On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/25/25 (Tether's GENIUS options, Defending Free Banks, Saylor's Stretch) (EP.649)

Episode Date: July 25, 2025

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Defending "Free Banking" from the critics – and why stablecoins are unlike free banks The American Bankers Association doesn't like new crypto charters Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announces the company's plan to launch a new US-based stablecoin this year Strategy announced the plans for the fourth preferred stock offering this week, STRC, or "Stretch." Anchorage Digital, which does hold an OCC banking charter, is launching a new stablecoin issuance platform. The first stablecoin product will be USDtb in partnership with Ethena Labs The Senate Banking Committee released their discussion draft for crypto market structure legislation this week, designed to build off the House's passage of the CLARITY Act last week Citadel Securities has expressed concern around the rise of tokenized securities Bhutan's Bitcoin trade BitGo, a crypto custody provider, and Bullish, a crypto exchange, both announced that they had confidentially filed an S-1 Further reading: Wired, The Great Crypto Re-Banking Has Begun Galaxy Digital, Crypto Policy Under Trump: H1 2025 Report

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, A.I. IG $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. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. And a busy week for you on the podcast circuit. you were on Galaxy Brains with Alex Thorne this morning. Yeah, we did our sister podcast, Galaxy Brains. It was a good time with Alex. I think that's my third time. I have this new thesis that I'm developing. If you remember Brink Nation, you're already aware of it, actually.

What's the new thesis? Yeah, we think that stable coins are narrow banks. Real big deal. I go into detail on this on Galaxy brains. And you've got, you said you're working on a medium post on this, right? Yeah, actually, I was thinking going to Substack, do you think they would pay me a bonus or something if I switched over? Are they still doing that? I don't know. So many people are on it these days. I mean, Arthur Hayes moved over to Substack.

I feel like every journalist in New York Times quit and went to Substack. Oh, Paul Krugman is who you're thinking about. Oh, did he? I think he's on Substack. So there was a time when they were paying people like six-figure advances to go to Substack. Dude, is that deal still open? Can I get that deal? Bring your page views over there.

I've been on Medium since 2016. I've written, I would think, over a million words on Medium. I'm open for business, substack or anyone else. All right. Are there any other newsletter platforms? MailChimp, but, you know, I guess we shouldn't say too many bad things because we use them. They do shut down the blockchain. newsletters on there.

Somehow we've survived. Yeah, I guess we shouldn't talk about it. It's like talking about your bank during the Biden administration. Just do not mention the fact that you have a bank. We slip through the cracks. Yeah, anyway, Substack Nation, if you're listening, look, I'm probably going to move to your platform anyway, but if you want to pay me as well for doing that.

A lot of page views. A lot of people want to read about your free banking take. I think there is appetite for that. there's at least a dozen people that care deeply about free banking. That's going to be a big topic. I mean, I've been talking about it for years. We're going to be forced to address it now because every central banker on the planet wants to talk about how stable coins are like free banking, but they're wrong.

Yeah, let's just talk about it now because so many people are sending me this FT article compares stable coins to free banking. I don't think it could be more different. Yeah, it's not really like free banking. And we bear shared the blame because our crypto dollars white paper in 2020 had extensive comparisons between the two. But that was before all stable coins effectively moved to a base collateral model of treasuries, right? It was an era where there was other stuff that was backing these stable coins. Oh, yeah.

So post-Genius, we got, or in the pre-gen, it's like BC and AD, right? We're now after genius, AG. We're in AG. Year 1AG. Post genius, all stable coins are homogenized, regulated, and they're only allowed to have basically one thing in them, which is short-duration treasuries. That's so different from what free banking is, which is, as the name implies, banking. He's not a full reserve.

You know what the Scottish free banks held in specie as a reserve? Species means gold coinage. What do you think they held in liquid reserves? In liquid reserves. On average. You're saying what type of financial instrument did they hold? How much liquidity did they hold in reserve on average? Oh, I would say sub 10%.

Yes, 2% on average. Yeah. And that was a very mature system with low inflation and very few actual bank crises, by the way. So it was a bank. They were banks and they had, you know, lending activity. So stable coins and all like that. by the way. I mean, are all these central bankers completely ignorant for how, like, how stable coins work?

