172. Now Is Your Opportunity, Altcoin Narratives, Crypto Investor Tips, and ETH vs SOL w/ Matt Willemsen

You got to sort of step back and accept that crypto is a very, well, risky asset. Of course we all love it, but at the end of the day it's very risky, can lead to significant returns. But whenever there is like a really stressful event, it's often the first thing that people look to cash in to get back some liquidity. And therefore that's why it also can just plummet in price very quickly when you get that cascading effect.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me is Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of our scaling a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. And if you like the podcast, we'd love for you to leave us a review, share it around or subscribe. It's how we bring the podcast to each and every week. Completely free. No affiliates, no advertising, no nonsense giving you the beans on how to win in crypto. And today we've got another amazing guest, someone that's been on the podcast before, but he hasn't. He was playing a supporting role. This time he's in the. He's in the. He's in the hot seat. Matt Williamson, the head of research at Collective Shift, the company that we all work for. He oversees our research team and produces quality, quality content related to crypto assets and blockchain technology. Matt has worked in the crypto space since 2017 as a writer, reporter and independent researcher. And he holds a bachelor's degree in business from Monash University, double majoring in accounting and economics. And when he's not deep down the crypto rabbit hole, Matt enjoys hiking and running as well as spending time with friends and family. And I've been working with Matt for, geez, Matty, seven years. Six years.

That's where we're a lot less, a lot younger in crypto years as well. Yeah, about six years or so.

Six years. Wow. So I absolutely love working with Matt. He is the most knowledgeable guy I know in crypto and he has has the track record to prove it. So Matt has helped thousands of our members over the course of Collective Shift Journey and now along with his research team, they deliver to over a thousand paying clients of ours and members in our membership platform at Collective Shift, as well as our platinum members. Matt delivers all of our masterclasses, all the research, we have B2B partners so we deliver research and content to some of the leading exchanges and brokerages in Australia and across the world. And Matt oversees all of that as well as his Altcoin analysis. And just understanding the market trends have been phenomenal. Like, you know, going right back, Matt put out a post back when bitcoin was bottoming around November 2022 when he was starting to buy and that turned out to be within a few days of the bottom which is an epic, epic sort of time to buy. Bitcoin shared Pendle a new Altcoin or was a new altcoin at $0.14 on the platform and it got as high as 50x in this investment which was nuts. And, and as well as Solana when Solana had that sort of big dip, that was one of his first investments that he shared in two years and since then it's done about a 6 or 7x as well as helped a bunch of our members avoid ftx. About a week or so earlier, before FDX blew up, we had a post go out to, to help people avoid that before it imploded. So Matt, you've got a record mate that is, is one of the best in the world I would think and it's awesome to work with you man and you've helped a lot of members so it's awesome, awesome to have your time to jump on today.

Yeah, let's get into it and like no better week really in terms of just talk about eventful and volatility. I'm, I'm happy to dig into sort of what has happened, try to unpack it and sort of I guess give you all an understanding of what's coming up.

But yeah, yeah, Matt, I'd love to start with just obviously, you know, as the day time recording Wednesday the 7th in Australia, there's been a lot going on. We had the big, I guess liquidation events that occurred on Monday when bitcoin and the wider crypto market and macro markets plummeted. We've now seen a bit of a bounce and correction. Could you just quickly take us through kind of what happened, why we saw a massive sell off and then maybe why we're starting to see an initial bounce off the lows in the last day or so.

Yeah, so like, like a lot of things there's always, you know, multiple reasons why prices go up or down. In this case it was, you know, quite unique in the sense that there was one very, very obvious and significant reason and it was all just the domino effect after I think last week the Japan Japanese sort of central bank lifted interest rates for I think the second time since 2007.

So I went from like a 0 to 0.1 sort of percentage range that they have and they, they bumped that up to 25 basis points. And they sort of also, you know, in their press conference of their language was sort of, you know. Well, it surprised the market to keep it, to keep it simple. That led to a lot of volatility in the yen. Like foreign exchange markets really strengthened the yen. Again, like very simple terms. The Japanese yen has just been getting absolutely hammered for decades. Weakening compared to USD, even Australian dollars. You've probably got a lot of friends or family who are going to Japan in the last couple of years. It's not really, it isn't really a coincidence. It's because the Japanese yen, the exchange rates looked very favorable and yeah, all of a sudden the yen just started to rip higher, strengthened. Not something it has not done in a very long time. That freaked out a lot of lending and borrowing markets and created a lot of like margin calls. Essentially. A lot of sort of people who are borrowing Japanese yen ended up just, yeah, just losing a lot of money and I think to scramble to get back to pay off any, any of the calls that they had. So that resulted in just high, high extreme volatility. I think it was, it was the third, only third time I think the volatility index. So to really put it in context, the volatility index, just a sign of just stress in the market. It was the third time in this century that that has gone above, I think it was 60. So the other two times were the GFC and also like the, the COVID sort of panic. So that just really gives you a sense of how panicked everyone was globally and it trickled into crypto.

