The Daily Gwei Drive Thru #5 with Anthony Sassano and Eric Conner | ETFs, 4 year cycle, Regulations

Transcript

hello everyone and welcome to another episode of The Daily gray drive-through I'm your host Anthony sassano I'm here today with Eric Connor to talk about all things crypto hey Eric how you going good good yeah if we're getting a Groove here right I think we had to take a little bit of a break for some travel we were both doing but um we're not we're not rugging I think this is the fourth now uh last one I guess with David but we seem to be in a good Groove here yeah yeah we are we're doing good which is which is great um I think David's too busy fighting people on Twitter to join us today but no no no he's he's all good he's all good um I think burning man maybe yeah he did go to Burning Man yeah yeah so I think that um this is the

last time we spoke there's been a lot of movements uh I guess like with the ETF stuff which was kind of the first thing I wanted to I wanted to talk about and wanted to cover for people who haven't followed along with I guess the latest in that world I mean I think we obviously had that big win you know grayscale won their lawsuit against the SEC for the SEC to basically take another look at grayscale's conversion of their existing trusts the gbtc trust to a proper spot BTC ETF we've obviously had uh after that the ETFs that are existing uh the existing ETF applications be delayed which was to be expected of course no one expected those things to be approved and for those of you who don't know the final approval dates for those things are in um March for most of them there is one that has

an approval date in January but it's March for the vast majority of them the next approval deadline is October so we might see a delay there as well love to see how that shakes out but also in I guess like non-btc ETF news we also had van Eck and Arc recently filed their 8th spot ETF applications which I mean to me it wasn't surprising we've always said that BTC and eth are both going to get ETFs it's just a matter of time I I personally think the odds of the BTC ETF getting approved approaching 100 for next year this year it's kind of a coin toss like it could have happened this year but it feels like it's more likely to happen next year and a fun thing about that is that if it happens in like March of next year where they all get

approved that's like one month before the Bitcoin Harmony which is just a pretty amazing coincidence considering that a lot of people think that the harboring leads to the start of a new bull market and traditionally that has been kind of the case right with this four year cycle but I think we wanted I wanted to hit on both of those topics but generally with the ETF stuff uh what do you what do you think like what what kind of odds did you put on ETFs this year versus next year and yeah I mean I do agree that they're kind of inevitable yeah I mean I I think I'm basically at the 90 five percent that they're gonna happen this year I mean there's a lot of like Tailwinds with some um legal wins right and I like I'm not an expert in this stuff but we had the

xrp win against the SEC a few months back um we recently had like the the grayscale win um against them a few weeks ago um where basically they can and I don't know all this like legal language but they can basically like convert their or they won the lawsuit saying they wanted to convert their trust to an ETF or something like that but but it almost doesn't matter to me right like the the fact that we're winning I'm saying we like crypto Community is winning lawsuits against um the US government is just bullish in general and I think at this point it's just gotten so so crypto like when we were first talking about ETFs like on our podcasts four years ago right

um we didn't have much support in Congress and the US government like crypto was still very decent and young and now it's become a bypro it's become a partisan issue right so you're seeing like not every Republican not every Democrat is in one way or the other but in general you're kind of seeing the Democrats right now be a bit anti-crypto and heavy on the regulation side you're seeing the Republicans in the U.S kind of pushing more Pro crypto stance it has become an issue I mean the president of the United States has stood up there in press conferences and speeches and called out like crypto like whatever tax evaders or something and they were just talking about like wash trading right but it has become a political issue and anytime that happens it's good for us

because like now you're gonna have one side fighting for you and this is just how U.S politics works right we have two parties one side says oh we like this the other side said okay so do you like it we hate it which is just mind-blowingly stupid and I hate it but that just is how U.S politics work and you know since we kind of have this talking point now of crypto and other countries kind of pushing it forward and saying okay you can do ETFs like Canada for example has crypto ETFs I think it's just becoming almost ridiculous I think is the right word for the US to be like so behind now and just adopting this right and like I I kind of hate using like the comparison and the meme of like oh what if the US heavily

regulated the internet back in the day but I I do think it's it's pretty relevant right like the US economy today is in a huge boom it has been for the last decades because we were very open to the internet and Adoption of anything that was built on the internet and all the companies that came along and we're still seeing that today right everyone talks about things things stocks and all these tech companies like at a point I think the US will realize hey we can't let this this is real um we can't let these other countries like take our talent and our money from us and they'll have to wake up right so like the the partisan issue of crypto is kind of that first stage of that and I

think I mean I think we're there ginsler's lost too many battles now in court and like at this point come on like the old excuse was like oh the market can be easily manipulated like that was the old ETF rejection right like three four years ago um that's just not the case anymore like you can't no one can go manipulate the Bitcoin Market by themselves right that's impossible liquidity's too high trading's too high it's everywhere so I just don't know what their excuse would be now right that was the old excuse I don't think would hold up anymore and now if they reject them you're gonna have like 50 of Congress saying okay what the hell is going on which that wasn't the case back in the day so I mean long story short um to sum it up I think the Tailwinds

