On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 09/03/21 (Two years of OTB, Matt's NFT strategy, Square's Bitcoin DEX) (EP.239)

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

Nic and Matt are back for another week.  Patriots choose Mac Jones Kanye releases Donda Two year anniversary of OTB The fate of the OTB lost episode Matt's peculiar NFT acquisition strategy What the hell is Loot Punks weren't the first NFTs Square is making a Bitcoin DEX The SEC sues Bitconnect Sponsor notes  This episode is brought to you by Withum, a top 25 accounting firm with a cutting-edge Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology practice. To learn more, visit  withum.com/crypto.

This episode is brought to you by Witham. Witham is a top 25 accounting firm. They have a cutting edge digital currency and blockchain technology practice. Wherever your company is from a stage perspective, from pre-cede to IPO, they have tailored solutions just for you. They have helped some of the largest companies in the crypto industry with audit, tax, and advisory needs. And they've also helped a number of our portfolio companies.

To learn more about advisory, audit, and tax services, head over to on the brink. dot link slash with them that's on the brink dot link slash with them boy we off the grid grid grid this for my kid kid kid kids have kids everything we did for the crib everything we did how we lived all this smoke got a sin all that spoke ever sent everything I spoke what I meant never disguised my tent lines outside the event brought my life out the trench God, thank God, look what he did, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, we off the grid, green, green, green, we off the grid. Welcome to On the Brink, I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter.

We're recording this one late. Yeah, you know, normally we record too early and then important stuff happens in between recording and publishing. But nothing. Not going to be a problem this time. Now, nothing important actually happened this week. There is a very, very slow news week. week before Labor Day. Yeah, everyone took the week off.

I mean, like I guess a bunch of people bought NFTs or something, but no actual news occurred this week. It's incredible. We had a lot of rain up here. It rained here too. I almost got run off the road. Yeah. It's crazy.

New York City at it. New York. Yeah, New York. Hopefully everyone's doing all right down there. A lot of people asking me about the turkey situation. I'm going to hold off on an update on these turkeys. If people don't mind for another week or two, because I'm taking some measures that I don't necessarily want documented forever on a podcast. Extreme measures, possibly violent.

Possibly. So just bear with me. We'll get an update. There are fewer turkeys coming into my yard. We'll put it that way. So the other news that our Brink Nation wants to hear about is the Cam Newton dropping. Oh my goodness. How did I forget about this?

So we're winning the Super Bowl again. Mack Jones just, I mean, we're going to run the table with this guy. Have you seen his shirtless picture? It's exactly like Tom Brady. I have. Is he like? He's pudgy. Yeah.

No, it's great. So the Patriots dropped like arguably the most stacked and. sliced guy in the NFL and Cam Newton, just a physical beast. And we have like a pudgy white guy now. Yeah, I mean, Cam was always transitional. I'll appreciate what he did. That's, you know, thank you for the time. Kim, just, you know, he's getting up there. The future is now. It's Mac Jones. I'm pretty sure there's going to be a 16 and no regular season. We'll see. I auto-drafted in fantasy this year in the league that I won my Bitcoin League last year, auto-drafted the previous year, so I intend to win again. I mean, I accidentally auto-drafted. We got busy with the meeting, and I totally forgot that I was

missing a draft. I completely missed the draft. So I never draft because my hypothesis is, if you believe in efficient markets, you should believe in auto-drafting, because if you are trying to like make these deep sleeper picks, that's the same thing as trying to be an active trader and trading stocks and stuff. You should just buy the index. I agree with that with the exception of two quarterback leagues. You never get the second quarterback high enough up in the draft order. The auto draft always messes that up.

Well, my auto draft screwed me because it just didn't draft any wide receivers until like the 14th round or something. So I just have no wide receivers. Yeah, it's not ideal. You're going to have to be on that waiver wire. Yeah. Stuff. No, but I'm really excited about Mack Jones.

we're going to have a lot of a lot of things to talk about okay let's watch let's watch honestly the the Washington football team have not paid attention this off season can't bring myself to do it not feeling good about this season I watched a couple episodes of hard knocks it's awful this year it's about the cowboy it's just so boring is it ever good it was good when rex Ryan was on it that was like the you know that was probably the best that was season ever yeah yeah well you can tell it was uh you know slow Newsweek because we just went right into football. The other cultural thing that happened is Kanye dropped Donda, which was great album, my opinion. So I haven't listened to it yet. You really liked it?

