Bitcoin’s $59K Test Is Coming As Korea Crashes – Caitlin Long

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
Of support as Bitcoin trades down today alongside tech, and of course, the Korean stock market that plunged down 10% just today and hit a circuit breaker again. We're going to talk about that, but we've got, I think, far more interesting things to talk about today with Andrew Tillman and very special guest, Caitlin Long. We're going to dive into all that right now.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to my mountainous retreat in Middle Earth. I literally never know what's gonna be back there behind me until it happens, and that one really looks like I'm living among the elves. Good morning to Tilvin, Andrew, and Caitlin.

**Caitlin Long** (0:51)
Good morning. Hey, good morning.

**Scott Melker** (0:54)
All right, so Liz, I guess we can start really quickly with what's happening in markets, and then we'll be able to move beyond it. So here, you know, Bitcoin falls under 63K as a tech selloff drags, risk assets lower. We got SpaceX down again. I think this has been dragging the entire market, or at least defining what's going on. Of course, we have STRC down at 87 bucks. All good things. And South Korea down nearly 10%.
I don't know if you guys saw the recent story at the beginning of June that South Korean retirees had decided to sell off all their insurance and savings to buy the top of AI tech with leveraged ETFs. So I don't think we can be particularly surprised that that's down now.

**Andrew Tillman** (1:41)
There are short term stories and there are long term stories. So you go ahead with those headlines and I'll raise you this headline. In 2016, the NASDAQ was at 4,900. It's up 600% since then.
So I always find it interesting that on any given day and any given show, the one right behind me in my ear, the news is always slanted to the downside, like the next problem is coming or is here or the next or the next or the next. Meanwhile, over any given year, almost any given quarter at this point, markets go higher. So take any possible opportunity with downside of any kind and invest, get involved. I think we're also at a really, really unique moment as it relates to crypto assets, Bitcoin and others, where there's a continued malaise, a continued downside. You know, I see Hunter Horsley is out there, you know, talking about just the building that's happening. And we've got a meaningful builder on the show here today.
No, that's not Tillman. It's actually Caitlin.
The amount of building that's going on in our space is going to bear huge amounts of fruit. That's just the truth. And so, you know, there may be, you know, negative news. There may be malaise in the space and there may be people that have exited. We've seen people exit. But at the same time, people that build and bear markets have just an enormous bounty waiting on the other side. So I'm encouraged. I'm encouraged because I've lived through times, you know, I lived through the fact that up until that 2016 number at 4,900, back in like 1999, the NASDAQ was at 5,000. So there was, you know, there was a long period of time where the NASDAQ took to get back to that number. And we may be in that space right now in our industry. It may take some time. But once the switch flips, you know, the foundation will have been laid to go meaningfully higher.

**Scott Melker** (4:09)
Okay, so to that end, instead of discussing the market, you're talking about obviously all of the fundamental things that are being built that will be exciting when you zoom out. And Caitlin, you're always building them, as he said, but I think you've built one of the most exciting. Right now, I would love for you to obviously give us the context. This was the press release, Vantage Bank and Custodial Release, White Paper, unveiling Hazel Network. But it seems that you have addressed the biggest elephant in the room of the clarity fight and nobody's paying attention because they're all too busy arguing about ethics clauses and politics.

**Caitlin Long** (4:40)
Yeah, we stayed on the sidelines of that whole debate because banks can pay interest on deposits. And if the deposit happens to be in token form, the FDIC has already said it does their technology neutral. If it's a deposit, it qualifies for all the things that bank deposits qualify for. And what we did was link it through a toggle to stable coins. And so you don't actually have to exchange a stable coin back to a bank deposit. It's the same token, literally the same ERC20 token in our first implementation.