Transcription
Breaking news. Bitcoin just lost $70,000. Again, it's really hard to figure out what's going on with this market. Every time Bitcoin seems to want to break out to the upside and get above that key level of 74, it seems unable and we get smacked right back down. But this isn't really a story about Bitcoin or crypto adoption or ETF inflows and outflows. We all know that this is really just a story about what tweet or truth Donald Trump sends on any given day and the status of the war, which we're not allowed to call a war because it's just a conflict in Iran.
To be honest, I don't really want to sit here and do macro and geopolitics today. So, I brought on one of my close friends, Josh Frank, to discuss what's actually happening behind the scenes, where crypto adoption is happening, what's happening with flows and VCs and hedge funds, and what we should actually be excited about or not excited about right now in crypto. Let's go.
>> Let's do Let's go. >> Good morning everybody. Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I've got Josh Frank here today from the TI. Going to go ahead and just bring him on right away. We're all war experts now, right? Like my first question should be, what do you think about mind sweeping in the Straits of Hormuz? Um, you know, I'm a little I'm a little nervous about, you know, some uh you know, IRGC militias going out there with a kayak and a bazooka, but uh maybe uh maybe we'll keep uh the geopolitics out of it, though. I'm I'm I'm happy to try to play expert.
>> Yeah, I think we've been doing this basically every day. I think first I mean, we can just kind of start with the market. As I said in the intro, you know, Bitcoin retreats under 70K as IIA's historic oil reserve release. It's funny because now like when you go on Decrypt, every story also has a war headline somehow. Everything's attached to the war. Every Bitcoin move.
>> You just scroll down between headlines. It's like Bitcoin regains 70K, Bitcoin drops below 70K, Bitcoin regain 70K, Bitcoin drops below 70K. So, you know, we're moving a thousand bucks here and there. We're moving like 2%. We're not, you know, it's it's funny. It's like we we get these flashy headlines because people need something to talk about, as do we, which is why we use this flashy headline. Um, but these are a couple percent moves. I mean, nothing really significant is happening.
>> Yeah. Okay. So, let's talk about things that are actually happening because I think we can both agree that we don't have a great sense of direction for the market or what the catalyst will be that's going to send it in either direction. Is that fair to say? I have no idea. Maybe you do, but I I don't.
>> Yeah. I mean, I have an idea of catalysts that can be helpful. Um, whether or not those catalysts happen, I think, are a different story. But I do think there's a lot of catalysts that that that you know are needed in in in crypto. I mean there's a lot of talks about institutions and institutional adoption and stuff like that. A lot of that is around tokenization. I think there's more you know conversation that needs to be h had around who's actually buying a token not who is tokenizing a product or who is building their own chain or who is using stable coins for whatever you know settlement trade settlement or remittance or whatever the use case might be. Um and so I think the biggest thing is you know if we start to see more news around uh capital formation and capital flows into crypto I think that's the most important thing. I think both capital flows on the institutional I mean it's an obvious point right the more people the more money that goes into tokens the better tokens do the better tokens should do and so um so I mean I still think that's obviously the biggest point. um on your show a few weeks ago, you know, I talked about how from a data perspective, we weren't seeing a lot of fund flows into crypto, but I um you know, we put on a bunch of institutional conferences, the TAI, and at our last conference, I went around and I spoke to a lot of fund managers and it actually does seem like there is new capital flowing into crypto and and I would say a significant amount. There is billions of dollars that are going to be flowing in, but they're primarily going to be flowing into VC funds. Um the question is what are those VC funds going to do? Some of their mandate allows them to buy and hold liquid tokens for the long term. If you look at the largest funds, right, the funds that raised let's say a billion$2 billion dollars last cycle, they weren't able to deploy all of that money into venture opportunities, they did have to buy some