On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 11/20/20 (Claytons leave the SEC, the not so quiet Quiet Rally, Bitcoin interest rates) (EP.149)

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Nic and Matt return for deals and news of the week. In this episode: Nic's appearance on Bloomberg TV Is Jay Clayton's departure good for the SEC? Our dark horse pick for SEC Chair Scaramucci's fund considers a Bitcoin position Is Binance decentralized? How are enterprise blockchains still going? How Bitcoin is akin to gold in the 1970s Bitcoin's changing narratives as a strength How our quiet rally isn't quiet How to interpret the BTC inflow into GBTC Why digital asset interest rates are structurally high   Sponsor notes: Withum is a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm committed to helping our clients be more profitable, efficient and productive in today's complex business environment. Our Digital Currency group is proud to partner with members of the cryptocurrency community. Get to know us at withum.com/crypto.   Sponsor notes: Withum is a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm committed to helping our clients be more profitable, efficient and productive in today's complex business environment. Our Digital Currency group is proud to partner with members of the cryptocurrency community. Get to know us at withum.com/crypto.

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, Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And today, you are just a content factory. I had a content day. This is something I learned from Pomp, who learned this from TikTok influencers. So instead of doing a little bit of content every day, you take one day, you set it aside, and you just do content. You're getting the message out there. You're on Bloomberg. That was big. You had a great appearance. That was really well done. really funny. It cracked me up, man. It really offended a lot of people. Joe, I think Joe set out to deliberately troll me and kind of set me up, if we're going to be honest.

He asked you about the Bitcoin having being priced in, and you said, look, we've known this information since day one. And, you know, there's really no, no reason why Bitcoin should reacted. That got you're controversial. You know, you can't really inject a lot of nuance. in a five-minute TV clip. So to be clear, my thoughts are more complex on the halving than I represented on Bloomberg TV. But they didn't give me, write a medium post about it. I already wrote a medium.

I already wrote an entire 8,000 word medium post. I guess nobody read it. I said, look, I'm bullish on Bitcoin, but not because of the having. There's all the reasons to be. bullish on Bitcoin. Demand. Demand. Yeah, I mean, you get these people that are trying to find these signals in the on-chain data too. And, you know, that's, that might be very useful at some point someday. But when you have a pension fund that's quietly accumulating Bitcoin through a

big custodian, it doesn't really matter. That's the stuff that's moving markets right now. You know, it's just people really like simple explanations for stuff. And the having, is the most simple explanation conceivable, you know, all those models about supply. But again, Bitcoin supply is the invariant here. The variant is, hmm, well, what's inflation doing? What, how many currencies are having currency crises? You know, what, or how deeper negative rate's going to go? If you want to see something that correlates with Bitcoin, look at the real interest rate curve. You know, people don't want to consider that messy, complex stuff. They just want a simple explanation.

So yeah, I'll happily be the Bitcoin Heretic here and push back against the halving discourse. I'll take the heat. I will take the heat. Doing your job. Doing your job. So you had a busy week this week. As we say, you had a big content week. You had Parker Lewis on the pod from Unchained Capital.

That was a good appearance. Parker's the man. I'm a huge, huge fan of Parker. This is something I was saying recently is, you know, one of Bitcoin's advantages is we spent the last couple of years just relentlessly churning out Bitcoin propaganda and rebuttals, preemptive rebuttals to every conceivable Bitcoin critique. And Parker really did a ton of that work. I mean, his gradually then suddenly series is just rebuttal after rebuttal after rebuttal. He's done a great job writing about this.

The other guy is Vijay, Boiopati, who's just had some phenomenal writing. There are so many people that are really in the hall of things. in terms of things that they've written that are very enduring, time enduring, feffer as well. When are you going to make your mark, Matt? When are you going to leap into the limelight with a thought piece? I don't know. I mean, it's intimidating.

I don't have, I don't know if I have anything that profound to say. You sometimes chime in with a meme here and there. I do. You know, I was thinking today, meme-wise, the price of Bitcoin, the implied market cap of Bitcoin was around 300. $130 billion I want to say this afternoon, something like that. Pushing right up on MasterCard.

