On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/28/24 (Solana ETF, Coinbase sues FDIC, SCOTUS vs SEC) (EP.540)

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Nic and Matt are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Nic's vehicular issues BTC mining FUD is now AI fud Abra settles with state regulators over lack of MTLs State Street and Galaxy Digital partner up US reps visit imprisoned Binance exec in Nigeria Vaneck files for a Solana ETF Coinbase is suing the FDIC and the SEC Germany is selling Bitcoin SCOTUS further limits the SEC's power Sponsor notes:  Mastering Crypto Derivatives In Coin Metrics' State of the Network issue 265, we dive into the landscape of derivatives in traditional financial and cryptoasset markets, examining their types, applications and underlying data

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. Guest and hosts 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.

Look down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of 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 a 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. Here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at the data behind crypto derivatives markets.

Derivatives constitute a major portion of crypto market activity. 78% of Bitcoin trading volume comes from futures, up from 50% in 2017. The 30-day futures basis, the difference between the futures price and spot, is an effective barometer for market sentiment. Spikes in this metric often coincide with major market events, such as, the 40% peak on CME before the Bitcoin spot ETF launch in January. Bitcoin futures open interest recently peaked at $30 billion twice post-ETF launch. One third of this comes from CME, suggesting that investors are using futures to hedge their

ETF exposure or to exploit the arbitrage. That is your metrics minute. Busy week, huh? Supreme Court week. Yeah, we were bemoaning the lack of activity last week, but things are totally heating up now. So it's good to see you this week for our Jamal Bowman elimination party in New York. So what happened there? He lost his primary. He lost his primary. Too bad. Another anti-cryptop person bites the dust.

Turns out he was anti-a-a-a-a-a-a-lott-things though. Oh, I didn't even know he was anti-crypto. He was anti-crypto. He was anti-crypto. He voted against him. all the major crypto bills. But he was also anti-Israel, and he pulled the fire alarm. He did pull the fire alarm. You're not allowed to do that. You're not supposed to.

Yeah, that's definitely not something you're supposed to do. They teach you that real early in life, too. Don't pull the fire alarm unless there's fire. Yeah, it's not something that happens accidentally. You'd be pretty deliberate about it. Well, he said that he thought he was opening the door, but it was a big red fire alarm, and the door was next to him. It was in the other direction.

So I was talking to some listeners this week, and they were complaining that I don't tell enough, like, weird stories. Like, you always have something that's happening, you normally involving some kind of wildlife. Right. So I don't have that. I mean, I don't really have a lot of run-ins with wildlife here in Miami. I mean, most of yours are just moving vehicle issues, really, in your life.

Funny you mentioned that I did have a significant vehicle problem this week, which frankly, I'm awarding myself the Bozo of the Week award because it was a sequence of events that was entirely avoidable, but also 100% my fault. So, well, basically, my car got towed. I parked illegally. If you live on the beach, you can get a resident sticker where you can park in all these spaces. I just never got around to doing that. So that was the first mistake.

Second mistake, parking illegally. Okay, my car gets towed, whatever. I was actually at a poker night and I won a lot of money. So that kind of paid for the cost of the towing. That's good. But, so I show up at this place. And I think tow truck lot administrators are the most miserable people on the planet.

the number one. Yeah. Yeah, it's tough. Because they're dealing with like people going full Karen mode on them all the time. Right. And I was one of those people. That was me. And I'm like, okay, can I have my car back? It's cash. They all need except cash. What a business. Wow.

And they're like, no. You have to prove that you own the car. Like, well, I don't know. It's my car. You just take my word for it. Like, give me back my car. like give it to me and they're like no you have to show us your registration okay so I go into the glove box I'm like well I have the registration right here I just renewed it but I didn't put the registration in the glove box oh no what I redoed it why and I don't know I forgot to and I go home I like the rummage around I threw it out I'd thrown out the registration oh and I go back to the toe place. I'm like, okay, well, I have an expired registration that clearly says my name on it.

