Hello and welcome to this special edition of Market Daily. We are coming to you from Dubai where Ox has announced that it is now available to retail and institutional investors in the United United Arab Emirates. Now UAE residents can trade more than 280 crypto currencies and 480 trading pairs on the exchange. We have a very special show today. We’d like to welcome our first two guests, Skybridge Capital, founder and managing partner, Anthony Scaramucci and Ox ventures partner, Jeff R. Hello, good to be here. How are you? I am doing fantastic, Jeff, how are you doing? Yeah. So OK. X has this big launch. We are sitting here in Dubai. I guess my first question for you both. I’ll start with you. Anthony is why is this market so unique? Why are we here and having these conversations today? Well, I mean, the the the the standard things or this is a fount of innovation. You can get anywhere, you can get the 80% of the population of the world inside of six hours on a plane. Uh They have done an amazing job of building infrastructure and regulatory infrastructure that’s very deep political or a polit. And so it’s made this a uh uh you know, over the next 15 years, this will be one of the big crypto centers, big financial centers. Uh Anybody in crypto will eventually have an office here is my prediction. And so congratulations to your team uh for, for putting this together and, and making this announcement, Jeff, I want you to jam a little bit on what Anthony is saying there, talk to me about the role that the Middle East is playing in shaping the future of crypto markets. Sure, absolutely. So uh UAE has a huge like market potential as of September. Uh you know, the year to year growth in UAE alone is over 40% for the crypto market. While the average for the Mina market is, you know, probably slightly over 10%. And uh as Anthony said, the regulator here is the most forward looking forward focused uh regulator that we’ve encountered. Uh they laid a very clear uh regulatory framework for the for the stakeholders here, not just the exchange service providers, but also custodians, you know, staking landing and uh you know, for the web three and the metaverse alike. So uh this is this is the the clarity, the transparency, the stability that it provides for the whole industry, I think sets the stage for, for folks from all over the world, Anthony, what’s driving this is this being driven by government, is this being driven by demand from institutional and retail investors? Is it being driven by capital that’s coming into the region? What do you think is the driving every, everything that you just said is components of it? But I think the, the missing element sort of the X factor is this government. And so when you’re looking around the world and you’re saying, OK, I wanna do plop my business and where do I need to be? And who’s gonna help me grow? Who’s gonna be there with a uh a great environment for my workforce, who’s gonna be there in a place where I can recruit easily, super talented engineers and super talented people to help me grow my business. Uh This is that destination, you know, my first time here in the UAE was about 20 years ago and I looked outside from my uh hotel this morning, I landed, come talk to you took a quick shower and I looked outside, I was just looking at the skyscrapers and looking at the landscape and I was thinking my God, what they’ve done in 20 years is nothing short of a miracle and it’s gonna be exponentially larger in the next 20 years. So just think about it from a business perspective. Uh I, I need talent, I need great energy. I need a great location with really smart governmental officials to help me grow my business. This is the destination in the world now. For all of that and that’s why OK. X is here, Jeff, I mentioned this is a special episode of Markets Daily. On Markets Daily. We talk all about um investments. We try and give our audience a little bit of alpha into what’s going on in the space. Tell me a little bit about your investment pieces. What kind of projects are you looking at? What’s standing out to you as we head to the end of the year? Sure, we’re, we’re uh a corporate venture. So we help formulate and execute, you know, with OKX as a firm uh really focus on. So what we’re focusing on, so we as the exchange, we focus on providing the best liquidity, best execution and user user experience for our users. But we also invest tremendous resources into the web three space. Uh most notably self custodial wallets, which probably is the best in class, you know. Uh nowadays, people can have access to within the wallet. We encourage users to do small bridge and the different discoveries and uh you know, uh different activities and to become a really native on chain users. So uh you know, as the as the investment arm, we help basically push this uh efforts forward. We also captures the, you know, the the the new kind of waves around, for example, right now, uh the UN E government Central Bank just announced that the the the new stable coin regime. And in conjunction with that. There’s a lot of initiatives around real world assets. So these really are the areas that we start to invest more resources and 10 and uh you know, focus on uh to build together with our excellent product team and marketing team. Anthony, what’s your investment thesis? I know you’ve worked with and collaborated with some start ups from the region. Maybe if we focus our attention back to the region, uh any interesting projects you’re seeing? Well, you know, I, I, we, we do our conference here every year. Well, we started that in 2019. I think we did it at Emirates Palace and then we did it at Saad Island. It was done here in Dubai once and so there’s a lot of different smaller projects. There’s a few small exchanges that we’re investors in. Um But, you know, for me, I’m gratified to be here to be part of this Oookx launch because, you know, they are uh probably the second largest exchange in the world and they’re incredibly well managed organization. Uh Think about what we’ve all gone through in this industry and think about how they emerged out of that, stronger, deeper bench, a lot more market share. So, so for me, I wanna be a part of their growth here in the industry. Uh And so I’m, I’m most excited about that. But yes, we have some small token deals. We uh we own some uh uh tokens in the video gaming space, I own avalanche, I own polka dot and a few other layer one protocols. But my big investments are really in Bitcoin and Solana. Hey, everyone did. You know 52 million Americans own cryptocurrencies. That’s not just a number. It’s a movement, economic, social and political, decentralized, finance, Blockchain and digital currencies are more than buzzwords. They are the future this November, it’s on us to show up and step up. We need to protect crypto to ensure it continues to fuel innovation and freedom for our families