Yeah, I'm a big Kanye fan. Everybody knows that. And it's very long. It's a long album. But yeah, there's just, you know, in fact, he dropped the non-explicit version, but there's no explicit version anywhere. So it's a completely clean album. No swearing. That's pretty cool. Yeah, so he's setting an example for the youth. It's probably like that's an album I would have been allowed to listen to back in the day. If it had the little explicit tag on it, it's very unlikely I would have heard it. So there you go.

Donda. I'm going to put a little sample in here. I record on my phone. There you go. Oh, we listen into it right now? Well, I'm going to splice it in with my, you know, technical prowess there. There was some deal. There were a deal.

this week, actually. You know, in years past, Labor Day weekend, heading into Labor Day weekend, just no deals. But, you know, this is the deal time to be in blockchain. So, yeah,

there were a bunch of deals. There is actually one other interesting thing to note about it being September. What's that? Well, this is the two-year, almost to the day anniversary of this podcast being started.

Really? Yeah. What episode are we on? It feels like 500, but it's 2.39. 239. 239 episodes in about two years, just under two years. It'll be exactly two years, I think, on the 17th. And when we started this thing, we said, hey, there's probably no way we could ever do this remotely.

So we'll just do it in the office on Thursdays because we're always in the office every Thursday. That didn't end up being the case. Yeah. In our intro episode, we said this would just, we have such good office banter that we have to do a podcast. We had a really high opinion of our office banter. We did have good office banter. Well, anyway, the office is no longer. The office is gone.

Yeah. Well, the office is still there. We're just not in it. That's right. So we've somehow made it two years, an uncountable episode. We did just count them, but lots of episodes. There's a hidden episode. We're going to release that as an NFT at some point in the future.

We're actually working with an audio NFT platform, which we'll be talking about at some point in the future. And maybe we will release the hidden tapes on that platform. Yeah, think of it of like the B-sides. So that's the one we've recorded during Miami Bitcoin 2021. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And we recorded it. to our credit we did somehow record it and then I just didn't edit it or publish it.

Is that what happened? Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Yep. I was just booked. So I don't know. I must have had some very important meetings that week. I don't know what happened. May 2021.

That simpler times. We thought COVID was over actually at that point. It did seem that way for a second. I seem to recall it wasn't a good episode though, to be clear. no i don't think it was that great i don't think it was great the dead sea scrolls of episodes i like to call but if we release that as an audio nfts i mean in this market i'm it's that'll do pretty well i mean everyone is making money on these nfts except for me right now it is i hate it we need to see what was that wsj article everyone is getting filthy rich yeah everyone is getting hilarious rich except for me

that's that captures that's you know story of your life and i've made some plays i've made some plays here and they just haven't pinned out. You know, see, if I went and publicly shielded some NFTs, I would get in trouble. But I feel like you can do it. Well, no. I'm not publicly shilling. This is not investment advice disclosure. We're just mentioning

in passing the portfolio. I'm just saying, I don't understand why you know, chill frogs are not really, like why doesn't everyone want a chill frog? Yeah. Okay. So what else you got? What else he got in there? I mean, you know what I really like is these

CAPTCHAs. They're called the CAPTC and you solve puzzles to get to unlock your NFT. And some of them are really hard puzzles. I don't understand that. Yeah, well, yeah, I don't, I wouldn't expect you to. It's art, man. Come on. So, so have you, is your portfolio Ethereum only or have you gone cross platform here? I'm set up to go cross platform, um, but I have not pulled the trigger on any Solana NFTs yet. I'm ready to go with Tezos. I'm set up on that as well. I'm ready to go, but I'm mostly Ethereum at this point. Tazos has clean NFTs, you know.

Yeah, they're not environmentally damaging NFTs. That's right. I don't lose that many, you know, REM cycles about that issue necessarily, but I'm also big in the Wicked Ape Bone Club. So that's like some sort of like discount ape if you don't have a real mutant ape or uh what's the default ape thing it's not bathing ape yeah it's it's board ape if you don't have a you know if you don't have a blue chip ape you go for like the penny stock it's yeah it's like silver to bitcoin's gold you know it's uh it's like ripple because ripple's

only a dollar in bitcoin is like ten thousand dollars so you had to buy some okay so you have wicked ape bone club um okay i did um um I did pick up a mutant ape. I will say that much. Is that a, that's a bigger one than the, that's a, so mutant, mutant ape gives you full membership in, uh, the,

uh, I guess, uh, board ape, uh, yacht club. So, so,

oh man, um, we do have to talk about loot though. We have to talk about loot. So yeah, loot, you just explain this to me. So you just buy words that are on, you just buy words,

basically. I saw, someone described Lute, actually I think is Dan Romero, Romero, as the second most valuable text-based universe after Harry Potter, which is not strictly true in any, you know, like sort of economical or mathematical sense, but it's sort of like directionally true. So Lute is basically a list of words on a black background, and that's it. And here's like an example.