And Matt, do you want to just share like in terms of. I think sometimes crypto investors think that the world evolves around crypto and that nothing else sort of impacts crypto outside of it, if that makes sense. And really that is the, the opposite of the truth. You know, the reality is the macro markets have a significant impact and when you have this macro.

Technical issue, it's going to hit crypto pretty hard. And what we saw was, you know, for example, jump crypto that were, you know, offloading what seemed to be all of their eth on a Sunday in the US which is very odd.

Can you just maybe walk us through what happens when you start to get these liquidation events trickling the crypto and why we see markets go down so fast, so quick.

Yeah, I think you gotta sort of step back and accept that crypto is a very well risk, risky asset. Of course we all love it, but at the end of the day it's very risky, can lead to significant returns. But whenever there is like a really stressful event, it's often the first thing that people look to cash in to get back some liquidity. And therefore that's why it also can just plummet in price very quickly when you get that cascading effect. And that is what I assume entities like jump crypto were having to do to pay off maybe other things.

In other sort of, I guess, financial reasons, such as borrowing cash, for example, or borrowing even Japanese yen more specifically. So that's why it is always interconnected to, to I suppose what is happening in the world of macro. It's, it's sort of a bit frustrating at times as like a crypto investor to see the correlation between like Bitcoin's price action and like the Nasdaq and how it's performing. Often it can be very strong. So if I wake up and say the NASDAQ has gone up 1% last like yesterday, I could be pretty confident that bitcoin is going to go up by, you know, 1% or call it thereabouts. At other times, like it almost just is its own echo chamber where bitcoin just does its own thing, NASDAQ does its own thing. A very weak correlation. So that is always like a bit, a bit frustrating as an investor. But at this stage it was extremely correlated just because of how relevant, like how significant this event was. So, yeah, I definitely remember in 2022 there was, that's probably a time to your point, Ben, where there was our little bubble of crypto where there was just internal credit crises, where terror collapsed and then that, that year led Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi, other lenders, and it was almost this little systemic sort of bubble that was just like bombs were going off everywhere and crypto prices were tanking. All the while the macro world, you know, just went on like happy days. Nothing was really affecting them. So that's like the difference between like those sort of internal events and those like endogenous events or macro events that can really affect crypto prices.

That's right, yeah. The internal ones were like cascading failures within the ecosystem.

Yes.

And this one, like the big advantage of crypto is it's open 24, 7, 100% of the time. Traditional markets are about 19% of the time. And Think about this. If you have to cover something and you have to get money quickly, it's going to be at least T +2 in a traditional market. In crypto it's instant 24,7. So that's going to be the first thing to go to get liquidity sucked out of it if you need to cover a loan.

Yeah, 100 which is probably what happened with Jump. Right? That's, you know, we don't really know, but that's exactly right. But it's like if you're getting liquidated on a Sunday, you're not going to be able to go and just withdraw a bunch of equity or stock out of your, your positions. It's like crypto is like the only liquid thing you get your hands on.

You have like a big player do something like that. The market starts to move, you start to get news. Then retail also have access to crypto 24 7. So instead of just freaking out during market hours and having time to think about it 19% of the time, you get to freak out 100% of the time. And you can always put that trade on and make that emotional trade and that's when it really starts to cascade.

So Matt, in terms of what we've sort of see play out, bitcoin dominance is starting to reach four year highs. I think bitcoin dominance excluding stablecoins up to sort of 70% ish, you know, levels not seen since 2020. In the past, bitcoin dominance hitting these sort of levels has actually been more of an indicator that we start to see an altcoin season. But I'm not entirely sure if that's going to be true this time around. Just considering the market participants being very little retail, you know, mainly bigger wallets I believe that are in the space buying up predominantly BTC eth Solana, do you foresee this being a turning point more positive to altcoins or do you think this is actually more of a deterrent away from altcoins performing well in the, you know, in the medium term.

Medium term I'm still confident bitcoin dominance will, will, will come down short term. I definitely think it will stay at these levels. If not maybe trend, trend slightly higher while all this gets that get sorted out. But to your point, like yes, yes, I believe bitcoin dominance will fall in the medium term. The big difference this time is the extent to which it falls. I highly suspect won't be anything like it has in the past. So that will mean we won't see this raging alt season where everyone's just winning by choosing any random altcoin that all sort of go up together. It won't be as dramatic as that.

Yeah, I agree. I think this cycle is different in a sense that you just look at the volume of coins in the market. There is infinitely more crypto projects out there. I think a lot of the older chains, we've been harping on about this for a long time. A lot of the older chains, older coins is arguably, probably won't perform as well as others. So trying to find those right projects, I think it's important.

Matt.

So basically what we've seen today or in the last hour or two is the bank of Japan.

