加密货币正进入范式转变期
Jonah扭转了此前的看空立场，认为ETF、稳定币进展和Ripple裁决显示出“曙光”。 Avi也转向更乐观：BTC重新测试$28,500，未触及其$27,000目标便进入需求区；同期BTC上涨1.83%，而Nasdaq下跌1.5%。
ETF争论的核心，在于资本能否为尚未能够接触的工具定价。 Jonah回顾Glassnode数据称，约65%的Bitcoin长期持有者持有时间超过1年，而美国新增散户资金仍难以进入。他认为，现货ETF将真正打开一座“流动性入口”。Avi则反驳称，“十有八九，这类事件会标志着趋势见顶”，GBTC潜在的资金流出可能抵消流入。
BTC和广义基础设施仍是更容易交易的方向，但不加区分地押注山寨币，已经越来越缺乏逻辑支撑。 Avi预计L1会受益于短期内再度爆发的贪婪情绪，但怀疑未来5年基础设施投资能否继续胜过应用层投资。Meme币依旧极度依赖择时：“要么你很早，要么你就死了。”
Jonah将加密货币定义为处于“拿成果说话阶段”，而Avi认为ChatGPT已经为新兴技术展示了显而易见的用例。 这让第500个、既没有用户也没有已验证用例的币更难自圆其说。Avi对大多数非Ethereum生态正在失去信心，但仍认为BTC拥有货币化逻辑，ETH则可以作为中立数据库，承载基于稳定币的用例。Jonah的结论是：“ChatGPT对无用的东西不利”（"ChatGPT is bad for useless things"）。
PayPal的稳定币表明，美国政策可能是在挑选获批的加密货币入口，而不是消灭整个行业。 Avi将PayPal获批与Meta和Coinbase遭遇的监管行动作对比：PayPal拥有4亿–5亿用户，Coinbase约1亿。对投资者而言，含义很明确：持有Coinbase的理由边际减少，持有PayPal的理由可能增加。
稳定币可能分化为两类：获得机构认可的产品，以及持续承压的产品。 讨论者提到，USDC已从峰值约550亿–600亿美元降至约300亿美元，而Tether接近800亿美元；不过，Avi仍看好Tether在发展中市场的效用。他认为，主要风险是政府干预，而不是假定存在储备缺口。
Jonah对石油的判断，映射的是Bitcoin潜在采用曲线更靠后的阶段。 更高利率可能以6–18个月的滞后压制石油产量，而未来2年需求上升，推动油价上涨，继而出现需求破坏，最终迎来一轮“相当壮观的抛售”。从更长周期看，Jonah认为大宗商品贸易可能使用BTC或Tether，以避开缓慢的银行体系和惩罚性的本币兑换；Avi补充称，生活必需品最终可能以Bitcoin、Tether或两者重新计价，尤其是在灰色市场贸易中。
1. BTC奖励了简单策略，投机型加密交易依旧残酷
Jonah给出的基准极其直接：仅仅持有BTC——或者更聪明地持有GBTC——就已经跑赢了大多数大举投入研究的主动型加密对冲基金。Avi的干脆限定值得保留：“大多数，但不是全部。”
Meme币仍是一场择时游戏，“要么你很早，要么你就死了”。Jonah质疑Pepe所谓的耐久性：如果有人在开盘后3天的暴涨阶段买入，如今可能亏损80%；即便是在6月买入，也可能亏损50%。Avi则提到HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu，称其似乎是一个表现和持有情况都异常出色的例外；有些币能存活足够长时间，最终形成邪教式社群。
Avi认为，2021年L1之所以能作为指数式押注，是因为新增资金更容易同时押注Ethereum、Solana、NEAR、Avalanche或MATIC，而不是挑选单个应用。他预计这些资产短期内会受益于贪婪情绪复苏，但怀疑未来5年基础设施能否继续保持这一优势。
不过，Avi对市场的判断已经改善：BTC在触及其原先$27,000目标前重新测试了$28,500，随后进入需求区，山寨币跌幅也小于预期。“我们已经冲掉了大量投机资金”，并在局部发现了需求。
2. 现货ETF可能打开新流动性，也可能标志着顶部
Jonah不接受Avi关于BTC市占率将在1个月内上升的判断。他援引Glassnode称，自己认为Bitcoin长期持有者中约65%已持有超过1年；在美国散户尚无法便捷参与的情况下，ETF工具正式出现前，无法进入足够多的新资金来充分反映这一机会。
他区分了定价信息和获取资金的能力：市场早已充分预告的事件是，“一座流动性入口将被打开”。ARK的首次获批日期就在那个周五，但Jonah预计会延期，因此在Avi的1个月期限上押注更长时间。
Avi的反驳是，加密市场经常用数十亿美元提前交易里程碑事件。2021年10月推出的期货ETF正好落在市场“字面意义上的绝对顶部”，而Coinbase在2021年4月上市，也距另一个顶部约1周。“买预期，卖事实。”
