← The Wolf Of All Streets
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- [00:01]
A
We have a potentially major setback for bitcoin and the crypto industry as a whole as the Senate slams the brakes on the Clarity Act. As you know, we were anticipating a markup today that has been delayed, and not only because of politics, because Coinbase also pushed back, saying that no policy is better than bad policy. Well, today's guest also said something very similar to Twim Tweet. We have Jake Chervinsky, who is the chief legal officer of Variant, among many other things, and one of the brightest legal minds in the crypto space. It's been a long time coming to have him on, and there couldn't be a better day to have an expert unpack everything that's happening on Capitol Hill. Let's go. Let's do. Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the show. We were originally anticipating the opportunity to unpack the upcoming Clarity act and its implications and discuss the markup. Instead, we're largely going to be discussing why that markup's not happening and what the future of this bill may look like. As I said before, I have a very special guest today, Jake Chervinsky, here to discuss all that. It's been a long time coming, but I feel like it was kismet that had happened on this day. So they were finally sitting down and having a conversation.
- [01:30]
B
Perfect timing. And thanks, Scott. It's great to be here.
- [01:33]
A
So, yeah, when we originally talked, how much time you had? It was, I got to be done by 9:30 because the markup's happening now. You got to be done at 9:30 because the markup's not happening.
- [01:42]
B
Yes, exactly. Yeah. It's an interesting moment here in D.C. you know, obviously, we thought we were going to spend the day dealing with amendments in the Senate Banking Committee, trying to figure out how we can get the Clarity act out of the committee and onto the Senate floor. And instead, what we learned last night is that the committee is going to delay the markup. We don't know for how long, and we don't know what the ultimate results of the ongoing negotiations are going to be. But all of us in D.C. are trying to figure out how to still move this thing forward. So happy to dig into any piece of that, whatever is most interesting.
- [02:14]
A
Sure. I just want to jump into your first take here. The market structure bill is the kind of law that will live for 100 years. Billions of dollars will be spent figuring out what it means before it's even fully implemented through rulemaking. We can take all the time we need to get it right, and we can walk if no bill is better than a bad bill. Brian Armstrong said something very similar went point by point, as you did in a thread, on why they could not support this bill. I think everybody, as impatient as we may be, agrees that locking a bunch of things in for the next hundred years that could be damaging to the industry or have unforeseen consequences makes a lot of sense, but still seems like a lot of the wind are out of our sails. I mean, maybe you can jump into the parts of the bill that you view as bad.
- [02:56]
B
Yeah, sure. And before I get into the substance, just to reinforce the point, whatever we do in this bill is going to stick with us for a very long time. Congress generally does not revisit laws that it puts into the United States code. And so although we want to get this done quickly, we don't want to rush and end up with something that jeopardizes the future of crypto in America. So let's talk about what some of those issues are. The first and most important issue that we've been fighting the banks over is the question of stablecoin yields. And folks may remember when we did the Genius act, the stablecoin legislation last summer, unfortunately, part of the deal we had to strike to get that legislation done was a ban on yield bearing stablecoins. You know, that's an innovative product that the crypto industry had created that we had to give up in order to get that bill done. But unfortunately the banks are not satisfied with that. They want to make sure that no stablecoin holder can get any yield at any time for any reason. And that's really a non starter for the industry and that's really slowing down the negotiation.
- [04:01]
A
Is that true even if we call them rewards? I thought if we just used a cute different name for yield that we could get away with sarcasm, obviously. But it did seem that the industry was getting away with rewards and not yield.
- [04:11]
B
No, look, you're spot on. And that really was the result of the negotiation. Ingenious, because the industry did not want to give up yield in its entirety. So the deal essentially was the issuer of the stablecoin cannot directly pay yield to the holder of the stablecoin just for holding it. But the holder of the stablecoin could get non cash rewards like loyalty points, very familiar in the credit card world, or they could get paid yield by some third party for holding the stablecoin. And this is really important to Coinbase because Coinbase is not an issuer of usdc. But if you hold USDC on Coinbase, they can nonetheless pay you yield. And this is why this issue is so important for Coinbase, because they don't want to give up that ability to pay their customers that yield. The banks, however, view that as as unacceptable competition. And so they've been pushing to reopen the deal that they themselves approved less than one year ago in order to make sure that stablecoin holders really can't get any yield in any form or fashion.
