On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/10/25 (Luxembourg buys BTC, N. Dakota's stablecoin, Salomon bros dust attack) (EP.675)

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Will stablecoins drive deposit flight from the banks? Is FDIC insurance obsolete? Can CBDCs provide real privacy? ICE invests in Polymarket North Dakota is looking to issue their own "rough rider" stablecoin, joining Wyoming Luxembourg buys bitcoin out of their sovereign wealth fund Is the quantum bubble creating risks for Bitcoin? The "Salomon brothers" OP_RETURN dusting attack on old Bitcoins Reg NMS for blockchains? Katie Porter has a new drama Congress is still working on the market structure bill Shutdown update Content mentioned in this episode: Nic on Substack, Yes, we really do want to trust crypto interests with the future of money Galaxy Research, The Great Bitcoin Dusting: A 'Salomon Brothers' Client Tries to Claim Dormant Wallets

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 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 the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And we had a busy podcast week this week. A lot of content coming out of the Castle Island. family grinding in the content minds so you sat down with mike cagney the founder figure i wanted to have him on um i was at a dinner with cagney one of these like chatham house rules dinners is it's not violating chatham house rules if you're only talking about what the other person said and they're

fine with it is that right i i think the point is you can't tell anyone what was said well i'm not saying who through the dinner who is there just saying on the podcast cagney and i talked about some interesting things he said about the banking sector in that dinner. But he brought it up. Okay. I'll grant you an exception in this case. So he has a very interesting perspective on just the impact of stable coins on the banking sector and just how this is going to hurt the regional banks. And so we talked about that at length and figure has some interesting products and solutions that theoretically could be very useful to some of those banks. But I just think people are asleep at the switch running these smaller banks.

So I've been pondering this as well I actually wrote about it last week I think And I've become totally convinced It's going to cause deposit flight I know we're not going to say that out loud Because that's kind of what the critics are saying And we shouldn't agree with the critics

But maybe the critics are right You know Maybe they're right I just think You know even if you don't pay interest People are going to want to have their holdings In stable coins I think it's just better than a bank liability

Right it's more secure that's for sure especially after 23 so it like we've talked about this before banks are becoming narrower through the 23 crisis people don't trust the banks anymore money market funds are getting more popular all time high for money market funds and now with stable coins just basically narrow bank it's not looking good for the banks no what do they do what do you do if you're as a bank you're being disintermediated do you lean in and launch a stable coin and try and monetize in other ways? You're just trying to hold on to your franchise as long as you can.

I think you're just going to see a consolidation there. You're going to see fewer banks. I just think you're going to see credit start to happen even more outside the banking sector. That's been a trend for the past 10 years. That's also happening. Yeah. You're just private credit has risen. It's come at the detriment of the banks giving out these loans.

Yeah, Amid Malikin at Columbia had a good tweet about this. as well. I think he calculated something like a quarter trillion dollars a year is amassed by banks and revenue from, you know, basically not interest margin that could potentially just go away. I can't remember if we've talked about it on this podcast before, but in 2008, right before Merrill Lynch was really about to go out of business that weekend, there was discussion. This is in Andrew Ross Sorkin's book about having the FDIC just do full deposit insurance on every deposit in the United States. And they didn't go forward on that proposal. But that might be the only thing that could save the banking sector from just consolidation. I'm not saying the banking sector is

going to go away, but I just don't know why you'd need as many of these smaller regional banks. But if you could have fully insured deposits, then you could actually see a world where maybe stable coins get built on top of those deposits. Well, that's the way we're trending, right? Because we keep raising the cap on FDIC. And then also banks end up being de facto insured, as we saw with a banking crisis. Yeah. So I saw a lot of discussions about that.

Like, why do we have this artificial cap? It's like de facto cap is infinity. It's infinity. I almost said definitive. It's definitive. It's infinity until it isn't, right? I mean, you do have these smaller ones that go out of business, and they do get haircuts, but SVB obviously got saved. But yeah, it's an interesting one to ponder.

