36 Burst results for "Michael Casey"
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"And so now it will be about kind of, can we create enough incentives and economy around us to really offset... It's a business model. The benefit is like, we have interesting ways to kind of experiment with these models in, because of the blockchain and the tokenization and all these efforts. So there was actually some interesting conversations on the stage as well about some of the applications of AI in blockchains. And you guys, some of the folks in your ecosystem have been working on it. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the ideas that are being developed? Yeah. I mean, I think the one side of this is definitely around how do you interact with computing and especially blockchain, because there is a lot of complicated, you know, on one side, complicated user interface on the other side, kind of the benefits are that it's guaranteed that this thing will be there. The data is yours, so it's easier to actually provide it as context to the application. It's really hard actually to get your Facebook graph out of Facebook and into an AI model, right? Near impossible. Yeah. Versus the graph that, for example, Near has, it's actually, you know, because you own it, you have that in a very specific format that can be plugged in and now you can ask questions about it. So this project that they're doing, for example, way to query in general data around the blockchain, you can have, there's, they're also doing, you can tell it to do something like mint and like generate a picture of, you know, Coindesk coming to Nearcon and mint it as an NFT. It'll actually do that and execute that and have an NFT provided for you in your world. Right? So that's kind of experience is already possible. We also have actually had this hackathon. We will build a way to, out of a smart contract, call out into some AI models through secure enclave and to do, and what this allows us to do in now, write smart contracts that are kind of AI enabled, right? They can have a natural language inputs and outputs and can decide to do something based on that, right? You can actually say like, well, for example, you can have an Oracle that can read, you know, sports betting page or news on CNN and answer who won the game or who won the elections or something like, was there something happened? Like you can analyze advance or something else and respond to that. So like it could actually more rapidly and expansively grow the whole Oracle infrastructure, right? We currently have Oracles that are very specifically designed, right? They have to be, you're saying like through this model now, so many more things could become Oracles. Exactly. Yeah. Oracles, which means you can start acting on them on chain, right? You can, I mean, for everything from futures to figuring out how to maybe make decisions around funding and allocation, right? And so this goes into more governance ideas where leveraging AI for governance is extremely powerful because AI can kind of predictably evaluate options. It can describe in detail what needs to be done. It can have summarization. It can have like way to answer questions, but it also needs a way to actually interact with blockchain and make responses. But it also brings up the point you were raising before about how important it is that that AI is not the controls on it. Because if you've got a blockchain that has now got some nefarious AI model that Microsoft has all those controls, God knows what they could do with those assets. Exactly. Yeah. So you need something that's provable compute to ensure that, yeah, it's not trying to, it's not manipulated in some way. I wonder whether, as we're now supposedly moving in this stratified world, right? There's an ETF and Bitcoin price almost hit 38,000 today because there's a lot of speculation around the speed of ETF in this whole conversation about the traditional financial institutions coming and tokenization of assets, which are from what I gather being built on open blockchains. I mean, there's a polygon products that are being used by big financial institutions. If they're going to build models around that, that those assets now like trade off smart contracts and so forth, there's no way they're going to want some, they're going to need an open architecture to do it, I would think. For sure. Yeah. I mean, for any financial stuff, you definitely cannot rely on like a... Yeah. If J.C. Morgan controls the LLM that Goldman is trading on, there's no way that that's going to fly, right? So yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, it always gets to this issue though. Like what is going to be the wedge issue that drives people to actually start embracing these open models? And I think, I mean, on the other side, I mean, right now we see some of the regulatory capture that's happening. Like, oh, if you have more than 10 to 29 floating point operations, which is like trying to regulate picks and shovels, which is like the worst thing you can do. Like instead of regulating the outcomes, you're regulating how people are doing stuff, which is like, now when I'm running stuff on my laptop and I need to count now what I'm doing, like how many floating operators, like is this like, are they expecting now Apple devices to have a counter on how many units you process, like 40 points you multiply, like it's just like a kind of ridiculous frame for this versus taking it from the other side and saying, well, we want to ensure that the outcomes are, you know, non-malicious and we need to do this and this like way of tracking what the outcomes are so we can actually know who produced them. And if they're not produced by anyone who is kind of verified or have the reputation from before, they need to either build a reputation or maybe it's malicious and we can surface that. So like, for example, right now in browser, we switched to HTTPS and we have this green kind of thing. And that transition, you know, secured the internet, right? Before like actually all the information was public subtle shift. And so we need that, we need the green check mark for content now, where it's like, hey, this content is produced by somebody trusted and you can look and see the trust chain. But you need to use blockchain, you need to use cryptography and hashing to actually understand this. Yeah, all the deep fakes that are coming and so forth, right? How do we prove the provenance of all of that material? All right, well, we could go on and on about this. This is my favorite topic. And it's always a pleasure to talk to you earlier with this wide ranging perspective. Thanks for putting on a great conference. Thanks for having me here. And I'll sign off for now. That's all for now. I'm Michael Casey from Coindesk's chief officer. This is an episode of Money Reimagined and Sheila and I will be back next week together. So join us then. You've been listening to Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Today's show has been produced by senior producer, Michelle Musso. Our executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is The News Tonight by Shimmer. We would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcasts at coindesk.com, subject line Money Reimagined or leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Fresh update on "michael casey" discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"CoinDesk's money reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. I want to push back slightly on the idea that cash, the value of it. I mean, that's what FX markets are about, right, is like arbitraging differences in cash value. And that's a whole gigantic market around currency exchanges. And so I think there that we do see trading that happens in cash. But to your point, the use of cash as a means of payment, et cetera, is pretty robust and sticky as a concept. And I think the joke is always, you know, if cash didn't exist, no one would invent it. But hey, it does exist. And so that's the world that we're in. Look, there is a crypto angle in this. Our job is not to sit here as either geopolitical conflict resolution commentators, but it matters to everybody, every human being. Given how horrific this story is, the fact that there was an order to shut down crypto accounts used by Hamas and that finance came in to cooperate with that, of course, is yet another negative story around crypto. Take the frame from wherever you want to take it. But by remaining silent about bad actors in our industry, about criminal behavior, about terrorists, about whatever it is, and just focusing on the topic of our show. But I mean this more generally by remaining silent. We are complicit. You heard what she had to say. Go out there, call spades, spades, stand up for what is right. Like just it's time to stop shirking the responsibilities we have. And it is time to just stand up for what's right. Listen to Money Reimagined every Wednesday on the Protocol Podcast. Thanks for listening. Okay, we are back. And thank you for being with us here on the Protocol Podcast. We're going to talk about a story that really broke last week, right, Sam? And Sam, Sam took a deep dive on this story early this week. And the big story, I'll just give a quick summary, but we've been writing about the layer two explosion on Ethereum. There's all of these layer twos. Margo has been all over that story. Sam wrote a big story about blockchain in a box, Arbitrum Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, all these teams that have their own L2s basically providing kits that people can do to spin up layer twos, new layer twos atop Ethereum. And here was a new one blast. And they showed up and they had a new idea where it was going to be a layer two that pays yield. And they said that was a differentiator. And all of a sudden, there's like $600 million in this thing. And it's not even a live blockchain yet. So Sam, why don't you take it from there? Yeah, to me, this story shows both how far we've come and how far backwards we seem to still be, at least in terms of the direction we're moving, or that money is moving in this ecosystem. So $600 million deposited into it. So what is it at this point? It's just a wallet on Ethereum with a three out of five multisig, meaning three people out of five people, we don't know who they are, which is kind of a common thing because we want to keep them anonymous for security, but three people kind of have the ability to move these funds wherever. And right now, like I said, it's just a wallet. The blast team promises that this wallet will soon become a layer two blockchain. The information, though, past the fact that it will be a quote unquote optimistic roll-up, sort of like optimism, one of the types of roll-ups that we've talked about on this show, the information past that is pretty sparse. We don't really know what it's going to be. So the reason why we've seen all this money here is because of this crazy incentive scheme, where they say you're going to get yield if you deposit into this Spark contract that does not have withdrawals into this wallet that doesn't allow you to take your funds back. And that yield comes from two places. First, it comes from rehypothecating assets, putting them into places like Lido. Essentially, they're just taking user deposits and putting them mostly into Lido, the liquid staking protocol on Ethereum today, and giving users some of the returns. But a lot of the money and a lot of the reason why you've seen hype around this is because of this FOMO marketing, where it's like, hey, not only are you going to get these market-leading yields, but also if you invite other people to deposit into this wallet that you can't currently withdraw from, at least for three months until we say we're going to launch this thing, you're also going to be entitled to a larger share of this airdrop, this new token that we're going to print out and distribute to early adopters. Why that token should be worth money, just like anything else here, we don't know. The market might give it money, might say it's worth money. Honestly, my bet is it probably will. I mean, this is not investment advice at all. I don't know if the tone of this would make one want to invest into something like Blast, but there's a good chance this is crypto. That airdrop will be worth some money, but it still kind of hearkens back to these days from before, where it's like people were willing to put their money into these protocols with flimsy technical specs or at least flimsy, you know, kind of opaque inner workings just because of hype. And that's why people are angry about this, including one of their lead investors. It is true everything you're saying, although it's also true if you go back to DeFi summer of 2020 and just earlier this year, the example of Coinbase is base. Sometimes projects just this is the way it works in crypto. It's just somehow people find these things to stick money into. It's pretty fascinating. Well, it's like the bank and freed black boxing. Remember that from the DeFi days where he got in trouble for this, even though he was actually, I think, trying to make fun of this system where all that DeFi was in a lot of cases or yield farming was putting money into black boxes, closing your eyes. I don't care what happens there and money comes out. And that was seen as like kind of a, you know, silly sort of mechanic and was, you know, the entire space is roasted and he was roasted as a result. He made those comments to Matt Levine on Bloomberg. I mean, just looking at the DeFi llama here and 620 million already in this thing on total value, like TVL, that would, that's basically Solana. Yeah. You put this into my story too. It's bigger than Coinbase is base. Like, which was, you know, seen as a huge success. It's got around 582 million in several months. So this is a lot of money. So even though people are yelling about it, right? Like who cares if in dollar terms or doesn't care in dollar terms and Hey, who's to say, this is really, you know, it's probably not a scam. Otherwise paradigm would go under. That's a big, you know, it would be a huge hit to its reputation. So, but anyway, you know, I'm also a little bit off of that. I'm looking at L2B and you're right. It is, there's more now there's more money locked into blast than base. The only two that are have more is Arbitrum and Optimism. So I'm wondering like, does this even have a chance to really compete with some of these other L2s? I was also like perusing Twitter X, whatever, and you know, when all this was going down and it was really interesting to see some of these L2 founders, specifically Brendan Farmer from Polygon noted that from a technical side, like I wouldn't even know why people would want to put their money into something that claims to be an L2 if there's no documentation showing that there's fraud proofs or fault proofs. The whole debate with Stephen from Arbitrum came back up again about fraud versus ZK proofs. So, you know, just that there's no technology or at least there's no evidence of technology that's sort of backing this thing. And so, you know, there's all this money locked into it, but there's no security mechanisms in place. And so I'm wondering, even with a price tag, does that mean that it still can compete with these other L2s? Are some of the founders that are sort of leading the space worried about what this means for the ecosystem? Like, I don't know. What have you sort of heard about all this? I mean, back in the days of yield farming, when we were talking about these black boxes, you saw this phenomena where you just have mercenary sort of yield farmers, where they'd come in, drop their money wherever it's going to get the biggest yields or get the most promised airdrop, and then leave as soon as they arrive once withdrawals unlock, once that airdrop comes and hits, whatever, you know, the timescale is or how things are set up, the incentive model in that system. So that's something that we might see here. And whether it can sustain users is really going to depend on the A, continued incentives, whether it can continue to offer incentives to users, which it says it'll be able to do because it does differentiate itself, at least at a high level, we don't know how it's going to be built, but they do say they're going to give native yields by reinvesting people's money, people's deposits behind the scenes into yield bearing protocols like Lido, which means that at a surface level for users using it, even if it's not as safe, and that's a whole other conversation, we don't know, because we just don't have the details of what this thing's ultimately going to look like. Even if it's not as safe of a platform, as far as users are concerned, just looking at it, using this thing, they might just have a system that works the same as optimism or arbitrum, but also pay some yields a little bit on top. And, you know, the bet here is that that's actually going to be a good retention strategy. But again, we don't actually know how they're going to do that in the long term. There's so much we don't know. And there's so much that we still don't know about their security system. Yeah, there's more to say about how they're currently keeping money secure with this multi-signature wallet. And we have some of that in the story. But, you know, that's another thing. Let's just take a tiny little, you know, moment and talk about some news that I covered last night, which was the news that Celo blockchain, which is, you know, tiny compared to Ethereum and Solana. Well, not, you know, it's about one, let's see, I think I looked it up last night. It was number 27, the 27th largest blockchain, according to DeFi llama. Okay. You know, a lot of times you're not really talking about the 27th number 27, you know, who's number 27 in this case, Celo is seen as a legit project. You know, with a decent community and smart people. And, and they're looking for somebody to basically merge with or merge into. Right. And so they're talking to all these different layer two teams, basically they're standalone blockchain. They're going to turn into a layer two on Ethereum. And initially they were just going to use optimism. So peace stack, and then all of a sudden polygon came in and said, Hey, why don't you use us? And then matter labs came in after that and said, Hey, why don't you use us? So it, it, this is one of the rare fun moments where not, it's not all scripted, you know, we're, we're having some competition. We went from all these layer two announcements that just sort of show up blast is kind of like that. Hey, here it's out, you know, it's up or whatever. In this case, it's more of a, okay, we're going to have a contest and there's so much money on the line and marketing and pride and first mover advantage. And as my, one of my ideas has just been, it's so hard for anyone from the outside to really judge who's got the best tack on these things. And so we defer to these teams who are basically the customers kicking the tires and making a choice. Are you going to buy a Hyundai or are you going to buy a Honda or are you going to buy a Tesla, you know? So, and anyway, they came out last night with the framework. They're going to evaluate over the next month or actually just over the next couple of weeks. And then they're going to make a decision by mid January. So we're going to see who they pick, but it's interesting. I don't think blast has really come clean on who they're using. What do you think about that? Sam? I don't think we know anything. I mean, you, you kind of just like hit it. What you just said there, like we still don't know how this thing is going to work, which is kind of at the core of this entire story. If they choose one of these big stacks, it would be a boon for that stack on some level, because of course more money flowing into any ecosystem is in this world typically deemed a good thing. Again, the sustainability of this business is going to come down to how they continue to retain users in the long term. And whatever ecosystem it chooses, if it can't figure out a strategy to do that, or if it fails to do that, which could be a big PR mess, will have ramifications for its partners, as well as the core technology or the core team itself. I will say that it sounds like Celo is going to make its timeline, its framework ready in January, will blast off in February. So we'll have to, you know, keep an eye on the L2 race and stacks in that time of the year. It seems like it won't be leaving us in 2024. Fair point to make, Bargo. And it does, this never ceases to give us the news, the gift from the news guys on the Layer 2 race. It's just like a new thing all the time. Anyway, all right, we should probably wrap it there. Want to thank our amazing producer, Michelle Musso, who is behind the scenes making us sound good. And we want to thank you for joining us this week. If you have any questions or any stories, tips that you want to pass off to us or any comments, please reach out to us at podcasts at coindesk.com, subject line, The Protocol. You can also listen to us weekly on Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please, please, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Protocol on coindesk.com. Thanks a lot. See you next week.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by CME Group and PayPal. You're listening to CoinDesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to another edition of Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. Unfortunately, this week I am alone. Sheila can't be with us. I'm in Lisbon at the NEARcon, the event put on by the folks around the NEAR Foundation, the NEAR protocol. And I'm here with the founder and now the new CEO of the NEAR Foundation, the founder of the protocol, the co-founder of the whole thing, Ilya Polosukin. And really, I mean, pleasure to be here as always. I mean, you did actually, as often happens at these events, you break a bit of news along the way. One of which was the fact that you're now the CEO. You were previously really, I suppose, the co-founder of the protocol. The foundation was a separate thing, but you had now stepped in to take charge of the actual foundation itself. Explain the logic behind that. Yeah. So thank you and welcome to Lisbon for NEARcon. Thanks for having me here. Yeah. So we started the kind of the protocol, the ecosystem. There's a lot of different nodes in the ecosystem already kind of working across different aspects. And I've been a lot more focused on product and technology kind of up to now. But as we kind of evolving into the next stage with focusing on founders and kind of bringing together some of the interesting innovations and governance, kind of foundation is a way to coordinate some of these pieces coming together, especially around coordinating kind of what we call founder success. Really ensuring that projects and builders who are coming to NEAR, and then we'll talk about what NEAR really means, are successful, are able to get to the user, provide value and build their kind of companies. And what's better than a founder actually leading that effort. So that's kind of background of me coming in. Okay. Right. So sort of really, I suppose, charge up that exercise and supporting the developers and others who are working on the protocol. Yeah. I mean, let's talk about what NEAR is, but I think also maybe one way to frame it is it seems like the big theme that you, at this event, that you've been talking about this for some time really is this idea of an open web and you're really focused on an interoperability. And on stage today, I think Mike Butcher from TechCrunch had said that you were first described as an Ethereum killer. You've come a long way since then, right? This is in fact a very different idea about what this sort of multi-chain interoperable world is about. Tell us a little bit about what that's about. Yeah. I mean, I want to mention, yeah, that we never were trying to be or wanting to be an Ethereum killer. We always worked with Ethereum from the start, actually. We published how Ethereum works with like, went to all the hackathons and events and actually worked very closely with the ecosystem broadly, as well as with kind of a lot of individuals folks there. And so for us, it's always been from the experience side and kind of within this bigger vision of open web, where we want people to own their assets, to own their data, to have power of governance. If we think from this perspective and want to bring a billion users, there's a set of things you need to do to achieve that, right? The experience needs to be extremely smooth, better than Web2 ideally. It needs to be easy to develop and build so we can attract tens of thousands, ideally even millions of developers to maybe not, they build a Web3 startup. They build a startup and it uses website, right? Like nobody right now says I'm doing a mobile app and people just building apps and they're mobile because that's where the users are, right? And then to do that, you need a scalable blockchain, you need a lot of tooling and kind of back when we started, that was kind of the piece that was missing. So we invested a lot in blockchain ecosystem, but blockchain infrastructure itself and the user experience on the blockchain level.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"You're listening to CoinDesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. A reminder, you can listen to us weekly on the CoinDesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts, and we love to hear from you. You can email us at podcasts at coindesk.com with the subject line, Money Reimagined. This week, Michael and I are back together again for one of our, the two of us shows. Something I've been thinking about a lot based on my experience in the last couple of weeks is the role of the press in all of this and everything to do with policy, with crypto, and really with new technologies as a general matter. I was asked last week to comment on, among other things, the speaker election of the United States House, terrorist financing of crypto, and of course, the Sam Banquin Freed trial, which thankfully is now concluded. What all those things have in common is that the press does play an outsized role in public perception of what is happening with those issues. And I thought, who better than our very own Michael Casey to weigh in on this topic as a general matter? Michael, over to you for some initial thoughts. Well, I mean, first of all, we journalists don't like to actually be the news, we like to cover it or get very uncomfortable when you wrote me into this now. So I'm having to talk about us and me and journalism. And it is a subject near and dear to my heart. I just want to make the, and this is obviously a little bit of a plug, but I think we deserve the right to do it. It was exactly one year to the date that when Sam Banquin Freed, I'm sorry, Sheila, we have to say that name one more time, was convicted last Thursday. It's one year to the date for then when Ian Allison's very important story about Alameda's balance sheet was published, which really did sort of set things off and led to the collapse of the FTX empire and everything else. People probably know as well, Coindesk has had a difficult year. We've had a very difficult year in terms of revenues and everything else. And so there's been a very stark reminder of why we do what we do and how difficult it is. There's something about journalism that's hard. And one of the things is how do you pay for it? How do you pay for good journalism? Because it's much easier to get somebody to pay you to write something in their interests than to get somebody to pay you to write about something that is either not in the interest or might even be directly against your interest. Advertisers and sponsors, they're trying to get their own word out. They're not necessarily in support of what you're doing. So you have to build this model around a trusted brand that for the sake of reaching readers and reaching others, it grows and is therefore a forum in which advertisers want to be, even if they have no control over it. The church and state challenges of journalism, we know it well. But I think in our profession and certainly in the crypto media world, it gets harder. I've never liked the idea that Coindesk is considered a trade pub. I think we are something far bigger. We're covering an emergent technology and an emergent idea, really something far bigger than just say, writing about the airplane industry. Nonetheless, it so happens as much as we'd love to have advertisers from right across the spectrum, we tend to get crypto advertisers, people who have a vested interest, direct interest in the stuff you're writing about. We basically contributed to, I think the truth would have come out anyway, but clearly Coindesk's reporting around FTX played a role in the implosion of not just FTX, but a lot of the business around that, which then resulted in slashed marketing budgets and everything else. It's made it harder in many respects to be able to continue what we do. We do, we always do stand up for what we believe in. We keep fighting. But I'm just raising this to show that I think in crypto journalism, it's especially hard. You're very much at the whim of the industry. And so how we stake out this ground, this higher level position, when we know there are so many scams, there's been so many challenges and the public perception of this is not positive. It's our view that airing it all, keeping making people accountable is critical because that's eventually how you'll have the public perception improve because we'll actually keep the bad actors out. But obviously vested interest will want us sometimes to keep our mouths shut because doing so they see is undermining them and the industry's perception. So it's not fun sometimes, come under a lot of attack from all sides. I do think, you know, CoinDesk has won three awards as a result of that coverage, including last month, The Loeb, which is essentially the Pulitzer of business journalism. I think that has helped people to understand the importance of what we do, but there's always tension. And there's been a lot of it in the past year. You've been a journalist for quite a while now without baiting either of us. How have you seen the practice of journalism change over time? Because one thing that was very interesting to me to observe the last couple of weeks was just, I don't know if it's this sort of impulse for fair and balanced, you know, quote unquote reporting or whatnot, but sometimes facts are facts. And it almost felt like, especially in the case of sort of the terrorist financing, there was this desire on the part of many publications to lean into aspects of that story that really weren't the main event. Now you have to contrast what's very interesting about this and the juxtaposition, I think, of these two things as important to understand contextually. So you had the press, in some cases, going very hard after crypto as being really responsible, I would say, for some of the financing of Hamas that led to these attacks. Meanwhile, you had in Congress, you had hearings, hearing after hearing, where basically expert witnesses rejected that premise and said, if crypto played a role, which remains very much in doubt, it was minuscule compared to things like money flows from Iran or, you know, other kinds of traditional financial flows, like other things that are very documented that were clearly, you know, complicit, if you will, in this occurrence and these horrific attacks. So I'm just curious how you think, well, first of all, just a general comment possibly on how journalism has changed in terms of the obligations of reporters and all that kind of thing. It's a general matter, right? Over the course of your career, how you feel about that at CoinDesk. But then also, what do you make of this kind of desire to, I don't know, I don't know, find a villain is the right word, but it does feel like black and white has become a little more predominant as a modality in journalism that I feel like it used to be, you know, 10 years ago, let's say. Okay, because there's quite a bit to unpack in there. I think, firstly, just stepping back again before diving directly into the terrorist financing thing, because there's a specific situation there. We're talking about my former employer, The Wall Street Journal. I'm a little aware of going too deep into that. But I do want to say that I think you're right in a broad sense that journalism itself has changed without a doubt. I have very strong views on this in terms of how incredibly influential in our information economy the gigantic tech monopolies of that system are, right? Google and Facebook especially, but others as well. And it has had a subtle but very transformative impact on the nature of what media is. I am old enough to have actually, you did sort of out us here. I started my career before the internet was actually a thing, right? So, I began reporting when there were just newspapers. There really wasn't any digital concept around what we delivered to the world. So, I worked for a physical newspaper to start with. And then really shortly after I started, the internet came along. But it really wasn't until social media that we saw the tremendous impact that it was having on us. When I like to say, you know, we went from, already it was a difficult world where you're having to balance, or let's say serve the interests as an institution, not as a journalist, but media organizations serve the interest first and foremost of their readers, their audience. And secondly, they serve the audience of their advertisers, right? Through creating the right sort of forum that advertisers could comfortably advertise in. Now, whether we like it or not, we have a third party that we're having to constantly serve the interests of. The algorithm that runs Google's ranking system, the algorithms that set and choose the curation structure of social media. So, whether we like it or not, we're playing to that. Every major news organization now has a number of SEO experts on the team, search engine optimization people who work with the newsroom to figure out what's best headline that's going to get the right attention. What are the stories you should be focusing on that are gaining attention that people seem to be interested in at this particular moment in time, how to place them, what kind of images are going to get attraction, whatnot. All of which, let's face it, is a distortion of some form in the curation process of what news prioritization is. Look, news selection has always been a subjective process. It's always been a process where we have obviously tried to attract readers, right? But we've also been able to, I think, with having to serve just those two masters, it's been an easier time being able to stand up and say, this is real news. This matters. I'm covering this because it's important for the world. Now, there's this third factor, and it really is dramatic because eyeballs are being taken from us all the time by alternative attention-seeking things. I often cite this one case that I think was, for me, revelatory. I suddenly realized how bad things have come, and things have gotten worse since. But this was 2016 when BuzzFeed came out with a story about these teens, Macedonia, who'd set up a website. They're in a little town called Veles, and they running stories that said things like, Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump, and birth certificate for Obama found in Kenya. And there was even some that were actually aimed at liberals that were saying things like, you know, I think there was one like massive migration of Democrats to Canada or something like that, the refugee story. And they were designed to specifically land inside Facebook groups that were solely these conservative groups or Democrat-only groups, and just to really get people riled or excited or whatever. So there were clicks and likes and shares and reposts and everything else, all of which drove massive amounts of traffic back to this little website in Veles. And these kids made a decent living on, you know, programmatic ads, Google ads that were running in there. And it was just like, oh, my God, we're literally being competed for those eyeballs that we're trying to get by people who are just making stuff up. And they're making stuff up with zero cost, like just there's nothing. Whereas a news organization will put into place a hierarchy of editors, a legal system, they'll pay for people to go to places. There's an enormous cost structure in a traditional news organization that is literally built around trying to get the facts straight. That's what you do. That's considered a cost of doing business. And now that is being out competed by these systems. So that's a major challenge. You can do it. What's changed in journalism, having to contend with that, it's made it much, much harder. And I think it's one of the reasons why I am absolutely passionate about why we need to fix the Internet.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Crypto Regulations and International Challenges Explored at CoinDesk's State of Crypto Event in DC
