On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/03/26 (Two big quantum papers, Drift protocol hack, Maritime Salvage law) (EP.711)

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The significance of the new Google and Oratomic papers on quantum computing and ECC256 Why short range attacks are now part of the threat model Is Nic conflicted out from discussing quantum? What will be the fate of the Satoshi coins? What maritime law and shipwreck recovery tells us about the fate of Satoshi's coins Drift protocol is hacked Gary Gensler does not like prediction markets DATs are selling BTC Content mentioned in this episode: Cain et al, Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits Babbush et al, Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations  

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

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $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 a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brinkum, Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. How many times have you talked about quantum this week? pretty much constantly all week nonstop busy one

do you think I'm the main character or not quite because you'd never want to be the main character you don't want to ever be the main character I don't think you're the main character

I think the main character is actually some of these guys that wrote the paper like the Google guys yeah because you want to be close to Maine you want to be co-main

but you never want to be the number one guy never want to be the number one guy never want to be the number one guy. I'd say the main character right now is probably Michael Saylor. So insane week, I feel somewhat vindicated. I mean, what is it earlier this week, Monday or Tuesday, these two quantum papers came out on the same day, vastly lowered the resource requirements to break elliptic curve cryptography. Yeah, I guess let's just hop into it right now before we talk about the deals and talk about the Castle Island content. I guess the Castle Island content was

just you talking about quantum on the observation podcast with Alex Pruden from Project 11. But why don't you just tee up the two papers that came out in what they said? Yeah. So you know how we've been saying that like we're in the equivalent of 1940 in terms of like nuclear physics advancement equivalent for quantum, right? So like theoretically proven but not practically built yet. that day, I think was basically Monday of this week, the day when it really kicked off the race. So two papers came out on the same day.

That wasn't a coincidence. That was coordinated. The first one was by Google Quantum AI plus Dan Bonae, the most, really the most influential cryptographer on the planet, plus Justin Drake of Ethereum. Google Quantum AI, by the way, the best quantum lab on the planet. So this is elite tier best of the best guys in every class. This paper, what they're not doing is they're not saying we've broken elliptic curve cryptography.

They're not saying we have a machine. They're saying if you had a machine, this is the algorithm you would run on the machine. And these are the resource requirements. So that's what they're saying. It's a resource estimate. They've posited that you, if you had a superconducting qubit logical, quantum computer, you could break elliptic curve cryptography with 1,200 logical qubits and you know, 70 to 90 million to folate gates, which you could run in, in terms of clock time,

you could run that into 10 to 20 minutes. So this is a massive reduction both on the logical cubit side, but much more importantly on the T-gate side as in the runtime. So their big contribution was realizing if you had a quantum computer this size, you could actually crack elliptic curves in around 10 minutes, which is how long it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain. So this opens up Bitcoin to this new style of attack, what they call on spend, what I call short range attack. And so it changes the threat model for the worse.

So that was a huge contribution. And they actually were so worried about this that they didn't publish the circuit directly. They published a ZK proof showing that they knew what the circuit was, but they actually didn't want to reveal it to the world. So that was an insane paper, and I highly recommend you read it. Pretty crazy they didn't publish all the details, right? Like that sort of shows you how serious this could be. Yeah, and you remember how we were talking about nuclear physics? That's exactly what happened in the early 1940s.

people stop publishing their research. Then there's another paper from a bunch of academics at Caltech, including this guy John Preskill, who's highly reputed. They actually spun out and started this startup called Oratomic that was announced. This paper used a different modality. It used a neutral atom modality. Neutral atoms are known for being more stable, higher fidelity, so lower error rates, but also they take longer. The computation takes longer. So what they found was they think you can run a successful break of ECC-256 on as few as 10,000 physical qubits. But it would take longer, right? So the other trade-offs they explore is 26,000 physical qubits in a 10-day runtime to break one key.

So a totally different trade-off there in terms of the number of qubits, the types of qubits, and the runtime. But this paper actually scared me more because this looks to be more immediately practical in terms of where we are at the hardware level. So both papers were very impressive, very scary, and both advanced the state of the art. So the logical next step was Bitcoin core developers read these papers and said, okay, we need to actually get on this. And there's an upgrade path here. We're just going to start now and put out our roadmap. That's what happened, right? Yeah, so it's funny you say that because that's absolutely not the reaction.

