On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 05/07/21 (PoR is back, NY considers a mining ban, NYDIG's FIS partnership) (EP.211)

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

Nic and Matt return for another huge week of deals and news. In this episode:  The Chamber of Digital Commerce publishes a Proof of Reserve whitepaper Why Proof of Reserves matter Popular critiques of PoR Coin Metrics raises a Series B from Goldman Sachs Galaxy acquires BitGo How do you pronounce 3LAU? NYDIG brings Bitcoin to banks through FIS global NYDIG continues their ascent Paypal considers a stablecoin DCG commits to another GBTC repurchase NY state explores a Bitcoin mining moratorium Why a ban in NY would be counterproductive Could Ripple actually win their case against the SEC? New FUD dice are in Content mentioned in the episode:  The Chamber's PoR whitepaper Nic in the Harvard Business Review, How Much Energy does Bitcoin Actually Consume? This episode supported by:  Sovryn, DeFi on Bitcoin Eventus, global leader in trade surveillance, market risk and transaction monitoring solutions

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Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. This is one of the craziest weeks so far. We're recording this on a Wednesday afternoon. I think more news has happened in the last two days than has happened in the last like three months. Yeah, this week is only half over. We're doing another one of those early recordings, but it's already been a monstrous week. Yeah, and I guess the risk here is that we have a day tomorrow where just a ton of news happens.

And we're going to drop this on Friday morning, having missed a whole day of news. Could it possibly be that anything's, surpasses the news that has already dropped this week? It's, yeah. So the first billion dollar M&A situation with BigGo going to Galaxy for over a billion dollars. So it's a first for the industry. We have a big second as well. Goldman dips their toe in once again.

Coinmetric Series B. Very exciting. Very exciting. We did have an exciting week of podcasts. You did two this week. So first of all, I did Nick Gregory, CEO of Commerce Block, talking about state chains. So that was some like really deep tech. You know, I feel like we should do more of those.

State chains is basically a virtual open dime. It's a way to move private keys without making on-chain transactions. Very cool. Then this is one of my favorite episodes I've done in a while, was with Jeremy Now and No Buxton from Arminino, the accounting firm. Talking about proof of reserve. They've already been on the show, but we did another episode because, We released a proof of reserve white paper with the digital chamber. What an enormous week this has been.

I mean, seriously. So tee this up for people that aren't familiar with proof of reserves and what you've been pushing here and then what actually happened. So I've been relentlessly shilling proof of reserve, which is not a token. It is a concept. It is an idea. And as V for V for Vendetta says, ideas never die.

I don't know what the quote is, but anyway, proof reserve has been around for like eight years. It's basically the very simple idea that using cryptography, a custodian can prove that they own client assets and that liabilities are equivalent to assets. And a very simple idea, there's obviously complexities with the implementation, but the core idea has never really changed. In fact, even the implementations haven't evolved very much. there was a spate of proof reserves by major custodians in 2014, 2015, after Gox, and then basically nothing. The idea went dead. Myself and some others have tried to revive it. Unsuccessfully, for the most part, only a handful of custodians do them.

And then, early or last year, I guess, the chamber generously agreed to sort of underwrite this research project, incorporating a bunch of the chamber. membership, a bunch of custodians, law firms, audit firms, venture firms like us, basically laying out what proof reserve is, how it can be implemented and making the case for it. And so that was the white paper we finally published this week. In my view, the most comprehensive resource on POR ever produced. My hope and my expectation is that serious exchanges take a second look at the procedure. and they adopt it. I don't think they have an excuse now.

So I'm pretty excited. I mean, we'll see what happens. But yeah, this is a big step forward in terms of the viability of POR. What are the most valid pushbacks against proof of reserve? I mean, I'm curious in particular, your views on the custodians that operate

an omnibus account and have the view that the proof of reserve doesn't actually tell you anything about the sub ledger if you have everything in an omnibus account. Well, that's okay. That is, that comports with the proof reserve attestation. You don't have to have segregated accounts for a proof reserve to work. The challenging part is not the proof of assets, but it's the proof of liabilities. And that necessarily involves trust. So that is probably the best critique of proof reserve. It's not going to be a purely critical or math-based exercise to obtain the trust signal.

