Biden vetoes SAB 121 repeal, Trump verdict, ETH ETF and Polymarket

Transcript

last Thursday Donald Trump was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records by a New York jury leading the Milkman to send him a badge for being the first US president to be convicted of a felony that same day leak suggested that President Biden had shifted to be Pro crypto and was booking meetings with leading American crypto companies then in a total shock late Friday night Biden vetoed Sab 121 clearly indicating that he is anti- crypto here's the question would you rather president felon or President veto gmgm welcome to milroad radio the easiest path to get smarter about crypto

I'm Jay Hamilton joined by Kyle rehead and we believe that onchain is the next online Kai welcome back to the show great to have you thanks for having me let's do this the whole world knows Trump was convicted so let's start with Biden here what happened on Friday this was a I guess a weird one because of all the narratives that went around last week and the week before of Biden kind of doing a 180 on crypto Biden originally said he was going to veto this sa21 bill or repeal or whatever you want to call it but then once we started I me once e ETF got approved and they started to hear that Biden was speaking with those in the crypto Community we thought okay maybe they've done a 180 and I mean

we talked about on the show last week that we thought they have done a complete 180 and crypto is going to be friendly in the US etc etc there was a few people that kept saying that week like I don't know that he's actually done a 180 it doesn't really seem like there's any evidence to support this like did was it really because of politics that the EF got approved we actually don't know that we hadn't heard is he gonna veto is he not goingon to veto and it turns out that well he vetoed it he vetoed on Friday they announced it on Friday like late Friday which generally means you're kind of hiding the news you don't want people to like hear about it and unfortunately he B basically just sent a message to the crypto Community saying hey I'm not pro crypto and this isn't going to be as

easy to think now he says he's doing it to protect investors and consumers but like I don't know that this really does it's high like basically this bill is to allow like highly regulated Banks and institutions to custody crypto for you I don't necessarily see why there's a big issue in that obviously we've had the issues with FTX and stuff so like this isn't the easiest like yes or no answer I think but this bill I think should have been approved and and I mean you had how many people in the in in Congress or in the head of whatever that actually did approve this it's a little bit weird for for Biden to come out and do this especially at this point where I mean crypto is becoming a Hot Topic in politics so probably a bit of a loss I would say I don't think it was the

smartest decision but I don't know I'm sure he has his reasons yeah obviously no surprise that us being in crypto don't think it was the smartest decision but we're not the only ones by doing this I mean quite simply Biden angered 50 million Americans that hold crypto he pissed off 60 Senators on both sides who had come together in a bipartisan support for this and as you already said he clearly demonstrated that Democrats are not pro crypto despite indicating or rumors that they were moving that way so those for those who don't know Sab 121 it is essentially piece of legislation that would require SEC accounting guidelines that direct financial institutions that

are holding crypto for customers to keep assets on their own balance sheets now essentially the outcome of that is should Banks be able to custody crypto or not and how does that impact the banking system well obviously I think most banks are seeing the direction that this is headed in and that's why hours on Friday Biden got a letter from the heads of a bunch of large American Banks saying please do not veto this like we the banks want this so we also pissed off a bunch of the banks which that's a large part of vote that just lives outside of crypto the last thing you want to be doing in an election year is

pissing off anyone and I mean I guess it's impossible to not piss people off when it comes to politics but this was just so weird it just didn't make sense in that moment there was a lot of and again we live in a crypto bubble so like yeah there's 50 million of us but like does 50 million holders of crypto in the US actually care that much I don't think the numbers are as big as crypto Twitter makes it out to be like if you were on crypto Twitter on Friday after this veto happened everyone was saying okay Biden you've lost the election there's no chance you're winning after this it's like okay guys dial it back a bit we're not that we're not that big yeah like we're not that big yet and I think people in this industry need to realize that like yes we are getting there and

there is a lot of capital we talked about last week like it is a thing it's not the biggest thing in the world yet as much as it is for us which is why if you want to vote that way you should it's just for a lot of the world it's it's not that big of a deal so I think we need to just check ourselves a little bit either way hate that he did this he's definitely put a Target on his back at least from the crypto industry and I mean the industry reacted pretty heavily from it so we'll see where things go here's the one question I have is speculation was that when the EF was approved that it was somebody High because it was such a 180 shift it happened so fast in the Final hours a lot of speculation was that it must have

