On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 12/12/25 (Do Kwon sentenced, DTC no action letter, Circle's private stablecoin) (EP.690)

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

Matt and Nic are back with more news and deals. In this episode:  CIV grows the team Nic does not regret 8 years in crypto People are getting blackpilled about crypto Does speculation in crypto have positive externalities? Matt has never seen LOTR Will web3 ever come back? The OCC lets banks broker crypto trades The Bitwise 10 lists Rushi Manche returns with a fund Circle is launching a private stablecoin The DTC gets a no action letter from the SEC to settle tokenized securities We do a Terra/Luna restrospective Terra's fatal mistake Oracle mishaps on prediction markets Why did the nation's largest teachers union come out against the Market Structure bill Content mentioned in this episode: Nic Carter and Allen Farrington, All Falls Down  

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, A.I. IG $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 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. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

And I'm Nick Carter. This week has been brought to by the stomach flu. the Walshaw sold, unfortunately. Yeah, it's like last year, right? It's stricken at the same time. It's terrible. It's like this time of year. It's just all the kids are getting sick.

It's brutal. You made it to the Castle Island holiday party? I did. Yeah, knock on wood. I actually have not been... Survived. Been hit by this yet, but good holiday party last night. Our numbers are growing every year.

Every year. Yeah, we'll be growing more next year. Some more people joining the firm. We actually, we announced Gus joining the firm this week. That's right. Have we talked about this on the show yet or no? We have not. Oh, yeah.

So I guess that's our first announcement. Yes, Gus Caldebella has joined the Castle Island family. So I'm sure everyone knows Gus, but feel free to reach out to Gus. Do you have an interesting idea or you need some regulatory advice? He's our lawyer, though. He's not your lawyer. He's a nice guy, so he might give out some free regulatory advice. It's possible.

Actually, you had a good blog post this week. I don't think we have that in our newsletter yet, but you had a rebuttal to the why I wasted eight years in crypto medium post that went kind of viral last week. Yeah. So my blog was called, I Do Not Regret, Spending Eight Years of My Life in Crypto, which is like, should be obvious. If I were to be regretting it, that would be extremely alarming to everyone that I work with. So I don't regret it.

And this was a reply to, Ken Chang. So I know Ken Chang is the guy who's involved in Ribbon Finance. That's right. Yeah, he's the founder of Ribbon Finance. Yeah, so this is a vault's protocol. You could write options in an automated way to earn yield.

I can see why he thinks all of crypto is a casino. You know? Yeah. That's the part that he was most involved in. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. Right. Right. So yeah, he became very black-pilled about crypto. He thinks he wasted eight years.

It's a weird coincidence that I've been involved in crypto for exactly eight years. Is that right? That's it? I feel like you're, I guess you're not counting the days when you're just amateur doge coin mining. Yeah, I don't count anything from 2014 to 2018. That wasn't full-time crypto. Got it.

He thinks it's a big casino and it's not changing the world or whatever. And I wanted to give my view, which is that there are. speculative elements obviously anybody can see that and I don't think they're good I mean in some cases speculation is maybe good because it creates capital formation but I'll bite the bullet and say okay excessive speculation is just bad right it's not a lot of upsides but it's this inevitable negative externality that comes along with building a new financial technology and any kind of technology really but since this is a financial technology it has even more speculation

because it's the technology about finance. So, of course, it's going to give rise to these bubbles. But you just have to, you know, pick as your North Star, the things that animate you about the industry, which there are some, and I think they're worth fighting for, and realize that it's probably worth it on balance, even though there's a lot of bad stuff. And so that's my view.

Yeah, I think that's well said. I mean, you can choose what you work on. It is a shame that over the past four years, there's been a number of categories that people just haven't worked on out of fear of regulatory retaliation, though. You know, if you think about something as ambitious as file coin, why have we not seen more competitors to that? It's probably because there was no clarity on whether or not the token would be a security or commodity. So I think there have been pockets of this industry that have

actually been underfunded because of that regulatory ambiguity. It probably have seen more action on the meme coins than just the D-Gen casino side because it's just, okay, hey, it's offshore. It's not for U.S. customers. It's less ambitious, but it's clear how you bring something like that to market. Yeah, and, you know, I think the speculative dynamics can create positive externalities, too, in some cases. Like, okay, so the tokens associated with the dexes go up and down a lot. That funds the buildout of more efficient dexes, which is good.

