The Wolf Of All Streets - SBF Bombshells | BTC Sen. Lummis vs. Tether & Binance | Crypto Town Hall

Starting point is 00:00:00 Everybody just getting all of the guests and hosts up on stage. You're going to absolutely love this show today because both Mario and Ran are on planes and we can say literally anything we want about the two of them and I doubt they'll ever listen back. So if anybody has anything amazing or just really terrible to say about either Mario or Ran, now's your chance. And I can tell you that I'm always extremely receptive and open to criticism of other people. So you guys can certainly share that with us. But seriously, both of them are in flight, I believe, right now.

Starting point is 00:00:39 I'm going to try to check in if they can get to work on a plane. But every time we attempt that, it generally is futile. The best part is that they're probably listening right now and dying to respond, but unable to do so. As always, guys, Friday, we get to sort of wrap up the week. Some big news that's been happening here and obviously have an amazing, amazing crew of guests up on stage. I'm going to repeat this because every time I'm alone here,

Starting point is 00:01:04 I like to make the point that everyone that we bring up on stage, we view as the final experts, authorities on these topics, the people that we are very comfortable getting our updates from, getting our perspective from. So you should be following every single guest that we have up on stage because these really are the guys that we're both publicly and privately that we call when we say, hey, we have this topic. We are not the experts on it. You are. So let's discuss it. Also, you should be following Crypto underscore Town Hall.

Starting point is 00:01:36 That's that big red logo that is hosting this because, as you can see, this is where we host Crypto Town Hall. A lot of you may remember that we used to do it on Mario's account. And I'm super psyched to see this particular panel up here because, man, this is some of my favorite people, both in the virtual world and in the real world. Mr. Deaton, how are you doing today, buddy? What's up, Scott? How are you? Thanks for having me, brother. And I got to be on the other side. We did a podcast stream on your show where I actually got to be one of the guests and I pretended to be a lawyer on TV. You did great, man. It was nice to put you on the spot and get your perspective. There's not a single probably thing that I have authority on around the law, except for maybe discussing SPF, which was the topic. So at least you gave me some softballs on something that I'm familiar with.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Obviously, that is going to be a topic today as well. Guys, I want to run through some of the highlights of the news that we do have today before we get started. FTX sold 59 million of assets so far by Bitcoin search queries up 826% in the UK. SPF widely derided after taking the stand. We're going to obviously dig in more to that with our wonderful panel of lawyers here. JP Morgan says an SEC rejection of spot ETFs could lead to lawsuits. And once again, JP Morgan, 1 billion daily transactions in JPM coin. You guys heard that right. When I saw that piece of news, I was really shocked that their private blockchain, this is not to be confused with anything public. It's basically a clone of Ethereum, but doing a billion a day in transactions. One of the more surprising stories that we're definitely going to dig in was that Senator Lummis launched criminal charges for Binance and Tether.

Starting point is 00:03:21 You guys may know Cynthia Lummis. She's a favorite of the crypto community, one of my favorite interviews in the world. She's leading the charge for stablecoin and other crypto legislation alongside Democrats, Jill Abran from New York. But even after sort of we've seen this disproven flood around the Hamas funding, which I'm sure we'll talk about even further, even after that, she penned this letter basically uh accusing binance and tether being complicit in funding hamas specifically and that the doj should move forward with uh against them turkey plans to craft crypto framework in 2024 and then of course there's no evidence that hamas received significant crypto donations and we can keep going uh on and on and

