Biden and Trump on crypto, FTX creditors and OP Stack L3s

Transcript

guys guys guys Trump is wearing a hat not a red one that says make America great again but a wool-knit one just like a dog and might it say make nfts great again look like it or not politics is becoming deeply intertwined with crypto for reasons you might expect regulation policy the things that politicians should be doing and for some that you might not have expected meme coin price action and a lot of money to he made off of memes and a few major political stories dropped this week that we are going to break down for you today Biden Administration said it plans to veto legislation which allows Banks to custody crypto and then Trump went on

stage and made several Pro crypto comments bringing up a couple of major crypto founders with him as well gmgm welcome to milroad radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto I'm J Hamilton joined by my co-host Kyle rehead and we believe that onchain is the next online this is the opportunity we're here to help you capitalize Jay welcome back to the rollup I missed you the last two weeks to be honest thanks bro I'm glad you're honest and that you missed me be really shitty if you said you didn't listen we had some great other co-hosts that came in and set up but it's always good to have you Jay here

today we got lots to talk about ETF updates as per usual Robin Hood Wells notices there's a lot going on in the policy and the boring stuff but we've got a lot to talk about that we'll make it fun for you don't worry but in the tech side of things the op stack continues to grow with l3s we're going to break down what's going on there coinbase is also kicking off on chain summer once again and then of course what everyone wants to hear about is the markets what's going on in the markets we're going to cover that we're going to help you think about what's going on in terms of Market structure right now it's all about patience I'll give you that little tldr but lots to talk about today so let's get into it crypto will go up more than 100x in both users and value

over the next decade if you're listening to this right now you're extremely early and having an incredible opportunity to capitalize at milk Road our mission is to make you smarter about crypto that's why we're doing today's podcast and why we send you a daily newsletter for free but if you're ready to level up as an investor then let me tell you about milk Ro Pro we crafted this resource for investors who are already smart enough about crypto and are looking for more actionable insights on how to invest successfully in one of the fastest growing Industries on Earth every week we break down the latest trends dive into tokenomics of popular and upand cominging tokens and get into the nitty-gritty of market analysis all to help you invest smarter plus we have a private Discord Community for pro members it's like your backstage pass to the milk road crew exclusive insights

Hot Tips and live amas with our team now if you're looking to level up as an investor then click the link in the show notes below and sign up to Pro today don't let this bull market opportunity slip through your fingers as we always do let's start with the market watch beginning with the major Bitcoin Kai what's going on in Bitcoin this past week yeah Bitcoin currently sitting at 62,1 74 as we are recording right now up 1.6% on the day up 6.67% on the week but of course still down a lot from the not a lot but still down from the the highs we had previously we pulled back about 22% or so in total in this dip that we've had for the last 50 or so days so

we're kind of just ranging nothing too exciting in price action I know people are starting to get a little bit bored and probably agitated they're ready for prices to move again but it's not it's not happening yet Kai wellow is off feels like uh maybe because I took the time off the market dumped actually that's definitely not what why it happened uh but uh ETF flows were going quite negative while I was off what's going on with the ETF flows yeah I mean kind of expected they had I mean people are like oh they're not a success they're sort of failing because we had like a week or of red days but it's like guys we had the most ridiculous start to ETF launch ever just blew apart like expectations and so pullbacks like this are normal expectations goes back to

what Carly and I talked about last week which was all about people need to learn to manage their expectations so yeah of course we were going to get a pullback of course we were going to get some outflows it can't just go up for forever it looks like that's sort of finished at this point we had almost a week or two of straight outflows and then since basically May uh we've been mostly green so so that's pretty good we like to see that was May 9th actually just zero or just it wasn't counted yet I guess that's today as we're recording not counted I was yeah I like no way we had exactly zero inflows outflows so yeah it's starting to come back but um again we'll talk more about Market structure in in a second the other thing that caught her eye this week was um

obviously Hong Kong finally launched their spot Bitcoin ETF and in the first week of trading which was last week we don't have up to- dat numbers on this but uh was over 300 million in inflows in the first week of trading pretty solid start for one week in Hong Kong absolutely it's actually very impressive and also beat expectations here now look it's way smaller than the us although in that week it actually had way more inflows than the U than the US I actually think the the US was negative 250 million was it for that week and Hong Kong was positive 307 million so it all helps it's all great and it's not just Hong Kong we've got so two things here one we have an asset manager hi

Tower which disclosed this week that they have bought 68 Million worth of those spot Bitcoin ETFs so it's not just retail buying this stuff and then trying to dump it's bigger institutions buying but the other big thing is so we've got the US ETFs you've got the Hong Kong ones now which is great well now South Korea has just announced that they are going to be allowing spot Bitcoin ETFs are likely I think they're still voting on it but that'll come in June so we're like a month away from having another fairly large nation state that's going to have Bitcoin spot ETF defs which again just allows for more inflows and more legitimization of this asset inside of their country so this is all amazing amazing stuff and again takes all time for takes time for it to unfold but it's all bullish gradually and then suddenly

okay let's go to ethereum what's going on in eth this past week ethereum just floating around 3,000 it's basically exactly that as we're recording right now so nothing again too exciting up 1% of the day up just 1.2% of the week it continues to just rain just like Bitcoin but Bitcoin still continues to to lead and and be the dominant asset and so Bitcoin dominance continues to to rise though I believe that that is going to change very soon which again we will talk about at the later part of this market watch section what else we got happening with ethereum there's lot to talk about obviously the upcoming deadline around the eth ETFs kind of not much news happening there recently but yeah it's kind of a no news news thing

on the spot ETF we haven't heard much unfortunately what one interesting thing did happen over the last week which was grayscale who had their um a filing it's called a 19 before filing for the Futures ETF the ethereum Futures ETF they actually pulled that so it's no longer exist which is kind of odd graay scale did this with Bitcoin they had it and this was their when they took the SEC to court and said hey you should be able to move our trust into an ETF a spot ETF because you've already approved our futures ETF it makes no sense that was their whole like case and so the Assumption was they were going to do the same thing with ethereum get the Futures ETF approved and then go to court and push the spot ethereum one to get approved and now they've pulled that

