On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/17/26 (Teleprompter insider trading, the AI DeFi apocalypse fizzles, NY's datacenter ban) (EP.730)

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with the deals and news of the week. In this episode:  Nic licks his World Cup wounds Do Bitcoin Treasury strategies make sense? Trying to make sense of Saylor's "bitcoin rating" Trump's teleprompter operator has been trading on what Trump is going to say in his speeches Why do people keep insider trading on prediction markets? Clarity Act odds are trickling down Strategy shores up their balance sheet Is the Bitcoin cycle finally turning? Stripe bids for Paypal The AI DeFi apocalypse didn't happen Kathy Hochul's AI datacenter moratorium Why is Anthropic running ads suggesting that they could cause extinction The DTC is using Canton for it's tokenized settlement pilot Brian Chesky's AI slop thread debacle Jesse Pollak leaves Base CBDCs are officially banned federally

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 is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $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 quantitative easing and 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. And I'm sorry for your loss. England, that was a tough one. I watched the last bit there. It was exceptionally tough.

Yeah, actually, I don't want to talk about it because I'm still really upset. I mean, Messi, he's just good, huh? He is the greatest player of all time. Definitely is. So now who do we have? Does that mean England's in the third place game now? Yeah, it's kind of like a humiliation ritual.

You have to play another game after you got kicked out. Yeah, that's weird. We're probably going to lose to France. because they're great. And then the finals this Sunday. And I will be rooting for Spain. You will. Make no mistake, yeah.

After that, after, I know we probably missed some Argentine listeners, but there's such thing as being a bad winner. You know, you can be a bad loser, but you also be a bad winner. Oh, were they gloating? Is that what was happening? Oh, yeah, big time. And they were bringing the Falklands into it.

It's like, guys, let it go, man. Yeah. We fought a war over this. You lost? resoundingly, we don't need to bring it up anymore. So who ended up getting the islands? Does the UK still control those islands? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Don't get me started on the Falklands. I mean, Britain has managed and governed the Falklands uncontested for 200 years straight. When they were settled, it wasn't even initially by... Argentina didn't exist as a country when they were settled, to be clear. So there's no first claim, okay? There was a referendum recently.

on the Falklands and whether they wanted independence, whether they want to be British governed or what. And guess what the result of that referendum was? I'm guessing since you're asking that they wanted to stay in the UK. It was about 3,000 in favor and there were two votes, not in favor. Really? So they want to be part of the crown? Yeah. I mean, they're all British origin for the most part. And if you actually go to the Falklands, I haven't been, but I actually would like to go. And I do like a lot of those weird South Atlantic islands.

If you go, it's like a small British village. Huh. Who knew? It's very British in nature. So I understand the proximity argument. I get it. But there's no real claim. And then also it was settled via a violent conflict.

Do they have any natural resources on the Falkland Islands? They've just been licensed to exploit some of the gas fields. around there. Interesting. Yeah. And, you know, the proximity to Antarctica as well. So this is a rivalry that runs deep. Again, I'm sorry. I would say it's more of a one-sided rivalry. Yeah. Well, they did just beat you guys in the World Cup, so I guess it's two-sided. It's one-sided in terms of the geopolitical aspect. Okay. You know, but in terms of the soccer, yeah, they normally get the better of us. And they did again. I extend them my congratulations. They we're the better team. That part's true. All right. Well, a lot to talk about outside of soccer this

week. It was actually quite a busy deal week. A bunch of stuff there. We got some prediction market shenanigans, which do you think it's just every week we're going to have prediction market shenanigans? Yeah, because structurally, prediction markets create a new financial incentive for people to steal information from their employers. And that's not going to go away. So as long as prediction markets exist, we're going to have insider trading scandals. Why don't we kick it off with the deals of the week? First one up, really excited about this one in our portfolio, Cyclops, stable coin payments company. They've raised $20 million in a round of financing that was led by our friends at NAVA ventures,

along with global pay tech, us at Castle Island and Coinbase. So congrats to the Cyclops team. They're crushing it over there. Yeah, very excited. Crypto.com. They're the crypto brokerage and exchange. They raise 400 million from Citadel Securities. Wow.

