Digital Asset News covers Solana's major ecosystem announcements, macro oil concerns, and Morgan Stanley's crypto trading launch
Solo presenter Rob from Digital Asset News covers Solana conference announcements, Morgan Stanley entering crypto trading, oil supply concerns, and a book review on crypto trading psychology.
Summary
Rob from Digital Asset News covers a busy day across macro and crypto markets. On the macro side, he flags a potential insider trading incident around oil — someone shorted oil roughly 45 minutes before a ceasefire announcement that subsequently fell apart, with Iran calling it fake news and Trump stating that bombing would resume if Iran doesn't agree to peace terms. An energy strategist from Carlyle warns that oil storage tank bottoms could be hit in Europe by May and in the US around July 4th, which Rob connects to potential inflation risk. On the crypto side, the main focus is Solana's Momentum conference, where major announcements included a Google Cloud collaboration, SoFi launching a stablecoin on Solana, State Street launching a tokenized on-chain liquidity fund on Solana, JP Morgan revealing a tokenized instrument solution for cashless stablecoin reserves on Solana, and Anchorage being mentioned alongside JP Morgan in the announcements. Rob also covers the Firedancer validator client rollout, which targets 1 million transactions per second, and Morgan Stanley launching crypto trading on its E*Trade platform.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Macro Update: Oil, Iran, and Treasury Yields
Rob: Another interesting day in the digital asset space, and this is what's going on. The market's doing quite well, and we'll talk about that in a second, but there's been some turmoil in the macroeconomics, and this is what just dropped roughly 45 minutes to an hour ago. Apparently, there was some insider trading going on with oil — somebody shorted oil about 45 minutes before there was an announcement made that there was going to be a ceasefire or some kind of peace talks. That fell apart, and Iran came out and said fake news, that's not happening. Because of that, Trump says bombing will resume if Iran doesn't agree to peace. Those are the updates. Just expect more of that and expect a heck of a lot more turmoil, but that's what we have right now.
Solana Google Morgan Stanly Enters Crypto Trading
Rob: Before we get into the whole Solana talk about how much they are really just crushing it, just a little bit of around the horn with what's going on in the crypto space today. Two trillion dollars — Solana Google Morgan Stanly launches crypto trading on its E*Trade platform. Nobody wants to be first, but nobody wants to be last. Solana Google Morgan Stanly, with trillions in assets under management, comes in and says, "Hey, we'll do some crypto trading with you guys." More the merrier. I'm happy for that.
Oil Supply Warning from Carlyle's Jeff Curry
Rob: This is Jeff Curry. He's the Chief Strategy Officer of Energy Pathways at Carlyle, an investment group with roughly $544 billion in assets under management. I want to play this clip because it's going to be important as we get into July. Right now we're just in the throes of May. We've got June and July 4th and the 10th coming up. What he says about oil I think is very important, especially as it pertains to inflation.
Jeff Curry: I still say it's going to be sometime in the month of May that you're going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms, and in the US somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner. By the way, the inventories numbers coming out of the US — the ones we got last night, the ones last week — I've never seen anything like that before. And I think it's important to remember these inventory numbers — let's define terms: a deficit versus a shortage. We have a deficit today, meaning that demand is above supply and we're drawing inventories. It's not a shortage yet. So to answer your question, you have the shortages in places like Asia, and it's not that bad yet because you're not completely at tank bottoms. But in places like Europe and the United States, you're in a deficit, and you don't hit the shortages until you hit tank bottoms.
Rob: Let's see if we hit the tank bottoms or not. If oil is not replenished, we're going to see some major amounts of inflation go up, and that is not good for the economy, which is not good for our bags.
Luke Groman on Iran Peace Deal Timing and Treasury Yields
Rob: On top of that macroeconomics, I thought this was interesting. This is Luke Groman, president and author of the Mr. X Interviews, and he had this pretty good observation. He says, "Don't you find it curious that a new US-Iran peace deal leaks every time the 10-year US Treasury yield breaks 4.4%?"