If you actually just had a, you know, a full blanket deposit guarantee, maybe you could see the genius bill revised. I wonder if that's what the bank lobby should be pushing instead of trying to kill stable coins. There's no way you're going to kill stable coins. Just push for more protections on your own franchise, maybe. Yeah, it's maybe one of the most interesting times in the history of banking in this country in living memory. Yeah. You know, since we've had these inflection points post-crisis in the 30s in 2008. And I think this is an inflection point.

Genius will be remembered as, and genius plus the crisis of 23. Yeah. Did you see this bank policy institute letter to the SEC to the? the crypto working group from a couple weeks ago. Was it this about covert interest or something else? No, it was about something else. So they wrote a letter to the SEC and they asked that the, basically the QC rule. So they did not want state chartered trust companies to be deemed to be qualified

custodians in the eyes of the SEC. And they also did not want registered investment advisors to be able to self-custody or do any of these things. So they're out there fighting fights that are hugely intense. to the cryptocurrency industry, not to mention a bunch of non-crypto interests that do rely on these local kind of state chartered banks. And about a week later, Atkins came out and just steamrolled it and just said, look, these are qualified custodians. He issued the guidance. So why is the Bank Policy Institute just still picking up fight with everyone here? Just get your own shop and order. Bank Policy Institute.

So on the, actually on the regulatory front, Jonathan Gold was confirmed. as controller, right? Is that official? Yeah, I believe that's official. And was Travis he'll confirm at the FDIC as well? I don't know. No, he wasn't, but he was nominated. So that's nominated for the permanent role. Yeah, gold was sworn in on July 15th. So elsewhere in Siv content, you sat down with Pelle, Brandeguard, the co-viter of Noda Benet, so they have a new payments platform called Flow. Yeah, this is a very interesting platform. So we've,

been involved with Notabene since the beginning. They're the leading travel rule compliance company for VASPs to comply with the travel rule, virtual asset service providers, basically brokerages, custodians. And they have a new stablecoin network. It actually allows for poll payments, which is pretty interesting. It has a very interesting interchange model around how participants in that network can monetize. So I think we're going to see a lot of innovation here and the types of payments you can make with stable coins. Pull payments and stable coins, fascinating. Yeah, that's something we've been looking for for a while now. It just pull requires a lot more complexity and coordination and, you know, an orchestrator, basically.

But it looks like we're getting there. And then you released a blog post this week talking about why private sector companies are better positioned for putting dollars on chain versus CBDCs. Looks like you took down this New York Times opinion piece by Stanford Professor Amman. at Seru, which I did not read the original opinion piece, I confess. Oh, yeah, that's okay. I mean, I found it really strange, actually. So he's a professor at Stanford at the business school. And he, you know, this is something we've heard a lot, actually, from CBDC advocates for a while,

that CBDCs would uniquely be able to offer privacy, I guess, because of the First Amendment, as opposed to a stable coin. which is kind of like theoretically true, right? You'd say, okay, well, maybe private corporation is not incentivized to care about privacy, but the government by law constitutionally has to care about privacy. That's true in a very abstract sense. That's true in like the 1776 version of the U.S. government.

But post-1971, the last 55 years of, you know, financial surveillance in this country that's been instituted by Congress and the courts, that's definitely not true anymore. Like the government is not interested in granting financial privacy to its citizens. And if we created the CBDC that was private, that would contravene 50 years of Supreme Court decisions asking for, so it would be illegal, actually, under precedent. So I just don't think it's remotely likely or practical that the government would

actually do an about. face on all this and decide that they suddenly care deeply about financial privacy and with the CBDC. Yeah. I don't get the obsession with wanting the government to build a payment system. Like when has that ever really gone right? Yeah. And this is something I talked about.

It's like in certain countries, the government runs a domestic push payment system. Like you have PICs in Brazil and it's called UPI in India and Spay or Cody. in Mexico. There's a government-run systems. They actually work pretty well. But there's a whole path dependence because those are countries that develop later.

