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Bitcoin is back at $85,000
Recorded: March 20, 2025 Duration: 0:55:01Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key highlights include Trump's media executives launching a SPAC to raise $179 million for crypto ventures, Kraken's potential $1.5 billion acquisition of Ninja Trader, and the increasing trend of institutional investment in the crypto space, signaling a significant shift towards mainstream adoption.
Full Transcription
Good morning, everyone.
Welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss
every single thing to do with the modern market.
That is the crypto market, the NFT market
and how to spot some opportunities
and hopefully make some and or a lot of money
on the internet.
Loaded up for discussion today,
we've got crypto up, Ethan Sol jumping the most
out of the majors on the positive FOMC meeting.
Falcoin was also up 21%.
We'll give a bit of a breakdown on what's going on there.
Got Trump media execs allegedly launching a SPAC
to raise $179 million on US-based crypto
and data security firms.
Interesting news coming out there.
And finally, Privy is raising 15 million
led by Ribbit Capital to continue to build the Web3 wallet infrastructure.
A lot of infrastructure stuff getting done. A lot of M&A on the horizon.
Also had the news of Kraken close to buying a futures platform. So interesting stuff there.
We've also got the latest on price action and general market thoughts coming up today.
I've got legendary in the cohost seat with me today.
We're ready to get into it, but just to remind friends that nothing that we say
here is financial advice.
This market is very, very risky.
We don't know anything for sure.
So please proceed with caution and exercise your own judgment with that out of the
way.
Legendary it's Thursday.
It's the 20th of March.
How are you doing?
How are you feeling?
GM, GM doing pretty well.
I've been observing two things happening on my timeline.
The first thing is that I get more and more political content than ever.
I mean, obviously we do talk more about it on the show.
And one thing that I found pretty amusing out of all the hit pieces was an interview with Howard Lutnick, secretary of commerce, where he was saying
on TV, Tesla is so cheap, you need to buy Tesla, such a great buy.
Obviously we had Donald Trump having the Teslas in front of the White House.
It feels like Elon Musk is assembling an army of KOLs to show his company.
That was definitely interesting to see.
Let's frame it like that.
And the other thing was just a massive influx
of DeFi-based games.
There's like a Wolf game-like, well, game,
DeFi game launching on Sonic.
And I've seen another one that's kind of like
DeFi dungeon style.
So it feels like that we're revisiting the DeFi kingdom,
the Wolf games of last cycle and are launching them on a couple of L2s or L1s. But that seemed
to happen like all within the last week or so, because I've seen more than like five, six of
these games suddenly pop up. I don't know if you noticed that as well. I did notice a couple of the games, definitely in line with the general thought, which I've
said crypto is becoming increasingly. I mean, I know you're making a general point and more
political point. But crypto itself is becoming more political and more corporate at the same
time. So I think those two things are happening. Yeah, I mean, I suspect Elon is,
and the Tesla team are not so happy
about how the share price has plummeted since,
or it's given up all of the gains of the Trump pump.
So I suspect they're not like super happy about that.
Or a lot of people are not happy about that.
Maybe calling in a few favors here to try to put a
bottom in or try to try to resurrect it a little bit. But
I think until the broader uncertainty kind of until the
broader uncertainty is dealt with, I don't see the kind of
the volatility stopping. Having said that, the thing that I've been looking
out for is kind of what I've been saying the last few days where, you know, hype is better here than
it is at 30. Bitcoin is better at 81 than at 109. You know, these things keep happening and
some of the downside seems to be slowing or like we've
certainly stopped going down in the aggressive way that we were
at one point in time.
Sure.
We could go down a bit more, but it feels like that's slowing down.
At least the descent has slowed, slowed down.
So wonder what your thoughts are there, Ledge?
Um, any, any considerations?
Yeah, I do share the sentiment.
The thing that I am still contemplating on is what to do with Tesla specifically.
And it's something that both of us have talked outside of the show,
just from the perspective that I think both of us, it's fair to say,
want to have some sort of portfolio exposure to human robotics.
And Tesla is still one of the very, very few publicly
traded companies that you can buy in that segment.
Just yesterday, I've seen a video of Boston dynamics and their humanoid
robot who is now perfectly able to do back flips and very athletic moves.
But obviously that company is not publicly traded.
It's a bit more difficult to get exposure to that.
So that's kind of the thing with Tesla where I keep going back and forth.
On the flip side of that, I've seen that a lot of people are trying to sell their Tesla
because they're afraid that they just will have massive insurance premiums because of
all the vandalism that's going on at the same time, which would put more sell pressure on
the, almost want to say on the floor price, on the secondary price and also drive primary sales numbers down.
So I'm still torn when to buy Tesla, if to buy Tesla, do I DCA in, do I ignore it?
I don't know what's, what's your stance on that?
My stance would be the same as with any other riskier asset, which you like.
