On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 08/28/26 (BankChain alliance, Goat grazing hedges, SHRINCS, is maximalism over?) (EP.736)

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Matt and Nic return for another week of deals and news. In this episode:  Matt and Nic consider candidates for the new bad boys intro music 39 state banking associations form the BankChain alliance Blockstream researchers proposed SHRINCS, a PQ signature scheme for Bitcoin How much should depositors care about bank credit risk? Kalshi hosts a prediction market on goat grazing regulation Are trading bot agents getting good? Blockstream proposes SHRINCS for Bitcoin Zcash hits an 8-year high Treasury designates anyone helping Iran's crypto sector AI watermarking Bad boys theme song submissions: Ian's song Seth's song Content mentioned: Omid Malekan, The banking lobby's bad faith campaign to kill the Clarity Act will backfire Nic Carter, A Second and Final Eulogy for Bitcoin Maximalism  

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, AI, IG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is a sleek. 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. So like I said, we've gotten some people really like the bad boys. and we mentioned that we had some copyright issues on all of the podcasts that we had the bad boys theme song on which I mean that was a lot how many do you figure that was had to been at least 20 that was a pretty active time in our history yeah I mean there was a time when the bad boys were really running riot so unfortunately if you live in certain countries you can't listen to those

episodes on YouTube because we were copyright infringing and so we put out a call for kind of a mix-up and we got a bunch of responses I mean, I think it's probably fair use of the clip, don't you think? I would have thought so. I think there must be some jurisdictional thing. I think we're banned in all of Eastern Europe for those episodes. Well, two, at least two of our listeners have submitted alternative theme songs for the bad boys. I think we should just play them and we'll just see who wins.

So listener Seth is option number one here. I thought it was very good and very comprehensive, actually. I thought that was quite good. I actually might put that on when I go out for runs and stuff like that. I thought that was excellent. The production was good. I guess this is made with Suno, not to spoil it. I had never heard of Suno before, but...

Oh, really? I've used Suno to make... Music is one of those things that AI did an amazing job with. Yeah, that was quite impressive. And it's a long one. Maybe we'll put the link to the full thing, but we didn't have like three minutes to spare here. Yeah, I mean, he was talking about Lazarus, Hocktua,

not just the bad boys you'd expect to hear about. I mean, it's really a lot. All right. Should we play number two here? All right. This one comes from listener Ian. You have been out there, been a bad boy. Belly, Belly, Billy, Billy.

You have been a belly by more. Billy, really, bow. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. I don't know what happened there. I, uh, I, I, I liked it. I liked it.

No, it was good. It was just, I mean, I, I, I don't know if he made that with AI or just, saying it himself. I thought it was, I mean, hey, look, it's in the finalist. I mean, you make it all the way. We appreciate the effort. We do. We undoubtedly appreciate the effort and the submission.

So I don't know. I think we'll see what the listeners think. We'll put that out to a vote. Option number one, listener Seth, and option number two, listener Ian. Just let us know what you think. And I think with the winning, the winner here is probably going to see a lot more airtime here if and when we have more bad boys in this industry which i don't know i figure that's probably going to happen at some point the next quarter or two yeah i mean we'll also consider late entries

here yes so we'll keep the competition running for a couple weeks but yeah if you win you actually get to make the bad boy segment and we're not going to have copyright issues right i don't think so i mean does suno have copyright issues or certainly i don't know ian might own that song so have you ever been to a restaurant or something they're playing all AI generated music no i've never never heard that you know you probably have you just probably don't even know it and is it just like cover songs and uh you know you might go to like a barbecue or something and they're playing like generic country music huh so you know sometimes it's like about the restaurant the lyrics no way no i've definitely never noticed anything you want yeah yeah so pay attention next time it seems a little

uncanny, listen carefully. And is that just to reduce the cost to the restaurant to pay for music? Yeah, I mean, I think it's like basically free, right? Very interesting. All right. So let's hop into the deals of the week. First one up is city protocol. This is an RWA tokenization platform.

