On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/13/26 (SBF wants a retrial, taking stock of Web3, Clarity deadlocked) (EP.701)

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Matt reflects on the Patriots season We review the Superbowl Ads Looking forward to the OpenAI wearable Is "something big happening" in AI? Does crypto accelerate the rise of malicious AI? Are all communications networks going to break down in 90 days? SBF wants a new trial Blackrock adds BUIDL to Uniswap Blockfills suspends withdrawals Robinhood is internalizing their prediction market product The stablecoin yield issue in Clarity is still a problem Fairshake is getting active in the midterms Is Chris Dixon right about Web3? We review winter olympic sports Content mentioned: Chris Dixon, The long game for crypto

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 is 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. How's your week then? It's challenging, quite challenging. Yeah, coins are down a lot. Coins are roughly flat on the week, I think, since we recorded this. Bitcoin's at 65-5. When was the horrible sell-off? Was it about a week ago?

It was like an hour after we recorded last week, I think. Yeah, so it has been flat. It's just been a really tough way to get back to flat. It's been a tough start to the week for me. Tough way to end the NFL season. I think you got to keep it all in perspective. If you had told me at the beginning of the year would be in the Super Bowl,

I would have been very, I would have been shocked. Yeah, you know, what do you think? Is Drake May going to be back in the Super Bowl? Of course. Many are saying that he will not. There's a lot of haters out there.

Including me, actually. I'm one of them. I think he's probably good for another five Super Bowls over the next call it, 10 to 12 years. Got to address the offensive line. It was tough to watch. Who was the left tackle?

I don't know his name. He'd be the worst game of his career. Yeah, he's a rookie. He also had a torn ligament in his knees, so maybe you give him a pass. That's just the worst time to have the worst game of your life. It was tough. Yeah, Sam Darnold. I'm happy for him. Yeah, I bet the Jets wish they kept Sam Darnold, huh? But he just wouldn't have, he would have had a failure to thrive, as they say. It does make you wonder about all those Jets quarterbacks, though, right? If they were just playing somewhere else, maybe they'd be doing great. Yeah, it was not the most thrilling game. The ads, you know, I make fun of people to watch the Super Bowl for the ads. It's like you, you can just go watch ads anywhere you want at any time. It's like,

is anything special about the ads? I actually thought they were good. As far as you can tell, it's basically all ads about filling in spreadsheets with AI. Yeah, a lot of AI ads. Kind of reminded me of 2022 with all of the crypto ads. Yeah, and the crypto contingent didn't cover itself in glory, in my opinion. Was it just the Coinbase? ad, I didn't even see that live. There was the coin base ad. I didn't like it because I have the same name as a backstreet boy. Nick Carter, yeah.

Which is something. I thought, is he a backstreet boy or was he another boy band? He was, he was a backstreet boy. I'm an authority on this topic. And I've probably been reminded of that, of that 6,000 times in my life. Yeah. So it happens basically every day. And for that reason, I don't like his music. So I didn't like the song. So it was just a song.

It was a Backstreet Boy song. It's a Backstreet Boy song. Yeah. And then it just flashed a Coinbase logo. So they kind of tricked people in a single along and then people realized it was a crypto thing and they got upset. I like the Anthropic ad. I actually thought the opening eye one, I liked it better because Anthropic went low and opening eye went high. I liked the Open AI one.

Negative versus positive. There's a deleted or maybe like a. Was the Open AI one a draft one where they were going to preview the device and then they didn't run that one, but it was all over the internet? Yeah, that might have been a hoax. Oh, you don't think that was real? It looks like a stainless steel airport. Yeah, you got, see, this is the problem. You got tricked by AI slop.

Oh, no. Or maybe I got tricked by the people saying it's a hoax. It was real. So what is Johnny Ive actually building over there? We don't know. but I'm very excited to wear it. And I was telling someone this last week and they couldn't believe that I was excited.

But I'm a big believer. I have one of these right here. I got the friend pendant. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I like the idea of an AI wearable because I'm ready to not have to remember anything ever again.

