The Breakdown - Trump Talks Bitcoin; SEC Sued; Deaton vs Warren

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

NLW and Scott Melker count down the top stories of the weak, featuring a softening stance on bitcoin from presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. 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, February 24th, 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 at the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another weekly recap. This is recorded live each week on Friday morning with me and Scott Melker. And this week we had a ton to talk about. We have a little Trump coming into the picture. We have a lawsuit against the SEC. It's some really interesting, if nuanced stuff. And so I hope you enjoy this episode. Listen, so we have to audible. We have a bunch of stories obviously lined up for the Friday 5. We have, you know, Texas companies suing the SEC, John Deaton and Elizabeth, U.S.D.C. see on Tron, but I think we first have to just pivot here and audible and talk about the fact

that Donald Trump is talking about Bitcoin again. He said it's taken on a life of its own. He says he's not a fan, obviously, of cryptocurrencies in the past, that he prefers the dollar. But he said, you probably have to do some regulation, but many people are embracing it. More and more I'm seeing people wanting to pay Bitcoin. I can live with it one way or the other. He said, you know, we once again have someone saying that people are doing Bitcoin. And he's saying these people wanting to pay Bitcoin, which I highly doubt.

But hey, let's talk about it. So let's put it in context of the only other time that he's spoken about this. He tweeted very famously. I'm no fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A couple things about that. One, it was right after Facebook announced Libra. And it was very clearly a shot across the bow of Libra wanting to do this sort of non-sovereign Mark Zuckerberg coin much more than it was about crypto. People widely assumed at the time that the tweet had been

written, at least in large concept by Steve Mnuchin, you know, then Treasury Secretary, who obviously did have a gripe with the industry. It never really felt like Trump had super conviction around this, which was sort of affirmed by the fact that he's put out a couple of NFT collections in the meantime. And so I think that this was always going to be an interesting question on how that position would evolve now that Mnuchin's nowhere near them. It's, you know, a few years on. This is definitely a softening. It's a sort of a walkback of the harshness of that stance without a full embrace.

You know, it could be a political determination based on the fact that so many of the other Republicans in the field have been more proactive and, and sort of excited about it. I actually think that the positioning of I'm noticing people want more of it is a pretty smart one politically, frankly, in the sense that it doesn't really, it allows the politicians saying that to look like they're responding to the will of the people, which obviously makes it very different, you know, from a kind of flip-flopping position. But it's notable. You know, it's as an errant comment in some way. But the fact that, you know, it was chosen to be a topic of conversation, I think is pretty significant.

Yeah, I think that this is probably some of the influence of a fake Ramoswami, obviously, who's been very pro-Bitcoin and is one of the potential vice presidential candidates for Trump, like you said, I think that he's not really giving anything away here, but he's saying, whatever. And honestly, whatever is as pro-Bitcoin a platform as you could expect to get from either of the guys running and sets him massively apart from the Biden administration's platform of being aggressively anti-Bitcoin. So this is actually probably a pretty well-planned tactical move

to just say nothing, as opposed to I'm against it, because that makes you, without having to endorse it, without having to go out on a limb, you're basically making yourself the more pro Bitcoin candidate. It's all the sliding scale and relative to your opponent. Yeah. Well, and the other thing is, too, not to get too deep into the American political weeds, but for a fairly long time at this point, you know, Trump has dictated the norms and shapes of the of the GOP and sort of you know he is the party line and what this does is it basically gives cloud cover for Republicans who care about this issue to continue caring about it and being loud about it without it interfering with or contradicting you know the the effective party leader so you know

if you're a tom emmer or someone like that who by the way has not necessarily had a great relationship with trump historically his whole candidacy for a speaker was basically destroyed by Trump, this at least sort of signals that you can continue to do the thing that you're doing. So it's a good thing for pro-B Bitcoin GOP years as well. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Let's dig in now to some anti-SEC sentiment, something that we love here. Now, this company is not huge. Texas crypto companies do its SEC for overreach on digital assets.

But it is nice to see that we have companies continuing to take the fight to the SEC, which is something that would have probably been heard of, unheard of a year or two ago. This is Fort Worth-based company Legilex and lobbying group Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas, claiming the SEC has asserted jurisdiction over the industry without a clear statutory mandate. They're trying to launch a cryptocurrency platform called legit. Dot exchange. And this goes back to the question of what the hell can and cannot we list on this exchange. Yeah.