It's a huge round. I'd be very curious to see how that round was structured because obviously Citadel Securities, you know, likes to do deals that involve payment for order flow. They also, I think, you know, some of these later stage financing, this one was done a $20 billion valuation,

but I always wonder, you know, what the rights are to the preferred in some of these deals, if there's a put right on some of these. later stage rounds with exchanges being led by Citadel, I think tend to be pretty highly structured. Yeah. If you were to ask me in 2022, if crypto.com would still be going strong in 2026, I would have said, there's just no way. No.

I mean, I guess you got to hand it to those guys for making it through, but I think they had exposure to, you know, they were lending during the time when you did not want to be lending. They were one of the few that made it out of there. Congrats to them. Alpaca is a tokenization infrastructure. company, there is $135 million from Peak 15, Elephund, and others. Then it's Pascal, which is a prediction market. They raised $9 million from Union Square Ventures, DBA, and Wintermute.

I'm surprised that name was available. That's a good name. Yeah, there's other, there's other Pascal's out there. Yes. There's the quantum Pascal. I wonder what Pascal is it that they are referring to. It's a good question. The artist?

Blaze. Is it Blaze Pascal, the mathematician? I think there was an artist, though. So Blaze Pascal was a mathematician, I believe. Yeah. Is there an artist as well? Well, Galasis Labs are a multi-chain crypto clearinghouse. There is $6.8 million from Lights Food Faction, Franklin, Tumbledton, and Coinbase Ventures.

Then it's Pact Labs, which is a stable coin payroll and payments company. They raised $9 million from Tether, blockchange, and lasagna. Velocity is the stable coin payments platform. There is $38 million from Dragonfly, First Mark, Coinbase, and others. Blocks Route is a blockchain trading infrastructure company. They were acquired by FalconX, the crypto brokerage platform. And Glide is a crypto deposit and cross-chain routing startup.

They were required by Moon Pay in an all-equity deal. Trasia, which is a trading app built on Hyperliquid, they raised $1.75 million from multi-coin capital. And lastly, orange juice. This is a permanent capital company that will acquire U.S.-based cash flowing SMBs and install Bitcoin and treasury strategies. There is 40 million from EgoDeath Capital

and Ricardo Salinas. Is this the Lynn Alden one? Yeah. So what's the model here? So they go in, they acquire small businesses, and then they get them to put Bitcoin in the balance sheet? That seems to be it. and I don't want to be a hater.

You know, it's easy to be a hater. I don't be a hater. However, I don't get it because it's kind of like saying we're going to buy businesses, cash flowing businesses, and then we're not going to use the cash to reinvest in the business.

We're not going to dividend out the cash to the shareholders. We're going to take the cash and throw it in a bottomless hole. Yeah. And that's what we're going to do with it. And somehow, and also the commodity that we're buying with the cash doesn't have a yield associated with it.

So it's just basically zeroing out the balance sheet. So I don't understand how that's meant to improve the prospects of the business. Yeah. And I guess we are just notorious haters on these Bitcoin treasury companies. And maybe we should start a new segment because why don't we actually do a segment right now? And it's called, what does this mean? And I'm going to read you a tweet and you can tell me what it means. I wish we did the video part of this podcast.

All right. Read me the tweet. Here's the tweet and then you got to guess who it's from and then tell me what it means. Here's the tweet. Currently, MSTR matches Ibit at a 1.0x Bitcoin credit rating with the added upside of our digital credit business. Our most senior digital credit security, STRF, stands at at 11.0x. and then it has a bar chart with STRF at 11x going down to STRC at 3.6x, STRK at 3.1, STRD at 2.9, I bit at 1.0 and MSTR at 1.0.

So first guess who it's from and then tell me what that actually means. I'm assuming it's someone connected with strategy, like the CFS at Fung Lee? It's actually Michael Saylor. sailor, okay. And then what's the unit here? Oh, this is the Bitcoin credit rate. The Bitcoin rating, sorry, BTC rating. The unit is the, is it Bitcoin rating?

It's a, it's a 1.0x Bitcoin rating. What are you not following? All right. So STRF is 11 times more Bitcoin than I bit? Well, if that's what Bitcoin rating means, but I'm not going to tell you. Is it like a sharp ratio or something? I don't know. I think the punchline to maybe ruin the segment is this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

That's, I mean, Sailor, you know, he's no stranger to ludicrous tweets, but that's actually one of the craziest ones I ever heard. He's introduced Bitcoin rating and he's just built a bar chart that shows why you should buy all of his products instead of Black Rock's Bitcoin ETF. Do we know what constitutes this rating? What are the components of the rating? I don't know. I looked through the standard accounting textbooks that I have here to see where I could find this Bitcoin rating.

