Unchained - The Chopping Block: Crypto Strategic Reserve, Trump vs. Crypto, Bitcoin’s Future - Ep. 795

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner break down the biggest stories in crypto. This week, we’re joined by special guest Laura Shin to dissect Trump’s Strategic Crypto Reserve fiasco. Why did he name-drop XRP and Cardano first? Was this real policy or just a market pump? Meanwhile, Crypto Twitter is melting down over Trump’s crypto summit guest list—who made the cut, and who got snubbed? Plus, another SEC lawsuit bites the dust, and memecoins look deader than ever. Let’s get into it. Show highlights 🔹 Trump’s Crypto Reserve Announcement – Trump proposes a U.S. Crypto Strategic Reserve, initially boosting XRP, ADA, SOL, BTC, and ETH—only for markets to fully reverse in 48 hours. 🔹 Who Picked These Coins? – XRP & ADA make the list despite having lower adoption than SOL or ETH. Was this a serious policy move or just pay-to-play politics? 🔹 Trump’s 5D Chess or Just a Meme? – Did the Trump team just pick random coins off CoinMarketCap? Or was this an orchestrated move to pay back donors? 🔹 The Crypto Council Drama – Trump’s Crypto Council implodes before launch due to infighting over seats. First summit features Ripple’s Garlinghouse, Michael Saylor, Chainlink’s Nazarov, Brian Armstrong, and Jesse Powell—but no actual protocol founders. 🔹 Is Crypto Being Used for Politics? – Nic Carter calls the plan a grift, saying the U.S. government should not buy altcoins with taxpayer money. Even Bitcoin maxis are skeptical. 🔹 Trump’s Obsession With Bitcoin Prices – Reports claim Trump personally tracks Bitcoin price movements and wants BTC to hit $150K during his presidency—is he manipulating markets? 🔹 The SEC Softens on Crypto? – Enforcement pivots as the SEC drops cases against Cumberland and Kraken. Will the Coinbase lawsuit be next? 🔹 Market Exhaustion Sets In – Despite the noise, traders are tired. The market isn’t buying into Trump’s crypto plans—was this just another empty promise? Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Laura Shin, Journalist, Author of ‘The Cryptopians,’ Founder and CEO of Unchained Disclosures Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:05 Market Reactions to Trump's Announcement 03:25 Skepticism of the Crypto Reserve 07:02 Strategic Value of Crypto Reserve 11:11 Political and Market Implications 18:52 Security Concerns & Future Speculations 31:30 Government Control of Crypto 39:50 Potential Forks & Government Influence 45:37 Crypto Summit & Council  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think people love to sort of pretend that there's like this 5D chess happening. And I think actually they probably went to like coin market cap and went down like the top 10 assets. And they're like, what isn't a staple coin? What isn't B&B? And it's like, this is the list. Great. And then that's how you get this tweets. Not a dividend.

It's a tale of two pawn. Now your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. I like that. E is the ultimate pomp. DFI protocols are the antidote to. this problem.

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, so we got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone.

Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Aloha. And back on the show, we've got Laura, the CEO of the show. Ciao. And I'm a seed of Headhide Man at Dragonfly. So we're early-stage investors in crypto,

but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block that X, Y, Z for more disclosures. So I thought last week was a bad week. Turns out this week was a kind of head fake good week over the weekend. And then it turns out to be a very bad week because macro still seems to be driving the overall sentiment in crypto. So it's been just kind of a roller coaster last 48 hours. So let's just kind of jump into it. So aside from Trump tariffs, which I think at this point is good, the news is really dominating the world

headlines is Trump starting trade wars pretty much all over the place. The big news over the weekend was Trump announcing a crypto strategic reserve. So of course, originally the talk was going to be about a strategic Bitcoin reserve, but this is now, the concept has been decidedly expanded to be a crypto reserve, not just Bitcoin. So I'll just read the tweets because they're pretty short. So he says, a US crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, which is my executive order on digital directed the presidential working group to move forward on a crypto strategic reserve that includes XRP, Seoul, and Ada, which is the ticker for Cardano.

I will make sure that U.S. is the crypto capital of the world. We are making America great again. Then about like 45 minutes later, he followed up with a tweet or a truth or whatever it's called on True Social to say, and obviously, BTC and ETH as other valuable cryptocurrencies will be at the heart of the reserve. I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum. So I presume that this second tweet came because you saw huge rallies right after that tweet in Cardano and XRP.

XRP, I think it pumped something like 35%. Cardano went all the way up to almost 70% in the span of about an hour. But Bitcoin and Ether were just kind of sitting there not doing a whole lot until Trump clarified that like, oh, Bitcoin and Ether are also going to be in the reserve, obviously. So we saw huge market rallies take place over the weekend. And then those market rallies start to get tempered, where, they came down. So Bitcoin was up 12%, Ethereum was up 15%, Seoul up 25%, XRP, up 30, and Ada up 75% at the height of the market. Then, by Monday, everything came down to actually pre-announcement levels after the

announcement of the Trump Terrence. So complete reversal in every single one of these assets. I think the only one that's actually up on the week is Cardano. Everything else is either flat or down on the week because of the macro instability that we've seen since then. Now, there's been a little bit of lot of criticism about the composition of this strategic crypto reserve. So first and foremost, it's actually not clear that what does this Trump tweet or truth social? What does it mean? Because obviously, originally we saw this executive order where he stated, I want this presidential working group to go out and investigate, does it make sense to do a crypto reserve? Now, he announced all this on a Sunday, and he announced all this while crypto markets were pretty depressed. And so,

I sort of tweeted at the time, oh, is this like the Trump put? Is he like, oh, markets are down. I should try to do something to revive them. Otherwise, why would you announce this on a Sunday? Why would you announce it without any indication of when this is going to happen, how it's going to happen, how much it's going to be? So it kind of seemed like he was intentionally saying this to get people bullish without actually having any real teeth to like, what is he saying?

So, of course, the idea was that this thing was supposed to go and, you know, convene, come up with ideas over the next 60 to 90 days, and then present something to the president. But instead he just announced this. say, oh, these are the assets that are going to be in the reserve. But of course, it's very clear, Trump cannot unilaterally do this without having congressional approval if he's going to go out and buy new assets. The government doesn't hold any Cardano, doesn't hold any Solana. So for them to have Cardano and Salana, they would have to get some kind of appropriations

to go and do this unless Trump has some crazy, you know, some crazy law deep in the history books is going to pull this out of. So Bitcoin, people already have identified. that he could just stop the sales of Bitcoin that happen automatically from criminal seizures. But all these other assets, they don't exist on the government's balance sheet. So it's unclear how he could do this. And so if you look at Pollymarket, for example, Pollymarket believes that a Bitcoin Reserve is 65% likely to happen this year.

