On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 12/29/23 (2024 predictions, BSA unconstitutional, ETH ETF prospects) (EP.493)

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

Matt and Nic return for the last week of 2023. In this episode: South Shore bar pie Our 2024 resolutions Was Barry Silbert the main character Bitcoin miners had a good year ARK is selling their GBTC holdings The Cointucky Derby Will an ETH ETF be a fast follow? Will ETF sponsors sue the SEC over cash create for ETFs? Nic and Matt's 2024 predictions for stablecoins, Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, NFTs, and adoption Solana versus Ethereum debate ETH L2 gas usage and EIP4844 Is the BSA unconstitutional? Is 2024 the year the 3AC boys are finally apprehended? Sponsor notes Coin Metrics' Best of State of the Network in 2023 In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 239, we reflect on a year full of riveting data and crucial events through the lens of the research team's favorite issues from 2023

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. Guest and hosts 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 is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes. On down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of 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. 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. For the metrics minute, we're looking at the highlights from coin metrics research, top picks of 2023. The introduction of ordnals to Bitcoin led to an increase in average mining rewards up to 11 BTC per block in May, over 9 BTC per block in November as the growth of ordnals continued. Following ETH Chappelle's hard fork, the beacon chain obtained 17 million 8 million eth, 8 million eth, withdrawn net flow of 9 million eth. Geographical trends and stable coin volumes over the last year showed North America's preference for USDC, USDT volume dominated in Europe

and Africa. Miners benefited from improving market conditions in 2023, with quarterly mining revenue exceeding 2 billion in Q2, 3, and 4. Transaction fees surpassed 200 million in Q4. study of trading volumes on Coinbase found that assets listed in 2021 or earlier accounted for nearly 90% of the total trading volume. And liquidity trends on decentralized exchanges highlighted the stable coins made up 40% of the trading volume when you need to swap VC. That is your metrics minute and a half. Final metrics minute of the year. Good good job on the metrics minutes this year. Thank you. Coin Metrics research team. Your efforts are appreciated. So how was your Christmas?

It was pretty good. I was recovering. I've been sick all of December, but I'm better now. I'm recovering too. You're still sick. Still a little bit under the weather. So we were arguing about whether antibiotics help with the flu, and I would contend that they do not.

Well, I think there's a placebo effect. I think if you go in and you've had something for like 10 days, you should be able to get a Z-pack. That's my stance. Yeah, the doctor should just give you something, you know, just like symbolically. Like you can't go to the doctor and come away empty-handed. Yeah. So I went in yesterday and they're like, well, have you tried Flonais? It's like, yeah, I've tried Flonais. What are you kidding me? Very unsatisfying. Doctors should do at least at a minimum a shamanic ritual to make you feel better. Just give me something. Tell me it's an antibiotic.

can just have it be a sugar pill or something. So I've been dealing with that, but my, my house is better. I get the tree off my house since the last time we did. Tree is off. Tree, you're free of the tree bird and that's good. No tree. I've had a, I've had a good week. I, uh, I had Linwood pizza.

I hadn't had that in like a year. That's the best South Shore bar pie around, baked bean pizza. Shout out to the Lynnwood staff and Randolph. What do you mean baked bean? What do you mean by that? So it's a Salshore bar pie. It's like one of these small ones. You know, you can at least eat one of them, probably two.

And it has baked beans on it. So it's like a can of baked beans on a pizza. It's pretty awesome. I tweeted out of picture of it. Why are you as an American eating baked beans, Matt? I love baked beans. That's not right. Bake beans and hot dogs, that's a great meal.

So the pizza topping is baked beans? Baked beans on top of the pizza mixed in with a little bit of cheese. gives that's shocking pizza run for its money it's a different kind of species of pizza I wouldn't even put it

in the same category as like a New York slice it's very different it's foul it's very good I don't support that I'm on record don't support that

at all we might need to get the Linwood Cafe as a sponsor in this podcast in the upcoming year we've had some sponsorship inquiries

we are we are thinking about taking on additional sponsors outside of coin metrics and I guess Masari Enterprise also sponsor of the podcast. Yeah, look, we're open for business, okay?