liquid tokens. So the more liquid tokens that they need to buy, the better. But I'm seeing a lot of, you know, what I would say is it's a lot of like funds realizing, hey, maybe we overraised last time. Maybe we need to size down because it's very difficult to put the amount of money to work that we wanted to put to work, right? Like if you think about it, if you raise a $250 million fund and you want to write a bunch of checks, it's really hard to write 20 $30 million checks into projects and justify those valuations today. So you're you're now doing, you know,1 million to5 million checks. That's a lot of checks that you have to write and a lot of checks that you have to deploy and and you have to figure out like, you know, let's say you're even writing $10 million checks. You have to find 20 to 25 things that you have conviction on to deploy that capital in. So, we're seeing I'm seeing a lot of like funds that maybe raised $250 million in 2021 that are raising $200 million now. And what we're seeing is kind of survival of the fittest, right? The funds that performed well in their last fund or maybe their last fund wasn't amazing, but their previous few funds were good. They got another chance. they're getting another app bat. They're raising capital, but there were a lot of firsttime fund managers that didn't perform that aren't able to raise. But I talked to at least 10 or so funds that raised a hundred million or more dollars um or closing hundred million or more dollars. So, there's real capital that's going to flow back into crypto. The question is where it goes. You know, we've seen a lot of stuff like Paradigm announcing they're expanding beyond crypto. So, the question is, is this going to be concentrated fully crypto? Think most of what I'm talking about is going to be concentrated fully crypto. But the question is how does that money get deployed? Is that going to be invested in new projects going to market or is that going to be invested in existing projects in market? I mean at this point there are thousands of real projects that raise well I use the word real thousands of projects that raise money from VCs that have a liquid token that are out there right or are those all just going to wash out and we're going to see a new wave of this or are we going to catch a bid? And I think we do catch a bid for projects that have fundamentals. And by fundamentals, I mean revenue um and buybacks and traction stuff like that. That was a very long way of doing my first point, but I will pause there.
>> Yeah. Well, it's interesting that it's coming in, I guess my next question which you somewhat addressed is will it all be crypto or it will just
>> I think 90% of what I'm describing will be crypto.
>> Okay. So that that that's great clarity. There is a lot that will be at the inner I think some of it will be broader fintech and what I mean is is if you look at crypto right now there's really this kind of
>> crypto no longer exists in its own vacuum right if you look at like you know you can now trade oil on Binance and Coinbase hyperl right you can you can buy crypto on Revolute and Robin Hood and stuff like that so I do think there's now this convergence and I had this interesting conversation you know with a crypto fund about how they're thinking of investing investing and they're saying fintech broadly because they're like at the end of the day fintech and crypto is kind of becoming no different. If you're a payments platform you're going to use stable coins, right? And so I think you know the I think the one big discrepancy which I didn't say before which I think is worth mentioning is before maybe 80% of the new capital went into token deals, 20% into equity. I think it's probably closer to 50/50 at this point. So, you know, you're going to see you're going to even though you're going to see a lot of money come in, a lot of that's going to be deployed into financial technology platforms that incorporate crypto in some way. Whether or not that means that your token is going to go up, it probably isn't, but but I do think it's it's worth mentioning that maybe at this point it's a little bit broader. And it's more especially as stable coins start to take shape. you start to see, you know, real raises, real acquisitions around stable coin companies like the bridge deal with Stripe, it fell apart, but the Zero Hash deal with Mastercard, um, and things like that. So, I think you'll see things that are a bit more, you know, financial technology and it's how do we leverage this technology, which doesn't necessarily mean, unfortunately for all of us listening talking that our bags are going to, you know, go up.
