On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 08/29/25 (Stablecoins in CDMX, DAT issues, GDP on the blockchain) (EP.661)

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Nic and Matt return for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Nic reviews the stablecoin conference in Mexico City Will the banks obsolete stablecoins? Some DATs are having trouble The government is putting GDP on the blockchain The CFTC opens the door to US customers trading on non-US exchanges Trump fires Lisa Cook Can the Fed be considered "independent" Google is developing a blockchain A BNB DAT gets delisted Tether is building on Bitcoin via RGB How does insider trading work in prediction markets?

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, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing and print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called... Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And you are down in parts unknown at a conference, Mexico. Mexico City, yeah. The food reference is good, actually, because the food here is exceptional. Let me tell you what. The exchange rate is 20 to 1. It's kind of a tough division to do, you know, 20 to 1. So a lot of menu items, like $500, 500, 500 pesos rather. Wow. They have the Mexican Zin down there?

They do have Mexican Zin. Yeah. So that's what it looks like. Oh, all right. So we need to have a video podcast. That looks good. I've been partaking Mexican Zin. It's all the same flavors, actually. But yeah, here for the very first stable coin conference in Land America. This is the first one. You know that? What's the scene like? It's jam-packed, I'll tell you that much. I mean, it really is.

It does feel to me like this is the nexus of sort of like real businesses, banks, fintechs, adopting stable coins. And the quality of attendees here is very good. It's, you know, it's not just like startups and things like that. it's, you know, the biggest payments companies in the world, biggest tech companies in the world are here. So very encouraging as far as Latam stable coin adoption is concerned. I mean, I'm always bullish stable coins, but there's two things this week that made me even more bullish. The first of which was, did you see this story that the former, what's the PBOC stand for? The central bank in China. People's Bank of

China. Presumably, maybe. Yeah. So the former head of the PBOC basically came out aggressively against stable coins. My reaction to that is anytime China comes out against anything that's internet related, that's when you buy it. Not that you can buy a stable coin and make money, but, you know, by the infrastructure, I suppose. But that's always a good sign.

The other thing was that I was having a conversation with a very smart person who was anti-stable coins. And their position on it was, well, why can't the U.S. banking industry just on board all of these people that want dollars? And if that's your rebuttal, we're going to win. Yeah, if that's the anti-stablequin position, is the banks getting better? The banks are just going to go 24-7 and they're just going to onboard people that have a, you know, net worth of $5,000 in sub-Saharan Africa. I just don't see that. Banking that's global, fully interoperable, 24-7-365, basically free.

There's no distinction between deposits one bank, another, permissionless, no onboarding cost. Yeah, if banks could do that, that's true. We wouldn't need stable coins. I guess that's kind of my conclusion to it, too. Yeah, if banks could onboard everybody in the world and that actually made economic sense. and then FedWire was open 24-7, 365 to anyone in the world, I guess we wouldn't need stable ones. Here's my request for, not request for startup, but request for service,

which is a bank that lets me send a wire without making three phone calls. Does such a thing exist? I don't know. I ebb and flow on this between wanting a bank that will make it very easy for me to engage online versus a desire for a bank that I need to go. in physically and go through one of those clear machines in order to do anything because of all the cybersecurity risks. I've never been inside a bank branch. I've never done banking in person. Wow. I didn't even know that was a thing. People did they physically go to a bank.

I mean, I used to, I remember in high school and college getting physical checks for my job and having to go into the bank to deposit them. I also don't own a checkbook. I don't know how it works, what it is. It doesn't seem secure. I'll tell you that much. Private key is on the piece of paper basically. Yeah, what is that movie? Catch me if you can where he just says check fraud the whole time? Or is it the talented Mr. Ripley? Or is that both of them? Catch me if you can, Frank Abignale. Abignale? Yeah. Yeah. So based on that film, which is my entire understanding experience with checks, it seems very insecure, like horrendously insecure. Very, very insecure. I mean, there are parts of the world that never did checks and never will do checks. I don't think checks

big in Europe. They also don't have credit cards for some reason, right? They don't like credit cards in Europe. Oh, is that right? I didn't realize that. It's all debit and prepaid. Oh, well, you can use a U.S. credit card at least over there. Yeah, but they've allergic to credit. They've got to get those points. So, yeah, some parts of the world are definitely going to leapfrog and go from highly oligopolistic and non-functional banking systems to just stable coins, or rather, fintech apps built on stable coins. And that is what is happening here. Let me tell you what it's happening. Definitely happening. And then it's sort of, okay, now you have the dollar on chain, what other assets can you put on chain and how can you program these things up?

