Trump & Crypto: Promises Kept or Dreams Shattered? (REKT Vision)
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Hi everyone, I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much. All right, we're here again. Another week of Wrecked Vision. Pretty good week. We had an all-time high for Bitcoin, an all-time high for Solana again.

Everything kind of went a bit nuts. I guess at this time last week, the Trump meme coin hadn't even... That's mental, isn't it?

Which is kind of crazy. Before we get into things, obviously, we've been talking about it a lot. We have the crypto gathering for Real Vision coming up in Miami. Ovi's going to be there, play some golf with him. Go to realvision.com forward slash CG 2025. We still have some general admission tickets. It's always a great event. You're going to get to meet a bunch of different people in the community and also some of the faces you know, like Raoul and Ovi. I'm still 50-50.

But maybe we'll get into stuff now. It does feel like an absolute age since we last did this show. It started off with a Trump meme coin coming out in the evening after our show last week, then one from Melania on the Sunday. Then Trump gets in. And this week, we've got a range of different crypto executive orders around

crypto assets, particularly in the US, a bit more broad than I think people are expecting. I think people are expecting just a Bitcoin focused one. And it seems like it could be a range of different assets. But how do you feel about the market here, SF? Do you think people have wildly different expectations when I go down the timeline? People are like, oh, we've topped. A lot of people are like, well, how can you ever be bearish again? Where are you in this? It's just a bit all over the place, isn't it? And

I think I'm someone who's usually always wired pretty bullish. And obviously for the last two or three years, I've been very bullish and buying a lot of risk. And after you've had that big move and you've had that move through all time highs, if you're someone who was early to the move, you always start questioning yourself and it's like, oh, should I be taking more profits here? Is the move kind of done? Where does it end? So those are always the thoughts that are going through my mind. Now,

On paper, on the face of it, what's just happened is the most bullish thing we've ever seen for crypto. Like you have a full-on crypto task force in the US. You have Hester Pierce taking a senior position within the SEC to work on this stuff. And, you know, they're doing a complete U-turn and all this stuff that...

they were trying to clamp down on last year. If you saw the David Sachs interview yesterday, he clearly said collectibles like meme coins and NFTs, like not referring to those things as securities. You know, the Trump coin, I'm sure we'll talk about that. That was literally like launched in the USA when this entire time you've had people trying to go offshore to launch tokens and stuff. So it just feels like the US has done a complete U-turn from trying to

regulate and clamp down on this stuff to now accepting it and trying to drive innovation and activity to the US. I mean, you even had A16Z today, say they're pulling back out of the UK and now back into the US to invest there. So these developments are just structurally extremely bullish for the industry from a long-term perspective. And I have no doubt it will result in a significantly larger amount of participants, both in terms of

builders, creators, investors, also opening up probably to a wider range of institutional investors. It's huge. It's incredible. The question is, how long does all this stuff take to happen? How long until you actually do get a Bitcoin reserve and all this kind of stuff? And what sort of price action do we have in between? How are people positioned right now? Were people really long into this event? Those are all the things that

you know, cross your mind and make you wonder whether like, you know, you have a bit of a pullback or a bit of consolidation before we get to those levels or, you know, can we truly get there? I mean, yesterday, last few days, I was feeling a little bit conservative. And after I just said what I said, I now I'm feeling like really bullish again, but it's hard to, you know, it's hard to really know. It's also really hard to know what to own because I think if you're like me, and I think many people in this space, um,

you benchmark yourself to Bitcoin. So you're always trying to outperform Bitcoin and you're trying to find like the higher beta version of Bitcoin. And for a while, that was pretty easy to do. Like, you know, you just bought meme coins that worked really well. Prior to that, you could have bought like ETH

Solana, NFTs. And it's now becoming more challenging if you're not an active trader to just buy something and hold it for weeks and months because these narratives and methods keep changing. And you had AI stuff did really well and then it pulled back and then meme coins came back and then it pulled back. Then you had Trump and then that's pulled back. And unless you're constantly moving in and out of these positions and timing them very well,

It's hard to really hold onto it. And right now I'm positioned, like it's the first time I've owned a lot of Bitcoin in a long time because I just don't know, without being an active trader, I just don't know what I can hold and be happy with over a longer timeframe. I just don't have the time to like day trade or even trade on like a weekly basis. Like I can't keep up with this stuff. I just need to be able to buy and hold some stuff. And right now it's just Bitcoin. Hi, Raoul here.

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Yeah, you said a lot there. And I think a lot of that, yeah, I agree with a lot of it. It's been very PVP on the stuff that isn't majors. But maybe let's break down kind of what happened firstly. Maybe we'll start chronologically. So we'll start with the Trump meme code, because I think it's probably useful to talk about everything.

Trump came out on Friday night, obviously had this gala dinner on the Friday, the crypto ball, they called it, and announced that he was doing a meme coin. In the past, he's done NFT projects, Ordinals projects. There'd been some unofficial or linked meme coins, but he came out and said, look, this is going to be the official Trump meme coin.

If you were in US hours, you maybe had a chance to buy it. I think it came around 10 p.m. Eastern or maybe just maybe 9 p.m. Eastern. Most European people were asleep. And that thing went up to 20 billion FDB, then 30, then all the way up to 70, 75, and then has had a pullback now back down to kind of the 30-ish range.

Firstly, let's talk about why he would have done this. Because though he does have 80% of the supply, there's clearly monetary reasons why you could say he would own this. But he also seemingly launched his token in pretty, I wouldn't say reckless, but it wouldn't be the most legally sound way to do something like this. Traditionally, if you're launching these sort of things, particularly if you're an entity...

