Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree. I mean, that's a message that I think everybody can kind of get on board with right like nobody wants to be surveilled. Nobody wants to have their liberties taken away from them, especially their financial liberties. So as far as talking points go, that's a good one. And you can kind of see why these candidates might think, oh,
crypto is a good thing to get behind or a good thing to not get behind. You know, you could go the opposite way and pull them Elizabeth Warren and say, you know, crypto is terrible, crypto is breaking our country, crypto is responsible for all the ills that we've seen. I don't know how effective that would be, but you know, I don't think you're going to get one, you're not going to get like
think that this is coming out as uh... you know we're looking to avoid default if you listen to treasury to treasury secretary Janet yelon saying that june first might be the earliest date in which the u_s_ could start to not meet its debt obligations it's not a long time you got to
really iron this issue out in President Biden over the weekend at the G7 summit in Japan took some time, surprisingly I think, to talk about the idea of going after tax cheats as he calls them and crypto traders. I just want to play what we heard from him over the weekend because you're right. There is a lot of attention. I think
from the Biden administration targeting crypto, here's what he had to say. I'm not going to agree to a deal that protects wealthy tax sheets and crypto traders while putting food assistance at risk for nearly 100, why should we need nearly 1 million Americans? I guess you can make the point that raising
the issue of bringing in taxes from crypto traders certainly would help maybe if you're not going to cut costs which Republicans are pushing them to do in this back and forth. But, you know, again, part of what he has in his plan, including that 30% tax on Bitcoin miners, you heard Senator Cynthia
at Bitcoin, my Amy say, "That's not going to happen." The idea of washtreating, I guess, in crypto, right, that you could sell these tax loss harvest and then buy back the crypto assets within 30 days is something that I think a lot of people have gotten smarter about. Certainly, that would be some money that the government could be making on taxes
there but interesting to see i think in this final chapter president by the sticking to his guns on crypto and raising those things again to your point only about one in five americans by or have sold or traded cryptocurrency um but it's but it's a huge talking point in the final chapter of the of these debt talks
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think the timing is significant here. But when I heard Biden say that and I saw the headlines on it, I just thought to myself, OK, you know, just, just by didn't know what crypto is. And you know, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, you know, he is, he,
is backed by the party and he's backed by people like Elizabeth Warren and then Nancy Pelosi who are typically generally against crypto. So whatever he thinks he may or may not know about crypto, but that rhetoric that's being ramped up that you see is very much a product of the people behind him like the Elizabeth Warren's
we need to crack down on this space. I think it lends credence to what we saw out of the White House economic council. They, you know, with the president's working group about, you know, when Biden got an office two years ago, they were very, let's say, like pro crypto, but they were super, they were crypto curious.
right? And they were like, this is a product that the American people are using. This is a product that we see doing good in the future. So let's divide and conquer and we're going to come up with a way to make this safe and make it viable for the American people. But then you saw the President's economic report a couple months ago.
And the rhetoric completely changed. It was basically saying crypto is evil, crypto is the reason where you know in debt and these crypto bros are you know screwing us on our taxes and you just you see that rhetoric change and I think we're going to see it even more coming up to coming up to the 2024 election but you know like
I was blown away by that 30% tax on Bitcoin mining. That's a hefty tax. Is that going to be reality most likely not? But at the same time, you see that forcefulness with what they're coming at the industry with.
Again, I don't know how many people think that's going to happen, but I do think that, again, part of the reason why they don't want to see it happen aside from the idea of taxing what a lot of people have noted in terms of where Bitcoin mining is coming from now, increasingly renewable energy and in different ways to power at all, is the idea of tracking some of that stuff.
