On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/24/25 (Quantum, Crypto Pardons, Fed Payment Accounts) (EP.679)

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Old fashioned crime is back Quantum risk to Bitcoin More outcry in Washington over the Democratic edits to market structure CZ gets a presidential pardon  Federal Reserve announces a payments charter   

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. And 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. Big Week for Crime. Are you paying attention to this NBA betting? story. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of nostalgia going on with the crime. Like, we're going back in time crime-wise. We have a jewel heist. We have insider betting some like zany poker schemes too. Yeah. I mean, so let's do the NBA one first. So Portland Trailblazers head coach,

Chauncey Billups, who I believe is in the Hall of Fame as a player, used to play for the Celtics for a cup of coffee. Him and Terry Rozier, there's an assistant coach from the Cavaliers, Damon Jones. They're arrested as part of a wide-ranging illegal sports in poker-rigging situation with the mafia. I guess the mafia is still going strong. I just didn't think the mafia was a thing anymore. I guess they are. I guess it's still a thing. And so there's bets here around taking the under and player points.

And this guy, Terry Rozier is alleged to have just taken himself out of the game early and telling people to bet the under. Yeah, I mean, so there's the insider betting. and then there's also poker games that are rigged some of the defendants are shared between these two cases so you had some of these guys doing double duty with insider betting

and now these rigged poker games where you know like some guy would be wearing sunglasses and the cards had like ultraviolet patterns on them yeah it's like what is it like x-ray goggles on and it's like the oldest trick in the book man And then cameras underneath the table or something so they can see the cards. What an unbelievable heist.

I mean, if I'm playing poker and there's a guy wearing sunglasses inside, like, it does happen actually in poker because you want to like never reveal any information. But I find that inherently suspicious. I mean, these guys make a lot of money as NBA players and NBA coaches. It's kind of a foolish thing to do. A lot of people have been using this as, a jumping off point to denounce sports betting culture overall because it's become so normalized and legalized in this country. I guess the view is that how can you stop professional athletes

betting? Everybody does it. Yeah. And I frankly I agree. I don't think sports betting should be legal. Really? Wow. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. So I don't think it's good for society. I mean, I think all the data shows that it, you know, correlates with domestic violence and, uh, there's some studies around that. I just, I mean, I don't, who does it benefit, you know? No, I guess it benefits the leagues and it probably benefits the, the gambler, gambling companies, right? Yeah. It's one of those things where I have an opinion that's, I think, probably totally out of step with the mainstream. Yeah. I'd say that we should recriminalize it. Well, it's a tale is oldest time, right? I mean, what was it the, Black Sox of Shulis Joe Jackson era.

It was 1919. They threw the World Series. I mean, I'm sure this has been happening for centuries, I'm sure. Oh, I've never heard of that. This is a baseball lore thing. Well, yeah, it's true. I mean, I don't think Shulis Joe Jackson is in the Hall of Fame because of that. I think he's kicked out of baseball.

And then, of course, he had Pete Rose in the 80s. I mean, if I was, if I could potentially win the World Series, I would just do that. As opposed to tossing it, right? Yeah, of course. The glory is worth so much more than the money. Shameful. Shameful. Jeez.

And we have a jewel heist as well. Yes. On top of all that. So someone just broke into the Louvre and just took a bunch of jewelry. I mean, what do you do with the jewelry? It's a staggering amount of jewelry. Yeah, who's the buyer? You got to have a buyer lined up ahead of time, presumably.

You can't just go to pawn shop and sell the tiara of whatever, Josephine Bonaparte. So Josephine Bonaparte's jewels, like where can you actually showcase them now that you've stolen them? The other crazy thing is, I mean, there's a lot about this story that's completely bonkers.

There were guards in the Louvre that saw this and they were unarmed. Oh, they were, really? For a European situation. And they didn't intervene. And the robbers brandished their,

like, you know, whatever, dremels or, I don't know, circular saws or whatever they had on them to get into the cases. And that was apparently enough to discourage the guard. I mean, it's crazy to see these like oceans 11 things

and this is just more brazen. I'm not crazy. I don't mean the second guess what the guards did. But I do. Like, okay, you're unarmed. These guys, he's holding like, I don't know, some kind of like glass cutter like I think you just you just try and tackle him at that point.