It does. Yeah. And I was actually thinking about. this. I can make the case for almost any aspect of crypto except the meme coin launch pads. I can't justify those. You're not over intellectualizing the fact that people, it's the creator economy and monetizing eyeballs? That I can't find the bright side in. And everything else, I was going through all the categories. I'm like, yeah, like the speculative elements, like this looks unsavory, but actually maybe there's something good about it. The meme coin.

the launch pads, no, couldn't do it. There are some categories that we've been talking about for 10 years that just haven't come to fruition yet around digital ID and being able to seamlessly engage with PII. Like good ideas, I would say. It's kind of unclear if we'll ever have that moment where identity can be tied to the blockchain. Yeah, I'm very, I was actually thinking about this because I boiled it down to like five categories of things that that is the. so-called T-Loss, the purpose of crypto. And one of them is the notion of the creator economy or Web3

or I don't know, read-write-own basically that concept. I don't know what to call it anymore. But the idea of like owning your property online in a very true and real way, not just renting it from Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or whatever, and having a real claim on that. And then maybe, you know, the Andreessen people would say is you're contributing data to a platform, so maybe you should actually own some of that so you're capturing the fruits of your labor kind of thing. Those experiments were numerous and virtually none of them panned out. Yeah. And I don't think it means that they will not ever pan out. You know, I think you can make an argument that a lot of those things when they got started, there were just obvious, you know, glaring holes really in the infrastructure

to build some of these things. So we didn't have embedded wallets back then. You know, you're talking about writing down 12 words to capture a seed phrase. Stuff was kind of in retrospect never going to work. And the blockchains weren't fast enough. I think there's some element of the technology just needs to catch up. And similar to the early days of the internet, you're just going to see categories where 15, 20 startups fail before one really breaks out.

Yeah, I ask myself this all the time. You know, is an idea bad because the technology is ready for it. but technology is not ready, but the idea is still valid and it's just not its time yet. And I think that's totally true regarding the Web 3 thing, which is I 100% believe that the core reason why it's good or interesting is still true, which is in the digital realm, we are serfs on the plantation. We have no ownership. In the physical realm, we can actually own things.

Online, we own nothing, and that's bad and that should change. So that's still true. so I think Web3 is still going to work. I do too. Yeah, I think all this stuff will work. I mean, a lot of people were talking about Farcaster this week. They sort of announced a pivot to more of like a wallet and trading experience. But I think it's great that the experiment that's been run.

I actually still go on Farcaster a couple times a week. Yeah, that's actually what animated the whole thing was I was thinking, reflecting kind of sadly on Farcaster. Because that to me was the last Web3 social thing in existence. There's probably others, but I don't know about them. Yeah. Yeah, I think, look, I think maybe even Farcaster that'll end up working. Who knows? Anyways, we digress.

Let's hop into the deals of the week. First up, this one's from the Castle Island portfolio. This is Gondor, a defy layer for prediction markets. There is two and a half million from Prelude, Us, and Maven 11. That makes it the third Lord of the Rings themed startup in our portfolio. Yeah, and I confess, this is going to, I'm going to get a lot of hate from this, but I have never seen Lord of the Rings. Yeah, so we were talking about this before the show and I was astonished and appalled at your delinquency. I mean, it's, I consider the Lord of the Rings

to be the best, most complete trilogy ever made by human beings. It's on my list to get to. I just haven't got to it yet. But I just don't understand what you've been doing this whole time. Well, sometimes I'm a little bit of a snob with these movies where I say, I'm going to read the book first. And I just, I have the books. I just haven't gotten around to it. But I've had the books for like eight years. I would say it's rare that this is the case, but the films are almost as good as the books.

I would say Dune is a case where the book is far better than the film, far better. Yeah. I am halfway through Dune as a book, so I've not seen the movie or the show. Oh, yeah. No, you can skip the movie. Yeah, I think you should this

weekend sit down and watch Lord of the Wings Extended Edition. Director is cut. It would take you about maybe I don't know, nine hours. It's a nine hour movie? Well, no, there's three of them. All three of them are nine hours. Okay, yeah, come on.

