On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 08/30/24 (Durov arrested, Trump's DeFi thing, the EU vs Tech Companies) (EP. 556)

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Has cryptodollarization occured? Tigran Gambaryan is still detained in Nigeria Durov of Telegram was detained in France Should major tech companies leave the EU? The SEC settles with Abra Sony is launching an ETH L2 The mythical Harris reset VCs for Harris support Harris Trump's weird World Liberty Financial DeFi thing is looking ominous Sponsor notes: Withum's Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology Team specializes in crypto-assets, offering accounting, tax and advisory solutions to fortify trust in a dynamic industry. Contact them today to get started. - withum.com/crypto Coin Metrics Stablecoin Dashboard; State of Stablecoins: Sector Expansion & A Changing Interest Rate Environment

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. Guest 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 is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes.

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So really not a lot of news. Once again, there is some huge shattering pieces of news. Of course, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, arrested in France. Aside from that, not a lot happened this week. Well, there was a ton of deal activity this week. So I guess we'll have a lot to talk about there. But yeah, week before Labor Day, a little light on the news front. The SEC made the news a couple times. That is a staple on this podcast.

They continue to harass the crypto industry. Now they've come for OpenC. So we'll have something to say there. Why don't we hop into the deals of the week? First one up is Stork. This is a Web 3 Oracle provider. They raised $4 million from lightspeed faction, Lattis, CMS, and Wintermute. Then we have Duckett, a Bitcoin native stablecoin protocol.

There is 1.25 million from UTXO, CMS Holdings, and the Bitcoin Frontier Fund. CMS, two for two on the week. Let's keep it going. No vacations at CMS Holdings. I love it. Next one up is chainbound. This is an Ethereum Research and Development Organization that raised $4 million from Cyberfund, Maven 11, Robot, and Bankless.

Then we have space and time. A blockchain data warehouse company, there is 20 million from Framework. Lightspeed faction, Erington Capital, and Hivemine Capital. That's a good name. That's a good name. I've seen these guys a few times and spoken with them. They're a sharp crew with a good sense of how to pick a name. Next one up is Lemnis Cap. This is a crypto investment fund.

They raise $70 million for their latest fund. Then we have So Layer, a Solana restaking protocol. There is 12 million from Polly Chain, HackVC, Big Brain Holdings, and others. Then we have Gameplay Galaxy, a Web3 gaming studio that raised $11 million from blockchain capital and merit circle. Then we have at echelon markets, a T5 protocol for the move ecosystem. There's three and a half million from Amber Group, Laser Digital, and others. So then we have Parify Capital.

They raised $120 million for a new vehicle to buy GP stakes in other crypto fund managers. So that's an interesting raise. Congrats to the Parify Capital team. Seems like a ripe opportunity. Next one up, we have Legion. They're an ICO platform. There is $2 million from Cyberfund Alliance Down in Delphi Labs. Then it's origami finance.

This is a D5 protocol building in the Berra chain ecosystem. There raised $1.5 million from Uburo's capital and good partners. Then we have Peregrine Exploration, developers of a stablecoin protocol. There is $3.6 million from polychain, dragonfly, and robot ventures. Then it's edge matrix chain. a multi-chain infrastructure project that raised $20 million from Polygon, Amber Group, and one comma. Then we have Kauai Network. That's QU-A-I. They're a proof-of-work blockchain.

Kind of a throwback there. There is 5 million from Codgitant Ventures and MH Ventures. MICO is a Web3 streaming platform that raised $10 million from Damon Investments, Aptos Labs, and B-Digital. Then you have Bridge, very successful stable coin payments and company orchestration layer, all sorts of stablecoin stuff. There is $48 million from Sequoia, Ribbett Index, and Han Ventures. And the last one is BitWise. They have acquired the assets of the Osprey Bitcoin Trust.

