On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/05/24 (WSJ attacks Tether, Chris Waller on Stables, Nic's fight announced) (EP.516)

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: How risky is Eigenlayer? The SEC is asking for public comment on ETH ETFs Is the US government about to liquidate $2b worth of Silk Road Bitcoin? Goldman wealth management CIO doesn't like Bitcoin WSJ is back with a Tether hitpiece Fed Governor Chris Waller says crypto is good for the dollar Nic and David Hoffman are fighting at Karate Combat at Consensus Sponsor notes: State of the Network's Q1 2024 Wrap-Up In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 253, we take a data-driven look at the most important events that impacted the digital assets industry in Q1 2024.

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. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nate Carter. And this episode is brought you by Coin Metrics. And here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at the last quarter of digital assets in 2021,

driven by the introduction of Spot Bitcoin ETFs. Bitcoin reached an all-time high of $73,000, ending Q1 with a 65% gain. Notable gainers included stack. up 143% render, an AI platform, up 141%. Solana, 92% near 90%. After a quarter since launch of Bitcoin ETFs, about 12 billion has flowed into these vehicles, which amounts to 4% of Bitcoin's current supply.

BlackRock's iBit has been the clear leader. Post the Ethereum Denkin upgrade, the network processed over 209,000 blobs in Q1, reducing transaction fees by about 90%. However, the introduction of blob subscriptions caused blob fees to surge at points to $60. This supply of Tether on E throws 16%. Tether on Tron rose 12%. Tether itself topped 100 billion. USDC had the largest increase of stable coins with supply growing 22%. The supply of died declined by 13%.

That is your metrics minute. All right. So recording this one on a Wednesday, that means big news. news probably on Thursday. Yep, something's going to happen. I mean, almost guaranteed because nothing happened this week. It's been a light week, huh? Yeah, so something is going to drop Wednesday.

Something will happen. Yeah, probably get an Ethereum ETF approval. Yeah, have our odds change there? There's been movement. It's been some movement. Are we wrong? Could we be wrong? We've been wrong in the past.

It wouldn't be the first time we were wrong. is the having pressed in we were wrong about well well well we'll see um we did have an active rather you had an active podcast week oh yeah i'm back on it i'm back on the podcast game we're we're doing the interviews again you had a certain mr david hoffman close friend of mine and now adversary talked about eigenlayer yeah we can talk about your your duel with david hoffman but uh david hoffman has been on the pod multiple times, bankless. I'd say one of my favorite podcasts. And he runs bankless ventures as well, along with his partner, Ryan. So David came on. We talked about Bitcoin L2s, which is a space that they've been active in lately. So we've done a couple of deals with the bankless

folks in the Bitcoin space. And then we talked about eigenlayers. So a few weeks ago, I was saying that, look, there are some risks here in the system. David slid into my DMs and said, let's talk about them. So we talked about Aveses, talked about liquid restaking tokens, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good podcast. I think there's a lot of potential for people to lever up and do dumb things in the eigenlayer ecosystem, but it was good to go through and just talk about some of the risks that exist and some of the mitigating factors that are also at play.

So what was your conclusion? David was kind of more on the pro-Igen-layer side. You're on the skeptic side. I'm not skeptical about eigen-layer. I think it's a really interesting new piece of technology, and I think a lot of people will build interesting applications for blockchains, shared security makes a lot of sense to me. I'm more worried about leverage that can build up off-chain, so to speak. So would you see the next version of three arrows get over levered and start putting a lot of

capital to work in some of these riskier pockets of the market, some of these ABSs that are offering higher yields? And ultimately, there's, you know, there's not a mechanism to have a first, lean, second lean on the underlying collateral there. So it has the potential to cascade, and you just hope that you see it. There's nothing inherent about the software that lends itself to that, but it's really about could you have the next Celsius raise hundreds of millions of dollars of off-chain assets and then just start putting them to work in some of these riskier pockets of the eigenlier ecosystem. That's actually what I'm worried about, people just levering up and

looping these LRTs. The interesting thing is that, people seem very focused on the risks of eigenlayer. Like this week, Coinbase put out a report on the rest of restaking as well. So we can't call it a black swan if it happens. It's not something of the market's not attuned to. No, the market is attuned to. I guess it would be gray swan.

