Bitcoin Steady, But the World Isn’t | Mando and Sergio Silva | REKT Vision
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Hello everyone, we're back again for another episode of Rekt Vision, although we don't have our usual co-hosts today. We're replaced with the better Sergio Silva for this week. Definitely looking more happy. Good to see you again, Sergio. I know obviously people on Real Vision know you very, very well. You've been

I'm kind of a guest person on this podcast for a long time as well as hosting some content in it. Well, it was a year or two ago, but now you are leading the charge on Mebits. We'll get into that a little bit later, but thank you so much for joining us on this, I guess, a holiday weekend, isn't it? I think everyone really has this day off. How are you doing?

Good. Thank you so much for having me. Always exciting to chat with you and the rest of the Real Vision family. And yeah, I think it's a holiday. That's what I could tell just from the fact that I turned on CNBC and like nothing's happening. So yeah, I guess the market's closed today. Yeah. In the UK, we have a double holiday at this period. And I always forget whether the US has the Friday or for the Monday off. But yeah, I think you guys are back on Monday. Hi, Raoul here.

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Anyways, look, it's great to have you just for a change of perspective, because we've been basically banging our head against the wall for the last few weeks as Bitcoin just continues to trade around this sort of 83 to 85K level. Hasn't really broken out, went up, went down, and then it's just kind of returned to this as a magnet. How are you thinking about the market here? I'd love to pick your brain just about crypto in general. How are you imagining we're going to spend the next few months trading?

I would love it if you pick my brain to the point that I can forget the last month. But since you can't do that, I think obviously, you know, it's funny because

politics is now the big driver and and you know politics such a thorny subject it just brings in people emotions which you haven't been a trader no it's probably the worst potential uh mix right trading with emotions it's just not good especially emotions that are you know have nothing to do with with the market itself and investments um personally i kind of was

what was going to happen with the administration coming in. They obviously have a way of going about things that doesn't usually play well with markets. But I just kind of decided to focus on what I was doing, which in this case is running the medits and turned off a little bit. And now I realize I probably should be paying a little bit closer attention because things meaningfully changed. And so now when things change significantly, you definitely have to readjust your

I think, you know, for me, it's not like having one view, but just having a bit of like possibility scenarios. And those scenarios have drastically changed. I think the long term outlook is still the same. If anything, what's happened recently bolsters the case for Bitcoin and some of the other cryptos as store of value. Cryptos as, you know, they're going to really benefit from increased liquidity in the system.

The problem is that increased liquidity in the system might come because the system breaks a little bit before. And thus, we get stuff like the last six weeks, which the price action. Obviously, Bitcoin holding up a little bit better, but just the whole market is pretty wrecked. But yeah, look, I think it's been a difficult market for everything else but Bitcoin. Bitcoin dominance, again, just pushing higher this week. I think it got to just above 64%.

and just feels like there's nothing stopping that train. I have been surprised to a certain extent that how well it held up, but then the fact that gold has kept going this week makes me think that it could even have a chance here to continue rallying. We spoke about that last week, that we felt like last week was maybe the first week where you...

you could potentially see a move up to like 90 to 100K. This week, stocks have kind of been a bit sideways, maybe slightly lower. And gold has just gone up to 3,300 plus and looks like it's just parabolic. I saw today that the gold has actually beaten the S&P 500 over the last 20 years, which is just a wild stat that gold is starting to outperform stocks.

What do you think here? Do you think Bitcoin can follow gold? Do you think we're in that world of digital gold? Or do you think we're just going to get dragged down by some of the sparrishes that you're kind of talking about?

I think last time I was here, you and I were talking about Bitcoin completely decoupling from the crypto market itself and really taking a life on its own, not just from the ETF flows, but just the fact that most of crypto is tokens without a real cohesive story. So to the point about dominance, I would continue to remain elevated. I don't know if it gets higher or not, but definitely remain elevated versus other cycles where obviously it comes in as we get an altcoin cycle.

When it comes to gold, it's quite clear what's happening. People in the global financial markets are quite worried that the traditional store of value, which was the US dollar,

might have some challenges. And I think you're seeing it in the way the US rates curve is kind of just playing out recently where, you know, I used to be an EM, emerging markets traded a certain way depending on policy. And you never had that same type of action in the US with similar policy. But I think

Now you're seeing just a lot more of aversion towards holding U.S. assets. And so in the absence of desire to hold treasuries, the only other thing left out there is going to be gold. And I do think at the end of the day, Bitcoin, Bitcoin still has that tech beta and obviously tech stocks not doing that hot. But but.

it doesn't take away from the fact that it is, you know, digital gold in a sense, and that we should see that bit at least also like the, you know, the dominance remain elevated vis-a-vis other assets. Yeah. That's kind of my view too. I think, I think,

There's sometimes a clash between gold and Bitcoin holders, like, oh, you know, gold is for boomers, Bitcoin's the new gold. I do still think that most Bitcoiners have a soft spot for gold. And I think people who own gold, a lot of them kind of, although they may not understand Bitcoin, they can probably understand that if people believe in it similar to gold, that it's going to have some value.

