On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/23/26 (CLARITY stalls, Iran's USDT reserves, Is Web3 Social over?) (EP.697)

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Nic and Matt are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  There's a big storm coming Matt's playoff picks Farcaster sells to Neynar Is this the nail in the coffin for Web3Social? Where Farcaster went wrong BitGo goes public NYSE is building a tokenized security trading platform Are we looping back around to enterprise blockchains? A MA judge has issued an injunction against Kalshi Jeffries drops Bitcoin from its model portfolio over quantum risk Coinbase launches an advisory board on quantum Trump sues JPM for debanking him Does the Central Bank of Iran really control $500m worth of USDT? What's next for Caroline Ellison?  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. And print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Sir, you hunkering down for this winter storm that we have coming up? Miami is not getting the storm at all. So it's going to be 80 degrees in sunny, but it looks like it's the apocalypse in the rest of the country. The mid-Atlantic region looks like it's going to get smoked.

Boston's either going to get 20 inches or zero inches, depending on which forecast you monitor. The thing is Boston, it's not unusual to have a big noreaster in Massachusetts. No. But in like Alabama, it's weird, right? Well, it was the year that we beat the Seahawks in the Super Bowl. We had like 20 inches on Super Bowl night. And we had like, I don't know, there was like 100 inches of snow that year.

So it's feeling very similar to that year. I'm getting FOMO actually. So this is being called the worst 10-day stretch of winter in the last 40 years. It's going to be a huge storm. Someone on Twitter called it that. I don't know if they're authoritative. But it looks hellish, actually. Yeah, you're missing out on a lot. You don't even have a snow shovel down there.

We don't. It doesn't snow here. The temperatures in parts of Wyoming are going to be minus, minus 35. That's crazy. What is that? That's crazy. That's not like the feels like temperature. That's just the real temperature. That's brutal. Yeah, it's going to be like five degrees up here. There's like a certain part of minus where it's the same in Celsius in Fahrenheit. Oh, really? I think it's in the minus 40s. Yeah.

Where it doesn't even matter what unit you're using anymore. It's just... It's just real cold. Super, really cold. Just stay inside. I'm excited. I don't know. Do you think that hash rate will drop?

Yeah, I think it will drop. I guess it... I'd love to understand how much hash rate is actually still in the United States, but, you know, if you have that... What year was it that there was issues with Erkot? Erkot kind of... 21. 21.

Yeah. And hash rate fell pretty significant. Did it? Or did we just over extrapolate from the noise? No, I think the hash rate fell. I think it's safe to say that if Texas gets hit here, then you're going to have some hash rate issues in Bitcoin. I think it could happen.

Yeah, I mean, because all these miners are doing demand response. Yeah. And in a crisis, you're probably rationing power. I think so. So the everyday user probably won't notice that unless you're trying to send Bitcoin. But, you know, it could have some big long intervals. Yeah, the blocks could be longer. Right.

Yeah, they can be longer. All right, so we had a busy week today. There's a lot to talk about. Why don't we start out with some deals of the week? First one is Superstate. This is a tokenization platform. This is Robert Leshner's company. They raised $82.5 million from ban capital crypto, distributed global,

Galaxy Digital, Brevin Howard Digital, and a number of others. Next up, we have an acquisition. This is Bitcoin Layers. It's a Bitcoin data site. I actually use it's pretty good. they are acquired by Blockspace Media. So congrats to them. Then it's Cork Protocol, which is a tokenized risk management platform. They raised 5.5 million from Andresen, Road Capital, and Wagmi Ventures. Hyperlund is a defy protocol on hyperliquid. You guessed it. They raised 1.7 million

from RockawayX and No Limit Holdings. Then it's Akito, an on-chain content creation launchpad. They raised $5 million from Caritas, collab currency, and tonne ventures. Vera is an on-chain neobank. There is 10 million from CMCC Global Sixth Man Ventures and Sigma Capital. And the last one is Farcaster, which is the on-chain social media platform. The protocol and I guess all the open-source infrastructure was acquired by Neh-Nar, a Farcaster infrastructure provider. This one kind of has crypto-twitter all in a tizzy.

