On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/03/25 (Stablecoin Wars, SEC no action letters, Government shutdown) (EP.672)

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: AI bailed out the mining companies AI people deal with the same energy use claims We reflect on the life of Jane Goodall DoubleZero gets a no-action letter from the SEC Will Tether and Circle lose market share? Who could challenge the Big Two stablecoins? Do optimists always win? Some DATs are troubled Is Kalshi starting to take over? Stripe announces Open Issuance The US Government is shut down Content mentioned: Nic on Substack, The Stablecoin Duopoly is Ending  

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, 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. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brinkum, Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Do you notice that I'm back in the podcast interview game? I have three that are recorded ready to go. Yeah, you know, we thought you might be done for a while,

but it was kind of all Wyatt for a minute there. He's still a force in the podcasting game, but I don't know, I did one this week with Kagney. A couple aired this week. I did one with Mark Coe, which was a really good one. Talking about the public markets in the crypto space, Mark started a dedicated public equity vehicle four years ago. we couldn't talk about it on the podcast.

For crypto. Yeah, he has a really good track record too. Not investment advice. But it was a fascinating conversation. Talked a lot about the miners. He's done well in the minor category. Yeah, I mean, basically any public Bitcoin miner that had any foresight about pivoting the AI, HBC,

just did incredibly. I mean, look at Iris Energy, for God's sakes. Not investment advice. We actually interviewed them back in the day, 2021. That's a 40 bagger from the lows. That's incredible. Believe it or not. Yeah, yeah. Look at Galaxy. Galaxy is trading. Galaxy has a diversified business, but they're trading really well because they have an AI installation that was originally a Bitcoin mine. Like, that's Galaxy. Yeah. They're trading on an AI multiple basis. Look at, I don't know, Name your Bitcoin miner.

Core Scientific got bought by CoreWeef and AI company. Like it's just no matter what Bitcoin miner are you looking at, if they've done anything in AI, they've been enormously rewarded by the public markets. It is crazy. It is crazy. Yeah, and Mark talked about it on the podcast, so go listen to it if you're interested.

But he kind of framed us. Like, it was a kick save because the mining business model is just tough. I mean, you can't predict hash rate. it's operationally intensive. It's a brutal business model. It's the worst. I mean, in 20,

was it 2021? I went around, interviewed every mining CEO. And my conclusion from all that was terrible industry. I don't want to own any of these. Yeah. And I think I was right about that. I mean,

you're selling to one client. That's it. You're 100% dependent on them. It's the Bitcoin network. And the amount of supply decreases by half. every like that's awful structurally declining market unless the price just keeps doubling

which you can't do that forever it's such a bad bit and anyone can do it there's no competitive there's no moat right anyone can do it AI is way better I mean AI data center market is bigger than Bitcoin mining oh for sure yeah it makes you wonder how much Bitcoin mining is actually happening

in the United States right now hard to say but I think when all is said and done, Bitcoin mining and eth mining will be remembered as the bridge technology that led to the acceleration of AI, which made it such that AI came about before it otherwise would have. Right. Because otherwise nobody would have built those data centers. I think that's exactly right. I think that's right.

So the AI people should actually be thanking us. They should. Yeah. And, you know, and when they complain about the environmental impact of Bitcoin, you actually should think us because that's why Chach EBT is so good. Do the AI folks get a lot of heat for the environmental aspects of it? It seems like maybe less than what the Bitcoin miners were getting heat for. They get some. They get some. People like to say that AI uses water.

It's like, all right. So let's actually think this through. When you have a power plant and they're using water to. cool the whatever cooling that water's not destroyed it's not sent out into space right the water is just evaporates and it falls to the earth as rain it's part of the it's called the water cycle you learn about it in third grade what are these people like why do they think that the water is eliminated from the earth yeah it's there's some strong views on that and then you know it does rain Yeah, the returns is right.

So I don't get it. You got to go deep on how things work. All right, another podcast. So Wyatt was on the board this week with a podcast. He had Ben Ward and Stephen Pack, co-founders of Rock Solid, one of our portfolio companies, talking about the staking landscape and Ethereum,

talking about D5VALs. That was a good podcast, too. We're approaching 700 podcasts on this feed. I know, and it's, you know, at what point is it just enough? I don't think it's ever enough. You just got to keep on going, keep on going. Eventually, Spotify is just going to show up and be like,

we need to have an exclusive with these guys. I would take a Spotify deal. Yes. I remember telling you in 2019, when we started in 2019? End of 2018, maybe, yeah. 2018, I was like, this is a never running liability. You didn't want to do it.

