On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 09/26/25 (Tether worth $500b?, Cloudflare's stablecoin, DAT insider trading) (EP.669)

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  We review the Coin Center dinner Tether is going out to raise at $500b Cloudflare wants to launch a stablecoin for agentic payments and launches the 402 protocol Circle is thinking about reversible transactions BitGo files for an S1 Strive acquires Semler Scientific The SEC is looking into 200 DATs for insider trading 9 major European banks are looking to launch a MiCA stablecoin The Bank Policy Institute thinks stablecoins threaten banks Senate Finance Cmte is looking at crypto taxes  Naver is looking to acquire Upbit

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. And 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 Brinkum. Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. We're recording this one late. Is this the latest we've ever recorded around up? Friday afternoon. Yeah, I'm sorry, guys.

This is multiple weeks in a row of being delinquent, but couldn't make it work yesterday or today. Well, we were down at the Coin Center dinner last night. What did you think of that, the Coin Center Gala? Oh, it was great, as usual. I'm glad that they did it in New York, back in New York after Austin for a while. I thought it was excellent. I mean, how many years have we been to the Coin Center dinner?

Six years, seven years? Yeah, a lot. It's one of my favorite events of the whole year. So Hester Purse was the keynote. I thought she did a great job. Really cool speech. I wonder if that's on the SEC's website. I wonder if that's a public thing.

But I thought she did a remarkable job. Way better than a couple years ago when they didn't even have a speaker. It's good to have someone with a lot of gravitas, and I feel like that's what we had. Yeah, I mean, she was wearing a T-shirt that was under the old SEC rules and exchange. I had the code to be in exchange. And then she laid out a fictional NFT collection,

which was, I guess, a way to lightly parody a lot of the characters we see in the cryptospace. Very funny. Excellent speech. And that is a good question, because aren't all the commissioner of speeches posted online? So is this going to be on the SEC website, too, the speech she gave? Yeah, as she was speaking, I was wondering that because it was very funny. I don't think that you see a lot of SEC commissioners that are making jokes like that. And I'm like, oh, this is going to be in the archives forever.

Is it we actually had a funny one at one point? Tremendously well done. We're very happy to be supporters of Coin Center for many years running. And the vibe in there was markedly different from prior years. There was the one year where they brought in a clown and they just kind of made up fun of everyone that was. year. That was a tough year. That was right after FTX. Yeah. And this year was much more celebratory. Cornsend was running through basically all their legal victories, of which there are many. But, you know, some cautionary notes as well, you know, about over-bullience in certain sectors in crypto and

making sure the victories are enduring as opposed to ephemeral. So I thought, you know, Peter and the team struck a really measured tone. Yeah, I did too. So if you don't support Coin Center already, you really should consider it because they're defending your ability to use blockchains, I would say. Yep. And they've been on it for longer than anyone. This week in Castle Island content, Wyatt sat down with Philippe and Noah from Thayer Capital, talking about investing in internet capital markets, talking about token valuation models. I thought that was a good episode. And moving into the deals, lots of deals this week. First up, we have rock solid.

That's from the Castle Island portfolio. They're a decentralized finance protocol. They raised 2.8 million from us, GSR, and Kindred Ventures. Then it's Zero Hash, which is an on-chain financial infrastructure company. They raised $104 million from Interactive Brokers, Morgan Stanley, Apollo, and others. You know the story behind interactive brokers? No, I don't actually. I use it.

I think it's a great platform. I don't know the story, though. The founder's name is Thomas Petrophy. He's a Hungarian-American. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has this Colossus magazine, which I subscribe to. It has an unbelievably good profile on him. Just what an unbelievable source. So he moved to the United States, basically didn't speak much English until he was in the early

20s, it sounds like. And started an options, market-making operation, later turned that into interactive brokers. I think he still owns 75% of it. just one of the bigger companies in the world. I think he's like the 25th richest person in the world or something right now. But he's really leaned into crypto. And this is a really interesting deal. So they led this round into zero hash.

Yeah. I mean, the convergence between brokerages and stable coins in the crypto space is just accelerating. I think IB is going to allow stable coin deposits and withdrawals now. I think that's part of it. Yeah, which is a great use case because then you can get your collateral onto the venue on the nights and the weekends. Totally. And yeah, part of IB is basically advanced trading tools for smart retail. So totally makes sense.

