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Off Chain 21/21/23: Airdrop Season is Here (Here's Our Picks) image

Off Chain 21/21/23: Airdrop Season is Here (Here's Our Picks)

S6 E38 ยท The Decrypting Crypto Podcast
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In this week's episode, we explore the current airdrop season happening on and off Solana, sharing some interesting projects that could result in airdrops. Enjoy!

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Transcript

Introduction to the Decrypting Crypto Podcast

00:00:12
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Decrypting Crypto Podcast. It's December 21st, 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. How are you doing, Austin?

Humor in Crypto: Bonk Billionaire Joke

00:00:27
Speaker
I'm doing great, Matt. I became a bonk billionaire this morning. Ah, excellent. Wonderful. What are you doing chatting to me then? And he won it back in one trade. Is this like, is this recruit the 2017 and 2021 losses yet? Are we still waiting? Oh yeah. We're, you know, still got a little ways to go before I can dig myself out of this hole.

The Rise of Meme Coins: Potential Bonk ETF?

00:00:52
Speaker
I saw a really good-
00:00:55
Speaker
All jokes aside, it's great to see yet another dog meme coin rise to the top. Oh, yeah. True utility, right? This is what we've been waiting for. I'm sure the Bonk ETF will be a really bullish play next year. I saw a great tweet that sums up more my trading behavior on shitcoins. And it was like someone had shared
00:01:22
Speaker
screenshot I think from like the phantom wallet and it had just like a $200,000 portfolio value in it and he was the tweet that he shared with it was like
00:01:38
Speaker
Yeah, just feel really blessed to be kind of like in the midst of this blow run. Can't quite believe I've been able to land a portfolio this

Bullish Signals: Meme Coins and Major Crypto Rally

00:01:51
Speaker
size. And I only put in 500K to begin with. It's just like, yep, that's meme coins for you. But it has been, you know, I mean, obviously just like meme coins,
00:02:05
Speaker
dumb. I think everyone knows they're dumb. Well, I hope so. But it is like a super bullish signal when they're rallying. Altcoins are rallying and just, you know, Bitcoin, ETH, I mean, Solana and the Solana ecosystem. I think I looked today and it was like eighties, eighty seven bucks, like three or four days ago. It was in like
00:02:34
Speaker
70 bucks, 69 bucks kind of range. It's been really, really rallying.

Airdrop Season: Opportunities and Speculations

00:02:40
Speaker
And yeah, we're gonna talk today a little bit about some of the free money. It's the holiday period. Airdrops, it is officially airdrop season. And I've been digging deep into the weeds on some of this. I'll be sharing
00:03:00
Speaker
some specific airdrop opportunities, what you can expect and what people are speculating on right now. Of course, you got to play safe. Play safe in these in these mean streets. But there's a lot of fun to be had, I think, over the coming month ahead. Let's get into it, man. Let's do it. I'm pumped. I'm ready. Let's go.

Matthew's Airdrop Protocol Insights

00:03:31
Speaker
It is officially Solana airdrop season. I've been doing the rounds on Twitter. I've been in the Discord channels. I've been in the deepest, darkest Telegram channels so that you thankfully, our dear listener, do not have to.
00:03:52
Speaker
I'm just going through everything and I wanted to share a few protocols that I've got my eyes on, some of them that I've known for a long time, some of them that are relatively fresh, and just sharing what's going on in the airdrop space and a little bit of thinking around how you might want to consider playing the airdrops. Believe me, I have been
00:04:17
Speaker
in and around a lot of Air Drops since probably the ICO boom of 2017 and learned some hard lessons in how to not play Air Drop season.

