On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/30/26 (Fidelity's FIDD, Gold rally, Worldcoin and AI bots, digital alibis) (EP. 698)

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Matt is heated about the Belichick HoF vote Fidelity launches a stablecoin FIDD on Ethereum Market structure passes Senate Ag Cmte The White House crypto council is being revived to find a compromise on stablecoin yield Fairshake has another war chest for the midterms Do stablecoins cause bank deposit contraction? Tether has 140 tons of gold now Why is Bitcoin not participating in the "debasement" trade? Is gold at risk from alchemy? People are still worried about quantum Will Worldcoin save us from AI bots? What's the solution to the AI slop apocalypse? Digital alibis with blockchains Content mentioned in this episode: Niall Ferguson and Manny Rincon-Cruz, Stablecoins Are the Future but Banks will Survive McKinsey and Artemis, Stablecoins in payments: What the raw transaction numbers miss

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All Vees 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 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. I'm fired up this week. I have a lot to say. Is it about football? The fact that Bill Belichick is not a first ballot Hall of Famer,

it just means that the NFL Hall of Fame is a complete farce. What a 302 career wins in the regular season, 31 playoff wins, six Super Bowls as a head coach, and that's not first ballot hall of fame. He's definitely in the top desile of coaches. It's clearly just Patriots hate, a bunch of jealous people, Bill Pollyan from the cold. 11 people didn't vote for him first ballot.

The fact that Kraft is not in his own. It's a bunch of like over the hill sports reporters. There's one for each city. It's journalists. And the guy in Boston is this guy Ron Borges who wrote for, you know, the globe like 20 years ago. Okay, I see. Do you think it's Pat's hate or do you think it's criticism of his lifestyle choices? No, it's definitely not the lifestyle choices.

I think it's just he wasn't warm and fuzzy with the media. and then this guy Bill Pullian, who is the general manager for the Colts, hated him and had a little smear campaign against him. But it shows you why the owner isn't in, too, because Jerry Jones is in, but the Patriots owner is not in? That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, far be it from me to defend the Patriots ever, but I actually am in full agreement with you.

It's crazy. But, I mean, talk about using something as, you know, motivation for the Super Bowl. Did I mention we're going to the Super Bowl again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Polly Market has it 69 to 32 right now, which I think is actually pretty fair. I have to say, I think there's just fair odds. Well, I think the Patriots have totally overachieved this year

relative to what, if you told me they were going to make the playoffs, I would have been quite happy. Although I do think I predicted 14 wins at the beginning of the year. We'll have to go back. You do have a habit of being optimistic. But yeah, the Pats have done well. I'll give them a lot of credit. Seahawks are very complete.

team very complete that was like watching two different sports with the blizzard happening in the early game and then just a very fast game in the second one the weather in i guess it was in denver it was in denver i mean it started out sunny and the yeah it was sunny and then halfway through the game it was like hoth it was just ice snow hell i mean snow hell was up here 25 inches of snow unbelievable. Yeah, it's chilly here. It's actually going to get into the 30s this week in Miami. Is it really?

That's the coldest for 15 years. Wow. It's about six degrees today up here. The Boston Harbor's frozen. Some locals have told me they're excited because apparently the iguanas died at a certain temperature. They fall out of the trees, yeah. And but even, so that's just they're kind of like torpid and frozen, but they recover.

but then below a certain threshold, they just straight up die. And they're a pest, apparently. Technically, they're invasive. So some people are excited for the deep freeze to cleanse the iguanas. That's kind of cruel. It's kind of cruel. I didn't know they're iguanas in Miami. Yeah.

I mean, they're not native to here. So it's just nature correcting, I think. Very interesting. All right. So a bunch of stuff to talk about this week. You want to start with the deals of the week? Yeah, first up from the Castle Island portfolio, Talos, the crypto trading infrastructure company. In our portfolio, they raised $45 million from Robin Hood, Sony Innovation Fund, IMC trading, and others.

Huge congrats to Talas team. Yeah, Fidelity also win that round. Just Talos building a monster over there. So congratulations. We're excited to be a part of that one. Next one up is Mesh, which is a crypto payments company. They raised $75 million from Dragonfly, Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures. 10 bin labs is a tokenization platform.

