On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/08/24 (OPNX closes, COPA case, more SAB121) (EP503)

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  OPNX is very sadly shutting down  Is jail good for you?  GBTC outflows are declining Solicited versus unsolicited treatment of ETFs The Bitcoin L2 space is heating up The latest on COPA  We revisit the Satoshi is the NSA conspiracy  SAB121 stuff The DoE's Bitcoin mining data collection emergency What's happening with Farcaster?  Brink Nation joins Farcaster  Monero delisted from Binance  Solana outage this week Content mentioned:  Fidelity Digital Assets, Q4 2023 Signals Report Sponsor notes:  Ethereum's Dencun Upgrade In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 245, we dive into the details of the Ethereum Dencun upgrade and highlight key indicators to monitor its success

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 Conjecturee 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 this episode is brought you by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at Ethereum's Duncan upgrade. As we approach the upgrade, the demand to transact on layer two networks has grown rapidly. Optimistic roll-ups like Arbitrum and Optimism have seen 3.5 billion and 850 million each bridge to their networks, respectively. At the heart of the upgrade is EIP 4844, which aims to improve data availability scaling on Ethereum Layer 1 and alleviate fee pressure through the introduction of blob transactions.

In December, Major L2, such as Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, incurred nearly 7,000-Eathen settlement costs to Ethereum L1. Fees paid by these roll-ups is expected to decrease as posting data to the blockchain gets more cost-effective. That is your metrics minute. All right, busy week. We are recording this on a Wednesday. It's been a while since we recorded on a Wednesday. Usually huge news happens on Thursday. It's guarantee.

Something's going to happen. SAB 121. We'll go away. We'll have, you know, Gary Gensler decides to go work for Elizabeth Warren, and we have a new SEC. Something big is going to happen. Well, there's some pieces of news,

a fair amount of deals this week. There's a lot to talk about this week. Let's hop into the deals. First one up is Ubit. This is a mobile payments application. They raised $25 million from Tether, CMC, 468 Capital, and Anatoly Yakavenko. Next up we have Nibiru, a layer one blockchain platform. They raise 12 million from Cracken, NGC, and Tribe.

Then we have Saltwater Games. It's a blockchain gaming platform. There is 5.5 million from Deos X Capital, Fourth Revolution Capital, and others. next up is kodiak their defy protocol building on bear a chain they raised two million from shima capital kinetic and amber group codiac that's a type of bear so do you see what they did there i understand a bear on vera chain i get it i get it yeah it's good next star tail labs it's a company building multi-chain apps they raised 3.5 from samsung next song network communications and others Then we have Glyph.

They're a DFI protocol built on Filecoin. They raise 4.5 million for multi-coin. Another Bitcoin DFI protocol here, Omega. They raised $6 million from Lightspeed faction, Bankless Ventures, and Wave Digital. Bitcoin Defi. So hot right now. Look at Bankless doing Bitcoin deal.

Love it. Proud of you guys. They love the BTC over there. They're Bitcoiners now. It's like when I go on their show and they ask me if I'm an Ethereum, and we're turning the tables. Bankless guys are Bitcoiners. You say yes, yeah.

The content coming out of bankless has been great lately. It's hard to keep up with all the podcasts they're putting out. I'll admit I listen to virtually no podcasts. I'm a net exporter. Oh, I'm a huge bankless fan. I have the premium subscription, no ads, gets piped right in. Highly recommended it. Bankless Dow member, proud contributor.

I'm in the Dow. I wouldn't say I'm a contributor. I guess passive. Yeah, whatever those guys do, I try to get my beque. Membership of the bank list now.

Last one is Delegate Labs, a blockchain security company. There is $9 million from electric capital, ARCA variant, and Arrington Capital. All right. So, you know, people have been asking,

I think we need to hit the bad boys. Cue it up. Really? All right, we're bringing it back. Let's roll it. Bad boys, what you're going to do? What you're going to do?

they come for you. Bad boys, bad boys. What you're going to do? What you're going to do when they come for you? All right. I'm sorry to report that OpenX, which is the unregistered illegal cryptocurrency exchange that was started by the Three Arrows guys in cooperation with Mark Lamb and the CoinFlex guys, it didn't work out.

