Crypto Banter: Crypto is About to GO BANANAS!

27:05It will confuse people from time to time. But over time, if they can bring more people into space, let's say Bitcoin is on its way to 100 ,000, people are just going to look at the smaller price denominator of ETH and say, I'm just going to buy some of that. You know, people are kind of dumb in that respect. They just look at the, oh, ETH is cheaper, so I'll buy more of it. You say dumb, but I remember when I was trading, when I first started trading, I started trading on Coinbase. And there was only Bitcoin and ETH. So Bitcoin's price was like between$500 and$1 ,000. And ETH was between$2 and$20.

27:40And I kind of remember when on days where the Bitcoin price ran up too much, I used to like, well, should I just buy this ETH thing? I had no idea what ETH did or how it worked. I just bought it because I just thought, shit, I missed the Bitcoin run. I just, yeah, and I missed the Bitcoin run. That will play out. That will play out for sure. How do you see Wall Street seeing ETH? Like, I mean, like it's clear that Bitcoin is a store of value and they're seeing Bitcoin as a digital gold and a store of value. I'm not sure that they see Bitcoin as a technology, even though it's a store of value technology.

28:12I don't think they price it like an exponential technology. Wall Street are very familiar with pricing exponential technologies. They know how to price Facebook. They know how to price Amazon. They know how to price Google. They're experts in pricing network technologies. Do you think that there's a difference between the way they're going to see ETH and see Bitcoin? Well, outside of the ETF, the ETF just gives them the cover to use ETH as their foundational layer for the stuff that they want to do. Because Goldman Sachs is not going to be using the ETH ETF. It wants to use ETH, as does JP Morgan's and everybody else, to tokenize assets and do other stuff.

28:49But what is super interesting to Wall Street is yield. Yield allows you to build products. You can do all sorts of things with yield. You can take the ETH yield and buy call options to give you upside or guaranteed products. You can create structured products. You can do lots of things. So I think that they've always been interested in ETH. And I've said this for a long time, is the ETH yield is the big game in town. not because it's high yield, but you can do lots of financial engineering once you've got yield. They also all want to build on the technology, whether it's on a layer two or an ETH itself.

29:30But this is where they're going to start tokenizing a lot of assets. You know, nobody gets fired for using Ethereum. So, you know, that's a choice. And most of these people have been building. Most of the banks have been building in this space and had teams since 2015, 16, 17. So if you think of the technology they've been using, it's generally ETH. So they understand ETH. ETH is the big one. You don't get fired for it. Your board's not going to tell you off. Why did you use some random thing? But we've now got the flexibility of the layer twos, which makes it cheaper and easier, depending what level of security they need.

30:08So look, I think it's a very, very big deal for the financial markets, much bigger than it is for retail. Do you think the ETH ETF has another risk because they said that specifically you can't have staking? So the institutions effectively start off with a negative yield because they give up on the staking yield. So do you think that that's, you know, you mentioned that for Wall Street, it's all about yield. They are starting here at what I don't know what the right word is, a yield disadvantage, a yield deficit.

30:43What you're referring to Wall Street is not Wall Street. What you're talking about is financial advisors. Okay. So those guys, yes, it would be nice if they had a yield on the product as well. But, you know, many, many financial products over the years as ETFs haven't given the stock borrow fees or the dividends. And, you know, then they get forced into it by a free market where a competitor comes in and offers it. So I think it's fairly common that you see this kind of thing. Wall Street itself will actually deal with ETH itself. The RAAs and stuff, right now, nobody cares about a 5 % yield if you're an RAA, if the number go up 100 % in the year.

31:27So it doesn't really matter, but competition will force it, and they'll force the regulators to allow it. They're just not going to do it yet. Okay. Now, when I look at the ETH BTC chart, I know you've been following this ETH BTC chart for a long time. Thesis for ETH BTC. And let me just paint a picture for you here. Up until probably two weeks ago, any institution that wanted to allocate or any RAA that wanted to allocate any money into crypto had one option. Fans probably said, OK, look, we're putting 2 % of our money into crypto. The only option was Bitcoin. Therefore, we're going to put 2 % of our money into Bitcoin.

