Has Crypto Lost the Plot? Bear Market Reality & What Happens Next

Bankless Nation is the second week of February. We got the Super Bowl behind us. Dave, did you watch some of those commercials?

Uh, I did. I did watch the commercials.

I think this was the only crypto commercial that was actually at the Super Bowl. Is that right? And there's a lot of AI commercials. That's right.

Here was the uh the reaction. This is from somebody's living room. A reaction to the Coinbase commercial. Uh, Backstreet Boys. This is Backstreet's back is what they went with. Here it is.

[singing] Rock [singing] [screaming] the double bird. [laughter]

So, who were you with? Were you with family, friends?

It was me and me and a friend.

So, what was the reaction around you when So, first of all, the commercial obviously you guys saw that, but it starts with Backstreet Boys. Really reels you in, right? The lyrics are on the screen, very simple. You also don't know what's going on. You're like, "Oh, we're doing karaoke. We're doing Backstreet Boys karaoke. Don't know who this is. Don't know what's going on, but I'm down for it." Grabbed everyone's attention. Roped them all in because it was a little odd, which is why it was attention grabbing.

So, what was the reaction when the uh your lyrics faded out and Coinbase uh popped up there?

Cryptos for everybody. Like my my reaction was like, "Oh, Coinbase was your reaction." Okay. All right. Like even I like felt got I felt got you. Did you feel rugpulled? You feel a little rugpulled?

Yes, I felt well like it's for me it's Coinbase and so thumbs up for me. You feel good about that? But I but if my perception of Coinbase was negative or if my perception of crypto was negative I would indeed feel rug pulled. Like I said I felt got but then I realized that this is they're doing a little switcheroo on the the watcher.

I felt got but in a way that was like oh well played like you got you well played Coinbase but then I looked around and again because that's because I'm crypto favorable and I have a fond uh thought oh that's everyone in the room I was with so I was with my family and they all kind of looked at me and they all groaned right they were all like ah they looked at me.

So do you think this was a a good ad or not there's there's a lot of back and forth on crypto this way like we can't um it was a good ad from the perspective of it attracted everyone's attention. There was big discussion afterwards about everyone. So undoubtedly that is true but there was undoubtedly a negative reception about the ad like universal essentially universal dissatisfaction unhappiness with getting quote unquote rugged about the ad.

Is that bad as a whole? Like the I saw Brian Armstrong's tweet about it like you know we wanted to create a universal moment where everyone is singing together in this one moment and that's like emblematic of crypto like get everyone onto the same system upgrade the system get everyone on board together get everyone on the same ship and we just wanted to provide that moment to the viewer and I'm like okay that's a very naively optimistic interpretation of what could happen in reality I think like Coinbase shouldn't be naive about these state of crypto PR in 2026. It's not great. Potentially it's the worst ever since FTX.

I think that was like understood in the ad itself where like they needed to rug pull people in order to get them on board. So first they got them on board. They leveraged the Backstreet Boys to get everyone on board because who doesn't like the Backstreet Boys? you know, millennials are are of the main consuming age. Uh, and and then they yonked them. And I think I think you can't really say that like the Coinbase marketing team didn't know what they were doing when they attemp to do this strategy. I feel like in a box the whole thing works. It's just kind of a timing thing.

The other contrast point I'll say is uh when crypto was big at the Super Bowl last time, I think that was like 2022, right?

Yeah. and Coinbase had a commercial there. It was actually similar to this. So, they kind of ran that playback because that was effective. Um, FTX had a fantastic commercial. Crypto.com did a what's his name? The guy from um Larry David.

Yeah, great. It was a fantastic Larry David ended up on top on that one cuz his whole bit was like, I'm never wrong about this stuff and I don't think crypto is real. And so, he was just like negging FTX which ended up being great for him. But then the nice thing about that ad, and of course FTX turned out to be the uh largest rugpull of all rugps, like absolutely terrible for anyone who watched it and actually opened an FTX account. So that aside, but that ad was about the change that crypto was bringing about. There was something positive about that ad and there's something forward-looking about how crypto can change the world like great inventions. There were notes of optimism in the ad.

