#1376 Nic Carter on Bitcoin Mining, Trump vs Biden, and AI

Nic Carter is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Castle Island Ventures. In this conversation, we talk about bitcoin, artificial intelligence, energy consumption, regulation, politics, Trump vs Biden stance on crypto, stablecoins, impact of ETH ETF, and future outlook on the industry. ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at https://meanwhile.bm/ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up guys? We've got a great conversation today with Nic Carter. He's co-founder and partner at Castle Island Ventures. In this conversation, we talk about Bitcoin and artificial intelligence. We talk about all the energy consumption, what's true and what is not. We then get into things like regulation and politics. We even go over President Trump

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and President Biden's current stance in the industry. We talk a lot about stable coins and what people are really using these assets for. And then we get into the Ethereum ETF. Will assets flow into this fund? What exactly is Ethereum's current role? And how do we look at Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and many other assets? Nick always brings the heat. There's tons of unique thoughts here, and I think you guys are really going to enjoy this conversation. So here is the latest episode with Nick Carter.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Espresso, the maker of the world's thinnest portable display. Now, listen up. If you're like me, you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at your desk. I got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities. There's my web browser, my text messages, I have Slack open, and I got a Notes app. I normally work on a desktop and it can be very, very productive. But everything falls apart the second I leave my desk. If I'm traveling, if I go to a coffee shop to do some work, or just want to work from the kitchen table, my laptop doesn't have enough screen space. I lose my command center. And my productivity falls off a cliff. It's a major problem, but this is where Espresso comes in. They have a portable screen that is so beautiful that you think Steve Jobs came back from the dead to create it. The thing is incredibly light.

• 2:22Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Go check them out today by clicking on the link in the description. Today's episode is brought to you by Meanwhile. Meanwhile is the world's first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Operating on the Bitcoin standard, they do everything in Bitcoin. You pay in Bitcoin. They pay claims to your family in Bitcoin. You take out policy loans entirely in Bitcoin when you need liquidity. Meanwhile, Bitcoin life insurance has redefined what it means to hodl. Protect your family from life's uncertainty in a broken financial system. Build intergenerational Bitcoin wealth while the cost of living skyrockets in dollar terms. Get all the tax and legal benefits of life insurance now in Bitcoin. They are actively binding policies today. Whether you are a long-term Bitcoiner or are just considering it for the first time,

• 3:51Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:07Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Nick here. I thought a great place to start is you are one of the world's foremost experts on the intersection between Bitcoin miners and AI data centers and these huge facilities that are getting built. You came at it from the Bitcoin side, but now many of the publicly traded miners are talking about this. There's people in the AI side that are starting to talk about this. The proof of work haters are starting to go after the AI companies. Like, there's a lot of intersection. So just how do you evaluate, you know, what the miners have been doing and then also what these new AI, you know, kind of data center companies are starting to experience?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Well, it's great to be back. I feel like it's been a really long time since we did a show together. And it's very kind of you to say I don't really consider myself an expert, just an interested amateur. But yeah, it's very, very interesting. Because for years, the miners tried to represent themselves as HPC companies, if you remember, but all they were doing was Bitcoin mining.

• 5:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And HPC, high-performance compute.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it was kind of a farce at first. The miners were trying to get a higher multiple because Bitcoin mining is a tough business, you know, like, think of another commodity where the supply of the commodity gets halved every four years. That's crazy. And they were always trying to chase higher multiples by implying that they could do AI stuff, and they were never able to. Until now. Now, there is such a demand for compute and data center space and just power and signed PPAs, power purchase agreements, that now a lot of these AI data center firms are taking a second look at the Bitcoin miners and realizing,

• 5:44Speaker 02

  okay, you have all this infrastructure built out. Fine, we're gonna have to do some work to retrofit it. It's not perfect for us. Like Bitcoin mines are very different from AI cloud data centers. But because there's such a shortage of power, because the AI infrastructure boom has gone so, so far, now they're taking a second look at the Bitcoin miners and we are seeing these deals struck. So CoreWeave struck a deal with Core Scientific. They don't have, the Core is just a coincidence that they're both called that, for 200 megawatts of power and hosting. And Hut8 recently got an injection of capital from CO2 convertible note, I think, to go after this as well. So

• 6:28Speaker 02

  It's interesting now, many years later, we're now finally seeing Bitcoin miners. You know, people are taking a second look at them and realizing, okay, maybe we can repurpose some of these assets and do AI stuff.

• 6:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, inside of the data center, a lot of people don't know this, but I started out mining Ethereum with GPUs. And back in 2016, early 2017, part of the thesis was like, one day you'll be able to take the GPU and you'll be able to switch between mining ETH, DNA sequencing, self-driving cars, like all this stuff. A lot has happened. ETH no longer is proof of works, now proof of stake. GPUs are good, but the form factor in which they were in 2016 would get smoked today, just given how much the hardware has evolved. There's now even announcements coming out of people building specialized hardware for transformers or whatever.

• 7:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what is happening like inside of the data center when somebody is, I have a business, I do mining, and I am doing, you know, kind of AI-related high-performance computing. Is it, I have a section for mining, I have a different section of the building for the AI stuff? Are they trying to figure out the hardware? Just walk us like inside of those facilities.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Bitcoin miners, you can kind of just throw a bunch of ASICs in a shack with power and put some cooling in there and it'll work.

• 7:52Anthony Pompliano?

