Hey everybody can you hear me alright?
Give me a thumbs up or let me know. Cool. Awesome. So we're waiting on maybe one more speaker, but I think we can go ahead and just dig in today. So thanks so much for joining guys. Today we're talking about the state of the market. Obviously we had some big
news around the end of last week with Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate having some issues. So that's our main topic of discussion today, but first before we dig into deep, I want to create space for all
like guest speakers up here to introduce themselves. So go ahead and let the good people know sort of who you are, what you're up to. Maybe a little bit about your history in the space and why they should follow you. Matthew, do you want to kick us off?
I'm the CEO of Sun and Global Capital. We've got Adventure Arm and we've also got a game studio. And it's a place to be here from Asia.
Hopefully you'll see me, you'll hear me, slowly waking up as we have our space tonight. It's a little late here, but I'm happy to talk about banks and anything else tonight.
Thanks so much for joining us even though it's late. I appreciate that. Sure thing I'm happy to rant about banks anytime.
I love to hear it. Joe, do you want to go next?
Sure. Can you guys hear me?
- Glad to clear. - Great. - Jovazani CEO, co-founder of Lunar Crush, we're a social intelligence company, and so we aggregate all the world's Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and news data for cryptocurrencies, NFTs,
stocks so you could imagine it was a very interesting last couple of days seen you know the first kind of Twitter or mobile bank run happened and yeah excited to be here Bitcoin class in 2015
Actually, I sorry, it just thought that was such a tremendously important point actually that was just made even in this introduction, which is that the velocity, the speed at which a bank and collapse, we're seeing that that has fundamental leads to
which I think is something hugely important. It's because of two things. It's because of technology. It's because of social media. And I'm not really sure how much of one and how much of the other. But I think it's super important to understand that the rapid outflow of
funds from Silicon Valley Bank was highly fast and highly unusual relative to bank failures in the past. And I think that's like a super fucking important change. So sorry to jump in here. I just really want to emphasize and what's I agreed with that.
I think it's a great call out. We'll continue with the introductions, but actually I think that's a great place to begin our discussion as soon as those are over as well if you guys want to dig more into how social media and just the tech that the level of tech we're at right now, how that is
influences financial systems. But yeah, crypto ape, did you want to take a sec to introduce yourself? Yeah, for sure, man, Matthew and 100%. We had a space, I was hosting spaces earlier, my daily show and we were talking exactly about that, the network effects and how
you know, Feds got to figure out different ways of regulating seeing how fast, you know, how literally over weekend things kind of blew up. Almost great, great recession, if not worse, and how we like, slimly evaded that. But yeah, quick introduction on mindset itself.
CryptoApe, founder of MultiShare and Advisors, we're a Web 3 consulting incubator company and we also do some VC investments here and there as well. I've been in crypto since 1617, started off joining a VC firm.
way back and figuring out investments in ICO, some of these L ones and all these companies. So that's kind of my experience here. I'm a CPA and also management consultant in my past life before joining crypto.
Glad you joined the industry and we're glad to have you here. Um, Riku, did you want to go next? Hey, yeah, I'm Riku. I'm a now under 11 year veteran of this space. Just founded multiple businesses mostly working in the
Fusion and tech industries before fully jumping into a 3. I consider myself an analyst and a decent one at that. I've been watching market trends, been
market trends pretty much right for the past year to the timeline as well. Yeah, I've been investing heavily in traditional finance and more so crypto in these past few years.
It's amazing. 11 years is quite a time to be in an industry like this. It feels like probably 100. I'm sure Tyler, did you want to round us out with an introduction of your story? Sure. I'm Tyler D. I entered the crypto space in 2017. Though fairly passive.
I entered the NFT space in the early 2021. I would say more aggressively after trading NFTs during the 2021 bull run. I ended up quitting my job as a traditional finance consultant with full time into Web 3. Now I do
content over at Lucky Trader, which is primarily an NFT news and media company, where I write a daily newsletter covering all the major happenings across NFTs and crypto, and I still actively trade as well. So that's a little about me.