There is 7 million from Galaxy Digital, Wintermute, and GSM. Doppler, which is a token creation platform, raised $9 million from Pantera, variant, figment capital, and Coinbase Ventures. Alfred is a cross-border payments company. There is 15 million from F Prime, Brevin Howard, and White Star. Then it's StarTale Group, the co-developers of the Sonium Layer 2 network. they raised $13 million from Sony Innovation Fund. BLEAP, that's an on-chain finance app.

There is 6 million from Blossom Capital and others. Here's an acquisition. Bulletin, which is a data provider focused on tracking over-the-counter deals, was acquired by Defi Lama. And Escape Velocity, that's a crypto fund, venture fund, focused on D-Pen, has raised 62 million focused on, again, Deepen for Telescope, solar energy. kinds of stuff. So big congrats to Salvador and Mahesh over at EV. Yeah, really excited for the

Escape Velocity guys. We've enjoyed partnering with those guys over the years. Very impressive to raise a second fun of that size. So lots of news this week. A lot of news this week. I don't even know where to start. Yeah. Let's start with, I guess, the Fidelity announcement. So Fidelity announced that they will be launching a stable coin. It will be called Fidelity Digital Dollar, FIDD, It will be issued on Ethereum. It's going to be managed out of Fidelity's new OCC charter. It will be freely available to retail and institutional users in the coming weeks it looks like. So big announcement here.

You'd have to think that the passage of the genius bill and the fact that the OCC path is now open makes this a lot easier to launch. So I'm really excited about it. And I know this team's been working on this for a long time. So shout out to them. Yeah, long time in the making, FIDD, about 10 years in the main. making really big congrats, the Fidelity team, excited to see what they do with the Stablecoin. I mean, one of the first kind of traditional asset managers to launch a stable coin.

I think the thing here is that stable coins need distribution and Fidelity has massive distribution on the brokerage side. So that is a competitive advantage here that many Stablecoin issuers do not have. So just as we went to press here today, it looks. like market structure was passed out of committee. Is that right? Yes. So the Senate Agriculture Committee had their markup. It only lasted an hour. I was expecting that to be a little bit longer. No Democrats voted for it, including Slotkin, who Fershak had supported her, right? That's Michigan, Senator Allen, Michigan. So it's party lines, which wasn't super shocking. It seems like the biggest pushback from the Democrats was they wanted an amendment

that would say that Trump and his family could not engage in the industry, basically. I'm sure they don't have that exactly correct on the wording, but they basically wanted to make sure that the sons were not profiting from the industry as this bill was passed. That amendment was rejected out of Senate Ag. It still seems like they're trying to make this bipartisan. And of course, they need, I think, 10 or 11 Democrats to get on board with this, ultimately in the floor vote.

I'll tell you what, I would trade that amendment for the yield prohibition amendment. You'd be supportive of the, you know, barring the Trump family from participating. Yeah, the sons, they can go find something else to do. Give me the yield. Forget the sons. That is a trade. I, and I think everyone else in crypto would make. I think everyone would probably make that trade, but, you know, there's just no way the bill is going to get signed into law with that.

And I think it raises some questions on, okay, well, can you just do that in other bills, in other industries? And maybe it should be the case that the president and his family are not allowed to engage commercially in other industries. But that's kind of impossible to put into practice, right? Like people are going to have sons that are, you know, working age. You can't just tell them not to work, I suppose. So the White House Crypto Council is being resurrected.

I actually didn't realize this was more than a one-off. But so the council is being gathered yet again. I think the objective is to reach a compromise on the stable coin yield point. I think there probably is a compromise to be had here. I think, you know, what we have in the genius bill seems like a good compromise. I don't know if the bank lobby would get on board with it, but the issuers cannot pay interest. If you're doing things on a brokerage platform, you can qualify for interest, but it's not always de facto out of the gate.

Like there's some middle ground there that I think would be safe. But I don't know. I get the sense maybe that this meeting is going to turn into the White House just telling Coinbase to get on board with this. Yeah, I could see it descending into chaos. Palo Arduino said that they don't have a beef in this fight,

which I'm going to forgive him for getting the idiom wrong. That's okay. I think they probably do have a beef in this fight if I'd guess. So what would you have said there? We don't have beef with anybody or we don't have a dog in this fight. Yeah, he was probably saying both and then he just... I mean, I got to think if you're tether, you actually are more aligned with the banks here, right?