Starting point is 00:04:02 on billionaire ken griffin citadel securities denies ridiculous claim that it tanked doquan crypto donations. And we can keep going on and on and on. Billionaire Ken Griffin, Citadel Securities, denies ridiculous claim that it tanked Doquan's Terraform. You got to love the narratives that we get in crypto. And then, of course, maybe one that will be worth talking about at some point is that Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, for the first time in 17 years at the helm of the company, is sellingP. Morgan stock, selling him and his family. But we all know that that means him hiding in a family trust structure. Him and his family will be selling one million of their eight point six million shares of J.P. Morgan stock in 2024, causing quite a lot of a stir in the market and people conjecturing. But let's talk about SBF. I'm sure that everybody has been at least following the trial yesterday was sort of a curious moment where SBF testified, but not in front of the jury.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Maybe, John, let's talk about it really quickly. Why do you why did we see SBF in this sort of unique position? Even the judge was sort of seemingly taken aback and confused as to what was going on. But he basically testified in what seems like a mock testimony to get him ready. Yeah, it was very fascinating. Even the judge said he had never done it before. And I, as a former federal prosecutor and criminal defense attorney, I've never seen it. Basically, the judge, it's sort of like a proffer. The judge knows, the defense told the judge they're going to go a certain line of questioning.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Let's say blame the lawyer defense, if you will. And the judge wanted to hear what that was going to sound like, hear like how SBF was going to testify. And then he was basically going to decide whether or not to allow that line of questioning. And so it was just a judge taking control of the trial, not letting the defendant get on there and potentially say things on the spot where it'd be constantly being interrupted. The prosecutor would object. They'd have to go to sidebar. And, you know, what's the expected testimony?

Starting point is 00:06:01 How's he going to answer it? The judge wanted more of a clean, you know, direct and cross-examination. So he wanted to get sort of this housekeeping of the nature of the testimony, what he's going to allow, what he's not going to allow to take place first. And that's basically what happened. Consider it like a proffer of testimony. And so we'll get the judge's ruling this morning on it whether he's going to restrict certain line of questioning of spf there were some curious moments right i guess we don't know if he got his adderall or not which was seemingly the story of last week but there were some curious moments uh one of them where there was an objection that was sustained and then spf

Starting point is 00:06:41 effectively answered the question anyway and his lawyer looked at him and said, dude, have you been here for the last four weeks? Yeah, literally his own lawyers frustrated with his own stupidity and insistence and narcissism that he had to answer the question no matter what. SBF saying that he had no idea it was wrong to take customer funds and he thought it was in the terms of service. I mean, there were some real head scratchers here. Yeah. Listen, I mean, he's got to take the stand right to to the whole viable defense there's got to understand he's got one shot in my opinion is that he takes the stand and he tries to convince one juror out of the 12 one of them that you know will hold strong that he didn't form fraudulent intent that he didn't form fraudulent intent, that he didn't have the mens rea, the requisite specific intent to defraud, to steal people's money, to money launder, those things. And if

Starting point is 00:07:32 he can convince one jury, get a hung jury, and then his defense attorney can go to the prosecutor and say, dude, you know, I've seen your entire case. I'm going to cross better the second go around. Maybe I get two or three next time. Maybe I win. And you cut a deal, you know, for 10 years or some shit like that. I mean, that's the only thing I can think of. But if that is SPF on Adderall, I'd hate to see this dude testify without his Adderall because he was all over the place. And I think that defense moment, that is a culmination, in my opinion, having dealt with clients that are difficult, especially if you're talking about a narcissistic

Starting point is 00:08:11 sociopath like SBF, where I think the culmination of his frustration was like, dude, it got sustained. And you know better than that. Like, have you not been paying attention and so I think that was a moment when the client issues kind of surfaced to to the defense attorney but it was it was interesting I mean the bottom line is this is a dream cross-examination for a prosecutor in my opinion yeah I feel like even without my law degree I could go in and cross-examine this guy yeah i mean he's gonna go you know i didn't have the intent it all happened so fast and the lawyers were in the room with me and you know uh i thought we even though our user agreement says otherwise right the the user agreement on the ftx uh doesn't allow it doesn't specify that certainly doesn't give customers notice. And I believe it's I haven't seen in a long time, but I believed one of the other lawyers might be better suited to answer it basically states otherwise.