I couldn't find it. I looked through some SEC documents to see if I could just find where you would put your Bitcoin rating. I can't find it. I mean, this is bizarre. There's no follow-up to it explaining what the Bitcoin rating is either. No, no. It's just assumed that you would not. know it. It's a bull post. That really is quite something. Maybe we should just do a tweet every

single week of here's something that got a zillion likes that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. All right. I like this segment. So what does it explain? Explain this tweet. I suspect that a lot of these are going to be about dads because dads don't make any sense. Explain this tweet. Okay. But yeah, explain this tweet. Yeah, let's we'll keep that going. So I thought the funniest story of the week was this teleprompter operator insider trading story. Yes. So President Trump's teleprompter operator has been accused of using insider knowledge to make over $100,000 trading on inside knowledge of what Trump's speeches are going to say,

kind of doing the, you know, will Trump say this word and making money on it. So, I mean, this guy, he should have known that. he was going to get apprehended. Yeah, so his name is Gabriel Perez. He's apparently operated Trump's teleprompter for a decade. And he's apparently negotiating with the CFTC over the allegation that he traded on insider knowledge. I don't know what there is as far as a negotiation.

I mean, he clearly broke the law. So what's there to negotiate? He actually adapted to Trump's frequent deviations from the teleprompter because that's true. Trump sometimes doesn't say things that are on the teleprompter and he goes into these digressions. And Perez would back out of certain bets mid-speech if Trump didn't say what he was meant to say. I mean, this is a phenomenon that's going to last as long as we have prediction markets. I think ultimately you're just banking on people's common sense to realize that this is not legal. I don't know if there's much you can do structurally because there's always going to be people that get

the advanced copy. There's going to be people that work for CEOs that get the 8K before it's filed. It's like, hey, do you want to review this? It is pretty interesting. It's like basically there's a new genre of crime that now exists. I mean, it was a crime before, but now it's like quite accessible to many people. And how long is it going to take for the knowledge to diffuse throughout society that this is in fact illegal? And it's not just a free money glitch. It seems to be taking a long time. It does. I mean, it, I don't know if this is technically insider trading, but this is basically insider trading, right? Yeah, I mean, it's still illegal regardless of what you call it, whether it's wire fraud or, you know, monetizing information that doesn't belong to you,

it's effectively a form of theft. I mean, I guess you just got to do the, what's the Warren Buffett when he took over Solomon Brothers and they had the big scandal. He was the chairman of the board, and he said, you know, I'm telling everyone that works here, don't do anything that you wouldn't want on the front page of the Wall Street Journal the next day. And that's kind of what you have to think about, I think, if you're this guy. I guess maybe it seems weird to us that people are so brazen with this

because obviously you're going to get caught because we are in the financial services industry. We're inside of trading something we're aware of inherently. Maybe other, maybe non-finance people don't think about this ever. Yeah, I think it's that. I mean, I also think, I mean, just the opportunity, you just have money dangling in front of your face. And I'm sure this guy's not making a lot of money as the teleprompter operator. Although, I guess if he's been with him for 10 years, it sounds like a pretty cushy gig, don't you think?

I think that must be so stressful. You think? On the pacing, yeah. Well, it's not like you're typing it in in real time. Like, you just, I presume you upload a word doc and then it just, he's probably twiddling a button. Yeah, he goes faster slow with it. but don't you think that's stressful? You've got to keep up with them

and Trump goes off script all the time so it's okay, is he hopping back into this paragraph? I mean, that's a high-stress job. I mean, thinking people who've lost their jobs because they've insider trading on basically government information, you got like Navy SEAL guys, special ops. Like that, I presume that's a job that you would want to keep rather than being fired and sued and put in prison.

Or like the Israeli intelligence guys that were trading on when certain things would happen. So these people are really losing in a big way. But people do this in financial services all the time. Remember the guy who was on the Goldman board, who was the McKinsey guy, and he was giving Galleon the hedge fund, you know, inside knowledge about Goldman's earnings or something. So people are people like on boards of directors do this, which is shocking.

