On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/11/25 (New BTC ATH, Crypto Week, Zelensky suit scandal) (EP.645)

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Bitcoin hits a new ATH and no one is talking about it Grok goes haywire The White House posts chudjak Core Weave looks to buy Core Scientific Stablecoins are going to pay yield anyway Did Zelenskyy wear a suit? How should prediction markets be settled? Pump.fun ICO is coming up Hester Peirce issues a warning on tokenized securities Crypto Week in Congress is coming up Jonathan Gould has been confirmed as Comptroller of the Currency There are new public access vehicles Andreessen wants you to leave Delaware A fundamental valuation model for L1s? GMX is hacked for $42m  Tim Massad's exchange with Bernie Moreno Content mentioned in this episode: Hester Peirce, Enchanting, but Not Magical: A Statement on the Tokenization of Securities Fidelity, Blockchains as emerging economies Bridge, How Meow and Bridge Make USDC Payments as Seamless as Cash  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as 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, $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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. So we're at all-time highs right now. Do you feel that? I don't feel anything. So what are we at 1137, right?

Yeah, I guess so. It's a very quiet all-time high. No one's making any noise about it. No, this is not, this feels very unlike previous all-time highs. I mean, because we only just squeaked above the previous all-time. We had one two days ago, I think. I mean, it's not, I don't know. What's the next month?

I feel like 100K was a big one. Now what? Is that 150K? Is that the one to celebrate? I think that's where people start. to get energized again. The thing is we just kind of logged on in one forever. So I think everyone's just jaded and it feels like Bitcoin already succeeded.

Like, what's the win condition here? Is it a million dollars? Is it gold market cap? I mean, you just look at the macro setup right now. It's really hard to paint a picture of how Bitcoin's not going to continue to grind higher. So to reach parity with gold, that implies. applies 800,000 per coin according to shot CBT. So maybe that's it.

Maybe that's victory. That number just keeps on going up as gold keeps on going up, huh? Do you remember when that number used to be 500K, not too long ago? When Pfeffer wrote his paper in 2017, wasn't it like 200K or something? 250 maybe, yeah. We're not at an all-time high in euro terms, by the way. Well, we're not in an all-time high in terms of if you just look at, previous all-time highs and then what the dollar was worth.

So in just dollar purchasing ability, I don't think we're at all-time highs. Well, Chad GPD is not giving me the right answer. I should be using GROC or something. Apparently GROC 4 is the best model ever. Yeah, people said that. Grock on X went pre-Heywire this week. It did not cover itself in glory. And then Linda Yakkerino immediately resigned.

Do you think that was related? I doubt it. I think there's a bigger play there around the merger. And maybe she was demoted. It's really interesting that we run one of these big AI companies. You can just twiddle a dial, which is like how unhinged the model is. And they just, Elon tweeted about this. He's like, yeah, we're going to adjust Grock.

And then it started praising Hitler. Yeah. I guess there's just a lot of bad stuff on the internet that it's pulling in. That's the thing. You can't train an AI on Twitter data. it's full of insane people. Right. So I don't know.

What's the answer? It seems like a very difficult problem to solve. Yeah, Grock went absolutely ballistic in the last two days. There's a lot of things happening on the timeline on X right now. A lot of people melting down. The White House posted a chud jack meme today. Do you know chud jack? Nope, didn't even know what that was.

Oh, so it's the nothing ever happens meme. There's a lot. There's deep lore behind that. this one. This is a 4chan. I mean, actually really all cultural content on the internet comes from 4chan, by the way. So the chud jack meme is the nothing ever happens meme, but it's also the Billions Must Die meme. And it's also modeled. People don't know this. The image of the chud jack is modeled on a, the El Paso mass shooter from 2019. Yeah, it's actually really dark. So I'm not even sure like the intern, the post of the meme at the White House is aware of that.

Yeah, someone might be getting fired over that. Who knows these days? So that's your meme roundup. We had some episodes this week, as we do every week. Yeah, Wyatt sat down with Charles Hamill of Opera MiniPay, which is a very cool app. Yeah, I really like it. It's a very lightweight app designed to use stablecoins, kind of native stablecoin payments app for African emerging markets built by the browser company, Opera. which is super cool.

And then we also had Zach Townsend of Meanwhile on the show. Yeah, talking about Bitcoin life insurance. Life insurance with Bitcoin. Good idea. I guess it makes sense. If Bitcoin keeps doing what it's been doing, it makes sense. Yeah, we talked about it on the episode. The question is, how do you grow that Bitcoin over time and what are the mechanics there?

