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BINANCE ATTACKS | PRIME BOMBSHELL #CryptoTownHall Partner:WorldMobile
Recorded: June 23, 2023 Duration: 1:35:00Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto industry is witnessing significant developments, including legal challenges faced by major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, and growing institutional interest as demonstrated by BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF filing. World Mobile's innovative use of blockchain to provide internet connectivity highlights the sector's potential to address real-world issues. The market is also experiencing renewed investor interest, with substantial inflows into Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Full Transcription
Yo, can you hear me?
Yeah, you sound good.
How are you, man?
Are you biohacking right now?
I am.
That's why I keep eating my mic quickly every time I speak so you don't complain about the background noise.
Are you freezing yourself right now or doing extreme heat or you injecting vitamin Q?
I'm heating myself right now.
Gorav's next to me meditating.
Wow. He can meditate while biohacking? That guy is multi-talented.
No, man, he can meditate while I'm doing his show right next to him.
That makes sense. I mean, I meditated with him every day. I don't know how we didn't end up connecting, but every morning in Dubai and pretty impressive.
I could look...
Hold on. Hold on, no, no, no. You meditate my ass, man. There's no way you meditate.
Okay, well, by meditate, I mean, attempt to sit still without...
Yeah, I'm the worst meditator in the world, but I'm good for like three minutes.
I do try.
And Gorov actually was one of the people who convinced me it was important.
Let me get Darnesh up.
Just give us a quick macro overview as we get the panel organized.
I think we should do that more often.
Yeah, I did it this morning.
We did it this morning.
The flip as we discussed, it was good.
Oh, it's good, man. It's good. Did you get a lot of hate from the macro guys about why we're talking about crypto?
No, I generally, my approach to the finance spaces is like in the movies where you pull the pin out of a grenade, you throw it into the room and then you walk away.
So I don't know what they said after I left.
So you walked away right afterwards, did you?
They were not hating it all, actually.
I think we'll have them working.
I've said out, I told you, man, you're a very intimidating man.
I've said this multiple times.
No one believes me.
But quick question.
I've sent out all the invites.
There's no question.
There's a statement.
I've sent out all the invites and Danish is up so you can give him the mic whenever he's ready.
Yeah, I think we should let him go.
Yeah.
Yeah, sorry about the background noise.
How are you guys doing?
Just wanted to give a quick macro update.
Again, our shows are at 8 a.m. Eastern, so just a couple hours before you all.
You know, for everybody that's listening, we usually cover, like, more general finance.
And then Scott comes in, drops bombs and then leaves.
And then it's like, okay, I guess we're not talking crypto.
But as soon as he leaves, like, everybody's talking crypto.
But really quickly on the finance side, biggest news of the week,
all of the deals that are happening between India and the US.
If I could tell you, this is probably one of the most consequential changes in posture
by India and the US.
GE is now making engines.
is selling engines to India.
You know, Micron is making chips in India.
India is now supporting AI efforts in the US and in India.
This alliance is building.
And, you know, I know everybody thinks that China is the rising power.
I'm not convinced, I think, from an economic perspective, India is showing its merits right now.
I had funny enough just about half an hour ago I was talking about Gorav he goes to me and I'm like organizing for the panel he goes Mario
How is India meeting everybody is Modi who's the prime minister is Modi in the US are they coming to the US? He's meeting Ray Dalio
He's meeting Elon Musk. He's meeting Sam Altman and then he's like Mario
We got to start doing your show in India. We got to get you to India
And so that was it's about half an hour ago Danish
Yeah, it's quite impressive what's happening in India right now.
By the way, we're building a consulate in Bangalore, which is India's AI hub and tech hub.
That isn't just, it's not by coincidence.
I think there's this confluence that's going to happen in India.
It's quite exciting.
The only thing, the other big, big news I think this week was around Fed Chair Powell's,
commentary around rate hikes, but that might be too detailed.
He essentially pointed to the fact that there's going to be likely two more rate hikes this year,
and nobody believes him.
That's pretty much the other big news.
I saw the Marcus didn't really care about his comments.
Yeah, the market does not care at all.
I mean, there was a little bit of, this week might be the first, you know, losing weekend in 10 weeks or 12 weeks, but nothing to worry about.
And it's not like a giant crash because of rate hikes.
It seems like nobody's worried about it.
Yeah.
And in fact, people on our panel today feel like there will be no more rate hikes.
And, I mean, this is a crazy prediction.
But someone on our panel and people seem to agree believes that we might even hit 2% this year.
I don't believe that at all.
In terms of inflation, there's no way.
But at least the market is starting to think that things are going to start slowing down before they speed back up.
Yeah, I literally asked them what they were smoking when they brought that up this morning, I think.
But it is what it is.
Mario, we actually have some breaking news.
I know it's really early in the space, but I do want to go ahead and mention this,
especially because we have one, two, three, four, at least five lawyers on stage.
If you're in a room with five lawyers, it's generally not a good thing.
We have more lawyers than it, than it called itself.
It's on too many lawyers, but I love you guys.
This is the news that just broke.
Can anyone hear me?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Can someone speak so I know the space is not crashing?
Hello?
I'd hear you.
Do you hear me?
Yeah, we got you.
Oh, okay, you got me.
So, hold on.
John, you can hear me, yes?
So Scott just dropped out, did he?
Do you hear me?
Oh, I can't hear Scott.
Is Scott speaking?
I can hear Scott.
We can hear Scott as well.
Oh, okay, so Scott, yeah, Scott, I can't hear you at all.
So after you're done with the breaking news, I'm going to remove you and beat you back up in a few minutes.
So I'm going to be quiet till you give me a heads up, Scott, that you take over the room, but I can't hear shit you're saying.
Just a heads up.
Go ahead.
Sure, I just want to quickly, this breaking news, the United States Supreme Court sided with a Coinbase Global Inc. unit in a ruling that reinforces the ability of companies to channel customer and employee disputes into arbitration.
The justices voted five, voting five four ruled that lawsuits filed in federal court must be put on hold while a defendant presses an appeal that would send the case to arbitration.
Business groups rallied behind Coinbase in the case saying that letting litigation go forward would impose unnecessary costs.
Consumer advocates said judges should have the discretion to decide which claims should proceed during appeal as courts do with other areas of the law.
Obviously, we see this...
We see this headline, you know, U.S. Supreme Court rules for Coinbase and its bid to halt court proceedings as companies seeks to move customer litigation into arbitration.
And this is the United States Supreme Court.
We have five lawyers to tell us what this means.
And I'll be quiet now, Mario, I'll come back.
But I'll tell you at the chat.
Any lawyer want to jump in and tell us why this is important.
I'm happy to jump in as the only lawyer who is taking Coinbase to pass for this and survive their motion to compel arbitration.
Okay.
Ultimately, this is a ruling that's probably right on the law, but is terrible for Coinbase customers because you want your cases to be heard in the public.
I have over 150 current arbitrations against Coinbase.
It's terrible that everything I do is behind closed doors.
The world should know the issues Coinbase has protecting their customer assets.
Instead, we get to see Coinbase go around the world and say they have no issues because
these aren't publicly disclosed.
Unfortunately, the way the law is written, the Supreme Court probably got it right.
Coinbase was probably right.
Um, the only way you can get around the arbitration provision is to not actually be a customer of Coinbase.
James, I believe you have your mic up and JW.
Oh, good, good. No, I didn't want to jump because I know if I can hear you, God.
I wanted to hear you.
You can hear me, Mario. Yeah, so we're good.
Yeah, yeah, I can hear.
What's funny now is I'm going to hear everyone commenting, but I have no idea what the breaking news is because I couldn't hear you.
But sorry, go ahead, James.
Yeah.
So this issue of forcing customers to go to arbitration goes back to Wall Street doing this after the crash of 1987.
They, everybody on Wall Street put arbitration provisions into their customer agreements that you sign at the inception of the agreement.
And the Supreme Court back then said that there is under the Federal Arbitration Act a federal public policy in favor.
of enforceability of arbitration agreements.
So there's a long, long line of cases saying
that these agreements are enforceable
in arrangements like this.
So Coinbase is not an outlier.
It's sort of following.
the lead, a well-tread path of broker-dealers across the country.
And if any of you have an account with anybody, Charles Schwab, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan,
you have agreed probably to arbitration.
So Coinbase has a lot of company in having this requirement.
J.W., then, John, please.
Yeah, this is not an usual.
Coinbase is in the news because of the SEC's enforcement action.
This case was pretty straightforward application of the American Arbitration Act that favors arbitration.
The empirical studies of the effect of arbitration have shown that customers tend to get more money
faster when they go through arbitration than when they go through regular court. The reason why lawyers often hate arbitration, because the fees are lower. And that's part of the reason why the customers get more money at the end of the day. It's harder to charge 40% on a customer when you're going to arbitration than when you're going to a long court battle. And arbitration is much easier for customers to do on their own rather than needing to hire a lawyer. So
it has its benefits i don't doubt coinbase has its problems i have i've had issues as a customer
in the past every uh you know major financial institution has has customer service issues
but um i wouldn't say arbitration is necessarily uh worse than than what happens in court at the
day go ahead john deaton john dden and john reed stark please
Listen, this is fantastic news for Coinbase.
It's bad news for the securities plaintiff's attorneys.
I'm a plaintiff's attorneys.
I filed class actions before.
So this is great news for Coinbase because they basically had what was considered the
gold standard arbitration clause waiver of participating in class actions.
Imagine a ripple loss.
or a judge saying, okay, you know, XRP's a security or this one's a security.
Then Coinbase, if they lost this case, would have been facing a slew of class actions of all the different token holders for listing, you know, tokens, even if that token wasn't classified because they'd be using the XRP case or any other case to say, look, it's substantially the same thing.
So bad news for securities, plaintiff's attorneys.
