On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/26/26 (Quantum EOs, STRC's selloff, more MSTR) (EP.727)

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Our recording snafu STRC's depeg explained Saylor's path forward Why Strategy's issue is the converts  Polymarket's questionable marketing Trump's Quantum EOs

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

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

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. I think of the first time I had a huge hiccup. in the podcast like this. And I've apologized profusely, but we recorded about a half an hour of this podcast

and then I realized I wasn't recording. Let it be known that I was actually very good-spirited and very forgiving about it. You were. You handled that very well. I don't think I would have handled that with as much poise as you did because that was painful. So we recorded a full half hour

and then Matt realized he didn't turn his thing on, which I think, has that ever happened in this podcast before? No, we've been doing this since 2018. I don't think that's ever happened to us. Six years of eight years? Jesus, that's like that. Time flies.

We did lose a podcast episode because I was at a conference and forgot to upload it. So there's one lost tape out there. There is a last tape. And then we skipped a week once. We skipped. Yeah, we skipped like two or three, I think. But we have never forgotten to turn on the equipment. Yep.

That's me. It's kind of a cool milestone for us. So it really was, you know that song, The Greatest Song in the World by Tenacious D? Yes. Or it's called The Tribute, right? This is just a tribute. Yeah, so what was it?

He like dreamt of the greatest song in the world or something? Right. Was that it? Yes. So this episode is a tribute to the greatest episode ever recorded, which was just now. In my defense, we got a lot going on here. I was trying to coordinate signing a term sheet.

We got a couple follow-ons going on. We have day jobs over here. We do. And we are uncompensated for this. I do remember thinking to myself, this was a particularly good episode. I know because we started talking about my skunk problem. Oh, there's the skunk.

Six minutes on the skunk. And, you know, for those of you who didn't hear, which is all of you, I have a skunk in my backyard now. Yeah, I guess we'll just play it back. So has the skunk sprayed you or are you children yet? Skunk has not sprayed me or my children. I've got the turkeys that's been well documented, but now we have a skunk borrowing holes in my backyard.

I thought it was a mole, but it's a full-blown skunk. Totally different scale of rodent. So skunks are very cute, I would argue. Yeah, they're good looking. They're handsome little forest critters, but they just have this really dark side to them, unfortunately. Yeah. So you can't enjoy their presence at all.

Yeah. And then we did a whole riff about what to skunks do in the winter. I think that's, I don't know if we can play that back. Yeah, we don't need to actually. We had a long discussion of like what various creatures do in the wintertime in Massachusetts. And the TLDR is we don't know how they make it through the winter. We don't know.

TLDR is someone needs to convince me that deer don't hibernate because I don't really see much of them in the winter. them, they go somewhere. I don't even, I don't think larger creatures can hibernate. Bears. I mean, bears hibernate, right, but they kind of like wake up a little. Don't they, no, I think they kind of just stay in like a torpor. All right. So there are certain frogs that freeze, solid.

Do you know that? I did know that, actually. Yeah, so they freeze. So they have some antique freeze item in their blood. that they don't, you know, red blood cells don't burst or something. I have always wondered about reptiles in the winter, too. Well, they fall out of trees down in your necklora. Yeah.

Yeah. But in Massachusetts, I guess amphibians and reptiles just borrow into the mud, and that's it. Yeah, I guess we don't really have reptiles up here. Yeah, you got reptiles. What do we have? We got turtle, box tortoises. Oh, yeah? I've never seen one.

Presumably have frogs. Probably some salamanders even. Well, those are amphibians. Sorry. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever seen a reptile outside of the zoo up here. Snakes? You definitely have snakes.

Oh, yeah, we definitely have snakes. So I don't know what they do in the winter at all. Well, we're going to have to roll back this micro strategy rundown here because there's a lot going on in micro strategy. And I think people aren't really talking about the things that matter. But should we just run through the deals of the week first? Yeah, let's go deals. All right.