I think these levels are
significantly better than the much higher ones. And so if you
wanted to build a position, my stance would be to start
building, like I think trying to trying to climb all the way in
and time the bottom, although it's tempting, it's kind of fun
thing to try to do every now and again. You'd feel pretty sick if it then, you know, the bottom continued to go further. So I think these
levels are attractive across the board. And I don't know if that would mean full porting it
necessarily, but starting to have a nibble at the things that you like will obviously feel much better than if you had done that
a month and a half ago when stuff was significantly higher. So I'm kind of thinking
that that's my kind of stance. I think we could go a little bit lower as well. I don't necessarily
think this little jump up means we're completely out of the woods, but I think we're at levels that
are kind of enticing for a variety of these things.
Any final thoughts there, Lej, before we get into the headlines and all the good stuff?
Nothing to add to that.
Let's get into the price action.
All right, let's do it.
As usual, starting with the price action to get you up to speed with everything that is
going on today, we have Bitcoin up a couple of percent. Wait, hang on a sec. How's this happen? Bitcoin's up
a couple of cents. I thought it was doing great. What? How has
this happened?
You have a small window of opportunity to buy ether above
2k and that window has closed.
I mean, people were bull posting either of those up 6%. Suddenly,
it's just sold off beneath. So and I was back under two. Okay.
Anyway, Bitcoin is up a couple of percent above 85. ETH is now almost down a percent to 1.9.
Solana is up a couple of percent to 130. That's changed significantly even when I wrote the
snapshot just a moment ago. Other majors XRP is up almost 7% to $2.50. That's on
the news. I think that the SEC is dropping its cases against XRP to BNB is at 634 up a couple
of percent to getting into the meme coin side of things. We have Doge up a percent Trump up a
percent bonk up 5% Pengingu is up 6% SPX
Morad's coins up almost 9% Fartcoin is now up 10% I think
it was up as much as 20% in the 24 hours not so long ago. And
16 Z up 7%. So like a reasonable amount of green actually on the
meme coin side of things today getting into the headlines
themselves, we have
as I said a bunch of majors being green mainly because of the FOMC meeting seems to have gone
relatively well legendary is going to dive into the details there why people think that was the
case Trump media execs launched a SPAC to raise $179 million on US based crypto data security firms.
That's interesting. I want to put that into context a little bit later as well.
Two more things, Prairie raised $15 million led by Rebic Capital to continue to build out
their Web3 wallet infrastructure. And then finally, Kraken is close to buying a futures platform,
Ninja Trader for $1.5 billion billion according to the Wall Street Journal.
Again, more examples of M and a coming to crypto.
And I can, I can definitely see that trend continuing as the administration makes crypto far more easier to interact with and transact with and to do
business in, um, any, anything going on the NFT side that we should know about?
Bit of a positive move, bit of a green day.
We have most of the major collections up anywhere between three and 4%.
That means that the Pudgy Penguins, for example, are above 9.5 ETH,
actually that 9.6 ETH, Azuki's are closing in on two and a half ETH,
Doodle's above three ETH at 3.1 ETH, Port Ape's pretty much flat at 12.6 ETH, Azuki's are closing in on two and a half ETH, Doodle's above three ETH at 3.1 ETH,
Port Ape's pretty much flat at 12.6 ETH. So basically moving in line with ETH and not yet
have reflected the ETH sell off of the last one or two hours.
Okay, it's not a huge amount going on there. There were some big other notable sales. I remember we talked about Sam Spratt's masks.
They've still around 14, 15 K floor,
but there was a skull of Lucy with a corresponding mask,
which sold for a hundred ETH yesterday.
That was pretty big.
And speaking about the good vibes club,
there was another top sale of 13 ETH yesterday,
the one we're sharing on screen.
Remember when live on video as well,
if you want to watch in with us,
getting into the rest of the world to round up to see everything else has happened in the last 24 hours. President Trump
is due to address the digital asset summit in New York today, the first time a sitting president has addressed a crypto
conference. That's what BlockWorks said. I don't know if the
Bitcoin magazines, Bitcoin conference will have something to say about that,
but big news.
So we'll be, I guess, watching carefully
what is said in New York later today.
I wonder whether, I thought, oh, Funky is with us.
I wonder whether he's unable to speak though,
because I think he's in New York
to consider what that could be about.
Ripple, as I said, is up 8% to $2.50 as the SEC drops its
case. North Carolina senators introduced a bill to invest up to 10% of public funds into Bitcoin.
So those there are certain states where that is still moving. I know a couple of them were rejected,
but it is moving in some. Solana ETFs are ready to launch today. That's the first ever Solana ETFs
in the US are launching from Volshares.
That was reported by Eric Balcones. UniToken holders approved $165.5 million in new foundation funding. Blast, one of our blasts from the past, one of our favorite apps and chains.
It's gone live for white listed wallets on their app store. This is their mobile,
they're going super is their mobile.
They're going super big on mobile.
I've kind of want to play with that.
I want to see how that's working out.
Doodles announced they'll share a white paper
for the dude launch.
And finally, highly anticipated final Bosu mint
on abstract revealed as mint details.
Gonna be $180 or the equivalent in ETH.
And it will be on March the 24th.
This seems to be the biggest,
most anticipated mint on abstract.
Legendary, that is the WebD roundup.
Before we get into the main stuff today,
what is catching your attention from there or elsewhere?
Two things I want to touch on.