And this didn't have that. Not to say that if you played that same ad there, like there's no way it would work in 2026 in this climate either. It's just like I think there's a meta point here of crypto at least in a pop narrative perspective and what is the Super Bowl if not it's popular cultural narrative is it doesn't have a it doesn't have a in the popular consciousness a purpose a broader purpose that it is solving for and crypto people are like but money and store of value and bankless future but the public no longer believes that and does not believe it at this current flash point in 2026.

I don't think that's Coinbase's fault. Nope. Um maybe you could say at some level it's crypto's fault, but I don't even know. It's just the point at uh in time. It's what we got. It's the cards that we are dealt. The cards that were dealt at this point in time.

It is worth saying that like every other Coinbase ad that I've seen has been a banger in term not not the last Super Bowl ad. The last Super Bowl ad they just put a QR code on the screen and then everyone was like it was also kind of a gotcha. Yeah. Of like just throw a QR code on the screen and then everyone's going to scan it and then we'll just take them to the Coinbase uh download page on the app store. And that was a gotcha. But I think people like that one. But all the other ads, the upgrade the system ads, the the ad about the farmer in Texas who is frequently hamstrung by his ability to pay people until he found Coinbase to use stable coins. Like inherently optimistic about the, you know, the longtail of America, the individual who's benefited by the permissionlessness and and accessibility of crypto.

That's right. And they they've always been so good. the up. I think I would have preferred that this year. I think I would have preferred that. I would have preferred that because it would have been contra to the current PR understanding that society has about crypto. Crypto is gambling and rugps and and then Coinbase could have come in and said, "No, we are upgrading the system. The old financial system doesn't work for people and and here's our message of optimism and technological progress." And we didn't get that.

All right. This is David and I volunteering uh as advisers to the next uh big crypto marketing push at the Super Bowl of 2027. We got to get to the weekly rollup. David, crypto got absolutely demolished last week, down 15% and that was after being down something like 10%. What happened? Did we blow up? Is crypto completely cooked? And then layer 0 announces a layer 1 to challenge both Ethereum and Salana fed up with the slow progress of Ethereum. They're just doing it themselves, rolling their own code. Does layer zero have a shot of entering into the top 10 top five chains of crypto? Prediction markets also reached new highs partly due to the Super Bowl I think. But uh some of this attention is not all good. There's some push back. There's some incumbent controversy. So we'll talk about that. Also the Farcaster founders, they have now joined Tempo, the former Farcaster founders. I think this opened up a broader conversation about the end of non-financial apps and use cases in crypto and whether we'll see them in the future or crypto is just meant to be finance. We'll get into all of that and more, but first a message from our friends and sponsors over at Rocketpool who are launching their long awaited Saturn upgrade. This is essentially RocketPool V2. uh is lowering the stake size, the bond size from Rocketpool from eight to four, so you can get even more leverage on the yield of staking Ether. You stake four ETH and run a node. Other people will come and stake 28 ETH to make a 32 ETH node, but you charge all of them a fee. So, if you want more ETH yield, as well as to check out all the other uh features that are coming to Rocketpool with this upgrade, you can check that out at bankless.cc/rocketpool. This launch is happening February 18th. Congratulations Rocketpool and the Rocketpool community for this upgrade. It has been a long time coming for the Saturn upgrade. It's finally here. It's pretty exciting.

Absolutely. OG's, but you want your uh staking upgrades to be very methodical and slow. But by the way, on staking, did you see that uh ETH as a percent of staking supply is now all-time high? It's above 30% now. It's the destiny to go up only.

Okay. Well, that seems good to me. That seems like it's conviction. People are staking. You know, they're they're transferring from strong hands to weak hands. No, weak hands to strong hands. Yeah, maybe there's some of that going on.