So they have folded in the Bitcoin from the Osprey product into the Bitwise product. So congrats to the Bitwise team. And before we go any further, let's do the metrics. minute we're talking about stable coins. The aggregate stable coin supply has grown, yet again, they reached 165 billion. It's approaching record highs. If you don't count Terra Luna, it is at a record high. Tether continues to dominate the market. They represent over 70% of total stable coin supply with 61 billion on Tron and 54 billion on Ethereum. Tether's adjusted transfer volume Ontron hit a record high of $14 billion, accompanied by nearly a million active addresses

on the daily. First digital USD grew by 56. In August, 56% to reach $3 billion, while PayPal's PYUSD saw rapid adoption on Solana, pushing its total supply across Ethereum and Solana over a billion. 54% of PYUSD, 30% of Dye, and 27% of USC is held in Ethereum smart contracts, highlighting stablecoins prominence in defy. Coin Metrics also has a stablecoin dashboard now at stablecoins.coms.competrics. Dot coinetrics. That's your metrics minute.

Coin metrics had a lot of good stablecoin stuff this week. So their latest, I think it's called State of the Network came out. And it's a state of stable coins sector expansion in a changing interest rate environment. So we link that in our newsletter. So this is like the golden an era of stable coin coverage. Yeah, in case you haven't noticed, we like stablecoins. We have a report coming out. We've been rumoring this for some time. The report is done.

It's a survey. We did a survey of stable coin usage in emerging markets. So we're not just looking at on-chain data. The on-chain data is interesting, but it doesn't tell you what's going on-with stable coins, really. So you want to get to the bottom of it. So in approximately two weeks, it will be publishing this report. So stay tuned for that. Yeah, I'm really excited for that to come out.

A report came out great. So more and more of this stable coin coverage. But I don't know. I think some of this coverage is going to influence a stable coin bill in a positive way. You know what I was thinking to myself? Like, it might be the case that 10 years from now we look back at crypto and we realize that the digital assets themselves were just the precursors to stablecoins. So stable coins emerged because there was this need to create liquidity between traders and exchanges to trade things like

Bitcoin and Ethereum. But then they took on a life of their own and now they settle more value than the crypto assets that they were created to help. So it's like the student has surpass the master in a certain sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly what's going to happen. I mean, if you look at all of these efforts by financial institutions to just move assets more efficiently, you look at just take like the repo market. If you were settling the repo market in a stable coin, you would immediately have more transactions settled on that blockchain in one overnight session than you would in the entire probably year of just Bitcoin and Ethereum. Yeah. So from a market cap perspective stable coins they think are less than 10% of the aggregate crypto market cap but they do

settle more value than all of the other crypto assets put together so they already blockchins are already dollarized pretty remarkable and you know i was thinking this morning if everything else failed like defy failed nfts failed even dare i say you know, the majors, Bitcoin Ethereum field, but we got stable coins. We still did something useful. That's a pretty cynical perspective, but stablecoins create the qualities of cash in a digital landscape. And we've lost that. We've lost that over the last 50 years. As finance became digitized and everything became highly surveilled. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, I, still feel like even if we just got stable coins, we still did something really useful.

Yeah. Well, you sound like you're a defeated man right now. Don't start saying that. I mean, I think it's all going to happen still. But yeah, I mean, to be clear, I think, you know, the rest of it is going to succeed as well. But I mean, there's just a lot of forces coming at, you know, at this industry from a lot of different directions, right? So you have people that are interested in this for the non-sovereign money story and that's going to happen. That doesn't need stable coins. But really where stable coins benefit, I think, is just people that have things that are in the real world. Like, you know, you want to settle an RWA transaction. Like, that's going to be a stable coin. I think that category is just going to be huge. So I guess one thing we predicted

in our white paper in 2020, if you remember that white paper, I think it aged very well, was that there would be sovereign currencies that are eliminated because of crypto dollarization. I don't know if we can say confidently that that has happened yet. Don't you think it will, though? I mean, don't you think some of these, you just look at where stable coins are being adopted on the ground. It tends to be the places that have really, really weak sovereign currencies. In rebasing a sovereign currency kind of is a failure, right? So if you have to repag or re-denominate or do a devaluation event, you're kind of failing. Yeah, I mean, I stand by the prediction.