It's shutting. Really? No way. But it was so promising and it was run by such credible people. How could it fail? Yeah. You know, it was getting a license, that was a problem, getting people to actually put their capital on a platform where people have a proclivity of taking their money away. That maybe that was part of the issue.

But the company line appears to be, well, now that FTCS is going to pay out 100% this claims marketplace is done, mission accomplished. It's kind of like a George W. Bush mission accomplished type of thing. Well, I actually have heard that the secondary claims liquidity has dried up. due to the success. Yeah, successive genre, I presume. But I don't know if OpenX had anything to do with that. Yeah, I saw news this week that there is some rumors that there will be an equity committee forming an FTX in the event that this goes above 100%. So what do you think the next venture for Kyle and Sue is here?

Well, it looks like they're launching their own L1. or maybe it's an L2 called Ox or something. So I don't know. I think you probably wouldn't want to be on the side of the bet that says that their legal troubles are done. Yeah, Sue, you know, went to jail for a short time. And he came out of jail really extolling the virtues of jail, which is like the most nuclear form of cope,

I think I've ever encountered my life. I saw that, yeah. He was saying jail is good for you. quite a spin zone. I haven't heard a lot of people say that. That is like elite level spin. I mean, just ignore why he was in jail, you know, forget about that part. Jail's good. It's good for the soul. Now, the part that is really interesting about three arrows here is just that, you know,

there's a lot of allegations of defrauding U.S.-based lenders and raising capital illegally onshore in the United States through some of these affiliate funds and we haven't really heard anything on that so it takes a while I think to build these investigations but it seems like it's taken quite a while in this case yeah the wheel what is it the wheels

of justice turn slow but they grind extremely fine if they could maybe accelerate the spinning of the wheels of justice like maybe it's stuck in first gear or something so like maybe let's crank the wheels of justice a little faster how about that yeah and I know the government

doesn't work this way, but there really ought to be a list of just people in crypto who have done really heinous things and defrauded people. There'd be so many of them in the ICO bubble that, you know, we haven't heard anything about this. A lot of defrauding's going on. There's several that are still going on, but they continue to go after very like stand-up companies. Yeah. Like the Coinbase thing is like, all right, you don't have regulatory clarity on the spot market for these things. You're going after Coinbase. Why don't you just start with all the scam? Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of real harm done in this case, like genuine firms, entities, individuals were basically defrauded, stolen from Lent under false pretenses. So they're material harms.

The fallout from the three hours collapse was enormous, obviously. We don't have to emphasize that. So it surprised me a little bit that this is kind of still outstanding. So that was the bad boys section. All right, let's move on here. Everyone is talking about the Bitcoin ETFs and the sell pressure and GBTC. It looks like we have some potentially some more selling pressure on the horizon. So Genesis, which is the bankrupt crypto lending firm that was owned by DCG, they're seeking court approval to sell $1.6 billion worth of the Bitcoin investment trust and the Ethereum investment trust. Unclear to me how much of this could be liquidated. There's

rules around how much you can liquidate if you're the affiliated entity. But these are both, obviously, Bitcoin and Ethereum closed-end funds, or at least they were, and the Ethereum trust still is. This is more cell pressure coming to that market, that the market is just going to need to absorb from a flow perspective if it gets approved. The good news, I think, is that it appears that the flows out of GBDC have really come down materially. So 75, mil the other day maybe? Yeah, that's very low. I mean, it's shocking, actually, because I mean, it's like, who are these people that own GBDC that are completely happy with 150 bips? That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people. If you own it in a structure that is tax

advantage, you'd probably be out of it by now. But maybe that says that there's quite a few holders that can't really sell because they're on such a low tax basis. Yeah, that's fair. So either way, that that spate of selling appears to be tapering off and the ETFs are still sealing inflows. And, you know, a lot of people kind of felt in the Bitcoin community that the ETF first couple weeks of trading was kind of a dud. But I mean, it appears by the numbers, there's basically like the most blockbuster ETF launch we've ever seen. Oh, absolutely.

