Is Bitcoin Really a Safe Haven Right Now?

Transcript

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Bits and Bips the interview, the show where crypto and macro collide one basis point at a time. My name is Steve Ehrlich, head of research at Shapelink and also your host. We've got a terrific episode for you today, but before we begin, uh let's take a brief moment to hear from some of the sponsors who make this show possible. Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create 50 billion dollars in enterprise value for 80 plus clients over the past 4 years. They're the partner to help navigate markets. Build real traction today at multichainadv.com.

Quick note before we get into today's episode. Bits [music] and Bips now has its dedicated feed. We're spinning off from the Unchained feed and moving to a new podcast [music] and YouTube channel. So, if you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make [music] sure to subscribe to Bits and Bips directly. We won't publish there until March, but subscribe today so you can be ready for launch. Be sure [music] to subscribe to the new feed at unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbips. All right, welcome back. So, my guest today is Lawrence Frauscher. He is a research analyst at Kaiko and we're going to discuss everything from markets collapsing across all asset classes in light of the uh uh the surge in energy pricing uh as well as some some news

that has popped up over the last uh couple of days that actually should be bullish for crypto, uh namely the launch of of Temple's mainnet and sort of the agenda commerce wars that are coming. And we're also going to touch on tokenization, Nasdaq getting its long-awaited clearance from the SEC to begin offering tokenized versions of stocks alongside its traditional order book. So, much to discuss, uh uh but before we begin and I introduce my guest, uh just as always, everything that you hear on the show, uh none of it is financial or investment advice.

Please see unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbips for full disclosures. And with that, welcome Lawrence. Thank you, Steven. Thanks for having me on the show. Happy to be here. Yeah, uh thrilled to have you as well. So, let's really dive right in. Uh as I was preparing the show a few hours ago, uh I was sort of debating whether or not to uh characterize Bitcoin as sort of remaining as a safe haven amidst this geopolitical crisis in Iran. Um it dropped yesterday along with most other assets in light of the Fed holding rates steady and sort of cautious commentary from Fed Chairman Jerome Powell about the impact of uh persistent or the potential for persistent inflation because of everything happening in in

the Gulf. Uh as we are recording now, I believe Bitcoin has dropped under 69,000 uh even though it it is still beating metals and and and some of the other assets that are are doing even worse. But, let's just start right there. I mean, what are you seeing and uh and and kind of like how are you monitoring all of this on Kaiko's platform? Um in terms of how we're monitoring Bitcoin, we we usually look at liquidity and how that's changed over the past couple months. And what we can see is that since the 10th of October, which was which was obviously a a huge hit for the market, um liquidity has dropped from 25 million um on average at 1% from the mid price to 15 million on average. And because of

that, we also see that there's a lot more volatile moves happening in the past few months like we saw the short squeeze rally from 60k to 72 74-ish K in the past 2 3 weeks. Um on top of that, we've seen 30% 40% and reduced volumes. And this, of course, has all uh a lot of impact on how investors are approaching crypto right now. Is it a safe haven asset or not? Um we can discuss that later as well. Currently, I would say that BTC has been outperforming gold purely because gold has had a rally has had a very aggressive rally earlier in the year, whereas now it's leveling

out a bit uh comparatively speaking. Um yeah, I would say that in terms of infrastructure, there's a lot of good things happening in the in the cryptosphere. You have the CFTC and the SEC finally giving clarity as to how majors should be um presented. They're not they're not securities anymore. Some of them are commodities and that's all very good in terms of how institutions should approach crypto. Okay, yeah, a lot to kind of unpack there. So, let's kind of get to it piece by piece. I want to uh go deeper into what you're saying in terms of of Bitcoin and and sort of I guess it's relative buoyancy compared to other traditional

safe haven at least over the last uh week or two. It it it briefly touched on 76,000 just just a few days ago. It's obviously down since then. Uh on my show last week, uh we had Andy Bear from GSR and and he sort of mentioned what you just discussed too, that um sort of the competing narratives as to whether or not Bitcoin's functioning as a safe haven because people now see it as a safe haven or is it just um sort of the a reversion to the mean from uh gold just surging over the last year year and a half and Bitcoin being punished along with tech stocks that had been hammered over the last few weeks because of AI fears. And and again, maybe it was just things sorting

