On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/30/21(Matt's Turkey Jerky, Elon 'proves' Bitcoin liquidity, Nexon's BTC buy) (EP.210)

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Matt and Nic return for deals of the week, joined for the first time by new member of CIV Ria Bhutoria. In this episode:  An update on Matt's Turkey problem Will Matt create OTB Turkey Jerky? Will Matt tase the Turkeys? Is monetizing stranded natural gas good for the environment? Elon 'proves Bitcoin's liquidity' Elon admits to having a personal Bitcoin position Nexon announces a $100m Bitcoin buy Is US Bank getting into Bitcoin custody? German regulators warn about Binance's equity tokens Do NFTs make sense for collectible card trading game studios? Genesis originates $20b worth of new loans Content mentioned in this episode Square and Ark Invest, Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future [pdf] Fidelity and BBH, Applying Subcustody to Digital Assets This episode supported by:  Sovryn, DeFi on Bitcoin Eventus, global leader in trade surveillance, market risk and transaction monitoring solutions

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated easing. You 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. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And before we kick it off, just a little word from our sponsors. Do you know what Coinbase, Gemini, Erisax all have in common? They all use the sponsor of this podcast, Eventis, who is the global leader in trade surveillance, market risk, and transaction monitoring services. Many of the largest crypto exchanges, broker dealers, and trading firms in the world are now using Aventus to improve the efficiencies of their regulatory operations and to mitigate the risk that they get fined and incur reputational damage. If you want to operate an institutional grade

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Pledge funds to liquidity pool to earn a portion of trading fees or trade with up to 5x leverage on the decentralized. exchange that's sovereign dot app and i have to say we have the most creative fans of this podcast in the world the amount of suggestions about the turkey problem it's just a lot of helpful ones i'd say a lot of not very helpful ones too so what are the what are the brinkers saying what's brink nation saying about your turkey problem so i'd say there's a lot of suggestions of violence first of all against the turkeys which we can't condone that but a lot of advice what i'm hearing shoot the turkeys turkey. We had some people that were in my mentions telling me how to use a slingshot. A lot of suggestions to get dogs, which I don't have dogs. I guess I could go out and get a

couple dogs. There seemed to be a lot of work to get rid of turkeys to like introduce new parts of your family. But that could be a potential suggestion here. Have the turkeys actually caused any destruction as aside from just mental distress. No, they have not, no, but the grass is in terrible shape and I'm pretty sure it's because of the turkeys. They're like, that's, that's, yeah, that has to end. They're pretty loud. That's not great. Noise pollution. Oh, there's a lot of suggestions to tase the turkeys. Um, one of our listeners may or may not have gone so far as to get me a taser. Are we talking a taser gun or like a physical like a one of a device you have to like hold up to the turkey's neck or whatever no you'd have

to be like proximate to the turkey in like place it just seems that's risky incredibly unrealistic to tis a turkey and then what like what have you really solved if you have just a like a stunned turkey in your front yard so so then you have a an incapacitated turkey and then do you sort of just throw it into the garden next door is that like this thing so you have like 19 turkeys in your where are you going to walk around just like 10. case every single one of them, then you have to pick them up and get rid of them. Wouldn't they notice after their first comrade was tased, you know, not to be near the big man? Yeah, like they're not smart, but they're not like that dumb, you know?

They're not going to sit there and let you just tase them. As far as birds go, where do they stack up intelligence-wise? It's hard to say. I mean, they'll, you start squawking at them. They'll start squawking back for sure. All right. So we're going to mark this as unresolved. Unresolved, but just don't send me any more tasers, please.

Thank you, though. Thank you. I suggested this to you off air, which I guess is like 99% of the time, but we should make turkey jerky and sell it on the merch store. Oh, we should. On the brink.com. On the brink.com. The world's greatest crypto podcast merch store. Don't you think people would buy Matt Walsh estate Turkey Jerky?

If, yeah, locally sourced, organic. Might be a little tough. Tased, maybe not tased, maybe. Electrified meat. Bone arrow. It's worth putting out some consumer research on that. So let us know. All right.