I correctly knew that the pain and trauma that it would cause. And the fact that you can never. going holiday ever. Yeah, you just got to, I've recorded this thing inside of closets and hotel rooms. That's the dedication we have to this. You can't take a break and it's so bad. It's like being in a prison in a sense. So I told you that we shouldn't do it.

We did it anyway. And I stand by what I said. It's a bad decision. Now we're stuck forever. People are asking about turkey updates. You'd never get the turkey updates if we didn't do the podcast. But I'd say the list. latest problem. They're still around all the time. My kids really don't like them. That's

rubbed off on them. But they're creating traffic jams now. They've gotten a lot more bold. So they're going into the main road in front of my house and just the cars are slowing down, which is a second order problem, really. I think you should take more of the attitude of like Jane Goodall, rest and peace to ideas. Oh, yeah. I saw that. And try and commune with the nature and integrate and seek to understand them to have them understand you. Tried fences, tried BB guns. We'll see if that's the problem. You take a latently

antagonistic approach to the turkeys. I do. Yeah. What if you sought to learn their language and they could learn yours? It's true. I don't know. I wish there was a way you could just get them in like an 18 wheeler and drive them to the town over. I think that's what I need to do.

Let me tell you one thing about Jane Goodall. I watched a documentary about her last night. her son was named grub she called him grub okay grublin for long her husband actually was the the national geographic photographer that went out document her and then they got married he sent her a telegram when he left saying will you marry me it's very it's like really sweet and so she was married to like who turned out to be like the goat wildlife photographer believe it or not wow who knew they had telegram back then that's crazy yeah and uh then her son was raised in the bush with them in Tanzania.

Wow. And they had to keep him in a cage because otherwise the chimpanzees would try and steal him and eat him. Oh my gosh, really? So the son, and he didn't have any friends, obviously, they're just living with the chimpanzees. So he's raised, you know, speaking Swahili,

whatever language of chimpanzees spoke, some English, presumably. And he lived in a cage. Wow. In the forest. There's some similarities that you were born in Swaziland, right? Yeah, but not in a cage, right? I wasn't caged. I imagine I had other like toddlers to, you know, communicate with. So this poor kid, like the worst circumstances ever.

And then worst part, even worse. So the mom would live with the chimpanzees. The dad would live in the serengeti doing wildlife photography. The son was sent home to England eventually. and just basically orphaned. What? That's crazy. So, yeah, this is where they don't tell you about Jane Goodall. I mean, look, it's not a good time to speak ill of the dead, and I never would. But her son grew up, like, solo. Oh, that's too bad.

She picked the chimpanzees over the sun. Oh, man. I hate to see that. That's the kind of sacrifice you have to make if you want to be, like, the true science. She was committed to the science. I don't know. I put Margaret Mead about. of her in terms of anthropology.

I don't even know who that is. Yeah. She's top of my anthropologist list. All right, let's hop into some crypto stuff. Let's talk about some deals of the week. Flying Tulip, which is a decentralized exchange. They raised $200 million from Brevin Howard Digital, coin fund, Falcon X, and others.

That's a monster raise. Wow. That is huge. Good name, too. So this Andre Cronier's new project. Yeah. I don't know how that one's structured, but he's had a lot of projects this guy.

Yeah, I mean, what was he doing before? Yerne. Yeah. I mean, I feel like he said three or four different things. He has, yeah. Next up you have Lava. That's a Bitcoin lending platform. There is 17 million from a number of angel investors, is how this is described, which is, there's a chunky

raise from angels. A lot of angels. That was heavenly around. Yeah. Next one up. Speaking of Heavenly is Divine, which is an under-collateralized lending protocol. They raise $6 million from Paradigm and Nacent. Then you have Share that's a social trading app.

There is $5 million from Coinbase, Collab currency, and PTC Crypto. BaseVal, which is a crypto-options trading protocol, raised $3 million from neoclassic, virtuals, ventures, and others. And we have Kajun. That's a Web3 gaming platform. There is 13 million from Jump, Excel, and ProCus Ventures. All right, a lot to talk about this week. Why don't we talk about CFTC?