Yeah. And to be clear, this is not the Brazilian footballer name. It's not nay. No, it's nay nar. Neynar. Yeah. So, yeah, people on CT are upset about this. Yeah, I think it's kind of like, it's actually like kind of gross the people going after the founders.

It's like, all right. Well, I think it's because a lot of people wanted an air drop and they're mad. Is that why you think people are? I think that's it. I mean, I think one of the best things about this country from a technology perspective and just capital markets perspective is that. that we don't like ostracize founders who fail. We tend to fund them again. And we.

Well, and they don't also go personally bankrupt. Yes. When they fail. Yeah. Or I guess some might, but so that's not the intended result. Yeah.

So for background, Farcaster was trying to build a decentralized social media platform. We're on it. I mean, we have like an on the brink channel. Yeah, I was like a top. I was 100 first user.

Yeah. Farcasting. Yeah, I was a very early user as well. And Dan Romero was at Coinbase. His co-founder was at Coinbase as well. So, I mean, they took a big swing. They raised, I don't know, $150 million, something like that.

At a big valuation, it's like a billion dollar valuation. They kind of went for it. It didn't work. And I think it is what it is. That's why this is a great country for startups. You can take big swings. Yeah. And the founders don't get to keep the money when the company winds down, by the way, typically.

Yeah, I mean, I think there was some secondary, but yeah, I think a lot of crypto Twitter perceives you to have like pocketed the $150 million. That's not how it works. Yeah, I mean, obviously it depends on the terms of the deal here. But in a wind down situation, it's going back to the preft stack, you know, and then distributed, you know, to the common, I suppose. I thought these guys did a really good job in the early days trying to just onboard users. remember when they were onboarding they were actually onboarding people one by one by invite only yeah they really tried to cultivate that social media platform it's it's just a tough category right breaking in there's a cold start problem with no so i can think of 15 web three social platforms that didn't work

yeah and i think i signed up for all of them yeah and none of them worked and i am wondering is web three social dead or are the concepts behind it still as valid as ever like owning your social graph let's say being able to choose what kind of moderation framework you use uh open source algorithm for discovery uh and like not being deprived of your handle unfairly are those concepts still something that people want i think the answer is yes Yeah, I would be shocked if something doesn't emerge in this category. And it took a while for, you know, Facebook to break out, right? I mean, there was a lot of attempts to build social networks before Facebook.

MySpace got to some pretty big scale. But there's a ton of them that didn't work. Yeah, but some new ones have broken in. Telegram is somewhat new. I mean, it's been around, but it seems to be, its success is new. I don't think of that as a social network, though, do you? I mean, well, it does have those. It's just we don't use the social features.

Yeah, discovery is really hard, at least for me in Telegram. Well, yeah, it's more channel-based, of course. Red Note is a breakout winner, right? Yeah, I don't use that one. It's obviously a different kind of app. So I don't know. I think there's, I think the problems that Web3 social diagnose and attempted to fix are still real and actually growing problems.

Like the algorithm is arbitrary. If you've ever used X, you know that's true. It's getting worse. The algorithm changes all the time. They're just twiddling the knobs in the back. It's horrible. In fact, the problems of moderation and rampant censorship, it's being normalized at the nation state level now.

The UK is trying to censor Americans. You know, it's a nightmare. If you live in Canada, you can't read news on Facebook. Do you know that? Is that right? I didn't know that. You can't read the news on Facebook if you live in Canada for some insane reason that I don't know why. So I think, and there is real value to your handle and people get, you know, kicked off for the wrong reasons all the time.

So I don't know. I think there's still an extremely valid reason to try and do this, but nobody's cracked it. No one's cracked. I guess you kind of have to have a wedge, right? Part of the issue with Farcaster for me was I didn't really have a deal. differentiated use case in terms of what I would actually be posting. It was kind of like the same stuff I would post on Twitter. Well, Farcasters seeded it with Ethereum people, basically. Yeah. And that is, it's like, you know, Harvard start or Facebook started with Harvard Arnegrads, right? But that is a

prestige group. Not to disparage the Ethereum crowd, but that's not something that's going to pull in a bunch of ordinary users. Yeah. They're not going to care about the discourse. I don't know if that's the answer. Blue Sky started with all of the. basically leftists that were mad about Elon Musk buying Twitter, right? Right. And so that colors the tenor of the conversation on Blue Sky. It's basically a ton of extremely aggrieved people on the left that are mad all the time. So no moderate or right winger would join Blue Sky.