heard that at Bitcoin Miami too from a lot of the candidates we were just talking about saying that it opens the door to the government stepping in and tracking all of this and then all of a sudden you've got the ability to figure out who's running Bitcoin nodes everywhere in the US and similarly as we saw in China cracking down or adding costs often just pushes people to different
places. You set up their brick coin miners elsewhere. I'm not sure that necessarily would be what I think a lot of politicians want to see have happened either. So I don't know, very strange, but you're right. We'll see what President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can land on as these talks go on, as the risk of default continues to hang over
people's heads. It doesn't seem to be impacting Bitcoin prices all that much just yet. But you mentioned some of the sanctions and cracking down on crypto. I think one of the other ones from last year that caught a lot of people's eyes was tornado cash. And the update there this weekend being that the Dow was attacked by a
someone who set up a proposal to essentially drain all the tokens attached to tornado cash. If you don't know what tornado cash is, is that crypto mixer that was sanctioned by OFAC last year for potentially having an active role in money laundering. And I don't know, this is an interesting one, Eleanor, because it's kind of another example of Dow's
gone wrong. And the idea of proposals, in this case, a Dow proposal attack where someone kind of proposes something that then allows them to take the whole thing over. And now actively a new proposal to undo that has been proposed, but a lot of people are pointing out that could just be, so this one attacker can be
basically by himself time to dump the tokens that he then unlocked. But I think there are stacking examples now, growing examples of Dow is not necessarily working the way everyone in them hope they would. And maybe this is just another example in warning to maybe not do what happened here for tornado cash.
Yeah, yeah, possibly. I mean, I feel like I haven't just as a crypto journalist. I don't write too much or I don't report too much on Dows. I mean, I can sense this last year I went to a DOW panel and I thought it was really interesting. But just from what I've heard and what I've read and what I've seen on crypto Twitter, I just do, I feel like Dows are kind of,#
they have negative press and I feel like that has a lot to do with some of the failures that we've seen surrounding them. People like Dows or Bad because they just don't work. People want them to work. It's a great idea, but in reality, in practice, is it effective? This is the prime example of what you'd see regulators looking at this and saying,
Oh, well, this is the prime example of why we think this is never going to work because this one person has essentially the means to take over the democracy, right? Everybody is supposed to have a vote. Governance means everybody has a vote, but when the votes are maliciously taken over, you get basically like a dictatorship, right? So you've got this guy controlling everything and
Whether his intentions are good or not, I don't know if I don't think anybody who does that has necessarily the purest intentions, but think what could happen if that person was like from a dictatorship that we don't want infiltrating the US, right? That could be a lot worse.
we could see someone from North Korea or Russia doing something like that. So I feel like it's just, yeah, it is a lot of bad press. It's unfortunate, I think, because it's a great idea. And I think there's a lot to be said for use cases and the future where Dowsk would take us, but at the same time,
things like this can happen, there needs to be a fix or something different. Yeah, you know, yeah, I know I mean as a as a Dow ourselves, this coinage is a community on show, you know, it would clearly trying to work this out and avoid a lot of the other issues that other dows have run into like this one, but again it's kind of all setting up
what should be to your point, what should be decentralized and what shouldn't, and going too far in one direction opens you up to things like this. When it is just a contractor, I guess it's different when you're legitimately a decentralized platform for trading back and forth or trying to convert things. It's a little bit different when you're actually changing the protocol.
versus, you know, like us voting on what guests and what stories we cover and unlocking ownership via a legally registered cooperative. So what should be on chain? What shouldn't be on chain? I think our, you know, issues all dows are struggling to answer. But to your point, I think I would agree if you go too far in one direction, it's quite easy to see where the
this goes wrong. If you can have someone just put up one proposal and take the whole damn thing over, swap everything in there for 372 ETH and then start dumping those. Never really a good thing for everybody else in that ecosystem. But I thought that was an interesting update just because, you know, tornado cash got so much attention last year to see it.
move in this direction. Maybe not great. I think the other thing too though, we talked so much about decentralized things in crypto, maybe not working out as they should. There are plenty of examples stacking up now in the centralized lending space of examples not going well. And that is the latest one is Gemini.