You wouldn't keep as much centralized control. You wouldn't be advertising it. And thirdly, like you probably would consider doing it in a, like a legal structure or most people do it off like offshore even. He's kind of, kind of gone and done it and just said, yeah, I launched it. I'm promoting it. I've got all the supply. It kind of, what you said before was that it's now just a free reign. What we've seen since then is,

loads of people considering creating tokens, like very, very big celebrities, brands. It's kind of open season now because of the way that he did it. What was your take on, maybe firstly, do you think Trump, are you going to be owning the Trump meme coin? What do you think about it first? Yeah, I mean, I did own it for a little bit and I sold it. I think from an attention economy standpoint, and we all know how important that is in crypto, I think,

we haven't even seen, we haven't even scratched the surface of the amount of attention Trump is going to command over the next four years. And I mean, I just remember sitting at Barclays in 2016 to 2020, and I would have my Bloomberg screens and all my risk up and everything. And the other thing I'd have out would be like a Trump's Twitter feed, because every time he said something, it would literally move like the entire market. And you had to just be so fixated on that. So I think we were going to see that, but we're just going to see that, um,

to like another factor. Like I think it's going to be even more crazy this time around. And I just have to think like every time you said something crazy or does something crazy, like this coin moves higher now. So from an attention standpoint, I think this was, is going to probably be like the number one tension coin this year.

The caveat or the counterpoint to that, and the thing that concerns me about it is 85% of the supply is held by the team and there's a three month cliff. So probably sometime in March, I guess, or April, it starts vesting. And then you're just going to have like a large amount of supply coming to the market perpetually, like forever, basically. It's like a daily unlock. So yeah,

Like, I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm mid curving it and maybe the attention economy that he commands is going to outweigh that and it will still go high. That's a very real possibility, but that's the part I'm a bit concerned about. If it wasn't for that and you know, if like a hundred percent of the supply was like circulating, then,

then I would probably have a position in it. I still feel like it's going to be one of those things you can't really ignore. But I'm just a bit concerned about the supply and given the levels it's at now, I think you need to have a big position in it to get a decent return out of it. So that's my take on it now. I think if it drops back to 25 or 20 or even below that, then I think it's worth a bit of a gamble for sure. I think there's going to be a level to buy it. I just don't feel like

I just don't feel like it's yet now is my hunch there. Yeah, I do think it's going to be easy to have the most attention to it. But this was a big win for a lot of people. You probably have to digest a lot of people who want to sell off the back of that. And then you have the supply coming. There is also a case, and what we saw over that weekend was that it was almost just too big for Solana. Every other Solana coin had to fall off.

actually fell like 30% to 50% while Trump came out because everyone had to sell their holdings to buy Trump. And Solana's FTV is, what, 150-ish? So when this was trading at like 75%,

it was a huge bit of Solana's ecosystem right there. And I think part of this may be that Solana really has to go quite a bit higher for this to be almost sustainable. They've only got 10 billion of stable coins on Solana, although that's up a lot. It's tough to sustain a coin that high. That being said, I do think it probably could be one of the coins to own over the next four years. Yeah.

There's going to be some short-term supply to digest, I reckon, as in that cliff, that initial cliff, and then everyone freaking out. But I do think this is the sort of coin that could go a decent amount higher, honestly. And it could even be one of the bull cases for Solana here if it really starts going higher. Like I just said, Solana needs to be bigger to help satiate how big some of these coins that want to come onto it are going to be. So...

I think that was one. Do you think that's like a Solana needs to be a bigger thing? Or I think your comment there was like every other coin had to sell off. But is that more just a sign of like, it's still the same people within crypto who are just trading this stuff around and there hasn't really been like enough new liquidity come in to be able to support those moves? Like it kind of, I think that's the other thing that sort of like concerns me that you just still get these like

liquidity sucks where things feel very pvp rather than everything being able to rally in like this parallel fashion like we saw in 2021 like it still feels like that to me at the moment i felt like that changed for me a few months ago um around the time of the election i did think a bunch of new people came in that being said like i i did look at the value of of solana meme coins the other day and it's 23 billion um give or take and it was 22 billion in november

And since then, that figure includes Fartcoin and AI16Z and Go and Trump. So we've only added $1 billion of net value to Solana memes, let's say, which includes Trump and many of the larger AI coins.

That got me thinking, yeah, it's become very PVP out there, at least in the meme coins. And we'll get into that, like what maybe trades you can kind of put on. But I think that's a very, very valid point. And I do think that, let's say, like I just said, I think it's open season now for coins. I think...

I think there's a world where you could see sports teams come out of coin very quickly. You could see like a big brand like Nike come out with a coin very quickly. There's talk about people like Twitch or kick, you know, these big streaming platforms, maybe they'll just drop a coin. Like if that's going to be on Solana, uh,

It does feel like everything has to sell off for that to have a multi-billion dollar valuation. But we did see after that, straight away, Solana hit an all-time high, right? And then it's continued to kind of outperform since then. It's today, it's up at 266, even with other bits of the market going.

uh lower and you did see stable coins start to rush in so the the stable coins of plan salon has doubled basically um or is up like 60 just over 60 percent um since since the trump meme coin so money is coming in there is new holders i think it just takes a little bit of time still like i think we all just assume like it's instantly gonna get

millions of new holders and maybe tens of millions of new stables. But that sort of figure, I think, takes a little bit of time. It does make me incredibly bullish on Solana still, that I think it will go higher as, you know, maybe you didn't buy the Trump coin, but you might buy LeBron's coin or you might buy somebody else who comes in and does something. So that was my main takeaway from that, really.

Trump to 100 billion, I think can happen. I don't, I don't, maybe it's not a this year thing. Maybe it's a next year thing, but I do think he's a, he's one of the most like memed or followed people out there. Right. And I just get the feeling that a lot of people are going to focus on this, uh, on this coin. So, uh,

That was my main takeaway. That happened on the Friday. Interestingly, then his wife came out with a coin, Melania, on Sunday. And the market really dumped then of all the other Solana meme coins because everyone was like, right, well, now...

