Ep. 538 Current Events: Ledger Wallet News, Pepe Coin Breakdown, Bitcoin’s Range

Ep. 538 Current Events: Ledger Wallet News, Pepe Coin Breakdown, Bitcoin’s Range
May 23, 2023 #CRYPTO101

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In this episode of Crypto 101 Pizza Mind is joined by one of our Analysts Brendan Viehman and our Producer Tevo to go over some of the current events surrounding the crypto markets.  First, the announcement that Ledger Wallet basically is centralized is something you need to be aware of, reviewing the Pepe Coin Mania trade that was, and discussing how Bitcoin has been in a trading range.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

SPEAKERS

Tevo, Aaron Malone, Brendan Veihman

 

Aaron Malone  00:09

All right, everyone, welcome to another awesome episode of the crypto 101 podcast is i Your host pizza mind. And today’s episodes can be a little bit different price Paul is off on his honeymoon, didn’t invite me to go. So I’m kind of stuck over here by myself in Dallas. And things get pretty crazy over here. And to be honest, I need a little therapy session today. So I’ve invited on a couple other people who work over here with us to join me. And we’re just gonna riff on some things that are pissing us off today. It’s gonna be a good little session just to kind of release the tension here. So joining me today is our market analyst Brendon Veneman and super producer TiVo. Both you guys, welcome to the crypto one one podcast front stage. Whoo.

 

Brendan Veihman  00:58

Yeah, we’re here to rant about this bear market. Classic bear market behavior. Oh, yeah. How

 

Aaron Malone  01:05

are you guys holding up?

 

Tevo  01:07

Well, I’m good because I mean, I think our first topic we’ll jump into the Pepe Coyne mania, but like that, that creates absolute chaos on social media, which as your producer I love because it creates for fantastic content on our Twitter, which you should totally follow us at crypto one on one but I mean, the memes a meme coin going crazy, just as is just a beauty of of a meme craze on the internet. And I love it.

 

Brendan Veihman  01:31

I mean, you normally don’t see this behavior in a bear market, right? I mean, we’re not that far from from price bottoms. But this is typically the behavior that we see, when we’re, when we’re in a full fledged bull market, everything’s sky high, people have money to waste. And then that’s typically where we get these crazy meme runs and rallies from, it’s because people, all of a sudden, have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. And they start their own at things called Chiba II knew and Dogecoin and Pepe and Santa coin and all the other ones that have ever existed out there. And this was one that managed to do it in a bear market and go all the way up to a 1.8 7 billion with a B and market cap. Now, since then, it’s fallen 62%. And I mean, what like a week or two. And you know, a lot of people took the heat there, what you had was people that got in early, really shilling it really pushing it, and telling everyone that they know to get in as well. And that this thing was going to a five a $10 billion market cap and it never got there. It was a great run. But I mean, if it’s down 62% There’s a lot of people that are underwater.

 

Aaron Malone  02:38

We’ve seen these people, if you want to loosely use that word, come out of nowhere that were part of other shit coin communities and now have added 20,000 followers in the matter of a week just by using these Pepe hashtags and stuff to launch their own coins, either after their first name or something else that’s dumb are following some other trendy meme like Grumpy Cat. And it is just an absolute free for all for losing money. As if anyone had any money leftover right now if you did, now’s the time to be accumulating long term good positions. And instead, they’re running it through this scam casino where you have an even better chance of 99% of losing everything. Like literally none of these things including Pepe are going to be around a year from now. And we’ve seen other things like this come and go constantly. This is not the first Pepe coin This is like the 50th so chances are if you’re going on uniswap Right now you might not even be buying the right Pepe coin. And so you have to make sure you’re trying to paste the current contract that people are all trading on. So not only is this super dangerous and super foolish, but you have other people that are you know, quote unquote professional influencers or people that others normally look to in the space for advice, just giving terrible advice, because they’re fucking broke. And they’re desperate to try and make money any way they can right now. So actually,

 

Tevo  04:09

I’d love to build on that point pizza because from my perspective of where I came from before I started working with you guys is I come from that influencers space, you know, like people that have huge followings and trade entertainment for clicks and all that. And when I came to this space and met you guys and then was evaluating the crypto space, I saw a little bit everything you had your influencers, you had people trying to educate all that stuff. And I just just build on your point you said it’s so perfectly it’s like, I see I’m seeing a little bit of desperation out there from some people that may not be getting the eyeballs that they’re used to in a bull market and also, you know, just like okay, how am I going to make the income that I’m used to because if my investments aren’t skyrocketing, and there’s not as many eyeballs on the space in a bear market, I’m starting to see people that I’ve had my eye on kind of just like jump around a little bit and it just seemed like a little more chaotic than usual.

 

Aaron Malone  05:02

Yeah, and we saw the final. Finally, we’ve seen the launch of pulse chain by Richard Hart, the creator of hex. This is his second project that everyone who fell for his first scam has fallen for this too. But it seems like he’s getting scared out of the space. Finally, he’s removed all kinds of things from his Twitter bio that would link him to this stuff. And finally, pulse chain has been launched incompletely without the working Aetherium bridge, and hacks and the pulse tokens are taking an absolute nosedive in price. I think they’re down like more than 70% since launch right now. And finally, we’re going to see this multi year long scam finally collapsing on itself. And everyone has tried to warn the Mexicans, as they call themselves about this, and their belligerent attitude is now finally going to blow up in their face. And I really am going to like a moral dilemma right now, like, one of my heroes, Bill Hicks always talked about viewing the world through eyes of compassion versus condemnation. But I’m literally just trying so hard not to say fuck these people, you got what you deserve. And feel sorry for them, because many of them invested their life savings, and are going to end up homeless because of Richard Hart.

 

Brendan Veihman  06:24

I mean, they were blatantly lied to. And not only that, it’s one thing to have passion about specific projects, we see that with a lot of communities. I mean, you look at XRP, you look at a lot of these meme coins, they have a strong passion to say it lightly about what they’re investing in. I think the the problem here is that when you look at Richard Hart, and a lot of these big influencers that were associated with, with hex or poles is that they only They not only were so vibrant and excited about hex, but they also discouraged people from investing into what I would call real, proven projects, they would basically say, why would you ever invest in a theory? And why would you ever invest in Bitcoin, those things are never going to hit their all time high. Again, their tops are in their time is done, you know, don’t invest in this, this garbage old technology, when in reality, you know, they have the garbage technology. So that’s where I draw the line, I think it’s one thing if you want to be a fanatic about your community, all the power to you, you know, have your passion, even if I believe it’s wrong. The problem I have is when they are like blatantly giving bad advice about what I would believe to be very good and safe investments. Again, you look at Bitcoin, you look at Aetherium, they have their proven track record, they have applications, especially Aetherium that are built on top of it. It has a proven model that works. And to say that it doesn’t, it’s just going against the facts. So that’s where I draw the line when you are telling people and blatantly lying to them, to scare them out of real options, and things that have real growth potential. That’s

 

Aaron Malone  08:00

yeah, and I believe many of these people that are in just got in because their friend told them Yeah, and they don’t know anything about anything. Maybe my mayor don’t even know about a cerium or what it means repulse chain to be Aetherium compatible. They have no idea why that’s valuable. They’re gonna get a hard lesson now, which is too bad that could have been accumulating things like cosmos and quant projects.

 

Tevo  08:26

I think it’s a testament to this team from my perspective because I would call myself like a resident Dejan not even just a crypto Dejan. I’m on Robinhood slinging some options. I like to go gamble at the casino. And this was my Pepe coin was the first one from I don’t want to call it from inception because I know it’s been around and bumbling but it felt like it was the first huge meme coin rise since I’ve been with you guys and like because I always thought like oh Dogecoin like yeah, I made a couple 100 bucks on Doge flip the blossom here once I’m there but I was like man what have you got in you know underneath a penny type of thing and and so it was happening like we’re Hey guys you see this Pepe coin looking crazy. Oh it’s going crazy. And we’re in our in our team and I’m just like I’m getting ready for somebody to be like yeah buy in let’s buy in and and nobody we our team was calm cool collective. It didn’t really peek as as a whole team or from you know, the newsletter perspective. Like it never caught our eye as something that we were buying into. And so I kept calm and just you know, I bought some more Bitcoin a theorem just DCA like I’ve been doing over the last six months since I’ve been here instead of jumping into the DGN meme craze, and I basically would have gotten in probably about like a week or 10 days ago is like when I was like man like how can I say I work on a crypto podcast and not be on this next big meme coin was like basically what I told myself but I talked myself out of it because you guys weren’t focused on it.