And so people were onboarded on the smartphones and the internet. And, you know, the government could then use that infrastructure to build a payment system. In the U.S., we had a payment system already run by the cards and the banks. And so there was way too much institutional inertia to tear out

all of that infrastructure and just put the government in charge. And also we're more skeptical of, you know, a very powerful central government here. So I know a lot of people like to say, well, like, why don't we just have picks in America? Well, it's because like the private sector already built a very robust payment system in the first place. So it doesn't, we don't really need it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's spot on. So you're just going to continue to pick off these opinion pieces. You got to be careful if you want to do an opinion piece, an anti-state. table coins these days because you're going to write a blog post about it. I mean, it's very asymmetric as his piece was like 800 words.

And my reply was like 4,500 words. It's always like that. It's so much more work to, you know, but people DM them to me all the time. They're like, can you take this one down? And this one, like three different people DM'd it to me. So that's why I did it. Well, if you're a student in Professor Suru's class, I hope that you surface Nick's blog post. that actually addresses the issue a lot more appropriately, I think.

I'm really curious what he thinks about it. Actually, we'll see. I try to be nice. I'd like to engage as opposed to just trashing him. In other Castle Island content, Wyatt gave a talk at Solana Boston, Salana Boston conference, which was a good one. Talked about a range of issues in the Solana ecosystem. So check that one out.

We'll put that in our newsletter. And it's a very light newsweek, but there are lots of deals. So should we hop in? Let's hop into the deals. First one is polymarket, the prediction market. There is $2 billion from ICE, the Intercontinental Exchange, which is the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. So big moves here.

I mean, I think all of these trad-five venues are going to need to get into prediction markets. And this seems to be how ICE is going to play it. Yeah, I mean, what a turnaround for Shane, you know. You know, pre-election, it was very unclear whether Polymineer wasn't allowed in the U.S. It was unclear whether the CFTC would go after them or the DOJ. He got raided. They took his devices.

And now he's the youngest self-made billionaire in the world, I think. That's what it says. Yeah, that's what it says. I think there's no doubt that if Harris had won the election, Polymarket would have been decapped. I think you'd be talking about just everyone that works there moving out of the country. I just don't think this fundraise never would have happened if that had happened. Yeah, I mean, it looks obvious in hindsight, obviously.

And, you know, a lot of people are, you know, piding themselves on the back. But, I mean, it was just so unclear early on if Polly Market would exist at all. So. Yeah, so huge credit to Shane and the team. Next up, you have meanwhile, that's a Bitcoin life. insurance company. They're huge raise. There is 82 million from Han, ban capital crypto and Pantera. Then it's coin flow, a stable coin payments processor. They raised $25 million from Pantera, CMT, Coinbase Ventures, reciprocal, and jump crypto. Then we have transcripts that's an identity

verification platform. There is 15 million from Pantara and Lightspeed. Block Street is a D5 protocol for tokenized stocks. They raised $11 million from HACVC, Generative Ventures, and DW. F Labs. Then you have Cypherall that's a crypto compliance company. There is 15 million from general catalyst, flourish ventures, and Coinbase ventures. BMAPs is a global mapping protocol.

There is $32 million from Pantera, borderless, LDA capital, and a number of others. Decentralized mapping, every couple of years, people take a run at this. Really interesting use case. Yeah, Deepen, haven't come across a Deepen deal in a while. Next up we have Grass. That's a decentralized data collection protocol.

They raised 10 million from polychain and tribe. Then it's Crunch Lab, which is a decentralized AI network. They raised $5 million from Galaxy, Road Capital, and Vaneck ventures. Then you have AGO ratings. That's a digital asset risk assessment platform. They raise $6 million from Albion VC and Portage Ventures. Here's an interesting one. Chainalysis, the blockchain forensics company,

they had a blog post this week that said they have obtained growth financing from Hercules Capital, which is a venture debt and BDC company. Interesting move there. Then you have 375 AI, a decentralized data processing protocol. There is 5 million from Delphi, Strobe, and HackVC. De Nero is a liquid staking protocol. They're required by Plume, which is an RWA-focused blockchain. And lastly, you have OASIS Pro, a licensed broker dealer in digital securities.

They're required by Ondo. All right. So here's my favorite name of a token. North Dakota is planning to become the second state after Wyoming to issue a stable coin. It's going to be in partnership with Pfizer, if it looks like. It will be called the Rough Rider token after Teddy Roosevelt. Love it. It's pretty cool.

