Watch the full video of this Space session on Gamma Prime’s YouTube channel
Panel discussion with Harrison Frye (CGO at Acquire.Fi), Alex McFarlane (Co-Founder of Keyring Network), Chaman Malhi (Managing Director at Gamma Prime), Joshua Cheong (Head of Product at Mantle Network), and Brian Becerra (Market Growth at Meta Pool)
Chaman (Gamma Prime)
Hey everybody, we’re just going to get started.
Allow our guests and listeners to come join the space. Welcome to the Gamma Prime podcast. I’m going to give it a few minutes. Just get yourself comfortable, pack a breakfast, make a coffee, and we’ll get set off in just a few minutes.
Welcome, Joshua. It’s good to see you in the room. If you want to take the Bitcoin Bee with the anime character and make him a speaker, there he is. How are you doing, Joshua? Well, thanks for joining, folks. What are we looking at? Okay, so I’m going to ask a quick question. Morning or evening, based on where you are, what is it right now?
Evening for you. Well, thanks for burning the midnight oil to be here. Appreciate it. What about you, Joshua? I think you’re in Singapore, so that would be evening for you.
Joshua (Mantle Network)
Yeah, evening here.
Chaman
Evening here. Awesome. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you, everybody, for joining. We’re going to get started off. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, I’m going to trust that everyone can hear me okay. I’m going to open up with something a little light and fun. I’m going to ask you a question about your belly. All right. So, if you could teleport anywhere for lunch today or tomorrow, if it’s evening, where would you go? I personally, I would teleport to, oh, what is that place called? Karna in Dubai. I feel like it’s one of the best steakhouses I’ve been to. Prior to that, it was Gotham, but I would rather not teleport two minutes down the road from me in Vancouver, Canada. So, Karna in Dubai, in the SLS building, amazing food. Who’s next? Let’s go to Joshua. Tell me about your belly, Joshua.
Joshua
Yeah, that’s a good one. I think it would be having brisket in Denver. Yeah, that would be it.
Chaman
Brisket in Denver. That’s actually where I met you. I met Joshua during EthCC at an event. And yeah, just perfect strangers. Awesome. Next time we go to Denver, I know what to get you. Thank you. Let’s move it down the road. Who’s next?
Alex (Keyring Network)
Can you teleport back?
Chaman
No, you’re not stuck there. You can teleport back. Either that or private jet, worst case scenario.
Alex
I feel that should be the first question anybody asks. Why is your number for steak and you aren’t doing anything for a few days?
Chaman
You could teleport back and you can even pick a different generation or year if you wanted to.
Alex
That’s like, you basically said I could time travel anywhere.
Chaman
You can time travel anywhere. The plot thickens.
Alex
So if I could teleport back, I would probably go to, you know, on Instagram, they’ve got all those little huts in the sea in the Maldives and they have all the pigs in the Bahamas. They have all the piggies. But one of those, you know, there’s no hot places that are sitting in the sea and you see all those Instagrammers looking like it’s awesome. But I would do it at the time where the problem is, is I bet they’re all really crowded and really busy generally. And it’s really difficult to find when they’re not busy. So I find out when they’re not busy. I would immediately teleport there on a down day when randomly no one’s there. I’d have the whole place to myself, have lunch, and then I teleport back again.
Chaman
Love it. So I got to ask you, though, you’ve only seen what it tastes like. You haven’t actually tasted what it tastes like, have you?
Alex
Well, no, I’d eat lunch. Obviously, I’m not going to go all the way over there and just dip my toes in the sea. The other thing I do is I would also teleport into I would have to be central New York or central London because I can’t be guaranteed that anyone else can be able to do what I need to do. And I would go make sure that my mobile phone plan still works. And if it doesn’t, I would make sure that I get hold of an Internet connection somewhere. I would check the stock market. I would see what the elections have done in the US and I would have lunch somewhere nice and I would teleport back and make a lot of money over the next five years. That’s what I do.
Chaman
Alex McFarlane, I’m going to go ahead and guess you’re creative by nature. It’s inherited. So, hey, man, that was a really thick answer. I love it. Also, I’m going to flag that you are basing it on what you see on Instagram versus what you’ve tasted before.
Alex
Yeah, otherwise my wife wouldn’t let me go.
Chaman
Well, you know how it is. You know, I’m not going to say there’s actually somebody who got divorced for referring to their wife as, what was it? S.W.M. She who must be obeyed. S.W.M.B.O. in a text to a friend. And next thing you know, he’s giving half of everything he worked for to her because I’m sure she was working on the other half. Awesome.
Alex
I got married because of Instagram, because my wife started seeing engagement rings all over Instagram and then that Instagram basically pressured me into it. No, I’m joking. Married because we love it. But like I’m pretty sure the timing was a lot faster because of Instagram.
Chaman
No doubt. Hey, Alex, I’m not going to touch that one because the last thing I want to do is be a part of friction in anybody’s relationship. Moving on. Brian, how you doing?
Brian (Meta Pool)
Hi, everyone. Hope you can listen to me well.
Chaman
Yeah, I can hear you pretty all right.
Brian
So, well, I’m great. Just back from answering your question. I will travel back. I like it a lot. The weather, the people, it’s like a pretty nice place to find more crypto-friendly people.
Chaman
Awesome. Thank you. And I think that we have B as a speaker. And that was my mistake. So I’m going to flag that. I think B is a listener.
Brian
So I’m Brian from Metapool, by the way.
Chaman
Oh, you’re Brian. Oh, sorry, man. I didn’t recognize your voice. That’s my bad, man. Brian from Metapool, totally a speaker. And what was your answer? Where would you go eat, man?
