Unchained - The Chopping Block: When Will the ETF Hype End? - Ep. 596

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto experts Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner bring you inside perspectives on critical topics in the crypto world. This episode delves into the complexities and market impact of crypto ETFs: Are they a game-changer for investors? The team also examines the controversies surrounding Tether, exploring its stability and the implications of recent scandals. They then shift focus to the burgeoning world of asset-backed securities and crypto casinos: What potential and challenges do they present? NFTs and their evolving role beyond digital art are scrutinized, along with the integration of crypto technology in devices like the Solana phone. Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on these critical developments shaping the future of cryptocurrency. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights:  🔹 ETF Performance Analysis: Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and Competitors. 🔹 Circle IPO: Impact on Stablecoin Market and Financial Ecosystem. 🔹 Tether Controversy: Financial Backing and Southeast Asian Scams. 🔹 Vivek Ramaswamy's Political Future: Influence on Crypto Policy. 🔹 Asset-Backed Securities (ABS) in Crypto: Opportunities for Investors. 🔹 Crypto Casinos: Rise in Popularity and Move Toward Transparency. 🔹 NFTs in Mainstream Culture: Adoption and New Use Cases. 🔹 Crypto and Traditional Finance: Stablecoins like USDC and Tether. 🔹 Crypto Integration in Devices: Solana Phone and Market Adoption. Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Robert Leshner, founder of Compound Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly  Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Links Blockworks: Tether says UN needs more blockchain education in response to USDT report by Casey Wagner  UNODC: Casinos, Money Laundering, Underground Banking, and Transnational Organized Crime in East and Southeast Asia: A Hidden and Accelerating Threat CNBC: Costco sold more than $100 million in gold bars last quarter by Spencer Kimball Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise And Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux CNBC: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Bitcoin ETF approvals are ‘stepping stones’ towards tokenization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I, you think people in suits aren't also shill bags? Is this what you're telling? Going on, going on CEDC is like bullposting for boomers. Like, it's sort of the functional equipment. What do you? What do you? Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. It's the Bill Ackman Carl Icon version, you know, of like, of being. Right. It's their crypto Twitter. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quons. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

I'm in the trading firms who are very involved. Dalek.Eathe is the ultimate Defy 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 intros. First you got Tom, the D5 Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next we've got Robert, the Crypto connoisseur, and Tsar of Super State. GM, everybody. Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

Aloha. And finally, I'm. I'm a sieb the head hype man at Dragonfly. So we are 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 ChopinBlock.X.Z for more disclosures. So, guys, so excited to talk more about the ETFs.

We were just bitching backstage about how bored we are of the ETF story. But how are you guys feeling about ETFs? I mean, I think everybody is in the ETF hangover at this point where there was so much attention, so much focus. It's been roughly a week since, not even a week, since they've gone live. It's been really two trading days last week and one trading day this week, which we don't have the data for because data comes out in slow, inefficient traditional market ways after hours. I feel like, you know, we're all in the hangover period.

The data, I'm sure we're going to go into, it's somewhat exciting. It's most exciting on a relative basis between different competitive ETFs and between gray scale and the rest of the market. So I'm excited to dig in. So we can put the story to bed and never talk about it ever again. Hopefully never talk about it again, but we'll see if that plays out. So, okay, high level stats. So obviously the primary interesting thing was that it ended up being a sell-the-news event,

which is more or less what a lot of people were predicting. I think we were alluding to that on this show. That's more or less what happened. Bitcoin slumped, you know, three, four percent, I think, after all of this. But the trading, I think the trading in the volume was roughly, I think, in line with expectations. These things traded quite a lot, especially relative to most ETF launches. And the big winners and losers were basically, depending on how you measure it. So, gray scale, as expected, had net outflows.

They're obviously, you know, they're the only one that could really have net outflows at their scale. That said, you know, of course, their AUM. is 26.5 billion. And the net outflows were about 500 and 600 million that exited from GBDC, which is a lot less than what I was expecting. That said, it is only the first three trading days. So there may be more time for people to end up realizing

their gray scale and getting out of something, getting out of grace scale, given the fees, are an order of magnitude higher than any of the other vehicles. But right now, actually, they're holding onto most of their assets. So actually it looks like if this continues, It may end up being an amazing business for Grayscale to hold onto their Bitcoin trust. And they've had much more volume than anybody else. So their total volume over the last three days has been, is that $5.1 billion in trading volume for the grayscale BTC trust?

The next biggest by volume is the I shares BlackRock Trust, which is $2 billion for their ETF and then Fidelity at $1.5 billion. And then it kind of falls off from there. for assets, for net assets, like who actually is custodying and charging fees on Bitcoin. Right now, GPDC number one at 26.5 billion. Then there's BlackRock at 500 million,

way smaller, obviously. Then Fidelity at 427 million. Then BitWi is at 225 million. And then it kind of falls off from there. So that's how the horse race is looking. Any surprises in there? Anything that jumped out of you guys? you you told you talked about the wrong winner in this whole scenario by the way completely ignored the real winner

which is which is jane street oh which is jane street like 100% like being the authorized participant on everyone you know like also just the fact that you have fucking authorized participants is how boring trafai is like i have to have a white list always like a little boring like kind of like an nfti white list you know it's like it's an nfty white list yeah Exactly. They're like keepers. You know, that's why our approved keepers.

It's the same thing. That is, no, no, there are, there are, it is true, but,

uh, I think like there are protocols that don't have that. Yeah, so, I mean, maybe there's a dumb question, like, why,

why, like, so I presume there's some set of people who are authorized participants generally. Why do the ETFs have like this white list of like, we have two authorized participants as opposed to everybody who is sufficiently sophisticated and is a general, you know, kind of person of interest

cannot just be like, oh, I'm going to I'm going to do some stuff for your ETF. Here's my only half-educated answer. It's because it's as few as necessary to just ensure that somebody is able to go through the arbitrage process while minimizing paperwork and complexity that comes from having many participants.

Because the process of the relationship between like the ETF itself and the authorized participant. Like there's a lot of like tech integration and stuff. Like, you know, there's a lot of tech integration here. If they're getting a fucking AUM a day after, like, what tech? They have to email someone and say, please credit my shares to this account. Like, you know, I thought they were faxing them or maybe carrier pigeons. Yeah, there's really no APIs for this.

