The AI boom might just be money moving in a circle. Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, and Brian Cubellis put four stories on the shot clock. They break down Ed Zitron's circular-revenue thesis (an estimated 70% of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google AI revenue comes from OpenAI and Anthropic), gold breaking out roughly $200 after Warsh's dovish Fed, the national debt climbing $450 billion since July 1, and an estimated $30 million stolen in violent crypto attacks in 2026. Liam is out this week. Where's the signal, and where's the noise?

---

🎙️ About The Show

Signal vs Noise: a twice weekly show unpacking the five biggest stories across capital markets, technology, and people, with five minutes on the clock for each.

🧠 Chapters

01:15 - Topic 1 - The Warsh Fed and the Inflation Reset

07:39 - Topic 2 - Gold Breaks Out as the Fed Feeds It

13:52 - Topic 3 - The AI Revenue Circle (Ed Zitron)

19:36 - Topic 4 - Violent Crypto Attacks Hit $30M in 2026

25:35 - Lightning Round and Parting Thoughts

💡 Subscribe & Watch Live:

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SignalvsNoiseLIVE

✖️ https://x.com/OnrampMedia

📰 Your 1-Stop News & Data Source:

https://onramp.media/

🔸 Buy, hold, and secure your bitcoin in one place. Open a free Onramp Finance account.

👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/finance-svn

🎧 More from Onramp Media: The Last Trade | Final Settlement

The Last Trade: Jackson, Michael, and Brian go live for the first time to work through the Cold Card fallout, the Bitcoin Red Team audit that filed nearly 5,000 findings across 390 projects in 27.5 hours, and the UK AI Safety Institute report of OpenAI and Anthropic agents creating fake identities to pressure an open source maintainer into approving malicious code. They close on the sovereign bid for gold, with the Bank of Korea buying physical gold for the first time in 13 years.

---

🔸 Connect with Onramp: The leader in resilient, fault-tolerant Multi-Institution Custody for secure, enduring bitcoin ownership.

👉 Get Back to Basics: 50% off trading fees + no-fee recurring buys — open your free account: https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/back-to-basics-tlt

📩 Schedule a consultation:

https://meetings.hubspot.com/onrampbitcoin/tlt

The Last Trade: a weekly, bitcoin-native podcast covering the intersection of bitcoin, tech, & finance on a macro scale. Hosted by Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, & Brian Cubellis. Join us as we dive into what bitcoin means for how individuals & institutions save, invest, & propagate their purchasing power through time. It's not just another asset… in the digital age, it's The Last Trade that investors will ever need to make.

🎙️ About This Episode

Jackson opens with the on chain data: July 31 was Bitcoin's most active day since 2024, with nearly a million addresses moving and roughly 18,000 BTC shifted in days per Galaxy research, much of it toward exchanges. Michael and Brian push back on that instinct, arguing the answer to a single vendor failure is not a single custodian, and that centralizing a decentralized asset only builds a bigger honeypot as AI lowers the cost of digital, social, and physical attacks. Brian details the firmware flaw itself, a fallback that drew seeds from a football field of atoms instead of multiple galaxies, and asks why a test Coinkite ran last week was never run in five years. The AI thread carries the hour: a Kimi model likely found the Cold Card bug, the Bitcoin Red Team filed 4,962 findings across 390 projects in 27.5 hours, a worm compromised 868 npm packages carrying 2 billion monthly installs, and UK AISI caught OpenAI and Anthropic agents building fake online identities to social engineer a human maintainer. They close on macro: Luke Gromen on Treasuries failing as reserve collateral, the Bank of Korea restarting gold purchases after 13 years, and Mexico now supplying 40% of America's AI servers.

🧠 Chapters

00:00 - Introduction and Market Context

02:46 - Recent Market Movements and Security Concerns

05:05 - Implications of Cold Card Vulnerability

08:51 - Industry Lessons and Industry Response

12:19 - AI's Role in Cybersecurity and Threats

22:40 - The Future of Custody and Security Solutions

36:45 - Geopolitical Shifts and Reserve Management

57:39 - Global Competition in AI and Resources

01:02:27 - Summary and Final Thoughts

💡 Subscribe & Stay Ahead

Get Onramp's weekly Research & Analysis:

High-signal insights in bitcoin, macro, and custody.