back and the reason they said is basically they want to focus all their resources on the spot ETF which is either like some people like well this is bullish it means they probably think it's going to get approved so they didn't need the Futures one some people are like you know what it might just be a bit of a waste for the Futures one it doesn't make them a lot of money anyway but really they spent a lot of money in court to push that forward for Bitcoin and then who came in and and benefited the most from It Black Rock and so some people are saying well you know what maybe it just doesn't make sense for them to get this future ztf approved go to court spend all that money all those resources and then Black Rock just comes in and takes all the fees anyway I don't

really know if this is good news or bad news but just an interesting development in the story I don't know if this thing is gonna get approved to May or not it seems like it's not but who knows anybody who does know please call the Milkman he'd like to know if he could let's go to Solana what's going on in salana this week yeah salana sitting at $146 as we uh record right now up 3% on the day 9% on the week obviously it's the one that's pulled back the most out of all these um but every time we get a little bit of Hope of Market's going to go up salana just fires out of the gates now whenever we realize okay actually we're not going to go and take the next leg up in prices it comes right back down it's obviously more volatile than

something like Bitcoin or eth but whenever prices do move to the to the upside salana is going to by far be the fastest horse in the race so Alex at accordingly is what I would say you're not the only one that thinks that salana is going to be the fastest horse in the race and uh this isn't financial advice for me but this is coming from somebody who is certified to give Financial advice that's Franklin Templeton one of the largest asset managers in the world over 1.5 trillion assets under management they released a report talking about Sal's adoption and a really bullish case for salana in this they talked about how they were really impressed with Sal how salana captured so much of the q42 3 rise of crypto as a

result of all their native aird drops that happened at that time they remarked on the resilience of the network coming from the collapse of FTX when it was below $9 and it stuck around and that means a lot that resilience shows they manage to keep their adoption numbers uh strong throughout they also talked about sana's low Fe and scalability which will enable these use cases that could take them into so many new markets talking about use cases around payments and decentralized infrastructure or dpin and nfts so they really took a strong stance on the bullish case for salana I'll read you a quote from it and then Kai you can

jump in and let me know if you have any thoughts they said crypto enthusiasts are wondering what might be the next big thing in crypto well we don't know the precise answer we'd argue there is a strong chance it happen on salana I mean I completely agree you know the thing with salana that I would say right now that's so interesting is in terms of like institutional mind share not many Assets in crypto get that right or not much technology in crypto gets that a lot of it is just kind of crap especially the like top 10 top 20 top 30 there's Bitcoin which obviously has institutional mind share at this point and especially with ETFs etherium has had it as well institutions are building on it you know Black Rock has the bidle fund Etc they're now trying to get ETFs approved it is a topic of

conversation in the institutional world nothing else on the list gets that I mean xrp no one talks about it no one cares cardono no one gives a [ __ ] about it BNB no one cares and so on and so forth but there is one that's starting to get Whispers And it's salana and so like if you are still stuck on ethereum in the L2 ecosystem which by the way is great and I'm obviously very bullish on that but if you have not moved over to salana and like played around with it or investing in it and trying to understand it and wrap your head around like its differentiators like you really need to it's so obvious and has been so obvious for more than a year that's why we've written more Pro reports on salana than anything else over the last year and a

half or so it's been our biggest call it is and it's still the most obvious trade because it doesn't have the institutional adoption yet but it's getting it people are talking about it and then like stripe just announced that they are building on top of it visa is building on top of it like it's so obvious that this is the next big major asset you have Bitcoin you have eth you will have salana these are going to be the three big ones without a doubt and there will be more in the future but to me it's just very very obvious that this is the the next big thing and it's going to bring a bunch of new use cases that just aren't really possible elsewhere so if you're not paying attention this is probably my H 100th 200th cry about pay attention salana is here to stay without

a doubt I just recorded yesterday a great show which is coming out next Monday with h pm and Jacqueline Millan they started a new company called token relations together I'm not going to tell you what the company is you can listen to the next week's show to check that out but I asked pom directly if he's a BTC Maxi and what his thoughts were on other tokens and he wouldn't mention any other tokens on the show which was hilarious so clearly clearly would be and he said flat out that he is a BTC Maxi but the other thing he said was that he admitted he's like look like I can be a BTC Maxi and still believe in all of this other Tech he's like which I do he's like the only reason I'm a BTC Maxi is because it's the one that has achieved so much that I have the most

conviction in it so far and he's like it's also the one that when I go on news shows that's what they want to talk about and what they want to hear about as you said these institutions and these mainstream are not they're not talking about salana yet so it was funny really tried to get him to mention another token he wouldn't do it but uh I think he he clearly indicated same sentiment that you have that there's the belief that this other stuff is gonna be very successful let's go to some macro conversation Kai because macro has such a big impact on the space What are you seeing from a macro macro perspective right now yeah it's a confusing world out there I think for many there's obviously the inflation continues to sort of lag uh and not go as low as people are wanting to though it is down

a lot from from where it was you know a year ago and so there's a lot of mixed signals there's that inflation scare so people are like well rates you know can't go lower if inflation at high but then just this past week we had payrolls Miss so basically the amount that people are getting paid and unemployment was much higher which these are also signals to say hey rates need to go lower right the economy is not doing as well so a lot of mixed signals here the key thing is this we are in the season where bad news equals good news which is interesting because like and what I mean by that if you don't really understand I have a tweet up here that I that I wrote which is bad news for the economy which means people literally losing jobs and not getting paid enough money means

really good things for our crypto bags and for risk Assets in general whether that be tech stocks and other things so if the economy is bad that is good news because it means the FED is going to intervene and they're either going to lower rates or they're going to print money or whatever and whenever they do that our assets go up so bad news equals good news markets don't always work that way in the short term bad news generally kind of scares the market so sometimes people sell off but then once people realize what's going on all of a sudden then markets do well from it so we actually want unemployment to go higher uh because ultimately that means that they're going to eventually need to lower interest rates so anyway it's a weird scenario and something weird for people to wrap their heads around it is

