On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/19/24 (ETF winners, Dimon's Satoshi theory, Lutnick on Tether) (EP.499)

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Our plans for episode 500 Jamie Dimon thinks Satoshi might return and vanish the bitcoins or increase the 21m cap  Howard Lutnick goes to bat for Tether  Chevron doctrine is challenged in SCOTUS Dunking on Tether Truthers Coinbase vs SEC resumes  Coinhares acquires Valkyrie The relationship between GBTC and spot BTC BTC ETF rankings after 4 days of trading Coin Center declines to answer Elizabeth Warren Morgan Stanley on stablecoins (and did they plagiarize?) Will restaking cause an ETH fork? Sponsor notes:  A Short Guide to Bitcoin On-Chain Data for ETF Newcomers In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 242, we introduce or reacquaint some to the field of on-chain data, underscoring the properties that make bitcoin an intriguing 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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Conjectureeasy. 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at some Bitcoin fundamentals. So Bitcoin supply age bands reveal that while 1% and 2% of the total Bitcoin supply is active daily, 9% of supply has never moved since it was mined. 9%. The account of Bitcoin addressed this with the balance. of at least one BTC has crossed the million threshold up from 800,000 in 2022 its previous peak. Bitcoin settles billions in value every day. Everyone knows that. On the day of the spot,

ETF launch, Bitcoin settled $11 billion in value on an adjusted basis. Bitcoin's realized cap, which is a variant of market cap that values each coin based on the price when it last moved, stands at $440 billion today compared to a market cap of $830 billion. You can derive the MVRV ratio based on the market value and the realized value. It's risen to 2.1 today. This is below its sort of historical high threshold of four. So don't you more room to run there. That's your metrics minute.

All right. So episode 499 here. Big episode 500 is coming next Friday, turns out. Well, we have one for Monday. Oh, we do. All right, so 501 is next Friday. Yeah, so 500 is an interview with, yeah, pretty impressive company, I'll say.

So nothing special for 500 in the end. We'll take some listener questions, I guess. So if you have questions, yeah, just get in the, if 501 is a special episode. Everyone celebrates their 501. Yeah, okay. 5-01, that will be our 500th episode celebration edition, 500 episode, 501 edition. And yeah, okay, hit us up on Twitter or email. We'll take your questions.

We'll answer questions next week. So, you know, busy week, the ETF is all anyone's talking about, as always. Yeah, you're in the Boston Globe talking about it. Yeah, I was in the Boston Globe talking about the ETF. they asked me about if it was a better product than the futures so i think my quote was something around would you say yes yeah it's a lot better future's products are bad man i'm surprised that those were i guess they weren't popular but b i t o is pretty big market cap and i guess the issue with b iTO though is that right now that is quite a popular product from what i understand because

is the authorized participants have a difficult time hedging. So they have a difficult time like shorting Bitcoin because a lot of them can't touch spot. And so if you're a bank and you need to be short Bitcoin to stay hedged, you would use BITO actually, even though it's a, what about CME futures? I guess that's I guess that's also an option. Do CME futures?

Ah, BITO still has a role in the world. How about that? Yeah. So we'll talk more about the ETF, but it was actually a busy deal week this week. Yeah, things are heating up. And restaking is the big theme, the meta, these days. So first up, we have Renzo. They're in Ethereum Restaking Protocol.

There is $3.2 million from Maven 11, Figment, 7X Ventures, and iOSG. We should probably do an episode on Ethereum restaking. I think it's become a consensus. opinion that something is going to go awfully wrong in the restaking category. Yeah, definitely. Have we not done any? I feel like Ria has probably done one. Yeah, we've had, we've talked about it in the past, but I almost think we need a,

here are all the risks just so we can document all of those risks, because it really feels like the invention of CDS's. So we're never going to have a black swan ever again because everyone's so risk-averse and gun-shy now that everyone now. is aware of the risk. So at worst, we'll have a gray swan. We might have a white swan, white swan to the upside. Can you imagine if just one day Elizabeth Warren woke up and just said,

you know what, I do support this market structure bill. That would be a 10-sigma event in terms of unlikelyness. That would be huge. Or how about the SEC just comes in and says, hey, that Sab 121 thing that we did to just crush all the U.S. banks? Just kidding. well there was some interesting two interesting litigation or judicial developments today

