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Regulations & Macro = Crypto Supercycle? 📈 The Aggregated Ep. 122
Recorded: July 25, 2025 Duration: 3:03:35Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, crypto enthusiasts explored the potential for Poly Markets to launch in the U.S., the strategic partnership with BlackRock, and the growing trend of stablecoins in emerging markets. The conversation highlighted significant project launches, fundraising efforts, and the evolving regulatory landscape, indicating a robust growth trajectory for the crypto ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The Thank you. Music He's happening.
He says he wants to talk aliens.
Don't distract me from the files.
Sounds like you're changing the vinyl there
it's beautiful put on the next one
send me the files send me the files
i guess regulation and macro is it the super cycle that we've all been waiting for
so rock how are you doing this morning?
Doing well, my friend. Doing well.
Beautiful.
I accidentally set my alarm for too early and then just stayed up.
But yeah, doing well here.
Oof. Yeah, doing well here. Oof.
Yeah, that's rough.
So do you have like an active mind where like it's hard to sleep kind of thing, or you sleep
generally well or easy?
I sleep, I sleep well.
I, I put on a podcast and I just knock right out.
I put, I usually most nights for the last couple of months, I'm
listening to either the constitution or, or like, um, people who, uh, like study the constitution
explain like various aspects of it and kind of the history of founding fathers and these kinds
of things. It's like, it's, I don't know, it's, it's
entertaining, but it's not super high energy. It's pretty low energy.
But once I woke up in the morning, I thought I was supposed to wake up at the time.
So I started like, you know, waking up, took my caffeine pill. Uh, and then I was like, okay,
then I realized, wait, I'm not supposed to be up yet. And then I was like, okay, I'm
just going to wake up, do some research for the topic, et cetera.
How long has that been going on? Were you like the sort of kid that was asking to hear
about the constitution instead of bedtime stories or?
No. Um, I mean, I always loved history in school, but I was actually more of a math nerd and bio in high school and then into college.
Now, I guess really caring about government and politics came later in life.
Government and politics came later in life.
I really got heavy into it after I learned about Bitcoin.
I really got heavy into it after I learned about Bitcoin.
That's when you start studying, you know, kind of monetary policy and the history of money and why politics matters.
I think for a lot of people, once you start getting, you know, older and you start getting into business and these things and your life is actually affected by these things, that's when you start caring.
things and your life is actually affected by these things that's when you start caring when you're
young you know you know who cares what the heck is the government that i don't even know what that is
you know but anyways guys i'm excited for this topic yeah you sound well researched so
yeah let's introduce everyone and yeah i've been i haven't had my finger on the pulse like I usually do of macro. So I let me know as an icebreaker question,
do you think that poly markets will open up in the United States?
That's the current rumor right now.
Basically, that it will be kosher for people in the United States
to use poly markets very soon because of an
acquisition they made you think yes or no i'm going to go ahead and pass the mic on over to joel
what's up brother hey how's it going just enjoying that hard money how are you
same here spending it and saving it at the same time. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so for the intro bit, my name is Joel,
and I do business development and marketing for Dash,
which you see this handle, obviously,
which is an instant, private, cheap, very effective digital cash
that you can actually use to live on in much of the world,
pay all your bills, et cetera.
And that's kind of Satoshi's's vision not to invoke old Craig here, but yeah. So as far as like polymarket coming to
the U S I think it's an inevitability at some point, if you have something like that, that comes,
um, that has become such a prominent figure in the actual, you know,
the actual country and its discourse, et cetera.
But just to be completely excluded from it for some reason is, yeah, I think it's an unsustainable thing. It's kind of like, um,
the U S banning tick tock. It's just like, can't really, you know, that,
we just knew that wasn't really going to stick.
A hundred percent. And I have to ask you because i know you're a hard money guy um what's the last thing you've
bought or purchased with hard money any any hard money i am trying to think about literally the
last thing that'd be something like that last night I think I topped up my Nano GPT balance with Dash
so I could do more prompts for graphics and videos
and stuff like that.
That's what I use for all my AI stuff
because I get to just use one service,
pay as I go with small bits of crypto,
small as like 10 cents or something,
and just don't have to do a bunch of subscriptions
and don't have to dox myself as far as who's actually sending the prompts everyone's prompts
kind of go through there so it's a great service and that's I think that's the
last thing I did that's cool I just have to shout you out you know I've watched
your show for a long time and Joel actually knows how to live off crypto
and in not just like in in like the general ways that you would think, you know, he knows how all the secrets.
So I think you want to follow Joel and follow him on his personal account down below.
Yeah, much love.
I'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to joel if i could just say really
quick joel is amazing um we have had some of my uh best conversations ever i mean obviously on
this show we have, this show was really
the only show that I truly enjoyed in the space for a long time. And then now the Dash show has
really risen on my list. We also do the Bit Angels show and some others, but yeah, I'm going to play some favoritism.
Yeah, that Dash
show is really great. Everybody should
check it out.
Good times.
100%. I like listening
to you guys. I'll
talk. Really great conversation
on the Dash show as well.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on
over to Beat. what's up bro
hello hello hello sir i was just reading this uh i was just reading this announcement that
the guy at blackrock who was head of digital assets has just joined sharp link gaming
Sharpling Gaming.
That's pretty crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
The guy that was leading
digital asset strategy
at BlackRock for 20 years
is joining Sharpling Gaming
as co-CEO.
You know, the SBET,
Joseph Lubin's
East Fashion Company.
I'm just trying to pin it.
It's pretty crazy. is so wait what is that
company in total is it uh yeah what do they uh i think they hold they hold a ton of eath
yeah i mean what else is that company they used so it used to just be a gambling like betting
sports betting and affiliate marketing or affiliate company that was sort of declining for a lot of years.
And then consensus came in and raised a lot of money to also like take a big ownership stake in the company to turn it into like instead of like a slowly dying sports betting company that was in the S&P 500 almost dropping out of the S&P 500.
And so to turn it into an ETH Treasury place, the consensus with Joseph Lupin heading it raised like four or five hundred million dollars,
bought ETH for it, and now they just voted on buying five billion dollars worth of ETH more.
And then apparently this guy from blackrock is now
crazy and the guy from blackrock was what position at blackrock he was the he was leading the their
digital asset strategy for 20 years how interesting i don't know if he was leading that for 20 years, but he was at BlackRock, it says, for 20 years.
And what's his name?
Joseph Chalum.
Chalum, I don't know how to pronounce that.
I'll ask my...
I have a buddy who was on the digital asset team at BlackRock
and still unofficially advises them
and then officially advises Franklin Templeton
on their crypto strategy.
We can get some inside information.
We'll see.
You're a former head of digital asset strategy.
I mean, it makes sense.
BlackRock is clearly, you know, I would love to be a fly on the wall in those team meetings, right?
Like, okay, guys, we're going all in on this. This is going to be huge.
Larry Fink's up there, like, motivating the team.
Like, guys, we need to explore. We need to take this industry over.
Buy more E.
Clean it off.
Good times.
Black girl, you're a female ladies.
Is that next?
Tell us.
That's a rumor I heard.
Spread that off.
Black girl, you're a female ladies strategy.
Imagine.
That would be wild.
But V, it's happening.
Let us know what you're doing in this space, brother.
And then also the whole...
Totally blanking on my icebreaker. I think you remember.
I think you remember.
Yeah.
I mean, I do.
I run a lot of strategic partnerships for people.
And I've also been at Planet IX for a long time,
doing their partnerships and BD.
So, yeah, I really help projects connect
and find opportunities for various projects in space.
I have a long history in the music industry as well.
So I'm very well connected there and got into this space in 17 out of poppy interests,
I would say, and then ended up getting convinced to start working here a little later,
which has been fun to say at least and uh yeah i just want to talk a little bit about aliens
because darren told me that we should talk about aliens because we can't talk about them man i just
i gotta i'm gonna i'm gonna jump in here with a completely random idea that i just thought of so
that I just thought of. So this is so random, but I think this could be huge.
So at LDA and at all of our various portfolio companies, we have a group with all of our
different, it was because of what you were saying about, you know, how you connect people.
We have a group where we have different BD people from all of our various
portfolio companies and our very close family like projects.
I was thinking it would be really interesting if we either opened that up or
made a second group to like all of the people we do BD with around the
industry. I think that could be, I think that could be pretty powerful.
Just had that random idea right now.
But go ahead, continue on.
If anyone's interested in that, DM me.
I think that's a great idea.
I support that.
I think that Darren should set it up
right away.
Darren is like one of the
kings of BD.
Yeah, I'll make it so I can kick you when I feel like it.
Just be careful.
He always takes over HR and then sexually harasses people and they can't do
anything about it.
Cause he's HR.
Yeah.
I'd basically just get an unofficial HR title.
Any group that I'm in there.
Provides cover.
There was, I'm in a group with like beats and look and stuff.
And his brother said something funny, but it was like, make it.
He basically refused something I asked him to do.
So I like added Rose to the group and then got rose to meet
him so we were there was like six of us in this asdx in that group actually um so i just muted
jan for a bit it was nice the rambros so darren's original handle or his original pfp and his name
in telegram in the first years i knew him uh was uh the sexual harassment panda from south park
and uh at a certain point after working with us for i don't know a couple two or three years
uh i was like bro you we we got it you gotta you gotta you gotta clean up the section
so i think some people didn't know know the joke and were offended by it.
I'm like, sorry.
Yeah.
I mean, so when I got Telegram, it was just because I wanted to be a DJ.
I didn't envision having, like, obviously I knew I had ADHD, but I didn't manage.
I didn't think I had ADHD my way into actually working in crypto.
It was more like, oh, yeah, I'm going to have some passive income.
And this is clearly the least passive income ever.
But, yeah, so my Telegram handle.
I think I'd recently been re-watching South Park.
So it was like season three, episode six or something,
sexual harassment panda.
And I was like, yeah, that's a great one.
I'll pick that.
And then, yeah, I ended up actually working,
but then had to transition the handle.
So like people were tagging me in groups and stuff,
like at sexual harassment panda.
I mean, actually at one point in like the-
Only in the web three, man.
Yeah, it was like,
it was like in the Quicksilp marketing group,
there was like an argument between like five people,
like, no, I think you should change it.
And then loads of people like, no, I don't think they should.
I think eventually I just changed it because it made life easier.
You know, when you're in conversations with Coinbase and high-level people, it's pretty funny.
There's definitely less people that watch like season 3
episode 6 of South Park than I
envisioned, I thought everyone watched
South Park and some people were just like
why are you called sexual harassment panda
and then they obviously assume that sexual
harassment panda is the aggressor
and he's doing the sexual harassment
which is the bad part
but no, he just
informs people about it.
Yeah, he's like, you know, comes...
What do you do?
He comes to like either companies or like schools
and like tells people that sexual harassment is bad,
but everybody calls him sexual harassment panda,
so everyone thinks he's the sexual harasser.
Anyways, all right
little detour there rock maybe i have maybe i have the naming for your bd group it will be like
business harassers it's kind of a good idea to name it like that sexual harassment bd group
just call them the harassment pandas we just just, we can leave which kind of harassment is vague.
Yeah, if you know, you know. We can get like an
NFT collection. It's fine.
We'll do it.
We'll build a culture around it. I'll give you
a grant on this. It will be a town of harassers.
Like, it's something that counts.
Make sexual
harassment great again. Too far.
Too far, Rock. Too far.
This is top signal conversation right now, guys.
Terrible.
Time to change the subject.
All right.
Yeah, let's go ahead and pass the mic and get everyone introduced.
Switch reward card.
Welcome back to the show.
Haven't talked to you in a while.
Great to have you back.
I know.
I've been gone.
And I'm so happy to learn all about sexual harassment.
I never would have dreamt that was a thing. I was the woman who used to hammer on people who
were into it. I'm like, okay. But Switch Reward Card, this is Kathy Roberts. I am so happy to be back.
I am still traveling.
I'm out here in the West Coast in Seattle today where my childhood church,
the God's Pentecostal Church, turns 100 years old.
So tonight I'll go to the association, and I have to get really busy
because the church needs a remodel.
So, you know, I'm sure they're thinking, OK, Roberts, bring a check.
That Switch Reward card tries to make everything simpler for folks and to use their crypto.
And I think poly markets, like anything that becomes a demand from the market, should eventually
come to the US.
I know that we're very careful about our consumer protections and all of that, but ultimately
I think we have learned our lesson over time that the demand of the market, the demand
of the consumers should be regarded and people should have the freedom to choose what they want to choose.
You know, if Coca-Cola goes away, I will be moving.
But I do think that we have to pay attention to the markets and the demands.
It may be tough.
There may be lots of tags on it,
but I do think it will come.
I got to say that was one of the most abrupt transitions we've had on the show.
From sexual harassment panda to church.
I think you saved us here.
I think our show is ready to be canceled.
Hallelujah.
That's awesome. I'm glad to hear you're supporting the church there
and that it's being remodeled and everything. Very, very cool.
And definitely great to talk to you again.
I think it's been a wild ride this year.
So if you've been traveling, probably much nicer than sitting here watching all the crazy stuff going on.
Excited to be with you guys this morning.
Much love, much love.
Thanks.
All right.
I'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to Matthew.
Hey, brother.
What's up, guys?
How's it going?
How's it going?
I actually have to jump out in about five minutes
for maybe about 30 minutes for a consultancy meeting,
but then I'm going to jump back in.
But I'll just give a quick intro,
and then I will be back after that's done there.
It's with some pretty cool people in Abu Dhabhabi so i want to make sure to get there but uh yeah so anyways
thanks for having the space i've been on a couple times before i was in the past uh some other with
some other clients and uh yeah so uh you know matthew papineau um you know starting a venture
studio i'm just going through a branding process and the website development,
but advise on quite a plethora of projects.
Found my stick in the space in business development.
Just closed a nice seven-figure deal the other day with a top 20.
So I'm starting to focus more, less on volume
and more on higher quality deals
and higher quality projects in the space that are looking for very specific,
consulting and advisory and solutions.
So I've been focusing a lot on the APAC area.
I'm from Canada, I'm currently here,
but I live half the year in Thailand.
And so I've been helping larger companies,
find their way into APAC,
whether it be in Southeast Asia
or some of the
um more eastern asian areas have quite a bit of contact there so that it's been my bread and
butter lately setting up really nice marketing contracts and helping with fundraising and
you know bringing in advisors and stuff like that um yeah i don't have much to say on the
poly market thing i think if there's a need for it, obviously a lot of people really use it quite a bit.
I did want to make one comment on the super cycle thing.
And it's really interesting to hear that being talked about quite a bit, which is a hopeful thing.
But I just saw some really intriguing numbers recently.
Mid-October, we'll be at the 18-month mark mark on our bull market which is the longest bull market's
ever gone for so that's about three months from now and then also we're at this point where people
are starting to talk a lot about crypto you know new channels are starting to talk a lot about
crypto we're getting into that you know starting to get to peaks it seems and you know the big
people are saying yeah crypto can keep going you know
bitcoin 250 000 you know ethereum 10 000 blah blah blah where we're seeing quite a bit of
statistics right now an outflow of whales and uh larger holders actually selling bitcoin and
and starting to move out um as retail maybe starts to move in and as prices get a little bit higher
we actually just saw that uh xrp's founders founders just transferred 100 million dollars of xrp into central exchanges so
be wary all people who feel like super cycle is inevitable cyclists play out and we're getting to
some you know points where a lot of people are taking profits right now that are masterminds of the space
and really move the markets.
