On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/04/22 (Wormhole hack, PoR is back, Boston Fed pilots a CBDC, TX miners shut down) (EP.282)

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

Tom Brady retires to focus on NFTs Was Satoshi interested in altcoins? Our thoughts on startups raising 69.420m The Solana-Ethereum bridge is hacked for over $300m– and then bailed out by Jump Capital Was Vitalik's warning about cross-chain interoperability prophetic?  Is the cross-chain vision dead? Kraken revives their Proof of Reserve – after 7 years Why do exchanges avoid Proof of Reserves? Bitcoin developers at the MIT DCI are building the Boston Fed's CBDC pilot program How whaling was the predecessor to venture capital Gamestop launches an NFT marketplace Content mentioned in this episode:  MIT News, MIT experts test technical research for a hypothetical central bank digital currency Bloomberg, Biggest Texas Bitcoin Miner Shuts Down Ahead of Cold Blast Bloomberg Quicktake, This State is Becoming America's Crypto Capital Kraken, Proof of Reserves Sponsor notes: Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Learn more at fireblocks.com  

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Conchurchase. You're printed 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. And this episode is brought to you by Fireblocks. More on that company later in the episode. So this was a hell of a week. Yeah, Tom Brady retired. Big goings on. That was one piece of news. This wormhole hack exploit.

And then the private bailout is, one of the wildest things I've seen. It's a big story. I mean, it's definitely big. I mean, I can't believe that you just spent three seconds on the Tom Brady story. But yeah, I guess wormhole was fine. I mean, the guy had a 20 plus year career. He won seven Super Bowls. It's the greatest athlete of all time. There's a crypto angle because he's retiring to spend time on his NFT startup. I mean, I tweeted this. Frank Chaparro had a funny tweet about him joining a 16Z. I said not so fast. I had actually drawn up a Castle Island offer letter about an hour before. I had to put that on Twitter because he, yeah, it's an open door over here. Entrepreneur and residence.

You're like, whatever you want to be. He's welcome at any time. Just unbelievable. Do you know that he has been basically in the NFL for like half his life? Yeah, that sounds about right. Absolutely crazy. So anyways, Tom Brady retired. Kind of a sad day, but I'm actually sort of hopeful that maybe there's one more year. I could see Mac Jones are saying, I want to play second fiddle here and just let's run it back one more time. Well, didn't he put up some of the best yardage of his career in the last season? Yeah, I mean, he's absolutely in the prime of his career right now. He's age defying. It really defies belief. I think it's because he avoids seed oils in his diet.

Yeah. Oh, interesting. is he a noted non-seed oil? Yeah, I didn't know that. That's right. He was anti-seed oil before it became popular in the likes of me, hopped on that bandwagon. Yeah, he avoids canola oil studiously. He had a great quote, like, don't eat food that comes in bags.

That kind of makes a lot of sense, actually, when you think of it. So we did a couple episodes. We've really increased the cadence of this podcast. We basically have an oversupply of episodes. So it's like, you know, the Federal Reserve printing dollars and, you know, you get inflation. Now we have inflation and on the brink. That's good. So we've gone to a cadence of three a week.

Good. It's high quality content. You got to get it out there. You sat down with Paul Storch. I mean, what a legend in the crypto space. These newcomers to the industry don't know this guy, but this guy's been around forever. Yeah. So Paul is sort of one of the original.

culture critics in the Bitcoin space. And as I said in that episode, influentialed my thinking. And, you know, he certainly got some critiques of Bitcoin development culture. He thinks we need to do something about the security budget on Bitcoin. Pretty controversial. I was accused of spreading FUD by publishing this episode. Oh, people got in your mentions about this? Yeah, people didn't like it because, you know, if you,

you know if you sit there and claim that all is not well then you're accused of undermining the protocol but i think paul's got some pretty interesting critiques even if i don't strictly agree with all them but yeah very thought-provoking episode and what was your um what was your take on his um is satoshi involved in was sottoche involved in altcoins uh chatter that was kind of interesting I mean, Satoshi definitely talked about what became name coin. I think it was when Satoshi discussed it. It was called BitDNS. But yeah, I mean, I think Paul's case for Satoshi supporting merge mining is a pretty sound one, actually.

