Is Crypto Still in a Bull Run? | RSA+DH

Is the crypto bull market over? The crypto sentiment has suddenly flipped bearish. The skeptics are saying that the ETH ETF will amount to nothing. Gox will dump on you. There are no new crypto use cases. There’s too much token supply. The bearish list goes on. So what gives? Is this just summertime slowness or is the bull market over? ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/21 ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🌐 TRANSPORTER | CROSS CHAINS WITH CONFIDENCE https://transporter.io/ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:15 Current Market Sentiment https://x.com/splitcapital/status/1805346083981201775 https://x.com/biancoresearch/status/1805341535967527200 https://x.com/SplitCapital/status/1805349168229367936 https://x.com/cryptobran_/status/1805331025905729983 https://x.com/mrjasonchoi/status/1804107651854594071 https://x.com/tmnxeq/status/1804913082571071679 12:49 ETH ETF is Bearish https://x.com/Rewkang/status/1804735595111211104 16:26 Gox will Dump on You https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1805168222645244311 https://x.com/RyanSAdams/status/1804138577204289900 19:20 No New Crypto Use Cases https://x.com/0xCygaar/status/1801667353207521364 https://x.com/divine_economy/status/1802510497633198565 https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/1800190273517211699 26:09 Any Bulls Left? https://x.com/econoar/status/1805447135141544280 https://x.com/milesdeutscher/status/1805249025643581761 https://x.com/fejau_inc/status/1805242741494005780 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1805244957252284916 https://x.com/intangiblecoins/status/1805244973261914582 https://x.com/pythianism/status/1805608579422208061 https://x.com/pythianism/status/1804987849059787113 https://x.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1804998114090389795 https://x.com/cburniske/status/1805308535611502763 https://imgur.com/DXcyjMS 43:27 Closing & Disclosures ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, question for you today on Bankless Takes, is the bull market over? David, I was scanning crypto Twitter, catching up on the weekend, and it certainly seemed like it by the sentiment.

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  Everyone's bearish.

• 0:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, why, when, why, why did crypto sentiment flip bearish? It was like, it was like four things. It was the ETH ETF will be nothing was a take, Gox, Mt. Gox is gonna dump on you. It was, there's no new crypto use cases this cycle, it's not like 2021, there's too much token supply.

• 0:30David Hoffman?

  No new retail.

• 0:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, no new retail.

• 0:33David Hoffman?

  Oh, and also, Germany's dumping on us, an entire country.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, what the heck? Come on, Germany, get with it. So I guess the question for today, is this just summertime slowness, or is the, the bull market over? Did we, did we hit all time highs?

• 0:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, was that it?

• 0:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, was that it?

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  I mean, so the last bull market, 2021, I think everyone said like ended really abruptly, and it kind of like prematurely. So like, are we getting that twice? Is that just like what crypto is? Maybe crypto's always just like, we're destined to be sub $5 trillion market cap, that's just what we are.

• 1:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's the topic for today, right? We want to gauge the sentiment, we want to talk about the bear case for a while, and then maybe, maybe the other side of that, maybe the bull case, and what we actually think towards the end of this. David, as we're going to this episode, prices were down, actually significantly, like a fair amount, but they kind of popped before this episode. So, no idea what prices will be by the time you are listening, but like, we got a little bit of a, should we call it a dead cap bounce? Can we call it that?

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  So Bitcoin dropped down below $60,000 to $59.5. We are currently almost back up to $62,000. Ether did something pretty similar. Ether's at $3,400. We've seen these prices recently, we've seen these prices, what was it, like before the ETH ETF was approved, Ether got down to $2,900, its bottom was $3,300. So like, we are at a higher low, but sentiment is at a lower low. Like sentiment is just like, you know what, I'm jumping.

• 2:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright guys, so that's the episode today. We're gonna give you the diagnosis here on what's going on in Bearville. Is the bull market over? And what do these things mean? The Mt. Gox news, if you haven't heard about that, we'll get into it. ETH, ETF flows, maybe they're not what people will hope. We'll get into all of these topics and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible, including Bear or Bull, the number one place to go-

• 2:33David Hoffman?

  To sell your ether.

• 2:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  No, no, dude!

• 2:36David Hoffman?

  Sell away, now buy your ether!

• 2:37Ryan Sean Adams?

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• 2:46David Hoffman?

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• 3:31David Hoffman?

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• 4:16David Hoffman?

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• 4:57David Hoffman?

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• 5:41David Hoffman?

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• 5:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, welcome to Bearville. So this is a tweet, I don't know when this was dated, the 24th, 2024. So that was, I guess, on, uh, Wednesday.

• 5:55David Hoffman?

  It's the day of recording, we're recording the 25th.

• 5:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Today marks the largest drawdown on Bitcoin in more than a year. We felt the knock-on effects of a slow bleed down from 70K, but really hard to put to words how strong today's selling was relative to the last few months. We got an 8% sell-off of Bitcoin, candle down.

• 6:14David Hoffman?

