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SBF Goes to Hollywood, SEC Clears Nasdaq for Tokenized Trading, Clarity on CLARITY
01:20:16
On today’s Blockspace Live, we address reports alleging that Coinbase is meddling in the CLARITY Act and break down Blockfill’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to Block Space live presented by CleanSpark, y'. All. We're coming at y' all live on Friday, 9am PST 12pm ET. We've got a packed lineup today for news. The Obamas are producing an FTX series. Let's put a little tip into the tip into the tip jar for Marty Bent was right about conspiracy theories. And then we've also got a tradfi update that's really three pronged. We're going to try to condense it into one segment. NASDAQ is cleared for token based equity listings. We've also got Coinbase rolling out perps for non US Users. And this comes on the heels of Morgan Stanley filing an amendment for their Bitcoin ETF filing with the sec. We got a ticker. We know where it's going to be trading for the last news item today. An update from our friends at Coindesk on clarity. And for our interview segments, we've got Ayden Killik, CEO and President of Hive, on to talk about their AI expansion. We're We've got bitcoin developer Portland Hodl on talking about how you can supercharge your vibe coding with Claude. And we've got the boys from the Bugle. We've got Rod on to talk about Bitcoin Maxi Madness. If you're into March Madness, this is going to be for you. Except it's not basketball, it's maximalist.
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C
Block Space goes live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern. We feature quick hits in the latest in Bitcoin mining, bitcoin tech, AI and other emerging tech and cultural stories. Make sure to hit subscribe if you're watching on YouTube get that bell get that notification. This is also a podcast. You can find it anywhere. Podcasts are found. Apple Spotify, your favorite weird RSS feed. If you like what you hear here, you will love our newsletter. Go to newsletter blockspacemedia.com also we have a conference, a Bitcoin technical conference on April 16th in New York City at the New York Times center. Go to opnext.dev that's op n e x t.dev to learn more about that. This show is brought to you by our friends over at CleanSpark. Let's kick it off.
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B
We will kick it off with the Hash Rate Index update brought to us by our friends Luxor. And actually some good news here because Hash Rate has been coming offline. A few notes on that in a minute, but just a quick snapshot of The Bitcoin mining KPIs Bitcoin's hovering just around 70,000 right now. It's sold off and what I would say is kind of a macro liquidity crunch or sell off. Recently, gold tumbled, silver tumbled, stocks have been weakening as bond yields and the dollar actually rise. But we've got hash price at $30.46 per PETA hash per day. Not all time low. Not that great either though, y'. All. And network hash rate, this is the big thing for today's update, is down to 937, about 938exahashes a second on the seven day average. It has lost a big chunk over the last week. I'll get into some commentary on that in a second from the Luxor team actually. But the other big news from this, we are 99% through the current difficulty epoch. So probably while we record this, potentially even we will get a difficulty adjustment. But it's going to be upwards or down. It's going to be a downward difficulty adjustment of roughly 7.23%. That is a big move and it comes after the last difficulty adjustment was just about half a percentage point. Pretty significant moves though for half rate this week. And I just want to zoom in on that before I toss it to you, Charlie, for other thoughts. If you look at the seven day average on hash rate index, we are just absolutely plummeting, man. I mean we were at about 1086 Exa hashes on February 28, which was the onset of the war in Iran. That might have something to do with it. I'm, you know, it seems crazy but we'll get to that in a second. And now it is down to about, yeah, 930 exahashes. So over the last two weeks or you know, three weeks or so, you've had, you know, almost 100 extra hashes come offline. You've had a good or, sorry, excuse me, you've had more than 100ax ashes come offline. And to me, I, I asked one of the whizzes at Luxor what was going on with this my boy Dan on the derivatives desk and I said, are y' all keeping track of this? They keep track of all these things for their derivatives instruments. And I said, what do you think is behind this? He postulated a few things. He said one, you know, there's obviously still pivots from public miners and big miners to go into AI. So you know, that makes sense. Some of this hash rate's probably coming offline because of that. He did also throw the possibility of the Iranian war, throwing some operations, if not in Iran, in the Middle east, out of whack. We had a show, I believe, almost a year ago at this point, with Iranian bitcoin miner. There's actually a decent amount of mining that goes on in Iran. It's not a lot, but that could be one explanation here. I don't want to overstate that, though, because we don't know for sure. But if you're looking at macro events, those are one of the only things that line up. Also, you know, hash price is depressed right now. So, you know, people could.
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C
We aren't. We're. We're.
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B
We're up, up and away, man. I mean this.
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C
So if you scroll up. Colin, one interesting thing. I don't think we've ever had this on a live stream before. We could see the difficulty adjust mid stream here. So we only have a few more blocks. And if they come in quickly, we could see it happen within the hour, hour and a half. And I don't know if you said this, It's a negative 7.3, 7.23 difficulty estimate. So some relief coming for bitcoiners, for bitcoin miners. Also, bitcoin's prices up a little bit, you know, was 65, went up to 75, back down to 69.
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B
So, yeah, it'd be better if it were up around 75. 70.
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C
Yeah, I know.
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B
You know, the fact that we're above 70, that was a lot of people were chattering about whether or not we're finally seeing bitcoin serve as, you know, a kind of risk off asset and. Or, sorry, risk on asset. And we actually had the CEO of 2 Prime on one of our recent shows, Alex talking about, you know, he thinks it's a little bit too early for that. What we might be seeing right now is the fact that bitcoin is rallying because it was just so oversold. I mean, we had basically four months of nothing but down only. So it kind of stands. The reason that we'd see a bounce. One last thing I just wanted to point out. This is proving to be one of the wildest quarters, or you could say wildest 2/4 for Bitcoin's difficulty. I mean, if you just look at this chart here, this is the bitcoin's difficulty adjustments going back to October out of the last. Let's see, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. With this next one that we're about to get out of. All of those nine have been downward. And that does not happen, y'.
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All.
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Bitcoin's hash rate typically is always marching upward and you usually see these things going the other way. But once we did get, one of the positive ones we did get was almost 15%, which is a nuclear upwards adjustment. I mean, bitcoin's hash rate is just getting thrown all over the place. Miners are coming offline for AI. Other miners are coming offline because they can't afford to mine anymore. And it's been pretty.
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C
We had the winter storm across Texas and, and Tennessee. Like we had four major back to back to back events, each which swung hash rate in the opposite direction. I got whiplash, man. You know, how do I collect my insurance check? Who's the CEO of bitcoin?
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B
Yeah, I mean, who is the CEO of bitcoin? I wish they could figure something out
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C
about all later on in the show.
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B
Yeah. But you know, just, I think just to recap, it has, and I've said this on other streams before, but I just want to rehash it here. This kind of movement with bitcoin's hash rate and the extreme volatility and undulations is something that we haven't really seen since the China mining ban in 2021. So if you, I, I don't know if y' all can see it on the screen here, but all the way to the left you can see these huge drawdowns in difficulty followed by this big spurt in May of 2021 after some hash rate came offline, then went back online. But when China banned bitcoin mining, that affected roughly 50% of Bitcoin's hash rate. And the entire industry, or most of the Chinese mining industry ended up migrating across the world. And we are seeing with the AI pivots and some of the weather events, similar disruptions to hash rate that are really quite historic. If you actually zoom out and look at the difficulty chart. I've said this before and I think that it's proving out. Actually I need to hold my tongue because it could explode by the end of the year. But I would be shocked if Bitcoin's hash rate saw meaningful growth this year. If all things being equal and this trend continues, we should expect bitcoin's hash rate to be at a smaller percentage or maybe even be flat this year, depending on how Bitcoin's price shakes out throughout the rest of the year and depending on whether or not miners can actually find jurisdictions to mine in profitably. Because right now the US is tapped out most of that, most of those electrons are going to AI now or in the future will go to AI as these miners, their operations.
