Austin Campbell

“Jerome Powell, whose term is fed, chair is ending, will remain on the board until DOJ probe is over. No fed governor no Fed chairman has ever stayed on, since 1948, And he was like, it's too politically motivated. He says it's because of the probe, which effectively was sort of dropped already, I think. But it seems like he just, in his words, wants to maintain the Fed's independence and doesn't think that will happen if basically Trump gets to appoint another seat.”

“Tether, I will remind everybody, is something like, what, the eleventh largest holder of treasuries in the world. Because Tether has all those reserves, The United States can go to Tether and say, we would like you to freeze x y z. And so Tether's got two options. They could say yes, or they can say no, in which case The United States goes down the street to say Cantor Fitzgerald and says, please give us this amount of money out of Tether's reserve, and they will be like, yes.”

“One of the unpleasant lessons that criminals in crypto are learning right now is that if you use a public blockchain, everything you do is public. Two, stablecoins have freeze and seize capabilities, which means if you're using a US dollar stablecoin, The United States is gonna find a way to get their hands on you. A thing I've been saying for a long time, I think, because I experienced it firsthand is if you believe in cyberpunk ideals and true decentralization, do not use stable points. Those are fundamentally centralized entities that will respond to real world law enforcement whether you like it or not.”

“I just to be honest, I think DeFi is gonna be faced with the decision, Scott, have either become dramatically simpler and safer or get way more centralized to build in the kind of controls that the traditional market has. The market has been like, no. I wanna be able to have a billion dollar loan right in a single block so that I can borrow it, do a huge trade, repay it. But as a result, you were trading off a huge amount of safety. And now we're coming face to face with the fact that you have actively adversarial actors who do not care about the long term functioning of this system using those exact features you built.”

“As a guy who's been a CRO, let me be very blunt with anybody in DeFi who's listening. If you think your infosec can be good enough to stop the North Koreans, you are wrong. You need to be building your stuff with the idea that they will successfully get access to your systems so that they're built in such a way that if that happens, you still can't go break the current running protocol for people.”

“Given where yields on stable coins were prior to this hack, so let's call it two to 4%, and the fact that you can get three point, you know, five ish percent at a government money market fund, would you have left your money in? As a general rule, I would say for people in crypto, if you're getting paid less than high yield bonds, you're probably not getting paid enough. Like, that is the least risky risk instrument that I'll at least start to accept comparisons to.”

“I said there are only two kind of debts that make sense. Debt number one is a debt that is trying to buy cash flowing businesses. Like, you're trying to put together a thing that can actually have real economic activity, and the debt component is just a convenient form of fundraising. So think of this thesis as I'll call it crypto Berkshire. Two, the other one that hilariously would work well is a debt created to unwind all the other debts.”

“That may be the market being correct. And what I mean by that is for a long time in crypto, people believe fat protocol thesis, that is to say the l one will accumulate the value here. But I think a lot of the apps have realized, hold on. I can just place Solana off ETH, off Polygon, off Avalanche, off Mist and Labs and SWE, off like, make them all fight. I think the value accrual may be to the apps. Like, would you rather be an investor in the Polygon token or just in Polymarket?”

“There are versions of essentially what's going on here that actually have gotten quite big in crypto, Scott, that people don't even talk about. Like, have you ever heard of MiniPay? It's got 12 and a half million users who are real two legged people. These are not bots. It operates on Celo, which is now an l two on ETH. It primarily uses tethered. It's primarily in Africa, but that is essentially crypto Venmo, and it's real.”