Well, thanks so much again for joining us everybody. This is going to be a fantastic chat. I want to call out before we get into it though. That obviously nothing we say in this space is intended as financial advice. This is all for
thought-provoking entertainment purposes for chance. So yeah, let's let's hone back in on what Matthew and Joe called out maybe early on. Yeah, let's let's talk about how technology has sort of enabled the rapid
destabilization of banks in the space and what's different about now versus say 2018 before about the spread of information about how quickly these things can happen. Are there strengths along
side these weaknesses or is this mainly a danger? So yeah, in your opinion, where are we at in terms of 10 years from now, what are people looking back and see as the most important parts of today's financial system?
So yeah, I mean this was like an old school bank panic that happened with unusually fast, right? So banks are not designed to have obviously all your cash on hand, right? They're lent out or in the case of us
which is one reason when they failed, they were primarily lent out, they were invested in bonds, which is a whole topic in and of itself. But I mean, I think the basic point is that
I think the basic point is that in some ways, in some ways this could in theory happen to any bank, right? And the fact that people are, it's happening at some point,
Freo banks for it is something that could happen in theory to any bank and it's really being fueled by this combination of social media and technology again to circle back to that point. Happy to jump in, you know, I mean the speed of social
is everything today. I mean, you can even look at how their whole team stocks. That's what they're doing today with the regional banks. You're not whole team Ethereum, you're not whole team Bitcoin. And so when you look at even something like a Terra,
That's out there when it's more decentralized, you know, running the bank goes to zero. You know, I was actually talking to my father this morning who's actually at a regional bank, which is crazy, but the story is that, you know, his father in 1984, so up until Silicon Valley bank, the second
largest bank failure ever was Continental Illinois in 1984 and you know he gets home late one night at 2 a.m. and my mom still wake which she never was and she says he got to call your dad and Continental Illinois ended up making a bunch of
on the oil and gas industry in the boom, just like Silicon Valley Bank made a bunch of bets. You know, when they got a bunch of influx of money when the VC market was hot and the startup market was hot and the bank goes bust. But the interesting part, I think, that happened to my grandfather, which didn't happen to us,
was that he didn't get refunded anything past $100,000 in the FDIC and all of the businesses that had payroll there, it was a different thing. And so I think it's, think about what happened then, which took years to unravel. We just cleared a bank run in 72 hours.
backstopped it. So not only was the run incredibly fast, but the backstop was incredibly fast. And so we just live in a different time. And I think people are waking up, millions of people are waking up this morning to not trust the fractional reserve banking system that's out there. And I think the reverberation is going to be, could have been felt for a long time.
I just want to call out that this space is pretty open. It's all yours. So feel free to unmute and chime in whenever you want. I appreciate that we're keeping it orderly with raised hands. But I want to encourage you guys to feel free to take this combo wherever you'd like. Sure. I can jump in and I want to touch on or Joe ended there. But I think from a technical
technology perspective first. I'm digital banking is absolutely a huge driver here, right? It's never been easier to move funds online or even via mobile. It can happen lightning fast and previously would have taken days for people to physically go to branches and pull their funds out, right? And that's
And those barriers have been removed and that is a big driver of the speed in which we've seen this happen. The other driver as Matthew mentioned is social media and I absolutely believe that social media risk is now an incredibly important risk to be managed. And bank risk management offices really
as well as any crypto company or company that has a publicly traded token. You have to be conscious of what the public narrative is surrounding your company, your view that's happening out in the social media sphere because it can have rapid impacts.
And we saw that take place with SVP in having a conscious presence to get out there and control that narrative, control the public perception is as important as it's ever been. So I think that's going to be an interesting impact that comes out of all this to see how companies will address to that movement here that we've seen.