>> Yeah. So I guess the question is structurally whether they're going to start looking for equity in preIPO companies that are building crypto infrastructure or whether it's going to be like the old days and this is actually in token launches or what I've seen some just anecdotally is kind of a hybrid right where there's like an equity deal but a token associated but
>> yeah and so I guess question is does any of this benefit us this time? So, I think what you're going to see this cycle, um, and I don't I don't think you've probably talked about this on the show before, or maybe you have, is actually this concept of tokens being converted into equity. Um, and actually having tokens be fully acquired and some portion of that coke and cap table actually converting into equity shareholders. Um, and so what that does is, you know, there are a lot of protocols that are out there that are trading at ridiculously low multiples of their revenue. uh and significantly lower multiples of their revenue than if they were private companies. And there are private companies out there that are too small to go public that maybe want to go and acquire a bunch of businesses and add more revenue and diversify and build a diversified business to go public or just companies that want to add diversification. We've seen examples of like, you know, like the Axelar team was acquired by Circle, the the uh the the Aluvial team was acquired by Galaxy, but the token stayed separate. I think we're not that far away from the token coming with it and the token holders being converted in some way to equity holders. I think if that happens, that's extraordinarily bullish for tokens because I think you start to see a game of funds and individuals trying to figure out what is the next thing that's ripe for acquisition. What's trading at a a low multiple that should potentially be tra trading at a higher multiple? And I think there's also huge opportunities like take for example LST tokens, right? Like um Lido and a bunch of others. There are LST tokens that trade at a a wide range of market of multiples of of uh of revenue. At some point, the token that's trading at the highest multiple should just acquire the other tokens and merge it in. And so, I think what you need to see is consolidation in the crypto space, not on the equity side, which a lot of people talk about, but on the token side. And I think that actually shifts the market up because if people could start to view these tokens and I got into a fight on the last episode saying that token holders should have rights um and and you know tokens should acrue value to to you know their their their holders and I think if they start to there's actually opportunities for these these these these firms to be or these protocols to be bought out for token holders to be made you know even more whole. You know, you could have, you know, an example of maybe a tender offer in governance where the token is trading at a dollar. There's an offer to the to the, you know, in governance to buy all the token holders out for a$130, right? And you get a 30% premium to it. I think that that's coming down the line and I think that's going to be really bullish for protocols that do have revenue and there are a lot of them. I would say that they probably tend to be more DeFi related protocols. Um, but I do think there are a lot of financial related protocols that are ripe to be bought and to be rolled up uh into other businesses or into each other. Um, and I think that that would, you know, be a rising tide, uh, you know, kind of lifting all boats in a way and seeing a convergence and figuring out, okay, well, you know, this company does X, a company that has an equity business that does X is worth eight times revenue. This thing is trading at two times revenue. It should be trading somewhat closer to that eight times number.
>> Yeah. And as all this is happening, obviously, as you said, there's new flows coming in, we just keep getting these stories that individually should be huge news in a market but now are just you know part for the course on any given day. I think yesterday it was Kraken and NASDAQ today last week it was OKX and ICE right I mean on the tokenization side I mean these absolutely huge moves of tradefi or tradi coming into crypto and doing
>> part this comes back to where's the bid right the reality is you know when I talked about flows a lot of the flows that I'm talking about are venture funds right so you have obviously a venture funds and you have hedge funds the problem with hedge funds hedge funds are only interacting with liquid tokens they're not interacting with these earlier stage opportunities and liquid tokens have gotten nuked. If your portfolio's gotten nuked, a long biased hedge fund manager's portfolio has also gotten nuked. And if you're down 75%, your investors might be like, "Screw this, I'm out." And they might pull their money. And so on the hedge fund side, you know, funds that were maybe $200 million a year ago might be $50 million to hund00 million today. Even if they were, you know, hedged or or or thought about risk management in some way, maybe even 120 million, they don't necessarily have that capital to start deploying. And the average investor is not deploying into crypto or paying attention to headlines right now, right? So you need one of the two to be true. You need, you know, you either need funds buying or individuals buying. But if neither are buying, right? I guess the question to the audience is did you buy on this news? And if you didn't buy on the news, then you can't expect anybody else to buy on the news.
>> Yeah, absolutely true. But I guess, you know, as far as plumbing and not the effect on the market, here's another one. Binance, PayPal, Ripple joined Mastercard's massive new push into blockchain payments. More than 85 partners will work with Mastercard to connect onchain payments with banks, merchants, global commerce. It's part of the payment giant's recent crypto program. One thing I would add on that front, I think one thing we're also seeing now is that a lot of these traditional players aren't choosing a single partner. They're choosing a lot of partners. And so the question is, you know, before back in the day, it would be like X company partnered with or X token partnered with Y company. And that Y company is choosing to build on X tokens infrastructure or stack. We're now seeing like the DTCC and others have come out and said we're not going to work with one chain. We are going to work with many chains. we're going to build on many chains and I think that's also part of the problem as well is that now it's you know the impact is being distributed across 10 players or 20 players or 85 players instead of one player.