That's insane. Well, I actually think one thing to keep in mind is for some types of ETSs, there are actually more stringent requirements for APs. So I don't know the exact history of like exactly why in the 80s that equity APs versus commodity APs differed. But commodity APs, you actually have to prove that you can in the worst case take delivery,

not for every commodity. But this cash set. commodities that require. No, no, no. The AP is dealing with the cash, but they also have to guarantee that they can trade in the real spot market. But now with the Bitcoin. There's like some requirement.

No, not with Bitcoin. No, I'm just saying for commodity ETFs in general, usually there's this argument to that the AP needs to also be able to trade the spot metals market and take receipt. And so then they were like, okay, we don't want people who are like trading this thing, but then can't clear and then the market has trouble clearing because like the, so,

so there's some historical reason for that. But if, I remember there's like a lot more regulation. Okay. So if, if an authorized participant is like, yo, I'm going to take delivery of this and they suck at it.

It's kind of like, who cares? Like that's your fault. That's like your problem, not the ETF's problem. But no, no, no.

Then the ETF might not be tracking its index, tracking its index price correctly, right? They really want that. They don't care about anything else. And they, they have a lot of rules for who can, who, who, who actually can do both sides in certain markets. So you're saying if there's a copper ETF that holds spot copper in warehouses somewhere,

the authorized participants have to be able to take delivery of copper on their own. In the worst case, yeah, they have to be set up to do that. Right. Okay. Like, I think this is like, this is like a, this is like a worse. This is so more. irrelevant to the Bitcoin. All right, all right, fine.

Okay, let's move on. All right, so Bitcoin ETFs, hopefully this is the last time we're going to talk about this. If you care about this, I'm sure there's other podcasts for you. Related to the ETF, so I think Larry Fink has just been bull posting nonstop on CNBC about how

crypto is the future and tokenization is the future. Apparently, Bitcoin is no different from gold. He said on January 12th, and he's talking about how tokenization is the next generation of securities. Oh, I agree. I guess it was a good ETF launch. know what the yeah like what i like to be clear i more or less agree with him but um i don't know

kind of surprising to see larry think going out and and like talking like suzoo all of a sudden uh what's you guys what's what's the what's the vibe uh from you guys perspective on what's happening here i i think people in suits aren't also shill bags is this what you're telling going on going on cdbc is like uh bull posting for boomers like it's sort of the functional What do you what do you what do you what do you yeah exactly exactly it's it's the bill acman carl icon version you know of like of being right it's their crypto Twitter yeah exactly yeah although bill acman has clearly moved from CNBC Twitter now that's true that's true he's playing a different game now um yeah I don't know but so but Larry Fink has been kind of

alluding to the fact that he thinks E3TF is is going to launch this year so TLDR we will definitely be talking about, we'll talk about more ETF stuff later this year. It seems like right now a lot of people are speculating that it's going to happen mid-year, sometime in the summer. May, May seems to be the time. I don't know, Robert, as the resident ETF expert, what's your view on ETHER ETF and likelihoods there? Well, I think the important thing is to understand why people think it's going to happen in May. And the reason why people think is going to happen in May at this point is because the applications by BlackRock and others for Ether ETFs have a final decision date in May. And everyone thinks it's going to follow the exact same pattern of the Bitcoin ETFs where when it finally gets to BlackRock's ETF, you know, the SEC is obviously going to prove it because what's Black Rock's record?

What is it, like, 850 to 1 or something like that between getting an ETF approved versus rejected? and, you know, it'd be unreasonable for the SEC to reject so many ETFs again without having a good differentiated rationale for why they would even be rejected in the first place. Because if you look at the underlying thought process, well, they approved Ether Futures ETFs in the same way that they approved Ether as like Bitcoin Futures ETFs, and then based on the court decision in Grayscale v. SEC, they had to acknowledge that there isn't enough of a difference between futures and spot as the underlying. And if they've already gone and approved futures, they may as well approve spot as well.

And so there's a couple different, you know, small leaps of logic, but very basic, you know, obvious ones that, well, if there's an ether futures ETF, that's already live. And there's all of these ether spot applications all coming due in May. That's when it's going to go live. No one can confirm it. No one can guarantee it. But if you're a betting person, a lot of people are now betting on this as being the sort of like straightforward, it's going to happen event. And that's going to be the time frame of it. The thing I was going to try to say is like, if you read Gary's whiny letter, though, he's like, we'll never.

It makes it sound like the opposite, right? It's like, we didn't want to approve this. This doesn't have my approval. Okay, why did you vote for it? But then, you know, like immediately goes after everything else. So, like, do you really think an ether's future is ETF is possible, given that type of language? Yes. You know, if you look at his statements after he, you know, gets on TV after the approval, you know, he was basically saying, you know, this is an ETF that's a cash ETF that's cabined to exposure to one commodity asset.

And it's wrapped in a nice security form. And so what's there really to be afraid of at the end of the day was basically the statement? And, you know, after the Bitcoin spot ETF has gone live, we have seen significantly less volatility in Bitcoin. We haven't really seen any market dislocations or abnormalities. It almost seems like a boring, you know, morning after. And, you know, if you look at how boring, you know, the post-ETF launch is, you know, I think it, you know, should be a relief to the SEC and to market participants that this is. that this is not as exciting as people thought it was going to be. It was more a political process to reject it and then eventually approve it.

Yeah, I think the other side of that too is that so the Ether's future ETH is regulated by the CFTC. Now, obviously, Gary Gensler has been very evasive on answering the question to anybody who asks, is Ether a security? But through his behavior, we can kind of see that he's actually conceded the ground. because if the Ether futures, if Ether is a security, then Ether futures are also securities, and therefore they should be regulated, not by the CFTC, but by the SEC.

And the fact that the SEC was like, yeah, that's fine, we don't need to regulate that. And they gave the jurisdiction to the CFTC basically means that they are, they've already conceded that, hey, this thing does not need to be under our kind of regulatory thumb. And so I think it's hard now for them to undo that decision, even though, yes, they've not publicly said that, hey, ether is not a security. But to be fair, hasn't there always been the like, hey, proof of stake is not the same, whatever, you know?

