On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/21/23 (Harberger taxes, SEC v Bittrex, stablecoin hearing) (EP.419)

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  We debate some curious new sponsors The Miami gas shortage Nic's impressions of NFT NYC We review Eric's Orb When do Harberger taxes work? CIV is hiring The SEC is suing Bittrex and alleges that Algorand and Dash are unregistered securities Gensler is skewered by Republican lawmakers in the House Financial Services hearing Gensler refuses to answer whether Ethereum is a security We review the House hearing on stablecoins The McHenry Waters stablecoin bill appears to be dead Does FedNow make stablecoins obsolete? Should stablecoin issuance be limited to banks? A stablecoin catch-22 Hester Peirce dissents on the proposed SEC exchange rule Content mentioned: CIV is hiring Austin Campbell's written testimony to the House financial services committee Hester Peirce, Rendering Innovation Kaput: Statement on Amending the Definition of Exchange  

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 Concentive 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 a Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

Welcome to On the Brink, I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. This episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at Ethereum's Chappellea upgrade. It went smoothly, for the most part, with the exception of a short-lived increase in the rate of missed block proposals. As of Monday afternoon, over 1 million ETH had been withdrawn from the beacon chain with 380,000 flowing to around 21,000 addresses. and the remaining 680,000 going to the top 10 withdrawal addresses. The top three of those are LIDA with 260,000-Eath withdrawn,

cracking with 205,000, and Binance with 87,000. The ETH price remained relatively stable immediately after the upgrade, but in the days that followed, it spiked substantially, reaching north of 2100, the highest level since May 2022. That's your Metrics Minute, brought you by Coin Metrics. All right, so that was the Metrics Minute. I've actually gotten a couple requests from non-crypto companies to sponsor the podcast. What is our policy on that?

All right. Well, if they have money and it's green, I think it's good. I mean, I think what kind of request we talk in here? Mission aligned with who is trying to sponsor the podcast. It can't be like, we're not going to do like an oil company or something like that. Someone that just doesn't. I wouldn't oil company sponsor. Their product sells itself.

All right. Well, so here's who asked. Bailey's heating and air located at 501 East McKee Street in Greenville, Tennessee, area code 377443. What I'm told is that this is the preeminent HVAC company in the Appalachian area.

Well, based on my analytics here, we do have a lot of fans in that neck of the woods. So I'm told that these people value personal sovereignty. They don't like the invasive nature of the SEC and that there are listeners of the pot out there. So we're getting emails from people. Well, are they okay with you blowing up their spot like this? Is that, are they going to be, is this going to affect our prospects for the sponsorship?

It's hard to say. I mean, we might lose them, but Bailey's heating and air wants to sponsor the pod. 423636 8409. If you have a broken HVAC unit, I would call these guys. They have five stars on Google. So you just gave them a free first ad. I mean, I got an email. from the guy that owns Bailey's heating and air.

He said he's a listen to every single one of our episodes. I will gladly read out. I mean, everyone needs AC and heat for that matter. I mean, I'm told these guys are really good. I was just shocked that we have listeners in Greenville, Tennessee. We have listeners all over. Brink Nation is worldwide. So actually on the oil front, there is a gas shortage in Miami.

You can't get gas anywhere for the last five days. It's like, I don't know what's going on. It's like living in a failed state. Yeah. Why is that? I actually thought about ordering gas from Amazon. Is that even a thing? Can you buy gasoline on Amazon?

I doubt it. I mean, it's not like everyone has a Tesla down there either. What are you going to do? Yeah, we have gas. We have gas cozzlers down here in the dirty south. So I don't know. I can't go anywhere right now. I'm stuck.

No one has gas. I haven't seen this on the news whatsoever. They're suppressing. it. I don't know. DeSantis is suppressing the news. They just won't send DeSantis gas down there? I think maybe this is Disney's revenge. Maybe Disney has somehow inter, what's the word?

Interceded, whatever. Maybe they've intercepted the supply chain here. But yes, I think it has somebody to do with the floods. I think we so eat huge floods down here last week. I think somehow the gas reserves were flooded and there is no gas. Wow. It's a failed state. I mean, we're recording this on a Wednesday.

