The Breakdown - SBF Testifies; WSJ Errors; Bitcoin Booms - The Top 5 Crypto Stories This Week

Episode Date: October 28, 2023

Recorded live with Scott Melker on Friday October 27, 2023 Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemore...crypto Subscribe to the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW

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Starting point is 00:00:04 Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, October 28th, and that means it's time for the weekly recap. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends, we are back with another top five most important stories in crypto this week. This, of course, is the conversation that I have live with Scott Melker on Friday mornings.
Starting point is 00:00:49 Now, this week, there are two big, big blaring things that stand out. One is, of course, the SPF testimony. And the second, which is way more significant in many ways, is the attempt to blame crypto for Hamas's attack on Israel a couple weeks back. Now, we got a lot more information in that story this week. Elliptic basically said that the Wall Street Journal had misinterpreted what it said, but of course we've gotten no corrections from the Wall Street Journal. And even if we did, the damage would likely already have been done. We also talk a little bit about the big pump this week.
Starting point is 00:01:21 All in all, a very dynamic and exciting week, so let's dive in. Quite a week that we've had, huh? Indeed. It's been a week. It's funny because we always talk about how hyperbottomical. and exaggeratory, our titles are allowed to be. Yeah. And this time we were actually like, take it off.
Starting point is 00:01:40 Yeah, do whatever you want. Have it. Man, it really did skyrocket, right? I mean, obviously we have Bitcoin sort of consolidating here under $35,000. Meme coins like Pepe and Flokky doing 100%, you know, plus gains. Is there real money and interest coming back into this market right now? Are we back in the washing machine and we're going to see it rotating? What do you think?
Starting point is 00:02:01 So I, two answers to that. On the one hand, I still think that the vast majority of it is just our money internally and people moving things around and people, you know, kind of putting more of their own capital back in, moving out of stable coin, stuff like that, right? It is excitement that's predicated on the community itself that's already here. However, the big, big caveat to that is that every institutional fund, every Bitcoin onboarding firm. If you watch like anyone who works in Swan's institutional management, all week they've been talking about just phones ringing off the hook, people coming in. I think Matt Hogan tweeted that there are,
Starting point is 00:02:42 that the conversations this cycle have started to move from, hey, you should have a 1% allocation to, hey, you should have a 5% allocation to Bitcoin. So I do think that while when it comes to sort of like this vicious rip up that we had on Monday, that's, you know, market structure dynamics playing out with regard to this particular community by and large. But it does seem like this one may have finally triggered alongside all of sort of the narrative stuff we've seen. The phone calls to start coming in for people to actually kind of move in from outside. So I think that for the first time when we're asking this question, in a long time, it actually is potentially some amount of a mix of different types of buyers. Yeah, I mean, Matrixport being the analyst here that they're referring to,
Starting point is 00:03:27 Fifth bull market has further to run that's coming from Matrixport research. They're saying that this is officially now the fifth bull market for Bitcoin. Of course, they say 125,000 by 2024. We don't care about that, right? We don't really care about the hyperbolic price predictions. But to your point, I think that something's different this time. I know those are dangerous words, but we can see that the market cap has risen dramatically. We can see that both Bitcoin rose and things like meme coins rose at the same time.
Starting point is 00:03:55 That can't happen with the rotation of capital. That means that there has to be new money in the system. I've spoken with quite a few people. I had James Butterfield from coin shares on. And he said, yeah, we're seeing some inflows definitely at $300 million this year, institutional inflows. He said, interestingly, we're seeing a bit of outflow from the futures ETFs. And what that tells me is that everybody now is ready for this ETF's approval.