We're going to have a constant stream of coins. And then I think even his coin dropped about 40% when that came out. But since then, we have no more coins from the Trump. So maybe it is just those two. There are a lot of speculation about different family members coming out with coins or unofficial coins. And now we're kind of in this post-Trump world. Then I guess then we'll go into the inauguration and kind of

what was really announced yesterday, which obviously most people or many people will be the bigger piece of news, which is this huge bit of, um, crypto executive orders, which was around the, uh, creation of strategic reserves, essentially for, um, us, not us based assets, but for us crypto assets. Um, and there's going to be a, uh, a criteria, which I think David Sachs is going to lead the, um,

the team that's going to decide which of these assets pass that. The initial kind of front runners, I would say, are Solana, XRP, Circle, USDC has been mentioned, ETH, Nexus, and Stable, and maybe a few others like ETH got mentioned potentially in a couple of others. They said, or they hinted at the idea that they might build up this reserve via confiscated assets rather than going out there and buying them.

And they, I guess some other stuff they mentioned, no CBDC in the, in, in the U S they mentioned that they're going to, uh, put forward a broader, uh, crypto regulatory framework. Uh, as David Sachs said yesterday, meme coins and NFTs broadly are going to be classed as collectibles, which might sit outside of all of this. And then, uh, there might be specific stuff for utility coins or even security like coins, you know? Um,

I personally thought this was unbelievably bullish for crypto as well. This, for me, felt like the most that they could possibly do. But the market didn't actually react that well. Bitcoin went lower off the back of that. What was your take on it all? I think, as I said, long-term, it's extremely, extremely bullish. These are not like...

you know, spraying deodorant over a very smelly person. These are, is a full on, like having a shower. Like it's, it's a very, very, you like that? I've heard that metaphor before. Okay. Yeah. I just made that one up actually, but I think it works quite well. But yeah, these are big, big structural changes that are going to be amazing for the industry over multiple years, decades, probably. Yeah.

But these things, as I said, these things don't happen overnight. And you know how short term minded a lot of the speculative market is within crypto. And I think people probably went risk on, people probably had big lever trades on, hoping that they would announce, specifically announce a Bitcoin reserve and specifically announce a Bitcoin purchase program and start right away. I was reading my timeline. I didn't have that expectation personally, because I know these things take a long time, but

I think lots of people did. I mean, there is some chats that I'm in with you where people were like,

where I was just like, yeah, I don't know if they'll announce that. And they're like, oh no, they're going to announce that and they're going to buy Bitcoin. They announce all this stuff. And none of it really happened. So I think if you're a retail person and you have a big levered long into that, there wasn't really that many liquidations yesterday, but you probably get a bit worried that they're like, oh, that's not what I was expecting or what I was hoping for. And kind of missing the forest for the trees really, given how bullish it is, what they said. So I think the pullback was because I think short-term speculators wanted something

wanted a bit more action today. Yes, they wanted more action yesterday. You know what I mean? And it's not like people were probably thinking, this is like the ETF thing of last year when everyone knows it's going to happen, but it's not done until it's done. And when it's done, things will go a lot higher. And then with the ETS, it got approved and it started trading two days later and we started getting inflows. Then it was just like crazy, right? And I think maybe people were in that mindset of like, oh, this gets approved.

next week the US starts buying Bitcoin and it's going to go crazy. Like, I think that's what people were hoping for and that's not, clearly not what we're going to get. So it's not to say the news wasn't bullish at all because it was. Like, I read some of that stuff and I'm thinking, man, this is like insanely positive for crypto, but you're not getting like the

actual buying pressure tomorrow or next week or possibly even next month, which is maybe what people were hoping for to, you know, sell into or something like that. So that's my explanation of why we saw the price action we did. And, you know, maybe Bitcoin didn't rally as much as it usually does because it talks about digital assets and not just Bitcoin. So now it's a bit like, okay, which other coins will be involved? You know, it's a bit less clear, I think, as to what's going on. And I also think like,

Talking about a digital, using the term digital asset stockpile feels very different to strategic Bitcoin reserve. Even though they could potentially kind of mean the same thing, it's different terminology. And if you're a retail trader who doesn't know much and you see a different term, you're kind of a little bit like, ah, is that it? Is that not it? Like what's going on here? Yeah.

and i think um i think the other thing is also like david sachs even like in the interview confirmed he's like we are evaluating this idea it didn't like confirm that they're actually going to do it they said they're evaluating it so um it does mean the the positive thing i'd have to say back to it is like we sold off then we've kind of like rallied back today and it does mean we now

I was worried we wouldn't have any positive catalysts to look forward to this year after that was announced. It sounds promising. It's not a done deal, but it sounds promising. What he's saying is very promising. And it does mean we have stuff to look forward to this year that's fundamentally positive for crypto, which is a potential announcement of this stockpile, potentially other assets away from Bitcoin, some changes to the way

you know, the US looks at crypto in terms of securities, commodities, collectibles, like all these official things that are now potential catalysts to look forward to that aren't done deals that I don't think are priced in, but could maybe act as like, you know, a North Star for this year for some kind of like positive crypto price action. So, you know, I've gone from like,

Being like, oh, this could be a sell the news or what's left, what the catalysts are left to like. Being like, okay, maybe we didn't get the action we wanted to T0, but it's now created some future catalysts, which I think can be a 2025 events that I do think we can rally into. And we'll start to see and hear speculation come through. And it might be a bit of headline tennis. We may get some negative headlines as well, but at least there's a lot of things to look at here. Like we have...

the asset stockpile you have. Is it just Bitcoin or other assets? If other assets, which assets? Are NFTs and meme coins collectibles? If so, can anyone just launch all the stuff in the US? There's loads of different things now that have previously been unanswered questions that we should get answers to. And it's clear to me that they're pushing

the US as a crypto hub and pushing innovation and activity and encouraging people to not leave the US down and do their business in the US. You have to think it's going to be very conducive to the crypto industry, which has to be bullish. So I think, you know, it's just how do you play that? What do you buy? Like, you know, apart from Bitcoin, what do you... I still don't know. I still don't know what that move is. Like, AI, like...