themselves out. I'd love for you to just go a little deeper and and sort of uh explain like how did you see the last few weeks? And then how does that play into what we're seeing right now where where Bitcoin is uh sort of teetering it it's straddling the $70,000 line. I'm seeing some analysts predicting a drop back down to to 65,000, perhaps further, uh especially if uh energy prices remain higher for longer. So, so maybe please just provide a little more context. Yeah, so um what we also saw in the in the past few weeks is that when we bottomed early February, we saw open interest finally stabilizing in the perps market.

And because of that, a lot of force selling finally stopped stopped that bleeding that we previously saw. And because a lot of shorts also jumped into that um or started betting on a breakdown in that 60k region, we we saw funding rates going negative slightly and immediately saw whiplash back upwards. Um namely after the first part of the let's say the geopolitical conflict in Iran was concluded alongside with oil prices rising and and switching a lot around compared to comparative to BTC.

And what we could also see is that due to institutional flows kind of stabilizing us around that 60k region with uh ETF flows finally flipping positive after I believe 3 months of of negative outflows, that has helped us stabilize in this 60 to 70k region. And whether or not this is the bottom, liquidity metrics would say we still need to reaccumulate and slow down a little bit and make sure that things are settled properly before

shouting oh, we're going back to 100k, right? And and that's going to need time to rebuild that investor confidence like I mentioned earlier. If you look at market depth, it's down 40 to 50% volumes are down 30% and that all needs to increase in order for us to say like oh hey, actually Bitcoin is a safe haven asset. We can use it as an inflation hedge because because right now it's more function functioning as a high beta tech stock rather than a inflation hedge where you can which you can well buy to hedge inflation. And what we also see is that since yesterday after the Fed announcement, the S&P finally started

moving a little bit, which obviously is because of um growth fears and inflation fears. And BTC as a result of that, BTC also sold off a little bit after seeing a brief deviation above uh 72 to 74k. Okay. I'm I'm curious. I mean, you track retail and institutional flows, but are there any notable um uh differences or divergences in in behavior geographically? Uh do you see more of it coming from from Asia versus the US? Uh or or are there any ways any particular like subsections of of the crypto buying community that are worth pointing out?

Yeah, what we saw in the past 3 months is that um Asia used to sell a lot in the past 6 months in general. And that has now shifted from Asia is actually buying in the past 3 months with cumulative returns per session being up 0.2%. But, compare that to the EU and the US session, which is down minus 11 to minus 12%. So, we're seeing some buying from Asia finally after selling off a lot, whereas the US and EU are still selling consistently. However, important to note is that we are still very dependent on Coinbase flows. And whenever uh the Coinbase

premium comes back, we do see an uptick in BTC price. And we do see that BTC uh moves more favorably to the upside as opposed to when that uh Coinbase premium isn't present. Okay, and is interesting. I mean, we've we've spoken about the Coinbase premium before on on the show. Uh but for people that may not be familiar with it, I mean, can you just talk a little about like what are the ranges for the numbers and and where is it right now and what kind of is uh where does that fit contextually in history?

Yeah, so usually um when we speak about a Coinbase premium, what we what we mean is that the price on Coinbase is spot exchange is higher than Binance or Bybit spot exchange. That can range from $50 to $500. Currently, it's only a 0.2% or it was only a 0.2% increase, I believe, from from Binance's spot books. But we we do notice that traders are actively looking at this premium to position themselves into the market, be it short or long.

Uh which is a very interesting thing to keep monitoring as well. And um something I forgot to touch upon earlier as well in terms of liquidity. Uh if we compare open interest uh 6 months ago before the uh before the October 10th, we had 35 billion in open interest um across the market, whereas now it's it's 15 billion. And that also needs to recover for us to signal, okay, hey, we're recovering here. Things are looking up again. Um maybe we're going to um break market structure here and move back to the upside above 72 to 74K. And we can take it from there.