What seems to be announced that they're not going to increase rates anymore. They've sort of backflipped while the market. There's some very political words they're using, but basically they're like, we can't increase it now. Look what that did, you know, in a, in a real sense. Do you think that this will trickle into the US Getting the money printers going again? We already saw, I think, I saw this morning, potentially a plan to start buying back some bonds or something. Where do you think this, this, this goes? And do you think the bottom is potentially done, like, outside of. I suppose my opinion is that I think it's, the bottom is forming. Unless something, again, dramatic happens at a macro level, it seems that we're, we're potentially bottoming. What are, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think the thing to really highlight here is the timing of all of this being an election year. I think this is definitely, again, we will never be able to know this stuff, but I think I, I think there are like, I wouldn't be surprised if there's forces at play that have maybe, you know, maybe a phone call has come the way of the Japanese central bank to say maybe just like, undo what you did just last week because. Why? Why? Because the Democrats currently are in power and if they were to let this uncertainty continue, it would very likely result in stock prices going down and other assets, people just losing a lot of money and for political reasons, as we know, like, that isn't very, you know, doesn't lend itself to being a lot like, favorable towards the Democrats. By the time the elections come, you have a lot of voters who are just annoyed, disgruntled and like, well, maybe maybe another candidate like Trump would be able to help my, my asset portfolio or whatever. So I think those forces could be at play here. And if that is true and if these, these News that has just been coming through before the podcast started, I think there was yet comments from one of the people in that central bank saying they were yet thinking about unwinding their decision. If that is true, I definitely, I definitely think there's like a very strong argument that the bottom like is in. I'd be willing to. To say that. And we just sort of continued going on to what everyone is expecting to play out in the second half of this market. To your point Ben, the US actually starting to cut rates in September. We've already seen other central banks around the world doing that as well in recent months, which all is really good for crypto prices in simple terms. Okay.

Awesome Matt. So as this pullback or correction changed your outlook in any way, shape or form or you've still got that same vision of how this plays out over the next couple of years.

Yeah, over any time frame even like short term like it hasn't changed my outlook. It was really all just a. Yeah technical reasons really if it was something to do with like all of a sudden the economic outlook being terrible for the US in particular or like particularly that reason or something else like sure it could have but nah, definitely not.

What would have to happen for you to go. No, my thesis here is invalid.

This is.

This is not going to play out the way we think.

There's a few ways that that where that would just invalidate things. So at the moment my rolling sort of outlook is like like most people really I think around March, April, May, somewhere like that. I expect to be the peak of the the bull market. A big reason for that just being historic timing from. From the halving, you know as as one sort of input for that. But other reasons as well I'm sure you've discussed a lot like global liquidity, other macro conditions that are all sort of lining up for that same sort of cycle to play out. So reasons why that wouldn't. Yeah that would no longer be my running sort of outlook would definitely be just a very you know, calamitous event in in global markets.

Particularly sort of the outlook for the US economy just just going badly like that would again to importantly that's more for you know from now over the next like nine months or so. Again as you've always probably discussed on this podcast, a lot of it just ends up being money printing at the end of it stimulus. So like longer term I would still be extremely confident you know, bitcoin in particular and some other majors would do well other events even short term that could really Again, just make me a bit more just cautious about crypto as a whole. Would be some, a lot more, I suppose, action in terms of the regulatory side of things rather than at the moment. It's a lot of talk, posturing, things like that. But if, if they were all of a sudden to introduce a bill that was extremely restrictive and all the crypto industry just like wasn't a fan of it, but the regulators just didn't care and they just still pushed it through and the President signed off on it. Like that would of course be very like bleak for the outlook for crypto, particularly over like the short to medium term.

That's very key. And what Matt has said there is fundamentally nothing has changed for crypto. And over the last few days, a lot of people have lost their minds and changed away from their strategies, been emotional and done trades they probably shouldn't have. We all know that investing rewards the patient money moves from impatient hands to patient hands. And if we think about this particular event, I think everyone, our company was quite calm because it's water off a duck's back. It's what we're used to and we see it for what it is. And events will always happen, markets will always have corrections. But you need to look at that and say, okay, last week I thought this about crypto. Well, let's just choose bitcoin. Cause it's easy to talk about. I thought this about bitcoin this week. Has anything in bitcoin fundamentally changed or has the price just changed and it's just the price. So if that's all it is and your strategy is around accumulating more crypto and accumulating more bitcoin, it is now on a fire sale. This is the point where you make your money and you accumulate. It's not a point to get scared or emotional. But like Matt said, there's not heavy regulation. There hasn't been a huge shakeup within the industry. There hasn't been anything fundament has happened to change our thesis about crypto. So it's business as usual and keep going and carry on. Because Matt, the end of this year leading into next year is absolutely stacked with crypto. Favorable events that are going to happen.

Oh yeah, sure is. Like, I'm not sure how much time we've got to talk about this stuff, but just they're all lining up really. Just like, you know, the election in November. And also just what I talked about earlier, like the incentives for the Democrats at least not to make the market crash. Like, sure, you could get that extreme side of it where they want to make it like just rally. But again just I don't think it's going to be anything negative in terms of markets, put it that way. And then yeah, just other reasons like global liquidity has been trending up for, for a while now, which after you know, a couple of years of sort of pulling back and then also just yeah, the monetary policy side of things. You know, a lot of central banks starting to cut rates which of course just you know, increases the appetite for risk, like for assets, including, including cryptocurrency. But yeah, other reasons as well. But yeah.