I read that and didn't necessarily want to buy Bitcoin. Like you said, it was a bit more broad, which made me think that Bitcoin dominance could actually come down. But I also think that the misconceptions there were kind of wild because executive order, you can't spend Congress's money. You can't spend taxpayers' money via executive orders. It has to go through Congress. I think Trump actually got into a fight with this during his first term when he tried to build the wall via executive order and then got caught up in like a legal battle around it.

So they can only really do this sort of stuff where they give it like they actually set up a framework or they do something non-monetary, essentially. Now, I do think there is a plan potentially for which Santa Lumis has put forward, which is kind of to sell some of the gold reserves that the US has and move them into Bitcoin.

But that would have to, I would 100% imagine it would have to go through Congress to be able to do that. So, and she's been put in a slightly stronger position, this Senator from Wyoming to, I think she's now chairing one of the Senate subcommittees on crypto. So there's an expectation that they'll be able to maybe bring some form of legislation to the House around this or the Senate, sorry. And then we'll see where it goes.

But I kind of felt like what he said was the maximum he could possibly say, which is, we're going to do it. We're going to make sure we don't sell any of the stuff that we have, basically, or potentially not sell any of the stuff that we have. And I guess it wasn't as day one, we're having a Bitcoin reserve. It was a little bit like, we're going to go through a process of working out this is the best thing to do.

but i kind of feel like that's also best you know you don't just want to come the us president i think coming out and basically being like we need a strategic big reserve i think that would have been maybe a bit too far like at least like having a bit of a process here where they listen to people and decide what what to do i think is is probably the best one so and the rest of the legislation does sound incredibly but but if they seem very pro-business um

both in terms of how they're going to treat current assets, but also encouraging businesses to come back to the US. And going back to that first point, because Trump has just done this, this like coin, which didn't really pass a lot of the legal smell test,

I think basically it's a free, it's a free reign for a lot of people to come back, kind of do some fun stuff with crypto. So it's kind of that plus the meme coin itself, I think now sets us very fertile ground for the people to come in and explore with crypto a bit more, which I think will be, will be very bullish. What do you buy? What are you long? Like what, what is the, what's the, tell me what's the six month trade here? I

Honestly, I thought it was Solana just hands down. Solana just seems to me to be the hands down. Trump meme coin on Solana. I think that will always be what I'll see of the lion's share of new token issuance, in my opinion, just because of the way it's set up. Secondly, in terms of this, it was because it wasn't just mentioned as Bitcoin. It was mentioned as a

like a more broader base of crypto. Well, Solana is US, right? Alongside this, the other prominent ones would be XRP, Chainlink. I'm trying to think of which other like big ones, but World Liberty Financial bought a couple of them. So it's US, US founders. David Sachs was a seed investor in Solana, right? Famously had that interview on All In where they were talking about selling some of their tokens, although they've all denied that they did that.

So he's clearly cognizant of that and has been a promoter of it since the early doors. And I also think that all the stuff that we spoke about in terms of L1 regulation or regulation of the space in general will encourage L1 use more than potentially even Bitcoin use. So I felt like Solana was the real obvious one. I think Solana can fly here, like honestly fly. And I've been saying that for a while before. We have the unlocks now coming thick and fast. But this...

My first takeaway was Solana. And then my second takeaway, which I guess I've been speaking to you a bit more about, is like Solana DeFi, I felt. Because although I don't think, I think it's more difficult to pick winners right now in the altcoin Solana space.

As in terms of AI or memes or that sort of stuff, I do think that what we will see is huge DeFi volumes go through. We saw $200 billion of DEX volume go through Solana this month. And I bought a decent bag of Radium, which is kind of one of the best flywheel tokens in Solana because they use the fees to buy back the token and

it integrates straight into pump funnel pump on coins go to radium and i think 55 60 of all jupiter's volumes go through radium so it's like it's it's very very ingrained in salon d5 and this has a good flywheel so i was bullish on soul and sold deep on the back of that i could be bullish on a lot of different salt ecosystem coins

But it's very difficult to underwrite them in big size when, you know, LeBron might drop a coin. Because as we just said, like things can nuke. When Melania dropped her coin, AI coins dropped like 30, 40% in a day. And I felt like, oh, like, I don't see how those two are really related other than they're just, Solana's not big enough to be able to deal with the amount of money that needs to flow into the next gamble. So... It's a good point, isn't it? Like...

Sol ripped when Trump dropped his coin. Sol rallied a little bit when Melania dropped her coin. If you're trying to protect yourself from that stuff, it seems like buying Sol is the way to go. And it does feel like if you're launching a new coin, that's where you're going to go because that's where all the volumes are, that's where all the holders are. It's the cheapest to use. Do you have any thoughts on...

um, wild Liberty fi just buying all this ecosystem stuff and not really buying anything Solana related. Like, is that, is that a reason to belong ether for soul just to kind of do what the Trumps are doing? Or do you think they're just mid curving it and ignoring soul?

