On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/14/23 (Ripple gets a W, Machinsky arrested, PoR in federal legislation) (EP.438)

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Matt and Nic are back with a huge week in the markets. In this episode:  Ripple gets a key win in their summary judgment versus the SEC Implications for XRP holders Implications for exchanges and other tokens Prometheum's denials about their ties to the CCP don't hold water How Prometheum is a Potemkin platform Alex Machinsky has been arrested Arkham's tokensale and doxing snafu The Lummis Gillebrand bill gets a facelift and incorporates PoR The prospects for the Lummis Gillebrand bill Updates on the piping plovers Why Threads isn't going to make it Sponsor notes:  Coin Metrics' State of the Network: Spot On - From Trusts to Spot ETFs In this issue of State of the Network, we dive deeper into Grayscale's trusts and discuss the evolution of the digital assets investment landscape with the anticipated arrival of spot ETF's  

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 started 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. And this episode is brought you by Coin Metrics. For today's Metrics Minute, we're going to look at the grayscale trust products. So Bitcoin's returns have been 80% year to date. But for a lot of investors, they're holding digital assets in these grayscale trust products, which don't trade it now. So if you look at the Graeaskeals trusts, GBDC and ETH-E, they're currently trading at 28% and 50% discounts to NAV, even though those discounts have closed somewhat recently. The BCH-LTC and ETC trusts have traded closer to parity. The Link Trust, for some reason, is trading at a premium of 270%.

The Filecoin and XLM trusts are trading at premium of 8x. and 4X, the spot price. Curious. That's your Matrix Minute. And this week, we're going to start you off a little different. We're going to play one of you, we're going to play one of our favorite movie quotes.

Here it is. You know what? I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. I'm not fucking leaving. The show goes off. Fucking Wrecking ball to take me. We are not going anywhere.

We're not ripple investors, but this is a pretty good come here. Just mere hours ago, what is it called, a summary judgment? Is that it? Summary judgment. I believe that's a word. Yeah. In the ripple case. Multi-year ripple case, which we've actually been talking about it a lot recently. And we're no we're no ripple fans. We have been, I mean, we have been some of the biggest ripple haters, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The SEC is one of the most corrupt institutions on planet Earth since Gary Gensler took over.

So it's just great to see a win for anyone against the SEC. Much to digest here. But I would say the summary judgment, at least, is kind of still an intermediate step in the case. Basically, the judge's ruling on certain pieces of the case and then other things will go to trial was very unexpected with regards to one specific part, which is what everybody is jubilant about on CT today, which is the secondary sales of XR. on exchanges are not considered securities.

Those are not considered securities transactions, which is momentous. Pretty good for Coinbase, I would say. Yeah. So to be clear, the judge did say the primary sales, which were to institutional investors done by XRP over the last decade, were unregistered securities. So that will be something that Ripple will need to tackle. What I actually think is likely to happen is they will now settle with the SEC over this because the SEC took a huge blow here. So that's one thing that's outstanding.

But the judge did say those secondary sales that occurred on exchanges once those units of XRP had been distributed to their first port of call, those weren't securities. They also, the judge also said the use of XRP to pay employees, things like that, those were also not securities transactions. So it. I think what it actually means is the exchanges could happily relist XRP at this point. I don't see why it wouldn't. Huge win for the exchanges. And I think that's very precedent setting that goes beyond just XRP.

Of course, now the exchanges can probably say, based on this, not a lawyer, but they can probably say, well, even if some of these tokens are considered securities or maybe the issuance of these tokens is considered a security, the secondary transactions on exchange. or not so we can happily list them. So this actually kicks out a leg of the stool, which was the SEC strategy, which is we've talked about this, eliminating liquidity on U.S. exchanges for a lot of these tokens that are in their crosshairs. This makes it much harder for the SEC to do that because now the exchanges can use this decision and say, we don't believe these are securities transactions. I mean, it's another example of an overzealous administrative state. here that is being held in line by a check and a balance with the court. And so the fact that this is a New York federal court that stepped in to do this, I think is pretty momentous. This is not some