it's a good day for the judiciary which is in the crypto industry our favorite branch of government I would say we do like them so you're talking about coinbase and what else there is a weird case in the Supreme Court which isn't a crypto case but it does potentially undermine the Chevron doctrine. Oh, right. That was heard this week. Yeah. Yeah, today. So the arguments begin today. It's called Loper versus Raimondo. What the substance of that case is, couldn't tell you. But I've been

keeping an eye on it because it may well, and the prediction markets think, it will weaken the Chevron doctrine, which, look, if you have you, look, if you have, asked me to explain Chevron, I probably couldn't, but it's, you know, basically gives administrative agencies power to interpret the law when no law really exists in Congress. And so kind of a tug of war between the executive and the legislative. And right now the executive has the upper hand, also because the legislative never passes any laws. They just don't pass laws anymore. And if that's weakened, the theory is that that would also tie the hands. of the SEC. And in fact, during those arguments, crypto did come up. So it seems to be quite relevant

in that case. All right. Let's go. Let's root for the Supreme Court to make some headway on that one. Well, we have to mention the other one, which is SEC versus Coinbase. So. Yeah. So there was a motion to dismiss hearing on that that I was loosely following on Twitter, but I guess there was a live audio version. So a lot of people were tweeting about this. I thought that the justice there was incredibly sympathetic to Coinbase on a lot of those issues. Yeah, those are my interpretation as well. Obviously, we're not lawyers and so we can't ever really tell what's actually happening, but just another case of the courts taking a hard look at the SEC's position and finding them to be pretty strange. Yeah. So I don't know what the timetable is on that. I mean,

For Coinbase to get the whole thing dismissed would seem outlandish. I don't think that that would happen, but maybe some subset of it. Yep. All right, so why don't we hop back into the deals? Next one up is Hashkey. This is a Hong Kong-based crypto financial services company. They raised $100 million at a billion dollar valuation from OKX Ventures and others. Then we have, wow, that is a huge raise.

Next up we have Digital Infrastructure Inc. a decentralized car data network, there is 11.5 million from coin fund, slow ventures, and borderless. Then we have Kilm. This is an Ethereum staking platform. There is 17 million from 1KX, IOSG, crypto.com, and Winterbute. Then we have Flowdesk. They're a crypto market making firm. There is 50 million from Cathay, Innovation, Ledger Fund, and Ripple. Then it's agro token. So this is a project that is tokenizing. agricultural commodities. They raised 12.5 million from bungee visa and borderless. Wow. And lastly, Fetch, that's with two Cs. There are Web3 payments company. There is 1.5

million from AppWorks, Hashi and others. All right, so let's hop into some news. So first one up, we have actually, this is an M&A section, I suppose. So coin chairs, which is a European crypto asset manager, they have exercised an option to acquire Valkyrie investments, two days actually after the SEC approved Valkyrie's ETF product. So already starting to see some consolidation in the asset management category here. Yeah, coin shares, of course, run those ETPs over in Europe. I mean, it's remarkable that in Canada and Europe, you know, basically every other jurisdiction. We've had completely functional spot exchange traded products for Bitcoin for years.

And the U.S. was so far behind. Turns out they work just fine. Yeah, they actually work. You know, you just point to Canada. Canada's been running these things for a while. Yeah. Genesis, the now I think I would say defunct or no longer active trading firm and lender. They agreed to pay an $8 million penalty to the state of New York for compliance failures and they will surrender their bit license. One less bit license.

How many of these are they're going to be at the end of the day? like two two bit licenses it's so hard to get a bit license a dozen or so maybe a couple dozen out there it's very difficult to get a bit license it's also very difficult to transfer a bit license so then this is one of my favorite stories of the week i really am just starting to enjoy howard lot nick immensely so this is the cantor Fitzgerald's CEO he's in davos he appeared on television and they were not asking him about crypto whatsoever so he hopped in and he said well we got to talk about crypto and he goes on to assert that tether has close to 90 billion dollars of collateral we manage most of it and he says they have the money i've seen it yeah i mean Howard latnick

kind of said something to that effect on cnbc do you remember about a month ago a couple months yeah a month ago. But this was very amusing because he brought it up out of nowhere. He's like, okay, we're going to talk about crypto now. He just volunteered this opinion without being prompted.

