On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 03/07/25 (Crypto Reserve, Debanking Bill, Broker Rule) (EP.600)

Episode Date: March 7, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: We debate the prudence of a BTC reserve A Strategic Reserve of just BTC or altcoins? How would a crypto reserve be "strategic" Should the US Government just seize BTC to build the reserve? Is there a "strategic" purpose to owning a gas token? SEC task force for crypto is starting roundtables SEC drops lawsuits against Kraken, Cumberland, and Yuga labs Tim Scott's bill to eliminate reputational risk from bank regulation CME launches SOL futures An Argentine prosecutor is looking to seize $110m in the Libra case Tether and Circle are fighting in Washington SBF makes an appearance on Tucker 

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, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. And 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 Brinkup, Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Recording this one remotely today, I am in the crypto capital of the world in New York City. I'm back in Miami. I gave up Zen for Lent. So honestly, terrible fate. How's that going? You know Lent is 40 days.

Yeah. Maybe even longer. Isn't it a little bit longer, technically? I'm starting to feel what Jesus felt when he went to the desert and fasted. Yeah, they went. No nicotine. He did not have nicotine at that time. Yeah. Are you grumpy?

Is this like one of your fasts when you just don't eat for several days? and then you just turn into a grumpy human being. Yeah, for conjects, Matt had to ask me to stop doing three-day fast because he didn't like how mean I would get on the fast. Well, I don't think the entrepreneurs that were pitching the fun during that time period really enjoyed it either, to be honest with you. I don't think anyone liked it. At least of all me.

We need that brain firing on all cylinders. And when you're fasting, it's just terrible. And when you're doing Zinn, it's great. I think your brain works better when you're fasting. Is that right? I think that's scientifically supported, yeah, because it's like, your brain's like, well, I've got to figure out how to get food, you know, through all means necessary. Yeah, okay. So you're like really dialed in at that point.

That could be. That could be. I was thinking about giving up saying mean things about Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler and Better Markets for Lent, but I don't know, I only made it like 12 hours. Well, we can't do that because we actually have to talk about better markets today. So you're going to have to wait on that. You're going to find something else. Better markets is growing. Yeah, they're growing.

They added another bitter Muppet. They've had an addition. We're going to get into that. Plenty to talk about this week. A lot of nonsense happening in D.C., if I'm honest with you. Before we get to that, let's dive into the deals. First one up is Prime Intellect. This is a decentralized AI training platform.

They raised $15 million. from Founders Fund, Menlo Ventures, and others. Then we have Fastlane, a liquid staking protocol in Monad. They raise 6 million from Figment, DBA, and Coinbase Ventures. Then it's Flowdesk. This is the crypto market maker. They raised $52 million from HV Capital, Cathay Innovation, and others. 52 mil.

That's great. Wow. Then we have infrared. See, I used to think infrared was pronounced infrared. But it's infrared, right? It's infrared. Yeah. Are you one of these like nuclear instead of nuclear people?

Well, no, Matt. I mean, it's just I never heard anyone say the word infrared until I was, you know, grown, to be honest with you. So I just write in books. Anyway, they're a liquid sticking protocol on Barrow Chain. They raise 14 million from framework, Halo, and no limit holdings. Then it's a cross protocol. This is a cross-chain bridging protocol. They raised $41 million from Paradigm, Bain Capital,

crypto, Coinbase ventures, and others. Then we have double zero. They're a fiber network for blockchains. There is $28 million from multi-coin, dragonfly, and reciprocal ventures. Seismic is an encrypted blockchain network. They raise $7 million from Andreessen, Crypto, Polychain, and 1KX. Coral Finance, they're a crypto agent, crypto AI agent platform.

They raise $3 million from Taisu Ventures and Ku-coin ventures. Agentic payments. That's a big category these days, huh? certainly a lot of fundraising not sure about products and market fair enough next one is called aki-naki this is a layer one network that raised six million from hack VC and blockchain.com Aki-naki what that means and then lastly we have 42 network a decentralized AI protocol there is 2.3 million from big brain CMT and EV3 all right a lot of deals I feel like the M&A stuff is heating up in this market. We haven't seen a lot of announcements yet, but a lot of rumors out there.

