The Breakdown - The 5 Most Important Stories from Crypto This Week

Episode Date: September 29, 2023

A recap live with Scott Melker from Friday September 29th Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto 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

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, September 30th, 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, back with another live episode with me and Scott Melker. I say this at the end of the show, but I'll just tip you off at the beginning here, too.

This was an archetypal week of where the market is right now. What I mean is that we are very clearly after the worst of the bear market, but we are very much not in a new bull market yet. We're in these strange, uncomfortable hinterlands that are a combination of nascent new efforts and excitement and a lot of cleanup from what came before. I think you'll see as we go through all of these stories. that is the story of this week as well. So with that, let's get into this conversation,

which aired live on Friday morning. We're going to just dive into it right now. It is ETF a Palooza, man. Thank God. It's actually things happening rather than just more speculation. You know, I mean, it was interesting. It looked like the story was going to be about a set of rejections and delays again

up until yesterday afternoon. So a nice, unexpected twist, perhaps, at the end of the week. Yeah, so for anybody who didn't catch it, Valkyrie gets approval to start buying EFutures for its existing Bitcoin ETF. So for those who are reporting that a new Ethereum futures ETF was approved, that's actually not the case. What happened is that Valkyrie here is converting their Bitcoin-only futures ETF into a Bitcoin and Ethereum. Very interesting how this happened. So just to give the very brief storyline, we had, as you know, a lot of Ethereum futures ETFs filed for.

Valkyrie was first in line and was very, very likely. Bloomberg was saying 90% to get approved on Tuesday. All of a sudden this week, and you guys saw Steve on here being very coy this week yesterday, all of a sudden, apparently pro shares and Vaneck were moved to a Monday. And we talked yesterday about the first mover advantage, how important it is to be first. So somehow Valkyry was about to get preempted. What they did here is they updated their risk disclosures, which allowed them to add a very small amount of Ethereum futures.

contracts to this other ETF in the conversion. And so yesterday they were able to basically add 5% and come Tuesday likely they'll be able to go up to 50% to make it blended. So basically they played a little inside baseball and found a novel

way to get some Ethereum into there and then of course be first. I mean you may have seen even that Van Eck was actually running ads already yesterday for their approval on Monday. So everybody knew this was coming. They're literally already running advertisements for it and

Valkyrie got slightly, slightly ahead. I mean, what do you think of this move? I think it's, I think it's smart in the sense that it's kind of like the only play they had. There is such a strong first mover advantage that, you know, I don't necessarily know that it ultimately changes destinies just because it's, you know, the question ultimately will be like, do people want this blended product versus exposure sort of separately organized? Who knows? That actually could end up being a novel, useful product in the market. It could be that people just decide, hey, one fell swoop, I get exposure to both.

I don't have to think about it versus, you know, buying two different or something like that. So, you know, it's hard to say, I think, from here. But it's kind of, you know, it's smart when it's the only play you have, I guess is what I would say. Yeah, I agree. And as you can see here, major trad five player, Vanek, ready is Ethereum futures, ETS, and I think Bitwise, who we had Matt Hogan on yesterday, and he was kind of smiling, assuming they were going to be first. We had him on with Steve, and it seems that Steve got the jump. So kind of an interesting week around here. Of course, we saw this week that we had four lawmakers,

two Democrats, two Republicans on the House Financial Committee saying, hey, Gary Gensler, approve this thing right now, right? We need a Bitcoin spot ETF. What are you delaying for? and then it took all of 45 minutes for the SEC to then reject or I should say defer the decision on Arc 21 shares. And then now we've seen a slew of delays. There's nothing really to my understanding that's coming up now until January. They could have waited weeks to do all of this, but even BlackRock now delayed. Do you think that this was a cute FU by the SEC saying, we're not going to listen to these guys? or do you think this is a government shutdown coming and we've got to get ahead of this?

