Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, Crime, and the Ethereum Foundation

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All right, let's get into today's episode. And we're back.

What's up?

What's going on?

How's it going? Good.

What's going on?

Is this— is it like we've been at it for 5 years? Like, is this still the awkward, like, hello, how are you?

I don't know. I'm trying to figure out what to talk about this week. It basically feels this market is just like, you know, it actually— remember 2016 and 2017 when Trump took office for the first time and everyone basically just like everything just hinged on his tweets and it was like the market like dynamics and like company earnings like they mattered, but like they didn't matter in a weird way. It feels like we're back to that where I'm like, you know, I've got a list of like 15 news stories from the week. We can talk about any of them, but like, it really feels like everyone's just kind of waiting to see what happens with this strategic reserve. Are we going to get a Bitcoin? Option A, we get a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Option B, we get a crypto strategic reserve. Option C, we don't get any of it. It's like that will drive the market more than any— like, you know, I saw Bitwise had an announcement. They moved on-chain. They're deploying to Maple. I'm like, cool. But like, The news story, the thing that everyone's paying attention to is just like what happens with this strategic reserve.

So everyone always naturally— our engagement is much higher when we talk about the markets. I have—

our engagement is higher when we talk about what you are wearing. So let's first talk about the sweatsuit that you have on today.

You're not privy to what I wear other than my neck up.

That being said, so let me just describe to folks that if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see a really nice blue sweatshirt. Let me just tell you that he's got on the same blues, the exact same thing, but on the bottom.

So listen, for the record, I love being in a comfortable attire. If someone out there is very much inclined to sponsor us, I love wearing sweatpants, I love wearing a hoodie. I am having 90, like 90% of my time is having calls. I want to be comfortable. I want to not feel like itch, you know, sit comfortable.

By the way, we, we, you have a podcast setup. Why aren't you in the setup? Aren't you in the chair? I know, but I'm— no, but there's another professional setup with a professional mic. What happened? What happened to that?

Listen, people are bothered about these things. All right, I want to, I want to reference a great tweet from Rob Dragonfly who had, I think, probably one of the most cogent views that I think about what describes the state of the market. It. Um, so I don't know if you want to share it. He posted that a few days ago, 2 days ago. Um, and here, I'll share it with you so that you can do your magic. And we— that— this will be a good anchor for the conversation and a good part of the pod just talking about what he— what he means. And maybe, Rob, you're listening. Uh, if you're not, you should. But, um, you, uh, maybe we can have him on.

This one you're saying? A Few Musings, My Beliefs.

Oh my God, really good blueprint that just, um, goes into more detail we just described, which is people just kind of waiting. And I, I kind of agreed with most of the things that he said there.

All right, so let me read some of what Rob said, so, and then we can, and then, and then let's actually have a conversation around this. So the, the Trump— all right, so Rob Haddock is a GP at Dragonfly. So the Trump admin is likely going to push us into a recession or close to the brink of one. Seemingly on purpose because Bessant and co. are not dumb and understand what they're doing. Number 2, this is likely all in the name of trying to use it as an excuse to massively cut entitlements, foreign aid, broad government expenditures, imports, etc., which doesn't make sense because those are of course growth drivers, but they'll be marketed as unfair to American taxpayers, and they believe the headlines will work with the American people and aligns with the end goals they want to accomplish. This will need to happen at Congress, though, as Doge is more of a PR stunt than actually able to enact these changes. You can see in the Doge headlines, etc., with their grandiose, etc., etc. Number 3, the admin will then try and juice the economy on the other side with QE, golden visas, large tax cuts, etc. The sticking point will be inflation because for this to work, infla— interest rates will need to come down. I also believe a complicating factor is that we'll continue to see the upending of our relationship with allies, our support of regimes like Russia. AI investment will continue to stop the market from completely falling off a cliff. But if we see softness from Nvidia like we've seen with the hyperscalers, we're in some— we're— we are in for a lot more hurt. All the idiosyncratic good news for crypto won't be able to withstand all the uncertainty and macroeconomic backdrop, which is that, uh, and token prices won't reflect the strengthening fundamentals. But once the market turns around and the macro backdrop flips, crypto will come roaring back ahead of the rest of risk assets. Stablecoins will continue to grow extremely quickly. Long vol is the best public liquid market play in the near term. Long term, we're all going to make it. Okay. So then my question on the back of this, I think this is really sound. This is really— this is— I tend to agree with a lot of what Rob said. My question on the back of this is what Rob is saying is short-term bearish, medium-term optimistic, long-term bullish. So let's say we're bearish for the next So, so do you agree that like these crypto markets next 3 to 6 months, as Rob lays out, it's going to be— maybe it's going to be tough through the end of summer?

Yeah, yeah. I look, I'm not, I'm not an oracle. I do tend to agree that that's the way— I mean, that's the way things have been going. I don't— I think the market is skittish. We've had a phenomenal 2.5 years in the markets. And it just feels that the market goes through certain times. You see it in crypto more, but the market naturally has a tendency to want to go down. People are nervous. They want to— you need like a clean break, a clean, solid narrative. And I think like the first— you're more of a political pundit than I am, but there's like first 100 days in office set really the tone for people observe the first 100 days. As what is going to happen in the next 4. And I think that, you know, we're just gonna have to kind of wait and see, right?

Yeah.

So because, because it's such a big detraction from the prior administration, and to your point earlier, like, there's these grandiose headlines, but you need to see the evolution. Like, like, going in, in the election, like, you go back to the podcast that we recorded in November A lot of commentary, like, you know, there's what Trump says and then the private, like, Wall Street and financial markets, like, have been heavily discounted for a while what Trump says, including even Doge, right? And so I think, but there are important things that if you were to ask me what I'm paying the most amount of attention to is, um, at a geopolitical level, I think it matters, like, the Ukraine situation is, is important, um, and also just continuing to understand. I'm putting like, obviously the crypto stuff is very important. There's a crypto summit that is happening today and tomorrow, right?

Tomorrow. Yeah.

You know, stablecoin legislation, all that's like really important for crypto markets. For traditional markets, like I think this year, given the Deepseek announcement, I still think a lot about that. And I do think that in, you know, this quarter's earnings, next quarter's earnings, it's really just quantifying the AI impact. Like, and what does that backlog of orders for NVIDIA look like as a proxy into corporate spending and optimism and just everything else that flows through? I mean, CapEx is like the first signal and then you say, okay, what's like the appetite for companies to spend on this type of stuff? Going to be important because that, I read a lot into that, into like the economy and, you know, hiring has always been like a component, but you know, of course I think just AI in this particular case, the quantum of AI expenditure last year was like impressive. I want to see how it tracks this year.

