Episode 14: Crypto Clarity, Altcoin Surge & Polymarket’s $112M U.S. Comeback

00:00

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Social Ledger Report. This is JR, founder and CEO of Social Market. Hey, my name is Leon. I’m the chief marketing officer of Social Market. Crypto week is over, right? Is it officially over? Okay. I believe so. I feel like it was talked about, but also not. Bitcoin hit all times highs, Ethereum hit an all time high, everyone’s talking about Ripple. Crypto is shifting from Bitcoin

00:31

Era to altcoin era. Maybe you want to pull up some of the the social market dashboard and let’s just jump in and talk about  the dollars and cents of it all. Yeah, totally. Let me go ahead and share it right now. This is the  app for social market. Tech.  It’s  live. You can look at it right now at app.  Social market. Tech.  This is last week’s episode, so you can feel free and watch it when you have a moment. But to go into the markets, you you mentioned that

00:59

It’s all coin season and that’s what is very much happening here in the index. Keep in mind  it says mixed market, but really we’re starting to see a pivot into all coin season because for the longest time, you know, Bitcoin was favored. But now that it’s reaching a new all time high  and I believe as Bitcoin becomes more expensive, it is going to become more accessible for people to just get into altcoins, especially since Ethereum went up to 3500, I believe or according to this chart.

01:30

37.8. 37.  Yeah, so it’s going even higher, which means NFTs,  layer twos and everything, it’s  getting far more popular. So we’ll see what happens. Keep in mind, a lot of this data that you’re seeing here is live. So we’re not just, you know, pulling it or coming up with it ourselves.  We do reference from CoinMarketCap for this data as well. So you can also verify the authenticity for it there. For your agreed index, it’s also at 71.

01:59

71%. So it’s the markets are seeing the greed inflation. It’s right about 3%. So it’s right around there.  I, I’m really like super excited to see all coin season starting to happen.  season was fine, but it’s just like, there’s so many more coins out there that I think deserve attention. Like Ripple is blowing up. Sui is being talked about, know, Sol.

02:27

Ethereum could finally have like a blowout. Like it has not followed Bitcoin at all and it’s one of those blue token ships. So  I’m just excited to see way more discussion other than Bitcoin. Like it’s nice to see Bitcoin keep flying. But  I just think there’s so much more fun conversations to be had around the altcoins. Yeah, I agree. So  eventually what you’re seeing right now in crypto markets, you’re going to see decentralized exchange data.

02:57

I think that is  much harder to find. So just keep that in mind for future reference. We’re hoping to implement that by the end of the summer, uh, latest. So, yep, we’ll, we’ll keep you notified about it.  I, I know we have number one  as,  um, poly market and it’s like breaking news.  Um, you know, within the hour, but I’d love to talk about the clarity and genius first and then.

03:23

pivot into PoliMarket if that’s cool with you. We can keep some of this in here, but I think it sets up PoliMarket coming back to the United States with the Clarity and Genius Act passing. I agree. I’m going to share my screen. All right. Can you see it? Yeah. Great. So this is on Twitter. You can see here shared by Stem with Crypto, the official page where they shared the exact moment when the US House votes on Genius and Collect.

03:52

Clarity X, this is as of July 17th.  I think that was Thursday. I was on Greece during that time, so I was  not super aware of everything that was happening at the moment.  But yeah, it passed by four yeas and  one nay as of everyone. Or I guess the very close margin. You gotta go to the end. was  an F. Man, don’t know which one passed.

04:20

I don’t know. I’d have to Google it real quick. But yeah, here it is. They did have problems in the House and then they had to vote twice on it  was the whole drama around it. And then they went to it.  mean, and yeah, so it was actually by 307 people that had gays and 122 nays.  Most of them were Democrats. Very few Republicans said  nay. But even then, a good amount of  Democrats.

04:48

They’d say yay, but most of them were Republicans. So I think all the Democrats that said nay and then even the Republicans that said nay, I think the big thing was about not having like a official like crypto US currency. Like essentially it’s like  something around that thing because of tracking and big brother and all of that.  They wanted to slide that in, but nobody wanted to slide that in. So, but it passed.

05:17

And  that’s huge.  then it’s  the first step to making crypto very legitimate. Yeah. So this is only for stablecoins, which  seems to be a more appetizing for normies and for businesses as far as using crypto, which the main appeal  component, the more appealing component for crypto  is the technology itself. People don’t really  like the volatility of it.