Avi承认，现货ETF在结构上确实重要，因为CME的长期期货在期货升水状态下可能产生10%–12%的展期收益率成本。但他的短期担忧是，长期被套的GBTC持有者可能在更好的产品出现后退出，从而部分抵消ETF headline inflows。
3. AI迫使加密货币进入“拿成果说话阶段”
LK-99的讨论提供了更大的背景：Jonah认为，它在3至5年内成为现实的概率大约是“25 delta”。AI和其他技术突破，可能分走原本会流向加密货币的资金与注意力。
Jonah将加密货币定义为处于“拿成果说话阶段”。Avi认为，ChatGPT已经展示了新兴技术的显而易见用例，因此第500个既没有用户、也没有已验证用例的币更难辩护。Jonah也同意，“ChatGPT对无用的东西不利”，对尚未证明自身用途的东西同样如此。
Avi正在“对多链世界失去信心”，认为大多数非Ethereum生态可能会消亡。他表示，BTC仍然提供数字黄金和点对点货币的逻辑，既可能对抗货币贬值，也可能取代约180种法币中排名靠后的50种；ETH则可以作为记录契约和真实性证明的中立数据库，同时承载基于稳定币的用例。
Avi同意Jonah对长期趋势的判断，但看到了短期资金流向逆转：硅谷资金和赌博资本转向AI与Nvidia。等这些叙事达到饱和，而Bitcoin仍相对低迷时，部分快钱可能在未来2至3个月重新轮动回加密市场。
4. PayPal揭示了正在成形的监管版图
Avi从PYUSD推断，美国政府并非从根本上排斥加密货币，而是希望控制入口。监管机构阻止了Meta和Facebook的稳定币计划，并起诉Coinbase，却允许PayPal发行稳定币：“关键是确保由正确的人来掌控入口。”
规模决定了这一点的分量。PayPal拥有4亿–5亿用户，Coinbase约1亿，同时已经提供BTC、ETH、Litecoin和Bitcoin Cash。Avi因此对持有Coinbase的意愿边际下降，对PayPal则更开放，具体取决于后续哪些资产和服务能够获批。
Jonah提出的发达市场思想实验完全是假设性的：PayPal可以向商户提供收益率为5.25%的生息资金，以约13秒的区块时间完成转账，并取消卡组织手续费。这可能威胁Visa、Mastercard、JPMorgan和Bank of America——不过他强调，监管和产品层面的重大障碍依然存在。
这指向一个二元市场：加密货币类产品要么“获批并繁荣”，要么持续遭到攻击。讨论中引用的快照显示，USDC已从550亿–600亿美元的峰值降至约300亿美元；Tether则在DOJ相关新闻引发的10个基点波动后，仍徘徊在约800亿美元附近。
5. Tether的主要风险是执法，而非假定存在资产负债表缺口
Avi称，Tether是一个有用的发展中世界产品，具备显著的持续生命力。在他看来，反复出现的攻击并未揭示出明显的储备缺口；更尖锐的风险，是DOJ可能针对涉及受制裁司法管辖区的转账采取行动。
Jonah认为，DOJ若令其停止运营，结果会是有序清算，而不是脱锚。Avi回应称，即便只是出现2个月的赎回延迟，也可能因持有人试图提前退出而造成幅度不大的脱锚。
Avi建议将业务拆分到3家公司或3种稳定币中，以更薄的流动性换取更低的集中度风险。
Avi预计，新一批离岸团队——包括来自Tencent、Xiaomi和Alibaba的人才——会在香港开放后推出更好、更少灰色地带、也更直接的产品。Jonah从大宗商品市场得到的更广泛启示是，各司法辖区会就全球可互换资产产生激烈分歧；BTC、ETH和Tether之所以展现韧性，恰恰是因为它们能在这些分歧之间找到产品市场契合点。
6. 紧平衡石油可能先上涨，商品结算随后改变
Jonah认为，高利率会以6–18个月的滞后削弱资本密集型石油生产。未来2年需求预计上升，加上地缘政治因素同样限制供给，油价可能持续上涨，直到价格摧毁需求，随后出现剧烈抛售和“疯狂波动”。
他的类比是，BTC如今所处的位置，相当于19世纪末的石油：仍在证明产品市场契合度，而不是接近石油成熟周期的顶点。Bitcoin“可能要用100年才能走到那一步”，因此两种资产处在采用曲线的两端。
Jonah给出的结算场景很具体：乍得的石油生产商可能要等待“T+17天”才能收到美元，随后还要承受本币兑换时的惩罚性汇率。他认为，这可能推动用户转向Bitcoin，或者转向Tether。Avi补充称，大宗商品贸易最终可能以Bitcoin、Tether或两者为生活必需品重新计价，灰色市场贸易尤其可能率先采用这一方式。