  The chicken coop.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  You know, exactly. And like, if you've ever visited Bitcoin mine, of course, you have, like, these don't look like, you know, CIA data center, like anything serious, you know, they don't look like a Microsoft or hyperscaler data center. A lot of the time, it's just like a gigantic building out in the middle of nowhere, like probably in West Texas somewhere, with big fans, super loud, tons of ASICs running.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  A cloud compute data center, by contrast, is much more specialized. And you want it to be in a favorable location. You want good latency, right? Because you're getting jobs from probably Silicon Valley, New York, like population centers, the places where the queries are coming from, in the case of AI. You want really good networking. So you have fleets of GPUs. You need those all to be working on the same synchronous job. If you're doing something like model training, they all have to be working, and we're talking tens of thousands of GPUs, they need to be working together on the same exact job, right? So you need super tight connections, like the state of the art is what Nvidia calls

• 9:04Speaker 02

  "infini-band." So you need all of these fleets to be working exactly on the same job, on the same time. And the power density is very high. Well, they have that in common with Bitcoin mining, but they don't have that in common with conventional data centers. So AI data centers have a higher power density than legacy. And you also need more security, arguably. And the GPUs themselves are kind of more fragile, I would say, than ASIC. Or you don't want to risk the GPUs. So when you're talking tier three, tier four data centers, you're dealing with stuff like, how does this react to an earthquake? How do we harden this building against that?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  What's the security practices? We need armed security, things like that. Whereas Bitcoin miner is, obviously, things are different these days, but it's kind of like a random warehouse. You plonk down in the middle of the desert somewhere, as long as there's power and transformers and things like that, you're good to go. The other difference is Bitcoin miners can tolerate downtime, right?

• 10:15Speaker 02

  All of Bitcoin mining insulation is doing is running the same process, SHA 256, trillions and trillions and trillions of times a second. So it's kind of a discrete process. It's not continuous in a sense, and it can be interrupted. And we know this about Bitcoin mining. That's why they're really suitable as a buyer of energy on the grid. You can turn it off if it gets really hot in Texas and everybody's running their AC and power becomes scarce. The miners can just curtail their energy consumption. And that's a great thing for Bitcoin miners, right? That means they're able to engage in what's called demand response. AI data centers haven't figured that out yet because, you know, these jobs might take longer.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  You're training a model. You can't tolerate interruption or downtime. So they can't, you know, situate themselves in the same way from a power purchasing perspective. So people think, okay, it's data center, it's a data center. It doesn't matter if I'm putting ASICs in there or H100s. But they're totally different setups. So to answer your question, I would say you probably can't just plug and play GPUs into the same data center that you have your ASICs in. It's kind of, you have to reimagine the whole thing. Have it be more kind of fault tolerant, better uptime, better security, et cetera, for the AI use case.

• 11:37Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the decision between these power consumers is coming down to what hardware I already own? What facility? Like, do I have a tier three center? Or do I have, you know, the chicken coop? Or is it how much money can I get paid for each, you know, kilowatt that I am consuming? And AI right now is paying more, so let me go focus on AI versus Bitcoin or vice versa. Like, what's their decision making look like?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  I mean, you can't really switch, you can't toggle that easily. Like, if you're talking back in the day, go back in time.

• 12:08Anthony Pompliano?

  No, if there's a facility, right? And I'm basically going to decide, hey, for the next three to five years, should I go do Bitcoin mining? Should I do, you know, some sort of AI related work? Or should I try to do both? Like, what is it that's really driving those decisions, do you think?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would say there's like a bunch of entities involved. So it's not necessarily the Bitcoin miner itself that is deciding to buy a bunch of GPUs and get into the AI mining game. In some cases, they are doing that, but it'd be more common for them to use to kind of contract out the space and use a third party that is a specialist in managing AI compute, because there's also kind of a software and infrastructure and orchestration layer. So I would say the Bitcoin miners don't necessarily have the technical skills of being able to operate a fleet of GPUs. It's not just a matter of plugging them in. You actually need to figure out how to route the jobs and do the networking and stuff. So generally, well, at least what we're seeing at the moment is kind of like

• 13:05Speaker 02

  a joint venture model, or there's a company that specialized in AI cloud, like in the case of the Core Scientific deal, CoreWeave is the specialist in managing an AI fleet. And they contracted out for some power and the physical infrastructure that Core Scientific had built. But Core Scientific itself, obviously not to disparage them, probably didn't have the skills to become an AI service provider themselves.

• 13:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And as we're watching this play, I think the public markets obviously are salivating over all the AI stuff we see Nvidia, you know, becoming one of the world's most valuable company, if not the most valuable. Will Bitcoin miners get pulled up with it? Like, you know, you see Hut8 obviously is kind of playing this game. There's a couple of others around the world. Should we expect that these converge as trends and now it's just high performance compute? Or is like Bitcoin mining is a good business, but if you can somehow get, you know, an AI story out there now, you get repriced and a higher multiple and the economic incentive just pulls you to do it?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've seen multiple expansion in all, I would say, almost all Bitcoin miners, starting with when the Corey Of Courseide deal was signed, and now there have been other deals in the space as well. And public markets have already revalued up Bitcoin miners with the expectation that now they can participate in this huge trend, which is AI data center. So that's already happened. It might continue to happen, but we've actually already seen public markets rethink what a Bitcoin miner is worth.

• 14:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a worry that AI becomes such a big trend that what would be net new miners coming on to the Bitcoin network, there's fewer of them and they're going to the AI world and like, yeah, hash rate is, you know, near all time highs over the last couple of months, but maybe there's a security concern in the future or like anything that's on the horizon you see as a big issue or Bitcoin is the most secure computer network in the world is going to remain so?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a good question. I've seen a few people pose that same question. It's like if miners now have to compete for attention between Bitcoin and AI, maybe there's less hash rate. It doesn't worry me at all. I mean, you know, Bitcoin doesn't need a specific number of hashes per second to be secure, in my opinion. I think it's sort of overwhelmingly secure from a proof work perspective. So even if hash rate declines a little bit, I don't know if it will. I don't see Bitcoin security as being sort of linearly impaired at all, because Bitcoin security is almost overkill, let's say. And at current rates,

• 15:51Speaker 02

  at 30% or 50% decline, it doesn't really meaningfully change the calculus. I don't think it adds to the risk of a reorder or anything like that, just because like the security is so overwhelming, you know?