I thought about that. As we start getting these 10-year yields up to 4.4, 4.5 and above, that's just free money for everybody and we have to pay that debt. But all of a sudden, this Iran peace deal comes out of nowhere, and then all of a sudden everyone's like, "Okay, the whole economy is going to be fine." And then of course we go through the same thing again. So if you have to learn any TA, learn Trump analysis and just follow him on Truth Social.
Kelp DAO Drops LayerZero After $292 Million Hack
Rob: Lastly, from friends of the show Coin Bureau — Kelp DAO, which had a major hack of $292 million, has dropped the layer-zero protocol called LayerZero, which was in charge of everything for the Kelp DAO. And look, you guys failed us. They're going with Chainlink. So if you're a Chainlink holder, congratulations. That is a big get, as LayerZero failed to stop that hack.
Market Overview and Ivan on Tech's Bull Mania
Rob: That is what is going on in the hotspots of macro and a little bit of crypto. Also today, everything's looking pretty good. Bitcoin was almost at 82k — 81,319. Over the last 24 hours we're down a little bit. On Binance, XRP is up a whopping 0.5% — watch out. Solana is up 2.7%, almost 7.3%, nearly 10% over 30 days, but Bitcoin is up 17%.
I read this great book yesterday from Ivan on Tech and we'll talk about it in a second, but I had to take a look back at some of his plays. This is Bull Mania, and I hope he doesn't get ticked off that I'm showing this, but this is his money line that he likes to talk about. So far this is looking pretty good. Taking a look at the weekly — Bitcoin has been down 14% ever since it flipped. Ethereum's down. XRP is down 40% since it turned bearish. Let me just filter this out into the ones that are actually bullish. Tron — I've got that in my portfolio, it's up 8% for a month, I'll take it. Hyperliquid up 6%. LEO token. Zcash. BitTensor — they did fail. World Liberty down 53%, as they should be. So the Bull Mania is looking pretty good.
Other people will say, "But Rob, Bitcoin's been bearish over five months." But over 30 days it's up 17%. You can't get them all. Over a year you are down 13%, and over 126 days we're down even more. Anyhow, we'll talk about that in a second.
Solana's Momentum Conference: Major Announcements
Rob: Let's talk about Solana and just how much they are crushing it. A lot of good things came out of the conference they're at right now — Momentum, or something like that. One of the announcements was that the Solana Foundation now has a collaboration with Google Cloud. This was just yesterday.
Conference presenter: I'll introduce pay.sh. Pay.sh lets your AI discover tools for any API that it might need and pay for it using Solana stablecoins — without any account, without any API keys. And we're really excited to be bringing on board Google Cloud as a collaborator for this project. With Pay, there are over 75 services in a single catalog that any agent can discover, access using NPC or X42 payment rails, and pay using their favorite Solana stablecoin, whether that's USDC, USDT, CASH, or PYUSD.
Rob: Also on top of that, SoFi Bank said the same thing. This is actually Ben Reynolds, Head of Business Banking. Take a listen.
Ben Reynolds: The new news is we're launching SoFi USD on Solana. We're really excited about it. We think that it is the right chain to use for payments — partially because of the cost, partially because of the settlement speed, and ultimately the throughput.
Rob: That is SoFi, a neobank, and they have chosen to launch their stablecoin on Solana. I hope that works out for them. And then lastly, State Street's tokenized on-chain liquidity fund is live on Solana.
State Street representative: Today we are very proud to announce the launch of Sweep, which is our new tokenized on-chain liquidity fund. We launched it in partnership with Galaxy. State Street is the investment manager and the issuer, and Galaxy is the placement agent and tokenization agent. And why is this important? Well, we have been managing cash since 1970. We have half a trillion dollars worth of cash under management at State Street. That's all in the traditional world. Cash is an asset.
Rob: Half a trillion assets under management. I'll take it. And they have all picked Solana. That's pretty great.