But Solana, being in the crypto reserve or on the government's balance sheet, they pegged it at only 31% that Solana is going to be on the government's balance sheet by the end of this year. And that peaked at 42% right after the announcement went out. come down to 31%. So it looks like Polymarket is saying that it doesn't quite believe that Solana is going to happen or that some of these other assets are going to happen. Or if it does, maybe it'll take longer, maybe it'll take some kind of congressional approval, maybe Bitcoin comes first. Hard to say exactly how to understand this. But then you've got all the people who are criticizing, wait, wait, wait, how is one thing, but why? Why should there be Cardano and Solana

and XRP on the government balance sheet? So you've had people like Peter Schiff come out of argue against this. You've had actually Nick Carter, even Brian Armstrong, saying that just Bitcoin would probably be better than having all these other assets. And then the Winkle-Vye twins have also been, sorry, the Winkle-Vos twins have also been very actively coming out against some of these assets being in there, particularly Cardano. I think they were shooting a lot of fire against the Cardano community. So all in all, we've seen a lot of back and forth now on whether or not this is a good idea. And of course, the obvious reason of, okay, why is it that we're seeing these other assets showing up. Big part of the reason is speculated as being because these were big donors

to the Trump administration. So you can see, you know, Ripple, A16C, consensus were all big donors to the super PACs, especially the Fair Shake Pack. And it may well be that some of these other groups were curing favor with the Trump administration. But right now there's still a fog of war of exactly, you know, what does this mean? Will it actually happen? But markets on the whole seem to have first gotten very excited, and now that excitement has seemingly reversed. So curious to get you guys' reactions, Crypto's Cheetah Reserve. What are you guys' thoughts on this whole situation? Yeah, well, so one thing is, in your intro, you said it was supposed to initially be a strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but that was only just what the community wanted.

And you're right. Like, later you did say that the executive order only directed them to evaluate, but actually the terminology they used was a stockpile, which Should I explain that? Do you think the audience knows the difference between a stockpile and a reserve? I don't think I know the difference. Okay. Okay. So, yeah, this is why it felt so seed of the pants because, and I don't know if you saw my tweets, but like right after he tweeted, I was trying to figure out like, wait, because there were so many things that were inconsistent. Like he said, as I directed in the executive order, but like, yeah, if you look, there's, the word reserve is not in the executive order. Saul, A, A, XRP. None of those words are in the executive order. So like, it was kind of like, okay, why are you saying? that one, you clearly didn't do this. But then a stockpile is where the government just holds on

to assets that it already has, whereas the reserve requires them to go out and, or it would, yeah, they would go out and purchase the assets, which is a totally different ball game. And that's why I think Naval tweeted something like, or I don't know, remember who it was, but I think it was Naval who tweeted something like the U.S. taxpayers should not be exit liquidity for companies like Ripple or somebody tweeted that. I don't want to misspeak here. That was Naval, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. But the point is that the fact that it was so inconsistent and then the fact that like Bitcoin and either were afterthoughts, like that was so bizarre as well. Like clearly this was not a planned thing. It was not thought out. Whoever wrote it did not even know the difference between the reserve and the stockpile and either didn't check what they had written in. the EO or they were purposely trying to obfuscate, which, like, why would you do that when

we can all look at the text of it ourselves? And it didn't say that. So the whole thing was so bizarre to me. But yeah, I mean, the only likely explanation is, I think, something around the donors, because, like, you know, most crypto people would not say that XRP and ATA belong there. Like, they don't, they haven't, like, kind of achieved enough, I guess, to merit that. And even And if you look at something like Ethereum or Solana, like people were also like, even not those, you know, a lot of the OGs were coming out and saying it really should only be Bitcoin. So, yeah, there was something about it that was like super hasty and not thought out. And so that's why probably the polymarket odds are showing less than 50% for some of these coins.

Yeah, I think, I feel like pretty much everyone hated this. Like, I don't know who this was supposed to be for. Like the Bitcoin Reserve was sort of proposed or there was an idea around it, maybe six, nine months ago. I think it was a little polarizing, but a lot of cryptic people were obviously for it and still are. Everything else, like, no one really asked for this. And I think the donor angle is just like way too conspiratorial. This is like the like lowest leverage most roundabout way to give, do a kickback to donors. I don't even think like Charles Hoskinson or like salon finishing or like any of those people are serious donors to the super PAC.

So it just feels like actually, like, I think people love to sort of pretend that there's like this 5D chess happening. And I think actually they probably went to like coin market cap and went down like the top 10 assets. And they're like, what isn't a staple coin? What isn't B&B? And it's like, this is the list. Great. And then that's how, you know, you get this tweet. So I think people are just like reading too much into this.

And I think honestly 30% for a Solano Reserve by the end of the year is like way, way, way too high. I mean, not just for the reasons that we've talked about, but also just like what is. the purpose of this reserve. It's like, well, generally it's like when you have liabilities in some sort of asset that we want to hedge against, you know, like petroleum, this just really serves no purpose. No one has a ADA liability. So I really found the whole thing very bizarre. And to your point around him putting this out on a Sunday, I think like Eric Trump later put out a truth saying, oh, this is the first time retail could, you know, trade the market before, you know, sort of the big institutions. And so it was like knew that this was going to

move the market. So the whole thing is very stupid, honestly. I, yeah, no one like that. Yeah. The only thing that I will say in the favor of the conspiracy or what you think is a conspiracy is that during this whole time, it has been apparent that both Ripple slash Brad Garlinghouse and Charles Hoskinson have been trying to curry favor with the Trump administration and have been seen in and around Mara Lago and, you know, different things like that. Like, you can probably remember that because Charles said something like, I'm going to be on the Crypto Council, nobody could verify that, but we all know he's prone to tall tales. But, you know, who knows, maybe he attended some donor thing and, like, was verbally told something

or other? I don't know. But the point is that for those two assets that are kind of considered by the crypto community to probably not really merit being there, or at least, you know, the ranking goes, everybody probably agrees. Yeah, Bitcoin belongs there. Ethereum, like, on the fence, but people could. see it. Same with Salana, but like slightly less than Ethereum. Then the other two, everybody else was like, what the? And I saw NLW's episode was called something like the strategic shit coin reserve or whatever. And I'm pretty sure it's referring to those two. And those are the ones where, yeah, the people associated with them have been in and around

Trump. I think my favorite thing was watching the like Trump tech supporters violence on Twitter against one another, you know, like the Joe Lonsdale and David Sacks fighting on Twitter and because Lonsdale wrote a tweet that was like, you know, like I'm really against taxes and mainly because I don't like these. I think he said something like leftist wasting money, whatever. And he's like, but I also don't want to subsidize crypto bro get tax to subsidize crypto bros or something. And Sacks then was like, you don't understand. We're not changing any tax law to do this. Wait till you hear the full proposal.