It is interesting. The states are, even post-Genius, the states are pursuing their own state level stable coins. and there are some rumors that they could potentially be interest-bearing. So that might be a point of differentiation if the interest is extremely prohibited for the private sector ones. Yeah, because these wouldn't be covered by the genius bill. Would they? Would they have to be genius compliant?

I think it's totally distinct. It is, right? Because it's a state that's issuing them. And so I don't know why you wouldn't be able to offer interest on that. Talk about disrupt. Can you imagine if the states actually start to really kneecap the banking sector here? Yeah, so I think people are sleeping on the state issued tokens, whether it's Wyoming's, I guess it's called the front token or now the Rough Rider token.

If North Dakota tries to get in the mix on doing like a conference, will you go out there in the same way that we go to the Wyoming conference? Well, Jackson Hole is really nice. Yeah. I actually don't know if I could name a place in North Dakota. Isn't Fargo in North Dakota? That sounds right. I mean, I've never been to North Dakota.

It's probably beautiful. Yeah, I have no idea. Yeah, keep me posted on the conference circuit out there in North Dakota. It's on my list of states to get to. I've never actually been to North Dakota. Is North Dakota the one that's known for credit card or bank licenses? No, that's South Dakota. South Dakota.

South Dakota. I think South Dakota is where they have Mount Rushmore, isn't it? Hard knowledge of Middle America geography is lacking. I'm pretty sure it's Salt Dakota with the credit cards and all that. All right. So S&P Global, they're launching a new index. It's called the Digital Markets 50. It has exposure to crypto assets and crypto-related equities. You can probably see more of this. Just indices.

I don't know, like, will people build investment products with this? maybe, maybe not, but seems like a pretty low risk thing to do to get on the board doing interesting crypto stuff if you're at SNP. No, does this seem, this is all public companies that are doing crypto stuff?

I believe it's also cryptocurrencies. And currencies themselves. Yeah. So my guess is this is the more forward-thinking crypto publicly traded companies like Coinbase would be in this, you know, Square,

the Robin Hood, those types. Did you see that Luxembourg, the country is allocating 1% to Bitcoin out of their sovereign wealth fund? I did not see that. Is that a lot for them? How big is the sovereign wealth fund? Let me see. The fund is not that big. $730 million. So 1% is $7 million. Okay. So they're just going to telegraph that. I guess the market. because it's probably not going to move on a $7 million purchase. But I applaud the effort. I mean, that's the first European country to allocate to Bitcoin, right?

You ever been to Luxembourg? Yeah, I have. Is it nice? Charming. Yeah, it's lovely, if very small place. I liked it a lot. So, I mean, there's just not that many countries that outright own Bitcoin for investment purposes. Yeah, that's big development.

It's Bhutan, Luxembourg, El Salvador. I think that's it, right? I mean, the U.S. owns a bunch. I guess not for investment purposes, but not getting rid of it is a de facto form of investing, right? Yeah. And you know what? We were meant to see that audit of the U.S. government's Bitcoin holdings.

I think people forgot about that. Some months ago, and it is not forthcoming. Well, I think it's probably really hard to find. Plus, you'd have to imagine the intelligence agencies have a bunch of it that they're not going to have audited. So one thing that I've been thinking about recently is the whole quantum thing. So have you been paying attention to this kind of mini bubble in quantum stocks? I have. I think not enough people are talking about quantum stuff in the crypto industry.

So quantum is absolutely going gangbusters, not even in crypto, but just quantum computing companies are getting funded. and raising a ton of capital and the market's rewarding them. Doesn't that accelerate in theory, the timeline to a quantum break? Just more smart people working on it? Yeah. I would think so. I mean, you either have the private sector in the U.S. get there. You have the private sector in China get there,

or you have one of those two governments get there, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, there's the other accelerant, which is AI is getting, good enough to do fundamental math and physics discoveries. So AI plus quantum equals stealing all the coins. Like I don't know. This is the number one. This is the main question I get about Bitcoin now.

