The Breakdown - What We Should Learn From the Ledger Exploit

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

NLW and Scott Melker talk about the most important events in crypto this week. 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 Friday, December 15th, and that means it's time for the Friday 5. 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 of the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. Well, because of a couple unforeseen life things, there is not going to be a weekly recap episode tomorrow on Saturday. And instead, I am moving up that conversation that I have with Scott Melker every Friday morning, which we call the Friday 5, to today's slot on the breakdown podcast.

Before we get into the conversation, I just want to frame a little bit about what we're talking about. There are two really big issues that come up in this show. The first has to do with Ledger and the exploit that happened yesterday, which had a lot of people, as you'll hear, very, very, very scared, and for good reason. As we discussed in the show, I think that the important things to take away are not just screw ledger, but are a much more nuanced look at all of the challenging practices around self-custody, and how it can sometimes be at odds with what people want to do with their crypto assets, especially when they're in defy. There are a lot of very real challenges, especially as people try to drive some of these functionalities mainstream, and I don't

think it's a conversation that we can run away from. Secondly, the other big topic of the show is, of course the Fed pivot, although Scott, as you'll hear, is not quite as willing as some mainstream media commentators to call it such. I certainly think whether it's a pivot or just pivot-ish, that it does represent a big change and leads us into a very different place heading into next year. Anyways, without any further ado, here is the Friday Five. It's the day when we review everything that happened in the week. Sometimes we do it with a big smile on our face, and sometimes, frankly, I just have to shake my head and say, this is such a show and we are not ready for primetime.

Today is one of those show not ready for primetime days. In my humble opinion, just to set the table, yesterday I woke up, I was happy, started going through the news. There was a small hack on OKX, a couple million. You're in finance, apparently got hacked. And then the mother of all potential disasters hit, which was the ledger exploit, right? We've got this, what we know about the massive ledger hack. maybe you can give us the broad strokes, then we can talk about sort of the implications of what

happened there. Yeah, I mean, the couple important notes on it. The exploit was not around ledger hardware. It was the connect kit software. And effectively, it was a fishing attack from a former employee where they were able to get access to the ledger code base so that they could serve a set of screens that looked very similar to the confirmation messages that ledger sends. but instead of signing to, you know, do the thing that you thought you were doing, you were basically signing access to your ledger away. It was caught. There was about five hours of it potentially being a problem.

There were two hours in which it was actively being exploited. So caught super fast and patched. But I think to your point, Scott, more than the $450 to $600,000 or whatever it ended up being that was lost, because that's obviously very small relative to, you know, big crypto hacks. I think that it hit people hard because of the sort of the implications, you know, the sort of the potential that it could have been so much worse very, very easily. And that it was an attack on a very critical piece of infrastructure. It's much easier to write away, you know, some kind of, you know, a bridge that a very specific set of users, you know,

are doing kind of novel, exogenous things with versus something that sort of feels like tons and tons of normal people within the spectrum of crypto are using on an everyday kind of basis. Yeah, it's the theoretical implications that were so bad. We basically got lucky that the CTO of sushi noticed it, put it out there, which is an incredible testament to the way this community works and how fast things can be patched. But Ledger didn't originally notice it. And think about how many places Ledger completely blew it here. It's an ex-employee who got fished, which means they didn't remove his permissions and he could still be fished with some sort of access. And it was a single point of failure where a bit of malicious code could effectively infect every tap in the Ethereum

ecosystem. I mean, this was a list at the time, the list of affected protocols on Ledger. These are just the GitHub's. I mean, it was literally everything. Metamask tweeted, don't use Metamask for 24 hours. hours were aware of this, then they deleted the tweet after the patches were made. But at the time, it felt like any transaction you signed on the Ethereum blockchain could have effectively been affected in some way, potentially been affected, and that you could have had your wallet drain. That hits a lot different, even than to your point, a much bigger exploit of one specific wormhole or ecosystem. Yeah. So I think that there are a couple things. And, you know, we're the crypto industry, so I can't imagine that this is the direction will go.