Airdrop Benefits for Solana Phone Owners

00:04:28
Speaker
So we can share a little bit about this, but Austin, I don't know if you've seen some of this crazy stuff happening with the Solana phone recently.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's just, you know, one of the, I think I saw, I don't know if this is like a wash trade type thing, but it's like one of them sold for like $7,000, but there's definitely been several selling for like $5,000. And I'm pretty sure the retail price was like, what was it, 600 bucks? Well, the reason behind all of this, if you're listening, you don't realize why people are buying these on eBay for like 5,000 bucks.
00:05:03
Speaker
Is that saga pass holders that's the soulbound nft that you get when you buy one of these solana phones. They are just being given a bunch of air drops so initially they were given thirty million bonk tokens you may have had a bonk it's.
00:05:22
Speaker
kind of a big deal now, billion dollar plus market cap meme coin. Well, those initial bonk AirDrop tokens are now worth $550. So that's around the original price of the actual phone. So I think somewhere in the region of like
00:05:41
Speaker
1,500 bucks worth of airdrops so far have been delivered just if you own a salon. These can be claimed retroactively, which is just wild. And a nice fun fact in my just incredible ability to fumble stuff like this. Keen listeners may remember me mentioning
00:06:05
Speaker
that I put down my deposit for a Solana phone back in 2022, much to Austin's dismay at the time. Well, I got my initial like saga pass, which was like the deposit kind of pass that you needed.
00:06:23
Speaker
And I was playing around with a new feature in my Phantom wallet, which allowed you to burn spam NFTs. I was like, yeah, we're gonna do some housekeeping here. And one of those NFTs that I decided to burn forever by accident was my Saga Pass, which meant not only did I not get a phone, but I forfeited all of the airdrops and still,
00:06:51
Speaker
paid the deposit for the phone of like 200 bucks or whatever it was. So I think all round a really solid performance by me there as usual.

Airdrop Strategies: To Love or Not to Love?

00:07:00
Speaker
So with that credibility building story in mind, I'm now going to tell you how to play this in exactly the same way. So here's a bit of advice before I get into like some of the air drops. And I just want to call out, right? None of the things I'm mentioning are like endorsements. I'll also just remind everyone listening.
00:07:21
Speaker
We have never taken sponsorship from crypto projects for the podcast. We don't run ads. We will not ever do that. We would never mention a project for cash, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No affiliation, no affiliate deals, nothing. Now, if you are farming airdrops, right? Typically, if you're kind of new to the game,
00:07:47
Speaker
What happens is protocols will air drop you tokens for free if you have nine times out of 10 used their protocol prior to them launching a token. So there's lots of different ways that you can kind of go about this. And there's kind of two different types of air drop that I would typically say. One is the kind of more grind driven air drop where it's like,
00:08:16
Speaker
It doesn't really matter how much you actually spend on the protocol, right? It's just how much activity are you doing? Are you logging in each day? Are you playing games on the gaming blockchain, whatever it is? Are you doing NFT transactions? Are you doing a bunch of different stuff? Have you been on the testnet, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Sometimes you're in the Discord doing quests and all of this other stuff.
00:08:43
Speaker
That's not really the game I play. I don't have the time for that. There's plenty of opportunities if you want to do that. But typically, what I will focus on is when it's more about volume, where you have had assets on the platform, whether you are doing things like being a liquidity provider or there's trading volume that you're doing on the platform. So typically, what I just try to do and what I recommend is if you're going for that kind of volume play,
00:09:12
Speaker
is I just try to use stablecoins for liquidity provision. So I'll like be a liquidity provider into some stablecoin pools. Means I don't get like impermanent loss. I'm not buying some random token on the protocol that I'm kind of farming that could go wildly down in price. And then the most important thing, do not fall in love with your airdrop.
00:09:41
Speaker
My advice is, sure, the airdrop token may go up at some point. Sell it. Just as soon as you get it, sell it. Usually what happens is airdrops happen, they get sold the hell out of, and if it has some legs to it, it might have like a second round where it dips down and then we'll have another leg up to reach a higher high.
00:10:03
Speaker
I just don't overthink it. Sell it all. You've got it for free. Take profits and run. If you want to get back in, wait for the dip, buy that, and then you get some exposure. But make sure you take profits. So the first one on the list is...

