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Welcome in to another coin. It's chat happy Monday everybody GM GM or as we move into the afternoon good afternoon another busy weekend of news to get to in the crypto world and beyond as always excited to walk through all the headlines with you coming to you live from our Brooklyn studios in New York City on the
We are to think that this is perused at this point, but another bank failure. Another bank failure and maybe one that isn't all that surprising since this one kind of failed in slow motion. Yeah, this one kind of feels like when the bowling ball hits the tens and it's wobbling back and forth and back and forth, but it wobbled for weeks before finally going down over the weekend. Yes, this is one
of those ones where i think it was one of those inevitable moves and of course one of the big players that tried to save it being jp morgan chases the one steps in so that line of course there being first republic bank failing and then having a bc's by regulars which of course is something that we saw in the case of silicon valley bank as well as signature bank
Of course, Abrams, this time around they cannot make the case that crypto was at play here. This is not a crypto bank failure story, which again is kind of what we've been saying for the past few weeks, including in our episodes, digging through the details in what is going on here. But, you know, just to hit the news after
it was, you know, taken over by regulators sold to JP Morgan Chase, another bank that had been part of that collection of banks that injected capital into first republic to kind of try and save this offer as long as it could, but couldn't do it forever. Well, the crypto angle might be we've seen another mid-range bank fail another mid-size
bank fail is that's a it's assets gobbled up by JP Morgan, which has also been one of the beneficiaries a lot of outflows from these midsize banks. So are we reaching a point where the big banks are becoming centralized to a dangerous degree and maybe more people will be interested in decentralized money? Yeah, and you know, this is
One of those things when you contrast it with what's going on in Europe's banking sector, way more concentrated in a few players, the US, for whatever reason, has always been kind of in to the idea of having regional banks and specialized players. Of course, that raises its own risks as we saw with Silicon Valley Bank when it was basically all-levard two startups.
start of founders and when they all head for the exits, you deal with your own concentrated risks there. But I think, you know, just overall to your point, Abrams, pointing out that three of America's four largest bank fillers have now happened in the past two months. And again, not crypto, but we are talking about when it comes to some of the causations here. It's a good segue to focusing on the big event that we got coming up#
this week, which again is the idea of the Fed raising interest rates. And that big decision will be coming up on Wednesday. And as we've discussed in many pieces before again, if you haven't watched any of these, they are on our YouTube page or at coinage.media, the idea of all of these banks basically being caught flat footed when it
comes to interest rate risk. And as the Fed continues to raise interest rates, the idea of all the bonds on the balance sheets of these banks, not being worth as much. And so you wonder if this latest thing is going to give any pause to Fedger Jerome Powell and he steps to the mic and says that yet again, they are raising rates. Oh, so that's
prediction this time. This time around, I think, you know, if you look at it, everyone is essentially predicting, I think it was like an 80% chance last I checked if the Fed is going to go with another 25 BIPs hike. Right. It's 10th rate hike in a row. So I mean, that is kind of the expectations. Yeah. So it's 90% now.
