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BTC could threaten the Dollar Reserve!
Recorded: April 1, 2025 Duration: 0:57:43Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto market saw significant developments, including the successful launch of the GUNS token on Binance with altered investor terms, Circle's preparation for an IPO, and strategic investments by the Trump family in Bitcoin mining. BlackRock's CEO highlighted blockchain's potential to revolutionize finance through tokenization, while Brian Armstrong advocated for stablecoin legislation to allow interest earnings, promoting financial inclusion and innovation.
Full Transcription
good morning everyone welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything
to do with the modern market that is the crypto market the nft market and any other market where
there might be some or a lot of money to make on the internet loaded up discussion today we are
talking blackrock ceo larry fink's annual chairman letter where he's talking about bitcoin as a
reserve asset might compare and contrast that with Howard Lutnick's comments recently.
We've got Brian Armstrong publishing an article on why US stablecoin legislation
should allow consumers to earn interest on stablecoins,
which is obviously not happening at the moment.
And we've got the GUNS token, inverted commas,
successfully launching on Binance around a billion dollars.
It's dipping now, but some pretty big news coming out about the way certain investors
were treated.
We'll discuss all of that and more during today's show, along with a bunch of conversation
around the general market rotations and where liquidity is going.
I've got legendary and right with me on today's show.
We are ready to get into it.
Just a reminder, friends, that nothing that we say here is financial advice. advice this market is very very risky and we don't know anything for certain so please perceive the
caution and exercise your own judgment with that out of the way it's tuesday it's the first of
april ryan how are things on your side gmgm guys uh so good to be here. Always good to see your faces. It's been very good, actually.
You know, I know not to take away from like people obviously having a hard time because
obviously the markets are not doing the best. But to be honest, this is like the best life
balance I've had in a very long time. And I'm like low-key enjoying it a lot more than I thought I
would. I feel like I'm prepared a lot more. I'm stabled up a lot more than I thought I would I feel like I'm prepared
a lot more I'm stabled up a lot more so it's coming from a place of like solace and yeah like
you are here you're posting like gym selfies uh I am like balancing like social life work just
doing personal stuff so it's been good a lot of like cool um institutional news coming out I think
it's kind of cool to see our industry being just like legitimized during EVE I had a lot of like cool um institutional news coming out i think it's kind of cool to see our industry
being just like legitimized during eve i had a lot of conversation with like a lot of like older
people in like with like a very serious overtone on crypto which is kind of nice to see it wasn't
like a backhand comment of like oh so you're working in like crypto and stuff so i think that's been kind of good yeah it's uh a bunch of uh
you know obviously we're not in the same type of market we were in january right so people have
obviously stepped away a little reorganizing a bunch of things to to you know attack maybe some
other things that they're prioritizing just checking in on the audio on spaces. Are we all good there?
Legendary?
Yes.
We seem to be all good now.
Funky just confirmed that.
And my nightmare came true.
So what had happened is I am muted on the Rodecaster.
My setup is basically I have the screens in front of me to the red side.
There's the Rodecaster.
And if I mute the mic there, I see a red button.
And it was red all the time.
So I was muted on there.
But for some reason, the mute didn't work.
And I was singing and humming along parts of the intro melody,
which apparently was heard in the audience.
And I was so irritated because I saw people laughing
or sending the lol emojis all the time.
I had no idea what's going on
but it also had impacted the audio in the beginning um that seems to work now but yeah
people could hear me sing and hum along for a bit which is not great i think it's pretty good
it's a new sponsored segment now we can have new sponsored segments where legendary
sings or hums it's like a new direction i mean to be honest we can just cut we own the audio right we bought the rights to the
audio and you know you're just putting your original take on top of it you know we can just
use that as the new audio if anything in fact we could get rid of the actual underlying music just
use the the humming as the oh absolutely no way Oxy also in the YouTube comments saying, we heard Legendary do a lot of things.
Oh, okay.
Well, cut the audio and then let's figure out what we heard.
Right.
We've got to get into all kinds of other stuff
because we've got a lot of takes to give
on what's going on in the market today.
Let's get you up to speed ASAP
because the market is actually is
doing okay today a little bit of green how about that we've got bitcoin up a couple of percent
starting with the majors up to 84k we've got eth up almost four percent to 1.8k um we've got XRP up 3% to $2.14. Solana up 3% to $127.
On the meme coin side of things,
again, Barccoin absolutely ripping up 30% to 50 cents.
Pretty aggressive price action there.
Moving down the board here,
we've got Doge up 4%, Pepe up 7%,
Trump's flat, Bonk's up 6%, SPX, MirageCoin's up 27%, Whiff is flat, Pengu's actually down 6%
on a day where the rest of the meme board is mostly green. I'm trying to find some, any other ones that might be of note. AI16Z is up 15%.
Mog is up 4%. So a lot of green, a lot of green across the board on the meme coin side,
Fartcoin leading as usual, it seems to be at the moment. Getting into the headlines themselves,
we have, let me just find it here.'ve got the black rock ceo larry fink
saying in his annual chairman's letter the us doesn't get its debt under control
if deficits keep ballooning america risk losing that position to digital assets like bitcoin
we'll be diving into a bit more of the depths of that letter a little bit later had some interesting
points to note we had brian armstrong publishing an article on why US stablecoin legislation
should allow consumers to earn interest on stablecoins.
Rahim's going to be sharing his thoughts there.
And then finally, the GUNS token successfully launched
on Binance around a billion dollars,
but did so by changing investor terms at the last moment.
They did not get the unlock they were expecting.
And so we'll be discussing both the token launch and some of those investor deals going on at the moment at the same time.
