On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 12/06/24 (Bitcoin $100k, Atkins for SEC, more OCP2.0) (EP. 580)

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Bitcoin finally hits $100k Our reflections on 100k BTC Declaring victory Machinsky pleads guilty Rep French Hill pledges to investigate Operation Choke Point Trump nominates Paul Atkins for SEC Chair Hawk Tuah memecoin fiasco Sponsor notes: Coin Metrics State of the Network: Understanding Staking Yields and Economics on Ethereum & Solana Contextualizing staking yields, inflation, and network economics on Ethereum & Solana

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 course it did easy. 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics. And here is the Metrics Minute. today's metrics minute we're looking at staking data on ethereum and salana that's uh you know clearly the main thing happening in crypto markets right now right uh there's 34 million eith staked on the ethereum network that's 134 billion dollars worth 297 million sole staked on salana 70 billion

that's 28 percent of a theorem supply and 51 percent of salonah supply ethereum has a validator set of 1.07 million active validators. Wow. Solana only has 5,048 validators. Ethereum's nominal staking yield is 3.08% with an annualized inflation rate of 35 basis points. Salana's staking yield is 11.5%. And some other stats are on price action. We did cross 100K yesterday. Bitcoin did. It surpassed. I had not heard. Had not heard that. Bitcoin surpass the 100K milestone for the first time on December 4th in the year of our Lord 2024 at 9.34 p.m. Eastern. And this was first reached on the OKX Bitcoin market. That's an insight.

That's an insight by Bitcoin metrics. That's a metric. Yeah, that's a reportable thing. That is a metric. Good job, OKX. And Bitcoin's hourly trading volume across exchanges exceeded $6.5 billion, the second highest. hourly volume recorded in 2024. That is your Metrics Minute.

Metrics Minute. Bringing the heat. They must have known that we did the podcast this week with Lorraine Gable from Vigman. That's why we started with staking. Kind of buried the lead a little bit there. Yeah, we did. So yeah, Bitcoin hit $100,000.

Do you feel anything about this? At the time, I was at Smith and Walensky, actually. Great place. Great place. Miami, from a steakhouse perspective, is very down bad. There are no good steakhouses, and thus the best one is actually Smith and Wolenski, chain restaurant. Best one in the whole city, really?

I know, isn't that so terrible? It's just such an indictment of the city. And I was at the bar. It was on the water. It's actually a great spot, if you know, the Smith and Walensky on South Point. And I was a little fired up, for sure. Things might have got a bit out of control. frankly.

Yeah? You were with some crypto people? Yeah. So we were all pretty excited. Do you know people that aren't crypto people? I guess that was a stupid question. One or two maybe? Yeah.

But vibes were running hot last night. Let me tell you. Well, I was hanging out with some friends, not last night, but over the weekend. And one of them pulled up their Coinbase account and said, do you remember that Patriots game that we went to when you bought the tickets and you said that we could only pay you in Bitcoin? and he said something to the effective. I paid $38,000 to watch Ryan Tannahill crush the Patriots that night. I said, yeah, I hope you bought it back. We were at the bar in Austin the other day,

and we saw an elderly gentleman trading light coin of all things on his phone. What a situation that was. It's like, that's when you know the bull market's reaching exhaustion. a little bit. That was a topy signal. You see a guy at a hotel bar just slinging light coin. Light coin. And then I went to the gym today.

I was wearing my Bitcoin 100K hat, which I've had for three years. Palm gave me that hat three years ago. And I haven't been able to wear it the whole time. And a bunch of folks in the gym were pretty excited about it. But I did a straw poll and they all liked Ripple. actually. Ripple, yeah.

So they like to XRP the standard. Jokes on everyone that hated on Ripple, I suppose, us included. Yeah, jokes on us. Ripple is the future of finance, banking, and payments. South Koreans love Ripple, apparently. Yeah. Were you aware of this? No, but South Korea's got some issues.

