Weekly Roundup 04/26/25 (DEBTBox fallout, DoJ vs Samourai Wallet, IMF on Bitcoin flows) (EP.523)

This episode discusses significant developments in the cryptocurrency and financial sectors, focusing on legal battles, innovations, and regulatory shifts impacting the industry.

1. The DEBTBox scandal led to significant repercussions for the involved SEC attorneys, highlighting issues within the agency.
2. The arrest of the founders of Samurai Wallet marks a major legal confrontation regarding cryptocurrency privacy tools.
3. Hong Kong's approval of bitcoin ETFs represents a notable step in cryptocurrency acceptance, albeit with regional restrictions.
4. The episode underscores ongoing debates about the balance between innovation in financial services and regulatory oversight.
5. Detailed insights from the IMF report illustrate the varying degrees of bitcoin adoption across different regions.

1: Introduction

Hosts Matt Walsh and Nick Carter introduce the episode's topics, focusing on major events in the cryptocurrency world. They mention the Celtics game they attended and briefly discuss their sports affiliations. Matt Walsh: "So you have roots. You know, you're really from here. Yes. I have no allegiance to any place."

2: Main Discussion

The hosts discuss significant issues including the DEBTBox scandal, the legal challenges facing Samurai Wallet, and the implications for financial privacy and regulation. Nick Carter: "These guys are facing 20 years in jail for facilitating money laundering."

3: Market Movements and Innovations

Discussion of recent trends in cryptocurrency markets, new technology introductions, and significant regulatory changes affecting the sector. Matt Walsh: "Morgan Stanley, they're reportedly close to allowing their brokers to pitch an allocation to the bitcoin ETFs on a solicited basis."

4: Global Impact

Analysis of the IMF's report on bitcoin's cross-border flows and its implications for global economic dynamics. Nick Carter: "This paper, they look at local bitcoins data and they look at chainalysis data, and they try and determine which countries have the highest bitcoin flows relative to GDP."

1. Stay informed about changes in cryptocurrency regulations to better navigate potential impacts on investments.
2. Consider the implications of financial privacy tools and understand their legal risks.
3. Evaluate the potential of bitcoin ETFs as part of a diversified investment strategy.
4. Monitor global developments in cryptocurrency adoption to identify emerging markets.
5. Assess the stability and reputation of platforms and wallets before committing funds.

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:

CIV's new stablecoin survey What happened with Runes? Lawsuit against the SEC’s dealer rule New capital gains tax proposal How would taxing unrealized gains work? Two SEC lawyers leave in connection with the DEBT Box scandal The founders of Samourai wallet are arrested and charged by the DoJ Morgan Stanley close to permitting Bitcoin ETF to be solicited by their brokers Hong Kong Bitcoin ETFs go live Block is building Bitcoin mining hardware Visa’s stablecoin analytics dashboard Bitcoin Sign Guy sells his sign TikTok ban reactions Choke Point 2.0 moves to fintechs Content mentioned in this episode:

Visa’s stablecoin dashboard IMF, A Primer on Cross-Border Bitcoin Flows FDAS Q1 Signals Report Sponsor notes:

Layer-1 Landscape In Coin Metrics' State of the Network issue 256, we explore the diverse landscape of Layer-1 blockchains

People

Matt Walsh, Nick Carter

Companies

Castle Island Ventures, Samurai Wallet, Talos, Cloudwall

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Matt Walsh
Brought down by bad mortgage investments. Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International group AIG $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the.

Nick Carter
Two mortgage giants that have been threatened. By the housing crisis. The bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and. All of a sudden people start to worry.

Matt Walsh
So out of this worry, we have something called a bitcoin. Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to on the brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

Nick Carter
And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by coinmetrics. And here is the metrics minute. For today's metrics minute, we're looking at layer one stats. Among major l one blockchains, Solana has the shortest average block time at 0.4 seconds, while bitcoin has ten minute block times.