Okay. And what about long longer dated derivatives, long-term derivatives? Just to kind of span out to the to the um further out into the year. How are uh traders positioning themselves? Especially, I don't know if there's been any interesting or recent movement because of how volatile energy markets have been in particular of the last 12 this one of 24 hours. Um there's a there's a 2 billion options expiry tomorrow, which isn't long dated, of course. Um but that's something that needs monitoring here because um it's a it's a big options expiry in the sense that max pain is at 70K and currently we're at 69K, which means everyone's losing money based on theta

decay, right? But looking at longer dated options, we can see a lot of people are still betting on uh BTC going to 100K over the next 6 months, especially the December options expiry is a very interesting one to watch, which is usually heavily traded a year um months in advance. As well as puts heavily betting on the on us going to 40 to 50K, something we're also seeing in prediction markets, even though those markets are a lot smaller, right? Um so it's either 50K or 100K in terms of the price that we currently are and where we could go, it's it's more focused on on short dated options across

the market. And I I know crypto markets in general tend to be highly correlated especially during um acute periods of of market stress. But are are you seeing any interesting behaviors for assets beyond Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, XRP, or uh even I know I know hype uh hype hyperliquid what hype token has has obviously been doing well because of so much activity on on that platform. But are there any other assets that are worth kind of calling out that are either doing particularly well or or have been struggling uh in light of everything going on?

And like you mentioned already, um hyperliquid, of course, which has seen tremendous increase in terms of volumes, mainly due to equity perps launching on um their hit tree um block, right? Um Other than that, I feel like the overall crypto market is struggling pretty heavily and and it everything is super correlated. Um people are focusing more and more on stablecoin chains. Um you have um Paradigm and Paradigm and Temple launching stuff. Argus launching their um Circle is launching their arc blockchain, right? And in that layer, you also have plasma, which is super interesting but

I feel like layer one blockchains are kind of moving away from this traditional way of building a chain and they're now more focusing, okay, we're going to build an app app-centric chain in the sense that we're going to build a chain that only does stablecoin payments or going to do a chain that only does DeFi. And that's an interesting development as opposed to how crypto was approached a couple years ago in the sense that it was super cypherpunk. Uh we wanted to be decorrelated from the financial system, whereas now everything is converging and

we're trying to get on these traditional payment rails. We're trying to use stablecoins for real world payments. We're trying to launch um US tokenized treasuries and getting guilds on chain and and making sure we can use money market funds as collateral. So, I would say that's that's another interesting development in the crypto market in the recent in last, let's say, three to six months, which is accelerating and I think the infrastructure for that is being built right now and and we'll see we'll definitely see use of that in the future as well. Mhm. Yeah, and we're going to get a lot more into stablecoins and sort of the agentic uh payment wars for lack of a better term uh in just a few minutes. But I just want to tie the I I guess uh tie the bow

or tie the knot on the the the macro markets discussion that that we're having here. Uh as we're talking, it's been a big rate week. I mean, the US held rate steady. Um ECB held rate steady. Uh Bank of England held rate steady. I think I think Australian Central Bank actually raised rates. Uh but everyone is sort of um changing expectations um factoring in or anticipating zero cuts perhaps this year even some rate hikes just given how uh fears of persistent inflation because of energy uh and high energy prices is it's just really kind of uh causing a lot of fear and panic as this war, which I think is entering its third week, is is going on longer and

longer and expanding geographically. Uh do you see anything else? Uh do you have any other big predictions? Are you I know your platform, your your company, you you you track how the like the smart money is is moving, positioning. Uh we're going to get into stablecoins in a section and how people may or may not be moving into those. I know that uh a lot of traders, I think there was a Bank of America survey that pointed out that um uh fund managers have moved into cash at highest levels in in quite a long time. Uh is there anything else that you're seeing um related to the current market dynamics today and how they're positioning in the future that's worth mentioning?