You most likely have to incorporate an accounting firm or another independent third party that will put together or assist with the summation of the liabilities because there's two ways to really cheat on a proof reserve. You can overstate your reserves by, for instance, taking a loan from a third party, or you can understate your liabilities by concealing certain life. liabilities. And that concealment is the thing where you probably want to bring in an audit firm. So that's the critique is simply that, you know, there is still an element of trust required. So with an omnibus account, you're not going granular down to the customer. You're just saying

this is an institution that is solvent and here's the proof. So you do a sign message or something to demonstrate that you have X many bitcoins. And then you've, put together a sort of one way to do it is you put together a list of all the user liabilities anonymized hashed in in a Merkel tree structure and then all of those liabilities add up to the value of the assets hopefully in the happy case and then the users can individually look at their particular leaf on that Merkel tree with their identifying account information and the balance that they know they have on the platform.

And, you know, there's software that lets you confirm that your leaf was included in the ultimate sort of root of the Merkel tree. And if enough users do that, you get a herd immunity where, you know, if the exchange was lying and omitting liabilities, users would discover that if they were to do it. So really, it's about creating a privacy preserving proof of liabilities, which is then trivially compared to the value of the assets, which you prove with a microtransaction or simply a sign message. I see.

Well, glad that's out there. Hopefully more people start to do this. Hopefully this becomes more of an industry standard type of a thing. Yeah. And like, I'm a cheerleader for proof of serves. I'm not really an expert on this stuff. So if you do want to learn about it, You should listen to the podcast with Jeremy and Noah because they actually do this stuff for a living.

Well, there's a ton of deals this week. Let's start with one in the Castle Island portfolio that you already referenced. So Coin Metrics, the crypto asset data company, they raised $15 million in a series B that was led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from Fidelity, Castle Island, Highland, Accru, Morningside, BlockFi, Avon, and a good cast of characters here. So congrats to the Coin Metrics team. Yeah, obviously, affirmed. we're very close to, we're both on the board, looking forward to sharing a board with Goldman,

a huge, huge vote of confidence. Only it's Goldman's second ever crypto deal. Their first one was Circle. And so they've been famously reticent to sort of dive into the crypto space. The fact that they've done so with CM is just incredibly validating. I think it's a great signal for the whole industry, well that Goldman is back involved. You know, looks like it's for good this time.

And yeah, just so happy for the for the CM team to see them, you know, continue to institutionalize, obtain this credibility and basically entrenched themselves as the data provider of choice for institutions in particular. Definitely. So huge congrats to the CM team. Next one up is BitGo. So this is the huge crypto custodian. So they have been acquired or will be acquired by Galaxy Digital for $1.2 billion in cash in stock.

BitGo has about $40 billion in assets under custody. And I think this is a huge, huge move for Galaxy, really smart move for them. They have the trading and prime services group. They have the M&A advisory group. They have the mining group. And you add a custodian to the mix here and talk about scale in this model. So now they can plug in that prime services team, that, trading team right into this infrastructure. And I think this is a huge play. Yeah, really big swing

from Galaxy. Awesome outcome for the folks at BitGo. There's actually kind of a bit of a BitGo mafia floating around. A lot of people in crypto can trace their careers back to BitGo. It's changing one letter. We're going from BitGo to Bitso. This is another huge deal. And, um, you know, very consequential, I think. They're a Mexican-based crypto exchange, and they actually do some more stuff like remittance. They raised $250 million in a Series C, led by Tiger Global and Koto at a $2.2 billion valuation. Bitso, for context, kind of dominates the crypto landscape, whether it's exchange or remittance

in Latin America. I'd say their other big competitor would be Ripio. And, I mean, Latam, if you look at it all. a per capita basis, some of these countries have extremely high per capita crypto penetration. So a market that you can't ignore, you know, just a monster deal for a bit so. Yeah, that's a huge deal. It's great to see some of these crossover funds get more and more active, too. So a lot of investors are waking up to the infrastructure opportunity here. Next one up is Lido Finance. They raise $73 million in a direct token sale to paradigm,