So that's on the, is that the, is that on the tally of things that we say a lot? We're recording this on our bingo. So the fud dice, the bingo fud dice, those are near completion, by the way. So if you're on our subreddit on gm. xyz you will be eligible for one so oh excellent all right so have we decided how that works well yeah just join uh the on the brink community and you'll get a die a digital artifact all right so go to gm xyz so we're recording this on a wednesday because i'm on vacation but i really care about the listeners so you heroically hustled back from the bar dare i say you actually look to be in pretty good shape despite

that. Well, I wouldn't say I really got comfortable at the bar, unfortunately. So I had to record the podcast before I did some work at the bar. I'm at an undisclosed location right now on vacation. It wouldn't be the first time one of us has recorded this podcast under the influence. I guess that's true. I guess that's true. I'm not going to say when or which one of us it was, but it certainly has happened before. Could have been Ria or Sean, too. That's true. We got to hang in there because there's a, there's some, news this week. I wouldn't say there's a ton of news. But we got to talk about these hearings.

Before we got to the news, we had to talk about NFT, NYC. Oh, we got to talk about that. And I want to talk about this episode you did with Eric Wall. All right. Yeah, so NFT, NYC. So you went to this thing. I was there. I went to the Tapper Wizards party because I am the Tapper Wizard number three. Do you know that? So I, well, I heard that on the podcast. What does that actually mean? They just made one that looks like me.

Well, it's basically making fun of me, to be honest, but I'll take it. And so I went to the party. Everyone was wearing wizard outfits. I was just wearing normal clothes. And I met Razzlecan at the party. Razzlecan. All right. So for the listeners that don't know who that is, you got to tee that up.

I don't know what her real name is. I think it might be Heather, but she was one of the two individuals who allegedly hacked was a bitfinexed? Yeah, for $3.2 billion. And then they... You met someone that at one point had $3.2 billion just in their bedroom. I know. I was excited.

So they never really spent the money, though, and then they eventually got caught. And I guess, I don't know where they stand in terms of legal proceedings. But whatever the case is, she showed up at the Taprew Wizards party, which was pretty funny. So how does that work?

If she walked in, I don't think I would recognize her. Did people know who she was? I immediately recognized her. Really? Yeah, because her like content, because she's like an amateur rap artist. Her content is all over the internet. And after the indictment, it was just all over Twitter. Wow.

So she just walks in and gets swarmed? Or like, how does this work? I think I was one of the only people that noticed her. Other crypto celebrities, they wouldn't expect to be there were there. Bitboy. was there. Good boy. His podcast is actually a lot more famous than ours.

That's true. That really speaks to that speaks to the kind of folks to listen to these podcasts. Let me tell you that. Folks, we got to get those numbers up because BitBoy's out there. He's getting sponsored by Binance

and nexo.io. We're getting just stomped. We're being crushed by BitBoy. We're over here talking about the future of market structure and Bitboys over there are just making a million dollars on his podcast. Yeah, so what is it? You think our podcast doesn't have broad appeal?

People don't want to hear regulatory news. I don't think people really want to hear about the stable coin bill. I think people want to hear about the number going up. So BitBoy was there. Crypto finally, if you know her, was there. I actually don't know who that is.

You don't even know your CT characters, really. It was pretty good, though. I think I commend the Udi and Eric for putting that together. So actually, speaking of Eric, I interviewed him for the podcast this week. He has a wacky project called the orb. So the broad strokes of this idea

is that you buy this crypto asset and it gives you the right to ask one question per month for whoever's orb you have. So if you have your orb, say, you would be able to just ask you a question you'd have to answer. And the taxation element of this actually made a lot of sense to me too,

listening to that episode. I thought it was pretty clever. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, there's nothing that forces you to answer the question from the orb holder. But your economic motive is to answer it because that maximizes the value of the orb, and you as the issuer are entitled to that through the harbager tax mechanic, which to me is the most interesting part. This is a real crypto-economic experiment. So basically, harbiger taxes, it's kind of, we haven't really seen it in the wild.

a lot, but it's basically the idea that an asset, a piece of property, is for sale at all times. And if you want to set a really high price, so you don't really want someone to buy it, you have to pay a tax proportional to the price to continue owning the thing. So it's meant to achieve allocative efficiency and create a system whereby the person that most values the resource is the one that actually holds the resource. So you can imagine it in the context of domain names. Like Google is very interested in owning the domain Google. So they value it the most. So under a system like this, it would avoid squatting because the entity that most values the thing is the one that basically owns it.

