On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/21/24 (Certik v Kraken, Trump's memecoin, Paul Ryan op-ed) (EP.538)

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Certik goes from white hat to black hat regarding a Kraken exploit Bozo of the week The DJT memecoin scandal and Martin Shkreli What's the deal with Barron Trump and the DJT memecoin? Should we welcome celebrity memecoins? Should bankers have been more supportive of crypto over SAB121? Paul Ryan's stablecoin op-ed in the WSJ Sponsor notes: Floating on Thin Air In Coin Metrics' State of the Network issue 264, we dive into the different factors of a project's tokenomics and its effects on token valuation and on-chain activity.

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

What down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The Federal Government Loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. dollars. 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 constituted easy. And print a couple trillion dollars and all of sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by

coin metrics and here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at how tokenomics and airdrops impact crypto valuations. Median valuations for token launches spiked to 1.4 billion in 2021, dipping to 800 million in 2022 and rebounding to 2.4 billion in 2020. tokens with a high FDV and low float can distort their true valuation with WorldCoin maintaining an $800 million circulating market cap and an FDV of $34 billion. It's a 50x difference. Most Airdrop tokens lose their long-term value with a median return of minus 61%. Typically reaching their all-time high in 250 days post-launch before declining.

Despite short-term boosts and protocol usage due to airdrops, long-term activities often not stand as users engage in airdrop farming in the hopes of receiving tokens. That is your metrics minute. Pretty good metrics minute. It's a happy week to be in Boston. It is a city of champions once again, 18th banner for the Celtics, parade coming up on Friday. just another championship. What is it about Boston that caused them to be so good at sports? I think it's just the personality, just hard-charging people, just no BS.

Just something about the Irish Catholic mentality. This was one of the best basketball teams I've ever seen. I knew that this team was going to win the championship from the outset. I probably went to about six games this year, seven games. It's just an unbelievably good team. So the one playoff game we went to the Celtics last. lost. They did lose to the heat.

Yeah, that was not great. Aside from that, they're good. Unbelievable. So that made me in a good mood. Everything else in crypto this week, I'm in a bad mood about. I just think people are being really dumb in this industry this week. It was kind of a no news week. So this might be just a vent session on just why people are so stupid in this industry

sometimes. Yeah, I feel like vibes and crypto are at all time lows, maybe. or maybe not like quite the doldrums of, you know, 2020 or 22 when everything was blowing up. Believe that was interesting. Now we're just kind of going sideways. Things are selling off. The meme coins are selling off.

And everyone is fighting. The vibes are terrible. Everyone's fighting. People are building these idiotic meme coins and that's what people are actually talking about as opposed to real businesses. It's just really not. great. Yeah, there's a lot of candidates for Bozo of the Week this week, which is a permanent

fixture of the show now because there's actually no shortage of Bozos. So we'll unveil that later. We might need a song for Bozo of the Week. That was a very popular segment. I got a lot of people reaching out saying, I love the new segment Bozo of the Week. A lot of suggestions on Bozo's. I think this week maybe we'll have two bozos. There is some very obvious candidates. But yeah, hit us with your song suggestions for Bozo of the Week. Yeah, we're going to have to get into that. Not a bozo of the week. Very good steward in the crypto industry is the podcast I did with Edward Woodford of ZeroHash.

So that was a fun one. We talked about digital asset infrastructure, stable coins, regulatory landscape. He got into the industry really early up here at MIT. So enjoyed chatting with him, building a regulated financial institution, seemingly devoid of bozos. So I think that was it for Castle Island content this week. There were a fair number of deals as well. Yeah, let's hop into it. First one up is Renzo.

This is a liquid restaking protocol for Ethereum. There raised $17 million from Brevin, Galaxy, Maven, 11, and Figment. Then you have Sonic. There is Solana L2 for gaming. There is $12 million from BitCraft, Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and OKex Ventures. Particle Network, which is a modular layer 1 for chain abstraction, raised $15 million from Spartan, Gumi Crypto, and 7X Ventures. Then you have Elis Network.