If you want turkey jerky, hit us up. We have a Sphinx chat. So you can tell us, feel the lightning network. The Sphinx. Someone was in there today saying, I'm glad your turkey problem is not solved. That was harsh. I mean, this is top tier.

content. So I hope it never gets solved, frankly. I guess we have some like, you know, industry stuff to talk about too. Yeah. Well, we, so we didn't do, we did one podcast episode earlier this week with Andrew Steinwald from Fermien, which was about the metaverse. I'm obsessed with the metaverse. So this is good because I still don't know what the metaverse is. So what is the Metaverse. Well, so the way that I think about this is it is just digital worlds. It's where we're all going to go hang out. And I think it's going to be a progression. I think that increasingly people are living their lives in digital worlds. I mean, you basically live on Twitter. So maybe you are Yeah, I mean, I'm already much more online than I am. IRL. So am I in the Metaverse right now?

That's kind of what Andrew was saying. He's like some people kind of already live in the Metaverse, but it's just on like Twitter and Discord and TikTok, but maybe eventually we're going to be with VR goggles and just living virtual lives. And you'd have to think that cryptocurrency is a big part of that future and that there's going to be digital real estate. I like the idea of like rebranding being extremely online as inhabiting the Metaverse. That makes it sound much more glamorous than what it is. It's, well, it's kind of a cool concept. I mean, the Ready Player 1 version of the the world is a little bit scary, but it's hard to imagine us not going to that extreme.

I've never read that book. I've never read the book. You've got to read that book. I'm missing out. Everybody in crypto talks about it. But so Andrew's fund is entirely focused on this theme, and NFTs are a big part of the Metaverse. And so he's, he's ahead of the game here. I received an email pitch today for an NFT, initial price target of $100,000. And it was a rendering of house on the moon that's what it was and why was it 100,000 beats me beats me i mean it was like a quite good rendering but uh would i pay hundred thousand dollars for that i don't think so well it's you know beauties in the by the beholder i guess that someone will pay that for sure yeah that'll christies will have that up that'll go it'll get bought so those are one show of the week uh there's a bunch of news

are deals rather, a whole bunch of deals. Tons of deals, some big ones too. First one up is Crusoe energy system. So we've had Chase Lockmiller, the CEO, founder and CEO of Crusoe on the podcast before. They're a company that is focused on capturing stranded energy and turning it into productive things like Bitcoin. So they, for instance, put Bitcoin miners into flare mitigation systems. So they raised $128 million from Valor Equity, Bain, Polychain, DRW and others. So congrats to Chase and the team. Yeah, and I want to say something about this because

a lot of people don't understand it. So a lot of people think that they just object to the notion of combusting natural gas, period. When a flare mitigation service rider like Crusoe, and there are some others, is active at an oil well, they are ameliorating the climate. impact of that well because what would be happening otherwise if they weren't there is the gas gets flared off and on windy days the flaring is inefficient so the natural gas bubbles out and that's much worse for the climate if you just have the raw gas bubbling out into the atmosphere so if you do it in a controlled manner you capture the gas you put it into a gen set you combust it and then you can also manage the emissions, you know, you can genuinely mitigate the emissions there. That is a much

better outcome. It's a much cleaner burn. And so that gas is going to be burned anyway because most of the time it's not economical to bottle it up. And there's oftentimes not pipelines in these places. So it is a net benefit from a carbon perspective. Just wanted to be clear about that because a lot of people totally don't understand. Yeah. And the interesting thing here is also, you know, the other things that you could potentially do with stranded energy. And also, you know, where else there is stranded energy and how can you unlock that? So I'd be interested to see some of these things at the bottom of, you know, waterfalls and things like that.

Totally. It's going to be a huge theme, non-rival energy I call it. Next up, another stalwart firm in the industry, Paxos. They power a lot of sort of underlying infrastructure in the crypto space. They raise $300 million from Oak. Declaration partners, PayPal, and some others. Paxos is a really impressive raise. Do you know that I met Bill Bradley at a Paxos event in, I think it was like 2015 or 16?

Very tall, Cuban. I did not know that. Yeah. The Paxos, back then it was called Itbit, but in the head, this bank chain summit. But Sheila Bear and Bill Bradley were both there. next up we have zengo which is a mpc based crypto wallet focused on eliminating seeds i've used zungo a great product they raise 20 million dollars from insight partners distributed global and others next one up is finowa f i n oa i think that's is that finowa finnawa finn oa i guess a crypto asset custodian

they raised $22 million from Balderton Capital, Coparian, Signature Venture, and others. Well, there's some monster raises this week. Alchemy, their blockchain infrastructure company, they raised $80 million from Code 2 and others.

So Alchemy is like the back end infrastructure for a bunch of things. I believe they power top shots and a bunch of things that are happening in the Dapper ecosystem as well. So they're doing node hosting. Next up, we have Bumper.