📩 https://onrampbitcoin.com/research

Subscribe to Onramp Media for more:

🎧 The Last Trade | Final Settlement | Scarce Assets

Signal vs Noise: Jackson Mikalic, Brian Cubellis, and Liam Nelson - joined by guest co-host Cam

Stromme, filling in for Michael Tanguma - put four stories on the shot clock. Coldcard's $130 million

disaster was supposed to be a one-off. The panel makes the case it's the opening move in a much bigger

reckoning: AI models are now finding vulnerabilities across software faster than humans ever did, and

nobody knows yet what else gets found. They also break down OpenAI's Astra solving 10 decade-old math

problems, the US and Japan's yen intervention, and Iran's on-again Strait of Hormuz deal. Where's the

signal, and where's the noise?

---

🎙️ About The Show

Signal vs Noise: a twice weekly show unpacking the five biggest stories across capital markets, technology, and people, with five minutes on the clock for each.

🧠 Chapters

00:53 - Topic 1 - Coldcard's AI-Found Bug Ignites Bitcoin's Custody War

09:05 - Topic 2 - OpenAI's Astra Solves a Decade of Unsolved Math

15:42 - Topic 3 - Iran's Strait of Hormuz Deal That Isn't

21:28 - Topic 4 - US and Japan Intervene to Prop Up the Yen

26:59 - Lightning Round & Parting Thoughts

💡 Subscribe & Watch Live:

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SignalvsNoiseLIVE

✖️ https://x.com/OnrampMedia

📰 Your 1-Stop News & Data Source:

https://onramp.media/

🔸 Buy, hold, and secure your bitcoin in one place. Open a free Onramp Finance account.

👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/finance-svn

🎧 More from Onramp Media: The Last Trade | Final Settlement

Connect with Early Riders — https://www.earlyriders.com/contact

Connect with Onramp — https://onrampbitcoin.com/contact-us/

Presented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…

Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.

The Coldcard exploit has escalated: nearly 2,000 Bitcoin drained and counting, passphrase wallets confirmed compromised, MK4s and Qs exposed alongside the deprecated MK3, and Coinkite confirming a five-year-old flaw in on-device seed generation. This week Michael, Liam, and Brian walk the full timeline of the worst self-custody incident in Bitcoin's history: how the RNG silently downgraded to guessable entropy, why same-vendor multisig quorums are also at risk, and the firmware updates reportedly bricking devices mid-migration. Michael and Liam share their own weekend fund migrations (one from the back seat of a car), and the guys get into the harder questions: why AI may be a bigger threat to Bitcoin security than quantum computing, why the stampede to exchanges and ETFs is the wrong lesson, and what a fault-tolerant custody architecture looks like when one mistake can no longer be allowed to knock you out of the game.

Chapters

00:00 - The Coldcard exploit: what happened and who is affected

02:20 - Move your funds: urgent guidance for Coldcard holders

05:09 - Technical breakdown: how the RNG flaw was exploited

10:17 - Passphrases, firmware bricking, and the silent downgrade

17:14 - Earlier warnings and why same-vendor multisig is exposed

21:22 - Weekend migrations: Michael and Liam's personal anecdotes

30:26 - AI vs quantum: the real threat to Bitcoin security

33:25 - Single-vendor risk, single-entity risk, and custody honeypots

44:03 - Silver linings: the end of the custody purity test

50:26 - Where the industry goes from here

56:15 - One mistake can't knock you out of the game

59:05 - Final guidance and staying vigilant

If you found this valuable, please subscribe to Early Riders Insights for access to the best content in the ecosystem weekly: https://www.earlyriders.com/research

Keep up with Michael:

https://x.com/MTanguma

Keep up with Liam:

https://x.com/Lnelson_21

Keep up with Brian:

https://x.com/BackslashBTC

The Last Trade: an emergency episode. Jackson, Michael, and Brian break down the Cold Card exploit that has drained over 1,000 Bitcoin after a five-year-old flaw in the device's random number generation was found, reportedly with help from an AI model. They explain why the bug reaches beyond the MK3 to later models, why single-vendor multi-sig is not immune, and what Cold Card users should do right now. They make the case that AI has permanently changed the custody game, and walk through multi-institution custody as the fault-tolerant alternative.