And the interesting, we've been hammering this. this is going to take a while in order for the flows to materialize, but you saw LPL come out this week. So LPL is one of the largest, they might even be the largest broker dealer in the country. I think they have a trillion dollars on the platform. They came out and said, we don't have these products yet. We're going to spend three months doing due diligence on this. And people were all up in arms, but that is what you actually should do if you're in LPL's position. You're an enormous franchise. And you want to understand how the custody works on these things. You want to understand the in-kind versus cash create.

So, hey, these are cash create. Let's understand the liquidity dynamics here. Let's try to figure out who the top ones are. You know, there's 11 of these things. We're probably not going to list all of them or maybe we are. But that's a normal thing. And so I think there's a lot of LPLs out there that are just waiting for three, six months here before they put these things live on their platforms.

You know, here's something interesting I learned recently. Have you heard about the distinction between solicited and unsolicited projects? I have, and I think that's a big part of this. And so, yeah, feel free to kind of dig into that. We should talk about those dynamics. Yeah, so basically, ETFs within these issuers operate on different tiers. So within sort of like the asset manager construct, ETFs or financial products generally could either be prohibited.

So like even if you, you know, go to them and say you want this exposure, they say no. then the tier above that is, I might be getting this mixed up, is non-solicited. Not solicited. So we'll only sell it to you if you come in and ask. So you, the client, ask us, okay, fine, we'll sell you this thing. Solicited is we can actually recommend it to you and we can put it in these model portfolios and things like that. We will go out to you and we will sell it. We'll have a sales force that says, hey, what are you doing on crypto?

Have you thought about a Bitcoin allocation? And then even above that, the very best tier is you can use this as collateral. You can borrow against it. Right. You can margin. So from what I understand, Bitcoin ETFs currently within the large asset managers exist only on a non- solicited basis. And in time, they may ascend to solicited.

But that's not where we are yet. So this is why we keep emphasizing the structural flows associated. with the ETF will come, but they're not immediate. You know, and I think they will start to come right into the Bitcoin halving. So the timing here is really wild. They'll come into a Bitcoin halving. They'll come potentially into a Fed decrease in rates at some point in the spring or the summer. So this is setting up to be a pretty interesting.

Obviously, you know, the macro landscape and just geopolitical landscape will, we'll see where we are from that perspective. but if you just look at Bitcoin and look at the structural inflows that will be unlocked here in the independent broker dealer channel, the RIA channel, what you're saying unsolicited versus unsolicited, and then you get a Bitcoin halving and a rate cut. It's pretty interesting. I haven't seen a setup like this in a long time, maybe ever. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, an interesting thing that's also happening is I've never seen more non-Bitcoin venture firms

doing Bitcoin deals than is happening today. I'd say the talent is remarkably different than it was three or four years ago in terms of people trying to build things on top of Bitcoin. You know, these new EVM ideas on top of Bitcoin, there's a lot of stuff going on. Roll-ups on Bitcoin, yeah. I mean, Ordinals really kicked off a phase change, a cultural shift in Bitcoin whereby people revisited Bitcoin and decided, hey, well, you know, there's a lot of L2 activity on ETH, that clearly was a huge opportunity. There's virtually no L2 activity on Bitcoin.

Why don't we do it here? Like, clearly there is a demand for faster settlement, richer state, all kinds of other stuff. Let's build it on Bitcoin. And there's a lot of chaff to be sorted through. Which one is good? The wheat or the chaff? Is the wheat's good and the chaff is bad? I never really, I don't use that one because I don't really understand it. What are we talking about with the wheat? So one of them is the thing that you want, one of the thing you don't want. I don't know whether it's the wheat. I don't even know what chaff is.