They are a DFI derivatives project. There is $10 million from Alphabet, Autonomy, Beechhead, and ChainLayer. Next one up is Figment. So Figment is a blockchain infrastructure company. They're now launching a fund. So they are launching a $16 million investment fund to support D5 protocols and applications. And it calls out the Cosmos, Terra, and LivePure ecosystems. And then we have Phantom.

They're decentralized application platform. they raised $15 million in a token sale to hyperchain capital. Next one up is Polygon. This is the Ethereum scaling project, formerly known as Madik Network. They launched a $100 million fund, which is promoting defy-development on top of Polygon. A lot of things being launched on top of Polygon from a scaling perspective. So it seems like these guys are doing a good job of getting people to build things on their platform. Yeah, they seem to be an early winner in kind of the Ethereum L2 space.

We have a fund announcement, Volt Capital, early stage venture fund run by Soona Amhaz, Imran Khan. They raised $10 million. Huge congrats to them. Very excited to see them announce this, get in market. They've already been in market doing deals. Great to see the announcement. Congrats to the Volt team. That's great news and some great LPs in that fund as well.

Next one up is Notional. this is a fixed rate lending business. They raised $10 million from Pantera, Parify, and one confirmation. And lastly, you know, we didn't have any CMS deals this week. So that's the second week in the row, I guess. Hashflow, a defy trading platform, there is $3.2 million from Electric Capital, Dragonfly, and Alameda research. All right. Late breaking news here.

We've got a CMS deal. there's a tweet from Dan for official release. Today CMS has purchased many Bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price higher than here. Combined with CMS's prior purchases Bitcoin, this represents a bag. That's a deal. That's a deal. Bitcoin is a deal. CMS on the board.

Shout out CMS. That's the free space on the bingo card. So let's get into some news. And the big news of the week is that the Castle Island family is growing and Rea Batoria has joined the team and the podcast right now. Welcome to the team, Reh Batoria. Thank you guys. I am so excited to be here at Castle Island and on the Brink. What is up? What do you call podcast listeners? Are they on the Brinkers? Are they the Brink Nation? We have a lot of nicknames for them. Brinkers, Brink Nation, those are the main ones.

All right. Shout out Brinkers. Thanks for listening. Super. stoked to be here. We're really excited to integrate you to the podcast. We are expecting tremendous content from you. In the spirit of Cass Island, Ria is a content machine. So that's fully in line with the SIV approach. It really is. Everything is so aligned. And a Fidelity alum. Fidelity Mafia. Yes. It keeps growing. It's unstoppable. Well, Riaia Yeah, let's get your take on some news of the week here. So Tesla has announced that they've sold a little bit of their Bitcoin stash for net proceeds of $272 million. So quite a take.

And Elon, of course, claimed in a tweet that this was just a move to prove liquidity, quote unquote. What's your take on Tesla, taking a little bit off the table here? Yeah, I mean, I believe them in that, you know, they did it to display or test out the liquidity of Bitcoin. The CFO also said, I think, that they're pleased with how liquid Bitcoin is. The CFO is alternatively known as the master of coin. That's actually his title, right? It is. It is. It's officially in the SEC filings. But yeah, I mean, it's also, it's what, 10% of their holding.

So they still hold about $2 billion worth of Bitcoin. on balance sheet at today's prices. But, you know, it also helped them beat their streets, earnings expectations. So I think people are debating whether, you know, what, what their true intention was. Yeah. I saw a couple good takes on this. So Dan Held had a good take on Peter McCormick's podcast this week, just talking about, look, if this extends runway, what does Elon care about? He cares about extending runway he cares about getting to Mars you know if this helps the company that's what he cares the most about and so that was an interesting take to me the other one was NLW talked about this on the breakdown yesterday from a shareholder activist perspective there's some interesting

considerations here you know if you think about micro strategy no one had really heard about micro strategy before and so when they came out and said hey we're going to buy some bitcoin no one really perked up on that and then of course they went out and did it But if Tesla had a similar reaction and said, hey, we're going to go out and buy some Bitcoin, the price of Bitcoin would have skyrocketed. They would have gotten terrible fills on it. And so they kind of had to slowly build into this position. And so taking a little bit off right now, maybe from just a shareholder relations perspective,

was a smart move. So, I don't know, either of you guys have a take on that. The notable thing for me was not the proving liquidity, which doesn't make any sense, frankly, because when they've tested the liquidity on the way in, hello. I mean, this thing's pretty liquid, right? Is both ways, right? Liquidity is the market impact of a trade. When they bought Bitcoin, they would have tested the liquidity.