They have raised $11 million from Dragonfly, CMT, and stratified capital. Next up is Oro. That's an AI trading platform. there is 3 million from MH Ventures, Maple Block Capital and others. And then it's entropy, a perps trading app for private companies. They have raised $14 million from Ribbitt Capital and others. Perps on privates is interesting, huh? It's going to become more and more of a pre-IPO tool, I think.

Yeah, that's kind of tricky, actually. I don't know how you do arbitrage there. So FACET is an on-chain bank. there was $68 million from SBI Group and others. Then Kalshi, they filed a Form D this week. I think it was just an extension to that $1 billion that they raised in April, a $200 million extension. But man, they are Calcian Polymarket really spending a lot of cash on customer acquisition.

Relayer capital was acquired by Rockaway X, a Crypto Venture Fund, and they will be rebranded to the RockawayX Liquid Opportunities Fund. right where to start this week bunch of stuff going on you want to talk about the bank chain alliance yes this is pretty interesting so 39 state banking associations to form something called the bank chain alliance that it appears to be a industry owned blockchain i think aiming to do both tokenized deposits and stable coins is that right that's what it says i would have to imagine that they're going to try to lean into tokenized deposits and make those a thing, which let's just be clear about this.

tokenized deposits are not going to be a thing relative to stable coins. I think you're going to see a lot of banks that have tokenized deposits, but they just ought not be fungible. We've talked about this before on the podcast, but why would a Deutsche Bank deposit trade at the same parity as a JP Morgan deposit? There's some inherent credit risk here to the deposits. And so I just don't think that this is a product anyone wants. I don't know if I agree with that.

actually. Why? If you have money above the FTIC threshold in either one of those institutions, it's theoretically also exposed to credit risk, right? Well, it's fungible up to FDIC for U.S. banks. But if you want this to be like stable coin scale in terms of people using this for remittances and just massive volumes, you're going to be over the FDIC limit, at which point you have to look through to the credit risk of the bank. No, I agree. But I'm just saying de facto, no one actually cares about that unless it's a crisis situation, right? Yeah, I'm fair enough, but you care about it when your bank is being, you're going out of business. And that happens every couple years, right? That's like once, I don't know, so it happened in 2003 and then before that happened in 2008

and then before that happened in the 90s. So you're just going to bank on a bailout? Wouldn't you rather have your money in U.S. Treasuries? Yeah, you're banking on a bailout. Exactly. That's where the fungibility comes from. It comes from a bailout. I mean, is that going to be in the marketing collateral for the bank chain tokenized deposit program? It's like, hey, don't worry, guys. These are just like stable coins because the Fed will bail us all out. I think it's implied in the part of the name that is bank.

I think it's totally implied. Why take the risk? I mean, I just think like, you know, most of the time you don't have to worry about this. And then once every 10 years or so, 15 years. years, something terrible happens. But the rest of the time, you don't have to worry about it. I think it's like once a year, though, you have some smaller bank that does have an impairment on depositors.

We never hear about it because it's always some tiny bank in Nebraska. But, I mean, at scale, why would you use a tokenized deposit when you could use a stable coin? It just doesn't make a ton of sense. To me, this just looks like the bank's trying to scramble to be competitive and offering a product that serves them a lot better. Obviously, they want to grow their deposit. and I get why they're not explicitly doing this with stable coins, but I don't see it working.