Yeah. And Agenlair itself has put out some risks. They have an FAQ that we've linked in the show notes of that episode. So people, I think, are aware of them. But it's really around what's your view on just the social behavior of people in this ecosystem and their ability to risk manage? I feel okay about the leverage in the market right now. Not worrying me the way it used to. Yeah, I mean, the fact that the lending desks don't exist is a part of that, though.

Right. Well, the next one you did, I think sets the record for longest names ever on a OTB episode. You sat down with Miller Whitehouse Levine and Amanda Tuminelli of the Defi Education Fund to talk about their lawsuit against the SEC regarding Beba. Beba, yeah. So this is a really interesting case. So we talked about this a little bit last week. So Beba is an apparel retailer. So I might actually pick up one of their duffel bags.

They look pretty cool. Do you like the Baba? Yeah, they're sourced in Kenya, I believe. Really nice looking to bags there. So the crypto angle is, is there a fidgetal element? So it's almost like a coupon. So they have these tokens that you can redeem to get discounts on the actual apparel. And they want to airdrop these tokens.

And I guess they already have done one version of this air drop. So it's almost like a loyalty point system coupon type of a use case. They don't intend for this thing to be the next new L1. This Beba token is really useful in the context of buying some of these, some of these bags. And so they have sued the SEC proactively saying, you know, there's no clear rules of the road here. We don't want to be in a situation where we get sued for doing an unregistered securities offering. We want clarity that airdrops are not in and of themselves securities. And then there's a second count of the suit that the Defy Education Fund is involved in, which is

just getting access to the SEC's internal documentation around how they decide to go after these token projects because it's haphazard to say the least. And so do they have an internal document that says all digital assets are securities, for instance? How do they parse whether or not an asset is a security versus a commodity versus a loyalty point? And it'll be interesting to see what comes of that. So there's, I think, a 30-day period after this lawsuit is served that the SEC can

come back and file a motion to dismiss. If it is not dismissed, then this case goes to discovery on both. So the SEC will get to see information from Beba and the Defy Education Fund and vice versa. So to get discovery into the internal workings of the SEC here would be quite interesting. Well, any apparel manufacturer that sues the SEC of a securities laws has my attention. Yeah. So I'm going to be investigating the Beba merchandise now. They just got five minutes of free airtime on this podcast and then about 30 minutes earlier in the week.

So I consider me intrigued by the Beba product line. Yeah, maybe we can have them do our next round of merch here. Oh, that's a great idea. We are overdue for merch. Do you think there's more fud to put on the dice? Well, we have some fud. Well, it's kind of the same old fud. We're going to cover it today.

The Wall Street Journal has been out of it again. They never quit. What about L2 fud? L2 fud is going to be a thing, right? There's a fair amount of fud in the market today. Athena Fud. There's a lot of Athena Fud out there. bunch of deals. These are just the deals that happen through Wednesday, but we'll call them out.

First one up is a Castle Island deal. So this is Station 70. It's a disaster recovery infrastructure platform for private keys. So safely store your backups. That's kind of the mission of this company. So they've raised $5 million in a round that we led at Castle Island Ventures. It had participation from fireblocks, notation capital, Symantec, SCB 10X, and coin chairs. So really excited to be in business with Adam Healy, someone that we've known really since we got started in this industry. So really psyched to be behind the Station 70 team. Yeah, I'm fired up about this one. Next up we have Agora, an interest-bearing stable coin issuer founded by Nick Venick.

They raised 12 million from Dragonfly General Catalyst and Robot Ventures. Then we have Zion. This is a layer one blockchain that raised $25 million from Anamoka, Laser Digital, multi-coin, and Arrington Capital. This one gets my vote for name of the week. Sofon, a public blockchain protocol. There raised 10 million from Paper Ventures, Maven 11, 7X, Spartan, OKX, and Hobe. That's a three-body reference.