 

Aaron Malone  09:47

I’ve made more money this year shorting meme coins in the past two weeks that I have even trading in the positive direction.

 

Brendan Veihman  09:58

The scary thing here is that that people saw what happened to Pepe. And they heard these these, I was gonna say 1% of people who made a million dollars out of nothing, but it’s so much less than 1% of the people that actually made those gains. But there’s these stories that people have heard where they put in 100 bucks, and they came out with 10 million or something like that. And what you have to understand is that these things are less than a dime a dozen. We had Dogecoin, it blew up came into existence in 2013. Seven years later, we got the next major meme coin that blew up Shiva, no. Now we’re three years later, and we got Pepe coin, and it blew up over a billion, almost $2 billion in market cap. So we have three mean coins in a matter of 10 years now, which means that on average, about every three and a half to four years, there’s one successful one, which means that the 1000s and 1000s of main coins in between those periods, were pretty much all failures. I mean, how many mean coins? Can someone name outside of those three major ones that are still around and have a big market cap a big following? And the answer is maybe one at most, right? The average person is not going to be able to name any of these other ones. So for people that are looking at the scenario and saying I want to catch the next Pepe coin, I wanted to catch the next Dogecoin. You have, again, there’s one every three to four years, and there’s 1000s that are created in that timeframe. Even if you do put in 100 bucks in every one, the odds are you’ll go broke before you make it. There’s just too many out there in existence. There’s too many rug polls, and you have no way of knowing which one is going to be the next thing before it happens.

 

Aaron Malone  11:44

Yeah, very well said. And there’s, if you go to do Dex tools.io, you can see new coins that are being made. And there’s like a new coin being made on Aetherium almost every hour right now. Wow. So yeah, it’s really ridiculous. I mean, you can try and be some of the first money in but you can see how much liquidity is actually there. And there’s like nothing, it’s just these random guys that are burning a couple eath and gas fees. It’s really a shot in the door. So

 

Tevo  12:21

even for your average consumer, like the average consumer, like myself isn’t getting in before we’re seeing what’s happening. And then we jump in and get caught on that 60% drawdown like Brendan said earlier. And so I think, you know, if you’re looking to invest and learn about the space, this is a great spot. And everybody that we’ve brought on our guests like nobody we’ve brought on the podcast in the last three weeks has has been like, hey, let’s talk about Pepe coin. They all just go Yeah, that’s crazy. I wish that would and so it’s like we’re it’s just an interesting community that I’m in with you guys, because I’m used to the internet, Twitter DGN community that I get wrapped up.

 

Aaron Malone  12:55

And well, let’s talk about the term Dejan, for example, like it’s changed meanings over just a couple of years, it’s been around to be a DJ. And when it first came out, it meant the crazy smart developers that could code flash loan bots, and MeV extraction bots, and do all this crazy stuff to essentially print money. Like there’s an MeV bot on Aetherium right now, under the address Jared from Subway dot eath. And you can watch his wallet just grow exponentially every day on ether scan. Because he’s running some kind of sandwich attack on just about every trade, he can get a piece of on uniswap. Basically what that means is he’s got a bot that is reading incoming transactions and uniswap in the Aetherium mempool. He’s then doing the exact same transaction at a higher gas fee. So his transactions processed first. And then he’s selling that coin back to the first person who’s buying it at a tiny little premium because uniswap allows for a certain percentage of slippage. So he’s making a 10th of a percent to one or 2%. Each trade is able to get a piece of and he’s just running this through 1000s or even millions of times a day and just growing this money. That’s what DGN really is, is these crazy financial ninjas that are able to do shit like that. DGN doesn’t mean just buying literally anything and losing your money. That’s stupidity.

 

Brendan Veihman  14:33

I think the term for Dejan really started to change after we had the Gamestop scenario pizza. I think we had the whole Gamestop incident we had a Wall Street bets go absolutely viral, and then the term de Chien was translated into what we’re seeing more of today.

 

Tevo  14:51

Yeah, yeah. DGN for me goes back to college where we have like a $500 allowance from you know, the football team like you get a couple of bucks a week. And supposed to go towards your food and housing, but we would just all go to the casino by beers and lose it all in blackjack in about an hour. And then you tell your parents and just be like, Yeah, you’re just acting like a degenerate. That’s where mine came from. That was fascinating pizza. So I saw I saw on the internet, you know, I’m always scrolling. I saw some story of like, somebody was like, I sent a million dollars to Jared from Subway on, and I can’t get it back. You think that’s the that’s the Jared from Subway? Like he accidentally sent it. And I’m thinking I’m like, Isn’t Jared from Subway actually in jail? And then you’re telling me there’s like some famous theory of Jared from Subway. So I’m guessing Yeah,

 

Aaron Malone  15:40

I think the real ones in jail, but who knows he might be working for the federal government now the way they feel about these policies these days. So we got there is a subway wallet that is just cleaning up that name right now.

 

Tevo  15:52

I got to dive into that. That’s an interesting story. Yeah. But um, if we want to go to the next topic. So we talked about right before the show, literally trending today, it’s Tuesday, but Ledger Wallet, released a new announcement. I’m not super technical. So I don’t want to dive into it. But it’s trending on Twitter, and a lot of people are upset.

 

Aaron Malone  16:12

Yeah. So basically, what’s happening here is there’s a new firmware update, that allows you to opt into this new recovery service, where they would shard and encrypt your private keys and then store them on centralized custodians. So if you ever lose your wallet, you can then recover it just by showing your ID and then claiming it. Well, this is an enormous problem, because ledger has already had several data breaches where customer identity hadn’t, and other information has been used by hackers to then try and fish for the private keys of users. And now we’re supposed to trust them with the actual private keys. Doesn’t sound very good. But even if you don’t opt into this recovery service, the fact that this new firmware update that I’m not 100% Sure, if you’re being forced to use or not, it’s still going to have this code in here, which means it can be exploited, which means now there’s a link between what was supposed to be an air gapped device and some centralized server, and everyone is freaking out about it. Personally, I don’t trust ledger, I don’t own one. And I think the user interface on them is terrible. The Ledger live was a huge improvement when they put that out a couple years ago. But look, I mean, these guys are a French company, we’re lucky they show up to work at all, they seem to have other things in mind these days, it may be distracting them. So it depending on how you want to look at it, you can give them a break. Or you can go explore one of the other options for crypto wallets like Trezor, or Oculus. I think after talking with their team, and seeing that they’ve actually been around for like 20 years in the security space, and Oculus has been around for a few now. I think it’s okay to add them to the list of safe, cold wallets. But yeah, Ledger way to drop the ball buddies. Good job.