I think World Liberty Financial using buying ETH with some of their treasury is not as big a thing as Trump dropping a meme going on Solana. And that where the token creation stuff will happen that basically points to it being Solana. I think the World Liberty thing was more to do with like DeFi. Like maybe we will see, I think they're trying to do kind of their own DeFi project. But to be clear, World Liberty Financial is...

is the Trump's son, right? It's a Trump-related project. Trump can't actually be involved in that project in any sort of way. There's even questions about if he's allowed to have this meme coin because you're not really meant to have financial interest in anything when you're the president, right? So I would kind of see the World Liberty Financial thing as more separate to Trump here. And just because they bought some ETH, I wouldn't necessarily think that that was...

I mean, if they buy ETH, what does that mean? Like, oh, they're buying it because the Trumps are buying it. I feel like what I really want to get on the top of is who's going to be issuing tokens? Who's going to be issuing tokens? And I don't think anyone's issuing tokens on ETH because Eric Trump bought some ETH. I think they're doing it because Trump just issued his exact token on Solana. So I think that's a much bigger factor here. But I do think like majors...

majors look more attractive to me than a number of different alts right now, just because of what we just said, like the liquidity suck, apart from some of the DeFi coins, interestingly, just because I think no one's really looking at them and they have some interesting tokenomics around them. But out of the three majors, Solana was definitely number one. Bitcoin for me, honestly, although Bitcoin dominance has kind of stayed where it was, it looked less interesting, particularly also because we've seen a number of

ETFs now being filed, like rolling ETFs filed for a range of different altcoins right now. So maybe the institutional rails are going to be less of a wall for crypto, for Bitcoin even. Yeah, that seems to be the case, I think. It definitely seems to be the case. Yeah, it's pretty exciting to see what's going to happen, I think, in the next few months. I think we're just going to see some big, big structural changes and

There are going to be some trades to put on now that I think will be crazy, probably even in majors. It's just trying to figure it out. Like even, you know, I know lots of our viewers are on Ripple, but I saw an interesting back and forth between the Ripple CEO and someone else. I don't know if you saw this or not, but yeah,

It's sort of like accusations of like, you know, you guys have been speaking to the Trump guys and bribing them with, you know, Ripple and stuff like that. And starting to make sense to me. I mean, not bribing is the wrong word, I guess like heavily lobbying, but

But it kind of makes sense to me. The Ripple rally now makes sense to me because of this idea of like, this is an American coin. These guys are lobbying, you know, the Trump's pretty hard. Let's, you know, Ripple, I guess, at higher prices, the tech looks better. And he goes back to the use case like, oh, this could be, you know, a real like mechanism of exchange and all this kind of stuff. So like,

That's actually, I think the reason why Ripple has rallied, not because of, oh, everyone's woken up and they're just buying all these dinosaur coins. Like that's not the reason why I think it's clear to me now that that's what's going on. But, um, yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm like, I guess we missed that trade. I mean, or maybe there's more of it to go. I don't really know, but I think that's the kind of thing I'd love to get my ears to the ground to like who's lobbying really hard on this stuff. Um, yeah.

And what are they going to push? And it does feel like, I guess that's also another tailwind for Solana being, having, you know, US founders. I think like this idea of like American made stuff, I think is going to be, it's going to be championed for sure. As it should be, you know, like we'd,

you know i was we were talking about like how all the stuff against coinbase was ridiculous it was like literally a us company listed on the nasdaq and they were trying to like crush it down and while they let stuff like ftx in the bahamas go and you know all this other stuff so it's good to see that they have their priorities straight and they're trying to push the right stuff that's actually better for the usa but it kind of makes you realize that maybe that's the stuff you should be looking into and it'd be long like if there's a

US coin with a strong narrative. I mean, I saw just for people who don't know, usually a lot of token structures are such that you maybe have like a US or UK or whatever it is, labs-based company, but then your token foundation is often offshore and a completely separate entity. And I saw today blast one of the L2s

have now combined the two. So the US entity actually now owns the offshore entity and it's all like one thing. And I think we'll see a lot more of that now. But it'll be interesting to see that kind of development as well, I think. It was so hard to launch a token before. Now it's going to be a lot easier. I mean, Trump just did it

Right. I was speaking to a prominent law firm in the space yesterday, and they said, yeah, they have clients coming into them being like, look, we're just going to launch it in the US. Whereas they've been one of the big proponents of the offshore foundation. And they said, look, probably in six months, you'll get more clear regulation, but a lot of people are just willing to take the risk now. And I think it opens it up. I think

And in some ways, the reason why I focus on the meme coin quite a bit at the start is because in some ways that's even the biggest thing. Yeah, it's the meme coin in the front, but what it really is, is he's done it, which means that anyone else can come and do it now. And that will extend across businesses to like more utility style coins, to meme coins, like big culture style coins potentially.

It is free. Like it is open season now. You'll see big AI, like I would guess developers come in here, researchers do coins. Now you'll see big celebrities. I think you'll see huge brands. We're starting to see some of like the old dying brand, like all dead brands come back. Like Vine did a coin this week, which is kind of funny, but you're going to see,

In the same way that GameStop was basically a much-loved brand and then it created the meme stock, I think you'll see some of those old brands come in and be like, yeah, we're going to create a coin. Why not? It is going to be open season for a lot of this sort of stuff.

And that might extend to games, you know, who knows like Pokemon, imagine if Pokemon came and did a coin like it is, it is really, really made it open season for new big, big drops or big, big projects coming in and doing coins in my opinion. So, and that's why I get so bullish on Solana because I'm like, that's the big thing. I don't care if I can't buy ETH, but there's going to be huge, huge token creation stuff about to happen.

There's so many different people looking at this now thinking like, "Well, why don't we launch a coin? Why don't we... We can do it in the US now." And that's where the majority of these big brands are housed anyway.