are too strong I think they're going through and I think the market has severely underpriced um the impact of them yeah yeah I mean I I totally agree with the the market impact which I think we'll get to but the other kind of important Point here I think over what you were saying about how the SEC has traditionally denied these things due to Market manipulation concerns the important point I think for people to realize here is a lot of the trading volumes of crypto is actually coming back to the US now and back to the more regulated and legitimate markets rather than on offshore exchanges obviously we had the collapse of FTX right where I mean their trading volume obviously went to zero um and then binance is actually facing a lot of headwinds in the world not just within the us but also in

Europe they've had a lot of their licenses revoked or not approved and a lot of their market share is going down so I think that should definitely appease the SEC for them to say okay well a lot of this trading is actually happening on uh heavily regulated us-based platforms a lot of the volumes are there a lot of the liquidity is there so if they were to deny it based on Market manipulation concerns again they would then have to defend that position if challenged in court right and based basically say well we think that a market is not big enough and it's being manipulated on U.S regulated exchanges which just opens another whole can of worms here so I think that if you take that perspective and look at it from from that kind of point of view you start to realize that the SEC really

doesn't have any legs left to stand on to deny these things uh when it's specifically when it comes to the BTC ETF obviously with the eighth one it's a bit Mill murky because Gary Gensler has gone on record and said that he thinks everything except BTC is a security but I honestly think that he's going to lose that fight and continue to lose that fight as he has been in court obviously the xrp win was a big signal there but you know eighth generally I mean I I feel like it's it's basically impossible for them to prove in any which way that ethers a Security even if they wanted to prove that the crowd sale was a investment contract it would be extremely difficult because I mean the crowd sale was not done in the US right it was done extra U.S it was a long time

ago now and I don't think they'd be able to find any people that bought the Ico that felt uh hard done by or wronged by the icr I said it would be difficult in my mind to kind of go after that but on the on the market impact front I mean I think a lot of people are confused by this I actually have watched a few of these kind of um Traders lately on on YouTube just to get the vibe check from them and they obviously look at all the different levels on the chart and the technical analysis that they do and everything and all of them are like well okay you know we had this grayscale win the price went up a lot but then it it went not a lot but like the price spiked right but then it sold down and actually

ended up lower than uh before the win and they're all confused they're all like you know this should have pushed us higher I'm like but the the thing is is that there isn't it didn't is because the liquidity right now in the ecosystem is very low there's no new money coming in it is the same Traders playing against each other it is what people like to call a PVP or player versus player environment where everyone knows the game right everyone knows there's no new money coming in so everyone's too sophisticated and just playing against each other for scraps basically so if you want to play against each other in a player versus environment game uh and you want to play that out you need new money coming in and I think that the new money is not going to come in until next year at least in my mind

um and I think that plays into the four-year cycle that everyone talks about and this is the next topic that I wanted to cover leading on from the ETF stuff where there has been this four-year cycle based on the Bitcoin hardening for as long as Bitcoin has existed and if you go look at the charts it actually plays out quite perfectly the 2020 12 um uh kind of uh I start of a bull market into 2013. um that and the 20 2012 was the harmony year 2016 Harmony year into the 2017 bull market 2020 harvening into the 2020 uh one uh bull market and now we're having 2024 hardening into a potential 2025 bull market right but the bull market tends to start in the harvesting year and then just go crazy in in the following year but that's what you need

for the the new money to come in for those kind of Cycles to play out and for people for it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy because even the people who don't believe in the four-year cycle will still probably buy uh as a hedge to be like maybe I'm wrong right so I'm gonna buy it anyway and then what ends up happening is that you break these kind of ranges that the price has been stuck in for quite a while so there's these kind of crab market ranges for eth it's like one to 2K for BTC it's like 20 to 30k and if you sustainably break above that it becomes a kind of Snowball Effect from there and then all the narratives obviously come into play and we get the the bull market again so I think that right now that's what kind of everyone's waiting for and waiting to play out it's

like that happening four-year cycle but I'm curious Eric if you uh like a pro for your cycle guy or do you think that uh it's not going to play out like that this time because of maybe macroeconomic factors which is something that people bring up I'm just curious for your thoughts there and just to be clear I actually believe in the four-year cycle still I think it's going to play out exactly the same way yeah I mean I think it's become so I think I I don't like when people like take charts and they're like oh this happened in the past so that's gonna exactly happen like that I think if you step back and take like the larger four-year cycle view I actually do think it will play out this time I don't know if it'll happen next time just because like everything has to perfectly align