Upcoming Airdrops: Jupiter and Other Protocols

00:10:18
Speaker
Jupiter, which I actually love this protocol. I'm not sure, Austin, how much you've played around in the Solana space over the years. I'm not sure if that's ever been a spot where you've played around. Not really. So tell me all about it. Yeah.
00:10:40
Speaker
I, in the last kind of bull run, I was never a huge fan of Solana, I'll be completely honest. And the pasta, this kind of rally and this airdrop season gave me another reason to just jump back in. I think one of the best things actually about Solana is the Phantom Wallet, which now is on ETH and it's just actually added support for Bitcoin as well.
00:11:05
Speaker
It's such a great wallet, such a great experience. The nice thing about Solana is I think it's much more kind of non-crypto-native friendly. Everything just happens lightning quick. Sure, you get a lot of outages on the network over the years, but we're starting to see that that's happening everywhere.
00:11:22
Speaker
But Jupiter has been around for a long time. It's become kind of like a self-sustaining ecosystem. It looks like it's a decentralized exchange. It's actually not. It's like an aggregator of liquidity across different exchanges, somewhat similar to 1inch or ParaSwap or something like that on ETH.
00:11:44
Speaker
but it also has a bunch of other features they've launched so you can have like a DCA feature where like let's just say you just drop in like I don't know a thousand bucks of USDC and it'll just DCA you in on whatever cadence like each week buy a hundred bucks worth of Solana and you can just set it and forget it
00:12:06
Speaker
It has a perps exchange, stuff like that. But they've announced that the Jupyter token is going to be here in January, phase one of the airdrop set. There'll be four phases. If you've ever used Solana, you'll likely be eligible for at least, I think, like 200 tokens. So you probably have a small allocation in there.
00:12:30
Speaker
If you want to, so you kind of like the first drop is already locked in. For the second one, I think it's probably worth just doing a few swaps on the Jupiter exchange, maybe use that DCA feature. And with really great caution, you could play around with their perps. Remember, that's leverage trading. So really, really do be careful there. If you don't know what you're doing, don't do that.
00:12:51
Speaker
They're likely to be kind of giving out token allocations based on trading volume and the number of features used. But of all the Solana airdrops, I actually think this is going to be the one that has the highest potential, assuming we stay in bullish territory, to not just tank on the airdrop price, sorry, on the airdrop launch. I think this is actually a great protocol and should be a really, really cool and lots of hype around it.
00:13:20
Speaker
So that's the first one. The next one is parcel. And I've been playing around here. This is a real world asset perps exchange. It's somewhat complicated to explain, but by and large, the summary here is you can go long or short the real estate in cities where they have markets to basically speculate on the
00:13:43
Speaker
real estate prices around the world. And it's kind of cool. I love it, but it's an interesting concept. And I think real world assets are going to be a huge narrative over the next 12 months anyway, which if you've been listening to podcasts, you've heard me talk about a lot before. They have actually been around for quite a while, but they are gearing up to launch a token now since launching V3 at their protocol.
00:14:05
Speaker
they have a point system, which has now become very, very popular, where they'll use this to determine token allocation. So you can just be a liquidity provider. This is what I'm doing. You just provide USDC. So you have a 30-day lockup, and then you're free to withdraw after that. And you're basically being the liquidity provider for all of these different markets.
00:14:30
Speaker
you are exposed to traders P&L. So if traders on the platform make an overall loss, which when I was looking today, they are making a loss, you'll make a gain on your, your LP. If they make a profit, then it comes out of the liquidity pool, right? So shouldn't ever get too crazy, but it's worth going out. You could make a gain or loss on your overall contribution. So make sure you bear that in mind.
00:14:56
Speaker
You get a 5% bonus if you're referred in by someone, you just type in their code and 10% of the points of anyone that you refer. They also have like a NFT collections, a homeowner association. You get a 20% points boost. I don't own any of those. I'm trying to stay out of the NFT space for a while. It's just a bit of a black hole, but I just.
00:15:21
Speaker
There's enough, there's enough here. But I know a bunch of people have been speculating in that place. And also trading volume accounts for points as well. Again, it's perps, it's quite complex. So if you don't understand trading derivatives like that, just bear that in mind.
00:15:43
Speaker
But that's a nice little way, and I don't think it's too crowded actually, so could be a nice spot to just set it and forget it. I often just keep a pool of stablecoins, just that I rotate around that are exclusively for farming tokens like this.
00:16:03
Speaker
So we've got Parcel, we've got Jupiter, two more really on the Solana ecosystem that I want to call out that are going to be the biggest ones. Just a note, there will be loads more, but these are the ones that I've kind of at least got exposure to. So Kamino is another one and Margin-Phi is the other. These two are very similar, so I'll explain them together. They're basically
00:16:27
Speaker
lending protocols kind of like an Aave but on Solana they got point systems basically you get points for both lending and borrowing more weight on the borrow side so the more volume that you lend or borrow the more points you get this one is actually getting a little crowded but to be honest what I just do here is I just lend stable coins and you get like I don't know like a four percent yield on that
00:16:54
Speaker
and then you can borrow against it. I literally just like borrowed some Solana using my stablecoins as collateral, important using stablecoins as collateral because they don't fluctuate in price so less likely to get a margin call there. And I just do a really low loan to value ratio so I've just literally got a small amount
00:17:11
Speaker
very small amount in each of these protocols, just farming some points, then I'll pull everything out, sell the airdrops, and be on my way out of that ecosystem as quickly as possible. Because while these are interesting, I don't think they're groundbreaking in any way, to be completely honest.
00:17:31
Speaker
Uh, so those are the big ones in Solana.