Brian
Yeah, I will go to Medellin, back to Colombia. I just came from that place like yesterday, but I will go back. Honestly, I like the weather.
Chaman
Awesome. And what would you eat there?
Brian
Well, they have a lot of food, pretty much like Venezuelan food, but not as good as Peruvian food. You can enjoy your food there. It’s a pretty nice place. Honestly, there’s a lot of innovation, a lot of people that are building on crypto. So I would say it’s a potential San Francisco in the middle of the jungle. So it’s kind of interesting.
Chaman
Love it. Beautiful. Thank you, Brian. Harrison, my man, we’ve shared a couple of dinners over the course of this year. How are you doing? Do we have Harrison with us? Hmm, maybe not. Maybe not. He’s joining soon. So I think he’s going to miss out on the question about food. But I’ll let you know that I think Harrison would teleport literally anywhere that has a plate with food on it. I have seen that man eat. Boy, does he have quite a wide range of palate. Harrison Fry, great conversation. Look forward to having him as a part of this space. I look forward to how he chops it up with the rest of the group here. And until he gets in, we’re going to get into it. So that’s the icebreaker. I’m going to transition a little bit here. So we’re going to talk about the $900 million plus in crypto liquidations, Ripple’s win, as well as the Bitcoin supply crunch from treasury accumulation. I’m going to set it off with the $900 million in crypto liquidations. So right now, the world’s a little jittery. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. $900 million in leveraged long positions just got liquidated, triggering sharp drops in Bitcoin and Ethereum. A single whale dumped, I think, 24,000 Bitcoin. If anyone here knows the actual number, feel free to fact check beyond that. And it sent tremors through the market. Meanwhile, the Fed’s dovish tone, it’s making investors a lot easier. And I want to unpack that. Let me forward a question to the room. What are you seeing? Was this liquidation wave driven more by retail or institutional actors? And why do you think that is?
Alex
I would just say, I was looking at this as we hit the all-time high, so if you look at the chart from the 24th midday, it looked like there was… So basically, when you have a series of buy orders come into the market, you get what’s called a shark’s fin pattern. So it’s called a power law where you exponentially move the price against you. So as you buy, it increases an exponential curve. And then as soon as you stop buying, it curves off, and then you get an exponential decay. And then it’s kind of an inverse power law after that. And so that is what a shark’s fin… That’s exactly what a shark’s fin looks like. And you can see an absolute clear shark’s fin coming through from around 12 midday on the 24th, which also aligns with when people might put a buy order in because people like nice times.
And then it kind of stops around 7 or 8 p.m. that day. So it’s almost like between midday and close, someone was putting a lot of orders in, which kind of aligns with an institutional seller just moving a massive position into ETH. Now, I don’t know why they would do it at that particular time, but it might be someone, some massive giga chad, decided that they were going to claim the all-time high, and they were just like, “I want to get into position, why not do it now?” And then screenshot it on their phone for their mates.
But the result is, when you see the exponential decay coming off the back of it, when you actually look at the price disturbance coming off the back, it’s also higher than the level at which the buying started happening. The buying started happening at around 4,720. And then when all of the shark’s fin finished, it was around 4,800. So it’s still bumped ETH up by a decent chunk.
So you have the short-term impact, which is the shark’s fin, and you have the long-term impact, which is where it settles after the shark’s fin. Now, the thing is for ETH, I think, because it’s so retail-driven, a lot of people saw this random massive down candle after it got near the all-time high. And then everyone freaked out. Because I remember seeing on Telegram, a lot of chats where everyone was like, “What is happening? Why hit all-time high?” Suddenly there’s loads of selling pressure. And I think people mistook a shark’s fin buy order for everyone just selling because it was all-time high, which I think is bollocks. I think that led to people selling and freaking out.
But generally, the price stabilized afterwards around 4,800. Then there was some random freak outs, like around 1 a.m., somebody dumped a load. After that, everyone dumped to about 4,300. I think it’s just people not knowing what to do when they see volatility like that suddenly come out of nowhere. There was no news items. This also emphasizes it was probably a random buy. No news, nothing happened that day. No one had any clue why. And I think, in my opinion, now’s a really good time to buy ETH. I may have to eat my words, but the market has already started trending up. I put some buy orders in myself as soon as I saw it going below 4,500. I took a little bit underwater to 4,400, but I think ETH is going to continue trending up. I think this is just a short-term disturbance from a random actor.
Chaman
Nice. Thank you, Manny. I mean, retail sees big candles and panics, but institutions, they might actually be happy with the price settling higher than where the buy order started. It’s kind of like… engineered momentum. I’d love to hear other people in the room’s thoughts.
Brian
Yeah, I would like to add something from here. I honestly love trading, so I can give you some perspective. In fact, as the other speaker said, this is mostly retail traders playing the rush, but in a way that looks like a casino. But while institutionals play with very good risk management, this move was a swing failure pattern. When price pushes beyond a key level of support or resistance, it triggers liquidations or stop-loss, and then quickly reverses.
An easy way to understand that: in soccer, a swing failure pattern is like a striker faking a shot, the goalkeeper dives one way, but the striker switches last second and scores on the other side. So I think the run is still on the way, but if you check the prices, for example, in the week of July 7, prices reached $119,000. In the following weeks, the candles closed at the same price. So it means accumulation to distribution to a lower zone. This lower zone is potentially beyond 98, and could reach 75, but we still have to wait.
Honestly, this is a healthy way to shake out holders who don’t have much idea of the long term. For institutions, there’s no problem, maybe a small drawdown sometimes, because the next upside movement will be over the weeks of the candles that are at all-time high. If we check the charts, the last cycle shows similar patterns. It’s kind of always the playbook: swing failure pattern before the massive pump. I honestly get excited when prices go down like this.
