On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/02/26 (Fat Model Hypothesis, Agentic bank runs, Hester Peirce retires from the SEC, ETH 2030) (EP.742)

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Are OpenAI and Anthropic reenacting the Fat Protocol Hypothesis Will AI agents cause bank runs optimizing bank balances for yield? If the AI complex bursts does it take down VC? Our tribute to Hester Peirce as she retires from the SEC The SEC and CFTC publish crypto FAQs Vitalik lays out his vision for Ethereum in 2030 Quantum progress is accelerating Illinois delays their crypto transaction tax  Is San Francisco better than it was? 

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, IG $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 to 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. Kind of a slow week here, recording this one later on a Thursday. had some internet issues. Who's been the main character this week in technology? And I don't know.

Dario. Dario is the main character. Yeah, I don't watch Saturday Night Live, but when they play you on Saturday Night Live on weekend update, that's not good. That's how you know you're the main character. And it was pretty funny.

Yeah, I hate to give S&L credit, but it was actually a really good rendition. Yeah, it was really well done. It was like he was Smigl or something. Yeah. And then at the White House Summit,

Dara was being really autistic and weird. What was that when Speaker Johnson was speaking? He was just, it looked like he was slithering out of his skin. I think he's just super, super weird. What did you make of the seating? He was not proximate to power at that table. No. I mean, and him and Trump are not friends.

It was only a last minute addition that he was even invited, right? Yeah. I guess Sam Altman wasn't there because he had Developer Day, Brockman was there. Some of those signatures on that resolution left a lot to be desired. Yeah, I think as a grown man, you have to have a decent signature. Yeah. Like, what is it with people just like scrawling their initials? Like, drawing a big act? Like, what is that? Yeah. The Greg Brockman one. Have you never pretended that you're a professional baseball player and tried to write autographs? Like, I guess not with these guys. Like, if you're over the age of 15,

You have to sign something every day, probably. Yeah. Right? For sure. I don't know. I feel like I'm always signing stuff. How about Jensen, though? Jensen had a very strong.

Strong commanding. Yeah. And this is why Jensen is, of all those guys, he's my favorite, because he isn't scared of the future. He's great. I love what he's doing with the open weight models. It makes a lot of sense for his business model, too, but I think it's the right move. And he's just not indulging in the doom.

He's, dare I say, trustworthy. He is a trustworthy tech CEO, I would say. I think we've actually reached a local peak of Doom, and the Doom is going to now subside a little bit. Did you watch the Pat Grady video that he put out? Yeah. I thought that was quite good. Maybe we put that in our newsletter too,

but just on the state of the AI market. And what was really breathtaking in that tweet was just the data he had around the deals that Sequoia has done and then have been quickly marked up within a few months. there's a lot of people chasing this AI trade it kind of makes me uh makes me wonder when the the bubble's going to burst i hate to say it but i think my biggest idea right now in markets is simply that opening eye antarropic are not worth two trillion dollars and they're not worth one trillion dollars i think collectively they're worth half a trillion dollars and what do you base that on the competition and models yeah i mean it reminds me of the

the fat what was it protocol protocol fat product now we're doing the fat model yeah we're doing the fat model

hypothesis and it's just fairly commoditized it's not perfectly so and I would say opening eye in particular is doing a lot of product innovation which is

kind of creating stickiness but I think you know selling tokens selling inference is not a good business at the end of the day well it's not a good business if you're spending

that much money maybe on the frontier though but isn't it a good business because the the neoclouds are making a lot of money right now and all they're doing is reselling inference right yeah but i mean in the long term as the model can you really defend against competitors i think i think not and i think it's easier to catch up than they had thought initially and not just from the open way guys but from everyone even google yeah at least a pretty good model this week well google has a much better business model to bring to bear on this right now. And I do think advertising is going to have to play a role at the frontier here with OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to get into ads. I think a lot of people change their mind this week. You have now meta has mews. People realizing

about meta is, you know, they have something to say for themselves here. Google's not going to go away. Maybe space A.I will come up with something good. Who knows? I just, I don't know if being a standalone model company is going to be the business model here. Fay-Fay-Fey-Lee's company got sold to AMD this week for $8 billion. That was wild. You know, one of the lesser thought of model companies, maybe? I don't know. Right.

