On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/14/22 (Crypto-dollarization in Turkey, Dorsey's Bitcoin Legal Defense fund, Banning CBDCs) (EP.277)

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Matt and Nic return for more deals and news of the week. In this episode:  Matt loses the podcast audio New Turkey drama Rep Emmer introduces a bill banning a retail focused CBDC Nic releases a song with Gramatik The story behind the Scribbler song We investigate Fan Controlled Football Paypal looks to build a stablecoin Several banks issue the USDF stablecoin Crypto-dollarization in Turkey Why dollarization fails Jack Dorsey starts a Bitcoin developer legal defense fund  Justin Sun is a Grenadan diplomat  Content mentioned Nic's song with Gramatik, Just a Scribbler WSJ, Turks Pile Into Bitcoin and Tether to Escape Plunging Lira Sponsor notes:  Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Learn more at fireblocks.com Corporations and institutions can allocate cash into Circle Yield to gain crypto lending exposure and earn superior returns compared to traditional markets. It's secured, overcollateralized and built on the leading dollar digital currency. Visit circle.com/yield to book a meeting

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 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 On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Circle. And it's also brought to you by Fireblocks. More on those companies later in the episode.

Welcome to Brink Nation, Fireblocks. May you stay with us a long time. Welcome to the crowd, Fireblocks. It's a powerful company. We love our sponsors on the show. And they love us. We do. Temporarily.

Yeah, we do. We love their sponsors. Well, I just have to put my hand up and apologize because we are recording this at 9 p.m. And we actually already recorded it at 8 a.m. And then my audio file just wasn't there. Absolutely brutal day. So we've done 270-ish episodes of the show. And actually, we've only really lost the audio one time.

Actually, that was the Matthew Mizinsky's episode. And now you thought that was actually a great episode. And the joke was that we did a tribute episode. to the last episode. It was really funny at the time. And for the first time, you have fumbled the football here and lost the audio.

I mean, and it was a pretty good episode. I mean, we're coming in hot. I had a big Trenta iced coffee this morning. I had a run-in with turkeys, which I guess we can talk about again, but I had a full-blown turkey run-in this morning. And then I recorded it in our new office, which was the setup was a little bit off,

and I just think something happened there. I'm like a boomer who can't do a VCR. So we've lost some, like, moderately decent, you know, content. We just have to say all the same jokes again, basically. I don't even remember what we said. Well, the thing that was crazy this morning, I mean, it feels like it was years ago at this point, but I drove out of my house this morning.

There's 20 turkeys out there. And my next door neighbor was feeding them raw onions. He was in front of his house feeding a flock of turkeys raw onions, like an absolute maniac. I feel like you're more scandalized by the fact that it was onions as opposed to the fact that he was feeding the turkeys, thus causing them to infest your neighborhood. He was rolling raw onions into just a gaggle of turkeys.

It was like he was bowling onions at them. So is this kind of, have we cracked the mystery here in terms of like why there's turkeys in your backyard all the time? No, I knew that it was because he was feeding them things, but to see someone do that, just to take it to such a level of disrespect for your neighbors,

is just unbelievable. to me. What you could do is, you know, fulfill your destiny here and hunt some of them and then make turkey jerky and then offer him some of the jerky for Christmas. That maybe, you know, because it'd be his beloved turkeys. That would be like a nice little plot twist. He's, he's one of those guys, though, that you just don't really, you know, you don't want to engage if you don't have to. Well, so that's your turkey update. Still, still rumbling somehow, that drama never runs. It's still still continuing. I mean, I say, sent you a picture of this. That's what's happening. Well, the podcast, I guess, was brighter news.

So we had one of our all-time episodes this week. I think this might have been my favorite episode of on the brink that I was not a part of. But you had Representative Tom Emmer, Republican from Minnesota on the podcast, talked about crypto regulatory views, his views on inflation, MMT, stablecoins, CBDCs. I think my faith in humanity, at least as it relates to politicians, was restored after listening to that episode. Yeah, that was definitely a bright spot for Brink Nation. Tom Emmer admitted on the podcast that he is a listener. So shouts out to Representative Emmer. Thank you to Lizzie Fallon for setting that up. That was great. And yeah, I like how he referred to you as Walsh a lot on this show. I felt like I was like high school bud is your right now. Yeah, yeah. But he did have some great takes. His takes on MMT were great. I was so psyched about that. The stable coin versus CBDCs. Now, Representative Emmer has introduced a bill banning retail focused Fedcoin or retail focused CBDC. So it's all good stuff.