kind of like you were saying right like macro environment has to kind of line up you have to have like a wall at year two three that like goes like macros pumping in year four like you're not gonna for example let's say like next time like not this cycle next four year cycle like right as we're going to like this point like or this could happen this time I guess but there's like a huge like Ebola outbreak or something like or like world war three stars right that like the four-year cycle isn't that strong um but I think right now in years whatever we are three and a half of this cycle um everything is aligning perfectly enough to where it's going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a lot of like Ta on graphs or like memes like this are just self-fulfilling like

you're saying like people are like they just start believing it and then everyone in crypto switch was talking about it and then like your neighbor starts talking about the four-year cycle and then everyone starts buying you're like uh four years cycle work but really it's because I mean it's a meme at the end of the day right but like memes run this entire Market um but it does make sense and like The Happening is kind of as much as I hate the happening and so like zero IQ but like zero IQ works like I'd rather be left or right curve nowhere in the middle right and like the middle would say oh The Happening like doesn't really have any impact blah blah and like this is I'll tweet this all the time like you know no one's actually thinking about security policy but that's not what

mainstreams think you have right they're thinking oh there's less Bitcoin being made and like my Bitcoin is going to be more valuable at this point in time um so I'd rather left curve that for sure which I think the entire Bitcoin Community is left curving everything these days but you know I think it will be a catalyst um I'm not too worried about macro I mean yeah there's some weird stuff going on the markets around like rates and debt and you know is inflation really going to go away and you know I think the average American is working a lot more hours and making a lot less money there's a lot of like weird things but at the end of the day and I say this all the time to like friends offline like

the stock market will lead and that'll that'll lead crypto and where do people have to put their money like it's either in housing or the stock market like where else you're going to put it right so um I mean these days maybe savings but I feel like everyone's just kind of over like earning a small interest rate like we're in this new stage of markets where people want to like Chase things and you know the the age of information moving so fast like not many people are just like putting money in a four percent savings account anymore right they're trying to find the next Game Stop or the next eat or the next Bitcoin um and I think every time you look back at a crypto cycle like I was just looking at the eth chart right around you know when we started pumping last we

had like the double dump we had like the defy collapse that we had the covet collapse both went like 80 bucks it started like kind of going up and if you look at that graph there were multiple times where and we kind of just like block this stuff out right but we had gone up to like 300 400 we're about to break out and like went back down and kind of went all the way back to like 200 multiple weeks of like lull and sideways and people kind of forget that always happens before the next cycle begins it's like the fun I'll ShakeOut like everyone wants to kind of get that final bargain price on the buyer's side um and you're kind of shaking out those final like non-believers and I I truly believe that's what's happening with the price now like I guess I'll caveat this

was saying like if World War III breaks out or something like that tomorrow that will nuke any of these um thesis DSi um but I think I think we're good it's when it will actually happen so I love Labor Day as a Trader and as a crypto holder because in the US that marks the I guess for anybody not in the US Labor Day just happened on Monday kind of marks the end of summer for most people in the United States um and I think most people return to their caves and start trading crypto again and they're back online they come inside um I think that's always aligns pretty well I've seen like monthly trends for crypto and I think most of the bullish

months are usually in the winter the U.S Winter I know you're an upside down land over there but um which is funny we were just talking about this before we started recording but at least in the U.S Winter I think most of the months between like I want to say it's like November and March or some of the most bullish on average something like that I could be totally off there but um yeah I think the meme's real I think I mean 1650 at the end of the day is still a pretty good price for eth like we would have taken that for sure years ago um but I I mean I'll say it again I think 15K is in play for me for the top on this next cycle the exact day it starts I don't know but I think it's coming

yeah and and I think that the main point is like super interesting right where essentially people don't realize that a meme is really just an encapsulation of attention so if you have a tension on something it's more than likely when it comes to markets that thing is going to go up in price right and we see this play out uh even in the bear Market in the crowd Market with these mean coins that we spoke about last time with with David Hoffman um on on the show you know these meme coins are just the tension games at the end of the day like can you get attention on your coin the more attention you get the more money you get and the more the higher the token goes so I think when it comes to things outside of meme coins it's just a general crypto cycle the reason why it

kind of falls into a four-year cycle I think and I think there's maybe a couple of different reasons but the major reason is obviously the hardening that's an attention sync right that gets everyone's attention because it's a meme that says okay well there's going to be less Bitcoin to buy now and then people think okay well logically the price is going to go up because of that which obviously isn't a guaranteed thing but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy if enough people believe that and then if it happens every time which it has happened more and more he will believe that's going to happen again and as I said it becomes that self-fulfilling thing and then of course as the BTC price goes up you get more and more people in because it starts sustainably going up and then when it hits all-time high media frenzy begins you know bull

