On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/30/21 (Shadowy super coders, Goldman's DeFi ETF, is TVL overrated?) (EP.233)

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Warren's shadowy super coders Was Digicash the first stablecoin? Is TVL overrated? Castle Island adds a new partner An anti crypto rider inserted into the Congress infrastructure bill Does taxation pay for government spending? Goldman applies for a 'DeFi ETF' Exxon looking at flare gas? China's crackdown on big tech Sponsor notes:  This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto. Eventus, the leading global provider of multi-asset class trade surveillance, transaction monitoring and market risk solutions. Its award-winning trade surveillance platform is easy to deploy, customize and operate. Eventus is proven in the most complex, high-volume and real-time environments and supports many of the industry's leading crypto exchanges including Coinbase, Gemini, ErisX and OSL. Find them at onthebrink.link/eventus

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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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentive Easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin.

Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. We're taping this late at night and you look like a shadowy crypto coder. Or what is it? A shadowy. Shadowy super coder. You look like a shadowy super coder right now. Yeah. Unaccountable technocrats run this system.

Unlike, you know, of course, the monetary system, which is run by unaccountable. shadowy and opaque, you know, PhDs. It's very different. Do you think a little Warren came up with that herself? Shadowy crypto coder. Super coder. Super coder. I mean.

It's like, how are we not selling T-shirts with that on it? A lot of people are selling them. Coin Center selling them. I don't know. It sounds cool though, right? I mean, I kind of, yeah, I like that. That's meant to be a pejorative, but we made it our, that's our thing now.

We've leaned into that. We've embraced it. Elizabeth Warren went on CNBC this week and said that public blockchains have their own inflation problems. And I think, you know, she might just really understand some of these inflation bugs. Do you think she was making a reference to the Verge, you know, five prefer cash function, script-based inflation acceleration exploit? I don't know. I was thinking she might be talking about the Zcash issue from a couple years ago or maybe the, you know, the Bitcoin issue where it was that Gavin Driesen's a little mishap there in 2011.

Do you think she knows about CVE 2010 5139? Yeah, that's why she said, you know, she's like, these public blockchain assets have their own inflation issue. She's deep in this stuff. Does she know about, yeah, value overflow incidents? Yes. Yes, she clearly does. it could have been well we've had a number of

inflation based CVEs over the years I mean some of these assets are just perpetually inflating I mean well that's true but they're inflating as kind of God intended like they're deliberately inflating that's the difference between the dollar which is inflating

out of control and you know Doge coin which is inflating but according to the schedule laid out not at inception actually. Dogecoin was fixed in supply and a bug introduced the inflation and then they kept the

inflation. Oh, little known fact. That, yeah, a little Dogecoin trivia right there. Dogecoin archaeologists over there. Yeah, not many of those around. But yeah, Liz Warren, maybe she's deep into this stuff, you know? Maybe she's

talking about rugpoles on pancake swap, you know? I don't know if I can do too many of those CNBC hits with her. I mean, And that was a tough one this week. Yeah, you know, Massachusetts is not covering itself in glory when it comes to policymakers, members of Congress. In fact, I would venture that we were in one of the worst states as far as tone of the top is concerned.

Yeah, it's not very friendly to the innovation that is happening in the crypto space. And it's odd because they preside over one of the biggest custodians, fidelity, the biggest American onshore stable coin issuer circle. The most effectively the number one institution as far as producing blockchain engineers, cryptographers is concerned, MIT, vibrant asset management industry. State Street is involved in this now.

And yet our local Congress people are pretty resolutely anti-crypto. It's a shame. You hate to see it. You hate to see it. Not to mention Castle Island Ventures. Castle Island Ventures, Premier Crypto Venture Fund. There's other venture funds around here that do crypto deals too.

Got to give them a little bit of credit. Yeah. Well, it was a busy week. Busy week of Castle Island content. You went on Bloomberg this week. Did a little quick take. Yeah, I did quick take. Trying to diversify.

