On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 03/27/26 (Google's Quantum Deadline, Circle's selloff, DATs are selling) (EP.710)

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Circle stock sells off big on a CLARITY yield update compromise Tether is doing their first big 4 financial audit Who is the CLARITY Act Yield "compromise" good for? Why Circle might benefit from closing the yield loophole Is no bill better than a bad bill? Should Coinbase back the bill? Fannie Mae will accept crypto-backed mortgages Ethereum Foundation launches their post-quantum roadmap Google has revised their quantum transition deadline up to 2029 Why we will not have a lot of warning regarding quantum risk Where is Bitcoin on quantum preparedness? Why it's not all doom and gloom on quantum MARA sells $1b worth of BTC

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, IG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to You on the brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. How are your travels this week? Do you have any snafews? Yeah, they weren't good. Let me tell you. I went through Newark and I can report to you that it's just not doing well. My plane out of Boston to LaGuardia was canceled. It turns out there was a crash, which is not great. Oh, yeah. So I ended up having a drive. Yeah, I landed at LaGuardia six hours after the crash. So I guess they cleaned it up. I guess.

Yeah, the annoying thing is they turned off TSA pre at a lot of. lot of these air forts. Did you notice this? Yeah. Yeah. No TSA, three, sometimes clear is closed too. Yeah. So now they just force everyone into general admission. What was the point of going through this whole rigmarole to get TSA pre clear? TSA pre touchless is the new thing. So that, I can't use that now. No. Why? They want to belittle frequent travelers and just throw us into the muck. One of the things I saw this week was that Delta had this private concierge service just for politicians and they closed that, which good riddance. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's their fault. Yeah, one of the most preventable snafus, I think. Because like sometimes these airport disruptions,

like, okay, well, there's a storm, you know. But this one is a completely manufactured crisis. Yeah, just figure it out. And Congress is going on recess pretty soon. I hope they can figure it out in short order. I'm just not going to go anywhere. Yeah, I just, you know, thankfully we have Zoom, you know. All right, busy week. Should we start out with some deals? Yeah, tons of deals this week.

Big one in our portfolio, XFX, that's a stable coin-based FX platform. They were 17 million in around led by us, as well as Han Ventures and Coinbase Ventures participating. Very excited about this team. Congrats Asante and the rest of the gang over there. Yeah, big congrats to the FX. X-FX team. That's a hard word to say, isn't it?

I always struggle. X-F-X. Doesn't roll off the tongue. It doesn't. Next one up is Kalshi. So this is the prediction market platform. Of course, they raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation and a round led by KOTU. That's staggering, isn't it?

Yeah, especially as the only thing I see in the press about these prediction markets is people complaining about them. And politicians are complaining about them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing a ton of real backlash. The revenue's there, though, right?

I mean, some of the fastest growing companies in the tech landscape. For sure. I think the question now really is adoption and growth versus the political risk. And that's what you have to consider. I think that's right. Next up is Parify, the crypto asset manager. They announced a $125 million venture fund. Big congrats to the Parify team.

Yeah, congrats to Ben and the team over at Parify. Next one up is Blue Sky. This is the social network. They disclosed that they raised $100 million in April of 2025 from Bain Capital Crypto, True Ventures, and others. You're a big blue sky guy, right? So I actually do have an account on there from back before it became the refuge of all these insufferable people that got mad about Elon. But you know, it's been declining in posts since late 2024. There was a chart that came out this week. Did you see that? I did not see that. I confess I have never been on blue sky. I have never really given it much thought.

I didn't know that there was a crypto angle there. Yeah, I mean, it started as, was it a fork of Macedon or something? Oh, right, okay. Or is it a brand new open source. Anyway, they hit, because the blue sky's growth is mainly precipitated by grievances at outside factors like Elon buying Twitter or Elon supporting Trump. It's very funny that that's how it grew. It doesn't seem very sustainable.