And I mean, the whole thing is worth watching. The two minute clip, I actually clipped it and tweeted it. Regarding Tether, he said, quote, I managed many of their assets from what we've seen and we had a lot of work. They have the money they say they have. We've

seen it and they have it. I mean, it doesn't get more concrete than that. It's pretty startling. And so what do you do if you're one of these people that's always been on Twitter for the past five years saying Tether has no backing and it's all for Gaze? I mean, it's very funny that they were fixated on Tether. And let's say, you know, the year is 2021, 2022. Like there's anything you could have shorted and you could have probably made money. And, And instead, you know, most of these tethered truths, I don't think are actually market participants. But like, let's say they did have money. They chose the one thing that didn't collapse, which is tether.

It's crazy. I mean, some of these big hedge funds were so in the weeds on this. They were calling around everyone. They were telling people, we have this ed to rights. We know that there's nothing there or that there's very little there. They could have shorted Luna. Yeah. I mean, like, or just like liquid crypto, you know, there's like so many things they could have shorted that did collapse.

And, yeah, Tether stood firm. It's growing. It's 96 billion market gap now. It's remarkable. All right. So why don't we talk about these ETFs? So I think we have data through four days right now on total flows, which is, you know, the AUM number and then the volume. All right.

So let's go through the leaderboard here and just see where we stand. So number one is BlackRock, a little bit over a billion dollars in assets. This is after four days. Fidelity is number two, $874 million in that fund. Then you have Bitwise at $354. So great showing from Bitwise. Then you have Arc at 279. And then it kind of trails off from there.

You have Invesco, Franklin Templeton, Valkyrie, Veneck, Wisdom Tree is the last one here. they have 4.9 million in their product. Obviously, the top product is still gray scale. So gray scale still has $25 billion in that fund that was a preexisting fund. That's the largest Bitcoin fund out there. They have had tremendous outflows, though. So they had their day three was minus $5.94 million in flows. Day four was minus $450. So that thing is bleeding. But to be honest with you, probably not bleeding as fast as I thought it would bleed. Yeah, I'm actually shocked. I mean, on net, they've lost 1.6 bill on a base of, you know, 25, 30 bill.

And you have to imagine. I know a lot of people are saying, oh, people don't want to lock in the capital gain. They don't want to pay taxes. You have to imagine so much GBDCs held in tax advantage accounts because that's why you would use GBDC in the first place. That's why I hold GPDC, right? If you want Bitcoin, you can just get it. you know, anywhere. So he's to get Bitcoin. So like, that's why you hold GPDC because you want to hold it in tax advantage way in your IRA. So I have to imagine, I don't know, 30% of GBDCs held in

tax advantage accounts and should be, in theory, frictionless to convert. Yeah, you would think. So of course, it, you know, it bears mentioning. So gray scale is in at a 150 basis points fee on this product, bitwise is at 20 basis points. So they all kind of fall within that range. And so you would think there would be some rotation in those tax advantage accounts. The other thing that I think is a part of this market here is you just have some four sellers in this GBTC. So GBTC was held by FTX, for instance.

And that estate is going through liquidation, whether or not they have sold that GBTC, as anyone's guess. There was also a lot of GBT held by a number of the lenders over the years. And so a lot of that was sold at like 40% discounts. Obviously, the discount has come in. It's only a half a percent right now. So you'd have to think that a lot of these just traders are kind of out of this thing at this point. So maybe that's a little bit of the story around why Spot Bitcoin has not reacted to this

ETF in the way that maybe some thought they would. You just have a lot of cell pressure here on gray scale. And it's not all going back into these other products. It's not like it's one-to-one rotating into black, bitwise fidelity. Yeah, I mean, on net, the cohort of Bitcoin ETFs has accumulated assets. That's true, even including the outflows from GPDC. However, GBC is also causing cell pressure on spot Bitcoin.

And I guess there's two main channels through which that's happening. So redemptions of GPDC, Bitcoin is just being sold off. and then sell pressure on GPDC causes a trade at a discount. And then in theory, there's an arbitrage there, whereby you're long, GPDC and short spot, and there's a convergence. Right. Right. So there's definitely some of that going on, and that's been a trade for a long time. It seems like a lot of these arbitrage trades have kind of wound down, but others have popped up. And so now you have all of these products. They're all trading at slight variations from one another.

