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Market is quiet ahead of American Liberation Day
Recorded: April 2, 2025 Duration: 0:58:49Space Recording
Short Summary
Circle's IPO filing and its financial ties with Coinbase underscore significant fundraising efforts and strategic partnerships in the crypto space. The NFT market shows growth with projects like SteadyT achieving notable price increases, while the Guns gaming token experiences a decline. Additionally, the trend of companies adding Bitcoin to their treasuries continues to gain traction.
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 how to make some or a lot of money on the internet loaded up for discussion today. We have the big news for today. We're looking forward to American Liberation Day. The market is preparing for Trump's tariff plans. So we will be discussing what those might be what we know so far what the
significance uh could be um stay tuned for that we've got circle filing for ipo as well revealing
it pays more than half of its revenue to coinbase as distribution partner interesting details coming
out there we'll break that down too on the nft side we've got steady teddy selling out on bearer
chain 12 barraments 9x up to 106 bearer floor price fun to see some nfts
popping off so we'll touch on that towards the end of the show today we've also got the latest
on price action on crypto and nfts plus a general discussion of what we think is going on at the
moment i've got legendary bread and adam product lead at pirate nation and proof of play with us
today cannot wait to get into it we are ready ready. But just a reminder, friends, before we do,
nothing that we say here is financial advice.
This market is very risky and we don't know anything for sure,
no matter what we say or how intelligent we sound sometimes.
With that out of the way, legendary.
It's Wednesday.
It's the 2nd of April.
How are you doing?
How are you feeling?
MGM full house. I love the Wednesdays. I feel like the pre-show discussion on the Wednesday
is typically the three of us nerding about AI and either you, B, or myself being aware of the fact
that the show needs to start at some point. But we could probably go on for hours and hours and
talk about our AI stack, which is the thing that Brett is very aggressively inquiring about.
Like Adam basically just arrived in StreamYard and Brett goes like, Jim, what's your AI stack?
He wants to know everyone's AI.
In fairness, he started it because he's spinning up applications like every second day, apparently.
He's like, oh, by the way, which this is the power of it all, right?
By the way, I've created two things since the last time we've talked.
How many have you created, Brad?
Yeah, we have to start tracking our contributions to the world.
How many AI applications have you spun up in the last seven days?
Oh, it's less than me.
I keep spamming my friends with the stuff it's like i
made this i made this like when do you have time to this like it just does it for you also i don't
sleep very much those are the two answers to that question so we're playing the game like i did it
too like i like thanks to actually legendary because he told me about that bolt new um ai
which does a lot of
shit for you so it's literally just like you know someone vibe coded something on timeline i was like
okay i'm gonna go query this thing and see if i can just spin up my own version boom done in like
20 minutes and everyone else it's we're still in the phase that no one really understands that
these tools are available so everyone's like oh you're a wizard what do you holy shit you're so
fast at this like yeah man i can write some sentences no big deal what do you think um because look i i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily say any of us are well maybe
red and adam definitely more on the coding side but you know we're typically busy with a bunch
of other stuff too if this stuff gets to us and is like it came kind of captivating us in this
particular way something is clearly going on right now We spoke about it a little bit last week, Adam,
what's like for the audience who are maybe not in as deep as us, what's the key kind of takeaway?
I know we spoke about it a little bit last week, but what are you feeling now with all of this
AI stuff going on? What's the key thing you're feeling at the moment?
I wrote a tweet about this a couple of days ago, like working through my journey. I think
the key takeaway for me is that the cost of an employee who is kind of just doing what they're
told and they're given a spec or they're creating a design or they're coming with ideas. I think
the value of that type of employee is going to go down dramatically. And the type of employee who
can just do all the things themselves, whether it's code, fake quote, I should say, or vibe
code, design and ideate is going to be much more powerful. And I think the types of employees
who are going to thrive at companies are going to be more a go-getter, which has always been
the case. But now you can collapse your team down pretty dramatically. Like the fact that I can
build anything that I want so far, now granted, when I show my CTO at the company, when I built,
he's like, there's definitely some security holes here that I was like, without a doubt,
there's no guardrails. Like my private key is in there. Like there's something bad that I've done that I don't realize. So there need to be better guardrails around all these things.
I'm certainly making very junior dev mistakes, but I can take something from idea to testable
under an hour. That is a superpower, right? Even way less than an hour, actually. And so I think
the market is going to value creative individuals more than ever.
It's going to value the idea more than ever. Execution will always matter, but the execution
risk I think is going to be diminished on just like the building of the thing, whatever that
thing may be. So I think creativity is going to be the thing that is going to be hard to mimic
for now. Obviously, I think if we get to this agi future
um you know it'll figure it out but i think for now like creatives are safe
interesting brett did you want to come in there yeah i think maybe just like the kind of reiterating
what what fern is talking about there and then kind of what started this whole conversation for
me or what made me ask about the stack stuff right like we i talked about what i listened to the empire podcast you know as
yano head of blockworks right talking about what he's seeing uh throughout his his um throughout
his company right he's like i have a bunch of employees shittany creatives like 4o came out
with just chat gpt's name so it started the whole ghibli wave and he's like him being obsessed with um
like even just image generation from like ads like marketing presentations whatever he can he
quickly tell how much of a level up he can do and what this means to his and his staff less and less
so about like oh i can now wipe out 30 of my people and more about like my people can now 10x
right like they can go further we can achieve more we can do whatever and then that branched into the stigma that is associated to
using these tools today still where he's like i can see clearly that like a portion of my my employees
are like hesitant to use this because they think it cheapens their work they think it you know
removes some of their utility like you know there's still some some hesitation there and he's like the other 30 or x amount are like clearly clearly leveling up like they're they're
going crazy and he's like i want those people he's like and like so whenever i get stuff that
comes to me from the people that are um still afraid to use some of this he's like i'll just
straight up tell them like but run this through chat dpt like go like go ai this for a little bit and then come
back um and you can actually draw parallels to that from um there's a i forget i forget who he
referenced that said it but like like the manager's tactic was always like whenever someone comes and
brings them their things like is this your best work is this your best work and then they'd often
go like ah okay i'll be back i'll be back they'll run off and then come back. And after like the third or fourth time,
they're like, okay, yeah, this is my best work.