Great news for Coinbase. And I agree, you know, for Coinbase, it gets to keep everything private because arbitrations are private hearings.
They're going to mark everything confidential and you can't release that information.
So if there is news that the public should know, that is a downside.
So other than that, that's all I got said.
Go ahead, John, Reidstock.
Yeah, but I agree with John.
I agree with everyone.
I think this issue, though, has been around for probably, you know, the 35 years that I've been doing this.
It's a consumer issue, you know, and it was often way long before crypto, there's been all sorts of movements to stop mandatory arbitration because...
consumer advocates don't like the fact that it's secret.
They don't think people get a fair shake.
They think they'd have a, they think it's balanced more toward the industry.
JW might be right that, you know, studies have shown that it's not, but who knows?
So I think it's one of those issues that's been coming up for a while.
Congress always talks about getting rid of these provisions.
And you see it in cyber sometimes because
You'll have, like I remember with the Equifax data breach, they put together all kinds of remedies for the people who had experienced any sort of, who were impacted at all by the, any potential infiltration of data from Equifax.
And they put in an arbitration clause and they got all kinds of hell for it because people just signed away.
The victims of the data breach just.
signed and agreed to arbitration.
Some of the lawyers just threw it in there in that agreement.
So they eventually took that out.
So it's one of those things that's at least perceived
as not consumer friendly,
as least perceived as something that's secret.
But what's annoying to me about it is already people are tweeting,
hey, actually John Reed-Stark, you're an idiot, see, you're a moron.
Look, Coinbase just won in the Supreme Court.
You know, this is an issue. I'm with the rest of the crew on. I think it was correctly decided, and it's a matter of Congress to act to change it. And it's not good news for people with disputes. I think the arbitration
You know, generally, I'd be happier in federal court.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe I'd be better off in arbitration, but I feel like I'd be happy.
I don't like doing what the industry tells me I need to do, whether it's the crypto industry
or the broker-dealer industry.
But Congress is going to happen.
John, are you daring to imply that people just read click-bait titles and don't read
the article and then attack?
Exactly.
I'm shocked.
Yeah, it's about like 99% of what people say when I tweet something, but whatever.
But I'm with all the guys on it.
I think they're all dead right on everything.
Yeah.
I know John and David both wanted to speak and I'm going to wrap this topic because it seems like it's not that, you know, obviously that like I said, the title is huge, but I don't think it moves a needle much in the bigger case as we're talking about.
Go ahead, John, David.
Yeah, just to wrap the bow on it, it's not, this wasn't a challenge to Coinbase's actual, it wasn't a challenge to Coinbase's actual terms of service.
It was just a challenge to whether or not when Coinbase is,
filed a motion to compel arbitration,
whether they can stay the case or not.
It's not nearly as exciting, sexy as anything
in the realm of dealing with Coinbase.
I do think that arbitration is obviously an abomination, but it's not a sexy issue.
As the law stands, it's probably right.
The only distinction I made, I forgot who said it, was unlike when you have a financial account
where you go to a femur arbitration, where you have qualified arbitrators who are in the financial
field, consumer arbitration versus arbitration when you lose money in a security house is more
wildly different. It's so much better. I've done both. I continue to do both. But at the end of the day, this is a
outside of clickbait. This has nothing to do with anything we're talking about. The only thing that I would add is that
for people to understand why some people are going to say it's bad for customers. I don't know what the
average Coinbase...
account is but when you're talking about individual arbitrations
and someone has a two thousand dollar three thousand dollar account as you can
imagine
if you can't put that case in addition to hundreds or thousands of other cases
as an attorney
uh... they can't afford to pay by the hour because
they're gonna pay more than their account was worth in total and you're not
gonna make any attorney fees on a two or three thousand dollar account so
that's i just want people understand why
there are going to be a lot of people that say this is bad for consumers.
Cool.
I think we've litigated that one, so to speak, to death.
Yeah, I think...
And my conclusion is it's not that big of a deal
considering everything else we're going through.
It's a matching burger.
Exactly, exactly.
I know everyone wants it to be some sort of burger
because it looks like it's good news for Coinbase,
but it's not.
Before we go to the important stuff, Scott,
I just want to mention, I'll talk about the sponsor in a bit,
but today's sponsor is one of my favorite.
I think he's...
We've always talked about blockchain bringing, banking the unbanked, in this case, bringing internet to the people that don't have internet and leveraging the blockchain to do so.
These are the solutions we were talking about many years ago.
So today's sponsor, the tweet is pinned at the top.
We're going to talk about them in a while.
Definitely check them out because I was pretty excited when I read that one.
But go ahead, Scott.
Yeah, I mean, to that end, I actually met Mickey from World Mobile at the Satoshi
Roundtable in Dubai. We became friends. I've recorded a podcast with him. Absolutely amazing.
So I'm really excited to have that conversation later. We should probably do, I would have
Imagine here a very quick market update, right?
Although I'm looking, it seems like actually the crypto market is somewhat flat,
which is a good thing when Bitcoin is sitting above $30,000.
Everything kind of within 1 to 2% of price 24 hours ago, so not much to talk about there.
I think that the next candle is a green God candle up.
And I'll tell you why I think it's a green God candle up.
Because everyone's expecting this to be the resistant point that Bitcoin can't break.
And I don't know.
I think the point of Max Payne is what we expect the market to do next.
Yeah, I mean, up has been Max Payne, in my opinion, ever since everybody went into bankruptcy last year.
To be honest, as much as I hate to say it, so many people lost all their money are tied up in Chapter 11 bankruptcies between Voyager, Celsius, BlockFi, and of course, FTCS being the biggest, that the higher price goes and the less money they get, the less their long crypto, sadly.
Can I ask a quick question unrelated to the market?
Scott, do you remember how when we talked about Bynas and everyone, we had different attorneys come up on stage, said the...
the the order to freeze Binance US assets things will move fast and we'll see
developments relatively quickly compared to other compared to Coinbase or other
other you know FTX for example
What movement have we seen?
Is there anything worth noting at all?
What was the latest developments?
That's our story.
I mean, that's the big story today.
Yeah, I mean, that is the big story.
I don't know if you want to finish your point there
because then I want to go to James Murphy,
met a lawman below because he's been pushing on the Binance story
pretty aggressively and he can give us that summary.
I mean, in fact, let's just go straight into that story.
I know myself, you and Mario, want to call last night,
and we said, what do we think is a huge story?
And we saw Binance actually going on the offensive against Coinbase,
sending out a very clear, against the SEC,
sending out a very clear signal to the SEC that this time they've messed with the wrong person,
a wrong company.
Maybe James won't take us through some of the pushback and some of the attacks that Binance is
And James, I've pinned every for everyone.
I've pinned the tweet that he'll be likely referencing above in the nest.
So you guys can check that out and see his thread.
Go ahead.
All righty.
So the lawyers for Binance have filed a motion asking the judge to make the SEC lawyers follow the rules.
And there's a rule that says, in a case which is likely to attract media attention,
counsel should not make statements that are misleading about the proceeding or likely to contaminate or taint the jury pool.
And then they also cite SEC's Internal Code of Conduct.
What this all...
came from is everybody knows there was that hearing on the TRO, which was not a great day for the SEC lawyers,
because they could not identify evidence that Binance U.S. was currently sending customer assets to CZ to his entities and the Caymans or wherever.
and it was not a good look for them.
And so the judge said, we need a consent order instead of a TRO.
We need all the parties to get together and agree on maintaining the status quo pending the rest of this litigation.
That happened.
They submitted an order that they all agreed to to the judge.
And once that was entered, the SEC immediately issued a press release.
And in that press release, the SEC said that they had secured emergency relief in the case and that CZ, they intimated and very strongly implied that they had evidence that CZ had commingled their word and diverted their word.
customer assets and that the order, the emergency order they obtained was, in their words,
essential to protecting investor assets. So that was a press release that went out and it was
tweeted out and the lawyers for Binance said, hey, that's violative of that rule that I mentioned.
It's misleading and likely to taint the jury pool. And so that's what they've done. And it's
And it's unusual, and it has additional heft to it because it is signed by Bill McLucas,
who's a pretty big figure among the securities bar in D.C.
He worked at the SEC for 20 years and served as the longest running head of the Division
of Enforcement back in the 1990s, a long time ago, and then also signed by George Canellos.
who was also the head of the enforcement division at the SEC.
And so this turns up the heat a little bit.
Lawyers really don't like being accused of engaging in unethical behavior.
that ratchets up the, you know, the volume in the case.
Now, one could say that the SEC started it.
But if you have any children, you know, that's not actually a defense when your child says,
hey, she started or whatever.
But what has happened at the beginning of this case is unusual.
I've never seen the SEC when it files a case, send out a tweet that,
with a picture with a bright red background where they dropped the F bomb.
I have never seen the SEC do anything close to that.
And what they did is they took one of the terrible, terrible emails that they've collected
in the course of their investigation of BINATs and quoted it.
And it says something like, we are in...
We're running an illegal exchange.
We're running a fucking illegal exchange in the United States, bro.
Yeah.
basically right right so i was going to say effing but yes you said that correctly um and so
you know what's going to happen now the cc's going to come back they do not like like
this narrative to take hold.
And so while they have, I think, three weeks to respond,
I think they're going to respond much more quickly
and they're going to push back hard.
I would say the chances of them filing something
that says, Your Honor, they're right.
We made a mistake with the press release.
We're really sorry.
Please don't enter the order.
I would say there's a 1% chance of that.
Instead, they're going to say, we have the right
to repeat publicly what we have alleged in our pleadings filed in court.
And that is true.
You do have that right.
And they will also likely point to a number of statements by tweets by CZ,
finance, the organization of Binance, U.S., where they...
put their own spin on what has happened in court and in particular in that hearing. So there's
going to be a fight about this, but I can tell you that, you know, it has an effect for Bill McLucas and
George Canellos to publicly allege that the SEC is acting in an unethical manner in probably,
arguably the largest case, the biggest case, most high-profile case, that any of those
trial attorneys at the SEC are likely to handle in their careers.