It's, you know, I guess there's a lot to digest there. But the one thing was that he just knows what he's talking about, which is just such a refreshing view. I mean, you hear so many of these politicians talk about cryptocurrencies and they just have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. They're misrepresenting it. And he's just a very clear thinker on it. So that was one thing.

I also liked how we called himself out on the CARES Act a little bit or at least said, hey, here's why I voted for it. You know, some of the Republicans didn't like it. So just seemed like an honest broker. Yeah, that CARES Act thing was really interesting because I was scandalized by it at the time that, well, not the representative Emmer specifically voted for it, but just that fiscal conservatism apparently had died in 2020. But he did raise a good point, which was if the government is going to shut everyone's livelihoods down. they probably owe those businesses and individuals, some sort of, you know, transfer payment. Obviously, you got out of control thereafter. But, yeah, that was an interesting insight.

The other thing I really liked was he was recommending High Ex-Rode to Serfdom, classic book. Yeah. I mean, it's so cool. He seems totally aligned with sort of the core ethos here. So definitely check that out. It seems like he's going to, you know, to the extent that the Republicans gain a bunch of seats here in the next election,

then he'll be on that host Financial Services Committee with presumably a much bigger role, I would think. Yeah, so he's got, you know, that relatively senior position on the Financial Services Committee, which I believe will be in the hands of the Republicans come November. He co-founded, I believe, certainly co-chairs the Blockchain Caucus, which is gaining membership. He's introduced a number of pieces of crypto-focused legislation. co-sponsors crypto legislation. So, you know, I think it's going to be a good year for, you know, Emmer's office and that agenda in Washington,

although that does, that is predicated on control flipping over. The other story of the week here, as it relates to Castle Island content, is that you are in the music game. So you collaborated with grammatic on a song. It's called Just a Scribler, and you did the keyboard parts of the track. So let's turn it on.

Okay. Here I'm going to play a little extract. Here we go. Look at that. So it's more than just them dubbing you in there. You actually perform that song. Yeah. So Grammatic grabbed the vocals from my Lex Friedman appearance.

Hopefully Lex Friedman doesn't DMCAS. And then he sent me the beat with my vocals on it. And it's just this nice beat. And he's like improvised over the track. I'm like, well, I'm actually. grammatic, you know, you're great, but I'm not a professional musician. I can't. And he's like, just send me anything. And so, you know, I spent an hour or so tooling around on the keyboard. And that, you know, I came up with like five or six melodies. And then he actually

assembled it into something that actually sounds great. And did he know that you knew how to play the piano? Yeah, because in April of last year, I posted a video of me playing Apex Twins song on Twitter of Real 14. It's a great piano song. And so I believe that's how he realized. But he just assumed that I could improvise like a jazz lick over a beat, which was a faulty assumption, frankly. You know, there's like, that's a very different kind of skill. But I like how it came out. I think it sounds great. I think it's awesome. It's on Audius now. So it's going to live forever. So we did our web three launch. So it's on Audius. It'll most likely will be releasing an NFT probably on Mint songs. Sive portfolio company.

Shout out Mintzongs. And then we'll do the legacy streaming launch. But I think this is a new thing, the Web 3 launch. So before you go to Spotify, before we go to Apple Music, you go Audius first. And so, yeah. So please do stream it as much as you can. I officially have royalties. I'm registered with BMI, I think, or BMO.

they're like a talent agency or like I'm officially a songwriter on the track so you know I'd like to get my royalty check of like six cents or whatever so please stream it it'll be programmatically paid to you the royalty check right you can your your kids will be getting those royalty checks at some point in the future yeah I've honestly no idea how it works I'm sure it's like tons of like actual paperwork and stuff like that but it's cool to be you know a literal actual professional musician, you know, in case this whole venture capital thing doesn't work out, you know, I've always got my backup plan now. I used to work for a radio station company. I could talk to some of those old boomer stations. Try to get you on. Yeah, it's all about the connections in the music industry.