I think it's a combination of everything. So one, my base case is I believe that the Gensler SEC is going to do everything they can to delay as long as humanly possible. I think that the Democrats have decided that they don't really even care if they win these court cases as long as they screw up the industry for as long as possible. And, you know, it's sort of a situation where, depending on how the elections go next year, either they're re-emboldened and re-empowered to kind of continue on their course, or it's not their problem anymore. So if they can just keep it locked up in problematic litigation and sort of endless bureaucratic delays, fine, right? That's as good as it can be. So I think that that's my base case in general for how Gensler is thinking about things. So that means that I think that they were preparing to delay these applications no matter what, right? But then you have two other factors in terms of the specific timing. One is I do think that probably the preparation that went into making this decision to delay

at this stage was shutdown related, kind of a, you know, if you know that it's going to be delayed, this is the, you know, one of the things that you can actually get out ahead of on your list of stuff that you're not behind on coming out the other side of whatever that shutdown looks like. So I think that's part one. And then I think that the, the, it was just the, the cherry, you know, on top, the icing on the cake when this letter came in from the House Financial Services Committee, My guess is that they would have delayed these anyways this week in advance of the shutdown. But I don't think, let's put it this way. I don't think that they minded being able to kind of let the middle fingers blaze a little bit,

posting it right after that, that letter hit the wires. Yeah, I 100% agree with that. And to my knowledge, and I've called the ETF experts, if they didn't get ahead of this and there was a shutdown, and for some reason those specific employees were furloughed or were not at work, there is a risk that these could be effectively passively approved because they're not actively denied. So the SEC actually has to deny these or else they basically become approved.

That's what's happening with this future's ETF. There was no denial. They just come to market. So that's sort of how ETFs are quote unquote approved. They're filed for it. If they're not denied, then they effectively can go live. So they really, I do think, had to do this. And to your point, I think they just got the little extra FU as a part of it.

Now, speaking to the title, crypto funds can manage as much as 650 billion within years. Bernstein says. It's obviously coming from Alliance Bernstein, a huge institutional player. The crypto industry is expected to transition into a formal regulated asset management industry from a cottage industry with 50 billion of assets, the report said. Now, 50 billion is referring to the cottage industry. 650 billion is referring to it being a major trad-5 player. Do you think that this is hyperbole or possibility? I certainly don't think it's hyperbole. I think that the numbers are completely arbitrary with all these reports. But this is basically saying that, you know, over five years in the next two having cycles, you know, you're going to see whatever, 13x growth,

you know, I guess that's from where we are in terms of the amount of traditional capital in these sort of managed products. I don't think that that sounds at all unreasonable, you know, especially, you know, considering price appreciation as well. I think that the people are probably pretty binary. Either they think that everything is eventually going to zero and we're going to wake up and someday these things won't be valued. Or, and BlackRock is in the second camp, these things have lived once again. They're going to keep being a going concern. They're going to be more relevant.

And there's going to be exposure from the traditional financial world into that category of products. You know, 650 billion sounds like a lot, but it's not a huge. Let's put it this way. If there were $650 billion of assets under management right now, it would obviously make the crypto industry a lot bigger. it would change the proportion of the industry that was retail versus versus institutional, but it still wouldn't make it crazy overweight relative to the rest of the world's

places to park money, right? So I don't think it's at all unreasonable. I just do think that, you know, my eyes glaze over instantly whenever someone puts random numbers and a five-year-offer 60, 650, 6.5. Yeah, exactly. I think that mostly the spirit of these tends to be provocation for the underlying trend. And so I think that what Bernstein is saying here is this is going to get a lot bigger and

Tradfif funds are going to come in over the course of the next cycle, which is something that I agree with. 100% agree. And listen, I don't want to talk Gary Gensler to death, but I do have to ask you your feelings on that actual committee hearing. I played all the videos yesterday. We're not going to be redundant. He took a beating.

The question is, do you think that it even matters? Or is it literally just political theater? 100% does not care. So Gensler is, he has a very very important. very thick skin. He is a career politician through and through and through who is ready for any battles. He very clearly wants to continue to rise in the ranks of the Democratic Party and is using sort of his, you know, action as a way, you know, that's his main application for further advancement in the party. And he doesn't give a crap about what congressional Republicans do. I mean,

he was completely not bothered by the idea that they're going to start, you know, slap subpoenas on on the SEC. He clearly doesn't care about potential ramifications in terms of trust of that institution long term. He is a rabid political actor as much as any of those elected officials, which is probably, frankly, why some of the folks in the GOP are so frustrated that they're not dealing with your sort of cottage variety bureaucrat. They're dealing with someone who's sort of, you know, willing to play the game. So, you know, it's very satisfying. And I think that you, I think that the Republicans have reached a different point where we are likely to start seeing, you know, subpoenas or sort of more compulsion type actions, but I don't think that Gensler cares

at all. And which tells you exactly that he has a mandate from somewhere higher up and ain't worried about losing his job as a result of these things, right? I think that that's very clear. All right. So we got an Ethereum futures, ETF. We're going to get a whole bunch of them, I think, next week. And we're not going to see a Bitcoin spot, ETF.

