On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 09/19/25 (SEC listing standards, BoE stablecoin limits, Tether's USAT) (EP.667)

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The SEC approves generic listing standards for cryptoassets Gensler loses a year's worth of text messages BoE wants to limit stablecoin exposure to £20k Tether launches USAT Coinbase is exploring a Base token Binance nears the end of DoJ compliance monitoring Galaxy is launching a tokenized money market fund PayPal launches PayPal links

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

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

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. I'm Nick Carter. Recording this one early on a Friday, a little bit late. had some travel issues yesterday. Yeah, I've gotten some complaints. You know, some people, they like to listen at 6 a.m.

when it comes out on a Friday morning. I get it. I mean, I have my favorite podcast, and I like to listen to them. You know, when Galaxy Burns doesn't come out, I get upset. When Ireland doesn't come out on Friday night, I get upset.

Yeah. We have day jobs. That's true. I was down in New York yesterday. I went to the North Island Summit. Very good summit. If you're going to be at any islands, summit besides the Castle Island summit, then the North Island summit's a really good one.

Yeah, how was it? Who is, uh, who is in attendance? It was really good. Um, they had, uh, Bill Dudley actually was there. Um, he did a panel with Steve Leesman, uh, and Glenn Hutchins, talking about stable coins, talking about the future of the dollar. It's, uh, you know, the dollar is just the, the strongest of the fiat currencies, but pretty, uh, pretty weak the past few years. So Bill Dudley Former I think head of the New York Fed Is he pro stable coins? What's his attitude?

He seems quite pro stable coins I think he He's one of these guys that Kind of has the view that the Fed should be overseeing the system Is kind of the vibe I got though But I think seemed quite pro stable coins Obviously it's very good for the dollar To be able to

It's just good for the government I suppose to be able to print at the short end They just have another reservation buyer for treasuries. His view is that stable coins were kind of quasi-cbDCs anyway. I would agree with that. Kind of hard to argue with that. So Steve Moran is not part of the Fed. Yes.

And he wrote all these, but did you read his papers before the election? I did. Yeah. So he wants like competitive devaluation of the dollar. Yeah, what would that look like? Kind of like another plaza accord type of situation? So this is what I don't understand because are we pushing and pulling on the rope at the same time? With the stable coins you mean?

Yeah, like this is something we've been puzzling over for months now. So Besson says he wants to entrench dollar dominance. At the same time, Trump has this idea of reindustrializing America and making exports competitive again. I mean, that's the moral justification for the tariff policy. So which is do we want to devalue the dollar China style and make our exports competitive? Or do we want a strong dollar for, I don't know, patriotic reasons? Yeah. So I can't figure it out.

I think the stable coins have another angle, though, around to some degree financial surveillance and just the fact that you don't want another currency to rise and become that, you know, international. clearing currency for trade between China and Pakistan and you know places like that I haven't seen a really sober analysis of this yet balancing or maybe this contradiction hasn't been resolved at all regardless of stable coins do we want a strong dominant dollar or do we want a week in the dollar I haven't seen people grappling with this in Washington it's certainly not it's not simple enough to be an issue that is debated at a large scale in congress i would say right so maybe moran his accession of the fed will tell us something oh the other thing that was cool is richie torres um zoomed in i really like him yeah he's excellent he's just a really

free thinker um so props to props to him we had a busy castle island podcast week uh I sat down with Walt Smith from Standard Crypto. That podcast is more about the philosophical underpinnings of Bitcoin. I like that one. Yeah, Walt is a gem. A big fan of his. Jumping into the deals, lighter week this week. So we've braille, the Stablecoin issuance platform.

There is 30 million from Lightspeed, NIA, and Refract Ventures. StableCore is a stable coin infrastructure business that raised $20 million from Northwest, Coinbase Ventures, BankTech. ventures and others. Then you have Credete with a K. That's a stable coin powered cross-border payments company. There is $22 million from Africa Invest Group, Polymorphic capital, and PARTEC. Then it's BioProtocol, a decentralized science platform. There is $7 million from Malstrom, Mechanism, Anamoka Brands, and others. I want to know what decentralized science is that, I mean, this is D. D.Ci. Is this D. D.Ci. So let's. So let's, let's,

see it allows scientists to convert their work into centralized AI agents or bio agents they're designed to speed up or reduce the cost of scientific research or raising funding through token sales you remember there was a kind of like a D-side mini bubble was it last year yeah what was it there was like Vita Dow there's like Vita Dow hair Dow there are dozens of these but I don't know if we made any fundamental discoveries. Yeah. Did you listen to Anatoly on the All In podcast summit feed? No.