market goes goes crazy and then you get everything else kind of going crazy as well because the attention is squarely on crypto right now in the crab market the stocks Market's going up so where do you think the attention is in markets right now it's in stocks right it's not in crypto like right now crypto is just too dead for people to care about even though ironically it's the best probably the best time to be buying most people are not looking at crypto right now the attention is on stocks and I actually think I mentioned this on one of our previous episodes but if you look at what the stock market was doing in like 2019 2020 while BTC and eth were still range Bound in their crab market range um the aspects was going to new all-time highs for the better part of like 12

months right uh so if you look at that and look at what crypto is doing now and look at what the SPs xpx is doing is basically on the verge of breaking through a new all-time high soon it could happen towards the end of the year while crypto still stays in its lull but then what happens is that crypto starts going up right we break out of the crab ranges and then the attention shifts back and people start thinking oh wow um you know the crypto is back crypto's not dead and they start hearing about people making you know overnight millions and stuff like that and they plow in thinking they're going to do that and that's when you get the proper bull market that pumps everything so I think that at the end of the day yeah the meme is just a conduit for for attention and

attention is the the most scarce resource when it comes to to markets and if you're able to capture the attention you're able to to capture the the market action I think that's the four year and and that's that's kind of like just the cycle playing out in any markets but yeah I think people are confused right now about that where they think oh the Stock's going up why isn't crypto going up because no one's paying attention to crypto right now no one wants to buy so so so I think for a lot of people if they buy eth right now right and then you tell them well you know it's probably going to be a little while before you make a return on that they're not going to want that right they want to see something going up they want they want quick gains they want quick

turnaround especially in as you mentioned this high-paced kind of always online society that we're in and crypto lends itself really well to that when it actually is doing that right because crypto moves extremely quickly when it's in a bull market um and but I just think it's going to be a time thing and I think you're right about the U.S summer the Europeans I guess like Northern Hemisphere some I should say being pretty good time for Mark sorry winter being a pretty good time for markets and the summer being a pretty bad time we actually see that reflected there's a there's a kind of uh graphic that I saw which measures all the monthly performance of BTC since basically Inception and September is usually like a lull month where it's it's basically sideways I mean it could go negative five percent or up five percent but what people need to realize

is that that measures the beginning of the month to the end of the month inside that month the price can go down like 20 and then come back up right and still end the the month mutually so I think looking at month-to-month returns um is is only maybe good for a kind of uh longer term thing where you take the months together not not looking at them individually uh but yeah if you take the kind of winter months together or the colder months together it's definitely more bullish especially at the start of the year like the start of the year is actually bullish most of the time um for really any kind of um asset class as long as the asset class isn't kind of already in a bull market towards the end of the previous year going into a bear market so if you're

talking just like normal kind of market conditions um and regular kind of stuff there on a longer time Horizon that's kind of what happens and I think the New Year stuff is also kind of phenomenon where a new year happens and people feel like more hope for the year right because they're like I'm washing away the old yeah you know it's a new year now I have all these hopes and dreams and that happens just psychologically and I think that that makes people more prone to taking on more risk they're like oh I'm gonna buy crypto because you know this year's my year crypto is going to go I'm going to go nuts whatever it is so yeah and and when it comes back to like the four year cycle if you just look at the the charts it's playing out exactly the same 2023 is basically a

mirror of 2019 just with less volatility people don't remember this um but in 2019 the reason why BTC and eth went up so much um was because of the this Ponzi called plus token which was a massive Ponzi ran out of China that sucked in billions and billions of new money right new money came in billions of billions of new money um into a dollars worth of new money into BTC and eth that were um and these people end up being arrested that were running plus token and those assets seized so of course once the Ponzi shut down the market came off of that and 2019 was also one of those kind of like recovery years after the brutal 2018 bear Market but the plus token Ponzi just sent us a lot higher than it would and that resulted in BTC basically dumping 50 towards the end of the year

E3 traced its entire pump that yeah which was pretty brutal um but yeah that just spoke to the fact that there was new money coming in but it wasn't uh it was concentrated in this kind of plus token thing which means that it was it was just basically sold down once that kind of happened like that so I think even though that happened in 2019 and not in 2023 just from Pure Market sentiment and the way the markets have acted in 2023 it just very much the same as 2019 so if that's playing hang out again you know you make the prediction okay well history doesn't repeat exactly but it does Rhyme so if is 2024 going to be a repeat of 2020 where maybe we won't have a covert dump because it's that's like a Black Swan

thing unless another kind of thing like that happens I don't think that's going to happen so do we have like just an uptrending year in 2024 where we climb that wall of worry where we start breaking out of those long-term ranges where it goes back to 3K I mean eth hasn't been at 3K since April of last year um so if if it doesn't get back to 3K until I don't know the second half of next year that's like over two years where of of range being broken that becomes a very powerful kind of moving Force to the upside and I think you know then the bull market kind of kicks off from from there but yeah that's my general kind of view on on the four year cycle and how it all plays into things yeah I mean the funniest thing that people always say is like what's going