But if we were trying to be sort of like nuanced and actually learn lessons from this, I think that we'd start to break it apart into who has blame for what and what are the implications of each different piece. Ledger for sure has to take lumps for a former employee still having access. I mean, their letter or their CEO's note made it seem like that's obviously not something that they try to do. But ultimately, if your entire brand is security, you can't screw things up like that. So Ledger's got to eat it on that. It just is the reality. They're going to have to build back that user trust.

They're going to have to have some way of explaining how that's not going to happen again. Unfortunately, they're also dealing with they've had a number of different sort of controversial points. So there's a lot of sort of brand challenges there. Then there's also, I think, other issues. I think that right now, because people were so terrified of this, because the implications hit so clear and so fast, it's very easy to just make Ledger the exclusive boogeyman of this situation, rather than one, understanding that based on market demand, Ledger is not just, like, people are thinking about Ledger as though it's just some hardware wallet.

And I think part of the initial scary response is they're imagining their hardware wallet being compromised. But in reality, Ledger is two totally different sets of products. Ledger is a hardware wallet. And then there's this whole suite of tools which allow people to use. their hardware wallet to interface with the rest of the ecosystem because people want to use their hardware wallets to interface with the rest of the ecosystem. And this is why you have Bitcoiners all over the internet screaming like, you guys are idiots and it's not actually your keys,

your coins, and your hardware wallet if you're using it to connect to random defy protocols. Now, that's not necessarily the correct take. The whole point of crypto is that it's productive and that you can use it for different things. But I do think that there's some aspect of this where we have to understand that there's a difference if we're talking about individual good behavior as relates to preserving our wallets between having like if you if you may if you put the things that are on your hardware wallet subject to all these things you're opening yourself up to more exploits not that people shouldn't do that like there's there's a reason that we have these tools it's just important to realize that there is an inherent piece of that there and there's there's room for

us to think differently about sort of that point at which assets can move between hardware wallets and cold storage and not. I think a third part of it is just the fact that, you know, there's a larger set of questions to your point about, you know, you mentioned prime time and how ready we are for this. This is a not all that sophisticated exploit, but an extremely like easy one to fall prey to. I mean, fishing attacks work across every industry for a reason. They mimic things that people are used to doing. people are habitual creatures where if they've done something a thousand times,

it's natural for them to just do the thing that seems like the thing they've done before. And so I think that the problem is more endemic than ledger. And that's another part of why it's so scary. And again, it's not to say that ledger doesn't need to eat its shit for the part of it that was absolutely sort of part of its security process. I just think that if people only take away from this, ledger equals bad, they're going to miss the lesson and they're going to open themselves up to this sort of thing over and over and over again.

No, and the very clear lesson, and I spoke to Jameson Lop yesterday, obviously, who, you know, as OG in the security, crypto security industry as there is, the bottom line here is, if you're an investor, you need to have one wallet or one set of multi-sig wallets for your core position that almost never touches anything except for simply sending a transaction to your trading wallets, right? You have to basically have a stack of multiple wallets for different purposes. so they don't expose your entire portfolio to something as simple as malicious code. And so this leads me to a question that I want to ask you.

At this point, I think we have two ships in the wind passing. We have self-custody, which I think people are becoming more fearful of. And we have centralized exchanges. I'll particularly say coin-based because I think it's viewed as the safest, which is, I think, trending towards people feeling more comfortable, not less comfortable with. even with all of the disasters we had with centralized platforms last year. But if you have Coinbase that has a proton mail that also has 2FAA attached to it and you use a UB key to be able to send transactions, it's pretty secure, right?

Especially if you're using their prime or their custody. At this point, do you think people should be more comfortable trusting themselves and these unknown unknowns in self-custody? Or do you think that we're getting to the point where at least with part of your money, certainly that you're trading with, you might be more comfortable in the centralized exchange? I am certainly not the pure Bitcoin or like, you know, keep all your money off of exchanges type of person. I think what's happening, this has been happening for a couple of years. We are getting a spectrum of products that hit every part of that spectrum, right?