Like, I do remember there was like all these, there were all these SEC proclamations on around the world. Like, oh, Ethereum might be. Well, no, no, no, no. So I. But I, that's what I'm saying. I don't know how those were all. Those were very vague statements. And I think most of that, what that is referring to is like staking intimately.

intermediaries. I think people saw the very broad language. I'm like, oh, my God, he thinks proof of stake is a security, which is like not at all what he has, what he, he did not literally say that. And he has, like, the pattern of enforcement has been very, very clear. They're going after staking intermediaries. When they claim that, you know, Seoul, right, like Crack and like Coinbase, when they say that soul is security or near his security or this is security, that is security, the claim,

the argument made is not like, well, look, they do proof of stake, therefore it's a security. Not once has he ever levied that argument against. and asset. It's always about issuance and here, there's a team and blah, blah, blah. So I think that's a misreading of what the SEC has claimed. They were very vague. But obviously, staking does not, like, that's such a tortured argument that staking would make something as security. And that's not what the SEC has literally claimed. Okay. Well, that's good to know. Because, like, I don't know. It's a meme that has gotten very popular on crypto Twitter that somehow Gary Gansler thinks that like staking makes you a security,

which is just not true. So anyway. Cool. So other news, Circle has filed, confidentially filed for an IPO. Like, well, I guess not that confidential thing. Congratulations, Circle. Well, they haven't an IPO yet, right? And obviously it is kind of an icy IPO environment.

And it also has been, as we've, I think we talked about this in our end of year episode. It's been a relatively rough year for Circle. Well, 2020 was. So USC market share has gotten hit pretty bad. I think it's gone down from $55 billion at the peak now to like $25 billion. million.

And at the same time, interest rates are projected to compress, right? So like the 10 years down, five years down. So the expectation is that interest rates are going to decline this year. We're going to start seeing rate cuts. And that means that, you know, it's a big blow to the business model of all the stable points. So, you know, if interest rates go towards 2%, 2.5%, that's basically chopping your revenue in half on a going forward basis.

So that said, it's not, it's not chopping in half the revenue of BlackRock. who is managing all the assets behind USTC. They're going to make their 20 basis points regardless of how much circle makes, which is when we go back to why is Larry thinks so excited about crypto all of a sudden, it's yet another arrow in the quiver of why Larry is so excited about crypto

is because he's going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of USDC growth, especially in a lower rate environment. Very true. Very true. So anyway, UCC going public, how do you guys think this is going to be received in financial markets? I think terribly.

Terribly. And I'll just say that now. Simply because Coinbase was so poorly received by the public markets because the public market said, oh, crypto is volatile, it has cycles, the revenue is not predictable. It's all based on trade. Well, when Coinbase came out when it actually did IPO, it was a blockbuster IPO. I know. And then after that as the market itself, yes, and after that as the crypto market itself cooled, the public markets did not treat Coinbase very well at all. I mean, Coinbase went from $300 to 30 in the 30s with the three handle, right? Because of the volatile nature of its revenue and income. And, you know, I have a feeling that USC will be and Circle will be treated the same way, which is that. the market's not going to appreciate the fact that, you know, there's cycles and that, you know,

the stable coin float grows and shrinks sometimes and rates go up and down sometimes. I think they're going to see potentially a decreasing revenue story because the total supply of USC is going down and interest rates are going down and get really afraid. And I personally think Circle should have gone public a year ago when the numbers were way bigger. I mean, they tried going public maybe two years ago now through a SPAC, which didn't occur. And so, you know, I think the timing of this is a little bit late for circle. And I think that, you know, they're going to get perceived negatively in the public markets because it's a declining chart. And even though, you know, people in our corner of the world say, well,

it's declining now, but just wait another three years like, you know, rocket ship, you know. I think public markets have less crypto familiarity and just won't, you know, vibe with that, so to speak. So I think it's going to be a cool reception. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. There was actually a pretty decent thread talking about how a lot of these equities that are sort of pseudo-crypto exposure kind of pre-ETF like Coinbase or MicroStrategy, basically all the premium is totally compressed with the launch of the ETFs. And I think with Coinbase, you could tell a story around, oh, you're buying, you know, sort of proxy crypto. exposure, you're getting some, some convexity to public markets, which, you know, kind of goes both ways, but market goes back up. Coin Maste does well, with circles, it's a tougher story, right? Because it's like, interest,

enterrates go down. Well, that's also circles revenue. And we haven't even seen a clear story that like, that would even lead to more issue. And so it's like, you're not buying sort of pasture exposure to Bitcoin, which you might not even want anymore because you have the BTF. Like, what do you really buying with this business? Unless you think there's some totally new third category that that they're building out. Well, I mean, people have. seen. So here's my bull case for Circle. So one is that, okay, right now Circle is, you know, $25 billion roughly of USC. Currently at 5% interest rates, I'm sure they're paying a little bit to BlackRock and all these other people in the middle, but, you know, more or less 5%, that's like one,

over a billion dollars in revenue per year. That should be basically all margin, right? Their fixed costs are pretty minimal for managing a gigantic stable coin. So I think that is a really attractive business. Super high margin. It's very, very predictable relative to coin. which is extremely volatile with crypto markets. And so it's much easier to forecast their revenue, which I think is, I think Wall Street's kind of like that. The second thing is that everyone knows the Stablecoin regulation is coming. And to the extent that Stablecoin regulation does arrive,

it's very likely, in my mind, to favor Circle over Tether, which are basically the only two Stapoint issuers who matter at this point. And I think it's very likely if you see regulation that basically says you need a banking charter to issue a U.S. dollar stable coin, that circle gets one and Tether it's like,

oh, you know, I don't know, we don't quite trust you. And they basically kind of get, you know, regulated out of existence, potentially. If that happens, and so third, okay, so there's a strong regulatory story there. I think that is relatively foreseeable.

