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Off Chain 11/9/23: Signs of Life Spotted in the NFT Space
210 Plays11 months ago
In this week's episode, we discuss the surge in activity in the NFT space, with daily trading volumes hitting 3-month highs, plus we dig into the NFT marketplace wars and make some predictions on how the space will shake out. All that, plus we discuss the SBF guilty verdict and what's next in the FTX saga.
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Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Return
00:00:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Decrypting Crypto Podcast. It's November 9th, 2023, and this is Off Chain, your weekly recap of the biggest stories in the crypto space. I'm Matthew Housebarbie, and as always, I'm here with Austin Knight. Austin, we've had a few weeks off. I know all of us are in 2024 planning hell. How are you doing? How are you holding up?
GTA 6 Announcement & Time Reflection
00:00:33
Speaker
Yes. Well, hey, a lot has happened since the last time we talked. Do me a favor, Matt. Think back 10 years ago.
00:00:40
Speaker
Think back to 2013 and what you were doing. Personally, I had just graduated from high school. I struggle with last Tuesday, to be honest, Austin. It's a hard thing to do that 10 years. Well, not only had I just graduated high school, but Grand Theft Auto 5 had just been released.
00:01:02
Speaker
Oh yeah. And yes, and here we are 10 years later, we've finally gotten the announcement for Grand Theft Auto 6. It's actually happening. I think it's Rockstar's what, 25th year anniversary, which made me feel really old, just because I remember playing the original GTA.
00:01:22
Speaker
And in the beautiful 2D top-down view, consistently riding the train, firing flamethrowers everywhere. That was a fun time for my life. Far less complicated time of my life I will add as well.
00:01:38
Speaker
but yeah i mean yeah i think it's going to be while while i am not a big gamer myself i grew up with uh with with gta for sure feels like this one is going to be an absolutely enormous event and probably the closest thing to um
00:01:59
Speaker
I guess like a metaverse that we'll probably see outside of maybe what Fortnite have been doing, but it's gonna be interesting for sure. I'm hyped, dude. Finally, 10 years later, we've probably only got one more year to wait before they actually release it.
00:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, I've never seen so much hype around just a trailer. It's exciting. I mean, do you know what else is exciting? Forget 10 years.
Bitcoin's Price Surge to 40K
00:02:28
Speaker
Let's go back, say, 10 days.
00:02:31
Speaker
Bitcoin price wasn't as good as it is today. It is on a tear. We're on a collision course of 40K, and that is not something I thought I was going to be saying one month ago. This is a good time. Market volumes. I think when I was going through some of the spot market volume data,
00:02:54
Speaker
as I do each month, back in August and then September. I think like the three-month period between July, August, September was one of the lowest volatility periods in BTC price history. It was just
00:03:15
Speaker
the most boring environment from a trade perspective and an actual like spot volumes in incredible low points multi-year low points open interest on futures just non-existent and now wow things are picking up things are picking up big time um i just i always know when things are picking up i have like these
00:03:41
Speaker
kind of canary in the coal mine situations where I follow these random crypto like shill influences on telegram just to see the hilarity of what they're pushing out. And it's just been an absolute dead zone for ages. Now, all of a sudden I'm getting like 10 push notifications an hour telling about this latest like crap coin that they think is going to go from like 200k market cap to being a top 10 coin. Excellent. Yeah, great.
00:04:09
Speaker
But you know, we're back, baby. We're back.
00:04:13
Speaker
And the Lambos are cheaper than ever. You got to love it. You know it. That's the real BTC to Lambo. That's the real exchange that I keep track of. And that ratio is looking good in our favor, Austin. All right, well, we're going to talk a little
NFT Market Challenges: OpenSea & Yuga Labs
00:04:30
Speaker
bit about the market. In particular, in this episode, we're going to dig into the NFT market, which, yeah, remember that? It turns out signs of life
00:04:41
Speaker
have been spotted in the NFT space. And in the past, in particular, two to three days, the space is just on a tear again. I want to dig into some of that. And of course, it wouldn't be an episode of Off-Chain without us mentioning our curly-haired friend. We will, of course, cover off the latest and greatest from SPF. All right, let's jump in off our story of the day.
