Dealflow Podcast
[Ep. 5] BITCOIN HALVING EXPECTATIONS AND THE RISE OF RUNES
[Ep.#5] BITCOIN HALVING EXPECTATIONS AND THE RISE OF RUNES
Join us for a deep dive into the world of #Bitcoin in our latest episode W/ @0xKDOT and @MehdiFarooq2
We analyze the Bitcoin Halving's impact, Runes-hype, $MERL token launch, NFT market trends and much more!
Timestamps :
0:00 Intro
01:18 Token 2049
04:04 Telegram & TON
08:45 Kam's Token 2049 Experience
11:15 Michael Saylor & BTC
14:29 OTC Markets & Future
17:59 ZKasion & The FUD
22:11 Decentralisation Confusion
24:02 Bitcoin, Halving & Market Movements
28:50 Runes, Launch & Ordinal
34:30 NFT Markets & Ordinal
39:27 Merlin Chain & Bitcoin L2s
41:04 Airdrop & Points Communication
42:11 Bitcoin Price Prediction
43:47 Outro
Video Credits: @BoriyaKishan
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
[Ep.#5] BITCOIN HALVING EXPECTATIONS AND THE RISE OF RUNES
Join us for a deep dive into the world of #Bitcoin in our latest episode W/ @0xKDOT and @MehdiFarooq2
We analyze the Bitcoin Halving's impact, Runes-hype, $MERL token launch, NFT market trends and much more!
Timestamps :
0:00 Intro
01:18 Token 2049
04:04 Telegram & TON
08:45 Kam's Token 2049 Experience
11:15 Michael Saylor & BTC
14:29 OTC Markets & Future
17:59 ZKasion & The FUD
22:11 Decentralisation Confusion
24:02 Bitcoin, Halving & Market Movements
28:50 Runes, Launch & Ordinal
34:30 NFT Markets & Ordinal
39:27 Merlin Chain & Bitcoin L2s
41:04 Airdrop & Points Communication
42:11 Bitcoin Price Prediction
43:47 Outro
Video Credits: @BoriyaKishan
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
Welcome everyone to another episode of the DealFlow podcast. I'm your host, Jonny, Chief Editor at BSCN. With me, as ever, are our fantastic regular guests Cam of MH Ventures and Mehdi of Animoca Brands. So today's topic very, very much on point and topical is everything Bitcoin halving right? So impact, future impact expectations is it going to be different from past halvings and, crucially, following on from that, runes as well? But before we dive into that, just a really, really quick word to say nothing in this podcast should in any way be considered financial advice. Everything is discursive. Only Cryptocurrency always carries risk. You should always, always do your own research before investing any capital into it. But without further ado, before we dive into Bitcoin halving matters runes, all the rest of it. I know that, uh, cam and medhi, you guys are both in dubai at the moment and have been very much enjoying the uh, the events and discussions around token 2049. Maybe you know you guys can pick some of the biggest insights, updates, developments that you feel have come out of 2049 I'll have a crack.
Speaker 2:I think the token 2049 initially started with the black swan slash grace swan event. Like Dubai got two years of rainfall in one day, so a lot of folks kind of kind of canceled their flights. You saw Rolls Royce and Lamborghini kind of like swimming on the streets, yeah. So after that, like loads of people struggled like getting taxi and coming to main event. But but as the days progressed I felt like things got back to normal.
Speaker 2:Bau and the conference was a good start. So there were loads of alpha in the conference, like loads of KOLs, like high quality KOLs, high quality infra AI, deep end project. Deep end was like there were multiple deep in events, which is interesting to see. So one of the names that kind of popped up everywhere was MegaEth. So think of it like Monad, which is like Monad as an L2 on Ethereum, and I think their innovation is on making sequencer very beefy and making it go really fast. The transactions goes really fast. So I think there was a lot of hype around that. Then I also met the Zero Gravity team in person, kind of felt like a lot of AI projects are building on top of them and they're partnering up with that AI. So it was good to see that Peak Network also did a vent and what I found was there were loads of deep end projects being built on top of them. So, really bullish on Peak and really bullish on that ecosystem. I kind of feel like it's also still a very contrarian bet. I don't see many quality deep end projects elsewhere. So what's happening is projects are launching on Solana and Peak simultaneously. I think there's a high-member competitor that's doing that, so interesting from that perspective. There was a lot of infra and AI projects.
Speaker 2:I also found this KOL, like people in crypto know graileth. I was also very surprised. The guy in person is very knowledgeable. If you meet him in person, um, even though he's an influencer, I would call him as an angel. Like. We had a very good chat on different games he liked, um. He kind of shared alpha. There's a game called chrono forge that that that he really likes and and escape from tarkov, which is a very nice web 2 game similar to sharpnel, has 400 million dollar revenue. They're making a web3 version, um, so yeah, there was loads of alpha. I think probably will take one or two weeks to kind of digest all the telegram chats and and all the deal for that I was able to, and all the friends that that. That, uh, I I kind of made during the, during the conference. So, yeah, there was a lot going on.