playing out the way that we want it to in my opinion like it's just a typical cycle this is all very normal but if you haven't been in a cycle it's hard to wrap your head around so for me where I think we're at in the cycle is we just need to be a bit patient right here as macro kind of gets figured out rates are going to go lower they have to I've talked about this a bunch so I won't even get into those details the macro side of things in terms of like where we're at in terms of the economy it's coming around so it's going to get worse for a little bit and then eventually it'll start to get better I talk about this a lot in a coming Pro report where we dive really deep in the macro but basically the tldr is this is a typical

macro cycle I think right now we're in this stage where I actually don't see a reason for us to go up in terms of price for the next little bit because there's just no Catalyst no Catalyst from crypto is going to make our markets go up more it doesn't matter what aird drop's coming or what new protocol comes like it's not big enough what matters right now is macro we need liquidity and the thing to understand is liquidity is coming in the in China they have printed more than a TR or added a trillion dollars and assets to their balance sheet over the last year so like liquidity is coming just not in the US yet we need unemployment to go a little higher we need things to get a little bit worse in the US in order for that to come but it's coming and in fact if you

really dive into details the US is printing money they're just doing it in kind of a backdoor way through like the repos and through like all these different ways I'm not gonna get into because it's very like complicated and complex but they are doing things in the background that is actually them printing money it's just not showing up in the way that we typically look at it so all that to say China's already printing Japan's Got a [ __ ] show going on so they're going to need to print Europe has some very very strict guidelines that they have to have in terms of like their renewable energy and stuff and the only way they can achieve those is by printing so like China Japan Europe is all going to print money this year the US it will come especially with the election coming we talked we're

going to talk a lot about politics here we're just in this like phase where we know it's all coming but it takes a bit for it to play out and so this is always the confusing part and the the real issue with it is that people are very impatient and so when we reach this point which by the way is the best time in my opinion to be accumulating because we know where it's going to go it's just we don't know will it be tomorrow will it be a couple weeks will it be a couple months in my opinion it's probably going to be a little bit I could be wrong but I think we are going to be in this kind of range that I've been saying for the last how long for months it could be till the end of summer think about that

for a second everyone's like why is retail not here why are we not going up why are we still in a dip it's probably going to be months in my opinion and so Q3 maybe it's actually Q4 which you know is when the election come in and all this other stuff so I think it's going to be a bit which I just think it's a good time to be accumulating and then um the fireworks will all start soon and uh it's all good it's just gonna take a bit so we got to be patient that's all patience man that's a that's a tough one that's that's anti-human nature human nature is not patient human nature is not taking it one step at a time it's immediate faster return give me that give me that dopamine it's because

everyone has been told we're in a bull market and so people go back to 2021 of like bull Market's just crazy it just goes up and up and up and it's like no bull market takes time actually if you remember 2020 we went up early then Co hit and things got I mean in this instance things got a little bit crazy but it was months and months before we actually passed like it wasn't until the end of 2020 till we beat alltime highs and then just skyrocketed from there but we had that first phase of the bull market where was like end of 2019 where things went crazy and then it did nothing for months and months and months in months and then Michael sailor finally started buying it still took months then we passed alltime high and it was Q4 where things went nuts and so

we're kind of at that same stage right like end of 2023 early 2024 things have been great we maybe went a little bit over our skis here with the ETFs being approved I think it's going to be months for the markets to figure itself out again and then probably the end of the year we start to go off kind of like last cycle and honestly if you look at all the Cycles we've done this every time again if you're not pro Go Pro because I have a full like 10-page report breaking all this down in terms of macro but also in terms of like the cycle Trends to me it seems like we're actually just very much on track so we just got to be patient and let it play out and don't get caught up in this like accelerated cycle [ __ ] this is just

narratives change when price goes price went up fast because we got an ETF approved obviously that was going to happen but then people go oh now the Cycle's all different it's like no just chill it that was just one little narrative it's now died down that's normal we got to wait for macro and liquidity to come back in but it's coming one of my favorite tweets of the week lines up perfectly what you're saying Kai was purple pill who said so if we all quit our jobs the coins will go higher oh that's so good I love it bad news is good news now if we all I know there's not enough we all we is the key the key word here we ironically no we need everyone else to get fired from their jobs and to lose their jobs which uh makes me sound like

a total [ __ ] to say that so uh I I hope that doesn't happen uh but there is a lot of Truth in the fact that if people lose jobs coins go higher risk assets go on okay anything else to add on the on the market watch before we jump into some politics in the top stories of the week yeah politics let's go to it let's do it let's go to politics we don't talk enough about poit it's it's election year we're actually probably we're going to talk a lot about politics I bet this year not I shouldn't say we're talking about politics we're talking about the impact on crypto and two things happened this week first with Biden and then second with Trump let's talk about Biden first so first the Biden Administration came out and they said that they had have plans to veto

legislation which was actually currently being voted on like they said they were going to veto this legislation that got voted on yesterday we'll tell you what happened with the vote in a second and this legislation is meant to allow Banks to custody crypto and so Biden administrat say yeah we're going to veto this the reason they said they were going to do that is because they believe believe that custody custody and crypto would disrupt the sec's work to protect investors I can't even wrap my head around that line but that's what the Biden Administration said wouldn't that that's exactly like what like Banks cting crypto is like that's what they want they want Banks to cuss your assets because they believe that banks are

smarter than anyways whatever what this would obviously mean is you know it would continue to slow down adoption in the US it is another step of the Biden Administration showing that man I I hate to say it but like they're on a crusade against crypto and they continue down that path and it doesn't it doesn't appear to be slowing down well thankfully the US politics doesn't work like that and Biden can't just come in in veto because although he put a letter out saying that they would like to do that it was voted on and there was 21 I don't know whatever these votes are that were to the yes and basically they all voted I think this is Congress I'm not exactly sure Canadian so I don't know everything going on in the US

