Web3 weekly rollup: Bitcoin ETF approved, Circle IPO filing and Visa Web3 loyalty

Transcript

the waight is over the BTC ETF has been approved but what's coming next what can we expect over the next days weeks and months that's going to be one of the main things we talk about today because as always we want to make sure that you're able to stay on top of this onchain world in constant transformation gmgm welcome to web3 Academy we are your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet I'm jbird along with my co-host Kyle reidhead and we believe that crypto is going to change the world there's not much news to talk about today Jay so we'll make this one a short episode and just wrap

this up I'm just kidding this is a jam-packed episode as Jay just mentioned the BTC ETF is approved we'll talk about everything that has G on this week there and what we expect moving forward uh both in the news but also in a market watch segment also we woke up this morning in Circle the company that created usdc has filed for an IPO in the US it is going public alongside coinbase that is huge and then that's not it visa has a web three loyalty program Fox is launching a new platform called verify on polygon to do exactly what Jay and I have said is going to happen in the future with AI content and blockchain uh openc is launching embeddable wallets

we've got a bunch of really good agree disagrees agree disre explains to talk about today we've got one of probably going to be the most exciting episodes we've ever had it's a bullish time to be in crypto I'm super excited I have not taken a breath for the last 24 hours so I'm excited to do this Jay but let's take a breath take a second and just go over some gratitude what are you grateful for today is it I'm man I'm just hyped I'm just so I woke up this morning and went for a run and I don't run you just you just had to get the energy out I I'm I'm grateful for this moment in history this is a moment we will look back on we've built up so much to this moment Kai you and I have joked

that we wanted the bef to get approved just so we could stop talking about it because it really has dominated the airwaves for so long but now that we're here I actually find myself taking a deep breath to appreciate what this means and is going to mean a decade from now or a century from now and we are at the beginning of a monetary Evolution we are at the beginning of an Internet Revolution and there is no bigger moment than the legitimacy of American Regulators saying that they are willing to allow their public to get involved in this monetary evolution by owning

Bitcoin and through the ETF and so I think it's easy to get CAU caught up in the number go up what does this mean for my investment like very exciting but there is something much bigger at play here that connects back to the ethos of why we all got into web 3 to begin with which is to create a better world to remove control from our government that has been devaluing our currency for basically ever since Fiat money came into existence and now is this is a big big moment for all of humanity I believe I believe this is a moment that we are now taking steps towards a better system that will allow us all to thrive and not be so reliant on money that is

constantly inflating constantly going through money printing all these issues that are caused by the way that our governments manage our money currently so I'm just yeah grateful to the SEC I guess for approving and grateful to everybody that's listening to the show like we all were a part of this everybody here made this happen I know you know obviously you weren't at the SEC passing these these laws but this is a big moment for all of us so grateful to all of you just stoked I'm so excited I second that completely I'm grateful that the ETF was past one so we can stop talking about it although probably we we still won't stop talking about it for a while but two I think it just means

something really big for the world and so I think obviously excited there and I think J I reflect on this I'm very grateful that we started web through Academy when we did and for all the listeners that you've been listening for as long as you have because we started in the bear market and we're like ah we're probably going to go through some tough times here but we believe in the space and we believe what's happening and we're like let's just build through the bear build through the bear and like we'll see what happens coming out the other side and we made it we made it out the other side and now we've sort of like it's been legitimized I feel like right I think people in the mainstream media are now about to hear about this there's so many commercial out for Bitcoin ETF right now and I think I I

feel very grateful that I've taken the last however many years to just commit to this space and really understand it so that when people ask I have a good answer right I can talk about this and explain it and I really understand it and so I'm grateful that both you and I and everyone else in the web T Academy team and the community has put in so much time and effort into this space over the last couple years to be educated and involved and heavily invested in this space well before this happened which is obviously going to allow Bitcoin and crypto become more mainstream which we will talk about more especially in the market watch section so yeah very grateful to have put in the hard work during the tough times and I think now we all get to uh celebrate I had a beer last I had a couple beers

last night I happened to be just like walking by it's funny my girlfriend and I were just like exploring and walking through bonus areas after a cafe that we were at and we we stumbled upon we hadn't seen this but like where there's just this court of just bars there's like probably 30 bars it just all paos we're like w we've been looking for a spot like this we go have a nice beer because mainly it's it's cafes and we happen to be walked through that as the Bitcoin ETF got approved and I was like well we're gonna choose one of these and have a beer right now and it was happy hour I was like this is perfect so yeah great time days like yesterday I'm so sad that I don't live in a major city did you see anybody else celebrating like this gave me Vibes of like

Argentina winning the World Cup like I was I want to be in a city where there's like Bitcoin Flags and people are running around all excited like did you see that no it's a digital Community here right so people were celebrating in Discord with me and on Twitter because I took a picture of me drinking and I had all these people share them taking a drink but they were all from different parts of the world and that's the cool thing about Bitcoin is it's this digital nation and so it wasn't I didn't see anyone in the physical world who had any clue what was going on although I think I saw a guy an ethereum t-shirt at the gym yesterday morning but I don't know anyway we'll talk about why he should also be excited in this episode but you know what else is really cool Kai right

now to celebrate this Bitcoin ETF approval we are giving a discount on our Pro subscription so you want to get in right now because now is when there is so much opportunity coming I think there's a lot of people who think the ETF is approved okay is this the top of the cycle what does this mean did I miss the boat right you get these feelings of confusion cuz there's so much going on in the space there's so much news and it's so hard to keep on top of it all but if you're an investor in this space which I'm sure you are if you're listening to this podcast or if you're a builder in this bace you need to subscribe to web3 Academy Pro this week only until Jan 16th you can get

