On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/11/25 (Tether's new stablecoin, Signature, dedollarization, DoJ disbands crypto team) (EP.612)

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Is dedollarization happening? The SEC's Division of Corporate Finance released a "Statement on Stablecoins" The US Justice Department has disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement team The SEC releases new guidance on securities offerings in crypto markets FDIC Chair relaxes rules on crypto activities at banks Paul Atkins is confirmed The SEC has approved options trading for spot ETH ETFs Tether is exploring a US stablecoin Janover is doing a Microstrategy for SOL strategy Michelle Bowman is launching a review of the Fed's failures in 2023 around the banking crisis What happened to Signature?  Matt's critter situation Content mentioned: SEC, Offerings and Registrations of Securities in the Crypto Asset Markets

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

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

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And a full week went by. We talked about tariffs last week, and the market's about. in the same spot as it was last week. Well, things don't seem good, that's for sure.

I'm seeing very serious commentators out there saying that they think de-dollarization is happening. I don't know if I believe it, to be honest with you. I don't think it's happening. How would you even define de-dollarization? I mean, if the percentage of dollars used as just the trading mechanism and global trade goes down by a percent, is that de-dollarization? Or what are we talking about something more?

I mean, I guess maybe like gold becoming the reserve asset instead of treasuries. There's a couple of percentage points of the margin here and there, but I don't know, man. I don't think equity values or the dollar index have moved enough that anything concrete has actually happened. Yeah, I mean, what's the alternative here? I mean, what other currency would you use to settle these global trades? Could you see the world moving over to use the Chinese Yuan in lieu of the dollar? I really doubt it. It's not like China's become more integral to global trade in the last week.

They're also under pressure. And are these people paying attention to the stable coin market? I think if anything, it's going the other way, where you see some of these longer-tailed fiat currencies just collapsing potentially as a result of stable coins becoming more pervasive. There is this interesting debate, though, which I think is. may be happening. So Stephen Moran, he has been echoing this point that Luke Groman has made for a long time, which is, you know, we, and actually this has become like a very popular talking point. We, you know, issue dollars and give that to the world. And in return, we have this big trade deficit

and we import cheap goods. So it's like dollars for goods. And the idea is that that's, you know, artificially strengthened the dollar and made our exports uncompetitive and so we suffered a hollowed out of the manufacturing sector. But then at the same, so then that is an argument for reducing the dollar's dominance for the sake of the American worker.

But then that stands opposed to this notion of reinforcing the dollar's dominance maybe with stable coins, which we've also heard out of Washington. So which one is it? Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, I still just go back to what's the alternative here. I mean, people are going to use dollars as long as it's the strongest fiat currency.

And the Chinese yuan just won't satisfy that objective. And plus, it's pegged to the dollar. Yeah, and the yen and the euro. Come on. There's no alternative. So what, we're just kind of a fragmented system, a basket of currencies and gold in there too? Well, and this is where, you know, the Bitcoin people say, no, you just use Bitcoin. but Bitcoin is microscopic in terms of this just size here so that you can't use Bitcoin.

Yeah, the gold bid has really actually taken me by surprise. It's on just this belly bursting rally. Yeah, gold has really done well. I mean, these gold venture capital funds must be crushing it, huh? Well, I mean, everything's melting down. So everyone's upset right now. I would just say give it time, you know. It hasn't fundamental change to the economic order really happened.

I personally do not think so. Well, we just keep on going with the content here. It was a busy content week. Sean sat down on the token warrant podcast with Milan McKay, the founder and CEO of Kuala Pay to discuss bringing stable coins as a rail to help the humanitarian aid market. So that was a good podcast. Yeah, Qualopay, one of our newest investments,

really fascinating company. you know when it comes to international aid something like there's 20% loss because of issues getting the funds to the destination these are places without you know functional financial systems and with stable coins you know there are these you know all you need for you know a dollar stable coin to make its way to the local FX is either local exchange or even a peer-to-peer market so as long as someone willing to accept the stable coin, you can actually remit those funds. So it's a really fascinating case study in why stable coins are just more, I don't know

