Crypto Town Hall

“I was at a Galaxy event hosted by Mike Novogratz at his house in New Orleans last November, and Paul Tudor Jones came and kindly spoke to the group, giving his whole history and how he got into Bitcoin and how he approached everything. And one thing that is really, I think, very important about him, he's obviously one of the most recognized and important hedge fund managers of all times, frankly, especially in the macro space. And he was really the first to publicly adopt Bitcoin and push it and even write a paper about it.”

“He was very emphatic about it, pointed out quite a few reasons why he believes that the stock market is once again near a top. Now he's been saying that for quite a while. But mostly that US equity market cap is 252% of GDP right now. Dotcom peak was 02/1970. You know, previous crashes were far, far less.”

“Jones was, actually, this is a really interesting point, Scott. He wanted 35% market decline could hit capital gains tax revenue, widening the federal deficit and pressure of the bond market. So that's kind of a nightmare loop as stocks fall, tax receipts weaken, the deficit looks worse, bonds get hit, and investors are forced to sell more than what they own. And he also cited some of the big IPOs. He said that a flood of new share supply from companies expecting to go public combined with insider lockup expirations could create pressure similar to the setup before the dot com bust.”

“We had the KelpDAO hack, which then led to a problem with toxic debt across all of DeFi, which led to an issue specifically on Aave, which is obviously considered the blue chip safest DeFi of, I I think, roughly 200,000,000. And we have sort of a JPMorgan early nineteen hundred situation where it gets everybody in a room and asks for a private bailout. So we have, I guess, a mix of different companies either sort of donating, I mean, Steny himself, I think, millions of dollars, or offering loans, but basically plugging up this whole I think it's $300,000,000 already has been pledged. This reeks, I think, on the surface of tarp, you know, a government bailout like 2008, but I think that's sort of a lazy comparison because it's voluntary and it's not forced and it's not the government.”

“Wouldn't you imagine if institutions are looking at this, they see the power of utilizing smart contracts as a better way, obviously, for yield and and lending, but won't wanna do it in a decentralized manner. And this may actually, ironically, push them to use the technology to build centralized walled gardens to offer yield for their own customers and not be a part of the larger system where there's potential contagion. Like, why doesn't Goldman Sachs just have a Goldman Sachs, like, you know, it's not DeFi, but the centralized lending put it all together themselves and close it off.”

“Look. It's preferred, man. It's preferred over MSCR. I get 75% loan to value on my on MSTR. I went to my bank and I said, hey. I want you to move my treasury position or at least half of it into STR in into STRC. You're giving me 3% on the bonds. I get 11 and a half on the fucking, STRC. They did it the next day, dude. Risk management had never seen that trade.”

“It's just tough to get keep getting kicked while you're down, Scott. Like, we're we're down 90% on anything else that we've bought that's not Bitcoin. Right? Like, some people down more. Things have been lost. Like, retail's just got barely like, almost no heartbeat left. And then the little bit of ETH maybe that you, you know, that that someone had trying to earn a little bit of yield, you know, hoping to get a little bit more capital for the next run.”

“None of these STRs, whatever you call them, none of them are gonna make it except Sailor. I mean, maybe BM and R. I'm not even sure about them. But if they don't make it, the token market is, like, it's all toast. Now I don't see, hate to be like mister negative here, but I think we go for another round down Bitcoin because there's too much money that's just dying to get the fuck out of XXI and NACA and all these, you know, like, none of these companies have done shit, man.”

“It is really happening. Floor prices across the board of OG collections from the first cycle, Bored Apes, Deadfellas, doing the whole thing. I I understand most people would think that this is nonsense, but it it it's it seems to me that there is a correlation between the flight from DeFi and people wanting to custody their ETH in cryptographically verifiable art, and I don't think that's a trend that's gonna end anytime soon.”