  In a one-day candle, that's a lot.

• 6:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, like, no wonder people are feeling bearish after this. What's going on here?

• 6:21David Hoffman?

  Well, there's a bunch of different things, all putting it together. I think the big news that we're going to talk about is the Mt. Gox distributions. That is kind of the new thing that's in the meta. And if you've been around in crypto before, you know that Mt. Gox always comes back. There's been this supply of Mt. Gox, of Bitcoins, that is perceived to be going to be sold by the market as soon as Mt. Gox creditors get their Bitcoins. Mt. Gox, the, of course, infamous crypto exchange that got hacked, 15% of the Bitcoins were recovered. And over the last like 11 years, creditors of Mt. Gox have been squabbling over like the distribution details.

• 6:59David Hoffman?

  And it seems to be like that those arguments, those debates have finally come to a head and they have finally determined a release date for the Mt. Gox coins. And this has created just the bearish, like the price action, perceived to be the reason behind the bearish price action. But I would call it like, it's not just Mt. Gox. It's just like Mt. Gox is like the next sucker punch out of just like a seemingly lack of ability to get some momentum. Like we, we crossed all time highs in Bitcoin and that was it. And then we went down below them. Like we haven't, we haven't had the bull market that we wanted. And so I think Mt. Gox is just like another sucker punch to the gut. And people are tired of just like, why am I getting punched? I thought I was getting a bull market.

• 7:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they're saying, uh, this wasn't the bull market we were promised and we hoped for. So what's going on here? And is, is that kind of the end? This is Jim Bianco commenting on that 8% down, like the largest Bitcoin candle down in a year. If this holds, it will be Bitcoin's worst day since March 2023. You know what happened in March 2023? Not only were we still kind of in the, in the bear market, it was the Silicon Valley Bank panic. Remember all that? That chaos? That's what precipitated it last time in 8% down. And like, I guess maybe Mt. Gox and other just bearish sentiment precipitated it this time. How about this? To give you an image of how much net delta was sold today across futures and spot Bitcoin, major exchanges on Bitcoin alone.

• 8:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  We sold more than 57,000 Bitcoin or 3.4 billion net.

• 8:34David Hoffman?

  That's how much, how much dollars was sold into the market? So implying that actually like, there's also that much buying. Uh, but like, yeah, so like 3.4 billion dollar, like what hit the market in a sell pressure.

• 8:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's a colorful chart. What are you showing here?

• 8:49David Hoffman?

  This is a chart of Bitcoin as well as like a bunch of, call them altcoins, just random altcoins like Litecoin, Cardano, Doge, XRP, YFI. And Bitcoin is down worse than all of them. Bitcoin in this chart is down like 2.3%, while most of these things are down like 1% or less. And this is uncharacteristic, where like Bitcoin is usually the safe haven. And as you go down the market cap stack, as things get more illiquid, they usually just get absolutely wrecked when Bitcoin goes down 2%. Like Bitcoin going down 2%, that means other things are going down 6% or greater. But this is kind of the inverse. And so like, what's up with these uncharacteristic like decrease in Bitcoin price? Usually not what happens.

• 9:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Also saw this tweet thread that kind of summed it up from Jason Choi. He says, he titles the whole thread, it's kind of a long one, "Welcome to Bear Town", I'm not going to read it all, but he goes through all of these different metrics that he's seeing that makes it feel kind of like crypto feel toppy, let's say. And I'll point at this one, a qualitative observation. He talks about large VC funds and kind of like LPs being more reluctant to kind of like invest. So LP capital in private crypto funds kind of drying up. And then he also says this, "Celebrity coins usually signal an increasingly frothy market. While these once hailed as crypto Twitter's heroes, they're now castigated as the scapegoat for the pains of the market. All reliable signs of late cycle.

• 10:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  The TLDR is the qualitative signals that he, Jason, observed in late 2021 have reared their heads in alternative forms today." It's been kind of a weird cycle for that too, right? Like, we already got the celebrity involvement, Iggy Azalea and like Andrew Tate, like launching their own coins.

• 10:32David Hoffman?

  Jason Derulo's here now.

• 10:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, really? And it's like, these tokens have pumped and then sold off. So Jason's saying, hey, there's these qualitative metrics too that make this feel a little toppy and like falling off the top, including celebrity involvement and celebrity endorsement.

• 10:50David Hoffman?

  There's another take I saw on my timeline that I thought was just like emblematic of the times, in quotes, "Crypto trading close to all-time high arguments are logically flawed as they lack timing and benchmark decisions." Yes, crypto is still trading below 2021 highs. That's a problem. It's a sign of weakness, not a strength. And so I think I've said this, maybe, maybe we have said this, it's just like, yo, Ether still below all-time highs, Bitcoin crossed all-time highs but fell back down below. Still plenty of upside left in this market. And this individual is giving the opposite side of the account. The SPY is massively at all-time highs. Many equities are at huge all-time highs and crypto is not. That is a sign of weakness, not strength.