I'm trying to get on Fox Business next, actually. I'm going to go ahead and publicly say that. Fox Business, please. bring me on. I'm trying to hit all of the major financial TV shows. Wow. That's the last one, I think. I mean,

what's left after that? Well, you got to do that, have you done the Pomp's, a big business show, Global Business Report? Have you done that yet? I mean,

it's only existed for like two weeks. I just have another chance. Have you done it? Does he even have guests on that show? Yeah, yeah, he had Win Alden on the other day. Well,

I can, I'm sure I can go. I mean, I don't know if that, you know, as much as Palm Show is great. I don't know if it's in the same league as, you know, prime time financial TV. Well, it's only been around for two weeks. Give it another couple weeks. I actually have been watching it. Yeah, it's good.

It's, I mean, it's a little shouty. It's a little shoddy, I must say. But I like the schick of having multiple pumps on there. Yeah, it's like five pumps. I wish I had like four large brothers that would just echo. in my talking points too. That would be great. That would be great. Yeah, it would be great. So Ria did the FtX podcast. That was a good one. I like the FtX podcast. I'm a frequent listener of the FtX podcast. Those guys put out some good content. And you interviewed Jeremy Lear,

one and only Jeremy Lear, on the SCB10X conference. That was a fun one. Jeremy Lear, I remember we brought Jeremy into Fidelity in either late 2014, early 2015, and he laid out the vision for sending fiat currencies on blockchain rails. And it was before, like, well before stable coins. We were talking about colored coins back then. So it's crazy to see how fast things have progressed in the circle world. So that was a fun discussion. We'll blink to that in our newsletter. Yeah, I mean, stable coins, you know,

Some people talk about Tether's the first stable coin, but arguably DigiCash was the first stable coin. Do you think? Well, it wasn't on a blockchain. So DigCash wasn't on a blockchain. I think the first... It was internet cash, you know, it was digital cash. What was the first stable coin on a blockchain? I want to say Tether, Omni was.

But it may have been something like NewBits. And if we were talking about the first white paper for a stable coin, I think MasterCoin, uh, 2013 had a mention of a stable coin in their white paper, even though I don't think, uh, they made it according to that design. Uh, Bit Shares, uh, had an early stable coin, which didn't work, BitUSD. I think that was a MakerDA style stable coin, uh, if I'm not mistaken. I think NewBits was a senior ad share style stable coin, which didn't work. and then Tether was the first one that worked.

So I looked into it. Tether had a, you know, if you're looking at the reserve composition question, like there's all these interesting questions about commercial paper and do they have, you know, are they exposed to Guangzhou Ever Grande? Are they exposed to Chinese commercial paper? So I looked into the drawdowns. Tether's max drawdown was in the 30% range in late 2018. So you have to look at.

look at free float supply. This is what people miss. And so that was material, but that was only when it was in the sort of a couple billion dollar range. Recently, Tether's has drawn down about a billion dollars, but that only represents single digits because the aggregate float is something like $60 billion. So if you want to start penetrating the reserves and get to the juicy stuff, which might not be that liquid, you're going to need to see bigger drawdown. So TBD. I forgot about that drawdown. It seems like that was a long time ago, but yeah,

2018, quite a day. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy how these things work. We write, we wrote our paper in summer 2020, right? Was it summer 2020? We wrote a paper. Summer 2020, yep. And the charts in our crypto dollar white paper

were like, something like $9, $10 billion, stable coins outstanding, literal 10x since then. It's just unbelievable since then. It's just absolutely taken off. And of course, DFI has grown significantly some of these international use cases

around just holding dollars as a savings technology. The need for that has become a lot more pronounced. There's a lot of things that are pushing that growth. So speaking of DFI, I'm going to go ahead and give a shout out to the coin metrics team.

They had a good piece on Total Value Locked. And Lucas, the head of network data, told me something pretty fun. he said each word in total value locked is misleading. It's not total, it's not value, and it's not locked. Correct, correct. And so according to them, and we'll see more reporting to come.

So TBD, most or all of the aggregators that are producing TVL figures are vastly overstating it because they're not accounting for a rehypification. The fact that you can create. reserves with with certain assets which themselves may not be the original collateral. So like LP shares in Uniswap can be used to create reserves or die, which is a derivative of eth, things like that. And so, you know, there's interesting concerns about leverage in the system which is hidden. And it seems a bit ironic to me because in theory, things are meant to be transparent in Defi and of course they're all on chain but then in practice you actually have to

disentangle all of these protocols that feed into each other if you want to really track the collateral turns out that's enormously difficult that's just super super difficult I mean because if you want to audit the collateral you know some of these protocols except virtually any form of collateral and so now you have to audit every other protocol that feeds into a different protocol which could be you know hundreds yeah and so it's just a very long maze of trying to trace back to the origin, the collateral. And so TVL, you know, tricky, tricky metric, I must say. Yeah, definitely.