They peaked around the time of the election with one and a half million unique posters per day down to about 700,000 today. So I don't think a social network filled with the angriest people on earth can last. Yeah. Although some of the other social networks seem to be filled with angry people too. It's just maybe there's more normal people that fill out. that cohort. We don't have a Castle Island account on Blue Sky either.

We do not have a presence there. We don't have one on threads either. Oh, threads. Yeah, you used to have threads. I had threads for one day. People do post on threads, believe it or not. Yeah. There is a community there.

It's not good, but it exists. You still doing any of the Web3 social platforms? I just don't know if there's any left. I'm still on Farcaster. But I thought it was like being shut down. No, it was acquired, right? It was someone else is running it. But we still haven't on the brink presence there.

Someone actually asked me if we could do another episode with Groma talking about tokenized real estate. And I said yes. So I'm a daily active user as of last week on Farcaster. You might be the only one. Yeah. It's still out there. Well, we'll be monitoring the On the Brink Forecaster channel. Next up, we have pay with two WIs.

That's a privacy-focused stablecoin app. There is 6 million from First Mark, DBA, and Robot Ventures. Then it's Kairoswap, which is an on-chain interest rate exchange. They raised $2 million from six-man ventures and lattice fund. The interest rate market bringing that on-chain, that's always been quite interesting to me. That is an enormous market. Next up, we have Eureka Labs. It's an Ethereum Block Builder.

There is 6 million from Spark Capital, Collider Ventures, and Verrick Ventures. And the last one is Eunice, which is a DERC, due diligence platform for alternative assets. So this is one of those companies that does a look through on cryptocurrencies and tells you how decentralized they are, tells you how many users they have. They sell mostly into brokerages. They raised $8 million from Moonfire Ventures and Speed Invest. Well, I think the thing we got asked about this week, well, there are quite a few things, actually, but one of them was, why did Circle sell off so much all of a sudden? Yes. Circle was down 20% on what day was that Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday this week? Yeah. So. And this was this came out

right as news. There were two pieces of news that broke Tether was going to be getting an audit from a big four firm and the language around the compromise and the Clarity Act regarding stable coin yield seems to be stabilizing. Yes. So I guess let's dig into both of those. So Tether has signed a contract with the big four accounting firm. It's unconsored. which firm that is, they will be doing their first independent financial audit. I doubt that that is what sold off circle. You know, Tether, their main stablecoin USDT still has Bitcoin as backing. I don't think that will be genius compliant.

I don't see how that would have a material impact on Circle necessarily. The second item, a compromise on the Clarity Act that theoretically allows it to move forward, which I think we'll have to talk more about. I'm a little skeptical. I also don't see how that hurts Circle. So the compromise language is basically that there is no yield, which is not a compromise. That's just the bank lobby winner. I mean, that's what that is.

Yeah, let's be clear on that. Yeah. There's no deal there. That's just crypto loses and the banks win. Yeah. So Circle can't pay yield, which is, in fact, probably good for Circle, right? But they maintain more of the economics. Of course, they could still have distributor payments.

I guess the logic, if you believe that the sell-off made sense, would be that the total addressable markets for stable coins might not grow as fast because you'd have these cohorts of people that hold stable coins on brokerage platforms like Coinbase because they want the yield. And if you can't get any yield through Coinbase on a stable coin, then why would you hold USDC there? Would you just move that into some other asset, move it over to Meow or move it over to one of these high, you know, interest rate plays here where you can just earn on treasuries, basically? I'm not sold. I'm not sold on that. I'm not sold. First of all, if you hold stable coins, you can get yield by putting them in the defy-fool. Right. Right. Right. The stable coin itself is not natively paying the

yield, but you're still getting a yield. So that's first of all. Second of all, I think people accept a cash as a convenience yield, right? It doesn't have an actual yield, but it has an implied, people still hold cash despite the opportunity cost. I think it's the same with stable coins. People accept the opportunity to cause folding a stable coin because it has a convenience yield because you can use the stipend to do stuff. So I just don't know that this is going to hurt Circle that much. In fact, I think it helps. I agree with that. I think we're not public market equities guys and we don't hold Circle, but it didn't make a ton of sense to me that that would sell off by 20% on that news. It actually seemed, if anything, kind of neutral to positive for Circle.