And then third is just this perception that stable coins are growing, which, okay, maybe they didn't grow too much in the last couple years, but obviously it was a pretty, you know, choppy environment for a lot of reasons. But I think most people would expect that especially if you see stablecoin regulation,

stablecoin issuance is going to grow significantly over the next few years, and Circle is going to benefit from that just as much as anybody else is. So I think most people project that stable coins are not going to sit around at like, you know, the order of magnitude of 100 billion of stable coins. I mean, what is it, like 130, 40 total stable coins, something like that. I don't think most people think it's going to be sideways. So yes, interest rates are going to chop in half, but I think most people predict that stable coins are going to grow by more than 2x over

the period of time while rates are getting cut. That's my, here's, there's my bullcase for Circle. Yeah. I would agree with you, I think, if they ran the company more like Tether, like, in some ways they are kind of the coin base of stable coins where like, they're doing things the right Silicon Valley, U.S. regulated way, but they're in Boston. The downside is like, you know, the actual employee costs are massive, right? Like Tether may, like almost $200 million per employee, super bare bones operation.

And, you know, Quimator, sort of legit a bunch of layoffs. Like, you know, they have a very large staff. So they're actually, like, not extremely profitable. Even though you're right, on paper, hey, running a stablepoint business is actually, like, a great business. But I hear you on the regular rate bit, but, you know, the flip side is, you know, FTC is able to acquire, you know, a shitty bank and get a bank charter. Like, I don't see why I tell everyone would be able to, but maybe that's thinking too optimistically. Isn't it a different charter or something? There's, like, some weird thing that they want for stable coin issuers?

Is it just you own a bank charter? I don't know. In the bill? Does anyone know? Good question. We will have Jeremy all the future show to talk about it. Yeah. We did.

We did a Jeremy before. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No, Jeremy's the man. Yeah, I would also put myself in the, I don't think it will perform super well. Not because, yeah, not because of all the things you said. But I actually feel like because of it.

it's so easy to underwrite in terms of like pricing it, it like will get value like a reed or a bond fund and it won't get this like extravagant P.E ratio type of thing. Like it won't be treated as a tech company. It'll be treated like a reet almost, right? Like, which has like no premium right now in the current market. So like I just kind of feel like people might just view it as a bond fund. I don't know if that's true. I mean like it's like stable coins are one of the only things that tradify people who like crypto or like, look, I don't know about all the stuff. crypto stuff, but like dollars on a blockchain? I totally get you, but I totally get what you're saying, but like I just feel like people

will look at the cash flows of this and then they'll look at the cash flows of a reet and they'll say it like reminds them of it or reminds them of a bond fund. It's like it's almost, it's this kind of paradox people always talk about, which is like investing in company with no revenue, but like a story, people will give like valuation X. investment company that has story adjacent to that one and has a ton of revenue, it gets a valuation less than X, right? Like, you can always dream of this kind of like, oh, anything could happen once it doesn't have revenue, but once it's locked in the cage, it becomes a lot harder.

And in particular, public markets very, very rarely are, I think, as egregious as crypto, let's say, with the narrative running ahead of the usage or fees or revenue. And I think in this case, they're just literally going to be like, okay, this is this is kind of a bond fund. It's like, you know, it has like this like cash flow analysis that like looks like a very boring company that won't get a P very high. And like I think that's the problem. It's like it to me, it seems. I mean, it's not a problem. It's really amazing they're able to hopefully have this liquid diva.

I just am saying I think it looks too much like what a spreadsheet monkey. Here is my non-financial advice. for germany if there was a usDC equity token and it was airdropped to everyone who's ever used us dc i guarantee you the market cap on that token would be like four acts what it would be as a my favorite my free my favorite favorite tweet today was someone pointing out that the market cap of bonk on salana is greater than spirit airlines after the the antitrust decision killed their market cap. Ah, okay.

Unfortunate, unfortunate. The cryptocurrency are very good at all in capital effectively. Yeah, that's right. As we've learned very well over the last few years. Let me tell you, yeah, the utility of bunk is clearly, clearly higher than those Spir Airlines. But I just, I just am trying to say, like, I think there is this Tradfai problem, which is like if you look, if you look to Tradfai, good luck with.

with your multiple. It's not good. It's like it needs to look like foreign or like a little bit. And it does circles business doesn't kind of doesn't look foreign. No, it sounds dumb, but it's just true. People want some,

they want, they want, they want to imagine. There's nothing imagine. Yeah. If you look foreign, you get a better. Yeah,

it's like you can stake your USDC and run a USC validator. I think that and then you get yield or so I don't know, you can tell a story. I'm all about that. Oh, Jeremy, if you're listening, we need that USDC staking to run the validator for USC.

USDC roll-up. USDC re-syncing roll-up. Post the data on Celestia. I think that is how you get to underbell for example. We got it. We got it. This I, I, nailed it.

I feel like we're about to get like hard retweeted by USTC bowl. You know that guy. Oh, yeah. I think that guy's to root. I thought that's his alt. Is that true? It's a lot of alts. It's hard to keep up.

Yeah, he has like 32. That's not, I do not. I don't, I don't have any alts because I don't like, giving myself schizophrenia. I think people who have alt, when you meet them in person, they're like, A, there's always the like, is anyone looking while I'm using my phone? And then there's the B, like, them worried about someone who has figured it out. And like, then they're, they're cage. It's like, I feel like there's just so much. There's so. Well, this is why we had court on the show last episode so that people would no longer speculate

that it was to ruin or myself or anyone else. it did kind of sound like Tyrone to be honest actually if I think about it just like with a little twang I feel like that that could have been Turin with a voice changer AI is just going to make it hard

for me to prove that that's true that's true so speaking of USC there was also some news this week about Tether there was a UN report about Tether talking about I think it was the casino underground banking report

which claimed that Tether was used for a lot of Southeast Asia based human trafficking and pig butchering scams. So actually, I'm in Singapore right now, and I was hearing a lot of people talk about these Southeast Asian like slavery fraud farms, where basically they will enslave people,

like literally kidnap and enslave them and get them to work on these, in these like fraud compounds. And basically they're not, you know, they're not allowed to go home until they work off their, whatever, slavery debt or something. And a lot of what they're doing is crypto romance scams. So they are just sitting there all day messaging people on telegram or whatever.