It’s very clear that the environment for crypto is shifting right now. You have the ETFs, you have the stablecoin and the Ripple lawsuit. I don’t know what’s coming next, but it’s clear that there are green shoots in a way that there weren’t before, and that makes me more bullish. So, if you were a listener on the last podcast and heard me waxing bearish, I’m changing my tune.
I just came back from a nice vacation in Greece. I got to disconnect a bit, catch some octopi, eat feta cheese and delicious Greek food out on the beach.
Octopi?
Octopi. It’s for sure octopi. Have you ever watched My Octopus Teacher?
No, I haven’t. Maybe that’s another generational thing.
Yeah, no, this is a Netflix documentary about some South African guy who made friends with an octopus. I think the whole point of the documentary was to try to convince you not to eat them because they’re really smart.
He also sounds smarter than the dude who made friends with a hippo and then got eaten by it.
No way. A dude made friends with a hippo and got eaten?
Yeah, he was riding it like a unicorn or a horse for a while. Then one day the hippo was just like, “Enough. I don’t like you anymore.”
You gotta be careful.
Okay, now here it is, man: mauled to death in South Africa.
So what is it with South Africa?
Well, animals down there. A lot of animals down there.
He several times described the hippo as his son. It was a 6-year-old pet hippo. He went swimming with him. When he went in the water, Humphrey—he named him Humphrey—allowed him to get on his back and ride him like a horse.
Yeah, this guy’s nuts, swimming with a hippo.
These things are—more people die from hippos a year than die from lions.
Where does the octopus death count factor into that?
I don’t know, but there apparently is an octopus called a blue-ringed octopus, or something like that. It’s only 5 to 8 inches long, but it’s extremely dangerous if provoked or handled because its venom can kill somebody very easily. They’re found in tide pools from Japan to Australia.
Have you ever seen an octopus with blue rings on it?
Just whatever you do, don’t touch it. Sounds like certain altcoins, doesn’t it?
No, but, you know, just stay away.
Definitely some, like BALD. What happened with BALD?