One is Uniswap because those 165 million
in the Newfoundage Foundation funding also go hand
in hand with one of the governance or two governance proposals that have been voted
through and one of which has to do with the groundwork to finally activate the fee switch,
which we now have a bit more regulatory clarity on to be able to do that.
And again, that goes back with that narrative that we had.
I feel half a year ago to try to value DeFi protocols based on the
revenue that they generate and keeping in mind that if they have a token at
one point, they might redistribute parts of that revenue to token holders back
as sort of a dividend payment.
And that was basically shut down before Trump was elected for regulatory reasons.
And now it seems like we are moving quite quickly into the direction of turning on those fee switches.
And I'm very curious if you extrapolate that a bit to see how this will play out, because I feel like it naturally
has to become a race to a hundred percent basically, because the foundations hold the
tokens themselves mostly.
So they will have to distribute at least the majority of the revenue, because I feel like
other protocols will do that as well and will increase that.
And then the question is, if that becomes the standard, they're redistributing
as much revenue as they can, how that will affect the entire pricing of DeFi protocol.
So if you will then have to, as a founder, as a developer, whatever, as a team
focused more on like driving individual campaigns to drive volume
back in order to drive fees back in order to drive token price up.
Or if you will have basically a pretty clear winner that already has most of the volume
and that will keep to continue winning this.
And then the question is also how will DeFi aggregators and aggregators of aggregators like DeFi, LamaSwap and KyberSwap, for example, deal with that?
Because I could then very well see a world where there's some sort of additional incentives going on to either have a cheaper route or to have a specific additional kickback if you do the transaction on Uniswap while you're a uni holder. And I feel like that could be a period where it becomes maybe a bit more
transparent for a while. What actually the best way to go is
and in terms of how you want to swap and where you want to swap.
So I'm quite interested how the game theory and all of that for the DeFi landscape will play out.
Do you think there's anyone specifically well placed for that?
I would probably say the protocols that have the most money because they can steer the most
incentives and Uniswap is definitely one of them. Yeah I think that's probably the case.
That's probably the case.
And do you think that value will go to the token holders eventually?
Yeah, I think it will have to go to the token holders and that
there, that stake of value going back to token holders will have to increase
because if someone starts at 20%, the company will go at 25, then someone will
go to 30, et cetera, et cetera.
So this will be a race to almost 100%, I think.
Yeah, interesting.
I'm just looking at the Uniswap chart yesterday on the news, showing it on screen for the
people who are watching in.
We have kind of definitely jumped.
It was up, I think it it was much as 10% at one
point in time but maybe now just around 3% 3 to 5% people I think like the news
in general though all of this talk I mean in the end you just got to watch
how things are playing out no the positive news around regulations and the freedom with which these companies should
be able to operate ultimately has not had good news over the last three months at least.
Uni was at $14 not so long ago.
Now it's at $670.
I'm just trying to see.
Okay.
So again, similar to most other coins actually, it's kind of just gone up and down in the same way
that Tesla ramped up and then has given up
all of the gains post Trump.
This chart is exactly the same where it's gone.
That just, it's gone off the screen now.
Yeah, there you go.
You can see from October into November,
it went up a bunch, kind of peaked in December, 2024,
and then it's kind of given up all of those gains
down quite a lot in the last couple of months.
So I think it's probably not right to make,
to take too many learnings from,
when you're looking at the DeFi sector,
it's probably not right to take too many learnings from it
because ultimately so many of these
Charts look exactly the same like the Uniswap chart basically is looking the same as the Tesla chart
so I think that's probably one of my takeaways where sometimes you're looking too much into what's going on specifically when macro and
Trump and
Domestic policy and foreign policy has completely, completely taken over
and grabbed everything.
We're basically trading on his tweets and the Fed's decision on rates potentially.
So I think that's a little bit what's happening.
Any final reflections there, Ledge, before we keep moving?
Yeah, a final question for you on that, because yesterday we spoke about the permission
pools coming to base via Uniswap v4.
So basically having quote unquote KYC pools that are more directed towards
institutional participants to also be able to use decentralized finance, but
obviously in a bit of a different way.
What do you think is the bigger price driver, driver for the DeFi ecosystem? decentralized finance, but obviously in a bit of a different way.
What do you think is the bigger price driver,
a driver for the DeFi ecosystem?
Is it this fee switch narrative or is it actually getting permissioned infrastructure,
getting permissioned pools on to try to cater more to
stratify plus institutional players?
Look, it's a good question. I think the fee switch thing is big. And I think that the people who are
making money already, like they'll just continue to make money in the way that they're making money.
Without knowing any of the numbers, this is purely off, it's not off a whole lot of intuition. And I
guess it's kind of a new industry. So it's hard to know, but I would predict that if you could capture some of that permission
volume, you really, really should.
And in that sense, maybe I disagree with, we looked at the aerodrome example yesterday
where bread was talking about some people were like, Oh, you know, our base screwing
over aerodrome, which is their biggest, biggest decks. Should they have done this with aerodrome and it seemed like aerodrome
were of the opinion, but guys, we're doing great as it is.
This is a new thing that you guys are trying to do.