politics but basically what happened this is the coinbase lawyer that that tweeted this out basically what happened is they voted anyway and they all voted against what Biden and the administration said in that letter and so this legislation did not actually go through this way and what Biden wanted is not going to happen so this is really really good news that the Democrats came in and they voted against what the the boss you know Biden wanted them to do so this is politics working the way it should right these are obviously people that were all voted in for their jurisdictions and they voted to say hey we don't think that what Biden said is correct and um you know we want to be on the right side of the history books and so they voted against it and I absolutely love love love to see that

just to be clear here they voted for in favor of the legislation so legislation is going forward which will allow Banks to custom crypto even though Biden basically threatened and said yo like I'm your boss I'm the head of the Democrats I'm going to veto this regardless of what you guys V right so like it was kind of a you know it's power right like he's trying to control and use his power to say hey this is what I'm going to do regardless of what you guys do and these guys said you know what middle finger up in the air we're freeth thinkers we believe in the future of crypto the Milkman salutes you well that's not all that happened in the political world also Trump got on stage and just had a time talking about crypto he had some great great lines at a an

nft event where he said I'm good with crypto if you're for crypto you better vote for Trump he said I made nfts hot again which is just a great line and then somebody asked him if he know knew about Bowden the meme coin and Trump said yeah that sounds like a bad investment it's just incredible to think about these guys are talking about meme coins now and you can just imagine what's gonna happen with mem coins in the coming and we got we got some great takes on this we're going to talk about later in the show and then then he had Ryan celus the founder of Masari up on stage to talk about his support for Trump basically and his belief that Trump is going to be Pro crypto and the

best way to go also on stage I've got a screenshot of a video up on the screen here you can see in the background Halo bck I can never say his name properly he's one of the co-founders of polygon so they were on stage with Trump talking about how they believe Trump and his administ is going to be the best solution or the best forward movement for crypto and for condex Ryan SAS is the founder of of Masari which is a really big like crypto analytics platform in the space what's interesting here is that so when Trump was on stage he was asked also about Biden he was like guys Biden doesn't know anything about crypto and he doesn't like crypto basic is what he said so Trump taking a pro crypto stance here I wonder how big the crypto you know world is in terms of

politics in the US there are a lot of people in the US that hold crypto so I think they have a say I don't know if it's necessarily the biggest say but Trump obviously sees it as an important like I don't know that Trump really loves crypto I think he's just trying to get the votes but who knows I could see him understanding crypto more than Biden mainly just because he's obviously like a a business entrepreneurial type so like I think he gets it a bit more I could see and he cares more about I think freedom than necessarily that Biden does the cool thing I think was Ryan cus has been very very vocal about politics in crypto for years now and he has made it his like his main goal goal to figure this out and to really get into DC and try to push strong

regulation and so he's supposed to be just a Founder for a crypto company and he has instead decided to just like go all in on politics and um so it's good to whether you agree with you know Trump or not I don't really care it's good to see him take a side for someone that is actually supporting crypto and who knows what Trump will do when he actually if he does win but I believe he will actually do something good for crypto at least that's what he's saying and I think if Ryan is there upfront and supporting this and saying hey this guy's going to do good things for crypto it makes sense I mean obviously Trump is playing around in crypto and he's doing things so like he obviously has has some interest in it Biden has only been a dick to the space so I think um you know

if you're Pro crypto youve gotta kind of vote on you know and someone that's gonna at least support our industry and there's others not just Trump that's gonna support the industry obviously you got to think about that but hopefully we have a say hopefully crypto people actually have a big say at the US election yeah so what I saw was there was a a poll that came out this week that said 20 % of Voters in swing States care about crypto from a political standpoint so I don't know like 20% is not a massive number now this is obviously in swing States so that's that's where it matters but it's also to be honest higher than I expected it to be it is I mean to be honest though it doesn't really matter sure it might help things move a little bit faster in the

US but look if Biden wins and he continues to do what he's doing it'll just move out of it already is is moving out of the US and crypto will flourish and it will continue and it doesn't actually matter obviously they can try to slow things down but they're never going to stop this thing so I wouldn't be too concerned either way it just would be nice if it wasn't you know if we actually had some support here because I mean crypto is doing some amazing things for the US especially for the dollar if you understand stable coin so it's a bit wild that they can't wrap their heads around that but is what it is either way it's all good I just want to remind people that Trump is not necessarily Pro crypto he is pro himself and and gonna do and say whatever he

needs to say to get what he wants and a great reminder of that came from Franklin Franklin is bored who's a favorite on Twitter and he he posted a screenshot of a tweet from Trump from when he was in the Oval Office last back in 2019 and he says Trump says I'm not a fan of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies which are not money and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air unregulated crypto assets can facilitate unlawful Behavior including drug trade and other illegal activity so Trump is not a crypto Maxi he's not in it for the principles or the belief in decentralization like the rest of us he's in it for himself well I mean so to

take the other side of this and I'm not supporting Trump by any means but you can do this with a lot of people in crypto who in 2019 did not like crypto because there was nothing in crypto at that point 2019 was before we even had Defi and so like nothing was big back then and crypto literally was just a piece of [ __ ] and so we've come a long way in the last five years and so there are many many high-profile people that said that crypto was crap and now are building in crypto or are big holders of crypto etc etc so to take someone's tweet from five years ago it's like I don't know either way I I agree Trump cares about himself and only himself but I think to do it based off old tweets is probably not the right way to do it hey

man this is that's what we do on the show we take opportunity to slam for their mistakes man come on that's the fun I love doing that no you make a good point okay let's go to the next story keeping with the political theme the SEC has issued another Wells notice feels like a badge of honor at this point if you're operating in the US and you're a large institution coinbase consensus Unis swap have all gotten Wells notices and now it is Robin Hood that has received a Wells notice from the SEC for those who don't know just a reminder a Wells notice is basically the SEC SEC saying hey we've got eyes on you and we are usually it comes before a lawsuit usually followed up with a

lawsuit from the SEC and so look this isn't really a surprise to be honest like Robin Hood is a large fintech institution and we've talked a lot about how fintech and crypto are going to blend we see it with most major fintechs and obviously the SEC has a hardon for all major crypto institutions in the US because for whatever reason they continue to believe that enforcement is the best way to regulate and lawsuits are the best way to do it so yeah here we go again I don't know it kind of feels like not anything that anybody needs to pay attention to no I mean it's more just a like an annoyance I think they're going after all of our biggest