Despite recent fee spikes due to congestion, Solana's fees remain at around $0.01. Bitcoin average fees spiked to $124 per transaction with the launch of runes during bitcoin's fourth halving block, but have since dropped at 25, while Bitcoin and Ethereum l one active addresses have remained stable at respectively. Unique wallets on Solana speaked at 1.2 million in March daily. Major stablecoins have gained traction across all ones, with Tron leading tether usage and Solana stable coins showing the lowest median transfer values. $10 for USDC, $60 for USDT.

That's your metrics minute. Alright, so we are recording this in. Our podcast studio in the bowels of the office. This is a great studio. We got noise canceling foam on the walls.

Matt Walsh
No, no video though. If the audio sounds incredible, that's why. It's because we got the foam. We're making up for the air conditioner. Episode 2 hours off.

Yeah, so we went to the Celtics game last night and they got beat by the heat. That was terrible. Well, I'm not a big basketball guy, but I guess I'm technically a heat fan now. You can't be one of these guys that moves to a city and just starts rooting for that team. You can't be that guy.

Nick Carter
What, so I have to be a Wizards fan for the rest of my life? Yeah. No Washington Bullets. That's your fan? I don't want to be a Washington Bullet Wizards fan.

Matt Walsh
I just. These people that move to new cities and then just start rooting for that team. I just don't get it. You don't understand. I'm an itinerant person.

Nick Carter
So you have roots. You know, you're really from here. Yes. I have no allegiance to any place. All right, fair enough.

Matt Walsh
But the garden was rocking. There were not a lot of heat fans at that place. I was the only one. Yeah. And I'm not even a real heat fan.

Nick Carter
It was cool, though. It was a really good kind of an upset. It was a. Yeah, it was a big upset. I think this might go seven games.

Matt Walsh
This series is. Yeah, that was great. We saw CJ Stroud was sitting a couple rows in front of us. Saw CJ Stroud. Yeah.

Not a ton of celebrity Donnie Wahlberg. Yeah. I thought there'd be more celebs there. Yeah, they probably come out a little bit later in the. Not for game two.

The NBA post season is like two months long. Too long. Yeah, it's way too long. A lot happened this week. We had some good podcasts.

Yes. Wyatt did his inaugural castle island on the bring podcast. Getting good reviews on that. So Wyatt had his debut. Wyatt's an investor on our team.

He sat down with Alexei from build on bitcoin Bob to talk about the bitcoin layer two landscape. So that was a good episode, and you did well. How do you pronounce this? So it's bvnk, but is it bank? Do you just pronounce it bank or is it bivunk?

It's. I just call it bvnk. It's. If you look at it, though, and you flip the v upside down, it is bank. It looks like it could be bank.

Yes. But it's really bvunk. So I sat down with Chris Harms, who's the co founder of BVNk, and they are a global stablecoin company. So they're an infrastructure company that sits underneath companies that want to offer on and off ramps and payment services around stablecoins. So really fascinating episode.

Chris has been in the stablecoin space for a long, long time. Started to really see the opportunity set in the context, first of crypto trading, just moving stable coins around on venues. So enjoyed that episode. We have so much stablecoin content coming your way here. We can do the reveal.

Here we are doing a comprehensive study on stable coins. Yeah. So you know how there's a lot of on chain data now? There's tons of these dashboards. In fact, we have a new one to talk about today.

Nick Carter
There's all this on chain data. Okay. This many wallets that hold stable coins, all these active addresses, all this transaction volume. We know that. But who is using them and where and how and on what blockchain with what wallet?

We're getting to the bottom of it. We are going to be getting to the bottom of it over what, the next three, four months? Yeah. Don't hold us to a specific date because these things take a lot of time, but we're doing a real quantitative, on the ground survey with one of the best survey companies that exists in five key emerging market geos that are highly adopted for stablecoins. And we're going to tell you what they're using stablecoins for.

What they're using tether Tron really for. I love it. What are they doing with Tether Tron? I love it. So we'll report back to you on that soon.

Matt Walsh
All right, so more to come on that front. Busy deal week. Yeah, for sure. First up is Castle Island Portco Talos, the leading institutional trading platform for digital assets. They acquired Cloudwall, a risk management platform.

