Transcription
Bitcoin's crashed to 73,000 as the US is bombing Iran once again. Meanwhile, ETFs have bled 733 million in a day and we've seen a billion dollar once again in liquidations. Isn't it fun to be in crypto? I think so. And when we have a great day like this, I bring on Josh Frank to talk about uh how amazing the market is and how much fun we're having. Let's go. That's dope.
>> Let's go. >> Good morning everybody. Happy Thursday and welcome to the wonderful world of Minecraft. I have a special assistant in the studio today who is running the cameras and my backgrounds. Spoiler, he's seven. Uh, and so we get chickens running around in the back and the Minecraft background. Josh, uh, you know,
>> I think I think the thing burning is a great sign of things happening in crypto right now. So,
>> yeah, it hasn't reached the house yet.
>> It's just a fire fire on the outside, but but yeah, I I do think that's pretty good. I mean,
>> Ian drone missed and it missed the house. hit the ground. But
>> I don't even know like where to start on on these days, you know, like uh well that that's not the place to start with blank thing. Bitcoin falls to six week low amid war jitters ETF outflows. I mean, taking a look at the market, it's pretty ugly out there. 73,000ish for Bitcoin. Ethereum back under 20,000. Even the darlings of the market, Zcash and Hyperliquid seemingly dropping. If only somebody had said they look kind of toppy. But yeah, I mean, what do you make of the market right now first?
>> Yeah, I mean, look, I think the I mean, I'm not surprised about Iran, even one out of 10. I mean, at the end of the day, they've never been willing to negotiate ever. So, why anyone expected that to change is beyond me. And so, I expected this to kind of continue. And so, to me, it was more a matter of when, not if. and and I don't expect them to negotiate or come to an agreement because they've said all along that they don't really have interest in doing that. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm not I'm not particularly surprised um surprised the market hadn't fully priced that in uh and and was expecting, you know, the pause to last longer, but we'll see. Uh, one thing that's actually relatively interesting to me today and is very reminiscent of 2021 or 2022, Stellar is up 26% on some DTCC news this morning, which I have not seen any token pump on Tradfy news pretty much at all. I mean, you know, Canton partnered with the DTCC. There there tons of other uh chains that have uh and that are working with them and to move 26 and a half% right now watching it live uh is is pretty stellar.
>> Uh >> uh I see what you did there. I see what you did there. Yeah. I mean Canton I I actually when I when they made that first announcement which was the first time you'd heard the DTCC really talking about tokenization the canon announcement. I couldn't believe that the token didn't move. But to be fair it did in the subsequent three or four weeks.
>> Well but they also had a 100 other announcements at the same time.
>> But this you're right. I mean Stellar and Stellar is a dinosaur. Like this is not a new token. There's a got to be a lot of bag holders. So there had to be some pretty impressive volume to get this thing going.
>> Yeah. I mean it's it's just it to me it's nothing to do with Stellar specifically or or the DTCC. It's just the fact that the a token has reacted to news. That that's that's a good thing. We've seen tokens react negatively to news. We haven't really seen tokens react particularly positively um to news announcements recently. And so to see this one I think is promising. It might it might you know um it may might say something about who Stellar's um uh supporters are and I think they they overlap with the XRP army quite a bit and I think
>> yeah always
>> it's it's I think it's a unique set of people um and and set of buyers but I do think it's interesting to see the market reacting to something and we need to see that again. Yeah, that was one of the old predict like uh easy to predict narratives of the past was that XRP would pump and then XLM would pump immediately afterwards. It was like that Stellar always followed XRP price action. Clearly that's the thing now, but that was always a thing.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Yeah. So, no, I mean, you know, to to point on markets though, look, I mean, I think it's there's a lot of noise right now. The war is not going to last forever. It will come to a conclusion. I don't know what the I'm not, you know, I'm not a fortune teller. I'm not going to be making any money on Poly Market unfortunately, but uh the war will come to some form of an end at some point. Um and markets will recover. I mean, I think the thing that's interesting here, and I'm sure you've been talking about this for weeks and months, and I'm not breaking anything, you know, particularly interesting to people, but all of the banks, all of the asset managers, everyone is moving into crypto. And obviously they're talking about tokenization, they're talking about stable coins, but also all of these different banks are focused on allowing their retail clients to buy Bitcoin, to buy ETH, to buy other tokens, to get exposure to ETFs, to get exposure to products. Um, and so you have this kind of backdrop which is just extraordinarily interesting. I mean, we've been building and selling to