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Crypto pumps as tariff concerns ease
Recorded: March 24, 2025 Duration: 0:56:24Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto market is witnessing a resurgence with Bitcoin's price climbing to $87K amid easing tariff concerns, while Fidelity and DWF make significant moves into on-chain treasury funds and liquid investments, respectively. High-value NFT sales further indicate a growing interest in digital assets.
Full Transcription
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything to the modern market that is the crypto market, the NFT market and how to hopefully make some money in on the internet in this market on the internet loaded up for discussion today we have the markets are going back up Bitcoin is back to 87 K might even have gone past 88 as Trump tariff concerns ease we'll be talking about fidelity filing for on chain US Treasury funds and DWF announcing a $250
million liquid fund.
We've also got the latest thoughts on price action on crypto and NFTs more generally and
some thoughts on the general state of the market coming up.
So stay tuned for that.
I've got legendary and bread in the co-host seats,
ready to get into it, but just a reminder friends
that nothing that we do say, think, breathe, eat or sleep.
It is financial advice.
This market is very risky and we don't know anything for sure.
So please perceive the caution
and exercise your own judgment at all times
with that out of the way bread.
It is Monday.
It is the 24th of March.
How are you doing on this wonderful Monday?
Everything you just said is true.
It is Monday.
It is wonderful.
It is.
I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true.
Yeah, man.
The things are good.
Um, I know we were talking before the show of like, like, kind of vibing like vibe, like, how do we feel about the vibes of the
market? Everything else? I've been touching some grass, right? Like I got to the weather's finally
nice, right? I'm in the Pacific Northwest, so I get kind of rainy, got to ride my bike, got to,
you know, go down to the store, walk to the grocery or the farmer's market to buy an apple, like, you know, all the homies
shit about all these things, like they wouldn't ordinarily be
happening. Like these things are not ordinarily things that you
would do that you get a chance to do.
They wouldn't. Whether they wouldn't for two reasons. One
would be because the market's hot and crazy, right? Like I
have so much pulling me to the screens that I cannot get away
to do that.
And then the other is that like the rain, rain sucks. So we've had a lot of rain lately, the first
day that I can actually do that and not get soaked. So both of those things ended up being true. The
market was not pulling me to the screens. And then, you know, the rain was gone. There's a deeper
point to make here. But my first question is less deep. What kind of Apple are you know, the rain was gone. There's a deeper point to make here,
but my first question is less deep.
What kind of apple are you purchasing, Brad?
Green apple kind of guy, right?
I need a little tartness,
and it's because I am a fan of secondary compliments
to the apple, right?
You put some peanut butter on it, right?
You start dabbing.
I was with you for a moment.
Now you're-
You've never done that, then you're you've never done that then you're
you that makes sense because you're not American
right so you don't have freedom in your blood
um so
yeah we have we have rules
we have like decorum we have basic
basic
decent. Would you besmirch the
apple with adding things to it?
Exactly I mean come on
what's going on it. Exactly. I mean, come on, what's going on? It's absolutely
amazing. I recommend it.
Okay,
peanut butter or like almond butter. It's awesome. But the
green apple specifically.
Okay, well, we'll consider that for sure. And then you've been
talking about your AI integrations, especially to your
health. Is this something that your new Manus AI companion
would be recommending to you?
Yeah, a couple of things here.
A, I love the Apple talk.
It feels like there was a post on the timeline, you know, when people start to get wealthy,
the things that they are focusing on and you have those, the one sort of people like first
go for the Rolex, go for the car.
And then like everyone, it seems like is after that thinking about what is really important, which is health maxing, extending longevity hacks, et cetera.
And like, you know, once you're in that like sphere, you were like, Oh, I'm
buying this apple from the farmer's market.
This is super exciting.
So you can just circle back to what used to be the normal and regular life before.
So you kind of circle back to what used to be the normal and regular life before.
Specific to your question, Manus is this AI agent that the timeline has been pretty excited about
because you can give it a task and it just goes to work and reports back to you 30 minutes, one hour
later. You've got to get the details from what you're talking about. This is like next level.
And a lot of people want to have access to that. This is why on the secondary market, like white listed accounts have been
trading anywhere between 10, 20 K obviously prices going down a bit on that.
But the thing is that's so interesting about it.
You can, and I think Alex Finn had also this one post on it where Alex was like,
look at my posts, look at what I do as a creator, come up with an idea for a SaaS
business, scale that to a million and produces a bunch of documents. It comes up with 12 documents
how to do that, but you can also do so much more. I asked it to come up with a website for like stock
markets that I find interesting, criteria that they look at. And it was like, yeah, you need the Yahoo API key for
that. And like, no, you can set up yourself on Yahoo and get an API key yourself. And it can do
all those things. I asked it to get feedback on a website and it wanted to have access to the back
end and do the improvements itself. You can watch it, why it's clicking on the computer in
its little sandbox and playing around.
And it's very, very fascinating to see that.
And I've personally been using it to enter my biohacking era.
So I provided it with all the data, blood works, uh, all of my like medical
history, blacked out the private, the privacy related details on that.
And I was like, do a literature review.
What am I supplementing?
What am I eating?
What should I avoid?
What should I do?
Focus on top tier peer review journals,
focus on meta analysis,
focus on who's like sponsoring those journals
and come up with something interesting.
And I got like 50 pages back of literature review
plus recommendations.
And interestingly enough,
and I mentioned that before the show,
the one compound which was turned into a meme coin when we spoke about that by decentralized,
but when decentralized science was still a trend was Urolithin A. And that compound, obviously,
has been a lot of longevity research going into that. And it's not the meme coin people who
invented it is now one of the things that I am supplementing and I'm importing
to get my hands on it.