We need some pocket money for 2024. That's my resolution. 2024, this is setting up to be a pretty interesting year. We're going to do our predictions this podcast. Do you have any resolutions? I think I'm going to stop eating as much bad food. Pizza? Yeah.

Pizza with baked beans on it. I might shut it down on the baked bean pizza until this time next year. mine is to learn and do a muscle up do you know what a muscle up is no what's that it's like a pull-up but uh when you're done with the pull-up you lever yourself up over the bar so basically your whole waist up is over the bar so it's like uh it's a calisthenics maneuver so you're trying to do one of those well they're very hard i mean uh even uh I have super jacked friends that can't do them. Hold on. So it's just a pull up and then you keep on pulling and then...

You keep on pulling until the bars are your waist. So it's like a gymnastics thing. It's a calisthenics maneuver, as I said. Yeah. I think you should be able to do that. I think so too. I think it's partly strength-based. We're going to work on that. And then skill-based.

I mean, you learn the skill. So that is my resolution. That's it. That's it for 24. That's what I want to do. I think you should be able to get that done within the first couple of weeks just to pull up with an extra step. Well, it's actually pretty hard, Matt. So, you know, it's not the easiest.

Let's not set expectations too high here. I've gotten back on the ice these past few days. First time since Babs and club hockey days. Yeah, I'm back skating. I love skating. There's just no ice round here. Yeah, that's why you've got to come back and get out on the ice up here. So, okay, so we each have one resolution. That's good. We'll revisit this. If we're still doing the podcast, I mean, we've been doing this podcast for like four years. It's coming up on the 500th episode. We had three, this is the third episode of the week on this podcast. Yeah, I think we're going too fast on the episodes. How can someone consume this much content? I'm recording three today.

Yeah. Even the most loyal members of Brink Nation, I don't. don't think and listen to all these podcasts. Well, there's a lot of content. We had Ryan Selkis, a special Christmas edition with the Crypto Theses report. Recommend everyone go to Masari.i.o. Check out that report. Masterful report this year. Very long one. Yeah, I actually thought it was pretty good. I appreciate the work that Ryan puts into those.

And then Rhea sat down with Jill Gunter from Espresso talking about L2 roll-ups. That was a good episode as well. I did TV this week. I did, it was a regrettable audio and video set up. But it was my longest TV hit ever, actually. You had your Christmas tree in the background. Yeah, I wanted to, you know, spread the little bit of Christmas chair. But, yeah, I thought it was fun.

I said never be the main character. I don't know if they got that. Yeah, you don't want to do the main character. Yeah. That was in reference to Barry, yeah. But the anchors didn't understand that at all. I wouldn't say that Barry was ever the main character. He's always been pretty relaxed and behind the scenes.

Sam Beckman-Fried and the Three Arrows guys very much the main characters. I mean, Barry was and probably remains one of the top ten most important, I would say impactful people in crypto over the history, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I think he built one of the great companies in the space for sure. Yeah. And I mean, remember, it was grayscale suit against the SEC, which actually led to the ETF potential approval. So that is the most impactful single thing anyone has done in the history of the crypto industry, arguably. Yeah.

To pick one thing. Very clear to me that the ETF would not be where it is today if it wasn't for that APA, lawsuit. And I think Gensler's public comments on, I think it was CNBC a couple weeks ago, basically confirmed that, that the only reason the SEC is actually considering these is because they lost that lawsuit. Yeah. So, I mean, look, same you want about Barry and DCG, but they arguably added more value to Bitcoin through doing that and through the GBDC product than any entity has ever done. But, you know, maybe Coinbase, you could say, is up there. as well. All right. So why don't we hop into just a couple deals of the week. Nothing major this week.

