On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 11/28/24 (OFAC loses vs Tornado, Cantor owns some Tether, More OCP2.0, Who we're thankful for) (EP.578)

Episode Date: November 28, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another Thanksgiving episode of OTB. In this episode: Fire departments love thanksgiving Who we're thankful for Eggnog is underrated Justin Sun puts $30m into World Liberty Financial Marc Andreessen appears on Joe Rogan and covers OCP 2.0 Why were non crypto tech peopled shocked by Choke Point revelations? Trump is looking to shift power from the SEC to the CFTC An appeals court rules that OFAC exceeded its authority by sanctioning Tornado Cash Cantor owns a 5% ownership stake in Tether that they acquired at a $12b valuation How prudent is the establishment of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Can the government pay down its debt with Bitcoin? Careful what you wish for on the strategic reserve Sponsor notes: Coin Metrics: MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Mega Strategy: Analyzing MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings, acquisition strategy, and its role as a Bitcoin treasury company

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought you by Coin Metrics, and here is the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at Micro Strategies, recent performance and Bitcoin Strategy. So micro strategy has been one of the best performing stocks in equity markets, delivering 700% returns since 2022 and 460% year-to-date. My goodness. They have 386,000 Bitcoin in their treasury. That's worth 37 billion. They're the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin. They hold 1.9% of the Bitcoin supply. The stock trades at a two and a half

times premium to the net asset value. In case you're wondering if it's a buy, its Bitcoin acquisitions are funded through these convertible bond offerings. The total debt stands at $7.2 billion, following a recent $3 billion raise at 0% interest notes maturing in 2029. Their performance exhibits at 1.5 to 2 times greater volatility than Bitcoin itself, often overperforming during bullish periods and underperforming during declines. quite the stock.

That is your metrics minute, courtesy of coin metrics. Well, we have a new main character, I guess. If there was any doubt, it is micro strategy. Yeah, I was actually thinking about that. I mean, who is the main character? And I guess it has to be Michael Saylor. I mean, he turned micro strategy into a meme stock. Yeah, it's a complete machine.

So last, what was it? Sunday night, everyone thought that we're going to go to all-time highs 100K, because everyone thought that Sailor was going to put the money into the market on Sunday night or Monday. It turns out he had already bought it looks like 55,500 Bitcoin for $5.4 billion last week. And it was just disclosed on Monday morning. So a little bit of a sell-off. We jinxed the $100K because as soon as we said, hey, we're going to $100K in the last podcast episode, Jim Kramer came out and endorsed Bitcoin. So you knew we were selling off.

I have a good feeling about it, though. I think it could be Thanksgiving. I think it could vindicate all of the crypto traders coming up from the basement to join their family at Thanksgiving. You know, there's our little crypto trader. Tell us, tell everyone how your coins are doing. I think it could be it.

Playing with his magical internet money, threw away a perfectly good job at Fidelity. Just go play with his magic internet money. Yeah, I think that could be us at Thanksgiving tomorrow. Do you think you'd get asked about FTX? I hope not. That was a tough Thanksgiving. What was that two years ago?

It's just, hey, do you see this Sam Bankman Fried? It's like, yeah, I saw. Yeah, I've heard of him. SBF, yeah. In fact, I know him. Yes, yeah. The name does ring a bell. Yeah, we have heard of him, yeah.

I'm in the Hurt Locker now because he tore down my industry. I don't know. I think it's been long enough. People have forgotten about him a little bit. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, this is a special Thanksgiving episode. We're recording this the night before Thanksgiving. I'd say I'm on my conservatively speaking sixth coffee of the day.

It is a busy time in this industry. Yeah, I'm meant to be marinating various meats for my meat smoking endeavors tomorrow. Actually, I've been put in charge of the feast, which is unwise. I don't think I should be in charge of that. Friend of the firm told me they were having a turduck in, which just sounds incredible. Have you ever had one of this? and chicken and they're all inside of one another. Concentricely, yeah.

I need to try one of those. I am smoking the turkey. It's an interesting turkey strategy, smoking the turkey. You can do that. You can just do things. What is that just like green egg situation? Yeah, in the smoker. You suspend it in there.