rinky dink small court in a state that doesn't have a financial services ecosystem. This is the premier federal court for financial services. Yeah. So shout out John Deaton. He's had obviously one of the lawyers on the case on the ripple side, been covering it well on Twitter for a long time. And he's always made the case that this is much more important than just ripple. This will have reverberations around the industry. I think he's right. My takeaway from this is that let's say this court, this decision becomes precedent setting. We actually really don't have a lot of precedent when it comes to the status of these tokens in the courts. Then it seems to me that the initial distribution method matters a lot. It does. So if it's a big crowd sale, especially

to retail if it's a big sale, if that's how most of the tokens found their way to market, maybe the court takes a negative view of that. If it's programmatic, kind of protocol-based issuance method, whether it's an airdrop or mining or something like that, in this case, the court took a much more benign attitude to that. So I would say if I were to generalize this to other tokens, which maybe was a mistake, I would say this is a really good outcome for tokens which were mostly airdropped as opposed to sold or distributed through some other programmatic means. You know, it's really just disheartening to see that the SEC continues to take all of these cases to the mat when there's clear legislative activity going on right now. And that's actually

trickling its way into some of these lawsuits where you have the Lumas-Jillobrand bill, which has been introduced in the Senate. And then you have the McHenry Thompson market structure bill in the House. And so it's very clear there's a lot of activity going on to regulate this industry. But Gary Gensler has decided that no, he's in charge. And so he's just going to use taxpayer money to take action against the largest businesses while completely missing FDX and trying to do a deal with IEX, by the way. So cozying up to the fraudsters and then trying to take Coinbase to the mats on this, it's really just, it shouldn't work that way. I mean, you have to be. You have, this division of government for a reason and you have Congress there to write the laws and put

them in place. And they're very clearly starting that process now. And then you have this overzealous politician and Gary Gensler that is just moving forward trying to dictate policy for the entire United States. So my final takeaway from all this is this increases the urgency for Congress to act. Because now the SEC has started to basically lose. these cases. They've certainly lost on a very important piece of their case here. The fact that they are spending a ton of taxpayer resources and losing should motivate Congress to actually try and clarify the ground rules here. Additionally, Preston Byrne made this point. The conclusion in this case was different from the ruling in the telegram case. Right. So now we have conflicting

jurisprudence, which I think should also motivate Congress to act. Because now we have an uneven treatment by the courts. Congress should be looking at this and say, okay, hang on, it's time for us to sort this out. Clearly, the courts and the SEC's interpretation are not doing enough to give us a single consistent outcome. I think it disempowers the SEC. It's a political loss for them, and it increases the urgency from a congressional perspective. I fully agree. So that was Ripple right off the gate. Yeah, a huge day.

Ripple obviously up big today. Frankly, it's good for retail holders of Ripple. You know, they're not going to have to, it appears, register their wallet assets as securities. It's a loss for Prometheum. You know, it's a loss for Prometheum is a win for the industry. It's a win for the bridge currency people that you don't have to. to settle your international trades in glazed donuts, like I was talking about a couple weeks ago. So moving on to Castle Island content, busy week on the podcast.

You sat down with Amir Halim, the founder of Nova Labs, formerly known as Helium, to talk about D.Y. D. Y. DY and D-PIN. Every time, by the way, I need to know about D-PIN or D-Y, I talk to the escape velocity guys. So that's a, they're specialists in investing in that category. Boston, Boston based fund. But anyways, we, we had Amir Halimon, who was the, who is the founder of Noval Labs, company behind helium. So fascinating.

Just a huge ambitious project there, building their own MV&O. I just found out about D-PEN. Decentralized physical infrastructure. I think it's great. So more to cover on, of course, the regulatory and SEC front, but, before that, let's dive into a handful of deals. Not a particularly busy deal week. The first one up is Narval, which is a usage platform for Web3 wallets.