institutions for eight years, uh, nine years in crypto. So I've been doing this for a long time. I've talked to these firms since they were one people, you know, one people teams and, you know, I spoke to one of the top three biggest banks in the US last night and, you know, they have like I'm like, "Oh, are you working with this person?" They're like, "No, they're on like this other crypto team and this other crypto team." They're like, "We have a commercial, like a consumer bank crypto team, and we have a tokenization team, and we have a stablecoin team." And you're talking about these large banks not hiring one person for crypto building out like 100 plus person teams. Uh, and I think, you know, once the market recovers, I I think you're going to, you know, you're gonna it's going to be significantly easier and more accessible both for retail and institutional market participants to access digital assets because of this. Uh, and so it's really interesting to me. You have all this interesting, you know, this incredible infrastructure being built, all of these banks coming in, all these asset managers coming in, you know, real things lining up, but price is not reacting to that. And so I I view this as a temporary uh just reaction to the the Iran news and and not necessarily something longterm. That doesn't mean, by the way, that Bitcoin can't drop lower. That doesn't mean that it's going to, you know, it's going to pump overnight. It that doesn't mean any of that. But I do think as you think long term and you think about uh this that the the the the future of the space, I mean, there's so much investment coming into crypto right now and it's coming in from real players that have deep pockets.
pretty uh much the vision of Satoshi right
>> 100%
>> massive adoption by the banks and institutions and the governments the irony is not
>> banks on the brink of adoption of digital assets
>> banks on the brink of uh incorporating blockchain into everything they do uh h man they kill
>> the cool thing is it's not only blockchain not bitcoin like a lot of the times in the past you've seen this like blockchain not Bitcoin tokenization, you know, thing. And there's a lot of that. There's a lot of tokenization going on, but there's not like this negative perception towards crypto broadly, which is really interesting to see. And it's interesting to see obviously everyone's talking about hyperlid, so I'm not trying to, you know, go go into that too much, but the hype ETF seeing a lot of inflows. Um, uh, Matt from Bitwise was tweeting about how it's such an easy conversation, uh, with, I think, financial advisors to talk to them about bit, uh, you know, hyperlid and cash flow and stuff like that. So, there are interesting things going on in the space. And I think, you know, we're we're a retail bit away from, you know, a huge, you know, huge positive movement here.
>> Higher prices are the best marketing for Bitcoin, right? So,
>> 100%. So all we need is like 10,000
>> 100k again and you know I think we're we're we're good.
>> So let's talk about the most fun story of the day which is Robin Hood is allowing agentic trading. So your agent will be able to build portfolios, automate trading strategies, adjust your portfolio, analyze your portfolio, analyze market data, but this is the first time effectively that an agent will be able to trade for you. It will be in a siloed account which will be your agent account. It will have basically read access of your entire uh account, but it'll have right access in its specific one. It will be able to make trades on your behalf without you specifically pushing a button or permission. None of this is yet regulated. So, I definitely appreciate the fact that they're willing to push the boundaries knowing that they're going to get push back probably from the government and certainly other exchanges and such. But um h you know I'm not generally particularly cynical but like feels like this is a way to just lose money faster.
>> I think it's incredibly bullish for Robin Hood stock because what it means is that people instead of trading once a day or once a week or once a month are going to have AI bots trade for them at an incredible frequency and Robin Hood will be able to you know monetize every single one of those trades. So I think it's positive for the exchanges and venues. uh you know you know Robin Hood I think their crypto volume dropped about 75%. Uh I think there was an announcement about that or or or some news about that a few days ago and so you know you get enough people to trade with their AI bots we start see volume picking up again. Uh but I do think it's an incredible way for people to lose money as you mentioned. Uh there are some extremely sophisticated systematic trading firms that have access to way better data way better tools than the average person is going to have access to. um and they're going to pick off trades and they're going to make a lot of money. Everyone's not going to be successful. But, you know, uh you know, there there's also this idea of alpha decay, right? The more people that have access to the same signal or the same data and the more people that trade on that signal and trade on that data, the more that there's a decay in the alpha uh and the opportunity to make money. And so, I'm not particularly bullish on people's ability on average to make money using AI agents to trade.