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by PayPal. You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. This is a very special occasion. We are coming to you live from Coindesk's State of Crypto event in Washington, D .C. One of these rare moments where I get to actually be joined in person by my wonderful co -host, Sheila Warren. And we are absolutely honored to have in our presence Commissioner Summer Mersinger from the Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, who I just spent a delightful 20 minutes on stage with. And we thought we'd just do something that we can bring to the wider audience through the podcast here, talk a little bit about, I don't know, the dysfunction that is Washington and how, you know, a determined commissioner like yourself tries to sort of move forward with things in this environment. I mean, we talked a little bit, let's just talk about this, about there does seem to be this vacuum right now, legislative vacuum, obviously, you know, the House that are in disarray and therefore once more stalling on crypto legislation. Also, you've highlighted the problem of regulation by enforcement and therefore the need for a rulemaking from the commission, from the SEC and others. So what's your solution? What can the commission do within this kind of vacuum that we're currently experiencing, but specifically with, obviously, with regards to crypto regulation? It's great that we're continuing our conversation because I realized I forgot to give my disclaimer previously. And so I just give it now and pretend like I did it previously. The things I express are my own. They do not reflect the commission or my fellow commissioners. So putting that aside, there are things we could be doing as regulators. We could be putting out notice and comment rulemaking as to how we're going to hold certain actors in this environment accountable where we have rules that we are saying they're not, that they are violating. So, you know, when we bring an enforcement action and we say to, you know, most recently to some DFI protocols, you're violating the Commodity Exchange Act. The problem is we're not telling them how they could actually abide by the Commodity Exchange Act. And we can do that now without congressional authority. So I think there are other ways to engage stakeholders as well to better understand how they're operating and how our rules may impact their operations. And so they can understand what we're looking for and how we would like them to comply with our rules and regulations. So there are a number of things we could be doing as we wait for Congress to weigh in on how to regulate the crypto cash market federally. Yeah, and it is really interesting because I think there is this misunderstanding by some in the industry that without congressional action, there's really nothing that can be done. When in fact, as you've noted and said publicly multiple times, including today, there is quite a bit that actually could be done by both commissions, like the SEC and by the CFTC. But actually what's happening because I think, mostly speaking, primarily because of the Gary Gensler shared SEC and the way they're approaching this, the congressional action would actually help with that regulation by enforcement approach and kind of push the thinking is some of this the more proactive way that you're talking about forward. But it's not that that isn't possible now. And so I'm curious, you know, why you think, and this is just speculation, but, you know, why do you think that that has become the kind of dominant legality of engagement, these enforcement actions versus an impairment, like a kind of ordinary course of business for these commissions, which are being done in other spaces? Why do you think that in the crypto space, it's become more about going after folks as opposed to setting the rules of the road? Right. There's a combination of things. One, you know, anytime you're doing notice and comment rulemaking, that takes a lot of a lot of work, a lot of focus. And chairman have different priorities when it comes to rulemaking and where they want to see their rulemaking agenda. So, you know, it might it might be that just doesn't come up on the priority. It might be that it's just it's easier to do enforcement. I know that doesn't seem right. But, you know, sometimes what we see a lot are settlements. And so, you know, these entities are settling, which is an easier task to, you know, bring that. I think there is maybe some desire to be the stronger agency and, you know, bring more enforcement, be the be the real cop, you know, cop on the beat in this area. I think we've seen a little bit of that between the two agencies as well. So, you know, I think that's why you're seeing enforcement really kind of taking these, you know, the stage here versus going through the processes that we could use to create some clarity. So it sounds a little bit as if it's a resource issue, though, right? Because obviously something difficult. One way to solve that is to put more resources against it. Right. And obviously you've got enforcement divisions and, you know, rulemaking divisions and they're quite different within these these agencies. So is there like some sort of solution in regards to that? Like there needs to be some angle of gain that may depend on Congress to actually put more money toward the rulemaking process? Well, I think resources are only good if you have the framework and the clarity to use those resources. So I'm not even sure at this point if additional resources will help us move in that direction. In fact, you know, we have seen some of the agency's requests, both the CFTC and the SEC's request to Congress for funding focused on more enforcement resources. So there is this play to get more resources, but not necessarily where we need them. So I just think regardless, we've got to be able to sit down, engage stakeholders, come up with a framework and move forward that way. I think there's ways of people interpreting this string of court cases that have really come down against the SEC for the most part is that like it's a litigation risk for them that now if they would have come back and actually, I suppose, ignore the rulings, particularly the Grayscale case, that they would just be, you know, a red rag to a ball for all of these industry lawyers who can now just like lean in heavily to what the precedent has been said. And so it's almost as if the courts are sort of driving something to happen. And so I suppose maybe discuss that. Like we talked on stage about this idea that it's, you know, both that and the idea that industry leaders could just choose to go offshore, in some respects challenges the leadership of the SEC, the SEC itself. And so is there an awareness around that? You feel as if with all of this action happening in both international activity and in the courts that is a realization that we've got to do something constructive and forward -looking like rulemaking? Yeah, absolutely. Both in the sense of, you know, if you're looking at how Congress views this, you know, with the enforcement actions and the courts, you know, dividing, you know, kind of being divided on this or, you know, making decisions that are policy decisions, you know, that's not what they are meant to do. And, you know, you see some of this struggle too with some of the opinions that they are having to make decisions that you think normally Congress would make that your elected public officials would make. So I do think that's helping to drive kind of the desire to get legislation. And definitely when we're seeing foreign jurisdictions come up with frameworks and start to put that in place and you hear companies say, we're going to go to Europe or the UK or Singapore, I think that definitely creates some concern. You know, there are still a lot of people who don't see that there's any legitimate use for digital assets or DeFi. They don't understand that the market's there, that people are in the market, that there's an interest. And I think seeing other jurisdictions create frameworks, it helps them view this more as this is real, this is happening. And we don't want to be left behind. The US has always been a leader in financial services markets. We don't want to fall behind here.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"At this exact current moment, and look, once we have a speaker, I think things will play out and resolve a bit, but at this exact moment with this kind of churn and everything else going on with the SEC voting 3-2 on so many topics that involve digital assets with the advent of AI coming faster than anyone can even comprehend who's not in that industry. I'm industry adjacent. I used to be paying much more attention there. All these things with climate stuff, we go back and forth over all these things, right? I don't really know what we do. I'm not a person who's ever been a techno utopian. I do not think that tech is coming to save us either, right? Because at the end of the day- That's a dangerous way to say it. Yeah, I'm not neither dystopian nor utopian about tech. I think the things that happen with tech are things that humans are going to be doing with tech. AI personhood is going to come in and inject itself into that whole situation in ways that I think we can't even possibly contemplate yet, regardless. I think it's to some extent about what it's always about, which is people standing up and speaking out and saying things out loud, saying the quiet things out loud, right? Enough is enough. I think there is no hesitation on the part of extremists on all sides to say all kinds of words. I think many of us who do not fall into any of those sorts of ideological or technological or whatever other camps don't always say the words out loud. I think it's critically important, denouncing terrorist activity, calling somebody who is a criminal, a criminal. Not being afraid to say things out loud and say there are people among us who are motivated by exploitation, by personal gain, by I guess in one case, effective altruism, whatever they're motivated by. What that leads them to do sure looks an awful lot like exploitation. I'm supposed to say blah, blah. But I think at this point, going back to Espaillat, we have multiple people who have testified and pled guilty and said, yep, we crimed in broad daylight. We're criming. We all crime together and then we kept criming. And now we feel bad. Normally, I'm a lawyer. I would use all kinds of nuanced words and blah, blah, blah. But in this case, I'm like, oh, come on. Sometimes you just got to call the thing for what it is. I've tried to do that. I'm trying to do it in the role that I'm in now. I've been trying to do it for a long time, as you know. I know you are the same. But I think it's about more people stepping up and recognizing that if we are silent, we are complicit. And it goes back to civil rights. You can take the frame from wherever you want to take it. But by remaining silent about bad actors in our industry, about criminal behavior, about terrorists, about whatever it is, and just focusing on the topic of our show, but I mean this more generally, by remaining silent, we are complicit. And so it behooves all of us to be using our voices in whatever sphere of influence we have to say, like, some of these things are just not OK. They're not OK. They're antisocial. They're dangerous. They're irresponsible. Wherever on the spectrum they fall and to be having that dialogue out loud. So it's one of the reasons I always appreciate talking with you and our show, because I think we do, if I may, I think we do a good job of trying to do this, but it has to come from more people than just us. It has to come from people across the entire positions of employment. And we have to wrap. And I think, therefore, let's summarize what you said as a call to action. And also, I just want to quickly say this as well. Coindesk won an award, but Sheila Warren, named to the Washingtonians list of the 169 most powerful women in Washington.So there you go. Your voice matters, Sheila. Everybody who's listening to this, you heard what she had to say. Go out there, call spades, spades, stand up for what is right. Like, just it's time to stop shirking the responsibilities we have and worrying about, like, you know, all of these sort of right. It is time to just stand up for what's right. So on that note, let's let's wind it up, Sheila. Thank you so much. Great to be back with you. And we will be back again next week for another edition of Money Reimagined. You can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. So please send us an email with whatever you think at podcast coindesk.com subject line Money Reimagined. That's it for now. See you later. You're listening to Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Today's show was edited and produced by Michelle Musso. Our theme song is The News Tonight by Shimmer. We would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcasts at coindesk.com subject line Money Reimagined or leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Current Affairs | Analyzing Israel-Gaza Conflicts, Crypto's Dual Nature, and the Intriguing World of Crypto Celebrities
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by PayPal. You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. Very happy to be back for quite some time now. Have not had the opportunity of doing the show that is two people's show with the two of us actually in the same room. Sheila, Warren and I together today. Yay. Anyway, this is Money Reimagined. You can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts and we would love to hear from you. Tell us what you think about us or the show or both. Email us at podcast .coindesk .com, subject line Money Reimagined. Hey, Sheila, stranger. How are you? Hey, Michael. It's so great to see you, although what a... I don't know. So much has happened. Where do we think? We live in... Yes. Well, we did choose to work in the crypto industry, which means that we are part circus performers and part whatever else we do. But this does feel like a circus right now. This is the world. It's not even just... Well, the world is hard. I'm thinking the circus is the trial that we were all obsessed with, but the rest of the world is really more than a circus. This is tragedy on a massive, massive scale. I don't know if you... I feel we have to take a moment to just acknowledge what's going on. I don't know if you've watched any of the videos. They're just unbelievable. Unbelievably horrific. Unbelievably horrific. The latest revelations about what happened. We're, of course, referring for those who come in later to this. We're referring to the terrorist attacks in Israel. Now this war that's happening in Gaza. And in addition to that, I mean, it's just chaos everywhere, Michael. I mean, so we have a war. We have absolutely unprecedented, horrific terrorist attacks of a kind that I don't know that we've seen in a generation, quite frankly. Then we have the Speaker of the House situation in Washington, that clown show, if I may. Then we've got, of course, two trials happening in New York, like a block away from each other. We've got Sam Bankman -Free. We've got Donald Trump, who somehow is not getting a lot of airtime in all of this, which I find very interesting. So where to even begin? Yeah. No, I think there's a lot of people just putting their heads in the sand right now. This is just too much. But let's just acknowledge that the utter tragedy that is the attack on Israel and the retaliation, the very fact that this conflagration has now just been taken to another level. And then the horrible, horrible civilian casualties on both sides, but the head not being torture. I mean, just the cold terror, bloodthirsty terrorism on a level that I don't think any of us could have imagined, as you said. So, look, there is a crypto angle in this. This is our job is not to sit here as either geopolitical or conflict resolution commentators, but we certainly, you know, it matters to everybody, every human being as human. Yeah. Given how horrific this story is, the fact that there was an order to shut down crypto accounts used by Hamas and that finance came in to cooperate with that, of course, is yet another negative story around crypto. I mean, we had somebody on first move around the TV show that I was hosting this morning who was making the point that like, you know, well, at least you've got traceability that actually allows this and that's a positive crypto. But at the same time, I think that that nuance is going to be lost in so many people right now. It's this guilt by association problem that we've encountered elsewhere. So I don't know how to wait. What do you make of this part of the story and what it means for our industry? Let me just say this. So speaking personally, just completely personally now, I certainly believe that any avenue that can be used to divert funds away from terrorists that can be used to expose and eventually prosecute terrorists and terrorist activity should be used. And certainly we know Hamas back in, I think, 2017, it was stopped using Bitcoin because they realized pretty quickly that Bitcoin was quite traceable and that that was not going to serve their need to be invisible, to basically move funds or move value invisibly. That was the opposite of what they wanted to do. And we certainly know that for centralized exchanges, which are running KYC or AML, it's like they're supposed to, especially in the United States and in Western democracies, that you can figure out and you can use somewhat traditional methods to figure out who might be the recipient or the sender of funds. And that is done. That is done with some level of vigilance. In fact, compliance with AML regimes is for U .S.-based exchanges. In many cases, their single biggest budget line is compliance with that to ensure that they're not in violation of sanctions or of the rules around that. So I think all of that is not widely known. It's certainly known within the industry. I don't know that it's widely known. And when we talk about terrorists getting funding, ordinarily we're talking about the theft of funds through an exploit, sometimes through a bridge, whatever, through code that was not properly secured in some cases. I'm speaking very generally here. We're not usually talking about funds kind of moving in the ordinary course of crypto business, if you will, that are being used by terrorists. Because a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to root that out. And I do think that deserves acknowledgement as well. Now, that being said, I certainly think as an industry, we should have zero problem and we should just be completely united in denouncing terrorists. That should not be a hard thing to do. But I got to tell you, I've been a bit disheartened by the silence from many corners. So in the face of something that I think should be a just as a human being should be something that we are easily able to denounce and to commit, I would say, to doing our level best and whatever that looks like in our various roles. We all have different roles in this in this industry, but doing our very best to ensure that these horrible actors, murderers, and frankly, do not gain access to funds that can support them in their murderous slash illicit activities. So that's kind of what I get to. Yeah, go ahead. But I mean, as you mentioned, certainly for US exchanges, KYC, AML compliance, this is a huge part of what they have to do. One would think that exchanges that were involved in this particular incident should have had those sorts of checks and balances in place. And so, I mean, whether or not this sort of raises questions about the quality of that, there's one in particular that's, we'll say it's finance because it's in the story. Does this sort of raise questions for them? It's just getting harder and harder to make the case. Things that I think I still believe are truly valid solutions for privacy preservation in this industry. And you and I have talked at length over the years around why this is important from a financial conclusion perspective and so forth. But you see things like this, trying to make a case for tornado cash, for example. And it's just very hard because the enforcement agencies can just say, look, look what happened, bad guys, really, really bad guys, really, really, really, really, really bad. And then the nuance of the conversation is lost. And so I would just feel like it's almost just a complete and utter losing battle. Any of the kind of pro privacy arguments around how we manage this push for surveillance, which I think is just yet another tragedy, to be honest, because the fallout is, it does, it means the poor and others are undermined. I mean, look, I'll also say what I've said before on the show and in other venues, which is, I am a South Asian woman who was present and lived in New York and was present after 9 -11 and is very, very well aware of what the Patriot Act did to my community. And it is troubling to me that instances like this, which again, this should be a no brainer, denouncing these acts should just be the most obvious human reaction, in my opinion, period, right? I just think that should be, that's my personal, again, my personal opinion. That being said, you know, these situations are ripe for exploitation, and they are ripe for those who do want to increase government surveillance, who do want to crack down on civil liberties, you know, to come in and attempt to push through rules that are going to make that possible. Now, in this case, of course, the United States is not, does not have victim, well, I guess there are actually American citizens who've been kidnapped from what I understand and French citizens as well have been kidnapped by Hamas. So who knows, right? Who knows what we're going to actually see. Now, I suppose moving, you know, we can maybe move to our next topic, which is the US government's not doing anything anytime soon because the US government, you know, at least one branch of, one chamber of one branch of government is not currently functioning. So the, the ability for the US government to quickly mobilize around the legislation is not a current state of affairs to say the least. And, you know, today, I mean, Michael, right, like probably right now, while we're recording this, there is jockeying happening in the house on the Republican side to see who the next speaker of the house might be. And I have to tell you, I got jokes about this for days, but my, my favorite one is, you know, I really thought when the writer's strike ended, you know, we'd be able to come out of the simulation, right? Like the AI would stop writing for us and we'd get some good content. Yeah, here we are, you know, here we are. That's a goodie. That's a goodie. Yeah. Yeah. You got to put a lighthearted thing on this, but does that does feel like somebody, some monster is writing the script of our lives right now. It's like, for goodness sake, you know, I I've seen the matrix. I don't need to actually be reminded that it's a possibility. It's as it does. It feels like that indeed. Look, we don't know at this stage who that that is. Maybe by the time our listeners are listening to this, they will know. So again, you know, showing the reality folks, this is not a live show and therefore you won't be up with it. But obviously, you know, Scalise is, is a favorite Jordan, another one. We'll see what happens, but it's really part two. I mean, which again, just all to believe that the AI is writing things down. I think we may have a speaker by the time we, this, this goes live. We may not. It wouldn't surprise me either way. Nothing would surprise me at this point. Michael, I think is right. Despite the fact that McHenry, you know, briefly, for now, at least under interim speaker has this sort of brief period of power and he is possibly the most high profile supporter of at least legislating in an open way. Crypto is there in that role. I think the bigger takeaway is like this just utter disruption in the legislative process is just going to mean, as you just alluded to, that any fresh regulation is, crypto is not a top priority right now when they just can't get their house in order. And yet, as you wrote, you know, a piece in CoDes this week, that if we don't, if we just don't go through with this regulatory approach and give some clarity to this, then another Sam Bankman freed is a real possibility. Why don't you lay out your thesis there? Well, I think so. Okay. I have so much to say about this. And, you know, I did write this, this op -ed for CoDes and I have been quoted in the press quite a bit on this topic. And I have to say to some degree, I have been entertaining myself with some of the interviews that I've been giving on this because look, I think this whole thing, I love what Noelle said in Wired. She and I were quoted extensively in Wired and she said, this is a galactic embarrassment. And I think that just nails it, right? This is just, it's a long time friend of the pod often comes on the show with us. It is just a distraction. It is, it is an individual who is being put on trial. And for some reason, the press and others are painting this as if it is an indictment potentially of the entire industry. Now I need to think, I think it's really important to note the prosecution is not doing that in this case at all. The prosecution is very much talking about the actions of which is a tactic, right? Cause I think that is coming from parties, other third parties. The defense would actually probably like to have not crypto on trial, but certainly like, Oh look, crypto confusing. Like this idea that this is something else, right? So ironically, yes, this isn't the government that's going after crypto. It's the defense of the crypto guy that is trying to throw it into the trial.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Decentralized Storage, AI, and Blockchain Convergence | Shawn Wilkinsons Insights on Industry Transformation