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C
And that vibes with the Valentin Rousseau mod D pills who was on a previous show that, that, that vibes kind of a Valentin's Russo's prediction over the next few years, it's less dramatic, barring some kind of white swan event. So do we want to.
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B
I think we will go ahead and just cover a few more things here.
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D
Okay.
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And then we'll move on to news. Yeah, I just keep coming back to this. I, I, I. There was this tweet that was claiming that, you know, Iranian bitcoin miners can mine bitcoin for like $1300. And I keep coming back to this idea, like, is this hash rate blackout because of Iran? And when I saw that tweet at first I was like, first of all, that's just not true. Whenever you see someone like this is how much a miner can mine bitcoin for. There's no way to actually know that. And you can maybe try to get an average out, but that doesn't mean that every single miner is going to actually be able to do that. Those are often misleading. And actually the argument in that tweet was even more convoluted because they were saying that miners are now they're having to sell because of the Iranian war and that's causing pressure on bitcoin's price. Or rather they were selling before the war. Now they can't mine, so they're not selling anymore. Which is a ludicrous theory for saying why bitcoin price is being suppressed right now. But I do have to say it is really curious, just going back to this one more time and we'll leave it after this, that at the outbreak of the war, bitcoin's hash rate hits a local top and then it goes down. So at the very least it is a interesting coincidence at the most. Maybe there's something here. Maybe there's some alpha in the fact that there's actually more.
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C
Yeah.
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And there's also a decent amount, I would say, going on in the other Gulf states. It's not a crazy amount, but the UAE and Oman, do you have a decent amount of hash rate? You do have to wonder if some of the military action is disrupting those operations as well. I don't know for sure, but at
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C
least, you know, and just speculating, it could be like, you know, response to anticipated increase in energy prices which has happened since, I mean, nat gas has spiked. If you're trying to buy gas which is refined somewhere in the Gulf like Qatar. So LNG plants now affecting LNG plant throughput in the Gulf now affects your Bitcoin hash rate. So add that to the list of weird things.
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B
Add that to things you have to consider when you're trying to hedge your hash rate exposure.
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C
All of a sudden the terminally online monitoring the situation, people seem to be very well primed for trading hash rate futures on Luxor's hash rate futures derivatives desk.
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B
So we'll, we'll leave that there and we'll go ahead and move on to our first news story of the day, which I almost moved this out of the hero spot because the, the NASDAQ stuff is actually more consequential. But this is just super interesting and that's Netflix is Netflix is rolling out a series called the Altruist which chronicles the rise and fall of ftx. A few housekeeping items on this that are worth noting. The Obamas, via their Higher Ground Productions company are producing this. They're the executive producers listed on the credits for this series. It's going to be an eight episode series. I, you know, it's going to be, I think limited series, probably just one season. If they, if they string this out into two, that would be kind of wild. This is one of the analyses that I found very interesting though. And to me it, it exposes this as something that's going to be less about the fraud that was committed and more about the smuttier side of the ftx. Give, you know, give that
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C
I'm all about that. I don't want to hear about the fraud. I know too much about the fraud. I want to hear the salacious details.
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B
I do think that that's what's going to sell the series. But this is a way, this is how historical revisionism creeps into the of the masses, you know. And apparently this is going the show is going to center on S. SBF and Caroline Ellison's relationship. And you know, there's this quote from the trial where Caroline said I wanted more from our relationship but often felt he was distant or not paying enough attention, much attention to me. So there's the hook for the religious conflict and it's going to be kind of framed as this Gen Z. Although I don't think they're Gen Z. They're millennials. Right? Whatever Bonnie and Clyde. Which is, which is kind of funny to even think about them as Bonnie and Clyde because Bonnie and Clyde are running around with Tommy guns, you know, blasting through banks and Caroline Ellison and sees and SBF were, you know, just Sitting in their Bahamian mansion, crushing Adderall, figuring out how they can steal billions from their customers. You know, and if you just one last thing, I'll say, Charlie, I'll throw it over to you. Just looking at the people they have slated for this, they've got Anthony Boyle playing Sam Bankman Fried. And they got Julia Gardner playing Caroline Allison. They glowed these people up, man. They absolutely glowed them up. And this is maybe the most detached from reality casting I've seen in anything. There are a bunch of characters that like, I think are just going to be stand ins for multiple different characters that don't technically exist. Like this Hannah and Lucy. They also have the psychiatrist or psychologist. Doctor, psychiatrist. Dr. Lerner who lived in the Bahamian mansion. And I'm pretty sure he was the one who was involved with making sure everyone had Adderall and Vyvanse prescriptions.
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C
But look, it's hard to cast Sam and Caroline. I will say Julia Garner's off a heater of past few years with Ozark and then recently Weapons, which I think got an Oscar. So yeah, we here on this show, we do pay attention to pop culture. I do think Sam's gonna be the hardest to nail because how does Anthony Boyle gain all that weight? Maybe he's a method actor. I mean, Christian, maybe Christian Bale did it for, for that documentary featuring the George Bush's. Whatever.
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B
Okay, you're talking about Veep or not?
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C
Yeah, sorry, the vice President. Yeah.
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B
Who's that? Yeah, the Cheney doc.
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C
Cheney doc. Dick Cheney?
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D
Yeah.
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B
I didn't know that he was in that.
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C
Yeah, he, you know, he looked like Dick Cheney, so. No, that, that was, it was Christian Bale is Dick Cheney. It looks.
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Oh, I see what you're saying.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
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Maybe he will do a little Christian Bale here. It's like maybe we'll get like a progressive weight gain as the stress mounts on sbf, you know, and he continues to slam veggie burgers or something. You know, I, I do think that this is the other thing that I thought was really fascinating about this. And I'm curious how many of these will actually go. But this is one of three FTX biopics that are being planned right now. Lena Dunham is apparently doing one for Apple and based on Michael Lewis's book Going Infinite. And Amazon prime is apparently doing its own limited series with the, with the Russo brothers. What is this, Matt? Like, I get it. This was one of the biggest frauds to ever hit the North American financial markets. But where is this rush to do all of these biopics on this thing? You know what I mean? Why are people chomping at the bit for? Why do we have three of these things? I mean, you only really need one, but it's got to be done. Well, I don't think any of them are going to be done. Well, they're going to, I think probably whitewash a lot of the situation.
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C
Well, don't count your chickens before they're green screened. I mean, so does. I will say, you know, they. They shoveled tokens down our gullets. Rugged. Those tokens stole our bitcoin. And now they get the last laugh by selling their biopic, Their, Their stories. Man, that's a good question.
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Do you.
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I mean, I don't think anyone will get royalties from this, but could you imagine, like, SBF's legal representatives, like, you know, going to bat for him while he's in a cage, being like, hey, you know, this is. There's some intellectual property here. You're going to be picking my client.
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C
We'll do it for. Yeah, we're in. But, you know, 5 million in FTT token or something like that. All right, let's. Let's move to. I. I think we should probably either go to the next news, which is the nasdaq, or we could bring. We could bring on Portland. Hoddle. I see him in the audience.
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B
I think, I think we should. I think we should bring on Portland.
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C
Let's do it. Okay, here we go. We're gonna bring on my boy, Portland Hodl. Welcome to the show, Portland. You're muted.
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D
Good morning, gents.
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C
Good morning.
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B
What is going on?
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D
Portland Life is excellent. I'm very thankful. Bitcoin is tick tock. Next block as usual. And yeah, I couldn't ask for anything more. There's some. As a swe, though, software engineer, I'd say AI has been the biggest change and probably on the front of everybody's mind right now, including my own.
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C
Yeah, and this is why, because like, okay, everybody's got to have their little AI segment and so we do too. You dropped in one of our chats that you had used over a billion billion anthropic tokens. Charlie, what in the world?