So, yeah, that is my report from the ground and very smoggy, actually, Mexico City. I will tell you a lot smog here is my the one negative point but otherwise very good there is a palpable sense of excitement and also real deployment of stable coins into the fintech and banking sector it definitely feels like the epicenter of where the activity is right now is uh is there a football game in mexico city this year like uh american football you mean yeah don't they usually have a game down there they do they have been doing it yeah they do them in london i think they send the worst teams to london that's why the brits are like all jaguars fans yeah it's always the jaguars the jaguars the jags watch them yeah so they send them the absolute dross of the nfell i think they've

done it in mexico city i uh we got to get ready for our fantasy football drafts that's coming up the first game of the year is this thursday right i think yeah next thursday yeah right for liberty yeah i can't wait i've also been very unlike me i've been watching tennis lately are you have you followed the tennis at all? I don't. I don't know how tennis works. I have been to the U.S. Open. It's quite fun. So is it just me or did the U.S. Open like become a scene and tickets are 10 times more expensive than they ought to be? I haven't been in like 15 years, but it is a scene. I mean, it takes forever to get there. Yeah, so I'm going this Thursday and the tickets were like five times more than I thought they ought to be for tennis.

You have a good time, though. You can get like a $25 drink while you're in there. I think tennis is fun to watch, though. The thing with tennis is not, it just gets dominated by the very top guys. So like before it was Djokovic, Federer and Adal, and then almost instantly it switched to all crowds and center, and no one else ever wins. I don't even understand the rules in the scoring system. Doesn't it go zero, 15, 30, 40?

Yeah. So why not just go one through four? and zero is called love. I think it's probably an artifact of like, I don't know, was it invented like by British aristocrats or something? It's probably some weird artifactive with the way it came from. So if I just follow your progression, you went from pickleball to Padell to paddle to tennis?

Is that the... Well, I mean, I don't, I still don't know how to play tennis, but I'm becoming a fan of the sport. I actually find the Alcraz Center dynamic to be interesting. Okay. So, all right. I'll keep you updated. Can't say I've ever dabbled in that.

My recommended sports viewing thing in this week leading up to the NFL is the Jerry Jones documentary on Netflix. It's quite good. What were your takeaways from that? It's just all about the mini dynasty. I say mini dynasty because the only true dynasty is the Pats, the six. But they won three Super Bowls in four years. Yeah, I was going to say, did the Cowboys really?

have a dynasty would you say no i wouldn't say that's a dynasty they had a nice little blip but but it's like patriots really took over cowboys fans are like liverpool fans which is they're very nostalgic for the past when they were good yeah i mean that's all they have to live for down there right Dallas with the you know the football team's been terrible for a long time awful used to win a lot and it was a lot of drama i'm feeling good about the commanders and i think we're going to get renamed back to the old old name. I think we're going to be the Redskins. Oh, is that right?

I didn't say that. Trump is pushing for that. Okay. I kind of like the Washington football team. Yeah, that was funny. I have a lot of that merch still. That was actually my favorite name era, the no name era. Yeah, just keep it simple.

Yeah. All right. Well, on the podcast this week, we had Wyatt set down with Sandy Call, had to digital assets with Franklin Templeton. They've been very active. I have been informed. I was actually just at lunch, and I was informed that, our disclaimer only refers to us in our podcast or disclaimer.

You know, I realize that. And the ending sequence, if you listen to Wyatt's podcast, it has our old URL. So we're going to have to fix that. So the disclaimer is wrong. The sequence is just, yeah. I mean, the disclaimer does not cover when anyone else is an episode, which is frequently. I mean, I think if you listen to this podcast for the first time this year, you would think that Wyatt is actually the host of the podcast.

I think he's outnumbering us in terms of episodes done. We are. We actually, we're not going to break the news now, but we are doing a live podcast recording at some point this fall. Yeah, much to my chagrin, actually.

