DEFI

“It's very, very hard. So there are things you can't do, and there are things you can do. You've got to be, first of all, very selective in looking at your balance sheet and saying, okay, it's not the worst thing in the world to say we need to become more efficient on our balance sheet, what's less efficient, where do we make less money, how do we reallocate that balance sheet usage. You then turn to certain things and say, we're just not going to be active about soliciting loans, we're not going to be active about soliciting deposits. We were very careful not to throttle consumer deposits, because you tell a consumer to please bring your deposit elsewhere, you've lost that relationship.”

“I think Bitcoin's totally fine. I do though think that they will burn those coins or freeze them or do something. They're not gonna let a $100,000,000,000 of Bitcoin get burned. But what I think the sorry, using another analogy here, but the other analogy of an ideological movement doing this is like the church, which everyone loves to compare Bitcoin to. I think it'll be fine. I mean, the church kinda went through this when they had to reconcile with the Roman emperor and, like, you and I wouldn't care about this, but in Christianity, you can only worship one god. Roman emperors were version like, worshiped as gods. How do you reconcile?”

“So, so I started my career in biotech. Um I was like uh 20 didn't know a lot of life but sometimes you need to be at the right place at the right time and need to be bolded. So I uh I talked two of my professors into starting a biotech company with me uh which became very big. I didn't check the market cap meaning I sold years ago but it's called Alnum. We pioneered RNI technology. It's roundabout like people can look it up alny as a ticket but again I'm sold years ago but like I think it's a $50 billion company now like it became wildly successful it's a very iconic biotech company where I have actually and actually that is maybe as an anecdote so I'm doing biotech which makes me very old like since 27 years again I started early and since I'm in biotech I was quizzing all of the people I met and because of the success of a lot of cool people early and I was like why the hell are we only focusing on nichy diseases which originally was the mantra of biotech for 20 years.”

“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.”

“The other the other kind of weak point here was that the KelpDAO team used, like, a one of one DBN, which means that you're just relying on the layer zero laps, sort of core infrastructure. If they had used, you know, a deviant set that required two of three or something like this with different independent operators, it would have been this much harder for North Korea to, like, compromise each of these independent organizations. So I think that was that was clearly a failure as well as is using a one of one implementation was, you know, not the right choice.”

“So it's been funny to see, the portfolio of things that Sam invested in fraudulently, has now continued to grow. So Anthropic is worth a trillion dollars. I think he didn't de seed investment in Cursor. They put $200,000 into a $400,000 pre seed round there, and that Cursor announced this week that what they have given, Elon Musk the option to buy that company at $60,000,000,000 post SpaceX IPO. So it is a tragedy in a sense, though, that Sam really was a generational investor.”

“the 50year-old teacher in Iowa who just wants to do more with his grandchildren or whatever. He's not on Twitter. He's not going to go on a out of his own impetus. And most likely he's also not going to get reached with the marketing the classical the platforms are doing at the moment but he's going to most likely watch one of the biggest sports events of the year and when he's then learning about it he's like oh wow there is real science behind and that's why our clinical study we're doing in Abu Dhabi beyond that it's like gold standard for the uh for the athletes what they're getting in terms of uh medical service I think it's very important that be very scientific and everything we're going to do in the future and everything we're going to recommend uh is going to be backed up by science and with that sort of combination approach of like this massive global sports event which going to reach again hopefully millions and millions of people.”

“I do think it is important that we acknowledge Donald Trump has injected chaos and corruption into everything he touched. And I think it's important for me, for other Democratic leaders in this country, to be able to show what calm, competent governance can actually deliver for people. That's what I'm gonna be talking about in these midterms as I see reelection. I think it is important to paint an alternative picture to the chaos Donald Trump has created, one where you can actually grow the economy.”

“Jones was, actually, this is a really interesting point, Scott. He wanted 35% market decline could hit capital gains tax revenue, widening the federal deficit and pressure of the bond market. So that's kind of a nightmare loop as stocks fall, tax receipts weaken, the deficit looks worse, bonds get hit, and investors are forced to sell more than what they own. And he also cited some of the big IPOs. He said that a flood of new share supply from companies expecting to go public combined with insider lockup expirations could create pressure similar to the setup before the dot com bust.”

“The KelpDAO exploit is just the latest reminder that DeFi is nowhere near the maturity level we pretend it is. When you have a 300 million dollar hack of this scale, it reveals deep-seated security vulnerabilities that exist in these complex composable systems. You realize that we are still building on top of very fragile foundations where a single line of bad code or a bridge failure wipes out years of community progress.”

“So, in the US, for example, if you win gold, you make 37 a half thousand. Compare that to the 250,000 that we're paying if you win an event. Massive difference. In Germany, where I'm from on Cru, where we're both from, uh the prize money for for gold that Germany pays you is €20,000. So, it's really nothing. And so we had one female swimmer, she won gold at the Paris Olympics in 2024 and she was saying like, "Hey, I've now represented my country on the highest level, won the highest award there is in my sport after having dedicated my lifetime to the craft and I make 20,000 euros, but if I go to Love Island, I'm going to make at least three times as much from just rocking up there. So how is that possible?"”

“Coinbase does not take that posture. So Coinbase says, yeah, there's no imminent threat, but you actually do have to upgrade now. Interestingly, the debate on timelines, timelines to a a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is largely irrelevant since migrations should be planned for and prepared now. The board's view is straightforward. The time to start preparing is now, not when it's urgent.”

“So what happened is that there is, a bridging mechanism for RS e to go to other chains. This is called a lock and mint bridge. So, basically, the RSE is is natively issued on Ethereum. And so if you want to go to, another chain like Arbitrum, you would then lock the RSE in the this is a layer zero bridge on Ethereum, and then it would send a message which would mint the, RSC. It's like an IOU for the backing that's sitting on Ethereum. So what happened is that, there was a forged message, from the security mechanism within the layer zero ecosystem. Again, this North Korea was able to penetrate deeply into the infrastructure layer here.”

“We want to enable value to be communicated as quickly as possible, but like any time when it is about to leave the boundary, you want to just like spend a little bit extra time because it's important that our orders match at sub microsecond in like HFT, but it's not important that the actual funds settle between institutions and TradFi in sub microsecond, right? That takes longer. It takes hours, if not days. There's reasons for that. There's circuit breakers. There's people on both sides checking. There's middle offices like everything that TradFi has built in terms of circuit breakers. We're just speed running, relearning those things in crypto.”