00:05:18
Speaker
So there's been some mixed signals in the NFT market over the past few weeks but you know volumes are seriously up and we've been spotting some early signs of life in the NFT space but
00:05:34
Speaker
It's not been all sunshine and rainbows. There's been some big storms over the past three to four weeks and I want to start with OpenSea because they just announced that they've laid off 50% of their staff. That's
00:05:51
Speaker
just over 100 people. And it's worth calling out, I mean, we covered this mid last year, where they'd laid off around 20% of their workforce at the time, which was actually 230 employees. So, you know, they've gone from a pretty sizable, close to 1000 kind of people down to now 100. So that has really, really shrunk. So the good side of this is,
00:06:19
Speaker
Well, I at least think this is relatively good. They've received four months severance packages, and importantly, they received accelerated equity vesting, so they didn't have to lose all of their potentially worthless stock options in OpenSea. They got six months of healthcare and mental health benefits.
00:06:40
Speaker
At least they've done somewhat good. Certainly in the context of US severance, that's pretty good. On the flip side of this, probably not the best look that days later after the announcement, the full OpenSea exec team decided to rent out a $9 million mansion, previously owned by Katy Perry and Russell Brand, to do a strategy off-site.
00:07:06
Speaker
It's an interesting, interesting decision after laying off half of the company. That's a good one. Now, here's the thing, Matt, was that mansion, did that happen to be in Southern California? Or do you know where it was? Because a $9 million mansion in Southern California, that's like a 1500 square foot house. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, they were in like a one bed apartment.
00:07:35
Speaker
Well, you know, the big story, I think, though, coming out on OpenSea, they've laid off a load of staff, et cetera, et cetera. The lead investor of OpenSea in their last round actually just wrote down OpenSea's valuation by a whopping 90%. You may remember that their previous valuation was $13.3 billion, which I actually think is absurd, to be completely honest.
00:08:04
Speaker
Um, it is now down to 1.4 billion, which actually I think is probably a lot more realistic. If anything is still probably a little frothy considering the.
00:08:16
Speaker
the state of the NFT marketplace space and just how ripe that is for a bit of disruption as we've seen with the introduction of Blur, but then also I think coming down from like some of the wider centralized exchanges launching the majority of us now have launched at least an NFT marketplace. So they're just getting attacked from all angles. And I think in a bear market, NFTs
00:08:42
Speaker
get hurt the most. So that's been a tricky one. And then, you know, another big name in the NFT space, Yuga, right? The company behind the Bode Yacht Club IP and CryptoPunks and MiBits and a couple of others.
00:09:00
Speaker
They announced layoffs at the end of October. They actually didn't specify how many, but it seems it was significant. There was enough like news stories, right, to note that it was significant. They only had their US employees impacted here. And this is since they brought in their new CEO from, he was from Activision Blizzard.
00:09:21
Speaker
What is that now Activision Blizzard and Microsoft now we call it. So, the company I think still has around 100 employees so quite sure how big you go was but probably relatively sizable so you'd imagine a big chunk but
00:09:38
Speaker
I think that is more signs that the NFT space has been struggling and volumes in the NFT space, as in trade volumes, have been at some of the lowest recorded points since at least the first big rally in maybe 2020. It's just been a ghost town, a real lack of liquidity, a real lack of positive price action.