Yeah um we've had all this positive news, right? Like we mentioned earlier with the CFTC and the SEC finally properly mentioning and stating what crypto assets actually are and how we should use them. And personally, I expected a lot more of a positive reaction from from crypto side. Like uh a good trader once told me or actually a a trader I still speak to regularly is that the reaction to the news is more important than the news itself. And as of right now, we haven't really reacted that positively. But to dive more into the macro aspect, what I what I also think is important to to

consider is that financial financial conditions um matter a lot more than than Fed rates. And financial conditions are driven by geopolitical issues or like geopolitical clarity, sorry, or lack thereof. And which in turn is largely driven also by market performance. What we can also see or what we saw is that financial conditions started tightening long before the Fed started hiking. And they started loosening long before this hiking cycle was was getting into stride. So, looking at CME options as well, um odds of no cuts jumped to 33 33% from from 5% uh in the past 48 hours, I

believe. And yet the S&P is still only down, let's say, a mere 4 to 5%. It was 2% prior to to yesterday's Fed meeting. And I think um one of the reasons of extended hold rates is that um the market uh the market price long-term inflation expectations uh they seem to be stable. But despite expectations of oil pri- oil prices rising and and um staying there for quite a while, I I still think it's quite concerning how um the US market is seemingly um

or at least the indices um like the S&P are still pretending like the traders positioning into them are still pretending like nothing is happening. Like, for example, here in Europe, uh rate hikes are showing up in market expectations, like you already mentioned. And if this causes any issues in in global stock markets, we'll probably also see any impact on on US indices as investors will just likely try to sell what they can. And um banks don't really ease into into oil shocks because it it increases inflation and and it decreases growth because uh spending goes down.

Yeah, I mean, a lot to discuss there. I mean, it's it's kind of curious that that divergence between the US and the EU that you mentioned um because one of the things I'm watching, too, and I'm sure you are as well. The US is is more self-sufficient when it comes to to to energy, whereas Europe is highly dependent on imported like natural gas in particular. So, it would make sense that at least like US-based indices might be a little more resilient than than in Europe, but I mean also just like the nature of flows like passive flows into some of these big ETFs and stuff. It's just not sometimes they're just not as reactionary as as perhaps um we may want. And and and you're right you're sort of the idea that you mentioned about like

credit conditions, liquidity tightening before we actually see the associated impact in um in indices. That that's pretty curious, too. I mean it makes me think uh maybe things aren't entirely related, but it makes me think of just everything that's happening in in private credit especially in the US. I think the Bank of America actually just had to walk back a um a memo where they recommend to clients shorting I think 17 different stocks European stocks that were exposed to to private equity uh private credit I mean and uh and just kind of waiting for more dominoes to fall there, but I I know whenever we start looking for conditions tightening we look for defaults etc.

etc. So, um that that is something uh that was a good point that you that you brought up. All right. So, we're going to turn the page to a few perhaps bullish catalysts for crypto, but before we do let's just take another quick break so we can hear from some of the sponsors who make the show possible. Multichain Advisors is an emerging technology growth firm that has helped create over $50 billion in enterprise value for more than 80 clients like Piff, MoonPay Commerce, and Wormhole. They've worked with some of the largest and most impactful companies in the space. They're the partner you want when you're navigating markets and trying to break out from the noise. They help navigate TGEs, go-to-market BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations,

and more driving execution from launch to scale. Their results are measurable. To learn more and start building real traction today, visit multichainadv.com. Quick note before we continue with today's episode. Bits and Bips now has its own dedicated home. We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel focused on the Fed, macro, AI, and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and macro meets crypto breakdowns, make sure you're following Bits and Bips directly. [music] We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one.

You can [music] find the new Bits and Bips channels at unchainedcrypto.com/bitsandbips. You can also find us by searching Bits and Bips [music] on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. All right, and we're back. So, for you I I think really since ChatGPT exploded on the scene a couple years ago, people have been trying to marry crypto and AI and talk about how they go together uh the the the the synergies etc. But it looks like it's finally happening. Um we are uh uh Coinbase made a lot of waves I think last year uh November during one of their product demo days, and I don't even think this was one of the big products that they

were launching, but with their X402 uh payment standard for agentic commerce uh Tempo just went live with the mainnet with its own machine-to-machine uh payments protocol, and everyone is talking about agentic commerce and and bots transacting with each other um at the has to humans for all sorts of of reasons and uh and use cases. So, I'd like to just kind of throw to you kind of open-ended Lorenzo. I mean what are what are you seeing in terms of of agentic commerce? Like what are your expectations for for how this sector can grow and perhaps most importantly uh with many different offerings now out there what do you think is going to sort of

