Nasdaq's Big Two-Day Rally and the FTX Fallout

of user impersonating major brands. More on the revenue strategy in a moment, And the text space is under a major restructuring, but you never know it looking at the markets, and that's like One just notched its biggest two day record run in nine up nine, the best since two thousand and eight. Even though we see the meta layoffs, even though we see Amazon looking at trimming its workforce. Not to mention Dizzy me just now, we'll get to

all of that in by a moment. At first, Let's stick with you, our audience, because we asked you to admit the myriad of news that we're just hearing from Emily, the fact that we have these layoffs, the fact that we have f t X imploding, the fact that of course we still have this run up in stocks. What was the most important thing that caught your eye? You took to Twitter. You told us knew it wasn't Twitter. No, it wasn't Meta. It was f t X bankruptcy. That

is what rocked your world the most. Didn't rock our own, Katie Greifeld's world the most. Is it the biggest shocker for you? Katie? It was the biggest shocker? I would say. I think back to who I was a week ago last for a different post. I was so young, I was so naive. I didn't know that f t X was on sale. You had told me that we would see f t X, the crypto exchange, one of the

biggest players in this space file for bankruptcy. I would not have believed you if you would have told me to that bitcoin would be trading around seventeen thousand dollars a coin after that too, I want to believed that either it's you obviously have seen a really rocky crypto a market this week, a little bit of resilience, though I don't know's We're not talking about ten thousand, we're

talking about seventeen. And then therefore, let's talk about the ripple effects, the contagion concerns, the issue that therefore we see across the rest of the markets, because that's sort of where we're going with this, the fact that for once the correlations broke down, yes you still have the shock and all when it comes to ft X and the rest of the crypto space, But actually that didn't hold bout the NASTAC and was that something people were

talking about, not at all. It's really this is playing out in the most dramatic way possible in markets in that on the upside, you have the NASZAC one hundred, what looking at one of its best weeks and years, Like you said that headline at the top, it's best two day run since two thousand and eight. It's interesting because previously, until really this week, stocks and crypto were tied at the hip. It was the same exact trade.

To really the detriment of the bitcoin bulls, the crypto bulls that I would talk to, they would say, this decoupling, when it happens from the equity market, it will be such a relief for the crypto market. The decoupling happened, it was not bolish for crypto at all, and man

tech stocks just really ripping after that CPI report. And what's interesting though, of course, amid all of this is the concerns about the tech layoffs, is the issue of the fact that suddenly we're in a different, different paradigm right now where companies that we thought were no matter what, unstoppable and now having to trim themselves. We're just getting the latest headline as the CNBC headline. We know from Disney that they're looking at freezes, maybe even job cuts.

We saw it from Meta, the biggest layoffs that we've ever seen in its history. Is that something that we should prepare ourselves more for what we've got yet further earnings next week for example. I mean, these are the type of headlines that are unfortunately pretty common when you have the FED hiking so aggressively. This is the impact of tightening financial conditions. These are the sort of news

events that we unfortunately have to get used to. And when you contrast that with what we're seeing in the markets, this really goes to show sort of the cold blooded nature of markets, that forward looking sort of stance of markets that okay, when you start to see these type of headlines, when you start to see the impact of these fed rate hikes. Maybe that closer gets us closer to the end destination. And you pair that again with the CPI print that we've got a seven handle, nothing

to celebrate, but cooler than expected. That maybe gets us closer to the end destination, maybe closer to that pivot. As I read for many though, this market is kind of dangerous now, and the fact that Jonathan God himself a real bull saying that was an overreaction one to bear in mind as we digest the data that's still to come over the next week or so. Kitty Greifeld a different person from one week ago. We thank hers

so much. Meanwhile, sticking on the crypto fallout, let's talk about f t X. Let's talk about the rippling across the entire ecosystem here, but in by his utually Yang is with us on the story. I've seen your byline on every single piece of update that we've been having. You must be exhausted, but probably not as exhausted as man whose wealth went from sixteen billion to zero this week? What are you? What is the next knock on effect? What are we hearing and waiting for? In terms of