Starting point is 00:09:13 And so he's just, hey, the lawyer next to me in the room knew I was doing this and didn't didn't tell me otherwise kind of defense. And so it's pretty weak. And I think that he's- Yeah, the judge pushed back pretty hard on the idea that he could blame his lawyers as well. I mean, it's not going well. I think obviously it seems like his best chance now is to romantically look deeply into the eyes

Starting point is 00:09:41 of a female juror and hope for the best. Good luck with that. Apparently, Martin Shkreli says it worked for him, by the way. So that's where I got the very idea. Darren, I'm going to let you comment. Then I want to talk to Preston about this, obviously, our other resident lawyer. Yeah, I mean, so I am not a lawyer by trade, but, you know, have some experience with a jury, right, serving for jury duty. And I think one of the difficulties here serving on a jury is that you would have no prior knowledge of SBF and, you know, everything that's been happening in the news, right? Like, to be able to be selected

Starting point is 00:10:25 to this jury, you have to be impartial, which also means that you have to be relatively out of the loop of the current news cycle. And, you know, if you're hearing this for the first time, I think there may be some predisposition to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, you know, everybody here on this panel, everybody speaking here, and I would assume most listeners have been following SPF for a number of years, right? And so I think that's one of the things that I get held up when you think about this going to a jury, thinking about somebody hearing this for the very first time and only hearing the facts of the case, you know, that's my concern is that one of these may not be able to see the wolf in sheep's clothing because of them, you know, only hearing this for the first time. Yeah, that makes sense. Good point. Preston, what do you think is the path

Starting point is 00:11:23 forward, if any, for SBF? You can say there is none, by the way. Nobody will fault you. You know, I'm not in a great position to talk about the trial. So, you know, I think the only thing I could say is that the comments yesterday about Dan Friedberg as a lawyer who represents crypto companies, something to keep in mind, right, is that your advice that you give um might one day wind up getting quoted by a client on the stand um so that's something where uh you know particularly newer practitioners in the space should keep in mind not to play fast and loose uh but no i really shouldn't talk about the trial if that's all right i heard uh if you did a shot yesterday every time spf said friedberg that you would have been drunk in about 30 seconds and dead after about 10 minutes. Basically, the entire premise of his argument was he made me do it. I mean, John, when you talk about blaming the lawyers, was that the name that kept coming up?

Starting point is 00:12:19 Because that's what I heard. Yeah, basically, you know, and that's a fine line that and the judges, this judge is trying to keep a tight leash on what he's going to allow or not allow. And so but yes, I mean, his defense is that he did not believe he was doing anything wrong. He's a good guy and he made some mistakes and he didn't appreciate the risk and this and that and that, you know, the Caroline and Gary and his lead engineer that, you know, they all just cut deals and threw him under the bus and are lying so that they could do less prison time. But he just didn't know these things.

Starting point is 00:13:06 You got to remember, there's a lot of stuff that the prosecutor can bring up, because we can't forget what I believe SBF's trying to do is just continue that media tour that he did. Remember, before he got arrested, he did get interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin at New York Times. And you had people like Bill Ackman and Kevin O'Leary say, I kind of feel sorry for the kid. It all just got ahead of him. And so I think he thinks he can convince people, other people, regular people of that sort of theme. His testimony before congress remember he got arrested before he was supposed to testify before congress and his opening statement was quote i fucked up uh but it was you know it basically i'm incompetent i'm not a criminal it is sort of and and i got bad

Starting point is 00:14:03 legal advice i mean that's his entire defense. Yeah. I mean, my, my, my four-year-old once was holding a marker and there was marker marks all over the wall and he used the same argument that he hadn't done it and it was somebody else. And, and, uh, he wasn't responsible cause he's young. I mean, it's literally, this guy sounds like a child. Yeah. But I, I believe, um, uh, I believe it was, uh, Darren, uh, you know, he makes a great point, uh, which is, you know, the rest of us have been following this.