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by PayPal. You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. I got a solo show this week as Michael's away, but a reminder to listen to us weekly on the Coindesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from you. You can tell us what you think by sending us an email at podcasts .coindesk .com, the subject line of Money Reimagined. Today we'll be talking a bit about blockchain and AI, crypto and AI, digital assets and AI, and how all of these things ultimately intersect. I'm joined today by Sean Wilkinson. He's the founder of Storj and of Protea. Storj is one of the biggest distributed storage platforms available today, and Protea is an AI company that uses decentralized processing on the backend. So decentralized processing, Sean, let's start there. Walk us through this entire model and how you're using a blockchain, if at all, or if not, what does decentralized mean to you? Sure, sure. So yeah, I guess it's worth going back a little bit to set a little context. So I've been in kind of the crypto web3 space for 10 years now. Started in 2012, just started a little project out of my dorm room that was... I was downloading a bunch of Twitter data, I guess we call it X now. Store and analyze it. And I was just adding up to too much data for me to store locally. And so I looked at all these cloud providers and try to find something that could store all this data. It was way too expensive. Amazon and Google and Microsoft, same offerings that we have now, still too expensive. So I was mining back then, I wish I hadn't turned it off, half Bitcoin a day. If I can rent out my CPU, why can't I rent out my hard drive space and maybe a little distributed network, I can store all this data for cheaper. So I went down that rabbit hole and never came back out. Found its storage, it allowed people to rent out their distributed... Rent out their extra hard drive space and then allow businesses and companies to store their data. So it started as a small little open source project. We're one of the very first ERC20 tokens, raised $30 million in a token sale. Grew that from basically four guys and a dog, 60 plus people. And now it's the largest distributed cloud storage company in the world and really just solving a lot of problems in terms of privacy and security and costs for companies. And so got started playing around with AI as ChatGPT came out. Everyone's just having so much fun. It's funny, I've actually been playing around with a lot of the tech GPT -3 since 2020, but no one seemed to care about it until ChatGPT came out. And I found the same problems that people are having with traditional cloud. You have these massive AI companies, and they're just giving all their money to AWS and Microsoft and Nvidia, and it is really difficult for them. And all their data. Yeah, well, so played the page out of my playbook, just used the experience that I had building distributed storage and built out a distributed GPU platform for AI. And funny enough, it uses a former GPUs, mining but AI is not in the ground. It's taken off, but the infrastructure is really difficult for people to run. And so at Proteo, we help with that. So you can see how the two meld together. Yeah. You make such a good point though about ChatGPT -3 wasn't around for years until ChatGPT, but it was the form factor that made it accessible to people because it's like a chatbot. You're just chatting, go to that, type some things in, things come back, haha, they're funny or not, whatever. And it's interesting because you can imagine if it were easier to get a private key back in the day, what that would have done for adoption of crypto. It was just so impossible to get your head around how to do it. I remember back in the day where if you wanted to use Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, go to the source code and compile it from scratch on your computer to use it. You can't help but wonder in an alternative, somewhere in the multiverse, that problem was solved early on. It was fun in a way that ChatGPT is fun. It was fun and easy and almost very familiar, the interface of engagement, what that might've looked like. And I do think a big reason people are always like, oh, adoption, adoption, this and that. And I'm like, well, the learning curve was really steep for a long time. And frankly, it's not necessarily super awesome even now. We can kind of acknowledge better. But when you start with like, you have a, I don't know, PhD in computer science to figure it out at all, it's kind of like, okay, now here's where we are. Speaking of, okay, so you're a computer science at Morehouse. And when you graduated, was Bitcoin a thing? Was crypto a thing? Or give us a sense of timing and how you came to these different kinds of things. I mean, certainly you were starting with a very interesting use case focused on the monopoly, I would say, or the oligopoly of these... Well, I probably shouldn't say that, but that probably is legal ramifications for those companies. But the idea that you really can't run a website, you can't really run a retail -facing business unless you're using one of these cloud storage providers, or you couldn't for a long time. And that is problematic. So we started with that observation twice. But I'm curious, technically speaking, kind of what was the thing everyone was buzzing about when you came out of school? Yeah, so I mean, I graduated a little bit ago, 2014. I think people can kind of guess, you know, the 2014 crypto was still very kind of new. And I think people were very idealistic about, you know, oh, these distributed systems will take over the world. But I think one of the things that people really gravitated towards is these kind of distributed systems. You know, it's hard to build, you know, let's say a decentralized Uber, right? Or a Lyft, right? Because there's so many people and physical touchpoints to that. But I think a lot of people get the idea of like, oh, you already have like a digital service, like storage or compute, right? It's a lot easier for you to imagine, oh, I have these excess resources on my computer, I can sell them, I can rent it out. So it was a very exciting idea. And you see, you know, from that time here, a lot of projects like storage, Filecoin, other attempts at distributed storage or compute or all these other resources, people were excited about it. But back to what we were just saying before, I mean, the interfaces are very important. Again, I was playing around with -3 GPT in 2020, pretty much the same technology. But until people put it in OpenAI, put it in a chat format, nobody cared because that's super accessible. Until it was helping you with menu planning, no one was interested, right? Make me a grocery list. Not a lot of at this time, like 2014, a lot of early attempts, but like the interface, you know, wasn't there, wasn't easy to use. You had to go compile things from scratch to be able to use it. So I think that's a big difference between, you know, back then and now is everyone's so excited about these systems, but there's been some maturity in making them easier to use. You can go to Coinbase and buy and sell. Yeah. Well, you know, I came out of college. I graduated college a long time before you did, my friend. But even at that time, I was running study at home, right? And then, I mean, I know like my younger sibling, you know, and some of my cousins, they were running folding at home, you know, Vijay Panday's thing. And so, so this concept of using your extra compute, like for a service that wasn't monetized, you know, in those cases, right? But the idea that you could be useful, quote unquote, you know, in your, use these productive assets that weren't being deployed for something productive that was oriented in the academic and scientific community is really powerful. And what I think is really interesting about seeing how things like Filecoin, Arbiben storage, you know, have developed is there is some of that, but there's also this idea that, whoa, like as the cloud, because the cloud was not a thing when I came out, there was no cloud, that was not, no one, no concept of the cloud even really existed, right? But as the cloud became this dominant modality of engagement around storage, I think people were like, oh, to your point, like, this is something you can combine this sort of, I don't know, like socially oriented, you know, mentality around using this extra compute in a way that's really interesting. So I'm curious how you thought about tokens from the beginning of this, right? And the token economics around the project. And then I want to go back to your AI project, but let's just stay with this for a minute on storage and the token model you had there. And your tokens, I suppose, too. Yeah. How you thought about all that? Yeah. It's not a very particular view on tokens that, you know, color storage, but also Protean and kind of other projects is there has been, like you just said, there's SETI at home and Folding at home. There's been a lot of these projects out there. And there's been other attempts at distributed storage and distributed compute that go back, you know, a couple of decades, but those were always kind of idealistic, you know, contribute volunteer kind of work. And so you're going to get some people who understand that technology are really excited, but you're not going to be able to scale it beyond a certain point. And once you start to get any kind of network, a distributed network where you want a lot of resources, right? Let's say you want 10 ,000 people, right? They're selling compute or storage or whatever. The most difficult part is paying them. You might have 10 ,000 people in, you know, similar to 10 ,000 people in 80 plus countries. How are you going to pay them? What are you going to send them? Send them each a check in the mail, you know. Good old -fashioned postal service. Good little wire transfer and ACH, you know, 80 different currencies. Yeah, you're pitching. Yeah, totally. Yeah. So what tokens really allow is solve that missing piece of incentivization, because you can build, you know, a distributed compute or storage network, but without the incentive for those people to run it, you really can't scale it. And until crypto came around, you really couldn't do that in a highly automated, highly transparent and quick fashion without a lot of fees. And so really the token, if anything else, really serves as that rails where people can buy distributed compute, distributed storage in a way that's economically feasible that just really didn't exist before. And so that's why you've had the emergence of these technologies that have been around for years, but they've really were missing that incentivization piece to be able to grow into the size and scale that they're at now. And this is something I think is really missed in a lot of discussion around regulation that's happening right now is the idea that this is fundamentally about an incentive structure and system to encourage and incentivize, to use the word, to overuse the word, to incentivize engagement with the system in a way that, to your point, Folding at Home and Steady at Home relied on like the what's in it for me is like, you're helping scientific progress of mankind, blah, blah, blah. I mean, that only appeals to a certain subset of nerds, me among them, but to be fair, but it's not a proposition that makes a lot of people jump up and down and get really excited unless they're already convinced of the project's value. Whereas here, you don't necessarily have to even, like there's some people who go in and use centralized storage providers because they actively are like, I don't want to use AWS, blah, blah, blah. There are others who are like, hey, I mean, it's easy for me to do. This asset is sitting here. I can deploy and I can make a little bit of value on the side, right? And that as an incentive, I don't think is something we should sneeze at because I do think if we're going to be more honest about creating more equity in these systems and not allowing big, giant, preexisting legacy corporates to capture the market on these things, whether monopolistically, oligopolistically, it doesn't really matter, if we're not going to open that aperture and recognize that the reality is that it's really tough, if not impossible, to compete with those existing players, unless you're doing something that to your point is going to deploy 10 ,000 people or 100 ,000 people all over the world to take a very minimally an action that doesn't require a lot of engagement from them and is largely passive, but they're incentivized to do that. So how do you think about that in the future? I think the thing that you start out with these technologies that are very idealistic, right? Very technical oriented. And then you build them into the systems to say, hey, no, this is a system you can participate in and you can get incentivized for it. But at the end of the day, you have to look at the other side of that, like what is driving that incentive? And what is driving that incentive, what needs to drive that incentive is really the demand. So you if come in and say on the store side, hey, look, we can reduce your AWS cloud bill by 50%. Businesses go, what? Especially with inflation and all those other things going on in the world. It's a very real fixed cost, right? That people don't understand. And so on your expense side, I mean, those are significant costs. And as somebody who works at a social enterprise, it's not a huge budget as an organization. That's huge. The ability to say, first of all, I do think as an element, I can support this project and this more decentralized system. I do think that matters to an awful lot of people, especially those who are in the technical space. I do think that matters. But even if it doesn't, the idea that you can just significantly reduce costs and provide something that is as secure, as robust, is really powerful because there's not really a thing that they're going to be doing. You're really doing is you're just, again, it's just like the difference between Hyatt and Airbnb, right? They have to go invest in a big hotel and build that whole building. But if you have an extra bedroom or an extra room, you can rent that out and really monetize that resource and it ends up being a lot cheaper. But it goes to the same thing when you look at just like this explosion of AI right now. And I think a lot of people who are just using these tools, using ChatGPT, don't understand the huge difference in cost of some of these systems, right? How much do you think it costs for a Facebook like to make a post on X? No idea. Fractions like a small amount of money, right? But every time you type a query into ChatGPT, that's a couple cents. You multiply that times hundreds of interactions by millions of users, so much money is going out the door. And so using these same systems where a lot of people have mining GPUs or anything selling around, you can say, hey, I'll pay you a good amount of money to utilize that resource. It ends up being significantly cheaper than the cloud. And then those same AI companies that are really struggling to scale can save 50 to 90%. We find the difference between them being economically viable or not.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by PayPal. You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. I see a lot of panels that get called demystifying crypto, but we're going to this is it. This is the one we literally are going to demystify it, right? Because it's it's still a mystery to a lot of people for some strange reason, but this is it. The total and utter complete demystification of crypto. I got an incredible panel, actually, guys, this is you want to call on some experts, some rock stars in this space. These would be the gentlemen that you'd want. We're represented by Fidelity, by Van Eyck, by Bitwise, all of whom have really been so much more driving into this space than anyone else really in this industry. So it's going to be a good ride, I think. Maybe a bit of a show of hands, because if we're demystifying, you know, show of hands, who knows what HODL represents? Okay, that half. We've got one down there already. So that's pretty good about half. But Jan, why don't you just do the honors and explain the HODL story. So at least, you know, it's got some reference. Well, I mean, there's a lot of communication in the Twitter and the crypto community on Twitter and Signal and Telegraph and other kind of alternative social media. HODL stands for Hang On For Dear Life, which means, you know, be a longtime investor and holder of Bitcoin. My favorite phrase is FUD, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which represents all the misinformation. But since we're demystifying, we don't need, we can forget what FUD stands for. This is a FUD-free zone. However, we are going to start talking about Washington where there has been some FUD. Look, the thing that is, we'll just get the elephant in the room out of the way first. And that is, you know, when are we going to get a spot Bitcoin ETF, right? Because it's all dependent on the say so of a certain regulator. And we've been down this road for quite a long time now. But a number of institutions, BlackRock over there, Bannock, others are all in this space, Fidelity, all of you are playing in this space. I want to know when you think it's going to happen. Why don't we start with you, Jan, as well. Like, when is Gary going to give us the okay? My dad used to say, you know, pay attention to what people say, because often they do what they actually say. And it seems like the chairman of the SEC has no interest in approving a spot Bitcoin ETF. It may go to political levels higher than that, but I'll stick with that. So unless you have a change in parties in power, I just, I don't see it happening. I'm a little polluted by my law school background, which always says that, yeah, the law is one thing, but look at the power structure. And lawyers can always come up with different excuses for different things. So I'm sorry to be the negative outlier on this panel, maybe, but that's kind of my view. Whenever the Republican president gets elected. Okay, so possibly a long time, possibly not. Matt, though, you're a little bit more optimistic, I think. Yeah, I'll take the under on that, Jan. Another way of viewing this SEC commission under this chairman is it's the first commission that approved a ETF with the word crypto in its name. It's actually a bitwise ETF. It's the first commission that approved a 40-act Bitcoin futures fund. The first commission that approved a 33-act Bitcoin fund. First commission that looks likely to approve Ethereum futures funds. Approved a 2x levered Bitcoin futures fund. Compared to all the commissions that came before us since the Winklevoss filed for the first Bitcoin ETF in the 1930s or whatever, this commission has made a lot more progress. And I think they're sort of boxed into a corner where I think there's a reasonable probability that we'll get a spot Bitcoin ETF. I'm not certain, but I think there's a good probability. And I think they've actually done more on ETFs, even though I don't think they're favorable to crypto, they've done more on ETFs than any other commission before them. And they probably don't get enough credit for that. They certainly don't in the crypto industry. That is a rare perspective, actually. He clearly has not received enough subpoenas.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Demystifying Crypto With Bitwise, VanEck, and Fidelity
"This episode of Money Reimagined is sponsored by PayPal. You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. I see a lot of panels that get called demystifying crypto, but we're going to this is it. This is the one we literally are going to demystify it, right? Because it's it's still a mystery to a lot of people for some strange reason, but this is it. The total and utter complete demystification of crypto. I got an incredible panel, actually, guys, this is you want to call on some experts, some rock stars in this space. These would be the gentlemen that you'd want. We're represented by Fidelity, by Van Eyck, by Bitwise, all of whom have really been so much more driving into this space than anyone else really in this industry. So it's going to be a good ride, I think. Maybe a bit of a show of hands, because if we're demystifying, you know, show of hands, who knows what HODL represents? Okay, that half. We've got one down there already. So that's pretty good about half. But Jan, why don't you just do the honors and explain the HODL story. So at least, you know, it's got some reference. Well, I mean, there's a lot of communication in the Twitter and the crypto community on Twitter and Signal and Telegraph and other kind of alternative social media. HODL stands for Hang On For Dear Life, which means, you know, be a longtime investor and holder of Bitcoin. My favorite phrase is FUD, Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, which represents all the misinformation. But since we're demystifying, we don't need, we can forget what FUD stands for. This is a FUD -free zone. However, we are going to start talking about Washington where there has been some FUD. Look, the thing that is, we'll just get the elephant in the room out of the way first. And that is, you know, when are we going to get a spot Bitcoin ETF, right? Because it's all dependent on the say so of a certain regulator. And we've been down this road for quite a long time now. But a number of institutions, BlackRock over there, Bannock, others are all in this space, Fidelity, all of you are playing in this space. I want to know when you think it's going to happen. Why don't we start with you, Jan, as well. Like, when is Gary going to give us the okay? My dad used to say, you know, pay attention to what people say, because often they do what they actually say. And it seems like the chairman of the SEC has no interest in approving a spot Bitcoin ETF. It may go to political levels higher than that, but I'll stick with that. So unless you have a change in parties in power, I just, I don't see it happening. I'm a little polluted by my law school background, which always says that, yeah, the law is one thing, but look at the power structure. And lawyers can always come up with different excuses for different things. So I'm sorry to be the negative outlier on this panel, maybe, but that's kind of my view. Whenever the Republican president gets elected. Okay, so possibly a long time, possibly not. Matt, though, you're a little bit more optimistic, I think. Yeah, I'll take the under on that, Jan. Another way of viewing this SEC commission under this chairman is it's the first commission that approved a ETF with the word crypto in its name. It's actually a bitwise ETF. It's the first commission that approved a 40 -act Bitcoin futures fund. The first commission that approved a 33 -act Bitcoin fund. First commission that looks likely to approve Ethereum futures funds. Approved a 2x levered Bitcoin futures fund. Compared to all the commissions that came before us since the Winklevoss filed for the first Bitcoin ETF in the 1930s or whatever, this commission has made a lot more progress. And I think they're sort of boxed into a corner where I think there's a reasonable probability that we'll get a spot Bitcoin ETF. I'm not certain, but I think there's a good probability. And I think they've actually done more on ETFs, even though I don't think they're favorable to crypto, they've done more on ETFs than any other commission before them. And they probably don't get enough credit for that. They certainly don't in the crypto industry. That is a rare perspective, actually. He clearly has not received enough subpoenas.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to another edition of Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. Listen to us weekly on the Coindesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from coindesk.com. Subject line Money Reimagined. Sheila is out this week so it's me on my own but what I'm bringing to you are recordings from an interview I did earlier this month with two leaders in fund management, both of whom have significant interests in crypto. One is Jan Van Eck, the CEO of Van Eck funds and the other is Matt Hogan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management. Van Eck and Bitwise have both filed applications with for Bitcoin. The question I wanted to put to you guys, and I'll go to you first, Jan, is I've been covering this space for 10 years now. And I think we all thought there may be some tipping point moment when the world would suddenly embrace this. And certainly there's been some incredible growth, both in terms of prices and activity and development, phenomenal growth. But at the same time, it always feels like, no, it's not yet there. So what is the single most important barrier that you see toward wider adoption of crypto? Sure. Thank you. I really break it down into, are you talking about crypto as an investment, as an asset class that should be in people's portfolios, or as a technology to be adopted? And I use this example of the relational database, which was a big breakthrough in the architecture of databases 50 years ago or more. And it created a lot more productivity, almost like AI is doing with technology today. But who cares? It wasn't investable, right? It was a nice technology, but it wasn't investable. So I'll start with the investable aspect of it. And I think that since 2017, I firmly believe that Bitcoin is a store of value alternative to gold. But I also say it's sort of like an eight-year-old child. It's going through evolution and adoption, even this year, with the ordinals kind of break through for a while and sort of transaction fees being a thing in Bitcoin, right? It's evolving, it's code, it's kind of living. And I think there's a lot of investor types that haven't adopted it yet. And that's what I see kind of going forward in the future, whether it's probably frontier countries adopting it more, maybe even formally through their central banks or something like that. I think that's foreseeable. I don't see the German central bank or the central bank buying it anytime soon, but it's possible. One of my colleagues pointed out, I think you all did a survey of, sorry, this is a long answer, but yeah, Coindesk did a survey, I think, of perceptions globally of crypto and there was a big break between EM and I guess specifically it was energy usage. It being friendlier for energy usage was the majority view in the emerging markets and in the developed markets, it wasn't that, it was the opposite. So anyway, I see Bitcoin as kind of going through cycles and gradually getting more investor adoption, the ETF aside. So let me stop there and give it to my colleague, Matt. Thanks John. I agree. And I like that separation of investment case versus sort of maybe real world utility. I would add on the investment case, I think it's already there. I agree. It's a digital alternative to gold. And so the people who are holding it are using it for its use case. And I think the barrier to mainstream adoption really is the ETF. I know we'll talk about that more later, but I think if you look back at gold, it was the ETF that brought it into the mainstream. There were a few gold funds before the ETF. Van Eck ran one of the longest running, maybe the longest running, a phenomenal fund, but it really wasn't mainstream until we had an ETF. And I think that will be the tipping point. On real world use cases, if you look at like the Ethereum ecosystem, I actually think we surmounted one of the major hurdles over the last two years. I think what stopped the NFT boom and the DeFi boom was actually the rise in transaction costs as much as anything else. I think there was not enough throughput in that ecosystem to allow it to go mainstream. And I think the development of layer twos have allowed it. I think that's necessary, but not sufficient. So there's still additional barriers, there are regulatory barriers, there are design use case barriers, but I actually think that throughput question was the biggest one and we surmounted it. We just haven't seen the fruits of it because of these other steps that we need to take as well. Okay. So there's actually both of those answers, some things I want to dive into a little bit here. The first one is like this idea of it being gold. And I think in a way, I think maybe you can read from it slightly differently because Jan, you're talking, this is what its use case is, but there is still some evolution in a way that Bitcoin needs to go into. What I think is fascinating about that is like, okay, gold isn't going to evolve. It is just gold. It's in the ground, right? But there is this Bitcoin is code, but it's also a community. It's a living, breathing ecosystem of human beings, which makes it sort of unique. And so therefore, like, you know, how it evolves into being recognized for being the status. Is there an educational component to this, for example? Like, is it important that people kind of get in their heads? We can all use the digital gold analogy, but even getting there requires an understanding about why this actually does do that. Well, let me, this is Jan. I am going to pick a fight with you on the gold side because the use of gold as an investment has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. So even if you look at the history of our company, VanEck, the reason we started our first gold fund as a gold mining fund is it was illegal to own gold in 1968. So you see both Bitcoin and gold being affected not just sort of by securities regulation, but much bigger political, even geopolitical debates. But if you go back to before FDR, right, gold was the underpinning of central banks globally with the idea of trying to reduce currency volatility so that there would be more global trade and global wealth. But then they moved to basically away from the gold system. FDR did when he wanted to spend more money during World War II. Anyway, so, you know, gold has been in and out. And now more recently, central banks around the central banks because they don't trust the U.S. to hold their dollars anymore. Okay, so maybe that's a little historical quibble, but I do think that the role changes and I think it will change with Bitcoin going forward as well, just sticking to Bitcoin. It still sounds to me as if that is a discussion about the external factors, right, i.e., regulatory models, whatever, where governments stand. And all of that is maybe what the composition of what gold is and what a secure, uncorrelated investment needs to be is all contingent upon what is actually happening in that geopolitical circle. So in some respects, Matt, it gets back to your point about like, we're still sitting here waiting for the regulators to make a decision about an ETF or whatever. Yeah, I do think we are. I wanna hit one more thing on the gold thing and then I'll get to that because I think it's really important. There is this perception that gold has been the same for 5,000 years, completely wrong. Most people's perceptions about gold are untrue. We went off the gold standard in the early 1970s and people didn't know what gold was, right? They were figuring out what its role in the world was. Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, that was the single best decade to be invested in gold. That was a phenomenal time. When stores of value move from uncertainty to established is when they accrue a lot of value. And that's what's happening in Bitcoin. I think there's some direct analogies to gold. I'd also add gold is a lot more volatile than people give it credit for. People think of it as this steady eddy. It has big swings up and down 20, 30% a year. A store of value doesn't have to be day to day, unvolatile to be useful. It has to hold value or accrue value over long periods of time. And I think people discredit Bitcoin because they misunderstand gold a little bit. Just to add a comment on Bitcoin before we get off of that, gold shares, to your point, like Bitcoin miners fell 90% from 2011 to their lows in 2016. I mean, you don't get worse than that, right, in terms of volatility. And that's a part of the ecosystem. It's not bullion, but still, I completely agree with you. So I just wanted to add that. I do think also, and I really want to push you, Matt, on this, that we have a global view of regulation of Bitcoin, right, because China has really taken its foot off the brake over the last year. And I think that's, you know, I call it the country the size of the United States. I think that's super important. Yeah, I think that's really important, too. I actually agree. And I think that's been going on for the last decade. It's sort of like a blanket that won't cover the whole world. And when somebody pulls it, then another government's like, oh, maybe we have an opportunity. I think that's what we saw in China with the U.S. being more restrictive, and then Hong Kong saying, well, what if we aggressively banked gold? Maybe there's an economic opportunity there. And I think it's sort of anti-fragile in that sense. Can I just punch down, maybe we're going to move to the technology side, but I just want to punch down on Bitcoin, because I think it, as an investment, is potentially relevant to everyone's portfolios here at this conference. I mean, you may not like, there are investors like Warren Buffett that will never invest in gold and would never invest in Bitcoin. But for a lot of people, the biggest risk out there, I would say, macro risk, is U.S. federal budget deficit. And I don't know of a better hedge than gold or Bitcoin. So maybe that risk doesn't come to fruition in our lifetimes, but it has got to be an alternative that people think of regardless of everything else in crypto. Yeah. Jan and I are going to keep going back and forth. I would add, it doesn't have to come to fruition for gold to be a good, for Bitcoin to be a good investment. It's an insurance against that potentiality. And if you're a wealthy individual, that's one of the biggest risks to your long term wealth and holding that insurance policy regardless of the outlook. Last thing I would add is we've come a long way. The other mistake people make when looking at Bitcoin regulation is like evaluating us today versus a year ago. If you evaluate us today versus 10 years ago, massive progress, even today versus five years ago. Look at the conversation in Congress today around crypto versus where it was two or three years ago. People need to relax a little, take the long view, and they'll probably have a better outlook for their long term investment.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Breaking Down Barriers to Crypto Adoption | Insights from Jan Van Eck and Matt Hougan
