On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/09/21 (Circle is going public, SEC targets exchanges, the Bullish SPAC, good takes on stables from the Fed) (EP.229)

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

Nic and Matt are back. In this episode:  Circle's SPAC filing Circle's evolution over the year The business model behind stablecoins Circle's risk factor slides The SEC is targeting centralized exchanges for trading unregistered securities Senator Pat Toomey buys BTC and ETH Matt tries out the Blockfi credit card GBTC unlocks wrapping up this summer Why are congresspeople allowed to trade financial assets? Warren grumbles about crypto markets once again Bullish exchange is SPACing Fed vice chair Randal Quarles has some good takes on stablecoins and CBCS Content mentioned in this episode:  Randal Quarles' speech  Circle's announcement on becoming a public company

Brought 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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentive Easing. You've printed 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 Brinkum, Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. What a terrible weather week. It's just rain, rain, just all day. I haven't been here. Been out in California. Better weather. It was great.

Yeah, what happened here? I don't know. It's just like raining. It's like the month of May over here. It does that. Not good. but we got a busy week in the crypto. Actually, not that busy of a week when you really think about it,

but some interesting announcements. So a lot to cover. Had Anton Katz and Ethan Feldman on the podcast after trying to get them on for about two years, the co-founders of Tala. So that was a fun episode. It has, yeah. It really has been a journey getting them on. They're like celebrities now, you know?

It's finally got them on. I was very happy. There's a big Boston-based deal this week. Yeah, so let's hop right into the deals. So Circle, which is one of the oldest companies in the industry, they have entered into a definitive agreement that will result in them becoming a publicly traded company. So what they're doing is a SPAC merger. So they're merging with a company called Concord Acquisition Corp, which is publicly listed SPAC. The chairman of Concord Acquisition Corp is Bob Diamond, who's previously the CEO of Barclays. So the transaction is going to value CERCLAB,

at $4.5 billion. Once they complete this and get all the approvals, the publicly listed company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CRCL. So first of all, I guess, congratulations to the Circle team. Never bet against Jeremy Aller, just a complete master stroke here and getting Circle kind of turned around and listed here.

Yeah, it's been a long journey. And I mean, at one point, Circle was like a Coinbase like on an even kind of footing with Coinbase right and as as far as like being a Bitcoin on ramp and then I think it was Dan Matashevsky that came on this show and said that the difference was the banking the Coinbase kept their access to banking and Circle didn't keep it and chose to pursue other lines of businesses it's just crazy to think about what could have been but then I'm but the also crazy thing is that we sort of come full circle. And now they're, you know, they've made it to public markets or are almost there. Well, the crazy, I mean, there's so many crazy things about this story. There should be a book written about this phase of the crypto markets. But the original vision was very much in line with being this fintech platform that allows

you to move money over public blockchains. You know, the thing is stable coins didn't really exist. their current form back then. And so it was, it was not something that could be achieved. And they were building a bunch of this on Bitcoin initially. And then they were looking at all sorts of other implementations. Eventually, the market got to the vision, though. And these stable coins ended up being like the basis for building this business, which right now looks a lot different. But yeah, I remember the circle, the original Circle app was how a lot of people bought their first Bitcoin. They used to hand around these cards that was like $10 in free Bitcoin. And it was, you know,

when the price of Bitcoin is like $200. So there's a lot of people in the city of Boston that have these, you know, that have Bitcoin as a result of circle. Yeah, I mean, one of the stalwarts of the Boston crypto scene, stablecoins as a business model is interesting because in a low interest rate environment, you're going to be challenged because obviously that's,

I would say the main business model for stable coins is, you know, you don't pay out interest to the holders of the note or of the stable coin. So it's like a bank account that doesn't pay any interest. But of course, interest rates are so low that you're also not collecting that much on the back end. Right. So Circle now has three business lines. So they've had many permutations over time.

Obviously, when Dan was there, they had the market leading OTC trading desk, basically. They also have had Poloniacs, which we can talk about a little bit later, some of the disclosures around Poloniacs. Right now, there's three lines of business. One is the USDC, where they make interest income off of reserves. The second and biggest part of the business,

as far as I can tell, is transaction and treasury services. They call this TTS. So this is transaction and usage fees, spread capture. It's basically the API services that allow companies to accept payments in stable coins. So they have disclosed partners there, with FTX and compound and dapper and top shots. And then they, of course, have the seed invest platform, which is a marketplace business for private capital markets.