From purely cold storage to, you know, Yolo let a Justin Sun Exchange do whatever they want with my assets. Every spot in the middle there has now more or less some offering. And I think what people are starting to figure out is, to Jameson Lops point, that different categories of assets probably mandate different types of solutions, right? To, you know, if he was basically saying, if you're an investor, you got to have the part that's your reserve separated, duh, and then the part, you know, the part that's sort of more risky can be somewhere else.

I don't think it's actually that dissimilar for individuals who are managing their own crypto, right? If you have, you know, a half a Bitcoin or a Bitcoin that's reserved for your kid, right, that you know you're never going to trade with. put that crap on a on it you know your cold wallet of choice your hardware wallet of choice stick it in a drawer somewhere you know right right down your your your password put it somewhere else and and leave it you know but then you're probably still going to use other uh stuff for uh you know you're going to use other assets for active trading and participating and you want air drops because it's fun and

all this you know like look at bonk it's going crazy you know like there's there's a reason that people participate in the ecosystem that's fun, like, you just have to understand there's a different risk profile there. I think people are starting to do that naturally. I think that the reality is that the gray area is being filled in. The challenge is that there is a messy middle. And this is, I mean, Ledger, more than any other company has lived inside the messy middle because they've been trying to build products for multiple parts of that spectrum. If Ledger had never built anything but a hardware wallet that was meant to remain disconnected, they wouldn't have had the same issues. They've tried to introduce products like the sort of, you know, multi-sig where you give part of

it to other people, you know, so it's sort of a, you're not exclusively alone, which created all sorts of challenges for them from a messaging standpoint and from an actual practical product standpoint. They've tried to do ledger live and connect, which again are like, allow you to use your ledger to interface. And it's, it's, those are the areas, the things that aren't just the pure, you know, cold storage that are challenging for them. And, you know, I don't know if the takeaway is, you just can't blend, you know, the sort of like the centralized custody model with the cold storage model and that there's always going to be problems in that middle space because you're just exposed to too much user error and challenge. But it's, you know, I think that if we are trying to take away

as individuals, certainly just, you know, having better hygiene and more sophistication about which assets are being risked for what things is probably always a good approach. Yeah. As one of the comments, not sign messages in your main hardware wallet. For this particular exploit, it's that simple. But I think if you're looking at the umbrella, it's more nuanced kind of like you said. I can even tell you anecdotally two weeks ago. I was looking for an old ledger, somehow hit it too well for myself. I did eventually find it, but I had then replaced the private keys on another ledger. And I could see the wallet on ether scan and everything was there, but nothing was coming up on my new wallet. And I had to then attach it to the legacy version instead of the newer version.

and nobody is figuring this out if the people who are sophisticated take three or four hours just to find their coins. Right. And so they're just, it's still really early. That's how I'm going to kind of wrap that one up because we obviously have to move on to other topics. Here's a more favorable topic. FASB confirms fair value approach for corporate crypto holdings.

The new rules by the U.S. accounting standards, setter would go into effect in December 2024. That's notable because we were waiting, I think, even until 2025, although that's not that much earlier. But this is the, why didn't anyone follow Michael Saylor and put Bitcoin on their balance sheet story, right? We had the gap accounting rules that effectively meant you had to market down to the lowest price. It crushed your earnings. There was no way that anyone with a fiduciary responsibility could do this to their company. I can't say the demand is there, but I can say that now the ability is there because we're getting a better accounting rule for companies. Yeah, I mean,

listen, I would not be surprised if one of the big lessons from the early part of the cycle, And I don't want to diminish or be pessimistic about how much institutional demand there will be. But a lot of what's happening right now is the, I'll call it affectionately the well, fucking duh, period of crypto institutionalization, where these things that were absurd for not existing or not being available or for being dumb rules are now slowly coming online. This is a great example of a rule that the previous version made absolutely no sense, almost everyone at every level of engagement thinks that this one is, you know, this shift is the correct shift, including the FASB who are kind of like, how do we even get

