On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly News Roundup 10/4 (Deals, EOS, Sia, Crypto Ratings Council, Hedera, State Street) (EP.05)

Episode Date: October 4, 2019

Matt and Nic from Castle Island Ventures review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. This week's topics include:  - Deals - EOS - Sia - Crypto Ratings Council - Hedera - State Street

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin.

Welcome to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. We're recording this on a Thursday. This is our second shot of getting through this. We had a fire drill just now. But we're going to try to make it through this one. Yeah, it's been a pretty tumultuous week, as you're all aware.

So we'll have a lot of things to cover today. So we're going to start off with the section on the deals and the fundraising. So these are the companies that were funded this week or the funds that were closed out some fundraising this week. The reason that we're doing this is so that those of you who are looking to get into this industry, I think this is a good opportunity to see who just raised capital, who's going to be hiring. These are likely to be the companies where you'll start to see some job postings. So the first one this week is a company called Evernim, a blockchain identity company. They raised $8 million from Barclays Ventures, as well as overstock.

Medici Ventures. Another company raising this week is scale network. So this is an Ethereum scaling project, tokenized protocol. They raised $17 million through a SAFT. That's a simple agreement for future tokens, Winklevoss Capital, Arrington XRP, blockchain, multi-coin, and others. Another one is Instadap. So this is a decentralized finance portal. They raised $2.4 million from Pantera, IDEO, Coinbase, and others. One interesting one this week was an M&A. There's actually a few M&A transactions this week. One was RSK.

So this is that smart contract platform building on Bitcoin, but they have their own token. They acquired a company called Taringa, which is a Spanish social networking platform. And this isn't the first protocol MNA that we've seen. Stellar famously acquired chain. Right. And there's probably other examples too. I think Eos acquired a thing called voice.com. So there's been a few of these.

I mean, that might have just been a domain name as opposed to a company. But yeah, protocols buying companies. It's a brave new world out there. Another M&A event was core scientific. So this is a crypto asset mining company. They acquired Stack Digital, which is better known as Honey Miner or operates Honeyminer. So congratulations to Noah Jessup on that one. And then the last one that we thought was notable, Broadridge.

Broadridge is a back office technology provider in the financial services space, traditional financial services. So they acquired a company called Shadow Financial Systems, and it was reported as kind of this crypto asset play and a sign that maybe Broadridge is making a more active play into crypto. Not necessarily true if that's the case. So Shadow Financial operates back office software for a bunch of banks and financial institutions. Some of them touch crypto, and so they do some ledger entry type of work for some of those firms,

but not necessarily an overt crypto asset play as it's being made out to sound like. So those are the big deals for the week. So in the news for the week, you're all aware absolutely monstrous developments, especially when it comes to regulatory. So as we warned last week on the pod, the SEC was coming to the end of its fiscal year, and we figured that that would mean there would be some big announcements from them.

And boy, did they not disappoint. Yeah, so this was a big one. So the SEC has settled an enforcement with Block 1, which is the parent company of EOS, or it's the company that is, building the EOS protocol. And maybe we'll just give some background on kind of the facts and circumstances here first, because we think this one is a kind of a mind-boggling situation.

This certainly, and I tweeted this, this blew my mind when I read about it. I had expected there to be an enforcement action against Block 1 being the most high-profile ICO that ever occurred. I did not expect this. So let's just set the stage. So what is EOS? So EOS is meant to be a kind of a blockchain 2.0. They pursued scalability, arguably at the expense of decentralization.

So running an EOS full archival node, very few people do this. The coin metrics team complains to me all the time about how hard it is. It's taken the months to spend one up. So just for context, they really cranked the lever hard on the scalability front, very much at the expense of decentralization, the cost to run a node. And EOS was meant to inherit some of the properties from Ethereum while having much higher TPS potential. They decided to forgo proof of work entirely. They have 21 validators and some standby validators.

So it's essentially run by a consortium of entities which are entrusted with validating the chain in kind of a round-robin format. And the validators are selected through voting. A lot of people expected that this might lead to cartilization. and self-dealing and, you know, quid pro quo. That's precisely what happened. Nevertheless, EOS continues to function. I've been reported that it's a little bit congested today. But, you know, it'll do, you know, tens of millions of transactions a day.

So from that perspective, they, I guess they met their objective. All right. So, you know, the idea here is to essentially be a better Ethereum. And so wind the clock back a little bit. They had this idea. It was pre-production. So it's not like they had built this yet. And they open up this ICO.