Yeah, I'm turning into a mini AI fueled Brian Johnson,
which also seems now to be something that people
who have accumulated a bit of wealth
are doing in their downtime.
My, the thing, so I actually had,
there's someone posted about AI doing like road tasks.
Like why is there like, why is every AI ad talk about booking travel?
Or like everything is about like book travel for me.
And I was like, yeah, like I get it.
Like I travel.
People do, Brett.
They book travel.
Yeah.
And I was like, you know, like if I'm reflecting on it, I was like, I wish, cause like, I bet
I have habits that I don, because I bet I have habits that I
don't even realize that I have.
And I wish I had something that would analyze all the shit that I do and be like, bro, you
know, you typically, you typically book for red eyes and like, you know, I got you like,
you know, this is what you normally do.
I can hook you up because you don't realize this.
You don't realize you prefer this.
And then I thought about like, extending that to basically everything else
that I do, right? Like, like, when I work, how I work, like,
where I wish something could analyze all of my shit, and just
tell me like, you know, you tend to get up a little little too,
too early, a little too late, you don't know, you know, you
don't roll out a bit at the right time, I would like there's
I bet there's something there. Collecting the data is the hard
part. But if I can build a an AI agent on my profile, specifically all my little behavioral nuances that I have, and then give
them some autonomy, be pretty cool. I mean, Google is probably the leader for that, right?
They're the ones that has all my shit already, even though they almost deleted my entire
timeline this weekend, that that would have sucked. I went from like 700 cities in like
12 countries to like, where have you been in the last six
days?
It freaked me out for a second.
Yeah, they sent me an email.
It was like, Hey, hey, PS, we had some technical issues.
We identified you as someone who might be affected.
You should check it out.
And like your entire timeline might be wiped.
Luckily, I had a backup.
But yeah.
I mean, I wish there was something like that.
And I hope like, you know, at one point,
the context models will be like deep enough so that you can feed all of the data into OpenAI
or wherever you want to feed that into. But one thing that I already found interesting is that
only works like if you have used chat, GPT, cloud, whatever, to like enough of an extent that it
already has some data on you is go to your favorite LLM and
ask it to tell you something that works very well, for example, with ChatGPT because it
has cross chat memory.
Based on all of our interactions that we had so far, tell me something about myself that
I previously might have not realized about myself.
And that was a very interesting response that I already got by by chat GPT, which was pretty accurate. And
some of the inserts were like, I didn't even notice that.
What did it say? That you'd like peanut butter with your apples?
Yeah, probably that.
Interesting stuff. Yeah, maybe we're at that time we I think I
think we're ready for these AI agents to get a little bit more
supercharged. Yeah, I think we're ready for these AI agents to get a little bit more supercharged.
Um, yeah, I think we're very, very much ready for that.
Um, right.
We've got a lot of stuff to get into today.
Um, despite it feeling like a bit quieter, which maybe we're going to touch on again in a moment.
Um, things are, things may be heating up. Let's get into it.
Starting with the price action as usual with the majors, we have everything green green what a delightful thing to be able to say
on a monday morning we've got bitcoin up three percent to eighty seven point six k
up five percent on the week got eth up to two almost two thousand one hundred as up almost
ten percent on the week we've got bnb at six hundred and thirty dollars soul at 141 up six percent
We've got BNB at $630, Soul at 141 up 6%.
And that is that for the majors on the meme coin side.
Also a lot of green got Doge up a couple of percent to 17 cents, got Trump up 10% after
he decided to tweet that his coin was like the best coin or something like that.
And people, people like that.
Pepe is up 4%, Bonk's up 6%, SPX, Morad's coin is up 22%, Farquhoun is up 8%,
Whiff is up 4%, Pengu is up almost 10%, Doge, sorry, AI16z is up 10%, Ket is up 40%,
what on earth is going on there? That's on Avax. Peanut is up 8%, So generally green, MOG is up 10 as well. So green in the majors,
green in the memes, including AI as well. AXPT is up 22% in the last 24 hours. Getting
into the majors, sorry, the headlines themselves, we've got Bitcoin, as I said, getting past
87k against the backdrop of maybe these Trump tariff concerns
easing. So Legendary is going to speak about that in just a little bit. We've got Fidelity
filing for on-chain treasury fund joining the asset tokenization race. I think that's pretty
significant given the size of their assets. We'll talk about that as well. And then we've got DWF
announcing a $250 million liquid fund, which I think is interesting because a lot of people
are talking about the importance of liquid funds now.
We've yet to see, I think everyone wants
the early stage access always
because that's historically been very profitable in crypto
and a later stage fund has not been,
sorry, not a late stage fund,
but a liquid fund has always been harder
because the price of these tokens go down over time.
So interesting to see that develop that narrative develop we'll touch on that.
We've also got some quite big NFT sales in general. XCopy, Instabags and for 27 ETH these low edition XCopy collections really have diamond handed collectors. CryptoPunk Alien sold for 420 and crypto bank 3d glasses sold for 120
eth legendary is there anything else on the NFT side that we need to know?
Yeah, I'm very pleased to answer this question. And yes, which I haven't been doing in a while.
Actually, the whole NFT market is looking pretty interesting. We have Pudgey penguins being up
almost 20% over the last seven days, well above 10 ETH, 10.55 ETH floor,
up 7% over the last 24 hours.
We have a very similar picture
where the Board Ape Yard Club being up 6%
over the last week, 5% over the last 24 hours,
not as much as Pudgy after that NFT announcement,
but still a healthy gain.
And at the 13.44 ETH floor,
obviously we had that very big sale on the CryptoPunk side
of things, but not only was that relevant, the whole CryptoPunk floor is also slowly moving up.