So listen to that episode if you're interested in learning more about how they do that from a capital market's perspective. So it's a light news week where there's some things to discuss. Let's do the deals first. So first one, Core Scientific, which is a Bitcoin mining company, they were acquired, at least they announced the acquisition here for $9 billion by CoreWeave in an all-stock deal. So we talked about this last week around how these Bitcoin miners that have these long-term power purchase agreements and the infrastructure are all just going AI now. So this is a very large transaction.

Yeah, so full disclosure, I'm a shareholder in both cores, in size, as many of you know. CoreSai, CoreWeave has been a client of CoreSai for years and years, so they know each other really well. CoreWeave, I think it makes sense for them. You know, the stock went up a lot post-IPO. They are looking to verticalize, you know, they want to own the infrastructure. And CoreSci is the biggest domestic Bitcoin miner, probably the biggest single mine. are probably the biggest single in the world. Tons of power locked in.

They have expertise, not just in Bitcoin mining, hosting AI-HPC compute. So CoreWeave had tried to acquire CoreSai in the past. And in the distant past, I told CoreSai to buy CoreWeave. So how the tables turn. Well, at least they don't have that much name change to do. You know, it's just changed the end of the name.

Yeah, it works. So some of the other Bitcoin miners, sold off on the news, which I thought was interesting. I think it should be the other way. I mean, it shows that these Bitcoin miners have a pretty valuable asset to these AI compute companies. Yeah. There's a few names that are maybe interesting on that basis. Yeah, a very interesting deal.

Hasn't closed yet. I think it closes slated to close in October. So the next one up is another acquisition, Portal Labs, which is a stable coin infrastructure company. They're required by the Monad Foundation. So very smart move here by Monad. Yeah. And I think this is a real sign of things to come. So Monad's a new general purpose L1, but they have a very deliberate stablecoin attitude.

And I think all new L1s see where the demand for block space is coming from. And it's stable coins. This is going to be a huge part of that. So that's definitely part of Monad's approach here. And Portal is basically a full stack payment solution. So I think a really smart acquisition. Then we have Kuru, which is a decentralized exchange on Monad. they raised 11.6 million from Paradigm, Electric, Credibly Neutral, and others.

Next up we have Bridgeport, their digital asset settlement platform. There is 3.2 million from further ventures, virtue, financial, and XPTO. Then it's a Rally, which is a crypto wallet app. They were required by OpenC. Next up we have Vertex protocol. There are a perps exchange. They're required by Cracken. Then it's Agora, a yield-bearing stablecoin issuer.

They raised $50 million from Paradigm and Dragonfly. And last up, we have ego death capital. They're a Bitcoin-focused venture fund. There is $100 million for their second fund. Huge congrats to Lynn and all the principals over there. All right. So a bunch of news to talk about this week. Where do you want to start?

I want to talk about Zelensky's suit. That's my news. Okay, so we were having a bit of an internal disagreement about this. There is a market on polymarket. Will Zelensky wear a suit? before July. It settled no. There were $242 million

wagered on this market, which is like, imagine trying to explain that to someone in like the year 1950 or something. And so it traded as high as 32% back in June. It spiked again when he ostensibly wore a suit. It was reported in the press that he wore suit.

Because, you know, Slensky's whole thing is he wears a military. military fatigues. People complain about it. He's out of state, but he's a wartime ahead of state, et cetera, et cetera. He wears an outfit to, I think, the NATO summit. Some in the press report that it's a suit. You've seen the picture.

That's not a suit. So it's an all black outfit. It kind of looks like a mob boss. It's a black jacket with lapels, a collar, a black button down. and black slacks or dark pants. I think he's got a shirt on with a coat is how I describe that. I asked Chad GBT for its expert opinion, and it said it resembles a tactical or utility inspired jacket.

It's a deliberately styled outfit, but not a suit in the classic menswear sense. However, do you know that account on Twitter, Derek Guy? No, I don't follow him. He's like a menswear commentator. He's always like, his whole shtick is like conservatives dress badly and liberals dress well. I mean, it's a thinly veiled political commentary account, but he is like the biggest menswear account. He said it was a suit.