It's not just a one-way thing. Leaving that aside, Elon admitted he has a personal position in Bitcoin on Twitter. He did. That's new, actually. Yeah. So trade a friend of mind identified. a dogecoin wallet with tens of billions of dogecoin and a Bitcoin wallet was something like 100,000 bitcoins that he informed me was Elon's wallet, which I did not think is the case to be

clear, but I'm sure, you know, we're going to enter this golden age of speculation as to which is, which is Elon's Bitcoin stash. So hold on, the two separate wallets, obviously, how would you, how would you draw a relationship between the two of them? Oh, because they had transactions. they're happening at very similar times. So they seemed sort of correlated. And given that he's an avowed Dogecoin fan and I guess a Bitcoiner now, the theory was that that was Elon's wallet. But I don't necessarily buy that.

It was interesting because right around the same time, Nexon got on the board with a big purchase of about $100 million worth of Bitcoin. So, you know, kind of netting. They bought some of Tesla's coins. And they wrote a good note about it. I like how they all write notes, justifying their exposure. And they were talking about the growth in the money supply. And what's crazy is whenever I post about this, I get killed on FinTwit.

He who must not be named. I just get slaughtered out there on like CFA Twitter by people, you know, telling me that I don't understand, you know, the data. And actually, you know, you have to contextualize, you know, these broad money aggregates. And you got to, it's like, come on, money supply number go up. Okay. It's so obvious and clear. Am I wrong? Anyway, this Korean conglomerate agrees with me.

So that's the debate over. Sometimes it's better to just live on the left side of the bell curve. They're just printing more of that money. Exactly. Print more money. Value of money go down. Like, let's not overcomplicate it here. Another story that caught my eye this week was, so Anchorage and Two Ocean Trust Company.

So Two Ocean, of course, started by Joel Revel and Dustin Sventi. Joel's been on this podcast before. They are now offering a crypto estate planning product called Coin Trust. And basically, to dumb this down, they're establishing protocols and guardrails around how you would pass on crypto assets in the event of your death, which is clearly just a super valuable service and there've been countless times, you know, horror stories that we've heard in this industry about people passing away and next of kin not having access to their funds. So good to see, this is the type of thing that's a no-brainer to build. So good to see things like this

coming into the wild. Yeah, kind of an unsolved problem, estate planning and crypto. So pretty exciting to see. Brian Kelly's fund, BKCM, is relocating to Wyoming. Shout out Wyoming. We got to get this. Maybe we should read. locate. Does this mean you actually, like, you live in Wyoming? Is he going out there? Do they have CNBC set out there? They'll be bison in the background of that thing. Can we relocate Castle Island out there? But like, we don't have to like go out every day out there, do we? One week a year. I would move to Wyoming. I would do like half a year in Wyoming. I would do a quarter in Wyoming. Wyoming is a diverse state. There's like nice parts and less

nice parts. No disrespect to Wyoming. I've never been to Wyoming. I went there to watch the solar eclipse in 2017. That was my one visit. But I went to Casper, Wyoming, which is like maybe not the part

you want to live in. Well, congrats to BKCM and I guess congrats to the state of Wyoming. They're doing a great job of getting companies to move out there. The next one up is a huge story, I think, that hasn't got a lot of airtime this week. So U.S. Bank, which is actually the fifth largest bank in the country, they announced that they were selected to administer Nidig's Bitcoin ETF. And then they also,

it was kind of a weird announcement. So then they said that they're getting into crypto custody with a provider. They didn't name the provider, but the announcement was also that they were on Nidig's Bitcoin ETF. So like, you don't have to be a rocket scientist here to like draw the comparison here or to draw the connection. But so based on this announcement, it looks like, U.S. Bank is getting into the crypto asset custody game, which I think is much bigger news than the fact that they're administering Nidig's Bitcoin ETF, which is also good news. So a big bank getting in the space, I guess, is the long and short of it. On a related note, Fidelity actually published a research report today in collaboration with BBAH or Brown Brothers Harriman

on the topic of subcustody. So I think we're going to see a lot more of these announcements throughout the year. Yeah, I agree. And I think this is all on the heels of the OCC under Brian Brooks acting chairman Brian Brooks in the waning days of the Trump administration coming out with that clarity that banks can custody Bitcoin. And so now we're just seeing this wave of subcustody requests. And it looks like U.S. Bank is now on the board.