Chaman
Yeah, you and me both. I mean, the greed and fear index, right? You’re either too greedy to get out, or too scared to get in, and usually those emotional natures happen at the wrong time, which is why I don’t trade my own money. I just don’t, because I’m not like the people in this room. I have different skills. Joshua, I’d like to hear a little bit about what you have to say about the topic, and also get your insights on whether or not this kind of correction could actually reset the market to a healthier footing.
Joshua
Yeah, so I think I wasn’t in the previous calls or I didn’t actually make it as public, but among my friends, I think leading into the Jackson Hole speech, I didn’t make the correct prediction. So, I thought that everybody, because just a quick background, I think my perspectives come from more macro and then it’s second-order interpretation into the crypto perspectives. So, I generally saw that in general, there was a lot more concern around whether the speech might be more hawkish, and I was already quite convinced that the underlying, it was actually like a, it was a complicated debate on both sides of this argument going to Jackson Hole speech, where we knew that there was data that’s more inflationary, while at the same time, we also knew that the jobs numbers are relatively weak, and in that kind of context, it wasn’t clear whether Jackson Hole would be a speech to reiterate the September cut or not.
So, I saw that the downwards trend leading into Jackson Hole was the way to reduce that uncertainty, especially, and I felt this the moment inflation numbers came a few days beforehand. So, I saw that, but at the same time, I sort of knew that the longer-term vision of the future of the Fed and the administration is going in the direction that the Jackson Hole speech sounds like. So, I think it’s all set for a goodbye opportunity.
Now, that being said, my signals also show that, had I been extremely diligent to catch my trading signals on the dip in the Jackson Hole kind of speech and pivot, I would have been stopped out. So, it does show that the current situation is triggering liquidations, because what I’m sure everyone sees as well. So, I’m sure this is actually reducing the overall, even though I remain bullish and I think the short to mid-term trajectory from here to maybe Q1 2026 is a bullish trajectory, I recognize a lot of people have been stopped out as a result of this push of price lower and breaking some of my technical signals.
So, I think what that means, just to answer the question, is this healthy? I do think so. It actually positions these assets, especially Bitcoin in particular, because of the rotation into ETH. It positions Bitcoin to find a new bottom and in doing so, find a new set of buyers. So, I think that’s a bullish construction if you have additional capital. That’s my not-financial-advice take on the situation.
Chaman
Awesome. Thank you, Joshua. And yes, of course, listeners, just so you know, this isn’t financial advice. These are the opinions of everyone and all that other legal stuff I’m supposed to say. So, let me flip it over to Alex. Alex, why do you think the dovish speech, which usually calms markets, led to this kind of sell-off, or do you think that it was just this immaculate coincidence?
Alex
Wait, me?
Chaman
Yeah, you. Why do you think the markets weren’t feeling good after hearing our fearless powers-to-be talk?
Alex
It’s all priced in, isn’t it? I think that if we think realistically, the sophistication of quant trading in TradFi – bear in mind that in traditional finance, things like the machine learning models that we’re now seeing, given a user interface, ChatGPT is just a user interface to what’s been done in quant trading for at least five or six years before GPT came out. So, the idea that these quant shops at the top end are not… I would be really surprised if they aren’t already analyzing every single thing Jay Powell says, every single movement he does in a video.
Basically, before he even announces anything about rates, they already know what rate he’s going to put in anyway, just from facial expressions on convolutional neural nets and stuff like that. Maybe I’m giving them more credit than it’s due. But I do know that people analyze, for example, crawling through all of the voice data coming from the Fed and all of the written minutes. They’ve been doing that for over 10 years, putting that through large language models. And I don’t mean like GPT bullshit. I mean actual proper quant models.
So, I think basically the market priced in the rate cut pretty much to a precise level already. The only thing that’s kind of questioning things is the jobs market data. More recently, there’s been some concern that maybe the jobs market data won’t be as problematic. The problem is, I don’t know what Donald’s doing, because DJ has decided to become the DJ of the interest rate markets and is moving them all over the place. Working against his own mandate. He’s trying to get the Fed to cut. If he just shuts up and lets them do their job, they’ll cut. But the problem is with him going in hard on this random lady… fine. No one really cares so much about that. But if he goes in hard after they cut, they’re going to cut. If he goes in hard now, spooks the markets in the long end of the curve and causes treasuries to start selling off on the 10-year because he’s doing some kind of weird activity with the Fed that’s unprecedented, that’s going to actively stop the Fed from cutting because they’re then going to be more concerned about their inflation mandate. It’s almost like Donald’s intent on messing with the system from an inflation perspective. At the same time, the jobs market isn’t looking good so they probably need to cut, but then they’re concerned about what’s going on from a political point of view. I think from the administration, if they want to cut, they need to just shut up and let it happen.
Chaman
I think there’s a minor flaw in what you were saying with respect. And I’m going to quote you: if he would just shut up… come on, do you think there’s ever going to be a world where that would happen?
Alex
I don’t know why he doesn’t just stay out of it for the moment. He just wants to see Ukraine for two weeks. Let it cut. Let old bags grow.
Chaman
Yeah. I mean, I’ve never seen grass grow, but when I stop looking, maybe it happens. So maybe if people stop looking, the silence will be had. Thanks for your insights, man. I love it. I want to transition here because we’re halfway through and I want to talk about Ripple and their win and the SEC dropping the appeal. It’s big regulatory news. If you don’t know about it, you’re probably in a hole. Ripple is out after a $125 million settlement and XRP saw double-digit gains. Clarity kind of emerged. That’s a serious pivot point for regulation.