and Gary Gensler ain't changing his tune. I think that wraps up story number one. Story number two, not a direction we usually go on this show, but NFT brand Pudgy Penguins debuts toy collection in 2,000 Walmart stores. It's actually pretty interesting because each toy comes with a unique birth certificate, allows the user to claim traits for their digital forever

pudgy and interact in a metaverse and online world, basically bridging the gap between physical and digital worlds. But listen, Walmart is the biggest retailer on the planet, probably, certainly in the United States. And this is going into 2,000 stores. And if you take a look, this is a major display at the end of the aisle. I mean, this is a real, real major accomplishment. I mean, do you think that this moves the needle at all for NFTs, for Pudgy Penguins? Do you think that this is one and done like we'll see this again? How meaningful is this? I think it's actually pretty big and I'm pretty dismissive of these things.

Yeah, I think it's fairly meaningful as well. So here's here's the dimensions that I think it's meaningful in. One, Walmart is, Walmart has actually long been a pretty deep innovation sort of focused company. They've had an innovation office for a long time. They do funding. This goes back, you know, before their engagement with crypto and Web 3. So it's not surprising to see them continuing to be interested in these things. They're very not fair weather when it comes to exploring new, you know, sort of new opportunities like this. The fact that they are doing this, now in the context of this market means that there is some amount of conviction that it is at least worth exploring this middle space between digital and physical. And my guess is that for them,

hold aside the language of NFTs or anything like that, that's what they're interested in. Is there a path to have people buy a thing in their stores that then becomes part of a subscription or whatever, right? Like, it's a whole new revenue stream that opens up. So I think it is meaningful that Walmart is doing it. I think it also sends a meaningful signal to a lot of other brands that have quietly stayed fairly interested in Web3 despite the sort of chaos in the markets. I think that a lot of brands saw very clearly the opportunity of integrating digital assets, either from a loyalty perspective or a new product perspective, but weren't necessarily convinced that Avatar NFTs were the path.

And they've all been lurking around and watching the industry throughout. So Walmart sending a signal that it's like okay to kind of jump back in and explore, I think is meaningful there. Now, for NFTs themselves, I think it is, I think it's important because NFTs were always going to have to go through in this bare market a real test of just how much product market fit they actually had. And I think that it was, there's a lot of good arguments that they found some amount of product market fit last cycle in that.

It was the thing that brought in new people like nothing else, right? There was an entire community of people who came into crypto who hadn't been attracted before by Ethereum and Bitcoin and all these sort of things that had their totally separate community that didn't even care when we were, you know, the Bitcoin kids and the Ethereum kids were yelling at each other on this other section of Twitter. It was they're oblivious to it. Now, you know, prices are 95% down. A lot of collections are done. A lot of collections have been rugs. You know, by the way, this one was sort of before it was resuscitated. And and the question is now, if people are.

sticking around, it's like, why are they here? What's the value proposition? Is it just sort of, you know, these cute collectibles? Is there something more? And this to me could be seen as a signal that perhaps we're on the other side of the kind of bottoming out. And now we're back in the phase where people get to re-explore, is there a there there, why they're still around and what might be interesting. So if I were, you know, deep in the NFT space, I would be really excited about this as potentially a transitional point in the cycle where even just from a kind of an energetic perspective, we get to look forward rather than look backward. Yeah, we spoke with Luca on Cryptotown Hall on Twitter Spaces yesterday. He's basically the guy who took over the project after

that rug, as you described. He was very impassioned about this and really convinced me that this was a meaningful move. I hadn't really taken a look at the project. What I find interesting is that the floor price has not moved, right? Even on this news. So I thought that you would see some major pump on, you know, news of Walmart, 2000 stores. I think this shows you just how sort of depressed and in that part of the cycle we are. And honestly, we have an Ethereum futures ETF. You didn't see the price of Ethereum move, right?

