On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/05/21 (Saylor Day reflections, IBM jettisons 'Blockchain', India Bitcoin ban) (EP.175)

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Nic and Matt return for another jam packed week. In this episode:  Our reflections on Saylor day Is Ross Stephens the 2021 Bitcoin MVP? NYDIG bursts onto the scene Visa's overlooked crypto API pilot for banks Is hashrate moving to the US? Nic's ongoing spat with the Wall Street Journal Bitcoiin 2gen gets taken down by the SEC Soulja Boy's ENS name gets lost in Coinbase's vaullts IBM finally abandons 'enterprise blockchain' How will public markets treat Coinbase equity? India contemplates a crypto ban Content mentioned in this episode:  Bitcoin Masterclass with Michael Saylor and Ross Stevens Stone Ridge, 2020 Shareholder Letter Visa's API pilot for banks Nic's response to the WSJ piece NYT, As Bitcoin's Price Surges, Affluent Investors Start to Take a Look Balaji Srinivasan, Why India Should Buy Bitcoin

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of 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. And I'm glad you're with us today. You had a big spill while you're out running this week. Why do you tell everyone that? I mean, I thought we almost lost you. Who goes running when it's six degrees and just ice everywhere? If you're training, you can't choose your moment.

You just have to get out there and run, you know? I'm glad you're in one. piece. That was a scary situation. Well, yeah, so for context, there was a lot of black eyes, and I slipped on the ice, and I was kind of laying there stunned. I wasn't injured or anything, but I was just sort of laying on the ground. And three people ran past me and said nothing. And I was pretty shocked by that. That's bad. I mean, North Carolina, you do that. Someone picks you right up, pat on the back. You want to come in for a cup of coffee. But in Boston, they're like, what's this guy's angle. This guy like trying to steal money. He's going to like pop up and steal my wallet. It's like,

you got to be careful of these guys. Yeah, they don't call them muscles for no reason, you know. That's tough. That was another lesson. You know, we're up here in the north people and not friendly. Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Well, I'm doing this in a new studio. We're doing this. The We work has shut down for anyone asking about the bike saga. It's a longer bike ride now. We're in a different locale and they went out of business, probably because they steal bikes. Yeah, so you were evicted from the WeWork, but you're still loyal to WeWork the institution. I prepaid for a set amount of time, so we're making due. You have no choice.

Well, this was an interesting week. We had a new Bitcoin holiday. I'm referring to it as Sailor Day from now on. What an event? That was pretty great on. I mean, I wasn't able to catch the whole thing, but that first talk between Ross Stevens, and Michael Saylor, I was legitimately fist pumping while listening to that. As Ross Stevens was speaking, I was having this thought that I can't believe that like Twitter,

as I was watching it on Twitter, I guess YouTube, but through a tweet, I just can't believe that this content is free because it's just so good. I would pay money for it. I mean, Ross Stevens at this point is responsible, not to, you know, be a fan girl or anything, but he's responsible for, in my view, two of the best pieces of Bitcoin content now. He wrote that annual letter last year, the Stone Ridge annual letter, which was incredible. And now he did this interview with Michael Saylor, which to me is one of the most concise and complete thesis for Bitcoin I've ever heard in my life. Yeah.

There's this concept of the IDMAs that people talk about in really pressure testing assumptions and going through different scenarios. And it's pretty clear that Ross Stevens has just been through the idea maze on. Bitcoin and the pros and cons and is able to articulate it in just a really powerful manner. I'm going to lay out a few choice quotes from his interview because there's some pretty good ones in there. So I'm just going to hit you with some of my favorites. All right. Let's go. Let's go. One of the amazing ones, he said, quote, a client asked me, what are the chances the Bitcoin goes to zero? I said, what are the chances that Christianity goes to zero? It's just not a possible.

ability. Very true. What else did he say? Cash is now a liability. It's no longer an asset. A central bank can control the supply of their money. They can't make their people value it. Central bankers, as well intention as they are, they're just up against forces far bigger than themselves. That's a great one. Yeah, his understanding of the history of central banking was on full display there. Some great anecdotes. It was outstanding. He said, in the same way, cigarette packets come with labels warning that they're bad for your health. Fiat currencies should come with labels warning that they're bad for your wealth. Savings divided by infinite units of Fiat equals zero wealth saved.