They raised $4 million from Block Tower, Fabric Ventures, and First Capital. It's first spelled FRST. So this next one gets my vote for name of the week, Alluvial, a liquid staking protocol. They raised $12 million from Ethereum, Varenhauer and Avon Ventures, our friends at Avon, nascent, block damon, and robot ventures. Why does that get your, what's the etymology of that word? What's the etymology of alluvial? Yeah, I thought, I thought there was a story there.

Why would you like that word? So alluvial means matter deposited by flowing water. Well, that's the definition. I thought the etymology is more of like where did it come from. I thought this was like a, you know, all right, you want the etymology? Okay. So the etymology of,

of alluvial comes from the Latin alluvium, which means washed against. So anyway, it just has to do with liquidity. I just thought it was clever. That is clever. All right. I like that. I like that.

The next one up is very deep. This is sound. This is a Web 3 music platform. There is $20 million from Andreson Sound Ventures and Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dog, getting on the board. Has he been in the Ardeal section? I mean, he's been in crypto, that's for sure. It's certainly on the NFT front.

I remember when Snoop Dogg's first album came out and very not safe for listening. It had one of those explicit tags, one of the first ones I remember. Well, I think we have to explicit tag this podcast. Yeah, this is a very profane podcast. This episode is explicit. We had a curse word at the beginning. We did. We did.

Well, we have more music. We're about to cue the music for a new segment called This Week in SECC. So look, we listened to our listener feedback. More than one listener suggested this song, I think. This song's great. I wasn't, I'd never really watched the Benny Hill show, but this connotates sort of a circus and sort of a bunch of a clown show, basically. You know, basically an institution that has lost all credibility.

with the American public. And let's talk about some of the stuff that's gone on with the SEC. So we talked about Prometheum, which is the bogus broker dealer that Gary Gensler put out as the shining example of how to be compliant with securities laws in the digital asset space. Needless to say, we've talked at length about this, they have no business whatsoever, they have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and they have no future. And they're actively trying to raise money with an investment bank right now.

So the whole thing is a very strange, strange scam. Anyways, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican from Alabama, and several members of Congress, wrote a letter to the SEC and to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week, urging them to investigate Prometheum, basically saying these guys have either lied under oath or something is off here. And so there's some very strange circumstances there. Furthermore, Representative Ritchie Torres, who's a Democrat from New York, went a step beyond that. So he wrote letters to the Inspector General of the United States of America as well as the controller general of the United States of America. And he's urged them to investigate the SEC and specifically Gary Gensler's role in putting forth a, quote, Potemkin platform as an example of how to be regulatoryly compliant. So the SEC There's something fishy going on here

With this Promethean thing I can't make heads or tails of it But the SEC is playing games on this one How good is Richie Torres, man? This guy's great Potemkin platform It is, it's a Potemkin platform It's there's a fishy, fishy platform

That Gary Gensler is saying Hey, here's the perfect example Of how to be compliant You just don't have a business You raise a bunch of money From the Chinese Communist Party you come and you testify and you say whatever we want you to say we just read the read the bullets please and then you just quietly go out of business so potumkin village of course is uh for those who are not

familiar it's a basically a facade like a fake village right correct i think it traces back to like maybe russia has to do with some russian history i don't know which sort of era of russian history it was was Is it Catherine the Great? It might have been. So the idea would be like there'd be like parading dignitaries through the town and you'd have these facades and then behind them there'd be nothing. You know, people would, it would look like their houses. Wow, it was Catherine the Great.

Was it? It was Catherine the Great. You know, you know on the Rogan show how he has this guy that Googles things in real time, right? Yeah. Jamie. We should have that. Jamie, yeah.

We don't have a Jamie, but we have now looked it up. And yeah, it's a fake villain. designed to impress Catherine the Great, but it's not a real village. It's just like a movie theater set, basically. So that is what Prometheum is. It's a fake crypto token exchange set up to impress the SEC. Yeah. And also to punch down on all the other exchanges.

So it appears that the Prometheum folks, their denials of their connections with the CCP, have now been questioned. Yeah, so Tuberville is... did have those. Called out that the dates don't line up here. It looks like they are in bed with the CCP. The whole thing just stinks to high heaven. And you basically, the bigger picture here is just the SEC has been weaponized for Gary Gensler's political purposes here.

