On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/13/25 (Stripe buys Privy, Stablecoin FUD, Rogue Traders) (EP.633)

Episode Date: June 13, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Stripe acquires wallet infrastructure company Privy for an undisclosed sum Fireblocks' stablecoin data Stablecoin FUD Were mnemonic phrases a local maxima? Bullish and Gemini have filed preliminary paperwork for IPOs Soc Gen is launching a USD stablecoin We look at some infamous rogue traders Gamestop's bitcoin strategy is a flop DTCC is looking at issuing a stablecoin

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

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $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 quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. It's starting to get hot out. It's, I think, summer right around the corner. Yeah, it's about 85 degrees in full humidity here. The deal week, it's been a busy deal week. A lot to talk about this week.

A lot on the deals. Virtually no news this week. Nothing happened this week on the news front. Oh, there's some interesting stuff, some interesting reports. No podcast from the Castle Island crew. We do have some of the hopper, though, fear not why it's been active. So we got some coming up. I've got one coming out next week with Josh Ty, or Josh Frank, from.

the tie. It's like Tim Apple. Tim Apple, yeah. Josh Ty. Josh Ty. Josh from the tie. We got some reports that the edit last week was a little choppy. Yeah, the editor who is me occasionally misses things. I'm sorry. I'm only human. Okay.

It's all right. The error was remediated within minutes. How does that work in the podcast players? So you push out and edit, does it just delete the first one? Yeah, I actually don't know and I'm curious for what happens, I think people automatically download the podcast. So does it get replaced if you put up a new one? I don't know.

I honestly have no idea. I don't know how that works. Shall we hop into some deals of the week? Yeah, we've got a few in the Castle Island portfolio. First up, we have TyubeB, it's a blockchain-based brand loyalty platform. That's one of our portfolio companies. There is 11 million from offline ventures,

Strobe Ventures, us and others. Then we have NOAA, another one in the Castle Island portfolio, a stable coin payments platform. There is $22 million from local globe, Felix Capital, FJ Labs, and others. Yeah, so congrats to Shaw and the team over there. Next up, a big deal, big crypto acquisition. This is Privy, a wallet infrastructure company. They were acquired by none other than Stripe.

Smart move. Do you think any of Stripe's competitors are going to wake up to the fact that Stripe is making huge moves in the stable coin space? I mean, it's got to, it's got to be convincing. some people that stable coins are a useful settlement rails for payments. I mean, Stripe is the preeminent, you know, new payments company, two huge acquisitions down in the stable coin space. That has to be perceived as a signal. Yeah. So for those who are not familiar, Privy is a, you know, it's a walled infrastructure company. It allows you to effectively self-custody assets. So you could see Stripe moving into the space with bridge.

you know, on and off ramps, how to move the stable coins, and then Privy, which is more around how do you interact with the blockchains in a non-custodial way. I think this is a great, great way to grow your stable coin platform. And you're looking at this through the lens of their competitors not making any moves, and all of a sudden they have wallets and they have the ability to move fiat in and out. It's a pretty interesting move. Yeah, I also find it interesting that it's a non-custodial wallet platform because it shows that they intend to use stable coins in this so like full open loop manner as opposed to just trying to integrate everything to their own like captive network so obviously we don't know that much about what they intend to do with the infrastructure but it's

directionally seems like they're going for sort of like the open loop approach which is very different from what a conventional payments company would be doing another thing that comes to mind on the Stripe thing is it just shows you how important having a founder or a set of founders that believe in this technology, how important that actually is. You think about the companies that have been successful in this industry, whether that be a fidelity, a Black Rock, obviously, all of the crypto natives, which they're going to be successful, obviously. But, you know, picture a bigger payments platform that is a Stripe competitor. They're probably out there trying to buy a BCG analysis on stable coins right now. Like, you really have to be living this stuff to some degree.

to be a first mover. Yeah, I do take an exception with one thing that the Stripe founders say, which is that Stablecoins are room-temp superconductors for finance. Oh, yeah. You have a better analogy, don't you? Well, I'm not saying mine's better. I call them Starlink for finance or what it's worth, but room-temp superconductors don't exist.

They're not real. So it's a bad analogy because it's fictional technology. Well, he's saying it's kind of like a magic. But I guess, yeah, your point is well taken that they don't exist. And stable coins very much do exist. Yeah, they're real. I mean, they can be clunky. They've got their flaws, their warts, but they work well at scale.