It actually, it's very hard to ruin the turkey when you smoke it. A little fun fact for you right there. Interesting. There's always just turkey related injuries that come up. What is the contraption that you dip it into the boiling water? is that or what is that? Yeah, I think I think what you're meant to do is take a fully frozen turkey. Do not thaw it and drop it aggressively into the boiling oil. The gas. Goil. Yeah. Yeah. That was a joke. Take a picture. Yeah. Get it on video. This is like every Thanksgiving, every single fire department in the nation releases a video of like, this is what happens if you drop a frozen turkey into the deep friar.

everything and they just look forward to it because like oh guys we get to do the video again it's true it's that in the 4th of july it's very busy days yeah and but the thing is people are still going to do they'll still do it they'll drop the frozen turkey into the oil it's gonna happen yeah i mean you get about you know 14 eggnogs in you you'll you'll do just about anything i actually love eggnog i feel like everyone hates it i'm a big eggnog and joy that's my that's my answer to the question what do you What's one thing you believe that no one agrees with you on? Eggnog.

Oh, no, I totally co-sign on that. I was in the grocery store the other day. They have it out. It's ready to go. I will be buying eggnog this week. I don't even know what it is. What is eggnog? Is it a dairy product?

Yeah, it's like a milkshake. I think it's a milkshake. I don't know what it is. It's great. So we are going to do a segment later in the episode, what we're thankful for. There's a lot to be thankful for this year, Matt. A lot.

So much to be thankful for this year. This has been a great end of the year, which makes it a great year. There have been other years when we've really had to search for things to be thankful for, not 2024. I have a long, long list of people I'm thankful for this year. So I'm excited about that section. Why don't we start out with some deals of the week? There were deals.

First up, we have open trade at RWA-backed yield product platform. There is $4 million from AlbionVC, A16C, crypto, and CMCC Global. Then it's Talis Network. blockchain protocol for AI agents. They raise $6 million from polychain, Anamoca, and Foresight. Then we have Schumann Financial. They're a Eurobacked stable coin issuer. There is $7 million from Brockaway X, Lightspeed faction, and Cracken Ventures. Then it's Colonel Dow, a restaking protocol that raised $10 million from finance labs, SCB, limited, and laser digital. Then we have World Liberty Financial. The infamous Trump-backed Defi Protocol, there is $30 million.

from none other than Tron. Congratulations. Justin's son. He strikes again. Speaking of main characters, he's trying to be. Yeah. This one, I guess, makes sense he's trading $30 million for support at the Trump administration. I guess that's how it works.

Or maybe he just loves the fundamentals of the coin. That's possible, too. You can't buy citizenship for $30 million. What's the play here? This is not one of these. What was he? He was like the ambassador of some country that he paid money to? He was a grenade.

Was it Granada? Granada? He was a Grenaden diplomat. His excellency, right? But then he lost that, I think. He was stripped of that. Yeah, it must have expired. But I think you basically can buy an ambassadorship, but maybe not if you were just in son.

Maybe not if you're a foreign national. Yeah. I think there's a good reminder to just, let's be careful this cycle. Like the bad actors. let's try to minimize it. I don't want to be doing this podcast 18 months from now and bringing back the bad boys section. I just kind of love that, you know,

of all the people you thought wouldn't make it through the cycles, Justin's son was Teflon the whole time. Yes. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong about that, but incredibly, he's survived and thrived this whole time. He's so far, so far. Tron turns out is a very used blockchain. The other Teflon, not in the same category as Justin's son is Tether.

I mean, Tether won this election in such a big way. Now they've got their guy. He's running commerce. I don't know what that means exactly. But what a political bailout for Tether that was. Yeah, it's incredible. So the Wall Street Journal had an article today that Cantor has, I guess, it's suggested that they actually consummated this deal, that they now owned 5% of Tether.

It looks like this business is valued at $12 billion for this transaction, which seems actually cheap. I mean, that's, without revealing too much, that's in line with what I've heard in terms of private marks. It's not like tether slugs trade very frequently, but that's basically one and a half to two X times revenue. I mean, that's very, very reasonable. The thing spits out a dividend from what, uh, what I've heard.

And, um, obviously Cantor is the custodian for, Tether's U.S. Treasury holdings. Cantor's run by Howard Butnik, who is now going, if he gets confirmed, I guess, we'll be stepping back from Cantor. Very strategic move by Tether to get closer to Cantor. They're not a bank, so it doesn't really solve the banking issues for Tether, but it is broker-dealer. I mean, they hold all of the treasuries.

Yeah, more on the banking, debanking issue in a bit. It's been the biggest day ever for the debanking discourse. I think. Well, I guess we can talk about it now. So Mark Andreessen went on the Joe Rogan podcast and delivered just a blistering three-hour diatribe on all manner of topics. I mean, it was an incredible episode. Have you listened to it yet?