You'd want to be able to manage liquidity outside of your typical trading hours. Next one up is red. Dot pay, which is a crypto payments company. They raised $47 million from Coinbase ventures, Galaxy Ventures, and Vertex Ventures. Then we have Bastion. They're a stable one issuance company. There raised 15 million from Coinbase Ventures, the Sony Innovation Fund, and A16 Z crypto. Then it's Finality International. This is a blockchain-based payments network. There raised $136 million from Wisdom Tree, Bank of America, City, and a number of others.

Then we have Bulk. That's a Salonabase PIRP Decks. They raised 8 million from robot, 6th Man, and Chapter 1. Cloudburst is a crypto-focused cybersecurity company that raised $7 million from borderless coin fund and strategic cyber ventures. Then we have Raiku. That's a Solana Network Infrastructure Company. They raised 11 million from Pantera, Jump, and Lightspeed. Co-op Records is an on-chain music label. They raised $4.5 million from 1KX nascent in one confirmation.

That's Cooper Turley's company. Congrats to Cooper. Next up we have Shield, a blockchain-based cross-border payments company. They raised $5 million from Giant Ventures, B-16-Z crypto and factor capital. Then it's GRVT, which I, I'm just going to go with gravity on that one. Gravity. It's a decentralized exchange.

Is that what that is? That's probably a safe way to pronounce it. GRVT, gravity. They raised $19 million from ZK Sync, further ventures, and 500 Global. And lastly, we have a fund announcement. That's archetype. That's Ash Egan's fund. They raised $100 million for their third fund.

big congrats to the team over there. Congrats to Ash, Dimitri, everyone over there at Archetype, Danny. Really well done on that one. Excited to do more with Archetype. Where do we start? So I guess we were wrong about the Tether valuation. And I think we were like, hey, this company might be worth $50 to $100 billion. Turns out way wrong.

They're reportedly raising $20 billion at a $500 billion valuation right now, which after we said it, I thought about it over the weekend. I was like, well, we're totally not taking into account that they own a ton of Bitcoin. Count me a skeptic that this deal will close at 500. Maybe it will. But what do they make a year on 13 billion, right? Something like that. Well, they make, yeah, I guess you could just apply the treasury rate to the,

to the holdings, but they also just have a ton of other stuff on their balance sheet, right? Yeah. Yeah, $500 billion. I was truly shocked by that. You know, we'll see what they can do. I mean, I guess Circle's trading in a pretty high multiple, too. But in a falling rates environment, you know, you have to grow to offset that. To their credit, they are growing.

Well, in the falling rates environment, they have gold and they have Bitcoin, right? So I don't know. There's rumors of some very, very sophisticated folks looking at this deal. So who knows what the valuation is, but that was that a Bloomberg report? It's clearly worth a lot more than just the stablecoin. Also in stablecoin news, this is the most surprising announcement of the week. Unexpected, really, Cloudflare, which is a company that, you know, I know them as the company that prevents you from getting DDoS attacked if you have a website. I guess they do other stuff too that I don't know about.

So they announced their plans to launch a net dollar, which is a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin. that will, quote, enable instant secure transactions for the adjunic web. I think they also came out with a sort of like web standard for stable coin payment online. I thought under genius tech companies couldn't issue stable coins. Yeah, how are they doing this? Maybe if they're, maybe if they're like white labeling it, I'm not exactly sure how you get that genius compliant, but maybe the carve out for tech companies applies more towards quote, quote big tech. I'm very curious there. I saw this. I was like, why is Cloudflare doing a

stable coin? But then you start to think about almost like a what it was a hash cash cash type of a use case where could you prevent DDoS attacks by having micropayments exchanged on the web? Is that where this is going? Yeah, I could see that. They say in their press release, the AI-driven internet will need money that's instant global and secure. So the A.D. agents, developers, and creators can transact instantly, automatically, and reliably. I kind of do buy this whole like remonetization of the web thing or micropayments for content, like metered Paysie Go content. I mean, especially if agents are getting involved. We've talked about how we're skeptical that stable coins are the necessary currency of choice for agents.