>> Yeah. I mean so basically you'll be able to plug in claude or chatgbt cursor codecs those are the four that I'm seeing and then you know using natural language prompts you'll be able to automate strategies and build portfolios like build a portfolio of littleknown tickers across the AI supply chain right and it will build you a portfolio and go access that my favorite thing is the risk disclosure in that article that I just showed you here's here's how they wrote it out you are ultimately responsible for the trades your AI agent places in your account you're in charge of your trades when you use an AI agent to place orders. All investment decisions are yours. Before your agent takes action, you can review what it's about to do. Be aware that if you ask your agent to take action without asking your approval, it can place trades without your confirmation. Review disclosures for more details about the risks. I mean, obviously, this is just like legal.
>> I think the other opportunity, by the way, is if you're a token or an equity and you could do a really good job training these AIs that you're an undervalued asset, you're going to get a big bid. So I definitely recommend hiring marketers who are good at uh uh you know AI uh placement because that's I mean that's that's I mean you know you know used to be SEO you know was the focus for a lot of marketers and and and and ranking high on keywords and things like that but I think ranking in AI agents is you know maybe going to create a bid for some tokens. I mean, now if we're going to be, I guess, honest, this is the direction things are moving whether we like it or not, right? I mean, this is where the the puck is headed. All exchanges are going to have AI integrations with crypto and prediction markets on stable coin rails. You know, that that's where we're headed.
>> Yeah, 100% 100%. I just think that, you know, there there are just think about all of the times that you've been given misinformation from AI. Um, and then you're going to give it your money. I don't I AI is incredible. I use it in my workflow every single day. I spend hours on AI every day. But am I ready to let it trade for me um against sophisticated, you know, systematic trading firms? Probably not.
>> Here's what I've found. AI talks to me like it's my mom, not like it's my wife. Like whatever I tell AI, it tells me it's a great idea and I'm doing wonderfully.
>> Your mom likes you a lot more than
>> it agrees, you know, and it's like, you know, support. And if I told my wife that thing, she'd be like, that's dumb, you know, like she'd be brutally honest. We need AI that's more wife than mom.
>> Yeah. I mean, I I've been
>> if it's going to trade for us. Like I I don't want you to be like, you know, is it really a good idea for me to trade esoteric, you know, crypto on Robin Hood through my AI agent? Like go find the coins between 100 and 200 on Coin Market Cap. No, I want you to tell me that's a stupid strategy. Focus on hyperlquid Zcash and Bitcoin.
>> Yeah. Like is FTT going to make a comeback? Am I is this a great idea here? Should I put all my money in FTT?
>> So good undervalued token in the market. Real powerful narrative because of name brand. Yeah. Yeah. I also gonna, you know, give you, you know, like I wouldn't be surprised if it's trading off of like old information, too. Like some partnership announcement from six months ago, then, you know, gets incorporated. Look, and I'm sure these things are going to get better. Um, I'm just not putting my money in it.
>> No, I'm not going to let them trade for me yet. Like, I I, you know, unless
>> I'll strategy that I've uh developed myself. Yeah. So, I mean, we're talking about kind of the institutional adoption and plumbing. I mean there was actually three stories I think in a line that kind of for for stable coin adoption. One was I don't even have pulled up but SoFi is basically launching their own stable coin I believe for 15 their 15 million users. So it's basically a bank issued stable coin which is a little different than what we've been seeing. Then you had Mastercard getting their bit license in New York which is like the most difficult thing you can ever do which is obviously to build stable coin rails. But then this one which really caught my eye. Block kicks off Cash App's phase stable coin roll out to its nearly 60 million users. So this is Jack Dorsey,
>> right? And I mean Jack Dorsey was like our last
>> towel.
>> Yeah, he was our last like Bitcoin for payments maximalist I think that we had. And so you know this when he throws in the towel and says we're going to use stable coins and he said it reluctantly. I'm now looking for the exact quote. He said I don't like that.
>> Yeah. He said, "I don't like that we're going to support stable coins, but our customers want to use them. I don't think it's wise to go from one gatekeeper to another." So, I mean, listen, there's the irony that like our killer app is obviously the thing Bitcoin was created as a hedge against. We've like hyperdollarized the world and made fiat faster and and cheaper and more plentiful. But, he's got to do what he's got to do for his business. But, this really does just support your everybody has a stable coin plan or a crypto plan. It's all happening. Every single every single firm does. Every single firm does.