They're like, well, it could be anyone's car. I'm like, well, clearly the pattern of evidence points to the fact that it's my car, but that didn't satisfy them at all. They also had a financial motive to deny me the car because they just charge you a huge fee every day. Of course. They hold it. And this happened on a Saturday night. So I'm like, well, hang on. I'm going to catch 22 situation because the only way to get a new registration is go to the DMV, which I can't do until Monday. So they're like, too bad, so sad, get out to wait and rack up those fees for the next, whatever, 48 hours.

So I had to spend my Monday morning at the DMV, of course. Oh, man, that is tough. I mean, yeah, that's a good bozo of the week. You got to put the registration in the glove box. So, yeah, the bozo was me. I was the bozo. Yeah. We are going to unload a new bozo of the week theme song, probably next week, though.

Since you're the bozo this week, we didn't want to drop on you. We couldn't find an obvious candidate. But yeah, thank you for your suggestions. We do have a theme song. So it was a busy content week. So you went back on the Pomp podcast, talked about the Bitcoin Mining Space AI, regulatory landscape. That was a good one.

Yeah, it was good to see Pomp. He's always wearing a really nice suit, which I appreciate. you know he's raising the bar sartorrily well-dressed man yeah he's a well-dressed um good episode um talking about how the uh environmentalist fud against AI totally mirrors the bitcoin mining fud and it's already becoming a problem the same people like Alex de Vries who's the big Bitcoin mining hater he's now an AI hater so he pitherto pivoted to that, pivoted to AI. Even the haters have pivoted.

Yeah, you think Bitcoin mining energy expenditure is bad. Wait to see what the next five years are going to look like in the AI space. It's going to be orders of magnitude more. I think at least literally an order of magnitude. If you extrapolate these trends, AI data centers, they're going to, there'll be at least 10%, 510% of U.S. energy consumption. Bitcoin mining's not above 1%. And they complained about that a lot.

So they're going to have to grapple with it. They should have gone to bat for Bitcoin mining, is my view. You know? They made us fight that fight on our own. Yeah. Well, we're locking arms, I guess, with the AI lobby. Yeah, the problem is that AI data centers can't be location agnostic like Bitcoin miners, or they have a harder time.

And they can't be interruptible. or at least they haven't figured out how to do that yet because AI workloads, you just got to dispatch them when the request comes in if you're doing inference. And for model training, you can't interrupt that either. So they're not like Bitcoin miners and then they can just curtail the power. So they can't curtail,

but some of these Bitcoin miners seem to have very attractive power purchase agreements that could be refactored for some of these AI use cases. Yeah, and we're seeing this. So CoreSci, the miner, struck a deal with Core Weave, the AI compute company, big deal. That caused all the Bitcoin miners to get repriced upwards. And then you have HUD-8, raised money from CO2 to do AI cloud. So initially all the miners tried to do this didn't work.

It seems like now, because there's a scarcity of data centers, the miners are getting a second look. and some of them may be able to sell into AI. So another Castle Island content, I sat down with Adam Healy, who's the co-founder of Station 70, had a fun episode about cybersecurity, talked about key management, evolution of custody. So I recommend people check that out. Adam was a great podcast guest.

So should we dive into the deals? Yeah, first one up is actually the Bitcoin mining deal you just mentioned. HUD-8, which is a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company. they raised $150 million in a convertible note from KOTU, and the purpose of that capital raise is to expand their AI capabilities. So HUD-8 must be one of these outfits that has attractive PPA agreements. Next up, we have Coliseum, Solana Ecosystem Accelerator. They raised $60 million for their first fund.

Then we have Conduit, which is a roll-up as a service platform. There raised $37 million from Paradigm, Han, Coinbase, and Bankless. then you have mega labs developed of the EVM based blockchain mega-eath they raised 20 million from dragonfly figment capital robot ventures and vitalic himself i thought this was fake when i first read it i'm like vitalik is investing in a new l1 yeah you don't see vitalic in a lot of these uh deals but mega eth that's a good uh that's a good name I'm not going to lie. I'm critical of names, but I kind of like that one. If you can put Mega in front of anything, it sounds better. What was the token that Kim Kardashian got in trouble for touting?