So this was originally something that I looked at in the context of maybe this is like a security token play, and maybe it will be at some point. It's unclear kind of how much blockchain and USDC is involved in the seed invest business, but it's a fee-based business. And so they have customers like Wire and now R. that have used that platform to issue securities. So it's really those three lines of business that the company is going to the public markets on.

Yeah, judging by the investor presentation, they are more bullish on the TTS line of business than the regular old interests on the reserves, although they do expect that to grow too. Yeah, I think when you look at these, so the API services that they have in that TTS business are pretty interesting. So they have APIs around just setting up accounts, so enabling fund flows in all different types of crypto assets.

They have an API for payments to allow you to accept digital assets. That's kind of like a stripe type of a service. They have fraud detection in there as well. They have like a payouts sort of API where you can quickly be making these automated payouts. And then, of course, they have an integration, I believe it's with Genesis around generating yield. So you can have a yield API where you can be making interest on these USDC and Bitcoin, presumably, platforms. So kind of a comprehensive suite around APIs, which seems really logical. Yeah, the deck suggests, as I expect, USC circulation to grow to almost $200 billion in 2023,

which would make circle effectively one of the largest banks in the U.S. So we'll see. I mean, stable coin growth, I think, has outstripped virtually anyone's expectations for it. Certainly, USDC, I mean, has been the biggest winner of the last 18 months from a stable coin perspective. I mean, stealing a ton of market share from Tether. Well, this kind of market growth, I think, is, you know, presumably they want to steal a lot of market share from Tether. But the other thing is that this is a market that's just growing really quickly. And if you look at some of the major integrations over the past year with stable coins, Visa comes to mind as one where they integrated USDC into VisaNet.

So you get a few more of these than all of a sudden the market size of this thing becomes much, much bigger. So I think part of it is capturing and becoming the dominant stable coin and unseating tether. But the other part of it is just they're sort of making a play for the last. wit market in a way that no one else is really doing on the stable coin side. So there's over 100 billion of stable coins outstanding. And do so USDC, if I'm interpreting this correctly, is around 28 billion of that. And they've forced Tether's market share down to the kind of, I want to say 60% range, which is literally the lowest it's ever been. So something is happening in the markets like certainly you know people have the free choice of which

stable coin to use and they're opting to use usDC increasingly well to also be interesting just from a disclosure perspective now that circle's going to be a public company and jeremy put out some tweets around some of the disclosures that they're going to be looking to do so presumably you'd have a lot of differentiation here between us dc and tether in the sense of what is behind that asset in terms of like proving reserves and proving that there actually is something there. Yeah, obviously there's been a lot of scandal around that. Speaking of disclosures, you found some interesting stuff in the risk factors and the fine

print. What did you find? Yeah, this is, so it's, it's really interesting once these companies become public. I think the risk factor slides are always my favorite ones to read because they give you a little bit of glimpse. And some of this got picked up by the press, so it's not new information. So there's a bunch of stuff in here around the liabilities associated with Poloniacs. So Poloniacs was, of course, I think they were based in like Somerville or Medford, Massachusetts.

It was a, it is and was a cryptocurrency exchange. It was the dominant one for quite a while in 2016 in this market. Really a, so they'd never had fiat. So there was a crypto to crypto exchange. Circle bought them. And of course, assumed a bunch of these liabilities. So I guess my number one takeaway is, you know, the guys that owned Poloniacs and sold it to Circle made a great trade here

because they were able to take cash off the table and really separate themselves from these liabilities. But it looks like the Circle is taking the view that they have retained certain liabilities here when they owned the platform from 2018 to 19. and there's substantial unresolved regulatory investigations and commercial litigation. And among those kind of issues, number one is an SEC investigation relating to the trading of exchange tokens that are deemed to be securities. And Circle is saying in their disclosures that they expect to settle this for $10.4 million. So that's maybe point one. That's interesting that they already have a specific dollar amount that they believe they're going to

settle with the SEC. So maybe this is just working through, um, like a formal process here. But it looks like the SEC has gone after Poloniacs and Circle saying that you're facilitated unregistered securities on the platform. I wonder what security that is. So was it, did it mention that it was an exchange token? Uh, no, it didn't say it was a, it was a asset that was on the exchange. So, um, you know, it could be like ripple or so I don't know. It could be, could be anything, I guess. Yeah, so have there been actions against, I know we've been expecting this, have there been other actions by the SEC against the exchanges specifically?