Fire Dancer: Solana's Dual-Client Architecture
Rob: But then there's this announcement, which I think is one of the biggest — even bigger than Google. This is Fire Dancer.
Fire Dancer presenter: The answer was impossible. The community radically underestimated the scale and sophistication of big tech and traditional finance. Even then, using custom hardware to process bursts of millions of packets per second on multiple links from dedicated physical networks was table stakes. Crypto was orders of magnitude behind and unaware of it. Since then, we've been grinding away. We open-sourced accelerated cryptographic networking and hardware primitives. We demoed 1 million transfers — simple, uncontended transfers per second — capacity on over 100 intercontinentally distributed validators. We deployed our hybrid validator and then our full validator. We worked closely with the community to increase capacity and robustness. And all the while we tested, audited, fuzzed, polished, tuned, documented.
Rob: Fire Dancer got rolled out. Everybody's ecstatic. But how good is it? There's a great website, chainspect.app — I'll put this in the description — and it takes a look at how Solana compares against other chains. You can pick any chain you want, except for some reason it doesn't have XRP, which I'm a bit bummed about. But it's got a whole bunch of different layer ones and layer twos you can compare against.
Just taking a look at Solana and Tron, my other favorite — real-time TPS versus Tron: Tron actually crushes it in real-time. Max TPS: 6,200 versus 272. Max theoretical TPS — meaning we could do this but it's not going to happen all the time — 65,000 transactions per second where Tron is a paltry 2,516. Volume, finality, and so on. You can play with this as much as you want. You can compare against Arbitrum, against Bitcoin. Oh, I'd like to report a murder. Anyhow, yeah, it's faster, it's great.
But the big question — doesn't Solana go down all the time? No, it doesn't. The last time Solana went down and I mean down was February 6th, 2024. It was down for five hours, which I've got to tell you, not too bad — my bank was down for a couple of days only a couple of months ago. As far as degraded performance, you have March and April, which means things were being upgraded, things were going on in the background. In 2023 there was one time in the year, and in 2022 there were three times. But look, sometimes you've got to break stuff to make it work. It's been going pretty strong for two years.
Now, the 65,000 TPS to 1 million TPS — that is what they are going for with Fire Dancer. There's a thing called single client versus dual client. Right now they are currently using the Agave codebase. Now they're going to push over to two of them — Agave and Fire Dancer — which makes it more resilient. If something goes down, there is a backup. That is the codebase. Agave is currently running on Rust. Fire Dancer is on C++. Runtime, ledgers — this is the difference, and this is why they have two, to make it more resilient.
The third thing, which I think is the bigger thing besides maximum TPS, is monolithic versus modular tiles. Monolithic would just be one big chunk in the CPU. With modular tiles, you can break things apart. Think of it like AI agents — having one AI agent would be like one client, one tile, one monolithic setup, versus having multiple different agents on that chip. One could be networking, one could be the CPU process, one could be the consensus, and so on. If one of those gets messed up and goes down, no big deal — they can reroute to another one. With modular tiles, there's near-zero downtime when doing upgrades or a degradation of the actual network.
Additional Solana Conference Announcements
Rob: Let me just go through the whole hoopla of what the announcements were. We talked about State Street. Also Anchorage and JP Morgan — this is funny — JP Morgan revealed a tokenized instrument solution designed to power cashless stablecoin reserves on Solana. Remember we talked about how people were saying it doesn't matter about stablecoins because all the banks and institutions are just going to do a private permissioned blockchain and trade amongst each other? You can do that. But guess what? All the liquidity of the world doesn't live on JP Morgan. All the liquidity doesn't live within other institutions — it is global. And to get all that liquidity that you want, news flash, banks are greedy. And they're going to work with these non-permissioned, open-ledger, decentralized platforms such as Solana.
