On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/06/26 (Bitcoin bloodbath, Digesting Epstein's Emails, Ethereum rethinks L2s) (EP.699)

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Bitcoin grapples with the fallout of the Epstein Emails Did Jeffrey Epstein influence Bitcoin development? Is Bhutan selling their Bitcoin? Do Bitcoin devs care about quantum? Is Bitcoin Core under the influence with sophons Kyle Samani steps back from Multicoin What Samani's departure means for crypto Is web3 dead forever? Vitalik starts second-guessing the L2-centric roadmap Tether is trading at a slight discount Content mentioned in this episode: Nic on Substack, Bitcoin developers are mostly not concerned about quantum risk  

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

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AI, IG $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 the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Another week, another Nocastle Island mentions in the episode. Files. So congratulations about that to you, to me.

Good job, everyone. Honestly, this sounds weird, but I'm feeling weirdly pleased about that, even though I already knew that we weren't in it. Are you getting this? I mean, you had to have Googled your name almost immediately when you saw that that search was coming out, right? It's like, I'm pretty sure I was never like in a big dinner with Jeffrey Epstein, but it's really good to know.

Yeah. Like, it could have been the case that we had been on an email thread with him. Like, that could have happened plausibly. Right? Yeah. We were on a lot of email threads with a lot of email with a lot of people. And so it's really, because we knew that we've never corresponded with the guy. So why am I feeling relieved? I don't know. There's a lot of people we knew in this industry that were in those document dumps. So many. And in some cases, for relatively benign reasons. Like someone wanted to introduce them to Epstein and that's it. You know? then the trail goes cold. But there's something that are less benign. There's kind of a, yeah, there's a staging of this, right? Like if you were introduced to Jeffrey Epstein and you didn't respond or, you know, maybe you did, maybe you had a call.

That's the next level up. I feel like the culmination of it is like you're on the island partying with him and that's, you're canceled at that point. Here's where I draw the line. Should you Google someone before you meet them? Probably yes. I do that. I feel like you do that too, right? Just basic diligence.

You're going to meet someone in person? Of course, yeah, of course. And especially, I think I would put it through Google and you'd be able to see that the guy was arrested. And wasn't he convicted in like 2009? Yeah, I mean, anything post-09, by the way, that was on his wiki page. So that was very, there was mainstream press reported on it. So, you know, if you had done a 30-second Google, you would have known. So even meeting with him is kind of a little sketchy, but going to visit him, wouldn't you do some basic diligence on this reclusive shady billionaire that lives on an island in the Caribbean?

Like, of course you would, right? Yeah. So you're either deliberately ignorant, enormously naive, or you know and you just choose to go anyway because you expect something out of it. Yeah. it's financial or other. So I have actually no sympathy for people that, you know, visited him on the island and now want to plead ignorance. Like that's not an excuse to me.

No. And there's, I mean, that's what like there's a number of Blockstream founders that were on that island. It's not great. Tentacles all over the MIT Bitcoin digital currency initiative. All over the DCI. And, you know, Blockstream raised capital from him. they gave it back or whatever.

It sold secondary. I don't know exactly how they got them off the cap table, but that's not good enough. You have to look into who is investing in your company, obviously. It's called reverse diligence. It's called diligence. Yeah. Investors, diligence founders.

Founders should diligence investors. Yeah, there was a, speaking of that, there was a grin SPV mention. So Jeremy Rubin, it looks like, was being funded by Epstein or doing SPVs with them. Kind of unclear, although there is a check that is in the Epstein files made out from Jeffrey Epstein to Jeremy Rubin. It says like quarterly payment.

There was some back and forth about a company. I think it was layer one, which I think turned into a Bitcoin mining company, but it looks like maybe there was a Grin SPV type of angle there. And it looks like the underlying founders of that business were pushing back and saying, you know, we're not going to take money unless we know where it's coming from. So it didn't get consummated that investment? It didn't get consummated and then there's a back and forth with Epstein saying he didn't want to do it anyway or something. That one really takes me back as I remember that Grinn SBV.