I don't know how to pronounce it. It's E-L-Y-S network. They're D-Fi L-1 on Cosmos Hub. There is 2.5 million from Kama 3 ventures, cogitent ventures, persistence, and Kahuna Ventures. Those are some of those ventures I'd never heard about in that one. Yeah, three of them, in fact. then it's a stage which is a play to earn social network for music they raised 2.4 million from salana ventures cracken ventures and castrum capital next up we have wasabi leverage trading protocol for meme coins and nftes

i guess not to be confused with uh bitcoin privacy protocol wasabi they raised three million from electric capital lines down canonical crypto but it is confusing right that is yeah that's where we had to disembate you had to disembate It's ambiguous it because it's the same name. Yes, it's very confusing. Do you like wasabi peas? Yeah, I love them. Delicious. Yeah, they're really good.

I like wasabi peas. Then we have Zeke, which is a decentralized social network that raised 3 million from OkX Ventures, Anna Moka, and Mask Network. Actually, on the topic of wasabi, is it true that it's sushi restaurants when they give you wasabi? I'm doing air quotes right now. It's actually horseradish most of the time. I don't think so because horseradish doesn't give you that violent kick, does it?

Oh, I thought wasabi was gentler than horse radish. And horseradish is more intense. No, I think in my opinion, wasabi is more intense. They do have some overlap, though, but yeah, definitely not the same thing. Okay. I like to put the soy sauce in, dunk in a bunch of wasabi. I like the spicy sushi. Okay, I'm going to go on record.

I am actually the only person I know that just doesn't like sushi, It just doesn't do it for me. Oh, you don't like sushi? Huh. It's just not exciting to me. I don't know. And it's not feeling. Do you know, we didn't have sushi in Boston when I was grown up.

Or maybe I'm sure there was, but I had never had sushi until I graduated college. I don't think I had sushi until I was like 24 years old. I also never had guacamole. That's troubling. But I love both of them now. But it's just one of these things I just was not exposed to until I was like 22, 22, 23, 24 years. old. Here's my problem with Miami restaurants. All the high-end ones are basically sushi and steakhouses. That's it. There's some variation, but who decided that a high-end restaurant

would serve sushi and steak? Like, why those things specifically? I get the sushi part because it's really easy to share it, right? The small plate element of it. But yeah, steak, I don't know. Steakhouses are just popular everywhere, I think. I've never had a sushi meal where I felt. fulfilled after eating it. Well, there's too much rice on a lot of them, right? You have to have a strategy of not getting like full on the rice. To be satiated by sushi, you have to eat like 30 pieces. It just doesn't add up as a meal.

The economics of sushi don't work, my opinion. All right, so let us know what you think about sushi in our Warpcast channel. We'll get going on that. Next one up is Bondex. This is a professional network for Web 3. they raised 10 million from Anamoka, Morning Star Ventures, and Coinlist. Deni of router protocol, their cross-chain messaging protocol, there is an undisclosed amount from Wintermute, banter capital, and luganodes.

That one might have slipped by me. I don't like to put the undisclosed amounts, because I'm always like, well, is it $200 or is it $200 million? Well, it went out on PR Newswire, I guess, so it's non-zero. It's an undisclosed amount there. And then we have, look, we have another one. Mango Exchange. This is a cross-chain decks and bridge aggregator. They also raised an undisclosed amount. So no one knows what they raised from Binance, Nomad, and foresight. Maybe new rule. We're not going to do undisclosed amounts on the podcast. We're only announcing if you disclose. Yeah. Okay. So all right. News-wise, it was a little bleak this week. Everybody's busy fighting, launching meme coins, fighting over me.

meme coin launches. I think that just dominated. I don't know if anyone talked about anything else this week. Yeah. So my summary for people that are not in the crypto industry is that, and maybe you listen to this podcast just to see if you missed anything in crypto for the week. You didn't miss anything this week, actually. People in the crypto industry spent most of their week fighting each other

and arguing about meme coins as far as we can tell. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a huge amount of clown behavior. Well, there's one interesting thing, which is the CERTIC thing. which was also very clownish. Yeah, why don't we just queue up the bozo of the week? So first bozo of the week, I would say anyone involved in the CERTIC thing. So I don't even know where to start on this.

