Episode 34: Jane Street Shadows & The Agentic Future

00:00

Welcome back to another episode of the social ledger report. This is JR. My name is Leon. We’re in person. Yeah, we are in San Antonio at the Geekdom office. So man, a lot has been happening in the last few weeks. I don’t know if you want to- of 24 hours. Well, definitely on that as well. You know, I think the interesting part is, know, we’re the United States, this is recorded at 1233 on Saturday, and United States has attacked Iran with Israel. Yeah.

00:27

I’m watching gold prices. Everybody’s got all the screens up, you know, trying to pay attention to what’s happening to stocks, to futures, to crypto and everything. So there’s a lot. There’s Jane street. Yeah. Jane street is probably going to be the biggest talking point today.  You’re going to have to fill me in more on that. You know,  um, I don’t even know. Like the, the news is broken. Yep. There’s a lot of misinformation and there’s a lot of facts. I don’t know what is right and what is wrong  on the Jane street stuff. So like we can parse it.

00:57

but I think it’s a little bit of  rumor mixed with fact. I definitely don’t think all the facts. Well, I don’t think everything is a fact. There’s  a bit of a mixture of both. know, reality isn’t as black and white as I like to say.  But besides that, we’re going to talk about a genetic wallets. I think that’s more of my forte. It’s more algorithmic. It’s more  autonomous.  And beyond that, you’re probably just going to get to opinions,  mine and Leon’s.  So

01:27

With that being said, know, last night, you know,  quick side note, just because I think the  state of the market impacted by world events like world, possibly World War Three with the Iran attack.  How do you feel about that? Okay, so prices where we’re at right now,  again, it’s Saturday, it’s 1236, bitcoins up a bit, but it’s still down in the  net net. Ethereum is just, man, Ethereum is not.

01:57

Not moved in general for  for so long. It’s like been sticking around this price in general  Everything else is you know looking relatively strong considering the weakness that has been happening in the bullish. I don’t know what the Fearing greets at 14 right now. So  it’s pretty fearful.  It’s better though. It was at like five or four really and I think that was the lowest it’s been since uh

02:25

I think that 2022 crash after FTX when it was like close to an eight. So overall it’s, it’s, it’s looking positive. You know, it’s leaning more alt season, I guess a little bit of really leaning more towards big point. I’m just reading that chart, but yeah. You know, I’m not sure. I these assets are not stores value anymore. The perpetuals, the ETF inflows, all of that.

02:54

I think it makes it follow the stock market more than anything.  It’s slowly merging into that.  And we’ll talk more about Jane Street because I think firms like  Jane Street are kind of to blame to that because we’re seeing ETFs more of these real world assets that are sort of pegged to Bitcoin, like ETFs or like the  one from BlackRock, I think it’s called Bit.io. um I think that’s also part of the influence here.

03:24

I don’t know, man.  It’s kind of scary because  I can see why so many people who have been long devoted or been long-term users on  crypto or like Bitcoin. I  you know, they’re starting to pull away their money from that because they’re seeing the big money or big corporation money is pouring into crypto. But  most of them aren’t really putting it into like Bitcoin itself. It’s mostly on ETFs. oh

03:51

Yeah, but they’re still holding Bitcoin. They’re just they’re holding it in like institutional accounts, which which I think is still good, but it’s like a totally different system than than we’re used to. Like it’s broken. What’s Bitcoin is like  in its core. I think all this institutional money is flowing in and a lot of people are questioning why isn’t the prices going up? Yeah, that could be one reason. um I’m not an expert on this as far as the

04:20

where the institutional money goes. But  I mean, it’s definitely interesting to see how this unfolds. with that being said, why don’t we talk about J Street? I know you were kind of hyping it up all of the week outside of the podcast. Yeah, I think it’s been the biggest news in crypto for  the week. And I think it’s it’s also something like I’ve heard this a couple of times is that somebody is manipulating the price of crypto.

04:46

One to possibly hurt the president and his family, but then also two to like make some serious money. So the let’s go to the start. Jane street is a proprietary trading firm from around it in 2000. A lot of former like tech people. So it’s there. They have one of the largest liquidity providers of ETFs in the world. They trade equities, bonds, options, commodities, crypto, everything. I think they have about 2,500 to 30,000 employees offices.