 

Brendan Veihman  18:18

What I don’t understand is why all these companies recently just don’t understand their audience and their user base. We’ve seen that happen with traditional centralized companies recently, we’re seeing it happen in crypto, where their entire spiel, their whole use case for their product is having a safer, decentralized option for crypto users to come to, and know that they’re not going to have a custodianship through, you know, something like Coinbase, or an exchange or anything like that any kind of service or platform. And what they’re doing is they are essentially becoming that by storing the seed phrase on a in a centralized way, even if it is sharted. By storing it in a centralized way, they become little to almost no different from the centralized sources that they’re trying to stand apart from. So that kind of begs the question, why would you go through all the rigmarole like we think of Coinbase like Coinbase has great security like they do, but it’s still centralized security for your steed phrases, and there are still centralized, like your information is stored in a centralized manner. And that’s why exchanges are often attacked. So why would someone go through all the extra trouble to get one of these cold wallets to get one of these hard wallets, and then all of a sudden just put their information in in a centralized way? It just doesn’t make any sense. They, they’re appealing to the wrong audience here. There. People are coming to them for decentralized an extra security measures. And now all of a sudden, they’re offering an alternative to that and people who don’t know any better, could be the ones to show up here and say, Oh, that sounds great. That sounds useful. Maybe I will maybe I’ll lose my seat for one days, maybe I’ll forget it whatever happens, and you have people who who don’t know any better just say, Oh, that’s a cool feature, let me try that out. And then God forbid something does happen, then they’re the ones who innocently, like just lose their money. And they were the ones that we’re told that a device like a ledger could never ever be hacked or stolen. And now all of a sudden, you know, God forbid, it does happen. You know, those are the people who are never going to come back to the space because they felt like they were betrayed. So, you know, in a worst case scenario, here, I only see this causing more problems and doing more harm than it does good. And for what, for them to be a little bit more profitable for them to appeal to people who don’t know any better. It’s probably not malicious, but I think they’re just doing it strictly as a way to increase business and revenue, and a time where it’s maybe a little bit harder. But again, just know your audience here.

 

Aaron Malone  20:54

I think they’re basically selling out their audience, like so many beer companies are right now. They’re deciding to appeal to the next 100 million customers, and throw out their current 100 million, because they’ve already bought their products. So why not start appealing to the next wave of inflowing people into the space that don’t already own a ledger? And now maybe this offering seems a little more safe than writing down the secret thing and having to actually take control and responsibility for all their money, or some people, they’re just not ready for that. So I’m sure there’s somebody in their marketing department that gave that speech to the executive board and to the product department. They all said, Yeah, that sounds like we’re gonna make a lot of money that way. But for people that are crypto native, they’ve just been stabbed in the back. Yeah.

 

Tevo  21:51

Is there ever a scenario I think this would be a long time down the road. But the from a marketing perspective and a sales perspective, pizza nailed, and it’s like, oh, well, we have our community of people that use our wallet, like, how do we get more people to adopt this? They’re scared of losing everything. So we got to come up with some type of recovery phrase idea, right? Is there ever a world in the future where these companies are offering their wallets and offering, you know, seed recovery stuff, but also offer some type of insurance like some big reinsurer partners with a crypto wallet? Actually, yes.

 

Aaron Malone  22:26

And that’s happening today already. So Coinbase rolled out their wallet as a service a few months ago. So they’re going to be the back end for some of these next generation applications that want to have web three features in there. And then there’s a company called Medicube. That is doing a similar thing, but they already have an insurance provider. I think it’s Lloyd’s of London or something. So they’re also sharding encrypted keys over several centralized servers using something called fully homomorphic encryption. I don’t know a whole lot about that. I’m not a cryptographer. But I’ve talked to several since I heard about this thing. I said, What do you think about this idea? Storing seed phrases in a cloud goes against literally everything we’ve ever been taught. And as I’ve explained the way it works, they say yeah, it sounds like it’s okay. There hasn’t been any breaches of homomorphic encryption and the 10 years or so that it’s been out in the wild. So while I still don’t feel completely safe about it, you’re right. TiVo, there are some products that are coming out now. And they’re able to convince some of the biggest insurance companies in the world to take a bet on it.

 

Tevo  23:40

Yeah, Lloyd’s of London is one of the famous ones like they insured like what David Beckham’s leg will do, although the wild ones, so they definitely would be the right people.

 

Aaron Malone  23:51

Yeah, the thing is, though, if meta keep is cut in custody of $10 billion of millions of users crypto and their insurance policies only for 1 billion. And something really, really bad does happen. Yeah. Is that insurance policy, good or bad? I don’t know. If you’re Lloyd’s of London, you’re looking through every last little line of things to say, Oh, something was in violation, therefore we’re not paying out? Yeah. Well, so I think insurance is kind of a a false sense of security. But the insurance industry online was something that was toyed around with the past couple of years with Nexus mutual and cover protocol, and things like that, where you can have insurance from a smart contract that isn’t going to have a human on the other side, try and screw you when you come to make your claim. So there’s more and more things that are going to happen on that front as well. That I think will eventually circle back around. Because it is something that is necessary in this space given how one little character are being in the wrong place with the wrong code version can cause $100 million to be lost, like in the case of wormhole.

 

Tevo  25:07

Yeah, well, the plug on I’m glad I have good ideas. If anybody wants to hire me as like a product development, you can tell I have great ideas for the space. We may

 

Aaron Malone  25:16

need to give you a promotion. But you’re so good at what you already do here.

 

Tevo  25:20

My man Well, alright, let’s, let’s talk about some fun I got on the rundown here. I got the Bitcoin seems to be in a range. So I put out the newsletters for our crypt nation family. So I read them. And I’ve definitely seen a couple talks about how we’re range bound. You know, you guys are experts. So what do you what do you see in kind of go into the summer stock market wise, which I know is not us usually says, What Sell in May and go away? So heading into the summer range bound? What do you guys see?

 

Brendan Veihman  25:48

Yeah, I mean, the first half of this year, great rally, we look at pretty much any crypto, you look at Bitcoin, you look at Aetherium a lot of the mainstream alt coins, great rally for the first couple months. Now we’re in the most recent a couple of months, you know, we’re about halfway through the year, almost the the back three months have just been a lot of chop and consolidation, we had Bitcoin go all the way from around 15,000 went all the way up to 25,000 in the first half of the year, then ever since that point, we’ve been really stuck between, you know, 26 to 30,000, it’s just been a sideways range. Yeah, we’ve gone up a little bit, we’ve gone down a little bit. But for the most part, we’ve just been hovering around 26 to 30 $31,000. And that’s where we’re at now. Now, it doesn’t mean that big, big things haven’t happened. Obviously, we’ve looked at a lot of independent, independent altcoin projects that have had their own runs, even while Bitcoin and Aetherium. And a lot of the major altcoins do consolidate right now, there are independent alt coins that are moving. And I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways is that we are seeing more independency from the altcoin market, some are falling, the new lows, some are consolidating with Bitcoin and Aetherium. Other ones are ripping 10 New all time highs. And that’s been one of the cool features for me to see is that we didn’t always get that in previous cycles, I think there was always a bit more of a correlation. And while things did kind of differentiate every now and then we’re just seeing a lot of independency between a lot of these projects. So you know, yeah, you know, we are seeing consolidation. And we’re kind of range bound for the moment. But I’m hoping that we can see a rally. Yeah, one thing

 

Aaron Malone  27:27

we’ve talked about on our coaching calls recently is how little liquidity there is on a lot of major pairs right now, which tells us that market makers are kind of out of the picture at the moment. They’re accumulating their own supply and minimizing their own risk. And when that happens, there’s a lot less stability in markets. And with even fewer pairs and fewer support. Actual people can come in and move price. And a community that’s very excited about something can move their coin, a few 100 spots in just a couple of days. So it’s cool to see that there is life in the industry, despite all the bad that’s happened last year. Despite all the chaos going on in the world this year. It seems like there’s still a ton of interest in crypto, even at consensus even even though it wasn’t exactly the biggest event that the consensus has ever had. There were still 15,000 people there. And it may not have been the biggest event because there was a record 67 side events going on simultaneously, instead of before and after the main event. Like it usually happens this year. So there’s still a ton of interest in this space. Anyone who’s gotten shaken out is probably coming back in after they saw a good recovery this year. And, you know, for better or for worse, things like Pepe and shiba inu get people talking just about every Uber driver. I know. When they ask what I do for work and I tell them I’m in crypto they asked me what I think about Shiva and I’m like how the fuck did they hear about this shit? And I just hope and pray to you know any god, Christian Shinto, anything, you know, take one of these rabid communities and put the buy in somebody that has like real value to change the world like amp or cosmos or humor finance or literally anything other than this garbage like I really really hope that some of the good things in crypto get some of even a 10th of the momentum behind him is something dumb like doji lon Mars.

