On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 03/29/24 (SBF sentenced, Blast and Munchables, the MSTR convergence trade) (EP.513)

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Was SBF's 25-year sentence too lenient? Beba vs SEC Coinbase motion to dismiss is dismissed Coinbase notches a win vs the SEC over their Wallet product SDNY v Kucoin Ripple vs SEC Will MSTR ever converge to the fair value of their Bitcoin? North Korea allegedly hacks Blast's Munchables farm How did Blast persuade the hackers to give the money back? What's going on with ETH blobspace? Bitwise's ETH vs ETH futs correlation analysis Content mentioned: Bitwise thread on ETH/futs correlation Sponsor notes: State of the Network's Q1 2024 Mining Data Special In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 252, we zoom in on the impressive recovery of miner profitability amid improving market conditions

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated easing. You've printed 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. And this episode is brought to by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. Today's Metrics Minute. We're looking at Bitcoin mining, quarterly update. Bitcoin miner revenue hit an all-time high in March, surpassing $76 million in a single day, driven by high Bitcoin prices and transaction fees.

The hash price peaked at $0.12 per kWhats per capita hash per second. in December, the highest level since June 2022. While not at the level seen during the late 23 Ordinals mania, transaction fees did remain high in Q1, averaging 2 to 3 million a day. Marathon Digital, the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner, mined the three largest Bitcoin blocks ever in March, each exceeding 3.98 megabytes. The first two blocks contain a pair of NFTs linked to the Roonstone project,

Well, the third block contained an audio inscription from rapper French Montana. Did you know this? No. Honestly, I don't know who French Montana is. Oh, you don't know French Montana? No. Well, all you need to do is consult the Bitcoin blockchain now because his song, Bag Curious, an MP4 file was etched. and before I'm sure it's Mb3

was etched into the Bitcoin blockchain so spin up a Bitcoin node and Oh okay Yeah you'll listen to that Listen to that song on Bitcoin I guess Yeah

And clean spark Fliped right To become the second largest miner With a now 4.6 billion dollar market cap It's on track for a record month Bitcoin's estimated power consumption hit a new high of 19.0.19.

6 gigawatts in February, continuing the boiling the ocean's trend. That's your metrics minute. These metrics minutes are, it's turning out to be like three minutes per minute here. I was entertained by this one. I didn't know what I was getting into when I started reading that. There's a massive trend here of people just putting large JPEGs on blockchains. This seems to be unavoidable. Do you think we're going to go audio pretty soon?

Do you think our podcast will be on one of these blockchains, maybe in the eith blob space at some point? Well, the average OTB MB3 file is like 40 megabytes. So we'd need 10 blocks. Well, we could put it on Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin SV that would probably fit. Yeah. That's a use case.

It's probably the only use case for Bitcoin SV. So it's raining again up here in Boston for probably, I don't know, the 12th day in a row. yeah whenever i leave boston i just got this sense of joy in my heart and i touch down in miami and it's like all is right in the world yeah no you were up here it was raining i went through that exact experience this morning and it was great well it's it's almost uh it's almost springtime i don't know it's technically already is spring he wouldn't know from looking out the window no um all right well busy uh deal week goodness great We've got a lot of deals to rip through here.

Yes. And the first one up is a Castle Island deal. We like those. So this is Bob, build on Bitcoin. They are building platform enabling the Ethereum virtual machine. Well, it's really an L2 on Bitcoin, EVM compatible L2, with plans to build an optimistic roll-up. When BivM is ready, they raise 10. million in a round led by us with participation from a number of firms and angels including CMS holdings shout out CMS bankless ventures mechanism UTXO management and others yeah congrats to alexi and the team there we're really excited about this bitcoin l2 season full

effect here yeah we're fired up so uh check them out um in our view obviously one of the most exciting bitcoin l2s out there next one up is one kx uh they have raised $75 million for their latest venture fund. Congrats to Lasse and the team. Great to see that happen. Next up we have Gunzilla Games, a blockchain gaming platform. There is 30 million from Avalanche and Coin Fund. Then we have Raya Network. This is the L2 blockchain that raised 10 million from Framework, Coinbase, Wintermute, Fabric, Brevin Howard, and Robot Ventures. Then you have Bato, a decentralized art collecting platform. There is 1.7 million from 1KX, collab currency, and variant. Then it's OG Labs. This is a developer of decentralized AI applications that raised