It fascinates me how much people are willing to throw away for such a small financial gain. Yeah. Because like with the NFT inside of trading stuff and then this case, presumably he's not netting that much money from the trades. Now. And now he's disgrace. Right. Well, let's stay on the politics slash legislative angle here. Clarity Act. I would say the past couple weeks, things have been really quiet. Usually hear a lot of chatter coming out of people that are close to these negotiations, but it's been pretty quiet. The next two weeks is definitely pretty critical here if you just look at floor time. The news today is that President Trump is expected to meet with senators at the White House this afternoon. So by the time this airs,

presumably this would have happened and maybe there will be some news on Friday. But they're trying to break this gridlock around the ethics provision. The ethics provision was originally kind of drafted to take direct aim at Trump's Sons from what we understand. And so now they're arguing about what that language is going to entail. So I think that's the last big issue here on clarity. I know we were just complaining about prediction markets, but the polymarket for clarity has been in a downtrend since May. It peaked at about 75% odds of passing all the way down to the low 30s. now it's at 45, so it's very volatile, but it has been running down. I mean, it's basically a coin flip as of right now.

I think it'd have to be trading down just if you look at the Senate calendar here. And they're trying to get this save act with the... The time value of the option is decaying. It's decaying. You've also had Lindsey Graham passing away. You've had Mitch McConnell in the hospital. So I think there's a lot going into that. That is one really interesting use case of a prediction market.

It's just seeing something happen to Lindsay Graham and then seeing the Clarity Act immediately move on it. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, and I know we're telling people to not trade on information that doesn't belong to them, but I wonder if this market does reflect what the interns in those meetings are hearing. Oh, it must, right? I mean, it must. I don't know if they get sat down and told about Calci and Polly Market, and you're not allowed to do this. They should.

So returning to the strategy topic, our favorite, security there is 467 million selling MSTR shares last week they put it into cash and not bitcoin so the reserve is now three billion they did not buy bitcoin this week so it's kind of like the listen to this podcast they kind of did what you said they should do right well i don't know i told them to sell some bitcoin didn't i but um i think i think it's wildly impressive that strategy is able to hammer this at the money common equity offering week after week with hundreds of millions of dollars. It's unbelievable to me that there's a bid there.

The resilience of MSTR holders is really, the amount of pain these people are willing to tolerate is quite impressive. It's crazy. You really have to tip your cap. And, you know, like we've been saying, there's no immediate forced liquidation on the horizon here. I mean, he's got the converts. He's got to deal with.

It sounds like there's maybe some bankers involved in the preferred negotiations. But he has time. and, you know, I think Sailor is probably a four-year cycle guy. And if you're a four-year cycle guy, you're probably looking at September, October as a low, and you're just having a view that, hey, Bitcoin's going to keep on going up and we're going to have a ton of flexibility. I have started hearing from traders that I respect that they think the cycle is turning. Yeah.

There's light at the end of the tunnel here. I mean, I think we've both been, hey, we're not four-year cycle. guys for a long time, but I guess you just look at it. It technically is fitting a pattern here. I think it's moon math, but we do seem to be in a four-year cycle for the third time. Well, I reject the cycle, but the metrics that I look at seem to suggest that we might be bottoming. Well, don't you think it has more to do with just interest rate policy here? Yeah. And we had kind of a good CPI print this week and Bitcoin Rapport. on that. Yeah, I think it's aggregate liquidity conditions for sure. And also the credit cycle

can't be overlooked. Yeah. So there's the, you know, endogenous crypto factors, exogenous factors. All that said, strategies stretch has not returned to par. So it is at $85. Here's an interesting story this week. So PayPal, which is, they've been in a tough few years over at PayPal, a bunch of leadership changes. They haven't had a very cohesive. strategy on a lot of different dimensions. They've received an unsolicited bid to buy the company for $53 billion from Stripe and Advent International. This represents a 28% premium to its market cap when it was announced. What do you make of this? I think they should take the deal. They've just squandered such a lead over the last 15 years and it's just been so horribly mismanaged.

I think you'd take the bid. I'd love to know what the structure of this deal is. Advent is one of the best private equity firms out there for sure. I'd love to understand how this works with Stripe. You know, presumably it's kind of an equal transaction, but does Stripe go in there and just kind of take it over? Is this almost like a backdoor way for Advent to have a huge stake in Stripe when they go public? Add an appetizing premium to the market cap, too. Oh, it is. You'd have to think that as a director of PayPal, you'd have to really consider this. Do you remember a couple weeks ago when And we all started to get really worried about AI destroying defy. Yes.