Honestly, I did not pay too much attention to what was going on with BALD. All I know is that it’s just a continuation of what happens every time you get a launch of a new protocol, like Base, Sui or Aptos. There’s always going to be a meme coin, and 50% of the time that meme coin is going to run. You’re either early or you’re dead. That’s it.
In the case of the octopus, I think you’re just dead, and then you gotta avoid it. I don’t think there’s as much money to be made picking up venomous octopuses, but in terms of altcoins, you’re either early or you’re dead. That’s the way I think about it.
Although there have been 2 very notable exceptions to this rule. One of them was Pepe, and the other is apparently HarryPotterObamaSonic10Inu, which has done remarkably well. It actually seems to be holding remarkably well. There are some that last long enough to create a cult community around them, and then you’re good.
So I kind of disagree with you on Pepe. If you were early, you obviously did quite well. If you had bought into that early pump, the thing was only out for about 3 days. You could have said, “All right, I’m early. It’s only 3 days old.” If you bought it then, you’d be down 80% from there. Even if you bought it sometime in June, you’d still be down 50%. Pepe’s had its sell-off.
I mean, look, Avi, more broadly speaking, this year, if you just held BTC—or even more intelligently, if you’d held GBTC—you would have outperformed most discretionary hedge funds that trade crypto, do research and actually try to invest a lot of effort, capital and time picking apart the space. Most, but not all. I’ll just leave it at that.
Yes, that is true.
Only the best rise to the top, Avi—and loud in podcasting.
At the same time, as somebody who doesn’t work at a hedge fund in crypto—Cumberland is a little bit different—I guess the general approach that I’ve taken this year has been to dismiss most of the space and focus on coins, ETH and Bitcoin with an actual use case and products.
I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel smart for doing that, and this calendar year the price action has confirmed that approach. However, other times I wonder, “Am I just being lazy here?” I’m not particularly kicking myself for missing Pepe or that Obama coin, but maybe I’ll miss the next big summer of some new asset class within the crypto space just by ignoring all of this that I perceive to be white noise.
It’s a lot easier to make money on a bet on an infrastructure play because you’re effectively betting on the index. All of the money that flowed into crypto in 2021 came from people who didn’t have the chops to underwrite specific assets and specific applications. What they would do is put all of their money into index plays—meaning Ethereum, Solana, NEAR, Avalanche or MATIC.
These are effectively index plays on the applications that are built on top of them, and that’s why they radically outperformed. I don’t think that’s going to be true moving forward over the next 5 years. I do think that in the short term, it’s very likely to still be true because we’re not at the point yet where we’re sophisticated enough investors to really start to parse these things out in aggregate in the crypto market.
I think L1s still do reasonably well. I think we’re going to get a spike in Bitcoin dominance over the next month, but I do think that then what ends up happening is that it starts to peter off. The reason is that I think the ETF starts to get really priced in.
I have a slightly different view. It’s similar, but a bit different. Basically, I don’t think the ETF can get priced in until the ETF exists. I mentioned this on previous podcasts and on Twitter. Normally, markets price in information well ahead of time, and that’s because you have ample capital and dry powder in the market to price in whatever information may be available.
In Bitcoin and ETH, when events are bearish, that is certainly the case. Plenty of leverage can come out of the market very quickly, as we saw last year, ahead of problematic events for the space. However, leverage cannot be added easily at this point.
I saw some statistics on Glassnode showing that the long-term holders in Bitcoin—which is just an easy asset to pay attention to because of the nature of the blockchain—I think 65% of them have been held for over a year. The long-term holders are quite stagnant. There’s not a lot of fast money coming in and out.
If you’re retail in the United States, it’s kind of hard to access crypto, so you don’t have this steady retail inflow. I think an ETF like a BlackRock or an ARK ETF—ARK, by the way, their first approval date is this Friday—is very likely to get delayed.