It just, they're fully reserved. Even the FT for putting that out. It's like, did you read the bill or even the cliff notes on the bill? Yeah, so what did the FT say? The technological transformation is fraught with risk. If stable coins succeed, they're likely to eat into the business of banks while being regulated with nowhere near the same rigor. The U.S. itself has painful historical.

experience of what can go wrong. The mid-19th century era of quote-unquote free banking, ushered in by President Andrew Jackson's successful campaign against a federal protocentral bank featured chaotic monetary conditions as each bank issued its own currency, which traded a bearing exchange rates to one another. So it's like, it's not, first of all, it's not really true. Like, the free, they're characterizing the free banking era as if it was like the absolute apocalypse. It was honestly fine. but it also wasn't true free banking. This is like a no true Scotsman fallacy right now,

but what happened was the states, there was no central bank at that time, and the states permitted unrestricted insurance of new banking charters, but the states still did exercise significant restrictions on the banks. Two major ones. One, the banks could not quote unquote branch.

So it was like one bank, one building, and a neighborhood, right? And, you know, that's it. They would lend to farmers in Montana, and that was it. So there was no geographic diversification, so of course they were fragile. And the bank's lack of branching meant that it was harder to clear the notes because you couldn't have a branch in New York and California and Idaho and Texas, right? So it was much harder to have a clearinghouse effect, right?

Also, the states stuffed the banks full of their own inferior debt basically. They force the banks to hold their kind of garbage notes. And so the banks were losing money all the time. So they're super fragile. They're going out of business. And so now the discounts. Like so, okay, some of the notes would trade a discount because there's a cost associated

with redeeming a note on a geographic basis, right? So like if you have a bank and, you know, a high. and you try and redeem the note, New York is like an actual real cost associated with, you know, taking the wagon, whatever it was. I guess they'd railroads in that time, maybe. You know, there's a cost. So then, of course, it's expressed in a bit of a discount. So obviously none of that applies to stable coins at all. Like none of those features.

And so just to close up, the U.S. is not Antiballin for banking. not considered an instance of true free banking. You go look at the Scottish experience from 1715 to 1844. You can look at the Canadian experience, like the Swedish experience, Swiss. It was actually about two dozen historical episodes where those restrictions were not present and they worked very, very well. They were stable. They were not wildcap banks. Market force has held the banks in check. If one bank overissued liabilities, that was the real risk. banks would redeem the liabilities for the species and drain the reserves of the bank. It's like a competitive dynamic.

They're also clearing houses in Scotland, for instance. There is central clearing. Actually, there was clearing in one part of the U.S., and that's where the free banking system worked the best. It was in New England. Is that right? The Suffolk system is a very functional and effective clearinghouse. So places where basically the banks would mutually accept each other's notes, right?

then there were no discounts, right? The banks trusted each other. They knew the notes were worth a dollar. So when you had clearing and when the banks could communicate with each other as opposed to being like siloed across great distances, then the whole system worked great. The Scottish examples, you know, it's really puzzling that the FT talks about the US.

Like the Financial Times is a British publication. Are they really unaware of Scottish free banking? How could they be unaware? So I don't know. That's a lot. But yeah, basically their characterization of history is erroneous. Free banking is generally pretty successful unless the state itself gets involved and it's not free banking. And also, the reason free banks were bad, none of those things are present.

Those are not the case with stable coins. Doesn't it feel so much better to be having this conversation after the genius bill has already been signed into law? So you can have these dumb opinions if you want, but we're no longer. worried that that's going to influence the vote. Yeah, it's nice. Also, the genius changes the debate because the banks, or rather stable coins, are regulated federally. They are secure. We know what's in them. They're audited. I mean, genius hasn't actually been put into practice, but, you know, basically. So, and the other thing I'll say is, like, people compare them to money, which is like a little bit more accurate as a comparison.

Answer me this. How many money market funds holding just treasuries have ever broken the buck or been in distress? It's never happened. I think the only commercial paper is what gets those guys in trouble. Yeah. So the reserve fund in 08, what got into trouble? They held layman debt. Okay.