And so I think that there's no news right now that can drive any part of the crypto market up until the cycle improves. but all of these things are going to become so important when it does. And when we see 10 more of these announcements and you see these things going up, I mean, still, listen, I mean, almost 5eth for a pudgy penguin is not cheap. But I would have thought it would have gone up 10%, 20%. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if this is a contrarian opinion or not. But I think that the more disconnected from speculative NFT mania,

the launch of these products can be, the more likely that they actually find some reasonable value proposition for people who are buying these things in Walmart. And we've talked about this before. One of the great challenges with crypto when it comes to crypto products that aren't just strictly financial

is that they're so easy and powerful, it's so easy to speculate on them. It's so easy for fun flows to come into them that it usually subsumes and totally warps whatever purpose they might have had otherwise. So to the extent that, you know, Pudgy Penguins has a, I don't know, six-month window where people aren't talking about the price of Pudgy Penguins to just, you know, be in Walmart and do whatever they're going to do could be healthy relative to the alternative.

Yeah, listen, I'll take it. I think that it's a huge move for the NFT space and that this is going to only help their momentum in the future. The question I think that remains to me is whether that value will actually accrue to the NFT holders or whether there'll be that sort of disconnect where they could have these toys that are very successful all over the place and the NFT floor just kind of stays the same. But I guess that remains to be seen. The next story that we've got here, of course, finance sells Russian unit to day old comics exits country. A lot of people saying, well, he ain't exit in the country

if you're selling it to a company that's existed for one day. Of course, he immediately denied that he owned comics, but nobody knows who does. It very quickly got on to coin. market cap with only 2 million volume a day, which is owned by finance. And Binance successor in Russia, everything you need to know about comics so far, which is almost nothing, right? What do you make of this? I mean, it's clear that finance wants you to think that they're exiting Russia, and maybe they legitimately are. But man, this doesn't seem to be the way to go about it if you're trying to make a clean PR move. Do you remember the SNL where Elon Musk hosted? And in one of the skits, he was playing Mario, and then he left the screen and came back out as Wario. That's basically

what I think this feels like. It's like, oh, look, instead of Binance, we have Winance now. You know, like, but who knows? I don't know. The interesting thing to me is, I think that a hold aside questions of, is this just a Binance shell, which it's hard not to feel like that's the case, although CZ doesn't usually make a point of kind of brazenly, like lying, you know, which would have to be, you know, like he has been, the language is pretty uninterpretable, or, you know, hard to misinterpret that he used yesterday to describe the lack of ownership that he has. But the, you know, for me, one of the interesting sub stories with it is how much it shows that policies that are purportedly about one thing are actually about another

thing. And so in this case, what I mean, is we are, you know, wanting to reduce Russian access to, to cryptocurrencies as a way to get around sanctions, right? That's nominally what all of these policies are about. Well, Binance having a place in that country means that we at least sort of nominally have access to, you know, an institution that we can send letters to about what they're doing and, you know, keep track of it. Whereas now with Comex, like, do you think they're going to respond to a letter? I mean, it's just totally disconnected now from any of our sphere of influence. So to the extent that you actually want to control a situation, blocking yourself from it seems

a little, you know, counterproductive. But I don't know, it's one of these weird, I don't know, it's probably going to end up just being an asterisk, you know, when all of a sudden. and done on the weirdness that was both finance and our kind of foreign policy as relates to crypto in 2023. Doesn't this remind you of Prometheum in the United States? For anyone who was following the stories, you had the SEC going after Coinbase, then all of a sudden this exchange nobody had ever heard of that apparently was fully compliant, was answering questions on the floor of Congress that were clearly pre-prepared and pre-prepped by someone else.

And going on to make the SEC's case, look, it's totally. possible to act in a compliant manner in the United States. Maybe you can't actually trade anything on the platform. But you can open one. This to me feels like the Russian Prometheum. Yeah. It's a, I don't know, I guess we'll have to see what happens. But I think that if there is a, if there is a trend that it is a part of, it is the further disconnection of finance from, you know, where it used to be, you know, it is a sort of further reduction of that, of that empire, which is sort of the relentless push right now. Right. I mean, you pointed out that's specific to Russia, this is about sanctions, but this isn't the only market that finance is either pulling out of voluntarily

or is being pushed out of very clearly. We're seeing it all over Europe. We've seen it even literally everywhere in the world. There's a market or two, and it seems that the trend is that finance will reduce. We've talked about this a lot before. It's probably actually best for the industry if this is the manner in which it happens. But I think it's very, very clear that one way or another, they're on their heels, whether they control comics or not, this is going to be a shell of what Binance was before in Russia. Absolutely. I mean, listen, the other Binance news this week that we didn't even really talk about talking about was that they were debanked in Europe. So there are further problems there. But I think to your point, you know, if you want to be relentlessly optimistic,

there being this slow bleed two-year period where the crypto industry gets off of its finance addiction, you know, slowly but surely, is probably a lot. better for the space as a whole. We're down from 70% of volume going through finance to I think we're around 50% now globally. Maybe it's even lower. That gets down to a healthy 30%. And I think that the industry in general looks a lot better and a lot more decentralized. And that's with no sort of a priori hate towards finance. It's just, you know, it was never a healthy scenario to have so much concentration in a single actor. Totally agree. And our final story is sadly, hacks because you can't go a week, a day, an hour without hearing about some huge or very small,