And by the way, bank chain is already taken. Does anyone remember it pit bank chain? I mean, that was the original bank chain. I don't think anyone remembers it except for you and the Paxos people. Yeah, so this was probably 2015, 2016, where Itbit, the formerly, the former name of Paxos, they kicked off like a private blockchain project called the Itbit. bank chain. It's actually like very well thought out concept. I think it if launched today with partners could have been successful. But to much fanfare, they launched that. I remember I was sitting close to Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator. So the name, not original tokenized deposits, not viable,

but they did wave their hand at stable coins. So maybe they will do them. Well, if they do a stable one, then I think it's way more interesting. But I mean, if you're going to have tokenized deposits front and center there, you're probably not going to prioritize stable coins. So did you read Matt Levine's latest newsletter? No, that just came out, what, an hour ago? I haven't read it yet. Well, I don't remember when this one came out. But you know how we were talking about the ice cream hedge a couple of weeks back? Yeah. So I think it was a bet on the weather. And if it was really cold out, the bet would pay off, and then the ice cream shop would make back the lost profit from not selling ice cream. Yeah, I remember that. But it was like the tiniest hedge ever, and it was just really good marketing, I think.

There has been a new, unusual use of prediction markets to hedge a real world outcome. I mean, it has to do with goat grazing? So did you see this? No, I haven't seen that yet. All right. So this one's even weirder. but it's a good use for prediction market, sort of. Well, you tell me, you give me the verdict.

There is a rancher in California called Tim Eresmith. He runs company called Western Grazers. They employ, or I guess have 4,000 goats, and they eat the brush, the grasses and various plants. And it's for wildfire mitigation. So if you're a landowner, you know, bring Mr. Aerosmith on your land and the goats eat the brush and then it's less likely to catch on fire. Then California wanted to change the law around the wages for the goat herders. They wanted the goat herders to be paid every minute that they're out hurting. And I guess Western grazers wanted to pay them.

I don't know, not while they're sleeping kind of thing, if that makes sense. and in the end Western Grazers wanted to hedge the possibility of this adverse regulatory outcome where their business would become unviable because they'd have to pay the herders a lot more. Okay. And so I'm still with me on this.

I'm still with you, but I'm waiting to the point where we get to like a scaled category here that's going to be consequential. Oh, yeah, no. You're going to have to keep waiting for that. So Susquehanna priced this risk and Kalshi listed it. So the hedge would pay up to 500,000 of California. Changed the goat herder wage rules by the end of September.

Susquehanna priced it. Interesting. Yeah. But it got listed on Kelshi and then other people started trading it. Huh. That's interesting. So I think you can go trade the goat regulatory market, California, Which is interesting that it was listed on the public market, because this is the most bespoke hedge I've ever encountered in my entire life.

I mean, am I being too skeptical to say that Kalshi, Polymarket, a bunch of these market makers are all just looking for stories like this so they can get them out in the press and on Bloomberg so that people don't perceive these prediction markets to be all sports betting, which they basically are? Well, I mean, if the ice cream story is also in that same category. Yeah, they're making $20. Pudging $20.

I mean, it's like, what are we talking here? People are betting millions and millions of dollars on every single baseball game. I mean, it's a specific kind of bait that entraps Matt Levine and us. Yeah. I think those are the, he's the primary target or a secondary target of the bait. And it totally works. Yeah, of course. I mean, if you're in charge of Cal Street, you're going to have congressional hearings for the next five years

and you want to point to goat herding and ice cream futures or whatever, as opposed to, hey, we're. running an illegal sports book. Well, everybody wins. Kalshi gets to say that they're not just used for gambling.

We get to talk about something funny on this podcast when absolutely nothing happened in crypto. Yeah, that's true. This is true. I mean,

I think we're all winners here. God bless Matt Levine. And it does seem like he gets a lot of tips from his readers. He does. And why don't we get that many? We're getting one to two tips a week,

maybe. A lot of the Promethium stuff came through tips. I would welcome more tips. I want to achieve a Matt Levine level of tip saturation. Let's hop into a product launch this week that we were obviously a little bit close to is Bitwise, which we're an investor in that company. They launched automated token portfolios.