This has been a busy week in terms of just crazy things that have happened. South Korea, they're still in martial law? I think that ended, but that, happened. France government collapsed, maybe. Not really falling what they're up to over there. There's an earthquake on the West Coast or a tsunami. Is that just happening as we're recording this? I think just breaking. Sheesh. So lots going on. Yeah. Well, I'm in New York right now recording this at a portfolio company headquarters and there's a lot of noise. I don't know if it's someone's birthday party. I hope they're not having a 100K party. I feel like you can't have 100K

party. Well, the thing I feel about 100K is it's as good a number as any to say that we did it. You know, uh, the job is done and, uh, it's complete. And Bitcoin won and all the no corners were wrong and the book corners were right. So I'm declaring victory. I mean, Bitcoin, what does it have though to reach gold parity? Another 10x from here. 900K Yeah Well I don't think it's I don't think it's over

It might be Uh stops and starts But 100K is pretty arbitrary Yeah yeah No I'm not saying it's over And there's obviously a lot of work to do on Bitcoin

A lot of L2s to build You know whatever But I'm saying If we were to pick a moment To declare victory Would be now You know

I think now is as good at time As I need to say Uh, we did it and the haters are wrong, and we were right. No shortage of haters over the years, that's for sure. The Financial Times had a column today, basically not apologizing for anything they've written about Bitcoin over the years.

I saw that. That was quite, I don't know how to describe that. Provocative. Provocative, tone deaf maybe. Brian Armstrong had a good tweet. He said, regular readers of FTA Alphaville may have formed the impression that we are financially illiterate Marxists. This is correct. The funny thing

is they were digging their heels and basically saying, we stand by everything we've ever written trashing Bitcoin, but they actually don't. They don't. And here's why. How so? Their best ever writer for Alphaville was Isabella Kaminska.

And she used to be a big skeptic of Bitcoin if you remember. And she left and is now, I don't want to misrepresent her views, but I would say, no longer a skeptic, basically. Really? Yeah.

And so she does kind of, I'm not saying she's recanting what she wrote, but I don't think she has the same attitude that she did. So their best writer left and is no longer a Bitcoin hater, which is, so I think that, yeah, basically their views did change, or at least hers did. I put out a tweet, I don't know, last Friday maybe. it's a Venn diagram and it has basically two circles. One says can explain the difficulty adjustment on one side and then the other side is thinks that Bitcoin is worthless.

And I said, I have never met someone at the intersection of that Venn diagram, someone that can actually explain to you in detail how the difficulty adjustment works and then comes to the conclusion that Bitcoin should not be worth anything. I did have some good responses. You know, Kyle from Multicone hopped in. I know he's not a fan of Bitcoin, but... Did he say that he's in the Venn diagram? He said he's in the Venn diagram, and I came back at him, just jabbed him a little bit,

and I said, you know, well, you own a lot of Bitcoin. I can see it... Yeah, I mean, for a big file. So I said, my thing was, I think you're saying that it's long-term worthless, but, you know, you basically made a great trade on GBTC. Yeah, stated versus revealed preferences, Kyle. Yeah, but I get his point. Like, his point is that he actually understands how Bitcoin works,

and he thinks that the stability of the network once the block reward emission has tailed off is in question. And that's probably the best fud you can have for Bitcoin is just what does the network look like when it is no longer omitting an ample amount of coins. How did the miners get compensated? And it's kind of a bet on fee revenue to some degree. But there's some really interesting dialogue in that tweet thread. Peter Todd was hopping in there talking about kind of a little bit about what you were saying. in the early days around like reusing,

taxing like unused coins that have... Oh, does he endorse that idea? I don't know if he fully endorses it, but he said that he's going to write something up on it, basically a tax on like a stale coins. Well, let's rebrand this. Let's not call it a tax, okay? It's a way to...

It might be a tariff. Yeah, it's a way to extend the block reward by tariffing the coins that are maybe lost. I like... I like the idea. I've been a champion of this idea. A lot of people got very upset when I first started talking about it. It's a heretical idea.

It's a little bit of a heretical idea. That's what we live for over here. We're contrarians, okay? I think it's interesting because it allows you to keep the 21 million cap and find basically an unlimited source of funding for new issuance. And there's plenty of coins that are lost. So why not? you know, I like it.

Yeah, I don't know. I hope that we just have L2s that proliferate and we have notarizations and ZK roll-ups and optimistic roll-ups and we just have a lot of fee pressure coming to the network. The other thing is that this is going to be a problem in a long time. I'm a seller of the fee, the permanently high plateau fees idea. I'm a seller of that idea. Paul Storz has rebutted it quite deftly, in my opinion. I don't think we've ever seen an incident where fees came up, were high and stayed high.

