A (4:11)

Colin, I've never wanted to subscribe to a substack quicker in my life than when I saw this. It's just, it's really well written and it's just an insane piece of gonzo journalism, really. I mean, you hope it's not gonzo because that implies that they're lying about what they're seeing or stretching the truth.

B (4:29)

They're just exaggerating.

A (4:31)

But the fact of the matter is, is it's, it's an incredible show of will and ingenuity on their end and gumption that they would send this guy, this polyglot, to the Strait of Hormuz to figure this out. And I just want to read this one excerpt and then we'll move on. I highly recommend y' all go look at the piece, give it a read, Throw them some bucks if you want to read it in full. Quote, if David Foster Wallace were alive today, he'd be reporting from the bar in a beachside town on the Omani coast, taking notes on a napkin about the particular quality of silence in 100 room hotel with three guests watching tankers drift towards but never quite reach the Strait of Hormuz. That's our inspiration here. If DFW is also concerned with finding Alpha, there's also this really funny excerpt that Geiger Capital tweeted about where he's getting searched by some authorities there. They're asking him questions about why he's there and he tries to play like the dumb American tourists and say that he only speaks English or the dumb English speaking tourists. And as he walks up to them and says, hi, I speak English, the receptionist at the hotel that he was staying at looks at the officials and says, this guy was speaking perfect Arabic to me the other day. There's no hype in plain sight over in the Strait of Hormuz. Fear and loathing in the Persian Peninsula. Okay, I think that does it for the banter for this. As we get this kicked off now, we will move on to our first story of the day, which actually happened mid last week. We don't really cover things outside of Bitcoin as much here, so it kind of flew over or under the radar for us. But we picked it up today because it plays on a theme that we've reported on over the last year here, and that's North Korean hackers getting their hands into the coffers of Western crypto projects. This is a Drift Protocol update about an incident, a hack that they suffered over the last week. CoinDesk and a bunch of other major publications reported on this. We're going to be going from the primary source here. Essentially what happened here though, is the Drift Protocol suffered a vulnerability that was the result of a socially engineered attack that took place over at least a year. So as I'm quoting here, quote, as the investigation of the attack occurring on April 1, 2026 continues alongside forensic partners, more details can now be shared about this attack vector and how the operation was staged. Drift is sharing this publicly because other teams in the ecosystem deserve to understand what this attack actually looked like and to protect themselves accordingly. This was not some sort of long ranged hack that we're used to seeing with some of these, with, you know, with defi protocols or other blockchains that have sometimes sketchy security, or if it's something like Ethereum, a bunch of, you know, a bunch of teams are building apps on top of it. All of those have their own specific vulnerabilities. Now, essentially what this was is as they detail here, this was an attack six months in the making where the Drift Protocol befriended or rather engaged in business relationships with some ostensible quant traders who wanted to use the platform. And what these quant traders did, they ended up investing a million dollars of their own capital, putting it into the Drift platform, and then they ended up building a, you know, trading apparatus software for the platform and sharing it with the Drift team. And then that ended up leading to this contingent of hackers to exploit a vulnerability in the Drift protocol. Quoting directly from the article here, from December 2025 through January 2026, they onboarded an ecosystem vault on Drift which required filling out a form with strategy details. They engaged in multiple contributions through multiple working sessions, asked detailed and informed product questions, and deposited over 1 million of their own capital. They built a functionally operational presence inside the Drift ecosystem deliberately and patiently throughout all of this. Links were shared for projects, tools and apps they claimed to be building, which was standard practice for adding trading firms. And then Fast forward to April 1st, there was an exploit and Drift ended up, ended up losing some funds as a result. They froze the, they froze the platform. They are no longer allowing trading, at least for right now, as they try to figure this out. And if I look up, let me, I'm looking at my notes right here. It was, the exploit was for 270 million and they believe it was a North Korea state linked group. As we know, the North Koreans are quite prolific in the realm of crypto hacking. We had Taylor Monahan of Metamask on I believe in January to discuss a phishing attack for Telegram accounts that ends, you know, the Lazarus group will end up calling you, requesting a meeting from a Telegram account that you've interacted with, from someone that you know, get you on a zoom call and get you to download malicious malware. And then they try to sweep your keys for anything hot that you have on your wallet. So North Koreans always kind of running around running amok in the realm of cyber security.

C (9:41)

Security. Yeah.

B (9:42)

And so like this would be differentiated from your standard Telegram zoom, like zoom call hack because they didn't get people to install a fake zoom. And this was a much more insidious year long plan where they had real people show up at conferences, build real trust, facetime with folks and then they, they utilize techniques which are not necessarily localized to just like defi or broader crypto risk. Like this is a type of attack that could happen anywhere, including Bitcoin because it's a very sophisticated social engineering attack because a lot of these protocols are held together in multisigs, like the permission is in some kind of multisig. And so they exploited a couple vulnerabilities, one of which was in non crypto related software, that being cursor and VS code, or cursor which is a fork of VS code. That particular vulnerability allows Basically people to install code on your machine that runs without your knowledge. You do that. They had one of these test flight apps was iPhone mobile development environments. Got some folks who had the multisigs, you know, multisig sitting.

D (11:01)

Yeah.

B (11:02)

The ability to sign for these protocols to install the software. And we're able to somehow use that to exploit the actual keys to the protocol, like to the. To the multi sig that. That runs the protocol. So like this just makes you terrified to use a computer. I think this also, you know, makes it even more. This is a huge warning for just even trusting people in person. You know, like I will say I'm bullish on small North American conferences, maybe like ours with a little more known folks because of just, you know, how do I. How do I put this politely? A lot of these North Koreans are trying to appear as if they're Japanese. And so that is a huge tactic to. To like gain trust as typically Japanese people. Don't scream like I might be possibly North Korean. And I. Yeah, this is a wild story. I think if you are. If you possess keys to any amount of like, you know, any important code, important things related to security, your own Bitcoin think you need to be totally paranoid right now because you are a target and it's not just somebody sending you a dumb link and you actually clicking on it over telegram. It is real people social engineering. You.

