The Wolf Of All Streets - Visa And Swift Go All-In Stablecoins | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

On this episode of Crypto Town Hall, the hosts and guest speakers dive into the latest wave of stablecoin developments and broader shifts in payments infrastructure. The show covers Visa's new stablecoin pilot for cross-border payments and Swift's multi-bank blockchain initiative, juxtaposing these with ongoing debates around XRP's role in the future of payments versus stablecoins. The discussion expands into new stablecoin blockchains like Plasma (backed by Tether), regulatory moves in the US, Senate hearings on digital asset taxation, and the tension between banks, credit card companies, and crypto firms over interest payments and rewards. Speakers also tackle SEC regulatory approaches, innovations in DeFi and token launches, and the growing need for practical payment rails and regulatory clarity.

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Crypto Town Hall every weekday here at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on X. A bit of a, I guess we'll call it slow news day, but we do have quite a bit of Stablecoin news, which I think is going to be the norm moving forward until the end of time as we see further adoption of the most obvious use case of blockchain technology, which is clearly Stablecoins that are proven to be the killer app. The big story today, Vita launches Stablecoin Pilot for cross-border payments, and of course, Swift partners with 30 banks to build 24-7 blockchain ledger for global payments. Looks like Swift finally deciding that they don't want to go the way of Kodak and Blockbuster and adopting a superior payment technology to the rails that they are currently using that were probably made in the 1970s. this seemed like a very obvious move for Swift unless they want to be as extinct as the dinosaurs and going to be interesting to see how this progresses, who they partner with, and how they use it. I think, Dave, we're going to get into this, but you made a great point on Macro Monday yesterday, and this is not to trigger any of the XRP army. It's not anti-XRP, which is one of the biggest

narratives that we had for XRP and Ripple was that they were going to be adopted by Swift, right? I mean, yeah, I did an experiment yesterday. I was at a conference, which was actually very interesting. And I'll tell, I'll talk a little bit later about some of the conversations I had with some CFTC staffers and some other people involved in regulatory. It was the DACOM conferences in New York. We actually had Chris Giancarlo and the head of the Crypto Task Force video when they were going to be there live. But because there was the roundtable yesterday, which is also worth talking about, they weren't there. But I did an experiment to see how much engagement farming I could do by one innocent tweet asking a question.

And when I did it, I thought, you know, this could get to 100,000 views. It's in the 80,000 now. So it was right. Basically, I asked the XRP army, could someone explain to me what the value of XRP is since we were all told we should buy it for Swift? And yet here it is chain link doing a deal with Swift and not them, which of course means you get the link army and the XRP army, of course, arguing at each other. You know, it's fun for invasion farming. It's terrible if you actually want to be able to use your notifications to respond to people's questions because it gets cluttered with spam.

But the simple fact is the people who are buying XRP have no fucking clue what they're buying. That's just a simple fact. Now, that's not true about some. Mickle and others do understand. But there are people who believe XRP as a token to be used as payments infrastructure. Now, in 2017, it was being used as payments infrastructure because they just had a system, which allowed you to buy XRP on one end and sell it on an exchange at another end, and that's fine. But when you compare XRP to stable coins, it's like comparing a horse and buggy being driven

over dirt fields compared to trains running on train tracks or whatever, or like a bullet train in Japan. I mean, it's not even close. I mean, there's so much more volatility in a token that's not pegged for use for payments. It is literally dead. So repeat after me, XRP army. XRP has nothing. to do with global payments as a token. Now, the ledger, that could be debated, you know, you know, that's why they pivoted to a stable coin. But it's amazing how so many of the people in that group think, think something. It's just, it's utterly insane. As far as Swift is concerned, I mean, the real question is, and this is the simple one, you know, they will go the way of Kodak, by the way, uh, if people, if they're, they would, if it wasn't for regulatory capture and

the regulator is trying to keep them up because why do we need a centralized payments mechanism anymore. You needed it to quote Mark Yusco when the technology was trust, because who would you trust? You want to trust one bank. Dikes don't want to trust each other. They wanted to trust a neutral third party. But with the technology of truth, aka blockchain, where everybody could verify transactions, there's zero need for a centralized counterparty. So we'll see if people are going to pay fees to a centralized counterparty to trust them when there's no need for it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's going to take years to evolve. They'll probably figure out some way to make the regulators give them a monopoly, which, by the way, is the

biggest story today, which is what's going on in the stable coin world. But I'll let you, I'll let you get to there when we get there. We can continue on the stable coin conversation. I think it's an obvious one. First, Maricio, are you a listener or speaker? No, I'm a speaker now. Thanks. You're a listener to me. So I just wanted to make sure, because I saw some emojis, and I was like, he wouldn't just be listening. He's definitely on stage. I know he was invited, but of course, I don't see you on stage. So, so.

