Bitcoin Steady, But the World Isn’t | Mando and Sergio Silva | REKT Vision

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1:30SuperAI.com with promo code Real Vision for an exclusive 20 % off, only while tickets last. Hi, everyone. I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much.

2:06Hello, everyone. We're back again for another episode of Wrecked Vision, although we don't have our usual co-hosts today. We're replaced with the better Sergio Silva for this week. Definitely looking more happy. Good to see you again, Sergio. I know, obviously, people on Real Vision know you very, very well. You've been kind of a guest person on this podcast for a long time, as well as hosting some content in it. well, it was a year or two ago, but now you are leading the charge on MeBits. We'll get into that a little bit later, but thank you so much for joining us on this, I guess, a holiday weekend, isn't it?

2:42I think everyone really has this day off. How are you doing? Good. Thank you so much for having me. Always exciting to chat with you and the rest of the Real Vision family. And yeah, I think it's a holiday. That's what I could tell just from the fact that I turned on CNBC and like nothing's happening. So yeah, I guess the market's closed today. Yeah. In the UK, we have a double holiday this period. And I always forget whether the US has the Friday off or the Monday off. But yeah, I think you guys are back on Monday. Hi, Raoul here. Listen, I think we've got until 2030 before the economic singularity arrives.

3:18Now, it might not be the exact date, but it's around then. So we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future. I've put together a report to help you called Prepare for 2030. It's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030. So just click on the link below and start your journey now. Anyways, look, it's great to have you just for a change of perspective, because we've been basically banging our head against the wall for the last few weeks as Bitcoin just continues to trade around this sort of 83 to 85k level. Hasn't really broken out, went up, went down, and then it's just kind of returned to this as a magnet.

3:56it how how are you thinking about the uh the market here i'd love to like pick your brain just about crypto in general um how are you imagining we're going to spend the next few months well i would love it if you pick my brain to the point that i can forget the last month uh but since you can't do that no i think obviously you know it's funny because politics is now the big driver and and you know politics such a therny subject it just brings in people emotions, which you haven't been a trader. No, it's probably the worst potential mix, right? Trading with emotions is just not good, especially emotions that have nothing to do with the market itself and investments.

4:39Personally, I kind of was bearish what was going to happen with the administration coming in. They obviously have a way of going about things that doesn't usually play well with markets. But I just kind of decided to focus on what I was doing, which in this case is running the medits and turned off a little bit. And now I realize probably should be paying a little bit closer attention because things meaningfully changed. And so now when things change significantly, you definitely have to readjust. I think for me, it's not like having one view, but just having a bit of possibility scenarios. And those scenarios have drastically changed.

5:19I think the long-term outlook is still the same. If anything, what's happened recently bolsters the case for Bitcoin and some of the other cryptos as store of value, cryptos as they're going to really benefit from increased liquidity in the system. The problem is that increased liquidity in the system might come because the system breaks a little bit before. And thus, we get stuff like the last six weeks, which the price action, obviously Bitcoin holding up a little bit better, but just the whole market it's pretty wrecked but yeah i look i think it's it's been a difficult market for everything else but bitcoin uh bitcoin dominance again just pushing higher this week i think it got to just above 64 and just feels like there's nothing stopping that train um i have been surprised to a certain extent that um how well it held up but then the fact that gold has kept going this week makes me think that um that it could even have a chance here to continue rallying we spoke about that last week that we felt like last week was maybe the first week where you you could potentially see a move up to like 90 to 100 100k um this week stocks have kind of been a bit sideways it's maybe slightly lower and uh gold has just gone up to 3 300 plus and looks like this is parabolic.

6:47I saw today that the gold has actually beaten the S &P 500 over the last 20 years, which is just a wild stat that gold is starting to outperform stocks. What do you think here? Do you think Bitcoin can follow gold? Do you think we're in that world of digital gold? Or do you think we're just going to get dragged down by some of the sparrows that you're kind of talking about? I think last time I was here, you and I were talking about Bitcoin completely decoupling from the crypto market itself and really taking a life on its own, not just from the ETF flows, but just the fact that most of crypto is tokens without a real cohesive story.