But I guess we should just talk about this Clarity Act because this has been billed as a grand compromise. It's clearly not a compromise. I mean, the bank lobby ran us over as an industry on this. To suggest that this allows the whole bill to move forward, though, I think is premature. We don't know where Coinbase stands on this. So if Coinbase comes out and says, look, we're against the bill, there's just no way, in my opinion, that it would pass. I don't think the politicians are going to take a risk here of moving something. forward that Coinbase who's spending a ton of money through Fair Shake and other initiatives

would be against. So I think it's basically DOA if Coinbase tweets out tonight that they're against this thing. Yeah. And I know opinions are divided, you know, some of us are of the opinion that no bill is better than a bad bill because the bad bill crystallizes this yield arrangement forever. I mean, so when are we going to revisit stablecoin yield? Yeah. Never, never, right? I mean, these kinds of financial regulations last and last until you have a crisis 90 years later. So I don't like that. But you're of the camp that we should get a bill and just take the win. I'm going back and forth on this because I don't want a bad bill.

I don't know how bad of a bill this actually is, though, because as far as I can tell, there's no defy prohibitions in this bill, I think the yield issue, you know, let's just take the loss on that is probably where I come down. And there are other ways to get yield. So what's to prevent Coinbase from activating their broker dealer over there in offering people the ability to hold a tokenized money market fund? I mean, that's how you get yield. Yeah.

So there's not even a loophole. Yeah, you'll see an explosion of creativity. And I don't mean loopholes, but just ways to give people access to yield-bearing tokens relatively frictionlessly. Yeah. So that'll happen without a doubt. So I think the big danger here is that you never have a more friendly administration towards the industry. You have Congress lined up to potentially pass this thing.

And we just might not see a window like that ever again. And so if Coinbase doesn't back this bill, I think there's a world where they really regret it. You know, you have these activist heads of the SEC and CFTC in the future that could go after them. You don't have the law to fall back on. You're basically an interpretive guidance land. So I don't know. It's a tough call. It's a classic, like, strategy question, I think, for Brian Armstrong here.

But I think it's a 55-45 that you just take the bill. So there was a lot of progress on general institutionalization this week, actually, regardless of the bill's progress. So Invesco announced they were taking over super states, tokenized treasury, USTB. So they're looking to join the tokenization race. Yeah. And then NASDAQ announced a partnership with our portfolio company, TALOS, to allow tokenized collateral management

for both traditional and digital assets. A huge deal over there between TALIS and NASDAQ. So congrats to both teams. And then the New York Stock Exchange announced that they're partnering with Securitize to develop a 24-7 trading platform for tokenized securities. Securitize is going to play the role

of a transfer agent there. So we're seeing this tokenized security thing move fast here. I mean, this comes on the heels of SEC guidelines. a couple weeks ago. I think it's all systems go for tokenizing real-world assets. You're also seeing institutionalization and prediction markets.

Bickgo is partnering with Susquehanna to offer its clients OTC access to prediction market event contracts. Kalshi offered a part announced a partnership with FIS this week to make it easier for institutions to engage with prediction markets too. Yes. So that comes against some maybe not so good news for Kalshi and Polly Market. Senate lawmakers introduced a bipartisan bill targeting, basically restricting sports betting contracts on prediction markets. We also saw Nevada come out this week introducing a 14-day restraining order banning sports betting, entertainment betting, and election markets in the state.

It looked very similar to what Massachusetts did in terms of trying to shut down Kalshi in this state. So, you know, this is it turning into a, this is going to be a really interesting fight. You know, you might compare this to like Uber versus the taxis, but, you know, it's going to be massive scale in terms of the states coming after these platforms. Yeah, I mean, the disruptive company doesn't always win. Like, think about Jewel. Jewel, yeah. Sometimes they just get totally nuked from orbit. So we'll see.