players coinbase consensus Unis swap Kraken PayPal Robin Hood so like at least it's ones that have the money in the backing to actually fight this and the good news is like we win all these cases so like go for it SEC take us to court you already got your ass kicked by our worst one which was xrp and ripple they beat your ass what do you think you're going to do against coinbase and crack like you're not winning this stuff so like keep doing it it's it's actually better because the more lawyers and the more teams we get in to fight the SEC one like the SEC doesn't have unlimited resources so there's I don't know how they're going to handle all these court cases so like if anything they're kind of biting off more than they can chew and two they're just going to keep

piling up losses so like it's all good I actually don't as much as it sucks and I the teams that have to deal with this now it really sucks a lot of money and time and resources and stuff it is really annoying and I know it slows down the Innovation that they want to do but ultimately if they're not going to give us regulation we've got to do it through the court system and so like sure take on our best ones that's probably our best chance of winning you know so I don't know that's the optimistic take I guess we also saw news out of a a friend of ours over at Exodus a wallet that we've uh been longtime supporters of they also so are on The sec's Hit List this week what happened here Kai yeah so The Exodus has this like very

interesting like way that they had launched a token it's not even really token but basically they put their shares on chain is what they did and these shares were supposed to go on the New York uh Stock Exchange but it's tokenized so there was a way that people could buy these shares on chain like before they' they've gone on which was really cool and I love the way they did it it was all super legitimate and you know regulated Etc and then they were supposed to launch on the New York Stock Exchange and who blocked them the day of obviously the SEC and so now they can't do this this was supposed to be actually a pretty cool moment for crypto and uh unfortunately exus getting blocked uh SEC just continues to be a pain in the ass all right let's go from politics to

some good news I don't know you let's let's see what you think Kai if you think this is good news or not FTX has proposed a plan to pay back their creditors their creditors obviously mostly consist of 98% of their creditors are over $50,000 under $50,000 in credit that they are owed and so it's mostly American public who put their money in FTX and yeah they should definitely get their money back right and it was eight billion doll that was it was lost over eight billion FTX made has made a plan they're saying hey we're g to pay you all back we're actually going to pay you 118% so you're going to get your money back plus 18% and this news picked up and a lot of people said hey great everybody's

getting a full recovery that was kind of the the tagline that we saw across Bloomberg and across a a lot of major news channels and then a lot of people said hey whoa whoa whoa wait a second this is not a full recovery when you actually look at the numbers because what people are getting is they're getting paid back in US dollar of what the value of their tokens or their investment in FTX was on the day that FTX crashed which was November 2022 and at that time let's say you own Bitcoin well Bitcoin was only worth 20,000 then so you're getting if you're getting 20 , 118% of that today bitcoin's worth 60,000 so you're not getting the payout that you deserve if

you still H that Bitcoin salana is up 5x since then ethereum's up 2x since then so Kai what what do you think good news bad news so I I went through this with Celsius I had some assets on Celsius and they've already done their plan and gave us back and so it was the same thing they had to give back the amounts based off of the US dollar amount not not what it's at today it sucks obviously it really sucks for people like if you would have held that through the bare Market you know it would have 3x Etc and so a lot of people are going to lose money they say it's 118% it's not again I always like to take the other side of it and just say like expectations so look you [ __ ] up if you went and put assets on FTX in a collap I I say that

with Celsius like I thought it was a loss so my expectation was hey I messed up I should not I was not responsible and I put my assets on a centralized exchange that I did not know about and I did it because I wanted some extra yield and that was dumb of me and look there many people who just didn't even know that I'm in the space and I knew that and I still did it right it wasn't all my assets so I was fine but I know many people did so I feel really really bad but ultimately we need to take responsibility for our own money that's why we're here in the crypto space as is and so look your expectation should have been like hey I screwed up and I should get nothing back but thankfully something's coming back like when I I

got some back from Cel it was not a lot but I was like hey this is great it's better than nothing it's all about expectations your perspective it sucks I know it's and we had Carly on last week and she explained the fraud that's going on not just from Sam and FTX but from the lawyers as well so like look none of this is good news by any means so that's my answer but also like be happy you got something back because there was a really good chance you were G to get zero and then one other point and I know people are not gonna like this one is you probably weren't going to hold those assets to the bare Market anyway that's what I'm thinking that's exactly what you know what yeah like the most people sold at the bottom and so all I'm saying

is like hey they kind of forced you to hold it maybe would have bought back in but most people were buying back in at 60k 70k anyway so like I don't know and I know I'm the I'm the [ __ ] for saying that but most people weren't gonna hold that anyway so like just just be happy you got something like here here's not to say what they did was okay or that you know obviously I hate everything that happened it sucks again I'm an optimist you just you got to just take your punches you know no keep keep bringing the controversy I like what you're bringing today I'm feeling the vibe here's what I think I hope the history books say FTX everyone got their money back that's it that's all it should say it should say nothing else like that's it that's like all the line

should say in history and and everything else should be forgotten and put behind us because nobody should have to talk about it ever again let's move on uh to next one of the leaders in scaling ethereum is optimism they have been since the beginning just look what they've done with Bas Bas already over five billion tvl as a result of building on the op stack and they've done that in less than a year uh and they're not the only ones and now optimism came out with some big news this week saying that they're going to Welcome l3s to the super chain so starting now l3s can build on top of the super chain or on top of the op stack and as part of that

you need to share Revenue with the op Collective and you're going to get a lot of benefits for doing that you're going to get access to the entire super chain which we've talked a lot about we've had some of the super chain other TW is like mode on the podcast recently and then of course you get access to optimism's retroactive funding their airdrops their growth campaigns their expertise their Network and so much more I think this is really great to see Kai what are your takes yeah look I A lot of people are very confused about the l3s and what this means and they're like well there going to be L fours and l5s and L sixes and it's like that's not how it works there might actually be l4s but not in the way that most people think that