delineate or demarcate the winners from the losers? Great question. I would say that something very important to note here is that if agentic commerce is is going to let's say revenue revolutionize the way we're we're doing things is that they need robust pricing and proper pricing mechanisms because some of these agents they they operate operate at their own peril, and if they if they start doing transactions that are worth a dollar at at 3 cents, you're going to lose a lot of money or you're going to make a lot of money regardless of which which counterparty you are. And

in terms of how the market can can grow, it's it's I think it it goes hand in hand with how stablecoins are growing and how they are being used in terms of um on-chain capabilities, and it's a trillion-dollar market. There's multiple researches also done by McKinsey I believe. There's probably more out there. Um we've seen um Coinbase's X402 processing uh $34 million in volume. Uh Google is launching a payments protocol, so everyone's trying to jump on the hype train, and it's going to be very interesting to see how that converges alongside stablecoins because in 2025 we saw 33 trillion in in

stablecoin volume. That was all done by humans or probably mostly done by humans, so it's very interesting to see how that is or very interesting to um observe how that's going to grow as we see more agentic payments launch and how that's going to slot into TradFi as well as crypto as well as just e-commerce in general. Yeah. It's one of the things that like I'm trying to to track and I would imagine you you might be as well is really figuring out how to um get a real sense of activity like upticks in activity when it comes to these types of bots because

like if you create some basic bot on Claude or or or ChatGPT or or whoever. I'm I'm not a coder, so I'm not really um able to go too deep into this. You might create uh like I'll I'll make a task for something I'm doing at ShortLink, and it'll create 10 different bots for me doing 10 different things simultaneously. And then once it's done, it goes away. Uh like we'll we'll look at something like like network addresses. I think that's a that's a common uh metric that we try to use to to understand uh actual usage of of a blockchain like Ethereum, Solana Bitcoin whatever.

Um I could see like an exponential increase in new wallets, new new addresses. Um but they're not persistent, and they they don't go on forever. And and when it comes to to stablecoins, too, like uh you can make a quite you could say well these new types of blockchains with uh micro payments to stablecoins a lot more payment volume, but the value may like unless there's going to be new use cases that were not priorly um viable before agentic commerce. Like you may not necessarily see a huge surge in in volume. Uh what do you like how do you think about this problem? Like what are some of the the numbers or or metrics that you think will be really helpful in sort of

getting a sense of of true adoption of agentic commerce? Well, I would say looking at looking at unique addresses, looking at how these transactions are conducted, where they're going. Is it just like spam being conducted to inflate numbers, right? I saw a paper saying recently that um the volumes on on um well, the um the unique addresses on USDT are a lot different compared to those on on USDC. So, that's all metrics we're looking at uh via blockchain monitoring um solution we built to to look on-chain.

But what I would also look at is how can we use these agents to actually, like you mentioned, do something that previously wasn't possible, right? Do we really need these agents right now? Is it actually useful for us to use them? Because I I might just do it myself. I I might just order whatever I want to order myself. If we're talking about trading, that becomes a whole other thing, right? Because you can start automating your system, can start automating strategies.

You can um do a lot more things on-chain, especially the way blockchain interop is interoperable with AI. So, that opens two different pathways in the sense that from a let's say a retail perspective is it useful for me to put an agent on this? Does that agent need to do transactions for me? And on the other hand, you would have to let's say from a trader perspective how can I automate this strategy? How can I make sure that agent isn't going to make any mistakes for me? And how can I make my life easier and and more, let's say, put it on autopilot from a from that point of view. Yeah, cuz the

last thing you'd ever want is one of your agents like accidentally revealing a private key or or or I I I was reading some things about like at some point the Nigerian prince scam's going to come for AI agents, and then some some benevolent agent is going to want to say here, I'll help you. Here's $500,000 of of USDC, and and and and what do you do then? Um so, it it is kind of fascinating. I I do want to ask you a kind of a more I guess like foundational or theoretical question about um about this debate because it is coming up now. Uh I mean we're seeing like Coinbase X402. Uh I believe it's on Ethereum and and Solana, but but but correct me if if I'm wrong where it enables uh payments and it actually shipped a couple of big