I think we're going to be talking about some M&A stuff in the future. So I guess we have to start with the reserve has evolved. Initially it was Bitcoin. Now it's crypto. There's apparently five assets going in the reserve. What do you make of this? Well, so on Sunday morning, President Trump announced his intention to create a U.S. crypto reserve. It was a true social post. he initially the post I guess it was about to call it a tweet but it mentioned ripple solana and cardano and then about 45 minutes later he came out and said and also love bitcoin and ethereum so it leads you to believe that there is a crypto reserve being contemplated

that would be bitcoin ethereum ripple salana and cardano i would say this was i don't know universally criticized in the crypto space in terms of why would we be holding reserves for assets that don't really fit the bill of being non-sovereign stores of value. I think it's probably a little bit too early to opine on this. And the summit is on Friday. So the time some people are hearing this will probably know the answer to this. Well, it's their job to opine, Matt. So we have to. Well, my opinion is that it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a crypto reserve for some of these coins. Yeah. I mean, I don't think it makes sense for any of them. And I haven't made a secret of that. I'm against the reserve, whether it's Cardano and Ripple or Bitcoin.

And the reason for that being other assets that we hold in reserve, commodities, there is a strategic reason to have them to stockpile them in case there's some emergency, and Americans really need the asset and we can't get in a pinch. So if we have those asset denominate liabilities, there's no such thing as an emergency that requires Bitcoin. What could that even look like? There are emergencies where we need oil, but what emergency could it be where we just desperately need Bitcoin at the government level?

I don't think it makes sense right now to spend U.S. taxpayer dollars to buy Bitcoin, but I do see the strategic rationale of having Bitcoin if Bitcoin monetizes in something akin to gold. So at that point, if you... But we're not buying gold. we don't even treat gold as a strategic asset. It's just a vestigial.

It's like the appendix. Like we don't need it. Well, there's potentially a world where fiat currencies start to debase rapidly. I would argue we're kind of been living in that world for a while where having a sound monetary asset would make sense. So is there a world where gold? Why not gold? Why not gold then? We already have gold. We're doing the gold thing, right?

So you're saying we have a sufficient amount? of gold and we need more Bitcoin relative to gold? Why don't we hold some small fraction of the dollar amount of gold in Bitcoin? I think that that makes sense to me. And the easiest way to do this would just be to not sell the Bitcoin that the U.S. government already has. And then potentially explore ways to just codify that when the government seizes Bitcoin from bad actors, you don't sell it or something like that. I think that would qualify as a reserve to me. Well, I take exception to the strategic nomenclature. Certainly holding other assets is not strategic.

Bitcoin honestly dubiously strategic, in my opinion. So many people are surprised that this is your view. Well, why would they? They think I'm just going to go along with the crowd? I don't know. I mean, if you think that Bitcoin is going to be, all right, I guess, let's back up. Do you think that in the next 50 years, the value of Bitcoin will exceed the value of gold in the world?

Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably within the next two decades. And do you believe that fiat currencies will continue to debase relative to that? I guess the answer. Well, we're talking like continued slow and slow to medium inflation for sure. Like we're talking Lymear hyperinflation, probably not in the dollar. So if you think about this from a geopolitical perspective, Would you rather the U.S. holds more Bitcoin in that world than China?

Matt, this is already addressed in my article. I've already anticipated this objection months ago. We can get the Bitcoin at any time. We have all the Bitcoin already. It's already here. It's like as if all the gold in the world wasn't evenly distributed, but it was just like all buried in Montana or something. That's how the Bitcoin is.

the biggest corporates holding Bitcoin, all of the funds, all the ETFs, all the retail and institutional investors, all of it's held here. I mean, the ratio of American held Bitcoin to other countries is totally out of whack.

So if we ever want the Bitcoin, we can just make a law and get it so easily. So you want the government to just seize people's Bitcoin like we seized gold under FDR? That's what's going to happen. I'm telling you, that's what's going to happen.

careful what you wish for. Who am I talking to here? This is craziness. I'm not saying I want this to happen, but I'm saying it will happen if the government decides they really need the Bitcoin. Careful pedaling these ideas, Matt, because they're not going to buy the Bitcoin.

They're just going to take the Bitcoin. Well, they've already taken some Bitcoin. So I'd say, park it away, maybe make it such that people can pay their taxes in Bitcoin and figure out a way to hold some fraction of it. Let me put it to you like this. Let me put it to you like this. You are now the U.S. government.

You are no longer Matt. You're the U.S. government. It's 10 years from now, Bitcoin eclips gold. The dollar is collapsing. The euro is done. The euro died in 2027. All their fiats are collapsing. Okay, we need a new, we need the Bitcoin all of a sudden.