33% off so hit the link in the show notes because you're going to want to be a pro member for the next year to make sure you're confident in the space you can just buy bit coin and do well but really what this signaled is crypto's legit and so the smart contract platforms like salana ethereum Cosmos these are going to be the real winners here and the applications built on top of it and that stuff is not easy to understand and that's what we break down in Pro so this is why you want to be a pro member if you're not already you also get in our private Discord Channel which we have been calling everything from salana to when the market was starting to don't sell your Bitcoin and hold on to your eth which we'll talk about why that was a great move after

this approval so anyway get your discount let's go it's big gear all right let's get into the news Jay what do you say let's do it man let's do it for those of you who have not been following on Twitter and and and haven't really just been tracking everything we'll try to wrap everything up for you for this entire week because there was just so much that happened first we got the approval around midaf afternoon on Wednesday January 10th that the SEC has officially approved all spot Bitcoin ETFs there was 11 of them including of course Black Rock grayscale Arc so on and so on so that's the big news that came out around the the afternoon it's funny it wasn't supposed to be until after trading hours and then what happened was the approvals got put on the SEC website so everyone started

tweeting about it and sharing it and then it got taken off the website every was like well wait a minute is this fake did was this true like what happened then the site crashed because too many people were going to the SEC website it was a bit of a mess just like what happened the day before which we will get to but anyway we woke up this morning thday just less than 24 hours after the approvals and all 11 are actually live to be traded so you can actually buy these ETFs already they're live and trading within the first I think it was like half hour or something we had over a billion dollars in trading across all of the ETFs so pretty big numbers there's a bunch of different numbers going out on Twitter right now some I'm not sure how true they are

there was a tweet that said 2.3 Billy and that was in like the first hour Eric who's the the ETF bro has said that this isn't true I think it's more around like one to 1.8 if you include grayscale so anyway whatever it is it's a large sum these are potentially going to break records this year year let's see the interesting thing about this ETF approval is it's the first ETF in history in which the underlying asset that the ETF holds has a limited Supply so what's interesting is like let's say gold for example when the price of gold goes up you can fund more of the mining right you have more money it's more profitable so you actually deploy more Miners and you actually can find more gold so the supply of gold goes up faster as the price goes up right and

this is true of all Commodities and everything that's in an ETF whereas Bitcoin nothing changes doesn't matter how high the price goes you cannot create more of this stuff and so it's the first time we've had the ability for so much demand it doesn't mean the demand's coming just because we have ETF but the pipes have widened significantly and yet the supply can never widen and I think this is just a really really cool concept that I think is going to play out over the next year or two and why I think Bitcoin is going to reach some pretty big numbers so really really exciting to just to kind of wrap your head around that let's continue on there's a few more more tweets here around the Bitcoin ETF so a few things just to catch you up this one was quite interesting so after it was approved

Gary Gensler released a statement G gensler's the the chairman of the SEC he released a statement that was a little bit odd so he just basically said yeah we've approved it blah blah blah but then he went into like details that normally like they just would not do this so he went in and he said though we're Merit neutral I'd note that underly the underlying assets in the metals etps or ETFs have consumer and indust uses well in contrast Bitcoin is primarily a spective volatile asset that's also used for ilicit activity including ransomware money laundering sanction evasion and terrorist financing while we approved and listing and trading of certain spot big Bitcoin ETF shares today we did not approve or

endorse Bitcoin investors should remain cautious this is just so weird like this is unprecedented never have they done this been like Hey we're going to list this ETF of gold but by the way gold can be used for elicit activity and gold doesn't have a use case like I don't know copper does or whatever like weird for them to state that but just yeah very interesting they're still trying to take this like weird stance against crypto but anyway it doesn't really matter they've approved it there's going to be enough marketing out there from the Bitcoin world that what they say doesn't really matter the other interesting that came out about garyan stff he's so off and on like he's writes the statement of you know doesn't approve of Bitcoin blah blah blah but then we found out that the SEC actually

had to take a vote for the CTF to actually be approved there's five people that voted on this two which were the Democrats did not approve two which were the Republicans did approve and so we were at a two verse two and the final vote the Swing Vote of the approval was none other than Gary Gensler who approved it so we won three to two isn't that unbelievable so very interesting that happened there's sort of speculation that Larry Fink and the boys over in tradire world have basically force them said if you don't approve you know we're going to sue you and blah blah blah also in their statement they talked about they kind of had to approve this because of the court case from grayscale so we actually owe a lot of the kudos to grayscale for taking them

to court and winning that because they were sort of the reason that this really became a thing this year it was sort of like it's probably not going to happen then gry scale won was it this summer and all of a sudden it's like okay we're back like let's go and then six months later boom we're live so we got a lot of kudos to send over to grayscale let me ask a couple clarifying questions here questions that I've seen lots of people uh in our Discord and on Twitter asking first with these ETFs that are now live why are their prices different than the Bitcoin price can you explain the market dynamics there Kai yeah sure so one sh Let me Give an example the grayscale ETF

opened at $42 just to yeah use that so one share of the ETF does does not equal one Bitcoin right if it did it would be whatever we're at right now I don't know 46,000 or something the last I checked before we clicked record and the problem is you can't buy like if one share was $46,000 most people would be priced out of being able to buy a Bitcoin right uh because you can't buy pieces of a share in the trafi world and so what they've done is it is still an exact correlation to bitcoin so there is you know if there's a billion dollars worth of value in each ETF they have a billion dollars in underlying asset instead of Bitcoin and they're buying the the Bitcoin at spot but what they've done and each one will do this differently is maybe one

has a billion shares that represent a billion uh Bitcoin maybe one has 10 billion shares that represents a billion dollars in Bitcoin or maybe one has five million shares you know what I mean like it can be very different and so that's why the share price can be much lower which they want anyway so that more people can actually buy it and so with grayscale being what is it $46 that basically means that it's somewhere around I guess it'd be 100 shares or a thousand shares no 100 shares would equal one Bitcoin kind of thing so but everyone's going to be different so they'll all be different prices but they will all go up in correlation together now the weird thing if you've never invested in an ETF like asset is remember the markets do close at whenever it is 4M and so Bitcoin will

still go up or down after the markets so what will happen is you have to wait till the next morning and all of a sudden it'll correct and like change by whatever's happened in the after hours so bit weird when you buy this thing but overall it'll track it on almost perfectly and most of these have almost no fees at least for the first few months or first certain amount of volume but then they're really low it's like 0. 2324 the highest one is grayscale so I would not be buying gray scale they like 1.5% which is way higher than all the others but it's because they have like what is it two or three billion dollars worth of bitcoin already in it so they're just printing money off of that and so yeah I wouldn't be buying that one I'd buy any of the others what do