Instead, you had, most of the Bitcoin core developers that I saw comment on this accused me of having a conflict of interest for drawing attention to the papers, ignoring the fact that I was not involved in these papers at all. This is a Google paper and it's a Caltech and a Stanford paper. I was actually cited in the Google paper, though. That was cool. was so no most bitcoinsers I mean to give credit to quite a few bitcoins actually did perk up their ears and and revised their their assessment of the risk here but no unfortunately there was a big stir about this and a lot of developers and bitcoin nerds continued to kind of deny dismiss deflect some of the Bitcoin core devs did reach out to me actually and

they said, you know, you're wrong, actually. We are concerned about this and efforts are underway. But the thing is, this is information that it seems like only they are privy to, right? And so if you look at the Bitcoin mailing list, there's no real evidence that there's any kind of posture that Bitcoin is going to upgrade. We have to somehow eavesdrop on their private conversations to get this information, which is not very helpful. Everybody that holds Bitcoin wants to know if this is a priority or not. And it's not clear from public data whether it is. So that's the predicament we find ourselves in. What's your take on BIP 360 that's being proposed here? Obviously, this is not a quantum play, but it's, you know, fixing some of the tap root issues, I guess. Yeah. So I like the team there.

I've met with them. I'm supportive of them, Hunter and Isabel and Ethan, 100% a supporter of what they're trying to do. Bip 360 has changed a lot. In its current form, it doesn't have any post-quantum cryptography in it. So it's very incremental. The current proposal fixes an issue with Taproot. That said, I still want it to get included into Bitcoin because it would show the developments have, the developers have this pro-mitigation posture. Because then, there would be a phased approach and maybe we would include, you know, a new address type that's post-quantum. But as it stands, Bit 360 on its own, as written, is not a solution, unfortunately, though I do support it. Crazy times. Well, we'll keep an eye on this. So as I mentioned,

you appeared with Alex Pruden. I guess people are saying you're conflicted because you're going on podcasts with a portfolio company that is in the quantum resistance or quantum migration space. I don't know how you'd characterize that. Yeah, I mean, if you don't like conflicts, then you hate this podcast, too, because we routinely interview our founders. There's like this kind of like East Coast mentality that, you know, all economic incentives are evil and perverse. And then there's sort of the West Coast mentality that like,

of course you want to invest in what you believe in, right? So we as venture capitalists invest in what we believe in. So I don't really see an issue there. Well, I think we, so we made this investment in Project 11 over a year ago, and it was with the idea that we just believed that quantum computing was going to impact public blockchains, and eventually we'd have to have some sort of a migration to post quantum. Thus, we put our capital on the line beneath that thesis. So it's funny that people would consider that a conflict, that you're like rooting for the demise of crypto or something. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, we're so long crypto with our careers and our capital and our fund. I mean, unimaginably long, as long as anyone could be. So we want crypto to survive. And from my perspective, we've put more capital to work to save crypto than literally anyone else on planet Earth. All right. So we'll talk a little bit more about quantum, maybe later in the pod. But why don't we hop into the deals of the week? Yeah. First up, you know, two Castle Island deals here to start.

First up Valenor, that's a credit institution designed for on-chain finance. They raised 25 million in a round led by us, also including neoclassic capital, Susquehanna, Paxos, the venture department, and Maven 11. Yeah, very excited about Valenor. So huge congrats to Connor and Lily. Really excited about what they're building. Then we have OpenFX, which is a stable coin FX wholesale liquidity company. Dave raised $94 million in a series A led by Excel with Atomico, M13, and Pantera.

Big congrats to Prav and the team. FX market is just being completely upended by stablecoins right now, and the big wholesale banks are nowhere. So you're seeing these companies like OpenFX just get to tremendous scale. Yeah, one of the fastest growing companies in our portfolio. Next up, you have the better money company that's a stable coin clearinghouse platform. They raised 10 million from A16C box group, Sunflower Capital. But congrats to Sam Bruner and the team there. Then it's polymarket.

they've raised another $600 million from the intercontinental exchange. I guess this is potentially part of that original investment that was agreed upon back in October where they pledged to invest up to $2 billion. So maybe there's a trunched out deal there. But it's a lot of capital. And they might need it. You know, there's some regulators coming after them. That's for sure.

