On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly News Roundup 6/05/20 (Avanti Bank, Hester Peirce re-nominated, Section 230 and digital property rights) (EP.86)

Episode Date: June 5, 2020

Matt and Nic review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. In today's episode: Avanti Bank's raise and Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution regulation GBTC eating up the new supply Bloomberg's commentary on Bitcoin Hester Pierce is re-nominated to the SEC The prospects for blockchain games The Section 230 debate, and how that intersects with Web3 Social media and digital property rights The continued normalization of Bitcoin as a global macro asset

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 Concentive Easing. 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 this week's episode is brought to you by CASA, which is one of our portfolio companies. So be honest. How confident do you feel about the security of your Bitcoin? Every quarter we hear stories about exchange hacks, a new exit scam, a friend losing their pin, or we read about someone passing away and their family coming up empty handed. The best way to keep your Bitcoin safe is to hold it for yourself. and CASA is the easiest and safest way to do that. They have one of the most well-respected teams in the industry.

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off. Head over to keys.casa and get peace of mind that your Bitcoin is safe. So get over to Casa. Own physical, guys. There's nothing like it. There's nothing like it. Well, another, another busy week in the crypto space. And a good podcast earlier this week, you had Appalene Blanden on from Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance. Yeah. So that was a great episode. they have made some really awesome data tools. They have the Bitcoin consumption index and a new map showing where Bitcoin is mined based on geolocating the IP addresses of actual miners,

which is the first time anyone has done that. So that's pretty cool. As it turns out, most of the bitcoins in mine in China. Who knew? You know what I was kind of thinking when I was listening to that episode. where do you think the coolest place that Bitcoin is being mined? Obviously, these like flare gas situations are very interesting.

I'm fascinated by it. But I'd love to just start like a website where people send in pictures of where their miners are located. Like at the bottom of a waterfall, you know, where are these things? We might have an episode on this topic soon. I think some of the cool locations are like in Siberia or Central Asia, like in extremely remote places. It was very cheap electricity up there. Well, request for the most creative place that you've ever seen a mining operation. Let us know.

You want to get into some deals? Yeah, it was a busy week. Things are heating up again. Yeah, we had a bunch of deal announcements this week. So OmniX, which is a crypto asset brokerage platform, they raised $14 million in a series A led by Six Group. So Six is a consortium of Swiss banks. participation also included jump capital, Wicklow capital, and Sierra Capital. OmniX, for those of you who are not familiar, it was started by John Burnett and Hugh Lang.

They were previously over at State Street running State Street's blockchain initiatives. So congratulations to those guys. Yeah, we had a really interesting deal announced this week as well, Avanti Bank, which is a crypto-focused bank. based in Wyoming, raised 5 million in around led by the University of Wyoming Foundation, and blockchain capital, Morgan Creek, DCG, and others participated. So this is Kaelin Longs Bank. Brian Bishop, Bitcoin core developer, is the CTO.

James O'Burn, another Bitcoin developer, just announced that he's joining. So they've accumulated some really awesome Bitcoin talent. Yeah, and Wyoming is at the cutting edge of banking regulation. So they're pursuing a, maybe we should even do a whole episode on this, but they're pursuing this licensure regime that would make it really easy for crypto asset and blockchain companies to establish themselves in Wyoming. It's sort of what, I guess it was South Dakota did this for credit cards. And it became just a really attractive place to establish a company that was in the

credit card card industry. So that's what Wyoming's trying to do here and trying to be the most crypto-friendly state. which is a good idea. And I love that the University of Wyoming did this deal as a direct. I mean, that's great. It really speaks to what they think about the space. So excited to see these guys continue to grow. It looks like they're pursuing the charter now. And hopefully they'll get it. There's also a few other, you know, pretty large companies that are going down this path as well in Wyoming and pursuing these special charters. So exciting times. Yeah. What is it, the special purpose depository institution. Yeah, that's what it's called. I mean, the fact that that legislation talks about

Merkel trees is crazy. So there's references to like proofs of reserve in there. Shout out proofs of reserve. I get the feeling that's actually going to be a bit of a theme this year. Well, Caitlin really was a driving force behind getting that done out there. So she's been doing great work. Yeah, that state, compare that to the New York state legislature. on crypto exchanges, it's just night and day. Well, the big question is going to be, you know, your company, you go to Wyoming, and you get established, you get one of these charters,

and, you know, you would think that you'd get reciprocity across all the states. That's what you would expect, at least. What will be interesting is if New York actually grants reciprocity and allows folks to operate within New York without going through the New York licensing regime. I think that'll be the battle that eventually gets played out. We'll see what happens there.