I think it was the best Rogan episode I've ever heard, actually. I listened to it on 1.5x speed with Andreessen talking. That's listening to it on 3x, basically. but just got to the heart of so many issues and so many things that I have been struggling to articulate. I thought he did a great job articulating, particularly just around the debanking of crypto startups, the Biden administration's policy towards emerging technology companies. I thought it was phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, his commentary on AI where he basically said they talked to the Harris campaign

and the Biden admin, and it seemed like the objective was. to just enshrine one or two AI companies as the winners and harshly regulate them and promote whatever political agenda they had via that regulation and then just leave everybody else out in the cold. That's terrifying. I mean, I wish we'd known that before the election. That's very salient information. Yeah, that was a particularly revealing part of that episode. And Rogan asked him, wow, so you leave a meeting like that where they tell you what they're going to do, what do you do? And his answer was, you go and endorse Donald Trump. I mean, and the, obviously the debanking stuff we know well that's, we had a whole choke point miniseries dating back to, I think, 2021, maybe even before it happened to us.

I mean, I'm getting ahead of ourselves, but I'm thankful for Mark for putting this in terms that everyone can understand. and just blasting the doors off on this thing. I mean, it was so interesting. I saw all these technologists, non-crypto people, watching the episode reacting to this with total bafflement, with amazement. Did this really happen? Was there a concerted conspiracy from the Biden admin

to use a sensibly neutral financial regulation to marginalize an entire industry? People couldn't believe it. That's how insane it is. They couldn't believe it. And Rogan himself was just shocked and I felt like I wanted to scream. It's like, yes, every single company in our portfolio has had this issue of getting debanked, not being able to get a bank account.

It is something that we have dealt with for the past three years at a extreme velocity. Yeah, I mean, there's people who were asking like, well, do you know anyone that's been debanked? I'm like, everyone I know. Everyone I know. Me. Me. Yes. Okay.

in 2016 I wired bonds to Bitfinex and doxing myself a little bit and I was debanked for that I was de-risked and in our portfolio especially since 22 early 23 every single one of these firms has had bank problems every single one and it's every it's every firm

I mean Castle Island has had this issue where we've tried to get bank accounts and certain financial institutions haven't been able to Luckily, there's some friendly ones where we've been able to, I would say, like, negotiate a business bank account, which is just crazy. Yeah. And we are a fiat in, fiat out business. You know, that's what happens. And even that was too scary.

I mean, Andresen has had this issue infamously with Coinbase, you know, dating back to the early, early days trying to get that SVB account. They had to pull so many favors to get Coinbase banked back in the early days. And then, I mean, Mark Andresen has the best vantage point of maybe anyone on this because they have so many crypto firms. They have the data showing that this is real. So it was just a monumental day for this discourse. And I think it's going to really accelerate things in Washington. Yeah, you had a tweet about the Overton window basically just shifting with that conversation. And it really has because Andreson was a, he was a Democrat.

I mean, he was a Clinton supporter, Hillary supporter. So he was totally shifted on this. basically because of the policies towards financial services. So it'll be really interesting to see where this dialogue goes. But Operation Choke Point, let's get the investigations going. We have to get to the bottom of this and we have to prevent this from happening again. Yeah, and I had a tweet today, you know, I honestly think Democrats should be glad that Trump ran on an anti-debanking platform because the Republicans could have said, you know, turn about his fair play.

That's what Vance said in another context. And they could have used the existing apparatus to go after other industries that they wanted to debank. But they didn't. In Trump's first admin, they installed the Fair Access Rule. They ended choke point one. Trump has declared his intent to end choke point two. And this is part of the platform. So I think Democrats should be pleased, frankly, that this is part.

part of Trump's stated ambition is to end the politicization of banking. They're not going to, as far as I know, go after leftist causes with it. What I would like to see would be legislation. I think it should be bipartisan, frankly, enshrining some kind of neutrality into the banking sector. Because banks are heavily regulated. It's not a free market thing. So the free market cannot correct when this happens. It's just crazy.

So that was a huge story this week. The other story, I guess this got a little bit overshadowed, but it's a huge deal. So a U.S. Federal Appeals Court has ruled that the Office of Foreign Asset Control, which is a division of Treasury, has exceeded their authority by sanctioning tornado cash, which is the basically open source smart contracts that facilitate peer-to-peer value transfer, kind of a mixing service, I guess I would classify it as. So they had been sanctioned by OFAC, basically open-source software that had been sanctioned. if you did anything with that open source software, you would be in violation of the OFAC rules.