But our second ever, our first one was in Boston during Boston Blockchain Week. And there was an absolute monsoon that descended on the tent. Oh, yeah. We were in. And I think you could hear it. It was so loud.

We've done a couple. actually. Do you remember we put on a conference the first year of Castle Island and we had Jill and Meltem as guests in person? Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, so we've done two. No, we've actually, I think we've done three. Didn't we do another live one? We did one at Pubkey with Thorne. That's right. So not as popular as the odd lots live recordings. Tell you that. No. No, but pretty good. I mean, I think maybe if we do it for another five years, we'll get as big as all lots. I think, I think we probably will. I think we will. All right, let's hop into the deals of the week. First one up is a company called the Clearing Company. This is a prediction market.

There is $15 million from USV, Han Ventures, and Variant. Then we have Polymarket, the prediction market. They raised, quote, double digit millions from Don Jr.'s 1789 capital. So that's six months after Trump Jr. was an industry strategic advisor at Polymarkets competitor, Kalshi. I don't know how that works. Exactly. I guess some VCs

don't invest in competitors. I guess he does. Also, 1789, what was that? That was the French Revolution, right? That wasn't,

that's not like a key date in American history, is it? Yeah, it is. Isn't that when the Bill of Rights was ratified? Oh,

let's see. Let's pull that up. I went to French school, so I only know, French history. I think that's right. I mean, we're going to sound foolish if that's not right. I'm going to sound foolish.

Well, you're right. It is also the storming of the best deal happened. Yeah, I mean, that was definitely the notable thing. Of all the things that happened, that was the notable thing. So the new constitution went into effect in 1789. Okay. First U.S. Congress. Yeah, the Bill of Rights.

I was right. So the Bill of Rights went. Okay. So that's just embarrassing for us as far as U.S. serious concerned. Because people forget from 1774 or six, I don't know exactly when sort of like, you know, the Brits lost control, de facto control, we had the Articles of Confederation. And no one ever talks about that time. That's true. That's very true. It's just not even brought up. It's like what? Was it a shameful period? Like I know it wasn't very successful, but we had a first

president before George Washington. We did. There were six, weren't there? Yeah. Six other ones. It was more of a ceremonial role granted. But anyway, 1789, Constitution ratified and French Revolution. That reminds me. Last week we had a reference to 13 books capital.

And we said it was a biblical reference. It's not. And someone messaged me what it was, and now I can't find it. But it wasn't biblical. So, chat, GBT, GPD-5. says it has a masonic context. That's probably not it, if I'd to guess. That's not it.

So it refers to collections of ritual and philosophical texts in the Masons. It does also refer, it does have a religious context, the Pauline epistles in the New Testament. There's 13 books. Lemony Snicket's a series of unfortunate events consists of 13 books. Probably not that. I'm telling you, it's not only is it not any of those things. but the person that pointed this out is going to be very frustrated that I couldn't pull up this message. There's one last thing. Euclid's Elements is divided into 13 books.

It's Euclid's Elements. I'm pretty sure that's what it is. But it could also be those other things. It could be anything. All right. Next one up is Rain. This is a stable coin powered card provider. They raised $58 million from Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Galaxy, and Samsung. Then we have A priori. That's a liquid-staking provider. on Monad. There is 20 million from Hashi, Pantara, and primitive ventures. And it's M0, a stablecoin infrastructure company that raised 40 million from polychain, ribbit, and bane capital crypto. Then we have hemelabs. There are Bitcoin

layer two. There is 15 million from Republic, YZI Labs, and hyperchain capital. Stargate Finance, a cross-chain bridging protocol, they were required for $120 million in a token swap with layer zero. This was interesting to watch. You don't see a ton of these protocol to protocol eminay events. Yeah, that's one of, I mean, probably not the first token swap deals we've seen, but

pretty landmark deal. Yeah, that's a big one. It's been a couple, but this is a high profile one. Now is the part of the deal section where we talk about that. So we have Sharps technology. A Salana Digital Asset Treasury Company, there is 400 million via private placement from Parify, Pintara, Falconax,

Rockaway X and others. There's a vehicle called Bitcoin infrastructure acquisition. It's a SPAC targeting an acquisition, not surprisingly, in the digital asset sector. They filed an S-1. They planned to raise $200 million. So that's actually not a dat, but a SPAC in this case. Well, you could be both. Yeah.