So I think the way to think about this is as the inverse Prometheum. So Prometheum in the crypto industry's estimation, was effectively a plant exchange, not a real thing, that the SEC has used to try to argue that their stance of, you can just come in and register is legitimate, right? They held them up as an example of you can get these special broker licenses and they put them in front of Congress. Well, it turns out that they actually couldn't offer any of these assets under the license that they got. And so that's created a whole, you know, kerfuffle. But by and large, you know, obviously that Promethean people say this isn't the true. But the crypto industry has been pretty consolidatedly believing that they are effectively just a plant. This is almost the reverse.

This is a legal tactic organization. I mean, it's right there in the name. It's called legit exchange. This is a company that was created to make this challenge and to demonstrate a point. That doesn't make it not legit, by the way. This is a thing that happens in lots of different places. When there are uncrearure regulations or there are regulations that want to be challenged, this is a tactic for getting a, you know, a decision that potentially can rise up the ranks of all the way to the Supreme Court.

It looks like, looks to many people like this is an attempt to get a major questions doctrine conversation in front of the Supreme Court. Major questions doctrine is a sort of relatively novel or new legal theory that basically says that when it comes to matters of economic importance, significant economic importance, agencies can't just, you know, assume that they have authority. They have to be specifically mandated from Congress. So crypto companies have tried to argue in numerous cases that the SEC doesn't have authority unless Congress explicitly gives it to them. This is an attempt to kind of get that issue in in front of judges and particularly in front of favorable judges. The judge that they are, will hear this case initially in Fort Worth does not like government overreach. Let's put it that way. So, you know, it's a tactic. This is a, this is the crypto industry,

using and availing itself of the legal system to the full to the fullest extent possible in order to try to force the issue. And so that's what makes it significant. It's not significant because it's a big exchange. It is, I mean, it's literally, tongue in cheek, it's called legit.com. It is a legal strategy and probably a smart one, honestly. Yeah, and I think we should give honorable mentions, obviously, for both Coinbase and Cracken, pushing back against the SEC once again this week, too. We didn't really have it in our list, but they're looking to get cases dismissed. It just seems that the SEC continues to be under fire. And it's amazing how much of a 180 reversal that is from the past when you just assume the

SEC could do whatever they want and was always going to win. It used to win 99% of their cases. They've been off a lot. I mean, you're going after an entire industry all at once that's still well funded, you know, even in the depths of the bear market, it adds some money. So, you know, they really decided to test the limits of how many battles they could fight on how many fronts. and this is the result. This is a big story. USDA stable coin issuer Circle Dumpstron network, TRX, Steady. Circle-sided its risk management framework as part of the decision among other factors.

If you read into all of Circle's comments on this and USDA's comments, it's word salad for regulatory compliance and risk management and assessing risk and all these things, this is a really big deal. Now, given USC has a very small presence. on Tron, a fraction of what's on Ethereum, but USDT, 51 billion of the 101 billion USDT is on the Tron network. As we've talked about before, it is the most popular network for people to make quick and cheap transactions on USDT all over the world using stable coins. And it makes you question what Tether's going to do. They've said they won't confirm or deny if it's dropping USDT on Trond.

But if they did, it would be huge. Also, You can't help but put on your tinfoil hat and start to think that this has something to do with a crackdown coming for Tron and Justin Sun. Yeah. I mean, so first of all, I don't think anyone saw this news and thought to themselves, wow, really? Tron, they're dropping Tron? Like, it's not surprising, right? This is open questions. There's always been open questions.

The sort of, you know, the questions that surround the Sun Empire are, you know, legendary and numerous at this point. The question, I think, is how much is this circle positioning, positioning relative to a future upcoming IPO, positioning relative to just trying to differentiate themselves as the clean, stable coin as they're trying to kind of jockey for position of regulatory favor versus they know something specific. And I think that it's obviously totally possible that they've heard something specific, but it makes just as much sense that especially as such an instance, that especially as such an insignificant part of the overall USDA network, that it looks like an easy way for them to clip off,