Some notable price action got the guns token coming out at a billion, but it's dropped,
I think 30% now to around 70, 700 mil. The recent TG on SUI, the data storage protocol
war us is up 22% to 2.6 bill that's come out really really strongly and then as i said fartcoin is
leading the meme coin side of things up almost 20% in the last 24 hours legendary anything going on
on the nft side that we need to know yeah we did see a bit of recovery on the nft side pudgy penguins
are up a couple percent above 10 eth again 10.14 east floor for them. However, the big winner, once again, board apes, they
are moving up and up and up.
Now they're up 12% over the last
seven days, up another 6% yesterday,
and sitting at a 15 E4 now.
And the rest of the market, including
Doodles, has had a nice move up again.
But clearly, the apes
are the leading collection here.
Yeah.
Apes is doing unbelievably like what a
rhyme you've been speaking about how it's like performing much more in line with traditional
collectibles right they seem to have moved past the cycles of um speculation any thoughts on the
board ape well as a collectible in the community in general at the moment? Yeah, I think at this point,
their floor, I would say, is pretty organic.
Anyone who's buying it,
they're not buying it for a short-term investment.
There's no speculative news of a token or a launch.
And I believe that long-term,
a lot of assets that actually have some credible backstory to it
will fall in the same category.
So yeah, they're definitely doing
super well have been super stable for the last four months actually like it uh i think that's
pretty fair i would agree with you completely um getting into the rest of the roundup here
with everything else happening we had the u.s treasury announced it's pretty interesting
they'll be disclosing their bitcoin holdings on April the 5th after an audit. Remember, we spoke about how basically the government doesn't know how much Bitcoin it has. And they've
said that they've done the, they're doing the audit. And so in a few days time towards the end
of this week, they'll be announcing how much Bitcoin they actually hold. That'll be pretty
interesting to see. Eric Trump and Don Jr. involved in investment into American Bitcoin
mining company. The Trump family conglomerate
continues to invest in crypto and position itself very, very well to take advantage of the positive
regulations for the industry. Circle the issue of USDC reportedly preparing public filing for its IPO
in April. That will be very, very interesting to watch. We always talk about how to get exposure
to stablecoins, the best business in the world. That will be a potential how to get exposure to stable coins the best business in the world
that will be a potential way to get exposure see where that how that goes kaito announced
partnership with noise to facilitate mindshare trading this is an app on mega eth which is still
in testnet but they're allowing people to trade mindshare, which might be an interesting alternative
to meme coin trading, given that so much of that is just trading attention too.
That'll be interesting to see.
Strategy acquired another 22,000 Bitcoin for $1.92 billion at $86K.
That sounds high, but I copied and pasted that from the official announcement.
So that is how much they bought uh recently uh ambient raised
7.2 million dollars from a16z delphi digital and amber group to to create a replacement for bitcoin
that was kind of interesting piece of news backed by some big names the memes by 6529 on the nft
side kick off season 11 today with arsenic uh that's like a very popular nft collection that's been running
multiple multiple seasons now always minting at around 0.06529 eth um got like some very
big super fans in that community got a cat pre-sale remember people may not even know this
if they went around in 2021 og n NFT collection was once very, very popular.
Now, not so much.
It appears the pre-sale, which aimed to raise at $1 million, raised just 3.66 ETH.
That was not very successful, but also in the pre-sale side of things,
Doodles co-founders shared a new pre-sale for Project Zero Two,
appears to be a utility token for a game.
This is not by Burnt Toast, who is the current CEO of Doodles,
who is one of the co-founders.
It's by the other two co-founders who,
I don't know if they're still deeply involved with Doodles,
but their bios on Twitter,
it still says they're co-founders in the present.
So interesting that they're launching that as dude is meant to be coming
out at some point soon as well. Right. So that's interesting to see that that's the
reality roundup to get you up to speak with everything else in the space. What is catching
your attention before we get into the main stuff that legendary first maybe?
Yes, sir. Definitely the circle news as we have a bit more info on that than I want to
kind of dig a bit deeper into that.
So Circle has reportedly, and this is coming from a Coindesk article,
hired JP Morgan and Citi to lead that IPO to be the underwriters of that.
They do plan to be ready to file the prospectus late April, which would mean that the IPO could be at some point before the end of June. Very interesting to see the valuation
because I feel like this is a good reality check to see a company like Circle is quote
unquote, only targeting a valuation between four and five bill, which when I first read
that article seemed shockingly low. But that reminded me very much how inflated our views and valuations have been in crypto.
And I was like, oh, are they missing a zero?
I double checked with another article and was like, no, no, this is actually the valuation.
It doesn't make sense.
And it seems weird in the world where we have so many tokens coming out of the bill plus that clearly shouldn't have that valuation.
out at a bill plus that clearly shouldn't have that valuation.
Yeah, it's like if the gun token comes out at one bill, you'd think that circle should be
more than four times the valuation of a shooting game on avalanche, right? That's what your
instinct would be, perhaps. That is correct, yeah. Okay, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that's very, very interesting
to see where that comes out.
Just curious, like, is that something, you know,
we talk about stablecoins all the time, Legendary.
Is that something you'd want to get exposure to,
given that, or is there too much uncertainty
in the stablecoin business now?
I know that Tether obviously is the big player
by a huge amount, right?
I think the market cap for Tether obviously is the big player by a huge amount, right?
I think the market cap for Tether is at least like 10x what Circle has.
I'm pretty sure.
I can't remember the numbers on DeFi Llama.
Maybe you can see now, but pretty sure it's at least 10x what Circle has.