you expect to come are you going to start buying the ETF do you think that our listeners will buy the ETF who's buying this ETF and what can we I me we've already seen over a billion dollars purchasing it any ideas of what we can expect that might happen in the next month year yeah so I already own the Bitcoin and E ETFs but we've had it in Canada for years so this was a thing that i' I've had for a while the reason that I have like most of my crypto is actual crypto self- custody but the reason I own sumon ETF is because I can put it INX savings account and I can sell it and I pay no taxes on it which is like amazing when you have an asset that goes up 10x in a number of years right and you can put a

significant amount of money into it so I own that I sold all my Bitcoin spot ETF actually earlier last week and put it all into the eth spot ETF my reasoning was I thought that eth would pump after this thankfully that worked out well we'll talk about that in just a second but who's going to buy this um I think many people will I mean a lot of crypto natives will for the same reason I just did which is to save on taxes so the the amount of crypto that they hold a certain percent that they want to sell why wouldn't you use this it's lower in fees than even if you were to go buy real crypto on coinbase so it makes sense but really what's going to happen here is every single one of these financial institutions Black Rock Etc they have a team of advisers that will

go and teach all the financial advisers around us around the us about their product about this ETF who will then go and preach this to your grandma your grandpa your parents whoever is putting their money in their retirement savings accounts and say hey you should put an allocation into this just like they do gold and other assets same sort of idea Pension funds they have been looking to get into this stuff so Pension funds always have a different allocation to a bunch of different assets they can now put one two whatever percent into Bitcoin so they will be buying many many many different funds and institutions that have been wanting to invest this but haven't been able to because they're not allowed to custody the assets themselves they they just because of regulations they can't do that so now they can do it with an ETF because they

don't cuss it another like obviously the company does and so I think there's many many many different institutions and people that can now finally buy this and hold it now it won't happen all today it'll happen over time but I'll show you a chart in a second of what happened with gold when it had its ETF but I think yeah there's many different people that will be able to do this and I think a lot of demand will come over the next months to years amazing thanks for that explanation okay now this couldn't have all happened without a little bit of drama beforehand so we got to tell a quick story of what happened on Tuesday the day before the approval okay so Tuesday we're all excited we think maybe it's coming today and boom the the SEC tweets today the SEC grants approval for

the Bitcoin ETF for listing on all registered National Security exchanges the approved ETS will be subject to ongoing surveillance and compliance measures to ensure continued investor protection sounds just like an SEC tweet there's even a photo of Gary gendler with a quote from him about the approval and everyone goes crazy it's happening it's live uh uh uh not so fast okay that was actually fake the sec's Twitter account got hacked within minutes I think it was like within 20 minutes Gary gendler tweets out that the sec's Twitter account was compromised and an unauthorized tweet was posted the SEC has not approv the listing and trading

of spot Bitcoin ex spot Bitcoin exchange traded ETF F product okay so it was fake as a results of this there was massive green candle and then massive red candle we saw a big spike big pump and then a big dump and here's the best part can make this stuff up somebody said hey X can you do an investigation here there was a lot of speculation that this was a tweet that was scheduled and scheduled wrong and that somebody at the SEC accidentally just pushed the button early so X went and they didn't investigation and they confirmed that the sec's account was in fact hack and even worse they didn't have two-factor

authentication on unbelievable we 100% should hold the SEC accountable for this it's crazy that they didn't have two-factor authentication on and this is on top of the fact that the SEC constantly is trying to protect us here's a quot a tweet from Gary gendler October 24th where he says this is a reminder to secure your financial accounts as well as protect against identity theft and fraud he says remember to set up multiactor authentication Gary gendler the head of the SEC said that on his Twitter to the whole world and his own organization has not done that for their own Twitter account it's truly unbel there something

like aund 100 million dollars of Longs that were Longs and shorts that were liquidated because of that hack and that tweet I mean it's crazy that someone in crypto actually hacked the sec's Twitter account number one but also crazy they didn't you know take the right precautions but yeah $100 million in liquidations I think it was even more than that but pretty extensive and the results of that is the SEC now will likely have to investigate themselves which is totally unprecedented never happened but basically their negligence led to $100 million being liquidated which that's on them right like they made that m akake so they need to take accountability for that it's just crazy there's so many hilarious memes that

came out as a result of this I think the best tweet I saw was from John Woo who said the coin Telegraph intern walked so that was if you guys remember back in December coin Telegraph intern made a post saying that it was the BTC ETF was approved that was incorrect they were wrong so the coin Telegraph inter turn walked so the Matrix port analyst could run so the SEC social media Chief could fly and just a absolute runaround but hey none of this matters now because we got the approval and we can move forward so now the question is what do we obsess over next what's the next deadline

what's the next thing that we can all talk about well that is the yeast ETF approval and when is that coming yeah I mean the the SEC gets no break that's for sure they now have to turn to the eth ETF which is coming in May at least that's the next deadline so we'll see what happens there but let's jump over into a little bit of market watch stuff and I also just want to talk touch on one thing I saw here with just sort of a way to think about what this Bitcoin ETF means to the space so crypto in general is its own little world right and one way to think about it is like crypto is an emerging market right it's a new Financial system it's a digital country we call it digital Community we we have our own finance and our own Finance

services and it's kind of like our own world that lives on the internet and so we're we're almost like an emerging country think of like India as an emerging country China is an emerging country and so there's sort of two ways to think about it the first one when we think about it as an Emerging Market is this ETF is a trade deal between the Fiat world so the us the biggest Market in the world and Emerging Market of the crypto world the crypto country right very similar to the trade agreement between like China and the us back in the 90s and this was the World Trade Agreement or World Trade order whatever it was where basically China was a private country for many many years in the 90s they opened up and said hey we want to trade with the rest of the world

and so you had this country with a billion people in it and they could make all these products but they couldn't sell it to the rest of the world and all of a sudden one day boom they could sell it to anyone in the world Americans could buy it Canadians could buy it whatever and this created just a massive massive growth stimulus in China's economy we could invest tons of money into real estate into their companies we could buy things products that they made and China just boomed and became one of the biggest countries in the world over about two decades right and so it's kind of the same idea here as like this is an agreement between the traditional world and the crypto world that hey we can now all invest in this and so that's one way to think of it the other one which is