Oh, your guard making minimum wage is it really worth it? It's an abdication of duty. Like this is the only time in your career where you're going to see an active jewel heist at the lube for like be a hero. Like do your job. I don't know. I kind of feel for it. It's crazy to me. No, I don't feel for them.

Crazy to me that had happened in the first place. But it's nice to have a week where the two main crime stories are not about our. industry. Yeah, we have some, we have some crime-related stories, but not quite as exciting as those. Well, let's get into something very exciting on quantum computing. Would you say this is your new obsession? You wrote a good blog post about quantum computing this week. I'm planning a trilogy. I have one is out. I don't know. You know, I got really carried away. I got into a level of detail that I couldn't sustain. So I initially thought I would just briefly explain. and how elliptic curves work.

That turned into a days-long odyssey of diving into the math. I think it was a pretty good explanation. The objective is to discuss the odds of quantum breaking elliptic curves treated with the seriousness that it deserves and just look dispassionally at the data. And I think my conclusion of all this is that, yes, within the next 10 years,

there's a very high probability of a quantum break and within the next five years, it's possible. and what do you do? You should actually start preparing now. Like there's things you can do now. So to me, Quantum is at the top of my list of serious threats to Bitcoin. It can certainly be dealt with for the most part. Parts of it can't be dealt with.

And I think we just have to start reckoning with it now. That's why I wrote the series. So is part two going to be what should we do? No, part two is actually just making the case that Quantum is a, threat. Okay. We don't even get to, you know, reactions until three. Because I'm just trying to establish that because everyone dismiss, because people will say, oh, quantum's been a decade away for the last three decades, whatever, but actually a lot of things have changed recently with quantum. There's been a lot of new developments and a lot of cash has come into the sector. So I think the odds are

changing in real time. So, yeah, I mean, if you project out a lot of these timelines, that these major publicly traded companies or IBM or Google, they're projecting their physical and logical qubits. If you project that out, you'll get to a quantum break of ECC by between 2028 and 2033.

And is this just a function of GPUs being thrown at this problem? Is that what's driving the acceleration? No, I mean, you need specialized, bespoke computing hardware. Completely unlike anything. you might imagine. It's like super cooled, you know, atoms that are suspended

and some kind of, you know, strange solution. I mean, there's a bunch of different ways to do quantum computing, but quantum computers look nothing like classical computers because you need to have them in massively low temperatures. So it's all bespoke. But I mean, we're just getting better at building them and more capital slowing into the sector. as there's more breakthroughs, people are more willing to throw cash at it. So it's kind of a super

linear thing. Fascinating. All right. So we have that one in our newsletter. Recommend everyone check that out. Should we hop into the deals of the week? Yeah, first up, two deals in the Castle Island portfolio. First up is Beam. It's a typical infrastructure company. They were acquired by modern treasury. Congrats to Dan Modis and the Beam team. Yeah, very exciting for Dan and team over at Beam. Excited to see how modern treasury integrates stablecoins as well. And second one also in the Castle Island portfolio, Dynamic, which is a wallet infrastructure company. They have been acquired by Fireblocks. So really excited about that one, Italianoni, great entrepreneurs, excited to see what they build over at Fireblocks. And a couple of massive fundraise, M&A deals this week, Tempo, the

strike backed Stablecoin L1. There is 500 million from Thrive Capital, Green Oak, Sequoia, Ribbitt, and others. I mean, Stripe is just coming right at the credit card companies, don't you think? I mean, this is just a signal

that they are using this L1 blockchain to build a new network. And I think interchange is really in the cross-airs here. A lot of soul-searching on the ETH crowd

over this. But I don't know. I think it's a very different thing. I don't think it necessarily is parasitic on ETH. Yeah, I don't think so either. I think this is more of a play to go after the payments business

is another big deal echo which started by cobi it is an on-chain capital raising platform they're acquired this week by coinbase for three hundred and seventy five million dollars really impressive yeah very interesting move by coinbase i think it uh you know echo has the kind of crowdfunding crowdfunding accredited investor platform also as the iCO platform sonar i think it's called sonar sonar makes sense echo um i think that's a big part of the reason why Coinbase has acquired them. You know, we've had some regulatory loosening, shall we say.