you know, potentially a hanging Chad that could create questions in the future, as well as just sort of bolster their, their bona fides as sort of the clean one. Now, something we've talked about over the past, I don't know, month or so is how Tether has made this sort of interesting, not full pivot, but slight shift towards the U.S. government in terms of, you know, approachability and sort of interest in engagement. And perhaps this is a response to that from Circle of, again, trying to reinforce a difference between them, given exactly what you pointed out, Scott, that 51% of Tether is issued on Tron. Yeah, I mean, the take I think that I've seen the most is the one that you mentioned. Obviously, it says it right here in the article. It could be part of a long time

realignment separating compliant and gray market crypto. Right. If they're trying to be publicly listed, if they want to get in line with the United States government, the best way effectively for them to do that is just to differentiate from USDT. So it doesn't mean the USDT is doing anything wrong. It just means that they're basically losing nothing here to gain a political advantage or a regulatory advantage. I think that that's the correct take that you offered.

Yep. Well, now I think we have the story of the week, in my opinion. Crypto attorney launches Senate bid against Elizabeth Warren. Listen, I've been talking to John Deaton about this for quite a while. I was really excited that he was going to do it. He moved from, he moved his address from Rhode Island to Massachusetts just to get that done, which irked Elizabeth Warren to no end, who called him a Maga Republican, who's backed by the political machine and the RNC when anyone with a brain knows he's literally the opposite. Nobody saw this guy

coming. He's doing this of his own free will. He is doing it because he believes it's right, not because he wants to be a politician. He's doing it because he believes in term limits, which would be, you know, against his personal interest if he actually won. And the crypto industry is coming in hard behind him. And what's really incredible as you dig into it is she is shaking in her shoes. Eleanor Territ has been reporting on this pretty widely. She is going nuts asking for campaign donations, saying that they finally have a credible threat trying to already discredit him.

She's really seemingly very scared because this is not something she's ever done when there's a Republican opponent coming in. She's basically shrugged them off. Yeah. So it's weird. Long and short of it to me is it's very weird her response. I think that there are two possible interpretations. One is the she's scared interpretation, which is reasonable just from a sheer money standpoint. You know, the reality is that, again, crypto punches above its weight class when it comes to political advocacy and issues, in part because it's got more capital than most industries to push around when it matters. So, you know, there is a realistic possibility that it is genuinely her being scared. The other possibility, I suppose, is that she's expounded so much

narrative capital on making crypto the boogeyman that this creates an opportunity for her to kind of complete that narrative for her followers, that she is, that, you know, she's pretty entrenched at this point with the group of people that support her through thick and thin. And so maybe this is just playing to her base. I don't know enough about, you know, the specifics of the political situation to know, but it does surprise me how much she's tried to make this. I mean, she certainly turned him into a credible threat, whatever the reason is for it. And she did it in a matter of minutes.

These emails were going out hours after he announced his bid. It really gave him a lot of fodder. gave the news a lot of fodder. It seems like her best approach would have been just to lay silent and pretend that he was completely irrelevant. You know, I don't know if it's fear or just an opportunity to raise more money. I mean, that's either way. Yeah. It feels like it feels like maybe her war chest is not as deep as it might once have been, you know.

He told me she had four million coming into when he filed that. And I thought it was going to be much, much more than that. So that's nothing. Yeah. And there's also, I can't vet that, but that was from his mouth when I spoke to him on Monday. And also, you know, people have this, I think, sentiment that Massachusetts would always remain blue. There's literally no way that she could lose. She's so deeply entrenched in the system.

But Massachusetts has had multiple Republican governors in the past years. And one of them, now I can't remember his name, but they've been attempting to put him up against Elizabeth Warren for years. and he was projected to win every single time, but he works for like Major League Baseball or the NBA or something and loves his job and has no intention of switching over. But I do think she's more vulnerable than people are believing, and that even if this just riles up people who wouldn't have voted at all, assuming that she can't lose, I think there's a huge win.

And just one, it was Charlie Baker, yeah, as someone saying in the contest, he works for the NCAA. See, I butcher that, but I knew the context. But just the very fact that now we're going to have the, narrative against Elizabeth Warren being constantly reiterated over and over and over on the news and pro-crypto, I think is a win regardless of what happens in the campaign. Yeah, I mean, it's, there is nothing that the news loves more than a real fight story. And they just, you know, I mean, this becomes the perfect psycho drama for them to focus on.