And I guess you've got this uncertainty as to whether all of these banks are going to come in with stable coins.
It's going to feed into Rahim's headline a little bit later.
Would you be interested in a bit of Circle stock, Kladjindri?
Yeah.
So first of all, Tether market cap is at 58 bill.
Circle is at 9.5 bill according to CoinMarketCap.
Still a big discrepancy.
I do agree with that. But if you look at it from that perspective that you have this basically market cap reported,
and then the companies quote unquote, like half the valuation of that, it makes sense. And if you
look at private secondary markets, this is where Circle has been trading it. So people have on private markets
been buying exposure to the company for evaluation or ad evaluation of
$5 billion. So from that perspective, I would be pretty intrigued to do that.
And then again, if you extrapolate and look at the numbers on DeFi Llama, where in DeFi Llama you obviously have all of the networks, not only mainnet, you can still see that Tether has a market cap of 144
billion and USDC has a market cap of 60 billion. So it's basically a 2.5x or 2.3x between the two
of them. So I'd definitely be interested to get a piece of the action
depending on how high it opens.
Interesting.
I think I'd want to see...
I think you're probably right.
I kind of want to see...
Well, I want to see what Rahim says about this stablecoin stuff
that Armstrong's been talking about a little bit later.
We'll be doing that second half of the show. And I also want to see where this stable coin stuff that Armstrong's been talking about a little bit later. We'll be doing that second half of the show.
And I also want to see where this stable coin regulation comes out because if like,
okay, I'll hold it back.
I'll hold it back.
Because I've got some commentary on what Rahim's going to say a bit later.
Rahim, before we get into that main stuff, which I was just about to do, anything else
catching your attention in the roundup?
Yeah, because we have like a lot of institutional conversation later i'll probably like touch on the doodle news i just think it's
like so fascinating in our space that we kind of just like stick the previous project or launch
to the founder and even if they launch something like we always call them oh the co-founder of
doodles like poopy at least like publicly to, like to public knowledge, he's kind of like,
like he's not involved like operationally in the business, things like that.
And this isn't like his first venture either.
Like he was, he was part of like Dapper Labs that did CryptoKitties.
And like, if you ever have a chance to like to speak to him, he was one of the people
who ended up putting CryptoKitties
in galleries in 2018. I'm talking about galleries and stuff. He mentioned a particular gallery,
I believe, in Germany somewhere. So I just think it's just fascinating that in the regular fintech
world or the tech world, it would be like Elon Musk starts SpaceX or Elon Musk starts Neuralink or whatever.
But in our space, it's like ex-Doodle founder.
And it's almost like, it's just like so funny
to see that that badge kind of like sticks with you.
Like no matter what happens, it'll be like,
oh, the modern market people are like launching stable coins
or X, Y, Z.
So I just find that fascinating how that works in our space.
It's like your community cannot let you do anything else. It's like once you're the co-founder of an NFT community, it's like, what do you mean
that you're going to be focusing your attention in any way on anywhere else, apart from the
floor price for anything more than five minutes, you must remain focused on this very, very
specific, uh, NFT collection forever.
Now.
Um, I take your point.
Uh, what about the idea though, Ryan, that, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the on this very, very specific NFT collection forever now.
I take your point.
What about the idea though, Rahim,
that who knows, we have none of the details here.
It's obviously a pre-sale.
I'm not sure how much it's raised at the moment,
but what about the idea that the Dude Token is coming out pretty soon?
Like, I think doing one raise whilst there's another raise as you say
maybe they're not super involved with one and so in their minds it's like well okay these two things
are two separate things should we still think there's a bit of a fractionalizing liquidity a
little bit there right potentially yeah for sure i definitely think the timing of it is not the best
but it's also i'm like
i feel like markets will decide like you know we all can have like whatever opinion and stuff
a couple of months later a couple of weeks later we just get like a better optics of it like how
the market reacted and i think that no matter what my belief is or your belief is objectively
i guess we'll find out if it was bullish or bearish yeah fair enough um okay well the thing that i wanted to
just touch on briefly as well was just the price action of some of these big gainers and losers so
what do we think of like is far coin always a leading indicator of stuff to come what why is
far coin so volatile all of the time right you've you used to well i
don't know if you still are but you were definitely a meme coin culture coin trader um or collector
or however you want to phrase it what's your thoughts on fartcoin and its exceptional quality
on days when we're up it's most and then yes there are days when it's
very far down too but to be honest maybe not as much as anything else either
what are your thoughts on this this coin yeah i think it's fascinating because it's the one
of the only coins that i've been like trading in size in and out and this is based on like
even like on my timeline i see like some of the people
like eb7 and a couple of people trade fortcoin in like size so like i'm it's kind of hard to gauge
on like a granular level that why is it that you have such volatility but it also ends up like
performing like what like 32 percent uh absolutely nuts i just think it has like a lot of Vela activity.
I feel like for the longest time,
Bonk was like the main character for like Solana.
And then it was Whiff.
And then like kind of like all that,
like MemeCoin optics went south of bed,
the Anemo MemeCoin,
the Ansem optics kind of like changed for Whiff and stuff.
So I feel like Fartcoins become like the coin,
like the beta play for like Solana.
And I remember this was exactly what Pepe was like last February.
There was a point where like Pepe was like outperforming ETH by ridiculous. And on my portfolio app, I actually track everything in ETH.
So I was actually happy that ETH was down and Pepe was going up
because I was stacking ETH.
And suddenly when ETH started going up,
my ETH amount went down in like Pepe.