Do you have a sense of, sorry for the heat banging in the background. We'll be out of winter soon.

You mean the rats blowing through the pipes? Yeah.

Look at, look at what 2021— so 2021, people forgot that we had this huge drop in the middle of '21, right? So May through really like September. I mean, it was, it was a grind out there. So that's May, June, July, August, right? May, June, July, August. That's 4 months where prices got—

that was DeFi summer.

And then, yeah, DeFi summer was, was here. Like, right, uh, 2020, DeFi Summer kicks off this bull. We go up, we hit $60K, we're all, you know, we're all going to make it, supercycle confirmed. We then pull back from $65K and pull, pull all the way back, right? We get cut by 50%, we pull back to $32K, we go up, we go up to $50K, we pull back to $40K, and then we double top and then cycle over. So if you now zoom in on where we're at today, rates went up November of 2021. Rates went up November 2021.

So, so that was like the right— or 2020. Yeah. So like that's a double top right there.

So when you think about what this looks like, right, this cycle chart looks like, what I think you're saying is we could be in for like, you know, the cycle that, you we topped last month, basically 3 weeks ago at like 110, I think it was 108. And maybe we're in for like 3 or 4 months of kind of just either down or consolidation. And then Trump takes us, takes us, you know, shows us some pain.

Maybe he's basically trying to strong-arm Powell into reducing interest rates.

Maybe it actually works. Maybe we get the interest rates reduced more than actually expectations say. Maybe we're able to do QE, um, maybe we're able to do, you know, stimmies or something like that, and boom, we're, we're back off to the races and the cycle continues.

Yeah, I mean, in, in the near term, like, the most important thing is like, you know, M2, right? Um, is what, you know, like near term, it's like the amount of like, you know, M2, like money supply, right? I mean, what's like the China, the central banks, what are they doing, right? Are they printing money? Is more money in the hands of the consumer and is that consumer inclined to punt risk assets? Like, it's always like the, the meme at the end of the cycle is you all you have to do is like track M2 and like you would have like done pretty well for yourself. And it correlates closely to like the performance of risk assets.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains with a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security. SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X, at Skale Network. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. This episode is brought to you by zkSync. In 2024, zkSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of zkChains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose zkSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains including Abstract, Sofon, and Cronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible.

Let's talk about Trump and the Strategic Reserve and the summit. So first thing, I commend them on a very— whoever's picking the name of the summit, Digital Assets Summit, you did a very nice job picking a good name of a summit. I'm glad that you chose the exact same name of our summit, which is the week after.

Does that work wonders for SEO for you guys, by the way?

If you mean work wonders, like we go down a notch, then sure. No, they added, they actually added the way that they added an S. So it's Digital Assets, plural assets. We just care about the one asset, Digital Asset Summit. But no, so they're doing a, they're doing a, I mean, by the time you're listening, I don't know when you're listening to this, Friday morning or Friday afternoon. The summit is all day Friday. I think Trump will speak in the afternoon, probably around 3 PM is what I'm hearing. The conversation is, I mean, let's talk about the strategic reserve. Do you think that— so Trump came out and said it'll be Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, XRP, and Cardano. What do you think should happen? Should we have a Bitcoin reserve? Should we have a crypto reserve with all these things and maybe other coins too? Or should we have no reserve? Do you have personal takes on that?

Can we clarify for the listeners? When you say reserve, and it will become important because effectively the government is buying these assets.

We don't know if it's the government is not selling the assets that they own or if the government is buying the assets.

I think it matters to get clarity on that because it's when the taxpayer money is being put to buying something. It will, I think, determine a lot of the, you know, what you end up buying. Of course, like, all made-in-the-USA coins have had a pretty substantial interest in the market because people are anticipating, you know, if it's going to be funded with US tax dollars, well, you're gonna buy coins that are made in the US. Um, of course, the big cons— like, the big question is, well, when you think about the composition of it, you— I think you can draw inspiration from, like, bitwise indexes, right? Of the— there was a good tweet by Eric, I believe, or Hunter, that talked about, okay, here's our, here's our index, you know, here's how the US government could do it and the weightings attached to that. Um, but yeah, I mean, people should go listen to the podcast with Aidan from Asset Reality. It's like, okay, well, the big— the biggest holding will be Bitcoin, I think. Will they buy it? Will they use some of the seized Bitcoin? TBD, right? For the other assets, I think, well, there's a couple of constraints. Like, imagine if you're the guy that is going to determine the allocation. There's coins that have been— like, what is that filtering criteria? There are coins that are made in the US by US American founders. Okay, how important is that? Then you overlay that with how much can you actually buy? What's the aggregate amount that you want to buy? Is it signaling? Is it just a posturing stuff, or is it actually serious? Because that also, from a portfolio construction standpoint, you can only buy so much of these assets. Yeah, some of them have a massive market cap. Um, I do— I— but to answer your question concretely, I do think that they should have a strategic reserve. If I'm in their position, of course I'm biased, I think there is something really powerful to say plant the flag. And there's, I don't think, a better way to plant the flag than saying we have a strategic reserve as a signal to our commitment to these— this industry. And I think they, they should emphasize having a very good policy and procedure to explain why they bought the assets, what was the decision process to buy the assets. And I could envision that basket to have other things like Robinhood and Coinbase stock.

Oh, so you would go the— you would go that approach? You would say blown out. Like, like you're saying build it, you're saying build a sovereign wealth fund.

Like, why doesn't the US have a sovereign wealth fund? Have someone like— you have all these great, you know, the Trump cabinet I find is, is really comes from industry. So you have David Sachs in there, he's an investor. You have other people that could steward the sovereign wealth fund and like, heck, go full out, right? Buy, buy companies, buy Coinbase.

I disagree with this. I disagree with this. I mean, you wouldn't advise a company to— you wouldn't at a company level, you're not saying, hey, like Blockworks, do you guys own Robinhood stock? Do you own— well, I guess maybe you're— we do sit on a bunch of crypto actually, but tokens, we own a bunch of tokens and Bitcoin and yeah, yeah.