So the so-fons were the things in the three-body problem that the aliens sent to basically inhibit humans from learning things, right? It basically just kept humanity dumb. Yeah, I don't, we'll admit, I don't understand the analogy to the startup. But do you ever think that basically the aliens did succeed in sending sofons? It's possible. And it's kind of expressed in the form of desal activism around energy and AI. Like there is an effort society-wide to inhibit technological progress. In fact, a very active one.

I think so. I think there's a bunch of things that I would have thought would have been solved problems by now. Like, why do we still get sore throats and cold? Do we have anyone working on that? I'm like, why have we not invested more in nuclear energy? I don't know. Why is AI development hampered by AI safety? Like, the, I think the trisolarans actually succeeded.

Yeah, like, why do we still have potholes? Why is that still a thing? The sofans are with us. They're here. They're with us. They are with us, yeah. Why are we still allowing, you know, scammy token launches? Stuff like that.

There are a lot of things. Humanity, we have not figured it out. Did you watch the Netflix series? I haven't watched it yet. Do you recommend I jump into it now or should I wait for it to be a little bit more fully developed? I read the three books. I read the books. They're great.

I watched the Tencent film adaptation, which was amusing. There were a lot of Chinese commercials in there. Was it in English? I haven't. I think. subtitled subtitle in the English yeah I've heard that the Netflix one is very good

that was one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read it was exceptional towards the end I didn't understand the end of the third one it was very trippy and it got more into physics than I was comfortable with it made me wish I was a lot smarter on physics how many people actually understood that yeah yeah

the other thing is for these sci-fi epics that span millions of years in terms of the timeline, you can't get attached to any character. Right. Because they're so fleeting. Right. So it's like 500 pages on one character. And then it fast forwardes like 8,000 years.

It's like, all right, this person is so irrelevant now. Yeah, it's the hard part about watching these. What was that McConaughey one, the movie that he was in? Interstellar. Interstellar. Yeah, when he goes and he's gone for what he thinks is a couple hours, and then it's like 80 years on Earth or something. They're a great film.

Yeah. Underrated. File that one and why haven't we figured this out yet. What's to do with space? Well, why haven't we figured out how it works? How to defeat gravity and time travel? Yeah. I don't know.

That might be a fundamental physics thing. Might be. All right. Next one up is IOTech. This is a blockchain focused on decentralized. physical infrastructure networks, there is $50 million from SNZ Holdings, Foresight, borderless, Amber Group, and escape velocity. Then we have Camp Network, their Layer 2 network focused on entertainment and gaming.

They raise $4 million from Maven 11 and OKX. Then it's AutoLayer, a liquid restaking platform that raised $2.5 million from KuKoin Labs and Morningstar Ventures. And lastly, legitimate, speaking of Fidgetals, their platform focused on connecting physical objects to digital records. They raised 4.3 million from Lemnus Cap and Spermian. Legitimate's a good name for a company. Isn't there a legit exchange?

They're also suing the SEC. That's right. Yeah, legit exchange. Well, speaking of the SEC, we referenced the Ethereum spot ETF at the outside here, but the SEC has asked for public comments on these ETF proposals from grayscale, bitwise, and fidelity. So these just hit the public record,

which probably means they told the issuers, I don't know, two, three weeks ago that these are going for public comment. It'll be interesting to see what the public comments end up being. You can just bet your life that better markets is coming in hot here. Oh, yeah. The mother of all fud. Dennis, Dennis Kelleher just having a field day this morning.

He's like, how do we get more people to copy and paste our thoughts into these comment letters? Some intern is working overtime on reading. Talking points from Bitcoin Maxi Twitter about why Ethereum is a scam. Yes. Yes. And they're going to compile it. Yeah. It's going to be all about the Ethereum ICO and there's just going to be all sorts of stuff here. And also it'll be relevant that you will see names on these comment letters and you will say, why did that person write what they wrote? And then two hours later, that person will be on

Twitter and say, I didn't write that. Someone just submitted it under my name. in the SEC does not actually have a two-factor authentication process to actually validate whether or not you're actually submitting the comment letter. So there will be high-profile. Have they fixed that? No. Oh, okay. So you would think that that would be an easy fix.