First one up is FOMO. This is an on-chain trading app. There is $75 million from Index and Union Square Ventures. Then Allium, our friends at Alium, that's a blockchain data company. There raised $40 million from Amplified Partners, Kline of Perkins, and Theory Ventures. Then it's Orne, which is a tokenized GPU compute marketplace. They raised $33 million from Andresen, Crypto, Galaxy, and Norrisen. Nordstar. And that's Orne with two ends. Next up we have. We have Onyx odds. That's a sports focus

prediction market. There is 20 million from Payward, which is Cracken, X fund, and Breyer Capital. Then it's ground, an on-chain yield platform that raised 3.6 million from Bain Capital, crypto, Parify, and Nacent. Cambron is the data Oracle network. There is 6 million from Franklin Templeton, Polly Chain, and Flow traders. Daya is a stable coin payments platform. There is 2.4 million from hive mind lattice and alliance Dow. BitBank is Japanese cryptexchange. They're required for 289 million by SBI holdings. Ooh, big, big deal there. Junker deal.

Then it's Entente. This is an AI-enabled finance operations company. They're required by Moon Pay, which is on an acquisition spree. Had to say the French way there. Not a double entendre. That's a single entendre. So it's just exactly what. what it sounds like is a single entomber.

250 digital, that's a active crypto investment manager, spun out of coin fund. They're acquired by Franklin Templeton, and it's now Franklin Crypto. Now let's get into the strategy, and I confess I finally did it. I just burned several hours of time, actually going deeper into this company. We don't have a position. We have no way of making money on it. I don't know why I wasted my time, but I feel like I understand it a lot more. And it's a lot uglier than I thought.

No. Yeah. So in the prior episode, which has now been lost, we actually figured out the answer to strategy. But we've since forgotten it. So we're just going to pick up the pieces here. I like that you finally dug into it because it's like the, in my opinion, it's like the GPDC of today. Like it's something that you don't even necessarily have to hold, but it really matters for the market. It is. It matters a lot.

It's, GBT was not as complicated as this. This is really complicated. But there was closer to Terra Luna to me. Certainly more moving parts. There's like six different overlapping securities. But you need, you could, there was alpha in understanding GBTC. There is certainly alpha because you could look at, remember we would go and look at the creation of units of the truss and then the premium coming off as these funds were armed. Those are the good old days.

simpler times simpler times back then so what did you discover all right so everyone is talking about micro strategy and most people are talking about the relationship with the preferred which is stretch STRC

so this is a preferred that is theoretically supposed to trade at $100 and it's supposed to pay out what is it 11.5% interest that has been plummeting and where is it today do you know where that's trading somewhere in the low 80s

high 70s? STRC Hang on. STRC hit a low of $73 today. It's currently trading at 77. Okay. So everyone's talking about

he has to have cash to make these payments on the preferred. And it looks like he has 9.8 months of cash to service these prefers. So he's been doing at the money equity offering and he raised over

$300 million last week in At the Money Common Stock. So the question is, okay, what does he do with these preferred? I think there's a bigger question here that we alluded to a couple of weeks ago when we talked about why would he pay back these convertible bonds that he had previously issued early. And I think there's a good answer to this, the more I dig into it. So these converts have a put schedule, as I understand it. And so they have conversion prices, which means that if micro strategy, the common equity trades above a certain price,

then sailor can convert these into equity. If they do not trade above that price as of a certain date, he has to give them their cash back. So he has to come up with cash to pay back the principal on these convertible notes. And the put schedule, as I understand, I'm just going to run through some dates and some big numbers here that potentially micro strategy would have to pay if their stock, again, is not at a certain price.

He has to come up with $1 billion in September of 2027, if he's not at 183 a share. He has to come up with $2 billion in March of 28 if he's not at $4.33 a share. $1.5 billion in June of 28 if he's not at $6.72 a share. $800 million in September of 28 at $150 a share. Another $604 million in September of 28 if he's not at 233 a share and $800 million in June of 29 if he's not at $204 a share. So everyone's talking about how's he going to come up with the cash to service the preferred.

But if he defaults on these convertible bonds, that's a jeopardize the company, jeopardize the franchise type of thing. He can just let the preferred, as far as I'm concerned, trade as low as it goes. And he probably still shouldn't buy it back because that's a bad use of proceeds. There's no maturity date on the preferred. So I think, you know, if you kind of follow that logic, he needs a lot more cash. And there's two ways to get that cash. Number one is you could keep on selling at the money, at the money equity here and just dilute the common.