And now instead of like explicitly saying that,
you're like, did you run this through AI yet?
Do that first and then come back to me.
Yep.
We are going to start experimenting
with cold outreach for our VRF products
and for our B2B products.
So we've historically just been, you know, our industry
contacts, which are very deep, but we're like, we want to experiment. And so I've never done cold
outreach emails before. When I was in college, I actually did cold calls for, I was like a selling
venture debt. And so I did that for two summers and I like called people, I was like, Hey, like
you're a Sequoia back company. Do you need any venture debt? So I have a for two summers and I called people. I was like, hey, you're a Sequoia-backed company. Do you need any venture debt?
So I have a lot of experience with cold calling and just being told no.
But we're doing cold emails.
I haven't really ever experimented with that.
So I had ChatGPT write up best practices and write me.
I fed it like a white paper for Pirate Nation, like everything you could possibly know about us.
And it gave me the best possible emails. emails like here are three variants that are going to
kill and here's why like they're optimized like they're using the best practices from these
companies so i'm gonna start testing them and then i'll feed the results back and you know
we'll just get that loop going so i don't just make stupid pizza apps i also use it for work
i'm sure you're going to use those cold emails for something pizza related at some point,
Adam. So, uh, I got to stay on brand, you know, I know, I know. Um, funky your hand is raised.
Welcome to the stage. Give us a quick take care on the AI stuff. If we get into the headlines
and price action, get everyone up to speed.
No, I'm so glad you guys brought this up as the former educator of 20 years and my side work doing the ardent blockchain education stuff.
I often get into conversations about AI and every educator thinks about this the wrong way.
And what you guys are discussing is a shift in mindset and reframing this.
I said it to them all the time.
For one, it's a learning engine.
If a kid goes and approaches AI and they're remotely autodidactic, they're going to ask it questions and they're just going to spin that flywheel.
And Adam's point about creative people,
and I said this to many other people,
we need to be giving kids these tools
and teaching them how to prompt
because it's going to give them
a competitive edge in the world.
The people who are going to succeed in the economy
are those exactly like Adam said,
who are creative.
And this gets back to something Jack Moss said
like a decade ago.
He said, we need to stop focusing
on the knowledge economy
because anything a machine can do,
machines are going to do better than humans.
We need to focus on what makes us human
and that's creativity, that's emotions,
that's learning how to play, how to be social,
taking all those things and using AI
to ramp up that productivity.
Absolute game changer.
Love the conversation.
One quick note before we get into the price action on that
because you like that funky.
I talked to a law professor at King's College in London who is focusing on AI, on ethics, on blockchain. And the way he approaches stuff is
to integrate AI, to make the PhD students think about the limits and the capacity of what AI can
and cannot do is he takes a specific case. He has an essay written by an AI,
and each student gets an individual essay by the AI,
by chat GPT 4.5 in this case,
and they are tasked to review that, to find the flaws,
to find what's good, what's not good about it,
to basically approach it from the other way around to actively take something I've written
and try to find and puncture holes in it
and understand how the LLM
works. And by doing that, integrating AI in a way more meaningful way than being like, oh,
we're just going to ban everything that's submitted by OpenAI or any other LLM.
Very, very interesting stuff. So the people who are going to be successful are going to be those
who are most creative. Imagine what they're going to be like when they're liberated too. We're going
to be talking about American Liberation Day in just a little bit. Before we get there, let's get into
the price action. As usual, starting with the majors, we've got Bitcoin up a percent at 84k.
We've got ETH flat at 1.8. XRP down just a percent at 2.1. BNB down a percent as well as 600.
Sold down a percent to 126. Not a lot going on on the majors.
I think everyone is just waiting for the information we're going to get later. It's 4pm
Eastern time, the announcements around Liberation Day later. Getting into the meme coin side of
things though, we've got Doge pretty much flat as well at 17 cents. Pepe's down a couple of percent.
Trump is up a percent. Bonk's up three fart coins up just
two percent spx down five percent pengu's down a couple um usually i can see down down single
figures on um the meme coin side to be honest i think as i said most people are waiting uh today
for the deeper news we're going to get later getting into the headlines themselves uh crypto
is flat ahead of American Liberation Day.
Market prepares for Trump's tariff plans.
We'll be breaking down those at the moment
and what information we know so far
and what the implications might be.
We've got Circle filing for an IPO,
revealing it pays more than half of its revenue
to Coinbase as distribution partner.
Legendary will be breaking down
some of the interesting details there.
And then finally on the NFT side, I've got SteadyT out on bearer chain a nice 9x for minters nice to see
people win and nft projects letting the community win um i'm looking forward to
maybe we'll have a scroll of the art towards the end of the show there
pretty interesting stuff uh some notable price action the guns gaming token we spoke about
yesterday has dropped another 21 uh after criticism for changing investor terms i don't think it's
necessarily because the criticism it's just the type of the market and the sell pressure at the
moment not enough demand i guess uh that came out a billion ftb now down to 580 uh also you had
jupiter down another seven percent down almost% on the month after announcing buybacks.
It's down 30% on the week.
A lot of tokens might be down in similar regions,
but I picked that one out in particular
because there's so much hype around them buying their token back.
And everyone was talking about how it's so bullish
to be buying your token back.
That's what they announced,
but this kind of market is not saving protocols
that are doing that necessarily. So i just wanted to point that out and uh legendary is there anything we
need to know on the nft side of things some huge crypto punk sales here absolutely yeah the crypto
punk sales are definitely the most interesting thing that happened yesterday apart from the
bearament which we'll touch on either way we've seen a bit of a pink wave, all pink, CryptoPunk, pink hair, other pink trades
selling for 100 ETH.