Alex, just so you know, everybody in the room, he’s a co-founder and CEO of Keyring Network, a compliance layer for DeFi powered by zero-knowledge proofs. Recently in the spotlight for institutional-grade DeFi vaults with innovative identity controls. Alex’s background spans Nomura, Commerce Bank, and Quantum Trading Strategies, if you couldn’t tell based on his insights. Let’s turn it over to you again, Alex. How does Ripple’s legal win change the narrative for altcoins currently under regulatory scrutiny? Then I want to pass that over to Josh, and then we’ll follow up with Brian. Feel free to respond to each other. Let’s mix the pot a little bit. I love it when there are competing opinions or insights. Take it away, Alex.
Alex
So I have to watch what I say because I know the Ripple team really well. Like the head of trading at Ripple used to be, maybe he knows, but he used to be my boss at Nomura and one of my close colleagues now works underneath him as the market making team there.
But I think Ripple’s in an interesting spot because I don’t know how they make money. I mean, I actually do know how they make money because I know what they do to make money, but it’s not what you think. I think mainly they make money from trading.
And I think the weird thing with Ripple is like all of these DeFi projects, or sorry, not DeFi, that’s the point, the no DeFi, all of these projects like the new L1s, we’re all trying to find their product market fit, their USP.
And one thing that if you’ve read the book, the really good book called The Innovator’s Dilemma, which talks about how you create, it talks about the ingredients for a disruptive technology. Bitcoin is a disruptor because it completely revolutionized the idea of decentralized peer-to-peer settlement.
And the whole thing about disruption is you basically, you almost objectively create a shitter technology that has a new KPI that people will value more than the technology more efficient. So when people in TradFi say, ah, Bitcoin’s inefficient, it’s slow settlement times, like I have risk with KYC. That’s because all the people in the Bitcoin ecosystem don’t give a shit about any of the KPIs you just quoted.
What they care about is the things that Bitcoin is exceptionally good at, which is intermediation, decentralization, and lack of, and as an inflation hedge. And then when you can, when you create that new KPI, that’s when you drag all the people in and you’re worse, all the KPIs that the industry is currently way better than you at, like Swift can settle way faster than all the top—I mean, other than shit countries, but like all the top currencies often touted by the European countries is like, what’s the point in blockchain?
And then guess what, what happens is as stated by the Innovator’s Dilemma, suddenly the new technology that has created a new KPI in a new market for itself, suddenly it’s better at what you’re doing as well. And that’s what we’re seeing with stablecoin payments.
But the interesting thing is that, how do you put that in the lens of like L1s? So when you create a new L1 like Ethereum, Ethereum created a whole new KPI from Bitcoin. Bitcoin was good at like what Bitcoin does, but Bitcoin shit at DeFi, properly shit at like smart contracts and DeFi. And they didn’t even think about it. So Ethereum just created a whole new KPI where it’s like, okay, well, we’re not going to compete with you. Like Ethereum is never going to compete with Bitcoin on like proof of work.
And so Ethereum just decides it’s going to compete with Bitcoin on DeFi. Now the problem for Ripple is like Ripple’s win obviously is a good thing for like L1s in general when it comes to like ICOs, but I think ICO season is dead anyway. I mean, legal clarity is kind of already there to be honest, I think just you just pick a different jurisdiction.
But I think the key thing for Ripple to like gain, if Ripple need to find what they’re going to do, that is not best, that is probably worse than how Ethereum do it for generally most applications, but they’ve got to yet find what they are doing that has nothing to do with Ethereum.
And I’d say the same of every single L1, any single L1 that comes out and says, yeah, we’re going to do the same thing as Ethereum, but better, shit idea. I don’t know how they get money because you’re never going to disrupt an industry. Like as history has shown, you cannot disrupt an incumbent by doing the same thing as the incumbent better. It just doesn’t, it very rarely happens, almost always never happens.
And it also isn’t a disruptive technology, you just get bought out, it’s a shit exit for the investors. So I think the thing with Ripple and all these other L1s, they need to figure out not how they’re going to compete on transaction speed, not how they’re going to compete on like kind of smart contract settlements and not how they’re going to compete on specific like projects they’re going to have on that L1.
How are they going to create a brand new entire L1 kind of thing that nobody’s ever thought about before? I think that’s the key thing. And I think the biggest angle I can see in that at the moment is the privacy layers. So focusing on privacy, but that’s obviously not what Ripple are doing.
Chaman
Love it, Alex. Joshua, talk to me. I know that you have, we’ve shared some interesting conversations about stablecoins and what the next gen is, but I’d love to hear your thoughts about what Alex just shared and maybe some of your own regarding what’s going on with the narrative for altcoins.
Joshua
Yeah, so I think just to respond to what was said, I think I totally agree about the disruptive innovation kind of framework. I think everyone should actually read that book by Clayton, which is really helpful. Actually, it shaped a huge part of my early career in being able to understand stuff like Bitcoin and venture capital, especially.
It’s very helpful. And I think that’s very valid. I think it is.
When it comes to altcoins, I think we are coming into a phase of delivery in terms of key metrics, whether it be a TBL, daily active users, or in the case of some of these metrics in trying to drive revenue. And I think that’s also a function of, you’re not in a net new category and therefore you’ll be assessed in the existing categories, right? So I would say a lot of chains today are assessed that way.
The way I would think about it, it’s like Bitcoin is on its own. It has to store value, narrative, and thesis, and valuation metric that actually sits with macro. But then everyone else, it’s like, if they’re not Bitcoin, then they have to figure out revenue and they have to be assessed as if they’re a stock.