And not to mention, post-Ripple summary judgment, it's not another central claim made by the Promethean folks is that the secondary transaction, for all these tokens need to be considered securities transactions, which appears not to be the case, at least with XRP. Yeah. So that part of their moral case doesn't appear to be as valid after today. So that was our inaugural this week in SEC news. How do you think that went? Pretty good.

And unfortunately, I think there will be no shortage of clownish behavior going forward. So I see us using that again. Well, this is a very busy week. We actually have two bad boys this week. So cue the music again. A lot of work for our long-suffering podcast editor, whoever that may be. But let's do it. All right, Alex Machinsky, what you're going to do? What you're going to do when they come for you? Bad boys, bad boys. What you're going to do? What you're going to do when they come for you. All right. Alex Machinsky, formal welcome. to the bad boys club. Alex Machinsky, who is the founder of Celsius, we don't really talk about him

that much. We never really cross-pass with him that much, but he's been arrested. He's been charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to manipulate the price of the sell token, which is the unregistered security that he issued. Charges have been brought by DOJ, SEC, CFTC. It's a it's a hodgepodge regulatory soup. And I don't have much to add here. There's nothing very surprising to me. He was, they have this guy dead to rights, if you read these arguments. There's employees just outright saying that, hey, we have no business model. This is a total sham. And it looks pretty bad.

Generally, I've long felt that as an industry, we cannot move on from the absolute calamity of 2022 until we have taken care of the worst actors. And Mashinsky certainly was one. I mean, the damage he did was significant. There's two outstanding, though. You know, we did eventually get to Doquan. We got to Mishinsky. Sam is awaiting trial. There's still a couple bad actors outstanding, though.

So we're not actually ready to move on just yet. I think the wheels of justice are turning. They turn slow and they grind. They grind extremely fine. They grind extremely fine. they do. Well, we have another bad boy here. And it's a company. It's a bad company. It's a, wow. Yeah, the first inaugural. Yeah, bad company. Wow. Goodness. And it's called Arcam Intelligence. This is a Dallas-based company. So a U.S. company located on the soil of Dallas, which is important

because what I'm about to say, which is these guys are running a token sale, an unregistered security sale on Binance, which has been charged with the finance launch pad. Finance launch pad. Yeah, yeah. Launching, they're launching their unregistered security. This Dallas-based company, which is in Dallas. It's open to retail investors, which is

selling their token to Dallas. There's a Dallas company selling their token just so we're clear. What city is they? They're in the United States of America and they're doing a token sale on Binance. Venture backed. Venture backed.

So I wouldn't want to be on the board of that one. So what else here? Okay. The business model, what does the token do? It's a data company. Okay. Let's talk about it. It's a data business.

Why do you need a token for a data business? Well, the token is an incentive for people to de-anonomize blockchain users. So you get tokens, these unregister- You snitch on each other. Yeah, you snitch on people, and you try to, docks people's addresses. So you have a blockchain address and you try to tag that to someone and attributed to them. And then you get unregistered securities.

That's how it works. This is like, you know the movie The Lives of Others? You've seen that? No, I never saw it. Oh, great film. This is like if the East German Stasi had launched a token to persuade people to snitch on each other. Yeah. And report them to the security services.

Yeah. people maybe that would have happened faster yeah it would the token really moves at the speed of light tokenized snitching so i don't know say kind of two two big PR mistakes on the same day and uh yeah not not great i'm not done so they did more there's more yeah no they they have these ref links where you can get incentives and discounts by trying to which is a common thing you have like referral links and it turns out that they didn't do a good job encrypting these. And so they're just based 64 reflinks that you can deanonomize people's email addresses. So all of these people that are anonymously participating on Twitter and putting out reflinks,

they're all public now. Well, that's actually genuinely ironic. You know, people often say things are ironic when they're not ironic, but this is actually a supreme level of irony is that the anons that, you know, proffered themselves up in order to snitch on their fellow blockchain users themselves were doxed in some cases. So welcome, welcome to the bad boys club. You have come up with a deeply unethical business that you have then sold shares to via an

unregistered securities offering and you have doxed all of your customers via reflinks. So good, good week, Arkham. it honestly takes a lot to get in the bad boys it's a high bar to clear it's incredible they're in it they're in it so there's that was the bad boys uh speaking of finance actually do you see this the irs uses they're using coin market cap to price crypto assets the coin market cap owned by finance this is crazy this is crazy what's happening here block works has an article this week that the irs put out a request for information about crypto pricing. And in this request, they said they use coin market cap for pricing.