Oh, yeah. And Epstein made the right call or whatever he just did. He knew mimble, wimble was just not. Epstein looked into Grin and he's like, you know, this seems way too complicated and he was right. Yeah, the wallet infrastructure. Yeah. The interactive, do you remember making transactions on a grin? Yeah, I thought it was clever for a second.

And then I was like, oh, actually, this is completely unusable. It involved emailing, like, files back and forth. Yeah, so it's surprising that didn't catch on. Yeah, I don't know what the hell I was thinking, because you would have to sign a transaction, send it to the recipient. The recipient would have to counter sign and send it back to you and you sign it for the third time or something. It's like, yeah, it's a future of money.

It's like a completely ludicrous. Worst blockchain UX ever devised. It's up there. It's up there. It might be the worst, in fact. Yeah. Hell for exchanges that tried to support it. But yeah, I mean, a lot of Brock Peres in there.

There's one email where Epstein called Brock Perce a little Bitcoin elf. I mean, that's stuff. Madars from Zcash on the, the island. I mean, it's not a great look for a lot of people, honestly. I mean, you know what I've been thinking? You know, you remember the Bitcoin cash people, of course? Yes, of course. If they had still been alive today, they would have just loved this because it's the most nuclear conspiracy fodder against Blockstream of all time. It is. It doesn't get better from a conspiracy perspective. I did see some of the posts about, okay, this shows that

Epstein was trying to influence Bitcoin. It's like just because you donate to the MIT DCI, it doesn't mean you're able to influence Bitcoin. That's kind of ridiculous. Yeah, I mean, he clearly was just making all sorts of investments all over the place. He didn't seem to really be smart about crypto or Bitcoin at all as far as like, or interested even. And he made a tiny investment block stream. He was involved with the DCI, but I think that was just buying clout and prestige at MIT. Yeah, I mean, Joey Edo is kind of a big name and broader technology, so it's probably more of a prestige play.

It's incredible. He stepped down years and years ago. Joey Edo stepped down. Yeah. 2020 or 2019, right? When his name got first associated with Epstein, he stepped down. Yeah. But it took another six years for the rest of the fallout to hit.

All these people in the emails probably thought they were good. Yeah. the files aren't all even out yet. So there's going to be other waves of this. It's kind of, the whole thing is so confusing. It's like, who was this guy? Like, where's all this money coming from? There's so many unanswered questions. Yeah, he was the most prolific guy in terms of meeting important, cultural and tech, like the most prolific guy ever, I think. Like, how did he have the time to do all this? The access here is just unbelievable. It's incredible. I mean, there's even one that caught my eye was like someone that was,

like hacking for pay his Wikipedia page to try and hide the mugshot and they're like yeah you know we managed to get get a bunch of people booted from Wikipedia so we can lock down your page it's like how do you have so much power this dude it's really it's puzzling I mean it's it's one of those things where we'll probably never know because there's intelligence agencies have to be involved it here yeah and I know everyone thinks you know there was some kind of like sexual blackmail thing going on. There obviously may well have been, but I think a more simple

explanation for why so many people are in his thrall was simply they were willing to overlook his history of indiscretions because they thought they could get some money out of him. Like I think that it's that simple. Yeah. I think that's probably right.

If he's a billionaire or seems like one lives enormously lavishly, knows everyone, and he's got an entry on his Wikipedia you page it says he was convicted for some you know soliciting underage prostitution or whatever it was you'd be like uh yeah whatever you know he's gonna invest in my startup like i need the money unfortunately i think that's what people did i mean it like they regret it now that's for sure but i think people thought it would never come out yeah you know i think that's probably

exactly right on a sunnier note bitcoin is down about 10 000 dollars in the last 20 four hours. Yeah, we are we are in a bloodbath of a Bitcoin market right now and I'd say it's very unsettling to a lot of people because it the chart looks like there's just some forced selling here. I think it's very unclear where that's coming from. It's selling off and it's accelerating. It's not just selling off. It's really accelerating. I mean, we're at 64,000. A month ago, we were at 97,000. What's happening? Yeah, I think we, I think it would be so much cleaner to know that there was like an FTX unwind going on right now, which there very well could be. It's just that we don't know. Just a lot of chatter about finance on the timeline, but you know, a lot of noise. Who knows?