That doesn't mean that Satoshi, you know, would have supported thousands of ICOs. but I think Satoshi probably was a pluralist with regards to blockchains, not to sort of invoke Satoshi's vision or anything. Satoshi's vision, man, I can't hear that word without thinking about the long-tail coin that is, BSV. The defunct fork. So, and then Ria is kicking off a Web3 music miniseries. And we actually rolled out a new aesthetic for this.

I don't know if you noticed. I did see that. Yeah. Very new tile feature. So that is pretty cool. Who did that? I made it. I mean, it's not really that original to use the sort of vapor wave aesthetic.

But yeah, we're rolling out a new look for the Web3 music miniseries. So Rhea sat down with Shuri Hugh, the founder of water music. So expect to hear more of those music NFT episodes coming up. Music NFTs is a huge category. Shout out Mint Songs. I think I released, myself in Grammatic, released 25 editions on Mint Songs. What are they going for? Well, I think the issuance price was 0.04269th, so like a very small amount, modestly priced an NFD.

Yeah, yeah, not an investment advice there. Yeah, I don't know if any of them sold, who knows. But they're on Mint songs. Well, a bunch of deals this week. Let's get into them. FTX raised again. So I made a joke last week that FtX is always in this for raising money, but they raised more. And this time it was $400 million.

It was a Series C. It was valuing the company at $32 billion. It was from SoftBank, Paradigm, Tiger Global, the Ontario Pension Plan Board, others. So congrats to the FTX team. Yeah, some monster raises this week. Not that many, but some just enormous raises. Next up, we have Phantom. Many of you will be familiar. It's the crypto wallet built on Solana. There is $109 million from Paradigm. It's a great product, that Phantom browser extension there. So congrats to the Phantom team. Speaking of great products, so Metamask, they have acquired My Crypto, which is a leading Ethereum wallet. This used to be called My Ether

wallet and was basically the only way to engage with Ethereum, basically, for a very, very long time. This is Taylor Monahan's company. So congratulations on that exit. Do you remember using this back in like the ICO days? This was like the way to do ICOs back in the day. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a super underrated platform, actually. Congrats on the acquisition. Next up we have Dune Analytics, which is probably the premier. you know, Ethereum-focused user-contributed data dashboarding product in the sort of defy analytics space. They raised $69.4 million from KOTU, huge around. How many of these companies, how many have there been that have raised 69-420?

That's a very popular amount of money to raise. Yeah. And, you know, if I'm going to be honest with you, I just don't find it even the slightest bit entertaining. You didn't, yeah. You didn't laugh. It's pretty juvenile at this. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's a very canned joke at this point. I just don't understand why you wouldn't want that extra 600K.

You know, you don't want that eventually, right? I don't think they're hurting for cash. Just make it an even 70. It's like pretty complicated. Yeah, Elon Musk is to blame for normalizing this as sort of like, I guess, nominally humorous, sort of very much in the Reddit school of humor, which is to say not at all funny. I mean, I get it. It's like, I mean, it's a little bit funny depending on how old you are. Yeah, I don't know. That kind of ceased to be funny for me a long time ago. So anyway, they raised 69

420 from CO2. It's a lot of money. I think the CO2 investment committee is probably like, well, why are we not making this an even 70? But then like they had to have a 10 minute conversation about 69 and 420 in a KOTU investment. Maybe that's why they did it. Look, they got us to talk about it, so it was worth it. So that was Dune. Next one up is Pixel Vault. This is a superheroes and comic book NFT collection.

They raised $100 million. It was from Zero One Advisors and Velvet Sea Ventures. Next up we have Trust Machines, which is a project from the Blockstack ecosystem focused on promoting applications, which settled to the Bitcoin network, they raise $150 million from DCG, Brayer Capital, Golden Tree,

hive mined, and USB. And the last one of the week is FTX again. So they have agreed to acquire a liquid group, which is a Japanese cryptocurrency exchange. So FTX continuing the acquisition spree here. So it was an active week for news. I want to start with Wormhole. It was hard to miss.