Honestly, I'm very jealous of you because I think it's just, you're so lucky to be able to... That I get to experience this? Yeah. For the first time. Well, I did read a book, actually, over the past couple weeks,

born to be wired by John Malone. What an amazing story. I didn't know that much about John Malone, Liberty Galo. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. know anything about it. Oh yeah, like one of the original cable cowboys, um, just a all-time investor too. Really? Yeah, I highly recommend it. He's a kind of a magnet corporate Titan, so to speak.

What era was this in? I mean, he's still alive. He's, he's like 85 years old, um, but he, um, so this is kind of dot-com era. This is an autobiography. It was before the dot-com, so he kind of wrote the cable wave as all that infrastructure is being built out and then he eventually transitioned to running more of a holding company making investments and I think he's an investor in this big deal that's happening this week the Warner Brothers Discovery is one of the largest investors in that platform so I highly recommend next one up is Li-Fi this is a cross-chain bridging protocol there is $29 million from multi-coin and coin fund then we've crowned they're a Brazilian stable coin company, there raised $13.5 million from Paradigm.

Then it's a cascade, which is a decentralized brokerage for equity and crypto. They raised $15 million from polychain, variant, and Coinbase ventures, along with archetype, actually. Then we have Pi Finance. That's Pye, not PIEE. That's a liquid staking protocol. In Solana, there was $5 million from variant, Coinbase, and Nason. Asgard Finance is a D-5 protocol built on Solana.

They raised 2.2 million from robot, Salana Ventures, and Primal Capital. Deep Node AI is a decentralized inference network. There is 3 million from blockchain founders fund and side door ventures. Magma Finance, which is a decentralized exchange built on sui. They raise 6 million from Hashkey and 7X ventures. All scale, a stable coin based neobank raised 5 million from YZI Labs, informed ventures and generative ventures. CoinMina, which is a crypto exchange focused on. on the Middle East in North Africa, they're required for $240 million by Paribu, which is a Turkish

digital asset company. That's a big deal. Yeah, that's one of the stalwarts in the crypto in the crypto, the crypto-stabucousand payments company. They're required by lead bank. Very interesting. Here's another interesting one, Buenbit, which is a Latam-focused crypto exchange. They're required by NXO, the digital asset infrastructure company. We even talked about NXO and ages. Yeah, I mean, I was actually looking at the lending data courtesy of Galaxy research that always does a great job with lending. And next, I was looking, who was active as a lender in the 21, 22 cycle and subsequent collapse and who's still around?

Yeah, it's, it's, it's not a lot of them, right? Not a lot of these guys survived. I think Leden survived. Yeah, Lennon survived. And I don't know if Tether was doing lending back then. But basically no one was around for both cycles. But nexo is like Teflon, and they survived this whole time. I mean, does anyone know, I don't know anything about Nexo, but next one up is Valora, which is a mobile crypto wallet.

They were acquired by Stripe. AsTech Network is the privacy focused L2. There is 59 million in a public token sale deployed to the Uniswap's new continuous clearing auction platform. All right. So there's a bunch to get into this week. Should we do Doquan first? Yeah, let's start with Doe. So in preparation, I went and listened to what we had to say about Tara back in the day.

And honestly, we actually could have said more. We weren't fans of Tara Luna by any means. We pulled some punches, I would say. That's right. We did. We didn't castigate him on this podcast enough. You know, I think it was a, that was an interesting time. I don't know that I have any regrets about not going all in,

Doquan is just kind of he was operating on the side of the road and we were looking at other stuff. But in retrospect, that was really the match that just lit up the lending markets, the collapse of Terra. Oh, yeah. That was it for sure. March or April 2022. I mean, I had some tweets saying that I thought Algo Stables were total garbage. So I'm glad I said that.

But I remember my state of mind was a lot of my friends have put tens of millions of dollars in this thing. Yeah. And I'm going to. look like such a huge a hole if I go around telling everyone that's a scam and a fraud. Yeah, right. And we had just obviously gotten the pitch or got the pitch several times, I guess, over the years. And it's not the best form to be coming out just publicly castigating someone after you just took an hour to hear their pitch. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

And we talked to Doe. I remember talking to him when I wrote my sablecoin white paper in 2020, when Tara Luna basically didn't exist, the supply was under a million dollars of UST. And he was talking about chai back in those days. And if you read our white paper, Tara is profiled in there. That's right. Very, very small project.