Cimitar, this is one loot. It contains the following list of words. Cimitar, leather armor, dragons, crown of vitriol, dragon skin, belt, will shoes, gloves, necklace, platinum, andering. All right, I'll bid on that. I'll bid on that. So that list of words is currently trading for about $13,000, $48,000. But if you own the word, no one else can ever say it again, right?

Well, I suppose you can try to enforce that. So there's 7.8,000 of those lists and the floor price is about 13th, thus giving loot a floor price valuation of $380 million at today's prices. Undoubtedly, the true market gap is much higher. So, yeah, don't let your memes be dreams. like you can just make lists of words and have them be worth hundreds and millions of dollars. And I guess the premise of loot is that they, they, the Ethereum's, the creators, the owners, they think that someone will make a game with the lutes and thus the lutes will become incredibly valuable in game items.

So you're buying items in a text-based. presumably role-playing game, although the game isn't defined. You know, the game doesn't exist. In the expectation of the items, you get the point. So that's loot. I mean, you're talking to a guy that has maybe 20,000 baseball cards. I probably had, at my peak, 200 pogs. I get this stuff.

So you're born in the wrong era, man. if you had been, you know, getting started today, you would just, you'd be one of the top NFT collectors, probably. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm going to elementary school trying to trade like a, trying to trade a Ray Bork card with a classmate. I'm not getting full value here. If I had open C at that point, I'd be, this would be a lot different story.

It'd have been unleashed. So in your NFT journey, like, how do you curate your collection, how you define your artistic taste here? So I like the What's the term for the profile pictures? I do like the profile pictures The ones that you could put as a Twitter avatar But I'm too embarrassed to put as a Twitter avatar

I kind of like those I like these capture things I think I'm going to get a way to Demonstrate these things I'm going to get like a frame We'll probably put it in the office And have it be rotating through So I'm just from your answer

I'm getting that this is like Basically completely random And you don't like, is there a strategy? No, the strategy is I pick the things that look cool to me, which unfortunately does not seem to be translating into economic value. See, you got to go one step beyond and buy things like lists of text on a black background. That's what you should be going for here. I actually have a, I think I have a mooky bets one too, actually. So that's NFTs. That's the NFTs for the week.

Let's see what's trending on OpenC, the koala intelligence agency. Lazy Lions. Lazy Lions, yeah, I've seen those. Fang Gang. Wicked A Bone Club. That's a position. Are we trending? That's, well, 38th rank.

All right. The Wicked Craniums, Rumble Kong League. You know, there's just an endless world out there. anything you could possibly desire. You know, the counterparty guys right now are just like, what the hell? Well, because the rare Pepe's was the first NFT. Yeah, one of those sold this week, actually. They figured out a way to transport them over to Ethereum.

Well, yeah, you know, there was an interesting arbitrage for a time because people thought the punks were the first NFT, but really it was the rare Pepe's, if we're going to be honest. And you could get, you know, the total market gap of the rare Pepeys was like a thousandth of the punks. But I think the pepets have sort of begun to sort of climb. And collectors went for the most OG. Although the pepes are just, the art is sort of like reminiscent of 4chan.

So it's not exactly, it's not very tasteful. It kind of fell into a slipstream of a group of people that not everyone wants to be associated with, maybe. Yeah, it's a bit, I mean, it's been five years, I think, since they were launched, maybe even longer. I remember back in the day looking at rare pepe's, I should have bought one. I remember there was even a token to buy the Pepe's with called Pepe Cash. Yes, Pepe Cash. It was like top 30 on Coin Market Cap or something. Yeah, I remember.

I used to know Pepe Cash whale, who I think at 30% of all the Pepe Cash. Maybe that paid off for him. I don't know. But yeah, the Pepe's, they were just a little bit grimy. They didn't. And they had their cultural moment. And then they were sort of, you know, got associated with all sorts of nasty things. Yeah, something.

And the creator, Matt Fury started suing everyone that was doing Pepe-related stuff. A little fun fact. Yeah, so there's no IP risk, I guess, with punks. Like, I don't even know if there was an artist that made punks. It was like was an algorithm? I don't know, actually. They're auctioning off some. This is actually part of the news.