the news about the bankruptcy for example. Of course, the bankruptcy news itself is a huge shocker for the industry. No one has seen this coming me neither. When I started the week, I did not know this is how it's going to all pan out. We're starting to see

some contagion effect coming out. We know that for example, Voyager, which is a bankrupt lender earlier on that was supposed to be bailed out by f t X, they now had to restart their biding process essentially because of this bankruptcy procedure for for f t X. And then at the same time, even for a big crypto market makers such as Genesis, they have money that's being trapped in their training account on ft X, and then they had to get capital infusion for from their parent group DCG.

So we're expecting to see more companies coming out to this close UH the impact, and we know from the bankruptcy foulding itself, at least for Alameda, there's a hundred thousand creditors listed and their library is UH is at least to be over ten billion dollars. So the size and scope should not be understated. It is the biggest bankruptcy we're seeing this year. Extraordinary really and therefore the full from grace of Sam Batman freed himself, there will

be movies written, that will be books. Of course, the investigations that now continue into him and into what indeed has occurred. Is that going to be happening in the same time frame as we do understand who the creditors are, where do you think the sort of the books are going to stop dropping? So for investigations usually they're lagging behind. But we do know that US regulators are investigating them.

Whether the conclusion will come out soon, that's uncertain. And from UM and then a same bankman free himself is also being investigated by the SEC as we reported yesterday. UM, so we're going to see UM a lot of angry customers and as a result of out of angry regulators all over the world as well. Just looking at the implications for this event. As many say, the lawyers are really the only people that win in these scenarios. When you've had more than five million customers, that's going to

be torturous process of unfolding this. How many people are telling you at the moment that there are further counterparties to go, that there is further We've already heard from the sequoias of this world, for example, marking down there their value the overall holding to zero. We've already seen what SoftBank's implication was. Who we worried about? Are we were?

You mentioned Genesis for example. UM. So it is still too early to say who's going to be, which company is going to be the next one tool far completely um, but I think there's one point that we should be hopefully um more hopeful about for the industry, which is um comparing to the event in April when the industry has a huge leverage event are from the terror collapse. The cryptal industry today is um much smaller than back then, and then a lot of the lenders have already delivered. UM.

So this is not not a good news. It is a one to a punch. But at the same time, the industry is already downside significantly from the beginning of the year. Lunar Voyagers, Celsius ft X. I'm sure for many they hope that there's some calming after that. Ang me, thank hers so much. Let's talk about Twitter suspending. It is a dollar subscription program that was launched just earlier this week that in an effort to combat a growing problem of users, of course impersonating major brands, maybe major

people as well. It's all according to people familiar with the move at the moment, and I'm pleased to stay across it all and rather exhausted. Is Alex Barrinka. Thank you so much for joining us for a few moments, Alex, and just talk to us at the moment about what seems to be the u turns that are going on. Is this sort of a startup culture once again with the CEO just throwing things against the world is single sticks.

I think my neck and maybe a lot of others are hurting with all the whip blash we've seen already this week, in the first week that Elon Musk has been at the helm of this business. This subscription move is one of those things they rolled out, this idea, this eight dollar subscription to get more users. Having this an infamous blue check um that used to signify veracity of an account and now has been impersonated by the likes of folks pretending to be drug maker Eli Lily

saying insulin is now free. It's not um to government accounts of governments and politicians, so kind of a big uproar here because um, it all plays into the kind of proliferation of misinformation that we've seen on the platform before that in a free Elon Musk world, Twitter really tried to lock down on but in just five business days time, it seems like, um, the misinformation, whether it's ingest or more serious, has started to really play a

bigger role on that platform. And then let's took us through Actually the irony of this per aferation of businesses that aren't actually those businesses getting these tacks is because Elon Musk himself wanted to move away from an advertising model because he was less. He was more concerned about those businesses not advertising because they're worried about the fake news factor and turning to a subscription model. But he's also been talking about other things within the business model,