A (12:38)

I do think. I'm glad you hit on that. And then we'll close this. Charlie. That this, this was an incredibly labor intensive attack in the sense that they had to build these relationships. It's almost like something out of an espionage novel or a spy movie. Right. And you know, this is a. This is a mate Dex on Solana. Drift is. So it's like these are teams that are, you know, theoretically highly qualified and they're smart people. And the people that the. The North Koreans that ended up hacking them had verifiable employment histories. All of this other stuff that made them above that made them seem above board when they were talking with the Drift team. So it's very scary thing. And going back to what you said about North Koreans posing as Japanese. Guess US ghost faced over here on the west side of the world. Don't really know the difference. I'm trying to find,

B (13:29)

you know.

A (13:30)

Yeah. Start studying up on Asian phys. Physiognomy. Guys, it might save. It might. It might save your bags. All right. I think we need to.

B (13:37)

We need to move to the next segment before we totally cancel ourselves.

C (13:41)

Okay.

B (13:41)

Yeah, we got. Okay Instead of people stealing money, we're gonna talk about people giving away money. We've got absolute, very cool guy Matt o' Dell in the wings. I'll bring him up here. Matt, welcome to Block Space.

C (13:57)

Yeah, not North Korean.

A (14:02)

Can you verify by saying something mean about Kim Jong Un, please?

B (14:06)

Yeah, say something disparaging.

C (14:09)

He would. He can't fly an airplane. I don't know. He makes a lot of claims.

A (14:16)

Matt, good to see you as always, man. Welcome to the show.

C (14:19)

Likewise. Thank you for having me. I haven't had the pleasure of being on TVPN yet, so I feel like this is a good warm up.

B (14:28)

They got acquired. We're like TVPN lite. We're the tvp and you have at home. Um, okay, so we have you on because Open SATS just launched the 17th wave of grants right after you did 16, I think like a month or two ago. By my estimates, you guys are doing like, you put doing like 1 million a month out the door. Can you tell me about this latest cohort of grants?

C (14:53)

Yeah, I mean, just first off, real high level. We just keep shipping. Our team at Open SATS is fucking awesome. We're led by our fearless leader Gigi, who I had the pleasure of bringing into my web of trust many years ago. And I haven't let him go. So we are shipping right now open SATS501C3 nonprofit. We take zero cut of donations. In total, we've given out over 392 grants. Now that's over $33 million. So to your point, we're shipping about a million dollars worth of bitcoin every month to open source contributors. Probably the active runs right now is like a little under 200. So every month we're sending out 200 Bitcoin payments around the world, 40 plus countries. And we just announced our seventh wave of Bitcoin grants. I mean the big highlights for me, I'm very focused historically and currently I've been very focused on using bitcoin more privately. So I'm very excited that we're continuing our support of Pay Join. We helped bootstrap the Pay Join foundation itself so that they could hopefully be more self sustaining and not have to rely on us going forward. So that's been a massive success. I would love to see Pay Join added to more wallets and added to more exchanges. The cool part about Pay Join is you have a financial incentive to use bitcoin more privately. It's actually cheaper to use Pay Join. That's why we could see exchanges added Even though historically exchanges have shied away from anything privacy related. This is a cost saving measure. And then on the privacy front, we also had Join Market ng, which is a redesign of the OG join market client, which is the idea of coin joins without a centralized coordinator. The big thing that one of the big trade offs with that original join market is that it used IRC for comms. So this is using Noster for comms. And it's kind of cool just seeing the compounding effect of different freedom tech stacks, open, open protocols and how they can be used together to, you know, one plus one equals three, for instance.

B (17:02)

Yeah.

A (17:02)

And I was. Sorry Charlie, go ahead. I have one of the.

B (17:08)

Yeah. So I mean I look through every wave of obvious hats grants. You've been doing a lot of great privacy funding lately. I was looking into the Spectre wallet which seems to have done a lot of work. You guys did a nice grant inspector wallet. I'm kind of curious. Explain to me this because I are saying I can build a wallet just with like off the shelf hardware to sign my bitcoin transactions. Because this looks, look like a pretty cool project to me, Matt.

C (17:36)

Yeah, I mean so Spectre is like the granddaddy of these do it yourself, build your own basically hardware wallets or signers. Right. And it was part of the inspiration for the seed signer project as well. So seed signer is obviously another option. We also, in this grant wave we also funded Crux, which is another do it yourself signing project. And I mean to your earlier story, I think a lot of these issues get solved two ways. The quote unquote North Korean hacker issues. The first one is very much, you know, we. I think anyone who's been in the space for a while should be very grateful that we already have pretty established webs of trust and be very careful on who you add going forward. I mean it's like we're almost like, especially in the age of, of slopping and fake videos and everything online, it's going to be even harder I think to build credibility and reliability and trust in this space and outside the space. But the second piece is, is quite simple and that's, that's using cold storage for Bitcoin and keeping your bitcoin offline. It's something that we take very seriously at open sats. For instance, OpenSats could not run without a bitcoin standard. We run full bitcoin standard. We keep everything in multi sig. Not a single person has control over the funds. It has to be multiple people signing and Everyone is keeping their keys cold, offline and the beauty of that is if your computer's compromised, your keys are still offline. So they might compromise your emails, they might compromise everything else, but they're not going to compromise the treasury, whether that's your personal funds or whether that's corporate Treasury. And so we take that very seriously. I think there's a lot of solid commercial products in the space. I personally love cold card. My investment fund is the only external investor in cold card. My family relies on, my projects rely on it. But in a lot of situations you can't get your hands on one of these purpose built devices and I like to my other one. One of the other things that I love is, is firearms and training with firearms and I think that's a good example. It's like if you can go out and buy an hk, go out and buy an hk super reliable. It's, it's incredibly well designed. It is very hard to to it up. But if you can't then you have 3D printed firearms. And that's kind of where I see these signers. There are a break glass emergency type of situation. If you're in a country where you can't obtain the pre builts or if the regulatory environment gets worse, or if you don't want to be known to have bought a hardware wallet, then you have these available to you. And it's pretty great that in the bitcoin space we see so many different projects working along those lines.