I see Panos with his hand up. Amatea with his hand up, both speakers, Mauritio is a speaker, Ali as a speaker also with his hand up. He just put his hand up, but Panos's hand is not up for me, just for the record. Yeah, well, but Panos had his hand up first for me because we were living in the glitch,

you know, that's what we're dealing with. But those are the only people I see a speaker. So if there's anybody else like David or others that are speakers, I don't see it. Yeah, I don't either. Panos, you can go ahead. You had yours. We'll just go down the line.

Go ahead, Panos. While we're on the subject of XRP killers, is what is your guy's thoughts on plasma, the new, the new blockchain that is built for stablecoins? Like what, I've just started looking into it now, but I just wanted to get, maybe, probably Dave's most clued up on this, but I wanted to get your thoughts on it because, I mean, this is like, I have one thought, Panos. It's backed by tether, right? It is backed by tether, yes. I have one thought. Stable coin backing technology is going to be ubiquitous.

It's going to be commoditized. I'm not saying you can't make money at it. I'm not saying, but you're not going to get tokens worth hundreds of billions of dollars backing a technology where the technology can shift. The stable coin issuer can shift to another chain easily if the price of the first chain gets too expensive. We've seen it already. That's why Tron dominates in the case of Tether. And I made the point, the other point that I made, which drives people absolutely bananas, is if, in fact, you're saying XR, I know I'm crashing on XRP.

And by the way, I still own some. So, you know, whatever. But, you know, all these people who are hyperbolic on XRP, they're saying, well, it's going to back RLUSD, which is going to be the winning stable coin. It's like, okay, maybe, except for Tron, literally, I did the math. Tron back 637 times the transaction value of stable coin, then XRP backs of the RLUSD. And that's even after a fairly rampant growth. So even if it grows a thousand times from here, relatively, it would justify a valuation.

That's one-fifth what XRPs is today. So my point on plasmal or anything else is understand the token economics. What are you actually owning? If you're actually owning a piece of a network that's going to generate fees in perpetuity, okay, well, now there's a use case. If you're owning a token that's going to get burned at infinitesimal rates because it has to be cheap, well, whatever. I mean, it's, I can't think of a good analogy, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Does that make sense? That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think we have plasma obviously announced, which is backed by Tether. We have Tempo, which is backed by Stripe. We have USC or Circle proposing their own stable coin, I mean, their own layer one as well. So I think that we're going to see a ton of this. But to Dave's point, stable coins should eventually just, and the rails are on, just be commoditized. don't think the user should care about what network they're using the stable coin on or even

what stable coin they're using at the end state of this. The real value from all of this is going to be driven into two places. It's going to be driven into companies like equities of companies that can create better business models for people. I was talking with Ron Hammond yesterday at this conference and I won't go into detail now, but I basically proposed a business model that community banks could use, which would be much more profitable in their current model with far less risk. And he was laughing, but, you know, and we can go into that. But there's lots of business models that can utilize faster, cheaper payments technology to create all sorts of new products and services. So that's one. And the second will be defy. We'll be defy protocols

and defy platforms that can allow people to use stable coins to go peer to peer, most notably AI agents peer to peer to peer in order to provide value to each other. and you know to link up what's going on the the idea that the layer one promoting this this technology which by definition has to be a commodity I just don't get it they really don't someone's going to have to explain to me why why I'm wrong I think it was amateo next morning Dave morning Scott morning everybody else I mean I think the main thing is that we're moving into the next generation of stable coins which is essentially something that Dave you and I have talked about a lot which is