• 16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  So if Bitcoin's hash rate went down 50%, you wouldn't be concerned about the security? Like it's that much more secure than it necessarily would otherwise be?

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wouldn't concern me too much. I mean, there's been a big literature of people trying to quantify Bitcoin security. The thing that is, because you know, Bitcoin mining is so distributed, there's so many different miners globally, there's not one big pot of energy that people use and then it's a matter of controlling that. It's like energy resources are globally distributed. There's no one country that even dominates that much, you know, where it's all over the world. There's still mining in China, believe it or not, even after the ban. And within the US, there's so many different operators and things like that. So I don't see any like points of significant concentration or nodes in the network, nexus is where you can obtain control. The one thing that would maybe worry me a little bit would be if hash rate declines so much that there

• 16:57Speaker 02

  are a bunch of ASICs that were fallow? You know, ASICs are just offline. And then a sort of malicious entity could sort of marshal those ASICs and maybe try and scoop, you know, cobble together enough power to turn them on and then do something hostile. So as long as the ASICs are mostly online and are mostly controlled by entities that are benevolent, have an economic interest in the network working and Bitcoin being secure, which is the miners, of course, they're sort of biased long Bitcoin, then I'm not too concerned. But if it's a matter of, okay, of all the set of ASICs that exist, 90% of them are offline in a warehouse somewhere and only 10% are online.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Okay, then I'm maybe a little bit worried because some malicious entity could sort of rent or purchase those ASICs and then try and attack that network. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

• 17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the other threats to Bitcoin historically has been just the haters, right? The Bitcoin miner, anti proof of work, the ESG crowd. There's a bunch of different maybe nomenclature or, you know, tags you could put on these people. But pretty much they hate the fact that we're consuming energy. They hate the fact that Bitcoin is seen as quote, quote, dirty. And sometimes they have recommendations for potential solutions. Most of the time not, but just it's very clear they don't like Bitcoin mining. When I look at the data, 60% ballpark of the energy mix is coming from renewables, which is like three times the average of the American economy.

• 18:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like maybe we should be considering Bitcoin mining as like put it on a pedestal and every other industry should aspire to have the renewable penetration. But now AI people are starting to feel the heat as well. And I've seen, I don't know, four or five different, you know, kind of hit piece articles. I've seen a couple of, oh, on Twitter, like you're going to be the anti-AI energy consumer person. How real is that risk for the AI people now?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  It's the funniest thing ever, man. It's like I'm getting deja vu from this thing. Cause I mean, for years, for years, my main focus is like a content creator and a writer was, okay, I'm not just going to blindly defend Bitcoin from the environmentalist concerns, but let's sort of clarify the issue here. Let's get real data. Let's be really clear about how Bitcoin interacts with grids. My hypothesis the whole time was, hey, Bitcoin's actually pretty benign on the grid. Bitcoin miners can actually help add flexibility to the grid. This we understand now, but it's taken a lot of work, right? A lot of serious work and Bitcoin miners themselves have changed their business models such that they can be interruptible, which is very helpful in grids like Texas that need that interruptibility.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  And it's so funny because the same exact haters that made a living out of trashing Bitcoin mining are now moving on to AI. And it makes you realize it's not about Bitcoin. It's not about AI. It's just these people belong to what I think is like a secular cult or, you know, they have this almost religious zeal and they think that economic progress and industrial activity is bad. And I call them degrowthers. You know, these people that want to reverse the trend of growth and civilization out, you know, to obtain penance or something from mother nature. I don't really understand it, but it does seem to be kind of a religious fixation

• 20:26Speaker 02

  as opposed to, you know, you know, firmly reasoned thing. And the Bitcoin mining hater in chief was this guy Alex de Vries. He worked for the Dutch Central Bank. I think he's independent now. He's now pivoted to being anti-AI. And, you know, with Bitcoin, it was always a little bit harder to make the case because most people don't see the value of Bitcoin. Of course, lots of people do, but if you took a poll of the entire world, the majority would still probably be like, well, I don't see the use of it. With AI, AI is already embedded into so many use cases and applications. You may not know that there's AI, like you are interacting with a chat bot for some customer service thing, like there's AI there.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  You are using Snapchat, a Snapchat filter, or you're on a Zoom call, AI is being used, right? Maybe using ChatGPT, like that was the most successful product launch of all time, right? I think with AI, it's a little bit easier to make the case to bite the bullet and be like, yes, we're consuming energy for sure, but we're creating all this value for you. And after years and years of defending Bitcoin mining, I realized to myself, well, it doesn't really work to say, oh, you know, we're using such and such renewables and it's not that bad. And if you look at the numbers, like washing machines are worse, whatever. I think you just have to bite the bullet and be like, we are delivering value. And if you're going to consider the costs, you also have to consider the benefits.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  With AI, it's a little bit easier because it's not just about creating, you know, images of people with, you know, 17 fingers or whatever. Like AI is clearly very useful and it will only increase in its usefulness as society. So my advice to the AI people is, bite the bullet, explain that AI isn't a toy. It's something that is going to vastly enhance human flourishing, right? We're going to use AI to develop new medicines and maybe new industrial techniques and maybe even, you know, help develop nuclear fusion. Like there's a lot, obviously, near infinite number of ways it's useful. There's one problem though, which is,

• 22:39Speaker 02

  AI data centers, as I mentioned, are going to be less benign on the grid than Bitcoin mines because they're not as interruptible. If there's a way for them to figure it out, to plonk down AI data centers in more rural areas where there's more, you know, cheaper energy, where it's not as disruptive. And if there's a way to make AI data centers engage in demand response, so they're only doing jobs at specific times, it's better for the grid, that would help. The Bitcoin miners kind of figured that out. So that would be the challenge I oppose to sort of the AI people is try and figure out how to make the, you know, mode of energy consumption by AI more like Bitcoin mining, because that's how the industry reacted.