A (20:31)

Matt, I want to zoom back out on open sats as an organization and specifically touch on where you all get your funding from. So I know Jack Dorsey's been a prolific donator to the project. What is your, the typical donor profile though for an open sats donor? Are we talking about individuals, companies, institutions?

C (20:51)

So it's actually kind of wild. I mean we're bitcoin first, right? So we have a lightning address and we have a node pub key. So a lot of podcasts give us podcast splits. Like if you're like streaming sats to your favorite podcast, like we're just getting sats, a lot of people will zap us or you know, add the lightning address to different schemes to automatically send bitcoin so our number of total donors and also just it's as bitcoiners. It's very easy to underappreciate this. We accept bitcoin or dollars and if you send US dollars then we automatically convert it into bitcoin. We have a very simple treasury strategy, just 100% Bitcoin but if you donate bitcoin, you can donate anonymously or get a tax deduction. And that's kind of. I don't think people appreciate that some random person can go to our website, open our BTC pay server and send us $500,000 anonymously is a wild concept. So we have, I don't know, probably close to 10,000 individual separate donors, which is a really cool thing to see. But in practice, in terms of like actual amount of funding, it's a smaller and much, much smaller subset. And so you mentioned Jack. Jack was the big one. I mean, he seeded us with $31 million over two donations, 10 million first. Then after a year he's like, okay, these guys are actually doing good things and gave us another 21 million, no strings attached. Obviously, we put that all into bitcoin. You can look back on the announcements. The timing was quite great. The treasury is quite flush with funds right now. And I've been trying to. I'm a volunteer. I make no money off of this. I'm the main fundraiser for open sats. So the big thing for me right now is trying to get reoccurring corporate and individual. So we have the ability for individuals to give monthly on the site. Obviously bitcoin doesn't have subscriptions, so that is a fiat product. You put in your debit card or credit card and it just will automatically send us $50 a month. And you can see how that would scale really well. Like if we had 100,000 bitcoiners all giving $50 a month, then we have actual sustainable cash flow we can count on. And then the second piece is just reoccurring donations with companies that operate in the space. And that's been harder. We haven't seen the kind of support that I've been hoping for. But the two big ones that I'd highlight is bitwise, which is they came out strong. The only ETF provider to provide us funding. And I really like how they do it. It's a percentage of profits, so 10 of profit every year they give to us. So we kind of scale with them and I don't have to keep asking for donations. And then the other one, which was kind of cool, was steak and shake. They just, it's, it's small amounts, but they're giving us 21 sats per. They're giving us 210 sats per burger that they sell, which is kind of cool because it's locked in on bitcoin terms, not on dollar terms per burger.

A (23:44)

That's purchased with Bitcoin?

C (23:46)

Yes.

A (23:46)

You're getting 210 sets.

B (23:48)

That's cool.

C (23:50)

It's like, it's little, but I like the concept. The concept is cool and so I would just like to see more of that just reoccurring donations. I think companies in the space do not appreciate the larger companies in the space do not appreciate how much of their indirect value stems from a proliferation of open source projects. And a lot of focus has been on protocol dev, but you see tons of projects on the side of the protocols that actually really make this technology more robust, more usable and create underlying demand for their corporate products. And as a result, they give back a little bit. It can really pay dividends for them going long term. Yeah.

B (24:32)

A lot of the big boys don't understand how much of the ecosystem is built on the backs of devs and people bootstrapping their work. We got a couple more questions. I am kind of curious. You guys probably get tons of inbound on people asking for money. How does the process work? Give me a little more insight than. Well, we just choose people we know because you probably get a lot of cold inbound and you got to do legwork on figuring out who these people are. Sometimes they want to be anonymous or pseudonymous. Like, how do you navigate that?

C (25:07)

Yeah, I mean, so first of all, it's not for the thin skinned. I think I've, I've gathered a large group of dedicated haters on the Internet and a significant portion of that is because they've been denied funding. Not all of them, but a lot of them is because they've been denied funding. And they never say, oh, I hate Odell because he denied me funding. They, they always make up some other reason. But you can, you can see the link. I can see the link because I know they applied. But to that point, I think over 2,000 applications we've gotten, so we've approved 392. We're probably like between 2,000 and 3,000 applications in total. We've gotten. I don't think it's easy for people to comprehend how many that is. It's significant and it shows that there's a lot of demand out there. And so we have a very simple process that was designed deliberately. When we got started. I, you know, historically I've thought a lot of charities are scams and I wanted to do something differently. And it seemed like we needed a more independent, more robust, broader kind of grant organization in the space. That's what was needed. Like there's, there's the brinks of the world and the chain codes of the world that are very focused, they're very deliberate, they do very that, you know, they're not funding that many people but they're funding them hard and supporting them hard. And it's mostly protocol dev focused stuff. But we needed to be broader. And the second piece was you saw, you see a lot of corruption in the charity space. So we have nine unpaid board members, I'm one of them. They all have established proof of works in the bitcoin space and reputation in the bitcoin space. Integrity is like the number one rubric for being selected for that. And so every grant requires five of nine votes. So when people come to me and they're like I have this project and this happens all the time, obviously this project I would love to get funded for open stats, I'm like directionally it makes sense, I think it will probably get funded, but even I can't tell if it's going to get funded or not. Because you have that threshold, you have that threshold that you need five of nine people. And the cool part about that is it means that corruption wise you basically need to corrupt five of the nine board members to do self dealing on grants. The negative means you're more likely to get not approved. But I think for the long term robustness of the org, it's better to lean in that direction than the opposite. But you know, have a bunch of like scammy things, get funded and then that sounds like a lot of work for volunteer board members. So we add another level of volunteers underneath us which are committee members and they have like kind of more topic focus. So like layer two, layer one, you know, we have these different sections, Noster for instance. And so the applications go through the committee, the committee has a non binding vote. If the committee approves it, then it goes to the board and then the board has final say.