U.S. Appeals Court has said that that is not allowed. So you cannot take a smart contract and treat it like a person, basically. Yeah, a huge, huge deal. I didn't expect this. Actually, you know, shout out for Coinbase for involvement in this case, for Coin Center as well, but a really, really significant win in the courts. Yeah. So the implication, there are pretty profound. So that's going to have a big impact on the DFI ecosystem, I would imagine. I think one notable thing that some folks have been saying is that this applies particularly because I suppose the contracts, smart contracts were immutable.

Right. They burned the keys. There was no one in control them. So maybe the facts and circumstances would be different in the case of a protocol that is not immutable. But even so. a really nice common sense rolling from the court. So in other regulatory news, there's a report coming out that says that President Trump

is planning to shift crypto regulatory power to the CFTC and away from the SEC. I guess not that the SEC had it to begin with. I mean, the SEC does not have oversight of digital commodities, which a lot of these things are. But there's a lot of murmurings that the plan is to basically hand this over to the CFTC. and to marginalize the SEC.

Interesting development there. Yeah, frankly, I think there's a role for both. When these things are commodities, it should be the CFTC Zambit. When they are securities, and some of them resemble securities, it should be the SEC. The SEC is a much larger regulator and more equipped to deal with a large industry. I think there's room for both, and I would hope that the SEC would go about crafting some kind of regime whereby we have issuance and disclosure standards

for tokens that look like securities. I wouldn't hope that both would be at the table, actually. I'd say there was this brewing conversation in the community around, you know, should you even have two agencies to begin with? And I don't know where I come down on that, because on one hand, you look at other countries and their commodities regulator is the same as the securities regulator. It's all under one wrapper. And you could see an argument. that that would be a lot easier in the United States. And if we're going to be trying to cut down on government expenditure, maybe that's a path.

The flip side of that is, can you imagine a world where Gary Gensler was in charge of both at the same time? He probably could have killed crypto. Yeah, it's funny to go to other countries and realize they've won regulator for everything, all capital markets. And we have seven. I mean, we have the FDIC. We have the Fed.

We have the OCC. We have the CFTC, we have the SEC, we have the CFPB. Right. We got to get rid of that one. We don't like the CFPB. We don't like the CFPB. But I don't know. I mean, you could see that would make it really easy.

If your Coinbase, you would just operate, I guess, in exchange for the commodities and for the securities and only have one regulator. But you got to be careful what you wish for there. Yeah. I mean, especially if we got a favorable SEC chair, which it looks like we will, based on recent reports. What's the rumor now? Paul Atkins? Yeah, that's the one I'm seeing.

All right. So what else happened this week? Ripple has announced that they're tokenizing a money market fund on the XRP ledger. They also announced a product with Bitwise, XRP, ETF product in Europe. So Ripple is another big winner in this election. For sure. Micro Strategy, as we said, they bought another 55,000 Bitcoin for $5.4 billion. And Polly Market has restricted users in,

France from using that platform after the French whale won $80 million betting on President Trump to win the election. So this is why you can't have nice things in France. France is just a nice place to visit, just a bad place to do business. This is like one of those Matt Levine case studies where first you have to win the trade, but then you also have to find a way to get the proceeds of the trade. And is Theo going to be able to cash out here? Poor guy. Or did he win so hard that he actually doomed himself in a way? He's going to end up having to leave the country and live in Switzerland or something.

In Brazil, Brazilian lawmaker Eros Biondini has proposed a bill to make a national Bitcoin Reserve for Brazil. This Bitcoin Reserve thing is still gaining a lot of steam here. Yeah, I continue to be a seller of the Strategic Reserve concept. but that's more because I don't think it's likely to happen. That's not because I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah, I think it's a good idea. You could see the dominoes falling into place.

It's one of those ideas that might be outside of the Overton window, though, for now. But you don't want someone else to do it first. It looks like it'll happen. I mean, nimble or smaller countries will do it. They already are. Explain steps two through five on how this is going to repay the government debt. Are you buying onto that storyline? No, I mean, what's the debt?

Is it 37 trillion? Yes. And Bitcoin is worth $2 trillion, all of it, maybe? Well, let's say that Bitcoin goes to a million dollars a coin or something, and you're in striking distance. Yeah, let's say it goes past gold. Let's say it goes to $20 trillion. And, you know, you can make a chip into the debt.