$35 million from HackVC, OkX, Gsr, Anamoka, Arca, and a number of others. Then you have Ordinals bot. They're a company building a data layer on the Bitcoin blockchain. They raised $3 million from DACM, Eden Block, and CMS. Then it's MyShell. It's a Web3 AI platform for creators that raised $11 million from Dragonfly, Delphi, Bankless, Maven 11, and nascent. Then you have MyPrize, a company building an online crypto casino. There is 13 million from Dragonfly, Andreessen, Mechanism, and Arrington Capital. My Shell and then My Prize, both led by Dragonfly. That's going to be internally confusing, no? Wow. And they, no relation between the two Mies. No, it's just a shell and a prize. It's clever. Next one up is

Aluvium. This is a blockchain gaming company that raised 12 million from King River Capital, Arrington, Anamoka, and Arka. Then you have Alex in all caps. Bitcoin Layer 2 Defi protocol. There is 10 million from Spartan, CMS, Foresight and others. Then it's Flock, another one of these Web 3 AI platforms that raise 6 million from Lightspeed, Tagus, DCG, OKX, and Volt. A lot of Bitcoin L2 deals this week. We have Bitlayer a Bitcoin Layer 2 network. There is 5 million from Framework, OKX, Kinetic, and others. Here's a Dpin one.

It's called Peak. It's a Dpin layer one blockchain that raised 15 from borderless, Spartan, and Anamoka. And lastly, we've DAP OS, an intent execution network. Don't know what that means. They raise 15 million from polychain, flow traders, Amber Group, and others. A lot of deals this week, huh? Wow. All right, so let's hop into the, I guess, the big story.

is Sam Bankman-Fried, no? He's going to jail for 25 years. Yeah, I was reading that inner city press thread. I mean, that seems to be the only way information was getting its way out of the courthouse, and I was on the edge of my seat. It went on for so long. There were so many different,

everyone had a point of view on this thing. So what's your take? The judge set had something to say. 25 years, I was actually shocked by how lenient that was. I know that seems like a long time and it is. I mean, he'll be in prison until he's 57 if he serves out the full sentence. I was a little shocked, actually. I was shocked at the leniency, frankly, especially the judge kind of torched him in his comments, Judge Kaplan. Yeah, the judge had a couple of comments around never having seen a

performance like Sam's in the 30 year history of his career as a judge, really referencing the fact that he was evading the questions of the prosecutor, he's lying. I mean, yeah, the judge said he perjured himself. Yeah. The, uh, Sam's defense had some really colorful statements, which made me just reinforced my disdain for Sam and everything he stands for. I'd forgotten for a second how much I disliked this man. It is sort of nice to have it over, though, right? Yeah. The one statement that I just couldn't believe was his, I guess, his defense attorney, Macasey said, quote,

he's an awkward math nerd. He's into veganism. He is an off-the-chart intellect. He is a beautiful puzzle. He can parse words better than a Talmudic scholar. He was a billionaire unconcerned about material possessions. I mean, I get that this is meant to garner sympathy, but this just makes me, hate Sam.

Yeah. Like what is, does being a vegan make you morally superior? I don't think so. I think his point is that it's a little weird. It's a little weird to be a vegan.

Is that what he's trying to say? Is that the point? I don't know. They tried the autism defense. They threw everything at this and it didn't work. Well, it's good that it's over.