And keep in mind, Dan Larimer, you know, the founder had also created bitchairs and Steam. Very similar principles. Both of those networks had the validator model. So, and, you know, he'd infamously abandoned Steam or at least he'd left the project as well as bitchairs. So he had a bit of a try. So he had a bit of a track record. The quick tangent here, the Satoshi comment to Dan Larimer. Was it on the message?

On the Bitcoin Talk forums. Something along the lines of, if you don't understand this, I don't have time to explain it to. Just one of the all-time comments. Yeah, that was infamously. Satoshi said his meanest everything was a rebuke to Dan Larimer. In any event. So it's very important here to draw the distinction that EOS was not a functioning protocol when they did their ICO.

So it did not exist in the wild yet. These guys raised $4 billion before a functioning product. So it's the large, I believe it's the largest ICO ever. By far. Yeah, the second one would have been Telegram at 1.6. So they raised $4 billion in a structure that anyone can participate, but they tried to geo-fence the United States, although they took out an ad in Times Square.

so I don't know what that was for. Yeah, it doesn't exactly comport. And this also came up in the settlement action. So they had a year-long ICO, which is actually a pretty interesting structure in of itself. If you wanted to sort of mimic the distributional properties of proof of work, you'd actually want, you'd prefer a longer ICU as opposed to a shorter one because it gives more people a chance to get involved, as opposed to like a 10-minute ICU, which we saw a lot of in 2017,

with some ICOs like bankor and status and brave. Yeah. So from that perspective, it was at least an interesting model and maybe a better model than some ICOs. However, that said, they made, in my opinion, a critical mistake with the ICO design. They allowed withdrawals, and in fact, there were many, many withdrawals from the Treasury

during the course of the ICO, and a lot of those withdrawals went to exchanges like BitFenex. And, you know, the question is, is, so, you know, perhaps the Block 1 was using that to support their operations during the ICO, I guess that's fine, but what it means is they could have, I'm not saying they did, but they could have recycled the takings from the ICO back into the ICO themselves, thus acquiring an arbitrary fraction of the future EOS tokens. So if they had wanted to, I'm not saying they did this, they could have acquired 99.999% of all the EOS tokens,

just by, you know, taking the treasury and plowing it back into the same ICO. And the way to avoid this is to not have withdrawals from the treasury. Tezzo's did. Tezazos, for instance, the crowd sale wallet was, you know, frozen for the duration. But EAS had a year-long one, so I guess they, you know, had costs during that year-long period, and so they'd withdrawals. So it's important to note that Block 1, you know, subsequent to the ICO promised to have an audit to prove that this did not occur.

Of course, it's basically impossible to prove because some people say, well, why don't you just look at the chain? Most of the outflows went to exchanges like BitFinex, which acts as kind of a black box, so only BitFinex itself knows what happened in there. And also no audit firms really want to touch this. Maybe they will, but so far they have.

So basically, there's a cloud of suspicion which is now hanging over the ICO, whether it was fair or not, which cannot really be remediated. And unfortunately, I don't think we have clarity on any of those issues. And so what ends up happening here is that to make a long story short, they have settled with the SEC for a $24 million civil fine. and there's nothing in this agreement that addresses some of those rumors around the money laundering and the fact that they might have been self-dealing with the token, what has effectively come out here is that their fundraising mechanism using an Ethereum ERC20 token, that is a security. So that much is clear. What is also a little bit less clear, but appears to be the case,

is that the main net token of EOS right now appears to not be a security. Yeah. So this is, and this is going to be poured over by lawyers for years to come, because this kind of validates a thesis that lots of people had, like Marco Centauri, when he created the SAFT, that there is the investment contract, you know, pre-mainnet, and then somehow, you know, the token upon main net launch was a distinct entity entirely and might be, might have transmuted into not a security. And the SEC, it appears to us, is essentially validating this idea by saying that the ERC 20 version of EOS, which was just an IOU or a placeholder for a share of the future EOS network,

that one was the investment contract. That was the security. And then upon launch, they're saying those EOS tokens are not securities any longer. So there's a few hot takes here or fallouts. This story is going to be playing out for months and years to come. I'm sure there will be other investigations into this. There might be some civil actions. There's a few. a few things that are becoming clear. So one is that Karen Uble at Cooley, she is worth every penny, it looks like. You do a $4 billion ICO and you settle for $24 million. And not only that, but the SEC did some crucial things like they waived the bad actor provision, which would have prevented Block 1 from doing all sorts of fundraising in the future. So they really, it appears