Also, JTO just unveiled a self-custodial trading platform featuring centralized exchange-grade execution. Bittensor went live on Solana, which is great as far as AI, but again, it's just trading. And then Raposa Coffee announced a partnership with the Miami Heat and Miami Marlins. And I'm going to defer to what Rusty Bot said — this reminds me of a proper bear market. Me too. As soon as we start to get partnerships with sports teams, watch out.
So that's what we have for Solana and the big upgrades. Congratulations to the team. They've done a pretty great job and we'll see how it all works out. But I'm excited for what's coming up next into the next evolution of crypto.
Book Review: Ivan on Tech's Bull Mania
Rob: Lastly, I just want to give a shout-out to Ivan for a fantastic book. I got this book yesterday and it's very fast — about 260 pages, good, easy to read. Ivan did a great job. He actually gave me access to this back in December and I really hadn't paid attention to it. But when I was reading this book, a lot of things made sense.
Let me ask you if this resonates with you. Have you ever gotten into a position where you've bought crypto and you just watch it bleed out over and over again, and you know you should get out but you just can't? Or have you seen your portfolio grow exponentially and then it goes down like crazy and you round-trip your bags? If that's you, this is your book.
If this sounds like you — you intended to make a quick profit instead of being forced into a multi-year hell hole, trapped by your belief in the fundamentals and diamond hands — nobody's ever trapped in a trade. You can always sell. What you're trapped in is a refusal to accept that your idea was wrong. Tough stuff.
And then this was a good one: when you go down, it's not like you just have to recover the same percentage. When you go down 5%, you have to recover 5.3%. When you go down 20%, you have to recover 25%. If you go down 50%, you have to recover 100%. And anything below that — which I know a lot of us have been, myself included — we've seen massive losses. You're down 70, 80, 90%? You've got to do a 900% return.
But the best part of the whole book — I think it was page 251 or 260 — is where Ivan talks about, and he touches on this in the beginning too, how he lost $9.3 million in trades. $9.3 million. He watched his massive egg grow and then just watched it slip through his hands the whole time and couldn't do anything. He said he was trapped. He said he was having palpitations, getting very tired, bloodshot eyes. And that sounds like a lot of people. He watched it all go. And then he talked about how he thought about his mom, because his mom raised him — they were immigrants — and he's like, "I can't now even provide for my mom." And in the last page of his book, he talks about how he came back even more so and was able to buy a house for his mom. It was the greatest part of the book. It was beautiful.
If you'd like to read that book, it's going to take a while to get to, I'll just tell you that. But the book is available, it's about 30 bucks, there's a link in the description. It's not an affiliate link. Just check out the book. It was a great read.
Live Q&A
Rob: Now we'll do a little Q&A. I'll answer all your questions and we'll get the heck out of here.
Vincent says, "Greedy banks suck." There are good people that work at banks — I've met some very nice people — but the upper echelon of the banks, yes, they are extremely greedy. But aren't we all just a little bit? Not like those guys, but we're all a little bit greedy. We're all sinners out there. And those are also the ones that are holding up the Clarity Act.
Meme says Algorand blockchain typically sees around 800,000 to 900,000 monthly active accounts and between 15,000 and 30,000 daily active users. What are they doing on Algorand to do those kinds of numbers? Good for them. I do not own it. Solana, Ethereum, Tron, BNB, and Hype take most. Everyone else is fighting for scraps. BNB has been quite a laggard lately. I'm very tempted to take Binance out of my acronym — BEST: Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron — and put in Polygon. But unfortunately, if I do that, no one would call it BEST. It would be PEST, and that's a bad acronym. We'd have to move it to STEP or something — Solana, Tron, Ethereum, Polygon. I'm not going to call it the PEST because that doesn't sound good.
Crownator is right — most of them never hit a sell button. But boy, we can all buy, can't we? We can all dollar-cost average with the best of them.
Future Trader says 99% of crypto is over. I hope so. Wouldn't that be great if we could have the liquidity from all the altcoins that don't do anything just flow into the top 20 or 30 crypto projects? And also the developers working over there — maybe we could stop them from pivoting over to AI and say, "Hey, we'd like you to come to the Solana Foundation and work with us." They can leave those altcoins that just aren't making it.
