The Wolf Of All Streets - XRP & DOGE ETFs Smash $50M! Altseason Unlocked? | CryptoTownHall

Episode Date: September 19, 2025

Crypto Town Hall is a daily live show focusing on major developments in crypto, regulation, and the global financial landscape. This episode dives into regulatory pressures in the US and Europe, debates about stablecoins, the launch of new crypto ETFs (specifically for XRP and Dogecoin), and the intersection of technology, censorship, and jurisdiction. The event features regular hosts (Scott and Dave) and brings in several knowledgeable guest panelists to discuss tech policy, free speech, and the practical realities of operating within different global legal regimes.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Crypto Town Hall every weekday here on X at 10.15 a.m. Eastern Standard time. As usual, we have quite a few topics to unpack with our always epic panel and with my co-host, Dave W over here. Before we get started, we do have an awesome sponsor here today. ZeroG. I'll tell you a bit about them. AI is reshaping the world. But right now, it's stuck in. in the hands of just a few big players. What if AI could run openly, verifiably, and on-chain? That's what ZeroG is building, the world's first decentralized AI operating system open to everyone. Imagine a network where you don't just trade tokens. You train, store, and run independent AI models at scale.

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The answer for me is no, I don't hear you. Cool. Hey, Austin, are you there? Austin's not there. No, I'm here. Thank God. I can't go, I can't go three for, yeah, I couldn't go to a third person and see if they were there or not. That would have been shameful for me, clearly.

How about now? Ah, there you are. Let's see. Yeah. It's really, I don't, I don't, well, never mind. I'm just, I'm tired of trying to estimate or what will cause the glitch in an X. It is what it is. I was out of like 10 minutes yesterday.

Yeah, I was in the glitch. Yeah, I know. I remember. I was looking for you. Scott, where are you, Scott? It's in the Matrix. In the Matrix. So I know you didn't mention it off the cup, but I'm curious because I see, you know,

Austin up here and others. I wonder what people thought of Mr. Gensler's CNBC interview yesterday. And, you know, I know my thoughts. It's just funny, you know. You can see some of the people at CNBC on the staff are just incredulous by the fact that he was there and making the statements that he was. But they were obviously stopped from asking some questions like what happened to the emails and the text or who was directing you or, you know, things of that nature.

So, yeah, I don't know about you, Scott, but the theater from that, that's clearly coming somewhere from the banking lobby is, to me, rather, rather absurd. I'm going to be honest. I miss him, you know? It's almost like I don't have anything to talk about, nobody to hashtag fire Gary Gend. or I don't, we need a heel, you know, and we don't have one anymore. We just have heroes. But yeah, it was, it was insane. Who are the heels, Austin? If you keep talking about it. I was going to say, how much do we want to talk about Europe? Like, that is a perpetual sort of

laugher going on over there. I think the reason they're not really more significantly in the field camp is that, quite frankly, very little is going on in Europe economically. Otherwise, that would be much more of a story. Yeah, that, you know, it's, it's, It's actually funny. What did you make of, you know, after the Trump state visit and some kind of positive, you know, notions out of the UK on, well, we're going to have coordinator sandboxes. They're going to support innovation. I mean, this was the same country that I think last week came out and said that if you had too big of a balance of stable coins, they were going to restrict it. So not to mention what they're doing with free speech, I don't see Preston, but I thought he was going to join us.

And I'd love to give him that platform. But what do you make of that? Well, Preston's going to be here. I'll lob him that volleyball when he gets here on the speech part. So I'll just summarize that end as saying, I don't think if you believe you can censor people for posting memes that you are a country on the side of freedom, and I'll leave that one there.

On the economics part, though, like Europe has been doing the thing of jawboning about innovation and then regulating in a way that is like as protection just as humanly possibly in the crypto space for a while now. So like Dave, you correctly identified that the UK was just out saying, hey, if you own more than 10,000 or 20,000 pounds of stable coins, we're going to send you the jail, basically, in their latest proposal. And I would remind people, the mainland, if you look at their stable coin legislation,

said you've got to leave 65% of the deposits in a bank, non-interest bearings. And so as a result of that, like, unsurprisingly, nobody is launching them. Nobody is losing them. Nobody wants Euro-stable coins because it's a giant handout to the banking industry, right? And, like, I don't know how much people know about the making of the sausage. But when Nika was coming out, that was essentially the condition the French banking regulator demanded at the behest of people like Bainf, Sopjana, et cetera, so that they would essentially have a monopoly. And Europe just continues to go down this path. that we're going to regulate things on such favorable terms to insiders in the state,

and then, you know, stock, Pikachu, why is nobody building here? You know, it's funny. You know, people always talk about history repeating, and I always make the comment it doesn't repeat it rhymes. One wonders if what's going on between Europe and the UK in terms of stable coins is the exact opposite of the stupidity in the U.S., which essentially ceded the euro dollar market to the city of London. You know, it feels like they are leaving.