If you can prove that it has PMF, then yeah, maybe we'll consider it in the future,
but we actually don't need or want to do this now.
I think kind of as we described yesterday,
this is in the mindset of the universe being full of like
oars where people are saying we can do this
or we can do that.
And thinking that the world is binary in that sense.
Whereas I'm more of the opinion,
whether it's to do with DeFi applications or permissioned
or unpermissioned pools or whether it's the different kinds of media you consume. It's more case of and so it's like,
yes, we're going to have permissionless stuff, and we're going to have permissioned stuff.
And given that there is going to be this new market entrance that I want to do the more
permissioned stuff. I suspect you'd want to have a slice of it. I do see there being benefit in being specialized and people really knowing your brand for being
outstanding at something.
And sometimes as you get bigger, your brand can't necessarily expand to include the variety
of things.
But personally, I'd probably want to participate in that stuff.
And I think that market will be sizable.
So I guess to your specific question, is it worth going in that direction?
I think so.
Not to the detriment of the permission and the stuff, but I think from a business perspective,
I think that that market will be sizable based on the way that some of these corporates have
been speaking at some of these conferences that we've been observing and just the
general trajectory and observation of how these things have been moving in my
opinion. Thoughts, Ledge?
Very much agree with that.
I think we've seen two good examples.
One was PayPal incentivizing PYUSD farming on Camino Finance.
Quite significantly.
The other one is Wintermute with Wildcat, where they also offered,
are still offering, I don't know how full the pools are rather attractive.
It's filled up.
Yeah.
Is the stablecoin pool gone?
It was gone and then they've raised it.
So yesterday, remember we spoke about Wildcat, Wildcat last week, we presented as an
interesting opportunity where I guess Wintermute are seeking credit, a credit line to the public,
you can lend to Wintermute directly the USDT, you can lend USDT or USDC at 12%, which is, you know,
beating everything else that you're going to get on the market. So yesterday I actually went into the USDT pool with some that I had, and then the USDC one was
closed. I think they were seeking 20 million. I remember when we looked at it last week,
that week, like it was, it was loads and loads of space that actually filled up.
But then when I checked again later, it looks like they've added an extra 10 mil. So,
Oh yeah. Yeah. I just see that. It's now,
they're now, you know, having space for 30 million. And so I entered a little bit there as well,
just because I wanted to try it out. Noting the risks, right? The risks being,
well, this was the conversation took place in the timeline last week. If you were the type of entity
that could get this kind of funding from more traditional
places, you would therefore it kind of skews towards the type of entities that can't get
the type of funding, which means usually this type of debt would be considered maybe lower
quality or like higher risk.
But you know, I guess everyone can make their own decision.
I thought it'd be interesting to try.
Did it with a relatively small amount.
So, um, yeah, lending to winter me.
So that's one of the biggest market makers in space.
So, uh, we'll see how that goes.
Uh, sorry, I interrupted.
Was there anything else you want to say?
Yeah, just those two are like really good examples for institutions
trying already to find a way to kind of connect stronger to
the lending markets to incentivize DeFi place and very much agree on the Wildcat side.
Do want to have some exposure to the platform and give it a try.
I also just did the favorite thing of checking the BTC poll.
We said it once when we spoke about the news first time that I think there was like a total of
0.3 BTC in that being loaned to Winamute. That number is still very, very low. We are up to 5.2 BTC and they're seeking for a total of 200 BTC. So it does seem that people have way more appetite
to give away their stable coins, but are very, very conservative when it comes to Bitcoin.
People don't like landing.
You don't like interacting with Bitcoin, like no transactions with Bitcoin in their wallets.
I think that is how people view that.
And to be honest, I'm kind of similar. I don't know. It's a psychological thing.
One thing I wanted to bring up before we get into the main stuff.
We missed it yesterday.
Cause I think it happened just before the show went live.
We had hyper liquid announced
that they're introducing staking tiers.
I'm gonna just share this on the screen
for people who are watching in
and just take you through what that means.
The price yesterday, I hype was up at least 10%. I think
it might have given up some of those gains potentially overnight. But this is what they've
said. They said staking tiers will be determined by the amount of hype staked. The initial benefit
of staking tiers is reduced trading fees. These updates are expected to go live on or after April the 30th. So a bit of time actually, before these updates
are expected to go live. And to give people time to adjust. As
part of the update, the overall fee system will be reworked. So
the new fee system will have the following properties, even
without staking discounts, perps and spot fees are lower than
centralized exchanges for most users.
Fee sensitive users can stake hype to benefit
from even lower fees than the existing system.
Protocol revenue is projected to increase.
And number four, crucially, potentially,
hype will have more utility for users.
When asked what else is changing,
they said separate fee schedules for perps and spot spot volume
counts double toward your feet.
And what is not changing?
Okay.
Just a couple of other things, but interesting news that
legendary staking tiers being introduced with hyper liquid.
I think this is trying to model the Binance model potentially
trying to incentivize people model, potentially trying to,
you know, incentivize people to lock up their hype.
One of the interesting comments from moon overlord, prominent crypto Twitter,
uh, trader was the initial benefit of staking tears is reduced trading fees.
Okay.