So that was pretty cool. So we, while we pop into some deals of the week here, the first one up is actually a Castle Island deal. So Friction, which is a portfolio and risk manager building on top of Solana. They raised $5.5 million from Jump, Defiance, Castle Island, Pillar, Libertus, Delphi Ventures and plenty of others. So congratulations to the friction team. Love it when we can announce Castle Island deals on the show. Next up, we have a pretty interesting deal. It's not even strictly a crypto deal,

but it concerns crypto VC firm. So Citadel, the market making firm, has raised $1.15 billion from Sequoia and CryptoVC firm Paradigm at a $22 billion valuation. So this is the first time they've raised outside capital. And it's kind of shocking almost that it is a crypto venture from doing it. And Matt Huang over a paradigm said that they look forward to sit at all getting into the crypto market. So that's a pretty clear signal that they will be opening up a crypto arm of the business there.

Pretty wild deal. I think this is a much bigger deal than people are talking, you know, people think. So think about this from the perspective of Citadel is the largest player really in this market outside of crypto. And plenty of their competitors in that market have popped into the crypto market. So jump is huge, Jane Street, Virtue. I mean, there's plenty of their competitors who've been active in crypto. And Citadel really hasn't. And for that matter, Ken Griffin has really like not embraced it, I would say.

You know, he's had some pretty critical comments about the industry. And he just hasn't been leaning in. Not to mention he beat out the constitution DAOFO. So he's been kind of a villain to the crypto industry, maybe in that respect. But this is a clear signal that they're going to be moving in that direction. You know, they see the value there. And, you know, I just wonder here, are we going to see more sort of Web 2.0, finance 1.0 companies start to get valuations done by outside crypto vCs that really just see the opportunity

to take an existing business model and bring it to the crypto asset market and mature that infrastructure because it's not too hard to imagine here that Citadel will be getting into the payment for order flow game here pretty quickly and just bringing some structures that exist maybe in the equity markets into the crypto markets to the extent that they're not already there. So I think this is a fascinating deal. Yeah. To me it sort of just drives from the point that crypto isn't this siloed off asset class anymore. It's just another asset class that can be accessed with the machine. of institutional finance. And so, you know, that honeymoon period, I think, is coming to an end where we were off in our own sandbox. We're just kind of part of the financial system now.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So the next one up is Flip. This is an NFT marketplace aggregator. It was founded by Brian Krogsgard. He's the co-host of the Up Only podcast, which I'm a big fan of. That's the podcast that he does with Kobe. They get a lot of listens, a lot of downloads on that podcast. He raised $6.5 million. It was a seed round. It was from distributed global chapter one in CMS. So congrats to the flip team. Next up we have DeCentral Park Capital. They're a D5 Focus Crypto fund. They raise 75 million. These are some sharp guys. So congrats to the Decentral Park Capital team. It would be exciting to see what they do over there. Next one up is serum community foundation. This is the community-led foundation behind the serum decentralized exchange protocol. So they

raised 75 million from Tiger Global and Commonwealth Asset Management. Then we have zero hash. There are B2B infrastructure platform, power and crypto services for neo banks and payments firms. They raise 105 million in a series D. Next one up is Conduit. This is a decentralized finance app. They raise $17 million from core innovation capital, portage diagram ventures and Gemini Frontier Fund, among others. Then we have the Near Foundation. They raised $150 million from Three Arrow's Capital, Mechanism Capital, Dragonfly, A16Z, Jump, Alameda Z Prime, and Amber Group. So this is an interesting one.

Coinbase acquired Fairax, a CFTC regulated derivatives exchange. So it'll be interesting here. The movement is happening here on the derivatives exchange front where you're seeing just a kind of a consolidation in that market. And so Coinbase getting on the board here seems like a smart play here. get that derivatives functionality in place and be able to service that market, which of course is a lot larger than the spot market in most asset classes. Next up we have the Defy Alliance. So they've raised $50 million and they are turning themselves.

What else into a Dow? A Dow, nice. Next one up is Gemini. So they have acquired BitRIA. It's spelled Bitria, which is, that's a little confusing. They used to be, they used to actually be known as blockchain. So this is a digital asset portfolio management platform for wealth and asset managers. So congrats to the Bitria team.

Next up, we have proof of learn, which is a Web3, learn to earn platform. That's my new favorite thing to say. Learn to earn. They raised 15 million from NIA, Anamoka Golden Tree, asset management, Gumi, Cryptos, and others. Proof of Learn. That's a good name. Next one up is C. Shell.

