Joining me now live from the trading floor and not just a longtime friend of ours here on Taking Stock, but a friend of mine as well.
Say hello to Andy Beer, managing director of asset management at GSR.
Nice to see you here as always.
Thank you for having me.
We'll start first and foremost.
I always want your take, big picture, crypto price action for the long term hold holders, so to speak, and the people who see the headlines and they get a little freaked out.
They're wondering what's going on here.
How are you viewing the landscape?
I'm just happy.
To be here after the quarter that crypto put in in Q2, it was, it was pretty dismal and brutal, and I think even the cheerleaders in the industry are kind of recognizing and taking stock of the fact that it was a pretty tough quarter.
Prices were down, volatility was down.
All the metrics of energy that we like to look at suffered curb funding rates, DI rates, volumes on exchanges, volumes on derivatives.
So crypto does have about a one quarter attention span.
So we are hoping that in July and in Q3 things start to look better.
You know, you get 10 points as a guest when you organically say the phrase taking stock in an answer on the show.
So very grateful for that.
I want your take on catalysts here, things that could better move the needle presumably in the weeks and months ahead for the crypto majors.
It's a big week this week, right, with Chair Warsh speaking in Washington and the CPI number tomorrow.
I think my personal take on this is that We're still climbing the hawkish wall of expectations, and until we sort of get over that summit and get into a zone where we can start to look forward to any kind of easing, uh, Bitcoin in particular is going to have a tough slide, right?
It's, there are not too many environments in Bitcoin's history where we've had this kind of expectation of hikes, and Bitcoin likes real interest rates, uh, not, you know, not nominal interest rates going up.
So if nominal interest rates. are going to go up faster.
That's going to be a headwind for Bitcoin.
Others will follow, although there's so much good slow money news, integrations, blockchain adoption, things like that, that other tokens could take over and start to depart.
It is time for my obligatory clarity Act update question of the day.
Where are we?
Where do we stand?
How close are we to finally making this a reality?
As I always like to point out, no easy task a few weeks ahead of the midterm elections, I think, you know.
My, my, my old Wall Street trader gut says the longer something takes to happen, the less likely it is to actually end up happening.
Uh, Poly markets putting odds on Clarity Act passing this year at 44%.
That was up to 75% even as recently as May.
Uh, Washington has just come back from the July 4th break.
They only have until about August 7th to get a lot of things done.
So, uh, some of my colleagues back at GSR are still kind of optimistic that things can get done.
I think that the market would treat it as a positive surprise at this point, even if it is a bipartisan issue, which it certainly is, and that's not, there are not a lot of things on Capitol Hill in this ecosystem you could use the B word for, but general crypto blockchain technology support is one of those things.
You're preaching to the choir, and when you think about how positive and healthy all of the regulatory changes have been happening.
That's been happening.
The CFTC and SEC harmonizing around rules.
A lot more capital has returned to the United States.
A lot more activity.
Exchanges like New York Stock Exchange and whatever other stock exchanges there might be are getting integrated and thinking about, you know, most, many of the centralized exchange new listings this year have been tokenized equities instead of crypto tokens just to show you how much this bloc.
Technology means there's, yeah, a little bit of hair still on the issues around ethics and around, you know, once these rule changes become encased in law, they're encased in law.
So it's still a big deal.
A lot of work needs to be done.
Gosh, I hope we're productive over the next 3 weeks, but I still think the market's going to be surprised if it sails through.
Andy Baer of GSR, come back on the show anytime.
Nice to see you, my friend.