Well, it doesn't mean it's going to be pretty in the process, though. Let's take a look at the blood in the numbers this week. So, uh, what's Bitcoin showing us?

Down 5% to $66,000. We're even dumping a little bit at the time of recording. Wow. $66,000 flat. Perfectly flat. Uh, ETH doing something similar. Down 7% to $1,900 where we are right now.

U, we do have what looks like a generational bottom on Bitcoin, I think, is is what it is called. Is that what?

Yeah, generational bottom. So, Bitcoin is in the bottom 5% of its entire price history relative to the 200 day moving average. And so, we are in a 5% idiosyncratic moment. Uh whereas, as you compare the current Bitcoin price to the 200E moving average, it is very rarely this low. So, either is a generational bottom or we're cooked and like, you know, pack it up and go. This is the only two possibilities.

Only two possibilities. Yeah, that's right. What are you going with? Are we cooked or generational bottom?

Generational bottom. I'm going with that as well.

This is uh Benjamin Cohen making an appearance and saying welcome back home. This is some sort of weekly average extrapolation that he likes to use. It's his kind of a band, his rainbow type band. And uh you can see ETH is driving towards the bottom of that band, but it's in kind of a a long-term band since 2020 uh 2015 if you want to compare it this way. Ben Cohen was saying ETH is going to quote unquote go home. This is a Ben Cohen meme and return to that like regression band and it did something like four or five months ago. Yes. And then we had him on to talk about that because like this was a huge meme in the Ben Cowan universe that ETH is finally going home. Took way longer than he thought. Finally did go home and then we brought him on and then he I remember him saying like and then it's going to bounce back up and then it could go home again and I'm like damn it. It's like a curse. And here we are.

Um, we we are also at 2.34 trillion. So, if you recall, there was a time we were at 4.2 trillion. So, we shed about two trillion on total crypto market cap. David, I kind of thought we were going to get to 10 trillion this cycle and we didn't get there. Not quite. Just a narrow miss of 6 trillion off.

We're going to talk about the big sell-off that we saw last week, but um I want to just get your vibe check on sentiment. So, I've seen a lot of conversation about like people saying crypto people saying this feels worse than post FTX 2022. Do you think this feels worse? Do you think the sentiment is worse now in crypto than the last bare cycle after all of the rug pulls and everything that happened then?

I think why this feels so much worse than FTX. So, so you do think this?

Yes, I I think I do think this is that FTX happened to us and it was like an unforced error that we felt like we still well we still have with the power of DeFi, right? We still have so much juice left to squeeze with enemies to blame. We have we had enemies to blame. It was like well this happened to us. Uh you know maybe we did the Teraluna like you know there there's these external reasons as to like why we are down bad right now. Yeah. But like that's just now we're just going to wait for DeFi to mature even more and we're going to move do more things and put more people out of office. Yeah. All that stuff. There were like a ton of catalysts and now it's like this is un this is just indogenous like the price action. Why is this price action happening? It seems to be because I don't know the world knows about DeFi. We've squeezed the juice out of DeFi. Like we've we've done a lot of the stuff and prices are are where they are. And so I think it's like just a lack of control over the price. I think people feel a lack of agency over what the crypto industry itself can do to our own prices. And that feels helpless. Uh and and I think that there's been just a broad lack of conviction or loss of faith in like some of the core premises of what crypto is, which is why it feels so bad.

I get that and I think that's true. Although I will say every four years it's something. Yeah. And this is just that something this time. Yep. You know what I mean? So, I actually I see that it's different in what the thing actually is that makes everyone bearish, but it was always going to be something and this time it's like, ah, we have no one to blame.