But Sotheby's is auctioning off some Borde Ape Yacht Club NFTs this week. They have 107 of them. Right now, the top. bid is 4.5 million. Yeah, I think, uh, wait, are they auctioning off them all in a single batch? Yeah. Yeah. 107. 107 of them. Why would someone want 107 board eight piaught clubs? Uh, why not? I mean, it's just so many. You got a, you get a frame. You get to rotate them through. And like that there just aren't enough social media networks to have each one be a unique AVI. Yeah, that's true. Maybe it's a fund. Maybe a fund will buy them. Yeah, that is part of the news.

There was an NFT fund launched this week. Yeah, let's get into some of the deals in fundraising. And let's start with that one. So three arrows is launching a $100 million fund to invest in NFTs. I mean, these guys are ahead of most trends. So this is one that I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye on. Yeah, they did sweep the floor, I believe, on certain NFTs earlier. So they've been in it for a while now. So we'll see. It might look back. It might look to be extremely prescient in hindsight like many of the things

the Eros does. We also have in sort of non-NFT deals, we've got old DFI parallel finance, decentralized lending platform. They raised $22 million from polychain lightspeed slow blockchain capital and Alameda research. Next one up is off-chain labs. This is the company behind Arbitrum, which is the layer two scaling solution on Ethereum. They raised $120 million from light speed, Mark Cuban, and others. A little known fact about some of the Arbitrum guys, they worked on Blockside back in the day at Princeton.

You remember that project? I certainly do. That was critical to the development of coin metrics. and some of the ideas and heuristics in denoising transaction volume. BlockSai has a very special place in my heart. That was one of the coolest projects I've ever seen in the data space in this industry. It was great. Blockchain co-investors, which is a blockchain-focused multi-strategy fund,

they filed for $250 million SPAC focused on the blockchain industry. Yeah, huge congrats to blockchain co-investors. As far as I know, this is the first fund. that has been raised specifically saying that they're targeting a company in this industry. So really exciting to see. Next one up is syndicate. This is a decentralized organization. It's focused on investing.

They raised $20 million from a number of investors, including Andresen and Coinbase Ventures. That is the most general description I think I've ever heard in my life. A decentralized organization focused on investing. Well, it's like a, it's a syndicate. You know, so they invest as part of a syndicate in rounds. should be pretty self-explanatory. This is the most generic. I think that might be the most generic deal we've ever announced on the show.

Well, I think that was my language, but it's a syndicate Dow. This is Ian Lee in those guys, you know? This is a great team. Fair enough. Next up, FTX, sponsors of the local Miami Heat Stadium, of drug pass it today. They acquired Leddrucks, which a lot of you will know. They, I think, were the first CFTC regulated derivatives exchange, been around for a very long time.

I found it by Juthka and Paul Chu. So congrats to them on the acquisition. The first MIT Bitcoin conference I ever went to, Juthika, was a speaker. And I remember thinking that that was a really cool concept when they started that. I know a lot of OG bitcoinsers that used to, you know, sell calls on LedgerX. And that's how they got yield on their Bitcoin, a call writing strategy. Yeah. So kind of LedgerX has an important place in Bitcoin history, I'd say.

Next one up is UXD protocol. This is a stable coin built on Solana that raised $3 million from Multicoin, Alameda, CMS, Defiance Capital, and others. So XMTP, which is a Web3 communication protocol, raises a $20 million series A led by Andreson. XMtip, in case you're wondering, stands for extensible message transport protocol. So that should eliminate all doubt as to what they do. Yeah. I think this is for contacting people to figure out. if you want to buy their NFTs. So if someone wants to use XMTP to hit me up and talk about

the Wicked 8 Bone Club collection that I have, this seems like a good way to bilaterally negotiate. That's kind of what this is. If that is truly what it is and you're not just speculating, I need to make use of it because someone owns my ENS domain, nickarta.eath, and they are not selling it to me. And also I don't know how to get in touch with them. I'm pretty sure this is actually what this is. So, yeah, if you want to sell Nick Carter.eath back to Nick Carter, get in touch. I want it. I am buying it, but not for more than like, I don't know, 0.1Eth, frankly. Not worth, come on. I mean, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's not that valuable. I'm not desperate, okay? I'm not desperate. Like, this guy thinks, you know, I'm desperate because I'm, I alone need

this property. No, okay. I'll wait it. I'll wait him out. He's just squatting on that thing. He's just he's gonna be like sailor just 20 years on a domain name It's rude It's rude Next one up is hype This is a social network for NFT collectors I would totally join this This raised $1.5 million from electric capital

I need more people tell me about NFTs I feel like I'm always the last one to know And to be clear that's hype with two whys So it's more like hype It's hype So I mean NFTs are built to be displayed on socials, so it does make sense. I will give a shill to one of our portfolio companies evaluate market.

