On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 11/12/21 (Inflation hits 6.2%, Discord dithers on Web3, Is is really about the supply chain?) (EP.259)

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Matt and Nic return for news and deals of the week. In this episode:  Circle launches an early stage venture fund SEC targets American CryptoFed DAO LLC The SEC references Nic's paper on DeFi risks Should DeFi teams be more aggressive in disclosing admin key risks? What would a DeFi disclosure regime look like? BlockFi files for a spot Bitcoin ETF Bitwise withdraws its futures-based ETF NYC mayor Eric Adams says NYC schools should teach about cryptocurrency Miami will airdrop BTC to residents Inflation prints at 6.2% annualized Why the 'supply chain' explanation for inflation obscures the underlying dynamics Is inflation really a supply chain issue? Real interest rates are as low as they were in the 1970s Why we have entered monetary repression Discord dithers on Web3 BrinkDAO Could tungsten rods in space improve on nuclear weapons? Content mentioned in this episode:  SEC, Statement on DeFi Risks, Regulations, and Opportunities Michael Greenwald, The Digital Asset Olympics 21Shares, Q3 Report  Nic Carter and Linda Jeng, DeFi Protocol Risks Sponsor notes: This show supported by Coinbase Prime, an integrated solution that provides advanced multi-venue trading, custody, and prime services for institutions. For more information see coinbase.com/prime Corporations and institutions can allocate cash into Circle Yield to gain crypto lending exposure and earn superior returns compared to traditional markets. It's secured, overcollateralized and built on the leading dollar digital currency. Visit circle.com/yield to book a meeting

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 to 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. Bitcoin.

Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And we're taping this with one microphone. This is just, this is probably the hardest podcast we've ever had to do. Yeah, this might be the worst setup yet, honestly. We have to stop doing it with me just holding it as if I'm interviewing it. I feel like I'm a CNBC host right now.

Yeah. So what Matt is doing is like just moving the mic back and forth because we had a mic snafu. So we just recorded our annual meeting. So we are at an offsite. with the whole team today. And it turns out one of the team members didn't bring their microphones. It wasn't you or me.

Yeah, so we're not going to name names, but there was a lack of understanding that when you get your audio gear, you also need the cables. Just not intuitive. Not everyone is a, you know, a podcaster. It's true. But this was actually the first time

we've had our team together. Was it really? Maybe not. Well, this episode is brought to you by Coinbase Prime, and it's also brought to you by Circle, more on those companies later in the episode. It was a busy week. It was a good podcast week.

You had Brandon McBee, the co-founder and CSO of Corrieve on the show, talking about GPU mining and Ethereum and all sorts of good stuff. Yeah, so we've had Brandon on before, and we covered the Texas grid before the Texas grid became this political issue. And so this episode was interesting because Corrieve is a Ethereum miner, still. those still exist. And they also do a ton of rendering and visual effects and machine learning, model training. So they do those bursty computational jobs some of the time. And then they mine Ethereum and other GPU coins the rest of the time. So we talk about that. And we also talk about

how the heck they're going to deal with Ethereum effectively turning off proof of work. One of the interesting things he said was that, you know, they became more inclined. to do MEV as the ETH leadership and developer community got more hostile towards miners. I thought that was really interesting. We've had Ethereum miners on the podcast in the past, and they've historically, you know, two years ago, you remember they're saying, oh, we would never do MEV, but that totally changed. Yeah, I mean, it just becomes, well, it becomes a matter of extracting value, I think, and using all the tools you can once it's clear that there's no long-term future for mining

in Ethereum. So it'll be interesting to see as we head into the upgrade into staking from proof of work, whether or not some of these miners get even more hostile over time. But I thought that was a great episode with Brennan. And great photo on the website. You know, it's not every day that we have someone up there with a hat on backwards. It's nice to see someone not just rocking a suit on their profile picture. Yeah, it was kind of reminiscent of I guess Dan Matashevsky really rocks the backwards hat look.