 

Brendan Veihman  29:43

Yeah, I mean, you look at some of the big projects that have just been overlooked recently, like Bitcoin hash rate and activity hitting all time highs. You look at a theory of deposits even after its Shanghai update. It just hit a new all time high. And that’s after withdrawals RNA That was a big fear is that people would mass withdraw their money as soon as they have the ability to do it. And that’s not what we’re seeing, we’re still seeing deposits, you know, at least as of recently, deposits, outnumbering withdrawals. And so we have Bitcoin activity that’s high Aetherium activity, which is very clearly high because of all the Pepe stuff, but also Aetherium deposits, you know, people who are depositing and staking and saying that they are here for the long term of Aetherium also happening. So we’re seeing longevity, we’re seeing people that are competent, creating activity and saying that they’re going to stick around for a while on a lot of the major caps. And I find that reassuring. But it’s not being talked about enough. You know, you go and you look at the news, how many times are people talking about the on chain metrics, and how positive they are for these major cryptocurrencies. Instead, people would like to read about things like Pepe coin, or like a lot of the other kind of BS news that we see, instead of looking at like the core fundamentals of the big crypto projects, and how they are improving every single day, every single week, every month. And you know, I mean, if you were to ask people about what the future roadmap for Aetherium looks like, arguably the most built on the most active blockchain that there is out there, people probably couldn’t name one step of the six step program that Vitalik had talked about. And yet, they can probably list off their favorite meme coin, like pizza was saying. So it’s just a shame, I think people’s direction is being pushed into the wrong direction. And imagine if all the time that people had to put into mean coins or anything that’s related like that, if they would direct that same amount of time towards something that is fundamentally useful to increase and push the whole space forward. You know, there’ll be a black and white just day and night difference.

 

Aaron Malone  31:52

I may be overthinking this. But this, what we’re talking about maybe a symptom of a much larger problem. And that’s in a sick, dying society. People are now scrambling, and not thinking of the health of their community, or the environment they’re living in, but they’re just saying, okay, screw it. I’m on my own. Now. I’m going to take whatever I can and look after myself, or seeing this in the looting situations in California. We’re seeing this in the financial approach to people’s future here and crypto. And we’re seeing this, you know, in politics as well, where there’s several politicians that are trying to make a statement and a career off of doing what makes them popular, or gets them attention rather than what’s good for the country. Gary Gensler being the primary example of that.

 

Tevo  32:49

Yeah, it’s actually to build on that my mystery topic that I told you, I was gonna throw you guys is, is political. We don’t want to get too political. But it’s all over the news cycle. It’s all over Twitter is the debt crisis, the looming debt crisis. So Janet Yellen is out every other day now saying, you know, this June 1 date throwing dates out there the debt crisis, the President’s meeting with, you know, the Senate and Congress this week to try to figure out what they’re going to do, not specifically talking about the debt crisis as as just face value. But how do you see that either way? I mean, if it gets lifted and raised, I guess things maybe go on as normal. But if some kind of bad happens, you know, I think well, it’s always wrapped up in that and

 

Aaron Malone  33:30

raised like, every two years, and everything that’s going on right now is just a song and dance, and a game of hot potato. So one party’s left holding the bag, being the bad guys for voting for this. The other one gets to say, oh, in the future, oh, look what they did. But everyone knows this is going to happen. There’s been zero financial responsibility in this country for 20 years. So yeah, it’s gonna happen and it keeps happening. And you know, Yellen herself said, to think like a finance hearing a few weeks ago, yeah, we plan on inflating the debt away. So we can keep spending. So you’ve got the the Secretary of the Treasury in favor of inflation, completely opposite what the Federal Reserve is attempting to do. How is a country supposed to function like that? If you look at all the things that happened in history for the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Republic to completely collapse? It’s all happening here in the US today.

 

Brendan Veihman  34:32

Yeah, I mean, I was just talking about this the other day. I think that this just continually makes the argument for crypto increasingly stronger, you will look at the inflation rates if if nothing else, just look at the inflation rates for mood, you know, for a lot of these fields, including the dollar right now, you know, arguably around 6%. You even look at precious metals. Those are around two to 3% from new metals being mined and coming out, you know, whether they’re made in a lab or not. inflationary for metals is around two to 3% you Look at Bitcoin and Aetherium. They’re lower than all of those options. And so if nothing else, then crypto will intrinsically gain value as time goes on, if it’s compared to gold, silver, and a lot of the Fiats, whether it’s the US dollar or something else, you know, if it does nothing else, if it just holds its value, it will increase in value, just because they are inflating at a 234 times faster rate than a lot of these Kryptos are. And then there’s arguments to be made with a lot of these updates that we saw with Aetherium. Two point now and some of the recent EIP upgrades to Aetherium. That one could even argue that it is going from inflationary to deflationary, because of different burning mechanisms and how hard it is to create a this a lot of Aetherium. And then you look at Bitcoin after this next halving getting even harder to mine. So what we what we’re going to have is, again, crypto become exceedingly more rare. Well, you know, who knows what will happen with the inflation rates of all these other assets? So I think it makes a strong argument that you know, whether you love or hate your love crypto, maybe you hate it, maybe you’re just in between on it. I think this kind of brings to light the whole conversation of what does your portfolio look like? And how are you diversifying your portfolio so that you can be properly prepared for whatever situation comes your way, because there’s a lot of people who think that they are diversified, because they hold maybe a savings account, and they hold cash, and they hold stocks and bonds. And they think, Okay, I’m properly diversified, when in reality, you’re maybe properly diversified only in pretty much the US equity. And so you have to look to diversify yourself properly beyond just holding us related assets. And I think that’s where crypto comes in. Right? When you think of Bitcoin, you don’t think of the United States, when you think of Aetherium you don’t necessarily think of the United States, we have decentralized assets here. And, you know, I think that it’s just something that everyone, even if it’s just 1% of your portfolio, your holdings, I think everyone should hold just a little bit. Because, you know, again, God forbid, there is some worst case scenario out there something crazy happens, then, if the US dollar tanks or if any of these other things that Kryptos compared to drastically tanked, then that will make, again, inversely the price of crypto go exceedingly higher, and then you have something to hedge against, you know, a lot of worst case scenario. So, anyway, I’ll yield there.

 

Aaron Malone  37:34

Well said then you can’t buy Kiwi futures in the US.

 

Tevo  37:37

Yeah. Well, that was that was beautifully said, I might clip that for you and put some like patriotic inspirational music or something.

 

Aaron Malone  37:48

waving flag in the background. Yeah. bald eagle

 

Brendan Veihman  37:50

flying across my green screen.

 

Tevo  37:52

I’ll do you know what I’m gonna do that on your shoulder. We’re gonna do that for you. And so to do that, you have to follow us on Twitter though, at crypto 101 podcast and the crypto analyst. We’ll do a little joint tweet there. But um, that’s all I got pizza if you want to jump in and then close this out. This was a fun episode. Thanks for having us.