I think it's going to be real slug fest here, even if when the product is really, really popular. This was an interesting piece of news. Fannie Mae will accept crypto-backed mortgages via a new product by mortgage company, Better Home and Finance in partnership with Coinbase, allowing customers use crypto assets as collateral for obtaining a mortgage. Fannie Mae will purchase these loans like any other conforming mortgage. That would have been very handy, I don't know, a few years ago. Totally.

This is actually why some of these dollar lending platforms where you park Bitcoin as collateral, get U.S. dollars. end up being used a lot, I think, by people that are looking to put down a down payment on their first home. And so this seems like a financial product that makes a ton of sense. I looked into it a little bit. So there's no like mark to market on this collateral as far as I am seeing. I don't think there's any ability to margin call it. So basically you just qualify where they look at all of your assets and I'm sure they give a haircut to the Bitcoin position. But theoretically, I think will allow people that otherwise would not qualify for a mortgage to get one.

Yeah, this is a good example of, you know, crypto actually crossing over and becoming generally useful. It was and has been this kind of stranded instrument with no value in credit. So I'm glad that's changing. I'm establishing a betting market right now. I just thought of this. Over under on Elizabeth Warren writing a letter to Fannie Mae. I'll give you next Friday.

Yeah, I mean, I'm taking the under. I think this, I think maybe within the next 48 hours, we'll have an Elizabeth Warren letter. Like, what are you doing? You're destroying the mortgage system, giving these young people the ability to get the mortgage. You know, I think she's exploiting the system because I think at this point she's using AI to write these letters. You don't think her army of staffers are writing these things? Well, the staffers do it with AI. So it's like a DDoS attack on people she doesn't like. Because I guess you sort of have to respond to the letter.

Or I mean, can they compel you? I think you probably should respond. Did you see that she wrote one to Mr. Beast? Oh, yeah, over Beast Financial. Yeah. It's basically what are you doing by acquiring this financial services firm? Are you going to be offering them tokens? Yeah, it's weird that senators wield this power of forcing you to,

basically forcing you to respond to a letter that they write you. I think if you don't respond, then you probably are at a much higher risk to get dragged in front of a committee, don't you think? Yeah, something bad could. It's implied. I suppose you could respond privately, and that's probably what most people do. So this was quite good from the Ethereum Foundation. They launched pq.etherium.org. This is our post-quantam hub. This is an official Ethereum Foundation.

roadmap, resource, FAQ. I went through this yesterday. It's really good. Very impressive, especially when compared with what Bitcoin is doing, which is nothing. And, yeah, Ethereum has their act together in terms of post-quantum. They're targeting a full transition by 2029. So Ethereum has full transition by 2029. Should we talk about the Google announcement this week?

Yeah, also this week, Google comes out and announces that they also plan to transition fully to post quantum by 2029. And that's in 2.7 years, by the way. That's not far away. They had a blog release called Quantum Frontiers, maybe closer than they appear, basically saying that they see an accelerating threat here. and they want to have fully transitioned before Q-Day arrives. We don't know when it'll come. They're not saying they think Q-Day is 20-29, but they want to be prepared. They want to get ahead of it.

That's ahead of the U.S. government's transition period. U.S. government wants to transition critical agencies by 2030, non-critical by 2035. Google hosts the best quantum lab on the planet, by the way. So they have as good as sense as anyone. and they're now sounding the alarm. Yeah, I don't know, though. What does, you know, what does Google know about quantum?

You got Adam Back. He's saying, look, this is decades away, the short term. The risks are nil. There's issues on every vector. I could go find some of his tweets. I mean, I wouldn't even worry about it. Adam Back says, don't worry about it. Just don't listen to those Google guys.