So you're just okay with the big brother nature of it? Yeah, because I'm not. not going to have to think any thoughts anymore. The AI will do it for me. Yeah, yeah. That is great. That's going to save me so much effort. What did you make of this? I'm sure most people listening to this podcast have probably seen this tweet thread by a guy named Matt Schumer, something big is happening. And it's quite good. Just talks about some of the groundbreaking things that have happened in the AI space just over the past, we call it month. and how the future is going to look a lot different.

What did you think of that? Yeah, I sent it to a lot of my normie friends. Basically, people that I want them to succeed and I know that they need to use AI and they're resistant to doing it. So I sent this thread to all of them. Yeah. Because I think regular folks are still vastly underestimating

what you can do with AI. It'll take a while for this to permeate, I suppose, into everyday life for a lot of people that don't have jobs where they need to be on a computer all day, even like not to mention just being on AI all day. I mean, it just applies to everything. It does. You can do plumbing now by asking the AI how to fix your sync.

Yeah. You know, there's nothing it doesn't apply to. I think that maybe regular folks use the free version of chat or something and they just ask it like, what is my cat thinking about or something? You know, they don't ask, get like serious stuff. And so they don't realize that it's way more powerful. It is a, the plumbing example is good because it's, it's almost like anytime something goes wrong in your house,

you should be running it through AI just to see if you can fix it without calling a technician. And yeah, that works. Yeah. And soon we'll have embodied AI, you know, with the humanoid robots. I mean, I am certain that it's going to totally disrupt the labor supply. Basically, I think it's can make the top performers insanely more productive, and it's going to completely eliminate the need for the more mediocre performers. I mean, I just, I don't see any other possible outcome here. I think you're going to see a lot of companies that are formed with one person and just an army of AI agents. Yeah. The first billion dollar one-man company. That company probably already exists. Probably. Yeah, probably already exists. The interesting thing is on the payments front, obviously we talk to a lot of startups that are trying to build at this intersection of AI and crypto. And I think stable coins are just going to be the way that dollars get moved in these things. I just think from a usability perspective, it seems to be better. I guess you could do this with Stripe on analog rails, but from an API integration perspective, it's not as efficient. I mean, just a,

non-custodial stablecoin setup seems to be the most efficient way to move dollars on these things. I'm not convinced by that yet, but I'm open-minded, but I'm not convinced. Yeah. Although here's something that people don't talk about.

The existence of crypto as digital bearer money, right? That you're not in some, you're not, you don't have an account in someone else's database, right? Databases doesn't belong to anyone. That means that malicious AI models can do crime and monetize it with crypto, which they couldn't otherwise do it with it. So the existence of crypto actually gives a little bit more oxygen to the malicious AI because that will be their currency of choice for bad stuff.

So you think it'll be like ETH using tornado cash? I find it hard to believe that like Monero is going to be intertwined on all these. models. Why not? Whatever is easiest. You know, they'll learn from Lazarus or whatever. But don't you think that's the case? Like some people are going to set their AIs loose and say, okay, well, go make money for me. And they'll have the open source model. And so they take off the guardrails. And so then like, okay, what's easiest way to make money? Probably scamming people, you know? And they'll be able to buy, you know, cloud credits with Bitcoin. And so like the existence crypto makes it easier, I think, for malicious AI to thrive. I think it'll definitely be a huge category, AI crime.

I think it'll highlight the need for a lot more cybersecurity companies to be sure. I think there are some choke points there, though. I mean, with a stable coin, obviously, you can just extinguish the address. You can blacklist it. Definitely can't do that with ETH, Bitcoin, Minero, all these digital bearer instruments. So it'll be interesting to see how that turns about. The other thing that's interesting is there will be these custodial points of control, right? So a lot of these companies will run on some version of an MPC architecture. Maybe they'd run on like a turnkey for wallet management.

And so I think you'll be able to address some of the root issues there. Have you read this short story by Gwern called Clippy? You know what I'm talking about? From a few years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a really compelling story of a misaligned super intelligent AI. And he, the AI and the story makes money by hacking crypto users.