So they really don't want a finding that they have in any way violated any rule or code of conduct.
Why do they care and why should they care?
They're untouchable.
They're effectively government-funded legislation.
lawyers they I just you know I just think if I would have I'd be sitting in the room and I'd be
laughing my head off going this is actually really funny and who gives a shit well you know there
there's the concern is for the perception and their own personal careers and so to have a court finding
that you have violated a court rule and the code of conduct is significant.
You don't want that on your career record that if somebody ever Googled you
because virtually all of the lawyers, just like John Stark and many, many others on this call,
eventually want to leave the SEC and they're going to go interview.
And by the way, kind of if you're in enforcement in particular, the first place you go to interview is Wilmer Cutler.
And I know because I was recruiting SEC lawyers, you know, who were interviewing at Wilmer Cutler
back in the day when I was running my own law firm.
We hired two dozen SEC credentialed lawyers.
And by the way, if you just indulge me, I do want to say, I have tremendous respect
for the institution of the SEC.
I hired two dozen SEC lawyers to work with me as my partners in every single one of them
was high integrity, very, very smart people who are great partners in the law firm.
I believe.
What do you think?
I believe the integrity.
I believe the SEC is right now suffering.
from poor leadership at the top.
And that to me is the problem.
I am critical of what the SEC is doing
in some of this crypto litigation
and very sincerely don't think it's right.
But I have tremendous respect for the institution.
You know, someone once told me, and I'm going to quote, and someone once told me, if you take an ice cream, a bowl of ice cream, and you mix a teaspoon of shit into a bowl of ice cream, the whole ice cream is ruined.
And for me, that's probably a good analogy of what's going on right now at the SEC.
As I believe you have, you've got the majority of the people, which are great, which are the ice cream.
the leader seems to be poisoning the whole environment there.
And I think that, you know, you talk about the integrity of the institution.
I want to say that before three years ago, I had great respect for the institution that was the SEC under Jay Clayton.
Today, when I look at the same SEC, I've got to be honest, I think the integrity of the institution is,
has taken specific, my eyes, a lot of damage.
And look, I'm a crypto, bro.
I'm in crypto.
So maybe, you know, right now they're fighting and band against this
and maybe I'm being a little bit emotional.
But I'd love to hear from other people what you think has happened.
Ran, I want to get John's thoughts to balance it out.
Maybe this is a different way of looking at this.
And John, if you can start with that tweet that I've got open,
I've pinned it above as well, red background.
And the quote is,
we are operating as a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the USA, bro,
by Binance Chief Compliance Officer.
Yeah, you know, I do think, did you mean John Stark or John Deaton?
John Reed.
Oh, okay.
I'm sure John Deaton has a lot to say also.
Yeah, of course.
We'll go to John Deaton right afterwards.
But John Reed, the only reason I want to you, John Stark, is just because I think you'd maybe give us a different perspective, balance it out a bit.
Are we looking too much into this?
No, sure.
I think everything that's been said is definitely...
There's a lot of truth to everything that's been said.
Here's my interpretation.
First of all, you know, having worked there for almost 20 years, including 11 years as
the chief of Internet enforcement, you know, yeah, people filed motions all the time.
I brought lots of TROs and lots of asset freezes and people file motions all the time
and they can get very, very personal, you know, had lots of...
the threats can range from trying to ruin my career to, you know, trying to kill my family.
So all through it, you learn to let those things roll off.
But I think that's true.
I think when you call the director, I also think when you call the director of enforcement
out and say he's committed an ethical violation because of what he put in a press release,
I think the SEC will take it seriously.
And I think you're absolutely right that the SEC will file a very aggressive response.
And...
You know, when you look at that motion that finance has filed, and Bill McLucas, I know him very well.
I worked for him for at least seven or eight years, something like that.
And he's larger than life.
And he's probably the best SEC defense attorney on the planet maybe that there has ever been.
So I agree his signature on that carries a large degree of gravitas and he wouldn't sign it if he didn't believe it's true.
And having worked for him, I think he does believe it's true because one of the things that I was super, super careful about, especially when I did his HR, was if I was making any public statements and I used to make a lot of public statements because the press calls you a lot after you do an asset freeze in particular.
And because I was chief.
I got a lot of phone calls and was handling a lot of the media.
And Bill McLucas and his successor, Dick Walker, were both very strict about what you could say in a press release.
And I wrote a lot of the press releases for the Division of Enforcement during my time.
at the SEC.
And we're very strict that you have to pull specifically from the pleadings.
You have to be really careful about mischaracterizing anything that happened in the
governmental proceeding.
And I think there's a lot of oddities to this governmental proceeding.
Normally you bring a TRO.
It's ex parte.
The other side isn't there because the evidence is so bad you feel like if you confronted
with that evidence, then they would take the money and run.
So usually you're in a judge's chambers or maybe you're in the courtroom.
And I was often the main primary declarant in those circumstances of those TROs.
And, you know, you testify to everything that happened and the judge would grant the TRO.
Then you go back to the office and you fax all the financial institutions and freeze everyone's money who's involved in the case.
And then that person goes to court and says you've got to unfree some of this because I have to pay the electricity.
I have to pay my employees.
I have to pay my lawyers.
and you work out an agreement that is somewhat similar to the consent order that happened in Binance.
Of course, the Binance matter to me is unprecedented because when I think back of all the
TROs and asset freezes that I worked on, it was never of a multi-billion dollar financial institution.
And they were never brought in open court.
As I said, they were brought in secret and then granted.
And then there was a TRO hearing 10 days later after expedited discovery to work out the details.
So we're dealing with a lot of first here.
And I think that-
But John Reed, just one, John Stark, one question.
When you say we're dealing with a lot of,
and for anyone listening, just the basics,
TROs are just temporary restraining orders.
So essentially the SEC is trying to freeze
Binance US's assets.
But John Stark, the question, we're dealing with a lot of first.
We had James mentioned earlier about the tweet with the red background,
and you've now talked about how this is done in an open court.
Why is there so many firsts?
Does that point out to anything?
Yeah, I think it just seems like social media has changed everything
in terms of how you publicize cases.
I think the SEC has gotten very aggressive because of the constant attacks.
You know, again, during my tenure, there was a time where the SEC didn't get attacked
at all.
Everybody thought the SEC was doing a great job, especially after 9-11 when Harvey Pitt
was a chair and got the New York Stock Exchange up and running again.
But then Madoff came, the 2009 crisis came, 2008, that crisis, and a lot of people blame
the SEC for a lot of things, including even going back to Enron and WorldCom and
Global Crossing, all of those cases. So I think that when you're getting criticized everywhere,
they've just taken a more aggressive stance. And that all comes from the top. You know,
and I think Bill's old school, Bill McCluckus is old school. He's about as old school as it gets.
If you hang out with him, he's a man of few words. And he's just like, this is ridiculous.
In my day, we never would have made any of these kinds of comments. However, but let's take a look
at the motion and try to figure out exactly what its ramifications are.
because it certainly may prompt the SEC to become more disciplined and measured and muted, right?
I think it certainly will.
I think it'll achieve that goal.
It may curry favor with the Binance customers with the Twitter fan base, which is probably good for Binance's business.
And it could even result in an admonition from the judge, you know, the order they've submitted essentially.
He says, you've got to follow the D.C. professional rules of responsibility.
And she might give that sort of admonition.
Yeah.
But, you know, I listened and I read the transcript.
I ordered the transcript that day, I read it that day.
I don't necessarily think that the statements that Grebeer Gruel, the head of enforcement,
made in that press release, which says, further, we ensure that U.S. customers will be able
to withdraw their assets from the platform while we work to resolve the alleged underlying
misconduct and hold Zao and the finance entities accountable for their alleged securities
violations.
And,
And he says, given that ZZ and Binance have control the platform's customers and assets and have been able to commingle customer assets or divert customer assets as they please, as we have alleged, these prohibitions are essential.
to protecting investor assets. So I think, again, this is an incredible order in terms of the scope. It's as big as intense, I think, as some of the restraining orders and asset freezes that I worked on. But the other thing is, I think, strategically, that they might actually, this might trigger a criminal prosecution or an unfeeling of an indictment against finance because
DOJ may believe that the judge needs to hear additional evidence of finance-related fraud
and that finance deserves to understand and be given the opportunity to dispute government
allegations.
The SEC may be withholding evidence because producing it could somehow compromise an ongoing
DOJ investigation and now wants to show that evidence to the judge, which would be made
easier if, for example, the DOJ accusations were unsealed.
And when you accuse, I think it was a good point, accusing the director of enforcement of unethical behavior.
That's a serious charge.
And my guess is the director was very careful with his words.
And their DOJ's prosecution of finance would further buttress the support of the director's allegations and deter the judge from tendering any sort of harsh judgment or making any preliminary determinations.
I was looking over the pleadings this morning on the docket.
And it's still interesting to me that the primary SEC enforcement staff declarant, that declaration has yet to be unsealed.
It's not even listed on the docket, but we know it exists because it's referenced in the SEC brief supporting its motion.
And if you look to the 11 times that Colby Steele, that's the name of the staff attorney, that Colby Steele's name was referenced in.
In the motion, you'll see that most of those references pertain to the wash trading and the manipulative behavior.
So for whatever reason, when the SEC submitted that motion, they decided to file the declaration of Colby Steel under seal.
And maybe they did that because it had customer information on it and they were concerned about it.
Or maybe they did it because the DOJ asked them to.
You know, the only thing that I know is...
Let me.
Before you continue, I want you to make that last point, but I do want to...
Because we do have a pretty wide panel.
But before that, before going to John Deaton as well, Scott, did you see the story as well that Bynas is going to be testifying in the Brazilian Congress?