quite interesting is this is rul Paul who is explaining this is's a big macro thinker and he just said a way to frame this is that we were all seed investors pre 2011 in coin series a investors in 2012 series B investors in 2015 series C in 2019 and series D in 2023 and now we are iping he goes then just like in the mid1 1990s we get to see the demand from retail and institutions back then the first few days around the actual IPO of things were always weird things went crazy and volatile while people took profits on their allocations and then it ripped higher as new demand came in people who didn't buy pre-ipo all of a sudden could now buy you know whatever stock we're talking about here same sort

of idea with Bitcoin now it's not that but it's just a nice framework or way to think about it that I thought was was pretty interesting another way to sort of think about this is if we look at and again I have a chart up on the screen here this is looking at what happened with gold after its ETF was introduced versus Bitcoin when its ETF is introduced so gold you could buy it but it was difficult to buy pre ETF but many people did for many reasons similar reasons to bitcoin actually and it had its ups and downs it was very volatile Etc and then the ETF approved and this thing just went absolutely nuts it was like a 500% growth I see 300% growth it looks like in from its previous all-time high in just a matter of years kind of

thing now gold this was back in the day this is like the 80s or the 90s whatever so it took a lot longer for people to get money and be able to buy this whereas like now we live in a world where money moves so freely and so my assumption is the amount of money that can flow into this will be much faster and much more than what happened with gold so yeah it's a interesting comparison of what we saw with gold to now what we will see with Bitcoin interestingly though I was not buying Bitcoin when this was approved I was actually selling my Bitcoin and instead I was buying some eth which is quite funny and the reason is for what yeah you're crazy I mean anyone who's Pro knows this we've been talking about this for a while I thought the trade would be once

this approves we're g to move everyone in crypto is going to move to eth and we're going to speculate on the eth ETF now and so the eth BTC ratio was dying for while there so I want to just touch on that and what happened and what I believe is going to happen first quick overview of markets they have been up and down like crazy in the last 24 hours Bitcoin just earlier today an hour ago no an hour and almost two hours ago now it was at 49,000 so it was pumping and people were like what no sell the news no sell the news and then in a matter of minutes it dumped all the way down to 455 so just it's up and then it's down it's all over I mean we're basically where we were when we started the day but wildness ethereum has done the best

here especially over the last two days but it is sitting right around 26,000 but it is up a lot since yesterday it was at 20 2250 actually at one point it was below 2200 on the eth and now we're already up we reached 27 and now we're sitting around 26 so it's a wild 40 by the time that this thing goes live like who knows where we'll be things are a little bit crazy but what really matters here what's been interesting to watch is I have been flagging this massive wedge pattern for Bitcoin for the eth BTC ratio for a while now it's this like seven-year pattern where if it breaks the up or down it's going to be a massive move and we have been at the bottom of this wedge pattern for weeks

just fighting it and fighting it and uh for months even actually and on the weekly we actually closed last week below this wedge pattern and so it was looking pretty bad for the eth BTC ratio it not only broke below this wedge pattern but there's been been a range that we've been in between eth and BTC for three years now and it actually came and touched the bottom of that this is just like two days ago and I was like oh damn this is getting way worse than I thought if we go below that range like we are going to dump meaning the eth BTC ratio and then out of nowhere the fake approvals that actually what really did this the fake approval we saw immediately that eth was pumping and the eth BTC ratio went up and everyone was like whoa what just happened because

then all of a sudden we realized it was fake and was like wait so eth is going to pump when this thing approves and then it got approved yesterday and eth did pump and so now we are back in that wedge pattern which we were so far out of it and so below I was like dang this thing's done but we needed a monthly close below it and now I mean we still don't know we got to wait for the end of this month but we've already pumped all the way back up I think we're sitting at 0.56 we were down at 048 and so we're back in the wedge pattern we're back in the safe Zone and uh we'll see what happens moving forward my expect is that eth continues to fly moving forward because I think all comos now move to eth ETF after this and

especially if Bitcoin does well in terms of inflows people are gonna make okay eth is gonna have these kind of inflows as well and eth is a about the quarter of the size of Bitcoin maybe a third of the size of Bitcoin so a lot less money can make it move a lot more so anyway that's what we're watching the other interesting thing that I wasn't really so confident I was really confident the eth BTC play Soul eth which has been a wild one to watch Soul has just absolutely ripped against eth for the last few months it has actually come back the last few weeks as well meaning eth is starting to catch up so three weeks in a row of eth outperforming salana and there was a moment there where both when the approval happened Bitcoin was down Stole was down and eth

was up like five six seven per. I was like whoa what is happening and so even today soul is down 2.3% ethereum is up .4% on the day so this is I think East moment where it's just finally you know taking its reins back and saying hey I'm not dead I'm coming back and the L2 tokens which I also talked about have just also been on a tear like 30% they were up yesterday so eth ecosystem is going to have its moment I think that continues for the next few months here interesting one other thing on the market watch side of things we had inflation that came out this morning so if the ETF and all the noise around that wasn't enough we also have some macro stuff and inflation came out sort of mixed so the CPI if we look at C Pi was

actually up and it was up higher than expectations so it's up at 3.4% this is the inflation in the US it was 3.1 last month now it's at 3.4 the expectations were 3.2 so that is not great however what we care about more than anything is core inflation that was actually down so we at 4% last month we were down to 3.9 it's slow and steady but as long as core continues to go down then I think we're all good we're laughing but we would have loved to see it Go much lower but didn't happen it is what it is not a huge deal I still feel good about where everything's going with inflation and where things will likely go with interest rates in the coming months so not only do we have an ETF approved we have core inflation continue to go down and likely rates to start to go down

this year 2024 what a time what a time do you think obviously markets are so controlled by narratives and yeah you're talking a lot about how eth will become the next narrative mainly as a result of the EF May 23rd is the next headline as we get closer to that there will be more and more conversation about that as you said particularly if everything goes well with BTC ETF which it's I mean we're we're hours in and we're already over a billion dollars so it's clearly GNA go well do you think the narrative is going to switch to eth and away from salana and Bitcoin or do you more just