they are essentially paving the road for the dollar to become the dominant currency globally. It already is, but I mean, really, even at the retail level, to become the dominant currency via U.S. stable coins by basically effectively blocking their own currencies and their own companies from competing. That's what it looks like. I mean, okay, so I've been saying for a while, now that genius has passed, other countries need to fish or cut bait. And it looks like a lot of them are essentially just cutting bait on their own currency because nobody is really designing an effective response. Hilariously, the one group of people, because they've been pretty good at regulating crypto in some ways, it's pretty restrictive, that seems to have gotten a message is the Financial Services Authority in Japan. So the JFSA licensed their first, again, stablecoin issue where they're actually launching a bunch of initiatives now and, like, responding in a coherent way, Dave, to your point.

But like Europe, China, India, they're all just like, yeah, I guess. And then moving on and letting U.S. dollar stable coins proliferate. It's been absolutely fascinating to watch. Yeah, I'd make one point about that. Japan had to. They're not dumb. They're very smart. And Japan is one country that literally can't afford to lose control of their currency at the

retail level. Because if they did, it's game over, right? I think of the music for those who ever watch professional wrestling. I think of the music from The Undertaker because, you know, with their debt to GDP, they need to keep that yen captive. Europe, not so much, and they don't generally agree. I mean, there are already plenty of places in Europe where you can almost spend dollars now or they'll let you spend dollars.

And certainly countries that are on the periphery of Europe that aren't in the common market where they take euros or they take euros or dollars. I mean, I was in Budapest and that's the case. it's not going to be hard to imagine a world where the euro gets marginalized, and it's fascinating the dynamics because the obvious countries who benefit from being part of the euro currency in their bond rates are the south of Europe, whereas Germany, if you think about their perspective, it's like, you know, how much do they enjoy, you know, giving their low budget deficits, their more responsibility and letting it be used by other countries. So it's really a fascinating geopolitical thing. But it is, not hard to imagine a world where local merchants using U.S. dollar stable coins, and they could buy everything in their supplies for it, and they could sell for it. And then when they want to transition it to their own currency, yeah, they can. And it won't be that hard because you know there'll be American companies that offer that, not necessarily to a stable, but, you know,

and then it's not going to hold it. Then they'll transition it immediately into their local currency. So you can see it happening in a very interesting way. And, you know, I guess we'll see how it goes but my guess is is that under the covers they're going to make it as simple for people as possible the tech companies and we'll see if the european regulators and other countries are going to be willing to actually regulate u.s. stable coins and what happens there in the context of tariff and other financial negotiation so it really is fascinating but anyway dan sorry they interrupt my monologue oh good um i just think it's funny um tether is the biggest u.s dollar stablecoin issuer, right? And they're all European, right? Palo's European, he's Italian. I think most

of the team are European. I don't think you're American. And so when they started, even though they're in Europe and they transact in euros or they're Europeans, they didn't make a stable coin euro. They made a stable coin dollar. That's the first thing that they did. No one wants stable coin. They're stable coin pounds. They're stable coin euros. When I worked at Binance, we launched our own, I think, GVP. I don't know if we launched euro. We launched our own a few other currencies. There's no interest. There's no uptick. clearly I'm British I don't I've never held

I think stable coin pounds I don't think I ever would but I hold stable coin dollars for sure it's crazy and what you say about you can spend dollars in some places in Europe now I mean Indonesia at the moment I love Indonesia you know stay here all the time speak Indonesian love it it's actually

they still have a long memory back to 1997 financial crash so Indonesia it is illegal to transact in any currency other than the Indonesian repier and this is not just some law on the books they enforce it. You've had some companies that like crypto hubs or whatever and they're saying, hey, you can come and buy your sandwich and stable coins

or whatever, the authorities went and shut them down for being able to transact in currencies other than the local currency. So I agree with your point. I think the US dollar is now so far ahead and all that is happening with these protectionist stuff is it's just cementing that USO opposition as the lead and it's not getting any better. Okay, Scott, back to you.

What's the next topic? Oh, I don't know. XRP and Doge ETF smash 50 million, all-season unlocked. So as James Safer told us about yesterday, there was kind of this sneaky route to get these two specifically approved, which will be not used in the future now that we have more clarity from the SEC. But these did get approved and started trading and actually did a tremendous amount of volume. The XRP one itself. to the largest first day volume of any ETF in 2025. Obviously, that doesn't count the other crypto ETFs in 24.

But still, this shows there is a bit of thirst for, you know, stock market exposure to XRP and Doge. Yeah, but, I mean, yeah, and Doge is definitely in an elevated level. XRP has kind of retreated off the elevated levels it was at, you know, yesterday. It's interesting, you know, the, impact on price seems much more muted. I mean, it's almost like the XRP is almost a sell the news sort of thing, whereas Doge has a little bit more follow-through, but not a lot. I mean, to me, it's hard to make of this. I mean, I'll come back to XRP at a very simple point.