Speaker 1:Honestly, didn't also get enough sleep, so so, yeah, actually like mentioning telegram and all the messages that you've got to go through, I think one of the biggest winners from you know I know you're talking mostly about, like you know, quiet alpha and private deals and stuff like that but one of the biggest sort of main stage announcements, one of the biggest winners from from from some of the publicity that came from 24.9, I think, was the ton ecosystem, which, ironically I, you know, until probably about the last week or so, I've known very, very little about, but pavl durov, the founder of telegram, really came out to shill blockchain.
Speaker 2:I mean, shill's a harsh word, right, but yeah, that was also very hyped up, like I forgot about that, like everybody, all the private events taunt came up again and again. I kind of feel like there is a disconnect, like I think crypto trader doesn't pay that much attention to ton, whilst if you come to seem slightly disjointed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, traditional sort of yeah, if you come to dubai or if you come to asia, like, look like not coin is, I think, going to launch in a couple of days? Uh, yeah, it's. It's one of the I think it'll be one of the biggest meme coin launch. Uh, and ton has like amazing bots for trading. There's a game over there casual game that you can play on telegram, so it's it's a very massive distribution play and I think what people are bullish on is if they like change their architecture a little bit, it will scale and then have achieve a lot of throughput. So, a lot of funds.
Speaker 2:I spoke with liquid funds. I spoke with and lots of like folks on on events. They were very bullish on on ton and I also kind of get got a feeling like similar to solana, where there's a lot of meme coins that are launching, a lot of people also thinking about launching like multiple levels of different meme coins on top of taunt like I also met the taunt ecosystem lead, like she was telling me pumpfun, which is kind of like a meme launcher on on solana that allows you to launch meme coins in like a couple of dollars. They're also incubating like something is getting incubated on TORN. So, yeah, torn is like very bullish on TORN, like everybody is speaking about it. So, yeah, I feel like on public market side something to pay attention to. That was the only one that was brought up again and again in different events.
Speaker 1:There is when you talk about maybe there's, maybe there may be some sort of say jokey, but right, like meme coin type assets launching within that ecosystem. I think there's a genuine case to say and I was having this debate the other day I think there's a genuine case to say that an l1 or l2 cannot be considered successful until it has a real meme coin ecosystem, like whether or not it's good for the space.
Speaker 3:It's just like it's the clearest reflection of, like, retail investor interest and traction yeah, but going back two years and say the same thing that you just said now, people would laugh at you.
Speaker 3:I know, I know, because avalanche, yeah, but memes back then were, like you know, looked upon as, oh, what a chain, and you've got memes, or it's only a meme chain, but now it's like, oh, you have to have memes, but anyway.
Speaker 3:But on the ton thing, I would say I think it was like the easiest bet. Um, I say that in hindsight um, but I faded like massively, because my frustration was that these guys had like every 99 of crypto users on telegram and they decided to launch a chain that was an evm compatible and I personally thought that was like a really bad move because, you know, they would have been able to onboard everyone, with all the infrastructure that's built out, all the developers and everything else, and I was like why did they go a different route and not be evm compatible to onboard everyone, like you know their wallet would have. It would have just made things a lot easier. I I feel, however, you know saying that now, if they're getting a lot of hype, but the hype is one thing and it's like how many developers and how many applications are actually building on top of Donner? That I don't know, I haven't looked into it too much.
Speaker 1:They want to do some stuff in-house. Like I know, the latest update you can call it a small one or whatever is that they want to tokenize? I think it's NFTs, emojis and stickers within the Telegram application itself emojis and stickers within the telegram application itself.
Speaker 3:I do feel like that's the new thing that, like, as you know, the l1 l2 space does get saturated. It is all about, like, these guys raising a ton of money um to be able to survive and actually build, but then also building the infrastructure in-house from you know what a normal um l1 l2 would have, and then just build it all in-house because it makes sense to do that, because it's hard just to get developers to come across.
Speaker 1:We've got 900 million users monthly supposedly, which I fully believe. Frankly, I think of it as like a WhatsApp equivalent. Yeah, I'm just looking at the market cap as well.
Speaker 2:right now it's top 10. Now, tom, is it? Yeah, it's top 10.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's up 25% over the last month, I think, when Solana's down like 13%, like it's not been a good month for anyone.
Speaker 3:Don't say that about Solana. Maybe Mike can do the screen. It's the most performing blockchain.
Speaker 1:That's what I've been told. Anyway, that's what I've heard. I've heard WIF is going to trillions.
Speaker 3:I do believe it is. I honestly do.
Speaker 1:Bad news Okay, anything else from 2049 because there's, there's also another couple of sort of wider market. I met cam in person.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, we met. Oh yeah, how can we miss that?
Speaker 2:so cam is taller than I thought. He's taller than I thought.
Speaker 1:He's more handsome in person thank you, man, isn't he like? I met him first time in denver. Throw me off the plane stop shilling me mate. To be fair, look at the sunburn though oh man so isn't it powerful?
Speaker 3:I came here with I brought my family out, so my expectations were 70% family and actual vacation and then 30% work. It's been 90% vacation and literally 10%, 10%, literally. I just made Mehdi up to now. I'm having a few other meetings this week coming um, but yeah, and maybe we're gonna meet again, right, are you gonna?