It looks like Quintens has officially been withdrawn from consideration to chair at the CFTC. There are no bodies at the CFTC except for the one commissioner, which is Caroline Pham, left. So back to square one. That is a tough pill to swallow. I mean, very, very few people were against Quintan's. It was broadly well-liked in crypto. and I would have to say, you know, probably the main and the only reason he's not in the seat is the Winklevi complaining about it. Who do you think gets this?

There's some rumors that Mike Selegg, who's now over at the SEC on the Crypto Task Force, he's a chief counsel and senior advisor over there. His name's in the rumor mill. He'd be good. I don't know enough about D.C. Peter. The Politico is rumoring that Tyler Williams, formerly Galaxy, who advises he's at Treasury right now, is the name that's being considered. Josh Sterling, former CFTC official, who's a big law, and Jill Summers, former CFTC commissioner.

Wow, Tyler Williams, huh? That would be crazy. He is. What a career Tyler is putting together here. Yeah, seriously. I wish there was a way to buy stock in Tyler Williams' career like three years ago. I would have been a buyer. There's probably some crypto protocol or you can do that. Probably. Yeah, it would have been long his career since I met him. All right. In SEC news, a bunch of stuff this week.

So ahead of their token launch, double zero, which is a decentralized protocol, basically in the DIPN category, it's like an internet, faster internet type of a protocol. They received a no action letter from the SEC stating that the tokens on their network would not be deemed to be securities. it's a big development for sure, especially if you're double zero. I don't know if this is something that is widely applicable to other projects. The way that's worded is pretty narrow on the facts and circumstances of double zero, but probably does give a bit of a template for projects that are seeking to launch these somewhat utility-like networks

where they don't want the token to be deemed to be a security. They want it to be a commodity. So I think it's a very positive development. What were those no action letters? The SEC used to give crypto companies way back in the day. Turnkey Jet, do you remember that one? Oh, yeah, there was like a loyalty points or something. Pocketful of quarters, ink.

So basically, projects are not substantive in any way. No, this is a real deal project. This is Austin Federa. He was at Solana before this. This is a big swing of a technology build. I think it's a good development. And it goes without saying this is, yeah, much more material type of no action letter as compared to those prior ones that I think some of them were like stable coins. It's like, well, why would you even need no action letter for that?

Right. It wasn't the only no action letter. So in a separate no action letter, and this is a huge one, the SEC has stated that registered investment advisors can use state chartered trust companies as qualified custodians for crypto assets. That has been a huge question for so long. And you had all these RIAs that were getting investigated by the SEC or even just during routine exams. And they'd say, well, where are you holding your crypto? And you say, oh, I'm holding it at this state trust. And there's a lot of questions there.

There was RIAs, I think, that were getting deficiency letters from the SEC around not having a qualified custodian because they weren't respecting the Wyoming state trusts. So my interpretation of this is it's kind of game on now if you're an RIA and you want to hold your assets with the two oceans of the world. Anyone in the New York state trust system looks like the Wyoming state trust system is is up there, top five definitely, in terms of a state that does these things. So very, very positive news for registered investment advisors. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge deal because as an RAA, you would run into trouble where you just wouldn't be able to hold these tokens anywhere and you'd have to self custody them,

which had its own set of challenges. And so they just were, in many cases, no way, there were no venues that would hold the tokens for you. So it's causing huge issues with a lot of the bigger firms. Yeah, definitely. So this was on the, I wouldn't even say this was like a wish list item. This was just, hey, we need this clarity. And the SEC is given the clarity.

So that's great. In stable coin news this week, Stripe announced open, issuance, which is a new platform powered by bridge, it allows any business to launch and manage its own stablecoin. I know you had some thoughts on this this week. Yeah, I did predict that Tether and Circle would lose market share. They're at about 85%, which has actually come down from the 90s of stablequin supply between the two of them. And their low low was about 71% back when Tara Luna was the thing, but that was only for a brief period. So my prediction, is that they lose market share to some of these newer ones. There's so many white label

providers you've Anchorage, Braille, M0, Agora, and obviously stripe with bridge. I just think there is now this infrastructure in place where it's not that difficult as an intermediary to roll your own stable coin. It's easier than ever to swap between stable coins and cheaper than ever to do it. So it's not that much of an additional friction. There's all these you know, digital dollar apps and fintechs that are emerging that just say you have a dollar in the account. They don't say tether or USDC. So they can do their own stable coin. Interest rates encourage you to do it. So I just think tether and circle or like I think this is kind of the peak of their market share. I think it's going to decline from here. And obviously what bridge has

done, Stripe Bridge has been unbelievable. I mean, it's like almost every startup I talk to now is they're using them, basically. Yeah, I think Stripe is definitely the most forward-thinking Web2 company. They are now a full-blown crypto company, as far as I'm concerned. I think the leadership at Stripe has just done an unbelievable job moving fast and growing via inorganic moves with these acquisitions of Bridge and Privy, I think, just really smart. It's hard to argue.

