On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 09/18/26 (Clarity fails to advance, Caroline Ellison's new job, AI leaking MNPI, Poland's oil snafu) (EP.740)

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  How is SBF like Dario? The EAs are at it again Do we need new regulation to Pace the Frontier? Can Anthropic be regulated like a bank?  Are baseball cards back? Clarity fails at the final hurdle Why did Clarity fail? Stablecoin yield is still in effect The SEC and CFTC are engaging in rulemaking Circle launches Arc, their new L1 Robinhood employees get caught insider trading on Hyperliquid Caroline Ellison is back and working for a former FTX portco Can AI models leak MNPI? A Polish oil company tried to buy sanctioned oil from Venezuela with USDT The DOE launches a $250m Quantum computing competition

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 is 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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Is it all clarity, or are we going to talk about pacing the frontier? today. Well, last week was pacing the frontier. Yeah, but then Dario had a, was it Saturday morning pacing the frontier post. Was that, we didn't talk about that last week? No, we talked about the coxin thing last week, the whistleblower. Someone tweeted that this is the least crazy AI discourse is

ever going to be, and I agree. Like, it's only going to get crazier. Yeah, it's crazier because, it's crazy because of the people involved. Some of the people are just actual crazy people. I mean, If only we had some warning that EAs are megalomaniacs, you know, that'll commit crimes in order to advance their lofty goals. Like, if only there had been some great example of this. I think the FTX thing, just people attributed that to just crypto scammers. And there wasn't enough introspection about the fact that, no, this guy was part of a cult. Yeah, I saw a lot of people saying on Twitter, like, oh, well, you guys just found out what EAs are yesterday. And now you've got all these opinions about them. It's like, well, hang on, we in the crypto industry,

we've known what EAs are. We've known this. Yeah, we had a dose of this. Starting in 2020, probably. And it was so uncannily similar to what's happening now. It really was. I mean, even the way Sam went about trying to pass regulation in D.C. is reminiscent of what D.C. is doing now. I was trying to think about that actually earlier today. What was that bill? It was the Stap, Bozeman. Stabenow bill or something. He really tried to ram market structure through that would have just killed defy. Yeah, it was clarity before clarity and it was really noxious. And I feel like he didn't get that far with it, but he definitely tried. He tried really hard. And I think if he was in a more

powerful position operating in the U.S., he might have actually gotten that through. Yeah, I mean, he might have been a bit naive about how Washington works and things like that. And I don't think he was actually going to get it through, but given another three or five years or something, and he might have. And yeah, I think it was going to kill Defi. It was, it's very similar. So compare it to, you know, a large closed source frontier lab, effectively arguing that open weight AI shouldn't exist and that the government should be involved in regulating a handful of large labs to the exclusion of the smaller ones. I mean, it's very similar concept. It should, There's a peculiar world to live in that Mark Zuckerberg is the voice of reason here.

And he's saying, hey, you operate a company, you have responsibilities. We've gone a little bit slower because we're actually taking compliance into effect, that he's the guy that's actually making the most sense. I think our current framework works fine for what Dario is saying, frankly. You know, product liability is a thing. If your model goes haywire and starts committing crimes like opening eyes did, that's already illegal. We don't need to invite new laws. We have laws for that.

There's civil liability related to the product. There's also potentially criminal liability. Yeah. If you want to slow down, you're welcome to slow down. You can't compel anyone else to, unfortunately. You certainly can't compel China to. And based on what I've seen this week, they won't. The one thing Dara was asking for, and if you want oversight,

he was asking to be regulated the way banks are, but then he wanted the supervisory organization to be, like, closely affiliated firm that they are financially intertwined with. That's not how banks are regulated, by the way. He wants metter, which is a bunch of EAs that are invested in Anthropic to and vice for a second. That's not how the banking system works. That's certainly not how Finro works. Yeah, so Dario, he's very smart, but he's incredibly naive. I get this impression from him all the time. He's so naive. I think he's very good at what he does. But then when he talks about finance, It's like, well, that's our realm.