Just came out.
Not long ago.
Yeah, I was about to check it, so give me...
It's something two major...
I saw on one source, apparently they're saying Binase is...
Bynes was utilized by pyramid schemes in the country to facilitate asset transfers.
Then we testifying Congress.
I don't think it's...
Not a major story. It's nothing too concerning, but we're just seeing, I wouldn't, I don't know if you would even call that a crackdown.
Justifying front of Congress.
Mario, what I was talking about just, I just wanted to make the last point.
Then I want to hear what the other panelists have to say because some of the stuff that I'm, some of these conclusions I have are purely subjective in just my guesswork.
I worked a lot with FBI agents.
You know, I was an instructor at the FBI Academy for in-service.
courses and we typically had an FBI agent embedded or working with our office or multiple FBI agents.
We had meetings with DOJ and the FBI almost weekly in our office to give them updates on all of our cases and
I was part of the commodity fraud and futures task force, which was a group of criminal
prosecutors and investigative agencies and the SEC and the CFTC.
And we met quarterly to talk about recent cases and what was going on.
And I got very close with a lot of these agents.
Some of them came over on the weekends with their kids to play with my kids.
And, you know, so the communication lines were odd here because oftentimes if there's a grand jury proceeding, for example, the FBI can't tell you any of that evidence because that evidence is secret.
If there is maybe some sort of undercover operation, they can't tell you about that.
If they've done a search warrant, they can turn some of that data over to you to help them examine it.
But the point is you have a very close relationship with them, but it's oftentimes a one-way street.
So in this situation, my guess is that the SEC staff look at this motion and they sort of say, you know, to the DOJ, it's time for you guys to do something here because...
We need some of these great facts that you've told us to hold back, and it's time for you to file.
Just like I think after the Voyager hearing, my theory anyway, when Binance was going to buy Voyager, the SEC lawyer shows up, and the judge says, stop telling me not to sell this to Binance.
You can't just use hearsay to convince me this.
You have to file something.
something. So I want to hear what everyone else has to say about that.
Yeah, so John Deaton, I want to go to you and I'm going to let you respond to the conclusions that Mr. Stark came to.
And also, I've got a question. I'll bring it back to a question that Scott asked.
or Rand mentioned is that Gary, Gary Gensler is poisoning the well.
The SEC is not operating as it usually would because of Gary.
And they kind of linked it to the tweet that was mentioned earlier
and other points that Mr. Stark made as well.
Is that a fake conclusion?
And then obviously you can comment on other things,
other conclusions that Mr. Stark came to.
Sure, let me unpack it.
First, yes.
When you look at Gary Gensler, you look at the higher attrition rate of people unsatisfied the SEC,
I'm...
I personally believe two years from now for sure.
Gensler's not going to be there.
I think he's becoming more of a political liability.
And he's a transient regulator just because he says something doesn't make it so.
Let me go to Rand's first question.
On that comment, John, on that comment, so Gensler won't be there, how would that work?
What's the process to get rid of Gansler?
The process is he becomes a political liability.
At some point, the Maxine Waters and the Democrats realized that this full-fledged anti-crypto and Gary Gensler being criticized by fellow Democrats, which is starting to happen in an election year.
If it wasn't an election year, maybe I don't have that opinion.
But I think he becomes a political liability, and they simply, he resigns or he gets a lateral move somewhere of some sort.
So that's what I believe is.
rank speculation on my part, but it's what I believe.
And then the process will be impeachment by the House of Representatives, correct?
No, no, not at all.
No, not at all.
The White House would just say, get lost, and he would then give his resignation, right, John?
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about any kind of punitive proceeding against him at all.
Not at all.
Oh, so they can, but they can, what if he doesn't want to resign though?
That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Like what he's like, no, I want to say in my position.
He's going to resign.
If the White House tells him to resign, he will.
That's every chairman has told that sooner related.
Biden's people tells Elizabeth Warren to call her friend and say, it's time for you just go away,
the election is too important, blah, blah, blah, and he does.
Maybe they promise himself.
I just read an article that says that he's facing an ethics probe over his Sam Bankman-Fried relationship.
It's not an ethics probe.
No, no, yeah, it's, yeah.
Scott, do you want to clarify it?
Yeah, we were reading that.
I just didn't want to, we were going to talk about that.
It's the New York Post, first of all.
It's epic scrutiny. It's a few people outside of government scrutinizing his meetings with SBF, which is not really new news, just saying that he didn't register the meetings correctly on this Zoom call. There were no emails about it. Usually you protect yourself by sharing those emails, et cetera. And he didn't necessarily do that. But to be clear, it was broken as if he was being investigated, and that is not the case.
Okay, so John Deaton, I know I interrupted you, so I'll give you the mic.
No, that's fine.
So let me unpack a few things.
First, with...
Rand's question of why should they care?
Listen, there are some brilliant attorneys at the SEC, but there's also some that are not so
brilliant and strategic.
The SEC is great at offense.
They're not so great at defense.
I mean, look how they handled me.
If I was in charge there, I said, ignore the dude on Twitter.
Instead, they filed motions, said I should be recused, I mean, kicked off the case.
misled the judge about my comments, all of that because they're not good at playing defense.
So they do care.
Second thing, as far as what John Reed was saying, I think if there is a criminal indictment coming, which I believe, like others, I think we're going to see it in the next three weeks.
I think that there's going to be coordination with John Reed-Stark is saying where the FCC enforcement director, Gru Waugh,
gets on the phone and says, we have to unleash it now.
We have to show the judge.
We have to put this in context.
Don't risk.
of me getting some kind of order that says comply with the rules.
And so because you got to understand there's a public court of opinion and then there's the court.
And this falls all into the narrative.
I think that they were aggressive in what they released because they're setting the groundwork.
Didn't Binance hire someone who was like chief of criminal division?
In addition to the SEC enforcement directors to come in and represent Binance or CZ.
So the writing's on the law.
And so if there is a criminal indictment coming, I say we're going to see it in the next three weeks.
And do you think the market would have, Rand, do you think the market would have already factored that in?
Do you think it will impact the market much?
I think if we do get a criminal indictment, we get a little bit of a candle down,
but I think a candle that kind of recovers pretty quickly because the market's pretty much
priced it in, to be honest.
I just get the feeling that everyone is on edge waiting for this criminal indictment that
We have been almost programmed to believe is inevitable.
I mean, I think it get a red candle down and then we get a quick recovery.
Yeah, I mean, listen, we, yeah, I mean, to Rand's point, FTCs crashed in November.
Bitcoin price was back above the point from before it crashed by January.
Last week, we saw SEC enforcement action against both Binance and Coinbase
and are now trading significantly higher than before both of those actions.
Ran hot mic, yeah, hot mic, Frank.
Think about this.
Basically, I think that what you're going to see is they're going to say, oh, finance, you thought that was bad.
And then they unleash even more damaging evidence, the co-meaning of funds, all of the other stuff that they can point the finger at.
Yeah, I agree.
I just think, John, from a market perspective, that now it's almost like every piece of news is a little less dramatic than before to the market because we've seen it and expect it.
Right.
And so, I mean.
Oh, no, I agree.
And the market's got to understand.
This is a lengthy fight.
I mean, you know, Ripple, look what Ripple did when they got sued.
They hired Mary Joe White, former SCCC.
Judge, what happened, John, question.
What happened when Ripple got sued?
What happened with the markets?
Yeah.
Nothing.
It dropped 57% in the first two days,
and then within a few months, it had completely recovered.
But nothing happened to the market.
That's good to hear.
I think also, guys, we've got to be a little bit more cognizant of what we're dealing with here.
We've been through in the last 12 months, and I'm only talking 12 months.
We've been through lunar, TRO's capital, Voyager, Celsius, FTX,
SEC attack, Slana, Cardano,
SEC attack Binance.
We've been through, I mean,
you've got to kind of understand what you left with here.
I call what we have left here a bunch of retar de-gens
that aren't selling for any reason whatsoever.
I think if you were going to sell your crypto now,
after everything that's happened, you probably would have sold.
And I think what's left is the real believers.
How much more do you want people to go through?
And I think that regardless of what happens in the market now,
I just think that, you know, hit me again.
Come on, hit me again, hit me again, hit me again.
That's what it is.
Yeah, and as those hits keep coming, you're going to see more traditional finance getting involved.
I mean, Scott has said this.
I said this 10 months ago on Charles Payne.
You know, the blueprint here is they decided that they couldn't kill crypto.
So we're going to crush it and we're going to get the black rocks and the Fidelity and the Bank of Melons and the NASDAQ and everybody else is going to come in and swoop it up at discount prices.
And then and then you will see a softer approach when those traditional players.
But my question, Ron, Scott, I know you want to jump out. I'll give you the mic right after promise.
Rand, just briefly, when your comments.
Are you talking about Bitcoin and the big guys?
Are you talking about the entire industry, including startups?
I think that, again, if you're still building old coins, then the reason why you're still holding old coins is one of you.
So either you're a complete retard.
Number one.
Number two, because you just don't care anymore.
You've been hit into a position where you kind of say, look, I've lost so much money.
I don't really care anymore, whatever it is it is.
Or three, you've got real conviction in the old coin that you're holding that somehow the situation kind of resolves itself.
That's what's left.
But then the question would be, but, right, the question would be in Scott, I'm really sorry, last one.
But rent, the question would be is that, okay, that's for people that are currently holding.
But what about new buyers?
Like, are they just being delayed and delayed by all this action?
Or is it, are they looking at the markets now that I've seen the worst?
Maybe it's a good time to come in and buy shit up.
Mara, you know what the best?
You know what, what, you know, you know how nature works?
You know when a woman gives birth, it's probably the most painful experience of her life.
And she swears that moment that she will never, ever, ever give birth ever again.
And then she watches the kids grow.