So T it up maybe. Okay, so CERTIC is a blockchain audit firm, right, or kind of white hat security audit firm in the blockchain space, probably one of the better known ones. there is a tweet thread from Nick Perko who is the chief security officer at Cracken he said they got a bug bounty alert from a security researcher

the security researcher found a critical bug they determined that there was actually a bug and you could use the you could do to a UX change at Cracken it was possible to inflate your balance on the exchange, even if you didn't have the funds. And I guess what happened was they found three accounts that had used this bug, as described in the alert that they got to withdraw roughly three million of other user assets from Cracken.

And as it turns out, those accounts were associated with, were associated with the security researcher that had flagged the bug. So instead of participating in the White Hat program, which is common, and receiving a handsome bounty, I think over a million dollars was the bounty, this research firm under doxed KYC credentials, exploited the KRAC exchange, effectively stealing from them. So then we ended up, it turns out it was Sertic. the audit firm, security firm. So now we're in this kind of weird situation

where they could have sort of gone through the normal process and in a valid manner, collected a large bounty. But instead, under their own name, they decided to exploit the exchange because they felt the bounty wasn't large enough. Do I have that right? It gets worse.

So yes, they did all of the things that you said. I think it's worth mentioning that they laundered it or sent it. I don't know if launderer is the appropriate word, but it's kind of the one that comes to mind. They sent it through an no-fax sanctioned protocol. So there was a decision there to launder the money through an o-fax-sanction protocol, which is crazy. There's also an allegation from Cracken that instead of going through the normal responsible disclosure, the response from Sturtec was, well, you'll have to talk to our salespeople, sort of insinuating that this was an extortion attempt that sign us up to a large enterprise deal

or else we're not going to send the money back. I think my feelings on this are summarized by Sam CZ Sun's tweet that says, sending my thoughts and prayers to the investment partners that have to explain why their portfolio company hacked in American Exchange, stole $3 million and laundered it through an OFAC sanction protocol. That sounds about right to me. So Sertic has been defiant here. They basically don't think they did anything wrong, but the fact that they sent the funds to tornado cash immediately upon withdrawal very heavily implies

that they think they did something wrong this is there's not a lot of good explanations to this i mean one maybe explanation is that there are people working for surrogic that went rogue but then the steps to take it to clear it up do not appear to have been taken this is a really really dead story for Sertick from a brand reputation standpoint. So Sertick then did return the funds after. They just returned the funds this morning. Yeah, after complaining. So they kind of knew that Cracken had them dead to rights.

I think there's going to be some legal implications there. I don't know if Sertick's ever done any work for Cracken in the past, but usually when you do work for firms, you have to sign a number of agreements around things that you will or will not do. And so that's one vector. I mean, the fact that they sent it through tornado cash, I just don't understand that. That's explicitly going to get you in hot water with the DOJ.

It is. There is a weird phenomenon in crypto where black hat hackers will exploit a protocol. And then in some cases, the exploitee figures out who they are. In fact, in a lot of cases. And then they basically inform them, hey, we're going to tell law enforcement, we know he or give us the money back. And they do give the money back. So that's one set of cases.

But the other more weird one is where black hats exploit a protocol and then they strike a deal with the exploitee saying I will put on a white hat for a portion of the returns from this exploit. So let's say 10% and then we'll just call it even. So I'm transforming this act of theft into a benevolent bug bounty white hat award. And that's a thing that happens. God bless these CSOs. Can you imagine sleeping at night as a CSO? No. Terrible. It's just crazy. So Bozo of the Week to Sertic, although I think we have another one. Yeah, that's Bozo number one.

