw, Zcash suddenly became all the rage about starting in late September. It's up 630% so far this year, but really most of that just came starting in September. You know, people say things like, oh, you know, it was influencers like Naval Ravicon, Mertes and Arthur Hayes tweeting about it. I'm not sure that really is the cause of the spike. So I would be curious to hear your thoughts on why we saw the sudden jump in price and what you think the future is for the whole privacy coin sector. As someone that follows social media and that's what we do,

I would actually say that is why you saw things move. When you have influencers or creators that otherwise haven't spoken loudly about something that was a slight, like when you think Naval, you might think, like, maybe he's got some Bitcoin, right? And like, maybe he's got a couple other things. But to go so heavily into that and then to defend those positions, that instills a ton of confidence in retail. So that's somewhere where we did see a spike in retail engagement happening like crazy across eCash. And when you have that, then you have this kind of cascading water. waterfall effect of, hey, everyone that's got, you know, tweet notifications for Naval on,

they win. And then it keeps going down to those kind of circles of friends and those, you know, signal groups, then SMS, WhatsApp, you name it. And suddenly everyone's like, oh, Nevaal's, you know, doing this. Like, I'm going to buy $10. I'm going to buy $100. I'm going to buy $1,000. And so that's actually how we see these kind of quick rise and falls of these tokens is when you have people posting about them, right? Like, if Elon posted about Doge again, like suddenly, we're going to see, you know, a three or four day run up 20, 30 percent of that. Like, why is he posting about that? Are they going to add that to the Tesla Treasury?

So, you know, again, as someone that has followed social media, our tagline is social media impacts markets, right? Like people impact markets. I think this was purely kind of driven by that. I will say there is a narrative. Like you see, you know, some different exchanges out there, like a Houdini swap, which is like does, some privacy swapping. And you've seen kind of the rise of that a little bit. But again, like this is all available because of the kind of more unregulated world that

we're living in where you can have kind of privacy. Like no one was touching like Monaro for like the longest time, right? Everyone's like, it's just not going to work. It just gets beaten down or like they're going to get slammed with, you know, all of these different subpoenas, you know, and people are just like super decentralized, like hiding who they are. I think that people are kind of coming a little bit more to the surface with with this privacy side of things. And then it's also kind of a reaction to CBDCs and stable coins and, you know, what's happening there and are people going to be able to track every single dollar

that you spend, you know, with USDC or, you know, is USDT, you know, an extension of what's happening, you know, with the US government? Like, there's just a lot there. So I think people are responding to that a little bit. But I think the surge was mainly driven because of the names that we're posting about it. I think it's a side, it's a kind of a tail of two sides in a way. I think Joe, what Joe is explaining is kind of the tail end, let's say the last piece that requires something to go exponential and explosive, right? Let's say the last piece of the flywheel. But I think there's structural reasons as to why that is happening. And we've been tracking Z-Cache action for the last to three months where you've seen shifts in how it was traded, let's say volatility shifts

within the price structure. And I think a lot of it, let's say from narrative perspective, I think also has to do with larger allocators on the Bitcoin side that have been basically selling out of positions. We know for a fact in the research that we've done, the glass set and some of the, let's say, deeper foundational research that we do, that we have seen a massive rotation or let's say a change in the guard between OGs that have been rotating out of Bitcoin into cash and to diversify the portfolio. So let's say if you look at October by itself, there's been $30 billion excluding the October 10th, let's say, event.

And I think that kind of shows that there is, I think, of that of that cohort, let's say there's probably a faction that is much more extreme in terms of how they look at Bitcoin. Maybe they're not as happy with how Bitcoin has evolved as it has become institutionalized, Zcash all of a sudden becomes a relevant alternative, not only from an investment perspective, but also in terms of what it stands for. So I think it's a combination of things, right? We're dealing with complex systems. It's never one thing. Every catastrophe or basically, you know, exuberance always is a combination of factors that kind of converge together that lead to a basically irrational kind of endpoint, right? That's why I go back, Laura, to the point. Yes, it takes a lot of

a lot of things to kind of align, but blow off tops are exactly that exuberance, right? It's kind of the combination of irrationality that comes together for multiple different areas all at once. And it doesn't take a lot, right? Even if you look at Bitcoin right now, we're super oversold, right? Across the board. And it takes very little for these things to shift in the opposite direction. Yeah, honestly, that same week was the week that Thread guy was complaining about his taxes.

And in my head, it was linked. It was like he suddenly realized he had this big tax bill and then all of a sudden, Bitcoin just took off out of nowhere. And I was like, wait, are those connected? But yeah, I never really looked into the timing and all that, but maybe I'll do that later. All right, let's talk about Ether and Saul at least before we wrap. We could talk about a few other things. We'll see if we have time.

So, you know, Ether was kind of a little bit like left out of the party in 2024. Not that it didn't perform well, but compared to Bitcoin and Saul, you know, it kind of lagged behind. And as we all know, there was a little bit of consternation in the Ethereum community for that reason. This year, it kind of seemed to outperform. And yet, at the time of the recording, it is currently where it started the year. So I was wondering, where do you think ether's going? And what factors do you think will determine, you know, what happens to the price over like the next year or so? I think in this case, it's narrative, Joe.