This is what I keep trying to say. Like, whenever I talk to people not in crypto about stable coins, they'll tell me it's the same things. They say every single time. It's like, well, I heard that was just for crypto trading. Well, it's not. Now we have the data to prove it. happy to provide that data. What's our URLstables.

fye or something? What is it again? I think it's stables. dot FYI, I think. Wait, we should know this. stablecoin. stablecoin. Stablecoin.

Fireblocks also came out with data this week. It was kind of in the same range as us. They did find a 10 to 1 trading to payments ratio. So from their clients only, they were 10 times as many trading related transactions as payments, but still a lot of payments. So they validated the data. So I tell them that, and then people will say,

well, it's all a regulatory arbitrage. And that, I don't get that because there's no one regulatory system globally. So it's definitely not the case that stable coins are all gray black market. I mean, we went through and documented all of the licit stablecoin transactions. These are, you know, in our study, at least, it was all registered users, KYB businesses, KYC to individuals. Both sides of the trade are known. So I just don't buy this thing that stable coins are just for crime.

And then if you go into the data on the crime, like the stable coin issuers are freezing funds right and left. Yeah. Tether is a dashboard on this. It's like well over a billion dollars funds frozen. So I just think these these these critiques. of stable coins just falling away. It's pretty wild to still have these critiques. And I don't know, I guess we've seen this in other categories, right?

How many times over the years have you had people tell you that Bitcoin wasn't going to be a thing? Yeah, there's the Bitcoin fud dice. We should honestly do stablecoin fud dice because it's like people just don't, they don't perceive the realities exist in front of their face. And I just like want to show them the data and force them to look at it. Like in a, do you see the movie Clockwork Orange? I did. So like the scene where, you know, they hold his eyes open,

make him watch the movie or whatever. I want to do that with the stable coin data for these people because they refuse to acknowledge the empirical reality. I think a lot of it is just people in the United States generally don't use stable coins. And if you talk to someone who's mass affluent, generally speaking, they feel like their payments infrastructure is pretty good.

And so they don't maybe see the store of value, use case with dollars. They also have never, maybe they've never had to send an international wire. Yeah, but is it really that hard to put yourself in the shoes of someone in Argentina or Nigeria or Venezuela or the Philippines? Like, is it really that hard? I mean, Americans know these places exist, right? They're aware. They know what the inflation monetary characteristics. They know that There's the banking core where you have access to banking. That's us. And then there's the periphery where you don't really have that.

People know this, right? It shouldn't be that hard to understand that. I guess the other dynamic is a lot of people don't understand how interchange works. They don't understand how the ACH network works. A lot of people just generally don't really have a reason for knowing these things. And by the way, I just dug up that fireblocks data. So it was a very interesting data set. They published in Fortune.

I don't think people even noticed it. So this is all their clients, which is not everyone. There are firms that are not using fireblocks, of course. It's still, you know, pretty good sample. They found that monthly in May, trading volumes in stable coins, transaction volumes for trading was $200 billion. And payments volumes was $20 billion. So $20 billion worth of stable coin payments between their clients in May 2025. So that's actually even higher than our estimate that we found in our study with Artemis.

Wow, that's pretty remarkable. Let's hop to another deal. This is a similar type of company to Privy. So Turnkey, which is private key management platform, they raised $30 million from Bain Capital, Crypto, Sequoia, Lightspeed Faction, and others. This is a very interesting category here. So you have Privy and Turnkey, Fortify, Dynamic. There's a number of companies operating in this segment. And as stable coins grow, this is just a more and more, it's a more important category, really.

Yeah, and I don't want to declare victory, but when people ask me, what would it mean for crypto to reach maturity? I would always say the ability to utilize crypto assets non-custodially without writing down a seed phrase. Right. And all of these companies that you just mentioned do that. So we're, I would say arguably almost there. in terms of the consumer side of the technology being sufficiently mature, that you can actually just use it. Yeah, it was one of these user testing things we had done in the early days back in like 2014-15 time period

where you'd give someone a wallet and you'd say, all right, well, what would you do if you lost the seed phrase here? And generally speaking, people would say, well, I'd just call customer support. So you kind of knew that this 12, 24-letter nymonic was never going to say, scale. But the good thing, I guess it, there were a series of parallel technologies that emerged. So face ID and the secure enclave and the Apple devices was actually a big enabler of some of the stable coin use cases we're seeing today. Yeah, I think the mnemonic phrases was actually a local maxima that we got stuck in. That it was, it was almost like sufficiently good

that there wasn't enough of a need to move to better systems. where you're actually not really exposed to the cryptographic material at all. And we got stuck there for 15 years. And we're finally out of it. Like, ideally, no one would ever write down a 12-word phrase ever again. Yeah, I think we are out of it in a big way. It's interesting, though. Log-in with Google and log-in with Apple ends up being a critical enabler of this technology.