Congrats to the Talos team. If you're a institution and you're doing trading technology and you're not using Talos, you're out of your mind. So congrats to Talos. Next one is runes Dex. This is a bitcoin runes exchange.

They raised $2 million from kinetic and mechanism. So runes. We were excited about runes, but runes were a flop. Or what do we like runes? What's the winning rune?

Nick Carter
What's the best rune? So the fees on bitcoin after the having. Oh, I guess happy having occurred. Did bitcoin's price double, like. No, it almost halved.

Matt Walsh
Yeah, it's going. It almost, yeah, it's kind of the opposite. So runes launched. And I assume that that's why the fees on the bitcoin network were exorbitant. So I didn't even try to get involved in the runes.

Nick Carter
What's the best rune? I don't know. I don't know. What are they? I couldn't tell you either.

Matt Walsh
Are they just meme coins? And where do you. Where do you see them? I don't know. I guess they're like new brc twenties.

Nick Carter
But, yeah, the whole thing is very indecipherable to me. If you know what the best rune is, let me know. If someone could explain this rune situation to us, it would be great. Greatly appreciative. Well, there's a Dex to trade them now called ruins Dex.

Matt Walsh
So congrats to the Ruinsdex team. Next up we have superlogic, an enterprise loyalty platform. There is 7.6 million from American Express Ventures and Chainlink. Then we have a company called Prime Intellect. This is a decentralized AI platform that raised 5.5 million from distributed global coin fund and collab currency.

Nick Carter
Then we have authentic, that's with an o. They're building an Eigen lair ecosystem. They raise 4 million from finality capital Partners, Briar Capital, Coinbase and bankless Ventures. Authentic, that's a good name. I like that one.

Matt Walsh
Next one is Turnkey. It's a wallet infrastructure company that raised $15 million from lightspeed faction and galaxy. Then we have Tevaira, a blockchain gaming company that raised 5 million from laser Digital, Hashkey and Fanbushi. This is a fund announcement here. So founders Fund, Peter Thiel's fund has taken a stake in alliance, which is a crypto focused venture fund.

Nick Carter
Big congrats to the team over there at alliance. Next up we have infinigods, a blockchain gaming company. There is 8 million from Pantera. Then it's Moso, it's a crypto reward site that has a browser extension. Sounds like honey back in the day.

Matt Walsh
Yeah, they raised 2 million from symbolic capital P, two ventures and coinlist. And lastly we have Puffverse, a blockchain gaming company. There is 3 million from Animoca, Sky, Mavis, Spartan and Hashke. Alright, so busy deal week there. Let's get into some of the news.

So on the lawsuit front, this is kind of interesting. Blockchain association and the crypto Freedom alliance of Texas have sued the SEC over their new dealer rule. And this dealer rule would essentially define a number of open source blockchain protocols as security dealers, which is totally unworkable. So imagine having a. A smart contract that is now a quote unquote securities dealer and needs to comply with the SEC.

But it's just a piece of open source software. It's not like there's a person there that can actually produce dealer statements or whatever type of filings you need. So I like this lawsuit because this rule just actually makes no sense. You're introducing a rule that is structurally impossible to comply with. It would be like having TCP IP have a reporting requirement.

And like, who do you go to? There are a lot of strange proposals from our dear leaders this last week. Capital gains tax. Yeah. You think was that 46% capital gains.

Proposal from the president this week is 44.6%, plus an additional 25% on unrealized gains. That's actually even more psychotic. The unrealized part. How would you even do that? So if you're a startup, so let's say you found a company, you have founder shares.

Your cost basis is essentially a dollar, and the company gets to a hundred million dollar valuation in the private markets. That's all. Just private. It's not that. That's cash in your pocket.

So you own 50% of that company. So you have $50 million and then you're getting taxed 25% on the gain. I don't understand that. So then you are forced to sell the company. You sell the company or you give the shares to the government.

Well, how? How would that actually even work? It makes entrepreneurship illegal. No one would start a business. Yeah, I don't.