Not surprising. Not a lot of fundraising announcements. But as always, these are powered by Masari Enterprise. So go check that out. First one up is Arcon Energy. This is an Australian-based Bitcoin mining company. They raised $110 million. What a time to be a Bitcoin miner. I would say a tough time to be one ahead of the halving. But I think the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miner's ETF was the best performing ETF in the world this year. Oh yeah. I mean the last the last month these things are just the publicly traded miners are doing great the past quarter. Yeah. Next up we have Medallion, a web three artist to fan platform. There is 13.7 million from dragonfly and light speed faction. So the bulk of this episode is going to be our predictions for 2024. But before we hop into that,

let's talk about some of the news that happened this week. This just happened the morning. So Kathy Woods core arc fund has it looks like rotated out of their gray scale Bitcoin trust, the GPTC holdings, into the pro shares Bitcoin ETF strategy product, BITO. It looks like she cited some uncertainty on the conversion. And she also mentioned something around tax, which I found puzzling because Grayscale put out a blog post that there won't be negative tax implications. So I thought they kind of refuted some of the fud around the tax consequences of the in-kind, or the cash create, rather. So the way I sort of read this is just Kathy Wood probably setting up to own her own product here if and when it gets approved in early January and a little bit of a rotation trade out of GBT into BITO, probably on a temporary basis, I would imagine. So don't know if there's much to read into this.

Obviously, she has a competitive product, so would make sense that she would try to own that. that eventually, I would think. Yeah. So, you know, I'm, I was a little flummoxed by this because she's giving up six to seven points of upside on this. If you, that's where the discount is right now. If you assume conversion is imminent, you know, you would imagine that the GBDC product has seven points of upside to close relative to nav. So, she must have a very good reason to do this, basically. You know, I guess there's always the chance that there wouldn't be an approval, so maybe it's just some downside protection,

but it's really hard to speculate because no one knows what's going on with these conversations with the SEC and these issuers. There's been a bunch of amendments of the past few days and weeks, so who knows? I think we're just all in the same boat here, thinking it'll happen, but very unclear who's actually ready to do these cash creates as well. so you need to go and get authorized participants signed up in order to actually do them. Looks like the SEC is requiring disclosure that you actually have these AP agreements in place.

Kind of unclear to me out of all the, I guess it's 13 issuers now, 13 sponsors, who would actually be ready to go on the first day. I think we all have a good feeling about probably five or six of them that are for sure ready to go based on what we have just been able to glean ourselves. so kind of unclear on the rest of them. The Bloomberg guys are calling it the Coin Tucky Derby. Oh, I like that. So, yeah.

Eric Balcunis and James Seyffart, they're at risk of becoming the main characters, dare I say. I mean, they're the most listened to analysts at the moment in all of crypto. Yeah, for good reason. They have good insights. It'll be interesting because they will immediately hop over to the, Ethereum ETF chatter, I'd imagine, after Bitcoin hopefully gets approved here. And that'll be an interesting one. I wonder if the SEC will have any grounds to not allow that ETH product to go

through. It seems like it's very similar from a market structure perspective. Has the CME futures attached to it, obviously. So it seems like if you're just looking at this based on facts and circumstances, ETH is going to be a fast follow here. Yeah, let's not get ahead of our predictions. That's actually one of my predictions. So we'll get to that. I just want to go on record that I think we were the first ones to talk about cash create versus in kind. We were? Well, you were.

I always didn't know what it was at the time. But now everyone has a view on it. But I think you were the first one to actually really talk about it. I think these cash creates are dumb. I don't understand why the SEC is taking this posture. I mean, I get what they're saying. I mean, it makes sense in the English language context. It just doesn't make sense from a market structure perspective. And I think you'd have a really good grounds to contest this based on an

administrative procedures lawsuit to say, look, you're not treating this like other commodities where you can do this incand create. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that the SEC is taking such a hard posture on the incand create. And I think a couple of these sponsors will sue the SEC after they get approved because they want to do this in kind. It's better for investors. Yeah, and isn't that the SEC's mandate, you know, investor protection, in theory, at least. I haven't looked, but it's my understanding that most commodities or all commodities, ETFs are in-kind in terms of spot commodities ETFs. So this seems out of step with that.