 

Aaron Malone  38:10

I really appreciate you guys hanging out today. It’s been a lot of fun. And fun is what we need right now. And I think that’s why a lot of these memes are also flying off because they’re fun. All these Pepe memes make everyone laugh and smile and who doesn’t want to be around things and people that make them laugh and smile. Just be careful. There’s people out there like Ben, who are launching coins left and right. And booking trips now I guess, to Qatar, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. So we can run off with 6 million in eath. That is raised between Ben Coyne and SIOP now, so be careful with this stuff. Once the DJ music gets unplugged at some of these parties, the fun will be over and be pretty painful. So as we always like to quote, Mooney ollie over here. No, that’s the one. It was Hasib, the one who said it. Slowly. As long as you protect your downside you’ll always have upside. This industry is still so new, and so volatile, make some smart decisions. You can still change your life. But with that, we will leave you for now and we’ll be back later on. Very soon. With another episode here the crypto winter one podcast

 

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All Episodes

In this episode of Crypto 101 Pizza Mind is joined by one of our Analysts Brendan Viehman and our Producer Tevo to go over some of the current events surrounding the crypto markets.  First, the announcement that Ledger Wallet basically is centralized is something you need to be aware of, reviewing the Pepe Coin Mania trade that was, and discussing how Bitcoin has been in a trading range.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

SPEAKERS

Tevo, Aaron Malone, Brendan Veihman

 

Aaron Malone  00:09

All right, everyone, welcome to another awesome episode of the crypto 101 podcast is i Your host pizza mind. And today’s episodes can be a little bit different price Paul is off on his honeymoon, didn’t invite me to go. So I’m kind of stuck over here by myself in Dallas. And things get pretty crazy over here. And to be honest, I need a little therapy session today. So I’ve invited on a couple other people who work over here with us to join me. And we’re just gonna riff on some things that are pissing us off today. It’s gonna be a good little session just to kind of release the tension here. So joining me today is our market analyst Brendon Veneman and super producer TiVo. Both you guys, welcome to the crypto one one podcast front stage. Whoo.

 

Brendan Veihman  00:58

Yeah, we’re here to rant about this bear market. Classic bear market behavior. Oh, yeah. How

 

Aaron Malone  01:05

are you guys holding up?

 

Tevo  01:07

Well, I’m good because I mean, I think our first topic we’ll jump into the Pepe Coyne mania, but like that, that creates absolute chaos on social media, which as your producer I love because it creates for fantastic content on our Twitter, which you should totally follow us at crypto one on one but I mean, the memes a meme coin going crazy, just as is just a beauty of of a meme craze on the internet. And I love it.

 

Brendan Veihman  01:31

I mean, you normally don’t see this behavior in a bear market, right? I mean, we’re not that far from from price bottoms. But this is typically the behavior that we see, when we’re, when we’re in a full fledged bull market, everything’s sky high, people have money to waste. And then that’s typically where we get these crazy meme runs and rallies from, it’s because people, all of a sudden, have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. And they start their own at things called Chiba II knew and Dogecoin and Pepe and Santa coin and all the other ones that have ever existed out there. And this was one that managed to do it in a bear market and go all the way up to a 1.8 7 billion with a B and market cap. Now, since then, it’s fallen 62%. And I mean, what like a week or two. And you know, a lot of people took the heat there, what you had was people that got in early, really shilling it really pushing it, and telling everyone that they know to get in as well. And that this thing was going to a five a $10 billion market cap and it never got there. It was a great run. But I mean, if it’s down 62% There’s a lot of people that are underwater.

 

Aaron Malone  02:38

We’ve seen these people, if you want to loosely use that word, come out of nowhere that were part of other shit coin communities and now have added 20,000 followers in the matter of a week just by using these Pepe hashtags and stuff to launch their own coins, either after their first name or something else that’s dumb are following some other trendy meme like Grumpy Cat. And it is just an absolute free for all for losing money. As if anyone had any money leftover right now if you did, now’s the time to be accumulating long term good positions. And instead, they’re running it through this scam casino where you have an even better chance of 99% of losing everything. Like literally none of these things including Pepe are going to be around a year from now. And we’ve seen other things like this come and go constantly. This is not the first Pepe coin This is like the 50th so chances are if you’re going on uniswap Right now you might not even be buying the right Pepe coin. And so you have to make sure you’re trying to paste the current contract that people are all trading on. So not only is this super dangerous and super foolish, but you have other people that are you know, quote unquote professional influencers or people that others normally look to in the space for advice, just giving terrible advice, because they’re fucking broke. And they’re desperate to try and make money any way they can right now. So actually,

 

Tevo  04:09

I’d love to build on that point pizza because from my perspective of where I came from before I started working with you guys is I come from that influencers space, you know, like people that have huge followings and trade entertainment for clicks and all that. And when I came to this space and met you guys and then was evaluating the crypto space, I saw a little bit everything you had your influencers, you had people trying to educate all that stuff. And I just just build on your point you said it’s so perfectly it’s like, I see I’m seeing a little bit of desperation out there from some people that may not be getting the eyeballs that they’re used to in a bull market and also, you know, just like okay, how am I going to make the income that I’m used to because if my investments aren’t skyrocketing, and there’s not as many eyeballs on the space in a bear market, I’m starting to see people that I’ve had my eye on kind of just like jump around a little bit and it just seemed like a little more chaotic than usual.

 

Aaron Malone  05:02

Yeah, and we saw the final. Finally, we’ve seen the launch of pulse chain by Richard Hart, the creator of hex. This is his second project that everyone who fell for his first scam has fallen for this too. But it seems like he’s getting scared out of the space. Finally, he’s removed all kinds of things from his Twitter bio that would link him to this stuff. And finally, pulse chain has been launched incompletely without the working Aetherium bridge, and hacks and the pulse tokens are taking an absolute nosedive in price. I think they’re down like more than 70% since launch right now. And finally, we’re going to see this multi year long scam finally collapsing on itself. And everyone has tried to warn the Mexicans, as they call themselves about this, and their belligerent attitude is now finally going to blow up in their face. And I really am going to like a moral dilemma right now, like, one of my heroes, Bill Hicks always talked about viewing the world through eyes of compassion versus condemnation. But I’m literally just trying so hard not to say fuck these people, you got what you deserve. And feel sorry for them, because many of them invested their life savings, and are going to end up homeless because of Richard Hart.

 

Brendan Veihman  06:24

I mean, they were blatantly lied to. And not only that, it’s one thing to have passion about specific projects, we see that with a lot of communities. I mean, you look at XRP, you look at a lot of these meme coins, they have a strong passion to say it lightly about what they’re investing in. I think the the problem here is that when you look at Richard Hart, and a lot of these big influencers that were associated with, with hex or poles is that they only They not only were so vibrant and excited about hex, but they also discouraged people from investing into what I would call real, proven projects, they would basically say, why would you ever invest in a theory? And why would you ever invest in Bitcoin, those things are never going to hit their all time high. Again, their tops are in their time is done, you know, don’t invest in this, this garbage old technology, when in reality, you know, they have the garbage technology. So that’s where I draw the line, I think it’s one thing if you want to be a fanatic about your community, all the power to you, you know, have your passion, even if I believe it’s wrong. The problem I have is when they are like blatantly giving bad advice about what I would believe to be very good and safe investments. Again, you look at Bitcoin, you look at Aetherium, they have their proven track record, they have applications, especially Aetherium that are built on top of it. It has a proven model that works. And to say that it doesn’t, it’s just going against the facts. So that’s where I draw the line when you are telling people and blatantly lying to them, to scare them out of real options, and things that have real growth potential. That’s

 

Aaron Malone  08:00

yeah, and I believe many of these people that are in just got in because their friend told them Yeah, and they don’t know anything about anything. Maybe my mayor don’t even know about a cerium or what it means repulse chain to be Aetherium compatible. They have no idea why that’s valuable. They’re gonna get a hard lesson now, which is too bad that could have been accumulating things like cosmos and quant projects.

 

Tevo  08:26

I think it’s a testament to this team from my perspective because I would call myself like a resident Dejan not even just a crypto Dejan. I’m on Robinhood slinging some options. I like to go gamble at the casino. And this was my Pepe coin was the first one from I don’t want to call it from inception because I know it’s been around and bumbling but it felt like it was the first huge meme coin rise since I’ve been with you guys and like because I always thought like oh Dogecoin like yeah, I made a couple 100 bucks on Doge flip the blossom here once I’m there but I was like man what have you got in you know underneath a penny type of thing and and so it was happening like we’re Hey guys you see this Pepe coin looking crazy. Oh it’s going crazy. And we’re in our in our team and I’m just like I’m getting ready for somebody to be like yeah buy in let’s buy in and and nobody we our team was calm cool collective. It didn’t really peek as as a whole team or from you know, the newsletter perspective. Like it never caught our eye as something that we were buying into. And so I kept calm and just you know, I bought some more Bitcoin a theorem just DCA like I’ve been doing over the last six months since I’ve been here instead of jumping into the DGN meme craze, and I basically would have gotten in probably about like a week or 10 days ago is like when I was like man like how can I say I work on a crypto podcast and not be on this next big meme coin was like basically what I told myself but I talked myself out of it because you guys weren’t focused on it.