And we've also seen
the two pilot helmets
selling for a total of 200
something ETH combined.
Apart from that,
pretty quiet on the NFT side of things.
As you said, ETH is very flat.
Everyone and everything
is waiting for Liberation Day.
But PUNK's not only doing well in terms of the major sales we just pointed out.
Also, the floor price is holding up extremely strong at 42.6 ETH.
And at the current ETH price, that is an 80k floor.
Okay, good stuff.
As you said, we're getting into the Liberation Day tariff conversation a little bit later,
along with the Circle IPO.
I think those are two biggest headlines.
We've got some interesting conversations to have before that, though.
Just in some other news that I think it's important to note, Tether announced 8,888
Bitcoin buy in Q1, bringing its total holdings to $7.8 billion worth of Bitcoin.
That's the sixth largest amount in a single wallet you've
got gamestop raising 1.5 billion in convertible notes to buy bitcoin banic registered a bnb etf
joining its etfs for bitcoin eth soul and avax blackrock has been approved in the uk to operate
as a crypto asset firm and offer its i shares bitcoin etp a couple other things from around
the space shape announced the shape claim for artists who deployed a contract on Ethereum L1 via Manifold.
So if you're an artist, that's kind of interesting to note.
Shape is this kind of art focused L2.
We worked with them some time ago, kind of doing some really cool artist interviews.
They've got some of the top artists on their platform.
And finally, fund contributors to put the dog without on the las vegas sphere
will be refunded um people were asking where those funds went for quite a long period of time
apparently you're going to get the funds back i don't know what people prefer getting the funds
back or would they have rather the funds to see the dog with the hat on the sphere um but that is
that is the situation so that's the roundup to get up smooth everything that is taking place before we get into the main stuff um i might actually
just direct the conversation a little bit here because actually no uh legendary is there anything
you want to pick out there before we get into a couple of things i want to talk about yeah real
quick on the btc buying by companies
that is becoming a stronger and stronger trend and i do like to occasionally revisit bitcoin
treasuries as a website to just keep a bit of a broader look on how that is evolving so the last
30 days we've seen another five entities adding btc to the balance sheets that obviously this website is aware of. That's 173
companies now, roughly half of them 89 being publicly traded once. And the total amount of
BTC in treasuries is now up to 3.15 million BTC. And that figure doesn't sound a lot, but in my
opinion, it is a lot is up 0.7% over the last 30 days. So 1% is 30,000 Bitcoin.
That's like 20,000 Bitcoin that have been added over the last month to company treasuries,
which is pretty significant. Interesting. What do you make of,
just a quick one here, what do you make of the criticism of the company buying, which is that they're not significant enough companies to influence anyone else?
Like they're kind of fringe companies, potentially.
They're not necessarily the prestigious companies.
Is this something which has to happen for anyone to take notice?
Is it supposed to be the big companies?
Adam, do you have a view on that that's like i guess the one criticism that exists there or does this have to
take place first before the other people follow they have to follow their own uh processes you
always have to have the early adopters and so i guess if it's going to be strategy and game stop
as the first couple i mean uh block Block, where I used to work,
also jumped in the ring a while ago.
They were like a pretty early buyer, and then Tesla also.
I think that you'll see more companies start doing this over time.
Right now, it feels still on the fringe,
but I wouldn't be surprised if you see more mainstream companies,
maybe some large financial institutions start doing this as well.
And as far as what needs to like,
for the dam to break,
I think you need more like legitimate name companies
to do it.
Like when El Salvador started buying Bitcoin,
it was like kind of making fun of El Salvador a little bit.
But if when the US started buying Bitcoin
or at least not selling Bitcoin, I should say, that's a very different signal, right?
For sure.
Either way, the Tether business model is just absolutely outstanding.
But we'll have some interesting data to contrast that with a little bit later.
Legendary will be showing the Coinbase IPO information where they revealed some of their costs and i think it's quite stark that they are not running well you know they might be
their business model is not operating as efficiently and accumulating uh wealth as
tethers is so we'll dive into that in just a little bit the thing i wanted to get to first
was just a quick point on price action. I put this tweet out earlier today
where I just said like the market is so ruthless at the moment. So like thinking about price action,
I was looking at Jupiter. I don't know how I found myself on Jupiter's token, but
Jupiter's down almost 50% in the month. It's down 30% on the week. And I just thought like it was, it must've been no
more than 30 days ago, maybe even less where everyone was talking about hype and buybacks.
Everyone was talking about revenue generating protocols. The only way to have anything valuable
is if you're making money and potentially on top of that, you have to be buying your token back in order to justify your valuation, to create demand. But it seems like that's not necessarily the case. And I said here,
just when you think you figured something out, people really prioritize revenue generating
protocols. People are really prioritizing buybacks. Jupyter's down 50%, Hype's down 30%.
And the interesting maybe cognitive dissonance i noticed is when i posted that i think
a lot of people jumped to the idea that this is because of their connection with kelsea and
connection with meteora and the whole libra scandal and i don't know if we've necessarily
heard the end of end of that um but you know that connection maybe is tainted Jupiter in some way.
That was the suggestion.
It's like, if you just look at the rest of the market, I think everything is down pretty
colossally.
So I think we do this thing quite a lot where we, after the fact and after the price action,
we just take some events and then attribute it directly to some events when actually in
this market, I'm still pretty clear in my, in my mind,
we're entirely trading along the president's tweets and percept and takes whatever he says
today. Again, we will move in step with that. I think it's very hard to break out of that in the,
in the kind of short term. Curious to hear your guys' takes on that. Do you have any thoughts on this
kind of short to medium term action and the just general environment we find ourselves
in at the moment?