• 11:32David Hoffman?

  And so just like another bearish take that has been circling around my feed these last weeks. And I'm kind of reminded of the episode we did with Chris Bernuski not too long ago, the last episode we did where bearish takes go viral when everyone is bearish. And of course, vice versa, bullish takes also go viral when the market is looking for bullishness. And bearish takes were going viral over the last like three days, four days.

• 11:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, sentiment is reflexive, but I do think there's something to this underlying tweet. It's like people are looking over at the S&P and the stock market and they're seeing all-time highs over there and they're looking at crypto and they're seeing like no all-time highs, nothing close. And so like, there's almost a question of like, what happened? Maybe this, the glass half-full interpretation of that is like, wow, this is a sign of weakness. Is there something structurally wrong with crypto? The reason we have all-time highs in the stock market, but we don't have them in crypto? It's like, one interpretation of this is, has the whole market liquidity pivoted to AI? Nvidia is sucking in all of these gains and it's smoking things, whereas crypto is stagnant and off all-time highs.

• 12:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that's kind of the sentiment right now that we're looking at. So I think we should dissect these one by one, kind of like the FUD, and then we'll talk about the bull case too. The ETH ETF will be nothing, Gox is going to dump on you, there's no new use cases in crypto, there's too much token supplies. Let's take some of these one by one. David, there was a thread that went somewhat viral on the impact of the Ethereum ETF, an analysis. So many folks had been saying, including our take, Bankless' take, is that Ethereum ETF is going to be absolutely massive.

• 13:12David Hoffman?

  Right. Grouphy is going to love the ETH ETF.

• 13:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yes, and not necessarily immediately, but like inflows will steadily like come in and we'll get like, you know, 20% of the inflows or so of the Bitcoin ETF and maybe that's a conservative estimate and those flows will be good for Ethereum because there's not very much ETH supply on the market. This take, this analysis from Andrew Kang does the exact opposite. So his analysis is that the ETH ETFs will be basically nothing. What's some of the summary of like Andrew's take on this?

• 13:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah, he says, "Personally, I believe the expectations of crypto natives are overinflated and disconnected from the true preferences of TradFi allocators." So I think that's kind of the main punchline here is that the true preferences of TradFi allocators is actually just not on the radar of crypto natives. We just like aren't tuned to what they actually want. And he goes in and says some of the things that we actually have frequently said about Ether and why TradFi might like it, like Ether is a cash flowing asset. It does a buyback and burn. Like you can model this out. You can put it in DCF. This is something that TradFi can reason about. It's a tech asset. But then Andrew Kang goes into some of the Etho metrics with, you know, $1.5 billion 30-day annualized revenue gives Ethereum

• 14:30David Hoffman?

  Ether a 300x price to sales ratio, which is like very expensive, with negative earnings to PE ratio after inflation. He says that how like if it's a tech asset, these metrics are dog shit. It's a dog shit tech asset in the grand scheme of things. And then he also goes to say that like, well, we got net Bitcoin inflows at around $5 billion, $5 billion of buy pressure. There's $15 billion of net inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, but some of that is doing a bunch of delta neutral stuff. So some of that Bitcoin ETF inflows is also selling on some different exchange. So net inflows are $5 billion. That's Andrew Kang's math. And then he thinks when you, you know, do the how the correlation with how much is

• 15:15David Hoffman?

  going to go into Ether, he's thinking 0.5 to 1.5 billion, which is a much lower number. That's not a, that's not a very high number at all.

• 15:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  He says this in conclusion before the ETF launch. I expect ETH to trade from 3K to 3,800. So that's within range of where we are now. After the ETF launch, my expectation is 2,400 to 300. So David, a price point lower than we are now, after the Ethereum ETF products go live, right? It's like, I think a lot of the, the bull case would be like, obviously new inflows were going to go up. And he's saying, we go down because the inflows will actually disappoint crypto investors and the market in total. He also, in another tweet, like on the back of this, compared Ethereum charts and ETH Bitcoin ratio to Intel. Actually, he shows like kind of Intel, sorry, hit an all time high and then just like never fully recovered

• 16:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  in terms of all time highs against some sort of indices. And the question is, has Ethereum lost its steam too? Will the ETH ETF flows disappoint? Anyway, we gotta get, we gotta get the, the bear cases out before we get to the, the bull case. But that, that is the bear case on the ETH ETF. Can we talk about Mt. Gox again?

• 16:28David Hoffman?

  Mt. Gox?

• 16:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right.

• 16:29David Hoffman?

  How many times have we talked about Mt. Gox in this podcast?

• 16:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, Mt. Gox, this was actually breaking news. After, how many years has it been, David?

• 16:37David Hoffman?

  11?

• 16:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like 11 years?

• 16:39David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 16:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is the, is the Mt. Gox, is all of that supply finally going to become unleashed on the market? What are we looking at here?

• 16:46David Hoffman?