Oh mate. Yeah, I can't wait. It's like it's a stack roster, man.

It's so good.

Oh yeah, this is like a concert lineup for like or festival lineup. You'd be losing your mind. Like it's so, so good.

And, and the big thing here is people then like the, the big thing here is people then get worried like okay, if everyone's like oh, this looks like an amazing setup, you know, is as am I as an investor maybe should I be thinking contrarian and be like oh, position myself sort of against that happening? I get that question a lot over the years. And the big, the big thing I always say here is like you're only listening to like a very tiny bubble of people who are the ones, the survivors of all these years, who are the ones saying, who are now very confident and that can appear as your consensus if that's your whole input of crypto information. But talk to anyone on the street and they don't haven't looked at bitcoin in years and they will only get interested once prices have already gone through all time highs.

That's exactly right and we've touched on it a bit here. But I want to go a bit deeper into.

Investment mindset things to look out for and common traps because we have a lot of experience in this area being in crypto for quite some time and we're in that kind of boring period between the halving and when things really pop off. We have had one event this week where there's been a liquidity crash and prices have gone down, you know, 20 plus percent up to 50 in, in some altcoins. But it's also that boring period where you know, you accumulate against your strategy. Should I be doing more? There's fomo. I'm going to miss out. Are you able to walk us through Matt? Some of those come common traps and what will help people in terms of mindset? Just the Things you've seen and experienced over the years.

Yeah, particularly even in the context of this. I'm already starting to see it a bit this, this week as we've started to correct. One big thing I encourage investors to think about is it sounds simple but just like looking at it even, even on a chart or this understanding of, you know, just because something goes down, you know, 50%, it needs to then go up 100% for it just to get back to break even. Like so you're seeing, I guess. Why am I talking about that now? I think you're seeing a lot of charts now on social media showing like the best, the best bounces, if you will, like which altcoins are going up the highest. But if you actually just then go back to what it was last week, it's still at a lower price than last week. So yes, like momentum is a big thing in investing in crypto in particular. So in it's helpful to see which ones are outperforming the other altcoins. But at the end of the day they're all, they're all down still. So you know, a big one is just if something's down 20% needs to go up 25% to get back to break even, something is down 30% it then needs to rally by 43% just to go back to break even. So by far that's like a big just trap I see people falling for in terms of if I am like putting my money into an altcoin today, if it's gone down 30%, am I happy, am I confident? And if I've already held it and have gone, it's gone down 30%. Like do I still think it can go up 43%? And if the answer's sort of no, then it's sort of like, well, you know, maybe consider either just selling it or just not investing in it.

And Matt, I want to touch back on a point that you made before around like shorter term.

You know, holders and, and people that come into the market and sell down and panic and the fear that, you know, versus talking about. There was a chart I was looking at yesterday around the liquidations of short term bitcoin holders. And you can see that there was huge increase of short term holders. So I think that the definition of short term is at less than three months who came in, bought and sold over the last few days and are down significantly. And that's only showcasing, you know, bitcoin on chain that's not showing all the centralized exchanges where all the retail Investors actually are. And so it was your point, Matt, around just like getting a viewpoint of where your data is around the sentiment of crypto and like when everyone, when you think everyone's on one side of the trade, but reality is you're just listening to 15 very loud people on Twitter. It's like that's not the reality of, you know, the actual situation. The actual situation is no one really has an idea what they're doing. They come into crypto because they think they're going to make money. Then they wake up, it's down 35% and they watch some YouTube influencer saying it's going to go to zero. And it's just like they're panicking and sell. And that just happens over and over and over and over again. And that's really where you get these huge sell offs. And where the opportunity comes from is, is, is buying. When there's blood in the streets and there has been blood in the streets the last couple of days and it takes some kahunas to back yourself and buy the dip. If it's, if it's your first rodeo because you're like, well, maybe this is it, you know. And even some of the platinum members I was speaking to, it's like that, you know, even, even if you've been in the market for a long time, there's still that, there's always that little whisper, you know, it's like what Checkmate.

Said where like you feel uncomfortable about it. That's how you know it's going to be a good trade.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, for sure. I think that psychology of any investing, but even particularly crypto, given that the future of it is, well, it's so undefined as a who asset classes like yes, bitcoin started in early, very early 2009, but the Bitcoin started exchanges were more like 2011. And it wasn't until the Ethereum and the ICO era where a lot of the crypto market infrastructure and all that and people just in general got interested in crypto. So this asset class in many ways is still like seven, eight, even nine if you're being generous years old. So people just don't really have any idea of how high or what could happen in the future. So when they see the number go down 30% and they don't really fully understand the reasons behind it, you can understand why a lot of people then just do panic and sell. But yeah, that is an opportunity for those who have more of a context and understanding about what is driving price.

Yeah, spot on now, Matt, I want to get in the beans of a question that a lot of us have on our mind. A lot of our members meet me as well around the Ethereum Solana pair. And we've seen today that this ESOL pair has hit another high.