So I actually think the funny thing is this ripped apart the Silicon Valley supporters of Trump in the election. You just saw them kind of like hand-to-hand combating each other all weekend, which was kind of funny to watch because they were like, you could tell who took jujitsu class and who didn't in terms of their PR ability to like fight with one another. And I would say like the other thing that I thought was kind of funny was the unholy alliance between Ripple and Ada. I feel like both sides were just like complimenting each other on Twitter, which I thought was really funny. There's a great Hoskinson tweet where he's like, yes, you know, Ripple, they survived through the trenches like us or something.

And I don't know. It was just like it was almost like the comedic aspect of it was pretty hilarious. I mean, I would be embarrassed to say I'm an American citizen if Ada was bought with taxpayer money. I'm going to be the first one to say that. Yeah, look, I think with Ripple, you've got to give them respect for everything that they've done in their battle with the SEC. That, like, they did kind of carry the industry on their backs to some degree. And so respect where respect is due. Cardano, I'm like, what on earth is Cardano doing on that list?

I'm like, Jesus Christ. I think I just saw David Nagy posted sort of side-by-side comparison between Ethereum and Cardano. Cardano has 440 million of TVL, which is one one-hundredth of the TVL of Ethereum. They have 180 full-time developers, supposedly. They do 70,000 transactions per day, which is, what is that? That's like maybe 5% of Ethereum and 40,000 daily apps. actives, which is, yeah, even less than that, even less than 5%. That's like 3%.

So I'm just like, okay, clearly Cardano has no business being on this list. But that being said, it's also, I mean, I'm at least glad that like Hashgraph wasn't on the list or some of these other things that were being speculated as being part of the the strategic crypto reserve. That being said, yeah, it's just like this whole thing of, okay, well, you're crypto, right? You should be celebrating this. I like it just every everything about it is just so grifty like even though okay it's like some executive order and it's it's got the imprimatur of the u.s. government it's just so unsurious right

like we don't actually know if it'll happen we don't know how it'll happen we don't know when it'll happen we don't know how much it will happen it just really feels like he was trying to move the market when the market was sluggish like honestly that when i when i saw this that was my only that was to me the only thing that could possibly explain why he would be announcing this on a Sunday with no details is just to pump the market. And we know there's from prior reporting that Trump monitors the crypto prices, the same way he monitors stock prices as like some kind of judgment on his administration and that he internally has this goal that he wants Bitcoin to hit 150K during his presidency as some kind of add a boy to the work that he's doing. And so yeah,

it just it doesn't feel good to see this. And especially now that the market has shrugged it off and seems to not even be believing it with respect to some of these other assets. It feels part and parcel of the whole Trump administration MO, which is that throw a bunch of stuff at the wall, see what sticks, see what people like, which is, you know, obviously that's been a strategy from the beginning, you know, as just his whole political philosophy.

But just seeing this play out now within our industry is like, okay, I don't know what to believe. I don't know if he'll change his mind on this. Like he might just be like, oh, okay, I tried this. People seem to be mad at me. People are infighting now. mind, it's going to be just Bitcoin and Ethereum or something. That seems a pretty plausible way that this plays out, regardless of what happens with Congress. Yeah, that's actually the exact article that

we wrote right after, which was that he loves to, yeah, think of himself as being good for the markets, and he equates his job performance with how the markets do. And so Steve, or like the new editor that we hired here, he wrote a piece, basically saying that the reason that he chose to do it this week is because of the summit. And so he didn't want to like have the summit or the roundtable happen when the prices were depressed. So it's kind of funny that everything like roundtripped already within 24 hours. But and I mean, he was just analyzing Trump's history and speculating.

So it wasn't like we were reporting that. But it's just like, yeah, it was so clearly not well thought out. And yeah, that's why people don't really seem to believe a lot of it. Nick Carter put out this post that was on CoinDesk, which I, which I like quite a bit. He basically laid out eight reasons why he thinks that we should not do a strategic crypto reserve. So here are the eight reasons very briefly. One, what is easily done is easily undone, meaning a future administration could just undo it and sell what's in the reserve. Two, a global reserve issuer, meaning the issuer of the U.S. dollar, should not disrupt itself by endorsing another asset.

Third, U.S. already has plenty of exposure to Bitcoin. There's already Bitcoin in the balance sheet. Fourth, there is no strategic value in a crypto reserve. Five, a crypto reserve dilutes the value proposition of Bitcoin. because now it's largely controlled by U.S. government. Six, Bitcoin does not need the government, so it's not that this is necessary to do. Seven, it would turn Americans against Bitcoiners, because obviously now half the country is like, hey, this is really stupid, why are we doing this?

And then, eight, it looks self-interested in that, you know, there's already this appearance of the Trump family business is now crypto, and so therefore he is doing something that's directly going to enrich himself using the government dime. Curious, what you guys think. So, you know, all the stuff about whether all these assets belong in the reserve or not, how do you feel about the concept of a reserve itself? Do you agree with Nick that we should not do any reserve at all? This is actually, let's imagine it was just Bitcoin, the most anodyne version of this reserve.

Do you agree that we should not be doing this at all? Or do you think that Bitcoin Reserve is okay, you're on board with that. Tom, you alluded earlier that you thought maybe just Bitcoin would be okay? Yeah, I think it's fine. I think the scale of it is also kind of the question. Like I think in the grand scheme of things, any amount that we could possibly get purchased or authorize to be purchased would be kind of a rounding error for the overall budget and frankly like Bitcoin as an asset. So sure, maybe you can do it and chalk up a victory for Bitcoin people and non-Bitcoin people aren't going to get too mad about it. But I think ultimately it's kind of a no-op.

This is kind of those things that like no one really asked for. I think there's a lot of other things that crypto people are asking for. And granted, I think he has been kind of working through that list in his time in office so far. I just kind of, it feels like much ado about nothing. Like, I don't think this is going to happen. I think it does happen. It's really not going to move the needle that much. Maybe it's a signaling thing.