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to another edition of Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. Listen to us weekly on the Coindesk podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from coindesk .com. Subject line Money Reimagined. Sheila is out this week so it's me on my own but what I'm bringing to you are recordings from an interview I did earlier this month with two leaders in fund management, both of whom have significant interests in crypto. One is Jan Van Eck, the CEO of Van Eck funds and the other is Matt Hogan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management. Van Eck and Bitwise have both filed applications with for Bitcoin. The question I wanted to put to you guys, and I'll go to you first, Jan, is I've been covering this space for 10 years now. And I think we all thought there may be some tipping point moment when the world would suddenly embrace this. And certainly there's been some incredible growth, both in terms of prices and activity and development, phenomenal growth. But at the same time, it always feels like, no, it's not yet there. So what is the single most important barrier that you see toward wider adoption of crypto? Sure. Thank you. I really break it down into, are you talking about crypto as an investment, as an asset class that should be in people's portfolios, or as a technology to be adopted? And I use this example of the relational database, which was a big breakthrough in the architecture of databases 50 years ago or more. And it created a lot more productivity, almost like AI is doing with technology today. But who cares? It wasn't investable, right? It was a nice technology, but it wasn't investable. So I'll start with the investable aspect of it. And I think that since 2017, I firmly believe that Bitcoin is a store of value alternative to gold. But I also say it's sort of like an eight -year -old child. It's going through evolution and adoption, even this year, with the ordinals kind of break through for a while and sort of transaction fees being a thing in Bitcoin, right? It's evolving, it's code, it's kind of living. And I think there's a lot of investor types that haven't adopted it yet. And that's what I see kind of going forward in the future, whether it's probably frontier countries adopting it more, maybe even formally through their central banks or something like that. I think that's foreseeable. I don't see the German central bank or the central bank buying it anytime soon, but it's possible. One of my colleagues pointed out, I think you all did a survey of, sorry, this is a long answer, but yeah, Coindesk did a survey, I think, of perceptions globally of crypto and there was a big break between EM and I guess specifically it was energy usage. It being friendlier for energy usage was the majority view in the emerging markets and in the developed markets, it wasn't that, it was the opposite. So anyway, I see Bitcoin as kind of going through cycles and gradually getting more investor adoption, the ETF aside. So let me stop there and give it to my colleague, Matt. Thanks John. I agree. And I like that separation of investment case versus sort of maybe real world utility. I would add on the investment case, I think it's already there. I agree. It's a digital alternative to gold. And so the people who are holding it are using it for its use case. And I think the barrier to mainstream adoption really is the ETF. I know we'll talk about that more later, but I think if you look back at gold, it was the ETF that brought it into the mainstream. There were a few gold funds before the ETF. Van Eck ran one of the longest running, maybe the longest running, a phenomenal fund, but it really wasn't mainstream until we had an ETF. And I think that will be the tipping point. On real world use cases, if you look at like the Ethereum ecosystem, I actually think we surmounted one of the major hurdles over the last two years. I think what stopped the NFT boom and the DeFi boom was actually the rise in transaction costs as much as anything else. I think there was not enough throughput in that ecosystem to allow it to go mainstream. And I think the development of layer twos have allowed it. I think that's necessary, but not sufficient. So there's still additional barriers, there are regulatory barriers, there are design use case barriers, but I actually think that throughput question was the biggest one and we surmounted it. We just haven't seen the fruits of it because of these other steps that we need to take as well. Okay. So there's actually both of those answers, some things I want to dive into a little bit here. The first one is like this idea of it being gold. And I think in a way, I think maybe you can read from it slightly differently because Jan, you're talking, this is what its use case is, but there is still some evolution in a way that Bitcoin needs to go into. What I think is fascinating about that is like, okay, gold isn't going to evolve. It is just gold. It's in the ground, right? But there is this Bitcoin is code, but it's also a community. It's a living, breathing ecosystem of human beings, which makes it sort of unique. And so therefore, like, you know, how it evolves into being recognized for being the status. Is there an educational component to this, for example? Like, is it important that people kind of get in their heads? We can all use the digital gold analogy, but even getting there requires an understanding about why this actually does do that. Well, let me, this is Jan. I am going to pick a fight with you on the gold side because the use of gold as an investment has changed dramatically over the last 100 years. So even if you look at the history of our company, VanEck, the reason we started our first gold fund as a gold mining fund is it was illegal to own gold in 1968. So you see both Bitcoin and gold being affected not just sort of by securities regulation, but much bigger political, debates. even geopolitical But if you go back to before FDR, right, gold was the underpinning of central banks globally with the idea of trying to reduce currency volatility so that there would be more global trade and global wealth. But then they moved to basically away from the gold system. FDR did when he wanted to spend more money during World War II. Anyway, so, you know, gold has been in and out. And now more recently, central banks around the central banks because they don't trust the U .S. to hold their dollars anymore. Okay, so maybe that's a little historical quibble, but I do think that the role changes and I think it will change with Bitcoin going forward as well, just sticking to Bitcoin. It still sounds to me as if that is a discussion about the external factors, right, i .e., regulatory models, whatever, where governments stand. And all of that is maybe what the composition of what gold is and what a secure, uncorrelated investment needs to be is all contingent upon what is actually happening in that geopolitical circle. So in some respects, Matt, it gets back to your point about like, we're still sitting here waiting for the regulators to make a decision about an ETF or whatever. Yeah, I do think we are. I wanna hit one more thing on the gold thing and then I'll get to that because I think it's really important. There is this perception that gold has been the same for 5 ,000 years, completely wrong. Most people's perceptions about gold are untrue. We went off the gold standard in the early 1970s and people didn't know what gold was, right? They were figuring out what its role in the world was. Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally, that was the single best decade to be invested in gold. That was a phenomenal time. When stores of value move from uncertainty to established is when they accrue a lot of value. And that's what's happening in Bitcoin. I think there's some direct analogies to gold. I'd also add gold is a lot more volatile than people give it credit for. People think of it as this steady eddy. It has big swings up and down 20, 30 % a year. A store of value doesn't have to be day to day, unvolatile to be useful. It has to hold value or accrue value over long periods of time. And I think people discredit Bitcoin because they misunderstand gold a little bit. Just to add a comment on Bitcoin before we get off of that, gold shares, to your point, like Bitcoin miners fell 90 % from 2011 to their lows in 2016. I mean, you don't get worse than that, right, in terms of volatility. And that's a part of the ecosystem. It's not bullion, but still, I completely agree with you. So I just wanted to add that. I do think also, and I really want to push you, Matt, on this, that we have a global view of regulation of Bitcoin, right, because China has really taken its foot off the brake over the last year. And I think that's, you know, I call it the country the size of the United States. I think that's super important. Yeah, I think that's really important, too. I actually agree. And I think that's been going on for the last decade. It's sort of like a blanket that won't cover the whole world. And when somebody pulls it, then another government's like, oh, maybe we have an opportunity. I think that's what we saw in China with the U .S. being more restrictive, and then Hong Kong saying, well, what if we aggressively banked gold? Maybe there's an economic opportunity there. And I think it's sort of anti -fragile in that sense. Can I just punch down, maybe we're going to move to the technology side, but I just want to punch down on Bitcoin, because I think it, as an investment, is potentially relevant to everyone's portfolios here at this conference. I mean, you may not like, there are investors like Warren Buffett that will never invest in gold and would never invest in Bitcoin. But for a lot of people, the biggest risk out there, I would say, macro risk, is U .S. federal budget deficit. And I don't know of a better hedge than gold or Bitcoin. So maybe that risk doesn't come to fruition in our lifetimes, but it has got to be an alternative that people think of regardless of everything else in crypto. Yeah. Jan and I are going to keep going back and forth. I would add, it doesn't have to come to fruition for gold to be a good, for Bitcoin to be a good investment. It's an insurance against that potentiality. And if you're a wealthy individual, that's one of the biggest risks to your long term wealth and holding that insurance policy regardless of the outlook. Last thing I would add is we've come a long way. The other mistake people make when looking at Bitcoin regulation is like evaluating us today versus a year ago. If you evaluate us today versus 10 years ago, massive progress, even today versus five years ago. Look at the conversation in Congress today around crypto versus where it was two or three years ago. People need to relax a little, take the long view, and they'll probably have a better outlook for their long term investment.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Women led funds, Africa based funds, African based funds, and African led funds, even in the US. And then our latest lead is Matrix Partners in India that really got interested into how can they participate and how can they make investments more structurally in Africa. And they saw our business case as something that is absolutely fundamental to the future of the continent. So we're really proud of that. But you're right, I think what you're tapping into, I'll kind of delve right into it and kind of say that I feel like you want to say something that you're not saying. But I've had companies that approached me and say, you know, can we invest and then you give us access to the central banks? Can we invest and, you know, get access to CBDC? And, you know, go talk to the regulator for us. That for me is a path to failure. And it is not aligned with the problem that we're trying to solve. It would be absolutely counterproductive to everything that we're doing for me to land there. So I'm very proud of having investors who understand who believe in me, honestly, at the early stage, that's all I had, I had to convince that I could, you know, as a solo woman, I had an investor who said that it's like, we didn't invest the first time because we were kind of wondering, how is this woman going to take over the world of central banks? So now we're seeing like, here I am. So very proud of that. It's all good. And I'm very proud of the progress we've made. I have an amazing team too. They don't get the headlines on the face of the company, but I have an amazing team backing me and I'm very grateful for that. Well, we have to wrap there. But Carmel, such a pleasure. Carmel Cadet, the CEO and founder of M-Tech. And if I may, I think these conversations are the conversations I love the most. But I also think it's emblematic of the approach that actually will help when we talk about inclusion and equity within these systems. And I have to say, it's quite in contrast and something that still troubles me to this day about the crypto ecosystem is I think there's still a lot of lip service given to these challenges without actually putting the skin in the game, without actually getting engagement from whether it's thinking about the cap table, thinking about the people you have on your team, thinking about the engagement model that you have, thinking about what kind of regulation you're pushing for. So you're not going to, you know, inclusion and equity don't happen by default, unfortunately. I mean, inclusion by design model that I think M-Tech and certainly many others in this space are embodying is the path forward. I think it's the path that's going to actually help us build the more equitable and inclusive financial system and technical systems that I think everybody in the world deserves. So on that note, I will say goodbye for this week and join us next week again for the episode of Money Reimagined. Bye for now. You're listening to Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Today's show was edited and produced by Michelle Musso. Our theme song is The News Tonight by Shimmer. We would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcast.com, subject line Money Reimagined, or leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. Thanks for listening.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. A reminder, you can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. You can email us at podcasts at coindesk.com with the subject line, Money Reimagined. I'm in Washington, DC this week at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual legislative conference, which is taking place at Walter Washington Convention Center. The theme is curing our democracy, protecting our freedoms, and I am extremely grateful to be invited to participate in this event. But our topic today is much broader than that. I'm joined by Carmel Cadet, who's the founder and CEO of Mtek, which is a New York-based fintech startup with the goal to rebuild central banking infrastructure for the Web3 era. Now, Carmel and I have had the opportunity to speak many times in the past, including when she was instrumental in developing the world's very first national digital currency, the Bahamian Sand Dollar, which many of you will be familiar with from discussions we've had on it on this show. That was her first big government project. But since then, she's signed on six other central banks in the Caribbean and Africa and has plans to onboard more to their platform and their regulatory sandbox design offerings. I'm really looking forward to Carmel joining me today to talk about the advances in central bank digital currencies and CBDCs, particularly how they're being used by diaspora populations and how we're thinking about this opportunity and this technology in spaces that don't necessarily get the attention of groups like the Bureau of International Sutterments, the BIS, or even, frankly, the U.S. government. So, Carmel, welcome. Let's start off by just a little bit by way of background. Tell us, this is an interesting thing, an unusual thing to have gotten so deeply engaged with. And what was the moment when you kind of realized, hey, digital currency is something really critical and important? Your background, of course, you grew up in Haiti. I'd love to hear a little bit about how all that came together to make you the ambassador for this technology opportunity that you are today. Yeah, I never thought I would actually play that role, but I'm happy to be here. So, as you mentioned, my name is Carmel Cadet. I'm the founder and CEO of EmTech. It started really with my story. I'm originally from Haiti, born and raised. And when I migrated to the U.S., I became fascinated by the concept of financial markets, the access to credit cards, the access to mortgage, and car loans, and student loans, and realized that how access to capital and access to money really impacts lives. So, when you think about helping people out of poverty, it's one thing to do aid, but it's another thing to really build a better infrastructure that are more long-term, better institutions, and better access to financial markets, more importantly. So, I was really curious about that, but I didn't know what to do about it at the time I was 17. So, my mom told me to go to school and get a job. In the meantime, as I figure it out, but sure enough, my background is in corporate finance. I ended up lending. But before that, one of my first job was as a teller at a credit union. This is one of those jobs you get to see how people experience money. Day-to-day, paycheck to paycheck, every Friday, every two Fridays, people have a different experience in how their lives are changed with the fact that they get paid, or sometimes when they lose their job as far as how that impacts their lives. Then I got into mortgage underwriting, got to see how the credit system works in the U.S. How do you provide credit? How do you buy houses? How do you get home equity lines of credit? And how do you build value and invest in other properties? I've seen so many different lives changed by financial services. Yet again, I did not know what to do about it, but I landed an internship at IBM. I spent 10 years at IBM. This is where I fell in love with technology. So marrying the two, fast forward to around 2017, IBM was launching the IBM blockchain division. For me, I heard about blockchain before I heard about Bitcoin, believe it or not. The ability to use a technology that really flattens out the intermediaries or the models that you get access to financial services is something that I really, really got excited about because a lot of the policies over the years have changed the makeup of the financial industry in a lot of emerging markets. If you think about Basel III, if you think about the de-risking of a lot of countries, I've seen the results of that, kind of how more and more people in emerging markets did not have access to banking services. And that impacted my family. That impacted how we sent money and how much it costs us to send money back home. And the idea of using technology, I got to see that from IBM. IBM builds just amazing, big technology that impacts the world, so much so that you don't even feel it. You don't even see IBM everywhere, but IBM runs just about everything that we run on and that we use. I fell in love with that concept and blockchain for me was the first technology that really made sense for me for how to do that. So the very simple concept that ignited my curiosity to go into this space is to say, you know, we've been waiting for the banks to bank the unbanked. This is something that different policies and different efforts have tried to drive. And even if you think about Senator Sherrod Brown's bill around fed dollar accounts, the idea of forcing the banks to provide a digital cash or a fed dollar account to unbanked users or low deposit holders, it was a debt on arrival type of proposal because commercial banks would never have the incentive to do something like this. And the fact that I worked at a retail bank and a commercial bank, I understood the business model very clearly. So what blockchain represented for me was really an idea. What if we take the most used asset that people use every day and trust every day, especially those in emerging markets, which is paper cash, what if we digitize it with blockchain? Could we provide financial inclusion by design and having people be part of a digital financial service infrastructure that could be built on and give them an access to a new world? And that's around the time where I got the opportunity. I saw the RFP from Central Bank of Bahamas. And of course, I'm from the Caribbean. I got super excited. I cannot tell you. I remember the first time meeting that RFP, when Central Bank of Bahamas said that they're looking for a blockchain solution to modernize their overall payment infrastructure to drive financial inclusion across 700 islands that make up the Bahamas. I don't think most people know that. It seems like one island is 700 islands. So that was a moment for me. And sure enough, with no architecture, with no reference at the time, me and my team at IBM got together, found partners to work with, and really pitch an idea that the Central Bank of Bahamas ended up really selecting and has now deployed. And I just came back from the CBDC conference in Istanbul, where they were presenting their efforts and their progress. And I think they're one of the shining stars. Yeah, well, I would agree in part because they were the first in part because to your point, it really was about inclusion by design, not just laying over, I use this example a lot, the way that roads were built in Boston and Cambridge is they just saw where the cows were walking and laid down concrete, basically, right, or whatever was used at the time paving. And I think the Central Bank of the Bahamas did not do that. Their goal was actually to create a system that was better in some ways, not just digitize the existing system. And I do think we've seen some other efforts at CBDCs really just digitizing existing systems, not interrogating those systems in the way that I think you and the bank did. But I've got a million directions we could go. But let's start with let's start with this. Because it would be interesting, actually, I could see how you'd be interested in something like a Bitcoin or something like that. Instead, the idea of paper cash was the most compelling thing. Can you just talk about how a how you see CBDC is playing out in the broader digital currency landscape? But also, why that? Like, why fiat, right? Like, why your approach focusing on that specific opportunity as opposed to the broader, let's say, you know, crypto opportunity, or even, I mean, as we were so ended up in the IBM Blockchain division, looked at blockchain in different use cases, so global trade, food provenance, and different application of technology. When it came to financial services, of course, Bitcoin was the first use case that really gained broad visibility and broad access and even fame, if you will, as a token, but in itself, what we continue to see is one, the learning curve on how to get into Bitcoin. I remember how proud I was when I was there. Oh, yeah.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: CBDCs Unleashed: Changing Finance for All!
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. A reminder, you can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. You can email us at podcasts at coindesk .com with the subject line, Money Reimagined. I'm in Washington, DC this week at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual legislative conference, which is taking place at Walter Washington Convention Center. The theme is curing our democracy, protecting our freedoms, and I am extremely grateful to be invited to participate in this event. But our topic today is much broader than that. I'm joined by Carmel Cadet, who's the founder and CEO of Mtek, which is a New York -based fintech startup with the goal to rebuild central banking infrastructure for the Web3 era. Now, Carmel and I have had the opportunity to speak many times in the past, including when she was instrumental in developing the world's very first national digital currency, the Bahamian Sand Dollar, which many of you will be familiar with from discussions we've had on it on this show. That was her first big government project. But since then, she's signed on six other central banks in the Caribbean and Africa and has plans to onboard more to their platform and their regulatory sandbox design offerings. I'm really looking forward to Carmel joining me today to talk about the advances in central bank digital currencies and CBDCs, particularly how they're being used by diaspora populations and how we're thinking about this opportunity and this technology in spaces that don't necessarily get the attention of groups like the Bureau of International Sutterments, the BIS, or even, frankly, the U .S. government. So, Carmel, welcome. Let's start off by just a little bit by way of background. Tell us, this is an interesting thing, an unusual thing to have gotten so deeply engaged with. And what was the moment when you kind of realized, hey, digital currency is something really critical and important? Your background, of course, you grew up in Haiti. I'd love to hear a little bit about how all that came together to make you the ambassador for this technology opportunity that you are today. Yeah, I never thought I would actually play that role, but I'm happy to be here. So, as you mentioned, my name is Carmel Cadet. I'm the founder and CEO of EmTech. It started really with my story. I'm originally from Haiti, born and raised. And when I migrated to the U .S., I became fascinated by the concept of financial markets, the access to credit cards, the access to mortgage, and car loans, and student loans, and realized that how access to capital and access to money really impacts lives. So, when you think about helping people out of poverty, it's one thing to do aid, but it's another thing to really build a better infrastructure that are more long -term, better institutions, and better access to financial markets, more importantly. So, I was really curious about that, but I didn't know what to do about it at the time I was 17. So, my mom told me to go to school and get a job. In the meantime, as I figure it out, but sure enough, my background is in corporate finance. I ended up lending. But before that, one of my first job was as a teller at a credit union. This is one of those jobs you get to see how people experience money. Day -to -day, paycheck to paycheck, every Friday, every two Fridays, people have a different experience in how their lives are changed with the fact that they get paid, or sometimes when they lose their job as far as how that impacts their lives. Then I got into mortgage underwriting, got to see how the credit system works in the U .S. How do you provide credit? How do you buy houses? How do you get home equity lines of credit? And how do you build value and invest in other properties? I've seen so many different lives changed by financial services. Yet again, I did not know what to do about it, but I landed an internship at IBM. I spent 10 years at IBM. This is where I fell in love with technology. So marrying the two, fast forward to around 2017, IBM was launching the IBM blockchain division. For me, I heard about blockchain before I heard about Bitcoin, believe it or not. The ability to use a technology that really flattens out the intermediaries or the models that you get access to financial services is something that I really, really got excited about because a lot of the policies over the years have changed the makeup of the financial industry in a lot of emerging markets. If you think about Basel III, if you think about the de -risking of a lot of countries, I've seen the results of that, kind of how more and more people in emerging markets did not have access to banking services. And that impacted my family. That impacted how we sent money and how much it costs us to send money back home. And the idea of using technology, I got to see that from IBM. IBM builds just amazing, big technology that impacts the world, so much so that you don't even feel it. You don't even see IBM everywhere, but IBM runs just about everything that we run on and that we use. I fell in love with that concept and blockchain for me was the first technology that really made sense for me for how to do that. So the very simple concept that ignited my curiosity to go into this space is to say, you know, we've been waiting for the banks to bank the unbanked. This is something that different policies and different efforts have tried to drive. And even if you think about Senator Sherrod Brown's bill around fed dollar accounts, the idea of forcing the banks to provide a digital cash or a fed dollar account to unbanked users or low deposit holders, it was a debt on arrival type of proposal because commercial banks would never have the incentive to do something like this. And the fact that I worked at a retail bank and a commercial bank, I understood the business model very clearly. So what blockchain represented for me was really an idea. What if we take the most used asset that people use every day and trust every day, especially those in emerging markets, which is paper cash, what if we digitize it with blockchain? Could we provide financial inclusion by design and having people be part of a digital financial service infrastructure that could be built on and give them an access to a new world? And that's around the time where I got the opportunity. I saw the RFP from Central Bank of Bahamas. And of course, I'm from the Caribbean. I got super excited. I cannot tell you. I remember the first time meeting that RFP, when Central Bank of Bahamas said that they're looking for a blockchain solution to modernize their overall payment infrastructure to drive financial inclusion across 700 islands that make up the Bahamas. I don't think most people know that. It seems like one island is 700 islands. So that was a moment for me. And sure enough, with no architecture, with no reference at the time, me and my team at IBM got together, found partners to work with, and really pitch an idea that the Central Bank of Bahamas ended up really selecting and has now deployed. And I just came back from the CBDC conference in Istanbul, where they were presenting their efforts and their progress. And I think they're one of the shining stars. Yeah, well, I would agree in part because they were the first in part because to your point, it really was about inclusion by design, not just laying over, I use this example a lot, the way that roads were built in Boston and Cambridge is they just saw where the cows were walking and laid down concrete, basically, right, or whatever was used at the time paving. And I think the Central Bank of the Bahamas did not do that. Their goal was actually to create a system that was better in some ways, not just digitize the existing system. And I do think we've seen some other efforts at CBDCs really just digitizing existing systems, not interrogating those systems in the way that I think you and the bank did. But I've got a million directions we could go. But let's start with let's start with this. Because it would be interesting, actually, I could see how you'd be interested in something like a Bitcoin or something like that. Instead, the idea of paper cash was the most compelling thing. Can you just talk about how a how you see CBDC is playing out in the broader digital currency landscape? But also, why that? Like, why fiat, right? Like, why your approach focusing on that specific opportunity as opposed to the broader, let's say, you know, crypto opportunity, or even, I mean, as we were so ended up in the IBM Blockchain division, looked at blockchain in different use cases, so global trade, food provenance, and different application of technology. When it came to financial services, of course, Bitcoin was the first use case that really broad gained visibility and broad access and even fame, if you will, as a token, but in itself, what we continue to see is one, the learning curve on how to get into Bitcoin. I remember how proud I was when I was there. Oh, yeah.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Noelle Acheson On Whats Not Happening With Bitcoin