I think the quantum threat is is certainly very relevant, especially to the older coins. And so that's that's the bug bounty. But then again, like, all right. So you take those coins, you're stealing them. right? I mean, so if China does it, who cares, right? Like, they're not going to care. But a private sector company, if Google is the one that gets there first, they can't just take Satoshi's coins. But you can't prove that it's theft as opposed to the valid signature controlled by the owner.

From Bitcoin's perspective, it looks the same. Oh, yeah, but from the legal perspective, it's like, you just took a million Bitcoins from Satoshi. So there is an interesting and weird story that Alex Thorne and Galaxy research. Actually, I guess Alex didn't write it, but you know, indirectly he did because his subordinates wrote it. So Galaxy wrote this story about this quote-unquote Solomon Brothers client that is dusting all these old bitcoins. But it's not this real Solomon Brothers. No. What is this? Like some Craig Wright style operate. Like what is this thing. So the website, I think the IP was bought, like the way this cryptosk bought Enron's IP and then launched a meme coin or something. So they are dusting and sending a legal notice to all these old

big coins in the op return. And then they're giving them 90 days to move the coins to prove that they're their coins or send Solomon brothers, quote unquote, documentation of their claim to ownership. and if they didn't take action, they would relinquish their rights to the coins. So what a crazy idea this is, huh? It's just like people are always cooking up the zanious schemes to like basically try and legally steal Bitcoins. I mean, it didn't work with Craig Wright,

although it did kind of screw a lot of people over for a long time. And now there's some, you know, Craig Wright's successor that is trying to, you know, utilize some weird law, I guess, that exists in some jurisdictions to say that they're claiming the coins if they're considered lost property, which I guess that is a law in some places. This is a really long analysis of this by Galaxy. Good for Galaxy for going deep. I think this is in the category of this is too long for me to read, but thanks for doing it. So one of the interesting thing is nobody really cared about this dusting attack until an early Bitcoin holder moved 80,000

Bitcoins because they got the message. So someone thought it was important enough that they were actually rotate their coins. That's wild to me. So TB8, whether, you know, anything happens here, I guess some legal claim will be lodged at some point, but how can a court come, it means the same issue with Craig Wright, even if a court is persuaded, how can they, you know, compel the Bitcoin protocol to hand over the coins? Yeah. No, it's, I think nothing to worry about, but just interesting that human beings will spend time on this.

Yeah. Weird thing to do. It's just one of those Bitcoin things. It's always this constant, like, constant, like, legal griefing that occurs. It's very unfortunate. Coinbase this week, they have announced that they're going to apply or they have applied, I guess, for a national trust company charter with the OCC, which is definitely something that a lot of firms are doing. They hope to use it for some new payments-related services. They also say they have no intention of becoming a bank.

I would read into this that Coinbase will become a lot more active in the stable coin market. That's my read-between the lines. I mean, they're already super active in the stable coin market. But if you had intentions to really blow it out on stable coins, I think the OCC wrapper is a pretty good path. Really not long until I think certain banks, probably, starting with the fintechs and the neobanks, uh, start to engage with stable coins. Coinbase announced like a product released this week. I'm blanking on what it even was, but it available everywhere except for New York.

It's like this bit license thing still just holds up a lot of these consumer companies. What is it? 13 years on or something or 10 years on a bit license. It's just a bad, bad rule. So gray scale became the first issueer to add staking rewards. are ETHs this week? That's a pretty big development there. A lot of rumors about Grayscale getting ready to go public here.

That'll be interesting. Elspan regulatory Plume Network, the RWA-focused blockchain. They received approval from the SEC to become a registered transfer agent, allowing them to manage digital securities and shareholder records directly on-chain. This is a critical function for tokenized securities. I want, do you think you'll see more just trad-fi transfer agents moving into the space? You haven't seen that many. It's not the most glamorous business in the world in the conventional markets.