So did anyone talk about that? If you get a trillion dollar airdrop with very little liquidity, do you owe billions of dollars on that? Maybe that's the game here. People are just gonna start creating airdrops. I don't know.

If we could just figure out that that doesn't work in 30 seconds, you would think that other people in our government would be able to understand that. Well, elsewhere in SEC, clownish SEC news, dare I say two SEC lawyers have resigned in the wake of the debtbox fiasco. Michael Welsh and then Joseph Watkins. These guys were fairly junior, is that fair to say? Michael Welsh seems like he's junior.

Joseph Watkins maybe the next rung up. But they were trial attorneys on this detbox case. And the story that, I guess this is in a bunch of different outlets, including Bloomberg, but the story is that the SEC went to them and told them to resign, otherwise they would be fired. But their names are out there. I mean, they might as well have just fired these guys.

And I guess if there were trial attorneys on this case, obviously this case is one of the biggest fiascos in the history of the SEC. The SEC fabricated evidence against this company and the judge was furious, sanctioned the agency, so they had to step down. But you think it goes beyond just two individuals here, right? Yeah. I mean, surely this isn't a decision made unilaterally by these two SEC employees.

Nick Carter
Like this is part of their strategy. You have to imagine that leadership was aware of the tactics around deadbox. So if you're Michael Welch or Joseph Watkins at this point, what incentive do you have to be quiet? The SEC has already put your name out there. You're completely unhirable.

Matt Walsh
No one can touch these guys. It's not like they're going to get a job in the private sector at a reputable law firm. They're the bad boys of the SEC here at this point. But you would think that between the two of them, they would come out and say, no, we were instructed to do this by the SEC general counsel office, or however this all happened, because this was clearly more than just two rogue employees. Well, they might have signed a fat non disparagement clause, presumably, do you think?

I don't know. What. Usually those non disparagements come with some sort of a monetary thing. Right now, the SEC is on the hook to pay for debt boxes, legal fees, and disgorgements. So I don't think the SEC is going to write Michael Welch and Joseph Watkins, the bad boys of the SEC, a fat check on their way out.

Nick Carter
Well, Michael and Joseph, if you want to come on and explain the innards of the SEC to us, you're welcome to appear on the show. Maybe they should, because right now, these guys, the reputation is in the mud right now. But maybe there's more to the story. So, big, big story this week, the founders of Samurai Wallet were arrested in Portugal, I guess one of them was. In Portugal and was sent back to the US, maybe it sounds like.

And charged with. With running an unlicensed money transmitting service and facilitating money laundering. And I have to say, the facts of this case do not look good. So why don't we set this up? What is samurai wallet?

Samurai wallet is. It's existed for a fair amount of time, I think, since maybe 2015, 2016. Basically a service to build privacy in your transactions by engaging in collaborative mixing with other bitcoin users. The founders of the wallet did make money from this. They charged premium fees in order to obtain better mix ins.

Basically, there were really two privacy preserving wallets in the bitcoin space, Wasabi and samurai. This is one of the bigger ones. They probably did the most amount of volume, from what I know. And frankly, after the tornado cash case, given the facts of that case and the way that one went, this one looks pretty bleak, I have to say. Yeah.

Matt Walsh
So it's essentially a wallet mixing service. They're being charged with running an unlicensed money transmitting service, which. That one's kind of interesting. I'm kind of interested to see what the case looks like on that front, because they weren't, as far as I can tell, they weren't taking possession and control of the underlying assets. So they're essentially putting software out there.

But the second charge of facilitating money laundering, there's no doubt that they were. Yeah. I mean, the question, I guess if they did, they knowingly facilitate the mixing of illicit funds. And based on their tweets, which were pretty brazen, they were right. It is interesting, though, on the first point, because I believe it was non custodial, they were just creating a software layer where users could opt into making these collaborative transactions.

Yeah, I'm no money service business expert, but the fact that they did not take possession of customer money, I think, is critical to being a money transmitter. But maybe that's a secondary point. These guys are facing 20 years in jail for facilitating money laundering. Known bad actors using this software. Yeah, I mean, the DOJ included DM's from the samurai wallet founders to folks using the service who were admitting that they were engaged in basically illicit transactions.