And I was like, ah, I actually don't want this. So yeah, I feel like it's a massive beat up play
at the moment. I just, I don't know what to make of it because I feel like the timing of the timing
of this, I'm just not sure about the timing of it. Like in what circumstances would this be the thing to move aggressively back up when it's
already been up and come back down?
Because I think one of the strongest, one of the things I'm kind of standing on is the
idea that the things that have moved really hard and fast before will almost certainly not come back.
Like, I don't think a lot of that stuff is coming back.
You had your time with some of the meme coins.
You had your time with some of the AI stuff.
Maybe there's some actual quality stuff that was built, maybe more on the infra side or the apps.
And maybe those can.
But in terms of the actual meme stuff
personally i think there's way too many and i don't think they're going to come back but farcoin just keeps i'm wondering if it's like come you know technically this was only in just
looking at the max chart here this came out in november so i would have thought it's like had
its time but it just won't die i mean i know none of them
have technically died completely but they it just keeps being stronger than everything else
um do you have a view there right yeah i think it's i mean like you're spot on i've been like
thinking about this as well i've been like entering and exiting it's hard to gauge all of this uh it's
one of those things like you know one all of a
sudden one nft project does better like long term one d5 product does well long term one meme kind
of so at some point like you know like there's no you can't like really create like a massive pieces
on memes and stuff so i don't really have one not thinking it's not that deep not thinking too deeply on it then just respect the charge
respect the pump sir respect the bump respecting okay fine we'll we'll respect it um we'll get
into maybe some more respectable news now as well away from fartcoin that's how we do it on the show
we go from fartcoin to blackrock ceo larry fink it's annual chairman letter perfect adjacent pieces of news so let's get into this one this
is the news that yesterday Larry Fink CEO of BlackRock dropped his annual letter to investors
with some big thoughts on Bitcoin as a reserve asset and tokenization the first thing he said
was that he warned that if the U S doesn't control its debt,
the dollar could lose its reserve currency status to assets like Bitcoin,
BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF, IBIT launched in 2024.
It's already been a monster hit over $50 billion in assets under management in less than a year,
making it the biggest ETF launch ever.
He went on to say, and I thought this was interesting to be clear.
I'm obviously not anti-digital assets, but two things can be true at the same time.
Decentralized finance is an extraordinary innovation.
It makes markets faster, cheaper and more transparent.
Yet that same innovation could undermine America's economic advantage.
Investors begin seeing Bitcoin as a safer bet than the dollar.
The reason why I thought that comment was interesting was because I've watched various
interviews with Howard Lutnick, the Secretary for Commerce. And when he speaks about Bitcoin,
he talks very specifically saying, don't compare it with the dollar. Too many invested interests
in the dollar. Bitcoin is a commodity. Talk about
it as a commodity. A commodity is not threatening to the dollar. You want people to not be threatened
as you're trying to push this new asset on them. Whereas it sounds like Larry Fink is
kind of like whether you, no matter how you slice it, no matter how you frame it, no matter how you define it, Bitcoin will inevitably
become a competitor to the dollar if the US can't get their house in order in certain ways.
So that's what I'm thinking from that perspective. And then the other main thing that he speaks a lot
about in the letter was on tokenization.
He said he sees blockchain revolutionizing finance.
Every stock, bond and fund could become a digital token.
It means faster trades, lower costs and fractional ownership, opening doors for more people to invest.
He calls it a shift from postal service to email for markets.
And BlackRock's already expanding.
They've got the biddle fund on ETH.
They've got it on Solana too now.
This interesting phrase in the letter, which is kind of, I guess, the vision for BlackRock
by which they live is when people can invest better, they can live better.
And they gave all kinds of interesting statistics on how the number of investors in the States
has been rising over time
and they obviously want that to continue that's good for business but i guess that's obviously
he did note that part of that success story in the in the recent uh the last couple of decades
have been with historically low interest rates which have obviously been quite helpful
um to the markets and been beneficial
for people who wanted to be investors so those are the maybe two key takeaways and maybe the the
general uh vibe of this letter um coming to you guys to get some thoughts here legendary what
are your thoughts on this um maybe maybe any general thoughts anything specifically on bitcoin versus the dollar
um what are you what are you thinking here yeah what a what a great letter like really can only
recommend to read the whole thing it has so many interesting data points in it i'm gonna gonna get
to your question in a second but two things that really stood out for me were that larry fink is talking about the 68
trillion dollar investment boom and asking the question who will own that with 25 trillion in
roads 21 trillion in energy all leading up to 2040 and also speaks about the fact from the history of
when the first stock exchange was launched and was catered more towards wealthy people
and that the world is not really set up for giving
what financial markets giving like access in a like 50 30 20 tier model that he describes
to like individual investors and like privatize everything and this is kind of where bitcoin
comes in this is kind of where tokenizing everything comes in and allows other people to get
access to investments and for all of those reasons,
and for the fact that towards the end of the article,
he mentions three,
three basically pieces of data that I found very interesting.
Going to bring them up on screen.
33% of Americans have no retirement savings.
51% this is shocking.
I'm more worried about outliving
their savings than of death itself.
And a third would also have a hard time to pay an unexpected $500 bill.
And if you take all of those data points, if you take this journey into privatizing
markets more, into tokenizing markets more, and making them more accessible to typical
retail investors and the role that Bitcoin could play
with that. Definitely agree with that view. I think it gets really interesting if you add or
layer that perspective on top of it, which is what Larry Fink did in this letter and basically
painting a picture of how a world could look like where Bitcoin wins versus dollar and what would
need to happen there.
But much appreciated deep dive.
And again, there's like so much to process in this.
I feel like we could talk about this entire letter for the rest of the show, but I'm going to pause here.