I think they both are kind of doomsday predictors of a fall of civilization kind of happening here and then this is kind of what it feels like a little bit here in that you're seeing slightly waning international power from kind of all powers let's say and kind of retrenchment from globalization and that's a world where you want to own gold and arguably you could own Bitcoin too

I feel as though Bitcoin dominance could go up to like 70% now. I really do over the next year. Apart from maybe stablecoins actually kind of hurting that, I think it's just going to be on a one-way train. But whether that's in a falling market or a sideways market right now, I'm still not sure. I don't know the direction of the market, but I do think Bitcoin dominance goes

goes higher here. I felt like this last week was the best chance for us to kind of push on and then gold kept on going and Bitcoin has just gone sideways again. And I don't think that's a great sign because it tells you that people are not ready yet to believe that it's made that jump to being purely digital gold.

I don't know if you saw this week, though, the comments from Binance that we had about nation states coming in to buy Bitcoin. What did you make of that? Do you think you're about to see a number of different nations come in here? We've already seen, I guess, smaller nations and we've seen the US made a pivot like

Do you think this is now going to be an accepted asset class by central banks and several wealth funds over the next few months?

So funny, as you were saying the fact that you saw gold continue to move, but Bitcoin didn't follow. I was going to challenge that with similar as we're talking about Bitcoin having the ETFs and the other cryptos not having ETFs. There's a different buyer pool. I think for gold, it's very established. All the central banks, all pension funds, all the big players,

have the ability, the know-how, and even the permission to buy gold. Whereas that takes time for Bitcoin. And that's why we're seeing gold outperform. And I would expect that continues for a little bit. As these other players, and you kind of set up for my point with the Binance headline, where these players start looking at, hey, maybe the gold market is not

Big enough for what we need to deploy. And there's other asset class that not only will protect, you know, our value, but potentially give us a little pickup on the upside. So let's look around at that. And yeah, you know, it's always the smaller nations, the Bhutans of the world that drive that because they need to, again, as you get cut off, you know, rails and traditional markets and so on.

you move outside to other types of asset classes. And yeah, so I would just expect that to actually reinforce in itself and follow. I think the Bitcoin problem just has really bad press, right? Let's call it Bitcoin KOLs are just

you know, you put some of those people, I'm sorry, like nothing personal, but you put some of those people in front of like a pension fund, a central bank, insurance, you know, it's just like they talk about nonsense. And so, yeah, that I think takes away from the Bitcoin story. So it's good to have

You know, people like, you know, the big ETF providers, you know, the BlackRock, the Bitwise, the Banex, the Binances going out there and really being the face of Bitcoin instead of, you know, podcasters or people who, you know, were early and obviously props to them for holding on and changing their lives and making a ton of money, but who might not have

the right background or just expertise in how to really sell the story to a PM, to a central banker and so on. So, yeah, I think it's all positive signs that that is changing. We see Larry Fink talking about Bitcoin. We see Powell mentioning Bitcoin. And it's not just like some random dude that, you know, was trading on Silk Road becoming the faces of the asset. I think it's just pointing in a really good direction.

Yeah. It's funny that you said that, like the Bitcoin KOLs are cringe. Do you think the ETH KOLs are better or the Solana KOLs are any better? Oh, I don't want to open that kind of warrants. I would love for Solana to stop having this little mentality of like, we're the little brother with a chip on our shoulders. They're at the Bitcoin table now. And so this whole chirping at ETH every single time is just annoying. Like, you know, for somebody that's trying to build multi-chain and stuff, it's like,

Oh man, why are we being this way? Like it's, it's, it's the pie's big enough for everybody. Let's all work together. I think the EKOLs have always been very like academic. It's like college professors, right? Like when I was studying my, my major in Texas, the UTSA go runners, the, my, my, except for one finance professor who changed my life, the rest were published authors and we're doing research on like, you know, the volatility curves and all this stuff.

And it was awesome and it was fun and it's intellectual, but none of them will ever work on a trading desk. Right. And so it kind of like got lost from kind of like theory to practice and Ether and its ecosystem has seen a lot of that come to kind of like bite it in the butt if you're taking price performance as a measure of success.

So yeah, hopefully, you know, the Solana people, which I built pups at my old startup on Solana for a reason, but I hope they just, you know, realize like, hey, like just calling each other out and call each other names. And like, by the way, Solana people went super quiet when Solana went down to a hundred bucks. There was no chirping on the TL. Absolutely none.

And now that it's back to, what, 130 and ETH is, like, down in the dumps, it's like they're back. It's like, come on, man. Like, it's not high school. Like, this is, this is, we're trying to be a real serious industry. Well, exactly. Well, we're trying to be a real industry here. And it's, you know, going back to, like, the Bitcoin KOLs. And they're, like, you know, claiming that tariffs are not inflationary and, like, all this stuff. Like, come on.

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Thank you.