- [05:12]
A
They point obviously to risks to the financial system. But the more cynical view, and if you've been around the banks for a while, is that they're lobbying in their own self interest because they make billions of dollars in capturing that yield for themselves and not passing it on to their customers. I believe JP Morgan last quarter made 25 billion doll in net interest on their yield. They don't want to give that up. They can make the 4 or 5% and give you 1% and you take it and like it. And that's not what stable coins are promising.
- [05:41]
B
Right? That's their business model. And yes, they have arguments that they've constructed as to why stable coins are a risk to the financial system. I don't think that any of those arguments hold water at all. But this is unfortunately the reality of how things work in Washington. Influential lobbies will come up with some argument that seems to justify whatever position want members of Congress to take. But then in reality, it's their influence over those members of Congress, often through the funding that they do for, you know, campaign contributions, that ultimately lets them get away with pushing those views. And the banks are very powerful. You know, the crypto industry has become quite powerful in recent years. But the Senate Banking Committee has, you know, a very large constituency in the banking lobby. And so they're going to be influential on a bill that has to go through that committee.
- [06:31]
A
And the Senate Banking Committee could also flip colors once again at midterms, which could be another existential risk to the crypto industry. People believe that the anti crypto army is dead. And I want to get into that more, but I think it's just hibernating and seeing some opportunity coming about. But you can have Elizabeth Warren as the head of the Senate Banking Committee very realistically next year.
- [06:49]
B
Again, I think that's true. And that is one reason why we all want to get a market structure bill done in this Congress. You know, we have Republican control of both the House and the Senate. Republican leadership is very pro crypto right now. We have a president who wants to sign a market structure bill. The expectation in the midterms, just because this is how politics often happens, is that the Republicans will lose control, most likely of the House of Representatives, less likely in the Senate, but nonetheless, if you think about being under a chair waters in the House Financial Services Committee, that's going to make a bill much harder to get done over in the House than Chair French Hill, who got the Clarity act through the House last year in a form that looks really very good and frankly, quite a lot better than the draft that we're looking at in the Senate. So we do want to get something done this Congress, if we can. That said, to the point that we've been discussing, it may be that no deal is better than a bill that will jeopardize these key issues in crypto or that will just hand regulatory authority over to the agencies in a way where if there is a future hostile administration, they'll have all the power that they need to drive crypto out of the United States. And as the anti crypto army was trying to do under Biden, which thankfully we stopped them from doing mostly by going to court and arguing they lacked statutory authority. So that's a really key issue here.
- [08:13]
A
Very clear that this is not the time to be complacent. I would even say that we want to get it done in this Congress, but we want to get it done in the coming months in this Congress before all focus turns to midterms. And nobody cares about the Clarity act anymore because they're fighting for their own survival or that of their party.
- [08:29]
B
That's true. And you know, the sort of secret of Congress is that in a midterm year or any election year, they sort of stop doing serious work at some point over the summer because they have to shift their focus to running for reelection. It's a little bit less true in the Senate because only one third of the Senate is up for reelection in any given year. But this bill will have to go back to the House if we get it out of the Senate because of how different clarity looks in the Senate than what passed the House. And if we get to June, July or August, it is really hard to to imagine the House being able to pass a new version of the Clarity Act. So we are on a pretty tight timeline here.
- [09:07]
A
Right. So listen, I want to just bring up Brian Armstrong's tweet. It kind of goes through the bullet points here. They largely align with your thread as well. He put draft amendments that would kill rewards on stable coins, allowing banks to ban their competition last. I think we all know that that One was going to be first. There's a reason that he put it last for optics, but a de facto ban on tokenized equities. This one really got my spidey senses tingling when I read it because we've seen so much momentum on tokenizing everything. You have Paul Atkins at the SEC saying that the entire United States financial system could be on blockchain rails by the end of 2026. Hyperbole. Sure. The DTCC getting a no action letter from the SEC and saying that they intend to move everything to blockchain rails and all these massive news items on tokenization. And then you see that that might all basically be banned in this act. Is this true? I mean, is this how you read it?