• 23:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, what's also interesting, I guess, is it's not just demand response and, you know, kind of certain areas. Or is stranded energy, right? The Bitcoin miners have obviously done a fantastic job, all the gas flare,

• 23:37Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, mining and stuff like that. And when you see why they're able to do that, you know, I remember doing a deep dive with Daniel Batten. And we're talking about the landfills and kind of the landfill gas being converted to energy. And you could right there onsite mine. You can't really do that with AI because you need the, you know, much more kind of built out infrastructure and data centers and stuff like that. So there are some limitations, I think, because of the fragileness of the GPUs and the jobs that are being done. But to your point, like, you don't have to replicate Bitcoin mining, but maybe just like move in that direction probably helps them.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. And you're right. A large part of the reason why Bitcoin is able to penetrate the renewables so well was because Bitcoin mines can be modular. They can be transportable. You can kind of put ASICs on a truck easily, set up a little shack somewhere. You know, go after that stranded energy in wherever it is, upstate New York, hydro and southwest China, hydro in Canada, west Texas, lots of wind and solar. Again, that's very hard to do for AI. Maybe there'll be a startup that figures it out. That would be an amazing thing. If they can make AI data centers more modular, more location agnostic, more interruptible.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  I would hope to see that. Because I mean, look, the AI growth trajectory here, I think is going to far, far outstrip the energy demands of the Bitcoin mining space. I don't think Bitcoin mining consumes much more than 1% of US power.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  From my estimate, I think AI could be 5, 10%. So eventually you will start to have, you, AI will compete with residential buyers of electricity. That will be a real problem. I think, of course, you're delivering significant societal value for that, you know, so there's benefit that accompanies the cost. But we are going to have to grapple with this stuff. And the US has not done a good job of adding power. We just haven't to the grid. China's way, way ahead of us. We're not building a lot of nuclear. We're not building much of anything from a power perspective. So hopefully AI is kind of the wake up call. To the grid planners that, okay, we need to tack on tens and tons of gigawatts here because there is a new

• 25:50Speaker 02

  energy consumer in town and it will be competitive with residential or industrial.

• 25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Another part of the Bitcoin ecosystem that people have been talking a lot about has been the ETFs. We now are, you know, five, six months since they got approved. There has been 15, 16 billion dollars that has flowed in. What I find fascinating is Bitcoin is up about 50%, you know, give or take since when they were approved. But the estimates that are coming out now is like 80% of the ETF flows have been retail. And whether that number is exactly right or not, I think just directionally, like it has been much more retail flows than people originally thought. Right? If you get the ETFs, like the institutions are here, they're coming. Is it good? Or is it concerning that, you know, five or six months later, it's mostly been retail flows that have gone into these vehicles?

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think retail is any less valid than, you know, institutional. I'm very satisfied with the, you know, the progress being made here. I think, I mean, it is the biggest category launch of all time in the ETF. And it's, you know, it's still early. I know it's kind of weird to say, but some of the, you know, wirehouses and banks and RIAs and asset managers still haven't fully come to grips with the ETF. They're still diligencing it. They've yet to approve it for their clients. So these flows will come. It just takes a long time, months, if not years. If you look at when the gold ETFs were first created,

• 27:18Speaker 02

  you had structural flows that were unlocked for gold over a number of years. Gold had, I don't know the exact number, but gold had a number of consecutive up years after the ETF. So not all that flow is going to happen in the first six months. One thing, one note of caution, I would say on the flows is a good portion of that 15 or 16 billion has been. Funds prosecuting the basis trade, you know, going long spot and short the future. Because now you have, you can do the entire trade within kind of the regulated financial system. You can short the future on the CME and you can long the ETF for spot.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And so those are interpreted as flows into the ETF, but it's delta neutral, market neutral. And all they were doing is just compressing the arbitrage between future and spot. So those look like strong flows, but they're actually just arbitrage.

• 28:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, when that trade gets put on, because it is market neutral, is that also a suppression of volatility? And, you know, one of the things that we've seen in the past is when certain futures products in crypto got approved, it would be near the top of market cycles, or there would be, you know, some sort of negative downside impact, because people are going to short or kind of manipulate the market in certain ways. Is this basis trade being executed at this size and scale, something that could actually limit the upside of Bitcoin, you know, in a bull market?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  I would say the general financialization of Bitcoin suppresses volatility, whether it's the basis trade or something else. You also get these structural buyers that have a desired percentage allocation of Bitcoin, whatever it is, let's say 5%. If, so they have a portfolio, all kinds of assets in it, equities, fixed income, real estate, venture, whatever, and then some crypto. And if you're targeting whatever 5%, if Bitcoin sells off, all of a sudden they're underweight Bitcoin, so they buy it. If it rallies, maybe they trim the position a little bit. So you see how that just chops the tails off the return distribution. To the extent you have those kinds of institutions that are now incorporating

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Bitcoin into their portfolios, that's definitely a volatility dampening thing.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Now those allocators can get access to Bitcoin efficiently. I 100% think that we're going to see less volatility on a go forward basis. And yeah, I mean, I personally think that's a good thing, but you know, some people love the volatility.

• 29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, when we talk about lack of volatility, there is maybe like day to day, week to week, month to month volatility. And then there are these like four year cycle type volatility. Do you think that the dampening volatility leads to a disappearance of, you know, hundreds of percent upside, 80% drawdowns every four years?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we're in the four year cycle regime anymore. I don't want to say super cycle.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  That's a term that was coined by some pretty bad guys. But yeah, I think we're in for a kind of a longer term secular positive cycle or.

• 30:34Anthony Pompliano?

  And it just kind of grinds up?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, especially as we have the sovereign debt issue continue to be a problem in the entire developed world, which it is, it certainly is. And I just think a greater portion of those fiat assets continue to take a look at Bitcoin, especially as the asset class matures.