So this is rules-based baskets of tokenized stocks through Coinbase. They sit in the investor's own wallet. They automatically rebalance. They've launched with Mag 7 AI and robotics. themes. I think this is quite interesting. You can see how this wrapper would be a lot better than an ETF for certain types of customers. Totally. Yeah, very novative. And you know, I've started to hear about people just putting tokens in the hand of Grockbot or something too, so DIYing something adjacent to this. And it actually seems to work now. It does work. Actually, it was working for meme

coins a few months ago. I don't think we ever talked about it. But people have been really experimenting with that. And if it, if you can get it working for a meme coin and it's the same back end infrastructure as a tokenized stock. So I think this will probably continue to take off. I think, yeah. So I haven't trialled it myself, but a good friend of mine said he founded a portfolio and is working completely smoothly without using any super complex agent, you know, infrastructure. Yeah, that is quite interesting. So I were kind of at the point where people can give an in a rule for a portfolio and let it run. The GROC AI has really gotten a lot better

over the past few weeks. Have you noticed that? Yeah. Strategy has raised $2 billion selling MSTR shares. They did not buy Bitcoin again. They've carved out a new $1.6 billion pool. It calls USD cash. So that's different from USD Reserve. USD cash can be deployed anywhere, I guess, unlike USD Reserve, including buying back Bitcoin or common stock.

and their preferred securities have rallied. So I think STRC is almost back to parity. You got to tip your cap to sailor. I think we've tipped our cap to them the last four weeks probably. But to be able to sell $2 billion at the money again this week, it's just unbelievable. So the retail bid for micro strategy common equity

is very, very strong. Yeah. And he's been very much rewarded by the market resurgence. So here's some quantum news. blockstream researchers this week proposed Shrinks, which is the first quantum resistance signature scheme designed specifically for Bitcoin. The algorithm is derived from the standard NIST algorithm, Sphinx Plus that the researchers believe are too large. So they think the payload there is too big and it would limit the number of transactions that could fit in one block. What did you make of this?

Yeah, so Shrinks has been one of the dominant proposed signature. schemes for Bitcoin and I believe it's a derivative of something called sphinx I said that wrong yeah so well no no I mean shrinks is right because it started with sphinx and then they created shrinks there's a lot of puns involved here yes and so shrinks is a hash base signature scheme that's meant to make post quantum signatures work with Bitcoin there are some tradeoffs I would say with all hash base schemes especially shrinks in particular some implementation complexities.

If I had to guess, I think Bitcoin will go with hash-based signatures in the end for post-quantum because we already trust hashes. Basically, everyone trusts. Something really unusual would have to happen for hashes to not work anymore. And like thinking about it like this, actually, I heard this great analogy in Jackson. You could hash the Bible down to a 64-character string. but there's really no way to reverse engineer that, right? If I gave you a 64-kicketer,

you're never going to be able to reverse-engineer the Bible out of that, right? So thinking, you know, hash could be, like, reverse-engineered is kind of hard to believe. I mean, I guess it could be done, maybe. But because we generally trust hashes, we in the Bitcoin community, will likely end up going with this, I think. Whereas other blockchains, I believe, will use lattices, if I had to guess. And is that because lattices allow for more throughput in some of these other blockchains are selling themselves as high throughput blockchains?

Latuses are generally more fit for purpose, in my opinion, as long as you're, and smaller, as long as you are willing to accept a slight new risk, which is a new cryptographic schema, which isn't as battle-hardened as, you know, elliptic curves, for instance. Interesting. I mean, just getting to consensus on what the upgrade is going to be would, I mean, talk about that's just removing one of the final bosses here for Bitcoin, right? I mean, are there other pieces of fud that in the short term in the next 10 years are bigger than quantum? I don't think so. Security budget, but maybe not in the short term.

Yeah, I mean, I think so many investors are watching this. The first step is agreeing on a scheme. Maybe it'll be this. Jonas Nick is super respected. So I'm very excited about this. Then there's a matter of implementing it. And then there's the matter of doing the migration. So the battle's not won.