I think there's going to be more regulation because freedom of speech is definitely one thing. But we're seeing the impact social media and certain people in social media have been able to make on
the public markets. For example, Elon Musk tweets something out like stocks get halted. Or for example, the whole FTX situation, even though there was a lot of stuff going on with their internal controls and accounting and all that stuff that was not in place, regardless
because CZ tweeting out his next investment move was a catalyst that set that entire, all the stuff that happened in motion. Even with this current situation with SVB and these banks going on there, there's certain politicians
a little bit more and you know pretty much fear mongering on Twitter so I think there's going to be a lot more you know scrutiny with like who which figures which I guess quote-unquote influencers of you know of greater scale outside of like just this Twitter space like real like it would be
real life influencers, like what they can say in the public. And I think that like companies are going to definitely need to take this into more consideration because, you know, in a blink of an eye, your company can be going concerned. Like, it could be a very, very, very big issue in a very short period of time because of
you know what's going on in the market and how easily people are swayed. So what's fascinating them is that we had all I think been kind of assuming that a run on a crypto exchange was some kind of unique feature of our our industry
over in a corner here, but actually that was really a a a premonition of what has happened this week in many ways and it's a sign of the way things work now in our digital rather than analog world. So I think it's
It's super fascinating in that regard. Riku, I notice you have your hand up. I want to create space for you to comment as well. Yeah, I was just listening to everyone's like a comment on everything at once. Everyone brings up great points and I love Flannic Joltles running on
way back to the 80s. Let's be for my time. But I think we see interesting parallels. I think I mean fear is fear, right? Regardless of like how it spreads, whether it spreads on TV or it spreads through like, you know, the phone network like it did, the screen or net.
I think social media just acts to accelerate, but it also shows the glaring vulnerabilities that exist within our current and modern financial system. And that's mostly credit, right? Like someone brought up the point that banks aren't supposed to sit on their money, but
like most money in existence today doesn't actually exist right it's just debt transfer like someone's supposed to owe you that money it's not really backed by anything other than the guarantee that as long as the economy continues moving you're gonna have access to your money because someone's always gonna owe someone in fact
That's why debt exists, right? Money is a sign of debt because if no one owed anything we wouldn't need money in the first place. So, I think going back to your question 10 years from now, what's going to be glaringly obvious? I think that's going to be glaringly obvious. That our financial system
is broken and has always been broken and that everything that's been done is like a stop-get measure. That's why crypto has seen such a rapid rise. I think a good real world example of it right now is President Putin using
Bitcoin to sell oil to get around sanctions, you know, and it keeps going like the US tried to censor Ethereum and, you know, the OFAC transactions. And that was like a huge centralization and censorship issue. And, you know, at least Bitcoin, it can't be done that way.
because it's proof of work, rather than proof of stick. So I think we're starting to see a flight to safety where Bitcoin is treated like a safe asset because it's finite, it's tangible and you can prove real ownership. Much
like gold is like the traditional libertarian flight to safety asset. So you know things that have value are better than you know money that doesn't actually exist like in physical form. I think that's what we're starting to see here and you know social media helps
spread that narrative around.
and educate people. Just to build on something that you were saying there, as someone that was affected by SVB, Lunar Crush Bank at SVB, it's this kind of fractional reserve banking system. It's always kind of,
I kind of always understood what was going on. We've seen bank runs before and I came out of school in 2008 and I had a job at Lehman Brothers and then suddenly I didn't and suddenly a hundred-year-old bank doesn't, investment bank doesn't exist anymore. But the odd thing was that I started to realize
weekend a little bit was I didn't have any other real options even with Bitcoin today to participate in the economy in an impactful way as a business to pay people's salary so they can pay their mortgage or rent or buy a car or whatever else it may be.
I didn't have it like a true like broad-based option. Right? And so we were talking about it like that my co-founder John and I were talking about this morning of hey, we have to move all of our money to Chase and then you know there's all these options with companies that can maxmyinterest.com or they can spread it across FDIC but that's not administratively feasible.
But if there was at least a business and someone that understands Bitcoin and understands cryptocurrency, if there was a button on Chase that said diversifying to Bitcoin here, I would be
I've seen that button this morning with at least a portion of the company's money because it feels safer. I can deal with fluctuation. I can't deal with zero.
as a business owner. Right. And so I think that that is something that a lot of these small companies are waking up to. The thing that I'm nervous about is that
Did this have, was this enough of a scare for, like for me it was as a CEO, but was it enough of a scare for the rest of this market to say I'm going to do something different?
maybe it's not an immediate impact, but maybe we did steer the ship one degree to the left, which over a long enough period of time is an infinite amount of different space.
You know, that's a good point. Yeah, I was like a business owner myself. It's You know like not having diversification. It's like putting out your eggs in one basket. It's the old adage, right? I think
I think it's difficult. Change is always difficult. And as a business owner, you're looking at, erratically volatile, new, class of assets that hasn't really been around for that long. I mean, comparatively, the internet hasn't been around that long too, if you think about it like that.