I think that's basically, I think we're, who is it that tweeted this? Nikita Beer. He said, now that AI is good, just get ready for torrents of slop on the internet. He said within 90 days, didn't he? said that phone numbers will become unusable in 90 days. I hope that's not true. I mean, they're already unusable, and it's just that we've moved to a

white list framework already. Like, both email and phone for me is actually a whitelist model now. It is. Yeah, you have to really be running that new Apple call screener, and then you have to have endpoint protection on your email.

Yeah, you've got to have a super tough filter on your email, and then you basically only see the ones that you want to see. So that is the world we live in already, I would argue. Those channels have been compromised. It is kind of the thing where it's like, could you imagine this going in the world where it's like, hey, you want to get in touch with me, get in touch with someone that's my

friend and they'll let me know. Well, that's kind of how it works, right? With, you know, warm intros, whatever. Yeah, there's a way to reach me. It's probably you're most likely to get through if you're going through someone that knows me. 100%. All right, let's hop into some deals of the week. First one up is from the Castle Island portfolio, Birch Hill Holdings, an institutional on-chain credit infrastructure company. They have raised

$2.5 million. It was a round that was co-led by us at Castle Island as well as Parify Capital, had participation from nascent escape velocity, Falcon X, and others. And Wyatt sat down with Bob Vindbade, the co-founder of Birch Hill on the podcast this week. So really excited about what they're building over at Birch Hill. Congrats. Yeah, very excited to be backing Bobvin and the rest of the team. Next up we have Level. That's a stable coin payments company. There is $7 million from Galaxy, protagonist, and blockchain builders fund.

Then it's Relay Protocol, which is a cross-chain settlement network. They raise $17 million from archetype, Union Square Ventures, and others. Bullshot is a meme coin launch pad. There is $7.5 million from Animoka, B1 Ventures, and Genesis Capital. And then it's layer zero, which is a cross-chain messaging protocol. They announced a strategic investment from Tether, Citadel, and Arc Invest. And they also announced that they're launching their own layer one blockchain, zero. They did a big event this week.

That got a lot of attention. So congrats to the Layer Zero team. That is it for deals. Also not a lot of news. There is only one moderately interesting news item, which is this latest thing. in the Sam Bankman-Fried saga, which is not over. SBF has filed a request for a new trial, saying that new witness testimony could refute his fraud charges.

And apparently his mom will be representing him. Is that right? Barbara. Oh, gosh, really? Barbara Freed? You know, I'm starting to think Sam Bankman-Fried is not a very good person, just the way he's been conducting himself here. He's just, he's turned his back on Joe Biden in a major way.

is the second largest Biden supporter, and now he's just tweeting all these mean things about former President Biden and how, you know, he, Sam Bank-Mid, is very similar to Trump in the sense that they were prosecuted and persecuted by the Biden administration. He's really changed course,

not very genuine. Yeah, too little too late, Sam. You were a major Democrat donor back in 22. You can't just have a change of heart now when it's convenient. Sorry. I mean, I guess you understand the calculus, right? He's just trying to kiss up to Trump, but this guy is a total criminal.

If he were to be pardoned, this would be the biggest scandal I could even imagine. I mean, what kind of evidence could he possibly bring to bear that would cast his trial into doubt? Is he going to say, I didn't steal the money? It's like, no, people didn't get their money back. It's provable that you stole the money. I think his claim is that somehow, well, he first of all he thinks he was tricked and depleting guilty by the lawyers. So fine, whatever.

But I think the crux of it is that he feels that they were actually liquid at the time of the collapse. Yeah, that whole line of inquiry here is just so strange to me where people are saying, oh, he would have made so much money on Anthropic. You know, if he just wasn't arrested, he would have been the greatest investor of all time. And does anyone want to just note that every investment he made was with stolen money?

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It actually doesn't matter that he made. I don't think he was liquid, but let's say he was. That wouldn't actually matter because he still took client funds that were meant to be in the assets, in kind on a one-to-one basis, and he put them in all kinds of other stuff, not to mention the mansions that he bought. Like, where does that come into all this?