So that was actually two months ago. I don't know. Time's going really fast these days. Haseeb had a tweet this week. He said it was a false alarm according to the data. So since that tweet, I know a lot of hacks happened in April. And there was another hack this week. There was osteum.

Yeah. for 18 million he says the defy hackpocalypse was a false alarm it's halfway through the year and the annualized dollars hacked in defy in 26 is lower than 25 huh so kind of surprising narrative violation right there that almost reads like a challenge to hackers though unfortunately yeah it does not give me much comfort frankly i didn't look too much into this ostium one but it looked like maybe an oracle bug that triggered some payments out of the vault. I don't really track Ostium day to day, but $18 million, that's a tough exploit.

Yeah. So Haseeb says there were 2.5 billion in hacks in 25, and the run rate for 26 is $1.89 billion. That's quote unquote, only 2% of TVL on DFI. 2% of TVL getting hacked a year is a disaster. It's like, I mean, a conventional market. Right. I mean, it's just so bad.

Like, imagine if 2% of all securities went missing a year. Yeah, it's like, hey, look, 2%. Imagine if that was like bank accounts in the U.S. 2% of these things got liquidated, but look on the bright side. I mean, it's just an intolerably high number. So you'll forgive me for not feeling that good about this. But there are just intolerably high numbers in non-financial markets too, right? Like think about how many people die in car crashes in the United States every year.

Like we're going to look back 50 years from now once self-driving cars are the norm and that number's way lower. And we're going to say that that's crazy that we tolerated that as a society. Yeah, I totally agree. Kathy Hochel this week, I guess we should mention this. She is signing a moratorium for new data centers in New York. She also said she is going to slow play the rise of self-driving cars in New York, is I think a completely indefensible policy. No, that just means statistically more people are going to die, guaranteed.

Like there's no real. And so like for what benefit to save the jobs of Uber drivers? Who cares, man? Seriously, who cares? Like people will die. So you're valuing the livelihood of gig workers over people's lives. That example everyone always used is when like the automobile was introduced and they still had those laws around people standing in front of horse.

with red flags. And those people, they wanted to keep employed. So they slow rolled the automobile. It's this exact same logic. I guess we should talk about the data center thing. So New York has very expensive energy because they turn off Indian Point, which was a huge, huge generator of power for them.

And they had to backfill it with natural gas. Yeah. And so they don't have a lot of data centers to begin with. Do you remember when they did the moratorium on Bitcoin mining? New York. Was this because the fish were, they said the fish were dying in a lake or something? The fish,

yeah. So this is great Seneca Lake and the Finger Lakes in upstate New York. There is a power plant that was converted from coal to gas by a private equity fund called Atlas. And then Greenidge is the operator of Bitcoin miners there. We had them on the show back when this was a big deal. Yeah, it was such a funny episode. And this one behind the meter plant converted from coal to gas.

It's not coal. It's gas. It's much cleaner. they would run sudden power to the grid most of the time and then mine bitcoin some of the time they were perfectly happy doing this they would use the water in the lake to cool whatever their machinery i think they were allowed to use 0.003% of lake water so the net effect on the lake's temperature was literally nothing right yeah and because of this one power plant slash bitcoin miner Kathy Hokel passed the ban on all basically conversion of power plants to mine Bitcoin.

That's insane. Here's the funniest part. It didn't even stop them. So what did they do? The funniest part is they had their permit denied, the renewal of their permit denied by an activist, whatever EPA official. That was later found to be wrongful in the. denial because this person was pressured by all the grass quote-to-crow grassroots campaigns. So they kept operating the whole time.

Wow. And did any fish actually die here? I feel like that was very overbond. Yeah, there was a lot of discussion about the trout. No, the lake temperatures were completely unchanged. It's a big lake. I mean, they're taking in some water and it's getting pumped back out into the lake slightly warmer, a couple degrees.

The lake is huge. And they were not permitted to, you know, you know, cycle, you know, even a tenth of one percent of the lake water. That's crazy. It's just, so you look at this ban on new data centers in New York, and it reminds me of the other one, because the last one didn't achieve anything. It was brought about by this hysterical campaign against an operator

that was actually doing a lot of good for the New York grid because they were idling and then sending power to the grid when they needed it, right? Yeah. Especially after Indian Point was shut down. And it didn't actually stop anyone doing anything because no one was doing this other than them. Yeah. So that's what this new ban on data centers makes me think of. I don't think anyone was building data centers anyway.