to be the next Catalyst for ball right the reality is just price going up price goes yeah exactly it's like a circular thing right exactly yeah you get media coverage and like the ultimate meme to me always has been or like family or friends texting me about crypto and like the the second so right now I don't think I've got a single text about crypto in like 18 months right so you just know you're inside yeah yeah right it's crazy and then like at the same time that's what that's a single to buy because you know at some point that's changing and then like as it goes up I got like a few like family friends that are pretty good at it like as it

starts to heat up right to like text and be like Oh I'm thinking about getting back in and they're like still kind of early um and then like there's like the mid tier where you're like okay things are like build text and it's getting like a little overheated and then you got like the top textures right where you're like okay we gotta [ __ ] sell everything we gotta get out um and it's funny because that like last cycle put out in nfts too where like all of a sudden like people were texting on nfts and like no one has text me about ft's in Forever um but it's you know if you turn on like CNBC right now you probably don't get much crypto coverage and it just I mean you were talking about the stock market everything is there right now and historically like you can go on trading

View and compare SPX to Ether to bitcoin or whatever and you're right like there is usually a lead up spread where like stocks take off and and the reason for this right is crypto is a risk on assets so you're you're just really never gonna see crypto lead stocks well maybe you know decades in the future if like how we think it would play out crypto becomes a bigger asset class in stocks but for now um you're not really going to see crypto lead stocks uh like on a big cycle what's funny though is you even if stocks lead which is happening right now which is great anytime I see stocks green and leading I'm fine like I know people get frustrated because they're

like hey Crystal's not moving but stocks are trust me it's way better than the other way around like you do not want stocks going down because crypto is not going to go up stocks are going down um but what's funny is in crypto gets the multiplier higher right like 100x of what some of these stocks go up um so we're seeing a bit of a I mean it came back back but that sucks are bouncing but crypto hasn't caught up and that Gap always catches up it always does because people are going to take profits in stocks what are they going to do with it do you want to get risky they're going to go chase crypto right um and then you know maybe they chase crypto and they do well and then like last second we saw then they chased nfts right and then maybe they do well in

nfts and then they chase meme coins like it there's always something lower right um and I think the reason we're seeing this like longer time Gap right now in SPX versus I say it for people that don't know S P 500 SPX is kind of the index right you would use to kind of like get a gauge on American stocks in General on the stock markets across the world in general um is people are still a little cautious with inflation and like just some some weirdness going on right it's it's not the same Market we had pre-covered where stocks started pumping and then like crypto kind of was like falling right away I think people were still a little cautiously optimistic

um which is probably Fair um there's still some Oddities out there that we didn't see in the last few Cycles um but I think most of that's gonna be shaken off and eventually crypto catches up and that that Gap will be closed all of a sudden your neighbor will be texting you when he said 15K hey should I buy um uh Solana should I buy uh Charles coin or whatever it is and then you're gonna get nft texts and then you're like okay I should definitely sell that's when you sell by the way that it's all always on point if you take that last like ridiculous text where it's like oh hey I know you told me about Heath but I bought [ __ ] coin X instead because

someone told me if it goes to a dollar it's gonna be worth like a trillion dollars give it like a week or two after that sell and it's pretty much guaranteed to be the top yeah yeah that is definitely been my my experience and I think a lot of people's experience with things especially if you'll if you have a lot of people you surround yourself with that aren't in crypto um I I mean obviously with most of the people that I surround myself with are in crypto these days but I still obviously have um friends and family outside of that and yeah it is a pretty much like 100 hit right uh which is kind of scary but uh it makes sense because it's the attention game as I said like why are these people paying attention to crypto well because it's gone up a lot that's the only reason and

if they're doing it like that then yeah the top is near so to speak and it's worked kind of Wonders in the past but I think the final kind of leg of this discussion is is just generally the macro stuff and I think that when it comes to the macro I I don't really think about it in the context of my crypto investing decisions because for me it kind of is irrelevant I think crypto is still way too small to really be affected too much by the macro as you said it is a very risk on asset class it's basically where you go once you've kind of made money in the stock market and you want to you know you want to do something more risky or it's where you go when you're fomoing into into things you don't really have an investment thesis on anything like for example

people will buy a stock or to buy apple or Microsoft because they're like oh apple is selling lots of products or Microsoft is selling lots of products and they're beating the revenue estimates blah blah but when it comes to crypto most people are not doing that uh when they're coming into crypto they're just buying indiscriminately based on some YouTuber has told them to buy some coin as you said maybe it's a cheap coin and they're buying it because they think it's going to go to a dollar or maybe they're buying it just because it's been going up right there's not really much fundamental analysis going on there um and I think it's just because crypto is very small it's very misunderstood as an industry um the products and services aren't as obvious as they are in in the stock market so it becomes a game of