maybe becoming a checking account provider. I mean, what are we hearing from this man in the leadership levels right now about the direction of travel for the business. Yeah, sources, I've told um Bloomberg that they're looking for these fifty revenue to come from subscriptions. Elon Musk, remember came from PayPal. Um. He has talked about payments could you send money to people. Could we give everyone ten dollars to start having people send money to other people via the platform. So it

seems like they're pushing some of these ideas really quickly. Um, it seems like they're potentially pushing some of these ideas before they thought through all of the implications, with the with the blue check verification, the subscription issue being the lead one. Now I want to underpin just how important this is for Elon Musk to figure out how to bring in more money and get this right, he told employees in the past twenty four hours. He threw out

the word bankruptcy. If we don't figure out how to make subscriptions work, the company could be in dire straits from a revenue perspective. So lots of pressure to figure out what is the thing. But it seems like kind of the darts they're throwing at the board really quickly this past week are not landing in a way that's keeping Twitter a place that people and brands and governments want to spend their time. Alex, it's in a motive

and a difficult question. But when I'm looking at Pommy Elson, our opinion writer over in London, who's saying that basically we might be watching two to implode in real time, and that some are kind of debating as to whether he's purposely running this business into the ground. How many

people are sort of echoing those concerns. If you spend time on Twitter, you've seen that question posed in the context of Okay, he remember he is very confidently talking about how he's going to change the platform and reignite

freef speech at the HELM. But it was only weeks ago that he was saying he did not want to own this asset at So when you think about the thirteen billion in debt that this company now has from being taken private, the thirty seven hundred employees were fired who are now getting severance paid out, UM, throwing around that idea of bankruptcy is something that, you know, uh, could be a knock on of of what could he do. I will remind you that Elon Musk with Tesla and SpaceX.

In the context of those companies, he's also thrown out

that b word of bankruptcy. Ellen has proven himself not to be the typical CEO who maybe would avoid that um for for fear of stoking kind of UM bad bad fears within a company, but he has used this language before, so with him, perhaps there is a little bit of more of a wait and see if this is something that he truly believes, um that the company has head in that direction quickly, or if it is, maybe it's motivation tactic or something of that sort of

internally to get folks to figure out an ex place to make some more money and make them do that from the office with no free food, which is just a minor detail in what is a very complex story. Alex Sperenca, we thank you so much for their latest and let's now continue this conversation from an e commerce perspective as well from a trust perspective. We've got a real expert for you, Rachel Typograph, CEO and founder of

make map. It's a global ecommerce enabling and analytics platform for multi channel brands, huge brands that depend on you to understand where should I be putting my money to work when it comes to spending to advertising to social media? What are you seeing in terms of media traffic at the moment. What are your numbers telling you about how fearful they are of Twitter or how much it's useful

for them at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean right now, I feel like we're living a movie about social media, and except this time it's a different platform. In the last thirty days, we've seen a seventy five decline in Twitter traffic, seventy five of which of that decline happened since October, which is when Ellen took ownership over Twitter. And just talk through that traffic drop, what is that meaning?

That is meaning that you know, the companies that you're talking to, you just don't want to be anywhere near affiliated they they're not posting on it, they're not putting out their products center or it's more people on interacting with them because they're so distracted by other things that are on the platform right now. Yeah, So at Nickmack, we get trafficked through national digital media across all major social platforms, and so when we see the client in traffic,

it means that ad spend is being paused. The thing about advertising is that it's very easy to turn on and off, and so while things are so volatile right now, it's better for advertisers to take a back seat then expose their brand reputation. I was just speaking with the m X CEO Steve Square yesterday and he was talking about how where they put their money to work on a marketing perspective has to reflect their values. And this is what a lot of companies are doing. Why General