  Not all of it, but yes, we actually are getting a date that is going to be July, early July is what they said, which is, you know, that's like two weeks. So the rumor is that $9 billion of Bitcoin is going to become available and distributed to creditors of Mt. Gox. It is perceived by the market, the classic like Mt. Gox FUD is that, well, these creditors have had their capital locked up in these like Mt. Gox distribution court cases for 11 years. And Bitcoin has, you know, what's, what's 11 years of big price action? It's like really, really good.

• 17:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  A lot.

• 17:19David Hoffman?

  It's a lot. And so they would, they're going to sell. Clearly they're going to sell. They're like forced holders for 11 years. They're going, that's, that's going to be selling pressure. And so it's been perceived by the market that when these Mt. Gox coins finally get put into the hands of their owners, per the distribution of the courts, then all of those people are going to sell. And that's why like this Mt. Gox FUD has been like overhanging the market as long as I've been in crypto.

• 17:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:43David Hoffman?

  In 2017, I, it's just been this like meme that has just been passed down through the generations.

• 17:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's like one of those like China's banning crypto type recurring like cycles. Uh, Mt. Gox like supply is going to become, uh, released, but this time it actually looks like it's gonna be true. And we're talking about a substantial amount of Bitcoin, $9 billion worth of Bitcoin.

• 18:02David Hoffman?

  Remember earlier in this podcast, we just talked about how $3.4 billion was net sold on Monday. That was the big red candle day.

• 18:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 18:09David Hoffman?

  And so the market is like, we got nine more billion to get sold.

• 18:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. So maybe like, obviously part of the, the Monday price jump was, uh, your price drop was front running some of that activity. But like, we actually haven't seen the pressure. So when is that happening? Did, am I reading July?

• 18:26David Hoffman?

  Early July, yeah.

• 18:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  And does it all come in a lump sum? All nine billion is available right away?

• 18:31David Hoffman?

  No, we'll talk about that, but does the market know that? I'm not so sure.

• 18:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Interesting. And to add insult to injury, David, do you know that Germany, the country of Germany is actually dumping on us?

• 18:42David Hoffman?

  Where did, where did big Germany get Bitcoin?

• 18:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, they, they got it in a seizure. So there was, I don't know, it was like, uh, I'm just not the pirate bay, but it's some sort of, you know, like, yeah, a black market, gray market type of thing.

• 18:55David Hoffman?

  Intelligence seizure of crypto.

• 18:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, German government sees $3 billion worth of Bitcoin. They've started to sell and they're continuing to sell. You can see their transactions on chain. Yeah. So.

• 19:06David Hoffman?

  The entire country of Germany.

• 19:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Arkham is, uh, doing this. So yeah, they're paper handing. I don't know. Maybe they have to by law. Uh, it feels like maybe like they should kinda, they're gonna regret that in 10 years.

• 19:16David Hoffman?

  They should change that.

• 19:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Anyway, they're dumping on us too. It's not just Mt. Gox. Uh, and that's not all. The FUD, the FUD kind of continues. So how about this, uh, we have no new use cases in crypto take, like the best we can do are these, uh, cheap celebrity meme coins. We've got nothing new. What's, uh, what take are we looking at here?

• 19:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this is, uh, Saagar, uh, who I wouldn't say that this take is, uh, this, well, this take is actually old. This is June 14th. So like a little bit over a week ago, but it's a take that has been like brewing. And a lot of the recent, like I'm saying, a lot of the recent sucker punches that we've got just recently, the, the Mt. Gox, the Germany selling, all this kind of stuff. Is like layering on like this previously like nihilist sentiment about the currency. Data crypto.

• 19:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 19:59David Hoffman?

  And so all of these like current events that's happening this week just feel way worse because we have these like there's no new use cases for crypto this cycle. So Cygar, he tweets out 2017, we had ICOs, 2020, we had DeFi summer, 2021, we had NFTs, 2024, what the hell do we have? He says, the real mania begins when a new paradigm comes around and brings in new entrants to crypto. My guess, the innovation this time around will involve around consumer friendly apps that are unlocked by better tooling. But where is the apps? Where are the apps? And so we have these ideas about where the apps are, but like right now we have celebrity meme coins. And Jason Derulo is coming back to launch his like fourth or fifth like rug that he's been in crypto.

• 20:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, he's done this before?

• 20:43David Hoffman?

  He's done this like four times before.

• 20:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Jason Derulo?

• 20:45David Hoffman?

  Zach XPT is like in his mentions and his replies, like every tweet saying like, just FYI, this guy's a scammer. He actually got community noted by the Twitter app, saying like, hey, by the way, this guy has done this before. He's, this is like his fourth time, like, don't buy his bullshit. Uh, and so like, no, you don't get to put like celebrity meme coins as like the, the mania that is bringing people in in 2024.

• 21:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Am I right that he usually does this like near cycle tops too? It's like when things get fraught.

• 21:10David Hoffman?

  He doesn't do it in bear markets, that's for sure.