So be very, very cautious over the next three or four months.
And also know it's always nice to get behind things
that aren't just bearable cycle projects
that are projects that have a long-term strata
and also have business outside know outside of uh crypto as
well too because those are always good plays that can last through the bear market but i am going
to jump out but i'll be back in about 30 minutes after this meeting and i'll jump back up and
enjoy the conversation again but thanks a lot guys really appreciate it yeah much love definitely want
to pick your brain when you come back because i i had some comments there but i know you got to go
uh great to see you matt and i just dm'd you you
you might be great for that uh this bd group where we share share contacts i uh i'll be back guys for
sure um i'm just gonna jump out now and then i'll circle back around and then we can keep the
conversation going appreciate it i'll be right back guys all right cheers awesome awesome okay Cheers. Awesome, awesome. Okay, let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to DeFi Grandad.
Hey there.
Thank you for the invite.
And actually, I've been here once, I believe.
And I'm seven years involved in product development and growth hacking for Web3 projects, especially in DeFi segment.
Development and growth hacking for Web3 projects, especially in DeFi segment.
I've been here from 2017, which was a really nice year to lose all your money
and actually to fundraise an insane amount of funds from different groups of investors in Leaf.
We've seen these projects, I believe, a lot.
And today I'm on behalf of Protofire.
We are a brilliant DAO of Web3 developers.
Among our clients, there are Balancer, Flayer, Saga,
actually Polygon and QuickSwap.
We have really nice connections with them.
And honestly, Rog did on the last,
the aggregated episode where I was,
had a representation of protofire than me
for like five five minutes we've been discussing what protofire did uh rock uh additional thank
you for that so probably we should make you an advisor uh so we actually man we do so much work with protofire i love protofire i i also i i also yeah good good uh that was that's pretty
that was pretty good there you knew i'd jump on it uh yeah we i i tell so many people about protofire
how great they are yeah and actually uh we built different really complex and nice products widely
spread across the market you may have seen and use safe multi-seq wallet probably being one of the
biggest products we've built and actually it's super useful and used across
complex products average users etc so yeah you guys are also safe safe
guardians so on new chains you guys are one of the official, if not the main official, deployer of safe after they more decentralized it.
Yes, actually, if you have a new chain, you may come to us and we will do a safe deployment for you.
That's for sure.
And 30 seconds.
Do I have some time to represent it more?
I think you're past 30 seconds, but go ahead.
Yeah.
Speaking about myself, I also have been working with quite extensive products,
which have built across the Web3 world, derivative ecosystems.
We've built actually the top NFTft collection on near protocol you may
see it as my pfp actually i do love it a lot and gray bird was actually purely my idea uh
so i pushed it for like three years we've been top one collection on near protocol also we've built the top three uh decks on near uh the onchain uh order book
derivative decks called spin maybe you also heard of it a bit when near was really hyping in 2022.
right now they also doing really great stuff but i would say they can maybe think of the better marketing.
Like, for example, Polygon doing right now and actually QuickSwap and Polygon team.
I do really like what you're doing in terms of like marketing, different activities.
And congrats to that, because community is everything and not really all protocols, chains, et cetera,
they're treating it right.
So, Rock, I believe you're a good example
of someone who now leading that part.
Thank you very much, appreciated.
We're just trying to build cool stuff in the space man
You know people who are do
Anyone who's new to the show and heard the beginning of the show is like, what's this guy talking about?
You know, it's better to start from the things like that because they will be well prepared for what will be coming. So it's not even the middle of our discussion.
So they should understand where they are.
You're going to scare people.
I just saw 20 people drop off.
Just kidding.
As I said, it's right in the middle of discussion but yeah all right let's Aztec you want to hyper charge
us through the last last intro so you get into the meat definitely definitely I
think I want to discuss like I've been looking over you know the. I think I want to discuss, like I've been looking over, you know, the market.
I think I want to discuss BlackRock with everyone here.
So basically, after we get through the intros, everyone, we jump into just a dynamic, free-flowing conversation.
No one has to raise their hand. You can piggyback right off each other.
And it's just like we're all sitting around a big table, a bunch of friends talking.
table, a bunch of friends talking.
Rock likes to describe it like
we're in the Roman bathhouse
discussing philosophy
and the times
of the day.
Except women are welcome
in this Roman bathhouse.
You guys,
you gentle ladies here are also welcome.
Yes. We're here.
But some of us
may be nude in the Roman bathhouse.
So you got to, you know.
I have a son.
We got right back into the sexual harassment.
What are you doing, brother?
What are you doing?
Damn it.
We were on track for 10 minutes.
All right.
All right.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Alex Damsker.
Cause I noticed we have two Alex's here,
but Alex Damsker,
and then we'll pass the mic on over to Alex too and jump into the
conversation.
Great to see you,
Alex Damsker.
Hey,
I did not think I was going to make it,
but I'm glad I did.
Good to see you.
I'm a corporate and securities lawyer. Hey, Matthew's back. I'm so good to see you i'm a corporate and securities lawyer uh hey matthew's
back i'm so glad to see i was like i sent him a message saying oh bummed i missed you um but
i jumped into the other meeting they had to they had to cancel so i'm super but but hey alex nice
to see you too yay um so uh I'm a corporate securities lawyer.
I used to work at the SEC and a bunch of firms and I had my own practice.
I founded a couple of businesses.
I've exited.
I've been in blockchain since 2016.
AI and quantum computing, which is really quantum resistance since 2019. I've written a book on finance and DeFi for O'Reilly that came out last year.
And I advise a bunch of funds and firms and companies about blockchain and uh and ai and and the quantum resistance basically like how to use it in their
companies how to apply it or um or apply it better so that they save money or um or make money so
adding revenue streams or things like that so uh that's a lot of what i do and um and then i do uh
on x i do a lot for subscribers so i do things like economics and market spaces for them.
And a lot of, I don't ever tell anybody how to invest, but I give them information so that they know how to invest,
like how to understand news and information so that they can make investment decisions from them.
so that they can make investment decisions from them.
And I do like, you know, news breakdowns, law breakdowns.
And like we're doing this coming week,
we're going to do like some upcoming IPOs and ICOs
that are coming up later this year
that most people haven't heard about.
But I think that they're interesting to talk about.
So I do a lot of stuff like
that, but mostly for subscribers, but it's good to talk to you guys and, and great to be here.
Yeah, you're awesome, Alex, and definitely have to follow Alex. She has, she's a wealth of
knowledge. I mean, I've, I've seen her pull ideas that no one's thought about.
And she's very, very, very helpful.
So you definitely want to follow her spaces and follow her information that she shares often.
Much love, Alex Damsker.
Let me jump in with a quick comment before you go on.
But also a badass.
She doesn't fuck around.
So she's someone to trust.
Yeah. comment before you go on but also a badass she doesn't around so she's someone to trust yeah um alex we are actually working with david chom on building out quantum resistance
for bitcoin david chom the godfather of cryptography wrote his you know was doing his uh 1982
dissertation on um i'm i'm paraphrasing here, but anonymous digital e-cash essentially,
long before Bitcoin. But anyways, yeah, we're still in the process of
deciding whether we give this to the public open source or if there's like a business behind it,
but I'll DM you. Awesome. There's definitely a business behind it,
but you can't do it directly.
But yeah, let's talk.
Cool.
Good times.
All right.
Let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Alex2.
It's funny that your name is Alex2
because it almost like fits perfectly with,
you know, the current name.
It's almost like a new,
because there's always another Alex in the room
it's just like it's easier to take your own spot you know like every crypto project says crypto is
four point something billion industry and if you just take one percent so I'm just trying to take
my percent uh I'm marketing manager at lingo we do reverse rewards for people that stake with us
and I like to talk about talk about
the market with smart people here beautiful all right and thank you for being here thank
you everyone that's here thank you to everyone that makes this show possible there's a bunch of
really talented and and great bd people that help build this show up every week.
Thank you, Polygon.
So, Toussaint and Timmy helps us at Polygon.
And then Darren puts in a lot of work on the show.
Nicole, Marshall, and then some people from LDA as well.
So, much love to everyone and everyone here to talk.
I think we should jump into this.
So the topic is regulations and macro.
Does it equal the crypto super cycle?
Matthew was talking a bit about some concerns about this current market.
And I don't know, let's do this just to juice the algo and get some uh
get some emojis flowing here thumbs up for super cycle talk uh and heart for blackRock talk. I'll let the panel decide.
What do you guys wanna talk?
Just thumbs up or hearts?
I would like to talk about Crypto Supercycle,
but can you just give a brief idea
of what you wanna talk about in BlackRock?
I mean, just like a few sentences, what's happening?
Sure.
Basically, if BlackRock is a positive for crypto, I think that's where I'd want to start.
But let's jump into SuperCycle.
We got two thumbs up from the panel, so let's run with that.
So I think there's a couple different train of thoughts here. You know, one, there's an evolution of the market and with positive regulation and ETFs and institutions dipping in heavier to crypto.
Some believe that we're about to see a super cycle.
We're about to see a super cycle.
There are some caveats there where that doesn't mean that it's a super cycle for all projects, all coins, all tokens.
But that, you know, we're headed into a super cycle.
And then I think there is many people that also believe that on the other side, that's going to be really similar, like traditional market.
And, you know, we probably have another six months to a year or less in this current cycle.
So my question for everyone really is, and again, you just jump in wherever you want,
and you just jump in wherever you want.
But are we in the middle of the super cycle
or is this just like another, like the previous cycle?
I think this is actually the beginners line.
Something that we like to call the beginners line.
Greetings, good morning everyone.
I am Chairman Beaudry of the Miami-Dade County Cryptocurrency Task Force, Executive Director of the Miami-Dade Digital Commission.
And just a warm felt shout out to everyone on this call, all the believers and all the blockchainers.
Ultimately, it truly is refreshing and a blessing to be on with you all.
It truly is refreshing and a blessing to be on with you all.
So I'll be very brief, but I love what you're saying.
And I think that it actually is a Beginnish situation.
One in which the old era, the pre-legislative clarity era for the United States federal government has ended.
Legislative clarity era for the United States federal government has ended.
The era that we have prophesied, the initiation of a mass adoption, has a clear runway.
We understand, those of us who are true blockchainers in crypto, know that intraday trading will always most likely tend towards volatility. But pulling
out, depending on how far you pull out, you'll see that the inevitable trend is upward. Be not
mistaken. The legislation that has passed is like a meteorite that has landed far out into the ocean.
Many of the commoners are still on the shore of
the beach, not understanding exactly what ramifications will come. And because there's
not a huge tsunami washing over them at the exact moment right now, they can get lulled into a sense
of, oh, this is how it's always been, or this is just like before, but it's not, right?
Because even on the scene, as it seems that the flower of the price does not grow or bloom, in between the seams, the roots are sowing.
In enterprise, at government level, but in policy, legislation, and where we are at the county level of Miami-Dade County integration into our actual
municipal systems. That era is starting now, but now has full speed ahead. All of the resistance
that the traditional resistance that we receive from proposing different projects that would
entwine, replace, or supplement the municipal systems we have. We're always met with, well,
we're not sure about regulatory clarity. We have to take our direction from the top.
That does not exist anymore. I can tell you personally, from the community in Miami-Dade
County on the ground of our Miami-Dade Digital Commission, which is basically our premier big tent, if you will, of all types of technologies
from crypto and blockchain to AI, quantum, cyber, flying drones, what have you. We speak for the
entire startup tech community to the government, assisting them, advising them on the appropriate
actions to take in reaction to this cryptocurrency phenomenon.
So I just want to say that, give my shout out, my kudos, my congratulations,
and my unyielding support and service to everyone in this crypto community.
Because if you're in crypto, even if you don't live in Miami, Miami is your city.
Even if you don't live in Miami, Miami is your city. Dade County is your county. And it is the strength of all of us globally that actually pushes forward. Miami has a point that will pierce the legislative veil of the municipal mesh of this entire nation and spark what we have prophesied for the mass adoption.
Dade County is your county.
for the mass adoption. So I'll just leave it right there. But in short, this is just the beginning
of the super cycle. And even though the intraday may undulate back and forth, we are moving into
a new era. I wholeheartedly can't be as eloquent as the speaker that just finished, but I do feel
and have gotten more queries recently from people who
have never, ever thought about these markets, want to be involved. I think this is going to be a
longer cycle. I don't think it will end. I think it will continue to go up. We'll have its ups and
downs, but people who have never thought about it are thinking,
I made a mistake. I should have been involved in this. What should I do now? And as Alex said,
I don't give advice, but all of those people and even generations that are older are now looking
at what should I have done? What can I do today? That's how I feel about this cycle.
So I feel a little different. And I love the optimism that I'm hearing. It's wonderful.
Here are a few things, though. So first, one of the things that we know about the strength of
Bitcoin now is that part of it is based on the weakening dollar, right? So we look at Bitcoin
in relationship to other assets, right? So one of the things that I've talked about
recently in one of my economic spaces is we look at the value of the dollar and we look at where assets are moving.
And we see that the dollar has been dropping relative to a basket of other currencies and that it is weakening in terms of a number of other markers.
And then we look at what strategies generally are played by institutions overall
and by large market movers.
What are they going to be doing with their money in order to have their money make money?
Because that is their job, right?
They have to have their money, make more money.
They put money into assets. So we look at what assets are available to them, and they basically
have a selection of other assets. And one of those is Bitcoin, right? And that now has been
one of the movers along with, you might notice, metals, right? So these two things we've been seeing moving up, these are one of the drivers.
So you can see, is it a super cycle? Is it related to the value of the dollar? And a lot of this,
you have to follow what's happening between Trump and Powell in order to determine whether or not
this is a short-term or long-term thing, right? So on one hand, we have true economic drivers that are related to offsetting the U.S. economy
versus underlying something that's happening with Bitcoin.
It is related to Bitcoin adoption.
People accept it as an asset, essentially a high- asset that is a place to store value when
other assets are not creating the value or when currency is weakening or things like
that.
This is something that's accepted.
And so we see it as one of the traditional, more traditional now, economic storage values. So that's one of
the reasons why things have been moving into Bitcoin. It's a sign of the weakening dollar.
On the other hand, what we have here is also, we have a lot of people who've been moving into it
and moving into crypto because of things like the Genius Act and Clarity and the stablecoin thing.
Now, there's a lot of misunderstanding about these acts,
and I don't want to get too much into it because I don't want to take all the time here.
But the Clarity Act is not what people think it is.
It doesn't support crypto stablecoins.
Like Tether and Circle don't qualify under those.
Those payment stablecoins, it's actually a bank protectionist act.
And if you understand actually what went into those bills, it's designed to protect banks as the payment stablecoins within the Clarity Act
are not even really favored by the banks that are benefiting from them. Banks are actually
favoring something that are called deposit tokens because there's a whole issue with stablecoins
maintaining their face value. So there is a lot more complexity here rather than just seeing that
super cycles are like everybody's in and everybody's out and there's all of this enthusiasm or not.
It's not as easy as mass adoption.
Once you're talking about, you know, large institutions and having national reserves and things like that.