Future Airdrop Opportunities: StarkNet and ZK Sync

00:17:34
Speaker
There's a few others that I think outside of this that I am kind of excited about that I've been keeping my eye on that you can dig into. Stark net is, you know, one of.
00:17:44
Speaker
has been one of the most talked about protocols in, you know, the recent years with the zero knowledge zk sock kind of technology that's a roll up into the Ethereum blockchain. They've announced the airdrop for January for their stock token.
00:18:04
Speaker
I think the snapshot's already been taken for that, but what we'll probably see is when that token launches, all of a sudden a load of the protocols on there are going to be launching tokens and doing airdrops, usually the way this works. I think Jedi swap is one of the biggest and will most likely
00:18:21
Speaker
do a token, to be honest. I provided some liquidity there back in November, just in stablecoins and pulled them out in December. So we'll see. Maybe there's something there I would hold off until the token launches and see what happens there. ZK Sync is probably been the biggest bet I've been making. I've actually been providing liquidity on SyncSwap, which is the largest DEX on ZK Sync for quite a bit.
00:18:47
Speaker
quite some time now, a little over a year. I think we probably see the ZK Sync drop happen in 2024. I've been waiting years for that one, but nothing's confirmed on that one.

Staking and Airdrops: Eigenlayer and Ethify

00:19:02
Speaker
Almost certainly the most hyped and biggest airdrop that will happen, if this happens in 2024, will be Eigenlayer. That is the restaking platform.
00:19:11
Speaker
So if you have any staked ETH, you can restake it on Eigenlayer. We'll probably do a whole episode on Eigenlayer because it's a fascinating protocol. You get Eigenpoints. I have ETH restake there that I've had since its launch. I really love Eigenlayer and what they're building. I think restaking is going to be a big narrative next year. And similarly,
00:19:34
Speaker
Ethify is a is another protocol similar to like a LIDO and others it's a liquid staking protocol has point system they don't have a token yet. So if you're staking some ETH there you'll accrue points you also accrue Eigenlayer points as well so a little bit more.
00:19:49
Speaker
and on the similar vein as the liquid staking tokens that is swell. They've just recently been added to Eigenlayers staking protocol so you can accrue points there too. And the last one, feels like an age that we've been waiting for this one, but if social fire becomes kind of a narrative that next year, I'm unsure if it will be, then maybe lens protocol will finally drop a lens token. If you haven't already picked up a
00:20:15
Speaker
Lens handle go go do that it's a decentralized social network been on there for quite a while it's kind of interesting feel like the kind of lost their way recently but just this one just doesn't really require capital just a bit of time go play around on the social networks so

Cautious Investing in Protocols

00:20:32
Speaker
A crap ton of stuff to take a little look at. I'll just summarize the list of protocols I mentioned. We've got Jupyter, Parcel, Camino, and Marginify. They're all on Solana. Then outside of Solana, we've got StarkNet, ZK Sync, Eigenlayer, Ethify, Swell, and Lens Protocol.
00:20:54
Speaker
If you don't make some free money there, you're never gonna. So there we are. Just play safe, don't get greedy. Remember, whenever you're doing stuff like this, it's usually that these protocols are in the earliest stages of their development.
00:21:09
Speaker
don't go and ape in 100k to like some of these like brand new protocols this should be a very very small amount of your dry powder that you just throw in there and it's mercenary capital and then you get it out and do it with stables not with anything that's volatile
00:21:27
Speaker
So Matt, you mentioned a ton of protocols here. I have to ask a question that I think probably a lot of the audience is thinking, which is just on a practical level, you're putting capital and assets and bets, if you want to call it that, into all of these different scattered protocols.