think that the there will be an eth narrative that joins the party that's a great question question I think both Bitcoin salana eth all do well in the next quarter I don't think like eth just runs and nothing else moves I think they all do well I think eth just probably outperforms for a little bit here though I still don't feel confident about that with salana because I feel like anytime eth moves generally in a week two we basis whatever salana is probably going to come back but no I don't think everything else goes away but I do think e Stills the spotlight so just like we've had salana steal the spotlight for the last couple months because of all the air drops and the salana seaphone and Bon and the things going on I think we have the EIP 4844 upgrade coming next month so that's going to drive a lot of

conversations people are going to be talking about a lot on Twitter and what that means is l2s the fees on them are going to go down by an order of magnitude so at least 10x so we're talking sub one penny to use l2s that's going to be a big deal I think because you have to something like bass right like Bas is going to have an order made to cheaper fees come February and that's a publicly traded company that's going to be talking about that plus you have okx and others launching there's so many l2s I think we're going to see some hype around l2s in the coming weeks because of that and then of course we also have the eth ETF and just like when you have this speculation on ETF and you have the SEC talking about the media starting talking about it people start to learn

about it we're gonna have commercials coming out about eth and how it's the internet Bond and how it has yield and it's deflationary and like all these things we've all been talking about for the last two years are finally going to be put in like nice marketing formats commercials there'll be nice infographics like all the things that we try to put out but we're just this small little you know store or whatever you want to call it like an analytics firm and now you're gonna have black rock putting this stuff out putting out commercials and Arc and like Fidelity and the biggest companies financial companies in the world all writing reports and putting out good marketing material about what eth is and it's going to help people wrap their heads around it I think salana probably rides along with it though so I think like I'm

not I I plan to probably sell a bit of Ethan a Sal at some point my hope is over the next little bit eth really runs and if it does and that sole eth ratio really picks up then I I probably will move just a little bit it just I have like amount that I'm trading for the cycle just for fun to fulfill my inner Deens so I don't go and screw everything else up and so probably I'll put it back in Soul and then Sal will have its narrative once again at some point maybe when fire dancer goes live like this is what the cycle is all about just narratives and narratives yeah and and you make a good point that with the Bitcoin ETF approval is going to come so much media around Bitcoin the thing that we all need to remember is the masses

don't know the difference between Bitcoin and cryptocurrency to them it's all the same thing right now and they're learning but as a result of that All Ships rise with the tide for sure there's a lot of positive information and knowledge coming towards crypto in general which God knows we need it we've had a rough few years of a lot of negative media attention so I think this positive helps everybody out well and speaking of a big narrative Jay let's start the first part of our news if you want to share your screen here here's something that's going to generate some Buzz around ethereum because this company lives on ethereum which is circle which is the creator of usdc has just filed today it's funny they must have been waiting for the approval uh of

the Bitcoin ETF to now do this this is why I say the SEC is not done yet they're busy not just EF but circle is filed for an IPO and so the SEC has to go and do all their work and due diligence to fulfill this as well but circle is a company that lives on top of ethereum essentially right usdc its main liquidity is on ethereum and moving to its l2s it's also in salon and some others but its biggest chain that it uses is ethereum I guess ton as well but that's mainly usdt or Tron not ton so anyway you have a company that is about to go public that exists only as a result of ethereum right and that's really cool someone else put out a tweet was like what happens when the the real world assets start to move on chain and

so Circle which is a company that hosts its asset on ethereum then IPOs and puts those shares on top of ethereum right and it's like okay this is just getting a little bit meta here but so yeah this is just I think again proves the utility and just the validation of what ethereum and smart contracts in general are doing and so we're going to have a company that IPOs and hopefully Circle does really well because what I've seen is there's about six or seven other crypto companies that will also IPO if this gets approved as well yeah think companies like Kraken and whatever else so going to be an interesting year yeah it's the start of big things to come for sure and as a result of the circle IPO we're also going to see a lot more talk

about stable coins which is really the app that is going to change the world and the way that we transfer money and there isn't enough yet people that understand stable coins that are outside of crypto so it's all going to head in that direction as well I mean bullish bullish bullish let's go okay next next up Fox Corporation is launching a new platform on polygon to verify their content with within licensing deals with AI firms that are using their content so this is something that we've talked a lot about is we have a massive problem of content verification who is the owner

who actually created this content and then was somebody else allowed to use that content well if you're Fox Corporation you're one of the biggest content producers in the world and most a lot of your money a lot of your Revenue comes from content licensing deals where you enable another Media company to use your content to reuse it to repurpose it okay the problem is it's very difficult to track that and with the creation of AI and the mass adoption of AI it becomes even more difficult to to do so fox has launched verify and this program which has just launched in beta launched on January 8th is basically it's going to allow any Media

Company can register content from articles to audio messages to images and then Grant usage rights to AI platforms and then using the verified tool these pieces of content are cryptographically signed on polygon allowing customers to identify the content from trusted sources this is huge super exciting I'm super worried about the identity and content verification problem that is going to come and we're already seeing it but it's going to get so much worse so this is amazing yeah I think it's super cool it's great that they're building a platform for others to use it too which I think is really exciting I mean this is just such a problem that we already have like I saw I think I was on

this Twitter this morning Sam Alman I guess just got married and I think yesterday or this weekend or something like that and there was yeah there was a picture of it and everyone was just like is this true like do we know if this is true is this someone AI made this and like no one knew and we were like because it was a screenshot of his Instagram and because he didn't publicly say it on Twitter so every was like tagging him like is this actually it I'm like man you have to do this with everything now and so like things like this and we need media especially to be the ones that can verify so I think this is an awesome platform well I don't know if the platform's good I've obviously never used it but the idea is legit and we need this stuff so really exciting Jay