It's today's the Q4 announcement for micro strategy. Yeah, that'll be good. That's going to be great earnings. Is that after hours? Yep. In about an hour. Just huddle. I mean, the interesting thing was you did see earlier in the week, Nomura came out and said that laser digital took a big loss.

I think it was in the ballpark, a $75, $80 million loss after the flash crash of 10-10. Obviously, Galaxy reported losses. Novigrots went on, you know, caused a little stir. We can talk about that around the quantum side. So I think people are seeing that some of these more buttoned up regulated financial institutions took a big hit on 1010. And it would lead you to wonder, well, what happened to some of the completely wild West venues and market makers? I think people are panicking a little bit, that there's probably some bodies out there. You know, the saddest piece of news that I saw today was Bhutan is selling.

My favorite sovereign holder of Bitcoin is reportedly selling. And you just really hate to see that. You hate to see that. I think Bhutan was, they were also borrowing against their Bitcoin. Could be that they're selling because they got margin called. Could be King Jigme.

Jigme, Kesar, Nagmel, Wangchuk is his full name. Personal friend of mine. Yeah, didn't you? You went to dinner with them, didn't you? I didn't, yeah, that was great. He gave me a bottle of Bhutanese, whiskey. You know they make whiskey there? And I just didn't see him doing, you know, betraying us like this King Jigman. I mean, he probably reads your quantum pieces and he's probably thinking,

look, these Bitcoin developers just don't have a clear roadmap. Nick is right. Yeah, I'm sure he is an opinion. You know, the thing about King Jigmay, he was the most relaxed and Zen person I've ever met. Like the serenity just radiated from him. It's a happy place. He's not being Zen. right now at all. He being a panicking, in fact. Yeah. You just got to turn off your computer, you know, take a couple days off. You think he of all people could be more chill about this. He's like the top Buddhist, almost. It's, I mean, do you want to talk about the quantum thing? You wrote a new piece this week. Bitcoin developers are mostly not concerned about quantum risk. I guess I'll just lead with,

I don't think that's why we're selling off right now, but I think that is that in the stability of the, just post block reward subsidy are probably the two biggest issues for Bitcoin right now. Yeah, so I'll put this in the show notes. It's another FUD missive on quantum. It does what it says on the 10.

The title is exactly what's in the article. So I was having a big argument with Matt Crawlo, who is one of the most important Bitcoin developers. And he said that basically it was a fudster and I'm wrong and that all the doves do care about quantum secretly. And I'm like, well, I think you're wrong because I went and looked at everything

they'd said about quantum on the mailing list. And by and large, they're not concerned. So I confirmed that by indexing everything, every Bitcoin dev has ever said about quantum ever. And then I've just put it in this article and had AI summarize it. So what I also did was I ranked. I know I'm not allowed to do this. This is totally verboten in Bitcoin name. I ranked all the Bitcoin developers by their importance. And so I use that to discern who actually matters. So it doesn't matter if the 30 least important Bitcoin developers care about quantum.

What matters is what the top 10 gatekeeper. I call them high priests, devs think. And I'll name them. Peter Willie, Greg Maxwell, Jonas Nick, Anthony Towns, Adam Back, Alex Morcos, Michael Ford, Marco Falk, Andrew Puehlstra, Marra van der Leyen, and Peter Todd are the ones I identified subjectively as the most important. Guess how many of those is taking it seriously? None. One, Jonas Nick. Interesting.

Although Peter Willie, so he was my S-tier most important of, he has posted about quantum. He said he's happy to see discussion in the area, but he also does not think there's a risk imminently at all. So he doesn't think that there's any need to act imminently. I think it's kind of one of those situations where those folks would benefit tremendously from just spending like a day or two at a quantum conference or something, just to understand how fast this is moving. Yeah. I mean, there has been one Bitcoin in Quantum Conference. Prozidio Bitcoin had it, I think in July of last year. So there were, I watched all the talks.