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D
What are you doing?
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C
Portland?
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D
First of all, I would just like to like the grandioseness of that statement. I figured out after asking a few people, I'm actually like, kind of on the lower tier of high amounts of usage. So basically.
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B
Hang on, hang on. You're in the lower tier at a million tokens, A billion bottom of the top.
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D
You could. Yeah. So like you kind of like. So I was like, okay, I used a billion tokens. And I was like, I thought, oh man. Because like it was kind of my goal for February. I just wanted to hit a billion tokens and build everything. I've always wanted to build anything, any dashboard that didn't exist, anything that was a pain in my butt, anything I wanted to automate. All these things are now possible in a limited fashion because I'm going to caveat with like bunch of problems that come along with this. You can build anything you want. So I was like, okay, I want to use a billion tokens. I started like, I hit like 500 million. Like, okay, I'm just going to go the whole way. It's going to. I got some, I'll generate some revenue, I'll pay for these things. They'll make me a few, few SATs, right? And yeah, some users, I think the highest I saw was somebody used 1.5 billion, but it's still high. But there are bigger fish out there. But yeah, in, in general I've been using like a. Specifically I tried a tool, openclaw and I kind of didn't really build much useful with it, didn't really enjoy it as a tool. Claude code combined with Klein and like VS code, like hands down, like that was just anything I want to build. Hey, I got a project outline, a plan, I had all my MD files set up etc, and yeah, so I've just been. Other than just building everything I want to build, paying for tokens through anthropic. I've had to kind of realize that there are a bunch of nuances to being a software engineer right now and that I truly think that the majority of software engineers are going to have a very hard time dealing with the fact that you have to use these tools very likely to be competitive at the workplace. And this is probably the most deflationary technology I've ever witnessed. Because my, my kind of anecdote on this would be like, okay, like you have like, you're trying to sell yourself as like somebody who's like somewhat senior. I want my 180, $250,000. People can now come in with doing the exact same thing, probably using AI to a heavy degree and build the same thing and ask for far less. And so that's my biggest, like, how do software? So I'm just going to say the overt part out front. And this does relate to Bitcoin as well because we're using this to build stuff in Bitcoin too. How does a software engineer ask for the current salary that they probably are earning when the reality is that a lot of these software engineers are just kind of prompting AI into their code base at this point to 80 to 100%.
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C
So we can get into existential. I want to actually hear about something you've built, Portland. Like what is a thing that you've built? Maybe hopefully something that like an average listener show can understand, like what you built. That's useful.
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D
Yeah, so one thing I used specifically all AI for what have.
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C
Yeah, something you use tokens for.
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D
Yes. So something I use token for was the miniscript FFI interface to Bitcoin Core. And so what this is is currently if you're building a project using Rust and you want to use any miniscript descriptor, like for example, like you have like this multisig, a time lock and you got all these spending conditions and you kind of want to define, like, do I want to use Taproot or Witness script hash, like all these cool features. You have to use a Rust implementation. By Andrew Polstra Rust miniscript Bitcoin. I like that library. I'm fairly certain it's incredibly sound, but I didn't quite trust it completely. What I did was Bitcoin Core also includes an implementation of miniscript. I took Rust and then using tokens through Anthropic Opus. Hey, I would like you to do the following thing. I would like you to bind to Bitcoin Core's Descriptor Logic and miniscript Logic. Can you do this? Yeah, sure. This is how I do it. Okay, well, I still don't trust that you're going to do the right thing because you make a lot of mistakes, even though I tell you not to make mistakes. Can you also replicate the entire test suite from Bitcoin Core as well into the Rust FFI library? Then do the validation that, hey, we have the correct that the test cases pass and that we have exactly matching behavior then. So after a little bit of manual review for memory safety at the end, in an evening, and plus like 50 bucks in tokens, we have a working FFI library. So you can literally build Bitcoin Core in Rust during the compilation process, connect into it, and you can validate side by side that whatever's executing on your Rust side will also match what's in Bitcoin Core, reducing the chances of errors. Or you could use this to fuzz, for example. Hey, I'm just going to send off a bunch of random inputs or maybe targeted Inputs and we're going to see if they always match. Maybe we could find a little divergence somewhere where somebody has not implemented something correctly.
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B
Yeah, Portland, I wanted to latch onto something you said in your first answer. You said, and this is a two part question, you said that a lot of developers are going to have a hard time moving to AI to do their work. They're going to be stubborn. Why do you think that is? And number two, what is the biggest benefit that AI gives you as a developer? Like what is the thing that it helps supercharge in your work?
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D
Okay, so here's the, the two part answer. I didn't say that developers would have hesitancy or like pushback though it is definitely a thing culturally within businesses right now. Like they, they don't want to see this because it presents an issue where like there are only so many seats at the table because it is a productivity multiplier. Right? Like you can get more code written. You don't need to ask somebody else to please build this while I build this thing. Both are integrated now, so. But yeah, essentially like at the end of the day, I think to do well with AI, individuals need to be very high agency. And what I mean by that, they need to have control, they need to have vision, they need to use it as a tool to force multiply their existing skills. But with that said, if not necessarily in the bitcoin space, bitcoin typically seems to have a lot of very high agency individuals, very inquisitive, they're always wanting to pry open every box and build all the coolest stuff. But for the general company like Intel, Intuit, etc, I would say like 80% of people are low agency. They kind of go there, they do their 3 to 5 commits or polls a month and they collect their check.
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A
Those
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D
people are going to have the hardest time because the people with higher agency are basically, you don't need to ask them to do things for you anymore. So they just literally it'll, they'll just do the work themselves or they'll prompt and I'll get into like how that works in a second. But essentially they just won't ask for it. And so you'll see very smaller, flatter teams. I think as Jack Dorsey pointed out, like he had a notorious like tweet where he's like hey. And I think maybe I've heard rumors that he's pulling a couple people back in. But yeah, 40% of the company was wiped out because of specifically the statement AI tooling is reducing the need for these individuals. And so ultimately, like, what does AI do for a developer at this scale? Like, when you start using APIs, I'm not talking, hey, I'm going to take my code snippet and then put it in ChatGPT and then can copy and paste it back and forth. But once you start getting, it's like agentic tools like Claude Code, even OpenClaw, these kind of things where you can send out these little minions and armies to start doing work. You literally just have them do tasks. Everything that you didn't have time to do. You have time, you have the force multiplier, the ability to produce basically unlimited code. At this point, whatever you dream, you could probably ask it to make. So that's where I'm just, like, really stoked about it as a developer because, like, I feel I'm pretty high agency and, like, I have all these things in my backlog of things I want to do. Like, for example, the other day, like, I was like, I want to test PSBTs on the Jade, like, without actually having to bust out my Jade hardware wallet and then, like, connect it up and like, do the QR scanning. They have a simulator, but it's kind of hard to use. Hey, Claude Code, can you make me a Docker container that will automatically do this so I connect to it? Oh, they're asking a few questions about, like, hey, you need to verify, can you remove these walls warnings? Because I don't care about them. I'm just testing here.
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C
And it just, it does all the same thing. I had Claude build. Yeah. Set up Docker for me on my, like, Ubuntu instance here. So, yeah, like, I get that. Okay, okay, you've danced around the question. How much does a billion credits cost?
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D
7, depending on the type of token you use. Which I was a very even mix with anthropic specifically. I'll go into why it cost about a thousand bucks. And I was Opus, which is the smart model, very few tokens, very expensive Haiku, which is my favorite. That's a fast, quick one. I'm just like, hey, just do lots of stuff. Keep doing more stuff for me. And then, yeah, Sonnet is kind of like that blend of like, okay, haiku, you're failing really hard. Can you just go a little bit higher without just breaking the bank? So it's about a grand.
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B
So how long did it take you to manager?