Jury's out. But this is a real. Real show of intent from Cloudflare. I actually think the more time I spend thinking about that, the more I think that stable coins actually are the right decision. Because if you're, let's just say the alternative is to just use some centralized payments company. Then every time you launch a new website or you have a new device that comes onto a network, you're going to have to enroll them. And what if you could just do that via wallets?

It seems like you could make it a lot easier on blockchains, actually, and just have this completely open loop system. So count me very intrigued by this Cloudflare thing. So Cloudflare also partnered with Coinbase this week to launch the X402 Foundation. So apparently there's an HTTP response, which is 402 payment required. Yeah. So that's already exist. And so now they are doing a protocol, which I guess codifies this and makes it real.

So there's something's going on here at the in the bowels of the web such that it will be equipped for agentic payments. Well, people call this the original sin of the internet. There were people that were trying to build payments natively into the internet. There was no way to do it back then. You didn't even have proper encryption to do it. And credit cards didn't even really take off in the early days of the web. But I think that's promising.

I would bet a lot that this will eventually happen at scale. I mean, it's just a matter of time. I feel like the tech is fully caught up. The thing is when we've looked at metered content, I don't know if this is part of the plan, but sort of like pay-as-you-go content, people didn't really go for that. They preferred ads or the other ways

in which contents monetized affiliate links or just regular old subscriptions. So I haven't seen consumers adopt. to metered content model yet? They haven't yet, and I wonder how that will happen. I mean, is it going to be a debit equivalency or will someone build credit on top of stablecoin networks that just makes that easier? Could there be recentralization with kind of browser extensions that come along and just

make it easy for you to do it? The whole product management around this is probably the hardest part. So there's an interesting development from Circle this week, which is, something we've talked about on this show. Maybe they're listening. I don't know. I'm not taking credit for it, but reversible transactions. They're looking into reversible transactions. Predictably, the skeptics were making fun of them for that. Matt Levine? I don't know if he's talked about it. Yeah, I'm sure he did. Yeah, he blogged about it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I haven't read it, but I feel like I could actually write that column for him. He's going to make fun of us for rebuilding

what already exists in payments. Yeah. Yeah. And then he'll probably say something conciliatory like, yeah, but you know, whatever. Let them try. And they'll relearn the lessons of history. He probably said, I'm sure he said something like that. I haven't read it. And then the Bick corners make fun of it as well. As they are right. Yeah, you pretty much predicted it. Yeah. So I just, I've read enough Matt Levine that, you know, I feel like I have a Levine AI in my head or something. It's got a very unique style. I'm a big fan of his. his work, although he's not a huge fan of the crypto space. He does write about it a lot. Yeah, I think he's secretly a fan. Either way, I think it's great. I think we should definitely do this. I was just, I actually gave a talk at Columbia MBA yesterday. I went into Omead Malikin's

class, which I do every semester. And I talked about this and I said, I was presenting my taxonomy of all payment systems, including stable coins. So I was explaining push versus pull payments and midway through that, I was like, well, there's actually, we don't need them to be push. They could be pull. There's no actual reason why their push, except for that's how blockchains have always worked. But they could also be pull if we wanted. And this is what circles think about. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting design space.

I think it would open up a lot more use cases for stable coins. So I hope they get there. I feel like there's a few teams that are talking about this now. And so maybe you'll see more R&D in the space. It's got to be really complicated. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. Pull payments are basically extensions of credit fundamentally. And they require adjudication because that's why people want reversible transactions

in case there's fraud or, you know, someone pulls, does an unauthorized pull or you want to do a chargeback or something. there needs to be some entity sitting there that determines whether it's a valid chargeback or not. And that's why credit card transactions are more expensive than I'm oversimplifying than debit transactions. So it creates a lot of complexity

and you need an entity to sit in the middle that's willing to make those subjective decisions. So that's why it's hard because it's not socially scalable. I don't know if Circle itself would want to be that entity. maybe they do. Yeah, maybe not.

I mean, maybe that's a new business model. It'd be interesting to see. Another news this week, I guess this happened last Friday after we had recorded, but Bitco, the custodian, they had filed for an S-1 last week. I guess it had been confidential. Now it's not confidential. It's out there. They're run rating over $4 billion in revenue.

