Matt and Nic are back with a new week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Spanish soccer club Osasuna hedges their relegation on Kalshi
• Strategy shocks people by buying the dip
• Is Strategy sacrificing MSTR to save STRC?
• Saylor bolsters his cash position
• What factors are dragging on the BTC price?
• Zcash fixes a scary inflation bug
• SBF formally applies for a Presidential pardon
• The CFTC proposes banning a subset of prediction market contracts
• Polymarket thinks that Kalshi is spying on them
• European fans in America for the World Cup are discovering Buc-ees
• The DATs are struggling
• Hester Peirce gives her farewell address
• Japanese banks are launching a joint stablecoin
• Will there be offshore interest-bearing USD stablecoins?
• Anthropic drops Fable 
• The thin model hypothesis
• What could pop the AI rally?

Check out this episode!

Wyatt sits down with Omid Malekan, a Professor at Columbia Business School, author of several books, and “Explainer-in-Chief” of blockchain technology. In this episode, Wyatt and Omid discuss:

• Why do stablecoins carry a persisent sense of being “dangerous” or “ungovernable?
• Are stablecoins truly private money? How do we define private money?
• Who owns our current banking and payment systems?
• Why do banks vocally oppose stablecoins?
• Who will own and control digital money networks?
• Are blockchains the right medium for digital finance over the long term?
• Is digital trust a problem?

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• FIFA’s World Cup ticketing scandal
• Andrew Yang is now a crypto and telecoms entrepreneur
• Are Strategy’s woes responsible for the Bitcoin pullback?
• Will Saylor defend STRC or MSTR?
• What are Saylor’s options here?
• Polymarket has another market resolution SNAFU
• How UMA could be used to exploit Polymarket
• BitMine considers a perpetual preferred security
• Google’s quantum circuit is optimized by hobbyists
• Galaxy launches OTC trading for prediction markets
• Treasury sanctions Iran’s largest digital asset exchanges
• Andrew Left of Citron research is convicted of securities fraud

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• The CEO of Lead bank says debanking was made up
• Which aspects of debanking were real?
• The SEC scraps its 50-year-old gag rule
• The WSJ gets free banking history wrong in their attack on stablecoins
• What does history tell us about decentralized monetary issuance
• Why stablecoins aren’t vulnerable to the same issues as free banks
• SoFi launches SoFiUSD and mixes a stablecoin with a tokenized deposit
• Sentiment is bottoming in Ethereum
• David Hoffman sells his ETH
• Are stablecoins parasitic to L1s
• Can L1s accrue value sustainably?
• The DATs are troubled
• Is AGI here already?
• AI cost discipline

Content mentioned in this episode: 

• Nic on Substack, Stablecoins are private money. There’s nothing wrong with that

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Are AI datacenters better or worse for the environment than Bitcoin miners?
• AI is not responsible for your power bills
• Why AI could actually drive down residential power prices
• Is AI less popular than crypto ever was?
• The negative societal effects of tech companies staying private for longer
• We analyze the SpaceX S1
• OpenAI solved one of the Erdos problems
• The US government is taking equity stakes in quantum computers
• Jane Street is still dealing with the Terra fallout
• Prime Trust is trying to claw back assets from Swan
• The SEC has questions about tokenized equities

Content mentioned in this episode:

• Nic on Substack, AI is not hiking your electricity bill – yet

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Matt and Nic are aback with another week of news and deals, today joined by Gus Coldebella to cover the CLARITY Act. In this episode: 

• The Clarity Act advances resoundingly from committee
• Sen. Warren doesn’t like the Clarity Act
• Will there be an ethics provision inserted into Clarity?
• The next fight in DC
• What’s up with Nantucket real estate?
• Nantucket’s ponzinomics
• Nantucket is the birthplace of venture capital
• Circle is issuing a token
• Cprkrn recovers 5 BTC with the help of Claude

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Will Hantavirus become another global pandemic?
• Kraken buys Reap for $600m
• Bullish buys Equiniti for $4.2b
• Reflections on 10 years of attending Consensus
• Is it acceptable to wear a backpack with a suit
• a16z crypto announces a $2.2b fundraise
• Coinbase is laying off 14% of the firm
• Will AI lead to massive job losses?
• Is VC immune from AI job displacement
• I bipartisan compromise is finally reached on Clarity
• How the AI water use debate is just like Bitcoin
• The AI lobby is learning from Fairshake
• The SEC delays prediction market ETFs