If you look live on the CME tool, a 90% expectation that you're going to get a 25 dips rate hike there, it need to be up above 5%. So the highest that we've seen since when back in 2007 since the Great Recession was kicked off. So I mean, you know, this of course always sparks concerns. Are they moving too fast? It's the fastest
They've hiked rates in 35 plus years. We've seen again another bank failure and who else might be swimming out there with some issues right now. The weird thing is is that first republic again was kind of on the tip of everyone's tongue. And so again, it's not incredibly surprising. So we're not going to spend too much time talking about that one specific bank before
move on to deeper and deeper crypto headlines. But it is one that I think, you know, again, maybe enough other banks have had enough time to kind of start to move these things around. But the main thing that I think everyone in the crypto world is talking about is just the fact that JP Morgan stepped in, JP Morgan's big bank, they are now basically
playing on the same side as regulators. And if you listen to a Jamie Diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan was saying, you definitely didn't want to do this. But he's playing ball. Yeah, because the big bank leaders are realizing that they have to shore up confidence in the entire industry, which is similar to, you know, I always think
back to the efforts we saw of Sam Benjamin-Free, back when lots of people still thought he was a good guy bailing out bankrupt crypto companies because he realized that if the dominoes continued to fall, it would be bad news for the crypto industry. Obviously he himself ended up being one of those dominoes. You got to connect the dots by the way, back to Tara, which you could
good. We talked about in our past episodes is that limited amounts of money backing all these things existed both with Tara and everyone saw exactly how much money they had in their defense fund so to speak. And when you think about the FDIC and how much money is over there, that's of course another thing that is public and everyone knows how much money they've been using
to basically step in and take over these banks. And that's something that a lot of people continue to point out. It's not something that normally gets discussed because it's not something that, you know, normally anyone has to worry about. But increasingly, people are starting to say, "Wait a minute, how much money does the FDIC still have to back some of these banks up?" How much of they spent, not just in first republic, but
signature Silicon Valley bank. At the beginning of the year, they had $128 billion. And now about more than a quarter of that is basically gone. So it'd be like, I don't know, the equivalent would be like, what? When Tara was just starting to see some pressure and they had gone through a little bit of their billions in their defense fund. But this
This is, of course, I think why regulators are still talking about banks having to get, you know, basically giving them fees to re-up that fund. Right. And why Bologna was on stage at consensus saying he still believes in his bet that if these dominoes keep falling, we could see hyperinflation, million dollar bitcoin, not personally my view, but
I'm, you know, props to him for sticking to his guns. I'm refusing to blow it down. He got to give a blow to credit for sticking to his guns. You mean, he's what? I think he has what on a 60 days, just a little over 60 days, right? Well, I'm not sure they've started the time again. I think they're still working on iron out the precise mechanics of the deal, but I've been#
I've been looking for updates on the Twitter feeds of those involved. Regardless, if anyone is in the space and wants to pop up and ask any questions about all this stuff, as always, request the mic because that is one of the things. Abrams and I were not at consensus this time around too much going on over here with Coenage to escape this time.
five Bips rate hike expected this Wednesday. But the questions around what it means for crypto is something else that's catching some eyes because Bloomberg, which by the way, their team pretty well built out, been focusing on crypto for a while. They've been looking at the idea of where Bitcoin goes here. And of course, it's been one of the strongest performing assets on the
year, if not the strongest, when you look at funds. The idea of where it could go. And they're saying, look, the last time we've seen Bitcoin rise for consecutive months, it basically shot up a shit done. And I believe that's the mathematical term. You're looking at maybe $100,000 is the number that they're pointing to an interesting price call to
up from Bloomberg, usually I feel like they're a bit more conservative when it comes to their predictions. But it is based in a historical fact, as Bloomberg puts it in the past decade, four month winning runs in Bitcoin foreshadowed an average surge of 260% over the subsequent year. And 260%
from where we are would put us north of 100k, which is, you know, again, I think you're right. I didn't expect to see Bloomberg really deep, digging deep into, hey, what's going on with Bitcoin here? But I mean, it is not exactly the craziest of things. And the reason why I say not exactly the craziest of things is because we're going to get into Pepe in a second here.
here, which is arguably the crazier of things. But I mean, I don't know. We haven't, and this is kind of why I'm curious if anyone is in here and was that consensus? One of the big things that I guess we've taken our eye off of is investors in terms of institutional demand and excitement. That was all the rage in the bull run before and as much
as we've seen Bitcoin's price appreciate, you don't really see the same enthusiasm among institutional investors who might still be a bit shell-shocked from both the FTX collapse, the idea of block-file-essentialized lenders going down. But then also now, as we've discussed, facing the specter of regulation from Gary Ganser and the SEC
again in terms of how deep down that path they want to go. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised to see the price continue in this range for a bit longer. It just feels like everybody's still feeling the aftershocks from the crash last year. And there are bullish
signal. So like we have Caitlin Long in the show, she mentioned how the happening is coming next year. And if you look at the timelines, generally, a lot of accumulation happens before. So I'm not sure where Bitcoin goes from here. I think it'll be interesting to watch. Yeah. I mean, I'm still, I think most of our audience myself included still remain completely bullish on the idea of Bitcoin.