05:45

So for stable coins, I think that is a very valid way to move money or value between countries, especially between businesses and users. yes,  and I think the important part of the genius too, is it mandates one to one reserves for cash treasuries.  it’s just making it safe. It’s essentially saying if you have a billion dollars worth of stable coin out there, you need a billion dollars in reserves.

06:12

There’s way better KYC too. So essentially just like better verifications There has to be financial audits on these like there’s a worry that Tron is just like Uncovered like they don’t have enough reserves cover all the the stable coin they have out there So there’s some stuff there and then  it  prohibits yield paying stable coins, which is kind of interesting but you know it it also shifts  the crypto oversight from the SEC to the CFTC

06:41

Um, in very clear cases, but there’s going to be like a regulatory tug of war on the sec and the CFTC jurisdiction and the end. then I think the other part of this too is, it re the, the yield prohibition, like, I don’t fully understand some of that, but I know it redirects, um, defy capital. like it’s it’s

07:06

keeping crypto in various ways, but really just stable coins is becoming a remittance platform more than anything. Yeah, I agree. So before we move on to another topic here, there’s a couple of things I do want to Cool. Here it is. This is from Cointelegraph on Twitter and it’s from Senator Warren saying the Clarity Act could blow up the value of the New York Stock Exchange. So yeah, there’s still a lot of uncertainty of what could happen after this bill happens, but

07:36

I’m just going to play this video real quick here. I’m going to play a double the speed as well. Okay. That’s too fast. Can you keep track with it? No, you’re going to to like 1.5. It’s news. I don’t know how anybody talks that fast. Yeah, you’re right. Let me play this again at 1.5 to speed.

08:06

bill is anti-CBDC legislation. While the House struggles to find a way forward, you would like to see none of these bills passed. If the Cary Act comes to the U.S. Senate, you would not be in trouble.  I want to see us do strong crypto regulation. But what I don’t want to do is see the United States government just sign off on very weak regulation that has been written by the industry. The problem with the stable coin bill and the Cary bill in particular is that they don’t do anything about the Donald Trump corruption. It is occurring right out in plain view. They also don’t put enough safeguards in place for consumer protection.

08:35

to make sure that terrorists and  human traffickers and drug traffickers can use the system and guardrails to make sure that crypto is used to blow up our entire economy. So I’m very worried about that, but I want to add one more twist, and that is clarity. Bill has all those problems, but it also has a provision in it that would let any company listed on the New York Stock Exchange opt out of SEC regulations by just digitizing themselves, put themselves on the blockchain, and all of a sudden it turns out that it’s

09:03

Amazon or Meta or General Motors is no longer governed by the SEC. You do realize that literally would blow up the value of the New York Stock Exchange. That whole stock exchange has been a boost that has laid a lot of golden eggs for people in New York City, for people around the country and around the world. And this would basically just take a baseball bat to it by saying any company that doesn’t want to its books audited and make sure that it’s following certain consumer protections and so on can just go somewhere else and be traded on the blockchain.

09:33

There is nobody in Congress who should support that. So that’s her thoughts.  Did you have any immediate thoughts almost? Yeah, I don’t really love it. Like I get what she’s saying in some capacity that it’s going to disrupt like what the New York Stock Exchange is.  I don’t like the companies that are going to go do this.  It’s no different than like like gatekeeping, you know, investments. You have to be an accredited investor over a million dollars in assets or make over 250 grand a year. Like there’s a lot of

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guardrails and and stuff stopping people from investing in all these companies out there because of the supposed thing of risk  Obviously, you don’t want somebody just dumping their whole life Investments in some random crypto company, but in the end it  like people are not that dumb like, you know, I’m sure there are people out there, but People are gonna understand the risk in anything but you give somebody Ten thousand dollars to start a startup like there’s a high risk that you’re not gonna get that money back like

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You know, it’s not going to stop.  I think in the end it’s a net good. Elizabeth Warren is, you know,  in a funny way, kind of aligned in a lot of stuff about antitrust for tech companies, but also very like outside on the crypto and everything. I just think we have to move fast to figure out what this stuff looks like and how does it interact with the traditional finance systems and then start like legislating faster on rules.