Yeah, but I think this is moving the right direction, moving away from these ersatz tokenization structures with SPVs towards actually having the blockchain be their record. Yeah, you got to have the the asset natively on chain for sure. That was another interesting part of the Cagney conversation on the podcast this week is, you know, you have the reg NMS, which is for conventional securities. And I think it's going to be really hard to just have those type of assets also fall into this peer-to-peer framework where you can trade them on defy connectivity. I just don't think it's compatible whatsoever. So I think the question is, do you end up just having a bunch of natively issued non-regnMS securities that sit almost like Harry Pesu in a cap table as the conventional one that's already been listed on NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange and then they can just trade differently or is there a world where you could rethink reg NMS in this

concept of best execution to actually include D5 protocols yeah I was thinking about that too I mean how could you possibly enforce a national best bid best offer on D5 protocols you can't it's just not it's not actually technically possible so then do you just have these public publicly traded to companies that have two securities and maybe they'll trade divergent implied valuations of the company even I don't know could be could be messy so did you follow this katie porter drama uh over this last week katy porter I hadn't thought about her in a long time ever since who did she go against it was like Adam Schiff Adam Schiff and I'm shift and she Steve Garvey.

She came in third in the primary. Blame crypto. She blamed crypto. I mean, and then this week, so all I saw was there was three or four of these clips that somehow leaked. They must have been angry staffers that leaked them. And she's just losing her mind on people that are trying to interview her or yelling at her staff, huh?

Yeah, I think, was it 60 minutes? I mean, it was one of the, you know, ordinary MSM outlets. And they were interviewing all of the, I guess she's running for a California governor now. Yeah, apparently. She's a frontrunner, believe it or not. And they're just asking pretty straightforward questions, and she went completely ballistic.

And then the prediction market sold off for her odds of winning instantly. And then all these stories came out about how she's kind of abusive towards her staffers and things. And that was a lot of people's first introduction to Katie Porter. But we in the crypto space had known about her from before. Oh, yeah. I mean, she's been abusive towards us. for a long time. But yeah, I googled her name after I saw one of those things. I was like, man, she just seems really mean. And apparently she dumped hot mashed potatoes on her husband's

head or something. Yeah, I came out in divorce proceedings. That's a mean thing to do to someone. That's tough. That's real tough. It's kind of interesting. Someone loses an election. They just don't go away. Like they run for an even bigger and more consequential office. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, but yeah, I don't know. So she's the front runner in California. Who else is running for that? I couldn't name the others. You know, a lot of people like Katie Porter, though,

because she was really famous for, do you know this? Bring these whiteboards. Oh, the signs, yeah. She would do these signs when someone would come in and testify. And she wouldn't ask them questions. She would just lecture them. Yeah. And people went crazy.

They loved that. People thought she was sort of teaching them. Yeah. So she's a lot of residual. goodwill from that. So we'll see if that's enough. Yeah, I don't know if that's going to be enough. But I guess it depends on who she's running against.

There's a lot of damage you could do to the crypto industry as the governor of California, I suppose, though. Yeah. So I don't actually know if the crypto space can take all the credit for defeating her. In hindsight, it sounds like she might have just been a bad candidate for Senate. Well, didn't shift just kind of run away with it? Like, I think he just cleaned her clock. It wasn't close at all, actually, in the end.

But she did blame the crypto industry, big crypto. Well, so she wrote a book with Elizabeth Warren, and she was a student under Elizabeth Warren, apparently. So I think she just sort of adopted Elizabeth Warren's view towards cryptocurrency, which, as we know, is not a positive one. She named her daughter after Elizabeth Warren, too. Oh, really? Yeah.

Probably not good for crypto if she wins. Probably not. In other news, it looks like Binance has sold. a 40% stake in Binance Japan to pay pay. That's kind of interesting. I didn't really think that finance would do that, but maybe that opens up more opportunities there. So pay pay is a soft bank group company.

I guess it's just a lot easier to operate in Japan if your cap table has a bunch of Japanese native money on it. And pay pay is a big player in Japan. So CZ came out of legal enforced retirement and he's doing crypto stuff again. Yeah, he's doing like a billion dollar B&B fund or something. There's BNB meme coins have gone crazy this week. I've never used BNB, so I've missed out on that one entirely.

And then there's a hyper liquid clone or competitor, Aster. Is that right? I mean, CZ is back. He's doing stuff. He's definitely doing stuff. I mean, you know, you get the, he's probably one of the best executors. in the history of running a crypto business, right? I mean, he's got to be the top.