But this is very exciting to see. There's some other quantum news in the Monad, ecosystem. So Monad developers posted a protocol upgrade proposal this week designed to separate a wallet's addressed from being directly tied to the private keys that control it. And so this would have the impact on Monad, it looks like, of allowing for quantum resistant cryptography upgrades without actually having to move your funds, which would be obviously a much easier path forward. I think that's not available to Bitcoin, unfortunately. But I thought that was quite an interesting development. Yeah, reminds me of account abstraction. Yeah. Grayscale has launched the first Zcash

ETF converting their long-running Seacash Trust into a NICARC-listed fund. As Z-Cash hit, it's eight-year high. Wow. I mean, it's basically the all-time high for Zcash, right? Yeah, you know who's been on a heater lately as Tushar over at Multicoin? Isn't he, he's behind Z-cash and hyperliquid right now? Well, what do you mean behind like he's he's publicly holding positions he's publicly long those out of his hedge fund so i just checked and i would characterize this as an all-time high the only weird thing is that the you remember the way the zcash initial auction maybe it wasn't an auction but it's like they started with very slow mining was that it well it's just like a low float high fdv right they um and they debuted on poloniacs at some insane market cap yeah so the first print

was at a ridiculous unit price. So that's why this isn't technically counted as an all-time high, but it is really actually an all-time high. So it last peaked at $700 in early 2018, and as of today, it's $811. Eight years later. It's impressive. I mean, and they've had to climb a wall of worry,

a bunch of issues with the shielded pool historically. We're still not 100% sure what's going to happen with the shielded pool migration, right? I mean, yeah, talk about a blockchain that was kind of left. for dead and then a few people got behind it and their new development organizations and just new life was injected into this thing. It is impressive. The SEC took another step this week that I thought was interesting. It's in the vein of their rulemaking, which is kicking off here. So they sent a proposal to the White House that they wanted to upgrade crypto custody rules for

investment advisors. I think this, I mean, this is a positive development. I think custody has been something that is historically held back broker dealers and RIAs from participating in digital assets. And obviously under Gensler, there is a proposal, and I think it was 20, 23, to effectively just restrict custody for RIAs and BDs out of digital assets, which is just a backdoor way to try to kill the industry. So Atkins is responding here and thinking that we need some more clarification for broker dealers and RIAs specifically. So positive development. I mean, not one that got a ton of fanfare, but these are the types of plumbing clarifications that make it a lot easier for these bigger firms to do things in the digital asset space.

Did you notice on Monday that Bessent has formerly now designated digital assets, rather, as part of the Iranian sanctions umbrella? I did. Yeah, what did you make of that? It's kind of weird that they hadn't done this before. Yeah, I just, I figured they'd already done it, honestly. So they've broadened OFax authority. They said they can sanction anyone anywhere that is providing services to Iran's digital asset sector.

So we've known, obviously, for some time that, you know, exchanges and, you know, potentially stable coins and, you know, OGC dust and things like that, you know, there's been a very active trade in digital assets in Iran. And yeah, I'm surprised it took this long. I am, too. I don't know what it means for stable coins. I know some tether were frozen a while back, potentially related to Iran. Yeah, I was surprised at that. I mean, that obviously wasn't the biggest best news of the week.

He's been intervening in the bond market. And then he had Druckenmiller going after him with the AI-generated op-ed this week. Yeah, I mean, I understand the point. Some people say, well, if it's, your thoughts and then you just phrase it with AI, that's fine. But the thing is you can't tell, the reader can't tell. So you could have just said write an op-ed and that's it. Do you think Bessent asked him to do it? It's got to make people like Bessent more. Or to at least take a little bit of prep. Maybe Besson feels like he's getting pressure from Trump over some of these issues.