SPACDAT. Then we have M3 Brigade Acquisition 6, or MBVIU for short, a SPAC targeting an acquisition in the digital asset sector, there is 300 million in its IPO this week. All right. A lot of capital markets activity. Where do you want to start this week? I want to talk about GDP on the blockchain. So the Department of Commerce announced today that they're uploading GDP data

on a nine blockchain networks, including as supported by Pith and Chainlink. So we've come a long way from lettuce on the blockchain. Now we have GDP on the blockchain. I guess that's pretty cool. I mean, you just pipe into GDP data on the blockchain. I could see people wanting to build things around that prediction market and stuff like that. I could see it being a composable data input into certain, like if you had inflation data in the blockchain, you could try and create a stable coin that takes that into account. Yeah, what are those called flat coins?

Flat coins. Yeah, the idea of a flat coin could be interesting there. GDP is a primitive. I don't know how it would be utilized. I think you'll just see immediately people start to bet on GDP, don't you think? Bet on the GDP print? Yeah. Jobs data. Yeah. I mean, jobs data is just notoriously bad and revised all the time. Next up, we have the CFTC. This was interesting.

The CFTC issued advisory saying that non-U.S. exchanges like finance will be able to operate in the U.S. I mean, that is a total 180 from where we were a couple years ago, huh? Yeah, it's sort of advisory clarification. I wouldn't say it's a full open season the way I read it, but they're basically going to put them under a framework. So foreign Board of Trade Registration, it's FBOT, I guess is the registration standard. And it looks like you'll be able to access these things as long as the venues comply with the CFTC regime, which kind of leads you to think about all the people that got in trouble for accessing these venues over the best few years. It is kind of, I don't know, funny is the word, but you had the Bitmex founders, you know, facing actual criminal penalties.

You'd CZ doing time in jail. The main infraction was basically letting Americans trade on those exchanges. And now with the benefit of hindsight, I mean, it's a different time, different administration. But, yeah, what a change. CFTC is gutted right now. So you had another commissioner announced a resignation this week. Caroline Fam is the only commissioner left at the CFTC at this point. She said she's leaving.

We don't have a new head of the CFTC that's Senate confirmed yet. So there aren't enough people over there right now. So why does no one want to run the CFTC? I don't get it. Isn't the CFTC the agency that is going to be empowered, presumably, by clarity? I would say Brian Quintan very much wants to run the CFTC And it seems like there are people that don't want him to run the CFTC Don't fully understand that one get that I don't really get it either

I mean it seems like that process should have gone faster I mean we're going to be in September before it's even up for a vote Yeah there's a lot of these agencies that are There's like understaff the leadership level and I don't understand if that's a deliberate thing or weird structural thing. But there's just big vacancies at a lot of these agencies. There's also vacancies at the SEC when it comes to the Democratic commissioners. So Crenshaw is supposed to be leaving. Crenshaw, who is just hates crypto, hates it. I mean, it's probably not the most fun job to be constantly overruled if you have an oppositional stance to the leadership.

It's actually not when you're putting out analysis on denying the Bitcoin ETF and then they'll court is saying, well, that's just rubbish, basically. You're, you're breaking the law, basically, but then you stick to it. But I wonder if Trump will put up the Democrat nominees. Usually you see some sort of a deal where they put up the Democrat and the Republican together because they think it can go through. But it doesn't seem like we're following normal procedure on that. Speaking of abnormal procedure and vacancies, this isn't crypto news, but of course, Lisa Cook was fired, I suppose. Fed Governor Cook was fired by Trump on account of allegations of mortgage fraud.

Do you think that she's going to show up for work? I mean, I don't know. It looks like there's going to be a legal battle here. But do you think it's going to be business as usual at the Fed this week? No, I definitely don't think it's business as usual. And a lot of people are talking about the Fed losing its independence. I think it's kind of been going on for a while, though. I mean, if you remember the Nixon tapes,

there was quite a bit of a Fed chatter there. Who is it, was it Arthur Burns who's headed the Fed under Nixon? That sounds right. There's a lot of dialogue there around gusing the numbers, lend it run hot into the election. I think it's a total paradox to have an agency that's quote unquote independent. I mean, how could you do that? They obviously have incentives.

