On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/23/20 (PayPal jumps in, the banks push back at the SPDI, are CBDCs inflationary?) (EP.140)

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Matt and Nic cover deals and news of the week. In this episode:  PTJ's latest comments on Bitcoin How Bitcoin is akin to a cathedral Franklin Templeton invests in Curv PayPal launches a crypto offering Will PayPal open up its walled garden? The Kik story finally reaches a conclusion Coinbase publishes their first transparency report Paradigm's big bet Is CBDC going to be pro-inflationary? The bank lobby pushes back at the Wyoming SPDI Why this bull run is more sustainable than that of 2017 How Bitcoin scales with capital, not people Content mentioned in this episode: Doubleline, The Pandora's Box of CBDC Paul Tudor Jones appears on CNBC Coinbase, Transparency at Coinbase Forbes, feature on Paradigm Raoul Pal, The Bitcoin Life Raft  Bank Policy Institute, Beware the Kraken

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentive 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 Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And these are the weeks. I mean, what a week. It's a good week. The coin metrics reference rate Bitcoin price is $13,063 right now.

There's a lot of people that are just here for the underlying technology that are really excited about the price this week. Oh, yeah. I mean, how can you not be excited about it, though? It's great. It's a really good week. We're going to call that the PayPal effect, I think, this week. PayPal coming into the party really, really lit that up. But we were pumping before PayPal was involved.

We were. This is a secular bull trend, I think. Who knows? If we get stimulus, you know, there would be some real inflation prospects, you know, direct injection of dollars into the real economy. That's another catalyst. Yeah, I think that $1,200 stimulus check is now what 2X probably, right? If you just bought Bitcoin with it? Yeah.

There's a bot, I think, that tracks it. There is. It's a really good pot. It just says $1,200 stimulus, and it'll tell you the price. I think it's 2X as of today. I watch a great interview on CNBC this morning. With Paul Tudor Jones? Yeah. That was...

Meltem also went on CNBC today, which was pretty cool. I haven't seen that. Was that good? It was, but the thing I liked about Paul Tudor Jones's interview was that he gave credit to the Bitcoin content creators and the sort of Bitcoin intellectuals, you know, the people really driving Bitcoin forward as not just technological, but, you know, philosophical, ideological, ideological movement, which is similar to Michael Saylor, honestly, who talked about the Hornets Nest. very similar yeah you know these guys they spent a little bit of time on crypto twitter they start to realize you know it's all about the content that's the one thing we have in spades content well it was interesting because it's kind of a reframing of how john feffer talks about this in terms of a store of value like asset but with this tremendous early stage technology kind of

option value to it as well and then capturing that you know the community the part that i really liked about that is saying there's just a lot of smart people working on it. And I saw Bob McElrath had a good tweet saying that you're basically betting on just the past 30 years of hardcore cryptographers that have been behind this thing. I mean, we're really standing on the backs of giants here. That's absolutely right. And not just cryptography, but, you know, innovative monetary ideas. And Haseau had a good tweet today. He said, Bitcoin is progressive and gold is regressive. There's nothing wrong with gold. Bitcoin just aspires to be more and to do more. You know, with Bitcoin, you're not just getting its current qualities, but you're getting all the future innovation that's

going to be built on it. And it's not done. Bitcoin is not done. It's like a cathedral. You've just spent 100 years building it. Yeah. And his part about the Paul Tudor Jones's thing about this being the first inning, I think that's being too generous, actually. I mean, if you look at just how many banks hold Bitcoin on behalf of their customers directly? None. How many broker dealers hold this thing? None. How many mutual funds hold Bitcoin directly? None. How many exchange traded funds have the permission to hold underlying Bitcoin? None. So I would say this is not the first inning. I don't even think we're close to the first inning. I remember thinking that we would have an ETF way back in 2016. How naive I was. Well, you know, I think all.

All of that is obviously coming and the exchange landscape feeds into that. I think, you know, as more and more liquidity comes into the United States on some of these regulated venues, we probably will get one. But I don't know. I mean, the OCC thing with the banks, I think you're going to start to see some forward-thinking bank CEOs start to do a couple things. One is that they'll enter into these sub-custody agreements with federalities and, you know, anchorages, Bitco's, coinbases of the world and start, you know, offering exposure that way. you'll also start to see some banks coming in and do US dollar loans against Bitcoin collateral. So there's just a bunch of things that these banks could and should be doing that, you know, no one's really done yet except for maybe Silvergate signature and, you know,

maybe one or two others. So it's early. It still kind of shocks me that two of the most important kind of financial regulators are just unabashedly pro the industry. I mean, and honestly, Brian Brooks is, his, if you listen carefully, his stance has changed over the last few years. He's become more pro-Bitcoin. If you listen to what he's actually been saying historically. And then Heath Tarbert just, he loves the coins. He loves the damn coins.

