Bonus Ep: Is the FTX collapse just the beginning?

Adam: [00:00:26] Hello and welcome to an extra bonus episode this week of Comedian versus Economist. We felt there was so much to unpack with everything happening with the FTC's saga that we wanted to give it a bit of room to breathe. So lucky you. You get two episodes from us this week. My name's Adam and we're joined, as always, by my little older brother and real life economist Thomas. Hi, Thomas. 

Thomas: [00:00:50] Yeah, real life crypto expert two. Actually. 

Adam: [00:00:56] In the podcast world, you can be anything you want. Much like crypto, grab yourself a bucket of popcorn and settle in as we enjoy another episode of Whoa! Nobody saw that coming from the world of crypto. Thomas Three words F T X. What's going on? 

Thomas: [00:01:22] Yeah. What is going on? You just give so much, so much on the way up. So much on the way down. 

Adam: [00:01:28] So what's FTX?

Thomas: [00:01:29] FTX is a crypto exchange, so we might go back to sort of first principles for a little bit just to catch people up because it's all over the place is all over the news, but maybe you haven't fully got to got into all the detail of it. So we'll sort of forgive you if you're across this already, but we start with first principles. 

Adam: [00:01:44] And maybe you've just been ignoring crypto by choice since the beginning. It's just like this is just like another one of those schoolyard brawls that kicks off and it is like, I'm not even going to go and watch it. It's a fighting game and things go wrong. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Thomas: [00:02:03] Okay. So FTX is a crypto exchange, a crypto exchange like Binance is I think FTX is the second or the third biggest in the world. Binance is the biggest one, probably the best well known. It's a place where you dump your feet into it and then trade between currencies and then at some point pull your fear back out. 

Adam: [00:02:23] So take my Aussie dollars. I go and buy some Solana or some Ethereum or Bitcoin. I watch a tank and then I take out less Australian dollars and I put it that's, that's, that's been my experience so far and the crypto exchanges where that, where those losses happen. Yes. Yeah, that's right. But it can go off of course. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:02:44] So if the X is a crypto exchange, it has a particular bent towards derivatives and futures park that in your mind that'll be important later. It issues a token called FTT, which is an interesting token because they issue it and then commit to buy it back if they make nice profits. So it functions like an equity in the sense of if they get the profit to go up, then your token value goes up and you get a return. But totally wasn't equity because they didn't want to. Come under SEC governance. Right. Issuing equity. So a very clever, innovative financial instrument. 

Adam: [00:03:26] That places crypto like equity. Yeah. Yeah. Just working to their own roles. It's like equity on the blockchain.

Thomas: [00:03:33] So it worked like equity, but it wasn't equity. That was the token FTT. Okay, so that's what that's what is a couple of weeks ago was worth $32 billion to just raise some money at a valuation of 32 billion today. It's worth nothing. It's bankrupt. It's a bust. So it's a massive wipe out of theoretical wealth in a very short time. 

Adam: [00:04:00] You wouldn't theoretical wealth imagine because it's either a massive like economic disaster or someone lost a spreadsheet because it was like it's like writing down my bank balance is $1,000,000,000 and then I'd figure out where I saved balanced thought. Xl6.

Thomas: [00:04:20] Well, yeah. I mean, there are definite losers who've lost real money, like the asset managers that invested in FTX at that $32 billion valuation like Sequoia Capital Tiger Fund, SoftBank as well picked another winner. They've lost real money. They're they're the stakes gone to zero. But also the customers who had put their Fiat into the exchange but hadn't yet taken it out there, they've lost everything as well. Well, we don't know that. Like though, they've declared bankruptcy. Bankruptcy administrators have been appointed. I saw one analyst saying that customers will be lucky to get $0.05 in the dollar. They had money in 50 X. 

Adam: [00:05:03] Wasn't it? Wasn't it Sequoia Capital that basically came out and said, we invested 230 million, but we now can zero. Yeah. Worth zero. Yeah. So this story is changing by the minute and I think also didn't they do so before either just before or just after they declared bankruptcy, they also got hacked or might have got hacked.