Yeah, do you know what?
That's a great point.
It's actually just an interesting read. Like sometimes you think of, I don't know, these annual letters as, I don't know, like a quick shareholder update style thing.
But it's like, no, this is going into history.
This is going to those like, it's a really genuinely interesting read.
Just to your point about like this broader perception of people and like where people
are, where people are perceiving their own wealth at the moment.
He asked this interesting question of once people start investing for retirement, the
goal, well, the goal is to make their money grow as
much as possible and they conducted a survey in january asking americans how much money they'd
need to retire comfortably and they took the average of those responses and the answer you
know how it's funny in crypto twitter there's people always joking around like this amount of
money is not enough one million is not enough 10 million is not enough like what are you meant to do with 20 million dollars so the average american says it
was just over two million dollars the average was two million dollars 89 000 to be exact more than
they were expecting but so that was how much they think that they need. And the reality is almost no one is close.
So even Gen X's, the oldest of whom will start retiring in five years are falling short.
In fact, 62% have saved less than 150,000.
So I don't know what's going on here from the perspective of, are people's perceptions
being warped maybe to some degree as well or is the
is the standard of living really has has the in order to keep up with a decent standard of living
or perceived good standard of living has that really got that much more expensive is it a little
bit of both but point is the reality that the delta between the reality for the average
American, it sounds like and where they would like to be or with how much money they would like to
have. I think that gap is, well, it's huge. It's $2 million basically. Because they haven't really,
they haven't found a way to bridge that gap at the moment for whatever reason.
So I thought that was interesting too, and it's got all kinds of further interesting statistics on that.
Rahim, what were your thoughts hearing this commentary?
Did you have any takes on the difference between Lutnik's perspective on Bitcoin,
which was treat it as a commodity.
Don't try and antagonize anyone by saying it's going to come for the dollar versus this take,
which is, guys, if you don't get your house in order, it's going to happen regardless.
So what's your thought there?
Yeah, I definitely love those takes.
There was a friend of mine once he said on a podcast we were
recording and that statement kind of stuck with me is the more subjective truths you have the
closer you get to the objective truth and I really like that idea like the more perspective that you
hear like different polarizing one I think it helps you kind of gauge what you want to like
really believe yeah I haven't had the chance to read the whole paper
stuff i skimmed through it from the way that you guys are talking about it i definitely want to
deep dive into it i like on one side we're talking about comparing bitcoin to gold
at one point we are just like talking about straight up like investing there's some of it
that'll bleed into the the stable coin segment that I'm talking about when it comes to investing.
But yeah, I definitely like this was even just by skimming through it, it was like a nice thought leader kind of a perspective I got from that paper. So I definitely think was
nice. And to your point, talking about the delta between people's perceived wealth that they need
to what they actually need, I think this kind of changed with like globalization and digitization of just like content and media
and our exposure to things and stuff.
It's like before we, you didn't know what you didn't know.
And I think that has kind of changed a lot.
So I still think if you go in like small pockets of society
in different countries and rural areas and this and that,
I still think you will find like a lot of people
that their perception of like a great life,
a happy life is actually not as crazy as for people like who live in like big
cities and stuff like such as like myself living in Dubai. So I
definitely think it's like a product of media and just
digitization of everyday things, you know?
Hmm. Yeah, I think I think that's probably fair. Got some
interesting points going through the comments.
Tom just mentioned that if you layer in the fact here that the working population is starting to shrink, a lot of money is invested via pension funds, right?
And I think already you might remember in the UK, not so long ago, there was like a pension crisis at one point in time when, you know, that interim government were doing some, were taking some strange decisions.
But the working age keeps getting pushed further and further.
The number, the birth rate is just like not keeping up in order to support the number of older people
people are living longer so like all of these things factoring in with each other i think
is strengthening someone like blackrock's argument which is like guys you've got to
invest properly here because um yeah you just got to figure this stuff out because it's it's not going to be
obvious i'm someone that's actually personally quite skeptical on pensions i don't know if
they're going to be there sufficiently in the way that maybe the previous generation were able to
rely on them because you know based on all of these trajectories the working population the
the birth rate the growing the increasing age life age of life expectancy, I think it's all
like a confluence of factors, which is making it difficult to be able to rely on those in the way
that previous generations did. So a complicated set of factors, maybe bringing it back,
depending on if you want to continue in that direction, or you want to kind of circle back
to the core crypto parts.
Spoke a little bit about the difference between Bitcoin as a competitor to the dollar versus
not.
What about this emphasis on tokenization?
I think that part is nothing new.
He's absolutely obsessed with tokenization now.
I think it's fair to say in a lot of the interviews.
Any further takes there?
Yeah, quickly sharing this chart that shows the EU top 10 economies
in the working age population and how that is projected
to significantly decrease leading into the 22nd century.
Also adding to that, I think on tokenizing everything,
as you said, yes, per se, it's nothing new.
It's also making the point that things in Europe, in the US,
take so much time to build.
Talking about infrastructure, talking about energy, he mentions that a power line, both in the US and in the EU,
to build that takes a high-voltage power line.
That is, it takes 13 years.
China can do it in a quarter of that time.
And he also says you can't democratize access to investments if stuff like that takes so much time. And he also says, you can't democratize access to investments if stuff like that takes
so much time. And one final comment, maybe because it's relevant to me, and we do have quite a few
listeners from the European Union or from Europe as well. He is surprisingly bullish on Europe,
he's making the point that he talks to a lot of policymakers. And he sees where they those
policymakers are seeing that regulatory roadblocks aren't going to remove themselves.