so far, pending potentially other agencies getting involved, it appears the block one is totally in the clear now. So they have a great lawyer there, and I'm sure she's getting a lot of phone calls. The next thing that is interesting here is what is going to be the fallout with the ERC 20 token? So if this thing was a security, there was plenty of exchanges that were listing it. And so would they fall under any sort of enforcement action by virtue of having an unregistered security on their platform? I mean, they should be ATS venues if they're listing securities.

Yeah, and you can use the way back machine. and go on coin market cap and see it, you know, June 2018, I believe, prior to the launch of EOS Mainnet, lots of exchanges, including some U.S. domicoddicages like Cracken and non-U.S. domicodd like Benance, we're listing the EOS, ERC20, which the SEC has now said is a security or it was a security. And that's going to be interesting. I don't know if anything's going to happen there. My suspicion is that maybe not.

I mean, the Dow is kind of the same thing. The Dow was traded on Crackin and a number of other exchanges as well. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been any repercussions there. It looks like we have the most conciliatory SEC in modern history. Well, I don't know. I mean, it's a double-edged sword. It's on one hand you have this SEC under Clayton has not exactly been a smooth operation. So under his nose, we saw billions of dollars worth of unregistered securities offerings

flourish, these ICOs just went bananas. Meanwhile, you have these market infrastructure companies that are seeking clarity on a number of issues ranging from custody and a good control location under 15C3-3. You have companies that are going out of business because they cannot get engagement with the SEC. Meanwhile, like, ICOs are just flourishing and kind of off to the races and settling for 60 basis points of their total ICO. So it doesn't seem very organized. Yeah, the words that come to mind are arbitrary and capricious. You know, there also appears to be a certain division in how the SEC treats ICOs,

the ones that are the best healed and are the most well integrated into the industry, like EOS with Block 1 and the many venture funds that are involved with them, that was used, you know, partly in the argumentation for why they should not receive a stiff penalty here. Whereas, you know, in the other news, you see securities issuances like that done by Nebulaus back in 2014, which was treated much more harshly. Yeah. And so let's jump into that. So we'll come back to EOS in the weeks to come. Nebulae is a company that underneath it has two companies. One is Obelisk, which is a mining company. The other is SIA, which is a decentralized file storage network, similar to Filecoin,

but way before Filecoin and actually is operational. Yeah. And in 2014, David Vorg and the other folks at SIA issued something called a SIA fund. I think they might have called it SIA shares back in the day, essentially from their dorm room and they raised about $120,000. And the thing that they sold was a token which would give you claim on cash flows from the SIA network itself. So whenever a storage contract was entered into, the owners of the SIA funds would receive a share. So a really interesting model.

And then Sia itself, the coin was a proof of work mine coin, essentially fair launched with a really minuscule pre-mine. I think the pre-mine was four basis points of total supply. So essentially a fair launch. So they kind of were one of the pioneers of this two token model with the one token being, you know, an overt kind of security, although, you know, they didn't register it. And the other one being the value conveyance coin. And, you know, this week they were also dinged by the SEC, and they actually had to pay $225,000 fine. Yeah, so the $120,000 of unregistered securities were sold on the Bitcoin Talk Forum while David Vorick and his co-founder were in college. This was back in 2014.

This was before the launch of ERC20 as a fundraising standard, well before the Dow report. Yeah, and the really big delineator here is the 2017, I believe July 2017, Dow report, where the SEC said explicitly, look, some of these things are securities. you have to follow the Howie test. And notably, the EOS crowd sale, for the most part, took place after this report. Right. Whereas the nebulous raise was several years prior. So doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't mean it's not an unregistered security, but completely different facts and circumstances than the EOS sale.

These guys are fined $225,000 on a $120,000 raise. EOS is fond $24 million on a $4 billion raise. I mean, just doesn't seem fair. It's a little tough. Yeah, I think it's pretty easy to call that unfair. So I guess what is the president? We've talked about this for a while, but to me, I think this opens the door to a bunch of these safs, these simple agreements for future tokens, what Marco Santoria essentially invented to convert into mainnet. I think that we're going to see these things actually be possible under the SEC.