They answer to someone. They have perspectives on things. So they get appointed, of course, by a president. And I suppose they testify to Congress twice here. I don't know if that's any measure of restraint or anything. But I think it's such a farce that we think these people are independent. They're not. Nobody's politically neutral.

They obviously have a point of view. Yeah. It's kind of the same thing with the Supreme Court. court. Yeah, but we know that, you know, explicitly Supreme Court justices have a partisan lien. I mean, they're maybe not meant to, but everybody acknowledges that they do. It doesn't get discussed that much in the context of the Fed, right? Right. Yeah. But I don't, I mean, they have an institutional perspective, right? Yeah, certainly they do. It's also just, how can you ever be totally neutral? If you're being totally neutral, a computer could do that job. That's right. So if they

we're just taking in inputs and creating outputs. You know, they're taking in economic data as the input, and the output is what the price of money is. Then you don't need a human to do that, right? No. So people are saying the feds like this, you know, amazing, beautiful institution that's purely independent are telling on themselves.

Yeah. Because if it was, you wouldn't need the humans. You definitely wouldn't need the humans. That's why we run it hot into the elections, typically. And also, where do these people come from? they come through the academic circuit, you know, who gets promoted is a factor of, you know, whether you adhere to the institutional perspective of that institution, right? So there is a pathway to the Fed. You don't end up with like monetarists or people that believe in nominal GDP targeting

or free banker types. They don't end up in the Fed. So there's a certain kind of person that ends up in the Fed. Yeah. And then when you take it back to economics and what you learned, I mean, did you learn about Hayek when you're in school? I don't think I ever heard about Hayek. I'll tell you what, Matt. My economics textbook in high school was written by a certain Paul Krugman. So no. We did not learn about Hayek at all.

Yeah. I mean, that is kind of a crime, isn't it? That generations of people are going through colleges, American colleges, in getting indoctrinated with one view of economics. Yeah, my young economic mind was poison. by Paul Krugman. I just thought that's the way it worked. Turns out it's not.

Yeah, so I don't believe in this whole Fed independence thing. I think they all have a view. Whether or not Trump can fire governor for cause literally has never happened. So we're in a brave new world now. The thing is, though, governors have been forced out and not been convicted of crimes. Like remember the insider trading scandal at the Fed a couple of years back? I don't even remember that. Yeah, several folks were forced out.

they weren't convicted of anything. So the mere allegations were sufficient or the appearance of impropriety was sufficient. I think this will go to the Supreme Court. I think it will. There is a lawsuit filed today against the administration. So I think it almost certainly will. So Google Cloud is developed,

this is L1 blockchain corporate season. Google Cloud is developing its own blockchain called Google Cloud Universal Ledger. This one kind of took me by surprise, actually. Yeah, this one took me by surprise too because it wasn't an official announcement. So it was Rich Widman who leads up crypto over at Google, and he put it out in a LinkedIn post. And he was comparing the Stripe blockchain versus the Circle blockchain versus the Google blockchain.

I mean, you're to see what's going on with this. They have a big partnership with the CME. We'll see. It would have been cool to announce this at like a big developer conference or something like that. Yeah, it's a little bit odd for it to come out on LinkedIn. Next up in Datworld, Solana is the focus. of many debts now there is a conglomerate of galaxy jump and multi-coin they're looking to raise a billion for a salon and treasury company elsewhere pantera is raising up to 1.25 billion for a salon

a treasure vehicle which is also separate from sharps technology which they participated in this week and then in other debt news there's something called wind tree therapeutics it's a biotech company apparently did we talk about this one i don't even remember um they are going after a b and strategy, it has been delisted by NASDAQ. So this shell company has failed to meet its compliance requirements. Probably not going to be the last one we see that does this, is my guess. Yeah, that is a tough one for sure, but it's not that unexpected. This is one of the failure modes of DATs that we have talked about, which is the teams

running them just may not know how to operate a public vehicle. They may not have the expertise to do it. This is one thing that can happen. You're going to have a really good CFO if you're running a public company. That's sort of baseline requirement and meet your filing obligations. So Win Tree Therapeutics currently trading at nine cents down from 75 cents a week ago. What a golden age to be the CEO of a penny stock, huh? Yeah.