And I talked to Doe about it. It was a weird conversation. He's like, yeah, like, we have all this e-commerce traction in Korea with this thing called chai. And that was part of the fraud, right? I mean, that just wasn't true. That was alive from the,

very, he was lying from the start. Yeah. So this is not a situation where you can say, hey, you know, if it just collapsed, he would have been fine. And then he did a bunch of fraud. It's now he's kind of doing a bunch of fraud since the start. Oh, big time. Yeah. And the judge in the, well, we haven't even told you what happened yet. You should have known. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison. So the prosecution, the government recommended 12 years. Doe Kwan's counsel asked for five years. And the judge gave him more than the recommended

amount and he was pretty tough with him actually in his comments at the end. I mean, they, there are all these letters from victims, people that lost money in either tear out, either in Luna or in UST, hundreds of these letters. And I was reading the transcript. I mean,

some, it's really tough stuff. It's, you know, people's life savings, you know, people committed suicide, like really,

really dark. Yeah, I mean, they, they read, actually in sentencing here, the judge, came out and read some of these tweets.

One of them was, I don't debate the poor on Twitter, and sorry, I don't have any change on me for her at the moment. I mean, that's pretty brutal. Yeah, if you remember Doquan, he was incredibly brash and arrogant. That was sort of his whole brand. Yeah. Like, that's what he was known for.

And one of the reasons I didn't go as hard was because I didn't, I knew that the Terraluna army would come after. me. Yeah. There was a group. That was totally a thing back in those days. Totally. And also I didn't want dough to come after me.

And I thought, well, I don't think this system is sound, but I think there's like a chance that it actually does work, actually. I thought it could get exit velocity and like will itself into existence. It's the same thing as Basis, right? I mean, I guess we never ran that experiment with Basis. They never launched. But what was the one that was the maker guy had a stablecoin that was kind of similar before your bit shares? But new bits was a senior ad shares stable coin.

Oh, is bit shares? Bitshers was an over collateralized style. Yeah, but they were yeah, UST wasn't the first. The flaw is obvious, I think. In hindsight, it wasn't that obvious at the time. But the system is collateralized by its own. equity. Yeah. Which those things are correlated. Right. Obviously. Yeah. Then you have the death spiral. So that's, yeah. And then they bought Bitcoin for their reserve, but that was the thing. They shouldn't

have bought the Bitcoin. Yeah, that was just shining a light on the fact that, hold on, wait a second here. How does this thing work? They're buying Bitcoin, but it's not enough Bitcoin to collateralize the network. We should panic. And I think the mechanical thing that happened was they bought the Bitcoin for USTs, they sold UST.S.T. Yeah, so you had a market maker, OTC desk dumping UST. So then, yeah, and should we know who was on the other side of that, and that was sold for USDT, and that I think was the DPEG. So it was actually their efforts to shore up the peg, which caused the peg to collapse.

Someone needs to write a book about this industry over the past five years. I was asked the other day, what's one of the best crypto, books you've read past couple years. And there haven't been that many great ones. You know, there's that wave after FTX, but, you know, let's get into the detail on the Terra DPEG and just who pressed the button on that and just how that just rippled through the industry. So I did, I'm not going to say that I wrote the canonical post-mortem on Terra, but I think I did actually, to be honest with you. I wrote it with Alan Farrington. It's called All Falls Down. Yeah.

And I think it's the most complete analysis. Having been there and witnessing this and knowing how it worked and having been a skeptic before it failed, I think this is probably the best piece of work about the peg and why it failed that exists. Yeah, that was a good post for sure. So I'm going to plug this in the show notes. Put it in the show notes. All right, switching gears. So this was interesting.

This just happened about an hour ago. So the DTC announced that they have received a no action letter from the SEC to offer tokenized real world assets on their platform to their participants. It looks like it's a three-year no action letter that is going to allow for their clients to engage via the DTC on pre-approved blockchains. So here we go. I mean, I think we're kind of off to the races here on collateral management being a use case here in the blockchain space. this seems like a big deal but i i don't know i need someone else to interpret it for me i think this does seem like a big deal i'd wish that it was more than three years i guess we're kind of rushing towards some market structure clarity via legislation or additional scc guidance but i would

imagine that one of the first use cases here is just moving collateral between dTC participants we'll see what blockchain they go with that'll be interesting did you see uh this news about Rushi Monshi, the founder of Movement, who left. And he's now raised, he's reappeared with a $100 million fund called Nick's Group. Count me skeptical, I would say. Count me a little bit skeptical. Have we even talked about movement labs on this? I don't think so.