Like all the spending, all the real estate, all the donations, the nonprofit. Like, there's no real ambiguity here at all. Yeah. Can't believe we still have to talk about this guy, but someone's got to take away his ex account. I don't know how he keeps. I know.

I thought we would never hear from him again. And he's still haunting us years later. All right, let's move on to some other news. BlackRock, this is a pretty big announcement this week. They said that they're going to take their tokenized money market fund, which is called Biddle. It's going to be tradable directly on chain in a partnership with Uniswap and Securitize. So I think one of the first times you're going to be able to trade an actual security here on Defi Rails. BlackRock looks like they also purchased an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's UniToken as part of the rollout.

this is actually pretty front-footed move by BlackRock here. And, you know, we're talking about it through market structure and rulemaking, whether or not you're going to be able to move these security tokens on chain. And BlackRock is just kind of putting their foot down and doing it, which is really interesting to me. So this is for for whitelisted participants. Yeah. So it'll be a white-listed framework.

They have answers to the KYC stuff. But it's, you know, it's on the public uniswap network. Yeah. That is very cool. very exciting. I know we've been talking about the body floating to the surface. One body has surfaced. I don't know if this is a very satisfying one, but it is block fills. They're crypto lender. I wasn't really deeply familiar with them. So they halted customer withdrawals this week. They were kind of a mid-size lender, I guess. Yeah, it was one of, I mean, we talked to

these guys. We took a pitch a couple times on this one. Back in 2020 when they were raising capital, I want to say they were making $20, $30 million a year in revenue. Not really sure what the client base looks like. If you go on the SEC's Edgar database and you put in block fills, you do see a number of publicly traded Bitcoin miners that were using these guys. And they were lending into some of those companies. It seems like they also had an over-the-counter desk. So I don't know exactly how they blew up here, whether it was the lending desk blew up, maybe they were facilitating some over-the-counter trading activity and they had exposure to the perpetual futures contracts blowing up.

But anytime you see one of these centralized intermediaries halting withdrawals, you obviously know they don't have the capital, but it leads to the logical next question of, okay, well, then who's actually on the hook here? Who are there customers that don't have capital? And the suspicion is that this is part of, of what's driving kind of a sell-off here in the crypto markets, although I just don't know how big these guys are.

Yeah, for the bodies floating to the surface theory to be true, you'd need to see a bigger body. This one I don't think is big enough to explain the ferocity of the move. A lot of rumors, and we didn't put this in our newsletter, but a lot of rumors about a trad-fi hedge fund in Hong Kong who've been floating around the industry. You know, the idea being that one of these traditional, kind of non-crypto hedge funds had a significant exposure in options contracts on the BlackRock

ETF and got blown out of those positions. I don't think we have any proof that that happened either, but that's what a lot of people are talking about. What's that from something research that had a huge ETH position got liquidated on it? Trend research. Trend research. Yeah, they did not research the trend. Yeah, that was, I guess, another blowups. I think you'll see more of this, right? And I guess when you have the quarterly filings, maybe we'll learn even more. So we have some prediction market news. Jump is reportedly obtaining small stakes in Polymarket and Kalshi in return from market making. And Polymarket has announced its plans to offer attention markets, which is a market focused on the popularity of trends, brands, or people.

Also on the prediction market category, Vlad Tenav at Robin Hood on their earnings call this week had some really interesting things to say about their new joint venture. So as a reminder, Robin Hood's doing a joint venture with Susquehanna and Mayaks to build a prediction market. It's an institutional style prediction market. I don't think it'll have a retail front end, although who knows. It's called Rothera. And on this earnings call, he said that they're basically going to start to move a significant portion of their volume over to Rothera. Right now, that goes out to Polymarket and Kalshi, I believe.