and I have talked about this for I don't know good year at least since chat gbt came out saying that we need something like this so didn't think Fox would be the one to do it but cool I have some interesting news that isn't so great but honestly somewhat expected that is that X removes nft profile pictures from its platform so interesting because this is actually the initial Tech that I thought would make sense for how verify would work right so you can verify content on Shain through Web Two platforms right so there was this ability to connect your wallet to Twitter and then you could look at the profile picture and see like oh that's actually an nft and this person owns it and this is the group that made it and blah blah blah so you could verify and this was the initial

aha moment for me of saying oh all content is going to do exactly this I can click on an image just like the hexagon profile pictures and verify who uploaded that on chain right was it actually whoever P whichever person or company and so it was kind of the like first look at how this would all work but I guess for profile pictures people don't really care and here's why I think they probably just shut this down one very small population was actually using it no one really cares about nft pfbs although I think that will increase in the coming year or to but still it's it's quite Niche like under 10,000 people actually would use it or care about it there's not even like I forget how small the market was actually trading this stuff and most those people don't actually care about the art

they're just trading it to make money it's not a revenue generate for Twitter so why would they continue this it probably adds a lot of expenses because they actually have to keep up with all the different blockchains and the l2s and the different wallets and it's like for me if you're a big tech company and you're not going Allin on crypto or on blockchain there's no point in dipping your toes in right now because it's still too confusing of a space right there's too much new it's just not mature enough to like do small little things it's like you either need a blockchain team and you need to go all in on something kind of like what Reddit did with their nft Market not Marketplace but they're NC avatars uh yeah or you just got to kind of get out and so it it kind of makes sense that I

think X would do this yeah I think it's it's a really good point that we need to remember that just because these massive Enterprises are launching blockchain programs and then shutting them down does not mean that they don't value blockchain long term they're all experimenting and so we're going to see as with the start of any new technology we're going going to see a lot of trial and error and I think the funny thing is X wants to solve the identity problem that we have online and they as you said this was a way to try to do it didn't work because there's just not enough people that want to do it this way yet but they've tried it so now in the

future they've got an experiment that they can look back on the next time they try to solve the pro solve the plan sorry solve the problem okay next up Visa Visa launches a web3 loyalty program this is a program not for Visa customers but it's for brands that use Visa so this is more of a platform that would allow any brand to gamify rewards and bring immersive experiences to digital first customers this is huge you could imagine that basically what this does is it allows any brand that has a partnership with visa and uses Visa to launch a loyalty program where you can gamify giveaways by giving away

digital Collectibles you can have augmented reality treasure hunts and then you can use new ways to earn and burn loyalty points one of the biggest problems with loyalty right now is we all get these points but they're sort of meist they're not they're just a point that is connected to that company if we don't want to use them with that company a lot of us just don't even use our loyalty points we imagine that your points rather than your points being just connected to that company imagine you could openly trade them imagine you could burn them to gain something else imagine there was ways to earn more loyalty points by completing a game or imagine that your loyalty points came in

the form of a digital collectible with programs like upt trip which is L th's loyalty program or programs like Starbucks where rather than just getting regular points you get a actual piece of art that is memorable and connects with what you've done with that brand we're so back we got Visa Fox Circle iping BTC ETF approved like what is this news we have this week this is insane you know what's funny about this and I got to give some kudos to Visa is they keep building and shipping in the space whereas think about you were just talking about big Tech will build things and some will work some will not how many times has big Tech built in crypto and then they built at the top of the

cycle and then the bare Market came and then by the end of the bare Market they leave and then all of a sudden we go through another cycle again and it's like Instagram bowed out of what they were doing with nfts Twitter bowed out Reddit even which was kind of surprising just a few months ago backed out of the community points and all this is happening at the bottom of the bare Market these are bottom signals and so what's your top signal this cycle well when Twitter when Instagram and when Reddit come back in and start building and saying they're going to launch new things that's probably your top signal for the next cycle but Visa is not because Visa just keeps shipping and they've been doing it consistently for years years and years through multiple Cycles that's really impressive and they're not just focused on the payment

side of things they're doing so much more like you just said with with web 3 loyalty they're doing some music stuff they're just they're doing a ton of stuff on chain which is really cool yeah so much happening there okay next let's move along to openc which is partnered with our friends privy to launch their own self- custodial wallet this is huge news well I think this is big news Kai I I I feel like you don't think this is as big news as I do so we'll get your take on this but let me just explain what happened here so this is happen on Monday so basically openc introduced a new onboarding experience where you can simply create your own self- custodial wallet just with an email add address on openc as a result you could use this wallet you could buy sell and send

crypto within its wallet you could buy sell and send nfts you can manage your crypto you can view view your crypto crypto transactions this is operates just like a typical crypto wallet and then what this allows openc to do is it allows them to completely change their onboarding experience where now you can go to openc you can sign in with an email the first time you're at openc you can purchase an nft with a credit card and then automatically a wallet is created for you and that nft lands in your self custodial wallet and this fits with open C's plan to openc seems to always be aiming in the direction of

trying to be the Shopify of web 3 they want to be the Shopify of digital Collectibles and so there's a great quote from Devin finser who's the CEO of openc where he says one of our internal mantras at openc is how do we make your first nft purchase as simple as purchasing a pair of sneakers from a Shopify store clear C this is a huge step towards doing that I originally wasn't so most I like yeah I don't know do like new people really come in and need to use open seed to buyts like isn't that whole thing done and then I was reminded of the amount of celebrities and companies Etc that launch nfts in the bull market and that's likely going to come back and

that brings in a lot of new people and it was very challenging for many of them last cycle to like go get a metamask wallet and then go fund that wallet and get Ethan to it which meant they had to go get like a coinbase account and like take days to just to fund your wallet and figure out how to do all this just to connect in and then spend $60 minting an nft and the nft was also really expensive so I was like I don't know about that but now I mean a lot of NS will probably launch in l2s or salana so they're super cheap and now that you can just do it with an email it makes sense and I think all those things will come back of people launching nfts whe whether they'll be like pfps and stuff I'm not sure um but I would bet all that

comes back and so having openc have it just be so easy is is obviously huge I think every application in crypto is going to go this way this is what frch has done this is what sound is doing uh and I think they're all going that way and kudos to privy for for setting all this up the one weird thing that comes to this is like we're all going to have like many embeddable wallets like if you use sound if you use frch and now use openc you now have three embeddable wallets plus let's say Reddit is an embeddable wallet so it's like okay there's four now what right but priv is also building we talked about before the global wallets which is a way to like interconnect all those I don't know how it's all going to work yet but I'm excited to see their solution to it

because we we definitely need it but I think every app is going to have these edible wallets now so really cool very very exciting okay next up what is going on uh in India uh one of our team members lives in India and he brought this story to our attention which is an important one to look at because binance C coin and other exchanges okx have been removed from the Apple App Store in India I don't think they've been removed from the Google Play Store yet but I I assume they will be removed from there as well Kai what's going on here yeah so basically all the biggest exchanges that people from India are able to use like binance good coin all the ones outside of India there are a few Indian ones but they're a bit smaller but all those are basically getting kicked out of the