This is a high yield savings app. million from Kostla, Kindred, Solana, Avalanche, and Mark Cuban. All right. Then, you know, no disrespect to the other deals, but probably my favorite deal of the week, is fan-controlled football. So they're an actual football league, like American football, with NFT integrations. So they raise $40 million. The premise here is that owners of the

tokens, I suppose, can actually call the plays that the real world players are actually acting out in the game. So it's like Madden in real life. It's a pretty cool premise. I mean, if I was, if we got this up and running and you could call the players for the New York Jets, I would just run the butt fumble play every single time. I don't know if that's an option, but, uh, So it's, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's different rules from sort of regular football. So it's not exactly full size. There's no special teams.

There's no kicking. It's a 50-yard field. It's a 7 versus 7. But I believe, and they stream it on Twitch and then, you know, the fans of the teams call the plays. I believe they actually have some maybe ex-professional players in the league too. It's a pretty cool concept I'm not sure that the fans should actually be calling the plays though That's sort of like a direct democracy in a way that maybe you shouldn't have on

I'm not sure if I'm more qualified than like Josh McDaniels to call the plays for the Patriots I mean I couldn't do a worse job than the Washington football team leadership If we're going to be honest But yeah this is what the founding fathers warned us about you know the passions of the crowds And that's why they put these structures that you know, remove the common man's influence on government. You got to put some, you got to put some intermediation there. Just be sending people deep.

Same with football. Just send them deep, right? Would you run the ball at all in a league like this? Yeah, would fans ever vote to run the ball? Like to commit to a running style of play? Of course not. You're not going to do the three yards in a pile of dust. You don't do that offense.

Yeah, you would just probably call Hail and Mary's every play or like weird stuff. I mean, should we get a team? I'm interested. You know, I want to learn more. I want to call the plays. Yeah, I'm interested. All right. Request for podcast, fan-controlled football with.

Get in touch. These are our two interests, football and crypto. Yeah, they're merging. Yeah. That's sort of, that's it. That's what we care about on the show. The only previous intersection was just Tom Brady selling NFTs. I mean, when Tom Brady.

started to get into crypto. That was a good day for me. So FCF, pretty interesting. Got to say. When your business is scaling up and your portfolio is growing, you don't want to waste precious time on manual crypto treasury management or settlement. Fireblocks can handle that for you with smart custody solutions for your crypto business, along with industry leading security technology. Whether you're starting a new fund or expanding operations, Fireblocks offers scalable solutions for companies of any size. From day-to-day crypto transactions to the most advanced defy strategies, FireBlocks is here to give you a competitive edge. They'll take care of the back end so you can focus on the big picture. Visit on the brink.link.com slash fireblocks to learn more. If you manage corporate or

institutional funds, you're probably looking for ways to access opportunities in crypto. You see the growth in momentum and want exposure. But a lot of institutions don't know how or aren't comfortable with the risks of Bitcoin or Defy. Now there's a new investment that's built specifically to help institutions get into digital assets. Meet Circle Yield. It's a blockchain-based investment built with USDC, the leading dollar digital currency. Circle Yield is fully secured and over-collateralized with Bitcoin to protect your funds. This also makes it a great fit for crypto institutions who want to diversify their treasuries and reduce risks while staying on-chain. You get your your choice of terms from one to 12 months and a fixed rate that's higher than what you'll get at a

bank or in many fixed income markets. Visit circle.com slash yield to book a meeting with one of their experts. That's circle.com slash yield. Well, how about this news this week? So PayPal, it came out. There was some evidence here. So this was someone was sleuthing through some of their code here. Someone saw that PayPal coin was in some of the code of their iPhone app. So it looks like they're actually, and they confirm this, launching their own stable. What do you make of this? So in some respects, PayPal balances are already stablecoins. They don't settle on blockchains, but they're very similar to stable coins.

You know, they're IOUs that are redeemable for underlying dollars held in reserve somewhere, which are tradable on a peer-to-peer basis. So it sounds a lot like stable coins. So they were sort of already close to being a stable coin. there are some proposed regulations on stable coins that would have also captured PayPal dollars, by the way. Yeah, among other things, right? That was the Stablecoins or Securities Act.