And, you know, three months later, she's asking her husband if they can have number two and number three.
Ask Scott, he'll tell you he's on number two.
I'm on number four.
Now, I guess it's the same psychology of the markets.
When the markets are going down and we get hit,
we all hate this market,
and we swear to God that as soon as we can get our money
out of this thing, we're leaving.
You know what happens when the market starts running,
like the market starts running now,
Wait if Bitcoin runs another $5,000 and we get to $35,000 and we have a God candle that I keep talking about.
Everyone's going to forget about all the bad things that have happened in crypto and all the new money is going to come in because they're going to again believe the narrative that crypto is the best and hottest place to be.
Rand, it's James here. I might be able to add to this.
Obviously, I write this fund flows report every week.
We've had nine weeks of outflows,
consecutive weeks of outflows,
totaling over 300 million US dollars.
Last week, we just saw, well, this week so far,
we've seen $150 million in-flow.
So you're absolutely right.
People are just seeing these large corporations
clam to launch an ETP,
and suddenly they're piling back in.
You know, and if I look at what they've added to, it's just purely Bitcoin and Ethereum and nothing else at the moment.
Well, that's how it's the largest weekly inflows.
Every cycle.
Yeah, I watch, James.
I watch your flows.
I watch your influence.
I'm an avid reader of reports, and I watch the inflows and outflows very, very, very carefully.
And I realize that your market is very much a...
retail mentality market,
maybe it's a retail market,
but it's a retail mentality market.
They...
I would apply...
There's about a, I say, 15% institutional component to that.
It's hard to calculate, but that's probably the best way of looking at it.
In the mindset, I've been watching your flows, and the mindset of your investors,
and I guess it's any investor is at peak fear, they're exiting,
and at peak height they're entering.
And it should be the other way around.
If you've been here for long enough, you know that it should be the other way around.
Well, it will be back.
It's a bit more complicated that because you get, we do have some institutional clients that buy in big amounts at this point.
When you see a ball run, the R between the spot and the futures really widens out.
And they want to take advantage of that.
So they immediately buy the spot and short the future.
So that's why you also see shorts at this kind of time pick up too.
So there is some quite big instos participating in this at the moment.
Like, particularly this week, some people have had some really chunky single-line inflows, which is an institution, not an individual.
Yeah.
So, James, what would be your conclusion from this information?
Where do you stand on my same question that I asked around?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of it, a lot of the flowstays, so sadly, is coincidental.
It's not leading or anything like that.
It's not telling you too much, but it does give you at least a feel for the sentiment of investors who have just flipped on a dime, right?
They've been incredibly bearish and now's a little bit of news and they're piling back in again.
Humans are going to be human, right?
And that means what, James?
That means what?
I just, it's, we see this very, very commonly, you know, when I used to track flows in equities and fixed income, it's a very, very similar thing across other asset classes.
It's just the mentality of the investor that the sheep may be, maybe that's the best way to put it.
It's called, it's called investor amnesia.
And you won't believe how much amnesia a $5,000 candle can create.
That's exactly what happened.
Yeah.
Hold on, guys, two weeks ago on the 5th of June when the action happened against finance, it was the end of crypto, people were exiting the space.
Big VCs like Jason Callaghanis turned around and said, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI.
The article said now is a good time to leave crypto.
It was the worst time to leave crypto.
Weeks later, we're $1,000 in Bitcoin and crypto Twitter is euphoric because TradFi is coming into crypto.
It's an investor amnesia.
And you know what I've learned, you know what I've learned, and I wish I could apply it a little bit better, is just do the opposite of how you feel.
Just where I felt always.
Just do the opposite.
Yeah.
If I had two buy-bit accounts, and one of them was what I feel, and the other one was the opposite of what I feel, the opposite of what I feel, I'd be a multi-billionaire today.
I've written articles on that.
You counter-treat the beginners should just counter-trade their own personal sentiment and emotions.
Yeah.
It's 100% true, but I do want to pivot out on the trading side.
Okay, go ahead.
No, hold on, hold on.
And right now, today, it feels very uncomfortable to be buying Ease,
and it feels very uncomfortable to be buying old coins,
and it feels a lot more comfortable to be buying Bitcoin.
What does that tell you?
Yeah, I'm buying all coins, but that's beside the point.
Hey, I didn't know.
Hold on, Scott.
Hold on, Scott.
You're buying Alcoins, are you?
Quietly.
Hey, holy shit, this is, okay, this is, hold on, this is a breaking news.
Guys, Scott, breaking news, breaking news, breaking news, breaking news.
This is mental.
I'm bullish as fuck suddenly.
I'm bullish as hell now, ignore Binance, ignore Coinbase, Scott is buying up.
You never told me this, you know, I also, I also, for a month, literally, for a month said, I'm just setting bids on Bitcoin to 25,200.
for a month. And everybody said, uh, it's never going back there and this is whatever and it's
boring and if it goes there, it's going straight to 19 and you're an idiot. I didn't share anything
else and I just spent most of what I had on Bitcoin at 25,000.
It feels uncomfortable to be buying alt coins now.
Therefore, I think should be buying old coins now.
This is not financial advice.
This is just the way.
Long term.
Long term.
I don't expect that.
That doesn't mean they won't go down another 20, 30%.
But when things go down 30%, yeah, yeah.
But could we see, could we see, so, right, couldn't we, yeah, I'll let you share the story.
Can I ask you one more question?
Like, with the crackdown, can't we see a lot of startups just literally, literally, literally,
literally go to zero, not because they fail as a startup,
but because the crackdown forces them to go to zero.
It's like, hey, you cannot, for another couple of years,
for another three, four, five years,
operating through a utility token will not work
and we'll make sure of it.
Is that a possibility, which I don't think it is, but is it?
Let me give you, let me give you to the first, the first argument that I have to what you've just said is, I think that the SEC has thrown its two biggest punches.
I think, if you think about the SEC and they had two big bullets, they've now fired both of those big bullets.
I kind of asked, I kind of ask myself, where else do they have to go?
They are after token number three in the picking order, which is, which is.
which is XRP, they are, they leave, they have left coin alone,
potentially they could go for Ethereum.
I'm not sure where exactly they would go.
Are they going to sue Pallik, the Ethereum Foundation?
I'm not sure where they're going to go.
And they've gone for the two biggest exchanges, okay?
So what's left?
Like, where else are you going to go?
What's the next action you're going to do?
Who are you going to sue?
Who are you going to cross down?
Any action?
What about stables?
What about any attacks on stables?
There's a stable coin bill that's going into Parliament
in the month or two months?
Scott, you're much more on top of timing as I am.
It's one month.
In July, at some point, McHenry has said that there'll be a markup period for some stable coin legislation.
We're also seeing that Lumas Gillibrand may be re-proposed a year later now.
They've said it'll be a meaner, leaner version, and we'll focus on staple coins.
David Silver, I see that you have your hand up.
I don't know if you had a comment on the stable coin side.
We'd love to get the guess opinions on this.
Maybe David's not there. There is a question that I wanted to ask very specifically, though.
We have my two favorite Charles's, Charles Jansen and Chuck Mounce here from S&P.
And obviously you guys are listening to this, and I'm sure somewhat uncomfortably to some degree.
But you guys are literally at one of the most trusted largest financial institutions on the planet, S&P Global.
And the two of you have effectively led the charge on the crypto side for S&P jobs.
period. And so what I want to know is, does this regulatory environment, this uptick and
enforcement action, which has nothing to do with you, does that at all shake your conviction,
or does that change anything for SMP's approach to this space?
Hey, yeah, hey, Scott. Can you, can you hear me?
Yep, you're perfect.
Okay, yeah.
So, you know, from my perspective, I don't think it really changes our approach.
It's just an additional piece of information to factor in on how we think the market is going to unfold
and how it will influence institutional adoption in the space.
And I think it's notable to...
look at the fact that you've seen these SEC actions and kind of this conversation has been really focused on that.
But at the same time, you have now BlackRock filing for a spot Bitcoin ETF and the reemergence of applications from previously denied applicants.
So it is quite an interesting dichotomy there.
on the regulatory side, but the largest asset manager in the world is taking proactive steps to kind of launch a new crypto product.
So, you know, I think there's like elsewhere in the space, there's just a lot of competing and, you know, like divergent trends.
But the long-term trend to us is clear.
that the creation of this alternative set of financial rails is moving forward.
And BlackRock has just demonstrated that.
Yeah, I think we agree.
And that's why we've seen.
I think the market sort of shrugged off the Coinbase and finance action because BlackRock
came in a few days later and made the ETF announcement and changed everything.
Charles Jansett, I see you here as well.
I mean, do you share?
I'm assuming you somewhat share, but what color can you add to that?
Yeah, so I obviously share a thing Chuck said.
We were at Washington, speaking with the Senate and the House just last week or two weeks ago.
It was very interesting to see the role of feeling on both sides.
So it seems when we discuss the idea of...
people leaving the US. It seems it's not really seen as a huge issue. It was not that it's before when we had the discussion, it was before the Black Rock News.
The feeling was that it's fine if people are living. When the regulation will be there, everybody will come back, which could be true. It's done soon. It might not be true. It's done in 10 years.
Overall, it seems that, so, you know, we're interested in more in the stable coin
and the actual crypto finance market more than just Bitcoin itself.
So they got this bill that is going to, for market, I think next week or around that date,
for stablecoins, that's something we've been following a lot and we're really interested in.
I don't know if you're interested to expanding really on that.
Yeah, I mean, that's what we were literally leading in with anyway.
So that's a nice sort of segue.
I think everybody is curious what's going to happen with stable coin regulation in the United States.
It's the lowest hanging fruit.
I think we all agree the most logical place for them to start.
But then we get this rumor mill of, oh, they'll just choose USC, everything else will be outlawed, or there will be, you know, no algorithmic stable coins, which I think will be the case.