Yeah, look, I feel as though we've lost a lot of tourists over the last few weeks. All we have

is a bunch of one group dunking on another group for not being down as bad as the other group. Crypto goes through these sort of periods, doesn't it? Yeah. You know who's going to be on the timeline. It's the people that have been here. It's much more cliquey, I would say, more recently. And it's in some ways more divisive at those times. Yeah, which is honestly a shame. I would hope that people realize that.

Having chain leaders and people in positions of significance spending their time complaining about other chains or trying to change the narrative. No, why? Let's work together. Let's push forward. So hopefully that eventually changes. But for now, yeah, I mean, pick a side and hold on to your backs.

I want to ask you something actually a bit more personal to you because you're based in New York. How does crypto feel like in New York now? Because obviously, if you said you were probably in crypto in New York two or three years ago, it was like, oh, God, he's probably doing something he shouldn't be doing. Or they're probably under investigation from the SEC, right?

Now that seems to have been lifted. The SEC has gotten rid of about 40 different cases. You must know people in the industry around. What's the general sense of it there? Well, now people think I'm a MAGA person. Nothing personal. I think people don't care about crypto outside of crypto anymore.

Whereas they cared a little bit more a few years ago. I think, you know, when I talk to people like, oh, I'm in crypto or running an NFT project, they're just shrugged their shoulders like, okay. Right. It's not something that gives people any kind of just reaction like you used to. You know, in 21, when I left Barclays to go to Fireblogs and it's like I was in crypto, people were like, oh, my God, you must be so loaded now.

And then the year following that, it was like, oh, for you, like sucks to be you, you idiot. You knew it was a bubble. Now it's like, I'm in crypto. People are like, okay. I think plenty of people have made the move or been involved. And they kind of like understand from a distance that, yeah, it's a cyclical industry. People are trying their best. But it doesn't trigger much of a reaction like it used to, either positive or

or negative, to be honest. If anything, people just ask more educated questions, I would say. Or they want to have a conversation about like, you know, what do you actually think about this to your point? Like, what do you think about, you know, Trump coin? What do you think about it? But more from like a philosophical side rather than like, hey, what should I be buying right now? That's awesome. I guess that's a good place to be. It would be nice to see crypto, I think, flourish in the US. And I think

You just don't want to feel, I think if you're working in this industry, that you're suddenly against the law in some sort of way. I don't think it's been a good environment for people over there. And I think you'll see a number of companies actually come back there a little bit more. We're seeing it. Solana is actually driving the charge there, right? They have their big event next month here in New York City. They've been opening offices or having reps in different cities there.

So it's really good. Obviously Solana like launched their policy arm, which I think is super interesting. It's a good business decision. But, you know, I think crypto people tend to have a chip on our shoulders where we expect folks to just like be happy for us or like, you know, give us credit for something where it's like, whatever. When I meet somebody that works in any other field, I'm like, wow, that's amazing. It's like, okay, cool. That's your job. That's your career. You chose to do that.

Hope it works out for you. Whereas crypto people are like, oh, well, if you're not excited for me, like, you know, subconsciously, I feel like you're against me. And so, yeah, I don't know. To your point, I hope for good, sensible regulation. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that needs cleaning up, but it's definitely a lot better to be, you know, running a crypto business and

in the US and not having to worry about just arbitrary enforcement of laws that maybe didn't even exist. The regulator was after you. I was actually just opening up another business account for the Mivid company. And I actually noticed it's the first time where I was checking the boxes from like, do you do business in the OFAC nations or do you do like a high risk business? And it's usually like prostitution, gambling, yada, yada, yada.

And usually there's a crypto box there and it wasn't on this form and it made me so happy. So, yeah, definitely moving in the right direction. But I think people expecting, you know, public adoration for it from outside the space are just, you know, not really going to get it because at the end of the day, as the industry mature, a lot less people care that you work in it. Yeah. Maybe we'll touch upon that even more as well. Like, so.

let's go into me bits a little bit and actually this is gonna be one of the topics we spoke about which was during this bear do you think it's going to be an nft resurgence or do you think meme coins are going to come back because i'm not bear wrong terminology but let's say a bear for like most of the market most of the market's down 70 80 percent whatever i see this week um

I see a lot of NFT communities being quite loud. You've seen some innovation from OpenSea in the last week, which I thought was relatively interesting. It was like cross-chain minting and cross-chain trading. You've seen Xcopy continuing to see huge flows go through his additions. Punks, obviously, always active. We saw a huge Punks sale, although it was down quite a lot from the seller. I think it took a big loss, but

What do you think here? Because the only real meme coin I've kind of seen be strong on this bounce has been Farcoin. But it's, but it's, I think there is that debate here about whether what's going to last through this. And obviously you've, you've pivoted back. We were just talking before we went on air, back into NFTs, back into meme coins, which is one of your first loves of the NFT space. Maybe we want to talk about it a little bit. What's your view on that?