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. As a reminder, you can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we podcast at coindesk .com, subject line Money Reimagined. Michael's off moderating a panel today and so I am joined by a frequent guest on the show, Noelle Acheson. I'm thrilled as always to chat with her. Noelle is now the new host of Coindesk Markets Daily and we'll spend some time today talking about the crypto markets, specifically what's going on with Bitcoin or not going on with Bitcoin, more to the point. Noelle is joining us from Spain and she has a view into European markets as well. Noelle, let's get right into it. It's so great to see you. Sheila, always great to see you. Thanks very much for inviting me to join you today. It's a fun day. I mean, we're traveling the world. You're in California, if I'm not mistaken. I'm over in Europe and this is going to be a lot of fun because while crypto markets have been quiet over the summer, they certainly haven't been idle. No kidding. And I think if anything, people are wondering, I think let's just get to the question on top of mind for most of our folks who are into crypto and not the lay people who tend to join us, which is what's going on with this bear market? How long is this going to last? Why aren't we seeing a little more of the usual volatility, right? Which is we've come to think of as a feature, not a bug. What's that about in your view? There's so much to unpack there, but I'm going to start off with a fairly controversial view in that we are not in a bear market anymore. I mean, look how much Bitcoin is up since the beginning of the year, quite double, but not far from that. And there's been just so much going on. Institutional interest is low. So if you want to go by that definition, I suppose you could say it's a bear market, but no, I go by it's done pretty darn well. It has outperformed stocks easily. And it also, Sheila, depends on what currency you're looking at. If you look at Bitcoin versus in the dollar terms, then it's up. I haven't checked the figures today, but it's what, 70 % last time I checked, 76%, whereas they are in the Turkish lira, it's up something like 120%. In Argentinian pesos, it's up over 200%. So again, I don't think we're in a bear market entirely depends on the point of view. That said, the institutions are yet not interested. They are standing on the sidelines for now, which is very strange when you consider the relative risk in crypto versus a whole lot of other assets that they are invested in. I am of the belief that we have an almighty stock market crash coming because there's no way the consumer can hold up and stock prices are discounting consumer strength. They're discounting Fed cuts in the near term. They're discounting a soft landing. I think all of those are pipe dreams. I also believe bonds are incredibly risky investment at the moment because of the misconception of what the Fed really is after here, which is bringing down inflation at whatever the cost. And they have plenty of tools in their arsenal to ensure that the financial system continues whatever interest rates are. So going by tracking slightly, the institutions are surprisingly quiet at the moment. One, because of the macro uncertainty, they've got a lot on their plate at the moment just trying to figure out the direction of the asset classes they are more used to. And also two, you touched on this already, so we can dive into that. There is very little volatility in crypto markets today. And that is a problem. Volatility in crypto markets is not a bug. It's a feature. And its absence is the main reason behind the low liquidity, which is keeping the large investors out. With low liquidity, they run slippage risk when they get in with large orders. And they run exit risk in not being able to exit should they need to. And anything but large orders is just not worth their time. I knew you would go there. And I love it because I think what is a bear? It's all contextual. And you have to look at specifically Bitcoin, but I'd say crypto in general, compared to what are your other options? Are people really investing in real estate at scale right now? Is that a thing that seems wise? I guess it depends on where you are in the world, right? So in so many ways, I couldn't agree more. I think people are looking at the extended caution, shall we say, of institutional investors and over pegging to that, if you will, as an indicator of where the market actually is. Now, next question for you, though, is given that we do have some positive signaling around Bitcoin ETFs, well, it's mixed. Okay, fair enough. We've extended some applications. The SEC's extended applications here, but Grayscale got a positive outcome. Why are we not seeing more institutions engaging with Bitcoin? What's your view on that? Well, how much, I guess, do you think, how important do you think, first of all, threshold question? How important do you think a Bitcoin ETF is to institutional investors? How important should it be? Different question. And then why do you think institutional investors aren't necessarily reacting to this signal such as it is? In order, yes, very. And it's the lack of volatility. Yes. Yes. Investors should be focusing on the likelihood of a Bitcoin spot ETF. Let's throw the ether spot ETF in there as well. Why not? Why is this important? Because it will bring in new investment. It's a convenient wrapper. And let's face it, you and I are fairly used to managing crypto wallets, but most people aren't. They've improved so much over the years, but they're still kind of finicky. And your average investor who just wants to do a couple of taps on his or her screen isn't going to sell it. And the seed phrases, it's kind of it's kind of a hassle. So when it is as easy as, again, a couple of taps on your screen or just telling your broker, please get this Bitcoin ETF, I mean, to get some exposure for portfolio diversification reasons, even if you're not going to buy into the whole decentralized eagles, just for diversification reasons, it makes sense if it's easier, there will be new funds coming in. And Sheila, it's something that we often tend to overlook. Every single bull run is driven by new funds coming in. Tends to be institutional funds to start with, because that is the smart money. They have different risk profiles, et cetera. We know the bull run is nearing its end or running out of steam when the retail starts to come in. That's generally the latter half of it. But the institutions are still waiting for some signals, one of which is one of which would be, I should say, the approval or actual listing of Bitcoin spot ETFs, whether they care or not, because I'm sure they have plenty of smart people on their staff who could handle custody for them. They're thinking about what everyone else is thinking. It's not so much what I'm going to do. It's what is everyone else going to do and can I get ahead of that? So, yes, the spot Bitcoin ETF is very important for the markets and it is looking increasingly likely. I think it's going to happen this year, latest, obviously spring of next year. But I think there are strong incentives for the SEC to get ahead of this and to approve all of the applications in one fell swoop so that they can't be accused of picking favorites, even though I'm sure they're quite tempted to do so. Probably that's not a minefield they want to wade into. And as for why are they not doing so right now? One, they don't see the momentum there yet. Now, there are always exceptions. And I think we're starting to see some signs of that. But in general, institutional investors like to think what other institutional investors are going to be doing. I'm not saying they're pack animals, but they do like to wait for some momentum. It's not there yet. For the reasons that we were talking about before, right now, the liquidity is just painfully low. It's risky. We want some volatility in the market. An interesting question, Sheila, is what will it take for that volatility to come back and what will it take? So what would it take for the liquidity to come back? Because that's the key. In fact, even more so than volatility, liquidity is what the institutional investors are waiting for. And the answer to that, in my opinion, is volatility. Why? Because market makers and the high frequency traders that are responsible for a large part of the liquidity in the crypto markets, they need that volatility to make money. The market makers hedge their positions and hedging and crypto is more expensive than hedging and other assets. And if there isn't that volatility there, they're not going to cover those hedging costs. And as for high frequency traders, it's just not worth their while unless there is that volatility on which they can make money. So when we start to get volatility, we will start to see more liquidity. When we start to see more liquidity, we will start to see institutional interest because the asymmetric risk profile is there. There is less downside right now in Bitcoin to choose one example than there are in many stocks. There is more upside, arguably, in Bitcoin to choose one example than there is in many stocks at these valuations. And this is something that for sure smart institutional investors are thinking about. Something I think that gets missed a lot is in the sort of CFI, DeFi, I don't want to call them wars, but kind of the camps that we have within the crypto ecosystem, right? And this idea that TradFi versus CFI versus DeFi, you know, kind of mindset is that a lot of the liquidity comes from various forms of exchanges. If you can't exchange something, if you can't trade it, if you can't buy it and sell it just to be as plain as possible for those of our listeners who aren't as familiar with this terminology or how this works. If you can't trade something, if you can't exchange it and buy and sell it, it doesn't have any liquidity. It's a stuck asset and it can't provide option value for you. You can't move within it freely. And that is not attractive in many cases. In some cases, you don't mind that, right? All of us are familiar, well, most people I think who listen to this show are familiar with the idea of buying and holding an asset. Real estate's a great example. You buy some of your intentions to hold it for a very long time. If the market makes little moves here and there, you don't necessarily care, right? This is the whole theory behind single family residences or buying your home or owning a home as an asset. Other kinds of things, especially digital assets, are very different. The idea is that you can trade them faster and they are more liquid. And that is meant to be a feature of the asset. If that liquidity is compromised in any way and there are multiple ways it could be compromised. It could be compromised because people are afraid to sell. It could be compromised because suddenly they're faced with a gigantic tax event if they sell. So they might sell in smaller amounts. It could be because there's some regulatory thing happening that makes people very nervous. It could be because an exchange shuts down. It could be because a bank failed. There are all kinds of reasons why liquidity might be affected. And so I think what's interesting to me is when I think about the TradFi, DeFi versus DeFi kind of framing, the idea is, well, what's really needed is the exchange. The exchange is the functional place where this kind of thing happens. And the more places there are to trade, to exchange these assets, the more optionality you have around liquidity. But I'm just curious to get your thoughts around the role of exchanges, different kinds of exchanges and what would happen. I think this is something a lot of us are back of mind, very concerned about what would happen if one of the major exchanges suddenly became unable to list a token. Let's not let's leave Bitcoin out of it. I think that is a very unlikely thing. But if another token suddenly were unable to be exchanged for any number of reasons, what might the consequences of that be? Are we looking at another potential major crash? Over to you, Noel. Lots of unpack there and stepping back, this reminds me of that saying, you know, if a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it, did it actually fall? If something doesn't trade, it doesn't really have a market price, as you pointed out. However, Bitcoin has had a market price since 2010, effectively, it always will have a market price, whether that market price is legitimate, legitimate in the sense, does it represent the market opinion at any given point in time? That entirely depends on the liquidity and the distribution of the exchanges that are trading it with smaller, more liquid tokens, the altcoins, if you will, that does become relevant. That becomes relevant when we're talking about very thin float. If you and I were to exchange two percent of a token, which involved, you know, you and I swapping three shares, maybe three tokens, maybe if that turned out to be two percent of the free flow, then you and I can really move the market. That's not representative and that is going to affect the liquidity. In other words, you're not going to get big orders or major investors looking at that because that would be irresponsible of them and they have a fiduciary duty. So liquidity is fundamental. Liquidity does depend on the number of and characteristics of the platforms that allow for the exchange of these assets. And coming back to your last question, unfortunately, we can all still remember much to our chagrin what happens in the market if a major platform just disappears or implodes. You know, we're still working through the debris of what happened to FTX in November, and it's not quite over yet. Unfortunately, it's another another headwind. So exchanges are super important. And as for the debate about what is better for the ecosystem, the centralized version of the decentralized version, the centralized version right now is what most institutional investors have to use. They do not have the regulatory authority or the permission of their compliance departments to deal on decentralized exchanges. I think that's temporary. I think that will change as compliance departments around the world get more comfortable with idea. But for now, centralized exchanges are key for this. They provide certain comfort and regulatory cover. And when it comes down to the question, which I get asked a lot, you know, we don't need the institutions in this industry. We don't want centralized. It's anti -crypto kind of thing. And my response is always, we get to decide if the market will decide if the market doesn't want centralized exchanges, they will cease to function. But unfortunately, the market does want them. And that's one of the points of crypto. It's the free market. The market decides. Now, that's not that's, you know, very handwavy, truthfully, legislation regulators around the world are grappling with the requirements of of what centralized what crypto centralized exchanges should what rules they should follow. And this is important because it's investor protection. We can all get behind the idea of investor protection. But the it's like water. It will find the easiest path. It will find a way to move. It just needs to move. If the jurisdictions such as the United States do not get some clear guidelines in place, then the liquidity will move elsewhere. We're already seeing that. If I can throw in a totally different twist, and this is another very significant tailwind that we are not is being looked in my opinion, and this is relevant to liquidity, is what is going on in India at the moment. We saw the wrap up of the G20 meeting this weekend and one of India's goals for being Just to interject really quickly to just note for our listeners that India has the presidency of the G20, which is so they are setting the tone for a lot of the conversations in addition to some of the content. But please continue, Noelle. Absolutely. In fact, they said at the outset that one of their overriding goals for their presidency was to establish global guidelines for crypto regulation coming from India. This is fascinating because you've got the central bank wanting to ban it. I mean, even earlier this year, the central bank governor said that crypto assets were not even tulips, which is very insulting. But you also have the Supreme Court saying that the central bank cannot forbid banks from servicing crypto companies, but no bank wants to. The central bank doesn't approve, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, in India, crypto trading has been muted because of regulatory pressure and the punitive tax rate. However, with India having succeeded in its goal at getting some, in my opinion, toothless guidelines around crypto, still they are indeed global guidelines. We now have India saying that it is going to be focusing on its approach. That is a massive market. This is just one milestone in what I'm seeing around the world, Sheila, and that is a steady march toward greater crypto clarity, even in the US. I mean, the decisions that have come down from courts over the past few months, handing victories to, not to the SEC, but to the crypto companies that the SEC has been doing battle with, it's a slow and painful march, but it is a march toward crypto clarity, even in one of the most resistant jurisdictions. But that covers a potentially huge market as well. Yeah, and I have to contextualize that as well. So when I first met with the Reserve Bank of India, the RBI back in, oh, gosh, it must have been like 2018, 2019 at the latest, it was just, you know, listen, we've got our universal payments interface, we've got UPI, we've got a universal identification system, everyone's on it, you know, we don't need any of this stuff. We're already taking a lot of steps to make sure everything is happening. And it's a really fascinating march towards, I mean, frankly, high surveillance. OK, but what's really interesting is you have a populist prime minister in Modi who is somewhat analogous to Trump. I say that realizing it's a controversial stance, but as a person of Indian descent, I feel very comfortable making the statement. And yet you had the exact opposite move with respect to crypto in the country for quite a period of time. So this thawing, while it is minor compared to other moves being made, is extremely significant. And the idea that now that I think some of the other moves that were made by the Modi regime have been pretty cemented and they're kind of commonplace and they're sort of a psychological adjustment on the part of the population to the use of these kinds of things, you're now seeing, I think, kind of the next thing, which is, OK, this other thing is happening. Digital assets are blowing up all over the place, maybe not in terms of the price, but in terms of the ubiquitousness. Right. There's a clear stickiness here. The U .S. and the SEC there are not, frankly, winning their apparent, well, Gary Gensler, especially in the Pacific, Gary Gensler's apparent quest to ban the asset class. That does not appear to be successful. Europe, the UK are moving in the Middle East, moving at a march pace into this. Brazil, all kinds of places. And so I think India, to some extent, doesn't really have a choice. They have to take this very seriously. And there are no fools over there. They're recognizing what this might look like within their context of the financial system that they have very, very deliberately laid out. Now, this government is not averse in any way to making extraordinarily dramatic changes overnight. OK, so this is a government that, what was it, a few years back, just banned certain bills, just took them off the market with 24 hours notice. So you basically had it was a very high denomination paper currency. And the idea was you had basically 48 hours to take them to a bank and get them exchanged. And if you didn't, they were worthless. You could not use them anymore. That was ruled out with almost no notice, basically overnight. It caused a huge kerfuffle among certain classes in India. But the idea was it was an attempt to get black market money and turn it into white money and to say, you're holding this in these giant denominations, you can't do it anymore. So they have no hesitation in doing things super quickly. And so I think that's also important context is if they were to decide we're going to lean into Bitcoin, crypto, certain kinds of products, whatever it is, it would happen potentially extremely quickly. It's not the kind of thing that ever else would need months of back and forth and legislation and this and that and public comment. They would just do it and go. So I think it's one to watch, not just because they have the presence of G20 and that will set a tone, but also because to your point, it is a massive market that has remained pretty closed in terms of a lot of opportunities to outside and not just investment. That's a different issue, but to outside engagement within the rails that the country runs on. Absolutely. And it's not only a massive market, it's a massive entrepreneurial culture itself that has had to pretty much sit on the sidelines with its cost waiting for some sort of clarity. Not only that, it is also a culture that is not averse to speculative trading, similar to other economies in Asia, similar to many economies in developing worlds, Sub -Saharan Africa comes to mind. And when they initially clamped down, they saw it as a threat to the UPI and also to the digital repeat that they're trying to increase the usage of. But that is bucketing crypto into payments use. The fact that they are now aware that, hey, if we let people trade this, there is going to be significant tax revenue behind this. Plus, we're going to be giving people what they want, which generally polls quite well and turns out quite well for in the elections. But it's so it reflects a growing a deepening understanding of what crypto can do. And it's standable. It's difficult for many for many to get their heads around, let alone leaders of giant economies that have other things to worry about. But it's significant. Going back to what you're saying, Sheila, about India's role in the G20 this year as its president, it did guide it towards some global framework, clumsy global framework. But a global framework, that's a start. You have the IMF actually acknowledging the point in banning this. It's in the pattern on their previous statements. The presidency passes to Brazil in December. Brazil is very pro crypto. Brazil has a host of spot ETFs. Brazil's leading crypto exchange is right now in trials with the central bank on the digital currency that they're launching. You have banks that are quite happy to serve as crypto businesses. In other words, an entirely different environment which could push the G20 into an even more accelerated understanding of the potential of crypto assets and stepping back for a second. It highlights what you and I have spoken about before, Sheila, about the one complexity, but to the opportunity of an entirely new asset class that is many things to many people. Crypto is a speculative asset to some. It is a payments rail to others. It is an entrepreneurial platform for many. It is many things, and that is very hard to regulate, but also does present great opportunities for those brave states that are willing to embrace the potential.
WTOP
"michael casey" Discussed on WTOP
"Kaiser permanente we believe the the only way to care for all of you is by seeing all that is you kaiser permanente for all that is you learn more kp .org kaiser foundation health plan of the mid -atlantic states incorporated 2101 east erlin two zero eight five two everything you need every time you listen wtop news it's seven fifteen i'm michelle bash and i'm john aaron house speaker kevin mccarthy's decision to move ahead impeachment with an inquiry is roiling congress as lawmakers begin efforts to avoid a government shutdown utop's mitchell miller has details today on the hill speaker mccarthy says gop investigations have already raised a lot of questions about the first families finances and hunter biden's international business deals taken together allegations these paint a picture of a culture corruption but the white house house and senate majority leader chuck schumer say the decision is all about politics i think the impeachment inquiry is absurd many conservatives who have threatened to vote against a short -term spending bill are glad to see the ball rolling on impeachment now the question is will there be enough votes for a continuing resolution to a avoid shutdown before october first on capitol hill mitchell miller w t o p news there's been much speculation over whether virginia governor glenn young can could enter the twenty twenty four republican presidential primary but is there a chance that maryland governor westmore is interested in entering the race on the democratic side that question was posed to him in a live interview with news organization semaphore yesterday his first answer though not enough more called himself the most improbable governor in the country and added that he doesn't come from a political lineage federal headlines brought to you by amazon web services for public sector i'm peter miss early and hear your top headlines from federal news network the top u .s. intelligence office has a new leader the senate on tuesday confirm michael casey as director of the national counterintelligence and security center casey most recently served as staff director for the select committee on intelligence and a new unclassified summary of the twenty twenty three cyber strategy g was rolled out by the pentagon on tuesday trying to maintain an edge over china and building on lessons learned from russia's war in ukraine the strategy focuses on expanding the cyber workforce and increasing the capabilities of america's allies for more on these stories go to federal com out the top stories were working on it w t o p totals glowed last night at a vigil for a sixteen -year -old girl shot and killed monday outside her school north korea's his leader is pledging to support russia in its war with ukraine national security correspondent jay jay green joins us at seven thirty two with the latest and what will the new inflation numbers show when the consumer price index report comes out this morning keep it for here full details on these stories in the minutes ahead seven eighteen traffic and weather on the eights fill us in Rita well I can tell you about a problem on the Beltway this is the inner loop of the Beltway after 201 Kettleworth Avenue that was a report of a wreck we're also seeing delays on the Baltimore Washington Parkway both ways near 197 where there'd been a report of an earlier crash then southbound slows in Greenbelt headed inside the Beltway toward the good luck road overpass inbound fifty that's slow from 410 all the way on to New York Avenue toward the Anacostia River the New York Avenue inbound slows to the light at Bladensburg Road southbound DC 295 delays from eastern all the way past the East Capitol Street and the inbound Suitland Parkway delay stretches back almost to Silver Hill Road headed to the light at Stanton Road now we still have the delays in Brandywine the crash was reported northbound Branch Avenue near Birch Hill and but that stretched all the way back onto 301 headed toward McKendree in Cedarville 28 was closed near Peachtree Road for a downed tree in the roadway northbound 210 after Swan Creek and Livingston a broken down truck the in left lane while southbound 29 near Johns Hopkins Road a report of a crash and southbound 50 near 201 in DC 295 was a report of a broken down vehicle so that could be the reason for big that backup as well now on New Hampshire Avenue it was southbound in New Hampshire Avenue between Cresthaven Drive and Powder Mill Road you're under police direction for the crash investigation watch for the redirection you'll also find in Virginia eastbound 50 or Arlington Boulevard after Fillmore Street stay to the left to get by that wreck 29 at Stringfellow Road and Clifton Road you're under police direction for the crash while 29 at North Danville Street in Arlington that's a report of some flashing traffic lights Johns Hopkins Cancer Care in the greater Washington area with renowned cancer experts in our community including at Sibley and Suburban Hospitals find out more at HopkinsCancerDC dot I'm org Rita Kessler WTOP traffic seven news first alert meteorologist Brian Van de Graaff it's been a gloomy morning but I'm now starting to see some peaks of sunshine on our window the edge on the sun is going to start to work its way through in fact I by think mid
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"michael casey" Discussed on WTOP
"Drinking water or eating anything as long as you can this teenager took part challenge in the and then passed out at school and then he went home and passed out again and then he died and his family firmly believes it was the chip challenge that contributed to his death Michael Casey reporting. Sports at 25 and 55 powered by Red River decisions technology aren't black and white think red here is Frank Hanrahan it's game day for the commanders season opener it is a fresh start for the newly owned commanders as they will take on Arizona at one o 'clock commanders won't have defensive end Chase Young he's still recovering from from a stinger in the preseason commanders on paper favored by seven college football on Saturday Maryland closes out Charlotte 38 -20 Terps 2 -0 host Virginia next Friday Wahoo's loss of James Madison 35 36 Virginia Tech loses to Purdue 24 -17 Navy blanks Wagner 24 zip in Annapolis Howard pounds Morehouse 65 19 top 25 sexist upsets number three Alabama 34 number it 24 was a wild ending as a wild pitch allows the Nats to walk off with a game winning run bottom of the 11th 76 Nats beat the Dodgers Lane Thomas hit a homer for the fourth straight game that ties a Nats record As the Nats and the Dodgers will play again on Sunday Baltimore holds off Boston 13 12 O's win despite giving up 23 hits MLS DC United San Jose scoreless draw at Audi Field US Open Coco Gets Golf her first Grand Slam title at 19 comes back and beats Arena, Sabalenka in the US Open final Frank Hanrahan, WTOP Sports. Coming up after traffic and weather at least 2000 are dead after a powerful
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Hello, and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey here this week with my co-host Sheila Warren. You can listen to us weekly on the CoinDesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you. So tell us what you think in an email at podcasts at coindesk.com using the subject line Money Reimagined. All right. Well, Sheila, that's it. Summer's over. Labor Day weekend done. Get down to work. All right. This is it. We're sort of diving in here. Bit of news going on around the place in the regulatory world, which of course is a major interest of yours. But I think today I'd really like to dive into the conversation around tokenization. It seems as if the word that was a buzzword for a number of years has become an even bigger buzzword. There's a lot going on in this RWA, real-world asset concept. Some sort of seeing it as the mainstream, or at least the trad-fying killer app almost for crypto. But I got a lot of thoughts, a lot of different ideas on it. But before we go into that, what's going on? We've got news out of Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a roundup on the sort of the global regulatory front. Yeah. Well, there's always a lot going on. I mean, I'm not going to do the full global rundown. But two things I thought were kind of interesting that got some press were what happened in Australia. There was a bill that have been introduced to basically think about some regulatory parameters around crypto that got rejected. I think that's my view on this is it's less of the headline maker than it's kind of being touted to be. It's just a slowing down of the function. And so the prime minister in Australia had put out this really interesting token mapping consultation exercise in February, I believe. And that was supposed to lead to this consultation around how do you actually regulate and license crypto asset service providers. The legislature basically said, let's wait until that work is done, essentially is how I read the rejection of this bill. But it got some press worthy of mention. And of course, you with your Australian roots, might have some interesting comments on politics in Australia's general matter. The other thing that happened in region, I'll just kind of stay in that region, is Singapore. Singapore, of course, has a new has new leadership. The new president, who used to be a central bank chair, has expressed a view around crypto, you know, calling it, I believe the quote is slightly crazy. You know, I, for one, do not think that is an inaccurate assessment of the crypto ecosystem. Relatively reasonable assessment of the overall. It's also modified slightly somewhat. You know what I mean? But also, I don't think we should be surprised that a central bank chairman is going to have a view that is, you know, influenced by the focus that that individual and anyone in that position is going to have on monetary policy, on fiat, on M0 and M1, you know, etc. So, again, something that made some headlines, I didn't read too much into that. I found it more entertaining than anything else. And I think just a healthy sense. I think that the industry does need to have a healthy sense of humor about some of these things and recognize, you know, that our reputation perhaps precedes us. And that isn't always, you know, it isn't always that we're seen as the most calm, rational, sober actors, you know. And who would want it to be anyway? Ecosystem. Right, exactly. So, I'll stop there. Crazy is kind of what draws me into something. Isn't that, you're not above, right? Yeah. And I thought it was actually, yeah, as you said, like pretty accurate. It's slightly crazy. Yep. Well said. True. Correct. Look, I think that the reason why maybe they got some headlines, both of these things, is because they run a little counter to the narrative that, you know, we talked about. They, hey, the rest of the world is embracing this stuff, you know, that Japan's moving forward and Hong Kong is now all into it and Dubai, et cetera, et cetera. And like, you know what? Yeah, there's still hesitancy out there. And look, I think, as you said, yeah, a former central banker, like, should we be surprised? I think, you know, the fact that- I don't think so. Seems on brand.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: The Thrilling Frontier of Tokenized Assets and Their Impact on Bitcoin