I don't think we've ever brought it up on the show. Yeah, this is, I mean, this is in the category of thankfully this didn't get so big, but just red flags everywhere on this project and this founding team. Can you just come out and say you have a $100 million fund? Is that, like, don't you have to kind of file with the SEC, like file form D? I don't know. It's coming from someone who's like run a fund before. It's a little head scratching.

There have been some recent instances of so-called fund managers getting in huge trouble overlying about the details of their fundraisers and their track records and so on. Yeah, just, you know, buyer beware. Like, you know, one method of raising capital sometimes is to just make it up. And it seems like we've seen it a little bit. Yeah, fake it till you make it totally valid strategy, legally questionable. Yeah, right. And when it comes to fundraising.

And so this is a fund that is purportedly just focused on buying liquid tokens. Honestly, if I were him, I would not show my face in the crypto industry. I would go find a different hobby or occupation and just put it behind me. Yeah, it didn't go great. Yeah, the first attempt wasn't a success. Moving on, Circle announced this week that they are planning to launch a new stable coin. It's going to be called USDCX. It's on the Aleo blockchain, and it's a privacy-focused stable coin.

So it allows, basically for institutions it looks like to hide balances, payment histories, sounds a little bit similar to kind of what Canton's doing in a lot of respects. I'm interested to see this. Yeah, I thought this was pretty eye-catching. I thought it was very funny that the headline described it as banking level privacy, because banks are like the least private things that exist. Yeah, I don't know, unless you're trying to hide the Epstein stuff, they did a pretty good job, been private about that for a while.

Banks leak data like a sieve by design and by law. You know, we have a Supreme Court law in this country that says, your data in the bank does not belong to you. It belongs to the government. Right. That's what it says. We have the bank, quote, unquote, secrecy act, which is really the anti-secrecy act,

which is anytime you do anything at the bank, the government needs to know about it. So anyway, I found that funny, but I do think we have work to do in terms of adding privacy to stablecoins, that's for sure. And that is a big pain point for corporates. They don't want people tracking them. Yeah. And I think, you know, you're not going to see the Stipagcoin market is going to be huge with or without privacy.

If you have privacy as a potential feature, this market's going to be enormous. I mean, just think about all the transactions here stateside where you just want to have privacy. Yeah. I mean, it is weird in the blockchain world that if people know your address, can, you know, spy on you. That's very unusual and strange. Yeah. Did you see that Gemini was approved for a DCM license with the CFTC this week? So that would allow them to offer regulated prediction markets in the U.S. I mean, this was what the Winkle Boss twins were trying to get for a long time. This is part of the reason why they were so upset with Quintends. Yeah, this was, this is a big part of

their objection to Quintends and they got it anyway. Yeah. You think they'll launch a prediction market? probably right yeah why not the prediction market wars man they're getting hostile you get nasty VC on VC crime going on on Twitter the Kalshi versus Polymarket just this is a ugly yeah everyone's like picking aside like both Kalshi and polymarket have these like armies of loosely affiliated influencers that will go to battle for their preferred prediction market then you got the VCs yeah the VCs fighting each other it's like you don't see that every day it's it's really catty. But you know what?

We have not picked a side. We've not planted our flag on either side. Yeah, so we're totally neutral on this and we're actually the only impartial ones. I'm just going to call balls and strikes. Prediction markets are going to be interesting to watch here. I mean, the states, or certain states at least,

are just coming out guns blazing, trying to shut these things down. There was one interesting, you know how there's always Oracle abuse on the prediction market? Yes. Obviously. So there was a funny one today, which was there is a lot of volume on a market about whether this Ukrainian town would be captured by the Russians.

Really? Did you see this? No, I didn't see that. And then surprisingly, the market resolved to yes, it was captured. And the Oracle was some nonprofit that draws the battle lines on the maps. No kidding. And in the real world, this. city was not captured by Russia.