7:26So to the point about dominance, I would continue to remain elevated. I don't know if it gets higher or not, but definitely remain elevated versus other cycles where obviously it comes in as we get an altcoin cycle. When it comes to gold, it's quite clear what's happening, People in the global financial markets are quite worried that the traditional store of value, which was the U.S. dollar, might have some challenges. And I think you're seeing it in the way the U.S. rates curve is kind of just playing out recently where, you know, I used to be an EM. emerging markets traded a certain way depending on policy.

8:09And you never had that same type of action in the US with similar policy. But I think now you're seeing just a lot more of aversion towards holding US assets. And so in the absence of desire to hold treasuries, the only other thing left out there is going to be gold. And I do think at the end of the day, Bitcoin, Bitcoin still has that tech beta. and obviously tech stocks not doing that hot but but it doesn't take away from the fact that it is you know digital gold in a sense and that we should see that bit at least also like the you know the dominance remain elevated vis-a-vis other assets yeah that's kind of my view too i think i think there's sometimes a clash between gold and bitcoin holders like oh you know gold is for boomers bitcoin's the new new goal i do still think that most bitcoiners have a soft spot for gold and i think people who own gold a lot of them kind of although they may not understand understand bitcoin they can probably understand that if people believe in it similar to gold that uh that it's going to have some value um i think they both are kind of doomsday predictors of a fall of civilization kind of happening here and then this is this is kind of what it feels like a little bit here in that you're seeing slightly waning international power from kind of all powers let's say um and kind of retrenchment from globalization and that's that's a world where you want to own gold um and arguably you could own you could own bitcoin too i feel as though bitcoin dominance could go up to like 70 now i really do over the next over the next year like this apart from maybe stable coins actually kind of hurting that i think uh i think it's just going to be on on a one-way train but um whether that's in a falling market or a sideways market right now i'm still not sure you know i don't know the direction of the market but i do think bitcoin dominance goes goes higher here i felt like last this last week was the best chance for us to kind of push on and then gold kept on going and bitcoin has just gone sideways again and i don't think that's a great sign because it tells you that people are not ready yet to believe that that it's that it's made that jump to being purely digital gold I don't know if you saw this week though that that the comments from Binance that we had about them about nation states coming in to buy Bitcoin what did you make of that do you think do you think you're about to see a number of different nations come in here.

10:49We've already seen, I guess, smaller nations and we've seen the US made a pivot. Like, do you think this is now going to be an accepted asset class by central banks and several wealth funds over the next few months? Yeah, so funny, as you were saying, the fact that, you know, you saw gold continue to move, but Bitcoin didn't follow. I was going to challenge that with, you know, similar as we're talking about, Bitcoin having the ETFs and the other cryptos not having the ETFs. There's a different buyer pool. I think for gold, it's very established. All the central banks, all pension funds, all the big players have the ability, the know-how, and even the permission to buy gold.

11:33Whereas that takes time for Bitcoin. And that's why we're seeing gold outperform. And I would expect that continues for a little bit. as these other players. And you kind of set up for my point with the Binance headline where these players start looking at, hey, maybe the gold market is not big enough for what we need to deploy. And there's other asset class that not only will protect our value, but potentially give us a little pickup on the upside. So let's look around at that. And yeah, it's always the smaller nations, the Bhoutans of the world that drive that because they need to, again, as you get cut off rails and traditional markets and so on, you move outside to other types of asset classes.