He did say it was a suit. Interesting. So anyway, the market settled to not a suit. And people are very upset. Let me tell you. There's a whole cohort out there of suit truthers. And they lost a huge. amount of money. It went to Uma. So this is how

Polly Market settles its markets. It uses this protocol called Uma. I don't know what it stands for. And the Uma whales were blamed here for saying it's not a suit. Well, the Uma whales have been up to some shenanigans lately. Did you

see a couple weeks ago there's a Dodgers game and they just pick the wrong one. So it was clear who won obviously. It was like a blowout win for the Dodgers, I think. And then the market resolved to them losing. Or Med had that mixed up, but you get the gist of it. Yeah, there have been a number of these.

There's another one where contested markets. There was one where the question was, would Zelensky win time person a year and he shared the award? So he didn't exclusively win it. He shared it with like the spirit of Ukraine or something. That was contested. I don't know if we should be trusting

truth to who owns Uma tokens. I don't think it should be like that. kind of reminds me of that ICO. Do you remember there was an ICO called True Story back in the day? And the whole of it was to do a token to adjudicate the truth on the internet, which is actually impossible. I remember Truth Story well. Yeah.

I think CalShe doesn't do it like that at all. I think Cal she just decides. That's probably how you should have it. But then I guess the question is if you're on this quote unquote path to disqual, centralization and you don't want it to appear like you're centrally operating the thing. You know, that's where you'd want to use a decentralized protocol. I think what Polly Market needs to do is hire a team of lawyers to write the most ironclad, highly specified and codified, like resolution conditions for their markets.

I don't know how they do it now. Do they just let the market creators define the sort of win condition? Yeah, I think so. I think you try to define it the best you can and then you put it out to Uma. This is why we have lawyers, you know. You got to anticipate weird edge cases. Like it looks like a suit to some. Others don't think it's a suit.

We got to nail it down. We got to get we got to codify. Well, prediction market's very hot right now. Definitely having a time. Speaking about a hot category, pump dot fun, the meme coin launch pad, they announced they're going to do an ICO this weekend. They're raising $1.3 billion at a $4 billion valuation, $600 million available to the public.

Feels like we're rewinding the clock to the ICO era again here. Yeah, this is, I guess, one of the most anticipated ICOs. Some people are complaining that they're doing it. You know, why do it if they've made so much money already? More power to them, I guess. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. Here's something that I thought was interesting this week. So SEC Commissioner Hester Perce put out a brief statement this week on tokenized securities.

I thought it was basically a warning shot to the industry. And so the name of the post is enchanting but not magical. A statement on the tokenization of securities goes into detail around just because you're doing something on a blockchain doesn't mean that you can claim that something's not a security. I think it's a not so veiled shot at some of these markets that are popping up around tokenizing stocks, but not with native issuance. So these SPV type of structures, we've seen maybe five or six of them pop up. So buyer beware here, but I think the end state where we need to get to as an industry is just having the native issuance on chain as opposed to these intermediate loopholes, balkanized liquidity. and I guess you could interpret this as the SEC putting some market participants on notice. Yeah, I agree.

I think it makes a lot of sense. Hester says a token could be a receipt for a security, which itself is a security, but is distinct from the underlying security. Alternatively, a token that does not provide the holder with legal and beneficial ownership of the underlying security could be security-based swap that cannot be traded off. off exchange by retail persons. This is, I don't know, might be a little bit of a mess, actually, for some of these tokenized securities.

Yeah, I think this is, we have to kind of avoid getting into this balkanized liquidity landscape where you have Tesla shares trading in 25 different formats. That's just not where we need to get to. But you know what would fix all this is actually just a market structure bill. Yeah, so crypto week is next week. Very exciting. Crypto Week? How are you celebrating Crypto Week? I will be celebrating. You know, Crypto Week is happening at an all-time high. We're having a lot going on in the House. So the House is going to vote on three

pieces of legislation. We're going to get the Genius Act, which is the Stable Coin Bill. We're going to get Clarity Act, which is the new name for the market structure bill passed out of the House, hopefully, knock on wood. And we're going to get anti-C-C surveillance state act bill. So, a lot going on. Yeah, so I guess we expect genius passes for good, and we finally get genius, right? I would think so. I mean, I would think that you'd get genius

and then you'd get a quick signature from Trump, and then that would go into effect. Yeah, anti-CBDC Surveillance Act is Tom Emmer's bill, actually. That's right. Yep. Clarity, we don't really know where that stands, I guess. Yeah, I don't know where that stands in terms of what the amendment process is going to look like. Fit 21 did pass the House last time with a number of Democrats on board. So you would hope that it would just be the same result.