“His name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke, and he allegedly made more than 400 k trading on Polymarket on the basis of classified info regarding the timing of The US military operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. He tried to cover his tracks after making the bets by sending most of the gains to a foreign crypto account, and he even asked Polymarket to delete his account. He's 38 years old, and he was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.”

“The way that they were able to do that was by effectively exploiting the OFT, which is basically a cross-chain boundary bridge between two chains. In this case, it's an implementation provided by LayerZero. But the infrastructure can actually be run by anyone. They were trying to lock a value which was not actually held on Arbitrum, and they effectively spoofed a packet saying that Arbitrum received 116,000 RS ETH, and now you're clear to go ahead and release that to this address on maintenance of Ethereum.”

“On the exorbitant principle privilege issue, I agree with Steve. I think Americans are shielded from foreign exchange risk, which is also advantage. This notion that one hears from all over the world that The US has some exorbitant privilege is overrated.”

“One of the few things I've been following over the weekend because it's just so fascinating and validates something that we've been worrying or warning about in the space for for many years is the the draining of multiple DeFi protocols by hackers because the virtual machines that they're running on aren't as secure as as many people were led to believe and are not as decentralized as many people were led to believe either. So that, like, if you have a bunch of DeFi actors going aping in the stretch and they're doing it on insecure protocols or using insecure smart contracts, could could get interesting there as well.”

“Arbitrum took what I or off chain labs, I think, took what I thought was a great move, which was they froze about, you know, between around $65,000,000 worth of these stolen assets. But I see some people saying that, well, this is MultisigFi instead of DeFi, and we kinda to me, I interpret this as this is the ideological backbone of crypto colliding with the real world. Well, I think, you know, North Korea not having $65,000,000 in that money going back to users, like, the outcome is unambiguously good.”

“We've got a money back guarantee on all of our permits. If we don't get you your permit in time, we'll give you your money back. And fun fact, we've issued 40,000,000 permits during my time as governor. We've only had to issue five refunds, meaning only five of those permits were late.”

“He was very emphatic about it, pointed out quite a few reasons why he believes that the stock market is once again near a top. Now he's been saying that for quite a while. But mostly that US equity market cap is 252% of GDP right now. Dotcom peak was 02/1970. You know, previous crashes were far, far less.”

“A DeFi cascade could be the linchpin that causes that final capitulation candle. And just to back up to what I said yesterday, that final capitulation from FTX was about a 25% candle to the downside in a singular week. And if we keep cooking, and it looks like we got some juice to keep cooking, I actually think that we're gonna be tapping around the 80, maybe $81,000 range, and a 25% move brings you smack dab back down to $60,000, creating a double bottom party time back on.”

“Galls Law. It comes from 1975. His law says a complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make work. You must start over again to with a simple working system and build outwards. Complexity is your enemy. It is always your enemy. It's in it's your enemy in investing. It's your enemy in policy making.”

“It's by the way there's one company out there which does that perfectly people just don't know it or know it they know the company but like not the business model because they're not public which is Red Bull uh if you look at Red Bull yeah it's a consumer product um but they own various sport events. Um, it's not public, but my guess is uneducated guess is that at least some of them are really profitable or at least value a creative like the Red Bull Formula 1 team. Um, but the vast majority of the brand value of the Red Bull Formula 1 team is going to Red Bull. So, they make money or they build up value by owning it and they have this massive translation into their consumer product. And that's very simple or simplified said like what we are aspired to become.”

“I still think that the models flatten to a commodity over the long run and just that the harness, how the harnesses are really good and that Anthropic has a ton, or OpenAI has a ton of compute power. But I don't see it being, I see it being likely that people will be able to use open-source models to devise the same caliber of attacks as we're seeing today. So I really don't see certain nation states having an advantage over others that are purely due to model dominance or even compute.”

“Mark Carney's comments, I guess, in in reaction to to Trump's posturing towards Canada specifically. And if you're thinking, like, deep state actors placing Mark Carney in the prime minister role of Canada seems to be very strategic for for the incumbent power structure. If you know the history of Mark Carney at the Bank of England and HSBC and his involvement in the the cartel the cartel money laundering case with the HSBC where they're putting, duffel or, excuse me, briefcases full of cash through teller windows. They designed the teller window. He's he's had his fingers in everything. Many would consider him a a Davos class economic actor.”

“We had the KelpDAO hack, which then led to a problem with toxic debt across all of DeFi, which led to an issue specifically on Aave, which is obviously considered the blue chip safest DeFi of, I I think, roughly 200,000,000. And we have sort of a JPMorgan early nineteen hundred situation where it gets everybody in a room and asks for a private bailout. So we have, I guess, a mix of different companies either sort of donating, I mean, Steny himself, I think, millions of dollars, or offering loans, but basically plugging up this whole I think it's $300,000,000 already has been pledged. This reeks, I think, on the surface of tarp, you know, a government bailout like 2008, but I think that's sort of a lazy comparison because it's voluntary and it's not forced and it's not the government.”

“When you say you want more Aussie babies, you're not saying I want people who wanna be able to have kids to have kids. A decent, but thankfully very small minority of people will talk to me about the great replacement theory and how people are coming from around the rest of the world to replace Australians. The dog whistle is well known, which is you say a thing knowing full well how people will take it so you don't have to say the thing out loud. That's that's the very nature of the dog whistle.”

“None of these STRs, whatever you call them, none of them are gonna make it except Sailor. I mean, maybe BM and R. I'm not even sure about them. But if they don't make it, the token market is, like, it's all toast. Now I don't see, hate to be like mister negative here, but I think we go for another round down Bitcoin because there's too much money that's just dying to get the fuck out of XXI and NACA and all these, you know, like, none of these companies have done shit, man.”

“It literally was a hairdryer. It literally was a hairdryer. They've charged the guy. I mean, you could see a barbed wire fence. So, I mean, there's some sort of security protocols in place here. I'm not sure how much, but he made $36,000 by walking up to the weather sensor. It was a unguarded thermometer near a Paris airport runway. He just pointed a hairdryer at it, entered in with two k, and almost did, basically, a 15 x there.”