Let's get into what actually happened on Friday cuz that was a the the mother of all dips. I think uh Jim Biano said this was the fourth worst day this decade for Bitcoin prices. And I think actually it turned into maybe the third worst day. So Friday was worse than the FTX failure in 2022. Worse than the in terms of price action. Worse than the Terral Luna collapse. Worse than the 2020 COVID shutdown in terms of uh daily percent changes here, David. So like what happened? Did something blow up?

There are a handful of reasons as I understand it. Um, gold is just super volatile, which is making the rest of the market very jittery. That's the sell-off that we're happening right now, we're watching right now, is gold and silver is getting pummeled on the day of recording, uh, Thursday. Um, we had SAS apocalypse uh, which I didn't know, but Bitcoin and crypto has been very tied to, uh, SAS as a as a sector. And there's worries about AI coming and disrupting SAS. I I think that's overblown. Jim Biano also kind of thinks that's overblown. Uh there's like weak labor signals as well, but there's like if you're into reasons, there's probably plenty to find. Yeah. Uh ultimately, I don't know, markets going down. Market's going up.

I mean, there was question this felt like forced selling. We got on the feed and greed index to kind of like extreme fear territories and people were saying the selling is looking like it's becoming forced, looking like it's becoming emotional. The Kobasi letter said uh not even the record 20 billion liquidation on October 10th came close to today. It appears that someone big was liquidated. So we see all of that and at the same time we saw IBIT which is the Black Rockck Bitcoin ETF with its highest volume day in history. That happened last week as well. So on that Friday, the day of the the big crypto Bitcoin selloff, IBIT's secondary market trading hit a record volume of $10.7 billion. It's had lots of derivatives, options trading against it as well. And that $10 billion in IBIT trading, that is suspiciously big scale.

So part of the uh take here or a consideration is there could have been some Tradfi type actors that were playing with lots of different instruments maybe speculating on some of the the assets that we just talked about precious metals, gold, silver. We don't know where they were they were and they got liquidated. They got taken out in some way and they needed to liquidate some of their IBIT collateral in a hurry and this caused a a casa cascade. So, it's possible someone was blown out or seriously damaged and they weren't actually a a cryptonative company and firm. They were in Tradfi. And that now because IBIT and because Bitcoin crypto assets are so tied into the rest of the financial system, we just took uh a volatility extreme hit along with some of that liquidation in Trafi assets.

price discovery at least from what people can understand about this recent price action price discovery happened using the ETFs not anything that happened. So it was kind of like well we are the smaller of the market. So it was like then the tread market is is the bigger one. So the you know the dog did wag the tail uh and we are the tail in this circumstance.

I mean there's some that are now doing a retrospective on why crypto is having such a bad year so far and people of course of course corresp pointing to the 10-10 slaughter. This is um Alex Krueger. He's got a few things listed. There's a hangover from the digital asset treasuries quantum fears which are you know maybe somewhat real. Maybe that's affecting things. The AI opportunity distraction of course that's ongoing. The uh institutions and the swamp he says taking over and overcrowding OGs. So, this pivot from Cipher Punk and Rebel Tech, it's now it's all about Trady and ETFs, um, an over supply of coins, uh, Trump and his kind of corruption and associated political risk. People are like, well, when the Democrats take charge, they're going to reverse all of these favorable crypto things. And he concludes that killed the momentum. Uh, and then came the nomination of WASH. And the market suddenly became deeply aware that WH is a strong advocate of a small balance sheet. And uh so that was kind of the the crushing blow for crypto. So as we said, if you want reasons, those are some reasons.

There are some and you can definitely I guess uh connect those dots if you want to. Another thing you could just say is it's a four-year cycle and it was time random walk and a random walks. we just randomly walked down and and we are in a like top 5% uh extreme situation for Bitcoin and perhaps you can take advantage of that.

I uh I am enjoying this um this **Poly Market** on the price of Bitcoin uh in 2026 and let's look at the odds that Bitcoin falls below 50K this cycle. So uh 50K the odds right now are 66%. That's really high. That's really high. 66% chance that we lose $16,000 off of Bitcoin. The equivalent price in the other direction, 72% chance that it goes up to $80,000. Oof. So, you can hedge, you can uh trade on on Bitcoin price on **Poly Market** if if you so wish. You can also like just think about setting um buy ticks, you know, under 50K.