Probably it says more likely than not that it happens at least for Bitcoin. Well, I don't know how they're defining reserve. I mean, I think to Laura's point, like I bet this sort of stockp is going to exist and maybe the stockpile can sort of turn into a reserve in some way. But like, I think 30% for Solana or XRP is way, way too high. I just don't think there's a lot of political. And like you said, I think the overall Trump strategy, which I think I think, I is not a bad strategy is you throw stuff at the wall and see what people respond to. And you can say,

hey, like we're going to go buy Greenland and maybe people really like it. And then you go do it. And you say, hey, we're going to make Mexico pay for the wall and people don't like it. And then you don't go do it. And, you know, it's kind of like a TV star the same way, you know, one of them might actually try a new content. Okay. Fair enough. Would you, would you be supportive of any other assets? Like, would you be supportive of ether? Would you support of Seoul? Would you support of soul? Nothing else. Just Bitcoin. Even Ethan soul is kind of absurd. Gold kind of gets this grandfather status, obviously, into government holdings, but everything else is strategic for a reason. We have strategic reserves or exposure in different types of commodities. There was a report

recently about cheese and, you know, so the U.S. having some sort of, you know, claim on cheese reserve? Well, it's not like we literally have cheese and, you know, capes. We used to, but no, there's like a claim on cheese as sort of a hedge. So you, I mean, like any other or any corporation, you want to hedge out some of your liabilities so that you aren't totally exposed to price volatility. But those are essential commodities for running cheese, I feel a little silly saying now. But it's true. I need a long cheese. I didn't realize this is an option.

Do you know that Quebec, the province has a strategic reserve of maple syrup, which has been robbed many times. There have been many crazy hype where people have, people have, people have, is the most Canadian thing I've ever heard. People have, like, basically robbed the Canadian Strategic Reserve and, like, taken the maple syrup and filled it up with water. And then people discovered. This is why you need a Fort Knox for your maple syrup. Yes.

That's the thing. Yeah. Anyway, if you're interested in stockpile theft, I highly recommend learning about the Quebec maple syrup. Boy, imagine if North Korea hacks our stockpile. That was kind of where I was going with it. Okay, okay. All right. Yeah, yeah, please, please.

I don't know. I just meant like, because of that, I would say Bitcoin only at most. Because of security. If North Korea had a strategic ADA, I don't want, I think that's like time to go to war. I don't want,

I don't want any smart contracts in this reserve. Let's put it that way. Well, you don't need smart contracts. You can. No, I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I'm just saying I would rather you, stick to Bitcoin because like I don't want Fort Knox being able to be that easily hacked or like have other kind of. No, but if you're holding these assets, it's just a private key,

right? A Bitcoin private key versus Cardano private key. Like, what's the difference? I have no clue what their multi-sig setups are for Cardano or XRP and I don't want to know because I'm sure. I don't think if to be clear, if the U.S. government is holding it, it's probably like some kind of charting situation. It's probably not a lot to say. I hope so, but then as we talked about, like, why did, you know, someone has sophisticated as by bit and does a lot of- fair point, fair point. Why did they have $1.5 billion in one wallet? Like, I just, all the obsec possible violations you could do, I feel like this hastily put-together thing will somehow violate.

And like, yeah, to me alone, that is already from a security standpoint. That's right. But whatever they're doing, they're going to do whatever the asset is, right? So if they're going to do that, they're going to do it with Bitcoin. I don't disagree. I have no clue what the security model for any ATA thing is. I'm sure there is something. I'm sure it's also like not the best.

But I also, I love that this is the Tarun take is that I'm worried about their obsec. So we don't buy these assets. We spent a whole episode talking about the buyout. No, I know. I'm just saying this is the one party that North Korea will not touch. I guarantee you they will not come after the strategic crypto reserve or Trump will go to war. I kind of doubt.

I feel like that's what Kim Jong in my world. I think Trump, I absolutely think Trump. He might want that. Trump would declare war on North Korea if they steal our strategic crypto reserve. I think this would be the most hilarious, like, AI hallucination headline that will be real. Yeah, I was going to say, this is like, this is like, this sounds like a good fiction novel. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

All right. Laura, what's your take of the assets that should go? Are you pro-cryptor reserve? Yes, no. And if so, what assets do you think belong in there? Yeah, this is a tough question. I actually think it really comes down to timeline because I feel like at some. At some point, it probably would make sense for the U.S. to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve,

but at this moment in time, does it make sense? I'm not so sure. We have an episode of Bits and Bips, our crypto and macro show that's coming out tomorrow, which will be the day before you guys all listen to this, the audience listens to this. But in it, James Sefer pointed out that, you know, they're trying to make all these different cuts and they're saying that they're like doing good things for the government budget, you know, like Doge and all that. And so if they're doing all that and they're like firing all these federal employees at the same time that they're going out and and again, this this boils down to what the meaning of reserve is.

Like if it's the meaning that like the people who care about words think it means, then are they- Not this administration. Right. So are they actually going out to purchase the crypto? Because if they're doing that at the same time, they've like fired all these people, like it is definitely going to turn a lot of people against crypto, which would, not be good for crypto. So yeah, at this moment in time, like, I think probably what makes more sense is a stockpile just from a pure kind of political perspective, but also, frankly, just because generally in life, it is a good idea to, you know, not jump into the deep end, but, I mean, it depends

on the thing. But, you know, for most things, it's good to, like, you know, you kind of try something out. And then, like, if that works out, then you do the next step. And, you know, and so I think it, like, would be a little bit more measured if they didn't go into kind of this full, on reserve thing where they're like actually going out to purchase Bitcoin and blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I think for right now, stockpile makes more sense at some point down the line, if the stockpile goes well, if like, you know, custody is worked out, like if there's just so many questions that even just doing the stockpile raises, and I know they already have the assets and whatever, but still like, like, you know, at different points, they do auction it off

and they have traditionally. So it would be a change and like how they're handling these assets and things. So, you know, yeah, if that first step goes well of, like, establishing the stockpile, I'm determining the criteria of what they keep and what they don't, or is it just everything? And also, if there's, like, victims, do they return the money or, you know, when do they keep the money? Like, I just feel like there's so many questions with only that. Yeah, like, let's say, let's say that there is some, you know, so this actually doesn't apply for this one. But I do believe some of the Bitfinex hack. And as you know, BitFinex did the token and paid back everybody.