I mean, I guess there's Ether Delta, but the centralized exchanges for hosting the trading of unregistered securities? I can't remember any. I mean, there were U.S. exchanges that listed the Dow, for instance. So, you know, there's been no shortage of unregistered securities that were traded on some of these. venues but I can't recall them going after an exchange yeah this is interesting to finally see it happening you'd have to expect that such a thing would be kind of contagious to the other exchanges because they all tend to list the same assets I mean Polonics wasn't really that unique in terms of what they were probably

more aggressive with the listings I mean they had all kinds of stuff on there back in the day but yeah I mean if if they're going through this, I expect the other U.S. exchanges would be, too. The other interesting thing here is that there's an ongoing OFAC investigation. So OFAC is, of course, the Office of Foreign Asset Controls, and they maintain a list of, you know, people that you're not supposed to send money to. And so Circle has taken a reserve of $1.07 million.

However, it's unclear what the exposure is here. So my guess here is that, you know, this looks like, a situation where Polonex probably had some OFAC violations. Circle acquired the acquired Poloniacs probably started to clean this up, but this is just an ongoing thing that has yet to be resolved. And so, you know, my guess is that Circle saw this and disclosed it pretty quickly and it's just working through. And I think there was another case against BitGo that was, that was settled for, I think,

less than this reserve that Circle has taken. So it's probably not, you know, hopefully. Hopefully for Circle, it's not a material thing. I don't see why it would be if they're settling with BitGo at smaller numbers. But it's interesting that we're starting to see these OFAC investigations and really highlights the fact that if you're running one of these exchanges right now or a brokerage, you better be maintaining compliance procedures to prevent people from sending money to terrorists and things like this.

And lastly, they are currently in arbitration regarding investor losses suffered in the clams market. So many of us will remember the clams I think it was like a Like derivatives issue actually Wasn't like the clams spot market I'd something to do with margin and clams I don't remember exactly But anyway the clams have come back to to haunt them a little bit too

Man what a the clams market Forgot all about that one Running an exchange is a tricky business I mean like Yeah so a lot of overhang there on the Polona next side. And, you know, I don't think any of these are really, you know, devastating. It's just interesting to see this view into the regulators' interactions with some of these companies. You would never get this type of disclosure if Circle was raising private capital for this round.

It's all about the disclosure since they're becoming a public company. Well, that's my favorite thing about all these crypto companies going public is that we're finally getting better insight into their revenue, their metrics, how they operate. and just more transparency into their operations. So that is really refreshing, frankly. Yeah, it really is. So I guess more to come on this. We'll, of course, be tracking this.

But congrats again to the Circle team. It's great to see another crypto company and a Boston one at that popping onto the public markets here pretty soon. So that was deal one. I don't think they'll take that long to cover. The next one we have is Solrise, Solrise Financial. soul so no prizes for guessing what they're building on they're a fund management protocol built on solana there is $3.4 million from alameda CMS delphi jump capital parify defy alliance reciprocal and

sky vision capital next one up is coin chairs uh coin shares has agreed to buy elwood technology's ETF index business for $17 million. Then speaking of indexes, we have index cooperative a Dow. They run the D5Pulse index. And they raise $7.7 million from Galaxy and 1KX. Pretty cool that you have publicly listed company like Galaxy Digital entering into a deal, buying tokens directly from a distributed autonomous organization. You know, you think about like a publicly listed company and some of their disclosure.

So it's very cool to see this new paradigm where you have investments going into just distributed autonomous organizations. You know, no stock purchase agreement on that deal, I'm sure. Yeah, I had no idea that D5Pulse was run by a Dow. apparently they have the index cooperative as 150 AUM, 150 million AUM. And if you read the Coin Desk article, one of the chief leaders of the Dow is called Lemonade Alpha. So not only a Tao, but with pseudonymous leadership. I mean, you would have to assume the galaxy know who these people are. maybe they don't

there's a bunch of these teams out there where they have you know pseudonymous characters they're not the only project and kind of makes sense you know makes sense from a lot of different perspective i have a bone to pick with d5 pulse i will say what's your bone to be

vastly vastly overcount metrics like total value lock um they yeah they like by a factor of a lot well team VL is like very circular. So getting an accurate count there is very difficult. Yeah, because you use these assets to create new assets. And so you really have to trace back the provenance of the full history of the asset.

I mean, like for instance, synthetics, you know, you end up with all this double and triple counting. So my ideal index would be a much more opinionated model. But, you know, but. It's kind of a logistical challenge to trace back the history of each constituent component in Defi. Yeah. Next one up is BlockPitt. This is a crypto tax company that raised $10 million from middle game ventures, Fabric Ventures, Force Over Mass Capital, Teoga Capital, and a few others. Then we have Zerian, which is Defi Interface.