I mean, from a balance sheet perspective, like, okay, so here's the—

here's how I think about it. I think the US— so the US has reserves of— has strategic reserves. This idea of a strategic reserve is not a new thing. We have a strategic petroleum reserve, right? Because we need to— we have a strategic gold reserve. I do think we should have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I do not think you should include anything else on it. I liked— let me show you a combination of takes that I thought were good takes. I mean, look, we go the complete degen way, include Robinhood stock. I'm not complaining with that. But I thought totally— there's a combination of 3 takes here that I thought were good. So I thought Toly had a good take. My reserve— this is totally my reserve order of preference. First off, no reserve, because if you want decentralization to fail, you'd put the government in charge of it. I disagree with that take because I think if something is decentralized, you can't actually stop— anyone can buy this. I don't care. I don't care if like— I don't care which government buys it. I don't care if an individual buys it. So I disagree with that take. Or states run their own reserve as a hedge against the Fed making a mistake. That I do agree with. I think all states will eventually have their own Bitcoin reserves and that they should be in charge of it, just like they have their own pensions, right? I don't know how familiar people are with the pension system, but like, you know, if you're a police officer or if you're a teacher in California or a firefighter in New York, you have pensions, and pensions are run by individuals.

Pensions— CalPERS is the largest pension in the world, right? I mean, they already invest in hedge funds and venture funds, and they have a really robust— they're one of the major contributors to like hedge funds and venture funds and PE funds. So again, what's the difference between a state and the federal government? Like, the federal government can also hedge their, their own exposure to the dollar and to their deficit by having—

like, I, I just, I just think like two is kind of like You're saying if you do two, why don't you just do one at the federal level?

You do one.

Something about it to me is something related to taxes. Maybe I have a mental block, but, you know, a very small amount of my taxes go to New York. A very large amount of my taxes go to the federal government. So something in my mind—

not revenue, like, uh, yeah.

Uh, and then number three, totally said—

can we go back to one? One makes no sense.

One is a— is not a good take. If you want decentralization to fail, you'd put the government in charge of it. I don't think anyone is saying a strategic crypto reserve is putting the government in charge of crypto.

Uh, definitely not. I think what he means more of that is like the government's not a good steward of capital. And then you have a more, uh, theoretical discussion around resource allocation and centralization of resource allocation. But no, uh, I think the government can find competent people to run the strategic reserve. Like you would hire a PM. This.

And like, one of my personal takes—

I forget if I put this in the predictions— was that the strategic reserve actually would happen, but it would take longer than people expected. And so we would end up buying Bitcoin at the top of the cycle and have to endure, you know, a year or two of owning Bitcoin into a bear market. And they, you know, it's fine if a hedge fund manager has egg on their face. What if the US government had egg on their face? And then maybe you get a new regime, like you go back. I don't know, like, that'd be a tough thing for someone to stomach. The third thing that Tully said, and then I'll lead this into someone else's tweet that I thought was good, is he said, or if there has to be reserve, it's based on objectively measurable requirements. I don't care what they are. They can even be constructed such that only Bitcoin satisfies them. They just must be objectively measurable and rationally justified. And that, I think, is the best— that's the best take. And the reason for why why that's the best take is because, um, it's not— okay, half the people are freaking out that XRP and, uh, XRP and Cardano were included. But because, you know, crypto people like, oh, these are bad assets. The real reason people are freaking out is because everybody knows why those assets were included, which is it's a pay-to-play game. Like, outside of Coinbase and Jason Yanowitz, and the Winklevoss twins. I think Ripple and Cardano gave more money to, to— I'll just bucket this as the Trumps, the Trump campaign, the, you know, the inauguration party. So Ripple and Cardano gave more than anyone else. Or Ripple. Yeah, Ripple and Cardano gave more than anyone else. And I think people are just upset. It's like, oh, it's a, it's clearly a pay-to-play game. So that leads me into Bill Barhyte, who is sued out, sued out of a— or not sued, but lawsuits out of oblivion in the bear market by the SEC and states coming after Abra. Like, just the regulatory apparatus just came after Abra really hard. His take was 10-point plan for crypto policy. Bitcoin strategic reserve is relegated to proof-of-work assets only with an FDV of $500 billion or more. Assets are relegated to a sovereign— this is what you're saying, kind of— a sovereign wealth fund based on a strategic value to the US as we adopt DeFi as the new banking system. And he's— I can share the tweet in the, um, in the, in the show notes if we want, but there's 10, there's basically 10 criteria for what should happen. This is, I think, a better framework because it tells companies, it's like, look, we, we're doing this reserve, here's how you could get into it if you want to get into it, instead of just like, yeah, look, Hoskinson gave me $20 million under the table, like, we'll, we'll, we'll pump ADA, you know.

This reminds me so much of like these theoretical discussions around like I think when people make these recommendations, it's like a little bit like thinking about risk. Like, it's like there's always like a— I don't know how to say it, but like people are like very black and white with these things. For me, like you draw inspiration from sovereign wealth funds like Singapore, the Emirates. Like you, you put really competent people in charge of that. You create like, like everything, like it's no different than a hedge fund. Like I don't think— I don't understand why someone that is in crypto wouldn't like the government to hold these assets in their balance sheet. It produces more skin in the game. It delivers such a strong message to entrepreneurs, to other governments, because it—

because it biases you towards doing things that are better for the country instead of— okay, so let's say you held Amazon stock, or, right, you you just, human psyche will do things that favor Amazon over the two other cloud providers, right? Like, or let's say you, or let's say you held Amazon stock. Are you going to then favor Amazon or Walmart? But if you don't own the Walmart stock, you're going to own, you're going to favor Amazon. So I just like, let's say there's a DoD government contract for a cloud provider. Like if you own Google stock, you're going to give it to Google instead of, instead instead of the other two. That's why I don't like it.

Um, I— there's, there's, um, I don't necessarily agree with that. Like, there's, there's already a— always, but there's always bias. Now, you, you— it all comes down to the process. Like, a hedge fund can own two different positions. Like, a hedge fund can own Amazon and can own a competitor, can own Nvidia and can own a competitor. You can have two different PMs, and they can have different positions that compete against each other. A PM at a sovereign wealth fund is no different than a PM in a hedge fund, which is you have fiduciary responsibility to produce the best risk-adjusted returns for that capital. Do you think the DOJ or some government agency is going to be biased because there's Ripple or Cardano in the balance sheet? I think it's I don't think so. We're not even there yet. Now, I think like, I don't think it computes, to be honest. If you're, if you're a project that doesn't have scale, well, work hard to be included in the strategic reserve.