Thomas: [00:05:27] Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Adam: [00:05:28] But when I say it, it might or might not have been hacked. I mean, people saw some money move because everything is recorded. Yeah. So people who are keeping it on it obviously are fairly close to that. As events unfolded, people saw tons of money start moving out of FTL. And then speculation, which is bread and butter for the crypto sphere, speculation then suggested, well, it's been hacked, but then some other people are saying, no, no, that's just that's just the administrative moving money. And then some other people are saying, no, that's SBF or Sam Bankman-Fried doing some like moving some money to support his new lifestyle in the Bahamas. 

Thomas: [00:06:13] So this is so this is a key character. So say Sam Bankman-Fried, if you. Haven't come across it, he was like he became crypto royalty quite quickly and he was on the cover of Fortune magazine or Forbes magazine and had a real hype built around him as being this visionary founder who wanted to use his crypto wealth for good. He built and owned FTX as well as 130 associated entities. That we've learnt from the bankruptcy filing. So like he had this sprawling kind of organisational structure for a brief period. Of time had his net worth somewhere around $16 billion. So he was very rich, but a lot of that wealth has evaporated and I think he's arrested now. Last I heard, they sent someone round in the Bahamas and picked him up. 

Adam: [00:07:04] I thought he's in Argentina. 

Thomas: [00:07:05] Yes. 

Adam: [00:07:07] I think he fled wherever he was and he's now in Argentina. But he might have caught up with him. 

Thomas: [00:07:11] And that's what I heard. That's what I heard. They caught up with him. 

Adam: [00:07:13] But so how did that happen? So we're talking about if it's going to zero. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:07:20] So if the ex was doing some funny things, one of those was the token that worked like equity but wasn't equity. Yeah. The other thing is that so SBF this is, that's what they call him had 130 different entities. One of those was Alameda, which was a crypto hedge fund, so a sort of asset manager in the crypto space taking punts on cryptocurrencies, trying to generate a return. That was in Alameda. What it looks like is that FTX had a backdoor installed in it that allowed SBF to move customer money from Phoenix to Alameda without alerting anybody else, without alerting auditors or anyone. Not that the auditors look like much chop. They look like cowboys too, but. 

Adam: [00:08:16] The crypto Specialist auditors. How long have you been in the game? About 20 minutes. This was the job an hour ago when I had this job as a crypto auditor. And here we are. Yeah. So. 

Thomas: [00:08:34] So Alameda was out in the market taking punts on crypto leveraging quite leverage punts on crypto. The collateral it was using to make those punts was FTT tokens. Right. So on the balance sheet, they've got the collateral, which is these FTT tokens which are linked to their partner organisation, which they're sort of borrowing money from or funnelling money from. 

Adam: [00:08:59] I think Alameda was the first one that the SBF started. He started that as a trading. 

Thomas: [00:09:04] That's right. That's right. 

Adam: [00:09:05] Like that was his trading account kind of. And then he decided, I need an exchange, like a good exchange that'll take on my trade. So he's like, I would just build by an exchange. And that's how FTX started. Yeah. Yeah. So they're intrinsically linked. 

Thomas: [00:09:24] Yeah that is right. So that's super dodgy. The customers had no idea that the money that they had put in FTX had now gone out the door, out the back door to Alameda to take punts on shit coins. They didn't know that was going on. And so. 

Adam: [00:09:39] I mean, there's every chance they would have been supportive of it if they had just been open about what's going on. Is that look, just to let you know, you've bought some FTT and we've got your money. We're going to use that money. Well, we've got it. We're just going to use it. We're going to take some punts on some pretty rock solid teams. We've got you cool with that. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:10:03] I'll get a cut of the profits. Get equity. No, no, no equity. 

Adam: [00:10:04] Just equity. Just pence. All right. Definitely profits, though. Yeah. Even the moon. You might even say, oh, I like the Moon. 