11:00

Yeah, I think you put it out perfectly because oftentimes when we wait around dilly-dallying or trying to come up with some sort of regulation, a lot of the narratives, a lot of the new  sets  and standards, they’re going to change over time.  And if we’re not moving fast and we’re not breaking things, you’re, you know,  not doing anything right. Funny enough,  she mentioned that the clarity act and the genius, or I think it was a clarity act where it doesn’t

11:28

really do much to protect consumers.  something that I did read on Wall Street Journal, which is  not going to look very good in favor of Tether, which is right now the most widely used  stable coin. I’m going to share my screen. So then I’ll get to it.  Here it is. Yeah, so this is from Wall Street Journal. The big loser from the genie stack is 156 billion crypto giant Tether.

11:54

Billing out rules for stable coins would force issuers like tether to be audited and end risky practices So first of you could don’t know  tether it’s widely used on Binance and Binance is widely used in Asia and other parts outside of the US  for their own reasons, of course, but one thing that Tether is really good at is they don’t have any KYC as an issuer.  I mean, they’re kind of like an issuer like

12:20

Circle is for USDC, but they don’t really follow a lot of legislation, a lot of rules for know your customer  and anti-laundering money rules or laws. So for those reasons,  these bills would actually make them comply. If they want to operate in the US, they need to have their own form of KYC and  at least some form of verification that  people are not money laundering in their platforms.

12:49

Tether is a stable coin issuer. I’m not sure how they would be able to make this compliance. Maybe if they were to partner up with Coinbase the same way they’ve partnered up with Binance is where you would see this kind of, you know, taking effect for them. But it is still enforcing people to follow a set of rules, especially with know your customer or KYC. So I think Elizabeth Warren is to an extent just fear mongering  what this passing of the bill could do.

13:19

Yeah, it’s I think tether is going to be the biggest risk in the end. And okay. Uh, do we want to talk polymarket now? Yeah, totally. Uh, do you want to lead that? Yeah. Let me pull open my screen. This is more or less breaking news. 9 53 am it’s 12 46 right now as we record this, uh, poly market’s going to officially return to the United States market after acquiring, um, a crypto’s derivative exchanges called QCY and

13:47

that exchange is actually regulated fully. So the exchange is a, I believe it’s a CF, a CFTC. There we go. I had to look at my notes, a regulated exchange. So they’re able to like kind of roll in pretty quickly. Shane Copeland talked about this on Twitter. So he said, Polymarket’s acquired QCX, a CFTC regulated exchange.

14:17

and clearing house for $112 million. $112 million, like  one thought JR, like, why didn’t they do this before? you know? Well, one thing,  one thing people need to understand is under the last administration, not to make this political, but they were very, very predatory. The people that were pointed under the SEC, they were very predatory for  this, these kinds of businesses.

14:43

Even investors were very skeptical on supporting any crypto based companies. Now that the administration is longer present, it’s kind of like night and day difference where we’re starting to see not only a lot of changes, a lot of money being poured in this sector, but also now legislation. We kind of just talked about the genius thing, Clarity Act passing. I think if I were  in the shoes of Shane Copeland, I would think, hey, now is probably a good time.

15:13

going to be prosecuted by the SEC  or  the  CFTC or anything, know, now would be a good time to  start doing business in the US. And there’s a lot of people who want to be doing business in the US, you know, right now, the only way you can access Polymarket is by using a VPN, which it’s  part of their terms of service, like, you cannot use a VPN, but people still do it, you know. So now it’s going to make it much safer.  And  quite honestly,

15:42

quite honestly, know, Kalshi  is probably the biggest  or might be the only  betting platform in the US. know Robinhood was trying to do something similar. Yeah, predictions. Thank you. So Kalshi, think even Y Combinator was starting to support  Kalshi because  Jerry Tan, the current head of the Y Combinator  accelerator,  he’s come out

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quite in the open saying, Caoshi is, we’re supporting them, they’re the underdogs or something. Yeah, also one thing to notice on a note on Caoshi is Robinhood uses them as their intermediary. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. is also not a betting platform. And the reason I corrected you on that is their CEO has come out and said they are not a betting platform. Well, that makes sense. what they want to say is that

16:38

Everything is not gambling and betting and gambling synonymous together. They want those sports contracts on call. She’s a platform because they want to be able to offer that in sports is the biggest like betting market in theory. But if you call it gambling, then you have state regulations. Some states don’t allow you to gamble. Some do like there’s so many things. So call. has their own things. I don’t think they’re really based on crypto at all. Right. Like no, not at all.