I would say more functional, but they're able to get their tendrils into places where the financial system can't reach. Yeah, I mean, you're displacing duffel bags of cash, really for some of these use cases, which is just objectively a better, a better mechanism, less leakage for sure. And you sat down with Huli. Ted Chwani, the head of Coinbase Ventures. Yeah, that was a fun podcast. Coinbase Ventures has done something like 500 transactions in the early stage

crypto venture market. So really fascinating to hear more about their strategy. And they have some great deals over there. And we had another podcast this week. Wyatt sat down, our Wyatt sat down with Wyatt Lonergan and Juan Lopez of Van Eck Ventures, which is very much focused on stable coins and other really good podcast. So busy, busy podcast week over here. Let's hop into some deals of the week. First deal is in our portfolio. It's a massive acquisition. This is Hidden Road. The prime broker,

they were required for $1.25 billion by Ripple. Yeah, really exciting news here. Congratulations to the Hidden Road team. Smart move by Ripple too. I mean, Hidden Road is a dominant force in that PB category and you can see the strategic rationale of Ripple acquiring them and really using this as distribution for not only the XRP ledger, I guess, but the Ripple stable coin. Yeah, Ripple has quietly amassed a portfolio of interesting businesses over there through their acquisition strategy. Next one up is Blackbird. This is a blockchain-based restaurant loyalty app.

They raised $50 million from Spark Capital, Coinbase ventures, Amex Ventures, and Dreson Horowitz, and a number of others. Then we have meanwhile, they're a Bitcoin-based life insurance company. There raise 40 million from Framework and Folger Ventures. Then it's Codex. This is a stable coin-focused layer one network. They raise $16 million from Dragonfly, Coinbase, Circle, Wintermute, and others. Stablecoin-focused layer ones and layer twos are definitely going to be a theme for the

rest of the year. They're very hot right now. As is just the general stablecoin space, we have p-to-p.mee. stable coin payments app they raised 2 million from multi-coin and coinbase then we have cap labs this is a stable coin yield protocol they raised eight million dollars from franklin templeton gsr and others then we have sats terminal a bitcoin defy platform there is 1.7 million from coinbase ventures and draper associates then it's octane security this is an ai-enabled auditing platform that raised seven million dollars from archetype winklevoss droid partners and others

And lastly, we have slingshot of crypto trading up. They were acquired by Magic Eden, which is an NFT marketplace. All right, a bunch of news this week. I thought this one was interesting. Janover, which is a publicly traded commercial real estate software company, they announced that they plan to adopt Solana as the primary reserve asset for the company and that they have raised $42 million in convertible notes from Pantera, Krakin, and Arrington, among others.

they want to build a defy development corporation for the salana ecosystem so this is am i right this is the micro strategy for salana playbook here yes and there's a couple of these out there so janover had a good start to life uh i guess they were trading up four dollars on friday rocketed to $37 by it in the next Monday. And now they're actually at $45. So about a thousand percent in a month. Do you think this is going to be a thing for every, you know, cryptocurrency network or every big ecosystem that there's a publicly traded company that does ecosystem type of investments? For the for certain all ones, I think. I could see it for Bitcoin East Salon. I don't know if there's desire for the avalanche version of this. Yeah, and I wonder how many of these

the market will support. Yeah. And I mean, the beauty of the micro strategy one is they've access to the fixed income markets for the smaller microcap names that will have to come in time. Well, the interesting thing about micro strategies is that they had a business there that they could borrow against, right? And so I guess it looks like Janover probably does. too if they're a real estate software company. So you have to be able to service the debt if you run this playbook, right? Yes. We will keep an eye on that one.

Very interesting news this week. Tether is reportedly exploring a U.S.-based stable coin to sit alongside USDT. So I guess the idea is that U.S.D.T will remain offshore and in parallel, assuming this stablecoin bill goes through. which favors domestic stable coins, they'll attempt to launch a domestic stable coin, also dollar backed. What do you see is the key differences between these stable coins? I think my best understanding of USCT is that they operate with this reg S exemption.

So they're not US base. They don't endeavor to have US users. I think there is kind of a de minimis exception whereby there can be some usage in the U.S., but if it's sort of primarily offshore, you're not exposed to U.S. rugs. And I think they want to play in the onshore market, too. And the stable-cold makes that very difficult. So I think this actually makes a lot of sense.

Interesting. All right. Well, I'm going to be pretty intrigued with how those things end up functioning. I mean, I would imagine USDT is going to be hard to displace. I mean, so the U.S. version will just be a lot smaller and maybe some more targeted use cases. So the SEC's division of corporate finance, also on the stable coin front, has released a statement on stable coins, which covers, focuses on what they called covered stable coins. So those are stable coins backed one to one with short term treasuries or cash and drum roll. These are not securities.