• 30:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, one of the things that most people get excited about is they would hear backwards looking, the 10 year compounding growth rate of Bitcoin depending at the top or bottom of a cycle was like 50% to like 120%, right? I mean, these are massive numbers where in a world where the S and P is up 8% a year, right?

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What number compounding growth rate for the next 10 years would make Bitcoin become unattractive to investors? Right? Is it a thing where I deem it to be riskier than the S and P? And so I need it to be at least two times the S and P's return for me to allocate three times. You know, if all of a sudden it's only returning 12% a year for a decade, is that now something that like you're not getting paid for the risk that people perceive they're taking? How do you just think about, you know, like a threshold where Bitcoin's return gets dampened so much that it actually could, you know, change the way people evaluate it?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  I mean, the way I would think about it if I were in that frame of mind would be in terms of sharp ratios. So, return over volatility. And even if returns are dampened, if volatility is also less, you can still have a very attractive looking sharp ratio. For me, it's about the qualities of the asset itself, and something that's truly sovereign, it's outside of the reach of governments, banks, something that you can self custody, you know. So for me, I just consider the qualities of the thing itself. And I don't have a desired return profile or anything like that. So, I mean, look, gold is an attractive asset, and it goes sideways

• 32:33Speaker 02

  for years at a time. So I think Bitcoin can also be like that. I know that's not a very exciting story to tell. But I think the returns can be positive, especially if volatility's dampened. It still looks attractive from a sharp perspective.

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I agree that gold is attractive to a certain subset of the population. One of the things that I find interesting, though, is how many people in the Bitcoin world are like, oh, this is like, you know, gold, but it goes up. And so if it's like gold, but doesn't go up at 50, 60, 70% a year, do some portion of them start to say, maybe I won't sell the Bitcoin that I already have, but I will allocate elsewhere, right? And you see that maybe with some of the altcoins, but also, maybe they actually start to invest in completely different asset classes, because they were really chasing the return versus where you're looking at it from the properties of the asset being the kind of attractiveness.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, I think it's funny to have this conversation as we've run up from whatever, the 20s to 60, 70. Now, I guess we're around 60. So Bitcoin is still showing that can surprise to the upside and move very quickly. For an asset that large is remarkable. But I do think this is a feature of the maturation of the asset class, is those massive candle days or weeks or months, you just don't get them as much anymore. The law of large numbers has to kick in at some point. You know, Bitcoin cannot grow indefinitely. I mean, we've seen Nvidia go from a 200 billion trillion dollar asset to 3.4 trillion in a couple of years.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  So, you know, these things can happen. I don't know where Bitcoin is today around a trillion, maybe.

• 34:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like 1.2 trillion.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 34:14Anthony Pompliano?

  But a great point is if it went to, you know, two and a half, it's only really a double from here, which in Bitcoin world is actually not that attractive to people who are used to, you know, 800, 900, 1,000% upside in a bull market.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is why you have to calibrate your expectations. And I think that backwards looking analysis, where you're looking at the returns from starting 2011, when this thing was minuscule, like, that can't happen again. But that's okay. You know, Bitcoin has reached a period of maturity. For me, having been in Bitcoin for as long as I can remember, when the ETF was approved, I thought to myself, most of my work is done. You know, I don't need to be an advocate for Bitcoin anymore. Now there's BlackRock that's doing it, you know, like the biggest asset managers in the world. So my part of the story is almost over in a sense, right? I really thought that day was the end of the beginning. And now we're in a new phase where Bitcoin is more integrated into the financial system.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It's great. It's part of the plumbing and one can access to it efficiently. But that also means you're, you know, some of the upside is gone.

• 35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It's funny you think that because I've said similar comments. I know a couple of other of our friends have basically been like, hey, kind of like, we're not going to be nearly as effective almost as Larry Fink going on television and saying, people are buying Bitcoin because it's a flight to quality. Like that one sentence is more powerful than majority of what anyone who considers themselves a Bitcoiner has done for institutional adoption, right? You don't get him to say that sentence without a bunch of the other work, but it does feel like, uh, kind of like the varsity team is here now.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  That's not to devalue like your contributions or mine or anything like that, but it's just like a different level, you know?

• 36:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but, but I think that it's if you want quote unquote mass adoption, you need them, right? And I think that's kind of the point that you're making. Now, the flip side of that is BlackRock has the largest Bitcoin fund in the world, I believe, right? Or grayscale BlackRock, and then you also have MicroStrategy. Those three have very large pools of Bitcoin. There's a couple of other individuals or groups that have, you know, half a percent, 1% of the Bitcoin supply. Should we worry about concentration of ownership in Bitcoin? Like, can BlackRock get too much Bitcoin into the ETF? Can MicroStrategy have too much Bitcoin on their balance sheet?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Well, BlackRock is holding it on behalf of many thousands of investors. So that doesn't worry me. I mean, you have the legal claim on your Bitcoin if you are holding IBIT. It's not BlackRock's Bitcoin. They're just the service provider. The thing that does worry me concentration wise is actually the custody side. Because of the nine major Bitcoin ETFs, eight of them use Coinbase. I mean, Fidelity is different. They homebrewed their custody. Obviously, I used to work there, proud alum. But I think almost every other ETF provider uses Coinbase custody. I don't have any worries about Coinbase. I mean, they're a very successful company, but it does seem like a potential point of fragility.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  In terms of ownership concentration, I actually would guess that it's getting much more distributed as you now have this ETF rails that can distribute it to anybody that's active in public markets through their brokerages. So I'm not as worried from the ETF asset manager service provider perspective. I do worry from the custody perspective. I was hoping that some of the other ETF sponsors would divers away from Coinbase custody.

• 37:43Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what about a MicroStrategy or any other company that's gone and put Bitcoin on their balance sheet where, you know, MicroStrategy is the leader with the most amount? Yes, there are shareholders. At the same time, there's, you know, one person who has voting control. And so, you know, it has an element of the ETF where like, yeah, the shareholders technically have a claim on the assets, but maybe like the decision making is concentrated. And the beauty of Bitcoin is it doesn't matter how much you own, you can't change the system. But are there other risks that maybe people don't talk about?