"Hello, and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey here this week with my co -host Sheila Warren. You can listen to us weekly on the CoinDesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you. So tell us what you think in an email at podcasts at coindesk .com using the subject line Money Reimagined. All right. Well, Sheila, that's it. Summer's over. Labor Day weekend done. Get down to work. All right. This is it. We're sort of diving in here. Bit of news going on around the place in the regulatory world, which of course is a major interest of yours. But I think today I'd really like to dive into the conversation around tokenization. It seems as if the word that was a buzzword for a number of years has become an even bigger buzzword. There's a lot going on in this RWA, real -world asset concept. Some sort of seeing it as the mainstream, or at least the trad -fying killer app almost for crypto. But I got a lot of thoughts, a lot of different ideas on it. But before we go into that, what's going on? We've got news out of Australia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a roundup on the sort of the global regulatory front. Yeah. Well, there's always a lot going on. I mean, I'm not going to do the full global rundown. But two things I thought were kind of interesting that got some press were what happened in Australia. There was a bill that have been introduced to basically think about some regulatory parameters around crypto that got rejected. I think that's my view on this is it's less of the headline maker than it's kind of being touted to be. It's just a slowing down of the function. And so the prime minister in Australia had put out this really interesting token mapping consultation exercise February, in I believe. And that was supposed to lead to this consultation around how do you actually regulate and license crypto asset service providers. The legislature basically said, let's wait until that work is done, essentially is how I read the rejection of this bill. But it got some press worthy of mention. And of course, you with your Australian roots, might have some interesting comments on politics in Australia's general matter. The other thing that happened in region, I'll just kind of stay in that region, is Singapore. Singapore, of course, has a new has new leadership. The new president, who used to be a central bank chair, has expressed a view around crypto, you know, calling it, I believe the quote is slightly crazy. You know, I, for one, do not think that is an inaccurate assessment of the crypto ecosystem. Relatively reasonable assessment of the overall. It's also modified slightly somewhat. You know what I mean? But also, I don't think we should be surprised that a central bank chairman is going to have a view that is, you know, influenced by the focus that that individual and anyone in that position is going to have on monetary policy, on fiat, on M0 and M1, you know, etc. So, again, something that made some headlines, I didn't read too much into that. I found it more entertaining than anything else. And I think just a healthy sense. I think that the industry does need to have a healthy sense of humor about some of these things and recognize, you know, that our reputation perhaps precedes us. And that isn't always, you know, it isn't always that we're seen as the most calm, rational, sober actors, you know. And who would want it to be anyway? Ecosystem. Right, exactly. So, I'll stop there. Crazy is kind of what draws me into something. Isn't that, you're not above, right? Yeah. And I thought it was actually, yeah, as you said, like pretty accurate. It's slightly crazy. Yep. Well said. True. Correct. Look, I think that the reason why maybe they got some headlines, both of these things, is they because run a little counter to the narrative that, you know, we talked about. They, hey, the rest of the world is embracing this stuff, you know, that Japan's moving forward and Hong Kong is now all into it and Dubai, et cetera, et cetera. And like, you know what? Yeah, there's still hesitancy out there. And look, I think, as you said, yeah, a former central banker, like, should we be surprised? I think, you know, the fact that - I don't think so. Seems on brand.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: US Court Challenges SEC, Fuels Financial Evolution & FX Market's Next Phase
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren. I'm solo today, but a reminder you can listen to us weekly and you'll catch me and Michael next week on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think by emailing us at podcasts at coindesk .com, subject line Money Reimagined. It's a big news day, as every day is here in the crypto universe. Today, we woke up to the news that a U .S. court ordered the SEC to vacate its rejection of Grayscale's bid to convert its Bitcoin trust into an ETF. Now, we're not going to get technical about what this exactly means. We'll have an episode on the SEC coming up in a couple of weeks. But the point here is that the U .S. may be about to get its very first spot Bitcoin ETF. And this is a big deal. It's a big deal in part because other countries are way ahead of us on this, as they are in many other areas that involve crypto and crypto regulation. But the door is now open for a spot Bitcoin ETF in the United States. Advocates have argued for a long time that this particular type of product would enable a bigger swath of the public to invest in Bitcoin without having to go through the hassle, which it still is a hassle to this day, unfortunately, of buying it directly or of dealing with potential issues like picking the wrong custody provider who may not survive, as an example. The SEC has systematically disapproved every single ETF application it's gotten to date. But a new swath of applicants we expect to burst in and try to get into this market. I'm joined today by our guest, Alex McDougall, who is the CEO of Stable Corp, which is a Canadian -based company that's created the Canadian dollar -backed Stablecoin, the first one on the market. But Alex, I'd love to bring you in today to just chat quickly. You're Canadian and you're HQ'd in Canada. And of course, Canada has had an ETF for quite a long time. In fact, as I recall, we actually had 3IQ CEO Fred on, I'm looking this up, two years ago now. So two years ago, Canada already had Bitcoin ETFs on the market. How has that developed over course of time? And what do you make of the fact that we are so into the game here in the US, but finally on the scoreboard? Absolutely. Sheila, thanks a ton for having me. Really appreciate it. I'm always a big fan of the pod. It's such an interesting kind of history repeats itself, right? And especially now that today is not an announcement of a Bitcoin ETF. It's an announcement of a potential undoing of a bad announcement that was a roadblock to potential ETF, circle, circle, circle. And that's not actually that dissimilar from how the Canadian ETFs came about. And you'd mentioned Fred Pye and 3IQ, and they actually fought a landmark battle with maybe more of a collaborative Canadian battle. Yes, a mediated battle. A friendly battle. A light arm wrestle. Yes, there it is. With the Ontario Securities Commission back in 2019, around their closed -end fund, which was sort of a more public version of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust traded on the TSX. But they ended up having to go to court and effectively challenge the ruling and have their day in court. And it forced the discussion of why this was or was not in the best public interest. And ultimately, 3IQ won. The arguments that the regulator put forth weren't necessarily accepted, and 3IQ got to launch their product. And it was really the ETFs that came about on the heels of that almost two years later. But that was actually one of the things that caused the Grayscale NAV discount in the first place when there was a way to get out of these at par. And so I feel like that whole sort of launch of the publicly traded funds has been lost to the sands of time a little bit in Canada. And we've been chugging along for years with our spot ETFs. And it's really interesting to see the evolution of just how highly leveraged this type of news is. I mean, you saw the reaction in the price, the reaction in the Grayscale discount, the reaction in Coinbase stock, from just these tiny little bits of news that sort of drip out. And you can tell how important this is to the market. Definitely. I was joking with someone the other day that if you were to make sports analogies and compare countries, other countries, almost every other country, it's kind of like big point totals. It's low point totals, but like big point moves, right? So it's more like American football. You get a line in here the U S it's like basketball. It's like just two points, two points, two points, two points. Right. And it's just like a constant flood of news, all of which is like moving incrementally, incrementally, incrementally, you know, and it's so exhausting. Like, uh, like soccer where each two points is covered, like the most defining thing. Yeah, there it is. Right. Exactly. Those two points are not moving at that because there's so many of them, you know, it goes back and forth and you don't really know who's going to win until the very end. Right. Whereas in other sports, it's like, you kind of have a sense around halftime of where it's going to go. So look, the excitement never ends. Um, this is definitely a very positive move today on behalf of Bitcoin, certainly. And again, to your point, you're seeing that in the market already, but also just in general, the idea of being able to offer products that are more geared towards consumers who don't have the ability or the desire or, you know, any, any sort of, um, whatever, whatever it might be for whatever reason, don't really want to engage directly with the asset, but want to have access to it. And so that of course is what these markets are about, but yeah. And I think so much of it is just, you know, we, we as digital asset folks spend so much time 10 years down the line in this like cryptopia of, you know, everybody's going to be on the same standard and we're going to have all this completely free money movement around the world. And so little time necessarily on sort of building the bridges to get there. And, um, you know, obviously the ETF is sort of wrapping a brand new type of asset and an old type of asset, but I think more, more so, and you see, you, you hear critics say that sometime, but more so it gives you sort of built -in access to traditional types of financial solutions, securities lending, collateralization, where you don't have to, you know, with existing custodians, it's all of those sort of bridge building techniques to where, you know, we can build out the user experience to where it's easy to hold, you know, native Bitcoin. And we have all of that stuff that's built down the line. It really is sort of a bridge backwards to bring people along as much as it is like, Oh, this is how Bitcoin is always going to be is, you know, this wrapped Bitcoin in ETF. It's super important. If the goal is adoption or engagement. I mean, this is one of the most dramatic moves that could be made forward here in the United States. And again, it's not as if we have to, we're not Yolo -ing it here. I mean, there are, you know, multiple years of not just in Canada, but certainly our neighbor to the North has been engaging in this product offering for some time, right. At a minimum two years now. So, uh, so we have a lot of kind of, uh, a trajectory of how this might play and how it might go into your point. It's now just kind of like ordinary boring offering in Canada. It's not like this. It's a Armageddon up there. Right. Right. So hopefully we will get to a place where this is also very normal and it's just another thing on the market and you can make your choices and you have a panoply of options, you know, as will be the case. Okay. So thanks for spending some time with me on that today, as usual, we don't always predict when these things happen, but it's so helpful to have you on the chat about this and typically the comparison with Canada, but let's shift gears into what we actually were intending to talk about today, uh, which is, so you recently wrote a post, uh, it's called the seven defining opportunities and on -chain FX. And Michael and I both found this actually very interesting. And maybe what I'll do is just have you, well, first of all, what I would love to have you do is just explain to our listeners, many of whom are not necessarily sophisticated financial actors, you know, what an FX market is, why it matters, and then your observation and maybe walk us through the general thesis of your, of this post, which we'll link to in the show notes. Amazing. Yeah, absolutely. And this really came about, uh, in, in collaboration with, you know, our partners at circle, uh, with Cumberland, um, who's, who's taken a very active position on, on non us dollar stable coins and Zodiac markets side, who's the exchange that's, that's run by standard charter. We started to talk about this a little bit more and more as, you know, some of the deeper seated challenges with stable coins and global flow of assets became more and more prevalent. I mean, you know, 60 % of the global foreign reserves are in us dollars, you know, a number that's slowly, uh, the declining over time, you know, 99 .9 % of the, uh, the global stable coin dollars are denominated in us dollars. And there's this natural drift towards sort of a proliferation of currencies around, you know, even just the use cases of today within the digital asset land, let alone, you know, the use cases of the next billion users and a lot of this, you know, payments and international money movements and things like that. But the FX market is fascinating. It's sort of like the tectonic plates of financing and almost every transaction that you do has an FX transaction baked somewhere into it. And whether it's, you know, a derivative transaction, whether it's actually settled, whether it's through an intermediary, like, you know, buying a daiquiri in Vegas was as a Canadian, or it's, you know, these, these gigantic sort of OTC desks that are trading billions of dollars of Japanese yen for Canadian dollars or us dollars, you know, it traded seven and a half trillion dollars a day. It's one of the most liquid efficient price markets, but there's no central body and there's no exchange. There's no nicey for FX. It's all of these sort of mechanisms that have developed over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Um, that makes it this really fascinating centralized market, but we've sort of run into some places where it can no longer evolve with the state of current trend, traditional finance infrastructure. And so a lot of the points of this paper is, where do we run into walls? What have we sort of fake evolved in TradFi? And then where are we really looking? Like, what can we do with crypto? What can we do with instant settlement? How does sort of T plus zero or T plus instant really change the game? Um, and where doesn't it as well? So that's just as important as like, again, the Cryptopia side, um, how do we build bridges from today to get there? And that's really sort of the point of the paper. So foreign exchange markets, FX markets are already fairly efficient and they are to your point, one of the most liquid markets that exist in the world. Um, but the premise of your paper really is that even in such a market, you can still, there are still challenges that exist. There are still challenges in that market and that blockchain technology and things like Sablecoins can actually really address some of those challenges and make this already well -functioning market even more high functioning. So A, why is that desirable? Like, why is this an important problem? I guess we're just kind of out there. And second, what are those challenges and how specifically can digital assets and the kind of underlying technology that they're based upon help? Yeah, absolutely. FX is an extremely efficient market in terms of pricing. You know, people have been trying to arbitrage the FX market for years and years and years, and they're excellent at doing it on fractions of bits. So setting aside the opportunity and arbitrage as FX moves on chain, which is going to be generational, it's really efficient if you're actually accessing the core FX market. If you're one of the 70 international FX brokers who has access to the continuously linked settlement system, great. You're settling in as close to real -time as possible, which is another challenge. You're paying fractions of a bit. You're doing great. If, back to my example of me as a Canadian going down to Vegas, I'm not paying fractions of a bit when I tap my MasterCard, I'm paying 4%, 5%, 6%. And that's because it's so disintermediated and there's no connective fabric between that core underlying market and me as an actual consumer. Even when I'm paying cross -border payments to settle bills as a small business, I'm still paying 3 % or 4 % or 5%. And that gets even worse when you're looking at students coming to Canada to study abroad, trying to set up an international bank account, trying to fund tuition or things like that with wire payments. They're routinely looking in the 6%, 7%, or 8 % plus wire fees, plus time to set up international KYC challenges. It's a very efficient market except for who it's not efficient for. And it's one of the most valuable markets in terms of fees in the entire world. And the second piece to that, even for those incredibly large, sophisticated global enterprises, they're still limited by the banking hours in each country. And so there's a chart in the paper that looks like the craziest Gantt chart you've ever seen, which is trying to map the overlaps of the Japanese banking system and New York and China and all of these different places. And if you want to send any kind of real -time payments, your window to trigger those is, it could be two in the morning. It really is challenging from that perspective. And the G20, and the last piece I'll say on this, the G20 identified this as a big problem two or three years ago with extending those banking hours being sort of the number one thing they were focused on. And then they came out with a report a couple of years later that it would take extreme costs and permanently elevated cost bases and a lot of infrastructure and basically threw their hands up and said, it's really challenging to extend our TGS. And that's some of those walls that we've run into today where it works. We've solved settlement risk to a certain extent, large organizations can get money around in two or three days potentially, but there's almost a blocker of further evolution. And that's really where blockchain settlement comes in, because it can be a rip and replace of all of this antiquated cross -border correspondent banking system with a digital wallet that can hold all of these currencies, a public blockchain that can settle and manage the swaps, and then a whole infrastructure of liquidity providers, exchanges, decentralized exchanges that sort of already exists out of the box to manage and replicate a lot of that. So let's talk about the role you see of stablecoin in FX markets in general, but also in real -time settlement, like all these different places that you kind of either alluded to or talked about directly. So, I mean, I think stablecoins or digital dollars or whatever, sort of the next generation of vernacular, that's where we're moving away from the stablecoin piece too. Is it stable? Is it a coin? And that's maybe a good place to start, right? Because we've sort of lumped stablecoins all in together with the algorithmic ones, the crypto collateralized ones, the fiat backed ones, the gold backed ones. And that's fine as we're creating a new experiment essentially, but now that we're ready for prime time with some of these instruments, then there needs to be sort of a separation between the experimental ones and the ones that are truly ready to evolve and reach this global scale. And I think oftentimes we've completely blown the marketing on stablecoins where we should have positioned it as this is a better version of PayPal. This is a FinTech evolution instead of, hey, this is a less crazy version of Bitcoin, which is kind of the middle ground that we're stuck in today. Don't get me wrong. There's a ton of interesting value in experimenting with new forms of money, new forms stability, new forms of decentralized governance for coins, all of that stuff. But there needs to be guard rails around that such that it doesn't go to 60 billion and then down to no billion, specifically to your points around where stablecoins sort of fit in all of this. They effectively give you the ability to leverage these brand new rails that can chop out the trillion dollars of friction costs that sits in our kind of international correspondent banking system today. And so it's our job as issuers and also the Web3 builders to create all this connected fabric. It's our job to make as little friction and risk as possible between a Canadian dollar that you're used to and that lives in a bank or on your debit card or whatever, and a digital representation of that dollar. And so the global regulatory environments, and this is one of the pieces we talk about in the paper of sort of this slow grinding consensus of monoculture on how regulation should fit there, which we're getting towards slowly. Again, it's a lot of those viewpoint layups. Europe's getting towards it fast. That's true. They're playing hockey. We're playing basketball.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: A Rant | The Labyrinth of Digital Feudalisms Grip and the Quest for Intentionality
"You're listening to Coindesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. This week, it's Sheila and I just doing what we do from time to time just to sort of do a bit of a roundup of what's going on and like get in each other's heads a bit. We are, of course, available. We can listen to us weekly on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you've enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, we would really like to hear from you. If you didn't like our episode, you could also talk to us and you could email us to do so at podcasts .coindesk .com with the subject line of Money Reimagined. As always, there's just lots going on, Sheila. Maybe we can talk a little bit later about the ongoing saga that is Sam Bankman free. He's in jail now, of course, but he's now pled not guilty to his latest indictment. We had some news of Coinbase acquiring a stake in Circle, which has got people intrigued. Markets aren't looking so great. A bit of a weird, wild collapse in Bitcoin. And that's, obviously, a determinant of all sorts of other things. But look, you came on, I don't know, saw text messages from me before we started this. You were obviously in a bit of a mood, a bit angry about a few things. You just want to rant about a few things. And you talked about comparing the United States to Japan and maybe the regulatory framework in each country. I thought we can get you under that. But it got me thinking that maybe we should, and if we do these two -way things, the one -on -ones, that we should just have a section just called Sheila's Rant. And I'm trying to think about what - The Rant of the Week. The Rant of the Week. The Rant of the Week. There's always something to rant about. I could just like a now. I could bring a now BBC voice. It's time for Sheila Warren's rant. Sheila, rant away. She's like, over to you. Over to you. Please rant away, Sheila. But your rant, actually, I thought you were going to rant about, you know, the US v Japan. I was. But then you joined us and you started talking about problems with your Google connection on things that was actually undermining your ability to actually do things, which got me thinking that this is a perfectly good rant because it is a way to speak about the whole dependency on centralized platforms. Yes. Yeah. Let me let me just walk our listeners through the last hour of my life. So I have a new laptop. Yay me. Hooray. That's very exciting. And I was trying to do what I thought would be a fairly simple task of pairing my Bluetooth mouse with my new laptop, which you would think would just be a very simple click a couple of times and things are done. No, apparently not. So in the course of this, I restarted my laptop and now I don't have access to Google Chrome. I literally cannot use Google Chrome. I can't download it unless it comes from someplace, whatever this that bottom line is without Google Chrome. What the realization I was late to our recording today because without Google Chrome on my machine, I have to use my laptop, not my phone, because I have a mic and I have to plug it in whatever for a variety of reasons. I'm dependent on my laptop for our particular from any reimagined to record this podcast and between Apple and Google and their willingness to interface in some ways and not others, etc. And then throw in Zoom, which is where we do our recordings for the podcast. I wasn't able to access my Zoom account. So then I had to like back into my Zoom in a different way. And then I had to like reset a password. It was just like, you've got to be kidding me with this. But all of that, I think, Michael, just it's just emblematic of the problem that I think we talk about, even not as pointedly as this, but more generally on this show, which is we are beholden in ways we don't even realize. Like I'm at a point now where, thank goodness, I've got people on the back end working on figuring out how to get me Chrome. Yeah, you've got an army of people trying to. Well, I wish I had one person, but regardless, I've got someone helping me with this and it's going to figure it out on our IT support side. But without access to Chrome, I basically can't really do my job unless I'm on my phone, in which case if I work on my phone for too long, I'm just going to like lose my eyesight, which is a whole other issue. You know, it's just it's just we're beholden in ways we don't even understand, because when these things function, the point is that when these things function, we don't even realize how connected they are. I don't know that I deliberately set my Zoom account up to run through Google, but at some point I did that or someone did it for me is probably more likely what happened, to be very honest. But regardless, the whole thing just kind of falls apart. And yes, you can very deliberately choose. I'm very conscious about data person, right? I mean, we've talked about this many times. So I do tend to use different kinds of browsers for other things, this and that. But when it comes to kind of hyper efficient work product oriented things, like we just default to the big platforms because everyone else is on there. It's a lot easier. You can make different kinds of connections. We work in Google Docs, whatever it is, right? If those things don't function, the integrations are somewhat default. And if those don't function, your productivity takes a massive hit. But your ability, I think, to engage is really complicated. So this isn't so much about data capture and control. It's about the ability to actually engage online, engage digitally in a meaningful way, which is is not it's just it's so beholden to these gigantic entities. And I find that today I find it deeply irritating and annoying and frustrating. I want to throw my machine out the window. But as a general matter, it's highly problematic. Well, the two are related, right? Like it's not just that there's data capture going on. It's that they create such a level of dependency. Yes. And such an integration of all these other elements of your life that the data is all the more rich from their point of view and therefore valuable from their point of view. Right. So, I mean, it is all related. But yeah, there is this convenience of the network effect of everything tied together. The one that I often think about lately is what's happened to email. So we often talk about how, oh, at least email, right? SMTP, it's this independent protocol. And you can send an email to anybody on any email server anywhere. And then whatever client you're using, you're fine, right? Well, I'm not so sure about that anymore because everybody has Gmail, right? So many corporate accounts are now just Gmail accounts. It is so big that Gmail's spam filtering system will, if you happen to be from a smaller server, I mean, there's not really not many left. People have ProtonMail for privacy and there's a few Yahoo and a few others that are still there. But any of the little guys, any independent email provider, you're going to be interpreted by Gmail's spam server as spam and just pushed out into the... You're not going to get your stuff read because you're not using... So there's this backdoor way in which Google has created control of what we thought was at least an architecturally far more decentralized system. And that is problematic in addition to all of the other ways in which Google just sits there in the middle of our lives. When you're using Waze in your car, it's Google. If you've got Google Home, it's Google. And of course, we can say the same about Amazon with Alexa and Prime and AWS and everything else, but this is the reality. We've built these dependencies. In fact, as anybody who listened to last week's episode will now know, I'm actually in the middle of writing a book with Frank McCourt, as I said then. More information will come about what it's really going to be about, but maybe it's going to come out in a drip form because I'll just offer this little tidbit. I mean, I'm just in the process of working on a chapter to try to give it a little bit more context to what we mean in the book by this concept of being a subject or a vassal in a new modern form of feudalism, as opposed to being a citizen in a kind of a republic and a democracy. Given that our information system is fundamental to who we are as a society, like it's critical to democracy, it's critical to a free market. If that information system is so controlled by these powerful platforms and that they are using that data to then actually feed back on you to direct you to what to read and what to say and how to behave and all that behavior modification stuff, which by now is very well documented, by the way, then in effect, we've lost agency. We've lost our citizenship, right? So this goes into digital feudalism. And I think one of the ways to describe it is this, right? It's the same way that like, oh, you can't actually go to this part of the country unless the king lets you go there or this dependency on the say so of some powerful lord is very similar to, I think, what we're at here right now. And that's a cause for great concern. I completely agree. And I think what's really even more disturbing about it is unlike physical feudalism, right, where there are boundaries and markers and you physically could not cross. Here, it's very invisible. And so to your point about Gmail's ubiquity, I think most people know this, but I don't think people really realize that your domain name does not say anything about the corporate master behind the email account, right? So most companies, to your point in tech, do use a Google interface. And so they have their own domain name of their own company. It's going to be whatever .com or whatever .org or whatever it is. But that's all run on the back end by Google. It's a Google account. It's all a Google workspace. And that's very common in tech. And unless you're a competitor of Google, in which case you have your own interface that you're using, right? Microsoft being a great example of this. But regardless, I mean, there is almost complete capture of many parts of the ecosystem through that functionality, not to mention servers. AWS servers come up with some regularity. But the idea is that most companies are back ended into an AWS server. AWS is actually a bigger portion of Amazon's profit than Amazon, than the brick and mortar kind of the retail facing part. And you can imagine, given how often the frequency of how people use amazon .com to buy things, you can imagine if that's like a drop in the bucket compared to what AWS is making in terms of gross profit. It's pretty wild to think about that. But our entire digital infrastructure is really dependent in ways that when they break down, it's like, you have a day like I'm having today, it's really abundantly in your face and obvious how problematic that is. When it functions well, it's something that is pretty invisible in ways that I think regular feudalism, if you will, was pretty in people's faces. It was a pretty obvious system. This is invisible to a lot of people. You don't think about it until it breaks down. And when it breaks down, you're just annoyed about it and you're frustrated because you can't, like I'm a person who's incapable of not contextualizing things. But I think most people in my position today would just be very irritated and want to just fix it and move on without the reflection necessarily on what it means, right? Right. We were talking before about how this is actually very different from, say, a regular tool breaking down, right? This is not just getting a flat tire on your car and being annoyed with that. But I think most people will see it that way. They'll just go, oh, damn it. Yeah, it's a temporary problem. The dishwasher's got some problem with the detergent rinsing function and that's it, right? But no, it's actually a very clear reflection of the dependencies that we're talking about. I'm glad you mentioned Amazon because we should recognize this is not just one company, there are a few of them that have these particularly powerful roles. But I'm going to go back to Google because I was thinking as you were saying this, one of the ones that, like back in January, of course, there was the ruling from the Department of Justice that sued Google successfully for monopolizing digital advertising technologies. Right. And like, yes, now there's been a response to that, thankfully. But it's just the very fact that we've managed to create this system, I think is one of the most clearest reflections of this power, right? So, again, Google controls Chrome, Google is control search. And so every aspect of how we actually find things and therefore all of the ways in which every single website is incentivized through search engine optimization, which is a buzz word that we journalists have to deal with every single freaking day, SEO is designed to keep that Google algorithm happy. So we are shaping the way we design our content and curate our content specifically to keep Google happy. So that's on the content side. But how is our content monetized? Well, regardless of whether or not it is on Google, it's like, you know, like it's not just Google ads, but our own ads themselves have to really play through the sort of the big Google network. So our content enter ads because there's the Google ad exchange, which has a sort of a combination ad of network technology to actually broker that the amount of space that's taken up inside the whole real estate of the Internet by bringing the sell side components together with the buy side, right? You've got folks who are publishers trying to sell that space and you've got folks who want to buy media space. Google sits right in the middle of it because it's engineered this perfect ecosystem in which you have no choice but to sit in the middle of it. Why this isn't looked upon as something that is, I don't know, 10, 20 times worse than Standard Oil was or rubber barons and the thing that led to the antitrust movement and Teddy Roosevelt's very important laws at the turn of the century. It baffles me. We've never seen anything like this level of monopolistic control over our economy. Well, I think it is in part because a lot of it is, as we were discussing, it's somewhat invisible. People don't really realize the interconnections and the way that it kind of reminds me of this show 30 Rock, which probably most of us are familiar with. And there was this running joke of like the corporate map, right, of 30 Rock and who owned the studio and the fact that they owned like it was a microwave or whatever it was, but all rolled up to this one central company. And Alex Baldwin character, Jack Donaghy was his character, which joke a lot about the fact that everything rolled up to this one company and there are all these different things and they were all in the do product placement of the other kinds of parts of the company and whatnot. But when it comes to our online world, people just don't really they don't even understand the different things that go into making these services possible. Right. And how they all interconnect. And I also think that there is an element of just sort of embarrassment, like I think most people like I am beyond this in my personal life, but I'd say probably a decade ago when everything failed on my laptop like this morning, I would have been like, oh, my God, it's user error. I did something wrong. I messed it up. Now I'm like, no, no, it's not me because I'm sophisticated as an Internet user at this point. And I know what is me and what is a pepcak issue, as they say, problem exists between keyboard and computer. Right. And what is not. And I know this is not. But in many cases, people feel a level of tech illiteracy or embarrassment around it because they don't understand it. They don't they know they don't understand it. They don't really get it. There's nothing visual about it that you can really process. You just know it's not working and you feel an immediate. It's part of partially the addiction of it. You feel stress. You feel a tremendous amount of stress that you're not able to get this thing to function. And then you feel, I think, according with that embarrassment and shame. And this has been documented by many sociologists that when people's tech is not working, they feel shame and embarrassment in ways they don't feel when their microwave fails or they get a flat tire or whatever. They don't have that level of anxiety and shame around it, which they do. Right. Which they have when their online tools aren't working. It's another form of control in terms of like the trust us. We got this because we know don't get this. That differentiation is dividing divide. You don't understand this. You don't. And you can't trust. And you can't. Right. So we build up that even if you could easily just by building up that expectation that you can't by holding out these tech geniuses as sort of the lords of everything you can only only once you can get it. We build that expectation and therefore we ultimately lock ourselves into again, more dependency. I think that that's what I find even more challenging about this. Right. Just to take this out, go out even one more layer is when we think about how this is affecting a lot of the ways that elites think about education and not just elites, but really, but the way that the focus on technical mastery, being a coder, all this stuff is now considered the pinnacle of educational achievement in many ways. And there's some backlash against this around liberal arts education. You need to have other kinds of skills and talents and creativity, all these kinds of things that really matter. I think anyone who's been in tech for a long time will tell you that the EQ component is the thing that really makes or breaks a career in tech, not so much your technical ability or capacity to do things like code. Nevertheless, the emphasis on that, I think on the one hand, it's important to be competitive in the global economy. That is certainly an important thing. But the overemphasis I would say on it, it reinforces this concept. So as demographics get older, there's a sense that, well, I'm too old to understand this is too complicated for me. My oldest kid and I are watching the show called Avid Elementary. Highly recommend. It's phenomenal. I'm Avid rewatching Elementary. It's fantastic. 