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D
What'd you say?
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B
How long did you. Sorry, Charlie, go ahead.
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C
Oh, I was saying Sonnet's like a, like a really High agency middle manager. Go for it.
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B
Colin, how long did it take you to burn through a billion?
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D
Like it's about 28 days. Almost a month. No, it was like it was just in a month. I was just like, I, I just started February 1st and it was a very like lots of sprints going on. So like I'm a contractor for Anchor Watch and like there was lots of like in, in not in the core logic, but like, like I said, like I want to build more tests.
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A
Right?
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D
Tests are. It doesn't really hurt to add more to your CI pipe. So I was like, okay, well I want to add. Just like I want to make sure these things are bulletproof. These are all tests that would take me too much time to hand.
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C
Right.
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D
But I still want them. Okay, Go through and make these right.
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B
Portland, last question. Maybe a lightning round here.
- [30:06]
C
I've got lightning iron questions too.
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D
Okay.
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B
Yeah, I think. Well, that's the last question on the prep sheet. So you want to go ahead and field it, Charlie, because I think it' a great question.
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C
I'm hit you with a few lightning questions. Portland. We're gonna, we're. Then we're gonna dance you off. You can only answer one. You can't qualify this. Okay, here we go. Lightning round. Claude code versus Codex clock code hands down. Claude bot versus Claude SDK.
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D
Claude bot.
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C
X402 versus MPP.
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D
Don't know that.
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C
Okay, that's good. Those are the new two main payment protocols. Portland, thank you so much for coming on Blackspace live. You're a rock star.
- [30:49]
D
Thank you.
- [30:50]
C
Yeah, we'll have you on when you do a trillion tokens.
- [30:55]
D
Unless I'm making a lot of revenue to get more stats, that probably will not happen.
- [30:59]
B
100 grand.
- [31:01]
D
That's a million bucks.
- [31:02]
B
That's a million bucks.
- [31:03]
C
Yeah. All right, thanks, Portland. Catch you later.
- [31:07]
D
Bye.
- [31:13]
C
All right, let me catch my. Sorry, I had to catch my screen here. Thanks a ton for watching. We're going to take a word from our sponsor and then we'll get back to NASDAQ and the bugle.
- [31:38]
A
We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner. A publicly traded company with the largest operating hashrate powered entirely by self operated infrastructure across four states. This is our proof of work and we are setting the standard for what's next. Learn more about the intersection of energy and bitcoin@cleanspark.com.
- [32:10]
B
All right, now for our next story before we have our next interview segment which will be with Ayden Killick. He's running a little late but we'll get him on here in a second. That is the SEC approves Nasdaq's move to support tokenized securities trading. So this is a three parter news segment because we had really three kind of big intersection of crypto and tradfi stories hit the wire this week. This one I think was one of the bigger ones to come out and the headline kind of says it all. So the securities and Exchange Commission has approved Nasdaq to let certain securities trade in a tokenized form on a blockchain. Don't know what that blockchain will look like yet. We don't know if it will be a proprietary thing or if they will use a public blockchain. I would imagine it'd probably be proprietary. But this is news that's been a long time coming. Nasdaq's tokenization plan ties into a pilot run by the depository trust company DTC, which will be handling clearing and settlement for the trades. Nasdaq first filed for this regulatory clarity back in September. So now they've got the green light. And as for the rollout for this, that is the one, I think kind of murky thing so far we don't actually have. NASDAQ has not come out and said like we're going to go live on this date with this. They have said that the first token settled trades on Nasdaq could potentially take place by the end of the third quarter 2026. That's when DTC is expected to complete the necessary systems updates to participate in this rollout. And Nasdaq's own filing says that basically, you know, probably be available by the end of Q3, 2026, subject to regulatory requirements. So we don't really know for sure, but it's looking like it'll come sometime soon, within the next few months, and almost certainly this year. But this also comes on, comes on the same week that Coinbase is rolling out perps for non US Users. So non US Users will be allowed to trade perpetual stock futures to take leverage positions on company large cap stocks like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, as well as ETFs and S P500 and NASDAQ indices. And the reason I included this one in is because I think that with Nasdaq getting approved for tokenized securities, you kind of have this tug of war where either side is trying to infringe on the other side's turf in a way. Like Nasdaq is saying we're going to start trading tokenized stocks and Coinbase is saying, well, we're going to start doing the same thing, you know, allowing, allowing us non US users to trade these futures. And these exchanges have already started rolling out some real world assets and tokenized real world assets to allow people to trade. Like you can go to Kraken and Coinbase and trade stocks today and you can do the same thing on Cash app, although that's a little bit different because Cash app is kind of a Neo bank. They've always had the tradfi angle and the bitcoin angle. But you're starting to see the intersections of both tradfi and crypto really ramp up and both sides trying to protect their piece of the pie here.
- [35:29]
C
What I hear is that I actually can trade shitcoins on Cash app because apparently I can trade stocks. I mean, it's wild because if you're paying attention to broader crypto, you may have seen that Hyper Liquid traded more volume in gold, silver and oil than it did any other crypto asset on its platform over the past week. Now obviously those are like the hot things to trade, but it's kind of, it is wild. We have been really ramping up the, you know, tokenized everything. It does become, you know, bit questionable. What, who, which, which is the tail wagging the dog? Which of us is the tail? I'm not really sure.
- [36:17]
B
Well, it's the new hot button topic, I think for this. Is that one of the new bull theses or they call them rwa, they the, the ethereal and they called them real world assets RWAs. And it makes sense to me that we would move in this direction. But I think where you have to kind of throw some cold water on it is this is not going to look like the defi landscape. You know, it's like NASDAQ and all of these other players are probably not going to be using like an Ethereum or a Solana public blockchain for this. They're going to want complete control over it. It's going to be a kind of black box environment, I would imagine, where they can do whatever they want. They want to be able to roll back transactions, they want to be able to freeze assets for people who, you know, are not, you know, for whatever reason are barred from trading. Right. So definitely seems like one of the bigger narratives as we, you know, kind of chop along here in what really feels like bear market territory. Although some people are in denial about that. And, but there, there are, you know, going on. On that note, there are reasons to be bullish outside of, you know, tokenizing everything from, you know, shares of Tesla to your grandmother's condo in Florida because Morgan Stanley is filed an amended S1 with the SEC for their Bitcoin ETF. This, this wasn't more prominently featured in the show because they've already filed for this. And we've known about this for a while, but we now we have a ticker for it and we know that once it goes live, it's going to be trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker msbt. So there, as far as I can tell, there's no clear timeline on when this will hit. I think that I've read, you know, estimates saying this will probably go live sometime this year. A lot of these things are slower moving, but a lot of people have made the comment that this is kind of a big kahuna in terms of getting the bitcoin ETF to the masses. Morgan Stanley has deep penetration with retail investors and portfolio management for your average Joe as well as institutions. So kind of a three parter there for bitcoin and tradfi. Even though bitcoin's price is getting kicked in the nuts, there's still plenty going on behind the scenes. Clearly the interest has not died down. You know, even though Bitcoin's at like
- [38:45]
C
7, it's a great tragedy that all the good tickers are taken. Kind of like how the boomers took all the good band names, like all, all the early like crypto funds took all the good like four letter crypto names. Like is there. That is there. You know, there's the Wag Me fund, there's the hot, there's hodl, which is great. I feel like maybe there should be some kind of like domain like squatting rule to this. Maybe there is, I don't know but you know, I've.
- [39:16]
B
Yeah, yeah, it's almost like dot com names. It's like you think you should just like got gotten the, the ticker in there just in case it pays off.
- [39:25]
C
Imagine if Mark Cuban could have bought four letter stock ticker thousand podcast run. Talk about how he's a genius son. I would have done that too.