The take rate on that is small. I think the profit's $12 million. net. I wonder if like staking revenue GMV is factored in there. It seems it's staggeringly high revenue. It's really impressive. But I wonder if that's kind of you know how square counts revenue. Yeah. They count the GMV. Yeah, I was going to say, is this a kind of a block square situation where they're, everyone knows what's going on. Be it to peek into the numbers to, you know, pull out net revenue from GMV. Yeah, I think that's probably right.

I mean, regardless, just really good job over there, building beyond just regular custody. I remember back when Bicco was just software, actually, before they've not hosted custody. So really impressive. Yeah, super impressive what they've built. I'd love to have Mike back on the podcast. In other news, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the agency is planning to release a, quote, innovation exemption by the end of the year. I think this would, it looks like this would allow crypto companies to immediately launch

products without waiting for specific regulatory guidance, which I think is a good idea. Also in public markets strive, this is the Bitcoin Treasury company backed by Revec Rameh Rameh. They have agreed to acquire another Bitcoin dat, which is similar scientific. That's in an all-stock deal worth a billion dollars. So we are now seeing dat consolidation. that's also an implied premium of 200% over the September 19 close for Sumler. So I don't fully understand the logic behind the premium,

but anyway, we were seeing DAC consolidation now. We were talking about DATs last night, and you were telling me that some of these dashboards don't actually capture the shares outstanding properly. So it's just really hard to know even what the premium or discount on some of these things is. Yeah, I had the worst hour yesterday trying to, determine the MNAV for, I guess it was Bitmine, actually. And they released some warrants, which were not all exercised yet, which caused the MNAV to spike to 1.5, even though it was probably closer to 0.95.

And then I was dealing with the blockwork stash. I mean, the problem is it's kind of a full-time job to track the premium for any of these stats. And then if you're trying to do 200 dots a once is just going to be impossible. So honestly, the blockworks guys and everybody else, you have my sympathies. It's just so hard to get it right. It's not great for the by side, right? I mean, I would think that that would on the margin decrease the interest in just following this category if you can't just stay up to date on it.

Yeah, it's very troublesome because as sort of like a retail punter, you have to do so much additional work to actually determine whether you're getting it at par at a huge premium. It looks like BMNR is at a premium. It's actually basically at par, slightly under par. I don't know. It's really tricky. There's also the news that came out, I think, yesterday that the SEC is looking into 200 dots over potential insider trading allegations.

Is that right? Yeah. That's what the report was. And it makes sense. I mean, you see these crappy biotropos. tech stocks that are going out of business that all of a sudden become a dad. And it's funny that a day before or 48 hours before the announcements, they tend to do pretty well. Yeah, we've seen this happen on so many occasions. And I think what crypto people don't realize is just how easy it is for the

SEC to catch insider trading. Like, you know, ahead of earnings releases, they'll look at unusual options buying activity like week ahead or day had options if there's a massive spike you know this is all happening on registered you know fully known to the brokerage so they can just see who was it that bought the massive options position that made a ton of money and then they look at the last name and it's like the cousin of the cFO or something right like they just have you dead to rights you're like if you read matt levin he talks about this all the time so it's not hard for the cc to identify inside of trading. In fact, it's the easiest thing in the world. And I think crypto people they come in with this assumption that like when it's all happening on decks or, you know,

on a crypto exchange, it's maybe not as tightly surveilled. Okay, maybe something's and slipped through the cracks. But when it's happening on a on the NASDAQ, it's there, you know, and the SEC is, is going to find it. There's just a lot of, um, surface area for potential insiders to do stuff here because a lot of these deals have been shopped around to a lot of funds. Hey, come and invest in this thing, you know, sign this NDA, of course. You're not allowed to talk about it. But these rooms are pretty large, right? So you get a lot of investors have heard about this. I'm sure the underlying portfolio company that's about to get acquired, people work there and they have families. There's a lot of leakage potential, I would say.