Yeah, I mean, there are other cash-created ETFs out there. I think it's something like 10, 12% of the market is cash-create, but other types of commodity ETFs you can do this in-kind. with. So I don't get it. I think it would be a much better product. It would track the underlying a lot more efficiently. It would have less financing risk on the back end, less balance sheet expended by the market makers and APs, certainly. So just a better product for consumers, which you would kind of hope that that's what the SEC would try to do, but they aren't. So elsewhere in news, this is interesting. Micro Strategy bought $615 million.

worth of Bitcoin, and now they have $5.9 billion worth. Is it fair to say that their ability to do this will be much diminished post-ET? I mean, they were the de facto ETF, and now they won't be anymore. I think we should endeavor to do a full episode with an expert on what micro strategy is trying to do, because it's one of the craziest capital markets moves of all time. They're just creating new shares, new equity, and using the, proceeds to go out and buy more BTC. They've obviously have a, they have a very complicated capitalization structure over there now with the debt. Some of it is collateralized by Bitcoin.

Some of it's not. So we should, we should do a full episode on this because Michael Saylor is just swinging for the fences right now. I saw some people actually being disappointed when this news came out because I guess it suggests that the big TWOP bidder in the markets was just micro strategy. So if the number had been smaller, I think people might have been happier because that would have implied that there was someone else bidding in size. But it looks like it was just micro strategy. Lastly, big news here out of Indonesia. So they have established, the country has established a new BORS called the Commodity Futures Exchange. And they're requiring that all crypto exchanges and brokerages in the country register with CFS.

or face shutdown or basically leave the market. Sign of a healthy market structure, I would say, you know, basically bringing the Indonesian crypto market in line with the way that Indonesian equities work. So I think that's an important step. I'd imagine the best in class exchanges and brokerages will be able to go get registered with this exchange. But it seems to me like this is a pretty big step forward in that market,

which is a huge, huge market. I mean, that's like, what is it, the fourth or fifth most populated? country in the world. And actually more people own crypto in Indonesia than own equities in Indonesia, which is just mind-boggling. That's right. And consistently one of the most top-ranking nations on the crypto adoption index. Okay, well, we said last week we were going to do predictions and we wrote some down. I actually went crazy. I have 25. Crazy. So I only have five. So why don't we start with a couple of yours and we'll sprinkle a

couple of mine in there. All right. And mine are arranged by category. So I'm going to start with stable coins, of course, my favorite thing. Stablecoin supplies 135 bill today. I expect it will easily cruise to 200 bill a new all-time high by the end of 24. Stables, I think, will end the year, having done 80% of on-chain transaction value versus sort of the liquid crypto assets. I think tokenized U.S. Treasuries will hit 1.5 bill up from $450 million today, so triple. I think the stables to watch for the next year and disclosure we're an investor in one of these are first digital PayPal USD, USDM, that's one we're an investor in, and Athena, USDAE. Those are the ones to watch.

I would say Tether does not suffer an adverse legal or regulatory events. event. That's maybe a controversial one. And I think stables on Solana will reach 15 billion up from two billion today. So those are my stable coin predictions. So I think that's a pretty safe prediction. And the one that I would add to that is my prediction is that you have another massive issuer enter this market in the U.S. I think you'll see folks look at the success of Circle and Tether and PayPal and really see this as viable. I think you'll see a big push to enter the interest-bearing stable-coin market in the U.S. I don't know.

That's actually not one of my predictions, but I think you will see a lot of momentum there. I don't know if you'll actually get one approved through the SEC, but I think you'll have several issuers try to go with a U.S. interest-bearing stable-coin, TBD on whether or not they can actually launch it. My next category is Bitcoin. So I think you'll see a Bitcoin ZK roll-up launched in 24. I think I'll have to start as a sovereign.

and roll up pending any kind of soft fork. I think the Bitcoin hardliners, this one is easy. They will fail to filter out ordinals or inscriptions from the Bitcoin protocol. I mean, obviously. And I think pools that are set up to try and do that filtering like Ocean will have less than 1% of hash rate. On the ETF front, I think it will attract 20 billion of flows in year one, probably a safe one as well. Bitcoin, I believe, will be flat. on the week of the ETF approval. Wow. Sell the news, huh? Sell the news or just don't buy the news.

