Galaxy Grid Turns One: Can AI Break Cryptography and PaperTrade Launch

Lucas Cheyan (0:08)

GMGM, welcome back to Galaxy Grid. I'm Lucas Cheyan, joined today by Zach Bacorny, Thad Pinnikavich, and Will Owens. We've got the whole crew together finally, it's been a while, and we are celebrating one year of Galaxy Grid. Congrats guys, it's been quite a year. Survived a bear market. Hopefully, in a bull market. Before we begin, I need to remind you to please refer to the link to the disclaimer in the show notes, and note that none of the information in the show constitutes investment advice or an offer recommendation or solicitation by Galaxy or any of its affiliates to buy or sell any securities. All right.

One year anniversary of Galaxy Grid. First red weekly for Bitcoin since the beginning of September. Down 3% on the week, but still closing above 80k, around 83.7. ETH was down 7%, closed just above 2,500, sold out 8% at 111 So some blood in the streets, but we're also up a lot. It makes sense for there to be some pullbacks. Not the best in terms of ETF flows last week. I think there was about almost 700 million in BTC outflows. 487 million of that was on Wednesday. That was the worst day since June. ETH outflows saw almost 550 million in outflows. So, ETF is selling quite a bit last week. We also saw a lot of liquidations. There was 1.16 billion in liquidations on Thursday.

Seems like we've been in a market where alts have steadily been... There's a lot of idiosyncratic outperformers.

Seems like generally we're seeing a broader alt pullback across the board. BTC dominance keeps on inching up. It's up almost 2.5% over the past 3 weeks while altcoins bleed out. Just to give an idea of some of the drawdowns we're seeing in alt trade, some of the strongest names. So like Zac, Zcash was down 30% from the highs, VVV 40% from the highs, Pump 30% from the highs, ENA 33% from the highs. So it seems like large numbers, but relative to how much they're up, it's not massive. And if you've been in crypto for a while, you know that the volatility on the alt coins is kind of what you expect. Big moves up, deep drawdowns, and then you kind of see who the survivors are. But I think definitely Bitcoin is once again leading the market in all eyes on kind of where it's gonna move next. It does seem like last week was kind of the perfect storm, right? We'd had a lot of upwards price momentum. Everything seemed to be just kind of inching up and up and up. And it kind of felt like everyone was getting a little nervous. October 10th anniversary was kind of like around the corner. So people were in crypto, everyone's superstitious expecting another sell off on 1010 There was Justin Drake's tweet on like the AI math breakthroughs and their potential to render cryptography irrelevant. There was a ledger supply chain attack, another L2 shutdown, abstract shutdown. So two weeks, two L2 shutdown.

But generally, it seemed like the market was looking for a reason to pull back, and it got those reasons.

Will, it's been a few weeks since we've had you on. How are you feeling today? How are you feeling about the market?

Will Owens (3:31)

I'm feeling pretty good. I think it's positive. Nothing crazy happened these past few days. I feel like past two weeks have been a little bit interesting. We had the conference circuit almost in Asia. 10-10, like you said, Justin Drake tweet. And I don't know, people were kind of panicking at first. And then we had Paper Trade launching. And it was kind of just like people didn't really know what to expect. But I will say, it could have been a lot worse, knock on wood. Yeah, things are down a good amount from the highs. But a lot of these alt coins have run so hard for, I don't know, in such a short period of time. And then we saw rotations like Starknet, right? Like STRK was pumping like crazy last week on kind of the quantum narrative a little bit. And then over the weekend, we had this rotation with Wormhole, ticker W. And when you see stuff like that, it's almost like, okay, probably we need things to cool down a little bit in terms of just alt coin price movement.

Just because these are kind of like dead tokens. If somebody's able to hit a 5X on perps in one day, just longing some random dead coin, like probably things are kind of frothy, right?

And I guess on the on-chain stuff, in my opinion, like on-chain is not doing too well right now. Just like thinking back to like over the summer with all the Robinhood chain stuff, like that was a lot more exciting than kind of what's happening right now. Like Launchpad daily volumes are down, you know, not too much. It's like 500 mil a day versus like one bill like a month ago, which isn't crazy or anything, but I haven't really been seeing any super innovative stuff happening on-chain, at least this past week.