So I think actually that money is supposed to go back to BitFinex. But let's say that they hadn't done the Leo token and all that. And instead it was that there were actual victims. Then I could see an argument where those people would be like, hey, that's not the government's Bitcoin. That's my Bitcoin. So I just feel like the stockpile itself just raises so many questions that you'd like want to work that out. And then if, you know, like that works out, then yeah, like maybe five years. from now, or I don't want to put a time date on it, but like, I don't think you just want to jump

right into like buying assets, especially, like I said, at the same time that you're firing a bunch of federal employees. It just like is bad optics as well. But, but again, like, I feel like it raises too many additional questions. So I would just like start more incremental. I feel, I'm pretty sympathetic to Nick's view is that I think the, obviously the concept of having a strategic Bitcoin Reserve, like that's obviously stupid. There is nothing strategic about having Bitcoin. It's a financial investment. And if you're making a financial investment, I think that's actually pretty reasonable to say that, hey, I think that this asset is going to be a good financial investment. And the U.S. endorsing this asset essentially allows our government to front-run

other governments eventually coming onto a Bitcoin standard or Bitcoin becoming this eventual replacement for gold. I think there's some wisdom in that in saying that, hey, as being the first mover and the first legitimizer, we're basically going to be the beneficiary of this asset. We can sort of draw the trend line out and see where it's going and say, hey, we're going to get ahead of that. And I think it's good for the U.S. to not always be the last mover on things like this. And that being said, it has to be at a scale that it matters for the U.S. government, which, you know, if it's like $20 billion, like, okay, for Bitcoin, okay, Bitcoin's

very happy, but the U.S. government, it's a rounding error, right? It doesn't really make a difference, especially relative to the scale of gold that the government owns. But if the U.S. government was like, hey, we're going to basically diversify. some of our gold holdings into also holding Bitcoin. Obviously, the Bitcoin is very volatile, but the U.S. government is strong enough that actually it can withstand that volatility. And having that kind of strength of balance sheet actually means that you should be willing to basically go and take a big bet on, hey, I think the world's going to change. And the reliance

that we have in the old world on gold is being rapidly displaced, and we can see through to that. We have the competence, we have the visibility, and we have the willingness to take risks to support that. I actually, I like that version of the world. But that is not a here, this is a love letter to the cryptocene. And especially not a like here, we're going to buy all the stuff that you want us to buy just to like, you know, pump your bags. I think that part of this is very blatant. I think it's like obviously distasteful.

And I think it doesn't fool anybody. You know, there's nothing fucking strategic about buying ether. There's nothing strategic about buying Seoul. Nothing strategic by buying XRP or Cardano. I think if the U.S. was being rational based on their, export restrictions and tariffs, you should be making a strategic GPU reserve much earlier than you should ever be making a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Because, like, realistically, that is like...

That I disagree with. That I disagree. I mean, GPUs depreciate so fast. I agree they depreciates, but the supply constraints, the government has been absolutely unaffected at enforcing supply constraints. One way of enforcing supply constraints is just to be the biggest buyer. But then what? Then they have to use the GPUs. How is the government going to dole out usage of these GPUs?

They're paying, they lend them out to, basically rent them out to U.S. companies, right? They're already basically doing that. That is going to be an absolute disaster. You're basically nationalizing the GPU industry. I mean, what do you think the export? Have you ever read the letter of the law of export restrictions? That is so different from we have to render GPUs from the U.S. government. I disagree.

I disagree. The export restrictions are trying to do cap and, trade. They're trying to like cap a supply in a certain way. Of course, the U.S. government seems to be incompetent at the supply chain management of this. And, oh, the Thai government is hosting all of Deep Seeks data centers. Do you really want a monopsony where the, all of the GPU providers, their job is to sell to the U.S. government? Do I really want a monopsony buying Ada or XRP? Like, I'd much rather we at least do something useful. I agree. Yeah, okay. Great. My point is the GPUs are better than this.

Fine, fine. Okay, maybe that's marginally better. I think I kind of disagree with that. But the other thing that I, it's just really weird to see the support for this. I remember when I first got into the space, people being afraid of what would happen if a government owned so much of one of these cryptocurrencies and tried to control it. I remember that. It's very weird to see our industry go 180 and say, no, no, no, no, we want the government to

own a bunch of this asset, right? What happens if the U.S. government owns so much of the supply of ATA or, you know, Seoul or whatever that they say like, hey, actually, there's this illegal thing happening on the blockchain and we don't support it. And we are not going to vote in favor, or, or alternatively, because we own so much of this asset, if we start seeing this illegal stuff continue that's enabling China or enabling Russia or enabling North Korea or some of these rogue states that we don't like, we're going to sell the asset and we're going to take it out of the strategic reserve, right? Because we no longer want to endorse this thing. And now all of a sudden, you've got this sort of Damocles hanging over your, hanging over your head. That, like,

do you really want to give up control of this asset of this, of this, like, token holder governments means that the people who, the biggest holder of this token might well be now the U.S. government. Now we have five U.S. government controlled networks. With Bitcoin, it's very clear the U.S. government is not going to control Bitcoin. I can't imagine an amount of Bitcoin that would really give them control over Bitcoin. But for almost anything else, else, it's not that difficult to imagine that people will start to understand you should not piss off the U.S. government because if you do, they're going to sell our asset. Or, you know, it could be that they intervene directly into governance. I think that's unlikely.

I think it's more likely they would just say, this thing is going off the rails and it's time for us to divest from it. And it's like, okay, there's billions of dollars of cell pressure that are waiting for you if you make the wrong decision. You're saying that the way CZ tanked FTT is the death of Ada and that the U.S. government will tank them one day and write a tweet that says. Right, but it's not that it's not that it's going to be a surprise. It's not just going to be like, hey, one day they decide to come after us. It'll be that all along the way, we will see through American politics what rates well

with American congresspeople and what doesn't, right? Or with the American president or whatever. We already had so much market impact just from Trump's truth this weekend. Wow, it's such a weird way of using truth as a noun. But Trump's truth this weekend. And what do you think will happen when he says, I hate Charles Hoskinson? We're dumping the Ada. Like, you know.

I just think that this is exactly what the, like, remember when Satoshi originally talked about not wanting WikiLeaks to use Bitcoin. And this was very early in the history of Bitcoin where basically Satoshi said Wikileaks was contemplating using Bitcoin to take Donuts. nations. And what Satoshi said at that time was that we are too small to have WikiLeaks potentially start using Bitcoin. At this scale, if WikiLeaks starts using us, it's going to overwhelm us, it's going to paint us with a broad brush, and it's going to give them effectively ammunition and control over this very fragile network. We should not do that. We should not put ourselves into

the bullseye. I feel like there's a deep unwisdom in these networks, basically saying, please, please, please, government, buy our token and be one of the largest shareholders in this network that we're building because U.S. government doesn't use any of this stuff. They have no interest in using any of this stuff. If Trump is saying we should buy a bunch of EDA basically as a tool of politics, then he's going to sell the EDA as a tool of politics as well. And I don't think that's a game that you want to be playing at the end of the day. Yeah. I mean, so I understand what you're saying and I kind of agree with it, but I don't know if like, I'm not one of those people who thinks like who owns or sorry, so for something like Bitcoin that is decentralized, I don't think it

matters if like there's somebody who owns a lot because yeah, okay, they could sell it. They could affect the price. But like, then what, you can buy more of it more cheaply or something at that point. I do think like where I don't think that applies to something like Ripple where the company owns 55% of the supply there. So like that definitely should not be in the reserve because you know, that's like, yeah, they can just, I don't know, that, that is, that's a different thing. They're like, they're selling. They're just making money from it. But the government would, you know, buy and then sell or, you know, whatever.