But I think it will end the year with very positive flows in the 80K range, non-investment advice. Lastly, I think two nation states will announce they're mining Bitcoin at the sovereign level. Those are my Bitcoin ones. Interesting. All right, I'm going to sprinkle in one of my predictions on Bitcoin here. So I believe that there will be a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. that would seek to prevent the U.S. government from auctioning off its Bitcoin holdings.

So all of these seized bitcoins from all of the, you know, the Silk Road style companies that have been seized by the U.S. government. Obviously, the U.S. is sitting on a sizable stash of Bitcoin. And I believe that a national conversation will emerge around whether or not the U.S. Treasury should implement a HODL strategy. Oh, that's a very interesting one. Okay. I like that. My next category is Ethan Defy. So bear with me. I just look, I just got too excited with my predictions.

I think ETH will be net deflationary through 2024. So if you consider the whole year, I think it'll be supply will reduce on net in 24. I think a spot ETH ETF will be approved in 24 on the heels of the Bitcoin spot ETF. This one's a bit of a reach. I think ETHBTC will end the year at 0.75. or higher. Right now it's at 0.055. So that implies a 6k eth price if Bitcoin is 80k or a 3.7k Eth price at Bitcoin 50k. And then on defy, I think defy lending on Collat hits a billion in TVL. It's about 500 million today. I think the prediction market TVL will hit 100 mil.

it's about depending on how you count 10 to 30 million as of today so I'm actually very excited about prediction markets so I think the big variable there is the eth ETF if bitcoin does 20 billion inflows on a on a new ETF product which I think is a pretty good estimate I think ETH would do at least five in terms of five billion of flows I don't know I don't know about this ETH uh ETF approval I think you know like I said if you just look at the facts and circumstances that's a product that should be approved. Who knows what the SEC is going to come out with in terms of reasons to potentially deny that product?

I think you could look at the spot volume on uniswap as a potential issue there. So my last batch is NFTs and then adoption bits and pieces. So my top three NFT chains in terms of trading volume for 24 are in order, ETH, Bitcoin, and Solana. Probably a fairly safe bet. I think major non-cryptanative brands will issue or sell at least $100 million worth of fidgetal goods in 2024. So there's a goods with a chip in them that corresponds to an NFT.

I think one, at least one, smartphone manufacturer will add blockchain time stamping to images produced on the phones as part of a kind of proof of provenance package. I would say the crypto AI projects, aka the Airbnb for GPUs, I don't think they will take off in 24. I believe at least three jurisdictions will pass proof of reserves guidance or legislation in 24. And lastly, I think helium will be a breakout success in 24 and show real crypto utility in the real world. A little deep pin prediction there. Deepen. Yeah. So that's all of them for me. So we can evaluate them. Pretty good predictions. They're quantifiable. So we should be able to see whether or not we were successful in some of these predictions. I like it. The proof of reserve legislation, I think,

is pretty safe bed. There's a lot of folks that are looking at that right now. Obviously, there's been some movement in Texas on that front. Yeah, I mean, I'm cheating on that one because I know of a couple of places where it's underway. So hopefully it happens. All right, well, I'll sprinkle in a few of mine here. I already said the bill to prevent the, you know, the auctions from occurring. So I'd like to see that happen. I think that probably will happen. Another prediction of mine is I believe that the CME will announce on an earnings call

that they're exploring Solana futures. And this would be a huge game changer for the industry. This would open up a pathway eventually for a Solana ETF. I don't think that would happen in 2024. But having a CMO. market for Solana would be the kind of the baseline of what you would eventually need in order to point to it. Now, the issue, of course, is that the SEC is saying that Solana is a security, and so that could be a potential issue. So I'm not predicting that the CME will actually launch this product, but I think they will announce that they're exploring what it would take to launch this product.

