Longtime friend of the show, Joseph Chalom joins us once again.
He is the CEO of SharpLink.
Nice to have you back.
Nice to see you again.
JD.
Can I get your take on general crypto price action?
We talked about at the top of the show.
Bitcoin still holding on more or less to that 70,000 level, but you know as well as anyone we are well off of those highs from October.
Seems like that's been quite some time.
Both Bitcoin and ET have had tremendous run ups in the last several years.
We've seen some.
October, a pull down of about 50% started on October 10th when there was a pretty significant deleveraging event.
There was bubbles in the industry, and this idea that you can invest in perpetual futures allowed people to lever up.
It's very, very natural when you have a deleveraging event.
It takes about a quarter or two for the liquidity to come back into the system, but it feels like we're approaching a bottom, and the long term thesis. is really, really positive.
Talk to me about some of the ways or what are you seeing for ET over other high-speed rails right now?
We talked so much about the crypto majors, but ET tends to be a little bit of its own ballgame.
What are you following there as the broader cryptocurrency related conversation continues?
We are looking at three macro trends.
One is the adoption of stablecoins.
So the idea of a digital dollar or another currency, it's about $310 billion in circulation.
Today there's an expectation it could grow into the trillions based on the second trend which is just tokenization of assets, stocks, bonds, funds, and commodities, and you're hearing the largest financial institutions in the world tell you loud and clear they are going to tokenize all their assets.
And the third thing is this idea of a lot of finance that's centralized will end up sitting on decentralized rails.
And what does it mean for Ethereum.
Ethereum has about a 60% market share across stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi, and that's very, very bullish for the future of finance.
It'll end up becoming the decentralized sediment layer for the new rails of finance.
Speaking of DeFI, $200 million deployment into DeFi for Sharp Link, talk to me about those initiatives and some of your other top priorities these days.
Sure, so unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum is a natively productive asset.
You can stake your ether tokens, get a yield.
It's called staking yield for your investors, and what's very interesting is most of that is done through custodians in a very.
In a manner.
But when you own billions of dollars of permanent capital, we're not a fund, we're not an ETF, you can actually make deployments on a multi-year basis and get incentives.
So going out into the decentralized finance world allows us to get outsized returns, but we're doing something interesting that had never been done in history.
We're keeping these DFI returns and protocols.
Within our qualified custodian, which is Anchorage Digital, had never been done before.
How close are we to a regulatory environment that allows banks to hold E directly, and in what ways have you seen the broader industry-led conversations change even over just the last couple of quarters?
I'll tell you from two dimensions.
One is the US Genius Act that passed last year set the stage that stablecoins could be used broadly.
Today we're essentially waiting for the US Clarity Act to make its way through Congress.
There's a bit of a debate between the crypto natives and the banks.
The banks are very fearful of stablecoins offering yield.
I'm optimistic it'll happen before the midterms, but if it doesn't, both the SEC and CFTC are ready to solve the problem through rulemaking.
The second dimension is global.
This has been a US dominated.
Industry, you're starting to see countries realize in Hong Kong, in Korea, in Japan, in Singapore, their native economies need to digitize, and they're looking to pass legislation to give regulatory clarity.
When that happens, you'll see banks hold stablecoins and crypto on balance sheet, and it'll become like any other tokenized version of an asset.
Joseph, my friend, the worst.
Part about this interview with you is that I have to leave it there.
I'm out of time to continue it, unfortunately.
Please come back anytime.
It's my pleasure.
I look forward to being back when the price action is happening on the positive side.
Yes, we'll push back back north above 70 for BTC pretty soon, I'm sure.
Joseph Chalom, thanks for being here.
Nice to have you.
Thank you, JD.