Jeff insinuating that there should be more to come.
I think, uh, because of that point
number four, which is hype will have more utility for users. Any thoughts on your side here on
this news coming out of hype and any of the benefits that they've described?
Makes a lot of sense to have that going makes a lot of sense to look at the existing trading volume,
see how much hype the whales are holding and kind of
try to play around with those fear tees. I think if you look at the staking tiers and at the max
tier, the difference between like the highest and the second highest tier, second highest being
coming in at a hundred thousand hype, the highest coming at 500,000 hype, just quite a lot of money
to jump from a 30 to a 40% discount.
But it does make sense to have it so high because otherwise everyone would
basically fill up the tier that they, that suits them best. It makes just sense from an equilibrium standpoint to optimize for reducing
their fees and keeping a hype exposure that they're like happy with.
But having this upwards potential
for future growth of the platform, for getting people in where it makes sense to put in an
additional 400,000 hype and an additional, what is it, $5 million at $13.
So wherever hype is trading right now, just get 10% more discount.
You need to have insane trading one to do that. But kind of inspires you to think about the potential growth trajectory of the platform.
So it's, it makes a lot of sense to structure it like that.
And I'm pretty curious to see what those future benefits will be other than, you
know, staking hype to get more hype, have yield on that. Probably more stuff to do in connection with the EVM that they are building, but smart system,
nothing surprising Jeff keeps delivering.
Yeah, I think it was the logical next step, right? So we'll see how that goes. Obviously,
hype being the leader in this new on-chain per perhaps platform that's trying to be the on
chain by Nance I think there's gonna be a lot of competitors coming I think we're familiar
with some already I posted earlier today if you're looking to back your eligibility for
another airdrop I posted earlier today on my personal account that definitive are trying to get some of
hype users over if you did 100k of cumulative volume over the last few months, you should
be eligible for their drop which is going to come soon they've built a similar type
of product. And I think there's going to be more, there's going to be more people have
seen how high how successful hype have been. And so they want to get in on the action.
Okay, that's that. I think we will just quick shout out to overarch in the YouTube comments.
We've got some interesting information. Oh, wasabi we're talking about USDC yields was
I'll be of 10% above average on USDC at the moment. That's not bad. That's pretty good
actually compared to a lot of other reputable places where USDC at the moment. That's not bad. That's pretty good actually compared to a lot of other
reputable places where USDC yields gone quite far down
when you're lending to around the 4% region, I think.
So a good shout out there.
Before we get into the main stuff today,
Ledger was just gonna take a look at our mode segment.
They've been building some really cool prediction stuff
going on.
Won't you let it rip, what's going on here?
Yeah, absolutely.
Pretty excited about this one, to be honest.
Mode has developed a unique model to attempt to forecast the price of BTC.
And so far the accuracy of that seems pretty promising.
What the model does is it's on the one hand, leveraging the synth subnet on
BitTensor and it's synthetic price data to allow agents and LLMs
to create forecasts and use probabilistic reasoning. The reason why you want to use
synthetic data is just because you can use even more data than quote unquote exists in the real
world. That's something that car manufacturers like Tesla also do because you have way more
more data in simulated worlds to improve the accuracy whatever model you're building.
data in simulated worlds to improve the accuracy whatever model you're building.
And the model that mode is building is based on so-called Monte Carlo simulations.
By definition, that's a mathematical technique that is simulating the range of possible outcomes
for an uncertain event.
In this case, that is the price of Bitcoin and we are sharing this on screen as well.
A post by James Ross, the founder of Moat which is explaining pretty well what is
going on there. So you can see it on screen that there is a top graph that represents the top minus
Monte Carlo simulations of the price actions over the next 24 hours and the histogram below is showing
the probability at the selected time period that the price will be in a certain range. So if we
take a look at a more recent example, James used this model to analyze the chance
of the hyper liquid whale with the 500 million BTC short, which we talked about on the show
a couple of days ago, and the question whether that whale will be liquidated or not.
And once the prominent trader CBP started to work on getting the hyper liquid whale liquidated
and started to post about that, you can also see that in the BTC Synth model, that chance
that the whale will be liquidated increased to a 32% chance of liquidation was 17% the
day before.
And looking at that chart, the percentage is the cumulative probability of all paths above the red dotted
line. It's a bit hard to see, I think, on the chart, but we're going to post the link in the
comments, which then forecasted a BTC price above $85,540, which is exactly that price where the
trader would have come liquidated. However, that also means that the majority of price paths, 68%
did not predict the liquidation.
That's also how the story in the end played out.
The hyper liquid whale did not get liquidated on his short.
He did close it with $9 million in profit as BTC went even lower before it obviously
started to recover up to the level that it reached today.
And personally, I'm pretty excited to play around with this forecasting model once it's
live in public access, mainly for the reason that I excited to play around with this forecasting model once it's live in public access,
mainly for the reason that I used to play around with Monte Carlo simulations for my own master thesis.
So I'm curious to see them in action with the BTC price models and definitely going to report back on that as part of our partnership with mode.