00:10:03
Speaker
Now, despite the layoffs, co-founder, the pseudonymous Gordon Garner, has been on a very public buying spree of NFTs. He dropped around $1.5 million yesterday alone, buying up a
NFT Market Dynamics: Blur vs. OpenSea
00:10:18
Speaker
load of NFTs from CryptoPunks, Doodles, Bepool, and just a few others. And he said on Twitter that he plans to deploy
00:10:30
Speaker
even more over the next few days. And there's a bunch of people that have been trying to speculate, front run the trades or lots of collections pumping speculatively and then obviously retracing off the back of it. But there has been a lot of price action. Question for you, Austin. Is it a good sign to announce a load of layoffs in your company and then publicly start splashing millions of dollars on NFTs?
00:10:53
Speaker
Oh, gosh, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it is an interesting thing. I will say, I guess, maybe a little bit in there. Although, you know, I did go to a party of theirs the other day and I've got this skin rash. Yeah. Have you? Yeah. I hear it was a sight for sore eyes.
00:11:13
Speaker
Uh, if you all haven't heard, uh, yeah, look up what happened at the, the board, a yacht club party. Um, it's wild. Uh, but anyway, you know, okay. So buying NFTs, maybe not the greatest thing, but it is a common pattern that companies will go through like tightening, uh, you know, whether it be through a riff or something else. And then they do like some type of investment, which could be, you know, uh, like a, uh, uh, an R and D investment. It could be a stock buyback. It could even be hiring again.
00:11:42
Speaker
just hiring a different type of staff, you know? It's very true. And this is, you know, this is Gordon Goddard's personal funds as well. I think like on one side you could say, kind of bad taste doing this after you've laid off a load of people. The other thing is, you know, actually, is this more of a, you know, kind of putting his money where his mouth is and investing in the space, stimulating some demand, which he has in fairness alone, kind of shows the state of liquidity in the space where
00:12:11
Speaker
deploying 1.5 million in a day has created enough buzz to really drive up some demand and pump a bunch of projects across the board. So I don't know. I'm not going to
00:12:27
Speaker
shit on it too much. I think it's largely a good thing. But I think it's interesting. So we've set the scene, right? Layoffs tightening. It's not just going to be the NFT space where we see layoffs. I think moving into Q1, we're going to see the next wave of tech, as in web2tech layoffs really start to come full force. But in the NFT space,
00:12:49
Speaker
Let's talk about these signs of life that I was mentioning, because all I've really been talking about is largely death at this point. And here's some areas of optimism. Daily volume hit a three-month high yesterday. It surpassed $20 million in sales volume. In early October alone, this was just around $5 million. So, you know, significant improvement and blur.
00:13:17
Speaker
continues to dominate in terms of volume. It accounts around 67% of overall volume. Open season at 17% in second place. And then I actually think like third on the list is actually like CryptoPunks' own native marketplace. It's basically these two battling it out and in all honesty just blur. They have really dominated market share from a volume perspective since launching there.
00:13:45
Speaker
a big incentive campaign. But one area where OpenSea has had an edge for a pretty sustained period was that while it had lower volumes,
00:13:58
Speaker
It consistently had somewhere in the region of like 2x the number of unique traders on the platform versus Blur. So Blur was doing a lot of volume, significantly more volume, but from a much smaller pool of probably just the same traders that were just farming rewards.
00:14:17
Speaker
Interestingly, the past two days, this gap basically went from being a 2x lead to pretty much parity. They're about the same now, but volume is significantly up. Why might that be the case? Well, Blur's second season, the season two of rewards ends on November 20. And if you're not super familiar with how that works effectively, you earn points for the bids that you make, whether that's on their Blend NFT lending product or whether it's
00:14:47
Speaker
actually bidding or making sales and closing trades on NFTs themselves. You get points and more points you have at the end of the season. You guessed it, a nice airdrop of probably hugely diluted value blur tokens, which will not be worth all of the cash that you spent bidding on shit NFTs.
00:15:07
Speaker
So, you know, if there's a silver lining, don't worry about it. Most of the season two bidders are probably going to be underwater at this point, even if season one was quite profitable from that perspective.