Because you don't pay interest in your stable coin and you'd rather just keep all the net interest income. And so you're probably looking at this and saying, hey, go for it, bank lobby. You know, tell us we can't do this because we're just going to make more money. Yeah, I'm sure they're perfectly happy staying on the sidelines and letting the banks do their thing. Same with Circle, right? So yeah, they may not have beef in the fight, but they have a dog in the fight. Now, the interesting thing is, you know, some people are getting more and more pessimistic on market structure. I actually am getting more optimistic about it because it's clear the White House wants this to happen.

You know, you had Trump come out and basically say this is my bill. It's not Coinbase's bill. You've continued to see bipartisan movement on this where they keep on meeting in the Senate. Seems like there is some dialogue also with the House, because of course, remember that the House has already passed a bill on market structure, but it will need to be reconciled. The Senate version looks a lot different, but there's already discussions underway there. And then this week, I thought this was interesting. Fair Shake, which is the pro-crypto political action committee, announced that they have $193 million on hand for the 2026 midterms, which they are

by far the largest pack right now. I think Soros might be a little bit larger, but is not active. I kind of just sits on a lot of cash, but Soros' pack might be in the 200 million range. But in terms of active packs, this is definitely the biggest. And that matters. Like, that's going to get people to the table. Yeah, that's the beauty or the ugliness of American politics. This is a sort of Damocles hangover everybody that's up for reelection here. Yeah, I mean, if you don't play ball here.

And, you know, it's too bad that, like, Gallego and Slotkin are not running. You know, they won't be running for, I guess, five more years here because... Yeah. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were made last cycle. We did call them out of the time. You know, we're not allowed to criticize Fairshake because we're all in the same team or whatever, but mistakes were made. I think it's a highly effective organization and I like the people that run it.

I do wish that Zotkin and Gallego, you know, kind of... I just recommend that they stop being tricked by Democrats that claim that they're going to govern as moderates and then govern like they're to the left of Stalin it is kind of a slap in the face like you have to really wonder about a politician who will look you in the eye and tell you one thing and take your money and then just do the complete opposite do you think all politicians are like that it seems like Gallego out of Arizona and Slotkin out of Michigan those are those are close races very close yeah they took their money like what's what makes more of a different scriptive policy in this country putting two

moderate Republicans in those seats, they don't care about crypto one way or the other, but we'll vote along party lines. We're putting two dems in those seats that say they're pro-crypto end up not being pro-crypto. It's a huge swing.

It's a huge swing, yeah. I mean, you're on the hunt for 60 votes here because I don't think they'll kill the filibuster. No. No, they won't. But so in parallel with this, and I guess we probably sound like broken records in saying that,

market structure bill would be great if it's a good bill. But if it doesn't happen, I think you're going to get rulemaking from the SEC and the CFTC and the bank regulators as well that will give clarity around some of the key things like tokenized securities. And in fact, the SEC released a statement yesterday. So we're recording this on a Thursday. They released a statement giving guidance on tokenized securities. So it was jointly issued by the Division of Corporate Finance, the division of investment management and the division of trading and markets. And it gives, it's basically definitional clarity. We'll put it in our newsletter.

By the way, if you don't do our newsletter, just go to our website and put your email in. And we kind of write up thoughts of the week in that newsletter. So it's in the newsletter. I think this is a first step towards rulemaking. And I think we probably will get a bunch of stuff that's in the bill with or without the bill passing. One thing I forgot to mention on the stable coin yield kerfuffle, there's a very good opinion piece in Bloomberg, which is an unusual thing to say, from Neil Ferguson, Manny Brinkon Cruz called Stablecoins of the Future, but banks will survive. Basically pointing out there's no actual evidence that Stablecoin growth in any way trades off against bank deposit growth. In fact, they move in tandem.

Yeah, it's an interesting point. Yeah, I thought that was a really good piece. Ferguson's just always been sharp, huh? Really good, really good. He's written a few books, but what was it? The Ascent of Money? What was his really good one? Yeah, I think that's it.