Yeah, so I think as we move forward in time, right, like NFTs themselves are just going to be like the technology layer. There's different types of businesses and verticals that rely on the NFT tech, right, the blockchain tech.

but they're not all the same, right? I think the art NFTs are just doing what art does, which is, you know, power loss. You have people that, you know, artists that are really in high demand, their work goes really, really high. And then, you know, that really flattens out. And there's not a lot of demand for some of the other stuff. I don't think NFTs have anything to do with that. It's just, you know, where the money comes from right now, you know,

the buyers of Xcopy are mostly folks who made the money in crypto or like crypto. When it comes to NFT projects like Punks and Mebits, Punks are mostly in the art category, so I wouldn't bunch it too much with Mebits. So the fact that both were created by Larbalabs and obviously I think the market prefers Punks to remain a virgin or undeveloped, whereas Mebits were really pushing forward a very robust development plan. But even stuff like Apes, Penguins, all the other like Chimpers and the like,

Again, using the term NFT only refers to the digital receipt of ownership and maybe the coordination mechanism for the community that's spread around the world. But they're really just IP companies. The reason why I decided to buy the Mibits when the opportunity came about, one, I love them. Obviously, I was like one of the 10 people on the timeline that kept talking about Mibits because I truly think they are beautiful. And obviously, they're Matt and John's artwork.

And so digital sculptures from the creators of Punks and Cliffs, it's a no-brainer to me from the art perspective. But I also think NFT projects like those are next generation distribution networks. And so for me, that's where the opportunity lies. But then there's other types of NFTs that liquidity pools on Uniswap v3 are NFTs. So like your liquidity position in a pool.

And nobody really like, you know, groups them into, you know, punks, glyphs, art blocks, because obviously they're very, very different, but they're also NFT. So I think we continue to see that divergence from, you know, grouping everything into NFTs and more like art, you

next-gen distribution networks and some other things, ticketing, games, and then shitcoins, mean coins, whatever you want to call them. I think that fall into the broader, you know, kind of crypto consumer discretionary speculative bucket.

but they're really like a beast of their own. And they're just more, I think, a gauge on how much kind of like DGN market attention and liquidity exists. Right. We used to have runners go up to like 500 mil and now something breaks 10 mil, people get excited. I think that's just a really, really good metric as to how many people are involved, are paying attention, are risking their capital. And yeah, outside of like one or two,

communities, I don't think you're going to get something lasting. You can see it for me. The biggest example is Dutch, right? Like imagine if four or five years ago I told you, hey, there's pretty much a government department run by the biggest Dutch public pool and it's literally named Dutch.

and the coin has not really done nothing. I mean, it did a 4X from 0.10 to 0.4 a year ago. That's it. You would expect it to have moved significantly higher. Granted, Dogecoin has always had a much higher market cap than other meme coins, but you would imagine it captured a lot more momentum than it has. It didn't even come close to what we saw in 2021. So I think for me, meme coins are more of that gauge rather than the actual product.

Yeah, look, I think there's a really good point about Doge, right? Like, yeah, it just hasn't really... It's been strange this cycle that you would have assumed, like, if you were to paint the most bullish scenario for Doge possible, it would have been what happened. And yeah, it hasn't quite gone the way planned. I think my gut, just sort of the last week, is that NFTs form slightly better communities, right?

um really stronger communities in my eyes like more personal uh i i kind of get what you're saying about it like it's just the technology but i feel like there's an identity bit with nfts often which which kind of um changes that and i think i would be unsurprised if we see some of the best trades over the next few months actually happen again in um in nfts i think meme coins might might need

Bitcoin to push on to 100k plus for this to for them to like really start performing like if Bitcoin stays in this range I think you could see it like people return to NFTs because it will be it's like the it's this clique crowd you know it's like the OGs just playing around and in some ways a lot of them I think prefer the NFT cycle they did for this most recent one this kind of like kind of version to it like even today I think it's like 300 million dollars worth of Trump started unlocking today and

It's not a great feeling, I think, out there for a lot of these. So I think that the Mebit move was potentially a smart one. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what you've got planned there for Mebit? I don't know how much you can say. Yeah, no, for sure. You know, we publicly mentioned that, well, the company we formed is called the Mebit company.

It was funded by One Confirmation and Yuga also has an equity stake on it. And that's how we're able to put the deal together to acquire the MiBit's IP brand and half of the Yuga Labs MiBit NFT portfolio with an option to buy the rest at a later point in time.

We have four pillars that we're going to develop. The four people actually work at Mivid Company. We're all like, you know, hardcore Mivid members from day one. And I think that's really what's illustrated. We want to go with it. So the first pillar is art and provenance. The second one is fun utility. The third one is tech innovation. And the fourth one is community first. And.

Again, it's just like a roadmap, without saying a roadmap. Obviously, Larva Labs created Mevits, so Matt and John, their provenance will always be there, and we always want to highlight that. And we're also tying in some of the art stuff in the space, because personally, I just love art. I love collecting art. And I think Mevits play a really good kind of like segue into both sides, right? Like their art, like Mevits could be in museums or digital sculptures.

but we can also help elevate other artists. And we have some of that coming here in the next couple of weeks. From there, fun utility, obviously, like you said, right? Identity with NFTs, we all have fun. It's kind of like who you are in the digital world.