This is a cross-chain bridge between Solana and Ethereum and the Solana side of Wormhole was hacked, enabling the attackers to print a lot of wrapped ETH on Solana, which they then withdrew and redeemed for actual Ethereum. So they sort of printed up Ethereum-denominated liabilities on Solana. That was sort of the exploit. And then they withdrew actual ether. to the tune of 80 to 100,000 ether around $326 million worth on Ethereum.

And somewhat incredibly jump trading announced that they are going to make the whole system whole. Just a crazy turn of events. There's a lot to unpack here. So I guess it sort of shows that these bridges end up. being a very attractive target, maybe would be the way to say it for Blackhats, that there's a lot of capital tied up there, in this case, $326 million worth. And you inherit vulnerabilities from either chain because you have the contract on either

side. Battalick did warn us about Bridges, although he said he had a sort of prophetic blog post, but yeah, he warned us about Bridges saying that you were vulnerable to reorganization. on one side. So this wasn't that. But certainly this is another blow against this idea that we're going to have this glorious future where base layer assets are bridged onto other chains. And that's how you get interoperability. Yeah, I mean, we've had some high profile cross-chain issues lately, right? The Thor chain one comes to mind, a cross-chain project that suffered a couple of exploits in recent months. this is a big one

and Jump trading having this type of a war chest to backstop this thing just shows you that that thing is a money printing machine right now at Jump. Yeah, that's unbelievable. I mean, this is a private sector bailout

effectively. I mean, compare that to what happens when you know, financial institutions fail in the traditional finance world the government bills them out. Here you have,

I think Joe Weisenball said, this. It speaks to the scale of the crypto industry that you have effectively immediate private sector institutions that are willing to bail out failures like this. Now, we don't have all the details, you know. It could be the case that they negotiated a settlement with the hackers. And so they got most of the coins back, you know. So I think maybe, you know, we'll find out later that those negotiations were ongoing and sort of jump figured that they, it'd be resolved. And so maybe the bailout isn't the full amount.

But either way, it's kind of just an enormous amount to back solve the system with. Yeah, I mean, I guess if you tick the lens that there's going to be like a $10 million dollar bounty bailout type of thing here, a payoff to the hacker, then $10 million is a pretty low cost to defend the entire ecosystem that you're investing behind, you know, countless other projects plus salon itself. So from that perspective. make sense. And certainly there's a lot of other high-profile backers besides

jump that are big behind wormhole. And wormhole is really kind of a critical enabling technology for a lot of other projects too. So, you know, look at this maybe as just an investment in the ecosystem, probably a lot less than $326 million, is my guess. Yeah,

I would be shocked if there was no expectation of any return of those funds here. Because what we've seen from these big high-profile hacks is normally negotiated. agreement with the hacker. Well, because the hacker wants to, you know, it's going to be really hard to wash $326 million worth of stolen wrapped teeth, right?

I mean, that's a difficult thing to clean, I would guess. Yeah, I think it's impossible. I don't think, you know, your tornado cash has that kind of liquidity. And, you know, normally most of these hackers make a mistake and get traced to an exchange somewhere anyway. So returning most of the funds and then taking a bounty and calling it sort of a white hat hack, that is how a lot of these things end up being resolved. It's kind of funny.

Like it's not a white hat at all. Not at all. But everybody sort of agrees to call it that in order to save face. Yeah. It's like, all right, please don't report me and give me $10 million. How is that white hat? but it's also like they still committed a crime even if they gave you know someone mugs you and steals your wallet

and then gives you most of the money back they still stole from you yeah that's a black hat even if you call it a penetration test or whatever after the fact yeah i guess at that point i mean if you're missing three hundred twenty six million dollars call it whatever you want you'll take the you'll give up ten crazy crazy exploit i mean this is it's scary some of these cross-chain bridges how much capital is tied up in them. I think the sentiment was pretty negative on bridges and positive on sort of the, because Vitalik said that we'd be, not to invoke Vitalik, but he did say he was more bullish on the multi-chain world, but not interchained world because he felt that the connections between blockchains

were so tenuous. And so a lot of people on sort of the camp that, liquidity will actually remain silo to two blockchains, to individual blockchains. We're not celebrating this, but seeing this as vindication for their view. Yeah. Every time there's a hack, I just think Twitter's unbearable for the first three or four hours, people dunking on other projects, people gloating on it. It's just a bad look. When your business is scaling up and your portfolio is growing,