- [10:03]
B
Yes. But let me give you a little bit of nuance here, and I'll start by saying we only saw this language maybe two days ago. So we had no idea that the Clarity act was going to include anything on tokenized securities. It's not entirely clear to us where the language came from or what it means. This is one of the problems of trying to rush legislation without having enough time to really understand deeply what the language means. And I, as you know, when the lawyers go to court to fight about this stuff, you could have an entirely different result from a judge based on a single word in a federal statute. So we have to be really careful when we're analyzing these different statutes. But what showed up in the bill, which we had not reviewed before, was section 505, which, depending on your interpretation, seems to be a direct strike at what Chair Atkins has said that he wants to do. He launched Project Crypto last year. The goal of Project Crypto is truly to modernize the entire financial system by bringing all securities and financial instruments under the SEC's purview onto public blockchains. That is an amazing and ambitious goal. It's also absolutely what the SEC should be doing and what section 505 seems to suggest is that the SEC does not have statutory authority to write new rules for securities that are on blockchains. It actually says that there is no ability of the SEC to waive or modify the regulations that apply to traditional securities just because those securities are moving on chain. And also no ability for the SEC to exempt anyone from registration by virtue of the fact that the securities are trading on chain. And the issue we've been having with the SEC getting them to enable tokenized securities thus far is looking at the traditional securities laws and saying, how do these laws written for traditional intermediaries apply to a Decentralized disinterested intermediated financial system where for example, the developer of a decentralized amm. Right. A decentralized exchange protocol is not performing the same function as NYSE or nasdaq, the operator of a centralized, you know, central limit order book exchange. And it seems like what this new section of the bill says is the SEC doesn't get to write new rules because an AMM is on chain and those securities are tokenized trading on an amm. They just have to apply those same rules and to traditional finance. As for DeFi and of course that is not workable.
- [12:34]
A
Yeah, I want to continue kind of going through this, I guess point by point while I have you DEFI prohibitions giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy. Privacy seems to be a huge narrative, I should say regaining steam over the past few months, both within the market itself with the emergence of zcash and Monero again, but certainly behind closed doors when creating legislation like this.
- [12:59]
B
Yeah, it's crucially important. And the fight that we've been having over privacy in crypto all along is how the Bank Secrecy act applies to again people in the crypto industry who are building infrastructure but do not have custody and control of user funds. The traditional Bank Secrecy act essentially says if you're a financial institution and you take control of user funds, meaning you receive funds from some person and then have the independent authority to transmit those funds to some other person or location, you're a money transmitter. This means you need to have an anti money laundering compliance program that requires you to KYC all of those people whose funds you are in control of. Now DEFI is non custodial. It just doesn't function this way. A DEFI developer building a lending protocol or an exchange protocol does not have control over user funds. What this means is there's no obligation to do kyc. And this is somewhat frightening to folks in law enforcement and national security who feel like they need to be able to surveil every single transaction we make at all times in real time in order to combat illicit financial activity. I think that's absolutely not true. It's also the wrong trade off between freedom and national security. But what we saw in the latest draft of clarity are two sections, sections 301 and 302, which seem to suggest that the operator of a sequencer on an Ethereum L2 would have to KYC users and the provider of a decentralized exchange front end. Right. Like any type of web application or wallet that allows users to connect to some underlying defi protocol, they'll have to KYC their users too. And there's a little bit of ambiguity there. But to me, this is an existential issue for defi. If defi has to start kycing every user, we have lost the plot of what we are here to do. And we should not tolerate any ambiguity there.
- [14:58]
A
Defi. Right. I mean, it ceases to be defi. It's interesting because I thought we already settled all of this. I guess it's coming back around. But we went through the phase of every wallet provider is going to have to KYC and report every transaction. I thought we had already proven to the government that that was literally impossible. And then businesses left the United States during the last administration because of fear of these exact things. And here we are again, litigating the same exact argument.