Could a stable coin hold commercial paper of an investment bank? No. That's not allowed. So the thing that you're attacking stable coins for is saying, oh, well, like the money market funds have run into trouble. Yeah, when they were full of garbage. Right. Which under genius, stable coins are not allowed to hold. Do you hear this ice cream truck behind me?

Is that distracting to the podcast listener, do you think? I can't hear it at all. Why do you think there's a ice cream truck in a commercial district here? People are at work just going out and getting an ice cream? Yeah. I'm in downtown Boston. It's just like, is that something people do? is I hear the ice cream truck.

I leave my office and go get a like a blood pop or something. I feel like it had the desired effect because now you're aware of it. You're at least thinking about it. I mean, I just cut you off on a free banking dialogue because I'm pretty sure the listener is going to be able to hear this. No, we can't hear it. At least I can't. Anyways, I agree.

This is just a terrible, terrible piece. But at the end of the day, stable coins are a thing now. They're in law. So the thing is, I think the reason central bankers hate free banking so much is it shows that banking can work without a central bank, of course. It's an obvious reason. So they're never going to like praise free banking. But there's a robust literature out there.

You just got to read Larry White, George Saldron. Like people have written about it. Whenever they talk about stable coins and free banking, then they always say, well, and after the free banking era, we federalized the currency. And then everything was great. And then they say, well, we need CBDCs. actually once we banned stable coins, we're going to have CBDCs, everyone's going to be happy. And it really brings me joy that stable coins are here to stay. And they're not going to be able to do that, at least in the U.S.

No. It fills my heart with joy. All right. So that was talking free banking. So that was a good podcast. Check out the Galaxy Brains podcast. In Castle Island content, Wyatt sat down with Cyrus Shirazi of Haven, talking about tax and accounting, riveting topics on the Castle Island podcast.

we have we've we're like of all the podcasts out there we're like four standard deviations above the mean in terms of how much accounting we talk about we like that stuff a lot let's happen to the deals there are quite a few this week the first one up is an acquisition Q C-E-X they're a US registered derivatives exchanging clearinghouse they're required for 112 million by polymarket which will presumably allow polymarket to operate legally in the US then it's court. Yard, a tokenized collectibles platform. They raised $30 million from forerunner ventures, NEA, and Prelude. We have Poseidon. They're a decentralized data collection protocol. There raised $15 million from A16C crypto. Questflow is an AI agent network. They raised $6.5 million from Cyberfund, Delphi, and White Star Capital.

Then we have Iron Forge, a SolanaFocus infrastructure company. They're acquired by Sanctum, a liquid sticking protocol. Then it's DLABs, a blockchain game developer. there raised 5 million from hashed and Spartan Group. Gaia is a decentralized AI protocol. They raised 10 million from Suscohuna, Bight Trade Lab, and Marana Ventures. And the last one is free name,

which is a blockchain-based domain registrar. There raised 6.5 million from entre capital, polymorphic, blockchain founders fund, and others. Blockchain-based name registers. I've always been very intrigued by that category. There have been many. There may be too many, actually, because you never know if this is the one to go for.

Yeah, you kind of always have to go buy your handle, right? Yeah, so at this point, if you buy your handle on how, God knows how many, like now you have the same handle 15 different ways, and they're all obsolete, you know, because the new one's going to come along. Do you remember one name? Oh, yeah. I have my one name. I still have my one name.

I don't have the keys to it, but it's on the operant. I still have my one name. I don't think it's around anymore. right. Is there any way to resolve? I'm sure you could. I mean, it was all open source, right? Name coin, or name coin? Yeah, wasn't one name built on top of name coin initially for Bitcoin? Not sure. Name coin doesn't resolve, right? It doesn't, no, it doesn't resolve. Satoshi actually spoke about name coin, positive. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, people say Satoshi didn't acknowledge all coins, they're wrong. All right. So news this week, more stablecoin stuff. So the American Bankers

Association, the ABA, they sent an open letter to the OCC. They're urging the regulator to delay basically all these crypto companies that are going in and saying, we want to get the new license. They believe that there will be significant policy and legal questions as to whether the applicants proposed business plans involve fiduciary activities performed by a national banks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, they don't want competition. They call out circle, ripple, fidelity. I think BigGo has a charter application out there.