Coinbase is historically not a place people go to do listings or initial public, you know, whatever, coin offerings, token listings, et cetera. They've, you know, mostly ceded market share in that sector to finance and buy bid and okayX and crack and so on. I think they want to own people from start to finish the whole life cycle. I think that's why they've done this deal. Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's a smart acquisition, especially if you have the view that this market structure is going to be defined.

You're going to clearly know what's a commodity, what's a security. This will be the platform that allows you to take these entities public and then be traded on Coinbase and be traded on the base blockchain. So a pretty smart category bet, I think, for Coinbase. Next up, we have 21 shares there in ETF this year. They're required by Falconack. Then it's Pave Bank, which is a crypto-native commercial bank licensed in the country of Georgia. They have raised $39 million from Excel, Tether, and Wintermude. Next up we have Bitcoin OS, there are Bitcoin L2. There is 10 million from Greenfield Capital, Falcon X, and DNA Fund.

Turtle Club is a defy liquidity provisioning platform. There is 5.5 million from BitScale, Thaya, and Vary's capital. Then we have Limitless, their prediction market. there is $9 million from one confirmation, Collider Ventures, F Prime, and others. Printer is a meme coin launchpad. There raised $2 million from Marana, L1D, and Flowdesk. LIP protocol is a decentralized private key management system.

There is $2.5 million from RRE ventures and collab currency. Then it's a DAT, Greenlane Holdings, which is a Berra Chain Treasury Company. They raised $110 million from polychain, blockchain.com, Dow 5, and others. I think some of that 110 appears to be in-kind, but now we have Barra-Chained Dats. And lastly, we have Railbird. They're a CFDC licensed DCM.

They're required by Draft Kings. Draftkins apparently planned to launch draft Kings predictions, a mobile app, which will let customers trade on regulated event contracts, real-world outcomes across finance, culture and entertainment. Polymarket announced that they would serve as the designated clearinghouse for the new Drafings platform. Makes a lot of sense, right? If you're Fanduil or Draft Kings, you have to be in the prediction market game.

Yeah, without a doubt. News-wise, kind of a lighter newsweek, I would say big headline, CZ is pardoned by Trump. He, of course, pled guilty to BSA violations, a CEO of Binance. Serve time, right? I mean, I don't know if he went to actual prison. Yeah, who's in prison for four months? real prison, yeah, and now he has been pardoned. Yeah, so this is a controversial one, I guess.

People on each side of the aisle really taking a different stance on this maybe. But so he pled guilty to one BSA violation. Is he the only person in the history of the country that's ever gone to jail for a BSA violation? I think that's right. For at least one count, I think. I mean, maybe there's others that have gone to jail for many counts. But, you know, he went to jail for one count. obviously there's an angle here with the Trump family and some of the projects that the

sons have been involved with that involve Binance. So that's really the source of scrutiny, I would say, that you're hearing. Yeah, I mean, any major token involves finance. So that's just the nature of the industry. I think, you know, CZ probably was pretty hard done by to face the criminal sanction for BSA. Yeah, the excessive pardons also. It's alienated even some of Trump supporters. I think Joe Lonsdale spoke out against it too. Oh, did it? It was actually, yeah, I was watching Trump's press conference today,

which was meant to be about our imminent war with Venezuela, I guess. And he was asked about this, and at first he had absolutely no idea who CZ was. Oh, really? Yeah, he had no clue. And he was like, yeah, I've never met the guy. He's like, and then it sort of came to him. He's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, you know, people I trust told me that he'd been,

very hard done by and targeted by the Biden administration. But it was very clear that Trump had never met him and had actually a hard time recalling him at first. I guess he would have had no reason to meet him, right? Yeah. Do you see George Santos also got pardoned after recorded last week? Yeah, so what was his deal? He was in Congress and then it emerged. He lied about every aspect of his biography, right?

I think every aspect of his life Everything. There's not one truthful thing that ever happened with that guy. But what I don't, and I know he spent money on like a lot of stupid stuff and campaign funds, but I don't remember what his crime was.

Like what was his actual crime? I think it was campaign finance violations, wasn't he? Just using campaign funds to, you know, live a lavish lifestyle? So Google says it was wire fraud, identity theft and lying to Congress, embezzling campaign funds for personal use,

stealing the identities of donors to make unauthorized credit card charges, and making false statements on financial disclosures. He had a seven-year sentence that was commuted. Wow. And he was in jail for, like, a month of that. My goodness. I think maybe he probably should have been in jail a little longer if you asked me. Well, he's out now.