That's effing crazy. So the IRS is investigating people and doing all sorts of, obviously, tax analysis on people who are evading taxes. And they're using coin market cap as the price feed. Coin market cap brings in its data from unregistered securities exchanges and just there's massive wash trading on that. And they just take that data, they don't correct it. It's not like a, there's a term for IASCO compliance, which is like an institutional grade

reference rate. And if you were a professional money manager, you wouldn't be able to mark your book to coin market cap because it's just pure outright third party unregistered venues and you're just taking their word for all the data. But the IRS is using this to go after people. That's insane. That's very questionable. It's owned by Binance too.

All right. So, okay, on a slightly sunnier note, the Lummis Gillibrand crypto bill was reintroduced with some edits this week. And look, I don't know how all this stuff works in Washington. My understanding is it's not strictly considered that likely to pass. However, there was a part of the bill that was very interesting and encouraging, which was they covered a lot. but the part that I particularly liked was the very explicit mention of proof of reserves. So, of course, we all know that Texas now has a proof of reserves mandate for custodial platforms that do business in Texas and have an MTL.

So you have to prove to your clients and to the authorities that your assets match your liabilities, right? And by the way, post-prime trust a solution, this is as important as ever because what we have in cryptos is drawn out insolvencies where the platform loses funds or misplaces, misappropriates them, and then they're insolvent for a long period of time. That was the case with FTX, the case with Kodriga, case with Prime Trust, case with actually Bitfinex after their hack. That's been the case generally with all these exchange hacks and insolvencies. Proof-reserve makes it impossible to conceal a long-running insolvency because you have to prove

on an ongoing periodic basis your access to those keys. In the Llamis Gillibrand bill, they ask for mandatory proof reserves plus audit or oversight. And there's one, so which would be fantastic, of course, there's one additional thing is, this is part of the reason I was so excited. They specifically asked the PCAOB, which is the regulator that oversees public company audits. They're one of the sort of key standard setting bodies, the key regulators for audit firms. they asked them to standardize proof reserve. Proof reserve is currently not standardized,

which is why a lot of the big audit firms don't touch it. They're kind of afraid to. The PCOB has historically been a hater of proof of proof of reserves. So if any legislation like this actually goes into law, the PCOB will have to reverse course, and they will have to embrace proof reserves and standardize it, which would, in theory, allow the larger or risk-averse CPA firms to cover the procedure.

Needless to say, if this does it get incorporated into legislation, whether it's a Llamis bill or the market structure bill, it'd be immensely good for the industry, and it would be evidence of a self-regulatory procedure, which is industry first and crypto-native being adopted in Washington, which I think would be awesome. Yeah, so I agree with that. There's a lot to say on this.

So Justin Slaughter put out a great tweet storm. We can link to that in our newsletter. So he's the policy director over at Paradigm. And a lot of this comes down to how a bill becomes a law, which I took AP government, but I had a terrible teacher. And so I'm still a little bit fuzzy on that. The teacher was like to use the baseball coach. No, I didn't get a five.