So the way I think about that, though, is that would, so I don't know if that would actually work in domain names because then you'd just be putting up this huge tax if you build this brand. It sort of penalizes people that build huge brands. So it doesn't work with things where there's a cost to losing access. So real estate's another good example. People often talk about it in the context of real estate,

but you don't want a situation where someone just buys your home from you and you have to move out. Right. So it works well for things where it's kind of frictionless and where it can change hands easily. There's a large transaction costs. And where it's just not the, of the world if you don't own it anymore, which is definitely the case with these

orbs. So I would think of it as a tokenized GLG. Only one person can own at a time, but in return, they can get basically consulting services from you, which is worth something. So GLG, for those not familiar, is an expert network. So basically you use them. They put you in touch with an expert. Say you're diligence in a company.

You want to buy a company. your private equity firm looking at a acquiring a company, you would do maybe 20 GLG calls. And so this is just a, you think it's a tokenized version of an expert network? Yeah, I think it could disintermediate it, though, because there's no, well, there's no intermediary, right? The value is bilateral.

It's flowing between the person getting information and value and flowing to the issuer. So I think it's going to be really interesting. I may produce an orb of my own not as a way to make money or anything, but just to see what kind of questions people ask me. You know what we should think about if this takes off is doing one for the Underbrink podcast.

You have one question per week on the podcast. Then someone's going to have to take charge for it. And judging by the distribution of responsibilities on this podcast, it's going to be me. Well, no, that's why we're hiring this junior investor with one to three years of experience. Check out our medium page and we mentioned her last week on the podcast.

We are hiring. Could be your responsibility to figure out how we do this orb thing. We will give you props if you mentioned that you heard it on the podcast. That means you really care. We did get a lot of inbound. So we will get back to you, by the way. Eventually. And for our second podcast of the week, you also interviewed Dan Tapiero.

That was his second on the brink appearance. I thought that was a pretty good episode. Tapiero is great. I mean, this guy is playing a totally different game than most investors in the crypto VC space. I mean, he's really not a crypto VC technically. He's doing growth stage deals. He's doing tons of secondary. So between 10T and one RT ventures, which is one roundtable ventures, he's put $1.3 billion to work over the past two years into crypto infrastructure companies.

So awesome to catch up with Dan. Yeah, it's in like 600 of that was secondary. So as far as I know, he's like the only guy that at scale is doing secondary deals in the crypto space. Is 1RT the successor to 10T? What's the relationship? Yeah, that's the, Dan's the founder of both, but 1RT is kind of the new name for that umbrella. Why did he not call it 11T or 10U? Like there were so many options there.

I don't know. I actually think that 10T might not have been the. right answer because like 10 trillion was kind of the idea there but I think we're going way north at 10 trillion eventually not under this administration but eventually I didn't realize that that's what it was 10 trillion 10 10 trillion but one roundtable partners is more about like forming a group of people around the table 10 T is roughly the market cap of gold yeah roughly I think it's like 12 might be more now yeah yeah gold's been rallying.

It's a good target to aim for, certainly. Yeah, but it's only like a 10x from here. We can do that way more than that. We can do more. We can do more. We're talking about addressable markets that are touching on the internet itself here, right? But not during this administration. Yeah.

So there was, there are regulatory developments always. That seems to always be the case. We will cover those. Let us briefly touch on. the deals. So the first one up is Hutt Capital. This is a blockchain fund of funds and direct investing firm funded by Brooke Pollack. They announced the closing of their second venture fund, funds, second blockchain focused venture fund of funds. So congrats to Brooke and the team at Hutt. Next up, we have fractal, a digital asset clearing and settlement startup. There is six million from

HACVC, QCP Capital, sixth man, archetype, Blizzard, and CMT Digital. So the third one of the We talked about this a little bit last week, but there's actually a report from Bloomberg that tribe capital is interested in investing $100 million as part of a $250 million round of financing to get FTCS off the ground again. So pretty interesting development here that we see tribe officially in the fray here. And you can actually see their name all over these legal filings. So actually makes sense that this is out in the open now. Yeah, this has been getting more and more concrete by the week. And this is a real show of intent from Tribe. So it seems like this notion has legs, FTX2.0.

This is going to be controversial, but I think this is probably one of the better bets to recuperate up to 100% if they do it right. Look, there's a ton of operational risk there. But if they do it right, I could see this working. Next up we have Unchained Capital, of course, very well-known Bitcoin Financial Services. company custody lending. They raised $60 million from Valor Equity Partners, Nidig, Trammel, and Highland Capital Partners. And the last one is Yaws Labs.