It's hard to take the other side of your argument around the market share, right? Because I think you're just going to see a lot of banks and asset management, mint firms issue stable coins that'll be very large even if they're only for their own platforms right even if it's just a brokerage cash type of a platform so the the total volume of stable coins i think we're going to be in the top 10 here in terms of sovereign holdings uh stable coins here pretty soon i think it's 10 is it already 10 okay earlier today i said it was 14 i feel like every no i read ran the numbers recently it's 10 yeah so stable coins let's just emphasize that. So stable coins, if you consider them a country, would be the 10th largest holders

of U.S. Treasuries. That's wild to me. And something similar in terms of money market funds, roughly 10th as well. I need to redo it as well. I can steal me on the other side of the argument, which is, one, the circle tether duopoly has never been broken. It has always been that way since 2015, you know? Two, there are network effects of stable coins. They're not impot like in my article we'll bit in the show notes i argue that the network effects are less strong than people think because cross chain swaps are easy cross stable on the same chain swaps are easy blockchains don't impose a lot of exit costs right so you can leave fairly easily but there are network effects like tether has the most liquid pairs against fiat on every

exchange in the world. Right. That's a very powerful value prop, right? So, yeah, if I were to steal man, I would say it's very hard to beat that. No one has a distribution to do it now. They've had 10 years to build this. You know, how could anybody possibly compete? To which I would say, yeah, I do think it's going to be hard to compete.

But other stable coin issuers will be able to compete on yield, which I think is not going to be fully banned. And then, of course, the banks haven't done anything yet. I think they will. And I think a bank consortium could credibly compete. Like if a consortium of city and Wells and Bofa and JPM, that could compete with Tether on distribution. Yeah, yeah.

Or, you know, a Stripe, Shopify, Vs, you know, there's all kinds of consortia that could create big competitive stable coins. Yeah, there's parts of the world where those consortium stable coins won't go. So I think Tether is going to have a great run here for many years to come in certain parts of the world where they were early. You mentioned the liquidity network effect around Binance and some of the Asian venues that are just deep, deep markets on Tether. But the world's a big place. If I was a regional bank right now, I would be petrified. Yeah.

I mean, I think the deposit flight is real. Like, okay, civil one is pretty small. Still $300 billion. Once they get into the trillions, like, yeah, I think. And if they can pay yield, whether it's covert or with the loophole, yeah, I would be concerned. I wonder if this is a topic of conversation at regional bank board meetings, because it seems like it's the biggest existential threat to their deposit base. We could probably look at earnings calls and see how many mentions there are for the publicly traded ones. All right.

We're going to put our chat GPT analyst on this today. Yeah, big announcement from Stripe. There's also some news, Nodibene, launched their stable. coin network with some exciting partners. I did a podcast with Pellet. We'll run that next week. Just a lot of interesting payments-related technologies being built on top of these stable coin networks. Yeah. Also, along those lines, Swift announced their partnership with 30 global financial institutions. They're developing a blockchain-based ledger for cross-border based on a conceptual prototype designed by a consensus. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, Swift obviously

has a very important role to play in the global financial system. It'll be interesting to see if they actually can do this for stable coins or if they sort to get leapfrogged here. Swift is not a for-profit entity. So I don't see them as historically moving with a lot of urgency. Yeah. Elsewhere, Binance has launched a crypto as a service platform for licensed banks and burgages to offer white-labeled crypto trading in custody. Apparently, Coinbase also has something.