Mills are pulling back on Twitter. Why we've heard gm and do the same. Some thought about competition there too, But I'm interested is this is also an environment, a recessionary environment and slowing down economically environment where people might be pressing pause everywhere? Is that the case or is this really idiosyncratic? It's actually not the case. Right now, it's November and December Q four, this is when six

of media spend normally happens. So we're seeing spend happened on Meta, on snap, on Pinterest, on TikTok, on Google. People are spending, but spend is now being reallocated outside of Twitter into these other channels. And why it's benefiting the most. I have a feeling I can guess and you could probably guess. But in the last seven days

we've seen a increase in TikTok traffic. And is that I mean today just me, I was on TikTok and suddenly I found myself basically perusing some at leisure brand because it's Singles Day and then just I didn't even realize I was doing it native within that overall app until I clicked out of it, and the naturally by what is going to buy? But I'm interested is to is it because we're in that particular months and or is it actually a different reason. No, TikTok is inherently personalized.

It's probably scares you how well the appnos you, and so when you open TikTok right there and then they have a high consideration knowing what you want to buy. We actually see amazing conversion on that platform, and unlike other social platforms, you can get huge bang for your buck organically or being influencers. Most of the other social platforms you have to pay to play. And a lot of people have been sort of wringing their hands about

the noise that has been built into the system. Many lay blame a lot of CEOs would like to lay blame Apple's feed as to how perhaps some of the direct targeting has become less direct, less efficient in that respect, and probably harder some of your clients. I'm interested in general, like are you seeing at this moment, what are your clients wanting to do. Are they wanting to have more effective, efficient use of social media? Are they backing away entirely? What?

What are they saying to you? Yeah? I mean changes in iOS fourteen have really undone brand media as we know it. Platforms like Meta used to be an amazing conversion channel, but ever since the changes that Apple made all of a sudden, you're seeing spend shift out of national brand channels into environments like retail media. If you look at Amazon's most recent earnings advertising through quarter over quarter, there's really strong R o I within those environments as

well as brand safety. You don't have to worry about issues like you're experiencing in Twitter in an environment like Amazon. Okay, and I love you, I love that. You bring us back to the brand safety element. Is there anything in the hair and the now that will change the centrol? Do you thing full Twitter traffic? Yeah? This is not the first time of moment like this happened. In two thousand seventeen, brands paused on YouTube because of hate speech.

In summer, brands pause on Facebook because of hate speech. Both of those platforms inevitably regain the trust of average tisers. But what it took was the corporate executive team going from conference room to conference room and showing that they can stabilize their platform and deliver on their words. So I don't think this has to be a forever thing for Twitter, but what the industry needs to see is stability, and they need to see action not words. Well, we

thank you for your words. We thank you for coming in the studio as well. Such a great voice for Rachel topographic course, founder and CEO of make Mac. Meanwhile, we're going to be right back with more on bloom Bag technology after the spring. We're going to be talking so much more about the layoffs in particular across the sector. Stay with us as a Bloomberg. Soft Bank founder, Mass Yoshi's son says he will no longer speak at earnings presentations.

He's not for decades. That's after the company's Vision Fund. Of course, the arm that is doing a lot of investing had a seven point two billion dollar quarterly loss due to the right downs on its tech investments. Now, soft Bank, which for years was the world's most aggressive tech investor, has virtually halted new investments and focused instead on his balancie. Meanwhile, Ali Baba decided not to disclose full sales results for its signature Singles Day shopping festival,

and that's for the first time ever. Alabama said in a statement that the gross merchandise value was in line with the last year's g m V performance, despite macro challenges and COVID related impact. But some forecasts say, look, the figure could suffer a decline that's unprecedented in the events fourteen year history. I think this is the first of many cuts that we're going to see, not only for these companies. Okay, but the company is written large.

We've seen over hiring, over inventorying, over ordering, and then I'll has to get wrong out of the system. These companies are starting to take action right Finally the natal party. This is Bloomberg Technology and Caroline Hide in New York. You were just hearing from Mike Wilson Morganestani's chief U security strategist about the current landscape of tech layoffs and stick into that a little bit more, plus much other conversation topics to be having with the Activate founder and CEO.