I would think that you just, you wouldn't be able to like sell it to cash. in that size to pay the debt. You'd have to have a situation where your creditors are willing to accept a Bitcoin as payment. Yeah, I think the concept would be you accumulate a reserve maybe similar to the share of gold. I was doing some math around this. We have 3.4% of all the gold.

So we could acquire that amount of the Bitcoin. That would be doable, relatively. And I think the concept would be then, you would just install a Bitcoin standard as the base of the global monetary system, similar to how we were on the gold standard. The dollar was a weight of gold. Every other currency was a weight of the dollar.

And we held all the gold for everyone. So I think that has to be the logic that you don't sell it. You just gradually move on to a new standard. But when we did that, we also had just won a World War. Every other country on the planet was in ruins. I think the U.S. government had 40% of all of the above ground gold in our vaults. at that point. Right.

And by the way, the way they got that gold was through force. Through confiscation. And confiscation. So it's kind of a careful way you wish for concept, in my opinion.

If the U.S. government becomes adamant that they want to create a Bitcoin standard and restore a Bitcoin version of the gold standard, would they run the same playbook, outlaw private ownership of Bitcoin,

forced conversion and unfavorable price? You know? and ban private holding of Bitcoin for the duration as they did with gold? I don't know if that's what you want. I would hope that that would never happen again in this country, but you never know. I mean, the other side of this is that if you get people thinking too hard about what your currency is backed by, you might not like where that goes.

Case in point, Terraluna. Yeah, let's not pop the, like, whenever you ask people, would the dollars back by, 30% of them will say gold still. Right. Let's not shadowed the illusion. You know, we still have a lot of assets that are in dollars. It would be nice that the dollar didn't vanish. Okay.

Let's keep this thing going for a little longer. You know, people like to say that Bitcoin is this kind of fictitious thing that just lives in the ether. It's like, yeah, but kind of the dollar's just backed by GDP and, you know, nuclear weapons at the end of the day. So some of those things are very tangible. Some of those are very non-tangible. I mean, it's like our ability to collect tax revenues in,

it's our credit worthiness, it's our ability to pay the debt. If the government is buying Bitcoin and saying we've lost faith in the dollar and we're going for Bitcoin now, I think that that spikes interest rates like crazy because people like, well, you're going to have to pay me a lot to hold your debt, you know? Right. So I don't know if we want that. I think I'm fine with just let's get a market structure bill. Let's get a stable coin bill. this Bitcoin thing would be great, but why don't we put that on the back burner?

So we have a new segment, or it's actually a recurring segment. We probably, have we done this every year? There's been five years. I think we have. Yeah, I think we have. So who are we thankful for? There's a lot.

Do you want to start with your first name? I'll start it out, man. There's so many names to be thankful for this year. My first one up would be just the entrepreneurs in this industry who've been, chewing glass for the best four years under the current administration, just fighting to figure out ways to pay their employees, raise capital, keep their teams motivated. It's been just a great few weeks of talking to entrepreneurs who are coming out of the other side of that. So I am very

thankful for all of the entrepreneurs that stuck with it. We had a few duplicates. We both had some of the same names on our list. One of them is the Coinbase Policy Team, Paul Grewell, and his staff. They've been doing yeoman's work, winning cases. They foiled the FDIC and they got concrete evidence of choke point 2.0, doing God's work in Washington, supporting Vershake, you know, convincing the nation that there is a crypto lobby and a crypto grassroots movement. Well done. Coinbase policy team. Really well done. You know you've reached elite status when portfolio companies are referring to the types of people they need to hire and saying, I need a Paul Gray-Wall type.

That's how you know you've made it. So yeah, kudos to them. I'll throw in the Defi Education Fund, who's also been just great this year, amended to Minnelli over there, surfacing these lawsuits and really going after the SEC for its overreach. Next up, I think they're on the list every year. Coin Center, Peter, Jerry, Noraj, Anthony, Holter. team over there, been at it for 10 years now, 10 full years, basically the same team the whole time.

And, you know, they're showing their heft. They're winning cases. And they've stuck to their guns this whole time. And they throw a great party every year. So thank you, CoinSenter. Just a highly effective organization. Not that many people over there, but they just, wow, what a very effective group of people there.