Was that Ethereum Max? Yeah, not a bad name either, to be honest with you. You can see why she was attracted to that. Ethereum Max bad. Mega Eath. Good. On the other hand, good. Yeah, that's good.

Next one is ORA. This is an Oracle protocol, a powered by, AI that raised 20 million from polychain, hash key, and 7X ventures. Then you have Covalent, a blockchain data infrastructure company that raised 5 million from Rock Tree, CMCC, Moon Rock, and Double Peak Group. Next one up is crossover markets. This is a digital asset trading technology company that raised 12 million from Illuminate, DRW, flow traders in Laser Digital.

Congrats to the crossover team. They've been on the pod. That's right. next up we have Allura Decentralized AI Network There is 3 million from Delphi Our friends at CMS Holdings and archetype Enzo Finance

Which is a smart contract abstraction layer They raised 4 million from Hypersphere and IDO CoLab Then we have So So Value A financial research platform for crypto There is 4 million from Hong Shan and GSR SoSo value Okay

I don't know Yeah not sure about that one NovaNet, a decentralized network for ZK Proofs, raised $3 million from finality capital and Arrington Capital. Then we have decent land labs, an EVM integration. Who? EVM integration for R-Ave?

What does that mean? It's bringing the EVM to R-Weave. Okay, well, next up, we have decent lab. Decent land lab. They're integrating the EVM into RWE. They raise $3 million from Foresight Ventures, LD Capital, and Big Grain Holdings. A bunch of deals this week. All right, let's start it out talking about a partnership.

So we have long said that State Street is one of the, probably the least forward-thinking financial institutions out there. I guess they're probably up there with Bank of America in terms of how far behind they are in the blockchain and crypto space. So State Street announced a partnership with Galaxy asset management to partner on. a new digital asset investing initiative. And if you read the press release for this thing, which we'll put in our newsletter, it is completely unclear what this is. You could read this press release and have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Now luckily, a galaxy founder of Mike Novigratz tweeted some details.

It looks like they're focusing on building out some products that are not necessarily spot exposure, but more like exposure into companies in the digital asset space, which, you know, there are some of these funds out there, I think, Fidelity has one, Bitwise has one, that provide equity exposure to companies that are building in the digital asset space. But I will say this. It has been one year since the State Street ETF had said there is no investment case for crypto. And but a year later, here we have a investment case for crypto involving a new partnership with Galaxy. So that's pretty interesting.

I mean, State Street is mere feat from the Fidelity Hedge. quarters and just down the street from circle and yet they just didn't do anything in crypto for the longest time it's kind of surprising one of the largest custodians in the world and one of the largest asset managers in the world with SSGA and just completely missed the crypto you know trade here didn't get involved in custody uh you know did not get involved in the ETF so good to see they're doing something now yeah uh next piece of news I thought this was very encouraging. We've talked about the plight of the beleaguered finance executive Tigran Gambarian,

who was imprisoned in Nigeria. And he had malaria. Is that right? Malaria. He has malaria and pneumonia right now. Oh, man. So clearly the conditions are not good. And if you haven't heard of this guy, he was a decorated former federal agent,

went to join Binance on their policy team and was basically kidnapped in Nigeria. He was summoned there under the auspices of a normal business meeting and was kidnapped. I think in the Nigerian government, there's some viewpoint that crypto is affecting the Naira. Maybe they're concerned about crypto-dollarization. He was effectively held to ransom Nigeria demanding large payout from Binance

that they're not willing to pay. And, you know, we've been bemoaning the Biden admin's lack of movement on this, kind of a high-level political prisoner that the Biden-Nateman didn't do anything about. Now, this week, representatives French Hill, Republican from Arkansas, and Chrissy Hulahan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, they went to visit him and called on the Nigerian government to release him. Yeah, I thought that was very encouraging. It was also good to see a bipartisan delegation go over the.