So we kind of knew this. But it's also nice to have them say it. Yeah, I mean, I'm grateful that they said it. It is kind of obvious that they're not securities, but this would not have been obvious with Gensler. You could have seen a world where he would have said that USDC was a security. Well, they tried, right? I mean, didn't they for a while maintain that BUSD was a security?

They did, right? They went after Binance and I guess Paxos too. Yeah, I think we did a whole analysis of this under Reeves and how we. did. Do you remember? We did a podcast about this. I mean, it's, I seem to remember us expounding on this at length. And, I mean, if you just tick through the prongs of Reeves, which is the thinking man, Sowie, you know, it's just not a security. I'm sorry. Did you see, I think this happened after we recorded last week. It might happen over the weekend even that the SEC's X page posted a number of, a number of updates that said that Doge was coming in and reviewing certain SEC statements and probably going to pull back on

some of them. And a lot of them had to do with digital asset guidance. So this is like the SEC podcast this week. There's so much. Aside from that, there is new guidance, courtesy of the division of corporate finance regarding the kinds of disclosures that a token issuer or an issue of a. crypto assets should make, which is very interesting. I mean, this is kind of what we've been asking for, hoping for, is some kind of parallel regime that's analogous to equity securities

as it pertains to tokens. I guess my question is, so we'll link this in the show notes too for you to read. My question is, is this in place or is this kind of a proposal and then it'll be crystallized at some point by legislation. Not sure how to think about that, but when the SEC puts out guidance and it falls under your purview as a company, usually it would be a good idea to abide by that guidance, which is why some of the guidance that was put out during the Gensler administration was super problematic because you have broker-dealers look at that guidance or register investment advisors, look at that guidance and say, well, we just can't do crypto stuff.

this one seems like a kind of a no-brainer obvious one for an issuer of a security to start to abide by these things. So I would think you'd just see companies abiding by it, but eventually you would get some of this codified in a market structure bill, ideally, right? Yeah, I mean, I think a legislative codification would be ultimately necessary here long term. But I think the key point here in this tweet was we're not saying your crypto-assification. sets our securities, but if they are, and we're working on clarifying that. Or if your company is involved in the crypto industry, here's some disclosure guidance. Oh, I see. So this is for things that are considered explicitly securities that are issued on a blockchain.

Yeah. On elsewhere in Washington, this is very interesting. The DOJ has disbanded its national cryptocurrency enforcement team. I believe this was the team behind the samurai, uh, wallet and tornado cash prosecutions among others. So it looks like there's just going to be a lot less focus on, I don't know, going after the good guys, going after the bad guys, maybe just less enforcement in general. I don't know. I would not interpret this as a open season to do crime here. I think that this is, this seems a little bit more targeted to me and that the DOJ will not be

going after open source developers. But, you know, I think the government's still pretty interested in getting criminals. Yeah. So Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that Biden's administration had pursued a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution within the digital asset industry. I suppose a lot of people in crypto were felt very hard done by with the prosecutions of open source developers, you know, building privacy technology. and who is that developer that gave a talk in North Korea?

Virgil Griffith from the Ethereum Foundation. Yeah. Who just got out of prison, by the way. I saw that. I'm maybe more in the middle on this one. I mean, I don't think you should go to North Korea and tell them how to do crypto. No, definitely not. Definitely you should.

And frankly, I might get a little heat for this. I think there was a case against a tornado cashdubs. I do think there was a case. I think they knew that illicit entities would be using that protocol. I think they for sure knew. You know, it's such a nuanced one because on one hand, if you just created this privacy technology and you put it out into the wild and bad guys started to use it in addition to good guys using it,

I would have a lot of sympathy for the developers. But on the tornado cash side, didn't they, they had like a token and they were profiting for it. So they made money from illicit actors. So their incentive was to get maximal usage of this thing, good guy or bad guy. Yeah. So, I mean, that part of it is a bad fact. Yeah, I'm maybe less sympathetic to this than most crypto people are.

Yeah, I'm less sympathetic to it as well. But the part about you can't just blanket it all and say, okay, well, you built this technology and we're going after you for building the technology. It has to be hyper-targeted around, okay, you profited from this. you know, you have to have it be a little bit more nuanced, I think. Yeah, so maybe, you know, the facts around the major kind of flagship cases here, whether it's Tornado, Virgil Riffith, or Samurai are not that positive. You know, they're not the most sympathetic cases, frankly.