Yeah, I don't have a ton of sympathy for these guys. I know there's going to be people on the Twitter platform that are talking about, hey, this is open source software. But these guys, these guys really knew what they were doing. Yeah, I mean, look, there's no love lost between me and the samurai Walleye guys at all. I am disturbed by the Biden administration's continued criminalization of financial privacy.

Nick Carter
At the same time, it does appear that they have them dead to rights on this. Yeah. So these guys are facing, like I said, 20 years in jail. So this is a pretty serious charge. All right, let's move on to some happier news here.

Matt Walsh
Morgan Stanley, they're reportedly close to allowing their brokers to pitch an allocation to the bitcoin ETF's on a solicited basis. So this, of course, means that they can go out and they can say, put this in your account, as opposed to just waiting for customers to come and say, I want that bitcoin ETF in my account. So it's actually a big deal. It'll open up a very large network here. These are professional salespeople.

At the end of the day, sooner this happens, I think the better it is for bitcoin as a whole. Yep. Also on the bitcoin ETF front, Hong Kong has approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin ETF's, although it appears that that's still not available to mainland Chinese. Yeah. So what, Hong Kong, their market is probably.

What about the size of, like, the Boston market here? It's pretty small market. Well, I remember doing analysis of the size of all the public securities markets, and I think Hong Kong was actually one of the biggest ones. But that's because it's chinese capital, as far as I can tell. So I don't exactly know how that works.

But, yeah, I'm not expecting this to be a material impact, but it's obviously good to see. I think that you'll see Hong Kong approve Ethereum ETF's before the US does. I mean, what it does show to me is that there is now this regulatory race. Regardless of whether the SEC was dragged kicking and screaming into proving the bitcoin ETF, other regulators have woken up and realized, okay, we need to. What's our response here?

Nick Carter
So it did catalyze action overseas, which is good. So did you see that block, which is Jack Dorsey's company, formerly known as Square, they're apparently building a bitcoin mining system. They have a three nanometer chip. I was shocked by this. Yeah, we'd known this was in the works, but it was very surprising.

I mean, it's a tough and very competitive industry. And as we know, with the having, it's an industry that shrinks and block. Is a kind of a payments business here. This is kind of surprising. They do have a hardware wallet, which we've talked about on this pod.

Matt Walsh
I think it's a very good one. But they are getting into hardware now. Yeah. Not what I expected. Well, I guess, you know, square, they were known for their terminal.

The terminal was great. Did you ever have one of those little chip reader things? No, because I was never, I never ran a food truck. Oh, well, I did not either. But, yeah, you know, I used to have these, I used to get these gift cards, and it was great because you could just swipe them on the terminal.

Nick Carter
So you had a terminal just so you could ingest gift cards? I had a terminal because I just started to stack up all these gift cards because I had some people in my family that would give me like a $25 prepaid card for, like, my birthday or whatever, and I would just have them for years. They would be sitting there. So I said, let me get one of these terminals, and then you repatriate. I've never heard that before.

That's interesting. So just breaking, as we went to press here on this podcast, visa was so inspired by the chart I made. Apparently the chart heard around the world that they made an entire on chain analytics dashboard for stablecoins. Wow. And it's pretty good.

Dare I say it is pretty good. So visa on chainanalytics.com has a ton of stablecoin data on it. This is pretty awesome. I love how much great stablecoin data there is. I love it.

The thing is that there's a lot of complexity with specifically transaction value. So everybody always wants to know what the actual number is like. Okay, what's the transaction value settled by stablecoins? No one actually knows the answer to that, but there are ways to filter it and make adjustments. So visa has made an effort here with Allium.

There's a lot of great dashboards. I'm going to give a shout out to Rwa XYz. I've been using their stuff recently. It's excellent. And you know what I found on there is the total number of wallets holding any kind of a stablecoin is rapidly approaching 100 million.

Matt Walsh
That's incredible. 100 million wallets holding some unit of a stable coin. Wow. Pretty awesome stuff. So visa is really at the forefront here.