is once you get the initial infra down and you get approvals, you get regulatory green lights, it now becomes a performance-based market on the velocity at which they can move and the actual fees to use the chain. So when I look at plasma, it looks like the next kind of obvious evolution of where this stuff heads, which is, okay, now that the infra has been approved. and we're there, we're now looking at how can you increase the efficiency, increase the velocity of these stable coins? I think that we'll continue to see this trend. How much these institutions and banks are going to be willing to integrate all of these custom blockchains

into their rails. I think that that will, ironically, probably just be abstracted away by chain link where it's single settlements with multi-chains and then it just becomes a competitive market so i think it's very hard to put multi-billion dollar valuations on these things because we don't actually know we know where current adoption is we don't know where the competitive market will be as things evolve i think plasma likely has a strong competitive chance especially with the innovation of tether But we're going to continue to see these massive improvements in blockchain efficiency, which will have downtail effects to stable coins, and who wins remains to be seen. I think it's also worth noting as we go into this conversation that different companies will need these for different reasons.

We've talked about it a lot, but obviously Circle, I think, has very specific reasons. They need their own L1, namely is that they're going to make a health. of a lot less money when interest rates come down. And they need to find another way to make money to justify their high stock price. But number two is that if a stable coin issuer wants everybody to use it for payments, it's unfortunately going to have to be extremely centralized and you're going to have to be able to roll back, you know, fraudulent payments or even just mistakes. I kind of always joke, you know, 75-year-old Peggy, who's an hour from retirement, who's doing payments for a Midwestern company, and accidentally sends USDC to a Salana address on

Ethereum, that's not going to fly for a real company, right? You need to be able to call customer service and get that fixed for better or for worse. But there's such an easy answer to that, Scott. I mean, there's going to be, everyone in crypto has this notion, I should say everyone, a lot of people have this notion that we need a completely disintermediated world. Horshit. People need people. That's part of the problem with the whole AI narrative that there will be no jobs.

Think of a company. Think of a community bank, right? you're in your local company, you're in your local bank, and you go, you sign up for an account, they're using stable coins underneath it. Instead of fractional reserve banking, you don't deposit with the bank. They charge a small fee for services. What are their services? Their service their service might be to provide a loan. So they take a small spread out of the loan. By the way, that's what's happening in the mortgage market today anyway. Almost every mortgage originator doesn't actually service the loan. It gets done by this amorphous pool of global capital

that finds into it into securitized stuff. Think of a community banker who now provides a service, for their community. This is, okay, we're going to give you payments infrastructure. We're going to manually, instead of it being instantaneous, you can opt for instantaneous if you want to, but we will give you the service optionally to hold up your payment. So human beings or they'll probably use AI for it, but they'll provide a service where you can roll things back. They'll provide another service and says, we will insure your purchases, insuring purchases against fraud or deceit is another service. Credit card issuers right now bundle that with this massive 3% fee. what percentage would be fair for that? I don't know, maybe half a percent. I mean, whatever the

numbers, I have no idea. But these services can happen. The point is, it's like, what did Amazon do in the early 2000s? Amazon was the only one to figure this out first. They figured out just in time delivery, and so they crushed it. Now, every retailer figured the same thing out. So there are so many others, but Amazon got this early lead. People are going to figure out instantaneous movement without having to pay someone to trust them is a very valuable service, but there are other services people are going to want. People are still going to want credit. People are still going to want the things you talk about. And so they'll be provided because that's how markets work. Markets, you know, create people, innovators, entrepreneurs will create those services. That's really

the point that I like to make. And it's relevant for this stupid stable coin conversation where the community bankers are being trotted out by the banking lobby reneging on the agreement they made when they passed the Genus Act, and so we'll get to that later. But I think I don't know whether it was Mauritia or Ollie. I think Ali still had his hand up, and I can't see Maricio at all, unfortunately. Yeah, no, I was going to add in terms of like the race of, you know, these stable coin companies, who's going to get used, especially in these big corporations, start to adopting these, you know, stable coins into their transactions and how they go about their daily operations.