And, you know, maybe you wouldn't be able to do this with Gary Gensler at the SEC, but I think the market is trending towards wanting that CME product for Solana. So I'm going to put you on the spot here and ask you for a prediction on Solana versus ETH. So the sole to ETH chart, it was at 0.01, as recently as October, it hit 0.05, sold it a 5x against Eith, and then now it's given up some of its gains at about 0.04. Which one do you favor throughout 24? Where do you think that ratio ends? I think ETH is underappreciated kind of in the doghouse right now. So I think this ETH chatter around ETH is going to drive the ETH spot market in 2024.

So I'd be more favorable towards seeing the ratio increase in Ethereum's favor. One of my predictions that I had to get rid of had to do with ETHL2 gas usage. It's about 20% of all gas on Ethereum is. accounted for by L2s. I thought that would go up, but I knew that I would be clown for saying that because with ETH, there's always some weird technical thing that I'm getting wrong. And as it turns out, the ETH people are going to put in EIP 8-4-4844, I think, which apparently is going to reduce the gas usage of L2s. Yeah, that'll actually be a big game changer if that were to happen. I think that'll open up the surface area for new applications to launch on ETH. So I think you'll see,

more product development happening in the Heath perspective. Now, obviously, the flip side of that argument is there a bunch of primitives in Solana that just don't exist yet. So Salana doesn't have a native stable coin yet. Salana doesn't have as robust of a defy infrastructure as Heath does. So there's some, like, major catalyst that could happen on Salana as well. Yeah, I will answer my own question and say the ETH sole ratio ends the year below 0.04. Okay. Have you wrong on that? I'm often wrong. So my next prediction is that a massive topic in the crypto space in 2024 will be whether or not micro strategy is good for Bitcoin.

And this will be partially due to Saylor continuing to accumulate more Bitcoin, continuing to lever up as balance sheet. And so this will just become a constant conversation throughout 2024. I don't know quite how to measure that one other than to say this will be one of the top five topic areas for is Bitcoin secure. I think you'll see a bunch of Wall Street Journal style articles about this to say, hey, the price of Bitcoin is like manipulated by micro strategy or whatnot. I think you'll see a bunch of Bitcoin people come out and say, well, is this really a good thing? Does Sailor own too much of the coin? So we'll be talking about this a lot in

2024 is my expectation. This isn't a crypto prediction, but I predict and this is already happening, that everything that the mainstream press said about Bitcoin mining, mainly pejorative, they will start to say about AI. So uses too much energy, et cetera, et cetera. I think a lot of that discourse, they're just going to copy paste it and hammer AI on that. So laziness out of the mainstream press as it relates to AI on the back of laziness from the mainstream press about Bitcoin mining. Pretty safe bet there. Yeah, or, you know, motivated reasoning or cherry picking of the data. Yeah, I mean, I thought it would happen. And as AI becomes something that's perceived to be hostile to the press, like you saw the New York Times is suing open AI, which I found kind of amusing, I guess. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, we're seeing some pushback. All right. So my next one is that the Bank Secrecy Act will be challenged at the

the Supreme Court level in the United States. So this is not necessarily a crypto prediction, although it's very possible that a crypto company or an entity like Coin Center could mount this challenge. And I think the Bank Secrecy Act is pretty flimsy if you actually look at the constitutional merits of that act. And I think it's quite possible that one of these Elizabeth Warren anti-crypto bills is the catalyst for someone to go challenge. the actual whole enchilada here on the Bank Secrecy Act. And at that point, then I think you're opening up the surface area for just more kind of non-crypto folks to enter the spray.