- [15:26]
B
It's sort of. It's sort of the perpetual issue in Washington. And we've convinced a lot of people, especially in the administration and the Treasury Department and elsewhere, who do really understand how this technology works, why it is important to preserve permissionlessness in public blockchains and also the fact that permissioned defi is not defi at all. The problem is we haven't done a lot of work educating all of the members of the Senate. Right. Senators who've just not thought deeply about these issues. We spent a lot of time with their staff. But it's really the moment where legislation like this actually gets close to the finish line, where a lot of the members of Congress themselves start to pay closer attention. Also where the banks and the traditional securities intermediaries like Citadel, Ken Griffin is a major opponent of us doing anything that would help crypto when they start sort of telling their story and their narrative to the members of Congress. And so this is just an issue that keeps coming up over and over again. And it's hard to imagine that we're going to work out a deal considering that we need to get seven Democratic members of the Senate to sign onto this bill. And Democrats, for better or worse, have been very skeptical about the value of crypto in the first place, and therefore very sensitive to this question of whether illicit finance is a bigger issue than getting the benefit of innovation and passing a bill.
- [16:48]
A
Okay, I want to go into that in a second. I just want to finish this last thought. Erosion of the CFTC's authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC. Also, I thought that we were kind of done with the SEC versus the CFTC and choosing a regulator but here we are. I guess right now nobody would have a problem with the SEC being the more powerful regulator in this case. But we've all seen what happens when it's not our guy. Yeah.
- [17:13]
B
So totally. And I'll give you sort of two points to explain why I think Brian wanted to raise that issue. The first is sort of why this is an issue in the first place. And as you'll know, the main question in market structure legislation is are digital assets securities or are they commodities? And we did a really great job in the Clarity act in the House and then in the draft that came out in the Senate in September of explaining these assets are commodities provided they meet certain minimum requirements. As long as they're not just mass, you know, stocks masquerading as commodities, then the CFTC will have jurisdiction over them and the SEC will not. But in the most recent draft of the Clarity act that we saw this week, all of a sudden the SEC has way more authority to decide which assets are under its jurisdiction and might be treated as securities and which ones can go over to the CFTC regulatory regime. So for example, what we saw added to the bill, which we had not seen before, is essentially front door approval power that the SEC will have to allow token issuance. The way this should work is maybe the token issuer has to notify the SEC that they've launched a token, but provided that the token complies with those minimum requirements, you shouldn't have to wait around for the SEC to give you permission to launch that token. That also gives the SEC the authority to prohibit token issuance in the United States. This is what we were fighting Gary Gensler over all day, every day, for every minute that he was the chair of the sec. And so handing that type of approval power over to the sec. Where folks who are trying to launch tokens need to wait around for SEC approval and they can deny it essentially within their discretion, with very limited ability for recourse, is a non starter for the industry. It doesn't solve that key issue that we have. And the second point that I'll make is we haven't actually seen the CFTC half of the bill yet. Right. We're working on only half of the Clarity act in the Senate Banking Committee right now. The Senate Agriculture Committee has to do the other half of the bill. Their markup was scheduled for two weeks from now. It's up in the air. Given what happened with the markup today, whether they will move forward or not. And we haven't even seen their updated text so that gives you a sense of how much more we really need to do to get to a point where we have a bill that we want to pass.
- [19:30]
A
Yeah, I think we covered the. Probably the main points. So now I want to shift slightly to the sentiment now that we've seen this delayed. Coinbase has obviously raised their concerns and said they won't support it. Senator Lummis didn't want to comment on Coinbase's opposition to market structure legislation at first, but I asked whether it would impact the process. I think it'll have a profound impact on the process. Lummis said she's been exceptionally bullish and optimistic about this passing. This is obviously showing a crack in that facade. David Sack saying the crypto industry should use this pause to resolve any remaining differences. Now is the time to set the rules of the road and secure the future of this industry. To me, that sounds like a backhanded comment said saying that we're shooting ourselves in the foot and this isn't necessarily the politicians. I guess what I'm getting at is, is this thing dead in the water right now? And my feeling is that I've been wrong. I've said long thought that this was a foregone conclusion. Now I see this happening. I talk to you, I think about this. I think this is. Is it's not happening.
