On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/24/26 (Finding Satoshi, KelpDAO retrospective, Insider weather betting, Coinbase's Quantum report) (EP.716)

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals: The Finding Satoshi documentary has a new guess Was it Hal or Len? Could Satoshi have been a team? Why Stylometry might not reveal Satoshi Why the cypherpunks were interested in resurrection What happened with KelpDAO? Is DeFi cooked? Is Arbitrum decentralized? The Paris temperature market was manipulated Coinbase releases their highly-anticipated quantum risk report Performance tradeoffs for post-quantum signature schemes SBF was a good investor The Justin Sun WLFI saga continues Did an Indian tanker fall victim to a crypto scam in the Strait of Hormuz?  Content mentioned in this episode: Finding Satoshi Documentary Fidelity Digital Assets, Getting Off Zero: Evaluating Bitcoin in 2026 Coinbase, Quantum report

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

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

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. I feel like so much has happened this week. a lot of really funny stories and also some disturbing stories too. Yes. What did you think of the founding Satoshi documentary?

I thought it was good. I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur of these Satoshi investigations. I think I've read all of them at this point. And this, I thought, was the best attempt to date. Yeah. I don't know if they got the answer. Are we going to spoil it or are we going to keep me a secret? I think we can spoil it.

I think it's everyone's talking about it online. So they said that their best guess is that it's Hal Finney and Len Sassman together, Hal Finney doing the back end work in Sassman doing the white paper. Which is actually a really good guess. It is a good guess. Because a lot of us thought it was Lenn already. But Len publicly derided Bitcoin. It's a bit strange.

Wasn't known to be technical enough or to I think I've programmed in CBO. plus C++ C plus or to have coded on like windows I guess but how had that experience very deep technical and you know cryptographic expertise but it couldn't have been how because how was running a road race when Satoshi was sending emails right so Jameson Lopp appeared in the documentary running through the road race example of look he was sent Satoche was sending emails to Mike Hearn At the same time, Hal was running a road race. So it had to have been either not him or he had to have had a partner.

And what I didn't know was they literally worked together, those guys. Yeah, they worked at PGP together. I mean, PGP, the amount of talent that came out of that place, unbelievable. Yeah, and so I thought it was a really good guess because Satoshi did have this unusual combination of certainly academic chops plus the engineering chops. which it's kind of like very rare that one person would have that. And the case for Len is very good. Like what they didn't cover in the documentary is Len or Satoshi cited this very rare document that was like a symposium paper from this conference in Belgium.

Right. That was not distributed online. And so you had to have been at a university that had the paper. And that was what was cited. And I think, I don't know if this is confirmed, but someone out there said that Len had a Flickr account and posted a picture of himself that had that paper in the background, one of the pictures. I didn't know that. So that, I think, is a really strong piece of evidence because it implies that Satoshi was an academic in Belgium, basically. Yeah.

So that's very strong. So the combo was something I'd never thought of before, but it's very compelling. I just thought above all else it was a very well done documentary. It was very touching. The hell thinny parts were very moving. Yeah. I mean it's very sad frankly. I mean both of these men we lost them way too early. I mean Len was in his 30s when when he died and how you know I thought it was very touching they interviewed Fran his widow who hadn't given a lot of interviews I mean for good reason and Meredith who is Len's widow And, you know, ultimately regardless of whether they were or weren't Satoshi, they were obviously giants in the sort of cryptography, cypherpunk space and left a huge legacy.

And I think it's just right that they get a homage like this. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I thought the part with House former co-worker, the coworkers at PGP when they were just talking about what he was like, that was particularly moving. And just that these guys that, you know, were alleged to have started it did it for very pure. reasons and never made any money off of it. It's very different from the kind of scammy crypto element that has emerged since then. Yeah, I mean, that's what's always set Bitcoin apart is you just cannot impeach Satoshi's motives. Right. They were just so pure. And obviously, we're in a pickle now because Satoshi has abandoned us and left us with a million quantum

vulnerable coins. Fine. But yeah, I mean, the motives are pure. And you, you, you never be able to recreate that. I thought it was interesting that they were not even able to get in touch with Wadei. They couldn't even really find an official picture of him. That felt a little bit under explored in the documentary. Yeah, it was strange, right? I mean, Way die is still, I think Waydie is active on Twitter, maybe even. Well, there's a different way die that works at 1KX, but I don't know.