“If if your view is Trump has the chicken out, this is he's he's sensitive about stock market. He's sensitive about treasury yields, all these different things. Well, maybe. That may be true. But if that's the case and that's his primary Achilles' heel and primary constraint, even after he sent 10 destroyers, 12 destroyers, whatever, into into the Persian Gulf to turn away dozens of ships and kinda imperially take control thus far of of that area and stocks are all time highs. So if your entire bed, if your entire philosophy, if your entire worldview is it's, you know, it's just a matter of time before The US has to pull back because Trump's so worried about the the stock market, well, you know, he's he's got a lot of leeway right now.”

“I think the real breakdown here was, you know, not necessarily that KelpDAO ran a one-of-one between Arbitrum and ETH Mainnet, but it's that Aave allowed it to be a collateral asset without properly vetting the bridge risk of the one-of-one. I think Aave is not without fault here. They did have, you know, one of their key risk teams walk out earlier this month. That was Chaos Labs. And Omer Goldberg did a very good post on X, explaining like a lot of the things that we could have added in terms of sanity checks and circuit breakers.”

“The independence of the Fed is critically important, not just here in The US, but in other parts of the country. And when you think about just the way our our governing system works, you know, it's different than a place like China where there's long term management, long term goals, high coordination across all the different areas of government. You know, here we have, you know, a political infrastructure that turns over, which has points of views, and we have a more long term structure in place at the Fed.”

“We also noted that if the dollar were to be dislodged, it would be not so much because of competition from Europe or China, but because of bad economic policies in The US. And if that were the case, then the loss of dollar dominance would be the worst of our problems. So fast forward to today and the article that Mark and I wrote recently, the list of bad policies has gotten longer, and it's actually happening.”

“Stockpiles is my answer. And the reason is that stockpiles, you pay effectively just the carrying cost. If we had ninety days or a hundred and twenty days worth of fuel rather than twenty eight, we'd have a a storage cost, which would be the infrastructure cost to create, build tanks, and whatever else. If we are invaded by Indonesia or China, if we'd had hundred days of fuel, we might be able to last behind the barricades for another month or two. And then the tanks rolls straight over the top.”

“I think a lot of people were caught off guard by the fact that, like, you know, Aave, which is kind of like a core pillar of the the industry, through this smaller relatively collateral RSEs, they've had exposure to, you know, what turned out to be a pretty unsafe, like, bridging setup. And it's pretty challenging to, like, map out this whole dependency graph of, you know, you're just a depositor in Aave Eth. It's you you know, on the face of it, it seems like it should be a very safe asset, but you're actually exposed, you know, through a couple layers of intermediation to, you know, a one of one DDN bridge.”

“There was one of the more amusing ones I've ever seen was this Paris temperature market. So there wasn't a ton of volume on this because why would anyone bet on the temperature in Paris on a given day? It was an Oracle attack, so they were using a single sensor near the Charles De Gaulle Airport. The guy bought the 22 degree, that's in Celsius, 22 degree option which was trading at basically zero, took a hairdryer, heated it up, the sensor triggers, the market closes, he wins and then gets arrested.”

“That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team. It's a little like Pete Rose. Pete Rose had kept him out of the hall of fame because he bet on his own team. Now if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I'll look into it.”

“Stablecoins can be helpful, but they're not a panacea. In a context where our termites had been working diligently on the foundations of the house of dollar dominance, leading it to become precarious and crash, it's unclear that stablecoins would be the dollar savior. In this adverse scenario where the dollar is becoming more precarious in terms of its role and we look to stablecoin for rescue, at that point, stablecoins themselves might be a very viable entity in financial markets, but people would presumably stop pegging them to the dollar and start pegging them to other currencies.”

“Yeah. I think right now there's pretty clear consensus that it would be the wrong thing to do. Until the, Iran conflict is clear what the end is in sight, there's there's real risk out there. I mean, I think as you hear voting committee members talk about it, there's a high degree of consistency, including, I think, from, treasury secretary in terms of, you know, waiting to see how this all plays out.”

“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.”

“Probably the same threat that we identified a couple of years ago when we were here even before the new administration took power, which is the fiscal. So projections for the right now, federal debt to in the hands of the public to GDP is around a 100%, which is historically high in peacetime for The United States. But the projections are given current and future fiscal deficits for debt to GDP to go up to a 150% or higher by the middle of the century.”

“It's just tough to get keep getting kicked while you're down, Scott. Like, we're we're down 90% on anything else that we've bought that's not Bitcoin. Right? Like, some people down more. Things have been lost. Like, retail's just got barely like, almost no heartbeat left. And then the little bit of ETH maybe that you, you know, that that someone had trying to earn a little bit of yield, you know, hoping to get a little bit more capital for the next run.”

“Did you see that, Scott Besant, secretary of treasury of Besant, wrote an op ed in the journal today, taking aim at congress, calling on them to pass the clarity act, talking about how The US needs to remain the world's financial center? This is an evolving technology we need to lead. Like what I'm hearing there. I agree. Let's get it done.”

“No. God, no. For god's sake, do not give these people more power. Like, no hard no strong, the most emphatic no that I can go. For god's sake, it's like giving a machine gun to a monkey. They they do enough damage as it is with the tools that they've got. And to give them another one, you know, nah. It just comes back to the the Hayekian face or conceit, you know, which is is just the the the height of hubris to think that a board of 12 very, very rich people can make decisions for the whole nations by meeting once every six weeks.”

“Just ask yourself, like, does de dollarization need need to happen? Does the Petro yuan need to happen? Do do we need to enter into thousand percent hyperinflation or, you know, massive, unprecedented big print? All of which is possible. But do we need that for Bitcoin to be an attractive investment, for Bitcoin to be an attractive technology to use for for payments at the sovereign level, the institutional level? And I, you know, I think I think the answer is definitively no.”

“Bitcoin screamed up to 78,000 on the seventeenth, so last Friday. And it's it's held up pretty well throughout all this. you had Bitcoin on the one month chart really diverging from the software stocks index from from Vanguard, I think. There was some sharp divergence. Bitcoin up 6%. Software stocks down about a percent, and they've been trading in tandem since the middle of last year.”