00:15:20
Speaker
So what I would expect is a lot of last minute farming increased volume as a result. And we are seeing a ton of gains across pretty much all the big projects in the EAF NFT space and double digit gains in many cases. So there's a lot of activity happening. And once you have this big spike in volume,
00:15:46
Speaker
during times of low liquidity, it's not unusual to see huge swings in price action to the upside. So we'll see. Some of it, the momentum seems to be holding slightly. But one big area, and this is the last point I want to call out on this, a big, big area of kind of momentum, narrative that's coming back up again, and growth that's happening in the NFT space,
00:16:12
Speaker
is on Bitcoin, ordinals. You may remember back in, I think it was February of this year, we did an episode where we did a deep dive to explain ordinals, the Bitcoin NFTs.
00:16:28
Speaker
and dug into all of those. You should definitely go read that up. We spoke to some of the early builders in the space and we were doing this ourselves. Playing around on the Bitcoin blockchain actually minted one of the first thousand ordinals to appear on Bitcoin. So we know what we're talking about. They have been just on another absolute tear and what I thought was particularly interesting
00:16:52
Speaker
is for the first time Bitcoin NFTs overtook ETH NFTs in daily trading volume. That was yesterday. Their volume seems to be down around 50% today, but there was just a huge, huge amount of trade volume come up. And one of the
00:17:11
Speaker
I guess triggers of this was Binance listing the BRC20 token AUDI on the Binance exchange. So if you're not familiar with BRC20 tokens, we probably don't have a whole lot of time to explain this, but very complex technologically to actually even list these kinds of tokens on exchange.
00:17:35
Speaker
So Binance have obviously taken on a bunch of extra operational stuff to get that going. It pumped about 50% upon the listing. And with the rise in interest in ordinals,
00:17:48
Speaker
Bitcoin fees are up just a casual thousand percent since August. So that's picking up. And when you look across kind of many of the top ordinals projects, they have really kind of pumped hard.
00:18:07
Speaker
Bitcoin frogs, which is probably the largest, I believe, of all of the Ordinals NFT collections, they're up 12% over seven days. OMB up 60% over seven days. Bitcoin punks up 7%. D-GODs up 39%. And then just looking, which I often do, is like the sub 10K inscriptions. That's the first 10,000.
00:18:31
Speaker
ordinals that were minted. They've rallied their floor prices up around 43%. So you can see tons and tons of activity happening here. I think if, while I'm not an active NFT trader, I spend a lot of time keeping and paying attention to this.
00:18:47
Speaker
I think everyone in that space is going to be very relieved to see some liquidity coming back in the markets. And even if it's nowhere near even the peaks of Q1 of this year, it is a significant increase on the past few months. So there is life yet in the NFT space. And speaking of life, yeah, a huge shakeup, huge shakeup. It's very, very different.
00:19:16
Speaker
It's amazing to me, Matt, as you were talking through that portion on the NFT marketplaces with OpenSea versus Blur, I was thinking to myself, am I remembering history correctly? Or has it been rewritten here? Because I could swear that just a year ago when we were talking about Blur, our thought was this is some wild stuff that they're doing, but this could be a flash in the pan.
00:19:44
Speaker
I mean, let's not forget, January of 2022, OpenSea had 90% of the NFT marketplace market share. It was unmovable. It was basically agreed upon that they were going to dominate. They were positioning themselves like, you know, CoinbaseX, SQX for NFTs, and they were just going to scoop up the entire market share and no one could beat them.
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, and then just a year ago, in October, you know, that's really when Blur started to hit the scene. And their meteoric rise got them to the point where, if I recall correctly, like a month or two later, like maybe by
00:20:28
Speaker
november december they had eclipsed open sea momentarily and then they fell back down and then they eclipsed them again but to see this being sustained and not not just sustained but there you know it's it's almost the tables have completely turned right 67 percent market share for blur versus
00:20:47
Speaker
17% market share for OpenSea. It's just wild to see that. Here's my take on this. And I think that this can be explained. I think this is actually
00:21:00
Speaker
something that if you're an NFT marketplace, it has to be a concern regardless of who you are, right? So the ability for the market share in, and when we talk about market share, we're talking about the distribution of sales volume, which ultimately is the most important thing because that's where you're generating fees. That's where you're generating revenue as a marketplace.