Oh yeah, you can use **Poly Market** to inform your your stink bids. Dude, there's $17 million of volume on this. I'm I'm very interested in the increasing robustness of this as a financial instrument and if that's actually gets integrated into people's overall strategies. Yeah, I don't speaking of strategies, um you know, strategy is actually using this dump to buy more. So I don't know if they're looking at **Poly Market** or what they're looking they using this sum to buy more or are they just buying more. They're just buying more. So their average price we mentioned last week. So their their cost basis is 78k per Bitcoin. So it's higher than the price now. So they are underwater. So they got 5 billion in unrealized losses and Michael Sailor is still buying more. He added uh $90 million worth of Bitcoin. This was actually Michael Sailor on CNBC when asked about um his strategy here.

If Bitcoin falls 90% for the next four years, we'll refinance the debt. You refinance where, Michael?

We'll just roll it forward. I mean, again, but you you you think banks would lend to you at that point?

Yeah. Because because the volatility of Bitcoin is such that there's always going to be value. We'll just roll it forward. We'll just write it off, you know, just write it off. I mean, people are worried. Some people are worried about this. I saw this clip played all over on my timeline that you know fear is in right now, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm still not worried. I mean, like Michael uh Sailor specifically, the debt that he has is just not insane. But I mean, if you had a lot of years below 50k Bitcoin, then things look shaky. Then things get in trouble. I mean, if we were truly cooked for good, if Bitcoin was cooked for good, then yes. Michael, like Michael Tragy, Michael Taylor is also cooked for good, too.

Um, Bitmine maybe in worse shape. Uh, I I you could say at least from an unrealized loss relatively speaking. Yes. So, Bitmine has uh almost 8 billion in unrealized losses. A lot of billions. And yet, David, uh, Tom Lee purchased another hundred million worth of ETH last week. Amazing. Guys, I don't know where he's getting this money at this point, but he is a net buyer, which is uh frankly quite impressive. Also, Tom Lee Bit Bitmine does not have the debt structure. Yeah, they have strategy does. They have zero debt. So, I mean, they should take on some debt. No one's going to lend to them in this environment. Not while fear is in.

Lastly, uh a rare insight into Goldman Sachs crypto portfolio. And here's how it breaks down. So Goldman Sachs apparently has $2.3 billion worth of crypto. So they are buyers. And here's how they split this. 46% Bitcoin, 42% ETH, 6% XRP, 5% Salana. Rate that portfolio, David. What do you think about that spread?

I don't hate it. I hate I hate 6% of it. Uh I don't really care for the the XRP, but I don't know if I'm Goldman Sachs and maybe I'm into it. Oh, yeah. I think that's great. Not a bad port. There are many people with much worse portfolios than that. Yes. Yes. I might be one of them, I'm not sure yet, actually.