They sort of, I think it was Calcanus asked him around what are the use cases for blockchains other than finance, which is kind of a, that question does get asked a lot. But I thought he had a really good answer. And he basically said that like everything that has been attempted in prior cycles that didn't work eventually will work. So decentralized social. networking and all of these creator economy things with NFTs that basically is just too early for a lot of that stuff and there wasn't a regulatory environment that supported it. It's kind of

similar to what I've been saying around why are there not more file coin type projects? It's because, okay, what is the token? Is it a security? Is it a commodity? Obviously the tooling wasn't great for some of the things that I'm totally referenced. So I thought it was quite a good answer. But did he say that D.Sai would work? He actually didn't take a view on D. side, but this sort of reminds me of that. I don't see any reason why this D-Sy stuff wouldn't work. I think there's just a lot of legal questions around. Yeah. How do you enshrine the intellectual property? How do you actually make the payments? How do you, you know, there's IP issues there? Well, I think you have a maturity issue, you know, like a very short-term sources of funding

and fluctuations in the token price. And then medical or whatever, scientific research. search should be this long-term sort of endowment model if you were to ask me. So I think there might be a maturity mismatch there. Why wouldn't we be able to do like an X prize on blockchains? It's sort of, I mean, it's not a lottery, but just large scale funding, almost in a pooled model or just huge audacious goals. I think that would be a really interesting thing to have just natively on a blockchain. That would totally be possible. It would, right? Yeah. And I think that would actually be one of the more pro-social things that could be built in the blockchain space. People just might not like the capital inefficiency of having some funds locked up while no one's

won it yet. Well, you'd be locking funds up, but couldn't you just borrow against them? I don't see any reason why you couldn't have another protocol that just allows you to take out a loan against your position or something. Yeah, or they could be interest-bearing in the meantime. Yeah. I don't know. Someone build that. All right. Next up we have Titan.

There is Salana-based exchange our gator. There is $7 million from Galaxy Digital Marana and Susquehanna. And the last one is an acquisition, Mezzo, which is a stable coin payments network. They were acquired by Moonpay. All right. So in my mind, the biggest news of the week here is the SEC kind of quietly, I guess on, was it Wednesday night, they came out with generic listing standards for exchange traded products that hold spot commodities, which this new rule will allow exchanges to list new products that meet the requirements

without having to go through the current 19 before approval process. So it's just clear rules of the road on what it takes to get a spot crypto ETF to market is basically the punchline here. So there's an eligibility criteria talks about how the underlying must be a commodity with a futures contract that has at least six months of trading history on a registered DCM. And then they approved in the same breath the gray scale large cap fund, which is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and XRP. I mean, this is huge.

You're going to see a lot of VTFs pumped out as a result of this. And this is what the industry was really pushing for and what the sensible people at the SEC were pushing for, which is, let's just not evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis and drag it out for months and years. Let's just put out some clear rules of the road on what it takes to launch a crypto ETF and be done with it. And that's exactly what they did. So have ETFs been issued already under this rubric?

Yeah. Well, I think the gray scale product starts trading like next week. So the first first one under this rubric is the gray scale large cap digital fund. So that's Bitcoin Ethereum, Solon, Krodon, and XRP. Wow. Yeah. And I think it's market cap weight. Yeah, I mean, what a difference from waiting 10 years for a Bitcoin ETF to now you can just crank these things out in a matter of days.

It's unbelievable. And it happened on the same day that Gensler was on CNBC. Did you watch that? I don't know who that host was, but she was incredible. She really slapped it down. Did she tear into him? She was basically like, everyone's happy. You're gone.