- [39:38]
B
Yeah, 100%. And you do kind of have to wonder. I just think going back to the Morgan Stanley thing and then we'll leave it here if this ETF gets approved, is that enough of a bullish signal to take us back up to like 100k or are we just kind of in chop solidation hell and we're kind of at the whims of the macro market? I don't know, but a lot of people are really bullish on this news. And I know that it will probably help bitcoin, but I don't really see in the near term how it's going to take us back up to six figures. But I could be wrong. I'm kind of pessimistic on these things.
- [40:19]
C
It'll help the boomers sell their bitcoin through the new, hot, more insanely etf. Okay, enough about that. Let's bring on our next guest, the man, Mr. Ayden.
- [40:31]
B
Ayden Killick, CEO and President of Hybe Digital. How are you doing, sir?
- [40:36]
A
Hey, good morning, gentlemen. Good. I just got back from Nvidia gtc. It was a remarkable conference in Jensen's keynote, him unveiling the next generation Vera Rubin. Vera Rubin Ultra. So this, these are the engines that are going to power the advancement of AI as we know it over the next year. A lot of really cool industrial applications. There's a lot of talk about OpenClaw, which has been this new agentic tool that maybe you guys have heard about it. It's sort of the new latest trend that's spreading like a wildfire. And really what's interesting about it is that I was actually talking to an engineer from xai, a friend of mine, and he's working on building AI applications within X. And they actually have some pretty cool enterprise stuff, by the way. It's worth checking out. There's something called X search where you could actually have an agent on X aggregate opinions from thought leaders that you follow. So, for example, if you know Matt Siegel at Van X Prolific Tweeter or sorry, you know, do you still call it tweet now that it's X? Whatever.
- [41:46]
B
I do, I. I do. I can't. Old habits, you know?
- [41:50]
C
Yeah, over my dead body.
- [41:52]
A
And so there's a lot of really smart guys like him. And I don't have time to track everybody's tweets all day. And especially like, you know, like, I'm an electrical engineer and now a data center CEO. So my area of expertise is rooted in that realm. But I'm not a hedge fund trader or a macro economist. So, like, if you want to get expert opinions from people that are tweeting, the agent on X can consolidate on a daily basis and just give you a live feed summarized for you from whoever you want to follow. I thought that was a pretty, pretty cool tool. But any rate, what's interesting is that with openclaw, you're basically giving root access to this agent to get into your system. And that to some people, especially if you know, it is kind of scary. But most people don't understand so they're just like, hey, cool, look what it could do. But you know what costs of privacy. So then the flip side to that is Jensen was really big on promoting Nemo Claw, which is the Nvidia version of it. And so it comes with ostensibly it's going to come with some guardrails and they're selling a box, which is interesting. It's loaded with a GB300 and like a workstation, like a really high end workstation. But it's $160,000 and it's preloaded with Nemo Claw and a GB300 processor. So just really interesting stuff. We go to a lot of conferences. The week before I was in New York at the Cantor conference. Shout out to Cantor. That was a fantastic event. So yeah, it's been super busy. Put a couple of press releases this week as well on our advancements on HPC and AI. So yeah, gentlemen, that's what, that's what's new with me. It's good to be here. Thank you.
- [43:45]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, thank you for joining. I'm glad you mentioned those press releases. I'd like to dive into those really quickly and kind of two parter to this. Can you give us an update on the Manitoba expansion and the Asuncion Paraguay expansion? Both of these are HBC rollouts. What can you tell us about progress on those sites? And what can you tell us about timeline to energization?
- [44:07]
A
Yeah, so the strategy with Bell which we announced last year as a partnership with them, it's really to have a really quick ramp to market to bring on AI clusters for our GPU cloud. It's as simple as that. Now Bell of course is Canada's largest AI telecom company. So I would say it's quite prestigious that they have selected Buzz and they've partnered with Buzz. And so we go in there with our team and the expertise and we build these clusters of Nvidia reference architecture GPUs. And so we announced a $30 million deal recently. So that was a two year contract for a cluster of 504 Nvidia Blackwell B2 hundreds. And in the press release that we put out, so those are being granted and so that's what increased our annual run rate revenue from 20 million ARR to 35. Right. So a $30 million contract over two years. So 15 million per year. So if we were doing 20 million a year, we're now doing 35 million a year. 70% increase just like that. So that's super exciting. And on the heels of that, we had this Update that we're 4xing the capacity in Bell across Canada, notably 2 facilities in British Columbia. So what does that really mean? I'll break it down. I'm a numbers guy, right? And especially for, for people that just want to learn about the sector or understand what Hive's doing. And even just the dollars and cents and the kilowatts and how it all adds up, it's actually pretty simple. So I'm going to give you round numbers. A cluster of like 500. Again round, not 504. It's actually 504. And why is that? It's because you're doing a 63 node cluster. So typically it's 64 nodes, but you have one rack that's dedicated for networking equipment. So you have 63 nodes of actual GPU racks and there's eight GPUs per node. So you go 63 times eight. So you got 504 GPUs. That uses about one megawatt. And so for people in the, you know, bitcoin mining sphere, they understand megawatts. Well, on this one megawatt, if you're doing $15 million a year of steady contracted revenue, that's really, really good. Right? So in the Winnipeg site, which is 4 megawatts, that means we could fit 2000 Blackwell B200 GPUs or similar. Now in the press release that we just came out with, where we're expanding that portfolio of data centers with Bell into British Columbia, I'm based in Vancouver by the way, and filming from my mom's place just because she had a kidney stone surgery. So just little post op car, I was on the road, always says Holy Mary. And so they, we, we had a near term 5 megawatts of it load and that will with up expansion to 12 and a half megawatts in 2027. Now it's a slightly different metric when you get into the Grace Blackwell architecture. So the Grace Blackwell architecture is more power dense. So this is like in crypto mining, you're talking about like, okay, are you talking about like an S21 or an S21 XP Hydro One produces a lot more hash rate, consumes a lot more power. Right. So think of the Grace Blackwell as a high power density, just bigger, meaner machine. And so the GB, if you had a cluster of, of say 2000 GB, two hundreds for example, that, that would take up five megawatts. So the first phase in British Columbia, that five megawatts, you could fit like 2000 GB two hundreds. The Grace Black one, not the B200, the GB200. And what, what does it really add up to when you talk about the economics? Well, that cluster will do like $60 million a year of revenue in, in that 5 megawatts. So when you, when you kind of do the math, you say, okay, well, if you've got a ramp, where you've got an immediate 5 megawatts available, and the demand is crazy, like, just coming back from gtc, you know, Frontier Labs, Model Builders Enterprises, like all these different types of businesses that want AI compute, they want to rent GPUs for three, four, five years at a time. Thousand, two thousand GPUs, like big clusters. And so that's why you're seeing this shift in the ecosystem where people are really utilizing their capacity for hpc. And so that if you, if you kind of read through our press release, you could kind of put it together and you can say, okay, so if you could do 60 million ARR. In that first five megawatts, ultimately that can expand to 12 and a half megawatts. Well, that's like roughly almost $150 million. And that 12.5 megawatts, if you were to fill it up all with Grace Blackwell's sort of over the course of the next year. And so that kind of. We haven't announced the GPU deals yet for that expansion, but what we're explaining is that now we have the racks ready, it's kind of like, again, going back to bitcoin mining days. You could just have a bunch of S19s on the floor, but they're not hashing. You've got to have your rack space ready. So it's akin to back in the day if a miner said, hey, we've just got 100 megawatts of rack ready capacity good to go, and now we just got to plug in the machine. So that was kind of the flavor of that press release. And so what will soon follow are specific deals where we're saying, hey, we just rented out a cluster of 2000 GPUs for whatever term. And that's kind of what's really exciting. And I'll kind of tie it in. When I was in New York, by the way, is this stuff interesting to you guys? I don't know if you guys wanted to focus more on crypto or is this helpful?