And mentions a very interesting stat with that as well, saying that reducing intra-EU trade barriers to the level between the U.S. states, that alone could boost productivity by nearly 7%.
That's $1.3 trillion to the economy.
That's the equivalent of creating another Ireland and Sweden.
So he says basically policymakers are realizing
that there is issues in the EU, waking up to that,
and there's massive, massive potential to unlock there,
which is quite nice to read
because I'm typically always pretty bearish on the EU,
so it's good to get a bit more of a positive take on that. And I think what, maybe one of the
reasons he's being, speaking about that, you know, historic, strong alliance between the EU and the
States is because there's a palpable, and notice this in a bunch of other
commentary, but there's palpable fear around China, I think, in this letter.
It says, China is not waiting on a couple of fronts.
They're building 100 gigawatts of nuclear, which when completed will mean they supply
half the planet's nuclear power.
And then on the production front,
they've got automakers like BYD.
They sell more electric vehicles
than any other company in the world.
Next year, they plan to add
full autonomous capabilities to their cars
at the same price as last year's models.
And they already sell EVs for just $10,000.
I didn't know that.
Which is a price that no us or european automaker
can match um so i think there's like palpable china fear in here as well and a real feeling
that like look we kind of need to get our act together if um this stuff's like slipping away when it comes to energy and production.
And so, yeah, that's that on the kind of some of the bigger topics outside of crypto.
As you said, very interesting read.
More generally, would highly recommend having a read through
to get a snapshot of how they're kind of seeing things.
Let's probably keep it moving, though.
We've got a couple of other interesting bits of news from some other prominent leaders rahim you're going to talk to us a little
bit about brian armstrong ceo of coinbase what he's up to and suggesting about stable coins
the best business in the world what's going on here so brian armstrong put out like a fantastic article on on-chain stablecoin interest.
And I thought it was very well written.
So he's basically talking about like the US legislation allowing consumers to earn interest on stablecoins.
And he makes like a couple of fantastic arguments.
So obviously, like, you know, where stablecoins like usdc they are one is to one peck to
the dollar so they buy u.s treasuries they are invested in u.s treasuries and whatever interest
they earn they keep it to themselves you guys have talked about on the show multiple times
how it's been one of the most profitable business now they're going public uh with their um companies
now what he's talking about on a couple of fronts,
he's saying that if a regular US citizen
is leaving money in their savings account,
they are earning interest as low as 0.4%.
And you have inflation.
Last year, the data he puts is about 3%.
So he's like, you straight up are losing money by leaving money in your bank account. So that one argument he makes. The second one he
talks about is people like who are like debanked. So he's talking about like a whole stack of people
who are debanked. So not only do they not have access to like a financial system, but like this
way that they can actually like grow out their wealth, have like a way more
like stable lifestyle and kind of like be able to integrate them in society. I think that was a
great point. The third point he makes is that if you look at it from like a zoomed out perspective,
that if stablecoin issuers are investing in US treasuries, that kind of like creates like this
flywheel for the US economy to grow. You have consumers who are
basically getting interest on the stable coins. So now they have way more spending power to actually
consume products every day from like, you know, like lifestyle ecosystems. So I think he makes
like some fantastic, great points how this is like a win-win situation for the entire economy.
how this is like a win-win situation for the entire economy.
Just like speaking from personal experience,
one of my most interesting conversations I had in the last year,
I came across a stack of people in Dubai,
especially from Lebanon and Turkey,
who are holding stable coins as a form of currency,
never been in Bitcoin, never been in ETH or anything.
But their whole idea is that, A, we want to never been in ETH or anything. But their whole
idea is that A, we want to hold a currency that's like kind of like their regulatory ecosystem.
Secondly, they just want something that's just not going to go low in value. Lebanon has lost
its currency value a lot. Egypt has done the same. Turkey has done the same. So there are like a whole
group of people out there who like to live on like stable coins. So this is like a great value proposition to them.
And I thought like the article is very fantastically written and it makes it sound like, yeah,
like it seems like the government would win, the consumers would win, the economy would
run great.
Like, why wouldn't we do that?
Excellent summary of the information.
Just clicking over and over again, trying to get off mute.
I guess the counter to that, it's not really a counter because I think, look, the only reason these companies like Tether and Circle have been able to make so much money is because
at every other point in history, it is not possible for you to take custody of someone's
money and not give them anything for it
like it's it's ridiculous it's a ridiculous like cheat code that's just happened if in this
particular point in time because people are so desperate to get on chain and um they're happy
to forego all interest and just because they really want to get on chain when ordinarily
obviously with the bank they have to give you some interest, right? But the point now is if you can allow people to get access to that
treasury yield of 4% or whatever, that is very, very meaningful amount of interest that can go
direct to consumers. However, it does cut out the banks. And i think one of although this is like a beautiful vision
my one question is that it you know i've tweeted this earlier today it all sounds good until you
realize this this would kill banks why would you necessarily hold your money in a bank if
you could hold these stable coins and just get automatic yield all the time.
I do think, I mean, maybe even the counter to that is, for whatever reason, there's like so
much inertia in general with the population. I think I was speaking with Oxy beforehand,
and apparently Apple already have a relatively high interest savings account, Maybe it was like 3.7% or something like that.
And the question would be, well, why didn't everyone move over?
