On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/04/25 (Tokenized stocks, Crypto Week, BBB passes) (EP.642)

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  EthCC troubles  Robinhood has been shipping Figma owns BTC  The House GOP has declared "crypto week" in July Circle and Ripple are applying for bank charters  AI companies are buying Bitcoin miners Sharia finance The BBB passes  America teeters towards default The Sohan Parekh fiasco How do tokenized stocks work?  Another architect of OCP2.0 bites the dust Is AI going to usher in a socialist revolution?  Ric Edelman wants you to buy crypto  Franklin Templeton is worried about bitcoin treasury companies  No crypto language was included in the BBB  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All Vees 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, AI, IG 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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. So here we are late night on the third, the night before the 4th of July. We're supposed to be watching fireworks. We're recording this podcast, but at least we're not at ETHC stuck at the airport. Yeah, so the most French thing happened because people thought people would get kidnapped at ETC. That didn't happen.

But what did happen was the French went on strike. And now they're all stuck in the airport, I gather. That's a, that's tough, but somewhat predictable, I would say. That is the French experience. And there was a heat wave. I found out that more Europeans die. No offense to my European friends. More Europeans die from heat than Americans die from gun violence.

Do you know that? Is that right? Are you kidding? That's a true fact that I just found out about. So that's all I'm saying. They didn't put AC. Wow. Yeah.

What is it with the air conditioning in Europe? I mean, old buildings plus a little more climate sensitive and actually fewer homeowners. That's a big part of it too. Is that what it is? Principal agent problem. Think about that. it would just be a great idea for them to get full-blown air conditioning. Yeah, I mean, like Singapore figured this out, you know?

Civilization is built on AC. You go into a hotel in Singapore, it's like 65 degrees in the lobby. It's glorious. Kind of an insane week in many ways, I think. It's America's birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday America. This Soham Perek saga on Twitter is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. Yeah, this is not a lot of.

a crypto story, but this is the guy, the engineer who, how many jobs did this guy have? He had like eight jobs? Yeah, so many. At once. Yeah, it's kind of like, I think there's a lot of this that happens. I mean, there's whole Reddit forums that are focused on having multiple jobs at the same time. He's a celebrity now. He went on TV today. Yeah, on TVPN. I think we're going to discover that due to remote work and the existence of AI tools, there's just thousands of these people out here. It is. Yeah. Multitabling jobs. I don't even know what you can do about it. Just return to the office policy. I mean, it should be fairly easy to identify that someone's just not working at full capacity, but I guess you have to have a manager that's actually paying

attention at the end of the day. Yeah, I mean, I can barely do one job. I don't know how this guy does four. Like think about all the stand-ups and just daily catch-up, like all the Slack. How do you infrastructurely? How do you manage that? Yeah, I don't know how that works. I mean, I guess in some jobs, if you're an engineer, you're not just getting a random phone call and getting pulled into a meeting. So maybe that works. Yeah, I can't do it in our line of work. I'll tell you that. No, definitely not. So busy podcast week, you sat down with Chris Maurice, the CEO and the founder of Yellow Yellow Card to talk about stablecoin adoption in Africa. Yeah, it's nice to have Chris back on. I met him on in 2021.

It's always funny. I sometimes forget that we'd had a guest on literally five years ago. And so Paolo came on recently. He'd done it five full years ago. I mean, I just can't believe how long we've been doing this podcast. Chris was on the show four years ago. Back then, Yellow Card was basically a Bitcoin, a Coinbase style company for Africa. And now it's completely different.

Now that it's basically B2B stable coin base payments in Africa, completely different. We have to go look and who is our first ever guest on the podcast in 2018. Oh, how do we even search that? I don't know. I want to say it was Spencer Bogart. Yeah, early guest was like John Pfeffer. Spencer Boggard Ballagy was an early guest. He was an early believer in the show.

Dan Medashefsky was pretty early. That was a very important early episode. Yeah, we did numbers on that one. Yeah. Because that was one of the first time someone serious had come out and said Tether is legit. Yeah, which was a very controversial thing to say back then. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, we're going to have to go back and look.