Every photo I've seen him of him. Yeah, he's been known to rock the... You have to be unique to rock the backwards outlook. I used to be able to pull that off. I can't pull that off anymore. So in the prior episode we did with Brandon, he had suspenders on. And I was instructed to change the photo. Yeah, I think that was, it's a better photo this time around for sure.

So it was a busy week. Let's get into some deals of the week. There are two Castle Island deals to start us off this week. So no-de-ben-a, company that we led the seed round in a little under a year ago. It's a blockchain compliance software company. they specialize in travel rule compliance for brokerages and exchanges and all sorts of crypto vaps, as we call them, virtual assets service providers. They raised a $10.2 million series A.

It was a round that was led by Jump Capital and F Prime Ventures, included participation from us, Greenvisor, Luno, Bitso, BlockFi, and a few others. A great job by the Notabene team. Yeah, huge congrats to Pali Analyst and the rest of the team there. It is just becoming increasingly clear that this flavor of compliance is a necessary line item for every major exchange out there. And no-de-ben-a is very well positioned to do that. So next up we have Meow, which is a Miami company.

It's another one of ours in the portfolio. They're focused on allowing corporates to allocate their treasuries into accounts that are powered by stablecoin yields and crypto yields more generally. So they raised 5 million from Coinbase, Gemini, Gemini, us, acrylic, Lux, jump capital, and slow ventures. So congrats to Meow. I remember when we were looking at Meow and I asked Brandon, the founder of Meow, what the deal is with the name. And he was just like, this is an awesome name. And I was like, okay, that's a good, good answer.

So next up actually, Corweave, again, features. So just talked about them. They are a cloud provider. They do crypto mining and non-crypto-computational jobs. They raised a $50 million round from Magnetar Capital. Big congrats to them. Next up is a fund deal. So FTX, Lightspeed, and Salana Ventures are investing $100 million to build a Web3

gaming focused fund. So kind of an ecosystem fund here focused on Web3 games in the Salana ecosystem. Then we've got Far Away, which is a blockchain gaming studio. They raised $30 million from Lightspeed FTX. Pantara, Sequoia, and A16Z. Next is Solidus Labs. This is a trade surveillance platform. So they essentially work with exchanges to do surveillance sharing between exchanges

and monitor for all sorts of abnormalities. They raised $15 million from Liberty City Ventures, GSR, and XR seeds. Then we have Cadenza Ventures, which is a crypto fund focused on DFI. They raised $50 million. Neon Labs is the next one. project that's aiming to bridge some Ethereum functionality into the Salana ecosystem. They raised $40 million from Jump Capital, IDO, Solana Capital, and Three Arrows Capital. Then we have Matter Labs, which is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. They raise $50 million from Andreessen, blockchain.com,

and others. Next is Agorik, a cosmos-based smart contract platform raising $32 million this week via a private token sale. And lastly, we have Saddle Finance, an automated market maker, They raise 7.5 million from polychain, electric, nascent, and others. First up in the news column is related to fundraising, I guess. So Circle is launching an early stage blockchain venture fund. So in the mold of a DCG, in the mold of a Coinbase ventures, getting into the mix over there at Circle. So it'll be interesting to see what they start to invest in.

But more capital for startups, never a bad thing. And more capital in the Boston crypto ecosystem, presumably. We always love that. Boston definitely outkicks its coverage here in terms of just startup ecosystem volume in the blockchain space. So this is the regulatory podcast, of course, I'd never heard of this one. In fact, I never have heard about any of these ones that the SEC goes after. So the SEC has instituted proceedings against something called American Crypto Fed Dow LLC, which is, a Wyoming-based organization. I don't know. A lot of these SEC proceedings

I've just never heard of the companies. A lot of the, I guess, to be fair, a lot of the ICO crazy projects that were fraudulent I had never heard of either. But what's going on over there at the SEC? They're just working really hard so that Gensler can become the Treasury Secretary? Is that kind of people burning it at both ends?