As ETH is moving up as well, we are essentially at 40 ETH in US dollar terms. That's 84k almost
for the CryptoPunk. So, seems to be a bit of a relief rally that goes hand in hand with
ETH flirting with 2.1k. Absolutely. Good stuff on the NFT side. In terms of the the web the
roundup gives you with everything else you need to know some other pretty cool pieces of news.
One thing that I missed out just say off the top of my head,
MegaEath obviously launched their test net.
I think it was over the weekend or Friday.
So that's been pretty exciting to see what's going on there.
We've got Bearer Chain announcing
proof of liquidity beginning today.
That's their kind of novel mechanism
for you to kind of accrue BGT tokens.
That requires like a bit more of a deep dive,
to be honest, to fully understand what's going on there.
Trump post about Trump on true social,
so in sending it 10% higher over the weekend,
Tether announced a full audit from the big four accounting.
They said that's gonna be a top priority,
given that's always been something people
have been asking questions about with regards to Tether.
MetaPlanet planet added 12.6 million
dollars worth of bitcoin after appointing eric eric trump to the advisory board nice job nice
advisory board nice advisory position to just be able to say the thing that i advise you to do
is buy some more bitcoin um that doesn't sound too bad uh and then finally it's more comical
post over the weekend the meme coin routine hit $15 million after the
viral morning routine video about a couple of minutes long of just this absolutely stacked
guy going about from like 4am onwards doing the most absurd relaxing slash, I don't know,
life hacking healthy, allegedly
healthy things, the way to start a day, you haven't seen the
video, I'm sure you have already. But that is what that
is. And there was the mean coin that went to 15 million, which
is kind of the first runner.
That's not a big number. Like, I think I looked it up that like
that little viral post or whatever was the most viral in uh
in twitter's history at least just like according to grok and as far as I can tell from searching
other things right like I found a post that post specifically that like 550 million impressions
it was 575 at one point and I'm sure it's over 600 now and for the meme coin to only go to 15
it's over 600 now. And for the meme coin to only go to 15, like that feels really, really
low. Like that was like, people had daily runners to like 10, right? 10 was the point
where you started talking about it for some people. And like, that's the runner to 15.
Like I think that's more telling you all the times than anything else.
I think that's very fair. It's very fair. Like the proportion of virality to price.
I think ordinarily you would think something that with that much virality should should
move things further. I take a point. What did you think?
Yeah, like I comment on that was like, man, this thing actually ran pretty crazy. And
then someone linked me to the one that sold Jakey actually made he did a post that like
mimicked it from his like his side, right. And even that ran me to the one that's whole jakey actually made. He did a post that like mimicked it from his, like his side, right?
And even that ran really well. I think they got like 14 or 15 million impressions.
So like you have two videos,
both getting more impressions than dollars in the market cap of the actual
token itself. And I just saw like a lot of people are retweeting doing much of
that. There's just, I don't know, there's just not a lot of energy in the space.
I know we were talking about that, uh, before the show too, right?
Like we had not started testing that, you know, you did the, the
bear chain liquidity posts.
Like we were a little self-conscious whenever we, we posted that like after
looking at the numbers within thinking it was us, but no, I think it's the
little bit of the industry right now.
It's just the, everyone's a little fatigued.
We're starting to enter the spring summer months, right?
So you have a little bit of the sell in May stuff coming up now.
Um, yeah. So I have a little bit of the sell it may stuff coming up now.
Yeah, I think just generally conversations are dull. Yeah, I mean, two immediate thoughts on that. Maybe that takes us into the conversation we're probably going to go into. First, thanks to take
off tone on the YouTube comment saying it's like only 500k liquidity on that coin. So not a lot,
that probably helps move things along. And second thing is, yeah, just observing
our own behavior, right? You said yourself over the weekend, you kind of took some time out,
had a walk, went to buy some apples, did some other things. Like, I get more and more confident
in observing or reading the market by just observing my own behavior and how I feel and
how I'm acting and using myself as a proxy
for the rest of the market. Like remember back in that day when I said that I was going
to start going back to the gym, like that was just an outstanding moment in time to
call that I thought that things were going to go lower basically because people are logging
off or taking some time and we're noticing it on engagement, noticing, noticing it in people's behavior.
And so I think that's all, all part of the mix.
Doesn't mean that, you know, excessively bearish, but it just means that,
you know, there's this plateauing period or cooling off period after what was,
you know, I think, you know,
just in a completely insane run in January up to the inauguration.
Yeah. I mean, so it was just fatigue, right?
Like you, like you can't sustain craziness for that long.
So it's just like, man, all right, give me a little break.
I'll cool off a little bit.
I think just collectively people are coming to that point.
Um, yeah, but like things are happening, right?
We're going to talk today about the, the Autry and treasury shit.
Like there's like the glacial pace of government and like the
industry or industrial side of this stuff is not going to stop
moving. So it's like, it'll be here when we get back. And we
just, you know, we slog along.
Can I can ask one question? So legend, I'm going to come to
you to maybe just riff on that for a second, this idea that
okay, people are calling off and things are slowing down just to touch,
which they definitely are.
I think the industry's moving forward at a great rate on the corporate side and there's
still loads of awesome stuff getting built.
But on the human crypto Twitter side, definitely things have taken a breather.
But the other thing I wanted to bring up, which we didn't get a chance to speak yesterday,
was this piece of news.
I just wanted, I was curious for your thoughts on where you read this because I think my initial reaction is that this is like
super concerning that this is even a product that exists but this was the news. I'm just going to
share it on screen for people who are watching. I just just it needs to the settings to change.
This news that DoorDash users will be able to take out loans to pay for their lunch after
the company company struck a deal with Klarna.
Customers will be able to split payment into four interest free installments or defer payments
to a more convenient date.