 

Aaron Malone  09:47

I’ve made more money this year shorting meme coins in the past two weeks that I have even trading in the positive direction.

 

Brendan Veihman  09:58

The scary thing here is that that people saw what happened to Pepe. And they heard these these, I was gonna say 1% of people who made a million dollars out of nothing, but it’s so much less than 1% of the people that actually made those gains. But there’s these stories that people have heard where they put in 100 bucks, and they came out with 10 million or something like that. And what you have to understand is that these things are less than a dime a dozen. We had Dogecoin, it blew up came into existence in 2013. Seven years later, we got the next major meme coin that blew up Shiva, no. Now we’re three years later, and we got Pepe coin, and it blew up over a billion, almost $2 billion in market cap. So we have three mean coins in a matter of 10 years now, which means that on average, about every three and a half to four years, there’s one successful one, which means that the 1000s and 1000s of main coins in between those periods, were pretty much all failures. I mean, how many mean coins? Can someone name outside of those three major ones that are still around and have a big market cap a big following? And the answer is maybe one at most, right? The average person is not going to be able to name any of these other ones. So for people that are looking at the scenario and saying I want to catch the next Pepe coin, I wanted to catch the next Dogecoin. You have, again, there’s one every three to four years, and there’s 1000s that are created in that timeframe. Even if you do put in 100 bucks in every one, the odds are you’ll go broke before you make it. There’s just too many out there in existence. There’s too many rug polls, and you have no way of knowing which one is going to be the next thing before it happens.

 

Aaron Malone  11:44

Yeah, very well said. And there’s, if you go to do Dex tools.io, you can see new coins that are being made. And there’s like a new coin being made on Aetherium almost every hour right now. Wow. So yeah, it’s really ridiculous. I mean, you can try and be some of the first money in but you can see how much liquidity is actually there. And there’s like nothing, it’s just these random guys that are burning a couple eath and gas fees. It’s really a shot in the door. So

 

Tevo  12:21

even for your average consumer, like the average consumer, like myself isn’t getting in before we’re seeing what’s happening. And then we jump in and get caught on that 60% drawdown like Brendan said earlier. And so I think, you know, if you’re looking to invest and learn about the space, this is a great spot. And everybody that we’ve brought on our guests like nobody we’ve brought on the podcast in the last three weeks has has been like, hey, let’s talk about Pepe coin. They all just go Yeah, that’s crazy. I wish that would and so it’s like we’re it’s just an interesting community that I’m in with you guys, because I’m used to the internet, Twitter DGN community that I get wrapped up.

 

Aaron Malone  12:55

And well, let’s talk about the term Dejan, for example, like it’s changed meanings over just a couple of years, it’s been around to be a DJ. And when it first came out, it meant the crazy smart developers that could code flash loan bots, and MeV extraction bots, and do all this crazy stuff to essentially print money. Like there’s an MeV bot on Aetherium right now, under the address Jared from Subway dot eath. And you can watch his wallet just grow exponentially every day on ether scan. Because he’s running some kind of sandwich attack on just about every trade, he can get a piece of on uniswap. Basically what that means is he’s got a bot that is reading incoming transactions and uniswap in the Aetherium mempool. He’s then doing the exact same transaction at a higher gas fee. So his transactions processed first. And then he’s selling that coin back to the first person who’s buying it at a tiny little premium because uniswap allows for a certain percentage of slippage. So he’s making a 10th of a percent to one or 2%. Each trade is able to get a piece of and he’s just running this through 1000s or even millions of times a day and just growing this money. That’s what DGN really is, is these crazy financial ninjas that are able to do shit like that. DGN doesn’t mean just buying literally anything and losing your money. That’s stupidity.

 

Brendan Veihman  14:33

I think the term for Dejan really started to change after we had the Gamestop scenario pizza. I think we had the whole Gamestop incident we had a Wall Street bets go absolutely viral, and then the term de Chien was translated into what we’re seeing more of today.

 

Tevo  14:51

Yeah, yeah. DGN for me goes back to college where we have like a $500 allowance from you know, the football team like you get a couple of bucks a week. And supposed to go towards your food and housing, but we would just all go to the casino by beers and lose it all in blackjack in about an hour. And then you tell your parents and just be like, Yeah, you’re just acting like a degenerate. That’s where mine came from. That was fascinating pizza. So I saw I saw on the internet, you know, I’m always scrolling. I saw some story of like, somebody was like, I sent a million dollars to Jared from Subway on, and I can’t get it back. You think that’s the that’s the Jared from Subway? Like he accidentally sent it. And I’m thinking I’m like, Isn’t Jared from Subway actually in jail? And then you’re telling me there’s like some famous theory of Jared from Subway. So I’m guessing Yeah,

 

Aaron Malone  15:40

I think the real ones in jail, but who knows he might be working for the federal government now the way they feel about these policies these days. So we got there is a subway wallet that is just cleaning up that name right now.

 

Tevo  15:52

I got to dive into that. That’s an interesting story. Yeah. But um, if we want to go to the next topic. So we talked about right before the show, literally trending today, it’s Tuesday, but Ledger Wallet, released a new announcement. I’m not super technical. So I don’t want to dive into it. But it’s trending on Twitter, and a lot of people are upset.

 

Aaron Malone  16:12

Yeah. So basically, what’s happening here is there’s a new firmware update, that allows you to opt into this new recovery service, where they would shard and encrypt your private keys and then store them on centralized custodians. So if you ever lose your wallet, you can then recover it just by showing your ID and then claiming it. Well, this is an enormous problem, because ledger has already had several data breaches where customer identity hadn’t, and other information has been used by hackers to then try and fish for the private keys of users. And now we’re supposed to trust them with the actual private keys. Doesn’t sound very good. But even if you don’t opt into this recovery service, the fact that this new firmware update that I’m not 100% Sure, if you’re being forced to use or not, it’s still going to have this code in here, which means it can be exploited, which means now there’s a link between what was supposed to be an air gapped device and some centralized server, and everyone is freaking out about it. Personally, I don’t trust ledger, I don’t own one. And I think the user interface on them is terrible. The Ledger live was a huge improvement when they put that out a couple years ago. But look, I mean, these guys are a French company, we’re lucky they show up to work at all, they seem to have other things in mind these days, it may be distracting them. So it depending on how you want to look at it, you can give them a break. Or you can go explore one of the other options for crypto wallets like Trezor, or Oculus. I think after talking with their team, and seeing that they’ve actually been around for like 20 years in the security space, and Oculus has been around for a few now. I think it’s okay to add them to the list of safe, cold wallets. But yeah, Ledger way to drop the ball buddies. Good job.