And, you know, like, when you get a WhatsApp message, it's like, hi, pick me up at four. And you're just like, what the, what's going on? These are people who are basically trying to get you into some kind of romance scam. They'll eventually tell you, hey, I'm, I'm, I'm, whatever, some beautiful woman from such and such place. And maybe men, too, I don't know. and I'm very successful and I made a lot of money through crypto and I love yield farming

and there's this great yield farm that you should try and they get you to send money to the and this is a huge thing and they make a lot of money doing it and apparently the most common asset they use is Tether and so the UN called out Tether

for being used I guess in these kind of scams I don't know that there's really that much that Tether can do about this kind of thing it seems like okay well if it's not Tether it's going to be Bitcoin or ether or whatever,

if anything, it's probably better they're using Tether because they can actually get frozen relative to other assets. But then on the other side, the other story about Tether was that Howard Lutnik,

who is the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, was on, I guess he was on CNBC the other day. And he basically said, like, yeah, Tether has all the money. We saw it. We managed a lot of their money, and it's all there.

So tough shit, Tether Truthers. So yeah, any Any reflections on tether, slavery, fraud, fraud rings, reactions? Love to see Tether Truthers eat it, you know? That's great. I don't know. I mean, I do wonder at a certain point. I feel like you have to put a expiry on your, on your predictions or your doom saying. And like, I feel like Tether Truthers have gotten a free ride basically since like 2017 on talking shit about Tether and like. I feel like some way to put a stick in the ground as to when you think the tether fraud will be revealed. Otherwise, you just sound insane. You know, it's like 9-11 truthers. Like, you know, it's been 20 years.

You haven't come up with any great, you know, fraud events yet. It just feels like these people shouldn't be able to get a free ride. As in terms of the Southeast Asia and money laundering stuff, you know, like the Laoshen and Cambodian borders are, I guess the most famous places for where these things are because people are like, I guess like Chinese mobsters or something like somehow. control these like brothels slash whatever. It's in the other, uh, FTX book. Number go down or whatever.

The other one, Zeke Fox. Number go up. Number go up. Um, he spends a bunch. He has a chapter covering this. Uh,

sorry. Yeah, I should have, whatever. You, you can, the spoiler is that number go down after number go up. That's the spoiler.

Uh, but, but I, I think the, The thing about this type of stuff is, like, if you look at it historically, it was kind of just done in USD before. Actually, people didn't even want to use room in before it. So it's almost like it's more in the open when it's done in Tether. So I don't know.

Like, obviously it's really bad and it's like ethically malicious and stuff. But I actually think it's probably more transparent that's happening than it was when it was done in cash. Yeah, to be clear, I mean, part of the. story was that... I'm not trying to say there's any... Yeah, yeah. Part of the story was that Tether and OKX both collaborated

to freeze $225 million that was connected to one of these funds. I don't think you could have done that. I don't think you could have done that. Nigerian prints email stamps, you know, wire me a money. Like, you know, this is going for a very long time. Yeah, gift cards.

Send me a gift card. Send me a gift card. Was that... Was that thing? Used to me. People would be like, if the IRS, you owe back taxes, you need send me $100. It was on gift cards.

It's a thing. I did not know this. Wow. No, no, it's a very, well, don't you remember all those, like, Bitcoin gift card companies? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. For a while. I mean, that whole market was bootstraffed off the fact that people were, like, trading gift cards. And some of the gift card demand was certainly illicit.

Yeah, just that's so bizarre. I've never seen that, like, gift card scams of, like, I don't know how you would convince somebody that you're a very important person and you need Amazon gift cards. that just you work with the tools you're given you know yeah no fair enough yeah exactly well USCTT I guess is a boon to both to pig butchers which is the name for you know these people who do these kind of romance scam type things and then it's also a boon to law enforcement so obviously kind of both sides are turbocharged I think in this new stable coin feature that we all live in so okay um next up on news so Vivekram Swami, friend of the podcast, who we had on an episode not too long ago talking about his campaign,

has unfortunately dropped out of the race. Well, unfortunately, unfortunately, depending on how you feel. He's dropped out of the race. I think Iowa primaries did not go his way. He was a pretty distant fourth behind. Trump, of course, who swept the primaries and then what's her names? Nicky Haley. What's his face?

Ronda Santos. Big face, yeah, Ronda Santos. Meatball Ron, they call him. Big face. He has a big face. Do you not believe he has a big face? I feel like his face is like very large and flat. I don't think I've never even thought about that.

That's what they call him Meatball Ron. Yeah, it's a meatball round. I had to really think about like he. That's what Trump sings from is Meatball Run. Because of the shape of his face or is there a meatball anecdote about him? It doesn't matter. I think, but I suspect it's, it just looks. Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, it's a good descriptor.

Since this is a podcast. Since the podcast about news speculation, I would love to the, I'd love to talk about, you know, Vivek almost immediately after dropping out, went to endorse Trump and like went to New Hampshire to go be in the, be on stage. what let's suppose he is a cabinet member or VP or what or whatever where do you think he ends up slotting up if say he's like joins he you know because he like folded this feels like a thing in poker he's folded and was like hey I'm just going to like team up with them oh totally totally yeah he's he folded his hand and then he's going to sit beside the chip leader and be like oh yeah you should you hear he should play this one uh it would be amazing if you were the VP pick, but there's almost no way he's going to be VP. Like, I think Trump... I feel like VP is pretty useless. I would rather it just be like a secretary of treasury.

I think if you were VP, I mean, I don't think you'd be Treasury. If he were VP, because Trump has so few actual opinions on policy, I think basically Vivek would set policy. And Trump would just be like, cool, yeah, that sounds great. Like, let's go on TV.

So I think it would actually be, I think you basically get Vivek policies in Trump rhetoric, if the Vague were VP, but I think there's almost no way he's going to be VP. He probably gets some kind of cabinet thing, and it's probably not going to be super interesting. Like FDA or something. Yeah, I was just saying, remember when Trump won in 2016, and there's a brief moment where people were like, oh, Bologi is going to run the FDA.

And I feel like this is like a very kind of perverted, you know, spiritual successor where it's like, it's not quite Bologi, but you know, got a little bit of that. You've got the biotech thing. It's not, you know, really 2016 anymore. But, you know, it's like, you know. Well, Bologi hates America, as you can tell. He didn't get to run the FDA. I don't think he was.