Until you have one of those instruments, the capital that you would need to reprice crypto to the levels where crypto is accessible via an ETF just doesn’t exist. This is one of those very rare opportunities in the market where well-telegraphed information just can’t be priced in because the well-telegraphed event, to use your word, is that a gateway of liquidity will open at some point.
You do kind of have to get ahead of it. You have an opportunity to get ahead of it. So I challenge your month. I take the over, and then I think BTC dominance trickles down from there as interest returns to the space.
You make a very good point about how altcoins will come back in the post-XRP, post-Ripple-ruling world. I agree with you, but I don’t think it’s going to be a 2021 thing where everyone sees 4x of all altcoins and they go up like crazy. I think you’re going to have things like Arbitrum and Optimism, Ethereum-based altcoins, rally or outperform. dYdX is an ETH-based product.
But what about alt-L1s like Solana and NEAR and some of these other ecosystems? They could do very well or just die. We don’t know. What do you think?
My view is that they’re coming back. I just think this is a similar conversation to the one we had last time, but around greed. I think it’s inevitable that there’s going to be enough greed to pump these things higher.
I do want to talk about the Bitcoin ETF for a second. It’s very possible that the initial reaction to the Bitcoin ETF is outflows from GBTC. A lot of people have that trade on, and people will probably end up trying to redeem from GBTC. There are a lot of people who have been stuck in that asset for quite some time, so I do think it’s possible that there’s some negative reaction. There’s an offset to the pure positive.
Nine times out of 10, what we see is that the event marks the top of the trend. Basically, every single time I’ve seen an event in crypto, it’s marked the top. People talked about the ETF in October 2021, and when it came out, that was the literal peak top. People thought, “Buy the rumor, sell the fact.”
People talked about the Coinbase IPO, and that was within a week of the top in April 2021.
I mean, these things tend to get front-run very, very hard—billions of dollars in front-running. That's why I'm not sitting here saying, “Hey, I think we've topped now,” because I think the front-running can still occur. But by the time the event occurs, the likelihood that we're going higher post-event is pretty low, in my opinion. People just start to exit at that point, and there will always be somebody who says, “This time is different.”
The argument that you're going to hear over and over is, “Well, it's a spot ETF. It's a better product than the futures ETF.” The reality is that the futures ETF was a product that people wanted in October 2021, and prior to that, it didn't exist. Now, if you want access to Bitcoin, you can go buy long-dated futures on the CME, you can buy MicroStrategy, or you can buy Coinbase.
But it's terrible on those long-dated futures, though, right? In a contango market, you pay something like 10% to 12% to buy a futures ETF.
Yeah, that part's killer. Obviously, that's why the spot ETF is important in the long run, because you just can't hold these things. No institution is stupid enough to eat 10% to 12% roll yields from contango. Everyone learned that lesson from the USO and commodities ETFs—it just kills you. That's why I think the spot ETF is consequential. It'll allow your random hedge fund to trade Bitcoin.
Jonah, one thing I was thinking about: have you been paying attention at all to the semiconductor narrative, what's going on with LK-99?
I have. I listened to a couple of podcasts on it, and I was struck by the fact that it sounds like a 25-delta—that it's something that will be real in 3 to 5 years.
Here's something I've been thinking about: there seem to be other things that are interesting and on the periphery of technological breakthroughs that aren't crypto, and that is probably harming allocation to crypto. AI was the first big blow to crypto, where everybody in crypto was saying, “We're not the hot new technology anymore.”
If ChatGPT hadn't come out this year, do you think crypto would be higher?
No doubt. Ultimately, again, I think I have a slightly different thesis from you. I'm losing faith in the multichain world. I think that most non-Ethereum ecosystems will die. I agree with you that if you believe in blockchain-based applications, you're effectively putting your bets on ETH.
I think that ChatGPT, by proving a use case for emergent technology, basically invalidates a lot of what is going on in the altcoin space—the sort of long-tail crypto that people were investing in speculatively for years. ChatGPT just reminded people that new tech can actually be useful, whereas your coin number 500 has no use case or users whatsoever. ChatGPT is bad for that stuff.