coin. And certainly if you think about the bottom out process, even John Woo, which by the way, props to John Woo for calling the idea of a bottom forming when we had him on in the winter time, crypto winter in the winter. And he was basically ahead of the game. I think that was back when it was at 17 K, the claims back at 17 K and saying look, the bottoming process is essentially
is talking about the idea of two months being the timeline that Congress could get their act together and put a bill out ahead of Gary Gensler doing what Gary Gensler is trying to do. And you know, the idea of Congress coming together, you never hold your breath on that, especially Republicans and Democrats agreeing on something as perhaps controversial as crypto. And firstly, I have to get
together to fund the government, which is always a really easy process that happens quickly. The government never shuts down. Everybody always comes together, or smoke smiles on their faces. And it's always drawn out. No, it's always, it's always spicy to watch. But in this case, you know, again, the idea of seeing a two month thing might actually work.
In terms of blocking off the SEC going full nuclear and shutting this down, that's one of the headlines we have up on coinage.media right now as well. Meanwhile, the SEC is full steam ahead continuing to charge companies for things they did during the ICO boom of 2017. So if you think you're gotten away with it,
If you're still sleeping well at night, the SEC still might be coming for you. They came this week for Bitcoin ATM operator CoinMe, which has Bitcoin ATMs in 49 states, finding them $4 million in connection with their 2017 ICO. Yeah, Bitcoin, Bitcoin ATMs are some of the dirtier things. I think that exists in this space.
And maybe a whole special could be just coordinated and focused on that, a coinage. That's something to float perhaps. But no, the moment everyone's been waiting for Abrams, the moment that I've been dreading, actually, if you think about it, Pepe discussion is what's top of tongue. And just a few moments ago, if you were on Twitter spaces, if you're on this space because you're addicted to Twitter spaces, you might have#
With CZ in Binance just a few moments ago a couple hours ago And of course the reason why everyone including people in that space are talking about Pepe is because SmartGaCap has completely exploded I think just what a few days ago we were talking in the tens of millions maybe a week ago tens of millions and now technically
And this is where I need to be careful. Marie-Capt crossing half a billion dollars. But most of those coins correct me of a wrong Abrams basically locked up in a few different wallets and liquidity on Uniswap. It's still only just north of three million dollars. So it's not exactly the safest thing to be talking about as if it truly is.
some of the other coins on the top 100 list which it now finds itself on is not exactly the same thing. And you got a lot of people and I want to play the clip from CZ because a lot of people are now asking if there's this much excitement in terms of the price does that mean it's going to get listed on these centralized exchanges anytime soon and here is what CZ says.
I can't comment on any listings or any project that's right. So we actually have street policies that, even if we are talking with a project team, we forbid them disclosing anything about listings, etc. There's a lot of potential accusations or sometimes real leaks.
beforehand and they're causing insider trading all these other problems. So, and I don't comment on specific projects, but I'll comment on meme coins in general. I personally never really understood meme coins that much, to be honest, but there's many successful people who
do seems to understand it, including your mask, everybody else, etc. So we go by users. So if the user community goes, you know, if a coin to have a lot of users trading and wanting and playing with it, etc. Then we will most likely well list it. And if the coin
If it's only last for two weeks, then we probably won't. But no, if it sustains, we probably will. So, yeah, so that's, we view coins from a user perspective. There's no guarantee listing of any specific coin. There's no guarantee not ever listing a specific coin because no coins are developed over time.