We have some collaboration going on with them, too. We do stay tuned there. There's an interesting paper that came out this week which I want to draw your attention to, entitled a primer on bitcoin cross border flows, which is published by the International Monetary fund. IMF. Huh?

Nick Carter
IMF. Wow. This is actually a good paper. Wow. They don't always put out good papers at the IMF.

Yeah. Of the sort of Bretton woods institutions. I found historically that the World bank has been more favorable to crypto, and the IMF has been more hostile, and the BIS has been the most hostile. BIS is the one that has that big toad looking guy. Carson.

Carson. Yeah. So this paper, they look at local bitcoins data and they look at chainalysis data, and they try and determine which countries have the highest bitcoin flows relative to GDP and try and ascertain which factors covary with those flows the most. I'm not going to dive into the regression for you. I'm going to spare you that part.

But there's some interesting graphics, some good visuals in here. And basically, if you like the chain analysis geography of crypto report, which I personally love, this goes further than that and provides even more comprehensive data, and it shows you what the hotspots of crypto adoption, specifically bitcoin, are globally based on different data sets. It's kind of what we knew already. So we know that Southeast Asia is really the hotspot. Eastern Europe is really big turkey, Latin America, of course, Asia minor, West Africa, southern Africa, again confirms what we knew already.

But it's just interesting new, additional data. Really cool. Yeah, it's a good chart. We'll have to link to that in our newsletter. Um, did you see that the, uh, the bitcoin sign guy sold his sign.

Matt Walsh
So the buy bitcoin sign, that was famously held up behind then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen in a congressional testimony. It has been sold at auction for over $1 million down at pubkey. Yeah. Huge congrats to Christian. That's one of the most profitable memes of all time, I have to say.

Incredible. So I think he was an intern right on the hill when he did that, and he just scribbled, buy bitcoin, and he held it up behind her on, what, c span or something? And now he has a million dollars, and he's going to use it to build out his startup. So it's a venture round. I respect that.

Nick Carter
I mean, yeah. He's not just pocketing the money. He's building his company with it. Incredible. So, congratulations to Christian, and it looked like a fun night.

Matt Walsh
The guy that bought it looked like a character. Yeah. I remember watching this. I was on Twitter, and it was in July 2017. I think the price of bitcoin was, like, three or $4,000 at the time.

So it was good advice in terms. Of meme based financial advice. It was good advice, yes. And I sent Christian some bitcoin at that time. Sign guy.

Yeah. Because I was so fired up about it. And then later on, we became friends, climbed some mountains together. That's funny. So that you had not met him before that.

Nick Carter
No, I didn't know who he was. Sign guy. Love sign guy. Yeah. I remember people used to hold bitcoin signs back in 20.

Matt Walsh
1415 on college game day. Do you remember that? People used to put up the QR code, send me bitcoin, and people used to actually send them bitcoin. That was a better time. You know, a simpler time.

College campuses, you know, people were just getting together and partying. You know, it was a very different type of flavor than what we see in this day and age. Yeah. College campuses are not happy places these days. No, I don't want to go anywhere near a college campus.

No. Hey, did you see TikTok is being banned? Does that. Does that matter? Is there a crypto angle there?

Does it matter? I am shedding no tears for tick tock. I'm sorry. I'm just. I can't find it in me to be upset.

Nick Carter
It objectively is a propaganda tool. I know a lot of people are saying, oh, well, it's unconstitutional. There's nothing in the law that says you can ban tick tock as a slippery slope. They're gonna. No, dude.

Tick tock is objectively an arm of the CCP. I'm sorry. It just is. It's crazy. I downloaded TikTok and I had it on my phone for about ten minutes and then I took it up.

Matt Walsh
So this is not going don't happen. And it's just not good for the soul. No, it's not good for your brain. And what about reciprocity? So why can't us firms operate in China, but we can have TikTok and Prometheum here in the United States?