I think there's a lot of air cover for these Democrats to come around. I mean, there's nothing too too controversial in this. The question is, what does that look like when you send it back to the Senate? So Genius Act is at the one-yard line here. market structure's got a little bit of a ways to go. You know what I thought was interesting. I think it was announced this week that Circle's doing an incentive or kind of rough share deal with Bybit.

Do you see that? I miss that. I might be misremembering, but there was something like that. And, you know, everyone says stablecoins won't pay interest. They're not going to call it that, but they're going to do it. They already did do it. Maybe Tether won't. But every domestic U.S.

stable coin, whether it's Circle or USDG or Gora, they will pay interest, well, we won't call it interest. They will pass along some of the returns from the underlying treasuries held to intermediaries like exchanges, custodians, who will then be able to pass along to the end holders of the stable coin. So this whole thing, people have been saying, well, stable coins are inferior because they can't pay interest, that's moot, in my opinion, because they're going to do it. And they already do do it. And you can't stop them, actually. There's no way you can stop them.

Yeah, you cannot stop a company like a Coinbase from classifying something as a marketing expense. Yeah. There's any number of ways to account for it. They'll just find a way that, you know, as long as you're not baking into the protocol, interest provision to end holders, it'll happen. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. it'll be interesting to see if tether does get into that um you know they probably don't have to in certain

parts of the world um also very interesting this week jonathan gold has been confirmed as the senate as the comptroller of the well i guess it's controller you don't pronounce the p right he's the head of the oCC yeah so he runs the occ uh he's been on records saying he's going to halt operation stroke 1 2.0. He wrote the legal opinion that gave Anchorage their charter back in the day, actually. Oh, yeah. So gold is a very strong ally of the crypto industry. So this is really excellent news. Yeah, Crypto Week starts a little bit early there. All right, here's one that we talked about this one for a long time. For years, we've been talking about this crypto broker rule. So back in 2021, during the infrastructure bill, there was this crazy rule that was passed that said that decentralized

exchanges and actual protocols and node operators had to submit customer transaction information for tax purposes to the IRS. And there was an actual dollar amount in the bill, like an offset, I think they call it, that there was actual revenue attributed in this infrastructure bill, which, by the way, that bill just looks worse and worse by the minute. They said they were going to make X amount of money through this crypto provision, that the problem was these protocols would have no actual way to. to do this.

Like there was no way for a decentralized protocol to make a tax payment or make a report. It's like asking TCPIP or HTTP to, you know, report something that's happening on the internet. It's a protocol. It's not a company. So anyways, this had gone through. And there was a rulemaking process that also went through. Today, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the IRS have just formally removed this

crypto broker tax thing. So they just wiped it up. It's gone. That's great news. And that had been hanging over us for years and years. Yeah, it's hanging over you. It's kind of one of these things. If you're running a node on Ethereum,

you'd be in violation of this rule. You'd have actually no way to comply with it. And so you're just creating this situation where, you know, potentially millions of Americans who just run open source software would be in violation of a very important rule. So let's check in on the

I guess what do we call them? Public access vehicles, that's what I call them. Some people call them crypto treasury vehicles. There's more. There's more. Bitmine filed a registration to sell up to $2 billion in stock to fund ETH purchases. It's an Ethereum one. K-Wave Media.

I guess that's the K-pop one. They raise an additional $500 million convertible notes of fund Bitcoin purchases. Bitcoin miner bitmining raised $300 million, not to buy Bitcoin, but to pivot to a Salana Treasury strategy. Why not? Should probably change the name. Reserve One, they're a newly formed crypto asset management firm. They're looking to raise a billion via SPAC to fund a diversified strategy into Bitcoin

Eath and Seoul. That's your run. There's probably more. There's a BNB one, I think. You know it's not going to be open for business on all of these longer tail ones, the convertible bond market. So there's just, there's no way that they're going to all be able to replicate the micro strategy playbook. The thing is, we were warning about these and then Bitcoin hit an all-time high.

So, you know. Yeah. Well, I don't think. I'm not saying they're going to blow up right away. But, I mean, eventually some of these things are going to trade at a big discount. And then I think micro strategy ends up buying a bunch of them. Yeah. So that's, we're, like, we're still monitoring the situation.

There's some juice last. to squeeze out of the lemon for sure. But eventually the premiums will be discounts and that'll be the bad times. So did you see that Brian Armstrong at Coinbase announced that they're partnering with perplexity to power some AI driven market data on the exchange? Yeah, very interesting actually.