And Mibits are little people. They're inspired by New Yorkers. That's what Matt and John were trying to create with the collection. All the traits are New York City based. So you have people in suits that are going to Wall Street. And then you have people in basketball jerseys playing basketball in the West Forth courts and courts in Brooklyn and so on. So it's really, really cool from that sense when they can really represent people. So we can have a lot of fun with that. So we're integrating them into the Player Zero games, for example.

So 20,000, maybe it's if you own one, you can play with your character in a suite of games that they have. I think it's pretty cool. And it's kind of like the original vision of Matt and John, but also the original vision of like this called early metaverse. And if you buy an NFT, it can represent you across game interoperability. It's there. And so I'll be going live here in a couple of weeks.

And then just having fun activations for the community, both physical and digital. We participated in UgoLabs' other side world record attempt, which obviously they achieved. And we'll continue to do that. Maybe it's have a whole island in other side called Metropolis. So we can't wait to be that 24/7 other side and really start converging there.

Then on the tech innovation, obviously AI, we've talked about that. We've actually used AI a lot in some of our Web2 content to help us leverage our resources. But we think MiBits are the perfect bodies for AI agents. We have some of that coming out next week and then we'll just continue to push in that direction. MiBits are fully-rigged characters. It's been really cool to see teams reach out and be like, "Hey, MiBits are perfect.

for what we're trying to do. Let's work together. So it really helps us the fact that there's such a complete product when it comes from the tech side. And then community first. I think that's self-explanatory. We put it last

um on the list because it's you know it's obviously the first thing ever um and we're just going to continue to listen to the community but also expand it um by showcasing how awesome uh maybe it's are and how they can be so our whole campaign is like maybe it's are that underscore maybe it's our art maybe it's our fun maybe it's our ai agent maybe it's our everything and um that's the plan next two weeks going into the maybe it's birthday on may 3rd it's gonna it's like

like packed with announcements. We've been, you know, owning Mevits for just a little over two months and I'm really happy with the stuff that we're going to deliver here in the next couple of months. So definitely stay tuned. And, you know, my DMs are always open. If anybody wants to chat Mevits, I can talk about Mevits for hours at a time. I know. I've heard you. I've heard you talk about this. It does sound like an interesting time to be there. Like I said, I think AI is going to massively revolutionize, like you said,

this content creation in gaming and in the metaverse, right? It does feel as though you're going to be able to expand these sort of worlds pretty, pretty quickly. And the idea of NPCs is going to change very, very quickly as well. So yeah, Miibits as the first 3D avatar NFT feels historic, but also it feels like the utility could start increasing rapidly. So interesting move. I think it was...

Very, very interesting to kind of get. Do you have any insight to how that happened? Was it when you want to talk about that or? Yeah, sure. I mean, honestly, it was not my life plan. I was sitting in Miami. I was waiting whether I would live in Miami or had a very interesting job offer that would have seen me go to Europe. I actually had the job offer sitting in front of me when UGALabs reached out.

And obviously they've been very public about doubling down on the Yacht Club, the other side and supporting teams on ApeChain.

And MiBITS kind of never really got the bandwidth that they required to be developed and steward. And so they're like, hey, listen, we're looking for the right person to take the property and grow it. We want to grow with them. And so it was like, what, December 16th, Christmas Day, we had a handshake agreement. I hope our friends had one confirmation. They'd always been super eager.

ETH and NFT Align, obviously they invest in companies like OpenSea and SuperRare early on. So really kind of like the right direction of travel. And they're a great team. They've actually like, they were helping me a lot think about Pops at my previous startup, even though they were not investors. So we built a good relationship there. And I called them. I was like, listen, this came up recently.

we want to do it. And they were from the first minute to the point where we honestly didn't need to call anybody else, which was pretty cool because I didn't want the deal to leak. I think something that happens a lot in Web3 that I hate to see is just insider trading and people front running. And so it took two months for all the legal paperwork and everything. And we announced on Valentine's Day and nobody knew it was coming. Like you

you can't see any kind of like, you know, sketchy activity on the chart because there was none. And that made me pretty happy to kick off the right way. Because for us, you know, it's not just the media. We love them. We think they're great. They're tech forward and everything, but it's Matt and John's legacy. So we definitely, you know, feel that weight a little bit on our shoulders that, you know, we want to make sure we always honor Blabber Labs, you know, all the work they put into this. And so, yeah, so yeah,

If you are interested in NFTs, maybe not, you know, haven't made the plunge that you have, but, you know, the communities you're a part of maybe have lost a little momentum, you know, just keep an eye out. I think Mibits are going to really, hopefully, just surprise people in the right way. Or if anything, just let us entertain you. I think we're excited to do that.

yeah so if if you agree with my take the nfts um might be the thing to own the next few few months virgio has obviously made this move it feels like an interesting one um obviously a lot coming up uh get a raise bought the assets i feel like there's going to be a ton coming there so go check him out obviously i know a lot of people in the community um

kind of aware of and what else is interesting you away from that are you are you busy at all kind of looking at different assets are you interested in al1s at the moment um yeah rwa is that what was supposed to take in your own your eye um stable coins stable coins it's a lot of infrastructure that has been built there's a lot of stuff that is out there

And there is no distribution. And so kind of cooking up some ideas there. Because I think there's, you know, it's kind of like Web3 gaming. They put a lot of pipes down. They create a lot of product. But there was very limited take up.