I think ultimately it's going to come down to how these stable coin companies are going to offer more value beyond just the bottom line. For example, like hyperliquid, they kind of bid it out their builder to somebody that's going to invest back into their communities. So I wouldn't be surprised if some of these stable coin companies decide to make an agreement where they're actually going to invest back into these other companies in different. ways and Shopify that's using USC they announced yesterday that they're partnering up with Chad GBT so now like if you go into Chad GBT you can just message I'm looking for a gray shirt that's meant for hiking it's going to give you options and all that type of stuff and you can just check out very quickly and in regards to Peggy trying to you know get her refunds back oh yeah you're like packing your luggage right now

Sorry? Oh, no, that's not me. I was wondering what the sound is. Okay, it must be Dave. You're outing me again. At least it wasn't me doing something. I like that you're impacting that. Oh, yeah, Dan, I don't even want to know.

Go ahead, Ollie. Yeah, no, I was just going to add. So, like, Shopify, their cryptocurrency policy on refunds basically just says here, like, they don't have automatic refunds for crypto payments through Shopify and that you need to refund these payments manually through the payment gateways that they use. So they're using Coinbase and Stripe to facilitate all of this. So there's probably going to be a lot more volume coming in for USDC with this ChadGBT partnership. Marisha, did you have your hand up and are you present?

If not, now you're on the spot, so you need to say something. No, that's, hey, Scott. First of all, Dave, you're fired today, man. The ripple troll extraordinaire. I loved it. And all the other points, I just echo almost entirely. I think my two points on this is, number one, there is a very interesting Senate hearing tomorrow

to examine the taxation of digital assets. And my sense here is that this is going to land somewhere along the lines of we're going to basically tax everything that's not a stable coin. as a commodity or an equity, and basically stable coins are fine for payments. Because the point here is that the U.S. wants people to use stable coins as payments. That's the one they benefit the most from the point of view of having people going and buying their debt.

It's not beneficial to them. So I think they're going to lay the incentives such that people want to pay with stable coins only, and it doesn't necessarily make sense to pay with other things. So I'm watching that one, or I'll be following that one closely tomorrow at 10 a.m. for anyone that wants to check it out. And then the other point I'll make is that I saw a few points from Coinbase and Brian Armstrong that seem to be lobbying really hard against this pushback because it appears that basically banks, as we've mentioned in spaces before, banks are really pushing back on this idea of paying

rewards to the distributors. And I don't find this surprising, but I really am interested to see how this shakes out in the context of the infrastructure bill or the clarity bill as well. So I'm not sure, you know, people that are better versed in this sort of legislative, you know, battleground can have a better guess than me as to whether this can get pushed back or not. But I do sense that there is this massive pushback from the banks to basically stop the ability for people like Coinbase to pay interest on stable coins. And I think that's actually pretty unique to Coinbase, given the Circle relationship. So for me, at least, I haven't seen other stable coins being as loud or as sort of upset at this.

But I'm curious to see anybody else has any thoughts. It's a very big deal. I was talking with Ron Hammond yesterday and he's pissed. And mostly because he helped negotiate the original genius at Prohibition on interest. And the fact is the banks are going back on that deal. That's how he looks at it. The truth is it isn't going to matter. And I explained to him why.

And I'll explain to the whole audience why. But it's what they're doing in it and it dovetails very nicely with the title. So visa is going all in the stable coins, but the credit card providers are have a carve out in the law that they can provide rewards for their services. So what will happen? Credit cards may have their margins hurt a little bit by stable coins, but they'll be able to keep. So, you know, it's sort of like they'll be able to give rewards and even when they're not giving credit just by using stable coins and those repay payments and nobody else. will. So the way it's being set up is it's an unholy alliance of the banks who want to protect their deposit base, which just to put this in a number, it's between $20 and $30 billion of a federal subsidy to the banks by keeping their entire structure the way it currently is and a subsidy

to the credit card companies who will still be allowed to provide rewards, but upstarts won't be able to do so without using the credit card. So like if you consider Gemma, for example. So I have the Gemini Bitcoin rewards card. Well, they're using MasterCard because they want to use the MasterCard network. But they're in a position, I'm sure, where MasterCard gets a lion's share of the revenue and Gemini gets a smaller thing because Gemini doesn't really have any other place to go to get it done. But if you imagine a world where stable coins are ubiquitous and that's the payment infrastructure and then you set yourself up as a payment processor, you know, you're a bank, you can offer payments through stable