So, you know, ABA is a real trade group. This will be taken seriously, I'm sure. But it just reeks of an incumbent that does not want competition. Yeah, I don't fully understand the thrust of their arguments. But what I do understand is that they represent a cartel of credential. institutions. They don't want new entrance to the cartel. Makes sense. As the pro-market forces guys, I think we disagree with that.

Yeah, I think this is a last gasp here, but I hope it doesn't slow anything down. The OCC hasn't actually approved any of these yet. Yeah, if you look at the chart of new FDIC issue, insured commercial bank charters from 1990 to now, I actually made this for one of my articles. It's like 50 to 200 a year from 1990 to 2008, and then it's zero. Yeah. It's like single digit a year from 2008 onwards,

which is an absolute travesty, if you ask me. You know, it would be interesting is we haven't really had a conversation around the staffing at the OCC or the CFTC or the SEC for that matter. I'd be interested to see how many people took those dose. buyouts at these agencies because the OCC is going to be very busy now. I think the way this works is you apply, maybe get a conditional approval. I think they're supposed to have like a 120-day window to get back to you. They actually have enough human beings going through these things. Can they meet that deadline? And then if we get the market structure bill, some version of clarity

going through the Senate, I mean, CFTC is probably going to need some money to staff up, don't you think? Yeah, it's weird to say that we don't have enough resources. is devoted to financial regulation in this country because we definitely spend more on it than any other country on the planet. But yeah, you do need enough bodies in these places. I mean, I'm sure there's other ways to, there's probably agencies that are well overstaffed. But yeah, you wonder if there are enough people that actually are available to work on these applications. Godspeed on that. To other CEO, Pala Ardino, he announced the company's intention to launch a new US-based stable coin later this year following the passage of genius.

So Tether was at the White House, actually, for the signing of genius, which was very notable, I thought. Apollo got called out, right? And Trump thanked him. Yeah. So it's interesting. Tether under Genius is not really a lot. In three years, they would be phased out in their current form from U.S. intermediaries being

able to use them, right? So they wouldn't, right now they have this, I think it's the reg-ass exemption. They don't have that right? Reg-S exemption, so they can have a portion of the tethers are held by U.S. individuals, even if they don't serve the U.S. market directly. Under genius in three years' time, they would not be able to access the U.S. market at all. However, there's two ways for them to continue to access the U.S. market. One is create a U.S. version of tether, which they're saying they're going to do.

the other is under genius tether it could be determined that they're issued under a comparable sufficiently comparable jurisdiction as of right now it's el salvador so if el salvador passes some kind of legislation which presumably they can just do i mean i don't know if the opposition party

is a lot of power over there they could just pass some kind of like genius light and then treasury would have to determine that it's sufficiently similar to genius and it would be declared a regime of reasonable comparability, and then they could actually serve the U.S. That seems really far-fetched to me. Do you think that there's any way that would happen?

I think that's the likeliest outcome. You actually think that the U.S. would honor reciprocity to El Salvador? Why wouldn't everyone just go to El Salvador and then back their stable coins with Bitcoin and Treasury is the way, you know, Tether has? Tether is on a different level, you know? Yeah, they're building a skyscraper in San Salvador. I just, I don't question that they would get approved in El Salvador under a license. I just question whether or not the U.S. would honor reciprocity with a country like El Salvador

versus honoring reciprocity with like the U.K. or someone like that. I think there's the letter of the law and then there's the political reality. You know, I think the latter is what's going to drive that. well let's say that they don't go that path and they have two versions of tether the version as it exists today can't touch the u.s what does that actually mean so like i think it's a little problematic actually because like the thing that's good about tether is the liquidity so now you fragmented liquidity well maybe the two tethers can talk to each other but i don't know like it the reason why tether is good is not the case if there's two tethers and one is captive to the U.S.