I mean, I think the Bitcoin industry didn't do a great job of getting out there from a PR perspective when all these Bitcoin mining sites were being banned a few years ago. I also think that the AI industry does a terrible PR job here when they're talking about just what. AI is because you have these lab CEOs talking about job displacement and the fact that we're going to have UBI in the future. What they should be talking about is curing diseases and all the positive things that AI is going to do. Who is in charge of the PR department of Anthropic right now? Yeah, Anthropics' ad campaign. It might be the worst commercial I've ever seen in my life. It's terrible. The one where they imply that AI could kill everyone on Earth and they showed a picture of Arlington Cemetery. Like, who is responsible for that?

That is atrocious. I mean, and I guess when you see that, you're like, well, hey, look, they're the ones building it. I guess we should listen to them. But you would think that you'd be pointing to the novel problems that could be solved here. You think about what AI could do added with quantum in terms of just simulating, you know, various genomes and trying to figure out the right medicine and the right cures for cancer. I mean, you got to lean into some of these futuristic ideas, I think. And Dario has historically tried that with some of the right. of his writing.

Like, what's his, he wrote an essay called like Machines of Infinite Grace or something. Yeah, right. And so, but now their ad campaign is like fear mongering. They're saying, well, we're building the technology that could kill everyone. And so definitely just let us, you know, manage the kill switch. Yeah. What is that? That sucks.

That doesn't play well with anyone. I don't blame both the left and the right for hating on data centers. I understand it. Rob Taves at Radical Ventures, which is an AI venture shop, had a good piece a couple of weeks ago talking about a prediction that Anthropic is going to move into drug discovery and that'll be a big part of their business. I could totally see that. I mean, if you control that infrastructure, why not compete with Eli Lilly head on here? I think that'll happen. They need to lean into it because they need to tell the story that AI is making people's lives better.

Right now they're not. One of these guys goes out and, you know, cures some form of cancer or cures ALS or Alzheimer's. I mean, that's what you get on the board with one of those things, you know. All right, let's talk about the DTC. This was actually, this got a lot of coverage this week. So the DTCC, which is the central clearing depository here, basically for a ton of securities in the U.S. They began limited production trades for tokenized securities, converting Russell 1,000 stocks, major ETFs, and U.S. treasuries into block. blockchain tokens that basically carry the same rights as the original security.

There was 40 firms in this production run. It included JP Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman, Vanguard, Nizzi. It was on two different blockchains. So it was on their own private blockchain, hyperledger, what is it, Basu. And then it was on Canton. So I don't know. This is, you got to tip your cap to the Canton folks. kind of everyone involved in this.

I guess this must have taken a long time to get everyone coordinated. Yeah, and we've been reading headlines about pilots like this for years and years, probably about a decade now, but this one seems to be more forceful than others. I mean, also it's hitting a private or public blockchain, I guess, in Canton. So is this the one that we, is it time to take this seriously? I definitely think this is a real deal thing. Now, I don't know that this is one of the, I mean, there's a lot of different types of securities that can get tokenized. Not everything goes through the DTC, but quadrillions of value per day probably go through the DTC, right?

Like, this is a massively high throughput operation over there. And I think it's probably the wave of the future. Now, these aren't necessarily going to be like trading in defy protocols and things like that. This is a little bit of a different thing than a, you know, tokenized version of a money market fund. can move on public Ethereum rails, but it is solving a real problem, it seems. The other tokenization story this week, Brian Chesky of Airbnb, had a long thread about it, saying that he was pretty optimistic about it, and then disaster struck when it revealed that he used AI to write the thread.

Yeah. So this was interesting from a couple of different perspectives. One is why would you have AI write that? But my second thing is, like, why was he even thinking about writing? something like this is Airbnb going to do something yeah i mean he must be trying to figure out a way that to make it commercially relevant for them yeah i would think so um i liked the thread unfortunately he i think what happened is probably he had a i sharpen it up and then it outputs text that looks completely a i written and that's a mistake so what do you think he just uh the prompt

with something like here's an idea i have put this into a tweet storm yeah like yeah maybe he even wrote the full thread and then just ran it through AI. But that's just such a big mistake because everybody can spot it. And how do you think people spot it? It was just the commas. AI has such a distinct way of writing, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, I usually, what is the M-Dash thing? You can always tell with the M-Dash.