coins and you can offer rewards by having people keep assets at you know either in the stable coin or just on your platform just kind of general platform wide rewards those are the sorts of things they don't want to have happen but it's a it's an absolute 100% regulatory use to to help the rich and stop the average american from collecting interest and it's the most regressive policy i've ever heard and it's amazing and it's the progressive democrats that are the ones that are leading this charge. I mean, some of them are ignorant. And that's what Ron said. He thinks some of them just literally have no idea of any of the stuff. They just believe what the banks tell them. Others are just evil. They push their own agenda. So that's what's going on. It's a very

big deal. So Coinbase is they're leading the charge for the industry, but they did, this is not the first time they've led the charge for the industry. Let us not forget. But it goes way beyond Coinbase. I mean, I talked to someone from Cracking yesterday. They're literally on exactly the same page with Coinbase on this. I didn't talk to anyone from Gemini yesterday, but I can imagine where they're coming from. But it's not just them. I'm sure Vlad at Robin Hood feels the same way. Right. So it's a it's a big deal. And what's at stake here in the short run is proof or question, will this administration allow laws to get passed that specifically hurt the average person and help the bonuses of the of the bankers and I hate to be populist about this but this is true populism

and this is not I mean if Austin Campbell were up here he'd be saying the same thing you know this is Republican Democrat doesn't matter this is not party lines this is just the big guys versus the small guys and it is actually a very important battle and why we really care is because if it gets too heated they're trying to do this to trip up or delay the clarity act which both sides want for lots of reasons Ali yeah I was going to add to That was kind of the sentiment mentioned in yesterday's roundtable that they had. There was one gentleman, I forgot his name, but he was basically talking about how the rest of the world, right, EU, Canada, Australia, they already have clarity in terms of how they

need to operate, and the U.S. is kind of lagging behind in terms of this regulation and what to follow and adapt. So they're kind of playing catch-up now with the rest of the world. And I heard you mentioned Robin Hood. So Robin Hood, they're offering their tokenized stocks in the EU right now, but not in the U.S. So they're also trying to gain attraction and get some more clarity in terms of offering more services for U.S. customers to come. Yeah, and we could go down that rabbit hole. But when you talk about that roundtable, they talk more.

There were some fights, so evidently I have to go back and watch it. I don't know if anyone has. Scott, did you record it? I know you were streaming it. Which, record which? Yeah, I think that's roundtable yesterday, it's on my channel. It's, you know, it's recorded there, but it can be replayed the video on there, yeah. Yeah, because evidently there was some interesting fights.

I mean, I, you know, Ian, you know, the CEO of Coinroutts and I penned a letter that's on the SEC website, the Crypto Task Force. It's right up, it's literally the first one you see when you look at public comments. And effectively what we wrote, you know, you can board the TLDR is don't take the current equity or securities rules for trading and apply it to crypto because crypto is already more efficient for institutions because they don't have those rules that create that are effectively counterproductive, create lots of costs and make it harder to trade. And, you know, the data is quite compelling on this. And I'm sure that that it had to be in the public record. But they weren't even at that level. They talked a little bit about it. What they're really trying to figure out is where. The big news out of the, out of that roundtable is that they're not going to waste their time trying to merge the CFDC and SEC. They're just going to try to harmonize rules and work together, which that's fine, but so be it. That's what came out.

I can't see any hands to you, Dave. Holly. Yeah, I can add a little bit more. So they did talk about, like, you know, leverage, margin, the trading. They also focused on prediction markets as well a little bit in terms of gaining more clarity in terms of what events they can actually allow on their platforms. And I know one of the issues that weren't really delved into was the sport side of these prediction markets because in America, I think you guys have like a lot of different regulators when it comes to gambling,

sports betting that's kind of governing that side of stuff. But in terms of like the retail side, so I think in the next three to six months, we'll probably see, you know, what the max leverage can be on some of these platforms, liquidation risk disclosures, and maybe like other KYC checks to make sure they're trying to protect the users of these different platforms as, you know, derivatives and perpetuals become a popular thing in crypto. Dave, did you see this other story about Double Zero? No, what was the story? So this is kind of big news, but it's a little bit above my head.