>> But I mean Jack is really like that. He was I think he was truly our our last hold out. I mean Jeremy layer said it too. He was like everybody has a plan. And you just have to wonder though how that acrru value to anything we might be holding. Like do you think that the stable coin mass adoption will make Salana and Ethereum go up?
>> I think it depends on where the stable coins are issued, where they're used. if they acrew fees to the network, if there's a lot of transactions. But I think ultimately the way that a lot of these institutions are building, they don't care about like like an institution isn't going to brag about using AWS over Google Cloud. Like I don't think they really care. And I think that's also why this L1 L like L1's and L2s have really sold off quite hard is because this idea of like owning this kind of platform for users is not is not you know I I think maybe from a retail perspective you can own that more but I think from an institutional perspective it's really plug-and-play where a lot of these banks institutions are going to plug into six or seven or eight or nine or 10 different networks and they're going to choose whoever is cheapest and route trades or route orders or route flow blow to wherever is least expensive because why would you pay more money to do something if you don't have to pay more money to do something. So I think you know I think it's it's I think what is a net positive about all the stable coin adoption is if it can bring people on chain and then it can be a way to enter into additional things. But I think in terms of like if there's another billion dollars in stable coin issued on a chain I'm it's positive. It's positive, but you know, does it justify the token going up by five billion dollars? Probably not.
>> I mean, then what about, I guess, in that context, the private blockchains that are being purpose-built for stable coins, you know, Tempo with Stripe and ARC with Circle and those they're launching specifically for that purpose. Do you think if we can get access to those tokens after Black Rockck and everybody else has got
>> I'm not I'm not I I it's transparently I haven't looked into that space enough but I think you you can see it with you know a lot of the chains that exist today you know people aren't really watching stable coin minting and redemption on particular chains and making investment decisions based off of that to my knowledge.
>> Dude, this is a hilarious tweet that I just got sent. Got to show you this one. Crypto the only asset class to go down on a Trump tweet. Micron is good. Instant 20% up. I'll never let crypto down 3%. It's pretty funny. I mean, like you were kind of talking about how with the Iran war, you're surprised that the market hadn't priced things in. What I'm surprised about is that people still believe anything about the Iran war based on a tweet or a statement or anything and that markets actually continue to react at all.
>> Like we all know that it's theater, right? I'm not speaking specifically about Trump. Iran makes a comment. Trump makes a comment. Somebody else makes a comment. Israel makes their comment. And like markets actually react as if anybody is telling you the truth.
>> Yeah. And I I just I just I Yeah. Yeah. I No, I look I agree. I agree. And And Trump, if you're listening to this, and I'm sure you are not, but if you're listening, please please mention specific uh tickers in your tweets. Don't say crypto broadly. We want some tickers.
>> Yeah, we have too many. We have millions of coins. Yeah, we need a couple and I'll leave the tickers up to you. Maybe maybe leave World Liberty Financial and Trump and Melaniacoin out, but but you know, some other tickers would be great.
>> Tweeting about those hasn't worked. I mean, it Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, my thesis around the market has been that sort of the launch and and evolution of prediction markets has been actually kind of the silent killer of all coins. I mean, you take a look at a hyperlquid, not to it keeps coming up all the time, but even what Robin Hood's doing and all the others, it seems like they're just building more massive casinos and we used to be the only casino in town, right? I mean, it's like you could basically view it as like, you know, the early days of Vegas and there was just like one or two casinos that was all coins on a weekend 24/7 365 and meme coins and now they've built all of Vegas around it with prediction markets. I think the other thing too is when's the last time one of your friends told you they made money on a coin, right? Like that's what started, you know, starts a lot of these bull markets, right? Is somebody say, "Oh, I got into this thing and I 50xed my money. I 20x my money. I 10x my money. I 5x my money." Even I went up 20% at this point. I think we would take uh you know, we're not hearing any of those conversations. And I think once those conversations start to happen and your Uber driver starts telling you about how much money he made trading a coin you've never heard of before, I think that's really what starts the uh you know what's what starts the movement. And I think like ultimately at the end of the day there were tremendous amount of tokens that launched that raised a ton of money but there are not that many buyers of those tokens. And I think you need one of two things. either you need retail to come back um or you need uh institutions especially liquid funds to raise capital especially those that are more like discretionary long biased um that are going to actually be the ones that are buying the tokens and right now we're seeing redemptions in a lot of those funds. So you need like the the question that I always have is it doesn't matter what these people you know what people do and what they announce at the end of the day somebody needs to buy the thing right if you're only thinking about how I sell my coins and not what do I buy then you have to imagine other people are thinking very similarly
>> yeah I mean what's really sad in that vein is that now like when the biggest mover is like it's pulled like a 3x this year which is amazing by the way but crypto people want to hear 300x this year It's May already, right? 300X.