Might be lost in the Forever Archives there. Wyatt also did an episode this week with Bernardo Bellata. He's the founder of stables.money. They talked about stablecoin fintech and APEC. A lot of geographies covered this week. So I suppose let's jump into the deals first. First up, we have Liqueify their token operations platform. they were acquired by Coinbase.

I thought this was actually a really smart acquisition by Coinbase if you have a lens towards prosumer retail and the institutional market. So Liqueify is a very well-used platform for pulling down vested tokens. Yeah, we use it. We have to use it. Yeah, this is a smart move by Coinbase,

making this more of an institutional offering. You could see this being integrated with Coinbase's institutional arm. Next up we have Lolly that's a Bitcoin rewards app. They were acquired by thesis. Congrats to Alex and Aubrey and the team over there. Then it's the open platform. This is an infrastructure platform that is building on telegrams ton blockchain.

There is $28 million from Ribbitt and Pantera. Then you have Limitless, their prediction market. There is $4 million from Coinbase, one confirmation, and Maelstrom. Do you ever watch that movie, Limitless? Yeah. with Bradley Cooper. That was a great movie. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the drug and limitless was just Adderall.

Yeah, but it was, I don't know, it was much better than that. Even better. It just made him brilliant. It's like a drug that you could take every day that just made it so that you don't at sleep, but that you were stunningly smart. I did, took Adderall one time and that is how I felt. But maybe it wears off. Yeah, I don't know.

I feel like whatever that limitless drug is, if they could actually make it, it would sell out. It would be better than Ozumpic, I think. It's like the first time you have a nicotine pouch. Do you remember your first pouch? I think that's how you feel. I can neither confirm nor deny I've ever tried on. I think the first time my negatine pouch was like, this is absolutely incredible. My IQ has increased by 30 points.

Yeah, that's why they're ticking off with those notes, NOAT. Yeah, I got some notes right here. Yeah. That's very good. It's the best pouch, in my opinion. That's what I've heard. Next one up is Datagram. This is a decentralized internet provider.

They have raised $4 million from Blizzard, Anamoka, and Amber Group. Then we have all scale. It's a crypto-focused neobank. There is 1.5 million from Draper Dragon, Amper Group, and Ku-coin Ventures. Then it's Crystal Fall, which is a blockchain video game company. They raised $2 million from Coin Fund, A100X, and the Beam Foundation. This next company is just called Inshallah, which is a Sharia compliant defypilot protocol. They raised $2 million from Alliance Dow.

Blockchain Builders Fund, polymorphic capital. That means God willing in Arabic. Oh, it does. Okay. What is that? Like no interest? Is that kind of the gist on that? That's honestly a very good question.

I think that's right. But there's like a backdoor way to pay interest, right? Yeah, that's what I've heard. So they have IAUSD. It's a completely halal yield-bearing stable coin. How its halal is not entirely clear to me. And then they have a borrowing protocol called IA borrow. You can borrow lope and leverage with zero interest.

How does that work? I don't know. I mean, there's got to be interest somewhere. Borrowing protocol you would think. You'd have to imagine. I would think that that would be required. All right. last one is backseat exchange this is a japan crypto exchange they've raised 10 million dollars from spiral

capital headline ventures and east ventures all right i just looked it up so sharia compliant lending is a real thing so interest is forbidden excessive uncertainty overly speculative contracts not allowed there is cost plus financing muha have you heard of this cost plus financing the lender like a bank, buys an asset the borrower needs, like a house, then sells it to the borrower to markup paid in installments. Profit is fixed and known up front, no interest is charged. Yeah. All right. Well, that's kind of the same thing, right? Sounds like... And then there's Sukukuk, which are Islamic bonds. Instead of interest-bearing bonds, investors buy ownership and asset or project and receive profit from its performance.

These all just seem like straightforward analogies for how capital markets work. Yeah, that's what they sound like. We'll keep digging into this. All right, I want to talk about this Robin Hood thing. So Robin Hood, they're making some moves over there. I've been really impressed with just the pace at Robin Hood. So let's just run through what they did. So they were out at ETHCC this week.