I am using that nonstop to analyze my NFTs. So you can go on there. You can load up your NFT collection, and you can actually see what's going on and what the last trading activity is sort of like a coin market cap style experience for NFTs. Breaking news on loot, you know, covered loot. So in case you're, you know, nervous about, about loot having a specific loot portfolio.

Georgios over at Paradigm created a product called Lute Luce, where you can unbundle the Lute NFTs into individual, their individual components. So maybe this Lute cinematic universe is actually kind of taking off. Well, I'm looking at one right now. And I mean, what if you don't want all the words? Well, so that's why Giorgio's constant. to Constantopoulos.

We're just going to call them. Georgeos did the project so you can disaggregate the lutes. That's great. Yeah, that's a great idea. Perhaps someone will step up to the plate and make an MMORPG featuring the lutes. They practically have to now.

I mean, the floor price on these things is just insane. I mean, like, is it any different from buying, you know, just a new L1 in the hopes that an ecosystem develops? In some ways, it's the same exact thing, right? Like, if you bought ETH in 2016 with the anticipation that sort of like defy would emerge, maybe that's the same idea as buying long lists of words and hoping that someone will make a game with the words. And in that game, the words will be worth a lot. I mean, you kind of kid about that, but I think that's kind of what it is. and you can even extend it down to,

this is like buying a city in the West in the 1800s and just hoping that people come out there and start building buildings and railroads to it. Well, I kind of garbled the analogy. It's you're buying like plots of land, not a city. Well, you're buying a huge plot of land and you want to own the town, you know? Go big.

Yeah, and so I guess the hopes are that someone builds a railroad through your plot and, you know, a vibrant, vibrant city springs up. You're hoping for that. You're hoping that CMS gets behind your project, throw some liquidity on there. You're hoping for some positive press coverage on CoinDesk, although CoinDesk just the, you know, the refactor, though, with that website, we haven't talked about that yet. That's tough.

You don't like that? No, it's terrible. I liked it. As a CoinDus contributor, probably their most prolific columnist, if we're going to be honest. Not to brag. it's more like I feel hard done by I mean you know I do it for free so the part that I don't get is there you never know what the latest news is I need to know what the latest news is I like the new interface I like the new interface I'll go I'll say it all right well I don't I don't

I don't like this much I'm going to pull it up right now so people did complain though because a lot of cryptic people are paranoid which is okay good for them And they don't run JavaScript. They have it just turned off. But apparently it doesn't load. Oh. If you have JavaScript turned off. So all is not well.

All is not well. But I do like that they have a big opinion section because that's where I write. And so I want my pieces to show up on the front page. It's, so there we go. There we go. All right. Well, let's get into some news. This came out after we recorded last week.

So Square is apparently going to build a decentralized Bitcoin exchange. I was pretty surprised about this. So there are decentralized Bitcoin exchanges. BISQ, BISQ, BISQ, remember BISC? I do. And Hoddle, Hoddle, too, right? Yeah, I mean, there's, BISC has an order book, I believe, whereas Hottle, Hottle, Local Bitcoin's Pax full and Binance P-2P,

those are P-to-P. Fair enough. So I would say there's a difference there. what Square was describing seemed similar to Bisk, but they also said that they didn't want to build Bisk. So it's not exactly clear what they're going to do. The part that I'm a little bit unclear on is how will the Fiat side of this work? Because Square is a regulated financial institution.

If you're going to have Fiat currency on the platform, I would think you would have to go through a KYC process. So yeah, that's a great question. I mean, normally decentralized exchange implies doing things sort of outside the boundaries of the various money transmitter laws and things like that. Also, if they use stable coins, then presumably, I mean, I would say there already are decentralized Bitcoin exchanges in that case. I mean, I don't know if this is exactly what they had in mind, but like the Uniswap, uh, WBT stable coin market would sort of qualify, right? Yeah, that's a good point.