Yeah, I mean, the thing I don't quite understand is why they're going after complete unknowns. I mean, who have, heard of American crypto fed Dow LLC. Like it's not clear from the name what they do. Like are they a Dow or are they, you know, a central bank? It's the crypto fed. It sort of plays into the whole like on the trails out there.

It's, you know, Wyoming. So the, I guess the allegation was that they made false and misleading statements about their ducat and lock. tokens. It's, um, it wasn't the only thing the SEC did this week. So SEC commissioner Caroline Crenshaw published a pretty good write-of. It's called statement on defy risks, regulations, and opportunities. I believe you're referenced in this, actually. Yes, footnote nine. That's, uh, really the key footnote. So I mean, everyone who's going to read that is just going to immediately jump to footnote nine, the paper that you wrote with, I believe, Linda Jang. Um, yeah, so SEC's reading that,

apparently. Yeah. So the sentence and question is, many current DFI participants recommend that new investors exercise caution and many experts in academics agree that there are significant risks. It's a very valuable contribution by you. So that's, you know, the SEC has now officially called me an expert, so I'm going to take that to my grade. That's a LinkedIn profile update coming soon. I do recommend you read the paper.

Defy Protocol Risks the paradox of DFI, kind of a fancy name. The preprint of the paper is available online. And I'm actually very happy with it. It's basically we talk through critical risks in the defy space in ways that things can go wrong. I guess what I found was really interesting about that paper was just thinking about the admin keys and some of the things that individuals can do to really disrupt these defy systems. And some of the adversarial consequences that those setups or some nefarious activity by people controlling those keys could have on investors in the defy space. Yeah, and the problem is that there is no disclosure around admin keys or multisic setups. I mean, it happens on an ad hoc basis, but there's no real culture of disclosing who controls what in a smart contract context and the compromise of which key could do what to the system.

It's very informal, very ad hoc. And, you know, one of the things I've started to talk about when I have these discussions with policymakers is, what a disclosure regime could look like that is actually tailored to defy to the crypto industry. And, you know, I think that would be the softest possible ending here because I'm a little nervous that the SEC will just be looking at, you know, all these rugpoles and all these, you know, various hacks and frauds and things like that and decide that the whole space is meritless. You know, better disclosure would really go a long way in my opinion. I guess the question is disclosure to whom? If these things are securities disclosure through the SEC, you would think that would just follow a traditional path.

If, as we think, many of these things are not securities, then the question is to what regulatory body would you be making these disclosures? Yeah. So I think we'd need a restructuring of the regulatory environment there, frankly, because, of course, some of these things do have cash lows and governance rights associated with them, which is indicative of them being securities in some sense. But then a lot of these things are used transactionally and provide all kinds of interesting different models of engagement that you would never use a security for.

I mean, paying out like liquidity mining basically doesn't happen with public equity. It would be too difficult. Things like that just doesn't really seem to suit a securities regime. I think the best possible thing to do would be create a body that's specifically tailored at dealing with these, you know, newer assets. And I guess that mirrors the Coinbase proposal that they've been talking about and actually put in writing and have been having discussions on the hill about that is just creating a new regulatory body.

It's clear that the SEC doesn't want that to happen. And particularly Gensler down there is quite ambitious, wants to not only to have the SEC cover that, but probably wants to have the SEC go out and, you know, acquire the CFTC, it sounds like. So what was the takeaway from this Caroline Crunch? shaw piece in your mind. I mean, I think the big takeaway was that there are a lot of risks. We probably need to evaluate some regulation. But there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of startup activity. You know, we should we should also allow it to thrive. So I thought it was pretty measured.

So elsewhere in SEC related news, BlockFi has optimistically filed for a spot Bitcoin ETF. So BlockFi, good luck on the Bitcoin spot. Certainly, we believe it's time for a spot ETF. We think the analysis on the ground is sound. In related news, Bitwise, which also has a spot ETF proposal, has withdrawn its futures-based ETF proposal. So citing the complexity of the product, basically the fact that this is a bad product for investors. So the futures-based Bitcoin ETF is a bad product. We've said it countless times. There's high costs to do these futures rolls. So it's up to 10% per year in roll costs. it's also not pure exposure to Bitcoin.