Tracking Investments in Crypto Protocols

00:21:46
Speaker
How are you keeping track of this stuff? I feel like writing your will and tracking down all of your stuff is going to be impossible.
00:21:54
Speaker
Yeah, so that is actually a big consideration for me. I hate having stuff getting too messy. Funnily enough, actually, my wife and I maintain a financial
00:22:14
Speaker
inventory, Google Doc, and I keep it regularly updated with details of where we have crypto in particular because of stuff like this. But I mentioned loads of things, but what I typically do here is I won't keep funds in many of these protocols for very long. The moment that I know that a snapshot's been taken, I get the stuff straight out. And what I'll have is I'll just have a pool of stablecoins.
00:22:43
Speaker
Right? And I'll be like, okay, usually if I take profit and I pull things into stablecoins, it just goes into my like either sideline stablecoin fund and then a portion or a portion of that I'll use for just like, you know, airdrop farming. So I'll do the same thing across each of these. But typically the way this will work is I like stuff where I get like more bang for my buck. So I mentioned Eigenlayer and Ethify.
00:23:12
Speaker
Well, EtherFi is just like a Lido or a Rocket Pool. So I just stake my ETH with them. Not all of my ETH, but I stake a portion of the ETH that's like my long-term hold ETH with EtherFi. And they automatically restake that on Eigenlayer. So it's like, OK, one asset does the job of like those two for me. And I really like those two protocols anyway. So I'm like, great. Same with ZK Sync. ZK Sync is like the layer two blockchain.
00:23:41
Speaker
I just have like a few thousand USDC that's just providing liquidity on sync swap, the biggest decks that should do the job for me. Like I just keep it there. And, you know, it's earning like a 7%.
00:23:57
Speaker
yield likes, it's just, you know, it's just sitting doing nothing really just on that. And that's typically the way that I'll do this. I just park stable coins there. And then on like a practical level, I think the key thing for a lot of this is because these are somewhat new protocols a lot of the time, you do have to stay up to date with what's happening. So I actually, I'm looking at my
00:24:21
Speaker
My, uh, my, my Mac book, well, my monitor right now, and I have a Chrome tab that just says air drops. And it just has each of the protocols and they're like portfolio page or whatever page that's relevant.
00:24:34
Speaker
that's just sitting there. And I just check that once a day. And then I have a group of, I join all the Discord channels and I group them together in like an airdrops group in my Discord. And I just set up alerts on their announcements channel. Cause if they announce anything that makes me be like, not so sure about this, I immediately get out. Cause I'm like, you know, it's never worth anything weird. But typically I spend a lot of time just,
00:25:01
Speaker
thinking about, all right, if I'm making a more sizable bet, which I've done with ZK Sync, it's more that I actually believe it's a long-term big narrative play that I would maybe consider investing in in the future. But when it's just like some of the Solana stuff where I'll be the first to admit, this is not like long-term plays, just short-term stuff. I'm not putting a lot in and I'm trying not to make it too complicated.
00:25:29
Speaker
There you have it folks, some very practical advice from Matt.

Transition to Mature Crypto Topics

00:25:34
Speaker
All right, let's get out of airdrop stuff and we will jump into some slightly more grown up talk at least. All right, let's jump straight in. Well, Matt, I'm very proud to say that I have resisted the temptation
00:25:55
Speaker
to mention SBF and FTX one last time before the end of the year. I'm actually proud of you, Austin. I'm in a program. I'm in a program. But I am going to talk about Doquan.