Yeah. So these early platforms, they cultivate a reputation based on who's the first set of users are. Yeah. To your point, you kind of have to have that wedge, right? wedge that is big enough. And you can grow into Instagram, obviously, with photos. There's that one, I forget what it's called. There's one that's more of like a neighborhood one. I think that was like a pretty good idea. Citizen? Citizen is out of it. Yeah. I don't know. Citizen. Have you used that app? No, I've never used it. But, you know, isn't there one where you can post like, hey, I see a

sketchy person in the neighborhood. Be careful. I mean, Citizen is like that. And it also tells you, like I use the app and every day I get a notification on my phone. It's like machete wielding man, point three miles away from your location. It's like the paranoia app. I didn't uninstall it. Yeah. I don't know. In any event, that was the, those were the deals.

I would say, you know, take it easy on crypto Twitter people. It's just like, relax. Yeah. Let's go into some of the news of the week. Big one this week, BitGo, which is crypto custodian, been around for a long time. They have raised $212.8 million. They priced an IPO at $18 a share.

I think it's trading around $21 now. It's been trading for like three hours. Values the company a little bit over $2 billion at that $18 share price. So it's now public on the New York Stock Exchange. Congrats to the team over there. Mike Belchie, Ben Davenport. You know, there's a long road to get public.

But roads not. Yeah, they've been around forever. Been around absolutely forever. key player in the history of Bitcoin and Crypto. Nice to see, you know, some more crypto companies getting through the gonlet here and getting public. One of the first conferences I ever went to in 2014 or 2015 MIT Bitcoin Expo, BitGo was like presenting there. And it wasn't custodial back then. You remember it was just like the open source.

The multi-sig product, right? So probably sign of things to come, right, don't you think, from the IPO perspective? I know there's a lot of late stage series E, series F, crypto companies that want to go public. See if the window stays open. Next up, NYC announced this week they're in the process of building a platform for trading tokenized securities,

enabling 24-7 trading. I saw some people searching their souls after they read this because it does make you wonder, is it true that everything is going to be on the blockchain? It's just that the blockchain is just going to be run by some big corporate intermediary. I think some of that will happen, right? I think you're just going to see this proliferation of attempts here by some of the exchanges.

Some of them will have their own blockchain. Some of them will probably use Canton or use some other public open blockchain. It'll be interesting to see the technology choice here. Yeah. Some people, I think, were worried about this because it's like, well, what if we were right about everything, but they don't end up using Ethereum or Solana, and they're just using their own basically enterprise blockchain. Where do you come down on that?

I mean, my view is like, people will use a lot of stuff. I think it'll be Ethereum, it'll be Salana, it'll be private L2s, it'll be private blockchains maybe. Yeah, I think it depends on the use case. Like something that really has a ton of different global stakeholders that don't trust each other like moving dollars around. You probably want that to be on a public blockchain. And then something like securities, like I think it's probably kind of okay if that ends up being on the equivalent of an enterprise blockchain. I think the hardest category to just

re-platform is listed equities in the United States. I mean, there's already a market structure. It works fine. Upgrading that market structure is going to take forever. So to me, the tokenized securities market, probably the more interesting part of it is what are the new types of securities that could get introduced here. Yeah, I mean, ordinary people have pretty good access to equities already. In the U.S. Monday through Friday. Yeah. But it'll, you know, it could go to T0.

I don't think there's any technological reason it couldn't. It could go to T0 for sure. But, you know, it's more of a behavioral thing. your question. It's more of like a legacy systems integration, getting everyone on the same page. It took like 10 years to go from T plus 7 to T plus 3, I think. Yeah, I actually don't know if equities should be trading 24-7 because it makes everyone's life harder that is active in those markets. Oh, yeah. And the liquidity is not going to improve. It's just that it's spread out over, so you just have more times of thin liquidity. I mean, you know the type of person that I'm much

reference, but like hedge fund junior person who covers like airlines and is living and dying with every, you know, filing. Can you imagine being that person? Your life is stressful enough. Now you have to be like aware two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like for the sake of the mental and physical health of the analysts, I don't think we should go to 24-7. It's, you know, it will be really fascinating when you have geopolitical things happening on the weekend, which happens probably 10 times a year. And you know, you just see the big movements in Bitcoin. I think you're about to start seeing that in equities.