05:16

the normal places where you think NYC, London,  Singapore, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, big financial  hubs.  Yes.  Um, like if you want to give it one line, it’s like Jane’s train is in the hedge fund in a traditional sense. It’s a technology driven trading firm focused on liquidity and pricing, pricing efficiencies.  believe Jane street was the one who was playing the Japanese market when  they would, they would do like  micro trades and make like pennies on the dollar hyper fast.

05:45

That was Jane straight. I didn’t know that. Yeah, they were playing with the Japanese currency because of the the interest rates in the currency system over there. So like the Fed sets the rates here. They set the rates over there. All of that. The quantitative their quants that you know, they do all that math have any problem probability driven. that’s really where it comes into the crypto involvement. They were early recluded liquidity providers in crypto markets.

06:15

They pulled back after regulatory uncertainty, really under the Biden  admin. And then they’ve  looked at everything because they are really about discipline risk management  and less about following these hype cycles.  Okay.  I believe it.  So I did pull out here  on Riverside. We’re not only recording from these cameras, but also on Riverside. You know, I pulled out this article from  the Fortune.

06:44

And it says Bitcoin fans lodge on ridiculous. What’s up? The fortune.  The fortune. I mean, is it just fortune? How do you start the conversation? Just fortune? I’m not sure. I just like it. The fortune. Well, we’re to go with that. So this article from Fortune says Bitcoin fans lodge latch onto ridiculous Jane Street conspiracy to explain Priceline. So the crazies have been right on a lot of stuff recently. And I keep saying the crazies have been right. So we got to listen to them.

07:12

Agree, I mean that’s kind of how Bitcoin began in just a hacker news forum Yeah, but I mean and everything like conspiracy theories all the way down to Epstein and people like like uh like truth, you know, like there’s just so many crazy theories Yeah, that I believe the crazies are on to something more and more  God that reminds me. Have you seen? um Alex Jones not trying to get political but you’ve seen Alex Jones before. Yeah, so

07:42

Oh my gosh, have you, you, you hate, don’t like Star Wars, but for anyone else who has seen Star Wars,  that guy perfectly in captures or perfectly  summarizes the rise of the, of the, of the empire, the, the galactic empire where he basically, it’s a three movie  story and he pretty much summarizes in like two minutes. I am, I almost want to put up, pull up the video. You know what? Let me do it. Just for, yeah, I hate.

08:11

Star Wars 2,

08:16

So I’m going to show this.  I think I should be able to.

08:22

explain Revenge of the Sith  plot line because at the time we wrote articles about it because  the media said we don’t understand this. This makes no sense.  The most popular of the three prequels. It made total sense. Emperor Palpatine was a little known senator from Naboo, small planet. He finances  terrorists to attack the planet.

08:49

And then he plays victim and says says that the pacifist republic isn’t doing enough to help him  with the terrorist invasion, the trade federation invasion, uh, who even speak in Chinese accents. It’s all geopolitical. And so,  yeah, little aliens with Chinese accents. Uh, he then goes and complains  and catapults himself in the crisis into the role of chancellor. Because

09:16

You know, he was the victim, now he  demanded something be done. He’d been a pacifist previously. Now he’s chancellor. Episode 2. Launches terror attacks uh all over the galaxy with groups he’s secretly financing  through his backers. In the Trade Federation, he turns around, double crosses in the end. uh Lord Vader killed Viceroy Gunray and everyone else in the f-

09:39

So basically in the end they knock out all of the people that backed them which always happens Nazi Germany Soviet Russia now is China learn from history Then in episode  so he uses that to build up the power of the Empire in episode two and Now he’s got this big Imperial Army, but it’s not Imperial yet  But it’s it’s the stormtroopers the outfits the weapons systems to counter this outside threat run by count Dooku that the Osama bin Laden guy that actually works for him and they meet the secret

10:09

Now, in episode three, he launches an attack on the imp-  It’s almost done, but what that tells me is you need to watch the movies because it’s fucking amazing. I cannot watch the movies. I’ve tried. It’s just  too slow. Well, we  can agree to disagree.  that’s still really, where were we going with this? The point is Alex Jones is fucking crazy and he was able to perfectly describe how the prequel movies were for