All right. Coming up next, David, you're going to tell me about prediction markets. They are on fire. And uh some of this news came from a Robin Hood report that just shows how much growth prediction markets have had in the US this year. Also, layer zero launches an architecture. I think this is trying to frontr run Ethereum ZK architecture. We'll talk about all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. In 2024, emerging markets generated over $115 billion in annual yield for investors with yields ranging between 10 to 40%. These are some of the highest, most persistent yields on Earth. The problem, DeFi can't access them. Bricks changes this. Built on Mega ETH, bricks takes emerging market money markets and solvent carry and turns them into composable primitives you can access straight from your wallet. While DeFi investors earn 3 to 6% on stable coins and T bills, institutions have been harvesting 10 to 50% yields backed by sovereign monetary policy. BRICS connects these worlds with institutional grade tokenization, local banking rails, compliance across jurisdictions, and real-time stable coin settlement. BRICS does the heavy lifting so DeFi can finally access real collateral and structured products on top of real world yield. Even the best carry trades can be within reach. Brrics brings DeFi's promise to the emerging world and brings emerging market yield to your wallet. Let the yield flow with bricks. What if you could trade gold, forex, and global markets with the same tools and speed that you use for crypto? That's exactly what BitGet Tradfi unlocks. After strong beta demand, including over $und00 million in single day gold trading volume, BitGet Tradfi is now live for all users. Inside of your existing BitGet account, you can trade 79 instruments across forex, precious metals, indices, and commodities, all settled directly in USDT. No platform switching, and no fiat conversions. This is BitGet's universal exchange vision in action. Crypto and traditional finance side by side. You get deep liquidity, low slippage, and leverage up to 500x, letting you apply crypto strategies to macro [music] markets. New to Tradfy? Start with gold. The gold USD pair is liquid, macro driven, and a familiar natural bridge between crypto and traditional markets. Try trading gold on bitgget now at bitgget.com. Click the link in the show notes for more information. This is not financial advice.

So Ryan, yesterday we got the Robin Hood earnings report. And as you know, in Q4, maybe even it was even in Q3 was really when Robin Hood rolled out their prediction markets product. Um, in Q3 it was all KHI in the back end and then they also announced that they are rolling their own prediction market and so they're building one natively into the Robin Hood app. And so we have a couple quarters of data of how much volume and their revenue Robin Hood is actually making from prediction markets. That's great data actually to have.

Ready?

Yeah. In Q3, this is not the not the quarter that was being reported. Q4 was being reported, but last quarter $115 million in annualized revenue from Q3 of 2025. That grew to $435 million of annualized revenue. That is called market fit. They have an audience for this. That is 11% of Robin Hood's revenue la this last quarter came from prediction markets. 11% on a brand new product. Up from 0%. from 0%. Imagine imagine you stumble into a new product. You're already a massively like revenue positive business and you stumble into a new product that adds 11% of revenue. Incredible. Onto your that that is crazy. Okay. Um Robin Hood controls 35% of US prediction markets by volume. Uh there's some split there between them and Keli and then also **Poly Market** is in the game as well. And so we're just kind of seeing massive growth into in inside of I'll call Robin Hood an incumbent inside of an incumbent who are le leveraging this as well. It's no it's no surprise that Coinbase and even Gemini are all doing the prediction market stuff because it seems to be very revenue positive. And Ryan, one last thing on this, this is not the quarter that Super Bowl and March Madness volume is going to be reported. That will be next quarter. Wow. So, next quarter is the is the Super Bowl and March Madness quarter. I saw this tweet. Uh, prediction markets did 1.33 billion on the Super Bowl. Just the Super Bowl. And that apparently that's 10x what Vegas did. I don't know if 10x versus Vegas is totally accurate because there might be there might be apples to oranges there with volume in Vegas versus But but nonetheless, the growth isn't great. incredible uh just for for one event, the Super Bowl event. Uh but so with the success, there's some push back. I see push back in three different maybe dimensions, but one of them is certainly this question about insider trading. This is a clip from CNBC interview with Khi founder.

doing the first thing. How are you making sure that as a marketplace you [clears throat] are limiting the impact of a person who has control over the bet that you're placing or that's that you're offering um doesn't manipulate it either for their own gain by by being able to place bets or being able to tell their friends and family uh what what would go along with those lines. It's it it's bizarre to me to be able to bet on these things and have someone who completely controls the outcome and you don't know if they're betting or if their friends and family are betting on it.

Well, the insider trading risk is very real for a stock market as well and has been near real since the stock market has begun. But I feel like we control that and we can trace it. The SEC can very quickly find out who profits by how much and they shut that down. Do you do the same thing on Khi?