Speaker 2:we're gonna have coffee yeah, I'm gonna show them any machine, but yeah so, so, um, yeah, I, I was lucky.
Speaker 3:I was fortunate enough. My flight was later on. You got in as it ended, didn't it?
Speaker 1:Yes, you were basically the day after.
Speaker 3:So it started on the Tuesday where everything was getting flooded and people's flights getting cancelled or they were just stuck at the airport for like 18 hours. I flew the next day. By the time I got there it was mainly. Most of it was all cleared, and Dubai, I would say I know that still now a lot of some of the parts are still flooded, but most of the touristy areas. They quickly just fixed it and did what they had to do to make sure that everyone was cool and safe as well.
Speaker 1:So that's what you get when you've got unlimited money right and did what they had to do to make sure that everyone was cool and safe as well. That's what you get when you've got unlimited money, right? Yeah, precisely, but no, I'm glad you guys are having fun. I'm still stuck in a rainy Western country, alas.
Speaker 3:I was going to say I do think. Moving on to the Bitcoin side, I think it was a bit of a shitty time for Token2049 to be about and us being to buy with the bitcoin. Halving the runes launch. I feel like I lost. It was an opportunity cost of not diving into runes and some of the big stuff that um were launching and being able to be the first in and have purchased some but um.
Speaker 1:But yeah but everyone needs time away, though. Especially dubai is still a crypto hub, whether you're there or whether you're there for a while.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but if you're on holiday, you don't have your setup to be able to be aping into, like all this, the new stuff like the runes and stuff that just launched.
Speaker 1:This is true, this is true, but another issue around, I guess Bitcoin itself, one that we probably don't time on, but I'm kind of curious. So effectively it came out, sort of end of last week, that um michael saylor had dumped just under 400 million dollars worth of micro strategy, basically his entire class a shares. Does this in any way undermine? Because obviously he's you know, his whole narrative is never, ever sell bitcoin and micro strategy is basically just his personal bitcoin exposure. So does this undermine his whole narrative? Does it make him less of a god in the Bitcoin industry the fact that he's basically, in the space of four months, offloaded as much as he can into cash from MicroStrategy?
Speaker 2:Typically when insiders are selling, it means like I'm not aware, like Johnny, did he sell all of his personal holding? Or just like, do you know?
Speaker 1:So he still holds holds, I think like 2.3 billion in class b micro strategy micro strategy stock. But he did hold 400 million in uh class a stock which in mid 2023 I think summer 2023 he entered an agreement with micro strategy saying that between, effectively, 1st of january 2024 and end of april. So I think, like in the next week or so, he's allowed to offload up to 400 000, which is basically his entire, his entire stock. But, yeah, offload everything he has in that demographic which is still so. He hasn't offloaded a majority of his stake in micro strategy, anything like that, but it's still a buttload of cash right at a time when you'd think, you know sailor would be ringing the bells and yeah, I feel like he's, he's now comfortable, given the price of BTC, that he feels like it's time to de-risk, time to like enjoy a little bit of conviction.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, so. So in traditional market, typically, when insiders are buying or insiders are selling, it's a, it's a signal that either something is overvalued or undervalued. So I think one way of kind of thinking about this is he kind of feels like, for this cycle, bitcoin is kind of reaching that peak or it's about to reach that peak. So I think that's his perception. That's why he wants to like de-risk his position a little bit. Um, I guess it's fair enough like like you have such conviction someone offered me 370 million.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, like give him as much as you want, but ultimately like never get into that so, yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing.
Speaker 2:I think it is a signal that kind of like some of the people who are the Bitcoin whales and OG are kind of feeling like this is kind of peaked or like, yeah, market are getting hot. I've also kind of heard theories that when mid-cycle or this cycle will be shortened and stuff like that, so kind of makes sense like I yeah, you can't, you can't hold that guy accountable I think also because of the agreement he signed, he did have to sell between january and april this year, so it didn't really matter.
Speaker 1:I think when um, where bitcoin was at, necessarily he just had to. He had this period to offload it. Right, he probably lined it up to be a bit before a halving so he was forced to sell them in a way he wasn't forced to sell. He could hold it. But if he was gonna sell he would have either yeah, but why wouldn't you de-risk?
Speaker 3:if you had that time frame to de-risk, you would de-risk right like that's guys I'm not being mean to him.
Speaker 1:I'm not trying to give him a hard time.
Speaker 2:It's a discussion topic I feel like another thing this kind of gets me to like.
Speaker 2:These days I'm kind of forming thesis I think, the markets are getting mature, I feel like otc markets will play a pivoted role, like now going forward and like um.
Speaker 2:When I say otc markets I mean more on the illiquid token side, especially altcoin I think we're coming to that point of the cycle as well as of the industry.