Well, we can either get the gold or the Bitcoin. We have some gold. We need the Bitcoin. How do we get the Bitcoin? Do we pay one trillion dollars? for one million bitcoins, or do we just seize the Bitcoin or pass the law saying you've to solve your Bitcoin for $50,000 a coin? Do we ask for taxes to be paid in Bitcoin, capital gains? You know, do we, how do we get it?

I would say the executive function of this country looks a lot different. The executive branch looks a lot different than it did under FDR. The guy served four terms as the president, and it was effectively... I'm not saying FDR. I'm saying you're now the hegemon of the U.S. You're in charge. You've got all three branches government behind you. How do you get the Bitcoin?

Do you spend 20% of our GDP of buying Bitcoin, or do you find a way to get it for cheap? Well, the first thing I would do is go down to Langley, crack open the safe, and take Satoshi's coins out of there. That would probably be my first move. Maybe that's the answer. So honestly, I think that's actually a great answer, right? So either they're there, right? Or we just spend like $10 billion figuring out quantum computing and we just get the coins that way. But you get my point, right?

The U.S. government has abundant ways to get the Bitcoin. I just don't think it's, I mean, this would have to be a wartime situation to imagine that this country would tolerate confiscation on that scale ever again. Well, you're saying that the dollar is going to collapse, so that sounds like an emergency situation to me. I don't think the dollar is going to collapse. I think the dollar would be the last one to collapse, but I think all fiat currencies will be debasing relative to Bitcoin. My more sincere point is, my real point here is we can get the Bitcoin at any point. We have nothing to lose by waiting. We could be the last country to monetize Bitcoin. We'd be fine because all the Bitcoin is here.

And the government can get it. They can just accept Bitcoin as tax payment. If Bitcoin goes up, they receive 20 to 40% of that in taxes. So they already have exposure to the Bitcoin. So we can so easily get it at any point. We don't need to do it now. That's my real point. Well, my stance on the crypto reserve to be abundantly clear is I think we should not sell the stockpile that we already have.

And let's just do that for a starting point. I don't think there's any appetite to go use taxpayer dollars right now when you're running this type of a budget deficit to go buy Bitcoin. But yeah, let's keep the Silk Road coins. If we catch some coins from the North Koreans here, why don't we just hold on to those? That seems reasonable to me. I don't see a strategic rationale for holding non-Bitcoin cryptocurrencies, though. And I've seen some interesting attempts to rationalize why you would do that.

But I don't really see any reason to hold. a smart contract coin for a strategic reserve. Yeah, I mean, there's no strategic use. Like the one strategic commodity use I can imagine would be like, if all of finance moves over to a smart contract blockchain, then maybe it would make sense to stockpile the gas token? Yeah, so let's play that out a little bit because I saw some people talking about this. And I think it's not a crazy thought.

So let's say all the stable coins and events, and eventually all the securities in the United States transact on public blockchains might not be too much of a stretch to imagine that that would happen over the next 15 years. So you need a certain amount of the smart contract coin in order to just pay gas and transaction fees on the network. So the thought process would be, well, we should hold some of that. If our enemies got a hold of that, then that would be an issue. Or if they controlled the network, that would be an issue. But ultimately, aren't we talking about off-chain assets?

like the treasuries are going to be parked at a bank. The securities are in the form of companies and debt instruments that don't actually reside as bearer assets on chain. So you could always just halt and reissue on a new chain, couldn't you? Yeah. And the other thing is, if we're really going to play out the analogy to a strategic asset, why do we acquire these strategic assets? Because the supply is rigid and fairly inelastic.

Like you can't just like spirit more oil into existence. right, you have to mine it and refine it, whatever. You can't massively ramp up production year to year. So if there is a crunch, okay, maybe it makes sense to have some reserves. With a smart contract gas token, you can just buy it at any point. And it doesn't cost anything to transport. So it's not like we have to pre-buy units of Ethereum, you know, in order to know for sure that we can transact on the Ethereum network.

next year. You just buy them when we need them. You don't need to store it up. So also that part of the analogy doesn't work. It's interesting. Some of these coins that were mentioned are very centrally operated and have big treacheries. So I could see a world where some of these teams decide to just give the government the coin. Yeah.

The one issue that I think I have with a centrally controlled coin that the government holds in reserve is like now all of a sudden you know you're you're creating a cantalon situation where like the issuers of the coins can just create 50% new supply out of there and right give it to themselves or whoever and the government's implicitly backstopping this thing so kind of looks like it's just like a government slush fund to the protocol founders directly so it does. doesn't make sense to have a coin held by the government that's mutable in supply. Right. Now, who is attending this crypto roundtable, I guess, is the other question.