Now, I guess there's a few cleanups here. So some of the other sentencing situations are going to happen. We've got CZ, I think, is going to get sentenced for the Binance situation in the next week or so. That might even be tomorrow.

Caroline Ellison, we'll see what she gets. Neshad, we'll see what he gets. Gary Wang. There's a few others. The judge in his comments put a lot of stock in what Caroline had to say specifically. She was the star witness. He really felt like her testimony was really critical. So I don't know, maybe Caroline won't get any time at all.

that's totally plausible to be. My guess is that she gets a couple years at least. But we might be done talking about Sam Bankman-Fried for a little while here. I mean, what more is there to say? I think his counsel said they're going to appeal it. Presumably they'll do that. I don't know what there is to appeal. I think they ran a really bad case.

I know it's obvious to say that in hindsight, clearly with the outcome being what it is, but he wasn't really remorseful. Did he show remorse? He kind of said I'm sorry a lot, but he didn't really seem remorseful. He seemed defiant. Obviously, he pled not guilty. In hindsight, should have probably pled guilty, right?

And the strategy was very evasive. It was defiant. He was trying to outsmart the prosecution. He didn't go into this. I mean, it looks like he went into this with a fair amount of arrogance and believing he could actually get a, you know, really positive outcome for himself. He wasn't at all hedged to the downside.

You know, now he is a very long sentence. I thought 25 years was about right. And people were upset about that and thought it should have been longer. But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think this is a miscarriage of justice. It's not like the judge gave him a five-year tour here. Yeah, and apparently in federal,

you have to serve 80%, 85% of the time. I mean, you can't compare one sentence against another, but I, my immediate reaction, actually, first reaction was relief in catharsis. Second reaction was, I just felt so sad for Ross Elbrecht. I mean, double life. It's not the same case, obviously it's very different, but double life with no parole versus Sam arguably harmed more people. I mean, the harm committed was much greater, in my opinion.

That might be controversial. I think you compare them against each other, and it feels very unfair what happened to Ross Albrecht. It's been a while since I brushed up on the Ross Ulbrook Silk Road case, but, you know, he was initially charged with being almost a hitman, right? There was, but that was later dropped. That was not included in the final. Yeah, I'd have to go back.

Yeah, but like, there's like actual murder cases where you don't get double life with an parole, right? So, you know, he didn't actually succeed. I know. He didn't actually succeed at killing anyone. Anyway, we're not relitigating the Ross Albrecht thing. But given that that wasn't included in the sentencing, I don't think that was actually even really covered in the trial.

I mean, it was a long time ago. I think his sentence was excessive. I think that's fair to say. I think it was totally excessive. All right. Let's move on to some other news here. So there's a company called Beba, I believe, you pronounce it, Biba, B-E-B-B-A. And it's an American apparel company. So they make duffel bags and

things like that. They're based in Texas. They have teamed up with the D-Fi Education Fund here, which is a leading nonprofit research and advocacy group that talks about D-Fi-related issues. So Beba and D-FI-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-E-C have filed a complaint against the SEC, challenging the SEC's aggressive pattern of regulating VEA. enforcement against token creators and digital asset industry participants. So basically what happened here is that this company has some sort of a loyalty points program. So they air dropped a number of these tokens, which are essentially coupons. So if you had enough of these, you could put them together and get a duffel bag for free. And they did an initial air drop. And then they're getting ready to do

another one. But right now, what they've done is proactively gone to the SEC and said, we don't want to have this be classified as a security. And the SEC is just not telling us whether or not this is a security. They're taking a posture that anything that is a digital asset should fall under securities regulation. This doesn't work if it's a security. It doesn't make any sense. And so they have brought that case. The second prong of this is that the DeFi Education Fund and Bebba are saying that the SEC is breaking the Administrative Procedures Act because they have not engaged in a lawful rulemaking process. So they're saying, look, somewhere at the SEC, there has to be this written document or forms where they say, okay, if the token looks like this,