Well, I would think that, you know, the international exchanges would continue to just have USDT, the liquidity. I don't see any reason why that wouldn't remain really strong. But my question is more on what does having a U.S. nexus actually mean? Because the treasuries are held at Canter, and that's in Manhattan. Yeah. I mean, the tether isn't able to operate under genius because they don't size. satisfy the requirements. Because they hold Bitcoin in the backing.

There's Bitcoin. I never fully understood that, actually. I think maybe we should have Powell on the show again. Yeah. What do you think? I do. I think we should. I mean, they probably do have enough treasuries.

They're well over collateralized. So maybe they can get to 100% collateralization with just the treasuries, but they also hold Bitcoin. They don't satisfy the lot of the law and genius in terms of the asset composition and the audit as well. And I guess, yeah, we should have palo on it because i think there's holding bitcoin at the corporate level versus within the stable coin but it's weird because if you go to tether their transparency page it does seem like

the bitcoin is held in reserve for the stable coin and there's also corporate assets which are not part of the reserve yeah so i always found that really confusing and hard to parse this is gold in there too but i can't tell the gold is backing just the gold stable coin or it's the dollar stable coin too elsewhere in sort of stablecoin market structure here anchorage which does have an oCC bank charter they're launching a new stablecoin issuance platform so doing this for others it looks like the first product they're releasing is called us d t u sddb which is in partnership with athena so this will be they're saying it's going to make it the first u.s issued stablecoin under the genus act compliance yeah talk about offshore stablecoins

coming onshore and complying with a genius. That's what Athena is doing here. That was quick, huh? I mean, that was, what, four days. Anchorage, which got that license in the charter in 2021, that thing is worth its weight and goal. I mean, it doesn't weigh anything, but what an incredible coup that was to get it.

Yeah. There's in pole position now. A lot of credit to Nathan over at Anchorage for driving that process. Next up, we have Bicketts. Bitcoin a crypto, a crypto, a crypto custody provider, and Bullish at Crypto Exchange. They've both announced that they have confidentially filed S-1s this week with the intention of going public. Well, I guess this is not confidential because I read it. So it's not confidential. But so I guess that's a typo. But BitGo announced that they had confidentially filed an S-1, which I just find so funny. Because if you're announcing that you've confidentially filed, it's not confidential anymore. Yeah, this is sort of an abiding mystery on this show. Someone needs to explain this to me.

I get the idea of being confidential about it, but then if you come out and tell everyone about it, shouldn't the confidentiality go away, then can't we read it? Yeah, your complaint has been noted. We're going to continue to hear this, I'm sure, over the coming weeks. I mean, I guess this is a very minor complaint in the grand scheme of my complaints over the years against the SEC. Count me as very pacified in terms of what the SEC is doing.

Also in public markets, actually on the top of the SEC, Citadel Securities has written a response to the SEC's Crypto Task Force. They're expressing concern around the rise of tokenized securities. They're pointing at the potential for investor confusion and fragmented liquidity. So a lot of people on crypto Twitter jumped all over Citadel for this and said, hey, they're just worried that they're going to lose share, blah, blah, blah. I actually think Citadel brings a pretty good point here. I mean, you don't want a balkanized equity market for listed equities.

And I think they're probably looking at some of these tokenized SPVs and price discovery happening on the same asset under three or four different rubrics, tokenized SPVs with different structures, different legal incorporations. I actually think some centralization in the equity market is beneficial here. So I kind of agree with them, to be honest with you. Yeah, I think they're talking sense. I think tokenized securities only really work if they're tokenized from the get. They have been natively issued from the actual company.

From day one by the company, not by a third party. That doesn't work. In Figma's S1, they actually call out the fact that they have given themselves the ability to natively issue on a blockchain. I guess there's nothing stopping you saying the ledger of record for a security is a blockchain. I don't think so. I mean, you know, TBD on where they would actually take that out, though, publicly. I assume they're just going to do a traditional IPO process,

but giving themselves a flexibility to not go back and get a shareholder vote to amend a charter or something like that once they decide that blockchain is feasible for trading securities. That's pretty cool. I hope that becomes a standard part of these filings. Yeah, and they own a lot of the bitwise Bitcoin ETF, as we talked about, I think last week or the week before. So Figma really seems to be a big fan. So elsewhere in tokenization, Goldman and B&Y Mellon have partnered to launch tokenized money market funds for institutional investors, which will live on Goldman's blockchain platform. I guess is that a public blockchain?