just like attention I think like pure attention it's got nothing to do with anything else just to Pure attention thing and number go up is the best kind of form of attention there but the macro kind of stuff generally I think you know even if you you think to yourself well the FED is not going to cut rates again until like 2025 2026 for example okay if you if you believe that and it doesn't happen until then it doesn't mean that the crypto Market can't go up because the crypto markets can just front run it because if there's enough of a belief and enough of a narrative that okay inflation's come down a lot the fed's going to pause rate rate Rises maybe they won't cut rates for another two years um as long as that belief exists crypto will front run it and what will

ironically end up happening potentially is that the FED starts cutting rates in 2026 and by that point we're in another bear market and crypto's just going down and everyone starts saying Oh look The fed's Cutting rates and crypto can't even pump during it you know crypto's dead right and there actually has been years where crypto has gone down during years where the FED has cut rates or where rates have been really low and I think that's just the con in the context of crypto just being too small um to to be largely affected by but also crypto uh being a lot faster as a market just front running these things because if you look at where crypto bottoms I mean especially eth bottomed in June of 2022 and that was when inflation was at its peak and then inflation started trickling down um over the next kind of

I guess like yeah since then and eth has not gone to a new low since then Heath kind of like seemed to have priced that in a lot more a lot more quickly and the same is true for most assets in crypto I think BTC was the only one that's not the only one but like BDC said a new low in November but it wasn't like a a big new law and that was obviously because of an outside external force in FTX right that was definitely related to FTX but other than that crypto has seemed to front run uh that that sort of stuff there um and then to the upside I think as you say crypto lags because it's more risk-on it lags SPX and stuff like that but it will definitely front run any kind of rate Cuts I I definitely think that we could be in another bear Market

when the rate Cuts actually start happening which will eventually just be fuel for the next bull market but but yeah because crypto is trying 247 because it moves a lot faster because there is like a four year cycle rather than like a 10-year cycle which is what the stock market tends to play out as um I I think that it's in crypto it also doubles uh because it's hard but the cycle is basically hard what it is in the stock market but then it's double as fast right it's half as half as um fast and double as fast as well so if you look at it from that perspective I think that that matters like that but as I said like I don't generally pay much attention to the macro environment um because it's I mean honestly it's two reasons I don't think crypto is big

enough and and if I'm investing in crypto I don't really care to look at the macro stuff but two if you look at the macro stuff you overload yourself because the macro thing is so much bigger than any individual it's so huge that you literally as an individual have no power over at all you have no power to change it the only thing that you could probably have a little bit of power over is the um is changing the the president in the US right when you go to vote rattle changing the senate or the house like that's the only real power you have but that is influenced by so much more than the markets and and the macro environment that is influenced by a million different things right the the the the social kind of side of things as well when it comes to our social rights

things like that like um uh things that are outside of the financial purview that plays a huge part in it so yeah just generally I mean uh we don't have control over it so there's no use getting kind of upset about it you can you can base your trades and investment on it but for me if I base my trades in investment on uh in crypto on the macro I would not have bought eth in June of last year right I would have been like oh my God the macro is so bad inflation is going to keep going up everything's going to go to [ __ ] and I would have missed out on buying eth in triple digits again so I'm glad I didn't didn't follow the macro stuff yeah the the issue is following the macro stuff like that macro doomers and stuff like that is like if you just zoom

out on charts they're forever wrong like just zoom out on an all-time stock graph right and all the time just U.S economy World economy graph like they're just wrong and like it it always comes down to kind of the point I was just saying earlier like at the end of the day where people gonna put their money like in in the US at least in general people that are are working and they have paychecks coming in they're like very directed to put their money into the stock market right you got 401ks like you know you're you kind of like get these financial advisors every one of them wants you to just pop money into the stocks right and like that's the reason I never will believe the the macro bearishness stock bearishness because like I mean what is

everyone just gonna put their money under their covers like under their mattress for years I mean yeah maybe that happened in like 08 for two years but even then that was like an all-time buying opportunity on stocks like the world literally people thought was the world was coming to an end with the housing crisis and in all reality that was just an all-time buying opportunity like three years later everything rebounded and people were making money again right so I just yeah I I get some of the stuff on like maybe some numbers or metrics don't look great right now but in all reality like you just have to kind of zoom out on these charts and realize what history has done and it's just not gonna like go to zero

like it's just not gonna happen and the main reason is people just keep making money and they got to put it somewhere like that's just the reality of the situation so um I don't I I'm with you like I never really base crypto decision I mean for crypto for me these days it's like a little easier I guess because I'm just I just am I staked and I'm just chilling and you know earning interest and restaking it and that's just my play for the next until I die basically to be completely honest um yeah every once in a while like on a big dip I'll throw some money at it um but other than that like I'm not making too many bigger decisions but if I step back like when I first was investing in Ethan stuff like that it