Next step you have Midas, the tokenization platform. There is 50 million from RRE, CREandum, Coinbase Ventures, and Franklin Templeton. Then it's Megapot, which is an on-chain lottery platform, a global lottery. How many times have we talked about that on the podcast? I've always thought that someone would know this. So they raised $5 million. It was led by Dragonfly with participation from Coinbase Ventures and bankless ventures. Global lottery system, I mean, you know, this is actually a pretty good use case for a blockchain.

Congrats to them. Next up you have Key Rock. That's a digital asset market maker. they raise a series C from standard charted ventures, Ripple, and others. Then it's Latitude, which is a stable coin payments company. They raised $8 million from NEA, light speed faction, and Coinbase. Next up you have Culepo. That's a stable coin card issuer.

There is 6 million from Flourish Ventures 1KX and White Star Capital. And lastly, it's Uniblock, a blockchain infrastructure company that raised $5 million from SBI, Alliance Dow, and blockchain founders fund. busy deal week. So we've covered the big news of the week, you know, two pieces of quantum research. I strongly suggest you read those. I thought the Google paper was just really comprehensive, not just in terms of the threat, but also the specific implications for blockchains, Ethereum and Bitcoin.

I think that's why they brought in Justin Drake. He provided the most sophisticated breakdown of the, issues that Ethereum faces with quantum. So people say, well, you know, this is some kind of conspiracy by the Ethereum Foundation to undermine Bitcoin. To be clear, the paper also goes through all of the many risks that Ethereum faces. It's just that Ethereum is much pro proactive and has determined that they'll upgrade by 2029. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. I think the fact that they brought Justin Drake into this was controversial for some of the Bitcoin. that they thought that, hey, here's an Ethereum guy that's just pointing out all the flaws in Bitcoin.

But look, it's going to impact every single blockchain. I guess with the exception of like three blockchains, two of which I had never heard of. Yeah, as my understanding that Algarand is already post-quantum. Is that right? I think Al-Garand is. And then there's a couple of others that are just very small blockchains. Yeah. So I'll tell you what's going to happen here.

I mean, basically every blockchain, Ethereum. Salana, just go down the list. They will re-engineer themselves to strip out elliptic curve cryptography and other dependencies. It's not just ECC. It's BLS signatures. By the way, the B and BLS is Dan BNeh, who is on the paper. It's darks, no, it's snarks that are exposed. It's all genres of cryptography. All these blockchains see the threat. They will upgrade, I think, in time. Google has... set the deadline of 2029. The U.S. government has set a window of 2030, 2035. I think Bitcoin will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming. But I think they'll do it too. I just, what I worry about is

being caught a little bit too late where we realize, okay, this thing is coming in a year. We have one year to upgrade Bitcoin. That's a situation we don't want to be in. I mean, you're talking about some pretty white-knuckle experiences if you're self-custom. And then you're also talking about some just, I wouldn't say Herculane because it's not rocket science to move assets from one address to another. But these custodians, it's going to be a lift here, right? I mean, they're just going to have to move all the assets. You're going to have mempools backed up. It's going to be really hard to use these blockchains during that migration period.

Yeah, I will. It would be something like 40 consecutive days of full blocks to get their best case. So, and one thing I think ordinary Bitcoiners don't understand, and I actually think Bitcoin developers don't understand this either. We are not in the same situation as we were in 2017 when we had the block size wars. It's wildly different. The Bitcoin blockchain is intermediated and institutionalized. So there are now huge multi-billion, hundred billion dollar institutions that are fiduciaries. They have client capital in Bitcoin that they manage for them. They have legal obligations, their clients.

When faced with an existential risk like this, they cannot accept that the Bitcoin could go to zero overnight. That's a huge liability on those institutions. They have two choices. One, they can de-list Bitcoin, just eliminate that product line entirely. They probably don't want to do that. The other thing they can do is push for a change. and I don't think Bitcoiners would like

what that would look like to have 50 top institutions tell the developers do you guys need to or elevate a new group of developers right that's not going to be a pleasant experience but it's necessary so it's either D-list

or forced through a change there's no passive option there yeah yeah I think you're going to find that the asset managers and the custodian and the exchanges end up having a lot of power here. I think Sailor, to some degree, will have quite a bit of power as well, just based on how much of the circulating supply he owns.