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Crackin has come out and they've conducted a proof of reserve audit. I wonder if you'll have anything to say about this. So they have cryptographically proved that they control $19 billion worth of Bitcoin and Ether. And I think this is great. Congratulations to Cracken for going through this process. This is a great thing to do for your customers. Yeah, so what this means is that if you're a cracking client, you can verify that your balance held with them is included in this list of balances which they summed up

and equals their assets that they cryptographically attested to owning. So you can effectively prove, and they can prove to you, that they hold assets in your account on your behalf. and this is something that a lot of us have been pestering Cracken about. Cracken specifically because they did proof of reserves in 2015 claimed it would be an ongoing thing. They did it in the wake of the Gox hack alongside a lot of other exchanges and then it was not an ongoing thing. But now seven years later, here we are and they have proof reserves once again.

But very few. Very few companies do this. So you got to tip your hat to crack in. I mean, this is something that puts them distinctly apart from most of their competitors. Yes, correct. And BitMex, to their credit, also rolled one out last year. It's a different model. BitMex, of course, they hold most of their funds and vanity addresses in a multi-sig.

So it's relatively easy to identify the funds on chain. And so they created a tool similar. but Crackens is a slightly different model. They brought in this accounting firm, Arminino, to assist with the proof reserve out of station. But so those two are really the only major exchanges that do it. It's not that complicated. I think every major custodial entity ought to do it.

What's the reason not to do? Like, why don't more custodians do this? I think they think that, it would expose something about their setup. And a lot of them go for security through obscurity. They don't want anyone to know what their model is. And a lot of exchanges go to great lengths to hide their on-chain footprint as well. And so there's been a hostile view towards proof of reserves on the exchange side.

But the benefits are very significant. It's a very strong self-regulatory measure. it does something that is not possible in the legacy world. It's not possible with the gold vault, for instance. You can't cryptographically prove that you have X many bars of gold prove their integrity. So it's really something that's unique to the crypto industry. And we should be taking advantage of the fact that this is possible.

Does it require an on-chain signature? How exactly do you conduct a proof of reserve? There's a couple different ways. One thing you could do is, you know, use a sign message or do build a specific UTXO. I mean, that part's trivial, cryptographically attesting to your ownership of certain assets on chain. You could do a partially sent, partially signed transaction. That part's relatively easy.

You could send the coins to yourself, you know, that part's simple. The complex part is summing up all of the liabilities. so the user deposits, and then proving to the users that they're included in that liability set and they haven't excluded or undercounted the liabilities. That's the more complicated part.

That's really what proof reserves actually entails. That's a complex thing. But we basically, this software to do this exists now, the procedures exist, and there's accounting firms that'll help you do it. So if you run an exchange, and I'll note that Cracken covers a lot of different assets, but they did the proof of reserves

for Ethereum and Bitcoin. And so I think if you're a major exchange and you're custodying a lot of client funds and you intend to be a regulated entity that deals with regulators, it's a fair amount, I think this is something you should absolutely consider doing. As we go forward here and the fee market starts to build on Ethereum and Bitcoin, do you imagine that we'll be in a situation where we'll have exchanges and custodians that actually have a deficit because they have the inability to take. funds out of certain addresses because they're just dust and the on-chain fees would actually

be more than the balances. So you could actually end up in a world where there's, you know, tens of millions of dollars of inaccessible coins because the fee market is just too high. I think they learned from 2017 in the case of Bitcoin and did work to consolidate their accounts so that they wouldn't have that problem again. But yeah, that was a, that was a, there was a weird issue that we had back in the day. You'd have to imagine at that point you're just, you know, have a relationship with a miner that will just mine a block for you. Like, there's got to be a way around that.