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• DeFi had its worth month of hacks ever
• How are people falling for the fake Zoom link hack
• The KelpDAO Aave bailout is happening
• Is Bitcoin’s security degrading because miners are pivoting to AI?
• Litecoin suffers a 51% attack
• Is Bitcoin PoW at risk?
• Computershare partners with Securitize
• Meta will offer creator payouts in stablecoins via Stripe
• Q-day prize controversy
• Why quantum canaries might not provide much of a warning
• Paul Tudor Jones is spooked by quantum
• Some evidence for insider information in political prediction markets

Check out this episode!

Pluto is a veteran of DeFi and cross chain systems, with prior stints at Thorchain and Airswap, now building Harbor, a native asset DEX. In this episode, we talk about the KelpDAO exploit and how DeFi can regain people’s trust. Nic sits down with him to discuss:

• What exactly happened with the KelpDAO/ Aave hack?
• Will new AI models make hackers more proficient?
• Is advanced AI a defensive or offensive technology for smart contracts?
• Why protocol exposures are often not on chain
• Why DeFi might want to segregate execution from settlement
• Is it possible to have instant settlement and proactive monitoring
• Do we have anything to learn from DeFi
• What could Aave have done different?
• Where did LayerZero go wrong?
• Can DeFi work if there are occasional freezes and seizures?
• Pluto’s reflections on Thorchain
• What Thorchain did right
• Arbitrum’s questionable precedent
• What Pluto is building with Harbor
• Where does DeFi go from here?

Learn more about Harbor and follow Pluto on X

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Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals:

• The Finding Satoshi documentary has a new guess
• Was it Hal or Len?
• Could Satoshi have been a team?
• Why Stylometry might not reveal Satoshi
• Why the cypherpunks were interested in resurrection
• What happened with KelpDAO?
• Is DeFi cooked?
• Is Arbitrum decentralized?
• The Paris temperature market was manipulated
• Coinbase releases their highly-anticipated quantum risk report
• Performance tradeoffs for post-quantum signature schemes
• SBF was a good investor
• The Justin Sun WLFI saga continues
• Did an Indian tanker fall victim to a crypto scam in the Strait of Hormuz? 

Content mentioned in this episode:

• Finding Satoshi Documentary
• Fidelity Digital Assets, Getting Off Zero: Evaluating Bitcoin in 2026
• Coinbase, Quantum report

Check out this episode!

Brandon Arvanaghi, the co-founder and CEO of Meow, joins the show. In this episode we discuss:

• The rise of agentic payments and the convergence of LLMs and financial services.
• Meow’s approach to banking the agentic economy.
• How financial services firms and banks will need to evolve in order to service AI agents.
• Meow’s product roadmap.

Meow recently made history as the first fintech to enable AI agents to open business bank accounts and virtual cards. Meow has been building the banking and treasury infrastructure for crypto-native and VC-backed companies for several years now. This includes USDC/USDT rails, stablecoin card programs, treasury management, and FX. To learn more about Meow visit meow.com

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for more news and deals: 

• Jameson Lopp’s BIP361 gets an official BIP number
• What about an official salvage process for the quantum-vulnerable Satoshi coins
• What about recycling Satoshi’s bitcoins into long-term tail emissions
• Why the Satoshi freeze war will be unlike the Blocksize war
• Kraken confidential files for an IPO
• The SEC says defi frontends might not be broker dealers even if they list tokenized securities
• Goldman files for a Bitcoin ETF
• WLFi is having a feud with Justin Sun
• Ether Machine, an Ethereum DAT winds down
• There is a new Satoshi documentary coming out
• There is an A-list Hollywood movie coming out about Craig Wright
• Leo Aschenbrenner’s secret
• Tether invests into Drift Protocol post-hack
• Why is USDC refusing to freeze funds after hacks?
• Do we need an “on-chain” Chancery Court for blockchains

Content mentioned on this episode:

• Nic on X, How to resolve the matter of the Satoshi coins without a freeze

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• The New York Times thinks Adam Back is Satoshi
• The problems with the NYT’s analysis
• The case for Len Sassaman
• The case for Satoshi not being alive
• Could Satoshi be a group?
• Why Satoshi might be discovered this year
• Morgan Stanley launches their Bitcoin ETF
• Scott Bessent asks for Congress to pass Clarity
• The White House finds that stablecoin yield would not harm the banking system
• Kalshi secures a key win in a NJ appeals court
• Anthropic’s Mythos model is exposing vulnerabilities
• CZ is publishing a memoir
• Will Hormuz tolls be payable in Bitcoin?