So I mean coins I don't really understand it but we list a lot of coins I don't understand I'm not I'm actually deliberately not involved in the by-listing process. So there you go he says he's not involved he says they list coins he doesn't understand but also I guess reveals insight into the metrics that they're looking at and how some of those of course can be game
to Abrams. But I mean, you know, this is one of those ones. Some meme coins do start out as jokes as dogecoin did and then all of a sudden it gains enough users and enough traction to where it justifies maybe if you're a centralized exchange worried about users getting burned, you know, you want to make sure that things aren't going to pan out poorly. Sure.
It looks like Pepe is already experiencing some price action today that's bringing it below that $500 million value. But what's wild is that there's a circulating supply reported of 420 trillion tokens. So the prices have tons of zures before
them. It's almost, I mean, everything about PEFACE seems designed to take off in the meme coin context. You have the 420 trillion 690 billion circulating supply, a lot more different numbers. It's based after a meme that has had, you know, as somewhat of a meme, history
myself. The story of Pepe is fascinating from becoming a comic casual resume. As a meme historian myself, to a favorite character of the alt-right and forechan and a lot of that kind of eduier culture and then the creator attempted to reclaim the character for himself and even has a
whole documentary about it called feels good man I believe yeah but um it's an interesting story I almost think this is revived Pepe as a meme icon because I hadn't heard a lot about Pepe for years but now that's all I see on my crypto twitter timeline it is I mean oh yes so that's the thing is that these things live and die by price and end to be
fair. Again, sometimes I don't know if the people behind these are really in the vein of don't take financial advice situations and I think that's become a catch all cover my ass situation there. But if you look at the roadmap for what Pepe is all about, I think that that's an interesting thing too because they, as all good meme coins do,
They basically say, "Look, this is a coin that has no roadmap and no intrinsic value. Don't buy this thing." I don't think they go as far as saying don't buy this thing. But it is essentially one of those things that doesn't have a lot of promises, explicit promises. And I always respect that. All they have promises for Pepe Merch, Pepe Academy, Pepe Tools, whatever that means.
But another interesting aspect of this story has been how it's recalculized interest in D5 because as you heard from CZ, big exchanges aren't listing this coin yet. But the popularity of Pepe and similar mean coins has led to uniswap breaking its records, uniswap being probably the biggest Dex and D5 right now.
know. And they're hitting all-time highs on users because users need to use these decentralized exchange to capitalize on the meme coins. So if you're trying to protect consumers, I'm not sure how much you'd protect them by regulating major exchanges away from listing these coins. It's just adding more
extra step to let you be able to trade these things. But again, it's back to the whole core of the conversation around what Gary Gensler and the SEC actually does want to do when they claim all what we're doing is about protecting retail investors. When you look at the actual impact of some of these decisions and what they do, generally, don't always line up with the idea of that.
Perfectly lottable goal of protecting investors when of course you can just send them to uniswap and see all this stuff happen It has been fascinating though. I mean the run up is always something that sucks people back in and everyone always says the altcoin boom is where the bull market really takes off and people have been waiting of course Bitcoin's been charging ahead this year we haven't
really seen an altcoin pop to the scale, I don't think. I do kind of feel though that meme coins and altcoins have to be broken down into two separate categories. There's a difference between wanting to improve on, you know, build your own blockchain, create a token with new technology. Like we're seeing from Aptos and Sway, and it's a lot of a
share the theory before them and a meme coin which like is it still a violation of the how we test if there's no common enterprise if you specifically say we're not trying to create anything we just want you to buy this to get to good point I think that's also partially why everyone always does that yeah even I think you know back in the old bull run you had a bunch of reporters who were dropping their own ERC at
20 token as well, just to kind of say, I made a meme coin too. And you know, I mean, why not go after them if they are kind of the same as the meme coin? So I do think you are right. I think there is something there. And that is part of the defense as always. The other coin is meme coin coin coin, probably coin coin, age coin.