But even the way he calculates his MNAV, this thing is already trading around a 1X on an MNAV basis, maybe even lower if you dig into it. I would say he's going to have to sell some Bitcoin here. Yeah, if you're on the board, you're looking at this, so what is it, September of next year is the first cliff, right? You've got to come up on a billion in September of next year. Not to mention all the preferred dividends before that, which you have not funded currently.

That's the thing to be afraid of is that converts. That's the tricky thing. The MNAV is 1.05, or 1.03, even, according to their kind of messed up version of MNAV, which is not correct, in my opinion. You have to compute your own. So as the board, you have to kind of time the market a little bit. you have to think, well, do we just wait? Do we wait for Bitcoin to go up and maybe we sell some Bitcoin later?

Maybe the premium grows from MSTR. I don't know why the premium would grow because MSDR knows now it's the primary way to monetize STRC and these other obligations. Or do you bite the bullet and sell 50 to 100,000 BTC today? Yeah, I think that's right. So today's Bitcoin price, which is at least, it was earlier today a little bit over 60K, it's since gone down. Funding the first three puts entirely with Bitcoin would require micro strategy to sell 74,000 Bitcoins. Funding the full

$6.7 billion put schedule would require them selling roughly 111,000 Bitcoins. And that's before the preferred dividends. So if I'm on the board of this company, the question I'm asking is, should we be selling 75k to 100k bitcoins units of bitcoin in order to give us some breathing room here and if the answer is yes how do we do that without completely spooking the market you know who they could really use on the board would be a legendary distressed investor name of great point name of Pete brigger but he is no longer on the board that so this is a conversation that you and i had this morning where I put out this tweet storm and I said, look, at least they have Pete Brigger on that board as far as I knew at the time. And then I go to the website and Pete Brigger, who I think was named to the board last year, is not on the board anymore.

So what's going on there? Yeah, that's odd. So STRC, we also have to talk about it. I think I figured out why it's trading in the 70s. I don't think it's an accident that it's trading there. my way of reasoning about STRC is what would you have to be paid to hold this instrument what would you demand to be paid to hold the instrument he's a sailor is offering 11.5% that's not enough right it's not enough

the market's saying it's not enough because it's not the most senior claim it's not really a real debt instrument because he can just suspend the dividend at any time. So he can basically quote-unquote default on it whenever he wants. And this thing, the capital structure is a little impaired. Obviously, it doesn't have the cash to pay it for a long time. He's got a few months cash. And there's negative convexity associated with the instrument. The cash out the door increases as the collateral.

declines as wrong way on the trade. So I don't know. I think if I was a junk bond investor, which I'm not, I would ask for 15 to 20%. And so you can back into the price of STRC that gets you to that yield. 15% has a sell off to $76, which is where it is. 20% has a sell off to $57. So I think that is the sort of appropriate range, so to speak. And I think that's where it's going to trade until something changes. I think the market is actually being kind of efficient here. It's basically saying we're demanding a higher rate. Sailor is not hiking the yield.

He's holding it fixed 11.5 for now. Given that, we're selling this thing until the implied yield rises. to a required rate of return. So I follow that logic and I agree with it. My personal view is that there's no floor to STRC right now because it's not economically rational for him to go in and buy this thing back when he has the puts to deal with. And so you might argue that you should be getting paid a lot more

to hold this preferred security. Yeah, but if that ratio goes above, if the yield goes above 20% than this thing, the required price of STRC goes. goes down way, way, way down. It goes way down. But what's to say this thing should trade at, you know, $100? I mean, there's no actual peg there.

So what should he do? And I have my view, but curious what you would do. I think what he will do. And remember, he used AI to design this or helped him, right? Yeah. So we actually know, because we can just ask AI what he should do, and he's asking AI. So we know what he's going to do because just whatever Claude thinks.

Right? I think there's what should he do and then what will he do? I think he should frontload the sales of BTC specifically. So I think that's what he should do. What he will do, I think, is just wait. Just wait it out. Yeah. Do nothing with STRC.

Sell MSTR as needed. Drip it out into the market, even maybe at a slight discount to MNAV. And try and fill the coffers and keep that buffer alive. And then basically hope the best. Bitcoin recovers and the premium recovers too. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's probably right. I mean, I think what he should do is at least stop accumulating Bitcoin. That would be a good place to start.