The great thing about this industry is that every couple of years you have these people like Ross Stevens and Michael Seller that pop on the scene and, you know, do their homework and really understand it. And then they just go hard on it. and they've just become the staunchest allies of the industry, and they're just evangelizing it. It's amazing. Yeah, he compared, because Nideg's been around, I believe since 2016,

almost, if I'm not mistaken. They've been around for a couple of years, but they've been in kind of stealth mode. They've been accumulating assets, but they have not done much PR, and now it seems like they burst on the scene. Yeah, they've made some interesting moves lately, too. So they, of course, acquired digital assets,

that data. So the Alford brothers over there. So it seems like the team is firing on all cylinders. Yeah, I would predict that in a year's time, they would be one of the most well-known kind of Bitcoin banks, Bitcoin financial service companies. It seems like this really started to move the needle in terms of awareness among Bitcoiners. But yeah, it's amazing how you know, you're an advocate for a long time and then these new folks come on scene, they're so much more eloquent and you feel like, all right, my work is done here. I don't need to chill Bitcoin anymore. This, we can pass the torch.

It's so true. It's so true to hear people have these unique perspectives and to be so erudite about it. It's amazing. So that was an awesome conference. The other thing that deserves mentioning is that it sounds like there's some life insurance companies or at least insurance companies on the platform already. He kind of hinted at some big names that were not public. Yeah, that's right.

So life insurance companies plural. And also he mentioned that he expects to have $25 billion in assets on the platform by year end. Some of his comments on the pipeline were just mind boggling. So I mean, it's no longer in doubt the quote unquote institutions, whether their pension funds or insurance companies or family offices, they're here. They're very much here. I mean, if you're a bank CEO and you're not doing something here, it's just, it's incredible to me. It's kind of the, everyone can see that every broker dealer and bank is going to need to have a strategy here. And they're going to need to incorporate public blockchains.

And there's some that just don't seem to know it yet. Speaking of banks, I know we're getting ahead of ourselves here, but something that really struck me was Visa's announcement this week, that they will effectively be creating crypto brokerage as a lot. service for neo banks and banks using Anchorage on the back end. The kind of the same way that Paxos does it with PayPal already. Yeah, what a powerful service this sounds like. I mean, so you team up and it essentially sounds like an API type of integration where banks would be able to essentially white label the ability to buy crypto assets,

which I mean, you think about how hard it is to stand up custody and trade execution. You can just have that out of the gate here with an offering like this. It seems pretty compelling. And with a provider like Visa, I mean, this was an announcement that I thought was a little bit overlooked in terms of its magnitude. We're talking about the ability to seamlessly turn on a crypto brokerage solution with very credible players behind it. Obviously, Paxos does it with PayPal and Revolut, but this is Visa.

This is nothing to do with Visa Net or credit cards. This is Visa of, you know, fully endorsing crypto. and saying to their banks, of which they are partnered with, you know, hundreds, thousands here, you can have, you know, one-click module to turn on crypto exposure for your clients. Pretty, pretty wild, honestly. Yeah, and you're doing it with Anchorage, which is OCC regulated as well. And so there's the pieces here are just keep on coming together. And we're not quite there yet.

I mean, there's tons of infrastructure that still needs to get built here. But banks are going to use this offering. There's no doubt in my mind. The other interesting, again, we're skipping ahead to the news section, but I listened to the PayPal earnings call. It seems like they didn't really discuss their crypto solution much in their slides, but they did say that the adoption of that crypto product in the app very much exceeded their expectations and that they're heavily investing in their sort of core crypto business lines and that they're bring it to Venmo as well. So this isn't just a, you know, a passing infatuation. I mean, they're heavily investing in the crypto industry as well. Yeah. And it seems like there's some favorable statistics in terms of time spent on the app and engagement since it's