And to be frank, this was not something that I thought was going to take place at all. I mean, I, for a long time, I know some of the folks at Coin Center have also said, you know, there's a big difference between the investment contract and the token itself. And even if those are both conjoined within the same token, they can be disentangled, which I always found a little far-fetched. but it seems to me that, well, it's very clear if you have the two token model, you know, where you have the main net, the pre-mainnet IOU and subsequently have the main not coin. If they're conjoined in the same coin, I find it a little bit hard to pull those two apart.

Yeah. So this seems like it's a good thing if you're a file coin, if you're DFINITY. I guess time will tell. Maybe closing thought, what do you think the impact on Ethereum is now that EOS is in the clear? So the general view, if you are a cyberpunk and you believe in permissionless finance, I guess this is conditionally good because it shows that the SEC is really going for a hands-off approach here and kind of a harm reduction approach. That's very clear from the ESS settlement.

The other thing, though, is lots of Ethereums were proposing this view that they had a regulatory remote of sorts, with new smart contract platforms being virtually impossible to launch, especially if they were backed by VCs, because the view was that the SEC would really be dinging these guys. There was a presumption in some quarters that Bitcoin clearly was not a security, and then Ethereum itself had this safe harbor, and that would really delineate those to from the would-be smart contract platforms. And that has been essentially rebutted by the events of this last week. EOS is probably the most well-known Ethereum competitor, I would say, and the most direct

Ethereum competitor. And they've been given the All-clear. And it seems to me that lots of their peers, the other pretenders to the throne, will be given the All-Clear too. So from that perspective, it might be conditionally bad for the theorem as well. So ultimately, I guess the market will decide if these tokens ought to be worth anything. Yeah. And the thing that rankles me, though, is the SEC exists.

One of really the main things they enforce is proper disclosure standards. And, you know, this is part of the reason, in my opinion, the WeWork IPO collapsed is because they released their S1 and the blogosphere got a hold of it. And, you know, and not only that, but the analysts at the funds that might be buying this thing got a hold of it. And then, you know, the numbers don't lie, right? I mean, you can dress it up in flowery language, but ultimately the SEC mandates that you disclose all the material things about your business. And, you know, in a very comprehensive report. And nothing of the sort exists in crypto.

So to some extent, the market doesn't have the tools to decide. You know, there is no such thing as a disclosure. requirement and EOS certainly didn't disclose appropriately. I mean, that was the crux of the SEC's issue. And some things, you know, like the whether or not there was recycling that occurred, that's unknowable, essentially. And if there were an organization or the SEC was actually enforcing standards here that were similar to the way that the rest of the capital markets work,

ICOs at the very least would have to disclose, you know, the financials, of the parent company. Maybe that would have been pretty material in the kin raise, for instance, knowing what the nature of the KIC company was at the time. Knowing they were going out of business. Exactly. So that's super material information. But for the most part, ICO investors have received these technical prospectuses with roadmaps and, you know, cryptographic, esoterica, and nothing that actually really matters when it comes to investment decisions. So that's probably my biggest objection to all of this is that we're whitewashing history and it doesn't look like we're any closer to narrowing that informational gap such that the market can actually make intelligent

allocative decisions about these tokens. I guess block stack would be an example of a project that's taken a path of disclosing much more than you would expect versus another tokenized network. They're really the one that stands out to me is trying to operate within that framework. And yeah, so they did it within the standard framework. And their disclosure documents are way, way, way more comprehensive than anything one of these unregistered ICOs has ever done. And, you know, that's a model. And unfortunately, they were essentially punished for doing that. So I'm sure we're going to see more enforcement actions in the week to come.

I'm sure Karen Ubel's phone is ringing off the hook with a bunch of projects that would like a similar treatment. But in any other week, I think the top story would have been this crypto ratings council thing. And so what this is, it's a group of companies that are in the market infrastructure space in this asset class. So it's think exchanges and custodians and trading firms. So it's Coinbase, Crackin, Circle, Bitrex, Anchor Labs, DRW's Cumberland Unit, Genesis, and Grayscale. And so what these guys have basically done is they've gotten together, formed a crypto, ratings counsel in order to look at individual crypto assets and grade them on a one to five scale in terms of their likelihood of being a security. So one would be, you know, probably not a security,