32:04So then to Michael Saylor's huge surprise and probably huge disappointment. In fact, I have to play this quick video just to show you. I watched it. I thought it was quite, you know, he's always said there is no second best. They will never, ever, ever approve an ETH ETF because they're all securities. And then. And, you know, so here's what I think. I think two weeks before, the world looked like Bitcoin was going to be the only asset securitized and offered as a spot ETF by the Wall Street establishment, and it was going to spread as the one legitimate crypto asset. I think right now, the best expectation is the crypto asset class will be legitimized, supported by both parties.

32:54There's an industry. Crypto is an asset class. There's an entire range of use cases, 24-7 digital trading, digital art, NFTs, tokens, decentralized this, functionality, DeFi. There's a lot of things that will be considered in a more open light. And Bitcoin will be the leader of the crypto asset class. And if you look at it and say, well, is this - So he says, OK, so he went from being the only to actually being the leader. Now, I mean, he said it that way. He came onto my podcast in 2022 and basically just told me, Raoul, ETH is a security. This is all securities. People are going to go to prison for this.

33:45It's never going to happen. He rallied around the cult of the laser-eyed Maxis and told them there can only be one God. God. And here he is coming on saying complete change of tune is, well, there are many gods, but one God is going to be a bit larger than your God. It is a staggering change in narrative that's come out of him. And it's good to see because it was unhealthy and toxic what the narrative was coming out of the kind of Bitcoin hard believers. Bitcoin has its role. It's always role. So, okay. So question, how do you see this ETH BTC chart and how much do you think Bitcoin will lose to the ETH ETF?

34:29Because again, I think that it was quite novel that 2 % of portfolios, we're going to be allocated into crypto, but now it's two cryptos. There's not one crypto anymore. So how do you see the ETH BTC chart playing out? Well, I think it goes to the new all-time highs. Wow. Okay. That's big. Yeah. It's a big move. That's what I think happened. That's what I think it's up for grabs here. You know, I've been following this chart for a long time. It has been, you know, we now come into the season where this tends to outperform. It's usually when the ISM is picking up, the altcoin season starts, the liquidity season starts, the banana zone tends to be the period when ETH outperforms.

35:09So we're in that zone. It really picks up next year, but starts this year. If you go back to 2020, ETH started basing and then started outperforming from about the summer onwards and really started picking up towards the end of 2020. And then by 2021, it went ETH-tastic. You know, it went into full banana zone. I think we'll see something similar. You know, I also think ETH will underperform Sol. People get confused when he shows up. I want to go there. You don't like Sol anymore. It's like, no, I think Sol outperforms this. but I think ETH outperforms Bitcoin and I think it's healthy for the space because it shows a deepening and broadening of the overall space, which is what we want.

35:50So I put a trade down this week or last week. I don't know if I'm an idiot for doing it. I went short Bitcoin long ETH. So I guess I'm pretty much funding neutral. I guess I'm pretty much market neutral. I'm only betting on the gap to close between Bitcoin and ETH. Good trade, bad trade? Good trade. I mean, I put that trade idea out on the Real Vision platform two, three weeks ago. just before the ETF announcement, I think it's a good trade. Guys, this is why you should be watching Real Vision. I'm going to leave a link below because you would have got that information two or three weeks before I acted.

36:20So, I mean, you see, I've got a lot of catching up to do. I've got a lot of catching up to do before I'm as good as the master here. The other thing people should do is, you know, my YouTube channel, The Journeyman. There's a lot of really good stuff. I'm going to leave a link to it, but I want you to just tell us a little bit about the journeyman while we have before before we start talking about journeyman is my journey to that kind of nexus of macro crypto in the exponential age of technology and i interview amazing people but that interview see that one everything code master class i've literally put my heart and soul of 30 years of information and given it to people holy two and a half hours of everything you possibly need to know about how this all works guys go and check it out If you then go to the Real Vision platform, which is free at realvision.com, you can download the entire PDF document with all of the charts.