Speaker 2:I think those desks will play an important role. So first thing we are seeing is I think Cam can attest to this like vesting and cliff are becoming longer each cycle and let's say, if there are hot deals, not everybody can get access but even with those hot deals you have long cliff and long vesting. There will be hot otc market where some of the funds who might be good at research or are thesis driven might not be able to enter around but could basically at a good price try and buy like bags of some of the other funds who are kind of paper hand. This is kind of also giving me confirmation that I think in like OTC markets will become really big in crypto, given the nature of how it's illiquid but liquid, such scenarios. So I think, similar to traditional markets, we'll see a lot of prop shops and OTC desks kind of pop up both on illiquid side and liquid side.
Speaker 3:I definitely agree as well with Medin. I think it's something that needs to become a bit more friendly from either party, because when you're doing OTC, you're getting the foundation involved as well. I think they just need to be more friendly and see that as when they're swapping hands, because at the moment it's a it's kind of like a you're treading on eggshells sometimes if you are doing an otc of the person who's uploading, and I think it just needs to become more of a friend, a friendly environment, because what you're doing, inevitably you're actually handing off one. You know, one fund is de-risking and then you're handing off that allocation to another, another fund. That's like cool, we want to hold these tokens and we actually are happy with the vesting. So maybe you're actually passing off to someone that's got stronger hands in the than the first one, so it shouldn't be seen as a bad thing. Um, so you know, I think we're going to see, like you said, they're going to see a lot more otc stuff like pop up it has to come with time, though, to get normalized right from a foundation point, but it just has to be but I've honestly, I've seen a lot more pop up and a lot more transactions happening, but transactions do get blocked like I
Speaker 2:won't name the project like tier one project, like oh, we are very bullish on our project. We think 1.5 billion, 2 billion is like very low valuation. It should be like 15 or 10 billion. So we're going to block the transactions it's stupid yeah, it's stupid.
Speaker 2:100. Agree with cam like. I'll give you two reasons why it's stupid. Firstly, you are kind of hampering the market, like price discovery, and I think it's good. Let's say, if you raised at 1.5 or 2 billion and then let's say somebody wants to buy 3 billion, what's happening is there's somebody that the other person, the counterparty that buys the 3 billion, will not sell in the market unless and until it's four or five billion. So you kind of like exactly, yeah, yeah, so it's like good liquidity, like price discovery suppresses the volatility. But I kind of feel like founders, especially in bull markets, when they are raising an exorbitant valuation, they just don't have the conviction to to basically allow these types of things to happen that they want to like, yeah, fake the price.
Speaker 1:There must be an emotional component as well, like like it or not I think it's an ego component as well it's massively ego yeah, massively yeah, it's like we are a unicorn
Speaker 1:we've lost conviction. Um, but no, very, very fair, all right. One last topic before we dive into Bitcoin halving related stuff, and that's the ZK Casino. I mean, I call it FUD, but it seems completely legit, like I don't think it's necessarily FUD, but yeah, effectively I think what's happened there is you had ZK Casino big, you know, betting project raised funds from, I think, several notable investors, some suspicious token movements on chain, I think is where it began, and now, sort of last few hours I think last 12 hours at the maximum they've basically taken $33 million worth of Ethereum that was submitted by consumers to the platform and they've just sent it to Lido Finance and the you know. The upshot of that is effectively like, yeah, it's just a complete rug pull. We're just putting it there because we can't launder it and get rid of it now, so we might as well earn some yield on it while we're being scrutinized super hard.
Speaker 1:But already you've seen Mexi, which I think was an investor, but effectively just tried to distance themselves from it. Same with Big Brain. So I don't think Big Brain was an investor in ZK Casino, but they previously backed a project called Zigzag Exchange, which lost them a lot of money and I don't know whether it turned out to be a scam or whatever and which lost them a lot of money, and I don't know whether it turned out to be a scam or whatever. And they've come out saying that some of the founders of the ZigZag exchange are also on the ZK casino team and therefore people shouldn't really be surprised or whatever else, which I think means those founders must be anonymous, obviously, which you know makes you think like how rigorous are some of those DD processes that were going on behind the scenes?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think one of the biggest things is, especially when you invest in on the vc side, is like they just have to be dogs. Um, I think that that's one level of thing. That's 100% what we do. If and if you ever done an anonymous founder, I'm not gonna say we haven't, we have, but there's always been barriers to to make sure that we have our safety of our funds. I'm putting in multi-sigs or whatever in place that we are signers for and all on all of that.
Speaker 3:On the zk casino thing, I think a lot of fun was coming out prior to this. I'm talking to maybe like two months ago or maybe a bit more, um, and I was like, okay, cool, whatever. We you know we actually came on our desk previously, but we passed on. It saw a thread. I have tried to be keeping up with stuff on twitter when I can, but I saw something on on twitter. Someone did a thread of have tried to be keeping up with stuff on twitter, uh, when I can, but I saw something on on twitter.
Speaker 3:Someone did a thread of them tracking down one of the founders and he actually lives in dubai. Um, I don't know how they did this, but they went through his twitter and they they literally tracked down because he must have been posting stuff, because he was a supposedly the founder was an influencer. So he was a Twitter crypto influencer before he started this project and he used the same Twitter. He must have changed the name, or something like that, and he would post photos of flashy cars staying at the Burj Khalifa, or he was here and there, and then that's how he got his status and then I think that's when he started the project and maybe that's where he gauged a lot of interest and was able to close. You know certain people when you're raising money. So one of one of the guys on twitter did a thread and literally tracked him down.