I earn and I wanted to get your take on this one too because I actually don't know if you fell victim to any of these centralized lenders. I have already disclosed that BlockFi has my money and I don't know if I'm ever going to see it again, but you've got Voyager as an example from last week saying that their clients might be able
to recover $0.35 on the dollar. You got a Celsius that still hasn't paid people back and you had BlockFi also botching their update. They had to get one of the updates they gave their customers basically taken back. They hit Ctrl Z. They undid that one because the bankruptcy courts said they were basically giving an update too soon. And now you have Gemini
I, which Gemini earns saying that the person in that back and forth, DCG and Genesis, they say they miss a $630 million payment. So unclear what's going to happen to Gemini earn customers who are also waiting for their money. But Eleanor, I mean, that's another big thing that I don't know if anyone's really addressed.
in terms of the retail impact, all these people who had money on these platforms now waiting to see what's going to happen with them. And maybe that has more of an impact to where crypto goes in 2023 and beyond. Because if you're only getting 35 cents or such back on your deposits, I imagine there's going to be a lot of people who just don't want to be in this space anymore.
Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, right, when you talk about the bankruptcies that we've seen over the last year, there's been many of them, right? And Gemini in particular was targeted by the SEC for their own products. So now they are slapped with this lawsuit and they're also trying to make their
users whole. And I think that the Winkle Voss trends will, you know, they will fear the SEC if they don't make their users whole because then they've got an entirely new problem because, you know, I don't believe and correct me if I'm wrong, but there's been so many like SEC enforcement cases, but I don't believe the SEC enforcement action against them was, you know,
If they have to pay a fine or whatever, it's not going to make their users whole, whatever they find them for. So they've got that worry on their shoulders. They've got the SEC fine, but they've also got the X amount of people who are not seeing their money. And it's interesting. I think the Winkle-Foss twins are some of the earliest holders of Bitcoin with the genital
and assist default decide, I think they have money, but it just goes to this platform that they built out and what's the future of it? We advertise, we got all these people on board, and now we have to honor them and make them whole, and I think that's just such a stressful situation. For them also,
But also for you know obviously the people involved but also for for the week of last 20 legal buy legal buy People call them a wiggle by There are package deal those two their package deal and I think it will require a package deal to figure out what's gonna happen there at Gemini Earn because again that ones in Turkey worry because they're
in this weird back and forth between Genesis and the DCG side and trying to pursue getting the best possible outcome for their earn users, but it's been a mess. All of that's been a mess. It's been a total mess. And then they got DCG, they don't just own, they got Genesis.
They've got coin desk, they've got race scale, race skills and litigation of its own with the SEC. So that whole kind of like microcosm of, you know, those companies and those names, it's like, whoa, like could there be any more bad news surrounding them? Yeah, they're all in here. And they're trying to twine and it all comes down to what exactly
happens in one back and forth could have huge ripple effects on the next one. It's not easy to untie all of those relationships. On top of all that, you also have, I guess, these companies trying to do the best thing for their customers. I think about Voyager and they wanted to
basically get bought by Binance US to have them scoop up the whole thing for a little over a billion dollars I think if I'm remembering that correctly and then that one Binance backed out because they're like regulators are not going to go for this and we have to not do this deal anymore and then obviously that led to a worse outcome I think for their clients. So it does raise
questions, I think, a little bit about what the government's role in all this is, too. And certainly as we've covered before on Coinage, the idea that, you know, not having banking partners or bankruptcy protections, honestly, set up in the way that would help protect US crypto retail traders, kind of
or everybody in these cases. It's almost like the chicken in the egg, right? It's like, if we had proper adoption, if we had proper rules in place or proper, the US government welcoming the crypto space and making them reassured and accepting the crypto space then
Banks would be more comfortable to be on board to help out these retail traders. But because the government is so, I'd say, hostile towards the space than everyone's freaked out about getting involved. So everyone's a bit sideline at this point. It's a huge catch-on-two. Yeah, it's a huge catch-on-two and it's kind of like designed to have them all fail in a certain way. And that, you know, if#
and your dare I say a conspiracy theorist. There's a good case to be made that that was the plan all along by the SEC watching this play out and you know finding companies where they could you know block five paid that $100 million fine before their collapse and you know the idea of the SEC just saying look this is the house cards we're going to sit back and watch
this one fall and then swoop in on the back end and say, "See, this is why we need more protections." And that's essentially kind of how it's gone. And I do want to get your take on that when we talk about the ripple case in just a second, but there is one last story that we had flagged that kind of has caught this whole, I guess it is related to the conspiracy theorist
Why? Because the idea of ledger getting hit with so much backlash. I don't know if you've been watching this Eleanor, but the backlash that ledgers dealing with around their recover feature essentially spook the entire crypto space for people who had used a bunch of ledgers as their preferred storage option.
for all of their crypto, saying that now there's an open back door for people to come in here and essentially give their seed phrase or control up of their ledgers to anyone who might eventually request that. And the company's been pushing back saying, look, all of that's overblown. There is a certain amount of trust that you'd need to put into any wallet provider like a ledger.