The use case that I do see is validating the need for public blockchain is for foreigners getting access to listed U.S. equities. I mean, I guess they have the equivalent of ADRs in some cases, but much of the time they don't. Yeah, it's a big world. And a lot of the world would like access to the U.S. capital markets. and, you know, to some degree that already exists, but it doesn't exist for everyone. Certainly doesn't exist unless you have some degree of affluence.

And if you do it on a public blockchain, theoretically, access could expand significantly. But, you know, like I said, I think there's just going to be other types of instruments to get issued. You're almost going to have these, like, you know, fully regulated ICOs on specific product lines and rev share tokens and things like that. I think things are about to get really, really wonky. Yeah. So we talked about market structure last week. Not much has happened. It looks like it's stalled, actually. Well, so a bunch happened. So, you know, we talked about Coinbase kind of backing away from the deal, the fight over yield with the bank lobby. Senate banking is going to push this back by several weeks. But Trump came out against Coinbase. I think that happened after we recorded. It's basically like it's not Coinbase's bill. It's my bill.

And I wonder if that's going to cause Coinbase to get in line here. And maybe we don't get a yield here. Most of the crypto industry is on the other side of the table from Coinbase on this issue. They just want a bill. The other thing that happened this week is that Senate Ag did in fact release their version of the bill. They haven't had their markup yet. It's released on party lines, though. So it's basically the Republican version.

It seems like Corey Booker and the Democrats are still talking. but the text that came out of Senate Ag was the Republican text. So I think basically we're looking at like a late February, maybe even early March for Senate banking to pick this up. But I'm becoming more optimistic on this getting through. I think the polymarket odds are probably sub 50% right now, but people that I'm talking to are generally in the 60 plus percent chance that this happens. Let's see.

What does polymarket say? clarity acts signed into law 2026 trading at 39% chance that is basically the all-time low since this market was created you know i think that the optics kind of look bad but what i'm hearing is that there's probably going to be some sort of a compromise on yield i think the bank lobby is also really busy with this credit card uh cap issue you know the 10% cap on credit cards so they're fighting multiple fronts yeah and i think frankly, there's just a bunch of crypto market participants that are fine to sacrifice stablecoin yield, and maybe that's where it ends up. I'm not fine. I mean, I don't think it's great, but I do think there'll just be a lot of ender rounds, right? Like, I think people will.

If they're allowing that as a compromise, the drafters of the bill will close the loophole firmly. Maybe, maybe, but I don't know. I don't think that bank lobby is, uh, I don't think they're going to give too much on that issue. We'll see. Speaking of prediction markets, a Massachusetts judge has issued a preliminary injunction against Kalshi, barring them from offering sports betting in the state without a gambling license. I expect we'll see this in other states too. I think this takes effect on Friday. Kind of a tough weekend if you're a sports better in Massachusetts, right?

Yeah. I don't know. Probably a sign of things to come with some of the states coming out hard against the prediction markets. I actually didn't read the injunction. I'm not sure what their basis was, but I assume it had something to do with, hey, you didn't get all the licenses

that Draft Kings and Vandul. Yeah, I mean, I think it's very, very straightforward, frankly. I want to leave this to the end, but I guess we can do it now. I'm going to the polymarket, actually, not the Cal sheet for the NFL.

I'm more of a polymarket guy. I hate to say it. Pats are trading at 68 cents. 68 cents. What do you think? Are you buying? or selling at that. Look, that was one of the ugliest football first halves I've ever seen.

It was horrible. I mean, on both sides. Just the fumbles, I mean, C.J. Stroud actually might be one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL. That was the worst quarterback performance I've ever seen. And I'm a lifeline commanders fan. Now, the Pats pulled it together. The catch was unbelievable by Kishon Booty. Drake May started playing well.