110 billion. I mean, we're going back and rewatching season one, and it's really funny. But there's an older teacher who's been teaching for many, many years. And there's an episode we just watched last night that's called something like tech or whatnot, new tech or something like that. And they bring in this tablets, right? And they're like, this is how you're going to teach the kids to read. They're going to use these tablets and you're going to do all this stuff. And the older teacher who's probably in her 40s or whatnot, she's not that old, but relatively speaking, she is like, I don't know how to do this. She just kind of like does an end run around the technology and winds up coding in that her kindergartners are reading it like fourth grade level. Okay. So of course there's an assembly and they want to pre it's really funny. It's a great episode. But part of it, I think she talks about having a hot male account, all this stuff. Right. But I was watching that and I was thinking about this idea that we have basically created a generation of people. We've kind of told them and shamed them into thinking that they are just not capable of understanding these technologies. And in countries, I think where you're getting older and older versus younger and younger, there's this kind of flip, right? This flip has happened where not only do we prize youth and vigor and all that kind of thing, but we also think there's something about their brains that makes them more capable of understanding how a computer works or how an online, which is just absolute nonsense. That's just completely untrue. It makes no sense whatsoever. If anything, the logic that underlies how a lot of these systems work is something that age and experience actually are helpful in comprehending, right? Because you understand systems, you can be a systems thinker, the older that you get. So I find all of this kind of cultural framing of tech and our dependence on tech equally challenging to how complicated tech itself is, which is not to say that tech is not complicated. It is to some extent, but it's not, it's not unparsable by anyone, frankly. We hit on something there that I think is really, and I do want to get to another quick rant before we go, because I got to run this out, but a different topic. But you said systems thinking, which I think is really important here because to me, the biggest insight that I think I've had, and I really do believe that being in the blockchain space has allowed me to think about these things, about what is wrong with this web two world, these centralized platforms is the business model, right? Is the idea that there are literally incentives amongst everybody to keep drilling down on this model and building out essentially a system of data extraction, this abusive manipulative system that we have, because it pays, because everybody's locked into that system. And I think one of the things that I find talking to my daughter sometimes about this is that she knows there's something big, bad, and wrong about this. And yeah, she gets tech as well, and she's comfortable using a whole range of technology, but she doesn't have that economic understanding. I don't think of business models of thinking through what's driving Wall Street. What's driving capital? Where is the actual profit motive that's driving all this? That is definitely something that you acquire as an older person. Right. And so in some respects, what you're talking about as well is a system that prevented those of us who have that knowledge, that EQ, that broader knowledge of systems from being able to then apply it to this model. Oh, it's tech. I can't. I couldn't. You know what? How could I possibly? You would see the same old stuff that we've seen for years that drives business decisions that leads to these extractive, broken systems. That's kind of where the book's going to be all about, by the way. Anyway, look, the segue I'll try to pull off here is, of course, I thoroughly believe we need not just blockchain technology, but a range of other decentralizing mechanisms that will require perhaps some centralization as well, but to redesign this whole thing. And that's where the policy challenges come into place because we really need to be thinking creatively about enabling these technologies to develop in the right environment to emphasize what's leading centralization. And of course, you've been looking at different models around the world and the U .S. is really lagging. And I keep writing about it. And so now we've got Japan somehow strangely leading the way over here. Well, that was my original rant. So I just got back from family vacation in Japan, 11 out of 10 recommend. Phenomenal. It was really amazing, even with the really little kids. And part of the reason it was so incredible is just the infrastructure. And so not only I immediately noticed a couple of things since my last trip, which was in 2019, which is a work trip. A, the transit system has gotten even more efficient and effective, which is remarkable considering in the United States, our transit is just, I mean, infrastructure bill and all that, but that's a long time coming. And oh, my God, that's a whole battle. It's going to be fought and how that all gets implemented. But, you know, grateful for at least a step in the right direction. But also the accessibility, just the way that accessibility is modeled into urban design is something I just found remarkable. And I live in San Francisco, and we're pretty thoughtful about these things here. But it is my kids were asking, like, oh, why is there this thing there? Why is this thing over here? Why is there the sound or why is there this bumpy thing in the road or whatever it is? I was like, that's all for people who are visually impaired. And it's just built into urban design in a way that I found remarkable. I don't think I've seen that as prominently a feature of urban design anywhere else. My co -author Frank McCourt will be loving, I mean, he's going to get into this next episode. He'd be loving to hear this because this is this idea about building architecture with people in mind. Right. As opposed to the company that runs things. It's truly human centered. Right. And part of that look is the demographics in Japan. We talked about demographics. And the Internet was built for machines, not humans. This is one of the problems. That's exactly right. So looking at AI, for that matter, is built as a tool to help make machine learning. Right. So just put there, leave it there and say what you will. I think, though, that there is a demographic thing there. There are older people in Japan. It's an older demographic. There are fewer and fewer children being born in Japan to the point that the government's providing incentives for people to actually have more children to kind of try to alter and adjust the demographics. So there's a real practical need for this. But imagine if this were the default in everywhere in the world. It should be. There's really no reason. And I looked a little bit, because I'm a nerd, into the kind of cost structure behind all of that. And it's marginal. It's negligible if you do it from the beginning and do it intentionally. So I've always loved Japan. I used to run an office in Japan and have major Japanese colleagues in my last role. And we, of course, have engaged in Japan at CCI as well, because to your point that you were making earlier, it is quite robust and thoughtful in how it's thinking about crypto regulation in ways that I find very impressive, especially around NFTs and stablecoin as well. But regardless, I hadn't been there as a tourist and as a regular person in quite some time. And it was just a remarkable experience. And I can't say that I came back overly impressed by the American offerings in these areas like infrastructure and accessibility, which I have not been historically, but I was even more deeply unimpressed when I was faced with the parallel option of what could be, with a little bit of imagination, a little bit of political... I'd love to really understand some of the aspects of Japanese culture that makes this sort of instinctive recognition of building for use and for humans so automatic almost, because there's one little example that I just thought was so fascinating. If you walk through the streets of Tokyo and look down, I don't know if it's right across the city, but certainly in a number of them, you'll see manhole covers sometimes in the city, which one has its own little design with colors and artwork in it. Somebody decided that it would be of interest to the society to have artwork that was differentiated across each of the manhole covers. That's a unique thing to decide to do. And it's a lovely thing to decide to do. It brings a whole new experience to being walking outside and looking down and being part of the environment that you're in, right? It's fascinating. It's something really quite magical about that capacity. Look, Japan's got lots of problems as well. Yeah, no culture, no countries, but on an infrastructure level, it was really hard to argue with the manifestation of a vision that really did put people and their needs at the center of the plot. You know, there's a place called the Shibuya Crossing, which is the biggest intersection in the entire world. It's got the most foot traffic of any intersection, apparently, in the entire world. And so we, of course, my kids wanted to see that and they wanted to cross it multiple times and whatnot. It just functions. It just functions. And you look across a city like that and you think about what that would look like in many other cities in the world. And suffice to say, it's not the same experience. Just not the same experience, right? It's organized. Part of that's cultural. Part of that is a cultural politeness, which has its own challenges, right? I'm not here to say that. I'm not here to laud any particular aspect of that or anything else. I think there's individualism is not as highly prioritized that has its own challenges. But nevertheless, just from a straight up urban infrastructure perspective, it was pretty hard to argue with how it functioned, how it was maintained, how efficient it was. All of those things I found not only admirable, but really compelling. And so coming back, I have to say, you know, I'll be in D .C., New York and San Francisco and none of those cities, I'm sorry to say, have anything to compete with that with what you've got on offer. So there you have it. That was actually less of a rant and more of a kind of a bit of a wistful observation. Yeah. And a little bit of an acknowledgement, a love song, if you like, almost to Japan, which is I mustn't say I love the place, the food. I love going to those little cocktail bars where the guy will spend like, you know, 10 minutes gently stirring you a martini. There's something very, really unique about it. All right. I'll wrap up there. Hopefully, this meandering conversation has actually landed in a place that our listeners found useful. Hopefully, it'll lead to people thinking a little bit more about intentionality. When I think about Japanese culture, the number one thing that comes up to me is intentionality and intentionality and how we engage online, intentionality and how we engage with each other, intentionality and how we build in our infrastructure, both digitally and physical. All of those things, I think, can only benefit us as a society. And I just don't know that that is a, I think the intentionality is there in our digital environment based out of the US, but it is intentionality to your point around a particular business model, which is not one that necessarily puts people and their needs and their desires at the center of anything. Well, the connection between the two ideas is the physical infrastructure into Japan being built with its intentionality to humans. And we need to really start to think heavily about the infrastructure of the internet, our infrastructure digital being built with humans in mind. And that is a major challenge that every one of us needs to be confronting right now. Okay. Let's leave it at that. We didn't get to talk about Stan Bankman Friedman, talk about Bitcoin price. Those of you who are looking for that, read Coindesk. There's loads of great material on that, as always, because it's the one stop shop for all of this vital employment information. A little bit of a housekeeping note for everybody, since I am writing a book, just so you all know, those of you who are subscribers to my newsletter that comes to the same name, Money Reimagined, thank you for doing so. Unfortunately, I'm putting on a hiatus for a little while. So if you're not getting in there wondering where it is, it will be back. But I need to kind of get this book project done. The podcast will continue every week. Don't worry. This is Sheila and I doing this. We're never going to stop, Sheila. This will go on to where like, I don't know, 105 years old. I'll be dialing in from, you know, wherever I need to dial in from when I'm 80. We're hopefully not a Google Chrome problem at that time. But otherwise, yes, just stick with us. It's great to have you around. And if you do have anything to say about this episode or any other ones, of course, you can reach us at podcasts at coindesk .com. Subject line Money Reimagined and certainly, you know, tell it to all your friends, subscribe. You can listen to us weekly here on the Coindesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now. Bye. Bye.
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"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"So the internet went from being computers connected to now an internet of data and vast, vast troves of data that when Internet 2 started roughly 30 years ago there was no way to create a shared state of that data. No way to have a decentralized storage of that data. You needed intermediaries to hold the data. You know storage was becoming vastly more powerful and cheaper and prevalent so it wasn't like you or I couldn't store a lot of data and conceivably we could build a company to store all the data right. The difference was you couldn't store the data in a aggregated data which is almost unimaginable now the amount of that data. We've heard information that you know there's meta has at least 15,000 individual attributes on every individual you know their platform etc etc etc. So just imagine massive, massive amounts of data growing by huge amounts every day sitting in the server farms in on the servers and being stored by these platforms which in turn manipulate the data. So they apply algorithms to the data to optimize for whatever they've decided to optimize for. That's where the internet went off the rails because it was this idea of surveilling people 24-7 and targeting them and turning the economy into a so-called both an attention economy and a surveillance economy where that data was you heard the privileged few companies had control of the data of the storage capabilities and we didn't have the capability to store data in a decentralized way. So now there's multiple ways to store data in what's called a shared state, universal shared state where everybody you don't need a big player to hold all this data. The data it can be in shared state which means now everybody can have access to the data. It gives everybody the opportunity to build in this new world and have access to the data and therefore the network effect and so on and so forth but on a permissioned basis. The emergence of artificial intelligence and specifically the large language models that OpenAI and others are now pushing out into the wild makes this issue all the more urgent. We are at an inflection point. Do we double down on this centralized data control system as AI grows exponentially or do we break up the power of the feudal data lords before it's too late? Here's Frank on this LLM moment. Again apologies for the background noise. These large language models are ingesting all the data, all the content, all the IP, all the works of humanity. So think about this logically for a second. These machines are ingesting all of human creativity right with no attribution, with no consideration for whose labor or thought capital or innovation or creativity but it's not just a film or a piece of music or an important book. It's also people's social graphs and that I think is a fundamentally important breakthrough in this that has been written in all of the films that have been created and all of the valuable information, encyclopedias, etc. They've been read into computers a long time ago. What is the active data in the world right now that's being created every day is being created to a large extent on social media platforms, on shopping platforms, on search platforms, on YouTube, on TikTok, etc. That information is our information. It's information that belongs to individuals. We need to get to the bottom of just what percent of data that goes into these large language models is coming from social media but I've heard that already it's at 50% is our social graphs, our information and I would imagine that that number will increase over time because the amount of information that individuals are creating when you connect billions of people is accelerating at a far faster pace than somebody can write a book and I think that that number is just going to increase more and more. So what is going to be driving these large language models? Of course it's going to be a famous book written by da Vinci or a philosopher or a scientist or a renaissance person in terms of a renaissance man, meaning someone who's a big thinker. Einstein's theory of relativity is all of that stuff gets ingested but so doesn't John Loeffler's social graph and Michael Casey's social graph and all the articles he's written. All of this stuff is hoovered up, sucked up indiscriminately and large language models are, we think of artificial intelligence, well algorithms are artificial intelligence. Algorithms are machine learning, right? That's what they are. They're another name, it's another name for artificial intelligence. So it's not like artificial intelligence hasn't been around for a long time. It has. What's different is with ChatGPT and so on and so forth is that it's been now put in the hands of millions of individuals. So not only are these big companies ingesting the material and profiting from it because they're creating new search engines and they're creating new new products like ChatGPT and so forth, but now individuals are using the information created by humanity for their own sake, all right? So they can copy some, you know, use ChatGPT to produce something that is now they're claiming is their IP. This is a massive disruption of our whole legal system around, you know, who owns what in terms of IP, our copyright laws and all of our IP laws and so on and so forth. So this technology has just, is racing along without any regard to a set of norms and rules and laws and behaviors that are inherently important to a legal system that's he's for what will come with Frank McCourt's and my forthcoming book. More to come on that in the months ahead. That's all for this episode of Money Reimagined. Listen to us weekly on the CD podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts. We would love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. You can email us at podcast.coindesk.com, subject line Money Reimagined. I'll catch you next week when Sheila is back with me. Bye for now. Bye.
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"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"You're listening to CoinDesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. Well, this week I'm on my lonesome as my co-host Sheila Warren is on a well-earned family vacation. We're also doing something a little different as we'll be playing a few recordings of a conversation that I had with the businessman Frank McCourt at his home in Cape Cod this week as part of a book project that he and I are working on. Frank is a construction magnate, the former owner of the LA Dodgers and now of the French football club Olympique de Marseille, but more importantly he is the founder of Project Liberty, a bold, urgent initiative to fix a broken internet. A system that under the model of Web 2 that you've heard Sheila and I talk about so often has made us all subjects, serfs if you will, to a small data and rule our online lives. Our book will dive into that problem and explore solutions for how to fix it and restore a sense of agency, of citizenship in the internet age. From our wide ranging discussions this week I thought as a tease to some of the concepts we're grappling with in that book for which you'll have to wait for its publication, I'd break out some remarks that Frank made over lunch at the problem of centralized storage and the power that has given to the big platforms after the Internet's data became the most valuable commodity of all. Here he is explaining how this problem began and how now with the rise of decentralized storage solutions in the Web 3 era we might escape from it. Apologies for the chink of cutlery on China and the tapping of my keyboard in the background it's all part of this informal discussion.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Empowering Tomorrow's Internet | The Massive Disruption of AI in a Changing Data Landscape With Frank McCourt
"You're listening to CoinDesk's Money Reimagined with Michael Casey and Sheila Warren. Hello and welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Michael Casey. Well, this week I'm on my lonesome as my co -host Sheila Warren is on a well -earned family vacation. We're also doing something a little different as we'll be playing a few recordings of a conversation that I had with the businessman Frank McCourt at his home in Cape Cod this week as part of a book project that he and I are working on. Frank is a construction magnate, the former owner of the LA Dodgers and now of the French football club Olympique de Marseille, but more importantly he is the founder of Project Liberty, a bold, urgent initiative to fix a broken internet. A system that under the model of Web 2 that you've heard Sheila and I talk about so often has made us all subjects, serfs if you will, to a small data and rule our online lives. Our book will dive into that problem and explore solutions for how to fix it and restore a sense of agency, of citizenship in the internet age. From our wide ranging discussions this week I thought as a tease to some of the concepts we're grappling with in that book for which you'll have to wait for its publication, I'd break out some remarks that Frank made over lunch at the problem of centralized storage and the power that has given to the big platforms after the Internet's data became the most valuable commodity of all. Here he is explaining how this problem began and how now with the rise of decentralized storage solutions in the Web 3 era we might escape from it. Apologies for the chink of cutlery on China and the tapping of my keyboard in the background it's all part of this informal discussion.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Money is changing, both in form and function. Money Reimagined is about the changing nature of money, digital currencies, and various topics related to finance, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and more. Michael Casey and Sheila Warren walk us through the dynamic and evolving nature of the global economy and the implications for businesses, governments, and individuals as they must adapt to new payment methods and technologies. Welcome to Money Reimagined. Welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren, a reminder to listen to us weekly on the CoinDesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. Email us at podcasts at coindesk.com, subject line Money Reimagined. This week, you've got Michael and I doing one of our riffs on the Week in Review and what's happening in the crypto ecosystem. It's been a wild week with tremendous activity coming out of Congress, United States. We also had the launch of FedNow. We also have movement on some of the cases that have been making their way through the courts. Michael, where should we start? Well, look, they're all sort of much less in a way. They all get to this question about policy and regulation and government involvement in the crypto space, FedNow being obviously the project for faster payments launched by the Federal Reserve. Let's go to your wheelhouse. Let's look at those bills that have come, making some progress now, a couple of them in the House. It feels like the very fact that it's happening is good. There is some degree of consensus. I think it was the broad crypto bill, the one that's got two committees that had six Democrats vote for it. People seemed very celebratory that there was this, that the six of them gave it this bipartisan feel. It speaks to our times that that's considered a win, right? Wow, six people, right? Well, here's my take, to your point. Here's my take on the thread that connects FedNow and these bills. In the context of the United States, these are huge things. I don't want to in any way discount that. The fact that comprehensive legislation on regulation of an entire asset class coming out of the House Ag and Federal Services Committee together, it's just a gigantic deal. And yes, six votes is six votes, but I mean, six votes by Democrats in a time when politics in the United States is so partisan is a big deal. And I think we should recognize, yeah, exactly. But it's a big deal in the context of, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. And then similarly, FedNow is a big deal in the United States. It is huge that we're going to have real time settlement. But when you zoom out even a little bit in the context of the world, you know, and so we can talk at length, I'm sure. It's not the innovation the U.S. thinks it is if you talk to most other countries in the world. Anywhere else in the world, you can pretty easily move your money from somebody else's bank and pay with your phone and whatever, and it's all done through a faster payment system that integrates, you know, banks on a now basis. That's right. And then similarly, the comprehensive digital assets regime, I mean, well, we already have that in other places. We have MICA, we have the MAS and their rules, right? So, yay, the U.S., yay, you know, but it's also kind of like, you know, so just depends on what you're taking on the conversation. Yeah. The FedNow one is the one that's really, I mean, talk about that taking a long time. I suppose I'd want to know why that in particular has taken so long, right? Because this isn't even a particularly contentious issue. I tell you, I have no idea. You know, it's just it's a plumbing issue. It means that the Fed had to, you know, upgrade its own Fedwire technology, I presume. But ultimately, this is just something that meant that you had to upgrade systems amongst a bunch of banks and obviously at the Federal Reserve itself, whereas the crypto stuff is all about, you know, politics and division, right? So I often wonder whether one of the biggest issues with the United States generally in the world of money, and I think it manifests as both political and as technical, is that just it's been so entrenched. Like, I think of the dollar and the dominance of the dollar almost as the curse of the incumbent in the sense that big lumbering monopolies do not make change quickly because they're sitting on this cash cow. And in a way, being the world's reserve currency manager is the equivalent of that in the world of money. So the sort of like the motive, the driving need to innovate, the competitive pressure is not there if you're just standard oil and you just sit in the middle of every oil deal, right? I just think there's a parallel there. And it may be one way to draw comparisons to both sort of legislative inertia or just simply slowness and these sorts of technological changes. In concert with that, of course, is this the deep political divide and the fact that it's like quite a dysfunctional political system. So I think these two factors probably come into play a little bit. But I don't know if I'm maybe making a leap with my monopoly comparison there. I think it comes back in my mind fundamentally to the role that the U.S. government sees itself playing in the world economy.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
A highlight from MONEY REIMAGINED: Twitterverse, Now X in Chaos as Crypto Regulation Heats Up!