So Double Zero was issued a no action letter for 2Z by the SEC. Did anybody see this or get the opportunity to dig into it? Because it's basically the first of its kind, no action letter from the SEC on a token launch in the United States. So 2Z does not have to register as a class of equity. Securities and programmatic flows of 2Z on the double zero network are not securities transactions. I can't comment on the specifics as I haven't read it. What I can say, as I've said this before on the show, and this is sort of arcane, but effectively the SEC has made it extremely clear that they're going to use no action or what they call exemptive relief to allow innovation. That's something that matters.

Now, what they're not going to do, what they're not going to do is allow tokens that are equities or bonds to be traded without the proper disclosures, et cetera. They may offer, they may, who knows what they're going to do in terms of limiting disclosures or, you know, writing, you know, different types. But the basics is they're going to use no action relief for this. And they're particularly interested in helping defy grow. I mean, Paul Atkins was surrounded. Eleanor Territ did a great, had a great tweet about it. yesterday, you know, showing a picture of him being surrounded by reporters as he talked about it being their highest priority. And what he really wants to do is allow for defy innovation

as middlemen and agents to do so in a much quicker, cleaner way as long as you can understand it. But the basic principles of SEC regulation are not going to change. And that's the thing that everyone needs to understand. So you need to, you know, disclosures are relevant. People are still going to be liable for false and misleading statements, you know, et cetera. And as far as when it gets to trading, it'll be best execution and fiduciary responsibilities and segregating assets. None of that's going to change. But the way that the rules are written, as we've all talked about, were written, look, they were written in the 40s, in the 30s and 40s, and then again, in the 70s. And then there was the market structure that happened 25 years ago. And really,

there's been no changes since then. So now all of this new technology is after it. And so they know they need to make changes. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. It says it represents four months of constructive engagement with the SEC to establish a clear framework for compliant token launches in America and a landmark moment for the crypto industry. I mean, so I haven't dug too deeply. I'm just reading like what I can as we go here. But the 2Z token powers value transfer incentives and security across the double zero network. That sounds like any gas token for layer one or layer two.

right so yeah and so eventually it'll it will help anyway we i see you probably don't see maritio's hand up i do not he does not exist yeah his hand is up maritio thank you allie i think you were actually ahead of me you want to go first uh sure sure yeah no i was going to add uh for the double zero so i think it's like a deep in project so decentralized physical infrastructure and i think it's it's bullish for deepen or utility tokens because now it's like if a token's value and distribution are tied to like using or providing network services, you know, now it looks like the regulatory bodies are, they might view it outside of securities registration, which is a very good thing. And in terms of how it might look like a security, if it wasn't, like it could

be if they were trying to do fundraising, you know, if they tried to sell the token. tokens to fund the build of their deep-in projects, if they're trying to promise any profits, yields, or buybacks, different things in that nature. So I think overall, it's very bullish for deep-in projects. Maricio. Yeah, Dave, this is actually a question for you. And I would, just because you're so well versed in this,

I think when you look at this announcement from Double Zero and you look at the guidance from the SEC saying, we want things to go on chain. Do you really believe in the world where people could just have self-custody of stocks and no KYC, no AML trading of stocks in these defy-dexes? And I ask because when I look around, you know, every, at least the ones that I've looked at, all these efforts by some of these defy pools to create what they call, quote-unquote, institutional defy has not really been picked up a lot of volume or traction.

And again, this is the cynical view, and I'd love to get some more informed thoughts on this. Let me, this was discussed at length yesterday, the TL, you know, by a variety of people, regulators, non-regulators, including the person who just resigned who, you know, is running the NYDFS to Wyoming, to the federal side. The TLDR is this. Most people believe that all KYC and AML is going to happen at the stable coin level. So when you put Fiat introduce into the system or take an out of. the system, you'll have to KYC, that all vendors who accept stable coins as payment for services obviously know their customer because they're their customer, right? And so that's how they're going to do it. So if you, once you enter, you get money into the system to buy whatever, Tesla stock. And now you sell Tesla stock for some other stock. What's going to happen

is the platforms themselves are going to have to be open and transparent so that they can do the same thing they do in the brokerage world in terms of wash trading and manipulation and that sort of thing. That's more of what will happen. So the answer for KIC is going to be at the gateways in and out and for merchants or brokers who are using it, you know, being able to do transfers and defy, look, let's face it, the other thing they really care about is the government, if you're trading an asset and you have capital gains, they want it to be reported. So there's going to have to be it. Blockchains are open. So the question is, how does that happen? That's the issues they're trying to work out now. But no, it's not going to be a free-for-all where you can