I don't know. But I think on the AI, I think it's bad etiquette to use AI to write. And I think people can tell and Anthropics are now doing watermarking. I saw that, yeah, just for Europe, though, right? Is that right? I thought they're going to do it all over. I mean, the watermarking thing's really interesting because it doesn't degrade the quality of the output at all. It's just that there's a very subtle statistical fingerprint where they make some words,

I guess, more probable and others less, and then they can tell. And you can't tell by looking at it. Do you think that people are going to care about this 10 years from now? Is everything just going to be AI written anyway? It's just the prompt I'll have to be. Here's generally what I'm thinking. Spin up my essay for me. I don't know because it's so tempting to have AI rewrite something you've written.

Even if you wrote it originally, it's tempting to have AI rewrite it. And so I think it's going to be really rare to have bespoke human author text out there. I do too. But I still try. Everything I write is still in my own hand. Yeah. I think you're probably in the minority. Because like people, why do people read what I write?

Because they care about what I think, right? So if I'm delegating that to an AI, my taste is not being reflected in that text at all. That reminds me. You had a really good piece this week on the death of Bitcoin maximalism. Oh, yeah. And that was all no AI. Yeah, that was all me. I mean, a lot of people were like, yeah, like, just couldn't have possibly been you.

You wrote 8,000 words all by yourself, no way. It's like, well, yeah, this is my hobby. That's what I'd like to do. Yeah, harassing Bitcoin maximalists is one of my favorite things. I mean, I don't know. I just, people can disagree with my piece as much as they want, but I think the beliefs of maximalists are either, have either been falsified or clearly not trending in the right direction.

That's not to say anything about Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's done very well. And actually Bitcoin's success is what created this aura around the maximalist that they're right. But they've only really been right about one thing, which is Bitcoin doing well. I don't think they've been right about any of their additional ancillary claims. Yeah. So I just thought, you know, well, let's just tally them up. Let's do an analysis of what they said and what happened.

You know, it's been 18 years. You know that 18 years now? It's crazy. It's crazy. It's been that long. So I think the cold card hack undermined the maximalist position. I think the filters coup did as well. So I know it's a lot to relitigate, you know,

ideologies that aren't even that prominent anymore. I mean, I don't think there's that many maximalists out there. But I think it's worth doing. Yeah. You know, because if they've been saying for 10 years that stable coins are dumb and irrelevant, okay, I'll just happily point out that stable coins settled $15 trillion this year. That's true. I mean, I came into Bitcoin in a time when most of the Bitcoin narrative was, okay, these altcoins, you know, don't pay attention to them, but we're just going to steal anything that works on an altcoin chain incorporated into Bitcoin. And that's the way forward. So things like smart contracts, all these scalability proposals.

Hey, just wait and see if it works on that all coin and we can always incorporate it. But at some point, I don't know when that was. Maybe the block size wars is it just stopped innovating. Yeah, I mean, it went from a very ecumenical approach, as you say. They claimed that they would take in all the best ideas from elsewhere to a very technologically regressive model, which is reviling any technological development that happened anywhere else, any markets development, and then actually saying we don't need it. You know, it's just a shame. Like stablecoins first emerged on Bitcoin via Omni. And then years later, that was deprecated.

Ethereum and Tron and Solano got all the stable coins and Bitcoin got nothing out of it. I don't think we should be proud of that. Yeah. You know, that's a failure, in my opinion. Like, yes, Bitcoin leaned into the monetary use case, but really little else. And there were big opportunities elsewhere in crypto

that they could have captured if they wanted. And they never figured out side chains. You know, and then I know the Ethereum Foundation has moved away from roll-ups a little bit, but, you know, trustless roll-ups were developed on Ethereum in the end. Yeah, well, they were actually originally, I think, were they originally proposed by Greg Maxwell on Bitcoin Talk in like 2012 or 2013? Yeah. I mean, it's an impossible question, but would Bitcoin price have been higher with or without the innovation?