What do they know? Michael Saylor, too. He swore up and down on a micro-strategy call that it was 10-plus years away. So I did the math and actually 2029 is less than 10 years. That's less than 10 years away for sure. Yeah. Believe it or not. It's actually less than three years away, I think, right?

So there will be more to come on this from Google. I can't tell you what or when, but something is coming from them that is going to totally change the game here. So, you know, we kind of know what has to happen. There's what, three, maybe four post-quant schemes that could be adopted here. So it's just a matter of picking one and then doing the engineering to

facilitate the upgrade. So it's not existential. It is existential if you keep on waiting, though. Yeah. And the thing is, here's the problem. People think we will have a long lead time and we will have very clear evidence. This is coming half a decade or a decade before it comes. That is unfortunately not.

the case. I wish it was true. I wish we could just wait till it was clear and then we could choose to act and that would be it. But we are actually not going to have that luxury because of the nature of quantum computing. Basically, once you figure out how to scale these things up and make error correction work at scale, you're going to go from breaking keys that are two bits or five bits to 256 bits the next week. So you're not going to have this break of 505 billion. 100 bits, 200, it's not going to be the slow build. It's going to be overnight, unfortunately. So you have to act under conditions of uncertainty, which is now, right? You have to make costly decisions well in advance in order to avoid a tremendously rushed transition once a break is

imminent. That's unfortunately the base reality. There will be more evidence of this coming out very soon. You know, you don't really have to take my word for it. But that's the problem. So the Ethereum people have figured this out to their credit. They are doing a relatively rushed transition. And they've marshaled a lot of resources. The Bitcoin people are really behind, unfortunately. And technically, it's not impossible. This can all be done. But you do need every address to rotate on chain. So that takes. It takes a long time. It takes months, even if every transaction was just that rotation. So, I mean, it's a serious task that we have ahead of us.

I mean, you think about this from a couple different angles. One is the parties that need to actually have a plan here that don't. So you're talking about the core development of Bitcoin. Like Ethereum's kind of working on it, but every other layer one blockchain is going to have to have to prepare for this, right? I think there's probably some that by design are less vulnerable. But if you're an investor in a layer one blockchain, you know, they better have an answer to how they're thinking about this. The other angle is the custodians and the exchanges really need to be on this and be able to move quickly. Because as you point out, it's going to take months for these addresses to rotate.

If you just look at the mempool on Bitcoin, we think it's a terrible user experience. And it is if you're just making a regular way Bitcoin transaction and it takes an hour to settle. we're talking about cues here that are going to be weeks long. Yeah, that's right. Even in the good case, which is, let's say the developer is convening meeting today. And they say, all right, we're going to do this, all systems go. We're picking MLDSA. We're going to go with lattice space signatures.

Here's the soft fork. Let's test it. We'll spend a month engineering it. And it's live on Mainnet. Absolutely amazing best case. Then it's going to take years. Some people don't have access to their keys easily. So the block, basically blocks will be full.

Yeah. For the foreseeable future, regular transactions have to compete with that. These custodians have hundreds of thousands of addresses. Those all have to rotate. The problematic thing is the custodians can't even do anything until the core devs flip the switch. Yeah. So that's the tricky thing is they're sort of on the sidelines waiting, trying to see if the, you know, high priests are going to get their act to together. And you know, people like to say that this is handled. It's like under control.

They're aware of it. They're having secret discussions where they agree that it's a problem. It's just that we're not privy to them. I mean, you can go on the Bitcoin mailing list and just read it. You don't need to take my word for it. You can just go. It's on the internet. It's public. Bitcoin dev mailing list. And you can see what they are saying about this stuff. I'll spoil it for you. The top devs are not concerned. barely even acknowledging that there's one proposal BIP 360 that doesn't actually have anything post-quantum in it there's nothing post-quant about BIP 360 unfortunately the top devs won't even really acknowledge that one so if for any soft fork to happen in Bitcoin you need like four people to say yes basically right you can go back and see who championed all the prior