And just why didn't you? why didn't you do anything? Why did you just block the industry for four years? Why were you the way that you were? And it was crazy. What didn't even have to say for himself? I mean, it was crazy. He basically, you know, we always talked about the SEC should be a disclosure-based

regulatory regime and, you know, just look at what they're meant to be by law. They're not supposed to be a merit regulator. And everything out of his mouth was, well, I just don't believe that these things have a lot of merit. As if he's Warren Buffett looking at this thing and trying to form an opinion and just everyone should follow his view of this. I mean, he kind of, uh, he kind of just revealed himself to be a merit regulator on, on CNBC. On the same day that his former agency just puts out clear rules of the road,

just, look, if you do this, this and this, go forward. That's so tough. I mean, not only does basically everyone seem to hate him in this industry, but, you know, and to, you know, they lost, you know, I would say in court, but also, you know, his, his life's work has been undone because the new successor SEC is just, you know, greenlighting everything that he hated. Oh, yeah.

I mean, he has a complete legacy. It's a tough legacy. He accomplished nothing at the SEC whatsoever. It's a tough legacy. Did we talk about these text messages on the podcast? The missing text messages. Did we talk about that already? No, we haven't.

So this is wild. And so, you know, one of Gensler's big. crusades was around record keeping at banks and asset managers, really anyone that was overseen by the SEC. I mean, there were big settlements if you if you didn't preserve records appropriately, even like personal devices. Totally. I mean, they were going in finding people at banks that were sending text messages to their friends who worked at other banks and banks were getting fined hundreds of millions of dollars because of things like that because they weren't happening on approved channels. So listen to this. So Gary Gensler's text messages,

from October 22nd, sorry, October of 2022 to September of 2023 are missing. They just don't exist. And so there's a big explanation. There was an investigation. Who does the investigations? It was, I don't know, some government watchdog group came in and did an investigation. But basically those messages are all gone. One month before that time period that I just referenced,

Gensler finds 16 firms $1.1 billion for text message recordkeeping violations. Basically the exact same thing. The irony is unbelievable. So it was not on purpose, though, right? It was an inadvertent. They blamed it on the IT guy, which is the oldest trick in the book. It was like, hey, you know, he had an issue with his phone. The IT guy came in, pressed a button, and deleted it. I mean, you can't do that. Come on. I don't know. I mean, I think based on the reporting, it looks like it actually was a mistake.

It was a mistake, but okay, let's just say that that's all true, which I'm willing to concede. Maybe the IT guy just pressed a button and blew it up. You still would have been fined if you're a bank. You know, the SEC comes into your bank and you're talking about record keeping. You're like, sorry, you know, Joe, the IT guy, just pressed a lead on this. We don't have them anymore. here's your $1.1 billion fine. That's how that usually goes.

Yeah, so the reporting here says, when Gensler showed up for work on the morning of September 6, 2023, and noticed that SEC apps were gone from his phone. He reached out to the Office of Information Technology, whose personnel hastily performed a factor reset of the phone, which resulted in the permanent deletion of the devices data, including a year's worth of text messages. I don't know.

man. How is that? Don't they live on the cloud? Can we go to the carrier? I mean, if this guy had committed like a heinous crime, I think we'd have these things tutusweet, don't you think? I mean, look, there's no smoking gun here. Like, you know, certain unnamed politicians using an app called Bleachbet to purge their

email servers, but it's not good. I mean, and juxtaposed against his very real enforcement. information loss that covered firms. I mean, this is the technology guy. This guy's over at MIT doing lectures on artificial intelligence, and before that it was crypto. I mean, come on, man. Can't tell me that this doesn't just wreak of impropriety.

You just don't have the best of the best working in the SEC's IT department, I guess. I don't know. If I was in that IT department, I guarantee you there's someone over there being like, well, I know exactly what happened. I know how to recover these things. It just seems too good to be true, that he's just missing that many. Think about all that was going on in the world.

You know, we were having these big, big arguments with Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Diamond coming in to testify. You had the whole Prometheum thing that was happening during that time period. There's got to be some unbelievable text messages. Yeah, I mean, this is the, this is a very important period, actually. Choke point. Yeah, September 22 to 23.

That was the absolute heyday of choke point. And it's Sab 121. It's like you don't think there's any text messages with Gensler saying, okay, I actually found a way to shut down the crypto industry. No one's even going to realize it for about six months. It's called Staff Accounting Bolt in 121. And it's a backdoor accounting way to prevent the banks from custodying Bitcoin. It's my master plan. Yeah.