And there's some sort of a meme to be had there just around, you know, how many MasterCard T-shirts and mugs and tattoos are you seeing around in the country these days? Not many. I don't know if I've ever seen. I was thinking about getting a Bitcoin tattoo. I don't have any tattoos. So, you know, that's a very high threshold to clear in terms of affinity for something. I mean, it's an asset that is legitimately worth less than MasterCard's market cap,

but you have people that are just religiously zeal it, which is great. Yeah, I think I was thinking about it. I could probably just wear Bitcoin clothing every single day of the week and never run out at this point. We have a listener of the podcast who has started a store and he's selling merch. It's really good. I don't want to blow it up yet because he's still working on it, but he sent me a link, and it's very good. I think you're going to like some of the stuff there.

One Bitcoin merch store that I liked is Zubi's store. Are you familiar with this man, Zubi? I actually bought a Zubi. I bought the Bitcoin black hoodie this week. So this is free press. We're not being paid to say this, but Zubi's store is quite good. The Bitcoin Movement.com. I bought a like a baseball cap and a couple t-shirts and a mug right here.

You can't see it, but you can't see it. Matt, you can see it. The rest of you can't see it. It's a really good mug. Yeah. Here's the word from our sponsors very briefly. So listen, if you are a regular listener of this show, you know that we take accounting issues pretty seriously.

And you might think that's a little strange, but the truth is it really matters in this industry. This is why we fixate on things like proof of reserve. There is a ton of custodial Bitcoin floating around. It's really important that depositors have quality assurances. it's important that we know that stable coins are backed with credible fiat reserves. So for issues like that, that's why we have firms like Witham. Witham is today's sponsor.

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So accounting, not the sexiest topic in the world, very important. I saw an interesting tweet from someone affiliated with OK coin, OK exchange today, saying that their reserves are fully guaranteed. But what they did not do coming out of this crisis was provide us with a proof of reserve. on the topic of accounting. So if they really want to get back deposit or confidence in their exchange, they should probably consider a proof of reserve. Just saying.

Proof of reserve would be great. The other thing about accounting is it's the same type of thing as financial advisory right now. If you have a financial advisor and you're asking them about Bitcoin and just blockchain in general and they're telling you it's something that you don't have to care about, you need to fire that person. You need to probably find someone else. It's the same thing with accounting. If your accountant doesn't know how to handle this stuff, what are you doing?

Yeah, it's a great question. Proof reserves, so hot right now. It's going to be a big year. I'm going to just go to lay it on the line right now. 2021, enormous year for proof reserves. I think so. So let's get into some deals of the week. A couple that actually happened towards the end of last week.

Galaxy Digital has acquired drawbridge lending and blue fire capital. These are two trading firms. It looks like Galaxy is going to be pushing more. more into structured products, lending, derivatives, hold on yards. So nice to see an acquisition in this category. Here's a huge deal from our forensic paradigm. Fireblocks. Many of you will be familiar with them.

Kind of an underrated company, I would say. They basically help, you know, larger users move crypto assets on chain safely and focus on custody as well. They raised $30 million around led by Paraly. at I'm with participation from Galaxy Digital Cyberstarts to NIA and some others. Next one is a Boston-based company Axilar, which is a protocol for cross-chain interoperability. These are two guys that spun out of Al-Grand actually. They raised $3.75 million from Divergence ventures, DCVC, Waiqlau, and Naval Ravikant.

Next up we have Mint Base, which is a platform for NFTs. there is million dollars from Sino Global, R-Weave, and D1 Ventures. And the last one is Axy Infinity. This is a game, a blockchain-based game. They raised $860,000 in a token sale led by Delphi Digital. Really interesting seeing Delphi, you know, initially an equity research, or not equity research, token research firm, move into this sort of capital formation space. Yeah, and Delphi's been super active on mechanism design and token.

economics and things like that in the defy space. So it's starting to invest more directly as well. All right. So here's a big story of the week. You know, from a regulatory perspective, Jay Clayton, the current chairman of the SEC, there's been rumors that he's going to be stepping down at the end of the year. That is now confirmed. So it's official. This will be a big shakeup. No word on where he's going. There was there was the idea of him going to the Southern district, Prit Barara's old job, SDNY. And, you know, I guess a lot of different angles, a lot to talk about on this. I think the first one would be just what impact will this have on tokens. And the second would be what impact would this have on the Bitcoin ETF? And we probably

don't know, but many in the industry have really been looking forward to the day when Clayton leaves, because there's a perception that he's very hostile towards this industry. And there's a lot of critiques. I don't agree with all of them. I agree with some of them for sure. But there's a perception that he hasn't allowed the token economy to really flourish. There's a big question around the SAFT and whether or not some of these simple agreements for future tokens can transmutate into non-securities. So there's been a lot of criticism from certain factions of the industry around we should have a safe harbor, we should have clarity here.