Yeah, this is super interesting. Really, really interesting. As you said, I've maybe I'm newer to the this mathematical
modeling. But these charts look really cool. And I think it's
important or the thing that I've developed most in in this
space as an investor or trader or some combination of the two
is thinking in terms of probabilities. Thinking in terms
of probabilities is probably one of the best
advancements that I've made.
And I think any modeling that is encouraging you to think in terms of probabilities, rather than just is the price going up?
Is it going down is super helpful.
So I'm excited to explore that as well.
As you said, as we partner with mode and kind of see how they continue to build out that
product.
So that's that.
Let's get into the main headline today then, Ledge.
We obviously had the FOMC meeting yesterday, which actually I saw a bit of a split on the
timeline, to be honest.
I saw some people interpret it negatively.
I saw some people think it was super positive.
The market obviously responded pretty well.
Tell us what we need to know first and foremost, and then how did you interpret it?
Yeah.
Main news is market responded positively.
BTC is holding pretty, pretty well above the $85,000 mark.
However, there's a bit of both positive and negative ways to read the FOMC meeting yesterday.
We bring up this article on screen.
So what has happened is exactly the expected outcome.
There wasn't any change in interest rates.
But what has also happened is that J-PAL once more confirmed we are still on track to have rate cuts towards
the end of the year to reach that target rate below 4%, which means we will have to cut
rates by 50 bips by half a percent.
And the market is still thinking as a result of that, that we'll see those two rate cuts
of 25 bips each towards the end of the year.
However, Paul also said that he's not going to be in any hurry to move on rate cuts.
So it seems like we are on a bit of a slower trajectory, but nothing that is specifically
negative has come out yesterday that would have surprised the market.
What he also did, Jay Paul, was addressing the impact of tariffs on inflation and making the pretty honest point that it's actually pretty hard and difficult to assess how it exactly will affect inflation. There's still obviously fears of inflation going up again, but that is
in quite a stark contrast to the commentary on X where it seems that everyone has obviously
become an expert on tariffs and is very, very easily able to connect the lines and say this
is exactly what's going to happen. But typically, you know, the Fed taking a bit more of a careful
stance there. In terms of some more negative news is that we've seen the projection for 2025 GDP growth
being revised downwards to 1.7% from what was 2.1%
in December, unemployment forecast up a bit,
1.4 from 4.3% and also PC inflation up 2.7% from 2.5%.
So it's a bit of a cautious tone coming out from the Fed, but again, I think the mainly positive thing as a result of that is that we are still having that
target of 50 basis points of rate cuts in 2025. Just to have a bit more color of what is also
going on, one of the things you pointed out
in the snapshot, it is exactly Donald Trump giving the video address at the BlockWorks
Digital Asset Summit, which was announced a bit later than the FOMC and that probably
also had supported the price action a bit.
And then another stat that I wanted to check in with again is something we took a look
at at the beginning of the week when we looked a bit at the overall market and at the recession fears, which on Polymarket
had peaked at 44% only five days ago, so on the weekend, and that number is down significantly.
It's down at 34%.
One of the comments in Polymarket was actually pretty accurate saying, so J-PAL says there's a 1-4%
chance of recession.
Major US banks see a 20-25% chance of recession.
Meanwhile, Polymarket deans think it's 38%.
So there's definitely a bit of a more aggressive pricing or more cautious stance, at least
for the Polymarket bets.
I think the market has a size of $830,000 towards the recession fears, which makes it
kind of interesting to think through what is actually going on because you have this
more cautious standpoint from the Fed.
You have, and I would say polymarket is still a platform that's more used by crypto native
people who have this say higher increased fear still a platform that's more used by crypto native people who
have this say high or increased fear of a recession potentially coming, yet BTC is reacting
positively.
And I've seen a couple of people painting that picture on the timeline again, that if
we're heading into recession, actually BTC is the asset to hold.
That is something you want to buy.
And then that again, if you look at the gold price, uh, gold also had reached an all-time high going above a 3k per ounce yesterday for the first time.
So it does seem that both the more traditional market is liking gold a lot.
And it also does seem that as a result of the FOMC meeting, we have seen a pretty
significant price movement, I would say, against the total volatility of the market that we've seen
over the last couple of weeks to buy more Bitcoin. I'm glad you brought up gold because that's
something which has just continued to rip, right?
Gold is through its all time high. I think you've got the chart there.
Where are we at on gold now, Lodz?
$3,030 per finance.
And that is all time high?
Mm hmm.
More or less.
What are you thinking in terms of the connection between gold and Bitcoin? All obviously one being described as digital
gold. rarely ever actually operating like that in the
market. Do you think the time where that starts to happen is
getting closer? Do you think that ever happens? Or is Bitcoin going to track Tesla and other growth stocks moving forward?
I think that is very hard to answer because there's so many things going on at the same time.
Right.
And we're trying often to reduce like a multi-dimensional model to like one single thing.
Yes, there's good reasons why gold
and BTC are moving hand in hand now, which is obviously the recession fears the instability
that's going on. Then you have the whole set of things that you hear from Trump's environment,
from the family, from people close to him that the goal is still to buy as much BTC as they can. Then
you have those regulatory news going on. You have apparently a big announcement coming tonight at the video address.
