PASS CLARITY

“People index way too much on day one, month one of chains. There's no chain ever that has been successful on day one or month one. It's true of Solana. It's true of Avalanche. And if you look at the ones that have had breakout month ones, like you think about like Blast or something, doesn't really seem to predict much of anything. The reality is that it takes time to build a chain. These things are, you know, ecosystems, they require breaking the cold start effect and or the cold start problem.”

“We did a calculation, just so that this is a bit of a sideshow, but, 2.2% of GDP Bitcoin volumes and trading volumes in Iran represent 2.2% of GDP in Iran. So there's clearly becoming quite popular there. But also just the relative price action. Gold's down 9%. Bitcoin's up 22%. And equities are down 3% since the start of the war. And, that is really, to me, showing its crisis resilience.”

“This is Kash Patel and Todd Blanch, the deputy, the FBI director and the deputy attorney general who should have been, like, rock star treatment on state. There's, like, 12 people in that room. Yeah. And maybe a 100. But, I mean, if you wanna see the state of affairs is to your point, like, I just happen to have that video. It's like the feds are on stage talking about Bitcoin, and nobody's watching.”

“The silometric analysis that they originally ran was inconclusive. It said that there were many people who were, consistent with the sort of silometric distance from Satoshi. Adam Back was not even the closest. And Hal Finney was equivalently close to Satoshi's stylometric analysis as Atterback. But then at the very end, the the author runs it again, but he kind of, like, picks the particular parameters that he uses to create this decision tree. Basically, they, like, p hacked their way into their own answer, which is that, oh, it must be Adam Back.”

“I think the right mental model for quantum is it's kind of crypto's y two k. And I think it's actually a really clean analogy because y two k was a real problem. It was a huge coordination issue across the entire tech industry. It really would be catastrophic if unaddressed. And, it's really obvious how to fix it is that, you know, you just go and upgrade all the all the Unix time slots to be, you know, larger integers so they don't overflow at, the year 2000.”

“I mean, it just feels at the moment like an iShares show and nothing else. All the other US participants, you know, year to date are just nothing like the scale. I mean, Grayscale and Fidelity year to date and our 21 shares are are all in a net output position year to date.”

“My primary concern when I saw the news break was that this is going to put this potential legislation in protracted debate now about the things that we all have worried would be the killers of this bill, including now really having a case to box Trump in on an ethics clause in this thing. I am concerned it's gonna give the opportunity for people who don't wanna see crypto adoption to kill this bill.”

“I actually think that him opening the door to allow people to invest in meme coins was intentional to try to, you know, kinda push out, you know, the shit to basically collapse the altcoin market in the end. I actually think that that was intentional. They issued guidance that says meme coins are not securities. He did help the alt industry, you know, kind of self-emulate.”

“The other people, I don't think, were aware that the pool is, you know, 93% collateralized, but effectively by one entity. This is about the fact that that the entire DeFi ecosystem has enormous issues that are undisclosed to people who participate in it. And this is going to be meat to the lions on the regulatory side because it is exactly the sort of thing that good regulators care about.”

“If you speak to a lot of the hedge funds like some of our clients, you know, they're increasingly combining the basis trade with the momentum. The two are inherently linked. So as soon as the price falls, the basis trade just evaporates and exacerbates the the price falls and the price rises too because people exit out of the basis trade with negative price momentum as we've seen.”

“I think the multiclient architecture for Ethereum will probably go away in a post AI world. The reason why you have multiple clients is you assume that errors are uncorrelated, that it's just really hard to have the same kind of exploit on one thing versus on another thing. This assumption gets a lot weaker if basically there's exploits everywhere and, like, everything is Swiss cheese. If everything is Swiss cheese, then probably you can find with enough time, with enough compute, with enough tokens, some way to halt the network by doing something on this thing and doing something on this other thing.”

“The Clarity Act has ten weeks left to get passed before recess goes into August, and we likely don't see any clarity until 2030. So this next ten weeks could really determine what Bitcoin looks like and certainly what all coins look like for the rest of this cycle.”

“It looks like they're charging tolls in the millions of dollars for ships to go through the Strait Of Hormuz, which is still a significant impairment to oil prices if that continues. But things have stabilized, and it seems like it's in everyone's interest for things to stabilize. But the markets are not fully buying it, and you see it in the oil prices as well. Oil prices have rebounded quite a bit from seeing that Iran is not really playing ball, and they seem to be insistent on controlling the Strait Of Hormuz as a way of, quote, unquote, you know, getting recompense for the war.”

“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.”

“And hyperliquid is fascinating in this. If you look now, it's trading at times 4 and a half, $5,000,000,000 a day in trading volumes. That's the same as the London Stock Exchange. That's huge. And, it is trading it in things. Like, earlier on in the year, it said your basement trades are gold and silver, and now it's oil.”