You know what I mean? It's like without those things or if one of the, I don't think they would ever go away. but there are a lot of assets being secured by login with Google. Here's a good thing about stablecoins too, which is, I'm not saying this applies to retail users, but at the large scale, if something happens on the blockchain, you lose your keys or whatever,

the funds are still there. That's a thing. That's a thing. So, look, it's not very cypherpunk of me, but the blockchain is not actually the ledger of record, really.

It's indicative, but it's not the real ledger. So if you have billion dollars in stable coins and something happens on chain, you can go to the issuer, worst case. That's why the dollars is still in the bank. Yeah. And so therefore, you know, North Korea is not generally speaking, hacking a lot of these stable coin things because they would not be able to spend. Yeah, I think it's actually a great tradeoff. It's sufficiently cash like you.

Like it's effectively final settlement for most transactions, but then in the most critical of cases, there's recourse. So I actually really like the tradeoff space. I know the Bitcoin is don't like it, but. Well, you can always just use Bitcoin if you have a use case. You just use something else if you want to. So next up we have a new construct, their crypto trading infrastructure company. There is $6 million from Cyberfund, Mavin 11, and Greenfield. Then it's hyper-native, a Web 3 cybersecurity platform.

They raised $40 million from 1011 ventures, ballistic ventures, and others. Ballistic Ventures. That might be their first mention. Yeah, that might be a new name. Then we have Silhouette, a decentralized trading platform. There is 3 million from Rockaway X, Amber Group, and Hivemind. Open Trade is a stable coin yield protocol. They raise $7 million from Notion Capital, Mercury Fund, and Indreason Horwitz. Then you've RISE chain, a layer two blockchain. There is 4 million from Galaxy Digital. One Balance is a decentralized app development platform. There raised 20 million from Cyberfund,

blockchain capital, and Marana Ventures. This next one is the word soon, but in all caps. That's an SVM-based layer 2 blockchain. There is 5 million from Jump Cryptone Amber Group. Here's another one. Tether has acquired a 32% stake in Elemental, which is a Canadian gold refiner for $89 million. Getting into the gold business.

Tether does have a gold token, right? Yeah, XAU. The price has been going up because the price of golds been going up. The market cap is $830 million. So kind of a quiet winner there is this, the tether gold token. Yeah, gold has really been on a heater here

over the past year, huh? And it might go higher. You know, who knows, apparently war is on the horizon. Don't know what's going to happen there. Yeah, I hope not. All right. In the last deal of the week, there's a new SPAC. So one round-tale.

has launched a $150 million vehicle. It's a 1RT acquisition is the name of it. So congrats to Dan Tapiero on the team over at 1RT. I think we're going to see a lot more of these SPACs, honestly. I think it's just, there's a lot of heat on that category right now. And people thought SPACs were a ZERP phenomenon. And here we are with rates where they are. People are still doing SPACs.

I think there's just a lot of, if people see how Circle went, Obviously, that wasn't a spec, but a lot of companies that could be public, I think, in the crypto space right now. Yeah, almost every public market's entry has been an absolute ripper in the last year. Well, so speaking of that, bullish in Gemini, this is some news this week, they have both filed apparently preliminary paperwork for IPOs. I guess these are, someone's got to explain this to me. So I think these are confidential filings, but then they kind of leak. And so they're not confidential anymore. So the only thing is you just can't read the S-1.

It's quote-unquote confidential, but then someone's telling everybody about the confidentiality. Well, you're kind of more of the Edgar Gourer than I am, so I leave that one to you. But I guess you can't prove that any of these. I'm not saying that they necessarily leak them, but what's the purpose of confidentiality if then whoever's involved,

someone's telling people that they have a confidential filing? So we know there's a filing, but we don't know what's in it. Yeah, and I guess the reason for the confidential filing is that you don't want to reveal the numbers. Maybe you're not sure if you're actually going to do it. But then if you just go around and tell people that you did it, shouldn't you have to reveal the numbers?

I don't get it. Someone's going to explain that to me. So the Circle IPO has done extremely well in its first week trading. So congrats to all Circle folks and Circle Lumms too. Unbelievable well, huh? Yeah. surprising. Color me very surprised, actually.