This is a Web 3-3 notification system. They raised $3.5 million from electric, collab currency, Coinbase, Depper, and North Island Ventures. And last up, we have CoreWeave. They have been on the show a couple times. They've raised $221 million at a $2 billion pre-money evaluation from Magnitar with participation from Nvidia.

So congrats to the team over there. Congrats at the quarter weave guys. So I guess they're doing a lot of AI stuff now. Yeah. I mean, you know, after ETH deprecated proof of work, they went full bore AI. Turns out it was a good time to go all in on AI. That's the hottest, say compute is the hottest resource in the world right now. Except for oil in Miami, of which there is none.

that yeah that's pretty hot i'm seeing some crypto phones pivot to a i not surprising not us though we're holding we're staying in holding the line we're going down with a ship if but it's not going down it's just you got to survive to get through this uh administration potentially but that's all right the ship is in choppy waters well let's let's get into it so the reason for the jokes is the SEC. So this week, the SEC sued BitTRAx, which, look, if we're being honest here, I thought this suit could happen a lot earlier. But BitTex was sued. They're in a cryptocurrency exchange. They're being sued for failing to register as an exchange, a broker, or a clearing agency. The suit also alleges that several assets that were listed on BitTex, including Algorand and Dash,

are unregistered securities. So, look, BitTex had its issue. over the years. I'm not entirely shocked here that it was put in the spotlight. It's a very easy target. I think the fact remains, the SEC has not given guidance in over four years on what it would actually look like to come in and register as an exchange, a broker, or a clearing agency for digital assets. So I think it's a very disingenuous lawsuit on the face of it. Yeah, this is a weird one because BitTrux hasn't been relevant or I mean they haven't been

taking American clients for what feels like years now maybe it hasn't been years. It's been a while. I don't know. I think they backed out of the U.S. only weeks ago. So I don't know. They've had their issues. They had no fact violation big fine. So they've had all sorts of compliance issues.

It's not like Bitrex is neither of us could just stand here and say that BitTrex is like a bastion for a great institutional exchange. They've had huge issues over the years. So the fact that the SEC is going after them is not surprising. I think the basis upon which they're going after them is very questionable. Yeah, I mean, I just wonder if this is the best use of resources going after an exchange that's no longer in the U.S. That's not a major exchange as far as I can tell. Also, there's the weird

subplot, which you couldn't avoid if you're on Twitter this week. Gary Gensler apparently praising Al-Garand some years ago. And of course, now they're alleging as an unregistered security. So kind of a funny juxtaposition there. I mean, I've been to meetups with Gary Gensler and Sylvia McCauley, both there talking to each other. He was certainly praising Al-Garand when it came to his MIT clause. So, yeah, pretty puzzling to me. I don't know. The fact that they took this opportunity to just say, hey, Al-Garand is unregistered security. That's pretty interesting. Like Al-Garand was was a big VC backed layer one blockchain. So we'll see what happens coming out of that.

It is weird that the SEC does these kind of drive-bys on sort of handfuls of assets at a time for cases that are not, they don't involve the assets specifically, or at least they're not sort of the counterparty in the case. Right. So they are going after an exchange or the insider trading case, I think, I don't think that was SEC. and as part of the building the case, they also just allege almost in a footnote, hey, these were unregistered securities.

But so then how does that get resolved? Because it's not like the tokens themselves have the chance to sort of respond because it's just been mentioned in passing basically by the SEC. No, it's entirely ridiculous, I think. So I think the bigger news with this Bitrex thing is we're all, we're kind of leading up to the inevitable Coinbase lawsuit. So you had this

BXE, B-EA, XY Crypto Exchange. I'd never even heard of that thing. So that was shut down. They were charged with running an unlicensed exchange. You had basically the exact same charge against BitTRAX. So it's pretty clear to me at least. I'm curious to your perspective that they're just

gunning for Coinbase here. They're going to file the same charge against the Coinbase. You're going to say you fail to register as an exchange, a broker, or a clearing agency. Coinbase is in turn going to say, Well, we had 30 meetings with you. We went state by state. We got all of our MTLs.