There was some good talks. So there's been one ever. But yeah, the thing is, here's the thing. People think the Bitcoin devs have some kind of like privileged epistemic position on this because they're Bitcoin devs, which makes them like all knowing. But they are very specialized in one thing, which is Bitcoin core development. which is a very niche thing. They're not physicists.

That's okay. No one's asking them to be. But it does mean that they don't actually have insight into the cutting edge what's happening in QC, which is a totally different domain. The cryptography part, it doesn't matter as much. All that matters is when are we going to get a useful, cryptographically relevant quantum computer?

So, and so I think people assume the Bitcoin devs have done their diligence on this. They haven't really. Yeah, I think that's spot on. Well, you know, I would say the energy around fighting you on this is increasing. So maybe there's some positive externalities that more people will, you know, like go back to first principles and try to see what's going on. Yeah, I mean, just don't fight me. Just spend that energy fixing Bitcoin. Yeah, obviously. Why fight me? I'm on your team. Yeah, it's funny. It's like the, you would think that the perception is that you have this like huge short on Bitcoin, which I can assure is not the case. Yeah, not at all. Not at all. I'm suffering just the reason I'm doing this, everyone's question

in my motives, which is very unfair, in my opinion. The reason I'm doing this is because I care about Bitcoin. I want Bitcoin to survive. I don't want it to be fragile to, you know, even long-tail threats. I think we should have a paranoid attitude about Bitcoin development. If I wanted to destroy Bitcoin, I would become a core developer in Stonewall all quantum research. That's what I would do. Yeah. Like the three body problem. Yes.

Where the so-fons stop all scientific research, that's what's happening. The so-fons control Bitcoin core and they're stopping the research. If I wanted to save Bitcoin, I would do exactly what I'm doing right now, which is harassing the devs until they lift off the so-fond veil and start to care about quantum. I think you might maybe you need to dust off your coding skills, you know, try to become a dev. I would vibe code the solution. Bob code a soft fork here. Claude, fix Bitcoin.

Make no mistakes. All right. Well, let's move on to some of the deals of the week. Couple in the Castle Island portfolio, TRM Labs, blockchain forensic software company, there raised $70 million in a round that was led by blockchain capital with participation from Bessemer, Goldman, Toma, Bravo, and CMT. Congratulations to Esteban team. Next, I'll be BitWise, the asset manager.

They acquired Kores1, an institutional staking provider. Congrats to both firms. Yeah, really exciting move there by BitWise as well. They had previously bought a testant. So I think they're way ahead of the game in terms of asset managers getting into the staking space. I think that's a trend that will continue here. Next one up is called Opinion Labs. This is a prediction market that raised $20 million from hack VC, jump, and primitive ventures.

Then a bit of a theme this week. You have Bluff, an on-chain betting app. They raised $21 million from 1KX, Makers Fund and others. Then it's Kai Ross, which is a trading terminal for prediction markets. So three in a row prediction markets here. They raised $2.5 million from Andreessen Crypto and Geneva Trading. Your favorite company, Prometheum, has raised $23 million. and group of undisclosed investors over 2025.

Yeah. Congrats to my guys over in Prometheum. I don't know. I looked at the Form B. Three million dollars in sales commissions to two different investment banks on that round. I'm just shocked that someone invested in the company. Yep, they did. We won't dredge up all the Prometheum takes,

but these are the guys that were in concert with Gary Gensler are trying to get Ethereum designated as a security, which didn't really work out well. Next one up is Anchorage Digital. This is the crypto-custodian and OCC Chartered Bank. They announced a $100 million strategic investment from Tether, valuing the company at $4.2 billion. Congratulations to Nathan over at Anchorage.