He's a historian, right? I mean, I think you, yeah, the Ascent of Money. I mean, you can't talk about stable coins without looking into monetary history. And what's almost worse is having a really incomplete understanding of monetary history, like having a very shallow understanding of the free banking era in the U.S., for instance. So I highly recommend this piece. I will put it in the show notes. It's kind of crazy how the bank lobby is just regurgitating a bunch of points that they came up with the data for that are unsubstantiated.

Look at the inflows into deposits of the banks and then look at stable coin supply growth. and they move, they're totally correlated. So there's no evidence whatsoever that, you know, stable coin growth is coming to expensive banks. Bank deposits are up in the last five, six years. Obviously, stable coin supplies up. They both exploded in 2021, 22 with, you know, the burst of government spending, et cetera.

And then there was contraction in 23, 24, in both cases and then again growth in 24-25. So there's just no evidence. And in the piece, they also talk about price-sensitive depositors and non-price-sensitive. So a lot of people are using these big banks because there's just a cluster of services that you get access to.

It's liquidity network effect, basically. And then if you are extremely price-sensitive, then maybe you will use a fintech or hold treasuries or optimize, make sure you're getting the highest rate. So a lot of those deposits are just fundamentally sticky and not exposed to what the bank's paying you out. So I thought it was a really well-reason piece. It's interesting to think about what the second order impacts will be

if this law goes through and prevents payment of stable coin yield of any type. I would imagine that banks outside the U.S. would actually launch yield-bearing stable-coin accounts. and you actually might see some deposit outflows from U.S. banks into international banks as a result of that. Yield-bearing stable-cone accounts, but not under genius. Yes. You know, stable coins, it could be a U.S. dollar stable coin, but almost just held at an international bank, almost like a euro-dollar style treatment, where, you know, it's the same asset effectively, but it's held at a, like a European bank or a bank in the Middle East or Asia, something. like that. So one thing we forgot to mention on the stable coin front, Tether has 23, sorry, 140 tons of gold now. Yes. So they have such an incredible gold hoard. I think it's in a Swiss nuclear bunker

or something. So they buy one to two tons of gold a week. Whatever happened to them buying Bitcoin every week? Are they still doing that? I think they do it as well, but they, they Yeah, see where the wind is blowing. I mean, I looked it up this morning and continue this. In the last 12 months, gold and silver have added as much market cap just between the two assets as 15 bitcoins. Is that right? 15 entire Bitcoins. And then actually today, they sold off by two entire bitcoins worth.

Wow. And we're talking trillions and trillions. It's unbelievable. I thought gold can't grow that fast. it's an established, it's worth $20 trillion, and then it taxed on another $10 trillion in supply. Do you remember when Tim Draper bought the, I guess it was the Silk Road coins that he bought at auction?

Yeah, something like that. I think it was Silk Road. It was back in, what, 2015, 2016, and when he bought them, he had a price prediction of $250,000 per Bitcoin, and that was tied to the market cap of gold. If you were to do that, now you're talking like $2 million Bitcoin or something. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, gold in just the last five years has more than doubled, right?

Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's a moving target. And I don't know if it's good or bad that Bitcoin's selling off relative to gold. A lot of people are really concerned that Bitcoin's not participating in the quote-unquote debasement trade. Well, I think there's just a lot of stuff going on in Bitcoin, right? You have a little bit of an overhang with the Dats. you have, I think people are waking up to the fact that Bitcoin core development is moving way too slow on the quantum issue, that there's not enough open dialogue about that. So that's weighing on it. I think you have the events of 10-10 where you just had retail get blown out. I think you have the fast money retail might be more in the prediction market game now, like betting on sports or zero-day options on Robin Hood, like that type of thing. So I think there's a confluence of factors there.

Obviously, interest rates, you know, haven't come down as much. But I guess that hasn't really hurt gold. Yeah, I think the quantum factor is quite explanatory because it would explain why all crypto assets are kind of treading water going sideways. And then precious metals are doing great. You know, if gold was selling off two, then you wouldn't need to look for a variable that's unique to blockchains. But I think it makes sense. although there's a lot of positive stuff happening

on the quantum front Ethereum now has this quantum initiative Solana's working on it Coinbase has a quantum group it's just Bitcoin where the devs have kind of dug in their heels yeah I'd like to see a little bit more movement there or maybe a lot more movement there

the corollary to quantum for Bitcoin is nuclear fusion alchemy for gold which is technologically totally doable. You just have to, someone has to invest in it. What do you do? You turn coal into gold or something? I don't know what element you start with.