00:21:22
Speaker
For it to, for it to jump that dramatically over such a short space of time going from like 90% down to 17% in like a year, but even in the space of a few months right like cutting that market share in half.
00:21:39
Speaker
When you dig into the data behind a lot of this and the point I was making earlier around the fact that OpenSea historically had nearly double, consistently at least double the number of unique traders on their platform, yet they're doing a fraction of the volume. What this shows is that the lion's share of all of the trading volume is done by a very, very small percent of traders.
00:22:10
Speaker
if you can incentivize that very, very small pool of whales that ultimately spend all of their time trading between each other, right? To come over and trade on your platform.
00:22:24
Speaker
you will win in this space as it stands today. Those whales control the NFT space. They largely are the ones that are making markets that are setting the prices ultimately. And what are they motivated by?
00:22:41
Speaker
Profits, so how can you bring them over? Well, you spin up a really attractive money printing incentive screen that incentivizes them to bring their liquidity over to you. So blood, they did it very effectively. They saw this, they did it. In a bear market in particular, when retail are not trading on NFTs right now and haven't been for some time, it is just these whales that are making up the trade volume.
00:23:09
Speaker
you if you're open seat you're so much more exposed right because what you're trying to capture is the tail and what
00:23:17
Speaker
what Blur are capturing is kind of the fat head, right? Which is of volume. And that is a very, very big hurdle to overcome if you're OpenSea, because first of all, Blur will end this season. They'll probably launch another season. They can't continuously do this, right? Because there's only so much dilution that that Blur token can take. And you know, the big question is,
00:23:43
Speaker
How long can that last for? And that I think is where we look at like, is this a flash in the pan? But from OpenSea, you know, how do they get back these, these big whales? They've got no real differentiator. Like the whales, okay. Maybe you build like some pro trading tools, things like that, but I don't know, like.
00:24:00
Speaker
The only thing I see is if OpenSea launch a token and do something there. But this is a US entity. They are not going to launch a token. It's far too complicated. They already have raised a ton of capital as well around equity.
00:24:18
Speaker
It would be too much of a complexity, in my opinion, and risk for them to launch a token. I just, I don't see where this goes. And that's why I think this market is in a really challenging spot. They're all competing to be the Amazon, but I just don't see that playing out this way.
00:24:36
Speaker
Yeah, these huge C changes and reversals, it's certainly volatile. Here's another thing to think about. Earlier, you mentioned that OpenSea had their valuation written down by 90% from their lead investor from $13.3 billion to $1.4 billion, right?
00:24:55
Speaker
And we were thinking, that's obviously a huge write down, but it may still be a little frothy even at that. Now, think about this. If they're at 17% of market volume and Blur is at 67% of market value, market share, where does that leave Blur? Well, in February of this year,
00:25:16
Speaker
Blur, that was the last time that Blur did a funding round and they raised at a $1 billion valuation. So does that mean that Blur is worth several billion dollars now or more OpenSea is worth actually way less than their 90% markdown?
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting, right? You know, if I was going to bet on either of these as an investor today, who would I bet on? And actually, I would probably, as crazy as it sounds, pick OpenSea. The reason why I'd probably pick OpenSea is that
00:25:50
Speaker
Once Blur is positioned at traders, hands down. I've used Blur a bunch and I quite like it. Retail is not going to use Blur. It looks horrible for a retail user.