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you're right. I mean, with MicroStrategy, it's much more the decision of one man. But as you say, like Bitcoin's not a proof of stake network. And that's one of the beautiful things about proof of work is your wealth in the system does not grant you any additional political power, not explicitly, at least. People listen to Michael Saylor because he is an individual that controls a huge amount of Bitcoin, but the network doesn't grant him any additional credibility versus you or me. So that's what I worried about with proof of stake, for sure. I mean, we know proof of stake works and everything like that, but I'd be very concerned if Bitcoin was a proof of stake network, that these large holders, I mean, especially ETF sponsors, if Bitcoin is proof of stake, then BlackRock, Fidelity,

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Coinbase, et cetera, would really have a lot of influence over the future of the network. So we do have to be vigilant about that. But yeah, that's the beauty of proof of work. You know, that's why I like it so much.

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of proof of stake, the Ethereum ETF or Ether ETF, looks like it is going to be approved. It is proof of stake. Are there concerns on the proof of stake side? And then also, do you think it's going to be a popular product? Or do you think that people assigning extrapolation from Bitcoin ETF success to Ether may be misplaced?

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll address those in turn. So yeah, I would be a little concerned. I mean, I don't think the ETFs will have staking at inception is my understanding. So for now, I suppose they're not going to be exercising that power. And overall, Ethereum staking seems fairly, fairly decentralized. But yeah, that's definitely something to monitor and be aware of. I mean, long term, I expect maybe a majority of the units of Bitcoin to end up in the ETFs, maybe something similar for Ethereum. At that point, you are consigning a lot of control. And we have plenty of precedent for this. I mean, BlackRock holds equity, right?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Individuals hold equity through the Vanguard and the BlackRock index funds. And then Vanguard and BlackRock do vote on resolutions because they are the main shareholders. For the most part, you don't have retail individuals submitting their proxy votes to BlackRock or anything like that, right? And this actually does influence corporate outcomes. Like infamously, there was this Exxon case, if I don't even remember, there was a tiny hedge fund that was able to put, I think, three board members on the board. They were kind of ESG advocates. They were able to put three board members on the board because they were able to get the support of BlackRock.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  This was before BlackRock had their anti-ESG turn more recently. And so that's very similar to like how a private stake might work, right? So there is a principal agent problem where you have a huge service provider that controls votes, even if they're holding funds on behalf of some individuals, but they're actually doing the voting themselves. This does cause problems, cause problems for Exxon. I mean, you're putting board members on the board of an oil and gas company that are against the business model. It's crazy. It doesn't really make any sense. So that does concern me. What was the second question? I forgot.

• 41:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Popularity of the ETF itself.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I think the Ethereum, so people are saying, okay, well, the Ethereum ETF, just take the ratio of the assets in the Bitcoin ETF and then the ETH BDC ratio, and that's how you'll back out the assets that flow into Ethereum ETF. I don't think it's like that at all. Bitcoin, because you have to remember, take yourself outside the mind of a crypto native. Take yourself into the mind of Main Street and Wall Street. These people aren't necessarily that familiar with Ethereum, right? Bitcoin has this incredible brand value that's accrued over 15 years. Ethereum is successful as it's been, doesn't have that same brand value. So I'm kind of more skeptical about the flows for that reason. And I think Ethereum is caught in the middle.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  So Bitcoin is sort of the store of value asset, digital gold type thing. People understand it. Ethereum is more technologically progressive. They change more frequently. It's more sophisticated. There's, you know, L2s, smart contracts, DeFi, et cetera.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  You know, huge amount of complexity, but then you have newer, like faster blockchains, like the Solanas of the world, right? And so they can offer even more TPS and even lower transaction fees, et cetera. And so Ethereum is a little bit caught in the middle there, narrative wise. And I think they struggle with that. Like, if you look at some of the changes made to Ethereum, it seems like leadership vacillates between we want to be more like Bitcoin or more like Solana, like introducing the IP 1559, in my opinion, was an attempt to make Ethereum more like Bitcoin. So, okay, we're going to turn it deflationary and we're going to burn the fees and we're going to create a capital return to the token holders. So that's more

• 43:22Speaker 02

  store value-esque. And then what was the newest GIP 4844, designed to reduce fees dramatically for L2s? That's kind of going the Solana direction. It's like, all right, well, maybe we went too far in terms of having high fees and burning a lot of units of ETH and make it look attractive from capital asset. Let's go the other direction now and let's make it as cheap as possible because we're actually worried about the threat from our flank here on Solana. So I think they don't know what they are.

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the lack of principles.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, it's no firm guiding North Star in terms of the identity of the network. Trying to be everything they can, trying to compete with Bitcoin on credibility, monetary soundness, et cetera. Also trying to compete with the Solanas, et cetera, on low fees, transactional throughput, et cetera. I think they're in a tough spot narrative wise.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  People who have critiqued Bitcoin have long said, oh, Bitcoin is the AOL. It's the first one. If you go and you look, there's 40 years of research and development, you know, many, many attempts, eight, 10, 12 different attempts at digital currencies before it. It's the first one that's worked at kind of a global scale. And so it's hard to argue it's the quote unquote AOL, given the product market fit and, you know, kind of everything that came before it. But is it a fair argument to say Ethereum is the potential AOL because it was the first kind of smart contract blockchain and actually the Solanas and others who came after it had the advantage of kind of seeing what worked, what didn't work and trying to improve on it. And so in a weird way, not only is Ethereum caught from a narrative standpoint, but also

• 44:54Anthony Pompliano?

  in a technology competition, they don't have the benefit of kind of like building on top of what other people had figured out already?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  It's tricky. I feel conflicted about it because on the one hand, you know, Ethereum does have the bulk of liquidity, DeFi activity, developer traction, et cetera.