Yeah, that was probably the overly broad conception. But it doesn't surprise me. I mean, we're seeing a lot of these payment processing credit firms getting involved in public blockchains. I mean, Visa has been very active here, MasterCard to a lesser extent. Kind of makes sense. They're kind of skating where the puck is going. Yeah, I mean, I'll go so far as to say this is a total no-brainer. And it's great to see PayPal leadership actually get this, because if you think about the

functionality of this, just to be able to take that PayPal coin off platform and have it be completely interoperable with presumably like anyone that has an Ethereum address, I think that's a pretty powerful thing. And probably positions PayPal really well at the on and off ramps of that type of an ecosystem. And certainly they have the network to do it. So talk about an end around maybe that releases their dependence on the card networks. So you think about this as maybe PayPal's leap beyond Visa, if ultimately successful. So it's pretty compelling. And obviously they have that curve infrastructure already from the MPC custody perspective.

So some good stuff going on over there, it sounds like. So speaking of new stablecoin structures, there is an interesting announcement this week that caught my eye. There's a new stable coin called USDF. which is being issued by a consortium of regular old banks, including Cinevis, New York Community Bank, First Bank of Nashville, Stirling National Bank. Now, these are not large banks. They're sort of in between 50 and 100 in terms of the ranking of banks in America.

And they're issuing a stable coin, which is meant to be an alternative to your sort of USDTs, to your USDCs. It's on the Providence blockchain. Remember that one. And it's also meant to be fully KYC'd, so you can't send it to a wallet, which is not KYC'd.

So if you've ever sort of looked at your cash and thought to yourself, gee, I wish that this had embedded KYC and AML controls, like this is the coin for you. That's the coin. Well, it's nice to see those type of experiments. Yeah, so I predict that it will not be very popular, but who knows I could be wrong. You could see something like that as opposed being used for bank-to-bank settlements or something like that,

but I don't see a lot of people clamoring to get retail exposure to that. Yeah, and, you know, frankly, Tether is good enough for a lot of people, whether or not it should be. I mean, the news that caught my eye this week was this Wall Street Journal article about Tether usage in Turkey. Yeah. Talk about crypto dollarization. That might be the first instance that I would say is genuine crypto dollarization that's sort of really hostile to the local currency. I mean, the lira, I'm sure that some of the devaluation has to do with the fact that it's so easy to get access to stable coins or crypto assets in Turkey. I mean, it's a very vibrant country for the crypto industry.

Bitcoin and Tether is really, you know, that was the two. Those were the two assets that the WSJ profiled there. And you'd have to think that tether must be also quite popular in some of these African countries where you see just Tron Tether usage really skyrocketing. So it's probably the same use case. Yeah. And you know, it's incredible is like this Wall Street Journal article entitled Turks, Pile on Bitcoin and Tether to escape plunging Lira. I mean, what a headline.

You've got to pinch yourself sometimes. I mean, come on. How far have we come? That's unreal. To what Brock Pierce intended when he invented Tether. So, I mean, this is just crazy to me. Like, what, this stuff's been around for 13 years, stable coins been around for five years, and now crypto dollarization.

As we predicted, we wrote a white paper in 2020. As we predicted, it's threatening sovereign currencies. In the article, they say that Turks prefer stable coins to, domestic dollar denominated bank deposits, right? So you can have a bank account in Turkey that's denominated in dollars, but you don't trust it because in currency failure situations, they have a nasty habit of mandating conversion into the local currency and doing an overnight devaluation, as Argentines know very well. So your dollar deposits and your bank count are not safe, but what is more safe is a stable coin, which is managed by an offshore bank, some entity that's not in Turkey,

and where, you know, it's more portable and you can sort of really own the asset in a bearer asset way. So to me, that just underscores why stable coins are superior in many cases to the sort of domestic banking system. They're importing property rights from abroad that the locals just didn't have access to otherwise. It's why people in the United States kind of miss it on this topic, because there's an assumption that why would I use tether, it's operated by this shady offshore exchange, and I can just use, you know, Venmo. But that's not who this is competing for, right? This is, we take for granted the stability of the U.S. financial system. It's really incredible, yeah, and Americans don't appreciate that having dollars is a safety net, dollars or a safety net abroad and so

many countries, so many countries are partially dollarized. But getting physical cash in is cumbersome. You know, there's often black markets selling physical USD cash. You know, most $100 bills circulate offshore outside of the U.S. But, but, you know, there's obviously constraints there. And getting a U.S. bank account, you can do that as a foreigner, but it's typically reserved for the upper class. So it's just the great equalizer letting people buy stable coins at their exchange. I mean, it's such a powerful thing and totally underappreciated. Well, let's talk about some more news of the week.