12:18And yeah, so I would just expect that to actually reinforce in itself and follow. I think the Bitcoin problem, it just has really bad press, right? Let's call it the Bitcoin KOLs. I just, you know, you put some of those people, I'm sorry, like nothing personal, but you put some of those people in front of like a pension fund, a central bank insurance you know it's just like they talk about nonsense and so yeah that i think takes away from the bitcoin story so it's good to have you know people like you know the big etf providers you know the black rocks the bidwises the van x the vinances going out there and really being the face of bitcoin instead of you know podcasters or people who um you know were early and obviously props to them for for holding on and changing their lives and making a ton of money, but who might not have the right background or just expertise in how to really sell the story to a PM, to a central banker and so on.

13:18So yeah, I think it's all positive signs that that is changing. We see Larry Fink talking about Bitcoin. We see Al mentioned Bitcoin. And it's not just like some random dude that, you know, we're trading on Silk Road, becoming the faces of the asset. I think it's just pointing in a really good direction. yeah it's funny that you said that like uh the bitcoin kols are cringe do you think the eth kols are better or the solana kols are any better oh i don't want to open that kind of warms i would love for solana to stop having this little mentality of like there were the little brother with a chip on our shoulders they're at the big boy table now and so this whole chirping at eith every single time is just annoying like you know for somebody that's trying to build multi-chain and stuff it's like oh man why are we being this way like it's it's it's the pie's big enough for everybody let's all work together um i think the eat kols have always been very like academic um it's like college professors right like when i was studying my my major in texas uh the utsa go runners the my my except for one finance professor who changed my life the rest were published authors and were doing research on like you know the volatility curves and all this stuff and it was awesome and it was fun and it's intellectual, but none of them will ever work on a trading desk, right?

14:40And so it kind of like got lost from kind of like theory to practice and Ether and its ecosystem has seen a lot of that come to kind of like bite it in the butt if you're taking price performance as a measure of success. So yeah, hopefully, you know, the Solana people, which I built pups at my old startup on Solana for a reason, But I hope they just, you know, realize like, hey, like just calling each other out and calling each other names. And like, by the way, Solana people went super quiet when Solana went down to a hundred bucks. There was no chirping on the TL. Absolutely none. And now that it's back to what, 130 and he's like down in the dumps, it's like they're back.

15:17I was like, come on, man. Like, it's not high school. Like, this is, this is a, we're trying to be a real serious industry. Well, exactly. Well, we're trying to be a real industry here. and it's going back to the Bitcoin KOLs and they're claiming that tariffs are not inflationary and all this stuff. Come on. Yeah, look, I feel as though we've lost a lot of the tourists over the last few weeks. All we have is a bunch of one group dunking on another group for not... Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet.

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16:30With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500. It's trading with a plus. Being down as bad as the other group. But crypto goes through these sort of periods, doesn't it? where you know the people that have been here it's much more cliquey I would say more recently and it's in some ways more divisive at those times Yeah, which is honestly a shame I would hope that people realize that having chain leaders and people in positions of significance spending their time complaining about other chains or trying to change the narrative no like why why let's let's work together like let's push forward um so hopefully hopefully that eventually changes but for now yeah i mean you know pick the side and hold on to your backs i want to ask you something actually a bit more personal to you because you're based in new york how does crypto feel like in new york now because obviously if you said you were probably in crypto in new york two or three years ago it was like oh god he's probably doing something he shouldn't be doing or they're probably under investigation during the SEC.

17:55Now that seems to have been lifted. The SEC has gotten rid of about 40 different cases. You must know people in the industry around. What's the general sense of it there? Now people think I'm a MAGA person.