37:16There's 130 pages of charts. Holy shit. So watch that video. I can't express how important it is. Amazing. So guys, there's a link below. There is a link below. Just go and click that link and then you guys can watch it. Also subscribe. I just subscribed. If I did, I would have taken my short Bitcoin long ETH trade two weeks before I did. Maybe I would have been a whole lot richer. Okay. Let's talk about the next one. So you spoke about, we spoke about ETH BTC. Let's talk about Sol ETH. And the reason why I'm using Sol ETH up until now, Solana has greatly, greatly, greatly outperformed ETH in this cycle.

37:49I want to quickly just call up a chart first so people can have a look at it. But that is the chart. That's the Sol ETH chart. You can see that specifically since January, this thing has gone like a rocket. Obviously, since the ETF was approved, we've got a slight correction. How do you see this chart playing out? because you're getting a lot of use on Solana right now. I mean, you're getting the meme coin mania, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes. Crazy usage on Solana. Phantom Wallet beating big apps like Telegram, Snapchat, in terms of adoption and usage. You're getting celebrities launching meme coins every second day.

38:26But I mean, you laugh. We're going to talk about that, but you laugh. But I was watching the app downloads on Phantom relative to the celebrities coming in to Solana. And there is a huge spike in downloads when Caitlyn Jenner launched a token and another huge spike in downloads when Iggy launched a token. So, I mean, you can laugh at it, but that is getting downloads of Phantom. Yeah. So question, what do you think happens now? Do you think that, do you still think, I know you were very bullish around the sole trade. Are you still as bullish around the sole trade as you were before, now that there is the ETF in the mix?

39:03Yeah, I think there's a bit of chop still. But then I think later in the year, the Sol ETH chart breaks higher. And I think it goes significantly higher again. So I do think Sol will double or triple the performance that ETH does. And that's driven by the usage and then fired answer. Okay, so it gives you a big narrative. So I want to talk a little bit about the usage. Let's talk about the usage of Sol. So the usage of Sol currently is all around meme coins, right? Like we look at the transactions, we look at the active users. I'm just trying to get us a chart over here just to show us the usage relative to other chains.

39:53Just give me a second, I'll log in. Yeah, there's that and DeFi has a decent, you know there's a decent defy ecosystem in seoul as well so you're right but i looked at the defy usage and the defy usage is mainly dexes so there's no real tvl the defy usage is mainly dexes and the problem with the dexes is that they're mainly being used for meme coins and so a lot of the critics okay obviously specific in the eth ecosystem are saying you guys cool keep your usage but your usage is just people trading meme coins. We're building real apps. We're tokenizing real world assets. We're tokenizing, we're building lending apps.

40:31We're building pendals of the world where you can separate your yield from your, you know, we're building interest products. You guys are trading meme coins and shit coins. What do you think of that ETH narrative or that ETH maxi narrative which is saying that um well last time around eth was all about nfts i don't care usage is usage early stage uses what these mean coins are is an early stage testing ground that nfts were last time for a technology stress testing it and figuring out what is the true product market fit my guess is what we're doing here is starting the social token thing that i've talked about for some time.

41:17Now, will we get there this time around? No, like NFTs last time around, we didn't fully get there. So but what we're seeing is the start of something, which is community tokens and the ways of participating in cultural communities and benefiting if you help the community itself. So I think it's a very big thing that's happening. Like the first round of NFTs, 99.9 % of it will go to zero. But you can have some fun doing it in the meantime. So I certainly don't judge it. And people are very aware of the risks that they're taking in it. And I think it's what it's just showing, if we step back, it's just showing that Solana can handle these kind of transactions at the right cost, at the right speed.

42:06And it also shows that culture can be tokenized in a way that works for the internet culture culture tokenized we said we called nfts culture tokenized uh i found nfts to be very excluding exclusive so it excluded a lot of people if you couldn't afford a punk if you couldn't afford an ape you were excluded um and you felt very isolated you know like hey i can't afford it i can't get in just because i don't have enough money meme coins anyone can afford them 10 cents one cent you can be part of a meme coin community who wins the culture battle is it nfts or is it it's all part of culture right high value things end up being nfts it just works better for that but it also nfts will end up being for tickets and all sorts of other things this is just the start of the technology memes is a different thing it's fungible fungible versus non-fungible there's different use cases in the end, but culture always starts the movement, right?