soft forks and so you know whose approval is needed that's you can see that from the storable record. Those key taste makers have not authorized any post-quantum transition, nor have they even really acknowledged that it needs to happen. So you don't need to take my word for it when I say the most important developers are not acknowledging the risk. You can just go on the Bitcoin. Ask Claude, can you look to the Bitcoin dev mailing list and assess the urgency? Don't take my word for it. Go do that. So what changes that? I think it's just, more research that gets put out there from people that these Bitcoin core developers trust. Yeah, but the thing is, some core developers would rather that they be right and that Bitcoin

fails as a result than admit that they were wrong. So I don't really have any confidence that the core devs will evolve on this and adopt a radically different stance in terms of how core dev should work. I think they want to retain control of their little fiefdom. I don't think they actually really want to be proactive and do anything drastic or necessary. That's not the style. So yeah, more papers, I mean, more papers will come out. You know, we'll start to get results that are very scary. But by the time this realization dawns on the core devs, it may well be too late for an orderly transition at that point. We're in a rush transition. At that point, it's a bad outcome. A lot of people are probably listening to this and saying panic, should I sell all my Bitcoin.

I think it's an important thing to realize that this is in a lot of ways, I think, the last boss to beat for Bitcoin. Kind of cross the chasm of, hey, is Bitcoin going to be outlawed by the U.S. government? That's off the table. Is there some sort of a critical vulnerability? Is there going to be a 51% attack? I mean, there's a lot of fud historically here. the good news here is that there's an actual answer. It's not theoretical that we're very lucky in a lot of ways that post-quantum cryptography already exists. So it's an engineering challenge and it's a governance challenge, if anything.

But if Bitcoin can get past that, then the chances of it going to zero diminished significantly. Yeah, that's exactly right. So it should be seen as a big opportunity because Bitcoin gets to bust a lot of different fuds at the same time. Yeah. You know, it can deal with the quantum problem. It can deal with the accusation that Bitcoin never rises to the occasion, that it's stagnant, that no code, you know, is ever committed, that no changes ever occur, the governance is

impossible. It's gridlocked. You can tackle all those views, but you have to do the changes. And just zooming out a little bit, what needs to happen is all blockchains will go this way, which is the cryptographic. primitives the blockchain is built on, we will have to understand that those will are mutable and should be seen as replaceable. So you won't think of a blockchain as oh, this is just built on elliptic curves specifically. You will embrace an outlook whereby the cryptographic function

or puzzle is, it's okay that it can change because we're entering this technological era now. cryptography gets broken more frequently, whether it's quantum or AI, just math is moving forward pretty quickly. So Ethereum is already going this direction. They've acknowledged this. Bitcoin is having a very hard time decoupling from elliptic curves, but eventually this is how it's going to be. The blockchain is not going to be dependent on a single specific cryptographic implementation. It'll be mutable under the hood. Yeah, it'll be really interesting, see how this plays out here. I think we're going to be talking a lot about this over the next three weeks. I think there are some big developments that some of the labs have been working on that

hopefully they'll put out into the public domain. On a sunnier note marathon, the mining company, they sold $1.1 billion of Bitcoin to, I guess, pay down some debt that they'd taken out. Why is that a sundar note? Is this like the worst run company in the game right now? Didn't they buy this Bitcoin at like 40% north of where they sold it not too long ago? And the funny thing is that they went through this again. Do you remember?

Yeah, we talked about this nonstop. The miners went through this in 2021 and 2022, and they had to de-lover. And the exact same thing. And you'd think that they might remember that this happened last time, that there was forced selling and it causes kind of a spiral. And then they're all selling. And there people went bankrupt and they had to sell. You think they'd remember this.

They went through it. This is why we can't ever invest in mining companies. This happens every single cycle where these companies just put Bitcoin in the balance sheet. They think it's never going to go down. They will get over levered and then they have to puke it out. It's awful. Yeah. And when people ask me about market conditions or have we bottomed or whatever, I just say, well, look at the dots.