Is Way Die B Money Way die active on Twitter? I didn't even know that. I think so. I mean, I think I've seen some stuff from Waydie since then. Yeah, I'm glad, you know, I'm glad they did this now because a lot of these people that were contemporaneous with those guys, they're not going to be around forever. They're getting older. Yeah. I mean, Zimmerman, the fact that they were able to get him on camera was pretty remarkable. Yeah. So, you know, there might be some stylometric analyses in the future they get done that give us some more insight here. But I think this is probably the best last attempt we'll see of this nature.

and also I've lost faith a little bit in stylometry argument because as they point out in the movie which I this is like a very lossy synopsis I strongly suggest you watch it in the movie they say Hal and Len I think were they knew about stylometry in particular Len Graham Cohen spoke about that and so you know they said Len

Bram said Len posted on the cyberpunk's mailing list under a NIM for a long time that he never found out Right. So these guys were aware, obviously, of stylometry for deenonymization. They could have, in theory, been adversarial in that respect. So, you know, basically assuming that people would take a look at their writing in the future to try and deanonymize them. So it kind of stands to reason that these experiments with stylometry have not worked. Right.

Well, I would highly recommend everyone buy it and watch it this weekend. I think it's one of the rare, you know, documentaries about crypto that's actually well worth it. Yeah, and it's, you know, these guys are not crypto natives at all, but they really did a ton of work to figure out how to engage with the industry in a kind of a respectful way. Yeah. I mean, some of the people they interviewed were very funny. It's like, what does Bill Gates know about this? Yeah, I was watching it. I was like, why is Bill Gates on a Bitcoin documentary here?

Yeah, I mean, very few of the people interviewed really have anything to add here, but especially some of the investors. but it was very well done. And yeah, it's just rare to see a piece of content at this scale that it is respectful. The Alcor site, do you know that Ted Williams is embalmed there? I don't know if that's the right word, but Ted Williams is also at that site. Is that right? Yeah. I don't know how I feel about that.

But, yeah, like the cyberpunks and the extropians have some kind of overlap. I didn't realize that there were multiple extropians in the, cyberpunk movement. I thought it was just Finney that kind of believed that he could get brought back to life. Yeah, and if you ever read Finn Brunton's book, I think it's called Digital Cash, have you read that one? No. It's actually one of the lesser-known books about kind of the origin of the cyberpunks in Bitcoin. He explicitly makes that connection like, well, part of the reason they, cyber monks wanted this kind of electronic money was because they planned on coming back to life in the distant future. and they wanted an asset that they could return to. And so that's a very, and Finn appeared in this documentary too.

Where do you put the keys? You got to go find them when you return, unless you can memorize them, I suppose. Yeah, and I mean, it's not going to work because they didn't plan for quantum. They didn't quantum upgrade. Yeah, I mean, I should have left instructions or something. That's tough. That's tough.

All right, well, moving on, Castle Island. contact. I sat down with Brandon, the CEO of Meow, talked about banking AI agents. Very exciting what they're doing over there with Meow. Your AI agent can now have a bank account. Meow has really been on top of it, you know, with first going to kind of like high-eiled checking during the banking crisis and gaining a ton of market share in that capacity, then moving on a stable coin support before basically any of the fintechs were doing it. And now being a first moved around banking AI agents. Yeah, these AI agents, man. They're going to be able to spend money and they're going to be able to control the world and hack everything, it seems like.