Access to XRP is probably less of a big deal because, you know, I think most of the people in the XRP Army and others will be, will go on Coinbase or uphold because they were one of the first ones to do it. I think that the convincing institutions in the XRP story is significantly more challenging for a lot of reasons. And, you know, we could dive into that one. But it's, I do think it's interesting, right? Because, you know, when you see the price action and the narratives, it's different. Now, you can make the statement that, well, Ether launched the ETFs and didn't do squat until after the price started moving. And once the price started moving, it became a flywheel, to help repel it. And that's probably fair. So, I mean, curious. Anyway, we have Austin and

Rudeau. Austin. Yes, on first, by order of norms. So one thing that I would advise everybody is if you're looking at the SEC general listing standards, when those have been promulgated for other types of ETFs, you do see a giant boom in activity in that ETF sector. So one, get ready for ETFs of all kinds of crypto. But two, Dave, before thinking about price action, I think the most relevant factor that's going to fall out of the ETF general listing standards is, wow, are the days numbered for a lot of these debts that essentially launched because it was a way to get equity exposure to the token? Because now there's about to be ETFs with giant sales forces behind them for a lot of these things. And the whole theory of a lot of these dads was, well, I can get you

stock-like exposure to X has just been swept by the SEC. now that, you know, back to Scott's original point at the top of this, we've got an SEC that's doing its job instead of an SEC run by some sort of like devious miscreant like Gary Gensel. I love that. I love to respond, but, but, Rudeau, why don't you go and then then I'll make my comment. there you're going on Mike there we go nothing go ahead dance yeah go ahead

okay well so much fun it's so much fun the tedious miscreants I mean it's funny if you watch yesterday then and you overlaid uh Gensler on CNBC and how pale he looked with

get with with Montgomery Burns from the Simpsons I mean, you know, they look like they were, you know, separated at books. So, but, but, but, you know, that aside, the, that, a digital asset treasury company, look, Scott and I have made this point bazillions of times, so I don't want to belabor it. There's, there's two kinds of companies. There are, actually, there's three. There's company which is just a pure access vehicle, and if there isn't restricted access, they're dead. That's your point.

There are companies that effectively are cash flow generating entities, which are going to use assets that they believe will outperform holding cash, which, by the way, isn't very hard because cash is a melting ice cube, and outperform that, and therefore, goose its earnings. And those, I think that we're going to call companies at some point in the not so distant future. So I don't think that's going to be particular. I think that will be mainstream. But the third are companies that have a way of outperforming the underlying. And the way that outperforming the underlying could be staking, it could be borrowing, it could be a covered call strategy, it could be a lot of different things. In all those cases, those companies need critical mass, first mover advantages in all likelihood, et cetera.

So there's quite a few of these companies that are going to go poof. But there are plenty of them that might be okay. The biggest difference with, because ETFs, by the way, charge a management fee, whereas the DATs are not going to charge a management fee, their fee is, all their executives tend to be compensated in the stock price. So that being said, you know, they probably have lower overhead, et cetera. We'll see. You could easily see it being developed that way. But the one thing that this ETF ruling does that is hugely different is it allows for indexes. And I'd mentioned this yesterday, my stat, for those who didn't hear it, is if you had bought the basket that was the S&P 500 in 1990 and just held that basket for 35 years, you would be up about 20 times.

If, on the other hand, you bought an S&P 500 index fund and held it for 35 years, you'd be up 37 times. That's a very big difference. And yes, fees cut a tiny bit into that, but they're very small relative to it. So there are a lot of people in crypto who would say, I don't know what the hell is going to win in the next 25, 30 years. I want to hold one asset. It's much more tax-efficient. Anyone who tells you that they do know what's going to win in the next 25 years is fooling themselves anyways. Well, they're not fooling themselves.

They're generating clicks. They're some of our best friends on YouTube. Or they're just very passionate community members because their bags are 97% underwater from 2017. That's even what you mean. You know, it's funny. We fight each other for who's more cynical, Scott. And I don't know. I mean, I might lose this battle, and I'm not sure.

I really wouldn't have expected that. It's Friday, dude. I have to bring in the big guns. I can't, like the weekend. So, Ruto, are you back? Guys, can you hear me? Yeah, now we hear you. We can.