- [50:15]
C
No, this is absolutely interesting. AI is all everyone talks about. In fact, that's half of a. I mean, Half of what we're talking about. I mean, I've got a question. So it's been a while since I've been in a GPU data center. These racks you're talking about, are they like the 3U or 5U racks? And you know, walk me through what it looks like actually walking into one of these, because it's probably going to be quite a different vibe than your average bitcoin mining data center.
- [50:42]
A
Yeah, very different vibe. So what's happened is this is a big takeaway from the week at GT Scene. Nvidia did a great job of laying this out. You have now the electrical engineering and the mechanical engineering all integrated in one rack. Ready solution. So what I'm talking about is the, the power density of these racks is, you know, up to 170 kilowatts per rack for like a. So exactly what you're thinking, like a 3U rack, whatever. So like a singular data center rack. 170 kilowatts for Grace Blackwell, 300 at peak load. And, and to cool, this is now liquid cooled. So what you have is you have massive power whips. Like they were. They actually had. We, we posted a little bit on LinkedIn. Check out my LinkedIn and the Hive LinkedIn. Frank was actually filming and I was sort of pointing out they had a full rack, but everything broken. Like imagine a car engine, but just every component broken down and pasted on a wall. And so, for example, on the electrical side, you know, you had the power shelves. But what was really interesting and you know, like a conventional data center rack, you have a server, a 2U server, and it's got CPU, memory networking and GPUs. And so, okay, that's what you could think of. You got a bunch of these. And then typically when I gave you that analogy earlier about, okay, if you have a 64 node cluster, one of those nodes is used for networking, you'll have a dedicated rack. So Bluefield, Infiniband, this is all stuff. So there's two things happening. One is how do you stitch these GPUs in the cluster together so they focus, they function like one seamless brain. Like they're just almost. They're not because they're in different servers on the rack. So each server has eight GPUs and you got different servers per rack and then you have different racks. So if you have GPUs that are not on the same server that connected the same motherboard, how do you make it look and feel like from a compute point of view, that those GPUs are on the same motherboard and just instantly talking to each other and how you cut out that latency from different servers on the rack and different racks. And that's what Infiniband comes in. That was a huge, huge thing that Nvidia was pushing the last few years. That's industry standard now. So if you're going to be building this stuff you gotta use Infiniband. And so and then the other thing is once you've got this big cluster how fast can it talk to the outside world? So there's this kind of external networking, the internal networking working. But the cooling of this is where all the advancement had been made. So now you have manifolds where you've got all these manifolds that think of like a hydro miner. You know where you've got. Have you guys ever seen industrial scale hydro mining facility? Right.
- [53:29]
C
So there's way quieter than air cool except for the, for the big cooling towers.
- [53:39]
A
So there's a whole other component to the mechanical electrical plumbing. When you look at a hydro cooled same thing with these racks. And so you see all of the. We'll post photos and there's actually a cool video that I that Frank filmed for me. But you'll see the breakdown of. Because these, these GPUs will have
- [54:05]
D
like
- [54:05]
A
sir like servers that are stacked so tightly and you could see the, the vertical manifolds that have these nozzles like quick connect nozzles. And so at each level there'll be you know, liquid coolant manifolds. So you know your liquid coolant can do. Do a heat exchange and remove the heat from the server. But a huge, what I'm getting at is a huge amount of. Now the design of these things which is integrated into the product offering of Nvidia is mechanical engineering is it is liquid cooling. And so before that was, that was less you were. It wasn't considered part of like the core reference architecture. So that, that would. That's really cool. And I think that the industrial applications are remarkable. You know Jensen was really previewing how these like the next generation is called Vera Rubin how that performs compared to the current Blackbone previous hopper. And so they'll have for example it's all about tokens per second. So you know in mining it was terahash. Well in AI it's actually teraflops. So the speed of a processor is teraflops per second. The other thing is VRAM how much virtual memory is on the server. And then the other thing is memory bandwidth. How Quickly can that server move data on and off? And there's one key component or one key metric, I should say, that measures it all, and that's tokens per second. And if you want to get really technical, which Jensen is super technical, that keynote, which is on YouTube, highly recommend you watch it is really like, there's like a lot of PhDs and computer science people in that audience. But it felt like a rock concert. Like you had like, we're in San Jose Shark stadium, there's like 25,000 people there. It felt like it was wild. But it's tokens per second per watt. Tokens per second per watt. Because again, what have we been doing at Hive for years and years and years and years is the input to our systems have been energy and the output has been compute. So are we mining Ethereum? Are we mining Bitcoin? We started doing this HPC thing like three years ago. We had income for HPC as a line item going back three years ago. So we very much, I would say better than any one of our peers, understand the difference in quantifying the dollar per kilowatt hour. At the end of the day, that's what you're doing. You get your power bill in dollar per kilowatt hour, right? So you really need to be able to understand your revenue in dollar per kilowatt hour. And especially if that's variable. The really nice thing now with all these large contracts, Sorry, it's a bit stuffed up. Is the now they're, they're steady, right? So if you sign a two year contract, three year contract with an enterprise client, they just want to rent 2,000 GPUs for three years. That's, that's great. All the heavy lifting sun in the beginning where you're negotiating that, that contract. What are terms of default? The sla. So you know, what is, what is, what does a win look like? But once you build the cluster, and I mean, of course you've got your data center ops team and continuously ensuring that over the life of that contract the client's getting the service that they need. But you're not beholden to. Oh shit. Hash price dropped at $27 like it did a few weeks ago. I mean that was pretty intense. So, so yeah, that's kind of the high level.
- [57:43]
B
Ayden, we're running up on time here. But I got one more question for you. We've seen two diverging business models for the bitcoin miners expanding into AI and hpc. Some are going the powershell route where they're building the infrastructure, having someone else host the GPUs. Others like yourself are going the NEO cloud, operating the clusters themselves route. Can you explain the business strategy behind that and why you all decided to go the NEO cloud route rather than PowerShell?