Yeah, well done. Huge, huge raise. And they're doing very well. Well, in news, there's not that much more to say about the sell-off. everything's going down. It's very sad. What can you do? You know? I think you just got to you got to not do anything impulsive in a market like this. It's very clear that there's some people that are forced sellers. And if you're not a forced seller, then you should be feeling a little bit more at ease than if you were levered up, I would say. There have been some big personnel announcements

in the last few months. Mostly people leaving the industry, frankly. A lot of turnover at funds. And most recently, Kyle Simani, of course, co-founder of multi-coin, has stepped back after eight years as managing part of multi-coin. Yeah. Surprised at this. I mean, you got to tip your cap to Kyle. I think one of the best runs of anyone in the crypto venture landscape,

just completely knocked it out of the park. Frankly, in VC, I want to say. I mean, you know, in under a decade. Yeah. I think just, you know, crushed it on Solana. Definitely a person that's always out there, not afraid to mix it up. Don't get the sense he's going anywhere from the industry. So it looks like he's going to be spending more of his time with forward industries,

the Solana Digital Asset Treasury Company. But definitely kind of an end of an era there in terms of his involvement at Multicoin. Yeah. And I think it kind of. it actually does bookend a certain era in crypto history. You know, Kyle was always willing to consider the non-financial use cases of Block. He actually said on the way out he still likes Deepin. Yeah.

So he's not totally sick of crypto. But I think it does mean something, his departure, you know. I think it shows that certain kinds of investors are not that willing to sit around invest in like quote-to-go more boring financial infrastructure, stablecoin stuff and fintech. And now there's this, you know, belief that Web3 is dead forever and that the non-financial use cases for blockchains are dead and more creative stuff is dead. And I don't know if I actually fully agree with that. I think I have maybe a contrarian view on that. But I do think that this is this growing belief that it's just stable coins from here on out. And so, yeah, you will see some

managers leaving because they didn't sign up to do that. I think you'll see some turnover there. Yeah, I mean, this idea of Web 3 decentralized internet applications. They're fully decentralized, don't have a single point of failure. That didn't really happen, right? I mean, even something like a polymarket, which you'd say is probably by far the most successful application that uses a blockchain right now. It's not decentralized. Doesn't need to be on the blockchain at all. Yeah. Yeah. You know,

I remember the first time I met Kyle, I reached out to him back in 2017, maybe early 18 when he wrote a really compelling piece about Auger. Do you remember this? Yeah. I do remember because he tried to do a DCF on Oger. Yeah, you tried to do DCF on Auger. I thought it was just

really ahead of its time in terms of thinking about the space. So I think he's just always been one of these guys that's pushing the boundaries. I had fought with Kyle pretty much constantly over really the last eight years. However, I have a huge amount of respect for him, not just because of the scoreboard, not just like, oh, scoreboard, but because he was willing to totally, he was willing to trash the sacred cows of the crypto industry. Yes. Right? Like he would say publicly he doesn't believe in Bitcoin is store value or Ethereum is architecturally broken, right?

And then he would create these ideas that basically nobody else believed at the time. You know, they had an EOS pitch at one point, which obviously went pear-shaped, the auger thing, probably didn't work, but they didn't, you know, they weren't apologetic about doing that stuff. and that's what I respected about him and I've actually endeavored to be more like that myself just totally unapologetic this is what I believe is why I think it maybe I will be wrong

but in the grand scheme I'll have enough right ideas that I win yeah so that's what I like about Kyle it's very true about the EOS thing I mean a lot of VCs get stung in a category and they just say I'm never going back there but the Salana thesis was the exact same thesis as EOS Then Solana was the successor to that. So credit to him, man. Yeah, you're exactly right.

Most people give up after one failed bet on an idea. So definitely some personnel changes there. The other thing I wanted to talk about is Ethereum. So this is actually, you know, it's an interesting thing in this industry because every time Battalick puts out a blog, interesting things happen a few months later. Have you noticed this? Like he put out the original blog for the idea of Uniswap, AMMs. put out a blog post several years.

Metallic did? And was it the Bancor team that implemented it? Well, it was really Hayden Adams that implemented it, but Bancor was a they were around at the same time. I think Bancor was first. I want to correct the record at Dye. They were definitely first. They were first but different architecture, right?