You know, this person who tweeted I don't know them just final comment on it was taking
out a loan to buy lunch maybe the most insane thing I've ever heard. And I think that is probably my instinct to like, when you're
thinking, remember, we were talking about everyone in this place always wants to talk about retail,
like when a retail going to come when they're going to come to buy your bags, whatever, like,
look, I think we've already been through that period, to the extent that they're going to be
here. But the broader point that I was trying to make quite a lot.
Let's, can we get the setting, the screen changed?
Um, the broader point that I've tried to make quite a lot is I don't know if
people have like on the, on the, on the, like on a general scale for the people
who might want to be aspirational or nearly, I don't know how much spare capital there is around. And I
feel like this product is coming into existence, because it's a
necessary product, like it's a needed product. So I just was
curious, which basically means people are broke, like
generally on a broad scale, like if this is something which
might be useful to people. So I'm just curious for your read
on the situation, like, is this happening because people really don't have that
spare capital? Or is it just like, no, people are fine. It's just this is a thing that we want to
provide as an option. And, you know, people might just take it up because it might be a helpful
thing. Like what's your ledge maybe to you first and curious to your thoughts as well, Brad?
Yeah, I think it's a very interesting piece of news because Klarna is a very interesting company
as a payment provider because they do things a bit different.
Klarna is very well known in Europe specifically for the buy now, pay later type of payments
that are supported by a lot of online merchants.
But the thing that they don't do is they don't charge you interest rates on the deferred payments basically. So yes, in the background, they are partnered with
banking companies, with banks to provide those loans, but they don't charge you interest for that.
And they don't necessarily mainly monetize off you as the customer. Well, there is, so maybe it's just taking one step back.
So what happens is you defer your payment
and you pay at a certain amount, at a certain point in time.
If you want to defer again, you can't do that
and the company will cut you off
from like further deferring your payment.
There is a fine that will be charged
at a certain point in time,
but that is not the typical way how they make money.
The way that how Klarna makes money is because this is getting so popular is by actually
charging the merchants more to implement Klarna and to implement the BNPL, the buy now pay
later payments.
So they're like basically taking away the interest like lift from you as the customer
and they're charging the merchants more and they're kind of, they want you to defer as much as possible because then they can charge the merchants
more and everyone is ordering food and getting into that and having the option to defer payments
with that is a massive unlock for Klarna.
I think there is an average amount of $100 that the typical customer owes Klarna and
it's just using that to defer the payment.
And it's also very interesting if I order something at my online pharmacy here, which
is one of the pharmacies where I can pay with credit card, I have to use Klarna in my bank
account.
The standard option for that is not to pay now, it's just to pay in 30 days, which is
super weird.
So I order now and even if it's like 50 bucks, it just defers
the payment automatically. I would have to manually go in and be like, no, pay that shit.
Now I don't want you to credit my account a month later when I have no idea what I was doing a month
ago. But that's a very, very interesting business model by Klarna. Now on the other side, on the
question that you actually asked, do people have money to spend on groceries or not?
If you look at it at the like face level, it's pretty dystopian, right?
You can pay your burrito in for installments or whatever you're ordering.
It's pretty weird, but I don't think that this is like emblematic of what is either
going on or not going on.
I mostly think for Klarna, this is like a very, very good move, A, to make headlines
as a payment provider once more, and B, to just have this revenue boosting tool for themselves.
If people will certainly use that, and there will be cases where like, bro,
it's pretty wild that you have to defer your pizza payment because
otherwise you can't afford it.
Yes.
But I don't think that implementation as a result of like, you know, food or
grocery prices being so expensive, it's just as a result of clariners, like
business strategy and growth approach.
Interesting.
Okay.
I was definitely curious to hear your thoughts.
I think I'm probably maybe slightly on the other side to you, Brad, just curious,
curious where you, how you view that situation that's kind of arising.
Um, yeah, honestly, it's not something that's really piqued
my interest. So I don't have any strong opinions on it.
Thoughts.
Fair enough. Just seeing Cap in the comments says he agrees with
me, but not only are people broke, many unable to secure or
maxed out traditional credit. That's, I guess, the interesting
additional point, maybe this is just a more helpful and easy to
access credit line and rather than try to secure some other
big credit line for, you know, when you have to justify what
you need it for.
Maybe this is just the easier option.
One follow-up question.
Because if you don't pay back, you can't extend, you can't use that.
They actually have.
Yeah.
So you order your one burrito, which you can't afford and then you can't pay
your second installment in the burrito.
You can't use that anymore with them.
Basically.
So it's, it's a one-time
basically offer in that sense. This is why Klarna actually has super high repayment rates,
because it's not used like as another credit card where I can accumulate that because I don't have
enough money on. Okay, so you need to keep making every second and then every following installment you need to pay in order to continue
the credit line.
It's very similar, at least how Amazon does things in Europe.
I don't know how they do it in the US, but here it's also if you use the buy now, pay
later on Amazon and you fail to pay in time, you just banned from that feature and you
have to buy and pay now.
Interesting. Is this just a natural byproduct of like a sideways down ish
market? Right? Like, it's been shopping for a while, which
means people who are true believers, they probably been
trying to DCA for a little bit, they probably shot their load
a little too early. And now it's just extended a little further
than they can, like continue to buy. And therefore, like, you
know, we're kind of in this stagnation period
until a liquidity injection, right?
We need more people from outside to get excited,
to pour in money so that we can make money
and then to spend that money on things
that doesn't deserve it.
And then for us to start the cycle over again,
actually, that's kind of always the flow.
That and in this case specifically,
Klarna also seeks to IPO apparently, based on the paperwork they've been filing.
I think they're now also the exclusive provider for buy now pay later with Walmart in the US that is.
So it is maybe a bit of a result of sideways market, sideways interest.