Chuck, I saw you lifted your mic as well.
I mean, where do you think this is heading as we see this legislation actually finally hitting the floor?
Okay.
Just, I'm just, just before you answer, remember we spoke about that God candle on Bitcoin?
Happening.
Happening as we speak, 30,700.
There we go.
That was the candle.
Anyway, let's get back to our regular program.
Yeah, so the time we spent in Washington last week was really interesting.
And I had just a few pretty strong takeaways.
One was, as you mentioned, Scott, the stable coin bill is going to mark up my understanding
is July 19th.
And so that we're going to get to the point here very quickly of a vote on progressing this.
And the sentiment is if it's a strong bipartisan vote, i.e. 60 to 70 Democratic House members get on board, including Maxine Waters, then the bill has a good chance of passing over to the Senate and advancing.
Right.
And if it doesn't get a bipartisan kind of result, and that they can't, in essence, get kind of together on what seem to be some of the main issues like, for instance, federal oversight versus state level oversight.
If they don't get the bipartisan vote, then it's kind of dead on arrival in the Senate.
So I think that's the kind of landscape as we see it based on kind of our understanding of what's happening in Washington.
Right.
And as far as the crypto market structure approach goes, I think that's going to be off for some future date.
So it seems like all focus is going to be on stable coins and it's going to come up to this bipartisan approach kind of coming to be if it comes to be like in the next month or two.
And just like quickly on that, just when we say stable corn, remember we include all the bank issues, stablecoin.
Last time we spoke, Scott, we mentioned the one issued by Society General.
Now Mitsubishi is issuing one.
So we're looking at cross the scope.
Do you think that the Stablecoin Act, if and when it's passed, do you think that that's bullish for crypto?
And when I say crypto, I mean anything under Bitcoin?
Yeah.
or do you think that's just bullish for usDC, USDT, and creating a digital dialogue?
Do you think that flows into things like Ethereum, Tron, I don't know, maybe even some of the DAPs,
or do you think that that's kind of like isolated for that section?
Charles may have a different view than I do, but I think this is table stakes for the whole industry.
So I think having kind of clear policy formation and regulatory parameters are being set will be a very important piece of unlocking the flows of capital into the crypto financial ecosystem in all its various fashions for institutional players.
Yes, I agree. It's the only thing we're not speaking about any opinion on being bullish on the token price.
That's not something we can touch on being where we are.
Yeah, but essentially what you're saying is that we're talking about regulatory clarity.
We're talking about the herd coming in, the Wall Street coming in.
Well, this is happening and now we're complaining.
It's not happening as we'd like it to, but it is happening.
And for me, I see that to be net net.
If you look at it from a thousand-foot view...
that looks like a positive development.
It is going to be a few hurdles on the way.
We're not complaining.
Yeah, no, it is the positive development for the field.
It really apparent the mentality of who is listening, right?
So if you're an absolute Bitcoin maxi that just care about resisting censorship,
maybe it's not super interesting or maybe it's a bad news,
but you're more interested in having a new financial market that can thrive with Defi and
hybrid stages before that and have tokenization of real world assets with fractionalization,
better access to those different type of investment, faster settlement, but still on public
chain etc. than it's a great thing.
By the way, as you just mentioned, Charles, I think the part of the BlackRock news that's
being somewhat underreported is how incredibly bullish they were in their last investor report
on the idea of tokenizing real world assets.
absolutely huge.
They've made a huge point to mention it.
They're very, very supportive of doing that.
And I know that obviously aligns with what you guys are working on as well.
Yes, that's a big thing, right?
That's quite really a great job.
Yeah, we're super interested in that part of the market.
And kind of going back to kind of the expansion of the crypto ecosystem through stablecoins,
you know, when we talk to many of our Tradfai clients, they can't actually own or have
stable coins or other crypto assets on their balance sheet.
And so to the extent that you get a policy formation, a regulatory approach that facilitates that ability to bring those assets on balance sheet, then you're going to start to unlock the capabilities around expansion to the ecosystem, the flow of their funds onto Defi Rails, and also like the creation of structured products.
So it is, in my view, the beginning of unlocking.
the decentralized financial capabilities to the traditional market players and the hundreds of trillions of dollars that can ultimately flow that direction.
So I think this will be, when we look back 10 years from now with our 2020 hindsight, we will see this as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the ecosystem.
I agree. Matt, you have your hand up. Go ahead.
Well, there was something left unsaid with that Black Rock letter that I think bears mentioning.
Tokenize real-world assets, yes, but maintained and controlled by a ledger that BlackRock controls.
They're not going to anoint or appoint not to fed of anyone's bags, but Tron or et cetera token poca dot as, okay, and then we will maintain who controls or who owns what on these.
change that we do not, that we do not control.
I'm not sure about that.
The unwritten word, the unwritten word that I took away was they're going to retain control of who updates the ledger and who can add and remove from it.
It can be done with the mission protocol.
And we see, for instance, what GP Morgan is doing with Project Guardian is exactly that.
So there's a lot of projects right now with all World Street to do two big type of project.
One is permission thing on top of mostly Assyllum, like nobody's speaking about Tron.
And the other one is stuff like Digital Asset Count on.
which in a way is a bit decentralized.
Nobody's speaking about Tron, but we're talking about stable coins and the bulk of USDT is sent on Tron,
which nobody talks about for whatever reason because it's cheaper and it's faster.
But that is where people are sending stable coins.
It's actually the default on most exchanges.
Bam, we're speaking of a big institution, but...
Yeah, yeah, but let me just kind of give more credit to Ryan.
Bitcoin just hit a two-month high.
It's at 30,800.
The team just sent it in the group.
I know I'm a bit late because I wasn't looking at the charts like you guys.
Heath, is that 1,900?
You know, I come here and I tell you that we get a guard candle
and we get the gold candle while we're on the show.
You should, you know, we should do this more often.
Yeah, well, we have...
Okay, hold on.
So that means when you talk about our sponsor in ten minutes,
it should pump, huh?
When you talk about our sponsor,
it should blow up, I guess.
I'll give you a list of projects
we can talk about tomorrow.
I'll give you my whole bag.
But let's, you know, talking about the...
Scott, can we talk about the sponsor,
actually?
Because this is a pretty exciting one.
Let's do in a minute.
I just...
I just...
You want to...
You want to ride up, you want to get a fight going.
I know what you're doing.
Before we talk about our sponsor, I think when you just need to remind the audience that we do take sponsors.
And there is a pin tweet with all the details if you do want to have sponsors.
I didn't pin it, man.
Did you pin it?
Hold on, I didn't pin it.
You should pin it, Mario.
Yeah, I usually do, but I'll bring, hold on, Romi from the team.
You should be listening to this.
You didn't send it to me, Romi.
I know you're listening.
Why don't you send it to me to pin?
Romi is your fault.
But yeah, so just, I'll pin it tweet, you can email us.
Mario, hold on.
Whenever you come on here, are you having an MRI?
Are you having some aging treatment?
Bio-hacking, you're doing biohacking, but I sat 14, I slept 14 and a half hours.
I woke up really late for this, so my schedule is screwed up.
So I apologize for the background noise.
I do have a life and I'm doing some biohacking.
But what I'll do now is I'll retweet it on my account.
You can retweet it on your account and then I'll pin it.
But this is, so if you want to, if you want to come on as a sponsor, I'll let you chill it as well, Rand.
But let me, if you want to come on as a sponsor, there's an email in that tweet.
I'll pin it at the top.
It's on top of my account and I'll pin Rand's one as well.
Can you retweet it so I'll find it, Rand.
And I'll pin Rand's one.
And yeah, you can email us there.
You can DM us if you can't find the email.
It's not working.
It's easier for you, but we prefer emails.
But yeah, go ahead, Rand.
Okay.
Okay, Scott, Scott, actually, over to you.
Maybe you want to introduce our sponsor,
and I know Mickey's a friend of yours, so.
Well, listen, Mickey, Mickey would be here anyway.
I want to be very clear.
Mickey, first of all, what's up, buddy?
But you're invited any day to these spaces, period.
Go ahead.
Thank you.
Yeah, I want to give you guys some context because Mickey, you can listen to my podcast with him.
We've spoken, but I'm in the Waldorf Astoria in Dubai.
And these guys, I start talking to these crew of guys as we were.
It's a small conference.
And they start telling me the most amazing story about Africa and,
and the adoption of crypto there,
but this insane story about a village in Africa,
it's become my favorite crypto story period,
where basically they went in,
they dropped this thing,
and then all of a sudden came back after COVID
because they were locked out
and this one piece of equipment
had effectively transformed this entire fishing village.
And it just, and they said, well, if you really want to hear the story, you got to meet Mickey, right?
And so Mickey and I started talking, and I just absolutely love it.
And it's the story, obviously, of sort of the inception of World Mobile.
I mean, Mickey, I guess you could do this much more justice than me.
If you could even just tell that one little story, I know it's not what the point is here, but it's so incredible to me.
Sure.
Hey, Ron.
Hey, Scott.
Hey, Mario.
How you doing?
And I hey, everybody.
All good?
Good.
Oh good, man, tell us a story.
You know what cares about us?
Go ahead, bro.
Okay, yeah, so around three years ago, we decided that we were going to run our first pilot.
It was in Tanzania Zanzibar on a small rural fishing village.
So we started to look at how to lay down infrastructure, how to power that infrastructure,
and we came up with something called an aerode.
This air node was solar powers, at the top of it a solar array or on somebody's hut.
Underneath that was a repeater, underneath that was a Wi-Fi unit,
underneath that was some second-life batteries, and underneath that was some charging ports.
So we were expected to put this up for a month or so and go and see the impact of internet
before we really went out and made World Mobile something big.
We couldn't last a month.
We ended up lasting seven months, eight months because of COVID.