What's chaff? Is it like the bad byproduct of weed or something? I'm guessing. I'm going to assume that chaff is the bad thing. So anyway, there's a lot of chaff in the Bitcoin L2 space, but there's also a lot of wheat. Okay. There is. So the amount of deals I'm seeing there is insane.

talent first you know fresh eyes on this stuff young entrepreneurs that are building on bitcoin so i find that very exciting and i think there's also been a realization among a lot of these funds that were historically not at all bitcoin focus that are now doing bitcoin deals so that seems to be very good albeit not necessarily directly accrucative to the price you know one of the things we talk about a lot when we're doing investments is just the total addressable market so you'll look at a lot of startups that make good sense, but only if this market continues to grow. And if you think about that setup and you just look at the crypto landscape as it exists today, so the assets that exist today, not counting new L1's launching, new L2's launching, not counting new brokerages and banks

coming in, which I think we all think will happen. But if you just look at the market today and you say, this won't grow, where can you go out and get TVL in Defi? The logical place is that you have all these Bitcoin holders that can't really do anything. with it. You know, they might be lending on centralized exchanges. They might be using something like a Thor chain to generate yield. But there's a lot of dormant Bitcoin there that I think would be put to work if you had these EVMs available, if you had these roll-ups available. So I think it's a market growth story by just unlocking the biggest asset. Yeah, there's other things I'm really excited about. So I was talking to Casey Rodhamor, Mr. Ordinals himself today. Shout out Casey.

and he's building a better version of BRC20 on Bitcoin called Rooms. BRC20 is as a protocol, it's terrible, but it took fire. So that's interesting. You have the taproot assets protocol where you could transact, you know, all kinds of third-party assets on Lightning potentially. So there's just like a huge amount of really exciting stuff potentially happening with Bitcoin. I'm seeing people building Maker using Bitcoin as a collateral. Synthetic stable coins with Bitcoin is a collateral.

You know, Bitcoin's been underappreciated, but it's sort of entering a new spring. So there's a few things that people have asked my opinion on this week. One of them is the Craig Wright thing. I'm not following it. I'm sorry. I don't have the time to understand all of the ways that this guy has lied about being Satoshi, and I don't really care. Should I? So I read some of the very long tweet threads.

My sympathies to the people would go to these trials. I don't know why people do it. Um, one commonality is that it always seems very hot inside the courtroom. Yeah. So that's what is it with courts and inability to, we have air conditioning. Like that's a modern convenience that we have. What about doing that? I run pretty hot anyway.

I needed it like sub 70. Um, I don't think I could operate in that. So apparently it's just stiflingly hot. And actually that did give me some joy thinking of Craig Wright and one of his preposterous outfits, probably some ridiculous. suit and just sweating away on the stand out of nervousness because he's clearly going to lose the COVID case and also because it's like intolerably warm. So that was my main takeaway is hot in the courtroom and Craigra that's going to lose. You know, I was just thinking about,

you know, the people that actually are Satoshi, right? Like this team of elite cryptographers at the NSA. Do you think they're monitoring this? I think somewhere, they're on a beach somewhere, having long since left the NSA, never touched a Bitcoin. And they're just glad that they leaked Bitcoin from the lab. They're looking back to fondness. They set up other accounts. These guys are top-tier cryptographers. And this is a true conspiracy.

And one day will be proven correct. I have a couple other conspiracies. I think that there's a, I think the intelligence apparatus is, We will find out 20 years from now that the intelligence apparatus was very involved in early crypto exchanges and maybe even stable coin projects. Okay. That's horrifying. That's very scary prediction.

I don't know if I like that. I'm just throwing stuff against the wall. But where else would you get visibility into what's happening on chain other than people that are minting these assets or people that have these huge omnibus wallet? So is it bearish or bullish if you find out that Bitcoin was an NSA project? I think it's very bullish if it never gets sold, right? So if it eventually comes out that the NSA had a team that kind of went rogue and built this thing and the keys are gone, that's bullish. It's also bullish if you have the collapse of sovereign currencies worldwide and it becomes a strategic imperative almost to have the Fort Knox of Bitcoin.

Yeah. America came with the million bitcoins. Yeah. It's like, hey, Fort Knox might be empty. We might not have the gold. but we have the million bitcoins as a country. Here's my prediction. I think in the next 24 months, we will use AI to find out who Satoshi is. Really? With the power of AI.

I mean, if AI can go and find all this plagiarism at elite universities, what can't it do? So we're going to look over the full corpus of everything that Satoshi wrote. And for once and for all, using AI, aka Magic and just figure it out. We're going to figure this whole thing out.

I don't hate that prediction. Do you think maybe Bill Ackman and his team after they're done taking down Business Insider, which I think they should, and KKR and whoever else is affiliated, maybe they'll just decide to figure out who Satoshi is. I mean, I would like an enterprising journalist to take one more swing at it, one last swing.