>> Yeah, I I 100% agree with that. I think that like all these partnership it's like blockchain technology is being completely commoditized across everything which is why it once again it comes back to the question of where's the bid as you said like what how do I how do you and I as investors benefit from Mastercard doing a partnership and blockchain becoming the underlying technology of payments. I I genuinely think you should be looking at fundamentals and evaluating protocols as equity businesses because even if the market doesn't fully appreciate that today, the market is getting is definitely moving in that direction. We're seeing that the market is moving in that direction and ultimately one day there will start to be transactions that benefit people that have that conviction, right? And we've and so you know it's figuring out where is the revenue, where are the users, where is the traction, where is the growth and where is that where do those metrics exist post airdrop, right? I don't care about pre-airdrop there's a farming campaign and there's incentives and all of a sudden this protocol has a bazillion users and a bazillion dollars in revenue. But the only reason it does is because people know that if they participate in that protocol they're going to get an airdrop of the token. Take the airdrop out of it. look at, you know, what I'm really excited about is what tokens are six, seven, eight years old that are still generating revenue, that are seeing some growth, right? That are maybe doing 10 million, 15 million, 20 million in revenue with a small team, right? That that's likely profitable, that's lean. To me, that's that that's that's really ripe for either an acquisition or, you know, the market matures and people start to value those businesses. And I think ultimately those that have conviction and those that believe in the thesis of like you know there'll be a conversion between convergence between equity and and protocol multiples I think they will they will benefit ultimately from um that that happening in the future. But again it depends what your timeline is. Is that going to happen next week? No. But I think over the next you know six months year two years that that starts to play out.
>> Okay. Can we name names on some of those? I mean, there's got to be some of those that are on your radar.
>> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a there's a lot of protocols that have a ton of revenue. I mean look, anyone can go I mean I'll I'll just share a public website that anybody can go to. I mean anyone can go to DeFi Lama and can look at you know uh fees and revenue and other you know and other metrics that exist for uh you know for crypto. So you know I'm not I'm not even looking at this in any particular way whatsoever. Just looking at um you know 24-hour revenue on protocols. But you should just start going going into here and looking at okay, you know, what is their revenue? Uh, you know, what are they doing? Are they buying back tokens? You know, how does that benefit holders? You know, what which of these which of these protocols maybe are trading at, you know, lower multiples than they should be trading at, you know, relative to their market cap. So, yeah, I mean, you start to annualize some of the revenue. Um, you know, take take a protocol that does $10,000 in daily revenue, you know, that that they do, you know, about $4 million a year. I mean, that's not the most significant thing ever. Um, but you know, you start to look at some of these larger ones, maybe $100,000 in daily revenue, that's a 40 million revenue business. And what is it trading at, right? Uh, I I think is is is really beneficial. And and how do you as a token holder um you know, benefit from that? You know, take take Lido for example. Obviously, Lido, the benefits all don't go back to the token holder. So, you need to understand how all of these things work. But Lido doing 137,000 in daily revenue, that's 50 million in in in uh in annualized revenue, right? These are real companies. That's what I'm saying. There are real companies out there. The problem is that like
>> the value of the token has never aligned with those metrics.
>> Yeah. But token has always just been speculation. So I I still find it hard. I agree with you. I think those are the ones that will do exceptionally well. I guess the glass half empty side of me wonders if there's a repricing to get back to the actual value of their utility and earnings that could be down before they can go up. It's definitely possible. But I think if you look at this and you're like, look, what is a growth stage business that's doing 50 million in revenue that's growing at X or Y or percent that has and I think it's also really important with any of this evaluation is to understand do they have a moat, right? And that's historically been a huge problem in crypto is do they have something differentiated that's going to allow them to exist and continue to exist forever or is there a new product that's going to come in like that's going to be slightly better or do something slightly different that you know kills that business right like Dydx was crushing it for the longest time and now compared to Hyperlid it's it's it's almost non-existent unfortunately uh you know on the blip of of of you know the you know the the the perpex exchange radar, right? And so the question is, you know, like sushi swap was huge and now it's not. You know, unis swap continues to be. What do you think has sustained value that is able to generate revenue? And also, I think there's a huge opportunity and I think there will continue to be an opportunity to go out and voice your concerns in governance and change the way that protocols work under the new SEC, right? You can actually acrue value to protocol holders in ways that you were not able to do under Gensler. And so I think there'll be a lot of activists investing. I think there'll be hostile takeovers. I think there'll be a lot of creative and unique and interesting, you know, mergers and ways that these protocols are able to drive more value to their token holders. And ultimately, what you should be focused on is who's driving any value whatsoever and where is there that most opportunity to drive sustainable value in the future. I mean, it's not what I'm saying isn't rocket science. Ultimately, it's ultimately it's buy things that generate revenue.