• 45:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Big first mover advantage.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, you know, really they've done exceptionally well. And now they're being recognized as a commodity by the US government. Not that that should matter, but of course it does. Like, I don't see any other major blockchains getting an ETF after Ethereum, not for the, you know, near term. But at the same time, there's so many new L1s always being created that are nipping at their heels. And I would argue that Solana was the first truly successful Ethereum competitor to emerge, get traction, and actually sustain that. People thought Solana was dead. After FTX collapsed, it came back. And Solana is

• 45:56Speaker 02

  ahead of Ethereum by many metrics now, right? And the fees really seem to matter. The monolithic structure really seems to matter. Ethereum has chosen the more fragmented approach of going for L2s, which I think L2s are sensible because that's how real payments networks scale in the real world. But that's a hard case to make when you have a monolithic structure with tons of composability. There's no question of going between L2s or from the L2 to the L1. The whole thing just works. So even though it might seem cheap and maybe doesn't scale in the long term, the monolithic structure is much more appealing in the short term. And so Ethereum has this much harder task where they have to argue why the L2 model,

• 46:40Speaker 02

  the kind of effectively sharded model. Where you're losing composability, they have to argue for that while it's a better UX on Solana, for instance. This isn't to say I think Ethereum is going to fail or go away or anything, but I think they're, they're in for a bit of a challenge here. I mean, especially as you get more performant blockchains too that come out.

• 47:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned no other blockchain getting an ETF. You don't think Solana or others are likely to get it in near term?

• 47:07Speaker 02

  No, I mean, look, Ethereum's been at it since 2014, 15. You know, they have a track record. Arguably ETH2 was a centralizing event. Frankly, I think that is the case. You could probably argue that there is a nexus of power and control and efforts of a third party, et cetera. But yeah, nobody else is even close, I think, to the level of decentralization that they have obviously behind Bitcoin.

• 47:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Um, let's talk stable coins. I know you've spent a ton of time on this. It seems actually, I might even argue that it has more product market fit than the smart contract platforms. It's debatable, like, you know, people can go back and forth, but Bitcoin seems to have product market fit. Stable coins definitely seem to be either number two or number three on that list. What is your current evaluation at, you know, $150 billion market cap, give or take? Is this just a straight line and eventually be, you know, trillions? Or is there something else that, you know, could kind of impede the continued progress?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Well, the stablecoin growth did slow down. I think we rocketed off the bottom in around 125 bill to around 150, and then the growth eased off. I think it's 162 now, but I remain extremely bullish on stablecoins for so many different reasons. We're seeing them obtain real traction outside of the crypto industry as a digital dollar alternative, right? Just a substrate that powers these fintechs that work globally that help regular folks get access to dollars, access to the rest rate. So get access to US yields, effectively treasury yields that they weren't able to before. We're seeing stable coins achieve real breakout success powering remittances and

• 48:51Speaker 02

  cross-border payments in a way that's fundamentally more efficient than the correspondent banking system, much, much more efficient. We're seeing, and, and you know, these trends are accelerating. So actually, we wanted to get data on this. So we, as in Castle Island, commissioned a study about a month ago at five key merging markets. So this is forthcoming. We haven't published it yet, but we just got the data. So I'm very excited. And we looked at India, Indonesia, Turkey, Nigeria, and Brazil to see how people are using stable coins. Were they using it for crypto? Or are they using it to do payroll, send money to their family

• 49:33Speaker 02

  back home? Are they using it to get yield dollars, et cetera? And I kind of had some ideas of what the data would look like, but I was pretty excited. I mean, you know, a lot of people in Washington and stablecoin skeptics like to say, stablecoins are just for crypto. They're just to trade out NFTs or get access to crypto exchanges to speculate. That's not what we're seeing in the data. We're very clearly seeing that people now treat stablecoins as just a dollar alternative, a way to engage in commerce, get access to yields, get the equivalent of a dollar savings account. All of these use cases, payroll,

• 50:16Speaker 02

  B2B transfers, cross-border transfers, trade invoicing, all these use cases that have nothing to do with crypto. They just so happen to be settling on blockchain rails. And that's the exciting thing to me because it enables us to tell the story in Washington, other policy venues, saying, hey, we've created a product that's enormously useful for hundreds of millions of people worldwide that has traction outside of the crypto casino. In fact, it doesn't have that much to do with trading crypto. That's exciting. So I'm pretty fired up about it.

• 50:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Another area that I think people are closely watching domestically is the presidential election. Trump went from multiple public comments in previous administration, "I don't like Bitcoin, I like the dollar, it's all about the dollar," essentially saying this Bitcoin thing is nefarious, competitive, and not something that he would support, to now explicitly saying, "I am the pro crypto candidate. If you like Bitcoin or crypto, vote for me." Pandering? Does he actually, do we think he understands some of this? Would it be good for Bitcoin and crypto if he was to become president?

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's hard to know, but if he gets elected, his cabinet is certainly going to be far more pro crypto than the Biden admin one. I mean, Biden's main financial regulators were handpicked by Elizabeth Warren, and they just took a foreign brimstone attitude to crypto. They tried to destroy it. It doesn't matter what agency we're talking about, FDIC, SEC, CFTC, DOJ, like every possible angle. So it wasn't, okay, Biden was neutral on crypto. No, like the Biden admin actively tried to dismember crypto in the US. So whether

• 52:09Speaker 02

  or not Trump's feelings are authentic or not, I can tell you for sure that his cabinet would be staffed with either pro crypto folks or people that are neutral on crypto. I don't see any real risk that we have a repeat of the Mnuchin situation where he passed the midnight rule that was, I don't even remember what concern, but it was hostile to crypto. And I do think there is a political understanding now on the Republican side that there is a significant crypto constituency in this country. There may not be single-issue voters, but there's a lot of them, and crypto does move the needle. There's a lot of money now supporting crypto PACs. I think Fair Shake is the largest single-issue PAC in the US, period.

