On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly News Roundup 4/03/20 (CoinMarketCap, Telegram, and bailouts) (EP.62)

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Matt and Nic review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. This week's topics include: Binance's acquisition of CoinMarketCap Factom's insolvency Telegram's latest setback in court Recent stablecoin growth Nic's piece on bailouts in Coindesk and much more news of the week

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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentuteeasing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something. call the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And you look like you need a haircut and so do I. Yeah, it's entering shaggy territory. I think we're just going to have to go for buzz cuts at this point. I think everyone's going to have to go with buzzcuts. I don't know what else you do unless you have a floby. I was speculating about the possibility of achieving a mullet if this, you know, quarantine really drags on. You're not far away. You're not far away. way. It looks like you might be able to pull that off. I could get there. Yeah. I think that's why Mullets were invented for people that just like were cutting their own hair and they couldn't see what

was going on at the back. So they would just like manage the front and let the back go. I like that theory. Yeah, because you can, it's kind of business in the front and, you know, it's a party in the back. Yeah, it works for for teleworking. Nobody would even know what's going on back there. Well, we're back for another podcast episode. Let's do a quick read. So this episode is brought to you by Zen Ledger, which is one of our portfolio companies. Pay your taxes, people. So Zen Ledger is the best software to get your crypto taxes done fast and easy. They have friendly customer service. You can actually talk to them on the phone. You can shoot them an email. You can do a chat. It's definitely the easiest place to get your crypto taxes done. What I like about

it is you can actually involve your CPA in the process. So there's a way to invite your CPA in, give them visibility. You can do tax loss harvesting and get a full audit report. It's a lot of good stuff. And as a special offer for our listeners, you can use the coupon code Castle 15 to get 15% off. That's zenledger.io. So taxes are still a thing. Yeah, you know, I was reading, I was reading an essay by Larry White last night and he made a really good point. He said that the U.S. government is protecting the dollar monopoly, not just through legal tender laws. But another way they protect it is by forcing you to incur a tax burden for using alternative currencies. So the dollar is really the only one which gets this exemption.

And so because that tax burden exists for crypto, we have to figure out how to remediate that and deal with it. So that's why a software like Zen Lenger is so important and so useful. No, that's interesting. That's very true. I mean, the tax burden for dealing with alternative currencies is crazy. But I guess you don't deal with that with like the euro or whatnot. Well, under certain limits, right? I think for Forex, there's de minimis exemptions, right? Yeah, and I think that's why coin center is going after some legislation there, which hasn't been successful ultimately. But that was a good dovetail into you had Larry on the podcast this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you guys know I'm a fan of Larry. I think he's just such an

important thinker. He laid out so many of these ideas which are relevant to Bitcoin 35 years ago in some of his writing. He was one of the chief architects behind the revival of free banking, you know, in the kind of historical record. So he did this great analysis of the Scottish free banking system. This is a big pointed debate in the Austrian school. Does free banking work? Can you denationalize currency or money? you know, can that function in a fractional reserve environment, which is what happened in Scotland? And his answer to that is yes. And so his study of Scotland was super critical in kind of pushing that debate forward. And so, you know, I observed that what's happening right now, the stable

coins actually kind of in some ways is reminiscent of the free banking era. And so I wanted to get him on. And we had such good conversation. It's one of my favorite episodes I've done on the show. It was he he knew about privacy coins. He was very, knowledgeable. Yeah, there's not that many, you know, very well-respected economists that are super in the weeds about crypto, but to Larry's credit, he's been following this industry for a long time and has a super, super deep understanding of it. He even proposed Bitcoin banks several years ago. It's crazy. Yeah, that was a really good episode. So we had another episode this week with Adam Draper. It's just a podcast that I did. So Adam is the co-founder of BoostVC, which is an excellent.

accelerator and an early stage venture fund. We talked about VR in this one a lot. So that's a topic. I don't know a ton about Adams heavily invested in VR. You also talked a lot about crypto and some of the intersections between VR and crypto. It's pretty clear to me that we're all going to be living in some sort of a metaverse in the next few years here, sort of like Ready Player 1. And it seems like crypto will have a big piece of that. VR is like definitely having its moment right now. It's crazy. I feel like something distinct has changed. I don't know, but VR meetups are like super, super hot right now.

Yeah, that's what he said. He said the killer app is hanging out with people. And he also said that the fitness apps are doing really well. So exercising and VR, I guess there's a boxing app that's doing really well. I got to say I've never used a VR headset. I've never put one on. I don't get it. I feel like a boomer.