we go after it. But none of that has been made public. And so what the Defi Education Fund would like to do here is just get their hands on that in discovery. So this is going before a federal judge in Texas eventually. So I believe the SEC needs to get served first. So they need to actually get served the paperwork. And then they have 60 days to respond. They could, of course, respond. They could, of course, respond by doing like a motion to dismiss and try to get the charges dropped, the case dropped. Hopefully that doesn't happen. But pretty interesting. And I think it's a, it's a, it's not like it's a defy native protocol here that is suing the SEC. It's an actual company with a real business that's selling duffel bag. So I think it's a very interesting case to monitor. Well, we'll keep an eye on

that. It dovetails very nicely into the Coinbase case this week, which actually interesting cause Bitcoin to sell off, which I don't see the relation there. So basically, the judge denied Coinbase's motion to dismiss, effectively ruling that the case can proceed. And in this case, the judge did feel that the SEC has the authority to rule make on crypto, at least as it pertains to this motion. And interestingly, the judge said Coinbase can't invoke the major questions. doctrine, basically suggesting that the existing law was sufficient to provide guidance

on the SEC's view of whether crypto assets or securities. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not the judge saying the SEC is right here. It's the judge saying there's enough to warrant taking this to an actual trial and getting all the information out there. So what happens next is it moves to discovery. And so there'll be a discovery process and eventually it'll go to trial. But there was a success in the motion to dismiss against the Coinbase wallet. So they were saying that the Coinbase wallet was an unregistered broker or unregistered securities broker.

I forget the exact terminology. And the judge actually did dismiss that part of the case. So it's a little bit more narrow. It'll go to discovery. This will play out over a couple of years, though. I mean, this is going to take a long time. There'll be a new head of the SEC by the time this is actually in court. Yeah.

And yeah, some people are characterizing this as a loss. for Coinbase, but I mean, again, it was a motion to dismiss, which was denied, which just means the case is going to proceed. And in that denial, the judge said, SEC has the authority to rule make on crypto, although it'll be litigated. They felt the SEC did provide fair notice to Coinbase. Interestingly, the judge in that decision said that they didn't feel that there was a meaningful difference between a primary and a secondary market. transaction as far as it pertains to securities which differs from what the judge in the ripple gays felt and they did also say they felt custodial staking might have might constitute

as securities offering but as you say the kind of good thing for coinbase is their wallet product is immune largely immune from scrutiny the non-custodial product well if all this sounds very confusing that's because it's very confusing and there is a number of discrepancies between the way the SEC has gone after a number of the companies in various cases that are pretty similar. The SEC is on record saying eth is a security and then six days later saying it's saying it's commodity. So it's about as clear as mud. And there's not a lot of things that could really elucidate the SEC's posture towards crypto other than getting a market structure bill passed in the U.S. where Congress just steps in and says, look, here's here's the actual

law. Yeah, it's also worth noting that the courts frequently disagree with each other, and that's actually why things feed up to the Supreme Court, especially when those disagreements at the appellate level and at the circuit court level, those disagreements are what give the SEC, the Supreme Court rather cause to examine these things. So I'm sure some of these questions will make their way to the Supreme Court eventually. Did you see there's another SEC thing that happened this week where it was unsealed what they're asking for in this ripple case, they want like $1.9 billion in penalties? Yeah. So that was another interesting one. So the judge in that case had given Ripple a key win, as we recall, by saying the secondary market transactions

aren't how he's not relevant to them. But at the same time, it's not over. like the SEC still or the judge is still scrutinizing the primary issuance of those rebel tokens, right? Yeah. And I'm not sure when this one would actually go to trial. It's going to play out over a long period of time. But initially there was also charges pressed against Chris Larson and Brad Garlinghouse. And those are no longer on the table either. So now it's looking like it's just the primary issuance.