They had a bunch of announcements. So first was that European users of Robin Hood, which remember they bought BitStamp, they're now going to have access to perpetual futures on Bitcoin and Ethereum with up to 3x leverage. So entering the perps game, smart there. In the United States, Robin Hood is going to be launching staking for Ethereum and Solana. They are also announcing that they are launching an L2. And so this is initially going to be launched on Arbitrum, but they said that they're going to plan on doing their own layer or two on Ethereum.

And then the last thing, which is probably the one that got the most attention here, is they're going to start tokenizing stocks, equities here. And so they announced that tokenize U.S. stocks and ETFs are going to be made available to customers in the EU. European users previously only had access to crypto on the Robin Hood app. Now they're going to be able to trade 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs. In the presentation, CEO Vlad 10 have also teased that tokenized, private shares, and you mentioned Open AI and SpaceX will also be available in the EU this summer.

There was a kind of a big kerfuffle after this. Did you see any of the kind of the reactions to this last piece? Yeah. So Open AI came out and disavowed the tokenized stocks. I mean, it is certainly complex to tokenize a private security that's not publicly traded yet. I mean, very unclear to me how that would work. So I guess the idea is that they bought an interest in some SPV that held opening I equity. Yeah, that's what I think probably happened here. And I guess it is important to just point out that this is not natively issued U.S. stocks on chain. And so Robin Hood is not doing that.

They are effectively, if you buy into any of these instruments, believe you're buying into an SPV that Robin Hood has put together and that SPV is going to trade. So this is not, I'd say this is an incremental step towards where people hope this all goes, where you have native issuance that can be on chain, you can actually have a market structure that supports the trading of securities directly. Because this model, while it's interesting, and I think people will probably use it, it's just not going to scale.

Like you can't have different various exchanges that are all doing tokenized SPV interest into various stocks. you're just going to have a balkanized liquidity landscape, which some people are kind of dunking on Robin Hood for doing it this way, but I don't know, I kind of admire them just trying something. They're trying to get something in market. And if we don't have companies like this that are pushing the envelope

and showing that there's actual demand there and that this works, albeit not in its fullest pure form, then I don't think we're going to get there to where we need to go. We're not going to have the regulators actually understand that this is something that people want. So this same week also tokenized stocks were launched by back finance, X stocks. But that was a different thing, right? Yeah, yeah, that's different.

And so Cracken has an effort here. I mean, you can just own these things on Solana, I think. Yeah, but again, this is not, it's not like a publicly traded company is saying, hey, we've issued our stock on the blockchain. These are all just kind of siloed SPV structures, basically. Yeah, I mean, I'm looking it up. With the Robin Hood one, the tokens are not redeemable for the stock, or are they? No, they're not.

In back finance, apparently they are if you're outside the U.S. But it's not redeemable for the stock itself. I guess it's through a licensual. Yeah, that's right. So it's, think about these things is no different than you're creating a legal entity. That legal entity goes out and buys stuff. But your interest as the investor is into that SPV legal entity. And that's the thing that trades.

This isn't that on like an ADR, though. It's not. But, you know, ADRs are, that's actually like a sanctioned market structure. This is just a, this is almost like if you had a, you know, someone had a, fund of funds that invested in Sequoia or something. And, you know, people wanted access to Sequoia. So the fund of funds tokenized their LP interest in Sequoia and that thing traded and people called it Sequoia.

It's not actually the underlying asset. It is quite directionally interesting. I think the reaction generally was positive. So I think it is a sign of where things are going. It's definitely a sign of things. Yeah. I mean, basically all of this would be a. addressable in a market structure bill.