"Money is changing, both in form and function. Money Reimagined is about the changing nature of money, digital currencies, and various topics related to finance, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and more. Michael Casey and Sheila Warren walk us through the dynamic and evolving nature of the global economy and the implications for businesses, governments, and individuals as they must adapt to new payment methods and technologies. Welcome to Money Reimagined. Welcome to Money Reimagined. I'm Sheila Warren, a reminder to listen to us weekly on the CoinDesk Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. And we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you think. Email us at podcasts at coindesk .com, subject line Money Reimagined. This week, you've got Michael and I doing one of our riffs on the Week in Review and what's happening in the crypto ecosystem. It's been a wild week with tremendous activity coming out of Congress, United States. We also had the launch of FedNow. We also have movement on some of the cases that have been making their way through the courts. Michael, where should we start? Well, look, they're all sort of much less in a way. They all get to this question about policy and regulation and government involvement in the crypto space, FedNow being obviously the project for faster payments launched by the Federal Reserve. Let's go to your wheelhouse. Let's look at those bills that have come, making some progress now, a couple of them in the House. It feels like the very fact that it's happening is good. There is some degree of consensus. I think it was the broad crypto bill, the one that's got two committees that had six Democrats vote for it. People seemed very celebratory that there was this, that the six of them gave it this bipartisan feel. It speaks to our times that that's considered a win, right? Wow, six people, right? Well, here's my take, to your point. Here's my take on the thread that connects FedNow and these bills. In the context of the United States, these are huge things. I don't want to in any way discount that. The fact that comprehensive legislation on regulation of an entire asset class coming out of the House Ag and Federal Services Committee together, it's just a gigantic deal. And yes, six votes is six votes, but I mean, six votes by Democrats in a time when politics in the United States is so partisan is a big deal. And I think we should recognize, yeah, exactly. But it's a big deal in the context of, yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. And then similarly, FedNow is a big deal in the United States. It is huge that we're going to have real time settlement. But when you zoom out even a little bit in the context of the world, you know, and so we can talk at length, I'm sure. It's not the innovation the U .S. thinks it is if you talk to most other countries in the world. Anywhere else in the world, you can pretty easily move your money from somebody else's bank and pay with your phone and whatever, and it's all done through a faster payment system that integrates, you know, banks on a now basis. That's right. And then similarly, the comprehensive digital assets regime, I mean, well, we already have that in other places. We have MICA, we have the MAS and their rules, right? So, yay, the U .S., yay, you know, but it's also kind of like, you know, so just depends on what you're taking on the conversation. Yeah. The FedNow one is the one that's really, I mean, talk about that taking a long time. I suppose I'd want to know why that in particular has taken so long, right? Because this isn't even a particularly contentious issue. I tell you, I have no idea. You know, it's just it's a plumbing issue. It means that the Fed had to, you know, upgrade its own Fedwire technology, I presume. But ultimately, this is just something that meant that you had to upgrade systems amongst a bunch of banks and obviously at the Federal Reserve itself, whereas the crypto stuff is all about, you know, politics and division, right? So I often wonder whether one of the biggest issues with the United States generally in the world of money, and I think it manifests as both political and as technical, is that just it's been so entrenched. Like, I think of the dollar and the dominance of the dollar almost as the curse of the incumbent in the sense that big lumbering monopolies do not make change quickly because they're sitting on this cash cow. And in a way, being the world's reserve currency manager is the equivalent of that in the world of money. So the sort of like the motive, the driving need to innovate, the competitive pressure is not there if you're just standard oil and you just sit in the middle of every oil deal, right? I just think there's a parallel there. And it may be one way to draw comparisons to both sort of legislative inertia or just simply slowness and these sorts of technological changes. In concert with that, of course, is this the deep political divide and the fact that it's like quite a dysfunctional political system. So I think these two factors probably come into play a little bit. But I don't know if I'm maybe making a leap with my monopoly comparison there. I think it comes back in my mind fundamentally to the role that the U .S. government sees itself playing in the world economy.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"Well, we're going to have to wrap, but I certainly hope our listeners take away that there are opportunities for a variety of different jobs or economic development to be a priority at various places in the industry and more generally. And I think when tech started, people didn't foresee that some of the biggest employers in tech and as much as Michael and I have expressed, you know, our view is repeatedly on the show about the challenges of Web 2. There's no question they are massive employers across a wide variety of skill sets, geographies and globally. And the same thing is true of entertainment industry. We're seeing a strike that's happening right now and the effects on workers that engage have nothing to do with content creation or writing or production or anything like that. But our security, right, are the people who are providing food services, things like this. There are huge knock on effects across a gigantic swath of the community. And those who are hurt the most are often those, to your point, Adrienne, that are the least able to create fungibility of their skill sets and are not even the ones that are necessarily in the middle of a fight at any given moment. So with that, we do have to wrap. But thank you so much, Adrienne Hale from Foundry Digital for joining us today for a provocative conversation. As always, my co -host Michael Casey and to all of you, our listeners, come back next week for another episode of Money Reimagined. You've been listening to Money Reimagined. This episode has been produced and edited by Michelle Musso. Our executive producer is Jared Swartz. Our theme song is Aida by Neon Beach. Download wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. If you have any questions or comments, we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to us at podcasts at coindesk .com. Subject line Money Reimagined. Or you can reach out to me directly at Michelle with one L at coindesk .com. Thanks for listening.
The Breakdown
Bitcoin's New Governance Challenge
"All right, Friends, well, as it is Bitcoin conference week, I thought why not do an LRS all focused on Bitcoin. So today we have two essays both sort of grounded in the recent feast bikes and both really focused on what happens next and more specifically what sort of additional emphasis on layer twos we might need as a Bitcoin community. The first piece was written by coin desk Michael Casey and is called frogs, fevers and fees, Bitcoin's new governance challenge. Michael Wright's this is why we can't have nice things. Just when we thought we'd learned our lessons from the blow ups of FTX, three arrows capital, Celsius at all, meme coin fever strikes again. Crazy crypto casinos are back. People are making ridiculous gobs of money from tokens based on a frog image, while others stand to lose massively as a rational bidding takes hold. At this time, the fever is not only infecting greedy human minds, but messing with the functioning of the most valuable blockchain in the world. The ability to create tokens based on the new BRC 20 standard, which was enabled by Bitcoin's taproot upgrade, has fostered a variety of new Bitcoin based meme coins, many mimicking those released on other chains that have recently experienced wild price movements. This past week, for example, the Ethereum based Pepe coin rose almost 5 million %, then lost 50% off its highs. This follows the creation of the ordinals protocol, which gave rise to Bitcoin based data inscriptions that function as non fungible tokens. These use up a lot more data than a basic Bitcoin transaction, which means they're driving up Bitcoin fees. Bitcoin miners have lately been earning more from transaction fees than from their routine 6.25 Bitcoin block reward, and that means if you want to send a small amount of Bitcoin on chain, it won't be accepted or you'll have to pay a prohibitively exorbitant price for doing so. I can hear Elizabeth Warren's anti crypto army snickering. These crypto Bros are so obsessed with mooning into lambos, that they're destroying what they claim to be this technology's core purpose as a better form of money and value exchange.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
"michael casey" Discussed on CoinDesk Podcast Network
"The conference. We'll have some takeaways from what's gone on this week, but we're now just going to offer a bit of a preview, a bit of a taste of what's going on here down from the show floor. So consensus is always a bellwether of activity in the industry about how people are feeling and when we did the C 22 conference last year it was really at the very height of the market, everything was like going crazy. We've been preparing for months during a bull market and we had every single aspect of crypto here represented and lots and lots of money flying, lots of sponsorship, lots of events. This year is a bit more low key. It's kind of fewer sponsors. Peer events instill buzzing here, but it's definitely a different vibe. What are you picking up on, Danny? You know, I like the vibe. We're still filling out the entire Austin convention center. And this is not a small space, right? We don't need to have a sport court and another satellite here, another satellite there. And especially in the heat, right? It's too damn hot in Austin. Okay, someone else would do something about the weather. And because we can't do anything about the weather, we did move the conference earlier this year. So it's a little more tolerable and it's a little smaller. It's just makes it easier to navigate and to talk to people and to get to the ideas and the speakers and the panels that are really worth giving us some listen to here at consensus, right? I mean, you mentioned regulatory problems for the industry and for industry in general. I mean, that seems to be a big thing this year for people. Absolutely. There's not a better time to have consensus given everything that's going on in the regulatory space when it comes to crypto. And there are a lot of great conversations that are already happening. I think that overall, if there is one theme that I'm already picking up on, it's regulation. And we'll be able to see that in all different types of panels are going to be focusing on regulation. And this is worth noting that at a time when an industry and U.S. industry in general is calling for regulatory clarity. There is not a single member of the SEC here to provide any regulatory clarity and we certainly invited commissioners esteemed people like Gary gensler to come here and provide that regulatory clarity, but they declined that opportunity. So that's a notable. It's almost like trying to get a comment out of Twitter. When reporters reach out to Twitter these days, Twitter auto response with a poop emoji, you know, the SEC doesn't go quite that far, but just nearly just as bad with try to get a handle the SEC. They have no interest in joining us. Right. They're just sitting in their ivory tower at dishing out enforcement actions without providing any kind of notice or explanation of why that should be. So that's a really a problem for this industry. So if the SEC isn't here, whose president consensus that's contributing to this conversation on regulation. Plenty of people who have been called before the SEC are here. But none of them want to talk quite about that. Well, we do have some senators, so simply allow us to say from Wyoming, for instance, she's a big champion of crypto. So she's appearing on the main stage. And we have Patrick mchenry, who is the head of the financial services committee in the House. He's very influential person he is also here. He wears good bow ties. So I'm very excited for you. He was excellent both sides. He had a very good dress sense. But it is notable that there's no actual regulator here to provide any kind of explanation of what's going on. So Michael Casey started this year's conference with an anecdote from last year. He talked about how at the coin desk staff party after a very successful consensus. We were having fun, getting a little too drunk. You know, he's Australia. He always gets a little too drunk. But the shots fired, baby. But he knows it's true. We all know it's true. Anyway, he was talking about how we were all having a good time after the show. We all went to bed. We woke up to a notification on our phone. Celsius had stopped all withdrawals. And that really kicked off the second leg of the massive bear market that we saw last year that started with the death of Terra, then we had consensus, but then when Celsius kicked the bucket, that really accelerated the fall that continued to out block fight, took out three hours capital so we got all these big firms, ultimately we took out FTX, but it just fed into this very fast changing world where crypto was falling apart. And that is the background that we are now having this consensus and in April of 2023, things have fallen apart. Looking out into this environment, can you tell that the mood of the people is different? I think so. But on the other hand, I think the kind of panic that we saw at the back end of last year is maybe not so evident here. I think there has been some kind of stabilization going on in the last few months and maybe there's been some necessary kind of culling of the industry a little bit where we've seen the companies that are really here for the long term that really have treasuries and really sort of banks and reserves during the good times are still surviving. And then some of the kind of fly by night operators who are frankly not here for the long haul have dropped away and maybe that's not such a bad thing. What do you think? Yeah, well, first of all, Danny, I want to bring back to
The Breakdown
Why We'll Remember This Banking Crisis As a Turning Point for Bitcoin
"Going to kick this off with another piece from Michael Casey from coin desk called this crisis will define the future of money. I think the title of the piece is pretty self explanatory, so let's dive in. Michael Wright's ten years ago, a strange new digital currency called Bitcoin caught my attention for the first time as its price surged during the Cyprus banking crisis. Local authorities had infuriated Cypriots by slapping a 10% tax on withdrawals, unwittingly encouraging some to warm to the idea of bankless digital money. I'm not alone in seeing parallels between the past week's events. Again, Bitcoin's prices rallied on speculation that stress among U.S. and European banks will open people's eyes to the leading cryptocurrency censorship resistant, intermediary free qualities. But if this is Bitcoin's cypress moment, the context is very different from 2013, with crypto now embedded in public consciousness, negatively mostly, the industry faces its biggest ever test, one that involves an intensified struggle with the financial establishment. The community now has a narrow opportunity to seize the day and define the future of money. Echoes of 2008, 2009. Recall that the Bitcoin blockchain was born out of the chaos of the 2008 2009 financial crisis, with Satoshi Nakamoto's immortal timestamp on January 3rd, 2009, inscribing a headline from that day's London times. Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks. That crisis highlighted how our dependence on banks to run the plumbing of our money and payments leaves the entire economy vulnerable to mismatches and banks investments in liabilities, which can undermine their ability to honor deposits, and it showed how the largest banks whose interwoven credit exposure create systemic risk exploited their too big to fail status. The idea that governments would always bail them out to protect the economy, to place asymmetric high return risky bets. It showed how Wall Street and other financial centers in effect hold our democracy's hostage. Now with the collapse of three high profile banks, hundreds of regional banks facing worrying outflows, the U.S. Federal Reserve creating a new backstop facility reportedly worth $2 trillion, and Switzerland's Central Bank bailing out credit suites to the tune of $54 billion, the echoes of that prior crisis are loud.
CoinDesk
First Mover Asia Solana in the Green After Weekend Deep Freeze
"1 a.m. Monday, February 27th, 2023. First mover Asia Solana in the green after weekend deep freeze. Also coin desk chief content officer Michael Casey considers why the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has overreached in its recent actions against crypto entities, and that the crypto industry must improve its lobbying efforts Bitcoin's price rises.
The Breakdown
Fighting Back Against Rogue Regulators
"All right, Friends, well, today we are really picking up on the theme of 2023 so far, which is as it turns out not just fallout from FTX, but specifically, the emergence of a dramatic regulatory battle around crypto in the United States. I think many of us felt that this was inevitable coming off of the events of last year, but it is playing out in very specific ways, which I think demands specific responses. We're going to read one essay in a couple of threads today, and we start with a piece by Michael Casey from coin desk called regulating crypto by enforcement and stealth will set the U.S. back. Michael writes, call me naive, but I've always resisted the conspiracy theory that the anti crypto stance adopted by certain U.S. regulators is meant to strangle this industry and protect the financial establishment it seeks to disrupt. I've preferred to see it as a wrong headed but well intended effort to protect consumers. Recent events have me wondering if something more sinister isn't afoot, and that maybe I am naive. First, all indications are that the securities and exchange commission will outright prohibit companies from providing staking services to retail customers in the U.S. products that give investors an opportunity to share and the token rewards that proof of stake blockchains delivered a validators. Following a hint from coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, that's such a band was coming, news broke that in response to an SEC lawsuit, coinbase competitor kraken is indefinitely abandoning the staking service it offered to U.S. customers and paying a $30 million fine. Second, per observations from castle island ventures general partner Nick Carter and blockchain association chief policy officer Jake stravinsky, and evident in other signs such as binance's problems with U.S. dollar bank transactions, it seems regulators are pushing U.S. banks to stop surfacing crypto companies. These latest moves will make it even harder for average U.S. citizens to participate in this industry. Limiting it to large institutional investors, while various innovative startups look to disrupt those same rent seeking intermediaries will struggle to access liquidity. It's hard to understand how these actions serve to protect consumers or further other policy objectives such as expanding financial inclusion. It feels as if government agents are deliberately trying to force this industry into the hands of Wall Street fat cats.
The Breakdown
Worldwide Grassroots Projects Can Lead Crypto Recovery
"We're going to start with a piece by Michael Casey, coin desk's chief content officer called worldwide grassroots projects can lead crypto recovery. The subheader reads crypto is not hurting lower income in marginalized communities, but instead providing them with new tools through innovative governance models and tokenomics to regain control from historically oppressive financial systems. During the House financial services committee's FTX hearings last month, representative Jesus Garcia, Democrat from Illinois, described crypto as an entire industry that thinks it's above the law. And then said something that irked me even more than that unhelpful opening generalization. Crypto companies quote are making money using one thing hype, Garcia said, and when hype runs out and ordinary investors especially late comers who are disproportionately low income black and Latino lose. Now it's true that many people of color bought crypto in recent years, and that by extension many have lost money on account of Celsius network, FTX, Voyager digital at all. But there's a subtext to Garcia's comment, whether or not he consciously intended it. That patronizingly paints certain communities in the U.S. and elsewhere as ill informed and vulnerable, denying them agency and blindly missing a bigger story of empowerment. Take a look at hundreds of grassroots crypto projects led by blacks and Latinos in the U.S., and at the many crypto based business models arising in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and you will find large swaths of human beings from income challenged. Marginalized or oppressed community seeking new ways to take charge of their lives. There's a reason why the top four positions in chain analysis activity and purchasing power weighted country ranking of per CAPiTA crypto adoption are occupied by Vietnam, the Philippines, Ukraine and India, and why the 6th through tenth position belonged to Pakistan, Brazil, Thailand, Russia and China. And according to a forthcoming report on black experiences in web three, from the crypto research and design lab cradle, there's also a reason why the 5th position is occupied by the U.S.. The only developed western country on the list. It's because of an outsized level of adoption among black Americans.
CoinDesk Podcast Network
Worldwide Grassroots Projects Can Lead Crypto Recovery
"We're going to start with a piece by Michael Casey, coin desk's chief content officer called worldwide grassroots projects can lead crypto recovery. The subheader reads crypto is not hurting lower income in marginalized communities, but instead providing them with new tools through innovative governance models and tokenomics to regain control from historically oppressive financial systems. During the House financial services committee's FTX hearings last month, representative Jesus Garcia, Democrat from Illinois, described crypto as an entire industry that thinks it's above the law. And then said something that irked me even more than that unhelpful opening generalization. Crypto companies quote are making money using one thing hype, Garcia said, and when hype runs out and ordinary investors especially late comers who are disproportionately low income black and Latino lose. Now it's true that many people of color bought crypto in recent years, and that by extension many have lost money on account of Celsius network, FTX, Voyager digital at all. But there's a subtext to Garcia's comment, whether or not he consciously intended it. That patronizingly paints certain communities in the U.S. and elsewhere as ill informed and vulnerable, denying them agency and blindly missing a bigger story of empowerment. Take a look at hundreds of grassroots crypto projects led by blacks and Latinos in the U.S., and at the many crypto based business models arising in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and you will find large swaths of human beings from income challenged. Marginalized or oppressed community seeking new ways to take charge of their lives. There's a reason why the top four positions in chain analysis activity and purchasing power weighted country ranking of per CAPiTA crypto adoption are occupied by Vietnam, the Philippines, Ukraine and India, and why the 6th through tenth position belonged to Pakistan, Brazil, Thailand, Russia and China. And according to a forthcoming report on black experiences in web three, from the crypto research and design lab cradle, there's also a reason why the 5th position is occupied by the U.S.. The only developed western country on the list. It's because of an outsized level of adoption among black Americans.
ESPN Chicago 1000 - WMVP
"michael casey" Discussed on ESPN Chicago 1000 - WMVP
"Or not. QB in the A F. C West will tell you why the Raiders shouldn't fall the dare car era in Vegas just yet. He shot Jamie Willens Uman six Eastern on ESPN radio. Yeah. Chicago's home for Sports is on twitch. See what we're up to Follow ESPN 1000, Chicago today. It's always tough to get the pain to find your friend and teammate. I don't know Gilbert. But it is my job to go in there and put his dreams on hold. We have something that I wanted him. He's gonna be award already. That's cool. I'm not talking about that. I'm a champion. He is a monster will strip you passed away? Pulls out his own teammate. I look into your statue of a very fast with a lot on the line. Brady's on gentleman. Well, welcome to the Oh Honeys, M. M S o Welcome back to the hell on the show. Right here on ESPN Radio were presented by progressive insurance We're getting you set for you have C 2 58. The action kicks off in about three hours less than three hours now on ESPN, plus 7 P.m. Eastern, to be exact. Main car 10 P.m. eastern on ESPN, plus Main event tomorrow, has been defending his UFC welterweight title against his former teammate Gilbert Burns. We've been with you for the past what two or so hours and we got an hour and a half left and we got a lot more to discuss. It's a solid 11 fight card. You got the main event you got Macy Barbara, returning after a 13 month layoff. Her first loss. A C L surgery going up against Alexa Grasso, Kelvin Gas alarm. One of against Ian. Hi, Nish. You've got Ricky Simone against Brian Kelleher. That should be a lot of fun as well. So a little something for everyone tonight But with the welterweight division in focus, I thought would be really interesting to talk to our next guest because we found out a couple of days ago. Unfortunately, one of the most anticipated fights of 2020 and then 2021. Leon Edwards. One of the best welterweights in the world. Comes out Sharma of one of the stars of 2020 breakout stars of 2020 Thistle fight they've tried to make now three times has been canceled once again. It was supposed to happen. March 13th. Potential title implications. We find out that harm such knives still battling the after effects of covert 19. His coach. Telling a website recently front kick He thought he was going to die at home that your mind was going to die that his lungs haven't recovered yet. Serious stuff. Scary stuff. So where does Leon Edwards go from here? What is what is it was Mina birds fighting for Who are they fighting to face next? What is the winner gets next? It's a mess of a situation of 1 70. So that further ado let's go to Ireland. Let's go to Dublin. Let's talk to one of my favorite people in the sport. A man who covers the sport and in particular European. Mm, a better than anyone, the one and only Pizza. Carol joining us pizza. How are you? Great. What an honor. It is to be on this show a real star studded lineup. I'm very proud to be here. You're killing her ambition all the way over in the emerald. Also a pleasure to be here. I'm so much money. Thank you, Petey Petey, a member of the BBC squad. MME on Point. Does some work for BT Sport. We work together. Then they fighting. He's joining us down the Goodyear Hotline. Pizza. Big question is, what do you do with Leon Edwards? You've talked to him. So many times over the years would've frustrating almost two years now. It's been for this man. Yes, and fought since July of 2019. Quite frankly, I'm tired of talking about his demise and all his bad luck. What do you do with the other words at this point? What did you say? Look, we're nothing on the daughter Two years since we saw him last on What's crazy to me? Ariel is we have to go through this whole Rick Lamarr rigmarole of getting the homes that you, Moya Boy booked. Never. Certainly it's important for the tour time on that we're talking about call be covered them very really, on Edward's a point that he was calling for all these years, and now all of a sudden it's presented to it. It just feels crazy to the agent. It doesn't feel right. What's happening. And of you said, And you're on the show The fact that called me and Hari mas Vidal or in a negotiation bottle at the moment. It just doesn't sit, right. I mean, I just don't see Leon coming away. But one of these big names we see at the moment we see lady I was talking to him here. Dana talking? No, Colby, but I feel like you know, if anything now it's probably gonna be the Stephen wonderfully. Thompson point Who's a great fighter. Don't get me wrong, but that's something that Leon hasn't wanted are getting one to take care of the year and last year, so I don't know. It seems like it's gonna be even more frustrating Enforcing for Leon, who has been you know, two years on the sidelines coming up on it very hard situation for him, But I'm such a Moya. I'm very worried about that. I felt in January when they read books this point, But it was wait. You already We know so little about over 19 of these complications are kept going like we had me on had lost a stone. In his battle with Kovar 19. And we're re booking before he felt it was too 85 Dion and there were times there with two ladies my hands up or they're very frightening details. American from that campus you mentioned just there in the end, brother. And for the American listeners. The stone is around 12 or so pounds so very significant. It's a mess of this situation, and here's what I think they should do and let me know what you think of this. I agree with you. They should have never delayed the fight. They shouldn't have delayed Leon's return to the U. S. C. He should've fought on January 20th against someone else. Maybe a Michael Casey, even in humanity just to fight to get a paycheck to get going again. At this point, they need to figure out a way to make Mas Vidal Covington. That's the fight. Everyone wants to see. Make that happen. I wonder boy. God bless him. We'll talk to him in about an hour. I wouldn't mind seeing that fight. But he could only return in May June per his management team because his hand is still injured from his win over Jefe..