But perhaps precedent-wise, it's good that the DOJ is not. going to be going after open source developers and they'll be focusing on cases of fraud and things like that i mean i guess you could use this to go after developers of tor right although i guess tour was built by the u.s government wasn't it yeah it's like the spider-man meme pointing at you know spider-man pointing at spider-man but think about a technology that i mean a lot of bad guys use right i mean that's a open-source technology and basically that's the dark web right but the u.s government invented it Yeah, I mean, we're even like firearms, you know, we don't put engineers at Smith and Wesson in prison for making guns, even though gangsters use them. We had these same exact arguments in the early days of the internet around encryption on browsers.

The argument was, okay, well, bad guys are going to use this. There's going to be a lot of bad things happening on the internet. And yeah, there are a lot of bad things that happen on the internet. But there's also a lot of good things. I mean, bad guys are not Luddites. they use technology. So you can't just criminalize the development of technology. Bad guys are early adopters to almost every new technology.

That's the other thing. Telephone was used by bad guys in the early days. Hate to break it. Again on the SEC, Paul Atkins has been confirmed as the new chair of the SEC. That was a 52 to 44 vote along party lines. He was an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008. And of course, everyone expects him to take a friendlier posture towards the crypto space. Congrats to Chair Atkins.

I wish we could go back. I guess we could go back and listen to what we said when Gensler was approved four years ago. I recall talking about this. We could. We could very much go back and listen. It's like, hey, this guy knows a lot. I mean, we actually went over to his class and spent some time with him. And I think he knows a lot about crypto.

This would probably be pretty good. So careful being too happy here. You never know what happens. Yeah. personnel or policy is that it personal or policy yeah elsewhere the ftic interim acting chair Travis Hill had an interesting speech that he delivered at the american bankers association on a number of things the two things that really caught my attention was his comments on crypto so he said you know they're releasing new guidance and

crypto related activities for banks will be treated just like other permissible activities. He also said that under the previous FDIC model, the prior notification requirement effectively prohibited many banks from engaging in crypto-related activities. So I think we can all agree that Chokepoint was not a conspiracy. I don't know how many times we need this to be confirmed. So basically they're saying, yeah, you can do crypto stuff. You don't have to get prior approval for that. thing he said was he wants more de novo bank formation, which is very exciting, because no one starts banks anymore. It just doesn't happen. And it's, I think it's actually a Dodd-Frank thing.

It just became very, very expensive to start a new bank. I think it was the rate of de novo bank formation since Dodd-Frank was around five a year, single digits a year, on average for the last decade and a half. It's been terrible. Well, this is a policy response that will bring in capital to this space. I mean, we haven't announced it yet, but we'll be getting behind one of these De novo banks focused on the crypto industry. Looking forward to being able to talk about that at some point. But this is a great thing for just capital formation and I think for the broader financial ecosystem to allow some of these banks to actually get off the ground. It's been way too long.

And competitiveness. You know, like, if you have a licensing regime, you don't give out any new licenses. That's just a one way to take it to oligopolistic market structure. So if you want the bank sector to be vibrant, you have to let new entrepreneurs come in and start new banks. I don't know why we're so fearful of startup banks. So I'm very excited about this. The OCC also seems to be a current target. So it's a new era for banking in this country.

We're getting, we've got to get all these people in their seats at these agencies. I mean, it's already April. I feel like Atkins should have been confirmed a lot earlier. They're taking their time with some of this stuff. Yeah, I don't think Jonathan Gold has been confirmed. Michelle Bowman, the new VP of vice chair of supervision, not VP at the Fed. She had her confirmation hearing yesterday. I was actually watching that.

And she said she wanted to launch an independent review into the, specifically into the Fed's supervisory failures around the bank crisis in 2023. Personally, I'm very excited to keep digging up old bones and look into the past and see what happened with the bank crisis. You know, I think there's a lot more to say about that. You know, a lot of people, we've talked a lot about Silvergate,

but you know, the bank that people forget about is, What happened with signature? Yeah, you know, the last we heard, Barney Frank went to the New York Times and said they were executed as an anti-crypto to send a message. I was very sympathetic to this at the time. I thought that was probably true. Since then, new information has come to light, Matt. There's been new information that has come to light. Oh, so was it a crypto drive-by here? What do you think happened? Well, I'm not going to tip my hand. I have an article coming out on Tuesday about this, which I think is going to be really big.