So there's some really interesting dynamics going on in the trading space. The volumes are crazy on these things. So the other dynamic is that the authorized participants are just getting their feet under them on this. And so there's balance sheet questions here in terms of the capacity to actually finance some of these things, since there's an extra leg and you can't do the in-kind. So that's something that's being worked out. I already mentioned the hedge side of. this. So how do you actually short Bitcoin if you're not allowed to touch Bitcoin? So you have to

pick an instrument that you can short that sort of behaves as a proxy for Bitcoin. So just a lot going on. It's also not clear to me if some of the larger APs are even in this. So for instance, Bank of America is one of the largest APs in the world. I don't think they're doing anything here, which is kind of surprising, right? J.P. Morgan, you know, Jamie Diamond doesn't like Bitcoin, but J.P. Morgan is active in these markets. Goldman's very active in the AP market. McCory, obviously Virtue, Jane Street have been for some time. But there are some of these APs just haven't showed up yet. All right. Well, on the Jamie Diamond front, actually. So he gave an interview on CNBC this week where he said he thinks Satoshi will reemerge. Do I have this right? Reemerge once Bitcoin reaches

21 million coins, which is the year 2140. so he thinks like Satoshi's like a Christ-like figure that will appear you know a hundred years from now and do something can we just roll the tape on this

can we just play this as part of the podcast we certainly can Matt we have the technology yeah but gold's limited in the supply so is Bitcoin and it's been using so you think so huh I do I think there's a good chance that when Bitcoin

when we get that 20 million bitcoins They'll go to 42. No, that Satashi is going to come on there, laugh hysterically, go quiet, and all Bitcoin's going to be erased. I think, man. How do you know it's going to stop at 21? I've never met one person who told me they know for a fact. They take that as... Mathematically, it's not, it can't happen.

So, this is the first time I'd watch the clip. So, Jamie Diamond thinks that Satoshi will come back once all the bitcoins are issued, laugh hysterically, and make them vanish. He's going to delete him. Yeah. And he also thinks there's no way to know for a fact that it's $21 million. I mean, I will admit I didn't even identify this as a risk. I've written down so many risks to Bitcoin over the years, but this is not one that I came up with. And he's a really smart guy.

Obviously, he's far more accomplished than me. So I think we've got to take this seriously. You know, the year is 2140 and Satoshi comes back and he just deletes your bitcoins. This is like the rapture. This is like the Bitcoin Rapture. Would it fit on the Fuddice? I don't even know how we describe this. We can't condense that into one word.

Satoshi returns, but it's not like he sells his bitcoins. He just deletes yours. I mean, I would kind of be okay with that. I mean, it's 2140, so Bitcoin has succeeded or failed at that point. And Satoshi returns, that would be literally supernatural. So that would be interesting. But, you know, the Bitcoin Rapture and then he deletes the system. Like, that would be pretty interesting.

It would be. I'm not even going to knock Jamie Dobbin for this because when you are, when you can be that confident in yourself that you can say something like that, I just have to tip my hat to him. I just have to tip my hat to him. That is how you succeed in corporate America by just being the most confident person in the room. regarding whether we know for sure it's a 21 million cap i mean that is in the code it's written in

the code it's a 21 million cap yeah i mean it's not written like that it's written in the form of basically a math equation you know yeah but is there anything in there about you like me coming back and deleting all your bitcoins did you put anything in there i i haven't checked i didn't see that i didn't see that in the code base maybe it maybe it's in there I mean, you know, there's like a steelman version of his argument, like, oh, you know, it's Bitcoin is just a social consensus and, you know, maybe the consensus will change. You know, he didn't even get into the security budget. Like, there is the steel man version of what he's saying. Oh, so you think he's actually, you know, hey, I remember this Fork Wars thing and I don't trust that Roger Ver is not going to get on the wrong side of this to try to push it in one direction. I mean, look, there's a lot of smart people that agree with Jamie, but they don't have the same chain of logic to get there. So he might be accidentally right.

I mean, I don't agree. I've, you know, I've kicked around ideas, you know, here and there about ways to achieve sustainability in the protocol without busting the cap. I get in trouble if I said what those ideas are. I'm not allowed to say them. Are you getting trouble? You've talked about this. Yeah, look, I don't want people to yell at me, so I'm not going to even say them. They're just unmentionable.

But yeah, I don't know. I think the 21 mil is basically inherent to Bitcoin. So it's not 21 mil, then it's something else. It's like Bitcoin 2. So I would say definitionally, Bitcoin is 21. And if it fails, then so be it. Bitcoin itself would have failed. There was another quote there, another piece of this that we don't have to run, but

he actually swore on air. He said something along the lines. I don't want to talk about Bitcoin anymore. I don't want to talk about this shit or something. It's right on CNBC. I didn't know you're allowed to swear on TV. Yeah. If you're jamming down and you're allowed to do whatever you want.