- [20:32]
B
I don't want to say it's dead in the water. What I'll say about Washington, based on my few years of experience doing crypto policy, is everything looks like it can't happen right until the moment that it happens. And in D.C. even if there's a 2% chance of passing a bill like this, you treat it like 100% chance because it still happens, or the opposite.
- [20:52]
A
Because genius was 100%. And then all of a sudden you had that letter from all the senators and we thought that it was done. I could totally be wrong.
- [20:59]
B
And day to day, right, day to day, things can change. And it could be that by this afternoon, Coinbase will have worked out some great deal and we'll be back on, and we're doing a markup next week, and it's all good. So it's hard to predict. I will say, though, these issues are really hard, and we haven't been working on them in a serious fashion for very long with a Congress that's even willing to have genuine conversations with us. This is very new, and to do legislation of this size usually takes a decade, not a year. And so I think we shouldn't be surprised if we find ourselves in a position where we just can't make a deal deal that we want to make. And to the point that you raise, looking at what Senator Lummis and what David Sachs, what they're saying is they want to make a deal and they view the industry's opposition to moving forward as the key problem. And to an extent they're right. But also we have to be able to make a deal that actually works for the industry. And if we can't do that again, we are better off with no bill than a bad bill. We were just talking about what Chair Atkins says he wants to do for crypto. I believe the SEC can do a massive amount of good through rulemaking under its current authority without jeopardizing crypto. If we end up with a hostile administration in the future. The same thing over at the cftc. Mike Selig just took over as chair. He's barely gotten into the building and started hiring staff. But there's a massive amount of work that we can do over at the cftc. So I think it is true that we should keep working on this. We should spend every bit of effort that we can trying to get it done. It's very important to do. But it's really unclear what the path forward is at this point.
- [22:35]
A
Yeah, I guess it should have been more specific. I thought it was going to happen in a very short time frame and now I do not believe that. Right. I'm not saying that it's never happening. That would be hyperbole. We obviously mentioned the, I guess renewed tailwinds for the anti crypto army to some degree. And you made some points previously about Democrats. I'm not sure if you saw Blumenthal's. I guess it's an op ed here on Fox. But Senator Richard Blumenthal crypto is a gamble our financial system doesn't need. I read through this this and commented on it. This is one of the more disingenuous takes and it really scared me that there's still people like this out in government. He basically said that the Silicon Valley bank and Signature and those failures were a result of the crypto industry narratives that have been so widely disproven and dead. I thought for a while that it was the speed of the rails and the customers they were using to collapse these banks when we all know that it was interest rate risk and duration mismatches and bad balance sheets. It was because of the yields on bonds that these things collapsed and they killed Signature bank on a Sunday when it was solvent. So to Pretend that that was an insolvent bank that needed, that was collapsing is also disingenuous. This struck a chord with me because it feels like they're coming back and they feel that they have enough tailwinds, as I said, to start making these comments publicly again.
- [23:57]
B
Well, I hate to break it to you, Scott. They never went away. You know, the skeptics are out there. I think it's very frustrating for me because I've spent years now fighting back against disingenuous arguments like this. You know, very frustrating to me that, you know, these issues keep coming up and that folks feel comfortable making sort of blatant misstatements in public like this. But also it is a little bit comforting that this is the best they can do. Right. It makes me feel like we're definitely on the right side of this thing.
- [24:24]
A
Best we could do is to tell a lie about something that people know is a lie. Right? Right.