So I don't know. I view it as like, I think for something that is like truly decentralized in the case of Bitcoin, that I don't know, does it matter if like, okay, maybe it matters if like some percentage of the supply is owned by one. person, but like, or one entity, but I don't know, it's, like, do you guys think it's a problem? The U.S. government could not conceivably own enough of Bitcoin to have a real impact on Bitcoin governance, right? I just, I don't think that's possible. And I think Bitcoiners would not care. For almost everything else, I mean, Bitcoin is like almost $2 trillion, you know, for almost everything else, it's pretty conceivable that you could own a huge portion of this, of, of these asset

supplies and be able to really meaningfully influence governance. And the other thing, too, is that Bitcoin, very explicitly, the governance of Bitcoin is not up to Bitcoin holders, right? Bitcoin Core and the way that all the political machinery behind Bitcoin works is that it's not that every Bitcoiner gets together and votes on what happens next, right? Whereas for Ethereum and for a lot of other assets, that is explicitly the philosophy is that coin holders together jointly along with other stakeholders in the business. Certainly Ada, certainly Ada, certainly Ada, even more than any of the other coins. Because they have on-chain governance? Fully on-chain governance for everything, Right. So all of that points toward, actually, for them, it's explicitly supposed to be a democracy. Bitcoin never claimed to be a democracy. Bitcoin's not a democracy. It's not like one Bitcoin, one vote. But for all these other assets, even if it's informal, like within Ethereum, where they say, oh, you know, we care about what cone holders think, but there's only one part of the overall ecosystem, then it's like, okay, then if you're serious that you care what coinholders think, then now you care what the U.S. government thinks. And that puts you in a very, very different place than where you were before any of this started. So I think, I think.

think there's a, it's more complicated than just, oh, okay, are they going to buy our bags or not? If you're talking about an actor the size and scale of the U.S. government, that's not going to be a user of these protocols, because, you know, why would they be using these things? They're just putting them in a, you know, in a vault somewhere. But I just want to ask a related question. Like, do you guys think that it's a problem that micro strategy owns 2% of Bitcoin? Not really? A problem in what sense. Yeah, well, that's what I was trying to say about even if the government owned like a, a significant chunk like that 2%. I don't really see like I to me it's a problem if like the miners

are centralized in some fashion like if all the Bitcoin mining was in the US that's a problem. If you know, I mean already even just there's an issue with the fact that they're mining in Bitcoin is dominated by a few small entities. So it's like like like those to me, those are actual real problems because that's control of the network. But like who was holding the coins like to me that I don't view that as like a really important vector for like if you're kind of evaluating decentralization. Am I just wrong and thinking about that? I think in a base level, you're correct. But I kind of do disagree with this a little bit. Like ultimately, people are responding to economic incentives. And I think if the U.S. government or micro strategy, I mean, micro strategy is a little weird because

it's like, you know, I also have shareholders. So I would say it's more vanguardy like in that way. But it's like, yeah, if they were the ones who say, hey, this is the Bitcoin fork that we recognize this having value and we're going to hold and we're going to continue to use. That obviously does create economic incentives for other miners. And so you do implicitly kind of have influence and control over them. And I don't know or I don't think, frankly, that any of these actors would ever get together and sort of say, hey, we're going to, you know, only recognize the Bitcoin fork that increases the block size or something like that.

But, you know, they are large market participants and they do, therefore, affect minor economics. And that can obviously control hash rate. So it kind of flows back the other way, too. But the thing is, like, for the U.S. government decides to propose a contentious Bitcoin fork, right? Or back of contentious Bitcoin fork. And it says, look, this Bitcoin fork deletes the assets that are owned by North Korea. So, you know, you imagine whatever.

Maybe it's less obvious than that. I think there's zero percent chance that the Bitcoin community would come along for the ride. I think there's just almost no way. They don't have to. I think this is kind of the point is many other people hold this up. asset. I mean, granted, it is somewhat self-defeating and that this kind of ultimately kind of deteriorates the value and the purpose of the asset. So you kind of kill yourself in that way. But yeah, I mean, I think like ultimately it's, you can have the, you know, weirdo fork cypherpunk

chain if you want that, you know, you can have the Ethereum classic equivalent of Bitcoin. But you can also have the government stamped version of Bitcoin. And yeah, it's, it's shitty. But, you know, if you're a boomer and you're putting your IRA into this, like maybe you don't care. Maybe you just want the one that's in your brokerage account. No, yeah, I don't, I don't see it happening that way. I think if the U.S. government said, we want to do this one fork, I don't see like, I bid or like, I don't see any of the financial firms being like, yeah, we're going to go with that chain. Like, they're going to go where the users want to go. They're interested in making money. They're not going to, they are going to know that's going to end up being like Ethereum

classic. So that's not, they're, they're just going to go with the financial incentives. So I don't. And who has financial incentives? The, you know, one of the largest holders is recognizing the value, one of the largest market participants. I think these are all kind of conjoint. I don't think these are separate parties necessarily. So, no, I disagree with that because if you do a crypto reserve or a crypto stockpile, whatever we're calling this now, you're not actually a financial participant. You're actually a holder, right? And like, you're probably never, you're not, you're not like, T-wopping and to buy more Bitcoin or something. If you were, then actually, in a way, you have more implicit power.