upgrades either yesterday or the day before to sort of make it so that almost any ERC-20 token can be used in these types of payments as opposed to I think just before it was was USDC. Uh but Stripe uh Tempo I mean they're their protocol it's very different. It's it's much more efficient, but it's sort of like batches transactions instead of like settling them um uh on a gross level and it it raises the same debates I think that came up when when Tempo was first uh uh created or ideated or or sort of revealed to the world that is it really a blockchain or is it just some sort of is it just a permission database? And you might be seeing this battle between

the permission database and then the permissionless databases or permissionless blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, etc. going after these um these uh these uh agentic payments. And and it's not just uh an educational or or or like academic debate because investors who are listening to this show and again and uh this is not financial advice, but they're going to wonder where should I put my tokens? Like like should um like should we buy into these these protocols or uh actually I'm I'm I'm actually forgetting if Stripe is private or not. I think Stripe may have been purchased by Visa, but I'll have to I'll have to double-check on that. Um but how should they think about allocating assets to uh

in light of like this big divide in different agentic payment offerings? I think it very much depends as to what you want to use your assets for. Um as you mentioned it's permissionless. Um some of these other blockchains may pose as permissionless, but actually they're fully centralized. That's a completely different debate of course. And I think it also will depend as to how well the infrastructure of said blockchains is integrated into the financial system or into Visa or into MasterCard right?

Um you don't want like I think the the average retail user doesn't really care which tech stack is underneath they just want it to work and I think uh Luke Nets mentioned it on on one of your podcasts a couple weeks ago as well like I I don't care if if Instagram or Twitter is built with Python or any other coding language, right? I just want it to work and I want to know and I want to be able to use it on a very in a very easy and understandable way. So I think the infrastructure layer is very important and it it needs to be robust, pricing needs to be correct

all of these mechanisms need to be in place, but once I start using the app or once I start doing payments be it agentic payments or not it needs to be seamless and it needs to just work. Yeah. Click of a button or two, right? Yeah. You don't want to be um entering a complex EVM address and also to to your point earlier with um AI agents going rogue, right? Some of these AI agents they're they've been um susceptible to address poisoning. I'm not sure if you're familiar to the topic, but for those that aren't address

poisoning is when you get sent a token that with that ends in the same few letters that your address ends, but the the things in the middle so the address in the middle is completely different and some agents have been able to getting tricked by that. So that's another extra layer of security you would have to add into these um agentic payment lay agentic payment bots, let's say before you can fully ship them and start using them. Mhm.

Yeah, and those are all really really good points and uh I just want to I don't know if correct, but update something I said before so Stripe is a private company. I it's a partner of Visa and the card networks, but it's it's a it's a private company. So the choice isn't buying stock in Stripe or or or one of the other blockchains, but uh I guess maybe buy into Visa or some of the card networks that that might utilize uh Tempo. But uh and the other point you mentioned too is is kind of interesting as well. I mean AIs are not going to necessarily I guess have the same type of brand loyalty um or blockchain loyalty that humans will. I mean perhaps theoretically you could tell your AI to prefer one over over another the same way that like I um

I I have certain preferences for for payment rails for different types of financial transactions that I agree in, but for the most part they'll probably try to do it as cheaply as as possible. So perhaps like they might try using Ethereum L2 one day, then they might use Sui another day, Solana, etc. So uh it is whatever you tell them to optimize for that that's what it's going to be. So it's going to be really fascinating to kind of see how um sort of the the wars or I guess the the winners the breakdown between the winners and losers when um agentic commerce really becomes more mature than than it is now. Okay, so we just have a couple of minutes left. I want to touch base on two other topics. One one you mentioned

uh sort of the muted reaction to the market from sort of the interpretive guidance jointly issued by the CFTC and and the SEC. Uh I actually have a take on that that I'd like to to share with you and and maybe you could react it just have the discussion. I personally wasn't surprised at much of that the market kind of shrugged um for two reasons. One, a lot of what was already in there I think has already either been common expectations, common knowledge, or has already been issued under prior guidance or through sort of um the conclusion of various like legal entanglements like lawsuits against the SEC for like whether or not like ETH is a security.