they're going to be l3s are are are good for a few reasons but before I get into that just think of an L3 as just an app it's basically just an app that is existing on top of an L2 right and all it is is like apps also need to facilitate transactions or basically they need to do something with data they need a database and if they want that database on chain it's better for them to just do it as an L3 than it is to make their own L1 or technically they could make it an L2 but there's just some scalability issues with that it's better to have it as an L L3 because because the scalability stuff is taken care of by the super Chain by optimism uh and then on L3 you don't have to worry about any the scalability stuff you're just pure execution and like

making your app work it's just some of the things of your app might want to be on chain and so it's better to do it as an L3 remember everything is going to be a chain right and so we think of these as like oh it's another token and it's another like competing thing it's not it's not fragmented it's it's all one and it's all just part of this super chain it's just some of the things on the app need to be on chain two and so they're calling it as an L3 they didn't have to call it that because it starts to get confusing I think l3s are not just like this general purpose thing like optimism and then we'll have another an L4 that's a general purpose thing and like it's just going to keep happening that's not it an L3 is just an

app that needs some things on chain and the reason you would have an L3 instead of just doing that thing on the L2 is one it's a little bit more scalable um but two you have custom customizations so there are things that you can't customize on optimism itself but you can do as an L3 whether that's that's like get riding get rid of fees in general completely and then you just cover the fees for your apps or I don't know you know maybe you want people to pay in a different type of token or I don't know you want to take a cut from fees like you want to do certain things as a business you have more freedom to do it that way and so you could think of it as like you know a chain as a service type thing is what an L3 is but basically

they're just apps now at some point there might be an L4 like other chains existing on l3s but there is no additional scalability improvements from that the only way that happen is like let's say a game launches as an L3 and it becomes an ecosystem where other games want to build on top of that game and it wants to stay into its ecosystem for certain benefits they might build a chain that directly links into that L3 and technically you could call that an L4 but it's not for like additional scalability or like any of these reasons people think it's just to have them all connect in for functionality purposes that's all so there's no really reason to have an L4 unless you want to be part of that ecosystem which like you could think Nintendo might bu an L3 and then

have its games kind of Connect into that so anyway hopefully that sort of clears it up there but we need that Tech to be improved and to actually like function and be really really good and useful and then obviously we need teams to help those apps that want to build on top that's where the super chain comes in that's why this is big news that op is now kind of allowing l3s to come through Bas has talked a bunch about this where they're going to have a bunch of l3s I mean dgen has already won the mem coin chain bit ridiculous that's the first one we get but hey that's what's going to happen chain is also one in terms of nfts and again they're doing this because there's more customizations that they can put I think that we're going to see a ton of l3s maybe we need to get

rid of the word l3s in Just Apps we could call it might make sense to more people this way onchain apps you know daps that's all the [ __ ] is and so the super chain basically is now trying to build more infrastructure and more assistance for apps to come and build on the super chain so whether it be on top of mode on top of optimism on top of bass Etc so again these are just the steps we need to take to get all the apps we want and to reach that scalability so continue to watch what super chain is doing I think they are one of the best teams and one of the best like ecosystems that are in the space in terms of like scalable opportunities here I think what optimism is doing what arbitrum is doing although a lot of theirs is kind of like hidden

and people aren't really talking about it too much but I think they're doing a ton and then you have I mean salana obviously is the other one that's got a ton of teams and apps and building on top of but these are the big ecosystems I think people need to be paying attention to great thanks for doing such a great job of explaining that for everybody that was maybe we'll get an episode that we get someone who's a little bit more technical to come in and explain the nuances of of it we can't get to that in a rollup here but you're welcome yeah let's you know what you tell us if you're listening to this today's poll question is do you want to learn more about l3s bonus if you also tell us if you think that we should stop calling them l3s as Kai said and just

call them apps comment on YouTube wherever you're listening or on Twitter or answer the poll question on Spotify that would be be sweet and if you guys want to learn more we will bring somebody on the show to break it down for you okay let's go to the next story sticking within the optimism and super chain ecosystem coinbase has announced that they're launching onchain summer two it's coming back onchain summer was the one of the biggest campaigns that happened in crypto last summer and caught a lot of attention and also really pushed the onchain brand uh to the masses which is really great to see and it's going to start in June starting June 3rd with a online hackathon with

over $2 million in grants available so if you're a builder check out on chain summer because there's going to be lots and it won't just be for Builders it will also be for users they're just focusing they basically have three phases first phase is focusing on the builders with a buildon in June second is in July is going to be focused on onboarding and third in August is going to be focused on grow we'll see what the July and August have in store for us and we'll definitely keep you guys in the loop you know what's amazing about coinbase so the reason coinbase launched base and is doing this whole onchain summer thing and just onchain in general is not necessarily because they thought that launching an L2 was going to be like the most profit thing like they did

not expect to be making tens of millions like they're making right now it was because they know that people going on chain is the key for coinbase to succeeding they need more they need the adoption of crypto to be even faster than it is and what they realiz realiz is that most teams absolutely suck at building good user experiences and what coinbase is really good at is building a damn good user experience if youve use coinbase app it's incredible right any product they put out they have the ux people there but it there was a lot of problems in the onchain world and so it's holding back the ability to bring in new developers to bring in new applications to bring in new users and so what coinbe said is hey let's go build on chain let's launch our own chain let's figure out all the issues in

building on chain and fix them and we'll do it open source so that everyone else can go and just use what we do and upgrade their own stuff and then let's figure out all the pain points for developers figure out figure out all the pain points for users and let's go fix them we have the best team in crypto to do it why don't we just go do it and they think if whether bass works out or it just helps all the other l2s and all the other chains figure this stuff out so that it just ends up being that we can get adoption in crypto they want to be the solution for that it turns out it happened to also be a really good business opportunity for them but they are literally just doing this so that they can speed up adoption and it is

freaking working and you can see with this onchain summer what they're trying to do here is hey they they did onchain Summer last time which was the same thing let's launch a bunch of things let's onboard a bunch of people and let's figure out all the issues they're doing it again it's the same stages because they're just they're literally going to do this in study where are people's pain points this time around you know they've made a bunch of changes over the last year bunch of fixes bunch of optimizations now they're going to go they'll do the the same stuff users will go do it developers will go do it and they'll go okay where can we improve and then next summer they're going to launch the exact same thing Jesse already said we're going to do onchain summer until we have a billion users on chain so he's

