Bitcoin SHATTERS Its 200-Week Floor – Worst Week Since FTX

**Scott Melker** (0:01)
Bitcoin shattered its 200-week floor, closing the worst week since FTX. Absolutely absurd, but as you know, I find talking about price often far less interesting than talking about the fundamentals and what's being built underneath. And there are some amazing products and developments that are happening. Today to talk about that, I have my friend Austin Fadera. We're gonna dive into the markets, everything that they're building over at Double Zero, and more.
What is up, everybody? Happy Wednesday, and welcome to the show. I am currently in anonymous city, created on a screen, but it looks nice. Looks nice. Austin's gone for extreme anonymity. White wall, we have no idea where you are. You're in the vault. I like it. I don't know what city this is, but I like it. Farming, yeah.
I'm in New York. Well, there you go, man. It's funny, because the last time I think I saw you in person was probably in Paris, which was a while ago.

**Austin Fadera** (1:14)
Yeah.

**Scott Melker** (1:15)
Some party under a bridge that-

**Austin Fadera** (1:17)
Oh, that was a good one.

**Scott Melker** (1:19)
Yeah.

**Austin Fadera** (1:19)
The Coinbase one, right?

**Scott Melker** (1:20)
Yeah. Now, you can't go to Paris anymore, because if you're in crypto, sadly, it's kind of a crazy story. Okay. So listen, we can start by, I guess, just talking briefly about where the market is. I actually kind of find it crazy when I saw the data that we are, in fact, at the worst point, arguably, since FTX or that we had the worst week, because it just doesn't, to me, maybe I'm just mature, but it doesn't feel like the same level of doom and gloom that we had back then. I mean, we've had like this existential, it's all over, maybe they're going to regulate or legislate us out of existence. I don't feel like that anymore.

**Austin Fadera** (1:58)
Yeah. It's interesting. I think part of why FTX felt so hard, not just because I was working for the Solana Foundation at the time, but because it felt so uncorrelated to the rest of the market.
It was truly a crypto crash outside of any sort of external factors in it. I think what feels maybe different now is, again, my pet theory here is that the giant sucking sound we hear from equities markets and crypto markets is the two largest IPOs in recent memory and maybe human history. We have SpaceX, we have Anthropic.

**Scott Melker** (2:33)
And OpenAI is like yesterday, yeah, two days ago.

**Austin Fadera** (2:36)
Yeah, right. OpenAI has got this whole like foundation thing they're working on to try and make the for-profit company actually like a thing they can IPO.
And you know, it's just like the cost of capital has gone up. I was talking to some bond folks and they were talking about how like US treasuries might go up, not because people don't want US treasuries, but they would much rather have AI debt, which is like such a weird, interesting, I think this is the first time in human history that we've seen a debt instrument of a private lender be more preferable to a debt instrument of a sovereign government outside of like lending to like, you know, Elon Musk personally or something like that. It's very interesting.

**Scott Melker** (3:14)
Yeah, I mean, where do you put STRC in that conversation?

**Austin Fadera** (3:18)
Oh, I had someone describe this to me as it's a Ponzi, but it's a good Ponzi. And I was like, man, come on.

**Scott Melker** (3:26)
I mean, I mean, I two months ago, but structurally preferred have existed forever. And I guess I don't think that's unique to them. If that's your view on STRC, I think it's just the view on preferred. Right.

**Austin Fadera** (3:37)
Yes. Yes.

**Scott Melker** (3:39)
I agree with you on the sucking sound, though. I think that, you know, I mean, that's actually the narrative that Sailor gave last week for Bitcoin going down. I'm not saying that Bitcoin went down specifically last week because of these IPOs, but I do think that's been a part of the general downward trend. We're just not the cool kids in the room anymore, you know? And like when you have this much liquidity that's going to be needed to pour into these very popular things, people are going to start selling things. And crypto always seems to be the tip of the spear for things that get sold off at least slightly, you know, in advance of a big event.

**Austin Fadera** (4:12)
Yeah. But we've also got like, you know, Palantir is at like a local minimum as well. Like it is stuff that's more, I would say, broader spectrum and companies that, you know, there's no reason from an AI perspective, Palantir should be a risky stock to own or something like that. I think it's just this, it were an interesting moment in the market where it feels like no one knows where to put any capital. And they're just waiting to feel what happens with SpaceX and Anthropic.