I think it'll still happen. But you're right. It's more of a slow failure through inflation or devaluation as opposed to a sort of short, rapid one. Yeah, I mean, look at the mark, right, between World War I and World War II and Germany. It was like it still, I guess, existed, but it was just functional. Well, I mean, yeah, basically went to zero. Now, on that same topic, Tigran Gomberion, who is the finance executive held in Nigeria, still detained. We think that has something to do with the Nigerian government's theory, that crypto is bad for the Naira.

Apparently, he's now so bedridden or, you know, ridden with all these illnesses, he can't walk anymore. Yeah, this is an awful story. I mean, CZ is going to get out of prison, it seems like, before Tegroon, which is just a crazy situation. I mean, I don't get the sense that outside of French Hill and a few other politicians, there's many people fighting for him either. It feels very, very unjust. I mean, the guy is one of the folks. He worked for the U.S. government and was responsible for figuring out how to, you know, match the needs of law enforcement. with the reality of blockchains. So he's actually very influential and helped with combating illicit finance on blockchains. So this guy is not like a bad guy from the state's perspective.

Yes, he works for finance, but that doesn't mean he should be abandoned and allowed to be unjustly detained without charge in Nigeria. You know, you kind of look at this through the lens of what would happen if this was like a coin base executive, And I think there would have just been a mass movement to try to get this guy back.

And you would have all the investors in Coinbase really rallying all these high profile venture managers and politicians who are on the advisory board. But you just have none of that with Binance. And I think it's because it's a non-U.S. company that has been in the crosshairs. They also haven't raised venture dollars in a traditional sense. So they don't have that like powerful network effect around just the backers of the business. and they don't have the goodwill based on the settlement, I think. Either way, I think it's very, very unjust and a very unfortunate situation. Similarly, somewhat related, Pavel Duraub of Telegram, was detained in France.

I don't, I think he might have recently, is he free now? He's out on bail. He's on like house arrest bail, but he has to stay in the country. So this is interesting because, well, there's so much, don't much to talk about here. He was apparently lured to France by Emmanuel Macron. Is that right? Yeah, he invited him over for dinner.

Wow. He's also a French citizen somehow. And the French detained him, you know, on a bunch of different charges, basically saying he's aiding and abetting. or at least allowing all this criminality to occur, which happens on Telegram. I'm pretty mixed on this. I mean, I think Telegram is a tremendously useful application. Obviously, most chats on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted, so it's not like signal.

And, you know, the way you know this, by the way, is when you get a new phone and you install telegram on your new phone and you log in, all of your data is available immediately. So of course it's being stored on their servers. So I guess the French government's claim is that telegram has access to everyone's data. They presumably know what's going on on the app. And they should be more proactive in terms of moderation, which they've had a very free speech absolutist perspective, the telegram leadership. So I guess that is the issue.

Well, it just seems like this would be applicable to X and Facebook and all manners of other platforms as well. So I don't know exactly what Telegram is being charged with that they didn't do here. I mean, are there concrete things in this charging document that say Telegram didn't take certain steps to de-platform some obvious bad behavior? Well, I think that's the difference is Telegram has a less interventionist moderation policy. than all those other platforms, which I think is true. Like, Telegram is known as the place where it's much less likely that you'd be platformed for something you posted on the app. Kind of entering this dangerous territory with the EU, a lot of these countries.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see some tech firms just fully pull out of the EU, certainly from France. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's really weird that the EU sees themselves as the world blue. from a tech perspective, AI perspective, when they are not responsible for any of the innovation. No. These are, you know,

Telegram is created by basically Russian nationals. Most of the AI stuff is created by Americans, frankly, most of these tech companies are American, American capitalism, you know, American entrepreneurs or European entrepreneurs that relocate to the U.S. to build these companies. So Europe has this viewpoint that they have the right to dictate how these companies should operate

and to regulate them very aggressively, even though these companies are not created in Europe. It feels very unfair. Yeah, I mean, and there's been mergers blocked over the past 24 months, basically because of EU standards as well. So I think you will just start to see this conscious decision to decouple from the EU. And I don't know, it makes you wonder what the internet itself will actually look like in 20 years, where you'll have this kind of balkanized internet that people will not actually be able to communicate with each other across geographic lines. Yeah, I agree. It's the splinternet.