That's been a big fight. The other fight, of course, is just the several Bitcoin ETF applications that have been made and the really the intransigence, I would say, of certain factions within the SEC to be persuaded by the data there. And again, reasonable minds can disagree, I think, on whether or not the conditions have been met. But curious, your take on this. I'll say careful what you wish for. Careful what you wish for. If Clayton goes, there is absolutely no guarantee.

well, it looks like he is going, that we would get someone that is more positively disposed towards the industry. No guarantee whatsoever. If we get a Preet Barara at the SEC, probably not good. Probably not good for crypto. So I know a lot of people feel that Hester is going to take the reins. Looks like we're going to have a Democratic administration here. I don't know how it works exactly.

Someone please weigh in. Tell me how it works. I don't think we would have a Republican SEC commissioner under Biden. and Hester is a Republican. So, you know, I don't know. It's very, very hard to tell. I think there's a lot that turns on what the makeup of the SEC is here. I don't think there's any reason to believe that things are necessarily going to get better.

But that said, regarding the ETF, the reality on the ground, the numbers, the data, is getting more and more favorable towards the ETF. There's no denying that. But again, seems to have been a political issue in the past. There's no reason the SEC would suddenly listen to. reason and approve the ETF immediately. Yeah, I mean, if you think about what the SEC is there for, certainly there's a pillar of their mandate to promote capital formation. And I would argue that they've really failed at that on the crypto side of the house,

you know, allowing these markets to develop adequately. Now, of course, the other angle is just consumer protection. And you could argue that Clayton, by just effectively not doing anything about crypto for the past few years, just not allowing some of these tokens to. to come out. Maybe he's done his job in terms of consumer protection. So like I said, I think reasonable minds can disagree on this. Certainly a lot of people are rejoicing in the crypto industry right now and hoping that someone more progressive and more willing to engage with the industry as well, like more willing to listen to startups and perhaps more empathetic to the entrepreneurial journey.

That would be great. And I've seen Gary Gensler's name floated out there. I think that would be really interesting. Might not be great for Ripple, but that would be really interesting. Yeah, there have been some interesting names tossed around for SEC Commissioner. My dark horse candidate would be Chris Brummer, Professor Georgetown, a good friend of mine. I wrote a chapter for his book, fun fact. He's been kicked around a little bit as a potential candidate. He's super pro-crypto, very, very tune in and focus on the industry. So there's a lot of really interesting names. out there, honestly, incredibly hard to forecast which way it's going to go here. So let's keep it on the regulatory front.

So speaking of that, the OCC, so Brian Brooks, the acting commissioner of the OCC, he's been nominated for a full term, a full five-year term by President Trump. And if, you know, if this happens, I think a lot of people in the crypto space would be extraordinarily happy, just given that he's a former general counsel at Coinbase. It's been very forward thinking in terms of clarifying that banks can hold Bitcoin, banks can hold stable coins. It's been pushing for this national fintech license to allow startups to go to a federal level instead of going state by state with these money transmission licenses.

Now, I've talked to some folks in the industry who are a lot more knowledgeable on the crypto regulatory landscape. And they say this is kind of a total non-starter. This is a lame duck nomination. It's not going to happen. So I guess it's just not going to happen. It's sort of the bottom line. Honestly, I feel okay about that.

you know, with all love and respect to Brian Brooks. As we've said before, Brian Brooks, infamously on a panel at the DC Fintech week, trashed Bitcoin and said it was controlled by Chinese miners. This very week, he said the same exact thing. So his goodwill towards Bitcoin is very much in doubt right now. So unfortunately, friendship ended with Brian. Brooks. It's over. Man, that's hard. You just broke up with him on a live podcast. That's tough.

Yeah. I mean, just don't repeat ripple talking points. And that's pretty much all it takes for me to like you. But he couldn't resist. Man, all right. Mark the time. 15 minutes into the podcast, you break up with Brian Brooks. Tough, tough go. It's literally a tough day for Brian. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, it's just Bitcoin is not controlled by China. Yes, some miners happen to be located in China. That's not the same thing as control. It's just not. It's true. It's a valid critique.