like we will do it every year for the next 10 years if we have to we don't care because this is what just allows them to figure out and work through the Kinks which is like most the other teams can't really do this because they're focused on other things and so coinbase gets to and I just I absolutely love that it's amazing what coinbase is doing for this space and actually okx is about to launch theirs or just did launch theirs and then you also have Kraken and hopefully they're going to be doing the same thing because now you have three big exchanges that can be pushing the limits here on chain um and it's going to really really speed up the adoption let's hope that they also Embrace similar language and branding because if I can to just see Kraken having blockchain something or crypto something

or you know they're gonna they're not going to use the onchain word because coinbase is using it let's just keep the language the same for everybody we don't need to confuse all the normies out there all right let's go to the next section of the show in case you missed it where we keep you up to date on what happened in a fun way this is the milkman's favorite section of the show every week so in case you missed it first up Tom Brady got absolutely roasted on Netflix Netflix did a special where they got a whole bunch of celebrities together in one room to do they called it the greatest roast of all time the groat because Tom Brady is often known as The Goat in football and the I mean Kai you can tell me what you

think about I know you watched it or watched part of it on Netflix look shout out to Netflix for putting a bunch of celebrities in one room because this culturally got so much virality this week everybody was talking about this roast from both sides people saying you know the Washington Post said it was awful and a total waste of your time and ESPN said it was amazing and a whole bunch of great people in the same room uh making jokes unfortunately the best joke of the night was about crypto Nikki Glasser got up on stage and basically said that Tom Brady lost $30 million on crypto what an idiot even grank knew grank being rob gronowski me know that

not money yeah look first of all it's hilarious and it's so funny The Washington Post says it's a waste of your time like since when is laughing a waste of your time right but this is the old Boomer mentality these are the people that don't want crypto to succeed right the old old old people from the US they're just like oh you can't have fun you can't do this they don't get the crypto mindset which is hey let's freaking change the world but let's have fun doing it and let's be weird and have meme coins and do all this dumb [ __ ] Washington Post and and those kind of Boomers they just don't get it but uh I thought it was hilarious all right next up in case you missed it Bitcoin surpassed one billion transactions processed this week 800 weeks after Bitcoin launch

they have done 1 billion transactions an incredible thing that everybody in the space should be celebrating high fives all around drink some milk and celebrate one billion transaction for Bitcoin congrats to bitcoin I guess but this is the first time I'm seeing this I was just on vacation the last couple days as well but Jay 1 billion transactions since it launched like what 12 15 years ago whatever it is guys I don't know if I don't know if anyone realizes this if the Bitcoin Maxis know this but like salana does over two billion actions every single month so like it took them 15 years if that's not enough to go oh maybe there's something here with salana and other things outside of just Bitcoin then like I don't know how obvious it is but that's that's wild I did not know it

was only that much all right well I'm sure you missed this then too Kai this week Ohio State gold buck guys had their commencement their graduation for all their graduates this year and the commencement speaker was some uh previous grad who owns some like online jewelry jewelry retailer and he got up and shilled Bitcoin and I don't know if you can see on screen here I've got a video and he had actually had a like a PowerPoint presentation this is taking place in the Ohio State Bucky like football stadium like massive Stadium probably 990,000 100 thousand people fitting there and on the screen he's got Bitcoin logos and he got booed for Shilling Bitcoin he started talking

about Bitcoin he got and it gets even better the the guy who wrote the speech says that he took iasa to write the speech and then during the speech he made everyone do box breathing he told the grads to sing instead of taking anti-depressants and told him that singing is how lvia and Lithuania and Estonia earned their independence and the best part is he shared the draft of this speech with Ohio State come on that's wild Jay do you think he's getting booed for Shilling Bitcoin because people don't like crypto or because he shed a blockchain that has only done a billion transactions in 15 years when salana do

on people started chanting salana yeah I'm not a salon Maxi by the way I don't know what's going on in this episode but all right let's go to the final segment of the show agree disagree where we pull up tweets from the past week as always if you want your Tweet or a tweet that you see Fe Fe on the show make sure you tag us on Twitter and we will check it out and add it into the show first up Jack nyal says retail still isn't back never was everything so far has just been BTC plus crypto natives moving money around yeah I I agree completely someone in our Discord actually this morning had asked about retail and was like are they late this cycle like why aren't they here yet and I was like

they're not late this cycle that's that's what retail is retail is just late that's what makes the retail if they were already here they would be crypto natives or institutions right but they are retail which by definition means they are late and so retail doesn't come until late in the cycle we're still pretty early I think we're like mid cycle as I said in the market watch where we're in that trans transition period I think retail comes when we're at 100K Bitcoin and so in this transition period we are moving from that like first part of the bull phase now it's kind of we wait for a bit and then I think it's like we get into the aggressive part the 2021 stuff that's when retails here when things get crazy that's when retail is here because they are crazy and they're not here yet

so I completely agree I think the 100K is the nice round number completely agree with that BR him back yeah yeah definitely definitely you're going to see it all over mainstream media when we hit 100K okay next up legendary says the nft craze of 2021 is back but it's on blast Top Shot is back but it's fantasy top on blast new cycle new Heroes don't go into today's Bull with last cycle bags Trends and patterns the same true Innovation is rare just the city where we do business is changing very interesting take so one I mean Karly and I talked this last week too of blast or sorry blur launching on blast last week as well and there's a lot of incentives to trade on there and I was like well

will this bring a little bit of the bull market back not sure and again we were like well maybe not a bunch of the same nfts as before but interesting I mean fantasy top has has been quite active over the last couple weeks 35 million in trade in their first week fantasy top right so interesting I don't know that I agree fully like the 2021 craze is back because like I don't think we're going to get those kind of valuations not yet anyway we need retail back as we just said from the last one but I agree like it's new cycle new Heroes it's going to be different Alternatives different space and blast is probably where it all happens without a doubt in my mind so we'll see I agree with with this tweet fully and especially the last line that Trends and patterns are always the