But then you do get into these like pretty complicated financial mechanisms around, you know, reg NMS and the best bid, best offer standard. So these marketplaces are going to have to do a lot just to be in compliance from a trading perspective. I think they're all sort of aware of that. But it'll be interesting to see how that unfold. Yeah. I mean, these X stocks, you can trade them on radium and Jupiter.

how on earth do you how do you fold that into reg MMS? I don't know. And I'm glad people are trying to figure this out. I mean, if you are operating one of these venues, like this is all you're thinking about right now, is you're going to the SEC and you're saying,

well, what if we did it this way? What if we did it that way? Ultimately, it's going to be like NASDAQ and New York Stock Exchange that want to get into this as well. And so they're going to have a big voice here. What was the company that tried to like have their like overstock didn't they try and tokenize some of their stock way back in the day

yeah I can't remember if it was their stock maybe they did some sliver of their they had started with like a bond and maybe they ended up doing stock after but they did it with T0 back in the day yeah yeah I think the the tobacco brothers were running

T0 people have yeah people have tried this also in stock news core reviews and talks to acquire core scientific no relation Core Scientific is one of the biggest Bitcoin mining companies in the U.S. Corweave does AI. So it's kind of the sign of the times actually have a lot of these Bitcoin miners are now seen as takeout candidates by AI data center firms.

Is that just because they have long-term power purchase agreements? Yeah, you know, high-quality infrastructure, PPAs, data centers built out. Not that repurposable, but, you know, in theory. you could do it. So yeah, AI is now, I would say, well ahead of Bitcoin in terms of actually the energy consumption. It certainly seems like it. Is there, what is Bitcoin mining looking like in the United States from a hash rate perspective over the past few months? Is this impacting just overall Bitcoin activity? I think hash rate is down, actually. I haven't checked recently, but I mean, I don't think it matters though, right? Because Bitcoin's hash rate is so colossally

high. Like, Bitcoin's pretty much secure. You know, I don't think it's the units of hash, that absolute number that's secure as Bitcoin. It's more the decentralization of the power sources and the data centers and things like that. Yeah, so you get this one, you get Galaxy, which is now, I mean, they were a huge miner at one point, but now it's more of an AI play with their infrastructure, it sounds like. Yeah, the Helio site. Yeah. Also in news, this is interesting. Both Circle and Ripple are applying for U.S. banking license. It would allow them to act as custodians for their own stable coin reserves. Very interesting development.

I have a feeling it's going to be the golden age of new bank charters here, which since Dodd-Frank, there have been virtually none, and now there are going to be some. I mean, the benefits here are pretty obvious, right? So if you get the OCC license in place, you don't have to go to all 50 states, is my understanding, and do the MTL. just joke of a process. So you just go federal path. And then it is interesting that they could manage their own stable coin reserves. And there's obviously some margin there. So from a business perspective that makes a ton of sense.

So this comment by surprise, Figma, I guess is like a Photoshop competitor, the design company, their S-1 this week revealed that they hold $55 million of Bitcoin in the Bitwise ETF, shoutout Bitwise. Pretty incredible, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, they didn't do this to make a splash or for PR reasons.

They didn't announce it. I mean, it was just someone read the SEC filing. Yeah. It's absolutely remarkable. And, you know, that's a very, very well-run company, but diversifying that balance sheet.

Yeah. So also in Bitcoin ETF news, Ibit is now more revenue generative than BlackRock's S&P 500 ETF? Is that right? I guess that's an expense ratio thing. It's three bibs versus 25 bibs, but still, that's unbelievable.

I mean, still, this is the most successful ETF launch in the history of the world. It's just incredible. I would love to know just the inner workings of BlackRock right now and just the people that were against them launching that product and how they're feeling about that right now. Crypto Team at BlackRock must be taking an absolute victory lap over the few months. Yeah, shout out Robbie. Been in the trenches for years. Incredible.

Just building support there. Labor of love. One of our mutual friends was showing me this candle that they got and it's, you know those scented candles that have something funny written on them? And it says, smells like I was right about Bitcoin. They should have that at BlackRock. They should just be passing that out. Also an ETFs, Osprey launched a Salana staking ETF. Is this the first one? I think it is the first ETF that allows for Stakes-Salana. Here's some other.

Did you see the Deutsche Bank thing? I feel like we talked about this over two years and it's just always two years out. But Deutsche Bank announced that they plan to launch a crypto custody service in 2026. Sounds like they'll be doing it with BitPanda. So coming soon, Bitcoin custody. Yeah, I mean, some of these European banks

have been sniffing around crypto for the longest time, like SOSGen, Standard Charter, Deutsche. Maybe now they will actually do something. I don't know. Deutsche Bank's been at it for a bit. I mean, they've been doing pilots since like 2014, 2015. But yeah, the opportunity set is there. So why not go after it?