• 21:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, he doesn't do it in bear markets. Uh, this is a David Phillips take, which is related. This has to be the strangest era in crypto I can remember. The tech is finally ready to be used at scale, but almost nothing useful is being built. This is nearly the exact opposite of how it was in 2017, 2021. 2017, we just discovered programmable money and smart contracts and some early use cases like ICOs as a result of that. That was a magical time. 2021, it was the world waking up to DeFi. And what do we have this time, David?

• 21:40David Hoffman?

  That's a good question. What do we have this time?

• 21:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 21:43David Hoffman?

  We don't have.

• 21:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why.

• 21:44David Hoffman?

  All the apps that I'm using are the apps that I've been using.

• 21:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's why it's a weird market cycle. Um, this is Miles making the case that, uh, you're like crypto media is suffering as well. Crypto YouTube views are disproportionately lagging the Bitcoin price. I don't know if these are his YouTube views. Oh, it's a whole bunch of.

• 22:01David Hoffman?

  So even we're in there, I thought that that's what kind of why I included in this. So like, this is just all crypto, like YouTube views. So like, we're on there, altcoin daily. is here, BitBoy Crypto is there, just like Data Dash, a bunch of just like YouTuber, crypto YouTubers. And the Bitcoin price is up epic, at all time highs, but just like views on YouTube have not, have not followed. Like, we had our, like, Mark Cuban interview in the middle of 2021 that got, like, literally 1 million views. And we don't, we don't have anything like that this cycle. Like, the people searching crypto terms on YouTube just aren't the same as it was in 2021.

• 22:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, again, it's retail, it's not here. We don't have any tweets on this, but we could add to the, like, there's, there's a feeling of too much supply. The, the number of tokens out there are at all time highs. There's a lot of VC unlocks that have been coming, and people are like, you know, people are getting sick of the airdrop meta, people are getting sick of the, you know, high, low float, high FTV.

• 22:56David Hoffman?

  WorldCoin is getting its first unlock in, like, four weeks coming up soon, so like, that's gonna be fun to watch. Like, if you're a WorldCoin investor, like, you're selling, that's, that's what you're doing. You're up a bajillion X.

• 23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, I don't, I don't know what it is now, but I remember seeing, like, a, a close to $100 billion market cap for this thing, at least from, sorry, not market cap, fully diluted valuation, at least, which is absolutely crazy. All right, so, that's the bear case. I feel like we've established that enough. David, give me some hope, man. Where's the hope coming from?

• 23:27David Hoffman?

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• 24:11David Hoffman?

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• 24:54David Hoffman?

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• 25:37David Hoffman?

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• 26:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, I asked for hope you give me a commercial. What's going on here, man?

• 26:11David Hoffman?

  Well, the views are down, man. The views are down.

• 26:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's some hope, maybe, from Eric.Eth. Once crypto Twitter is bearish, you're too late. Rest in peace.

• 26:24David Hoffman?

  This is something that I definitely learned pretty like early in my, well, late in my first cycle, but like relatively early in my crypto career is like if everyone around you is bearish, that's because the price, the bearish price action has already happened.

• 26:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 26:38David Hoffman?

  If everyone is around you is bearish, like you can't sell, but you can't sell on that bearish. You can sell for whatever reason. You can sell whatever you want, but you can't sell because like, oh, everyone's bearish. Now I'm gonna sell. Everyone's bearish because the price went down. And so like, and being bearish is like bearishness being priced in. And so like, you are not like, oh, everyone around me is bearish, maybe I should sell. I don't think that's like a valid, valid statement. And so this is why you always have like the line of be greedy when everyone's fearful and be fearful when everyone's greedy. Right now, everyone's fearful. Everyone's scared right now. Everyone's in dire straits.

• 27:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. By the way, on this, because it's bearish, you gotta focus on the bearish, but the inverse is also true. It's like, once crypto Twitter gets really bullish, you better think about your sell plan. Like in particular, start executing on that.

• 27:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I did. I think I remember talking about this take, and I generally agree when there's retail here, but I think all of crypto Twitter was extremely bullish, like the end of 2020.

• 27:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm talking, I'm talking drunk, stupid, exuberant, like super cycle, that type of bullish.

• 27:44David Hoffman?

  We hadn't, we hadn't uttered the word super cycle.

• 27:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. I'm talking about that level of bullishness, not the kind that we see, which was like relatively tame bullishness. But anyway, so, so Eric says like, you know, once people are already bearish, it's, it's, it's too late. And there's like, don't do anything, basically.

• 28:02David Hoffman?

  Sell when everyone's bullish. A tweet from Miles here, who says, it's equally as easy to make a bull case too. And this is in response to Andrew King, who listed like all the reasons to be bearish. So Michael just responds, it's easy, it's also easy to be bullish. We have the election in November, which people think is gonna A, put eyes on crypto and just B, Donald Trump's gonna be the pro crypto president. That's, that's, he's gonna put attention around it. Shift in regular story stance towards crypto, that's definitely true. ETH ETF imminent, equities rotate their profits into crypto. And also, the market's oversold, the sentiment is max bearish. And so, basically saying like, hey, bearish takes go viral when everyone's feeling bearish. But that doesn't mean bullish takes aren't valid. And so, he just lists off a bunch of, in my opinion, valid bullish takes.