And this is going to also take a while to play out. So more SEC talk. There's one more court case. This never-ending court discussion this week, Ku-coin. The founders of Ku-Koin were criminally charged by the SD&Y with violating the Bank Secrecy Act and money transmission laws. And apparently they're at large. So I guess that means those warrant out for their arrest in the U.S., presumably. Yeah, I think they're of maybe Chinese descent.

So I'm not sure that they're going to get apprehended because they're probably in China. But did you see that the CFTC in this complaint explicitly said that ether is a commodity? Yeah, they did. Yeah. So you have a cross-agency fight here. You have some cross-agency situations going on here. I don't know. This whole is-Etha security thing seems to be pretty crazy right now.

There was a big dust up on Twitter because, what's his name, Larry Fink was interviewed yesterday and asked about Prometheum. And he said something along the effect of if ETH is a security, I don't think it would change our plans. We would actually be able to still do an ETH. But the interesting thing is if you have ETH as a security and you want to do an ETH, there's only one entity if ETH is a security that could custody it and that's Prometheum. Can you imagine a world where the Black Rock ETF ends up being ether as a security

custody to Prometheum? Yeah, that would be shocking. Yeah, I don't think we're ready for that. All right, let's move into some other stories that happened this week. Did you see there's a hedge fund called Carisdale that came out with a public short here? So they are short micro strategy and long Bitcoin. Their rationale is basically that micro strategy is trading at a premium to the underlying value of its Bitcoin and its software business. And so they have a little bit of a spread trade on here.

But I don't know, man. Going short micro strategy right now, that just seems pretty dangerous, even if you're a long Bitcoin to me. I don't know. This guy might have wanted to watch the GameStop. Yeah, I mean, look, it's a convergence trade. They get a bad name because of long-term capital management. So obviously the main thing is can the spread blow out further?

And can your cost to fund that trade? Can you sustain the cost to stand the trade? to stay in the trade before the convergence occurs. I'm kind of sympathetic to these guys. I think they're right, thematically, at least. I mean, I haven't double-checked this, but according to them, the implied Bitcoin price by Microstrategy shares

is $177,000. So either Bitcoin can rally to that or micro-strategy can come back down to Earth. So, I mean, and we know micro-strategy's going to issue shares at some point. presumably. So I think they're right. The question is, are the dynamics of the trade right?

That I don't know. Everyone's mad at them. Don't be mad. I mean, the premium will eventually normalize. Eventually it will be, but I just hope that these guys have spent enough time on crypto Twitter and understand

the army that they're up against on this name. Yeah, but, yeah, I guess the question, question is what's the mechanic through which the price of micro strategy normalizes to fair value clearly we've seen like this you know huge amount of like retail activity piling into it and blowing out the shorts but I do agree that it'll come back down to earth at some point yeah it eventually it will but it's it's just a matter of when and if you run into one of these buzz saws of just retail decides to run this thing up and treat it like a meme coin.

Yeah. Okay, so what happened with Blast? This was incomprehensible to me, to be honest. I mean, this is, this just makes our industry look like such a joke here. So even just the names of the projects and protocols involved in this is just crazy to me. Yeah, so, all right, so to summarize, people were, using Blast, which is an L2 on Ethereum, to farm shnibbles on a protocol called munchables.

And North Korea, apparently some developer, some North Korean developer got hired by munchables and stole all the shnibbles. The future of finance right here, shnibbles on munchables and farming. Yeah, we're a very serious industry. centralized L2 called blast So

North Korea stole the shnibbles Presumably to build ballistic missiles And then The weirdest part of all this is actually not that It's that the purported North Korean hacker Gave the money back Completely

Yes So what I mean what leverage do you have against I guess we're just assuming this Zach XPT thinks they're North Green What leverage does Blast have against a North Korean software developer? What are they going to like cancel them on social media? Like what can you say against a person in North Korea?