Speaker 3:I don't know if anything's going to happen or if they're going to go to the police with it and they will do anything, but I think they've pinpointed who who he actually is. Well, that's progress, then. So I I vaguely saw that they asked consumers to stake ETH and they'll get it back one-to-one and in return they would get tokens, if I'm right. So if they were bridging this ETH, they would get one-to-one, but they weren't able to give them one-to-one, but they just took the ETH and staked it elsewhere. Is that right?
Speaker 1:I think so. I think so. I mean the mechanisms in terms of what they told consumers, I think are better, probably better food.
Speaker 3:But I know the big controversy as of today is that 33 million has just been straight up moved to lido finance. Wow. So I saw ape terminal was launching the m&a, cancelled it, mexi was listing them and an investor yeah, they're trying to come away from it. So was it 35 million that they raised, separate to what the eath that was put into the protocol?
Speaker 1:no, so the 33 million I'm 90 sure was consumer funds, for sure, wow and they're not able to get any of that money back because it's locked.
Speaker 1:It's. It's not locked because obviously, like um gone, what the upgrade was called, but obviously, like you know, um, if you put in lido doesn't have a have a lock period on it or anything. But yeah, be permissioned by the people that are in control of the wallets who supposedly are like the malicious, the malicious actors. But I'm now reading I think maybe that 33 million was both user and investor funds. By the way, it doesn't make a difference.
Speaker 3:It's like. This is like another thing. You know they're making a decentralized betting platform. I'm assuming that's what they were trying to market as. Sorry guys, no, but like. This is the thing where people get confused of decentralization. Right, they see, oh, this is decentralization because they're building on chain. That literally is not. It's not decentralized in any manner. As you can see, here these guys are literally centralized everything by controlling the functions of the contract. So now you deposit, they're able to just take your eth and do whatever they want with it. Because it's they're just not. And that's like the biggest learning curve for every new retail person coming on chain is that just because they're building on chain does not mean it's decentralized, and I think like a lot of, a lot of learning decentralized on the platform side, right like the platform, will not do like, not de-platform you, because ethereum is quite decentralized, so similar.
Speaker 2:It's similar to like, let's say, amazon, you start a business on amazon, amazon in in traditional web 2 can scam you by like, remove you, removing your business or de-platforming a consumer, customer. But let's say, if there is a shop that is set up, set top, they might provide a low quality service. You can't do anything about that. So I think even in Web3, that kind of holds true. Ethereum will not rug you because it's decentralized. But anything built on top, if the smart contract is still controlled by developer, it's not decentralized in that way. So the platform risk goes away, but that risk remains the same, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:I think it's decentralized.
Speaker 2:I think, ethos-wise, it's decentralized. When we are doing airdrop and giving out tokens, giving out the equity in shape of tokens, I think people kind of confuse that part of decentralization and Web3 with let's say, okay, yeah, everything is controlled by us and it's decentralized and there's no one decision maker.
Speaker 1:It's the application level risk, if not like cloud level risk, so to speak. Okay, so Bitcoin happened. Bitcoin halving happened. How many days ago now, like three days ago, something like that Thereabouts. I think it was late Friday that it occurred, or very, very early on Saturday, depending on where you are. It's you know no secret.
Speaker 1:The Bitcoin halving was preceded by a massive collapse in the price of major tokens, most obviously being BTC and ETH, both down significant percentage marks in days. Even Arthur Hayes had already predicted that there'd be another crash or another, you know, depletion of value, so to speak. After the halving itself, which we haven't really seen Right. Since the halving itself, btc has basically been climbing pretty gently, same with ETH, some other tokens starting to do bits, now Right, top 100 market cap tokens. What do we expect going forward? Is the? Is the impact of this halving going to be in any way different from previous halvings? And by that what I mean is Bitcoin go boom in like the six months following the halving? You know, a number of analysts have come out and said that the macroeconomic factors, the macroeconomic backdrop, is just so incredibly different to what it's been in previous halvings that you just can't use those historical data points as any kind of benchmark whatsoever. Where do we sit on that?
Speaker 3:Personally, I think that Bitcoin still goes parabolic and I know that you know people are saying on the TA side that things are different. You can't use previous historical data, blah, blah, blah. But there's so much infrastructure, like we've said previously in many podcasts that's been built on Bitcoin and I think already we're seeing I think I saw a post as well fees as well as volume has doubled Ethereum or it's way, bitcoin or the brc or runes side of things. That's like way past ethereum volume, so that already is showing like there's so much demand for it. Demand comes with, you know, uh, people buying bitcoin and that's just going to surge price in general.
Speaker 2:So I think the demand is going to continuously come and as we see more people building and more shit coins uh, more actual real products being built, it just demands is inevitable one thing that kind of like the value proposition I think, uh, bitcoin was going towards was like store of value, like it's like gold, um, but thing thing like runes and brc20 and ordnance kind of also make it a bit more similar to Ethereum.