It goes into a little bit more detail, and so does the CFO saying that on the economics of this, the way it works is that if a customer pays two cents, one cent goes to Robin Hood as the FCM, and then one cent goes to the underlying exchange. And so with Rothera, since they have a stake in Rothera, the way to think about this is they're just going to capture the economics. So they're going to capture the 0.01 cents for Robin Hood itself. And then as opposed to sending the other one cent to Kalshi or Pollymarket, Rothera would get that. I think you're going to see, I mean, Robin Hood's a huge platform for prediction markets. I think Calci and Polymarket are going to suffer in the near term on this. Yeah, disintermediation already in prediction markets. I think it makes sense.

Also in prediction market suffering, Polymarket has sued the Massachusetts Attorney General in federal court, accusing her of acting beyond her jurisdiction by regulating prediction markets. This is on the heels of a case in Suffolk County denying CalShe's request for a stay on the injunction barring Kalshi from offering sports markets in the state. Yeah, I think you're going to have to see this handled probably at the federal level, don't you think? It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. CFTC Chairman Mike Seelig is obviously very pro-innovation. He's a fan. So he's a fan of these things. But do you get like national

preemption or will these companies have to just fight it out at the state level? I think that's a big open question. In other regulatory news, so market structure bill kind of chugs along here. There was another meeting at the White House between the bank lobby. Actually, certain banks came, it sounds like, in a number of industry groups. It's still all about the yield issue, the stable coin yield issue. And the bank lobby put out a document, kind of like positioning there, here's what we will or will not compromise on. They don't want yield to, be paid. So you almost get the sense that if this bill is going to move forward, it will be with a yield prohibition. And I don't know if you saw this, but Besson made some comments

directly about Brian Armstrong without calling him out by name, but just saying more or less that the industry needs get on board of this. I kind of, I find it to be pretty punk rock that everybody is hating on Brian Armstrong. That makes me like him a lot more. You sort of, you get Armstrong's position and if you're being intellectually honest, he's, he's right. I mean, yeah, why would they not be able to pay out rewards to people that are holding stable coins on their platform? I mean, I struggle to see a legal explanation of why that should be outlawed. Legally, morally, why are we nerfing stable coins and making them much worse? Like, what's the point? How does that protect the consumer? Yeah, and the argument is just this kind of boogeyman argument

that the bank lobby used during the money market fund evolution, which is just to say that deposits are going to leave these banks, it's going to make the banking industry less stable. I just don't have any proof of that other than white papers that are written by the banking lobby. Yeah, I mean, there's really just different types of clients. There are corporate CFOs, and they care about optimizing every dollar, and so they will have cash sweep accounts.

and hold money market funds and treasuries and so on. And then you have regular kind of like retail users of the banks. And they're using Chase because they need a bank account, you know? And so they're willing to swallow the opportunity costs in terms of the yield. So you're not going to see deposit flight from like Joe Public here. And the ones that were sensitive to the yield were already. not eating the cost of, you know, holding their funds in a 0.3% yielding savings account. Yeah.

So I'm not persuaded by this at all. I'm not persuaded by it either. It does seem to be the main crux of debate here. The other kind of secondary issue, which could turn out to be also a huge problem, is just the language in the bill that the Democrats want about prohibiting Trump and his family from engaging in the industry. So even if you get the yield thing figured out, you still need to find 10 or 11 votes on the Democrat side that'll play ball there. And that's what they want. It's an interesting calculus. Because if let's just say that Coinbase backs off on yield,

we kind of move forward on that dimension. I think where this is headed is you're going to have the Democrat side here, the Democrat senators trying to decide if they want to just pass this bill, or if they want to dig in their heels on this Trump family corruption language and then face the wrath of Fairshake. Do you really want Fairshake to play such a huge role in the midterms here? And Fairshake's already out there kind of spending. So I think this actually becomes a pretty interesting issue. Yeah, they've got some of their targets already. Yeah.

So, right, this week they came out. Fairshake started spending in Texas, right, against Representative Al Green, who's in Houston. Notorious crypto-hater. Big-time crypto-hater. So he's in the crosshairs. And then I think there's an Alabama Senate race, right, where they're also quite active. Barry Moore, who's running as a Republican in Alabama, is seeing support from Fairshake. It looks like he's gotten upwards of $5 million.