I think it's just so indicative of the narrative follows price stuff. We got excited about
something and because we were excited about it and because price looked good for a minute
and maybe it was a fresh narrative, maybe not a new narrative but a fresh narrative like it was
just didn't have uh you know a couple weeks slash months of conversation around it we were able to
bull ourselves up on it and then you know ultimately people seeking money sought money
elsewhere because they wanted a new narrative that's just how a lot of this stuff works market is ruthless it's
absolutely ruthless um as a company you know that has a live token i can tell you it is
not been the most fun and entertaining time to have like a token in the market um red guy godspeed when when your time comes um the market's just like not very
forgiving right now and i don't even know if you're doing all the things the market wants whatever the
market may be i don't think you can overcome the macro i don't think you can overcome the bearishness of just ct in general and like the
trader mindset well i i think that's exactly that was exactly my point so i think people were trying
to attribute maybe jupiter's you know price action to some things that are actually more concrete
but you look at you look at the other stuff and everything's been hit if not as hard like just as
hard potentially someone pointed out to me for
example and this kind of i don't know this this just missed my radar that i'm just going to share
my screen quickly the first time i think kaito which you know people are super bullish on people
think it's a great product people like it it's not it's it's now beneath the price that it came
out at came out at a billion fDV, so those early sellers bred
who felt terrible for a period of time because they saw the airdrop double in price or triple
in price almost. I mean, this went up to almost 270, and now it's back down to, well, it is for
now down to 92 cents. It's down 10% on down 30 on the week and 50 on the 30 days that that
those those metrics track exactly jupiter's basically is my point and it's got nothing to do
with the the issues that jupiter has been facing this is just the market being the market at the
moment um my lazy ass is vindicated that's all i'm gonna say here is like there's no
way i was gonna track this price action i had already forgotten about it's like all right
position's established i'll just kind of let it ride uh i'm writing i don't know how much i was
like 30 of my stuff to zero it would appear um so here we go no you're not it's not that it's not
that bad but like when when people in our community are like,
you should do more things to make the price go up,
which we don't do as a company,
I actually don't know what we could do.
Yeah, could we line up a shady market maker
and just market by a million dollars?
Okay, sure, we can commit market manipulation.
But leaving that aside
they're just every the the meta now is down and maybe the meta will be up at some point in time
but right now everything just wants to go down and there's nothing you could do you just have to
like embrace accept continue on if you're building something, create value. Hype is still doing a million
dollars of buybacks. They're still doing tons of revenue, not impacting the token price
anyway. There's not that many protocols that are doing a million or millions of dollars
of revenue a day. It doesn't exist. My point is I don't think it matters what you do, what
narrative you fit into. Guns was supposed to save web3 gaming
but if you give you know 80 of the circulating supply to binance what do you think is going to
happen yeah you think these binance stakers are going to do you think they're going to hold it
it's free money for them yeah they're going to sell money what happens when you sell 80
of circulating supply that is tightly controlled you get a chart like what you see yeah definitely difficult situation
talking about what else you can do kaito founder even uh bought what was it 1.4 million dollars
token adam so that there's always that option you're gonna yeah and then what happened it
still went down yeah exactly so they just wasted 1..4 million that they could have used on
product development or hiring or
growth. It was
his private money in his defense though.
It wasn't company funds. It was his own money.
That's even worse. He could have been $1.4 million
richer.
I think
the main thing is independent from the market that
for most of the tokens
you just don't need to hold them.
They don't really do anything.
And you speculate on the future utility.
Take a token like Kaito, cool product.
They will build future utility.
But right now, you don't need the Kaito token.
Yes, you build up a nicer square on your profile and you can vote with that.
But if the market's down and the token doesn't have any immediate use case where I want to hold this token because it gives me access to something I really, really want to have, then you're going to sell it off.
And even if that's the case, which used to be the case for AIXPT with the terminal, the market goes down and the hype is leaving.
holding $600,000 or $300,000 worth of,
no, $600,000 almost,
because it was almost at a bill,
like $600,000 worth of AIXPT token
to have access to the terminal.
At one point, you will have to ask yourself the question,
is this tool really that great
that I'm having like half a mil deployed and accessing it?
So even if you have a token that has this immediate utility,
if it goes up and up and up,
at one point, the worth of your token
will outweigh the utility it gives to you
and you will again have the incentive to sell it.
So it's very hard to keep that up sustainably
and especially in market conditions like these.
I'll say one thing.
Despite the Web3 gaming narrative is dead,
I do believe that there is a use for gaming
tokens, like with a strong utility case. However, it requires a large number of DAU.
If you have a large number of DAU and you use that as a way to purchase items in game,
like speaking of Pirate Nation or any other companies that do this, I do think it can work.
If you have a constant buy pressure, but it requires enough people to want to play your game
and it requires enough people to want to purchase the things that are in your game.
And if you remove all the friction from token purchasing, I think it actually is an interesting
model. But since Axie, I don't think we've seen a game that's had a breakout number of DAU
where you can meaningfully move the metrics.
Pixels had a million DAU on point.
Maybe they still do.
But those are the only two games that have really broken seven-figure DAU.
I think this is one of the massive challenges
that people are completely underestimating.
If you look at the traditional economy of a country,
you want to hit your 2% inflation.
Deflation is bad because otherwise companies, investors won't invest.
They will just wait for a point where it's just worth investing again
because there is no deflation happening.
And you want to have like this 2%.
But then you have a game where you have like millions and millions of users.
Say you really have this MMORPG where everyone wants to live in.
You also don't want the
underlying currency to be like hyperinflationary in a sense that either everything gets devalued or
the opposite of that nobody can afford anything because based in dollar terms it's so expensive
to buy the token to do that and then you need to fine-tune the tokenomics and the pricing
to solve for that that you on the one hand have people who
want to see the price go up but on the other hand you want to have a like sustainable in-game economy
that works for people without playing a game and needing to pay i don't know ten thousand dollars
for your first pickaxe to even be able to wander off to the first mine and start start working
and it's always so hard to do economy and inflation models for
real countries and then building that on top
of a fun game and having
the challenge that you have those
two competing interests of keep
a healthy economy. People
want to see price go up. I think
a lot of people are underestimating how difficult that
is to solve for.