Speaker 2:So I think things over here get blurry Like is it a store of value or is it like an internet platform? I feel like if it was a store of value, people would kind of like resonate and think of it as like gold, so in things of in times like macro volatility, so in things of in times like macro volatility in future, it could have been like safe haven type of a play, like capital going to quality, like BTC. But given it's also becoming a tech platform, I feel like in kind of macro events people might not just think of it as store value and it might be priced like an internet stock, so it becomes a bit more sensitive to macro regime change. So I think that's another observation because of all of the innovation happening on top, that these innovations kind of distracts it from being a store of value, in my opinion.
Speaker 1:I'm very much of the opinion that people that are very, very new to blockchain and cryptocurrency. They ask me like, why is bitcoin valuable? What's it useful for? I always analogize with gold, right, and their instinct is always to analogize with cash, like you can't do anything with bitcoin, like we'll go and try and buy a tesco meal deal with with gold, like see how that, I see how far that gets you.
Speaker 1:Um, but my, my opinion is that, because bitcoin is so, so big, at this point, you could for sure have a flourishing functionality layer to Bitcoin functionality ecosystem while.
Speaker 1:So you know, in that respect, like you know in my mind, as Bitcoin matures and as, crucially, people's understanding of Bitcoin matures, I know that for us, that's something to take for granted, but actually, you know, when you talk about the vast number of institutions and investors, when they really understand what makes Bitcoin exciting and special, which you know is basically doing what gold does, but better by a factor of 100 or so then it will become a safe haven asset, so to speak, and we've even seen that at certain points, right.
Speaker 1:So I think a while ago, there was some major interest rate inflation announcements and Bitcoin behaved as you'd expect gold to behave. I think, even with some of the conflicts that have been erupting over the last 12 months, bitcoin is, at least to a certain extent, becoming more of a safe haven asset. I mean, you guys probably remember in 2019 to 2021, where cryptocurrency all of them were basically just treated like tech stocks, and we're so far past that now and I feel like people don't give the industry enough credit for that and on top of that, you know, maybe we can pivot to the the runes launch as well, which happened recently.
Speaker 3:Um, have any of you been dibbling and dabbling in in the runes launch as well, which happened?
Speaker 1:recently. Have any of you been dibbling and dabbling in the runes side? Not really. I think you're the runes maxi on this panel. We've done a little bit of digging and research beforehand in preparation for this, but you were the one that was like yeah, guys, let's talk about runes.
Speaker 2:Literally. I just read up about runes before this podcast I was like yeah me coins and Bitcoin.
Speaker 3:I'm annoyed because I'm in Dubai and I wasn't able to literally capture everything that I would do at my desk and it's a project by everyone knows. Everyone should know if they're part of the Bitcoin ecosystem or more the ordinal side. Casey, so Rod Armour on Twitter, he is the guy who created ordinals and then off that came BRC 20. So he basically built Runes in the last couple of months. I don't know, like how he did it so quick. Anyway, I'm not really followed or any podcast or anything. I just read some of his posts and inevitably it was a way I just read some of his posts and inevitably it was a way to kind of be an easy way for people to create tokens on actual Bitcoin and I think from a user's perspective, we don't see much difference if you've used BRC20. It's very much similar but just on like, the tech side is different and just to dive into a bit of that, so BRC20 is is built on top of ordinal. So I I don't know how that works, but it's just it's not like natively built into bitcoin, where runes is actually built um natively on on bitcoin. I think the way that they store it as well, um, brc20 is um, what is it called? It's json on ordinal, so everything's done, json, and then runes is using some form of the op return function, but the the downfall to runes.
Speaker 3:I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing and I'd love to know what your guys's thoughts is. If you're doing a transaction on runes and the transaction is something wrong with the transaction and actually I've seen this happen to someone in the last day or last 24 hours if there's something wrong with a transaction, everything that was part of that transaction gets burnt. So the bitcoins gets burnt, the whatever you were buying gets burnt, it's just dead done to you later. So, like on aetherium, if that was to happen, it would revert right, like if the transaction failed or wasn't functioning right. Something would happen where everything would just get reverted. It would fail on chain until you later buy, it goes back to everyone.
Speaker 1:What's the regularity of those failed transactions at the moment?
Speaker 3:I don't know too much about it, but what I do know is that let's say you were to create a token and there was something wrong with it, or you were sending tokens and there was something wrong with it. Everything apart of it just gets burnt, and they just did just burn it.
Speaker 3:So inevitably, people are talking about this more I don't know if it's happened to too many people. I don't think a lot of people understand it. There's one guy who's it happened to in the last 24 hours and I think he was buying something. I don't know what he was buying, maybe buying some runes. He must have been buying some runes and he bought two. And the third one that he bought it was probably the biggest transaction and something happened where it failed and it just burnt all of his tokens. So is this their way of saying okay, now Bitcoin is deflationary because there's going to be a lot of failed transactions and this is how we burn Bitcoin. I, because there's going to be a lot of failed transactions and this is how we burn Bitcoin. I think from a user's perspective, it's really effed up, because I'm scared now to buy things, because now you can easily lose money without really understanding the tech side, because I don't really understand the tech side.