Michael Wolfe, management consultant, previously CEO of President of MTV. He was also on the boards of companies such as Yahoo for example, you're a man who understands what it's like to run businesses have to slim down businesses to see a restructuring. What do you make of not only Disney now saying that they're going to be cutting their jobs, freezing, hiring only essential travel. We had from Meta the Artists formerly known as Facebook, but Meta eleven thousand jobs to go.

These are significant cuts. There are a lot of other companies Striped Lived. That's so many of these companies are using this moment. But if you look at the numbers, it's in a lot of ways they overshot. They expected that the growth that they experienced during the pandemic would be sustained. So if you look at but happened with Meta,

Meta two thousand seventeen had twenty five thousand employees. Two thousand nineteen, they had fifty thousand after the cuts, After the eleven thousand cuts, they're still gonna be at seventy five thousand employees. So this is this is just going back to yesterday a little bit, and and and it's also a moment in which they need to say to their investors, we're going to focus on profitability and recognize the realities of the web. I think what's interesting is

also the manner in which these are being announced. To his credit, Mark Zuckerberg had a mere colper moment. He said he his personal responsibility. You've seen that echoed by other leaders as well, and whether or not it's more Previously, Shopify was almost the first company to really announce that really they'd they'd got the trajectory wrong. They've got the COVID lift and they thought they could bring it into perpetuity and actually know the ark was going to fall

back down a little bit. And then on the other side, you haven't eno mask who is doing it without much emotion. How do it as a business leader, as a management consultant, think about the way in which these messages are delivered. Um well, overall in the tech business, we're losing about a hundred thousand jobs but from those companies, but also if you look at it from the perspective of the overall market, all those people are going to find other jobs.

There's a tremendous amount of demand for technology talent in everything from finance to government, to healthcare and it even startups. There's about two fifty billion dollars and venture capital out there waiting to be deployed. But when you look at these companies and you think about about where their cuts are going to come from, what they need to do. The bigger issue is they've got to find new sources

of growth. In every one of these cases, from Apple to Amazon to Meta, they're all dependent on the old sources of growth. And by that's why they're coming to our company activate, because they're looking for new places for growth. Cost has a human, huge human toll, but it's actually

much more difficult than growth. Okay, so let's talk about the growth that hopefully some of these people who are now getting we hope decent severance packages and able to go and set up their own startups or indeed a meta that now doubling down on the continued trajectory of a different kind of growth of focus on a web three let's call it. You'll, of course a man in puts together the future analysis you're putting together. What is

gonna look like for us? Is meta the right bet um the challenges metas metaverse bet is all about virtual reality. And what's happened overall with metaverse is we're already past the hype cycle. I mean, we've already hit the peak of of hype, and now we are going to see sustained investment, but the sustained investment may not be in the places that metas focused. So, for example, the metaverse doesn't necessarily mean virtual reality, not necessarily virtual reality headset.

In fact, our research shows that most people don't spend more than thirty minutes at any one time in virtual reality, So a lot of it's going to be too deep, and of a lot of it's going to art in

video games. And in fact, when you look at the metaverse, you have between four video games, between Roadblocks, Fortnite, Minecraft, Um, you end up having three hundred million people who are spending a great deal of their lives on average eleven hours a month, and some of them are spending forty hours a week in these games and so, and they're all metaverse platforms. So the idea that this is way off in the future and none of it is spending

time with an Occulus headset. So it depends every company is going to take a different bet. It just may not necessarily be the right bet. What you mentioned roadblocks and what roadblocks sort of for many helped with this whole idea of a metaverse we could then see, oh, that's maybe where crypto comes in. That's maybe where the payment of you know, when you're buying skins and they're like, suddenly you have a native currency. You have a digital

currency for one of a better expression. When we're starting to see the fallout that we've just done with FTX for crypto in general, is that going to impact the metaverse, Web three, the direction of traveling anyway. Well, actually, the payments that are taking place inside of those large metaverse platforms, they're not crypto. And when people look at metaverse they think Web three and metaverse are the same thing. In a lot of ways, they're not. Web three depends on