I think they just try to shoehorn their dumb token into the whole thing. Yeah, I think it was really you know, Hayden that kind of took the most direct interpretation of the Talix blog. And then a few years later he had a blog about Ethereum L2s and then he saw this spawning of arbitram and optimism and all these L2s coming up.

He put out, he kind of made some waves this week with a long tweet talking about the state of layer two blockchains on Ethereum, basically saying that they don't make sense anymore in that, you know, potentially Ethereum should enshrine a roll up within the protocol itself, which, you know, if you're an investor or an operator at an Ethereum layer two, is pretty bad news. You know, I think there's this realization that these L2s are cannibalistic to the main chain.

But again, I'm going to credit Vitalik for this because he staked his reputation in the future of ETH on the layer two model for how long now, how long? Yeah. Maybe the whole history of Eith

and him being willing to toss that away is a great sign of maturity. It is. You know? Because he's, yeah, he's going to incinerate billions of dollars in market cap for these L2s and all these people who were mad at him, I actually saw tons of Ethereum developers being like I'm sick of ETH, I'm done with it.

That's a great sign. That's actually a good sign that shows you're being led by a guy with real conviction as opposed to following this path to perdition, you know. I think you and I probably agreed the L2 architecture doesn't work for ETH. It's cannibalistic. Bad U.I. It siphons the value away. Yeah, it sucks to use.

You end up with liquidity fragmentation. We believe this for a very long time. But I think it's really brave of Vitalik to acknowledge this, even if the salon of people use it against him. Yeah, well, that's the thing is, so if you kind of interpret that as, okay, that architectural decision was wrong, what is the right one?

I think there are some options that are kind of off the table. You can't re-architect Ethereum entirely. don't think to be like parallel EVM scale the base layer. I mean, that could be really tricky. So having just a native roll up, like maybe that works. Maybe who knows if that's going to work. But I think some of the considerations are off the table because you can't just start from scratch. You get this existing blockchain that's been around for years. Yeah, I'm biased. I think a high performant modern EPM chain

is the answer. Yeah, well, it's like Monad, right? Like we're... I'm talking about Monad. We own it, by the way, full disclosure. Yeah, but like that's probably what you do if you're starting today, right? Like you'd

start at the almost like the hardware level and build it up, but I just don't think that's possible. It could be wrong. I was just telling you, I'm looking at all the major chains. I'm really struggling, you know, with who's doing well or who's, like, because like a Bitcoin, quantum problem unsolved.

Ethereum. Vitalik just trashed their own roadmap in actually a pretty good position from a quantum perspective, but, you know, people view it as antiquated, less performant. Solana just lost their number one booster, the number one guy. Oh, they didn't lose him. I would push back on that. He's going to be the CEO of a dad in like a week. He's not going.

He's gone. Doesn't count. So every blockchain is actually dealing with its own unique set of problems, really big problems. I don't know. I think not all of them. I think there's a bunch of the, like Canton is an example. Canton's too good. There's some of these corporate RWA type of use cases don't seem impacted.

Speaking of corporates, did you see the CME news? So Terry Duffy, which one of the more colorful characters in Tradfai, he said that the company's exploring its own CME coin and that it could potentially be used on decentralized blockchains. What in the world is this? Does that mean a stable coin or something else? I don't know. I guess it seems like it could be a stable coin. I don't know. It seems like the type of thing you'd say once you saw that like fidelity issued a stable coin. You're like, oh, man, yeah, we could totally do the stable coin.

Yeah, that's a little bit strange. Also, Aaron's stable coins, the FT reported that Tether are looking to raise maybe just $5 billion instead of the $15 to $20 billion that they were rumored to be raising last year. Have you seen that tether is kind of kind of interesting? I think it probably reflects a lot of people selling out of tether, but it hasn't been as stable as I would have expected over the past week. My interpretation of this from traders that are much smarter than me is that it's going from USDT, and people can't redeem directly because it's hard to get a redemption account with the other. So they sell it on the market instead of redeeming. Because if you redeem it, you get it at par.