I mean, yeah, so unclear to me what's going to happen here, but quite interesting because I think Jack is right. That's sort of the final frontier as a decentralized fiat Bitcoin on ramp. I mean, arguably the P2P platforms are decentralized because they're like Craigslist style interfaces. and they're just definitionally decentralized. I mean, it's lots of individual transactions are happening on a bilateral basis.

But I don't think a P-to-P platform is what they have in mind either. Yeah, I'm going to be really interested if they start to talk more about this and release more details. This could be compelling. I never told you this, but when I was at Fidelity in the very earliest days,

when we were, this was before Ethereum launched, we proposed a few, that had decentralized exchanges for cryptocurrencies as a provocative comment. And there was an executive there who told me that that's ridiculous and that will never happen because the DTCC will never allow that to happen. And he's not there anymore. Did you discuss the merits of AMMs or? No, I had no idea.

I had no idea what AMMs were. This was kind of a Reddit Bitcoin concept before it was really. really in the Ethereum space. This was sort of like a theory that people were talking about that you could build decentralized exchanges for cryptocurrencies. I guess we should find out if the DTCC ever had opinions about decentralized exchanges. They're still doing their private blockchain stuff. I feel like it's at a certain point the clock's going to run out on the private

blockchains. Yeah. And maybe after, I mean, it's been what, half a dozen years of them now. Yeah, it's been a while With no real progress or sort of evidence of anything useful If you look back on that you really I mean I went down that that rabbit hole really hard unfortunately And I will I will admit it And if you think back on what the minimum viable ecosystem had to have been in order for some of that stuff to work

You literally would have had to get every single bank and broker dealer in the United States maybe the world to buy into this concept of a private blockchain in order to actually get this thing to work. And then you would have had to figure out how to tokenize US dollars and put them on chain. And you definitely could not have done that with just banks issuing their own IOUs and having the credit risk. So you're talking about the most monumental just coordination challenge known to man. It would have been, it's just insane that we actually thought that this could happen. well speaking of insane things pretty great transition I know

the SEC finally sued the founders of BitConnect just a mere I guess three years too late but they finally got them and some of the promoters I thought these guys had been sued like six months ago when I saw this headline I was like I thought this already happened this might be the settlement

or something or other basically BitConnect was a scam as we all know And there's some interesting details in the complaint. But yeah, it was an obvious game. One interesting thing I will remind everyone of was I spent like a non-negligible amount of my time in, I think, summer 2017, trying to alert people about Big Connect. I know. I remember you came into work one day at Fidelity and you just hadn't slept and you just been online.

warning people about BitConnect. Well, it was just, it was kind of a simpler time when there were just like a handful of scams as opposed to like an unlimited number. And I, one thing I did was emailed GoDaddy, I think, which was the registrar, and they were doing who is guard services for BitConnect.co, the domain. And I'm like, hey, your terms of service says, you know, you don't allow frauds and Ponzi schemes to use your services. And I was like, here's the evidence that it's a fraud. Like, it's here. And they emailed me back and like, yeah, you know, we don't take anything down

about a letter from a judge or from a court, which is funny because they do. They do. Do that. They do. A hundred percent unilaterally. And yeah, like, come on. So now we have the letter from the SEC. So I feel like I want to email them back and be like, I was right. Four years. Yeah, take that victory. Four years too late. Well, apparently one of the guys is on the lamb right now. He's probably hanging out with Joe Lowe, wherever Joe Lowe is. He, the, the basically the founder, I think. Yeah, I think he's, I think no one knows where he is. I mean, like some of these like, uh, crypto scammers, like actually genuinely escaped. Like, uh, the, uh, what was her name? Crypto Queen, the one coin.

Oh, yeah. The Romanian lady. I think she's still on the run. Gerald Cotton, we know, you know, faked his death and, you know, is in Sri Lanka somewhere. I firmly believe that that guy's still alive. So he's good. And then the founder of BigConnect, which was a gigantic, enormous Ponzi.

Like one of the larger Ponzi's ever, probably. Some apparently escaped. The world is a big place, I guess. You know? It's where are these people? Is it? I mean, like, we've like facial recognition, like all kinds of stuff. It's wild. It's really wild that you can do this. There has to be a movie made about all of the crypto con artists. It seems very old fashioned for someone to go on the run.

You're like genuinely go on the run and like somehow escape the authorities and so on. But he has like $2 billion in Bitcoin. I mean, Whitey Baldro was on the run for like 20 years. They found him in freaking. California. He was in Santa Monica watching Red Sox games at a Red Sox bar. It's insane that that happened. Also, he was still a boss and boy through and through is where you're telling me. Yeah, but it's like, how does this happen? I mean, how do you spend whatever billions of dollars in ill-gotten Bitcoin? How do you spend it? I mean, like, wouldn't it be tracked on chain?