Well, keep it on the OCC front. So Anchorage, the crypto asset custodian, it looks like they're seeking a federal charter with the OCC in order to be a national bank here. So far I did this a few weeks ago. Figure did this a few weeks ago. This looks to be a trend, officially a trend here. You'll love to see it. we need to maximize the number of new banks and financial institutions. We need to add competitiveness to that sector.

Yeah, what do you make of this Binance news that they're suing Forbes on defamation claims? I thought finance was decentralized. How can they be a plaintiff in a lawsuit? Yeah, this is not a good look for sure. It looks like these journalists over at Forbes got leaked some documents. that purported to explain how Binance has been evading U.S. regulators and structuring itself in a way to essentially allow U.S. citizens to use the platform but not have exposure to the U.S. regulatory apparatus.

And obviously, Binance did not like that. And they are suing those journalists. Yeah, it seems a little bit like wanting to have your cake and eat it too. I mean, when it comes to avoiding regulation, finance claims to be largely, decentralized. We've seen this. They had a very public spat with the block a while back. And now when it comes to benefiting from the legal system, they are actively engaged in a lawsuit on the plaintiff's side. So I don't know. I'm not a fan of double talk. I would prefer that they would just bite the bullet and be clear about where their legal domicile is and where they're based really as an exchange.

Yeah. Would you make a... of the mooch is getting in the crypto game. So Skybridge Capital, the firm started by Anthony Scaramucci, large hedge fund of funds, has filed paperwork with the SEC that indicates that Skybridge is going to be getting into the crypto asset game. So potentially investing in managers, it looks like, potentially doing some things directly themselves. So big name firm moving in.

Yeah, the jokes kind of write themselves here. So I don't even know if you have to say it. But yeah, hopefully he's a longer tenure in the crypto industry, then. He had in the White House. I'd say the joke. Wasn't that funny. No, really. That's like the 50th time.

Someone's made that joke. But yeah, is he well known for his sort of asset management prowess? Honestly, I have no idea. He's got a pretty significant fund by AUM, fund of funds. Yeah, I'd say he's well known for sure. All right. So another thing I saw this week was, you know, of course, Jamie Diamond is back in the news with Bitcoin.

He loves blockchain to be. clear the guy loves some blockchain, but he is not a fan of Bitcoin. And he kind of repeated this longstanding belief that governments are going to be heavy-handed and ultimately regulate this thing. I believe his exact words were that governments would come in to regulate it, which newsflash, it's already regulated at the on and off ramps in most countries. So I don't know what to make this. I mean, there's, I feel like we talk about this every quarter where Jamie Diamond and comes out and says something about Bitcoin that's not well researched, but he loves blockchain, the underlying technology.

At what point do you get to the point with these financial services executives where it's just not okay to have opinions that are not researched and articulate? I gave a talk at a large financial institution, which I won't name today, and they're still really keen on private blockchains in the year of our Lord 2020. Believe it or not. That's a shame. That's tough.

I believe that I converted some of them into seeing the promise of public blockchains. But yeah, I was pretty surprised by that. I mean, it's been like six years of enterprise blockchains going absolutely nowhere. I mean,

what has been deployed on the enterprise blockchain side? What are people using? Almost nothing. No, it's an entire, or nothing burger of an industry. Now, the thing that's kind of weird about this is, you know, there's probably one school thought that says, look, there's an emerging new technology. Jamie Diamond is a super busy guy.

Obviously, he's a very smart person. He runs an enormously successful company. He's got a lot on his plate. So he probably doesn't have time to go deep into all sorts of new technologies. He probably doesn't know much about biotech and, you know, nanotech and all sorts of crazy technologies that are emerging. Now, at the same time, this is a technology that, fundamentally could change what his business looks like and represents the emergence of a new

asset class, represents potential threat to his business. And so I think two, three years from now, having these type of, hey, the government's going to shut it down or I don't believe in Bitcoin, I believe in the blockchain, these are not going to be fiduciarily responsible opinions to express publicly. I think they've got a couple of years before, you know, they start to be really shamed for having these somewhat naive stances on the asset class. I mean, it really hasn't sunk in for a lot of people yet that this is actually a genuine macro asset alongside the rest of them. But it will soon. We're not far from that moment. I guess what I would think of comparing it to would be maybe in 1992 or 1993, a newspaper executive dismissing the internet. You know,

that's probably fine in that time frame, but you fast forward five or six years. That's a, of really inexcusable foiepah. The analogy I was thinking about today was gold in the 1970s when it went from being a non-financialized asset. It was something people used as a savings device, but it wasn't really integrated into the wheels of finance. And then it gradually became a bunch of financial products were created around gold. and it was incredibly volatile in the 70s.