In terms of Solana basically outperforming eth. What are your thoughts on ETH versus Salon at the moment? Obviously, Solana's performed extremely well. And again, for, for listeners of Ben and Bergs, if you're not a member, you know, you may not have heard me say this, but I believe there's a world where Ethan Solana both live. Right? There's a world where Android and Apple both live. There's a lot of people that like to think that the only one's going to survive. And, you know, which camp are you on? And you're going to be shot. Yeah, you're gonna be shot if, you know, you're not on one tamp. I own both. I'm bullish on both.

Right.

But Solana has been outperforming Ethereum now for a little while and then you could sort of bundle layer twos into this sort of category of just, you know, market underperformance in correlation to other assets. Matt, what's your take on that? Do you think that's just been a narrative driven piece? Do you think it's just because of, you know, a lot of the activity and meme coin activity has been happening on Salana? You know, obviously we've got the ETF that's launched. We've had positive ETF flows last day or two with eth. Fundamentally, this feels strong to me, the ETH play, but underperforming, which is usually a good sign that the returns are near. But.

There'S always that just inclination of like, is this time different?

Yeah, definitely. Right? Yeah, you could say, yeah, you could say the same thing about, you know, even at SAR this year, you know, like Polka Dot or, or Cardano or something, they've. They've been underperforming in the back half of 2023. And if you saw this year, you could be like, oh, that means like they're going to come back. But like, again, if the fundamentals aren't. Aren't there, that's definitely not going to always happen. But in to your point, Ben, in your arguing and like, I agree in many ways the fundamentals are there, so why does it continue to just bleed against, against particularly Solana, which in many ways is its biggest rival. But of course I agree that both will exist in many years to come. So like the big thing I always point out here is like yes, the Salana price went down to 8 USD after the FTX collapse. It was, the ecosystem was, was on its knees and many people wrote it off. Of course, as the story goes, it's already did get up to as high as about 220 or so earlier this year. So just like extreme gains for sure. But from that very, very low base. If you're talking about like the outlook from now.

The picture is a lot different. Like I definitely don't expect Solana to, to do like another repetition of like whatever 8 from 150. I don't definitely don't expect it to do that again from now to the end of the bull market.

But even eth, like it still is so far below its previous all time highs and just can get no momentum. And I think momentum's a big thing. I just use as my biggest reason why this underperformance has been going on. There's just. We could talk for a long time about like the challenges with ETH at the moment from an investor's point of view. And even if there is new investors coming into the space, the confusion about why people, why people buy it, there's the argument of like unit bias, a very simple one. It just saw us $2,500, Solana's 150. Why not just, just buy that? It's cheaper. But obviously also the older L2 stuff, you know people, there's like literally like over 50 Ethereum layer twos now. And now there's also Ethereum mainnet. So people are like, if I'm just using one of the 50 L2s, yes, I need ETH, but all the transactions are still so cheap. I don't actually need that much, that much ETH to use this stuff. So that argument again, just that leaking and that sort of like damaging of that united identity like it all sounds. But if you've been long enough in the space you can sense it. There's definitely like factions of Ethereum spread around everywhere. Whereas Solana has this unification. Everyone is just all on the main blockchain itself. It's that monolithic blockchain as we like to call it. But that's from an architectural standpoint. But it also I think comes back to that community standpoint which in crypto again because there's no really standardization of metrics and all that like community narrative sentiment is an enormous factor in price. And as you said Ben, the meme coins have been one of the biggest use cases of this cycle so far, or at least from where it was previously. And therefore that's all happening on Solana because it's all the one chain and if people are using on Solana, they're enjoying it. They're enjoying the speculation side of things. So a lot of that demand comes back to Seoul and it's all everyone is sort of seems to be talking about because everyone is talking about meme coins, which is happening on Solana. So in terms of reasons why it's underperformed, I, I think I've touched on some of them, but there's, there's, there's several other reasons I could get into. But yeah, it's, it's a complicated one, but definitely it is. I think the story of the bull market so far in terms of Eth.

V Sol.

And Matt, if we take the last six months, where would you have spent most of your time exploring? Would it be on the Ethereum network or Solana network? And then in terms of capital deployment, have you deployed more capital into Ethereum network or the Solana network?

I think exploring on chain, I would say it's about 50, 50 at the moment. I spend a lot of my time on like my personal sort of just like I guess time on change is like researching and using certain stuff. I would say I'm a big user of Zora and base, so they're two Ethereum L2s. But then I also do spend the other 50% of my time just on Solana and even just seeing the meme coin sort of metrics and seeing just the amount of attention that's coming to these meme coins and just almost observing it in a sense and building my understanding of how strong that is, which there are reasons to why people are getting bullish on meme coins, but then also just other use cases of Solana. I think another point even just off the top of my head is I think a big thing in crypto is even just number of things to get excited about or number of upcoming catalysts. I think Ethereum is much further along than Solana, so there isn't as many even technical things to get excited about. Where Solana, they've got like a number of catalysts that you know, Ethereum probably did back at this stage in the last cycle. So that's even another thing I think people are getting excited about. But in terms of my capital.