And he's a, you know, pro-crypto candidate. So Fairshake is trying to primary Al Green. Correct. That's really interesting. They're actually trying to find, I guess, a more friendly Democrat. Al Green has had some of the just most ridiculous comments about this industry. Yeah, I'm trying to remember what he, what he, his most infamous from moments, because I can definitely visibly remember him doing something really, like, silly.

he's um i mean he's come out he's said that cryptocurrency is going to impact the dollar um in a negative way i mean obviously that doesn't make a ton of sense especially given the the rise of stable coins um he's also like 78 years old here um and i think his opponent is 37 both democrats obviously but um it seems like you you do see this situation where a lot of the younger democrat candidates are very much on board with the industry I'm looking at his stand with crypto rating, and he got an F. So it doesn't get any worse than that. He was voted against everything.

So I don't think this is, you know, some people are super pessimistic about the market structure bill. I'm not. I think this thing is still 50-50 maybe. Polymarket would suggest it's even better than 50% odds of passing. But then you continue to see the SEC come out and say, hey, we're getting ready for rulemaking. C-Lig over at CFTC came out last week and said CFTC will be with the SEC.

They're in the crypto working group of the SEC and that these rules will not be contradictory in nature. There will be joint rulemaking on this. And there was language out of the SEC this week that the rules are coming with or without a market structure bill. So I think he ended up getting a lot of the key items here. Obviously, you'd rather have it done through a bill. Yeah, Polly Market has it. that 58% of being signed into law in 2026. It's much higher than I thought.

That's up from earlier this week when I last checked it. So there is one thing that we've talked about, which is Chris Dixon's post, The Long Game for Crypto. Did you read this? I did read it. I did read it. So I'm not going to summarize this whole thing,

but I think he's basically saying that Web 3, like non-financial use cases, this didn't work. He offers some opinions as to why. And it seems like he's blaming policy, but he suggests that it's too early to write them off. What do you make of this? I am much more sympathetic than I imagine you're going to be

about his stance on this. I guess, first of all, I'll say reading Chris Dixon over the years is one of the things that got me into this industry. So I actually went back last night. and I was looking at some of my first mentions of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in my emails. And I would be reading Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon and just be kind of emailing my buddies. Like, hey, you should check this out. This Bitcoin thing sounds pretty interesting.

So I've always liked his thinking on this. Obviously, the Web 3 decentralized internet thing hasn't really happened. You know, the decentralized video games and decentralized file storage, I guess, has happened to some. degree, but nowhere near where we thought it was going to be. Part of that is because the products haven't been great. And there's probably a lot of reasons for that. I think the embedded wallets weren't around until about a year and a half ago. User experience was kind of challenging. So that's a little bit of an excuse. I am a little bit sympathetic, though, to his point around regulation, because I think on the face of it, look, why would you come in and build like a

decentralized file storage network if you thought that you were just going to get sued by the SEC and they were going to say that product was a security. It's going to be tons of legal headache and it's going to cost you $100 million to just get it off the ground. So I'm a little sympathetic. I'm sure you feel differently. Yeah, I mean, I think it's not a very satisfying explanation. It's not a very complete explanation to say, well, the regulatory killed this stuff. because on the financial use case side, there certainly was a lot of ambiguity in the regulation. There still is.

And yet you have these very successful use cases. And like look at stable coins. Like they were pretty much unregulated for the first five years. And now so many people use them that the lawmakers came to the table. They're like, well, we need to ratify. We need to find a framework for these. All right. All right.

So let me defend Christix. This is going to turn into the me defending Gris Dixon podcast. Yeah, tough spot to be in. I would argue with that what you said around, hey, all the financial use cases just worked and, you know, the regulation was an issue there. Look at where the biggest players got built. Tether outside the United States. Binance, outside the United States. Hyperliquid.