Like if your bank is giving you 0.4%, which I think is the number that Brian Armstrong
quoted in his article, which is unbelievably low, like banks really pass on almost nothing
at the moment, unless you choose choose like you have to like take
your money out of your normal account and then put it into like a high interest savings account
like they do routinely offer those products but if you're just in your normal account the number
is super super low um and so i'm not sure why well i think i think there's there's always a
bit of inertia and people are just
busy doing other stuff and they can't necessarily be bothered to chase chase the top yield all the
time but um any any reflections there rahim on like people's ability and desire to actually
switch over is this as disruptive as we think it could be would people actually be bothered
like i i think it's awesome but does you know are people ready for, I think it's awesome. But does, you know, are people ready for
that? I think it's like an education thing, right? I think for the longest time, like I think about
myself, like, growing up, you're just like, not very aware of what the rice investment thesis
is, even from a very conservative point when you are younger. I don't know how the education system
is now. But considering like, you know, with the rise of AI, and like, I feel like getting a job or just like integrating into like a career is a lot harder.
I just think like the idea of having like, certain people, I mean, like to Larry Fink's point,
that's like the direction he's also taking, right? Like in a very different way, what he's talking
about that, okay, looking at like a different investment thesis and stuff. So I just feel like
this is, I think this is like a very philosophical question
because it's almost like a transition
of how we do things to how we want to do things.
And you obviously have a different society
that kind of takes time to kind of get there.
It's a progression, it's a transition
and that always takes time.
But like, I think like these conversations
are important to have
for us to get closer to the objective truth.
Sounds good.
I think that's fair.
Alad, you want to take the other side here?
Yeah, I don't think this is killing banks
because the big thing here is the consumer debt.
Consumer debt in the States is $18 trillion.
That's $12.6 trillion in mortgage,
$1.6 trillion in auto debt,
$1.2 trillion in credit card debt, $1.6 trillion in auto debt, 1.2 trillion in credit card debt, 1.6 trillion in student debt,
11% on average of an American's monthly income is spent on debt payments. That is a pretty,
pretty serious number. Obviously, the consumer debt is rising. It's up another 13% from 2020.
And this is where banks really do make money. And if for some reason, there becomes this
big trend of chasing yield on your cash holdings that you have, nothing is stopping banks from
basically defaulting you into that high savings rate account or having a stablecoin system in
the background. Because what DeFi or what Aave can't offer you is to say, oh, I have 50k and I want to buy a 500k real estate.
You will see that borrowing and lending is the complete opposite.
We are actually having pretty conservative LTVs with all that kind of stuff.
And you want to have a credit card company approach and ask you, hey, do you want to have another credit card?
We pre-approved you for 6k a month.
That's not going to happen in DeFi.
And I feel like this is a massive, massive thing,
the consumer spending and the debt related to that,
that is very much keeping banks alive and healthy.
Okay.
Interesting.
You mentioned the house stuff.
I'm pretty sure I read that Robinhood
wants to take their financial app in that direction.
Like, I don't know if you saw, well, we spoke about it, I think on the show, they said they're
going to be starting to do cash delivery to people.
If you need cash, you can, you can just use their app and get a driver and they will come
over and bring you cash.
But I think they're moving towards like an all financial services product, which should
ideally incorporate the biggest financial purchase that
you'll ever make in your life, which is the home, right? So I think it's an important point you make
legendary because in the end, that home is so important to so many people. And if DeFi can't
fix for that, if it can't figure out a way for you to get some maybe extra stuff to deal with
maybe one of the core whether it's a problem or whether just core desires for people um i take
your point so that's like a really really big thing for people so you know maybe it's like
fun and games in defy with whatever but like when it comes to your home, you're going to need some more, right?
I think especially when...
Go ahead, Laj.
No, no, you go.
I go after you.
Yeah, I think especially when you just think about
in the traditional system,
the moment you add KYCA to something,
I think it changes people's risk abilities
to be like, okay, we're fine with giving an X person like a higher like loan or like an X interest rate. And I think in crypto, like there is so much of like non-KYC issuance of like not knowing. I think that fundamentally is like, I think to Legendary's point, that changes institutional risk from their point of view a lot with KYC and just knowing your stance and knowing your spending and XYZ on paper. Okay. Very interesting stuff. Maybe the final point before I pass over to
to get into the final headline, it's just the regulatory capture question. Obviously,
Coinbase have a very close relationship with Circle. That seems to be perceived as the
American stablecoin.
You've got Tether that's very global, maybe more popular in other places, although they've
obviously been invited recently to the White House and they're kind of very involved in those
conversations. The perspective would be that there's going to be a lot more competition coming
into the stablecoin market moving forward. So we'll see how that goes and whether they'll be able to
unlock this earning of interest on stable coins i think that would be a huge unlock
um let's see how that goes um let's let's get into the final headline for the day we've only
got four minutes left this guns token we spoke about it yesterday um big game on avalanche just
what do we need to know it seemed like it was going to go well and then
something came in and some bad information what's uh what do we need to know here absolutely the
guns token launched successfully at one billion dollars on binance but there was some very bad
news for investors according to a post which i'm sharing on screen by the prominent investor grail
it was supposed to be a five percent unlock for the $40 million seed round and a 2% unlock
for the $60 million strategic round. However, those terms were changed a couple of weeks ago
and zero tokens unlocked for those investors at TGE. Instead, they were presented with a 12-month
cliff or the option to receive a refund. And these investors have been waiting for three years to
launch that token. Grail initially has shared some more information on that, that this happened last minute, which
then in a later post he corrected that was not the case.
It was announced a couple of weeks previously to that.
So this is where it did present the updated figures from the get-go.
And what he also had mentioned is that this is not unusual.
It has happened to me as well.
I think it has happened to all of us hosting the show as well
that we invested in terms where it changed pre-TGE,
terms where sometimes even changed post-TGE.