Deployed, like I actually now hold more. Like I actually hold more soul than, than East. I know. I think all of our analyst team now actually do.

And also just Solana based assets like Jupiter and Jito like I also hold. Whereas Ethereum based assets, like I do have some. Like they're on their trust and transparency page and they're, they're. I'm bullish on them for other reasons but to Ben's point, like they're both going to exist. I think it's time people just stop, stop trying to pick sides.

And this is so interesting. So more capital deployed in Solana. Is that also because you got some sick airdrops and that really built up the bag or is it active? Like I've got money, I'm putting my money into the Solana ecosystem.

Yeah, I think it's the latter. Yeah. Most I know a lot of people got like even in our team, some of them were one of the under 10,000 addresses in the world that got the Jito airdrop which was sort of the catalyst for this airdrop season. I unfortunately wasn't one of them. But in terms of capital deployed probably like similar amounts to the Ethereum side of things. But the returns have been so great that I haven't thought of, I haven't even considered selling yet. Even though the weighting of my portfolio allocation has gone up a lot in terms of solving Solana holdings, like, I'm just, I don't know, call me just like way too confident. But I'm still given my experience and the timing of my bull market sort of expectations. I still think Solana like has a long way to go from when I told members that I was buying it. I think it was around US$20 or early 20s.

I'm the only one here that actually doesn't own any soul. Like a minuscule amount just to play around with. Right. Not even worth talking about.

Got no soul.

Got no soul, mate. Got no soul. I'm now feeling chronically underexposed, mate.

I might have to scoop some up in the coming months.

Well, yeah, well, yeah, here's the thing as well. Like Bergs, like I know you're a lot further along as well in terms of just like how much like you know, capital you personally like look after and things like that. And there's a strong argument that holding it in bitcoin and eth is perfectly fine, but if you want to take more risk, which there definitely is a lot more risk with holding soul for reasons to do with even just technical, the performance has always been an issue for Solana. Some people say that's bullish because like everyone's using it. But still it still Gets pushed to a point even just recently, where it just continues to buckle even at the infrastructure layers. And so the RPCs or the MetaMask equivalents, if you will, have started to, like, struggle with so much demand and even just like, yeah. Other reasons why Solana's architecture or infrastructure is just still a lot more riskier, like, or uncertain compared to Ethereum. And there's a lot of other. There's some other reasons why Axelana is riskier than Ethereum, but that. But that's definitely a big one. So again, it depends on your investment goals really, and what you're trying to get out of investing in crypto.

Absolutely. And this is one of the things that held me back where, you know, the, the technology and pausing the blockchain. I'm quite a purist when it comes to blockchains, you know, with.

Yes.

You know, you want decentralization, you want it to be permissionless, censorship resistant, neutral, borderless. All the good stuff.

Right.

And you have varying degrees of that. But just seeing even the group chats we're in, Matt, with the lads, like all the different crypto lads going after all these crazy meme coins. Just the amount of attention it's getting and how the innovation happens so quickly on Solana. I've been thinking about this for a while, to the point where I'm going to allocate 1 to 2% of my portfolio to Solana, because it does have the ear of the people. People are using it and it's kind of. People are over here in Bitcoin and it's a store of value, they know what it is, they're putting their money in it. They're over here having lots of fun in Solana, doing amazing things. And Ethereum, bit from a customer point of view, somewhat caught in the middle, where it still has a lot of utility and value and people are using it, but it's not at those extreme ends. And now only extreme people are in the market. Right.

Yeah, yeah, that's. That last point was great, but it's essentially, yeah, it's got it the last like 18 months for Ethereum. Like, you can just say in two words, it's identity crisis, really. Like, it doesn't have a brand or an identity really, or. And if you do have to explain its identity or brand, you will end up sort of talking for 30 seconds to 90 seconds at least, and you'll. And you'll still probably have the other person at the end still with a bunch of questions. But Solana and Bitcoin, you can summarize them in just like under under 10 seconds.

Very simply the Solana click for me when we're in the group chat and someone will just screenshot the latest meme where it's like bowdoin or something else and I'll just get it instantly I'll be like ha, that's hilarious. I'm like all right, I get the use fun and you get to gamble on meme coins. Great. I understood it in a quarter of a second.

Yeah, yeah.

I Matt, I wanted to know any other altcoins that you got your eyes on. Obviously we share a lot of these in all of these insights and buys and sells. Let's give the Ben and Bergs listeners that are not members just a bit of a little bit of alpha. Can you give us a couple that you're looking at or ones that you you're still bullish on this cycle?

Yeah, the one that I sort of brought more recently and it's one that I haven't I've watched since for the last five years or so and never been interested in buying it because of. Well I think for valid reasons it never ended up performing that well. Even though it's the largest defi project and it's the largest sort of real world asset project. I think more experienced crypto people know I'm talking about Maker MKR is one I still expect to do very well. This bull market it's, it's well talk about branded identity, it's got a very like poor brand in the sense from investors getting excited about it sort of angle that is about to change with this big end game upgrade where I've talked a lot for collective shift members about why end game is a big enough reason for me to go from not being interested in Maker at all to all of a sudden actually putting my money into the MKR token and expecting it to to do really well. And another one that's like probably you know, lower down the market cap ranking and a bit more well definitely a lot more newer than than something like Maker is is Echelon prime or Parallel.