Yeah, oh, yeah. He said he was going to retire and do education, and then the trenches just pulled him back in. You know? He can't be retiring. How can't retire from the industry? No, he can never leave. According to a report from unchained,

Laura Shin's publication, progress on the Senate market structure bill is still moving ahead despite the government shutdown. That's interesting. I guess the latest is that there's going to be a discussion draft soon coming out of Senate ag, which obviously has the oversight of the CFTC. But does this imply that people are working during this government shutdown on the crypto bill? Yeah, so I guess that answers our question that we had last week.

Yeah. They're still going, at least members of Congress going to work. Dedicated public servants still working on that bill. Do they get, they're not being paid right now, right? I don't think so. Do they get back pay? Like a Senate staffer, do you get paid? Probably not, right? So the government's been shut down for, what, a week now? They're shut down for a week. I guess it was shut down for over 30 days in 2019. Apparently it's going to go on for a while.

I mean, there's no end in sight. There's no deal. They said the last time what really catalyzed it coming back online was the FAA was just in shambles, air traffic control. So hopefully. Yeah, what's the deal with that? Are we just hoping that they show up to work unpaid and make sure the planes don't crash into each other? Seems like a big ask to ask someone to just not get paid. I mean, that's kind of crazy.

Yeah, but we need to fly around. Yeah, you're going to just make sure you get the back pay, but people got bills to pay, don't they? Yeah, it's kind of tough. You'd sort of want and hope that these people would be compensated at all times. We're not talking about like a baseball strike here where people have like millions of dollars and they can afford to miss spring training. I mean, what about like the military?

Are they all for a loan? They're not part of it. They're not involved? No. There's different pockets of the government classifications and stuff. I guess things will start to break in the coming weeks, presumably. Yeah, I would think that sanitation service, I don't know.

It would be interesting to see. what happens, but hope they can get back to work here. Like, if this was the 1800s and the government shut down, would you have noticed, like, how long would it take you to notice it? Like, I guess the mail wouldn't be delivered or something. It would be the mail, right? Yeah, but the mail keeps on coming. I'm still getting mail.

Is the mail is coming? Yeah. There have been no explicit signs that the government's not working in my life, at least. You wouldn't know. I don't think you'd know. I don't know. I guess if you went and tried to get like a, passport right now. Maybe that's not working.

So it does make me, it does make me wonder, so why are we spending 30% of GDP on this stuff? Because what do we get? What are we getting for that? It's a good question. Well, the IRS tax deadline's coming up, so there are people there to

accept. They're furloughed as well, I think. Are they? Yeah. Yeah. It's a, you know, no holds part. Crime is legal. So what's your overall feeling on this crypto market right now? feel like the sentiment has shifted very, very bullish. Well, I'd say maybe until yesterday.

And then actually the DXY rallied a lot yesterday or today. Yields continue to rally. I mean, everywhere in the developed world, I mean, you know, we're actually in a bit of a sovereign debt crisis right now, which is kind of like good for crypto in some sense, like the gold story. I mean, have you seen what's happening to gold this year? All time highest, yeah. I was looking at the rally in gold.

and I asked chat what, you know, look for, you know, similar historical rallies and what happened around those times. And it's basically unprecedented rally aside from in the late 70s. That's the only other time I could find. So the markets are now pricing in an emerging sovereign debt crisis in the devolved world. That's very clear. I mean, I think you want to own Bitcoin in that situation. Yeah.

But at the same time, everything's getting the general. a little bit. So it is very strange to have, you know, macroeconomic softness, this looming debt crisis, and then at the same time, crypto markets and equities markets are at all-time highs. It's interesting. I have CNBC on in the office right now. And do you know the coin metrics ticker, which is obviously powers the CNBC crypto prices, they usually just have the Bitcoin and the ETH ones up there. Now they're flashing the XRP ticker. Really? Yeah. I would thought you were going to say Salana, but it's XRP. Occasionally they'll have Salana. This is the first time I've seen an XRP ticker in the

bottom. All right. I think that is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.