- [58:08]
A
So we're doing both. We're building an operating data centers and then we're building a GPU AI cloud. So it's in our DNA. We're just really good at operating compute. And so we've been building large clusters GPUs for almost a decade now, number one. Number two, I think that the ROI is much quicker for AI cloud it's about two and a half years. The ROI on powered shell is you know, seven, eight years now in some institutions are going to say yeah, but you could just do a hyperscaler coal contract for 15 years and just have steady cash flows. And you know, even if it's for $130 a kilowatt a month and the margin isn't, isn't crazy and your capex is high, like you're spending whatever 8 million a megawatt, whatever it may cost, brownfield, green peel, 8 to 10 million a megawatt, whatever that is. And you do the math, it's like you know, roughly eight plus year roi. And I think the reason why is the street likes long stable cash flows because then the end game is like, hey, you position it like a REIT and then you get a crazier multiples. So I think that's like a Wall street thing, which I respect and I get. I think the other thing is as the demand. Look, I started as an electrical engineer as the demand and I saw this in wireless telecom, you know, went from minutes to bytes of data. You know, remember when your cell phone, you guys are probably a bit younger than me, but you know your cell phone, we used to have phone plans on minutes for voice baby. Yeah, there we go. But then when it went to data, the game changed and then your phone had how many megabytes per month and then we got to gigabytes per month number was like gigabyte. Now I don't even know. I think my plan has 100 gigabytes per month. Location based services, streaming, you name it. Like there's just more and more data that we rely on because the data is denser, the data tells us more. And just with Internet of things and AI, there's all of this. As society and habits and patterns change, we need more data. And so I see the same with AI and so I see the Same with GPU compute. I don't see GPU compute commodifying anytime soon. The CEO of Palo Alto Networks, the Cantor Conference, really gave the same analogy because he had a telecom background on this. And I was reflecting on it earlier that afternoon. I met a really, really smart colleague for lunch in Midtown that afternoon. So I, I, I really think that as the street gets more comfortable with the amount of demand and you see if you start seeing a lot of five year contracts for GPU rentals, you are literally baking in 2x ROI into a fixed term contract. Again, simple math. If your GPU is roughly ROI in two and a half years after direct operating costs and you have signed a fixed five year contract, you have baked in a 2x ROI to that operating contract and, and then at the end of that term you have the residual value of the GPUs and that's a sweetener. So I think that what's going to happen is you will perhaps start seeing with advent of more 5 look, it happened to Core Weave. Core we've just known for doing five year contracts. They're not like we were doing on demand earlier. That was our start. It allowed us to, to test the technology, expand. It's actually harder to deal with so many different clients. But direction the street like stable revenues, right? That's why the street doesn't like the volatile Bitcoin mining as much. So I think that there's a lot of value in companies that can consistently deliver Neo Clouds. And then you're actually doing AI, then you're actually serving AI workloads. I mean PowerShell, you're just kind of building PowerShell, you're not actually doing AI stuff, but that's cool too, right? So that, that's kind of, so we do it all. And, and so then the thing, and I know we're coming up on time, the thing that I wanted to mention was that we also with the Paraguay press release, in the spirit of that, we've actually sent a cluster of GPUs to a data center in Asuncion, which is capital Paraguay and it's Tigo. So Tigo is the largest telecom company in Paraguay. The same way we partner with Bell in Canada, we partner with Tigo and Paraguay. Why? Because they have existing tier 3 data centers with the fiber and everything. So rather than spend a year building something, we send a cluster of GPUs into Tigo's data center. They went live last week. And this is the best part, boys. We have a research team, award winning research team out of Columbia University in New York that does neural network research. And they're working on how to do better distillation and really kind of like detailed large language model optimization work on these GPUs in ascension from New York. So we're going to evaluate the, the tokens per second and latency and bandwidth of that experience currently. And, and you know, we know it's gonna, it's a start that it's a proof of concept. So once we do that, we know what we're going to need to do. When in iwazu, where our 200 megawatt facility is when we need to go and build our next 100 megawatts, we have a substation on the way being sent to Paraguay and civil's being done that. Next hundred megawatts we might just go straight into an AI factory because we'll know exactly what we need to build because we have the proof of concept. And that's what Hive is doing that nobody else is doing because a lot of people. Paraguay announced a 15 year PPA at 3 and a half cent power for AI. Amazing, right? So you're going to get all these guys like, oh yeah, we're going to build AI. We're going to get in there and we do all these great things. I was like, but what have you done? Have you. We built 300 megawatts in six months in Paraguay. We're the largest operator there and we're the first ones that have a cluster of GPUs live on a cloud being used by LLM researchers. So we're going to take that knowledge, that depth and I think we got some really exciting things coming for AI in Paraguay as well. And then of course in Canada, we have other sites that we've been land banking. So we're going to come to the market with again building a powered shell. That's cool too. We're going to do that and we will. Pardon me, it's my mom's mug. Shine Bright will absolutely be building a tier three that we can, we can co locate. So it's good to have a diversified income portfolio. You bet, boys. And I might add, if you look at where we're valued at right now, I think that we're a bargain. I think smart money, I mean, I would say like Jensen came out and said they're doing a trillion dollars revenue next year and they're at 4 trillion market cap. So in tech stocks that's a relative bargain. I would say like we're doing 200 million revenue. That's our projection for this year just, just on, on AI cloud and I think our market cap's a little over 500. So I would say we're an even better buy than Nvidia right now. So it's 2x versus 4x, right?
- [65:02]
B
Exciting times ahead for sure. Aydin, thank you so much for joining. Appreciate the rundown on ins and outs of operating one of these clusters, man. Hope you have a good weekend.
- [65:11]
A
Thank you for having me. Gentlemen. It's a pleasure as usual. Thank you.
- [65:16]
B
Alrighty. And before we get Rod Palmer on of Bitcoin Bugle, a quick word from our friends at Lygos. Hedge funds are getting liquidated. Is your Bitcoin safe? It's not just Bitcoin's price drying up. Big whales, hedge funds and lending desks are going under after the notorious 1010 and 25 liquidations. Counterparty risk is rampant. So it's important, it's more important than ever to understand who actually controls your Bitcoin. Don't be the next FTX or Celsius victim. Because with Lygos, you are in control of your Bitcoin. If you're working with another loan provider, do yourself a favor before it's too late. And check out Lygos Finance. They are our preferred non custodial Bitcoin lender. They use Bitcoin native smart contracts to protect your stack. With Lygos, you always know where your Bitcoin is. You hold your keys, there's no wrapping, no bridging and no rehypothecation. Get competitive rates for as low as 10% APR. And with that, it's Maxi madness time.
- [66:17]
C
It's Maxi madness time. Thank God we waited so long to get here. Now we have our, our boy. The CEO and usurper of Bitcoin Bugle, Rod Palmer. Welcome to the show, Rod.
- [66:31]
E
How are you doing? Thanks for having me. You know, I was really surprised in a pleasant way to find out that HIVE has a CEO who likes to talk more than Frank Holmes. It was good. It was very. I mean they've done exciting things going on. I just, I didn't think that Frank would be copped. And he could be.
- [66:52]
B
Yeah. Always a loquacious duo. Always come with fun takes.
- [66:58]
C
So the, the, the topic today is Maxi Madness. For anyone who has been living under a rock. What is Maxi Madness and where are we in the madness?
- [67:08]
E
Well, if you've been want, if you turn on a TV in the past two days, you know, it's March Madness in the United States. College basketballs, huge tournament Everybody goes dancing, as they say. Lots of big upsets, lots of surprises. It's always fun. Maxi madness is that without all the athletic ability, all the natural talent, it's just bitcoin influencers, podcasters, entrepreneurs, builders and some other people sprinkled in who just happened to be on bitcoin, Twitter or the timeline. And nobody really knows exactly what they do, why they're here, but it's madness. And it's a tournament, except for instead of playing a game to determine the winner, you decide. Anybody can get on there and you can vote. It's just a Twitter poll. We're actually doing a noster tournament this year as well. And that was a little interesting because that one is not one purse or one end pub. One vote. It is. You can zap as much as you want. So it's the ultimate amount of Lightning Network stats that you accumulate at the end of the 24 hour poll. That's aside, that's what decides who moves on.
- [68:17]
C
So we have Twitter polls, which is obviously the most immutable way to determine who is the maddest. Maxi, who are some of the names this year, Rod?
- [68:26]
A
Who.
- [68:26]
C
Who can I vote for or against on some of these? And yeah, what are your favorite matchups this year?
- [68:34]
E
We are breaking down the four regions. We've got the Node region, the Pioneer region, the Pod Comp region, which is short for Podcast Conference Industrial Complex, and then the Hot region, which is just who's hot, who's the hottest. And the Node region was my favorite. It's the most interesting. If you don't know, there's been a huge battle in the bitcoin industry. Very, very niche battle. But it's the Node client war or the filter war, whatever you want to call it. And this one is just letting everybody mow between, you know, Luke Nikanic, Tomer, Rodney Hamilton, Jameson Lot, Peter Todd, Justin Batchelor, nvk. I mean, you can see the list on the screen there. Now. This was my favorite region, the pioneer region, Sailor number one seed. Of course. He battled Adam Seka, the man with the highest IQ in the world,
- [69:43]
C
banned
- [69:44]
E
from a steak and shake band from a state. Yeah, he is steak and shakes. He is a franchise owner's worst nightmare, let me tell you, if you don't. Yeah, when this is. This is the hot region right here.