It's like click your email to confirm it's actually you, but that's not the way this works. It's too complicated. Does this change anything materially in your view for the ETH ETFs? No, not really. I mean, I'll continue to say, I think if you just read the interpretation of the law, you look at the correlation analysis, this is a slam dunk. The SEC should approve these ETFs. I just don't think they will. I think that there are larger forces at play.

I think this SEC has shown no willingness to go out of its way to do the right thing. And I think they will disprove, and then I think it'll be a, the next question will be, well, who's going to sue the SEC? in order to get this through. So in somewhat terrifying news this week, a large cash of coins held by the U.S. government, in fact, 30,000 bitcoins worth $2 billion. These were seized from the Silk Road? Or were they stolen from the Silk Road and then seized,

or were they just directly seized from the Silk Road? I believe they were seized from the Silk Road. So these moved to Coinbase. Well, some of them did. So it looks like a little bit over 100 million moved to Coinbase. The rest still appear to be in a government wallet. That was maybe not reported like that initially. But it's about $1.9 billion worth of Bitcoin at current market prices.

I don't know. Do you think they're selling them? I mean, they've sold. Similar as such Bitcoins in the past. Yeah. It seems to me there in tennis itself. I think that's part of the market jitters this week. The other thing I would say would be the move in the 10 year.

Pretty sharp rally there. Do you think this news got out? Because what was it on Sunday night, the Bitcoin price just tanked. It was off like 10% in an hour or something like that. And then early on Monday you see this wallet wake up and move the coins. Someone had to have known. I mean, you have to think that eventually we're going to run out of these sort of like structural or four sellers. Even GBDC has actually slowed the pace of outflows, which is a nice reprieve.

Yeah, so GBTC had 81.9 million of outflows yesterday, which was Tuesday. That was offset by BlackRock Fidelity bitwise. So there was only $40 million of net inflows on April 2nd. but it's positive. So even if you look at this and you say $1.9 million is going into the market, that's about a week of flows here, depending on what GPTC is going to do. So interesting news, Coinbase selected LightSpark,

David Marcus's company to bring Bitcoin's Lightning Network to their platform. Good job LightSpark. Yeah, that's a good haul. Yeah, David Marcus and Christian over. at LightSpark. Congrats to them. You know what I want is a stable coin on Lightning?

I think the Lightning Labs is working on an asset protocol. Well, they've tapperate assets, right? They've been working on it for some time. Hopefully that's out soon. I think that's where this gets really interesting for Lightning users.

The other thing that I think Lightning is just really well designed for is exchange to exchange settlements. But I don't see any evidence that that's actually occurring. No, and you know, I was reviewing the numbers. Lightning TVL, I know people like to complain that it's not all publicly visible. Is around 300 million, in Bitcoin terms, it's actually been declining since early 23.

So not to denigrate lightning, but I do think that's cause to explore other L2s on Bitcoin, which are being built now. you know, if you're a content creator and you want to have micro payments, have people tip you and pay you for paywalt content and things like that, you could certainly do it with Bitcoin now, but the addressable market for just making that dollar enabled and obfuscating everything under the hood, I think is so much bigger. Totally. Yeah, I mean, especially because if you're making the payment in dollar terms, you don't have

to do all this complicated tax accounting. Right. So stable coins on lightning make it happen. So did you see this Wall Street Journal article on Charmin Masavar Ramani, who is the chief investment officer of Goldman Sachs wealth management this week? Yeah, she really doesn't like Bitcoin. Yeah, that's kind of the whole point of this profile was to say Bitcoin is going up and Goldman CIO is very anti-Bitcoin.

Yeah, she. She thinks that Bitcoin is used for crime. Of course, no one's ever used a bank for crime. So that is unique to Bitcoin. She doesn't feel there's any way to take a view on it because there's no cash flow. She doesn't think there's any value. She thinks it's ironic because apparently there's a few people that control Bitcoin. I'm not sure about that one.

and it doesn't offer any service, according to her. She uses we a lot. It's kind of one of these things where these opinions are fine, if they're your personal opinions. But to say we do not think that this is an investment asset class, we are not believers in crypto, it kind of speaks for the whole organization. Yeah, that's a little problematic because Goldman itself,

obviously different divisions within the firm, but they're different parts of Goldman are actually pretty active in crypto. Oh, sure. Yeah, the Goldman crypto team is top notch. I'd say probably the best crypto team of any of the banks. And they're very deep. They're doing things. They've built stuff.