Again I've sort of admittedly I have held that you know since I think it was about, I think it was about US$3 so it did get up to about 3:30 at this like towards the start of this year, you know mistake or hindsight's 2020 but I didn't take any, any profits admittedly. So we're back down to about 7 or 8 or $9 something like that.

However, I'm still bullish It's. I'm still bullish on the outlook for that. Again for Collective Shift members. Sort of had to explain that, you know, these, these things about, you know, how active do you want to be as a crypto investor like prime is one where I would emphasize the need to be more active than another just generic altcoin holding. The big reason for that is that prime has this sort of new token coming out tied to another project that the founding team is sort of building.

That can sound like a red flag in many cases, but in this case.

The token is let's make a new project to pay for the current project.

Exactly. The token is actually necessary for this new project. So they're actually giving like 40% of the supply to sort of people who are like staking essentially their, their prime tokens. So it's sort of like, yeah, you're getting an airdrop, a big airdrop coming down the line for, for those people. And then just thirdly out of the three that I would sort of highlight is, is Jupiter. It's. It's the Uniswap equivalent of Ethereum, to put it very simply. There's a lot of other things that Jupiter is trying to be now like a perps exchange. So think dydx. Also, they're trying to be sort of like what Binance Launchpad is doing by being a place where projects launch. So Jupiter is doing many things and I think it's becoming synonymous with Solana itself. When people think Uniswap or Metamask, they think Ethereum and Jupiter is now sort of the go to place for really doing anything on Solana in many ways. Sure, there's always these exotic or, you know, these auxiliary things that people get into, but for anyone using Solana, I would struggle to find anyone who's never used Jupiter. So that brand thing is huge. Of course there's other reasons why the Jupe token actually would accrue value, but that's one I'm also excited about for the rest of this bull market.

Love it. And all that Alpha you've been sharing for a long time now and the members platform and personally I'm involved in those projects as well and it's been happy days since getting in those. So thank you, Matt.

Matt, is there anything else you wanted to share, mate, before we look to wrap things up? Any other Alpha insights, trends, mistakes, anything that you wish to share and deploy some knowledge to the Benneberg's listeners?

Yeah, and any narratives as well. And I also want to touch on Matt's Personal investing.

Yeah, yeah, sure. I think one thing is I keep having so many conversations with people holding altcoins from previous cycles. So the big thing, you know we've been trying to emphasize in in some of our content is also just ways to think about, you know, knowing when to sell ones that just haven't been performing. And one thing you know, we really like to say is just if you don't if you were to just look at it today and you had fresh capital and you never just try to erase the fact you've owned at this time, like would you actually be interested in buying it? And the answer to that like should give you the answer to what you should do with your older holdings. Another big thing I see people yeah just like a long list of this sort of stuff. Of course I could go on for a long time but one related to that is also just I think people underestimate or investors underestimate how quickly the market like dynamics and market structure can change. Why I'm saying that is like the likes of people who are holding Polka Dot Cardano even off BNB to an extent but more so yeah those and like V chain and other old layer ones. I think people underestimate how much things have changed. I strongly believe that their window of opportunity of I didn't really think it was much of an opportunity at the time but I didn't give them much of a chance. But that chance that they did have has well and truly gone in terms of trying to eat into Ethereum's like market share. And now Solana is well and truly in second place and then there's a lot of daylight until you get back to those older like dinosaur chains some people are calling them which they'll say they'll stick around for a while because they've got ecosystem funds and stuff. But again just like try to be as objective as possible is looking at on chain metrics and even just how many new announcements are they bringing out and other signs of fundamentals of are these older chains getting any traction? And again if the answer is no and you're holding their tokens, the outlook isn't as rosy as what it was in 2018 or 2019 when there was so much less and the image the market structure was like it was anyone's there for the taking in terms of just market share and just being the dominant smart contract blockchain.

And now is a good time to go through your portfolio before we have fireworks and you touched on the sunk cost fallacy and inertia and I usually hear this in people's careers, and I'm like, okay, the job you're doing now, you'll be doing it for X amount of years, let's say 10 years. If you just came in now and you were in the market, would you choose this job? And the answer is generally no. And it's like, well, why are you? And it's because, well, sunk cost. Because I spent so much time here, you know, I've built this up. I don't want to lose these things. And it's just inertia. You keep going forward, you move up roles, you get higher and higher in the company, but it's not the thing you want to do. And applying that to investing as well, yeah, this might have been a great project once upon a time, but it didn't play out the way we thought it was going to play out. But I still have hope. And it's like, first of all, hope is not a strategy and it's a sunk cost. Would you buy that today? Would you actively accumulate more? And if the answer is no, you should be doing something with those tokens and allocating projects that you think will do well in the upcoming cycle.

Very well said.