No, five. No, the teacher was the baseball coach, and he didn't even teach. He just basically handed out the same packets that had been doing every single year for the past 30 years. Terrible teacher. Terrible. I did take AP French. I got a five on AP French, though. It's a, it's a tough process to get something from a bill into a law. And the unfortunate thing for Lummiss-Gillibrand, although it's bipartisan, is neither of, neither Lummis nor Jillobrand are the chair of a committee. And a lot of this is going to run through Sherrod Brown, who's the chair of the Financial Services Committee, the Banking Committee, rather, in the Senate. So, and he's

he's not predisposed to liking digital assets. So get in touch with Sherrod Brown, if you want to see this going anywhere, I guess is the punchline there. However, this is very interesting in the context of the McKinney-Thompson bill, which is working its way through the house. And so there's a view,

and Justin Slaughter covers this in his tweet storm, that a lot of these ideas are seeking to maybe get into that McKinney-Thompson bill and see if they can forge a path forward. But you really wonder if, to your earlier point, you know, you start to see a little bit more urgency here as just the SEC just keeps on puking on itself with these court cases. And the fact that they put forward this CCP-backed company in Prometheum, and, you know, they're going after Coinbase. You have bipartisan letters that are going out trying to seek investigations into Gary Gensler. And so

you hope that one of these things starts to get legs. But there's a lot of great stuff in this bill. it would certainly give a lot of power to the CFTC instead of the SEC in terms of regulating the spot market. And it takes a pretty hardline stance on what is or is not a security. It doesn't have this concept of migrating from a security into being a commodity. McHenry Thompson doesn't explicitly have a safe harbor, but it proposes a path to become sufficiently decentralized. The other thing that's in this Lumis-Gill brand bill is this kind of like a Sarbanes-Oxley sign-off where the CEO of the crypto company needs to attest under the penalty of perjury. So you could go to jail if you make an attestation that is later revealed to be incorrect.

So I like it. I think this would get the job done in terms of regulatory clarity, as would McHenry Thompson, in my opinion. Well, I think from what I can tell, this legislation, whichever one it is, is becoming more of a concrete possibility. And it's important to just say, again, for the probably millionth time on this podcast, why this matters.

It matters because in the U.S., you have no participation, really to speak of, from banks or broker dealers in this market. And so you have all of these entities, and there's capital behind them, obviously, in terms of customers that want to buy Bitcoin, buy ETH, buy other crypto assets,

and participate and build things. And they can't do anything yet because they don't have this regulatory clarity. And so you have two issues. There's no market structure clarity. And then you have this crazy SEC rule that applies to the banks, which is SAB 121, which is the balance sheet treatment. So the fact that banks need to treat crypto assets on deposit with them as actual assets on

their own balance sheet for capital purposes, which makes no sense. It doesn't apply to any other, doesn't apply to any other asset, doesn't apply to stocks, bonds, et cetera. So you get this market structure clarity. And all of a sudden, you just see a. at least 10x total participation increase in the industry. You have all these custody platforms that go live. You have all this new trading infrastructure.

And you just have a more institutional market. And that will benefit everyone, in my opinion. So basically nothing happened last week, and we spent the whole episode talking about our views on Taylor Swift and your campaign against, what is it, the piping plovers? Yeah, the plovers. I say run them all over with trucks. There's in there's someone in New York must have listened to the podcast because someone in Long Island I think did that.

I got a bunch of inbound from folks saying, hey, did you go kill a bunch of piping plovers? Someone took the initiative and actually attacked the plover population. Yeah, let me pull this up here. So the feds are offering a $5,000 reward for thieves who stole piping plover eggs from the far Rockaway beach. Let the record show. not in Far Rockway. I was not there. Your words of consequences on the show. I think these piping plovers, I'm pretty sure they're not endangered anymore.

You can't go on the beaches in like half of the state of Massachusetts because you've got these birds. The birds can just go somewhere else. We have that down here with sea turtles that lay their eggs on the beach, but they just cordon it off. Then you just don't go to that part of the beach. Well, yeah, I wish they did that. Apparently they do that in New Jersey, and that's like, We coexist.

Yeah, no. We've learned to exist with the turtles. But you're saying the plovers are first class citizens on these beaches. Yeah, it's get away. You can't come on the beach. I heard a story. I can't confirm if it's true or not that a local township killed a fox because he was just walking on the beach near the plovers.

They killed them. So they're taking a value judgment on the plovers over the fox. they've made a ranking of the species. I just don't think that's right. I think that's fair. So the other segment we did on the podcast last week, who got some user feedback on this was people that have succeeded in three domains. Oh, yeah.