So a couple of deals here before we get into the news. First up, Hata, that is a crypto exchange in Malaysia. They raise $8 million from ByBit. Then it's Cracken, the cryptocurrency exchange. They have acquired Bitnomial. Bitnomial is a CFTC licensed derivatives exchange. This is a deal for up to $550 million in cash in stock. Congrats to Luke and the Bitnomial team. Yeah, really cool to see. Congrats to those guys. Next up, Kio, K-A-I-O. That's a purpose-built blockchain for RWA's. There is $8 million from Tether, systemic ventures, further ventures, and laser digital. Then it's Bethog, which is a crypto-native online casino. They raise $10 million from Rockaway, Will Ventures, Six-Man Ventures, and others. Cluster Protocol is a decentralized AI protocol. There is $5 million from Dow 5,000.

and paper ventures. All right. So should we get into this kelp-dow situation? Yeah, you know, an uncomfortable feeling is when a crypto protocol that you've literally never heard of

gets hacked to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and kind of ruins the party for everyone. And that's what happened this week. Yeah, I mean, do I want to even attempt to explain what happened here? I guess I'll try.

So there's something called kelp-dow. this is a liquid restaking protocol on Ethereum, mostly used for looping, kind of like retail, you know, yield seeking behavior. They had an attack vector with layer zero, which is the bridging infrastructure that allows you to move tokens from one blockchain to another.

They had apparently hired layer zero to run this bridging infrastructure, and that was the point that was hacked by the North Korean government. Now, what ended up happening was the attacker printed a bunch of kelped out tokens. AVE, the largest defy lending protocol, got stuck with bad debt as a result of that. So they basically printed a bunch of tokens, put it into AVE, we're able to withdraw other assets, you know, Ethereum, stable coins. Is that basically your understanding of the attack? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, because if you can trick the AVE protocol into thinking that you have genuinely,

collateral, then you can withdraw real money, which is what the attackers did. And it seems like Kelpda was using effectively a one-of-one multi-sig via layer zero's infrastructure. So a lot of finger pointing. You can point fingers at any of the parties here, actually. But the net effect is Avey has some bad debt. I don't know how that's going to be resolved. Arbitrum was able to freeze about 70 million worth of ETH here and rescue it, causing people to yell at them for not being decentralized. And DFI as a whole has taken a massive hit. People are kind of re-underwriting the risks, looking at the kind of risk return profile, the risk premium, basically deciding that the tail risks here, because this is not the only recent hack, the tail risks here are so

material that the rates they're being paid to lock to LP on a defy are not worth it. So huge mess. I will add, it's not necessarily, we don't know for sure that it was North Korea. So I actually did a podcast that'll come out tomorrow, won't spoil it, but our guest claimed that it actually probably wasn't even North Korea. Really? How would they, I thought that the address clusters were compatible with prior North Korean hacks. Well, we don't know for sure.

Yeah, a huge mess and lots of lessons we learned. The Arbitrum Security Council, which is kind of a very funny, like, self-aggrandizing name. They did freeze, 70 million worth. And now we're sucked into this debate as to whether Defi is worth it if it's all freezable or maybe we should be freezing more. I think, look, if North Korea is hacking stuff, freeze all day long. I don't want to hear any of these arguments about, oh, we need to be pure.

And like this is a security council. It was what, a nine of 12 group of people that had to come together. It wasn't like there's just one person that shut it off. We should be trying to freeze everything that North Korea gets. Yeah, it's kind of ironic because part of the issue was the insufficiently large multi-sig, of course, the one of one. Right. So you do. And then a lot of these funds went through Thorchance.

