On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 08/13/21 (More Infra Bill Chaos, an emerging Bitcoin Bloc, the crypto lobby shows up) (EP.236)

Episode Date: August 13, 2021

Nic and Matt return for more deals and news of the week. In this episode:  Where we stand on the Senate infrastructure bill Is Bitcoin a bipartisan issue? What the prospects for the House to change the language in the infrastructure bill? The crypto lobby shows its teeth Why is Bitcoin rallying in the presence of this bill? What is Gensler cooking up for the crypto industry? The Economist publishes a pair of critical articles on Bitcoin Should stablecoins be regulated like banks What's Tether's leverage ratio? Is there a political Bitcoin bloc being formed? 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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link slash with them. That's on the brink. dot link slash with them. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Another busy regulatory week. It just feels like this is just all regulation all the time. I think there's going to be a lot of these in the coming weeks. The big story, of course, this language in the Senate, the last ditch effort to change it. We did not succeed in changing it. Well, we unfortunately went to air last week. So we're taping this on a Wednesday.

Last week we taped on a Thursday night, and then between the Thursday night taping and the Friday release, there's all sorts of news. So who knows what's going to happen now. But it actually seems like there's a little bit of a wall in the storm. maybe we won't have anything happening. Well, it was meant to be decided on Saturday, and it sort of just dragged on through the weekend. And we had all the amendments and the counter amendments, and then we had the new consolidated compromise amendment language.

And then that was summarily blocked by a single senator, and not because he objected to the language, because he kind of just wanted to get his own additional amendment through. And so he blocked this one because he didn't get his own language. So that's sort of where we are. It's crazy. So I guess let's let's talk about this before we hop into the deals of the week. And so why don't I just tee it up in terms of what has gone on here for those of you who've not been following this. So crypto has definitely gotten wrapped up into the Senate's $1 trillion infrastructure bill. And how this came about is that there's a what's called a pay for in the bill. So a way to

raise revenues in the bill. And so there's a provision where they're seeking to raise $28 billion by imposing IRS reporting rules on exchanges in a broad range of, quote, brokers. And so on the face of that, not too big of an issue, it's the definition of broker that really triggers the issues here. And so as currently written, this bill would define brokers very, very broadly. It could be people that are running nodes. It could be open source developers that are building smart contract platforms. It could really be all sorts of things, you know, lightning node operators. So that's sort of what happened. That was basically an 11th hour insert that didn't have consultation with the industry. And so not surprisingly, there was a range of reactions to this and the industry really mobilized.

What ended up happening was Senators Cynthia Lomas from Wyoming, Ron Wyden, who's a Democratic from Oregon and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, proposed a bipartisan amendment to basically narrow the term broker. And so that happened last week on Wednesday. That would have exempted protocol developers, validators, software and hardware wallet makers from this original reporting obligation. What happened after that was Senator Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio and Mark Warner, Democrat from Virginia, proposed a competing amendment that would have actually favored only proof of work-based protocols. And so that would not have included proof of stake, proof of, you know, all the other

consensus mechanisms. And effectively would have not been a technology neutral choice and also would not have included Lightning Network. And so this was definitely kind of a pick the winners versus the losers type of approach. Not surprisingly, the industry luckily mobilized really quickly. And so, you know, we were tweeting, you know, call your senator and get out there. with the emails and the calls. And so the advocacy groups really spun into action. Blockchain Association and Coin Center did a great job and got it to the point where on Monday, all six of the

senators had agreed to a last-minute compromise amendment that basically looked a lot like the Lummis Wyden and Toomey amendment. And so Portman had folded in. They'd gotten the White House on board with this. Yellen had come out in favor of it. And Chuck Schumer, this is the part where the parliamentary procedure is a little bit over my head. But Schumer basically said, we're not doing amendments unless they're 100% unanimous. And so this went to the floor for a vote. And Alabama's Richard Shelby, who's 87-year-old Republican from Alabama, who's not running again, tanked it, basically.