I mean, some of these exchanges had millions of UTXOs at one point. But yeah, they spent a lot of the bear markets consolidating them to their credit. Another story this week was, so the SEC has apparently asked Bitwise to expand on their Bitcoin ETF proposal. So this is, of course, the spot Bitcoin product, which every other spot product has been denied, or they're just getting in line to get denied. Interesting to me that the SEC would come and ask a bunch of questions about how Bitwise would handle share manipulation and fraud, other potential issues.

If they're just going to deny this thing, it's like, why make these guys do more work? So I don't know. I don't see any reason to be optimistic if they just denied Fidelity's proposal, but who knows? Yeah, that's tough to give them extra homework if they just plan on. denying it eventually. But maybe it's good news. I don't know. So there's an interesting

development in CBDC world today. The MIT digital currency initiative in collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has published a paper and some software, some

code, which is intended to be a proof of concept for a hypothetical central bank digital currency. And if you look at the paper entitled a high performance payment processing system designed for central bank digital currencies, it does what it says on the tin, there's actually a number of Bitcoin developers involved in the creation of this because it was the MIT DCI involved. So you have a situation where your Bitcoin core developers building proof of concept for the Federal Reserve's CBDC pilot program.

Pretty wild. You wouldn't think the two shall ever meet. Yeah, but it turns out the government needs Bitcoin's help to craft their CBDC. Now, to be clear, this isn't sort of being positioned as the CBDC that the United States will use. But it's actual published code. and it could certainly be adapted to a variety of CBDC configurations. So more to come on this.

I think we're going to maybe sit down with some of the authors of the paper. Isn't it pretty wild when you're up in Cambridge and you see like Taj, Dryja, ride by on his bike? And it's like, this guy is a complete celebrity that just goes completely unknown in the city of Boston. But meanwhile, this guy wrote the Lightning Network white paper is one of the most prolific developers. I kind of have that feeling when I bump into some of these MIT developers. It's like in any other walk of life, it would be like Tom Brady walking in front of you and people would be

trying to get a picture with them. It's probably for the best that Bitcoin core developers don't get recognized on the street though. Yeah. It's like Corey Fields, hey, can I have your autograph? It's like no one knows that guy, but he's a, you know, just like a world renowned developer and he just walks the streets of Boston as if, you know, actually no one knows him. I think they probably prefer it that way. I'm sure they prefer it that way, of course. Yeah. It's like, what do you think they say when it's like, well, what do you do?

It's like, I'm in fintech. It's like, no, I build Bitcoin. It's build Bitcoin and then potentially built the U.S. CBDC. So stay tuned on that. I build monetary networks. You know, that's my job. There is a very interesting development, which is weather-related. happening. So bear with me. So it's due to get very cold in Texas later this week.

I have a weather-related thing, too, by the way. I wasn't home. There was a huge snowstorm. I was out of town, and I asked my cousin to shovel my driveway, and I paid him, and he just shoveled the car out, and he didn't shovel between the car and the street. And he received payment for this thing, but I'm still snowed in. So I don't understand how that kids these days just don't have the hustle. He shoveled my car out around the car, and then there's a two-foot snowbank between the car and the street. I'm like still trying to figure out how that made sense. So just completely, you know, he got the walkway, but. You just blew up your cousin on this podcast to 10,000 listeners. I mean, I have a picture of this.

I can put this on. It's one of the laziest displays I've ever seen in my entire life. He's shoveled my house just around the house, but not to the street. Like what? I just don't understand it. So Matt's cousin, you've been officially reprimanded. Very, not a good luck. All right.

So back to Texas weather. It's going to be cold in Texas. And this is an opportunity for Bitcoin miners, apparently. So, you know, last time it was cold in Texas about a year ago, February 2021, terrible things happened. Texas grid failed. They lost 50 gigawatts of power, which is a lot. And, yeah, it was basically super bad. And this time around, they're ready.