Okay. That's not how banks regulated at all. You don't just get to appoint an overseer that's like your buddies and your roommates and people that your investors are invested in. That's not at all how it works. And then you also, you don't get to get some antitrust exclusion just because you think we're living in dangerous times. They need to, do you ever watch that show The Americans? No, what is that about spies? It's about spies.

but one of the protagonists, I think his name's Matthew Reese, he's an actor. He looks exactly like Dario. This guy needs to just stay looking the exact same so he can play Dario in the eventual movie here. I mean, this is actually something we often ask who's the main character. And Dario is like the main character of the decade. Like not just the week or month. I mean, it's right now Dario is the unquestioned main character and can he survive?

You don't want to be the main character in crypto. maybe it's different in other fields? I don't know if we have one right now in crypto. I think it's probably still Sailor to some degree, isn't it? Did Sailor go to jury duty in Miami this week? Was that a real thing? That wasn't Jeff Bezos, though. Well, Bezos definitely did, but then I was, I might have been tricked by AI

slop and that would be a sad day, the day that I get tricked. And I don't know. I saw allegations that Sailor was also there. That was probably made up now reflecting on it. Yeah, that would be. remarkable to be on a jury with Sailor and Jeff Bezos. Okay, so we're going to talk about clarity, but should we do the deals first? Let's do the deals of the week.

First one up is Tari. This is an on-chain credit platform. There is $13 million from blockchain capital, Janice Henderson, and Strobe. Velocity is a stable coin payments company. They raised 10 million from Hahn, Moronaventures, Circle Ventures, and others. Finn.com is a stablecoin infrastructure company that raised $20 million from Expa and Coinbase Ventures. Deadstock is an on-chain collectibles marketplace.

There is two and a half million from bullish capital. On-chain collectibles, alive, huh? Thriving. I haven't heard a, have you heard an on chain collectibles deal on this podcast in the past two years? I mean, collectibles are hot right now. Have you been not following Pokemon cards and... Oh, Pokemon cards and then some of these companies, yeah, some of these companies

that do the, what is it, the pack ripping or whatever? They're just printing money. Yeah, don't you have a lot of baseball cards that maybe they... Incredible amount of baseball cards. I think you should keep an eye on that market because there's cards are in. I mean, I'm seeing crypto people pivoting into cards. I mean, I've told you this before, but my childhood was collecting aluminum cans, redeeming them for five cents each and buying baseball cards with them.

That was what I did for about six years. I think there was a small chance that you make $10 million on your, card collection. The problem is I was the guy that was always bargain hunting. I would go into the baseball card store and I would say I'll take the pack of 100 assorted cards and just hope there's a diamond in the rough. But that was a foolish way to do it. I should have been buying the good cards, fewer quantity of good cards. I never indulged in the hobby, so I don't know what the right meta is. But so you're buying like the torn up ones? Yeah, I would buy the bargain bin, but the guy who owns the baseball card store is probably taking all the good ones out of there anyway. So you're not actually

getting anything. I wouldn't be surprised of baseball cards even. I feel like they're already having a comeback. They're definitely having a comeback. And the problem was they overprinted them in the 90s. So I have a lot of cards that are not rare at all. That's when you learned that was like your

inflation. That was like when Vitalik had his World of Warcraft troll get. Yeah, yeah. Whatever happened to it, its spell was weakened and then he created Ethereum. This was like your moment of that. I was primed. to understand Bitcoin from a very, very early age.

I understood inflationary dynamics, digital scarcity. I was ready for it when I saw it. All right. Last one up is Open Zeppelin. This company goes way back. I remember these guys from the early days. A blockchain security firm, they were acquired by S&P Global. Congratulations to the Open Zeppelin team.

So not a surprise, but still disappointing. Clarity Act has failed for now in the Senate. The cloture vote fell short. It did not reach 60 votes. The vote went along party lines, 495. I guess someone was absent. Four Republicans didn't go for it either. Tillis voted no, but only to preserve the procedure that it could be reconsidered.

So there's three Republican no votes. What do you make of this? I mean, this is a shame because it was so close to passing. I mean, there weren't that far apart here. I think for the crypto industry, it's business as usual because you're going to get all of the positive aspects of the Clarity Act via SEC rulemaking. And we should talk about all of that because that started actually today and with the CFTC. But they were really close. And I think this was just a political issue here.