Starting point is 00:04:18 Right. So I'm not surprised that we haven't seen billions flowing in already because why would you start throwing money into this market if you're an institution? today if you think that there could be a Bitcoin spot ETF that you can safely invest in in a month. Yeah, 100%. You know, I think that the other thing, kind of going back to this contention of, is it a bull market yet? You know, listen, analysts papers love to call those things. They're very useful. They're good for, you know, kind of selling research. But when it comes to sort of the gut check on this question, because I think from a community perspective, that's in some ways more
Starting point is 00:04:56 enlightening. I think that we are just starting to be in a phase where, you know, in the long in between between a bear market and a bull market, you have the first part in which the little spikes that look like bull markets feel like the exception and then you return back to the rule, which is either down or sideways. And then you get to the second part where it feels like the retraces back down and the slight move sideways are the exceptions to the larger momentum. And I don't want to say this for sure, but it does feel from a psychological standpoint in this space that we maybe have just flipped over into that, even if we saw, you know, the first half of November going slightly down, we get back down to 30, 29. I think that it would still feel like,
Starting point is 00:05:41 whatever, it's not going to change. It's not a return to the norm. It's now sort of like, that's the exception, not the rule, kind of a thing. No asset in the world loves to leave people behind more than Bitcoin, right? So if we get the retrace, it'll be shall be shall be. narrower than people think. It'll bounce a thousand dollars higher than everybody has their orders. We love to talk about the meme of which direction is Max Payne and what can the market do to punish the most people. Right now it feels like anyone's sideline is really hoping that they get that dip to buy, which means to me they probably won't that Max Payne perhaps in this case finally is up. And speaking of Max Payne, look at this guy.
Starting point is 00:06:20 Thank you free trial. Live updates from the courtroom. I know looking at him gives me Max Payne. I'm sure even. Oh, my God. Every XFTXer is just having, calling their therapists off the hook for the last month. I'm quite sure that therapists, that service crypto clients are probably making almost as much money as bankruptcy attorneys here as service crypto companies at this point. But some wild stuff happens here. Maybe you can explain why he testified, but not in front of a jury.
Starting point is 00:06:51 Even the judge seemed somewhat confused at why that was happening. they asked the judge question, which frankly was like, I've never done this before. So I don't know. And SBF went on to say things as wild as I had no idea it was wrong to use customer funds. Yeah. So a couple things. One is it's worth noting that I don't think that there has been a lot of meaningful progress in the case besides this. I don't even really think that the defense had a chance to make a lot of its case this weekend just, I don't know, there's just not much there.
Starting point is 00:07:22 Right. And I think that that's sort of what gets us to the situation. There are two reasons that SBF is testifying. One is because he was always going to testify because it's a person who is the biggest thing that he suffers from is narcissism. And there was never a chance, I think, that at the end of the day, he wouldn't testify. So that's one. The second, though, is that it really is the only chance he has left.
Starting point is 00:07:41 Even if it is a literal snowball's chance in hell, it's better than the definitive verdict that he was looking like he was heading towards. And so I think on some kind of perverse way, it makes sense that he asked to at least try. Now, what my read on the situation was in terms of why the jury was dismissed, the government said something like there's data that the government doesn't think that jury should hear, but it seemed more like the situation was the judge was trying to figure out what Sam was actually going to say. They called it sort of a mock testimony, right? And he wanted to see, like, if Sam was just going to be evasive and not give answers, you know, because I think the judge has to rule on whether he's going to allow Sam to testify in front of a jury. And so yesterday was this very weird, there was a lot of obfuscation. There was a lot of, you know, someone noted, I think it might have been Laura Shin or someone else. It was Sam, or maybe it was Tiffany Fong, but someone noted that Sam was doing exactly what he was doing during his media tour, which is when asked a question, he slightly sidesteps it and answers something else. Politics.
Starting point is 00:08:46 Yeah. And unfortunately for him, courts don't work like that. When you do that in court, they say, you know, answer the. actual question asked, right? So it's sort of TBD on how that's going to play out. A second thing that Sam did a lot is very clearly, the defense very clearly and has from the beginning wants to make this an issue of FTX counsel, right, that Sam was just doing what he was legally told to do. Every other answer was Dan Friedberg, right, who's the name of the general counsel, who was formerly, you know, involved in a big sort of poker scandal as well.
Starting point is 00:09:29 And it's very clear that Sam is desperately trying to throw Dan Friedberg under the bus and say, I just did what he said. Now, I don't know if you have this tweet pulled up or if we can find it, but there was one moment where the judge literally asked Sam's attorneys to explain to him how blaming counsel was different in this case versus if you laundered money from a bank. The judge was basically trying to figure out. It's like, look, you did a crime. And then later, the attorney told you how to deal with the crime.
Starting point is 00:10:00 Doesn't that mean you still did the crime? And it's just this sort of very weird moment where, again, the judge is still trying to figure out if he is going to allow the way that the defense is trying to present the case. You know, because it's not a for sure. Yeah, he wants to blame his lawyers for everything and claim ignorance, but nobody's going to buy that. there was even a point in a trial where they objected and it was sustained and he decided to answer anyway and his lawyers got miffed. I mean, this guy is off the rails. I don't know if he got his Adderall or not. To me, that's the bigger story, right? He needed Adderall if he was going to testify. I wonder if they gave it to him. Do we have any insight on that important story?