You sound glorious. Yes, thanks. Hello, hello, hello, guys. It's been a while. Yeah, I was just thinking, talking to the topic about the XRP Doge ETF altcoin season unlocked. For me, the main thing is, regardless regarding the you know why it almost ended up in being a nothing burger is that these size of access to the tiles about you know I think you know that

the age old saying or rule is when you buy something you know you use fundamentals and technical analysis you just want to measure the risk you know if EA is there to just measure risk it's not a prediction tool it's just a risk management and if you look at the cart clearly Doge coin and XRP, you know, I wouldn't buy them right now, especially not if I'm looking to hold them. I would wait a month, maybe two or three, because these are far above critical support levels. If you look at the dominance, Bitcoin dominance. At this stage, if that was a coin, it is a screaming buy. So it's looking to push up a little bit either. So I think the charts,

although the fundamentals are there for us, I just I think the time, unlike when the ETF dropped for Bitcoin was not quite there yet, probably the same why ETH didn't really perform that well when the ETS came around, but later on accelerated quite nicely. So that's my 20 cents. I don't know what you guys think. I just switched trying. Anybody thoughts on that? I missed it but I think that the capital flows are complex the real question here will be what will new pools of capital be willing to invest in as the asset matures and I still think the greatest unlock is yet to come the greatest unlocks are yet to come when you know corporate treasuries become become become mainstream when funds consider Bitcoin an asset, a normal asset and not an alternative asset, when funds think that the crypto ecosystem writ large is worth investing in in a passive way. Those are the great unlocks.

Other than that, everything else in the short term, I mean, it's going to be swamped by short-term liquidity movements one way or the other. I mean, I don't know if you agree. Does that make sense to you, Ruta? Yeah, you've got to look, English is like a distant second language to me. So you've got a way more elegant way of getting the point across. I completely agree with you. That's basically what I hinted towards.

I sort of thought so, but I'm trying to make sure. Anyway, I see Preston up here. So before you joined, I threw the softball. Actually, wait a minute. Austin said volleyball at you. You know, how genuinely do you take the UK in their push-forward economic freedom that they claimed in the joint press conferences with Trump's state visit? I'm sure you have an opinion there.

I mean, do you care to elaborate on exactly what you mean by that? Well, come on, we're throwing you a dog. If you'd like me to rip, I mean, so for context for the people in the room, I'm a free speech, in addition to being a crypto lawyer, I'm a free speech lawyer, and I've represented companies for the last eight or nine years in U.S. companies in resisting foreign censorship demands. I have seen censorship demands from every country in the world, you know, not every country, but most of the big ones, nuclear-armed and otherwise, and there has not been a single

occasion, not once, where any client of mine has been compelled to remove so much as a comma that they didn't already want to remove as a result of foreign action. Now, more recently, the United Kingdom enacted a rule called the Online Safety Act. In 2003, they enacted this rule. And that's basically an online censorship law. And I had a phone call with the Home Office back in early 2023, just before the act was enacted when it was still the online safety bill. I was having a nice conversation with a fellow at the UK home office who said, you know, you have these clients in America, and we're

enacting this new online safety bill, and that's going to become law. So presumably your client's users will demand that they be safe, right, from these, these are free speech websites. These users want to say what they want to say without government interference. And, you know, how are you planning on complying with our new censorship rules? And I looked at them and I said, I looked at them as a phone call. And I said, well, you know, to be to be honest with you, You know, if you want to enforce that law against my clients, you're going to have to put ground troops on American soil and seize their servers. And in that case, my clients will be exercising their Second Amendment rights instead of the first. So if you want to do that, that's that's that's that's up to you.

But I don't think you have the, I don't think your country has the in a military cargo lift capacity to occupy Delaware, right? I just, I just don't think that's realistic. So fast forward two years and they start sending these notices out to American companies. and I have successfully intercepted, and I currently represent every single U.S. social media target of this new U.K. censorship law. And in fact, I'm counsel in a case in the District of Columbia where we're seeking declaratory relief from a D.C. federal judge to confirm that we are, in fact, you know, not required in the United States to follow European censorship laws. A little bit of information. I think, you know, actually breaking news because nobody in the law. world knows this except for the people who are here, but we served the UK's communications regulator with that lawsuit on Wednesday, on the first day of the state visit of President Trump

to the UK. Such a strange and coincidental timing. And so, yeah, so basically that's ongoing. But I think the UK has a decision, the UK has a decision to make, right, with its, as a policy matter, at the government level, right? This is not something that regulator needs to do. This is something that Kirstarmer and the labor cabinet and people who are in government and make policy have to decide. And the question is, do they want to win the future or not? Because if they want to win the future, the future is based on technology, right? Technology is everything. Technology is because it's no longer, I remember back in the day when tech was like a sub-discipline of law. Tech is now everything. It's in everything. It's in finance. It's in real estate. It's in medicine.

It's just everything is about the acceleration of human capability through artificial intelligence, communications technology and securing those things with cryptography, right? That is 99% of every economic development of consequence, including in manufacturing and other things. Anderil wants to set up fully automated AI drone plants and things like that. So it's all about automating things and minimizing human work and building faster, better, and more. And the UK has all of these rules on their books, which make it impossible to do that. It makes it impossible to communicate, it makes it impossible to open up a crypto business. Opening up a crypto exchange in the UK is a nightmare.

You have to have local staff and all the rest of it. There are restrictions. They don't have a harmonized regime yet for both crypto derivatives and crypto. Hopefully, we don't have one either in the United States, but hopefully we're going to get some with the market structure legislation that's working its way through Congress. And so it's this crazy thing. I'll give you another example.