So do you think Cardano and Ripple should be included? Do you care that, do you care that the American first agenda and big donations to Trump were weaponized to, to provide exit liquidity using taxpayer dollars.

I think as part of this process, the government should formalize information disclosures for teams and projects, because if you're, you're going to allocate this amount of money, you can be a— you can— I would love the US government to use that as a mechanism to introduce policymaking. Clearly, we talk about wanting regulation. You want regulation, you put a sovereign wealth fund and you create a strategic reserve. Because if you define the process by which they bought these assets, it creates regulatory clarity.

Hmm.

Why did you go buy Cardano? What about Cardano? Okay, you buy Cardano, you formalize that process. If there's a standardized blueprint— by the way, the US government could be a pretty big anchor in saying I want access to information for these protocols. You make that publicly available. The public can be more informed. Is it exit liquidity? I don't know. Depends on what Charles is doing and Brad doing. Their wallets are tapped. Let's, let's, let's get the information right. Binance is already doing this to some extent. Now it doesn't share all of their findings when we go back to that. Richard.

No, I know what you're saying. In the same way that I can see when Brian Armstrong sells Coinbase stock, I, I got to be able to like, yeah, give me some disclosures.

Yeah, create an agency or work with Blockworks, a data platform, to create a standardized unified view for people. Because no one is like— the block explorers are great, but we can do so much more of an industry to introduce information fairness. It sets the stage and the tone for everything that we've been asking for an industry, you know what I mean? Like it almost forces the government to get creative. The alternative is you have factions within the government that are buying, like, you know, World Liberty is buying like stuff on chain. I'd rather have a formalized strategic reserve that does that as opposed to this, what people think is kind of like the government buying coins, but it's really not. And yeah. I just come at it from that standpoint. Is there a polymarket for this? Someone should create it. I'd be really curious to see.

What do you mean? Well, there is a polymarket for Bitcoin, right?

There was one for Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. There we go. 65% chance.

There should be a market for—

up from 40%. Okay. My prediction for what happens. I'll probably be wrong. I know nothing. I was reading Lutnick's comments. The president definitely thinks there's a big— thinks— this is a quote— the president definitely thinks that there is a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Now there will be a question of how do we handle the other cryptocurrencies, and I think the model is going to be announced on Friday when we do that. A Bitcoin strategic reserve is something the president's interested in. He spoke about it all during the campaign trail, and I think you're going to see it executed on Friday. I mean, if Ludnik's telling us this, why is it only 65%? So Bitcoin is one thing. And then the other cryptocurrencies, the other crypto tokens, I think they'll be treated differently, positively, but differently. That's, that's great. And by the way, Ludnik, like, I don't know, like we've, we've, yeah, Ludnik gets it. Ludnik does get it.

This episode is brought to you by SKALE, the next evolution in Layer 1 blockchains with a gas-free, invisible user experience, instant finality, and robust security. SKALE allows for limitless scalability and has already saved its 50 million users over $11 billion in gas fees. SKALE's high throughput, zero transaction costs, and powerful Web3 infrastructure make it the ideal platform for gaming, AI, and other high-throughput apps. To explore the gas-free ecosystem, visit scale.space/ecosystem and follow their journey on X, at Skale Network. Thanks to Skale for making today's episode possible. This episode is brought to you by zkSync. In 2024, zkSync took a step toward a multi-chain future by transforming from a single L2 into an ever-expanding network of zkChains, the Elastic Network. To onboard the whole world into crypto, many specialized chains must be able to coexist, work together, and share liquidity. Institutions and global financial leaders choose zkSync for unmatched security, scalable infrastructure, better onboarding, gasless transactions, and privacy-first design. Join over 20 chains including Abstract, Sophon, and Cronos in the Elastic Network today. Behind zkSync is the zkStack. It is a one-stop platform for building private blockchains on Ethereum. The stack solves all the typical privacy, regulatory, user experience, and deployment concerns of blockchain without compromising performance or security. Join the Elastic Network today at zkSync.io/empire. Thanks to zkSync for making today's episode possible.

Can we talk about your— I'd like to get your take on the stablecoin stuff and drama that has been ensuing. Like, obviously, now you mentioned Latnik, and, you know, he's— he has a big position and he works closely with Tether, but he's like an advisor or something. So, so what do you make of the— can we talk a little bit about your thoughts around stablecoin legislation, your thoughts around, like, should the government be as opinionated on— like, right now, like, there's foreign governments that buy Treasuries, right? And that has always been like, when we talk about US-China relations, like, or, you know, US-Middle East, like Saudi Arabia relations, like these buyers, effectively, these governments hold a lot of Treasuries. I think China, I think They've been offloading some, but it's always been something that foreign policy pundits, which I am not one, point to and say, hey, you know, they can twist our arm. You know, you have basically a big buyer of Treasuries and they could, you know, be influential in policy decisions. Do you think that really factors in much? Like, you know, Tether has become a pretty big buyer of Treasuries. What is it, top 10 now? Top 5? Top 8?

Top— I think— I know it's top 20, top 15 at least, I think.

I don't have a problem with that, but I think some companies might, or for specific reasons. I'm curious if you have a position on that.

So just to reiterate the position, basically there's— so there's Tether and there's Circle. And I think Tether— yeah, Tether banks with Cantor Fitzgerald, which Howard Lutnick is the CEO of. Howard Lutnick is one of the main advisors to Trump. The— someone on the Tether side of things would say that Circle is coming into DC right now and trying to do regulatory capture, and Circle is lobbying to make it so that Tether can't play in the United States as nicely as, like, I think maybe someone like Lutnick would want them to play. I think if I were in Jeremy's shoes and I was in Circle's shoes, I would say Everybody agrees that America needs to integrate stablecoins into the financial system. Like, we all— everyone listening to Empire is probably like, yep, America needs to integrate dollar stablecoins into our financial system. We also probably agree we need federal rules so that it can be accepted. It can be an accepted product in every part of the global financial system. And we need standards for stablecoins for like safety and soundness. I think we all hear those things, we nod our head. Um, I think what we all also want is for the United States to give everybody, every founder and every startup and every company, um, the opportunity, both onshore and offshore and international companies, the ability to register in the United States. So to, to, to bring this home to your question, I think if I'm Jeremy Allaire and I'm Circle, I'm basically saying, hey, we now have the— you now have the ability to go register in the United States The United States is about to pass all these positive stablecoin legislations. There are laws in the EU, Japan, UAE, I think Hong Kong and Singapore about to announce stablecoin things. You are this like offshore international issuer in these jurisdictions and you've never registered with these folks. And Circle, we ran, we ran towards the regulations and we got registered. We got everything, we got the, you know, Big Four auditing firm, all that kind of stuff. We engage with the regulators. We did the really hard work. I bet they have a bunch of compliance people. And you, Tether, you haven't done any of that. So it's like, should you get a free pass from safety and soundness rules because of your historical success? That's the, that's the, that's the question I think that people can't decide on.