I don't know. It's kind of hard to tell, of course. My new hypothesis is that it was actually not crypto-related, but it was something bigger and more sinister. All right. Are we tinfoil hat time or how we feel? Oh, big time. But big time. Full conspiracy, full Candice Owens here.

Do you think the market for bank? conspiracies is large. This is going to get a lot of uptake. I think there's like at least a dozen people that are going to be really activated by this. Yeah, there's policy wonks. Banking policy wonks, I think are really going to like your article. Yeah. Will everyone else read all the 5,000 words?

Absolutely not. But I just need the like half dozen right people to read it. Yeah. Well, you know, I don't think that these bank regulators were really thinking about all of the people, the dozens of people that would be. pounding the pavement to find out why they decapitated these banks when they did it. They just didn't think about that. I'm very surprised that there has been less reflection.

I mean, you look at SVB, you look at signature, you look at Silvergate. SVB, you know it's the fastest bank run in history by far. Oh, yeah, I lived through it. I remember. Yeah, we do know that. So it was 42 billion withdrawn on Thursday, 100 billion withdrawn on Friday. I mean, no bank can survive that. it's very interesting because they didn't really need to have that run.

There was a true, true panic, like genuinely, basically because SVB's depositors were all on Twitter and they were all losing their minds. That was the worst weekend. Do you remember that weekend? That was terrible. Oh, yeah. So, you know what the second fastest bank run in history was? Signature.

Signature, yeah. But they were solvent the whole time. And frankly, they were also liquid the whole time. I'm not going to give you the article in verbal form, but they didn't have to collapse. And Silvergate, which kicked off this whole thing, certainly did not have to. They didn't even collapse. They voluntarily liquidated. As I've written, there is a specific regulatory catalyst for that.

So none of these banks had to fail. Zero out of three had to fail. But they all did. So I think that's a huge scandal. And I don't know why no one else cares about it. Well, maybe they will next week. because I've gotten a pre-read on this article. I'd say it's explosive.

So pre-notifications on pirate wires. It's going to be in pirate wires Tuesday morning, I think. All right. So what else happened this week? So the SEC approved options trading for Ethereum spot ETFs. These are, it looks like BlackRock, Bitwise, Greyscale. I'm sure there'll be others offering these products. I don't know.

You think people want to trade options on Ethereum ETFs? I guess so. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious as to whether that's more efficient than trading eth options on Deribut. Well, I mean, I guess it's just the sign of a progressing ecosystem, right? If you get them on Bitcoin, why not on Ethereum? I just, I don't know. Ethereum is just getting absolutely smoked.

Yeah, I mean, my question is, when is the Bitcoin's time to shine here? So we were doing so well, you know, we were going to be the reserve asset of the United States or something. And then the U.S. started basically default. vaulting and gold did great. So when is Bitcoin's moment in the sun going to come? Yeah, I think it's a function of the liquidity landscape, don't you think? When is the Fed going to do something?

I don't know. When is China going to turn on the money printer? Because now we're seeing reports that trade is being settled by Russia and China and Bitcoin. I don't know if that's true or not. Everything the Bitcoiners kind of dreamed about, ended up happening. I mean, you don't really pray for like a sovereign debt crisis or, you know, a massive trade war that causes people to lose confidence in the dollar. But it is interesting that these are the things that Bitcoiners talked about for years and years. And then when they happened,

Bitcoin did terrible. Yeah, but it all sort of logically flows, right? I mean, Bitcoin is a very small asset compared to things like gold or bond market. And so in the people that hold Bitcoin tend to be people that are out on the risk curve. And so as markets for equities or nuking, it's not surprising that Bitcoin would because largely the same type of people that hold these risky equities would hold Bitcoin. So I don't know what people are expecting here. Bitcoin's too small to be a global store of value. It's a venture bet on the emergence of a global store of value. Yeah. So maybe if this crisis happened 10 years from now, everyone would be talking about Bitcoin, Bitcoinization. I mean, if Bitcoin was 10,

times the market cap, maybe it would be acting like gold right now, but it's not. It's a venture capital bet on something like that happening. Well, as we speak, it's 83K. I obviously feel okay about that. I mean, I feel like if this has happened in 2020, Bick wouldn't be down to 30K. Did you just look at a block clock? I don't know. Do you still have that working? Mine is broke. I threw mine away. Oh, no, I got mine working again. Okay. Yeah, mine is toast. I need new trinkets. Yeah, I remember I spent about an hour trying to fix yours I couldn't Mine was bricked

I was very unhappy with that device actually Ultimately really I like my block color I liked it when it worked it just been working Didn't work very well Mine's been ticking for five years What was the office we were in the other day had one of those What's it called a Vesta board? We need to get one of those

Where you can just program anything to display It's like a better block clock Yeah we Our office is devoid of art of any type. No, we have, no, we have art. We have a Bill Russell picture. We've got a Larry Bird picture.