But that one is totally baffling because they, I mean, as an audit firm, your business is based on your, of course, your technical acumen, but also your credibility. I mean, who's going to want to work with these guys now? Yeah. Not a lot of people is my guess. So a really ugly story. Next, next bozo. Okay.

Who is it? Martin Schrelli. So I cannot keep up with this story, but apparently there's a DJT, Donald J. Trump, meme coin. It appears to me like Martin Schrelli is behind it. He's admitted as such.

And he said that he has been coordinating with Baron Trump, who is Trump's youngest son to do a meme coin. I don't know what the motivation is here. It seems like it's plausible to me that the motivation on Screlli's part is to get back at Trump because Trump had said some very mean things about him when he went to jail for being a, I don't know, what did he get convicted of being a con artist in the pharmaceutical game or something. Yeah, I think it was securities fraud in the end, actually. I'm not even sure he went to jail for the thing that people were mad at him for.

So anyways, he's behind this meme coin, which I just think this whole thing is just the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, I mean, the saga has been incomprehensible. So if you want an explanation, you're not going to get it from us. This thing launched. What was interesting about it was that Mike Salana, no relation to the protocol, Mark Salon of Pirate Wires reported this and said that I'm paraphrasing

but Trump was behind it or the Trump team was in some way supportive of this and that was a real tweet. He wasn't hacked and Mike Sala is a pretty credible guy like Pirate Wires is in my opinion a great

news organization I've written for them of course I have a high opinion of them. So this got a co-sign from a very credible journalist. And I guess he was kind of right. I mean, Barron was in, it seems Barron in some way did direct to the creation or authorized the creation of this meme coin. So yeah, I think that part seems right. You could sort of say that someone in the Trump circle, I mean, Baron himself is a Trump was responsible, maybe not responsible,

but kind of spurred the creation of this coin. So that was true. Yeah, this is a couple people in the crypto industry, Martin Schroly being one of them, seemed to have been working with Baron Trump, who just turned 18, and somehow got him on board with doing a meme coin, it seems like. Is that kind of the gist of it?

I think that actually did happen, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's sort of my understanding of the whole thing. think it's wrong to, I mean, there's so much wrong about this. An 18 year old kid who's not sophisticated from a business perspective to persuade him to create or authorize a creation of a meme coin. I mean, there's all kinds of possible ramifications for that. Security laws. There's reputational damage. I mean, so to encourage he's still a kid. This kid, to lend his name and his reputation of this coin, I think is crazy.

Yeah. There's nothing redeeming about that story. And we don't really know how involved Barron was. Like, we don't know if, you know, this proposal was brought to him and he was just like, okay, fine, whatever, you can do it. Or if it was his idea and he's like, okay, let me go find some intermediary who's well known in the cryptospace, who will do it for me. So that part is still, I think, very unclear.

And I mean, it certainly wasn't an official Trump campaign thing. And there's no evidence whatsoever that Trump himself was in any way behind this, which is kind of what the original headlines suggested. Correct. So, yeah, this was insane. I mean, the drama is still going on as of today. Oh, people are back and forth on this as if this is actually something that we need to spend any time on as an industry. And somehow like half of crypto Twitter got dragged into this, which I also don't understand.

Well, so that's it. I guess the last thing I would say about this. It seems like maybe there are some real people in this industry that have gotten somehow dragged into this from the perspective of being on the founding team or trying to be involved in this meme coin, which I just have to say is a terrible idea from. a reputational and professional and legal perspective. Yeah, I mean, my synthesis of this whole situation is it doesn't actually matter if ex-president Trump himself blessed the coin and was an official coin, or if it was made by some total third party with no engagement from the campaign whatsoever. It's still a worthless coin in both cases.