Look, it ties back to strategic reserve discussion. I think the problem is not so much— the problem is just that we need to get more standardized information disclosures from every company that operates in crypto. And I think that's just the most important thing. Like, let's create a blueprint. Let's create whatever it is that they need to recommend, create a standardized, easy process to register common blueprint of things that anyone that is involved in crypto should just, you know, disclose. So, and I thought it's the most important thing. If you have issues around Tether, all right, well, what is the issue? And so I think it's this— the strategic reserve acts as a way for the US government to clarify the most important thing.

Yeah.

Because in all of my conversations with capital providers, Wall Street firms, it's always the, hey, there's no regulation for this thing. And you're like, there kind of is. And I think if we have that, then it's important. Yeah.

All right. Next, next topic. Moving past the strategic reserve. I mean, yeah, we'll see what happens. We'll see. Hopefully it's just a Bitcoin thing. That's my take. All right. Sui Network breaking. We are extremely excited to announce a partnership with WorldLibertyFi, a Donald J. Trump-inspired pioneering DeFi protocol rooted in a shared vision for a more open and transparent financial world. As part of this collaboration, World Liberty Financial will include SUI in their strategic token reserve designed to bolster leading Web3 projects. World Liberty Fi and SUI have begun exploring product development opportunities. Let me remind people of this story that Blockworks published last month where scoop: World Liberty Financial is approaching teams with an offer. Buy at least 10 million of unlaunched World Liberty Financial tokens with a 10% fee and they will buy the same amount of your tokens. I think this fits into a broader conversation about— there's a— I will use the word crime, but it's not legal crime. It is like—

Pay to play?

Misplay, corruption. Shenanigans on-chain, funny dealings, backdoor, backdoor deals. I had lunch with— I got lunch with a bunch of founders at the Penn Blockchain Conference, all of whom are building L1s and L2s. And they basically said, they're like, look, you, you got two games you can play right now. If you're one of the new ones, like, I'm not talking about like a Solana or like an Arbitrum or an Optimism, like they don't have to play these games. But if you're one of the new people launching right now, you either play the backdoor games, bunch of things that, you know, to keep the token prices inflated, or— and you play those games and your token will go up, or you don't play those games and you rest, you stand on your morals and your ethics. And I'm sorry, but your token price isn't going to go up. That's what they— that was the topic of the The whole thing that we talked about, they basically— because they were— there are 4 people whose tokens are going, you know, flat or down, and they— or pre-launch. And they said, like, the thing— it's the crime is served to you on a silver platter right now. There are all these backdoor deals you can do. World Liberty Financial is a perfect example. There's many other funds that are doing pretty shady deals on-chain right now, like where they'll get kickbacks of tokens to buy the tokens on the open market. I don't know if you've been seeing these, but Um, it's like, it just actually, this got sparked by like this guy, Air Guy or Gal, I don't know. Um, maybe Gal. Um, finally, like this is, this tweet is like, finally. So this is a quote tweet to Sui if you're not watching on YouTube. Finally, crime. Thank God. Send this thing to 10. And this is like the, this is like the thing. This is the, um, You know, the comments— crime is what Sui needed the most.

And, uh, put aside the Donald J. Trump, um, so let— can we unpack this a bit? Like, World Liberty, for anyone that hasn't known or seen this name, what is World Liberty? What is the association of World Liberty with the president?

I will tell you what people thought World Liberty is and what I— what, what it actually is. And nobody summarized it better than Mike Dudas, who personally— who invested in World Liberty. He said, I was originally optimistic about World LibertyFi and personally invested. It's become increasingly disappointingly clear it is a pay-to-play scheme at this point, not what I was told it would be, a DeFi gateway to introduce new users to crypto. Sad. What it was pitched as, and I don't know if you looked at the deal too, but it was like, you know, all of DeFi is this like internal kind of like, you know, crypto insiders. We You know, are backed by the, by the, by the Trump family. And, uh, we are bringing DeFi to the world basically. And we're going to put DeFi in the backend and make it really easy for people to access on the frontend. And we're going to integrate with all these things like Aave and Uniswap and stuff like that. Make it super easy. Boom. Like cool vision. We've, we've heard the pitch before, kind of DeFi mullet type of game. And, uh, what it actually is, is just in my opinion, some big scheme that will end, end terribly and in tears.

Yeah, well, I think I looked at it when Trump meme coin launched. I was like, okay, what's this thing? And I, I didn't participate in the sale. They quickly sold out right after the meme— the Trump meme coin launched. Um, yeah, it's, uh, it's, it's noisy. I think it's— there should be more transparency around these processes to verify that. Yeah, again, it's just, it's just— goddamn, if you just like Can someone please create the Edgar SEC of crypto, whether it's the government or you guys or someone? But we need it. Like, you know, like if Sui entered into a partnership with Liberty, okay, we swapped some tokens for their tokens. Okay, what were the terms? Common disclosures. Like, there's a way to do this. It doesn't involve the backdoor. Like, it's not so much that if this happened, then it's fine. It's like one company swapping tokens for another. To my knowledge, that's not crime. Where crime comes in is when you don't properly disclose the, the payment component, just make it seem like—

right, if Sui had— look, I don't want to—

I don't know what to do here, but it's about $10 million of World Liberty because we believe in the project, we are diversifying our treasury, and then Liberty said we believe in this Sui, in Sui, their vision for yada yada yada. Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, that's not crime. Companies do this all the time.

That's— you just got to disclose it. I just care about the lack of disclosures.