there so hopefully they can work something out because this is a this story that is not getting enough attention if if this guy worked at a bank you would have been freed immediately or he wouldn't have even been taken hostage i mean this is a huge problem and a very high level political prisoner and shocked that that the administration is nowhere on this so we had some interesting developments in etf land today so van neck has filed an s one with the securities and exchange commission for a spot Solana ETF. So this is, as far as I can tell in the U.S., this is the first spot filing for a Solana product. I am of the view that you will definitely see a spot Salana product at some point

in the next few years, but it won't be this one. It won't be this one under Gary Gensler. So right now the SEC is alleging that Solana is a security. And of course, the CMB has yet to list a futures contract on Solana probably because the SEC is saying that it's a security. So I think it's a good gesture by Van Eck to get this conversation going, but I give this a pretty low likelihood. And there's also not a 19B4 filing yet. So the clock doesn't really start on that process with the SEC until the 19B4 comes out. Yeah, I mean, the normal sequencing here is the futures get listed on CME and then there's a

spot ETF. So this is still some ways. out. Although maybe you could eventually rely on on a futures contract that is listed by like Coinbase on their offshore exchange. I don't know. Maybe there's another way around that CME thing, but that seems to be the intractable barrier. Yeah, I mean, there's no actual rule that says you have to do it that way. No, it's just sort of the way that the SEC has been operating. Speaking about the way that the SEC has been operating, the Supreme Court today, a pretty landmark decision ruled on a six to three basis that these kangaroo courts that the

SEC has for civil violations, that they are not lawful. So if you have been charged with something civilly by the SEC, you now have the opportunity to go in front of a jury of your peers to be heard as opposed to being subjected to a SEC tribunal basically, an SEC judge, jury and executioner, so to speak. So this just seems like a common sense thing. And I think a lot of people who saw this ruling didn't even realize that the SEC had a court internal to it because it doesn't make any sense to have an executive branch actually have a court on the inside of it. Yeah, this was one we hadn't been tracking, but seems very important. So if you were a defendant in a civil securities fraud case, you were now entitled to a jury trial by your peers, as opposed to,

being forced in arbitration with an SEC judge, which seems like it seems pretty straightforward under the Constitution. I mean, that's the Seventh Amendment. So pretty nice outcome there. And I think the Chevron case, Chevron deference, is due to be reviewed this week or the decision is due to come out. Decision should come out this week. I guess it could come out.

tomorrow. Tomorrow's Friday. So Chevron deference would be enormous. And so that would dramatically curtail the rulemaking ability for some of these agencies, notably the SEC. And so maybe you won't be living in a world where the SEC just puts out these arbitrary rules on payment for order flow or how the Exchange Act is going to be updated, how the custody rule is going to be changed to kneecap the crypto industry. So that would be a huge one. I mean, that would actually force Congress to actually do laws. Yeah. That's been a longstanding doctrine, the Chevron doctrine, I think, stretching back from the 80s.

So fingers crossed, that ends this week. This Supreme Court, they don't get everything right. They had a case, Missouri v. Biden regarding free speech, which the case had to do with the Biden administration trying to informally pressure big tech companies. to suppress free speech on their platforms and the Supreme Court actually overturned that one. Yeah, I saw that. Kind of bad news for free speech out of the election.

But this SCOTUS is very skeptical of the administrative state and executive rulemaking by Fiat, basically. And consistent with that, you would expect them to overturn the Chevron Doctrine. So that would be a hugely influential case, which hopefully will be worth. resolved this week. So another pertinent SEC news. Coinbase this morning announced that they're suing the SEC as well as the FDIC for Freedom of Information Act documents relating to these two agencies and the alleged and I would argue proven illegal crusade against crypto industry participants.

So the lawsuit basically alleges that the FDIC went to certain financial institutions and told them to cut off access to banking to crypto industry participants and otherwise advised them that they needed to decrease their total exposure to the crypto industry. So basically saying deposit caps on crypto-related institutions, that much, that allegation is provably true. All you need to do is go to these bank executives and say, come under oath here and we're going to subpoena you. What did the FDIC tell you? When did they tell it to you? We know that that's true. This is a suit that also seeks documents relating to the SEC's closed investigation. So they know they can't get ongoing investigation documents.