Apple just came up with a feature for its AirPods, right, where you can put them into your ears and it will automatically translate anything that you hear from someone who's speaking to you, right? So you can speak to someone, they can speak to you as long as you've got AirPods. Like that's the babblefish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, right? This is a technological miracle.

But you can't use it in the EU because of fucking data protection like the law, which they haven't figured out how to comply with yet. So we have this amazing, we're in the middle of this amazing technological transformation of our species. And the Europeans have, instead of deciding to say, you know, we're going to lean into it and we're going to unleash. There's some brilliant European devs.

Like most of Ethereum, to be honest with you, was a European project. London, Berlin, and the Netherlands is where most of the talent was initially based. And then, of course, they all went down to Tsug to go hang out in Switzerland and avail themselves of the tax benefits from being there. But there's no reason Europe shouldn't have led, completely led, like unarguably. It should have been the leader in smart contracts and defy, right? Because they were the first on the ground in 2014, but all of the regulation they have around the internet, around crypto finance and everything else, and also the high levels of taxation, the low levels of compensation for developers.

If you want to hire someone in Germany, for example, it's like 70% of their wage, right, is what you pay in just taxes to the German government. and national insurance and other things. It's not much better in the United States where it's close to 50%, but it is materially worse. So it's, you know, anyway, long story short, I think the UK, and it was a very interesting visit, there were huge investment commitments which were announced.

There was not a corresponding commitment by the British government to roll back its regulation. And I am massively opposed, right? I have taken, frankly, some major professional risks in opposing the Online Safety Act as public as I do, I'm currently afraid to set foot in the UK. I will not get on a plane and fly to Heathrow voluntarily. They will have to drag me on the plane to do it because I represent companies, right, that have said, listen, UK law doesn't apply to us and I'm concerned that if I touch down in Heathrow,

I'm going to get arrested. Legitimately, like this is not something where I'm being, you know, over-ergging it. If Graham Linnehan can get arrested for a tweet in Heathrow, as someone who has, you know, brought a piece of litigation on behalf of his clients against the British government and the highly sensitive political matter, what's to say? that they're not going to go through every tweet I've ever posted, find one thing that's offensive, and decide I need to be arrested for it. So, like, as long as the UK keeps doing that,

I think they're really going to limit their ability to maximize the utility of the deal that's been put on the table by President Trump. And it looks like a pretty amazing tech deal, right? I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars of investment by a range of companies. But what they need to do is they need to bring down the price of electricity. They need to stop trying to target American companies

with British laws, right, on U.S. soil, and, you know, they need to, it's like, it's the crazy thing about it is this should be nonpartisan, right? If you're pro tech and you're like pro growth and you want good paying jobs and you want the UK to be a country where they benefit maximally from this tech and they've got good jobs and a good economy of people supporting those jobs and restaurants that these devs will run out to and go pay overpriced lunches for, like, that's what I want for the UK. I want everyone to be processing. and happy and making a ton of money and being able to live their lives in the way they see fit. But their regulatory environment, they just can't seem to get, they just can't seem to, it's

inertia. They can't seem to break free of the inertia and say, you know what, actually, this is not just Americans who are saying, oh, deregulate us so we can exploit you. This is American saying, are you guys crazy? We're in the midst of this enormous societal change. And you guys have all of these rules that basically mean you're going to be left behind. So yeah, I think, I think, I think it's a really, it's an interesting proposition, the tech deal that was put on the table. I know that the Europeans, particularly very, it tends to be concentrated, the people who support tech regulation in the, shall we say, more senior ranks of the parliamentarians and the more senior members of the House of Lords who don't understand how computers work. And so they view the online thing as a threat rather than as the engine of growth and progress for the next, you know, forever of our species. So it'll be interesting to see if they can break through that, but there are very well-established and trenched interests in these countries who don't like technology and who view it as a threat rather than an opportunity. And I'm not convinced that the UK can break through that, but I hope they do. I'll also pile in quickly on the crypto angle and say part of the

problem this creates for the UK is the easiest way to have these laws enforced against you is to, I don't know, leave your money in a UK bank or within reach of the UK regulators. So back to Preston's point on investment, you just can't do it. You've got to keep your money away from them. Well, that's, I mean, if you want to know how these U.S. companies that, you know, that I represent in various contexts, like how they structure their affairs when they know that there's a European threat to their business, the companies that haven't expanded into Europe and the UK choose not to, right?