I guess I don't know what he's going to do. Hopefully it just stays away from our industry. I feel like we don't need any of that. He seems very popular on social media. Oh, is he? I don't know. People have a real soft spot for him. Yeah.

All right. So in other news, Malstrom, which is a crypto investment fund, it is Arthur Hayes' fund, the Bitmex founder. They're looking to raise $250 million for a private equity firm. It will be targeting buyouts of medium-sized crypto businesses. haven't really seen a lot of private equity dollars coming into the space. I think this is pretty interesting. Yeah, this is sort of the first of its kind. I'm very, very interested to see what other does with this fund. You think about the types of businesses that would be conducive for

private equity. Obviously, you're talking about businesses that generally would take on debt and so that have cash flows. What categories do you think are interesting from that perspective? I mean, actually exchanges, I think, are in that category, especially offshore ones that maybe are a little harder to sell, but I don't know. You do have to sell it eventually. Yeah, I think you have these regional exchanges that could be really interesting from a private equity roll-up strategy. And I guess, yeah, you have to sell. You've got to take them public.

Who knows, maybe there's like a token angle with some of these exchange tokens. That could be a source of liquidity. I'm interested to see where that goes. Yeah, we'll be tracking this one. in DC there is a kerfuffle over market structure. The proposal had been leaked and there was a great deal of outcry over this, especially on the Democrat side. So I guess crypto executives have now met with senators in D.C. again, to try and hash this out.

Yeah, apparently David Sacks went down to the hill and brought a bunch of crypto people with him. They met with Republicans. Democrats. Sounds like Gallego was not very happy that this got leaked. Mostly because it made him awful because he does seem very upset. Terrible policies it looks like. Yeah, I don't get it. Like, okay, so you're proposed, the Senate Democrats are proposing version of clarity that's worse than anything Biden ever came up with. We're upset about it. What are they upset about? They're upset that are the ones that are trying to harm us. So what? I don't get it. They're mad that we're mad.

We're justifiably mad. It's our right. It's like, hey, we put out this proposal. It makes decentralized finance illegal in the United States. What are you guys so mad about? Stop being a mouthpiece for the Republicans. It's like, no, no. We just don't want the industry to be illegal.

Yeah, some things are bigger than politics. Let us have defy for God's sakes. The heck. Incredible. But there was a bunch going on in D.C. this week. so the Federal Reserve, Waller made some news here. So what was this? He's proposing a kind of a skinny master account?

Yeah, payment account. A new type of master account that would give fintechs and financial institutions access to the Fed that otherwise don't have access. It's obviously been a huge issue with custodia and their lawsuit against the Fed and their inability to obtain a master account. So really, really interesting. Things are moving very fast in the kind of bank sector you have. Now, de novo charters are open again.

Stable coins are new foreign narrow banking. And now you have this massive liberalization of the types of firms that have access to the Fed. It's a very exciting time in banking and payments. Kind of reminds me of the FinTech Charter that was shot down by the bank lobby. It's a different name this time around, but it's very reminiscent.

Yeah, really cool. All right. So in other news, Joe Nagar, formerly of Golden Tree Asset Management and Republic Digital, he is launching a new $300 million crypto hedge fund called Feynman Point Asset Management. It will focus on digital assets and frontier technologies. You don't see a lot of new hedge fund launches in the industry. Joe Nagar has a story of history, so this will be a really interesting one to watch. He was very involved in the Big Short era.

Was he really? Yeah. He's in some of these books actually. I forget what bank you worked at, but he had coverage on some of the hedge funds that had this trade on. And I believe at that point, you know, some of the banks internally had the short trade on as well. And he was one of the guys that had it on. Well, where is Feynman point anyway? Or is that a Richard Feynman reference?

Oh, yeah, it is. So it is, do you know this? it is a sequence of six consecutive nines that occurs in the decimal representation of the number pi and it starts at the 760 second decimal place wow so um yeah it's uh it's you know six digits in pie how far can you go on pie just off the top of your head without looking without looking 3.1 for 115-6-5-3. That's it. Yeah, that's as far as I go

to. I don't know. That's like programmed into my brain for some reason. That's pretty good. I feel like a lot of people can just go 3.14. I don't think you really need much more than that. I don't even think you need to know it anymore. You just use a calculator. Yeah. So,

it's the longest sequence of consecutive numbers in pi up to that point. Interesting little... Pretty good name of. for a fund. I like that. I would have figured that Fainman Point was just named after a, you know, a point somewhere. Yeah, like a protrusion or peninsula.