Coinbase Ventures, Three Arrows, Jump, Alameda, and DCG. So this is an Ethereum-based platform, Lido Finance. I think it's staking derivatives platform, if I'm not mistaken. I believe Crypto Cobain, everyone's favorite CT influencers involved. That's right. Crypto Cobain went on Uncommon Core last week. Really good episode. So Kobe has been doing some interesting stuff where he will direct his audience to

Twitch streamers with like very few listeners and then they get swarmed with streamers and then in some cases with like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of donations and it just turns into complete chaos. It's like incredibly heartwarming and kind of fun. So that's been my favorite thing to witness over the last few weeks. I mean he has a tremendous amount of followers on Twitter. And they're all very wealthy from just the run up in asset prices. So they are very generous. And so, you know, there's this illustrator. There's drawing cartoon art for Kobe. And over the course of a couple hours while she was drawing it, people just inundated her with donations. And she was just melting down. It's like a really cool thing. That's awesome thing. Yeah, it's great.

Next up, we have Genies. They're an NFT marketplace. There is $65 million from bond capital, dapper labs, coinbase, polychain, and hashkey. next one up is an M&A deal. So Coinbase has acquired SCUE. This is a platform that is a data platform. They were on their way towards building a trading and derivatives interface. So this is a move that I think underscores Coinbase's move into prime services and producing some of this data.

So SCU for my money was probably the best derivatives data platform out there. It still is, I guess. Yeah, before they were paywilled, I was. avid easier. But yeah, big congrats to both Coinbase and Skew. Next up, we have Equilibrium, their D5 platform on the Pocodon network. There is 8.5 million from CMS, LD Capital, and Cignam Capital. CMS was not to be denied this week.

Their present twice? Oh, no, this is their first mention. Yeah, there we go. Next one up is Showtime, which is a really good name. And it's a non-fungible token social network. They raise $7.6 million from Paradigm in DJ 3-LOW. Is it not pronounced blau? I mean, the DJ.

Did I just embarrass myself there? Is it 3-LOW? I mean, I don't know for sure. I'm looking at a number three and then it's L-A-U. So to me that's 3-LOW. But it kind of does look like a B, but you need to put that. No, no, no. I think he styles it 3-Low,

it's actually pronounced blouse because if you look at a three three looks like a b i just sound like a boomer just three low yeah i mean i mean what's he doing here doing nftc t non non fungible token social networks here you must be really into it yeah three low or blow as it may be is really really into like ethereum and nfts stuff i mean there's a big overlap these days i think with artists and producers uh next up we have mina form Coda, if I'm not mistaken, they raised 18.7 million in a coinless token sale. Oh, yeah. These are the guys that got sued by R3, Corda, right? And so they had to change their name. To me, Coda and Cota are not really that similar. I mean, there's a whole letter's worth of

difference. Yeah, I know. But if you're a private blockchain company, you've got to come up with a business model. So be aggressive on those patent suits. So our friends of Multicoin raised a 100 million. million dollar venture fund. Big, big congrats of multi-coin. They've had a great couple of years. And Andreessen Horowitz is reportedly in the market to raise somewhere between $800 million and a billion dollars for their new crypto funds. So a lot of funds being raised here, which is great for the ecosystem and great for founders. Yeah, so capital is not going to become any less abundant any time soon. So let's talk about this huge news of the week, Nideg. I mean, what's going on here? Yeah, so NIDIG has entered into a partnership with FIS Global, which is one of the largest companies that no one has ever heard of.