The quote-unquote right way to do
this is you constantly balance
the price and you fix it to
USD or whatever native currency you're
trying to fix towards because you're right,
you can't have a $9,000
pickaxe in a game.
It has to be whatever the price point you want.
It's golden.
That is true.
You have to constantly be moving prices around to adjust for for the token
price if you do if you do go that route yeah complicated things to balance but as we said
my point initially when bringing this up is just like this is a market-wide thing going on at the
moment and a lot of teams are just having to process that and figure out the best way forward it's not specifically one person or team that's affected it's kind of going uh market-wide so
um that's just why i wanted to bring that up i wanted to bring up one other thing before we hit
the liberation day stuff funky if you're uh available now i know you shared the crypto
uh arthur hayes article that just came out do you want to give
us a quick TLDR of what we need to know from his perspective I think the something from from what
I saw is that he's predicting things to turn around pretty nicely towards the end of the year
but do you want to just give us that TLDR on why that might be the case yeah sure and you know
obviously I love reading Crypto
Hayes and sharing his articles when they come on his essays. And I want to like kind of apologize
to the man because I remember talking smack when he was saying that the election was going to be
a sell the news event and maybe the knock on effects took a little bit longer and they didn't
probably go as low because I think he predicted a $70,000 Bitcoin. But obviously he was right,
right?
So that was the first thing I want to start off with.
The TLDR on this one, which is called the BBC,
and I will say I think Hayes is at his best
when he writes some really hilarious satire,
and that's what this one opens up with,
where it's Powell going to see sort of like a therapist
and explaining and complaining about beset and what's happening,
and that's what the BBC is.
And I'll let you read it to find out what BBC stands for as an initialism but either which way the
TLDR is effectively that they in what's really interesting is you go and look at
sort of the past where he brings up this analogy of what happened between I
think the guy was Arthur Bush and then like our and then it became like Paul
Volcker after that and we're facing the same thing that we faced in the 60s, which is effectively the Treasury is forcing the Fed to make its move.
And the Fed is not nearly as independent as we like to think it is.
It does get involved and mired in politics.
And effectively, Jerome Powell is at a place where he has to do something to eliminate the quantitative tightening.
And of course, there's going to be a lot of financial chicanery that's going to do this.
And a lot of that's alluded to in the satire. But the net effect is what we've been talking
about for a long time. Trump is effectively forcing the economy, trying to run it into
the ground so that way we can redo the rates and get more debt at a cheaper price effectively.
So we're already starting to see that come down. There's a couple of interesting charts because as long as we can continue to keep the
growth above what the interest rate is, we're staving off sort of that debt implosion and it's
going to take longer. It's not like we're going to completely eliminate it, but the net effect is
that ultimately we should see up until the right resume before the end of the year.
You already see this now.
If you guys are paying attention to global liquidity, you know, and that has sort of a lag in terms of how long it affects risk on assets.
Global liquidity is up.
If all these things play out as Hayes predicts, and it seems like there's really no, like Powell is in a corner.
And as long as he does these things, we're going to resume up into the right.
And especially because China is going to then have to devalue the yuan to keep up with what's
happening in the U.S.
And there's just all of these dominoes will start to fall.
So ultimately, you know, he's predicting upwards of $250,000 per Bitcoin.
By the end of the year, Maelstromstrom his fund is already positioning and has been buying in small clips anywhere between you know the 70s where it kind of bottomed out and up to 90k he thinks the
level that we're on right now at about 85 is going to be interesting if you look at like quarterly
closes this was actually very bullish even though we're looking at again crypto twitter is so short
term mindset you know they just always focus
on the next few weeks or a few months.
And yes, we're down below, like, say the 30, 50, 100 day moving averages.
But when you look at the quarterly close and everything else, like it's a very bullish
setup. I mean, heck, even English, you know, he was Mr.
Bearish in the modern market discord and of course, Mr.
Permable. And he's even saying it's starting to look better.
Right. So I think that now we're starting to see this turnaround. I really think
it's just a matter of waiting it out. Of course, we're probably going to have to go through that
summer lull. Right. But I think this next quarter will be indicative of what's going to happen.
And some of these things starting to play out where the treasury will have to effectively get
rid of some of the liquidity. It's going to loosen up the conditions. I mean, the Fed rather,
and you know, the debt ceiling, how that stuff plays out. He does give a warning. However, the last thing
I'll say is this, is that of course you could have some giant macroeconomic bad thing happen,
like a black swan, right? That maybe there's a war that breaks out or whatever that may be
that could knock all this off course, but it's looking very good. Highly recommend reading the
essay. It was a really funny one. I laughed a lot. Amazing summary, Funky. Really appreciate your additional context there. That's
so, so helpful for getting just a bit of an additional take on where things might be going.
I guess the only thing that I would push back on, because I've seen various people push back on,
this idea that it's all so intentional and that everything is happening because they're
driving the economy down on purpose the thing that i've seen some pretty smart people say in
contrast to that is something along the lines of like no american president has the mandate
to wreck the economy um and i mean maybe this in some way does still feed into what you're saying is because
if you were to attempt it, then you would need to correct yourself pretty fast because
it's not a path that you have a mandate for, for very long.
Like even if people might be pro, uh, cuts pro ending certain wars pro doing various
things, if it's going to tank the economy at the same time,
the argument is that you do not have the mandate for that. So that's the only thing I'd say. We've
got to keep it moving because I think this next headline probably feeds into what you were
discussing, like, well, this is all kind of pending macro stuff. And obviously, one of the biggest
macro events is taking place later today. This is the news of Liberation Day.
Today is Liberation Day.