 

Brendan Veihman  18:18

What I don’t understand is why all these companies recently just don’t understand their audience and their user base. We’ve seen that happen with traditional centralized companies recently, we’re seeing it happen in crypto, where their entire spiel, their whole use case for their product is having a safer, decentralized option for crypto users to come to, and know that they’re not going to have a custodianship through, you know, something like Coinbase, or an exchange or anything like that any kind of service or platform. And what they’re doing is they are essentially becoming that by storing the seed phrase on a in a centralized way, even if it is sharted. By storing it in a centralized way, they become little to almost no different from the centralized sources that they’re trying to stand apart from. So that kind of begs the question, why would you go through all the rigmarole like we think of Coinbase like Coinbase has great security like they do, but it’s still centralized security for your steed phrases, and there are still centralized, like your information is stored in a centralized manner. And that’s why exchanges are often attacked. So why would someone go through all the extra trouble to get one of these cold wallets to get one of these hard wallets, and then all of a sudden just put their information in in a centralized way? It just doesn’t make any sense. They, they’re appealing to the wrong audience here. There. People are coming to them for decentralized an extra security measures. And now all of a sudden, they’re offering an alternative to that and people who don’t know any better, could be the ones to show up here and say, Oh, that sounds great. That sounds useful. Maybe I will maybe I’ll lose my seat for one days, maybe I’ll forget it whatever happens, and you have people who who don’t know any better just say, Oh, that’s a cool feature, let me try that out. And then God forbid something does happen, then they’re the ones who innocently, like just lose their money. And they were the ones that we’re told that a device like a ledger could never ever be hacked or stolen. And now all of a sudden, you know, God forbid, it does happen. You know, those are the people who are never going to come back to the space because they felt like they were betrayed. So, you know, in a worst case scenario, here, I only see this causing more problems and doing more harm than it does good. And for what, for them to be a little bit more profitable for them to appeal to people who don’t know any better. It’s probably not malicious, but I think they’re just doing it strictly as a way to increase business and revenue, and a time where it’s maybe a little bit harder. But again, just know your audience here.

 

Aaron Malone  20:54

I think they’re basically selling out their audience, like so many beer companies are right now. They’re deciding to appeal to the next 100 million customers, and throw out their current 100 million, because they’ve already bought their products. So why not start appealing to the next wave of inflowing people into the space that don’t already own a ledger? And now maybe this offering seems a little more safe than writing down the secret thing and having to actually take control and responsibility for all their money, or some people, they’re just not ready for that. So I’m sure there’s somebody in their marketing department that gave that speech to the executive board and to the product department. They all said, Yeah, that sounds like we’re gonna make a lot of money that way. But for people that are crypto native, they’ve just been stabbed in the back. Yeah.

 

Tevo  21:51

Is there ever a scenario I think this would be a long time down the road. But the from a marketing perspective and a sales perspective, pizza nailed, and it’s like, oh, well, we have our community of people that use our wallet, like, how do we get more people to adopt this? They’re scared of losing everything. So we got to come up with some type of recovery phrase idea, right? Is there ever a world in the future where these companies are offering their wallets and offering, you know, seed recovery stuff, but also offer some type of insurance like some big reinsurer partners with a crypto wallet? Actually, yes.

 

Aaron Malone  22:26

And that’s happening today already. So Coinbase rolled out their wallet as a service a few months ago. So they’re going to be the back end for some of these next generation applications that want to have web three features in there. And then there’s a company called Medicube. That is doing a similar thing, but they already have an insurance provider. I think it’s Lloyd’s of London or something. So they’re also sharding encrypted keys over several centralized servers using something called fully homomorphic encryption. I don’t know a whole lot about that. I’m not a cryptographer. But I’ve talked to several since I heard about this thing. I said, What do you think about this idea? Storing seed phrases in a cloud goes against literally everything we’ve ever been taught. And as I’ve explained the way it works, they say yeah, it sounds like it’s okay. There hasn’t been any breaches of homomorphic encryption and the 10 years or so that it’s been out in the wild. So while I still don’t feel completely safe about it, you’re right. TiVo, there are some products that are coming out now. And they’re able to convince some of the biggest insurance companies in the world to take a bet on it.

 

Tevo  23:40

Yeah, Lloyd’s of London is one of the famous ones like they insured like what David Beckham’s leg will do, although the wild ones, so they definitely would be the right people.

 

Aaron Malone  23:51

Yeah, the thing is, though, if meta keep is cut in custody of $10 billion of millions of users crypto and their insurance policies only for 1 billion. And something really, really bad does happen. Yeah. Is that insurance policy, good or bad? I don’t know. If you’re Lloyd’s of London, you’re looking through every last little line of things to say, Oh, something was in violation, therefore we’re not paying out? Yeah. Well, so I think insurance is kind of a a false sense of security. But the insurance industry online was something that was toyed around with the past couple of years with Nexus mutual and cover protocol, and things like that, where you can have insurance from a smart contract that isn’t going to have a human on the other side, try and screw you when you come to make your claim. So there’s more and more things that are going to happen on that front as well. That I think will eventually circle back around. Because it is something that is necessary in this space given how one little character are being in the wrong place with the wrong code version can cause $100 million to be lost, like in the case of wormhole.

 

Tevo  25:07

Yeah, well, the plug on I’m glad I have good ideas. If anybody wants to hire me as like a product development, you can tell I have great ideas for the space. We may

 

Aaron Malone  25:16

need to give you a promotion. But you’re so good at what you already do here.

 

Tevo  25:20

My man Well, alright, let’s, let’s talk about some fun I got on the rundown here. I got the Bitcoin seems to be in a range. So I put out the newsletters for our crypt nation family. So I read them. And I’ve definitely seen a couple talks about how we’re range bound. You know, you guys are experts. So what do you what do you see in kind of go into the summer stock market wise, which I know is not us usually says, What Sell in May and go away? So heading into the summer range bound? What do you guys see?

 

Brendan Veihman  25:48

Yeah, I mean, the first half of this year, great rally, we look at pretty much any crypto, you look at Bitcoin, you look at Aetherium a lot of the mainstream alt coins, great rally for the first couple months. Now we’re in the most recent a couple of months, you know, we’re about halfway through the year, almost the the back three months have just been a lot of chop and consolidation, we had Bitcoin go all the way from around 15,000 went all the way up to 25,000 in the first half of the year, then ever since that point, we’ve been really stuck between, you know, 26 to 30,000, it’s just been a sideways range. Yeah, we’ve gone up a little bit, we’ve gone down a little bit. But for the most part, we’ve just been hovering around 26 to 30 $31,000. And that’s where we’re at now. Now, it doesn’t mean that big, big things haven’t happened. Obviously, we’ve looked at a lot of independent, independent altcoin projects that have had their own runs, even while Bitcoin and Aetherium. And a lot of the major altcoins do consolidate right now, there are independent alt coins that are moving. And I think that’s one of the biggest takeaways is that we are seeing more independency from the altcoin market, some are falling, the new lows, some are consolidating with Bitcoin and Aetherium. Other ones are ripping 10 New all time highs. And that’s been one of the cool features for me to see is that we didn’t always get that in previous cycles, I think there was always a bit more of a correlation. And while things did kind of differentiate every now and then we’re just seeing a lot of independency between a lot of these projects. So you know, yeah, you know, we are seeing consolidation. And we’re kind of range bound for the moment. But I’m hoping that we can see a rally. Yeah, one thing

 

Aaron Malone  27:27

we’ve talked about on our coaching calls recently is how little liquidity there is on a lot of major pairs right now, which tells us that market makers are kind of out of the picture at the moment. They’re accumulating their own supply and minimizing their own risk. And when that happens, there’s a lot less stability in markets. And with even fewer pairs and fewer support. Actual people can come in and move price. And a community that’s very excited about something can move their coin, a few 100 spots in just a couple of days. So it’s cool to see that there is life in the industry, despite all the bad that’s happened last year. Despite all the chaos going on in the world this year. It seems like there’s still a ton of interest in crypto, even at consensus even even though it wasn’t exactly the biggest event that the consensus has ever had. There were still 15,000 people there. And it may not have been the biggest event because there was a record 67 side events going on simultaneously, instead of before and after the main event. Like it usually happens this year. So there’s still a ton of interest in this space. Anyone who’s gotten shaken out is probably coming back in after they saw a good recovery this year. And, you know, for better or for worse, things like Pepe and shiba inu get people talking just about every Uber driver. I know. When they ask what I do for work and I tell them I’m in crypto they asked me what I think about Shiva and I’m like how the fuck did they hear about this shit? And I just hope and pray to you know any god, Christian Shinto, anything, you know, take one of these rabid communities and put the buy in somebody that has like real value to change the world like amp or cosmos or humor finance or literally anything other than this garbage like I really really hope that some of the good things in crypto get some of even a 10th of the momentum behind him is something dumb like doji lon Mars.