That's right. Well, he was planning to basically dismantle the FDA. And I think if you remember, like, when that, when the, the idea of him becoming head of the FDA was floated, he immediately deleted all of his Twitter history. And the only tweet he had left was, it was some tweet of like, don't argue to build the future. And it was basically like, okay, I got to flush out all my tweets where I'm like, to abolish the FDA. FDA is bullshit. FDA is a piece of shit. Because I think if he were to actually become head of the FDA, that would be his goal.

And I suspect the same would be true for Ramoswami if he were. But it would be more above board, I think, for Ramoswami than for aerology. Because I think he's been more outspoken in that regard. So it'd be interesting. I mean, the one thing is clear is that if Ramoswami has influence in a Trump presidency, I think that would be very good for crypto. That's pretty clear. Trump, it's hard for me to tell, actually,

how a Trump presidency would go for crypto right now. You're telling me those NFTs he's sold on Polygon aren't, aren't the real deal? I don't know that he even knows about them. That's the thing. Like, it's hard for me to tell. I would love a debate. I would love a debate host to ask Trump if he has ever used a wallet and or what RPC and

what they're in. I think the NFC and coins use that. I think the NFC. If the FD holders also get like a lunch or something or like one person gets a lunch with Trump. So like he must have some awareness of the trading cards, the trading card NFTs, you know, like, but yeah, I don't think he's ever. They maybe just told them their trading cards. Like it's possible they. Yeah.

He doesn't understand what NFTs are. No, no. I've watched the video. He goes like, buy my Trump FTs. You know, they're amazing. He knows their NFTs. Really? Yes.

You watched the video. Did you buy any Trump NFTs? I can't talk about that. Okay. No, sorry, no financial advice on the show. Wow, that was the first time, that was the first time you've done that in a while. I bought, and I'm embarrassed to admit this, to Trump NFTs. Which ones did you buy? Can we see those? You couldn't, you didn't know what you were getting. It was like a blind, like, you know, you purchased an NFT and then it gets run.

Oh, oh, you mentioned some. Okay. Yeah, you didn't buy a secondary market. I did not buy it on the second. What were they? What were they? What were they? one where he's throwing money in the air it's like raining money around him okay great what's the second one I forget the other thing it was just like him wearing like construction hard hat or something

that's really boring a construction hard hat okay wow this is this is very he's very exciting do you still hold them or do you sell them I hold one I was your believer

yeah you gotta hold Which one? I assume you kept the hard hat Because that's the one you keep, right? No, I think I sold the hard hat For roughly what I bought it for And I kept the money in the air Making Trump

Because I think that was slightly more rare Okay, okay It's like a zombie punk, you know It's yeah, you got the rare Trump I got the rare Trump You never let go of those Yeah, you got the rare Trump Okay, great

That's exciting Damn, wow I know That was my dirty secret, sorry Okay, so you do, okay, so Trump did the commercial for the NFTs, so I guess he does know what NFTs are. And Melania, of course, did NFTs as well, so it's like runs in the family. So yeah, I don't know. But then he's also been on record, at least in his last administration saying that a coin is bad and evil and he doesn't trust it and, you know, something, something, something.

And just a general just trust of new things, I think is kind of, you know, seems pretty central to his character. So that said, he's incredibly commercial. And if crypto people pay him, I'm sure he'll be like, great. I love crypto. Crypto is wonderful. So I don't know. Hard to say. Hard to say.

But right now, prediction markets are putting Trump as a frontrunner. He's edged out now over Biden. I think if you go to my favorite site, election betting odds.com, which aggregates a bunch of markets, including Betfair, Polymarket, which is a crypto prediction market. he is right now sitting at 43.2% to win the presidency, Biden at 32.6. So right now there's not a huge edge, but significant edge to Republicans

potentially win. But of course, we're quite a ways out, so there are a lot to change between now and then. Anyway, I don't know, those are kind of all the interesting stories. We are anything else that you guys want to chat about before we wrap for the week? this might be one of the first quarter of episode. Yeah, we were just lamenting that there's, that,

that what we're actually excited about. And I was saying that, like, there's not a ton that I'm excited about right now. What are you guys excited about? Tweet at us. Talk to us. No, I was asking three of you. I was not asking the audience. I was asking the three of you.

I thought you were speaking to the audience directly. No, no. What are you guys excited about? So I asked this question to the audience. There were a few topics that people wanted us to talk about, but we wanted to do separate shows for them. So we're probably going to do a show on, parallel EVMs, we're going to definitely do a show of modularity.

There are a few other things that people were clamoring about. What about the three of you? What are you guys excited about this year? Or right now? I want some more, given that there's a now, now the Solanophone has reanimated. Emerged. I want more of those like banana phone, salonophone memes,

like the ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, salonism. That's what you're excited about? a bunch whenever it came out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought that was hilarious. I'm excited to see more of the banana phone, salonophone memes because now they're going to be more as we learned.

Also, talk about a recovery, right? Like, weren't they going to stop, like, if I remember correctly? And then all of a sudden, like, it was bonk. It was bonk that brought back salonophone. Bonk and then the chain of airdrop. Right. And the chain of airdrops. So what happened was the salonophone was not popular.

There was a huge amount of unsold inventory. And then as Bonk and other things started air-dropping tokens to these phones, it really went nuts once the value of the bonk that was air-dropped to each Solano phone exceeded the cost of the phone. And then people were just buying them not only for the arbitrage because you could buy the phone from less than the crypto on the phone, but based on the expectation of future airdrops. And then every single Salatophone sold out instantly. And now Solano phones back. Well, the Solano phones on secondary markets are going for, they retail for $1,000, and they're going on secondary markets on eBay for like 3 to 4,000. So just the value of all those airdrops and the bonk and all that other shit on the phone is worth way more than the actual phone. But the new phone is supposed to be half the price.

So the new phone is projected to be $450, I believe. It's $4.50. Yeah, they've taken three orders. They got to find out. There's a referral system. I imagine there's going to be points involved at some point. So, you know, they're sick. Just juicing at those points.

Okay. Nice. Nice. There's going to be yield farming, you know. It'll be great. Yeah. No one is going to claim that a phone is a security. Just because, like, how could you?