I don't get the value prop at all. Like, I think AR would be great because like I don't have to put a jug in. headset on like just like put something in my glasses you know so that i can get like a little head like a hud oh yeah well maybe we should invest in magic leap yeah i'm i'm more of the ar school of thought but that's never like none of that has come to fruition unfortunately no it seems like vr is is going to be the first one that sort of um gains popular adoption i'm the same way i don't think i've ever even had a headset on but you know in this day and age i've heard about teams doing virtual meetups and in almost like jam sessions on on VR.

I just don't get what's so different between that and like a video chat. Is it because you're just like fully immersed? I don't know. I think you can like talk to someone as if they're like a raccoon or something. It's cool. Okay. That changes everything. Quite a week for the crypto markets, huh?

The number came back a little bit. So overall, I think the market was up 1.3% on the week, but continues to be a tremendous. volatile market. And we're only 40 days away from the halving. Yeah, I'm back in the halving is bullish school of thought. So I'm recanting on my previous skepticism of the having. So apologies to all the pro-having types out there. I am officially bullish on the halving. Are you going to recant your 26-minute medium post about efficient markets? No, no, no. That's That's staying up. That's staying up. I mean, I still effectively believe in efficient markets.

Just in the context of Bitcoin, it's very hard for that efficiency to really express itself because there's so many kind of structural barriers to having the market clear. So, yeah, bullish on the having. All right. Well, I hope you're right. I hope you're right. Without a doubt, the biggest news of the week was Bonance buying coin market cap. This was a huge deal. deal. So $400 million transaction, it's reportedly comprised of a mix of cash, stock, and B&B tokens, which is Benance's exchange token. So a ton to discuss here. Why don't we get right into it? What did you make of this? Man, the fact that you can make acquisitions of like real businesses with real assets using your own token that you've effectively printed out of thin air and just

magic into existence is kind of mind-boggling to me. There's some precedent for it. Remember, chain.com was acquired by interstellar or whatever that stellar, like, spin-off was with stellar tokens? Yeah, I'm trying to think about if the BitTorren acquisition was done with Tron as well, or if that was just for cash. Yeah, you wonder if some of these Tron acquisitions might actually be financed with, you know, some sort of a Tron token.

I mean, if I were on the other side of that transaction, I'd want some sort of premium because I'm sure that it's effectively impossible to liquidate a meaningful quantity of these tokens at market value without crashing the price. I would think so, right? Weirdly enough, I would prefer receiving BNB to finance equity. Just got to say it. I would rather have the BNB because at least that's liquid and you can sell it on the open market. Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure you would. So, you know, finance is an unregulated crypto asset exchange. It's not really clear where they're domiciled, although I guess you'd sent me a link that it appears now they're registered and Grant Kamen, but previously they said they're in Malta. So without a doubt, it's the largest and most profitable, I'm sure, crypto asset exchange out there. But it's in the crosshairs from the regulatory perspective. I think owning equity in that would be, you know, might be difficult to see that equity. realized. Yeah, unless they have some sort of really explicit dividend policy, I don't see how a liquidity event materializes with Binance ever. And I think they're going to have a really hard time

finding a friendly jurisdiction here. I mean, I've been a Binance kind of skeptic for a long time, and so I'm sort of surprised that they've managed to play this regulatory hopscotch game so successfully. Maybe they'll just keep doing this decentralized. organization thing in perpetuity. I don't know. It's possible. You know, so they're a controversial company and in coin market cap is really no different. So I think there's going to be a little bit of a positive and negative tint to this conversation. But I think you do have to tip your hat really to Brendan Ches. So he started this thing out of his apartment in Long Island City. As far as we can tell, he fully bootstrapped it, didn't take outside venture financing and achieve this exit. So you have

to tip your hat to him and say that this was the right product for the market. You know, it's a retail market. In 2017, he created this front page, started selling ads and was really ahead of the game in terms of listing assets. He's got something like 5,000 listed cryptocurrencies on the site. He's got, he covers something like 20,000 different markets and trading pairs. And this thing is a total machine. And it's not without controversy. And certainly there are people that are using it for things that they should not be using it for, specifically crypto hedge funds marking their P&L to it, which is bananas. But you have to tip your cap to this guy because, you know, this is no small feat to be able to build a franchise as big. Yeah. You know, coin market cap is like the landing page for

the crypto industry without a doubt, without a doubt. And Brandon had a very simple insight. which is people want information on, in particular, long-tail outcoins, and they want information on where to trade them, which exchanges to go to. So that's kind of an underappreciated quality of corn market cap. It's like an indexer for these offshore exchanges that you might not know how to find them otherwise. And, you know, for the exchanges, the value prop is very clear. They want to get to the top of the rankings on coin market cap. for each pair, you know, they want to position themselves or represent themselves as the most liquid exchange.