But now that the SEC is saying they've closed the investigation into whether or not Ethereum is a security vis-a-vis the consensus lawsuit, Coinbase wants to get their hands on those documents, which I think would be quite revelatory. Yeah, I was very, very excited to see this. the coin base was pretty stern in the complaint and they used the term Operation Choke Point 2.0

in the complaint several times They here's one of the quotes They said the FDIC has not learned its lesson They're referring to choke point 1.0 Which was a similar scheme to deprive other industries of banking, politically disfavored industries. They say quote,

Together with other agencies, is it's now mounting operation chokepoint 2.0, a similar scheme to deprive the digital asset industry of the banking services it needs to operate in today's economy. Chokepoint 2.0, like its predecessors unlawful. It's illegal for financial regulators to coerce regulated institutions in secret to cut ties with businesses, the government disfavors. And they actually quote the NRA case from earlier this year. So, look, we know this is really. real. I wrote a couple articles about this during the banking crisis last year. And it was kind of the fog of war. We didn't have all the information, but I alleged that this was happening. Fast forward a year. We know for sure

that this is real. And it's not just the FDIC. It's actually a constellation of these agencies working together. So the regional feds, the OCC. And I remain scandalized by this trend and the dissolution of the two major pro-crypto banks, Silvergate and Signature. Those were slightly different situations, each of them, but in both cases, those were banks that were effectively knee-capped by the government because they were serving crypto in the immediate wake of FDX. And the popular narrative is that they failed because they made bad bets in their asset portfolios, They had a duration mismatch, interest rates rose, whatever.

The true story there is very sinister, and it has to effectively the U.S. government destroying solvent financial institutions because they wanted to kneecap the crypto industry. So I would love for the truth to come out eventually. I continue to think it's a gigantic scandal, as is choke 1 2.0, which is not over yet. Yeah, I mean, Silvergate never lost any. money on behalf of their customers, their depositors. And so that was a case where it seems like the government came in and said, look, you need to cut down on your crypto business. The crypto

business was huge over there. So it was a- That was basically the whole business was crypto. Yeah. So there were like 90 plus percent concentrated in banking crypto industry participants. So if you go into a shop like that and you say, hey, we need to get you down to 10, 15, 20 percent. is what they said. So you tell someone that, that actually is not saying, okay, just go remove some customers, that you are out of business. You can't run a bank by just dropping 80% of your customers right away. And so then you will go out of business.

And so that is what happened there. Yeah, they voluntarily liquidated. You don't see that with banks very often. And no one outside crypto has even publicly wondered about this. Hey, why did Silvergate voluntary liquid? voluntarily liquidate even if depositors were 100% whole. And it's because the business they were in, which was being a boutique bank serving crypto clients,

was made de facto. It was prohibited by their financial regulators. Now, there's ongoing litigation here about the FTX side of this, but that's a separate issue, right? So we're saying, yeah, they banked FTX, but that does not, that is not why they actually went out of business. Yeah, and at the time, all the short sellers and Elizabeth Warren were making these

enormously pejorative insinuations about that, I think in the passage of time, we'll find out that those were lies. Those weren't true. I wouldn't be shocked if they have, like, procedural issues there, right? Like, there was, but there were by no means, like, aiding and abetting Sam Bankman-Fried. They weren't doing that. What was the name of that short-seller? that was

Mark Tejotas. Yeah, I mean, saying it's illegal, like they're doing money laundering, like none of that was ever came out or was proven. I mean, the fact that a sitting senator encouraged a bank run against these banks

is still astonishing to me. And that there have been no recriminations whatsoever. It's, yeah, that the whole part of this is add that to the list of things that have not been investigated thoroughly enough.

It does make me think because this did happen right in the wake of FTX. The timing here was about January, 2023. FTCX, of course, collapsed in November. FTX gave the government so much air cover to harass the crypto industry and so much political green light to go after crypto and turn the screw and eliminate the domestic crypto industry. That was the objective. the amount of damage

Sam Baker & Fried did is astonishing. It's unbelievable. So here you have someone that was what, the number one or number two campaign donor to Biden. And so in a lot of ways, it's pretty logical that there was going to be a massive backlash. You know, Biden couldn't be attached to SBF here on a go-forward basis.