10:38

I say prequel, but like the first three movies were for the position the entire  Star Wars as we know it. um He’s crazy and he has a lot of bad takes, but also a lot of very intuitive takes. And I think it applies with James Street because  people have all these conspiracy theories about James Street and with Bitcoin.  was, you know, sorry, I couldn’t, I wasn’t getting  the relational like  where it’s going. Okay. So

11:06

Back to  Jane Street. Yes. So anyways, that was a bit of a detour, but it  reminded me of that when you  have lunatics making predictions.  Yes. So with Fortune, with Back to Jane Street,  the theory spawned a series of viral posts in the fever swarms of social media and gained further traction when Bitcoin staged a midweek rally. You guys can read that. I’m  sure you can see on the screen.

11:36

um But essentially it’s saying like I mean I read this article before I even got here and it’s kind of the we’ll add this in the footnotes as well, but like Everyone has different takes everyone is saying what what is the take? Can you break down? What was happening  in general? Yeah, like fortune.  Well, then I’ll break down what chance we was doing that’s like I think for context on everybody. Yeah. Yeah, so  Well, I mean they were kind of just  Many believe the price of Bitcoin essentially. Okay. So let me let me give the breakdown fully is

12:04

They were saying that there was a 10 a.m. Don’t  okay every day that was at 10 a.m. US US time which is essentially EST that there was a dump of it the social media theories link  the Institutional trader Jane Street pushing short selling pressure Yeah, but there was no formal proof of that in the end  and what it looked like more than anything was like a liquidity and flow effects for like institutional order and fluxes. Yeah

12:34

this is like,  it might be that rather than targeted manipulation, but  to the crazies and the Alex Jones thing  is that there was a lot of chatter in daily price pattern in Bitcoin. And Tenium was always happening where there was a And there was a,  like, this is a correlation, isn’t causation thing where market, like algorithmic traders  are essentially manipulating without clear evidence and in the, or there’s manipulation without clear evidence.  Yes.

13:04

I was trying to say that, you describe it much better than I could ever. They were, I’m sorry, they were relationally tied to the, um, Tara Luna collapse in 2022. So there has been complaints and claims that Jane street was receiving non-public information related to Tara and liquidity changes. then Jane street obviously denies any wrongdoing. everything is allegations here. It’s all like fucking rumor in the end.

13:33

ah No verified findings. But  everybody is on the headlines now. Jane Street has been, you know, like essentially manipulating Terra Luna.  There’s no legal claim to that in there. And then the same thing is the 10 a.m. dump, which was happening on Bitcoin. And ever since that news hit the market, there has been no 10 a.m. dump and the Bitcoin price largely minus the running in attacks Friday night into Saturday morning. There hasn’t been any dips or moves on that liquidity. OK, um down.

14:04

I did not know that.  mean, I do  apologize. I’m not  very well versed in this. I do understand from a high level what’s happened. I know the involvement with Terra Luna,  man, mean, Coffee’s element, an incredible video about that too, but you know, can find it on your own.  man, it’s,  I mean, largely it’s kind of just insider trading to some capacity.

14:30

And that stuff, yes, that was insider trading for Bitcoin. It’s market manipulation.  It’s  like, they’re also tied to micro strategy strategy.  Um, and then a lot of those, like those things, so they’re essentially pulling shorts, put dumping money, capitalizing on those, and then made supposedly like $10 billion  in the course of that.  Yeah. And  essentially this is like,

14:59

The link is Jane Street was secretly dumping crypto um and then  it being a big liquidity provider um that the pricing pattern kept showing up and that the rumor is the manipulation have done  a lot of harm to Bitcoin and then the larger part of the crypto market. So  was it really a manipulation?