Check out this episode!

Connor Dougherty, Co-Founder and CEO of Valinor Digital, joins the show. In this episode:

• Connor’s background working at a large private credit shop
• Pioneering a new category of Open Credit and how it expands the TAM for private credit
• Explosion of stablecoin demand enabling new borrowing types
• Structuring deals to align with traditional private capital and onchain lending
• Building a modern credit institution by utilizing technology

See more at valinordigital.com

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Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• The significance of the new Google and Oratomic papers on quantum computing and ECC256
• Why short range attacks are now part of the threat model
• Is Nic conflicted out from discussing quantum?
• What will be the fate of the Satoshi coins?
• What maritime law and shipwreck recovery tells us about the fate of Satoshi’s coins
• Drift protocol is hacked
• Gary Gensler does not like prediction markets
• DATs are selling BTC

Content mentioned in this episode:

• Cain et al, Shor’s algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits
• Babbush et al, Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Circle stock sells off big on a CLARITY yield update compromise
• Tether is doing their first big 4 financial audit
• Who is the CLARITY Act Yield “compromise” good for?
• Why Circle might benefit from closing the yield loophole
• Is no bill better than a bad bill?
• Should Coinbase back the bill?
• Fannie Mae will accept crypto-backed mortgages
• Ethereum Foundation launches their post-quantum roadmap
• Google has revised their quantum transition deadline up to 2029
• Why we will not have a lot of warning regarding quantum risk
• Where is Bitcoin on quantum preparedness?
• Why it’s not all doom and gloom on quantum
• MARA sells $1b worth of BTC

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• What happened with the disastrous Vanity Fair photoshoot
• Kraken postpones their IPO
• The SEC releases long-awaited guidance distinguishing securities from commodities
• A compromise may be developing over stablecoin yield
• The SEC drops their case against Nader Al-Naji
• Phantom gets a no-action letter from the CFTC
• Tempo mainnet launches
• Some regional banks are tokenizing deposits
• Will agentic payments be a thing
• Q-day is creeping closer

Content mentioned:

• Galaxy Research, Bitcoin Is Rising to the Challenge of Quantum Readiness
• Global Risk Institute, Quantum Threat Timeline Report 2025

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• Are we in an oil crisis and energy shock
• Binance is suing the WSJ for defamation
• NASDAQ and Kraken partner to bring stocks on chain
• The SEC and CFTC issue an MOU
• Prediction markets need surveillance
• Across is considering converting their token into equity
• The White House’s cyber strategy
• The banks are still fighting about stablecoin yield
• What risks do stablecoins actually pose to banks?

Check out this episode!

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: 

• What Dario Amodei and SBF have in common
• Trump wades in to the market structure debate and asks the banks to come to the table
• Why stablecoins are not like banks
• Kraken Financial gets a skinny Fed master account
• Visa and Bridge are rolling out stablecoin-linked cards
• The FBI arrests a suspect accused of stealing $46m in BTC from the US marshalls
• Morgan Stanley is coming out with their own Bitcoin ETF
• The Aave token governance controversy rumbles on
• Kalshi’s traders are upset about their “death market” policy

Content mentioned in this episode:

• The CIV Youtube Channel
• Alpen Labs, Size Matters: Architecting BTC Credit Markets

Check out this episode!

Alex Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of Cyclops, joins the show. In this episode:

• Alex’s background running The Giving Block and the company’s acquisition by Shift4
• Difficulty in enabling stablecoin solutions when utilizing existing providers while inside of Shift4
• Backgrounds of the founding team at Cyclops
• Regulatory strategy for Cyclops
• Products: Pay with Crypto (POS, E-Com), Stablecoin Settlement (for Merchants vs. Wire or ACH), Stablecoin Payouts (Payroll, Contractor Payments, Remittance)
• Key features for building specifically for payments companies

See more at cyclops.io

Check out this episode!