Because people, high prices are the cure for high prices, right? Like if the price of oil goes up a lot, people figure out how to make more oil or they will use substitutes or use more energy efficient cars or something like that. It's kind of the same with Bitcoin. The price of block space goes up a lot. People use alternatives. They'll use L2s. They'll find more efficient ways.

to make transactions, so then the fees come down. So it's a cyclical thing is what we've always seen. Yeah, I get the argument. I was once in a room with a Bitcoin core developer back in, I don't know, 2015, 2016, who put out a very heretical idea around Bitcoin transitioning to proof of stake. Yeah, I mean, I think that is one of the answers, actually, as long as we're like saying cancelable things right now. Yeah, just all the Bitcoin people just turned us off.

100K Day and you guys are talking about the stability of the block. These guys can't have any fun. They can't appreciate nice things. These guys are celebrating by funding. So I think we are going to get backdoor proof of stake at the end. Yeah, so you've told me this before. So you basically think that the exchanges and the brokerages and the custodians end up having a lot of control on the network. And they effectively, without doing proof of stake, they effectively govern the network.

is I guess is your view. They create a group chat and they say, this is the block height and this is the block height. And if there's a fork or reorg, they're just like, forget that one. We're just going to go for this one. And that's all it takes. That's all it takes.

How many times do you think we can get canceled on this podcast in one 20 minute episode here? I think the bit corners have already lost faith in our ability to, you know, hew the line and stay adhere to the orthodoxy. so I don't think we're shocking anyone by saying this stuff. I guess my punchline is it's a tomorrow problem. And by tomorrow I mean 20, 30 years away.

But that will come eventually. It will come. Markets anticipate things. It do price things in the future. That's why Hidera is just ripping. People are looking at the future. That's right. They know that the hash graph is the future of finance.

I thought it was the Iota one, but it's not. Well, we got some news to talk about too, and before that, some deals also. Busy deal week. First one up in our portfolio, a company that we originally invested in at the formation stage, Cat Labs, which is a digital asset cybersecurity and compliance software company. They raised $5.3 million from M13, us at Castle Island, CMT Digital, and hash 3. Really excited about Cat Labs and hash 3.

next up we have mara marathon of course the big bitcoin miner they bought a north texas wind farm uh from a joint venture between national grid and the washington state investment board mara's making moves did you see mara had a big convert i think we have that in the news section this week but they're running the sailor playbook yeah i mean uh if you are getting credit uh in the capital markets then you can do it i think of all the miners they are the best equipped to do it because they have the, they're the most credit worthy Bitcoin miner. Yeah, they have the best balance sheet it looks like in that category. Next one up is called BLife.

This is a, or maybe it's B-Life, B-Life, a community engagement protocol for Bitcoin. They raise $7 million from UTXO management and Bitcoin Frontier Fund. Then you have union labs, a cross-chain bridging protocol. There is 14 million from Gumi Cryptos, Longhash, Ventures, and Borderless Capital. Then it's Fiamah. This is a Bitcoin L2. It is a company that raised $4 million from Lightspeed faction and L2 iterative ventures. Then we have Bleep, I guess is how that's pronounced.

They're a crypto debit card platform. There is 2.3 million from Ethereum Ventures, Maven 11, and Robot Ventures. Next one up is called Avant. This is a crypto yield protocol that raised $6.5 million from SuperLayer and Avalanche. Avalanche. Avalanche. Then you have Gabe G-A-I-B. A lot of weird names today.

They're crypto-A-I-S startup. They raised $5 million from HackV-C, light-speed faction, and hashed. I think you say that G-A-I-B. G-A-B. G-A-B. I think it's an emphasis on the AI. It's G-A-I-B.

Oh, okay. Gabe. G-A-I-B. Sorry. Gabe. Next one up is D-Fi. This is a D-Fi trading app. they raised $2 million from Mechanism, North Rock Capital, and Salini Capital.

And lastly, we have Sikai, a generative AI platform on the Story Protocol, probably the first story protocol-related deal we've seen. They raised $3 million from hashed A6 and Z, CSX, and others. Where to start this week? So price went up a lot, despite the fact that it looks like to me that the U.S. Marshalls probably liquidated two million dollars worth of Bitcoin related to sold load seizures. That is what I am seeing in the on-chain metrics.

I need to see this reported, but there was a movement of government tagged wallets into Coinbase Prime. They have segregated accounts over there with Coinbase. The U.S. Marshalls is paying Coinbase. Pretty big number, actually, to custody these coins. and they have to stay segregated per the contract. Coinbase Prime is obviously not segregated.