It went through this monetization phase. That's kind of where Bitcoin is. It's monetizing. The financial infrastructure is not built. We've built a small fraction of it, but it's not done. And people are beginning to understand it as a new asset class, but it takes a long time. It's going to take several decades for Bitcoin. So that's the analogy I'd give.

Gold was very, very volatile during that period. So I keep seeing this argument about volatility. I don't see how that's delegitimizing at all. Volatility isn't something that Bitcoin controls. That's just variance in the market's understanding of Bitcoin. That's all it means. Yeah, it's kind of back to the Spencer Bogart has the Bitcoin as a platypus analogy where he talks about the discovery of the platypus and how if you look at it and you didn't

know what it was, you'd compare it to all sorts of different creatures. maybe it's a beaver, maybe it's a duck. And so I think part of this is that the volatility argument is really looking at Bitcoin through the lens of a payments technology. And obviously you wouldn't want a highly volatile asset if you're trying to make just everyday cup of coffee purchases. I just don't know how anybody can look at Bitcoin today and think of it as a retail payments platform.

It's just so far beyond that at this point. I was listening to Odd Lots this morning. Great podcast. That was a great. Melton did a great job in that episode. Melton always when she, you know, does these non-crypto interviews, she always acquits herself extremely well. And this was no exception.

And Tracy Alloway on the episode said, you know, Bitcoin is this malleable thing. the narratives around Bitcoin are constantly changing. And that's obviously something we've pointed out in the past too. But that's the strength in her eyes. You know, the Bitcoin is pretty much invariant. It is what it is. But the way that it's perceived is changing. And since Bitcoiners are endlessly creative, that means we can constantly come up with new bullish narratives. So just change the, change the narrative. There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong that we've been pivoting since day one probably pivot again who knows what it'll be this time next year

do you see bloomberg came out with the headline bitcoin is gunning for a record and no one is talking about it people are people are talking about it yeah so um brad mickleson at um etorro actually pointed out that if you do a more sophisticated analysis of the search uh more people are actually talking about Bitcoin as opposed to in 2017. Oh, really? That Google Trends thing is only if you look at the keyword Bitcoin, but if you look at all associated keywords, in fact, the most commonly search thing is not Bitcoin, but Bitcoin price.

If you look at that bundle of associated keywords, we're actually ahead of 2017. So this quiet rally is actually a fallacy. It's a loud rally. Oh, it's louder. It's louder than we thought. But that said, other retail indicators like, pay. Page views at Coinbase are not anywhere near what they were in 2017. So getting a lot of searches.

We're not getting as much kind of retail interest, which makes sense. So it's not as many kind of fun ICOs to invest in these days. Yeah, that makes sense. I thought Fidelity Digital Assets put out a great piece this week addressing persisting Bitcoin criticisms, kind of a fud dice run through of sorts put out by Ria Batoria, a really good piece. Great work from Ria. She's so good at these.

you know, a lot of people have tried their hand at rebutting these critiques, you know, me among them, but sometimes you need someone like Ria just to put it together in a nice, easy, consumable piece. And I thought hers was really, really well done. All right. So why don't we close it out talking about your article this week? So you wrote a medium post, nine Bitcoin charts already at all-time highs, why this bull run is fundamentally different from 2017. Yeah, so I'll let you, why don't you pick one? we can talk about it. All right. Let's talk about one that I really like talking about, which is Bitcoin held by Grayscale. Talk about why this matter is what the dynamic here is.

Yeah. So that is, that's one of the most important ones, actually. If you look at the seasonality of Bitcoin price over the last few months, it's pumping during business hours during the week. What is the cause of that? The cause of that is Grayscale. It's because Grayscale only adds units of Bitcoin during business hours. Fun fact. So this rally is driven by, you know, individuals on those brokerages adding Bitcoin to their portfolio in GBDC format. And it's driven by those funds that are playing that arbitrage, which benefit from that persistent premium, which exists because of those investors buying GPDC on Schwab and on Fidelity. So it's not just that there's funds that are doing the trade. The arbitrage is,

is only worth it because there's a persistent premium, because it's consistently bit up by those investors that need to hold Bitcoin in a tax advantage away. But the AUM gray scale is stacking on right now is absurd. They're over 10 billion now. They're over 10 billion. So I think there's some really interesting market structure, kind of microstructure, actually, things that are happening as a result of gray scale, as a result of this premium. So the premium is still, what, like 20% I think some days.