But yeah, Wyoming is looking like a more attractive place to live by the day. I actually watched the eclipse in Wyoming. I was in Colorado. You guys remember the eclipse and we drove north to Wyoming. Casper, Wyoming. Seems like a long time ago. It was a simpler time. Yeah, it wouldn't take much to convince me to go to Wyoming right now.

So congratulations to those folks. Let's move on. So Numurai, which is a. crypto asset project. They raised $3 million through the sale of NMR tokens to Union Square Ventures, placeholder, coin fund, Dragonfly. So this is Richard Kribb. It's actually a hedge fund that operates on the back end based off of this platform. So congratulations to those folks. There was another one out of Japan, SynchroLife. So this is a startup that is focused on restaurant rewards. So they use a token to do this. They raise $2.6 million from MTV ventures and a number of

others, including Mitsubishi and Ceres. And then a floating point group, which is another crypto asset trading platforms. You're starting to see a theme here with these crypto asset trading platforms and execution venues. So these guys raised $2 million. They're a Boston-based team from Naval Ravakant. Algarin, Steve Kikinos was in the round. one ventures. Congratulations to those folks. A couple more. A lot of deals this week. Kingdom Trust, the custodian, they acquired choice holdings, which is a company focused on enabling crypto assets within retirement accounts. I mean, that seems like a no-brainer, right? Totally. And it's still pretty challenging to hold crypto in a tax advantage way.

Really difficult. So we'll probably see a lot more activity in that space, just holding, and Coinbase made a move in this space and had a partnership a few months ago, so we'll start to see more of that, I'm sure. And then the last one of the week is Fort Maddoch, which is a company focused on building a passwordless sign-up experience using blockchain technology.

So they raised $4 million in a round led by placeholder that had participation from Lightspeed, Social Capital, and Naval Ravikon. Passwordless sign-up, that's, I mean, sooner the better, right? Yeah, there, I mean, it's interesting because it kind of degrades into, or at least cryptography anyway, because lots of people use these password managers, which are based on cryptographic credentials.

So it's already in kind of an indirect way, we have passwordless sign in. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, this doctrine of remembering hundreds of distinct passwords for different services seems. pretty obsolete already. You remember the episode that we did with Nick Grossman where he was talking about the potential killer apps for crypto and talking about a browsing experience that would have no passwords and also no credit card entry, you'd be able to just kind of point and click and buy something.

I do think that that's where we're going with this, where one of the killer apps will be basically a browser, similar to the killer app for the internet was like the browser. Yeah, he was way ahead of that. Yeah. Some news this week. Did you see Samsung's announcement? Yeah. So they announced that their mobile wallet will integrate with Gemini so users can buy directly and then hold on the HSM on their smartphone. Yeah, I don't have a Samsung phone, but this is really cool. I might have to find someone that does or maybe I'll get one just to play around with this. But so I guess their mobile wallet is going to become just preloaded on all their phones,

it looks like. Yeah, natively integrated crypto wallet is pretty cool. I guess HTC also does this. Apple seems nowhere on this. Yeah. But all these phones come with HSMs now. So you think it's just going to be the default in a couple of years. Yeah, I guess it wouldn't take much.

for Apple to, you know, to get into it, especially if something like Libra is successful and we start to see more stablecoin adoption, maybe some banks getting into the stable coin game. So maybe this is an early indicator that we're going to start to see more wallet infrastructure built out on the phones, which would be great. I mean, I think just the ease of use around wallets is actually a barrier to getting, you know, people into this space. It's not super easy to use these wallets. And talk about an important trend in terms of allowing people to actually functionally use cryptocurrency in the developed world. Not everybody has the ability to acquire a ledger or treasor and use it with a laptop. Functional and user-friendly mobile wallets are pretty much essential here.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, picture being in a country where you don't have great faith in the fiat currency, and you want to hold just U.S. dollars represented on blockchain. Imagine doing that on your phone. So you get paid in local currency and you switch into U.S. dollars represented in the form of a stable coin. That's a killer use case right there. Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of that this year. There's already a few startups.