That's probably a text message. Well, the Financial Times reported this week that at the bank. of England is going to limit your ability to hold stable coins in the UK to somewhere between 10 and 20,000 pounds and businesses can be limited to 10 million pounds. What happened to this whole thing about the Starmer admin being pro-crypto? This doesn't seem very pro-crypto at all. I honestly don't understand this. So stable coins, certainly the ones under the Genius Act, are basically tokenized.

government money funds. I don't see there being like a bank run risk there whatsoever, safe collateral. I can see this from the angle of the Bank of England not wanting people to hold more dollars, but why don't you just start your own stable coin regime, put a market structure in place so that you can hold stable coins via pounds. It just doesn't actually make any sense to me. So this is about, is this about Brits holding foreign stable coins or GbP stable coins. I think they were just generic with the stable coin moniker. Obviously, 99% of all stable coins are dollars,

but they were trying to limit just general stable coin ownership, is my understanding. This is, this makes no sense. I mean, you have Trump over there getting the royal treatment. Did you see that? His visit to the UK. I've never seen a U.S. president celebrated like that. before. That's a fancy dinner, huh? Yeah, I mean, wow. And also, I'm shocked. How many courses of a meal was

that? The table had like a hundred seats at it. I know. It's like a banquet. So Trump is getting the rural treatment. The UK policymakers is saying they're being pressured to be more innovative, more pro-tech because they feel like they're falling behind, which they are. And then meanwhile you have this totally regressive proposal on stable coins basically kill the sector in the UK. I don't get it. I felt like the UK was moving in the right direction a few years ago when the FCA over there was just giving licenses to training venues and things like that, but it's gotten the total other way. Remember, we used to occasionally bump into entrepreneurs that were moving from the U.S. and you'd say, well, of course you're going to move to like Singapore or wherever.

but some of them were actually moving to the UK for a period of time. Probably not anymore. I mean, also like Britain, the financial sector made its name. I mean, obviously, like, UK finance goes back hundreds of years. But post-1971, it merged as its hub for euro dollars. And I just don't understand why they wouldn't look to replicate that, especially as the city of London has fallen off post-Brexit and Frankfurt and Paris had benefited and stolen a lot of their thunder.

Yeah, I don't get that. I mean, the only angle there that does somewhat make sense to me, but you still shouldn't do it, is just that they think that there's going to be bank runs in England. And basically people will just be opting out of pounds with their bank and just wanting to hold interest-bearing stable coins, dollar savings, but still, I mean, just lean in and compete. Really puzzling.

Elsewhere in stable coins, Tether has announced they will be launching a U.S. regulated stable coin under the ticker, US-sat and that business will be run by Bow Hines. Do you think that Tether would be one of the largest businesses in the world if it was public? I think it's worth $50 to $100 billion. Yeah, I think so. Probably the upper bound of that, I would think. It's just basically a money printing machine. Yeah, but I mean, you know, it's very exposed to rates.

The rates are being cut faster than they can grow the supply right now. Yeah, but it just has a powerful network effect in a lot of parts of the world, not the U.S. Yet, maybe that'll change with this one. they also just have all those investments in stable coin l ones they have a very diversified balance sheet yeah i mean i think the supply of tether was up to about 170 billion so very simple math is to the cash flows it's spitting off it's an easy one to underwrite but they they also have just a ton of bitcoin too yeah i mean certainly a very good business uh palo tweeted that their margins are 99% which is about as good as it gets

Yeah, that's pretty good. That's pretty good. So I guess USAT will live in parallel alongside Tether proper. It's this, I suppose, designed to be the genius compliant onshore stable coin. I don't know how they're going to work together. Exactly. We'll see how they can stitch the two systems together. But we'll keep an eye on that one.

How do you think this is going to work just longer term with brokerages that decide to have stable coin interfaces, where you can send stable coins in. Do you think you'll see brokerages choosing to do with Binanced it as just auto-convert into their own stable coin or into a partner's stable coin? Or do you think on a brokerage platform, you're just going to have like 12 different stable coins? Yeah, it's a really good question.