It's one one. It's one one on the show today. What did you award yourself a court secretly behind everyone's back? I ordered myself a point because I am accurate in saying that I think the Fed will raise 25 bips this week. Of course, that's a, that's a hand me down. That's a, that's a, that's a shoe in right there.
No, but we want to move on to one of the second to last topics and saving probably the most important for last, which is of course the coinage vote, which you haven't voted yet. On the topic we will be covering this week, you got about six minutes left, always closes Mondays at 1230 Eastern. And the clock is ticking. It was a tight vote in terms of what the episode will be this week after a banger of an
episode last week on Web 3 Music featuring the co-founders of Royal and Sound to the hottest platforms in Web 3 Music. We'll get into what we're covering this week, but Abrams, before we do, want to highlight the fact that the co-founders speaking to co-founders of tornado cash, the developer there, I guess I should say developer on tornado cash, out of prison and
not just out of prison, but tweeting again. >>Well, the first time. >>One of the founders, but one of the developers, and this is something that I did a deep dive a while ago into tornado cash, but I haven't been keeping up with it as much when it comes to the litigation. If you're not aware, tornado cash is a
protocol that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, that's a mixing service, it lets anybody deposit Ethereum and speciala choose a date and a distribution method, and the protocol will then spit out that Ethereum to a different wallet or set of wallet, so it's useful to
The tornado cash developers say preserve privacy on the blockchain. Yes. If you are a high net worth individual, you don't want people knowing that you have millions of dollars in crypto. You have the right the tornado cash developers say to send it to a wallet that's not publicly linked to you. It breaks the chain between the sending wallet and the receiving wallet so you don't know who controls it.
Obviously, this is also very useful for criminals. We've seen plenty of hackers, including the North Korean state sponsored hacking group Blasers steal tons of money from Axi Infinity or from other projects and then funnel it through tornado cash in an attempt to throw investigators off their scent. Though in the US,
people have often had problems not obscuring the blockchain records, but obscuring everything else. Like there was a case about a year ago where two young younger than me, NFT serial ruggers would promote a new project, get art from Fiverr.
FBI actually arrested them the day before they were about to launch a new scale. And these scammers had used tornado cash to obscure the activity on the blockchain, but when they tried to cash out through Coinbase, they were using accounts that were linked to them. They were accessing their discord server. - Named for an account from the same IP address.
So the government is still able to subpoena these tech companies to discover all of the information. So the blockchain might be safe, but all the ways you interact with it might not be. So it's really interesting to see how tornado cash, which you can't really shut down without shutting down the entire Ethereum blockchain.
And also the idea of maybe not everyone being a criminal using it. Still good people who like you said, just
want to hide maybe where their stuff is or exactly what they're doing since it's all public and there are other things that are being built to offer that maybe a little bit less criminal things that are being offered to do that because of course with any money mixer you can have some bad people use your stuff to well yeah criminals love using cash because cash is completely untrue.
Yep, but not everybody who uses cash is a criminal. That is true Abrams, and it's always we drink when we hear that on this podcast slash show slash spaces slash video We always do that, but it is important to note when he was tweeting because Alex Pertsyff the developer we're talking about again did take it to Twitter after he's finally walking free for now
and said, sorry, I was AFK, away from controller for a while. What did I miss? Which I enjoyed. You know, we haven't seen a lot of pizzazz on Twitter since Dokecoin also left the platform because he's in Montenegro in prison right now. But, you know, it's a little bit of swagger coming back from a man who was in prison in
maybe potentially facing charges around all this stuff too. So that's nice to see, I think, maybe for the entire crypto community, not just Alex. Yeah, it looks like there's an upcoming hearing in that case later this month. So we will keep an eye on that and report back. Yes, that is something to constantly keep track of because it does have rather large implications for everything in this space.
And it comes to privacy. And again, I think maybe potentially where some of the tides go for congressmen and women who are getting cozier and cozier to crypto, at least if you think about House Republicans, what we saw from the hearing not too long ago. But that does bring us abrums to the most important, maybe piece of the space when we have our community members.