So he voted against it because he wanted his own $50 billion amendment in the deal for additional military spending. And he had come out later and said, you know, I actually liked the amendment. I just was not voting for any of them because I didn't get mine, basically. basically. So that's where we stand right now. So after all of that, we're back to the original horrible, unworkable language. And this is on its way to the house. The house is in recess right now. So the house will not be taking this up at least for another week here. So what a complete cluster. Yeah, I just love the attitude of Richard Shelby. I mean, dooming every amendment

because he didn't get his amendment. And it's incredible in a way. I mean, he's not even opposed to the amendment. It's obviously one of these things where, and he can't feel the pressure from this because he's 87 years old and he's not running again. And so, you know, you'll have to turn your sights on people that are in his camp that have influence over him

if you're really trying to push an agenda here and try to put some pressure on people. But he clearly doesn't care. I mean, he's retiring. And so that's the state of the, the U.S. political system right now, unfortunately. Yeah, and so in theory you get another bite of the apple in the House, but from my understanding, the House kind of intends to go up or down while in the House

is Democrat controlled. So it seems likely, and I think Pelosi has kind of messaged us, that they would just pass the bill without modification from the Senate, whereas in other billmaking procedures, you have parallel bills between the House and the Senate, and they both get changed and amended and then you have some sort of reconciliation. In this case, it appears that the bill is just going to be handed down by the Senate and then pass in the house. Although, I guess you were saying there's a bit of a wrinkle potentially where sort of the progressive faction might actually derail the bill in the house potentially. Yeah. And so I caveat all of this with, you know, defer to Jerry Brito, defer to the blockchain association and everyone should be

following Coin Center in the blockchain alliance, or blockchain association, rather, on Twitter and staying up on this in real time. My understanding is that the bill itself is running into some issues with the far left-leaning Democratic faction in the House around wanting additional dollars put to work. And so we'll see how the bill itself actually makes it through the House. The other thing to keep an eye on here is that obviously there's quite a few members of the house that are in the blockchain caucus and that would be in favor of putting in an amendment in the House side if that's possible. And we'll see where that goes. Now,

of course, we know that we have other people in the House like Stephen Lynch and Rashida Teleb, who are more than happy to put their name on bills like the Stable Coins, Our Securities Act, that they have clearly never read and don't understand and are very anti-crypto industry. And so there's, you know, there's some pretty antagonistic folks on that side of the aisle towards this cause as well. So we'll see where it ends up. You know, it's interesting. think the house actually probably has more pro-crypto members than the Senate does. Well, it's a bigger body, of course. But there seems to be kind of a strong sort of pro-Bitcoin element in the House. I mean, you've got Tom Emmer, Darren Soto, Bill Foster, Warren Davidson, David

Schweikert. There's a whole bunch of representatives that have already begun rallying in in making noise about this. So who knows? I mean, we'll get another shot here. Although my understanding really is, ultimately this will come down to IRS interpretation of the law. It's not a good place to be in, to be kind of exposed to the IRS's views,

but it could well be the case that they interpret it charitably, and they realize, oh, it is actually unworkable to require a software wallet developer to have a relationship with everyone that uses the open source wallet or it's unworkable for a minor or a proof work, a proof of stake validator to have a relationship with the entity whose transaction they're processing. So they may ultimately realize that this law has to be interpreted in a more favorable way. But it's not a good position to be in.

Yeah, it's not a great position to be in. I will say this has been a tremendous show of force for the crypto industry just as a organized body who can mobilize a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails to senators and to elected officials. And so coming out of this, I think the industry is a lot stronger. And there's a lot of people that are really fired up about this. And we're seeing this on crypto Twitter all day long here around folks talking about organizing political action committees and getting a lot more structured with the dialogue with Washington. So I think that's a huge net positive, not to mention the fact that, you know, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency has been the first thing.

out of a lot of senators' mouths for the past five days. And so if you told me that five years ago, I would have said, hey, we already won. They're not talking about banning cryptocurrencies here. They're talking about how innovative they are. Yeah, the mobilization has been incredibly impressive. Bitcoin's been rallying. You might wonder, okay, why is Bitcoin rallying if, you know, Bitcoin wallet manufacturers and miners are going to be subjected to potentially onerous rules. I think the reason is that the conversation has become fairly technocratic. And, you know, and a number of our most important policymakers are now highly educated on this matter.