buy, you know, that's why this tax hearing is so important and Bitcoin is so important because if Bitcoin never has gets any capital gains relief, then effectively you can never use it. It effectively prevents you using it to spend it. And it means that when in, if it's an inflation, heads and inflation becomes a literal overt tax as opposed to a covert tax. I'm not sure how far they're willing to go to do that, but there's a lot of issues around this. Yeah, I see more than one challenge with that model, and maybe this is me coming from Venezuela and seeing all the aftermarket things that people do to, when the government sets up these unreasonable or criminal restrictions, people typically just find a way around it.

And I can see a world where, you know, you buy, you know, you buy a regulated stable coin and you, and you can't waste it on the way in, but then you do a side deal on cash and, you know, that stable coin now goes to someone else. And I just, I just don't, um, it's just very hard from a tracking perspective. Again, maybe someone smarter than me has figured this all out. But, um, I just have a hard time seeing it being that way. There are challenges for sure, Maritio. I mean, look, in Italy, You know, there's a reason why Italy may be the only country in the EU that is not pushing, other than the fact that their prime minister, you know, doesn't want it, trying to have central bank currency and digital ID tracking because Italy still has a black market, right? They have, you know, for a long time. You know, if tax rates are confiscatorial, if that's the right word, people, black markets will proliferate.

If they're not, and it's not worth the trouble, it's not worth the risk, then they won't. So there's a lot of moving parts to it. But the basics of the stable coin issuers being the place where most of the KYC is going to happen, I think, is real. But you're right. I mean, there's nothing stopping any of that. But if you're caught, you're going to get punished. And in this AI-oriented world, I don't know about you, but my viewpoint is if there's one organization you don't want to screw with, it's the IRS. I'm going to tell you.

I completely agree with you. Sorry. Go ahead, Maurice, yeah. No, that's it. I'll let someone else go. And then, Marisa, I'm Mateo. Yeah, I was going to say, this is a really fascinating conversation because it's like, how do you actually regulate an open and permissionless ecosystem

and monitor this stuff while embracing innovation? This has always been the tough nuts to crack and why this policy and regulation implementation is taken so long. So I've sort of always surmise that it's going to be on the on ramps and off ramps, Those are the registered entities that have the means to actually process this stuff. There's a lot of technology that's required in AML. You have to run addresses, things are tracked, they're labeled. It's pretty robust.

So you need good infra to do this, and you can't really expect, you know, some kind of meme coin defy exchange to actually perform that function. It's just not realistic. So, yeah, I think that's really interesting. interesting. And I, one thing I also wanted to note, and I'm curious to get Dave and Scott your feedback on this, but with the Visa news on the stable coin work that they're doing in their announcement, you know, they're treating stable coins as cash equivalents. And of course, we always know that in theory. And I was just wondering, like, is this like one of the biggest cash equivalence of stable coins that we've seen in terms of being adopted and embraced,

because it seems quite significant to even just embrace that language and sort of derisks the concept that it's anything less than a cash equivalent. Dave, you can take that when I have that, Dave, I'd just tell you, I have to actually run for another recording. I know we're going to probably transition at 11, but I'm moving on. Yeah. In the last two minutes where we turn it over to Buzz, I mean, I think, answer to that question is, yeah, you're right. It's a big deal. They're trying to come to grips with this. You know, there's two goals. The way to understand how this stuff is going to work is, at least in this administration, they want stable coins to become ubiquitous because that allows, that's a

purer buyer of treasuries than bank deposits, right? So they kind of understand it. They also understand that the only way for us to get out of our fiscal mess is grow baby grow and what's the best way to do to grow to encourage small business and deregulate and so all the kinds of businesses that we're talking about are are the ones they're trying to to get to so yeah that that's what i think hey buzz are you almost ready i am ready but we don't have the sponsor yet up on stage. So I'll follow your lead. If you want to keep going, we can do that. But if you guys are near the end, we can also shut her down. But I do see a hand up, Dave. Yeah, no, just last thing. So I noticed I saw strategy. They made like a really small Bitcoin purchase that they announced