15:25

Is that against? I don’t. This is the part that I don’t know. Is that like against that CC if they are the third ones manipulating the price of something like I don’t know if that’s, you know, even allowed, like can you go short and then dump yourself? Like I don’t, I’m not sure if that’s allowed as you’re the largest  largest. I guess that would be insider trading. Well, when you’re a big fish and you have insider knowledge or just  an advantage with knowledge that other people don’t, that is largely unfair, which is where the sec comes in and says, Hey, you’re

15:54

breaking the law. You’re yes. And that’s what  is essentially  there’s rumors. I don’t know if it’s substantiated that the FBI the SEC is all looking into it now.  Oh, um I mean, it’s only a matter of time if they already aren’t. Yeah, and there’s nothing clear. Yeah. And there’s cork filings on Terra Luna. No, or Terraform and Luna and all that, which is there. But  it’s it’s there’s no,  there’s no

16:21

actual facts on Bitcoin price manipulation or algorithmic dumping but I Kind of lean a little bit towards the crazies here.  It it just looks like it there’s Yeah,  there’s so many little things out there.  Um Like out there like  there’s it’s just crazy like but the SEC the CFTC Yeah, they haven’t done it but they’re gonna investigate is my understanding.  You know, I’m not surprised usually when

16:51

What I’ve seen in crypto largely with the Biden administration is  once  an agency gets involved, the rest kind of follows suit when there’s a legitimate case. um didn’t see that with Metamask or Coinbase. Coinbase was mostly the SEC and the same with Metamask.  Why? Because they weren’t really breaking the law. They were just operating business. And then the Biden regime came out and said, no, we don’t like you guys doing business this way. But it was no more than the SEC and some involvement. um

17:22

So that’s largely what’s happening here. um But anyways, um I think  something that we could start looking into is autonomous money management. Largely what we’re doing here at MintLock with this new approach that we’re building a business on.  And I think  in the middle  of people like James Streetwood, largely people moving other people’s money, I think  given where we are with AI, we’re now starting to put ourselves in a position where

17:52

maybe people can control these agents or program these agents to move people’s clients’ money. So all that to say, let’s talk about agentic wallets. Okay, let’s do it. um I  think it’s really interesting, especially when you talk about Jane Street and the  fact that a lot of the stuff is going to be moved to computerized systems.  Yes.

18:17

I could see it at some point becoming a problem for all of us just here. I think if you can move money in a fast and efficient way, it’s just like the fact back in the day, traders, when the internet first kind of came, they would all try to put their servers and everything in their offices as close to Wall Street so that the internet latency was the lowest. It’s no different than like a gamer sitting next to the server farm so they could play Fortnite faster.

18:46

That’s  it’s the same thing then you know and it’s got them smarter and smarter now It’s like agents are trading faster and faster. Yeah, I think there’s probably gonna be some sort of regulatory impact at some point that’s gonna say hey these robots can only trade with human input or something but Coinbase rolled out an agent to quality  There’s a lot of their sales open club. Yeah, like open clause doing a lot. I don’t know if I trusted to trade real money though uh

19:15

I could see it just fucking nuking your portfolio. God does it like doesn’t do things that one time someone programmed their open claw agent to I don’t know get access to some API and then he woke up with a $3,000 API bill. Yeah, it’s just like the Facebook safety lady. She was at Facebook or a meta and she gave open claw access to her email and it just fucking deleted everything like I didn’t like that. Yeah, Twitter has been a

19:42

uh Massed of all of this stuff man. It’s sometimes really hard to keep up with all that kind of oh,  I’m like uh I have  You remember tweet deck whatever they call it now where you can have three feeds five feeds. Oh, yeah feeds Yeah,  like this is my journalism background  I can watch six feeds at once  and know what’s going on like I love the force the four  Screens on uh a TV where you can watch the sports and you can watch a TV show the news and there and you can

20:11

do all that. That is me a thousand percent. That sounds like ADHD over log man. No, you just process all of it. okay. You know, talking about a gentic wallets, you want to show like the coin based stuff before I do that. Actually, I want to talk a little bit about AI with, with open call. Okay. I’m to share here this Reddit post that I found the most downloaded skill on open call marketplace was downloaded. What? Uh, the most downloaded skill skills and club.

20:39

Yeah, so in OpenClaw, you can download skills on this kind of marketplace. The first one was the most the number one most downloaded was malware. It stole your SSH keys, your crypto wallets, your browser cookies  and opened reverse shell to attack servers um over. And a lot of people were giving fucking  like admin  like God mode access to their computers. Like this is crazy. Pete Steinberg, the creator of OpenClaw, has said, please don’t enable.