Ted Cruz in particular kind of bursts onto the scene here with his own amendment and his own sort of monologue on this stuff. And this has caused a bunch of new senators to emerge and demonstrate a knowledge of this technology. And I think the ferocity of the crypto lobby in Washington really surprised people. I mean, this bill was 2,000 pages.

give or take, and it was five lines of tax relating to cryptocurrency that held it up. Not any of the other provisions. So this industry kind of announced itself. And even though we kind of lost this battle, I think a lot of investors are looking on the sidelines and saying, huh, well, this industry has figured out how to defend itself a little bit and the next fight and the next court challenge are probably going to win. Yeah, don't come at us. Yeah.

go to the courts and venture the Supreme Court, I really wouldn't be surprised to see the Supreme Court weighing on the definition of a broker. There's so much ambiguity here. This is a classic question where there's a new technology that requires new interpretation. And I think it would be really interesting to see if our Supreme Court acted as a check on Congress here. And so, you know, maybe we could also repeal the Bank Secrecy Act while we're at it, which unconstitutional. So I look forward to some of the judicial battles to come on this because clearly I think Congress is out of step with sort of natural law. And so, you know, I think it'll be really interesting to see it play out. I definitely agree. So more to come on this. We probably won't

have much on it in the next week. But once the House is back in session, we'll talk about it again. Why don't we move on to some deals of the week? So first deal of the week is a Castle Island portfolio company, Zabo, C-A-B-O, a crypto API company. They've been acquired by Coinbase. Huge congrats to Zabba and the team. I believe we invested in them in 2018, if I'm not misremembering. Great outcome for the team. And what Zaba does is effectively, kind of like a plaid for crypto. They stitch together accounts and on-chain information. They're sort of an account aggregator for different types of crypto accounts. Good outcome for them and a nice pickup by Coinbase.

Yeah, it's a great, great outcome there. And Coinbase team even more powerful now. So Zabo, congrats on that acquisition. Next one up is Pinto, is another Castle Island portfolio company. They're a crypto asset brokerage based out of Indonesia. We've had Jeff Sotayo on the podcast before the founder. They raised $35 million from Lightspeed, Alabama. Mita, Coinbase, blockchain.com, Castle Island Ventures, and others. So, congrats to the Pintu team.

Then we have helium. There, of course, the decentralized network that facilitates various types of transmission, Laura Wan, and then in the future, other internet networking protocols. Really interesting product with the nodes and, you know, this kind of quasi a form of mining whereby you transmit data and mine the tokens. There is $11 million in token cell led by Andreessen with participation from 10T, Ribut Capital, Alameda Research, and Multi-Coin. Did I tell you about my helium story the other day? So someone, it's, crypto has just taken over my life.

So someone told me that there's a massive helium shortage. And I said, oh, is that because, you know, the company, the hardware devices are, you know, are not out there. I saw they're backlogged with the company right now. And the person looked at me like they had no idea what I was talking about. They're like, no, like child balloons. Like you can't get them right now. Yeah, I mean, helium is helium, the element is a scarce commodity.

I think we're sort of gradually running out of it. Yeah. Well, apparently helium miners are also in pretty short supply. That's pretty funny. Now helium tokens, and I guess the question is, which is more deflationary helium tokens or the supply of helium itself? I think it's because the earth off gases helium, like it just escapes from the atmosphere, and so we're sort of running out. It's a real shame. In 20 years, we won't have party balloons anymore, I guess.

Next deal is another Castle Island company. So this is Talley. Tally is a leading defy governance focused company. So they raised $6 million. This was a round that was co-led by blockchain capital and placeholder. So congratulations to the Talley team. Then we have Falcon X, a crypto brokerage. They raised $210 million from Ultimiter Capital, Sapphire Ventures B Capital, and Tiger Management.

Next one up is NACG Network. This is an indexing protocol for blockchain data. They raised $8.8 million from Anamoka brands, CMS holdings, primitive ventures, and others. Then we have Horizon Labs, a blockchain privacy firm. They raise $7 million from kinetic DCG and Liberty City Ventures. Next is another acquisition. So Gemini has acquired Gesser, which is the decentralized predictions market platform. And lastly, we have Lekwality multi-chain wallet.