I'm not sure if you care about this story at all. I've always looked at ledger as kind of, you know, they're a leader in the space when it comes to storage. A lot of people have, a lot of people use them. They got best by promotions running all the time. But I think it does come down to how paranoid are we, are we over paranoid when things like this are being discussed?
in the news. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's right now in this space, in this environment. I don't think there's really too much. I don't think there's really any such thing as overreaction. When we see the craziness of the last year and a half, I think a lot of people see what they see from ledger as
almost a correlation to what FTX was because we hear everything about, you know, San Batman freeds alleged backdoor to Alameda and how, you know, he was like funneling funds across platforms and essentially screwing customers. So how, like, when you talk about a backdoor and ledger, like, even though it's different, and it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
It's an opt-in feature, I believe. So how big of a deal is it if you don't want to opt in? You don't have to. But at the end of the day, why did they have to do an entire company software update? And I've talked about this with people. And I've heard other people suggest what would have been a better move for them.
And one of those better moves would have been a separate feature with the ability to recover your seed phrase if you wanted to. And I feel like for newbie users, right? So this was kind of a marketing ploy for people who aren't necessarily super crypto savvy to come on board and say, hey, all right, well, if I'm not going to
lose my funds if I completely forget my 12 seed phrase, 12 words seed phrase. All right, then this is for me, but putting it out to everybody and then also at the same time not being so great on the PR end, I think they've been less than great on reassuring people. And I mean, people have been using
the years, right? And they said, there's never going to be a software update, we're never going to change blah blah blah. And then all of a sudden, all right, yes, we're changing. And then also we've also had we've always had this ability to we've always had this ability to kind of like, you know, recover a seed phrase. It's like, it just doesn't inspire confidence, I think, and a lot of#
big PR to vocalize you. Yeah, the co-founder of Ledger on Reddit saying very much all of what you just said saying that his mistake as CEO during his tenure is probably not being relentless enough about explaining the model. They're security model. And at some point you just give up as people don't care at all until they care again like now. And certainly I think people do care again.
right now because you nailed it. I think in times of challenge you do want to have someone in your corner and this I think scared a lot of people. And it is important. I mean, you talk about some of the most important things in crypto. Security and seed phrase is paramount to making sure that you're doing this correctly. And it's one that I think
lot of people had already checked the box on in terms of being, I don't need to worry about anything. I've got my ledger. And then once you got to worry about that, we're all back to square one where it's like, God damn, what are we doing here? But I think you're right. And I want to get your opinion, Zach, on, you know, if the goal was to onboard more people with kind of that confidence#
I can recover my seed phrase if I really need to. How much more adoption do you think they get from that? Is that really making an impact in the business? I don't know. I don't know. That's the trickiest part about all this. It's like, who is your core demo? It's a constant back and forth in Web 3 or anyone in crypto.
What are you willing to sacrifice on the deep D-Gens? Who have an entirely different set of priorities and things they strongly care about versus people who maybe don't know enough to even know what they should be worried about. It's the constant tug of war between ease of adoption.
really leaning into security and everything else that might, you know, again, be harder to use. But at the end of the day, it's a tough thing. We even had one of our members who bought an NFT, behavioral economist and Duke professor, Dan Arielie, bought one and essentially, you know, lost his seed phrase, he used Coinbase Wallet, but then he's like, "Hey, I bought your NFT
She was like, "You know, I kind of want to get in. Can you help me out?" Set her all up with all the stuff, the seed phrase. She wrote it down on a piece of paper in a notebook with other things. She put it in an apartment in a drawer. A freak one-off robbery happened. This guy took her seed phrase.