U.S. founder left. I think he was a U.S. founder, but left the United States. FtX, U.S. founder left the United States to go build it. I think you just saw people that saw that there was a near-term opportunity to be sure. Like it was easier to build an exchange than it was to build a decentralized internet storage system. But all of the successful ones, except for Coinbase and Crack-in circle, they left the United States. And all the ones that left the U.S. got bigger, faster. They all raised tons of money at high valuations.

It was an easier path, but you couldn't do it in the United States in the early days. no i i totally agree with that my point is simply that there was clear and evidence traction for the financial use cases that we just didn't see with the non-financial ones and they both shared the property that the regulation was hostile and yet we saw the growth on the financial side yeah and i think that lines up a little bit with what dixon's saying right like they've invested in financial use cases, the uniswap and they've done lending protocols and things like that. No, obviously they did Coinbase. Financial stuff was always going to come first.

I mean, we used to talk about this, the money tribe, the tech tribe. And we used to say, these things are going to happen. They're just going to happen on different time horizons. Like the financial stuff was driven by speculation, right? Like speculation that Bitcoin would go from, you know, very small, tiny asset to being something that could potentially be a venture bet on digital gold. So people were piling into that. Stable coins started as just this tool for crypto exchanges and eventually they found product market fit with people outside the U.S. that wanted access to dollars. I think it was always going

to happen that way. Like the financial side of it is leading because these things are assets ultimately. But I don't think, obviously we don't really do these investments. I mean, it's partially for the reasons that you're talking about, that they don't really work yet. The product experiences aren't there. But I think they will eventually. It's just, I think the question is, can they work on the time horizon of your venture fund? I'm not willing to put half of our fund into decentralized file storage, decentralized cloud compute stuff. I don't think it's going to happen in the next five years. Yeah, I agree. Being too early is the same thing as being wrong when you're talking about a two to three year deployment period.

So you do have to get the time right as well. I am more sympathetic that I'm letting on. I actually do think that Web3 social, we're not going to call it that, will exist for the simple reason that the reason why it's good is still true, which is that the existing Web 2 social is awful in many different ways and arbitrary and. and you can lose access to your account and your credentials and the algorithms changing all the time. So I think that is still a true fact about the world

that the Web 2 alternatives are bad. So I do think we'll actually see some winners. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, everything we're talking about at the outset of this podcast around artificial intelligence and scams, that just highlights the need for trusted social networks where you can actually authenticate and know that you're speaking to a human, right? Yeah.

What an outstanding use case for a public blockchain. Yeah, precisely. So we have a couple minutes left. We haven't addressed the Winter Olympics at all. Have you watched them? I watched a little bit of the bobsled, and I saw the clip of the guy running uphill in skis. Is that an AID fake or is that a real thing?

That's a new event. in called ski mountaineering. That's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. So I think he ran a six minute mile pace uphill in skis. That's one of the most unbelievable feats I've ever heard in my life. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, running a six minute a mile is hard enough.

And then doing it at altitude, uphill on skis. Is that a new offside activity that we can try? No, I think I would die if I'd try to do that. I mean, what an unbelievable feat of athleticism. Was he from Norway or something? Yeah, it's Norwegian. Yeah. Do we have any people in the U.S. that do that sport?

No, I think you have to be real sicko and live in the mountains to be good at that. I'm surprised. The Winter Olympics hasn't really, my awareness of it is very low right now. I think the U.S. hockey team is playing this afternoon. Maybe I'll try to see that on replay. Yeah, my issue that I have with the coverage is the news. or whatever, the media covering it, they only care about figure skating,

which is, in my opinion, the least interesting of all the sports. I'd rather watch curling, frankly. Yeah, figure skating gets the ratings, right? Yeah, why is everyone obsessed with figure skating? It's just dancing with skates on. It's barely a sport. Figure skating's really gotten boring

ever since Nancy Kerrigan hung him up. You remember Nancy Kerrigan? No, I have no idea who that is. Oh, you don't know who Nancy Kerrigan is? Oh, my gosh. This was the, she's, pride of Boston. What year was this?