That was the kind of known course to get registered here. We don't think that we have securities on the platform. And we asked you for a path and you just didn't give us a path. And I think this is going to be a three to four year fight in the courts, absent just getting some market structure regulation where you can actually have a pathway to register here. Yeah, it does look like the SEC is trying to build up. a number of successful precedence of enforcements against exchanges, starting with ones that just don't want to fight

and then working their way up to larger players once they have that kind of ammunition in terms of case law. I mean, it's too bad. So I guess that dovetails us into Gary Gensler, chairman of the SEC. He was skewered, I would say, by lawmakers on Tuesday. So he appeared before the House Financial Services Committee a key focus of this was his stance on crypto assets, but I would say another focus was just the rulemaking under the SEC,

which I had no idea that this was as expansive as it was. So we're at like record numbers of just new rules with very little in terms of comment periods. It's completely unprecedented what he's trying to do here with the agency. It's basically just trying to write policy for the U.S. government. And I guess the highlights or the low lights, however you want to define it. So he failed to answer a direct question from committee chair, Patrick McHenry on if Ethereum is a security. I mean, just wouldn't answer that question,

which I find remarkable. I thought Emmer was great. So majority whip Emmer. He was on point. He basically dressed him down for his various oversights of FDX, his decision to regulate via enforcement versus providing clear guidance. I mean, I guess at the end of day, it's just kind of sad to be in the United States where you have this agency chairman. So he's decided to go out and just unilaterally shut down certain exchanges to basically try to regulate by enforcement, to spend taxpayer dollars to go after hundreds of startups versus just working with Congress to get a policy in place here. And meanwhile, this is happening in other jurisdictions where you just will get this sensible regulation. I don't know. There's not a lot of things that happened on Tuesday in that hearing that I think you could be optimistic about.

I thought whip Emmer's line of questioning was really cathartic actually I mean typically the hearings are very taciturn and relatively slow-paced and sometimes a member of Congress will ask a question then the witness will just talk for five minutes and basically filibuster and that's the end of their time and emmer was having none of that no i didn't know that you could reclaim your time so basically you just tell the witness to shut up and you get to ask another question. I'm learning so much about how

this whole thing works. I mean, I don't know if they're- Let's be clear. At the school yard, Emmer would have been in charge of the whole thing, the whole recess operation. Was Emmer on the debate team in college

because he delivered a great performance? I don't know if he's on the debate team. He was definitely the alpha dog at elementary school recess. And it was interesting that Kensler just flatly refused to determine whether ETH was a security or not. That's remarkable. So he's just point blank asked the question. He just wouldn't answer it.

Like is there, don't you have to answer? I, is there, I don't know, what are the rules? I think you can't lie to Congress, which is another discussion. So, okay. So by the way, on that front, so I thought this was remarkable. So they took a page out of the TikTok playbook. I forget who asked the question, but they said,

have you consulted with Elizabeth Warren in preparation for this testimony? And he didn't answer it. He couldn't answer that truthfully either. Yeah, I think that is the answer. The non-answer is the answer. So Gary Gensler basically just meets with Elizabeth Warren. How did Elizabeth Warren get so powerful here on this topic?

She's never passed meaningful legislation. But it just turns out that Gensler just takes all of his marching orders from Elizabeth Warren. It's remarkable. So there was another hearing today, also in hearings. I feel like I unfortunately couldn't watch the hearing. I was very excited. It was a stable coin bail in the House Financial Services Committee and Dante de Sparty from Circle testified as at Austin Campbell, Columbia professor, and Jake Trevinsky of the Blockchain Association. Those were the ones to listen to. there were two other witnesses, but we can ignore those ones.

I thought those guys did great. They was good. And I would, in particular, point your attention towards Austin's written testimony, which I thought was just such a great, digestible summary of the case for stable coins, in particular from the perspective of a U.S. policymaker. And he made some just truly excellent points. It's like if you continue on the path that we're on where this, unfortunately, the prospects for the stablecoin bill look dim, we're going to continue having offshore stable coins win at the expense of onshore ones because people are concerned about the status of the onshore ones. That pushes oversight, control, surveillance, understanding, influence away from the U.S. to other jurisdictions.

I mean, if they're not careful, we'll have a bunch of euro dollars. stable coins that are issued out of foreign banks. I mean, how can that possibly be something that financial regulators want? How could that be an objective? It's remarkable. So I think there's so much to talk about on the stable coin one. So to put the Gensler hearing to bed, like not much coming out of that, I would say. I'd say he's on notice that there's a lot of people that are not happy with him,

including, by the way, a bunch of Democrats. And so I think we're kind of turning up the heat. a little bit in a bipartisan way that it's very clear that we need a crypto-specific market structure bill to be introduced here and that Gary Gensler is doing a terrible job of overseeing the crypto industry, including meeting with Sam Bank-Pen-Fried multiple times. And that was obviously discussed quite a bit. On the stable coin front, pretty disappointing, I would say. I mean, Austin did a great job. I thought Despart did a great job. Chervinsky did a great job. You had this commentary from Lynch, Stephen Lynch, who is unfortunately my congressman.