He gets it. He totally gets it. You had some good conversation touching on the regulatory landscape this week with Bruce Fenton. I thought that was a great episode. that was a really fun one i like bruce he uh has pretty refreshing ideas on uh on security tokens honestly i mean if you are super enamored with the latest crop of governance tokens you may be offended by this episode but uh he's he's you know bruce has been in the securities industry for a long time he's been in the crypto industry for a long time so he's some some very sober thoughts

on what a security is and whether tokens that claim to have governance whether they're giving you true governance or not. One time Bruce came to Fidelity and gave a talk, we had a Bits and Blocks meeting, and he came and gave a speech about Bitcoin. And Bruce is a big-time OG. I mean, he was on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. He goes way back.

And we ended up in a conversation about the ACAT system, which is kind of the system for transferring securities between brokerage firms. So he can go really deep. And I think he has some really interesting ideas on how security tokens actually could be used. and in a way that is not like ICOE or token salee. Like very tangible real world possibilities here once we start to get ATS venues

and some of these other market infrastructure categories built out. The other thing we did this week was we finally appeared on Circle Show, the money movement. That was a lot of fun. That was a good one. Yeah. They put a lot of effort into that show, I've got to say. Your audio quality is orders of magnitude better than mine.

to fix mine. Yeah, you got to work on that. I mean, you're a professional podcaster now. So that's part of the job. Well, the problem is I've been doing these podcasts in this like walled off we work space for the most part. And it's just like doing it in a fish bowl. It's all glass enclosed.

You need to hang some Persian rugs up on the walls or something. I do. Well, we need a podcast studio. So if you're, well, actually, I was about to say if you're in the real estate game in the Boston area, reach out, but definitely don't. That was a stupid thing to say. Anybody in the commercial real estate game has had a pretty tough year, I think, unfortunately. Yeah. All right. So you want to get into some deals of the week?

Yeah. And, you know, this time it's not all defy. So, you know, for the last couple of months, it's been defy, defy, defy, maybe things are changing a little bit. It's not 100% defy anymore. Well, the first one of the week is polymarket, which is a prediction market. It's built on Ethereum, they raised $4 million in a round from polychain, Parify, One Confirmation, and others. Yeah, I got to say, Polymarket actually seems to be making some pretty logical choices in terms of its design. So it doesn't force you to use, you know, a third-party token the way Auger does.

And it uses stable coins, which makes a lot of sense. If you're locking up collateral on a contract, you don't want to worry about the, the value of the collateral changing for the duration of the bet. So pretty sensible stuff, honestly, from polymarket. I mean, you know, TBD on weather, you know, the CFTC, for instance, they might have an opinion on those prediction markets, I guess we'll see. They've actually said things about that in the past. But in terms of the actual design of the thing, it seems sensible.

Yeah, so it kind of reminds me of in trade. I guess that is, it's basically in trade. And the regulatory landscape would be the one question here. There's a bunch of stuff up there. It's a good time to have a prediction market. Will Trump win the 2020 election? 36% yes right now. Who will win the 2020 World Series?

We got Dodgers, 64%. The next deal of the week is Zora, which is an Ethereum-based fashion and music marketplace. They raised $2 million from Kindred Ventures. next one up is Casper Labs, which is a smart contract platform. It's in that Ethereum competitor bucket. They raised $14 million in a private token sale led by digital strategies. Speaking of other base layer protocols, MENA, which is formerly known as Coda Protocol, they raised $10.9 million from Bixen Ventures and Three Arrow's Capital.

And I would insert a comment about how these. These guys got sued by R3 over their name being similar to something that R3 owns, but I don't want to get sued, so I'm not going to say anything. And we'll just move on to the next deal. Okay. Franklin Templeton has joined the Series A round for Curve. Curve is a crypto asset custody infrastructure company. They use multi-party computation. So Franklin Templeton, this is good to see.