We're going to go to the coinage.media right now. You'll notice a totally revamped site in terms of what we are doing and expanding beyond just Twitter space.
cases and our weekly YouTube video. But now to kind of being a truly community-owned crypto outlet with stories decided by our NFT holders with ownership truly controlled by our NFT holders. And it has been interesting to see some of these things coming in and some of the stories that
people have been submitting to tell us to cover. And that, of course, is where we arrive at this vote in neighborhoods. It was pretty close up until basically just now when it closed because there were three topics that everyone was voting on. And as we were talking about in our discord, Pepe has a lot of people excited as we already discussed. People like the idea of digging
to some of those things, but it wasn't that one. No, it was not. Looking like finance and CZ is what we're going to be covering this week. And our producer Nate is super happy to hear that. Yeah. And that is one that I think, you know, a lot of people in the community have been talking about. And clearly, I think every time that those spaces go on, I'm
We've seen that with Brian Armstrong. We had seen it before with the inroads that SPF were able to make in terms of trying to get responsible regulation through. And then you can see the downsides of any time you have a centralized figure in the space.
and what is supposed to be a decentralized economy, someone as big as that having that much control. And I think that recently has become one of the things that the ecosystem has really started to harp on and focus on and something that we'll be highlighting this week because, you know, as we play it, the only person we played on this whole space is CZ in Binance.
So many titans have gone down that I think it's important to look at the ones who are left standing with an additional eye and additional layers, scrutiny and ask. Is this person here because they're the savviest and the smartest or because they're the most ruthless? What's the story behind their eyes and how have they been able to hold on to power whereas so many others have lost it?
Yes, and entirely true. And if you are listening to space and you're saying that's not the story I would have gone with. Well, guess what? You can now join our community and weigh in on all these things if you don't have a coin in NFT yet. Those will be made available starting to roll out. But May 8th is the first chance to get your hands on one and own. Come on. What we're doing here at coinage,#
experiment goes unlike traditional coverage of the past community owned and weighed in on but Abrams that is that is the topic we're going to be chasing here and all these things kind of tied together really do get us to where we are after I don't know it's wild to think that it's been less than a year since FTX went down block five went down
all these things. Gemini earned by the way. Still going back and forth with Genesis trying to get people their money back. Celci is still trying to figure it all out. Tiffany Fong running around shouting at Alex Mishinsky left and right. I mean, none of this stuff's really been resolved. Yeah, Binance was about to buy Voyager and then decided not to. And now that's how I'm holding I believe. Yeah, so it's#
wishwash. And you do wonder how long that hangover is going to persist, as we said, how much some of this stuff just keeps a cap on thing and we trade sideways until the happening. But that is, again, basically the story and has been the story for the last few months. So at least with a new look,
time around. We'll be digging into seizing and financing. Appreciate everyone who voted on that this week to get us closer to the most important stories to cover as always. That's what we're trying to do here at Coinage. But Abrams, that's pretty much everything we had covered. This is the first time that we really wanted to dig into these topics. Since we've restructured
the site. And if you do have an existing Quintage NFT, feel free to go there now and submit new articles for us to have on the site as well as new story ideas for us to highlight and move forward. I think that that's an exciting thing because we haven't had that before, April. Yeah, absolutely. We'll also be sending out a newsletter later today.
Yeah, we're on Substack now. We're on Substack now, which is an important thing to highlight. In addition to all the spaces, in addition to the YouTube, and of course, in addition to the new revamped site that everyone should go check out. I think that's going to do it for us here, though, on a shorter than usual Monday, coin in space. I appreciate everyone tuning in.
And as always, thank you again to our community owners for voting in on what we should be covering this week and flagging all the stories as usual. For Zach Abrams, I'm Zach Usman, the host of Quenich. Thanks again everybody, have a good rest of your Monday and we will see you on the spaces tomorrow as we continue to roll out our NFTs. With Big Spaces plan for Tuesday and Thursday, chat soon.