• 52:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I think it's one of the top five or six super PACs at all.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  It's just huge.

• 52:58Anthony Pompliano?

  And they have like $160 million they've raised.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  And there's these tight elections, Senate elections in Montana, Ohio, where Fair Shake's going to be deploying. And you know, these, like, you're looking at Ohio, looking at Sherrod Brown, who's been a massive antagonist of the crypto space. I think the left is realizing they have extremely determined opponents if they're going to die on the hill trying to destroy crypto. So like even the left is kind of bending the knee a little bit. So I do think Republican strategists have realized that the crypto constituency is an important one, and it doesn't make sense to offend them. It just doesn't. You don't have to be ludicrously pro crypto. You don't have to swing the whole other way. Just let us do business. Let us open bank accounts. Give us clarity

• 53:45Speaker 02

  around what constitutes a security of a commodity. Simple stuff. We're not asking for the world.

• 53:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like we went on the Ether ETF. I was at lunch with one of the large issuers with the CEO of the business. And I asked him at lunch, kind of joking, like, are we going to get the Ether ETF? Because it seemed like everyone was saying no. And he was, he literally said, there is a 0% chance they're not even engaging with us.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:14Anthony Pompliano?

  That afternoon on, you know, Monday, whatever, he messaged and was like, just kidding. Like, we just got the word. It was all over the news. And it was obvious like there had been a switch. Do you think a lot of that was just like, we can't see to this point? We can't allow Trump to take a pro crypto stance and force us to be anti crypto. And so therefore, we're better off just, hey, we don't want to be pro, but we sure as heck can't afford to be anti. And so like, let's give a couple of these points and kind of just get out of the situation?

• 54:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think some Biden campaign strategists, I don't know who, I'm sure will know five years from now, looked at some internal polls, realized that they were getting hammered on crypto. They realized Trump's endorsement of crypto, he was going to hammer them with it. He was going to use it as a wedge issue. And they thought to themselves, okay, what are two or three things we can do to show that we're not anti crypto to get back to a more neutral perspective on it? What are some small concessions we can give these people so we don't get just shellacked on this issue in the election? The ETF, the ETH ETF was one. Then you had leadership in Congress passing the SAB 121 repeal bill,

• 55:31Speaker 02

  even though Biden vetoed it. So, you know, there and Marty Grunberg, you know, announced his resignation from the FDIC. He's been extremely hostile to crypto throughout his tenure there. So there were some issues where they eased up the pressure a little bit, but I compare it to it's like if they have their boot on our neck, maybe they lifted their boot by an inch, but the pressure is still there. There is a laundry list of things that the Biden admin has done that make it difficult to operate in this country as a crypto entrepreneur. That's just a fact and they've undone one or two of them. There's a lot more.

• 56:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Regardless of who becomes president in this next term, what could they do to help Bitcoin and crypto thrive? And there's a balance between letting people do business. And I'm sure you have a list of stuff there compared to maybe the maniacs who are like, just kill the dollar and like, let's go on the Bitcoin standard.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. So like, what do you think are like sensible things that the next president administration should do? To maybe help this thrive, but also not go too far.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And look, I'm not asking for, all right, let's just eliminate securities laws. You know, like I think actually securities laws make a lot of sense, you know? So the first thing I would say is end this informal campaign of pressure against the banks led by the FDIC, which I call choke point 2.0, which inhibits the ability of crypto firms to get bank accounts. That's a very simple thing. That's not even constitutional, actually. It wasn't allowed the first time. It's still not allowed, but it still happens. The bank regulators go after the banks that serve as crypto firms. They make life hard for them.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Stop doing that. Very simple. Second thing that I think would make a ton of sense would be some kind of stablecoin legislation. Stablecoins are issued under a patchwork of state by state licenses. A lot of stablecoin issuers are leaving the US. They're going to greener pastures. Paxos just launched a stablecoin in Abu Dhabi. You have interest-bearing stablecoins launching in Bermuda because they can't launch here. You have dollar stablecoins being launched out of Dubai, Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong. Let's re-ensure that. You don't want to lose oversight of these stablecoins. What's happening is good for the dollar. They're buying treasuries.

• 58:05Speaker 02

  But why would you want to lose that control? Right? So pass a bill allowing some kind of federal standard for stablecoins. I would ask that. And then something like the FIT 21 Act that clarifies the difference between a security and a commodity, gives tokens that have some cash flow mechanism, some kind of carve-out under securities laws. Maybe you still have to do disclosures. Maybe you are treated like public equity. Maybe it's a lighter-touch regime. Something that allows these tokens to exist and work such that you can gradually bring tokens into alignment with sort of like public equity. I think that would be great as well. And then just stop this, you know, attempts to undermine privacy.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Like I think we've gone way too far in criminalizing privacy. Like, should it be criminal to use tornado cash? Because it's not criminal for me to pay you with a physical dollar bill, even though there's no record of that transaction. So why is it criminal, you know, to develop a protocol that allows people to pay privately? So that would be more on the DOJ front. But yeah, those are kind of the main things I'd ask for.

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of simple, pretty straightforward things in there.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  I like to think so. I like to think so. Hopefully, we're going in that direction.

• 59:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we leave, remind everyone, Castle Island, what you guys do, what type of companies you're looking for to invest in?

• 59:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we do series seed and series A venture investing in crypto all across the industry.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  And we're kind of known for financial infrastructure, stablecoins. I would like to be the most active stablecoin VC, hopefully. Look out for our report that's coming out on emerging market stablecoin usage in about a month. We're doing a lot of stuff in the Bitcoin space, lots going on there, Bitcoin L2s. But yeah, we were active throughout the whole ecosystem, have been at it for a long time now, six or seven years.

• 1:00:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing. We'll do this again. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.