Which is motivated by Arnold, right? And actually, after that discussion, I went and watched some of his action movies from the 80s, they were not good. they were not good. Well, they were successful in the context of they made a ton of money. Terminator is good. Financially, yeah, no, Terminator was good.

So financially, he was one of the most box office successful actors of the late 80s, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Whether these have enduring cultural value, that's a question. Now, the question is who, so we pose the question, who else succeed in three domains? So let's submit some names for consideration here. Okay. I don't know how we didn't think of this. Elon Musk succeeded probably top of his class in electric vehicles, certainly.

Rocketry. Undeniably. And then arguably FinTech, right? I mean, he was certainly part of PayPal. Yeah. Oh, yeah. X.com. He founded it, yeah.

And I would say juries out in terms of whether he's successful. succeeded in social media. I mean, he's, I think he has the biggest audience. He gets the most impressions of anyone on social media. But is Twitter success, jury's out, let's say. That's a good one. Although you could say that's all just entrepreneurship. So it depends on how you classify it.

That's true. It wasn't really as cross-disciplinar. I agree. Donald Trump, I think we have to give it to DJT, to do, to do Dr. Trump. I think we have to in this case. Real estate, obviously politics, you know, for better for worse, and TV, right? I mean, The Apprentice. That was a huge show, right? So I think we have to give it to DJT there. And here's the last one. I'll submit James Buchanan Duke. Okay. All right. So James Buchanan Duke founded your alma mater, Duke University. He did. Yeah.

So that's one. The second one is Duke Energy, found in Duke Energy, which is, I believe to this day, one of the biggest energy companies in the Carolinas in that part of the world. Yeah, it's a big one. And he founded a tobacco company, which became British American Tobacco, eventually. In fact, that's why he founded the energy company, because tobacco was a really big consumer of energy. He needed lots of energy. So actually the tobacco was his first.

first industry. So that's that's our more esoteric submission there. Okay. All right. I'll give you that one. I said John Glenn last week. I think that's a good one. You had fighter pilot. He was the, I think he was the first fire pilot in the U.S. He went from California to New York. It's like west coast to east coast, but he was the first person to drive a plane across the United States. And he also was an astronaut. And then he was a politician. He was a congressman, I think. And then, I'll give you Da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci. He was a painter.

Painter, yep. He was a sculptor. He was a world-class scientist. He was also an architect. That's four. Yeah. He was pretty good. So I think I'm still taking submissions.

So we don't actually have a place to direct you to go post about this podcast anymore. So just hit us up on Twitter. Yeah, just let us know on Twitter. Don't hit us up on threads. Threads, no, I do have a Threads account, but I'm actually against threads. I'm short threads. I love how all of these, like the Kara Swisher and Scott Galloways of the world, just think threads is so great. It's because they're getting signal boosted on threads and they're getting no engagement on Twitter.

Yeah, the problem with threads is the whole feed is algorithmic, which is a business decision, which makes sense because it allows them to deprioritize the questionable. content, which is what Twitter is known for, whether it's controversial or explicit or just generally disgusting, tasteless in some way. So it's much more friendly for brands, right? Because the brands have the assurance that their ads are going to be up against something that's not horrifying. But that's also why threads is bad, because you can't actually just get the chronological feed of the people you follow. It's full of like, very mainstream content, I would say, like very milk toast mainstream stuff. So it doesn't have

the edge. And I think people come on Twitter for that real-time feed, for edginess, for authenticity. For that reason, I'm short threads. Well, it was a busy week. It's not over yet. A lot happened. We're going to be digesting this ripple. I mean, to be clear, the ripple case isn't over. Parts of it are go. There may be a settlement. It's still going to trial. It's still going to trial. Yeah. So this is just a ruling in a narrow, narrow thing. With implications. The ripple labs is not out of the woods.

They were found liable on the initial issuance of XRP. So that that will, they will have to contend with that. They will. They will. All right. So we'll be covering it next week. Everyone have a safe and healthy weekend. If you see any piping clover, just do what you have to do.