I mean, Trump alone has like a $2 billion reserve
or something like that right now of Bitcoin. We're talking about massive flows and movements
that are based on things that are much larger than things like enthusiasm, right? We're based
on, it's a real asset. Yeah. Alex, would you comment more on metals you you mentioned metals would you comment more on that
yeah and if i could say let's jump into like the stable coin stuff a little bit further down the
road because i i do want to give the genius act and stable coin conversation justice right now
hoping to stay a little bit more on the super cycle topic just to get everyone's take on this. But yeah, Alex,
if you want to comment on metals. So we're seeing quite a few of the metals
jump right now. And metals are traditionally something that you'll see investment in when
currency weakens. So when the dollar weakens, what we've seen,
it's okay. So this is not a historical thing, but this is something that's happened in post
modernism. So post seventies. So the metals will go up as an economy starts to weaken for a lot of
different reasons, but you're seeing now like gold increase, silver's increasing, and there's a lot of different reasons behind it.
But primarily, it's because people are moving their money into another asset that has greater
value and has the likelihood of having greater returns. So you're seeing metals increase too.
You're seeing a lot of different kinds of motion now in the economy and different strategies that people are now employing based on the construct of a weakening dollar, which is why, again, this issue between Trump and Powell is not like, you know, oh, Trump is so wonderful. Of course, Trump is going to win or Powell is so great and he's going to win. Like, it's really important that you look at the economic factors
underneath. Those can't be ignored. It doesn't matter who you like. It's like the strength of
this nation is based on two things. And one of them is the independence and strength of the dollar.
So the person who wins the argument has to be the person who has the interest of the dollar so uh the the person who wins the argument has to be the person who has the interest
of the dollar at heart because that's really one of the powerhouses of this country now i'm a
hardcore crypto person right and uh i think there should be an alternate system to the dollar i hate
that the entire world is uh is somehow related to the dollar because I hate that the entire world is somehow related to the dollar
because that's dangerous. We need an alternate financial system. And I hate banks enormously,
like I'm literally building around banks. But I do recognize them as a bastion of trust and security for most people around the world in our country.
So I'm not trying to say, get rid of all the banks, although wouldn't that be nice?
But I am saying let's build an alternate because having a monopoly on any fiat they having a monopoly on uh any fiat and having a
monopoly on a financial system is not a good thing i think competition is a good thing but
no one's saying get rid of all banks however they treat the world in an exclusionary manner
and i'm a former banker it's always you're not good enough for this, or you don't have the right credit score, or, you know, you can't get here during that day. And if you look
at the globe, there's a lot of unbanked people. We've got to have an alternate system. I can't
support that statement more. I mean, I'm one of them. Yeah, no, just to jump in on that. So
this is one thing that's really been hitting the generative AI
marketplace, particularly any that cater to adult content. Well, as we do, payment processors hate
that stuff, and they don't hate it for any reasons. There are genuine reasons to be skeptical of AI.
There is, say, the data that it's trained you know is there a possibility that there's artist data in there without there being consent with stuff like that there are genuine causes to
actually have that discussion about ai but when it comes to payment processors it just straight
up comes down to nope too easy to create adult content so you look at a lot of the platforms
right now which are essentially either shuttering or becoming shadows of their past selves.
Civic AI being the largest one.
If you had a look at them recently, they've had to greatly filter the amount of content that can be placed on the platform.
They have to add in additional restrictions, like you needed a minimum level of noise that
you introduce into images with a base image.
It's basically saying that you know there
could be nothing that even represents any person in the real world to even a close level if there's
content that we don't like in there because it's difficult to tell you know what's allowed and
what's not there's the easy side i.e do you detect genitals etc then there's other stuff like you know
if you have trump in there and you put words in his mouth
or any other politician fear comes into that side of it then which again that's worth having a
discussion about when it comes to payment processors it just went straight down to we don't
like adult content and making it with ai is too easy so we're not supporting it and a lot of these
platforms now are collapsing or having to greatly restructure their business models.
And that's where, you know, I suppose as much as I talk about how this is, you know, a terrible thing for the industry.
For what we're working on with Imagine AI, given that we went, you know, crypto rails was our first form of payment that we accepted on the platform.
on the platform and we still offer you know 10 discounts if you're using crypto stuff like that
And we still offer, you know, 10% discounts if you're using crypto, stuff like that.
like the people who didn't rely on these traditional payment processing platforms
such as ourselves are able to mitigate adapt and survive whereas other platforms are collapsing
this is not to the benefit of crypto in general it is more more to the loss of, or rather the chagrin of the banking
system, that payment processors are able to pick and choose at a whim what they're going to accept
and what they're not going to accept. It's not the case that, you know, crypto is great because we
can have, you know, all of this content on there. It's more the case of crypto allows people to
transfer their money and purchase services without needing mommy or daddy to sit there and approve it and you might
approve of mommy or daddy right now and say you know you don't like adult content and that's fair
but mommy or daddy are going to change the rules based on you know whatever political regime comes
in next this stuff can get more and more extreme and this is my big thing with unbanking the world and
banking them with crypto moving forward that if you want to actually control your money and have
a say in what you can spend it on right now the only option is crypto like payment processors
even steam so steam has always been very uh they've been very liberal they had adult content
on there way earlier than any other platform,
and they supported it. And all of a sudden, in the last month or so, they've had to start
removing titles because pressure has gotten much, much tougher on them. So when you can see,
you know, Steam, Valve, who are a private company, not publicly traded, getting frightened enough
that they have to actually start pulling the plug on a couple of things you know these payment processes are going in way harder than usual so i mean right now the
only option that gets you away from that is crypto now i hope that banks wind up catching up with it
as i think we just have kind of maybe an older generation as well who are never going to fully
embrace crypto they're probably going to have stable coins and maybe they don't know that they're stable coins and crypto stuff like that but visa and mastercard
are not going to loosen their grip in the near future it's loosening very slowly but it's not
going to loosen to the point where you can spend your money on what you want to spend it on so i
think that these financial systems they're not as i mean they're not liberal systems they're not as, I mean, they're not liberal systems, they're certainly not libertarian
systems. And you are under the thumb of these systems at every single level. Now, be this with
your credit score, or be it that, you know, you want to spend with a merchant who that provider
does not want to support, stuff like that. And yeah, that's kind of my take on it, that we've
seen so much shifting in the industry due to payment processes coming down so hard in the last couple of months that crypto has become not only the only viable option, but for many platforms, the only way to survive.
So yeah, I think that banks have a lot to answer for in terms of limiting business. But you'll also see that the, even though it's
tiny, what you did see in 2024 is, you know, the number of transactions that were crypto type
transactions, and I can't separate the stable coins from everything else but that number is surging and sooner or
later it won't be able to be ignored if you know if last year if it was 10
trillion out of the market you know sooner or later everybody's got to
realize it's a choice and I don't have to do this over here. I can do it as a choice here,
no matter what the product is,
that will start moving that way sooner or later.
Merchants are going to.
I'd love to make a comment.
I'd love to make a comment on that.
I think that it's very different globally.
I think, you know, going back to what Alex said,
and I can circle this comment back around
to super cyclists but i just wanted to make a comment on what alex and and some of the other
folks here were saying um i think that it's really important to really be able to see the difference
between what's happening in the west and then emerging markets say for example africa
southeast asia other places um you know maybe lat maybe Latin America as well too, where stablecoin
transactions are pretty prominent as well too. But I think in general, in regards to the regulatory
stuff, I think it's going to push things forward, but it's still very vague. And I think that's what,
you know, new regulations are meant to be like until things go to proceedings in courts and
things start to be refined and cases come up and blah, blah but in general i think in the united states canada
uh the western world people generally are not going to use stable coins as much as we might
hope or think in their everyday life if they can just use cash or usd or credit cards or
bank accounts or whatever where it's actually going to be prominent as more institutional and larger
tranches, larger volume players like institutions.
And so a big businesses and stuff like that,
but where you can actually see the prominence of this is in places where the
infrastructure doesn't already exist or monetary systems where, you know,
there isn't banks, there's corrupt politics,
there's corrupt business, where people don't have access to, you know, infrastructure and banking.
And you can already see it playing out in Africa. You know, one of the hugest tranches and volumes
of stable coins in the world is actually currently taking place in Africa and a huge amount of volume,
in the world is actually currently taking place in Africa and a huge amount of volume,
whether it be Tron or Tether or, you know, other aspects and other stable coins that
are being used there.
And so I think in general, you know, obviously regulations are really important for the West.
The world has, you know, been still moving forward, even though the West is still figuring
out the regulations and moving things forward.
I think there's a massive, massive use case to how we develop products, services, ways and ideas that are going to help affect larger markets.
And this is difficult generally for businesses, say, to enter into like African markets and find stability. stability because if you have a government that changes hands every six months or has coops every year or whatever, and depending on who your alliances are with, your business could be toast,
right? But some of the business that I'm starting to do and some of the cool stuff that America has
kind of pushed internationally is now because of stuff that's happening with Trump, some of the
people I'm doing business with in the Emiratis, the Emirates, they're starting to move forward even quicker on their legislation, government-wise,
and what they're doing with VAR regulations for tokenization and RWAs, you know, in Dubai and
throughout the Emirates, and how finding business alliance and looking at what uh nation builders are doing
in regards to you know these these empires these nations like the emirates that have kings and um
you know that can move a massive amount of weight and a massive amount of capital what they're
actually doing in africa what their businesses are doing there right and other markets it's it's
it's actually where stability and nation building is occurring in
regards to that because you can't just be a traditional business uh or you know to go into
africa and do business very easily in some of these emerging markets because you're just going
to get toppled over and you're going to get your stolen from you right but when you're when you're
a king and you move trillions of dollars and you buy massive fisheries and you buy cattle farms and you buy gold mines and you buy all these assets in Africa, and then all of a sudden you're connected to all of the presidents and they rely pretty heavily.
opportunity for emerging markets and stable coins and some of these, you know, these rails to really
emerge in a fantastic way because they don't have monetary systems. They don't have some of those
things in place. So this is kind of some of the more risky business stuff. And I think that this
is currently happening. I'm seeing it play out with my business partners in Abu Dhabi and in that
area. And so, yeah, I think it's really interesting to circle back
around to the topic, um, super cycle. So I'm just going to remind you guys of what I said earlier.
It's very interesting. So we got, uh, we saw Trump got in, you know, my friends at Hedera,
um, you know, they had a massive pump, you know, super institutional blockchain,
literally no, uh, retail, no volume, uh, no brand no brand awareness hardly anybody knows about them in
asia even some people in the united states don't even know about them but massive institutional
they're massive in ai massive in tokenization they're they're huge right and um we see xrp
pumped obviously hugely right so um what what we, you know, what I had mentioned earlier is, you know, one of the founders of XRP, one of the leads in XRP is actually moving massive amounts of some weight there and preparing. Well, simultaneously, these big dogs in Mar-a-Lago, XRP is very much in there.
Cardano is in there.
The Hedera guys, the American companies are in there advising in Mar-a-Lago.
They're promoting at the top of the top.
Michael Saylor, all the guys are saying, yeah, Bitcoin to a million, 250,000,
let's go, super cycle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, while they're silently in the background, you know, moving their bags out,
right? So as much as I want to say, you know, the stability of the crypto market and super cycles
are, you know, based and super exciting. And, you know, a lot of this crypto space is based
around attention grabbing and mindshare, and which is super, super important. It's community-based and those are valid things.
You really do have to look at the statistics
and the numbers and the volume
that's happening behind the scenes with the movers,
the market makers, the central exchanges,
the big boys, the top 20s,
and see who's actually running legislation as well too,
who's beside Trump, who's in Mar-a-Lago
and see what they're doing, not what they're're saying and then you can kind of have an idea that this
cycle i believe will play out similar to what 2021 was like um with the 18 year the not 2021 but
17 with the 18 month and seeing peaks in the last quarter and then seeing you know some capitulation
maybe we won't lose 50 off off Bitcoin. Maybe we'll lose
25%. Maybe we'll lose 30% because 401ks are pumping, EPS are pumping, you know,
institutions are starting to get hot and horny because retail has been gassed out for months
now. They're like, what are we doing with this volume? It's been meme coins forever, right?
But institutions are not gassed out. They're very excited. The space is maturing heavily right now.
You're seeing business people come into the space and really start to move the dial.
And there'll always be the gambling aspect to this.
There'll always be the speculative to this.
But those are just kind of some of my insights.
And I'm definitely not fucking a brilliant guy in the space when it comes to statistics and numbers.
I'm definitely a business development guy, a networking no good people i can you know have good trusted
people around me but these are some of the things that the people i keep around me and the people i
pay attention to are doing so i'm just like you know got to be very much you know aware of that
so super cycle sounds really good but i have a feeling that this is going to play out a little
bit like 2017 have that 18 months 19 months and then things are going to pop off.
And we're going to see the builders stick around.
And that's actually sexy at this point.
A lot of people, last thing I'll say is a lot of people are gassed out from this run because they are not making money the way they did the last couple bull runs.
They're not just fucking literally shooting a shot into the wind and getting a 10X or 15X or whatever.
That's not happening anymore.
So a lot of those players that were a part of the industry,
were a part of that, are falling off.
And I think this bear market is going to really play out
in a way where a lot of the fat is going to get trimmed
and real business is going to start to solidify.
And that's where we could potentially see massive,
massive adoptions and moves in this market
where we see who sits around in the market
and what they're doing.
But appreciate the time guys.
Once again, love to share.
Very well.
I just wanted to respond to what Matthew was saying there,
if that's okay.
Yeah, jump in, Jack.
I don't know if you guys can hear me.
I got to reset.
I'll be right back.
Okay, no problem.
I could hear you, by the way, Aztec.
My name's Jack, by the way,
co-founder of the project called Stratex,
which is about basically yield strategy marketplace
and also an executive for Lunar Digital Assets,
which is a market and incubation
firm. So just to respond to what Matthew was saying, a couple of things. So last year,
I actually wrote an article on the presence of crypto startups and crypto related things
within Africa. And that was published in CryptoMag. And it was all about how due to you know in some respects the
african economies and the african business sector is some of the most highly regulated areas of
commerce in the world it's just that the regulations and fit for purpose and it often
causes more bottlenecks than actually protecting investors and uh and And so, like, crypto had a clear...
And when you add to that the instability in general
of the African economies and also the instability
of the African currencies, particularly in the recent past,
it's very clear that if there's one place on Earth
that crypto has a clear use case,
even just for stable coin payments, it is Africa, like 100%.
The fact that there's these vast parts of
that continent where it is literally impossible to walk into a branch and open a bank account
but yeah if you have right right if you have a cheap uh huawei smartphone that you bought for
like 20 second hand you can download the crypto wallet and you can start transacting and trading
with your peers and if all you do is sell produce at a market and you want an
alternative way to accept payment as opposed to accepting the local dictators
currency that's going to devalue 20 times in six months,
then you can accept USDT on a phone,
which is such an incredible...
It isn't even just a vision. It's currently happening right now.
You can see.
Of course.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Yeah.
And you can look at the payment, not just the volume of transactions overall, but the payment
sizes.
So you can tell that these like micro payments for $5, $2, $3, some of that's literal physical
commerce on the African continent and other places where banking is difficult.
And then just in reference to something else you said, Matthew, if you'd allow me to answer
that as well, which is regarding, you know, you see this playing out more like 2017, you
talk about retail exhaustion, which I agree with.
I think something very interesting happened regarding retail exhaustion in the last 12
months, which is just basically an absolute harvesting of the top-of-the-line bid from retail, from MemeCoins on Solana
and then also, you know, like the fees taken by Pump.4
and other similar platforms.