And a whole bunch of stuff including her laptop and her ledger, I think. And she completely, yeah, the guy had no idea what he took obviously he hasn't, if they can't get in there, but she's now lost access to those crypto funds because of a freak robbery where they took her seed phrase. That's an anomaly.
that doesn't happen every day but it just goes to show like, "No, that's scary." Yeah, it is. I've been a Rob Funfactor also, maybe not so fun fact. I've been robbed in every single one of my New York City apartment so I feel for her because that's happened to me. They never stole anything that crazy though. They actually left, I don't really understand what happened and I think it may have been someone who#
me because it didn't make any sense what they chose to steal and what they chose to leave behind. I think they stole an electric razor, which seems like a weird thing to steal and there's a bag of cash. I'm not going to get into why I have a bag of cash in most of my apartment zone or we'll leave that there. But I do want to -- That's a different livestream. The feds are listening.
I wanted to, we basically lead up, we always save the good stuff for the end. And again, what we promised a lot of our listeners in this chat was an update on the important case of Ripple versus the SEC. And if you haven't really been following that case, you probably wouldn't know that Eleanor has been front and center in covering all the updates.
I saw you chatting about this yesterday is essentially the idea of the Hinman docs and if you don't know about that maybe we can start online what the update is there because the judge essentially ruled in Ripple's favor to start unlocking a lot of the I guess you know thinking that existed at the SEC before in this question of
what is and what is not a security in crypto. And it seems like all the headlines have been saying there's a huge victory for Ripple. This is a change in direction in this case. You've been covering it a long time, but what's going on there and what really should people be keeping an eye on as this case continues to develop?
So I've always said this case is like the cornerstone of crypto at this point, right? Because everybody is looking to this case essentially for clarity on whether digital assets are or are not securities. And that's always been the core issue at heart of this case. And with the HEMM documents, just a quick
recap. They were a set of emails and correspondence between internal SEC people, including Bill Hinman, who was tasked to get this speech by Jay Clayton on June 18th, 2018. June 14th. I'm sorry. I mean, you've been getting the year right. I mean, we're even getting the year right. We got to give credit.
>> I'm sorry, so 2018, 2018. At the time, it was right around the ICO boom. Everybody is trying to figure out what is crypto, what do we classify it as? These ICOs, security, and so Bill was tasked to give a speech.
And he asked his colleagues, you know, people all across departments, the trading and markets, Corpfin, his colleagues at Corpfin, basically saying, what's your, you know, how should I, we're not saying how should I work this, we don't know what he said technically X, we haven't seen them, but basically, you know, input on your expertise on how
how I should approach this. And what the product of that speech was was him saying that Bitcoin and Ethereum specifically were not securities because they were sufficiently decentralized. And the markets took that to heart. I remember like if you look up any headlines on those days, him and give speech, market, Bitcoin, Ethereum, jump, right?
So basically everybody took that to me like all right, they have a pass right they're not going to be under SEC scrutiny So those documents were classified and redacted and it's been a big part of the case because ripple believes that in those documents there's significant mentions of XRP, you know, not necessarily henman saying
but other SEC officials and other correspondence that the SEC had, while they were gathering all this information, how often was Ripple mentioned or how often was XRP mentioned and were they going to put XRP in there? Because at the time XRP was the number three cryptocurrency by market cap.
And Ripple believes that there could be some sort of maybe smoking gun in there that shows that him and his colleagues were kind of targeting XRP and that's why they brought the ripple lawsuit and that's why they didn't include it in the speech. Is that the case? We don't know. We know for sure now and that was what I was talking to John Deaton about yesterday.