really decentralized protocols. Crypto a metaverse is really the consumer layer. So in the same way that we saw the browser was necessary for the Internet, metaverse is going to be necessary for Web three. But we're way far off and seeing the applications of these technologies in Web three and what's happened even today with f t X shows that, uh that the tools may be valuable, but their application

is going to take a while to be applied. Activate founder and CEO Michael Wolf come back when you are talking to all these businesses looking for that steer. We thank them for it. We have, you know, a few billion on our balance sheet right now. We are profitable. We're in a relatively strong place from a financial perspective. I want to be doing something that positive, like with the making money per like, like I want to be

good actor there. We'd raised a few billion dollars over the course of the last last couple of years, and we're profitable business with Voyager. I think, you know, there's seventy million dollars there that that that we put in that I'm not sure ever seeing that seventy million. Again, we have not used the majority of the cash that we have on our balance sheet. We want to be flexible.

We want to be in a position where we are you know, looking forward at uh you know what we could be doing, where we could be most helpful um and where we can grow the most. I'm excited about

a pathway forward. I'm really excited about our leadership. Wow, the ft X co found a former CEO, Sam batmanfree talking to Bloomberg again and again about profitability, about growth in a series of interviews in fact from July to set Timber of this very year, and then the downfall that we've just seen, the unraveling in one week, and one that perhaps was slightly more prophesized by our next guest,

Mike Alfred Eagle Book Advisors founding board member. Of course, a man who's deeply working within the world of crypto also happened to be a value investor. So a man who can give us take some whether you should be an a b in bev at the same time as whether you should be into certain cryptocurrencies. And Mike, first

and foremost, why were you concerned? Were you concerned about the closeness, shall we say, of a maid and indeed of what was happening at f t X. So I was concerned about a lot of things over the last two years in this space. Right So, I think there's a couple of really big fundamental issues here. One is just a lack of corporate governance. Right so, ft X

basically had no outside investors on their board. Many of these other companies that blow up blew up this year had similar setups where because they had so much leverage when they were raising money, there was nobody you could tell them what to do. Right then, there's a lot of leverage. Right, you don't see blow ups like this without a tremendous amount of ridge, right, that's going to typically be there in every situation. And then the last piece is just this overreach for yield in a low

interest rate environment. Right, So all of these firms are essentially doing these sort of poorly structured arbitrage trades. And so if you look back to the spring of one, the gray scale arbitrage trade, who was in that trade three A c celsius Block five? Right, when you look at Tera Luna, that was also an arbitrage trade, borrow money from a trading desk at ten to get anchor? Who was in that trade again three a c celsius And of course f t X and so ft X

blows up, uh and uh. Indirectly, it's because of the relationship with Alameda, right, because Alameda essentially lost so much money in that anchor trade that they needed paper over it. And that's where Sam crossed that bright line, right, because up until that point it was just gambling with the principle's money in a sense. But once he started gambling with the actual users money at ft X, I think

that's when things really went down. Help five million uses, but also a proliferation of high profiles, celebrities of well thought of and deep pocketing venture capitalists and now been burned. And I'm sure incredibly angry at Mike. I'm what next in terms of credibility, because as you've just been mentioning the names, you've had lunar voyages, Celsius and then have f t X. Is there another shoe to drop here?