And so you do that, you start to pad some cash potentially. You sell MSTR maybe to the point where it's tolerable from an MNAV perspective, which, who knows, maybe that you even do that below 1XMNAV and maybe that's still the right move. I think you have to try to repurchase these converts opportunistically when they trade below par, and you need to try to refinance these things. This is not an existential crisis yet, but it could be if you're up against a repayment here. And so it's got to do something here.

And then I think there's no way around it. He's going to have to sell some Bitcoin, and he just has to hope that he's going to be selling that Bitcoin into a period of strength. but you look at how much Bitcoin micro strategy has in the balance sheet. We're talking about a major league market impact on Bitcoin here. Yeah, and I think the market is holding its breath, waiting to see if those sales are coming now or later. Oh, yeah. I mean, this idea that Bitcoin is just going to rip up and solve his problems,

that's not the way this is going to work. I mean, this and quantum are the two things overhanging the market, but micro strategy probably more acutely than quantum. So that's a great transition to the other major news item of the week, which is a monster executive order from the White House. The title of the fact sheet is Trump ushers in the next frontier of quantum innovation. So the White House this week did a whole number of things regarding quantum. They accelerated the deadline of quantum preparedness at the federal government from 2035 to 2031.

So it was a massive pull forward. they also said they want to have a commercially relevant quantum computer by 2028. That's crazy. Not only do they think this is going to happen, they actually want to make it happen. And then there's a number of other measures they now. It's basically industrial policy to support the domestic quantum ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah.

Part of those policies is I believe providing law enforcement help to U.S. quantum companies such that foreign adversaries don't steal their IP and things like that. So we've gone from 2035 to 2031 in terms of when the government itself is going to upgrade to post-quantum cryptography. We have Google and Cloudflare and other big companies coming out and saying 2029, 2030 in some cases. And then we have certain public blockchain development teams that are just not worried about this. Yeah, it really mystifies me at this point that as a developer of a major trillion dollar protocol, you're bearing your hands. had in the sand about quantum. And most blockchains aren't, to their credit. Most blockchains are not. Bitcoin developers still have knock on their act together on this, in my opinion.

And it's really curious because you have the biggest internet companies on the planet and now the government itself that are saying, well, not only do we think this is going to happen fairly soon, we're actually going to make it happen. I don't see how it's tenable as a Bitcoin developer to say this is fantasy. I don't either. I mean, I could see a perspective. of a physicist that is studying this thing to have a view that it's not going to happen by 2030. But the idea of a cryptographer just having that opinion in a vacuum just seems perplexing and ignorant. Yeah.

So I think it's about time that we actually start talking about implementing a PQ upgrade the hours later than we think. We're midway through 2026. Google and Cloudflare. I think this thing is coming by 20, the government exposed agencies have to transition by 2030, and the whole government has to transition by 2031. How long does a transition for Bitcoin take?

Certainly a while, two, three years. Yeah, we've talked about this. I mean, it's just operationally, if we had the BIP written and the software was actually in place, it would still take a while to rotate everyone's coins, right? So best time to start would have been yesterday, but the second best time is today. We haven't even started the clock.

That's the problem. We need to start the clock. In other news, here's an interesting one. Andrew Cuomo is back in the game. So OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, have formed a joint venture to tokenize listed equities on NICC. It's co-chaired by Andrew Cuomo.

Didn't know he was a financial services slash crypto blockchain guy. Yeah, very shocking career pivot for him. I wouldn't have guessed that OKX was going to be the one to partner with NYAC, but credit to them for pulling that off. It's super impressive. I mean, you would have thought that that would have been maybe a U.S. exchange, but good for OKX to get that. So the Ethereum Foundation appears to be in turmoil that whenever I go look over at Ethereum

land, there's some kind of crisis brewing over there. They've announced that they cut 20% of the staff, 40% of the budget, large restructuring, five former researchers announced the creation of a different nonprofit, ETH Labs. I remember just recently they also, seems like a lot of them went to etherealize. There's always something going on in Ethereum. I mean, didn't a lot of, well, not a lot, but some of the really critical developers also went to tempo, which wasn't probably great for Ethereum.