I believe it stands for Fidelity National Information Services. So this is back office connectivity for banks. And this is a partnership that on the face of it will allow a number, just a ton of regional banks to, and just nationwide banks as well, to roll out support for Bitcoin. So the ability to buy, sell, hold Bitcoin, probably more than that, probably interest accounts and things like that. in the future to anyone that is on that FIS platform. So if you think about just the points of leverage of how you'd actually bring, you know, Bitcoin and crypto assets to anyone at a bank, you know, you could go bank by bank, but the easier thing to do would be to find those integration points, those high leverage

touch points, and FIS Global is the top of that list. So I don't know if people are making a big enough deal of this, actually. It's just a huge, huge story. And when you think about just the addressable market of individual. and institutions that are connected on FIS is probably most of the country, I would think. So we're talking about potentially being able to get Bitcoin exposure directly through your local bank, administered presumably by NIDIG, but with the assistance of FIS. That's what it looks like to me.

And so, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of banks that no one's ever heard of that using FIS to power pretty much everything on the back end. And so if you had the ability to just point, click, buy Bitcoin in your local bank account, what a total game changer that is. Wow. And I mean, people may find it too large of a hurdle to pass KIC at Coinbase, but they're already on their bank and they already trust their bank. To me, this is just monstrously big. Oh, I mean, how many, you know, how many times have you talked to someone that says, oh, I don't, like,

establishing a coin base account is really difficult or I didn't make it through KYC or I didn't have my driver's license out. But to your point, almost everyone has a bank account. We've been quite praiseworthy of an eye dig on this show, but it's worth revisiting. I think they are the most dynamic sort of Bitcoin financial services institution in the space right now. I mean, it's got to feel good to work there just because they're executing at a ridiculous level. It's like every week they come out with a huge partnership. And they're very, very focused. So I think it's a very disciplined company too.

And the other reason I like talking about it is because it underscores just how asleep at the switch a lot of the incumbent firms are. And so NIDIG is going to be a public company in the next couple of years. It's going to be larger than most of the banks. And it's all kind of happening in very few people that are executives at large banks are really paying attention still, which is just totally puzzling to me. So speaking of other firms that are very crypto progressive, the block has reported that PayPal is looking to launch a stable coin. So I think I remember hearing on PayPal's quarterly disclosures that the uptake on the crypto projects was more aggressive than they'd expected.

So it seems like they've been rewarded by their first foray into crypto markets, and they're now pursuing alternative product lines, whether that's merchant payments, point of sale, or stable coins. So this is really interesting to me. If you think about PayPal's business, they have a huge network, obviously, millions of individuals, millions of merchants, but they still do clear everything through Visa and MasterCard and a couple of the other peripheral card networks. And so if you think about what a stable coin could be for PayPal, maybe this is a chance to cut out Visa and MasterCard from the equation.

Maybe PayPal has the opportunity here to launch a stable coin on an open public blockchain that allows them to build their payment system on top of a permissionless protocol as opposed to on top of Visa and MasterCard. Could this be the play? The interesting thing is the PayPal's visas and MasterCard's the world are all directly using public blockchains at this point or have announced plans to. I think it kind of obsolete these talking points about, you know, know we have to scale a Bitcoin or whatever at the base layer to match Visa scale.

I mean, that seems like a completely old-fashioned view now because these networks are becoming L2s on top of blockchains. They are now overlay networks. So they are scaling the underlying blockchains. I mean, it's just fascinating to watch. I never really understood that whole like Bitcoin doesn't move as fast as the visa network argument that's really the equivalent of saying this 747 sucks because it can't get even drive up to a McDonald's and you can't take it a half mile to get a you know a big Mac it's like that's not what

it's supposed to do yeah I agree I never bought the logic either well I think I had a sort of two-week period where it might have been a big blocker but I mean those arguments don't hold water anymore they basically reality has debunked them it's not theoretical anymore. Speaking of payment networks, Reuters is reporting the eBay is considering long customers use crypto as payment option, although they are vague about which assets. I guess you just float a little trial balloon that you're going to do a cryptocurrency integration. In this day and age, it's kind of like, okay, yeah, what are you waiting for? Two years ago, that would have been huge news, I guess, but they probably should integrate crypto as payment option. Certainly stable coins, people would be willing to