43:08It started NFTs, it started Mean Coins. It's all the same cultural movement. My guess is 90 % of the people who are in Mean Coins now were in NFTs last time around. It's the same thing. So what does this mean for NFTs? Like what does it mean for people who want to launch NFTs right now? I haven't heard of anyone launching an NFT for a long, long, long time. My thesis here is NFTs, if you're going to launch them better have a use case and a use case means you should be able to use them in a game you should be able to use them to get some real backstage access in a concert i don't know what what the use case is but i kind of think that memes or it's high-end art from a famous artist where you own a limited one of a limited number yes that's the other that's the other true value in these things whereas the real culture the real culture movement will will migrate to the one with the least barrier to entry, which is meme coins, right?

44:02Of course. Don't forget, you could do NFTs on Solana for virtually nothing. So don't confuse this with an end of NFTs. Somebody's going to come up with another use of having a non-fungible token, whether it's a specific artwork or something that is culturally relevant, that works in the same way as a meme coin, and you can buy them for nothing. So it's not gone. It's just the market only has a certain amount of attention. Okay. Do you own any meme coins, Raul? Yeah. What communities have you bought into? I'm 50. Yeah, 50 is probably the wrong number. My two biggest bets are equally weighted are whiff and bonk.

44:54And I've been in those for a while now. and I still have some Doge because I still think Elon's going to do something with Doge over time. Do I have any? I don't have any others. That's it. And all I do is also, I just look at every chart relative to another. So I look at, you know, Bonk versus other memes or Whiff versus other memes, the Bonk-Whiff chart, which I can't figure out the direction, which is why I'm both of those. I don't do the super early stuff. I don't have time. I don't have time. to go into pump.com, pump.fun, and figure out what's going to move. So a lot of people use the meme coins as the proxy for the success of the chain.

45:36So like, if you believe in Solana, you buy Whiff. If you believe in ETH, you buy Pepe. If you believe in Bass, you buy Brett. Good thesis, bad thesis? Like, do you think that there's any thesis there? Yeah, we're all tribal. We'll do that kind of stuff. You know, we just like, it's our identifier. We're part of this group and not that group. We wear a red shirt because we support Liverpool, and a blue shirt because we support Everton. We're just humans. Humans are ridiculous. So, of course, it is. So, if you're generally more ETH-orientated, you probably prefer Pepe. But we're seeing a lot of people moving cross-chains now.

46:11We're seeing a lot less of that narrative than there was maybe in the last cycle, which is good to see. You're seeing NFT artists happily punting around in Sol meme coins, and it's good. I like it. What do you think? And they've got runes and ordinals as well. So people are getting more multi-chain, which I think is great. What do you think of this? I mean, we spoke about it earlier. Caitlyn Jenner launching a token. I mean, this is the token pattern. It's a pretty normal token pattern. We had Iggy who launched Mother. I wonder if I'm going to get the right Mother here or if I'm going to. Here we go.

46:49I think we know this chart all too well. Same story. so it feels to me like celebs are coming in they are bringing in their communities they are getting their communities wrecked i mean for for lack of a better word they're getting the communities wrecked uh in the last cycle we had similar things with icos where we're washed i call them d-grade washed out celebs so it's not you won't get like an a-grade celeb doing it you get a d-grade washed out celeb who has become accustomed to a lifestyle needs a lot of cash has run out of opportunities to cash out by selling t-shirts or running extra shows i don't know what else they do to get to get even even only fans and now what they're doing is they're saying hold on there's there's actually a better thing than only fans it's crypto you go in there you bring your community you dump you create a token you dump your your token on them and it looks like this so some people say it's good it's bringing adoption it's getting people to download phantom wallets other people say well hold on everyone that's coming in here is getting wrecked what's your view here i think 99 % of all meme coin charts look like that.