No way, really? Some analyst at this company drew the line on the map, and so the market resolved to, yes, it was captured. Wow. That's crazy. Yeah, the cash settled, and then the next day they fired him. But, you know, maybe he made his money. There's another one people were talking about over the weekend that the odds of Trump coming

out with some UFO-related disclosure has got. up a lot, like, you know, 50% in a couple days type of thing. So people are speculating that maybe there's an announcement coming that we've had some breakthrough in physics or something like that. I'd be surprised if it's like Trump coming out on Christmas and saying, hey, we're, we got UFOs now and aliens are amongst us. But maybe there's something about, hey, some of those tick-tac things you're seeing, we have new technology, something like that.

How does the UFO thing, pertain to physics. Well, the theory would be that all of these, are you following the kind of the tick-tack-shaped things that have been seen coming out of the water? No, I'm not. Matt, you're deep in conspiracy of YouTube. We've got to get you out.

No, this is not a conspiracy of YouTube. You're going to be on some ancient aliens. Oh, you're just not paying attention. Maybe it's my 4-U feed, but. You're right. Yeah, your algorithm has funneled you. You built that thing brickbox. But there's been a lot of purported sightings of vessels basically coming out of the oceans over the years.

And the theory is that we have some new stealth bomber type of thing. So not that it's aliens, but that the U.S. government has a better spaceship or something. I appreciate you pairing it down and making the show seem a little less conspiracy-esque. No, you got to read, I read all sides here. I mean, I also spent a lot of time this week reading about why the Teachers Union, the United, what's it called, the United Teachers Union or something? It's the biggest Teachers Union in the United States. They came out against the crypto market structure bill this week.

What was that all about? That was weird. I don't know. I thought Sean's tweet was pretty appropriate. Basically, Randy, Randy Weing with conspiracies. Randy Weingarten or whoever, I think that's her name that runs the Teachers Union is apparently like best friends with Elizabeth Warren. So maybe Elizabeth Warren is behind that one.

Yeah, that was a really weird business for teachers to be getting into. Coordinated, though. Did you see there was 20 or 30 groups that came out against market structure this week? Yeah. No, I mean, it's still a political pawn. There's some like Save the Wildlife Foundation type of thing that came out against it. I don't know what, you know, why do they care? Speaking of bad takes, there was an article in Bloomberg today that was very bad.

and it really incensed me. So the OCC came out with their analysis of debanking over the last few years. So actually everyone's been doing it. You know, the House Republicans, House Finance came out with their analysis at a choke point. Now the OCC is coming out with their retrospective, and they said, yeah, politically motivated debanking did happen.

It was a real thing. So everyone's saying this is a real thing. And then Bloomberg says it was, they called it a witch hunt and they said it was opportunistic. And they said it didn't happen, but if it did happen, it was good that it happened because it happened to bad people. I did not see that.

Yeah, I'll put in the show notes. So they said, the sectors that banks were shunning were oil and gas, coal mining, firearms, private prisons, tobacco, e cigarettes, adult entertainment and digital assets. Excuse me while I picked my job. off the floor and then he goes on to say that these are controversial industries and so it's just totally right that banks debank them yeah so shut him down it's just a preposterous take i honestly

i don't understand he has no perspective whatsoever like what if trump turns around and does it and he says yeah well universities and abortion clinics are controversial right so you know let's debank them and leftist NGOs are controversial and, you know, so let's debank them. Yeah, it's crazy take. Crazy take. Weird to read from in an official Bloomberg editorial. That is very weird to read. I'm surprised we didn't touch on this one yet. I actually thought this was a huge deal this week. So the OCC, the office of the controller of the currency came out and said that banks are now allowed to engage as intermediaries in crypto transactions on a riskless principle basis. So this basically means that banks now can stand up trading desks and facilitate their customers buying, you know, cryptocurrencies.

People have been wanting to do this for ages. You remember the infamous Goldman picture, the Man Bun picture. Oh, yeah. You know, that was like a team that was trying to build some of this stuff. And that was, what was that, like seven years ago, six years ago. So, yeah. This will be a big, big business for a lot of banks. You just think about the private wealth channel.