A lot of the banks don't want this. ACLU has been against the Bank Secrecy Act, really from the start. They actually originally mounted a challenge in the early days right after it happened. I believe that was like the late 1970s. So it's sort of an issue that conservatives and liberals can agree on to some degree. and I actually think it's going to be Elizabeth Warren. It's going to be some backlash here. So I think there are going to be some folks that say,

listen, not only are you wrong about crypto, but you're actually wrong about the whole Bank Secrecy Act. That would be deliciously ironic if Warren's overzealousness on the BSA as part of her misguided campaign to trample crypto led to an actual SCOTUS challenge to the law itself, which I have long maintained is unconstitutional, says that right on my website. I think the BSA is unconstitutional.

I can't imagine anything better. That would be such an immense contribution to the world if the crypto industry was able to overturn that. My longer term time horizon, this will not happen in 2024. But if we just look out over a three to four year time period would be Elizabeth Warren runs for the re-election in 2024 in Massachusetts. She wins, but she does not serve the full term.

So there's a special election that happens at some point in the next four years. And Elizabeth Warren tries to get Michelle Wu, the current mayor of Boston, as her successor. And that there's a special election. And we end up with a big conversation around who the Republican adversary will be against probably Michelle Wu, I would have to guess. So Elizabeth Warren does not finish her term. Is it Charlie Baker? Is it Tom Brady? Who's going to run against Michelle Wu in a special election in 20?

25 or 26. That's a very specific prediction, Matt. I think that's probably the safest democratic seat in the nation, though. It's pretty safe if you're Elizabeth Warren. I don't know if it might not be necessarily safe if it's Michelle Wu running for it. There's a lot of races where maybe we could turn the tide a little bit here and there. For Warren's seat, I'm not sure I'm as constructive on. My last prediction is that the founders of Three Arrow's Capital are charged by a U.S. entity.

So could be the SEC, could be the CFTC, could be the DOJ. They are charged with defrauding U.S.-based lending companies. And my corollary prediction to that is that Kyle Davies is apprehended. He is probably in some hole like Saddam Hussein. and there's some sort of a mugshot picture where the whole industry kind of cheers that finally these criminals have been apprehended. My enthusiasm for that prediction coming true

knows no bounds, Matt. It could happen. It could happen in 2012. That would be incredible. I agree on the whole thing. He might be in a hole right now. Could be. Maybe with Wi-Fi. Maybe he's listening to this podcast.

You could have Wi-Fi. Could have Wi-Fi. That could be a vector for getting him. You know, we could figure out who is ISP is, I suppose. Yeah, DOJ needs to get a sack together on that one. Still some bad boys to clean up here. We got, you can't heal as an industry unless you get rid of the bad boys. I mean, 3-A was like one of the main entities that catalyzed the credit crunch.

So, yeah, we're not done. Okay, we're not done. I think it's just hilarious that the tweet from Suzu when they were collapsing was that we look forward to working this out with our lenders. And then you find out last week that they have over a billion dollars stashed away. That's not really working it out with your lenders and trying to make people whole when you're squirreling away. Yeah, of every entity that became insolvent, they worked it out the least amount with their creditors as evidence by where the claims are trading. So those are our predictions. That's a pretty healthy amount of predictions.

There's at least 15 predictions there. Yeah, that was a robust number. So please remind us next year if we forget. And we'll see how we did. None of this is investment advice. And do your own research. All right. Well, it was a good year in crypto.

Good job, everyone. good quarter, good year. Less meme coins next year. Maybe let's just go easy on the meme coins and build real products. How does that sound? That would help everything, I think. Just less speculative frenzy around the meme coins. Let's just buckle down.

Keep your head straight here. Don't do crazy things. Leverage is going to come back to this market. Don't get bit. Number one rule is just stay alive through these cycles. Just stay alive. in 2024. It's going to get a little wonky. The economist said the Bitcoin is a cockroach. So even the economists, they're admitting Bitcoin can't be killed. At the end of last year,

they said crypto was over. They said it was dead. This year it's a cockroach. It's another year of crypto not being dead. And I predict that will also be the case in 24. We'll continue to not be dead. I think that's a safe bet. All right, everyone, we enjoyed it this year. Thank you. Thank you to our listeners. Everyone have a safe and healthy new year and we will see you in 2024.