They raise $8.2 million from Mosaic Ventures with participation from placeholder, DCG Lightspeed, and blockchain.com. Next, we have Messin Network. This is a marketplace for bandwidth. They raised $3.5 million from Libertus, MASH network, hash global, CMT, DCG. And then we have coin cover, which is a cryptocurrency insurance platform.

These are all some pretty sizable raises. They raise $9 million from Element Ventures with participation from DOW CMT, Avon Ventures, Fowler Equity, Fintech Collective, and Susquehanna. Next is there was a report this week that Mobilecoin, which is the cryptocurrency project associated with a signal, they raised $75 million, is rumored to be a billion dollar evaluation for Mobile Coin now. Yeah, I guess the era of new base layers is not over somehow. There's always room for another L1. Mobilecoin sucks, okay. I'll just jump to the next one.

Then we have borderless capital, which is they raise $10 million for a mining and staking vehicle dedicated to the helium blockchain. There's a bunch of helium, like, hardcore ham radio guys down in the South Shore. And it's just, it's interesting. Like, a lot of people are into helium. Can you imagine trying to explain that to someone 15 years ago? So there's this new, first of all, like the helium, like what is the standard it runs on? Like Laura WAN, something like that. So it's like a new like internet network.

And then you have these hotspots. And then there's a token to power the network. I mean, all these concepts are just like completely novel. The funny thing is though, and I was saying this to Ethan. Anton this week is there are people that I've met that are mining helium that don't know like anything about Bitcoin. It's it's attracting a whole different type of person into the ecosystem, which I think is really interesting. Well, I think people love the idea, the appeal of having a physical device in your home that just collects internet tokens just for having it turned on.

Yeah. That's the appeal like, you know, mining, you know, retail mining. People love that idea. It's a very attractive idea. It'll never die. Yeah. That's why people are so excited about Chia. Like it just turn on your little hard drive and get tokens. I mean, people love that concept.

Yeah, it's a really interesting concept. But, well, it's interesting to see this network growing. And then the last one is our friend Ash Egan, acrylic capital. So his debut fund has launched. They've raised $55 million. So congrats to Ax. So that wraps it up for the deals. Some interesting news this week.

Well, our friends of BlockFi finally launched the credit card. You actually got yours already. Is that right? Do you skip the line? I've got mine. I've got mine. I got a little bit of an early look, but, you know. I didn't get mine to be.

I waited in line with everybody else to be clear. I got a couple day head start. and I had to tell you, this card is awesome. And I'm obviously very biased. We're investors in Block 5, but it is a very heavy metallic card. Oh, I see. It's one of those heavy ones. Like you feel like you're really thrown around like an MX black card or something like that.

So I've been just racing to use this thing, basically, since I've had it. It's just a, and I tweeted about it, this is a speculative attack on Fiat going on for the summer because it's 3% cashback paid in Bitcoin for the first 90 days. So you just got to spend as much as you can. That is pretty good. That's pretty good. I might pay my rent with this thing. Yeah, you have to figure out.

I was looking at if I could like put like refinance a car and just put all that on there. I love how your assessment of the card has more to do with its weight than the rewards. But the rewards are pretty good. The rewards are pretty good. I mean, I did go into a store there today. I put it down and the cashier was like, well, what is this? I was like, well, let me tell you. Ever heard about this thing called Bitcoin?

This company called BlockFi. That's great. That's great. So I've turned into a massive shill because every time I use it, people are like, oh, this is like really heavy. What is this? I'm like, well, this is the BlockFi card. Well, we were shills before.

Yeah. FinCEN hired Michelle Corver as their first chief digital currency advisor. So they're turning their attentions to the industry. Yeah, it looks like Corver will consult with the acting director of FinCEN, who's Michael Mosier on Crypto's role in financial crime. So it's the first time they've had such a role. But FinCent, of course, is all over this.

Industry has been for a very long time. And tends to be very well regarded, I'd say, in the startup community, is sort of an agency that is, you know, very measured. In contrast with some of the, FinCEN is also under Treasury, but in contrast to some of the people at Treasury over the years, which, you know, not going to point any fingers, but Steve Mnuchin comes to mind as someone who is completely unreasonable with regard to this industry.