47:53So they're as bad as every other fucker launching a meme coin. Okay. But fine. Everybody knows what this is about. This is pure speculation on is this cultural meme going to gain relevancy or not? Does me as Caitlyn Jenner have relevancy that can persist or not? That's the game. That's why the Bowdoin and the Trempe and all of this stuff, right? It's can a meme be persistent? So I don't have a problem with it as long as everybody knows that this is a game of betting on raindrops going down windows. And we are humans. We all bet on it. And some of these memes are persistent for centuries and others persist for an afternoon.

48:36And as long as everybody has a smile on his face that you've got on your face now when you're laughing at the ridiculousness of this space and realize that all we're doing is speculating, that all we're doing is going to Vegas. but with slightly better odds than the lottery ticket that americans spend 110 billion dollars on lottery tickets every year well they have better odds in the mean coin casino so i also think it's very early stage proof of concept testing of what will develop out of this so the reason why i laugh the reason why i laugh is because i've tried a million times to explain to my wife how i'm making money on a dog with a hat or whatever and she said okay but i still don't get it she just cannot and i mean it's like how do you explain to someone that a tramp tramp has a or trump or tramp has a market cap of 500 million dollars like it just half a billion dollars here's a way to explain it to her so find a famous meme let's say the girl looking back at the burning house yes that actually got tokenized as an nft but let's assume that you can participate in the success of that meme that you've found, like spotting a band where you go to a pub and this band's amazing, and then they end up becoming Coldplay, right?

49:56It's that same feeling of being, discovering something that nobody else discovered and it becoming a big thing. This way you get to financially participate while you don't when you discover the new band. So is this the next big meme or not? It's a game that everybody can play. Okay, but even if the meme's successful, why should the meme coin be successful? If the meme of the girl looking back at the house becomes really used, why should the coin do anything? Or is it just a sentiment thing? It's not like the one's linked to the other. It's not like every time the meme is shared, they're paying a license fee to the...

50:34But they are if you're sharing the bonk meme or the whiff meme. You actually are. Well, you can do it as a JPEG too, but then you're capturing attention around something and the attention is what has value. It's a very weird concept that attention has value, but actually, once you step back and realize attention is actually upstream of everything, the reason you have a media company is attention. What attention allows you to do is a whole bunch of other things. Attention is actually almost the essence of what we do. And this is one way of creating value around attention that's not just about advertising.

51:09So listen, I love memes. Don't get me wrong. I started off not liking memes. I had the humility to change my tune. And I think a lot of it was, you know, I think you and Dan Tapira came onto my show and you said something like, it makes crypto fun and it makes Wall Street fun. And I know that was one of the times that I actually, that was one of the reasons why I did a U, one of the reasons why I did a U-turn on memes. But here's the flip side for me. The reason why Luna took down the entire market is because of leverage. Luna created fake leverage, right? Luna created a coin, which was hot air.

51:44And that coin grew to$100 billion of hot air. It was backed by nothing but an algorithm. And as soon as the algorithm unspun, it took down the whole market with us, right? When I look at the total meme coin market, and I look at Doge plus SHIB plus, plus, plus WURF plus Trump, my big concern is that we're going to create another Luna. It's just not going to be housed in one coin. It's going to be housed in one narrative. And when the narrative unwinds, if the institutions are starting to create products around it, I mean, Van X joked about a meme coin index, but next thing you get a meme coin ETF, you know, I'm just saying if this thing becomes too big, and this thing is actually based by nothing but the feeling of memes, are we not creating another lunar situation?

52:30Yes and no. Yes, like the NFT situation is, as I keep saying, 99 % of these will fall 99%. Everybody knows this. They'll still get caught off sides and they'll still be pissed off and they'll still be blaming whoever told them on the internet, the last person to buy that meme after it went down and it'll still be a shit fest and it will be the same old stuff again. But there is value in this stuff still. There is value because Doge has proven it and Shiba has proven it. And these things, the two or three will persist. And that meme will create further value. So we don't know what is going to create value.