B (28:11)

So I guess zooming out, you've been doing this for years. You are one of the primary advocates for people who've been in the space a long time, have bitcoin, remember where you came from and give back. But open SATS is just one group. You can't do everything and you can try to be broad focused, but there are still underfunded areas of bitcoin and bitcoin development and people building on bitcoin. What do you think some of the underfunded places in bitcoin might be, if any and what do you hope to see that look like in five years?

C (28:55)

So we have an initiative that we're calling internally let a thousand flowers bloom. And so basically we want to see more organizations focused on open source funding, but usually more focused aspects of it. Right. And so the Pay Join foundation was one example of that. Right. I think Cashew is pretty cool too. We did a lot of early funding with Cashew and so we helped Kali bootstrap the Open Cash Foundation. Right. And it just makes sense that, like, we are not subject matter experts on Cashew. Callie is and his team of people are. And so they should be focused on that and doing, you know, the most efficient grant giving in that space. And it allows us to scale better. So that's easier said than done. But we want, we want to see more of these organizations get bootstrapped, become sustainable on their own, not rely on open sats. I think that's the best way to scale. And I mean, another one that I would point out is there's a new organization called way, which I think is kind of fascinating. And the idea of that is it's run by Amidi, who's a former bitcoin developer. And the whole idea is to focus on developer burnout, because that's a very real issue. And that's another example where if you have a larger, broad global organization, we can't focus on something like Burnout. That's a very personal touch type of thing. It's very real and we have a few key devs that the whole system relies on. There's like that meme with the little block holding everything in and they're all burnt out. I'm burnt out. Many of us are burnt out. There's. There's a lot of exhaustion in the space. So it's cool to see someone focused on that.

B (30:44)

Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. Everyone go check out the open tats grants, read through their blog posts. Some of the best way to keep up with just what's going on. Matt, thank you so much for coming on the podcast finally. And we will see you in person either in Nashville or crossing paths at some bitcoin conference. Adios.

C (31:06)

Thank you guys. Cheers.

A (31:08)

See you, Matt. Have a good week, man.

B (31:10)

And now a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark. Before we have ben on.

A (31:15)

We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner. A publicly traded company with the largest operating ashrade powered entirely by self operated infrastructure across four states. This is our proof of work. We are setting the standard for what's next. Learn more about the intersection of energy and bitcoin@cleanspark.com Next we've got Ben Carman.

B (31:47)

Ben the car man coming up here. Let me bring him on up. Ben, welcome. Good morning. Welcome to Blockspace.

D (31:56)

Yeah, yeah. How's it going guys?

B (31:59)

Great, thank you so much. And I assume you're calling in from Austin, Texas, where the number of bit devs meetings going forward is going to decline.

D (32:09)

Yeah, we're in a bear market for bit debs now, I guess.

B (32:13)

Yeah. So what I see is that you and your co organizer Puck Burley announced a hiatus. Now whenever my favorite band like the Beatles or Rage against the Machine announce a hiatus, they don't come back. You know, maybe contextualize this for me. Like you guys been this for a long time, why the hiatus and are you ever going to come back?

D (32:41)

Yeah, there's a lot of things that came into this. I mean for one, we were the longest running bitcoin meetup in the world. Like we were the first to come back post Covid and then we never missed one since we were like five plus years streak. I had like a three year streak myself, so it was very long running. But in 21 we get meetups with one to 200 people and that was humongous. These days we're getting like 20ish people and artist engagement has gone down a ton where the only way we get people to participate in bit depths anymore is talking about filters or quantum. It's just like these are the things I don't want to be talking about. So that's one big reason. And then as well, it's like our pre and post bit devs like hangouts where everyone's just hanging out in the room talking. Everyone's just talking about AI. No one's like before be like, oh, can you explain this taproot thing to me? Or oh, this. What's bolt 12? You need to talk about that inside conversation now it's just like, dude, are you using cloud or Codex? And like, oh, I tried this thing out yesterday or I'm using Minimax for my open claw. These are the conversations we're having. And we just started up our own little private Austin AI meetup. So now we're just like, let's just focus on this. This is all we seemingly want to talk about right now. And we'll just focus on that. And then as well, it's like we've gotten pretty burnt out on the bit devs thing. It's been five years and as the engagement's gone down it's like, well, the incentive is less there.

A (34:16)

This is such a stark Contrast for me, compared to 2020, 2021. We were both on a few bitcoiner ski trips back then. Right. And it was really interesting because you had a lot of enthusiasm from people who had been around for a while and the newcomers for things like Taproot and for things like a lot of these technical advancements that were being discussed at the time. Do you think that this malaise is a temporary thing or do you think that this is here to stay and also reflective more of a kind of general cultural inertia that is in the bitcoin ecosystem currently?

D (34:54)

Yeah, I think there's two things. One, it's like, because every cycle we get like, oh, there's a whole new entrance and then they start coming to the meetups or whatever and know some previous epoch, like, they got rich enough, they stay at home all day. Now they don't need to worry about bitcoin all day. And I feel like that kind of didn't happen with this latest cycle where most of the new entrants were just like Wall street kind of people or people investing in microstrategy, not actually investing in bitcoin. So we didn't get a new set of plebs kind of thing. And so I think that was a big reason. And then as well, it's like, it kind of feels like we're reaching the end of bitcoin development where it's like, we haven't gotten any protocol changes since Taproot, like five years ago, and doesn't seem like we're getting anything anytime soon. All the narrative is either like mempool policy or Quantum, which are like, one's not really a protocol change. The other one is this ephemeral thing that may never happen. So it's like there's nothing really to focus on when we make our list. It's like, oh, we're talking about this topic we've talked about 10 times before. It's moved one step forward. But we're never really talking about like, oh, here's this cool new thing that's actually happening. It's like a lot of it's just like these ephemeral things that are just big projects that are minorly going to affect people. But it's not like, oh, you need to update your bitcoin node tomorrow because Taproot's activating. We don't have those kind of big events for people to come to the meetup of about anymore.