And for them, it's just a good occasion to show, hey, we actually able to make pretty sick deals, like from a company's perspective
with Doordash or with Walmart and trying to get the positive momentum.
If they really were to IPO on the New York stock exchange.
I actually think it's something much deeper.
So look, maybe there's something to do with the market that we're in.
Which is that the thing that I've been thinking, I've spoken with a few people, it's like one of my bigger ideas about the trajectory that
we're in is, I think that the middle class might be a historical anomaly. And this is like,
more like a centuries, like a, you know, a millennium slash centuries analysis.
I'm not certain that what we experienced in the 20th century as industrialization kind
of distributed wealth to all kinds of people and allowed permitted them and allowed them
facilitated them to live lives that they were entirely unable to do so before.
I'm not sure that that is in line with how things were always
before and I'm not sure that is how things will be moving forward. I think that the default scenario
for society's makeup is not that, it's about fewer people having more of the stuff and then a lot of
people being super reliant on those people to provide in some way,
whether that's via taxation and via the state or whether that's through a more feudal system where
you literally are working for those people and are entirely reliant on them. So this is like maybe
just the bigger thought probably requires a lot more time to analyze that we've got the headlines to get into is in a
second, but unless you got if you have any quick any
reflections on that.
Like middle class in that sense did not exist before the
Industrial Revolution. The thing that came closest to it before
that were like your merchants, your artists, that were like still
supported by the elite and got like benefits from them to be able to do whatever their craft was.
That is like kind of a bit of the, you know, prototype of what is now the middle class,
but before the industrial revolution that did not really exist at a large scale. And it was like a
byproduct of, you know, democracies kind of to be stable,
need a happy population, then you need to have a middle class because not everyone can be rich
and wealthy. So it kind of makes sense that we have that now, but very much agree it is
certainly a historical anomaly. Yeah, I think we'll kind of that and that's what that's when
I start to view this through that lens. It's like the people who would normally be or would have been able to afford this stuff before seem to not be able to do that. And I think it's
part of that shift where the middle class is just getting absolutely smashed over and over and over
again and really, really struggling to be in it for there to be a meaningful middle class.
Okay, so those are some interesting thoughts, I hope, on what is going on more generally,
general thoughts on the market.
Let's get into some more specific stuff now.
Things seem to be turning around.
Bitcoin's back above 87k.
Tariff concerns seem to be easing.
What do we need to know about the major price action and whatever conversation is going
on with Trump, whether it's tariffs or anything else that he's going and tweeting about at the moment. Absolutely. Stock market is up. Crypto majors are up. It
does seem that we see a bit of relief in the market and that certainly has to do with some
of Trump's comments, which also have positively, as I said, impacted the stock market as well.
So on a headline level, we see that, um, tariff concerns are easing.
And it seems like that with the new series of tariffs that are to be
implemented from April 2nd, there's been a bit of a change in tonality and
language comment, um, coming from, from Donald Trump saying that there's a lot
more room suddenly for flexibility when it comes to tariffs. It's not like hit everyone with
the same amount of tariffs. But yes, he talks about, you know, liberation day in America when
there's going to be a series of new tariffs coming, but that there's a lot of flexibility there. So
he's saying, I don't change, but the word flexibility is an important word. Sometimes it's flexibility.
So there will be flexibility, but basically it's reciprocal.
And also talks a bit more about like fairness when it comes to the
tariff side of things, but it's something that the market has clearly liked.
And also in conjunction of that, we had the FOMC meeting, which we spoke about,
which, you know, some people reported on that a bit more carefully,
some saw a bit more of a positive reading, but things that were definitely positive were
some other economical data coming out of the US, mostly pointing to the US job market remaining
more resilient than we expected it to be.
So from the macro standpoint, you have a bit more news that gave the market more confidence
and removed a bit of the uncertainty when it comes to what is Trump's next move when it comes to the
tariffs on April 2nd, which again impacted not only crypto, not only the stock market,
but also for the first time has seen a bit of a stronger effect on
the dollar.
So the dollar has been very, very strong before Trump has been strong at the start of Trump's
second presidency.
But as soon as we got into the tariff wars, the euro, other currencies have increased
in strength massively. So the Euro dollar almost went from trading at parity to one Euro equaling $1.09.
Now we are for the first time down from that high at $1.08.
Also the entire US dollar index, which has six counterparts, six currencies, the trading
against that was marginally lower a bit. So it seems like
that the reading here is that this trust in the reduced uncertainty is not only
like a domestic US trading, but those international markets are
reacting to that and are pushing the dollar to be a bit stronger
basically against the other currencies that it has been benchmarked against.
So you think the market is starting to not believe that the tariff situation
is going to be as aggressive as maybe it was insinuated at the beginning?
Yeah, it basically went from the mindset that everyone's going to be hit with
massive tariffs and holy shit, what the fuck is going on?
We don't know how this is going to impact the economy too.
Oh, there might be a bit more strategic depth to it and there might be a bit more
flexibility depending on how the counterparties of the other countries are
reacting and, and engaging in a conversation with Donald Trump.
Interesting.
Excellent summary.
I would encourage people to have a watch of I think this is pretty historic that this is
even available to us. All in crew. I think I mentioned this
at the back end of last week, but they did two interviews
last week, one with Besant and one with Howard Lutnick, both
for around an hour, the Lutnick one was I think almost an hour
and a half. And if you want to get a sense
or a read of how what their views are, and how they're positioning themselves to attack the debt,
how to what the strategic thinking is for the tariffs, how they want to approach, you know,
this administration and what they're seeking to achieve.
Definitely have a watch because I thought it was quite illuminating.
They explained some of the rationale for the tariffs, which I wasn't
necessarily aware of before how things related to income tax, for example, in
the United States, which basically didn't exist up until a certain time.