53:11I assume that all of it is going to go to zero, but it won't. It certainly won't. I just don't know what those are going to be. But I don't see that as a lunar moment. It's just part of what is crypto. Crypto, the market goes down 90%. percent i guess i guess what i'm comfortable with memes but i'm uncomfortable when memes get too big and again my analogy is like if they start creating meme derivatives and they start creating leverage around memes and stuff like that and it actually catches on and people carry on drinking the kool-aid ultimately i'm a realist and i'm saying memes at the end of the day are based on nothing and i'll even challenge you i'll take i'll challenge you one step further everything is based or nothing everything is memetic there are much bigger things to worry about when it comes to leverage there are much bigger like 90 of the options market is one firm derivate i love derivate but 90 of all options is one platform the staking and restaking the restaking the liquid staking pools right these things are much more problematic because we all know that memes will go down 99%.

54:23But nobody expects yield to blow up, or options clearinghouse exchange to blow up. Those are the things that have actually much bigger risks to me. All right, got it. Listen, in the interest of time, I just want to ask you a question. In fact, let's go one more down here. So to me, I don't believe any meme can survive multi-cycle. And what I say that is, I don't believe any meme has survived multi-cycle. Why? Because I don't think doge is a meme anymore i don't think i don't think shib is a meme why i've said this before but i think that there's to be successful in in this industry you need to have three things you need to have technology casino and culture and religion community i think that protocols launch with technology and then they try and build casino applications and culture so like ethereum launched as a chain no one knew it then they launched trading then everyone loved trading on it and then they built a community and so they had all three elements of it.

55:22I think memes create, memes naturally have casino and they build community. So they come in with two out of the three. And then I think it's up to them to create a product or a use case. So in Doge's case, it became the potential payment system that will be integrated into Twitter. SHIB created Shibarium, Layer 2, et cetera, et cetera. Floki created a whole lot of use cases, But I don't know any meme that's just remained a meme and lasted multiple cycles. Because the point being is you're incentivized. If you think about what builds value on chain, it's the number of active users. So memes tend to have a lot of active users, no applications.

56:04So what happens is somewhere a chosen meme, whether it's WIF or Bonk. Well, Bonk's a good example because they're actually building the other side of the equation now. Yeah, they're building applications now. So you've got the retail usage and then the applications. You get incentivized to do that as a builder because there's a tension here. So it automatically does it. I don't think it needs, it's not a necessity. It's a natural outcome of getting attention is people build on top of your network because it has value. So there we go. And that's exactly what I think memes are. I think memes are just casino and community first and product later.

56:41Let's build a culture. When we have customers, we'll decide what we're going to sell them. but let's just get the customers in first. It's a marketing centric approach instead of a technology centric approach. And that's why I think that, that's where I think that, I'm a marketer. I came into this not as a technologist. I know how to market. I don't know how to build technology. Let me build a community and then someone else reverse list your technology into my community. Exactly right. Exactly right. Raul, last question before I let you go because we're completely out of time. Next ETF, Sol ETF, which ETF launches next?

57:16if the space stays true to its form, it should be Doge. Oh, you see, he's gone all down the rabbit hole, guys. He's gone all down the rabbit hole. All right, Ra, listen, we are out of time. My friend, it's been so good to see you guys. I'm reminding you of the link to the journeyman over here. Here it is. I'm just going to show you what you need to sign up for. I'm reminding you, you need to go here. You need to subscribe to this channel over here. And then on the weekend, you have to click this thing here. You have to put aside two and a quarter hours, send your wife shopping, click that button, even if you do it on two speed, but do it because I think it is the most important.

57:50It's a really important piece. I'm not shilling some random piece of content. Literally, I've given 30 years of understanding and put it into that one piece. Now, as you can see, right now it has 84 ,000 views. When I come back on Monday, that thing better be on 120 ,000 views. No excuses. We're coming back on Monday. We've got to make sure it's 120 ,000 views. Otherwise, we're going to do it again and again and again until it does get there. Ralf, thank you so much. Love you. Love having you on the show. Love the alpha. I'll see you again soon. We hope you enjoyed this episode. At Real Vision, we arm you with expert knowledge, time efficient tools and a powerful network to help you succeed on your financial journey.

58:29Get a taste of financial freedom with our free offer at realvision.com forward slash free. That's realvision.com forward slash free.