Starting point is 00:14:31 We know all those previous statements. Like I'm talking about the Andrew Ross Sorkin interview. I'm talking about the spaces that SBF was on. These jurors are immune to all that. So, you know, that's a valid point that we always have to remember that what we know and what the jury's perception are two different things. That's why I said, as far as I'm concerned, the only viable defense is trying to get, you know, one or two jurors to hang strong and then plead later if he can get a home jury. But if that doesn't happen, then him getting up there and testifying before this judge who will deem it as perjury and things

Starting point is 00:15:14 like that, that will impact the sentence if he gets convicted. Yeah, and I think this case is different than some of the other crypto collapses we saw in the past, but his arguments bring kind of echo, I guess, what we saw in the past. I mean, Simon, maybe you could address this. Maybe Sam is making me, I thought I could use customer assets, no big deal argument because he saw in the Celsius case and then the bankruptcy there,

Starting point is 00:15:41 which obviously you've been very involved in. He saw basically the court come back and say those weren't your assets once you handed them over to Celsius, to the customers, right? And so maybe he's kind of trying to echo that same terms of service defense that he's seen, quote-unquote, work or at least be received relatively well by the courts elsewhere. Yeah, interesting thought. So, yeah, well, then it would just push him into

Starting point is 00:16:06 offering the legal security which would then be a civil crime rather than a criminal crime as it were um so yeah that that's a that's an interesting thought but yeah to me it's just totally implausible we were on these spaces um this is a complete continuation of what we heard on these spaces i fucked up i don't know what happened you know um it was uh it was caroline that was doing that and uh you know we built bad technology and we just couldn't keep ahead of the numbers and we um didn't hedge or anything but every single testimony that i've heard of from, you know, following others that are doing the reporting on this indicates that he knows exactly what he was doing. And, you know, another interesting question is, is it a shame that his dad's not a lawyer

Starting point is 00:16:54 and wasn't intimately involved in FTX as well to kind of help him understand it? Yeah. I mean, he was in the meetings with the regulators. I think it came out like the dad was literally there for everything, it seems. around new types of regulations, which would involve an element of how to define self-custody, custody, how to do it within the DeFi space. If you're lobbying regulators, your father's a lawyer, you had a career in a hedge fund,

Starting point is 00:17:38 you've painted yourself as this genius whiz kid, you were involved in all decisions. Everyone has said you know to me it's a hell mary and the question i've got for the lawyers is would he have reduced his sentence by pleading guilty at this stage versus um going on the stand and lying again what's i don't know the answer to that. Yeah, absolutely. Let me point out to it, Simon, the continuation of Simon's point. Scott, it's not just like imagine if he would have like used 100 million of customer funds. You know, maybe he could make this argument. But when the testimony is 75 percent or more of all customer funds were

Starting point is 00:18:27 commandeered, I mean, if you have 10 billion and you steal 8 billion of it, it's a little bit more difficult to make that kind of plausible argument. And so we got to look at the depth of this criminal enterprise as it relates to his intent. But to answer Simon's question, sure. You know, the prosecutors weren't offering a deal. They cut the deal with the insiders, Caroline and Gary and Singh. And he goes in there, he throws himself in the mercy of the court. And, you know, maybe he gets 20 years, maybe he gets 30, maybe the judge gives him 15. I don't know, but it would be less because now he testifies, forces the trial, gets up there,

Starting point is 00:19:13 and if the judge is convinced that he lied and perjured himself, then he's not taking responsibility. When you plead guilty, you have to, and that's the other thing. SBF would have to allocute. He'd have to stand up and say, yes, I committed fraud. Yes, I intended and I knew better. And I took people's money and I used it to buy luxury real estate and pay off politicians and regulators and all the things he did with it and he wasn't capable of saying that and so he forced this trial and when he gets on there and perjures himself it will make a big difference in the uh the sentence absolutely you can count on it being double yeah i think it's double here so sorry in terms of rules do you have do you have to get everybody all the jurors to unanimously agree or if you can get one of them one of them to believe that he's innocent, then what happens next?