It seems like this is by design, though, I think, Vitalik doesn't want to have this kind of big foundation albatross thing. He'd much rather have it be balkanized with many development teams. So it seems like it's intentional, but who knows? So did you see this story in the journal this week about Polymarkets marketing campaign? It was quite troubling. Do you think we're going to have to bring back the bad boys section? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a bare market phenomenon.

It seems like we're in one. people are definitely doing bad things. Yeah, so this piece, this is bad, right? They just had influencers that were told to trade on fake sites, fake polymarket sites and post-winnings of things that actually didn't happen. Yeah, so we're, we like prediction markets. We enjoy breeding them and using them informationally.

We use them all the time on this show to see what's going on in the world. However, that doesn't mean that they're completely blameless with regards to their marketing. This expose was really a top read. I mean, so apparently, Polymarket created fake mirror versions of their site. Kind of like, you know, those scam sites will change an L to an I or something. They did that to themselves, gave it to a bunch of influencers, told them to place fake trades that looked real, record the sites, record them doing it, and then go on social media and claim that they won all this money trading on the site, and those were not real trades.

I don't know what law has been broken there, but I can guarantee you that it is a law has been broken. That's egregious. I mean, it's deceptive as hell. I mean, these trades didn't hit the tape. He's not real trade. So they're going out to retail investors and saying, you too can make rent money by betting on stuff, the trades weren't real. Yeah, that's not good. I mean, I just think the polymarket and

Kalshi, too. I mean, the way that they market themselves is going to be so damaging in the long run. And there's going to just be a major backlash here. Yeah. They're going against this tide of just young people becoming complete degenerates. And it's, I think there's going to be a ton of opposition politically to that. Yeah, and it's such a important time for the platforms to get this right because there's a massive fight brewing between the states that want to regulate these effectively sports books and the federal government in the CFTC. The CFTC's argument that they alone can capably regulate these platforms is weakening with the more bad behavior that is exposed. Well, yeah, that's a good point. I think that the sports gambling side of this is going to end up

in the Supreme Court. And, you know, you have CalShia this week, reportedly in discussions to raise it a $40 billion valuation and go public next year, you really wonder the timing of an eventual Supreme Court case, what impact that will have on the value of these platforms? Because sports is a huge, huge part of their revenue. Did you see this story this week? It was just a long, detailed investigative piece of journalism from the sky, Alex Walts, about who the first Bitcoin miner was?

Oh, was this the guy that just, he put it out on YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. I actually did watch that. That was fascinating. So it was a really cool piece of research, clearly took him a very long time. Actually, hadn't come across Alex Waltz before. So he found that Hal Finney was not the second person to run Bitcoin.

Yeah. So it was Dustin Trammell. Dustin Trammell, but I thought he came to the conclusion that Satoshi was the second node. Well, we don't know for sure because a lot of this stuff is lost to the sands of time. But it may have been Satoshi running a couple notes. But between Satoshi and Finney was Trammell, which is Dustin Trammell was kept a very low profile over the years, I would say. I'm sure he likes it that way.

Yeah. I had never even heard of Dustin Trammell until this week. He runs a Bitcoin Venture Fund, TVP. Oh, that's Dustin Trammell? The same. That's the very same. Yeah. Oh, no kidding. Okay.

All right. Well, then I have heard of them. Yeah. So pretty cool blockchain archaeology. He also found that the first couple days of Bitcoin, they were long blockchain halts, which was something that I had found eight years ago. I remember that. Yeah.

Just the big intervals between the blocks, right? Yeah. Why was that? Just the nose were crashing or something? Yeah. The early software just wasn't very reliable. There are a lot of bugs in it. And Hal Phine's node crashed the first time you tried to run it.

If you could go back in time, is that in the top five to ten things that you would do, is just become an early Bitcoin participant? I mean, yeah, of course. It's just you had to be such a specific kind of person to be in that position. You had to be a cypherpunk. You had to be on the mailing list. You had to care about it when no one cared. You had to see the value of Bitcoin.

Yeah. And even the, you know, serious cypherpunk guys, most of them wrote it off. They didn't care at all. And you had to have been able to get the node up and running apparently. Yeah. And you had to run a mysterious executable piece of software from an anonymous guy, which is like downloading as a Windows user, downloading a dot EXE and running it is kind of a crazy thing to do. It is. These days. Yeah, you don't, you definitely want to not be doing that on like your work. work computer. Yeah, so I was actually thinking about that. I'm like, okay, would I've done it? Probably not. I'm not downloading a mystery meet file and running it on my workstation. That's scary.