Redemption's par. I think it's actually 10 basis point cost maybe associated. But anyway, they're going USDT, USDA, and back into Fiat. Interesting. So that's why we see this. persistent discount because apparently it's easier to get a USDA

redemption than it is to the redemption. So that would explain it. Yeah, that would definitely explain it. Let's talk about the market structure bill here. A bunch of back and forth this week, I think we're moving in the right direction here. So there's a meeting

at the White House with the bank lobby and the crypto lobby on Monday. And it sounds like the message was figure this out on a compromise by the end of February in terms of this yield issue. Later in the week, I guess it was yesterday, it seems like there was a productive meeting with Senate Democrats. Some of the quotes coming out of that say that it was the most productive meeting that Senate Democrats have been involved with on this. The polymarket odds of a bill

were up to like 71, 72 percent yesterday. They're backed down a little bit. But some of the reporting said that Schumer himself went to that meeting. And there was some mention about fair shake, actually. And, you know, that they don't want to go into the midterms with this as an issue that this huge, you know, war chest basically can just be pointed at vulnerable Democrats that they'd rather have it off the table. Mark Warner, I believe he's a senator from Virginia in questioning Scott Besson today, the Treasury Secretary, actually talked about market structure and said, look, we've been hard at work at this. We could use your help.

So I think that this is moving along, actually. I think this might be back on track. I hope Fairshake is walking around the halls of Congress with a huge oversight checkbook just looking menacingly at the senators as they pass them. It sounds like that's kind of the vibe. That's what they should be doing. It sounds like that's a vibe. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal had a piece earlier in the week.

week. And it's kind of interesting. I wonder who leaked this. But basically that all the bank CEOs were antagonistic to Coinbase CEO, Brian Armstrong at Davos last week. And that, I think Jamie Diamond had some expletives even directed that. But that, that's actually the sickest headline they could have written about Brian Armstrong. Right. It's pretty good for Brian Armstrong, I think, right? It's super cyberpunk. And it's like, yeah, Coinbase, yeah, we're fighting the power. The banks hate us. It'd be much. worse if it's like yeah Brian Armstrong was chummy with the bankers it's like a it's like the last scene and animal farm yeah you know so it's actually great for Coinbase I think and Brian

that the bankers hate him he and he gets to play the outsider role the underdog there's that's great there's some quote from I think it was Brian Moynihan a Bank of America around just telling Coinbase to go become a bank it's like well I'm not a bank like what I'm trying to do here is is not lend fractional. Like I think these guys are like... Yeah, I thought that was idiotic from Moynihan. It's like, what are you talking about? It's like, this is a crypto exchange and custodian.

They're nothing like a bank. Yeah. You can't, just because they like accept deposits, small D deposits. That's some. They're not a bank, okay? I got it twisted. Yeah, really, really don't understand that whatsoever. All right.

Most important issue of the week, we were completely shableness. it again as an organization at the New England Patriots. I knew this. We live in trying times. The most important issue is the Hall of Fame boat. The Hall of Fame vote. So last week it came out that Bill Belichick will not be in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot, which is preposterous.

This week, we found out that the owner of the New England Patriots, and keep in mind, there's plenty of owners that are in the Hall of Fame, we happen to have the owner that has the most Super Bowl wins of any owner in the history of the NFL. turn the organization around. This thing was, this organization was about to be moved to St. Louis when this guy bought the team. Kept it here, built a new stadium, just win after win after win. And now he has been denied admittance to the Hall of Fame.

It's outrageous. One thing that I find very strange about American sports is this whole thing that you can move a team to a different city. Like, well, why would anybody in the new city be a fan of the team? team. Like, that's a foreign team. Yeah. In the UK, in the soccer and primary league or like the football league generally, if there was one attempt to move a team once and people are still mad about it. It was Wimbledon's team called M.K. Don's and it was this huge scandal and no one ever tried to do it again. Is that right? Because a team is like part of the neighborhood. That's like the fabric of the,

you know? Yeah. But in America, it's like, oh, the L.A. Charger, like, they're like moving around all the time. What is that? Yeah. I mean, it's devastating when they leave a city, right? Look at Seattle Supersonics became the Oklahoma Thunder and those poor people up in Seattle have just not had a team since then. It's just so weird, though.