I don't know if I love the idea of just, going out and trying to docks whoever Satoshi is though I've never really enjoyed that line of inquiry yeah but you know I'm sick of the uncertainty Matt I'm sick of not knowing okay I want to know all right all right all right so that was one thing people are asking me this week another is as a follow-up to last week so we did the late breaking news there's a joint resolution on staff accounting bulletin 121 looks like there's bipartisan support for this thing to go away what do you think is going to happen? So I have spent the past few days coming up with what I think is going to happen.

Do you have any thoughts? Well, you're really the Saab one-to-one guy, so I'll leave it to you. I've kind of gone both ways on this. So on one hand, you see, okay, we have a joint resolution. It's a slam dunk to pass the House. The House Republicans are behind it. There's enough Democrats in the House that are behind it. It'll pass the House.

Then you have the American Bankers Association and the Bank Policy Institute coming out and saying, yes, we agree with this joint resolution. You need to get rid of Staff Accounting Bolton, 112.1. You need to let the banks compete in the digital asset space. All their international competitors are getting in. So that's kind of rare, right, to have the bank policy, the bank lobby behind this. I don't know. I don't think this is going anywhere. So here's what I predict. I think it could pass the House. I think it's tougher in the Senate. I think Sherrod Brown, it's not clear where he's going to go on this. But even if you were to get through the Senate,

why would Biden sign this? If you sign it, you're basically just saying, the person I put in charge of the SEC doesn't know what they're doing. And so we're smacking our own agency and saying, yeah, look, you've got to change. Like, why wouldn't you just pick up the phone

if he wanted this thing to change and say, hey, Gary, do you earn a great job trying to stifle business formation in the U.S. but the staff counting Bolton 121, why don't you just change it? Like we don't need to go through this whole charade of having the House and send it past it. So I don't know.

I think he'd probably just veto it, right? If he wants it changed, just pick up the phone and call Gensler and get it changed. It's interesting how widely understood it is now that SAB 121 is bad. And I don't know, six months ago, no one even knew what it was. Well, there's other stuff.

So I guess let's briefly talk on this. So the SEC, came out with new broker rules that would be wide ranging in their implications. So would pull some of the hedge funds that are active in the treasury market into the oversight of the SEC from additional, like an additional perspective than they already were as registered investment advisors. And it would also have this negative implication on defy where if you were an entity that was contributing assets into pools, so, you know, TVLing into defy pools, you would essentially be a broker dealer. which is problematic from the perspective of why would you be a broker dealer if you're engaging with assets that are not securities. There's not clarity on whether or not these things are securities or not.

So how can you actually be compliant here as an entity that's doing these things? It is a rule that is impossible to comply with. So you're going to see this barrage now. We're going to be in this comment period. We're going to be talking about this for the next two months here where there's a 60-day comment period on this broker rule. And it's going to get attacked from all different perspectives. not just crypto, but crypto specifically is going to have to rise up again and point out that,

all right, none of this makes sense. It's unworkable. We don't know if these assets or securities or not. Broker dealers aren't allowed to touch them. It makes no sense. So speaking of comment periods, this is something we talked about last week, I think. So the Department of Energy's demand to Bitcoin miners to release data regarding their power purchasing, power usage. there was no comment period on that, which is unusual. And the reason they were able to bypass it was because they said it's an emergency. And the emergency is that the price of Bitcoin went up. That's the emergency.

Is that the emergency? That's the emergency. Forget about the fact that Bitcoin has historically been much higher than where it is today. But because it recovered a bit, that according to the White House is an emergency, and that means they don't have to do a comment period and they can just demand that these miners fork over the data, which I think is unconstitutional, actually. I think it's a Fourth Amendment violation.

I'm a little bit older, but I remember the good old days where if you were running one of these agencies, you'd do roundtable discussions, you'd engage with industry on how these rules would potentially impact the industry. Are they workable? Do they make any sense? Then you'd have a nice long comment period,

like a 90-day comment period in some cases, and you'd have an active dialogue. But the issue becomes, if you're in the last year of an administration, you have to jam things through. And so we're kind of getting to the point where if you get to like June or July on some of these proposed rules and you haven't actually got the comment period rush through, you can't jam it through. Yeah. I mean, at the expense of the Administrative Procedures Act and, you know, constitutionality. So I expect this will be fought, actually. and I consider it very pernicious because an industry has been singled out for buying energy.