>> Well, I guess that's a light bulb for a crypto A. But the thing is, you've been coming on the show for years and we've been discussing this and we've been saying the same thing and it hasn't caught up, but it does feel like people are actually widely starting.
>> We're really we're really getting there. Um, we're getting there. There are a few things and transactions and things that that we're seeing happening that aren't necessarily, you know, public information yet that I think are going to uh help make this thesis come true. We'll see if they, you know, if there's legal approvals and and and regulatory approvals and some some of these types of transactions, but I do think you see transactions start to happen um that start to enable uh token holders to acrew more value. Yeah. Uh, it's interesting. I mean, we're all like sitting here with baited breath waiting for it to actually happen, but the fact that you can actually see it kind of bubbling beneath the surface and with people able to raise money again, that's the direction it's going. Like I know a lot of that money will be deployed into things we've never heard of yet. And I think it's worth maybe discussing some of what those narratives may be. Agentic AI, I think, and the crossover. I mean this weekend CZ and Brian Armstrong both basically like copy pasting each other's tweets saying oh there's a world coming where millions of agents are out there out transacting humans and they're obviously not going to be opening bank accounts. What do you think happens? Right? But I mean you have the biggest players in the space very openly pushing that.
>> I think crypto needs to push that narrative because you know Visa and Mastercard and everyone else is pushing that narrative, right? I mean, I still don't understand why an agent couldn't just create a temporary debit card or uh credit card um and would necessarily need tokens. Um I haven't had that argument, but I am hearing from crypto and I am hearing that from crypto funds. There are a number of crypto funds that will be investing very heavily in this thesis that crypto is the best way for agents to interact and agents to pay for things. So I I have seen that bubbling under the surface as well. And if you look at you know performance of sectors within crypto uh if you look at over the last 30 days um agent platforms are actually up 42%. So I think you know machine learning platforms are up um about hold up just
>> yeah there's actually a story on this.
>> Yeah. So here you can see
>> which once again even in the headline by the way from CoinDesk they had to mention the war it to tell us this story that you're talking about. Here you go. Bitcoin drops on Iran war uncertainty. AI tokens jump.
>> Yeah. I mean, look, you know, everyone's in the business of clicks, you know.
>> Me, too.
>> Yeah.
>> Fair.
>> But but yeah, I mean, so the these are actually catching a bid right now. I mean, what did it say? I think I I read through it kind of briefly earlier. FedE like the kind of the same kind of the same family of tokens that had that one AI boom. There's a about over the last 30 days it's about a 42% return for um agent platforms tokens but the market cap of these tokens is only about a billion too. Um we don't have FET in this specific categorization of tokens. We have it under AI. I don't think we have it under agent platforms. Um but yeah, I mean, there's uh I don't know what Venice token is. It's up 200% over the last 30 days.
>> Eric Borhees is
>> got it
>> decentralized like LL I think it's an LLM. I don't want to speak wrong, but I know that's associated with Eric Vorhees, obviously, who people love and got
>> a more decentralized, safer version, I think, of a chat GBT. I'm probably butchering that, but conceptually, I think that's sort of what I've seen superficially.
>> All right, shout out Eric Vores for building a token that went up.
>> Yeah, see that it could happen.
>> He did it. He's done in the past, right? I mean, Swift and all those things. It's just the problem is that nothing that anybody builds that goes up stays up.
>> Yeah. Look, and I think I look I, you know, I, you know, I feel like a lot of, you know, what we're discussing is just, you know, when you're in a bare market, everything feels negative, but this is so different than any other bare market we've ever had. To your point of bringing up that Mastercard partnering with 80 crypto companies news, there is so much that's happening, right? The the Kraken NASDAQ partnership that you mentioned, uh, you know, I mean, if you look at all the announcements and partnerships around Canton as an example, uh, you know, investments that are happening in the space. So there is a lot of activity happening. It's coming from from real institutions. I mean we saw Black Rockck is buying Uniswap token. So I you know you see
>> you see a couple more of those. Apollo I think is going to buy Morpho or reserves the right to buy Morpho tokens, right? You see a couple more of those announcements and things can start to change very very quickly. Um so you know I'm for what it's worth I I'm not trimming here. Um, I've bought on some of the dips. I I bought I bought a bunch of Bitcoin at 80 grand. I thought that was going to be a good buying opportunity when we dropped a bunch in the 80s. I bought more when it went down, but I bought a bunch in the 80s. I was super psyched.