So maybe the biggest news in my mind this week for the industry is just that Hester Pierce has been nominated for a second term by President Trump. This is great news. So she is a commissioner. She's not the head of the SEC, but she's one of the, I believe, what are there,

five commissioners? And so Hester Pierce has been, by far in a way, the most staunch ally to the industry. So she wrote a dissent in the, I forget which, it might have been the Winklevoss, ETF.

She wrote a dissent that said that it should have been approved. And she's been on record saying that we should have a safe harbor provision for decentralized networks to allow these things to actually, you know, work and to see if there's a way to allow them to comport with existing regulatory regimes. Just a huge advocate for the industry and for allowing some of these things to be experimented upon. So, you know, if Hester Pierce

is back in the SEC and, you know, if she starts to play a more advanced role, you'd have to think that this is really positive for, like, the chances of getting an ETF approved, I would think. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the crypto industry seems resigned to the fact that we're not going to get one under Clayton. And I think that's true. I mean, at this point, there don't seem to be any real substantive objections to Bitcoin ETF. There's plenty of other asset classes that have ETFs that their markets are not as developed as Bitcoin. And there's a bunch of totally garbage ETFs out there, four times levered ETFs. There's the USO ETF, which had all these difficulties recently. They changed the terms of the ETF. Retail got crushed. It was a total mess. I think it's just at this point it's waiting until Clayton leaves.

Well, and that might not be too far away, but... That's 2021. You know, I think all you can ask for absent, you know, Clayton finding a great job, which, you know, he's really good. so people should hire them. All you can ask for is just to have regulators that are really committed to understanding the space. And I think Hester Pierce has proven that she has the ability to get in the trenches and really roll up her sleeves and understand this stuff and engage with the community in a very, very positive way.

So you know, you can't ask for more. And I think we would be lucky to have her back. Yeah, she's very authentically involved in the industry. I met her at the MIT Bitcoin Expo in 2019. She was just hanging out. It's awesome. She loves to actually engage in discourse with the industry, which is pretty cool. Yeah, definitely.

Another story that caught my eye this week. So Amazon was granted a patent this week in the United States for a blockchain-based authenticator to use in their supply chains, which it's like a three-year-old application that they put in. But it's a really great use case. They're basically just time stamping things as they move through supply chains and putting those entries onto blockchain. So I don't know how this one slipped under my radar for a couple of years,

but I mean, I guess Amazon's up to some stuff. Supply chain blockchains. I don't know about dedicated blockchains for supply chain purposes. But using a public. blockchain. No, I don't know if Amazon is going to use a public blockchain here, but we'll see. I mean, what you'd want to do here is if you're focusing on supply chains, you just want to use the most secure public notary, you know, and so just pick your poison, right? Like you're kind of defaulting into a public blockchain and there's probably a, you know, obviously there's one that's the

most secure, but there's probably a few options that you could play. And being agnostic might make sense too but we'll see um well what else happened this week in terms of things that you watch things that you listen to um the crypto ratings council came out with some new ratings so they rate they rated tron nervos and polka dot 4.75 out of five and uh five means they think it is likely to be classified as a security. So there is some pretty punishing ratings, actually. Remind me again who's on the Crypto ratings council? Crypto ratings council is composed of Coinbase, Circle, Genesis, and some exchanges.

And the idea is to generate a consistent treatment for tokens or, you know, crypto assets in kind of a self-regulatory way. But I don't know, color me skeptical about these ratings. Well, yeah, I guess they're sort of used to inform a kind of a broad set of companies and whether or not they would list an asset.

So that's sort of why it exists. TBD on how impactful it is, I suppose. Yeah, I guess the legal theory or the theory is that if the industry, you know, comes together around some set of ratings, that might be a self-regulatory measure and they could get the actual regulators on board potentially. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a plug. I went on the HUD Capital webinar series on crypto and blockchain VCs. So that was a fun webinar.

That's with Brooke Pollack who runs Hut Capital, which is a block. chain focused fun to fun. So that was a good time. It's always weird to do these things on a webinar. You're just like, you know, you're worried about your background. You're worried about all sorts of stuff. But it was fun. I think that we should have a new name for webinar. I just can't stand the word webinar. It's like the most boomer word ever. Oh, go off. Go off. I don't know. I just hate the word. Can we call it something else? Like, is there an alternative word for this concept? It was effectively a discussion. Maybe we could just call it a discussion.