which has a very big multi-sig and is basically not freezeable. Many people are upset about that. It's kind of like, well, it's a blessing and a curse to not be able to freeze. So now there's just a big debate. I mean, defy isn't really defy if every transaction can be questioned by some authority. I think there's just bigger questions here. Number one is you kind of pointed this out is, are these yields that are attracting people to Defi actually worth it? Are you getting paid enough for the risk? I think very clearly the

answer is no. The vulnerabilities here would warrant you getting compensated a lot more than what you're getting compensated. The second thing I'm curious is just whether or not these institutions that are pushing into Defi offering these yield-bearing accounts, will they continue to do that? When you can have kind of a socialized loss on Ave due to no fault of your own, that's a bad position to be in. Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, what we need is more diligence from the DeFi protocols themselves over what assets they list and support. Because if you're listing 30 different assets and each of them has a 5% chance of being hacked

in a given year, altogether, now you have a very high probability of something going wrong. And so you're exposed to the security practices of not just you, but every other organization that is your weakest neighbor. So it's a really bad security model. Something's going to have to change. The other thing is people are freaking out about mythos. This wasn't even a smart contract exploit. This was just, I don't know precisely what happened. Some people think it was an eclipse attack on the one validator. But it's a little scary. that we're entering into this world of more powerful tax against pretty battle tests and infrastructure, but there's always weak points. The weak points increasingly look to be not the smart

contract, but actually the just operational infrastructure of these protocols. Yeah, people are saying that this is an RPC node issue at layer zero. Yeah, so a big mess. I think we can expect defy TVLs to contract for a while. until DeVy gets his house in order. All right. Moving on, did you see this thing out of New York this week? So New York Attorney General, Letitia James, has filed a lawsuit against Coinbase and Gemini,

claiming that their prediction market products violate state laws on illegal gambling. I thought that was an interesting move this week. We've obviously seen other states get active there. I kind of forgot Latisha James was still running the show down there. Yeah, she's still at it. I mean, I think we're going to see one of these in most blue states. There's certainly a bit of a backlash against the prediction market.

So I think maybe this only gets out of the Supreme Court in the end. Did you see that there are a few politicians that were identified by Calci as betting in their own markets this week, too? Yeah, it was a big week for insider trading. There was one of the more amusing ones I've ever seen was this Paris temperature market. Did you see this? Oh my gosh, this one's great. So there wasn't a ton of volume on this, because why would anyone bet on the temperature in Paris on a given day? Yeah, I don't know why anyone would do that.

They were, there was an Oracle attack, so they were using a single sensor near the Charlotte de Gaulle Airport. The guy bought the 22 degree, that's in Celsius, 22 degree option, which was trading at basically zero. took a hair dryer, heated it up, the sensor triggers, the market closes, he wins, and then gets arrested. Unbelievable. So this guy went out there with a blow dryer and just put it on the sensor in order to win this, and then promptly got arrested. Yeah. Kind of makes the case that these markets need to be a little better design.

I keep thinking of this. Like, there was actually a market on finding Satoshi, by the way. Oh, really? And in the end, there was no single entry for more than one of these names. So they all closed it no in the end. So it's like you just need better market design, like better contracts. I mean, why would you be betting on the weather in Paris? How is that a thing that people want to do?

I know. Like I can get betting on the Oscars or sports or something, but who wakes up and it's like, yeah, I think it's going to be 19 degrees in Paris today. Yeah. I mean, let's do some like pro-social stuff in this prediction market space. Is there any of that or is this all just like complete degenerate stuff? I think you're making Latusha James's point for her. All right.

So speaking of Coinbase, Quantum Corner here, Coinbase's Quantum Advisory Group has released a position paper on the state of quantum computing, talking about blockchain security, talking about which blockchains are vulnerable. Kind of a 101 overview as well. I thought it was pretty good, what do you think? Yeah, so this is not Coinbase directly, but it is a independent academic group that forms their Quantum Advisory Board. So Kezi Akira, Scott Aronson, of course, Dan Bonae, Justin Drake, Sri Ram, the Vigin Labs,

Yehuda Linda Lindel, and Dalia Malki. So quite a credentialed group. And I thought the paper was very, very good. so I strongly recommend it. They did not adopt the posture that we have seen many of these kind of sell-siders take, which is, well, you know, there are the alarmists, and then there are the deniers, and we're in the middle, we're the nuanced middle, and we see no imminent threat, so we can talk about it.