Look at the navs. Are they trading above or below 1X nav? Yeah. And the answer is below. as long as that is the case, this is going to keep happening. They're going to keep selling the underlying to buyback shares, to pay down debt. There'll be acquisitions. Basically, the direction, as long as they trade below 1X, blow nav,

they're going to be net sellers of the asset. So we still have to work our way through this. You know, it's interesting. If you think about who benefits from very long mempool cues, it's obviously the miners. miners will probably be printing Bitcoin during this transition, don't you think? They will. That's right.

So we're going to, for a while, solve the security budget problem. Yeah. I mean, the run rate of these miners, it's going to be remarkable to see it. It would probably be the best time ever to be a Bitcoin miner during this migration. Elsewhere, our visa has joined the Canton network as a super validator. They've completed the company's first ever blockchain governance approval process. Congrats to both. Yeah, congrats to both sides.

there. Some odds and ends here. So CFTC Chairman Michael Selegg announced a new innovation task force designed to have clear regulatory frameworks for companies focused on blockchain AI and autonomous systems as well as prediction market event contracts. Very interesting development. Continue to think that the CFTC and the SEC are just executing very well, I would say. There's a lot of content coming out of both agencies right now. and they're very responsive to questions. Yeah, they are parts of the government that are functioning very well at the moment. All right, so any, how's your bracket doing here?

I didn't fill one in because I don't understand basketball and I don't. Actually, I don't even get collegiate athletics because I didn't go to school in this country, so I don't really resonate with it. Yeah. We don't have that in the UK. You don't have the 64, terminus 64? Yeah. Mine's not looking too good. I didn't pick enough upsets. There were a number of upsets. So I'm looking at the Polly Market. The favorite to win it all is Michigan, followed by Arizona, followed by Duke, your alma mater.

I've got Duke, yeah. Although I don't feel great about it. Sienna gave us a real run for our money. How are you feeling about the World Cup that's happening this summer? I know you're very excited about it personally. Yeah, I know that there was a World Cup, soccer game coming up. And I think they're going to play a couple games up here in Foxborough, so I'm excited to know that that's happening. I don't think I'll, I don't think I'll be there. I'll keep you in our listeners updated. The favorites are Spain. Shockingly, England is number two favorite, which is, as a Brit, I can tell you there's absolutely no way we're winning.

We don't ever win anything. And then France and Argentina. So the U.S. is just nowhere near the favorite there? We have a 2% chance, just above Morocco and below Belgium, which, Sounds about right. U.S. is unfortunately just not good at soccer. Well, the problem is all of our best athletes play real sports. And it really would be different if it wasn't like that.

Yeah. I mean, if just 30% of NFL players played soccer, we would win. Oh, yeah, or the NBA. I mean, but it would be nice to win. I mean, it was really nice that we won the Olympic gold medal against Canada. Yeah. So maybe we could run it back. It would be the biggest upset of all time, it sounds like.

What we do need is the, we need sort of the DHS and the various security organs to be functioning again in time for the World Cup. Yeah, you think. So it would be great if we could turn that back on by the time this starts. Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking to someone that was not from the United States earlier this week, and they were really puzzled at how our airports are so dysfunctional. And I don't think there's, I don't have anything to say to that other than you're right. Yeah, we didn't have anything to say in defense. It's just, sorry, man. I don't know.

This is not a well-run country. No, it's tough. All right. So I think that's it for the week. We probably scared a lot of people with the quantum stuff this week. It's not all over. I'll tell you when it's over. Okay.

It's not over yet. We do need to act, though. So you tell your local Bitcoin developer, you see them at the store. Tell them Nick says we need to act. Yeah, yeah. Tell them it's time to get moving on this. It's probably the last big project you'll have to do in quite a while, but we need to work on it. Maybe we should draft some new core developers.

That would be great. That would be great, yeah. I just don't know if they'd have the ability to actually maneuver politically. That is the trouble. All right, that's a good place to leave it. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we'll see you on Monday.