I guess, in the context of crypto hack in the space. Of course, I'm talking about the only $8 million of ether hacked on H-TX, formerly, formerly Khobe. And then, of course, this one kind of blows my mind. Mixin Network loses nearly $200 million in hack. It blows my mind because I've never heard of Mixen Network and how the hell did these guys get $200 million on their platform that could even be hacked. So the mix-in story is actually, it's even worse than it sounds because I think they have about 400 million on their platform. And from what I read, it is gone.

The 200, the reason that it's being reported as 200 million is that they've guaranteed to backstop half of it. They, you know, their CEO came out and said that they would make sure that every customer got at least half, which presumably sounds like they're reaching into their own pockets to cover that. But it looked like a fairly total wipeout. I also had not heard of this service. It looks like it's used in Hong Kong and sort of that part of the world more than here,

which is perhaps why we haven't. You know, the hack stories are fascinated. I think that there's two very different types of hack stories that we get right now. One is North Korea Lazarus Group related that has geopolitical implications. And the other are just these, you know, the constant never-ending reminder of how, difficult security is in this space. And, you know, one has implications for the industry in terms of how especially regulators think about it. And the other has implications, I think, more for how willing institutions are going to be and in what ways to get involved. You know, I think every

big hack that is, you know, some random third-party service provider is more warning for, you know, the risk management departments of some big Tradfai fund, you know, to go very lightly, which I think is probably, you know, puts even more demand on these sort of structured approved products like the ETFs we started the show with. But it's, you know, it is notable how frequently these things hit the headlines. Yeah. And it's very difficult to mitigate risk or to manage risk if you have unknown, unknown risks. that can't be accounted for entirely. I mean, to your point, you just can't see any sort of institution putting money into

defy putting together an entire risk model, then all of a sudden the money just disappears. It's literally impossible. Yep. Right. And so there was one more, actually, that we didn't discuss before, but I can't believe I haven't talked about this this week. I don't know if you saw this, that Ripple's canceled their plan to buy Fortress Trust. Of course, Fortress Trust was hacked for $15 million.

They pinned the blame on an unnamed third party. Ripple was coming in to buy them. Apparently, that deal was already in motion, but when they found out about the $15 million hole, they sped it up quite a bit. But it seems that due diligence has failed here and that fortress has failed. Now, why does this matter? Let me just give the quick, quick and dirty. Well, you guys may remember I was the one sort of who dug very deep into prime trust. I lost about a week and a half of sleep over it trying to figure out what was going on. Prime trust, obviously, we were the first ones kind of to say that they had lost private keys. they'd lost tens of millions of dollars of customer assets and then had basically degenerately traded to try to cover that whole. Bitgo came in to try to buy them, so we didn't talk about that, but that fell through in due diligence and Prime Trust is now in receivership. Well, you may remember as a part of the story that I told you guys very clearly, Scott Purcell, who was the head of Prime Trust, left Prime Trust to start Fortress, another registered, regulated custodian in the United States that got hacked here for $15 million and now has clearly a hole in their balance sheet.

What is going on? I mean, these are the custodians. This isn't even like an exchange hack or a protocol hack. You have one job. Secure the private keys and don't lose the money. Scott Purcell is the CEO of canceled acquisitions at this point. CEO of canceled acquisitions and like lost keys and hacks. It's really unbelievable because we were putting out sort of the warning flags against Fortress Trust when Prime Trust went under and now seemingly you have a very similar situation. And you also have exchanges that have been custodying with all of them that seem to be like Neo and the Matrix dodging bullets. I mean, Swan Bitcoin was with Prime Trust, got out just in time. Apparently we're with Fortress,

got out just in time or doing a product with BitGo. But man, it's very hard for an exchange. Even a Bitcoin only very secure exchange to confidently know where to custody. at this point. Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about this is that it's almost, it feels almost for sure that custody and brokerage are going to be split up whenever we have sort of comprehensive regulations. You know, like, I think that the U.S. will impose some amount of the intermediary sort of split apart structure that the traditional financial sector has on the crypto space. And I think there were arguments a couple years ago that the efficiencies that you get from having some of these functions combined lead to lower fees for people and yada, yada, yada.