So you really only move assets over to Coinbase Prime, I would think, to sell it unless you're doing some sort of a key rotation. And Bitcoin did sell off. We were at like 98, went down to 95 pretty quickly. So it looks like there's a good chance that the U.S. Marshals are chucking their Bitcoin, which is kind of crazy. You know, Trump has said we're not going to sell those things. and people in the seat now are just saying, well, we still got another month here.

They really are trying to burn down the house before they leave. It's crazy. In so many ways. So, you know, they sell it. Guess who bought a bunch of it? Who's that? Michael Saylor at Micro Strategy. Came in this week, bought 15,400 Bitcoin for $1.5 billion.

So I guess just basically could have been like the largest OTC deal of all time. Yeah, I mean, don't even bother hitting the market. It's just U.S. government hit up Sailor on Telegram, do a bilateral deal. Why not? Yeah. I mean, coins don't even need to leave Coinbase ultimately. So I think that's what happened. I think micro strategy's obviously been super active here. It's basically a Bitcoin backed convertible mode factory over there at this point. Have you followed the, this was my biggest news of the week, the Haley Welsh, aka Hock to a girl meme coin launch fiasco. I had people that are not in crypto reaching out to me.

If I knew anything about this, I did not. So what happened? The Hock to a girl did a meme coin? Well, we call her Haley because this is a family-friendly podcast. Okay. And yeah, she launched a meme coin and people are very upset. They are very upset. Did she sell it?

Did she just rugpole everyone? It's unclear. It's believed that insiders were selling. and then there was another meme coin launched called so hers was called hawk and then there was another one called tua which is short for straight toa prison which i think it's actually trading above hawk at this point wow wow so people people are mad about haley you know i thought she did a really good job managing her 15 minutes of fame until now until now yeah it's over the sale is old as time a failed meme coin lunch. Speaking of people that are in the press for not so good reasons, Alex Machinsky,

the founder of Celsius, has pled guilty to two counts of fraud, faces up to 20 years in prison, has not been sentenced yet. But it seems like we are not going to have to go through another trial for a crypto bad boy. Yeah, this, Machinsky doesn't, he doesn't, for some reason, he doesn't really get mentioned in the top echelon of like the fraudsters from last cycle. He doesn't. It's interesting, right? but this is a very stiff prison sentence potentially. Yeah, to plead guilty to this, I wonder what he thinks he's going to get. Maybe he won't get 20.

I mean, I know Celsius was kind of a cluster, but what did he, what's the main allegation? Have you been following it? No, I haven't really been following it. But I mean, he obviously, he got taken down for a lot of factors, but he was lending a lot of money to Alameda. I think it was just misrepresenting what was going on at Celts. saying that they were backed and they obviously weren't backed. Celsius token played a big role in that. Basically taking Bitcoin from people pumping up the Celsius token is what it looked like from the outside.

I do remember early on before the big crises hit, even before Luma went down, I had a few folks reach out to me about Celsius on the mining side. They're like what they're doing with mining is sketchy and it's going to blow up. Yeah, it did. Yeah, it did. It did. I guess, you know, it's kind of hard to, before these collapses hit to, you know, start alleging fraud or anything. But maybe that's a lesson. Just spread way more fud. Yeah, it's tough because when you're in the moment, you want to be bulletproof with any allegations. But a lot of people did avoid Celsius. Unfortunately, that was a lot of retail that got burned on that one. So, congressional news, this is very close to our.

our hearts representative French Hill, who's in the running for chair of the House Financial Services Committee, he has pledged to investigate the debanking claims that folks in the industry, including us, have been making. This went mainstream after Mark Andreessen went on Rogan and talked about it. And it looks like potentially there will be investigations here in the next Congress. French Hill is a highly effective member of the House Financial Services Committee. I really hope that he becomes the ranking member. Yeah, I mean, this would really help because so far we just don't have that much evidence, hard evidence of the choke point style tactics at the Fed and the FDIC.

We don't know what happened behind the scenes at Silvergate and Signature. This whole thing is veiled by confidential supervisory information. All of these bankers are not willing to speak out because I guess it doesn't make sense to go on the record and make allegations against your regulators. So the information is not coming out, and that's the problem. So maybe if there's congressional a hearing, maybe it will. Well, I think, don't you think these people need immunity from prosecution? Because you're not supposed to be talking about confidential supervisor information.

And I have been told that this could be a condition of testifying, that they could waive this, this CSI issue in exchange for testimony. That needs to happen. So I did a lot of digging this week around the FDIC's pause letters to banks, and I had a threat about it. This is a different issue from the main issue, which is with these 15% depository caps on banks serving crypto clients. The pause letter was a whole other thing that the FDIC undertook in 2022 and 23. they said that there were 96 banks in early 23 that had told them they want to do crypto products. So that's like an embedding Bitcoin buy sell into your banking interface or lending against crypto.