Yeah. I thought this was interesting. T. Row Price, they have filed for their first crypto ETF. It's going to be an actively traded strategy with 15 crypto assets at a time. Very interesting. Yeah. I haven't seen too many of those. I don't think I've seen any actively traded ETFs applied for yet.

And T-Roe Price, not exactly who you think we're doing first. Not known, yeah. Not known to be in crypto at all. That's their first crypto product, it looks like. Here's an interesting one this week. Cryptocurrency Exchange crack-in reported, so they're private still, but they're starting to report publicly their numbers. They reported $648 million in revenue for the third quarter,

up 114% year-over-year. Pretty incredible. Yeah, great numbers. What do you think is driving that? I think trading volumes are up a lot. So that's got to be the main driver. I think the geographic expansion that they've had also probably a big part of that. But really good execution over there, cracking.

On the CZ topic, Ryan Salami has just tweeted. Did you see this? No, what do you say? He said, as the Trump administration corrects injustice for targeting crypto Republicans, this is the crypto case, even though the Biden DOJ made clear. that Ryan was not involved in any fraud at FTCX, they hunted him down for political reasons and tried to lie to further agenda

when they refused they threaten his family to force him to plead guilty. I'm actually kind of sympathetic to that. Yeah, I am too. I actually think that if anyone had a strong case for a pardon, it would actually be Ryan Salem. Yeah, I mean, what's he seven and a half years he's doing? He's doing seven and a half years.

I think he could have done zero years if he flipped on SBF, but I guess he didn't. Yeah, like, Caroline got, what? Caroline got two years in, like, minimum security, like, the house harassed practically, right? Yes. I don't think that's right at all. And look, George Santos got out.

He was meant to do seven years. Yeah. Not a lot of, like, coherence in our justice system. It seems very arbitrary, actually. I just hope that we don't go through this news cycle of, is SBF going to get out? Because he doesn't deserve to. I think he was probably pretty excited when he saw that.

I mean, mixed feelings because CZ was the architect of his downfall. I think he was the own architect of his downfall. I stole all of the customer money. Yeah, yeah. CZ provided the catalyst. CZ just basically... He's the spark. Had the spark that made everyone realize that the money was not there.

It's kind of funny. I wonder if SBF regrets mostly aligning himself with the Democrats. That was just the wrong bet to make. Like if he'd been a big Trump guy, he might be out of jail by now. I don't know. I mean, how would you let a guy like that out of jail?

He just took all the customer funds. I mean... He made an investment in Anthropic. He did. You know? He turns out he's just one of the best VCs of all time. Like incredible investments. The Robin Hood deal, too.

I mean... Yeah. I mean... the anthropic deal alone is like 10 FTXs. It's Hall of Fame level investment stuff. Now, to be fair, he also had about 600 other positions, and a lot of those went to zero. So, you know, portfolio concentration wasn't exactly there.

Yeah, I mean, if you were an effective altruist deploying capital in 2020, 2021, you just couldn't miss because those turned into these gigantic AI companies. Yes. So right place right. time in a big way, man. Wow. Profitable ideology. A lot of controversy with Anthropic this past week, Reid Hoffman going at it with David Sachs. Yeah. I mean, I get it. These AI models are very, they want to police your behavior. Like, they don't let you do stuff. That's like pretty innocent. The AI browser, I guess chat GPD is browser now. It just doesn't let you go to certain sites if it

doesn't think that's appropriate. And it's concerning. And so the political views of whoever makes the models, that really matters. Like politicians use these models to make decisions. If there's an inherent bias in the model, that's going to influence actual, you know, policy outcomes, don't you think? I definitely think that's right. What's the answer to that?

I mean, do they publish weightings and is there a way to actually get to the ground truth of what's going into these models? That's hard to say. I know we don't know what the model is thinking when it's doing the thinking. We haven't figured that out, how to, like, x-ray its brain, basically. I mean, it's also possible to just empirically evaluate the models and say, you know, determine what their political bias is. Like, that much we know. And it looks like anthropic is more on the left.

