Hey, everybody, Welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. You're home for cryptocurrency
news and interviews. On your way in, please hit that subscribe button as
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on a podcast platform such as Spotify or Apple, please leave a five star
rating and review. Folks, I think it's no secret that the crypto market
has pulled back. It's a sea of red on the coin market, capitalist
Bitcoin of course, pulling back Ethereum and the rest of the alts. So
what's happening here? Well, folks, tomorrow we're going to hear from Jerome
Powell and the Fed. We're going to have an FOMC hearing, and we've
seen historically there is huge volatility in the week of these meetings. Right things
are just choppy. It's so volatile. This includes the stock market, and
of course crypto is extra volatile, volatile squared you want to call it that.
So this is a expected But what does this pullback mean? Doesn't mean
that we've hit the top this is the end of the bull market right now,
there's no indication of that, meaning that bitcoin is still holding key support
levels now if it breaks below sixty k and starts heading down to the fifties.
I'm going to be concerned. I'm being very transparent with you guys.
That's where myself and others are going to have to go back to the drawing
board and say what happened here? How has the thesis changed? Right right
now? The thesis is we are in a up trend. We are in
a macro bullmarket, and until those support levels break, folks, then we
can say bull market's over. Something is different this time around, and we
see Bitcoin on the daily huge red candle, but once again still hovering in
the sixty thousands, the DXY, the Dollar Currency Index, pumping looking strong.
However, that doesn't mean it's going to go to new all time highs
here or continue moving upwards. It could break downward. So the takeaway here
is we got let the dust settle, we got to let things calm down.
And there's a mixture of things. One, Bitcoin was super over extended
in that massive run up before they're having where it touch new all time highs.
That of course never happened in the history of bitcoin. And I think
we were so overbought, so over extended, we needed this extended cool down
period and people were still greedy. You look at the Bitcoin Fear and Greed
index over the past week, even months, greed, greed, greed.
Right. But historically we've seen in bull markets, if you go look at
the charts, we've had some deep corrections which brought fear into the market.
And I experienced some of those in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, and then
of course twenty twenty into twenty twenty one. And we need those flushouts right
to reset the system, and then we keep moving upwards. So my thesis
is still we are in a macro bull market. We are in a uptrend,
and I don't expect us to be topping out anytime soon. I still
think we have a phase three to go to where we're going to to see
massive euphoria blow off top activity. Now, as always, anything is possible,
but hear me out, what is the probability of such scenario playing out?
There is a bowl case and there's a bear case. Right now,
I think the bowl case has the higher probability of playing out. But every
dog has its day and sometimes things change on us, even if it's been
going on for decades, right, So I want to make sure I'm being
balanced here, and you understand my approach and that I am thinking of different
scenarios and not ignoring scenarios. I'm not some moon boy here just telling you
forget about the Bears. They're going to get destroyed. No, the Bears
could win this battle, but the probability of them doing it is low.
So just please understand me, because I know some people are going to come
into comments and say, oh, you're this and that right, But it's
like no, as an educated inform investor, putting our emotions to the side,
we want to look at both scenarios and see which scenario has the highest
probability of playing out. Now, many different analysts are weighing in because people
are getting fearful. Here. Kevin Spence and who's been sharing the bitcoin parabolic
curve model, which is the textbook model, and it's playing out perfectly.
He says, crypto social media today, why is it going down? And
he shared a macro chart showing hey, we're building support levels here, higher
highs, higher lows. Even Chris Berninski weighed in. He said, people
getting too bearish. In my opinion, most things look solid. This volume
is minor today, the flush later this week the springboard. He says,
you look at this chart and choose to be bearish, like why? So?
Once again, as I stated before, his chart is showing that we
have not broken key support levels. Even if we were to go to sixty
K, we have not broken or invalidated the uptrend, so that is still
in play here. Tech dev says, we've been here before, forty two
months after the start of an already ended long compression. Hovering at the prior
high press again, he's the top band banned with squeezed and bounced. Expansion
has begun. Next leg pois to accelerate. So what does this mean?
Though, with the news that we may hear from the Fed tomorrow, so
I have a few thoughts on this. On one hand, I see that
the FED has paused their rate hikes right, That in itself is bullish.
That means they're not going to continue to raise and make capital more expensive.
Don't get me wrong. People want the rates to be cut, and we
saw him in twenty twenty three as the FED was raising rates, and even
as they were pausing at the beginning this year, the markets were running up.
