Institutions Buy BTC While Retail Panics Again #CryptoTownHall

**Dave** (0:00)
Well, good morning, everyone. And here we are, yet another day, and Bitcoin right around 70,000 people. You know, the fear seems to be coming back. I mean, you know, it really is the same thing day after day from the market perspective, but you know, now we have, you know, potential agreements with community banks that's somehow part of crypto rules. I don't know, I mean, the whole world just seems to be nuts, but yeah, it's very hard to understand narratives and look. So I'm going to put people on the spot. So I'm going to tell you, I haven't been up here for a week. I don't know that a whole lot has changed in a week.
What are you looking at?

**Amateo** (0:43)
Hey, Dave. Yeah, I've had a lot of early morning calls, so I miss you guys. I hope everyone's doing well, staying safe and staying sane for the best that they can.
Hello. Yeah. You know, it's funny is when it comes to price action, not a whole lot has changed. But when it comes to the actual landscape of things, so much has changed. And I think that that's the underlying story here is that we have this monumental progress happening to the tokenization of the stock market. I know you guys probably talked about it at length, but the SEC and CFTC guidance was monumental and pulled a real what clarity act, you know? Let's just move this thing forward. At the same time, Coinbase just announced today that they are enabling perpetual futures trading on stocks, and Hyperliquid reported that digitized oil, gold and silver have now surpassed volumes in the past month for crypto. So I think that we're getting a hell of a signal here that everyone really needs to pay attention to, and that is this thesis that we've been driving home forever, which is that everything will be tokenized, everything will be, in terms of tokenized markets, and that these markets will be more efficient, open up 24 access, 24 7 access, and completely change the landscape of finance. And it's all happening at this time where the world is becoming just hyper reactive and extremely volatile. And so what you have is that appetite and in many cases, the need for market and liquidity access to respond to things, whether that's locally, regionally, whether that's purchasing Bitcoin to get some stability or stable coins, to move locations, whether that's to respond as a trader, to move money around, because news breaks after the market closes on a Friday, which seems to be this administration's favorite move. So I think when you look at this, it looks like nothing's happening in price, but what's actually happening behind the scenes is a fundamental shift in the way that markets operate. It's being led by crypto and blockchain, and the value of which is just not going to be realized in this volatility, but will be realized in time.

**Dave** (3:38)
I think that's right. I mean, look, I said it, when I joined crypto eight years ago, I talked to my friend Larry Tab, who's like one of the heads of research at Bloomberg, and I basically said everything would be tokenized at some point in the next 10 years or so, maybe longer, depending on how long it would take. And I still think so. Obviously, when you have the head of the SEC saying that's gonna happen, you have a pretty good idea. What's interesting from an investor point of view is what the hell does that mean? Well, it means a few things.
It certainly is incredibly good for adoption and understanding and valuation of Bitcoin. There's no question about that. Now, I'm not a maxi, but maxis love this idea, except for the fact that there is value in some of the token ecosystems that will support all of this. And there will be new rules and new capital rules to go along with it. And that's the big problem, right? Because people are trying to figure out what's what, between what will be the value of their favorite token, but they also have to understand that they're going to have more competition within the token ecosystem, because by IBM or Tesla, they're going to have to tokenize or SpaceX for that matter. Anyway, Paul, you have your hand up, sorry.

**Paul** (4:57)
Yeah, I think you nailed it except that the problem is everyone's looking at price and defining prices like where is Bitcoin? That's the number one thing and it drives the rest of the cryptocurrency market. Problem is it doesn't benefit from any of this tokenization. I think some people might think it has second or third order benefits, but it's so indirect that I don't think it really gets a chance to capitalize on it until at least it becomes the rail by which all this tokenization happens and it seems to be very, very far from it. And just taking your thesis, Dave, it's like all these other chains. Your thesis is that, oh, well, it doesn't matter. None of those things are going to really truly benefit from it, which is why Ethereum isn't that interesting, at least to a lot of the people in this space that are on the panel or have been on panels. Because, well, if Ethereum becomes expensive, you just go over to Polygon, then you go to base and whatnot. And so fundamentally, if this is what people are getting excited about, then there's nothing to invest in other than, well, the stuff that gets tokenized. And now we can do that more efficiently and cheaply, and maybe hyper for some degree, until the next faster hyper comes around. And so I'm still a Bitcoin believer. I'm definitely not a Max. If anything, Maxis hate me. But when are these rails going to be on Bitcoin? And that's what will make me, I guess, a bull again.