What do you make of this idea that agents will cause a bank run by optimizing it runs cash balances. Yeah, so what you're referencing is Apollo had a blog post this week talking about agents and just saying that these things aren't sticky, right? If you're in a cash management account, why wouldn't you have agents swapping in and out? And I'm inclined to believe that. I actually think that the banking regulators are going to have to reason with this. And I would think that stablecoins actually would be the kind of the underbelly for some of this. So we already see this in defy and i think defy in a lot of ways is just the the training wheels for true financial services and regulated financial services but we're going to see this at scale very soon i'd imagine

within the year yeah ruthless optimization i agree and i'm not saying that everyone's going to consign all of their portfolio to an agent but you could also just ask a sophisticated ii model can you reallocate my portfolio more efficiently yeah and do a year yourself even. And I think there is a broader trend here, which is AI creates this huge consumer surplus by reducing switching costs and transaction costs of dealing with suppliers that are relying on you being lazy, you know, whether it's Equinox and it's really hard to cancel your membership or it's car insurance and it's an optimal strategy to switch your insurance over two years but you're too lazy to do it. I literally just said that. It's all of these frictions or, you know,

your telecom service, you know, your cell phone plan or internet plan, whatever, all of these systems have enormous bureaucratic frictions that AI has obliterated. Yeah. Just in the last couple weeks, really. And this is not going to be captured in GDP. No. It's just going to go back to the consumers. So it's an amazing trend, I think.

It really creates, it empowers ordinary people so much. they don't have time to, like, be on the phone with AT&T for an hour and, you know, fight over their bill. Totally. I think it's a great use case. I mean, there's so many examples of that where you just like to have an agent, hammering through all the prompts. It's solving CAPTCHAs, too. When did that happen? I mean, think about how good AI is and how easy CAPTCHAs are. Like, it was only a matter of time. I mean, I can't even solve CAPTCES. Like, their AWS CAPTCHA, I fail every single time. I have to turn it on audio. I can't even see it. Well, you know that thing that they say if you go to a national park about how it's hard to make a trash can that the bears can't get into? That also the smartest humans can, the dumbest humans can figure out.

Right. So the smartest bears are basically smarter than the dumbest humans. That's the problem with CAPTCHAs. Right. Right. I'm very interested to see how this plays out with the stable coin bankground, but just more generally, I am quite astonished how good and how quickly these tools have gotten. And like, I have used codex to renegotiate my car insurance. And I got it from 10,000. I don't know how.

It was that expensive to $3,000 a year. That's because you keep on crashing that Vespa. Or you did keep on crashing that Vespa. I've never crashed a car. But, you know, things like that. I would have never done that myself. I don't have the time for it. 100%.

Well, I started using Mews. And the first thing that it prompted me with was, oh, you have an Uber one subscription coming up tomorrow. Renewal, do you want to keep that? It's like, I actually do want to keep that, but I do appreciate the question. Yeah, I got live with Dot today, opening I Dot, and I don't know if I'm going to get made fun of for saying this. I downloaded my last three months of credit card statements and put it into there.

And I was like, what of these charges looks weird to you? Yeah. And of the weird ones, can you go and figure it out and cancel it? And incredibly, there were like 15 subscriptions that I. wasn't using. Yeah. And, you know, went and canceled them all. I mean, it's just incredible. I believe it. I mean, it used to be that the only way to get out of some of those subscriptions is just, you know, your credit card expires and you get a new one. Yeah. Right. I mean, so it's a different feeling, you know, and I'll never be an AI dumer because of how useful it's been. And for the first time of my life,

really, I feel like I'm top. I'm on top of things from an administrative and bureaucratic perspective. Yeah. And it's really good at, I mean, you made a really good. PowerPoint deck this week. And that was not your strong suit historically. I actually, I think I was actually pretty good at making slides. But I did make a, I made a presentation to a large financial institution. And it was a 15 slide loop. And the whole thing was done with Codex. With me, I basically didn't intervene at all. Yeah. And I thought it was fairly good. Yeah. I mean, you just tell it what you want. And, you know, the fact that it can do these logos with the, how long did we used to spend just trying to find these logos? Oh, this one has

a gray background and to make it white. How do you do that? I mean, yeah, just like making charts. I used to spend hours and hours just making charts. And now you just tell it what kind of chart you want. I don't think we're grateful enough for this stuff sometimes. Now, all these things that are great on the product side, I think we're just seeing some massive excess in the venture markets, though. So it has the potential to take down the whole venture complex for multiple years if and when this bubble burst. But it might not burst for three, four more years. Who knows? Yeah.