Yeah. From this guy with these like totally anonymous made up name, experimental software. Absolutely not. I'm not running it. That's too scary. So you got to tip your cap to tremble. Yeah, well done. We were just talking about prediction markets, and this is an interesting thread on the prediction market side. meta has reportedly begun developing their own prediction market called arena and it might be a points based system as opposed to cash. I was really surprised and I still don't understand why they would do this. I think it's one of Zuckerberg's things is that he loves shiny objects and he gets captivated by them and doesn't necessarily have a full appreciation of whether they suit the platform. I mean,

how much money did he spend on his Metaverse boondoggle? Yeah, I mean, Andy changed the name of the business. But so if he got a ton of flack for just getting into payments, how much flack is this guy going to get for getting into prediction markets? This is politically, there's going to be a debacle for him. I think if it's play money markets, he'll be all right. I guess. I don't think he can do real money.

Yeah, I guess that's probably right. In other news, Senator Cynthia Lummes and Ruben Gallego, they have introduced a resolution opposing a pardon for Sam Bankman-Fried, saying he is exactly where he belongs. Hard to argue with that. Yeah, that's mostly ceremonial, I would say, or symbolic, rather. There was another, I've got to give some props to Wall Street Journal, as much as we've tangled with them in the past.

There's another good article in the journal this week about coin X. Have you heard of coin X? I've never heard of this. So apparently this is an exchange, I think Iranian, And they reportedly, Iranian entities moved $3.8 billion through CoinX in close conjunction with the central bank of Iran. So it appears that meaningful amounts of funds were moving on chain. They were effectively owned by Iran. Not great.

But also not surprising. I mean, if you're cut off from the rest of the financial system, then that's probably. probably something you would look at doing. These, yeah, these Iranian crypto exchanges were never part of like a reference rate methodology. They kind of fly below the radar. The Treasury did something quite good this week, I think, which is they are finally cracking down on these scam compounds in Cambodia and Lao and places like that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, some of the reporting on this stuff is just traumatizing. I've read some of these long form pieces, I think, in Wired about. it about basically people that get put into indentured servitude and end up in these compounds in the middle of the jungle basically and all they do is it's called pig butchering I guess do romance scams mostly against Americans elderly and extract just tens or tens of billions of dollars a year yeah do you ever wonder if some of these scam calls you're getting are originating from over there I'm sure they are I'm sure they are so I'm really glad

Treasury's cracking down on this I think they're should put a lot of pressure on the local sovereign governments to, I mean, we know where these are, you know? Yeah. There's just, it's just totally lawless. These governments don't have the territorial control, I think, over these places. Well, I think they're also just getting paid off by some of these organized crime syndicates that are running these things. But yeah, you really just need to go in and knock these compounds over. So I'm glad that they acted on it. This is something that if you've been investing in the on-chain forensic space as we have for many years, everyone knows about

these things. They're no secret. I mean, and you think about the amount of harm that's being done to everyday Americans, it's astronomical. I'm very glad that Treasury is now doing something about this. Looks like the Bank of England has pulled back on its previous plans to cap individual holdings of stable coins. Instead, they're opting to place a cap on the issuers. So it looks like the issuers can only go up to 40 billion pounds per issuer, which, I mean, that doesn't seem like great idea either, to be honest with you. It's less worse than the alternative, but it's still not great. It's still not great.

Have you checked out like coin market cap lately? No. What's going on? Tether briefly was the number two asset on coin market cap this week. and it's neck and neck with Ethereum. Yeah. I mean, I think,

last time you saw that Ethereum not be in the number two seat. I mean, that had been like seven or eight years ago. Yeah, I think ripple might have passed at one point. I mean, I believe that tether

or some stable coin will be the number one eventually, even out of Bitcoin. I mean, there's more dollars in the world than there is gold, right? Yeah. So,

yeah, I think it's just a matter of, of how many stable coins will you have, right? There could be many winners there. But I think that's reasonable. As a cohort, they'll definitely well surpass Bitcoin. So going back to Polymarket, as much as we've been hating on them today, do you think the U.S. is correctly priced at 3% chance to win the World Cup? They play tonight against Turkey. And are they favored against Turkey? Is Turkey good? No, Turkey is terrible. Actually, we're meant to call it. them Turkeye because they changed their name officially.