Yeah, so I mean, if the SEC is really looking into this, I wouldn't be surprised if there are dozens and dozens of cases that come out. No doubt. No, no doubt. I mean, you just look at some of the names. I mean, we're not going to mention any of them, but just look at how the publicly listed shell coes have performed. I think you could point to at least a dozen that have moved in a very strange way prior to announcements. In Europe, nine major European banks led by ING are joining forces to launch a MECA compliant Euroback stable coin. I won't name them. I was actually talking about this in Columbia as well with the students yesterday. There's capital requirements to be a stable coin issue in Europe. There is capital. Yeah. It doesn't, they got it wrong. Yeah, they just got the rules wrong because you can't profitably issue a stable coin in that situation. You just can't. In the US 100 genius, there's a, there's like, I think the requirement six months of operational expenses if you have to wind down, which is like a kind of

a capital requirement, but it's very small. In Europe, they basically made it economically infeasible to issue. I guess these banks are still going to try and do it, though. I guess. I mean, they're not going to work at scale, though, in the same way they do in the U.S. It's going to be challenged. I could see the big banks coming in that already have the capital requirements. It's very friendly to the incumbent banks. Yeah, I think it's a 3% capital ratio. So it does make it basically impractical, impractical for a startup at least.

Let's talk more about stable coins here. So the Bank Policy Institute, which is this trade association lobbying group for a bunch of banks, they released a white paper. It was an anti-stable coin white paper, but it was coming at it from the perspective of what we've been talking about on this podcast, which is interest payments.

And so they're taking the position that says that the equivalent of what Coinbase is doing, so paying rewards that are marketing, technically marketing spend, but look like interest, that's a backdoor in their opinion, and that should be shut down. So they're saying that it threatens the stability of the banking system, because if stable coins are effectively paying interest, even though it is technically outlawed in the Genius Act, that you're going to have less credit in the bank. the banking system because you'll have fewer deposits. And so it's already going to cause fewer

deposits is their point of view. But if you have this loophole, quote unquote, then it will be worse. I have some thoughts on this, but curious your take. I'm not sympathetic to the banks, Matt. And we talk about this on this show a lot. But first of all, they're paying basically a below market rate. Second of all, people said the exact same thing about money market funds. Now they're at all time high and the banks seem fine. Third of all, we had a big banking crisis in 2023. So I kind of understand if you are maybe a little more skeptical around the solvency of banks and you want to put it in a fully reserved instrument, whether it's a money fund or a stable coin. And then fourth of all, the law is the law. You know, if it's a loophole, maybe, but it's a, it's creating a product that

consumers want. And if this worsens bank unit economics, so be it. That's my view, at least. Yeah, I think you're going to see, you're already seeing this. So you're just seeing credit creation happen outside of the banks. And it's going to end up being in these LPGP structures, these merchant banks, as opposed to going to the bank directly, which is fine. I mean, that's just a natural evolution. Some would say that's an evolution back to where we actually used to be. you know, it wasn't always the banks that had the strangle hold on credit creation. The other way to skin this, I guess, if you want the banks to be the back end of stable coins, you would just have to have the FDIC cap increased radically.

And that creates a potential liability for the federal government that is probably pretty unpalatable to a lot of people. But that's really the only way that I could see them still playing in the stable coin field, other than becoming an issuer themselves. Yeah, I would say we're in the midst of reimagining what banks look like and what their role in society is with a few catalysts. One is the emergence of money funds as a much, much bigger force, especially post-23. Two is the emergency fintechs that pay the market rate of interest as opposed to banks paying 200 bibs or whatever. three is now stable coins creating a narrow banking standard and I think it's it's probably true you know deposits will leave the commercial banking sector because people don't trust it but as you say

banks were not necessarily the only entities injecting credit into the economy I mean are they even originating most mortgages I don't think so anymore yeah that's a good question it's probably Dan Gilbert's originating more than the average bank wouldn't you say So for, you know, for a hundred years or so, banks have had this dual role as, you know, credit funds that are also guaranteed by the government and subsidized by deposits. And because there's a social cost to banks losing money, you know, because they're holding people's savings, the government has to guarantee them. But that's kind of perverse if you think about it, you know. So I think that contradiction is coming apart. So I've been reading these books lately that I read years and years ago about the financial crisis.