- [24:28]
B
Yeah. Hey, look, man, that's. That's a bit encouraging. At least our enemies don't have good arguments to throw at us. Here's sort of the political picture, just to give you a quick sense of it. At this point. The Republican Party is essentially lockstep, pro crypto, with a couple of exceptions and outliers here and there. The Democratic Party is sort of split down the middle to some degree. The moderate wing of the Democratic Party, the folks who are pro business and, you know, understand also the sort of benefit of crypto for the types of principles that they espouse, right? Financial inclusion, reducing the power of authoritarian governments and, you know, trying to sort of open the financial system to be more fair and less, you know, bent toward the benefits of corporations. Those Democratic members of Congress are very pro crypto. Then there's the anti crypto army. And those folks are just never going to come around. And I think it's a waste of our time to try to bring them around, around. Elizabeth Warren is not going to be pro crypto no matter what you argue to her. And that's okay. We don't need her to be. We do need to be bipartisan. And it is extraordinarily important as a lobby that we continue to be bipartisan and talk to both sides of the aisle. But the situation in the Senate is there are 47 Democratic members of the Senate. There's only about 12 of them who are even willing to entertain a yes vote on a market structure bill. And we need to at least seven of them to get to 60 votes on the floor of the Senate. And we might Lose one or two Republicans here or there. So it could be, we need eight, nine, maybe 10 of those Democrats. That makes this extraordinarily hard around some of the key issues, especially around DeFi and KYC requirements, because one of those Democratic senators is Senator Mark Warner of Virginia. He's on the Intelligence Committee. And he's one of the folks who sort of believes that, that there's not a whole lot of value to crypto, but that it's really very beneficial to, you know, rogue state actors like North Korea. And so he wants any crypto market structure bill to have some illicit finance or anti money laundering requirements that may be unacceptable to the industry. And this is where the real challenge is getting seven Democrats on board. I'll flag one more issue for folks that we haven't talked about yet, but that's sort of a key issue lurking behind the scenes, which is the ethics issue. Those Democrats basically say they don't want to vote for any crypto market structure bill, no matter what it says about substance or policy, unless it includes some provision that prevents the President and his family from engaging in crypto business. Because they look at the Trump family's crypto business and they see corruption and abuse. The problem is the President has to sign this bill into law if we want to make it law. And it's really hard to imagine the President signing a bill that has an ethics provision that targets him and his family in terms of the business that they're able to do. So this is just one of those issues where it seems like there's no solution. It's like above our pay grade as a lobby to deal with. This is a direct negotiation between the members of the Senate and the White House, but also sort of hard to understand even if we solve all those other issues that Brian Armstrong and I mentioned on Twitter yesterday, how we get to an agreement on the ethics issue.
- [27:44]
A
I know you need to run. I highly encourage everybody to give you a follow on X. It's down in the comments, and to revisit your threads and continue keeping an eye on it, because I know you're very much on the front lines of this and we deeply appreciate that. And to that end, I know you have a call in 1 minute to go deal with these actual issues. So instead of talking to us, please go talk to them. Thank you so much, Jake.
- [28:06]
B
Sounds great. Thank you, Scott. It was awesome talking to you. Thank you.
- [28:09]
A
It's been a long time coming to have Jake on the show. Really, really incredible to have actual experts unpack these instead of Just all of us pundits giving our opinions on what's likely to happen in the future. I would also kind of revisit David Sacks's comments there about the industry getting it together to basically decide on our priorities, because I think it's important to remember that the crypto industry itself is not a monolith and that there are wildly different expectations and interests at play within the crypto industry itself. We know how much tribalism and community passion there is and that everybody obviously has different priorities and very difficult to get all of those on one side. I think the industry catalyzed around Trump in the months coming up to the election because the Biden administration was so anti crypto and Gensler was so difficult. But from what I've heard behind the scenes, the moment that Trump went into office, obviously the lobbies for the individual protocols and companies went to work in the interest of those companies and protocols, which makes a lot of sense. But what I see here from David Sachs is him saying, you guys need to get on common ground once again, common interest and act as a unified industry and lobby to get this done. And like I said to Jake, I just don't see this getting done now. I don't know if that's something that we should be sad about. I could be completely wrong. I literally, in a newsletter within the last three days, kind of listed clarity as a foregone conclusion. Something that was definitely going to happen. When you're wrong, you're wrong. I'm not sure if I was, but I'm starting to believe that this thing is not going to get done. There were a couple other pieces of news maybe