- [69:57]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [69:57]
E
So number one is Lyn Alden, of course, and she defeated Frank Corva. Love Frank didn't stand a chance. But that's all right. That's maximat, you know, that's Maxi Madness as March Madness too. The biggest surprise in this region, Aaron Redwing from the How Money podcast took down Ross Albright. In fact, at one point yesterday on the timeline, and this became the Zeus wallet dunk of the day. Aaron just posted a lock him up when she was losing. So the, the trash talk gets serious. It gets very serious.
- [70:34]
B
I just want, I wanted to point this one out because there's something broken in the polling here. If you've got Ross Ulbricht losing to Aaron. No, no shade against Aaron. Love Aaron. But where, where, where are you getting these votes from, man? Are people buying votes? That's a crazy loss. That is a wild thing for a Maxi Max.
- [70:53]
E
Maxi. Maxi Madness is a democracy and in a democracy, boats are for sale. I don't know who's buying votes. I don't know who they're paying. I don't know who. I don't know if it was showing up to the polls, if they're mailing them in, if they're voting twice, if there's any voter id. I don't know. I just know I. Because I can't see Ms. Brody. I can only. It's a, it's a private ballot now or secret ballot on noster. It's a little bit more transparent. So as you can imagine, the. There's some big upsets there as well. But it's very esoteric participants. There's some crossover. Jack Diversity and Odell of course, are both on both the X and monster brackets. But yeah, it's. We're only in round two. Round two just started a few hours ago. It's pure madness. I'd say the biggest if, if anybody remembers around this time last year, if you went on Twitter X people were freaking out about Teddy Bitcoins. Teddy Bitcoins last year swept the tournament, took out Adam Bat, Lynn Alden yellow, and then he defeated Michael Saylor in the final. And Michael Saylor, I mean, he was. Michael Saylor had a lot of votes. I don't know who was voting for him. I don't know. But it was close. Penny Bitcoins ended up winning. People were worried that that was going to happen again this year. We put Teddy in the preliminary round, he against Corey Clifton and Corey Cliftston boat raced him. So if Corey Clifton, maybe his popularity has gone down, turned it down in recent years, maybe this will boost it back up because defeating Teddy Bitcoins is going to be very popular with the bitcoin collabs as they call themselves.
- [72:42]
C
So maximatis is clearly the Ecosystem king maker. If you win this, you are the CEO of Bitcoin. Until next maxi madness. I think that's the official rule somewhere. What. Who do you think is the short list for who's still who. Who could take home the. The crown at the end of this madness?
- [73:02]
E
You know, it is anybody's game still. I think that you'd be crazy to rule out yellow. Yellow is a he. He won in 2024. He probably would have won last year if it was not for Teddy Bitcoins. So I think he's, he's definitely a favorite. People are talking about somebody named Tim B. Who is the podcast host. It's what it's called the Bitcoin divor. He came out of nowhere and beat Dennis Porter yesterday. So that one's something to watch. But I think going forward because anything can happen. We're looking at the prediction markets to kind of try to tell us what the odds are. People have been making prediction markets on this, this platform, this new platform called Predicts. It is just like, just lightning. You, you, you buy yes or no with your lightning wallet. It's not super liquid, but it is, you know, it's information. It is signal. And we're, we're going to be following the production markets to determine who we think is the best bet to win. Maximan is 2026.
- [74:15]
C
Rod, thank you so much for your selfless service. Thank you so much for helping us figure out through markets and madness who the main character is this cycle. Thanks a ton. Maybe we'll have you back on when Maximandis concludes.
- [74:33]
E
Yes. If you are following Maximize or you want to just know. We're taking a break for the weekend. Let everybody catch up with the action, figure out what's going on, and the Sweet 16 will start at 9am Eastern Monday morning.
- [74:47]
C
All right, cheers. Thank you so much.
- [74:49]
B
Thank you, Rod. Appreciate it, man. All right, we've got one more story and we will get y' all out of here. And it's just a quick update on the Clarity act that is, as coindesk says in their coverage here, inching towards approval in the Senate. So crypto Clarity act inches towards Senate hearings as lawmakers weigh legislative trades. So the Clarity act is the. Is part of this push for crypto market structure. It is a complement to the Genius act. And for those who don't know, there are a few key pillars of it. One of the biggest things it does is it gives the CFTC exclusive jurisdiction over digital commodities spot markets, while the SEC has jurisdiction over investment contracts. They also will create tailored registration categories for different actors within the space, like exchanges, brokers, custodians, et cetera. Clear carve outs for defi for saying when something is clearly decentralized, it will be exempt from the market structure regulations. And the bill also limits the SEC and CFTC's jurisdiction over payment stablecoins. There are a few other things. Those are some of the big ones. But in CoinDesk coverage they cover a few key, a few kind of key considerations that are either stalling or driving this forward in the Senate. So it's already passed in the House and right now it's caught up in committees in the Senate. And a few of the things that are reported in this CoinDesk article that I think are of note are the fact that Cynthia Lummis was reported saying earlier, we think we've got it. We are really going to get out of the Banking Committee in April. And so she Cynthia Lummis, one of the chief proponents of crypto on Capitol Hill, thinks that this is pretty close. Now, that being said, it's still got a few hurdles to go through. Officials from Trump's administration are supposed to be involved in the discussions with the Senate Banking Committee. There's a second panel that is going to be hosted that needs to advance the bill before it will before it would be repackaged for one final version for a vote in the Senate. And that will be the make or break before it goes to Trump's desk to be signed or if it's dashed, it will be thrown into the waste bin and we will have wasted all this time for nothing. One last note on this. The Democrats are playing a little tit for tat here. If it's going to be advanced through the Banking Committee, they want senior government officials and lawmakers to be barred from profiting off cryptocurrency investments. Looking at you, big guy in the Oval Office over there, that's really made finger pointed at Trump. And they also want Democrats appointed to the party's vacant seats at the cftc. So they're trying to get a few concessions here so that Democrats will be on board for pushing this forward. And the biggest thing in this article, at least that I thought in terms of the important provisions in this bill, is we might be getting closer to a resolution on the stablecoin yield provision. Now, a big thing that's been hanging up the Clarity act, is that exchanges want their customers to be able to earn yield and interest on their stablecoin deposits. The banks do not want this because this directly interferes with one of their core ways of generating revenue and with attracting customer deposits, you know, to lend out for loans and stuff like that. So banks are saying, no, we give interest on deposits. Sorry, you guys can't do that. With stable coins. Exchanges are saying, okay, we really need that. It's looking like that there will be some form of yield offered on the stable coins, but it probably won't look like interest. It will look something more like credit card rewards, according to this article. Quote on the yield issue, Lummis has said that stablecoin rewards programs that steer clear of bank line language on savings and interest may survive the compromise if insisting they're more akin to credit card rewards than interest from bank account deposits. Lemmas said Coinbase CEO Brian Iberstrong, whose opposition to a previous draft bill helped derail an earlier effort to get to a Senate hearing, has been more flexible in recent talks. So you might not get interest on those stable coins. Maybe you get discounted trading fees, maybe you get some sort of rewards token from Coinbase. No one knows yet, but looks like they're leaning more towards that reward structure than straight up interest on those deposits.
- [79:27]
C
Yeah, this whole time we were building super hard money to disrupt the financial system, but the real wedge issue apparently is interest on your stable coins. So with that, thank you so much for tuning in to Blockspace live presented by CleanSpark. Shout out to our sponsors. Shout out to our guests. We do this Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Friday. If you like this, make sure to listen to the podcast form and check out our newsletter newsletter.blockspace media.com it's still not too late to book that flight to our conference up next April 16th in New York City. Op n x t dext.de for tickets and info. Otherwise, I'll see you next week. See you all Monday.
- [80:10]
B
Have a good weekend y'.
- [80:11]
A
All.