I mean, I think all of these big intermediaries that have custodial user funds, their incentive is to spin up their own stable coin, which is pretty easy now. you know, directly or white labeled and then, you don't benefit from the underlying yield on the treasuries generated, not to just give a freebie to some third party. So I think the move is going to be away from the big established stable coins and, you know, still use them for liquidity, but when they're at rest, it'll be in their own stable coin,

don't you think? Well, it kind of depends, right? Like if you imagine a world where Coinbase has its own stable coin, I don't think they can make interest payments off of that. And so right now, maybe that's a comfortable place for them to be where they have a partner and they're making those quote unquote marketing payments. So I think it kind of does depend. But you could see another world. There's probably a bunch of options. One is you see the Coinbase model just proliferates. Two is what you're saying is you send a stable coin into a brokerage platform, any stable coin. They convert it to their own. Maybe they try to pay you interest.

Maybe they don't. Certainly they would have the incentive to keep a lot of the interest if they could. But I get, you know, maybe, I don't know, maybe those are the two models. And then the third could be you actually see this coalescence with tokenized money market mutual funds, securities. And so they say, okay, if I can't pay you interest on a stable coin, can I pay you interest on a tokenized money fund in the form of a security? And I guess you'd have to be a broker dealer to do that. But all right, send the stablecoin in.

It'll auto convert into XYZ tokenized money fund. Here's your interest. It's basically the same thing. Yeah. And if you think about the user experience, it's getting to be so much better than domestic banking, commercial banking. Oh my gosh. It's so much better. Yeah.

I mean, I just think about this yesterday. Coinbase has their credit card now, which pays 4% by the way. I know, I got the notification on that. So I just got that. I mean, slight caveat, you need to have $200,000 on the platform to be eligible for the top two rewards, but still 4%. That's so much better than Amex. So the whole system, if you brought up in the Coinbase world where you get, you know,

you cash automatically pays the money market rate, you access a stable. it's just so much better than a commercial bank. Like you could that could be and then you'll be able to buy equities through that, obviously crypto. It's just a better. Why would anybody use Chase? You know, if it's a young person.

Why would you? If I was at one of these brokerage platforms that is not in crypto yet and I was part of their competitive analysis group or strategy group, you if you're not paying attention to what Coinbase is doing right now, you're just totally whiffing. I mean, they're just moving into. Yeah, I mean, it's basically a full personal finance platform at this point. It's not even, people won't even think of it as a crypto platform anymore. It's just like the place between whether it's Coinbase or Robinhood, that's going to be

your starting point. It's not going to be Chase anymore. Yeah, I mean, you had this wave one of fintech, or maybe this was actually wave two, but the betterments of the world, all those robo advisors, people were worried about them for a while, but they were just riding on the same legacy infrastructure. They're clearing with Apex and all these legacy clearing firms. This is just a whole new financial rail. So I think the product innovation is going to be just a lot faster.

So on the Coinbase front, they have announced they're beginning to explore a network token for their layer two network base. Yeah. Not surprising. I think that was very likely to happen. Not surprising. Do you think that gets completely decentralized? That's going to be interesting to see how they can step away from that.

if they even really want to? Yeah, I think it should remain a captive product under their umbrella. I don't see how they can spin it out. Binance, also, they're nearing a deal with the DOJ to remove their outside compliance monitor. That was set up with a three-year duration. It must have been a pretty interesting job being the DOJ's compliance monitor of Binance. That's very fast, I think, to get rid of an outside compliance monitor. I was quite surprised at that.

Also, on the tokenized money front, Galaxy Digital has announced plans to launch their own. So this market has grown to $7.4 billion with Biddle BlackRock's product and Wisem Trees WTGXX. Those are the two largest. It's much smaller, of course, than the stable coin space, but still growing in pretty rapid clip. If you just look at the league tables of money market fund providers, If you're not doing this, you're completely whiffing. I just don't understand this. Like, look at Vanguard.

Like, what is Vanguard doing? Yeah, so BlackRock's the biggest, wisdom tree, Franklin Templeton, Ando is the fourth largest. And then you have circles. USYC. Fidelity has one. Yeah, Fidelity's is on there, right? I didn't see any press release on that one,

but that one, it's a top 10 at this point, it looks like. Wellington, Guggenheim. I mean, there's a lot of big names on here, actually. Yeah. I mean, that's what I say. Like, if you're in that top 10 traditionally and you're not doing anything, you're just completely whiffing. Fidelity had the most net flows in the last 30 days, actually, for FDIT.