Do Kwon's Legal Troubles

00:26:13
Speaker
Oh, good. Do I need to call your sponsor?
00:26:19
Speaker
Yes, our second favorite person, Dokuan. Well, if you've been following Dokuan, he is a notorious figure in the space. And actually, you know, a little over a year ago, we were talking about him a lot more than we are now. Quite a big personality. Has a track record.
00:26:39
Speaker
of imploding people's money more than once. But his most recent one is that he was the Luna Terra founder. And you'll recall that collapsed in May of 2022 and wiped out billions of dollars from the crypto market in a matter of days. And it actually led to the market contagion that we've experienced since, which, you know,
00:27:01
Speaker
led all the way up to the 3AC collapse. It led to everything that happened with FTX, one of the greatest financial frauds and collapses in history. So Do Kwon has rightfully earned his
00:27:17
Speaker
notoriety and hate amongst the community. Now, following all of these financial troubles and collapses, Do Kwon faced charges in the US and in his home country of South Korea. In the US, he's facing criminal fraud charges from federal prosecutors in New York and a civil lawsuit by the SEC. In South Korea,
00:27:46
Speaker
He's facing charges of financial crimes, including fraud, violations of capital market laws, manipulating transaction volumes using trader bots, and bribery. Since then, he's actually been in the middle of a jurisdictional battle between the two countries. It's been quite interesting to watch. Just recently, I believe it was last month,
00:28:07
Speaker
His extradition was approved by a Montenegro court, so we know that he's going to be extradited. The question was when and where. Well, he first needed to serve a four-month sentence for document forgery in Montenegro after he was caught trying to leave the country on a false passport.
00:28:26
Speaker
I forgot about that. But now it looks like he may be extradited to the US. So the Wall Street Journal just recently broke a story that Montenegro's Justice Minister Andrei Milovic
00:28:47
Speaker
privately said that he plans to send Dokwon to the U.S. rather than to South Korea. This is really interesting to me because I think he would face harsher punishments in South Korea than in the U.S., but I think that U.S. regulators have been a little bit more keen and insistent. Maybe that would be some of the logic behind this, but they actually talked to the head of the South Korean investigative team, Don Sung-han,
00:29:16
Speaker
who said that, quote, we think investigating the case in South Korea would be the most effective way of bringing justice to investors. And then he went on to say that Dokwon would likely face the longest jail term for a financial crime in South Korea's history. Now, I think there's no reason why we couldn't do these things consecutively. But it's interesting to see that he's potentially going to be taking a trip to New York first.
00:29:40
Speaker
Yeah, and you know, I actually just thought, just before we were coming on to record the show, so you may not have even seen this, a story broke, I don't actually know, I think maybe it was Bloom broke the story, but a court in the British Virgin Islands actually have frozen
00:30:03
Speaker
three eight the three arrows capital founders uh one billion dollars in assets so my goodness yeah so when you think about okay if if if dokwon is going to be kind of uh involved in some of this uh stuff with uh a lot of the courts and we've got three ac crew like having a billion dollars of assets people it feels like the the entire kind of

Three Arrows Capital's Frozen Assets

00:30:29
Speaker
the 2021 kind of scam brigade are all getting some of their comeuppance now, I feel. Yeah, finally. Which is, you know, it's taken some time, but it's good to see that with every day, it's more and more likely that some form of justice is going to be carried out here. So it'll be interesting to follow what happens with Dokuan. What I thought was super interesting is, you know, we're talking about the 2021 crew,
00:30:57
Speaker
here, let's talk about the 2023 crew and whatever that is.