And then obviously and infamously the sort of Trump,
then Argentina Coin, Melania and everything else that happened over that time.
That was a harvesting of, you know, kind of whimsical retail bids
and probably into smarter hands, albeit a little unethical.
And that smarter hands will not be gambling on mean point visits
that will go into the majors.
In reference to what you were talking, so we have that,
which is like a kind of counter trend to the bull market.
But then at the same time you
have much more liquidity coming in from the institutions and which as you rightly pointed
out is quite interesting because it means hopefully that more serious things serious
projects serious ideas serious builders will get more funding built for the long term and build things that are genuinely useful
like one thing that this kind of retail harvesting does very unfortunate especially if that's your
first experience in crypto is is buying the president's meme coin and getting hammered
however it teaches a very good lesson to people that are gambling on this stuff but maybe shouldn't
be because they've been around a little bit and they know better which is that the things that actually matter it doesn't
really like if you buy something that is very very important in the industry and it's going to be
around for a very long time and it's going to change things in a meaningful way it doesn't
matter if you buy it in the first 10 minutes or first 10 months really the fact of the matter is
like if you bought unitoken if you bought rma
if you bought eth if you bought bitcoin itself or any of those things you know you could literally
have thrown the data any date on the board between its inception to like the first year any point in
the first year and you would have been totally happy with the result and i think this is a lesson
here it's like we can either as an industry we can decide to chase
short-term immediate gratification or we can put our money where things are genuinely meaningful
and they're genuinely going to have an impact and it's a harsh lesson to learn if that was you you
know full porting into Trump or Melania like sorry but sorry. But at the same time, you know, we really need to do better as
an industry. And like, this is a lesson that everybody has to learn. Like, it's unfortunate,
but that's the way it is. Ultimately, in answer to the question, super cycle,
absolutely a super cycle. 100%. There is no doubt in my mind mind it might not be the super cycle you want it might not mean that
Your favorite meme coin
Sponsored by Murad is going to run to a hundred billion dollar market cap. It might not mean that
XRP is going to reach a thousand dollars
It might not mean that you know, whatever shit coin you've decided to gamble on is gonna retire your bloodline
However, I do think it will mean that the industry is here for the long run. It's going to retire your bloodline however i do think it will mean that the industry is here for the
long run it's hard to stay they've had this period of trying to ignore us and they tried to fight us
ridicule us and now we get to the winning part so hope you all stick around and enjoy that
yeah very well said um i'm sorry i'm in my conversation i mostly spoke about you know
the need to get away from traditional payment processors or the need to at least reform
payment processors in the real world when it comes to the actual like super cycle side of it
i would go on a side of yes and no it's yes in the sense that you know crypto is not going away
as jack said you know it's going to be around forever.
And yes, there will be 10,000 coins that can live and die every day, if not even more than that.
But the ones that are actually building for the long term, the ones you can see a lot of them now, look at the top 100, a decent amount of them were in there in 2021.
Some of them were in there even in 2017.
Obviously, you've got the big ones that
are in there since you know 2013 and way before that but in terms of you know everything goes up
forever which is what i think a lot of people think super cycle means as in there will never
be major pullbacks or bear markets like i do believe in extended cycles i do think the last
cycle would have been way longer if it wasn't for round one.
We had the China ban on Bitcoin mining, which brought us down for the summer.
We climbed our way back up, but then we had the return of higher interest rates, very hawkish Fed, and of course, war breaking out.
And I think that, you know, that was just the cycle was called early at that point.
I mean, that was the first cycle where
we kind of matched the length of the previous cycle and everything before that it was longer
every time and even if we look at this cycle now if you consider back in 2021 we were approaching
the end of the cycle at this point like we were coming up towards the final peak before everything
just kind of started falling apart you know owen let me let me just
jump in on that so you mentioned about the cycle being affected by the war recently i just want to
put something to the audience here that might be listening and might be worried about geopolitical
risk and so on just imagine for a second that it's 1990 and you hear about i think it was around
this time the bombing of the former yugoslavia and you think, oh shit, there's a war.
But you think, well, I've heard about this thing called the internet.
I wonder if the war will mean that the internet won't work or won't be around.
And you think, maybe I'll just ignore the internet and not use it.
And then like 40 years later, you look back, you realise how stupid that position is.
In actuality.
And I would urge everybody to look at it like that instead of
looking at it like this is a cycle it's four years it's going to last this i've got to make
enough money to see me through the bear market this is a technological adoption curve that's
exponential that's steeper than the internet adoption curve so we have to start thinking
about it like the advent of a new technology and not like
something that we can gamble on once every, you know, for one year, six months out of
every four.
Like, I don't know, man, like that's just what I'm looking at.
100% agree on that front that, you know, anything can happen geopolitically.
It's not going to kill crypto.
It might cause pullbacks,
but usually those kind of events happen
because market participants see an excuse
to be able to get something a little bit cheaper
down the line.
And we could start seeing pullbacks at that point
or selling.
There are still going to be pullbacks
as we go into the future.
Like the super cycle, if you zoom out,
yes, everything likely will go up forever.
But this doesn't mean that, as Jack said, your Murad-sponsored shitcoin is going to head to 500 billion because it's a super cycle.
I think the market has started rewarding a lot more of the utility-focused projects, the ones that stick around.
Once again, the top 100, the vast majority of that will back it as well.
When you've got Uni, you've got Aave, you've you know obviously your bitcoin ethereum you've got l2 tokens then you've got the
alternate l1 tokens generally everything that sticks around long term has done so because of
utility you have your outliers i mean now i would still say that even outliers like dogecoin created
utility and you know they set their own kind of standard. When you're picking up stuff just randomly off the market, because this is a fun meme,
it has a good community, despite the fact that it has the same community as the last
shitcoin you went in on and went down 99% on, et cetera, et cetera.
There will be bear markets for that stuff.
But when I talk about bear markets, I mean, back in 2014, I think I had to, so I had rent
you, I was living and working out of Dublin at the time.
And I had a couple of Bitcoin that I just kind of picked up.
I said, oh yeah, I can just kind of sell it off now and maybe I'll pick it up, you know,
cheaper later on.
Once again, like 12 years ago now.
And I think I sold at about $200 per Bitcoin.
And if you look at even where we bottomed out this cycle at 16K, nobody back in 2013,
2014 would have turned around and said like, oh, it's a bear market.
Bitcoin's going to be worth 16K.
That was completely unheard of.
So even when we do, as I believe we will, we'll have our pullback.
We'll have that kind of, we don't even need to call it a bear market.
We'll just call it a bit of normalization
for a short period when we flush out the dirt. When we go into that period again,
I don't think you're going to be seeing Bitcoin anywhere near 16K the next time we get those
pullbacks. I would imagine the absolute lowest you're going to find that it's probably 40K.
But more realistically, if we don't hit into any kind of major macroeconomic issues,
it's probably going to be 70 or 80K. So even if you look at people in the last cycle who are talking about, you know,
in 21, you're talking about a bear market, but it's 80K Bitcoin. Like bear markets are these
temporary things that we go into, usually to flush out all the dirt, but I just got a lot of
dirt come in this time. But real projects were built in the meantime, too.
And those real projects are starting to take off.
They're doing well.
We're seeing that kind of capital rotate from essentially shit coins back into utility,
into your L1s, into add L2 tokens as well, stuff like that.
It's going to go this way.
And there's going to be this big ramp up speculation period.
Everybody's going to go insane. You're essentially going to have the shoeshine ramp up speculation period everybody's going to go insane
you're essentially going to have the shoeshine boy is telling you about what crypto to buy etc
I mean there's no players left right now the market is crowded there's going to be a pullback
it happens every time in every market so that is going to happen but I don't think it takes away
from the idea of it being a super cycle because I think that everything which is here to stay
everything which is building you know real utility which is building, you know, real utility, real business, and actually, you know, offering a level of
transformation, and the odd meme coin or two, they're going to stay, and they're going to be
around the next cycle, and it's going to go higher, and that cycle is going to be even more extended,
and so on, until eventually these extended cycles start forming into what, yeah, I guess what you
would call that super cycle, where the pullbacks aren't't so big maybe the liftoffs aren't so big either but markets normalize once they start
finding their actual levels of value and yeah i think that the best thing out of all this for me
as we were talking earlier the stablecoin side of it when a grandmother or grandfather has a card
that is linked to stablecoins and they're able to spend it on whatever the hell they want
without having to go through all these weird you know third-party process merchants and stuff like that and we're able to go direct money to money as in you know consumer to merchant without having
somebody sitting in the middle taking cuts out of it stuff like that that is when crypto is going to
have its ultimate use case it's cutting out a middleman that is designed to cut out in the first place and with that then we have our tokenization of real stocks we have just
general tokens as well where we have you know i think we're going to see big businesses and we
already have them really big businesses that you know never release a stock never go public they
just have their token and dividends will be paid from that token stuff like that like i think that's
the big revolution that will lead in everything that's to come forward from it and that stuff in my opinion going to be
around forever like there's no stopping it at this stage you know that train is well left station and
it's at you know it's literally a bullet train at this point there's no slowing it down every now
and then it might need to refuel but that's it outside of that though yeah this is a super cycle uh find the projects that
have that good utility get in on top of it hold it and of course you're still looking there is
imagine ai i wish you had a quick swap as well uh very bullish on my quick tokens can't wait to see
you guys on base sorry i'll offer back up the floor or two we've got the next opinion what's wrong
no worries no it's good take it's a good take going because uh
uh i i agree i don't i think this is a and i'll add more after alex because she has her hand up but i do think this is a super cycle i do believe that the pullbacks will become more and more trunctuated and that these institutions that are jumping in are not only looking for blue chip assets and these will continue going up, but they're also looking for, like when people say utility, I think they're looking for yield and real revenue models.
I think they're looking for yield and real revenue models.
So projects that can provide this and show this are going to also be lumped into this super cycle.
But like I said earlier, when we say super cycle, I don't think that means it's like everyone is going to go up.
But I'll explain more. Alex, I think you want to piggyback off something.
Yeah. So a couple of things about the super cycle, even concept. So usually when we're
talking about super cycle, first, I mean, we're basically saying Bitcoin going up enormously,
right? And then do others get a knock on effect, right? And that do others get a knock-on effect, right? And that whole concept
is a bad concept, in my opinion, for crypto in general. That is like saying, you know, the S&P,
not even 500, but 10, right, go way up and all the other stocks go up with it. That's not a great idea, right?
Because most of those stocks aren't undervalued
and aren't going to produce great returns over time, right?
Those are not, that's not really how stock in general works.
And that's not how crypto works.
They don't all produce equal value.
So one of the things that we're saying is essentially
is a few things that have value that
people are pouring, like their assets that people pour money into for various reasons,
are they going to drag along a bunch of penny stocks? And those will shoot up for no other reason than it is appropriate for people to put money into large assets that happen to also be in the same alt asset group. away from this idea of grouping all of these things together because, you know, these penny
coins or whatever we can call them are always going to exist, right? But the idea of people
being able to just, you know, like rely on a few assets that have periods of time where they surge appropriately, for other coins to surge with them, I think
becomes problematic, right?
Use cases have always been problematic for crypto, not because there aren't any.
There are three core areas of blockchain that it does better than anything else in the world.
of blockchain that it does better than anything else in the world. And those core areas will
always, it's just a technology, right? And the technology, it serves better than any other
technology. So it's not that it lacks for use cases. What happens is it has a bunch of both developers, right?
And it has a bunch of investors that want quick returns.
So they don't want use cases and business models and revenue models.
And that is the thing that they're trying to evade. They want to ride the wave of other coins and people getting mixed up with the value
of coins that actually do have use cases. They want to ride the wave of that. And I know that
this isn't a very popular reading of this, right? But truthfully, this is something that comes with
the maturity of this space. We have to really start looking at this and saying, look, there's a separation
between things that have utility, well, not even just utility, things that have use cases and
things that don't, things that have business models and things that don't. Just like in the
stock market, there are things that actually have value and things that are very high risk,
you know, penny stocks that don't ride the wave of things that are doing really well.
Right. That's just not they're not tied together. Right.
There's they remain high risk, low return.
You know, like they're I mean, they're high return if they do well, but they're ones that don't they don't get the benefit of other stocks that do really well.
So I wish that we could actually separate this
stuff out because generally speaking, therein lies the con, right? Very, very frequently,
that's what happens with those kinds of tokens that the ones that ride along with ones that
where the asset is appropriately rising, the ones that ride along because we're calling it super cycle,
those ones are the ones that are basically benefiting off people not understanding the
difference and are saying, this one's going to the moon or whatever. Those are the ones that are
easy for people to get conned. Alex, do you mind if I just challenge you on just one point there?
So I agree with the spirit of what you were saying,
which essentially there's a bunch of freeloading coins
that benefit from the good work that's been done by other teams
or other projects that's getting genuine use case and adoption
and has genuine revenue.
That totally makes sense.
However, there's a little bit of a technical distinction
within the crypto markets, which is unique,
compared to the comparison you made to penny stocks within TradFi.
I'll explain that.
So, obviously, two types of returns in the market.
There's alpha and beta, right?
So, beta is passive flow into the market that lists almost everything.
And there's alpha, which is some prime mover, a token that's doing really well, or some new invention comes along and massively increases
value. So in crypto though it's a little bit different because of liquidity bonding.
So essentially you know because of the DEX structure in DeFi and depending on which way
the price in oracles relay information to the centralized market
which is where tradfi gets its price signal from there could be a scenario where the
outperformance of eth let's say eth does very well this cycle right because of the fact that
it's bonded to thousands of eth erc20 tokens through liquidity pools and unishwap and
other dexes that should drag up the price of those assets and it's not that people are being i mean
there may be people that are being conned but this doesn't need to happen for people to be
conned it just needs to be that the eth has increased in value right and I don't know what the exact parameters for that are so I can't
tell you like you know it's a price in each will equal X amount of price
appreciation another token because it depends on the bonding ratio and depends
on the size of the liquidity pools and how many different pools there are
parts of different assets and that's a big distinction between tradfi and crypto um
you know i've heard a lot of people talk about this in the past uh some people call it heart's
law which is basically like the price of one thing that's paired with another thing has related
trading action um it's interesting and it's a little bit different to the way tradfi works
now what's interesting right now though it's because TradFi is starting to get involved with cryptocurrency
via the centralized exchange network,
it'll be interesting to see how that price relay,
price discovery system from DeFi assets
to a TradFi investment fund actually works,
whether it ends up with the tail wagging the dog,
the smaller market wagging the dog, the smaller market
wagging the bigger market for price signal, or if it reverts back to what should really be the case,
which is the deepest, most liquid markets, that's the price.
That's actually really interesting. I mean, I think it's true that, okay, so you're underlying,
if your underlying base is one of the coins that's going up and the entire ecosystem gets a boost, sure. But then overall, you're seeing the average is the entire. It doesn't end up being like an extreme shoot up, right?
And on the whole, you'll still see the tokens in that ecosystem with the most value, they should
shoot up more, right? Because the entire ecosystem is absolutely getting a lift but you're not seeing
the ones that are like that are like useless right yeah my point is like interestingly in
this market unlike trad five dead like if you want to call it dead you know like not many users
like tokens can still rise due to liquidity bonding
and that's an interesting thing and we don't also know like how much weight that has on the
larger assets as well like this could also be causing a negative effect on for example
the price of eef and so on as the arbitrage bots and the other players in the ecosystem like
normalize those prices as fresh liquidity comes in.