Okay, there we go. A discussion. I had a discussion with Brooke. I'm feeling better already. Blockchain venture capital. So that was a lot of fun. And then something that I put in our newsletter this morning was, I don't know if you've been reading Bloomberg's analyst here as a commodities analyst, Mike McAllone.

He writes about crypto assets. And like really, he does a great job. He put out a really clickbait article this week. The title was something needs to go really wrong for Bitcoin to not appreciate. So not surprisingly, I read this article and I thought it was really good. I think Bloomberg is actually doing a great job here. Was that like, that wasn't on the news side of the house, right? No, it was not on the news side of the house.

It was on the research side of the house. Something needs to go really wrong for Bitcoin not to appreciate? Yeah. I think so too. I think so too. this guy's maybe he's on to something well it's clear that he really understands what's going on is this is not just like hey there's only 21 million of these things the number's going to go up he had a really detailed analysis he was talking about the kind of the market structure but he was also

just talking about the broader thesis for why you'd want to hold one of these you know crypto assets talks about the digitization of the dollar talks about tether talks about stable coins pretty extensively actually. So I thought it was a great analysis and I don't know. I mean you just some of these things that are happening right now like two years ago you'd be like hold on what like Bloomberg has a commodities analyst that's writing really intelligent things about crypto assets you'd be like this is crazy but it's happening. The one thing that people are really focusing on is that GBDC is absorbing all of the new issuance on its own. It's more than accounting. Explain that a little bit actually. I think that that's an important thing to talk about. Well, I don't know if you guys heard, but we had the thing called

the halving. So the issuance is only 900 coins a day. And as it turns out, you know, gray scales, GBDC is accounting for an inflow, which you can find all these statements online of more than 900 coins a day. So all of that new issuance is being gobbled up by a single entity. And that's before we even think about all the other kind of custodians. and exchanges and sources of kind of velocity sync kind of entities like coinbase or cash app. So people are pretty excited about this. I will say, however, that, you know, the mining function is not the only way coins reach the market in Bitcoin.

So people can just like sell coins that they already have. So this doesn't require the Bitcoin mechanically appreciates. you know there's just a whole bunch of coins sitting out there in cold wallets that people can choose to sell at any time but you know on the margin free market yeah on the margin this is this is a pretty powerful kind of phenomenon but yeah i mean you know the the like one year active supply of bitcoins will vary between typically 40% and 60% of supply so there is those supply side dynamics are more complex, I think, sometimes some people let on. Yeah, yeah, agreed.

Another piece that I liked this week was from Flipside, Crypto, one of our portfolio companies. So they had some research that goes into the gaming platforms, blockchain-based games. I call them video games. You hate it when I say that, but non-fundable kind of in-game assets, blockchain registered property, that type of thing. Yeah, we just say gaming these days. We don't say video games.

But when you say gaming, people think gambling. So it's like, you don't, it's tough. Well, we're gambling and gaming are converging in this instance. So that's fair. I guess that's true. So Flipside did an analysis and they think that about $20 million in revenue was generated from about three or four of these top firms together in the first year that they existed, which that's pretty impressive.

I mean, just to pop on the scene, industry went from nowhere to something in a year. So they did a pretty extensive analysis just in terms of the platforms. A lot of it was informed by the on-chain data that they're following. I continue to think that this is a huge market here. We're going to start to see a lot of really cool things built using blockchains to register property in the context of games. Yeah, I was revisiting my 2020 predictions, which I wrote in the block at the start of the year. And one of the predictions was that, quote, an actually fun. blockchain game emerges. No disrespect to the prior blockchain games. So far I've actually been

frustrated in that prediction, although I would say I haven't played every blockchain game or actually any of them. What are you looking for? Like angry birds on a blockchain? Well, there would be no reason to have, you know, strongly codified property rights and angry birds, right? But yeah, I mean, I still do think that this is potentially going to happen. It's just removing one source of arbitrariness in the game experience. Yeah. And codifying one thing put it outside the control of the developers. That's kind of inevitable, I think.