I mean, I think the ultimate growth plan is figure out how to get this sold at Costco. Because have you guys seen all the stuff about the gold sales at Costco? What? Unreal. Costco started selling gold just directly, and it's like, there was some quarter recently it made up like 10% of revenue. Like they're selling so much gold to people. And I think like Costco is like the right distribution channel for this type of product. Does Costco also? I could be wrong in that percentage, but it was like a really, it was like the Bloomberg article was amazing on this like. It sold the $100 million in gold last quarter. Yeah. Is it selling like gold bars?

or what are they selling? Yeah. One ounce gold bars. Yeah. Do they buy the gold back? It's like as much as cash apps, Bitcoin. Like it's like similar order of magnitude. So it's like,

what is the margin that Costco takes on selling gold? I mean, zero, right? It's wholesale. I'm sure it's hot. And they monetize the membership. And that's why people want to buy their gold. You're getting great,

great execution. But I think, I think this is great for the Solanophone because you know, Costco's not paying for their drops. Yeah. Here's the question.

Will Costco buy the gold back? So can you speculate using Costco where you basically buy gold through Costco? Oh, is Costco like an AMM? Yeah. Hold on it and then sell it back to Costco

or is it like a one-way flow where they're just letting people buy gold? You can probably return it and you can use it to hedge, you know, right, and buy a bunch of gold from Costco.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, I think the salonafone at Costco, because Anatoly is like Costco Dad. They could literally make like the Costco Dad memes. And that shit would sell out.

And I kind of, I kind of think that's the demographic. That's where you got to go. You got to sell the Salonophone at Costco. That's my, that's my, that's my hot, hot growth hack. And you, the new Trump phone. This is why. This is why Tarun does, yeah, this is why Tarun does governance simulations

and not growth hacking. Yeah, yeah, you know, whatever. But I do think this $100 million a gold thing was crazy because all these people I knew who were like, oh, Bitcoin's so dumb, then later told me they bought gold at Costco. And I was like, interesting. This is like a funny...

Okay, tell me who is the demographic of people you know who are buying gold at Costco. Indian people. Indian people are buying gold all the time. So I feel like that's not, that's just like a convenience thing. It's just like the closest place. But in particular,

this fact that there's no fees. I see. I see. Okay. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. But my point is like the salonafone being this like air drop thing,

I feel like this is the, there's so much mean. But they buy the gold though with a, with an eye towards like selling it or flipping it. Let's stop. I'm going to cut the Costco gold thing because this. This is not about crypto in any way. Robert, what are you excited about?

What are you excited about in crypto? I am excited. You're not cutting this from the edit. No, I'm not cutting for the edit. I'm just cutting this thread. I'm cutting this thread. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah.

I'm excited for things. One is restaking, and two are the myriad different point systems turning into tokens. Okay. Straight forward. Tom, what are you excited about? By the way, I'm secondly excited about those. I think there's going to be more AVS's than there will be roll-ups.

There would more AVS than potentially. Yeah, more picks and shovels than and users. Well, it's more that like I think roll-up liquidity fragmentation naturally will lead to some amount of consolidation. Like people mean like the UX is going to be worse and like things like that. So there's like some caring capacity than a roll-ups. But I do think things that need. security, whether it's Oracle's weird new cryptographic mechanisms, bootstrapping, all these identity things. I think there might actually, there's a possibility there's more of those than

the set of roll-ups conditional and liquidity fragmentation. And for the record, an AVS is something that uses restaking to get its security. That's what an AVS is. Okay. Don what are you excited about? I'm going to sound kind of boring, but actually, I'll do too. I do think the tether story is pretty compelling. I think even it was, I'm totally blanking. Oh, Howard Loddenick, when he was on CNBC, he was talking about the fact that like, yeah, Americans don't really need stable coins, maybe they really want stable coin. But he's like, yeah, if you live in Turkey, if you live in Argentina, if you live in Venezuela, this is a godsend. And this is like an incredible product. And so I think like overall it just tells us great story about crypto.

It's not really the story that maybe Satoshi wanted or people kind of envisioned. But like it is just kind of delivering like raw pragmatic utility to people and making their lives better. And like I think that's a great story. And I think it's a great stepping stone towards building something better. It's sort of like, you know, shoot, what's the phrase? worse is better. This is kind of the same kind of philosophy of like, it's a very pragmatic approach to like getting this in the hands of people

versus, you know, bickering about where your, you know, roll up is going to like post its data. Like this is actually just kind of delivering on the promise. So I really love this kind of the story about it. And I would see more being built on there in 2024. And the flip side is just I love the crypto casino stuff. I just think it's like so interesting that this has been something that people have been trying to do and then they've had sort of blips,

shining through of minor successes throughout the entire history of crypto. And now we're kind of starting to see like this thing actually, you know, take flight and real traction and real volumes going through these things. Again, I think this is hopefully a stepping stone towards a more open, transparent, fair, you know, eye gaming environment. But it feels like, hey, there's at least something here and people are building and something that people want to use. And that's sort of a great first step towards building sort of that ideal outcome.

What was the number one success story right now? Well, it depends. I mean, arguably it would be stake if you consider it sort of a crypto casino because they do take some crypto deposits. They're gigantic, like an acceptable billion dollars in gross revenue. But, you know, roll bid is pretty solid. Stake is or shuffle is pretty solid. So there are some decent players that feels like we're kind of in the maybe like Bifenex, bid mix era of this genre.

And we're kind of waiting to see how to sing matures. What does it need to grow? technology or legal clarity or better stable coins that can't rug get rug? Wait, better stable coins that can't. You think, uh, as in like they, they, do they have to only use tether? Cause like, I feel like, I feel like for a lot of these casinos, they basically can't use some of they can't. UCC is probably, I think some of them do use UCC because they're all licensed, right?

This is not, um, you know, truly. I remember the UstC terms of service, which we've talked about in the show a long time ago. I'm pretty sure that USCC terms of service restrict gambling. Oh, really? Okay. Maybe I'm mistaken. Yeah. There's like all this weird stuff that USC has like this long terms of service.

It's like no debt settlement, no this, no that. And one of them, I'm pretty sure it's gambling. Interesting. Yeah, I'm not quite sure then. I think a lot of these, you know, have different flavors. Some of them are truly appealed to crypto people. And that is obviously a somewhat limited segment. maybe that will grow over time or maybe you can go mainstream from there.