Frankly, they're a very benign buyer of energy, as we know. If you read my paper on this recently about how miners actually operate. And what I think it really is is an effort to politicize a neutral or common care resource, which is basically power in this country, similar to how choke point is an attempt to politicize a banking, which should also be fairly neutral. And my guess is that this is a dry run and it's just a precursor to going after AI and attempting to regulate the substance of AI

through the power purchases the AI data centers do because we're already seeing the same environmental arguments being used against AI. So this is my plea to, you know, not even to crypto people, but to anyone that supports sort of like technology and progress and growth is die on this hill because they're not going to just stop here if they successfully do this to Bitcoin. They will come for other industries. What's that meme of the two strong arms locking hands?

It's going to be AI in the crypto space, just joining hands as one. Yeah, and the AI people have historically been kind of dismissive and like, well, we're doing something really useful. So they're never going to come for us. Of course, they're going to come for you. What are you talking about? They're going to come for you. We'll be with you then. So be with us now.

I like it. I like that plea. All right, I want to talk about Farcaster. So Farcaster, I don't know if we've even talked about Farcaster on this show before, but we're on it. It's a Web3 social network. It's kind of a Twitter-like user experience, but it has some really unique blockchain elements to it. So you can port your data, multiple clients. And the daily active users on Farcaster over the past week have grown

by 10x. And so that's on the back of a release of a new product called Frames, which is basically a, it's kind of like a tweet with a payload in it. And so within a tweet, you can actually expose an application. And so you could expose the minting of an NFT or you could put up a pole or you could really do a lot of dynamic things that you cannot do on some of these centralized social networks because they want to keep all the traffic internal and they don't want to have execute payloads within their applications. So I think it's really a fascinating, primitive that we've never really seen. I guess we saw them in the early days of Twitter, but then Twitter kind of cut down the access. So I really like it. And I've been going on Farcester a lot more over the past

week just because new people are joining Farcester. I didn't know this, but you just told me that I was the sub. I was one of the first 100 users of the platform. Is that correct? Yeah. So you were number 97 on the platform and I was 151. Wow. That's worth something. That'll be worth something one day. Yeah. That will be.

So I am thinking that maybe we should have, we don't really have a place that on the brink listeners aggregate anymore. So maybe we should start a Farcaster channel. Yeah, I agree. You know, I was just talking about this with some listeners of the show. And I never, I don't know who listens to the show.

first of all, who are all these people that tune in? They don't identify themselves to me. We have no way of knowing. It's a one way relationship. So when people say they listen, it's great. It's like, oh, it's a listener. I want feedback from Brink Nation, but we're just speaking into the void here.

So we just decided, in fact, we're going to do a forecaster. Brink Nation is moving to Farcaster. And we're going to solicit your feedback. Please give it to us. We don't know if we're entertaining or boring or what. So yeah, this is a new thing that we're going to do now. We're going to launch. So you have our pledge that maybe even by the time you listen to this,

we'll do something on Farcaster. We'll get that running. Brink Nation, now on Forecaster. All right, odds and ends here. SEC announced charges and a settlement against Trade Station crypto around failing to register a crypto lending product. I don't think that's too big a news. we also have a decision by finance to delist minero we're surprised by that no end of an era and honestly

this was why some years ago i stopped being a minara enthusiast actually as interesting of a project as i think it is i figured i had this realization that it would not get the exchange liquidity necessary to succeed because the exchanges the way they operate the way the regulators think about them, it's incompatible with the true privacy coins. So this was unsurprising and expected, but obviously still unfortunate. Manaro, dealing with a Monero transaction remains like one of the hardest transactions to do in crypto from a user experience perspective. It's almost as hard as grin. Yeah, it really feels like the end of an era here. Manero was my first love in crypto, truly. And it's over. So.

protocol news Salana went down this week network outage it's back up and running now didn't really move the price that much I mean price went down price came back up anything to read into this yeah I mean look this is the salon of people well we're gonna anger the salon of people no matter what we say about this this is kind of the trade-off I think Solana is a high throughput high-performance high-performance protocol it's more brittle it does go down that's to be expected it turns into a tribal thing. There's a lot of mudslinging whenever it does go down.