Speaker 1:You've scared me and I don't even have any. I'm terrified.
Speaker 3:I would read up on it. I'm trying to read up on it. I'm trying to. Yeah, I'm trying to read up on it as well, so I'll send you the post after it.
Speaker 1:Mate, please do, please do, Because that is that's twisted, that's so twisted. Fair play, but you're going to keep gambling with runes anyway.
Speaker 3:Or has that put you Lasts? However long it's been launched? I think like two days now it's launched. I mean there's a shitload of memes that people are going through. The worst crap is that how you name them is really crap, like it's really hard to find and gauge through because the naming is horrible.
Speaker 3:But OKEx wallet is probably the best wallet right now to use and to look at all the runes, see what's being bought, see what is currently being minted, and then you're able to buy stuff out there. What is really cool um, it covers all chains as well. But for for bitcoin, it's really really good, and I've used x, first, phantom and then also now okay okay, x is far the best on bitcoin. And then there's another platform called luminex and that's where you can actually go mint these runes for free.
Speaker 3:Majority of them are going to be shit and never do much, but there's a, there's a few that you just need to research on twitter and find which ones are good and which people have got hype around, and if they're still minting, you should mint them for free. Yes, you've got to pay the txv and it is quite a large amount, I think right now I was looking about 20 and you can only probably mint um a certain amount, um. So yeah, if you're bullish on something, I would definitely mint it for free and just pay the txv. But I think that's the way, like all these meme coins are coming out. So just think of this. Runes is the solana meme coin hype right now, probably a fair analogy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, actually. So I know that. I know that runes are very much like the whole angle is to be brc20s and very much fungible, so, effectively, we've just been, like within the team, been looking a bit at the nft market over the last week or so, and the reason that we've had to take time out to look at the nft markets because nobody's talking about it, right, but broadly speaking, it's so, so dead right, bitcoin hitting all-time highs did absolutely nothing for it are ordinals just kind of the next nft craze and that's just going to get replaced by something else. So nfts I'm asking a p, are our traditional ethereum based pfb nfts sort of dead in the water? I know there's one or two exemptions, like pudgy penguins have been doing some exciting stuff, but something like like have yuga labs really really dropped the ball dramatically?
Speaker 3:my thoughts on nfts is that you know, we had a really good bull run last time on nfts because everyone was like just finding their feet on collections, right. So everyone was spinning off 10 000 collections and they were trying to lower the collections because they wanted to make it more exclusive, and this was like they were all trying to make these different communities. So this is this my like my own thesis on it. What's happened is all these collections there's been thousands of collections and they're really high, but what's happened is all of these collections, you know, minus a few, being one pudgy penguins all do the same shit. You, you get an nft, you join a discord group and you're part of this community and, yeah, they may do some offline events, which is cool, but other than that, all do the same thing.
Speaker 3:So how do you separate yourself to actually be yourself from everyone else, to do really well? And Pudgy Penguins has literally played a long game and found their feet and doing, you know, teddy bears and stuff like that, and then all the other stuff that he's been doing, which is which is cool, because they're just separating themselves from everyone else, and I think now we have, you know, um, yuga labs. They were doing this metaverse game, did they just didn't. They just say they're not doing that anymore. You remember the?
Speaker 1:sale day for other side. Yeah, I remember that back in, was it 2020, start 2022, like may 2022, where it was bananas?
Speaker 3:it was like the ethereum network basically become, became unfunctional yeah, but I'm sorry to say and I know how they're trying to be really professional yoga, but they inevitably just had ponderomics of a cycle of minting and rewarding other holders and and that cycle just ran out. Um, it ran out. They had this game everyone was hyped about. They stopped building this game. If I'm right I might be totally wrong I'm pretty sure they're not building this game or metaverse or whatever anymore. I mean, I've heard nothing about it for months. Personally, right now I don't see a good future for uh nft collections.
Speaker 1:Um, people sold lamborghinis to buy board apes in 2022 yeah, yeah and they're dead biggest fumbles in the industry and like they can't even argue like fundamentals like you could if you bet on something like icp or carter you think about this?
Speaker 3:what do nfts do beyond just a tight-knit community? These communities now are just like in every group, the same communities are just spread across, Like there's nothing different. Right, or I may be wrong and you guys may have a different take, but that's just what I feel. And I'm a big, I've been a big NFT collector and I got burnt really bad, so I mean no you said on one of the previous podcasts yeah, you gave a pretty savage story about some horse racing nfts. Yeah, and pfps that I have as well.
Speaker 1:But anyway, that's another story no, for sure, for sure, for sure. Medhi, was there anything you wanted to add to the nft debate in terms of where it's going, whether ordinals are just going to replace with that height?