I mean, they are in the market. they are doing a money market fund using a blockchain. So they're up to some stuff over there, Franklin Templeton, it seems. Is that going to be on a public chain or is that kind of squirled away on an enterprise chain? No, I think it's on a public chain. I mean, this is just more data points in terms of the institutionalization of blockchains. I mean, it's just, it's happening. Yeah, it's definitely happening.

And I guess that's a good lead into the story. week. So PayPal has announced that they're in the mix. So they announced this week that they will be rolling out cryptocurrency services to 346 million users. This initial offering is going to give the ability to buy and sell to not transfer off the platform. And we can talk about that. It looks like it's Bitcoin, Ethereum and a handful of other cryptocurrencies that are clearly not securities. So a few interesting things here. So they're partnering up with Paxos, which is a really good company in New York, Chad Cascarilla and Emil Woods started that company years ago. And they have a bit license, but it looks like PayPal has been granted a conditional license to operate in the state of New York.

They also said their CEO, Dan Schulman said, we're working with central banks and thinking about other forms of digital currencies and how PayPal can play a role there. So it seems to me like that could mean something for stable coins. So a lot to unpack here. What are your thoughts? I mean, some people were downplaying this a little bit, but honestly, I think it's huge. And we knew that something was coming. I mean, this wasn't completely unprecedented. It had been rumored that PayPal was working on something. This is kind of what I would expect from them.

I mean, they're starting with a Waldgarden approach. You can't transfer off the platform. Now, that's different from Cash App. Cash App let you transfer off from day one. They didn't let you deposit until later. So cash app was more open from day one. So PayPal is definitely taking a more restrictive approach. That said, I am optimistic that they will let you withdraw eventually,

that it won't just be an IOU or, you know, CFD kind of thing. Otherwise, it would be kind of a waste of effort, honestly. Yeah, and I'd have to believe this is all just about regulatory and compliance to get comfortable with sending assets off the platform. So this is a very nuanced discussion here, and it can get lost in the fog of crypto-twitter. But these payment intermediaries, these exchanges and brokerage firms,

they have a regulatory obligation to know where those funds are going when they're sent off the platform, when they're over a certain amount. And so my guess is that PayPal is trying to figure out how to address that. And there are ways to address this. And as you point out, you know, Square is figured a way to do it. It's also cash that's coming in.

And so let's say that you bought, as an individual, let's say that you bought cryptocurrency on Coinbase and you transferred it over to PayPal. Now, technically, PayPal has an obligation to look at that counterparty where the money's coming from and to do a check on them to make sure that they're not on a sanctions list or anything either. So I know we kind of dunk on the compliance and regulatory apparatus. at a lot of these companies a lot, but there are some real considerations here that need to be figured out. I thought Jerry Brito had a pretty good take on this, that they're probably just going to get a little bit more comfortable with the travel rule and then unlock some of this

functionality. And I think they'll get there. Yeah, so hopefully they open it up. And if they do, it's a really big deal. I mean, just alone, this is already big. I mean, we're talking about 350 million users worldwide. So they're starting in the U.S., and then they'll go global later on. There's about $32 billion of float on the platform already, so just user balances with dollars in them on PayPal. All of those balances could potentially, they're not going to, but they could be used as dry powder to buy Bitcoin.

And I think the other three currencies are ETH, Lightcoin, and Bitcoin Cash. If you look at the numbers here, they're pretty staggering. Cambridge had that good estimate of about 100 million users worldwide that have ever touched cryptocurrency. This triples that, you know? And granted, the experience isn't going to be this fully open experience at first, but fingers crossed that it becomes that. And, you know, I think it could get substantially more interesting

if PayPal becomes more comfortable with the risks here. Yeah, and definitely, so that's one angle of it. And then think about the merchant angle, too. So they have 26 million merchants on the platform. My guess is that a lot of these merchants aren't going to want to accept Bitcoin Ethereum and certainly aren't going to want to accept Bitcoin cash or Lightcoin, but they will accept US dollars. And so could a stable coin really have a big impact on that business?

Definitely. And does something like this further entrenched PayPal's just overreys, position, their FX position, kind of their market dominance in that industry. I think probably the answer is yes. My read on the merchant situation is that if you wanted, you could denominate your account in PayPal in Bitcoin and then you could use that to pay for things in USD terms with PayPal making that conversion at the point of sale. That sounds pretty good. If you want to substitute your savings and save them in Bitcoin and then make dollar denominated payments, they'll facilitate that.