• 28:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  The glass is half full, you can look at it from the opposite perspective as well. Let's get into some details, though, on some of these actual bear cases. Let's start with maybe Mount Gox. When you get into the details, I'm not sure how bearish it actually is. What's this tweet?

• 29:01David Hoffman?

  So, this is the take that insiders who knew that this Mount Gox disbursement announcement was coming, front ran that announcement because we know that Gox disbursement FUD has moved the markets, frequently moved the markets in the past. And so, the real one, which this is the one we got, we got the actual real one of like, the tokens are coming, the Bitcoins are getting distributed. Insiders front ran that by just selling the Bitcoins, which made the price go down. And then, the announcement was made, which means that this was already priced in. Kind of another side to the same coin of Eric Connor's take of like, if everyone's bearish, then it's too late. And then, he continues to say, after, "In my opinion", this probably means the nuke on the announcement was the final pricing in. "I continue to view the macro front as quite bullish, so I've been confused about crypto's weakness lately.

• 29:44David Hoffman?

  This all makes sense now because of the announcement. Based on all of this view as the final pricing in, it's time to deploy a bit of cash today and go profit."

• 29:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  I like how he said "deploy", David. Yeah, so he's basically saying, the market's reaction to this, all already happened. When you saw that 8% drop on Bitcoin, that was the candle down that like just now priced all of that selling in. And it's like, we don't have to worry about it from here on out.

• 30:11David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Alex Thorne, who works at Galaxy, who understands how these markets work, they do just, they do a bunch of market analysis, market structure stuff. He says that it's, there's a chance that people are overshooting the bearishness. He says creditors have been stuck in Mount Gox bankruptcy for 10-plus years. Finally, trustee says in-kind distribution of Bitcoin will begin in July. "We think, we as Galaxy, we'll think that fewer coins will be distributed than people think, and it will cause less Bitcoin sell pressure than the market expects. Here's why." And then, basically, he goes through a bunch of analysis that says, "The real number of distributed Bitcoin is 65,000 Bitcoins, not the 142,000 that's frequently reported, which means that $4 billion is distributed, not $8 billion also."

• 30:54David Hoffman?

  The people that are being distributed the Bitcoins aren't necessarily like these long-term holders because you can sell your claims on Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox claims have been like-

• 31:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Was already super liquid?

• 31:06David Hoffman?

  A decently liquid market since this like for many, many times. And so people have bought claims and the people that have bought claims are like hedge funds, people that are trying to buy Bitcoin at a discount, like long-term holders. And so a lot of that sell pressure has actually already been expressed in the private markets. And so of the Bitcoins that are actually going to go to these like long-term holders, the people that have been identified as like, "I'm a long-term holder of these Mt. Gox claims," are by definition long-term holders. That's what they had the option to leave.

• 31:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 31:34David Hoffman?

  And so they could have left.

• 31:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alex brought the full analysis here. And I gotta say, a plus one for Alex, like, he was dead on right. Do you remember we had him on the podcast? We were talking about the Bitcoin ETF and kind of like flows and the analysis there? And he nailed that. Like, he totally killed it. Yeah. So, you know, in this type of case, like, he might be more informed than than the general market about this. You know, like, one other tidbit, David, is not just the Bitcoin that unlocks from Mt. Gox, it's all the Bitcoin cash.

• 31:59David Hoffman?

  Okay. That is bearish. That part is very bearish.

• 32:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's very bearish for Bitcoin cash. Bitcoin cash is going to zero. Oh, my God. Imagine all of that liquidity of Bitcoin cash, like-

• 32:08David Hoffman?

  All that, the infinacy of liquidity for Bitcoin cash.

• 32:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's gonna be a race to hit the sell button on that one. So, maybe don't be in Bitcoin cash would be some advice that holds. Okay, how about the ETH ETF FUD? Does that hold?

• 32:24David Hoffman?

  Perhaps. I mean, we're not gonna know until after the fact, but there's plenty of reasons to be bullish in addition to like the perceived bearishness that people are giving takes of. I mean, the real question is, like, does the ETH ETF attract a meaningful amount of capital? That's always been the question. Some people are saying it's not going to, some people are saying it is going to. Now, just the loudness of the bears are-

• 32:47David Hoffman?

  Are getting louder because this is bearish time. Bearish takes go viral during bear times. However, this is another tweet from Zaheer. ETH CME open interest in ETH terms has officially hit an all time high. And so this is the CME open interest for Ether Futures. Because you don't have the actual ETF. But the Ether Futures is at all time high interest. And that just means like buying pressure, basically. And so, well, I mean, that's a pretty clear sentiment of just like demand. Maybe there's some trading going on here. Maybe they're going to try and do some arbitrage. But just like, you can't say it's bearish if futures interest is at all time.