Yeah, exactly. And I just want listeners to like understand that like it is the lack of at times unified and clear disclosure of conflicts of interest, of, of, you know, companies oftentimes don't disclose the exact terms. But when you're, when you're like a— crypto is one of these things where it's like a very public you know, people not right now might be looking at this and be like, okay, there's a lot of token holders that have SUI. All right. Well, you know, they need to know, right? Like, what were the terms? Like, what price? Like, it's like a PIPE, like a PIPE T, right? A PIPE is like when a hedge fund buys like a big position in the public markets for a company, but they negotiate the price and then it gets done, right? It gets disclosed. Yeah, it should just be stuff like that, you know.

100%.

So that's it. The crime would be not disclosing the payment component or the— and that should be— that should be addressed.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought Noah had a good take from Thea Capital founders. I hope you understand the message you're sending to the market by doing these deals. Quote, we paid Trump's associates to market our token. So if you did that and you thought that was the best use of capital, I don't think it's as bad as people say if, like Santi said, you tell the market that you did it.

So, I mean, people spend hundreds of millions in, in sponsorships, and like, ultimately you can dump the token, you buy the token, like, that's at your discretion. But I do think that you have to be at least have, have knowledge and access to some sort of standard unified disclosure, and everyone should have the ability to to access that information at the time it was issued in a unified information channel. Like you see public companies do this all the time. In Edgar, you issue an 8-K, that's a press release. You issue, you know, any sort of, you know, issue reports, you issue change of directors, like insider sales, you know, from 10b5-1 plans, you know, like all this stuff should just kind of be communicated. The beauty of it is we have a lot of this information on chain. It's true, that's nuance. It's not the— yeah, I would love someone to challenge me, and I'm gonna go on limb by saying this, but the crime is not so much that, like, SUI is in their discretion to optimize their treasury. If they felt that buying World Liberty or paying World Liberty was the best use of capital, it may be, I don't know. But they, um, yeah, that's not problematic. What is, is just maybe insinuating some things that might not be correct. Unfortunately, the World Liberty thing is now— most people think of it as like, oh, this is like— they probably are tying it to the Strategic Reserve too. Like, there's no surprise this came out the day before the summit and talks about some— the Strategic Reserve.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will leave with, uh, Zon from, uh, Zon. Oh yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

The only point I'll say is if this announcement happened, you would hope that no one in the SUI team is selling tokens right If they are selling, it's because they had agreed on a plan to sell tokens in a programmatic way.

Mm.

That's your thing, right? I mean, it's just common sense.

Good, good. Calm.

Earlier in today's episode, I mentioned Ledger's latest products, the Stax and Flex, and I wanted to take a few seconds to tell you more about them. These wallets feature the world's first secure touchscreens, which don't just simplify your digital transactions, but also keep them extremely safe. These wallets are virtually impenetrable to online attacks because they store your private key in a secure offline chip. You can manage more than 5,500 tokens and install up to 100 apps. Choose the most trusted name in hardware wallets and take control of your digital security today at ledger.com, or hit the link in the description of today's episode to check check out their latest wallets.

Hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here.

Wanted to, uh, just take a quick break and highlight everything that's been going on in the Mantle ecosystem. In just one year, Mantle has seen its TVL surge by over 1,100%, now reaching $1.69 billion. That's just such a crazy amount to think about. More than 225 protocols have made Mantle their home while the platform's Eco Fund has invested $38.5 million in 51 pioneering projects. Through strategic partnerships with Bybit, including MNT as collateral, supporting Athena to scale, and the first Ethereum L2 to integrate Ondo Finance, they just continue to be on the bleeding edge of L2s. Be sure to stay up to date with what's going on by giving them a follow on X at 0x Mantle. Special thanks to the incredible Mantle team for sponsoring today's episode. AO, the hyperparallel computer, is here. A decentralized supercomputer built on top of Arweave's permanent data storage. AO offers infinite parallel processing and leverages web infrastructure, HTTP, for unprecedented scalability, addressing limitations of existing blockchains. AO smart contracts support large programs including LLMs and can execute autonomously enabling new classes of decentralized applications, utilizing TEs for secure computations, and features a 100% fair token distribution to Arweave holders and bridge depositors, emphasizing community ownership. Thanks to Arweave for making today's episode possible. You can find out more by clicking the link in the show notes.

Speaking of people who are not committing the crime and the number is not going up, The Ethereum Foundation announced— maybe they, maybe, maybe the EF needs some more crime or something because goddamn, they announced things, but they don't need— they, they announced the Ethereum Foundation Silviculture Society. What does that word mean? Look up silviculture. A made-up word. All right. A loose collection of individuals from outside the foundation who provide informal counsel to the EF in tending to the dark force in the infinite garden of Ethereum to make sure we sustain the core values of open source, privacy, security, and censorship resistance. The roots of the infinite garden—

silviculture is actually a real word. It is the practice of— did you say this? The practice of controlling composition as well as quality of forest to meet values and needs.

Ah, missed that, missed that one in my SAT prep.

Timber production. I don't know.

Silviculture. Silviculture. All right. Good, good knowledge. The roots— wait, let me keep reading this. Don't, don't, don't interrupt the EF, the almighty EF. The roots of the infinite garden are nourished by soils rich in these core values. Ethereum success depends on having talented and committed developers building with these values in mind, and EF's ethos and work always has been centered around them. So let me tell you what this reminds me of. The Democratic Party just came out with a Choose Your Fighter commercial, and, uh, let me just show you this 19-second video.

So It's painful.

I sent this to, I sent this to some friends who worked in the Biden administration. Was like, I was like, it is like they never want to win again. I was like, this kills me. And they said, yeah, just talking about this, so brutal. And this is what I thought. This is what I thought when I saw the, the EF thing. I was like, I was like, who the, oh, let me go back to this tab. Who the hell are these people?

Like, wait a minute. Can you, I don't recognize anyone. Can you go back? Maybe Matthew Green. Can you go back? Like, how much money do you think, over or under a million dollars, created this ad?

I mean, definitely over a million, over a million dollars in like the committees that put this thing together, you know?

So this is like the worst. It's almost like the—

It's like read Founder Mode or the Paul Graham thing, like Founder Mode or like, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, or like the Ben Horowitz book that's really good. They have all read those books and chose to do the exact opposite of this. And so that's what I think when I see this EF announcement. I'm like, literally, who are these people? And then I don't know if they planned this, but Etherealize the day after announced that they had— they— Etherealize brought on Danny Ryan and Yeah, yeah, I saw that. So, and someone else, I'm, I'm forgetting.