Coinbase does not take that posture. So Coinbase says, yeah, there's no imminent threat, but you actually do have to upgrade now. Yeah. So, which is, in my opinion, the correct stance. I know some people disagree with me. So, you know, they say, interestingly, the debate on timelines, timelines to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is largely irrelevant since migrations should be planned for and prepared now. We have high confidence at a large scale, fault tolerant quantum computer will eventually be built. As such, blockchains must prepare for this eventuality.

the board's view is straightforward. The time to start preparing is now, not when it's urgent. So they completely understand the point that me and many others have been making. You don't have the luxury of waiting until one of these things is imminent because the transition takes a long time. So I thought this was really the most thoughtful paper on this that I've read so far. I mean, what do you think this does to just general speed and performance of some of these Alt-L-Wans? With Bitcoin, you can stand for kind of a smaller block size.

You can stand for a queue there. The real use case that's taken off is the store of value use case. But it strikes me that we're just going to have some very slow blockchains that used to be fast. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, I don't want this to happen. But I think because blockchains of different tradeoffs, they deliberately explore between safety and performance. you're going to get a fragmentation of standards. So Bitcoin is a very skeptical of lattice-based cryptography, which is a newer, but not really that new cryptography.

And I was talking to someone that does this outside the crypto context. They help organizations prepare for the post-quantum world. And she said to me, like, well, obviously lattices are safe. Like, everyone thinks that. But the Bitcoin doves don't. So there's an extra level of paranoia in Bitcoin land, so they want to use hash-based signatures, if anything. Ultra-safe, extremely bulky. There's tricks you can do to make them smaller, but the tricks add enormous amounts of complexity.

So it may be the case that Bitcoin signatures go from 60 bytes to 10 or 50 kilobytes, and we just have to eat that, which is a big problem. Do you think it's just the case that we haven't had enough eyes on these post-quantum signature schemes? that we haven't really tried to optimize them and make them fast. And we'll have similar progress that we had with traditional elliptic curve signature schemes. Yeah, I think we can find efficiencies like the Bitcoin, some Bitcoin doves have, you know, they took a look at Sphinx and they came up with shrimps, but there's a big, big tradeoff there in terms of implementation complexity. So it could be the case we get more optimized versions for Bitcoin.

But what I think is going to happen is, yeah, Bitcoin would probably add this. some point, but I don't think it'll be lattice-based. I think it'll be hash-based. Meanwhile, other blockchains can't accept a performance degradation like that because they're not like Bitcoin and they'll go for Falcon or lattice-based or newer types of post-quantam algorithms which are emerging, which there are some more experimental ones. And so now we're going to get this fragmentation where previously the whole industry was kind of of on elliptic curves and the implementation assumptions were standard and it was clear how you could do MPC and things like that. And I worry that we're now because blockchains have different

priorities, we're going to get this explosion of standards. And the wallets are going to have this absolute nightmare trying to reconcile them and keep everything safe. And that it might be the world that we end up in. Yeah. I think you're probably going to end up with these orchestration level companies that try to help these custodians integrate into the various schemes. But it seems like this could also push some of these blockchains towards more centralized implementations just to not be as slow. Yeah. So I don't know what's going to happen, but I completely agree with Coinbase the upgrade process

has to start now. Do you see Sam Bankman-Fried elected to withdraw his motion for a new trial? He said he didn't think you'd get a fair hearing from New York's judge, Lewis Kowell. So it's been funny to see the portfolio of things that Sam invested in fraudulently has now continued to grow. So Anthropic is worth a trillion dollars. I think he didn't a seed investment in Cursor. Oh yeah, Cursor.

They put $200,000 into a $400,000 preceded round there. And that Cursor announced this week that what they have given Elon Musk, the option to buy that company at $60 billion post-SpaceX IPA? Yeah, so Sam is making the case that he, as he made some very prescient investments, that, I mean, I don't know what the case is. He's not a fraudster. I mean, he was still, he still broke the law. Hey, I stole all the money, but I made some good investments with it.