Yeah, and the Sailor has already said that, you know, if Bitcoin needs to upgrade, it should. He's also given his view on what should happen to the Satoshi coins. I think that's actually going to be the most controversial thing in the end is what happens to the Satoshi coins. That's why I want us to start the discussion now. because that's going to be a very fraught debate. Where do you think the community is on Satoshi's coins? And maybe I'll just bring this back a level.

So Bitcoin, once people get their act together, will upgrade the protocol to post-quantum cryptography. Life goes on. But the old addresses that don't do that migration are screwed. So those coins will be quantum vulnerable. And our assumption is that Satoshi is dead. And so you're going to have a million bitcoins or so that are kind of left in the old version of Bitcoin.

And so what do you do with them? What would you say the consensus is right now? Among institutions, it's obvious. It's the Satoshi coins should be zeroed out. Or you can actually do it less specifically. You can do it more indiscriminately. You can just let people upgrade. And then after a certain point,

disallow all legacy signatures, which would effectively zero out the Satoshi coins. So that is what basically, institution wants to do. Now, the Bitcoin holders, the Bitcoiners, they're more mixed. Actually, many of them are on the side of, well, let the chips fall. And whoever gets the quantum computer, they get the coins, finders keepers, there's actually a lot of people with that view. And they're more driven by the ideology and Bitcoin property rights should be never compromised. We should never intervene in the protocol. So you actually got a fight around that. I don't think it's going to be

much of a fight. I think ultimately most bitcoiners want the price of Bitcoin to go up and the easiest way to think about that is just killing these coins. And so you're going to have a protocol with my guess is the protocol ends up having below 19 million coins at the end of the day. Yeah, there is another possible way for this to go, which I've been doing a lot of research into maritime law and case law. around shipwreck recovery. So it's pretty fascinating, actually. I strongly recommend you look into it.

I think it's possible that we end up with the application of basically salvage law, whereby an entity with the court or government's approval salvages the coins, so recovers them quantumly, but holds them in trust. So they don't take ownership of the coin. So this is actually how it works with a shipwreck for the most part.

You can identify and salvage valuables from a shipwreck, but they don't become yours. They actually belong to whoever the freight belonged to. So there was a very famous case with this Spanish ship. The Neuestra Senora, it was sunk in 1804, $500 million was recovered from it. What do you think happened to the $500 million cargo? It was taken by the people that recovered it.

No. Spain claimed it, all of it. Even though the coins were on a ship that belonged to the Spanish Empire, which is an empire that no longer exists. The courts found that there was an unbroken ownership claim over 200 years. Wow. Which is incredible. That's incredible. Yeah.

So abandonment is very hard to prove. even over 200 years. So, but more likely, I think what would happen would be the salvor, the entity that recovers the coins, gets a salvage award. And sometimes these awards are, you know, 10% of the value of the cargo. There's a famous case in the 80s, the SS Central America, this guy, Tommy Thompson, he dug it up in 1988. He got 90%. So he was awarded 90% of the Valley of the Cargo. the insurers that insured the ship in the 19th century sued him. So the descendants of those insurers because they pet out the insurance claim when it sank in 1857

and they sued him and they said, well, actually we deserve the coins because we paid out the claim so it's technically our property. But this guy Tommy Thompson actually kind of won the case. So the solvore in that case got the coins. That's interesting. I mean, I think about it a little bit differently. I think, you know, Satoshi owned real estate on a network called Bitcoin, and the post-quantum Bitcoin will be a new network, effectively. It will look very different. And so he will not own real estate on that new network.

Yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, it's going to be one for the Supreme Court probably if it happens that way. My suspicion is eventually the U.S. government would authorize a salvage mission, so they'd legally authorized an entity to do this. And then that Solvor would get some award and the rest of those coins would be held in trust for Satoshi if they were to return. I'm still in the camp. This is going to be a hard fork. I don't think we're even going to get to that point. All right, let's talk about drift protocol. So this is one of the largest perpetual futures exchanges in the Solana ecosystem. This is a tough story. So they were hacked this week for about $280 million. This happened on Wednesday afternoon. In a Twitter post, Ledger CTO Charles Guemay speculated that the attack method looked

very similar to the by-bit hack. That was a $1.5 billion loss. It was widely speculated to be North Korea. This is just a, this is a tough one here. Yeah, this one is super problematic. I mean, to me, I don't know if you notice, but there are a lot of conventional hacks in the last week of data breaches. I think AI is getting good enough to do exploitation. I don't know if AI had anything to do with this one. It looks like North Korea. The tragedy is that a lot of these coins went through USDC and Circle did not freeze them.