“This is just my personal bias, but I would I would almost start from the perspective of who's no longer alive as the most likely candidate to be Satoshi. Because who could sit on 1,500,000 Bitcoins and just not move them throughout all this tumult that we've had around the block size wars, now the quantum threat? I mean, to not move your Bitcoin, to still be breathing and have access to the keys. So to me, it's you know, doesn't have access to the keys or is no longer with us.”

“We need to build better infrastructure and not have one of one DVNs that are governing, you know, the ability to move value that quickly. And then, you know, aside from that, like how do we eliminate the blast radius on other DeFi protocols like Aave? Aave should not be accepting deposits that are that large from brand new addresses without those being flagged. If we're feeling downtrodden right now because we're really facing the music of DeFi in general potentially being at risk here, to me it's just a wake up call that we need to double down on our efforts on securing this infrastructure.”

“I think the the clarity and genius stuff is, like, you should fade it. I mean, the regulation is always a fade in terms of what's driving price movement 100% of the time. But I think that peep it I think it's the type of thing that people fail to price appropriately the long term effect of. Like, Genius got signed into effect, and then there are a bunch of things that are in motion right now which are going to drive, like, a whole bunch of changes that there will be big winners from.”

“If it was Craig Wright all along. I would yeah. Then I would actually be upset. Still don't really understand. I guess it's hard to explain the rantings of a madman, but what was Craig Wright thinking? I mean, I just think if you persuade people that you have a hoard of a $120,000,000,000, you can turn all that into real money.”

“Wanna know the the the the truth? Yes. I get to Wells, and first thing I wanna do is get a Wells Fargo credit card, and so I get the new card, and I was out to dinner with some good friends who run some big companies, and I pull out my card and it got denied.”

“I think most people want a very sure 10 to 15% return. That's what I think that's what I think, like, most people are chasing. That's where I think the biggest amount of money in the world is. Have you guys spent a lot of time on, like, the Reddit forums of, like, financial freedom? I actually disagree with you. I don't think we are clouded by crypto that retail wants thousand x's.”

“It is really happening. Floor prices across the board of OG collections from the first cycle, Bored Apes, Deadfellas, doing the whole thing. I I understand most people would think that this is nonsense, but it it it's it seems to me that there is a correlation between the flight from DeFi and people wanting to custody their ETH in cryptographically verifiable art, and I don't think that's a trend that's gonna end anytime soon.”

“The government should massively reduce the government deficit so they're not adding demand to the economy, making things worse. That that's easy. We are collecting more tax revenue than ever before. There there is no there is no deficit. And the treasurer could say, I'm gonna remove stimulus from the economy so that I'm not working cross purposes with the reserve bank so that they don't have to deal with higher inflation, put rates up.”

“Bitcoin is a superior inflation hedge because of its fixed supply and global portability. Gold has historically served this role, but Bitcoin acts with the speed of light in a digital economy. Paul Tudor Jones recognizes this shift in the way investors are thinking about store-of-value assets in a debased currency environment.”

“The first day I was governor, the first executive order I signed was to do away with the college degree requirement to work for state government. We have 80,000 employees, damn near all. Now you do not have to have a college degree other than, say, the doctors and lawyers and people like that who require advanced degrees. So now, sixty percent six zeros 60% of all of our hires in state government don't have a college degree.”

“The thing that really first just, like, tipped tipped me off to it was last summer with the MP Materials deal for, you know, an equities massive equity stake in MP Materials and other rarest brews here in The US with offtake agreements as well and price floors, which is very industrial policy, very, you know, World War two preparation style, unfortunately, kind of central planning flavor in a policy. Well, you're seeing that here, as well with this deal. And so a major financing package for the deal from the Development Finance Corporation, which is, government Pentagon aligned, as well as a a long term fifteen year, 100% off take agreement with with price floors largely, it looks like, subsidized by and guaranteed by the government.”

“Speaking of geopolitical, considerations, there are a lot of rumors that Iran is gonna accept tolls from straight of Hormuz passage in Bitcoin. And people are kinda celebrating this, which I find really bizarre, frankly. It's like, yeah. Well, like, okay. Yeah. Certain nation states, pariah countries do use digital assets. Like North Korea, they have Bitcoin, but why celebrate that? If these payments happen, that's not good for the global economy. That's basically a form of international piracy.”

“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.”

“The day I took office, it took twenty days for a barber to get their permit, to be able to go out and cut hair. Today, you get it same day. You get it within that day. That may seem silly to you, but but it but understand, I called my barber. I asked him. I said, how many heads do you cut a day? He said, about 10 a day. At $20 a pop, $200 a day for two for twenty days. That's real money.”

“One thing Mike said, which I agree with is, like, you know, meme coins and n f NFTs, etcetera, I'm not sure these things will come back. But there will be a new thing that people use, especially retail that we don't even know about right now, and that just absolutely blows up.”

“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?”

“I actually think the Congress of the United States, the leadership there, I mean, they are frankly, kinda sad, pathetic people. And let me explain why. Right? You put, what's his name? Johnson in as as speaker, and he's effectively a rubber stamp for anything Donald Trump wants. And by the way, whether you agree with Trump or not, I think you can agree that you'd like your member of congress to at least meet the burdens that they have on them in the constitution of The United States, which is to be a check, which is to be a a separate branch of government.”

“Well, I think one of the major design principles is effectively to segregate the base layer or the validator network that's actually witnessing transactions on those source chains and then attesting them into the blockchain. And then basically making a general abstraction, which we call subnets that allow multiple different, you can call them subnets or layer twos or whatever. But you can basically have like the base network, which is only responsible for custodying the L1 assets. And then those are being credited to networks that can have their own validators set. Our first subnet is our exchange, which is a limit order book.”

“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.”

“The only thing that that John and the New York Times did was they looked at language and grammar patterns in forum posts and emails and things like that. But it's not done in a very systematic way, Actually. They kind of were like, okay, well, let's look at certain spellings and then let's look at the 100 most possible candidates and see but they sort of assumed the conclusion. They kind of went from well, I think it's this guy back. And then they they kind of, with the conclusion already in mind, look for corroborating evidence, which you can do for any of these guys, by the way.”