So, and I wrote about this a long time ago, about this like perverse dynamic between the ranking sites, the exchanges and the token creators, the token issuers. And this is one of the reasons why we have so much fraudulent or fake volume on the exchanges is because you have providers like coin market gap, which kind of take that at face value because they don't have the ability to diligence 20,000 pairs. And so then, you know, you get some exchanges that rise to the top of the rankings and effectively dupe investors into trading on them, and, you know, believing them to be super liquid when they're not.

So that's why we have this fake volume plague. But, you know, despite that, this is a service that people want. I certainly use coin market cap pretty much every day. It's pretty useful. So he, you know, the interesting thing is that if they try and sort of institutionalize and create a sort of robust set of data tools, which are, you know, ostensibly of institutional quality, that has to trade off necessarily against their breadth of coverage. Because some of these exchanges are never going to be generating data, which is, which kind of meets those criteria for being. considered reliable. So it's a necessary trade-off in terms of breadth versus correctness. And so far, they went for one end of the continuum. So I don't actually see how they can, they can, you know,

trade off in the other direction. No, I don't think so. I don't think they can. I think that there's a pretty clear play here for Binance. This is the top of the funnel. There's a ton of eyeballs on coin market cap. You'll be able to presumably, just hit a button and start trading these assets on finance. It certainly has the largest kind of addressable market of crypto assets you can trade. So from that perspective, it's pretty clear. I think this takes them out of any ambitions that they might have had into being an institutional data provider. The fact that they had been conduits for a number of fraudulent Ponzi schemes that advertise in the platform

and led into a lot of retail users presumably being duped by. the BitConnects of the world. I think that was already a problem, but now that they're associated with an unregulated venue, probably takes them out of being an institutional data provider, but that's really not what they were ever trying to be. Yeah. Yeah. And now like, yeah, the monetization's very clear. I think, you know, when an acquisition happens, you look for the synergies, I think they're very obvious here. They have a ton of users, a ton of mine share, and they're a funnel for finding exchanges and finding markets, finance can represent themselves as the default destination for all of these altcoins, all these markets. As you say, they'll probably do like one-click trading.

So coin market got might become an interface for retail investors that don't care about execution. So the synergy is a very, very clear to me. I do have this suspicion that this $400 million ticket price that we saw, once the terms of the deal become. more clear, will, I think the true price or the true ticket price will be less than that. Actually, that's kind of my theory. I'm sure you have to bake in some slippage for the B&B, right? The BNB and maybe the Binance equity as well, they might have been internally valuing Binance at a really high evaluation.

So I think we might see some of that. It's certainly going to change the landscape a little bit in terms of the data providers. And I think some of these leaderboard sites like OnChane FX probably stand to benefit a lot. Yeah, On Chain FX is always positioned themselves as a more credible and more neutral alternative. I'm a big On Chain FX fan, have been since basically day one over there. And so not the Coin Market Cup ever had this pristine reputation for neutrality, but now they directly have effectively a conflict of interest. So some of these alternatives will definitely benefit.

Yep, definitely. And I guess my last take on this is it just showcases the economic strength of these exchanges. This is where all the money is being made in this industry right now. And they're the ones that are doing big deals, whether that's crypto facilities being acquired by Crackin or whether that's the Polo deal, the two times I guess the Polo was sold or Bit Stamp even. So, you know, this is where the money is being made in this market. Yeah, it's crazy.

We're 11 years in, and that's still the most successful business model is just being in exchange. But they are definitely the economic epicenter of this industry. There's no denying that. Yeah. Well, I think ransomware is doing pretty well, too. That's a nice category. Yeah. I heard that some of the ransomware providers said that they would stop targeting hospitals while the virus outbreak is ongoing.

So they have... so there's some altruism there maybe. Yeah, that's nice of them. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah. All right. Well, let's jump into some news of the week. So factum, which this one kind of surprised me, actually.

So factum's a blockchain protocol. They had raised $18 million. They'd initially done a token sale. Basically, this is, how would you describe this? I guess a timestamping service on top of Bitcoin is how I think about it. Yeah. They have their own protocol. They have their own token.