So it's kind of a tough look there. It's also probably a tough look if you're one of these Goldman advisors and you have clients that want to own this stuff. And obviously they can. Like Goldman has the Bitcoin ETFs on their platform already. Goldman is an authorized participant on a, number of these Bitcoin ETF products. So very tough look if your job is to go out and work with customers that actually want exposure to this. And then your boss is saying, we don't believe in it.

We don't think it's an investment class. It's tulips. One of our quotes was funny. She said, at least you can hold on to physical gold and store it. You can't do that with crypto. Yeah, you can. I don't know. Yeah, you can. She's talking about there. And she says, anyway, we don't encourage people to own gold. Yeah, she's been anti-gold for a while. So I get it. If you have this anti-gold prior, then you're probably anti-Bitcoin too. But gold's doing pretty good.

It has a clear use. It's like a real rates hedge. It's at an all-time high, I think. I don't see why you would just wall off entire asset classes. Wouldn't you want just to account for the total? totality of assets that your clients are holding? I'd be interested to see what the actual impact here is in terms of losing customers. I spoke to an individual this week who is on one of these large wirehouse bank platforms.

So they store a bulk of his retirement savings and told me that he moved everything over to Fidelity in the past couple of weeks. And the advisor called him up and said, what's going on? Where are you leaving? And he said, look, I work in this industry. and you guys are vocally not supporting it. So you're trying to put me out of business. Why would I continue to pay you?

You're paying 1% of your total assets a year or to an entity that is using that money to go out and get themselves PR hits on their anti-crypto takes. Yeah, the tone of the top matters. It just doesn't seem prudent to fade a rapidly developing asset class that most, many or most of your young clients,

clients will, you know, want to engage with. I'd love to see the transfer of asset flows onto places like Fidelity, post-ETF approval. I just think there's a lot of goodwill there to be one of these entities that has advice and guidance, but actually has leaned into this industry and is not trying to take a vocal stance against it. I mean, honestly, Goldman is a little bit different because the tone at the very top hasn't been as overtly hostile. J.P. Morgan, totally no excuse. if you still have your private wealth relationship at J.P. Morgan. If you have your credit cards of J.P. Morgan, it makes no sense to me.

So easy to switch over to fidelity. Another interesting Wall Street Journal article, kind of tough read, actually. Our favorite journalist Angus Berwick, this article is entitled, Crypto Fuels Russian Shadow Trade for Weapons Parts. Hmm. Could almost...

Weapons parts. Control search for... for Bitcoin and replace that with dollars and it would have been the same article, huh? Yeah, so the whole article is about how basically Russian arms firms are still able to make transactions. In particular with Tether, that's the claim. And there's folks quoted in the article saying you can transact with Russia, you can transact with Iran. if you're using tether. You know, I'm not disputing the facts of the sourcing,

but it kind of just occurs to me, like, what if there is a Wall Street Journal article every time someone used cash for something nefarious? Like when the Biden admin sent their, or was it, the Obama admin sent money to Iran for the kind of nuclear deal, the Iran nuclear deal, that was a literal deal.

pallets of cash. Correct. So are we going to get an article every time someone does something with US dollars that the government disapproves of? It's like, what do you think? Stablecoins are just going to vanish? I don't understand the notion of like casting moral aspersions over the entire stablecoin sector because there's some transactions that journalists don't like. It's crazy. I mean, the page views on throwing crypto. or staple coins into the mix, you get a lot more page views than just saying cash. But it's like we've said on this podcast for years. If cash was invented today, it would be completely illegal.

Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, the sanctions didn't work. Like Russia is able to transact freely with their suppliers. They found other ways. Other sovereign currencies, banking systems, they don't touch the U.S., cash in some cases. they have this thing where they have this multi-stage import where they'll import things through intermediary nations that aren't sanctioned. So you can see this in the data. There's all these small nations where exports to Russia skyrocketed after the sanctions, showing that now there's

just intermediary nations that are basically rendering that service. So I don't know. I mean, it seems like the sanctions didn't work. And yeah, I mean, look, I don't dispute that the tether is being used here, but at the same time, Tether is actually pretty active in terms of freezing addresses. You know, and cash cannot be frozen in a distance, whereas stable coins can't. I mean, if the U.S. really cared about going after Tether, there's an easy way to go after Tether. And it has nothing to do with enforcement actions.

It has to do with designing a market structure bill in the United States. and putting rules in place around who can and cannot issue stable coins. And then you just live in a world where banks and broker dealers would be able to touch the ones that are approved under that market structure bill. And if Tether wants to fall under that regime, then they can go and apply like everyone else. And so just lean into it and then you're going to grow the pie tremendously in terms of just total stable coin activity. Yeah, there was, on the other hand, there was something interesting that I saw from Fed Governor Chris Waller. This was from a February speech, but he seemed to grasp the importance of stable coins for the U.S. So this is kind of taking the opposite view.

He says, quote, most trading in DFI involves trades using stable coins. About 99% of stable coin market cap is linked to the U.S. dollar. That's true. Meaning that crypto assets are de facto traded in U.S. dollars. So it's likely that any expansion of trading in the defy world will simply strengthen the dominant roll of the dollar. This is a man that gets us. Spot on. Yeah. I mean, this seems obvious to people like us. We've been saying exactly this for a long time now. But what is interesting to me is that a Federal Reserve governor would come out and openly state this. That's awesome. I mean,

he clearly gets it. Is he looking for a job higher up in the administration? Yeah. I mean, yeah at the end of the day stable coins buy the u.s debt they strengthen the role of the dollar they are bad for weak sovereign currencies where you see crypto dollarization occurring they're not really bad for the dollar at all and that 99% number i'm curious where you got it i think you might have got it from us somewhere along the line we first published that in uh 2020 in our white paper. That's true. It really is dollars that people want for stables. You know, not so all those arguments are true. I mean, the other thing is from a surveillance perspective, it's a lot easier to track a stable coin flow than it is to track a

pallet of cash. And so from a domestic security standpoint, I would think that this would just be far more favorable. Yeah, they're just more legible. And even transactions through a network of offshore banks, those are actually pretty hard to track and to, interrupt and it requires going through the legal system and there's a significant amount of latency there. With stable coins, you go direct to the issuer and you say, hey, we've identified these addresses are problematic. Will you freeze them? It's direct. Right. So when you talk to law enforcement about this stuff, they tend to prefer that illicit activity occurs with stable coins because it is more legible and it's easier to interrupt. So another pretty interesting

development this week. So SEC Commissioner Hester Purse gave a, gave just an awesome speech at this, I guess it's called SEC Speaks Conference. And she highlighted a range of issues going on at the SEC, specifically get the bingo card ready, staff accounting bulletin 121 and the way that that guidance was rolled out and how the office of the chief accountant completely overstep the bounds of what the SEC should be doing. Really good speech. We'll put it in the show notes. I think everyone should go check it out. But pretty rare, I'd say, to have an SEC commissioner come out and be this truthful around what's going on at the SEC and kind of goes into some advice on how to engage with the SEC, including one thing, which is saying take notes and document everything

that happens with the agency, because that can be helpful later, almost suggesting, like, watch your back. Yeah. Yeah, this is a great speech. And yeah, we'll put this one in the show notes. All right. So that was kind of the bulky news of the week. We do have some Warcast comments. Someone talking about Bush's baked beans as a bake bean option since I talked about baked bean pizza.

I'd say Bush's baked beans are probably my favorite brand of baked beans. I don't know if you have a view on that. As a Brit, I meant to like bake beans. I just cannot stand them. I don't like them. Completely repulsive, especially on pizza. It's crazy. Yeah, well, Bush's baked beans would be my preferred method.

And then we have some people talking about the fact that you're doing a celebrity MMA match against David Hoffman. Yeah, that's right. So, well, technically it's karate. So that's announced. And, yeah, you know, here's the contours of the fight. So we're headlining the influencer fight series of karate combat. Cardi combat is a real promotion, you know, actual, I think, professionals fight in it, some X UFC guys. I've actually been to, to their events.