Like, a Trump meme coin has no, not to sound like, a no-coiner talking about Bitcoin or something, but a meme coin in itself has no genuine long-term value at all. Of course, it can go up in the short term, and this one did go up initially. But it's kind of still a scam in both cases, right? I mean, there's no reason why this thing would sustain any value. I know all of our brains are totally warped because we've been in this meme coin frenzy, but there's no reason why this thing should accrue value at all over the long term.

And just talk about bad timing. So as an industry, we're pushing the ball forward on stable coin regulation. We're talking about a market structure bill. Successfully got a SAB-121 custody bill through the House and the Senate only to get vetoed. So there's real progress happening. And then you have this pop-up, which becomes a story and everyone's covering it. And it just makes the whole industry look like a bunch of amateur clowns. Well, the thing is the meme coin frenzy and like celebrities launching their own meme coins,

It has been a very bad phenomenon. Not just this one. Yes. But it's like all of these dealist celebs are now launching their own coins and people are excited because we're onboarding, quote, celebrities to crypto. It's like, no, we're not. They're extracting value. They don't care about blockchain, smart contracts, composability.

I don't think so. These are dealist celebrities that are purely extracting value from the crypto industry. And like, sure, like if you're smart and tactical. you can make money on these things in the short term, but there's no reason why, you know, Iggy Azalea coin should be worth anything at all. Totally. I mean, and it is,

it actually does accentuate the need for why we need a market structure bill because this stuff should not be legal. No. Having a anonymous team or team that tries to be anonymous, having a bunch of these tokens and having esoteric LP positions in the liquidity pools, this is not legal. Like the blatant unregistered security is offering.

Yeah, I mean, get to the spirit of why securities laws exist. It's all about disclosure, and that is to resolve information asymmetries between issuers, basically insiders, and the people purchasing stocks. That's the whole point of a disclosure-based regime, is to the extent there are information asymmetries, insiders aren't allowed to act on them, and, you know, blackout periods, It's enforced disclosures, quarterly disclosures. You get in trouble if you lie on your disclosures. The whole point is to try and level the playing field between insiders and outsiders. That should be the case.

There should be a way to transpose that onto crypto. Just because it's a different medium doesn't mean those same fundamental issues don't exist. And meme coins are a perfect example of this. Of course there's all kinds of information in symmetries. Tons. So there should be some way to reconcile that. I mean, you can tackle it under the existing securities regime, and of course, the SEC does do that.

But there should also be probably some set of regulations that apply the securities framework to crypto tokens. So, completely agree. Lacking that, we're in this weird, bizarre world where people think because there's no explicit rules or laws that specifically target crypto, that it's like fair game, but it's not at all. And I think a lot of the people behind these tokens are going to get in trouble. Yeah, completely agree with that. All right, so those are the bozos of the week. I almost put a couple anonymous bankers that I talked to this week as the bozo of the week,

because there are just a lot of bozo bankers out there. Yeah, bankers, they haven't really done the crypto space many favors. Say that. And it's not their fault necessarily. that, you know, the banks have, they could have been better allies to the crypto space. Well, I was at an event this week, and it was one of these, like, you're not allowed to talk about who said what, when type of events. And there were some bankers there. And one of them sort of had this comment around, yeah, I mean, we would have loved for the Sab 121 thing to go through because we're actually like building some custody and we're trying to do things.

But, you know, we fought the good fight on that one. And they said, no, you did it. What the banks did was they got their bank lobbying group, the American Bankers Association, to write a letter. And the letter came out 12 hours before the veto. And it basically said, Biden should not veto this. That's not actually going to bat for the industry. Like going to bat for the industry is actually taking a public stand. And maybe going down and doing some of these meetings with the SEC and the Biden administration to educate them on why it is a good thing for,

banks to be able to enter the digital asset custody space. Not to mention the fact that if you were to take a public stand on this, I think the goodwill of the industry would be profound. And you'd be in a much better position to actually capture market share once it opens up. So I don't think the banks really have their act together here on the policy perspective or else maybe it's just that they're too afraid. So they're getting slapped down with fines across their various businesses. And I think they'd probably rather cower behind this industry group, which is four weeks late to the game on writing a letter and gets one out right as it's being vetoed. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about bankers is they're very risk-averse and they don't want to draw the eye of saron to them

if they can avoid it. And we keep seeing examples of this. I mean, if you're a bank that serves crypto or even fintechs, you're far, far more likely to face some kind of examination. So it doesn't correlate with courage being a banker. No disrespect to your friends. It's not necessarily a bozo of the week, I guess, but to all the bankers who have digital asset teams, it's really more of a coward of the week. We're disappointed.