And so there's tracking error in the sense that there's capacity constraints on the futures contracts in the front month. And it also holds about 15% cash and cash equivalent. So you're not getting that exposure that you think you're getting if you're retail just jumping into this. So I thought Matt Hogan had a nice tweets storm. And I applaud bitwise for withdrawing this because they could have gotten forward and they could have gotten approval here for Bitcoin futures ETF, but they want to do its best for their customers. Yeah, it's a good call. The contango associated with the futures is obviously causing tracking error. The more that they have to buy, the further ahead futures contracts, the worst it generally gets.

So I think it made sense to withdraw it. And I hope that they get their wish and we got a spot ETF. So the mayor-elect of New York City, a city I used to live in, Eric Adams, he said this week that New York City schools should be teaching children about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. And I wholeheartedly agree. I think that maybe you should take macroeconomics out of their curriculum because that is nothing but like astrology, doesn't contemplate anything that's actually happening in the real world. Maybe replace that with crypto and blockchain. Well, I don't think anyone learns about, you know, the monetary system in school. I mean, they don't even really cover it when you do econ, especially not the high school level, econ classes.

And they barely even cover when you do a college econ degree. There's not a lot of discussion as to where money actually comes from and how it's injected into the economy. It's very opaque. On the topic of pro-crypto mayors, not to be outdone, Mayor Suarez has stated that they're going to give a Bitcoin dividend to the residents of Miami. So I shall be happily collecting my Bitcoin dividend. Now, is that Bitcoin like you get one of them or how does that work?

My guess is it would be a fraction. I think it's something to do with stacks and city coins. It's not fully clear to me how it would work. But they've amassed apparently a bit of a treasury over there. And it seems like he's thinking of distributing it to Miami residents. These mayors are just the best politicians. I mean, they're going back and forth, just battling to see who can be more aligned with the crypto community. You got to love it.

So lastly, in news, I guess the Joint Economic Committee in Congress is holding a hearing in a week's time, clarifying the role of government in the context of digital assets. If I had to guess, they will be advocating for more government, not less. Well, we have Peter Van Valkenberg fighting the good fight. He's on this one from Coin Center. So hopefully he has some good things to say. He always does. So it would be great to see. I think we're going to have more hearings before we have less.

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on chain. You get your choice of terms from one to 12 months and a fixed rate that's higher than what you'll get at a bank or in many fixed income markets. Visit circle.com slash yield to book a meeting with one of their experts. That's circle.com slash yield. So it was a big week for market watchers. The inflation print came in very high. 6.2% annualized. highest level in 30 years. Feels like it's even higher, though, to just be living it. Doesn't it? It feels higher than that. Yeah, that's the thing about inflation.

You know, I view it as a local, not a global phenomenon. And it's just a function of what your own basket looks like. No one shops, according to the CPI basket, your own health care and rent and education and energy and food costs or would determine inflation for you. and if you rent in a very popular urban market where prices are up 30% year every year, your realized inflation rate is much, much higher than whatever the government is advertising with CPI.

And so, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording, but your argument is that we're paying too much attention in the media to this port crisis and that what's actually happening here on the supply chains has more to do with the inflation story than it actually has to do with the, you know, any issues at the ports. So I got a bone to pick with Fin to it and really with the financial press generally and basically with everyone that said anything about inflation the last few months. So the common narrative you hear is that inflation is occurring because of the, you know, some dysfunctional supply chain, basically. And that that is due to COVID mysteriously, you know, ruining the supply chain.