I had talked about this years ago when overstock did that thing when they started to accept Bitcoin, when Adam White was able to get that deal done when he was at Coinbase. And if I was a merchant and I could afford to just hold some of the money I was taking in in Bitcoin, called 5%. If you could afford to do that, why wouldn't you? Certainly more and more public companies are denominating a portion of their balance sheet in Bitcoin. So we'll see. All right. So from that's, story, let's move on to the end of a chapter. PayPal is the beginning of a chapter. The end of a chapter is kick in the SEC. They have announced that they've reached a $5 million settlement over the

dispute, and it seems like this is over. So they had a $100 million ICO. They raised a couple hundred million dollars worth of venture financing, and it's a $5 million settlement. A lot of people on Twitter are kind of bent out of shape over this, thinking it should have been more, but it's quite possible to me that $5 million might be all that KIC has left at this point. So I'm not sure there's a lot of money to squeeze out of that entity at this point. Yeah. The interesting thing that I took from this was

the SEC's messaging that the entire offering, they considered the whole offering, which was multi-stage private sales and public sales. They considered the entire thing to be an investment contract and a security. So they're not disentangling the different stages. which is the precondition for something like the soft to work, right? The dat disentanglement.

The SEC is explicitly pushing back against that. So I think we've heard the end of the kick story, and it will go down in history as, you know, one of the big ICO failures of this age up there with telegram and who knows what else. But many more to come, many more to come. Probably be more of that. one thing that I want to get your take on this week was the Coinbase report. So they published their first transparency report that basically outlines what type of law enforcement officials are asking for data from the company. And it's something that Cracken's been doing for a while. The Electronic Frontier Foundation had publicly called on Coinbase to do these type of reports in the past. And now they're doing them. So I really like this move. I'm impressed by it. As you say, the EFF.

ask them to do it, and it looks like they heated that call. I got to say, like, Coinbase have made a few key decisions here that are maybe re-aggratiating them into the minds of Bitcoiners. Brian Armstrong said Bitcoin recently instead of crypto. But just generally, I've been impressed by a few of these key decisions. And this transparency report is very, very welcome. Yeah, and they're going to sponsor some open source core development on Bitcoin as well. I think we talked about that last week. Took a little bit of prodding from Peter McCormack and others, obviously. But, you know, good signs.

Did you read the profile piece? Speaking of Coinbase, Fred Ersham and Matt Huang, were subject to that Forbes profile piece on Paradine. Do you read that? Yeah, very impressive. I mean, basically it's the first public acknowledgement. They called all the capital up front and just deployed it into, Bitcoin and Ethereum, apparently.

And with Bitcoin, if you look at the timing, it would have been in kind of the $4,000 or $5,000 range. So presumably some of that they had to sell in order to deploy into the various deals that they've done. So regardless, that position, it looks pretty good. I think this will go down in history is just one of the biggest, you know, biggest swings. Certainly the intestinal.

fortitude to call down a $400 million fund on day one and put it into Bitcoin and Ethereum. That's just awesome in my mind. I think that's how you become a legend. I'm just impressed that they were able to convince their LPs to do that. Well, good for them. I thought that was a great article. Yeah, that's one of the first actual pieces of insight into that firm that the public has seen, which is an enigmatic firm, I must say. I'm friends with a lot of people over there, but they actually keep a fairly low profile publicly. Did you see this research note from Bill Campbell over at Double Line this week?

So Double Line is the big bond fund. So they published a note, the Pandora's box of central bank digital currencies. And the central argument that the guy made here is that, you know, this is actually potentially not a good thing for inflation. So there's a view that the central banks will just really pump up the liquidity and the velocity of money at a consumer level if they have something like central bank digital currencies and that the byproduct will be that we'll have more inflation in a world like that. Did you follow that argument? Do you agree? I haven't seen that piece, but I fully agree. I don't think that's a secret.

If you listen to Odd Lots this week, they had this BIS official Binwaku. and he said one of the explicit goals of a CBC is to effectively deal with the impotence of QE because QE can't really get money into the real economy, so to speak, it just gets trapped. So in theory, a CBDC can get hands into the money into the hands of regular individuals and into the real economy, so to speak, and increase inflation. And that's not, in his mind, that wasn't a negative thing. they would much rather overshoot in the inflation direction as opposed to deflation. All these guys are terrified of deflation.