I don't know. I mean, I know Goldman's involved in the Canton network, so maybe they're doing that or maybe their blockchain platform just refers to the centralized platform that they have that does the blockchain stuff over there, who knows?

It's unclear from the release. Senate Banking has released their discussion draft draft for market structural legislation, which builds on the House's passage of the Clarity Act. As far as second to all, it's quite different from clarity. So there is some reconciliation that needs to happen here. Yeah, this one's going to be a lot more complicated because Senate banking needs to weigh in,

and then Senate Ag committee is going to have to be a big part of this, and Senate Ag oversees the CFTC. So we're going to have to have a lot of discussions here in the Senate, and then we'll see what the final version looks like. If it's much different from clarity, then I guess this thing will have to get reconciled, right? They'll have to have the house involved again. Assuming it passes, assuming you got 60 votes in the Senate. Yeah, that's very much not certain as of right now. What do you make of strategies new preferred stock offering, STRC, or Strutch? So they initially planned for issuing 500 million of this security. It's reported today that they have upsized that to $2 billion. So what is this thing? It has a, it trades

at par, it has a 9% dividend. I don't know. I didn't read all the ducks. I can't become an expert on all these strategy instruments. Yeah, I don't want to become someone that pays a lot of attention to the various strategy offerings. So stretch is an instrument. It's designed to trade at $100.

And there's a dividend of 9%, which is meant to induce you to, that I guess to trade I don't want to say at par it's not really a par at the desired strike price and I think the dividend goes up if it trades below and goes down if it trades above or something like that it's kind of like a perp it's meant to trade

a hundred bucks it's kind of ironic it's called it a stretch it's like it is definitely a stretch stretch I mean he's introducing securities that I've never seen before yeah I'm not going to say it's like Luna but it's a little bit like Luna

I don't know. I mean, all these things, he's pretty careful. It's not like he has a stopout here, right? Like he can convert a lot of these things to, he can convert a lot of the convertible debt into equity. These preferreds all have bells and whistles on them that are to micro-strategy's advantage. It feels like he's not going to be the first one to blow up,

I guess is what I'm saying. That is for sure. I mean, I came across one of these today called meme strategy. I don't even know if it's real or if it's just an elaborate joke. I think they're going to hold meme coins. So, yeah, we can confidently say micro strategy would not be the first to go down. I guess we'll go in a lot more detail on this, I think in a few weeks. We're actually writing something on it right now.

But as these longer till micro strategy clones and competitors start to trade at discounts where they inevitably will, I think the question is, does micro strategy just go buy them? Well, they got to pay out all the dividends, you know. That cash has got to come from somewhere. I don't think they'd pay cash, right? Why wouldn't, if you're a sailor and you can go buy a bag of Bitcoin at 80 cents on the dollar with your own equity, why wouldn't you do that? That actually makes sense. From a financial engineering perspective, if they're at a higher MNAV than a competitor and the competitor is distressed, you can use your stock to buy them.

I think that's what you'll see. So all of a sudden, micro strategy will end up owning, you know, diabetes, insulin pump company number three that is doing, you know, these things are all just like shells of not functioning companies or they don't actually have real businesses, but they say they do stuff. We didn't even, did we even talk about Robert Leshner's attempt, abortive attempt to take over, I think a liquor company or something? Yeah, you and I talked about it after we stopped recording last week. Yeah, that was, he was trying to do a kind of an access vehicle play, right? Well, like a community takeover. I mean, because he did it without the apparent assent of the company. They just bought a lot of the equity.

And then they had a poison pill, right? They just started printing shares. Yeah, I guess they're allowed to do that. It's a dirty game. So this penny stock thing? Yeah. Real dirty game. Yeah, how did all these penny stocks even get public?