It's just like at what risk appetite, you know, or like what accessibility is it like is onboarding to the space really that much easier for a business to diversify its you know funds into for safekeeping like are people going to choose their own
code storage for crypto instead of a bank. We all know banks offer a negative 1% interest right? So, you know, that is a good point. And I hope that as more and more people do it, and that facilitates more growth, that actually facilitates more money into the
the total market coin cap, right? You're going to want people coming in for security, people coming in for infrastructure, and that might be one of the catalysts for a bull run for the entirety of crypto. So this could be a good thing, and it could also be a really bad thing.
would like to be seen. With, sorry to interrupt, with the comment about the first location, I just wanted to go on one of my little rants to make the point that there is, there are programs like FDIC, ICS, and other kind of similar or related programs where you can
Effectively what they do is they do have that course of a button where they They have a network of banks and you can Have your deposits spread out among that networks you get to 50k times x number of banks insurance coverage
So there are a lot of ways to protect yourself through bank deposit diversification. So we really wanted to just jump in here and make that point. From the perspective of any individual customer,
of course, because it's there are a lot of pros and cons
to expanding the aggregate and management and sharing that we're providing. And that's a whole conversation in one of itself, one right also. I actually have pretty strong feelings about it because we just kind of implicitly agreed to backslap.
$17 trillion right because of a bank feels next week the customers are gonna expect that they're not gonna take a haircut they're gonna expect to be made whole right that's something that's new and really quite different and it's just jump in here and go on I guess it ended up being two of my rants
I'd like to dig in a little bit more into the conversation about Bitcoin and what it offers as a technology in these situations. So I know Rika, you brought up people are looking for something with.
a sort of tangible value in a way. And for Bitcoin, what that might provide is that sort of untouchability, the separation from the current system with USDC deep-hegging a bit from
It's you know dollar peg down to about 90% of that at a certain point and then coming back up Obviously it will be made whole After we've seen with the bank stop, but yeah, what does that do for?
confidence in USDC. I mean last year we saw USD collapse this year we had other centralized actors like FTX sort of implode and so there was a big push for decentralized stablecoins, it was a push for sort of
trustless permissionless technology. So yeah, how does that sort of affect crypto going forward in confidence in these centralized entities or should there be less confidence in these entities? Honestly, I
have like a theory, I guess it's kind of conspiracy, but I've had this theory for a while that the US itself is just like insanely against crypto or at least crypto that it doesn't control innocence and I've had this theory ever since
XRP kind of got locked up and it's in junction but like laid out simply like the first steps would be to go after stablecoins, right? So we saw a UST get attacked and there is a whole I guess I haven't forgotten about it, but like I think the leading theory of a set like black rock was behind it
I always thought that USDC would be safe because circles in American companies are backed by American banks. America would not attack America. I thought there would go after USDT which has foreign backing. It would benefit the government a little bit more.
I then I swapped it around like USDC is actually the easiest one to attack right because it's US backed you could you know cause a crisis and then step in and take over it right make your own CBDC and because
Then your CBDC is the US dollar which every other country's debt is priced in the dollar and you can just print infinite dollars then USDT would automatically be pegged to the USDBDC And I just saw this I'm
I mean, I haven't fact-treated anything, but it looks pretty condemning and I'll put it up there. But it basically says that signature was shuttered with no insolvency because regulators wanted to kill like...
the last pro crypto bank. So, you know, I kept seeing like, "Oh, USBV was a US government facilitated collapse to attack crypto." Everyone's like, "No, it doesn't make sense because you'd be destroying the startup industry, letting China
and Russia basically take the forefront in technology and they wouldn't allow that right so now we're in this like a bailout but it's let's not call it a bailout situation and then you know SBNY is like quietly being closed and I know that quite
base had like a quarter billion dollars there. So, you know, we're running into like a real like a crypto bank run situation again. You know, it reminds me of the FTX, but I just I don't think there's
trust, necessarily. The trust isn't strong for saying like it's reliable, but people are ready to click the exit button as fast as possible. And I just noticed like finances just like sitting there like finances been kind of quiet.