00:26:06
Speaker
On the other hand, for the retail consumers, the kind of mass market appeal, if you like, OpenSea is designed exactly for that. I think in a bear market, it absolutely sucks. A few things click together and I do think we'll see another big bull run in the wider crypto space. And I think that will inevitably, even for a period of time, bleed into the NFT space. And as the NFT space evolves and we start to see like,
00:26:36
Speaker
more use cases take shape there. I think OpenSea is best positioned to capture the quote unquote masses. I don't actually think NFTs are going to be for the masses, but like in the grand scheme of this, right? So. The masses of the dramatic minority. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I think that
00:27:02
Speaker
That's where I'd largely place my bed. I think that we're going to see a meteoric shift in almost like the D2C effect of NFTs. We're already starting to see this, right? I think that Yuga have been exploring building their own homegrown marketplace for board apes.
00:27:23
Speaker
And that's what they had for punks. And the more that starts to happen, and the more that the larger projects can still drive up enough liquidity for it to make sense for sellers to list on those marketplaces, the more fractured the volume gets. And that's then when a lot of these projects start to suffer at the marketplace level.
00:27:46
Speaker
I think it's going to be really interesting to see. I'm very keen to understand how ordinal starts to evolve and the Bitcoin NFT space is very, very difficult in all honesty or time consuming to
00:28:02
Speaker
to just like even go through the process of like buying, owning, storing, ordinals, trade volumes are much lower in general and things move slower. It's not a great spot to be for like, unless you are doing it kind of 24 seven. So we'll see how that kind of plays out. And I am really keen to see how the just wider NFT marketplace kind of plays out over the coming years. But with that,
00:28:31
Speaker
Let's jump in and take a pause on NFTs and jump into the wonderful world of Sam Bankman Fried.
Sam Bankman Fried's Fraud Case
00:28:47
Speaker
Ah, Matt, we've been talking about this for about a year now, believe it or not. Brings a tit to my eye. Yeah, I know. We've had so many episodes where we've talked about SPF and FTX and the incredible historic fraud that was perpetrated at FTX. Well, now we have some closure.
00:29:12
Speaker
to this it's not completely done there will be more but i think that this is a you know a nice opportunity a year later after uncovering and unpacking this this fraud and dealing with the roller coaster right of emotion around people losing their life savings and their livelihood and you know their their jobs
00:29:34
Speaker
it taking down so much of the crypto market, entire projects collapsing as a result of this. And us wondering, are they even going to go after him? What's going to happen? And look, it looks like some justice might be served here. Granted, maybe it's not the level of justice that we want. And I think that there's still some
00:29:58
Speaker
some wrongs to be righted, especially with all of these billions of dollars of funds that have been recovered, making their way back to people on the retail side that lost all of their money from FTX and this fraud that was committed. But even so, we do have some closure here after this five-week trial
00:30:21
Speaker
uh where the jury deliberated for four hours and 40 minutes it's actually a pretty short amount of time and they unanimously determined that SPF was guilty of all charges that amounts to two counts of wire fraud
00:30:37
Speaker
four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. If there is one thing that you do not want to be guilty of, it's wire fraud.
00:30:53
Speaker
It has to be, I mean, if you, if you put different, um, crimes next to their estimated kind of jail time that you, you kind of get for that, I think wire fraud must be in like the top 10. I'm pretty sure you, you have like higher chance of like a longer sentencing duration on average for wire fraud than you would for murder, which is wild. It's just absolutely insane.
00:31:23
Speaker
SPF is looking at up to 115 years in prison right now. He, he likely will be spending decades at minimum. I think I saw like people think it's going to be like 35 kind of years, something like that. I mean, yeah, realistically. It's a long time. It's a long time.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's either a long time or it's far too short of a time depending on who you ask. The people that lost their homes and their livelihoods over this, I think there's definitely more to be done to make them feel
00:32:04
Speaker
write it in whole again. But with that said, this is guilty of all charges. This is the maximum that we could have hoped for at this point from this trial. The sentencing date is set for March 28th of 2024. So it'll be a few months before we find out exactly what he's up against. With that said, it's likely that he's going to appeal this. His lawyer was immediately signaling that.