B (36:25)

I loved the Socratic seminar style of bit devs because I probably started paying attention to it. And going to regional bit Devs. Maybe in 21. I'm in Oklahoma, we don't have one. I'd love to start one, but time. It's a time issue. But I really like the format. I do kind of wonder. I invite you to reflect on do you think the future of. Organic bitcoin developers tinkering with the protocol, do you think that's going to change? Now that I see this happening across a lot of bit devs and organizers, there's a fatigue. The corpos are now the ones who have the most incentive to get good with. With bitcoin development, I don't know, what are your thoughts? Like, is, are we reaching the end of an era of like DIY cypherpunk, bitcoin pleb style development?

D (37:27)

I wouldn't say that. Like, I mean with AI now it's like anyone can be a bitcoin dev because it's like so easy to start making stuff now. Some of my friends are not like they're barely a dev and they're like, oh, I used to be in my own wallet over the weekend kind of thing. So I don't think that's totally going away. But yeah, I do think now that if we assume no more softwares or anything, the only real innovations happening in actual bitcoin development, that's not just making a new wallet with existing libraries, is you need a PhD to figure out how to do bit VM and zero knowledge proofs and all this stuff. So it's like for that there's 100 people on the planet maybe that can actually do that stuff. So I think in one regard, no, it's like, yeah, anyone can make their own wallet, do their own kind of project in that regard. But doing the actual bitcoin, Bitcoin development is getting a smaller and smaller field because just the barrier to entry is so high because we have to use these super complex systems now.

B (38:28)

So let's talk about what people are doing, which is AI. And it seems there's. If you're interested in bitcoin, you can apply that interest in emerging tech towards AI that is sniping a lot of people. Like, our coverage now has to be about AI and AI data centers. Just because there's so much interaction, I guess. Like, do you like, for me, like bitcoin was an inherently optimistic like project. Do you see that in AI on the ground? Like the people building with AI, Are they excited? Are they optimistic about the future? Do they see it as a similar type of freedom technology? Or is there a Different atmosphere around these conversations.

D (39:13)

Kind of, I'd say like AI kind of feels more like crypto than bitcoin. Or a lot of them are like, feels like a lot of people are seeing it as like, yes, it does have these potential positives. But they're also like this is going to make me rich versus if I go to bitcoin. That's the afterthoughts, more about freedom and stuff. So I do think the bitcoin narrative has always been more principled than this AI narrative. But what I find really compelling is just like AI is you can apply it to basically anything which is like bitcoin is like it's my money. And it's like, okay, how do I make a project this okay? Make a store that accepts payments and I use bitcoin. That's mostly it versus AI is just like a productivity tool. So literally everything you ever could do, it can be improved by AI. Whether it's running your fancy baseball team or managing your business or making a video game. It's all super doable with AI. So it's like the problem space, the total addressable market is way bigger because there's so much more stuff to do. Like for me and all my friends, we're just like, we're still doing bitcoin stuff basically 24 7. It's just like AI is our bitcoin stuff is our output while using AI versus someone else might be making a video game or something and that's like their output but it's all different. But the AI stuff covers everything so you can spend so much more time tinkering with it.

B (40:48)

So last question here is there's a lot of us, myself included, longtime bitcoin meetup organizers. We're still in the game. I still have that dog in me. I want to try to keep going. You have insights or lessons as being the longest running known bit devs, words of encouragement or just insights for people to keep their heads in the the game.

D (41:13)

And I guess I will say that all Austin meetups are ending. We still have a. There's also an Austin bitcoin club that's just like it's not technical. It's just like we hang out and talk about bitcoin. I guess this one we talked about AI at that meetup but previous ones have been about energy or mining. Talk about various topics like that. So it's not totally ending. But I think our biggest thing has always been like consistency. Like we're third Thursday every month no matter what. Like I think we only ever Moved it like once for the south by Southwest and otherwise it was just like every single time. And so that made it super easy. We're like a lot of people, they have their issue with their meetup. Like, oh, it's on meetup.com I have 50 RCPs. That means like 15 people will show up. We have the inverse problem where like 5 people would RCP and then 30 people would show up because everyone knew, like, it's on this day, I'll just show up. Like you didn't need the rsvp. So I think that helped us a lot is just having that consistency and having like a, a good meetup space to be able to do it. Otherwise it's just like keeping the like, you know, for us, like one of the reasons we want to shut down is just like we're so burnt down on this. I'm like, I feel like I'm going to do a disservice by like not being passionate about the subject anymore of like wanting to, you know, do do all the work for the bit dev. So I think that's really important is like having the passion to be able to actually run it and do it well. Because if you're not in it, then no one in the audience is going to be in it either and you're just wasting everyone's time. But yeah, I think those are our biggest things. It's like being super passionate and having that consistency where everyone just knew. Show up here at this time and you'll be ready.

B (42:58)

Last question. Kind of a curveball. You've had some of my favorite stacker news posts of all time. Do you have any of any other banger stacker news posts queued up or they're mulling around posting?

D (43:13)

I've been thinking about running one kind of related end of bitcoin development of if we don't get protocol changes, there's not much left to do Besides these fancy PhD things. But nothing in the works yet. Normally I'm a terrible writer. I'm super. I get distracted too easily so I end up like scrolling Twitter or just start working. So I need an AI has made that so much worse. So it's. It's hard to write sometimes, but maybe I should try to bring that out soon.

A (43:42)

But okay, actual last question. Because you mentioned there's nothing left to work on if we're not improving the protocol other than these academic kind of applications, right? And these kind of far flung ideas like ZK proofs on bitcoin, et cetera. Bit vm. I'm curious your take. You mentioned that we did not have. We haven't had any sort of protocol, major protocol upgrade since Taproot five years ago. We saw attempts to push CTV and opcat basically fall to the wayside. I think the big push was really, you could probably say 2023 and 2024 and then it's kind of, or rather, sorry, 2024 and into a little bit of 2025, but it really fell off after that. Do you think that pushes for things like CTV and opcat falling on their face kind of made a lot of bitcoin developers think twice about actually investing their time into something like this? Because it might not come to fruition.