So I think it's worrying. I think the old guard, the old structure, I think was really weak in hindsight to like a very centralized attack. And that could be because there weren't that many people or the people were always
in a PVP market instead of like, let's ignore the potential profits and build something that's strong enough to withstand, you know, governments. And then we can PVP a little bit. So it's really interesting to me.
I can't predict which way it's going to go. I know which way I want it to go, but you don't have to wait a little bit. Trust has been as low as it's ever been, I think. I feel like every bear market, there's negative press on Bitcoin.
like it's to head crypto's dead it's never coming back but I just I it hasn't been it has been this bad I think but I I feel like if it goes any worse than you know some of like the oldest people the people the idealists they might leave
Yeah, it's an interesting dilemma we find ourselves and I think a lot of the early
you know, idealist, the people who got in for specifically what crypto could do for the world and the society that we have, probably will stick around. They tend to be ideologically tend to be resilient. But as soon as I see you've had your hand up for one, did you want to? Yeah, thanks. So I get a quick comment just on the last one.
But then I have a bigger question that I would love all y'all thoughts on so that the quick comment is I think Look governments have armies so if you if you want to be in a position to be strong enough to stand against someone with an army you need to have an army You know, it's not it's not a conspiracy Facebook like governments love the ability
And we can debate the morality or ethics or whether the world would be better or not if that were true, but it is true. And that's why they killed Libra and D.M. It was a clear challenge to those things. So I think it's just helpful for us to kind of zoom out and go, these things are not conspiracy theories. These things are
people that are trying to challenge centralized power ought not to be confused when centralized power responds in a certain way. But here's my question. We've talked a lot about the kind of the velocity of social media and how that changes the velocity of the news and how that changes things. What I'm really curious about is sort of volatility in human nature and crypto. So we have this idea that crypto is somehow
better, fairer, more resilient because everyone's got direct 24 by 7 access to the settlement layer. There's no intermediaries to the TxState you're not using the central exchange, etc. But the consequence of that is that there's nothing to stop a crypto death spiral, right? There's no centralized circuit breakers. There's no theoretical
So, in crypto, as it stands, despirals are kind of, you can't stop them. Maybe the answer is, you know, we move to Dow governance and we figure out how to make Dow governance.
work for some definition of work. But I guess my question is, the world is volatile. Crypto allows us to have 24x7 read access and write access to the settlement layer. That seems amazing and super powerful as a computer scientist. How do we resolve that with the reality of human nature and volatility?
I've got a comment on that so that you maybe didn't jump in at the beginning where we were talking a little bit about Terra and Looking at the stock market today and seeing these regional banks. There's a reason that these halts are in place, right? I don't know if you guys know the the story about the the Lincoln hot letters, but Abraham Lincoln used to write these letters and
and we've all been there. It's someone at work or something. Something happens and someone pushes you off and you want to write that first email. That first email is like, fuck you motherfucker. And then the second email is like, hey, I really disagree with this. And the third email could be, hey, we should probably work on this. And it's kind of as you take
time and you calm, you start to realize that there's a better frame of mind to make a decision in. I think unfortunately for this, especially younger generation where they've just been, you know, if you came out of school 2008, all you know is getting burnt. How do we reframe
and put the like what you're asking with your saying is checks and balances right and how and like there's a system there that obviously has worked how does that not even not even not even checks and balances but but even infrastructure so so here here's a here's a good example the general crypto cannon is that it's idiotic that you can only send a wire on a week
day and that markets have hours and after hours trading is treated in a different way and whatever. And there's a ton of logic to that. I think it is ethically offensive that dark pool trading exists 24 by 7 and mere mortals have no access to that. But setting that aside for a minute, market hours are interesting, right? Because market hours allow the FDIC to stop
bank work through the weekend and have a thing that works at Open of Business Monday morning. These are fundamentally structural things that rely on the reality that, you know, to your point show, humans get really heated and do lots of stupid things in the moment and need a cooling off period, whether it's, you know, buying a gun or moving a whole bunch of assets.
It's interesting to me that a bunch of that stuff existed because the internet didn't exist. There was no way to instantly make these decisions and crad for stuff. And that's kind of the historical reason we have the system the way it is. But it also really matches well to some degree with some of the foibles of humanity. And crypto seems like it misses on those dimensions.