And obviously COVID has affected supply chains to a certain degree, you know, certain, you know, forms of industrial and transport capacity are reduced because it's harder to have employees physically in a specific place. All of that said, though, if you actually look at the data, and I'm going to post this in the show notes, if you look at the volume transiting through the largest ports in the U.S., L.A. and Long Beach, the volumes that are all-time highs, they're well about. where they were in 2019 even. Obviously, they're above where they were in 2020, where we had the COVID and sort of recession-induced dip. But they're well above where they were in 2019. So we're pushing all-time highs in terms of the actual cargo moving through these ports. Now, that's not consistent with this narrative that COVID is reducing the capacity,

and that's, you know, causing price increases. So what's actually happening? Well, what happened is COVID dramatically, reshaped the nature of the economy. People stopped buying services and they started buying goods. They were stuck at home and they decided to buy a ton of basically products, you know, merchandise, consumer goods, like electronics, things like that. And so that caused an enormous amount of demand. And of course, that was financed by the trillions and trillions of dollars in stimulus, you know, the fact that government spending has reached a new, much, much higher plateau than basically

it's ever been. That caused this dramatic uptick in demand. So it was the injection of dollar. And of course, that was financed by the Fed buying government debt. It wasn't foreigners that bought the debt. It was the Fed, right? So it's financed by the creation of new dollars. So the injection of new dollars into the economy, whether or not it was necessary or good, it happened. It caused this. enormous upsurge in consumer demand for physical goods and products, and then that overwhelmed the supply chains. It wasn't the fact that the supply chains aren't working. They're actually working, generally speaking, pretty fine. It's just that there was an artificial, enormous stimulus,

enormous stimulus, and now we're reckoning with the consequences of that. So this whole thing strikes me as a deflection to get away from the fact that this all began when the government injected a huge amount of cash directly into the economy. And it just so happens that, you know, that is expressing itself as scarcity at these ports and, you know, along the sort of trade routes. But the ultimate root cause, we can't forget that. It's the dramatic intervention into the economy by the government. So what we were talking about earlier today was really a kind of a presentation that we put together and conveyed to our LPs. But, Bitcoin's rise as a macro asset becomes pretty compelling if you have this type of a backdrop.

Yeah, I was looking at real rates yesterday, and they're down to the lowest levels that they reached in the 1970s. At the peak of the 1970s inflation, real interest rates hit about minus 4.6%. So that's the yield on the 10-year subtracted by CPI. And that's where they are today. It's actually 4.6%. As of yesterday's data, on the real 10-year yield. And so you're dealing with effectively a confiscation. Luke Groman calls it monetary repression.

It's basically a situation in which if you hold dollars, you're a big loser. And if you hold government debt, you're a huge loser. Because the yield on the debt has not increased to account for the fact that there's a massive inflationary spike. Inflation is 6% and the yield is 1.something percent. So it just hasn't caught up that difference. So if you're holding government debt, you're an enormous loser in real terms. And of course, what happened in the 70s? Well, gold increased by a factor of eight or nine in real terms, eight or nine. It went from $35 an ounce to many hundreds of dollars, almost $1,000 an ounce. So when, and that coincided with those enormous negative shocks with real rates cratering.

So I guess the question is, what happens now with these massive government expenditures? You know, clearly it would seem that we're going to require some sort of a debt monetization here. So is it just that we inflate and we take that debt to GDP ratio from, you know, 130 down to the 70s and then we just go back to normal and kind of tighten from there? What's the path here? It'll take decades to do that, though. So, Lynn Alden likes to say that in the 40s, this is what happened after the wartime finance. The U.S. government was incredibly indebted. It grew its way out of it.

GDP recovered very strongly after World War II, but also treasury holders suffered. And the government managed to reset its fiscal position by effectively doing a soft default on the debt, by inflating away the debt. you know, by printing, printing dollars effectively. And there was high inflation in the 40s. And so that's sort of my template for what I think we're going to see here. Now, the interesting thing about that is the 40s, of course, you know, going into the 50s, you started to see women entering the workforce. So you had these huge productivity kind of growth spikes as a result of just more people

working. I guess we would be betting on technology to do something similar in the decades to come. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. A lot of people say demographics is destiny and there's no way to get around the fact that the workforce is aging and structurally shrinking, which in theory is a disinflationary component and might hold down interest rates. A lot of people believe that. I think one of the, there's other disinflationary trends like technology generally is disinflationary. Globalization is deflationary. is deflationary or disinflationary. Of course, we're not going to reverse the fact that the workforce is aging, but one of those trends that might reverse is the globalization, right? The integration of global trade is clearly falling apart.