Like, how, what's the thought process for you as a resident of a city becoming a fan of some kind of third-party team that's just shipped in in the middle of the night? night. How do you justify that to yourself? I think the way you justify it is all these cities. I mean, a lot of them want teams and they would have fan bases that they kind of have to build up from scratch. And there's only so many teams on the board. You think about it like. Okay. So the, the San Diego Chargers, they move to L.A. There's already a team in L.A. That one doesn't make a ton of sets. Who is the marginal fan? Yeah. Who is the marginal fan? That's tough. That's tough. But you can get it would you know when someone moves a team to like Oklahoma City like that kind of makes

sense kind of hard for the team that the fans of the team when they leave though that's just yeah then what yeah now you're going to be a fan of the team 10 cities over that just that sucks you know the Atlanta Braves used to be the Boston Braves really yeah Boston used to have two MLB teams here's my other question about the NFL why does green Bay have a team I've never heard of the city of Greece. Is it even a city outside of the NFL context? Never heard of it. I think they were, they're just one of the original teams. Yeah, I don't know. Is it a town? What is it? Does anyone live there? It's a very small town from my understanding. I've never been there. It's like Trenton, New Jersey having a football team. Yeah, that's probably right. Yeah,

it should be more of like a double a baseball city. Yeah, it's weird. It's really strange. Okay, so since we're on the Like, Polly Market says the line is 6932. That doesn't add up to 100. That doesn't make sense. On the NFL, on the Super Bowl. What do you think, correctly priced? I love being an underdog in a Super Bowl. I think it's just the best.

And I really like this team. I mean, Seattle is really good. Really good. But you got to hand it to the New York Jets football organization. They really know how to build quarterbacks, and the Sam Darnold guy is good. The Jets trained him up well. But I feel good about this.

So I forgot to cover this in our Epstein section, but the fallout from these emails has been incredible. Yes. Just like Sam Bankman-Fried times 100. Like heads of state are losing their jobs over this guy. Just like, can you think of another person whose emails if they were leaked could have a comparable effect? I can't think of anyone.

I didn't know. I mean, this guy's like the fixer of all. fixers. It's just incredible. Yeah. So Kier Starmer, the UK prime minister, is now embroiled in an Epstein scandal because he appointed as the ambassador to the U.S., this guy that was totally in cahoots with Epstein. And then to make matters worse, he leaked British state secrets to Epstein for him to trade on them. Very nuts. Very crazy. So it's going to take that head state. Yeah. There was a CEO of a big law firm that went down this week. I mean, people are going to be dropping.

It's just all over the map. Peter Atia. Peter Atia. The most famous health guy, basically. He's done. So, incredible. You got to hand it to Gavin and Driesen. So they reached out, Epstein reached out to him and he just said, no, I'm busy.

No explanation. Love that. Because if I was busy, I would just not answer the, email, right? I don't know. What's even the point of signing that email? I guess Gavin is just like, I want to be very clear that I'm not meeting with you. Yeah. And the way that he got Gavin's email was from Jason Calcanus. So let it be known to the other Bitcoin developers that did take the meeting. You could have just said no. Yeah, could have said no. All right. On that note, I think we have to call it, who you rooting for in the Super Bowl? What's your prediction? I think the Seahawks, this is my boring

prediction as I think the Seahawks won. I don't really, I'm not a fan of either team. I'm very disappointed that it's two historically Super Bowl present teams that are in the Super Bowl. I'm a little insulted. I'd probably be rooting for your Washington Commanders team if you were in it. You would never root for the committee. What, if we made it to the Super Bowl somehow? Well, I guess we'll never have to worry about that. You'll never bring it to the Super Bowl. Yeah, this is a pure hypothetical. But go Pat, everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. We'll see all.