Here's an interesting piece of news. Michael Gibson, who is the director of the Fed's supervision regulation division. He has voluntarily resigned after three days. decades of the Fed. Another one bites the dust. This guy was Operation Choke Point adjacent. Yeah, I have this now infamous graphic, which I titled the Architects of Choke Point 2.0. I put that in my article in May 2023.

It was a long time ago now. Wow. And you could scratch out the eyes every person in that graphic because they all left. So just to, he was on there. He was on there. Who else was on there? that list. All right. So at the White House, we had Barat Ramah Merti. He was at the NEC. I think he was one of the chief villains. Gary Gensler at the SEC, of course, Nelly Liang at Treasury,

Martin Groomberg at the FDIC, resigned in disgrace. In the Senate, Sherrod Brown, of course, losses, reelection. Elizabeth Warren's still there. He's still there. She's one of the, pretty much the only survivor on this whole thing. And then at the Fed, I specifically named Michael bar the vice chair for supervision who's now been replaced uh and michael gibson who's who's now resigned the only mistake i made was actually adrian harris at nydfs in hindsight and it was kind of a fog of war situation in hindsight i actually don't think she was a key architect of oCP 2.0 now she caught astray from you on that one she did and i'm sorry Adrian i'm sorry uh but yeah everybody else on this graphic has left. It's kind of very vindicating, I would say. It's absolutely incredible.

And now you get these politicians that were anti-crypto coming back around. You see this Mike Rogers in Michigan? He was staunchly anti-crypto and now he's running. He's got a big crypto lobby behind him. He's going to run for Senate. Really? Yeah. You know, he was just talking, he was one of these guys that just said, crypto's just for criminals. You know, there was a phase there where that was very popular thing to say. So also in Congress news, the GOP, the House GOP has declared that Crypto Week is going to be in mid-July. I saw that. Yeah, what are we doing for Crypto Week? Crypto Week is like first you have Pride Month, then you have Crypto Week. So they're going to consider the genius stablecoin bill in the House and the clarity market structure legislation.

I do like the fact that it's a full week. I think that's right. With festivities. We should, yeah. Do we get a flag or something? Is there a crypto flag? Like every week is crypto week, really around here? But how many, do you think you get like marginal votes in the house for the genius bill by saying, look, it's crypto. It's crypto. Like, guys, it's the week of the crypto people. Come on.

Give them something. Get some new all-time highs that week. That could be this week, frankly. Yeah, it seems like it, huh? Things are moving. Well, do you think it has anything to do with the fact that a bill just passed that is going to be, you know just gas peddling on the deficit yeah the BBB did pass today Hakeem Jeffries apparently gave an eight-hour speech I saw that I saw that

I don't fully honestly I don't understand anything about what happens in Congress but he found the occasion to make an eight-hour speech the bill passed and yeah I mean we're just this train has no breaks like we really just full speed ahead towards default. I don't know. I'm not feeling optimistic about it. Yeah, we were talking about social security today, you and I. I don't think we're going to see that.

Yeah, I don't like the idea of paying into a system. I'm never going to see a dime out of ever. It doesn't feel great. Yeah, I don't know. It just seems like Bitcoin is really sniffing this out, punching out all-time high levels right now. The thing is, though, if we have a debt crisis, Do you think Bitcoin's actually going to do well in that situation?

Like what financial asset does well in the case of an actual debt crisis or financial crisis? Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be a financial crisis, right? It could just be, you know, suppression of the financial suppression, right? Like they'll just run it hot like the 1940s. But the thing is, I know that's like the conventional wisdom that we could just dial up the inflation gauge. but nobody seems to really want inflation ever. It's not a popular thing. Yeah, the market, the equity's market doesn't react well to it.