Starting point is 00:20:09 Well, that's what I was saying. And I think that, you know, you never want to be too critical of a defense attorney, you know, because it's easy to Monday morning quarterback for anyone. But, you know, the only viable strategy, in my opinion, is what I said. Yes, you have to get unanimous. You get one juror to hold out to say, I don't believe that, you know, that he falls for the story that, you know, what Bill Ackman thought after Sam, you know, was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yeah, you know, I just got ahead of the kid and he was just young and dumb and made stupid mistakes. But, you know, he's not a bad guy. He never had that. You know, he's a good guy who fucked up.

Starting point is 00:20:49 That's the theory. And if you can get one of them who holds out the entire time and refuses to convict, then it's a hung jury. At some point, the judge is going to do everything he can to prevent that. He's going to make them go back and deliberate. But after a long, lengthy deliberation, if it comes back, we're never going to be unanimous. It's a hung jury. That's when the defense attorney goes to the prosecutor and says, I've seen your entire case. I've crossed these people already. I'm going to be better at it the next time.

Starting point is 00:21:23 And I might get more than one the next time. And it puts the pressure on the prosecutor. And then you cut a deal. But that would require Sam agreeing to the deal. And note that, you know, that's the, you know, I don't know if he would ever agree to the deal. Is he going to demand a second trial if they were to get that? I'm not suggesting that that's going to happen to anybody. I'm just answering the question of what I think is the only Hail Mary chance that he doesn't spend decades in prison. Yeah, the most damning part to me of the Bill Ackman, O'Leary, etc. argument, which may, by the way, be valid for other collapses in the crypto space, things that just got ahead of people and they went further down the risk curve and made mistakes. But the most damning thing is that

Starting point is 00:22:08 we heard in the testimony, this all goes back to 2019, right? He was already taking customer funds before we even hit the last bull market, right? And already had the door. And it just seems that at the end of the day, Alameda was always SBF's priority and always his baby, and FTX was just his piggy bank for Alameda. I mean, that's how I view it. Nick, I saw you had your hand up, and then we're going to wrap up the SBF conversation and move on. Yeah, I was just going to kind of hop on with Simon there. And, you know, he's talking about it.

Starting point is 00:22:35 You know, it's a shame that he didn't have a dad that was a lawyer and wasn't involved, et cetera. But also, his dad was quoted saying he was underpaid and needed bigger bonuses. So you know his dad was there kind of coddling Sam throughout the whole time. And he called his mommy when Sam didn't agree. Exactly. I mean, how crazy is that?

Starting point is 00:22:52 And, you know, the other thing is, too, I don't know if Sam will ever plead guilty or admit to it. He probably will try to just keep pushing for more trials as far as he can until he's thrown in prison. Just because in his head, I think he thinks he can't ever be in trouble. Just the way he was silver spooning his mouth mouth had his mommy and daddy coddling him all those great connections to make FTX what it was I don't know if his brain can even process that he's actually about to spend years decades in prison potentially so um that's really all I wanted to say on that and also you know it's it's kind of funny how he's hailed as this uh genius and then now he's trying to play dumb so I think he knows what's going on i think that was a slip up he had in the in the court in the trial uh yesterday or whatever it was but uh you know i think he's

Starting point is 00:23:32 just trying to play dumb see if he can get that over on one of the juries and we'll see what happens but uh it's a shame it's a shame for the industry but it'll be nice when it when it uh comes to a close here hopefully sooner than later did kevin o'leary ever walk did kevin o'leary ever walk back any of his comments or um was he just trying to take down by now not that i'm aware of actually you know he's still kind of blamed binance for and i think he even said that if sam got out of this clean that he would even potentially invest with sam on another venture in the future still kind of hailing him as this genius even with all this uh evidence of the opposite occurring yeah stockholm syndrome is real um that's all i can say for that we're gonna move on kevin o'leary is bad for crypto let's just leave it at that