18:10Nothing personal. I think people don't care about crypto outside of crypto anymore. Whereas they cared a little bit more a few years ago i think you know when i talk to people like oh i'm in crypto or you know running an nfc project they're just shrugged their shoulders like okay right it's not something that that gives people any kind of just reaction like you used to um you know in 21 when i left barclays to go to fire blocked and it's like i was in crypto people were like oh my god you must be so loaded now and then the year you know following that it was like oh poor you like sucks to be you you idiot you knew it was a bubble now it's like i'm in crypto people are like okay i think plenty of plenty of people have made the move or been involved and they kind of like understand from a distance that yeah it's a cyclical industry people are trying their best um but it doesn't trigger much of a reaction like it used to either positive or negative um to be honest if anything people just ask more educated questions i would say um or they want to have a conversation about like you know what do you actually think about this to your point like what do you think about you know trump coin what do you think about it but more from like a philosophical side rather than like hey what should i be buying right now that's awesome i guess that's that's a good place to be um it would be nice to see crypto i think flourish flourish in the u.s um and i think you just don't want to feel i think if you're working in this industry that you're certainly like against the law in some sort of way.

19:45It's just not, I don't think it's been a good, good environment for people over there. And I think you'll see a number of companies actually come back there a little bit more. And I think that's. We're seeing it. We're seeing Solana is actually driving the charge there, right? They have their, their big event next month here in New York city. They've been opening offices or having reps in different cities, Austin. So it's really good. Obviously Solana like launched their policy arm, which I think is super interesting. It's a good business decision. um but i you know i think crypto people tend to have a chip on our shoulders where we expect folks to just like be happy for us or like you know give us credit for something where it's like whatever when i meet somebody that works in any other field i'm like wow that's amazing like it's like okay cool that's your job that's your career you chose to do that hope it works out for you whereas crypto people are like oh well if you're not excited for me like you know subconsciously I feel like you're against me.

20:39And so, yeah, I don't know. To your point, I hope for good, sensible regulation. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that needs to clean up, but it's definitely a lot better to be running a crypto business in the U.S. and not having to worry about just arbitrary enforcement of laws that maybe didn't even exist. The regulator was after you. I was actually just opening up another business account for the Mibit company. and it's I actually noticed it's the first time where I was checking the boxes from like you know do you do business in like for the OFAC nations or do you do like a high risk business and it's usually like you know prostitution gambling uh yada yada yada and usually there's a crypto box there and it wasn't on this form and it made me so happy um so so yeah definitely moving in the right right direction but I think people expecting you know public adoration for it from outside the space are just you know not really gonna get it because because at the end of the day as the industry mature a lot less people care that you work in it yeah but maybe we'll we'll touch upon that even more as well like so let's go into me bits a little bit and actually this is gonna be one of the topics we spoke about which was during this bear do you think it's gonna be an nft resurgence or do you think meme coins are gonna come back because i'm not bare wrong terminology but let's say a bear for like most of the market most of the market's down 70 80 whatever i see this week um i see a lot of nft communities communities being quite loud you've seen some innovation from openc in the last week which i thought was relatively interesting with like cross-chain minting and cross-chain uh chain trading you've seen x copy continuing to see huge flows go through his um through his additions um punks obviously always active we saw a huge punk sale although it was down quite a lot from the um from the seller i think it took a big loss but what do you think here because the only real meme coin i've kind of seen be strong on this bounce has been far coin but it's but it's i think there is that debate here about whether what's going to last through this and obviously you've you've pivoted back we were just talking before we went on on air back into nfts back into meme coins which is one of your first loves of the nft space maybe we want to talk about it a little bit what's your view on that yeah so i think as as we move forward in time right like nfts themselves are just going to be like the technology layer there's different types of businesses and verticals that rely on the NFT tech, right?

23:18The blockchain tech, but they're not all the same, right? I think the art NFTs are just doing what art does, which is, you know, power loss. You have people that, you know, artists that are really in high demand, their work goes really, really high. And then, you know, that really flattens out. And there's not a lot of demand for some of the other stuff. I don't think NFTs have anything to do with that. It's just, you know, where the money comes from right now. You know, the virus of X copy are mostly folks who made the money in crypto or like crypto. When it comes to NFT projects like Punks and MiBits, Punks are mostly in the art category, so I wouldn't bunch it too much with MiBits.