Ivan used to be a Pulsechain and Hex cult member. He does address this in the book. There's this part where he talks about Richard Heart — whose real name he gives — and he has the Interpol most-wanted picture of Richard Heart in there, and he's like, "And that guy convinced you to do this, this, and this. I was guilty myself." Then he took all the money and now he's on the run globally. It was pretty funny. Then he talked about Raul Pal and a couple of others. I think that was like chapter three. It's great. You've got to get that book.
Why doesn't Coinbase list Tron? Probably — and I'm just going to speculate — they have this sweet deal with Circle. Circle's CEO Jeremy Allaire is also responsible for USDC, and they give some really fantastic yield on that. It took Coinbase forever to list Tether. They don't even do much with Tether. Did you know that if you have USDC and you put it into Coinbase, you can cash out, swap it into cash, and there's no fee whatsoever to put it right to your bank? But if you do it with Tether, you're paying a fee. At least that's how it was three months ago. I'm like, that's kind of weird, but I see why you guys have a partnership. Who else would not benefit from that? Well, Tron is the biggest. Tether on Tron does $3.2 trillion of volume yearly. So maybe Brian Armstrong doesn't want to do anything with that.
Shout out to Coinbase for laying off 14% of their staff. I know people will say, "Well, that's awful." Well, that's business. Unfortunately it's sad that those people lost their jobs, but this is why we have to embrace AI — because those people lost their jobs because of AI. Hopefully they can get other jobs and use AI. I think if you don't understand AI and start using it in your daily operations, you're going to be left behind. That's what I keep thinking about as far as management software for my rental properties. If I don't implement it now, someone else is going to do it and they're going to eat my lunch. I will not let that happen.
John says, "I keep reminding myself to zoom out when in doubt and just DCA, DCA." But I think the most important thing is not the entry positions — it's the exits. We've got to get better at that. We talked on this show since 2022 about those rules, and the last one is take profits. But did we do that perfectly? No. Could we have done better? Absolutely. I will do whatever it takes to find those ways to take profits in the best ways possible. That's why when I saw the tops that formed — which we didn't know until a month or two later — I had to take a look at who were the ones that called it right. And it was really two: it was CTO Larsson and it was Ivan on Tech. Those guys really did a great job. And now that I know what they did, it makes a hell of a lot of sense.
E*Trade will start crypto trading. They're going after Robinhood and Coinbase's client base, reportedly with lower trading fees too. Good for them. We talked a little bit about that.
Richard Hart — Interpol knows him too.
You think Polygon is going to get real movement out of this recent deal with Visa? Let's hope so. As a reminder, there are nine blockchains with Visa and Polygon is one of them. That's a pretty good step in the right direction. The Visa nine: you've got Arc, Base, and Tempo — those are all pretty much permissioned, not open. Arc is from USDC. Base is still a layer one but not something we can invest into directly, unless you invest in Coinbase. Then there's Canton, Polygon, Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar. Not a bad lineup.
Andrea says, "If the Democrats get back in, I think Algorand will definitely come to light again." Polygon is making a lot of moves through the entire bear market. Sandeep, the creator and founder, knows what he's doing and never sleeps. And Polymarket is blowing up in prediction markets — they're doing quite well. I don't think you need just Polygon or USDC on Polygon. Didn't they implement Solana as well? Correct me in the comments. But yeah, Polygon — it's a funny thing. I thought it would just keep going because it did so well. Right now I want to say it's ranked around 64 or 65. It used to be around the top 30 and it's fallen. Hopefully they come back. Hopefully they get a lot more adoption.
What happened to Roger Ver? He was at the Bitcoin conference. I thought he was exiled in Spain, but somehow it looks like he's off that. Hopefully he's doing well.
Polygon partnered with the Mormons just yesterday. Well, that's it — let's all get into Polygon. Maybe that's polygamy. Funny joke.