Yeah, there's like tons of these. I mean, that's probably just a moment in time thing, though, because in six months, don't you think AI will learn to write? not like an AI. Oh, definitely. It'll be going through your emails and trying to figure out how you actually speak.

I think that's right. So another interesting ex post this week, Jesse Pollock, the lead at base, I guess has cycled off the base product. So he had a pretty candid, long tweet about it

and said that basically the social bets that they're making with Zora and Bass and Creator coins disintegrated completely in his words. And so Jesse Pollack is officially off base. So base, this was kind of a, I don't know, I thought this didn't make a ton of sense when they leaned into this creator coin idea when they started base. But I guess you have to respect them

for taking a big bet there. And that was their original vision. And it seems like now the vision is going to be much more financial, which to me makes sense. I mean, you look at tempo, you look at some of the success of just the stable coin chains that are going right now. I think leaning into trading, tokenization, AI agents does make more sense. I guess so Kobe is running it now. Is that right? Yeah. So Kobe's in charge, I think, of all trading on Coinbase. It seems like a really big job and base is part of that. So yeah, it does imply that they're going to push it in more of a trading direction. Yeah. I mean, look, you have to respect them for taking a swing on this. I don't think anyone really thought that it was a great idea, but, you know, sometimes that's how the best ideas originate.

So there's an interesting finding this week, courtesy of Nick Anthony at Cato, which is that, do you know this? CBDCs are now officially banned legislatively in the United States until 2031. Is that federally? I thought that was just state by state. It's now federal because it was part of the 21st century road, all kinds of. Cops to Housing Act, which did pass this last week. Yeah. So there was a clause in that act, which it didn't have anything to do with CBDCs or

crypto, and it officially banned CBDCs. Is anyone still pushing for CBDCs? It's not at all priority anywhere, but it's now officially banned federally. Yeah, good. All right. Yeah. Great. Here was, here was some interesting SEC filing stories.

here. So Tiro Price, they have launched their first multi-token actively managed crypto ETF this week. It trades under TKNZ. Looks like it, you know, it's just starting. So it only has a $15 million AUM, 75-bit fee. But this is an ETF that will actively trade cryptocurrencies. It has a real PM and everything. I think that's such a hard job. Can you imagine being the person that has that job? Really tricky. Yeah. So they say it's designed to provide diversified exposure to leading crypto assets from an eligible universe, including Bitcoin Ethereum, Binance, XRP, Solona, Hyper Liquid, and others. That is, there's four co-PMs, and Blue Massillary is the head PM there. That's tricky, for sure. That's a super tricky. I mean,

how many crypto hedge funds have persisted for five plus years in this industry? If she can do a good job on this, she's going to be an absolute legend. I would rather launch it today. than a year ago or two years ago. So maybe now is actually a great time to launch your active, probably long biased token hedge fund. Timing is everything, but yeah, I mean,

you can't be short these things in a DTF, presumably. So being short is basically being in cash, right? Do you have a pick for the World Cup final, Spain, Argentina? I mean, I got to go messy after seeing that. I mean, that guy's, he's old and he's he's really good i only saw 10 minutes of that game but yeah he did great yeah there is something about argentina this world cup they keep winning

and they keep coming from behind and winning yeah it's just every knockout game they've had it's that the same thing has happened so they have a belief about them which is remarkable but spain completely destroyed france and france i thought was the best team so i'm going Spain. I think the story of the World Cup has been just the hospitality of the United States. I feel like we've shown pretty well. I think it's been incredible for the U.S. and we've shown the rest of the world these stadiums that we just casually had. Yeah, I think people forget how good things are in the U.S. and this is a good reminder. Where's the next World Cup, do you know? I believe it is joint Spain, Portugal, and Morocco,

actually. Okay. Yeah, because you can't just have World Cup in one small country, presumably, right? Well, the Saudis did get the one after that. Okay, so that's all going to be, what are they? They're going to have to build a lot of stadiums. But yeah, you'd have to build a lot of soccer stadiums. Yeah, the U.S. could host it every single year without breaking a sweat. Yeah, I think we should. I think it was great for terrorism up here.

Yeah, probably even showed up in the macro data too. Sure. I think Sam Adams had a record summer, just all these Scots running around, just gassing Sam Adams. It's a shame they couldn't say in it from a moment. longer. That's true. All right. So I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.