Probably some cheap element that's a similar weight to gold. And you can use a new, yeah, some kind of nuclear device to create gold. I think one caveat is that it's radioactive for a while. Is this actually a thing? Is this theoretically possible? No, yeah, there's papers about it. It's a real thing. And I think the break-even price at which it makes sense is about the price of gold right now. So it's someone who has to build this. I guess the other thing is the asteroids have a lot of gold on them. Yeah. So this is something that people forgot about gold. When the gold price goes up, people find ways technologically to extract it more efficiently. Now, historically, that's meant ways to mine it or refine it better, you know, using technology.

That's what happened in previous gold rushes. Now, on a go-forward basis, it's going to be okay, how do we either, you know, create gold from other elements or go in a space and lasso an asteroid and bring it back to Earth? And so those two things are not, I would say those are not just possibilities. I would say those are guaranteed to happen. I think the mining of asteroids is going to happen in our lifetime for sure. Yeah. So gold is not as good as everyone thinks it is. It has the same kind of a problem that Bitcoin has with quantum.

It's just the Bitcoin can technologically solve its problem and gold cannot because gold needs us to not have a better mastery of physics, but we eventually will. Now, I'll be intellectually honest here, and I'd point out that Bitcoin, due to no fault of its own, has another dynamic when it's going up. It's not that you can create more Bitcoin. There's only 21 million Bitcoin, but you have the alt-coin market. And so people just look for the next hot thing. And so Capital, that otherwise would go into Bitcoin, finds itself going down the list on market cap and saying what's the next Bitcoin. So you have a dynamic there, substitution effect or a bull run. Or other derivatives, you know, Bitcoin equities, things like that.

Yeah. So, you know, I'd say the quantum thing is big, though. If you're looking at it from a store of value perspective, wanting certainty that there is a roadmap and that we're going to start talking about it and start moving some of these coins. It's interesting because even some of the custodians, the huge custodians of Bitcoin, they don't really have people looking at this yet. It's kind of worrying to me. Yeah. And here's the thing that people don't get. Previously, quantum is basically on no one's radar.

Now, let's say every institutional investor that has, you know, maybe Bitcoin is 2% of their portfolio, they might be looking at quantum saying, okay, well, I think there's a 5% chance quantum break happens the next 10 years. That's a pretty low probability. But it could, right? 5% would not be out of the question. you know the government U.S. government says

it's going to be between 2030, 2035 something like that. So we went from a 0% chance to a 5% chance that the store value asset has a kind of sharp break. Then you're just going to reweight your portfolio maybe from 2% down to 1%.

Yeah. And then just thinking about the net effective flows on Bitcoin if everybody's having that same discussion in their head. So I think it could totally explain the weakness we're seeing. Yeah, and for people who say this is not happening, it's clearly happening, right? The global head of equities at Jeffries came out and basically said as much last week when he removed the Bitcoin allocation from his model portfolio. So it's happening there. It's clearly happening on the very big institutional allocator side. Like,

we're getting asked about it all the time. Yeah, it's not just one guy. It's not just Chris Wood or it's we get this question from these people every single day of our lives. every day. So we are telling you it's happening. You're going to have to take her word for it. All right. So moving on from the quantum. Did you see this World Coin news? So there's a report, I guess, out of Forbes this week that Open AI is exploring the creation of a new social media platform powered by WorldCoin. It will have biometric authentication, designed to eliminate bots. You've been talking about this idea forever. Yeah. I like it in the set. I like it in some ways. I don't like it. others. I do think we should, I don't want to sound big brothers. I do think we should have biometric

authentication for social media. I think it solves the problem of bots. However, it's distasteful that Sam Altman is the arsonist and the firefighter. He shouldn't be allowed to profit in both ways, just on a moral basis. It's kind of, it is kind of funny. Yeah. Like, you can be one or the other. You can't cause the problem and solve it. It shouldn't be allowed. Do we need WorldCoin for it? I don't think so. The coin went up a lot on the news. Yeah.

You could just do face. What about Face ID? Heard of Face ID every time you open your phone. That's it. That's good enough. Sam Altman owns a bag of WorldCoin. How's he going to make money on Face ID? Yeah.