I think it's an interesting concept.
I'd love to get Darren's opinion on this,
on the Quakeswap side,
because I think he'd probably have some things to say.
That's an interesting thing also,
is the bot use has actually,
I mean, originally early on when bots came out,
you saw massive leverage effect
because everybody was using the same data points with their bots, right?
And so you're seeing huge leverage effect because everybody was using the same thing, and so you'd have massive slippage
because basically one person would be able to take advantage of the data point and everyone else lost
because they were using the same data, the same data, but too late.
And so I actually just had a space yesterday with Sandy Carter from Unstoppable Domain.
So we were talking about AI bots in DeFi gaming and this marketplace.
gaming and this marketplace.
One of the ones that there's a new DeFi marketplace,
and one of the issues that I have with AI agents is the same thing.
A lot of them are cultivating the same datasets.
What the problem that you have with the same datasets is that you end up doing
the same problem of massive leverage and huge amounts of slippage for people who are using them. If we're all going to be cultiv doing the same problem, right? Of massive leverage and huge amounts of slippage
for people who are using them.
If we're all gonna be cultivating the same bots,
especially if we're drawing them from the marketplace
and they're completely not,
what do you call it?
They're all the same, right?
They're not individualized, right?
You can't make them individualized to your particular specifications we're all just kind of
saying off the shelf i'm sorry i haven't had coffee i just made it but if we can't make it
dynamic do you know what i'm saying yeah i get what you mean can i i just wanted to make a quick
comment here so we're talking about the rise and fall of the markets and, you know, garbage sticking around because good shit is awesome.
And yeah, so that's probably just like a really layman's way to say it, but that's the gist of one thing that was being said earlier.
So I guess it's really interesting to see the building of an industry, you know, the four mound kind of seeding of new ideas and new tech and how there
will always be gambling and there will always be speculation and it will stick around. But there's
a massive level of meritocracy that's currently happening within the crypto space. And a lot of
the time, even the people, the biggest people in the space that are moving the rails, that are moving, moving the
trends that are, you know, creating a lot of what's occurring that you don't even know their
names. They're not, they're not super, you know, say viral in a lot of ways. Some people are,
but the majority of them, them aren't. And that kind of goes to show how things that do have true meritocracy in the truest sense of the
technology and in impact will actually be building behind the scenes.
We'll be slowly unlocking those partnerships.
We'll be slowly making those relationships sometimes quickly as well too.
And I just want to make this another example as well too.
You know, I already talked about Hedera for a second,
but it's because I've been doing a little bit of work with them lately.
And for example, they have next to no volume at all.
They have no brand awareness,
but they just are signing these deals with Sam Altman.
They're having these major AI deals, major RWA deals.
They're pumping super hard, but they're not a retail coin.
They are literally the meritocracy play of technology. And those are
the ones that last and stick around, whether the hype or the network effect or any of those things
are actually over in their corner. So I feel like you can come to gamble and gambling's a thing.
And we're all have gambled in this industry in the sense that this is a new industry. So
whoever's been in it for a couple of cycles has been fucked left and right. And I get, I got screwed over, been ripped off,
has literally played their defi fucking diplomas, all that stuff. Right. And, but when it comes down
to it, when you start to see the emergence of actual impact and you want to see how people
can actually make wealth, um, through creating substantial impact and how want to see how people can actually make wealth through creating substantial impact
and how that takes time, like anything good takes time. You can actually be able to tell a little
bit of the difference between the coins that are going to fall off and not. Obviously, we see that
in the bear market, the bull market, those type of things. But yeah, I just wanted to make the
comment on those trends and how there's the piggybacking. And I think that everybody really saw that with meme coins and sees that with meme coins. And yes, there's a massive aspect of virility and mind share and community movement and those type of things. But 90, 95% of it is actually garbage. So I think in the sense of things, when we look at instant gratification,
delayed gratification, we look at people's ability to actually self-govern their own
intelligence and their own attention and how they make choices as well too. In the end,
people are going to hopefully stick around, be resilient and find the right things that they can
put their energy behind. And then that's actually going to create the movement of their capital the capital into their life like someone said retiring
their uh their bloodline earlier and those type of things it really does come down to the individual
being able to clearly see uh you know some of these type of things in the fog and um yeah i think
that's the long-term play and long-term in crypto, I think at this point is like even five years or 10 years, probably 10 to 15 years seems long-term in this place because, you know, I've been around for a couple cycles and this is actually my first full bull cycle that I've been really around. I got in, I got in full time halfway through the last bull cycle. And I'm already seeing very clearly that this place is maturing and people need to mature quickly as well, too, or they're just going to get left behind in gambling land, basically.
Yeah, amen.
Also, probably I can drop one thought I came across when Matthew provided his speech previously. So we may also treat stable coins when it comes to USA as something that may not have a wide adoption.
But we also have different other economies like Latin America, Africa, even Central Europe.
Like even if you're not unbanked, you have your own, let's say, local bank.
But when it comes to the economy and currency in your country,
it's actually a bullshit, total bullshit.
You cannot rely on the currency that you can use actually in your country.
And this is where stable coins becoming, let's say, a safe haven.
We can say it like that.
We have a lot of people from Argentina, for example, in Pradaquire,
and they're widely using stable coins, Tether, USDC, and even decentralized ones like USD or DAI.
And this is actually what is underestimated when it comes to stable coin discussion.
Because, yes, obviously in USA, we may not have the wider option right now because we're lacking of infrastructure.
We just only have had the legal act sign it.
But stable coins can become a really useful asset for people outside of USA and actually even in Europe. Because in Central Europe, you may not use USD because there are a lot of restrictions,
huge fees, and actually stable coins are way cheaper and way more useful
because you can transfer it in a second.
There are no actually questions from a bank, et cetera.
So I would say that.
Also, to XRP, just the idea.
Probably we can do the aggregator topic next time
about the payment systems and why they do not need blockchain,
just in case.
Because it turned out that the entire first week
of Ripple blockchain is wiped out.
Like, you cannot find blocks of the first week of ripple blockchain is wiped out like you cannot find blocks of the first week of xrp
existence uh that's kind of interesting yeah that's super shady when i saw that that really
changed i mean like i've never been super pro xrp to be honest no offense to the xrp maxes that may
be listening but as soon as i saw like that like you know a really important part of the first few blocks of XRP is missing,
I mean, that's not good, right? That's not good at all.
I've got no idea what happened during that time.
Yes, and definitely there will be a long way to have this adoption in the first world countries.
But when it comes to
discussion around stablecoins,
they already used Bitly.
And Bitcoin as the key
asset of day-to-day usage as well.
On the stablecoin topic,
I think you've got a really good plan.
Stablecoins are obviously fundamentally
really important for I think the next
20 years in finance. The one caveat I'd make though, are obviously fundamentally really important for I think the next like 20
years in finance the one the one caveat I'd make though is I feel like stable
coins have kind of veered off the path a little bit in the sense that in order to
play the institutional adoption game and play that you know be able to get yield
from the Treasury markets and play ball with the us government they've essentially allowed in a bunch of freeze functions you know even even die which
you know if you look at die like two years ago didn't have these things but now they do because
i mean they kind of did half because they were they were bought by you know partly by usdc which
is bought by treasuries which would be because i've been teased obviously um but now with the rebrand to sky they do have
admin keys in the same way that the others usdt and usdc do and i i think we've kind of moved
away from what the ethos of the of the whole crypto like story be about, to be honest.
It's meant to be like trustless, unstoppable, decentralized money.
And we've essentially just kind of created FedCoin times three
with three biggest stablecoins, and everybody's just okay with it.
and everybody's just okay with it like that's how you take profits it doesn't sit right with
That's how you take profits.
It doesn't sit right with me, to be honest.
me to be honest and i really think that uh somebody should uh bring about an unstoppable
stable client in the near future i think that would be very useful i think i think it's a really
great point jack and and uh at litvm we're building hard money web 3. So I see a lot of these same concerns with stable coins
and the growth of stable coins,
the clarity that regulators are trying to bring
to the stable coin industry.
But while stable coins are growing,
you also have, someone mentioned Bitcoin bitcoin but litecoin is actually there's
a report that recently went out by grayscale and stablecoin's main competitor is actually
litecoin because it's decentralized and it's used for payments just as much as or nearly as much as like these some of these very popular stable coins.
I actually think that this will grow.
So if there's a contender to fight the big boss stable coin or the stable coin big boss, it's probably going to be decentralized money like Satoshi initially envisioned and i have a lot of research that i've done i think points to
something like white coin uh as you as people have talked about emerging markets and the unbanked
throughout the show um like coins like widely used as well alongside stable coins in all these countries?
Yeah, I mean, you go ahead.
Oh, sorry.
So stablecoins is actually a big chapter, like that's a big chapter in the book that I wrote. And it's a big issue.
issue um economically we've actually seen um for centuries that the the stable coin of choice for
both the most governments and in crypto which is this concept of pegged stable coin so pegged to
a particular fiat currency is the worst choice right it always It always fails. And it's essentially dollar derivatives.
But essentially, well, dollar derivatives are more what the Genius Act contemplates,
but the pegged stablecoin is essentially taking a small economy
and attaching it to a much, much larger economy that's making decisions
irrespective of the smaller economy.
And the ability of that small economy
to keep up with that large economy, it never works.
And even the ability to stay backed by that large economy
is extremely expensive.
And when I first saw Tether, I thought they'd probably get somewhere around 50% backing by cash because it's so expensive to back with dollars.
And it turns out it's about three, right?
So they're not even 100% backed in general. But most of the backing that they have are short, longer term
notes, negotiable paper, and then they have some crypto and things like that in there.
But pegging is actually a very poor strategy. So there's actually seven different types of
stablecoins that we have right now. None of them have actually had a good
long-term strategy. And we've got, like I said, hundreds of years of economic data to show us
what kinds of economies work that are like how we can make a currency that would actually work.
So I actually have something that I'm working on.
I'm building the first part, which is actually, you know, something that builds identity and
privacy that's fully compliant. And it does KYC, AML, but it's better than banks. Banks don't
actually do compliance correctly, but no one cares because banks have such a strong lobby. I know people
think like, oh, of course they do, and everybody is compliant. Banks spend much of their time and
money trying to get exceptions to laws. And it drives me a little bit crazy, but there are better
systems out there. There is a better way to build a stablecoin
that's not a pegged strategy
and actually does build something that's more secure
and doesn't have anything like it.
It allows you to flow fiat through it,
but doesn't actually depend on a pegged value of fiat.
So there are better ways that we can do this. I think that this idea
that we have to do it the way that, you know, the government wants us to do it, of course they want
us to peg to the U.S. dollar. It gives us another use case for the dollar, right? Of course they
have a vested interest in the U.S. dollar. As an American, I love a vested interest in the U.S. dollar.
As someone who values, you know, alternative systems and privacy, I think this is a terrible idea, right?
So I can think two things at the same time.
So anyway, just to let you know.
I just want to echo that.
Completely agree. It's I say often, I mean, as an American, you know, I certainly complain about America a lot as an American.
But and as someone who considers myself like, you know, a diehard patriot.
But that's our duty, right? As Americans is in that's our right.
Our right and our duty is to criticize where we think things are wrong.
And while I benefit like you from our exorbitant privilege of having the world reserve currency, I also care a lot about freedom and privacy and the things you mentioned.
So, yeah, I also can think and believe two things at once that are contradictory a bit.
Yeah, also can think and believe two things at once that are contradictory a bit.
I'll pile in and say the same.
You know, this is a system I was born into.
I don't want it to fail.
However, I do care about the rest of the world, and I care about those emerging markets, and specifically the markets in the African continent. And I also think there should be a way for all of this
to culminate in lifting that market,
which is surging with the population.
I have someone I should introduce you to.
Their name is Ubuntu Tribe.
They're building gold-backed assets,
and they're licensed in Europe and Africa.
But if you're interested in that side of the world and helping that side of the world tribe, I'll introduce you.
What's their licensing?
I'm curious about that.
I've been digging pretty deeply into tokenization
and the Emirates licensing with the Vara and different stuff like that through partners that I have.
I'm just curious what what that actually looks like.
Are they are they based in Europe and then they're doing tokenization in in Africa or are they based in Africa?
I think they have multiple offices and they plan to expand.
I think they might even have one in Switzerland.
I forget, but I could also introduce you to them
and you can chat with them
or I can send you some info from them if you're interested.
They have a gold custodian already
that has done like $250 million in gold volume and now they're trying to tokenize
um so they've got contracts with some of the different uh african governments i think i could
be totally wrong but i if i if i recall i think they might have said they had a their their gold
license was somehow related to mica but or like mica compliant also i don't remember but um yeah i can i can yeah
there are teamwork i would love that for sure i think that it's i just want to make this point
maybe it's off subject i don't really know but i just want to make this point i think that we
talked about stable coins a lot stable coins are the first tokenized asset it's tokenized usd right
and i think that uh we're, you know, a massive play out
of how blockchain is going to actually enter into the stratosphere of people's lives, maybe not
consciously. I think most people are going to be experiencing it maybe in their 401ks or their
investment plans or, you know, other companies like that, that their financial advisors help
them get, you know, access into whether it's, you know, tokenized real estate in Dubai, you know, other companies like that, that their financial advisors help them get, you know,
access into whether it's, you know, tokenized real estate in Dubai, you know, or it's, you know,
tokenized fisheries or cattle farms or gold mines in Africa or whatever, right? I'm super, super bullish and really, really excited on that movement right now and how the technology is going to allow for you know i think
we talked about stable coins in africa huge huge point and and go where the action is 100 and where
there's opportunity and um the people i'm talking to are very very much interested in nation building
and i'm not just going to say it's from an altruistic place but it just so happens in this
world when you create massive amounts of impact and you actually wish to create a positive impact in people's lives, people throw money at that. whether it be the LATAM countries, Southeast Asia, Africa is a really amazing example, obviously,
and starting to be able to allow for large quantities of populations of people that are starting to actually generate wealth
and build their nations with the support of other players and partners internationally who have a stake
because they want to build nations for the politics, for the credit, but also for the massive amount of wealth that will come from those nations maturing.
Those large populations of people that are not just having one or two babies, that are
having five, six, seven babies, and have really young populations, once they start to have
wealth and they're already on their phones, they're already on the blockchain, they're
already using stable coins. And then all of a sudden we start to have massive amounts of uh tokenization starting
to occur where central exchanges this is coming in the future but central exchanges and regulations
start to actually move uh so that these products whether it be art or whiskey or gold or the actual revenue made from a fishery in Ghana or whatever is tokenized
where the money starts to flow into the space through these illiquid assets, real estate,
any of those things. I am so, so excited for that. And I come from a place where I came from an NGO
background doing art events, parties, festivals, blah, blah, blah.
I don't have a financial tech or corporate background and blasted into the space, got
destroyed multiple times. And I found myself to hear because I actually came into the space being
like, hey, this is something that could actually create some serious impact. And this is the first
time throughout this that I've really seen the pulse and the heartbeat of where I really feel this technology can actually create massive monumental impact in this world and shifting the tide of how people actually access finance, access investment, access being able to have a small business and use stable coins or invest a small portion.
Like I said, being in Africa and being able to invest a small portion into fractionalized real estate and some of the biggest real estate markets in the world.