And Grail did go on to explain some of the details
that, as I said, vesting and tokenomics change
are not that unusual,
especially if top tier exchanges are involved.
They can apply quite some significant pressure on the teams and basically tell them, look, if you want to have the listing on this and
that exchange, this is what needs to change because we need to have a significant share to offer that
to our liquidity miners to have to ourselves. And you either take that deal because you think that
having this top tier exchange is helping your token or you just walk
away. Gray also mentioned that it has happened to him in several other investments and if you take
a look at the SAFT contracts, the safe agreements for future tokens, you will often see that there
is a clause in there that says the teams can actually do that. But he also makes the point
that it is possible that investors can fight back with that with a lawsuit if things actually go badly for a project.
And we do not to this point have some sort of legal precedents or cases for that that have been fought out.
But the key takeaway is that those teams indeed can change the terms you have as the investor signed a document that says that they can do that. And if it happens, very often, it won't be in your favor.
Interesting stuff.
in a bunch of things where do you stand on this we've it's funny i think i guess we have this
conversation more when the market is down and when things are not working well is this just
something to be expected when you take on the risk of angel rounds like look you know nine out
of ten of these are not supposed to necessarily be successful right um so therefore
is it okay for people to do these last minute changes to kind of change some very important
information very very late or should this just be kind of agreed beforehand and all sorted what do
you think yeah i've been thinking about this like a lot since yesterday this whole thing came out i
just feel like there's so much nuance i've as i as i do more and more investing i've become more accepting to the idea of like
stuff like just this happens like i know sitting on the back end a lot of people aren't able to
differentiate between malicious teams and teams that are actually just like trying to push but
sometimes pushing makes calls pivoting and understanding okay like
you know if you want your token being listed on binance they have these rules what do you go about
it because that's what like investors expect as well so i just feel like there is so much nuance
to all of this that i've started building like although i must say i feel like i'm way more
exposed to angel investing after experiencing for it for 1.5 years than i would have liked
but i think like there's no one more to blame than myself and i just think like
building like a lot of stuff in the background i've just like realized markets change a lot
faster than people make it seem i get it it's your money you're like losing it or like you're
seeing these terms change it doesn't feel right but like a lot of times you have like actual teams just like trying to survive and pivot and work out model it's not like always
malicious you know so it's it's it's tricky yeah in this specific answer question it's like would
you rather they don't because i i guess the point here is sometimes the exchanges are pushing
these changes like look if you want to be listed on binance
you need to make this change because we do not approve of these tokenomics and so the question
becomes from a team's perspective is it better for us to be on binance and all of the benefits
that come with that um and change the terms or should we stick to the terms and just try and do the launch somewhere
else and i guess there's no 100 correct answer for that like you have the scope as the team
to make that decision you have the contractual ability to make that decision
i guess in 12 months time when the cliff unlocks
you'll know how that has played out for your investors much better than you do
now but would they be happy with the 3 to 4x in a year's time instead of maybe a
3 to 4x now but then a faster price, what does it hold up better on Binance?
Like,
I think there's a lot of factors at play here and it's not,
it's not,
it's definitely not a science which you can,
conclude very,
very easily.
I actually think you can,
like we,
we even had the chart on the show where we looked at the launch pool token
performance.
And we've seen that basically most of the launch pool tokens
are down tremendously
after a long enough time.
And then you just need to look,
what is the time period?
Is it a year?
And then if your cliff is a year
and the likelihood
that your investment
won't be worth a lot
in a year from now.
And by that point,
you have basically locked up
your capital for a total
of 4.5 years.
And then you can look
at the opportunity cost that you missed out on by doing anything else with the other 4.5 years. And then you can look at the opportunity cost
that you missed out on
by doing anything else with it
out of 4.5 years,
like perfectly connected to the news
that we just had with
the dollar balance is doing nothing
on your bank account
versus the average performance
of a launch pool token.
And if you look at that,
it's not a good look to optimize for that.
If it's a shorter cliff
or you have a smaller unlock,
sure, it can work out
very well in your favor. But if you suddenly have zero unlocks in a 12 month cliff, likelihood is
not the highest that this is good for you, especially as the unlocks go, the early unlocks
go to BNB launch pool participants. And who's the marginal buyer of your low flow token then? Like
who is the buyer who comes in and says, oh yeah, there's like 7% of the circulating it trades at
one bill. Sounds reasonable to buy that that here and then you also know that what
these investors waited for three years once they have the unlocks will obviously want to realize
some of the profit that is left so i think that if you have the concrete terms and you see and i
wasn't able to find that chart in a um in in the last one two minutes of the like historic launch
pool performance i think you can figure it out for yourself
that depending on the exact terms
of the exact project,
if it's a good deal to stay in
or if you want to get refunded
and if you got shafted by the changes or not.
Yeah, I think that's a fair point.
I'd like to see the Binance launch charts
to see if it's any better ultimately over a year-long
period. But one thing that you can say immediately in the last 24 hours, although who knows when a
market maker is going to kick in here, Guns is now down 33% from the billion dollar launch price to
660 mil. So it probably doesn't look good or doesn't feel good at least seeing that as an
initial investor, knowing that you're now locked up for another year after you first invested four mil so it probably doesn't look good or doesn't feel good at least seeing that as an initial
investor knowing that you're now locked up for another year after you first invested four years
ago um okay that's that interesting conversation i hope that was interesting to you guys um
interesting corporate stuff interesting token stuff uh as usual we do this every single day
monday to friday 7 a.m eastern time for one hour
live on xx video youtube apple and spotify podcasts thanks to my co-hosts legendary and
rahim as always we hope you have a wonderful day take care and we will see you tomorrow bye