21:08

Well, he’s also an open eye. I still don’t trust him. That’s fair. uh respect the guy, also just because I still think he’s the first one billion dollar person company if he had probably. I’ve seen that that rumor. I think, you know, Sam Altman is kind of slimy and they did like Claude is  fumbling the ball. Claude is longer, you know, the Department of War. Maybe that’s right. Maybe that’s wrong. Not given surveillance. Maybe not letting Claude, you know, run run.

21:37

Missiles autonomously is probably a good idea based on what happened with multbook.  I’m gonna double down on Claude. I’ve seen that  but anyways,  I’m a different take I think that it’s it’s bad. I think it’s good and bad and I think overall Claude does have a  view of  a little bit more  left-leaning  Ideology and I think Tom a lot of stuff is is swinging to the right  and They could be on the wrong side in the end of what’s happening

22:07

Only history will tell. Yeah, like we don’t know. We’ll see. 10 years, 20 years from now. Just like uh a uh great old Bush. Yeah,  that guy was crazy.  But anyways,  going back to agentic wallet. So unfortunately, the number one most downloaded skill according to this thread was malware, which kind of gave you control to manage your crypto wallets and everything. um And we’ll leave this in the footnotes as well.  But the reason why I bring this up is because we’re starting to see a trend  where

22:37

Phantom wallet, Coinbase. um I’m sure Metamask will be next, but not anything else I have known yet. They are starting to allow MCP controllers or connectivity to UmbitClaw. Yeah. Why? They’re doing it via command line, right? Which I thought was really CLI. Yeah. Really clever.  But do know why? No. Well, we all can guess, but the reason is,  well,  if I were to take a guess  is people just don’t want to manage their money. They want…

23:06

other things or other people to manage it. What do you think 401ks, you know, with your employer, they have some sort of contract with a firm like,  um, you, you’d be, you’d be, what’s it called? Yes. UBS. Thank you. Like UBS.  Um,  they will manage your portfolio, your 401k for you.  Um, why? Because we’re not experts. Yeah. It’s mutual funds and all of that.  It’s, like why everyone buys QQQ or SPY versus, you know,

23:34

like most people, if you buy an index like the Fortune 500, they’re better off than going and buying NVIDIA. Even though NVIDIA has been a great one, most people don’t know when to sell it. Just like PayPal. bet you people have held PayPal from the start, not realizing PayPal is on a death spiral. Granted, all the rumors of somebody buying them. But I get what your case you’re making is.

24:03

Nobody wants to manage their money and actually most Americans don’t, you know, they cannot cover $200 bill and the people that do so well and the reason that even I can manage my money well is when a paycheck gets deposited, it gets split up to spending money, to paying credit cards, going to savings because I don’t have to think about it. If I had to think about it, I’d be bad at it. Yeah. And a lot of us just have so many decisions to make throughout the day. We don’t want to spend half of those decisions doing

24:32

Nuance shit that we can always just automate. So I do want to run this quick video. It’s about a minute. And this is kind of how it looks like when this is from the Solana  sub Reddit. This is what Solana plus USDC open collage and payment looks like. So this guy made a  bot  and  I’m guessing previously it was a, um, some sort of configuration, but now it says, Hey, can you send 50 cents to my software wallet?  I’ll use telegram. You can use telegram and WhatsApp for these.

25:01

kind of interactions with OpenClaw. So it’s typing. I feel like the UI could be better for this kind of use case. So it says, let me send 50 cents, kind of just agree with you. And then it will send, it gives you the transaction hash and a link for that. And you can kind of just view it on the Solana Explorer, which is the blockchain explorer where can see where the money moves.

25:30

unlike traditional finance. So that’s largely it.  Now, one more thing I do, I will want to share kind of just to summarize my point. Well, not my point, but like just how everyone is using these, you know, autonomous tools to manage people’s money.  Coinbase came out and you can follow this link on the footnotes.  Too long, didn’t read. Agentic wallets are the first wallet infrastructure built specifically for agents.  Equip agents with autonomous spending, earning.

26:00

and trading capabilities in minutes with built-in security guardrails in the battle test at 402, I’m sorry, X402 protocol, which is largely again used to pay for paywalls autonomously. Like you don’t need to add your credit card or your debit card and then just pay it. You put USDC in your wallet and it automatically gets paid off from that. So this is the future. This is where we’re heading.