I mean, the numbers we're seeing out of venture are the craziest ever, really. Yeah. And also the dispersion between top, you know, quartel and bottom quartel funds is massive. But yeah, maybe people are going to get used to the amount of capital being returned and that may not last forever. Well, some of it's just on paper, though, right? What you really worry about is just these quick rounds at huge valuations with negligible revenue. I think that's really where you can get in trouble. Yeah, and you think about it compared to 2021 when there was two trillion dollars injected into the economy.

And definitely things got a little crazy for a while in certain markets as we work through the liquidity. But I think now is like maybe 10 times crazier than 2021. Well, you and I were talking to an entrepreneur earlier today that was talking about 20, won and talking about how Coinbase was seriously considering buying OpenC at north of a $10 billion valuation reportedly. It's kind of hard to remember that, but that was a, that bubble looks quaint compared to the AI space. All the numbers from 21 looks small now. Yeah. In hindsight. I mean, I don't even know if, you know, it's fair to call what's happening a bubble. It's just a massive reallocation of society's resources towards AI. Yeah. At every, you know,

governmental credit, venture capital. Everything is now reoriented towards this. Yeah. In a way, we've never seen any technology in our lifetimes. All right. Well, more AI talk later. Why don't we hop into the deals of the week? First one up in the Castle Island portfolio, Project 11.

They have acquired Riva Labs, a post-quantum cryptography and wallet engineering team. Congrats to Project 11 and Alex and the whole team over there. Yeah, really exciting acquisition. Riva was a very, uh, very, uh, well-reputed post-quantum research outfit. Jeeves is a digital payments company. There is 110 million from Coin Fund, A16C, Coinbase Ventures, and Alliance Bernstein.

Do you ever use the search engine, ask Jeeves? Are you of that era? I think I was too young for that. Yeah. It was not the best search engine. Not surprised that it didn't pan out. Yeah, I don't know if I ever used a search engine before Google, actually. Oh, yeah.

I'm told that there were many. I was a big Lycos guy myself. Next one up is limited. This is a stable coin neobanking company. They raised $18 million from third prime, North Island ventures, collab currency, and others. Wallapay is a payments infrastructure company. There is $4.6 million from generative ventures,

commerce ventures, and Verta. So I think we should start it out with just some words of thanks for SEC Commissioner Hester Purse. She will leave the agency this week. So by the time you're hearing this, it's her last day. She'll join Regent University's law faculty. And I have to say, Hester Purse is my favorite public servant, I think, of all time. I think she did a really, really good job.

So hats off. And thank you for your service to the country. Yeah, I mean, a truly special person. And from the good times and the bad, you know, as a dissenter under Gens. and now an architect, you know, later on and now actually, you know, having the political ability to shape policy. I mean, she's just done so much for crypto. And more than anything, she was kind of like the voice for crypto and the really bad times.

Yeah. You know, the voice of reason and one of the very few sticking up for the industry throughout the very worst times. And that was almost like more important than the actual policy. She's being able to shape since then. Yeah, and it wasn't one of these. I mean, there are plenty people in government who are just blind supporters of crypto. That was not Hesterper's motto at the SEC.

She was willing to call out the bad behavior in the industry, but she was a first principal's thinker on why this technology is important, why we should care about it. And she will be missed. Yeah, you never got the impression that she was just like blindly supportive for some cynical reason. No. Like, frankly, many, you know, politicians have been. but it seemed like it was all principles driven. So the interesting thing now is there are only two SEC commissioners.

And so there was a final rule put out actually yesterday, it looks like, that says that two can be the quorum for now. So I think we're going to get a bunch of rulemaking just with Atkins and Ueda here. Yeah, it's quite interesting how understaffed Washington is. CFTC, SEC. I don't fully understand why that is. but it seems to be working still? Yeah, I think it's working.

I was kind of surprised that we didn't see a horse trade there to get clarity through. I thought that could have been a reasonable compromise. Look, we're going to let you pick one of the SEC commissioners in exchange for getting on board with the bill. But that would have been too rational. So the SEC is still working. They published a new FAQ.