10 to 20% yeah. Yeah. So the existence of this premium is actually drawing more large hedge funds into the Bitcoin spot market and into the Bitcoin lending markets in order to do interesting things to try to arm this premium. So it's actually great because the byproduct here is that just more infrastructure is being built out to support these type of institutional participants in this market. So I mean, I'm sure that would have happened without this product, but that's a big impetus.

It's sort of like a flashing a dollar sign up here and there's this carrot to go grab. Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, why are interest rates so structurally high for Bitcoin? Partly because GBDC exists. Because there's a bunch of funds here that are doing that trade. They need to borrow Bitcoin. Now, you call up your prime broker,

your traditional prime broker and you ask them to do something in the crypto space. It's not that easy. I mean, yeah, some of them are doing stuff around GBTC, but not all of them. And certainly they're not going to be able to offer you spot market Bitcoin exposure. They're not going to be able to lend to you. So you're going to have to go to Genesis and BlockFi and a few of these other places. So there's a whole market structure reason why this exists as a premium right now. And it's another part of this business case where if you're on the inside of big Wall Street Bank right now, hey, why aren't we doing something here?

Yeah, this is something you've been thinking about recently. If you look at Bitcoin, you look at Ether, you look at stable coins, interest rates are structurally very high and they have been for a long time now. But why is that? Because in theory, you can just convert as much commercial bank dollars as you want to stable coins take advantage of those high interest rates. But that is not normalizing with regular old interest rates. The gap is not closing. So what is it about the crypto industry that means that your interest rates are structurally high? What would you venture as an explanation. I think it's a market structure issue. I think that the the apparatus for large institutional participants to actually get in and trade and do things in this market just isn't built

out yet. And I also think that some of the standards that exist in other asset classes around like reference rates and lending rates and, you know, the lending curve and things like that where you can get these things very easily in treasury markets and bond markets. They just haven't been built out yet. I mean, they were built out for these other asset classes through the 80s and 90s, and it hasn't been done yet in this asset class. Well, so that's, that failure is the opportunity of anybody that wants to lend on blockfire or any of these other platforms. Collect your double-digit interest rates. They're still available. Yeah, and Zach Prince has talked about this. Actually, Zach did a nice presentation at Oppenheimer today that I watched, and he was talking about that,

some of that structural, the structural reasons why that interest rate exists and why it's going to persist for a while. It's not like this is going to go away next week, next month, next year. It's going to take an awful lot of infrastructure to be built. And that's not going to happen overnight. Well, so far it sucked a lot of capital into the industry. I mean, I would describe the growth of stable coins at least partially to that interest rate draw the same way that when a central bank sets interest rates high, they do that in order to draw capital into a beleaguered banking system. That's exactly what happened in Lebanon. It didn't work. They still had their currency crisis. But it's the same exact phenomenon. You set interest rates high, that draws capital in. That's

exactly what's been happening in crypto in a more organic way. Right. Now, the other thing on the stable coin front, why it's structurally high is just the demand for dollars outside the United States. And so that, you know, I think that'll persist for a while. Yeah, that's right. That's all central bankers. That's the only thing they're concerned about as a percentage of crypto is their monetary privilege being abolished by a dollarization event. If you listen to them talk, they're not worried about Bitcoin, but they are worried about stable coins. It's quite telling.

Yeah. All right. So I think that's it for the content today. you're finally done with the content yeah i'm going to relax and uh we've got the bird bowl on right now cardinal seahawks so oh wow i'm going to have a beer and take the rest of the night off well the Patriots are back in a big way that was a big win for you guys the big statement win yeah we'll see the bills might be a little hard to catch here for the playoffs though yeah the bills are looking good um well we'll be back for thanksgiving

We will not be taking the week off. Yeah, no weeks off for us. And we have pretty great guests coming next Tuesday. Not Monday. Tuesday. Tuesday. So we're mixing it up for you all. We have recorded it.

We have recorded it. So we're not being lazy. No, yeah. It's recorded. It's just you'll understand. There's a specific catalyst we're waiting for. Really exciting episode, though. Super pumped to share it with you all.

All right, everyone. Have a safe and healthy weekend. And we'll talk to you on Tuesday.