So we'll put that in our newsletter as well. So check that coin metrics blog post. That was really good. In other news, we added a member of the Castle Island team. So Sean Judge has joined Castle Island Ventures as a partner. And follow him on Twitter. He's got a very meager Twitter following. Sean Judge, CIV.

Well, I mean, you know, some of the, the best venture capitalist don't have Twitter, right? So maybe you don't need it. Well, I mean, I'm not a big Twitter person, but I mean, that's true. So you sometimes ask me for advice on how to do Twitter. I ask you for advice all the time. I barely know how to use it. Yeah, so welcome, Sean. We're very, very, very, very excited. We've grown our fund staff by 150% since the start of the year. I mean, at this rate, it's like, what are we going to be by the end of the year? Black Rock. I don't want to say Black Rock. Vanguard. You know, big. Coming for you.

So the franchise is growing. Expect us, you know, more deals in flight. And we're very excited. And maybe we'll get Sean on the podcast, too. We'll invite him on. He's a fan of the pod. So I'm sure he's listening. So there are some monster deals this week, too. Let's get into some deals. So Fireblocks, which is the crypto asset. at MPC custody platform, there raised $310 million in a series D funding from Sequoia, Strikes, Spark, Cotoo, and DRW. Just a big raise.

And fireblocks up to so many interesting things these days, becoming quite a platform. And I believe working on some big initiatives with some big U.S. banks as well. So hopefully more to come on that front. Just a huge, huge raise. And fireblocks, of course, beloved custodian. and crypto platform. Next up we have Eco, which is, I guess I would describe it as a crypto-native neobank. They raised $60 million from El Catterton, ActiveVent, Andresen, Lightspeed, and Valor, equity partners, among others.

Next one up is Genesis Digital Assets. This is a Bitcoin mining company. They raised $125 million from Kingsway Capital. Then we have Prime Trust, the crypto custody firm. They raise $64 million in a series A from Mercado partners nationwide, Samsung Next, Kranken, Krakken, and Seven Peaks Venturers. Next is by economy. This is a blockchain relayer network. There is $9 million from Mechanism Capital, Coinbase, Whobe, and Coin Fund.

Some just huge deals this week. Sabre Labs, stable coin exchange built on Solana, raised $7.7 million from raised capital, social capital, jump capital, multi-coin, and Solana Foundation. Next is Stronghold Digital Mining. This is not surprisingly a Bitcoin mining company. They're filed for a $100 million IPO. Then we have Alchemy NFT, a non-fundable token platform, raise $6 million from Mark Cuban, framework, mechanism, capital, and others.

Galaxy's Vision Hill Fund. This is the new fund, Scott Army and Kruh, who have now joined Galaxy. they closed their first venture capital fund of funds with 33.75 million commitments. Congrats to the Galaxy Vision Hill team. And then we evolved with a D, formerly known as Bank of Hoddlers, Singapore-based crypto brokerage. They raised $25 million from Valar Ventures, Pantara, Coinbase, Coin shares, CMT Digital, Gumi Cryptos and Robot Ventures. Next is Fabric Ventures.

This is a London-based crypto asset blockchain fund. They closed a $130 million fund. Congrats to the Fabric Team. And then we have a sense of assets, a DFI fund. They also close $130 million fund. So, wow, what a week for accountable allocation. The deals just keep on coming. Flying in.