If you have one, just amazing time to have the shawl companies publicly listed. inquiries left and right. You're a busy person. Tether has announced that they are extending their USCT functionality to Bitcoin by leveraging the RGB protocol. So this is Tether coming home.

If you remember, Tether was first launched on Bitcoin in 2014 via the Omni protocol, which I think was deprecated. But the first couple billion dollars of Tether were on Omni, fun historical fact. Omni was Omni the first SEO?

I think I did some work on this. Mastercoin, I think was the first ICO and did that become Omni? I think MasterCoin became Omni. Who is it? J.R. Willett? J.R. Willett? Yeah. J.R. Willett? Yeah. He's on LinkedIn. We got to bring the trivia back this year. Yeah. That would be great. I did a trivia quiz, I think in 2020 or 2021.

But yeah, I think we should do one, like a really hard one. That was a difficult one back then. I remember that. There's a lot of lore to bring back. There's so much. There's a couple other projects called Omni now, too. And the CFTC has announced that they are going to use NASDAQ's smart surveillance platform to monitor trading in digital asset derivatives and prediction markets, too. Prediction market is this whole industry is just changing so rapidly when it comes to

prediction markets. I was looking at the Democratic nominees. Newsom is number one. There's a lot of names on there. The Rock is on there, right? The Rock is on there. He's polling in the low single digits. Barack Obama's on there.

Mark Cuban's on there. How could Obama possibly, he's already served two terms? He's like 99.6% not going to get it. Is that just free money on the other side? You just bet it, but you have to hold forever until the actual election. Time value money there, maybe is the reason that that's not 100%. So there was a post by Bucca. this week about I think there's a Kalshi market on how much Bitcoin they were going to buy

and he was kind of jokingly implying he could manipulate the market or you know trade on the market and then influence the outcome my question is is there anything prohibiting you from trading on a prediction market and then doing the thing that causes the market to resolve a certain way that's a perfect like Matt Levine article it is insider trading right you can insider that that's the definition of insider trading But I mean, but I guess it's kind of valid in a way. Like the market is guessing what you're going to do. And then so of course you've acknowledged what you are going to do.

I think you have material non-public information. Yeah, I guess the knowledge that's in your own brain is non-public. Yeah. By definition. Yeah, I would not recommend it. But I mean, I'm sure that happens all the time. Yeah. I mean, it's, I guess it's exactly like an athlete betting on a game and then deliberately losing.

or something. Yeah, exactly. So that's how you get banned from the NBA. That happens like three times a year, right? Yeah. So we do need Matt Levine to wait on this one, though. I mean, we have John Stewart here, 4%. Stephen A. Smith, 2%. Tough roster. Zoron, it's 1%. I don't even think he's eligible, is he? Where's the O.C. trading? I mean, I'm sure she's on there. She's the number two. She's trading. 11%. 11%. Yeah. I would say Zoron's actually probably pretty good value there. Is he old enough? He has to be 35 by, what is he, 33?

He's 33. 35 by 228. Yeah. Yeah, I guess he is. All right, well, I think that is it for the week. What's going on for Labor Day weekend? Go on a boat, grill up, you know, normal things. What about you?

I think I'll just be reading up on Dats, reading some 8Ks. Yeah, we might have something forthcoming on. the DATs or institutional perspective on the Dats. I don't know why I'm so intrigued by these SEC filings. I just find it to be very revelatory. I was reminiscing today about your discovery of micro strategy back in 2020, which was made on this podcast. And a friend of mine asked me how on earth you were able to find that.

And I said, reading SCC filings is Matt's hobby. It is my hobby. I had a little bit of help on that one. but it is my hobby. But the tragedy is we didn't monetize that discovery. No. No, it's kind of like a useless skill if you're not going to monetize it. But who would have thought that it would,

I was under the impression with these treasury companies in the early days that it would just be just a cash substitute, where you just have these publicly traded businesses, eventually the apples of the world that would just put a little bit of money into Bitcoin. Maybe that will still happen, but in typical crypto way, Yeah, it started like that with micro strategy. They just held a little bit of Bitcoin, but then it just went to, let's just lever this thing as much as we possibly can. Well, the premium are coming down.

They're coming down to one across the board. That's true. So the day of reckoning is possibly quite near. That's true. All right, everyone, that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.