So, I'm going to let Step in here. I have an answer. It's a philosophy answer, but it's a tragedy of commons. People do what benefits them in the short term, even if it is a giant step in the wrong direction for the entire collective.
Philosophy and logic shows us that is entirely logical to do something that's in our negative interest and still benefit from it. So, you know, the whole thing is it makes sense that crypto code that spiral and it must like
will at least once before centralization comes in. But I think people might disagree with me, but I think there needs to be some sort of centralization in crypto. I genuinely think that I think that
Whether it be through like a Dow or someone setting like education or onboarding, you know Centralization instead of like control, but like a standard like a trading standard or a How would you call it like like a use case standard?
I'm guessing like a platform in which like everyone comes through Almost like a bottleneck so like people understand the technology and they don't get abused right and like it's like one of the major issues that we had and NFTs is like you know bad actors would come into space and they would charge
be like a bottom layer, something that we can build off of because right now it's the Wild West, right? And the frontier always outpaces a law. And we're seeing that in like the billions that have been siphoned off and just been lost.
Yeah, I think there's two different things, right? There's the scamminess of crypto and I think that's just the like if you allow anyone to create anything and say that it's worth some arbitrary amount and traded on exchange, you know, grifters are going to grift and so it's just it's nothing inherent to crypto.
It's really easy to drift with this particular technology and so people drift. All algorithmic stablecoins are grift based on poor understanding of the ability to mathematically predict the future. But setting aside the grifty stuff or the bad math stuff, there's also just the
So what happens when there are death spirals that all actors would say, "Hey, look, if we could pause this thing, we would, but we can't." I mean, there's historical examples, right? Like the Dalhack or the various sort of hard forks after the Dalhack are sort of examples of
We need to like pull the plug on this thing and fix something and restart it like it's not hugely different from what FDIC Intends to do with with banks But there is this there is this tension between if you have a thing that is wholly decentralized and everyone has access to the right layer or to the read right layer of the
of the settlement layer. That's really powerful, but it also means that it is a thing that is completely in the hands of the machines making trades where human judgment doesn't have an opportunity to kind of pull the plug, hit pause, have a circuit breaker, whatever other term you want to use.
Isn't that the beauty of the system though? Isn't that how this was all intended to be designed and how this is an answer to a centralized model that can fall into the hands eventually of someone that you don't want to have that power.
to have a decentralized network where one bad actor can have too much control. Yeah, but the problem is a little bit different. The problem is if you're familiar with cybersecurity, the fundamental issue with cybersecurity is things called zero days. Zero days is
a hack of a bug that nobody knew existed until the moment it was exploited for the first time. And all software, whatever the software is, is always going to have hacks. No matter how many people audit your smart contract or whatever it is, some fractional them are going to have hacks that get exploited at some future date. And so the problem is
is, if your view is, you know, code is law, the system is running as expected, you know, we want to sort of run with the bugs. Well, that's what the Ethereum classic people thought, right? That the code is law, we're just going to run it as works. That didn't seem to work particularly well. And I don't imagine
that it will work particularly well. The benefit in our current Fiat system, which has a ton of problems as well, is that things can be decided by Fiat. If a judge makes a decision, so long as the upper courts don't disagree, whatever a judge decides can be
can be enacted because the legal system has primacy over the Fiat system. That ain't true in crypto. So you have this issue where you have systems that work as intended, even though nobody expected this particular intention to come up because it was an unexpected bug.
And we sit here going, so what do we do? Do we take the Ethereum view of what we have to go fix these things? And then you run into, well, that's necessarily centralized, setting aside whether ethos is security because of things like that or not. Or you take the alternate view, which is the Ethereum classic view. And that seems like that hasn't worked well. I don't imagine it will work well going forward either.
I want to take a second real quick while we have this pause to create space for a crypto Florence. I notice you joined up. Did you have a hope you just dipped? All right, well then we'll move on to the next question. What lessons then are in
this moment in time for us. What can we learn from prom SVB? And in terms of specifically the conversation that was just ongoing, can't those sort of
bottlenecks that we're describing be protocolized. If you take the code as law stands, if we all agree to adhere to certain financial structures and
For example, you know, validators can agree to pause in that work as inefficient as that may be as possible. So does that not create solutions? Is there more that we need to develop the infrastructure not there yet? Like, what are we missing here?