They say, okay, well, we're not going to have any exposure. We're not going to have any service providers. We're not going to have any employees. And those companies, which are already there, right, are seriously questioning the wisdom of continuing to be there, right? If you run, you know, some type of major, you know, search or social app, and you've got a presence in London right now. One of the questions you're asking is,

should we be continuing to invest in this country when the country basically is going to interfere with our ability to provide our services to our users, threaten to imprison our senior leadership if they refuse to obey our orders? And that's something which scares tech investment away. And so that's why Europe doesn't, if Europe wants to know why it doesn't have a tech industry

or why it's tech industry, if you say that, of course, the Europeans would be like, no, no, no, of course, we have only fans. look that's amazing isn't it that's that's based in london but like the reason they don't have a tech industry of consequence right and that it's american tech companies promising to invest there rather than european tech companies promising to invest in the united states is because they've regulated it out of existence dan i'm from the uk i left the uk 17 years ago um but all of this is like historic kind of thinking from

the government or whatever. And it, to me, it comes down to, like, one thing. And they say, like, well, what are you going to do? Fucking leave. And people say, yeah, yeah, we're going to leave. Right. This is not the 1970s right anymore. If you make it so onerous here, then we'll just go offshore. But the whole thing is like, yeah, well, what are you going to do about it? You're going to leave? Yeah. And people are leaving en masse. People are leaving the UK on mass to go and live in Dubai and other places. Because of the interconnectivity now, because of cheaper airfare, you know, it's not, this idea of like, well, you're not going to leave, what you're going to do about it? And people go, yeah, we are, we're going to leave.

That's what we're doing. More millionaires left the UK less than any other country. Yeah, when you leave the UK and renounce citizenship, what's the penalty or situation? If you have money and you leave the United States, you still end up paying taxes for like 10 years anyway. I still have my UK citizenship. It's the only passport that I have, UK. But when I left in 2008, I just left, I actually went to Germany, wasn't that far away. Um, the first year that I was away, their, his majesty's, uh, treasury, no, uh,

HMRC, his magistrate's revenue and customs, sent me a check for like £800. Like, uh, you left me away to the year. You've paid too much in your tax. So they sent me a bunch of tax tax. Uh, when I left, there was no punitive like, oh, if you leave, we're going to tax you. It was just like, that would not happen here. Yeah. But I mean, this was 17 years ago. Um, I've seen now in Europe, they're on about, like, I think they're Netherlands. They want to So if you leave, we're going to tax you for five years if you're in the Netherlands and things like that. Well, that's because everybody's going to Dubai.

I mean, like, everyone's going to Dubai or Singapore and low-text restrictions, and they're very carefully, I had a friend who did this. He went to go hang out in the eighth. So Dubai was smart, or the UAE was smart. They set up this thing called the Abu Dhabi or ADGM. I can't remember what exactly it stands for, but basically it's a special enterprise zone, and there are a lot of these things in the UAE. What they did is they said, cool, the Abu Dhabi Global Marketplace or Global Markets.

So the ADGM basically, they said, okay, cool, we set this thing up. And oh, by the way, as of this date, we are just importing all of the English law. So if you want to do English law stuff, you can do it in the ADGM, and we've just copied the entire corpus of the English common and statutory law on various other things that applies here. And it's just operated as an enormous talent drain from London because people are going, great, cool, we'll just port our company over to the ADGM, we'll do all our deals there. it's a legal system we're familiar with and understand.

And so they've kind of like, it's almost like a vampire attack, for those of you are familiar with that in crypto. It was a vampire attack on London. And so they've sucked all of this talent out of London to the ADGM. And once you're in the ADGM, guess what? You're not paying income tax, which means that your equity grants, right, when you get them, you don't pay taxes they invest, right? Because they don't really have a 409A concept in London.

You can take equity from a U.S. company and there's not a tax consequence. You can get tokens and there's not a tax consequence. And so it's a year and then you don't have to pay income tax on your salary. So if you're getting paid, you know, 300k in London, let's say 300K in London plus equity and token comp on top of that, you're effectively getting paid now 600K because the UK takes 50% or more, depending on what bracket you're in of your income. So people double their income. They double their equity comp. They double their their token comp by moving to Dubai. And, you know, and the weather's pretty nice. And they're not going to, and there's no crime. So for most people, that's a good deal because most people aren't political dissidents like I am. So it's a huge problem for Europe that these other countries are demonstrating that, yeah, actually, you know, we can have a safe place where you pay no taxes. You still have good services. And we provide a nice life for you because they look at London and say, well, I'll get arrested for what I say in London and I'll get arrested for what I say in Dubai if I piss off

the government. So the Delta is in London, the difference is I'm paying a lot more for. it. And so they moved to Dubai. Yeah, but we have a DoGTF. Now we have a DoJTF. Nobody in London's earning 300K. That's at first point. Nobody in London's running 200K. That's ridiculous. But the other thing is the UK doesn't have extra territorial tax like the US has. So I guess it's always strange to me, but you Americans are very American-centric and probably don't know about that. It's one of the only countries in the world that taxes you if you're not in the country. The UK has not had that. Europe's not had that. But the way things going. I could imagine that's going to come. If it came, they want to tax me on my