The Democrats didn't want to give Trump a win. The ethics issue was the big sticking point. I think it's safe to say that if we didn't have this Trump meme coin or World Liberty Financial, we'd already have a bill. So there's a lot of what could have. have been there. That was a huge issue. At the 11th hour, I think it was like 24 hours before the vote happened, the White House gave an additional compromise on ethics. So they had already agreed to having Trump either sell his cryptocurrency holdings or to put them in a blind trust. And then they additionally, at the 11th hour, gave this ability for the state AGs to play a role in the

enforcement. So that's probably, I don't know, 80% of what the Democrats wanted here. Democrat counterproposal a few minutes before the vote involved looking through to Trump's dependent children, which I assume is barren and forcing him to be a part of it. And it also included changes to the blockchain regulatory certainty act, the BRCA, that would remove some of the protections for open source software developers. So, you know, we're really cutting down to nitty gritty here. But I think where this comes down is it's an election year they just don't want to hand Trump a win. And it's hard to get anyone to agree to anything. Yeah.

You know how they say politics is the art of the possible? I think politics is the art of doing as much as you can get away with without getting in trouble. And I feel like the Democrats look to the polls. They saw that they're trending well heading into the midterms. Crypto is unpopular with their constituents. It's lumped in with AI also unpopular. And they just thought to themselves, we don't. have to do this. We're not going to pay a big penalty for not voting for it. And I think that is the

dynamic. So I don't know if they will or won't pay a big penalty because you still have a lot of capital on the sidelines that has been raised into super PACs that are pro-cropto. So I think there is going to be a penalty here. I think it was short-sided by the Democrats. I also think it's worth going back to what February when Coinbase actually stalled this bill out because they didn't like the language in there around the yield restriction. And at the, you know, what was it? Like six months ago, we ended up losing that battle as an industry to the bank lobby. And the yield restrictions became a part of that bill. But we lost a solid three months there because you had Coinbase stall out the bill. Then you had the Iran situation, the Iran war popped up. And then just

nothing happened in Congress. So we might already have a bill if it weren't for that. That's obviously hindsight is 2020. I do think it's interesting that eight Democrat senators came out last night at like 11 o'clock and said, hey, we're open to a discussion. And I'm pretty cynical on that. I think that that is those eight senators not wanting cash to rush to the Republican side of the aisle. I think that's what that's all about. They're trying to hedge and prevent fair shake from going after them is my guess.

It's pretty funny. Do you think somewhere there's a bank lobbyist just fall into his knees in a Walmart because Does the yield is now still in effect for stable coins? That's the thing. Everyone's a loser here. So the bank lobby had this at the place where these brokerages that do stable coins can't pay yield. And since the bill didn't go through, it's status quo.

And what did Coinbase come out today? They said, hey, that yield that we're giving you on stable coins, we just ratcheted it up, which is such a smart thing to do. And that's what anyone who's in their position probably should do for now. It's just, all right, you want to see deposit flight. Let's run the experiment. Yeah, I mean, there's silver linings. And meanwhile, I think the White House came out,

one of the economic groups came out and said, stable coins have definitely not caused a deposit flight to date. I mean, there's silver linings. Coinbase is now ratcheting up to yield. We didn't get fully deprived of stable coin yield the way the bank lobby wanted. And we have a very active CFTC and SEC chair kicking off rulemaking right now. So it could be much worse. I mean, it's out there today.

So on Thursday, the SEC issued a statement on the digital asset innovation exemption. They approved a five-year exemption to allow limited trading of tokenized NMS stocks on certain blockchain venues. You had Hester Purse from the SEC releasing a statement on the rationale along with some FAQs. You had Paul Atkins coming out and saying with or without legislation, we'll act decisively within the statutory authority of the SEC to deliver certainty. for American investors and the entrepreneurs shaping our technological future. Mike Seleig, chairman of the CFTC, came out and said the CFTC is ready to ship. And then today the CFTC issued a no action letter to protect open source software developers.

This was part of the BRCA debate. So now you actually have just, it's better than would have been in the bill for sure. So, you know, I think what you're getting is just these agencies are pushing the bill through. in more of a pro-industry way than actually had been contemplated. I don't know if this is solvable to regulatory layer, but have you ever looked up tokenized Tesla stock or something on any of the major blockchains? There's like 15 variants and they're all trading at different prices.

Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's not. That is a bad situation. Our status quo was tokenized equities. It's not good. It's all. No.

We're going to have to harmonize it. I don't know how we're going to do it. But we cannot have a free-for-all as far as tokenized equities are concerned. I think the SEC is all over that because part of this statement today and part of the rule looks like the issuer is going to be able to remove those. So if you're Tesla, you can instruct whoever issued that effectively an ADR to pull it back. So I think they'll figure that out. But I think you're right about one thing is that you could have more of a balkanized liquidity landscape than you've had in the past. which some people will criticize and say,

we don't need all these venues. But I mean, that's kind of how it was before Reg. NMS. And the markets function fine. Yeah. Something's going to have to change because you have a variety of different wrappers through which these tokens are issued,

some of them more credible than others. And then different liquidity for all the tokens. It's easy to buy the wrong one. Different premium and discount. So that is one place where regulation, I think, would be very warranted. I just, I mean, the disappointment here is just getting so close and then maybe not seeing a window to pass this. There are some that came out and said, okay, maybe we could get this done in the lame duck.

I just don't see that. I do think that there's going to continue to be a lot more pressure on Democrats, though, in the fundraising process. You think about Gallego out of Arizona and then Slotkin out of Michigan. I think had raised like $12 million from Fairshake and then even more from additional crypto packs. You know, they're a no vote on this. Jilla Brand, who co-sponsored it with Lomas is a no vote on it.

So this just, there's a lot of work that went into this. A lot of people said that were aligned with the industry and they just weren't there at the end. Yeah, people do love to raise money from the industry and then vote the wrong way. Yeah, it's very, you know, it's easy to get cynical here. So the House has apparently moved forward on two other crypto bills. The House Committee advanced a federal crypto tax framework, the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act. There is a separate bill to codify the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that was voted out of committee. I presume neither will see a full House vote until after the midterms.

The tax one is the one that I think needs to get addressed here. there's just a lot of issues here on the margin and how to treat things like staking rewards if you're not selling the underlying asset and things like that. So I hope that that gets a fair shot of going through. I don't think anyone's talking about that one, but it's an important one.

Strategic Reserve, that's not going to get through the Senate, right? I presume not. So the Tax Act gives you a exemption for crypto transactions, under $10 and transaction fees, which is pretty good. That would save people a lot of time and effort as they're doing their taxes at the end of the year. It also says that mining and staking would be taxes, ordinary income.

I don't know about that. I don't know how it should be taxed, but ordinary income doesn't seem right. I don't really know. I mean, I think one thing that is clear, though, is that, so let's say that you're staking or you've received some rewards. If you don't actually sell that into cash, I don't think you should have. a taxable event. So that's something I think you should be able to just defer the taxes until you actually sell the underlying. Otherwise, if you're trying to run a business there, you're just

having to constantly sell and you can get yourself in trouble there if you're not staying on top of it. So that's the depressing news out of Washington. Also in Washington, the Commerce Department asked Kalshi to pull its markets tracking the cost of renting and video GPUs, citing national security. very interesting. Why do you think the Commerce Department would do that? I don't know. Is there something there that is being revealed to China that we don't want revealed to China?

Is that possible? You would think that they would already know that, though, right? Yeah, I mean, it's not a secret that, you know, I don't know, B-200s are rallying. What is the impact for some of these data companies that we've looked at that are tracking the prices of GPUs? Is that national security interest at this point? Yeah, but in our country, we don't really censor economic data if we don't like what the data says.

Yeah. Not a very American thing. I don't really get that then. No, it's strange. Circle has launched Arc. That's their layer one blockchain built for stablecoin finance. They went live with a validator set, including BlackRock, DDCC, Ice, MasterCard, and Visa. Big congrats to Circle for getting over that milestone.

Yeah, that's a big one. I saw that meme coins just immediately became the first thing that was all over that chain. Did you notice that? Yeah, that's a bit of a trend. You build a blockchain in the meme coins, they will come. That's the one thing that's certain. Seems pretty handy, actually. Gas is paid in dollars.

There's no native token. Sub-second finality. Potential for privacy, if you want, opt-in. Interoperability. Built for agents, apparently. Post-quantum signatures as well. Well, well-done circle. here was the one that I could have predicted. Federal prosecutors have charged two Robin Hood engineers with wire fraud and commodities fraud.