They raise $7 million from hashed, Galaxy, accomplice, and Coinbase. So we will, these are the deals through Wednesday. So we will update and put in any deals that happened between now and the taping next week. So those are the deals of the week. Another busy week. Just the deals keep on coming this summer. So there have been a number of settlements this week as well. This is the regulatory, maybe we should rebrand it. I don't know. But this podcast, all we do, it seems like as we talk about regulatory news. So first up, the SEC has settled with Polonics. I think we knew that was coming because we saw it in circles S1 filing in the fine print. Yes. So,

So there was a $10 million settlement between the SEC and Polonex to settle charges of arunding an unregistered securities exchange. They did not mention which assets in particular they were settling over. Or maybe they did, at least not in the press release. They didn't. And actually, Commissioner Perce released a public comment pointing out some of the issues with the order. And so among those issues is just, all right, so if you're Poloniacs in, you know,

and you think you need to become a license under the SEC, you want to go get an ATS. Good luck getting an ATS license because SEC and FINRA take those applications, they put them into a desk drawer, and then they forget about them forever. And that's basically the state of play for security tokens, and it has been for quite some time. And so it's sort of ridiculous to point out that, you know, you need to go get these ATS licenses if you just, you can't get them processed.

and there's no clarity from the SEC on the definition of a good control location under 15C3-3-3. And so how about a little clarity on that? And it was great to see Hester Perr's call out just the kind of the speaking out of both sides of the mouth that the SEC is doing on this issue. But, you know, of course, Poloniacs probably

had a bunch of unregistered securities offerings on the platform as the other side of this. So it's understandable that there's an action here, but which assets are we talking about? They didn't actually call them out. It would have been great to know, hey we're going after you because you had ripple on the platform or hey we're going up to you because clams is a security but like where's that detail yeah it's not very helpful i mean they went through

the trouble of doing the settlement and then the rest of us are kind of in the dark as to which was the offending token or maybe they were multiple so not that useful no it's not useful at all but if you know if your poloniac circle however this was you know settled it's you know of course you're going to settle because if your circle you want to go on with your life and you want to go public. And so, you know, it's just unfortunate that there's no clarity on this issue. It's kind of a wasted opportunity for the SEC. So also in SEC news, they charged and settled with a defy team called blockchain credit partners. They sold $30 million worth of tokens in and unregistered security is offering for a apparently crypto money market fund and had a very stiff disgorgement

penalty. So SEC has been busy. Hester Purse also commented on this on Twitter and said that this was a Dino project, decentralized in name only. And there's a lot of those. So maybe there'll be a few more of these settlements. Yeah, I like that. That's kind of the default, though, actually. Kind of reminds me of Angela Walsh's veil of decentralization, which if you haven't read it, she wrote that in a paper a couple years ago that I think is really, really excellent criticizing the language that people in the crypto industry use. Of course, Angela, pretty controversial in terms of some of her discussion

of miners as intermediaries, Davis' fiduciaries, but that particular concept from her, I think, is really compelling, veil of decentralization. Yeah. So maybe we'll see some more of these. Next one is a personnel move here.

So Brian Brooks, who was the former acting head of the OCC, who was the former chief legal officer at Coinbase, he has most currently been the CEO of Binance U.S. He'd been there for four months, and he resigned on Friday afternoon, citing kind of strategic direction disagreements. Kind of a head scratcher. Yeah, I mean, I suppose we're not going to speculate on this too much,

but one imagines that he saw something in the broader Binance organization that gave him pause, which may relate to our next news item. Yeah, I don't want to speculate too much, but sometimes when you see things that you don't like, it's sometimes you just got to find your next job. Yeah, so the next news item is Bitmax, of course. Yeah, and this sort of didn't really get discussed, but it is an enormous fine. So Bitmax, of course, the embattled crypto derivatives exchanged, has settled with CFTC and FinCN to the tune of up to 100,000. million. So it's an enormous, enormous fine. It seems like it has a lot to do with their prior weakness when it comes to KYC and user verification. Now apparently their user base is fully KYCed.

And so this is not, I suppose it's related, but it's distinct from the criminal charges that some of the BitMex leadership continues to face. What a staggering fine, huh? A hundred million dollars. That's probably like, like two days profits at their apex though. Well, yeah, I think the insurance fund could cover that on its own. But yeah, CFTC, and notable to see them included a kind of, I suppose it makes sense. BIMX, you know, is a derivatives exchange. And that's the CFTC's purview, of course, CFTC is a U.S. regulator.