Starting point is 00:10:41 That was, I mean, that was the most, I think that was the most remarkable moment for kind of anyone watching or reading along about it. Sam deciding to, that he said he felt, he needed to answer a question to which his attorney, you know, after an objection was sustained, to which his attorney said, have you not been here for four weeks? It's just wild. Dude, chill. Yeah. I loved, by the way, that in this quick summary from inner city press that we had the inclusion
Starting point is 00:11:06 of Sam China bribed Tribucco and Dan illegal narcotics, Friedberg. This is the first time that we've seen Trubucco's name. He's been the missing man this entire time. I mean, he was the head of Alamedo with Carolyn Ellison, and it's like he never existed. I think this is still this is still super confusing. I mean, it seems like there has to be something more going on because it's just, it doesn't make any sense. No one has ever offered an explanation.
Starting point is 00:11:30 No one has ever tried to offer an explanation. The complete silence around it is, you know, as sort of dubious as anything else. Defening, as they said, the silence is deafening. Now we get to move on from SBF because I think that's enough. We all know where that's headed for today. And we get to talk about something much more favorite. I believe we touched on it actually last week, Hamas militants behind Israel, attack, raised millions in crypto. Obviously, the bigger story that that was a Wall Street Journal article that referenced data by elliptic.
Starting point is 00:12:04 We saw chain alias come out and say this is completely wrong. And then Elliptic themselves, who were the basis for this article, said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're setting the record straight on crypto crowdfunding by Hamas, talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. but the bigger story is that we're not seeing a retraction from the Wall Street Journal, and we're certainly not seeing Elizabeth Warren and 100 plus senators and Congress people retract their statement that was made based on this article. And then to dig even deeper into it, yesterday, Senator Lummis, who's been very, very favorable, she's the one writing the stable coin legislation that's being proposed saying the DOJ needs to do their job and go ahead and charge tether and finance for their role in third.
Starting point is 00:12:48 things like this. It's a lot. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this has been, this is actually one of the most, probably the most significant story going on in crypto right now, because there are a bunch of different dimensions to it. There is obviously a larger media story of, you know, the incentives of press. You know, you've kind of seen the journalists who wrote the piece or one of the journalist who wrote the piece on Twitter, defending himself. And effectively, his argument has been, well, no, I buried these caveats later in the piece, and it makes sense. Now, if you go back and read that original piece, the headline and the first paragraph could not make it clear that the thesis of the piece is that Hamas was able to carry out this attack, this specific attack, by the way,
Starting point is 00:13:39 because of cryptocurrency financing. Now, by the end, there is a lot more doubt into that. The journalist isn't wrong that there is more questions by the end than are there in the beginning. But one, it's a fair question of, does that matter when you scream out the headline the way that you did? And two, the way that he did these caveats sort of like with, you know, his journalistic, you know, his journalistic covers are things like they raised as much as 93 million from crypto. It's like, come on. You think that adding an as an employee, like that that doesn't imply that it's 93 million, Like, that's not a reasonable journalistic take, I don't think. And so there's the whole media side of the story, but obviously it's even more complicated
Starting point is 00:14:23 because it comes at a time when the crypto industry is being absolutely assailed and has been for the better part of a year now. For, you know, the opponents have been looking for anything to cast doubt on this. This was the sole source of information for a letter that was signed by a fifth of Congress. that's totally, totally inappropriate. And so, you know, the question has been, will the Wall Street Journal issue a retraction? But I don't think that there's any chance on the planet that they will.
Starting point is 00:14:51 It also doesn't matter if they do because we know that fake news proliferates so much faster. And once it's seen, the retraction never is. That damage has been done. Absolutely. Yeah. There's no coming back from that. Obviously, I also pointed out here that Sherrod Brown calls for crackdown and use of crypto to fund terrorism. I think what's just most interesting to me is that this senator,
Starting point is 00:15:10 Lummus letter comes after we already know that this is a fake story. It was one thing for Elizabeth Warren, I guess, can claim plausible deniability. I read the article. I trust the Wall Street Journal. It was right there. We wrote the letter. Lummus, who we all love, who we all love, she wrote this letter seemingly after it's very clear that this isn't true. So I'm just trying to figure out what the potential angle there would be. My instinct is that the angle there has more to do with a prioritization around where we are, you know, what, what threats we're dealing with, right? Like, she clearly wants the emphasis to be on offshore non-American regulated sort of institutions and their role, rather than sort of like targeting the better part of the, you know, or the,
Starting point is 00:16:00 the sort of controllable, you know, regulatable part of the American crypto industry. So, you know, listen, it could just be literal politics, you know, instead of trying to say, hey, don't go after crypto, it's instead saying go after this very different part of crypto, you know? Go after non-American crypto, right? I mean, that's basically what they're saying. They're saying, we're going to pick the winners, which we understand. Maybe this is saying, hey, use USDC.