And they have to be careful of their PE ratios and they have to think about their use case and their moat and how they’re differentiated. And I think this cycle, there are quite a few specific winners that are new entrants. And as was said earlier, it’s because they created new categories of technical design, but it’s not just technical design, but a new category through business models of chains.
So for example, HyperLiquid is an example where it first created a high performance trading application that works as a chain. And at the same time, the business model doesn’t charge for transactions in terms of space in a block. It doesn’t charge the urgency to get into the other space in the block.
Rather, it charges how centralized exchanges were charged. So it charged maker-taker fees, it charged spreads, and it has a market making LP position for HyperLiquid. And it actually creates a business model for chains. And yeah, it challenges the net new and creates a new utility.
The final thing I would like to share, if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur and thinking about this, is that you have to always think about two things, who is the subsidy? And then where is your revenue coming from? Where’s the growth metric?
And I think in general, the industry struggles. I think in general, everyone in the industry knows where the subsidy comes from, which is tokens. But nobody has a good idea where’s revenue coming from.
Keep going. Yeah. And obviously, it is such a big problem that actually chains are not the ones that make the money. The asset issuers like Tether are the ones that’s making bank. And this is actually a bit of a market failure in the industry that we need to solve.
So anyone who’s an entrepreneur thinking about their next tremendous idea, we have to actually learn from innovation theories, but also from the past. So the best analogy I would give you is, I think there was a phase where Google Search was such a tremendous economic tool. It provided so much value. But there was a phase in time where Google Search, it was free.
But obviously, the intelligence of being able to pass through the entire history of human written words to be able to get your answers is a tremendous value. But the value capture, the revenue was a challenge for them. So they then had to create a whole new business model to monetize your eyeballs, which is digital advertising. And then they basically created the billion-dollar industry in Google Ads.
So I think that is the kind of challenge that our industry face, especially with all these altcoins, which unfortunately will be, they cannot take the category of store value. They have to take the category of Amazon. And in doing so, everybody knows where the subsidy is coming from, but nobody knows where the revenue is coming from.
And my take there is the revenue is coming from things that we haven’t really measured and valued in society yet. Just like how Google Ads was not an industry before Google Ads. And so I think that is where the struggle is.
We start to see some sense of it as well. So like, for example, we start to see, for example, KAITO being able to measure social clout and influence as a form of currency and trying to monetize that. So I think RWAs is also a sense of that. Prediction markets is also another sense of it, where you know where a subsidy is coming from, but you’re creating a new market for revenue.
But it is not clear yet that we have a clear use case beyond what I think everybody knows today, which is stablecoins and on-chain finance and institutional finance. And that’s why I think because of that, they have huge valuation multiples, right? So that’s why Circle is overvalued to some extent. That’s why Plasma gets more than $1 billion in TVL in 30 minutes. It’s because people are so hungry for use cases that this is the only one they’ve found so far.
Chaman
A huge challenge. I couldn’t agree with you more. About the Google Ad analogy, I mean, I don’t know if it was an accident, you know, Google Ads and that multi-billion dollar business and revenue model. If it was an accident or if it was by design.
And I think that’s what’s missing, like a direct path to revenue or a strategic initiative that maybe leads to a place where I don’t know if a lot of projects in this space are thinking about it that way. And that’s the challenge.
I mean, circling back, if you’re not Bitcoin, you got to show numbers. I want to ask Brian, do you think Ripple’s case clears the way for more tokens to be relisted?
Brian
Yeah. Being honestly, I think this is just like, this victory is more than a legal case. It’s a proof that this disruptive innovation can be caged with old tools.
For years, regulators tried to paint every token as security, as if crypto was just Wall Street in digital forms or something like that. But Ripple, after doing this, cracked the narrative, it showed the world that context matters.
As the past speakers already mentioned some examples, I would like to go deep dive in something that Metapool is doing, basically staking. Because if Ripple opened the door, staking is what walks through it.
Staking is not a speculation, it’s participation. When you stake, you’re not buying a promise or waiting for dividends. You are securing the network, validating transactions and giving the community the power to govern themselves.
That’s why I would say staking is regulation proof. You don’t regulate participation, you empower it. So understand this, basically, it’s a new paradigm.
And for people that only check for dividends or maybe rewards, it will be a new way to understand this technology. So the legal part of this must go deep dive in this type of cases that are kind of special.
So speculative bet is one thing, but a token that is used in staking is a different category. Altogether, it’s utility, it’s infrastructure, and it’s the foundation of decentralized future.
I think the past speakers already mentioned a lot, so I wanted to focus on the staking part for this question.
Chaman
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Closing thoughts on this.
Alex
I’m sorry, I thought I already addressed the Ripple thing.
Chaman
Yeah, you did. You did address the Ripple thing to the degree that it was, but closing thoughts on what Brian was saying about staking.
Alex
I’m sorry, I missed that.
Chaman
No worries. Hey, you know what? It’s all good. I’m trying to keep up with the giants in this room myself.
Hey, we have Harrison, AcquireFI here as a speaker. How are you doing, man?
Harrison (Acquire.Fi)
Hey, guys. Hope you can hear me loud and clear. I spent probably 25 minutes trying to log in. I was using my personal account, and it was just not letting me become a co-host or speaker.
Chaman
I was just telling everybody at the beginning about I answered the question for you. The question was if you could take the time.
Harrison
I heard it.
Chaman
Oh, you heard that. All right.
Harrison
Yeah, I’ve been here. I’ve been here since the beginning. It’s just they wouldn’t let me speak. No, I heard you. Thank you for doing me well. I do love to eat. Yeah, pretty much anywhere is on the top of the list.