I don't think ChatGPT, superconductors, cold fusion, or whatever's next is going to matter for Bitcoin and ETH. Each of those has its own narrative. Bitcoin's narrative is that it is a candidate for a global reserve asset, digital gold, and peer-to-peer money that will perhaps supplant the bottom 50 of the world's 180 recognized fiat currencies. It also has a role in challenging central banks not to debase their currencies too much.
That's Bitcoin off to one side. To the other side, you have ETH, a database that is owned by no one and everyone. There is use for that because if you have something like a deed to your house or a certificate of authenticity for a piece of art that you bought, why should it be stored by some random startup that will probably go bankrupt? It should be stored in an incredibly neutral database.
You have those two things, and I think there's real use for both of them. If you're ignoring them, maybe you're just focused on your little developed-markets lens, and you don't see what value they're providing to other people. They have a stablecoin-based layer of use cases.
We're going to talk about that in a second, but the rest of this, there's definitely a case to be made. We keep going back to Mike Novogratz's comment on this podcast: we're in the show-me phase for crypto. ChatGPT has done a show-me, right?
If you look at anything that's non-Bitcoin and non-ETH, you look at it with a really skeptical, stroke-your-beard kind of quizzical look and say, “What is being shown? What use case is being shown?” To your earlier point about Pepe and Obama Coin, I do think that memecoins are a cooler, more fun version of the lottery. We've talked about this on the podcast as well, so there is a use case that you can't ignore. Community is sort of a use case, but I think ChatGPT is bad for useless things, or things that haven't proven their use yet. What do you think?
Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. In the long run, I agree with everything that you just said. In the short run, my take would be that there's definitely been some VC capital and some Silicon Valley capital that may have gone to crypto but pivoted into AI stocks.
For example, there's a lot of fast money in Nvidia. I would assume some of that fast money, if AI hadn't existed, would have found a home in crypto. There had been some percentage of that that would have thought of Bitcoin as their gambling fix, bought Ethereum as their gambling fix, or bought Pepe—whatever.
I do think there is some of that. But then the flip side becomes true, right? Once you get peak saturation of these memes, crypto can start to go. I think crypto can actually attract some flows again.
That's a great point. It feels like the capital is stuck in Nvidia forever. As soon as Nvidia is priced to the moon and Bitcoin hasn't, it still kind of blows relative to its potential, so it could just flow right back one day.
That's a little bit of what I'm thinking: that it will actually do that over the next 2 to 3 months. Definitely on the last podcast, I was a lot more bearish. We were trading around 30K at the time. I was a lot more bearish; now I'm a lot more constructive.
From a technical standpoint, we retested 28.5. I think that 27 area was the original target, but we clearly stepped into demand. You see today, Nasdaq is down 1.5% and Bitcoin is up 1.83%. Across the board, altcoins have started to do okay. A lot of them just haven't come off as hard as I would have expected, given the way that Bitcoin is performing. It's been a while since crypto has outperformed the Nasdaq.
Yeah, I can't even remember the last time this happened.
On all accounts, crypto is looking a lot healthier. It looks like we flushed a lot of the speculative capital and found pockets of demand. I'm definitely feeling a lot better now than I was before.
I think that's why, in the absence of the BlackRock ETF filing—which triggered that massive rally in June—the space just sort of trickles a bit lower, with an occasional micro-pop, and then trickles lower again. I think it's going to take some time. You mentioned this earlier, Avi: maybe some guidelines need to be laid down.
Yeah, I think so too. The PayPal thing was really interesting to me because it made it very clear that that's exactly what the regulators are trying to do.
Jonah, what happened exactly with PayPal for the listeners?
PayPal got its stablecoin approved, and there was a lot of noise around the controls on the stablecoin—that they could wipe your balances and control things. But that doesn't matter; they can do that with your current money anyway. We never really expected a centralized financial institution to lean in very heavily into these decentralized ethos, but let's put that aside for a second.