Yeah. So politically, it's kind of suicidal to have a lot of inflation. Yeah, this is where you just have to go, you know, grow. So that would be nice. Like, you know what would solve this, which is growing GDP by like 7% a year for a decade in a row. Like, that would help. That would solve a lot of things. that solved basically everything.

How do you do that? I mean, that's the question. I mean, we've never had that. But China's had that though, right? Like, it is possible. I don't know if it's possible in a democracy necessarily. I think AI could do one point a year, which would be a lot.

That would actually solve the problem. Yeah. If we could do one additional point of GDP growth a year for a decade. Yeah, maybe, maybe. I don't know. You wonder, though, if there's some offset in the AI category just because so many people are going to lose their jobs as a result of it. This is what I fear. I do think the Zoran Mandami election in New York is a sign of things to come.

Not to be too doomish about it. I think socialism is going to have a huge comeback because of the AI. And so I think we could maybe escape the deficit issue. with AI, but the trade-off is a huge percentage of the population is immiscerated. And we have to grow the government for new entitlements for these out-of-work people. Yeah, it's possible. It's not like a happy outcome at all. I think this is where you just have to hope that there's like this age of discovery

and we just start inventing things and start being able to travel to different planets and stuff, which sounds kind of far-fetched, but when really look at it, I was reading something last weekend just around how many complicated diseases human beings have ever actually solved. It's not that many. I feel like there's just a lot of things we don't know how to do as human beings, and if we can start to solve some of those fundamental things, you could see the overall economy reacting very well.

Yeah, I think it's going to take a, we're going to need AI to make some physics discoveries. Like, that's just what we're going to need. like cold fusion or something like that, like a completely brand new source of energy that we didn't have before. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens, right? I mean, physics has just stalled out

since the 1970s. AI has already made brand new discoveries. Granted, they're like pretty minor. It's like, how do you fit a lot of hexagons in this one shape kind of thing? But AI has made, because people used to say this about AI, it hasn't found out anything new.

it has. They're just not the most material things yet. But if it can find out new geometry, then it can do physics or biochemistry. Have you ever put it in? It's like, hey, I need to connect the quantum theory of mechanics to relativity. I did actually. I said using everything that you know, can you like make a new discovery between two apparently unrelated fields? Did you discover anything? Didn't. Didn't work.

Maybe it did and I just couldn't fully apprehend it. I wasn't the right vehicle for that information. I was just thinking that. Like I would get the output. I'd say, I don't know. Yeah, I can't tell. I think people should do that. Just every day people ask the model,

can you make a fundamental new discovery? Go ahead. The amount of output, I don't want to talk about this query that I'm doing right now because I might talk about it on a future podcast. So I don't want to, I don't want to spoil it, but I'm doing a very deep, you know how I like to go into like public records? Yeah, you do.

You are good at that. So I'm doing a real beast of one right now on 03, and it's a four-day project. What? Yeah. So I put out a very, basically, this is something that I think you literally would have had to hire McKinsey to do a three-month project on. Right. But I've been, I've had this idea of something that I want to just. see if there's a there there on it.

And I talked to the oath of remodel for probably a half an hour to clarify it. And it came back finally and said, this is a four-day project. There's no way. I didn't know. I didn't know that was the thing. And it broke it into five steps. And so I've just,

it's been working on it for the past three days. And I've just been checking in. And they're like, listen, like, how's this going? Can you send me an illustrative output? It's almost like how you would use an analyst at a consulting firm.

It's like, hey, come over to my desk. and just like show me your work and see if you're on the right path. That's what this thing is doing for me right now. I think it would be like a $2 million McKinsey engagement. This is so many GP. You're using a whole data center right now.

And I'm paying like 20 bucks a month to use a system. Uprogresses. Economics seem upside down. I mean, you probably raise the temperature of the planet by like a thousandth of a degree. But if I get to the bottom of this query, I mean, I really need to,

I'm in suspense. I need to know what it is. It better be good. It has to do with crypto stuff. Oh, okay. Well, it has to do with crypto stuff. Maybe you'll tell us in a week. If this works, I'll let you know, if this works.

