Is there anything to the price action lately that makes you feel as though this is somewhat sustainable?

Yeah, so I guess the way that I think about Bitcoin's levels here is we had some pretty significant leverage, right? That was the August 19 washout.

So we had shorts get liquidated.

We had pretty decent follow through on spot and ETF buying.

which was good to see because that's very healthy in terms of building out a base.

And then what we also saw was an increase in options open interest, particularly with Calls Queue.

And while we also saw a decline in futures open interest, So leverage was reduced while spot buying increased and then upside buying was increasing.

I wonder how much you think investors and traders who are not necessarily as deep into crypto as you and Zach are, Mike, to go and maybe get more into places that are not just Bitcoin, but to other places that people talk about maybe in the news, but maybe don't talk about as much as Bitcoin or Ether.

So Mike, I wonder in your kind of opinion, is this something where Bitcoin's surge is indicative of the rest of crypto, and then can it last?

Yeah, so, um, I think we're in an interesting part of the market right now.

So we've seen Bitcoin surge, um, primarily on a short covering, uh, back on August, uh, 19th when the Treasury announced they're gonna be buying a substantial amount of long duration, uh, treasuries.

And so, well, the good part about this is we've actually seen spot buying support the move in Bitcoin.

So the initial spike was on, um, a liquidation of shorts, and we've seen a follow-through on the spot side.

Where we've seen open interest grow is on the call, is on the option side with, with call skew, meaning people are buying upside.

And the actual futures volume, or the futures OIs come off.

A- a- and Mike, uh, is it just Bitcoin, or can we feel comfortable a little bit more with other parts of that crypto sphere as well?

And so what is the next step on top of that?

So I feel like I am back on Wall Street [laughs] at this point.

I think I have more meetings with, with bankers and traditional finance folks I do now than, you know, the, the, the, the, the next DeFi founder or certainly in anything around NFTs and meme coins and the things that were kind of the cycle pass.

So what, what is working? Um, you know, stable coins.

You know, we've had $10 trillion of transaction volume in the last year.

Uh, perpetual, uh, derivatives, which are perpetual swaps.

There's these new form of derivative.

Mm-hmm