Apple Store in India so you won't actually be able to download them and use them this is India has a hard stance on crypto right now they don't want people using this for whatever reason which is it kind of sucks because India is the largest population in the whole world it's like 1 Point whatever three four maybe it's more than that billion people it's a lot of people and we want them to be buying our coins we want them to be buying our bags and not only that they also need this right like they don't have a lot of banking services Etc there so it's like this is a product crypto is a product that really helps them I don't know about the inflation there I don't know if it's as bad as um many other countries but regardless it is a service that many of them can use

that the government for whatever reason is trying to block them from hate to see that the we were asking AE who's who works with us you know what can they do there and he said there are Indian exchanges however they also get blocked all the time as well and so it's tough to get money into crypto so basic and then they also tax like crazy I think it's 30% on any of your profits and anything that you lose you don't get to like count that towards that to like minus some of your profits so it's just it's a weird setup they have I would bet they flip at some point the reason why I bring this up is expect countries to have pretty aggressive takes on crypto this cycle China has notoriously the last two cycles banned crypto right near

the top of crypto each time which is actually ends up being a good thing for the citizens because then they don't buy the top which is kind of funny but then they end up coming back India has been a little bit up and down but mainly down on crypto we'll see if that changes at some point I don't know but obviously India big population and we hate to see any country blocking their their citizens from getting crypto Can't Ban crypto you can just you ban your citizens from having having easy access to it but they can always find ways to get around to it right so just sucks for Indian citizens to have now they have to pay like expensive ways to get crypto and I don't know it's just annoying but something we'll keep in our eye on all right time for our favorite segment

agree disagree or explain uh before we jump into this segment though we have a poll question that we ask you guys every week and this week's poll question is did you or are you going to buy the BTC ETF in the US I'm curious to know how many of our listeners have already jumped on buying it or will plan to buy it in the future or whether you're not going to buy it and you're just going to continue to buy Bitcoin the traditional way through funny to call it the traditional way it shows how long we've been in crypto for the crypto way to do it the self- custody way so check out that poll if you're listening on Spotify because would love and know if you're on YouTube Just comment in the comments

below and let us know if you're buying and why you're buying it are you trading it are you using it for a tax for savings what's your story yeah I would love to hear okay first agree disagree explain this is from Anatoli the founder of salana says my bold prediction there are no longer any order of magnitude improvements to blockchain technology left I would say I don't know enough about the tech side of things of blockchain to say if I agree or disagree I did see this tweet and I actually commented because I was like well isn't the fire dancer validator cly that's coming next summer an order magnitude better for salana which it would be because it would make it more than 10x as scalable as what it currently is so that is an order of magnitude right

there but basically what Anatolia said was there will still be order of magnitudes improvements in Hardware just not in the blockchain technology itself which is bullish for salana because sana's Tech in terms of its blockchain is fully reliant on Hardware getting better and better and better but Hardware as we know it improves by like 2x every two years or so and so it gets faster and cheaper by double every two years and so we can continue to expect that to happen and so in if just a few years you'll have order magnitude improvements in the hardware Tech so again I don't know where things will go in the blockchain tech I thingss all the improvements of ethereum I mean maybe Proto Dang sharding or dank sharing like the full one is probably going to be in order of magnitude better for ethereum

but dank sharing already exists on other blockchains so I guess technically that's not a like new innovation to blockchain because that already exists on something like near so yeah I don't know it's a weird take but overall I think we've seen a lot of the improvements now and then I think it's up to hardware at least for salana side of things is what he's getting at all right next up this was a quote from Joe Luben the founder of ethereum that DJ news then requoted and Joe luin said salana is a great technology but not a mature ecosystem yet when asked on CNBC about the prospect of a soul ETF so basically he's saying that there will not be a soulle ETF because it's not a mature enough ecosystem yet Kai agree

disagree yeah I think I agree and when I say mature what I what I mean by it is first I think it someone files this year it's one of my predictions for 2024 in our predictions report I don't think it gets approved and the reason is there is still a lot of centralization around the tokens that are held of Soul meaning there's a lot of like VC funds that originally invested and then like the ERS in the team of salana and then just like I know FTX for example owns like I don't know some close to like 20% of the entire Supply like a lot of the supply I don't know if it's 20 so don't quote me on that but it's a large amount and these funds still hold it they can't sell because they have they're vested so they have like a an unlock period which

is like 2025 March for FTX so it would and the reason that's a problem obviously is like that means just a couple funds or institutions could get together and they own more than 50% so there's just a lot of attack vectors I think there's plenty of decentralization in terms of salon's Tech and its dodes and validators Etc so like I'm not saying that it's not a decentralized platform it is I just think the distribution of salana which by the way ethereum was the same so was Bitcoin in the early days it was just a few people that held Bitcoin in the early days few people that held e in the early days they were a little bit different neither of those had like a funding round so there was less like whales I would say and so anyway it's not going to say that way over time these funds will sell out

their tokens and more people will buy them and more users will come in so like it's not a concern by any means just don't think that the SEC will approve something like that especially when it's like FTX is one of the biggest holders which is a company that has one of the biggest frauds in the world so like they'll probably wait until you know at least that March 2025 Cliff when they can unlock all those and ideally FTX probably sells all that or gives it out to customers so anyway that's my guess I agree yeah I'm gonna agree I'm gonna agree with that one as well great take okay next up this is from mert if we cared about decentralization as much as we say we do then we would actually want as many blockchains as possible to succeed a world with just one L1 is a

world with a single point of failure yeah I mean I sort of agree I agree with this I don't think that there will be hundreds of blockchains and I don't think that there will be just one blockchain or that there should be just one blockchain the one thing to keep in mind is when you have hundreds of blockchains like let's say the cosmos ecosystem set up there just tons and tons and tons of chains you fragment security right because each blockchain has its own token that it uses to secure its blockchain which means that you have less security for every chain whereas if you just had all that capital in one chain it would have a lot more security Now obviously there's other risks that exist outside of just the market cap of a token and the security around that and then there's different types of