that the XRP specifically was mentioned in those documents. You saw it in a footnote. It referred to a correspondence that an SEC official had had with someone that said basically XRP does not necessarily satisfy all aspects of the how he tests. Therefore, does not satisfy
that is by, you know, securities under our laws. And that was a big thing, you know, because whether it was an SEC internal official who set that or whether they got it from an outside source, like someone told them that, which is looking more likely. That's a big thing. And, you know, Judge Torres has seen those unredacted emails. And we're going to get to see those unredacted emails on
June 13th. Yeah, that's the interesting update too here though because my next question is going to be all right, where does this go from here because you had a lot of people saying that okay this is such a big win for Ripple of that. You don't know necessarily what the SCC's change in thinking might be, right? If you're going to start to see some of these info come out as you said on
13th. And then you have the idea of both sides filing an extension around some of this stuff coming out. So I guess the question that I was going to post to you was, all right, how does this maybe impact the odds of a settlement? Because I don't even know what a settlement would look like in this. So many people are trying to look for clarity. We also heard from Anatoly Aukavenko when we said
that down with him on a quenj episode saying the same thing that so much direction was back there with the him in documents and what was being said by the SEC back then in 2018 that almost everybody was listening to guidance on what is and is not a security and the idea of decentralization was enough for any builder in the space to say okay we're in the clear
And so I don't know what the actual like what the takeaways you see coming if I don't know there could be a chance that the SEC just says no, we don't this is far beyond ripple and just ripple because if this if the Henneman docs are to get out then it basically unravels our whole case against any crypto company that may have been a security.
Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting when you think about it that way because right it wasn't just XRP mentioned it was it was a theorem of Bitcoin and and the thinking into thinking behind that speech and what people were really thinking about at the time I've always said that when we see the him and dogs as they if but now when we will it's going to be the biggest
part about it is that we're going to have that window into the SEC's kind of minds at the time, right? And we don't usually get access to classified documents from federal agencies. That's pretty rare. So all this correspondence and all these ideas we're going to get to see and kind of like the thinking, basically like the proof of the pudding, right? Like what went into the pudding?
And when terms of a settlement, I've been asked that and I always say I'm not a lawyer, so I'm going to ask John Deaton or Jerry Behogren or James Phyland, someone who's like, you know, really expert in this kind of thing. And on my life cast with John yesterday, I asked that question. I said, you know, with this extension, do you think that that is sort of an indication that both sides are#
thinking about a settlement and he said no. He said these documents are literally thousands and thousands of pages and there has to be reductions. Not necessarily reductions to the Hidman documents, but to the huge swath of documents that we're going to see because it's not just the Hidman emails, it's going to be other things. And you've got to redact things like names, like expert
misnames and sensitive, sensitive things. So that's going to take some time. And I think he told me that that weak extension is in the grand scheme of things really, really nothing. But if we do a CS settlement, it'll be after the summary judgment comes out. So if she sides to favorably with Ripple and
And the SEC kind of says, well, we have really no way of looking good here. The Hymn documents are out and Ripple's looking really favorable. Then we'll see a post summary judgment settlement. John said that's the most likely outcome. So, settlement before the documents come out or even in lieu of, I don't think so.
what and you know earliest could be June 13th. What does that mean then? What would you chalk that up to if it does go that route that you're talking about? This is basically what's going to happen. Does it mean, dare I say, that things are leaning, I guess the headlines again, that things are leaning towards ripple winning or that, you know, the SEC
to see a lot more of what we've seen, right? We're going to see like obviously I think the judge, what I'm trying to say is I think the judge is notoriously fair. She, you know, she's given things to ripple in this case. She's given things to the SEC. She actually came out and said a few months ago that she called the SEC out for
kind of changing their stance on what the Hibman speech was supposed to be, right? They kind of said in the beginning, "Oh, it wasn't supposed to be market guidance." And it was blah, blah, blah. And then they were like, "Actually, it was." And the reason we can't release these documents is because it's attorney-client privilege. And they basically changed those stories. And the judge said, "You know,#
a couple months ago and now you're changing your story so she's called them out. I think she's a fair judge and I think we're going to see that within the summary judgment. Do I think Ripple is going to win out right? No, I don't. Do I think the SEC is going to win out right? Probably not. I think parts of it are going to go to trial. I think what a
A lot of people do care about is, and obviously retail investors care very much about the topic is the secondary market sales and how show rule on that, right? Because we're XRP holders in the wrong when they bought Ripple back in 2016 and they didn't know anything about Ripple, they just bought it because they wanted to invest in a coin, like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
So, you know, I think we're going to see a lot more of what comes out of the him and documents isn't necessarily going to be shocking. It's going to be a lot more of that kind of like SEC thinking of like, you know, how we see this space. We've got it regulated. We've got it regulated hard. So we'll see. I mean, really, really, it's going to be really interesting. There's going to#
to talk about and I'm looking forward to kind of making those calls as well because you know once those documents are out and the names of the people who said those things are released to the public then you can kind of go to those people and say you know expand. I know you said this and now it's all public record they might not give me a comment but it's gonna be it's gonna make for interesting work.