America's relations with China are not getting any better. And if you have a de-globalization, that is massively inflationary. If you have a breakdown in energy markets driven by ESG or environmental concerns or just a structural underinvestment because everyone's concerned about investing in fossil fuels, right? That's massively inflationary. Energy prices power everything, fertilizer, food, transport. They're behind everything. So if we have a shock in energy prices, that's going to send inflation absolutely through the roof. So I think there's a lot of potential things that can reverse those disinflationary trends.

You know, in the political landscape isn't going to make it easier for them to take the foot off the gas here. So I think we're kind of just going to have to see how this plays out in the years to come. Yeah, neither party is the party of fiscal discipline. There's just no desire to pursue that in Washington. And I think there's a bit of an understanding that austerity is just not politically tractable. And the only way out of this really negative fiscal position is. to print a lot. So switching gears a little bit. Chris Dixon and Paki McCormick wrote a piece for the economist this week on the future of crypto with a pretty heavy emphasis on Web 3, which, you know,

people are calling decentralized internet, the Dweb, whatever we want to call it. I think this is emerging as a really powerful theme for mainstream, just awareness of crypto. It seems like a decentralized internet is a much easier thing to get your head around versus Bitcoin for someone that may be not indoctrinated into the crypto landscape yet. So, really pushes this narrative forward and probably does a really good job of just taking crypto out of the dark shadowy super coder realm and making it more of a hey this is the next generation of the internet get on board with it it was impressive that they got that contributor piece in the economist i didn't even realize they accepted outside byline contributors yeah usually it's just uh you know you never know who

shumperer is right exactly uh i liked uh 21 shares is uh q3 quartered review. I recommend that one. We'll put in the show notes. A lot of good Q3 reviews. The Coinbase Ventures Roundup was good too. They're doing a lot of deals over there. So it's great to see so many of these Q3 reports. We'll have to put ours out at some point. So lastly, I want to highlight Michael Greenwald's piece recently called the Digital Asset Olympics that he wrote for the Harvard Kennedy School Belfare Center. I'm going to put that one in the show notes as well. Michael Greenwald, of course, infamously of on the brink fame. Yeah, he came on. He was not as bullish on crypto back then, but I think he's, I'm liking what I'm seeing out of Michael Greenwald. He is

trending towards really seeing that stable coins are a tool for the U.S. government to really lean into can strengthen the dollar. I think he's coming over to our side here. Yeah, I was a bit disappointed by some of his views when we interviewed him, but I have noticed that evolution. Another one I'll point to, of course, Brian Brooks. So in 2018, in fact, three years ago, almost to the day, I was on a panel with Brian Brooks back when he was the CLO at Coinbase at the IMF, believe it or not, the headquarters in D.C. And he was pretty anti-Bitcoin from an environmental standpoint.

And then fast forward to today, he runs Bit Fury. and he's now on TV making pretty nuanced and sound points about Bitcoin's environmental footprint and how the miners engage with the grid and how they can pursue sustainable options. So it's pretty cool to see evolution in people's views like that. I mean, you have to have evolution in your views if you're in the crypto space. A lot of people got into crypto thinking that Bitcoin was a credit card killer and they're interested in it because it was going to disrupt Visa. That didn't pan out.

people started to think that, and by the way, I probably wrote every single one of these trends that I'm talking about. Colored coins. I was a big colored coins guy. Thought that securities would settle using the open assets protocol. I was on that for a while. I was on the private blockchain thing for a while. So you have to change your views. You have to evolve in this space. So we're going to do a year in review. I've just decided for one of these podcast episodes. You've got to do your retrospectives towards the end of the year. And so my question to you is, what has, been something you've evolved on this year? That's a good question. I don't know if I've evolved my views on them, but I've gotten much, much more excited about DAOs.