So they must have figured out how they had standing in that situation. Yeah. Next one up is a hack. So Polly Network, which I was not familiar with, but this is a cross-chain bridge between Polygon, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain. You were telling me that this is built by the same team behind Neo and Ontology. This network was apparently hacked in an admin-key-related hack, and the hacker took possession of $600 million worth of crypto assets, mostly Ethereum, Binance, smart chain,

and Polygon. This is the, or BNB rather, not Binance Smart Chain. So this is kind of an ongoing development, and it looks like the hacker was identified by a security firm because his or her address was tied to an exchange address that had done KYC. And so under threat of exposure, it looks like the hacker is in the process of returning the funds, hasn't returned much of them yet. But what a wild situation this looks like. yeah I mean in dollar value at the time this is the largest hack ever and it's not your

classic admin key situation apparently there was sort of a god mode call possibility in the contract which took a bit of trickery to call but yes I mean ultimately all of the funds were effectively controlled by a single key which was sort of exploitable and so it's another lesson in the fragility of some of these defy systems. Hopefully, you know, the industry is able to learn from these events and develop sort of tools to be more robust, but there's still a long way to go. There's some really interesting narratives in this. I mean, one thing I keep noticing is, of course, Tether generally acts pretty quickly to freeze the redemption of the Tethers relating to these hacks. So this means that

tether is basically departing from being a bearer asset. And there's a distinct tether ledger, which is basically maintained by tether itself, which doesn't 100% map to the on-chain ledger. And so, you know, you could see this getting really complex as things go on, this you have ambiguity over what's a hack and, you know, what transactions showed or should oughtn't be processed. It's kind of reinserting a lot of subjectivity into the into the conversation. So surprised we haven't seen more discussion of that. The other odd thing has just been this on-chain dialogue between the hacker and the hackies and various people pointing things out to the hacker and the hacker tipping them. And then now it looks like the hacker is sort of

negotiating the terms of their surrender, which is just so, so fascinating. The fact that these hackers often leak information. And once they've done that, their incentive is to give a lot of the funds back. Yeah, I mean, if you have that hanging over your head, that someone's going to publish your name and identity, and that you stole $600 million, I think you would probably want to give that back pretty quickly.

But, you know, like, even if they give back 80% of it, I believe they've only given back $4 or $5 million, they've still, you know, committed theft. You know, so it's not like they're morally or leasing. legally absolved, you know, so I don't see how giving back the funds actually protects them that much. Yeah. Unless they give literally every penny back.

Another ongoing situation here. Next one up is there's news this week that PNC Bank, which is actually the fifth largest bank in the United States, that kind of surprised me. They've been growing like crazy. They are reportedly working with Coinbase on a cryptocurrency offering. So expect to see more banks. getting in the mix here, but that's great for P&C customers. And speaking of Coinbase, they had a very strong quarter, Q2.

They beat earnings. Transaction revenue came in at $1.9 billion, beating analyst estimates of $1.57 billion. So congrats to Coinbase. It's a real company with real revenues right there, that's for sure. Did you check out this story this week that Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC has responded to Elizabeth Warren's inquiry from a few weeks ago, and he's basically asking for increased ability to regulate the cryptocurrency industry. And so he wants effectively trading, lending, and D5 platforms to fall under the SEC,

and he wants new rules and guardrails giving the SEC the ability to do that. This is going to be an interesting development because you could see that, really stepping on the CFTC's footing in certain areas, particularly with assets that are not security. So it looks like a little bit of a land grab here. Yeah, and Gensler kind of message this in some of his commentary, I think last week where he suggested that he would want to triple the SEC's resources. I think it's going to be a difficult time for the subjects of his ire here,

whether that's unregistered securities, onshore exchanges, offshore exchanges, defy protocols. I think we're in for a tough run of it if he kind of gets the resources that he wants. Yeah, so that'll be an interesting one to keep an eye on. And obviously that comes against the backdrop of increased enforcement actions coming down the pipe here,

it sounds like, against some of these assets that may be securities. So the economists had a couple articles on cryptocurrency this week. that I got a kick out of was one called the disaster scenario. What if Bitcoin went to zero? And it was basically a thought experiment on what would happen if Bitcoin literally went to zero and where the points of leverage were in the market. And I got to tell you, I'm not that worried about Bitcoin going to zero.