On the theorem, I would actually buy your premise that you need a narrative for people to rally behind. And I think etheth has kind of found that again ever since Tom Lee kind of came forward and really kind of proposed a kind of the concert that he proposed around, let's say, the ETH Treasury. So I think that was one, I think Stablecoin issuance and adoption as well, kind of really becoming the rails and having a reason to exist again. I think that's definitely a big part of it. And the, let's say the quantum me says it's also just the way that things mean

revert around each other. It was just so oversold versus the benchmark or the base end that is, let's say, Bitcoin, that there probably was going to be some sort of relief. But it just so happens that that was, again, multiple things that kind of tie into a, kind of an explosive move. So you have the utility element, you have the easy enough to understand narrative. And I think you had the liquidity and the structural backdrop as well for that to become explosive with very little energy.

Right. I think it took about $5 billion to move it from 1,800 to roughly 4,000. Yeah, I think I agree. I think Ethereum has come back a little bit. Obviously, the Tom Lee DAT conversation sparked that volatility back to it, which is good. It's bringing traders back. You know, and now it's correlated a little bit more with Solana, which, you know, they're both down 20% on the seven day, right? So since we start, talking about this, but like that's actually means that probably a good thing for Ethereum because it means it's trading like Solana was trading, which means that traders are back there.

I think, you know, they're a little bit more kind of fundamental about Ethereum. You know, I'm advising a company called Emanatech and they're, you know, working on taking AI, what is real and what it's not on social media is like a really big thing right now. And so they're trying to kind of memorialize like real things or find deep fakes and kind of go through that process. And they're going to take that and bring that all on chain. And I think, you know, six, seven years ago, if we talked about or less even, you know, you've talked about governments choosing a chain even, right? Like, it's kind of like a crazy thing.

It's like, our government's going to settle these things on chain because, you know, are they turning into cadena or are they going to turn into some of their chain that just goes away? I think we are finally hitting a precipice with, you know, Ethereum and then some of the other chains that settle down to Ethereum that, you know, obviously there's for speed reasons. That's why they're doing that. But I do think we're finally potentially hitting an area where you can memorialize these things and use these smart contract platforms like Ethereum as this kind of truth layer. Obviously, if you can use Bitcoin as that, ultimately that would be the best.

That's the ultimate truth machine. You know, 51% attack, whatever it may be. It's like, you know, can't change it forever. But I think Ethereum is kind of hitting that level with all of the other. infrastructure with base that's built around it. You know, there's a lot that's there. So I do think that we are hitting, there's going to be some interesting things that happen in the next couple of years where like Ethereum is just going to be this like

base computer for society in a way, unless we can really figure out how to scale Bitcoin, which I think some of the Bitcoin L1s like stacks and some of these people are doing that. But I think that, you know, that you need that volatility and that trading aspect of it. That's why a lot of times people are like, you know, whatever's happening with this chain. It doesn't make sense. It's like you need to have defy. You need to have deep liquidity and deep markets.

And you need to have trading activity. You need to have arbitrage. You need to have those things or traders and infrastructure is not going to be there. Right. And so I think that those things have kind of hit a level with Ethereum where, you know, it's kind of hard not to own it, you know, in a way. And then you actually do use it like from time to time where some of these other things you actually are never using. Right? If you're just sitting in your Robin Hood account and you're not using anything,

it's like that might be a signal a little bit that it's not going to outperform over time. But the tough part about this is that, you know, say you own a small cap stock and you're like, hey, like small caps maybe over time are more volatile, but at points in time, they're going to be higher than the S&P or whatever benchmark is out there. People, I think, kind of fold altcoins into that where it's like, I'm going to buy this altcoin. And eventually at some point it's going to be a little bit higher than Bitcoin, but then way lower. and it's going to, but they're going to kind of keep moving up together. That's not the case where Bitcoin ultimately was going to outperform everything on the long enough time scale.

So it just depends on how long you have. But I think we're seeing a world right now where some of these things aren't going to come back. And so, you know, being invested in Ethereum, Miss Lawn is probably better, much better than being invested in a lot of other things. But right now, I would say just get as much Bitcoin as you can. It's kind of a vote of confidence for the maturity of the system, right? where you have fragmentation, you have clear kind of differentiation between narratives. You can start to your point, you have utility and kind of the speculation starting to converge

into something more sustainable. So 100%. That's definitely a big part of it. And price is not always a good indicator of value, right? Yeah. Let's quickly just talk about Sol before we wrap. The BitWise SAL, ETF, B, SAL, launched last week. It brought in $199 million in new inflows on top of $223 million in seed capital.

It was the top crypto ETP by volume for the week, according to Bloomberg intelligence's Eric Balchunis. It also traded in the top 20 of all ETFs at launch. So, you know, there's also like good news for Saul on the horizon in the sense that there's two other ETFs in the works for Solana, from Grayscale and Franklin Templeton. And yet, here we are one week after the Beesal launch and Solana is down 20%. So, you know, despite like, you know, these new inflows and this great ETF launch, you know, what do you think is happening with Salana and where do you think it goes from here?