It's crazy. it's never been a better time to be a penny stock guy you know it's a golden age of penny stock guys right now like there's a kind of guy out there that just like knows how to do penny stocks yeah that's not a skill set I possess

and I'm very I regret it bitterly like golden age for the penny stock guys of the world it's a dangerous game though it's a dangerous game yep so we are not going to cover all of the strategy companies. What do we call them? I call them Bitcoin access vehicles. Is there some

board for these things? I think you have to broaden it beyond Bitcoin because I mean, this week you had this company Game Square. They're going out and buying a bunch of NFTs. They bought a rare crypto punk. It was actually Robert Leshner's Cryptopunk for $5 million. That's in a public vehicle now. I think you call them digital asset access vehicles, publicly traded access vehicles. So there's like 30 more that, or not in the newsletter. I don't know. Should we try and do all of them?

Should we just have an episode where you just read them out? Yeah. There's got to be over 100 now, I think. It is a crowded trade. I'll tell you that. But there's more coins and there's more stock markets. Like we're going to be on the Lesotho stock market soon. That's one thing about this industry is that it has a never-ending ability

to just serve up more of something that is working. I was reading about the Bhutanese stock market the other day. Oh, yeah? There's like half a dozen stocks on it. It's like the happiest stock market in the world, right? Yeah. Yeah, you know, I was invited to Bhutan last year and I didn't go. And you can't actually go.

I cannot believe you didn't go. And I pass up the opportunity and most mornings I wake up and I regret it. That is the regret of a lifetime. But the king might invite you back. I really hope so. I hope he hasn't forgotten me. He gave me a bottle of Bhutanese whiskey, which I drank. It's gone.

Is it good? It was quite good. Yeah. I'm not like a connoisseur or anything. Bhutan did very well out of their Bitcoin trade. Yeah. Did I see some reporting that they had just moved some of their Bitcoin onto exchange? I hope they're not selling it.

I think they're selling. because reportedly they're raising salaries for civil servants based on their Bitcoin windfall. I mean, they were in Bitcoin. They mined a lot of it. They were in it for a while. Oh, yeah. They went up a lot. Now they're paying government employees more.

So I assume they're paying them. And I don't know. What's the currency? I don't know. Didn't they do a partnership with Bitmain? They have a bunch of hydro-powered Bitcoin mining there. It's like Bitcoin miners at the bottom of waterfalls or something. So the currency of Bhutan is the Nogaltrum, which is divided into 100 Chertum.

All right. Yeah. You got a shut out and wired this week, by the way. Yeah, it's always nice to get credit. You know, thank you wired for giving me credit. Not everyone does. We'll put that in the newsletter. The title of the article is the great crypto rebanking has begun.

So all of a sudden startups get bank accounts. It's great. Yeah, Crypto or Meow is actually one of our portcos there, featured heavily in this as well. Really nice article. Thank you, Wired. They didn't even ask me about it. They just wrote it.

I used to have a Wired subscription when I was a little. It was like a techie type of thing. I don't know if it still is. I don't even know if they still have the magazine. Wired's had some great Bitcoin coverage over the years. like very early Bitcoin days, very good coverage, I think. Do you still do physical magazines? No, I used to be obsessed.

I used to make them. I published physical magazines back in the day. I still like the physical magazines. I still get the Economist. I used to get National Geographic when I was a kid. That was a good one. My favorite was the New Yorker. Believe it or not, can you believe that?

I used to love reading the physical edition of the New Yorker, and then they became just completely insuffer. I used to, in high school I had, I think one of my, it was like AP history or something. I had to read the New York or maybe it was AP English. I don't know. The economist is still good, I would say. I like the economist a lot. It's good. I'd say the crypto coverage is a little spotty though. I mean, it's sometimes good, sometimes really bad. Yeah. All right. Well, we're going to point your attention to an article from our friends at Galaxy Research, Cryptop Policy under Trump, H.

1 2025 report. It's an overview of all the crypto policy changes. Spoiler alert. They're all good. Pretty awesome. All right. I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend.

And we will see you on Monday.