>> Yeah. So, look, I, you know, look, from every conversation I have with institutions, none of that, you know, uh, changes my conviction. I mean, I talked to I mean, I I think Frank Chaparo is doing doing a really good job. He's, uh, become basically the glass door reporter. He's just going on glass door and looking at you know whatever LinkedIn and looking at all these big traditional financial institutions hiring crypto jobs and every day there's new jobs at n insert name of bank asset manager hedge fund you know traditional payments company things like that so the activity is happening it's bubbling under the surface you know I think look you know a tremendous amount of money got deployed into crypto capital was very cheap for a lot of years and if you look by the way if you look at any fund across any asset class on the venture side, you know, any 2021 2022 vintage, you know, h has pretty shitty returns. You know, not just crypto funds, take any big, you know, tier one VC name. No one has really returned capital, right? There was capital was incredibly cheap during COVID. Rates were really low, money was flowing in, things got overpriced, things got overvalued, and people are underwater on transactions. And I don't think that's a cryptospecific problem, but I think you're going to naturally have a wash out of things. I think you need a consolidate just like you see a consolidation on equity businesses in crypto right now like we acquired a staking provider other companies are acquiring other businesses. I think you're going to see the same thing on the token side. Uh and I think you'll see some really big winners. I mean the market cap of crypto is so is still so incredibly small. Uh and I still think there's some bullish catalyst like uh you know I think next week or this week uh the 20 millionth Bitcoin ever is going to be mined. There's only 1 million Bitcoin left. I mean, I still think there are things and narratives to be excited about, but if you look at all of the market, the entirety of the world's market are moving based off of news. I mean, you mentioned Trump tweets, right? I mean, oil ran to what, 120 and now it's back at 80 because Trump said like, you know, we're going to end the war soon or we're gonna backs stop stuff, right? And so, yeah, I mean, everything is everything is you no one knows no one knows anything and everything is sentiment driven.
>> Yeah. I mean, and meanwhile, back at the ranch, just to give us a little hint of the macro backdrop for all of this and where people are. I mean, it's pretty crazy when you go through all the bad data and how high stock market is. And this does explain why a lot of things aren't catching bids. I don't really think people have money, you know, but like US government quietly erased another 7 to 110,000 jobs. Yay. We've seen these revisions every single time. Americans are taking hardship withdrawals from their retirement accounts at the fastest pace in history. Warren's Vanguard. US manufacturing employment continues to shrink. Okay. Breaking Volkswagen set to cut 50,000 jobs by 2030. I'm not a doomer. I'm just saying. 476,000 Americans are working two full-time jobs simultaneously. An all-time high. They don't even have their agents doing four more jobs. What are these people? Poor. They want you to think, and then there's this hot take that like they want you to think AI is taking your jobs. So, you don't realize that basically we've been in a massive recession because of money printing. But yeah, I mean, listen, we talk into these narratives all the time, but the reality is maybe people just don't really have that much money to buy [ __ ]
>> Yeah. I mean, I think you also you also are going to see a massive wealth transfer from boomers. And I think once that happens, a lot of that is going to go into shitcoins. Um, you know, like a tremendous amount of that is going to go into crypto. Uh, you know, as that money starts to transfer to a younger generation. I mean, you know, I I don't know what the exact stat is. I saw it the other day, but you know, boomers are, you know, on average something like, you know, let's say the number is 81 years old and the average life expectancy is 84 or whatever the number is, right? And so, you know, there are a lot of people with a lot of money that are older. Once those people pass and no one's hopefully rooting for them to pass, but once they they do pass, there is going to be a massive uh wealth transfer to a younger generation. And so I think it's really worth looking at what are younger people investing in because ultimately if grandpa leaves you with 20 million bucks, where is that money going to go? Is that money going into GE stock that grandpa held for the last 70 years or is that money going into you know you know I whatever token and AI stock and you know whatever else.
>> Yeah, I I agree with all all of that and I think that that wealth transfer is going to be the massive story. It's just one of those things that's going to take a lot of time. Those people certainly aren't going to keep that money in like with granddad's uh or dad's um financial adviser, right?
>> I I would I would expect not. I would unless the will forces them to do it for some reason.