I mean, I guess you could make the argument that since Bitcoin only focused on the monetary side of it, you know, the number's gone up and people are happy. But, you know, I don't know what it would have looked like if, you know, Bitcoin had the scale of Solana and if stablecoins happened on Bitcoin. I don't know what impact that would have had on the price. I mean, I think it's fine. You know, different blockchain is going to explore different tradeoffs. But don't go around claiming the moral high ground. You know, if you said you would implement changes from elsewhere and then you didn't, you know. It's okay. I think we should just describe Bitcoin the way it actually is. It's the same thing with lightning.

You know, we spent 10 years trying to get lightning to work and not exploring other approaches to payments. You know, or maybe we could have put stablecoins on Bitcoin through all twos much earlier. You know, so there's this tunnel vision that develops when you allow this ideology to guide your approach to technology. So that's what I'm criticizing, not the protocol itself. Yeah. I still come back to just the fee market, and that's going to be 30, 40 years before that really matters, I guess. But I would have to think that just the more economic activity had, the more transactions happening on the blockchain, that's overall good for the fee market. I just don't see how it's going to develop without that.

Yeah, I mean, the two big long-term rest of Bitcoin, I think, are the fee market. And then, of course, adding post-quantum signatures. and unfortunately maximalism has a still defying effect on Bitcoin where it makes it very hard to push any change through because Bitcoin is understood to be perfect in its current incarnation and not deserving or requiring of any change. But if you have to change something, sometimes you have to change things.

Yeah. You know? And yeah, the fee market does require something other than the monetary use case. That's true. I guess unless you just rely on benevolent miners to, you know, mine at a loss, right? I don't want to rely on that. I don't know if that's a realistic assumption. So I know people might think I'm just relitigating past battles

or being unnecessarily cruel or punching down or anything like that, but I think it's actually really important to talk about this stuff. Yeah, I agree. All right, what else happened this week? I liked Omid Molokon's op-ed in Fortune this week. He kind of took apart the bank lobby's bad faith campaign to kill the Clarity Act. So anytime someone goes after the bank lobby and just exposes them for the logically inconsistent actors that they are, you will get a mention on this podcast. Yeah, this is really done.

Well done by Omid. And the thing I don't understand is the status quo is also not good for the banks. It's not. Yeah. It's like they don't realize that. It's like, hey, guys, Coinbase is going to be paying interest on stable coin deposits here if you don't pass this thing. So has anyone explained this to them? Are they listening?

I don't get the impression that that is a widely understood fact, which is kind of shocking. Because if I was, you know, obviously Coinbase is going to keep on doing this. But if I was another broker dealer, I would just turn on the interest. Yeah. And I think Amid is right. You know, the banks are not concerned about deposit flight. They're just concerned about their own profit margins. I think they're concerned about that.

I think they're just also concerned that there's going to be new front doors to financial services for the next generation and that they're not going to have this monopoly, you know, power structure. I think people are going to start to use Revolut and DeLarup and Felix and just all these next gen neobanks for their primary bank accounts. As they should. Have you sent a wire recently? Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. It's terrible. And it's the wire is the best of a bad bunch. And it's just awful. Yeah. Why? I mean, it's a strictly inferior technology to stable. coins. I'll tell you that. I mean, I think the experience of sending wire is so bad is because it's, you know,

this irrevocable push payment. Yeah. And so that obviously puts a huge amount of risk on the initiating institution. But banks really, they just hate it when you want to send a wire. No, yeah. It's like they try to make it, you know, harder to just get money at the door. Well, and they don't trust you either. I mean, because they basically think you're getting scammed.

And so there's many levels of verification. It's like, well, maybe, what if we put a little more trust in the end user to manage their own affairs? That being said, though, I mean, people are getting scammed left and right at banks. They are getting scammed. Yeah, I mean, they don't envy the banks. All right, so I think that's it for the week. I mean, who do you think is going to win this? Should we put out a poll on Twitter for these two songs?

I think Seth's song is the frontrunner here. It's catchy. We'll see who wins. We'll be back next week. and we'll talk about the winner. Maybe we'll play it again. I mean, I might be playing that song. The rest of the day.

All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see on Monday.