ourselves into the situation where this wasn't the rule? I think in some ways, the worst case scenario for a Bitcoin spot ETF at the beginning is something similar where will the supply of that, the availability of that product instantly create demand? I'm not sure. It's certainly doing a lot to generate buzz and get it back on people's minds. But even if it doesn't, it's supposed to exist. This is a mature asset where people deserve to have access to it through these traditional instruments. And so it's just, duh, it needs to be there. And that's going to be the way that it is. So, you know, it's a great, it's a very small, but like very sort of progressive and important update, I think. Yeah, I agree. Like I said, I don't know if the demand will be there.

believe that it will. I do think that there are companies that have been sidelines. There's been a few challenges because when Saylor originally did this, it was in that ZERP zero interest rate environment, obviously. So the pitch for Bitcoin was much stronger. When we got to 5% yields, a company was obviously more likely to just buy some U.S. Treasuries and put them on their balance sheet than to buy Bitcoin. But now those yields are dropping so the environment could be coming back around. Also, this is similar to an ETF getting approved, right? A Bitcoin spot ETF should absolutely exist because it makes sense, it's better for the investor, doesn't mean there's going to be $10 billion worth of demand in the first week.

Maybe there will be. I have no idea. But this is just yet another one of the few examples, I would say, where the government actually got it right when it comes to something crypto-related. I'm hoping that will be the case with the spot ETF as well. Yeah. I'm hoping that's the beginning of a trend. We'll see.

Yeah. I'm not going to bet on it, but you never know. Shares and bonds keep on climbing as Fed Pivot Rally. rolls on the story here being the Fed quote unquote pivot. I'm personally not ready to call it a pivot yet. I think the pivot is when they actually start to cut rates, but it was certainly a pivot in tone. This was the first time that Jerome Powell softened up. There are a number of tinfoil hat reasons I can float as to why, but it seems like this tightening regime and cycle is coming to an end and that we could start to see the pivot in March, even though a lot of

happen between now and then. What do you make of this in general? Pivot or not, it was certainly a pivotish shift in tone, right? Like it was the first time the, all of Powell's couching and hedging was so half-hearted comparatively. Every other press conference, even when they've held rates consistent, has gone to pains to say, we're not declaring victory yet. It's still premature. We still have a bias towards more hikes versus cuts, like all these sort of things. And he still said a couple of those things a few times, but it was much fewer and farther between. And it was sort of not with the same force. Like he didn't take the opportunities handed to him on a silver platter by reporters to sort of push back against exuberance that's starting to take hold in the market. And that's

really notable. My feeling is, we were talking about this, I think, last week or maybe the week before. But you know how we live through these periods in the Bitcoin and Crypto Cycle, where we're still so hungover from the bear market that we're not willing to sort of say that something has shifted. But then when we look back in retrospect, it actually started way before the quote unquote bear market or bull market actually started way before we were willing to call it a bull market. I think we're in something similar with sort of pivot. You know, four of the last five meetings have held rates consistent. there was some prediction for some time. It seemed like there was going to be one more rate hike this time and then we'd be done. And there wasn't.

And so I think it'll be interesting to see if this continues, if there isn't sort of new data that comes in that sort of shifts their attitude, it feels like we will actually mark the shift in policy even a little bit before where we are today. But again, that'll depend a lot on what happens next. I think the last thing that was notable about Powell's comments were instead of, sort of saying that people have a sense that we still might need some more hikes, he kind of shifted to a message where like Ceteris Paribus were on this path now. And if there is some big thing that happens, that's what would cause a hike. It's sort of some unpredictable thing that we don't have any indications of yet. And that's a fairly significant change.

To me, this felt like George Bush standing on an aircraft carrier with a big sign behind him that said mission accomplished right before the war went on for a couple more years. That's what it felt like to me. I think that Yellen, Powell, I think they're drinking their own Kool-Aid. They're congratulating each other. And I just don't think this is over yet. I'm not saying that we're going to go into a depression or any of those things, but it seemed very preemptive to not actually cut, but be this aggressive about the tone that they could.