Thomas: [00:10:17] So that's going on. So that's sort of that's the revelations that The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are saying. And if that's true, I'm not, I don't know. But that's fraud. That's just basic fraud, garden variety fraud. That's what was going on. And the interesting thing is, like, I had a few people come out and just go, what was he thinking? You know, you've got X was handling high volumes, taking like a two basis point cut on every trade. It was a cash cow. Why would you put it at risk by fleecing it, too, to run some speculative bets like how greedy are you? This sort of question is like how greedy you have got to be that you're willing to risk killing your cash cow just to make some extra profit somewhere else, like you're already $16 billion up. Like, really? Like what? What? Like, I just just seem so greedy to the point of stupid. 

Adam: [00:11:11] Yeah, which is crypto. I mean, that's the slogan. Crypto crypto. Greedy to the point that it's cheap. 

Speaker 1: [00:11:31] Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:11:32] I mean, it's also like, how do you not have an exit strategy in this story, right? Like how do you end up fleeing to Argentina or getting arrested? Either way, you're in trouble. Either do not know what you're doing is illegal and that might be possible, but it doesn't sound like fairly vanilla fraud. Mm. Or you don't, you know, I mean maybe like the weird thing around the FTT tokens operating like equity but not being equity that might just be something that someone just didn't know is, isn't appropriate or is borderline illegal. I think you could plead ignorance on that. 

Adam: [00:12:06] Well, I think that the entire executive team at FTX, I think they had a combined experience of about four and a half weeks of management of, you know, like the chief risk officer. The chief financial officer. I think they were, you know, a bit out of their depth. A little bit out of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. Okay. So, so the FTT token, so my understanding is that finance came into it at this point, right? 

Thomas: [00:12:37] Yeah, that's right. So, they're doing this dodgy stuff and maybe no one knows, except maybe that Changpeng Zhao knows. So he sees what we say seized because we're an Australian podcast, I guess they seized. SeiSed is the owner of Binance who's their biggest competitor on the market. 

Adam: [00:12:56] Don't mess with CS, right? They took down the SBF and ethics fee. I mean, everybody thinks it's easy and just pick your own name for it. Like somebody would take down these bogus careers. Look at it. 

Thomas: [00:13:16] Probably right. So he was right. He runs Binance which is their biggest exchange in the industry. Big competitor of FTX also happens to own quite a lot of FTT, the token of FTA. Which is a bit like Microsoft owning Apple shares. Hmm. Yes. It's just a bit odd. And then but at the start of the week, he comes out and says, you know what? We're just selling all of our FTT holdings. We just don't like it anymore. Something's off. We're out. We're getting rid of it. And everyone's like, whoa, okay. That's what I think.

Adam: [00:13:50] Not only did he do that, but Binance, which is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, also removed the FTT token so you couldn't buy it on finance anymore. Oh, is that right? Yeah. So that was a massive market signal along with we think it's shit. Weighing out. 

Adam: [00:14:16] From the head of Binance, from the head of the biggest crypto exchange in the world, along with that sentiment. They also said, we're outside. You can't buy it here anymore. We think it's rubbish. And so. Yeah. Yeah. So then. 

Thomas: [00:14:31] Markets read. 

Adam: [00:14:32] That markets. That this is a signal and then everyone went in and then so I think they just went to try and sell to liquidate their FTT. Right. Yeah. 

Thomas: [00:14:42] Well there was an interesting step in the middle of that where the CEO of Alameda, the hedge fund run by, you know, associated with SBF, came out and said they would buy all of Binance his FTT at $22 each. A fixed price in a private trade is like will take it all we believe in. It will give it all. CS It went. Yeah. And I'm, I think I'm going to sell it in the market and I'm just going to wait until it drops and drops and drops so it doesn't look like he got out of that trade to me, like he would like they owned Binance, owned a lot of FTT. What you would normally do is sell all of your FTT without crashing the market somehow by breaking up the trade and not doing it all in one hit and then announcing after the fact, Hey, we sold all our FTT. He didn't do that. He sparked the panic and then sold into the panic. And so this sort of the interesting story there seems to be that SBF looked like he was trying to corner Washington. It looked like he wanted to be the go to guy for crypto regulation. He wanted to be the person that was shaping crypto regulation in America. And he was doing that through big political donations, particularly to the Democrat Party and then massive marketing campaign, both of himself. And he sort of like had this whole persona and was getting all these puff pieces published and doing lots of things. But then also all the sports sponsorships like FTX was you're probably more across this, but then they own a football stadium or something. 