But ultimately, you're just anchoring data in, to the operturn. Yeah, you know, this actually reminds me a lot of MasterCoyne. So MasterCoin was a protocol is, you know, later rebranded to Omni as a protocol which made it easy to insert information in the operturn for Bitcoin. So just kind of a wrapper around the operturn to standardize the issuance of assets. Factum standardizes time stamping in Bitcoin makes it easy. And both of the native tokens effectively went to.

zero, but people kept using the service, right? So it tells you a lot about value capture versus value creation, right? These tokens often experience popularity, like Omni has a lot of usage, FACTOM has some real world usage, but the tokens themselves don't capture a lot of value. So the interesting thing here is that the Factom announced this week that they are winding down operations and that they're essentially just closing the company. So what's going to going to be interesting to me here is that the, like the business is gone. What's going to happen to the protocol? These tokens presumably are going to keep on trading. They're going to be kind of a zombie protocol like it sounds like. Yeah. And is the service still going to work? That's what I want

to know. You know, are people that use factum now? Are they still going to be able to use it? Definitely an interesting development there. So we'll keep an eye on that. That caught me by surprise. Another story this week was Bitwise Asset Management. They announced that they're going to seek to list their index fund, their multi-asset index fund, on the OTC market. So this move would be really similar to what the Bitcoin Investment Trust has done and what the Ethereum Investment Trust has done in the sense of listing their products on the OTCQX market and giving the holders of those products the ability to freely trade those shares on a retail brokerage platform after a one-year lockup period. under Rule 144. So I think this is pretty interesting. I mean, this is a little bit of an end around to get product distribution on brokerage platforms

without having an ETF. And there is clearly, if you look at the premium on the Bitcoin Investment Trust and the Ethereum Investment Trust, there's an insatiable appetite for these products. So it's good to see more competition. Yeah, for sure. And the premium on the Ethereum Trust in particular has been mind boggling recently. It's been in the 100%. 400%

It's 400% last week. So something interesting is that the GBDC maturity period was recently relaxed. It went from 12 months to six months. So you'd expect that the premium would be structurally lower because the arbitrage cycle would be shorter. But there's still a material premium even on the Bitcoin Investment Trust. Yeah, I think the Bitcoin Investment Trust the last time I looked was like 21%. Ethereum was 400%, something crazy like that. And it looks like the Bitwise product that they'll be trying to list here is the multi-asset index fund that has 10 assets.

So presumably you're going to have eight of those assets that there's no way to get exposure to on brokerage platform. So I'm not sure what the premium will be there, but presumably there will be one. It'll be more complex to calculate probably. but yeah differentiated product product from bitwise and in the absence of an ETF pretty much a no-brainer

to do this and get some distribution I think so I think so so more telegram news this week did you see that the federal judge has denied their motion to distribute their grams tokens outside of the United States

so yeah can't distribute them inside the United States can't distribute them outside the United States where are they going to distribute these things This is just going so badly for Telegram and their investors. It's crazy. You contrast this to EOS? EOS got a great deal with the SEC.

That was over and done with. They paid a fine and, you know, they're just cranking. Meanwhile, Telegram can't even distribute the damn coins out to the market. You know, actually, I recorded this week with a guest. We spent a lot of time talking about Telegram. It was a great, great podcast. And, you know, a big topic was, is this a death knell for the SAF? That's kind of my take on all this.

It seems like this judge really bought the SEC's logic on this, that Telegram was effectively conducting an implicit deal with the buyers, where the buyers were effectively acting as underwriters that were redistributing the grams out to the buyers. public on behalf of Telegram. And so the judge is effectively saying here, look, if you bought, if you bought a SAF, that whole thing still is a securities transaction because your intent is to distribute these coins out to the general public on these exchanges. So given that that is the context, it's not surprising that they are restricting the distribution even to non-US.

My guess here is that we're just going to see them return capital, whatever that ends up being 60 cents on the dollar or 65 cents on the dollar or something like that. I can't imagine that there's appetite for these investors to keep on fighting this battle and just have all of the you know the investment dollars just be spent on lawsuits basically. I think that unless the investors demand the money back, they'll take this to the circuit court or just the next appellate court because I yeah, I don't think they would stop. stop fighting the legal battle unless the investors collectively say give us the money back. And I think there is that provision to request the money back, right?