Well, it just shows you. I mean, there's, how would you play the stable coin thesis? There's nothing else in the public markets as a pure play stable coin company, I suppose, right? Yeah, although people are now arguing that Coinbase should be priced higher because they, you know, have a lot of the upside in USDC as well. So either, so there's some dislocation, either circles too high or Coinbase isn't high enough. The thing is, like, post-IPO, you're talking about very low float, you know, before the unlock. So these things can whipsaw around.

So I wouldn't read too much in the, you know, first three, four months of price action. Yeah, I agree with that for sure. All right. So what's the latest in the genius bill? It looks like the Senate reached cloture on the amended version. That went through. Looks like maybe the final vote would be on Monday. We're going to have to get a simple majority in the Senate.

it looks pretty good here. Yeah, definitely tracking well in the Senate. Have you been following the Stable Act in the House? I don't know what's going on there. No, I haven't. I haven't been, it hasn't been much going on there, but I assume that as soon as the Senate passes this,

then we're going to start to see the Domino's fall into effect here. I don't know if it's markedly different, is it? Yeah, I don't know the specifics. The Stable Act passed committee in May. Do you know what stable stands for, actually? No, what does it stand for? It's stable coin transparency and accountability for a better ledger economy act. Wow.

That's a stretch. Yeah, let's be honest. That's not the best mnemonic anyone's ever come up with. I just found out this week that the big beautiful bill is actually, that's the name of it. Is it officially? I think the name, the official name is the big beautiful bill. I don't know if that stands for something. Wait, what does the Genius Act stand for?

It stands for guiding and establishing National Innovation for U.S. stable coins. All right. That's better. That's good. That's better. Whose job is it to come up with these things? I'm sure it's AI.

AI is perfect for this. This really is. Otherwise, you just have someone who's like, I don't know. Some of Emmer's people are really smart. I bet they could whip these out pretty quickly. I mean, people have been doing this for you. Like the Patriot Act is a mnemonic, right? Right, it is.

I don't know what that one stands for. Patriot Act stands for, well, actually, it's not. It's not a mnemonics? Is it or isn't it? Well, I figured they were all nemonics. No, Google AI is telling me it's not. I swear I thought it was because it's always written in all caps. Apparently, it stands for uniting and strengthening America

by providing appropriate tools required to intercept an obstruct terrorism act of 2001. Oh, that just rules on. Oh, no, that is Patriot. Yeah. That is a mnemonic, yeah. Yeah, it's USA Patriot. Yeah.

Okay, I can't read. All right. More stablecoin news. French bank Sochgen. They have announced plans to launch a U.S. dollar peg stable coin called USD convertible, which would make them the first European bank to do that, basically a euro dollar.

Sochgen famous for what? Do you remember the big sock gen story from, I don't know, 0708? I don't know, but if I had to guess, I would say something with like mortgage-backed securities. Close. Jerome Curveille, the rogue trader. Oh. He went rogue.

I don't, well, they have to Google or chat GPT how much money he lost, but one of their traders just went rogue and they lost a ton of money. That's the first thing I think about. Yeah, he was imprisoned in the. 2008 Sochgen trading loss. He lost 4.9 billion euros. Can you imagine that? And I think that's part of the reason why they mandate two-week vacations at some of these banks for some of the traders. Because if you're in a position, it would become clear, I think, that you were off-sides if you were just gone from the desk for two weeks and someone else had to manage the book.

So he made unauthorized trades totaling $49 billion, which was a figure higher than the bank's total market cap. He tried to conceal the activity by creating losing trades intentionally so as to offset his early gains. He had generated $1.4 billion in hidden profits at the beginning of 2008. And then in January, the market dropped. And then he lost $7 billion in total. Kind of an FTC's type of guy there.

He would have really fit in in our industry, circa 2021. Yeah, crypto kind of makes us look small in hindsight. Sam's unauthorized trades, I think, were of a similar scale, right? For sure. So I guess my question is, if you make unauthorized trades but you make a ton of money, that's still a crime, probably. Yeah, you wonder, maybe that does happen and we just don't hear about those type of people. Yeah, I mean, is it like slap on the wrist, go get another job, we'll keep the profits, get out of here.

Maybe. Do you have any other rogue traders that you really like? I've got another one for you. Well, we know about what is it, Joe Lowe? Oh, Joe Lowe, yeah. I guess more of an outright fraud, right? Well, who are the worst rogue traders in history? There was the Tokyo Whale, right? That was one of them. Not as familiar with him. I'm thinking about Bering's Bank. So Nick Leeson, 1995. That was a real famous one. How do you know all of these just like off the top of your head? I just read a lot of these like books about financial markets, but Nick Leeson took down his whole firm. I think Bering's is back.