So it's basically kickboxing. There's no grappling. It's not BJJ. And I'm not a fighter at all. But they asked me if I would do it. And I said yes. And then I asked David if he would fight me. He thought about it for a little bit and said yes.

Well, there you go. And so where does the, there's a charitable contribution to open source developers as part of this? Yeah. So we, so there is. actually a purse for the fight. But on top of that, David and I have a side bet, which is 10,000 either donated to Bitcoin Core org. So I would probably have him donate to Brink if I won, and then I would donate to a theorem core development if he won, if he wins. So that's happening.

The tale of the tape is as follows. David claims to be 510. I think that's probably right. I mean, I've met him in person. We're about the same size. I'm 5-9. He weighs 160. I'm about 170. We're fighting 165. I don't know what the reach is.

I haven't measured his arms or mine. But tell you what, the polymarket's not looking good in terms of the odds. Polymarket says that he's a 63% chance to win here. Yeah, I couldn't disagree with that more. Yeah, so that upsets you. To be clear, I'm very confident about this fight. Yeah. Well, David has a pretty big reach in the Ethereum community,

which is, you know, polymarket's backyard. Yeah, I think there's structural bias there. So this will be May 30th in Austin, Texas. At consensus, I think it'll actually be in the consensus venue. I believe if you have a ticket to consensus, you can go to the fight, and there will also be tickets for the fight. Is that right?

So stop asking me, because everyone's asking me when can I where do I get the tickets they're not out yet okay I will tell you when they're out they're not out yet so who owns consensus now bullish now that they bought coin desk do they also get consensus I guess yeah I suppose but this is a karate comment thing it's just kind of affiliated with consensus so yeah it's it's honestly a short fight it's two two minute rounds oh wow all right one so yeah normally the normal rounds are three minutes this is short two two minute rounds and if we're tied one third one minute round oh okay all right so yeah so my objective is just to kind of not look completely untrained yeah i'd say that my objective is to have you

not look completely untrained too i mean i want to win obviously and i think i will so my prediction is that i will win so if you believe in me bring nation polymarkets right there and uh but yeah to also look reasonable. And I think, so the bar is the Bitboy versus Morlite fight because they headlined the last one. Yeah. They were just swinging for the fences the whole time. Yeah, at that bit, so I obviously I didn't watch it. It wasn't, it was on at like three in the morning. First of all, I watched it. Can they just accelerate these things? Why do they run so late? Yeah, I think it'll be late. That's going to be something I'm going to have to train for. Yeah, fighting it, take a nap. To a two in the morning or something. but yeah, I was an entertaining fight

because they were really going, they were trying to hurt each other. Yeah. So I see you more of like a pickleball athlete. How would you say your pickleball skills rank versus your fighting skills so far? Well, I'm actually very good at pickleball. In fact, I have one allowed to say this.

I beat Jeannie Bouchard at pickleball last weekend. And I guess just Google that. That's a professional tennis player, right? Former world number four in tennis and pro pickle. She's pro and pickle. Hopefully she doesn't listen to this podcast. I hope not.

I hope not. She was not happy about that. So yeah, pickle, I'm quite good. Fighting, I have no idea at all. But I just think it's going to come down to who's more of a killer. Oh, okay. All right. And look, David, good friend of mine.

You know, we're friends. We'd done climbing together and stuff like that. But I think I'm more of a killer than David. So that's really it. Yeah, it's tough. You know, two people you really like get in the cage. It would be one thing if you could fight against some of the bad boys of crypto, you know. Yeah, look, I've been trying to, you know, get Kyle Davies to fight, but I don't think he wants to.

Oh, he can't come to the U.S. Yeah, look, I don't actually know how tall or big he is, but after. He looks pretty tall. After three weeks of training, I think I can take him. But yeah, we're going to start with David, and then we'll see if I have any appetite to continue my prize fighting career. All right. So stay tuned on that one. All right, that's it for the week. We'll leave it there. I'm sure there'll be some big news. We'll break in if we have to on Thursday. But have a safe and healthy weekend and we'll see you on Monday.