You got me thinking now. Thailand’s a great place for food. Then last time we met, we were eating pizza. Italy’s a top one. I mean, I think Thai cuisine, Italian cuisine. Maybe that’s a cop-out because they’re both so good.
Chaman
No, it is what it is. Just for all the listeners here, we are going to all be getting together again in Singapore. The Tokenized Capital Summit by Gamma Prime is happening on September 30th at the Pan Pacific.
It’s going to be an all-day event, so check out gammaprime.fi. Go to our events page. Feel free to register for our event and maybe bump elbows with some of these guys, eat pizza, maybe a pig in the future, as Alex prefers, and so on.
I’m going to move it forward. I’m going to move it forward to the last topic and I’m going to pick on Harrison here. We’re going to talk about the Bitcoin supply crunch from a treasury accumulation perspective.
So shifting gears to that, institutional and corporate holders, they’re accumulating large chunks of Bitcoin. It’s not my grandmother who doesn’t have any money based on what I’m seeing in the numbers. And it’s possibly squeezing supply and reframing market dynamics.
My question is, are we seeing a shift towards a supply environment dominated by long-term institutional holders?
Harrison
I think institutional holders for sure have a grasp on it, as well as miners. I think miners are, like we talked to a good amount of miners, with some ROTC deals and secondary deals. And also M&A, you know, we deal with some mining facilities and they’re all basically not selling.
We don’t have too many deals. We hope that there’s more, guys, please come to us if you’re a miner and you want to sell. But yeah, no, it’s definitely, I think most institutions recognize the future and recognize the limited supply.
Personally, I do too, and investing as much as I can, or as much as feasible into Bitcoin.
Chaman
Awesome. Love it, man. Harrison Fry, if you don’t know, co-founder and CGO of AcquireFI. That’s the go-to marketplace for crypto and M&A secondaries. Let’s switch it forward to Alex. Hopefully you were listening to the question. If you weren’t, I can say it again, man.
Alex
Yeah, you can say it again.
Chaman
I knew it. All good. It’s a simple question regarding Bitcoin. I’m asking if we’re seeing a shift towards a supply environment dominated by long-term institutional holders.
I mean, we all know where Bitcoin got its rights, right? It definitely wasn’t institutional holders. It definitely wasn’t sophisticated investors. But look where we are now over a decade later.
Where do you think it’s going as it relates to supply environment domination? Are we looking at long-term institutions or what?
Alex
Yeah, for sure. I think obviously that’s where all the money is. Even if you’re a retail user, the most efficient way of buying something is by a 401k or a pension because you get tax benefits.
So when Charlie Munger said, show me the incentive and I’ll show you the result. And the incentive is tax and tax drives all the revenue that goes into asset management. And ultimately the most tax efficient vehicles of all asset management for retail, like all the money comes from retail, right?
Every money comes from people’s salaries. And there’s very little money that comes outside of people’s salaries, other than, I would say, state sovereign funds. And so the big drivers of that are where the individual users put pressure on their fund allocators to allocate and what do they look to allocate into.
That’s why I think the 401k thing was a huge, huge move in the US because automatically every single fund is now going to have to. We did a bit of research back in the day. I won’t say which, but we had an asset manager coming in asking about how much should they allocate to crypto. This was back in 2017 or 2018 or something.
They were saying how much should I allocate to Bitcoin and Ether or whatever. And they were just saying crypto in general. And you just take a basic portfolio construction model and you realize that you should be allocating between one and 5% depending on your volatility target.
And so when we looked at that back in the day, that would have increased the market cap. I think it was at 1.5 trillion at the time. It would have increased it to like 5 trillion or something. We’re now at 4 trillion.
And I think that a lot of that 4 trillion has grown from, a lot of it has grown, I’d say 50% of it at least, has grown from just retail native deposits. And I think a lot of those are probably not going to move themselves into pension fund wrappers because they’re just sitting there and people are doing the trick of DeFi borrowing against the notional and not paying tax on it.
But I think the big unlock is obviously it depends how you look at institutional capital. If you look at pension funds as just the allocations of retail pool, then it’s retail driving the move. If you look at pension funds as being passive vehicles that retail don’t care about, then obviously it’s institutional capital, but ultimately it’s going to be driven from pension funds.
Chaman
Yeah. I mean, I would personally look at it as like who’s making the decision behind that money, not who’s putting it in there, right? So that would be institutional in my opinion.
Alex
Well, I’d say it’s interesting when you look at that through the lens of ESG, because I think ESG shows you a lot about – it aligns a lot with what you’re saying, kind of indicating is the individual user. Actually, it’s a really interesting topic to think about because ESG was largely lobbied for by retail because they wanted the E.
Retail didn’t give a shit. I don’t believe retail gave a shit about the S and the G. Everyone I ever spoke to cared about helping and saving the planet, the environment. That’s what all the retail sentiment was. They didn’t give a shit who was on the board. They didn’t care about all the drives and diversity things going on. Some people do, but not the vast majority.
And so when people are funneling money into ESG, this is kind of an interesting thing because the retail vibe was for the E. It got to the pension fund allocators and BP and Shell suddenly go, okay, we can’t do the E because we’re literally killing the planet. I don’t know what politics people care about, but objectively, they are drilling oil out of the ground and they’re not doing very well on the metrics for the E.
So they need the S and the G. They need to somehow figure out how can we continue drilling oil out of the ground and not get crippled in our pension fund allocations. So then they add the other bits in the matrix and they push really hard on the S and the G.