But there hasn't been a real breakout hit yet. People talk about CryptoKitties, but that didn't last. Yeah, still early. Still early. We'll see. Maybe a slightly non-crypto, but I think there's a crypto angle to it story was, so there's a blog post put out by Albert Wenger,

who's a partner at Union Square Ventures. I thought it was really thoughtful. So he talks about social media platforms in Section 230 Protection, which has obviously been in the news a lot with, you know, Trump came out and said that he wants to remove Section 230 protection, which would be around, sort of regulating speech on these platforms and the role that these...

Maybe we should define it first, not to put you on the spot there. This is something that Press and Burn has been talking about a lot, actually. He's had some great blogs on it. But basically what it says is that you can be the administrator of a social media or a publishing platform and you're not accountable legally for the things that other people write on that platform. But if you're exercising a certain amount of editorial discretion over the content, let's say you are approving every single piece of information or content being produced on that platform, you're more of a publisher, in which case you are accountable for what's being written there.

So that would be like a newspaper, like you can sue the New York Times for libel for something, one of their columnists' rights, for instance. But you couldn't, in theory, sue Facebook, the company for liable for something a Facebook user wrote about you. So that's the distinction. Yeah. And so it's section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And where this really came from was in the early days of the internet when you had these

message boards popping up. And folks that were operating these platforms were worried and basically, would not have had message boards up if they didn't have some sort of protection there. So that's the genesis of it. And, you know, obviously there's two sides of this. And I think it is kind of a political argument. But Albert is proposing that, you know, maybe we should give this Section 230 protection or something like it to some of these large data monopolies, you know, the Facebooks of the world. But in exchange, they would need to provide a complete set of end user APIs. And And basically to define that, you know, what that would mean is that if you have an end user API to Facebook, then you would be able to build things on top of it using theoretically the social graph.

Right. So you'd be able to build things that, you know, allow you to take advantage of the network that you've built on Facebook, sort of the property that you have accumulated, which would be like your friend group, your connections. And so the design space for what you could build if you were able to port your social graph over from a Facebook. or a Twitter or Google would be really significant. And I think, you know, I mean, that's what like all of these sort of, you know, smart contract platforms that are going after the data monopoly, like some of these platforms are actually being created with the idea that, you know, you could build a new social graph and actually own it. And if something like what Albert is proposing here, you know, were to come into existence,

I think that would just like accelerate the adoption of some of these things theoretically. Well, I think it would actually outcompete some of those Web3 platforms because they're predicating their existence on creating a new alternative social graph, like real estate, basically, social media real estate, where you have identities and you have, you know, key pairs. And then you build that up from scratch. Whereas what this does is it turns these kind of closed. wild gardens, kind of monopolistic wild gardens, into kind of a, it just inserts open source forces kind of some more open source, open nature on top of them and turns them into more like utilities and, you know, gives a lot of power back to the developers and users. So you may not even need some of these Web3 projects if that were to happen. Maybe, maybe. Yeah, that's the other side of

it. I mean, you could see a world where this just makes the centralized options, you know, a lot more conducive to building things on top of, you know, or it could just accelerate your ability to just take things that you like from those centralized options and port them over really seamlessly onto decentralized options. So I don't know. I don't know if I have the answer there, but it seems like a really good idea. I thought that the blog post is worth reading. This is clever for sure. And this is reminiscent of the podcast who did the Balogy, where he talked about social media handles as a form of property, which I think is actually going to be a really big trend this year or people are being awakened to that because it's clear that these are

commercially, like once you grow a handle on a social platform, it has commercial value, right? That's obvious. Everybody who has a large account on Twitter or who even gets a whole bunch of retweets, they then immediately monetize that by selling ads, basically. So these are commercially relevant entities. So under kind of the Lockean theory of property, you would say, well, you're a squatter, you know, you found a certain name space. You occupied, you know, a slot on the frontier.

And then you cultivated that garden. and you built up that homestead and you turn that handle from something that was empty to something which is commercially vibrant and socially relevant. You build your graph. So under the Lockean theory of property, you could say you're mixing your labor with land, thus constituting property. And so this is not the way that people think about social media right now. They think, well, you're just there. you serve at the pleasure of some like feudal oligarch like Jack Dorsey and they can kick you off. They're effectively their their feudal estate whenever they want. But I think there's actually going to be more of a move towards, well, hang on.

Like I put a lot of work into this. I don't serve at your pleasure. What right do you have to eminent domain my property? So I'm actually pretty persuaded by this school thought it is kind of incompatible with the like dominant theory around how these things work today. But that's not to say people couldn't create alternatives that are more accountable to this kind of this reality. Yeah, yeah, well said. All right, why don't we come up with a few more recommendations here for weekend reading? So I enjoyed Token Terminal put out an interview with Marcos Verimis, who's over at Evanston Capital now.