Starting point is 00:16:25 We're regulating the hell out of it. Don't use Tether. Use Coinbase for regulating the hell out of it. Don't use finance. I mean, Palo from Tether and Bitfinex responded, we at Tether are proud of the work we do to stop a listed activity. to how they're proactively collaborated since inception with tens of law enforcement agencies, including U.S., Ukraine, and Israel, crypto used by malicious actors accounts for a small drop.
Starting point is 00:16:47 You get it, right? I mean, he very quickly said the same thing they've been saying all long. Listen, we're literally working with you guys to freeze these wallets. Everybody sees it. They're actually doing that work. So it just kind of blows my mind to see that. But I think you actually have it correct, which is that we're going to get rid of the foreign actors in this industry so they can be better controlled by the United States. I mean, I think that that's a fair sort of way to approach this. Yeah, I mean, listen, it's reasonable to not like that approach. It's just, this is very clearly there are, let's put it this way.
Starting point is 00:17:19 If on the one hand you have crypto antagonists and on the other hand, you have like the full on sort of crypto industry, let markets decide, you know, figure it out folks. In the middle, especially in D.C., there is a big space that says, you know, we got to make some compromises. We have to exert some control. And so the compromises that we're going to make. are things like, you know, focusing on, you know, pushing out the unregulated, uncontrollable stuff and, you know, and sort of enshrining and holding up the things that are sort of, you know,
Starting point is 00:17:48 regulatable. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. The next story, I believe this is number four. BlackRock, Bitcoin ETF in August got on DTCC site that just belatedly moved markets. That is a mouthful of a headline from Coin desk. I'm not even sure if they wrote that in English. But the idea here is a story that we've all been discussing. which is that the reason, because we need a reason, for the last move of Bitcoin from 31,000 to 35,000,
Starting point is 00:18:14 was because BlackRock's Bitcoin spot ETF had been listed on the DTCC site as IBTC. We dug into that, and the meaning of that apparently was that BlackRock is advancing. They're taking the next steps. They wouldn't do this unless they thought they were going to get approval. And further, once you do that, you start to actually seed the fund, meaning that you have to buy the underlying asset for that ETF, meaning even if in small amounts, BlackRock's going to start buying Bitcoin. We all know what happened next. Apparently it disappeared from the website. Then the website itself disappeared because so many people went to
Starting point is 00:18:50 check if it was still on the website, which actually crashed it. Then when it came back, it was there. It wasn't there. This all of course, according to Twitter. And the ARC ETF was there, but then that wasn't there. Apparently that was fake news. So basically we had this massive, confusing nonsensical story, and it turned out when someone actually just bothered to call DTTC that it had been there since August. I personally, I just loved this story. Everything about it is, I mean, listen, what this story tells you more than anything else, hold aside the details, is that one, this is now two weeks running where we've had a Monday fake news story around the ETF, so let's see if we can make it three. And then two, it's that there is so much pent up.
Starting point is 00:19:36 energy, excitement, anticipation. I mean, look, it is very clear that people believe rightly or wrongly that this ETF is going to be the starting gun on the next bull market. And anything that hints, I mean, that we are there is pushing people in, you know, and what I would be interested in is knowing sort of, you know, how much, like how much it's new market participants versus just more, you know, new capital from existing market participants because it feels like it's a lot of that. But anyways, you know, listen, I think it was hilarious that ultimately is just something that we didn't notice for two months drove the market that way. But I think that that speaks less to us being insane, although there's obviously always a little bit of that and more to just
Starting point is 00:20:23 the anticipation of what is seen as a absolutely catalytic event. That's right. It shows you that this market wants to go up. It wants to believe and it wants to you know, continue. And so I think you're right. It really doesn't matter what the news is, real or fake. It's giving us a huge hint as to what we can expect from this market when we do see a real approval. My favorite, just to wrap a bow on that one, was this final take from Philback. My brothers in Bitcoin, I spent six years managing new ETF launches for NISI 2010 to 2016, and about 15 years in ETF product development and management. The DTCC thing means absolutely nothing. nothing, get offline and spend time with your loved ones.