And I don't know why I've gotten on this kick. They're super enjoyable to read. So I just finished William Cowan's House of Cards about the fall of Bear Stearns. And I hadn't read it in years, but it's funny. You go through and you read it and you actually start to know some of the people now because they're off to their careers in other places. And in some cases, actually one of the teams that we backed, one of the guy on the management team was at Bear Stearns during this. I won't say his name, but it was interesting to hear.

But, you know, I go back and I learn more about the causes of the crisis. And you put yourself in Satoshi's seat. And you can really see how just the politics behind starting Bitcoin was probably very influenced by the interventions and the bailouts. I mean, Chancellor on the brink of bailouts, I guess, in the first Genesis block would maybe give you a hint that there was some motivation there. But just kind of like appalling that the taxpayer was put on the hook for a lot of these things that were caused in the banking sector. Do you ever think that it's also just maybe a coincidence that Bitcoin began in the depths of the financial crisis? Actually, really in the early stages, the financial crisis. And it's just that the technological pieces came together at that time.

And it was the whole thing was a coincidence that was launched then? It could have been a coincidence or it could have been someone sitting on the inside of the NSA or some just developer who was really, you know, upset. But I don't know. Do you think the chancellor on the brink of bailouts just happened to be on the front page that day? So they put it in or do you think it was politically motivated, I guess is what that question comes down to? Yeah, I mean, it would be interesting to go back and see what the Times front page was. was on October 29th and November 1st, 2008.

And if it was something just like totally relevant. Yeah, and it would just be saying it's like about sports or something. Yeah, it would be like Arsenal beats Man City 60 or whatever. And, you know, but that would be immortalized in Bitcoin. But I mean, I guess a lot of the early Bitcoiners on the forums were talking about, you know, the bailouts and how it was unjust. So it's always been this sort of politics behind, hey, this just feels like a bad system. And, you know, we're socializing a lot of things that probably should not have been socialized. So Bloomberg editorial had,

man, the Bloomberg editorial desk, they just don't like crypto at all. And there are many good people that work at Bloomberg. So I'm not saying they're all on the same team. There's some outstanding analysts there. But the Bloomberg editorial perspective on crypto is very hostile. So they wrote a piece, much like the BPI ones, saying, well, stable coins can offer rewards for payments, but they're not allowed to do rewards for holding. So that's their view. They shouldn't do it for deposits and that stable coin should apply for bank charters, which the whole thing seems really incoherent because now we have a charter that's dedicated to stable coins that's in the law.

Yeah, that's already, we're arguing right now over things that are already decided by the law. Yeah, I'm just going to take the victory lap on that one. It might have made sense two years ago. Senate Banking, Senate Finance Committee is having a hearing next week, apparently, to talk about the state of taxation and the crypto markets. I hope Lummus can get that bill passed around the mining and staking side of this. I feel like the tax policy is just wrong there. they can get something done.

There are some very interesting draft bills coming out. We'll have more to share in about a week's time as well. There's one on debanking coming, which I'm very excited about. And yeah, maybe we'll get a de minimis exemption. Next up, Navar, that's the South Korean internet conglomerate. They are looking to acquire upbit, which is actually the largest Korean crypto exchange. That's a big deal. I mean, Navar is, isn't that basically like a Google for South Korea?

Yeah. Upbit listings known to create a frenzy. I guess that was announced during Korea Blockchain Week, which is going on right now. Looks like a fun place to be, but I think Coin Center dinner was more fun last night. And Morgan Stanley is planning to use zero hash to let e-trade customers trade Bitcoin Ethereum and Solana on the platform. All right. You know, e-trade every few years. they'll announce, hey, we're about to do something.

At least now they have named a vendor. So maybe that's a real thing, I would assume. But how many times on this podcast over the years have we said, oh, E-Trade, you know, there's something in the news. They're going to add crypto on their platform. They never do. So hopefully zero hash can get that one across the line. It's kind of funny because E-Trade, I think,

was kind of the first internet native brokerage, right? Wouldn't you say they were? Yeah. It's the first one I remember. Yeah. And, but they were so slow on crypto. Meanwhile, other brokerages kind of lapped them. Oh, totally.

Yeah, they got totally lapped. Did you see that Vanguard is going to put third party ETFs for Bitcoin on their platform? Just years too late. Yeah, better late than never. All right. I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. And we will see on Monday.