What bear market? What bear market? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of shadowy coders out there. The super coders can't be stopped. Well, we got all sorts of regulatory stuff going on this week. So why don't we actually start it off? So this infrastructure bill that looks like it's going to pass in some form, the latest draft of this thing as of a few, I guess it was 12 hours ago,

the latest draft of the infrastructure bill has some language in there that is seeking to raise $28 billion from the crypto industry, basically, by increasing the tax reporting requirements on basically everyone in the market. And all of these industry groups that are fighting on our behalf here, Blockchain Association, Digital Chamber of Commerce, Coin Center have all started to push back on this because it actually, the way it's worded makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It would impose reporting requirements, not just on cryptocurrency exchanges and brokerages, but basically if you read the language, it would impose these things on basically everyone. So if you're an open source software

developer, you'd be folded into this regime. And it's just a completely unworkable type of bill. Now, unfortunately, it's attached to a much, much larger bill that is probably thousands of pages long. So I just don't know what the process is going to be to get this removed. Yeah, this was kind of a sunset provision. I mean, it got snuck in at the 11th hour into a bill that had already been negotiated and actually had formerly been at an impasse. and then you had certain senators that, you know, effectively decided to support the bill. So there's been a big negotiation already over this infrastructure bill.

And this rider got snuck in at the last moment. And it's not good. I mean, it defines, it takes a very broad view of what effectively a broker is, if I'm not misreading it, and imposes kind of disclosure obligations on them. The language I'm looking at says any person who, for consideration, regularly provides any service or application, even if non-custodial, to facilitate transfers of digital assets, including any decentralized exchange or peer-to-peer marketplace, and it imposes obligations reporting requirements on those entities.

Now, how as a wallet developer you are going to be able to report on the users of your wallet, you know, that just doesn't make sense. Like we're talking about software developers and millions of users that they obviously don't, you know, have a relationship with. We're talking about open source software much of the time, you know, even if non-custodial is in parentheses there. So deeply, deeply perturbing situation, it looks like we're on a very short timeline here, a matter of days, to get this language modified to something that makes sense. But this is unfortunately how the government works. It doesn't seem very democratic to me, I must say. It doesn't seem very democratic. The other thing, you know, the idea that there's $28 billion of taxes to pull out of this system seems like a strong.

stretch to me. I mean, this entire market is about 1.5 trillion in total market cap if you just take the naive coin market cap view. So to suggest that you'd be able to yank that much out is just perplexing to me. And also we're seeing language. It's very curious to me. We're seeing language about raising taxes to pay for the infrastructure, but we haven't been in a world where we pay for things with taxes in a long, long time. No, you put money for that stuff. Come on. Right.

I mean, so MMT has been normalized in Washington. There's no question about it. Just people haven't acknowledged it. But yeah, the current regime is an MMT regime. No question. The Fed monetizes the deficit. That pays for government spending the deficits 15%. You know, last time we had deficits that big was World War II.

So there's no chance of breaking even at a any point and there's no intention to under the current sort of monetary orthodoxy. And so that's that's fine, you know, like, okay, we'll see, we'll see how that experiment plays out. But then if you pair that, so under MMT, taxes are not to raise money. They, for the government to finance spending, MMT explicitly rejects that. Taxes are to destroy money and take it out of circulation to stop inflation, which is the real constraint on a spending inflation and taxes under the MMT doctrine are also to achieve desirable social outcomes so to you know redress inequality and things like that but you know the weird thing is the

government has you know been captured by this MMT dogma but we still hear this obsolete notion of you know we have to raise money to pay for our spending through taxes even though everybody knows that taxes don't finance the government. The government is financed through the issuance of new dollars by the Fed. I think not everybody knows. I think there's, you know, the wizard of odds type of thing going on here. So yeah, some people might be laboring under the delusion that we're still under the old system, but make no mistake, we're on the new system. And so it's extremely duplicitous, in my view, to hear people justifying a tax on crypto. which is clearly being done to disempower the crypto industry to punish, you know,

crypto owners, crypto holders by saying we need this to raise money, especially if we're talking about fundamentally de minimis amounts, you know, whatever it is, less than $100 billion, like we're talking about the bill is in the trillions. You know, it's extremely disingenuous to say, you know, we need this windfall from the crypto industry through taxation to pay for the government's large us because everybody knows it's an unspoken secret now everybody knows that it's uh it's the minting of new dollars that pays uh that pays for this expenditure so i mean if they yeah and if they really wanted to raise money just sell sell so so few of satoshi's coins i mean you have them yeah uh that lab leak uh

Bitcoin Lab League hypothesis. Yeah. Possible. NSA has got those coins. There's someone to be said for that. That's a good hoard. I mean, that's, what's that worth today? $30 billion.