“Look. It you know, your instinct is right. I think everyone should be off the screens, frankly, as much as they can. It's increasingly low low return on time and increasingly a a a dos attack on, your attention to really follow the headlines closely. So, it's it's Michael Scott, snap, snap, snap, snap basically every day of the week. And so I think this is just a great illustration of how little the average market participant knows or can really rely on anything that they're seeing come across their their Bloomberg or or CNBC on any given day.”

“Also, I see stable coins basically as a pass through mechanism for crypto. Crypto to me is about criminality, money laundering. Tether is the largest stablecoin in the world. It's in El Salvador. Who knows what it's invested in and whatnot? I think this could end unhappily.”

“The interesting thing that happened after April 2 was that the dollar, which previously had always been a flight to safety currency rising during times of financial turbulence, actually fell instead. In the four years before Liberation Day, on average, the dollar had always risen in response to increases in the VIX. But for several months after Liberation Day, that sensitivity turned negative. When volatility went up, the dollar fell, making the dollar less like a safe haven currency and more like an emerging market style risk on currency.”

“I think it's incredibly important, and I really dislike when people talk about lobbying like it's some awful, horrible thing. Showing up and trying to convince a senator or a congressperson at the last minute that what I think is right, when it's clear that it's just gonna benefit me, goes nowhere. What really matters is over a period of time, building a relationship with members and their staffs where you're where you're honest about about what works, what doesn't work, what the risks are, and so that when they need to actually have a position on something, they're more educated.”

“It's been a bull market for a long time. There's a huge amount of liquidity in the system. There's this underlying current that things are gonna be fine for a long period of time. There are a lot of people in the financial services space, in banks and outside of banks, that have never been through cycles, like a real cycle in terms of what that means, and there's a point in which that's gonna turn, and that's gonna have a whole bunch of impacts that I'm not sure we all really understand.”

“Also on the ETF, front, Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF, that's MSBT. They saw 30,000,000 in net flows on its first day of trading on Wednesday. Not eye popping day one numbers, but, I believe this is the cheapest Bitcoin ETF from an expense ratio perspective. This Morgan Stanley one is point 14%. And, yeah, they all kinda go up from there up to about, 25 basis points.”

“With the IEPA tariffs, my first reaction was, we've had deficits for fifty years. There's no emergency here. And I just told you there was no fundamental international payments problem. I just went through how the market functioning right now is inconsistent with the language of 122 as I think about it. So to me, why isn't 122 on its face ridiculous and out of bounds?”

“Try and try and do some scenario analysis and just ask yourself if if I did lose my job tomorrow, not saying you would, but just do do it. What if? What if? How do things look like and and they say it takes six twelve months, twenty four months, thirty six months to get another job. There's a lot of people who think that they're the world's, you know, greatest investor. They're God's gift to investing because they did some very, very reckless things, and it just happened to go well for them.”

“Wouldn't you imagine if institutions are looking at this, they see the power of utilizing smart contracts as a better way, obviously, for yield and and lending, but won't wanna do it in a decentralized manner. And this may actually, ironically, push them to use the technology to build centralized walled gardens to offer yield for their own customers and not be a part of the larger system where there's potential contagion. Like, why doesn't Goldman Sachs just have a Goldman Sachs, like, you know, it's not DeFi, but the centralized lending put it all together themselves and close it off.”

“You might have seen there was audio of a tanker captain released of the camp captain effectively begging the IRGC boats to not fire on his ship. And he kinda said, well, they'd paid the toll. Why are you shooting at me? It's looking like the ship may have fallen victim to a crypto scam. Someone fraudulently represented themselves as the RGC toll authorities. They pay the toll. They expect they'll go through unmolested. They get fired upon by the Iranians that never received a payment and that this whole mess takes place.”

“So the end new anthropic model is called Mythos. They have not released it to the public yet because they say that it has zero day the ability to, inflict zero day vulnerabilities on every operating system, basically every Internet browser, and they have formed what they're calling Project Glasswing, bringing together some of the largest companies in The United States, Google, JPMorgan, Cisco, Broadcom, number of others, to bring them under the tent on fixing some of these zero days before the model is released. This is scary stuff.”

“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.”

“And what does that what does that person feel after they try and get their permit, they can't get it. They try and open their small business, it won't work? They get frustrated. By the way, they get pissed. And then not only are they pissed at that agency, or that governor, or they're pissed at, you know, that state government, they also grow and this is an important point a little more cynical about government, and a little bit more frustrated about the process. And when that happens, I think that that creates more distrust in our system. And it creates more opportunity for, I think, frankly, dark voices on extremes to come in and take advantage of people.”

“AI deflation is a nice economic story for the aggregate, but it hides the distribution problem. Even if AI drives down the cost of goods and services, we are looking at a future of extreme structural inequality because the owners of the AI capital capture all the gains. The technology might make things cheaper, but it will make the divide between those who own the tech and those who are displaced by it much, much wider.”

“DeFi and just the whole crypto industry, it is kinda playing on hard mode because, we can't rely on just, like, moral hazard and someone bailing us out. If anything, like, maybe the closest, we have in crypto to, like, a lender of last resort would be someone like a Binance or a Tether, where they're extremely profitable. They have a huge balance sheet. They have a lot of sort of excess reserves where, they can backstop, losses. You know, private got hacked. Binance, had a loan out to them to make sure that they could still cover withdrawals.”

“I was at a Galaxy event hosted by Mike Novogratz at his house in New Orleans last November, and Paul Tudor Jones came and kindly spoke to the group, giving his whole history and how he got into Bitcoin and how he approached everything. And one thing that is really, I think, very important about him, he's obviously one of the most recognized and important hedge fund managers of all times, frankly, especially in the macro space. And he was really the first to publicly adopt Bitcoin and push it and even write a paper about it.”

“The most compelling piece, I think, is that one of the citations in the white paper is this, paper that was it was the result of a conference that was held in Belgium or Luxembourg. And the conference proceedings, you know, the written version was only made available in a couple universities in the region. And and, of course, Len, he studied in Belgium. So it actually wasn't on the Internet freely available. So you would have only had access to this paper, which is cited. It's like the third reference in the Bitcoin white paper if you were physically studying at one of those institutions in Belgium.”

“The way I describe it right now is we're about six months into a pretty deep bear market. Traditionally, bear markets have lasted around twelve months before activity started recovering. That kinda makes me think that by the end of this year, we'll be looking a little bit better. We won't be out of the woods yet, but I do think 2027 will be quite a good year.”