I think my original thinking on DAWS was that these would primarily be tools for coordinating early stage venture capital investments, and there would be more of like investment club type of DAWS. But, you know, having now been a member of some DAWS, it's way more than that. It's like a coordination slash social club slash we also do investments together. And it's just a new way of doing things together online. And the communities are just incredible. And so I think this Dow thing is just going to be orders of magnitude more important than,

hey, we're coordinating investments. And so that's probably been my biggest, and probably my most exciting kind of thing in crypto right now is just all of the communities that have become a part of on places like Discord and just all the fun things that people are building in the Dow communities. Actually, that's a news item we forgot to mention. The founder of Discord posted a screenshot of a beta product line whereby I believe Discord was going to incorporate signing on with eth addresses natively. And in response to enormous critique from the gamers, Discord has shuttered the feature for

now at least. So I suppose you could call this GamerGate. So what do I have to do? All I heard was Airdrop from what you said. I'm getting into Dows. I just heard you, I heard AirDrop. What do I have to do to get the Discord AirDrop? Well, I'm not sure they're going to do one now because the gamers got too upset, basically. I mean, it's incredible. The level of bile I see in sort of mainstream communities towards things like NFTs. I mean, it's, it's kind of shocking. But yeah, people really very, very divided on this topic. You're going on, aren't you going on bankless again next week? I want to hear you ask the bankless guys a little bit about their Dow.

Yeah, what I want to know is as a four-time, I believe, guests on bankless. How am I not in the Dow? I mean, what more does a man have to do to qualify? Well, I mean, you've got to be a newsletter subscriber. I mean, for one, it's clearly you're showing your cards here that you didn't activate there. Yeah, I don't know what happened. I missed that Dow. So I'm thinking we're going to make Brink Dow. I don't know what it's going to do, but I think it's going to be worth a lot, frankly. We should definitely workshop that idea. I think there's a rabid fan base here, and maybe we can do a Dow. Yeah, we have like I would say a couple dozen really committed fans, and we appreciate each and every one of them.

One of our great fans came in last week when I was saying that what is tungsten actually used for and sent me, some great materials that I was reading about. Apparently, the CIA had this big idea called rods from God, and it was the idea that you would take telephone pole-sized tungsten rods, and you would just drop them on other countries and just rain chaos on them with tungsten rods. Yeah, I think the idea is that it would be a relatively stealth deployment because there wouldn't be, you know, the explosion associated with, for instance,

ICBM launch, which is how you typically detect them. And you would just have tungsten rods in orbit already. And then you just sort of release them and guide them to Earth. Of course, the problem is getting the rods up there. I mean, if there's one thing that tungsten is known for, it's for being heavy. I have a similar, who is that guy who was talking about Guam tipping over, the politician? People will get this reference. But I would have a similar concern with these tungsten rods. Like, are you worried they're just going to go through to the middle of the earth? Yeah, I mean, can you imagine the force? I think that's the idea is there wouldn't be any explosive ordinance on the ride,

but the sheer weight of it colliding with the earth from that speed, that altitude, would apparently have the same yield as potentially thermonuclear bomb. So just yet another incredible use case for tungsten. It's just so versatile. The people that we're setting up our recording today for the annual meeting, we're talking about tungsten, and they have no idea what we do, but they had some other use case for tungsten. Yeah, I thought I was hallucinating because I just kept hearing tungsten, tungsten from across

the room. And I'm like, well, that can't be real. There can't just be a conversation about tungsten, but in fact, it had to do with the light bulb filaments. Yet another use case for tungsten. And I was happy that I had my tungsten cube. I don't have my holder. I bought on Etsy. There's a tungsten cube holder and I've bought one it hasn't arrived yet supply chain issues probably at the port you know big issues there but I did bring my tungsten cube in to work with me today so I was able to show that off yeah the intensity of the done city was really quite something so I think that's it for the week we'll be back next week I think we're doing more on the mining podcast front actually believe it or not we may or may not have a tungsten themed episode look I know you might be sick of it but

that's where this whole thing began, you know, really began on the Brink Nation. And we're proud of that. So we're going to do a little tungsten episode next Monday. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.