The cowards of the week. Yeah, just do a little bit. I mean, not to mention it, can you imagine being an employee of one of these places that we've built this great piece of technology? It's a Bitcoin, Ethereum, stable coin. custody platform and it's awesome. And I want to tell you how it works and I'll send you the onboarding docs. But no, we're not going to talk about it.

So what's the opposite of a bozo? An ozob? An ozob? I don't know. Is there an opposite? I don't know the etymology of that word. Smart person of the week. Anyway, so I'm awarding that to might get in trouble for this one.

Paul Ryan, former speaker. Oh, for his. Yeah, stable coin op-ed. Talk about a great op-ed. Great op-ed in the WSJ. Basic entitled Crypto could stave off a U.S. debt crisis, basically mirrors the comments that he made, I think on Bloomberg a few weeks ago, saying the exact same thing that everybody in crypto knows, which is stablecoins are a net new, and I want to emphasize that, net new buyer of U.S. debt, specifically short-dated treasuries.

and, you know, to the tune of $160 billion, of course, there's some substitution happening, so maybe some stable coin deposits were previously banking system deposits, so that is a neutral effect. But in my opinion, there is a net new set of buyers, and Joe Eisenthal had a comment about this on Twitter, saying, well, aren't we just going from one kind of deposit to a different kind? And in my opinion, no. In my opinion, this is a net inflow of basically foreign currency exposure into dollar exposure and dollar assets, specifically because we see crypto dollarization happening all across the world.

Now, we don't know how much of that is net new versus substitution, but there's some of it. So I do think it's positive. Of course, the magnitude's still small. like you know the big sovereigns china and japan have you know 700 billion to a trillion dollars of dollar assets in their official reserves so we still have some ways to go before really in sort of big league territory but still i think it's a point well made and i'm glad that someone you know who's widely known respected and he's outside the crypto industry paul ryan is is making the point yeah he's spot on with that.

So a couple other stories this week, micro strategy, they have acquired another 11.9,000 bitcoins at a total price point of $786 million. So that convert was upsized. I think when we last reported, it was $500 million convert. It got upsized to $800 million.

So their ability to raise capital to buy Bitcoin here is just unparalleled. Yeah, another bright spot here is the SEC closed their investigation into Ethereum 2.0, finding that it's not a security. A lot of people thought the move towards staking and the substantive changes made to Ethereum

with 2.0 could tip the scales in the security direction. I sort of thought that. I thought it would give the SEC ammo, at least. And they've apparently told consensus now that Ethereum is 2.0 is not a security. Yeah, I guess this sort of is no surprise from a facts and circumstances perspective, but good for consensus for actually getting the letter.

I think sometimes you ask the regulator if you're being investigated and they just never get back to you. So Representative Mike Collins bought a Velodrome. He's a Republican from Georgia. He bought $15,000 worth of this. What is Velodrome? Do you know? I was just going to ask you, what is a velodrome? Quote, its goal is to support liquidity.

for DFI protocols on layer two solutions. It blends concepts from curb finance and Olympus Dow, our favorite, designed to encourage long-term holding through staking, rebasing, and bonding. All right. I just, how did he even find this? I don't even know where you'd buy this. That, yeah, that is the most obscure disclosure I've ever seen, made by a member of Congress.