“this actually had a compounding effect in that, there's a lot of positions on Aave because they rehypothecate the ETH collateral quite heavily. This liquidity issue now turns into a solvency issue on the USD markets potentially. So that the there's a lot of positions there that are ETH collateral borrowing stable coins. And so, normally, when the market is is there's there's enough liquidity, the liquidations on a ETH USD position can function just fine. The problem is is that with an impairment in the ETH market, if the price of ETH drops, there's no more liquidity to sell and then recap like, recapitalize or basically pay off the loans that are reaching margin calls.”

“Auckland's seen house prices drop 26% in the last few years. Toronto's seen about a 23% drop. Now and this isn't the, oh, here we go again with the the property doomerism. It's just I sometimes feel as though we see it in Australia as sort of like, that's an impossibility. You know? And, you know, you you see the headlines when prices are down 2% quarter on quarter. Woah. People freak out.”

“Tether just announced they helped freeze over 344 million dollars of USDT in coordination with OFAC and law enforcement. This is not the first time, but the scale and the speed of this coordination show that Tether has become a primary lever for institutional oversight. It is a reminder that even the most stable parts of the crypto ecosystem are now fully integrated into the existing regulatory apparatus of the state.”

“Bitcoin has made it in the sense that it's still really the only institutional asset class, like, fully institutional asset class. So it's gonna start behaving like institutional assets behave. The original value prop of Bitcoin was you should buy this because this thing might 20 x in your face. And no one believes that anymore, and that's good if you are a kind of like a goal you you don't really wanna buy some there's a whole the big pockets of money in the world don't wanna buy things at 20 x because if it 20 x's, it can go down 90%.”

“I thought it was really funny in past cycles, especially, like, '21 where, when the institution institutional people, like, tried to basically, like, adopt crypto culture, you know, and you'd have, like like, you know, consulting firms being, like, g m g m. Like, we'd love to chat to you about x y z or just, like, random people at these big companies having, like, you know, board ape PFTs and things like that. And it was very much so, like, we're in our own little world over here.”

“you can do, DeFi custody in the right way, and it's been actually, some of the oldest protocols have been doing this the right way, which is, governance under time locks. And where there are multisigs that have, like, custody of funds, they need to be under time locks. And then for immediate reaction time, you have these, like, freezing multisigs that can react right away, but you need this, like, the custodian of the assets to always like, any sort of, like, unexpected movement that can be done with the assets, you need this under a time lock. This is a this is a massive, deterrence, to North Korea.”

“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.”

“Tokens are not an asset class. They are a way of they are they are a wrapper for different types of asset classes, period. Like, a token is not a new thing. It's not a new thing. It's just a different way of representing existing assets.”

“On the issue of Israel and The Middle East and the war in Iran and Gaza, there's a lot of nuance there. I'm happy to answer your questions on that, but I think on the issue of antisemitism, we have got to be in a place where we universally condemn it. And I think what you're seeing from some folks on the right and some folks on the left is they'll only call it out if it's said by a political opponent or someone they disagree with.”

“DeFi United bailout is the central talking point following the latest round of hacks and toxic debt on Aave. Some argue this is a sign of industry maturity where major players step in to prevent contagion. Others see it as the dangerous beginning of the too big to fail era in decentralized finance.”

“Think about it like Formula 1. When the engineers of the Formula 1 team designed the Formula 1 car, that's at the forefront of scientific innovation and technology, that Formula 1 car is never going to get mass-produced. But what the engineers learn in developing that form car in some form of a derivative is going to trickle down into the world car production a few years down the line. So the anti-blockage system that you have in almost every car today actually comes from motor racing. very similarly for us would help Christian Golam, a Greek swimmer that broke the first record last year as an enhanced athlete. What helps him break a world record is way too complicated for an average Joe like myself. But the work that we do with Christian and all of the other athletes is constantly improving our product offering and our prescription guidelines for the people at home.”

“Look. It's preferred, man. It's preferred over MSCR. I get 75% loan to value on my on MSTR. I went to my bank and I said, hey. I want you to move my treasury position or at least half of it into STR in into STRC. You're giving me 3% on the bonds. I get 11 and a half on the fucking, STRC. They did it the next day, dude. Risk management had never seen that trade.”

“AI in general, you know, North Korea, I don't know, you know, I have no idea what their operation is like. But, like, assume there's some number of humans that are incredibly intelligent that are, like, working through and doing these hacks. But, you know, humans are, you know, I did security and and, you know, university and stuff. It's incredibly, like, taxing on human minds to kind of go through binary and stuff. It's it's it's super hard. Computers, AI are are are very good at this. So, like, for me, like, you know, I I just think it's there's certain number of human beings that are are doing this are now being leveraged, like, probably 10 x.”

“Yeah. I'm actually leaning more towards the group thing because there's just no one person that fits the profile of this astonishing genius that was skilled in so many domains. It's about persuasion. It's about building the early community. It's about keeping the early network running for you physically. It's about creating an academic work that's persuasive. It's about the forum posts, about the tricky engineering decisions, the open source maintenance, and then of course the knowledge of monetary history and so on.”

“What we need is more diligence from the DeFi protocols themselves over what assets they list and support. Because if you're listing 30 different assets and each of them has a 5% chance of being hacked in a given year, altogether, now you have a very high probability of something going wrong. And so you're exposed to the security practices of not just you, but every other organization in your pool. So it's a really bad security model.”

“Look at this meme coin. Look at this meme coin. What if I told you it's a traditional stock of one of the largest companies out there in its space at least? This is Avis. Avis, the car company, the car rental company. This was a short squeeze. A couple hedge funds corner the market here, and there was it was one of those classic situations. There's, like, more floating shares than there's real shares. Short squeezed up, and now it's just the correction. It became worth more than all the other car rental companies combined.”

“we need sort of, like, independent risk ratings within within DeFi. Right now, there's, like, a a, like, an incentive problem with, with, like, the the managers of these risk curators, I guess, is the term that's used. So, like, basically, the ones who are optimizing for growth, revenue are the same ones that are underwriting the risk of the collateral that are being onboarded. And so this is not what happens in in TradFi. There's, like, the risk side and the growth side are two separate and, like, you know, walled off entities such that the growth side submits a proposition to the risk side and the risk side from purely risk, like, sort of perspective says if it's if it's a go or no go and what the concerns are.”