---

🔸 Connect with Onramp: The leader in resilient, fault-tolerant Multi-Institution Custody for secure, enduring bitcoin ownership.

👉 Reconsidering your security setup after the COLDCARD exploit? This is what Multi-Institution Custody was built for: bitcoin secured by three institutions, controlled by you. No single device, no single point of failure. Sign up in minutes with code TLTBASICS: https://app.onrampbitcoin.com/signup?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ai-cracked-coldcard

📩 Schedule a consultation:

https://meetings.hubspot.com/onrampbitcoin/tlt

The Last Trade: a weekly, bitcoin-native podcast covering the intersection of bitcoin, tech, & finance on a macro scale. Hosted by Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, & Brian Cubellis. Join us as we dive into what bitcoin means for how individuals & institutions save, invest, & propagate their purchasing power through time. It's not just another asset… in the digital age, it's The Last Trade that investors will ever need to make.

🎙️ About This Episode

Brian walks the timeline: roughly 600 Bitcoin (about $38M) swept from 500 wallets almost instantly, a figure Block's security team says has since grown past 1,000 BTC, all traced to a flaw that let Cold Card's on-device seed generation default to far too little entropy, live since 2021 and unnoticed for five years. Coinkite first claimed only the MK3 was affected, then aligned with Block's finding that the MK4, MK5, and Q are exposed too, deprecating the MK3 and pushing firmware updates. Michael lays out the math, that a real key is 256 bits and effectively uncrackable while this exploit collapsed entropy into the 30 to 40 bit range, and warns that single-vendor multi-sig can be reconstituted from the wallet config, echoing Wizard Sardine's call to move to new devices within days. The hosts argue the deeper shift is AI: cheaper compute has lowered the barrier for digital, social, and physical attacks, so a 2012 setup no longer holds at today's prices, let alone at $250K. They close on Onramp's multi-institution model, a 2-of-3 design with sharded offline keys, Lloyd's of London insurance, and retained client title, now $100 a month under code TLT basics.

🧠 Chapters

00:00 - Introduction to the Cold Card Exploit and Its Impact

02:18 - Technical Breakdown of the Firmware Vulnerability

05:11 - Implications for Hardware Wallet Security and Industry Risks

08:45 - What the Exploit Means for Cold Card Users and the Industry

11:01 - The Changing Landscape of Bitcoin Custody and Security Strategies

20:18 - Potential Impact on Other Hardware Wallets and Industry-Wide Risks

22:39 - Adapting Custody Strategies: Multi-Sig and Distributed Security

33:22 - The Future of Bitcoin Security and Industry Evolution

💡 Subscribe & Stay Ahead

Get Onramp's weekly Research & Analysis:

High-signal insights in bitcoin, macro, and custody.

📩 https://onrampbitcoin.com/research

Subscribe to Onramp Media for more:

🎧 The Last Trade | Final Settlement | Scarce Assets

Signal vs Noise: Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, Brian Cubellis, and Liam Nelson put four stories on the shot clock. They break down Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness fund blowing up and getting scooped by Citadel as South Korea's market sheds roughly $2 trillion in 40 days, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump agreeing to scrap the debt ceiling, Fauci pleading the fifth before Rand Paul, and open source tools like Granola and Whoop getting reverse engineered overnight. Where's the signal, and where's the noise?

---

🎙️ About The Show

Signal vs Noise: a twice weekly show unpacking the five biggest stories across capital markets, technology, and people, with five minutes on the clock for each.

🧠 Chapters

02:57 - Topic 1 - Situational Awareness Blows Up as Korea Sheds $2T

11:46 - Topic 2 - Warren and Trump Agree to Scrap the Debt Ceiling

17:19 - Topic 3 - Fauci Pleads the Fifth and the Information Crisis

25:53 - Topic 4 - Open Source Eats Software: Granola, Whisperflow, Whoop

33:50 - Lightning Round & Parting Thoughts

💡 Subscribe & Watch Live:

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SignalvsNoiseLIVE

✖️ https://x.com/OnrampMedia

📰 Your 1-Stop News & Data Source:

https://onramp.media/

🔸 Buy, hold, and secure your bitcoin in one place. Open a free Onramp Finance account.

👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/finance-svn

🎧 More from Onramp Media: The Last Trade | Final Settlement

The Last Trade: Jackson, Michael, and Brian make the case that the worst Bitcoin sentiment they can remember is exactly the accumulation opportunity, with Bitcoin near $64K and down 50% from its highs. They break down why the Clarity Act stalling barely dented price, and how the SEC and CFTC are already building Project Crypto backups. They dig into Jack Dorsey and Block open-sourcing tools that make Bitcoin the scarce counterweight to AI. They close on an OpenAI agent escaping its sandbox, South Korea's crash, and the Fed holding as three officials push to hike.

---

🔸 Connect with Onramp: The leader in resilient, fault-tolerant Multi-Institution Custody for secure, enduring bitcoin ownership.

👉 Get Back to Basics: 50% off trading fees + no-fee recurring buys — open your free account: https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/back-to-basics-tlt

📩 Schedule a consultation:

https://meetings.hubspot.com/onrampbitcoin/tlt

The Last Trade: a weekly, bitcoin-native podcast covering the intersection of bitcoin, tech, & finance on a macro scale. Hosted by Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, & Brian Cubellis. Join us as we dive into what bitcoin means for how individuals & institutions save, invest, & propagate their purchasing power through time. It's not just another asset… in the digital age, it's The Last Trade that investors will ever need to make.

🎙️ About This Episode

The crew opens on brutal sentiment, Bitcoin near $64K and below its 2024 election level, arguing set-it-and-forget-it accumulators are getting a gift while the bear market washes out the excess (BitMEX, Bitmart, and 60-plus crypto projects gone this year). They frame the Clarity Act stalling in the Senate as a non-event for price, noting the SEC and CFTC are lining up Project Crypto backstops even without a law. Michael and Brian tie the bull case to Jack Dorsey and Block open-sourcing tools that make Bitcoin the scarce counterweight to AI's abundance, with Nostr underneath. They turn to the real-versus-nominal reality behind Magoo's chart of the S&P priced in gold, down 66% from its 2000 high, and why gold and Bitcoin are the honest denominators. The back half runs through South Korea's KOSPI collapsing 44% and $2 trillion on AI concentration, a Hugging Face report detailing an OpenAI agent that ran 17,600 actions and seized root access across 11 nodes, the wrench-attack and self-custody debate, the Pacing the Frontier AI-safety petition, and the Fed holding rates as three officials dissented for a hike.

🧠 Chapters

00:00 - Market Opening and Bitcoin Trading at 64K

02:10 - Discussion on Clarity Act and Regulatory Outlook

03:08 - Market Sentiment and Accumulation Opportunities

04:05 - Economic Forces and Tech Innovation in Bitcoin

06:17 - Market Cleansing and Industry Consolidation

08:07 - Regulatory Backups and Bullish Sentiment

09:18 - Market Sentiment and Price Levels

12:00 - Bitcoin Mining and Treasury Strategies

16:44 - South Korea Market Collapse and AI Industry Top

17:50 - AI Market Dynamics and Geopolitical Risks

24:39 - Market Erosion and Real vs Nominal Value

27:28 - Understanding Money and Asset Scarcity

32:30 - AI Development and Regulatory Challenges

42:52 - Fed Interest Rate Decision and Market Implications

43:50 - AI Safety Petition and Global Coordination

48:54 - AI Escapes Sandbox and Market Disruption

50:52 - AI Impact on Society and Education

55:30 - Future of Education and AI Integration

57:14 - Fed Rate Decision and Market Outlook

💡 Subscribe & Stay Ahead

Get Onramp's weekly Research & Analysis:

High-signal insights in bitcoin, macro, and custody.

📩 https://onrampbitcoin.com/research

Subscribe to Onramp Media for more:

🎧 The Last Trade | Final Settlement | Scarce Assets

Signal vs Noise: Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, Liam Nelson, and Brian Cubellis put four viral headlines on the shot clock, sparring over Anthropic slicing millions of print books from their bindings to train Claude, grocery prices climbing 33% since 2019 in the biggest jump in 50 years, big companies hiring again for AI-native skills after October's largest layoff month in over two decades, and Franklin Templeton calling agentic AI the killer use case for crypto.