All of these banks want to do this stuff. The FDIC released a report from the Office of Inspector General of the FDIC saying, admitting that they'd send all these letters. And then Coinbase FOIAed the FDIC. We got more color on the letters. And my suspicion is that this was a lot of this was to do with the Nidig's launch of a Bitcoin access product with community banks, 300 community banks, which was announced in 21 and it never got off the ground. And I think that's what happened. It's 100% what happened. I know you're trying to be careful with what you said, but that is exactly what happened. So Nidig found this great product opportunity to build for these community in regional banks. And the community and regional banks were,

it was a great business case because they were seeing these ACH outflows from their customers going to Coinbase. And they said to themselves, wouldn't it be great if we just had a like a Bitcoin account type on our platform? And the Bitcoin resided at NIDIG. And so NIDIG went out and they integrated with all of these bank core systems, the big, you know, integrators. Yeah, FISA and yeah. What's the other one? There's one called Computer Services Inc. Yeah. Very generic. So they did all the heavy lifting there.

They got this thing live. And then all of their customers were approached by the FDIC and told to stop. It was the same type of thing where these, a lot of it was phone calls, but I guess it's coming out. That's a letter in writing, in letters. And this is a big scandal. And NIDIG was really completely kneecapped here. This is just taking a private enterprise out at the knees that had dedicated tons of resources to this, like staffed up the whole company to service it, and then it just went away.

And here's why it's so important, because this is evidence that the banks wanted to support crypto in their product offering. Not all of the banks, but a large number of banks, right? They saw the opportunity for a new diversified revenue stream and obviously to keep deposits captive to the banks rather than flowing out. And what a lot of the critics said after Andresen went on Rogan was, well, probably the banks just didn't like crypto. And they just de-risk crypto because crypto is risky. But that's not true.

We know that the banks were trying to launch crypto products and they were specifically told not to. So this is evidence. This is why this is so important. This is evidence that there was a top-down prohibition rather than this being a spontaneous bottom. up thing. So we need to get more information on this, but this looks like it could be another whole investigation that the host financial services committee explores. Yeah, I think it's a scandal because this FDIC didn't.

So even the OIG report admitted, okay, we didn't actually give the banks clear timelines on feedback. We didn't really tell them anything aside from just stop doing this. And so they were very vague and ambiguous about it. and they even admitted this might give banks the perception that were anti-crypto. While meanwhile, in public, they had their letter. Remember the joint letter? Yes.

That letter said banks are not discouraged from doing crypto. But in private, they were discouraging banks from doing crypto. So I think that's a huge deal. So yeah, I'm hoping we get to the bottom of it. It's a lot to get to the bottom of. Also, I forgot to say the stated justification was this is a risk to the safety and soundness of the banks. How is it a risk? How is it a risk to the safety and soundness of the banks? This is a product where the bank is using, they're sharing KYC information on an opt-in

basis of the end user to give them a flow-through account to NIDIG, which is an institutional Bitcoin custodian. Where is the risk to the bank? The bank is not holding Bitcoin. The bank has no exposure to Bitcoin. It's just a credentials sharing exercise and allowing this end user to hold Bitcoin through the bank interface. There's no risk to the bank. Total joke. It's a total joke. So a lot to dig in on that one, but we're going to keep on pressing. I want to talk about some happier news. I think it's a lot happier news. President-elect Donald Trump has selected Paul Atkins to be the next head of the SEC. Atkins was formerly an SEC commissioner under President Bush from 2002 to 2008. He has been advising

a number of companies in the financial services space since then, including a number in the crypto slash blockchain space. So what do you make of this one? Yeah, I was going to ask, everyone seems to think he's pro-crypto, and I think partially that is because the Trump transition team assured us that whoever got us is he would be pro-crypto. I know he advised maybe a stablecoin project. But it securitize as well. And secure does. I guess do we have evidence on the record of him saying anything about crypto to date? Well, I think you just see where he's spending his time and people like that. Obviously, you could say the same thing for Gary Gensler spending his time at MIT,

but I think this is a little bit more in the free markets context. Securitaz is a company that's been pressing to get regulatory clarity around things like security tokens for quite some time. So, you know, it seems like he's a pretty libertarian-leaning SEC commissioner when he was there. Yeah, I'm quite optimistic about this one. I will caveat that we were also optimistic about Gensler before he came in, and we were wrong about that. Yeah, I mean, Gensler, say what you will about Gensler, but he did understand the technology. But it turns out there's a lot of political motivation behind that individual as well.