And this is my general critique with, I've seen a lot of these ZK startups pivoting into AI authentication. I mean, I even have a camera that does a ZK signature when you take a photo. Oh, really? Yeah. It's sitting on my bookshelf over there. Called the Rock Camera, ROC.

I don't think you need fancy cryptography to do any of this stuff. You just need ordinary signatures. See, the thing is, I actually, this sounds really elegant, and I'm sure it would cut down on the bots. But, you know, as we know in the crypto industry, some of the people that are like scamming people, they're actually human beings. they're just in like North Korea or they're you know under slave labor in like Cambodia

living in big apartment complexes like they have faces they could do this world coin thing they're still going to be trying to scam you yeah but you know they're not Sally from the next town over they're you know Sridhar in Laos yeah I guess so Lao I think there's still be a lot of noise on a social media platform I guess is my point we could have this is maybe more controversial. I think there will be social media that more resembles physical communities, including geofencing. Yeah, that's probable. Yeah.

But I think this is going to happen. I think it's absolutely guaranteed. I think AI is so good now. We've all lost our marbles. We can't tell what's real. It's not real. AI generated video we can't really solve. I think it's very hard to put some kind of out of station.

in a maybe you can do it. Maybe you could have the iPhone sign each video that, you know, because we can't detect that a video is AI generated. That's, we're past that point. It is crazy how fast that's gone. And by the way, the X-Feed is just, they have to fix it, whatever's going on with that. Like I'm seeing pictures,

I'm seeing videos of people rescuing like snow leopards from ledges that look completely real. Slop. It's like, what am I looking at? Well, you got tricked by it too, it seems like, this looks very real. But then underneath everything, it's like, hold on, did this guy really just like climb up a cliff to save a snow leopard? It's like, no, of course, this is an AI video. Well, you know, a lot of news organizations are already signed on to an initiative to digitally sign photos at the point of origin.

Yes. So this is already occurring. So it's not that we can prove that something's fake. but we can sort of prove the set of all things that are real. Yeah, we're investors in a company that does similar thing in the insurance sector, a company called a testive that for claims photos, they'll authenticate at the point of capture that it's a real. So they'll put a fingerprint on the photo that way.

I think this is the direction of travel. Don't prove the negative, right? Don't prove that something's false. Prove that something's true. You can't prove is too much more, but create as strong an out of station as you can. Device, individual, GPS, biometrics, time, please. So I do have this very controversial idea that I think is, it's like a product that I think should or will exist. Have I pitched you on this before?

About the camera that you wear all the time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, yeah, for the listener. I wrote this up, but it's like maybe a little bit too crazy. Either camera or just actually a microphone, like, you know how we're going to have AI wearables out? They already exist, but better ones. So it will be normal to have a device that's recording all the time, right?

Yeah, unfortunately. So if you're an executive or a politician or celebrity where your reputation really matters, what about wearing a device that records everything you do and say all the time and your time stamps and then periodically takes a hash and posts it on a blockchain every 10 minutes or hour and so only the hash goes on chain but then when you need to prove that you did or didn't do something that you need a digital alibi you get accused of something you just post the raw footage and show that it compiles to the hash that's on chain that you put so is this not an interesting idea for a certain kind of extremely paranoid person? I think it's a very interesting idea for an extremely

paranoid person, but I also think the type of person that would really want that would have edge cases where they really wouldn't want that and they would turn it off and then like a politician. Yeah. I mean, you have to you have to turn it off at certain points, of course. So you know, for private moments or whatever. It's just that you don't have the alibi active. You don't have the alibi, right? So there's But I also think just normal people would see that is really creepy. Yeah, but I think this is where we're going because we are now at the point where people are making deep fakes of people they don't like and implying they're having an affair or something. Like that's happening. It's happening.

Totally. So how do you defend that? We can just regress to this like 19th century model of my word is my bond. You just trust me. But nobody wants to do that, right? Yeah. Maybe we regress a lot. little bit and pull our social circles in.

Like there are just fewer people kind of bring in. Maybe it makes you closer as a village or something. This is my prediction, I think, in this next year, 2026, we will have someone, somewhere will have an AI device wearable that is constantly uploading hashes of their timestamps and their dialogue, the transcript location, maybe even image content to the blockchain and it's this permanent digital attestation trail. Yeah. I think that's going to be a real thing.