Yeah, it is odd that FinCEN actually seems to be fairly well regarded within the crypto space, given what they do. but they seem to have like a fairly solid understanding of the crypto space all things considered yeah i think that's all you can ask for is that they they understand how the industry works and they're not trying to impose things that are actually just impossible with the technology so speaking of regulators binance u.s currently led by uh former comptroller brian well i guess someone told me that you can't You shouldn't see Comptroller. It's just controller.

Well, then they should spell it completely differently. I know. I fully agree. I was completely tricked by that. So former controller, Brian Brooks, runs finance. They have hired Manuel Alvarez, who was previously the commissioner of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation. I don't understand that just like every day we have another announcement about, finance getting shut down in a jurisdiction or some sort of a, I think it was Santander this

week said that you cannot transfer money onto finance. So it's just, they're in the news a lot. Yeah, the banks are, they're de-risking. It's their favorite euphemism. They're de-risking user access to finance. Binance proper, that is. I guess Binance U.S. is kind of exempt from that. Yeah.

So more to come on this. I guess Binance U.S., you know, I still don't really understand the capital structure there, but finance U.S. seems to be pursuing licensing in the United States in line with what you'd see from Coinbase and the others. So, Osprey funds is filed to register their Bitcoin trust as an SEC reporting company, which would take that maturity period for the creation of new shares down from 12 months to six months. speaking of which GBDC is still still trading a discount So Senator Pat Toomey has invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum

And that was disclosed this week And the conduit, how he did it Was through GBT and the Ethereum Trust So you got Pat Toomey over here He's looking at this discount and just saying These assets are on sale right now Well he gets it Yeah, you get it, you're buying Bitcoin at a discount

I mean there's real bitcoins inside the trust. It's just a matter of smashing the piggy bank and getting them out. You know, or it's, we're going to swing to once these maturities after the summer, maybe, like, maybe we're back at a premium. Who knows? Yeah, there's, there's been so much chatter about the GBC unlocks, whether they're bearish, not bearish. CMS has a lot of opinions. Sorry, I mean, Dan, aka CMS holdings on Twitter, has a lot of opinions on it. I don't fully understand them, if we're going to be honest. I think JPM had a note saying that they're bearish unlocks.

Maybe they're bullish unlocks. I mean, if everybody thinks they're bearish. But either way, there's still this kind of, we've got about, what is it, a month of these newly maturing, you know, shares of the trust in GBC. And then we're kind of free. Then we're free afterwards. I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. So we'll see what happens here.

Grate your teeth people. We get through this together. They're going to unlock. Nothing we can do about it. Pat Toomey. Pat Toomey is just he gets it. Be the change you want to see in the world. Pat Toome is helping out. On that line, I can't for the life of me understand what the trading policy is for senators and, you know, Congress people and their loved ones. It just seems to be that they just have permission to like insider trade. Is that basically what? we're doing. It's obscene. I mean, like Nancy Pelosi's husband made like $5.1 million on some like options traded on Google or something. Like how is this something that is allowed? I wasn't going to say it. But yeah, I mean, now that it's open season on this, it's ridiculous that these people with obviously access to, you know, highly privileged information of the top levels of government are allowed to express their view, especially with options, you know, like short time horizon instruments. Come on. It just seems to be one of those things where eventually the law is going to change and then

we're going to look back and be like, hold on, this was actually allowed. So let me get this straight. These people's like sons and loved ones were making obscene amounts of money based on knowing things that were actually happening on the insides of these companies because they had privileged access. It's crazy. And Congress people have some sort of like immunity from inside a trading standard, is that it? I don't know if it's like a full immunity, but they have some partial protection. Is that right?

I mean, would it be better to just be like, this is part of your compensation? You get to break the law and just make money this way because that basically is what it sounds like. It should be formalized. It should be formalized the way the MEPs formalized in Ethereum. It should be built into their compensation package. No question.

Because right now it's informal. It's crazy. I mean, like, I can't believe it, honestly. And I am a proponent of paying policymakers more because my theory is that if you pay them more in terms of base compensation, they're less likely to do corrupt things to earn money through their influence.

So I do support that. I support increasing their base wage and then reducing their bonus, aka their proceeds, from insider trading. Yeah, I think that, I mean, that seems to make a lot of sense. I'm not actually sure why we don't do that. Yeah, I mean, you know, you'd think that if it became this market prestige

to be a bureaucrat or representative, like true prestige, then we would have better ones, kind of like Singapore kind of thing. I mean, I just want one time. I want someone to come out here and just be a Massachusetts representative and run against the Stable Act. Yeah, we don't, yeah, our local, we had, that's the other thing, our local senator, Elizabeth Warren, our beloved local senator wrote a letter to the SEC

with like a bunch of sort of like anti-Bitcoin talking points in it, I believe. Yeah, she would, like to have an SEC follow-up to the Senate Banking Committee's subcommittee on economic policy, and she wants some answers by July 28th. And it's unclear, like, what she wants here. She, so my guess is Gary Gensler got this and was like, all right, what are we going to do here? Looks like we got to work on this for the next two weeks. Yeah.