added crypto. So it seems like it's going well. I mean, these are the largest, you know, most mainstream fintech and, you know, sort of core card payments providers in the world that are fully on board with crypto at this point. So that's how this next leg up of adoption happens, I think, not necessarily through people, you know, owning physical Bitcoin or anything, but just having the ability to own it through their brokerage or bank seamlessly. That's how you get to five billion people. I think that's right. Well, let's talk about some of the podcasts. We've been having a lot of podcasts lately, and we actually have a big backlog right now. So there's going to be multiple episodes per week for the next couple weeks here. So on Monday,

had a good one. Yeah, we did an episode with Boaz Sabrato. He is actually a Costa Rican entrepreneur who spent a lot of time in Cuba and was one of the key linchpins of the Bitcoin movement in Cuba after the U.S. opened its doors to Cuba back in the day under Obama. And so he really deeply understands the Bitcoin landscape in Cuba, which is not really talked about very much because I don't because effectively there's no good data on it but there is a pretty thriving underground Bitcoin market in Cuba. The other thing we talked about was Cuba's currency transition. So they at one point they had three currencies overlapping at the same time, three Cuban state issued currencies. Now they're trying to collapse them down to effectively one. But that part of the

episode blew my mind such a convoluted system. Definitely not a country where you would have thought that there was widespread Bitcoin use. It's really interesting. Yeah, there's a few key tailwinds for that. So Cuba actually just recently got sort of full internet coverage. So that internet penetration moved the needle a little bit. The tourism industry died down during COVID.

And that was the way that they were able to get physical US dollars. And because that channel was. collapsed, all of a sudden there was a shortage of currency. So they started using Bitcoin as this bridge asset to bring dollars into the country like we've seen in several Latin American countries. So there's a, and then of course, there's this devaluation that's planned and ongoing and high inflation and general monetary repression. So there's a lot of favorable tailwinds. And a few people reached out, you know, thanking me for doing that one just because it's a story that we haven't really heard much before. So if you do have a story about an interesting jurisdiction or, you know,

location where there's underreported Bitcoin activity, you know, feel free to DM us or send us an email and maybe we can talk about it on the show. Yeah, let us know. And you did an episode with our former colleague Amanda Fabiano, who's moved on to some pretty amazing stuff over their galaxy. Yeah, Amanda was running Fidelity's Bitcoin mining efforts. is now heading the mining business unit over at Galaxy Digital. So I wanted to have her on. And we talked about the kind of the market map, the landscape for the types of companies that are in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem in the United States.

Really interesting. I mean, Amanda is very much at the bleeding edge of the mining sector, a space that, you know, we haven't invested in, but I just find endlessly fascinating. Yeah, American onshore mining, I think, is going to be a big theme of the next year here. I think if you look if you check back in a year's time you're going to see 20 30% hash rate will be onshore. You have these companies like crusoe that are just you know exploding and some of this is just off grid electrical. It's a lot of actually what Ross Stevens was talking about where Bitcoin is an incentive to use renewable energy to produce at a lower cost. You know, so if you have a waterfall or a shale field where you can put a Bitcoin miner, you can make some,

money off of that stranded energy. So this week I had a bit of a spat with the Wall Street Journal. A little bit of a tiff, I would say. It was a little bit of a flurry of barbs. And dare I say this is not over yet, actually. So set it up. Set it up. What did they do?

Well, I read this really irritating opinion piece from a journalist named Andy Kessler in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal. And typically the WSJ does a fairly good job. job of covering crypto, which is why this was extra disappointing. And Mr. Kessler cited the infamous crypto-anonymous study on, or on study is to put it generously on Tether in an effort to effectively discredit Bitcoin. And that kind of tipped me over the edge. And so I identified the most egregious misuse of data in the article, which is, of course, his usage of these charts purportedly showing Bitcoin's liquidity, and I dissected them and pointed out that, no, like, this analysis

is erroneous. This is not representative market data. And you really have to contextualize Bitcoin liquidity, and you can't reduce it to this single chart, which is influenced by exchanges posting phony volume figures, which we all know is the case, but which apparently Cryptoanonymous and Andy Kessler did not know. And so, I wrote the blog and then I emailed it to the Wall Street Journal. And they sent me an email back saying. What they say? So they said, dear Mr. Carter, thank you for writing.