Brown Brothers Harriman being active here is also really interesting. Ria, I think you might be being modest here. didn't you write that report? I helped write it. Yes, I did. Applying subcustody to digital assets. That's going on the show notes. Yeah.

On a maybe more perturbing note, this is the, as we all know, this is the regulatory concern podcast. That's what we talk about. The German financial regulator, Bofin, has warned that Binance's stock tokens may violate European securities laws. Maybe not the most surprising thing to hear.

Well, they're tokens that represent actual securities. So the fact that they use the word in the qualifier may was very nice of them, but these things kind of look like securities, no? So how about those FTX equity derivatives? I believe they're issued by a German firm. I mean, does anyone not think that these are securities? Like, what's the surprise here?

Yeah, I think a lot of people just live in this world where firms like Binance are somehow completely insulated from the vicissitudes of regulation. And I think that world is going to collapse soon. Well, I don't know. Brian Brooks is there. He's at Binance. He's just going to fix it. Maybe he can ward off the German regulators. That's right.

did you catch this Q1 earnings call for Hasbro? I'm sure you were like you guys were both listening. But they announced that they're actively looking at NFTs. And it turns out that they, I think they own the Magic the Gathering franchise for digitally at least. Wizards of the Coast. Yeah. Do they own it? I think, I think so.

Which would make a ton of sense from an NFT perspective. That's an obvious use case. Yeah. I mean, that was one of the original ones that was very clear with the collectible card trading game. I mean, if you think about what physical collectible cards in a game like Magic are, they're effectively analog NFTs. So, you know, we've got investments there, of course. Makes all the sense in the world. I've got some old NFTs on like a meta.

I need to find. I've got a, there are a lot of NFTs from like the first wave that I now want to know if I still have. I actually just discovered that I have three NFTs. I knew I had one, and then I just found out I had two more. I, like, checked two of my Eath wallets. What do you got? I'm very excited. Worth something.

One of them I actually paid for, and I didn't realize that I won the bid until a month later. The other one was a free NFT, that Lil Michaela, the online avatar. just distributed to like the first thousand people that responded to her tweet. And then the last one is an NFT of that coin telegraph created for their top 100 people. Because you got the coin telegraph treatment. I did. Top 100. Yep.

I think I bought the Tom Jessup NFT when that came up. What's the Tom Cruise up? Jessup NFT. There was a coin desk, I think, put out a Tom Jessup NFT. That's awesome. I don't know if he even knows that. I said, I gave it. Okay, I was going to ask if you were hoarding that NFT of him. No, I gave it to him. But bringing it back to Hasbro, I think that like online and video game companies are going to try and continue to use NFTs as a way to, stay or become relevant. For sure.

Well, I mean, it makes sense because you're just porting this analog experience into the digital realm for collectible. I think, you know, the nuance is probably that if there is a marketplace which connects to your game natively, then it obviously makes sense to have NFTs because the whole point of NFTs is to be financialized. If throwing a marketplace into your game ruins the gameplay, there's something. some case studies about this. There's a famous blog written about Diablo 3, how the game was ruined as they added in

the financial incentive than maybe a marketplace and hence that are less suitable. But for collectible card trading games, these things having secondary market value is part of the premise. Yeah. Yeah. The Genesis Trading Q1 report came out this week. That report is always just jam-packed with great market color. There's some interesting nuggets in there.

So there's $20 billion in new loan originations on the Genesis platform in Q1, which was up from $7.6 billion the quarter before. And then Ethereum, I guess not surprisingly, is a growing percentage of the overall loan portfolio. And this is definitely a factor with the GBTC trade going away. And so the borrow demand in this market for Bitcoin has gone down. And so ETH as a percentage of the total. book over there is currently at 27%. And that's up from like 7.4% it looks like in June.

So I mean, the other thing is that ETH is just a much more exciting asset, I guess, from a borrowing perspective, just given everything that's going on with EIP 159, 1559, rather. So that was pretty interesting to me, just the Bitcoin borrowing dynamics shifting. Yeah, Bitcoin declining as a share of the loan book here. Is Bitcoin dead? Let us wait and see. Let's see. Let's see.