They were buying perpetual futures on hyperliquid just before Robin Hood announced what token it was listing. And they made $50,000 and it looks like they're facing 20 years in jail. So this is just how many times are we going to do this? Yeah, what is it with people doing insider trading and making the low? tens of thousands and just ruining their lives in exchange for a small amount of money. It just reminds me of the open sea guy, the NFT trading. It's like, guys, this is, you're throwing away your entire future and you're going to go to jail for a long time and you made $50,000.

That's not even close to enough to pay the legal fees here. So our next news item concerns another notorious former inmate. And, you know, I think this is an opportunity to bring back the bad boys. theme song. Oh, bad boys number two? Yeah, the new one. All right. Let's roll it. You have been out there being a bad boy. She has been out of prison. She's been out of prison, she has been out of prison, I guess. She has joined. She's a new job. Wow. Okay. She works for a nonprofit called a Mana Fund. They are unsurprisingly part of the effective altruism complex.

And they were originally funded by FTX. So that's, yeah, it's a little circular. So Mana Fund, I believe, is downstream of something called ManaFold, which raised half a million dollars from FTX back in the day. did they give the money back? No, they did not give the money back to the creditors. They took it to litigation. So they refused to give the money back. It's still pending. That case is still pending as of right now.

Hold on. So Manafund received the money or some prior company received the money as like an investment? There were two buckets of FTX money that were connected to manifold. One manifold markets was made. That was, there was an investment made. And then ManaFund was set up by Manifold. And there was a donation to Manifold specifically, or the project that became Manifold.

All right. So that should have been given back. But you don't have to give back the Anthropic equity. It turns out John Ray basically did. Yeah. So Manifold plus Manifold got $1.5 million from FTX. The FtX estate asked for the donation back, the 500K. Manifold refused.

they got sued and that lawsuit is still underway and they've now hired caroline ellison what do you think she's going to do it's a prediction market site i mean she can't be involved in financial services right she just answered in the phones i think man of fold is play money right they don't use real money prediction markets man of fund is yeah now i'm getting mixed up between fold and fund but i think her aspect of the job focuses on the charitable platform so maybe it doesn't count as finance. I mean, it's good to have a religious group to go back to you after you get out of the slimmer, though, don't you think? It's just no different from if you're a hardcore Catholic or Mormon or something. You go back to the fold and, all right, come to services on Sunday.

We're going to get you right. And in her case, it's just, let's go to an EA prediction market site. And we're going to get you on the right track here. Yeah, this is like the 12 steps program for effective altruists. I don't know if she's sorry, to be honest, with you because she went right back to these EA endeavors. Part of her salary is being indirectly paid for by herself with the money that she stole from FDX depositors. And people actually were congratulating her on the move and on Mana Fund for hiring her. I mean, what else are you going to do, though, if you're her?

She's only, what, 32 years old? I mean, she's got to go get a job. Write poetry. Like I'm a barista. I mean, the only thing she can't do is be on the, a director at a public company, right? And I think that's only for, what, five or seven years or something like that. She might have a phenomenal comeback here.

Well, that's, yeah, that's the bad girl of the week, it's Caroline. See, I don't know. I thought these Robin Hood engineers should have got the bad boys of the week. You can't be doing this. That's true, but it's just, it's not nefarious enough what they did. Yeah, it was very low-law. level crime. I think we can get some safeguards.

So if you run one of these companies, just assume that this is going to happen at this point. And you just got to really hammer home the compliance training. It's just crazy. So actually on that topic, you remember a couple of weeks back, I raised the question of whether MNPI could leak through an AI model. Yes. Okay.

So I asked this question to Matt Levine, who is, of course, my guru when it comes to insider trading, esoteric insider trading questions. And he emailed me back instantly, crazy. He must not been busy that day. So I was asking him, if you're using an model and someone else has leaked information into the model and it got included in that model update, totally possible. Then you get the information. Is anyone at fault?