17:07

So Polymarket is really the only  on-chain betting platform that’s large and known out there. I think there’s a few small ones that are popping up, but Caulsey is the non-crypto one. So it’ll be interesting to see as Polymarket enters. If you go to that page, I like that they didn’t request an email. They actually pressed the phone number. They said they’ll text you.  So I’m super excited to see.

17:34

Polymarket in there, you know, like one of the topics that we were gonna talk about was literally the astronomer  CEO bets on polymarket You know, we’re we’re talking whether you know that guy Andy Bryan if you don’t know he was at a Coldplay concert with  his head of HR as he’s married and she’s married and freaked out and caused like the greatest viral hit on the internet over the weekend and there was bets on it, but like

18:00

for an American market, you’d have to go VPN to that, like all that. I think that that’s like a fun and fair way to, you do it. It’s you’re not betting on, you know,  a sports game that could be rigged or anything. And you’re not betting on a market per se. You’re just betting on things that could happen. And I think these contracts are very clear. The call she wants with sports gambling and all of that, like it becomes more unclear because you do have the

18:27

possibility of like insider info and all that. It’s it’s, it’s fascinating to see. And, and I just, I’m really excited for Polymarket to be back. Like I, I’ve wanted to use Polymarket more, but doing anything on there is extremely hard. Yeah. So Caoshi is relatively more user friendly from my experience, but I just, I’m very  crypto maxi in of itself where, you know, I think there’s so many brilliant use cases for.

18:55

having things on chain and I think Polymarket having its own on chain verification system for outcomes. There’s been problems to be honest, like there’s some controversies that you can find on Twitter, like the whole Zelensky wearing a suit. If for those of you who don’t know. Was it a suit or was it a not?  Yeah, was he wearing a suit or not? I don’t think he was.  Some say he has, some say he wasn’t. I think he even came out himself saying it was a suit.

19:22

It’s not a conventional suit, I’ll tell you that much. So I’m kind of on the fence of what it could be. But a lot of people disagree. A lot of people say yes, a lot say no.  And because  with the way the UMA protocol is set up on chain, which is part of Ethereum’s  blockchain, on the Optimus protocol, you can dispute something by buying it, like  a dispute, which is relatively expensive. It’s about a thousand dollars,  which…

19:46

I think you can buy it on Polygon. But the point being is the fact that there is still some way for people to verify any of these outcomes on chain,  a decentralized,  immutable ledger that is the blockchain. Having the opportunity to verify that there, I think it speaks volumes. I would trust that more than Caoshi. So for those reasons, I support Polymarket, but I’m very excited as well to see it coming to  the US again.

20:16

don’t want to use a VPN anymore to use it. know what I mean? So exactly. I’m Polymarket’s coming to the United States  and now we have a new app called Base App. So let’s  talk about Coinbase.  Yeah, let me share my screen here.  Okay, there you go. Awesome. So without further ado, so the Base App, what is their new handle? Before it was known as Coinbase Wallet, but at the end of it had TPA. And as far as

20:46

You know, this is their pinned pose where they kind of go all into what base app is and everything that we’re going to talk about here in a moment.  This is kind like the TLDR or too long didn’t read. So TBA stands for the base app, which  brilliant marketing in of itself. They also use the blue square emoji to talk about the base app, which  Jesse, Jesse Pollock, which is the creator of the base blockchain or the base layer two blockchain.

21:14

He kind of takes pride  in the whole team here because in this  almost two hour  long stream, he goes to talk about how Base was created. And I’m not going to tell you everything. You can watch this video on your own. We’ll link the  video here in the bio. But  long story short,  he joined Coinbase  and he met Brian Armstrong.  And after some time of working with him, he

21:44

kind of almost pitched  base  and because  Brian was like, hey, well, if you can do something with a small team instead of getting like  all these billions in resources, if you can do something with a small amount of money, then maybe they can pour more money into it. But that was like about  two years ago or so. Now, know, base, you know, makes a lot of money for Coinbase.