come from the top that it must have been maybe Biden or somebody very high up saying hey you know what SEC push this through we this is what we want so follow our lead but clearly this indicates that it wasn't Biden so any idea what happened with the E ETF like where did that come from one of the heads of one of the companies that filed for the ETF and the Bitcoin one as well I can't can't remember his name it's Nate something or whatever on Twitter he had this Theory all along that this no news or like when the SEC wasn't saying anything he's like this is a good thing he's like they've already figured out how to get these ETFs approved with the Bitcoin one they don't need all the back and forth anymore and so his he was like the only person basically on Twitter

saying this is good news this is good news they don't need back and forth they'll just they'll approve it at the end at the last minute because there's nothing to talk about they've already know how to get these whatever the first filing is done with and so he was like they just they don't need the comments like we had with Bitcoin and he was the only one just like saying that constantly I always saw it at my feed and I was like huh but I never really thought much of it and then when it switched real quick I was like okay was this politics like it would make sense and then he sat there going guys I told you this whole time they were G to be approved it just was going to be last minute because that's just they didn't want to manipulate markets they knew

that if they said it was going to get approved they started doing all this it might kind of manipulate markets a little bit so I don't know maybe that is the truth and maybe Biden was doing nothing with crypto and there wasn't 180 turn at this point it's hard to say we don't really know um we're kind of just taking it day by day at this point and kind of seeing what's going to happen we do know Trump has obviously been very Pro crypto over the last few weeks which is great do we even know that he's actually Pro crypto like when he get if he gets elected like does he stick by what he says I nobody knows right now this is why it's like there's so much conversation about politics and with crypto and unfortunately we just don't know what the hell is going on and then

unfortunately as you said we have President veto and president what you call him convict or whatever that yeah felon that we have to decide between and it's just like I don't know it's a [ __ ] show that this is how politics works and like the leader of the I don't want to say this but most important country in the world it is in terms of like capital and it obviously dominates the markets so like it it matters to a lot of people in this world and everyone listen this podcast it matters because it's going to matter to your bags it's unfortunate that this is the situation we have to deal with okay let's go to president felon for a second here so on Thursday Trump became the first US president to be convicted of a felony he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business

records this happened in the state of New York so one funny not funny but one interesting tidbit here is that since these are actually State crimes if Trump were to be elected president he actually wouldn't be able to Pardon himself because he can only pardon himself of a federal crime so he is forever a convicted although of course he'll appeal it and this is and there's also a lot of headlines going around right now that you know Trump could go to jail highly unlikely that he goes to jail through this like I would be shocked if he did but let's talk about what was the outcome of this and how did it affect the crypto Community Kai I want to before you answer that question I want

to open up a a screen share here and show you an image of what happened with some meme coins right after this approval went through funny things maybe not so funny things but one of the things that is happening as a result of all this President veto versus president Trump is mem coins political meme coins going crazy I've got up here a chart from last week showing right after Trump was convicted the impact on Bowden mcoin and the impact on Trump mcoin one of the Trump mean coins there's many what do you think about this yeah so for those of you that are listening the Bowden token basically flipped the Trump one for like

I don't know what was it a couple minutes maybe an hour and then all of a sudden the Trump token came back and and flipped it so it's a it was a bit of a wild ride holding both of these tokens which is kind of funny it's interesting to watch both the meme coins that represent Trump and Biden then also the predictions Market you would have thought you know the president gets convicted of a felony and odds would change that he's no longer GNA be president I would say anywhere else in the world that you're president-elect potentially you know gets convicted of a felony and they they should be out of the race but in the US didn't matter the Trump token remained and actually went higher if you look at the poly Market stats it barely even impacted the the markets at all in terms of like his odds

of being elected president so it's kind of interesting to watch those play out but then also if you looked at what happened a lot of people on crypto Twitter were talking about this and a lot of people on crypto Twitter and especially companies in the space ended up donating money to Trump and I think he ended up getting was it tens of millions of dollars in donations since I think Thursday when this happened there's a lot of people like this is actually good for him because he's getting more headlines he's more in the news now I don't know if that's the case it's a weird situation to be in but people are standing by him and people are donating and want him to continue forward here so um yeah we'll see what happens this is a wild people the interesting thing here is like this

sounds wild right now it's a little bit annoying that we are talking about politics but I just want people to understand that I listening to this episode like this ain't going to stop until this is done in November politics is going to take over the news it's going to take over crypto markets this is the biggest thing that's happened in crypto for a while and the outcome here is going to matter a lot to our industry uh also just so you guys are aware and I wish I had this chart here but presidential elections during that year tend to be very bullish years for for Tech so and that's usually because along with presidential elections is the money printer so the current president needs to make sure he's giving candy out to his people so that they stay happy and