Who's tipping who? Right. And he said, I think he'd be okay with me sharing this email. He said the guy who's putting in the transaction data may not be misappropriating it because he's using it for legitimate business use, which is reviewing the legal contract. So it may not be misappropriation on his side. And then is open AI misappropriating the information?

probably not because that's the deal. You put information into the model and then they use it to train the next model, right? Yeah, well, if you're not on the enterprise plan. So whatever you've selected under the terms of service, is the person who receives the information doing anything wrong? Potentially not also because you didn't know that that was information that was tipped off to you.

So this is not legal advice. He was also very clear on that front. So I'll leave a little advice from Matt Levine or from me. But he compared it to hedge funds that buy aggregated credit card data to trade retail stocks. Yeah. Which is legal. You know, that's permitted. Yeah.

So it's possible, I think, that, I mean, it's going to be hard to trade this way because updates to AI models are slow. Each successive trading run is, you know, takes. months typically. So this would have to be really durable and long-lived information, some knowledge of a pending transaction. But you could definitely look at successive models and see whether it's describing a higher probability to a transaction happening. So you could find it that way. But I think it would be pretty hard to like mine a model for MNPI, but it's definitely in there. Well, if you get to recursive self-improvement, then that would happen, right? I mean, the model could be

updating every 20 minutes. Yeah, I mean, at that point, like, all bets are off, right? You could ask the model, like, make a million dollars for me, and it probably would because it'd be that good. Is that where this is going? I mean, if you have a superintelligence, making money is going to be the least of your, its concerns. I mean, the whole MNPI thing in the context of what we've been talking about here is fascinating. I mean, you could see someone just laundering inside information this way. I think it'd be tricky, but it definitely creates some kind of plausible deniability. Because the model isn't saying for sure this transaction is going to happen. It's saying, yeah, I mean, I think there's maybe a likelihood. It also could hallucinate a transaction that's

not happening. So it's a very interesting thing to think about. And if I had to guess, I think there's probably someone out there that's already mining AI models for inside information that's been unwittingly inserted into them. Yeah, I bet you could. Did you see the story this week about a Polish state oil company getting defrauded on an oil transaction that had to do with, I think, stable coins, right? So FT had a story this week. It was a state-owned Polish oil company. They were trying to avoid sanctions and they wanted to buy oil from Venezuela. They wanted to buy $230 million worth of oil. They sent the payment in U.S. USB sticks with tether on it.

And they didn't get the oil. So the tankers never were delivered. So they gave $230 million on USB sticks, Tether. It just didn't get their oil. So hang on. Poland was trying to violate sanctions here. It looks like it. This is back in 2023, apparently.

So maybe it was different. I mean, these days, I guess you can probably just buy Venezuelan oil, right? Yeah, this was pre-invasion. What's up with Poland undermining a close ally like the U.S. by buying sanctioned oil? Seems really problematic. I also just don't understand why you had to deliver this on a USB stick. Yeah, so the representatives of this Polish, it's a fairly Swiss company that was running trading for this Polish group, they physically met brokers in Caracas.

and did them a USB drive. That must have been electric. I mean, imagine holding a USB drive with $132 million on it. That's cool. I mean, it's pretty cool. It's totally unnecessary. Yeah, you could just send the transaction

from your desk in Warsaw or Zurich. So you didn't need to do all that, but they probably wanted to do it for the theatrical nature. And then Venezuela didn't deliver the oil. Yeah, tough. I don't know what type of recourse you have on this right now. Is that how it works in gray market oil world?

You just pay up front and then hope? Surely that can't be how it works. Do you think these guys were sophisticated enough to know that you can do on-chain kind of multi-sigs and, you know, covenants? And there's all sorts of cool stuff you can do with smart contracts. You don't need to use a USB stick. I mean, it's like how I deal with my contractors. You don't pay them 100% up front. Right.

You pay them on delivery or 50. I don't know. There's all kinds of creative ways to do it. Yeah, you got to do that. Very surprising. These people are sanctioned and they're selling oil on the black market. They're not trustworthy people. No. And also, I guess like the nation of Poland, they can't really go with their Navy and be like, hey, world, we were trying to illegally buy black market Venezuelan oil. We're here to claim it. Right. So because of by virtue of the nature of the transaction, they have even less recourse. And I'm sure that USDT has been switched into, you know, tornado cash Ethereum or something, but now. That's really naughty from Poland, in my opinion. Yeah, he can't be doing that.