They clarified that token buybacks on functional networks don't necessarily make a token of security and that liquid staking tokens can count as digital commodities. Yeah, that was good. I mean, obviously, that was reasonable. I think a lot of people in the industry thought that that was how it ought to function. The other thing, so this just happened a couple hours ago. The SEC put out proposed rules and amendments to provide a tailored framework for the custody of crypto assets for registered investment advisors and regulated funds,

which would be BDCs. So it is like 700 pages long. I have not read it all. I'm sure you haven't yet either. But this was the key sticking point. This is actually how Gensler was trying to choke off the industry, one of the many ways that he was trying to choke off the industry, by preventing RIAs from being able to custody cryptocurrencies and digital assets.

Part of this rule looks like state trusts in certain circumstances can be used. as qualified custodians. Now we obviously have the OCC path and we actually have some banks that have been approved. So those would fit into this as well. But people forget how difficult this was for a very long time. This is one of the reasons why you didn't see institutional capital at scale even into things like Bitcoin because the qualified custody thing had not been figured out. And now we're going to codify that. I remember. Yeah. I mean, it was like a catch 22. If you're an RIA, you can't own an asset basically unless there's, a QC that supports it. And of course, many, many crypto assets did not have QC support from the get.

Totally. I mean, Coinbase and Anchorage didn't have their licenses in the first couple years of those companies' existence. The OCC path was totally shut down for a long time. And so the interpretation that state trusts can actually be qualified custodians is very important. I think that's how the rule should have been interpreted anyway, but this will further codify that. So very good development there. And I think this is going to be what the SEC just does here for the next couple of months. It's just put out sensible rules. Not to be outdone, the CFTC has also issued an FAQ.

The main thing they said was that tokenized versions of otherwise permitted instruments can qualify as permitted instruments of customer funds. If you are a FCM or DCO and you're allowed to invest customer funds in a particular instrument, putting it into a tokenized form is allowed. A little bit convoluted. Yeah, sensible. They also said the blockchain can be used to satisfy CFTC record keeping requirements in some cases. All right. We always talk about prediction markets, although we don't invest in them.

But the Sixth Circuit ruled against Kalshi, finding that its sports event contracts aren't swaps under the federal commodities law, and that the federal law shouldn't override state gambling regulations. So the Sixth Circuit is now joining the Ninth Circuit. The Third Circuit is on the other side of this. So how many times we're going to say this, but just go to the Supreme Court already. I mean, you have circuits in disagreement at the federal level. We just need the ultimate arbitrator to come in. Yeah, circuit split. Yeah. A lot happened elsewhere in prediction markets. New York and Polymarket are now suing each other. So that's exciting. Cal She is reportedly raising at a $40 billion valuation according to Reuters. Novig has hit a $2 billion valuation. People increasingly talk

about polymarket, Calci, and Novig. Yeah. Is that because Sidney's sweetie? She really put the long map, yeah. I think it's this. I mean, she's a shareholder too. Oh, really? I mean, talk about value at. Yeah. I mean, they weren't on my radar. I hadn't heard. them before they had. There's all sorts of these things popping up though. I guess Novick's been around for a while, but I don't know how you get there on some of these. The CFTC apparently has soured on mention markets. So market contracts covering will Trump say such and such word, which is fair enough. Those are very manipulable markets inherently. Yeah, I feel like just the existence of those markets. People are just going to do illegal things. And Trump's teleprompter guy would be a textbook example

there. Yeah, I feel like it's already happened. Here was an interesting one. So Vitalik wrote down Ethereum's roadmap through 2030. It's a new essay called Not Just a Blockchain anymore. Talks about next year's Hagata upgrade. Is that how you say that? Hagata. He talks about that being the last quote normal fork before the network shifts over to zero knowledge proofs in quantum safe cryptography. So you do have to hand it to him for having a vision and the quantum stuff is he's going to be rewarded there, I think. So Ethereum is no longer going to be a blockchain in 2030, he says. You know, what do you what do you make of that? I could actually see a world where blockchain technology as we know it if we get a quantum break becomes less.

important and some of these money systems could actually just be built in almost like a Chami and e-cash way using using like a central origination point like do you even need a blockchain in a quantum world yeah I think Vitalik is skating to where the puck is going here he's emphasizing privacy natively he's emphasizing quantum resistance obviously we agree I mean that is only getting more urgent He's talking about formal verification. I was, formal verification was like a crackpot idea in the early days of crypto. You remember?