Yeah, there's more to this story clearly. So $63 million hack, this like I said, is a centralized L2. So the creators of this thing ultimately have the control of it and they have the ability to roll back the chain. And so. Although it's not trivial, apparently. to roll it. It's like a lot of work to do it. It's not the easiest thing in the world. Not the easiest thing to do. But when this thing launched, I think we even talked about it on the podcast that this is very janky, right? Like they went about this in a very centralized looking

way. And ultimately here, so you have the $63 million stolen. If you're, if you're on this blast team, you have a decision to make. You're probably going to have the FBI and other types of agencies at your place of business the next day if North Korea actually gets this money and is able to run away with it. And on the other hand, if you make the decision to just unilaterally fork or roll back the chain, you're really putting yourself in the grounds of saying, okay, this is probably a centralized project. We issued an unregistered security. So you sort of have this damned if you do, damned if you don't type of dynamic. But then all of a sudden, the hacker just gives back the private keys and disappear. It's kind of a weird thing. I don't really know what happened here.

Yeah, I called it, you know, sailing between the, what is it, Skilla or Scylla, I don't know how to pronounce it, the SILA of the SEC and the Carreptus of the DOJ. And if it were me, I would roll it back and go head to head with the SEC on allegations that it's centralized as opposed to allowing North Korea to abscond with $63 million. Of course, of course. So, you know, not that North Korea is going to be spending munchables or whatever. whatever the heck these are, but I guess they converted them to Eath. I think it was ETH. It was ETH on blast Eth. They converted it on Blast Eth.

Blast Eith. So that's what needed to be rolled back. But it really just highlights the, you get to figure out these smart contract bugs and internal cybersecurity issues, right? Like this is hiring a North Korean dev. Yeah, the developer got, this is a chronic problem, I think, is developers getting hired by software companies in the U.S. like North Korean developers with like fake LinkedIn's and fake GitHubs and stuff and apparently a developer just pushed code

that gave them total control over the funds in the system and they just waited till enough funds accrued and then they took them. Call me old school, but I like the idea of actually meeting someone that you hire. Call me old school. Yeah, firm handshake, eye contact.

It's really hard to hire a North Korean if you take them out to dinner and see what they're all about. This is a real cybersecurity problem for companies that hire remote. Totally. It's a huge issue. Yeah, not just in crypto, I think. It's just like a thing that happens for tech companies. Yeah, I mean, you almost have to assume that you have some of these. We actually talked about it on the Coinbase cybersecurity episode a couple weeks ago. You almost have to assume that someone internal to your company is a rogue agent of some other government to some degree.

And you almost have to build your whole security infrastructure to support the fact that you're probably going to have people internally doing malicious things. What a strange world we live in. Yeah, this is not a fun story here. Be a lot of Israel, North Korea would just chill out on the defy hacks too. jeesh. Salkos thinks that North Korea is the biggest threat to the industry in Washington. It doesn't help, right? It doesn't help the PR.

Yeah, not at all. This is a totalitarian regime, $63 million. It's not like it's going to feed North Koreans. No, it's going to ballistic missiles. I mean, it's like one of the worst and weirdest features of crypto, that it's these chronic. hacks have have been able to finance North Korea. It's just a thing that sucks. All right. Let's talk a little bit about this blob space thing that's going on here.

What's your take on maybe lay it out in terms of what the blob space is and what happened this week on Eath? Wow. I didn't realize you're going to put me on the spot like that. Well, I could do it if you want. So the so Ethereum had an improvement protocol, scalability focused, creates this blob space. I, I guess, I would classify it as like a fast lane that allows for L2s to put data into the Ethereum blockchain and pay less fees. So that's very oversimplified. Turns out what happened this week, I think on Tuesday or Wednesday is people just started jamming

arbitrary pictures into the blob space. So this idea that this was supposed to be a fast lane got very congested because people are basically doing inscriptions in the blob space. Do I have that about right? It kind of reminds me of the I-95 here where you can take the toll road, but then you can also just kind of cheat your way into it by driving over these kind of like flimsy plastic bollards. So that's how I'm picturing this.