We do the exact same thing on Kali. So as a regulated financial market by the CFTC, we have the same rules as a the NASDAQ and the NY and we have the same mechanism of enforcement. What I'm what's grinding my gears, Ryan, about a lot of the discourse from tradition markets is that they seem to be just giving an undue level of responsibility to managing insider trading to the platforms. Now like the platforms does they do have some responsibility and you know tar from Ki said it like we are doing the same things that all the other platforms are doing. The difference is that there's probably a lot more gray area but more aggregate surface area for insider trading to happen when like the promise of a prediction market is you can bet bet on anything. And so, you know, in in equities markets or uh you know, commodities markets, there's more it's more specific about when there is insider knowledge versus not. And with a prediction market where you can bet on anything, it's far more nuanced. But these are questions for the CFTC. So I would like the Squawkbox found uh people uh interviewers to stop pestering prediction market platform people who who are doing the same thing as all these other venues and then go ask those questions to the CFTC. We are bringing on Mike Celig, the new SCFTC chair and we will ask him those questions because that is the appropriate person to ask these questions to. In my opinion, this is a a hot button political item.

So so one item is insider trading and sort of how do you deal with that? What does that look like in prediction markets? Um, another question is who gets to regulate it? And this is hot button because it feels very much there's a set of incumbents and these might be states like uh states in the United States of America states like Nevada maybe that house's Las Vegas uh versus the CFTC which is a federal entity and who gets to regulate these things and then you have a set of incumbents who used to do things like um sports betting uh versus the prediction markets which are allowing trading in all sorts of markets to include food sports events as we just saw. This is exgovernor Chris Christie, obviously a political pundit. I believe prediction markets are violating the law. He says, "In 40 states, we have regulated betting, a camp market to teenagers, pays state taxes, protects game integrity, and reports suspicious activity to law enforcement. Prediction markets do none of that." So, the charge here is that it's completely unregulated. The CFTC chair, Mike Celic, who you just mentioned, quoted this tweet and said, "Strong disagree." So, he's making the case that no, there there is a regulator here. It's called the CFTC. It's a federal regulator and we span all of the states in the union and we've got this and are handling it. So, it's a hot button political issue at this point.

I wonder if the future of prediction markets is going to get down to the granularity onto the prediction market itself. M so like a prediction market like the one from **Poly Market** that we talked about earlier will what's the probability that Bitcoin will be at $100,000 this year. That is a strict financial tool. That is pure CFTC. That is a pure CFTC. 100%. What is the probability that a roulette ball will land on red? That's purely sports gambling, right? Well, I mean, roulette is maybe that's uh we already know the probability, but like maybe you're saying the probability of some sort of um but you could you could put you could spin up a prediction market. Sure. To guess the prob like for example, here's a here's a better example. There was a very pretty high volume prediction market on **Poly Market** about what the coin flip was at the Super Bowl, heads or tails. Is is that a financial instrument? I hope it was 50/50, right? Are we breaking some Okay, thank God. people were betting on it because you can bet on anything. So, is that a financial instrument that should be regulated by the CFTC or is that sports gambling that needs to be regulated by the states? It's a case-byase basis on the market and I wonder if the future regulation is going to have to get that granular.

Yeah, that's may maybe but I mean how good are are governments and regulators in getting that granular? you you need some broad uh uh principles I think in order to do something here. So there's the insider trading kind of hot button issue incumbents versus disruptors. Other people I think see any of this any markets as the gamblification of society and they don't like it. I think a lot of your position with respect to prediction markets probably hinges on we've said this before how you feel about markets in general. So I have a net favorable view of markets in general. I think they are good mechanisms for organizing and coordinating society for truth. Yeah. If you believe in markets, you want to let the innovation go here. You think a public good is being produced, which is a truth machine. Not to say there won't be bumps along the way. There will be, but you fix those as they go. You kind of open things up. If you hate markets, if you do not believe in markets, you probably don't like market. like control and if you like rules and perhaps you lean authoritarian or central if you lean hey centralized solutions will