which would be something like a Bitcoin, for instance, or an Ethereum. Two, or maybe Ethereum isn't even a one. I didn't even check. But up to five, so five would be an overt security, which it's unclear to me that they have any of those. So let's talk about this. What do you think? I sort of laughed when I saw this. It was another thing that was a news item, which was unbelievable to me, that these, well, I guess, you know, it's good in sense. The SEC has asked some of these organizations to impose some self-regulation. The problem is that there's not a lot of regulation going on. What this, these ratings appear to be is a, is a somewhat amateurish, you know, again, whitewashing of all of the tokens which traded these venues. And, and it seems so

far that they have branded all of them, unsurprisingly, not a security. Yeah. So the, the reason why these groups are doing this, it's not just that they're completely oblivious to how this looks in terms of, benefiting them. But the real motivation is that they have been trying to get clarity from the SEC on whether or not they can be told what a security is or what a security is not. And so they don't want to have things on their platform that are unregistered securities. They don't want to have to register as ATS venues. They don't want to have to fall under the SEC's approval. A bunch of these companies have already gone state by state to get money transmission licenses. So that much is clear. Look, they're frustrated with the SEC. They're not getting clarity. But to go this path

doesn't strike me as the way to get the SEC on your side. It seems a little unwise, especially if you're giving a grade of a four and a half, keep in mind five is an overt security to assets which are currently trading on your platform. Yeah. So how does that discussion go with the SEC or eventually in a court of law? Okay, so you gave this an asset, this asset a score of 4.5. You have it on your platform. So you're saying that it's more likely than not a security. In fact, it's closer to being a security than not a security. So why is it on your platform? And the other objection we saw is that I think if you look at the Howie test, you look at the four prongs, those are all fairly binary things. And the Howie test itself is binary. So insisting that there's a lot of gradualism

and vagueness isn't really that persuasive. Although that said, the EOS decision maybe throws that into disarray. Maybe there is a lot of vagueness. Maybe, maybe. So it looks like a JV version of an SRO to us, a self-regulatory organization. I think maybe at some point we'll have a real SRO, a SIFMA type of thing for crypto assets, but my money is on the fact that this is not going to be it. This probably won't. That said, it would be nice to see any self-regulation from the exchanges. You know, Japan, the Japanese exchanges have been much more proactive in regulating themselves. Unfortunately, their American counterparts are way behind. So another story that caught my eye this week was a Wall Street Journal article that said that Visa and MasterCard are reportedly

reconsidering their role in Facebook's Libra Consortium. What do you make of this one? I think you'd a funny tweet about it. What did you say? I think I said something along the lines of the pigs are declining the invitation to the butcher's dinner or something like that. With the implication being that Libra would be ultimately competitive with the credit card networks. Yeah, I think if you look at, if Libra works, it's going to compete with a lot of things. It's going to compete with sovereign currencies, but it's also going to be a ubiquitous payment platform that really would compete with the visas and MasterCards, which, by the way, make a ton of money. And you know, maybe Libra was the big loser in this EOS ruling in that they should have just launched and then asked for forgiveness after the fact.

Well, maybe. I mean, who knows what to think. There's going to be a lot of those type of discussions with project teams around just maybe we ask for forgiveness as opposed to go on the block stack route of being fully compliant. And, you know, the tragedy, not to return to this topic, but I think the tragedy is some entrepreneurs are going to. think that they can pull a block one and they're actually going to get eaten alive by the SEC because they don't have the same resources in cloud. Oh, it's good. And it's totally asymmetric. You're going to have investors that are pushing the entrepreneurs to do that. If you look at the investors in block one, I mean, Peter Thiel, Alan Howard, a bunch of funds. They made a lot of money because out of that $4 billion, there's a dividend. And so, hey, go for it. That's right. They got their spoils and they got out of there.

So more to come. Another story that caught my eye this week was Stone Ridge Asset Management, which is a pretty large asset manager down in New York. They have filed a prospectus with the SEC for a cash-settled Bitcoin Futures Fund. It's called the Nidig Bitcoin Strategy Fund. So Nidig, which is NYDig, that is a custodian and a crypto asset manager. And so this is interesting. to see more and more of these regulated exchange traded products being proposed. I think it's

exciting. I think, you know, there's a big narrative around institutional money coming in. This is an example of a really reputable firm coming in. And it seems like each month there's a new development here, you know, backed going live last month, of course, week volumes. But the very fact that there is now there are multiple physically settled futures venues, you know, that's an improvement compared to where we were in 2017, it's a world of difference. It's night and day. But if you want to take a trip back in time to affirm that really does not understand what's going on here, let's talk about State Street. So I feel like we hit these guys over the head so many times in our newsletter, but they just can't help themselves. They can't