I don't know what happened, but took down the whole company. He was a rogue trade. He would have loved the crypto industry. He, yeah, so you're right. I'm reading this now. He destroyed the firm and it was sold to ING for one pound. And he went to jail for,

six years. He was released after four. And then he ran the Irish Football Club Galway United. Interesting career path. There's also Allied Irish Bank, $700 million, 700 million pounds of losses. Have you heard of this one? Yeah, Allied Irish. They were a big player for a real. John Rusnak. John Rusnak. Yeah. There was Daiwa Bank, a $1.1 billion. This guy called Toshihide, He went to prison for that. The bank was penalized by the Federal Reserve for that. Let's see. Sumitomo Corporation, 2.6 billion.

Have you heard of that one? No. That was a rogue trader? Yeah, Yasuo Hamanaka, who is the Copper King. He'd been engaging in rogue trading for a decade. Wow. And he controlled 5% of the global copper market. And he cost Sumitomo $2.6 billion.

doesn't say if you went to jail. And then you just have the run-of-the-mill hedge fund blowups, like long-term capital management, which one of the better books of all time when genius failed. Yeah, and you know, I keep thinking about this in the context of micro strategy. Don't kill me. But people always say, when we criticize any of these things, I'll say, well, Nick, Sailor is smarter than you.

And that's almost certainly true. But also, the long-term capital management guys were smart. They were smart. Nobel awardees, right? Some of them. So being smart doesn't insure you against financial loss. That's all I'll say about that. That's true.

All right. Well, speaking about these acquisition vehicles, what's going on with GameStop here? So they came out, they said they intend to offer $1.75 billion in convertible notes. They're going to buy more Bitcoin with it. Company in April had said that they had raised $1.5 and converts then. They've put about $500 million of it into. Bitcoin purchases per their 8Ks. Stock's just getting hammered.

Yeah, so GME's been selling off like crazy. In the last two days, they've dropped from $30 to $22. I've been kind of tracking some of the chatter about GME, and I think the Bitcoiners are upset that they didn't buy enough Bitcoin, as far as I can tell. So they did the first part, which was the issue of the converts. They didn't do the second part, which is buying the coins. And also, it seems like the CEO did,

some weird FaceTime appearance at the Bitcoin conference that people didn't like. So they didn't like his style. So yeah. I mean, is it the beginning of the end for these trades? Or is it just GMEs not doing it culturally the right way? Well, I think you were right maybe what you said last week or the week before that I think a big part of the GameStop holder base just wants them to do something even more aggressive. Yeah. Paint a bigger picture.

Like, all right, hey, Bitcoin goes to a million. We want something that's going to go even higher. Yeah, if you're in GME, you believe in the meme stock concept, you're long for the ride, you want big swings. They're kind of capitulating by doing the Bitcoin thing that everybody else is doing. Yeah, that's just a safe middle of the road. That's safe. Middle of the road thing, right?

Yeah, it's all relative. Like, I don't know what else he could be doing that's more wild. Mining asteroids. That would be bigger. Like, you got to sell the drug. dream here. And as big a dream as Bitcoin is, it's not enough for the GME holders. No, the GME people, they cannot be satisfied. Well, also in that category, micro strategy was added again this past week. They acquired 1,045 additional Bitcoin for 110 million.

They have a bunch of dry powder here. So they raised about $900 million, I think, on that last structured product. So they will be at it soon. I'm sure. On the ETF side, the SEC has requested prospective issuers for Solana ETFs to submit amended S-1s, which paves the way probably for Solana ETFs to be approved in the coming months. Here's an interesting story from the information today. So the DTCC is reportedly looking at doing their own stable coin. What do you make of this? I have a lot of thoughts on this. I don't really know what the DCC does, and I should know, but I don't. DTCC is the central securities depository in the United States.

So technically they own all of the securities, right? They own all the equities in the U.S. market, and they facilitate settlements. And I think what's interesting about this is if you just look at the size of the overnight settlement market for something like overnight repo, Triparty repo settles a trillion dollars every single night. That's a staggering amount of capital. And so if you think about that from the perspective of who has a stable coin that would be big enough to actually satisfy that, the answer is no one and no one ever will. Like there's no bank on planet Earth that's going to be big enough to extend a trillion dollars for settlement overnight.