Starting point is 00:24:18 so wonderful though yeah okay literally his name mr wonderful you obviously don't know his name anyways that's sarcasm guys don't know his name anyways that's sarcasm guys don't cut that out anyways uh moving on to the next story which i think we can start we've beaten it kind of to death but obviously this hamas funding story the wall street journal put out an article with a very hyperbolic title claiming that effectively hamas have been largely funded by donations and cryptocurrency to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Elizabeth Warren, not letting a good tragedy go to waste, decided to gather, I believe, 105 senators and congresspeople to then send a letter saying we need to resolve this, take care of it very quickly. Cracked down on the crypto industry. After that letter was sent, we saw, of course,

Starting point is 00:25:05 Chainalysis did a great piece digging in and saying, listen, this is completely miscalculated, that this is more not tens of millions of dollars, more like maybe $450,000. And then Elliptic, who the Wall Street Journal article was based on, wrote a full retraction saying that basically the data was incorrect, that it was misspoken, and it was even less than that $450,000. Effectively, there was nothing burger, right? So then the bigger story became, why hasn't Senator Warren, we know the answer there, but especially the Wall Street Journal, why haven't we seen a retraction on this story from them? Now, listen, we all know that a retraction will go completely unnoticed. Once the main headline is out there, we know how news works. Whoever read that thinks

Starting point is 00:25:49 it's true, we'll never see the retraction. But still, I think it's important that we get that. But the bigger head scratcher, I think, is the follow up to that, which is even after the clear retraction, everybody who's following this knows that it was a story based on fake news then we get senator lummis who's extremely bitcoin friendly who wrote the you know who's a co-author of the lummis jillibrand bill that's gives sweeping uh legislation on crypto and stable coins especially she stepped in and urges swift action against binance and tether specifically for links to terrorist groups. She basically doubled down on this FUD and then actually named names. And I mean, for example, she tweeted, when it comes to illicit finance, crypto is not the enemy.

Starting point is 00:26:34 Bad actors are. I sent a letter asking DOJ to finish its investigation and consider criminal charges against Binance and Tether after reports they serve as intermediaries for Hamas and engage in illicit activities. Paolo Arduino from Tether, by the serve as intermediaries for Hamas and engage in illicit activities. Paolo Arduino from Tether, by the way, quickly responded saying, I don't know what you're talking about, lady. We've been working with law enforcement. You've seen us freezing wallets left and right. Give me a break. But just more continuation of the FUD. That was a TLDR that

Starting point is 00:27:00 maybe was just TL. But Iago, go ahead. What are your thoughts here? This is a very real and dangerous conversation. I think one which I personally take very seriously, and I think we all should. Just to give a little bit of context of where I'm coming from, my family have been for weeks sheltering with their children from Hamas rockets. I have friends who are currently dealing with the front lines of the situation.

Starting point is 00:27:31 And I have friends, family friends whose son is currently held hostage and they don't know where he is, which is one of the most tragic things that can happen to a parent. And this terror organization, like all terror organizations, is causing untold suffering, very real, very dangerous suffering to Israelis, to Palestinians, and terrorist organizations cause very real suffering around the world. So this is a very real subject.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And for me, a very personal one, because I'm working on a project called Sovereign. And Sovereign's goal is to allow anyone to transact, trade, lend, anyone to be able to do that in an unstoppable way. And I have to ask myself, are we building tools that are going to facilitate terror? And so with that context, I want to say that the use that Wall Street Journal have made and that politicians are trying to make of this subject is cynical and is immoral. And there are two reasons for that. First of all, this KYC AMO regime that we've created is incredibly ineffective, but worse than being ineffective. It's a much bigger scam than anything FTX ever did.