income living in Singapore, living in Bali. I'd give it my passport. Fuck them. I'll give it my passport, honestly. It's just not worth it. Yeah. Crypto Town Hall turned into, uh... Turn into globalization. Efficient, efficient ways to exit your country, town hall. Can I segue to a crypto question? say this is what crypto was created for right so that's the global taxation when it comes to free speech you know we one of the golden goosees that people talk about in the crypto world are is decentralized networks and yeah there's an austra and there's a few others but there really doesn't be major take up i mean if this stuff persists and let's just say god forbid you lose what do you

think is the potential for more decentralized uh platforms obviously the problem with the problem with that is, is the users, like you said yourself, your tweets. I'm sure I've said something in a tweet that's pissed somebody and, you know, somebody off also, although I tend to be, you know, I tend to be more circumspect than that sometimes, but there are certain things that governments do that, you know, I've criticized every government on this planet, probably at someone, not every, but quite a few of them for things that they do. The real question is, is there be, is there very future for decentralized platforms and how will the UK and Europe react to that? Because that seems a much harder. And the second part of the question, Preston, from what you're

hearing, is that one of the reasons why they've been, they're setting up rules that really does make defy very, very difficult? Yeah. I think it's, I don't think they're setting up the defy rules specifically to target speech, but I think that the defy controls are really a symptom of an instinct among the European regulators to exercise control wherever possible. So like their default assumption is that human beings cannot be trusted with the freedom to do what they want. And so as a consequence, they need to have a regulatory regime every time you want to wipe your bottom, you know, or go for a walk or anything else, right? Their COVID lockdowns in London, for example, were atrocious, right? Compared to the U.S., it was almost

It was unbelievable, right? You couldn't leave your house. There was no right of appeal. There was no constitutional recourse that you had under the First Amendment that closed your church. So it was really because Parliament has unlimited power, right? Now, in terms of the decentralized communication stuff, I think that the high watermark on that stuff, at least for the near future, has already been reached and that the tide

is starting to go out. A lot of the European rules that we're seeing now, the Digital Services Act, the Online Safety Act, were proposed and announced. at a time when there was a very friendly government in the United States that was willing to give effect to European orders by serving them on American citizens through the Office of Justice Assistance. So I had clients who were getting orders from Germany, for example. Now, I can't possibly say whether someone talked to Congress in the Trump administration about this, but if someone had, that would certainly be very advantageous because those orders have now stopped. at one client in particular who was getting them from Germany for years and years and years. And those notices have dried up ever since President Trump was in office.

So I strongly suspect that the U.S. government is no longer cooperating. There's also generally speaking a vibe shift underway, right, both in the United States and in Europe, although in Europe it's not as advanced, where I think the legitimacy, the idea that censorship and misinformation, disinformation, that it's the proper role of government to be intervening in these things has fallen out of favor and fallen out of fashion. among both tech leaders, I think if you talk to tech leaders in 2018, and I'm not going to say which ones, but these are like venture funds who you know, they're like, well, yeah, we, you know, this is an interesting proposition, this free speech, social media, but are you going to moderate hate speech? And I think that conversation would go very differently now if you spoke with a VC firm and said, oh, well, is the key that they moderate hate speech? I think they would recognize that hate speech moderation was used and abused in order to censor all kinds of, you know, mainstream political speech. And in the case of COVID, quote unquote, misinformation. actually, you know, true statements of fact that were simply politically inconvenient. So COVID kind of was the high watermark in the United States.

And then really there was a huge fight back after that here. And I don't think we're going to be seeing a return to that anytime soon. So I think there's a lot of the European stuff, right, the provinces follow the metropole. And I suspect that they thought they were going to be getting air cover from the United States. And the notices under, it's interesting, under the Online Safety Act, the first notices and the timing of the enforcers. for the act. The first provision started entering into force just after President Trump was inaugurated. So I think that they were probably betting that the United States was going to be run by a different president, either Biden or Harris, as they were planning those things out,

because I suspect that the people who are responsible for censorship in Europe are rather more aligned with that side of the aisle in the United States. So in terms of the decentralized stuff, it depends on the architecture. So if you look at something like Noster, I'm not overly familiar with how Noster works, but for example, Farkaster or Warpcast, which is the Ethereum social network, that works by every node basically reproduces a copy of every line of content that's produced, and they have these kind of super nodes which do it. And then they engage in content moderation based on the local law, which is applicable to the node, and what they do is essentially de-index.

And all they do is have text blobs and links, right, which is kind of a regulation minimized approach because there's certain content, chiefly illegal pornography. that you're not allowed to host under any circumstances. So what they would do is they say, listen, we hold text blobs with links to outside content, which then you will call and that will serve that content up if you want to see it on your feed. And if there's some user, we block or whatever else,

we'll simply de-index that user from our wallet client, our social media client, so you won't be able to see that illegal content. That allows those companies to then comply. You have to have some degree of censorship if you run a social media company because there are some things, even in the United States, which are illegal to host, right?