And so then what you end up with is when, despite retail asking for X, what you actually get is X, Y, Z. And the dominant effect is everyone realizes that X is actually very difficult and a pain in the ass to do. Everyone then puts all their money into Y and Z.
I know a number of people with ESG mandates who were basically saying: look, man, I could plant like 10 trees in Colombia, which costs me a shitload of money, or I can just sign this particular petition, put stickers on people’s desks, and champion a post on LinkedIn. And suddenly I’ve jumped 5% of my share price. And that’s a lot easier to do the Y and the Z.
So what I would be interested in looking at is: when retail is saying, I want to go YOLO Bitcoin, we get digital asset treasury companies. And that’s not what they’re asking for, right? But I’m interested in seeing—I don’t know what the vehicle is going to be that the pension fund allocators are going to do off the back of it—but it’s definitely going to be a corruption of retail want. And it’s going to be aligned with what the incumbent traditional finance participants, who’ve got all the capital and lobbying pressure, want to see to benefit them.
Chaman
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. Joshua, I’d like to hear from you and for the listeners in the room. Joshua Cheong is head of product at Mantle Network. He’s leading product and protocol R&D for modular L2 infrastructure. Mantle is integrated with Eigen DA, and it’s delivering massive improvements in scalability, data availability, and censorship resistance. It’s a critical backbone for institutional deployment on-chain.
And an interesting side fact about Joshua: I googled him and saw this very interesting cover or interview on YouTube. So feel free to type “Joshua Cheong, Mantle” into YouTube and interview, and you might get some very interesting macro insights and kind of get into the heart of a man who I think is one of the most ethical, brilliant men I’ve met. And he’s really young too. I admire you. I don’t envy you, but I admire you.
Joshua, please let me know a little bit more about how you see the supply environment dominated by long-term institutional holders.
Joshua
Yeah, so I think this cycle – I mean, it’s always difficult. First of all, super appreciate you saying that. I don’t deserve that kind of introduction. I think I need to prove myself more.
Chaman
Always be helpful and always be teachable, Joshua, and you’ll do just fine.
Joshua
Yeah, thank you so much. I think this cycle, where my headspace is specifically on a macro kind of picture looking at Bitcoin, is – we’re definitely in the later part of a crypto cycle. I think for very large, long-term holders of Bitcoin who have been part of the cycle, their perspective is: this is late cycle.
This is probably a time for lowering your involvement or stake. If there’s a chance to take chips off the table, this is probably around the time. And this is not just me saying it. People like Dan Morehead from Pantera have said this months ago.
But at the same time, that’s where things are slightly different with institutional allocators. I think there are different kinds of institutional actors. Last cycle, there was a lot of excitement over the big-name institutions, but it was the markets department, the volatility department, that was enjoying the high spreads and wanted to participate.
This cycle, it’s the allocators—the product people for structured products and financial products—that are creating these new allocation moves in the space. And I think this cycle has structurally changed why price moves.
The debate in my mind is: which idea is right? Is this just the general Bitcoin cyclical pattern that does not have any external money, only relying on the ebbs and flows of the global liquidity cycle? Or is this something more institutional and structural?
Of course, I think it’s the latter. For someone who is probably an OG holding Bitcoin for the long term, looking at the current market now, you might question: is this the chips-off-the-table moment in the crypto cycle? It does look like it. But from a macro perspective, it doesn’t look like it from a global liquidity perspective.
The only thing I see, and if that’s the only structural challenge, is that AI and technology stocks have been incredibly overvalued and they need some correction. Unfortunately, crypto is correlated to tech stocks, even though they have different characteristics.
In fact, the opposite happened in crypto compared to AI. In AI, P/E multiples just kept going up, and they took over the investment narrative as the hot investment. In crypto, the opposite happened. People became super discretionary. In fact, there was a bit of a lemon market where if you didn’t know what to invest in, you invested in meme coins. That was a bit of a market failure.
For those that delivered revenue, they had capital and investment. So right now, we are correlated to go down with tech stocks. But I don’t see any other factor that will allow this to persist.
Global liquidity as a forward-looking indicator seems positive for at least the next three months, in my opinion. So I really struggle to think through why this correction is happening—other than as a buying opportunity.
That’s my take. I’m very optimistic. My hope is that by the end of this cycle, we should see some de-correlation with tech stocks. That would be a very great push for the industry, because if there is less correlation with tech stocks, then crypto becomes its own unique asset class.
Chaman
Love it, Joshua. And you mentioned something interesting about structured products and basically more creation and availability of those might open the windpipes and balance the scales as it relates to institutional – or sorry, retail – adoption. Just an interesting fact: the White House issued an executive order aimed at enabling 401ks and other plans to include alternative assets that includes private equity, real estate, and guess what else? Cryptocurrency.
So I find that very interesting, especially being at Gamma Prime where we’re a marketplace for alternative investments in places like the USA, available for accredited investors, qualified purchasers. But if that floodgate opens for retail investors to embrace structured products that are managed versus, you know, an ETF, a Bitcoin ETF, that could do some interesting things in the market as well.
I want to push this forward to Brian. Brian is somebody who I just met. It’s good to meet you, Brian. I love what you’re sharing in this room. Brian Becerra, forgive the pronunciation if it’s inaccurate, my man, from Metapool. He’s a marketing growth specialist in liquid staking across Latin America. He’s the founder of Web3 Community, 21M Bulls, and a former crypto news reporter turned strategist. I’m guessing you were getting all the inside information to put together the right strategies.