“Where is the term medicine coming from? Where's the term doctor coming from? It comes from a report which was commissioned in the 1920s by the US government. Uh which was great back then because before there was no definition. Everybody could sell this whole thing and like yeah. So that report said hey if you want to call yourself a doctor you need to have a minimum of a dedication. if uh they call the disease a negative deviation from the norm uh and then a medication which has a minim minimum efficacy yeah and where you know kind of what are the side effects in order to bring back the negative deviation of the norm to the norm by the way back then I don't want to criticize it groundbreaking because it improved the medical system it's actually what the western medical system is built on but like the tricky thing was that negative deviation from the norm it's very obvious for cancer.”

“Proof of work, scaling on Ethereum, it's worked well enough that it still costs less than one cent to send any amount of USDT in normal gas times. So if I can spend less than one cent in gas fees to send any amount of value on Ethereum, what's the purpose of something like Arbitrum in the first place that offers decentralized scaling for Ethereum? It's like, no, either use the full corporate chain tempo or use Ethereum mainnet. I don't really see the reason for having Arbitrum anymore.”

“Honestly, the big winners, like, the fundamental compounders that I see this cycle are kind of like, you know, the Ave Morpho Sky Maples Caminos of the world. Right? I think I I think a lot of these Apollo type folks are gonna look at this world and be like, what? I get this. This makes a ton of sense to me. So, anyway, that's like my I think that that this next cycle is just all about that, to be honest.”

“No, I think Christian uh you're making a good point that I think the underlying thesis is right, how can we showcase the efficacy and effectiveness of enhancements when they are administered under the right clinical and medical supervision. And so there is, as Christian alluded to, right, there's athletes that can break world records, but that's extremely unrelatable, right? There's very very few people, one right, that can hold a world record. And so we have a second category of athletes like Megan who's 35 coming to beat her personal best. But then still how can you make it even more relatable? And so everything on the sporting side then if you take a step back and look at as an overall organization everything that we do on the sporting side is the showcasing of the efficacy and effectiveness of those enhancements to go out there and inspire people to think about their own health differently and consider what can enhancements do for me.”

“No. I don't think private credit's about to crumble. I mean, when you look at private credit, when you just look at the size of private credit, it's not big enough to be a systemic risk broadly the way we think about systemic risks, that have existed in the past. But it's credit. And there's been a huge amount of money that's flown into these products, both institutional and retail, and we've all seen this in the past when there's just when there's a lot of money that needs to get invested because that's the only way that these firms get paid is to actually invest, it doesn't always work out well.”

“Bitcoin and dollar near in near perfect opposition. It hasn't been this extreme in almost four years. So for traders for Bitcoin traders, the direction of the DXY, this is the dollar index. The thirty day correlation here between the dollar and Bitcoin is now negative point nine. It's the most negative reading since September 22. A below zero reading indicates inverse relationship. So that means when the dollar weakens, Bitcoin gains and vice versa.”

“It's a question of the degree of debt that you're carrying there. If if it was a pretty chunky amount of debt and losing your job would really put you in a difficult situation. I mean, it feels like playing a bit of a game of chicken. But if you've got a fairly sizable buffer that's there, you know, you're one of these property investors that actually makes a net positive return on your rental income.”

“You know, I think it's it's worth asking, you know, if we map ourselves to to Rome as many people often do, are we entering the decline of the republic stage or the decline of the empire stage? Because those are very different phases of the history of that great power and have a lot of great powers that follow similar cycles. And, you know, a lot of people are ready to to stick a fork in in The US, but they maybe should be sticking a fork in The US Republic, not The US Empire.”

“Well, they are obsessed with what they call monetary sovereignty. And it probably reflects long bristling resentments at the dominance of the dollar. I had the dubious pleasure of working on, I believe it was a g seven working group when Facebook first floated its idea for a the Libra stablecoin back in 2019. That got many members of the g seven very hot and bothered, very concerned.”

“U.S. stock market valuation levels are reaching levels that are historically unprecedented and dangerously high. When you look at the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratios, you see a bubble that makes the dot-com era look restrained. The risks of holding traditional equities right now are significantly higher than the average investor understands.”

“Johns Hopkins. I wanted to be a research chemist. Really? And it's I loved science in in high school. I loved math and I loved science. My parents were always encouraging of learning broad things and trying to find what you wanted, and both my brother and I were both very much math and science people, and I go to Hopkins, and I, first semester I take organic chemistry, where you're in with all the Hopkins premeds, which was probably the worst experience of my life.”

“The real discourse and the reason why the dollar sucks so much and the reason why you have such hyper bias between political parties on a middle class and lower class level is because they're printing your dollar at an exponential rate, and you're losing buying power. So in 2022 when you bought a $600,000 house. Your interest rate made it so that it was a $2,000 payment. Now that same house is appreciated on average up to about $800,000, and your mortgage payment is now $5,000. So people are getting hurt. Their quality of life is diminishing if they're not outpacing this inflationary uptick.”

“What Matt is arguing for, Tom, is a lower standard of living sort of because it's literally more Australian. Let's shut off. You're not allowed to buy any car that isn't made in Australia. Right? And let's play the record forward for ten years. The cars aren't that good. They're really expensive because it's a tiny market. No one else in the world is buying them. With the structural disadvantages in a thousand different ways, it's just not going to make that viable.”

“This sort of this is leaning on the authority of NIST or the perceived authority of NIST. Everybody is pointing at NIST and saying, well, NIST is saying that, and NIST is doing this, and we need to do what NIST is saying. I think it's, again, tone deaf and naive because Bitcoin Satoshi picked LibSec p two two fifty six k one, that cryptographic library, because he looked at a lot of the NIST approved and recommended cryptographic signature schemes and found that a lot of them had embedded constants, which ultimately led to backdoors.”

“Yield farming capital is shifting rapidly into Bitcoin as users look for safer returns outside of volatile DeFi protocols. We are seeing a mass exodus from the high-risk liquidity pools that defined the last three years. Investors are increasingly choosing the hard money properties of Bitcoin over the promises of inflationary protocol tokens.”