I don't think you have representation from all of these ecosystems that were mentioned in the Trump tweet, which leads me to believe that I just don't think that this is going to happen with these five coins. Yeah, it's not actually a bad guessless, to be honest. I think it's fine. I think it looks good. Plenty of Bitcoiners on there. Brian Armstrong's on there.

You get Nathan McCauley on there. You are missing some representation from the traditional players, though. Why is there known from Fidelity or Bank of New York Mellon on that list? Yeah. So honestly, I don't think anything is going to be decided at the summit. I mean, there's a lot of egos in that. room, how could they possibly agree on anything? I think it's more just a meet and greet photo op, make people feel like they're heard in Washington. It's an important first step. I mean,

we haven't had that in a while. Speaking of that, so the SEC's Crypto Task Force, which is led by Commissioner Hester Purse, they announced a series of roundtables to discuss regulatory priorities for crypto assets. The first roundtable is scheduled for March 21st. It is titled how we got here and how we get out defining security status. It's exactly what we should be doing. So also in SCC news, they dropped another round of lawsuits this time into Cracken, Cumberland, and Yuga Labs. You know, this Cumberland won.

I was, I mean, thankfully it's done. I think it was ridiculous that the SEC brought it. I guess the SEC was investigating Cumberland for years. But when Gensler, so Gensler sued DRW when he was at the CFT, And I'll get this wrong. I don't have it in front of me. But when the judge finally dismissed that case, there was this iconic quote that said something along lines of it's not a crime

to be smarter than your counterparty or something like that. Right. Do you remember this? Yeah, yeah. Matt was being right about this. Sort of hoping we would have some sort of an equivalence because Gensler, I think probably was stung by that CFTC one and, you know, had a second shot at DRW Cumberland here with the SEC and kind of whimpered off here.

Yeah, another dub for DOW. I'll swear in victories for the industry. The IRS's expansion of the broker rule has been defeated in the Senate. This is actually a resounding vote 70 to 27, so a bunch of Democrats also. This is a bad rule and it has to pass through the House, but very good sign so far. Yeah, a lot of Democrats got on board with this in the Senate, so I would expect that a number of these Democrats would get on board in the House who are already pro-Crypto.

I'd say even more so than some of the Democratic senators. But Stand With Crypto had a thank you note page. Did you see this? No. So it was like an automated thing where you could send a letter to your senators, and my senators did not vote for this repeal. So I didn't get to send a thank you note. That doesn't surprise me in the least knowing who your senators are.

Yeah, Elizabeth Warren and Markey. They wanted this onerous regulation to stay in place, which made no sense. Elsewhere in legislation, this is really cool to see. Tim Scott introduced a bill, which was, I think, co-sponsored by all of the Republicans on its Senate banking committee, too, which is very good sign. It's called the Financial Integrity and Regulation Management Act. what this bill does is it removes reputational risk from the regulation of banks, basically, across all government agencies that oversee banks. This is a very important thing.

This is one of my three desired things that need to happen to ND banking. This is probably the most important one. Because reputational risk, we've talked about this on the show before. It gets incorporated into the banking. supervisory framework. But basically the idea is that if the bank supervisor is determined that the bank is doing something risky, they can give the bank a worse score on their camel's score. But of course, reputational risk is completely ambiguous and can be made up by the regulator. So it's a complete catch-22. It gives them full discretion just

arbitrarily deduct points from the bank's score if they feel that they're dealing with the wrong industry like crypto. Right. So it's a very bad state of affairs shouldn't exist. And yeah, this is really an excellent start without trying to get too heavy-handed in terms of forcing banks to support certain clients. That's the wrong way to deal with debanking. The right way is just to end the structural system that allows these bank regulators to have so much informal ability to steer banks away from industries. Yeah, I mean, the problem with this was that it was just very subjective, right? So you could come in and say, you know, you're not doing enough around climate change.

So that falls under reputational risk and take a hard line. It's really you're at the whim of whatever the culture is at that point. And you want these regulations to be very objective. Yeah, it's completely arbitrary. Completely arbitrary. The other things that I wanted was forcing all guidance from regulators to be written, as opposed to verbal. ending informal guidance. I don't know if we're getting that,

but either way, this I think was actually the most important thing. So we'll keep tracking this bill. I'll hopefully go somewhere. Yeah, I've kind of wrestled with the written versus verbal because there's definitely stuff that you would want to stay private, right? If you're talking about, hey, the government is trying to track down a terrorist ring and we think they might have some interaction with some part of your bank.