Some of them, you know, like, you know, Drake live streams for stake. And so like, it's obviously hyper mainstream. I'm hoping there's something in between of having sort of the nice U.S. that people like of a mainstream application, but maybe using crypto under the hood or also frankly, like not relying on, you know, totally opaque centralized games to actually run the business logic. I'm hoping there's a little bit more transparency around that at some point. But or the really is moving to like a non-agostodial model will be nice. But for right now, I mean, it's kind of like the market is speaking and people are okay with kind of the situation as is.

I mean, Drake has inspired meme coins off one. That's true. We've come full circle. We've come full circle. That's true. I saw some Anita Max Win stickers on the street the other day. That's exactly. Yeah.

Things move faster. Yeah. It is. I feel like, I feel like, yeah, the casinos are missing out. on the meme coins. Yeah, okay, so sorry, just to follow up here because I wanted to make sure that I was getting this right, fact-checking myself here

on Circles terms of Service, because I'd just like to remind myself and everyone here how this works. So there are certain things called prohibited transactions in Circles terms of service. They include anybody who's in a restricted territory, which I think is like sanctioned countries, so you're not allowed to hold USC.

you cannot use USC to buy any weapons, including firearms, ammunition, knives, no controlled substances, including narcotics, prescription drugs. If you have a prescription, you're not allowed to use it with USC. Related paraphernalia, steroids, blah, blah, blah.

Just imagining all those guys at Equinox who are just like, oh, man, I need my fix and like I can't send USC. Gambling activities, including but not limited to, sports betting casino games horse racing dog racing dog racing games that may be classified as gambling i.e. poker or other activities unless they are authorized by the jurisdiction which the user's base as well as a jurisdiction which transaction takes place and provide any such activities

comply with all applicable law okay well that's why they have hamster racing um to get around to use the students of service yeah yeah well okay so horses are prohibited hamsters are allowed they're not they're not explicitly disallowed i'll say that got it got it um no money laundering surprise prize uh no Ponzi schemes paramed schemes or MLMs uh no goods or services that infringe on copyright so apparently you can't you can't spend us DC to buy what is it Obama sonic enu 10 or whatever the apparently that's not allowed probably even Anita max win like I don't I don't even know if there must be someone who there's one no credit repair services or other services that present consumer protection risks no court order payments no

settlements, no tax payments or tax settlements, no counterfeit goods. What can you use? No tax payments? Yeah. No tax payments. No court order payments, structured settlements, tax payments, or tax settlements. I feel like the U.S. government would be super excited if people would pay their taxes in USC.

Why would they want that? I don't know. It would arrive instantly. Yeah. All the benefits of not having to wait for the bank. I mean, I don't think. they want, well, you can't pay your taxes in treasuries either, can you? You should be able to do that too, but that's a complex backend process and it's,

who knows how to do it? Yeah. Well, I mean, UCC is effectively private money, right? So obviously they don't want you paying in like some weird. I mean, whatever, it doesn't matter. It is, it is true that 99.999% of the usage of USC probably falls into one of those. I think so, right? Yeah.

hilarious. And then the last category. What the fuck do people use USC for that doesn't call the last category is any other matters, goods, or services from time to time we communicate to you that are unacceptable. So basically like they'll, by the way, this is not, you can't do this. So fuck you. Has Circle ever enforced that ever? That's the thing.

I'm sure they haven't, right? This is all written by lawyers. So I doubt they've ever enforced any of these things. But technically, FYI, Circle has the most restrictive, um, uh, terms of terms of service of any stablepoint that I've seen. And it largely is unchanged for the last time I remember this, which was like two years ago. This basically looks the same. So, yeah, the circle is actually the most restrictive by terms of service, which is probably

why it's not used in exchanges. Does tether even have a terms of service? I'm sure they do. I'm sure they all do. But tether is nowhere near as enumerative. This is very philosophical. You can obviously be a tether user without ever having seen a terms of service. from Tether.

It's true for USC too, right? Like someone said UCC, yeah. Unless it's on chain somewhere. I don't know if they put this in their smart client. I mean, they claim that you abide by these terms of service if you hold the token. So it's kind of like, you know, I'm sure that obviously these things have never been tried in court and like, you know, I'm sure they would not hold up because receiving USC in a wallet by no means anyway. Like it's almost like, oh, you installed our video game. therefore you are bound by our terms of service,

even though you never signed anything or even acknowledged it. Courts have largely viewed that as being non-binding and kind of bullshit. I assume the same would probably be true with a stable coin that just like arrives in your wallet and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm not pound. Yeah, he does support USC.

So if any circle lawyers are listening to the podcast, you can go shut them down. Oh goodness. Well, no, no, no, because it says gambling if it's not allowed in the jurisdiction and by the user and by the blah, blah, blah. So if shuffle is compliant, then it's fine, I guess. But for roll bid, it might not be if roll bid is not compliant,

which I understand that it's like kind of curious there. So let me disclose after reading the source code. There are some terms in the USDC contract code themselves, which I can summarize very quickly. It simply just says copyright center, 2019, permission is hereby granted, free of charge to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation file. to deal in the software without restriction, including without limitation, to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute sublicense, and or sell copies of the software, and to permit persons to whom the software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions, and then there's like no conditions.

So the only terms in the actual USDC token contract themselves, say go wild. Apparently you're also not allowed to hold USC if you're under 18. so I'm sorry to all the miners that are also listening to this podcast. But miners with an O. Miners with a O. Not minor with them. Yeah. Because those crypto miners.

Crypto miners are like crypto miners. I feel like that's a great shirt to wear the content. That does not sound like a good shirt to wear a conference. Yeah. I don't know about it would be supposedly pro-I. Yeah. I would very strongly not encourage you to put that on a shirt and arrive at a crypto conference. You will probably get tricked out.

I said crypto miners, not cryptos, not cryptoconors. My Nors. Maybe I should have got the ordering correctly. I think either way, I would discourage you from making that shirt and distributing that shirt out of concern for you as a friend. Okay. Well, you know, don't use USC for under 18. That's all right. This is why this is why Tarone is not your growth hacker, but is your governance, your governance advisor. I, you know, what do you? I, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's different types of growth. All right, great. Okay, I think with that, we're ready to sign off. Thank you, everybody, and we'll be back next week.