But when we arrived to this village, first of all, nobody spoke English.
There was around 120, 130 people there, mostly fishermen.
And those fishermen would wait for a trader to travel 60 or 70 kilometers.
And you're not talking normal roads here.
You're talking 60, 70 kilometers, which is a long journey.
And they would hold that fish until the trader came or they'd end up smoking that fish.
So this is what we knew about the village. It had one pub, a bar, shop, and that was it.
We returned back seven months later, the film crew went in, and they called me and said,
look, we're not in the right place. I said, do you see our notes? I said, yeah, said you're in the right place.
What we understood from that moment onwards, there was around 300 people in the village,
the fishermen had upgraded all their fishermen. There were two or three pubs at this point,
one or two shops, and just because of the streetlight, the connectivity and the power,
When it went dark at nighttime, previously, everyone went to bed, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock.
And if they're lucky, they had a home solar system.
What we managed to do was stimulate the economy, where actually he ended up having a lot of people
staying up late at night, selling their items, selling their goods.
When we returned to that village, we also had three or four people that had learned to speak
English and German from Duolingo.
So that was really the catalyst for World Mobile growing.
Thank you.
Yeah, but also the fishermen were able to sell using the internet,
and all of a sudden everybody had jerry-rigged the one piece of electricity you had to give the entire village lights.
So we put up two nodes, right?
One on either side.
And then what we found out, that one of the nodes
stopped working three or four months in.
The reason it stopped working is because they were very clever.
They managed to take copper wiring and then start to light up their houses
or light up the shop with this copper wiring.
But of course it wasn't built for that.
So they ended up breaking the system.
When we got there, they said, look, we want to do that again.
But I think the most impactful was the real-time communications between the fishermen and the traders, because this was the biggest business in this particular village.
They were now able to message the trader and say to the trader, hey, look, I've got this fish, sending him pictures or sending her pictures.
The trader would then see it worth coming and was guaranteed that the fish wasn't smoked.
When fish is smoked or seafood is smoked, it ends up using 10%.
10 times the value, excuse me.
Right?
So the increase for the village was absolutely crazy.
And of course, they decided that they weren't going to hack the systems anymore
and take power from that.
Because the internet was more important to them to have light.
So, Mickey, hey, it's Ron.
Maybe just for a lot of people here in the audience
don't really know what world mobile is, how it works.
Maybe just give us a quick rundown of exactly how the product works.
Are you guys still with me?
Yeah, so Mickey, you can't hear Rand. Yeah, I'll bring you around and up.
But essentially what Rand is asking is like, can you tell the audience what is world mother?
How does it work for anyone that doesn't know?
Because we forgot to do the introduction.
Okay, yeah, sure.
And I've done you a favor as well. I've just pinned it. It's not a favor.
We do it all the time.
But I've pinned your a tweet which there's links and everything there and a bit of a summary for anyone that wants to check it.
But go ahead, man.
Awesome.
So...
Let me start with the problem.
There's 3 billion people that are totally unconnected to the internet right now in the world.
There's probably another billion that are connected to 2G.
2G can't really do much except for make a voice call or send an SMS.
In addition to that, there's a bunch of people still connected to 3G.
You couldn't have this call on 3G right now, right?
You can't have a Skype call.
You can't have a Zoom call.
You can't really download videos.
It's a very slow method.
So non-meaning for internet probably affects 5 billion people in the world, but 3 billion people
are totally unconnected.
You've got the World Bank, United Nations, the International Telecommunications Union, the GSM,
and they all recognize this, is a massive issue for the development of any country, any individual.
It affects education, health, and of course, prosperity, right?
So the most unconnected continent on the planet is Africa.
And that's what everybody thinks.
With around 850, 900 million people in sub-Saharan Africa,
you've got around 70% unconnected from the internet.
But actually, it's not just Africa.
If you take the United States of America,
you have around 10% of the population unconnected and 30% of the landmass.
And then if you look at all the other countries around Europe and the other continents,
they're all played with the same issue.
So the issue comes from legacy infrastructure and legacy business models.
And oligopoly own the communications network.
They own the spectrum. They own a lot.
So what we've done is something very different.
We've brought in something called a sharing economy into this space.
You know, you've heard of Airbnb, you've heard of Uber, even you heard of helium, you know,
and they proved that there was a shared economy.
Their business model was wrong, I believe, in terms of the connectivity layer
and giving out tokens when they weren't in a steady state in the startup stage.
So we chose to do something very different than that.
But essentially, World Mobile is a new economic model
to incentivize people to put up infrastructure where there isn't any.
And the incentives are quite big because the telecommunications industry
is over a $3 trillion market worldwide.
And that's without value-added services.
So it can be absolutely huge.
So how does it, I'm asked a stupid question, so how does it really work without getting too technical?
Like how, when you say you leverage the blockchain to bring this to the, not unbanked, but the people that don't have internet connection, how does that actually work? What does the blockchain provide?
A lot of the bureaucratic layers of telecommunications are done by huge teams, right?
Customer service, customer support.
Smart contracts can take a lot of that away.
International border settling smart contracts can take a lot of that away.
But I think it's much deeper than that.
So right now, as a mobile network operator, some of them, I'm not saying who, but you can go
and look on Google.
They know everything about us, right?
They know when we wake up, when we go to sleep,
who our friends' friends are, where we bank,
if we use Bitcoin, if we don't.
Because they have that passing through them
in plain text in most cases, right, due to regulations.
And that's not right.
The regulator needs to know what you're doing.
The government needs to know what you're doing,
but actually a mobile network operator
shouldn't know what you're doing.
Now, if they do or they don't,
that's not for me to comment.
Again, it's on Google.
But what we've done is as a blockchain operator,
At our core, we're able to prove that we cannot see these things, that your data is your data.
At the end of the day, you're paying it.
It's you, right?
It's your digital imprint of your own self.
You have a right to it.
So we've used SSIDs and we've used D-IDS and all types of methods in order to be able to actually give you your data and make sure that nobody else can take it from you.
And then you have an option.
You know, we never promote that you sell it because I wouldn't promote yourself.
But you could give it for a donation.
You could rent it.
You can do whatever you want.
At the end of the day, it's not our choice what we do with your data.
It should be yours.
But before I know...
I've got another question, Rand Scott, I know you've got questions as well, I'll give
you the mic right after this, but you know, I've got Imran Khan, so the former Prime Minister
of Pakistan coming on my show in a few hours.
And the reason I mentioned this is that Pakistan will be a perfect market for you.
Is there any other countries outside of Africa that you're working with?
Because we've used Africa as an example.
We're in four different continents.
So we started in Africa.
It was born in Zanzibar.
Zanzibar was a great place, very accommodating,
for us to be able to fine tune our share in economy.
And fine tuning it sounds like an easy thing,
but actually bringing infrastructure,
showing people how to use it,
telling people they've got to keep it plugged in,
giving them the rewards of running that infrastructure,
it's not an easy thing.
So we've been spending the last two years doing that.
And actually, I can go into this later,
but in Pakistan, we've taken the same approach,
as we have in Zanzibar, except from we don't have 50 people working there.
We have zero.
It's exactly the same sharing economy.
It's a cookie-cutter approach.
And actually, we've seen real big growth over the last couple of weeks,
with nodes going down, with people paying for the network.
And yeah, you're right.
It's a 200 million plus people who all suffer from either bad service or very expensive service.
So Pakistan is definitely something we've been focused on for the last couple of years.
And finally, the share in economy launched there last week.
Mickey, I mean, we've kind of talked about this before, but aren't you, isn't your model a major threat to some of the biggest incumbent companies on the planet?
I mean, you're talking about telecommunications.
Yeah.
On one level it is, right?
Because the people power is much stronger than any single company.
If you look at Facebook, you look at Microsoft, you look at Google, you look at Starlink.
They're all trying to fix this problem.
It's probably the greatest problem, the last problem to fix for mankind that we can fix.
And half the world being unconnected is just wrong.
Everybody should have the right to the internet.
If we didn't have the internet, we couldn't have the conversations that we've had or the communication that we've had or even listen to this.
So on one side, it can be perceived as that.
On the other side, it's a massive help.
They've got huge amounts of problem with their network.
You know, they buy their infrastructure.
If you want to become a mobile network operator, a big one,
what you typically got to do is go out there with a billion dollars in your pocket,
spend $200 million on licensed infrastructure,
spend another $200 million of marketing,
then you've got another $200 million to spend on your team,
and then you've got the rest to be able to continuously roll out where the patches are.
World Mobile, very different than any other DIY in the space, we support those mobile network operators.
We bridge the gap and fill the gap for them.
So in the United States of America, for example, I said 30% of the landmass is unconnected, 10% of the population is unconnected.
That's crazy.
9 million children don't have internet at home.
So the mobile network operators, four or five years ago when I first came to them, just laughed.
And then the last couple of years, they said, oh, this is interesting.
And then as of this year, we're actually speaking to some of the biggest mobile network operators on the planet.
And they need the help.
They need the support.
They want to provide service.
And more than that, the FCC...
and other regulatory bodies are enforcing that they use their spectrum,
are enforcing that they do connect the unconnected,
are enforcing that they do provide equal access to everybody.
So companies like World Mobile actually provide a massive solution to those.
Yeah, and you guys had a big announcement yesterday, right?
Yeah.
I believe we have big announcements every week, but I believe that yesterday was the buyback.
And, you know, that's just testimony that the network is working.
And it's exciting on many levels, exciting for our community, the people in the sharing economy,
exciting for the air node operators in the sharing economy as well, because money's coming in into those air nodes.
But most of all, it's exciting because actually, you touched on this 30 minutes ago.
There's a lot of, I think Rand said it, you're insane to be holding a token right now, right?
An altcoin.
The reason is because they're mostly speculative, 99% of altcoins, a future, a little bit of good tech, maybe a Ponzi.