The other, maybe it's just the boomer asset. And, you know, it's not relevant anymore. Yeah. The other interesting thing was the corporations are now just a sizable part of the client base. So I don't know if they're just calling this out for the first time,

but they have a new product here, Genesis Treasury. And it's catered towards companies that are putting crypto on their balance sheet. And maybe they're putting some of that Bitcoin boomer. or asset on the balance sheet? Yeah, I think they said that corporates made up 25% of total trading activity in Q1 and mostly, I'm assuming that was mostly Bitcoin positions. So I think that kind of balances out the decline in the lending book. So there's an interesting

white paper from Square together with ARC about Bitcoin's intersection with renewable energy. So it was entitled, Bitcoin is key to an abundant clean energy future. So I think you can probably guess at the editorial perspective from the title. Basically, the premise, and I know Max Webster contributed to this report, really, really fascinating, the open source to model. The premise is basically that Bitcoin, obviously monetizes energy, as we know.

Solar and wind have lowish capacity factors. That means they don't run all the time, and they're intermittent. Battery technology is not sufficient right now. It's not economical to absorb all of that power and spit it out at the right times. It's just not scalable enough. So the idea is to use Bitcoin as an economic sponge together with the kind of overbuild of renewables, such that you get a integrated kind of system, which is more economical through monetization with Bitcoin, has a higher total output because Bitcoin and batteries can absorb some of the

excess, but is relatively stable as well. And that's the premise of this piece. and frankly, if you look at the decline and the cost curves of solar in particular, and you make reasonable assumptions about battery efficiency increasing, I think it's a very plausible case to make. I mean, it's optimistic, but plausible. A lot of people didn't like it, especially the financial times, but no one should have to listen to them. I'm just glad you have more people out there defending the wall with you.

We need a meme with like Jack Dorsey, you, maybe Russ, Steven, It's just all just knocking down the fud. Elon, too. Elon's in on it now. Yeah, I mean, the thing that gets me is, like, a lot of the press and the peanut gallery responded to this and said, you know, this is greenwashing Bitcoin. But it's not claiming anything about Bitcoin. It's saying, look, Bitcoin has this interesting characteristic.

And this is a version of the world where Bitcoin could be strongly centered. synergistic with renewable technology. And that's an optimistic view and it's kind of a progressive view. And the critics are being incredibly cynical. They're basically saying, no, you know, we don't think green energy is going to expand. And we don't think there's a role for Bitcoin. And that's kind of a dark cynical take. And it's one I don't agree with.

And so I think they're basically on the wrong side of history here. So I think that's it for the week. got the NFL draft tonight. Well, this podcast will come out tomorrow, but we're taping it on Thursday. Interesting. I have to disclose, though, that I'm not an NFL fan anymore. I'm an MMA fan.

I've transitioned. What made you go with the MMA over football? So I realized that my love for football is just because football is like the most violent and popular sport, but then I discovered that there's an even more violent sport, which is literally the sport of violence, aka just, you know, people whacking each other. What about rugby?

Rugby is pretty violent. Reasonably so, but I mean, MMA, you know, like, MMA is legit. And I don't know how I missed it all these years. Anyway, I watched the card the other day. It was really great. And so I'm totally hooked. And there's a big overlap between crypto and MMA,

like Ben Ascran, former MMA fighter. It's a big bit coiner. There's actually a lot of these people. Well, athletes in general, I think. That's a lot of that. There's a new NFL player that said he that he's getting paid in Bitcoin. Yeah. What are your predictions for the draft?

Well, I don't know. The Patriots are stacked. The Patriots have signed so many free agents already. And I'd love to see them do something a quarterback. I don't think they're going to. But it looks like the Patriots will probably be 19 to know this year. Well, the ever suffering Washington football team need a quarterback. So hoping we take one in the first round.

because our other quarterbacks have not worked out. Ria, do you have an NFL team? I do not. I'm willing to be swayed in one direction or the other. So maybe in the next like six months, we'll figure out who I side with. You should probably be a Giants fan, right? I guess so. Why?

Why the Giants? New York. Because she lives in New York. Yeah, but what is it like New Jersey? He's like, no. Yeah, but is what? You're going to be a Jets fan? Nobody wants to be a Jets fan.

My allegiance is to New York before New Jersey, so that already puts the giants. Just because Castle Island, you know, is headquartered in Boston does not mean you have to be a Pats fan. In fact, I strongly discourage you from that. And it can't be two to one on this show. That wouldn't be fair either. So. that's true i need to find my own team yeah all right stay tuned all right well that's it for the week and we'll be back on monday with a new episode on proof of reserve i believe um no that's on

tuesday but there is a big proof of reserve related news item on tuesday so well i kind of just spoiled it anyway proof reserves is happening finally all right stay tuned everyone have a safe weekend