Starting point is 00:21:05 So just to give you the context, all of that, even if it was just there since August, apparently even the takes about how important it was that it was there were false, and this is literally an entire nothing burger. But the bigger nothing burger it is, the bigger the story it is to me on how it was treated and handled by the crypto world of media. Well, you know, it was interesting. I mean, I think that like, so we had, you know, we had this, this, this, Crazy rip-up.
Starting point is 00:21:32 And then when the next day on Tuesday morning, when this ticker symbol was suddenly gone, everyone freaked out and Bitcoin retraced three or four percent, right? Not nearly the entire move, but meaningful. Then when it came out, when it came back, and even when it was revealed that it was nothing, people were like, oh, no, you know what, we like that higher level better. We'll go back to the thing. You know, this asset wants to be, you know, somewhere around where it is now for the moment, you know, and it's sort of clinging to that, I think, you know, I don't know. I'm not sure what
Starting point is 00:22:01 would knock it off. I guess, you know, another ETF denial entirely if the SEC came out and, you know, kind of wiped off the slate. Maybe that would sort of, you know, really. Yeah, I think it would have to be the January denial when there's actually a final deadline for ARC. I think that would probably be it. I think until then, we're just going to sort of maintain this height. Maybe they'll float down if we hear nothing for a bit. Maybe my favorite actor in this whole story, I don't know if you saw today that Jay Clayton, who's been on his road show, the ex-SEC chairman, saying that we should approve a Bitcoin spot ETF, saying if he was chairman now, he would approve a Bitcoin spot ETF, is the most fair weather clout chasing human I've ever seen in my life because he was literally
Starting point is 00:22:40 SEC chairman and had the opportunity to approve a Bitcoin spot ETF. I guess we can say, hey, it's changed. The environment is different. Yeah, it's actually a lot worse. Like we're in a bare market. So I don't really get that. The life of an ex-regulator is a, it's a, it's very good work if you could get it. Living in the sun, man, just like sunny 24-7, got a great tan having a beer and just getting to fight. It's kind of like being the party that's not in power in politics. Yeah. Because you don't have to do anything but be critical and say what you would do if things were perfect. So much fun for him. But man, it just, it just aggravates me. He's literally the guy who could have done it. But hey, What are you going to do? Now, moving on to the fifth and final story is not just the approval,
Starting point is 00:23:25 but what would happen if we do actually get it, right? So, Bitcoin Spot ETFs could see inflow, a 14.4 billion in first year. This is from a pretty comprehensive report by Galaxy, which we can accept and enter the site. You can see that here on galaxy.com. But we're starting to get the analysis. We can call it research. It's really hard because it's all projection on just how big this could potentially be for the market and how much money we could see coming in. I think the only real reference point we have is BITO, the Bitcoin Futures ETF that was approved a couple years ago. We saw over a billion in less than 72 or 48 hours of inflows, assets under management.
Starting point is 00:24:06 That was the most successful ETF of all time, launch any ETF, obviously, not just crypto ETF. And Valkyrie, which didn't launch for another 48 or 72 hours after that. even being second was still, I believe, the 14th most successful ETF launch of all time. So that was in a bull market. There was huge demand, obviously, for a futures ETF. Now you have eight to ten of these, including the biggest names in the investment world. What can we expect and how can we come to that sort of conclusion as to what we can expect? Well, to your first point, it's all just projection.
Starting point is 00:24:42 So there's no certainty here. A couple things worth noting. One, obviously Mike Novogatz himself is a huge bull. He will always show up in the arena with a price prediction. That's sort of his thing. His team at Galaxy Research are not that. They're super serious. Alex Thorne was at Fidelity. He's been an investor for a long time.