Uh the SEC had already issued guidance highlighting how like sort of updating what Gary Gensler put out or the SEC under Gensler that staking isn't necessarily a security. Um so a lot of those types of things were already kind of in the in the air supply. The same thing with NFTs that NFTs assuming that they're just NFTs or meme coins are not securities that also wasn't new. So I wasn't surprised by that and then I mean as as I'm sure you know interpretive guidance is kind of the lowest level of sort of a a statement that the SEC can make. It's not um like a formal rule that went through kind of a a process where they solicited feedback from the from the community and uh while this was a positive step forward and it

was a nice signal that the SEC and CFTC are playing nice together although they've been doing it for for a year and a half or so at this point everybody wants clarity. Everybody wants the law and at some and I know I think Senator Lummis said that I believe she put out a statement yesterday or the day before highlighting or saying the clarity is going to pass out of committee by the end of April which would be tremendously welcome news, but there's still two big issues that need to be worked out. One is the yield question which really should have been handled under genius, but that ship has sailed and then two uh I guess the the question of whether or not President Trump, his family, close advisers are

allowed to participate in crypto during this whole process and those have been long largely intractable issues and as you know rules and and guidance they can be reversed like that when there's a new whenever someone new enters as SEC chair. So that's kind of my take. I'm I'm curious if you have any reaction to that. I I was particularly surprised to the muted reaction because with the current administration I feel like we've been in a to to to coin it a headline super cycle, right? The market has been very reactive to headlines.

So in terms of that I was quite surprised the market didn't really react. Maybe it it maybe it was partially priced in already because we did move from from 60k all the way up back to to 72 74k, right? Which could have been that preliminary preliminary positioning. Um so yeah that would be that would be my my idea my take on it and to add on to your point of the Trump family being allowed to do what they're currently doing I I think we can all look at it and be like yeah, that's not right. Um in a recent research report what we did we could see that

um World Liberty Financial um started selling off 6 to 12 hours before the 10th of October crash. So before Trump announced his his tariffs back then. So from a speculated speculative angle and also from a regulatory angle it's it's very much of a of a gray area from a red area how uh people are operating or how the administration the administration is operating operating currently. Yeah. So it will be interesting to just kind of see what happens um with with everything there. I know we're all hoping for uh for clarity

to uh or or market structure if it's clarity or some of the bills that that pass into law so that uh it the rules of the game can't change from administration to to administration and we'll we'll just have to see what happens there. And uh related to your kind of like uh buy the rumor sell the news point of view, I it is kind of fast usually when I see news that people sell off of or buy into, it's almost like a surprise like when BlackRock filed for its Bitcoin ETF. But but like you said, uh a lot of other things like like the like the actual trading of the ETFs like uh just to pick one example, those are have been priced in cuz they're well telegraphed. And and I I know that this interpretive guidance was also coming.

So so who knows? All right. Well, um we actually have to to leave it there, but before I go, uh Lawrence, I just want to give you a chance to um for provide any final thoughts, anything that we didn't get a chance to to discuss uh before we move on. I'd something, but I just lost it. Um Yeah, I was I was um Oh, I lost it. I was thinking about the fact how I'm very excited about how we're moving forward from a regulatory perspective and how that's all super positive for the industry, which makes me very optimistic, right? If we we um just wait for the market to to slowly

recover here. I think it's going to be very exciting few years into the future, right? Not not intraday or in the next 2 3 months, but all this clarity being built by US regulators, by regulators across the world. We're We're also seeing uh regulators in Korea and Japan trying to fully embrace um Bitcoin and crypto as a whole, trying to integrate it into their financial system. So that's all very positive developments and yeah, I'm excited for the future and I hope we can um contribute with Kaiko to to build that financial infrastructure, which is something we're very busy with right now. And I'll I'll like to leave it at that. Okay, great. Steven. All right.

Yeah, yeah, thank you for coming on on Bits N' Bips.