CZ's Legal Predicament in the US

00:31:04
Speaker
So a few hours after this story broke, a federal judge banned CZ from Binance from leaving the United States.
00:31:15
Speaker
uh so you may recall he's currently awaiting sentencing on criminal charges related to anti-money laundering violations it's likely going to take months for him to receive that sentencing and and he pled guilty to all of that stuff that was something we we covered um a few weeks ago that was
00:31:33
Speaker
I mean, I think a bit of a surprising thing to see, especially with how loud he is on Twitter. But he's facing 10 to 18 months in prison under federal- Which is incredible. It's incredible.
00:31:49
Speaker
to 18 months for violating AML, and the scale at which it happened. You got to feel like this has got to be the plea deal of the century to get just that amount of time in sentencing. I mean, we'll see where it nets out, but it seems to be consensus that that's going to be the case.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Now, CZ was planning on returning to the UAE during that several month period where he's awaiting his criminal sentencing. And it actually had gotten approved. But then a US District Judge, Richard Jones, reversed that decision and said, quote, the court agrees with the government that this is an unusual case.
00:32:40
Speaker
the defendant has enormous wealth and property abroad and no ties to the United States. So the U.S. District Judge has banned CZ from leaving the U.S. while he awaits his sentencing. Now, I think this kind of makes sense because if you consider the fact
00:32:58
Speaker
that the US and the UAE don't have any extradition treaties and also yeah so CZ could head out to the UAE and not really be extradited back and also you know he's got I think that his bond was like 170 million dollars
00:33:17
Speaker
$179 million maybe plus $5 million in additional assets that he put in. I mean, it wasn't an inconsequential amount of money, but it was actually like it's something that he could absorb given his net worth. Also, the way that bonds and bail happen in the United States means that he wouldn't entirely absorb that all on his own, right?
00:33:42
Speaker
And then you compile onto that the fact that he's very publicly hating Seattle right now.
00:33:50
Speaker
Surely he loves the weather. That must make him feel like at home, right? It would certainly make me feel at home, the Seattle weather word. Yeah. Yeah. I know it would make you feel at home, but I think CZ would be hating the British weather too, Matt. It's a fair point. It's a fair

Bitcoin ETF Approval Predictions

00:34:07
Speaker
point. Why is he in Seattle? Does he have to stay in Seattle, do we know?
00:34:13
Speaker
like or like travel a little bit California maybe and you know have a little bit more Sun
00:34:21
Speaker
It's like CZ, take a road trip down the PCH, dude. You'll love it. It will change your mind. You'll be asking for an even larger sentence after that. I just want to stay here forever. No, yeah, I could have guessed he would not really like Seattle. I mean, I love Seattle. I just don't think it's the fit for him. Oh, yeah. I mean, look, you know, I would have a hard time with Seattle to purely for the weather, but he had this
00:34:51
Speaker
this hilarious tweet of like a picture of a salad and he was saying you know i i recognize that a low calorie diet is like better for your health uh luckily for me this salad was so bad i only ate half of it
00:35:06
Speaker
Now complaining about Seattle cuisine, that is a new one. I would say one of the things that I felt was a redeeming quality of Seattle every time I went there was the cuisine. So CZ, dude, you gotta get out of there, man. If you can't go to the UAE, at least fricking come down here to Texas and have some brisket with us. Well, you know, he's really missing his team of private chefs, I imagine. It's probably the real issue here.
00:35:34
Speaker
Well, it's yeah, I'm sure we're going to have more news on on that. And we'll see what happens with some of the developments happening with three AC and doquan. But it it feels like all of that, which has been kind of hanging over the the crypto industry, obviously with
00:35:56
Speaker
he whose name we shall not speak. We're kind of getting a little bit of closure or close to closure on all of this. We can kind of start a new chapter, hopefully in early January with a nice delicious slice of Bitcoin ETF.
00:36:19
Speaker
And we'll wrap up there. Austin, we're both gonna be out for a little bit. I'm gonna be traveling, so we'll probably have a couple of weeks off, but here's my bet. The next episode that we record in January.
00:36:35
Speaker
is going to be the Bitcoin ETF approval episode. I've said it now. And I'll also call out, we can't just wait to record another episode until it happens. My bet here.
00:36:51
Speaker
between January 8th and 10th, this thing is getting accepted and we are riding, riding to the moon. It's gonna be beautiful. It brings a tear to my eye than thinking about it, Austin. And what could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong?
00:37:08
Speaker
I love the predictions, Matt. We'll see you in January. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. With the receipts, no doubt. All right. Well, Austin, I hope you have a wonderful time of the holidays. And we're wishing the same for all of our wonderful listeners. And we'll be back at it for another year in the crypto space. And I, for one, could not be happier. Yeah. CN 2024. Let's hope it's not a 2022. Don't say it, Austin. Don't say it.
00:37:38
Speaker
See you then.
00:38:00
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.