Speaker 2:yeah, I I feel like speaking with loads of nft collectors, I I just feel like ordinals will be the go-to nfts, uh, and like, when you compare to other ecosystem, I think they'll play a pivotal part because, if you think about it, they are the real nft, they're actually on chain. So I think that is one thing, that's yeah. So I think the analogy here will be if you're looking for something which is like a digital artifact, that's ordinals what ordinals will do. If you're looking for something which is like a digital artifact, that's ordinals what ordinals will do. If you're looking for a digital fingerprint, that's what nfts on, let's say, ethereum or solana will do. So gaming nfts, those type of stuff solana, ethereum more of a collector, collector item, or more of something which is part of culture or part of history. I think ordinals will kind of fill that gap.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it makes sense, right to have something like that inscribed on the oldest, most secure blockchain, fair play, and I kind of get that like in terms of because, if you like, the different ways that NFTs are being used, you've got very, very high performing, functional NFTs, which is obviously sort of like still a core component of the GameFi sector as we believe in it and as we think it's going to grow over the next year or so. And then you have, on the opposite end of the spectrum, those pure collectability sort of Bitcoin frog-esque NFTs and kind of you know, I know that you know maybe they tried to make this not the case but ultimately an NFT like a BAYC, for instance, or a CryptoPunk is probably the purest version, for sure. But to go back towards Bitcoin, we've kind of had I don't know that we've spoken about this a little bit before in a different context but we've had our first bitcoin or our major. Our first major well-backed bitcoin l2 token was launched, which is merlin chain in merle and I think now it's sitting at around it's like 200 to 300 million in in in market cap.
Speaker 1:It collapsed quite significantly after launch, which I think, in my personal opinion, is a temporary phenomenon. I do think that that's not going to last the way, like when people really understand what Bitcoin L2s can do and also they start to understand just how early to market Merlin chain and the Merle token is. I think that could really change. But do we have any thoughts on where that's headed, why it's crashed so much since since it launched? And I say so much, I think like 20 or something like that 20 is normal in crypto right now.
Speaker 3:This is that's this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not scared of this I've got it right. Like I know, wormhole collapsed after launch, like that happens. Right, people are getting airdrops and stuff like that. It's gonna happen. But I think there was some what there were, and it's really blanked on me which ones there were. But there were a couple of airdrop launches where they clearly just picked the valuation really well, like their anticipated market discovery Mavia was.
Speaker 2:I won't remember.
Speaker 1:Is that what you're thinking of?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Airdrop happened was more bullish, celestia. I remember because of the airdrop it was like at one moment trading below otc and then, once that campaign finished, boom, boom, boom. It just like reached like 10, 15 billion quickly.
Speaker 1:No for sure, but I do think merle is definitely one of my bitcoin ecosystem picks. I mean, I don't hold it and that's really just so that I can report about it all the time.
Speaker 2:I don't want any conflict of interest one thing I was thinking like like kind of doing a post-mortem of what happens with the blog games. Right, they did a massive farming campaign. So I think one thing team has to kind of be cognizant of is, let's say, when you're kind of setting expectation you like there will be a large airdrop and there'll be large farming campaign, what happens is everybody's expecting airdrop and everybody is like expecting uh tokens for the, the social farming they did, so they don't go on exchange and like buy the tokens. So I think one thing uh team I think have to be very careful of is making it a couple of weeks in advance very clear like this is what the plan is for for the, for the points and and the airdrop, so so so the retail has their wallet ready to go out there and start buying token.
Speaker 1:It needs to just drive down volatility as well. If certain things are priced in ahead of time, I feel like inevitably it's not going to be a bad thing for the token, at least in the first three or four months after its launch.
Speaker 2:Such basic things, right, such basic things. Web2, these are taken for granted. Such basic one-on-one market efficiency, slash, structure things.
Speaker 1:Okay, so last question, question just to wrap things up. It's definitely one that I think our audience is going to want to hear about. If both of you guys had to pick to the nearest thousand dollars what bitcoin's peak price not necessarily this cycle, but in 2024 is going to be, what would you say?
Speaker 3:so I'm super bullish on on bitcoin and that's because, one, I hold bitcoin, two, I've invested into a lot of bitcoin protocols and three, I just I'm bullish crypto overall and if crypto is bullish, then bitcoin's bullish, and if crypto is moving, bitcoin's moving. I'm gonna say 106k by the end of the year again non-financial advice.
Speaker 2:I think about 90k.
Speaker 3:I like that we're close together, medhi, and I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:We can sell the top together so, medhi, I would have said about 90, maybe like low 90s, on the basis that there's so much expectation around a sort of core level at 100. I just don't think it will quite manage to reach it in the way that bitcoin didn't reach 70 in 2021. Okay, so we got 106k um at about 90k, so we'll definitely be holding you guys to account at the end of this year and seeing how far off we were and if you beat like you could have beaten like b Bernstein or something like that, and we'll we'll make sure that all of Twitter knows that for sure. Um. But if that's all we have time for today, thank you guys so much for joining. Can't wait for next week.
Speaker 1:Uh, just a little nod to the audience. I think we've potentially got one or two very, very special, very, very interesting guests lined up for some of the some of the episodes that we'll be doing over the next few weeks. So stay tuned for that 100% and thank you for joining appreciate you mixed race magic for having us cheers guys.