That's art. I know, but we need crypto paraphernalia. We're not going to be one of those funds that has a, like, an NFT, you know, TV up there. We're not doing that. Because we don't have any NFTs. We don't have any NFTs. That's the reason why. Yeah.

Well, this one will go out a little bit later. So apologies. We just had a busy day yesterday. We didn't have time to record. Yeah, sorry, we were on the road. There were literally no spare minutes to record in, but we got it out. Then here, I had a couple requests for just turkey updates. I still have a ton of turkeys.

So that's unchanged. I just can't talk about it every week. They're all over the yard. I don't know what to do about it. But now I have a skunk. What do you mean? What do you mean you have a skunk? Last week when we were recording the podcast late,

I ended up coming home late, obviously, pulled into the driveway, there's a skunk in the backyard. And I'm tracing it. I think he's living under my shed. So, I mean, I think skunks would be great if there wasn't the kind of tail risk of them just like incinerating, you know, a 10-yard radius. Like if they didn't have the smell, is that what you're saying?

The smell element. Yeah, so if they were just these, cute. Are they rodents? Yeah. I think they're rodents, right? So if there wasn't the risk of the smell, I think a skunk would be a totally beloved creature. You actually think it would be a pet. Actually, that's funny.

Someone told me that... Well, they're cute. Someone told me that they had a neighbor that had a... I don't know what the term is, but they had the smell thing removed and they had this thing as a pet. To me, that's just disgusting. Can you get the smell glands removed? Apparently. I'm sure that's not legal, but...

Well, I mean, look, genetically engineered dire wolves. I saw that. Now we have new wolves that are back. We could definitely use CRISPR to take the smell out of the skunk. Why would you want a skunk in your house? That's awful. Well, I think you're conflating the smell with the cuteness,

and you're letting the smell color your whole analysis of the creature. It's basically a bigger version of a rat. I think they're cute. Okay, no. But I'm also not facing skunk risk like you are. I am facing some skunk risk. They tend to come out at night, though, so it's usually I'm not out there late at night. I mean, is the smell really that bad?

Like, how bad could it possibly be? I drove over. I hit a skunk like two years ago. Do you remember that? I might have talked about that on the podcast, ran it right over. And that smell, I had to keep my truck outside for like a week and a half. Okay, so it's material risk. Yeah, it's material.

But that's the update on my backyard. And it just rains every single day here in Boston with this time of year. It's like with you, it's like with you. It's like an episode of, is it sleeping beauty where she, like, befriends all the critters? Is that what it is? I don't, it's been a while since I saw that. It's like they're just drawn to you magnetically. Yeah.

But they don't help you do household chores. They just harass you. That's right. Yeah, no, they just defecate on my playground. It's terrible. This is a witch's curse. It is. I'm able to figure out how to break it.

We'll figure it out. All right. So I think that's it for the week. I think we'll be talking a lot about signature bank next week if I had to guess. Yeah, I would like to never talk about tariffs ever. if possible. And we'll just keep it crypto. Well, a lot of people come here for our tariff takes and I'm sorry we didn't have any tariff takes this week. You know, sometimes stay in your lane. We don't know. We don't know what's going on and we're proud to admit that. So there's enough going

on in the stable coin startup ecosystem that we're just going to keep on focusing there. And we can let Bill Ackman and Shamath and all the other tariff experts take care of the tariffs. That's what I think. We, we do not know one thing about the macro. not one thing. But I think there's power in admitting that. And it doesn't seem like a lot of people have that power. Yeah. I mean, like we're beholden to it,

but we're just blissfully ignorant. It's great. Startups are going to get started with high tariffs. Startups will get started in a low tariff environment. That's kind of my view. Yeah. I mean, we're at the early stage.

I think we are the most insulated from this stuff. But yeah, I mean, look, you can start a good company in 08. you could start a good company in 2020 and you can do it today. I think there's always capital no matter what the macro environment is

for a really good company. So on that note, everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.