So the complete overreaction and crack down on the industry, you have to attribute it to SBF. the guy did so much damage. And I mean, I'm amazed that there's a domestic crypto industry at all. Like the amount of provocation and attacks from every single possible angle has been enormous. And we have weathered the storm. It's not, you know, we took our licks for sure. But I'm amazed the industry even survived, given the onslaught.

Oh, yeah. I mean, so what would you do if you were in charge of the government like Elizabeth Warren is? and you wanted to crack down on the crypto industry, you'd say, okay, well, let's make sure the FDIC and the Fed and the OCC just debank all of the crypto companies, make it impossible for them to get bank accounts. They won't be able to raise venture capital. They won't be able to pay their employees. So mission accomplished on that. There's probably like four banks in the U.S. that will service U.S. crypto companies now.

Number two, let's just have the SEC sue everyone. And so get everyone embroiled in lawsuits, go after cracking, Coinbase, go after consent, census, you know, let's just run amok here. So they did that. And then let's just muddy the waters from a PR perspective. Let's just call everybody criminals and delegitimize. Let's make sure the banks can't enter. Let's put this really esoteric accounting policy in place that prevents actual financial institutions from coming in and servicing this. So it was a, you have to give her credit. It was a real masterstroke. Yeah, I mean, they did everything. I can't even think of something else. that they could have done.

They would have further harassed crypto. I think they did everything. They did everything and they did it below the surface to a certain degree. So it wasn't coming out and making crypto illegal. It was just exerting max pressure at the choke points. Yeah. So when the Biden admin, if they do turn cloak here and try and represent themselves as benign on crypto or less anti-crypto or less hostile,

just remember what they put us through. It wasn't just one thing. It wasn't just one bad policy. It was volley after volley of tough policies, insinuations, pressure campaigns, like, you know, refusing the past pro-cryptial legislation, esoteric rulemaking. It was everything. Yep. Sure was.

All right. So moving on, this has been a week of just supply conversations. And so Mount Cox announced that they will start to distribute their coins from that bankruptcy, which has been a 10-year fiasco in July. So broad market panic in the major crypto assets, notably Bitcoin this week, anticipating that as a sell-off event. Then you have the U.S. government, which got court approval to sell some more of the seized Silk Road bitcoins. So they moved $240 million worth of Bitcoin over to Coinbase this week,

apparently looking to liquidate that. You have the German government on the scene. So Germany liquidated over $195 million worth of Bitcoin, but they have a stash of about $3 billion of Bitcoin that was seized in a early dark net marketplace. So it seems like there is quite a bit of cell pressure on the old BTC this week. Yeah, I thought Bitcoin weathered the storm pretty well, actually, given all of that. Yeah, it was a sideways to down week. what do you what do you think this just goes sideways here until the mount gock story is clear yeah i think we want to see what happens with the mount gocks bitcoins i i actually do think a good portion of them will be sold at not to spread and fodder anything like that but

you know if you've been sitting on this for 10 years there's some goodies you want to buy probably i'm kind of on the other side of that i think there's just so much spiv capital that has bought the claims over the years. And I think a good number of the individuals that have bought into those SPVs are trying to stack more Bitcoin. So these aren't the type of people that are looking for a quick flip. So I'll probably take the other side of that argument. But yeah, retail if you're still holding your claims, hard to hold anything for 10 years. So last piece of news here, Abra, the well-known crypto financial services company and the founder Bill Barheight, they've settled with 25 state regulators,

for operating without MTS. So they'll return 82 million in customer funds and they will cease operating as a money transmitter in those 25 states. I don't really get that. That seems like very avoidable to just go register. Yeah, I get the MTS. Yeah, I don't really get that.