This is the stuff I'm super stoked about and really, really excited. And it's just the beginning
with that type of stuff. I got to ask you this because on the back of everything you just said,
I'm a massive fan of RWAs as well um it's definitely a controversial kind of uh
category you know many think that it's really just hype it's never really going to grow there's
it's really never taken off um but at the same time you can see there's a lot of potential
from with your background with what you're seeing um and just so you know
with your background, with what you're seeing.
And just so you know,
Lunar Digital Assets is incubating LitVM.
It's the first Litecoin layer too,
fully endorsed by the Litecoin Foundation,
Charlie Lee.
Lunar Digital Assets is rockin' eyes,
full stack blockchain,
and studio.
And one of the focus areas that we want on LitVM is RWAs.
So I'm really curious to kind of hear your thoughts
on how you think the RWA category will grow
in this super cycle.
Like, what do you think,
where do you think it really starts with adoption and also just overall,
like, do you think it's going to blow up in this?
I really think, and just, I am aware of Lunar Digital AST.
I think Rock and I had met at ETH Denver and bit a part,
like a couple of my clients did some pitches at BitAngels.
And so I'm very much aware of you guys.
And it's good to hear you guys are converging into that space space with a with a project that you're doing and doing some consulting
and advisor around that as well too where i really feel like we talk about super cycles you know i
think that's all fair and good maybe crypto in itself is a super cycle of the financial uh
financial international financial market and this is like you this is like, you know, peak point of,
you know, the, the, the, the decline of the Western, Western hemisphere, which has happened
with, you know, obviously the British and the Dutch before that and blah, blah, blah.
Looking to Ray Dalio about that stuff. He talks a lot about that stuff in a cool way. But
so the really, the, I, I really think that I don't, honestly, I don't give a fuck about hype.
Really. I love to go to parties. I love to have a great time. Hype, hype, hype. I really care about
something making sense in regards to how it can affect people's life on a micro macro level.
And because I do want to get rich as fuck as well too. And I really actually believe that'll be
through creating massive impact in the world. And that no easy task so i think that that is actually going to develop and
happen in this next bear market i think we're going to see massive companies uh we're already
seeing it with blackrock like if if you want to make money look at what the money masters of the
world are doing and what they're not,
what they're saying per se, because they're very quiet and they keep their cards close as much as
possible, but what they're doing, look at what the larger institutions are doing. Look at what,
for example, like I'm on the ground right now and I've got this, uh, I got this, uh, approval by,
um, you know, parts of subsidiaries of the Abu Dhabi royal family in the UAE to help with some projects
that they're spearheading through their subsidiaries, not them directly.
And there's big players that are very much interested in tokenization, right?
A lot of these people don't give a shit about crypto, but they care about blockchain and
what blockchain can do for existing assets, right?
And so I get excited about the bull market. It's really cool. You know, like some
of my clients and subcontractors that I work with, you know, I can set up deals and make 10 K here,
20 K here. And you know, Oh, you need some tokenomics. Oh, you need this. You need this.
And then a lot of those projects don't last because businesses fail and in crypto,
most of the businesses fail. But the thing is, I'm excited for the bear market. I'm excited to see who's around and to go to conferences where they're maybe less busy and there's less noise
and get into more of those pockets of people that are really making massive changes and impact.
And I really feel that tokenization is going to be
at the forefront of that. I feel like most people won't actually be aware of it. Like, you know,
a lot of the applications we use in our life that draws together, people don't know, you know,
generally how dating apps work or how Amazon works, or they don't know how their car works.
You know what I mean? There's going to be this massive influx of this tech that's going to drive
markets and it's going to make illiquid assets liquid. And it's going to be this massive influx of this tech that's going to drive markets and it's going to make illiquid assets liquid and it's going to create new financial apparatus that is going to create massive amounts of wealth opportunities.
Right. And these nations that are already at the top that are already pushing the dials like the Emirates and you see the larger financial centers in Southeast Asia or China or the West or Europe
or whatever, look at where they're investing for innovative technology and what risks they're
taking and how they're calculated around it. And everybody's looking at tokenization.
It's not this massive hype thing right now. I don't think that retail is like, yeah,
tokenization. I think that that's good. I think that that means we're really early to something that is astronomical
and we're late to maybe,
a lot of people are late to Bitcoin
or late to other things that were revolutionary
that are still revolutionary, right?
I think personally that this is the most revolutionary thing
outside of Bitcoin itself and decentralization
and how that has taken foot, I think that this
is the most revolutionary part of the space. And it's going to touch, this technology is going to
touch so many people and create so much opportunities for businesses, create so much
opportunity for wealth, whether it's just using capital to make more capital or it's creating
business. And I'm seeing it right now with some of the clients that I work with,
some of the subcontractors,
an example is a company, friends of mine,
they've, you know, in the past couple of years,
raised $200 million in the crypto space
and they're called type three
and they do high level consulting
for, you know, African nations,
places, companies and organizations
and government organizations in Europe
and around tokenization
of like carbon credits and, you know, eco-friendly sustainable energy stuff, which is a hot topic as
well too, and is maybe something for another time. But, you know, I see that where these
conversations that I'm starting to have and have are not like this, okay, let's do something and
let's see our money pump in six weeks let's do something and let's see our
money pump in six weeks or, you know, let's see our money pump in, you know, this bear, this bull
market. This is like, these deals are taking minimum three to six to nine months to happen.
And that's the actual maturing of the space. And it, for me, is happening around tokenization.
It's happening around RWA. I, you know, one of my major clients that I've worked with for the past
year has been EstateX, which they're one of the paramount companies that have come into the space
for fractionalized real estate. They just launched last month. I raised a couple hundred K for them,
three or 400 K for them and helped them with some introductions, blah, blah, blah.
And they're doing amazing things too. And they've launched one piece of real estate.
It's sold out in five minutes.
They have other pieces of real estate coming.
They literally just brought in the CEO of Remax.
And now he quit as the CEO of Remax.
And now is the CEO of their web to the real estate side of EstateX, of Remax, the biggest real estate company, one of the biggest in the world.
So I'm bullish on it.
I think-
I got to ask you this, bro.
So real quick on,
you said that piece of property
that was fractionalized sold out very quickly.
Do you happen to know where that money came from?
Like, was it from other institutions
or was it also private investors investors it was their community the
community okay that's beautiful this is crazy though they started five years ago they started
five years ago and uh they've been building for a while and bart and steve are friends of mine i was
on the call with them this morning uh just talking to them about some marketing stuff and they're
also they're launching a launch.
They're launching a, they've started a launch pad for,
for,
for tokenization and RWA and also have just launched their test net for
their RWA chain as well too.
So anyways,
I was catching up with them,
but they have the largest pre ICO stake amount of all projects in crypto.
They have over 50% of their tokens actually currently staked.
Their community is fucking strong, dude. And they've been building in the crypto space for
five years. That's a long time in crypto. And they just launched last month or two months ago.
So I think it was primarily their community that did buy in, but they also have strong investors
around them.
They have some institutions coming in.
I just heard on the phone today
that they're getting fast-tracked to their VAR regulation,
their VAR status in Dubai
because they're connected to the president of,
sorry, crypto.com who's in Abu Dhabi
or in Dubai in the Emirates.
And anyway, so these are just like a tale telltale signs of like okay this is just getting started we need them in Miami I'm
sorry I don't mean to interject well I missed the name of who who you were describing they're in my
profile look at my profile they're called the state X if you look on my profile they're tagged
in there with one other uh fractionalized real estate or one other, uh, tokenized company, Nomad Fulcrum.
They're a fractionalized hedge fund at a Europe. And then another company that's a client of mine,
a gaming client of mine. But anyways, uh, yeah, it's, it's happening and it's very early and I'm
actually excited for the bear market because I'm excited. I get really distracted by, by shit.
And I'm like, okay, you know, once the shit kind of calms down and we get out to those conferences when it's the
bear market it's like then you get to have some time to hang out more with the rocks and the
and the other cool people in the space that are doing really cool cool stuff and then meet the
other people that you haven't been met yet i you know i definitely want to connect with you outside of this space on rwas and
strategy um i i'm not however i'm not so optimistic or i should say i'm not i don't
think that the bear market's coming too soon so um but man we'll see well i mean yeah don't get too excited i know i know i'm not trying to invoke
people's bags not pumping or whatever i just i'm not a massive investor in tokens i like to like
build companies take equity take token shares and like you know do consulting and stuff like that
because i'm just shit at it at holding tokens tokens or whatever. But, uh, but yeah,
we'd definitely love to talk with you more and I love, you know, uh,
was meeting rock and the bit angels guys and everything that you guys are
doing. So yeah, I'm definitely interested in chatting more.
And there's massively anybody in the audience,
anybody here that's interested in getting exposed to tokenization in,
in the Emirates.
I get a massive massive project that i'm currently helping with
right now that they're doing some some fundraising around so please uh reach out if you if you want
to deploy capital or you're an allocator there's there's some pretty fucking hot stuff going on
i was about to say if uh if you enjoy building the bear markets i mean just look at the altcoin
market right now it's putting in it's still putting in new lows while bitcoin is
no fun please yeah so i've said yeah so like the bear market the bear markets get busier every time
like one thing that's funny you mentioned you wanted to wait for the bear market because things
are quiet and the real builders stick around but every time that happens there's more builders than
last time and so when you go to the conferences you'll be surprised that's it that's a great thing
gone are the days when i'm not going to stop building i'm not going to stop building andreas
clear out the dust a little bit but yeah you're right there's more and more people
but like but like when you look at like when you look at like old videos of andreas antonopoulos
stood up at you know a conference in london speaking to a room with literally two people in
it and like 500 chairs like it's it's really not like that anymore you go to the conference
there's still 10 000 people turn up even when the market is it's really good to know i love that there's that video of uh vitale where he stands up and starts
shouting at craig wright and there's like 10 people in the building it's fantastic but um
i would think these things are exactly what i like to tell people uh hi there this is uh
chairman baudray of the miami-Dade County Cryptocurrency Task
Force, is these systems are completely the same as the ones we use and that we've always
used for civilization.
They're just exactly different at the point in mechanisms in which they're actually expressed.
So when we look at, you know, there's a bear market somewhere in the current markets somewhere all the time, as well as there's bull markets in the markets all the time. to be expressed and the same human emotions and patterns of behaviors will be expressed,
albeit, we hope, in a more efficient
and a more prosperous way because of the new advances
of this technology and its ability to be decentralized,
to be encrypted, to be public and private distributed
amongst people who use it as well.
One of the biggest missions from my office and from my team and the people, you know, the bit lords of Miami, like Marshall and Crypto Chick
and many others, and Praveen and many others, is to help our leaders and our people who run our systems to know that
this is not a foreign thing that's like an alien that has come down, but that it is very
much just the next thing.
And keeping that mindset helps us relate these concepts in a simple way that they get it
that kind of helps us to influence more positively the actions that they're taking.
But I will even make sure that, you know, even self-reflect and challenge us, the community, to keep that in mind, too,
that we're going to see some things that may not happen how they should or how we predict it or how we modeled, but we need to also keep in that, you know, it's just a better mask,
you know, a better tool or vehicle for what we were doing before in the stock markets,
in the bond markets, in the commodities markets globally. And that's at the systematic level
with like the DTTC or the New York Stock Exchange, but also at the municipal level from,
or the New York Stock Exchange, but also at the municipal level from enterprise or small business
or commercial commerce. I want to say that I love what the speakers have been talking about
regarding the heart of these machines, because that's one of our big slogans as well, is that
what is technology's mission if it's not to improve the human condition?
Right. If it is just a total transference of the people who have the wealth in control, stay in control,
then we've missed the major mark of what it was intended for and what we actually have the chance to do right now in reality.
Spaces like this, I commend the organizers for spaces like this for macro strategy, you know,
where we can flesh out, right, the issues of the day intelligently, where we can collaborate
and contribute and actually create real solutions or actual steps that we can implement. Right now, I'm the author for the state of Florida's virtual assets
and digital currencies regulation. I'm also the author for the current Miami-Dade County
cryptocurrency payment processing protocol. And also, we had another resolution for employees, their their election for their self-directed IRAs and 529C retirement plans in crypto and their income to be elected to be taken in crypto. of resolutions that we're submitting for legislation is for the ABC MA pilot or MAP pilot
or the MAP, which is for AI, blockchain, and cyber, you know,
but it's our municipal applications pilot by in which the actual systems internally, B to G, as well as the services, citizen-facing services, G to C,
will start to have our demos and our test cases and our integrations for the entire six and a half
million residents of Miami-Dade County and all 35 cities that comprise the municipality.
So it is critically important for me to reach out.
And I will say with my hands up that, you know,
we need help and I definitely appreciate anybody
and the whole community in helping us craft
and lead Miami, you know,
from the policy side towards the next level.
A lot of people hear the high-
Chairman, I gotta ask you this. Thank you, thank you the high i gotta i gotta ask you this
thank you thank you yeah i have to ask you last last week
oh no no i i want to ask you a question real quick because last week you were also talking about you know how can um particularly get involved with you and help you and right now
you also mentioned it so i'm wondering what are some call to actions that people can do
to support you today maybe someone listening you know and to get involved uh at the government
level like you i'm curious oh absolutely so um uh i would say the first two ways is that um
I would say the first two ways is that connect with me as well as connect with our campaign, our crypto campaign, which includes Chris Marshall, a crypto chick, a Shauna.
We also have our crypto kitty, Lisa.
They're on the space now, but we have about 270 members, but you know, there's a smaller,
more active core. So connect with me directly, but then also connect with our campaign,
which is the Miami-Dade Digital Commission. And so there's a number of organizations that are
represented within that. But in general, what we do is make sure that whatever you're working on
is incorporated and presented to our government in a way that they can understand. We have a
standing training for all the 29,000 members of Miami County government, as well as the 13
commissioners. And so you might volunteer to do one of the sessions
to train, right, which will help us with, you know, the kind of regular, you know, leadership
education role, but also give you a chance to maybe, you know, put a concept, a program, a product
that they might have never heard of, but might be perfect for their department, right, and efficient,
right. To put it this way, there's 26 departments within
Miami County. The water department alone, you know, is a billion dollar business, right? And
there's a small dedicated team that runs that entire business, right? They need new solutions
to help with the monitoring, reporting, or internal CRM, or data silos, or how it operates,
reporting or internal CRM or data silos or how it operates, right? The transportation, the housing,
the electric, right? We're making Miami a model so that, you know, we can, which is, we're already
setting up to export to kind of the rest of the state, the 27 counties in the state and the 3,000
counties in the nation. So to put a short answer, contact me directly, contact our team,
but also think about whatever your project is or whatever your expertise is, you know,
if you can contribute to help educate, but if you have a product that's like, hey, you know what,
you know, municipalities have to, they have to do notary services and I have a protocol.
I don't know. You know, there's tons of them. I'll probably interview maybe 600 or 700 different enterprises. But we just want to be earnest to call to action.
I'm actually going to Hong Kong August 25th to September 1st to do a policy exchange with the
Hong Kong Special Administration region. They have just, as some may know or not, I spent nine years in China, five years in Shanghai,
four years in Hong Kong, doing blockchain business. Actually, a fun fact, me and Arthur
Hayes hosted the 2014 Blockchain Expo. I used to have a part of ownership of a bar in Lai Kui Fong
back in that time. Just backstory. But we're going back over there to actually do a policy exchange
with Hong Kong as well
and for our global crypto delegation.