I think what was the guy back in the, was it Justin TV? It was the Justin Can was it? Yeah. The guy who was he like the Twitch founder? They pivoted that business to Twitch, but I think that was the original idea. Wasn't he just kind of live streaming his life for a while? Yeah, Justin Canan. He wore a webcam on his forehead or whatever.

months. Yeah. Yeah. So this is like that, but I think the technologies come. I feel like you do that in late 2000, early 2010s or something. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that'll probably happen. In putting it on a public blockchain, assuming it's a quantum resistant one eventually, is a good use case for a blockchain. It's basically just a time stamping. A notarization service in the sky that anyone in the world can access. Yeah, it's actually essential. You need, the blockchain for this to work. Because otherwise, you could just have your own database and people like, well, how do I know you really made the hash? I feel like we're rewinding the clock a little bit to ideas that we used to talk a lot about in 2017, 2018 around. There's just this class of

like timestamping notarization use cases here that have nothing to do with cryptocurrency, but that should be bidding on block space just for the value of getting it onto the notary system. Yeah. And the difference is now AI has turned our world upside. down epistemically and I don't know what to believe anymore. In personnel news this week, Morgan Stanley continues to make big pushes in the crypto space. They announced that Amy Oldenburg will lead the firm's digital asset strategy. She was previously the head of emerging markets equity trading. Congratulations, Amy. If you don't know, Amy, she's just an awesome person and has been, even though she was on EM equity, she was very involved in crypto for a long time. So I think

she's a great, great choice for the role. Really happy for her. Other bits and pieces, We'll put this in our newsletter. I enjoyed the report on stable coin payment volumes by McKinsey and Artemis. It's how you know your big category when McKinsey is putting resources into doing white papers about you. Yeah, I thought that was cool. This is the never-ending debate on what is the volume of stable coins for payments, which we will never get a definitive answer on that. No, it's just so hard to.

Isn't it just like the MEV stuff makes it really complicated? There's just denoising. So many sources of noise. I still don't feel like we've cracked block explorers as an industry yet. Ether scan is great, but it's really hard for a normal person to use. Yeah, they're indecipherable, even if you've been around them for a decade. That's a good use case for AI. It's just go into chat GPT and type your question that you would have for the

Lock Explorer. Yeah. Do you see Laser Digital, which is the digital asset spin out of Nomura, they filed for an OCC bank charter. Wow. A lot of banks getting active here. This also just saw this benchmark analyst Mark Palmer has said he thinks the quantum risk to Bitcoin is decades away, not years.

So there are people pushing back. I will say I think these people are going to be spectacularly wrong in the coming months. actually and year. And I think there would be papers that will change these people's minds. Well, it's kind of, it's such a hard thing to do, right? Because you're like, all right, well, who are you talking to that's leading you to believe that? Yeah. And it's also like, okay, so you're bearish quantum. So you're short the innovation. Your short innovation. Yeah. Why would you be short? Be long innovation. You kidding me? Yeah. I mean, I guess being early is being wrong to some degree. But, The other tricky thing is that a bunch of these papers are not going out publicly.

So there's kind of a lid on this. That's what happened in 1939. Yeah, right. All the nuclear physicists stop publishing all of a sudden, very suspicious. And I don't think we're at that level, but I get the sense that it's happening. I don't know, right? I think we are. I think we are.

Yeah. I mean, China puts $10 billion a year into this stuff. Yeah. 10 billion. The U.S. government, not as much, but still a lot. It's an enormous strategic priority, and whoever gets there first is you unlock a huge bounty,

strategically, not just the crypto stuff. 100%. All right. I think we're going to have to leave it there. We have a hard stop here. But I'll just reiterate that what is happening with the NFL Hall of Fame is egregious. It's a debacle over there.

It's a travesty. And I think they should just move the Hall of Fame. of fame actually and new leadership new voters I think they should move it to foxborough Massachusetts well where is it canton oh yeah I guess I should have known that I mean when you just have like a density of people going into that hall from one area it's just kind of turn it into a home not yeah co-locate it all right everyone that's it for the week have a safe and healthy weekend and we'll see on Monday