Is there a contagion risk? Is there are the people that will be but so badly burned that there has to be further to full so eventually there won't be any contagient risk. But obviously those of us who felt the contagion was mostly contained in June after Celsius were We're wrong. Um, you know remember at that time SPF went on your program and a number of others and said, look this is over right, there's not going to be any more downside. And in retrospect, he was clearly doing

that to protect his own firms liquidation levels. He wasn't doing it because he actually believed it. He wasn't doing it to be JP Morgan. He wasn't trying to save everybody. He literally was just protecting his own ass and I get why he was doing that now, but I should have read kind of deeper into it and realized, Okay, he probably has the same problems in his balance sheet. So roll forward today. Who could actually have more risk in their balance sheet than we know of? The one

firm I can think of as Binance. That's not a popular opinion. There are a lot of people who want to believe that Finance is a good actor. But the reality is there an offshore exchange that's thinly regulated, just like ft X. They don't even have a domicile, so it's hard to hold them accountable for anything. And I'm sure and I'm certain that in some ways they're engaging in similar activities on the back end, so that that would be the ultimate that would be the ultimate blow

up if something would happen to Finance. Well, of course we'll go to Finance to try and get their take and have them be able to defend themselves CZ in particular. But there is an interesting interesting take them that this is the centralization of Ultimately what is wanting to be decentralized. Is there a way that you can have centralization other than perhaps a company that is public that is regulated, How do you regulate non public, non u s domassailed companies.

Is there a way we can bring transparency the promise of real transparency that's so excited many about the space. Can we ensure that is happening when you do have these deep pockets and indeed a level of hiding behind set in alvatrages. I mean, I think there's sort of

two ways. One is to just stick with a very safe, regulated onshore exchange that holds all the assets one to one, doesn't lend them out, doesn't run a hedge fund in the background like ftx or or celsius um or go all the way the other side into true decentralization and leverage defied protocols that are using code to offer these services,

right so unit swap and maker and compound. You know, I think it needs to be noted that when you look back at what happened during the period where Celsius was being liquidated, um, you know, those protocols did a good job, right They liquidated the counterparties immediately, no questions asked. They didn't care who you were, they didn't do any credit check, they didn't call you and say please serve

deposit more collateral. They just did the job that was written into the protocol, And so I think true truly decentralized DeFi could work at scale and may actually be better in most cases to a centralized option. But if in the in the meantime, while we're waiting for that to happen, using a company like coin base in the US is one of the safest sweats to approach it.

Let's talk a little bit about what regulation happens from now might because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of sharpening of pencils going on at the moment because in many ways he some Maguan freed himself, was seen as the main lobbyist out there and talking and maybe have been his undoing in many ways when it comes to the relationship that disintegrated between himself and Ceasy because of

that lobbying. But I'm interested when actually, in the clear light of day, in real trad fire traditional finance, you still get these blow ups. You still have archagos who still have Bill whim and you still have goodness a liquidity issue that it happened just a month or so ago in the UK with its pension funds because of issues within the holdings of bonds and the movement. You know, even in deeply regulated markets, we can sometimes have these

desperate affairs. How do we make regulation fit for purpose within crypto at the moment? So it's a it's again, it's a it's a tough question. But if you look at like MF Global, right, Um, you know, they went into bankruptcy and it took a little bit of time, but none of the sort of users of that platform lost any money. Um. Same thing with other brokerage platforms, other banks. The regulation is so stringent and there's so many protections that it's really hard for an end customer

to lose all their money. And so look, I mean that that that sort of regulation may stifle some innovation, but it also stops casual retail users from losing everything. And so I would err on the side of being more conservative generally. I don't think it makes sense to allow people to lever up ten x, twenty x, thirty X. I don't think it makes sense for these platforms to take the money on the back end essentially gamble with it.

And so if that means less innovation, I'm sort of okay with that, and interesting me of course, the innovation, the froth, the money that poured in has sort of been pulled out, and then it's almost a year exactly since bitcoin is a sixty and then since to today when ft X is unraveling, Can you cool a bottom in this market? Do? What do we need to instill some sort of trust back to in the relative space

of of other cryptocurrencies on there. I think the most important thing once again is that there's not going to be any tax payer funded government bailouts here, and I think that will give people confidence once it's clear that there's no more dominoes left to fall. And I think in the coming days and weeks, as we look at the creditors to ft x, which they're just going to be numerous companies like Block five, etcetera, that Block five

is probably gonna file for bankruptcy eminently here. I've heard they've already hired counsel today, which makes sense. I sort of said that on Twitter two days ago that you should pull your money off Block five because that was sort of an inevitable consequence of this um so. I look, it's going to take a little bit of time, but sometime in Q one Q two of this coming year, there's gonna be a wonderful, potentially generational opportunity to buy bitcoin.