And, you know, what the EU is saying is like, oh, you need access to the European market. So you have to listen to us. China said that too for a while And then eventually US tech firms realized that the cost of doing business In China was so extreme That they would just rather not do business there So I think the same could actually occur with Europe

It could well be the case that in a few years time Europeans just don't have access to the same internet That we do In the free world And they will have made their own bet They will have deserved that at that point Yeah, and it makes you also wonder if you'll start to see a disintegration of the EU where you'll have more exit scenarios from countries that are just not willing to play by those rules

where they might actually want to have a vibrant tech economy and otherwise maybe just leave. Yeah, I mean, imagine like, so you remember the Canadian court decision that said that meta, Facebook had to pay news organizations a ton of money in order to post their links And meta was like, all right, we're just going to block, I think block the posting of all news articles in Canada. So we're not going to pay your ransom. We're just going to make the platform way worse instead. So, yeah, I could imagine a situation where some of these big tech companies like, okay, instead of paying these egregious fines and submitting to European unearned governance,

we're just going to pull out. and Europeans want to access to Apple and Dropbox and Google and like, you know, open AI, whatever it is. They just won't have access to that stuff. That's probably what's going to happen. So did you see that? So Dharav is a, I think he's a citizen of France and the UAE. And the UAE paused to purchase, a large purchase of jets, it looks like this week, related to this. It is funny when the Arab world is a more ardent default.

under a free speech than the French? Yeah. I mean, it's just a total political inversion at this point. I don't have a lot of great things to say about the French here lately. No. And, you know,

a lot of people actually in like the security and crypto, not cryptocurrency, but crypto apparatus, we're saying, well, you know, actually Telegram is bad because it's not, because they're lying about how private it is.

And really they have access to your messages. and it's not into encrypted. Like, everyone knew that, okay? We all knew that already, obviously. It's still a useful app, and it's still meaningful to stand for free speech in this day and age. When every other platform doesn't and heavily moderates,

free speech is a worthwhile principle in its own right. So just because telegram the app isn't that private, We know it's not. It's still a great service. And of course, like the downside of free speech is that, yeah, there will be some odious speech on there. Maybe they should have done more to go after that. But what's the alternative? Just letting EU bureaucrats or trust and safety commissions like impose political filters on speech at scale, that's a much worse alternative.

If you were Elon Musk right now, would you travel to France? I think he's probably safe. I mean, X does have moderation. And I mean, he's the most high profile entrepreneur on the planet. Yeah, I don't know. If I was him, I'd probably lay low from some of these trips. All right, let's move on to the next story. So OpenC, which is the leading NFT marketplace,

they've raised a lot of money over the years. They've received a Wells notice from the SEC threatening to sue the company for running an unregistered securities platform. according to an ex post from co-founder Devin Fincer. What do you make of this one? Yeah, I mean, honestly not that surprising. The SEC has sued everyone under the sun, all of the major high-profile crypto firms in the U.S.

I do grant that NFT trading is blurring the lines a little bit between collectibles, art, you know, purchasing art and trading these assets for pure, speculative gain. I mean, were people really buying, you know, these pictures of apes because they liked the art? Probably not. So does making a token non-fundable, you know, magically mean that it's not a security? No, I think like, you know, the case could be made. So it doesn't surprise me that much that the SEC is just continuing to go down this path of being super aggressive. Yeah, but don't you think the decision from Judge Torres in the Ripple case, if that's applied to this, would say that the secondary trading of really any of these things is probably not a securities transaction.