so usually they find a way to print money or whether it's printing money or finding a way to give out money in some sort of manner it becomes a very liquidity heavy year typically which goes along with what we've been talking about the show a bunch of we think liquidity is about to go up this generally happens because of Elections so elections matter because of liquidity elections matter because of Regulation obviously uh and crypto tends to be in the mix of both of those things liquidity is what moves crypto Cycles and then obviously regulation is the thing that we need right now and so deciding between Trump and and Biden is a big part of that and that's why I think the crypto industry is Banning together to to donate I think coinbase has donated who are the others Ripple I'm sure Ryan cus from Masari has

definitely been putting some money in there and there's a few others so there is a lot of the industry that's trying to help Trump out here which is just not what I thought was going to be the case about a year ago let's talk a little bit more about these predictions you mentioned the shocking news not news but the shocking you mentioned that it was a shock to see that the predictions hadn't changed so Trump's convicted a felon you look at the predictions and Trump dropped about two maybe three% and Biden went up about 3% so minor difference what is very interesting to notice is poly Market this very successful use case for crypto is

growing it actually reached all-time high in monthly volume with over 63 million in volume in May what can you tell us about poly market and these predictions and what are you seeing from a more just general business level and the crypto use case level yeah so first for those wondering Trump is at at least when this tweet came out was 54% and then so Biden would be at 46% chance I don't know if it's still at that but that's what it was at the amount of users that have came over to poly Market which is your like onchain predictions Market has just skyrocketed it's now over like 10,000 monthly active users whereas before that it was like in the low thousands so politics is bringing a lot of people on chain to play around

and bet on this I don't know that you can bet on politics in like anywhere else in the US and so people in the US that want to get you know get in on this they can do it on poly Market on chain because it's permissionless so that has been quite interesting the other thing interesting is like poly Market doesn't have a token there is not a lot of use cases in crypto that gains adoption without some sort of token incentive and Market is currently seeing that $63 million in volume I think it was last month you know tens of thousands of new users and there is no incentive to use it it's just it's a good application we kind of love to see it it's a bit weird it's politics but like of course it's very polarizing topic people want to bet on it you can't do it anywhere else so

that's a great use case I'm sure what comes with this is a bunch of more new use cases from poly Market as well and so I think we are seeing a new sector that is kind of getting borne out of this and politics is the the Catalyst to get started but I know you can bet like sports on there you can bet a bunch of other things it's not just about politics and so I think we are seeing poly Market enter this ecosystem and become a now they don't ear any Revenue yet but becoming a legitimate used protocol in this space so it's quite interesting to see that come out of this as well Kai what a wild week I hope we can go a week without talking about politics and maybe get back to just talking about crypto but as you said that might not be the case for the next

six months we'll try to we will always balance out we're not a political podcast and we're not trying to be a political podcast our goal is to make you smarter about crypto as Kai said the important thing to understand is that for the next six months and for the future what the US does around crypto in terms of Regulation is going to impact the whole world any final thoughts you have to share on where you think this might go in the next few weeks or six months or Beyond not in terms of politics but tune in to tomorrow's episode because we're going to talk about our bull case for crypto and what we think is going on in the markets right now and I think going to be an absolute Banger part of politics has to do with that but it's more looking at macro and some other indicators and

we're going to cover that tomorrow I think so make sure you check that one out look at that thanks for the plug for tomorrow's episode Kai thanks for joining us stick around to find out the top news stories of the day in case you missed it here's what happened over the weekend first up Keith Gil also known as roaring Kitty went on to Reddit and revealed he is holding $180 million in GameStop that's GM stock uh and also a combination of stock and call options uh his post on his account deep [ __ ] value caused the D gme stock to Surge 19% in overnight trading now this is Gil's first public investment in GameStop since his involvement in the 2021 short squeeze and roran Kitty's screenshot shows he's gained over 9

million on his gme Holdings and is holding a loss of nearly 2.5 million on his call options it's one thing is for sure royan Kitt is going to cause the markets to move and he's also going to cause the memec coin markets to move because a lot of memecoins moved as well as a result of this so his tweets have a large impact For Better or For Worse also what you missed the usde stable coin referred to by Athena Labs as a synthetic dollar has hit the three billion Supply Mark just four months after its public launch it is the fastest growing USD asset to reach this point in history in terms of overall stable coin Supply usde is in fourth

place with a 3.3% share of the overall stable coin Market far less than the market leader tether's dominant 57% position that's it thanks for joining us and we will see you tomorrow 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 a 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 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