D (44:39)

Yes and no. I mean, a lot of it I think is. Yeah, it's just like, yeah, I mean, if it's like, if there's some guy, guy in his basement being like, oh, I found the best new covenant proposal, it's time. It's like, you know, yeah, you would probably think twice. Like, I just saw those two guys fail. Like, why would I try? But I do think, like, it's not gone away. Like, Instagibs and Antoine have been working on their template hash proposal and that's like, just got merged into BIP Repo last week. And I think that's like, if we are gonna get covenants, it seems like it'll be that one. So I think, like, not all hope is lost, but it's just like, I don't know, like, I feel like that'd be like, you know, the core blessed, basically a covenant proposal. But it just seems like most of the community just hates Core nowadays, so it might not even matter. So we'll see. And I do think Too seems like bit 54 will happen, which is like the consensus cleanup, which is nice. It doesn't really solve any actionable things. Just like, oh, we fixed the bug, but that would be good as well. But yeah, I think. I think it is like mildly slowing it, but not enough to like, you know, nothing like, won't happen. Like, I don't think like the random guy in the basement making a common proposal would actually get activated anyways. Like, unless it was like, like, you know, we had ctv, which is like the most minimal version of a covenant. Like, you know, there's no. Someone's not going to like create some innovation that's like even more minimal. Like, that wasn't like the issue. It's more like sentiment around actually doing a software or not. Not really like the actual proposal.

B (46:18)

It seems like, well, maybe we will get French CTV as some of us call it template Hash. And yeah, we'll. Yeah, looking forward to. We actually have. I think there's a demo of the Time Warp or I'm sorry, the Poison block attack on testnet this Wednesday. So eyes on that. Maybe that'll scare some ecosystem actors into pushing to make GCC happen. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate this. And yeah, looking forward to bit devs coming back someday. Because I will say, while the Beatles never rejoined, Rage against the Machine did play a couple shows in the 2010s after their hiatus.

D (47:07)

I will be doing a bit that's in Vegas, so I guess it'll kind of come back immediately, but we'll see.

B (47:14)

Cool. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day.

D (47:16)

I see you guys.

A (47:18)

And with the dissolution of the Beatles, we got wings. So.

B (47:21)

Yeah. But then look what happened.

A (47:24)

Including the worst Christmas song of all time. Yeah, simply having a wonderful Christmas time.

B (47:29)

Speak for yourself, man. I like that's gonna. That's gonna split the podcast.

A (47:37)

All right, speaking of splitting, or rather rebranding, we've got a story on Keel Infrastructure formally known as Bit Farms. And that is the investment bank Keef, Bruyette and Woods KBW maintaining its price target on keel at $3. Now this comes just about a week after Keel completed its rebrand away from Bit Farms. Bit Farms released its end of year financials on March 31 and then it woke up the next day as a beautiful butterfly as Keel Infrastructure after the rebrand and redomiciling had been completed. So Keel had announced when it was bitform. This is getting confusing already. Keel, formerly known as Bit Farms, when it was Bit Farms announced it was going to be rebranding and also re domiciling into the United States, incorporating in Delaware. It completed that redomiciling and rebrand last week on April Fool's Day. Kind of a tough day for an announcement, but this was real. And since then KBW has released this price target saying that they they are keeping the price target at 3 bucks. Currently, keel is trading at $2.11. Quoting directly from the Block Space article here, the bank lowered its 2026 revenue expectations however to 156 million from a previous 234 million estimate due to reduced mining projections. Now Keel, like many of its peers, is transitioning to AI services. This will mean a wind down of roughly 14.8 exahashes of its Bitcoin mining fleet. So that we should assume, if not a shortfall, at least a reduction in their revenue throughout the rest of the year as they start to repurpose those data centers for AI workloads. Quoting again directly from the article, despite the lower estimates, KBW expressed confidence in the company's ability to fund 265 million in estimated capital expenditures without a new capital raise. This outlook is supported by 520 million in cash on its balance sheet and pending the completion of its sale of assets in Paraguay, Keel had signed away the has his brokering agreement to sell its bitcoin mines in Paraguay. I have not seen a press release confirming that that has been finalized. They did put out a press release in January that a deal had been signed, but I don't think that the money is at the bank yet. At least I did not see anything about that. It could be wrong. So please double check me on that. Now a few other things on this. I'll toss it to you Charlie I interviewed Ben Gagnon last week for a bonus episode that we should be publishing sometime this week. So if you're listening to this show today on Monday, April 6th or after we have it published, check the feed if you're interested in Keel because we should have been on there for a good 45 minute hour long interview about the rebrand and one of the things that he noted was they will be winding down the bulk of their bitcoin mining operations. But he said if I recall correctly, roughly four or five extra hashes will still be operational across Quebec and potentially I believe Scrubgrass I think he said as they focus on building out Panther Creek and Panther Creek in Illinois for their for their AI and HBC services, they will be looking at revamping Panther Creek. They will also be looking at revamping one of their other their Sharon site in Pennsylvania which is also coal fire plant that they purchased from Stronghold and Moses Lake which is in Washington I believe. Now Ben said, and I asked him about this on the podcast because they say in the press release for their Q or for their 2025 earnings quote, they are under active go to market processes at Panther Creek, Sharon and Moses Lake. I asked him what that means. They recently had zoning approved for the Panther Creek site which is a huge milestone for them. Once they have the zoning buttoned up for all of those sites and and you know rubber stamp a few more things with the bureaucracy in those states, they will be actively looking or they will be closer to announcing an actual partner for these sites, a hyperscaler or other neo cloud company that will lease them for AI workloads. So I asked Ben when Can we expect an announcement? You know, he deferred. He can't obviously, give a clean timeline for that. A clear timeline, he said, should be soon once they have all of this finished. Because, you know, a lesser doesn't want to sign the lease until they know that everything about the site is rubber stamped and approved. So all that being said, I think we should expect to see something substantial from Bit Farms over the course of 2026 for an AI tenant for these sites. Charlie tossing it to you?