Well, they went through USDC immediately. I don't think they were alerted in time. I think they would have frozen them if they saw it, but this happened in the blink of an eye. Yeah, that is a really tricky one. Quite a bunch of other pieces of news. The CFTC and the DOJ fought a lawsuit in three states arguing that those states' officials

are going beyond their jurisdiction. in attempting to regulate prediction markets. So I did something this week. I listened to a podcast with Gary Gensler. I must confess. Wow. Yeah. It's called power and consequences.

What did old Gary have to say? You know, it turns out Gary is not a big fan of the prediction markets. I'm shocked to hear that. Yeah. He thinks we're going to head for a Supreme Court case around sports gambling with the states. And he didn't really come out and say he thinks the states are going to win, but that's clearly what he thinks. He doesn't think that the CFTC is going to have oversight of sports gambling. It does make me think that if someone like Gensler, I don't think he would come back as the head of the SEC or the CFTC,

but he could certainly come back as a member, a senior member of an administration here, having some oversight of financial services. Probably not a Senate-confirmed role, is my guess. But it does make me think that the prediction market players are going to be in some hot water here if the administration flips Democrat. Yeah, it's going to be a knife fight. Coinbase received conditional approval for their national trust charter from the OCC. They joined a growing cohort of crypto companies, including Circle, Ripple, Fidelity, Paxos, and BitGo. Yeah, and also EDX markets, which is a digital asset trading venue.

It's backed by Citadel. They filed an OCC application. they want to have a trust bank charter to do custody and settlement on their platform as well. So this OCC path is more and more popular. And it makes sense, right? You don't want to have these state-by-state money transmission licenses. You want to be able to just go to one regulator. These things ought to have been federally regulated from the outset.

So good to see that door open. Did you see Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF? Yeah, Morgan Stanley has done. so much, maybe the most of any legacy or conventional asset manager in terms of Bitcoin recently. They've announced their Bitcoin ETF with a expense ratio of 14 basis points. I think this would be the cheapest one on the market. Yeah, it's definitely below BlackRock's I bet, which I think was the cheapest one before that. So kind of makes sense for Morgan Stanley, right? They have that huge private wealth platform and they can just push their own product through

that channel. Makes a good deal. sense. Yeah, I've been incredibly impressed by what they've done, especially since Amy took over there. In Dat News this week, David Bailey's Nakamoto Holdings, the embattled Nakamoto Holdings, they have sold 20 million in Bitcoin this week. That's 5% of their treasury, and that's at a 40% loss relative to their entry price. What? Why would you do that? I'm guessing to pay down some debt. I thought these debts were going to buy Bitcoin and not sell it at 40% losses. That just seems like a, it's not why you buy a debt. Yeah, I mean, you get these headlines every week now.

I think last week it was Marathon. This is the problem with the dots is it's not just one directional. So people think they can only eat the coins and never spit them out, but they just get in over their skis. And we talked about this when they started buying the Bitcoin. So this was 100% predictable. and some of the more levered debts are now having a deal ever. These are some of the times we don't want to be on a public board

because you're going to have a lot of upset shareholders in a situation like this. In other news, Senator Cynthia Lummis and Bill Cassidy introduced a new bill. It's called the Mind in America Act. It has the goal of onshoreing Bitcoin mining. It's pretty interesting. I didn't really realize that that was a national. priority, but all right, why not? Yeah, the bill also attempts to codify Trump's strategic Bitcoin reserve from his executive

order. I don't know if there's enough political capital in Washington right now to do Bitcoin stuff, but we'll keep an eye on this one. But wasn't the strategic reserve? It was just an EO. So do you need congressional approval to do anything? If the whole goal of the EO was, hey, with all the criminally seized Bitcoin, we're just not going to sell it.