It's all about what it's going to be worth when we actually switch over and we leave the Fiat paradigm. Well, maybe that was the long game. I mean, is Bitcoin a monetary virus that escaped from the lab? is the NSA playing the long, long game here? They knew that the dollar system wouldn't last. They had to make the new system. Makes you think. Yeah, it's as good as theory as any at this point.

Makes you think. Well, there's some other regulatory news. So Don Byer, who's a representative, he's a Democrat out of Virginia. He introduced a piece of legislation this week. Who knows if this has any legs, but it's called Digital Asset Market Structure and Investor Protection Act. And it's effectively looking, from what I can tell, looking to bring a bunch of things that exist in equity markets to the crypto markets.

So this would involve creating a digital asset trade repository. So that would record every transaction that's happening on Central Limit Order Book exchanges. It would also define digital assets as monetary instruments under the Bank Secrecy Act. And, you know, who knows if this has legs, but it's probably in the theme of, you know, regulatory environment that starts to professionalize some of this infrastructure over time. I think we'll see more and more of this, whether it's this bill or others. I think you'll see things that exist in equity in fixed income markets coming to crypto markets.

I keep waiting for the equivalent of a new 40 Act type thing, you know, written for crypto assets, which defines, you know, the disclosure requirements of token issuers or something like that. Yeah, but I've never seen anything like that, frankly. I guess we had the Token Taxonomy Act back in the day. That was kind of an early attempt. We'll have some of that, but we need to figure out what is, you know, what is the EBITDA of crypto? I mean, we still don't even really know how to think about appraising these things from a valuation standpoint. Not that that's a requisite to get some of this regulatory stuff in place, but a lot of stuff that's evolving.

Yeah, that's true. We have to determine what they are. We have to properly taxonomize them and find out what the metrics are. What are the metrics? So some really exciting news. Just get ready for this. Goldman Sachs is doing a defy ETF. And it's awesome.

I'm going to read you some of the names. This defy ETF has got a couple names in it. It's got Nokia, Facebook. alphabet Accenture IBM Siemens Sony overstock Lenovo bydo that's a hell of an index I gave expecting you to say yeah you know uniswap or Avae no no no no sushi swap or something like that maybe this is a this is a big time this is a defy ETF defy ATF. What does Defy mean to them exactly? Decentralized finance. Yeah. Well, if you kind of squint hard enough, I guess Facebook is defy. A very generous reading of the word. I mean, if you,

if this thing gets approved, you just type in defy ETF in your retail brokerage account. You can be buying that. It's great marketing. Don't hate the player. Don't hate the player. That's That ETF is going to be approved before the Bitcoin ETF. Yeah. The defy ETF. Got overstock, you got Facebook. It's all it's decentralized finance. So Caruso Energy, which is probably the biggest flared gas miner out there, Bloomberg reports that they are looking to raise over $100 million in debt right now.

So it's got to be a good time to be doing some of this renewable stranded energy as a lot of capacity is. a lot of capacities leaving China. So exciting to see there. I'm going to on that topic, well, this podcast will be out at 6 a.m. tomorrow at 9 a.m. tomorrow, 9.30 a.m. Eastern. Exxon's Q2 earnings come out. And there's a chance. I don't know.

There's a chance they talk about clear gas mining. We'll see. Stay tuned. Well, keep an eye on that. Keep an eye on that. So the U.S. Marshal Service, they've selected anchorage for a custody provider for their seized cryptocurrencies. So that's all, that kind of makes a ton of sense to me. I mean, in the early days, the Marshall Service was, you know, seizing these assets onto, you know, hardware wallets and all sorts of janky setup.

So it just makes sense that they're going to go with a full-blown custody provider. The US Marshals also auctioned one of the most unique pieces, I think we've seen in some time, which was the Wutang Clan one-of-one single edition album that Martin Shirelli. Martin Shurrelli had bought once upon a time in Shaolin, and he forfeited that to pay some disgorgement. And they auctioned it off two days ago. And it's now changed hands, I believe. Wow. I did not know that.

It's a physical NFT. Now, would you rather have that or the Silk Road Bitcoins, I guess is the question. I mean, probably the Silk Road Bitcoins. They're worth a little bit more. Yeah, it's not close. Those are the cleanest Bitcoins in the world, too. Yeah. Polished up by the government themselves.