It's like the L2s were meant to use the faster toll road, but then people are just swerving into it and putting all kinds of junk up in there. It's almost like people didn't look at Segwit though, right? This was sort of bound to happen. Yeah, it reminds me of Segwit completely. People really, there needs to almost be a service or a person that you hire and say, all right, I have this idea on this blockchain. Just tell me all the five ways that this failed on other blockchains.

People don't have an appreciation for what has been attempted on other chains and why it did or didn't work. And then just take those learnings back and just don't make the same mistakes. But don't you think, I feel like the ETH research community is quite vibrant as far as I can tell. So wouldn't they have wargamed this out ahead of EIP? What is it, 48444? Yeah, they don't miss a lot. I would say in a lot of cases, it's other chains that don't learn from Ethereum.

So do you remember the plasma and state channels and things like that? I think Bitcoin people should have been paying a lot more attention to why those weren't taking off on Ethereum. and then we moved to a kind of a roll-up center of scaling on Ethereum. And now Bitcoin is kind of finally starting to catch up to that and say, oh, look, actually, that's a really interesting way to scale. And these state channel things might not be as interesting. Yeah. I mean, I said this on bankless.

Bitcoin's infatuation with lightning is like if Ethereum never moved away from Raiden. Yeah, I remember Raiden. Like, Ethereum is like 12 iterations. beyond that. And now they've roll-ups the work. Yeah. But now we're doing them on Bitcoin.

Now we're doing it on Bitcoin. So it took us, you know, six years, but we're doing it. Yeah. It's like, you know, everyone is so contentious around these ecosystems, but centralize some of the learnings that are just objective and it'd be a lot easier. Yeah, things do get very siloed. Late breaking here, Bitwise, has published their own correlation analysis of Ethereum to Ethereum futures.

So I think the SEC did their analysis, and now Bitwise has done their independent analysis, to basically determine whether ETH Spot and ETH futures are correlated, and they believe that to be the case. Actually, they think the correlation is about the same between BTC Spot and BTC Futures. So they're kind of pushing back at the SEC's assertion that it's a weaker correlation. And Bitwise has filed for an Ethereum spot ETF as well here. So S1 was filed on the 28th, which is today earlier this afternoon. So they're on the docket here. We'll see what happens with this ETH, SEC posture towards ETH.

It doesn't seem like there's a lot of discussion. To reiterate our stance on it, we feel, this is the official Brink Nation perspective, we feel that an ETH ETF should be approved under the law and precedent. However, we feel that this SEC is unlikely to do it. So we do think that the facts support the approval of an ETH ETF, which don't think it's likely to happen. Correct. And I would love to be proven wrong on that. All right, so not a ton of comments on Farcaster this week. I guess you and I need to get a little bit more involved there.

Although someone did go to Linwood, which is my favorite pizza place, Randolph, Massachusetts. We need to get them as a sponsor. That is, what was the pizza that you said you like, bake bean pizza? Bake bean pizza. Yep, best pizza in the game. No, it's great. That's just not right. That's like soup.

It's a great pizza. So, yeah, keep on hopping onto the Farcaster. We'll stay up on it. Yeah, we'll address your comments, post on there. And then Sweet 16 is in Boston tonight. You follow in this NCAA tournament? The only thing I saw was memes about this one guy who they had a big upset and he's not even destined for the NBA or something. This player that's played out of his mind for one game.

He got an NIL deal almost immediately too. So he got paid. So this guy's like 25 and he's in college for some reason? He, I don't, is he 25? I don't know. like way too old to be in college. Yeah, they played well. He ended up getting a, I think it was so like a tax company sponsored him to do a promotion

on Twitter. It's kind of interesting now that all these star college basketball players are getting paid more than some of the actual professionals. I mean, it makes sense, right? It's like they're producing a product, which is worth a lot. It's true. It's true. All right.

that's it for the week. Have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.