What does this mean? It means that there is a regulator out there that stopped Meta and stopped Facebook from issuing their stablecoin, sued Coinbase, but is okay with PayPal issuing a stablecoin. What's very clear to me now, more so than before, is that the government of the United States doesn't dislike crypto. They just want to make sure they can control the gateways to crypto. It's not about shutting it down; it's about making sure the right people are the gateways.
PayPal has 400 to 500 million users, while Coinbase only has 100 million. That means there are a tremendous number of people who could come into crypto because of what PayPal is doing, which is good and bullish.
Now the question is, what does PayPal do? Are they going to stop with their stablecoin? They currently list 4 assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash, for some reason. Now they're going to have a stablecoin. Are they going to start taking on Coinbase? Are they going to start listing other assets? Are they going to win approval to trade different things when Coinbase is currently facing scrutiny from the SEC?
That's a question you have to ask, especially as an investor in this space: what is going to happen next with PayPal? What are the downstream effects from this? I think, at the margin, it makes me personally less likely to own Coinbase and maybe more likely to want to own some PayPal in my portfolio.
All of this is to say that it's very clear the environment for crypto is shifting right now. You have the ETFs, you have the stablecoin, and you have the Ripple lawsuit. I don't know what's coming next, but it's clear that there are green shoots in a way that there weren't before, and that makes me more bullish.
If you were a listener on the last podcast and heard me waxing bearish, I'm changing my tune a bit. The other big thing about this PayPal stablecoin is that, if you zoom out, let's say PayPal had carte blanche to do whatever it wanted with crypto and there was no interference from any government.
PayPal could issue its stablecoin, make it interest-bearing, and then tell merchants, “If you set up a PayPal wallet, when someone swipes their PayPal card at your coffee shop or newsstand, we won't charge you credit-card fees. You'll just get interest-bearing money yielding 5.25%, wired within block time—13 seconds—from your customer's account to yours.”
Suddenly, you've disrupted Visa, Mastercard, JPMorgan, and Bank of America. No one needs a checking account or a credit card anymore. It's just ludicrous benefits. Obviously, there are a few roadblocks between that happening and where we are today, but it's a first step along that journey, and it shows you the promise of crypto for developed markets.
In developing markets, PayPal PYUSD is just a no-brainer. I think that's why you're seeing things like USDC lose market share. At the highs, its market cap was $55 billion or $60 billion, and I haven't checked, but now it's only $30 billion. Tether is hovering around $80 billion, but it depegged by 10 basis points recently on DOJ headlines.
You're going to have a binary world where crypto-looking things are either blessed and flourishing or under constant attack and threatened with being shut down. You're going to see continued FUD in some of those assets that aren't necessarily in the good graces of the institutions that will ultimately dictate what crypto looks like, if that's how this ends up playing out.
Yeah, I would agree with all that wholeheartedly. It's going to be really interesting, though. I still think Tether's a great product. I think it offers a real solution to the developing world, and I do not think it will get interfered with nearly to the extent that crypto Twitter does. I think it's here to stay.
You think so? Why don't you think the DOJ could take it down, even if they wanted to?
I wouldn't go that far. I just don't think they will. I think they have, frankly, bigger fish to fry. I thought it was interesting how, as Tether started to depeg, all these rumors started circulating around Cobie and the shadiness that's going on there. It's interesting how quickly these things tend to reverse. Every time there's some amount of nervousness in the market, people try to attack Tether, and it's been through so much at this point that I view it as very unlikely that it has a hole.
The risk that I see with Tether is purely that the DOJ decides to come after them and says, “These guys are facilitating money transfers to sanctioned nations, and we don't want that at all. We don't want any of that. We're going to shut them down.” Everybody's going to get their money back, but they're going to stop operating.
That wouldn't result in a depeg, though. That would be an orderly unwind.
I don't think it has a hole, but I think there's some amount of time value. For example, imagine if it takes you 2 months to get your money back. Then Tether will depeg a little bit as people try to get their money.