Yeah, I think of what you guys are describing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what you guys are describing now. No, no, no. What I'm imagining is that you buy the assets up front. You're not continuing to T-WOP and, like, buy more. I think that'd be a very dumb way to do it. I mean, maybe it would give you more power if that's what you want,

is what you want is power over the network, because then it is more of an active threat, right? But if this network is going to be forking away, then it's kind of like, okay, well, we'll just do without your tokens. Like, I'd rather your tokens be lost and not exist. Yeah, I think of it kind of like a petroleum reserve equivalent, right, where they are actually engaging in open market operations and, you know, maybe buying when things are low and, you know, trying to manage some sort of reserve versus, yeah, just buying and holding, then I agree in that case. It's, it's effectively, you know, to my mind, I think the way to frame it is more like gold and less like strategic syrup reserves because, like, what is the consumptive use for? There's no consumptive use for Bitcoin. What is the government going to use the Bitcoin for? Like, to my mind, it's like, it's a, it's a saving. asset. Yeah, I think Cynthia Lemmas' proposal is that you would create this

reserve or stockpile or what I forget which one she put in her in her draft bill. But the purpose is to try to sell it by some year and use it to help pay down the debt. But actually, just going back to the fork discussion, I actually realized, so I actually think the real question to ask is not like which fork should the U.S. government go with her or who would go with the U.S. government if they backed a minority fork. But it's more actually, if there is a fork and there are two chains. I mean, this is what we saw at the Dowhack where the whales, they wanted the ETC and they harassed the White Hat group to go gather the money for them because like Andre Ternovsky, the founder of Chat Roulette, was one of the people in my book

who, oh my God, he gamed the whole thing to his own benefit. But basically, yeah, he like, he strategized to get a lot of Dow tokens on the cheap where he was, he posted these things to Reddit pretending like he was the Dow hacker to drive the price of the Dow tokens down. And so he kept buying more and more and more of them to get them at like 50% off. Because he could just tell that the community was going to hard fork. And he was like, oh, like right now they're 50% off. But like, you know, when they hard fork, I can get a full ether for each of, for all one, for 100 of them.

And I'm, you know, so he was just like amassing so many. And then he was pretending to be the hacker and, like, posting these fake letters on Reddit and scaring the community. And so then what happened is that after the fork, he realized, like, oh, my God, I have so much ether. But also now my ether classic is worth more than a million dollars. So he was, like, trying to make the white hats go and get his ETC for him. Like, it was this whole, whole drama.

But anyway, all I'm trying to say is that I could see, like, if there's a Bitcoin fork, then what you have is, like, people like the Bitcoin. like Wales, like the, sorry, the Bitcoin government, the U.S. government. They might become the Bitcoin government pretty soon. Being like, hey, like, we should get that money because that will, you know, we could fund it. We could like sell it and we could do, you know, whatever they want to do with it. But the point is like, or there might even be taxpayer demand for that. And so it like, it creates like weird incentives.

I think that that would be detrimental. Right. It would create this kind of like, yeah, I guess this only happens with a contentious hard fork though, right? And yeah, I think the Bitcoin community doesn't want to do hard forks, but all I'm trying to say is like, we're going to see more of those. Yeah, but if there is a fork, I could see people wanting, yeah, whales to get those assets. And if it's the government, then I could see like taxpayers being like, hey, why are you just leaving all that money on the table there? Sure.

So one of the other elements of the story is that there's been some accusations flying around that maybe there was some kind of untoward activity that took place around this announcement, some potential front-running. We had Eric Trump tweeting. What did Eric Trump tweet? I have to go pull it up. But it's something to the effect of, you know, aren't you glad we put this out on a Sunday? It was the first time retail could trade before institutions could trade on this news or something

like that. It was like, all right. Very embarrassing. Yeah. And then there was a lot of accusations about David Sussie. Sacks, who of course is now crypto NIs are, of potentially having benefited from some of the assets in the strategic crypto reserve, Sacks came out on Twitter to deny some of these attacks, saying, one, that he divested from all of his crypto assets before taking office,

as well as that Kraft Ventures exited bitwise, as well as their stake in multi-coin, in which they were early investors. So supposedly, David Sacks does not have meaningful crypto exposure. I imagine he probably has some through his exposure to crap ventures, but apparently a lot of it or most of it has been divested already. But the whole thing, it leaves you in a weird position because I have to imagine, you know, everybody who's around Trump is kind of in the position of having to justify everything that Trump does, even when they probably don't, I would guess for a lot of them,

they don't even know that it's happening. And they're kind of like, oh, yeah, yeah, we totally plan this. So I'd imagine for Sachs, he is kind of put in a difficult position in that there's supposed to be a crypto council meeting on Friday, which supposedly is going to have. more details about some of this stuff as well as other plans from the administration. We have something of a guest list that's already assembled, but we don't know exactly what it's going to be about. And supposedly, there was originally supposed to be this crypto council that was being put together

led by Bow Hines, who's a, what is he, like a Republican, young Republican influencer guy, who was supposed to be the leader. I don't quite know what his crypto connection is supposed to be, but he was supposed to be the head of that. And apparently there was so much infighting around who was going to be on the crypto council that they've decided to maybe scrap the Crypto Council thing. Laura, you said that you'd heard some information about this. Yeah, we were the ones who broke that story.

Yeah, he, I think, well, I don't know exactly who, but somebody got irritated with some of the infighting around who would be on the council, and that's why they decided to convene this series of summits instead, like each summit devoted to a different crypto policy issue. So do we know what the issue is for this first summit? I don't. I like, yeah, just what I...

How much A-D-Buy to buy? Yeah, that's really what it is. But I'm hearing is to see out there being super tight-lipped. That makes sense. So I think we've got an interesting moment in the market as we're trying to untangle. One, obviously, the macro stuff that's happening with Trump, but then also trying to understand how to interpret Trump's claims and his promises toward the industry. I don't know if we're going to see the end of this until really the markets kind of get used to Trump.

It feels like right now, I mean, it's only been a month and a half since Trump's been inaugurated, although it feels like it's been fucking longer than that. And the market, I think, is just kind of getting exhausted is what it feels like, is that even this announcement of, oh, we're going to do the strategic crypto reserve didn't last more than 12, 16 hours until the market gave everything back. So how do you guys expect this to play out? Because it almost feels to me like no matter what Trump says, the market just doesn't feel like it wants to believe him. Yeah, this rally overall felt like the most on buying this rally because everyone else is, I think everyone else is going to buy this rally, but no one really believes in it. And I think that was kind of actually

reflected in the longevity and the price action. Like, I mean, even frankly, what being up 15%, like, that doesn't strike me as that much when the president of the U.S. says, we're going to go buy crypto and I think that kind of speaks to the lack of credibility of it. Yeah, I mean, I think also like really the best trade this year has been being long vol. And I don't know when that's going to kind of stop. I think people are looking for some sort of calm in the markets. And I think there is at least, I think some piece in knowing that, hey, you have people like Besson at the table who are more level-headed and who are, and Trump himself is obviously more commercial-minded. And so a lot of these things, again, remind me of Trump One and being kind of like these aggressive opening

gambits and see what people react to and then using that and sort of figuring out the path forward versus, you know, taking everything that's being posted on truth quite literally. I actually, I have a question for you guys. So these are the people that are being reported as attending this first crypto summit. And it's Ripple CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Saylor, Sergei Nazarov of Chainlink, J.P. Richardson of Exodus. Potentially, Brian Armstrong, the Wink of Las Twins, Jesse Powell. What do you think of that list? Like if you were too, so sorry, I shouldn't have named those names.