You don't want that out there. But it was just being abused to just shun people from starting crypto-adjacent businesses within their banks. Yeah, I mean, you could do redactions or you could have a one-year period before which guidance becomes public. I don't know. There's ways to do it. But yeah, I take the point. Just step back, though, and just see what's actually happening outside of the noise here. Obviously, there's a lot of macro noise.

there's a lot of noise around this crypto reserve, but what is actually happening on the ground at the SEC and in the legislative branches is all very, very good for crypto right now. Yeah, totally. And some of us are frustrated by, you know, this reserve and all the, the chatter around that and all the jockeying to be on the council and all of the coins being created in Washington. But at the same time, excellent progress is actually being made, both legislatively and in the executive branch and agencies that oversee. So you have to appreciate the actual real progress

that's being made despite the drama. Yeah, and the effect on capital formation here, we're already starting to see it, where there are just entire categories of businesses that you probably couldn't even look at in the prior administration around things like tokenizing real world securities and things like that.

And you're just seeing a lot of action there. You're seeing a lot of banks and broker deals. get active. I think the subcustody market is going to be on fire here. I mean, all of these banks and BD scrambling to find subcustodians. So you see a lot more people working in this industry six months from now. So interesting deal announced this week. This is actually two Castle Island portfolio companies. Bitwise, the Crypto Fund Manager has given their institutional clients access to lending opportunities with Maple Finance. Defy Protocol. So pretty cool to see try to find Defi being stitched together like this.

I recorded a podcast with Jeff Park from Bitwise this week that hopefully will release next week. But we talked a little bit about some of the opportunities in the stablecoin market. I mean, I'm surprised that you don't have more traditional hedge funds looking at this. If you were to just run a stablecoin oriented yield strategy in this market, I think it would perform really well. I think we're going to see more hedge funds start to wait. up to this opportunity. And elsewhere in Tradfai news, the CME group announced Salana Futures Dervatives Trading will launch on March 17th.

That'll be the third crypto asset after BTC and ETH to launch on the CME. So that in the prior SEC, we would have said, okay, that means you're going to get a Salana ETF pretty soon here. I don't know if we should think about CME listing a futures contract as a prerequisite for an ETF anymore, but I think it is very safe to say that a salon of ETF is not far away. For sure. Although careful what you wish for. Remember when the initial Bitcoin instrument got listed on the CME, that was kind of a local

top for a while. Yeah, kind of the kiss of death sometimes. Did you see this article in the Wall Street Journal about Hayden Davis? Breatthaking, that article. They had a couple good articles in Wall Street Journal about crypto stuff this week, but How did this Hayden Davis guy get on the scene? This guy came out of nowhere. I had never even heard of him.

But what a background. Yeah, I mean, he's like a low-level grifter MLM guy, and then somehow ends up in Javier Millay's inner circle and persuades them to launch crypto token. I mean, how does that happen? How do you go from being an MLM guy to buddies with the president of Argentina and doing business ventures with him? I mean, this is something that maybe you saw people like this pop on the scene five, six, seven years ago in the crypto industry.

But by this point, if you're contemplating doing a token, I would think you'd have someone else to call. Like call up one of the publicly traded company CEOs and ask them what they think. Yeah, seriously. So a Argentine prosecutor is trying to freeze 110 million assets. I wonder how that works. Do they have standing to do that? Can they go abroad and freeze assets? Because you think he's talking about the Hayden Adams.

Hidden Davis. No, Hayden Adams is the Uniswap guy. Yeah. Poor Hayden. Sorry, Hayden. Bad Hayden. Can the Argentines, I mean, presumably with our cooperation, they would be able to do it.

Yeah, I mean, but there's no way that a key resides in the country. right we're talking about this guy probably has it on a phantom wallet or something right yeah so they have to go to where does he live this guy hayden davis uh who knows i mean well anyway they'd have to go to the sdyn wire the doj and get them to do it i guess right probably i don't know i wouldn't mind extraditing this guy to argentina at this point like they're not going to send an argentine swat team in to apprehend him. I don't know. They probably want to get back at Elliott management for taking all the, would

did Elliot take a couple boats and planes and stuff? They took a boat. Yeah. Yeah. I think fair is fair. You know, Hayden, Bad Hayden really defrauded the Argentine people here. I mean, it was really Americans. They were the biggest losers, right?