I want to say, just buy a bitcoin. I mean bitcoin in cold storage, where there's no counterparty, where there's no risk that you lose all your bit because bitcoin is a wonderful thing on its own. It's what we're talking about is all the adjacent centralized businesses that took on too much leverage that we're often unregulated, and they're offshore and they messed up um. And that happens in

these sort of wild West environments. But bitcoin itself is still going to make a new block every ten minutes for the next hundred two five hundred years. That's what we're betting on in the bitcoin space, and that comes true. It doesn't matter what happens to any of these companies. Oh well, here from the bitcoin maximalists and more, but I'm not calling you one of those. But it's interesting that we once again go back to perhaps where people

feel that they can trust for the time being. Mike Alford, really great to have some time with you. Thank you.

Eagle Brook Advisors founding board member. Of course, all about institutional access to some of these defied protocols, well, I actually got to speak with a key CEO in the traditional finance space, American Express CEO C Squary, just yesterday, and talked about the fallout of crypto at the moment and whether or not it could still be an innovative space to be investing in, whether traditional payment methods could be disrupted through it. I spoke exclusively with him at

the Economic Club of New York yesterday. Take listen. We've looked at cryptocurrencies from when they first, you know, started to gain traction. We've experimented with blockchain, We've got investments in blockchain um companies. We have a partnership with Abra where people earned cryptocurrency rewards. And you know, I've been pretty public that I believe that cryptocurrency is an asset class, and I think people like to invest in different asset classes,

and and and off you go. But I don't see it um replacing the payment rails UM and and you know, and when I think about cryptocurrencies, I put that under the umbrella of digital currencies, and so I have you know, you have digital currencies, you have the cryptocurrencies, your bitcoins, your theoryum and so forth. And then you've got your stable coins UM. And then you've got you know, governmental

digital currencies as well. And and I think there there certainly is a play um for digital currency in you know, in the economy. UM. But it's it's hard for me to see right now, UM cryptocurrencies with the volatility, UM, with the limited supply of some of them as well, how it really um, you know, replaces the traditional payment methods. The one thing with the traditional payments methods, they're not broken.

They work. UM. And uh so we'll see. Having said that, you never say never, and and that's why you stay engaged. You listen to people. UM. You know, there's a lot of people that have a very different perspective than I have, and they've made a lot of money. They may be

a lot smarter. But I think when I think about sort of the business that that American expresses in which is we're really a lifestyle brand that brings people experiences, provides access, and combines a payment facility with that, the horses that we have right now are are working for us. So maybe just maybe we get a bit of calm in the week ahead, let's have a quick look at

what we're actually covering, what's already on the agenda. We know that there might be some headlines we're not expecting, but there could be some fireworks when it comes to the epic versus Apple trial Monday, of course a key focus there. We're gonna be digging into key earnings of

large mega brands such as Walmart. Of course, we're going to get a real sense check and where the retail where the consumer is at, but also whether shopping online, how digital spenders going at the moment, of course, in video front and center, when we're thinking of US China relations, when we're thinking of chips, when we're thinking of the semiconductor space at the moment, and well whether we are in some sort of megacycle once again. And Abco Branchesky

is going to be joining Bloomberg on Thursday. You want to be tuning into that exclusive conversation. And then of course back to the courts come Friday, Elizabeth Holmes, the sentencing the Themist trial. You do not want to be missing that as we deep dive so much more of course coming to Bloomberg, and please say, of course on Monday, when we're having Sunny Sing one of FDx IS investors from their funding round back in just how painful has that trade been, What does he think of the future.

Check out our podcast as well. You can get on an Apple, Spotify, and i Heeart. Have a good weekend. This is Blomberg