Yeah. Well, Tezos was formally verified. They would talk about it. The Cardano guys would talk about it using. And then AI made formal verification so much more attractable overnight. Right. Kind of interesting. He's talking about faster finality, more parallelization.

I think that's also where the world is going blockchain-wise. So I think he's on. the right track here, especially with regards to quantum, which is only getting more urgent by the week. Yeah, I mean, just this is going so fast. And I think the fact that we're starting to see censorship of academics and censorship of the big labs should be setting off alarm bells in this industry. Yeah, there have been some big raises in quantum, some technological results. Google said they're now using AI to optimize error correction. So, I mean, their lab is called Google Quantum AI.

So you should have kind of known that that's what they were going to do. But I think that's actually the dark horse and the whole quantum thing is AI is pretty good at math, as it turns out. Yeah. What is building a quantum computer until? Just basically doing math problems. Did you see the benchmarks for the new Google model that's not yet released? They're good, right?

They're really good. And Sundar Peshai came out and said that they're actually using it in their quantum lab right now, which that was interesting. That even brought that up. Yeah. So you have the NSA published a new quantum roadmap this week. I mean, a lot is happening. I don't know. I don't know if it's a 2030 thing anymore.

It might be actually a little earlier now. Do you want to do a segment on the show in the future? I don't know if I could do it today. just surprising places where elliptic curves are used to protect things. I mean, it's just like a default cryptography, so it's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's like, okay, certain car keys, a lot of smart TVs, like, you know, the things that you're going to need to think about upgrading at some point in the next four to five years.

Yeah, and a lot of that stuff can't be upgraded. Like there's a lot of hardware where the firmware is burned in. Yeah, that's a problem. It's etched on, right? It's un-upgradable. I think satellites are one of the worst cases of that. It's hard to do a software update on a satellite. So we're just going to have to shoot those out of the sky probably.

Yeah, I mean, I guess they'll fall back to Earth eventually. Maybe we should be long recycling. It's just because there's going to be a lot of hardware here that just gets thrown. the way, right? So Illinois, they had their crypto transaction tax. It's a very bad tax. 0.2%. They've agreed to delay it by six months to July 1st. I still expect there'll be a legal battle over that one. This one really irks me. So this is in the class of just politicians being total scumbags. So what happened was Illinois, when they went through the budget process, had a big deficit.

And so they needed to come up with a revenue number just to plug to get through the budget process. And they just arbitrarily said, well, we are going to implement a 0.2% crypto tax in the state of Illinois. Okay, good. Call it a day, signed into law before any discussion. And this would have been crippling to so much industry in Illinois. You think about the high frequency trading firms in Illinois.

Think about just the big market participants like DRW. jump. I mean, this would have been devastating. All these guys would have just left. And so it looks like it's been delayed, but there's a lot of lawsuits going on right now. So I'm sure it's unconstitutional to begin with. But the fact that we're even having this debate is just shows you how much of a joke the budget processes in a lot of these states. Talk about Chicago and billionaire is fleeing. Ken Griffin made the biggest ever donation to university this week with Carnegie Mellon, Miami. I saw that. So he gave some to the main campus, but then he gave a bigger sum to, what does it, start a Miami campus? Yeah, $2 billion in Winwood of all places. I mean, I don't know if I would strictly recommend putting a university campus there.

He didn't go to Carnegie Mellon, right? He went to Harvard? Yeah, it's actually an interesting point. I guess Harvard didn't want to put a campus here. Yeah, I mean, good for him, but I mean, that's if you're... I did show the Harvard fundraising team. I mean, you're probably like, man, where'd we go wrong here? Or if you're the Chicago mayor, you know, I mean, it shows what happens when he killed the golden goose. Totally. That's an interesting story about Oakland this week.

There, had you heard about this? The city of Oakland is going bankrupt. Oh, no. Because talking about killing the golden goose. They have a huge port. And then environmental activists shut down the port for a while because it was being used to import coal. Then some coal company went bankrupt because of this. and now the city is on the hook for something like $600 million

because they caused the bankruptcy of this coal company because they let activists shut down the port. Oh my gosh, you're kidding me? I thought you were about to say because the Raiders left town and they went bankrupt. I mean, that probably didn't help, actually. It's an interesting job being like a mayor or an administrator. There's not that many mayors that I would say are doing a great job.