to part with. I don't know if a lot of people would be, you know, parting with their Bitcoin to buy things on eBay. So shall we talk about this DCG news? This is the GBDC podcast after all. Yeah, so we talk about the gray scale Bitcoin investment trust quite a bit. It's still trading at a discount to NAV. Most of that is a function of competitive products in the market. GBT still has that 2% management fee. And of course, that became a very crowded trade when it was trading at a premium. So a lot of money flowed into that product. And so it's been trading at a discount. Can you check what it is now? It was about 15% earlier this week. Yeah, last I looked, it was kind of in the 15, 20% range. I mean, still still pretty serious.

Pretty staggering discount. So they had previously authorized a repurchase of $250 million. And they came out this week with an 8K and a public release that said as of the 30th of April, they had actually purchased back 193.5 million, and now they have authorized the program to go up to 750 million instead of 250 million. So they're going to be, it looks like, their intention, this is not saying they have to, but it looks like they're signaling

that they will go up to $750 million in share repurchases. So, you know, I don't think that if they just threw $750 million at that, that would close that gap. I don't think that would bring it back to nav. Now, maybe the signal tells people that, hey, these guys are serious as a sponsor. They're really focused on making this closed-end fund track with the underlying. And so maybe that does help. It can't hurt, right?

But I do think that this move has been looked upon favorably by current and probably future investors. But the question is, is that enough to close the gap? Yeah, so I just checked. As of market close, the discount is 14%. still pretty monstrous, right? And so you throw in $500 million at that, that's not going to close the gap. And so they really, you know,

they need to go get a bazooka to close that thing. My theory here is that as the GBDC trade continues to unwind, that's going to be expressed as continued weakness on the Bitcoin price. I think there are a lot of firms that came to Bitcoin specifically to do that trade. And as they are now sort of gradually getting out of it, that is putting a lot of pressure on Bitcoin itself. So I wouldn't expect a new all-time high until this discount is remediated. Hopefully the SEC kind of sees the light on it, understands that it's a significant consumer protection issue,

and that the trust is severely dislocated from the underlying, even though it's a completely arbitrary market structure reason, no fundamental reason. and it should be that discounted. The obvious solution is, of course, to break open to the piggy bank and get the coins out. But as we talked about on previous podcasts, there is actually no mechanism for investors to do that.

So either Grayscale themselves has to dissolve the trust, which they probably don't want to do, or the SEC has to allow them to roll into an ETF, which we're still waiting on, you know, whether they'll do that or not. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't hold your breath on an ETS, Gensler's been in the seat for like seven days. So there may need to be more, this program may need to be expanded, I would say.

You've seen other closed-end fund sponsors make very, very aggressive moves in order to keep their products in line with nav. So maybe this could go bigger. Maybe DCG itself could go out and, you know, buy some, you know, take out some debt and and buy some more. It seems like a great trade to me. I mean, if you're long Bitcoin, then it's buying it. a 15% discount. So there's a lot of capital that would probably chase that. We saw from the

micro strategy convert that there's all sorts of pools of capital that are interested in Bitcoin exposure. The other thing they could do is reduce the management fee. I don't think that would close it either, but certainly it might close it a little. So it's like a 2% management fee or one and a half right now. I'm a little bit surprised that some of the special situation or even merger ARB funds haven't looked at this because there is kind of a finite period. You've got instruments which are effectively the same, which are trading at different prices. This seems really ripe for a special situation fund to come in and try and perform the arbitrage, the sort of catalyst-based ARB.

Maybe the discount needs to get deeper for that to happen, though. I think people are doing this ARB right now. I just don't think it's as popular as, the arb was the other way. But there's a lot of smart folks out there that are doing this arb right now. So New York State, they continue to beclown themselves. Their latest move is this move to issue a three-year moratorium on crypto mining in the state, most likely prompted by this news about this natural gas powered, natural plant, natural gas powered, power plant due to come back online, I believe it's called Greenfield to mine Bitcoin.