Adam: [00:16:14] This FTX was everywhere. In fact, I still saw them being advertised in the Cricket World Cup final last night. Still? Oh really? Logo was on? Yeah. It was on the TV last night. Yeah. They, they had sponsorships with Major League Baseball. They sponsored the umpires, they sponsored what I love was the Mercedes F1 team. And the beautiful thing about that was that Mercedes were like, Ah, I dunno, I don't know that we need to jump into this crypto thing. I think we should wait like 18, 24 months. I don't know that this, this kind of whole space is where we want it to be and I think this is what we want to tie our brand to. And then someone within Mercedes is like, okay, seriously, if we don't get on now, we're going to miss the boat like total total crypto FOMO. So I was, I was like, All right, well, who's the, who are we going with? And they did, they did their due diligence and decided that FTX was the best run crypto exchange to settle up to. So they did that. And then yeah, literally not long after that FTX falls in a heap. But this is the thing. I think this is the thing that bothers me so much about this. The sport tie up with a crypto exchange and general sports brand association in general is always like the official partner of Major League Baseball. Like FTX was the official crypto exchange of Major League Baseball. What does Major League Baseball name with a crypto exchange? I don't know. You stayed in Australia like did you know that? Did you know that Colgate is the official smile of the NFL? 

Thomas: [00:18:02] Oh, God.

Adam: [00:18:04] I get it. They have to be something other than the official cash provided to the AFL in exchange for product placement and logo promotion and whatever. But I don't, I, it's, it's just it's all of it. It's all false. It's all a bit sort of flimsy, kind of like oh where the official breakfast cereal of the AFL. But it's worrying because the AFL, the AFL has an official crypto exchange which is Crypto.com and Crypto.com this morning accidentally came out, they accidentally transferred 400 million to the wrong account like. So again you go, why does the AFL need an official crypto exchange? I guess the AFL is probably in talks right now with Marsch, who is the official risk partner of the AFL, which might make a lot more sense off the back of the FTX and crypto debacle. 

Thomas: [00:19:09] Is it really an official risk partner?

Adam: [00:19:11] The AFL? Yeah. Yeah. Well the official risk partner of the AFL helping manage the official crypto exchange of the AFL I'd imagine right about now. But yeah you're right. And I was they, they were FTX was everywhere they had a, I think the Miami Heat renamed their stadium. They had naming rights for the stadium. They pretty much owned a couple of college football teams. Yeah. That was their marketing strategy was to kind of get their brand out there through sports teams and then celebrities and influencers like Tom Brady the quarterback for were famously with the was it patriots hey yeah he was like, I'm all in quite a guy, so he's doing alright. And that was just their marketing strategy I guess. 

Thomas: [00:19:56] Yeah, but it was more than that. Like he was really selling himself as the visionary cryptos for good, working with government, not against government, that side of things. And I think, I mean, I think of where Mercedes sort of ended up going with them because it looked like it was a perfect disguise. Like, why would you be pushing for regulation if you weren't dodgy? If you were dodgy, you know, you just wouldn't think so. I think like, oh, well, obviously the camp that's being noisiest about having appropriate regulation is the one that is probably the least afraid of regulation. Ironically, they were doing heaps of dodgy stuff and would have been destroyed by regulation, but they had this, so. 

Adam: [00:20:35] It just turned out they were the least aware of regulators. They had the least understanding of regulation. All right, let's pause here? There's a lot to get through on the other side of this. We're going to talk about the implications for crypto prices for broader asset markets and the future of Bitcoin in general and crypto in general. As I say, there's so much this story has got, so much to give it so many different angles. Check out the dive and also crypto curious from Equity Mates media. They've both run stories on it. There's so much to get into. So yeah, stick around. Lots more coming up right after the break. Welcome back here on comedian versus economist. A special bonus episode this week for a. We're talking about the crypto exchange that has gone under. So we've covered aftermath, what it is and how it came to be and then also quickly how it came to not be. So I guess the question now is, what does it mean for crypto? What are the implications here for crypto prices, I guess. 