So if you'd like to join us,
actually, for delegation,
we would have a follow up to that as well.
We're going over there
probably about 50 people
doing high level talks,
but visiting Xinjiang and Guangzhou as well.
Sorry, didn't mean to make a little plug.
But yes, in general, think about what you can offer, what you want to, you know, present.
You know, I'm not even going to call it like to sell, but right, because we really, I mean,
obviously anything will be, everything will be vetted, but it is an earnest time and a
rare time that the government's open to hearing to hearing new ideas.
I'll just put it like this. It's public news. I'll share here.
Miami County is facing a four hundred million dollar budget deficit.
We are looking for solutions. I just happen to be connected with the community.
The honor to be on the call with everyone here right now
that makes you're not about to launch a meme coin like the chairman
Baudry
imagine after all those plugs
I got a meme coin once
that's not my role or my path
but it's to provide a platform for all of you to provide those, you know.
I'm just super excited because, you know, we've been at this for a long time.
I got into Bitcoin in December 8th, 2012 in a city called Wenzhou, China.
Wenzhou China. Right. And it changed my life. And, you know, to be able to have written legislation
And it changed my life.
for it, to have written the resolution for the actual position I am as a cryptocurrency chair.
Right. Nobody cared about this when I was submitting these resolutions. Nobody cared
about it. They didn't even know. Because had they known what we know of where it is now and where it will be soon,
they would have never allowed me to do as much and create as much as I have.
But I'm glad that we did because now we have the opportunity.
And it will behoove me to think, oh, it's me or have ego.
Yeah, I'm the greatest.
Because I am a real blockchainer,
I always espouse to emulate the benevolent idioms of this beautiful, immutable forever ledger, to be transparent, to be immutable with my work forever. So help me God.
resonate that you've said, but one of the things I really like is that, you know, you want to build
something that everyone can be a part of that the world can benefit from. And so I'd love to
connect. We're probably already connected in some way in some chat. People usually throw me into,
you know, the chats at Roxanne as well, but love what you're doing on the ground. And anyone
listening, this sounds like an amazing opportunity to get in at the ground level and make a lot of
difference. So thank you for sharing that. I'd like to jump into the Genius Act. Alex isn't here, but, um,
I have, you know, when I was looking through some of the, uh,
literature, it looks like there's enough information and clarity,
uh, on, on, uh, you know, for like stable coin issuers and things like that.
But I noticed some representatives that were concerned that it might usher in a CBDC later on
or some type of bank-issued stable coin that could kind of be used like a cbdc i'm wondering if
anyone has any thoughts on this or has really looked into it alex was still here because i
we talked about this a little bit the other day and by no means am i i i'm fucking retired about
this stuff this is that's not my side of things, but like, I wish Alex was still here to comment on it.
Cause some people are just really talking like in a strong way about this,
opening up the pathway to CBDCs to actually come in through,
through how the legislation was set up. But then others are saying, okay,
legislation when it's newly passed is meant to be quite vague in regards to allowing for there to be flexibility
and how the laws then move forward, like that things don't actually, like the laws don't become
more critiqued or defined until there's actual, you know, until there's actual time where cases
come up and opportunities for, you know, the rules too to be defined so that's what i that's
what i there was a conversation about that the other day i'm like i said by no means know anything
about this stuff i just wish alex was still here but uh it's it's an interest one interesting one
anyways because a part of me is like yeah i want to believe that trump and you know politics and
government want the best for people um but then also the reason why, you know, Bitcoin
and blockchain, a lot of those things were incepted is because of massive centralized,
you know, power, power struggles creating not like are not helping the majority of people.
So I'm very skeptical about it. But yeah, that's that's kind of my, you know, uneducated opinion.
But yeah, that's kind of my uneducated opinion.
I'd love to hear Alex's take on this also, because remember, everybody, banks get their power from the government.
And, you know, there has to be a wash back and forth there.
It's still very encouraging.
The Genius Act is, it's, you It's kind of a load off everybody's
shoulders. But I do think that we need to be moving forward with a lot of integration
and talking to our lawmakers and regulators. When I was a banker, if I didn't like something,
I'd be right down there in Washington, D.C. I'd tell them exactly what it was going to do to the many firms that I represented
and how it would impact the states where those organizations were.
And it's a hard road to hoe for the lawmaker because they've got to try to please everybody.
they've got to try to please everybody and as everybody knows you can't please everybody but
And as everybody knows, you can't please everybody.
i think your statement about it being you know maybe vague enough it will get defined but we've
got to remember we've got to be in there helping people to define it and helping them understand
our side of the story too
Well, one of the, so there's three different things that passed this week in the House.
I don't remember if it was one or two that are finished or ready for the President to sign,
meaning passed in the House and the Senate, then the president signs.
The clarity, or no, the survey, what is it called?
CBDC, I think anti-CBDC State Surveillance Act or something.
That one is not done.
So it got through the House, but it has not got through the Senate. There's a kind of coalition of Republican senators that are pushing back on it, saying the language is not strong enough, and that they think that it could leave some room for CBDCs in the future when the point of it is to ban CBDCs at the federal level. And so it's not done yet.
And it's possible it'll have further iterations
and things change to it to make it better.
I mean, I just think it's incredible that we have, you know,
a ton of politicians fighting against a CBDC.
And even when many people are happy with the place
it stands, including crypto people thinking it's a great thing. Some don't, some do,
but a lot of prominent crypto figures think it is a good one. But even with that, I'm sorry,
there are not, one of the things about this era is we have way more, you know, audacity,
One of the things about this era is we have way more audacity, more mobility and access to information.
All right. So there are specifically nine senators that are the leading voices for the CBDC, you know, kind of element within there.
Right. I won't say any names, but my point being that you are absolutely correct that it is great that we have so many representatives that are knowledgeable.
But we also like the the lady who spoke before, we are the government.
Banks get their power from government. Government gets their power from us specifically.
And, you know, our community helped elect the current administration.
And, you know, there are people from our community directly
that are in the administration.
So if we are bold, if we are persistent,
if we use the knowledge and information that we have,
we can make sure that the right type of,
that it lands the right way.
I mean, a lot of, yeah, on that, a lot of people, and rightfully so, as I mentioned
earlier, it's not only our right, but our duty to criticize government and to keep our eye on them.
It is really the duty of the people to actually, you know, it feels like in modern society that the government
puts the barriers around us, but that is not the way it's supposed to be. It is we put the
barriers around government. That is what the constitution is. And especially what the first
10 amendments, the Bill of Rights is, is to protect the people from an overbearing government.
And so it's good for people to be skeptical of these bills and make sure you dig deep into them
and make sure that they're not overly influenced by particular lobbying groups, incumbents, banks,
other businesses. And by the way, that includes our own industry at this point.
USDC and USDT are incumbents now.
That doesn't mean they're bad people or entities.
It means they are the players.
They are the ones that don't want to be disrupted and want to have moats.
They want to build regulatory moats around themselves incestually with the government
and that's that's what capitalism unfortunately can lead to is and and tends to lead to and i'm
ultra pro-capitalist and free market i am not ultra crony capitalism which is what often happens so
people are my broad point here is while the government, uh, while, while a lot of people may criticize
these bills, I'll just say that, you know, I'm not happy with every single thing that
the government has done with crypto, but I'm a hell of a lot happier than I was, you know,
previously, at least now we are not criminals.
We are not having to hide.
We are not having, I mean, like there were times where I was
scared to even, you know, publicly like, you know, say that I'm doing anything in crypto people. I
mean, I have, I'm here in Puerto Rico and, uh, I think I mentioned this on a recent spaces, but,
uh, my neighbor, which I'm actually looking out my balcony at him right now, he's in the pool.
Uh, we, We live in like kind
of a resort, so our balconies face each other. He would always, him and his wife, we talked to them
multiple times and they were very nice and invited us to come drink wine with them. They're an older
couple. He's probably, I don't know, 60 or something. But when I finally told him about,
you know, I asked him if he knew about Bitcoin and he said, oh, that stuff's terrible. You know, that's for criminals. And I was kind of surprised.
I don't see that as much these days. But, you know, I told him, well, you know, it's a neutral
money and it's inflation resistant. What do you think about these properties? You know, it's the
money of friends and enemies. And I go into this kind of spiel and he's pushing back and I'm being
polite, but I'm also giving him some interesting points that most people kind of perk up for.
But he didn't any. And ever since his wife is still nice to us, but he is very odd to us now.
I think he thinks I'm a criminal or something. And it actually turns out he's an attorney and he a prosecutor.
And they've, you know, prosecuted some people that were using crypto nefariously or something.
But anyways, I'm just glad we're not as much in that place anymore.
Now we're out in the world and now countries are trying to get into our industry.
BlackRock, the people we are trying to disrupt are like, hey, if we can't beat them, let's join them.
And I'm just a lot happier with where we are, but we shouldn't get complacent.
We should keep fighting to make sure the industry goes in the right direction.
I'm just curious if he had ever prosecuted any criminals who use U.S. dollars in the commission of a crime.
Exactly.
Hundreds.
All of them.
Most.
I wonder.
99%.
I wonder.
It's so funny how people look at this.
Like, I hear there's north koreans doing this
does he know who his neighbors are the richest ones in puerto rica hello oh actually yeah yeah
yeah like yeah brock pierce is here uh friend of mine for over two decades um dan moorhead
uh the ceo of pantera is here here. DNA Fund is based out of here.
I mean, it's a massive, not massive, it's actually only about a 5,000 community of us here for Act 60, which is an investor program, investor tax program.
But the people that are here are all either crypto, which all started with Michael Turpin, who created BitAngels, a good friend of mine.
He's actually the one that got me to come.
He's the one that started the crypto people coming here.
Before that, it was mostly just like fund managers, kind of hedge funds and stuff from the East Coast because it's close to the East Coast where their family is.
Good taxes.
They spend at least six months of the year here.
But yeah, it's a great community out here about about 5 000 the crypto power of the world
there's definitely some shakers and movers here i was about to jump in on that and like
so look my general take on it is that i'm very much and it's contradictory to me saying you know
fuck payment processors.
Like, yeah, the government should just stay away
from my nice cypherpunk crypto and et cetera, et cetera.
But look, the reality is that the administration
you have, you know, in charge right now,
who are actually leading forward on this stuff,
they're quite libertarian.
And certainly more than previous administrations you've had who i wouldn't
like to have seen this kind of charge being led under i wouldn't comparison it may because i mean
if you look at the eu right now and i consider myself very lucky to have you know my residency
in the uae but right now we're you know essentially bringing in our own cbdc and we essentially just
outlaw or you know regulate the debt, anything which could
stand in the way of essentially profit being kept or made or kept by what's essentially a golden
inner circle. And that's not to say that other countries don't have their golden circle. I mean,
we know for a fact, and we've seen the Trump and Melania coins, this stuff does happen.
But in the EU, it seems very much like you
know that ladder is really just getting pulled up by the people at the top like a lot of the stuff
that you do in cryptocurrency now like one of the things being proposed and even i believe passed
in i believe it was belgium but i'll need to double check on this is the untaxed uh our gains
on the on sorry taxing the unrealized gains on cryptocurrencies
that you simply hold as in you know tax year has come to an end you bought bitcoin at you know 50k
now it's at 100k even though you're still holding the bitcoin you need to pay your you know 30
plus cgt tax on top of that so this gets to a level of insanity when you look at some of the
acts that are being passed, which, you know, designate what essentially are, you know,
pegged stable coins as a security. So, you know, you're holding 100 grand USDT. And at the end of
the year, then, you know, fair enough, you're not going to have CGT on top of it. But reporting that
as an asset is still a little bit strange if we're meant to be working into the world of stablecoins and them having an actual purpose.
A lot of the reason that's going behind this is they want you holding their own
essentially stablecoin, their own CBDC, and nobody's speaking out against that in the EU.
It's being purported as a positive thing. They're keeping it away from being labeled
as crypto, even though that's what it is, as they're still running forward with the idea that,
and this is from the highest level of European government, that crypto is for criminals.
And that's it. It's like we've stopped developing in 2006 or 2008 even, when Bitcoin was first
appearing on the market. And this is just kind of the idea that's been held through it.
And it's kind of pervasive in European politics.
I mean, it's the same with startup culture.
It's nearly looked at as a dirty thing across a lot of the EU.
Like back in the day, again, this is, you know, 2010 or in around those periods,
we'd have, you know, a big startup culture in Europe
where it was kind of this, you know, encouraging people to start businesses, make money, bring
money into the European economy, granted pay a lot of tax on your money, but either way,
it was seen as a positive.
And now there's just this attitude that, you know, it's, you know, capitalism is just leeching
off society, that it's a bad thing.
It's the same even with our push to bring, you know, energy consumption levels down,
even though energy consumption and energy use by countries has been just directly correlated
with quality of life for every individual in those countries since essentially the dawn of electricity.
That one is profound, man. I'll let you keep going, but then maybe if we want to expand on that after.
It is crazy to me to see that countries like the United States and Europe are stagnant on energy growth.
Stagnant.
As a society, you should be like, if you've ever played Age of Mythology or Age of Empires,
you want to make more villagers to get more resources to mine
more gold and to get more trees and whatever and and or you know in some of these you have it gets
to electricity and now you're producing more energy but somehow we are trying to cap the amount
of energy we output humans if you're a human you can only expend even if you eat a lot the most
you could ever expend is a few thousand calories.
That's energy a day on your work, cutting trees, building stuff, whatever. But if you pair a human
with electric power tools and factories in these things, then one human goes beyond 3000 calories,
two hundreds of thousands of calories of, of output. We should encourage that. That is directly correlated to, you know, poverty reduction, world hunger reduction.
This is a good thing.
We should never try to cap energy.
We should try to find a way to harness all the power of the sun.
Every source of energy we can, we should harness.
The secret adage of government is that that's not really purported.
The secret adage of government is that that's not really purported is that don't assume because something is broken that is not operating correctly.
Right.
In the crypto community, we have an art to tend towards the righteousness or more communal, more open, more equitable.
We must understand that inherently and innately, our government systems are ran by people who specialize in power.
And no pun intended. A lot of systems are specifically constrained, created, planned over decades sometimes to limit certain things, to protect certain industries, to maintain a certain dominance,
and also ultimately to maintain compliance of the public structure and reliance on the power
of the government to save them, right? I'm not saying that it's in everything. I'm not saying
that it's in everyone, but everyone on this call understands exactly what I'm saying. And I've
experienced it at the highest levels and just watching observe, you know, and this is why I'm saying and I've experienced it at the highest levels and and just
watching observe you know and this is why I'm so excited about crypto about
blockchain but in the actual tactical integration of these systems right if I
ever came said hey my we need a blockchain systems to make sure no vote
is ever stolen we need blockchain system to make sure that no money can ever be stolen because it's open.
I would never get anywhere, right?
So with that being said, all right, all right,
what's understood doesn't need to be said,
but when we're making our remedies,
when we're actually analyzing what it is,
let's keep in mind that things that we see
that may not make sense may be working exactly
according to plan of other people.
So we should make our plans around subverting or countering those type of setups.
Yeah, absolutely.
Hear you, man.
And I guess to kind of spin it back around to the general energy side of it, in my opinion,
a lot of it just comes back down to it's essentially looking at higher powers that are trying to keep power out of the hands of citizens,
stuff like that.