What do you make of this? Why does New York continue to shoot themselves in the foot here? This is ridiculous. So first of all, New York is the worst place in the entire country to start a crypto business. So if you're someone out there that's thinking about starting crypto business, if you can avoid being in New York, then you probably should. I think the New York DFS, the bit license, has just been probably the most economically destructive policy as it relates to this industry that we've ever seen. So it's driven out startups. There's a bunch of legacy financial firms even

that have been really delayed in their efforts to get things to market because of the bit license. It's pretty crazy as a law and as a construct. And I don't know if this New York thing that's in the state legislature has any legs in terms of putting a clamp down on crypto mining. But my bigger question is, is why does the state of New York feel like they should be going to their citizens,

their taxpayers, and telling them how to spend their money? I mean, is the next thing going to be like a ban on Christmas lights or a ban on hair dryers? What's next? So the supreme irony of this, I mean, these people are first order thinkers, so they've clearly not thought it through. The supreme irony is that a ban in New York would most likely raise the carbon intensity of the Bitcoin network. because New York actually has a ton of renewable energy, especially in upstate New York.

I went to one of these facilities, a former Alcoa aluminum smelter in Messina, New York, fed exclusively by hydro, turned into a Bitcoin mine, huge, gigantic Bitcoin mine, all of these shipping containers sprawled across the old canals. I mean, it's really impressive to see. So New York has these abundant energy, you know, renewable energy resources the same way sort of Quebec does in Canada. And yet they're looking at banning mining activity, which would have the net effect of pushing mining to other, you know, locales presumably with more carbon intense energy sources. So, I mean, these people do not think these things through. This is bad for business, for sure, for crypto industry. So tap route has begun its activation process. Seems like we're getting some positive signals.

It's hard to tell. I mean, obviously this is happening on a block-by-block basis. But to orient people around this tap route is an upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol. It allows for more complex transaction types, new multi-sig setups. Also, it has some enhanced lightning functionality. will enable new lightning functionality. So basically, if I had to summarize it in super basic terms, it sounds like scalability and user privacy

are the two biggest winners here for this activation process. But it's underway. So maybe we get to see this before the end of the year. Yeah, it's kind of hard to tell where we are. I mean, we didn't meet the required threshold in the first activation period. No surprise there. We need like a large sort of quorum from the miners. I expect there might be some shenanigans with the miners.

You know, will they, won't they, signal for it. It's not a controversial upgrade at all, but the miners are occasionally a little slow to update their software. They don't want to introduce a bug, which means that they create a malformed block and lose money. So fingers crossed, that would be the first upgrade to Bitcoin's core protocol in four years for a taste of how slow Bitcoin moves. And it's not like a dramatic upgrade either. It's sort of incremental.

Speaking of a network that does not have the same considerations when it comes to open source development and speed of community and can really just do things on their own, Ripple has announced that Rosie Rios, who's a former U.S. treasurer, she is the former U.S. treasurer. She has come on board to the board of directors. So this comes, of course, as Ripple battles with the SEC over their multi-year ICO that they ran. So these former regulators are just cashing a lot of checks right now in the crypto industry, huh? So I'm going to say something controversial. It's not a foregone conclusion.

The Ripple will lose this case to the SEC. Well, they have good lawyers and they have a lot of former regulators. It reminds me of the SEC Capital case, that dragged on for something like a decade and then had a very favorable settlement outcome for SAC Capital. I think it's very possible that Ripple could ultimately bargain via this procedure of draining the SEC's resources and get a, you know, probably less than ideal outcome, but get a reasonable outcome for them. just because it's not really a question of in absolute terms, you know, did Ripple violate Howie or not?