Complete opposite, like, tone. Yeah, listen, man, how much— can you go up? How much is the EF spending a year? $300 million? $100 million? It's like over $100 million, right? I don't know the exact number, but I love when you scroll over like these accounts and you don't follow them. You're a very— it's hard. Ladies and gentlemen, if you get Jano to follow you, you should be proud.

Wow, look at this. I don't follow a single one of these people.

Oh no, no, no, but you don't even follow the Ethereum Foundation. What a boss. Tell me you don't own any ETH without telling me you don't know any—

this is just, this is just social. They don't follow anyone. Why would I follow someone if I'm not gonna get that follow back, you know?

I gotta get that follow for follow game.

Oh God, that— you just sort of revealed all of your personality right now, which is, which is good. Look, I love you.

No, I'm a cringe, I'm a cringe KOL influencer. That is, that is it.

By the way. Yeah. I mean, how much does an ETF spend a year?

I mean, I don't know, but like, this just pains me. I don't know. Just pains me. What do you think of this? I mean, so sorry, we're talking like platitudes, but what do you think of like Etherealize, Ethereum Foundation? Like, what do you think of everything that's been going on here?

I think it's a good restructuring. It is something that I think about a lot as it relates to as other networks, smaller networks continue to grow. And I think we can learn a lot about the, the decentralization of a network does not necessarily mean decentralization of a main organization that spearheads product and allocation of resources. Now, the Ethereum kind of had its evolution in the early days where you had ConsenSys, who Joe Lubin as, as what he does. And I'll give him a lot of credit. And full disclosure, I'm an investor through Verify and ConsenSys, and I think Ben sits— has a pretty big board seat. Or anyway, so full disclosure. But I do think that, like, so it was ConsenSys, and then you had the Ethereum Foundation, and now you have these other bodies that are springing up. You can imagine the same evolution of, like, in something like Solana But I do think it will happen. Like, I'm pretty sure all the foundations are paying attention to this because right now they're more centralized. Like Solana is more centralized. Avalanche is more centralized. Aptos, Sui, Sei, all these networks, or even Ripple is like very centralized, right? And I think it just so happened to be this way, right? But if I were in charge of one of these foundations, I would be very careful in making sure that I don't necessarily feel compelled to decentralize the product and the BD component. And that I think should be very much centralized. Now, of course, like the closest to where, well, I think we'll get a lot of insight is like how Solana progressively decentralizes, especially as they have another client like Firedancer. And you have like these big fact, like these big bodies within a network. Like you can think of like Jito is like a pretty, pretty big force in the Solana ecosystem. Ecosystem, you then have like other players, right? Does that— they're going to weigh into like the Solana improvement proposals, right? That one of them actually happened now on inflation that was proposed on Multicoin. So I'm paying a lot of attention to how that evolution happens of how these networks, as they grow, naturally there's, there's some like decentralization. But Ethereum is interesting because it's pulling it back now. It's trying to kind of— what I feel that putting the Ethereum Foundation on the side, which I think will over time become largely irrelevant, I think more likely than not, someone like this— Etherealize is the name of it.

Yeah, Etherealize.

More likely than not, like someone like Etherealize and ConsenSys, like, band together and say, all right, let's, let's bail this out. Like, let's actually get our ducks in a row. But like, you remember Synthetix, like, Kain left and then he came back and then Vitalik kind of has done that now and becoming more like wartime founder, so to speak, but he doesn't like— he carries weight. But anyways, um, I think it's, it's going to be just an interesting thing to see how other blockchains, as they continue to grow, and, um, you know, how does that happen. And I think that we should never— if I were them, I would be very cautious in, in going to a place where you have all these different factions that just make it messy to really align in the vision and the allocation of resources. Yeah, they're spending— I look, I don't— I haven't seen the full audit. I get the sense that there's a lot of wasteful spending and a lot of inefficient spending. Yeah. And from all— a lot of foundations. And I think there just needs to be more, again, information disclosure as a process by which we get an understanding of where people actually spend the money.

Yeah. This, this is the— compare, uh, compare this with the Etherealize. Like, that's the, that's the dude I want running, running this. Wartime, baby. Yes. Danny Ryan. Um, okay. I, uh, okay. Some, some smaller stuff from this week that I thought was interesting. Um, uh, Solana activity dropped a lot in February. Real economic value, REV, down 64% month over month. App revenue on Solana down 56% month over month. DEX volumes down 54% over month. And stablecoin supply actually pretty flat, down 2%. I thought that was interesting. I thought— and you could just interrupt me if you want to talk about any of this stuff. I thought Vlad had some very interesting comments. So I'll read this. I'll read some of the highlighted things. This is Vlad Tenev, who is obviously the founder of Robinhood and CEO and chairman and all that kind of stuff. He says, and now I think that it's— it has been a little bit of an unfair criticism of the crypto industry because the problem is we've not been allowed in the US up until now to connect crypto to real-world productive assets because that's where the securities laws come in. In particular, crypto by its nature is 24/7. It's running on blockchain technology that doesn't close on the weekends. And then skip, skip ahead a little bit. So you get fractionalization for free, which was a complex build. You get 24/7 trading. And you imagine if this was permissible, 2 or 3 engineers from MIT who have knowledge in building these tools, for example, can build something like Robinhood very, very, very easily and have stocks and a whole bunch of other assets available on non-custodial wallets and DeFi infrastructure. And I think my team— and I think I, and I think I tell my team that should be like a scary thought to you. But also a huge opportunity because we're incredibly well positioned to actually be the first to adapt this new technology to traditional assets. And we should be putting private companies, startups on the blockchain. There's no reason why you should be able to invest in a meme coin freely as much as you want, but SpaceX and OpenAI are too risky. That doesn't make any sense. So I think we'll have to fix that. And I think there's huge advantages in crypto technology being the underlying infrastructure behind all types of assets, securities, and commodities. Other real-world assets. So that's one of the things we're going to be working on to make sure that the US is the leader in. I, I loved that. I loved that quote. Like, I think that was on their earnings call, maybe.

Um, it's good to see. Honestly, when people draw— ask me, when people ask me a lot about Fundoon and Inversion, I reference two companies, but primarily Robinhood, because Vlad has been extremely vocal in giving us insight, um, insight into what he sees from his organization as a builder in the cost efficiencies and how his business is structurally better on the crypto side than the traditional finance side. And I think he will be the one that will usher really the— that like proving and tokenizing stocks, like some of these things, them and BlackRock, of course, like, but Robinhood is really interesting because it's a founder and Stripe, right? But I guess Stripe and Robinhood are like really like founder-led organizations. And founders really get this technology and it's like they carry a lot of weight. And I wouldn't be surprised if those two companies just end up producing a ton of value because they were at the forefront of really from where they sit, really appreciating stablecoins, appreciating tokenization. And I just think that that's really like let them cook, you know? And I think they, I think both of them were invited to the Crypto Summit, I believe.