worth unpacking. This one just caught my eye. I don't have a particular opinion on it. Bitmind invests 200 million in Mr. Beast Beast Industries to expand DEFI and financial services integration. I'm old enough to remember when Bitmine was simply an Ethereum Treasury Company. Throwing 200 million at Mr. Beast is definitely a departure from their previous ethos and technique. I'm really curious to hear Tom Lee's comments. I had a few friends that messaged me and said, tom Lee's on right now. I don't understand this at all, but I want to reserve judgment until I take a deeper look at it myself. But obviously treasury companies across the board are looking for other ways to escape the we simply buy this asset and hold it mentality that they've had before. Even in my interview with David Bailey from Nakamoto, he said, yeah, we're looking at cash flowing businesses so that we can use that cash flow to buy more bitcoin. I think we all know that one of the few things I've been right about in my life, there's been a few actually, was that I thought the digital asset treasury space from the very beginning was a massive bubble. It popped a lot faster and harder than I necessarily anticipated. But I said from the very beginning that everybody can get behind the idea of digital asset treasury companies that are cash flowing businesses using that money to buy bitcoin as a hedge against the inflation risk of the cash on their balance sheet. But yoloing into a whole bunch at the top with all your money and then hoping for the best if price goes down was never a viable business. Business strategy. One more piece of housekeeping that I want to bring because I've gotten a million questions about it. I want to show you guys. On Instagram I do have the handle Slash Scott Melker again, which I lost for two years. I don't know if you guys heard the story. I had a huge Instagram presence. I use it all the time. It was from my DJ days. It was Slash Scott Melker. I had a hundred people larping as me and pretending they were me. Well, one of the imposter accounts got me kicked off of Instagram entirely for two years. It required lawyers and I finally got my handle back. Slash Scott Melker. Hooray. So started using that account again. Came to find out that I didn't actually, I knew I didn't get my followers back. So by the way, when I got the account back, it had 11,000 fake followers. 97% of them were bots from India. We had to clean out the account down to like a thousand people. It was at 11,000. My original was at 100. So I didn't get my followers back. Come to find out though, that people started sending me screenshots that the Slash Scott Melker name was getting a warning every time you went for it because it used to be someone else's account. So I did not in fact get my account back. I got my handle back, which was tainted by the scammer who had taken and was using my handle and had switched the name. So it became completely clear to us trying to deal with their customer service, which I tried to deal with for two years, that that wasn't going to work. So I launched a new Instagram account. Scott Melker is me. But we're forwarding everybody to the Scott Melker. So if you are on Instagram and are afraid of Finding a scammer, you'll see. We have a full feed here only for the last few days. It's really actually a great follow. I don't manage most of the news there myself. Obviously, I have a team. But if you're on Instagram, slash the Scott Melker and everyone else is literally scamming you, if you get a message from the Wolf of all streets but the O and wolf is a zero on X asking you how your trading's going, that's not me and you'll be sad to find out. And I've mentioned this before, how many people have been scammed by impersonators using my name? Even people I know who didn't bother to reach out to me and find out if I was real? I told you guys, there was one guy we're still working on, maybe a podcast with him who got scammed for millions of dollars because he thought he was talking to me for years on Twitter and Instagram, there were fake telegram chats and fake accounts. I didn't know about any of this until he lost the money and started trolling my Instagram saying I was fake. And I was like, bro, I'm real. What's going on? And then I talked to his private investigator. It's crazy. So if you think you're talking to me, you're not. Except for maybe now, because you can see my face. But that's going to be AI by next week, I'm sure. Anyways, so go follow me on Instagram at slash the Scott Melker. Otherwise, ignore Scot Merkel and the Wolf of Ool streets. And anyone who's telling you that they have trading secrets, send me a bitcoin. I'll send you two back. So many scams. Not even sure if I'm actually me right now. Very confusing. All right, guys, that was incredible conversation with Jake Turvinsky. I would like to remind you there are a lot of YouTube channels out there. I love all of them, but most of them suck terribly. And it's people telling you what they think about issues with very little informed opinion based on headlines that are likely unreal. What differentiates us here and what we'll be continuing to build out is a channel where we bring on the actual experts in topics to tell you what is actually happening and not just offer opinion. And I think Jake Tarvinsky today was yet another great example of of that. So you want to hear great conversations with brilliant guests? This is a channel for you if you want to hear what's likely to happen to your favorite meme Coin tomorrow. This channel is not for you. Go home. Leave us alone. We don't want you. That's it for today. See you tomorrow.
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Bye.
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