never was a factor for me like I never listened or read listen to like macro podcast or red macro like newsletters or anything like that because I mean when it's such like a nascent industry that you think and I I've said since day one of us doing podcasts forever ago and I know you have too like this is a multi-decade play and you got to realize we're still early like for either we're still in the first decade like decade hero I guess you would call it or whatever I guess decade one technically but like we're still in the first 10 years and like this stuff is still going to be kind of getting dull like maybe even well beyond like our years right of doing this stuff and it's not like overnight crypto's just gonna take over

and if you realize that the day-to-day movements shouldn't really matter to you because like and people get so caught up on this and you see it right and like it's why like people chase nfts and why people chasing me coins why people chase all layer ones and why they chase all this stuff they want like the day-to-day profits and the best investment is always going to be something that you or the best like investment thesis is always going to be something you truly believe in that's gonna like transform the world and you're fine just chilling in it and like if eth goes from I mean originally for me from a dollar to twenty three dollars and down to five dollars and then up to fourteen twenty

and back to 80 like it it doesn't matter right because you just you believe in it and you're not I mean yeah points I was over invested I guess but like that's also part of like really believing in a movement right but you're not gonna like try to trade yourself out of it because something moves or someone tells you the stock market's crashing you're not gonna like re-invent your thesis for why you think he's going to trade like change the global economy right and change people's lives for decades to come so um I'm with you like I don't bother myself too much with that stuff I mean even when the stock market's crashing I'm just kind of chilling I always have been um always kind of gives a good like day to read by ease because I'm sure he's

crashed on those days too but um like I said if you zoom out on stocks it's up only I don't really see a point by a lifetime that stocks won't be up only like I don't see a thesis where it wouldn't be mm-hmm yeah yeah and I think on that like kind of multi-decade uh kind of um approach that we've always taken to this industry uh it fits nicely into some of the regulatory stuff with crypto as well I think people end up fighting themselves out of their bags so to speak because they worry about the regulatory side and yes okay we've seen a lot of hostile kind of like regulatory stuff towards crypto but a lot of it has got to do with the fact that um there's crypto's new there's not a lot of laws and regulations that have been tailor-made for crypto so some of

these agencies are literally just applying the law and if they don't do that then they risk losing funding as well because they obviously need to prove to Congress that they're doing their job then you also have people that have a vendetta like Gary Gensler seems to have against crypto where he just wants to take a very hostile approach and he ends up just losing in the courts anyway but I think generally um the regulatory stuff because it moves so slow will play out during those kind of multi-decade things where countries around the world not just the us but like every country around the world will have their own legislation around this their own regulations that made for crypto so that we can actually keep building these things out and I know people will say oh it's so bearish you know they're trying to kill crypto in

the US blah blah it's like if they're really trying to kill crypto in the US guys like they would have just banned it I mean they would have made it so hard to interact with it they would have basically shut down the exchanges said that they were basically illegal money transmitters or done whatever like they could they be in the government could have put their weight behind this to to kill crypto but they don't want to do that they don't want to kill crypto I think what's happening is that there's just too much bureaucracy there's not enough guidance on the legit on the regulatory front and especially within the law that we just get this hodgepodge of kind of crap happening but that's all temporary in my mind I think that's going to get ironed out I think that the industry is going to mature a lot

especially with these Trad fire players now like BlackRock getting involved they're going to push the maturation forward I mean I don't know how many people are paying attention to the tradify world right now but they [ __ ] love crypto right now like they love crypto especially these ETFs they're all about it they're like holy [ __ ] atfs because for them it's like we can now access all of this retirement account money we can funnel it into these ETFs and we can make a [ __ ] ton of money off of fees doing it for an asset classes exactly for an asset class that hasn't been saturated yet because it doesn't hasn't traditionally had access to that money um so they're just looking at the trillions of dollars that they manage and saying well we think even if we put a small percentage of that into these

crypto products the crypto Market's just going to grow so large and we're going to be able to take those fees and repackage these products to our you know Boomer clients right all this old money that's that's hanging around so for them they're like and they're doing it at the right time too they're like everything's quiet right now we can get our foot in the door we can start getting these products onboarded so I think people really need to be paying attention to that because these tradify institutions they aren't worried about regulatory stuff because they know the game they know that it's going to get ironed out they know that it's not a a hard blocker for adoption of crypto it's just it's a thing that takes time to play out it might stall some things for a little bit but eventually it's going to come that

and that goes back to what we were talking earlier about the ETFs the tradify players they know the ETFs are now inevitable and that's why they're all filing for it because they're like I want my ETF I want to be able to take fees off of it I want to be able to to get this money in and they're all going to be competing each other with each other for it I mean fidelity recently published last month a report on the ethereum investment thesis so not only are they looking at Bitcoin they're looking at ethereum as well to to basically shill to their clients who have a lot of money but what people don't understand is that crypto money is [ __ ] nothing compared to try to find money we are literally a fly to be swatted away that's how irrelevant we are right now to to crypto to tradify