23:56So the fact that both were created by Larval Labs, and obviously I think the market prefers Punks to remain a virgin or like undeveloped, whereas MiBits were really pushing forward a very robust development plan. But even stuff like, you know, apes, penguins, like all the other like chimpers and the like, Like, again, using the term NFT, it only refers to the digital receipt of ownership and maybe the coordination mechanism for the community that's spread around the world. But they're really just, you know, IP companies. You know, the reason why I decided to buy the MeVets when the opportunity came about.

24:30One, I love them. Obviously, I was like, one of the 10 people on the timeline that kept talking about MeVets because I truly think they are beautiful. And obviously, they're Matt and John's artwork. and so digital sculptures from the creators of punks and glyphs. It's a no-brainer to me from the art perspective, but I also think NFT projects like those are next-generation distribution networks. And so for me, that's where the opportunity lies. But then there's other types of NFTs that liquidity pools. And Uniswap v3 are NFTs, so your liquidity position in a pool. And nobody really groups them into punks, glyphs, art blocks because obviously they're very, very different, but they're also NFT.

25:13So I think we continue to see that divergence from grouping everything into NFTs and more like art, next-gen distribution networks, and some other ticketing games. And then shitcoins, minkoins, whatever you want to call them, I think that fall into the broader kind of crypto consumer discretionary speculative bucket. But they're really like a beast of their own And they're just more, I think, a gauge on how much kind of like degen market attention and liquidity exists. Right. We used to have runners go up to like 500 mil and now something breaks 10 mil. People get excited. I think that's just a really, really good metric as to how many people are involved, are paying attention, are risking their capital.

26:00And yeah, outside of like one or two communities, I don't think you're going to get something lasting. you can see it for me the biggest example is Dutch imagine if 4 or 5 years ago I told you hey there's pretty much a government department run by the biggest Dutch public bull and it's literally named Dutch and the coin has not really done nothing it did a 4x from 0.10 to 0.4 a year ago that's it, you would expect it to have moved significantly higher Granted, Dogecoin has always had a much higher market cap than other meme coins, but you would imagine it captured a lot more momentum than it has.

26:43It didn't even come close to what we saw in 2021. So I think for me, meme coins are more of that gauge rather than the actual product.

26:54Yeah, look, I think there's a really good point about Doge, right? Like, yeah, it just hasn't really... It's been strange, this cycle, that you would have assumed, like, if you were to paint the most bullish scenario for Doge possible, it would have been what happened. And, yeah, it hasn't quite gone the way planned. I think my gut, just sort of the last week, is that NFTs form slightly better communities. Really stronger communities, because they're more personal. i i kind of get what you're saying and it's like it's just the technology but i feel like there's an identity bit with nfts often which which kind of um changes that and i think i would be unsurprised if we see some of the best trades over the next few months obviously happen again in um in nfts i think meme coins might might need bitcoin to push on to 100k plus for this to um for them to really start performing.

27:55If Bitcoin stays in this range, I think you could see people return to NFTs because it's this clique crowd. It's like the OGs just playing around. In some ways, a lot of them, I think, prefer the NFT cycle. They did for this most recent one. There's a version to it. Even today, I think it's like$300 million worth of Trump started unlocking today. It's not a great feeling, I think, out there for a lot of these. So I think that the MeBits move was potentially a smart one. Do you maybe want to talk to us a little bit about what you've got planned there for MeBits? I don't know how much you can say.

28:37Yeah, no, for sure. We publicly mentioned that, well, the company we formed is called the MeBit company. It was funded by One Confirmation, and Yuga also has an equity stake on it. And that's how we're able to put the deal together to acquire the MiBit's IP brand and half of the Yuga Labs MiBit NFT portfolio with an option to buy the rest at a later point in time. We have four pillars that we're going to develop. The four people that actually work at MiBit company, we're all like hardcore MiBit members from day one. And I think that's really what's illustrated where we want to go with it. So the first pillar is art and provenance.