I think that's because it's the, it's new. I think that's the, they just launched it, I think. Polymarket and Calci were in the news this week. apparently rumored to be risen capital, Polymarket at $9 billion and Kalshi at $5 billion. So prediction markets are unfuego right now. People have realized that sports betting is just going to be dominant on these things. I was explaining this to some of my normie friends that do a lot of sports betting.

And I hope we're right about this thing about the tax treatment. Well, it's not our, we're just parroting Matt Levine. I hope he's right. Well, I hope he's right because I've been telling people and they're like, oh my god i need to move to production markets i think it's going to the whole infrastructure around how these things work is going to change quite a bit i think i think you're just going to see a lot of capital come into this space so PayPal is launching a new service called PayPal links to enable

p-to-p crypto payments with messaging apps these links yeah people river has a good product with the links we can just kind of send someone bitcoin via sending them a link to click on I like that use case. This is kind of like sling money, right? Yeah, that's a great product too. Or tip link as well. Yeah, tip link. There's a bunch of these.

Did you see Google announced a release of an AI payments protocol that has stable coin support? Looks like they're working with Coinbase. So I remember maybe six months ago they also had a protocol for AI payments that had nothing to do with crypto. It looks like they added crypto. Because this is what a lot of people are saying, that you need stable coins for agents. And I was kind of a seller of that idea.

I don't know if I'm fully convinced yet. I am not a seller of that idea. I mean, you could definitely do this with Stripe, but then everyone has to be on Stripe that you're sending a payment to. So if it's on stable coins, then you can just have, I think a much, much bigger network because no one owns the base layer and there's no onboarding required. You just spin up an Ethereum wallet or something. So there is an interesting profile in the Wall Street Journal of Mark Casey.

A lot of us know him in the Bitcoin world, but I would say he's not known at all externally. So he's a PM at Capital Group, which is this gigantic mutual fund manager. and he's just quietly been absolutely crushing it over their capital group. So it's really cool to see Mark get his flowers in the journal. Yeah, he has a big, big position in micro strategy and meta planet it said there. They said in the past four years, Casey and his firm have turned less than a billion into more than $6 billion with investments in strategy and other Bitcoin treasury companies. And actually, Mark did send me a note after we had talked about, micro strategy on this show, puzzling over how you could generate sustained returns with the

convert strategy. And he explained it to me in detail. And I didn't understand it. But I trust that he does. Well, he just turned a billion dollars into six billion. So I think he probably will go with his. He's got a pretty good incentive to understand it deeply. Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah, that's really nice to see. The journal had an article the other day about the spat between Brian Quintens, who's the CFTC chair nominee and the Winklevoss Twins. And I think Quintens might not get this at this point. That's my read. It's being reported in Bloomberg, I think this morning or yesterday, that other candidates are being considered now, which I'm shocked by. I really didn't think, you know, just two folks objecting to his nomination, industry folks,

even necessarily political guys could block it but it looks like they might and who knows what the politics are on this and we've talked about this that the some of the gambling associations apparently were against quintens but they weren't doing it publicly the winklevoss twins seem to it's now in the public so bigger issue to me is just there there's one person at the cfTC right now in a commissioner's seat and it's fam Caroline fam so we need to get more people over there if we actually want to get any of market structure stuff implemented. Yeah, the CFTC has a prime role to play here, and it's woefully understaffed. I wonder who they go to next.

I mean, we're over nine months into the year now, so we're under nine months. So we're over eight months into the year. But kind of like wasted a whole year here on this, don't I think? The Senate did confirm like 40 people in one session, I think, a couple days ago. Oh, did they? They're able to do it. We just have to stop fighting over the nominees. Maybe we should just have a draft on this podcast

of who a good CFTC chair would be. I'll give it some thought. We'll propose some names next week. I mean, just there's this one person left. Can we just make her the head of the whole thing? It's funny. It's this weird thing that happens in D.C. Where for a year after a new election,

they just don't, like all these seats remain unfilled. Yeah, it's puzzling. This is very strange. These people can't keep their jobs, I think, right? Because you can't have the conflicts. And so you're just not getting paid for a year. All right, I think that is it for the week. Sorry for the delay.

We'll try to do better next week. We got a lot of podcasts coming on next week, right? We will get this episode out ASAP. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.