So we have Stephen Lynch, our local representative, and then Warren also a noted cryptocurrency, skeptic, unfortunately. All right, so some late-breaking news as we're recording this. It looks like there's another crypto spec. So Tom Farley's Farpeak Acquisition Corporation announced that they will be bringing crypto startup bullish public. So bullish is the exchange business that is spun up by the team behind EOS. So it's the, you know, they raised, of course, a big token sale.

And now they're building an exchange has the backing of, Galaxy and others. So two crypto SPACs this week. I didn't even think bullish was live yet. I don't believe they are. I don't know that it is. I don't know that it does I don't know that that matters from birth to SPAC. I mean that was a very quick turnaround for bullish exchange. Yeah, it's very quick. That's like some dot com level stuff. Yeah, that's a couple months. Wow. So just returning briefly to policymakers. you get it and or don't get it. I wanted to shine a spotlight on what I thought is the best speech from a central banker I've heard ever, maybe. Wow. So, yeah, so Randall Quarles.

Now, do I understand the structure of the Fed and the various committees and who's in control of what? Absolutely not. Do I know that he's involved somehow? Yes. Do I know what his actual job is? No. But so he had a good speech called Parachute Pants and Central Bank Money. I don't know what parachute pants are, but he like started the speech with a joke about parachute pants. But basically, it was really great. So he was interrogating whether CBDCs are necessary. And he was looking at common arguments made in favor of CBDCs and then actual risks involved

with CBDCs and basically said all the common sense stuff that we tend to say about CBDCs, which is currencies are already digital, or the dollar is already mostly digital. Do you really need a CBDC? CBDC trades off against privacy. CBDC potentially disintermediates the commercial banking sector. The dollar isn't really under threat here, and so you don't really need to react to other states creating CBDCs. and the reasons for the dollar's dominance are not technical reasons. They're sort of governance and sort of structure of the market's reasons. And so he said all that, which I thought was pretty sensible.

And then also he said, you know, stable coins do not really pose a threat to the dollar because they're just wrapped claims on commercial bank dollars. And it's just an alternative payments network built on top of that. And he kind of welcomed the innovation from the stablecoin sector and said, he actually said that if, you know, we may not need a CBDC if stable coins provide sufficient, you know, transactional benefit. So basically the best and most down earth speech I think I've seen from a federal reserve official in a long time.

Yeah, I can see why you'd like that. I'm really tired about hearing about CBDCs. I think the overlap of people that were psyched about private. blockchains and are psyched about CBDCs, that's a big overlap and it's just not really what I'm here for. Well, you're going to hear about it because they're going to be put into action in a bunch of places. I mean, the benefits of a CBDC to a central bankers are significant. You know, they let them grow their mandate. They give them scope creep. They can get into all kinds of other lines of business effectively. Yeah. Yep, I think you're right. Um, do,

Did you see these FTX commercials this week? So funny. Just FTX rolling out these national ads in conjunction with these big partnerships. But I got a kick out of them. We put them in our newsletter. So if you haven't seen them, you can check out our weekly newsletter. But they're rolling out two national ads that really feed into the FOMO. I mean, I didn't think maybe I enjoyed them as much as you did.

So I thought they were okay. I thought they were really funny. Well, any other news items for the week? I think that's it for the week. It was kind of a slow news week, but I guess the two SPACs is really the big story of the week. But, you know, it's actually funny because I, in Suna, do you remember Suna's prediction? Crystal ball. Crystal ball thing.

I predicted that there would be public activity and it would be infrastructure companies going public via SPAC. And it looks like I was proven right. That took seven months. I think I said stable coins would hit 50 billion. and now they're over 100. Man, two for two. I don't, yeah, I'll have to revisit. I actually saw someone revisiting the crystal ball.

The crystal ball is a lot of good stuff in there. Yeah, there is. There's been some good predictions over the years. Yeah, yeah. So two for two. All right, I think that's it for the week. We're recording a little bit late this week, so we'll get this out, and we'll see you guys on Monday.