And so it's not like, I don't know enough about the business model at OpenC, but they're not originating these things, as far as I can tell. They're really just providing a marketplace for people to exchange them in a peer-to-peer manner. Well, I don't, I think it's facts and circumstances. and then it might just be a different circuit. Like, you know, there's circuit conflicts all the time. And then I guess they ultimately get reconciled at the Supreme Court.

So it may be the case that the judge just had a different opinion from Taurus. It's just, it really is crazy that the SEC is going to try to run the table on all these cases. It would be so much less money to just work with industry around, you know, carve out, exemptions, or just get behind a market structure bill. just it's really insane to look at you know who they've sued so crack in coinbase they've gone after paxos i mean jemini the list goes on and on it's like we're dealing with the same set of issues here like let's just come up with rules that work yeah i think part of it could actually be political positioning like gensler might assume he might be planning for let's say a harris win and a

situation where he has to defend his tenure and because I think runs through 26, right? You think that's right. And so he could make the case that, oh, we have a lot of these outstanding cases, high profile litigation going on, you need to keep me in office. I'm the guy that began them. I should be the one to finish them. So part of this could be political positioning, I think.

So in other SEC news, they have settled with ABRA, crypto platform over allegations of unregistered securities offerings relative to their lending platforms. This business looks like has been shut down for some time anyway. This is just basically the settlement announcement. So got a bunch of buzz in the industry, but kind of old news. Yep. Elsewhere, Sony is launching a layer two network on Ethereum called Sonayum. Soaneum.

What does that do? I don't know. I actually wasn't aware of this until I read it in our newsletter. You were too young to ever have a Sony Walkman, right? Yeah, the first iPod I had was like the iPod shuffle. Okay. Which was actually pretty great. I mean, Sony Walkman was cassette tapes. Yeah, we, I...

You skip that. I skip that. Yeah, those. Remarkable that Sony's still around. I mean, aren't they like a pretty huge... Conglomerate pretty huge conglomerate, but I mean usually there's a shelf life on some of these technology companies They've they've been remarkably persistent and now they're doing L2s on Ethereum Which I think is other crypto companies I think you'll see a lot of companies launch L2s on Ethereum like why wouldn't you? Well, how many L2s could we possibly need? Don't you think it's just going to be the de facto kind of payment real? Like why wouldn't every crypto exchange be looking to do an L2 right now?

Well, yeah, I mean if it gets traction like base does, then it can really be a revenue generator, but I think from a UX perspective, it does introduce a lot of fragmentation that we haven't dealt with. Well, and I think you're just going to see a lot of these companies try to make money on being centralized bridges. Like, do you want to use decentralized bridge or do you want to use Coinbase? I think for a lot of users, they'd rather just use Coinbase. Yeah, my, I'm kind of leaning towards the monolithic thesis as the revealed preference of the market at this point as opposed to the roll-up-centric approach.

Yeah, certainly from a user experience perspective, that seems to be the chief reason why Solana is outperforming Ethereum. Yeah, I mean, bridging to L2s is usually a pretty bad user experience and you have to, you know, if you want to use Polygon, you've got to get Madic in order to use it for the gas. and it's like, it's all very annoying. The more frictions that you introduce, the last people are going to want to use it. So L2s don't really speak to each other right now.

Unless we can solve that, I think it's going to continue to be a huge problem. Yeah, I mean, they're slow. You have to be really technical to use these things. So yeah, it is a big challenge. But doesn't change the fact that base turns out to be a great business for Coinbase. And so I think you'll just see other firms copy them. Yeah, and I think the difference there is that it is easier to get access to base because they handle the bridging for their users.