If you think Mr. Cessler cited a flawed study, why don't you write us a short letter saying that and why it's flawed and some other stuff procedurally? So they think you're in junior high school, a letter to the editor. I found this extremely disrespectful to be frank, because. I don't get a thrill out of seeing my name in print. Okay, I don't want to get into the, this is like the kids table of Thanksgiving. Okay, I don't want to get in the damn letter to the editor's section. I was informing them that the opinion piece was based on bunk data. I was not trying to get a damn comment published in the WSJ.

So I sent them back a rather terse reply, dare I say. Oh, what did you say? This may have not been the wisest choice. I said, Dear Timothy, respectfully, I was not writing in the hopes of seeing my name in the letters to the editor's section. I was writing to suggest that you review the questionable sources employed by Mr. Kessler. The post he is citing is not a study. It is a set of unbacked conspiracies published anonymously on Medium. If you would prefer the blog in a pistillary format, I can add a letterhead to the top.

regards Nick. That's fair enough. The thing that struck me is that they need somehow my response in letter form, even though I wrote them an entire blog detailing why the study is wrong. What I want is a retraction. I don't want to be published in the stub section of the newspaper somewhere, but my guess is that this is probably the last I will hear from them, unfortunately. Well, at least you have a podcast where you can vent about these things.

Well, that's the thing. We don't need these guys. And I don't know why they think we need them. We have our own distribution channels. I mean, the reason I wrote the blog is because it'll get plenty of exposure. And whenever people use that flawed data, now they can refer to it from now on. But I still would like them to retract because it's completely preposterous that they would cite completely vague conspiracies from an anonymous author on Medium in the Wall Street Journal. That doesn't seem acceptable to me. It's a crypto anonymous guy. Man, we have burned. some calories thinking about him. Yeah, it's just wasted a ton of cycles and we've heard about it from dozens of our LPs, it seems like. And it's just there's nothing to this particular post. I mean, there's valid critiques of Tether. These critiques are not the valid ones, frankly. All right. Well, why don't we move on to happier things, deals and fundraising. And it just, I don't know about you, but I am feeling very, very bullish about this industry right now. This has been one of those weeks where you talk to so many talented entrepreneurs that are entering and having great ideas.

And it just feels like there's a lot going on. Yeah, it was a good week for deals. We had one in the SIV portfolio. So CASA, which many of you will be familiar with. They create software to enable individuals to self-custody of their Bitcoin in a multi-signature setup. They raised $4 million in a round led by our friends at Avon Ventures with people. participation from us, Tioga Capital, Kedenza, Champion Hill, compound, precursor, Lair, Hippo, and Coin-based ventures. So congrats to the CASA team, very proud to be supporting them.

For sure. Next one up is Manta Network. A decentralized exchange, they're built on Pocodot. They raised $1.1 million in a round from polychain, three arrows, defiance, multi-coin, Alameda, and Hypersphere. so many polka dot deals getting done these days we the next one up is very buzzy of course

NFTs are incredibly popular huge amount of money following into NFTs so this one is an nfti deal rarable they're an NFT marketplace there is 1.75 million from 1KX

parify coinbase coin fund and others and then a couple of funds so there is a a new island fund in the mix. So North Island, which is Travis Scher and James Hutchins, they raised a $72 million debut crypto fund, and we're really excited that there's a new island.

Between Castle Island and North Island, there's a couple good island destinations here. There may well be other islands active in the crypto space. We need to identify them and create some sort of consortium here. I think we're going to have a CMS Island Ventures. I heard that that was rumored to be in the world. works. Well, we welcome any and all island funds to the crypto industry. Travis, of course, former DCG did scores of deals over there, very seasoned VC in this space. As is James, as is James. And actually, Dan Tapiero launched a fund, so 10T Holdings. Dan is a known macro investor. So this is a

growth stage venture fund for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which is interesting in and of itself. You know, we're starting to have more of these companies getting to the growth stage. And so it only makes sense that you'd start to have growth funds, which is exciting. So congratulations to Dan and team. Yeah, this is a refreshing because a lot of the activity in this space is at the C and A stage. And there does seem to be a gap with crypto-native growth capital. So very cool to see. In news, we have a whole bunch of news items. We've already covered some of them. Guess we'll start with SEC. It seems like there's SEC every single week now.