And then, just different bits of information to do with tariffs, which basically didn't exist up until a certain time. And then, um, you know, just different bits of information to
do with tariffs, which I thought was helpful to get some deeper
understanding. I noticed there's still like a bit of a lightning
rod topic. People think that they're really, really bad, um,
from the economic perspective now, but, um, it's at least
helpful. And I just don't think you get, this is the thing I
routinely think now in this space is so amazing that we get access to all of this information. And I just don't think you get this is the thing I routinely think now in this space is so amazing that we get
access to all of this information. And then we can
make our own decisions. So I watched both of those
interviews, I thought it was very illuminating. Did you did
either of you see those? Did you have any takes on it?
Didn't see it. But I would be very curious to get like, a
headline key takeaway from either of the interviews or both.
My one headline key takeaway, which is less to do with the
strategy, which I think I guess we're going to see unfold
anyway, is more to do with the competence of the people.
And I think one of the things that people have always accused
government in general, and one of the things that people have
always been hesitant to commit capsules to the government. So I look governments
inefficient, they're useless, they will allocate your money poorly, like we should reduce the
scope of the government because you and you know, you have two sides, right, you've got the people
who want to reduce the scope of the government, you will have people who think big government is good.
But my takeaway from listening to these two people over a long period of time is though I don't
necessarily agree with every single thing they said, I think
they're incredibly capable people.
And it sounds like they've assembled a team of incredibly competent, capable
people, maybe they overstretch.
And I think this is probably the criticism, right?
The things that are going through the courts where they're trying to push
aggressively hard to get this stuff done, because maybe they don't come from a
bureaucratic administrative background where you need to respect the specific process. And I think
that would probably be the biggest criticism that they might be doing things that are either,
I don't know, the technicalities, whether they're literally illegal, whether they're
unconstitutional. One of those two things, because they're pushing so hard to move fast and break things in a way. So maybe that would be the
criticism. But I think if you listen to those two things, you've got people who are at least have
been incredibly successful beforehand, and I think are making a sincere attempt to try to make things
better at a minimum. That would be my take.
Maybe that's enough on that though for now, unless anyone has anything else. Let's get into the
second headline, Brett. What do we need to know about these Fidelity potentially coming on chain?
This is a huge asset manager. What's the thinking here? What do we need
to know?
Yeah, let me slide in here. So yeah, so Fidelity filed for on-chain US Treasury fund joining
the asset co-organization race. That's the headline. What it comes down to is, and you
guys may be familiar with what this actually means because of the Biddle fund, which was
launched by BlackRock. So anyways, but Fidelity is managing 5.8 trillion in assets and just
ended the race for tokenized US treasury space, which has actually
grown 500% year over year.
The interesting things in this note, so it's like, cool, if the
bringing treasury is on chain, why is it interesting?
What's going on with it?
It's one is just to note the growth of the current,
the current on-chain RWAs.
One, if you look at the Biddle Fund, right,
which is launched by BlackRock last March, actually.
It actually just crossed over,
I think it was 1.5 billion in total assets,
which you can see in two different places.
One, we have a Dune dashboard for that,
but there's also a specific website you can go to
to track a lot of this stuff and rwa.xyz slash treasuries.
So yeah, you can see here on screen now is the Biddle Fund,
which is also launched on Ethereum, which is of note.
And you can see the Dune dashboard had a huge spike recently
and it's crossed over 1.5 billion in total supply,
you know, distribution's getting grown. and actually it's on several other chains.
Like there's a breakdown there on the right.
You can see there's actually a decent portion that's on several other chains.
Although Ethereum has recently jumped back in to take the lion share of
everything, even when it's low as it was at like 70%.
So it's just more stuff coming on chain in the way of T-bills.
And this specific product is set to be live by May 30th if it becomes effective.
So that's another month from now.
No, we had April next, so two months from now.
That's how that works, right?
April, May, yes.
So two months from now, which is kind of commentary on how slow this shit actually moves, right?
Like we're announcing it now and it's going forward and it's kind of commentary on how slow this shit actually it moves right like we're announcing it now
And it's going forward and it's kind of bullish
Ethereum right if you if you and there was another post by Dan Smith from block works research
He's the head of research, and he's you know saying like well they chose aetherium. Why do we have these?
RWA specific chains coming to market if like everyone's just to go back to the main one, the big dog.
And the commentary on the time it
takes for this stuff to come to market,
and the established position of Ethereum,
and the choice to go to Ethereum here
kind of makes you wonder if that is what's
going to continue to happen.
History on me, I had a lot happen, right? Like history on me, right?
I had a lot of, because of my bags from 2017,
I spent a lot of time and energy in other ecosystems, right?
And other L1 is a small one, whatever.
And the, one of the dreadful things
that I realized as a competitor,
because they're competitors,
was that like Ethereum has such strong network
effects and man hours, timing and stuff. I continue to espouse about Ethereum that like,
there's a lot of deep seated stuff that is just going to like, it may move at a glacial
pace, but like there's so many people with so much interest in making this thing grow.
And the time it takes the roots to like have embedded in the government and shit is gonna be there for so long that like it's kind of just gonna be the default
answer for a lot of stuff right it's reaches like good enough point we're
just like over time it's gonna kind of slowly absorb basically everything now
what that what that means for asset pricing that's a different conversation
but like the fact that it's like just the default answer as a programmable
blockchain right we're trying to see Solana step into that.
Means it's just like,
eventually it's just gonna absorb basically everything,
whether it's like a feature that you have on an all-tell one
or whatever, it just kind of keeps doing that.
Yeah, that doesn't mean other things can't exist
and they can't thrive.
It's just like we're continuing to see this kind of stuff.