Did they really? Yeah. It's like how the Czech Republic were meant to call it Chetcha now. Really? Yeah, they changed your name too. I just, I'm like, do we really have to do this? Like, why can't we just call Turkey? Yeah.

So hold on. The U.S. only has a 3% chance of winning the entire World Cup. I would say stranger things have happened. And I will caveat that I've never seen the U.S. play soccer. but I plan on it. I tried to watch the last game, but I had something going on. But I mean,

Miracle on ice. Anyone heard of that? Come on. Yeah, it could happen. It could. I think 3% is probably right. Oh, this game's on at 10 o'clock at night. Yeah, it's late.

It's late. Where are they playing this in California? Yeah, I don't know. But Turkey has been awful. And the U.S. has actually been great in their first two games. So who knows? So the banter around the office yesterday was that some of the bars in Boston that love the Scots

shut down for the England game so that the English people who have now taken over the city couldn't watch the game at those bars. But why be hostile to the English and not the Scots? Everyone loved the Scots. I mean, the Scots were running around with their skirts. It was it was mayhem. But they were just good-natured. And I think the English are a little bit,

they've got a little bit more of a mean streak. They're a little bit more destructive on the city. Well, I mean, first of all, you're saying this to a Brett, so I object to that. Yeah, but you're now a U.S. citizen. Yeah, I have dual loyalties. I also do like the Scots very much. I spent five years there.

And I went to find them the other day because they're here in Miami now, the Tartan Army. That's true. The Tartan Army is, they're the best army out there besides the U.S. Army. It's a great, The Tartan Army, they were wandering around South Beach playing bagpipes with their kilts on. I mean, sweating it up. They really didn't look like they belonged in Miami.

Tell you what. But they were, it was lovely, actually, to run into them. They're good people. Now, I wouldn't say this, but a lot of store owners and bar owners are saying, we've already kicked the English out of this city once and we'll do it again if they keep on acting up. So I think there's a little bit of a behavior problem. well i mean new englanders are descendants of the english so pretty much direct so it's kind of like they're your distant cousins i mean

yeah well i came up from the irish branch so that was a little bit different that's that would be true but i think it's a little unfair to be prejudiced against the english and not the scots i just thought it was really interesting that these bars were like hey we're wide open for Scotland, but we're actually not open today for all these English people that want to get in. And frankly, on a technical basis, I would say the Scots are more rowdy and more prone to violence than the English. Oh, is that right? Interesting.

Well, 100%. Having lived in both places, from my own experience, you're more likely to get into a fight at a bar in Scotland than England. I was down at the U.S. Open for a couple days last week, and the Tartan Army was down there. And you would have thought that these people were celebrities. People were coming up to them, buying them drinks, giving them hugs. These people travel well.

They do, and they just had such a bad World Cup. Unfortunately, they did horrible. Oh, are they out? Effectively, yeah. They lost to Brazil yesterday. Okay. So that's a shame. Their party has to end.

I mean, it's got to be a little bit different party. down in Miami versus Boston. Yeah, I mean, there's 24-hour bars and clubs here. They don't close. All right. So I think that's probably a good place to leave it. Do you think I'm just going to get sucked into the vortex of tweeting about micro strategy again? I took six years off and came back into it with a couple tweets last night.

I mean, if you want to get your impressions up, tweeting about strategy is the way to do it. Yeah, I don't really care about that. but I find it interesting that no one's kind of talking about these converts. I think that's the big problem. I think it's an interesting puzzle because there's so many moving parts. It's just great. And it is driving the market. So you might be stuck in here with us.

Well, it's kind of like one of these things where we know he's talking to AI. So he's probably just saying, what's the craziest thing I can do to get myself out of this pickle? And the funniest part is when he came up with it, he was using. the 4-0 model. I know. Which is the most sycophantic one, by the way, which is a quite a concerning thing, actually. I know. Because he used the model, though, to just praise every wacky idea.

He should have just said, what's the worst that could happen? And it probably would have said what's happening right now. Yeah, this. Yes. All right, that's a good place to leave it. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.