well it's good that you can disclose it i suppose maybe there's congresspeople that don't disclose stuff like this and i guess tip your hat i hope that works out for him so jump crypto of course the crypto subsidiary of jump trading they donate a 10 mil in a fair shake fair shake is just becoming a behemoth and fair shake hasn't really deployed much of this capital it's one of the largest packs in the country and i guess the election season's heating up

but you'd expect in a lot of these debates in these swing states, you're going to be seeing Fair Shake ads. So there was a New York Times article about this, about crypto dark money, influencing the race and things like that. And it did credit, I think it was Fairshake with defeating Katie Porter and her primary campaign. Now, people in Washington tell me that the crypto folks should not take the credit for this,

and she just wasn't liked and ran. in a bad campaign. But I choose to, I'm just choosing to take the credit, not me personally, but I would like to believe that this was a crypto thing and those donations and ad buys

did move the needle there in that race. I think that certainly moved the needle. Katie Porter came out and said that that whole thing was rigged after she lost. She didn't really like the crypto people hopping in. Yeah, I wouldn't either. All eyes on Montana and Ohio. Yeah, it's Montana, it's Ohio.

Pennsylvania, I'd say Wisconsin, I think Nevada, I think there's a lot of competitive races. Massachusetts, they're not putting that one in the swing state bucket yet. No. But Elizabeth Warren is running against, well, she'll eventually run against one. There are two Republican candidates who are very pro-Crypto, and Ian Cain and John Deaton. I mean, I think, I don't know. Massachusetts is about as blue as it gets, right? It's green this week

Celtics win but yeah I don't know There's a lot of crypto stuff going on in Massachusetts I don't think that's a core campaign issue People in Massachusetts you know Right now it's all about the heat wave I don't know if you know about this It's 99 degrees right now So they canceled school because it was too hot

I think Boston public schools is canceled on Friday I don't know if that's because it's too hot Or because there's a parade When the Patriots won for the first time My high school I was in high school at the time and they canceled school. This is kind of funny because, like, in the south, when it snows, like, a half inch,

we cancel school and then Boston people make fun of, you know, like, it's like, okay, well, Boston would have two feet and we're still getting the kids to school. This is like the opposite now where it's like, yeah, it's hot in the summer, you know, so what? You have AC? I think it's just, you know, when they win a championship, you get school off, that seems like a pretty fair trade. It tends to happen a lot.

Sometimes that'll happen a couple times a year with the Red Sox and the Patriots will both win. Sometimes it'll be the Celtics. Usually you can count on that averaging about one a year. I think Miami might win one. We might win the Stanley Cup. Oh, yeah. Florida is a wagon this year. You never really think of Florida as like a stronghold of hockey talent at all.

That's an incredible hockey program they have done there. All right. So I think that's it for the week. Actually, Warpcast, there were a couple comments. So I guess we were wrong about the, what a child deer is not a doe. I guess we got that wrong. It is a faun. We really should know that.

We should know that. I feel like I would have known that if it was multiple choice. Because dough is like in the sound of music. Sound of music. Doe deer, female deer, Ray, a drop of golden sun. Yeah, we got that wrong. I've seen that movie. So I've seen that movie a lot of times too.

All right. Other comments in there, the Bose of the Weeks popular, for sure. There's a request to have less political discussion on the podcast. We unfortunately cannot honor that request because... I feel like that's a very difficult request to honor. I mean, it feels like most of the news stories right now are about market structure, bill, stable coins, candidates hating crypto or loving crypto. it's going to be really hard to ignore that.

Yeah, like you may not be interested in politics, but it's interested in you. It's interested in us. There's nothing we can do about that. There's another comment, which is that our disclaimer music sounds like the master's theme song. I haven't watched the Masters. Can you confirm that? It does kind of sound like the Masters theme song. It wasn't intentional, but the Master's just a premier sporting event.

So now because we have the disclaimer, you can't get mad at us for anything we say legally. That's true. That's what that means. Yeah. We're totally safe. All right. So I think that's it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend.

And we will see you on Monday.