Yeah. And Jerry's stepping down this year. So what an outstanding legacy, Jerry Brito leaves. Yeah, he had a great run. I will, my next one will be Fairshake. So the political action committee, this was the year, this was the cycle that we decided we weren't going to take it anymore. We're going to start to fight back and you want to put us out of business and unconstitutionally shut down an industry, then you will be hearing from us. So fair shake just turns out to be a remarkable group of people that were highly, highly effective.

I think won 48 out of 48 races or something crazy like that. Yeah, I mean, what a start for them, you know, as a pack. Incredible first bite at the apple here and a force we reckon with in Washington now. My next name is Austin Campbell, of course, professor now at NYU. He's my stable coin guru. Most of my stable coin talking points just are repackaged. Austin talking points. So in case you're wondering where I get my information from.

And just consistently spreading the gospel of stable coins in places where it's otherwise not heard. So well done. Keep it up. Talking to that guy is like talking to an encyclopedia. He can really pull out information. They're like, wow, I can't believe you know all this. Yeah. My next one is going to be not a person, but it is going to be, I am very thankful for the administrative

Procedures Act because it turns out that this act, I don't know when it came about, but this has saved the skin of the crypto industry numerous times. And Gary Gensler, it turns, I don't know, has he heard of this administrative procedures act? Because he's like, oh, for 12 against it. Mine is a special no thanks to the Bank Secrecy Act. I think it's one of the worst laws ever written. And, you know, I think in the next four years, it will be challenged at the Supreme Court.

I believe it's unconstitutional. I've been saying this for a long time. I think it may be the end of the Bank Secrecy Act. That's my stretch goal for the next four years. That's possible. It's definitely possible. All right, my next one, have you ever had a really bad boss?

Honestly, no. I've only ever had good bosses. I'm not just trying to gas you up or anything. Okay. I've only had like two bosses ever, actually, in my life. I've had some bad ones, but I can't imagine what these two next people are. have had to deal with. So Hester Perce and Mark Ueda, SEC commissioners, they have just been sitting

there and just writing these dissents, just countless number of dissents here for the crypto industry, really, I guess, just for civil liberties when you come down to it. But thankfully, we had those two individuals over at the SEC fighting back against some of the stuff. It wasn't always effective, but the fact that they were sitting there and fighting the good fight, I'm very thankful that we have public servants like that. My last one is Elon Musk. Thank you for buying Twitter. And I know obviously some people are upset by this and they're now on Blue Sky,

shouting into the void. But thank you, Elon, for becoming politically engaged this cycle. I think it made a huge difference. And for keeping Twitter open and relatively functional and censorship-free, I think it made a huge, huge difference. I would totally agree with that. Next one, and I guess my last one, is Joe Biden's debate prep team. So thank you from the bottom of our hearts, all of the crypto fund managers and entrepreneurs

who now get to stay in the United States. You have changed the course of history. So appreciate all the work you did this year. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot more names that I'm sure we could come up with. So many people deserve thanks for the political shift that's underway. And the fact that we got a second lease on life here as an industry, It feels like there's a new dawn in America really does feel that way, and especially for the crypto industry, which has just been up against it for four years. It's going to be a fun 2025.

It's one of those feelings, though, where you look around and you're like, well, what am I missing? What's going to blow up around me? Yeah, I can't shake that. I think we've been around too long to not have this slight worry, this tingle of a dumer instinct. keep an eye out for a December surprise. There could be something brewing at the SEC. December surprise. Yeah, don't celebrate too early here.

I think the SEC, you know, there's still, what, a month left here? A little bit more. Well, if you're joining us on Thanksgiving, thanks for listening, as always. I don't know why we still do the podcast. I guess it's for the listeners, five years of this. Five years of this. Well, we are thankful for our listenership. So thank you to everyone who hung in there.

You know, thank you to the guy who takes the 5K runs and tweets about it on Farcaster every time. Thankful for that guy. All the people that hop into the Farcester community, thank you for listening. Are you doing a turkey trot tomorrow? There is a turkey trot. It's supposed to be a Nor'Easter up here, though. It's supposed to be pouring rain.

I'd like to run it, but I just don't know if I want to go out in 30-degree pouring rain weather. How about you? Yeah. Yeah, it's going to rain here. I have to do a 10K in in miserable conditions, but we're going to do it and then I'm going to be smoking some meats in the rain as well. The turkey trot is definitely the best way to start Thanksgiving. I love it. I don't run it very fast, but it's fun. It's great. It is fun. Well, I'll be a game time decision. All right, everyone, that is it. We'll be back next week with, I think, a couple of episodes. So everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. And Happy Thanksgiving. We will see you in Monday.