I think you'd be on like Reddit trying to find people to buy it peer to peer and yeah, using mixers. It'd be difficult, I think. Not a, yeah, not a test guy. I envy. But yeah, apparently the chief architect of BitConnect is still out there somewhere. Well, the SEC made some big headlines there. There's some other regulatory news. So Adrian Harris, I'm not familiar with her, but she was a former Obama administration veteran.

She's been tapped to run the New York Department of Financial Services. And this is relevant to crypto because, of course, the. NYDFS is probably the most aggressive regulator towards crypto companies. Of course, the bit license is a complete debacle and makes it really difficult for startups, as well as legacy institutions to run crypto businesses. So her posture towards the industry is something that basically everyone's watching. All the banks are watching. All the startups are watching.

So hopefully she does a good job. Yeah, maybe they can make New York a place where you can do business as a crypto startup. once again. That would be good for a step. Yeah, if someone was coming to me and saying, where should I not start a business? New York would be in the top three. I think you know, North Korea would be on the list too. So in other regulatory news, Nigeria is apparently launching a CBDC in partnership with BIT. That's BITTT. Yeah, Central Bank Digital currencies. We kind of forgot about those with all the NFT stuff. But That's happening.

Cuba also passed some Bitcoin legislation, which is quite interesting, actually, because nobody had talked about Cuba having any Bitcoin activity until this show. That's right. We did a full episode about it. With Boaz, who is really the expert on it. And then a lot of people learned from that. Boaz also did a talk of Bitcoin 2021. So this notion of Cuba as an emerging Bitcoin,

nation kind of grew and then Alex Gladstein wrote about it and now the Cuban legislature has passed a Bitcoin law. It doesn't appear to be good for Cuban bitcorners in actuality, but nevertheless, it's recognition. Nice. That's good to hear. Also this week, SBI Holdings, which is the Japanese financial conglomerate launched a crypto asset fund. So it's great to see more funds like that. And then I guess the other news that I found pretty compelling was this TRM analysis. Did you see this Aurora project, which is an NFT drop on Solana? Which I did, you know, you asked me about other chains. I was in a meeting, but I wanted to do this.

So I, you know, I might have, I might have gotten scammed if I tried to do it. But, you know, I had to take a real, real world meeting here. So TRM had a nice blog post. So this was an NFT drop on Solana for a game, and it was super popular. And it was sort of like the ICOs, where what ended up happening was a hacker designed a website that looked the same and had a very similar URL. And when you clicked into the link, it drained your Solana wallet. And so a lot of people lost money on this. And it kind of reminded me of the Enigma ICO back in, what was that, 2017, where the guy who started an enigma, I think, is Ashley Madison account, got hacked.

And they got into the website and they put up a phony address and people ended up sending like $10 million worth of Ethereum to a hacker instead of the actual ICO. So you're starting to see some of these things that happened back then start to happen in the NFT space. Well, I think you being in a meeting and missing the drop is why you're just not going to make it as an NFT collector. I know. And I should be, you know, hiring someone to do bots or something. Like that's kind of where this is going. You got to be prepared to wake up at 3am for a drop and be ready to smash that buy button on three laptops simultaneously.

Well, you know, I'm just doing this for the research. And so I'm no, you know, I will admit that I tried to do the Brave browser one whenever that one came out. That was over in like 22 seconds. I missed that one too. Yeah, that was, there were some gas wars. I think that among the first gas price auctions, I would say. was the Brave ICO.

I remember it very well. I mean, I guess you probably made money if you were the whale that bought the Brave ICO. Probably. Probably. Brave is just one of my favorite case studies because the product is great. I don't use it personally,

but people like it. But it has no relationship to the token whatsoever. So a successful product, the token that was meant to sort of fund the build of the product, I have some sort of affiliation to it. Just no relationship at all. Yeah.

Yeah, that is weird how that happened. So it's a, it's just a, I think it's a great case study because the token still has no purpose. Well, maybe someone will come around and build a great product around that token. Kind of like loot. You know, token exists prior to the purpose. And you sort of expect it to emerge. Maybe when we release this podcast, the loot price will go up. I mean, it's astronomical already, frankly. And to be clear, I don't own loot much to my sugar

and I have no loot. I don't either. I wish I did. You got to tell me about these things earlier. Yeah. I don't know why I'm so fascinated by it. I think it's just because it's literally words on a black background for a as of yet non-exist. A game that doesn't exist. I mean, people collect pretty stupid stuff. I mean, look over my shoulder right now. I've got flutty flakes in a Wheaties box of when Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl. Like, I mean, and that, to be clear, that's not stupid, but some people would say it is. There is, yeah, there's definitely some stupid stuff on your bookshelf.