So there's many, many reasons that, you know, make sense for BTC to go up in
price and some of which are also positive news for the gold price, but
others don't affect gold at all.
Okay.
I think that's's it's interesting. I think yeah, as
you say, I think we've moved into a market where we just
hinted we're completely hooked on the president, it's a
president's market, just however he decides to behave, at least
that's how the market is going to react. Obviously, if you were
to abstract them away, there would be a market without him saying
the things he's saying.
But at least in terms of reactions, we've got like a really knee-jerk market at the moment.
Maybe that's how I'd describe it.
A knee-jerk market at the moment.
And that's the kind of way we're operating.
And my response to that has largely been to not do knee-jerk stuff.
Just have a nibble at the things which I think are decent long term and if we go lower, we
go lower. I think that's my kind of reading of the situation at the moment. But I appreciate
your analysis because there's definitely a bit of back and
forth on whether that was positive. I know the markets
responded well, just want to articulate the opposite side for
people in case they're wondering, well, the markets are
up. Why people even saying anything negative. This was Quinn
Thompson, who appears on the forward guidance podcast. He
said the bottom line is this is hawkish. Number one, inflation
expectations are higher,
because they spoke about inflation. Number two, growth labor market expectations are worse.
And number three, the number of participants expecting one or fewer cuts in 2025 from four
to eight participants expecting three or more cuts in 2025, when from five to two. So people are
definitely interpreting it differently. Just wanted to put
that out there so people can get a sense of like the specific
reasons why people might be taking an alternative view.
Market seeming okay at the moment, as you just described,
maybe we'll leave it there unless you've got anything else, Ledge.
Yeah, one final thing maybe is the sentiment to take a quick look at the fear and greed
index, which seems to be out of the fear zone.
We did breach the yearly low extreme fear just nine days ago on March 11th.
And now we have been trending upwards.
We had 31 for the fear and greed index.
So we are only nine points away from leaving the fear stage
and going back to neutral.
The last time we've been at neutral was
towards the end of February.
So it seems at least from the overall market sentiment
that the reading of the FOMC meeting
and the news of the last days
has been a rather positive one.
Okay, interesting. Good additional bits of data hope that
variety of data was helpful. In some way, let's keep moving into
the next headline talking about a president's market. This is
more presidential, adjacent to presidential activity. This is
the news that a SPAC, a special purpose acquisition company closely linked to Trump
media and tech is seeking to raise $179 million to fund his acquisition of a company in the
crypto and blockchain data security or dual use technology sectors.
This is important because it is further emphasizing the deeper intertwining of crypto and the Trump family,
business, a few other things here happening in the backdrop, which I think is important.
The administration is going ahead at tech speed with the strategic Bitcoin reserve and exploring
ways to add it to the budget in a neutral way. You've got the administration ending many of the
SEC legal battles against crypto companies, showing a much clearer path for crypto companies towards compliance and success in the US.
You're also getting much more crypto M&A. So this is clearly demonstrating appetite for crypto M&A.
Linked to this today in the snapshot reported that Kraken is close to buying futures platform, Ninja Trader for 1.5 billion. Um, this is now appetite being expressed from Trump's companies.
They also want to participate in this M&A.
This is an industry that they, I guess, want to bet on moving forward.
Um, and so, yeah, it's another example of Trump family business, deepening
their business interests to the industry.
Obviously had world Liberty fi already, which announced $550 million worth of token sales
just a few days ago to further DeFi.
So I think people will still have more questions
on like this Trump family business involvement.
I know for certain the World Liberty Fi stuff
has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.
They don't like how some of those sales have been conducted or how
they've been allegedly conducted.
Either way, I think at least one of the big takeaways still would be.
Crypto M&A is going to come.
It's like all of these companies that have been building for whatever
period of time and might have been looked at as not possible to touch
because they're in the business of crypto.
I think if we haven't already got that signal already,
which we should have done
because this M&A has already started,
then this is just an additional signal
that that's gonna be more to come.
And so crypto businesses will start to look increasingly attractive as we move
forward under this administration.
With the caveat being, I hope that it is done in a compliant, proper, above board
way, because you don't want crypto to be such a political football that we swing so aggressively and confidently to the side of being pro crypto that it alienates so many people makes loads of people think it's a scam at the same time.
And therefore, when the next administration comes in, they want to try to undo some of the excesses. So I think sometimes it's a bit of a pendulum.
You hope that as you make a move,
you take like responsible strides
rather than swinging so aggressively
that the other side are gonna have to swing aggressively back.
So that'd be my one caveat
and the kind of thing that I'm hoping
gets done in a responsible way.
Ledge, curious for your thoughts here.
What are your thoughts on this kind of crypto M and A and maybe
specifically Trump's the Trump family business interests moving in that direction too.
Okay.
A couple of thoughts on that.
So a, I very much agree with exactly what you said, the general direction,
getting more exposed to that, that we get quite a lot of signals as to where
the Trump family is headed and as to where the regulatory landscape is headed
with that, which is all very, very positive per se.
I still am very curious, that's the second thought, to see what the end game of that, call it crypto empire, that the Trump family is building is.