Think about some of these banks that just have really profitable trading groups. They're now going to be allowed to enter. I expect you're going to see a lot of market infrastructure build out here in this category. Yeah, this is actually huge news, and I don't know why we didn't talk about it earlier. I find it funny whenever you read an article in Reuters, the AP about crypto, they still have to do the image of metal coins with Bitcoin and Tether and Ethereum. on them. Yeah, that's true.

That's the stock photo, but they, this is an older one you can talk because there's doge coin and light coin and the old ripple logo. This is like a 2017 era stock photo. Oh, it has a fidget spinner? Yeah, on Reuters. Whatever happened to fidget spinners,

you've got to bring those back. Yeah, I guess like people vape now. Like, they don't fidget. There's vape. Like vaping is popular? Oh, yeah. I mean, I just like, I feel like that replaced fidget spinners is like the default thing to do with your hands.

Oh, I didn't know that. When you say? I don't know. I still have a, you know, here's what I do with my hand when I'm in my office. I actually don't have it with me right now, but I have my tungsten cube. So I hold my tungsten cube while I'm doing stand-up calls. And then if I'm on the phone, I actually have a Bitcoin yo-yo in the office. Really?

Yeah. I didn't know you were that active when you're on a phone call. I'm not like great at the yo-yo, but it's just something to do, you know. I don't think I've touched you yo-yo in 20 years. I got a, Dan from CMS gave me a Bitcoin yo-yo. In other news, Bitwise, man, they are cranking these days. So they announced that the Bitwise crypto index, B-I-T-W, began trading on the NYSC this week. So I think it's the first crypto index fund to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

And it's the largest crypto index fund by a U.S. Yeah, I think that's right. And so elsewhere in ETF news, BlackRock officially filed to launch a staked Ethereum ETF. So still a lot going on here. I think we talked about last week, but Vanguard now is listed crypto ETFs. So kind of a continued growth story there in that channel. Yeah, you know, everyone's kind of upset right now for some reason and the dots or the focus in the public markets. But the ETFs are just quietly cruising. Yeah, you know what else is cruising? Stable coins.

Yeah. And it's just not that it doesn't excite people, you know. People are sending money across the world in like a nanosecond and instantaneously settling it. And people that don't have access to US dollars are now actually able to like store their wealth in something that is relatively stable, certainly compared to what their alternatives were. Yeah.

And you know, people always tell me, well, I get why stablecoins are useful for people in Venezuela, but we don't need them in America. I think to myself, like, I don't get it, man. Have you never sent a bank wire? Bankwires suck. And you know what percentage of the time banks are open? Yeah.

22% of the time. And you know what are your odds are of actually getting that bank wire to clear that same day? Very low. And so, like, isn't it just obvious that final push payment, a true digitally native push payment would be better. I don't know why that doesn't excite people more. I mean, it's 9.30 at night right now.

If I wanted to send you traditional dollars, I would be unable to settle that right now. Seems kind of crazy in a world where we have the internet. You'd have to submit it. Let's say you want to send a real amount of money. You have to submit your bank. You can't even normally put all the characters in the fields because they don't accept all sorts of characters.

then you have to wait for them to call you typically for a verification. I don't know how your bank does it. That's how mine does. Yeah. You're like an authenticator app or something. Yeah. And then they have to manually push it through. And if it happened after 3 p.m.

Or maybe they went home early that day, then it doesn't go through until the next day. Like this is huge friction. Huge friction. Huge friction. And if you do it on Venmo or whatever, smaller dollar rounds, it's still not a final settlement. So you can't like pull that into your bank wreck away. Unless you want to pay an. exorbitant fee, I guess, but only drug. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah, I mean, you, you, you, you're trading an

unsecured note held by PayPal, you know, and that you can maybe redeem for cash later. So I don't know, I don't get why people aren't more tuned into the fact that this is going to be huge in the U.S. too. Yeah, I think people are going to be really surprised. The biggest market for stable coins is not EM. It's actually the U.S. because it's the biggest market for dollars. And stable coins are just better. Kind of a K-shaped crypto Twitter these days. Would you say? There's a lot of people that are kind of disillusioned.

A lot of gloom. That's why we've got to cheer people up a little bit. Cheer up. Hey, it's dollars on a blockchain. This is what we've been building. That's great. All right, everyone, that is it for the week. Everyone have a safe and healthy weekend.

And we'll see you on a minute.