There's a date that had gotten extended by 60 or 90 days when they first had the injunction from the SEC. I could be wrong on that, but I think there is some sort of investor protection in their documents. The investors turned down that offer to return the capital initially. And the problem is that telegram appears to be using the proceeds of the token sale to actually run their servers. So the amount that they have in their treasury is shrinking every day, the like the telegram messaging app servers. It's a real shame because the telegram app continues to be a really good app. But you don't really need a, you know, you don't need a coin attached to it.

Yeah, it's kind of sad that the only way to actually monetize a messaging. app is to sell a coin. We're seeing this with Signal, solid with line, cacao, potentially Facebook's Libra, obviously Telegram. There's so many of these. And I don't know if any of them need to exist. Well, I think there's another way to monetize a messaging app, and that's just through taking people's personal data and tying their phone number to their social graph on Facebook. It seems to have worked out well for Zuckerberg.

Yeah, but so that's the problem with telegram and signal. If you're privacy focused, it's very, very hard to monetize. It's free app. But it, you know, it's being subsidized right now by the enthusiasm of telegram investors. Right, right. So we'll see how that plays out. This one, of course, and kick, I think, are the two big lawsuits that will be material this year. And really, you know, I think we'll have a good idea of where the SAF stands after both of these cases.

are wrapped up. Yeah, that's right. The kick one is sort of falling off the radar. But that's still ongoing, right? It is. It is. So I saw you did a good analysis this week on the aggregate supply of stable coins and just what's been going on over the past couple of weeks.

And wow, the adoption is increasing significantly. Yeah, I've been paying attention to stablecoins. So if you guys haven't checked out our crypto. dollarization series, that's definitely the place to start if you want to learn about what we believe the political and economic impacts of stable coins might be. And it, you know, it took us a while to get turned on to this idea that stable coins are actually more than just a tool for traders to move money around exchanges. But it's very clear to me that stable coins are now seeing use cases aside from just being a risk-off asset for traders. And the data kind of bears that out.

So the supply of stable coins increased by $2.2 billion in March alone. That's while financial markets globally are just getting crushed. But the blockchains continue to work perfectly. And putting dollars on the blockchain is apparently the killer app. So March was by far the best month ever for stable coins. Tether accounted for a lot of that growth. Circle also accounted for or Circles USDC. and actually Binance Dollar grew by a significant amount.

I didn't even know about Binance Dollar until recently. But yeah, Coin Metrics has a sample of basically all the nine or ten biggest stable coins now. So they've effectively complete data. So that's what I use to track it. Yeah, these numbers are staggering. I again continue to wish that there was a way that we could tease out whether or not these stable coin kind of supply increases are driven by. net new capital coming into the market or if a lot of this is just driven by crypto asset investors

and traders going risk off into stable coins. I guess it gets you to the same place anyway, but from a flow's perspective, it would be helpful to know if some of this was coming from net new market participants. Yeah, that's very hard to know. Although you can look on chain and see, look at the distribution of ownership and see that it is definitely increasing. So there are new participants. are owning these stable coins. But yeah, it's very hard to triangulate whether those are just new traders or just new end users using it for cross-border payments.

So you wrote another article for CoinDest today? Yeah, that's the rule. You actually have to just keep doing it every two weeks. It never ends. It's like a podcast. Can't stop. Yeah, it seems like you're not happy about the bailouts. Yeah, I don't like the bailouts.

I don't like the bailouts. at all. So this article is basically biting the bullet that the dollar may keep rallying here and that QE and this enormous stimulus may not depreciate the dollar. But leaving that aside, the bailouts are still bad for society overall. And people might accuse me being cruel or heartless to say that. But it's hard to discuss because there's no counterfactual world where there aren't bailouts every 10 years. So this is just the new normal now. We've normalized the notion of corporate failures rewarded with bailouts initially 10 years ago just in the financial sector and the kind of real estate sectors and now in every single sector. And basically the

argument I'm making is that the existence of bailouts is what causes some of these corporate entities to take on additional risk because they have this implicit put option from the government. And, you know, that causes equity holders and shareholders to be able to take advantage of all the upside and then not bear the downside. So that asymmetry is just a colossal problem for a society and it leads to misallocation of capital. And a just leads to bad outcomes because the more risk-seeking businesses are the ones that do best and the most prudent businesses do worse. This is the Bob Rubin trade, right?