I think at this point, it's a lot harder to make those arguments, you know, coherently. And it seems likely that the beneficiaries are big traditional institutions who come in and bring their sort of, you know, long history with it. I mean, they're going to scoop all the people who have experience with custody at all these places that are going under, you know, hire them to build out the departments. And all of a sudden, it's going to be BNY Mellon and it's going to be, you know, You know, that's going to be the nature of trust. And frankly, at this point, for as much meaningful discussion as there should be about

the trad-fiification of crypto and what the threats there are, I think this is one area where it's like, let them have it at this stage because we've lost our chance. Yeah, Bitcoin by Charles Schwab and Black Rock, custody by B&Y Mellon and State Street. But to your point, I don't think that any of this takes the shine off of self-custody, if anything, it pushes more people towards it. And I don't think we need the middle option. I think very responsible insured custodians on one side and if you want to self-custody on the other side as an option are enough. I don't think we need crypto-native half-ass regulated by Nevada gambling regulation custodians in this space.

And I think this is yet just another lesson learned in a cycle that will be, you know, hopefully not repeated in the coming cycle. So I don't think that's the worst thing that can happen here. Yeah. Unfortunately, this cycle is going to be, there's going to be a lot of lessons learn this cycle. It's going to be the lesson learned cycle. I'm sick of learning lessons. I'm ready for some degeneracy again, man. I don't even know what's going to be the marker, but I just want to be talking next cycle and not this cycle.

I don't know when this cycle ends or what officially makes that the case, but I want this cycle to be the next cycle. I'm over this one. You know, we are in the, they are official, I believe strongly that we are in the overlap of the Venn diagrams right now. There's no, I think that the black, to me, the marker of when that the new one kicked off was BlackRock. I said this before on the show. I think that the BlackRock ETF application announcement will be seen as the moment where things could have slid farther and that back stopped, you know, psychologically the whole thing. And the first Ember started to glow back up. But, I mean, we have SBF's trial coming next month.

We're going to spend way too much time talking about it. But we, unfortunately, we have to. as much as we'd like to ignore it. It is a part of this. There's no way out but through that. And, you know, I think that the optimistic take would be that, especially with that concluded, there may be space to kind of focus on the future. If I were advising big enterprise clients,

I would be aggressively telling them to promote that narrative because even if it's not true, narratives could make it true, right? imagine if you are one of these big trad-five players who wants to get into the space. SBF trial ends. He's convicted. Whatever punishment comes down. The messaging is good. That's done.

We're ready for what's next. See, it's not crypto. Yeah, see, it's fraud. It's not crypto. Hasib Koreshi, who I talked to last week, I love, made the great point. He said we were in Singapore when we were talking. I may have mentioned this on this show before. I hope not.

But he said, listen, SBF was a blip in the news in China or in Japan or in South career. As much as Americans are obsessed with it and focused on it and were hurt by all these companies, who was mostly an American thing, he was an American celebrity, he was giving money to American politicians. The rest of the world moved on. So now I think it's time for the United States to move on as well, to your point. Yeah. No, I, there's a lot of Ron is there. Maybe, maybe I'll, I'll talk a little bit more about sort of the personal side of this as we get into the trial. But, But it is time. The right way to handle, I think, this trial is to view it as, you know, the closing of a chapter and the beginning of something new.

Totally agree. And I don't look forward to, but know that we will do that when the FTX trial comes down. And I hope it doesn't open any old wounds for you guys. Follow NLW, the breakdown. Of course, every single day you can find this show on both of our audio and YouTube channels. I think we wrapped it up, man. you got anything else? You know, this was a, this was a perfectly exemplary week of what's going on right now.

Speaking of what we're just talking about, you got some forward-looking stuff, you know, these future ETFs come in, 600, you know, Bernstein saying $650 billion coming down the line in the next five years. Then you have a lot of cleanup. You have hacks. You have, you know, Binance getting out of Russia. Is this, this is the weird in between that we're living in right now. So, you know. We hit all the, we hit.

Every single little container of items you can find in the crypto store for sure. Perfect. Exactly. Thank you so much, guys. It's a pleasure. We'll see you next Friday. Peace.