B (52:35)

Yeah. So I don't have a lot of insight to their operations, but I can, as a vibes guy, comment on the rebrand. I don't want to glaze them too much, but the rebrand is clean. I'm a big critic of rebrands and I will say the Bit Farms, now that they've rebranded bitforms didn't have a very good logo. It kind of looked like a Microsoft Word Word thing you'd make from the 2000s. But keel is fresh. Their website, I mean, look at this thing. Their website has the cool, like, flowing scroller thing where you fly around, you see, like, their sites and, you know, they talk about their pipeline and you can even, like, look at, like, you know, actual site diagrams and it shows, you know, flyovers and how it looks very, very cool. So, yeah, the rebrand is clean. It's going to be hard for me not to call. Yeah, going to be hard for you not to.

A (53:31)

Yeah, yeah, it will be hard not to call them Bit Farms, but, yeah, you know, keel, backbone of a boat, the kind of structural integrity of the hole. And I just have to say this before we move on to our next story. And I had been on. We didn't get this on air, but he was interviewed by Bloomberg during, I think, the day of the rebrand and they were asking him about the name and one of the journalists look him in, look. Looks him dead in the eye and says, well, a keel is not very useful out of water, though, is it?

B (54:01)

I guess so, yeah.

A (54:03)

Substations aren't very useful without a power line. What are we. What are we talking about? What are we talking about here?

B (54:11)

Yeah, yeah.

A (54:12)

What?

B (54:12)

We need to get rid of all journalists. I'm just kidding.

A (54:15)

Except for you and me, we're journalists, corporate journalists. Maybe need to take a. A nice long walk, though, and think about things. All right, we'll leave that there and we'll move on to our next story. We've got a few smaller stories to close out the program today. This will be the second to last and just A quick note on this to a little Hopium maybe for those who are looking for it. Charles Schwab's Opens wait list for direct Bitcoin and ether trading targeting Q2 Limited launch this is coming from our friends at the Block Quote. Charles Schwab has confirmed it's on track to launch spot Bitcoin and ether trading in the first half of 2026 through a new quote Schwab's crypto end quote account offered via its banking subsidiary. The CEO Rick Worcester told Barron's in March that a limited rollout begins in Q2 with broader access to follow. There is currently a wait list. The service will be unavailable in New York and Louisiana. Sad, Louisiana. Kind of funny to be lumped there with New York. Fee structure and custody arrangements remain undisclosed. So this is the latest in TradFi's intersection with Bitcoin and Ethereum. And notably it is spot trading. It is not ETF trading. It is actual cold hard coins that Charles Schwab is opening up to its clients this year. And I just wanted to do some quick inventory to see where we are in terms of asset managers or financial planners in terms of offering something like this. Charles Schwab is one of the only mainstream traditional asset managers and brokers that is currently offering this. Morgan Stanley via E Trade, which it currently owns, is adding cryptocurrency trading sometime in 2026 as well. So be on the lookout for that. Fidelity has offered spot trading for Bitcoin and Ethereum since 2025. They're longtime allies of Bitcoin. Fidelity has had, you know, had a bitcoin mining, bitcoin mining arm back in the day. They have been long entrenched, I think probably the oldest ally that bitcoin has in Wall street for a traditional financial institution. And if you count these, I don't count these as traditional. Robinhood and interactive brokers offer crypto trading as well. I don't really consider them in the same class though. I expect a zoomer hopped up on Adderall who just got done, you know, doom scrolling tick tock for five hours to then go YOLO trade meme coins on Robin Hood. But that's not the same as Charles Schwab, which my uncle might use for his brokers. Right. And might use for financial planning. So I think it's just a different caliber. But it's interesting to see this pick up, you know, with Morgan Stanley coming in. Morgan Stanley also looking at launching a Bitcoin ETF as well, I believe. And so there's just A lot of news percolating under the surface for bitcoin's institutional adoption this year. I mean, you want to get bullish on it. It's hard, maybe with Bitcoin below 70k but still notable.

B (57:20)

Yeah, we need boomers to log into their Charles Schwab account, be able to buy bitcoin in order for us to go to a million dollars per btc. I think I'll toss it to you to do our friends@luvor ad read.

A (57:39)

Thank you. Yes. This show is brought to you by Luxor Commander. Bitcoin mining management software built for enterprise operation. Commander gives you real time fleet monitoring, bulk remote commands across your fleet and intelligent miner, which is an automated profitability engine that runs every five minutes, adjusting power settings to live hash rate and energy markets. ERCOT back tests show over 10% more profitability with Intelligent Mining versus Basic Binary Mining. Commander Pro is $100 per megawatt or 25 basis point pool fee. Roughly half the price of competitors. But you can try it free for 60 days. Get started at Luxor Tech Commander. That is L u x o r dot T e c H forward slash, C o m M a n D

B (58:31)

e R. And Commander is a really cool name for a product because you boot it up, you feel like a bomb ass commander. So I think our last story of the day is one for the plebs. This is a. We're going to throw a bone to the plebs. There was a miner which hit a solo block. So solo miner pockets over $200,000, otherwise known as 3.139 BTC. What does that mean? Well, here we did a little reporting on it this morning on block space, solo Bitcoin miner hits $210,000 jackpot with once in a lifetime win. So basically last week, last Thursday, a miner pointing to CK pool got hit a block. Now I'll entreat you if you're not familiar with the mechanics of this or what solo mining is. If you run a bitcoin mining data center, you have a bunch of these bitcoin mining machines and you basically pool them with other data centers. And if one of your machines hits a block, you split that reward with everybody else in a pool. There is kind of the other end of the spectrum for bitcoin miners, a strategy called solo mining, where if your specific machine hits the block, you pocket the entire reward. Now there are pools and software that actually coordinates this. So you basically use somebody else to kind of send basically the block templates back and forth to you. So you don't have to be like run the pool software yourself. But one of the OG mining pool called CK pool is kind of one of the favored ones for doing this. A lot of people point their small desktop sized bitcoin miners bid axes at this pool and kind of lottery mine. So for these solo mining pools you're not guaranteed any revenue and statistically you'll, you know, you'll probably never get a payout, but sometimes one of these folks does get the block, get the payout and get that big payday. For context, the specific miner who hit this block was pointing 250 terahash of hash rate to CK Pool. That's ballpark like two kind of modern bitcoin mining machines. So there's a little bit more of a series setup, maybe more of like a. More of a series hobbyist style setup. But we don't know much more about that as far as I'm aware. You know, it could be like somebody who has a massive data center who just decided to take two machines in that data center and just kind of yolo them. But like as not most of the profile of these miners are hobbyists or enthusiasts who are tinkerers who want to maybe enjoy the low likelihood but non zero chance of getting a major hit. Colin?