I think we're going to see some very, very cool stuff there. And in some way, it kind of just makes you want to hold Solana because like, you know, good stuff's going to happen. And if you're all there on the right day at the right time, you'll be able to catch it. You know, you'll be able to catch one of these, these great coins. So, and that's what we've basically seen. Every single Solana meme coin is down horrendous over the last, over the last, uh, over the last week. Um,

Every other narrative because the value of Solana just went up massively in this world. And people know that when a new coin drops, it's just going to be even worse. I don't even know what would happen to some of these coins if a big celebrity came out this Friday and dropped a coin. It would be horrific.

Well, that's the thing. The other thing I said at the beginning, people maybe benchmark themselves to Bitcoin and want to outperform that. There's probably many people watching this right now who spend 95% of their time in the Solana ecosystem and the game there is to multiply your soul and outperform Solana. So it's a really hard thing to do when you hold onto positions and then something new comes and it sucks all the liquidity out. It feels like it's going to be hard to... If you want to buy on a whole thing to outperform Sol...

It's pretty hard to find anything away from that, unless there was perhaps one token that you could own which benefits from trading volumes and so on. I don't know if there's... That's why I own Radium. Yeah, Radium, I think...

not obviously I've said I've just bought some but like I do think if you bring up the radium chart it does look a lot like the sole D5 volume chart like if you think result sold D5 volumes are going to go up it's very very difficult to imagine that as a coin doesn't go high just because it's so ingrained it's I think it bought back it bought back something like 15 million dollars of worth of the coin this week um and uh and it trades at like two billion so it's crazy yeah it is it is um

it's got a good flywheel going. The thing is, it really is just those things like you're saying. I think other stuff can actually keep on going down here because people will slowly come to the realization that it's going to be very, very tough for people to want to pump anything that isn't something new right now. And if you thought last year, if you're involved in any of this more

left curve stuff was, was PVP, you know, um, people having to sell one thing to buy the other. And it was very difficult to like, hold onto long-term value, you know, like the Murad thesis, you know, like, Oh, these are going to be the, these are going to be the memes that like hold up really, really well. I don't know if you've seen the Murad memes this week, but it's, it's going to be even worse than it was last year.

Your ability to hold on to something. So if you're up in any of these trades, if you are there looking at

looking at new coins each day and you're up on something, just take profits. I really, really would advise you to, because I'm seeing coins that go to 300 million and then literally down to like 5 million in two days. You know, it's the attrition is unbelievable out there. I'm sure you've seen the same. People are going to screenshot an incredible wealth and then you'll blink and it will be gone.

So if you are doing that, I think take profits and maybe don't do it with your whole portfolio. Just try and get in with the new stuff, I think. Yeah. It's different to what last year was where I felt like I could... This time last year, I owned a whiff and I held that for three months and made like 100x. It's not that easy anymore. You do have to be super aware of

If you're not a full-time trader, it's really hard. I'm not a full-time trader anymore. I'm working on the REC stuff. You're not a full-time trader. You're working on all the to-be-announced soon project stuff. So I think many people here will have full-time jobs. So it's really hard to do it, I think, which is why I think those that are just glued to the screens 24-7 trade, this stuff has such a massive advantage. I'm seeing lots of people out there making a ton of money. I mean...

If you're like young, single, like no kids or anything like that, and you just have all the time in the world to... Like no real full-time job and you have all the time in the world to just literally sit at your laptop and trade the stuff, you could make an absolute killing, I think. And lots of people are, so... They are, but then they have to take profits. This is the point. Yeah, yeah. What I've seen even more this time is that people make wild gains, even with Trump, right? I think a lot of people...

printed like printed amazing gains. And then maybe even they got back in and then it's lower again, or they've over trade. Like the volatility on some of these coins is unbelievable. They go down to zero and,

as fast as they go up at the moment, even faster than they did last year. I think last year, you probably had like two or three days of a meta, really, of like a coin led and then other coins would follow and that coin would maybe like get to a terminal velocity of around 300, 400 million and then you'd see if it would go to a billion or not. Now it just goes to 300 million in the blink of an eye and then back down again. So...

You have to be wildly quick if you're going to monetize some of those trades, which makes you just put volumes. Yeah, exactly. You just have to be plugged in. You have to be quick. You can miss moves. I mean, these METs you're talking about, we've been through about five of them in the last week or something like that. The Trump coin...

as we said, wasn't even announced at this time last week. And so much stuff has happened since then. So yeah, you just have to, I don't know, it's tricky, I think. I think it's tricky. I think there's a lot to be made, but you really have to be

So it's divorce season, basically. You really have to... Divorce season. Yeah. That Friday, I think Trump ruined a lot of marriages on that Friday night. Came out like 3 a.m. The whole weekend was just like, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to do my sis weekend. It was revenge of the husbands there. It's like, I listened to you and this is what happened and I missed this. Like...

everyone can relate to that. Uh, particularly if you're in your European time, time zone, that's the other thing. What Ovi just said, you need to be young, single. Um, but you also need to be, you know, willing to stay up to like 2am if you're in Europe or 3am in Europe, which, uh, which isn't, isn't exactly ideal. Although I do, I know a bunch of people that do that. They literally just live us hours, but, um, but they're based in Europe.

Right. I don't know if you want to... Yeah, should we do some questions here? Should we do some questions? Yeah, let me pull them up. Let's see. As usual, before we do the questions, I'm just going to showcase some pro content on Real Vision. This week, we had Sebastian Purcell host a monthly roundtable of crypto fund managers. You can hear insights on that about Trump's policies, meme coins, etc.

macro picture much more. If you're a pro crypto subscriber, you can check out the video. If not, you can sign up on realvision.com to watch it. Okay. First question we have from Bernardo on the Real Vision website. What do you guys think about Sui's correction? Is it over? Sui, I think, has kind of underperformed the market a little bit, dropping from about 5 to 4.5 or so in the past week. Any thoughts on that?