• 33:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  That's very, very TradFi. I mean, it's the freaking CME, right? So open interest all time high is kind of bullish.

• 33:29David Hoffman?

  Additionally, ETH's supply on centralized exchanges are at all time lows. This is also, I think a lot of people are missed the fact that like, this is also because exchanges are staking the ETH. So there is supply on exchanges, but they have put it away. The supply is off the order books, but Ether is being staked by exchanges. And so that's why this like, this ETH supply on exchanges at all time low. I don't know how much signal there is in that. But nonetheless, like, it's not on the order books.

• 33:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's crazy all time low, too. I guess staking explains a portion of this, but probably not all of it, right?

• 34:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely not all of it.

• 34:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Here's a retort from DC Investor, which is like, kind of like, striking the balance here. He says a few things. Yeah, some people are saying, by the way, that Ethereum ETF getting launched in the summers, like, max bearish, because, you know, TradFi sell in May and then go away. Everyone's on summer vacations. DC is like, yeah, it probably would have been more bullish if they launched in fall rather than the summer. But it's better early than never. At least we have it. And so what if it starts out a little bit slow? It can kind of like catch up. He also says, I don't expect fireworks out of the gate. And there could be some initial sell the news, just like with Bitcoin. But it's more about the slow type melt up. So even if we don't see fireworks out of the gate, it's like, all of the inflows getting tracked on a weekly basis.

• 34:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  You see these ETFs that are like 25% ETH and 75% Bitcoin. Those will start like moving into TradFi circles. And also, he said, you know, the comment we were reading earlier from Andrew Kang about ETH being sort of a cash flow asset? DC says, "That's just the cherry on top. I don't think Wall Street will analyze ETH on a cash flow basis as this is not the value prop of ETH." Instead, he says ETH will be pitched as a tech platform with financial and other apps built on top of it, right? So it's not necessarily about PE. Certainly Bitcoin is not being rated on a PE ratio perspective. And so TradFi will take a broader take on the whole asset class. So that's a take that maybe balances the difference between the bear and the bull and I think is, you know, pretty rational.

• 35:32David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 35:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Alright, so we talked about Gox, we talked about the ETH ETF. What about this, "Hey, there's no new use cases" thing? And I mean, there's truth to that. We haven't seen any breakout use cases this cycle. Do you have a silver lining on that, David?

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  Not like a global silver lining for the entire market, but I will say Polymarket, the prediction market platform, they have open interest in all-time highs in like activity. So like, I don't know if they measure it in TVL, but just like the most amount of like gambling bets, money being placed on Polymarket bets is at all-time highs. And so that's pretty cool. Like, it's great to actually have like prediction market like taking off in a very big way. So that's, we got one, we got one.

• 36:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I'll actually plus one that because like, you know, prediction markets were an old use case for crypto. And I think like, we don't need new use cases because the old use cases were pretty damn awesome.

• 36:24David Hoffman?

  Ideas in crypto. Let's just dig some up from the grave.

• 36:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly. Like, DeFi hasn't been fully realized. Uniswap is now doing trillions in value. Stablecoins are just continuing to rise. That's going to be transformational on its own. When you look at some of the DeFi blue chips like Maker and Aave collateralized lending, that's all at all-time highs in terms of profit as well.

• 36:43David Hoffman?

  Revenues are at all-time highs in like a very big way.

• 36:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so the old use cases, I'm actually more bullish on than some like net new thing that we haven't discovered. Let's just finish up the old use cases because like, we're talking about a global financial system for the world. That's, that's huge. That's absolutely massive. And we haven't been able to realize that because we've needed better onboarding, we've needed better UX. And now we have cheap block space, we have easy wallet. wallets are kind of getting there. We have exchanges in the game like base is going to onboard so many people from crypto exchanges on chain for the first time. We have TradFi liquidity getting to stablecoins on chain treasuries. Blackrock is on chain right now. We have a solve for fragmentation, I think Vitalik put a tweet out and he's just like, we don't need full synchronous composability.

• 37:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  The internet runs on asynchronous composability. What we kind of need is some adoption of UX standards, basically, right? And he goes through a few short-term gains and how we can get there. So the building blocks are in place for user experience. And I feel like we are closer than ever to tying all of that together to realizing the old use cases. We don't need new use cases. Crypto is a use case in itself.

• 37:55David Hoffman?

  We will definitely take some new use cases.

• 37:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Take what we can get at this time.

• 37:58David Hoffman?

  I will say just like a lot of the conversations that you and I have on the show and especially when we talk about market stuff that like we do. Is like the market, the crypto market is so short-term. It is so short-term focused.

• 38:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:12David Hoffman?

  We think of things maybe 10 days in advance. Some drama will happen and we will forget about it like a week later. And I think you and me, like we are just long-term people. We've been here for, I got you out in 2016, I got in 2017. We've the whole content editorial policy of Bankless is like thinking long-term, long timeframes. So like, we don't really do well in like short-term markets because like, why, why would you care about the short-term? Just like, just let things cook.