22:13

and it took a sizable chunk of the  decentralized or I mean the self custody wallet downloading the app. think right now if you download the app, you won’t get the same experience that base provides, but they they are sending invites. So if you can somehow get an invite from any of the Coinbase team  or should I say the base team as well as people who are pretty  active there on base or even Farcaster because Farcaster is

22:43

is  embedded into the Coinbase wallet or the base app, mean, then you can actually get that experience. Let me slide in real quick. So this Coinbase rebrand, it’s a wallet app. It’s the wallet app that’s now the base app. So the wallet went from Coinbase wallet to the base app. They’re essentially launching a crypto super app.  You know, JR, you kind of had this  fundamentally at the start, so somewhat validating for you. they’re really running a wallet.

23:11

Payments, which payments are USDC trading social feed and chat. That’s via far caster. They have some AI tools in there. don’t really know what those are yet. And then they have mini apps in there, which are just kind of like games and bunch of stuff built on it. And it’s all on top of layer two base network. So very like web three, super app web three gate gateway.

23:37

I don’t know why Coinbase is really positioning this base app as like a one-stop web three gateway considering. Yeah. They’re, they look like they’re much more of an infrastructure company than a consumer company, but this is kind of like their way to be like infrastructure, like AWS, Amazon. Um, and then also be the consumer side, which is, you know, Amazon, the web store, and then also  them have like the super app. Um, super apps don’t work in the United States very well, like generally. So.

24:07

We’ll kind of see how this pushes through. Like that was kind of my feedback to even JR back in the day is super apps have a really hard time in the United States. You know, look, look at WeChat, look at line in China, they succeed. But in the United States,  um, Facebook fell flat on its face trying to build its own super app and inevitably broke everything out and purchased Instagram and WhatsApp and has messenger and all of this like mess of everything. So I’m interested to see how well base does in the end.

24:37

But yeah, me too. It’s a, it looks  from a market reaction. looked very positive. Yeah, very.  Um, I think some people have been there made in Farcaster. I don’t think you have the capacity to leave tips or buy people within posts. So base created its own,  uh, I want to say patent  way for people to

25:03

kind of leave tips into a platform where you can buy posts as tokens or tokenized posts on the base blockchain.  And  if a post does really good, its value could theoretically go up in value.  At the same time, if it gets a lot of likes that could, I think, influence the value of the post to some capacity. I still have a few questions on how it works, but you I’ve seen you can see kind of how much the poster on that post

25:32

has made money in that post. I’ve said post. The post of the post. So I saw a bunch of the Twitter, the Twitter sphere talking about, I made this viral post. made $32 in an hour. Like it was really interesting to see those kind of talks. And I’ve been trying to get a, uh, uh, invite, but getting an invite has been increasingly hard just because every time somebody posts about it, like, mean, within 10 minutes, there’s like 200 replies.

26:01

It’s just insane. Yeah, think it’s  kind of interesting.  So social market before it used to be called that it was Web C and we were using the diesel blockchain to kind of create what base app has done here.  It obviously didn’t go very well for us, but you know, it’s very interesting seeing how basis taking on building a super app on crypto, which  it almost seems a little convoluted just based on some of the screenshots and even from that video they shared.

26:31

I mean, only time will tell. We’ll see what happens. We first need to get into it, which I think Jesse Pollack was openly inviting people. So if you can send him a DM or even leave a comment on one of their posts on Twitter, then you can maybe get a be lucky and get a an invite. Yes. Yes. And  let’s see if any of us get lucky and get that invite.  Yeah, think that’s all the topics for this week.  Just from my side,  you know, if you’re  still watching,

27:01

Leave us a review on Apple podcast,  leave us a thumbs up on YouTube,  tell your friends about us. I think that’s the most important thing that’s going to help get the show out there. And we really appreciate you listening. Anything JR on your side? Yeah, no, you pretty much said what I wanted to say. If you like this video, give it a like. If you dislike it, give it a dislike. If you really enjoy it, you can subscribe as well, share to your friends, your family. Happy to educate everyone on what’s happening on the

27:30

crypto world which  every week as you may have already noticed if you’ve been following along a lot of things happen a lot of things change  and for some people it can be hard to keep up I feel like it’s our job to help you stay on top of it at least as far as what is actually important and what isn’t important we won’t discuss it but yeah  you know I hope you like the content I think that’s about it