On The Brink with Castle Island

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• Are OpenAI and Anthropic reenacting the Fat Protocol Hypothesis
• Will AI agents cause bank runs optimizing bank balances for yield?
• If the AI complex bursts does it take down VC?
• Our tribute to Hester Peirce as she retires from the SEC
• The SEC and CFTC publish crypto FAQs
• Vitalik lays out his vision for Ethereum in 2030
• Quantum progress is accelerating
• Illinois delays their crypto transaction tax
• Is San Francisco better than it was?

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• How loud are America's largest data centers?
• What's wrong with XAI's data center in Mississippi?
• The Trump admin is reportedly trying to promote dollar stablecoins
• Binance invests in Circle
• We pick up the pieces after Clarity
• Fairshake plans to spend $30m opposing Sherrod Brown in Ohio
• How AI anxiety helps the Democrats
• Sherrod Brown is back to haunt crypto
• Coinbase is listing IPOs now
• Are prediction markets out of step with the original vision?
• BitMEX finally closes its doors
• 52 BTC were saved from the Coldcard hack by white hats
• Is Anthropic privatizing the frontier?
• A White House memo says effective altruism is a cult

Content mentioned in this episode:

• Nic on Substack, How Noisy are America's Largest Data Centers?

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• How is SBF like Dario?
• The EAs are at it again
• Do we need new regulation to Pace the Frontier?
• Can Anthropic be regulated like a bank?
• Are baseball cards back?
• Clarity fails at the final hurdle
• Why did Clarity fail?
• Stablecoin yield is still in effect
• The SEC and CFTC are engaging in rulemaking
• Circle launches Arc, their new L1
• Robinhood employees get caught insider trading on Hyperliquid
• Caroline Ellison is back and working for a former FTX portco
• Can AI models leak MNPI?
• A Polish oil company tried to buy sanctioned oil from Venezuela with USDT
• The DOE launches a $250m Quantum computing competition

Matt and Nic are back for more deals and news. In this episode:

• We bring back his the theme music
• Anthropic employees think there's a 10% chance AI destroys humanity
• Was Jacob Coxon astroturfed or real?
• Are Anthropic employees being sincere or cynical?
• Blockstream's Liquid sidechain is hacked
• What does the Liquid hack mean for privacy coins?
• Hunter Biden launches the $LAPTOP memecoin
• IONQ says they will be able to crack ECC in two years
• Ex Silvergate CEO Alan Lane speaks out
• OpenAI offers a solution to the Navier-Stokes problem
• Can insider information leak through AI models?
• Why AI doom is like Pascal's mugging

Content mentioned:

• Alan Lane, Silvergate's Voluntary Liquidation

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• We determine the winner of the bad boys theme song competition
• Dwarkesh ignites controversy with his OpenAI hack recap
• What actually happened with OpenAI and Huggingface?
• Gwern's and Matt Huang's short story competition
• Will AI make us dumb?
• 200m Americans KYC data has been hacked
• Prediction markets lawsuit heading to SCOTUS?
• Robinhood Chain is taking off
• Strategy is buying Bitcoin again
• Should Members of Congress be paid more?
• Cronos suffers a defi hack
• Revolut gets a bank charter
• Is the stablecoin sandwich cheaper for cross border?
• RSA260 factored - panic?

Content mentioned in the episode:

• GPUworld.com
• Wenxin Du, Three Myths About Payment Innovation

Wyatt sits down with Guy Young, founder of Ethena, for Guy's third appearance on the pod. In this episode:

• What has driven Ethena's success and durability?
• Where is there demand for other yield assets?
• Where is capital coming from?
• Is full onchain portfolio construction possible today?
• Why tokenize financial products at all?
• Who are the eventual winners?
• How is Ethena positioning to an evolving onchain yield landscape?

Matt and Nic return for another week of deals and news. In this episode:

• Matt and Nic consider candidates for the new bad boys intro music
• 39 state banking associations form the BankChain alliance
• Blockstream researchers proposed SHRINCS, a PQ signature scheme for Bitcoin
• How much should depositors care about bank credit risk?
• Kalshi hosts a prediction market on goat grazing regulation
• Are trading bot agents getting good?
• Blockstream proposes SHRINCS for Bitcoin
• Zcash hits an 8-year high
• Treasury designates anyone helping Iran's crypto sector
• AI watermarking

Bad boys theme song submissions:

• Ian's song
• Seth's song

Content mentioned:

• Omid Malekan, The banking lobby's bad faith campaign to kill the Clarity Act will backfire
• Nic Carter, A Second and Final Eulogy for Bitcoin Maximalism

Matt and Nic return for another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• The boys review SALT Wyoming in Jackson Hole
• Why did Stripe buy Openrouter?
• Stripe says we have entered the Singularity
• People are upset about data centers
• The SEC proposes Reg Crypto governing token issuance
• The CFTC convenes a crypto roundtable in Washington
• FASB proposes treating stablecoins as cash equivalent under GAAP
• World Liberty gets an OCC charter
• Trump should divest his WLF tokens to push Clarity through
• Saylor wriggles out of another jam
• Tether passes a big 4 audit
• The White House issues a "crypto privateer" memo

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:

• Who is the main character in AI?
• Why are people so mad about datacenters?
• Sherrod Brown is back and he's running against AI
• Are datacenters being built with Flock?
• Culturally scarce goods and dinosaurs are rallying
• The SEC starts to fill the gap left by the Clarity Act
• FinCEN ends beneficial ownership reporting
• The CFTC charges a $400m Ponzi operator
• Are there successful Ponzi schemers?
• Is Bitcoin at risk from miners transitioning to AI?
• The collapse of the diamond market

Matt and Nic are back with more news and deals. In this episode:

• Why the Coldcard hack is worse than some major exchange and DeFi hacks
• What the Coldcard hack told us about the need for open weight models
• Is self custody over?
• MSTR sells more Bitcoin
• An FBI agent steals $1m in crypto
• NY state sues Kalshi
• Ethereum considers another change to issuance
• Ethereum needs to resist the urge to change monetary policy
• ai16z's Eliza winds down
• the merit of reading sci fi
• The cofounder of Sui leaves for Anthropic
• Will Anthropic keep the discoveries to themselves?
• The WSJ gets it wrong on Clarity