So you can get market analysis from perplexity on Coinbase. Perplexity, a lot of rumors around M&A for them. Yeah, I mean, If you think crypto markets are doing well, AI markets, that's the only ecosystem in the world where you have seed rounds north of $10 billion. It's incredible. You don't have that. Yeah. And have you seen how many of these open AI people have been hired by Facebook?

Yeah, for like nine figure comp packages. It's incredible. It's the list of people there and the roles that they used to hold at Open AI and Anthropic, it's incredible. So Andresen had a blog post this week. We're leaving Delaware. We think you should consider leaving two. What's the problem with Delaware? What happened?

Well, Bill Gurley had a good podcast about this. He does that podcast with Brad Gersoner from Altimeter. So if you want to go deeper on this issue, I'd recommend listening to the BG2 podcast that he did. Basically, it's the judges in Delaware that are just coming out with these lopsided rules around business judgment. So the statutory business judgment rule. And then the penalties have just been very excessive in some of these cases.

Well, the Elon compensation Tesla case, I guess, was one of the worst, the worst probably, right? I think that's really what started people looking into this. And then there's been a lot of people and a lot of academics actually digging into the actual data to track the cases and what the judgments were. And there's a view that Nevada and Texas have basically the protections that you thought you were getting in Delaware. So we'll put the blog post in our newsletter. We are getting this question a lot from startups around where to incorporate, just given everything that's happening. I do think it was the Elon case that really made a lot of people aware of this. Yeah, they are now recommending Nevada.

Yeah. You know, we're definitely seeing Nevada and Texas pop up more frequently when we're looking at companies. It's a shame for Delaware. Like, what's Delaware got if they got Joe Biden. They have Robith Beach. That's where I used to spend my summers, actually. Really? I don't think I've ever stepped foot in Delaware.

I've driven through it a number of times. Maybe a rest stop. I don't know. That's it. They got Joe Biden. They got a beach. What's it called? The chance recourse.

The chance recourse. I think Joe Flacco went to. Delaware, didn't you? That sounds right. It's not looking good. Well, they're the first state, right? Aren't they the first state? Is that right? Yeah. First state to ratify? Maybe the first state to ratify, but I think Virginia and Massachusetts were, I mean, we're the first colonies, sign the constitution. Was it the first one to sign? That's, all right, so they have that going for them. But, I mean, if you lose this piece of startup capital formation, that's really bad. I mean, everyone pays taxes to

Delaware on every legal entity. It's just a money stream. Yeah. Well, some reading material for you this week. Fidelity, digital assets, actually there's just fidelity, fidelity, has a paper called Blockchains' Emerging Economies, so Fundamentals-based Framework,

to help allocators in their investment decision-making. Yeah, it kind of goes deep on Ethereum and how to think about Ethereum and all sorts of, all sorts of interesting points here, actually. So we'll put this in the newsletter. Someone will win a, what's the award? Do you think a Nobel Prize here for crypto asset valuation at some point?

Yeah, we need to, you know, what's the equivalent? Like the Fama French model, remember the CAPM model? Cap M? You learn these in business school, yeah. Yeah, of course, yeah. We need a black, probably not black schools. That's very mathematical. But a factor-based valuation model for L-1s.

who's got it. Bernisky's been at this for a while. I tried. That was the genesis of coin metrics. I did try. But it was, alas, it was not to be,

I was not the one to do it. Well, I think it's kind of hard. I mean, it's hard in the absence of knowing if these things are definitely commodities or definitely securities, isn't it?

It's weird because Bitcoin has been institutional for eight-ish years now. now, but there's still no real fundamentals, so to speak, you know. There's no fundamentals. And there's no real cash flows either. So maybe other L-1s, you could start to value them on the fees and the revenue and all that, the M-EV and stuff like that. But it's, I don't know.

I don't have any good leads on this. I mean, I guess discounted cash flow evaluation for, is when you think of it. I mean, yeah, it makes sense. But it is sort of just this shared fiction that we all kind of say, okay, that's like how you should value inequity. It's just that the market has sort of aligned on that and looks at PE multiples and things like that.

Yeah, I mean, it's very circular, really. I mean, if you do a multiple analysis that's just saying, what does the market think of other similar firms? It's not saying anything fundamental about the firm. Yeah, and then when you actually do the DCF, it's like, all, well, what's the discount rate? Yeah, like R minus G or whatever. Like, okay, so it just comes out of the Fed, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, it's probably right that there will be a framework at some point, but you almost have to probably start with the taxonomy of what these things are. Like, do they spit off cash flows? Do they not spit off cash flows? Well, let's not shatter the delicate fictions that support the market, which is at all-time highs. I mean, everything is a fiction when you think about it.