Thomas: [00:21:49] Yeah, well, let's start there. I've identified a few implications and none of them are good. Mm. Yeah. The rule or I mean so the first thing is that saying you don't know who is swimming naked until the tide starts going out. So that's I think that's what we're looking at now in the whole crypto space is this like like you can, you can get away with a scheme which is where you're funnelling money from an exchange to a hedge fund to take punts when the market's going up and all those punts are paying off, when those punt stop paying off, then the hedge fund gets into trouble. And you're the entities associated with the hedge fund are getting into trouble as well. Now, that might be because they're linked as owners, but it's also like who was lending to Alameda FTX was, but who else was. So whoever else was lending to FTX or any of the 130 entities in that mess, they're in trouble now, too. So this is sort of how leverage unwinds. And there's no cover now because everyone's everyone's going to be checking like, oh, who? Who am I with? How stable are they? How exposed are they to these other players? There's a lot of dodgy characters out there. Like even if you think, you know, you're going to be rechecking the partners that you're dealing with, particularly for lending the money to make crypto bets. Yeah. So that starts to unwind and that sort of that has a freezing effect. You might have more collapses come out of this. That's the risk here. You know, we see more and more entities going bust on the back of this because, you know, there's a lot of cowboys out there in the crypto space. Yeah. And you know, and Sequoia Capital, SoftBank investing in FTX like they're not they're not fringe players. Like they're kind of the names that people hear. They're talking this real money. That's the first worry that you get more and more of these sort of you see more naked people in the pool and more and more people going bust. 

Adam: [00:23:52] Never a good thing. That's what you know. Oh. 

Thomas: [00:23:58] The other thing is like, there's this idea in economics called the deposit multiplier. So the central bank, the way the basic theory of money is, is the central bank that creates money. They give it to the banks. So they create $100. They give it to the banks. The banks take $100. They lend out. They keep some in reserves, say ten bucks, and then they lend out 90 bucks. So they lend that to you. You've now got money you deposited in your bank. There's another 90 bucks in the bank. There's now $190 in there. In theory, they take that $90, keep 10% and lend $81 out. There's now $270 in the system and around it goes. And so that it's called the fractional reserve system and a lot of money is that the money that's in the economy? A lot of that is created in the banking system, not just is what happens with central banks matters, but it also is about what the banks do with it. So you've got a situation here where the money goes into which then gets lent out to Alameda and then gets leveraged into other bits. You have an expansion of the money supply based on this leverage. Hmm. Did that make sense? And so like a look at the total market cap of crypto, you know, 800 billion or something. The basic story is that $800 billion from the broader economy has come into the crypto space. That's how that's often presented. Talk about how big it is, but it might not be that at all. It might only be that 100 billion has come into crypto, and then within the crypto ecosystem it's been leveraged up and up and up and up and up into 800 billion. Right. I remember someone years ago talking about how bitcoin and crypto was a deflationary currency rather than inflationary currency because supply is limited. Supply is not limited. If there's no checks and balances on that deposit multiplier, on how much is getting distributed through the financial system, through leverage, it can be very kind of a very inflationary cousin. It's not actually a thing, but it could be in that language a very inflationary currency depending on that on that multiplier and that leverage. So if there's a big risk of this kind of flavour now in crypto because everyone's like, whoa, these things are looking dicey, we need to check ourselves. That could. Leverage without sort of any money leaving the system. Crypto could itself just deleverage without any fiat being pulled out of crypto. Does that make sense? 

Adam: [00:26:31] So then crypto prices generally go down as the whole market is deleverage as people start calling in their debts. 

Thomas: [00:26:39] Yeah. And that could happen without any individual in the crypto space thinking I'm going to take my money out of crypto and put it in fiat. Right? Doesn't need to happen. You can have a collapse of increased crypto prices without any money leaving the crypto ecosystem. Hmm. Does that make sense? 

Adam: [00:26:54] Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, as much as anything you say doesn't look good. Yeah, no, I think that makes sense. All right. Cool. So just visualise it, but I kind of get it. 