the money in tradfi just absolutely dwarfs crypto and when we start unlocking that money and bringing it into crypto and allowing it to play in crypto and invest in crypto assets that's going to unlock the next leg for the industry and that's that's coming I mean people as as I was saying earlier people you know especially Traders are just like oh you know the ETF news did nothing for the price blah blah that's because as you said earlier Eric the market is severely underpriced seeing the impact of this because they just don't understand it right now they don't understand what this is going to unlock and they will they'll will over time but by the time they understand we're probably in another bull market and then that they just send us higher right they just bring that money in but yeah that's kind of generally how I view the

regulatory stuff is that it's a temporary hiccup at best yeah no I mean I think you made some great points I'm glad you kind of circled back to what I said earlier people are severely underestimating the ETF stuff and so what you said I think is vitally important is fees right and like these these institutions whether Fidelity Black Card E-Trade whatever you want to say they're gonna push this so hard because they just see money right and like the bottom line for them is they have shareholders and they need to find revenue and are you kidding me like bringing in crypto ETFs and pushing it to their customers and taking a cut of everybody that trades on these ETFs I mean they're going to be pumping this

like none other like it's a totally new thing like I mean if you look back at like the gold etf2 and like what Gold's done since then and like oh basically every industry that's got an ETF and what happened after the fact and like I I personally so why am I so why do I think most people are severely underestimating the impact of ETS is because I personally know or a lot of people that are still scared to not see well I'm scared it's probably the right word still like shy scared to use coinbase like and I know that sounds weird maybe to like a lot of our listeners especially like younger listeners um it just exists like people don't

really get like okay who's like so coin and it's it's gotten a little better since they became publicly traded but like are they regulated like people are so used to FDIC Insurance in the US like do they have FDIC Insurance like what happens if they get like hacked or they go under like these are all actually very legit questions right and like do I need to like know my crypto Keys you throw that on Fidelity who like people have used for years Boomers love and they're just like oh buy Bitcoin that you have no idea how many people are sitting out there ready to do that um and it's right in front of them and also they can do it in their 401ks they can do it in their investment accounts you know it's it's just they don't have to think about private keys they don't have to think about

coinbase you don't have to like log in and see wallets um there's a lot of money sitting out there waiting for this and I think people are grossly underestimating how much money is actually sitting out there for it um and even money that maybe doesn't know there's a lot of people that still just don't really know about crypto like yeah the show they've heard like Bitcoin beef but like if they're brokerage or their you know their financial advisors start saying hey did you hear about this new Bitcoin and eat the ETF like you should check it out you can buy it through me um it's gonna open a whole new boom it just really is because right now the reality is you have to go on coinbase you have to like I know people that are scared to wire from their Bank to

coinbase because they think their banks are going to like Blacklist them and like it that just is like I get it like even I maybe think like my bank will see something weird like more back in the day before Camp coinbase wasn't like legitimized through their IPO or whatever you want to call it but um there's just I I think a majority of people are waiting for this to get into crypto and I think it's the Market's just severely underpricing it yeah yeah and I mean yeah I totally agree with that and I think as you said like people uh generally scared of new things especially the older folks who have the money by the way like a lot of people really don't I I think sort of understand that most of the wealth is

concentrated with the the older folks and it doesn't have to be just cash that they're sitting on it can be coming out of other assets maybe they want to rebalance their retirement account and say okay I'm going to allocate like one percent to crypto for now um and and if enough people do that that's a lot of money coming in that's being rebalanced out of other asset classes into into crypto and as I mentioned before you know and as you said as well crypto is is new to these people and it may not be new to us because they've been around for so long now but it's new to these people they're gonna buy um they're gonna buy based on what these uh institutions tell them as well because Fidelity will put out a report or bucket will put out a report saying Bitcoin is digital gold and that's what

these people are going to buy based on they'll put out a report about ethereum being um you know this new tech or whatever and people will play and and invest with it because it's a Tech play for them or something because they're like oh I know Tech like apple and Microsoft and and they look at that and they're like holy crap you know Tech's been the biggest winner over the last 20 years or whatever it is 10 15 years especially uh they're going to invest in that and then also they can kind of give the ethereum investment case from a store value perspective uh as well there but yeah um I think that's all going to happen and I think it's gonna be very bullish but I guess like on that bullish note we're probably out of time for today but I hope that everyone is

feeling a lot more bullish after that uh you know it's funny some people made some comments that the episodes that we do focus more on the market side of things than I usually do in my in my daily episodes and I think that's probably a better kind of fit for what we talk about here because the market stuff is something that I generally do pay a lot of attention to but don't talk about too much on on my show uh daily but I think yeah but you both you and I have um a lot of attention paid to it and have a lot of things to say about it so I'm glad that we get to get to do these episodes so so yeah thanks again Eric for being on and uh yeah I hope everyone's feeling bullish