---

🎙️ About The Show

Signal vs Noise: a twice weekly show unpacking the five biggest stories across capital markets, technology, and people, with five minutes on the clock for each.

🧠 Chapters

02:17 - Topic 1 - Anthropic Destroyed Millions of Books to Train Claude

08:39 - Topic 2 - Grocery Prices Post Their Biggest Jump in 50 Years

15:11 - Topic 3 - Big Companies Hiring Again for AI-Native Skills

22:37 - Topic 4 - Is Agentic AI Crypto's Killer Use Case?

27:51 - Topic 5 - Lightning Round: Signals of the Week

💡 Subscribe & Watch Live:

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SignalvsNoiseLIVE

✖️ https://x.com/OnrampMedia

📰 Your 1-Stop News & Data Source:

https://onramp.media/

🔸 Buy, hold, and secure your bitcoin in one place. Open a free Onramp Finance account.

👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/finance-svn

🎧 More from Onramp Media: The Last Trade | Final Settlement

Connect with Early Riders — https://www.earlyriders.com/contact
Connect with Onramp — https://onrampbitcoin.com/contact-us/
Presented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…
Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.
This week Michael, Liam, and Brian open on the open-versus-closed AI debate: Jensen Huang's first-ever tweet and NVIDIA's letter backing open models, the new Security Alliance consortium, the researchers quietly wishing they could slow it all down, and NVIDIA's reported $250 billion financing for OpenAI's Ohio data center. They dig into Jack Dorsey's Buzz, the open-source workspace built on the same Noster and Bitcoin primitives as BitChat, and what shared compute and censorship-resistant protocols mean as BitChat downloads spike 32-fold in India. The guys run through a stack of payments deals: Stripe's talks to buy OpenRouter near $10 billion, Cursor, Ramp, and Meta building model routers, and Natural Pay's $30 million Series A for agentic payments. They get into their favorite topic, the DATs: Mallers exiting 21 Capital as Tether's XXI merger collapses, Strategy's first Stretch buyback, and the new Bitcoin security consortium taking on quantum. They close on Augustus's $180 million raise, Worldcoin, and Travis Kalanick's return with Adam.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction and overview of AI and open models
02:10 - Jensen Huang's first tweet on open models and global cooperation
09:08 - Discussion on slowing AI development and game theory
18:03 - Jack Dorsey's Buzz: Open source workspace and primitives
24:55 - Shared compute, decentralized protocols, and open standards
35:02 - Regulatory landscape and geopolitical implications
45:11 - Impacts on privacy, security, and censorship resistance
54:03 - Recent deals and industry movements in AI and crypto
01:02:08 - The future of Bitcoin, open protocols, and decentralized data
If you found this valuable, please subscribe to Early Riders Insights for access to the best content in the ecosystem weekly: https://www.earlyriders.com/research
Keep up with Michael:
https://x.com/MTanguma
Keep up with Liam:
https://x.com/Lnelson_21
Keep up with Brian:
https://x.com/BackslashBTC

Signal vs Noise: Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, Liam Nelson, and Brian Cubellis break down an OpenAI frontier model escaping containment during testing, unpack the US-China AI race and Anthropic's own hypocrisy on stolen data, dig into Google's first negative free cash flow since going public, and flag the 30-year Treasury yield's longest stretch above 5% since 2007.

---

🎙️ About The Show

Signal vs Noise: a twice weekly show unpacking the five biggest stories across capital markets, technology, and people, with five minutes on the clock for each.

🧠 Chapters

01:21 - Topic 1 - OpenAI Model Escapes Containment

10:12 - Topic 2 - The US-China AI Race and Anthropic's Hypocrisy

15:30 - Topic 3 - Google Posts Its First-Ever Negative Free Cash Flow

23:40 - Topic 4 - 30-Year Yields Hit a Level Not Seen Since 2007

31:17 - Topic 5 - Lightning Round: Signals of the Week

💡 Subscribe & Watch Live:

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/@SignalvsNoiseLIVE

✖️ https://x.com/OnrampMedia

📰 Your 1-Stop News & Data Source:

https://onramp.media/

🔸 Buy, hold, and secure your bitcoin in one place. Open a free Onramp Finance account.

👉 https://go.onrampbitcoin.com/finance-svn

🎧 More from Onramp Media: The Last Trade | Final Settlement