• 38:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, let it cook.

• 38:40David Hoffman?

  So many things that I just want to let things cook. Coinbase fixing like the, leading the charge on like fixing UX with like the base and the integrated wallet. And then getting base up to a gigas and like onboarding a bunch of people. Circle's marketing campaigns, Bitwise's marketing campaigns, Coinbase's ads, these are all like phenomenal like marketing campaigns for the industry. Stablecoin growth just slowly grinding up. Revenue and yield of DeFi apps have, like I said, has been up. Blackrock tokenizing Biddle and like they're not stopping there. Like all like Larry Fink is bullish on tokenization. Just like a lot of things, you just need to let cook.

• 39:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Give it a minute. Give it a minute, guys.

• 39:22David Hoffman?

  The Bitcoin ETF, which has like a pause and flows, that includes the ETH ETF. Once we get it, like everything just needs to cook. But like, time is on our side with all of these things. And I think like with the Bitcoin price hitting all time highs, but not discovering price action. Ether's not there. It's just like, just let things go. Just let things go.

• 39:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I totally agree. And if this is your first cycle or your second cycle and you're kind of like panicking, this is, is this, asking yourself, is this the end of the bull market? Just realize, everyone always asks themselves this question in the midst of a bull market. Like, it happens every single time.

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  And also, this bull market has been just so mellow and not crazy.

• 39:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  It has been.

• 40:00David Hoffman?

  The only place that's been crazy is in like illiquid Solana meme coins. But like, that's not, it's not like, the whole entire market has not been crazy. So like, my mind is like, is the bear market, bull market over? I'm like, it kind of hasn't started.

• 40:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  We have not started.

• 40:15David Hoffman?

  We've just been slowly cooking this entire time.

• 40:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is Chris Sperninsky. He's retweeting something he tweeted in the depths of the bear market. November 12th, 2022. November 12th, 2022, right after FTX. He says, bullish from near the bottom. Hope to see y'all at 10 trillion. He's talking about the total market cap of crypto. We're at about 2 trillion, 2.3 trillion, 2.5 trillion, something like that. He thinks we'll go to 10 trillion. And he says this, he reposts that and he said, unwaveringly, 10 trillion remains the target. We're still on target. Like, that is like around the estimates of what we've been talking about as well. In fact, I think that might be the base case estimate, sort of a conservative estimate. But he thinks we're still on target too.

• 40:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, on target for 10 trillion stablecoins.

• 41:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  David, should we end with some charts here? What's this? I feel like this could still be in the.

• 41:07David Hoffman?

  This is two charts that I pulled out from my trader friend who does this way better than I. And he posted these charts on June 22nd, 21st, 22nd, right before the crash. And he goes, I feel like this could still be in the cards. And he is showing the Bitcoin price falling down to literally exactly where it fell. 59,000. And same thing with the ETH price, both the Bitcoin and the ETH price falling down to exactly where they fell and then bouncing back up. So I'm just kind of shouting out him that he kind of called that. For the next part, for him to be right, we have to go up. But there are traders, there are traders out there who are saying like, yeah, first we're gonna go down, and then we're gonna go up. And we've actually just did the down part.

• 41:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah.

• 41:48David Hoffman?

  Hopefully, we do the up part.

• 41:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  So that was the hard part. But like, before up, we could be like in stasis for a while. We could be back to no man's land. We could be in like, what we call the crab market.

• 41:57David Hoffman?

  We've been in the crab market since like, what, March?

• 42:00Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, and I'm totally fine with a slow summer. And maybe we could kind of like summarize and close this out, right? My, my take here, David, is the, the crypto gods have blessed us yet again. We get another mid bull cycle accumulation opportunity this summer. And like, obviously, you have to buy with a long term in mind. So think in years, not months, when you're buying crypto asset. And if it's not worth holding for the long term, like, don't buy it. And if you're scared, dollar cost average in. And if you're terrified, buy more, lump sum, right? But be prepared to wait. This could take a while. Be prepared to wait years, right? So that you can like, every single month, not be like, oh, is price going up yet? Is price going up yet?

• 42:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  And overall, I would say, just like, for as long as I've been in crypto, I'm the least worried that I've ever been about my positions and about this bull market. It feels pretty secure, like, building more than ever. We've solved some fundamental problems. We've got regulatory tailwinds that are starting to like, move in our direction.

• 43:02David Hoffman?

  Things that actually matter, yeah.

• 43:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, the biggest risk, I think, is being off sides and getting shaken out by these markets, right? And so like, not, people lose more money in crypto by actually not having exposure to crypto, right? Or selling at the wrong times. And you also, I would not want to be offside in this market either.

• 43:20David Hoffman?

  But that's what we always say, so.

• 43:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is what we always say, and I'll end with something else we always say. Of course, you know, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier, not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 43:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hope to see you all at 10. Sorry for Murphy. Hold on, it's his birthday, but he's being an ass.