29:17The second one is fun utility. The third one is tech innovation. And the fourth one is community first. And again, it's just like a roadmap without saying a roadmap. Obviously, you know, Larva Labs created MeVitz. So Matt and John, their provenance will always be there. And we always want to highlight that. And we're also tying in some of the art stuff in the space. Because personally, I just love art. I love collecting art. and I think Mivits play a really good kind of like segue into both sides right like their art like Mivits could be in museums or digital sculptures but we can also help elevate other artists and we have some of that coming here in the next couple weeks from their fun utility obviously like you said identity with NFTs we all had fun it's kind of like who you are in the digital world and you know Mivits are little people they're inspired by New Yorkers that's what Matt and John I'm kind of like, we're trying to create with the collection.

30:13All the traits are New York City-based. So you have people in suits that are going to Wall Street. And then you have people in basketball jerseys that are playing, you know, basketball in the West 4th courts and courts in Brooklyn and so on. So it's really, really cool from that sense when they can really represent people. So we can have a lot of fun with that. So we're integrating them into the Player Zero games, for example. So 20 ,000 Mibits, if you own one, you can play with your character in a suite of games that they have. I think it's pretty cool and it's kind of like the original vision of Matt and John, but also the original vision of like this whole early metaverse.

30:44And if you buy an NFT, it can represent you across game interoperability. It's there. And so I'll be going live here in a couple of weeks. And then just having like fun activations for the community, both physical and digital. We participated in Hugo Labs as the other side world record attempt, which obviously they achieved. And we'll continue to do that. MiBits have a whole island in other side called Metropolis. So we can't wait to be that 24-7 other side and really start converging there. And then on the tech innovation, obviously AI, the talk of the town. We've actually used AI a lot in some of our Web2 content to help us leverage our resources.

31:25But we think MiBits are the perfect bodies for AI agents. So we have some of that coming out next week. And then we'll just continue to push in that direction. and Mibits are, you know, fully rigged characters. And so it's been really cool to see teams reach out and be like, hey, Mibits are perfect for what we're trying to do. Let's work together. So it really helps us the fact that there's such a, you know, complete product when it comes from like the tech side. And then community first, I think that's self-explanatory. We put it last on the list because it's, you know, obviously the first thing ever.

31:57And we're just going to continue to listen to the community, but also expand it by showcasing how awesome Mibits are. and how they can be. So our whole campaign is like Meavits are, underscore Meavits are art, Meavits are fun, Meavits are AI agent, Meavits are everything. And that's the plan. Next two weeks going into the Meavits birthday on May 3rd. It's like packed with announcements. We've been, you know, owning Meavits for just a little over two months. And I'm really happy with stuff that we're going to deliver here in the next couple of months. So definitely stay tuned. And, you know, my DMs are always open.

32:31If anybody wants to chat Meavits, I can talk about Miibits for hours at a time. I know. I've heard you. I've heard you, Tim, about this. It does sound like an interesting time to be there. Like I said, I think AI is going to massively revolutionize, like you said, this content creation in gaming and in the metaverse, right? It does feel as though you're going to be able to expand these sort of worlds pretty, pretty quickly. And the idea of NPCs is going to change very, very quickly as well. So, yeah, MiBits as the first 3D avatar NFT feels historic, but also it feels like the utility could start increasing rapidly.

33:12So, interesting move. I think it was very, very interesting to kind of get. Do you have any insight on how that happened? You want to talk about that? Yeah, sure. I mean, honestly, it was not my life plan. I was sitting in Miami. I was waiting whether I would live in Miami or had a very interesting job offer that would have seen me go to Europe. I actually had the job offer sitting in front of me when Ugalabs reached out. And obviously, they've been very public about doubling down on the Yacht Club, the other side, and supporting teams on ApeChain. And Mibits kind of never really got the bandwidth that they required to be developed and steward.