Sure, right. It's like, if so much of the float tried to redeem all at once, it might overwhelm the mint-and-redeem mechanism that keeps it—
If I were Tether, what I would do personally is break myself up. I think it would be a lot better for the industry. If you're going to operate something like that, you probably want to have 3 different stablecoins and 3 different companies. Even if the network effect isn't there, you insulate yourself from risk a little bit.
The risk from Tether is very low relative to the risks of Huobi, OKX, or Binance going down. At this point, one really interesting conversation I had with somebody very close to the scene in China said that the first iteration and first wave of everybody who built abroad were people who were very likely from shady backgrounds to begin with. They got into crypto early because that was the type of person who got in early, built very big companies, and then institutionalized them over time.
Now there's a new crop of people coming in—Tencent, Xiaomi, and Alibaba people who took the Silicon Valley wave. You're going to see better, less shady, and more straightforward products offshore in the East, especially with Hong Kong opening up a little bit. I'm pretty excited to see this. This is why I'm going out there next month for Token2049, which should be a pretty good conference. I'm trying to get a better read on that area of the world.
But I think what I realized is that business culture isn't uniform across the globe. If you're going to trade a global, fungible product, whether it be a hydrocarbon like LNG or crude oil, or a dollarized form of value like Tether—or anything in between—Bitcoin is the most salient example of this.
People in jurisdiction X will have vehement opinions about the asset that people in jurisdiction Y adore, and vice versa. That's just how global commerce works. It's nothing unique to crypto.
I think it's a testament to the resilience and staying power of Bitcoin, ETH, and stablecoins like Tether that they're able to transcend those differences and offer product-market fit across these vastly differing jurisdictions and opinions.
I think it's important. That's part of why I joined crypto. It started to look familiar to me when it started doing that. Jonah, before we go, just because I'm very interested and we've talked about crypto for 42 minutes now, is the oil market interesting again?
Yes. What's going to happen in oil, for all of you in crypto finance, is that high interest rates are going to impact production. The business of digging oil out of the earth just becomes much more expensive. It's very capital-intensive for all commodities, but the timing of that relationship between higher interest rates and less oil coming out of the earth has a delay. It's like a 6- to 18-month delay.
I think demand is forecast to rise over the course of the next 2 years, but interest rates are going to curtail production, as will other factors—geopolitical factors in particular. I think you're going to get one of those things that happens in the twilight of a commodity's reign over a particular market sector. In oil's case, it's transportation, where the commodity rallies substantially into consistent or rising demand against a backdrop of reducing production.
Then you reach a price where it eventually squelches demand, and you get a pretty glorious sell-off for people who trade it, followed by some wild volatility. I think Bitcoin will maybe do that in 100 years, but right now Bitcoin is where oil was in the late 1800s—proving product-market fit and starting to rally. Very interesting ends of this barbell.
What do you think?
I mean, I have no idea. You're the oil trader. I just wanted to ask you to get your opinion on this.
Oh, well, I think it's vastly underpriced because a lot of countries will start buying and selling oil denominated in Bitcoin one day.
You think so? You think just because it's a neutral asset?
I think it's because—and again, we've got to wrap soon—let's say you're Chad. You're producing oil, you sell it, and then you get dollars for that sale. The banking system that delivers you those dollars is T+17 days because you're an oil company in Chad. What do you do with those dollars in Chad? Convert them to local currency through somebody who's going to take your pants off on that transaction, and then spend it? Or how does it really work? They're going to use Bitcoin, or it sounds like they might use Tether.
Tether, yeah. I think commodity trade will eventually start redenominating many staples—maybe Bitcoin, maybe a bit of both. Definitely the gray-market trade will do that.
Yeah, makes sense. Well, anyway, you heard it here first: oil for Bitcoin soon.
Jonah, as always, it's a pleasure. Great seeing you.
Avi, it's an awesome podcast. Thanks for taking the time.
Always. Take care.