Whenever the pace is, we announce the thing,
we need approval two months from now,
like it can be implemented.
You start thinking about how that plays out
for basically everyone else that wants to do the same thing.
And instead of trying to do a net new thing,
which will take six months to do the thing,
they wanna come to market, right?
And they wanna come to market in the same way
that something else came to market
so that they can get there quickly,
they can be there effectively,
they can get their version of the thing.
BlackRock's already on Ethereum,
now Fidelity's gonna be on Ethereum.
Everyone after them is probably gonna come in and say,
we'll just do the same thing.
There's already a roadmap for it,
there's already a template for it,
we'll implement the same thing, and through that,
we can get the copypasta product
just the same way that everyone does the same shit
here in this ecosystem.
So bullish that it's on Ethereum questions, whether or not our
RWA specific chains will become the thing.
And, um, yeah, uh, RWA is just broadly as an asset classes is going up into the right.
One of, one of the most interesting comments I've seen on that, especially
when it comes to why, why on ETH and what is pushing this narrative was by the Athena founder.
He was saying stablecoin issuers decide whether demand for these treasury products will sit
at scale.
Athena holds 60% of Biddle alone and accounted for 95% of the growth in Biddle in the last
three weeks.
So very interesting to see that.
Once more reconnecting to one of the main narratives,
which is the stable coin issuance and the stable coin adoption in crypto.
And then we talk about their L1, right?
So converge, right?
So if he's driving, maybe he's saying that as like a bullish thing for Ethereum, but
then like as a slight nod to like, look, bro, I'm taking that action to my chain in the
future.
Yes. I'm taking that action to my chain in the future. Yes, I think that is certainly the case.
Something you said that was interesting, Brad, I wanted to just double click on
talked. I mean, on the one hand, we talk about these alternative L ones or L two saying, look,
general purpose isn't going to work. Now there's just too many, you need to be
specific. Probably. It's just like a view that seems to have come about, seems to make sense.
Like, look, there's so many of you guys now, you're going to need to drill down into something
to make you guys stand out versus all these other competitors. But now I guess part of wrapped up in what you just said was, okay, well, you say you have specialized in
our WAs, or you're specialized in something else that will if
that stuff just defaults back to Ethereum or elsewhere, frankly,
whether it's Solana or whatever, just basically H already
trusted, highly efficient, very strong network effects blockchain.
Do we just need this period of time where those all of those experiments of more specific
things might not actually even be the way like if if those things are going to go back
to main nets that are more established, more trustworthy, with better network effects?
Yes, but that I wouldn't even say that's exclusive
to like this Alt-L1 experiments.
We're gonna see with L2s too, right?
There's so many L2s that's gonna spun up.
Yeah, even those chains are gonna get fucking dunked on
over the next 12 months, right?
There's some that are straight up paying to exist, right?
They're not making money on users
because there's no traction there.
So, you know, whenever we had this really strong narrative
over the last year plus that's like,
every single app is gonna have its own chain
and everyone's gonna have 100% of everything.
And it's like, you know,
pendulum swung really far that way,
it probably over swung, it's gonna come back
and maybe even over swing the other direction.
Maybe it's already doing that, right?
Where you have these other, like other,
oh, we need to have the biggest fastest chains kind of like us.
Like that's our kind of narrative.
And it's probably going to swing back to the middle somewhere
or settle somewhere ultimately in the middle.
Yeah. It's just like the nature of humans broadly.
And I totally see that playing out here.
Interesting.
Okay. Very interesting stuff.
Big conversations on Ethereum
and its whole ecosystem, I think. So happy to have spoken
through that. Final headline for the day is DWF announcing $250 million liquid fund. This is news
that DWF Labs, the crypto market maker and investors excited to announce the launch of the liquid fund
aimed at accelerating the adoption and expansion of mid and large cap crypto projects. I think this is important at the moment
because many people have been speaking about just where we are in the market where lots of
quality projects are maybe beat up a little bit in the market at the moment, but they've already
launched and they've already got their token out there, but maybe their investor unlocks have begun and the market has obviously
taken a humongous downturn in the last month or two anyway, but they've actually established a
product market fit and are doing pretty well. And so people are calling for more liquid funds,
like people should be buying that instead of continuing the endless VC, VC circus, which
is just keep funding more of the same stuff that we've seen a hundred times already, and
taking your five X after two years and which rapidly declines and even for products that
are not any good. So people are calling for more liquid funds. They've positioned themselves
as the one of the most active investors in crypto space in the
last two weeks alone. The firm as part of this strategy, I think has already invested over $11
million into promising blockchain projects, and will sign two major investment deals with worth
$25 million and $10 million as part of this $250 million liquid fund with more announcements coming in the pipeline. So I guess,
just some further information, the investment size is ranging from 10 million dollars to 50 million
per project fund will provide strategic crypto venture capital and ecosystem support, ensuring
sustainable growth for projects that drive real world adoption, help promote change in the industry. I've got a thought on that in a second.
So two points.
One, I think a lot of people are looking
at live projects now because the market's beat up.
Maybe investor unlocks have started for projects
that have already established PMF this cycle.
And that might be more attractive now than
going into the next launch for another L1, which people are already starting to feel
like maybe not as necessary as they as it would have been 12 months ago. And then the second thought
is I'll hold the second thought for a second. Legendary thoughts
on this. Thoughts on going more liquid at the moment, even from a personal perspective,
right? Because right now we all have the opportunity to invest in deals on the side,
or we can go into the liquid market, or we can farm stables. Like, how are you thinking about it?
Again, we've talked quite confidently that our own behavior is a reasonable proxy for what might be decent market activity now. How are you thinking about it? What do you think of this move?
