Are ANY Crypto Bulls Out There or is This the End?#CryptoTownHall

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
Well, good morning, everyone.
Are there anybody out there who believes in crypto anymore? Because watching the news from Las Vegas, all I could see is literally every single person that I saw talking about prices have to fall because there's no buy interest anymore. And generally, when I see that, I always go the other way. It makes me feel better about being lonely. And, you know, it feels lonely being bullish here, thinking that we are close to the end of these doldrums. But, you know, what the hell? Curious, am I alone or am I just a complete moron? I don't know, Gary, what do you think?

**Gary** (0:45)
Never seen it more bearish. I mean, people are making shit up as it goes now. It's like really crazy.

**Scott Melker** (0:52)
I mean, I just think it's funny. All I could tell you is I'm back in Jersey.
You know, I spent eight days at the Horseshoe and Horseshoe in Paris playing at the World Series of Poker.
Every day, they were setting records. Number of people willing to try to win these big poker tournaments, even the medium poker tournaments. The last one that I set a record, it's one of the they have a nightly deep stack. It's like 400 buck, you know, tournament. And the prize pool was a record. I mean, you know, the first prize, I didn't get first prize. I got 10th, which was still not bad. First prize was $40,000 for one of these suckers. So, you know, it's, you know, there's just so many people throwing money, and I mean from everywhere, all over the world. It was crazy. But you know, whatever, I guess, you know, prediction markets are doing really well, and crypto has just had a favor. And you know, the stock market, you know, the reason SpaceX is holding up in here because there are a lot of people who are speculating. So meanwhile, you know, I'm not totally up on the crypto news, but it looks like somehow someone woke up over the last couple of days and decided, wait a minute, you mean, you're not going to be able to make, you know, tether size margins on stable coins? Maybe we shouldn't value your company as if you can. I mean, what's going on there, Carlo?

**Carlo** (2:11)
I mean, yeah, this was a this was a big announcement yesterday, and it's definitely drawn a lot of attention from the space because at its core, what is the purpose of the audience?

**Scott Melker** (2:25)
Why don't you just repeat what the announcement was? Sorry.

**Carlo** (2:28)
Yeah, yeah, I'll set the table. So yesterday we had a huge announcement come out of a consortium of businesses that all appear to be supporting the release of OUSD.
140 of finance's biggest names joined in the support and endorsement of this, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, American Express, Coinbase, BlackRock, a lot of banks, a lot of fintechs, a lot of crypto platforms, and it tanked the price of Circle yesterday because what this announcement essentially did is it basically reshaped how the revenue goes to the stablecoin issuer because what they're proposing in their announcement, and I'm going to put the article that I put out today on the stablecoin strategist up there for anyone who wants to dig deeper in this is, they're basically saying that we're not going to take the treasury returns as the issuer and use that as our profit margin anymore.
For a small transactional fee, we're going to pass all of that directly on to the businesses that are part of this consortium. And this really impacted the price of of Circle stock yesterday dropped like 17% because it basically turns the entire revenue model at Circle. And frankly, every stablecoin issuer, including potentially Tether, have built their business model on. So Jeremy Allaire responded back yesterday in a long post and basically said, look, consortiums like this have not typically been successful because it's like herding cats. And in this case, it's herding cats that are competitive in the same industry. And look, the bottom line is Circle still enjoys huge network effects, huge advantage as a leader, because this particular OUSD token is not even live yet. So the stock is rebounded today about 5%.
I'm not surprised by that. But Circle definitely has some challenges going forward because they're not going to be able to depend exclusively on the revenue they make on custody and treasuries anymore. And there are some regulatory wrinkles that I talk about in my article that I'm curious to see how the businesses that get these rewards through this program spend those rewards. If they push them back to the consumer, that could be a regulatory trap that I'm looking at right now as the rules are currently being written for Genius Act regulation. But this is not by any means the death of Circle, in my opinion. It is a challenge. But there's also a challenge for this OUSD, Dave, because it's not a proven product yet.