Hey, there's this other weird story this week. Bitmine, which is a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company, they raised $250 million and they pivoted to an Ethereum treasury strategy. And then they appointed Tom Lee, our friend, who's, he was on one of the early podcast too. Yeah, I love Tom Lee. He's like the chairman of that. Ethereum, you just don't hear much about it anymore. You don't hear about Ethereum much these days.

No, no, you don't. They're really swimming against the current here. They're going from Bitcoin to Ethereum. Yeah, this is, I mean, well, there's only one other, I think, Ethereum publicly traded access vehicle. That's a Joe Lubin one, I think, right? Sharplink. Sharp link gaming. Oh, Sharpling, okay.

Yeah, that's. This is the Joe Lubin's one? No, Sharplink's is Joe Lubin's one. that's his okay um so anyways you know good for good for them what else Rick Edelman uh says you should so Rick Alderman has made some um he's given some advice regarding your crypto allocation and uh I think he's bullish as far as I can tell this this guy is a gift he's been on our podcast too he has he has Edelman Financial Engines I think is the largest RIA in the world by the way yeah so this is this guy he's

His words actually have some way. Yeah, so he says conservative investors should have 10% of their portfolios in crypto. Moderate should have 25%. An aggressive client should have 40%. You know what? It's not a very popular thing to say, but I don't disagree with them. The traditional 6040 model is dead. I agree with that.

10% is your conservative position. Why not? He says there's no logic to omitting an asset class that's outperforming. all others for 15 consecutive years. Yeah, pretty good. And then he closes this with, are you a fiduciary serving your client's best interests, or are you simply an order taker avoiding difficult conversations?

Oh, tough. Franklin Templeton said that these Bitcoin treasury companies could create a positive feedback loop in the wrong way, which we agree with, by the way. So, yeah, that's kind of obvious. They are worried about the downward spiral. They say a negative, well, it's actually a positive feedback loop, not a negative feedback loop. So just to correct the article, they think it's a particularly dangerous scenario, which is true.

It probably will happen. At some point, I mean, it's just a matter of like what type of debt is loaded onto these things. But I feel like I'm kind of sick at talking about these Bitcoin access vehicles. When it happens, you'll. know. I mean, we'll tell you as well. We will tell you. That's our pledge. When the NAVs fall below one and these treasury companies start to blow up and their debt covenants get triggered and they've got to sell the Bitcoin. I mean, you'll know, but we'll also tell you at that point. It's not going to be pleasant for some of these companies to deal with these restructuring debt guys.

Have you ever met people that do that for a living? No. Well, didn't you do that for a while? Yeah, not fun. Yeah, like flew around and fired people. Yeah, you get like grown men screaming into the phone that they're going to rip their faces off and things like that. It's not great. You don't want to owe people money like that. Yeah, so, I mean, we've seen it before. That's the thing.

We've seen it before. It's not like going to be a shock when it happens. We saw the credit crunch in 22. We saw the Bitcoin miners getting over their skis. They bought too much Bitcoin. They went bankrupt. They'd sell the Bitcoin. Yada, yada.

It's not even interesting almost, but it is going to happen, we'll tell you. So this bill that just passed today, Senator Cynthia Lummis really went to bat for the industry to try to change some of the tax treatment on digital assets, including the tax on crypto miners and stakers. She wanted that to be basically only paid once you sold the asset, which I do think is the right way to think about it. and then also wanted to have a de minimis level. I think it was like $300 where if you did a transaction like that,

you didn't have to pay capital gains on it. So that would have been great to get in, but it just seemed like a complete cluster trying to do these amendments. So it didn't end up pushing in. But then she introduced her own standalone bill today. Yeah, so there was really no crypto language in the BBB, right? No, I don't think so. But do you think anyone actually read the BBB?

it seems like it was pretty long. I certainly didn't have a chance to read it today. No, I mean, I can barely tell you what's in it. Yeah, I don't know either. All right, I think that is it for the week. Plans for the fourth? I'll be on a boat. So please don't try and reach me tomorrow afternoon. All right, everyone. Well, happy Fourth of July to those who celebrate and have a safe and healthy weekend. We will see you on Monday.