SEC came down hard on three individuals that defrauded investors out of $11 million in the 2017 ICO called Bitcoin 2Gen. And for fans of pardon my take, this is where I heard of Bitcoin 2Gen because Stephen Segal was apparently hawking this one. It is hard to believe that with a name like Bitcoin 2Gen, this thing was not legit, but it was total fraud. And to be clear, that's Bitcoin with two eyes between the O and the N. So it's really Bitcoin 2Gen.

Bitcoin 2Gen. And people lost $11 million in this. What the hell? Not that big in the grand scheme. But yeah, celebrity ICOs, not good. No, not good. Not good. Soldier Boy has been loudly contemplating, or Mr. Boy, for short, has been

loudly contemplating doing a token of his own. And it seems like every night now, he goes on Clubhouse. And I just listened to Bitcoiners sending entreaties to him, asking him to not do a token and just to focus on the established crypto infrastructure, whether it's Bitcoin or NFTs or something like that. It's been really entertaining to see him go through this IDMAs. They're just trying to save his legal fees. there was an interesting story with Soldier Boy I don't remember who it was exactly but someone bought his ENS

NOS domain for him and then sent it to what they thought his address but it was actually a Coinbase deposit address and effectively lost it. Now it's in purgatory and he was actually a little bit of that. Coinbase has that asset under custody so maybe that's worth a lot.

Maybe that's going to help with their direct listing. That could be like a billion asset. That could be it. Yeah, that's part of their book value now. It's lost in the Coinbase labyrinth somewhere in their vaults and they haven't been able to extract it yet. It's there, but who knows if they'll ever be able to pluck it out. Oh man, that's a mystery. Well, let's talk about IBM. In terms of things that should come as a shock to no one who's actually spent time in this industry, IBM is cutting their blockchain team to quote almost nothing after missing revenue targets. And, you know, for those of you who are not familiar with this industry,

this might be surprising. And you might say, oh, man, is this bad? Like, you know, blockchain is dying? Well, I'll tell you what, private blockchains are dying and they've been dead. So IBM had this great strategy of going out and trying to sell private blockchain technology with themselves in the middle of everything. And the market seems to be speaking here. Yeah, it's only taken six years for this to this reality to finally set in. But I am glad better late than never. You know, this is like a really,

this could have been a really interesting blockchain strategy over at IBM, but they decided that they wanted to re-intermediate every industry under the sun. And people didn't want that. How much do you think they spent on ads? They had some very polished ads. Did you see those strawberries on a blockchain?

Didn't they have a Super Bowl ad? Super Bowl ad. Really, you know, dulcet voiceovers, you know, blockchains to solve humanitarian problem, sanitation, strawberries, tomatoes. You sprinkle a little blockchain on it and it just sounds good. And the crazy thing is that we've been telling this to anybody that would listen for literally half a decade now, you more loudly, I think, that there's just nothing there

with product blockchins. It's just not worth doing. And the reality has finally sunk in. But I mean, come on. How many wasted cycles? How many hundreds of millions of dollars wasted? I don't even know if it's over, but we'll see. Well, did you see this Coinbase news?

So they have chosen NASDAQ for their direct listing. And in some thin trading this week on NASDAQ's private market site, it looked like some shares were exchanging hands at about a $50 billion valuation. So this thing is about to be explosive on public debut, is my guess. Big time. I mean, I'm not in the business of making price predictions, but yeah, I think this is going to be one of the hottest IPOs in years. I mean, it is a true blue chip Silicon Valley company.

It is a pure play, crypto play. If you look at all these other assets that are publicly traded, whether it's Marathon, whether it's Voyager, whether it's, you know, there's a few publicly traded miners. they're all trading at preposterous earnings multiples. Coinbase is actually a real legit company with extremely robust revenues, which are actually hitting all-time highs because they're hitting volume all-time highs. To me, I think the market's going to give that an amazing premium and actually probably suck the air out of the room for some of these other publicly traded

sort of blockchain exposure stocks. I think that's absolutely right. So it'll be interesting to see that one. Well, let's talk a little bit about India here. I don't know if there's much to say other than there are some reports that India is introducing a law to ban cryptocurrencies, which is a shame because they had been illegal. And then there's a process to open them up and a bunch of exchanges got funded. But it looks like now it's in question. So what's your take on what's going on in India?