Money is a classic fiction, isn't it? Yes. I mean, even the notion of the stock market is a thing that goes up 7% a year, that's very much biased to the last 100 years of history in the U.S. And the fact that we haven't had wars or revolutions. That's really not the case in other markets. Well, and it's also that's in U.S. dollar terms. and if you were to adjust that to gold terms or something like that,

it doesn't go up 7% per year. No, yeah, that's nominal. Other reading this weekend, Bridge and Meow, they put out a case study on how Meow is leveraging Bridge for stable coins in their product. I thought that was a really good case study. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah, Meow, we're investors, of course.

The Costco for financial services. So Meow is a fintech. They do business banking, effectively and they support stable coins, which has been a blockbuster product line for them, and they do with Bridge. So it's worth a read. All right. And last up, GMX, if you remember them, the decentralized perps exchange and arbitram were hacked. Forty-two million dollars. Kind of a tough one for GMX. Not been a good year for them at all. Did they get it back? I mean, or do they know who it was? They don't know. They sent out a public message to the

hacker asking to parlay with them. So we'll see what happens. I mean, if it's North Korea, we know what the answer is. But anyone else, we do see these kinds of settlements from time to time. When you see the settlement, it's usually some like high school kid that did it and is like shocked that they were able to pull it off and wants to quickly settle and give 95% of the money back. The thing is that doesn't, you're not in the clear. once you get the money back. No, of course not. No.

But the hackers do end up giving the money back half the time. Yeah, they just take it as a bounty, right? It's kind of a black hat bounty. But I don't know if that's really, like, you still committed a crime. So even if the hacky says it was a white hat, you know, bug bounty or whatever, like, you actually did still break the law. Yeah, it's not a good thing to do. So if you're listening and you're thinking about doing something like

this don't. Yeah, would not recommend. So you excited about this crypto week? You think this is going to be a banner week next week for the industry? I'm shooting for one out of three. You know, let's, if we pass genius, I'll be happy. Anything else, bonus. Just give me genius. Genius will get through, I'm pretty sure. So I think pushing market structure forward and then getting the Senate in September to move on market structure would be huge. You don't want to enter a situation where you're heading into the midterms and you haven't passed market structure. And the betting markets are suggesting that the Republicans will lose the House. So it's really now is the time to do it.

You've got to get it done now. And I would say you even have to get it done before the midterms. I mean, you've got to move on this stuff quickly while the iron's hot. Speaking of notable members of Congress, actually, did you see this exchange between Tim Mossad, former CFTC chair and Bernie Moreno, Sherrod's, Sherrod Brown's replacement in Ohio. Why don't you run through it? So we weren't fans. Is it Sherrod Brown?

Is that how he pronounced it? We didn't like him. We called him Sherrod, but I guess it's Sherrod. Yeah. So anyway, he was the chair of Senate banking, a big opponent of crypto, lost to Bernie Moreno, which was actually a huge upset. But that was actually one of the things that turned the Senate. It was a huge win for crypto.

But then, you know, even though Bernie is an ally, I think he unfairly went off on Tim Mossad in a hearing this week. Yeah, I think it was around the definition of a token or something. Yeah, so Tim Mossad called Bitcoin a native token, which is the precisely correct term for what Bitcoin is. It is the native token of the Bitcoin blockchain. and Bernie really took offense to that and chewed him out for it which look we're just calling balls and strikes over here Mossad was right

yeah he was right actually it's massive as well we're pronouncing his name wrong too but to be clear we like Moreno I think they were just arguing about semantics that wasn't even the most explosive thing in that hearing there was the someone was who was it Kennedy

the Louisiana is it Louisiana Senator. What happened? He called one of the panelists deranged because the person actually was being deranged. It was just going, it was like the token anti-crypto person. I can't remember the guy's name, but he said, you sir sound deranged. Wow. All right, we're going to have to dig that up.

Yeah. You know, these hearings are a little bit, they're not as crazy and high stress as they were when Biden was in office. And Warren was just running amok and just passing things. have made absolutely no sense. Yeah, they're not as fun to watch. I don't tune in for all the hearings anymore. No, it's kind of when the winds are blown in your direction,

you don't have to really get as involved in the minutia sometimes. But maybe we should because this is really where you have to strike and make sure that the right things happen. Yeah, so fingers crossed, we'll keep you updated. Crypto Week coming up. All right, everyone, that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.