If it, let's pretend we don't know. Who would you expect to be at the first summit? Like who, or who would be on your wish list to be at the first summit? I would like to see the founders of crypto protocols there. It looks like the only one who's there is Sergey Nazarov from Chainlink. Beyond that, there are no founders of protocols, right? it's like all exchanges and then, you know, donors and VCs and stuff. I guess Exodus is a wallet, right?

It's a wallet. Yeah, and by the way. It's a public company, though. I think that's the reason. Yeah, and at the moment, the exchanges listed are only potentials. I mean, maybe by the time this episode airs, they'll be known, but at the moment it's potentials. I mean, right now, it just kind of feels like these are the people who have access and who have, you know, they're probably donors and supporters of the administration, which is probably the reason why they're at the very first one. but I would like if you're taking seriously the idea of hey we want to open up the US to these these protocols and like bring more innovation back to the US then invite people who are building the protocols like is I mean it's fine to have the exchanges there I think that that's obviously relevant but it kind of gives away the game a little bit that the people who are building the stuff are not there yeah I think the other thing that strikes me about this list is it's like

I'm going to get so much hate for this, but... Go, go for it, please. No, you have to know. And it's not, it doesn't apply to everybody on this list. It only applies to certain people, but, yeah, I, so when you talk about how the technologists are missing, I do feel like crypto kind of divides loosely between sort of like tech people and money people. And on the money side, there are people who are more like...

yeah, kind of, and I'm not saying this necessarily about anybody on the list, but on that side, you can see people drift into the, yeah, grifter kind of scammy section of things. Do you want to name, do you want to name names? No, no, no. I'm trying to, who does it rhyme with? No, all I'm trying to say is that. Laura's belief in the law of the excluded middle excludes Dan Larimer. That's what I see here.

My belief in the law of what? The fact that the money people and the tech people are sort of disjoint sets, and so hence there's no scammers on the tech side, and that's why I brought up Dan Lerimer. No, no, no. Yeah, that is not at all what I think either. However, I do feel like on the money side, there are people who view it more purely as a way to get rich,

rather than like building something for society. And so yeah, I, so it's just a different way of saying the same thing that has Sib said. But, but I do feel like you could get like honestly, like people like you, like or like a Chris Dixon who, yeah, they're technically money people on that they're investing. But by investing they're actually building, right? That's the purpose of what they're doing rather than just being like number go up. So that's how, yeah, I do think that there's different kinds of money people. There's the people who are using money to build, and there are the people who are like, number go up. You're saying VCs are underrepresented minority in this group.

And I agree. I'm very hard to hear this, Laura. I thought you hated this. Actually, I have a more funny question. You guys are kind of asking these kind of boring questions, to be honest, which is, imagine there was a world that Libra was not launched. Would Kelsey or have, Libra, the Teme coin? Would Kelsior have been at this dinner? I think the answer is yes.

If we were had not launched, I bet you that guy would have been there. I bet you. You've not that guy, someone like that guy. Yeah, like some, the version of that guy who's dominant in the U.S. politics and, you know, I thought there was some, some evidence that like some of the Melania launch was also done by them. There was, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know how you're going to say that they wouldn't be at the, the dinner. That's the most cynical version of what Laura's saying, by the way, is the idea that like that guy gets to show up, but like Hayden Adams doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, Tarun, you nailed it.

I think that's what you're trying. I just wanted to kind of go direct. Elections of consequences, baby. Elections of consequences. That is true. That is true. Yeah. Anyway.

All right. Well, we're up on time. So we got to wrap. Hopefully there's good news because so far. it's been a torrent of really not so good news. But I just want to reiterate, although we've had a lot of shows lately that we've been talking about how things are going badly, I do still believe at the end of the day, like the progress has been made in crypto, especially on the regulatory side and the legal

side, has been amazing. We've seen the SEC dropping tons of cases we just saw today. They dropped their case against Cumberland. They dropped the case against Cracken. We see that it's kind of a new day starting in the U.S. And a lot of new projects that are launching, a lot of new exciting innovations. So I actually feel really good about crypto. Trump's geopolitical craziness notwithstanding.

I sort of suspect that by the time that the year calms down and markets get used to Trump, things will be in a much better place than the odds of day. So I just want to end with that because I know that we've had a string of shows that we've been mostly just talking about bad stuff. And I don't want people to lose positivity. So, and hopefully this could just be a short answer. But if the U.S. were to get involved in some kind of war, And I'm only saying this just because there's like a lot of fuss that Trump is stirring up internationally, generally.

Do you think crypto will, the markets will go down or do you think they'll go up because of the longstanding thesis that it's like a safe haven in times like that? I think it depends. I think it depends, one, on if this is going to cause some kind of financial crisis, in which case crypto goes up. It depends on how much we're going to spend because it may mean that the government needs to cut rates or the Fed needs cut rates. and if Fed cuts rates, that's good for crypto. And the third, like you saw with the Ukraine war, when the Ukraine war broke out, crypto rallied. And I think part of this is that, like, hey,

this war is causing people to get afraid about the reliability of certain sovereign assets because of how much money is going to get spent to support this war. If that happens, it sort of depends on who are the parties in the war of whether or not that's going to be perceived as good for crypto. I was going to say a joke answer, which is if Japan was attacked by North Korea,

you know that Ada and XRP go to zero. because their holdings are so concentrated there. Oh, oh, oh, oh, wait. That North Korea owns? No, no, no, that Japanese pensioners are the largest owners of both of them as retail. Yeah, he sold the ICAO in Japan. All the SBI owning a ton of XRP, right? Like they own most of ripal.

But not Ada, right? Not Ada. I thought Ada is huge in the Eastern Europe. Ada also was. Yeah, you don't remember the ICU for Cardano was like, marketed to Japanese people or something. I don't remember the details, but yeah. There are these amazing pictures from that era of like Hoskinson

in the middle of nowhere, Japan preaching to these like 80-year-olds. So all I got to say is Japan, you know, it has many, much lore and crypto, everything from the first exchange hack onwards. Amazing. All right. Well, on that note, Sainar, everybody. We'll be back next week. See it.

Hi, everyone. Hey!