Yeah. Yeah. In other news, Rhodium, which is a Texas Bitcoin mining company, they have filed for bankruptcy protection. So it's kind of like in the Bitcoin mining space, it's kind of a tale of two cities, I guess. You have some companies that are crushing it and other companies that are struggling. Yeah. I mean, it's basically the ones that have easy access to capital and the ones that have easy access to capital and the ones that. don't but generally I would say the miners underperform bitcoin itself which makes them very hard

to bet on and yeah miners overall have just incinerated capital over the last few years so something interesting on the Harris pivot or the Harris reset which in my opinion isn't happening barat Ramahmurti who was one of the in my opinion architects of choke point two is now informally advising the Harris campaign actually is giving TV interviews on behalf of the Harris campaign. So another data point potentially signaling that there is not really going to be a rapprochement between the Harris administration and crypto. I think anyone who works in the crypto industry right now who's still trying to tell you that Harris is pivoting on crypto and it's going to be great is just lying to you, including Sheila Warren, who

runs one of these trade groups, the CCI, which has raised a bunch of money from some really reputable folks. But she had this tweet on August 22nd, said too soon. And it was that meme of like the guy looking over his shoulder and Democrats looking at crypto and Elizabeth Warren being upset. I just think that is so, such a gaslighting tweet for someone who leads one of these policy groups. I mean, it's just not, there is no pivot here to pretend like there is. is very, very disingenuous on Shillow Warns part. Yeah, Ron Conway, who we talked about last week, also had just like the mother of all misrepresentations on Twitter

where he said something to the effect of VCs support Harris, and it was based on a poll of VCs who had signed the VCs for Harris Pledge. Yeah, chart crime. So talk about sample bias, Ron. Yeah. Come on, man. Yeah, so let's tell it. like it is. I mean, Wiley

Nichols been pretty good on this on the Democrat side, you know, hitting Gary Gensler for some of these moves. So there are people that will tell you the truth out there. Unfortunately, Sheila Warren at the CCI is someone that will lie to you and try to raise money from you but not actually do anything.

So it's a shame. So on the other side of the aisle, kind of a tale of two, I even know what to say about this. Trump has a crypto project called World Liberty Financial. And you know, I wish I could come here and tell you today that Trump is great on crypto. And to his credit, he said all the right things. However,

World Liberty Financial, the DFI platform endorsed by Trump and run by Don Jr., I think, or Eric Trump, Eric Trump. It's looking sketchier by the minute. I'll tell you that. This is a bad idea. We don't know what it does yet, exactly. But the website metadata, CoinDest just reported on this,

says it will connect users to decentralized finance's best tools for secure high-yield crypto investments. That sounds like the language that a scam would use. Yeah, this is a terrible idea. I mean, if Trump does something like this before the election, he's going to lose the election.

There's no upside in this. But I just don't understand why he's putting energy into, like, crypto's great. But you have a much more important thing to do. Yeah. You have an election to win. Like, why are you wasting your time on a side project? Like, you've already, Trump has already convinced the crypto into,

that he is the crypto candidate. We didn't take much convincing anything other than the status quo is good. You don't need to go any further. You don't need to launch an NFT project. He's launched now a third iteration. That was fine. You certainly don't need to launch a defy protocol that most likely will get hacked, to be clear, and then there'll be tons of bad headlines about that.

What's going on? Yeah, just he needs to not do this. I don't know how else to put it. is a very, very, very bad idea. Like, we don't need to be further convinced that Trump is pro-crypto. We get it. He's pro-gripto. He accepts crypto.

He has a crypto platform. He owns a ETH. J.D. Vance owns Bitcoin. We're convinced, okay? Yep. Don't launch some sort of defy protocol. Why would Eric Trump or Trump himself have the expertise to launch a defy protocol? a DFI protocol that works and is secure.

I mean, we don't even know what it looks like. Maybe it'll be amazing. Probably not. I'm guessing it won't. Probably not. I'm guessing it won't. No, no. Just do anything else other than this.

This is my message. So this whole thing fills me with absolute dread. I mean, it's just focus on the election. Yeah, yeah. Not good. Not good. So. Well, that was talking politics.

Yeah, things are great. Things are great. All right. Well, I think that's it for the week. We'll have a few episodes next week. So we've been just hammering out these recordings here. We've got a bunch in the backlog. Yeah, we have some excellent guests coming up. So hopefully next week, you know, we're a little happier and sunnier.

I think we will be. We've got a long weekend coming up here with Labor Day. So I hope everyone has a safe and healthy weekend. And we will see you on Monday.