Brian, I’d like to have you end this space. Maybe let me know a little bit about the market sentiment from Latin America’s staking ecosystem. And more importantly, in context to this space, insights on how shifts in regulation and supply are affecting retail in emerging markets. What are your thoughts? Can’t hear you if you’re speaking, Brian. Reconnecting. I saw a lot of hearts and thumbs up, so we’re going to give Brian just a minute to connect and unmute yourself when you’re ready. Hey, Brian, we just got to make Brian a speaker. There we go.
Brian
We’re good now. Yeah, I was saying that here in Latin America, the legal issues are not much of a problem, except in some special cases. But mostly it’s very warm for crypto space.
For example, I’m from Peru, and in Peru, it’s very open for crypto. It’s not illegal, but it’s not also considered as legal in a full sense, for example. But there are a lot of instruments that make crypto very approachable.
For example, we had a legal thing that enforced interoperability in every bank. So basically, what crypto startups are starting to take is this bridge of interoperability between Web2 and Web3, transforming themselves into a mix between Web2 and Web3.
So right now, to make you understand the impact of this, Lehman, which is an exchange in Argentina and also Peru, grew from 25,000 users in less than six months to 600,000 users. And what they are expecting is to reach 1 million users this year. Also, Binance is starting to reach 2 million users. We are approaching almost 7% penetration of users just in Peru.
Similar conditions are starting to happen in Bolivia. Bolivia started to use USDT, for example, and they started to use USDT with a Peruvian bank called BCP. Basically, Metapool started conversations with BCP also to talk about infrastructure and stuff.
So the conversations here in Latin America are very kind and very friendly when you talk about crypto. It’s not only because of technology, it’s also because of what you can do with crypto – it’s what we need in Latin America. It’s not so much about investing; it’s more like you require this to survive.
For example, there are places where banks are not easy to reach. There are no opportunities to get credit. So in these cases, crypto basically cuts every barrier and is used as what it’s supposed to be – a tool of resistance.
There are also some countries like Cuba and Venezuela, where governments are corrupted, very tyrannical. Cross-border money movement is pretty hard, so crypto is the way there. And those are the countries that are the surprises when you see the volume of transactions and the participation.
For example, we have an ambassador in Venezuela and the events that this guy is making are always full of people, always wanting to learn. And there are a lot of startups emerging from Venezuela to the rest of the world. The last one I saw was making an LLC from crypto – I don’t remember all the details, but a Venezuelan guy is making that solution and it’s pretty awesome.
So yeah, I think Latin America probably could be the next crypto hub, honestly.
To give you more context, China, USA, and Russia are investing in something called Chancay, the mega port of Peru. The expectations are to have more than five billion dollars per year of transactions. And the conversations happening in these places are basically: we can use crypto here, we can make the payments more efficient. Which technology can we use to make it quicker?
We had some conversations from my side with Chinese entities in Peru. They are considering using crypto to transfer yuan to Peruvian soles instead of yuan to dollar to Peruvian soles. So things are changing and opportunities are growing for Latin America, even bypassing the dollar.
Also, Tether is opening some positions here in Peru, and also in Chile and Argentina. So there are a lot of things happening at the same time. And since the legal part is pretty friendly, I would like to invite all of you here in the space to watch more about Latin America as an opportunity to create here and reach these potential users.
That’s why at Metapool we have this ambassador program that has been in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru. I just came back from Colombia to meet some builders there. It’s a pretty great ground to do crypto stuff.
Chaman
A beautiful invitation accepted. The idea of crypto and just blockchain technology cutting out the middleman – whether that middleman is somebody trying to skim off the top or otherwise – is a big part of the benefit of this amazing technology as it relates to its assistance in revolutionizing finance.
Harrison, do you have any closing thoughts? You came in late and we had some technical difficulties, so I want to give you a chance to share some of your thoughts on the topics that were discussed today.
Harrison
Hey, yeah. Thanks for calling on me. I think we’re heading in a great direction with the SEC dropping Ripple and also just the general trend of the SEC.
Love them or hate them, but the new political changes that are happening now are good, at least for the industry. I know there’s plenty to be said in other aspects, but the industry is looking thriving.
So I think in the US particularly, we’re seeing a lot more ability to act, where there was a lot of fear beforehand. Just seeing a lot there. And yeah, we’re seeing a lot of deals coming through and more buyers from the US too. More of these institutional funds, PE firms, which is good.
Even asking them about compliance questions, because you don’t want to waste time—make sure we get those kinds of things out of the way as they’re looking at buying potential businesses. So making sure that we have that in place and they seem, their compliance is in order, even though they’re from the US.
So the sentiment in general is it’s a lot easier to navigate in the US and that’s bullish for sure. Having such a long time with the SEC pushing so much fear and people out of operations, it’s now really opened up.
Of course, as we reviewed, Bitcoin being able to be included into retirement funds and 401ks – that’s obviously a huge amount of equity going into the market as well.
Chaman
Yeah, absolutely, man. Thank you.
There you have it, folks. The reality is this market has just sprouted. It was planted about, what, 15 years ago, and it’s making international news. It’s on the forefront. It is not too late to be a part of something that is going to revolutionize finance. Buyer beware, and all that good stuff.
Harrison, Alex, Joshua, Brian – thank you for bringing this discussion to life. We’ve navigated from liquidation chaos to courtroom clarity and into Bitcoin’s structural transformation.
If you enjoyed today’s space, drop a follow, stay tuned, feel free to follow me. I’m kind of new to this X thing, and be ready to teleport for lunch and crypto insights. Over to you, audience – I’d love to hear what surprised you most today or where you want to teleport next time around. Feel free to drop a comment on the Gamma Prime post regarding this X space.
Thank you, gentlemen, for being a part of an amazing morning for me. I’m going to go crush it. I am inspired by this room. Thank you very much.