But yeah, so we're playing Jared Stidham. But you have to remember about Jared Stidham. He's a former Patriot drafted by Belichick. He's good. He hasn't played in two years, but... He's just been watching tape for 24 months. Yeah, and we're going into Mile High Stadium. It's a tough place to play.

His knowledge of the playbook is inclinclpetic at this point. I don't think you can be overly confident going into Denver, but I feel good about this team. Rams are trading at 44 cents. Seahawks at 58. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Seahawks defense looks unbelievable. Yeah. Do you watch that Bears game?

Yeah. What a pass there, huh? I mean, two weeks running made an unbelievable pass on fourth down. I mean, that pass on fourth and whatever was where he ran back to his own end zone for 30 yards and pulled it out. I've never seen anything like that in a football game. Oh, I was screaming. I couldn't believe that. I've never seen a play like that before.

It's like a 55-yard pass. It was actually a 15-yard completion. And then he lost an overtime. It's devastating. Tough. Yeah, we're feeling good up here. It's about time, you know, we got back to an AFC championship game. It's been a while up here.

Elsewhere, the head of equities at Jeffries, Christopher Wood, he removed Bitcoin, 10% Bitcoin allocation from his model portfolio, citing quantum risks. I hate to say it, but I think we will hear of many people doing similar things this year. Quantum risk is the number one risk on that. board for cryptocurrencies. And I think we should be pleased about that because it is something that can technically be tackled.

It's not an easy solution. We have to invent and deploy new cryptography, but it's totally fixable. Whereas some of the other risks are not fixable. Like government ban. Yeah, or like, you know, people not liking Bitcoin. because the climate, you can't fix that. That's just a normative thing. So I think it's good that the number one risk is quantum.

All we have to do is fix it. I'd rather be staring down the barrel of just a, basically an engineering problem, right? I think we know theoretically what to do, how to upgrade. But, no, it's just a matter of doing the engineering on these blockchains, which is, you know, it'll be complicated. But to your point, we know the roadmap there. And it's definitely far better than having the number one risk just be someone who

works for Joe Biden is going to shut down the industry covertly. Yeah. So Coinbase along those lines, they established the Coinbase Independent Advisory Board on quantum computing and blockchain. There's some good names on this board. Scott Aronson. I've heard that name before. Dan Bonae, Justin Drake, Sri Ram of Eugenlier.

I'm excited to see what they come up with, actually. I think part of their mandate is to basically write papers about what they think risk is. Yeah, I hope that they come out and actually put this out publicly. You think they will? You think they'll open source a lot of this research? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think so. Yeah. I think we'll probably see more of this, but good for Coinbase for being out in front of it. Elsewhere, all right, in debanking news, this happened today. President Trump has sued J.P. Morgan Chase for $5 billion, alleging that he and his businesses were debanked for political reasons. A bunch of crypto people that have been texting me about this over the past couple hours.

saying, you know, since we were all deplatformed by J.P. Morgan Chase, does this mean we have a case as well? I'm not sure if it works that way, but certainly JPMorgan Chase from where I said was by far the worst offender, if you just look at our portfolio companies who lost access to bank accounts because they were blockchain-oriented companies. Yeah. And there's probably a difference in debanking Trump after Jan 6 and debanking a crypto company because they're a crypto company. morally speaking, I'm saying. Yeah, I think that it's worse to debank. Isn't it worse to debank just a random compliance software company?

Yeah. That's what I'm saying. I think legally, they frankly, they shouldn't have done either. I mean, it's easy to say it now because Trump is president again. But at the time, Trump was toxic. He was cut off from everything, which is kind of crazy to think about sitting president. How about J.P. Morgan when they refused to platform us at Castle Island Ventures? I felt like I was on the receiving end of a Dekembe Mutumbo finger wave.

Like, no, no, no, you're not coming in here. Well, I don't get that reference at all, but it didn't feel good. No. Is that a basketball thing? Dekeme Mutumbo? One of the all-time best centers in the history of the NBA. But he used to just wave his finger at people like, no, no, no, after he blocked their shot. And that was the local branch manager.