And for me, I think Stable really opened my eyes to the power of crypto. It was like sending my mom and my sister back in Mexico die on a Saturday one day, whereas sending a wire from JP Morgan was like a process and go to the branch, my family lives there.

in a part of the country where there's a lot of like virtual activities. So banks are extra careful when you send money via wire, whereas with DAI, I could just send it to their crypto wallet without having to ask for permission to send my money. And so I think stable coins, you know, coming from Latin America, having an understanding of, you know, capital controls and just, you know,

You know, all the costs that go into accepting credit cards and so on, I think are super interesting. But yeah, there's a big missing part of the puzzle, which is distribution. And yeah, stay tuned for my take on that, hopefully here in the not too distant future.

Yeah, stablecoins in New York does seem to be quite a big move. They all seem to be. Tons of different stablecoin companies going back there. I feel like that's the most bullish thing in crypto at the moment, which we've spoken about a few times. I don't know if that's bullish or bearish in general for the whole market. It's bullish adoption, right? Like it's non-speculative. Like when I built Bobcet, which is kind of like Zora right now, like the talk of the town.

The reason why people are telling the base team like Zora doesn't really help creators is because people are using the post as, you know, meme coins. And so they rally and then they crash. And so the creator has to deal with the fallout. When we did Popset, it was in dollars and like there was no secondary value. So it was just kind of like paying for the creator's work, like micropayments. And so there's no speculation there.

Again, I think it's the right product for the wrong audience. If you hold USDC, it's never going to move. It moved a year and a half ago when it did peg. But really, you're not buying... There's a lot of people gambling in the world, yes, but most people are not. My mom doesn't gamble, but my mom uses points like dollars, pesos, and so on. So I think the time for stables

it's much bigger the problem is we're just talking to like audiences that they want the next 100x hey bro drop the ca kind of thing right so there's a bit of that where it's good products that need distribution outside of the space yeah look i think i think stable coins are going to be the eats eats the rest of uh i'm a little bit worried for l1s honestly in this world like i've been saying it the last few shows like um

I think there's a world where stablecoins starts to really accelerate versus L1s as actually the main thing that people use in crypto for, even for gambling. That's kind of where I'm at. And it's made me rethink a lot of my L1s apart from like Bitcoin, because I'm just a little bit worried that they're all just going to be seen as just...

like these are a MasterCard stock and it's just a fee play rather than actually their form of currency. I was saying this to Ovi, but you'd never really hear about ETH being money anymore. People just don't say it in the same way. We need to stack ETH and this is like programmable money that just doesn't really get said that much anymore, which I think is very interesting. For me, it's more like, do you want to own the network where all this economic activity is happening?

Yes or no. I think it definitely kind of like flanks out the potential appreciation curve.

But in a world where a lot of global finance happens on these L1s, whether that's ETH or something else, I don't know. But then for your participation in that network, it could be quite valuable. And if you look at the credit card companies, Visa, MasterCard, they were a consortium of banks back, what, 40 years ago or something. And then they spun them out and then they split because those networks are valuable. But to your point, like, you know,

It's not like ETH is money or like Solana is money or like, you know, Sui, Sei, whatever is money. It's more so like, do you want to own the network where all these economic activities happen? And if the answer is yes, then you buy the L1. If you don't, well then, yeah, come buy Amoeba or something. Buy Amoeba or something. That's probably a good way of describing it.

Yeah, I think we're going to be in this little bit for a while again. I'm sorry, audience. I do still think that Bitcoin now could be ranging here for longer, just the tone of the last week. So I think going to look at more of NFTs might make sense. I think prepare for this to be like a June, July. The only other thing I'm looking at is just some of the states are coming quite close to taking us out of this range.

sorry, getting some sort of Bitcoin reserve. I think Arizona is the furthest along at this stage. So maybe that's the thing that kind of sparks people into life. And then, I don't know, maybe some of the stablecoin or RWA regulation also pushes us through. But it's been a quiet week in crypto, but not necessarily a bad one if Bitcoin is staying at 84K. We'll probably bring in the public guys again here at this stage because I think it's been a

Another perfect week for not doing much and just sitting on your hands. Andrew Parris, thank you for coming on. What have you made of the market over the last week? Well, it's interesting. We're moments away, right? We're two to three weeks away where the mantra of sell in May and go away is about to take over the volumes associated with markets here in the United States.

So that if we remember what that was like last year when we had, you know, the Bitcoin ETFs becoming a meaningful part of the narrative, enormous inflows January, February, March, April. And then we get into May, June and July and things became very, very muted.

