Let's get to the big story breakdown.
Crypto majors are pulling back after that day.
With less than 48 hours left in October.
We are looking at an unimpressive October showing, and some retail traders are playing with fire through leverage positions and getting burned in liquidation events.
Now the US government has been shut down all month, which has stalled regulatory progress, but we have seen institutional momentum as Bitwise' Salon is taking ETF and gray scales.
Multi-token fund are uplifted to the NYSE.
Joining me to weigh in is Andy Beer, head of product and research at Poins Indexes.
So Andy, great to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Let's hold hands through October.
It's not the October that the crypto market was expecting.
It feels more like a traditional traditional markets October.
I went running this morning with an economist and he was, and I said, What do you think?
He says the Fed is flying blind.
I don't think that was a political statement, but just Statement on the government shutdown and the lack of data.
So I think we're starting to feel the squeeze on things just being less transparent.
Powell's remarks yesterday sent a jitter through the system, and the crypto markets still recovering, still trying to catch its breath after that October 10th deleveraging event.
So markets still tender.
We've been saying that the last two weeks.
I think that's proven to be kind of accurate, and I think we need a catalyst to turn it around and regain some foundation.
Yeah, and today is October 30th.
That means November is right around the corner here, so, so much for October, just for now.
But I do want to get your take on some of the funds that have been listing, especially when it comes to Sallano.
So for viewers who aren't as familiar with the technology, the blockchain Solano, why is this key and why are the key Features that are being represented in some of these funds.
Yeah, it's fantastic to see two ETFs launched here on the New York Stock Exchange as well as some others at Hedera and Litecoin listed on different exchanges with with another partner of ours.
So this kind of swarm of new wrappers for ETFs is hitting.
It's great for investors to be able to collect.
And start to learn about these tokens, right, because if you pick without doing your homework, you know, you don't know what's going to happen.
Salon is a really interesting layer one blockchain like Ethereum.
Many see it as Ethereum's main competitor, but it has a very different background.
Sallana itself is named after Salana Beach in California.
It's a very US centric, California-centric. kind of protocol where a lot of the entities, the foundation, the labs are accessible and they're hungry for business.
So Salon was very big in back to 2021 actually when the grayscale product originally launched as a private fund.
It was way back in 2021.
So you've had some very faithful either direct salon purchases or fund buyers.
Going back 5 years and it was seen as a faster, cheaper Ethereum, right, iterating on Ethereum smart contract platform kind of ethos.
It got caught up in a lot of the dangerous times around FTX and was associated with FTX and with Sandbank Minfried and had a giant pullback which kind of swept a lot of. away but then came roaring back in late 2023 and 2024 because it kind of was a perfect platform for all of these meme coin, you know, the meme coin craze, which was a big, a big thing for crypto native traders in 2024.
Now Solana is trying to kind of grow up.
We saw an announcement the other day with Western Union for a stablecoin.
So it's a build on salon, fast layer one blockchain, very kind of centralized governance and ready for business.
So it's a really interesting counterpart to Ethereum in how investors should be thinking about layer one blockchains.
It does seem as though we're hearing from a lot of firms launching stablecoins, especially in Solana.
So why do you think they're launching on Salana versus say other chains?
Yeah.
I think you know there's a couple of choices.
Ethereum's been around a long time and people see it as the stalwart, as the easy choice.
Ethereum is a little bit slower.
It's older.
A lot of activity, especially for crypto native people, happens on what are called layer 2 networks.
These are faster, cheaper networks that take a bunch of trades or a bunch of transactions and then settle them to Ethereum, sort of like if you go buy a bagel with a credit card at the end of the day, two banks are going to You know, are going to sort of net all those payments and do a giant payment at the end of the day, and there are 2 layers of speed, 2 layers of cost, 2 layers of security.
That's the kind of architecture that Ethereum has moved towards.
Solana is just layer one.
They're fast.
Everything is on the main blockchain.
They handle a lot of throughput and although some people may feel that the meme coin craze was a little frivolous, there was a lot of volume and there's a lot of money sloshing around, and it was a great testing ground to see how fast Alanna and how robust Alanna could be, so.
Um, when you're thinking about launching a stable coin or tokenizing an asset or even launching, you know, a decentralized exchange, Salon is going to present itself as an interesting counterpart.
Now for investors, we're not advising one way or the other, we think the grayscale product.
And the other ETFs offer staking, you know, Solana is a proof of stake security system like Ethereum, so anybody can go if you hold Solana, and post it into the network, help contribute to the security and get rewards back.
The yield on that can be pretty attractive.
So there is a future bet.
There's a growth bet, and there's a yield bet all wrapped together.
Still, for many people, we think a multi-t token index product or approach is going to be safer.
OK, Andy, well thank you so much for simplifying and explaining a lot of very complicated moving parts here.
Thank you so much.
Thanks.