That's bad behavior. They wanted the oil. They wanted it really bad. Speaking of energy-related things, the Department of Energy just came out with something, I don't know, 20 minutes ago. Daria Gil is the Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy. they have announced a 215 million quantum genesis Q competition. They want to accelerate the development deployment of the world's first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computers.

So in case you're wondering whether the U.S. is a passive watcher of quantum development or they're actively accelerating it, it's definitely the latter. They are funding companies, giving them a... prize if they can develop a quantum computer with at least 100 logical qubits, which to be clear, we're not very close to right now. But this is a very meaningful initiative. Once we have a quantum computer, I mean, how far back do you think the data harvesting has gone for the NSA? There is communication. Anything that has elliptic curves underpinning it will be decoded. So if we have secret transmissions from World War II, we're going to be able to read all those, or someone's going to be able to read all those.

I mean, actually, you know, there was an enigma message that was decoded today by Anthropic, I think. Wow. I think that cryptography was a little more vulnerable than the stuff we use today. But, I mean, harvest now, decrypt later. We've probably been harvesting since 2000. I would have to think that almost anything that's ever touched the public internet is saved down somewhere. Really the valuable stuff, it may not be leaving like government data. It may not be on the public internet.

It could be some good historical artifacts, though. If you get access to some of the stuff, I guess even if it's saved down in the database, it's like, okay, well, this war, you know, there are all sorts of things going on. And there are spies embedded in the 50s in certain countries. I think there's going to be some very interesting books to be written about almost rewriting history. You know what I've been wondering about recently is along these lines. can we use AI to decode coded manuscripts? Like old books or letters that are written in code that we've never figured out.

Like there's one from the 1400s called the Vojnich manuscript. And it's full of like botanical drawings and astronomy and text. But the text is not in any language anyone knows. Yeah. So we've lost the ability to decipher it. Yeah.

Why we never had it. So AI is going to let us. do that maybe. And then the zodiac, the zodiac killer, right? Oh, they never caught him, right? Not only did they not catch him, but they didn't solve some of his ciphers. So he left all these messages that were incifered. And I think many or most of them haven't ever been deciphered. Has anyone tried? Like, I feel like it's probably just a couple hours of time with with Astra at this point. Oh, you should do it.

I mean, we should pause to release this. You should do that this afternoon. Well, I don't know how to ask the right question. You know, that's the thing about knowing how to, you have to know what question to ask. Yeah, you have to give it some direction, but you're probably right that that'll happen

because that doesn't, I mean, it's not like you need a quantum computer or do that. Yeah, someone has cracked, people have cracked the earlier ones, but not some of the other. Zodiac ones. I think the one that includes the name of the killer, actually. Oh, how do you know that? I suspected. Well, this is, I mean, this quantum thing is more proof that the U.S. is just going all

way non-quantam here. I'm going to be interested to see who puts their hat in the ring tries to win this thing. I'd imagine the frontier labs in the quantum space will all be candidates for this, right? Yeah, it'll be interesting. You see if, yeah, the frontier labs get into it, or if the quantum firms just use AI to accelerate their own development? I mean, that's the thing. A few months ago, we were saying AI is going to accelerate quantum. And then since then, you've had Millennium Prize problems have been solved. It's just undeniable now that AI will accelerate quantum development.

Do you think AI could explain quantum to a normal person? That still feels like an unanswered. I mean, it's tried many times to explain it to me. and I don't know if I've fully grasped it. The best is just these PhD, you know, world-renowned physics guys that they just come out and say that they barely understand quantum. Is that right? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I think anyone with some degree of humility will tell you that they don't, they're just scratching the surface in terms of understanding it. All right. So I think that is it for the week. Do you think that we're going to have any more to talk about it on the Clarity Act? Do you think that this is a real effort to reopen discussion? or is this just, hey, fair shake, do not throw money against us? I think Congress is always going to find a way to titillate us and make us think that they're

going to do the right thing and then continue to not do the right thing. Well, I think what we'll look for is just rulemaking that covers all the important pieces of this bill. And I think that'll be enough for most people in this industry, certainly enough for the asset managers to issue things on chain. So it'd be interesting to see what they come up with. within next few days. I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see on Monday.