A (61:44)

Yeah, so it's comparable to maybe two like S19K pros or one of the later S19 series or it's comparable to one of the S23s or rather S21s. Excuse me, like an S21XP in terms of hash rate. So conceivably he could have been running or this miner could have been running, you know. You know, newer generation hardware could have been a bunch of older machines strapped together, you know, could have been a bunch of what it was 2 260. So what it could have been like 2020 S9s or something like that. Just could have been entire.

B (62:18)

It could have been an entire garage full of. An entire garage full of bit axes. But I don't know. Yeah, if you're doing that then dang, S19, bro.

A (62:27)

Yeah, right. And you get these every now and then. This is the first, I'm looking at MPUL space. This is the first, first block that solo pool. Solo CK pool has mined in four months. They had a string of successes in 2025 towards the latter half of the year with three blocks found within a span of two weeks. I actually. Or three weeks. I remember that. That was pretty exciting. But obviously not something that happens every day. Very rare. And if you actually run the odds on this, this is clear. This is definitely like lottery is not exaggerating it. I mean, it's the fact that anyone, any one of these miners ever hits a block is pretty staggering. They're absolutely hashing against the odds. So I would love to do that. I'd love to be ripping an S19, wake up one day to an entire block reward. And good, good for those guys for doing it, man. It's really cool, I have to say. And you're much more likely, I hate to say it for anyone listening to this, to win the block, as as minuscule as your odds are, as vanishingly small as they are, you're more likely to hit it with an actual ASIC than a bit axe. Hate to break it to you, but.

B (63:34)

But those are no KYC sats. So up to you to decide what to do with them.

A (63:42)

And with that, we're done with our news stories. Before we go though, just a quick shout out.

B (63:47)

Oh, yeah, we gotta do a shout out.

A (63:49)

Quick shout out to the lovers and the haters in the chat. We have.

B (63:54)

Yeah. Incredible investment reporting here.

A (63:57)

Who is a ostensible Mara pig. And that, that's a term of endearment for people who invest in Mara. By the way, taking qualm with our original reporting last week reporting that 15 of Mara has been of their staff has been cut down, that mera laid off 15 of their staff. We reported this last week at Block Space. Quote from crypto Klepto here just use an AI agent to cross check all MER employees with all Clean Spark and Block Space Include employees. Narrowed down the trader list to top five suspects based on prior relationships. Step forward now and inform Fred Thiel of your unethical actions before I do Tick tock. So this guy is. Is insinuating that the only sourcing we got for the Mara story came from CleanSpark employees who used to work at Mara. Since CleanSpark sponsors the podcast, I just wanted to throw this up here to say this. First and foremost, no one at CleanSpark ever talks to us about their competitors because we don't talk to them for sourcing, because we don't want to talk to them for sourcing because we know that they sponsor the podcast and we know that the incentives aren't aligned there.

D (65:08)

Right.

A (65:08)

We don't talk to them for our stories. 2. We actually source this from people working at MERA. Some of them were working at Mara at the time of the layoffs and when I was questioning them, which we,

B (65:19)

by the way, we said it in the story too. We said the, the our sources come from folks at Mara.

A (65:24)

Yeah. And you know, it was developing in the sense that when we heard of one round of layoffs, I was messaging some of our sources inside saying, hey, is this happening? They said, I don't know, I haven't been affected. Woke up the next day. They're like, I got fired. So you know this. I, I don't laugh at that because that sucks for them. I really don't want anyone to be losing their jobs. But the fact of the matter is the this story is not coming from anywhere but people who have direct knowledge of the matter within Mara CleanSpark did not report on this at all for us. So as much as I'd love to, as much as I'd love to stoke crypto Klepto's delusions and the shared delusions of Mera bag holders, that's not what happened. So TikTok sorry about that.

B (66:06)

Also, this is convinces this is all conventional above board way look at like common journalism practices. We we'd heard about this story way before but we waited to verify it, cross reference it. This is basic journalism practices. So you're kind of scrambling for straws here. But you know Twitter is an open platform. You can post what you want. I'm glad you're utilizing AI and not falling behind and like some other companies who haven't pitted AI anyway, okay, enough about that.

A (66:43)

We haven't used AI enough. That's why in his words, we're still quote fake news show. And he did say once he gets 100% certainty about who it was, he will let everyone know. Crypto, klepto. My DMs are open. Please feel free to DM me. I would love to talk to you about this. No, no ill will. Just legitimately want to figure out who you think that we talk to about this because it was not someone who worked. It was not someone who worked at CleanSpark. Anyway, all of that said, we will close out there. Thank you all so much for joining the show. As I said, please keep an eye out for a bonus podcast this week, a full interview with Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bit Farm CEO Ben Gagnon, and keep an eye out for our Wednesday and Friday live stream.

B (67:27)

Again.

A (67:27)

We do these every Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 9am to PT 12pm ET. For those of you rocking on the left coast, thank you for tuning in so early and one last shout out, head over to opnext.dev up next.dev for info on our conference in New York on April 16th at the time Center. Tickets are going fast. We've got a bang up lineup. We hope to see you all there. And with that, we are signing off. We will see you all on Wednesday. Audio.