I want to get to your personal investing mate. So I like to ask people that. Come on, Benneberg's. In terms of a pie chart, how are you kind of allocated to stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, you know, crypto? And what are your kind of goals with at the end of this cycle or net cycle? Do you want to diversify into anything else?

Yeah, I think when I do speak to people who, you know, they find out I've been working in crypto for seven or eight years and they just like, I've actually been asked, like, sometimes, like, oh, yeah, does that mean, like, you're rich? Like, because I've been asked that. Like, v. Yeah. Like, it's like a. But it's like, actually, it's actually like, it happens. And I've experienced that even a couple of times where, like, they haven't even gone in a roundabout way of asking them. So I'm just. Have actually asked me that. And like, isn't it weird? Like, they flat out ask.

They're like, oh, so you're rich? I'm like, well, no, because you get wrecked a lot if you kept all the stuff. If I didn't buy ICOs and I didn't trade, yeah, I would be like, stinking rich. But no, it's not that way.

I think a big thing for me, getting started my Career in crypto was like, that was, that was a gamble, right? And I was like, man, my career is. I'm investing my career into this, this, this, these cryptographic tokens like that you can't even touch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Explain that to your parents.

I was actually quite some. Well, yeah, people are so surprised when they hear that I was a bit. I did hold off investing like money because my first like, I obviously like brought into that like ICO error and stuff. But throughout 2018 and 19, which were deep bear markets when I was working like, like very much starting like full time really, I didn't actually invest like that much into well, anything really into like those D5 tokens and all of that. I was just really focused on like building up my. Just groundwork and just like my understanding of the space and, and my career. And then I started to get more into investing, you know, probably, yeah, call it at least like 2020 was when I started to take it like more seriously after a lot of like members back then were telling me how much money I'd been making them with my content.

So that's like. Since then, like, like I have put a lot of. Yeah, definitely like the, the, definitely the majority even like up towards like the vast majority at times of like the, the cycle. I suppose, like the vast majority of my wealth has been in like even just cryptocurrencies and even NFTs back in the day. I do hold, I do hold stonks or stocks as they're regularly called.

You know, back I started out on like an ASX and just like trying to pick some stocks like back before crypto. You know, some of them did pretty well, some of them not so well. And I've sort of accumulated some, some more stocks. That one in particular that I've sort of just kept adding to over the years. But I would say, yeah, the vast majority of my wealth is still like in, in cryptocurrencies and I plan to like, yeah, take out. I've communicated this with, with members as well. Like I plan to sell 100% of my altcoin holdings. So they are ones that are not named btc, ETH and Solana. And I definitely will be taking a lot of my Solana off the table, but I plan to hold like some for the next cycle. Eth, I plan to sell some of and keeping. Keeping some for the next cycle. And btc, I don't expect to be selling any of it. And what will. Why am I doing that? Well, it's, it's mainly A thing because I, I know that a lot of those altcoins in particular are going to go down, you know, 70 plus percent. Very likely. It's just the nature of the space with so many people rushing in at once. But then secondly, yeah I am, you know I do see myself buying, buying, getting in on the Australian Ponzi and insight into the, into the property market. But that would be more so just to, yeah, just to really diversify and not be so beholden to the whims of the crypto market which can be. Take its toll really when you're living and breathing it every day even work wise. Just. Yeah, it's a lot.

Okay, well I think that might be it. As you were talking there Matt, I think I was just thinking about the Eth Solana trade and do I own enough Solana never own enough crypto.

Right.

It's promised, everything's on sale mate. Now's the time. That's it. I think members, members always want to know the targets as well. Like as I said I'm more of a time based like investor. There's a lot of people calling for a thousand dollar Sol but I think in this bull market I, I definitely don't think it will get anywhere near that. So just be aware of like people just shilling it, throwing out any round prices. Just make up your own mind and your own decisions about what you want to do and get out of this cycle.

Matt, where can people follow you? Obviously from my perspective, if you really want Matt's insights and his investments, you know, you can come and join Collective Shift. Matt puts out all of his investments and insights and that's ultimately where he helps the most people and it's, it's a, it's epic value with him and the team. If you're busy, you're time poor and you need some help navigating the markets, Matt and the guys and myself are there to help and Berg so feel free to check out the description about booking a call if you want to see if it's a good fit. But Matt, where else should people look.

At Twitter X is the easiest way. So it's just my name so Matt underscore Williamson and yeah hopefully you know, chatting to well some of you I know would already be Collective Shift members but you know I hope to see some of you joining the platform and getting in the comments of my posts. I always like to get back to members in there or otherwise in the, in the community as well for our members that we have.

And Matt also does a weekly podcast over on the Collective Shift YouTube channel and podcast. So Nick and our scene. So Matt and our senior analyst, Nick, do a crypto market update 20, 30 minutes every every week, which is super valuable as well. If you want a very crypto specific news in Insights update, you head over to the Collective Shift YouTube channel or just search Collective Shift on your podcasting app. But we might wrap it up there. Gentlemen, thank you so much, mate, again for your time. It was epic. And yeah, if you like this episode, if you think someone else would find it valuable, you would love for you to share it around. Send it to a friend and let's get people.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks gents.