So you're always going to have that censorship or de-indexing functionality. The chief question is how susceptible that censorship is to being hijacked by a regulator and to what extent those regulators are able to say, well, here's the universe of censorship you like. We want you to expand that universe of censorship to include things that we don't like as well, right? So censorship is inherent to the expand, but also like spam, bots, things like that. you have to be able to curate and prune accounts from your system, which violate the rules because there's practically no system in the world, which allows a free-for-all, including in the

United States. So the decentralized stuff is interesting. You will still see a censorship or de-indexing function on those platforms, because otherwise the platforms will be spammed to hell and become unusable. But, you know, the question is really, are the Europeans going to be able to intrude, right, on the space that's protected by the First Amendment, which is the easiest one to comply with, right? It still requires some compliance, but it's fairly minimal. And I think that the answer to that question is no. If we lose right in D.C., it will be because of procedural technicalities and things like sovereign immunity and various other things. But ultimately, if we lose, I think, you know, maybe some company that's in the Fifth Circuit, for example,

down in Texas, will win, right? Because that's a very very important. different, that's a very different judicial circuit than where our lawsuit is, which is in the DDC. But someone will eventually, or Rumble, I think, is Rumble and Truth Social brought a lawsuit recently in Florida. And so I think the issue's kind of already been resolved. Rumble and Truth Social brought a lawsuit in Florida against the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, Alexandra de Mareas, because he served them, right, by email with a censorship order. And they said, they went to the district of Florida, middle district of Florida, and said, hey, hold on a second, we don't like this. Could you kindly say that they sought a, what's called a temporary

restraining order, which is emergency relief by the court initiated by one party ex parte, right? So you don't necessarily need to have the other party hearing it. And they said, we want a ruling that this stuff is both not properly served, one, and two, it's unconstitutional. And what the court in Florida said was, okay, one, it hasn't been properly served, right, because there's no applicable process that's been complied with. You can't just send someone an email and create a legal obligation on them to do something you want. And they said, one, yeah, we agree it's not properly served. And they said, two, from a constitutional perspective, because it wasn't properly served,

that question isn't ripe yet. So we're going to defer, right, answering that question. So essentially, they got the emergency relief confirming, right, that a foreigner sending an email to an American saying, you must do X, is not proper service. And then they kind of, you know, wash the hands of it and said, well, when the foreigner comes back and serves us again, let us know. But proper service would require, right, either use of the Hague Service Convention or letters rogatory, which are papers issued by a domestic court, or use in the case of

the criminal process, something called the Mutual Legal Assistance Procedure or the M-Lat, which is what Germany traditionally uses to enforce its censorship law, which is called the NETS DG. So I think that that is the early ruling that we see that's directly applicable, and I suspect we're going to see it repeated if these foreign countries attempt to continue to intrude on U.S. soil. So the TLDR is from a corporate point of view, they're going to use the courts here to keep operating and individuals need to be circumspect if they feel like traveling to these countries. Yeah. So basically you have to, and that's, that is, that has been the advice for a long time. It's that if you're going to, if a country is going to issue you with an order and you're going to

disobey it, you run the risk that when you put yourself in that country's jurisdiction, I mean, that Pavel Dura found that out last year because Telegram was apparently, and Telegram is a BVI company that operates in the UAE, Telegram Messenger Inc. And so under established principles of international law, French prosecutors and French authorities, normally to get that to happen, they would have to get reciprocal treatment or domestication of its orders in the BVI or in the UAE. And Telegram was insisting that they do that. And they said, well, you know, we don't want to do that. So then Pavel flies to Paris with his girlfriend, touches down, and he gets arrested on the tarmac because I said, well, you disobeyed our orders. And that was a shot across the bow to

everybody, right, in the tech universe that, okay, you may be able to, as a matter of domestic law in your country, ignore our orders. But if you put yourself within our reach, we're going to come after you and we're going to punish you to the fullest extent of our domestic rules, which is not something which was ever really done before. Usually countries respected the decisions of foreign businesses to operate their businesses in accordance with the domestic law of their country and didn't try to have extra territorial application of their orders. When they arrested Durov, that norm was shattered forever, right? And unless we reestablish that norm, hopefully by diplomatic action from the United States, you know, if you're an American

running an American business in accordance with U.S. law and you don't want to follow English law or French law or Russian law or Chinese law or North Korean law, now you know, England and France are going to be added, right, to the list of countries you can't visit. it, you know, countries that think that their domestic law has the power to override your rights as an American citizen in the First Amendment. Got it, Dave. I don't know if we can hear Dave now. All right, guys.

We're very animated when talking about this. Sorry. Yeah. No, it's appreciated. Thank you. But actually, we're right up against kind of time here for me at least. So we're going to go ahead and wrap and come back on Monday. Thank you, everybody, for joining another Crypto Town Hall.

And we will see you on Monday next week. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye. Thank you.