Nothing is really tapping into the real world beyond speculation and trading.
But our people on the grounds doesn't matter if there's a bear or bull market.
They're biting internet.
They're feeding the system.
They don't care.
They don't know.
They don't even need to know anything about crypto.
So it's a very exciting situation for us where actually over the next month,
months or years, we will actually be coupled.
No one will care.
The same amount of revenue or more will continue to grow into the network,
and that will come back to the sharing economy,
the people that are running the infrastructure,
processing the blockchain, running the core.
Hey man, the quick, let me ask you a selfish question.
Even if you're a sponsor, I don't care.
I'm going to ask a tough question.
What do you think, like how are you dealing with the current market conditions,
with the current sentiment, with all the regulatory crackdown?
What does that mean to you?
On a personal level, and be honest, be genuine.
They'll say, like, no, we don't care how is the utility token.
It must be tough.
How are your investors reacting?
Yeah.
Well, I think we were pretty smart. So we decided to do things differently. The actual connectivity layer, the air nodes, they don't touch crypto. They're just there. They're just functioning. They work. Those people get paid in normal fiat currency. You cannot expect to be a mobile network operator that connects hundreds of millions of billions of people. And we've committed to connect a billion people by 2030. I think we can do it much faster with the share in economy. How much have you raised to do that?
We distributed during the TG around $38 million worth of tokens, and we're still in very good shape.
Okay, so you've raised anything before the TG?
The founders put all the money in. We put around $5 million, $6 million in.
But the founders of the mobile network operators, for example, we've got
James Tag, the co-founder, invented the touchscreen telephone that most of you are using today,
invented the e-sim that most of you are using today, also invented our quantum antenna and our
proof of service.
Good for you, man.
But then then back to the other- Mario, you got to see these guys balloons, man.
Yeah, I covered, he's making fun of me because I covered the Chinese balloon.
No, I'm not even making fun of you that you actually have to see these guys balloons.
But can I go back, Mickey, can I go back to my question in that how does that all mean to you?
Like what are the meanings like that you had behind the scenes?
What is the community like?
With all the news, with everything we're seeing.
The SEC action, man, with Coinbase, with Bynast, with everything else is happening,
with all these different tokens considered securities.
I think people forget, and they haven't realized yet.
If you look at World Mobile right now in Zanzibar, we're in the top 15 of all blockchains in terms of real world users.
Actually, you people using the blockchain, no bots, no anything.
So I think the diehard world mobileers, they know what's coming, right?
They see what's coming.
They see nodes coming live.
They see new countries coming live.
They see all the new licenses, you know, that's happening.
So our community is incredible, and they're fully behind what we're doing.
In terms of how do other people see this?
Well, there's no other way for them to see it.
We don't have crypto on the front layer.
The blockchain, the mobile core that we've developed is the part that actually uses the
token.
And of course, the end user can hold that token, gets benefits for holding that token, but
absolutely not necessary.
If you...
put a token in the way of a user, how do you get a billion people? How do you get a hundred
million people? These people might not know how to use it, might not want to use, it might be
scared. And, you know, the situation right now in crypto, as it is always, is fear until
its joy. So in general, Scott, this guy, this guy's too optimistic. I'm joking,
I'm joking. It's a compliment, man. Any other questions they have? Scott, Rand?
I would just say give Mickey the chance for final thoughts.
I mean, I know everything there is to know here because I've grilled him before.
Mickey, anything else you want to share before we go?
Look, too optimistic, when you've got something that has real world demands in the hundreds of millions or billions and billions...
There is a reason to be optimistic.
When you've built your company in a way that is not a typical crypto play,
yet involves crypto mostly in the most meaningful way,
and you've got real world revenue driving through.
It's a great reason to be optimistic, right?
We're seeing an adaption every day.
The bear market's going down.
We may be losing token holders,
but we're gaining new customers every single day that are paying us for the network.
It's only a matter of time.
So you're right.
We are very optimistic.
And the problem you're solving is I've always talked about this.
You know, everyone's talking about all the next hot thing.
Everyone's talking about AI.
Everyone's talking about Metaverse.
But then everyone forgets the true, the main reason, the main argument we made to support,
one of the biggest arguments we made for Bitcoin, like banking the unbanked or helping people outside first world countries.
Remember, Scott, when we talked to these cryptoskeptics,
And what we need to say they're discussing with them that they might not see the utility of blockchain or decentralization.
But they live in a different world to the people in Pakistan, to people in Africa.
And this is why Mickey's argument.
Not just the people in Pakistan or Africa.
Go and live in, go to L.A.
Go there and see how much the cool drops.
It's not just facing, you know, it's a common misconception.
And Internet, that's the layer zero.
Man, man, our space crashed yesterday because, no joke, because Scott's internet crashed yesterday.
My house got struck by lightning in the middle of a, in the middle of spaces.
That's lucky.
You did okay.
I know.
I'm here.
He deserves it.
Got some good things coming to you.
So I interrupted your final words.
Go ahead, man.
Final words are that...
everybody can be a part of this shared economy and they should be a part of this share of economy.
Everybody here is using the internet and it's a human right to have the internet.
And that's kind of what we're fighting for.
Ultimately, what we're looking to do is not run a charity here.
We're looking to run an extremely profitable share in economy.
And so far it's looking pretty good.
If you look at Zanzibar and stats on the WMT scan, we're the biggest DY by revenue that exists.
at the moment and we only have 390 nodes publicly viewable.
We have a few more in a few different places.
We're just about to launch in the United States of America.
We're also launching in other parts of Asia with some really big partnerships coming up.
And yeah, please be a part of it.
You're joining.
You know, I'm not asking you to be an earth node operator.
I'm not asking you to be an end-node operator.
I'm not asking you to do anything except for be aware and make sure that people know.
Without the internet, we're screwed.
That's the reality. You have nothing.
Scott, how do you know Mickey, by the way, Scott?
I told you, we met in Dubai.
Bruce is here. Bruce, the host, the Satoshi roundtable.
We were there. We were there. Iran was there.
I was sitting on the couch, peacefully eating a meal, and I met Mickey, and we talked endlessly.
I've known Rand for even longer.
Ran and I met in 2019 in Miami.
I sat down and had dinner and I showed him and he was like, wow, you know, we need this.
You know, Africa needs this.
And at that moment, we were very focused on the African continent.
But now the share in economy is standing up on its own two feet.
He's generating revenue.
You know, it's the cookie cutter approach.
What we need to do now is massage that share of economy to work with license spectrum
in the United States of America much, much different.
You know, in some places you'll use Wi-Fi because...
It's fantastic, massive throughput, but the distance isn't so great.
So people will come to that node, and that's very suitable for a village in Africa or Pakistan with 200, 300 people, three or four nodes there.
In other places like the USA, you'll stick it up on a big roof and reach 15 kilometers.
And then we talked about the balloons, Scott wasn't joking.
They actually called Aerostat.
I get a fine every time I call it a balloon.
But it's okay.
I'm okay to go.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
But they're incredible, right?
So we stick an air node on the bottom of one of these aerostats.
Essentially, it's like a massive tower.
It reaches on the first version with our antenna.
We've got 75 kilometre squared radius.
That's a huge amount of distance that you can cover.
But you can't fit 2 million people, 3 million people,
onto one or one multi-array onto this.
So you've got to have the ground station too.
So my final words are, be a part of this.
Understand that it's wrong that people don't have internet.
Understand you can fix your own internet problems and your neighbours and the rest of the
world.
And we have a right.
It shouldn't be controlled by one, two, three or four big companies around the world.
Actually, if you want to connect the unconnected, you've seen it.
Starlink, Facebook, Google, almost unlimited money.
Have they succeeded?
Why not?
Because they're trying to do it alone.
Together we're unstoppable.
Okay.
Go ahead, Mario.
Yeah, no, that's it, man.
I think it was great.
I started my gym session while listening to this.
But one of my favorite projects in a while.
Really love the pitch, Mickey.
Love the overview and what you're building, man.
And you're a great speaker as well.
So the tweet is pinned above with more details.
It's on my profile as well.
So anyone that wants to check out World Mobile or hit up Nick, Mickey.
Check the pin tweet.
Yeah, I'm doing my gym, Scott, so...
Are you literally like on a treadmill right now?
Bro, I sent you the photo. I started my gym session.
I woke up late today. I told you, man.
I told you. I'm consistent. I don't take a day off.
You're working out with...
Yeah, man.
Sleep with my... Go ahead, Scott.
I'll let you wrap the space, man.
No way. No, no. You're gonna have to wrap it from your bike.
Bro, okay, I'm going to wrap the pace.
Guys, really appreciate you all joining.
Apologize for me doing the gym,
but I promise myself to always be consistent no matter what.
And I did so.
I slept 14 and a half hours yesterday because of my...
I didn't sleep for two days.
And now Scott's putting me on the spot.
But love you all.
Thank you so much.
If there's breaking news, we'll cover it on the weekend.
Scott, you're an asshole.
We'll cover it on the weekend.
And otherwise, we'll see you Monday.
Mickey, you're a beast, great pitch.
You're a real example here, man.
You're really dedicated.
Man, I don't take a day off, man.
I don't take a day off, I don't care.
No shoes.
You're an astronaut.
I didn't expect you to tell me to wrap.
I told you, so you take over.
But now, guys, thank you so much.
Really enjoy this.
It was a great space.
And at least I didn't have quote unquote thunder hitting my house.
We'll see you all.
I'll be sending you guys at Tim Tarves, all of you.
Alright man, yeah, and again, the pin tweet is above.
Check it out.
Guys, thank you so much.
I got to go.
Scott, thanks, bro.
I'm ending at this.
Cheers.
That's dedication to me.
I need to get my phone now to end it.
I'm going to kill you.
I'm going to kill you.
I'm going to kill you.
Bye, everyone.
Bye.