It's April the 2nd, 2025, the day the markets have been waiting for because of Trump's aggressive
rhetoric around tariffs.
This is important because ever since Trump started to posture that tariffs would be on
the cards alongside his domestic policy, trying to cut government waste and the ongoing uncertainty with war in Ukraine. Markets have given up almost all their gains, which kicked
off in full swing after Trump's election victory. And so this is the thinking.
It's called Liberation Day because this administration believes it's time to liberate
itself from what they describe as unfair trade practices, like high tariffs on US exports and
reliance on foreign goods imposed by other nations which have been undermining American economic
power.
And the thinking is that by imposing reciprocal tariffs, because the point is that these tariffs
already exist against the United States, so why should they not also be reciprocated?
And so by doing that and some other trade measures, Trump claims the US will reclaim
its financial sovereignty and restore prosperity to American workers and industries which have suffered whilst other workers and industries have prospered.
So that is the argument. Many have taken the other side of this. Many suggested that tariffs may raise business costs, slow US growth and pressure equities, which is a lot of what we're experiencing already as the
markets are anticipating some of these things coming to fruition. The key detail, which you
should know, which was released yesterday by Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, was this. He
said that they said that Trump will announce a maximum tariff ceiling today, offering countries
a chance to negotiate reductions. So the argument is that this
flexibility could temper market shocks. But ultimately, the uncertainty continues there,
right? Because markets like certainty, but we're not necessarily going to get it if people can
negotiate and that kicks off a whole round of negotiations. So that's probably what my view is.
It sounds like there will be a maximum tariff rate however you know maybe that
quells some of the fears because it means that it's look this is not going to be as bad as you
think there's going to be an opportunity for people to negotiate however that does not provide
the market with a certainty it likes because there is this optionality for everyone to negotiate it
down and as such i don't think this is going to be the definitive day everyone thinks it's going
to be i think we'll have some reaction but we'll continue to chop
once we realize there is no definitive answer um but ultimately it just depends on the details
we're shared that will be shared at the end of the day today at 4 p.m eastern time so look forward
to seeing what they say and reporting on it tomorrow as usual. So that is my summary and take legendary coming
to you first. What are your, what are your thoughts? And then bread, I want to bring you in.
Well, Trump is excited about it posted on truth social 30 minutes ago in caps lock. It's liberation
day in America. I think we talked about the tariff stuff for quite a while on the show.
And basically we've been going back and forth between either the stance that the market has priced things in
because now we got used to tariffs and then saying,
no, he's escalating that to a whole nother level,
which the market had not priced in just yet.
So this is why we're reacting again.
And I feel like this game is going to continue for a while
and we'll just have to wait and see what happens today.
As you said, it's a president's market.
We have to wait for the post, for the announcement, for the video conference, whatever the chosen
format is, and then see what we'll make of it and what the market will make of it.
Brad, what did you think of, A, it sounded like you wanted to react anyway, so what are
your thoughts?
And then B, what do you think of my take where it's like, look, everyone thinks this is going
to be the day you get the answer.
I don't think it is.
If you just have another round of negotiations open with every single country, that's not definitive in any way. What are your
thoughts? I'm actually going to flip that and answer the second thing first, because my reaction
is separate. I actually agree with you. And I think you don't have to look any further than
seeing news from like six hours ago. It's like, we're kind of still figuring out what we're going
to do with this thing. And like, so the fact that it's fluid i think is an understatement um and i would agree with you
largely do you think it's not because they want people to be able to negotiate it's just like we
don't we don't actually know where we're going that's their vibe presidenting like that's their
that's what they're doing their vibe governing um so great so i mean like it's that's just what we're in it's the paradigm we have for right now
uh and but like the original reason i was like want to do something is i on the arthur hayes
stuff i using ai ran it through a sentiment analysis of his past 18 months to say hey
review all of his predictions for and his forecasts and weight his predictive skills
tell me if you think it's accurate on broad macro stuff, whether it's the NASDAQ or just BTC. Tell me how accurate it is and tell me if you
would trust him going forward. And based on reviewing all of the subsec posts from the last
18 months, it said like short term, his actual predictive skills is around 25% accurate. So like
would it trust him? Eh, but like it's a mixed bag. He's good at, at very high, high, high timeframe, uh, global liquidity stuff.
Like he seems to have been accurate on that stuff.
But as far as predictive skills goes, um, it's not, not satisfying our AI overlords.
Okay.
Happy Overtition Day, um, to my fellow American, Brad.
You can be more happy about it.
I'm celebrating today.
Um, yeah, I think this is like one of those like monkeys and darts situation 50 percent of people are going to be right 50 percent of me
wrong i have no idea what's going to happen i hope nothing happens to be honest that would be the best case outcome because i think more likely bad than good
but also i don't know and i think that i don't really understand like the people who like speak
with so much confidence about they're like wrong like most of the time like most of the people are
most are wrong most of the time so i'm just gonna wait i'm
gonna celebrate liberation day with my fellow american bread and we'll see what happens um
you know maybe look back on this conversation and uh yeah this is the start of something great
but probably not but maybe also yes because who can know the markets are schizo
Maybe also yes, because who can know if the markets are schizo?
I mean, definitely that.
To your point, I think this is one of the biggest times in my time here.
I haven't been around forever since 2020, 2021, where the most knowledgeable market participants have just said, guys, I don't know.
Like no one knows what's going on at the moment because you're trying to predict what other people are thinking and what other people think the policy should be and we just don't know what they're going to do but talking about having certainty
and people not knowing this is what i i think is part of it i think that what we've been seeing in
a way is people pricing in with the worst case scenario over and over and over again
and increasingly now we've got i think we've got to a point where something comes out and you
know i think we're kind of getting to the point where like okay well that's kind of been priced
in we've we've considered that and if the answer is entertaining this idea adam that like is anything
going to happen you're going to you're going to name some maximum price then you're going to go
off and negotiate it's going to take some time are people just going to get bored of these details
and i mean they're very very important details but my point is i i think we're getting to the point
where the pricing of the assets are kind of not reacting to the downside anymore as much so um
that's where that's why i think we're going. Interesting stuff. Look, I think we've got one
other really, really important one to get into. And maybe this is all tied in with each other in
some way, but we were talking about Tether with the big Bitcoin buys earlier. Legendary,
some interesting information came out about Circle filing for IPO in the last 24 hours. What do we need to know here?