All right, what else do we have here? Chainalysis has announced that co-founder Jonathan Levin, who's, moved from chief strategy officer into the CEO seat. So congrats to Johnny Levin. Big, big promotion there. Johnny Levin dates the lead singer of the band Haim. Have you heard of them?

I have not, I had not heard of them, but then there was that picture when he was in the, was that at the U.S. Open, he was like with Taylor Swift or something. Yeah, because Taylor Swift is friends with the singer. If you're not into like indie alternative rock, you wouldn't know Haim.

But for me, this was a very weird collision of worlds. Did I ever tell you my Johnny Levin story from back in like 2015 or maybe early 2016? So Johnny Levin comes into Fidelity. We were just exploring stuff at that point. It must have been 20. It might have been 2014. I don't know. It was early and we weren't investing capital.

And Johnny Levin pulled up a demo. Well, by the way, he was wearing like flip-flops, shorts and a t-shirt. So it was a little bit of an interesting meeting. It was the first one I had like that at Fidelity. Pulls open a demo of the product, and he's showing live flows from U.S. cryptocurrency platforms into places that are like drug marketplaces. And I was just like, I cannot believe that you can do this.

Like this is the best software I've ever seen. Live flows. Live flows. It was like, this is the platform X that everyone's heard of. And here's money moving off of this platform. What is this thing? this is like hydro exchange and people are probably buying cocaine on this. It was wild.

Did this set back the enthusiasm for crypto at all? No, not at all. I think everyone was like, wow, this is incredible that you can actually do this. Because in theory, of course you can. It's all public ledger, but we had never seen anyone stitch it together with software. And I think everyone was incredibly impressed with the platform. And obviously they went on to raise a lot of money. But it's one of those things where you look back.

It's like seeing Bitcoin early and just not buying enough, right? It's like, well, if I had to do it all over again, I would have gone back and I would have sold every piece of copper I could get my hands on and just put it all into chanalysis at that point. So last piece of news here, Bicko has launched a dedicated retail trading platform. Nice. You can actually kind of need more of those, I think, in the U.S. don't you think? Well, they have stellar reputation, so see how it goes. I think you could look around and you say, you know, retail brokerages, lending platforms even, the safe ones, probably do pretty well here in the next few years. So this was an interesting article in The Times. I actually, here's a weird perspective. I think the Times has the best crypto coverage of any of the major publications today.

That is a weird perspective. Yeah. I personally think they're the best. I know they got a lot, they get a lot of hate. But I think the journal has been. captured by nefarious anti-crypto elements Bloomberg has unfortunately an anti-crypto perspective at the editorial level and I think WAPO is nowhere the FT hates crypto which basically leaves the Times. The Times said this article

about Tigran Gambarian the detained Binance executive who was held captive in Nigeria and the story is very dispiriting. It's basically a story of the State Department not going about for this guy. Yeah. I mean, you know, nothing like the, you know,

prisoner exchanges with Russia where we were really applying pressure. He wasn't even considered wrongfully detained by the U.S. government for a long time. We'll link to this in our newsletter, but this guy just got completely screwed by this country. There should be some, I don't know how you make it right with this guy, but he was held in a really crappy jail for a very long time, and he's a distinguished former federal agent. Yeah, and in the end it took, was it French Hill to visit him?

He went to Nigeria to visit him, and a lot of his former colleagues had, you know, within, you know, the national security apparatus started to make noise about this, but the government just didn't really budge. I mean, they didn't exert a lot of pressure on Nigeria to free this guy. I mean, it's kind of scandalous. No, it's kind of against the social contract that we all think we have. Yeah, if you're an American, especially of, you know, formerly important member of the American government enforcement apparatus and you were wrongfully detained by foreign government, you should hope that the government would not rest until they had freed you. I mean, that's kind of the deal with being an American, right? And it just didn't happen.

If you work at a crypto company, maybe not so much. Even if you're an ordinary civilian, you would kind of expect that the U.S. government would try and free you. Right. It just didn't happen. All right. So I think that's where we're going to have to leave it for today. Happy 100K to everyone.

Yeah, good job. Everybody, pat yourself on the back and get back to work. All right. Have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.