Starting point is 00:25:01 These are very serious people who are, if they're coming out with a $14.4 billion projection, and that's in their first year. They think it goes up to like $21 billion in the second year and $39 billion by the third year. They're looking at that, you know, listen, they still could have those. the rose-colored glasses that we all have in the Bitcoin space. But I think that you can take it more seriously than just some sort of, you know, errant CEO pumping up, pumping up to sort of the space. So that's one thing. The second thing is, I think that the sort of these big numbers are predicated upon either an assumption or a bet that what's different this time is that one, because
Starting point is 00:25:36 you have an instrument, which is accessible to a huge array of investors, and two, you have the providers of that instrument being some of the biggest giants in traditional finance, that all of a sudden those messages of, you know, get off zero, basically, you know, the stuff that people have been talking about for six, seven years now or more, like actually start to resonate. And when you start to have, you know, some meaningful portion of people who wouldn't allocate before there was an ETF, say, sure, one to five percent, you know, going in, it doesn't take all that much to add up to these sort of seemingly big numbers. So I think that the thing will, the question will not be in some ways so much to me what the actual number is, because that's, that's arbitrary. It will be do the things that we anticipate happening because this asset, because this instrument exists, i.e. this new set of investors allocating a little bit to it, does that actually happen?
Starting point is 00:26:34 That's the big question. And if it does, it's, you know, game on in a huge, huge way. Yeah, do registered investment advisors actually say, okay, now that we can, we're going to? Do institutions say now that we can, we're going to? Is the real demand there? All of these calculations, as you said, they're based on a theoretical if we get 1% from all of the investment managers in the world. It breaks down to X number, right? Mark Yusko came on. He did it. Yeah, it's like we have some three trillion. If we get 1% of those and they do 1%, it's this number, we're going to see, right? But I would tell you that the price action in the market is showing that at least that demand
Starting point is 00:27:13 is there. So I don't know if the numbers are going to matter if Bitcoin just skyrockets that will probably do more for inflows and adoption than anything else. Nothing makes people want to buy Bitcoin more than more expensive Bitcoin. Can I do an honorable mention real quick? I don't know if you've seen this one, but we're supposed to be done. But this one got me. J.P. Morgan chases Jamie Diamond and his family to sell 140.
Starting point is 00:27:37 41 million of stock in 2024. If you guys haven't seen this, he's never sold in his 17 years at J.P. Morgan. This is one million shares of the families, the families, right? Because he put it in a trust, so it's not yours. 8.6 million shares. He says he's just doing it for tax purposes to be efficient. He still believes in the company. I believe all that to be true, by the way.
Starting point is 00:27:59 But the billionaire playbook usually is never sell anything, take loans against it, and die and magically poof, all the expense goes away for your family. Do you think that this is, listen, I think people have the right to take profit. I have no problem generally with people eventually, you know, selling something. But do you think that this is meaningful in the context of Jamie Diamond consistently saying that there's like this massive correction and depression coming? He's been very vocal about how bad he thinks the market is going to be. I think it is a, I would characterize it as a meaningful signal to watch, especially if we start to see a lot more things like this, right?
Starting point is 00:28:42 There's a, there's a whole sort of watch what people do, not what they say aspect. To your point, could be completely innocent, you know, could be his son wants another yacht and they're out of a, their line of credit is over. But, you know, it is not an unnotable thing. Let's put it that way. Yeah, to be clear for everyone, this is starting in 2024. So interestingly, he's doing it for tax purposes, but not this year. My guess is he's just trying to buy 5% treasuries and get the hell out of here. But hey, what do I know?
Starting point is 00:29:13 If you can get a quick $140 million into treasuries and earn your safe risk-free 5%, why wouldn't you got? That's all we got. Are there anything I might have missed? When we put this together, are there any other narratives or stories that are on the top of your head before we let you go? No, I mean, listen, this is the big actual meaningful story. in terms of where our energy and fights should be are certainly in and around this sort of narrative
Starting point is 00:29:39 battle around terrorist financing. It's important because there's a lot of legislation that's sort of coming up. There's a lot of momentum around certain bills. There's rulemaking that has public comment periods going on right now. So that's one that's worth paying attention to. And then, you know, listen, we're always going to have to go through the spectacle and chaos of an SBF testimony. So we're at the end phases of that. You know, that should wrap up next week. I'm sure next Friday's show will be a wild, a wild one to look back on. But, you know, for now, that's where we are. Perfect. I love it. Guys, everybody follow NLW on Twitter. Follow the breakdown. Check this out on both his audio and video channels. And my final take of the day is that
Starting point is 00:30:23 Jamie Diamond is obviously selling 100 million in stock so that you can buy Bitcoin, right? There you go. I'm in. Obviously. You guys, you guys heard it here for don't edit that part out and put it on Twitter. Thanks, guys. We'll see you next week. Bye. Later, guys.

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