That's true. So that was the gift that keeps on giving every time he goes. goes on, does an interview. Another thing I wanted to touch on this week, and I think it's we'll put it in the newsletter. It's definitely worth reading. So Coin Center, which is, of course, this great group that pursues digital civil liberties and free speech through code and things like that, they got a nasty letter a few weeks ago from Elizabeth Warren, basically asking around their hiring practices and whether or not they hire former government officials and things like that. And a bunch of these trade groups did get these.

And they penned a response. So I'm just going to read the first couple sentences here. Dear Senator Warren, last month you wrote to ask whether CoinCenter engages former defense, national security and law enforcement officials, as well as other questions. With respect, we have no obligation to answer these questions beyond the public disclosures we make under the law. How great is that? How great at the CoinCenter goes? Did CoinCenter figure out the hack here to do?

dealing with Elizabeth Warren, which is when she writes these ridiculous letters, you just don't answer them. Did anybody else ever figure that out before? I've never seen just an overt, we decline based on our constitutional right type of response to these things. Usually you do get a response and it's like, okay, well, here's the explanation. Like, we don't do that or whatever. It's just incredible. No, I love it. And I think they're right to because they're that is ridiculous, you know. She's trying to shame them for doing their jobs and, you know, like, you know, pretty standard hiring practices, of course. So they have nothing to apologize for and they said that. But I do wonder, has there ever been, because she writes a lot of letters.

I looked it up once and it's like an insane amount. It's like a denial of service attack. And I just want to know, has anyone ever just not answered before? Did Coin Center figure this out for the first time. You literally just don't have to. If any of the listeners know, point us to the best responses to Elizabeth Warren letters over time, please. Yeah, I need to rerun the stats on this. I feel like I did it and she was writing them at a rate of like three per week or something, just like insane. And I mean, imagine what she's going to do with AI. Like she'll be able to increase her letter writing pace a thousand fold. Oh, it's going to be incredible. Yeah. I mean, Those poor staff were put out of business by ChatGBT.

Yeah. I mean, that's what that's all they do is write letters. You know, so I was actually thinking about Elizabeth Warren today, which I hate to admit. But there was a New York Times article about inflation. I don't know if you read it, but it was talking about how food inflation is actually the worst type of inflation. But, you know, it's a subset of what people spend. So, but it is top of mind, obviously, because you go in, you buy.

Snickers bar, you know, a gallon of milk and it's a lot higher than you remember. That's where you kind of peg inflation. So without getting into the debates on whether that's true or not, it just made me think of her big poultry and big supermarket chain tweets from 2021, where she said that these prices are going up because these supermarket owners are just, you know, they're evil. They're just gouging. Yeah. I think the worst kind of inflation is whatever price basket characterizes my spending activity specifically. That's the worst kind of act. Yeah, everyone's inflation numbers is different, right? It's unique to you based on what you do, what you buy. Yeah, so yours is like what muscle milk and what? I decline to answer the question.

Mine would be probably nitro cold brew coffee and diapers. and Tylenol, children's Tylenol. By far my main expenditure is angel investments, and certainly there has been inflation in the prices. I agree. We need to go back. I don't know. We got to go back.

Bring those 2018 pre-money numbers back, please. No one is safe from inflation. So I enjoyed this research piece from Morgan Stanley, which highlights stable coins as a killer app for blockchain technology, which we agree. We've been saying this for a long time, actually. You know, we were probably actually literally the first ones to say in that white paper we wrote in 2020. I remember where I was when you called me and said, I think we should do a paper on stable coin, actually.

I'm glad we did it. Well, where were you? I was in my parents' house. It was during COVID. And, you know, I think I was in my childhood bedroom. I said, yeah, let's do it. I think we, not to pound her chest or anything, but I think we were. literally the first ones to say stable coins are a killer app specifically in paper or blog format.