Yeah, very interesting. Not only the increase, I feel like in liquid funds, but also specifically
for this one, if you read through the entire announcement where they go through the, you know, what are we going to provide for the companies
that we, well, in our investing in, they are saying it will include a full
ecosystem growth strategy focusing or including number one, top priority,
stable coin TVL and ecosystem expansion, supporting liquidity and DFA activity
for L1, L2 networks and it goes into lending markets, et cetera.
So it's also interesting to see how DWF is looking at an investment and what they want
to provide them with.
And the last thing is the comprehensive GTM, the go-to-market strategy.
And the first thing is stablecoin TVL on ecosystem expansion, which then also means that the stable coin TVL is
becoming like a more and more important metric for companies
like DWF to look at if they're pushing this so hard that they
make it like the number one on their list of four items.
Interesting.
Yeah, I forgot from the personal behavior.
I like liquid funds and I feel like we've seen also the liquid lending with, I always
want to call it Winter Cat, Wildcat, that's the correct name.
The Wildcat stuff where it can lend to Winter Mute and others.
The liquid funds, I feel like this flexibility in how you invest to park your cash, because so much
of it is mercenary in this space, has become of tremendous importance, which on the flip
side is pretty cool, because you then actually incentivize builders to build really interesting
products where you want to keep your money in, because you have the option to move your money out way more flexible terms than
other like typical, you know, more bonded style of investments, which is in theory,
you should foster competition and innovation and should help to build more
attractive or more interesting products for the investors.
Yeah, for me, I'm definitely thinking liquid is the way at the moment because everything's
about return of value, right? If you, if you're looking at hype at 12, 13, $14, which is when
I was speaking last week where it's like, look, it's better than buying it at 30, isn't
it? Like if you're bullish in the next 12 to 18 months and hype is sitting at $12 or $13 or $14 like
that better or worse than buying it at 30 and do you think it's going down to six or eight and
I don't know it's worth having a nibble like that's how I was speaking about it in the last
week or two and I think if you if you're bullish in the next six, six to 12 months, you're probably thinking even BTC and BTC being
the main mark by which I think you're trying to evaluate your
own performance with Bitcoin down at 81 or whatever it was a
few days ago 82. Like, are you gonna you're gonna 1.5 or 2x
your stuff, your your private capital in the same amount of time, depending again, depending on your views, if you're gonna 1.5 or 2x your stuff, your private capital in
the same amount of time, depending again, depending on
your views, if you're bullish in the next six to 12 months or
18 months, can you is it worth tying up your capital in a
private round when there are so many things that had a discount
right now? I think that's the reasonable question that people
should be asking themselves. And I'm leaning towards the liquid side on that, unless there's some outstanding
deal that you really think is important or some builders that you want to back.
And, and you take an alternative view for that reason.
Um, that is my thought there, Brad, any final thoughts from your side on liquid
versus illiquid investments close us out.
Only that I am highly liquid and I'm glad that I did it. I
like, you know, now, like, I question myself whenever I
initially did it, I stapled up pretty hard over the last like,
mostly just around the kind of shit, or like, I, I sold in the
kind of stuff. And I, I questioned myself for a solid
few weeks, like I fucked up, we're going up in the right. Now with taxes upon us, I'm, I'm sitting pretty, I'm happy I did it. And then in this industry, like I know, like you've seen a lot of conversation around the big heads doing the liquid side, like the investment funds. And I'm in my internal conversations with players who actually are on the bid side of that shit.
It's surprising and how much of the degeneracy they actually partake in.
So it's good for all of us, all of us being like the normal people, right?
Like if you have, if they feel compelled to continue to be able to participate in this industry,
that they have to bid up meme coins. Awesome for us, right?
It just means that we are easy or we have a better capability to front run that kind
of stuff, that level of capital.
And you need that, you frankly need that level of capital if you want these like, um, penal
screenshots that are exciting for, for engagement.
So, yeah.
Interesting.
One final thought, which I think is really important to point out for people
to be aware of when you hear these types of announcements of people putting X amount of
money into what everything Oh, wow, that's so good that they are putting in their money,
you might think that that is them inputting money and receiving nothing back. Therefore,
they are net bullish on the thing because they're happy to tie their money up there.
That is not always the case. We saw recently some conversations on the timeline about how teams are tying these capital investments
into contractual obligations where it's like, yes, fine, we will put in $25 million into you.
But when it comes to you needing to support for your liquidity and DeFi activity, you're going to
have a contract with us. And you're going to need to pay us
via that contract. When you're trying to strengthen your lending market, we're going to be the
market makers there. When you want help for PR and brand amplification, we've got a team
for that. So like, I'm not saying that that's the case in this specific thing. They've obviously
listed all of these business offerings that they offer as part of the liquid fund. Like these two things
are going next to each other for a reason, right? It's like, yes, we've got 20 million to give you.
By the way, we've also got all these businesses, business parts that you can lean on. I don't know
whether that's a no strings attached, like we offer you this with our money coming in, or if it's,
we're going to offer you this. And it's going to be all my money coming in
and then that money is going to find its way back to ourselves as we offer some of these
products and services. That's the one question I have. I don't know the details on that based
on how it's been described, but I'd keep an eye out for that because I think it does happen
in the industry and I've heard some people talking about that most recently. Guys, that
is very interesting show. I think we kind of went around the economy
a little bit today, spoke about crypto general stuff as well as well as a bit of health maxing
to maybe that's the new standard three part series we do every day now. But guys, we do
this every single day, Monday to Friday, seven AM Eastern time for one hour live on XX video,
YouTube, Apple and Spotify podcast
Two thanks to my legendary co-hosts Legendary and Bread and we will be back with you tomorrow
Thanks so much for joining us. We'll see you again. Same time same place. Have a wonderful day. Bye. Bye