“I think we can spoil it. I I think it's everyone's talking about it online. So they said that their best guess is that it's Hal Finney and Len Sasseman together. Hal Finney doing the back end work and Sasseman doing the white paper. Which is actually a really good guess. Because a lot of us thought it was Len already, But Len publicly derided Bitcoin, a bit strange, wasn't known to be technical enough. But Hal had that experience, have very deep technical and, you know, cryptographic expertise. But it couldn't have been Hal because Hal was running a road race when Satoshi was sending emails.”

“I was very, very detailed and and and very specific in my book about this process. And I was very grateful to the vice president for being considered and grateful to her for the candid dialogue we had. And about forty eight hours before she picked Tim Walz, I pulled out and made clear that that was not something I was interested in doing. I thought I could serve the good people of Pennsylvania, and and do my best serving here as governor in a job that I absolutely love. So this wasn't about her not picking me because of my faith. This was about me, in the end not being interested in in that job.”

“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.”

“Steve and I both will admit there's no precise way to estimate how much currency is undervalued or not. And when we do, Steve and I are probably thinking about the trade weighted currency. But for a bilateral pair, the idea of a bilateral equilibrium exchange rate's kinda ridiculous. Countries do follow bad harmful practices at time. But on balance, I just think using trade tools to tackle currency perceived woes is a sketchy idea.”

“when you look at the research that's been done on an anonymized basis, it roughly half of Olympian athletes admit to using banned substances and only 1% gets caught. So you ask yourself why is that the case? The reason for that is because athletes when they choose to cheat, they take newly developed drugs that are not well researched. They take additional drugs on top of that to hide what they're taking in the first place. That's how they're able to circumvent the testing. And that is completely unnecessary. Because it puts their health massively at risk. And why is that unnecessary? Because all of the substances that would make you perform better, recover quicker, and protect yourself better from injuries are actually substances that are FDA regulated and can be prescribed and are being prescribed by doctors to other patients every single day. And so we're saying, let's not be naive, pretend that the cheating is not happening. Let's take it out of the shadows.”

“Here as governor, I've maintained a similar focus through my office of inspector general, rooting out fraud, through making sure, by the way, we're not fronting you money when you're going out and providing, say, human services. You have to submit for reimbursements, and you've gotta make sure you prove that you did that work. When we find that someone took advantage of the system, we're referring them to prosecutors. I'm proud of the fact that we've had more Medicaid fraud prosecutions in Pennsylvania, I think any other state.”

“If I was a DeFi founder, I'd really be looking at time locks and delays, in addition to just basic multisig hygiene. But I it makes me think about things like HSMs and think about just some of the core infrastructure sitting underneath the hood in the digital asset economy. I mean, some of the things I've been reading about this is that some of these vulnerabilities are coming into these browsers through things like the font settings and things like that.”

“I actually see the last twenty five years of Chinese economic development as a series of rolling shocks. So in the early naughts, massive current account surplus, undervalued currency, along comes the GFC to replace the demand. China ratchets up investment. 2015, 2016, growth scares in China. The next thing you know, the Chinese are replacing the lost demand with a housing boom. And that has now petered out. So now to replace the lost demand, you have the credit from the state owned commercial financial sector going into state owned enterprises, which keep producing manufacturing, exports that can't be absorbed domestically.”

“Arbitrum deciding to freeze funds in response to this exploit creates a massive precedent that the industry needs to grapple with. If Arbitrum or any layer two can unilaterally intervene in smart contracts because of a hack, you have to ask yourself what happens when a government demands that same capability. We are trading away the permissionless nature of crypto for a false sense of security that we might regret later.”

“As it relates to the war, which you also asked about in in your question, I mean, this was a war of choice. The president never defined the objectives. It is clear he doesn't know how the hell to get out of this. If you don't know why you're going in, you don't know how the hell to get out. You don't know how to instruct the military, our brave military, including those 13 souls who did not make it home to their families because they went on a mission that the president never defined.”

“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.”

“Jerome Powell's in the news. US Department of Justice have now dropped its criminal probe of Fed Chair Powell. This is something I'm actually in favor of. I'm not the biggest fan of Jerome Powell, but to assume Jerome Powell's gonna know if a contractor's ripping him off on plumbing seemed a little far fetched to me. I don't think he was in charge of the the management of the construction of a building. I think he was more concerned about policy decisions, not construction decisions.”

“Bitcoiners are very skeptical of lattice based, cryptography, which is a newer, but not really that new, cryptography. So there's an extra level of paranoia in Bitcoin land, so they want to use hash based signatures, if anything. Ultra safe, extremely bulky. So it may be the case that Bitcoin signatures go from 60 bytes to 10 or 50 kilobytes, and we just have to eat that, which is a big problem.”

“Right now, from everything that we see, the economy is still extremely strong. We just we all just reported our first quarter results in the banking space. Loan demand is decent. Delinquencies on the consumer side, are extremely well controlled. Consumer spend is growing on a year over year basis. They're spending more money on gas, but making adjustments in some of the other categories. Businesses have gone into this in strong financial shape. So those are all the good things, but then when you ask them how they feel, everyone's nervous.”

“And if you ever read Fin Brunton's book, I think it's called Digital Cash. He explicitly makes that connection, like, well, part of the reason they cyberbunks wanted this kind of electronic money was because they planned on coming back to life in the distant future, and they wanted an asset that they could return to.”

“In, you know, public company investing and Bitcoin's not public company, but public company investing, one of the key hallmarks of a CEO and a management team you wanna avoid is when they're overly focused on short term gyrations in stock price. Like, they just gotta get stock price up, and they're really freaked out when the stock price goes down one quarter, when the market misunderstands a quarter and sells sells the stock on earnings or something. And I see a lot of that in the conversation about Quantum, both from the institutional side, but also from some technical people as well. I would just encourage people to fade that type of thinking because that is a great way to optimize for decisions that will not help and will not drive value and will not drive stability and sustainability in the long term for any system.”

“I'm actually quite I'm surprisingly bullish on real world assets. I think that that would definitely be a thing this cycle. I spend less time there. I'm actually a bit concerned about the risks of real world assets. I wrote a master thesis on DeFi risks back in, like, 2019, and I think real world assets for me right now are, like, highly, highly risky and, like, massive chance of blowing up when the cycle comes back.”