It's a question is, does the SEC have the motivation to, you know, fully aggressively prosecute this and the resources to go up against this incredibly well-heeled adversary? So, I mean, I think the facts of the case are very clear and very much, you know, favor of the SEC. But, you know, stranger things have happened. Yeah, I guess you're right. Stranger Things have happened and bolstering your board with a bunch of former regulators might be might pay off. So in our newsletter this week, I'll note that you did not include the article that I wrote for the Harvard Business Review.

So I was snubbed once again from my very own newsletter. Well, keep in mind that the newsletter doesn't come out until Friday and we're taping this on a Wednesday. So why don't we talk about your HBR? All right. So this is my plan is basically to. write in increasingly high profile outlets such that the WSJ gives me a column. They will have no choice to make me their Bitcoin columnist. That's the ambition.

That's the goal. That's the top of the mountain. So yeah, WSJ editors, if you happen to be listening, please give me a column. I will save your coverage. You know, you need someone clearly. The FT is not going to do it. No, the FT already has the columnist. Yeah, they have a quote-unquote columnist.

I don't think the New York Times likes Bitcoin very much. They certainly don't. The BBC doesn't. The economist doesn't. So it's going to fall to the WSJ and who better. So anyway, HBO piece, it's basically the same thing I've written 100 times at this point, but it is in the HBO. So very, very pleased with that.

Well, so what's the topic for those of you, for those that don't? know. It's going in the show notes, so the link will be right there. But yes, it is more quote unquote nuance on the Bitcoin energy debate for a general audience. So, you know, presupposing no prior knowledge, you know, how to think about the Bitcoin energy debate. Certainly a hot debate, as noted with the New York State Legislature this week. Yeah. The interesting thing is that people are really genuinely scandalized by that natural gas plant that's coming back online. The odd thing is that natural gas is actually what is responsible for the decarbonization of the U.S. grid in the last decade. I don't think people are aware of that.

So the rise of natural gas and the decline of coal is why the carbon intensity of the U.S. grid has declined in the last 10 years. Moreover, you actually need natural gas as this energy source, which can spin up on short notice. You need it to backstop renewables because in particular, wind. wind is hard to predict and clearly, you know, it's very intermittent. So to balance out the effective wind on the grid, you need thermal energy. In particular, natural gas is really suited. So natural gas is really not the enemy here. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think that's it for the week. We did get some fud dice delivered this week. Yeah, so if you remember several episodes ago, we had dicegate, our dice manufacturers did not come through and they had a failed batch of dice. Like, how does a batch of dice fail? I don't know. Very puzzling. So that one, that failed batch had the Bitcoin orange, which I, you know, very carefully identified, but that wasn't possible for whatever reason. And so we have a slightly more reddish orange on the these dice, but we do have a lot of them, and we're going to list them on the greatest

merch store in the Boston region, which is on the brink.com. Definitely the, definitely the best merch store in Cambridge. So coming soon, I don't know when exactly. We've got some things to figure out in terms of how it would actually get them to people. Yeah, the actual fulfillment is the challenging part. But yes, fear not. Fourth edition, Bitcoin orange, almost,

fud dice, V4, new fuds. There's new fuds. There's new fuds every day. New fud just dropped. Let me see, I've got it. I might do a little teaser. All right, I got some right here. I'm looking at the orange fud dice.

We got helps China. Okay, yep. That one's a Mike Green special. We've got Satoshi Return. That's a new fud. It could come back. You never know. It's not a new fudge.

It's an incredibly old fud. But let's see. We got energy waste. It does. Burning, melting down the rainforest. So, yeah, in conclusion, no new, no real new concepts. But, yes, technically new. Oh, here's a new one, quantum.

That's everyone's favorite. What happens when quantum computers just break the whole thing? Quantum. quantum it's going to obsolete cryptography. Anyway, so we're going to make these dice available. I'll probably have some in Miami as well to hand out. But yeah, you should buy them from our merch store. Yeah, on the brinktop shop.

And yeah, we'll have them down in Miami. So that's probably it for the week. We have an episode next Monday dropping with Katie Chase, CEO of Coin Metrics. Very excited about that one. And we'll see everyone next week. I'm