00:32:34
Speaker
This legal battle will probably extend on by the order of months, if not quarters or years, but it's trending in the right direction and we do have some semblance of justice that is about to be carried out here. The jury, after they shared their verdict, expressed that SPF committed one of the largest financial frauds in history
00:32:58
Speaker
with nearly $10 billion in misappropriated customer funds spent on luxury real estate investments and dark money political donations. And they explicitly stated that they felt this was all done at SPF's direction because of course there was an attempt to say, oh no, this was like part of the FTX and Alameda machine and everything like that. And that didn't go over very well. I was reading in the Washington Post
00:33:23
Speaker
they had this nice sort of breakdown and overview of the entire trial. And, you know, they had all of these amazing expert witnesses. Of course, most famously, his girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, flipped on him. And what they're saying is that like their their legal analysis basically concluded that actually the most damning witness, the most damning evidence against SP SPF was his own testimony. Yeah. That's what I kind of thought. You know, I was like,
00:33:53
Speaker
Going through a lot of this, I was following a lot of the analysis. I think the Financial Times is a similar, really good write up and a couple of podcasts that dug into it. It just feels like Sam in true Sam fashion tripped over his own words in particular.
00:34:11
Speaker
I think he was always going to be found guilty. But he didn't do himself any favors. And you got to question the legal defense. At the same time, I would not have wanted to be those lawyers trying to figure out how you defend someone that is just on the borderline of being like indefensible. So it felt like probably a bit of a Hail Mary that they were throwing. So
00:34:37
Speaker
Yeah, and look, this isn't going to be his only legal battle. He's also facing charges related to an alleged $150 million bribe to Chinese officials in an effort to unfreeze a $1 billion amount of crypto that was supposedly frozen there. I remember that. Due to suspicion of money laundering, right? I saw Caroline's, did you see Caroline's comments around that? They were so damning. This was the one that got me a lot during this. Yeah, she basically just said like, yeah, no,
00:35:06
Speaker
This was ordered by Sam. And I think they have like some notes or something around it, but. Now, Caroline, I'll never forget when she was spotted in that Starbucks in New York and immediately we all knew she is just she is looking for a bus. Give me a bus to throw SPF straight under. Yeah.
00:35:28
Speaker
And I don't blame him. Yeah, I do not blame him. Not at all. I mean, you know, look, the reality is he is ultimately responsible for this. And I think that the evidence was very damning. I mean, like I said, it's not just Caroline Ellison's testimony, his own testimony and the hard evidence is really what was working against him in the greatest way. He's also facing charges related to violating campaign finance laws, which I think
00:35:57
Speaker
is going to be particularly interesting in the context of, you know, the sort of US angle of this story, because don't forget he was the second largest donor to the Democrat Party after George Soros. There's a lot. This is a tough one. I mean, this is going to be like a very contentious thing. I don't think that I don't think that the campaign finance issues are going to go away too silently, at least they shouldn't.
00:36:23
Speaker
I thought it was interesting that what kind of came out as well around the fact, which actually I think was a particularly damning thing for Sam's own story around himself.
00:36:39
Speaker
in that it kind of came to light that he'd been funding both the Democrats and Republicans in large sums as well. And he'd been doing dark donations to the Republican Party in size, because he wanted to keep this appearance that he was purely supporting Democrats, but clearly wasn't. He's just
00:37:01
Speaker
Oh, yeah. And his whole thing about like, oh, you know, this is what you have to do in the tech industry is basically woke signal. But if you want to create corruption, you know, you have to play both sides. And it's something that I think, you know, it's like, oh, okay, you just said the quiet part out loud, basically. Yeah.
00:37:19
Speaker
And so, look, he's going to be up against campaign finance charges. Also, I mean, very predictably, dozens of lawsuits from business partners. I have to imagine Tom Brady is not too happy right now. Yeah, I'd say so. I'd say he'd be a little bit miffed about this. There's going to be a lot of it. I mean, this event.