We're just not in that part of the environment. It's just there's no momentum, right? So it's volatility. So there's no reason to hold a speculative asset, let's say beyond Bitcoin Ethereum. And I think it is about just waiting. for the momentum to come back. So what we say also on Twitter, I think we are in a situation where price is not reflecting the strength of the flows that we're seeing. And I think maybe ETFs and these things are going to help part of the plumbing. But when it comes to specifically

trading and seeing kind of the net effects in price, you need to see momentum come back. So that is trend and volatility moving in the same direction, creating a force. We are dealing with currencies, right? At the end, so you want that juggernaut of Bitcoin to actually start. moving in a direction, breaking through, let's say, clear resistance levels, and that's going to really drag everything with it. At that point, I think Solana's going to start reigniting and becoming its own thing for a while. But I think as long as Bitcoin stays range bound and suppresses, the rest of the markets will be very difficult to see that. Yeah. You also, you know, if you believe the centralized exchanges and how much they say that there is actually trading on their exchanges,

is Salon is trading $10 billion every 24 hours. So $190 million. It's great, but I don't think it's like a Neil mover to an extent of some of the Bitcoin ETF inflows that we saw. But I think, again, structurally, like, again, if you look at this market structurally with the ETFs and there are some great companies buying Bitcoin consistently, people moving to Bitcoin, they are moving to it as a systematic hedge still. this world, even though trades kind of macro, big tech stock, like the adoption, the longevity,

like, you know, two months ago, you know, we were talking about this where it's like, it is kind of wild that Bitcoin's not sitting at 250K. It does kind of blow your mind sometimes to think about where we were today relative to where we were even three years ago and wonder why it's not a million dollars of coin, right? Which I think that it's, we will get there. It will happen. But we're in a interesting, I think geopolitical time, there's uncertainty in different places. The AI side of everything, which we didn't talk about much here, is transforming the world in such an interesting way that's like blowing holes in every single strategy for anything that's out there.

That's why you're seeing the top seven, five stocks and the S&P holding 70% of the value, right? It's not the S&P 500. What is that even? What's the point? It's the S&P six. And so that's just changing a lot. You're seeing billions of dollars in infrastructure and AI. People are just kind of wondering how, what the impact is going to be.

Like, is my iPhone even going to have apps on it, right? Is it just going to be this, like, interface that has like an antenna on it that gets, you know, data up and down. And then the AI is just like predicting everything I want every second. And what does that mean for the world? What does that mean for Amazon laying off a ton of people, but then also the stocks moving up a ton because of the improvements that they've made and efficiencies that they've made? I'm sure Yonzi's it.

at his company too. It's like you can scale with way less people now, way less people and you can scale fast. And so those forces are all being digested by the market right now. And it's, it's really tough to know where things are going, to be honest with you. There's also another point. There's another point, which I think is critical for non-crypt investors is that we have a, we've kind of created an ecosystem with with cryptocurrencies where you're taking a, a startup, putting it on a 24-7 marketplace. and validating it based on how that fits within the global perspective of that asset class, right? So it's a continuous, basically retesting of the thesis on a 24-7 basis.

And that's, I think, a crazy concept to begin with. And then obviously that's a very, you know, kind of a very complex environment to navigate. But to Joe's point, the longer it progresses, the more matured becomes, the more that obviously becomes a force for good and offer for bat within a portfolio. All right. So last very quick question, short answer. Where do you think we end the year? And I'll, I'll, you know, focus it on Bitcoin. Where do you think we end the year with Bitcoin? Price prediction? Yeah. Yeah. Normally I'm pretty good at this, but right now it is. It is tough. You're falling for the sentiment. I'm going to go in a crazy way. I think that we, We do hit an all-time high again. I don't think it's going to be a blow-off, but I think that you're going to see people starting to rotate, and smart money is going to start buying.

And it's going to kind of go range-bound a little bit here, but it will sneak to 130 at some point in December and then kind of range up from there. I'm not saying that in the next two weeks. We might not be down much lower. The government shutdown could be a bunch of bad sentiment, but they're not going to let that happen through the holidays. And then you're going to see this kind of like very fast reversal. So I don't know what's going to happen on like the actual end of the year, but some point in December we'll hit an all-time high. That's my prediction.

Okay, Jan. Yeah, I agree with the, we'll get an all-time high. I think the actual numbers is really not the point because I think it depends on what goes with it, right? Is it going to be led by Bitcoin? Is it if you're going to take the initiative? So I think it's definitely going to be an all-time high. And smart money is already buying, right? That's one of the interesting things.

From an on-chain perspective, you are seeing that rotation. It's just not happening very quickly. So the selling pressure is more expedited than the actual buying. As soon as it flips, it can go very quickly. So don't be surprised if you see Bitcoin back at 116, 118K within a couple of days once that momentum ignites. Okay. So for those of you who tuned in and didn't love how bearish this episode was, at the very end, you got your hopium.

I hope you enjoyed that. And thank you both so much to Jan and Joe for sharing your insights. Thank you, Laura. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Juan Oranovich, Margaret Curia and Pam Majumdard. Thanks for listening.