Can I actually sneak in a quick Bitcoin question for everyone? I'd love to hear everyone's opinion on we just lost three of the most tech-friendly entrepreneurial friendly crypto-friendly banks in the United States and Bitcoin's now a clip scene 24/3
what is everyone's take just on the fact that those two things are happening.
The chance of future Fed Hikes went down considerably. Yeah, I think that's why far and the biggest factor. Yeah, it's like 50/50, which is crazy.
But I think I brought out the point a little bit earlier. I think it's a digital gold like a flight to safety asset. What kind of safety? So if there's no off fiat on ramp here.
right? It means that people, like this, this is just a standard move that's happening because, hey, there's going to be more QE coming in the future, which I just think then, like thinking macroeconomically about that, it's like, well, this is still trading like a big tech stock.
like, are we that, are we still that early in this process? Like did Bitcoin in any way shape or form? Like, you know, people used to say, oh, it's an inflationary hedge. It's an inflationary hedge. That's obviously been proven.
and incorrect, at least on the short tail. But what is this telling us about Bitcoin, just in general as an asset class that
Like I think people on this Twitter space shirt like I would be hitting the Bitcoin button all day if I could if I could do it in a way that was impactful by business. I can't really do that in a super pack away, but just wanted to hear from one thoughts on that.
It's still a risk on asset and it's going to become less centered around the United States and everywhere because it's going to be less tied to other sectors of the economy as a result of the clampdown of its
I think it's also related to the lack of confidence in stablecoins now, right? I think a big question that I saw going around on Friday when USDC was depiguing
So we're asking, "Well, what can you even rotate to?" And I think we saw it in the price action Friday night that Bitcoin and Ethereum were some of the big winners. We've seen them level up again today, likely because of some other drivers driven in the macro.
Now with the latest news, what I'm interpreting from CZ Binance with the move that they made with BUSD is that they're trying to effectively wind down BUSD as a stable coin. Coinbase is no longer going to be allowing it for trading.
to be a lot less options. So perhaps the narrative is shifting to the Bitcoin becoming the most stable crypto option, even though the stable is clearly going to be with quotes around that because it will experience volatility. But it feels like that is maybe a narrative coming out of this here over the last few days.
I just want to make the point that my default presumption at this point is I think that concerns about USDC will be very short time. I just want to make that quick point. Let's call it more of a hunch, but that's my thesis.
Do you want to upgrade at all?
with that. I think that it's, it was related to one specific problem. They've always been by and large a good operator.
I kind of believe that it'll be more of a short-term perception issue than that. It'll be fine after a couple months.
Yeah, I mean, I think this the current situation with with BTC. I mean, it's I think people are realizing like even some of the stablecoins and all things that's happening, they're so attached to the you know, quote, unquote, web to, you know, normal financial institutions and financial
So there's, you know, counterparty risk and all these other other risks that I can come into play right BTC on the other hand, it's, you know, not necessarily centralized it's, you know, international asset like it's not only invested by people in the US, so just it's obviously a really
I think that's what's happening with the BTC situation right now, along with all the other predictions of the BTC situation.
the Fed not doing a 50 basis point high again and all that stuff given that they're already breaking, like the system is already breaking and there could be more risk to come. So that's what I think is happening in the BTC side things. In terms of the banking side things, I think that is a big blow.
for crypto, you know, Web 3 companies and startups and whatnot. It's that's a huge huge bloke as you know, those were not only the some of the regional banks that were helping a lot of the crypto companies, but also many startups. So I'm hoping like, you know, some some other, you know, player comes in and you
start something up new or fills in this gap but you know even with regulations like it's not like some it's not a situation where like some of these bigger banks can just come and scoop it up right that's there's regulations against that so that these banks don't get too big so it's gonna be interesting scenario
But I do see there's an opportunity, but you know how long is it going to take for you know someone to come and take that opportunity? So it's going to be interesting a lot of this is you know tailwinds of FTX and and Luna USD and all that stuff so Regulation is definitely the big
thing over here and either it works out, I mean the short term out of thing is going to be any positives related to that given all the restrictions that are happening. But in the long run it could create some confidence and get the rest of the, you know, folks mainstream to come into this space.