1994. Oh, yeah, I was barely alive. Tanya Harding, who was competing against her, Tanya Harding's boyfriend and some other hitman at the trials took out a Billy Club and knee-capped literally Nancy Kerrigan. But did she like instantly figured out who it was,

presumably? Oh yeah, they figured it out immediately that it was. What kind of like a, Half big plan is that Crazy. And I think the guy went to jail. I think his name is Jeff Galooly. It was a huge story.

And they still let Nancy Kerrigan go to the Olympics. Tanya Harding also went to the Olympics. She fell and Nancy Kerrigan got the silver medal. But that was the last time I watched figure skating. There was a big thing with figure skating last night. The Americans were huge favorites. And they got silver and it was a big upset. And everyone was very upset.

the French, I think. And here's the problem I have with figure skating. What would you do if your spouse was a figure skater and was part of a duo? No, it's like having a spouse that's like on camera kissing. Yeah. It's not. I was having this argument yesterday. I'm like, well, that marriage is not going to work because they're like looking deeply into this other person's eyes when they're, there's like a lot of touching and feeling. So the American couple, they're married. So the American couple, they're married, but then all these other figure skating pairs are, they're just like, colleagues with each other. Yeah. Like that's nuts. It is nuts. I do have a lot of respect for the figure skaters. I went to Disney on Ice this year. It's unbelievable. Some of the twirls that these people

can do. I won't deny their skill. I just, I'm more interested in like the skeleton. That's cool. Skeleton has a cool name. You're on a sled. You're going 80 miles and hour you're hurtling down there's two inches of sled between you and the ice that is crazy that's great what about the two-man luge i don't really understand why we came up with that concept no that's weird and the guy in the back can't see anything so what's he doing it's like what's the point why can't we just do the one-man luge you got bobsled if you want to put more people on the sled i don't really get it that one i don't agree with curling i will say i think it's very underrated actually I think it's a very underrated sport.

People do curling in my town on the lake. Really? Yeah, I've never done it, but it looks like fun. I think you just go out there. I think the goal is to actually just go out there and drink beers and say that you're playing a sport. But it looks like a lot of fun. Yeah, I mean, I think of all the Winter Olympic sports, it's the one that I feel like I could do if I really had to. Yeah, it's like botchy, right?

It's like botcha nice. I'm not going to be good at it, but I can do the motions, probably. What else do we have for sports that are coming? The hockey is the big one. Did you watch the Netflix documentary on the 1980 men's Olympic team, Miracle? No. So good. So good.

The sport that I absolutely could not do is the downhill skiing. Like the slalom, maybe I could do the slalom. The downhill, I think I would instantly die. Oh my gosh, yeah. These guys are going 90 miles an hour plus. The crashes, they crash. all the time. They're horrible to look at. Horrible. Lindsay Vaughn was taken off in a helicopter. Yeah, I think she fractured her tibia. Oh. I mean, just tough to look at. Well, we're rooting for the

U.S. I think what's the metal count? Are we up there? Norway's top of the golds, like they always are. Italy is actually top in terms of overall medals. Good for them. We're third. All right. Yes is third. I have split loyalties, though. I'm also team G.B. So are you really? So you're rooting for them too? Yeah. I mean that's where I was from first. I don't know. I thought you were born in Africa. Yeah, they're right. They didn't, Iswatina did not make it to the winter Olympics. That's too bad. It's too bad they didn't make it this year. All right. Well, when's the next time we're having it? What? The Olympics. The 2020 it's Summer Olympics or in L.A. Oh, all right. Perfect.

And the World Cup is here. I know you don't care about that one. The World Cup is here. I know. This summer. That's this summer. They're playing at Foxborough. I should rent my house out for that.

They're playing in Miami. They built a whole stadium for it specifically. You should go to a game. You might change your mind about soccer. I don't know. You just watch kick it back. It's one to nothing and you sit there for 90 minutes watching. Yeah, but it's that moment that when the one goal is scored is great.

People go nuts. Yeah. All right. So that's talking winter Olympics. Yeah, we'll keep you updated. All right, I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. We'll see you around.