So it's a weird tactic. I agree with you, by the way, but Massachusetts blue profile is very different than, uh, than, than I think some people would think. It's a, you know, kind of classic liberal stronghold, but in a sense of like, you know, you can imagine Kennedy running as a monitor at, you know, Republican kind of a thing. So it's really just, you know, it's not magatory territory by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly, you know, the thing is not handed to Elizabeth Warren forever. Let's put it that way. Well, she, all I know is that she's going to have a lot of restless nights and be working a hell of a lot harder over the next eight or nine months, which I'm here for.

Yeah. I love it. Anything that makes your life a little more difficult, a little more stressful, I think is a good expenditure of my money. The next one, man, this is taking the world by storm. I actually interviewed Guy Young yesterday, who is the founder of Ethena just to figure out what the hell is going on with this platform. DeFi platform earning yield by shorting ether attracts 300 million. Athena offers 27% annualized rewards to holders of its USDA stable coins, a yield that generates mostly by shorting ether futures. I believe they may net it. four or five days ago or test net. Either way, they launched quickly over 300 million. The yields are exceptionally high, but it should be noted that those are rolling. They're based on the eight-hour funding rates. So it's not always going to be that way. But obviously, the minute that the crypto community here is 27 percent annualized rewards or algorithmic stable coin, which they will argue that perhaps it isn't, they freak out and rightfully panic and start asking big questions. So I guess the first question here, and I have some insight, obviously, my first question for you,

does this reek of Luna, or is that just an unfair comparison because of the general similarity? I mean, both is the short answer, right? Like, it reeks of Luna only insofar as seeing eye-popping numbers that are, even if they're, listen, this team has tried to make it clear that these numbers aren't guaranteed, and there's lots of variability here, and they're likely to come. down over time. It doesn't matter. You see those numbers and it's an absolute trigger for the same sort of behavior that got people in a lot of problems last time. The flip side is that the dynamics of it, the actual sort of mechanism is totally different, right? I think the most recent thing that I've

seen is they're trying to push back on this sort of stable coin, you know, moniker. I mean, this is a tokenized basis trade, right? I'll get a synthetic dollar to be so angry at the stable coin. I asked them about that. Yeah. And this seems like semantics, but it's actually not. Right. Stablecoin has a specific connotation. And we talked about this a lot when it came to last cycle, like that algorithmic stable coins probably shouldn't be called the same thing as the one-to-one backed reserved. It's, you know, it's if we understood that there are different types of instruments with different risk profiles, we wouldn't have had perhaps the same amount of trouble, although I think Luna was always going to implode at some point. There are real risks here.

anytime you have the appeal of big yield matched on the other side by significant risk, no matter how much you try to caveat and condition, there's always going to be, you know, some challenge. I think that the response to this, the way that the team is handling it, shows that this cycle is different than last cycle. There's instantly more skepticism. There's instantly, more deep analysis of what's going on here. And I think that that's a positive indicator of where we've come completely outside of anything sort of specific to Athena itself. As you said, there's been a lot of skepticism, obvious reasons. A lot of them even are just counterparty risk, right? If they're going to have to be shorting on a centralized exchange,

what happens on that exchange? If you have to be staked, what happens if something happens with that protocol? I asked him these questions and many other. Just so people understand, And I see people making comments, shorting ETH at the beginning of a bull market, there's a delta neutral strategy. They are buying and staking ETH in the protocol to earn a yield there and then shorting to hedge. So they're not shorting ETH per se, as these articles would imply, it's part of the strategy. But that cash and carry trade has been largely and hugely problematic in the past. I mean, that was to some degree what was happening with GBT when people were taking advantage of

the premium. and when it quickly went to a discount, that's when we saw 3AC and BlockFi at all collapsing, hugely problematic, but they do make the argument this is different. They're disclosing the risks. There are tremendous risks, and people should be aware of that. It will only be defy natives who understand what they're doing. They will try this. But to your point, when you say 27%, a lot of unsophisticated people are probably going to rush in. We can leave the judgment as to whether that's the fault of the company or the protocol or not for allowing it or that's up to the individual, but there is some risk. Yeah. I mean, listen, one of the things that was always interesting to me is that part of why Defi, despite hacks and vulnerabilities and, you know, all these sort of things was never really that problematic is that the barrier to entry was so high that it was only like hyper-enfranchised people who were taking on the risk. It actually was sort of risk-mediated and people knew what they were getting into. The problem with Luna is that people got exposed to,

exposure simply by holding this Luna asset, right? It didn't take them actually, you know, being involved with the defy side of things to be exposed to Defy risk. And that's what ended up washing out so many regular people. So, you know, as we look at Defy this cycle, I think one thing that I would keep an eye on is the extent to which there really are those barriers to entry that are keeping it just for defy DGens and DFI natives versus some mechanism that gets it out into the broader public, which could create kind of a challenge. Yeah, totally agree. I think that this is going to be one of those interesting experiments that is TBD.