Like if you limit the amount of energy
that they're allowed to consume,
you essentially, as Rock said, limit their output.
You limit creativity.
You stifle essentially everything.
Even when we look at the very early FUD around AI,
it all came down to energy use.
And yes, training models is quite energy intensive,
but when you're actually calling from a model that's at an inference level, say when you just go to
chat GPT and you ask it a question, you're using less energy doing that than you are on like,
you know, two or three pages of Google search. And the reason that this gets spread around is
it's as if humanity is getting this drilled into its head that electricity is bad and using power
is bad.
And if you turn on your television,
you're essentially melting all the ice caps,
stuff like that.
That's fair enough, there are dirty forms of electricity.
And it's another issue that we have over in Germany,
they shut down a nuclear plant and reopened a coal plant
because they were afraid of nuclear.
I mean, I won't get into that
because I'll be here for hours shouting
about it yeah it's essentially sorry go ahead I just want a geography issue and please finish
please finish but I definitely want to make a point at some of the politics but also like
just some of the things that because of some business deals that I've had in Thailand that
were forming around and we were having conversations with AWS and blah, blah, blah, but finish your thing. And I want to jump in and make
a comment. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, look, it's essentially just coming back down to
the difference between the US and the EU or rather the EU and the rest of the world right now
is that we seem to be more interested in the EU in having a very heavy meant control over things
like, you know, a stable coin and meant control over things like you know a stable
coin and making sure it's you know just directly backed by the banks rather than somebody who might
work with banks there will still always be that issue where these companies that entrench themselves
be they banks or be they tether or otherwise they will start bringing up regulatory barriers
to prevent people from competing it's just unfortunately how things go over time.
But I am happy that with under the US right now, there does seem to be more of a push for having more decentralization and removing power from the Fed rather than just feeding them more
and more power to control that. It's a much nicer situation to see over in the US. And again,
I'm lucky in that I have my residency in residency in the uae as well have also been
extremely you know i can i went to a shop and essentially just exchanged tether for you know
deer hammer dollars if i want to but that's essentially what it's meant to be for it's
you know crypto is meant to be in a random shop or like a crypto or like a currency exchange or
something like you've got an amp and they're giving you converting uh the
supermarket their services over there you could essentially you know make your appointments with
and you can go in and essentially it's just like you know it's a currency exchange it's not seen
as anything beyond that you get handed a check it's all above board and it's normal you can just
say hey i want to buy an apartment i need a check for 300 000 i can give
it to you on tether i'll say sure our fee is eight percent or four percent or you know what have you
but that's essentially how crypto is at its most powerful and i tell money is that it's most
powerful too it needs to be able to move quickly and be liquid it has to have sources that it can
go into the faster you move your money and essentially the more efficient your energy
in you know supporting all of those systems it is a direct reflection on the quality of life that
your citizens will have and the countries which have made it easy for free-flowing money to
actually interact and i do count the u.s in there compared to you know other countries where they
might have very limiting currencies they might have a lot of say essentially embargoes that are
held against
them stuff like that growth is directly tied to how freely your money can move and how much energy
you're able to allocate to your citizens essentially how affordable it is and that's just been my
general take on this when it comes to politicians getting involved it better be to keep that kind
of system or improve how it can flow rather than bringing in you know
new regulatory barriers that are just going to make it more difficult or assign more control
to people who you know frankly should not have control of it to begin with but yeah that's my
general take on that stuff and i think alex you want to jump in with something alex are you here
to uh school son uh genius act and some of the concerns there i i would love for
you to dive in a 30 second comment before alex sorry yeah it's all good i just wanted to respond
to your energy thing i mean brought uh rock brought up some like really cool points about
the politic aspect and you know just um just energy in. And it's really quite interesting. I got exposed to it
in this weird way while I was in Thailand. I spent half of the year there and I was there.
This was like first quarter of this year. And I started to spark up this deal. I made a connection
between European investors bringing clean energy money to Thailand.
So their investors, they had about a $250 million stake that they invested in developing
two waste treatment, municipal waste treatment facilities in Thailand, taking care of municipal
garbage, turning it into energy, blah, blah, blah.
And this was all you know about you know uh writing off carbon uh i
don't know exactly what the lingo is but writing off uh you know sustainable energy carbon credit
blah blah blah and anyways so we we went in uh i met this guy and and we went in to propose a
bitcoin mining system uh for these uh the excess energy that was being produced from
these facilities in thailand and anyways the deal is is stalling quite a bit because there's coops
every you know two months in in thailand the the politics are all there but but basically um
when we were approaching people we needed a 10 to 50 million dollar investment to start up some of
these bitcoin mining rigs one of the
contacts approached aws and and it became really clear that like that a lot of these organizations
like aws google the biggest companies in the world they're making these huge investments um
you know much obviously much larger than 10 million dollars into clean energy movement stuff and sustainable energy stuff while they're
all spending massive massive quantities of energy and using massive quantities of energy
um on ai which is is is creating this massive uptake of how much energy is being used and the
the full circle to what i'm trying to say here is the political push around sustainable energy development and how it's so tied to politics and so hot it's so tied to uh how money is actually being made and
how people are making money and how really a lot of it isn't actually about protecting the earth
at all it's about changing money from one industry to the next it's it's it's really like super
corrupt and very polluted so I just wanted to make that comment because
i think eventually we're going to see in five years from now how much energy actually gets used by ami
and people are going to get hung out to dry because of a political uh a talking point that
like we were saying here energy is tied to people's livelihood and how
how civilization develops and all those things and um it's just silly talking in many ways.
And I love the earth.
I want things to go well.
But it's just there's a lot of politics in it that just doesn't add up.
So I just want to put that comment in.
Go ahead, Alex.
No, no.
I actually wanted to say something about the energy in a similar vein.
So there's a lot that's tied into the energy thing. One of the things you don't
hear about AI is that it takes a lot more energy than blockchain ever has collectively, right? So
that is the biggest issue. And one of the things that Jensen Huang just said in the All In is that AI isn't about the tech, it's about energy, right?
And that really is the truth.
It uses up so much that we're talking about like football fields worth of energy creation and storage,
not data creation and storage, it's energy, right?
And this is a major issue.
When you were talking about European issues,
so they have a different subset of issues.
They have independent countries, right, that have different rules.
And one of the issues that they've had is problems that happen with privatization of their energy companies. by non-nationals, which is the reason why Dutch energy and Dutch companies cannot be owned,
the majority of those companies cannot be owned by anyone who's not a Dutch national. So you have
these different rules in different countries about ownership and things like that, but the
energy policies can only move as fast as the countries move them.
One second, honey.
So the problem that we have there, I know it's my daughter.
The problem that we have is that we have these various policies there and the investments that they've made.
They made certain investments in the 80s that that they're not able to turn those investments over into additional investments.
Like some of them, when they privatize now, those decisions are not in the hands of the French or not in the hands of the Spanish or things like that. And so they can't
make those additional investments without actually drawing lots of money from foreign
investors into their own internal energy issues. Yeah, 100 percent. I totally hear that as well. We have quite similar in Ireland in that,
so we still have a partially state-owned energy supplier, but it's also controlled by a private
corporation. The problem is we also do not have as many lines entering into Ireland as
other European countries may have, and it's created a little bit of a monopoly. But that
monopoly is very difficult to get over because you're essentially fighting against a privately owned company that has
state equity in it and has been posting you know record profits every single year so that lack of
competition has added a lot to it and in europe like i said it's very hard to start a business in
a you know it's hard to start one to begin with but it's very hard to
start one in a more established kind of you know a large area like you'll never start a new bank
here new energy company extremely difficult extremely expensive too we've just kind of locked
ourselves in to that area and it's awful because i mean we have we could have some of the best
energy infrastructure on the planet but right now it's essentially
we're just very reliant on france and france having nuclear and outside of that then it's like
coal it it's i just find it very backwards now i'm the huge proponent of nuclear and a lot of
a lot of the pushback we're seeing on nuclear right now is coming from you know we had the
9-11 attacks where there was fear that you know a plane would be flown into you know cellafield in the uk
or i mean back in the day we handed out id and tablets all over ireland
yeah the other thing about the uh oh sorry i'm sorry i just uh something fell in the other room
but um yeah so we had a lot of fear that came around that.
And obviously, Chernobyl was a huge thing back in, you know, we wouldn't allow children to play outside in Frankfurt and stuff like that.
I think they even mentioned that in the show when it happened.
You know, we saw the devastating damage that nuclear can do.
But a lot of us, when you have that, you know, discussion today, when you've got like coal plants that are open and operating, saying, you know, you could replace that with nuclear. We have huge reserves of, you know, today when you've got like coal plants that are open and operating saying you know you could replace that with nuclear we have huge reserves of you know usable nuclear
and you know fuel and stuff like that and the argument always comes back to chernobyl where
we sit down and you know look at what happened there and a lot of people don't realize like
and this is a lot of from the show that came out on hbo a lot of people are saying like the point
that chernobyl is that you know nuclear is inherently dangerous and in my opinion it's like a lot of it from the show that came out on HBO. A lot of people are saying like the point at Chernobyl
is that nuclear is inherently dangerous.
And in my opinion, it's like, no, the point at Chernobyl
is that communism is inherently dangerous.
It's what happens when you run nuclear facilities
under a communist government.
Like you've got the most colossal reparts in history
and they're running a nuclear plant.
But when we have European education,
European infrastructure, and European schools are still some of the best in the world. plant but when we have you know european education european infrastructure and you know european
schools are still some of the best in the world like our universities are fantastic we have a
very highly educated workforce here nuclear should essentially be running this continent at this
point but instead it comes back down to this argument of oh yeah but chernobyl and also
nuclear energy is bad because we don't need more energy, we need to cut energy. And it's just a really shitty way
of seeing things going. The last comment I wanted to make, and...
Oh, sorry, if I can just really quickly finish what I was trying to say before,
just because my daughter's a little bit of a mess. But the other thing is the carbon market. And I would,
if I could just actually do anything to make that better, I would, but I can't. There's just,
you know, parents, you feel me. But the carbon market is not actually helpful with the energy,
with energy. So the carbon market works
like this. Everybody gets allocated a certain amount of carbon credits. And then those who
use more of them, who basically poison the environment more, have to purchase carbon credits from those who
don't use them, right? And so it's a way of, I guess, rewarding the people who don't poison
the environment, right? But fundamentally, this does absolutely nothing to reduce production of carbon poisoning in the environment.
It's a failed system.
It doesn't actually, it doesn't reduce the amount of carbon in the environment.
All it does is transfer costs to the people who are not actually producing it, from the people who are producing it to the people who are not producing it.
But it doesn't actually do anything, and it has not actually resulted in overall benefits.
So this is actually not a system that works very well.
So there are many better systems that we could devise than the
carbon credit system. It's just the system that they originally came up with. And for whatever
reason, or because it benefits people who produce no carbon in their environment, say you're a
service business or something like that, you know, you benefit from it. But it
doesn't actually do anything to promote a healthy environment. And it doesn't do anything,
more importantly, to reduce carbon from production. It doesn't encourage those
who are bad producers to find ways to produce that are less detrimental to the environment it doesn't do
anything right all they do is they pay uh for for the for the the cost that they're that they're
giving to the environment that's all they pass that cost along to their clients yeah and and it
punishes those who produce you know if you don, you're going to have a carbon footprint, all forms of energy.
And that cost is just passed along.
It's the same thing as what happened with the tobacco industry where they just passed along the cost.
Or it's the same thing as people who are going, well, I might get on the wrong side of the SEC.
What's the fine? I'm just going, get on the wrong side of the SEC. I'll just,
what's the fine? I'm just going to take that as a cost of doing business. It doesn't actually encourage better behavior. So it doesn't actually do anything positive. There's no net positive here
other than the benefit to those who happen to be allocated carbon credits that they can then sell to the,
the people who are, who are polluting the environment.
So there's not benefits them and punishes the producers.
It doesn't exactly the ones who are, who are, who are, you know,
who are polluting the environment,
but are creating something that people want to buy.
That's why one of the reasons why they're producing,
why they're producing carbon in the environment is because they're producing, right? So there's a lot
in here that is problematic about the current system. And again, this is two thoughts at the
same time, right? I want the environment to be healthy, but I don't think that this is a properly incentivized
system, right?
This doesn't mean, because I oppose this system, it doesn't mean that I want everyone
to pollute.
It means that I see that we're not properly incentivizing the people who are polluting
to not pollute or find other ways to pollute, or this is not actually incentivizing the people who are polluting to not pollute or find other ways to pollute.
Or this is not actually incentivizing anyone, but people who already don't pollute.
That's who's being incentivized by this current system.
It doesn't actually work this way.
Money is not working this way.
So this system just doesn't work the way it works.
That doesn't mean that I want a polluted environment, right?
It actually means I want a clean environment, but I want a system that correctly aligns
incentives.
So this is along with this energy discussion.
We have to put these things together correctly because we are now creating new energy systems.
These energy systems are still powered by fossil fuels, right? That's the whole thing with these Teslas and things like
that. You're not reducing the demand for fossil fuels by getting a Tesla. You're reducing emissions,
right? Because the energy that you draw is still off fossil fuel powered power grids. Right. So you're not reducing the demand for fossil fuels. What, we have to like understand how to properly incentivize the creation of these power plants and also how to move power quickly across large distances. That's the other
thing that we have a big problem with, right? We have to move power across long distances.
And the problem that we have with that is that we lose a lot of power to friction. And that's one of the issues with our power grid is that we have to move
stuff across distances and there's so much loss. And at the end of the day, we can't store power.
So we lose power because it's just wasted into the ground. So our biggest issue really is energy storage. And instead of creating ginormous power plants, what we want to be able to do is have small plants
that can move energy short distances so that we have minimal loss. So I think we really need to
think about how this whole thing is actually going to grow over the long term.
Hey, guys, I'm actually late to another call. This is a really fascinating conversation. I hate to jump out.
I do too.
Because my kid clearly can't wait in the air.
So I gotta go.
But this has been lovely.
Nice to see you, Alex.
Take care.
Let's chat.
Definitely.
Always great to hear from you, Alex.
Yeah, we'll wrap the show up here.
Actually, just so everyone knows,
we've switched from three hours to two hours
to try to condense and have it be more fast-paced.
But, you know, we used to go like three hours, and that would go sometimes to three and a half to four to five.
Now we're doing two, and it's gone to three.
So we're making a little progress there.
But time flies when you're having fun.
Yeah, thanks, everyone, for coming.
If anyone wants to say goodbye,
this was a great space.
Thank you guys.
It was a pleasure.
Another thing, we do this every Friday.
Yeah, we do this every Friday, guys.
So everyone listening, everyone here,
much love and follow everyone up on the panel today.
It was really great talking with everyone here.
Absolutely.
Thank you for taking time out of here.
Thanks so much.
Thanks so much.
Awesome.
Aztec and Rock,
definitely hit in the DMs there.
Let's jump on a call and chat some more.
Appreciate your guys' time.
Thanks, everybody.
Also, we've got the Global Crypto Delegation,
Miami to Hong Kong.
That's coming up.
Hit up Crypto Chick or Crypto Kitty. We hope to see all you guys thank you guys so much Miami love to go switch reward thank you bye
cheers everyone much love everyone and definitely have to connect Matthew
yep 100% all great speaking with you have a good evening a good weekend and all that
alright guys have a good weekend
bye bye