He was pretty explicit. They're okay with higher inflation. If they're going to overshoot in one direction, it's in the inflationary direction. It seems to me that a CBDC is actually solving a problem for them. And it just depends which where you're going to position it, whether you think that's good or bad. but I think central bankers would like to have more tools in terms of how they distribute funds. And so far, the only way they've been able to do it is just through this really rough intermediary through the financial markets. I think the bank lobby is just going to have so much to say about a central bank digital currency that has the ability to go in airdrop directly on retail.

I mean, what do you need a commercial bank for at that point? Well, I think there's hybrid structures that would be acceptable to banks. I don't think anybody is really proposing a CBDC where the Federal Reserve is maintaining where users have direct accounts at the Fed. That seems like a bit of a straw man these days. Most of the concrete proposals I've seen involve banks or kind of other intermediaries, potentially even stable coin issuers, if these are token basis. systems, that's when you would bring stable coin issuers into the fold.

Well, on that bank lobby front, there was an interesting piece this week from Bank Policy Institute, which is basically a lobbying firm for a bunch of big banks. So they came out with a piece called Beware the Crackin. And it's just a takedown of the Wyoming speedy and specifically around Crackin. And basically, I think it's pretty, I don't think there's a lot of merit to their arguments, but they're basically arguing that consumers are jeopardized by the structure here and that this is going to lead to run on banks. And my read between the lines on this is that,

hey, we're just worried that these crypto-friendly special purpose institutions are going to start to steal our customers. And, you know, if I had to guess, if that's the concern, that's a pretty good concern because your customers are going to be leaving you. Yeah, it struck me as really deeply ironic that they're just, a speedy, which is a full reserve institution, as somehow more risky than a commercial fractional reserve bank, which might have a 7% capital ratio or 5% liquidity ratio.

So you're comparing something which is 100% reserved against something which, by definition, it doesn't need any reserves, literally no reserves, and you can have, you know, single-digit capital ratio under current bank regulation. And so to them, the riskier thing is the entity which is fully reserved. Now, if that doesn't seem insane to you, you know, I don't know what it will. But their issue is that the speedies, by definition, they don't actually need FDIC oversight, right? So they don't really need that deposit insurance because there is no real risk of, there's no loan portfolio. So there's nothing that can go bad. and cause them to default on their obligations.

And so really, you know, once they are able to do that, they're able to disentangle themselves from oversight and from control by some of these regulators. And the FTC has abused that power in the past. Just look up Operation Joke Point. So it seems extremely humorous to me that they would characterize the speedy as something sort of super dangerous for consumers and super risky. I have to say, I think this article is one of the most intellectually dishonest things I've ever read, to be honest with you.

I feel that strongly about it. And, you know, I don't know whoever wrote this. I don't know if they were forced to write it, but there's no, no one put their name on this. This is just put out there as the policy group. So who knows who wrote this. It's really poorly done. They literally claimed that the SPDI, the crack in SPDI would have been insolvent in early 2020. Yeah. So I was going down that path. So listen to this. So this is an excerpt. We cannot help but believe that the structure of Crack and Financial is an accident waiting to happen prone to the same types of run risks of medieval banks and so-called shadow banks. But luckily, we know how to solve this problem, having grappled with it for more than 500 years. And to that, like, what do you want to retort to that? Like 500 years, but this whole industry was formed.

based on a bailout of the banks and someone named Satoshi Nakamoto just seeing that the system doesn't work. So I wouldn't really go out there and say, hey, we got this figured out. We've been doing it flawlessly for 500 years. It's like been bailed out three times in the last 10 years.

Yeah. Modern finance isn't exactly doing great. And I mean, if they could rewind the clock and adopt a business model that was more similar to Venetian banks or Scottish free banks, I'd be all for that. But the current banking industry is a highly concentrated industry. If you look at the number of banks in this country, it's been declining year over year for the last 20, 30 years.

It's effectively nationalized. They're all controlled by the state because bank charters are impossible to come by. And it's socialized. And, you know, banks aren't even doing real underwriting anymore. They expect that the state will guarantee. guarantee their portfolios. So they don't even care about making correct risk assessments. So the sooner that we can return free markets to the business of banking, the better. And the speedy is kind of an early attempt to do that. And that should be cherished.

So you'll forgive me if I'm very protective of the speedy and very contemptuous of the incumbent banks that are trying to crush it. Well, it's just hypocrisy, really. And it's very overt. So, yeah, check it out if you want to. It's BPI.com slash beware the crack in is the URL. But if you want to read an intellectually dishonest take down piece of a crypto company, go check it out. They're threatened and they're fighting back.