FTX Collapse & Its Ripple Effects
00:37:43
Speaker
Being someone that was working in the crypto space full-time through the event and now after the event, I can't begin to explain how different it is to work in the space post-FTX.
00:38:04
Speaker
a monument or a landmark moment that's changed and shaped not just the public perception, but the regulatory direction, in particular in the US,
00:38:17
Speaker
And I think just the way in which people operate in the space as a whole, I think there's been a lot of good that has come out of this. There's been a lot of bad that's come out of this. It's really challenging. I thought some things that I thought were interesting to share actually that I've seen happen recently. So there's been a lot of speculation around
00:38:39
Speaker
impossible relaunch right of FTX and we've been seeing people Various news stories around this and we've still got the looming kind of, you know bankruptcy Saga of FTX and will people get their money back and it seems it seemed like Things were looking a lot more positive what I thought was been interesting is in the past few days I've personally
00:39:08
Speaker
had, I tend to get quite a lot of just like random deal flow on whether that's like jumping into a seed round or whatever like that in this space. I've had three separate offers to buy FTX kind of bankruptcy claims at 50 cent on the dollar or below
00:39:31
Speaker
uh which i'll say i haven't and i haven't had that before but in in like minimum six figure like sums people are trying to offload these which i feel like is a is a is a big signal here that
00:39:48
Speaker
A lot of the individuals with these claims, this isn't just about them needing liquidity now. It's much more of a concern that this isn't going to be, this isn't going to be coming back. Um, I thought, I thought I would kind of share that cause I thought it was interesting because these just all of a sudden have been coming my way and it's been like, okay, this is, this is interesting. I feel I get this like sense that someone knows something I don't basically is what I would say here. Yeah, that is.
00:40:16
Speaker
That does not bode well. It's scary to hear. Well, that's what you might call alpha. I don't have alpha for you, Matt, but I do have another curveball, which is, scroll down in our doc here and look at this photo that I've posted in here. I know our listeners can't see this, but this is a photo of what looks to be maybe like a six, seven, eight year old Caroline Ellison. It turns out that,
00:40:46
Speaker
Potentially, Caroline Ellison appeared on the American Kids TV show, Arthur, in 2003. So not, you don't have Alfa, but you do have Arthur, some would say. Exactly, yes. That is the right way to put it. Take a listen to this and tell me if this is Caroline Ellison.
00:41:08
Speaker
My name's Caroline, and this is the library at the Maya Al-Baldwin School. And today, we're going to be talking about scary stories. Is this from the court case, or is this from Arthur?
00:41:28
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah, that's great. I loved Arthur when I was younger. That was a great show. Great show. Oh, yeah, it's the best. Yeah. That and Hey Arnold, the two classics, absolute classic. Yes. But you know, Arthur had the alpha. It was foreshadowing the scary stories that were yet to come.
00:41:49
Speaker
20 years later in Caroline's future. Wow. Well, I feel like we've come up to time. We've wrapped up a bit on the SPF side of things. The NFT market's up big time.
00:42:06
Speaker
Bitcoin is on an absolute tear. We've got the ETF to look forward to, maybe Q1 of next year, fingers crossed. We've got the Bitcoin halving coming up. Am I crazy, Austin, or am I sounding optimistic here? I think I need someone to pinch me, because all of a sudden I'm feeling a little bit bullish, and it sounds a bit dangerous at this point. It's usually a top signal, by the way.
00:42:36
Speaker
All right, well, we will soon find out if we are simply the top signal or if we're actually at the beginning of some very exciting momentum. And I'm just glad that while October left it until the last few days of the month, it retained its title of being October. All right, Austin, I will see you next week. See you then, man.
00:43:22
Speaker
The contents of the Decrypting Crypto podcast should not be used and are not intended as investment advice. Please do your own due diligence before making any investment, cryptocurrency or otherwise.