Because, as, you know, Sergio was mentioning when he was talking about, you know, the concept and the idea of working in crypto and what that means to people and the conversations and how they've adjusted over the course of the last two, three, four or five years.

he's right. And the reason why he's right is because, you know, Bitcoin in particular and then crypto overall is starting to become, you know, an asset that is part of traditional markets. The Bitcoin ETFs and the scale at which they operate

were successful have have put let's call it crypto you know into a risk asset asset bucket that people talk about now so you know if you tell people well i moved from you know barclays or goldman and now or morgan stanley and you work at bitwise people aren't going to look at you like you have three heads they just think oh that makes sense that's a risk asset type shop and

You know, they're doing good things and they've gone from $2 billion to $14 billion in assets under management. Yeah, sounds good. Good luck to you. So in terms of where the market is now, you know, the consolidation this week and, you know, I put out a post yesterday or the day before that said, if you'd have told me seven or eight years ago that we'd all be bored with being range bound between 81 and 84, you know,

It's frankly surreal to say that out loud. You know, we're range bound between 81 and 84K. Again, what that tells us is that, you know, Bitcoin is turning into a more traditionalized asset associated with broader markets. And so...

We're moments away from being at sell in May and go away when half of Wall Street is living elsewhere for the next, let's call it three months. So price action should probably remain muted. You know, the whole tariff thing has seemed to die down and simmered a bit.

Um, and so, you know, the next, the next move higher in my mind, and this may not be, you know, popular on podcasts or whatnot is probably three to four months away. So you're in a position where if you want to build an allocation associated with any particular asset in crypto, you're going to have the opportunity to do that over the next two, three, four months is, is my thesis.

critically do you think that this was the week where bitcoin should have should have followed gold though i was a little bit disappointed with it i kind of said to myself you know gold is going parabolic right now and the fact that bitcoin didn't move i didn't think i was like oh that's you're not going to find a better week for it to prove that it's digital gold here yeah um

Sure, there could be a case could be made that it should have followed gold. But at the same time, you know, the what we'd love to see, you know, that I like to joke, the term conscious uncoupling, which was, you know, which was put forth by, I believe, the

What's the woman that owns the... Gwyneth Paltrow. Yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow, right? So Bitcoin in its conscious, uncompling era...

um gold is certainly doing that um it would be nice if bitcoin would follow suit um you know i saw some some posts out there associated with you know at this point in the having for the previous cycles if bitcoin were following that same that same cycle math it'd be you know in the 200s or 400 whatever the number it was there were significantly bigger numbers

then 84 and change, right? So yeah, is it a little bit disappointing? Does that mean that in Q3, Q4, we don't see really, really significant moves to the upside because Wall Street returns? There's a different shift in narrative and adjusted concerns associated with asset prices at that point.

Yeah, I think that I personally think that happens. But I've never been comfortable connecting Bitcoin to gold. You know, Bitcoin is digital gold. It sounds great. It's a great narrative. It's worked for the Bitcoin ETFs, yada, yada, yada.

But I think it's just so much more than that in so many ways that I've never loved that connection. But short term, should it follow that path? Sure. But it hasn't. That's the thing about Bitcoin that I love so much and always have, is that whatever narratives we want to paste on or to the front or the back of Bitcoin at any given time frame, we

Oftentimes, it's going to surprise us one way or the other. It's going to do something that, frankly, nobody predicted. We had a good period, I think, where it was outperforming this horrific period for stocks. The cherry on the cake would have been this week. It just pushed on the goal right now. Now we can really have a new narrative.

I just kind of felt like it could be going sideways for a little bit. And maybe it is that. These chops, they really are bad for your mental health. You're just like, this is the moment. This is the moment. And then it's not the moment. I feel like we could be waiting for a little bit longer. We sat in the 54 to 65 range.

for nearly all summer last year i mean that that's basically where we were you know i remember a bunch of you know everybody was doing spaces and the spaces were called 58k gang you know for weeks on weeks on weeks because bitcoin would pop 63 move back to 58 pop 62 move back to 58 and uh

And then again, we had a world where Bitcoin didn't uncouple, but it became coupled to political outcomes.

And, you know, if we would have thought four years ago that Bitcoin would be tethered to political outcomes, we'd think, well, that's the opposite of what Bitcoin is supposed to do. It's supposed to be absolutely decoupled from, you know, politics, all that stuff. That's generally why it was created. So there are going to be moments where it does things that we absolutely didn't see how, why or what.

But we do have to have something to talk about today on this podcast, right? Exactly. Do you want to talk about the trades? Which trades did you do this week? Yeah. So, you know, we put out a post earlier today that said the following things. One thing that we did do is we launched our XRP algo this week. We worked closely with John Deaton, who's, you know, fairly well known in the space and

to launch our XLP Algo. So that happened with significant fanfare. But the latest trades on Bitcoin, XRP, and Solana, I think it's worth noting that all of those trades, all of the latest entries,

are significantly profitable as we sit here today. So let me give you a rundown. The latest two entries in Bitcoin were at 76 and 79. The last two entries for Solana were at 105 and 113.