Thomas: [00:27:12] Sure. Yeah, it's like. It is like a souffle that's deflating to heaven. Yeah, but. You haven't opened the oven, but it's still deflating. 

Adam: [00:27:22] Do I look like someone who regularly deals with souffles? Well, got. No idea what soufflé looks like.

Thomas: [00:27:33] The third implication for prices is what happens if everyone leaves exchanges. So a lot of people are saying, see, you need your money in a cold wallet. You can't have it. You can't leave your money on an exchange. It's not safe if it's not not your keys, not your Bitcoin, whatever. That saying is low because this is the proof, right? You've got to get off the exchange. But what do exchanges facilitate? They facilitate speculative trading. You know, if you're going in and out in day trading currencies, you don't want to be going in and out of your cold wallet. You need to be on an exchange where you can execute quickly and nimbly. That's what exchanges do. That's why they're so popular. 

Adam: [00:28:09] They're also popular because it's easy, you know, like putting it in a cold storage wallet or, you know, saving it on the computer somewhere and making sure that you're appropriately protecting your keys and all that. Yeah, it's hard. Oh, yeah. You know, people don't want to. Don't want to do that. Yeah. We've come to trust online services far too much, but. But we do.

Thomas: [00:28:30] Yeah, that's right. So the exchanges facilitate speculative trading. If everyone goes off exchanges because they don't trust them. And there's a good reason, like Binance now is the, you know, the biggest character standing. There's been questions over finances, money and management, and we don't even know where Binance is located. So, I mean, it's hardly like it leaves a strong player standing. So if everyone goes off exchanges and goes, okay, that's not safe, what happens to speculative trading? Because that's what they facilitate. Maybe that too, that diminishes. I mean, in the extreme exchanges evaporate, speculative trading evaporates. What happens to the prices of cryptocurrencies is speculative trading evaporates. Now, the price of a currency is determined by supply and demand. Demand comes from two places you the buying because you're actually using the currency in a transactional sense or you're speculating on it. Now look at Bitcoin. What share of daily volumes is speculative and what share is transactional people actually buying stuff? Not much. 0.1% tops. I don't know. Like it's a small number. 

Adam: [00:29:40] Yeah. Yeah.

Thomas: [00:29:41] But the price is.

Adam: [00:29:43] Pretty much just the population of El Salvador. But I don't even imagine they're having a great time. Wouldn't surprise me if most El Salvadorians are just going. Yeah. That we're not getting involved with that anymore. 

Thomas: [00:30:00] That's right. So, like, if there's no speculative trading, where does the price of bitcoin end up? Right. Like, so the extreme is that it goes to zero because this goes to whatever value you need for that transactional thing. That's not going to happen. There's two people who believe in it, but there is still speculation on it. But the point I've been making the whole time with crypto is it's like, yes, you know, crypto is amazing, blockchain's amazing, but none of that. You can then just jump into like insane valuations for the currencies, for the coins themselves because there's a lot that needs to be unpacked for that and that sort of value discovery. You don't know what the true value is until the speculative trading stabilises. It becomes, you know, a steady portion of the of daily volumes. 

Adam: [00:30:47] I love Warren Buffett's quote. He said, I wouldn't give you $25 for all the Bitcoins in the world. Yeah that's the way it pegs it. Even with all of his wealth he's not even taking your phone with 25 bucks on all of Bitcoin. 

Thomas: [00:31:09] He's willing to break a 50 for it even. 

Adam: [00:31:14] So that's crypto prices. And I guess this has broader implications for the rest of asset markets. 

Thomas: [00:31:21] Yeah. The thing the thing. I reckon this is the end of the Happy Gilmore phase of markets. So Happy Gilmore. Was that Adam Sandler character who played a golf movie? Yeah. And you know, and in the home. 

Adam: [00:31:40] So it's very lively. Yeah. Yeah. Snippets of that movie in my head. Um yeah. 

Thomas: [00:31:46] It's a happy Gilmore came to golf brought like total disrespect for the institution of golf and one you know meme stocks. 

Adam: [00:31:56] On Daly. 