So T0, which is a security token exchange, they settle charges with the SEC this week about violation of disclosure rules. And the only reason to bring this one up is to just point out again that the SEC has not given clarity to broker dealers around digital asset security. They don't know how to hold them because they don't have clarity. I think that's your bingo card. That's the middle frame on the bingo card is the good control location. 15C3-3-3. 15C3-3. Let's get a little clarity there.

Then all the broker dealers will be a lot more active. Just give them a little bit of clarity. That's the free space on the bingo card because we say it every week. did you read Moxie Marlin Spike's blog post on Web3? Yeah, I thought it was really good. So Moxie is, of course, the founder of Signal and just a world-renowned cryptographer. He's built an app that millions of people use, and it's pretty awesome. So he had a thoughtful blog post.

It was my first impressions of Web 3. I guess, you know, he just points out a lot of centralization vectors here that exist in the context of Web 3, including storage that is centralized, including the that a lot of these services are pinging centralized APIs, so like pinging the open sea, you know, scraping open C, pinging the open C API. And it's kind of just a, hey, you guys, wake up. A lot of this stuff actually is centralized and is this really, you know, the third generation. And so I guess there's a couple ways to look at it. Obviously, he's right about a lot of this stuff. I thought Vatelic had a pretty good rebuttal post, taking a little bit more of an optimistic

lens talking about all of the initiatives and projects that are underway to address some of those points of centralization. But it's hard to just, you know, read Moxie's thing and say that's wrong. Yeah, I mean, Moxie clearly understands this way around these things. And I think there's a lot of merit to what he's saying. He's not just saying, oh, this stuff is temporarily centralized. You know, you need to fix it. He's actually saying this stuff is intrinsically centralizing. and the process of building these things actually lends itself to centralization. So he wasn't a point in time analysis.

It was actually much deeper than that. He was saying you're trending inherently towards centralization. So it was actually, you know, sort of really stressed a lot of people out in the Web 3 space because I think it's a very trenchant critique. And I think apt in many ways.

There are definitely some easy wins that you could reverse the things that he points out. Like NFT wallets that are meant to be non-custodial are calling Metamask and calling OpenC, which seems silly. But of course, you know, the ultimate reason why they do that, why they rely on infure Metamask and OpenC is because running an Ethereum note is super cumbersome, really annoying.

It's not impossible, but it just kind of sucks. And, you know, the Ethereum community hasn't shown a, you know, market desire to keep node operation particularly cheap. In fact, Vitalik is forecasting very expensive full nodes, especially with ETH2, you know, 50 to 100 terabytes in size. So, you know, I think Moxie really hit a nerve. That said, some of the Therians did point out that, you know, he basically founded and designed mobile coin, which it's such. uses SGAX and has some extremely centralized elements in its own right. So it's kind of like, you know, you got to make your own bad first before you sort of criticize your neighbor.

It was sort of overshadowed that he stepped away from Signal this week too. So Brian Acton, who is one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, and he was a big donor into the Signal Foundation. He's taken over his CEO. So Moxie stepped away with this, you know, this wasn't the post-decent. them away, but this post got all of the attention. Meanwhile, I wonder what Moxie is doing next. Yeah, so tough critique.

Definitely some rebuttals, I think, I would take it more as a challenge and encourage the Ethereum community to sort of revisit their decentralized routes. They've definitely done a better job than many smart contract protocols, which just completely blew out the cost of running a node and forsook that model of decentralization. but I do worry the web that ETH2 will make a node operation effectively impossible and cement these intermediaries as the way to access the ETH blockchain. Do you see this Bloomberg report this week that CZ is worth $96 billion? I believe he owns the vast majority of the equity in Binance.