That's fine, right? Yeah, I'm a little muddy on the details. I think anything concerning the purse strings requires Congress. And you know what? We never got the audit of all the Bitcoin holdings. And I think that's because they lost some of the Bitcoin. Yeah, I think there's Bitcoin everywhere. The Bitcoin has been lost.

Like there was that kid of the guy who was custodying some of the Marshalls. Bitcoin and he just absconded with the coins. He took 40 million Bitcoins, $40 million worth of the Bitcoin. Yeah, I think their vendor selection process is lacking here. We have custodians, maybe for holding Bitcoin, just use a custodian and not some like government contractor out of like Alexandria. Yeah, there's established companies that do this professionally. Next up in news, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the X402 Foundation.

So that's a governing body for the X402 protocol. That's an agentic payment protocol developed by Coinbase. This is supported by Coinbase Cloud Flare and Stripe. Pretty exciting, actually. There have been some meaningful flows in these types of payments already, actually. Did you see that some of the source code for one of the cloud models was released this week? accidentally. Yeah.

Yeah. Did you see it had stable coin payments baked into it? Had like a genetic payments. Yeah. Yeah. So this is not like a public thing yet, but it looks like some of these LLAMs are going to start to do payments. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is the biggest race in all of payments right now is trying to be the protocol or the standard for agentic payments. And I don't know. I think maybe Stripe is in the lead. Stripes seems like they're being. in the best position. Maybe outside of the model providers. I mean, do you think that the model providers ever try to get into financial services?

It seems like the kind of thing Open AI would want to do. Well, OpenAI just bought a media brand. They did. They bought TBPN. What a ride those guys have been on? Wow. You know, we're not for sale yet, but, you know, TVPN, that's a pretty good comp for us, I think. Yeah, I mean, I assume that's a non-exam.

figure exit, so we would definitely consider selling on the brink. We'd consider it, but I don't know. We're trying to take this to the next level. We have bigger ambitions. Square has enabled Bitcoin payments for millions of U.S. merchants with the 0% processing fees. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Another new story here, Paradom, the Crypto Venture Fund and hedge fund, they're one of the backers of Kalshi.

They're building their own prediction market aggregation. rating terminal. I thought that was kind of interesting. I wonder if that will discriminate on order flow or if it'll, you know, see every venue or just the ones that they're backers of. Yeah, this is becoming a pattern for paradigm. And our good friend Arjun Balaji is actually running that product. I saw that. Yeah. Congrats to Arjun. A lot of these kind of aggregators, it'll be interesting to see what the retail experience looks like. Obviously, now you can trade prediction market stuff on coinbase and I think crack it now too right of course you can do it on robin hood yeah I'm a little puzzled as to how the aggregators will work because the markets are

codified differently on each platform so there's no consistency you know across how a market will be defined and paramat parameterized um yeah you know between cal shi and Polymarket and so on. So I don't know how the aggregators are going to deal with that. Yeah, I think, you know, in traditional finance, you'd have this, like, security master file and you know the attributes of a stock and, you know, how many units there are, what the various share classes are. Nothing like that exists in prediction markets because you could say, all right, will the price of Bitcoin be $100,000 on June 5th, or will it be $100,000 on June 5th on another platform, but it's actually marked as Eastern Time versus Pacific Time or something, right?

So there's these minor discrepancies. Yeah, and, you know, I think about options markets, you know, so there's more variables, right, obviously with option markets that are discrete and you have different strike prices and you have different expires. And those are the very simple when you think about a prediction markets like will the U.S. invade Iran by X-state? What does invasion mean? Now there's a different market which is will the U.S. bomb Iran, different X-free. So the option markets are already very fragmented and that's the biggest issue with them is their low liquidity. So it's just this on steroids when it comes to prediction markets. Yeah. The other problem, not to kind of point out all the

problems here because I think these are obviously very popular, but the clearing of these contracts is a huge issue. And so you don't have big DCOs that are clearing these trades. And so that leads me to believe that market makers are going to only collaborate with like one or two venues where they can have that experience. Otherwise, it's just way too complicated. So the market structure doesn't really lend itself to there being 10 of these things. Yeah. So we'll keep watching that one for you. All right, so I think that's it for the week. A lot of quantum talk this week.

I'm sure there'll be a lot of quantum talk next week. Good luck in the trenches there with all those bitcoins. Yeah, you know, I've grown to love it, actually. All right, we'll keep up the good fight. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.