I think Amy Wu probably did a bunch of those deals, though, right? That was like the argument the Martin Shkreli made. Yeah, like I kind of embezzled funds that were earmarked for one thing, but I ended up making money in other ways. So it's not a crime. It's still a crime, unfortunately. It's still a crime, Sam. So it is a tragedy in a sense, though, that Sam really was a generational investor. Or at least he oversaw an organization that appeared to have a lot of talent on the investing side. Yeah, I mean, right place, right time, right access, like deep in the EA community, that's where a lot of this AI stuff came out of and I think his portfolio would have been worth something like $120 billion. I think it does reflect badly on the trustees actually.

I mean, they sold these things at fire sale prices and sort of got people's monies back, but not really. Yeah. I mean, if you have that much demand to buy your anthropic shares at that level, you should take a step back and actually ask yourself if you're running a comprehensive process. John Ray was quite dismissive of AI. Yeah, and this is one of the cases where they ran the process quite quickly, quite expediently. It would have actually been very much in the favor of the creditors if they had done it in a more leisurely manner. But it was so haphazard because some of these things moved

really quickly, but there's other things, including portfolio companies of ours where it's still tied up, right? So these things haven't actually traded. Like people have been trying to buy things, but haven't been able to get a fair hearing on it. Yeah, so what did they get back in the end for all the assets that they disposed? It was like $12 or $16 billion. Yeah, it's still ongoing. And of course, all of the crypto was dollarized. So they're, they're above 100% for sure. But this could have been, it definitely could have been made whole without dollarizing the crypto claims. It could have denominated. It could have been. It could have been par in crypto terms.

It was par and dollar terms, but that's not, it's not great if you're a depositor. Definitely not. Well, he says he wouldn't have gotten a fair hearing. I think he would have gotten a very fair hearing. You just wouldn't have liked the answer, is my take. Yeah, I mean, I think he deserves his time. But I also think that some of his co-conspirators deserved more time, frankly. Yeah.

Yeah, some people never went to jail. That's for sure. So this is your favorite topic. Justin's son is suing World Liberty Phi for unlawfully freezing his WLFI token investment that's now worth roughly 75 million. Eric Trump and World Liberty Phi dismissed the claims is entirely mirrorless. I'm actually sympathetic to Justin Son for once. Believe it or not. Is that the first time those words have ever been said on this podcast? I hate to say it, but I think Justin Sun has a point. I don't think you should be allowed to arbitrarily change the vesting terms. just because you don't like one of your investors. Does this mean that Justin's son needs to go to California and stand in a courtroom in order to get a hearing on this? Is he allowed to be in the U.S.?

I mean, anything's possible in this day and age. Yeah. Wow. I'll continue to not really track this story. I'll just let you cover that. But speaking of Tron, Tether has frozen $344 million worth of Tether on Tron. what's your best guess on who this belongs to? So this was flagged by U.S. authorities for being associated with the illicit activity.

The rumors I'm seeing are that it was IRGC affiliated, which we had anticipated would be the case, actually. So now that Iran's economy has started to collapse and they're very much sanctioned, it was very foreseeable that they would move not to Bitcoin, but to stable coins, of course. And there actually is a vibrant set of crypto exchanges in Iran. that's a very real thing that exists. And there's, of course, all these Huala and OTC brokers in the Middle East, although I assume that noose is tightening a little bit as the OE is not friends with them anymore. But yeah, I mean, the rumors I've seen are that this is RGC, but nothing confirmed.

There was another interesting story regarding Tether and Iran this week. Did you see this? This was the boat incident? What exactly happened there? Yeah, so you might have seen there was audio of a tanker captain released of the captain effectively begging the IRGC boats to not fire on his ship. And he kind of said, well, they'd paid the toll. Are he shooting at me? And it's looking, this is Fat Mantera who's ruring this, but it's looking like the ship may have fallen victim to a crypto scam.

No way. So they paid money to another criminal. Yeah, someone from. marginally represented themselves as the IRGC toll authorities. They pay the toll. They expect they'll go through unmolested. They get fired upon by the Iranians that never received a payment. And that this whole mess takes place.