Why is this so interesting? Yeah, absolutely. Circle, the company behind the stablecoin USDC,
just filed for its IPO. And there's two surprising pieces of news tucked inside.
According to the filing, Circle revealed it's paying Coinbase more than half of its revenue
distributing USDC. That's more than 50% of the revenue that's being paid to Coinbase more than half of its revenue. So it's distributing USDC. That's more than 50% of the
revenue that's being paid to Coinbase. And that kind of is very emblematic to show how crucial
Coinbase is to Circle's entire business model. And just to understand the second piece of news,
the second surprise, a quick explainer on the Center Consortium. So basically, that's the joint
venture that has been created by Circle
and Coinbase to issue USDC. Again, every USDC token is backed by a dollar. And the surprise
here is that Circle quietly bought Coinbase's entire 50% stock stake in center consortium back
in August 2023 for $210 million in stock, a deal that hidden hidden until the IPO filing this week we did know
that a deal went on and we did know that the purchase happened but the details and the sum
were not known yet takeaway here is that circle now fully controls the sense the center consortium
basically makes the operations easier ahead of going public it's also easier to understand for
the lawmakers what is going on with the company that is to be IPO'd. But again, it also very much highlights how much
Circle remains dependent on Coinbase, given the fact that more than half of the revenue is being
paid to Coinbase in order to distribute the Circle stablecoin in order to distribute USDC.
There's been a couple of interesting commentary on that
on the timeline.
The most notable one,
just to get some understanding on the figures,
that's $1.7 billion in revenue
and 100 mil plus being paid to Coinbase in 2024.
And a very interesting take by Wyatt Lonergan,
who is the GP at Vanek Ventures,
talking about partner costs and saying that this is the biggest line item to pay attention to. And that kind of makes it very,
very hard for investors, for participants in the market to even say what type of company circle is
and how are we treating them? Are we treating them like a bank do we price them like visa network based business with massive distribution that only takes a small rate and
then the other big elephant in the room as you said be is tether offshore unregulated 50s employees
just printing cash there's no coinbase pushing tether they are just doing all of that by
themselves and clearly clearly the market leader here and that is a very tricky question to answer for the market another aspect that
why it is pointing out is the stable coin bill and how that we talked about it we talked about
the first drafts that we've seen but how that eventually will shape out and look like exactly, concludes by
saying that two things or three things are clear. A, that sharing yield with B2B partners is here
to stay. B, that margin for issuers will decrease as the overall stablecoin pie grows. And C,
issuers will need to diversify revenue lines outside of just capturing the net interest margin.
outside of just capturing the net interest margin.
Very interesting stuff.
Adam, I know you come from a payment background as well.
What's your take here on this news?
We spoke a long time ago about this relationship between Coinbase and Circle,
which I think everyone knew existed,
but it wasn't necessarily so obvious how important how how important coinbase was to its distribution
what are your thoughts here um on their ipo and what they're going in that direction and
this relationship with coinbase and their dependence on coinbase
um fun facts for me in 2014 i actually consulted with Circle Financial Group when they were an app
that was all you can do was buy Bitcoin with credit card and they were getting hosed with
risk and fraud. And so I was running like risk and fraud at Square at the time for my teams
and they're like, hey, we need help. And so I used to like, you know,
moonlight over there and like help them. And they were just a total mess. Like 50 or 60%
of transactions were fraudulent. Bitcoin was about a hundred or $200 at the time, maybe 300.
And I was like, this is crazy. These guys are just losing so much money on credit card fraud.
And then they evolve from
there. I think the signup bonus when you joined Circle was the equivalent of $5,000 in Bitcoin now.
But anyway, that was a simpler time. Listen, they're definitely not Tether. That's for sure.
Listen, they're definitely not Tether.
That's for sure.
Giving up 50% of your revenue, not great.
And they don't seem to be growing at the same rate as Tether.
Like if you look at the on-chain flows,
like what's being minted at a higher rate.
So if they're going to be measured against Tether,
I doubt Tether would go public.
I don't see why they would.
They're just minting cash for the team.
Like going public is just a nuisance.
It's a liquidity event.
But if you don't need that liquidity,
they're going to always be measured against them,
even though they're not going to be public market companions.
And they're going to have a lower,
like they're going to just be,
they're just worse across basically every metric.
I don't know why or how they set themselves up differently.
I mean, I don't know what the strategic differences were
in the founding days,
but they made a misstep along the way that made them less profitable and they could have been or
they should have been um and giving up like so much to coinbase i think they're so another thing
that caught me is interesting whenever looking at the ipo papers was how much they are actually
paying out in terms of salary like i think they saw that the actual cost to staff
was like 250 million a year,
which is crazy relative to Tether.
And Tether has 90 employees or something crazy,
which even if you have ridiculous salaries on those people,
you're still a fraction of that.
And I wonder if part of that
is just the regulatory environment
that Circle has tried to deploy itself in.
Obviously, it's like Coinbase. Coinbasebase is being marked by the Binances of the world
because it's trying to operate within the US, which has been notoriously a pain in the
ass to operate in as a crypto company. I imagine it's been somewhat similar for Circle, right?
Like having to pay a shit ton in lobbying, paying a shit ton in like basically anything
to try to survive as a business around here.
But that number stood out to me pretty starkly.
Yeah, I think they've got significantly higher costs
around the world.