All right, so odds and ends here. So there was a white paper that came out this week that was co-written by a bunch of industry groups. So the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the managed funds association, the National Venture Capital Association, and a few other groups. They released a white paper outlining concerns about the SEC's rulemaking process, as well as their overall agenda. So you don't actually see this a lot. I thought this was notable that these industry groups that are, I would say not always on the same side of every issue just came out jointly and

said, look, this is a tough time to operate here with this SEC. And BitWise, which is of course a portfolio company of ours, they've released a sequence of great commercials. Yeah. About Ethereum. This big finance guy, I think he's going to be a star. This guy is one of the best actors I've ever seen. Yeah, there's, these are some very clever commercials. We can't really play them because this is an audio-only podcast.

but you're just going to have to imagine it. I actually think we should play it. Let's throw it on there. All right. Let's roll it. Big finance. You okay? You seem nervous.

Nervous. Nope. Just gearing up. It's game time. Markets about to open. You understand. Not really. I'm always open.

All right. So this is where you wish you had the video version of the podcast. But that guy, do you agree? This big finance guy, I think he's a star. you like him? You like the big finance guy? I think he's hilarious that guy. I mean, it's like a,

they're cribbing the Mac PC commercials, right? Yeah, I think it's better than that. Yeah, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC from back. Yeah, that's kind of like that. I think it's a reference to that. Yeah. Yeah, good job bitwise marketing team. Crushing it.

All right, I think that's it for the week. Got a debate tonight. Do you think that there will be any mention of cryptocurrency on this debate? So there are a number of prop bets on polymarket regarding the debate. Will Trump say crypto or Bitcoin during the debate? That's trading at 56 cents on the dollar. So the market likes that. There's actually every possible prop bet you could imagine on polymarket right now.

Yeah, I don't know if it'll come up this week. You could see Biden taking a swipe at Trump for coming out as pro-crypto maybe. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's CNN, right? Yeah. Well, CNN moderators want to bring that up because that's kind of probably working Trump's favorite, don't you think? I mean, it's a losing issue for Biden. There's no both of upside really in being anti-crypto.

my guess is that this doesn't come up at all in the debate yeah i think us crypto people tend to think we're much more important than we are and most of the world doesn't care about this stuff yet yet 50 million americans 15 50 50 5-0 do you think okay do we believe that number not to spread foot or anything that seems like a lot i think that number broadly would encapsulate. I would believe that number if you told me that that number included ETF exposure. Oh yeah. Or people that maybe had ever held some amount of crypto. Yeah. I mean, because Coinbase has what, 100 million users worldwide? More maybe? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That number is logical. Yeah. Yeah. You know what, okay. I take it back.

It's plausible. It's not like everyone is sitting on a lump of crypto, but Yeah, has some exposure, has downloaded a wallet, has some ATF exposure. Yeah, 50 million for sure. Of that, a subset are just rabid and very, very politically active. Yeah, I mean, there's like a thousand of us that really, really care. Was it Binance, did they announce there at 200 million users worldwide? Is that what it was? That's crazy.

That's very high. That's not surprising, though. Yeah, it's like an insane number. Actually, so I think we talked about the report. they were doing a survey. The Binance, this one conclusion is that Binance is a juggernaut in emerging markets. Binance is one of the fastest growing companies in the history of companies, I think. The way that that company was growing, albeit with no KOC, I guess, in the first few years,

but that's a real textbook example of just hyperscaleing. And they really rolled with the punches there, too. I mean, the CEO's in prison right now. Do we know where he's in prison? I don't know if he's actually had to report yet So So it will be imprisoned or is in prison But that thing is still going

I kind of thought it was a CZ show I thought like if CZ is out Then maybe he's the only guy with the keys or something Yeah it doesn't seem that way But it's gone It's still gone All right so I think that's it for the week We'll have a more formal bozo the week

Next week We did get some good input actually someone sent us a bozo theme song from the 1960s and i think we're going to use that so yeah as always thank you for your comments join our warpcast um forecaster um the comments on there this week very much endorsed my sushi take yeah people don't like sushi i have allies in my anti sushi campaign. Very encouraged to see that. Yeah, that was good to see. All right, everybody, have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.