Yeah, that's actually a great segue into maybe a question we can use to round out the spaces. We approach the end of it. Do we think this is a net negative or a net positive overall? I mean, that narrative of, you know, banking awareness of the system.
them drawing more people in, how effective is that going to be and will it outweigh any negative sort of domino effects from all the companies sort of taking a hit with SBB right now.
I think it's a short term negative, but a long term positive.
Then the reason I say that right now is just because of the macroeconomic structure. I don't think anyone has the capacity to think about the future of crypto in terms of like, you know, people are just in survival mode right now. I think that's why it's pretty much a net negative right now.
just been a series of negative press, one bad event after another. It's really just hammered. Even us in crypto, I'm feeling it. I've had a week's where I've just felt burnt out. I'm like, "Well, why am I still here? Nothing's moving. It's all down."
So I just like I imagine people thinking about entering the space and they're just like they're turned off right like it just doesn't it doesn't seem safe there's nowhere to trust. I think the one thing that's really helped you know like combat that negativity is basically the community.
I think the best and brightest are in the space and I get to meet new people with fresh and innovative ideas and I think that's the long term good news is that those people are still here and you know that all this collapse has happened. I was really highlighted the week once in both traditional finance and the like the onboarding ramp in
to crypto, but also like the most obvious problem is nothing is ever priced in crypto right it's always priced in a native currency so there's always a layer of exchange and we might see that disappear this decade even you know not through CBCs I
I'm thinking like, you know, I'll salvage or in Bitcoin, and if they scrap the international currency for Bitcoin, or Venezuela, I know the Bahamas made their own like CBDC experiment, and it's not as centralized, and it seems to work pretty well. So I think there's hope.
I think that's the good news long term is that we're still here and we're still working.
Yeah, just to just kind of echo that a little bit for everyone, you know, I stand up with my team this morning and
You know, it was, you still, it's hard to focus when there's so much going on as a company that looks at social media intelligence all day long. I mean, we're right in the mix of it. Like if you go to lunarcrush.com, porchless.com, and you sort by social mentions, you know, you see SVB signature bank and first report with bank.
and Bank of America and Charles Schwab now being talked about and Ally Bank and it's a lot to take in on top of everything that we've all been through this last year with like Tara and FTX and Celsius and Voyager, three arrows capital, equity and investors
of drying up, it's a test for everyone. And I think what actually going all the way back to COVID did was speed up 10 years and now we're unfortunately at the LOP 6 off. But what you really have to focus on is that you're still probably further ahead than we would have been had all of the events that took place.
and how do you refocus yourself, how do you refocus your business and what you want to be passionate about and get rid of the noise and go after it. And I think it's a strong base for yourself. You can't change other people if you can't change yourself. And so it's, I think giving everyone a pause and opportunity
to look inside and say, "Hey, what do I want to be? Who do I want to be? What do I want to push this world forward as?" And go do it. And so you have to take these opportunities to do that versus, you know, wallow in your sorrows because no one else, just like we're talking about, like the no one else is looking out for you. It's just you so go after it.
I think Joe nailed it and I think that the ultimate positive outcome coming out of this for the crypto space is seeing more crypto companies going fully unbanked and being bankless, right? So trust in the
overcome there and I'm not saying I have all the answers but starting to work down that path could be a really positive outcome that does help shift and you know what the future of the space looks like so I'm excited to see where where that potentially goes from here.
I agree and I think it's good to sort of round us out on an optimistic note like that because we are coming up on the end of a space and I like to use the last five minutes to give everybody one sort of last. Haram, if there's anything you'd like to share with people anything you want to share.
You know, you guys have fought a really great conversation here and want to give you some time to sort of get that bread. So let us know where we should look for more of your work and then yeah, how we can keep in touch.
Bunch of humble folks, I've talked too much to your Bzzani CEO, go to LunarCrush.com, thanks.
I promise it's okay to chill. If you don't feel comfortable though, I just want to say thank you guys so much for joining us. Everyone in the audience definitely should be following everybody up on stage and a lot of really great, insightful conversation. We do these spaces every Monday and Wednesday and you
guys are all welcome back anytime we love to have you on and yeah thanks guys thank you sorry I was so sleepy thank you sorry it was so late thank you thanks for having us this was a great discussion
Thank you, this was great and we'll back for sure.