He used to be the crypto asset lead at Cambridge Associates. So this was a good interview. talked about Marcos's experience in the space, talked about the institutional allocators lens. Talks a little bit about some of the stuff that we talked about on the podcast with Marcos a few weeks ago. So I'd recommend checking that out. I also read this Bloomberg piece on Adam Bact, which was kind of like weird because they started it off by saying like maybe he's Satoshi, which I thought we've already gone through this a lot of times that, you know, he says he's not Satoshi. No, but this is a new, there's like some new like conspiracy that he has Satoshi that just resurfaced

recently for some reason. How many times a year are we going to do this? Like, hey, we found Satoshi thing. I'm getting, like, every time this happens, I'm like, oh, my gosh. I like the original fake Satoshi, the one by Newsweek. Dorian Nakamoto. Yeah, Dorian Nakamoto. Yeah, he was a good one.

There's some fun trivia around that. So that article was written by a lady named Leia Goodman, I believe. and the original Tazos white paper was authored by someone called L.M. Goodman. So they jokingly attributed the Tazos white paper to this Newsweek journalist who falsely uncovered Satoshi. I did not know that. So that's a little bit of blockchain trivia for you. That is good blockchain trivia. You listen to any good podcast this week?

No, I'm a net exporter of podcasts. So, man, you got to give back to the community. You got to listen. It's a golden age of podcast right now. Well, I'll give you a few to listen to over the weekend. So Antonopoulos, Andreas, was on chain reaction. Always good. He's been kind of quiet lately, but he was on a podcast.

Suu, who I think is one of the most thoughtful writers and thinkers in this space. He's from Three Arrow's Capital. He appeared on the scoop with Fintech Frank. and he talked about prime brokerage, talked about a lot of market structure things, deep in the weeds, but, I mean, for me, this is the type of podcast I like to listen to, so I enjoyed that one a lot. And then two more, Jesse Walden from Variant Fund, former Andreessen Horowitz. Now he's started his own crypto VC fund, so it's great to see more funds being started in the space. He appeared on Unchained and talked about decentralizing projects. And then Karim from Coin metrics appeared on Tales from the Crypt. I haven't actually listened to this one yet, but I'm looking forward to listen to it this weekend.

So Golden Age. Yeah, Kareem is a recent hire at CM. He came up with this really cool methodology to identify the relative share of minor hardware on Bitcoin. And he's done some really awesome stuff, visualizing the predominance of various pools in Bitcoin. So super dynamic analyst. that's great all right so i think that's all we have for the this week um you know a lot of news this week a lot of a lot of deals stuff's happening yeah the uh that's this is the view-shaped recovery

we're back yeah i don't know i it's uh i don't know if we ever went away but it's things are feeling feeling like there's a lot of startup activity right now and there's just a lot of interest. Continue to field a lot of phone calls from, I guess I would classify them as just global macro people, you know, people that are maybe interested in crypto assets as a macro play right now. And I'm having a lot of conversations with folks that are asking about, you know, how would I hold these things? Where do you, where do you get liquidity from? You know, talk to me about the benefits of a Coinbase versus a BitGo versus a fidelity. So these conversations are really picking up. And they're from like huge allocators. It does seem like we've gone through a normalization

in the last six months, which has really accelerated. You know, we talk about the continued monetization of Bitcoin, but, you know, something definitely changed this year. And I think the commitment of central bankers to unlimited issuance was probably the number one thing that opened people's eyes a little bit because there are constraints there. There are constraints. And eventually you do depreciate the currency. That's just the fact of it. You can't print on an unlimited basis without depreciating the currency. And everyone collectively realized we're ultimately beholden to what the central bank wants to do here.

And a subset of those people wanted an alternative. Yeah, that's well said. So we've got a bunch of podcasts in the queue. I think we're going to have a good stretch here next. few weeks of podcasts. We're kind of in a backlog situation. Yeah, we have some extremely good ones. So I won't spoil it, but we have some very, very good ones lined up.

Some good ones, some technical folks, some more markets folks. So you'll have to stay tuned and listen and hope everyone has a great weekend. And we will see you next week.