I thought... I said kind of even this time last week, I thought Sui was looking too high versus Solana. That wasn't a...

Looking bad on Sui. That was more to Sol look cheap. Sol's now repriced. Maybe Sui goes high, but I don't think Sui passes any of that test either. Potentially. I don't know. Maybe it is US. I mean, partly US founders. I honestly don't know. I know that they're the ex-Meta team, but I don't know where they're based now. No one has mentioned Sui in these sort of US crypto asset conversations. So,

My guess is it's probably not like in the first for the running to be deemed just like a strategic asset in the US. I, uh, it didn't get, you know, hasn't taken part in this whole meme coin season generally, and not really in the AI season either. So, um,

I've thought for a while that SUI has turned into way more of a show me story than it was at 10, like five to 10 billion right now. It really does have to have substantial amount of stuff going on it at 40 to 50 billion. So for it to go to a hundred, I think it'd have to see a big application unlock or a big, like you have to see a lot of people come onto the chain and start using it. Yeah. I think, um,

I think that makes sense. I think it was maybe seen as Solana beta before, or maybe even a Solana killer before. And then you had this whole Trump stuff take over. And I think, I guess the biggest counterpoint to Syria is there isn't much activity on there. Solana is not shifting away from Solana. And I think given what happened with Trump,

It doesn't feel like that's going to change anytime soon as well. So I think a lot of money moved from SUI to SOL actually in the last week, which is why we've seen that underperformance. And maybe you can have a short-term technical correction, but from a narrative standpoint, it's hard to beat what's going on with SOL at the moment, I think. Next question from JP. Should it matter that we didn't actually get an SBR?

Given that we've got an executive order for digital assets, doesn't that alone imply a signal to kick off the nation state race to accumulate? Why do markets seem to lag on realizing this?

I agree with you. I think that even if they didn't get 100% a strategic Bitcoin reserve, what this does say to me is if I'm a G20 country, you can see where this is headed. You don't have to be Einstein to work out what's probably going to happen here. So I do think it creates a little bit of a game theory where some other country might be like, yeah, we need to move a little bit quicker on this. And that probably extends to...

sovereign institutions as well as corporates even. So I would be very unsurprised if even if the US hasn't already gone to a explicit Bitcoin reserve, you don't start to see companies and other countries and maybe sovereign wealth funds explicitly go for this now. Yeah. Yeah.

I think, yeah, I agree. I think, like I said earlier, I think an actual SBR would have been much more bullish because it was just specific to what was happening. And I think, I feel like digital asset stockpile is a bit vague and, you know, you don't really know exactly what the plan is there. And I know it opens up to other tokens, but we still don't know, like, you have to go through that process of discussing it. And that kind of like, I guess it weakens the nation state race if it's other assets, but...

I just think that stuff will come to a head very quickly. I think there are plenty of states within the US looking at buying Bitcoin now.

that I was reading about. And I think, you know, obviously like Trump was meeting with the El Salvador president yesterday, who bought a lot of Bitcoin back in 2021. So I think that stuff will escalate. Yes, markets seem, you know, on the one hand, you can say markets seem to lag on realizing it. On the other hand, you can say it's being priced in and people are positioning for it already. So, yeah,

I think there are two sides to the coin there. But again, it's one of those things until these guys actually physically start buying or are very close to doing it, I don't think you unlock that next move higher. Next question from Ryan on YouTube. How high do you think the Trump meme would have gone if he wouldn't have tweeted his wife's damn meme? Good question. Honestly, it was a huge fumble in my opinion. It would have gone so much higher, so much higher.

And I think also the other thing was that it made what I just said. I really came to the realization that we were going to get this massive dump essentially across the board after Melania because it felt like...

it was just so obvious that so many new people were now going to come and do a coin and it was going to be even like, you know, maybe not even the biggest celebrities out there could cause the rest of the coins to go lower. So I think number one, it was a fumble by Trump. I think it could easily be closer to 100 billion now if that hadn't happened. And then secondly, I think that was when the market really came to the realization that this is going to nuke a lot of

our bags. So that was not a pretty hour, I would say, or a few hours post that. And even on bounces, you know, I looked down the prominent coins on that

when was it a week ago so fart coin for example which has been one of the best coins on solana in terms of memes was at 2.7 billion um just after the trump coin came out it's now at 1.4 so it's down 50 since millennia dropped that coin um and that's that's like one of the top coins so it tells you how bad it's been for some of the the smaller coins too yeah i think um i think that's right i think um

The Melania coin just made it also seem like not serious. Do you know what I mean? Like we're all here saying, yeah, like BlackRock, you know, Bitcoin ETF, ETH ETF, like breaking down the SEC regulation. This is a big, serious industry. And then you have like,

a trump coin and everyone's like a little bit like uh it's kind of a bit a bit rogue but fine it's trump and then having a milania one like right after which is repeated by trump's account is like you know there's obviously a team behind it who are making a ton of money on it kind of i think put the wrong taste in people's mouths a little bit and um i didn't yeah i didn't like it but yeah i think we would be i think we would i wouldn't be surprised if trump would have hit 100 billion um

Without that. Without that, yeah. I think. It wasn't just that that sold off. Bitcoin sold off as soon as that happened. It went from... Everything sold off. The entire market sold off. Yeah. People saw that as bearish crypto that she dropped her coin. Yeah. All right. Next question. Do you think if staking is allowed for ETFs, it could lead an ETH mood higher or another false dawn?