This is what we're up against. Just another boss to beat. So on a more optimistic note, I'd recommend everyone check out Raoul Paul's latest Real Vision video. So a lot of these are behind a paywall, including the one that you did a few weeks ago. But this one wasn't. It's called the Bitcoin Life Raft,

the end of monetary and fiscal policy as we know it. And he has some pretty bold predictions in there around kind of a global reset and a new Breton Woods or Plaza Accord type of demonetization event, kind of a re-pegging and really a crash of fiat currencies. And he talks about some of the upside on Bitcoin, some pretty wild. price prognostications talking about Bitcoin becoming, you know, a million dollars a coin and

things like that. So don't check it out for that reason, but I thought it was a good half hour sort of walkthrough of a logic behind the end of this current paradigm of fiat currencies and then how to hedge exposure. I don't, I try not to talk about price publicly too much. I've let that passive mask slip recently, and I said some pretty bullish things publicly, but it's hard not to be. I mean, in the course of this conversation, Bitcoin's up $100 just since we started talking. And the most amazing thing about what's happening right now is that if you look at Google trends or any indications of broader interest in Bitcoin, it's flat.

I mean, it's not really meaningfully up. It's nowhere near the highs of 2017. So this run isn't being driven by overwhelming new retail investor interest. It's just driven by certain sources of capital choosing to allocate to Bitcoin with little fanfare. That's the amazing thing. We haven't reached that euphoria. There's nothing artificial like ICOs driving the Bitcoin price like they did in 2017. It's just the financial plumbing has been built out such that it can accommodate much more capital.

there's real macro tailwinds now and there's genuine real world catalysts that are driving this thing forward. So it's so much healthier today, in my opinion, than 2017. And the ability of this current market to accommodate large-scale sources of capital is so much greater than before, which makes me incredibly optimistic about where this is going. Yeah, and it's important to note that this is not the type of thing that requires technology enhancements to scale. So the scale here, this thing is scaling with capital, as you like to say, as opposed to some sort of a requirement that the underlying technology evolve

in order to accommodate it. So sort of have the infrastructure built out around the protocol, at least. Certainly the financial market infrastructure is just nowhere yet. Despite the PayPal's and the fatalities of the world entering, this is super, super early days. Yeah, but you could even describe PayPal as a scaling vector. I mean, that's one way that we scale. I mean, Bitcoiners kind of made their peace with this a long time ago. You scale through deferred settlement. You scale by having third parties bundle up large numbers of payments and then periodically settle them to the main chain. Now, PayPal could be more trust minimized and all this, but that's an inescapable way that Bitcoin will scale. People will make tons and tons of retail payments.

denominated in Bitcoin, and there'll be a small number of settlements to the chain. Now, I'm not saying we should scale solely through centralized intermediaries, but that's just one way pragmatically this thing scales, is through smart adoption by companies that want to facilitate commerce with Bitcoin. And definitely it's one of those weeks where a lot of people are reaching out to me with questions and trying to learn about Bitcoin. Can you send me a few articles? And so it was good timing.

River released an education module this week, river.com slash learn. And I thought that was great. I mean, they have a lot of great information on blockchain technology and Bitcoin and what is this stuff. Yeah, and just having these high-touch brokerages that will hold your hand through some of this,

especially if you're new to the industry. I mean, that's something which didn't really exist in 2017 either. You have such a broader array of options in terms of getting exposure to this today. I mean, it's totally different. All right. So I think that's it for the week. It'll be an interesting weekend.

Wonderful, we'll have one of these crazy price fluctuation weekends that we haven't had in a while. Yeah, Bitcoin's liquidity gets thinner on the weekend. So sometimes it's when the fireworks happen. You know, one thing we didn't talk about was the OKX story. So that happened the last weekend, I guess after we recorded the podcast. But if you have Bitcoin on OKX, unfortunately, you might not have it for a while. It looks like the CEO is in custody and he's integral to the key signing scheme. So you can't get your assets off the platform right now.

But it looks like a secondary market for OKCoin IOUs has begun to develop trading at a discount. So if you really want your funds off, you actually probably can get them off if you take a bit of a haircut. All right. Well, we'll be back next week with a couple of new and exciting episodes. You're going to break some news, I think, next week. We get some news. You know, we're becoming like a media outlet here. This is the early stirrings of a media empire.

That's right. All right, everyone. We'll have a great weekend and we'll see you on Monday.