As Malay pointed out. That's true, but their country was really called into question. And perhaps they'll have an impeachment. and their future for the president based on this stupid meme coin. It's so sad too because Malian was doing such a good job. Just such a stupid fumble to make. So the other Wall Street Journal article was on the fight between Tether and

USDC. These guys don't like each other. Yeah. So is a layer at the summit tomorrow? Actually, I didn't see his name. I didn't see his name on the list. I also didn't see anyone from Tether on the list. But I don't know if this is the full list or not.

There are a lot of fake lists running around too. So Palo is in D.C. It's kind of actually surprising because I didn't really think the Tether guys came to the U.S. that often. Palo's in D.C. but not reportedly attending the summit. Well, there's also like a CFTC roundtable or something. There's a lot going on in D.C. right now. Yeah, so basically Tether and Circle are having a very pitched turf war. There were a lot of rumors about a week ago that the latest markup of the house

bill on stable coins would make it impossible for Tether to buy treasuries. I think that's not true, actually. But I do think it will have some language around U.S. firms cannot touch Tether if Tether is not registered here. But Tether already isn't active in the U.S. market, so I don't think it's like the worst case for them. They'd probably want to be active in the U.S. market, though, don't you think? I mean, if possible, I think they would probably try to establish a U.S. presence. Yeah, but they may, the bill may be crafted such that they can't comply. Definitely a lot of bad blood there. It was a pretty good Wall Street Journal article, I thought, all things considered. But there's, there's a great degree of animosity, it seems

like, between those two companies. For sure, for sure. This is one of those not well-kept secrets. It's the silent lobbying battle that happens, mainly with one firm as the antagonist and one is the victim. Let's be honest. Yeah, and then the presence of Howard Lutnik from Cantor as the Commerce Secretary changes this equation a little bit, I would think. Yep. In other news, did you have a chance to watch Sam Bankman-Fried on, I guess this was Tucker's show on X? Yeah, listen to half of it. I mean, I don't understand.

How are they letting him to do a podcast in prison? Like I don't even let him have a phone. He was in some room. It was almost like he was in a Zoom room or something. I was surprised that they allow that. So they have like booths in prison where you can take Zoom calls? I guess. And he was, he looked pretty healthy, actually.

Yeah. So he says he knows Diddy. He says Diddy's nice guy. Why is he still at Brooklyn, MDC? Do we understand that? Is it just because he's appealing in this case? So he gets to stay there? No idea.

He's been there for two years. He said, I can't believe it's been more than two years, really. So he, the collapses in November 22. Wow. Time flies. He's really sticking to his story in the sense that he continues to reiterate he's innocent and that as of right now, the assets dramatically outweigh the liability. But he's kind of missing the point that that's not what he told his customers he was doing.

Yeah, I mean. Said you're running in exchange, not a hedge fund here. Wasn't there a full return of the assets in the made-off Ponzi as well? Oh, yeah, definitely. Doesn't mean it's not a Ponzi, you know, it's just that they did a good job of the recovery. Right. So he's kind of, I would say he's not very contrite. He did bring up some good points around Ryan Salem getting a raw deal.

It was interesting to hear from him. Well, I kind of, I was totally okay with not, with him not posting on crypto Twitter, though. And now he's back to posting again. Yeah, I don't need to hear from him. I mean, give it 20 years. So I guess he's jockeying for a pardon. It's got to be it, right? I think he must be because he came out with the, he basically said that the reason that none of the Democrats stepped in to save him is because late in his tenure,

he started to make donations to Republicans and it became known by the Democrats. Sounds like a bunch of BS to me. I mean, he's definitely not a conservative, though. So I know he's probably trying to portray himself as one to build a Trump, but it's not very convincing, bro. You know? I mean, I don't think there's one shred of evidence

to suggest that he is not guilty of everything that he's been convicted of, not to mention all the things he didn't get charged with the whole Chinese, here, which just never got revealed. They're very strange on the money laundering in China. I mean, the campaign finance stuff didn't even make it in. Yeah, let's give him some more time to think about what he did before he start to consider

a pardon. So we'll link to that in our newsletter. But I don't think I need to hear from him much anymore. So this day, week from now, we'll know what the reserve consists of, maybe, and how it's going to be operationalized, perhaps. And I guess we'll find out. So yeah, we'll get back to you on that one. Yep, I think that's it for the week.

Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.