I'm so glad we did that paper in 2020, I think in age well. Me too. And I think 2024 is going to be the year of stablecoins even more than this year, this past year was. There are so many of these issuers that are gearing up to do stable coins. It's going to be front page Wall Street Journal news when some of these names come out. but stable coins are going to be huge. This sentence in particular from Morgan Stanley was fascinating. Rather than challenge of the dollar's dominance, their continued evolution and growing acceptance by mainstream financial entities

underscore their potential to significantly alter the landscape of global finance and in fact reinforce the dollar as the dominant global currency. That's spot on. If you want the dollar to be strong, you want the dollar to be strong, make stable coins a piece of the financial fabric. this country. We have been saying this. I mean, better late than never, Morgan Stanley. Demerits for plagiarizing me. Well, let's talk about that. So I popped this open and I say,

there's this great chart in here and that actually shows stable coin value settled versus ACH versus Fedwire. I said, this looks a lot like the chart that Nick did. Actually, now they're they actually, as I speak, I just popped it open. Now they're giving you credit. Oh, they did? Click the link. So it's like a little bit my fault also because they did ask me for permission to use it. And I said yes and then immediately forgot.

However, they also didn't credit me in the piece. So, you know, they were like almost there. I was going to say. I was about to say, hey, I popped open this chart. It looked like the chart. we used in our annual meeting and didn't have your name on it, but now it does. So good for you, Morgan Stanley. Oh, so yeah, thank you. Um, sorry for blowing you up on Twitter, but it had to be done. Okay. It had to be done. Sometimes it's a fire ready aim type of approach on the Twitter.

Yeah. I would say almost all the time. Um, but you know, it's, it was a good piece, actually. enjoyed the piece. It was quite good actually. I mean, to have people read these things is the thing, right? So, you know, Morgan Stanley puts out something on digital dollars. People are going to read it. And this one happened to be quite good. It's not that fun now that our ideas are becoming consensus and mainstream, though. We just have to go get some new ideas. Yeah, I know. We have to come up with some crazier stuff, like 10 year out stuff. I've got a whole list. I've got all sorts of stuff that's weird. Oh, yeah. Well, we're going to have to write some new white papers.

Maybe get into D-Pen or something. I think D-Pin might be important. I like the D-Pin stuff. I think the trick is to not go too far outside the Overton window. I think stable coins at the time we wrote them were maybe on one side of the spectrum, but they were just okay to talk about. But some of the crazier stuff, you just kind of have to, you kind of have to keep some of it yourself until the,

culture comes to. I just don't like it when everyone agrees with us. You know, we got to keep moving. Well, on the restaking point that we brought up earlier, I haven't been too vocal about this, but I genuinely think that there's a good chance that Ethereum has to fork as a result of something bad that happens in the eigenlayer ecosystem. Really? That there's a lot of capital tied up and something that goes really wrong. But that is now becoming like a consensus opinion. So now it's not even worth talking about because everyone thinks that now. But that's a bold prediction. Ethereum itself has never really had a contested fork, I would say. I mean, even Ethereum classic didn't really do much. Yeah. And I think Fatalic's already on record saying that they wouldn't fork over something like

that. But if something gets big enough, I mean, you just go to the back to the Dow hack, right? that was a massive amount of the total supply tied up. That was an irregular state change. That's what they called it. A regular state change. That was the euphemism. That guy never got apprehended. The Dow Hacker.

Yeah, he was called out by Laura Shin, so she released his name. But then nothing happened. Well, the stakes were lower back then. He was kind of like an early back. bad boy so to speak. Huh. But in kind of a lovable way. We learned a lot through the experience.

Yeah. I remember after that happened, I became very disillusioned with Ethereum. I was like, well, they're going to do this and alter the state. If there's a bug, like, it's not going to work. Yeah. Well, it turned out to work. It did work. Yeah.

It did work. It's going to be a really, interesting year in this EVM ecosystem with some of these paralyzed EVMs launching this year. I think there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff built in 2024. A lot of L1s coming. A lot of Bitcoin stuff happening too, though. Yeah. A lot of Bitcoin L2s.

Every ecosystem is growing, except for Grin. Grin's not growing. Yeah, Grin didn't make it. We were excited about Grin for a moment there. and the tell should have been when we tried to send a grin transaction there's like a 30 minute ordeal that should have been an indication that maybe it wasn't going to make it I remember using it and thinking oh this is pretty cool

I guess this is like a new way to do transactions you have to both be kind of there to do the thing back and forth but looking back on it that was just foolish yeah yeah we had to do an interactive transaction using the core client using the command line interface. Future finance. Yeah, I don't think that was really key to mainstream. I don't think that was going to get mainstream adoption.

All right. I think that's it for the week. So big episode 501 coming next Friday. If you have any questions that you'd like us to answer, please get in the Twitter feed. And we will see you on Monday. Have a safe and healthy weekend.