get out of their own way. So what does State Street done this time? So it's not quite a private blockchain, but it's pretty close. So they rolled out their latest blockchain lead, which it seems like there's a new blockchain R&D lead every six months at State Street, because what generally happens is that, you know, you get someone that comes in that's, you know, really excited about pushing through some change. And then the company says, you know, we're actually only interested in the innovation theater. We want to say we're doing blockchain, but we don't like Bitcoin, things like that. So they had their latest person do an interview with Fortune. And he led with the quote, we aren't focused on cryptocurrency.

we are really forward-facing and goes on to talk about all these tokenized hard asset things that they're doing, which are essentially just private blockchains and talks about their transfer agent business and just does about nine minutes of just word soup. So, you know, anyone who probably understands what's going on at State Street right now

is, you know, calling their friends of fidelity, seeing if they can grab a cup of coffee with them and do some networking, is my guess. Talk about two firms. that are diametrically opposed on the issue of blockchains and cryptocurrency. They're about 500 yards apart in downtown Boston. And yet, Fidelity just keeps pushing forward with amazing hires, especially on the digital assets team.

Hired RIA this week. Reh Batorra, huge win for them. You know, just keeps pushing out products. Obviously, we're a little biased being Fidelity Alums. Yeah, this is like the equivalent of being in the early 90s in just, you know, if you're State Street at that point, you're just pushing the intranet. The intranet is going to be so much bigger than the internet.

The internet, anyone can message you. It's who needs it? Like, if I want to talk to someone, that person will just call me on the phone. Like, come up. The internet's not going to work. But that's state street for you. Another one this week was, did you see the news from Hdera? Yeah, so what happened with Hderas, they finally went live.

They launched trading in H-bars. And what is Hedera? Sorry, I should have. Yeah, so on the topic of private blockchains, Hidera is, Hedera makes EOS look decentralized. It's a consortium model, right? It is, yeah. It's a smart contract platform run by trusted validators in a consortium. I think Boeing might be one of them.

And, you know, the interesting thing in this industry is that you have this amazing leap in breakthrough innovation, you know, in the Bitcoin white paper. And then the subsequent 10 years is people trying to reconfigure. claim the models that worked in the legacy world and build them in the crypto industry. And Hiderra is a great example. There's really nothing that's particularly new there, in my opinion. I mean, it's dressed up in a lot of language about, you know, Byzantine fault tolerance and so on. But ultimately, you're trusting a consortium of validators, which is like how Visa began. Visa was a consortium mediating payments. So it's like this endless regressive struggle

to pull us back into the modes that we relied on in the past. Yeah, I mean, the internet wasn't a better way to read the letters. The new things respond, and we're seeing a lot of companies that are just trying to sprinkle a little bit of blockchain on things. And that's generally what this is. So basically they launched their token. Since it launched, it's been down, it's down 92%. So this is, you know, you want to talk about WeWork.

That would make Adam Newman feel a lot better about himself, I think. And so now they, decided to think over their token economics and try and figure out how to inject some value into this coin after the drawdown has already occurred. This is just so ridiculous. So it's they go out and they hire some Harvard trained economists as they say to rethink their token model to get the price back up. What does that even mean?

I think every stock that has a decline in its stock price should just hire economists to figure out how to make the value go back up. Is that like what how about making something that people want? No, that'd be that'd be too difficult. Call me old fashioned. I don't know. So it's a busy week. A lot of,

a lot of stuff on the regulatory front this week. Yeah. And you know, one thing that I suspect is that the block one story might not be over just yet. You know, there's a lot of other agencies aside from the SEC out there that have an interest in this stuff. So and you often see these like regulatory one, two punches.

So, you know, stay tuned on that front. The story may not be in its final act just yet. What do you think? IRS, DOJ, FinCEN, any number of the alphabet soup. But it's certainly, certainly a win for now for, you know, ICOs and token launches and their backers. So that's it for this week. Stay tuned next week. We've got some exciting interviews coming up in the next week or two. We're going to be talking to John Bechia from FS Vector. We're going to be talking to Hunter Horsley from Bitwise.

So some wide-ranging conversations, and we will catch you next week. Thanks for listening.