and businesses. Don’t let this opportunity slip by. The future of crypto is on the line. Make your voice heard this November and pledge to vote now at stand with crypto.org backslash pledge. Uh If you had to pick one of the smaller tokens that you just mentioned that you were watching that you are maybe bullish on heading into 2025. I know you probably can’t say no, no, no, I’m, I’m iii I will say probably get me in some level of trouble. Good trouble, good trouble is fun. Right? Good. Yeah. When she interviews, she always gets me in trouble by the way. So why, why ruin my track record for you and me? Right. But you know, listen, I, I and I can’t call it a small token because it’s actually pretty well uh market capitalized. But I think avalanche what they’re doing in the world of tokenization. I think that you’re, you’re gonna see in the next 3 to 5 years. Solana and avalanche are gonna be two of the big tokenizing mechanisms for real world assets. And so um I own, I own a small thing called Parcel Parcl uh which gives you the opportunity to buy and sell. It’s almost like an index where you can buy and sell in a liquid sort of way uh real estate markets around the world. And so you can literally trade Dubai market or the Abu Dhabi market or the New York or Miami market uh uh through their tokenized exchange. And it’s a Salana based uh uh token, it sits on top of Solana. Jeff. I don’t know if I’m gonna get you in trouble, but Anthony gave me uh a few tokens that he’s watching. I don’t know if you’re able to tell us if not tokens ecosystems or specific projects that our audience might wanna look into because you think is exciting for some reason, pressures on. So I just want to extract from what just said, I think we love the, we love the projects that, that actually uh solve the real world real life issues for the assets cost like real estate or even reeds, right? There are some smaller cap reeds and uh uh for the illiquid asset that, that hard to be digitalized and how we can uh tokenize those assets and increase the interoperability and uh you know, liquidity around that. Uh I think those are the ones that we like. And also for those asset class that are huge that can potentially increase the entire size of the crypto asset, which is only 2.5 trillion. At the moment, if we see any asset class that can be tokenized and increase that crypto asset, we love it that comes down to carbon, that comes down to IP rights comes down to, you know, all these oil energy uh related uh products, imagine that we can trade different position in the financial instrument and tokenize those positions and uh you know, start trade on a, you know, uh decentralized or the uh the uh you know, lower the cost and the most cost efficient way and the scalable way. I think those are the ones that we want to focus on and uh you know, promote and uh we are the marketplace, we do change. We also do, you know, help uh you know, different d five projects, all these projects that uh Anthony mentioned to bring on our platforms. And so that uh you know, uh users can have a direct access to get those tokens to serve the utility purposes. And at the same time, you know, um enjoy the risk reward in the most transparent and effective way. I think I saw that you recently said Bitcoin could hit an all time high very soon. Well, I’m, I’m a big believer in studying the having cycle of Bitcoin. Uh Some people call the power cycle. Other people say it’s stock to flow. But if you really look at Bitcoin over the 15 years since its origination, uh you usually get a four X after a having now, you also get about 100 and 50 100 and 70 days of sideways activity after having some of that has to do with the economics around mining. Some of that has to do with uh uh you know, just the, the, the, the notion that uh less supply is in the marketplace and people are, are making a decision to sell into that market because they need to make money for themselves, particularly on the mining side. So uh that’s abating now. Uh And you typically see a tightening uh in the cycle and I, I predict that that’s happening. There’s a lot of positive things happening at the same time. I don’t know if you saw the Black Rock uh piece that came out. Um Those guys were very close to those guys. We were the first money into the Black Rock Trust. Uh My partner Brett Messing put $10 million into, into that, you know, Skybridge money to help it get started. And they are a selling mechanism. I just want you to imagine thousands of people next year telling institutions large and small retail investors that they need to have some asset allocation, excuse me into Bitcoin. And so I, I’m very bullish about the uh upcoming cycle. And you got the rate cuts too. We forgot the rate cuts. But that’s another big part of it. Yeah, I think 22 rate cuts before the end of the year. I think so. And I, you know, I was, I was, I was, I was hit hard and criticized at the beginning of the year when the inflation data didn’t look. Right. I said there’d be at least three rate cuts this year and it looks like there will be at least three rate cuts. And, and by the way, I’m, I’m in the camp that you’ll probably see 75 basis points of rate cuts by the end of the year. You did 50. My guess is after the election, they’ll do another 50 then possibly 25 thereafter. Jeff, we are just about out of time. I want you to wrap us up here. We obviously have a big event ahead of us. Talk to me about what you’re looking forward to tonight and to wrap us up what you’re looking forward to in 2025. Sure. If I may just add one side note on what Anthony just mentioned about Bitcoin, I think I agree with everything that Anthony just mentioned. Uh Bitcoin has recently since last year, we’ve seen a lot of innovation build on Bitcoin network. So it’s not just the storage of value, it’s not just the decentralized the money system. People start to build layer two on that and start to build great innovation, like all so on and so forth. So it becomes a productive asset. So it’s no longer something that if it’s a, you were to draw analogy to gold. Now it feels more like a piece of land. It’s a land of promise land of future. And with that, we also believe that UAE and Dubai here where, where we are is also a land of promise, a land of future. And it takes a lot of stakeholders here, the supreme rulers here, the, the, the people, the regulators, the business here to build a bright future for Web three, for crypto assets alike. And we’re proud to be part of it. And thank you for this interview and thank you, Anthony. Thank you to our audience for watching Markets Daily for listening to Markets Daily. If you love all the coin desk podcasts, subscribe to the Coin Desk podcast network that is available on all podcast platforms. If you like watching us, we’re on youtube, subscribe. Give us a thumbs up. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you tomorrow.