In bookshelf news, so my apartment is fully furnished, but it did not come with a bookshelf. You believe that? Does the person just not read books? I've been told that Miami apartments, as a matter of, principle almost don't have bookshelves. I've got like 10 boxes of books here. Nowhere to put them. No nice Zoom background. I have to do TV next week.

What am I going to do? You got to figure that out. You got to go get a bookshelf. Yeah, I have to portray myself as an intellectual here. I don't know, like staple them to the wall or something. I don't know. You got to get that block clock back up. I definitely think you need to get a bookshelf. Yeah. I can't have a, you know, an intellectual background right now. Um, it's a problem. Yeah, you need to get the bookshelf and then I'll get you some books like debt by Graber.

I know you like that one. We'll put that one up there. I mean, I do have that book. I don't like it, but I have it. I mean, everyone has it. I think. Yeah, you have to have that, right? Yeah, rip in peace.

Rip in peace to David Graber. Um, died. Yeah, he, oh, he died? He died. Oh, wow. All right. Well, on that somber note. See, we thought we didn't have any content, but we actually managed to do 45 minutes.

All right. Well, it's slow week, but we got there. So it's Labor Day weekend. So we actually do have an episode coming out on Monday with Alex from Nansen. On a holiday. On holiday. On holiday. We're going to start picking it back up.

It was a little slow on the interviews over the summer. But thanks for bearing with us. We're going to start ramping it up. And we'll have some more turkey updates. So just like I said, I'm not really ready to talk about some of the things that I'm trying. I think I'm going to do our first video podcast. Well, I mean, I don't think it's called a podcast at that point. But anyway, we're going cross platform here.

There's a couple new platforms I want to try to put the podcast on. I, you know, we'll see. So you've been interested in this, what's it called? Colin. Colin. Colin. Yeah, I think I think. Colin is like a new clubhouse like app for podcasts.

And it's the guy who started it. I'm not talking about David Sacks. The other guy, Axel, he was in crypto. I forget the name of his project. He had an Ethereum-based project that was really cool. So, yeah, I think we need to think about Colin. So Matt, to this is addressed with the audience. Matt was trying to pitch me on doing a simulcast of our podcast recording and Colin at the same time.

We got to be on multiple platforms. We need to be where our listeners are with the products. services that they desire. Zero of our listeners are on Colin. No, no, we have listeners. And actually, there's a Bitcoin podcast. I'm going to call it out right now that's on Colin that I like. I started listening to it.

Isn't this thing still in test flight, basically? It's not in test flight. It's out of test flight. Okay. All right. Well, maybe it's time for us to move on from Libson. you know, modernize our structure here. So there's a, there's a Bitcoin podcast on Colin.

It's called Bitcoin. And the, it's hosted by Rob Hamilton, who goes by the handle at Bitcoin, which is a power move. So he's just squatting Bitcoin entirely on this platform. Yeah. And he's, that's going to be a very valuable handle. But he's, he's a good bit coiner. And then Jay Gould, who I don't know Jay Gould online as much, but this is at J. Gould.

And they host a podcast about Bitcoin. I don't know about calling it just straight up Bitcoin. I mean, you know, be more specific, guys. Well, I think it is specific. It says it's called Bitcoin and it's all about Bitcoin. Okay. Well, I guess that answers it. Well, maybe next week we will be coming to you live on Colin.

How about that? I mean, I'm not going to let the Winklevoss twins and the Bitcoin show be the only shows on Colin. about this topic. I mean, this is more of an NFT show these days. I don't remember when was the last time I actually talked about Bitcoin? I mean, if we could get a call-in going with people giving us NFT tips,

this would be great. I hope none of our investors listen to this, that we just spend all of our time talking about NFTs. Well, we're doing diligence on new, you know, new interesting market segments.

Okay, that's what this is. We're not putting the wicked apes in the fund yet. They're not, we may have discussed it at our investment meeting this week, quite seriously. Yet. As of yet, they're not in there. Not investment advice. We'll leave that to three errors. All right, so that's all we have for the week.

Everybody, enjoy your long weekend, and we'll see you next week.