It has to be a consortium. It has to be a utility. It has to be owned by its members. And so logically speaking, the DTCC would be in a phenomenal shape to do that. It's either that or the Fed puts out a like a Fed coin for wholesale settlements. So it's a trillion dollars for overnight tri-party. The estimates is that it's $2 to $4 trillion for bilateral repos. So you're talking about a, I don't know, three to $5 trillion market every single day that goes through Fedwire.

that could be a stable coin. And I actually think the DTC could be the right party to do it. But this would be a utility enterprise scale stable coin. It's not something retail folks would be able to touch most likely. No one would ever notice it. It would definitely not face retail, but it would be a utility settlement coin that just makes the overnight process a lot easier

for financial institutions. And if you think about all these big asset managers and all the banks that are engaged in these repo transactions, they all have these teams that are doing these reconciliations and working at the end of every single day to facilitate the money movement that goes through Fedwire. It's a ton of operational overhead there. The fact that we're not on a unified ledger to do some of that stuff costs a lot of money. So the DTCC doing this would save a lot of money. Like anyone who's involved in these processes would theoretically have a much more streamlined operation for middle and back office, I would think.

I feel like this is a question for Matt Levine, but is the T, what do we on a T1 settlement regime for equities? Is that right? Yeah. Is that considered bad or is that actually good? Because we want latency in the system to deal with issues. Like if anything goes wrong, you want some time to fix it. So you don't necessarily want T0. Do I have that right?

Well, I think there's pros and cons of each side, right? So in a T plus 7 world, which wasn't that long ago that we were in T plus seven world, theoretically, that's just more credit that gets injected into the system. Various counterparts can effectively do more during that window until they have to settle. And so that creates a lot of risk, but it's also more liquidity theoretically in the system. And so T1 brings down the risk and the credit stuff just becomes a factor. Whether you like it or don't like it, kind of probably depends on what type of actor you are. Yeah, I feel like Matt Levine's written about this about a thousand times as to why T0 isn't necessarily better.

Well, T0, it's largely a credit thing, right? You just have to have the, it's like using a debit card versus using a credit card, which is, I think one of the reasons why stable coins will never be 100% share of payments because people like the deferred settlement. So being of the settle at the end of every. month as opposed to instantaneously. That's a desirable feature of a credit card. We did ask for a way to make stable coins deferred last week on the show and immediately got inbound for a startup doing that. Oh, good. People are listening. People do listen. We had a request

for startup. Yeah. Here's another kind of credit related tangent. Whoever does the first scaled credit fund in this industry is going to make a zillion dollars. But can we agree on that? You just think about all of these use cases for credit, whether it's cash loans against Bitcoin collateral. There's not a lot of lenders that will get involved in that. That's a very low risk business. If you can actually liquidate the Bitcoin and if you can have good LTVs. Then the other thing is the stable coin market, the banks aren't open on the nights and weekends. And so people want to make these payments on the nights and weekends. And so being able to inject credit into that system, you're really just taking the risk that the banks won't open on Monday,

which I think a lot of reasonable people would take that risk. But private credit funds could be making a killing if they were looking at some of these categories. Well, I will shout out one of our portcos here, Maple. They do on-chain lending. They went this year from $500 million in AUM to $2.2 billion. So the crypto-natives are addressing this. Crypto-native ones are addressing it.

But you don't see the apollos of the world coming into the space. And obviously it's because it's small. But the APR is a really high. And the market size is growing very quickly. So at some point, this will become a big category. Or maybe the last one on the week, Paul Atkins, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, he gave a speech this week where he described self-custody as a, quote, foundational American value.

We also had CFTC chair nominee, Brian Quintenz, talking about crypto this week. He said it's time for a comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto assets, including token classification, clear jurisdiction for trading market oversight. Like what I'm hearing. Yeah, they're saying all the right things. Calling self-custody of foundational American value. I mean, couldn't be more different from a year ago at the SEC. It's spot on. It's absolutely spot on.

Haven't heard much from Gensler these days, and I have not bumped into him up here in Boston. Yeah, what does he do now? Is he back at MIT? He's at MIT. Well, MIT is on summer break, I imagine, but I think he's going to be involved in the AI stuff. So I think what the plan is, if I had to guess, is become a quote-unquote expert on AI, come back into another administration at some point, and then go terrorize those guys. Leave the crypto stuff alone for a little while. Go in and run a muck on the AI category.

That's an even bigger prize. There's a lot of damage to be done there, for sure. I'm sure he's liking his chops. Very entrepreneurial, that guy. Well, we wish him luck. All right, I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. We'll see you on Monday.