 

Brendan Veihman  29:43

Yeah, I mean, you look at some of the big projects that have just been overlooked recently, like Bitcoin hash rate and activity hitting all time highs. You look at a theory of deposits even after its Shanghai update. It just hit a new all time high. And that’s after withdrawals RNA That was a big fear is that people would mass withdraw their money as soon as they have the ability to do it. And that’s not what we’re seeing, we’re still seeing deposits, you know, at least as of recently, deposits, outnumbering withdrawals. And so we have Bitcoin activity that’s high Aetherium activity, which is very clearly high because of all the Pepe stuff, but also Aetherium deposits, you know, people who are depositing and staking and saying that they are here for the long term of Aetherium also happening. So we’re seeing longevity, we’re seeing people that are competent, creating activity and saying that they’re going to stick around for a while on a lot of the major caps. And I find that reassuring. But it’s not being talked about enough. You know, you go and you look at the news, how many times are people talking about the on chain metrics, and how positive they are for these major cryptocurrencies. Instead, people would like to read about things like Pepe coin, or like a lot of the other kind of BS news that we see, instead of looking at like the core fundamentals of the big crypto projects, and how they are improving every single day, every single week, every month. And you know, I mean, if you were to ask people about what the future roadmap for Aetherium looks like, arguably the most built on the most active blockchain that there is out there, people probably couldn’t name one step of the six step program that Vitalik had talked about. And yet, they can probably list off their favorite meme coin, like pizza was saying. So it’s just a shame, I think people’s direction is being pushed into the wrong direction. And imagine if all the time that people had to put into mean coins or anything that’s related like that, if they would direct that same amount of time towards something that is fundamentally useful to increase and push the whole space forward. You know, there’ll be a black and white just day and night difference.

 

Aaron Malone  31:52

I may be overthinking this. But this, what we’re talking about maybe a symptom of a much larger problem. And that’s in a sick, dying society. People are now scrambling, and not thinking of the health of their community, or the environment they’re living in, but they’re just saying, okay, screw it. I’m on my own. Now. I’m going to take whatever I can and look after myself, or seeing this in the looting situations in California. We’re seeing this in the financial approach to people’s future here and crypto. And we’re seeing this, you know, in politics as well, where there’s several politicians that are trying to make a statement and a career off of doing what makes them popular, or gets them attention rather than what’s good for the country. Gary Gensler being the primary example of that.

 

Tevo  32:49

Yeah, it’s actually to build on that my mystery topic that I told you, I was gonna throw you guys is, is political. We don’t want to get too political. But it’s all over the news cycle. It’s all over Twitter is the debt crisis, the looming debt crisis. So Janet Yellen is out every other day now saying, you know, this June 1 date throwing dates out there the debt crisis, the President’s meeting with, you know, the Senate and Congress this week to try to figure out what they’re going to do, not specifically talking about the debt crisis as as just face value. But how do you see that either way? I mean, if it gets lifted and raised, I guess things maybe go on as normal. But if some kind of bad happens, you know, I think well, it’s always wrapped up in that and

 

Aaron Malone  33:30

raised like, every two years, and everything that’s going on right now is just a song and dance, and a game of hot potato. So one party’s left holding the bag, being the bad guys for voting for this. The other one gets to say, oh, in the future, oh, look what they did. But everyone knows this is going to happen. There’s been zero financial responsibility in this country for 20 years. So yeah, it’s gonna happen and it keeps happening. And you know, Yellen herself said, to think like a finance hearing a few weeks ago, yeah, we plan on inflating the debt away. So we can keep spending. So you’ve got the the Secretary of the Treasury in favor of inflation, completely opposite what the Federal Reserve is attempting to do. How is a country supposed to function like that? If you look at all the things that happened in history for the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Republic to completely collapse? It’s all happening here in the US today.

 

Brendan Veihman  34:32

Yeah, I mean, I was just talking about this the other day. I think that this just continually makes the argument for crypto increasingly stronger, you will look at the inflation rates if if nothing else, just look at the inflation rates for mood, you know, for a lot of these fields, including the dollar right now, you know, arguably around 6%. You even look at precious metals. Those are around two to 3% from new metals being mined and coming out, you know, whether they’re made in a lab or not. inflationary for metals is around two to 3% you Look at Bitcoin and Aetherium. They’re lower than all of those options. And so if nothing else, then crypto will intrinsically gain value as time goes on, if it’s compared to gold, silver, and a lot of the Fiats, whether it’s the US dollar or something else, you know, if it does nothing else, if it just holds its value, it will increase in value, just because they are inflating at a 234 times faster rate than a lot of these Kryptos are. And then there’s arguments to be made with a lot of these updates that we saw with Aetherium. Two point now and some of the recent EIP upgrades to Aetherium. That one could even argue that it is going from inflationary to deflationary, because of different burning mechanisms and how hard it is to create a this a lot of Aetherium. And then you look at Bitcoin after this next halving getting even harder to mine. So what we what we’re going to have is, again, crypto become exceedingly more rare. Well, you know, who knows what will happen with the inflation rates of all these other assets? So I think it makes a strong argument that you know, whether you love or hate your love crypto, maybe you hate it, maybe you’re just in between on it. I think this kind of brings to light the whole conversation of what does your portfolio look like? And how are you diversifying your portfolio so that you can be properly prepared for whatever situation comes your way, because there’s a lot of people who think that they are diversified, because they hold maybe a savings account, and they hold cash, and they hold stocks and bonds. And they think, Okay, I’m properly diversified, when in reality, you’re maybe properly diversified only in pretty much the US equity. And so you have to look to diversify yourself properly beyond just holding us related assets. And I think that’s where crypto comes in. Right? When you think of Bitcoin, you don’t think of the United States, when you think of Aetherium you don’t necessarily think of the United States, we have decentralized assets here. And, you know, I think that it’s just something that everyone, even if it’s just 1% of your portfolio, your holdings, I think everyone should hold just a little bit. Because, you know, again, God forbid, there is some worst case scenario out there something crazy happens, then, if the US dollar tanks or if any of these other things that Kryptos compared to drastically tanked, then that will make, again, inversely the price of crypto go exceedingly higher, and then you have something to hedge against, you know, a lot of worst case scenario. So, anyway, I’ll yield there.

 

Aaron Malone  37:34

Well said then you can’t buy Kiwi futures in the US.

 

Tevo  37:37

Yeah. Well, that was that was beautifully said, I might clip that for you and put some like patriotic inspirational music or something.

 

Aaron Malone  37:48

waving flag in the background. Yeah. bald eagle

 

Brendan Veihman  37:50

flying across my green screen.

 

Tevo  37:52

I’ll do you know what I’m gonna do that on your shoulder. We’re gonna do that for you. And so to do that, you have to follow us on Twitter though, at crypto 101 podcast and the crypto analyst. We’ll do a little joint tweet there. But um, that’s all I got pizza if you want to jump in and then close this out. This was a fun episode. Thanks for having us.

 

Aaron Malone  38:10

I really appreciate you guys hanging out today. It’s been a lot of fun. And fun is what we need right now. And I think that’s why a lot of these memes are also flying off because they’re fun. All these Pepe memes make everyone laugh and smile and who doesn’t want to be around things and people that make them laugh and smile. Just be careful. There’s people out there like Ben, who are launching coins left and right. And booking trips now I guess, to Qatar, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the US. So we can run off with 6 million in eath. That is raised between Ben Coyne and SIOP now, so be careful with this stuff. Once the DJ music gets unplugged at some of these parties, the fun will be over and be pretty painful. So as we always like to quote, Mooney ollie over here. No, that’s the one. It was Hasib, the one who said it. Slowly. As long as you protect your downside you’ll always have upside. This industry is still so new, and so volatile, make some smart decisions. You can still change your life. But with that, we will leave you for now and we’ll be back later on. Very soon. With another episode here the crypto winter one podcast

 

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