I don't get it. It's like we have this commitment to liberalism and openness and free speech, and our foreign adversaries abuse that. And they're happy to have their Internet companies, which are controlled, their proxy to the CCP, running riot in our country, spreading whatever narrative the CCP wants. And then our businesses can't even do business in China, so. Makes no sense.

Nick Carter
I am not at all concerned about this. In fact, I do support it, and I don't think it's a slippery slope to banning Twitter or whatever. That seems extremely far fetched to me. Completely. The.

Matt Walsh
You know, you. You have to get off a tick tock. I guess you should get on Farcaster and get on the on the brink channel. That's. Yeah.

Look, if you. If you're concerned about getting deplatformed on your social media site, just use the one that's on the blockchain, okay? You can't get deplatformed from the blockchain. Uh, some questions from our, uh, on the brink farcaster, Ian Turner, asked about air chat. What is air chat?

I don't know. Okay. I think it's a voice based social network. Do we need a channel on there? I can hardly manage the kind of two that we maintain.

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure. So we have David Morris hopping in. He did a good podcast that I listened to on Eigen lair in Athena, so that's worth checking out. Our Eigen laner, Eigen Lair and Athena. Time bombs.

Nick Carter
Did they deserve terra Lunaism? Yeah. So he had this guy, Zane Huffmanon, who's the CSO at block, and they talked about kind of how they're not terra Luna. There's a forbidden topic that I can't talk about because you don't want me to talk about it. Consensus.

Matt Walsh
Consensus related. Fill in the blanks.

Nick Carter
Adam says last week's episode didn't have a far cast a section. Don't forget about us. Yeah, no, we're not forgotten. Someone says stick to audio. We.

Matt Walsh
Yeah, we. We need to figure out the video thing, but I don't. I don't know. We have recorded the videos, they're just. Only.

We do have a channel, actually, on YouTube. Yeah. Okay. More to come on that. Oh, this is an important thing.

Nick Carter
You remember all that business about choke? .2.0 yes. And you remember how after that, I said it didn't end with crypto, it then moved on to fintechs and embedded finance? Right. We now have a lot of data about that.

Matt Walsh
Really? So the American Fintech Council came out with a letter basically saying that the FDIC, specifically, as opposed to the OCC or the Fed, has been extremely punitive towards fin banks that are the partner banks of fintechs. And there was a LinkedIn post, which I'll put in our show notes, that showed that banks dealing with fintechs, providing embedded finance, banking as a service, have a far, far higher rate of FDIC actions against them. And we anecdotally knew this. We know that the FDIC is taking this anti tech, anti crypto, anti fintech stance in a kind of a covert way.

Nick Carter
It's not like they've passed new rules. There's no explicit new guidance. It's just this kind of quiet campaign to disproportionately harass certain industry. And so banks that deal with fintechs have a far higher likelihood of facing an FDIC examination. So I consider this a slow burning scandal that nobody seems to care about.

But if you work in fintech, you know it's happening. Yeah, we need more coverage on this. Marty Gruenberg has just run amok on the american people. He is a very bad chairman. Very, very bad.

And presided over a culture, a bro culture at the FDIC, possibly worse. Tried to choke point out the crypto industry. That hasn't changed, by the way, and now he's come for the bank. So crypto is the tip of the spear for a lot of these crackdowns, and people don't seem to care about. It's the same with mining.

You know, the bitcoin miners got harassed by the Biden admin. Now they're going to do the same for AI data centers. Right? So it's the same thing. Like, you may not care about crypto, but you should care, because it's a sign of things to come, and it will eventually come for your industry, so you should care.

Matt Walsh
Right. All right, so in the reading list section, fidelity digital assets released their q one signals report this week. Really good. We'll put that one in our newsletter. But 23 pages of key metrics that matter in the digital asset space.

Really good report.

Nick Carter
And I think that is about it for the week. I think that's it for the week. Hopefully you get a couple celtics wins between now and the next time we talk. We actually have an episode coming up with someone who is running for us Senator next week. Is that right?

Matt Walsh
Yes. More to come on that front. But they are a fan of crypto. Not surprised to hear that. And it's not Elizabeth Warren.

So have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.