First of all, the Fed dot plot has never been correct in history. So the fact that we're taking it so seriously that there's going to be cuts all of a sudden in March, well, predictive markets have been wrong the entire way. But it leads you to wonder why he would take this tone at this time. Because rationally, pausing and doing nothing and saying we're going to continue pausing and doing nothing, labor, unemployment is low, stock markets high. There's no reason to cut. Nothing's crashed.

Nothing's broken. So it either means that, A, this is a political move, right? They're getting ahead of this in advance of the election. can't start talking about a pivot two months before the election. I'm not saying that's necessarily the case. B, they know that a few trillion dollars worth of U.S. debt more than a few is coming due and is going to have to be refinanced at a much higher rate next year. And that's a literal disaster for the United States. So they're going to need to pivot to save the treasury. That's what it feels like would be more rational to me. I just don't see with stocks at an all-time

high, why would they flood liquidity into the system? What's the rationale? out. Yeah, I mean, I don't think that that's a, I don't think that's full tinfoil hat. I think a lot of people have sort of some, they at least have their eye on that explanation. I think the other thing that's at least worth keeping an eye on is there are emergent signals of, you know, individual corporations, particularly in financial services, clearly having a more bleak outlook for next year than, than are sort of is being widely reported, right? You've got a lot of, you know, big consulting firms that are reducing the number of partners, you know, kind of anticipating lower business, like just all these sort of things that are starting to flash signals of concern. You also have a situation where

I think that the dot plot showed three rate cuts next year and the markets are pricing in something like six. You're not getting six rate cuts without a recession, which means that the market is thinking either they're just like high or they think that things are finally going to take a turn for the worse. If there is a broad emerging sense that, you know, things are starting to get more challenging and that there's sort of troubled waters ahead. You can see Powell, you know, listen, he made the mistake of waiting too long to actually fight inflation. I think they don't want to make the same mistake on the backside and wait too long to cut. So maybe he sees something that we don't, which gives him more credit than I'm willing to because

it means he's looking forward instead of looking back. But that was actually Mike McClone's explanation yesterday. He was like, he sees what's coming and is actually getting ahead of it for once. Yeah. Who knows? Yeah. It's it also could be a as, as it so often is, a combination of all these things, you know, it, whatever. Let's put it this way. That dead issue that you're mentioning can't ever be far from the, their, his brain, right? Like, it's there. And so even if that's not on any given day, the primary driver, you would think that to the extent that there are some warning signs flashing and that's looming, it's not a bad time to maybe start that pivot. Yeah, I totally agree with that assessment.

Moving on, 16 months later, Tether finally bends to OFAC. Tether has changed its mind about complying with U.S. sanctions law and says it's doing so voluntarily. If my memory serves me correctly, when they pushed back against OFAC was Tornado Cash. Is that correct? And now they are actually sanctioning the Tornado Cash wallet. So pretty big pivot from Tether here. Yeah, this one is interesting. I think that the, there's, there's a lot of this story that, that we don't have. You know, one of the reads from the crypto community has been that now that

that, that tether is so deep in the business of treasuries, they actually do just have to be more aligned with the U.S. government is that they can't just be this sort of fully, you know, Eurodollar offshore thing that has no interaction, you know, like we're starting. I mean, other sort of indications of this are, for the first time, we know at least some of the people who are holding, you know, the treasures or Tethers treasuries on their behalf, which are U.S. firms. You know, there's all of these sort of indicators that the relationship with the U.S. government is, if not less frosty, is certainly more engaged than it was before, you know, and not just in a sort of New York Department of Financial Services settlement kind of way in a more like, you know, big powers. that be behind the scenes kind of way. So, you know, it could just be a determination that that, like, this is not the, the hill to die on for them, you know, and that it's sort of a size and scale now where

they're not going to make a principled stand around, you know, OFAC sanctions being, being where they leave. Yeah, it's my feeling that they've effectively been helping the DOJ and government agencies around the world now for long enough that this was a technicality. Yes. Why die on this hill with OFAC when obviously it's going to come around? And I think you're correct. I think they're just getting in line with the United States government to avoid getting financed.

Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing, too, is like at the end of the day, for those in the crypto community who are frustrated about this, it can't reasonably be Tether's job to solve the issues of OFAC sanctioning a mixer. Like that's a political problem that we have to deal with here. that has to do with, you know, decentralized protocols and how they fit into the regulatory apparatus, you know, it's a bigger problem than, you know, the noncompliance isn't going to fix that. It's not going to fix the fact that there's real big questions around whether that type of institution or protocol should even be able to be sanctioned. Those are political battles

that we need to have onshore here in the light of day, you know, so ultimately does it suck that if you sort of are taking a principled stance against tornado cash being sanctioned, that now tetheras had to bend the knee. Yes, it does suck. But it was probably never reasonable to have them as the loan holdout given the, you know, the size scale and importance of that institution. It sucks. But from day one, Palo Ardoido, perhaps they push back against OFAC, but he's always said, listen, we are a centralized player and we are going to cooperate with governments. Right. So this was, it was almost an anomaly that they were making such a stand against OFAC because it was specifically tornado cash than the norm. So now we have our, yeah, go ahead.

please. Oh, and the last thing is, you know, one of the more fascinating things to see will be over the next few years as CBDC conversations drum up and the U.S. wants to chart its own path that is more traditional to the U.S., which is, of course, you know, basically integrating private sector innovation into the system instead of sort of doing things from scratch. You know, Circle has for a very long time been positioning USDC as the compliant, stable coin of choice. I wonder if tether smells a little bit of blood in the water, given how much people have moved from Circle to Tether over the last, you know, 12 months and is sort of saying,

we're potentially in the pole position to reap that bonanza. And a little tiny bit of sugar could attract some serious, you know, flies here. That makes a lot of sense. So listen, we have the fifth. We were kind debating what to do for our fifth story. And we came up with the idea of a hodgepodge of welcome back to weird, right? because it seems that we are back in the ridiculousness phase of crypto at the moment. One of the stories being sales of Solanophone surge as traders chase Bonk arbitraise.

This story is so crazy to be. Arbitrash traders appear to be chasing 30 million bonged token air drop that's available to every owner of the saga phone. At current prices, that much bonk is worth nearly $700 for a phone that costs $599. So they're paying $599. By the way, now these sales of these phones that were effectively dead are selling out, right? They're mooning. They're paying $599 to get what's worth $700 on a meme coin that can be worth $300 tomorrow or $1,500 the next day. But this is going a hell of a long way out of your way to try to secure that $100 arbitrage opportunity.

There is nothing that the crypto faithful love more than a ridiculous air job. drop-based arbitrage opportunity. It is like water for this community. And we're seeing it. And, you know, listen, it's so absurd and preposterous on the face of it. But it's also, like, financially rational in the immediate term. And you've got to think that there are probably some meaningful number of those people who are taking that arbitrage opportunity who are sort of were vaguely interested in the

salonophone before. And are kind of like, yeah, why not? Let me check it out. Let's see if it's an interesting, you know, like, I also think. to, you know, to not minimize Solana in this equation, there's another thing we've talked about before. This, they had a do-or-die moment at the end of last year, given their association with SPF and sort of the presumption that they were going to die and they were going to sort of just drift away. They didn't. And they are definitely a great example right now, at least, of what

doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They are radically more legitimate in people's minds, I think a better ecosystem to invest in because of the passion of the community in people's minds. I think then they would have been had Sam continue to exist. I think there's an argument that they are actually fundamentally and foundationally stronger today than they would have been had Sam not been a fraud and never been arrested. So, you know, maybe people are also reviewing the Salana phone with new eyes in light of that. I mean, probably not. Probably they just want bong that makes it a free phone. It's a free phone. You can sell it to keep $100 worth of bunk and you've got your phone to play with. And I, I 100% agree with you. I think that in hindsight, we'll look back and say

it was good that they got rid of all that froth from SBF and the VCs and that entire image. And now it's, you know, was kind of broken down to the core and rebuilding. I think Salana's doing exceptionally well. The other weird story that we have, which is a great way to conclude, Rolling Stone really came with the with the headline on this one, is why I'm sharing this article. Trump's desperation to sell NFTs has him ripping up his clothes. The former president has cut his mugshot suit, the most historically significant artifact in United States history. That's literally what it says on their website. Not the Constitution, guys.