And I think that it's great news that there's so many alerts flying and people are looking at it so that people will actually dig in before they use it. Hopefully it just doesn't grow as fast as Luna did, which was really the problem, right? that Luna became, instead of a cool $1 billion experiment, it became a $20 billion market cap monster that offered systemic risks to the entire market. Just to you guys know, the biggest centralized exchanges in the world invested in this long ago. So this is the only protocol like this where you've had with OPEX and finance, a number of them have invested Dragonfly Capital, Haseed Koreshi, who have had on here, who I think is one of the most respected and intelligent VCs in the game

behind it and Arthur Hayes, all of this is based on an article written by Arthur Hayes on his blog a year ago about creating a coin like this. I asked Guy about it and he said, listen, I read Arthur's article. I reached out to Arthur, so Arthur is kind of the main consultant on this. It's really interesting. It could be really successful, but damn, it is a bit scary to see this happening. The last thing I'll say is that this, I think, indicates it has a, it has a, another power of indicating where we are in the cycle. If you kind of look at some of the patterns, one of the things that happened last time is you have sort of this Bitcoin narrative lead, right, institutional Bitcoin narrative lead, followed by something new for the DGen sort of natives.

2020, that was DFI Summer, right? And you got sort of that explosion and that flowering. And I think in some ways you could argue that DeFi Summer even was the real kickoff of last bull market. It was just sort of like slightly underwhelmed in the news because we had sailor buying in August and September and then Elon followed. And so Bitcoin kind of continued to lead the narrative. But defy was what the internal crypto people are doing. This is the first thing that I've seen that's a new kind of explosion of what the crypto people are doing since we've had these sort of big, big pop and interest in Bitcoin. So I think we're clearly getting deeper and deeper into this bull cycle based on that history. Yeah.

Obviously, that means we need to talk about Ethereum and Ethereum price action, been somewhat outperforming Bitcoin as of late. Many saying that Ethereum's fundamentals look better. You might guys might not realize, but since the merge, Ethereum has actually been deflationary. Bitcoin reduces its inflation, so it's at 1.4, 1.7%, whatever it is now. It has actually been deflationary. There's been more Ethereum burned than there has been minted. So a lot of people pointing at that as a reason that Ethereum is doing quite well.

We have Ethereum obviously hitting 3,000 for the first time in nearly two years. Some saying that that's because of the Ethereum ETF hype. Other saying it's because of the Dankoon upgrade that's coming. We could talk about this. What do you think is driving this interest in Ethereum at the moment? Occam's razor answer is that it's the next thing to be excited about now that Bitcoin's sort of locked in in this institutional bin narrative. I mean, I think it's probably a lot of things.

things. One of the things that has sort of seemed kind of obvious to me when you think about this new buyer set who's kind of coming in through the ETF world is that if Bitcoin represents the sort of sound money, you know, safe side of the crypto equation, Ethereum becomes a proxy for all the interesting stuff that you can do on crypto, right? And so if you're someone who is just interested in the sort of hedge exposure, in your portfolio and, you know, sort of says at this point, look, crypto's been around for 15 years. It keeps not dying when everyone thinks it's dying. I'd like some exposure to that. Bitcoin and Ethereum alone represent, you know, kind of two big parts of two big sides of the market,

the safe haven asset side and the all the weird stuff side. And so I think that to some extent, it's just people starting to position for what feels like an inevitable Ethereum spot ETF, even if it gets denied this next time around. And then, you know, when people start digging in, obviously there's all these things going on. And so if you sort of come in the door of, well, it's obviously the next thing, there's a lot to be excited about too. So I don't think it's particularly complicated.

I think it's sort of just, you know, following on as it does and, you know, for completely rational reasons. Yeah. And we saw it the second that the Bitcoin Spot ETF got approved. And in fact, we saw it the second that the fake news of the Bitcoin Spot ETF approved was released by the SEC, the money immediately flowed into Ethereum. So the next best thing argument is so obvious. Yep.