That was, yeah, that was a tough time. Congress Street, JP Morgan. It's like, hey, guys, we're coming in. We've got to move some assets. Actually, a lot of them because of SVB. And it's like, no, blockchain, get out of this branch. Yeah, it's like in, I remember in the big short when that fund is trying to get, like, I think like a prime broker relationship with some bold bracket bank.

And they don't even make it past the lobby. Yeah. Like, the guy meets him in the lobby. And he's like, all right. Yeah. That's that was kind of it. I've been talking more and more about debanking lately. I've had some interesting meetings of late. In a bunch of our portfolio companies just have these unbelievable stories about getting deep banked, a lot of them from JP Morgan and hope some of these things become more public. My prediction is that the Trump administration is going to start to wield

debanking as a tool whilst simultaneously complaining about historical episodes of debanking. You kind of lose the high ground if you start doing it to your political enemies, though. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I think they will. I think they will go after any financial lifelines that illegal immigrants maintain, for instance. Yeah, I don't think that would be very popular. I think that would be quite unpopular. I hope they don't do that.

I just think it complicates their ability to complain about debanking. They're also doing it. It's just the worst world to live in if every four years you just have to like, oh, I'm on the wrong side of this political argument. I got to lose my bank account again for four years and then I can get it back in the next administration. In the meantime, I'm going to be in stable coins and gold. Yeah, that is the problem. That's where we stand is that you just get whipsaw. Like financial access is now politicized and that's not going away.

Who is targeted depends on what administration there is. Yeah. It's a bad situation. But until we get some kind of legislation where this is going to be the status quo forever. Yeah, it's not great. In other news this week, Micro Strategy acquired 22,305 Bitcoin for $2.13 billion last week. So that would explain the run up to 95K and then the precipitous run back down to 89 or wherever we are now. This is their largest acquisition of Bitcoin since July.

Yeah, the MNAB doesn't justify it. but they did do it. I think they must be raising the preferred, right? I forget the name of all the instruments, but it looks like they've done some more at the money offerings on the preferred. But I continue to say this market

on the liquid token side feels like something broke on 10-10 and we just don't know what broke. It would be nice if we had one simple explanation. Speaking of the liquid market, Galaxy Digital, they're launching a $100 million long short hedge fund. be 30% allocated to trading crypto tokens and 70% to financial services stocks. That sounds like a

pretty interesting product. There obviously aren't that many crypto-focused hedge funds out there. So are they shorting the crypto to pay for the long-tradfi positions or say it the other way around? No, I think it's just like, hey, we're going to long-short crypto stuff and we're going to long-short equities out of the same instrument. Elsewhere in product announcements, steak and shake fast food chain have you ever been to a steak and shake i have it's um really yeah down south somewhere i've been they don't have them here they are paying their hourly employees 21 cents in bitcoin for every hour worked starting in march i don't hate that i don't hate that well done good job steak and shake yeah this has been partnership with fold i think i had steak and shake like 10 or 15 years ago on like

a bachelor party. I don't think of it's. Oh, so this is a real chain. Yes. It is a real restaurant chain. Yeah. I think it was like Florida or North Carolina or something. I don't know. It's, I think it's a real deal chain. But, you know, accepting 21 cents worth of Bitcoin on a wallet might be a complete pain. So, well, yeah, if that's hidden the blockchain every time. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So this was the kind of news that I'm very tired of reading things like this. So this is DeFi DevCorp. have launched a meme coin called disclaimer coin and the ticker

is don't the word don't the disclaimer is don't buy it I don't even know what to say about this yeah this is a salana treasury company this used to be called Jen over and now they're launching meme coins I don't know I'll just I'll be charitable I'll say this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life

and they don't understand it yeah I feel like they're trying to do some kind of like reverse psychology thing with the name. But I don't know. Just exercise your best judgment on this one. Yeah. Yeah.

So the motto is don't buy it. And I think that's probably just terrific advice, actually. Probably don't buy anything associated with debts. All right. In more interesting news, is this true? Elyptic released a report saying central bank of Iran has acquired half a billion dollars worth of stable coins. in Tether, apparently.