So we have some more kind of regulatory stuff. So the National Credit Union Administration, the NCUA, that just rolls off the tongue. They published an RFI that's a request for information on crypto assets and DLT technology. So this is basically the administration that oversees 125 million credit unions. And it's a lot smaller, obviously, than the OCC or one of these bank regulators. but nonetheless, it's a regulator of consequence. And if you think about the distribution of just banking services, a lot of people are in these credit union relationships.

And so the fact that they're seeking to engage with the industry seems like a really positive development, especially since you have the likes of Nidig and Coinbase pushing into that channel with some technology that just makes it easier to buy and sell crypto assets on those platforms. Not strictly the most thrilling news of the week, but probably some of the most overlooked news of the week for sure. Yeah, and put in a comment.

I mean, if you want to be heard on these issues, put in a comment. And, you know, the more comments you have early when these regulators are trying to understand things, the lower the chances that you get called up, you know, shadowy whatever by Elizabeth Warren. So here's something that we haven't really. talked about. China is kind of

nuking their technology sector. They've aggressively cracked down on a ton of big tech firms from Tencent to Alibaba to DD. It's been a very aggressive few weeks. They're kind of

reasserting themselves relative to these tech firms. What do you make of this? It's hard to know. what to make of it honestly. I mean, there's certainly causing a lot of turbulence in the markets. You know, clearly there's been some questions around cybersecurity and whether or not some of these moves are motivated by just knowledge of some vulnerabilities in some of these platforms. So that's one angle. Certainly that's not the full story. I don't know. Being an entrepreneur in China right now is really difficult from the outside looking in. It looks like a tough place to be an entrepreneur. Yeah, there's kind of like a ceiling on your ability to succeed as a tech entrepreneur, as tech

founder. I've seen some interesting takes saying that most of these platforms, the effectively big tech platforms analogous to Facebook and Amazon, Uber, things like that, you know, the Chinese analogies to those, they were perceived as not innovating, but extracting rent, you know, through ownership of users and, you know, trapping them in a silo and effectively moving from innovation to rent extraction. And, you know, that was, you know, seen as, as, you know, stultifying, you know, status quo. And it was just seen as, you know, not like an environment that's conducive to innovation, which I'm pretty sympathetic to that view, actually.

Now, of course, is, you know, blatantly disregarding property rights by, you know, crushing these companies. Is that the best way forward? Probably not. but it does make me wonder a little bit about the U.S. and, you know, these tech platforms that, you know, themselves challenge the state for sovereignty. They're their own kind of sovereign systems on a sort of maybe even equal footing with the state itself. What is the American resolution? I mean, clearly we're not going to do the same thing. We might have some antitrust. That would take much longer and, you know, follow the rule of law and things like that.

what is the American response to these gigantic data monopolies, you know, taking control and extracting enormous rents from society? You know, it's harder to say in the United States because every four years you have the opportunity to throw out the government. And, you know, it tends to be stuck within a certain Overton window, so to speak. And so extreme moves on one end to the other you don't see as often. So it's hard to say. It's a great point, though. I mean, Clearly the data monopolies from the perspective of just antitrust and competitive behavior is something that will be in the crosshairs that imagine for the next few years here. It's not clear to me that antitrust will be successful in defanging any of these entities. I used to be optimistic about it less so now.

That said, I do think that the American reaction should be one of simply encouraging innovation, people to build systems that compete with these closed data silos. And that's, of course, what some people refer to as the Dweb, Web3, things like that. That seems like a healthier way to resolve this clearly untenable situation. But China kind of took an easy way out by just smashing these platforms. But yeah, it'll be an interesting one to track. I think that's a good place to leave it. We have an exciting podcast on Monday. Yeah, it's not a secret.

I finally got the chance to sit down with George Selgin, one of my heroes. It was a really, really, really fantastic episode. We did talk about free banking. Fear not. That's, of course, what he's known for. But mostly we talked about this Gorton and Zhang paper, which has been the cause of much gnashing of teeth amongst, you know, monetary historians.

and also myself, who is not a monetary historian, but equally aggrieved. And so I commiserated with George over this paper that took a very selective reading of history from our free banking perspective. I can't wait to hear this. So that'll be an exciting one. Hope everyone has a great weekend, and we will see you on Monday.