Sometimes it's not complicated. Yeah, I guess we don't need to complicate it. But man, there are a lot of takes as to why it's happening. And kind of finally here, we've got a series of stories. But we'll talk about Coinbase drops native Bitcoin payments for merchants platform. This is an eye opener for a lot of people, but effectively just saying, man, we can't be fast and cheap on a layer one. it's a de minimis part of their platform currently. And it seems like this is as simple as a business decision to that the cost of supporting

this totally different type of ecosystem wasn't worth, you know, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, basically. And, you know, they knew that it would provoke a response. Brian Armstrong commented on it directly. But, you know, as some question, you know, the Bitcoiners are obviously going to be sort of upset about everything. And I think on the one hand, that's sort of just a conditioned behavior. On the other hand, it's reasonable, right? Like, if you want Bitcoin to be able to be all the things that Bitcoin can be in the future, it's totally reasonable to, you know,

shout when there's less rather than more access to it. But ultimately, I don't think that most Bitcoiners think that payments are going to be on the base layer, nor do I think most Bitcoiners really think that merchant payment through Coinbase is a hugely important thing, at least at this stage. But it's always disappointing to see. again, less rather than more access as time goes on. Yeah, I agree. We had Lauren Dowling, who is the product lead for Coinbase Commerce here, explaining why it happened. Now we have to get into why we have this title as we're sort of talking about these things. This was honorable I mentioned too, but Pantara Capital reveals

$500 billion opportunity for Bitcoin. And this definitely speaks to that Ethereum versus Bitcoin direct competition that we're starting to actually have now because this is about defy on Bitcoin. We know, We know that the bulk of the TVL for Defi has always been on Ethereum remains there, no matter how hyped Solana and other protocols get, but basically saying that we are seeing a tipping point now with things being built on Bitcoin. And as the strongest base layer, we could really see a massive sort of Cambrian explosion here of building and of the monetary opportunity directly on Bitcoin. Yeah.

I mean, listen, I'm glad that this conversation is happening. I think it's reflective of larger shifts that are absolutely true. Franklin, the author of this piece from within Pantera kind of calls out that there's this flowering of a Bitcoin builder ecosystem, which is absolutely true, that there's been more excitement around Ordinals and BRC 20s, absolutely true. I think that the leap from that sort of excited interest to this is this huge market that's going to ultimately have the same percentage of Bitcoin's market cap from defy as Ethereum's is a little loose. But I think that if you're trying to understand the sort of

really relevant part of this, it's absolutely just that this is now going into this cycle a part of Bitcoin's conversation, whereas it never was in the past. So you kind of hold aside the specifics of the numbers, which are necessary for getting our attention. I mean, look, it worked. We're talking about it. Then the thing that I think is definitely true is just how much more rich this sort of builder ecosystem is around Bitcoin. How many people are thinking about, talking about and trying to act upon defy on Bitcoin, whatever that is ultimately going to mean. And one last really quick honorable mention, we had the fact that Jack Dorsey and Square made a ton of money selling Bitcoin. Okay, cool. Reddit discloses Bitcoin and Ether holdings and IPO

filing, converting their treasury into crypto. We should be here for this, right? Yeah, I mean, they so minimized it, though. They're really trying to make this not a story, I think. And it seems like not that much of a story. But it is interesting, like how little this captured people's attention, we are very clearly not super convinced or, you know, captivated by the Treasury narrative in the same way that we were before. If you would plop this story down in early 2021, it would have been the continuance of a massive trend. But at this point, it's sort of just like, whatever. I mean, that's it. We covered everything.

I have to say, because I'm reading the comments and it's just cracking me up that people can't. believe I would talk about Donald Trump favorably. Guys, we cover the news. If Donald Trump says something, we're going to give you the take on what it means. It doesn't mean I'm voting for him or Biden or anyone else. I hate politics so much. It actually hurts, but I do love John Deed. I do love John Deed. So I'm going to push for him. But it's our job to cover the news and to tell you what it means when a presidential candidate has a comment on Bitcoin, especially in the context of him having been so anti-crypto and so anti-Bitcoin in the past. That was my little, uh, caveat for the end there. NLW.

Guys, thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate it. Dathaniel, have a great day, man. Later.