Technologies Etc that you want so like I don't think that we should have just one by any means but I don't think we should have hundreds either I think there'll be I don't know five to like 20 important ones there might be a bunch of private ones and whatever but I think obviously ethereum and then its IDE you have a bunch of different l2s that's a great way to sort of like mitigate risk and then you are going to have something like salana and more this is also like a good take for like people like well if salana is so cheap why doesn't everything just go on Salon it's like that's never going to happen it doesn't matter if it can if it's scalable enough for it doesn't mean the whole world's going to go on top of that it's just that's not how the world ever works and

so Sala will probably have a lot of apps it's just not going to be the only one and we wouldn't want that anyway right and so I think that's why I say always there's plenty of room for ethereum and for Cosmos and for salana and whatever else comes in the future I guess I agree great take thanks Kai okay next up this came from Josh Stark he said it happened the ethereum L2 tvl passed the alt L1 tvl for the first time ever this week ethereum L2 tvl was over 20 billion and the alt L1 tvl was just under 20 billion yes this did happen however I think there's a bit of a caveat to it I just want to look because this tweet came out

before we had this massive pump so I bet you this tvl is way higher yeah we're at 22.5 billion now so we've gone up 2 billion almost two billion since that tweet so yes the tvl on layer 2os so total layer twos which there's you know 50 60 70 of them now is higher than the alt L ones which would include like salana and cardano and blah blah blah blah blah but this isn't actually true and the reason is evl on l2s at least if you're looking at L2 beat it's it's done differently depending on the analytics platform you're looking at but they using L2 beat I believe it's the reason why it's different comparing l2s versus l1's is l2s don't just count so l2s count all tokens that exist on their L2 they don't even have to be in smart contract platforms it's just everything

that's on there because it's been bridged over uh and so all of that is count as locked so even if it's not actually like in I don't know a or maker or whatever locked in a smart contract it's just the fact that it's all been bridged over which other l1s won't count it that way and then also the tokens of the l2s like ARB and op etc those are counted in this and so you know Solana so soul is not counted in the tvl of salana if it was Solana's tvl would be 50 billion right because that's what Sal Soul's market cap is whereas ethereum l2s they're counting arbs tvl which is like three billion in op which is like three billion and so you're comparing apples oranges here it's a ridiculous

comparison shame on Josh Stark actually shame I'm kidding but it doesn't make any sense compare those two that said I like the tvl on l2s is growing and is massive it's not to the point that that they're saying okay last one this came from the crypto dog they said working on a theory that in fact we are near this Cycle's top an early rally spurred on by the BTC ETF we just ran it back on double time and now we need to crash and cool for off for a while before the next rally having has no immediate effect the Catalyst ran its course I would disagree with this look we might have a pullback at some point and it could be now who knows it just doesn't make any sense in terms of the marketing and demand we're

about to have because of Bitcoin whether it's the biggest ETF that ever exists or it's something small doesn't really matter the fact is there's going to be tons of marketing on bitcoin and now it's more readily available you're you're just n going to have more people coming in as a result but then not only that if this link if the BTF Bitcoin ETF launched in let's say the bare Market when macro was still bad okay like maybe it wouldn't have a big effect the reason why I don't think we've topped or anywhere close to top is twofold here one macro just looks like it's really getting much better and so when interest rates go lower and we start printing more money like we're about to do there's no doubt in my mind we're going to go into a mega bull market again and I think that happens this year and next

year so I think we're just nowhere near that we've just made the turn out of the like that liquidity cycle and we've just peaked in terms of rates and so we're about to head lower so like there's just no way we don't go higher from here do we have a small correction whatever like I those can always happen so who cares but he's saying it's the Top Cycle which is just there's no way for that reason then number two is if you look at all the metrics retail and like newbies have just not come in yet and so what always happens in these Cycles is crypto natives people that get it in institutions come in first we get it back up to all-time highs and Beyond and then that's when all the other people the no coiners go oh what's this Bitcoin thing it's back let me learn about it

and they're like they come in like going to I heard bitcoin's going to go to the moon so I throw you know all my life savings in this thing somewhere near the top and then they end up getting wrecked and then they leave in the next bare market like they always do we're nowhere near that like not even close if you look at like the Google Trends of crypto Bitcoin Etc the numbers are tiny if we look at views on YouTube of like the big crypto influencers they're coming up they're starting to Escalade but it's still very small compared to where things were at last cycle so I think we're a long way off of the top of the cycle so I completely disagree here I'm going to have to second that I also disagree I think we're just getting started and things are going to be big

this year that's why right now we got a 33% discount on web3 Academy Pro and if you want to make sure that you're on top of this space You're Gonna Want to Go Pro because as we always say there is a diversified way to invest your portfolio there's also a lot to say on top of if you're a builder if you're active in the space if you want to job in the space if you want to participate if you're a doer all these things you need to go pro today it's 33% off right now to celebrate the Bitcoin ETF approval because we are fired up about this and we think this is the start of big things to come click the link in the show notes

Go Pro today Kai what an episode what a week holy gez how you do we have another one that has that much big news do you think or like this was pretty crazy crazy I guess maybe the ETF someday I don't know if that'll be bigger but let's see this feels like a milestone we'll look back on for for a long time everybody have a drink to celebrate I hope you celebrate with those around you or if no one around you is in crypto celebrating our Discord share a photo of yourself having a drink and celebrating because we love to see it have a great weekend everybody thank you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you

enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one