The markets are forward looking. They know the FED can only go so
far before they destroy the economy. And it's a presidential election year, and
historically that means there's a lot of liquidity that's pumped into the markets and that
any sitting president is going to want to look make the stock market and economy
look great. Right, it goes for Democrats or Republicans. So what we
may hear from Jerome Powell tomorrow is that he's probably going to say, hey,
we're still paused, and that raycuts are coming later this year or early
twenty twenty five. So that will give the signal to the markets, hey,
cheaper capital is coming, and then there's a Biden rumor sell the news
event. And what we've seen historically is when they actually start executing those ray
cuts, the markets start to tank. We've seen it time and time again.
The data doesn't lie. So, like I said in my newsletter earlier
this year, the markets are front running those ray cuts in my opinion,
but when they actually do cut the rates, then you know there might be
a sell off. That's what we've seen historically, So we'll see what happens
tomorrow. Obviously, this is all correlated to global liquidity, cryptos, stocks
and all these assets, so I don't think Biden would want to go into
the election with the markets not looking great, and he'll want the stock markets
looking great. And once again, it could have been Trump, it could
have been somebody else. But this is my thesis and I could be wrong,
and I would love to hear what you guys have to say about this
issue. Now. Of course, bitcoin is leading in all the social media
mentions. This data is brought to you by Sentiment, which is a partner
of the podcast. As far as negative to positive sentiment, there is some
negative sentiment which is at thirty eight point seventy six, pretty high compared to
the positive sentiment of forty five percent. So people are starting to feel the
fear. But in my experience being here for multiple bullmarket cycles, this is
bullish. When you have fear in a bull market, in a macro bull
market, that's very bullish, right, folks. For those my ogs who've
been here before, you know what I'm talking about. For retailing these folks
to get scared and run away, and then the markets do the contrarian move.
Right. When everyone's bullish, the markets can tank, and then when
everyone's fearful, the market's pumped. We've seen this time and time again and
how it works. So fascinating stuff. And if you want to get a
pro account for Sentiment you can check out the link in and description. You
can get a discount using the code thinking Crypto Now. Brian Armstrong, based
CEO, tweeted out the following Today. He says in DC this week talking
about Washington, DC, excited by all the bipartisan momentum as the Senate takes
up drafting bills in the wake of FIT twenty one. It's time to get
some clear rules for crypto. This is great. We need coinbase, we
need the industry to keep putting the pressure, keep the momentum going. Because
we were able to get Democrats to join Republicans to not only repeal SAB one
to one in the House and the Senate, but also get the FIT twenty
one regulation bill out of the House. We need to get through the Senate
now. This could be a catalyst that if it is approved this year,
that it could drive the markets insane, right because it will be an incredible
narrative that there is clear regulations in the United States of America. So let's
keep an eye out on this. But very very bullish news and remember money
talks, and we've seen Coinbasse, Ripple and A sixteen Z and a bunch
of other companies started donating to the political campaign funds for pro crypto candidates.
So it's going to be a very fascinating election. And we see Donald Trump
has come out and positioned himself as the pro crypto candidate. So crypto is
in the mainstream now, guys in the spotlight. Now, speaking of Ripple,
we got some news here. They tweeted out earlier this year, Ripple
announced its intent to acquire Standard Custody, and today we're pleased to share that
the acquisition is now complete. If you guys recall I've often had Jack McDonald,
who is the CEO of Standard Custody as well as poly Sign. Now,
some things didn't go well for poly Sign, and I'll try to get
Jack back on the podcast to talk about it. But part of the acquisition,
Jack remains as the CEO Standard Custody, which is now owned by Ripple,
but he will also become the senior vice president of stable coins at Ripple
to lead the team there as they launched their stable coin. I think it's
going to be r l USD, So interesting things happening. I'm going to
try to get him on and to give you guys the details. Brad Garlinghouse,
Ripple CEO, tweeted out the news saying two major acquisitions in approximately one
year under Ripple's belt with Medico and Standard custody, and a big welcome to
Jack McDonald. Jack is no stranger to the xrpl's ecosystem and to me thrilled
to have him join team Ripple leading our stable coin initiatives. So once again
I'll try to get you guys the details. Now, a great place you
can buy bitcoin, XRP, solana, etherrem and all your all coins is
Uphold, which is a great crypto platform. I've been using them since twenty
eighteen. They have two hundred and sixty plus cryptocurrencies. You can also trade
precious metals such as gold, silver, palladium, and platinum. So if
you'd like to learn more about Uphold, check out the link in the description.