He's also the congressman in the district that Fidelity and Circle reside in. And he came out and said, I don't know why you would need stable coins. So he took a view on the technology and he said, we have this Fed Now system coming out. The federal government's introducing this clearing and settlement system Fed Now. so I don't see why we need stable coins. That's not your job is to form a point of view on technology. this would be the equivalent of like, you know, the internet in its early days and having Stephen Lynch come out and say, look, we have the postal service to send letters.

It's we don't need email. It's like, that's not your job, Stephen Lynch. Your job is to put sensible policies in place to promote your constituency having good economic outcomes, basically. So I would define his job to serve your populace. And he's clearly not doing that. He's just taking his directives also from Elizabeth Warren. But Stephen Lynch, I'd say, came off worse than anyone in that hearing, came off like someone that just had no idea what he was talking about. I mean, it is weird because even if you don't see the purpose of a technology, empirically, it has a lot of usage and demand.

So you can't deny that. You can't deny the market cap of stable coins, the velocity, the transaction volume. The many demonstrated real world use cases, real world use cases. That can't be denied. So even if you don't understand it, that doesn't mean you're allowed to invalidate it. That's not how this works. That's not how this works. And look, we don't need Stephen Lynch to form a point of view on technology for the U.S. government.

Leave that to the capital allocators. The capital markets are telling you that it's an important technology. There's tons of money going into it. And users are telling you that it's an important technology. Look at the market cap of tether. That is an offshore unregulated stable coin. And look how much money is in it. And so, you know, I think you can look at that as a proxy for just how popular this would be.

Now, the other thing that Lynch said came out and said that the banks are the only ones that should be able to issue stable coins, which I found it interesting that someone on the same aisle as him, Richie Torres, out of New York, said that, look, we're not going forward with any regulation here that allows the state trust, particularly the New York Department of Financial Services, from being cut out of the party here. So Lynch's posture is that only federally chartered banks should be able to do these stable coins, which means that no one's going to do one. No federally chartered banks have this. Yeah, that's a total cash 22 because right now, according to the Fed,

banks aren't allowed to issue stable coins on public blockchains. So something has to give there. Those two ideas are incompatible with each other. So Torres knows what's going on, obviously. He's a Democrat, but he actually is into the technology, understands it. He follows it closely. He's not just following Elizabeth Warren's act. I don't know. I thought that was a pretty disappointing turn of events. It seems to me from where I said that this stable coin bill, basically both sides want a stable coin bill. The Democrats want a stable coin bill that says only the big banks can do a stable coin. And the Republicans want a stable coin bill that says that the big banks could do stable coins. Plus you can do stable coins out of these trust charters, these state trust charters. That's kind of what it looks like to me.

But the word on the street, I think Maxine Waters had a statement recently that they're going back to the drawing board for this bill. So it appears that the progress that has been made has been completely invalidated. So the bill's prospects are not looking bright. I mean, you wish that your politicians would be kind of the best and the brightest. and these these do not appear to be the brightest minds that we could bring to the table as a country, unfortunately. All right, so just a couple other quick hitters this week. So an Ethereum L2 scaling protocol called Meiji is being launched by Andreessen Horwitz. So they're launching a new L2 on the optimism stack.

So I'm excited to hear a little bit more about what that is. And Microsoft and the decentralized data platform space and time are working together, to do a real-time blockchain data offering on the Microsoft Azure marketplace. So interesting developments there. We love blockchain data. Blockchain data. Yeah, we are pretty compelled by that. Lastly, I would say go check out Hester Purse's dissent on this new SEC rule,

which we're going to talk about a little bit more next week, but it's an exchange rule that would attempt to encompass all of Defi into the, exchange ecosystem. So we're going to put a link to that, but I thought Hester Purr's as usual is totally on it, someone that actually understands this technology. Put out pretty brave descent, I would say. It called out the SEC leadership in terms of their just unwillingness to work with startups and promote capital formation. So I think the history will look back favorably on this dissent that Hester put out. Well, on that sunny note, we are going to wrap it for this week. We will see you on Monday.

Have a safe and healthy weekend.