analogous, maybe for more for legacy financial institutions. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, if you told me three, four years ago that Binance was going to do white label for custody and trading, I wouldn't have thought that that would be viable whatsoever. But it turns out Binance had the money all along. All this Binance FUD over the years was much to do about nothing, I guess. Yeah, I mean, if you think about the main topics of FUD in crypto, it's basically,

was tether and binance right and some people would fud coinbase even i don't know how you do that but and there just was there was nothing there was nothing there was nothing there you know those people still around all those tether truthers you know what a lot of them do now is there now they're they're anti-a-i oh they're anti-a-i is a bubble and they think we're spending too much on it it's not useful and no one's using it. It's like, I don't know, man. I use it every day for hours. Everybody I know does. So it's kind of a tough way to go through life is just being a professional hater on social networks. Yeah. And like I have a lot of hate in my heart too. So I do sympathize and like I like to wake up and hate, you know, but it brings me a certain amount of joy.

But at the same time, like you can't have that, you know, they can't dominate. They can't be your dominant worldview. It's true. You'll lose. You'll lose. have to be optimistic about some things. Otherwise, you just never invest, you'll never build, you know. And now you're right. It's not a good way to live. I do a little bit of hating sometimes via my exploration of SEC files. You know what I'm kind of worried about right now?

There's some lending going on in this debt market that I'm not a big fan of. So you get publicly traded companies that have Bitcoin on their balance sheet that are filing 8Ks, that they're entering into some loan agreements where they're taking out of cash loans against their crypto collateral. I think this is an early warning sign. I'm not ready to call out any names yet, but as this starts to grow, I think I'm going to start to become a little bit more vocal around.

Just let's be careful here. There have been some dats that are very troubled recently. Like, that the vast majority of the announced subscription amount was in-kind contribution from an unlaunched token. You know what I'm talking about? Problematic. So that is, you're like combining these very bad ideas together into one gigabad idea,

which is like the sort of like low float, effectively zero float, high FDV, pricing it yourself, and then combining that with the in-kind debt subscription. So the public market looks like there's hundreds of millions of dollars going into things, but it's like less than 20 million. Yeah, yeah. It's like an unholy combination of bad ideas. It is. And then you have these asset management agreements, which just continue to be mind-boggling to me, the leakage that you have here. So you have these crypto hedge funds that are pulling down one and a half, two percent fee per year on the underlying holdings of the debt. And that's leakage. Like if you're an equity holder in these things, that is just going right out the door. See, we're directly contradicting our advice from 10 minutes ago because did not be here.

Really, what we should be doing is doing this instead of hating on it because people doing it make the way. money and we get nothing for hating. This is true. This is true. Yeah, we're just sitting here in our ivory towers, just lobbing grenades at these dats. But, you know, meanwhile, you become the asset management firm on a dat. That's the road to Valhalla. We're hating and they're printing. Robin Hood is exploring launching prediction markets outside the U.S. They're speaking with regulators to understand how event contract swaps are treated in other countries. Looks like Draft Kingstock is down 18% in the past week as Robin Hood continues.

news to tout sports betting volumes that they've been doing in partnership with Cal She since the beginning of the NFL season. I didn't realize that. It's a good little tidbit there in our newsletter that Draft Kings has been getting hit. I didn't know that either. CalShe volumes higher than at the election. Yeah. I mean, I guess we're probably on record as saying prediction markets at some point we probably said this, that it's all election driven and what happens in the out years. But apparently what happens in the out years is people bet on NFL games. Well, I think there's the tax reason. We haven't really verified that yet, but Matt Levine wrote it. That's fact. Yeah, I mean, if that's true, it does really hurt the

kind of legacy, I don't even legacy, established bookies. I mean, it's just, and then you have every brokerage on the planet doing their own prediction market or partnering with one. And this is going to change very quickly. It's a real shame that these high school kids are just never going to have a bookie. I mean, I remember at my high school, there was, every year there would be some big thing that happened where it was like some kid who got in over his skis with a bookie and, you know, everyone in the school kind of knew about it. And I guess really, the physical danger isn't there anymore as a high school kid. Oh, I went to a very different kind of, we didn't have that. Oh, you didn't have that. Yeah. Now, there's always like someone that was over

their skis to some booking Quincy. That's pretty tough at age 15. if you're in debt to a bookie, like things are not going well for you. It was never me, so I stayed away from it. You don't want to be in high school with some bookie from Dorchester, South Boston, Quincy,

knowing who you are. So Calci is now, I think, doing more volume than polymarket. Yeah, that's wild to me. Yeah, that's really, I would not have predicted that. I think it makes sense because of what we talked about

in the past. Yeah. Which is the resolution of markets is troubled on polymarket. It is troubled. Because they're outsourcing it to anonymous UMA whales. Like, and sometimes it goes wrong. Like the Zelensky suit market, which I still maintain who wore a suit. Well, even that Dodgers game where it was objectively speaking, the Dodgers won and it,

it settled as they lost. That was like last year or something. Yeah. It's like we don't have to decentralize everything. We need to do strategic re-centralization. For a resolution of a high-stakes market, you just need one trustworthy entity to do it. You don't need a lot of anonymous people. That doesn't get you to the truth necessarily.