The miners are all enrolled in these demand response programs, non-controllable load is a resource, control below as a resource, voluntary demand response programs. So all of the miners are broadcasting that they're ready to curtail their usage in the event of grid scarcity, which is expected. And so they're actually getting ahead of the news. There's an article in Bloomberg entitled Biggest Texas Minor shuts down ahead of Cold Blast, which is about riot blockchain. And they're getting ahead of this because we all know that they would be blamed if there was a blackout, right? Everybody would blame Bitcoin miners. So in order to anticipate that, they've all preemptively shut off their operations. So is hash rate falling right now? Is it significant?

If you looked probably on the U.S. pools, yeah. There are basically no large industrial Bitcoin miners currently online in the state of Texas. Wow. And because they're all pretty concerned about the PR risk of mining during a grid scarcity event. And so not only are they enrolled in these programs that gives Urquat the ability to shunt them off, that's the term, turn them off at the grid operator's discretion, they're actually voluntarily off, even though they haven't been asked to turn off. Pretty good. Pretty good.

So, yeah, the miners are actually being pretty good corporate stewards here. dare I say so you know we'll see what happens see if the Texas grid remains stable but um you know this is a big big load which is offline uh so it's kind of interesting to see the narrative shift around this and this notion of miners being promotive to grid stability is actually becoming real those um those Texas storms or something huh apparently it's bad yeah I don't I don't know it seems like it gets really cold there watching 1883 right now, which is a must watch. It's kind of about the Oregon Trail. I don't, you know, like, I don't know if I would have survived back then. Can you imagine just living in a tent

and getting hit with one of those storms? I guess you just wouldn't make it. Yeah, I thought I would not have survived. Oh, I mean, they don't have, they didn't have public blockchains back then. I don't know what we would have done. People were built different back in the day. Yeah, I, I like to think that I could make it on Yellowstone, but maybe not. I would have perished. So that's your weather-related update. That's talking weather. That's talking weather. More to come. Speaking of Bloomberg, there's a very interesting article video even in Bloomberg entitled, This State is Becoming America's Crypto Capital, not about Texas, but about great state of Wyoming. Yeah, Wyoming's great. We still need to do our Wyoming event. COVID really put a damper on that. We're, we had to

big plans to do like a big jubilee conference out there. Did you know that Wyoming was the state in which the LLC was invented? That's right. That's right. And actually it wasn't invented all that long ago. What's it like? Yeah, in the 70s. It's actually a relatively new concept. People think that that's like a 200-year-old construct is definitely not. Yeah, it's incredible. Although the C-Corp is older. But yeah, the notion of limited liability is relatively new. There used to be full, companies where equity shareholders and businesses that failed would actually be responsible for the outstanding debts of those businesses post-bankruptcy, which is kind of not a great position to be in.

I just finished reading this book called The Company, which I feel like people have been recommending to me for years, but about just the history of corporations and the different structures that they've taken over the past, you know, hundreds, actually thousands of years. And it's a great read. You wonder if there'll be an addendum a few years. years from now just about decentralized autonomous organizations and whether that's the next thing coming. Yeah, probably the next edition will have an appendix on the Dow. On Dow's, yeah. People think that DAOs are this crazy thing, but I think they're going to be

in that category. It's incredible that, you know, just creating a legal structure just unleashes so much innovation. It's really true. There's a path dependency here, right? Like these decisions around frameworks matter so much. It's hard to know at the time. But think about just how much commerce has flourished on the back of the LLC being invented. One of my favorite sort of historical anecdotes is the fact that risk sharing for entrepreneurial adventures in the U.S. at least dates back to whaling expeditions.

It does, yeah. in Nantucket. Yeah. And you'd have, you know, it's kind of an LPGP structure, actually. Yep, it was. That's the book VC, I think it's called, that goes into it. It's like the first 100 pages are about the whaling industry in Nantucket. Yeah.