Exactly, yeah. So I'm just trying to explain that in simple terms that everyone understands what I'm talking about. And I do concede that like some stimulus is totally warranted, but in my ideal world, that would go to individuals directly without intermediation, without this oblique step of going to you know, corporate balance sheets first. I think there's, so there's a philosophical question there. There's also probably just a tactical question. And, you know, on these individual payments, it's, the delay is what's just going to be crazy

here. We just don't have the apparatus in place to get money into people's hands fast enough. And I think also with these SBA loans that are not going to individuals, but going to institutions, I mean, this is just going to be a complete cluster. We're talking about adding new SBA lenders really quickly, the volumes that are going to be anticipated here, even for the most robust SBA lenders that are cranking out volumes regularly. This is going to be like 10 times their typical monthly volumes, probably in a day. So there's just going to be a lot of things that break here. Yeah, talk about an accelerant for the digital dollar idea.

This is one of the few cases where giving individuals even a real. retail CBDC would the strength of that would really show through right now, which I never thought I'd say that. But you definitely see the logic in a in a situation like this. Yeah. I mean, people criticizing Jack Dorsey for kind of putting his hand up and saying that he could distribute this. But yeah, just do it through a stable coin, do it through one of these fintech platforms that have the distribution. I'm sure it would go a lot smoother. Yeah. And like Squares, your cash shop is a particularly good. example here because lots of cash shops users are unbanked. They have a heavy presence in the south.

Lots of unbanked users. They give users debit cards. So they bank effectively unbanked users. So some people were saying, well, you know, there's a high overlap between people who are banked anyway and between people who use these fintech products. In the case of Squares cash up, that's actually not the case. You know, they actually, they service a pretty different demographic from just people who use these retail online bank accounts. So I think if the government does do this, it would be a no-brainer to use some of these fintech platforms. Have you been watching the daily press conference, the daily Task Force press conference? I stopped watching after the third one.

I just gave up. I don't have the stomach for that much negative news. I just read crypto Twitter these days. Maybe we can close out with just giving a plug to some of the great podcasts that we've listened to this week. So this is, I think overall podcast listenership is down. But I wouldn't be surprised if actually the crypto segment is up because there's been some awesome podcast episodes. So you appeared on one. You were on the breakdown with Nate.

Yeah, that's a new podcast. The Nat is done doing with Coin Desk, I think. So that was actually a really fun one. That was just a short riff on some of these same topics like the bailout. We also had Antoine Lucalves, who's a name. engineer at coin metrics, pretty well known for being effectively one of the world's leading experts in blockchain analysis, appeared on Unconfirmed to talk about the BitMex issues that they had on March the 12th, which we're now calling the 12th, by the way. So that's the 12th because it really was

a absolutely catastrophic day in Bitcoin markets. Everything broke that day. And actually, spreads have been wide ever since. So it looks like, you know, one or two market makers actually went offline permanently after that. Yes, that was an awesome episode. Antoine's great, super data driven. There's a couple other really good ones this week. So Kathleen Brightman, co-founder of Tezos and Coase, which is one of our portfolio companies, appeared on Chain Reaction. So to talk about digital collectible card games and the launch of Coase's platform. So recommend checking that out. That's Tom Shannessi's podcast. also had on Pat Larson from Zen Ledger, the tax company that we talked about at the outset.

So that continues to be a really good podcast, churning out content this week. Yeah, and then we have Pomp. Pomp is just cranking these days. And Pomp had Chimath on his podcast. And Chimoth is legitimately one of my favorite commentators these days. His annual letter that he published about a month ago was also incredible. actually talking about historical parallels to where we are, how he thinks we're effectively at the dawn of a new progressive era,

how we're exiting the Gilded Age or an analog to the Gilded Age, with the robber barons, and moving into an era of sort of populism, upheaval, redistribution of wealth. So definitely one of my favorite pundits these days. Yeah, I agree. That was an awesome. So POMP's really been crushed it lately.

So what do you got on tap for the rest of the day and the weekend? Doing anything exciting? Pretty much the same thing that I do every single day. Stay at home, read crypto Twitter, do a little bit of work. It's like Groundhog Day. I saw you had a tweet that you're moving in on 50,000 followers and then some wise ass on Twitter said you should make a bet to see who gets there first. You to 50,000 or Matt to 1790, roughly the same percentage increase.

So what a jerk that guy is. That's not fair because you have a distinct advantage because you're starting from a much lower base. Like I've already saturated my whole audience. So there's no growth left for me. I just don't like to get called out like that. Well, you started from zero like a year ago. So you should be proud of what you've accomplished. Thank you.

That makes me feel a little bit better. You got to write some thought pieces, though. That's the way to do it. All right. So I think that's it for the. week. Hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and we will be back next week with a bunch of new episodes. See you next week.