Yeah, it's a little disappointing, I would say, because there is a very significant contingent of crypto enthusiasts in India. India, as we know, there are a number of startups that have been growing there for years and years. And for a long time, the default situation was that exchanges were not able to interact with the bank sector, which really held them back. And then there was a critical Supreme Court victory saying that that was unconstitutional. The banks had to provide services to exchanges. And then now it looks like the Congress has turned around and said, no, Bitcoin

It might even be Bitcoin ownership is illegal, but at the very least exchanges can't operate. I guess TBD on the precise details there. I thought there's a really great op-ed from Balaji, Srinivasa, entitled Why India Should Buy Bitcoin, which basically made the case that it's a matter of strategic importance that India embraces Bitcoin. And I think he's absolutely right. And it's not just about buying Bitcoin. and it's just about cultivating a hospitable environment for crypto enthusiasts and crypto entrepreneurs. So I really urge you to read this piece.

You could write it about any country, really. But it is very salient in India. There's already a cultural affinity for gold there. Everyone knows that the Modi administration has been engaging in basically tampering with people's wealth. By neutering some of these bills and you only had a short period of time, to turn them in. So in the face of monetary repression, Bitcoin and crypto assets are very salient and very germane.

So India would stand to gain, I think. And so I really like this piece from Balogy. Yeah, in some regards, I mean, the genie's out of the bottle here. I mean, it's really hard to confiscate wealth that is held in your brain, which is, where you can hold Bitcoin. So we'll see. It'd be interesting to watch. did you see some personnel news this week?

There's a bunch of interesting news. So Mike Dutis has joined Paxos to lead their stablecoin efforts. So that's a great move. And Mike has a deep expertise in payments. Yeah, this harkens back to his prior experience in fintech in payments. So I think it's a really tremendous move. Paxos is obviously doing great. They're the service provider for PayPal.

You can see the it bit volumes climbing ever since the PayPal integration. So, congrats to Mike. And we had Teddy Fusaro became the president of BitWise Asset Management, one of my all-time favorites in this industry, so congrats to Teddy. Yeah, shout out Teddy.

I'm sure he's a listener of the pod, all-around great guy, and great organization BitWise, too. We're going to get Teddy on the podcast and talk about local haunts and Providence and maybe some crypto stuff too. So also in news, and this should come

a shock to no one. Microstrategie bought some more Bitcoin. They bought 295 Bitcoins this time. So they keep stacking. I mean, you keep making Fiat money over there and they're just going to keep buying Bitcoin with it. So here's an interesting piece in the New York Times actually entitled As Bitcoin Price Surges, Affluent Investors start to take a look. This actually profiled the good folks over at Two Ocean Trust in Wyoming, which is a little bit underrated. It's one of the newer Wyoming-based crypto businesses, but really cool to see them getting this press in the New York Times. Yeah, Joel Revel and Dustin Sventi over at Two Ocean, really building quite a franchise over there. I have to say per capita, Wyoming might have more intelligent people in, you know, in this

industry than any jurisdiction I've ever come across. So it's interesting to see today that Caitlin Long posted that she and Cynthia Lamas are not only amazing contributors to the crypto industry, both from Wyoming, both involved in politics, also sorority sisters, apparently. Really?

This industry is full of coincidences, yes. We need to get out to Wyoming. I just can't wait to travel again. Well, I think I've identified a location for a conference this year. So stay tuned on that. It will be very historic and very important. 2021 is going to be a banner year here.

I just have to say, I've never been more excited. And we're going to tease this conference. There's no news yet, but it's going to be awesome. Yeah, we have a few pending news items. The conference is one or the rumors of the conference. We've got something else exciting that's dropping soon. So stay tuned. But, yeah, I mean, it's just going to be explosive.

There's so much pent-up conference demand. And frankly, Clubhouse doesn't cut it. As good as Clubhouse is, doesn't quite cut it. And I think we're also going to put a little Easter egg here in the podcast. If you've made it this far, you're a diehard listener. So if you know anyone that would be a good fit to join Castle Island, now would be a good time to send a little note our way. Okay.