But it does astonish me that the price doesn't at all ever reflect genuine fundamental developments. It's like maybe because people that own Solana already figure that this occasionally does happen. But it, you know, like, think about a 51% attack you remember with Ethereum Classic. Like that wasn't ever expressed in the price or anything. Iota? Do you remember Iota used to go down? it would go down for like weeks, it'd be down for weeks, and it was like the price wouldn't reflect. Like, this has been one of those enduring mysteries. Why do investors not care about the

actual functioning of the protocol itself? They don't care about that. So the part, so whatever, it goes down. It has gone down. It will go down, I suppose. But the part that I would be driving home here if I was the head of Salana, which there is no head of Solana, it's obviously distributed. but we have to get the CME to be active on our platform. So we need to get a CME futures contract on Solana if we want to grow the institutional adoption of Solana. And I think stuff like this sets back that timeline. Yeah, I mean,

CNE is going to look at the uptime. It's like they want this thing to not go down. And they probably want it to prove that it can stay up for a year before they go and fight battles and say that this thing is not a security. I will say that the outages have become less frequent from what I can tell. Right. But, yeah, this is the cost of performance.

It's like if you have a really nice sports car, it's going to be in the shop because it's, you know, it's a work of art. It goes fast. But you are going to take it at the shop. Yeah. Blockchains are just like sports cars. They're just like sports cars. Huh. All right.

Well, that's your choice. You have a sports car. Is it in the shop a lot? Um, no, actually, um, I do ding it a whole lot. I have a lot of dings. So there's nothing internally wrong with it, but the outside's a little beaten up for honest. I drove my truck into my garage by accident, like the first day I had a garage. It was terrible. So I've got a big white slab on my car. I've always wondered about your preposterously large truck because I've never seen you haul lumber or Oh, I haul all sorts of stuff.

Concrete or, you know, gravel or anything. I don't have trash pickup. I haul every week, at least twice. We have a dump in our town and I go. I don't have trash pickup in my house. So I'm hauling left and right. That actually does justify the truck. I mean, why do you not have, what's up with your municipality?

Why don't they pick up the trash? Well, you can pay to have a private trash pickup, but I don't do that. I, you know, I'm trying to stack sats here. So, you know, it's free to take your stuff to the dump. And the dump is great. You go up, you have a couple laughs. You talk to whoever's at the dump that day. They got a section for recycling.

They got a section for trash. You drive up the hill. They get a big leaf and tree drop off. And it's a good way to spend a few minutes. No, I used to be a big DIY guy, and I loved going to the dump. It was a very cathartic experience. You're really literally getting rid of all the filth and the garbage in your life. My kids love the dump because sometimes we go to Dunkin' Donuts after.

so they associate the dump with they're getting munchkins. That's that's Pavlovian. I mean, train them to love the dump early. It's true. And they'll love it their whole lives. That's true. Yeah. All right.

Last odds and ends here. A couple things that we're reading and watching this week. So Fidelity Digital Assets put out a really good signals report they call it. It's their Q4, 2023 signals report. It's a key breakdown of market metrics that impact the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum. I thought it was really well done. So we're going to put a link to that in our show notes. Have you read Chris Dixon's new book yet?

I am 80% of the way through. I'm enjoying it so far. I don't agree with everything, but I think it's a very good piece of content to be able to give to someone that is not in this every single day. I think it's quite good. I'm also reading it. And I will write a review once I'm done or will review it on the show. so we can do on the brinkbook club i'll be your first book book club let's do it all right it's a nice orange too so you know i've been reading it um on my commute people are like what's that book oh

blockchains let me tell you about them web three web three ever heard of it and then people just say oh ftx yeah never mind we don't like that all right so i think that's it for the week again we recorded this on a wednesday so forgive any late breakie news on Thursday, and we will see you next week. Have a safe and healthy weekend.