Yeah, I mean, you know, what if the sun exploded, you know? Seriously. You know, bad things would happen. What if aliens landed on Earth? Maybe they're already here. Yeah, you know, so what if all the oxygen was sucked out of the atmosphere, you know? It would be bad. I mean, yeah, like the market would collapse.

Yeah, you know, stocks would sell off. The economist also wrote an article, why regulators should treat stibocons like banks. And they made some very curious points in there. I mean, some good points as well. You know, comparing them to money market funds, you know, talking about potential contagion. If, you know, stable coins had tons of redemptions and then that would cause selloffs in the underlying collateral, namely commercial paper, which would then spill over to, you know, the broader economy. commercial paper, of course, it's a pretty useful thing for a lot of firms. So that sort of makes sense, but we've almost never seen redemptions from stable coins.

Small redemptions have happened in the last month, kind of a trickle. We had some redemptions in, I think, late 2018. But generally, the flow of funds is into crypto because it is just more useful and convenient to hold your funds in stable coin format than it is to hold them in currency. commercial banks or something like that. And frankly, if you look at Tethers new disclosures, for instance, they actually became more granular with their disclosures. They talked about the maturity of the underlying instruments. They talked about the credit rating of some of the fixed income instruments. It's really, I don't want to sound blasé about it, but it's,

it doesn't sound, it doesn't seem like there would be a significant impairment if they actually tried to liquidate, you know, any share of that portfolio in order to honor redemption. So they have plenty of highly liquid instruments. And then the other weird thing that the economist said was that Tethers leverage was 3 to 1 because they didn't have, they weren't counting the parent organizations sort of balance sheet. And so they got that leverage ratio just by looking at the slight surplus of assets that, tether listed on its transparency website relative to the liabilities. So the figure is kind of a nonsense figure because it suggests that the parent organization has no ability to recapitalize the

system should there be losses in the portfolio, which it doesn't look like there would be any losses. I mean, because the assets themselves are not really that risky. So that leverage ratio figure is kind of doesn't make any sense. The interesting, thing though is that Circle did say they intend to become a bank for USCC rather. I think they see which way the wind is blowing here. It's not clear that they could

given the OCC's sort of change of heart but and also the fact that if you look at the applications of Avantian crack and financial they've apparently been stonewalled by their local I think they are both accountable to the Fed St. Louis

branch if I'm not getting that wrong or no Kansas City I think sorry and they have not received their Fed Master account. So it's not clear that stablecoin issuers are having success in becoming banks. Speaking of stablecoins, Christian Catalini and Jay Massari wrote an HBR piece called Stablecoins in the Future of Money. I'm worried that this might displace you in terms of the most downloaded cryptocurrency-related HBR article. May well be the case. I may well, that's, I'd be fine with that.

it's a good overview so we'll put that in our newsletter this week it's called stable coins in the future of money i noticed a lot of uh kind of crypto twitter personalities talking about public office uh with a kind of um a renewed sense of vigor uh given the sort of octogenarian dictatorship that we're dealing with right now i think i'm going to i put selkis up there i mean if he was if he was running i'd get behind that. Selkis certainly has talked about that. There's quite a few candidates running

in this next round that are overly pro-crypto. Blake Masters would be one example. I think people will be surprised. There'll be a lot of candidates that realize, wow, the Bitcoin owner demographic is like 40 to 50 million people in the U.S.

And they're all fired up, single-issue voters, A lot of them have disposable wealth that they can throw you a fundraiser too. I think we could see a realignment, a political realignment here. You know, a new big tent. Crypto block. It's crypto block. Yeah.

That could be it. So, you know, aspiring representatives, listen to what Americans are saying and doing. There's a lot of us out there, a lot of us own. Own Bitcoin, own crypto. Who wants to be a senator from Massachusetts? We got to identify that person and get them working on early. I don't know if our senators are ever going to. They seem like they're both going to stick around for a very long time here.

Well, not if we have the crypto block in place. Then they'll be gone by the, you know, at the next election. So we will see. But my prediction would be there would be a number of, especially where our representatives elected in 2022, I guess, is the next one. So soon that take explicitly pro-cryptoposition. So we will see. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

So I think that's a good place to leave it. We will be back next week with another episode of On the Brink. Have a safe and healthy weekend.