Well, that's a halve an Easter egg, but that's right. Yeah, we are hiring. We are hiring. I've read some really great research pieces this week. So Rea Batoria over at Fidelity Digital Assets put out just kind of a 2020 Bitcoin retrospective, talking about the growth of the industry, using a lot of data to kind of validate some of this growth. So just a great piece.

We linked to it in our newsletter this week. Grayscale put out a paper on how to value Ethereum, interestingly. So you never really see these Ethereum valuations. You certainly see them for Bitcoin. Ethereum is much more challenging. So I credit them for taking this task head on. It's harder to value. And then I read Mark Cuban.

He put out a cool blog post called The Store of Value Generation is kicking your ass and you don't even know it. Just talking about some of the growth in this industry. And he's big on non-fungible tokens and things like that. So he comes in and comes out of the industry. But right now it's he's in. I like these guys that, you know, flip. flop back and forth. Another one would be Scott Minard of Guggenheim, who somewhat suspiciously flipped positive on Bitcoin, right, as they had started deploying into

the asset. So there's no coincidences in this world. I mean, someone did a good tweet on this. This is a hilarious, that he was calling for 400K Bitcoin, and then he was like, well, we could crash back down to 20. And then there's a regulatory filing that they bought a bunch of Bitcoin, and now he thinks it's going to 600K. So, you know, Scott, you got to, yeah, do your thing. I respect the hustle. It's very transparent, but I respect it nonetheless. And he's, he's an enormous man, so I don't want to trifle with him.

No, I mean, he's a giant of financial services. And he thinks that Bitcoin is going to $600,000. And, you know, last week he thought it might be going to $20, but it's neither here nor there. The fundamentals changed, okay? He just reevaluated the fundamentals. It's good to have them part of the team. A lot of people are asking if we're going to do kind of our version of the Shamath picture and just post our abs.

I'm here to tell you that I'm not going to do that. Abs or lack thereof. Yeah, give us a month or two and we'll see what we can do about that. I'm going to have to drop the carbs a little bit in order to do something like that. That was impressive. We are living in a golden age of podcasts, I must say. Just keeping up with all the content.

So I'm just going to throw some recommendations for people to check out. So Zach Prince of BlockFi was on the Animal Spirits podcast last Friday. That was great. Jeremy Allaire of Circle was on bankless this past week. Really good episode. We had Andrew Peel, who is the head of digital assets at Morgan Stanley, which I did, you know, I did not know that that was a position. And he was on Base Layer, so that's great to see.

We had Cynthia Lummis, the senator from Wyoming, on Pomp. And then this one I would highly recommend checking out. So Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenberg, just talking about Defi and SEC, and just talking about kind of market structure and regulation in general on the Coin Center Tangents podcast. Yeah, that's quite the list. I'm going to go ahead and say that tangents and Uncommon Core

with Hsu and Suzu are my, they get my vote for the most underrated podcasts right now with the exception. of on the brink, of course. But yeah, there's excellent podcasts. All right. So I think that's all the news for the week. That would be it. What is Bitcoin doing right now? Let's see. We are grinding up. We've been grinding up now for over a week. Yeah, things look quite sunny, I must say. Well, next week is going to be a fun week. We'll have some announcements from Castle Island next week. next week we are going to do another urbit episode actually so our second urbite episode and we are going to do an episode on bitcoin native smart contracts so building on the block stack episode so good week of content coming up oh and how could i forget tom brady and the super bowl

that's happening yeah i'm going to be rude informed i would be very dismayed if the chiefs just won ten consecutive super bowl's here I was talking to a mutual friend of ours about the Super Bowl, and he was talking about Brady. And, you know, it occurred to us that, like, we had dial up internet when Tom Brady won the first Super Bowl with the Patriots. That's how long this guy's been doing it. And interest rates were 6.5% when he joined the Pats. It's just, it's staggering. Well, this is probably his last hurrah, dare I say. Although I've been saying that for five years.

I think he's got a couple more years, yeah. All right, well, that wraps it. We will see you next week.