>> Yeah, we're going to have agentic raas. Like there's no there's no way that uh we're not going to have actively managed portfolios by brilliant AI agents instead of dude who puts you in a 6040 and goes and plays golf. It's just not happening. Yeah, it's really funny watching all of these people build AI agents to trade stuff and not realize they're still trading against like all the big prop trading firms. Like, you know, you're still you're even though it's not you and it's an agent, it's still trading against Susuana and Jump and Tower Research, right? Like, just keep in mind who you're trading against.
>> I'm going to be honest before I let you go. If I was grandpa in this environment, I would blow all of that [ __ ] on a yacht and just be out. Any grandpas, if you're listening to the show, Scott said it first. Go buy a yacht.
>> Like, what do we what? Why? Like, why do you do the whole like live your whole life to save a whole bunch of money to give it to people who don't even need it by the time you give it to them? Anyways, Josh,
>> [ __ ] your Bitcoin or something.
>> Yeah, you know, it's gonna it's gonna actually I'm going to do a speech on it's just gonna say mission accomplished behind my head like George Bush and Trump.
>> All right, man. I know that you got to go. Uh, I'm going to continue on for a few more seconds, but thank you, Josh. Everybody, give Josh a a follow and uh, appreciate you as always.
>> Thanks for having me on. Next episode is going to be Bitcoin back above 70K.
>> I mean, I think I I'm not kidding. I'm actually embarrassed by the title today, but that may have been the title yesterday.
>> I I'm not sure. Like, I think we did have a very excited about something or other title yesterday. And
>> what do I do? Thanks, John. Enjoy the yacht. Hopefully, I'll see you again and you're not selling off into the sunset.
>> I'm I'm gone later. I can't afford the yacht yet. I need the grandparents. All right, I'll talk to you soon.
>> All right, guys. I know Josh had to uh had to run. There were a couple other just very brief stories worth touching on that uh didn't want to uh have him, you know, miss a meeting as a result of. We have our good friend Matt Hogan. Why Bitcoin is on a path to $1 million per coin Bitwise. Listen, we all see these hyperbolic uh you know, price predictions, but if you listen to what he's actually saying based on flows and based on Bitcoin even capturing a tiny little minuscule slice of the store of value investment, uh it's basically programmed that this thing eventually continues to go massively up. Uh and I actually still deeply believe that that's going to happen even if short-term sentiment is down. And I think it's just a really important note that we can have titles that are like, "Yeah, 70K again." Like, nobody's clicking on that title. I I know we all like to clickbait, but you know, Bitcoin just lost 70 again. Let me zoom in and see why. We're at 70.5 yesterday. Like, yeah. like but what you know but I think it's important to continue to zoom out though and understand that we're here for a reason and that people like Matt are the necessary cheerleaders we need to remind us that nothing has really changed. If anything fundamentally we've grown much much stronger with time and this thing should go up massively. It just might take a little while. Also I think it's just worth noting Elon Mus says X Money early public access is to launch next month. Haven't heard anything about it being Dogecoin, but uh certainly possible. But I'm wondering still, we have very little info on what this will mean uh for crypto, whether this will be on blockchain rails or something completely separate, but obviously knowing that he built PayPal and wants X to be an everything app, there's a very good chance with his background that crypto could be involved. And this one's just fun. Binance sues Wall Street Journal as newspaper says US Department of Justice is investigating Iran transactions. So Binance is just they're not having it anymore. And I hope we see more of this from the industry. We saw this in the Gary Gendler days when people like Caitlyn Long and Coinbase would actually just start to sh sue the United States government. But Binance is suing the Wall Street Journal here uh for defamation. And you may have missed this when I broke this literally uh I don't even know when this was November that uh we saw the back and forth between CZ and Elizabeth Warren. and I wrote this long tweet thread about how Elizabeth Warren was being disingenuous and then CZ engaged with it and then he actually sent her these letters to go ahead and sue her. So I think it's very important even though we are a very ligious uh society here in the United States, you shouldn't sue everybody for everything. But when somebody says something false about you from the government or the media and it meaningfully impacts your bottom line, I think we can all support the idea of crypto companies standing up for themselves and taking care of business in that context. That's all I've got for you guys today. We'll be back tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. And today we do have crypto town hall 10:15 a.m. on X Weissberger and I. So tune in to that. See you guys soon. Enjoy your Barry Lacroy. This one does not taste like uh piss. Yesterday's taste like this. That's dope. That's dope.