Starting point is 00:28:48 It costs us $50 billion a year in compliance costs. That's a tax that every single one of us pays. It taxes the opportunity for entrepreneurs to compete with banks because it makes it impossible for anything but the largest organizations to act as financial intermediaries. And in 2014, I started a Bitcoin remittance company because UK banks decided that what they were going to do is shut off transactions to Somalia because it was too expensive for them to comply. Somalia at the time was a country which relied on remittance for 80% of its GDP. As a result of the fact that the UK banks

Starting point is 00:29:32 decided to do this, there was a mass famine which cost the lives of close to a million people. The cost of this KYC AML regime to us is billions of dollars, loss of innovation, the loss of our privacy. And every single year, there's a mass hack in which these honeypots of personal information are distributed to the world's most nefarious actors. And every now and again it inadvertently kills a million people. And what are we getting in return? Well, estimates are that of all global illicit funds, the KYC AML regime intercepts less than 0.2%, or the equivalent of 500 million a year. In other words, we're spending $50 billion in order to intercept

Starting point is 00:30:25 $500 million of flows. That's 100 to 1. That's ridiculously poor ROI. It's never stopped an autocratic regime. It's never stopped a dictator. And it's never stopped a terrorist organization. KYC AML is a complete, ineffective fabrication and scam. And why? Because money is so much more important than speech. Everything we do in our lives, we work for money, we save our money, we spend our money on things that are valuable to us and the people that are valuable to us. Much more than speech, money is the way that we express who we are and what we value. And if you can control money, you can control what we can express and who we can be and who we can associate with. And so this right that we speak about, about the right to free speech, is important, but nowhere near as important as the right to free money.

Starting point is 00:31:22 And that's exactly why any excuse will do to attack it. And so in my mind, this is because it kills people, because it destroys innovation, and because it creates the world's largest web of government overreach and surveillance, is one of the most important ideological, moral and practical problems that we face. There's no evidence that KYC AML has ever stopped a criminal organization or a terrorist organization, but we know that it costs all of us our liberty

Starting point is 00:31:59 and much, much more. So I think that if there's any reason we should be excited and think it's important to deal with the industry that we're dealing with, this is the reason. Go ahead, Tony. I have some comments to share regarding Senator Lummis and French Hill, both of who I've interviewed. And there's many layers to this. So I think they're certainly using the Elizabeth Warren Hamas crypto FUD and lies as an opportunity to take down Binance and Tether. And from the lobbying groups I spoke to in D.C., such as the Blockchain Association, Binance and Tether, everybody in D.C. would love to take them down.

Starting point is 00:32:43 They don't have a good reputation. So I think Lummis, while I respect her and French Hill, I've spoken to both of them. I think they're using this as an opportunity to try to sneak in something there to further paint Binance and Tether in a bad light and possibly pull some information and use the momentum that Elizabeth Warren has started. The other aspect to it is from the folks I've spoken to at the Blockchain Association, even though you may have Democrats or Republicans or certain groups working together towards crypto regulation, many of them are looking to get the notoriety to attach their name to anything that would either further crypto or take down certain bad actors right they want that notoriety so i see this as an opera with lummis and uh french hill being opportunists here and they probably hear this if they want to be happy about it but um just from those people i've

Starting point is 00:33:38 been speaking to so uh you know i don't know where this has legs or it's just an optics thing, but just some takes. I mean, there's also the potential that it's, I mean, perhaps opportunist, as you said, but also the chance to centralize to organizations and products and companies that the United States government would be more comfortable with, like USDC and Coinbase versus a Tether and a Binance and effectively to eliminate the offshore actors and centralize to the ones that are onshore, heavily more heavily regulated by the United States where she's writing this legislation. I think that that potentially could be a side of it as well.

The Wolf Of All Streets - SBF Bombshells | BTC Sen. Lummis vs. Tether & Binance | Crypto Town Hall

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