And the last entry for XRP was at 196. The reason I don't mention Ethereum, even though we cover Ethereum, is because nobody wants to talk about Ethereum right now. So we didn't put up any of the latest trades with Ethereum. But the point being is those executions happened. Several of those executions happened while people were sleeping.

And, you know, there's no way that they could have pulled them off themselves unless they were really, really good at trading and had, you know, versions of limit orders sitting at potential, you know, potential spots. So that being said, all of those trades are profitable trades right now. They're all in profit.

And, you know, the volatility associated with, for example, Solana, you know, our arbitrage algorithm associated with that product just absolutely prints additional cash yield. So people are benefiting in a unique way by opening a Gemini account.

running a Solana arbitrage, running a Bitcoin arbitrage, and then also running a weekly, you know, the weekly candle on the Bitcoin accumulation version of our Alcos. So just people are thrilled with what we do and how we do it. One thing I would like to note as it relates to, you know, where will we be in three years? You know, stablecoins are all the rage right

Or we'll be with L1s, meme coins, whatever it happens to be. I think three years from now on these podcasts, we're going to be talking about things. It'll be a very, very different world that we're talking about.

I think we'll be talking about Bitcoin options. We'll be talking about Bitcoin bonds. We'll be talking about Bitcoin related mortgages and the economics and the markets that are created around those products. I think the likes of BlackRock and Citadel and what they're building in Texas are

um you know the tokenization of you know uh the the the trading of assets i think that's where the all the action is going to be in in three years thus the foundation that is stable coins uh to manage um all of that scale of trade uh in any given 24-hour period it's going to be interesting what we're talking about in terms of um generating alpha

I think it's going to move away from the likes of toys that have been useful, like meme coins and NFTs and the like. But I think there's going to be a maturation, quote unquote, of the industry based on the ecosystems associated with effectively the largest assets in the crypto class. I kind of disagree, by the way, if I can jump in. Yeah, go ahead. If you look at Wall Street, right, like...

Nobody was talking about gold options, gold structure nodes, gold anythings up until this year. Pretty much people think what people are so surprised by, you know, gold outperforming stocks for the last 20 years because it almost, you know, came out of nowhere. And, you know, yes, well, like the biggest asset definitely will get a lot of attention. I do think that as it matures, it will be more like gold. And those, you know, what are you going to trade?

fall products, options, structured notes on something that has lower volatility than some of the other tokens, coins, products. And so, for example, I sat on a structured notes desk. We were selling all these products into LATAM, well, Barclays, and people were getting, we were the largest desk and our quotes were either indices, which that's what Bitcoin can play in, but it was never just one.

Or were really people were excited to have conversations about where ADRs and sectors one versus the other. So I disagree with your view of our like, you know, it's going to be just Bitcoin and Bitcoin products, especially if you parallel it to gold. Like, you know, there's no gold insurance industry. There's no gold like anything. If anything, it's like, you know, physical product and, you know, storing it and securing it.

but not really trading it as a financial instrument. Yeah, sure. My thesis is based on the fact that Larry Fink a time or two has commented and made a meaningful connection to where Bitcoin is in the beginning of the size and scale of what the mortgage market turned into.

So if Larry, in his head, has made a connection between where the size and scale of opportunity with Bitcoin is associated with the mortgage market,

boy there's a lot of open road and open space between now and then and i can't imagine that larry has decided that spot bitcoin price is going to somehow match the mortgage market scale that doesn't make much sense and that wouldn't make them very much money to be honest um so you know

My thesis wasn't necessarily that it was only Bitcoin was going to turn into this financialized new playground. There'll be other assets that are part of that quote unquote playground. There's a reason why BlackRock holds a portfolio that's gone from 500 million to almost two and a half billion in just the last eight weeks. Their Biddle portfolio that has, you know, Aptos, Avalanche, the other ones that start with a polygon and some others that

their belief is that there's enormous growth in this space, but at the same time, they have

You know, they like to play with certain sports gear, right? They have their version of tennis rackets and baseballs and basketballs that they will take this asset class and turn it into certain things. So it'll be interesting to see, again, where we're at in three years, you know, how markets evolve versus where we are today.

Yeah, I think there's something to be said about the point that Bitcoiners don't like to part with their Bitcoin to do different things. But there is also a world where everything fails and Bitcoin is one of the few remaining lifeboats. So maybe it does evolve into being something else. Well, I think that's it for this week. I actually saw a really good piece on Real Vision with Raoul. I think it was yesterday overnight. We were speaking to Barry Silbert.

I think it's probably based around your neck with Sergio. But he really good piece on, on tau, so you can go check that out on real vision. Obviously go sign up. We do these once every four weeks, we do them just for real vision members. But yeah, go check out, check out real vision.com. I think that's it for this week. Thank you again, Sergio. Thank you again, Andrew for coming. Hope you all enjoy your holiday weekend and we'll see you again next week.

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