26:26

I think it’s a really interesting world of this.  I see the problems that could arise where  every bot is trading and  they all have similar  knowledge bases that are essentially moving money and  flows in their own way.  I could see a crash at some point where all the money moves in one direction that crashes the market. I could also see all the benefits of this. I think we’re going to see a world where

26:54

You don’t have to pay a hedge fund manager to manage your mutual funds, manage your 401k, your Trump account, all of those things where more than anything, you can go pick some different flavors of an AI and essentially put it out there and say, hey, this is how we’re running everything. mean, Bitcoin was largely created because of the subprime mortgage collapse that happened in 2008. And after that, I think we’re still seeing a lot of

27:22

similar patterns even in 2026. And you know, like, I think one thing I want to share this year is the fact that everything can be 24 hours. Like the big part is what do mean everything can be in 24 hours? Everything’s 24 7 3 65. Oh, on crypto. Yes. Yes. Like it’s, it’s, it’s different. Like, you know, tokenized gold prices surged to a high of, you know, 4,500 announced in the U S

27:51

As the right almost 55. Yeah, 5500. Yeah, I don’t know what I said, but as as the US and Israel strong Iran that essentially those tokenized assets are moving in real time quickly all over the world and there while these real gold markets are all closed like it is the way of the future because the market doesn’t wait I I You see it. You see it. The reason President Trump has done any action

28:20

No matter what he’s playing the market more or less. He does it on a Friday night. The market kind of figure out what’s going on. So when it opens at, you know, six AM or whatever  on,  on Monday, that there’s not a huge crash. Like if you would have done this on a Wednesday market, what a crash. would have hit trip wires.  Things would have went crazy. But in a tokenized markets, they’re there. Nobody’s stopping anybody. There’s no trip wires. There’s none of that stuff. There is worry, worry that, you know, there’s no trip wire market could liquidate.

28:50

There could be runs on banks like we’re gonna have to see what happens but these tokenized assets let real-time thing I think the same thing as poly market lets you  bet and get real news Faster than what’s actually happening. I knew about the the Iranian strikes granted  We all saw it coming like if you didn’t you’re blind straight up almost 20 % of yeah, and that’s closed right now

29:15

Oh, and oils up 20 % really just yeah, like within the past couple hours again, it’s about one on Saturday. Oh God, but these tokenized assets are what moves faster and shows real time what’s happening and where market sentiment is where regular markets wouldn’t do that, where poly market is predicting what’s going to happen sentiment wise, too. So it gives people all over the world insights to what’s happening faster and faster because imagine, you know, like Claude

29:43

Anthropic had that fight with the United States government on all that on safety and everything Imagine if they’re a publicly traded company and they did that at five and they said no the stock would have tanked You know if it was tokenized or tanked overnight or would have went up and then you could see the market sentiment and I think that’s really really powerful and I also Think that’s like, know, especially with AI traders. You can go arbitrage, you know prices very quickly make some money in the chaos and

30:12

still make sure the market is safe and secure for all of us. mean, can you imagine some guys on the Bahamas on a Saturday morning and then next day, another company went down 20 % or something? It’s crazy. I would have a heart attack if that was that guy. Yeah, I’m trying to say, also for better for worse, think money moves better when it’s a market that’s open 24 seven. I mean, you could hear Brian Armstrong from Coinbase talk about it all the time.

30:41

Couldn’t agree more with that guy in that area. um So  yeah, I think this is the future, which is largely why we’re building MintLog, quick shameless plug, but with MintLog, we’re trying to automate people’s money.  We’re starting with crypto and then eventually into real world assets. You can find us on the base network and the Arbitrum network as of this month. So that’s what we’re building. Go  ahead and check it out at mintlog.com. also,  yeah, let us know what you think of Social Edge Report this weekend. you…

31:09

If you want to be on the podcast, we’re happy to bring guests. know, we want to do live, live chat. can do this, or excuse me, we can do Twitch. can stream. We’ve been planning it for a while, but we haven’t,  we have to, so, you know, let us know what you think and we would love to have you. Well, yeah, thanks for watching. Cool.