>> When you have 10 assets in your portfolio, one 3xes, the others drop 90%. The portfolio is still down.
>> Yeah, the 3x is not uh not getting there. It's kind of wild, man. Kind of wild.
>> Yeah. Look, we'll see. I'm I'm not I'm not I'm not long-term bearish. I'm I'm still long-term bullish on the space, especially with everything I see behind the scenes and everyone coming in. you know, the fact that, you know, one day you'll be able to, you know, log into your, you know, brokerage account at whatever bank you work with and and, you know, buy, you know, insert token name. I mean, that's pretty cool. The fact that you can work with your financial advisor and they can, you know, help you with the crypto allocation. All of these things are going to are going to help, right? And and it's, you know, it's it seems like it's a matter of time. It's a matter of, you know, when, not if. And I think even in DeFi, a lot of people are extremely negative about DeFi, especially with AI and, you know, the ability to hack things much more easily, right? You know, when you think about, you know, you know, building, you know, a smart cottage or anything else for that matter, right? When you're an engineer, you need to prevent against thousands of different attack vectors. But to be a hacker, you just need to find one entry point. And I think that scares a lot of people in DeFi. But I go and I speak to financial institutions and I mean you saw um Apollo with Morpho and you saw Black Rockck with Uniswap. Like there's real things happening behind the scenes. There's institutions coming into the space that are interested in the space that are going to build in DeFi that are going to think about offering their customers products with DeFi. Uh, you know, you know, potentially using these different lending borrowing marketplaces to offer yield to customers. Like that's really happening. It's really coming. And and so I think it's just a matter of when that happens, not if it happens. And I think I think you'll start seeing a lot of announcements in the next few months, you know, into the next year.
>> Yeah, I agree. I mean, listen,
>> whether they'll move the market though is a different story.
>> Yeah, that that that's the thing like I think that that like remains the narrative that we can keep pounding the pavement on is that the adoption is absolutely real. Every institution
>> I will say though, a lot of it is still pilots. And so I think what we also have to see is a large number of actual transactions happening on chains. A lot of it is pilots. A lot of it is very very early. And so I think what we need to see is like, okay, X bank announces the token tokenization initiative on Y chain. I want to see 500,000 transactions a day that that bank is doing, right? And it could be on a privacy chain and I can maybe I can't see what the transactions are, but I can just see that it's the bank or maybe it's on a public chain. Whatever it is, I think it's just a matter of seeing some of these things hit production. I think once that does, the narrative shifts very quickly.
>> Yeah, I agree. I'm trying to bring up a really funny meme, but I can't get it to go into the window because I wanted to just show it to you because it's funny. I can't get it to go It won't work. It's It's uh It's not a JPEG, but it's Michael Sailor with a huge green candle coming out of his pants. The doctor's measuring it, and it says, "This man will single-handedly drive the price of Bitcoin up so much. Learn about these stocks of his, STRC, and F MSTR." Are we at the point where Sailor is like the only thing that's doing this for us anymore?
>> Yeah, I mean he is, but I think also people view him as an existential risk too. So I wonder how much you know you people see a buy and partially it's like okay great he bought the token but on the other side it's like all right he's continuing to own more and more of this token you know you know how much of a risk is that?
>> Yeah. I just really want to be able to show this meme. It's not working. Okay, I think I got it. Wait. Nope. Won't go. It's coming as the wrong kind of file. I blew it. All right, man. Well, that's actually everything that I wanted to discuss today. So, we h get to get you out of your empty room earlier today. So, congratulations on next time next time I'm on the candles are going to be green and if if they're not uh blame Scott,
>> we'll live. We'll live. And everybody else, I'll see you for the Daily Wolf and then of course show tomorrow. Thank you, Josh. That's dope. That's dope.