Yeah.

So that's great.

Yeah. Other things I'm thinking about, the SEC approved a yield-bearing stablecoin for the first time ever, which is, which is very interesting. Which one?

Just in general.

Figure. Figure. So Mike Cagney, who's run— so started SoFi, now running Figure. Another thing I'm thinking about is investor relations in the industry. So I forget who posted this, but they said BD as a general rule will not be as popular as it is. Instead, IR will be focused on as people realize that investor relations is sorely lacking and being able to do good IR goes a long way. So I disagree with the first part. BD is just, as industries grow, like more salespeople and BD people come into those industries. But IR, like a lot of these teams don't have any investor relations team. And I think they're going, I think that's the next role to really emerge in crypto at these foundations and networks is, uh, are, uh, really robust investor relations. And actually there are two other tweets this week that I really liked. It was Cosmo. Um, uh, great, great trader, great investor. Pantera said, crypto maturing and converging with standard practice in tradfi. Protocols need to invest in investor relations. Ultimately, token holders are your stakeholders. If you don't have a compelling fundamental pitch to tell liquid funds, you're dead on arrival. And then Jason Yanowitz said, uh, if your team hasn't spoken to at least a dozen liquid funds ahead of TGE, the token will go to zero when VCs Unlock. And it's like, boom, that's awesome new role. If you're like listening to this, like trying to figure out how to break into the industry, like think about, think about what you can do in the investor relations place. And if you're listening to this and you work in investor relations, like big opportunity in the industry, I think.

I'm actually going to hire someone that has this really good expertise. I mean, they're going to do a lot of things, but this is one area that I I like the fact that she had this particular expertise.

Nice. Give us a quick Inversion update, then we can call it.

What to say? I'm hiring. So it's been really encouraging to see just people that I never thought would want to work because they were either doing something really cool or just have done a lot, but it's been really inspiring, honestly. I highly encourage anyone that is on the fence of building to take the leap because if you have a really clear mission, I think people— it's amazing to see people, very competent people, like align and buy into your mission. And I mean, you've probably seen it at Blockworks, right? How many people do you guys employ now?

80 to 85, maybe.

Is that like one of the most rewarding, if not the most rewarding thing? 80 people believe in the crazy thing that Mike and I had day one in a foldable chair, uh, you know, in our apartment in New York. It's crazy.

Yeah, it's crazy.

That's— so I'm spending most of my time hiring right now, um, and so we're going to be in DAS, there's going to be an event, uh, so, uh, yeah, there's going to be a lot of updates, uh, continue to do a lot of work on the playbook and the thinking about acquiring, uh, really proving out the playbook. I think the next 12 months for us are super important to to take a traditional business, transform it with our playbook, prove out how crypto rails can meaningfully transform a business in the same way that kind of Robinhood's doing it in their own way. And then like bringing those users on-chain to our chain. Yeah, it's a, you know, I'm building in the open very intentionally. There's a ton of podcasts. I don't want to bore you with details, but I'm going to continue to go on that to really just— I hope that like by doing this, other people do it as well. A lot of people ask me, what's the moat here? I'm like, honestly, the moat is just like opening it's so much of like, I would love that for 10 private equity funds and pretty much a lot of people all over the world start realizing this and, you know, do it in other industries, do it in their own way. Ultimately, if we get to a billion users on-chain, if you build a really good product, like, you best believe people are going to use it. And that for me is, I spent, I was very intentional and it took me a bit of time to formalize the mission. But now that I've been saying it over and over in these podcasts and with people, investors, partners, um, you know, it— I feel like we've hit that point where everyone understands it, both people that are— we're hiring, people that we're working with. And it's just, it's just— I don't know, maybe you felt that a block worked at some point, right?

Yeah.

Did you guys— as an events company, and then like, what was there, like, maybe a year in when you said— but I think like you maybe felt this like at multiple times in the evolution of the company because you've launched now data, you like You're just doing things, but like the mission is still very much, pretty much the same, right? At day one, which is there is a media empire here for an industry that will continue to grow. We're just going to go.

The mission has remained the same since, and the belief since day one, but the tactics to get there change on a year, year by year basis. So that's right. Awesome folks. Well, it is Friday when you're listening to this. Maybe it's Saturday. We're increasing DAS ticket prices on, I think, Saturday. So get your tickets. We have code Empire10. Uh, we just had our first like really blowout day. Basically like the, the, the last 2 weeks before an event are so stressful cuz all the tickets come in right there. So you never really know if it's gonna be good or not until the last. And we just had our first massively blowout day and we're recording this on Thursday. So, um, yeah, get your ticket, Empire 10. And then, um, Santi and I are, are, uh, hiring. We're hiring a senior producer. Yes. So we've had 2 producers come through here. The first was Garrett. Garrett was our first producer, cold DM on Twitter. He's now head of BD at Squads. He was phenomenal.

And then he then did the Lightspeed pod, which was different.

He went from Empire producer to— he then created the Lightspeed podcast, was a host there, and then he went to go become head of BD at Squads. And then our last one was Joseph. Joseph is retired on an island off of his meme coin gains, and now we're on to the third. So it's a cool career opportunity. You get to work directly with Santi and me. Um, and yeah, we'd love to work with you.

We've been at it for so many years, and I think you get inside access to some of the smartest people that are building and investing in the space. And so as a producer, you get to see— you have a front row seat in that. And helping us, uh, I mean, I wouldn't be as articulate or thoughtful if it weren't for the great notes that our producers put together and helping line up the guests and a lot— making it all of that happen. We get to sit on a chair, but there's so much that happens behind the scenes. And it's really, I think it's a great, um, we call it like a springboard, right? We were going to have like 10 producers over the next 10 years. All those producers are going to go and build greater things.

100%. We'll just be stuck sitting in the chair. All right, content for the week. I will leave you with this. I am looking at my feed and Tucker Carlson just released a podcast with a grimy, grimy looking Sam Bankman-Fried.

Then that's our cue to—

that's our cue. That's the pod. Thanks everybody, everyone listening.

Uh, we'll be back here next week. Have a good weekend.