No, not that. Into 2,024 pieces. First of all, I'm going to say that this is a grift, and they're just sending you a random piece of fabric, and there's no way to authenticate that it's part of that suit. But he's back at it, selling NFTs. Apparently, even though stoner cats and impact theory got charged by the SEC, this is not an offering of unregistered securities,

or on the back of all of his felony charges. He just doesn't care. Should we watch the video, man? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, guys, it's about two minutes long. I know we're a little over, but we got to watch this. Just have to. Everyone, this is your favorite president, Donald J. Trump,

with some very exciting news. My last two Trump Digital Trading Card collection sold out in just hours. And now I'm back with my latest series called the Mugshot Edition. I wonder where that came from. The Mugshot Edition. 47 all-new stunning cards, and here is the best part. I'm doing two important things for my Trump collectors. For the first time, we're creating a real physical Trump card.

Purchase 47 digital cards, and we'll mail you a beautiful trading card. It is an authentic piece of the suit I wore when I took that now-famous mugshot, and it was a great suit. Believe me, a really good suit. It's all cut up, and you're going to get a piece of it. I'll be autographing some of them. A true collector's item. This is something to give to your family,

to your kids and grandchildren. With the purchase of 47 of the Trump Digital Trading Cards, you will also be invited to join me for a gala dinner at my beautiful Mar-a-Lago. My home in Florida, you've perhaps heard of it, become a pretty famous place. We just had our first dinner for my collectors, and we had a lot of fun together.

That was a great evening. That was a fantastic evening. Some people called these cards pop art or modern art, I wish I looked as good as I do on those cards. That I can tell you. They give me muscles where, believe me, I don't have them. I wanted to keep my Trump Digital trading cards at the same price, $99 each. So go to collecttrumpcards.com. It's really easy to buy. They sold out incredibly fast the last time, and I think the Mugshot edition will sell out even faster. So don't miss out. Go to collect. All right, you get the idea. Now he just shows you the next

cards to dramatic victory music for the next minute. But what is happening? First of all, I like that he was self-deprecating and mocked himself over the muscles. I thought that was actually kind of humorous. The man completely he completely gets the NFT game right now. I mean, if that wasn't Donald Trump, everyone would be like, look, a great example of how a community gets access to a specialized set of events and features offline. It connects physical to digital. Like it's it's the whole shtick. He's got it. I mean, you know, this is a much more sophisticated approach to it than it was. And, you know, I don't know. If you're an NFT fan, it's going to, it's going to make clear the value proposition of NFTs, I think, for, for some number of people.

So, you know, thumbs up, I guess. All right. I guess not. The best is like everybody thinks it's a deep fake, But it's not. Only in this world, in this simulation, is that not a deep fake and that's actually real. But listen, we know that he made, I think it was like four or five million dollars. And Heath was sitting in his wallet after the first collection launch. So there's real money for him. It's probably a licensing deal. I just think it's hilarious in my mind. He probably has no idea.

This is even crypto, right? He's anti-Bitkoid and anti-crypto probably just thinks he's selling trading cards and moving on with his life. But man, what a better way to end. I'm going to be gone next week. So we're going to be skipping this. I'm going to be off with the kids. I won't be gone, but I will be not working in advance of Christmas. So maybe we'll run it back in two weeks.

Sounds good. Everybody, have a great Christmas. I'm speechless after I watched that. I've watched it like five times. I'm still speechless. All right, everybody. And of course, follow NLW. Check this out on his channels.

We will see you guys in two weeks. Peace.