“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.”

“And if the Clarity Act passes without allowing yield-bearing stablecoins, has the banking lobby won? Kavita Gupta, founder and general partner at Delta Blockchain Fund, sits down with Steven Ehrlich to work through a week of whipsawing markets, fragile geopolitics, and structural shifts that could define where crypto goes from here.”

“These problems happen because of a lack of regulation. You know? Not all regulation is bad. A lot of it is. A lot of regulation is written by the companies to create motes and competitive weapons for them, but basic disclosure sort of rules are good. And without clarity, this is exactly the sort of thing that would happen.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I sort of think this is gonna be a little bit like a government shutdown thing, where everyone's gonna be like, oh, no. Oh, heavens me. No. We can't do that. Oh, no. No. No. But then, like, right at the eleventh hour, people are gonna be like, oh, well, okay, fine. We'll we'll block all those coins, and then we'll all move on. And we'll never talk about this ever again.”

“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.”

“I feel like this particular cycle has been very different than in the past cycles of every time we have a world political situation or the economy situation moving in. We have seen crypto going down. But right now, we are in a sort of a cease file... the first impact is on crypto market as soon as the oil prices went down or expected to go down.”

“Some of them were trading at 40% discount to and that should recover at some point when sentiment improves, but I don't think we'll that there's heavy days of three, four times and never done it. We won't ever see that again. So and it does it makes sense that they trade it around the the one times end of mark anyway.”

“But I don't know how much of this is institutional waiting that they're putting money aside and let's bring in so much on ETF, which we saw, like, a huge amount of money coming into ETFs. I just really don't know how much was it wait and watch versus, oh, this is this is an asset we have to go in sort of a thing.”

“You can go into the code, and you can actually see what they can do and what they can't do. You can see if they want to, they can issue a trillion coins. And you know if you're invested in that, you are investing that. What we're talking about now is the balance of how much do we want to allow people to buy what they wanna buy.”

“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.”

“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 heard from Justin Drake that they are now getting one meaningful vulnerability in Geth per day from just random people, not using Mythos, using just cloud code. Just vibe coding normal analysis of security of these things. And these are from amateurs. These are not from security engineers or from bug bounties. These are just normal people running a cloud code and saying, hey. Can I find find me a vulnerability in Geth?”

“Mythos can identify and exploit zero day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Many of these bugs are subtle, decades old, the oldest being a twenty seven year old OpenBSD bug. Engineers with no security training inside of Entropic have asked Mythos to find, bugs overnight and have woken up to working exploits. In the words of Haseeb here, actually apocalyptic in the wrong hands.”

“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.”

“Iran announced that they were willing to take payment in two forms of currencies, one being Bitcoin, the second being the yuan, right, the Chinese currency. The fact that Iran is willing to accept not just Bitcoin, but these two currencies tells you something about the role of Bitcoin internationally, which is that it is the kind of sanction resistant alternative payment system, but it's not the only one. I was thinking more what it meant for China. Because I think China is thinking very deeply about how geopolitics is changing very rapidly, especially as Trump is threatening to withdraw from NATO.”

“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.”

“Eth, picking Eth actually has outperformed in last forty eight hours with around 6.7 to 7%, then Bitcoin jump, which is great because as you know, I won't call myself eat maxi, but I'm a big eat believer. Said that, I feel like this particular cycle has been very different than in the past cycles.”

“I think the real argument is that it's going to affect their profitability. That's the real argument. That is not a very that's not that that argument is not gonna be very politically successful. Nobody really cares that much about the margins of the banks. They do care about the collapse of credit, or they care about the crushing of community banks. Those are very sympathetic arguments to make in public. It's not very sympathetic to say, well, we don't want margin compression. We like our margins.”

“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.”

“Bitcoin is kind of this secular religion and very intentionally so. And this this, creation myth that we have that Satoshi Nakamoto appeared. He asked nothing. He kept no coins with him. He disappeared, and he left it to us to govern among men, this thing that could only have been created by the gods. That creation myth, it's so perfect. And if you found out that, like, oh, actually, it was like Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and he was a businessman who made a bunch of money from this, it's kinda like, oh, shit.”

“I've gotten a lot of things wrong over the past few years. One that I think I got right very early was that there was gonna be an old season, and it was gonna happen. It was just not gonna involve tokens. It was gonna involve crypto adjacent equities. Right? That that was when the circle launched, and we saw the price action. EToro did well and bullish and all these. But I really think that that's where the money wants their big money wants their crypto exposure.”

“I am like, this is not the first time I feel like PolyMarkets has been PolyMarkets has been highlighting that there are multiple times when it comes to Trump administration, from his VP pick to then going into this genius act, to, like, multiple things, like, exactly before, doing the first missile into Iran, etcetera etcetera. We have been seeing this so called insider trading.”