Yeah, I just saw that. So that came out yesterday. That feels incredibly reckless by Iran. I mean, that could be frozen in an instant. That probably will be frozen instantaneously. I'd be surprised if this is not frozen by the end of the week. Yeah, by the time this episode comes out. Like, if you're at Treasury and you're the Tether guy at Treasury,

how have you not already given the order to freeze this? I mean, if you're a central banker, don't you know that these things are not bearer instruments? They just represent collateral and they can be easily frozen. That's strange. Yeah. I mean, they have to know that.

Very difficult to tell what's going on in Iran these days. I mean, I feel like that's one of the parts of the world where I would love for Twitter to be active right now, with the shutdown the internet. Well, yeah, Starlink isn't even working, right? Yeah. Apparently, according to Leptic, Central America acquired Tether to support the value of the Iranian Rial, providing a viable alternative from market intervention given that sanctions prevent

the regime from deploying its official Forex reserves. This is not any better than their sanctioned assets. No. I think Tether is actually the most responsive stablecoin to law enforcement requests. If you look at the data on how many things. times it's frozen it counts that is true volume and number of freeings yeah that is fascinating did you know that there's a that there's a Netflix show like a mini series coming out about FTX called the altruists yeah oh yeah yeah and they cast all these actors that are like pretty good looking and it's like well

this is not yeah it's not going to be very realistic accurate yeah I think the only thing it's guaranteed is that we're going to watch that and we're going to say that's not how it happened and I don't even They better put the cube in this thing. The cube. There's no cube. I'm going to be so upset. There is an actor that's playing Ryan Salem, so I assume that that's part of it, The Cube.

Caroline gets out of jail this week. Do you know that? Oh, this week I did not know that. She's served her time for heinous crimes, and she is back entering society. Oh. You think she'll get funding? I think she'll start something. I think she's, well, you think she's restricted maybe in some respects in terms of

she can do now. I think she has eight years where she can't be a director on a public company or something. Yeah, I guess she could do a startup. What would you do if you're a Caroline? How would you spend your time? I think she's got to go work at like a nonprofit or something. I think you just kind of live a quiet life. Academia. You know it? It's got to be academia. Yeah. I think there's plenty of EA causes that I'm sure she's. Yeah, that's true. Some EA not think tank will take her. Did you read Matt Levine today? There was some FTX bankruptcy shenanigans going on with some EA guy. No, what do you say? So some guy got hired at the FTX charity.

Apparently they had a charity. It probably wasn't even really like a real charity. But he was making, I think his contract was for a million dollars a year. And he got a bonus of $600,000 or so halfway through his first year. And it was intended, the deal was he would get a bonus and then he would get an equal amount he would get to donate to a charity of his choice. And FTCS collapsed before they funded it. And he ended up winning.

He got a claim on the charitable part. So they actually had to give him the money. And then he tried to give it to some like EA fake charity or something and got sued. Really? Yeah. You know who also who started his career at the FtX nonprofit arm? Who? Leo Ashenbrowder.

Oh, he did? Yeah, that's where he got his first job. Can you believe that? Is he an EA? I didn't realize that. Oh, yeah, big time. Yeah, but he doesn't sound like the other EA's because he's not all doom and gloom all the time.

That guy's record is just unbelievable. For those of you who don't know, it's a hedge fund called situational awareness, and it started, what, last year? Yeah, and it's a monster. Tremend, yeah, multi-billion dollar, you know, for an untested, the manager.

I mean, the fact that he was even able to raise the money and then not go out of business, straight away is incredible. But yeah, incredible track record. And yeah, he started his career at FTX nonprofit arm. Wow. Wow.

He's only like, what, 23, 24 years old right now. Yeah. Yeah. Doing well. All right. So I think that is it for the week. Stay safe down there in that 80 degree weather.

I'm actually, I'm really jealous. I'm, I'm actually jealous that everybody else gets to see the snow. It's going to be the absolute end of my backyard skating rink. If I get 20 inches of snow on it, I'll tell you that. Yeah, that's no. I mean, the manpower required to shovel all that.

It's going to be crazy. All right, everyone, stay warm out there this weekend. Everyone have a safe and healthy weekend. We'll see you on Monday.