No, I think definitely not, right? only hear about them doing just like the most boneheaded things. I mean, people say that the new mayor of San Francisco is doing a better job than his predecessor, but you're still like, you know, I wouldn't say that it's, times are not great. Yeah, I got a bone to pick with the San Francisco. Like, I think people that live in San Francisco have this kind of selective amnesia or something. Like their car gets broken into or like a homeless guy like menaces them on the street and they just don't, they don't remember that it has.

happened. Yeah. Or something. Because I was there for like three days this week. And I saw just so much carnage and just like street harassment. And maybe people would be like, oh, you're in the wrong neighborhood. Why is there a wrong neighborhood in the middle of downtown San Francisco and the business district?

Yeah. Like this is where all the hotels are. I'm sorry. Okay. I have to stay in the hotel. And I saw more. homeless people harassing people on the street, not just like passively being homeless, but like actively harassing in one hour than I have seen in Miami in the last year. Yeah, I'm not surprised.

I'm not surprised. That's genuinely the ratio. And then, you know, I talk to people and I stuff, they're like, oh, it's so much better. Like, am I out of my, my, my noggin here? You're like, oh, it was really bad a couple years ago. It must have been like a war zone. Yeah. For it to be better. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, last time, well, one of the times I was there, there was like a bonfire and a tent in front of my hotel. Yeah, I mean, I guess it was bad, but it's not really that much better. No. But, you know, he's considered a good mayor, to your point on mares.

I don't know. The Miami mayor is pretty good, but he's like kind of the fake mayor, right? Suarez is out. Yeah. And now he's actually mired in a corruption scandal. Yeah, all right. So cross him off the list. Jury's out, I would say, on him.

He was good at the Bitcoin conference. year. The stripe-backed OpenUSD Stablecoin has launched this week with over $400 million in initial liquidity across Tempo, Ethereum, and Solana. Congrats to them. Yeah, it's a big launch there. And then Robin Hood had their summit this week, a bunch of interesting product announcements. I've been so impressed by Robin Hood, just the pace of shipping. You can really tell that's just still a founder-led company where he's in Hyperdrive. So there's a bunch of on-chain products. There's a Bitcoin, Ethereum, a PURP product that they're. launched. There's a bunch of agenic trading capabilities, weekend trading for stocks and

ETFs. It feels like every, you know, it's like twice a year they come out with just a big suite of new products over there. Yeah, I was thinking to myself recently about crypto's cultural exports, like the concepts that crypto has pushed into the mainstream. And there are so many, actually. I think crypto maybe doesn't get enough credit, like things like perps and 24-7 trading. These are just sort of unheard of before. outside of niche markets. And Robin Hood seems to be one of those vehicles for actually pushing that out to the mainstream in particular.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, they've really leaned in aggressively, and the BitStamp acquisition was a good example there. But yeah, launching products. There's a lot of things that crypto founders have been at the forefront of. A lot of these neocloud businesses are launched by crypto founders. And now tokenized equities, I never really saw the value, but they are skyrocketing if you look at the TVL, actually.

Yeah, I am, I mean, there is value there. I think the question is who captures that? Because to your point on the model company is just making it easier for you to cancel subscriptions and there's more surplus going back to the customer, that is the, that is step one, I think, of tokenized equities, is you're just going to drive down the cost of settlement for a bunch of things. and that will probably show up and just lower fees on ETFs, mutual funds, and whatnot. But I think what I'm really waiting for is show me a new type of instrument,

new type of security that makes me want to be on the blockchain. I feel like we're kind of lacking that. It's like show me something that's 10 times better than what I could have conventionally. Yeah, I think right now the unlock is just letting crypto natives trade equities through the interfaces that are used to. But what's next? Yeah. I think we, I mean, we won't below any surprises at portfolio companies or anything like that. But I think there's going to be some stuff launching here over the next six months that we'll get people interested.

And it's just like truly novel financial primitives that are only possible because of a blockchain in a security rapper. Wish I could tell you what it is. What a tease. What a tease. All right. So I think we're going to leave it there on a cliffhanger. No bad boys this week, huh? Nothing bad has happened.

The Elizabeth Holmes documentary comes out next week. Oh, I'll definitely watch that. Very excited for that. She's potential bad girl candidate. I mean, there's nothing new unless maybe there is. All right, everyone, that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.