I saw an interesting conversation
about their compliance in the EU, for example,
where I think Tether has basically been ousted
and basically are
not able to operate whereas USDC have obviously spent the time and money and
effort to become compliant and you know that's gonna come with a whole bunch of
costs especially with the kind of regulatory outlook and frameworks in the
EU and how they really like pushing that stuff pretty hard and now they're
losing some of the regulatory uh moat that
they obtained in america right with these two acts coming out right now you have like we're talking
about states coming up with their own stable coin right so like yes you'll probably have something
on the back end that rolls that up into a usdc potentially hopefully maybe for them is what
they're saying but like if it if there is guidance for every tom dick and harry inside of america to
have their own stablecoin,
people are going to do it because the incentive's there.
And that removes some of their usefulness.
And I always say this about Tether.
People can say whatever they want about Tether.
But as far as I know, it does get audited.
I don't know if it's by Big Four, but they do release all the stuff.
I've looked at the documents myself.
And the other thing people
need to realize, again, they can have whatever people can have whatever perception they want.
Paolo was invited to the White House the other day. Like, and I take, this is like part of my
investment thesis. Sometimes I just go off photos that I see. Sometimes I watch who is sitting,
where, who is photographed with who, like, it's literally important. Like, people can say whatever they want.
Where was the Circle CEO on that day?
I mean, maybe he was there as well. I mean, Brian Armstrong was obviously there.
But the point is, Paolo was in the mix.
So these guys are in the mix.
And to your point about there being some kind of regulatory moat in the US,
is that going to be there forever?
It sounds like they're just as much in the mix.
Counterpoint, I bought a bunch of coins in 2017
that had a lot of people sitting next to a lot of people
and all that went to zero.
So I want you to put that in your memory bank.
Well, my NFTs that had one person sitting next to four people
is doing quite well.
So just maybe this photo investing thesis, Brad,
we'll talk about it.
You've got to...
The steady teddies were in the White House the other day.
Get the steady teddies in the White House.
Brad, give us some light relief.
We've had a bit of an important show here today.
Give us the quick
one minute tldr we're drawing towards the conclusion but we can't ignore some of the fun
stuff going on in bearer chain a their yields are going crazy and need to figure out what's going on
there because the d5 stuff is pretty cool it's being very profitable for people but steady
teddy's also mint yesterday what do we need to know there are still opportunities in the market
so this is so steady teddies which is an an NFT project that launched on Barachain, Barachain
being the proof of liquidity L1 that just dropped.
They just sold out.
So there was 8,888 NFTs sold out for 12 barra per, which is roughly $80.
And then now they're sitting at roughly $700 or 100 barra.
So that's a good clean 9X, as you pointed out.
The interesting notes here are that one,
yes, they sold out in this market,
which is good and exciting for people.
And two, they have some unique stuff, right?
The pre-reveal art is actually a bunch of memes.
So people are having some entertainment
just by scrolling through the pre-reveals,
which is just, again, 8,888 memes
from 50,000 meme uh that the artist curated
so there are green shoots in the market keep your eyes out
love it um i think go on adam did you want to come in or listen i'm i just have to say i have
i'm just like scared of barachane i hope that no one comes after me for this like i mean
no one any harm.
I don't mean to fud.
But my understanding is that they have their roots in the OM folk.
And I don't know.
That's not a great...
OM has come back.
OM has come back.
They're using that massive treasury that they earned back in the day.
And they're using it to do some buybacks and some distributions and stuff.
So the coin's actually doing okay this cycle but yes there's uh there's mystery there i am just concerned when i see yields at these rates i know you can make money
of course you can make money however i've also been burned by these things in the past i kind of know how
they go maybe this time is different maybe i'm wrong but i'm just concerned and i also
chain people wow that is very surprising to see i have not looked at this chart in many years
did i ever tell you guys this is my first ever on-chain transaction swapping eth to to ohm no way legend you just just give us the context here what are we looking at
for the people listening in looking at the home chart up 120 over the last year actually looking
better than jupiter and all the other things we just talked about on the show up 13 over last
month however obviously we're still that doesn't really compare.
Jesus, look at that.
That's like the YFI chart.
It'll never recover.
Has the price gone beneath zero there?
Looks like there's some trend line in the middle and it's gone beneath that.
But guys, just for people who are listening in
or maybe unfamiliar,
let's just explain why is OM so risky
and why, you know, what are we suggesting here?
What are the risks here that people should keep an eye on?
Well, that is hard to sum up quickly, but let's say Ohm is a chain that has been forked.
There have been some very interesting things going on with the token distribution with yields
being farmed on there. And as you can clearly see, that chart is down more than...
In the meantime, that migration from V1 to V2 has happened.
But it was basically a big part of DeFi summer
to farm all kinds of Ohm forks.
And so many of them existed,
and none of them really ended very, very well.
And Adam's concern basically is that since this is the route of Barra
to a certain extent, and we have very attractive yields going on,
that it does not take the same turn and ends like most of the OMFORCs did.
I wish everyone well, and I wish you a great bullish time on Barachain.
I have just been personally scarred.
And I am going to have fun staying poor, I guess.
This makes me feel like the Lion King.
Everything but the light touches.
And he's like, we don't do that over there.
It's fun.
Enjoy yourself.
We don't do that.
I think it's a very reasonable point to make
be aware when you when you're looking at yield you need to answer the question where's it coming from
at the very bare minimum ask the question try and figure it out have some fun and games if you want
but just answer that question um right guys that was a very fun show and nice to have a full house
again reminder we do this every single day monday to friday 7 a.m eastern time for one hour live on Um, right guys, that was a very fun show and nice to have a full house again.
Reminder, we do this every single day, Monday to Friday, 7am Eastern time for one hour live
on X, X video, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify podcast.
Thank you to all of you for joining as usual.
Thanks to legendary bread and Adam for co-hosting with me today.
We will be back with you again tomorrow.
Have a wonderful day.
Take care.
We'll see you tomorrow. Bye-bye.