And that report excludes his own personal holdings too. So yeah, could well be the richest man in the world, actually. I don't think you'd want Bloomberg writing that article about you if you were the richest man in the world. Yeah, probably not something you aspire to. But I wonder if finance has an actual domicile at this point. You'd think that they'd sort of be able to find one. You'd think that you'd just be able to buy a country, right? the Bahamas

No that's not not for sale not for sale it's already sold to the other it's a competitor oh right

yeah yeah I mean did we talk about Justin's son becoming a diplomat in what country was it like the grenadines

or something Granada oh nice he's a statesman now yeah so he He is an official, I think he got citizenship and he's like an diplomat for this country in the Caribbean. Huh. So that's sort of his second career. I thought he handled that whole steam thing very diplomatically. Yeah, I mean, that's a great case study in terms of pitfalls of proof of stake networks.

I talk about it a lot. No one seems to care. Yeah, he's sort of an official diplomat. Now, that's what he does. I think he's retired. He bought a ticket to go on the rocket ship, I think, with Jeff Bezos. Oh, wow. I remember, you remember Consensus 2019, I think, was it 2019? Was he big there? Yeah, I'm sure I was there.

So he bought, I recall very clearly, he bought a banner on the outside of the Marriott in Manhattan, which was 80 yards long. And it had his face on it. and, you know, 30 yards high, emblazoned on the corner of this building. I think it said, dare to defy. Never get that out of my memory. Wow. Well, he has the last laugh, you know.

He owns a country now and he's a diplomat. Yeah, and I think he's probably immune from a lot of legal challenges through that. He might be one of the best marketers in the history of the crypto industry. He's up there with the Roger Verre. Probably the number one, because Roger Verre, you know, sort of faded away towards the end there. But Justin's on. He went out on top. Yeah, but he, yeah, we'll see if he has more longevity.

But, yeah, I mean, that was a remarkable ride. From ripple to Tron to BitTorrent, to steam that. There was just so much. Someone needs to write a book, just the characters of the crypto industry and just maybe do a hundred chapters of just the most interesting people that have crossed paths with the crypto industry. He would be in it. I mean, you could write a book about just like Charles Hodgkinson and like the weird stuff he gets up to. Yeah, that would be, he would be in it. There's just so many characters in the crypto space. It's unreal. I mean, all the books tend to

focus on like, you know, the history of Bitcoin or Ethereum, but yeah, you're right. We need a book on just like the wacky people that are in the crypto space. You just got to talk to someone who ran like an OTC desk from like 2013 to 17. They'll talk. tell you some wacky stories. Yeah, so basically Dan Madyshevsky needs to write this book. Dan, we know you're listening. Please write the book. CELCUS, you know, Selkis could probably grab 25 names there.

Yeah. Maybe we should crowdsource us. I think people would love to just 10 pages per person, just all the crazy things they did. What I'd like to see is more satires in the crypto space. I've been seeing any good satires, but there's just so much, you know, lunatic crazy nonsense. It deserves to be satirized. But I've never seen a good satire.

Yeah. Yeah. Like a movie. So, so this is cool. Jack Dorsey, Alex Morcos, and Martin White formed a legal defense fund

for Bitcoin developers that are being legally harassed by the odious Craig Wright, who falsely claims to be Satoshi. This is very, very welcome because, you know, a number of Bitcoin core developers have actually quit. And they haven't necessarily identified the legal harassment is the reason why, but I strongly suspect it

is. And it's really, really encouraging to see this. So I don't really understand how this can continue to happen. Like, how can this guy just sue people into oblivion and actually, like, continue? Is there no countersuit ability here? What's going on? Yeah, the legal system. system strongly favor is sort of the aggressor. And if you have unlimited funds and, you know, a desire to be a nuisance, it can go on for a very long time. Huh. So, yeah, nuisance suits, I believe a lot of them are launched from the UK.

But yeah, these nuisance suits are really an enormous drain on the core developers. To see Jack Dorsey pop up on the Bitcoin mailing list, that's pretty, I mean, things I would not have thought I would see this year. He's enjoying a remarkable sort of post-Twitter retirement career. Yeah. Well, keep in mind, he's also still running square. Still run square. Yeah. So it's not actually retired. 50% retired. All right. So I think that's it. I mean, hopefully this audio comes out. If not, then I just don't know. Yeah, I'm drawing the line and recording the same podcast three times. All right, so we have a good one coming up early next week. We'll keep it a surprise for now because it's geared around a fundraise announcement. So keep an eye out for that and have a safe

and healthy weekend. We will see you next week.