Now, moving ahead, we got some news here that ZK sink to
distribute twenty one billion ZK tokens. Matter Labs heralds the largest distributions of tokens
to users amongst major l twos. So this is a massive air drop.
So the developers of Ethereum Layer two, ZK sinc Era and ZK Stack are
preparing to air drop a token titled ZK. Following in the footsteps of dozens
of protocols, the team at matter Labs has looked to avoid some of the
pitfalls that have tripped up competitors in the public's eye. For starters to scale
two thirds allocated to the community distribution, including a seventeen point five percent allocation
for an air drop. Here's a quote. A seventeen point five air drop
to six hundred and ninety five two hundred and thirty two walls is the largest
distribution of tokens to users amongst major layer twos. Matter Labs that in a
blog post all air Drop tokens will be unlocked and transferable from day one with
no vesting period. That had been a point of contention following Iigen layers Igentoken
release for example. So, look, I love air drops. You know
some of these that have worked out well for me, like the Flare token
air drop and I have not participated in this, but I'm going to look
into how I can potentially get some of this air drob so FYI for you
guys, and I'll let you know as I find out more, but I
highly recommend you do your own research as well. So the rest of the
community allocation to be administered by the ZK Singh Foundation and an on chain governance
process dubbed ZK Nation. The remaining one third of the twenty one billion total
ZK will go to investors and the Matter Labs team over a four year investing
period with one year cliff. That means no team and investor tokens should be
expected to hit the market in mass until June twenty twenty five. Previously,
Starkware postponed its team unlock in response to criticism following the release of the STRK
token in February. So, folks like I said, this is pretty cool,
and I love air drops going out to the community to get people to
start using these air jobs and start getting interest in the blockchain, and for
people to build and steak and do all these great things. Now, we
also got news here that liquid restaking platform Melo launches with Symbiotic, So liquid
restaking project Melo launch Today's set to be the flagship of Symbiotic, which also
just launch. Melo aims to decentralize LRT creation and allow depositors to choose between
varying risk profiles. Here's a quote. Melo enables depositors more flexibility regarding their
desired level of exposure to risk while still benefiting from the liquidity of staked assets.
This is achieved by dynamically adjusting strategies within each vault based on real time
risk assessments and market conditions, the team claims and according to their documentation,
so this is an interesting update. Mellow will be the first and flagship LRT
for Symbiotic, which also launched today and seeks to compete with Eigenlayer in the
liquid restaking arena, which has grown rapidly over the last year. I can
later currently boast around twenty billion dollars in total value locked. So I don't
know much about restaking, to be honest with you guys, I have to
do more research here and I'm going to look into it though, and I'll
try to maybe don a video dedicated to it about what is restaking and is
it safe? Right, because you don't want to lose your funds and you
don't want to put your stuff in something that's going to get drained and all
that, we've seen a lot of exploits with DeFi. I do believe DeFi
is the future, but I think just like Web one point zero, it's
not perfect right or near perfect at all, and there's a lot of vulnerabilities
and it can be exploited. So we have to be careful here. And
I'm being honest. I love crypto. I believe in this technology, but
I'm no idiot. I was born at night, but not last night,
and I don't want to lose my fund. So you do have to be
careful with these things, and you have to let them prove themselves, give
them some time to get people on board and test it out and show that
they have the security layers and much more so. Just an flo on that,
folks. Well, folks, that's the news. Let me know what
you think. Leave your thoughts and comments below. What do you think the
Fed is going to do tomorrow and how that will impact markets. I think
everybody's going to be paying attention to that because it will tell us what's going
to happen next. As I shared with my thesis earlier, I believe the
bull market is still alive and until the chart show it's invalidated. Then you
know, we'll have to adjust accordingly, but we'll have to be patient and
see what comes out tomorrow. Now, folks, I'm going to be publishing
my interview with Charles Hoskinson of Cardono. Be sure you have the notification bell
enabled publishing that interview in the morning. You don't want to miss it.
It's a good one. It's a long interview, but we touched on a
lot of things and it's just something you definitely want to watch, even if
you're not a card Ono holder. Folks, don't forget to also grab a
copy of my book Rethinking Crypto and Amazon. Grab a copy, leave a
rating and review, Grab a couple copies for your friends and family. Thank
you, guys. I appreciate you all, and I'll talk to you all
later. A task tsk TSK tsk t