Thomas: [00:31:57] Yeah yeah so so I mean stocks and crypto were the happy Gilmore trades of the past five years or whatever the cases where people went in and got like, I don't give a stuff about the institutions or the rules and just go and do my own thing. And for a while there, all the happy Gilmore's were happy. They're making money and the things are great. But you know those people who bought into GameStop at $250 a share, there's people who put all their money in FTX. You know, there's people, you know, who bought Bitcoin back when it was 69,000. They're all hurting right now. And I think it's sort of like it's a bit of an awakening. I think, you know, the technology moved. It was a technology driven movement in the sense of like Robinhood trading and then and making crypto trading easy. And people got into it and for a while it was all good. And then you realise there are actually there isn't easy money, there's no free money. You know if you want to be a Bitcoin crypto trader, crypto day trader you need to have some amazing systems is not just get everyone in and good times and Lamborghinis for everybody. So it's sort of like I think it's a maturing of the market in general, but I think it means that we're probably past seeing Happy Gilmore booms, you know, like, like GameStop and crypto. Those booms were driven by sort of people going in and going, Yeah, whatever. We're sticking it to the man, you know, taking it to Wall Street. And it's like people are actually not we didn't take it to Wall Street, we didn't change the game. We just redistributed wealth in a weird way and a lot of poor people ended up poorer.

Adam: [00:33:36] Right. That's quite a good explanation, I think. Yeah. I mean, the only thing that keeps this case bouncing around in my head is that we've been here before. We're just in the trough of disillusionment. We just need to give it a few months, let there's a little countdown just so that get that hype cycle starts building again and off we go. Yeah because crypto had a big you know yeah we're just we're what is coming off the big spike in crypto of the pandemic quick crypto before that there was another spike where everyone made heaps lost heaps and then they said Crypto is dead, that's the end. Forget about it all got home and then the pandemic hit and suddenly everyone was like, Why are you in crypto? Here's where it's going to, you know, this is the solution. Yeah. And then it kicked off again. So I think. 

Thomas: [00:34:29] I think that's true, but I think this technology was a factor as well. And I think like, you know, in the 2017 boom or whatever, there wasn't a Binance, there wasn't an NFT, there weren't apps where you could just where you know, every, you know, Joe average could could make trades. Well.

Adam: [00:34:47] I bought some during that time.

Thomas: [00:34:49] It was different. It was harder I reckon. I yeah. I mean it wasn't hard. Hard.

Adam: [00:34:54] No. I remember going back to the coins but I can't remember that I opened in 2018 when I started kicking off again in 2021 or whatever, 2020 and just feeling like, oh, I've got to get some repo still floating around. Look, it's gone up 300% from my $28. So yeah. And I think that those platforms are around that. I don't know, I just, I think, yeah, I hear what you're saying and I agree with what you're saying. [00:35:23][28.6]

Thomas: [00:35:23] You need something to level up the market. You need to pull more people into it, you know, and it just gets harder and harder. The cost of acquisition for crypto as a space is getting higher. You know, you've had crypto sponsoring football teams, everyone knows about it now everyone's watching it go, you know, people get burned. They're not going to be just jumping in next. Next thing going, Yeah, this is going to the moon. They're going to be jumping in, going like this is a boom and it will bust at some point. You know, that's maturity. That's the new thing. It'll be in the next cycle that people in the cycle will be aware that they're in a cycle. 

Adam: [00:36:03] Maybe not if we get in early, if we get into the schools. It's some grassroots crypto. Programmes going on. 

Thomas: [00:36:14] Official sponsor. Of maths.

Adam: [00:36:21] Crypto. A visual crypto exchange. Private primary school. Okay. All right. And that does it for this one. Hopefully, that's giving you a good a good overview of what's happening in the crypto sphere at the moment, why everyone's talking about FTX, as I mentioned, check out Crypto Curious and the dive for even more on the story, our Bryce and Alec coverage as well on Equity Mates Investing podcast just briefly this week. So if you're interested at all, check out those other podcasts. And of course, don't forget to tune into comedian versus economist this week as well, releasing not just this one, but two podcasts this week. So make sure you tune in for the radio show as well. But that's it for us. We will catch you next time on Comedian versus Economists. Bye for now.