That always felt to me like that was an end around, a regulatory cover. Yeah. And that's the thing. We did the theater, the decentralization theater for many years out of necessity. we don't have to do it anymore. Yeah, agreed. So I could totally make sense to me that Kelchise ahead. So the CME came out this week

and they said they're planning to shift their crypto futures trading to 24-7 continuous markets starting in early 2026. Smart, very smart. Wow, yeah, ahead of the game. So a group of House Republicans have notified the SEC that they plan to launch an investigation into the loss of a year's worth of Gunso's text messages. Bravo.

My name is us as your chair. I say, to that I said, Bravo. Let's get to the bottom of that. You can't just blame the IT guy. Are they still working? Or do they go home as well when the government shut? Yeah, the government is shut down.

The Edgar system is still awake. So. Have you noticed, so we pay, whatever, 30, 40% of our income of taxes. Have you noticed anything? Have your life gotten worse since the government's been shot for two days?

It seems the same to me. Everything seems exactly the same. Well, I still see, you know, school buses are still running in my town. The traffic cops are still working. So it doesn't seem like anything has really changed in my day to day. Isn't that funny? You can shut off the whole government and everything is exactly the same. Do you remember the West Wing?

I didn't watch it. I used to really like the West Wing. They had this episode where they shut down, Martin Sheen shut down the government. And I was like, wow, that would never happen. I can't imagine the government being shut down. And it feels like that's happened 12 times over the West. Yeah, now we do it all the time. It's like whenever there's like a minor dispute.

I mean, is this a debt ceiling thing or is that, is this something completely different? I haven't followed it. I don't even know. I honestly don't even know. It really activates the almonds that if you just look around, everything is perfectly fine with no government. Yeah.

What about that? The libertarians are really loving this. Yeah. They're feasting. Yeah. I still think the tax raid will remain the same. Also, this is kind of like, you know, when you would like be sent to your room as a kid or whatever? And you're like, well, I like being in my room, right?

Yeah. That's what's happening because the Republicans want to downsize government anyway. Yeah. They're going to say, look, this works better, doesn't it? I mean, so yeah, they get to lay a bunch of people off. That's what they wanted to do. So how is that a punishment? I don't know. I don't know. Well, hopefully, I guess hopefully the government reopens by the next time we do this podcast next week. The SEC did try to get a lot done this week before that shut down. So they also announced that they're exploring a framework that will allow crypto exchanges to tokenize U.S. equities. Can we just do this in a non-balkanized SPV joke of a way? Let's just do this the real way if we're going to do it, guess.

yeah let's uh let's put some you know rules in place and then do that instead of what we have now which is a mess yeah we don't want the next scandal to be some unregulated securities exchange that raises billions of dollars and people think they own Tesla but they actually own some like Cambodian SPV version of Tesla that isn't liquid I feel like it's inevitable yeah it is that's gonna happen can it's funny how you sometimes you can just see the next great crisis as it's as it's brewing. I don't know if that will be the crisis. I think it's going to be someone with the Dats, still believe that.

Or maybe credit. Right now the credit seems healthy. Credit seems healthy. I mean, you could always have the Dats get levered up, which, as I said, some of them kind of are moving in that direction on the bad kind of leverage, right? like the ones where they're posting their collateral taking out a margin loan. Those are the types of stats that I really don't like. You know, it's interesting.

We're quietly cruising all-time highs here on the majors, and nobody's even talking about it. Yeah, I don't, I feel nothing on that. Strange. All right, I think that is it for the week. A lot of news this week. It feels like there's going to be a lot of deals announced in the next couple weeks as well.

I think there's some big fundraises going on in the private markets. And we'll update you next week if the government is back or not. But either way, our lives seem very much unaffected. All right, everybody, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.