And I mean, your returns were kind of seemed, looked like venture returns, except it was all based on, you know, slaughtering large mammals. I mean, the GPs there. It's tough. Like, you got to go out and out to see to get the returns. Right now, we just do Zoom calls. much easier lifestyle. Yeah. In Moby Dick, there's actually a passage about it. I think there's a joke that one of the sailors is entitled to one seven hundredth of the ship's cargo, which if you

sort of do the conversion for what a typical cargo is worth was like a complete pittance. So it's basically a it's sort of a bit of a satire of the way the model worked. But that was really how people are compensated. Your seniority dictated the share of the returns from the cargo of the vessel, which, like in many startups, often amounted to nothing. Yeah. But you might be out there for two years and return with an empty hole. She might not have gotten above the hurdle rate. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah. So I love that case study. There's actually a similar LP model for. Somalian pirates these days. Oh, interesting. So you can invest in hijacking, well, I guess, you know, presumably you have the right network. I think it's pretty network driven.

You can invest in hijacking expeditions. And if they're successful, you get a, you can earn an outsized return. Wow. Yeah, little known fact, but there's a legendary crypto trader out on Nantucket. I'm not going to docks them right now, but lives out there and just does a lot of good work. Yeah, we can paint the, you know, shout out, you know who you are. Love it. I just, and you know, there's a reason now that Boston is kind of this big center, big historical center venture capital.

I think it traces back to the risk sharing models and the asset management industry that developed around these, these expeditions. Yeah. these early models of financing. It's the high-risk behavior. All right. Well, a couple of personnel news things this week. So Brevin Howard just continues to grow at their team. They've brought on Peter Johnson, alumni of the podcast.

So he did a great episode with Peter, I think it was over a year ago now, formerly of Jump Capital. So great hire for Brevin Howard there. So Peter joins Colleen Sullivan, who is also a, a new hire at that firm. So just amassing a ton of talent over there. Just similar to Castle Island, just gobbling up talent. I mean, it's really a war for who's going to get Brady at this point,

because you know he's going to do something in the crypto space. I think FTX probably has the early lead. Andresen, they might be in the hunt, but I think he's going to want to come back to Boston. Maybe he'll start a substack. Maybe. I think the pitch has just come over here and we'll figure it out together, you know? Well, Brady, if you're listening, non-zero chance that he's listening. You got a seat at Castle Island.

Got a seat. Got a seat. So the other personnel news was Coinbase has added Shopify co-founder and CEO Toby Lucie to their board of directors. That's a good get. And Shopify doing more and more in the crypto space. So it probably makes sense for both sides. Yeah, so congrats. to both Coinbase and Toby.

And then the other thing that I thought was interesting this week is, so this GameStop thing on the NFT marketplace, turns out that's in partnership with Immutable X, and they're also launching a $100 million gaming fund. So, I mean, this is like a real deal thing. This was not a press release. So not just a press release. There's some real tech here.

So we'll see. GME. Yeah, it's sort of like the convergence of all the meme techs, you know, the meme stocks. all coming together. AMC ended up, you know, accepting crypto,

I think, for tickets. And so it's almost like they feel compelled to do a crypto thing because they have an overlap in sort of the shareholder base. But yeah,

to their credit, this actually seems like a real genuine initiative. Oh, yeah. This is not like, I mean, this does not seem to be like

sprinkle a little private blockchain and do a press release. This looks like a real deal thing. So congrats to them. And then the last thing, on my list today was you got to go listen to Feffer on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's podcast. John Feffer appeared on Invest Like the Best this week, and it was like a two-hour episode, but man, that guy's brain is on a different level.

A terrific episode. Feffer did a classic episode with us back in the day. It was sort of, I want to say maybe our fourth or fifth episode, but it remains one of our most popular. That was great. And then we went out and had a nice steak dinner. That's right. And that was his first ever podcast, actually.

It was. He's hit his stride. He did a BlockFi one last year. And then the Oshanasi one was awesome. There's quite a few guests where they did their first ever one with us, CMS, Dan Matashevsky, good example. Many more. Yeah. So we always, we try and get guests that have never done a podcast before.

Come on our podcast. We're just going to set you off and you know, you'll be on pops and, you know, a couple months. you'll be ready for the big time. So we do have a few like that, actually, first time guests coming up. So stay tuned. Some very exciting ones next week. Well, I think that's it for the week.

Everyone have a safe and healthy weekend. And we'll see you back on Monday.