That is a bad feeling to be that ship captain to realize that you paid however much you paid to the wrong person. Yeah. So, I mean, you'd have to have the obsec of a crypto fund manager. or if you are running a tanker in this trade of Hormuz. That's brutal. That's a tough one, double whammy. So did the ship get just torpedo? Like, what happened to it?

They eventually turned around. And so they got shot out a little and turned around. Geesh. So micro strategy had another big week. $2.5 billion worth of Bitcoin purchases since the last time we recorded this podcast. This STRC product is just on fire for these guys. This is the largest preferred out there, period, in all of capital markets. Yeah, I guess public preferred.

Yeah, so Bitcoin's gone up a lot recently, so they have kind of bought themselves more time. The whole STRC situation, it's more a matter of the rate of change. So basically they can buy a lot of this, but not an unlimited amount because there's only a finite amount of MSTR common that they can use to monetize to pay the dividend. However, if Bitcoin goes up a lot, it's sort of like is a mini bailout. Yeah. So they've kind of reset the clock here. Well, that's the whole business plan, right? I think they have something like 18 months of cash on the balance sheet right now to service these dividends.

but price of Bitcoin goes up, they're going to be in a lot better spot. Yeah, so a lot of premature announcements of Strategies' death, they live to see another month. Would you make of the Kalshi announcement that they're moving into launching crypto perpetual futures on the platform? Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. They have a big consumer base and every financial brokerage wants to be the everything app. Although it seems like they're competing a little bit with their own partners here because a lot of brokerages working with them that they're now competing with. Don't you think perps are just much more popular offshore where you can really lever them up?

I just don't think you're going to be able to offer these like 10x products in the U.S. Yeah, I think people just like the form factor of perps now. I mean, I have seen traders trading equities on perps. where you could easily do it in the regular way. Yeah. But so they prefer to trade tokenized equities on purpose because they just understand that market structure better. All right.

Some odds and ends this week. Wall Street Journal had a big, big article on New York Stock Exchange, how a 233-year-old Wall Street institution went all in on crypto. So it was pretty good. I mean, New York Stock Exchange does seem to be all over this in terms of doing partnerships. So you've got to give them a lot of credit there. Yeah, I mean, especially the Pontian.

market deal. I mean, there's not a lot of Wall Street firms that aren't doing something in crypto now. Yeah, at this point, I think everyone, but State Street has done something, right? Goldman have surprised me over how much they've flirted with crypto over the years and then ultimately not done anything. Well, they have the desk, right? They have the desk. They're doing stuff with Canton. Like, they're at least doing stuff. But the largest custodian other than Boni, I think, is State Street. And I don't think they have anything. And then they're, have one of the largest asset management firms with SSGA, and they also have not done anything. Yes.

Speaking of a asset manager that has done things with crypto, Fidelity, of course, Fidelity Digital Assets, they had a great report this week called Getting Off Zero, Evaluating Bitcoin in 2026. Getting off Zero, yeah. That's like, you know, the price of the crypto assets in 25. Like, now not zero anymore. So we'll put this in the show. No, it's quite a good report. All right, so I think that's it for the week.

There's a lot of stuff going on outside the industry that, you know, sports related that I just don't really want to talk about. The draft is tonight? Is it tonight? It is tonight. Day one of the draft is tonight. I don't really know what's going to happen in the draft. Yeah, I mean, as a Patriots fan, the draft doesn't ever really matter that much. But for the commanders, it's a big event because we're in a reality.

really picker. Yeah, I don't know. I haven't really spent much time on the draft. We're picking second to last, but maybe we'll trade out of it. Yeah, I will regrettably admit that I don't follow enough college football to have a sense at all. Well, it's the quarterback from Indiana, I think, is consensus number one. He was the Cuban kid, right, from Miami? Yeah. So he'll go number one I think but after that I don't know. I think we need to shore up the offensive line. So we will let you know if we find Satoshi this week. We'll keep looking. Yeah, check out that documentary. I think that's it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.