for about $22 million, so about 196 Bitcoin. Do you think this is because they want to free up more profits for their quarterly reporting and month end reporting? Or is this just maybe the dry powder running out a little bit? I hate to guess. There's so much stuff that goes on. If you're running a public company, you have a lot of masters. I mean, remember, Bitcoin's been ridiculously non-volatile. And as a result, their strategy, which is based on monetizing volatility is not really available. So it's a question of what's the best thing to do for shareholder value and who's the largest shareholder? Well, guess what? The guy who runs the company. So we'll see how he does it. But, you know, I've seen so many hyperbolicakes on the web,

particularly on X about this, that I don't even want to comment until you can look to the financials. I've seen far better way. There are far better people who have done the forensic accounting work than me. Sorry for you. That's not answers. Is anybody on the panel? have anything? Yeah, I guess either way, the whole financial engineering for this, it's pretty interesting of how he's doing it. And essentially, he kind of laid it out as, okay, if Bitcoin is appreciating more than the rates that you're borrowing, then you can just keep doing the borrowing fiat and

just getting more Bitcoin. I think you might have a call too yeah no it's my wife's phone no I look Dave that's an old school ranger I call it the boomer phone Dave is that is that a home phone that you got going on there?

No no no iPhone has that as one of the rings and so there are people who do that but yeah yeah I'll be back in my office tomorrow so I won't have this but yeah Buzz is Who is the account?

Because I see one person requesting to come up for the sponsor, I think. The sponsor is called Eve Dex. Okay. So is Carson Beard part of the sponsor? He's the only one is requesting right now. You research that? I will research that right now. Okay.

So, you know, other than that, I mean, just to put a bow on it, the things that are going on that matter. And everybody should understand. This is not, when Coinbase says, call your congressman, call your senator. They're not lying. uh it is actually important because this notion of trying to block uh is is very very real and it will gum up the works now the truth is it won't matter in the end and i tease this in the beginning the reason it won't matter is this if you're a trust if you're a bank if you're you know

and crack it has a banking license and coin basis i don't know if they have it or not but gemini certainly does they'll they'll get them uh you can offer a you know a payment a platform for people that imagine the following. You say, okay, you can deposit your money in stable coins, cool. As long as you maintain a minimum balance of, you know, $1,000 or something, we'll let you use the payments rails, and you're going to have these other investments on the side, and we'll create an automatic sweep function for overdraft.

You can have a $10,000 overdraft for free, and if, in fact, you don't have enough in your stablecoin balance, we'll debit your tokenized money market funder. We'll debit your Bitcoin account, whatever. We will take the money out. and push it, you know, out in the payments infrastructure. So it would basically mean you don't need to keep huge deposits. You keep your deposits in interest-bearing investments, but make it as a sweep.

There's nothing that could stop that. And that is where it's going to go. But the banks haven't figured this out yet. And, you know, Kempas knows it, but it's more work. And it creates more headaches and tax accounting and tax reporting. So they're trying to fight it. But eventually that's where it's going to go anyway. do you think it's only going to be like a few stable coins to rule them all or do you think there's going to be multiple stable coins a la carte for each company based on how they're going to go with their strategy for yield and all that type of stuff well i mean i i imagine that if i were if i am broker dealer x or coinbase crack or whatever so it's going to be the big war it's going to be between the the the

the older crypto firms and the, the tradfite firms. But I think if you're the firm, just like right now, you know, I hate to mention FTX, but they made it really easy. And a lot of others are not doing similar things. They're basically going to treat all stable coins as dollars internally, and you deposit it and whatever. And they do that for you. Scott made a point earlier, which is really important, which is nobody, you're not going

to get at scale. People have to decide, I want to do a stable coin transfer, and I'm going to have to choose the network and go through all that. It's going to need to be abstracted away. but of course it will be right it's going to be the service providers that have tracked it away and for the most part those fees are going to be extremely low if not zero because there's no reason for them to be high that that's what I think okay well I Buzz I'm going to need to jump so I got a jump to my friend no no sponsor here

yet so if you need to wrap we can wrap her up my friend okay any closing words from anybody else because I do need to go okay well we'll see you all tomorrow at 10.15, hopefully. And hopefully we won't be as glitchy or, you know, we'll figure this all out. Take care, everyone. Thank you.