If staking is down for ETH, I do think that's positive. I do think it's positive. But I think that's also going to be positive for Solana, right? Or any chain which has staking. So it might be a short window where ETH gets staking...

people can't come in. But I think that window now is much shorter than it was. You know, if, if the, if they got that last year and you had, you know, six, seven months, maybe, maybe longer of, of inflows based on this staking yield, that would have helped, but I wouldn't hold your breath. This is going to be some, like they've got a huge window where they're going to build up massive stockpile of, of inflows based on staking. Interestingly as well, like there is a bit of a fight going on at the

at the moment in ETH. Like Vitalik is in an open war with some of the core devs. And that has slightly extended to like traditional media or at least TradFi media. And you've seen a few articles basically talking about how...

There's just too much conflict at the moment at ETH. And Vitalik's been writing a lot of blogs at the moment about the future of ETH. He seems to be fighting. And some of the Ethereum core devs have actually left. There was some talk actually by the Lido founder this week that they could create a separate Ethereum foundation, which would run parallel to what Vitalik basically had. So I think ETH's in a tough spot, both from its...

both from its use case, but also like this conflict has extended and people are now a bit more aware about it in the fund manager TradFi world as well. Yeah, it's never good to see like internal turmoil. And I think obviously ETH Foundation and all that stuff has been under a lot of focus, I think. So I think that stuff will continue. I think you're right. The staking argument is positive for ETH, but it seems very likely we'll have a Solana situation

ripple etf possibly at some point this year and so there's risk that like that positive catalyst for eath just gets stolen by by something like solano but um you know i think with the world liberty five stuff buying a lot of ecosystem stuff blackrock obviously being heavily involved there as well i think those are two potential um good tailwinds for eath despite that

That's what I would say. So Larry Fink went on, was at the World Economic Forum this week and did talk about that he wants the SEC to imminently approve the tokenization of bonds and stocks. I feel like there is a chance that that would, I mean, that predominantly has been done on ETH so far, done partly on base.

If Blackrock really align themselves with ETH here, then maybe that provides a bull case. I think I'm more bullish on the RWA angle for ETH and that being selected, but I don't know if they have enough of a moat versus other chains on that either. Or if you might start to see...

Again, L2 is really being built around that. And there's a lot of questions about whether that's even that valuable for ETH right now. So would BlackRock use base or would they just create their own L2 or create even their own L1, right? Like I think we're going to see some experimentation there. So I'm slightly, I'm reserving judgment, but if I'm bullish on ETH, I'm bullish on RWAs for sure. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, next question.

Is there a sole proxy for UK ISA or SIP investors? I don't think there is, is there? So there is a company. Yeah, is there not? Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Cut you off there. Isn't there like a grayscale sole product? There's also a company called Sole Strategies. I don't know if you've heard about this.

No. I think it's Canadian-based, but you may be able to buy it out of a UK ISA. This thing's up 15x since September, and they are trying to do a kind of a strategy similar to MicroStrategy in that they're going to... With Sol. With Sol. But then they're also going to be a bit more ingrained in the DeFi side of stuff. So I think they're going to be running validators. They're going to be...

Yeah, like it's a bit more of an equity play rather than just we're just going to buy Bitcoin, right? So they're going to start doing stuff with the Solana a bit more from a DeFi perspective and also from a validated perspective. So that might be worth looking at if you can buy Sol strategies. It is up 15x in four months. So like be aware and it's vastly higher than its current Sol's treasury. But that is one to pay attention to.

Yeah. All right. Time for one more question. If someone takes profits and doesn't want to move those profits back to the conventional banking world, what would you suggest? Where would you, I think I know what you're going to say, but. I actually don't. So you don't want to take them back into. Yeah. Where would you, where would you park? Like if you're taking profits, where would you put it? I guess within, it doesn't necessarily say within crypto. It just says not, if you don't want to put them back into the conventional banking world.

So you can look at the RWA world again. Like if you go into Maple Finance, which is one of the bigger RWA firms, you can invest in a range of different like almost off, they do like off-chain DeFi. So like for companies in crypto that are looking to like basically take loans, they also do like tax receivables financing. So there's a really good website called rwa.xyz. And if you go into that,

You can see like a range of different companies in the space that basically invest in either like US treasuries on chain almost, or they'll invest in credit, like high yield credit or personal credit. And I guess one of the biggest is Maple, but there's a few of them. So you can look at that. I don't really know. I'm getting way more bullish on collectibles again here.

And the reason is I think we're about to go through an age of abundance here with AI where AI is going to be making up and 3d printers and robots going to be making all of our, a lot more of our products. So I get, I get kind of bullish right now on, we've seen a big dip in luxury goods because of like the wealth effect coming out of China. And I actually think it's going to be a massive premium on, on, on manmade luxury goods like,

an exquisite, exquisite, you know, Swiss watch or, you know, Burgundy where there's only like, they only make 50 bottles a year. And all that stuff is down a lot over the last years because of what's happened in China. And I, I think if you have a longer term horizon, I actually think some of that stuff will soar back because I think there's going to be a massive premium placed again on, on like human made rare items. So if you want to, you want to keep it out of crypto, that's where I go.

Cool. Well, I think with that, we can wrap it up. That was RekVision. Before we go, we have a question for you. Let us know in the comments, when will Bitcoin become part of the US strategic reserve? If at all, if you're watching on YouTube, Twitter, or any other platform, please let us know your responses and answers in the comments. Remember that tickets for the Real Vision Gathering, which is happening in person in Miami,

uh next week still on sale if you head over to realvision.com 4cg 2025 you'll be able to get yours there make sure you're following us on x and next week we will be back um it will be exclusive on the real vision platform every month we host a drinks with osf amando session where we will just take your questions for the entire show so if you're not a real vision crypto subscriber if you head over to realvision.com rvc you'll be able to um

sign up and watch that. Timing will be to be confirmed next week given I'll be in Miami but most likely hopefully we'll be back on the same time 11.30am Eastern Time 4.30pm Greenwich Mean Time. Fingers crossed we will see you guys next week either online or looking forward to meeting a bunch of people in person as well. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Yes.

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