And the only thing that specifically rubs me the wrong way about this SPAC is that it's not incorporated in
the US.
It's actually set up in the Cayman Islands.
Yeah, it's Cayman.
So I'm like, this would have been such a good signal to say, look, we're going to do crypto
M&As.
We are going to do this strong, strong focus on digital assets for US companies, but we're also going to invest from inside the United States because we are shaping the landscape, the regulatory landscape to, well, for that to make sense from both a legal but also financial standpoint.
So that's the only thing that I don't like about that, that it's being set up in the Cayman Islands. Yeah, I think I think that's fair. Maybe just a little bit of
speculation as we draw towards the conclusion of the show
today, we've got five minutes left, rather than get into the
next headline, which we can do if you want. But just wondering,
do you have any thoughts as to what direction this, I mean, to the extent that
we're focusing on the president, because he keeps coming out with seems to be like a new event each
week, which is kind of capturing crypto attention. But obviously, yesterday said he's going to be
speaking in New York today. Any sense of what that could be about? What are your thoughts in that direction?
If any at all, like do you think it's something we should be paying much attention to?
I think we can't ignore it because we just don't know what is going to be announced. So
for that reason, yes, we have to pay attention to it. I have no idea which way this is going to go.
There's been a couple of rumors, but they didn't seem very substantiated on the timeline.
What I do think, however, is if you take a couple of steps back and you see the Trump
real estate and hotel empire that has been built over the last decades, that it seems just from the intensity
of exposure that the Trump family is getting, that this is becoming basically Trump empire 2.0.
So setting sort of the generational foundation to transition the family's interest from more of the real estate side into the digital asset side.
And that is a pretty big move to make at that scale because it's way more than buying Bitcoin,
buying ETH and then, you know, seeing the price go up as you shape the regulatory landscape.
It's significantly, significantly different from that if you have things like world liberty finance, like this SPAC that is
being set up, like so many other things that the family has been doing.
So to me, it seems like that is from a wealth management perspective.
If you think about like the entire Trump family, Trump dynasty, a complete strategic shift to say our next
big focus is going to be digital assets. So this is why we want
to have exposure across the board.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, I doubt they're moving out
of I don't think you were suggesting this, but I guess
they've got a very strong hold on the real estate business. I guess
they understand that super well. Yeah, this clearly an attempt to
enter into in a hugely significant way. This new frontier
of digital real estate in some respects. Okay. Interesting
stuff. Guys, I think maybe we can call it there for today. Maybe the final point being
this raise of the, what was the other one, the Kraken one, the Kraken piece of news I thought was
buying Ninja Traders. What is it? The PURPS, the futures platform for 1.5 billion US dollars?
Yeah, I think that that'd be my final parting thought. I just think in line with everything
we've just said, we've said it over and over again on the show, the increasing, the increasing
nature of institutional and corporate news, the increased M&A activity that's going to come to
crypto, I think is going to be significant. And one interesting point, which we said yesterday for the first time in one of
the raises that we reported on yesterday, I think it was for one that was, I
think it was the cross mint raise when in the interview with the founder, they
asked like, will like, you know, how are these investors going to get paid back?
And in brackets, they actually said for the first time that I've read in like a public forum, they said they
will not be receiving tokens, like it's actually for equity. And you know, as someone who's
been investing in this space, and I know as well, you know, a relatively immature to that
game, like we've been doing for maybe a bit more than a year or so. But like, sometimes you get equity in a company, sometimes you get tokens. Well, you always get
tokens when you're doing crypto investing, because that's where you get your exit as an investor.
But sometimes there's equity involved. Sometimes it's not, to be honest, I don't know how many
people are like super keen to get the equity because that's not the way that you get the exit.
That's not where your funds come from
when you get returned something because the market you get your exit via the liquid token market.
And I just wonder whether this is something I've been thinking about. I wonder whether this is an
opportunity for proper companies to have their equity values at a much better rate and like
respected much more rather than this complete focus on tokens, because if the
M&A environment improves, it means that equity can become meaningful again.
So long as you're running an actual proper company.
And so when you're investing in these teams, having the equity can mean much
more because they might be
operating in an environment where someone might come along and say, yes, I want to buy your
company specifically because you're doing an awesome job. And, you know, there's no regulatory
hurdles anymore. And so you become significantly more valuable. So for the people who have even
got stakes in equity in these companies, I think you're probably already getting a bump potentially,
if you're if you're a good company, if you're operating out of the States,
your equity is probably worth more than it was before.
I mean, arguably maybe it wasn't worth a lot before because that's not how
people get their money, but, um, I think there's an opportunity for that to be
worth more moving forward, uh, final conclusions that are alleged as we close
Yeah, very much agree.
Which then again is bullish on all that permissioned infrastructure that we talked about on the one hand. And on the other hand, reminds me, I always
forget the name, but you probably know it, I call it Santiago chain, the private equity, inversion,
which is exactly bullish for that very use case that you just described.
I like it. Interesting conversation today. Hope you guys enjoyed it.
As always, just a reminder, we do this every single day, Monday to Friday at 7 a.m. Eastern
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And for one hour, we do it where live on X, X video, YouTube, Apple and Spotify podcasts
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