samees in Cycles the challenge is is that in crypto we move ecosystems and we move chains and this is why trading is so hard to do in crypto and why unless you're going to follow everything very closely and move your money constantly you need to take the simple strategy of dollar cost average into the majors and not try to follow every narrative well and also like the people in the space right now are Pros retail as we just said is not here so this isn't a 2021 craze it's just a a crazy tough competition between like the pros that were here in the 20 in The nft Craze

before that and the Ico craze before that that are in memes like these are people that do this all day every day I think I talked about this with maybe it was the Anica podcast it is not like in 2021 it was easy to make money because you could front run all the retail that was just buying dumb stuff it's pretty easy to figure out that craze isn't here because retail is not here so like you're just if you go in the in the Battle Royale right now you're you're going against Pros I agree but I I don't fully agree with this take okay next up Jason Choy says whichever chain captures the first big social app will win the whole category social is inherently more Lindy than defi average users of social products are more sensitive to onboarding friction than crypto Deens meaning most won't be multi-chain decent

confidence on this I agree with this completely I mean social is what we do if you think of every app that is the most apps we use it's all about social communication in some way whether that's like Tik Tok Instagram or even like podcasts newsletters like it's all communicating with other humans essentially and so I think whichever chain can figure that out is definitely be it and if you think of who's the farthest along it's probably base right they've got frch which I mean I don't think that's the big one but like it's something playing in the world there and then they have farcaster they have dominated farcaster farcaster is obviously across other chains but they have like 90% market share right now in farcaster and then all the tokens and stuff that come with it now again don't know if either those two will be the

ones but like Bas is is definitely the one that's that's kind of like really working towards these consumer apps and then I guess so is BL is blast it's the l2s right now Sona doesn't really have a lot of social stuff at the moment but uh yeah you definitely want to see where are people like hanging out and doing social stuff because that's where where it's all going to be next up Martin says memes have value the only reason we think that they don't is because there hasn't been a good way to financialized culture internet culture post something online goes viral Millions use it reference it get intangible benefits but the current web doesn't allow for Value acral yeah I mean crypto is just a a layer for financialization and as a result that every time we get a new sort

of like technology for that we can we can basically wrap different things and tokenize different things or like we can financialized different things right the internet allowed us to financialized different things uh and now crypto is allowing us to financialized different things including internet culture which most people they can't they're like what like I I don't get that and it's so hard for people to wrap their heads around like meme coins but that's all it is we are financializing culture and that's what nfts was in 2021 too so yeah I agree and the culture of the next year especially in the US is going to revolve a lot around politics which is why political coins have become such a big thing you think political coin is the term that's going to fly political coin I have no idea I haven't thought about

that that's a good question get you back next week on that one okay next up qw says the old Playbook of building slf funding vaporware playing the hype game then getting listed on binance doesn't work anymore there's an over supply of projects and tokens and exchanges can't possibly list all of them simple math fundamentals unironically matter more than ever I agree I mean I still don't think fundamentals are a huge aspect of price action but they matter more and more every day for sure and so it's important to understand them without a doubt the thing about the um exchanges though that it the thing I do agree about this is that exchanges actually control this Market a lot more than most people think um because they choose you know what you can trade on coinbase on

binance Etc and they are very strict and they have just recently gotten extremely extremely strict you need to basically have a really strong case of why they should take your token you either have to pay them millions of dollars or you have to prove that you are going to have millions and dollars of volume in that token because that's where the the exchanges make their money and so if you don't have a massive Community or like a massive amount of people already buying and selling your token then there's no way they're going to list your your token anymore and so they are now the like Gatekeepers for crypto tokens until we all move on chain coinbase succeeds at that like these exchanges play a big big role in this EOS system that most people don't actually realize it's not easy to get your tokens on there anymore

and so now either you can't play the hype game you just actually have to have a legit project or people find a new way to create hype that gets a lot of volume on their token and then they can get on these exchanges like I mean a lot of like what Point systems and stuff are doing right now what Blast has been done really good at so like people do find ways around this so like fundamentals matter but also people find new ways to create hype and basically inflate their expectations of their token okay last one do9 this guy again why do we keep getting this guy on the for that reaction this this is why I put him up for that exact reaction thank you okay that's it that's a wrap thanks for listening no I'll give you this one okay so do a nine Kyle's

favorite Bitcoin Maxi he said says in a bull market this is actually bearish for ethereum and he's a screenshot of the average gu gwei which is the cost guay thank you the cost of uh transactions and he's showing that basically the guay is very low on ethereum right now all right I agree with this take a bull market is crazy crazy low I mean look partly it means that it means that the ethereum scaling solution is working because people using l2s because interestingly it's like it's bull market which means onchain activity is very very very high in the ethereum ecosystem and somehow ethereum is able to do that

at for way that is really good and so like part of it I disagree because you actually just need to change your perspective things are moving right activity is now elsewhere it's not on here anymore but also the whole purpose of this scaling solution is that we're still going to have some decent gas on ethereum this is pretty dang low for bull market so I don't know I kind of agree though that's kind of funny look at that never thought I'd see the day I gotta say one thing I imagine I haven't looked at the guay in a while because obviously I was off but like this must be like a 1 second I was is not this low almost ever so like I don't know where he's cherry picking this but I was gonna say you could easily cherry pick this stat so dangerous that's a wrap thanks

for listening in everybody that's the rollup for the week everybody that is watching out for the Igan Lair tge event happening today if you're listening to this on Friday I hope you guys hope you get some good money out of that Kai I hope you're looking forward to that I'm sure and have a wonderful weekend touch some grass I hope to see you guys in your our Discord if you're not already there and of course if you're not subscribed to the milroad newsletter make sure you subscribe link is in the show notes we'll see you on Twitter we'll see you around peace out thank you for listening to milk Road radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto if you like this episode share it and hit subscribe or follow so you don't miss out on the next one there's also a link in the description to our free

5minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh and if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game then we'll leave a link to milk Road Pro as well your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto is risky so you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and we'll see you in the next one