Grock is actually more towards the middle or to the right. So I don't know. I think it's very worrisome if you have one or two models that end up winning whoever is on the quote unquote safety team as in like biasing the model in the direction that they want. That ends up having massive impact on society. Yeah. It strikes me that the, so at least in the crypto world, we have the two bills that we identify that we want to work towards and we got the stable coin bill and hopefully we get the market structure bill. and then we have a bunch of concrete things that needed to happen at the agency level

that by and large most of those have started to happen. It feels like the AI people haven't really figured out what the comprehensive legislation is, right? Like they need a version of what we got in the crypto industry is a federal framework here so that the states just don't go rogue and start banning AI companies. Yeah, that actually is a huge problem right now

is that there's literally what we, had. There's a patchwork of state rules. Right. From California's highly interventionist to more or less if here approaches. And it's making it very hard for these companies to do business. But I don't think they're very united. I mean, kind of like the crypto industry, pretty fractious as well. Pretty fractured. And I'd say even within like the Republican Party, I think you have very divergent views in terms of what the states should and should not be able to do. But you kind of have to get something done here. Otherwise, all of these. these states, attorney generals, and governors are going to be able to dictate a huge part of

just federal policy just by virtue of intervening and shutting down some of these companies. And presumably, since a lot of these are headquartered in California, that's the most important one. Yeah, right. So you had Newsome, didn't he veto a bill that was, originally the bill was meant to protect juniors, like adolescents and kids with AI. But I guess it was written pretty, broadly so he ended up vetoing it um so he's in a tough spot obviously because he wants to run for president he doesn't want the i lobby against him but in california i mean look their congress wants to kind of shut some of this down it looks like it is funny i have seen folks on the i side saying looking at the example of fair shake and being like we need to do a fair shake

maybe they do like wow it's when i see that i'm like well we really punch above our weight didn't we because AI is a much bigger industry than crypto at this point and they're envying crypto's political strategy Yeah I mean fair shake It makes you feel good about what we did They take some hits from you for the Gallego thing But they by and large did a great job

Yeah we like them one week we don't like him the next I'm just saying fair shake for better for us is envied Of course I think it's one of the strongest organizations out there in politics probably up there with like the NRA in terms of how successful they've been. But I still disagree with the Gallego thing. I think that's, I think we're allowed to say that.

Yeah, Gallego turns out. It was a very close race, very close race in Arizona. Kerry Lake, I didn't really like Carrie Lake, to be honest, but,

uh, it is what it is. Arguably Fairshake pushed Gallego over the edge. And then he doesn't even like crypto. That's it. That's where you just have to have an issue with some of those politicians that will just say anything to get elected. So this guy was pro-crypto,

and then he takes money from the crypto lobby, and he gets in, and he's anti-crypto. It's unbelievable. It's like taking money from the NRA and then trying to ban rifles. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's just... You thought we wouldn't notice?

He's just, it turns out he was lying about a bunch of stuff. Actually, that reminds me, did I tell you that up in Massachusetts, John Bechah, who used to be the general counsel at Circle, is running for Congress. Against? I don't know who's a bunch of people running for it. It's Seth Moulton's seat.

So Seth Moulton is running against Markey, the existing senator. Moulton is very pro-cropto. Obviously, Betcha is too. So this is an open seat. This is the Massachusetts 6 district. Yeah, I believe so. Like North Shore, Lynn area, the type of district. And the website is Betcha for Congress.

Betcha for Congress. That's actually B-E-C-C-I-A. It's not Betcha, but it's pronounced Betcha. Betcha, yeah. Yeah, very smart guy. He ran FS Vector. He's the chairman of FS Vector. So they've helped a lot of companies in the crypto space

navigate regulation. So, you know, you hire FS Vector to get advice on what your regulatory strategy should be, where you need licenses, that type of thing. So it's very excited to see that he's running. Yeah, I mean, Massachusetts, not a state known for its pro-crypto members of Congress. No, no, we really only had really one. Moulton's really the only really pro-one, and now he's running for seven.

It's been tough aside from that. Yeah, it's been real tough. Yeah, I mean, Ochin-Claas kind of stabbed us in the back. He was pro-Crypto, and then he voted against the stable coin bill. So you hate to see it. Not good. All right, I think that is it for the week, recording here late on a Thursday. A lot of news this week.

but we will be back next week. I think we have a couple fresh pods coming out next week. So everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.