Yeah, no for sure. And like I said, you've been all over it basically from the get go and you know really entrenched in the ripple community to figure out what has been going on and it's been super super helpful to watch your coverage and clarification on all of this stuff as it comes out. So if anyone listening doesn't already follow along or definitely do that because you
you've been breaking down everything for us and happy to have you back on to discuss all of that. Again, we also just covered the idea of meme coins and why I think it's so interesting to see them. Almost all of them too make the promise that, "Look, there's not a lot of money. You're not going to make money if you buy this coin. We're just joking around with these things like Pepe and
and everything else like that. And I think it's been interesting to see kind of that become the new norm for people trying to just say, of course, it's not a security when it's just a joke. And what that means for, I guess, you know, the SEC's way of looking at things. So June 13th, yes, to people who are pinging us in replies on the space, June 13th, the time to
to stay up to date on what those updates might be if those documents do come out then. Alan, or the other thing too, as far as scoops are concerned, you've been all over the ripple in SEC case, but also you put out a new tweet looking at a very interesting topic here around Vladimir Putin and sanctions attached to
One of Binance's big executives, BJ Kang, and that's an interesting one because he's a former FBI agent in this back and forth between the US and Russia. I don't know why necessarily that's happening here, but anytime you have Binance attached to Vladimir Putin in sanctions, it's worth digging into and you have that scoop. So, curious.
What your take is on that one and why it's so important to watch. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, when we say sanctions, right, when we sanction anybody or Russia sanctions anybody, what they mean is that they can't, they're going to freeze your financial assets in the country, you can't travel
to the country. Basically, you can't have any sort of access to Russia. But someone like BJ Kang, who's super, you know, he's former FBI 20 years in the Bureau, now working for Binance US, I don't see him traveling to Russia anytime soon or, you know, hiding assets in Russia. I think as far as sanctions
go, you know, how impactful is that? You know, it's just like basically, you know, avoid Russia, right? I think a lot of people can do that. But what I do think is interesting is that it's the first, it's the first finance, you know, executive or someone who's connected to finance that's been put on the sanction list, right? And that is partly because of his
a former role in the FBI. You saw Obama was on there, you saw a whole bunch of people that Trump didn't like as well. So, you know, someone who's like so entrenched in like the government, right? So that's part of it. And then also I think finance continuing to like freeze sanctioned entities, they're really
cracking down on those now and I think it was kind of like payback, right? It's got to pay back for, you know, you're not letting us use your platform then we're not letting you into the country kind of thing. But I think it's, you know, one of maybe a few more coming, like I'm not saying, like I know anything, but I'm just saying, like, you know, maybe like this is not the last#
many other sort of like sorrows crypto entity. The circumstances were interesting surrounding it. Yeah, it must feel like I don't know, that could be a point of pride too depending on the way you look at it and making that sanctions list of Vladimir Putin's calling you the most dangerous man on Wall Street because you're working with the Bureau for 20 years, not necessarily the worst of all things, and also
for the investigations as you know, going into and after Bernie made off. So I guess that also speaks to his attachment to all of the stuff going on. Yeah, there was a New York Times article about it. And I think one of the guys who was on the list basically said, you know, I'm not too worried about it because if I'm on that list, then it means I'm doing something right.
That's true. That is true. The enemy of my enemies. I don't know. But no, it's all interesting to dive into because again, it's kind of at the forefront now as we get into this weird cycle of, you know, the politics now, I guess to tie back to how we open this, the politics now being tied into crypto across the globe.
not just in the US but how countries are interacting with each other and where this is all going including the idea of unseating the dollar as kind of the currency used around the world you're already seeing inroads that China's been able to make and where this goes from here obviously how Russia falls on some of this stuff is going to be rather important to watch but as always Eleanor
I want to thank you again for coming on. This is basically all that we had set aside as far as topics are concerned. I don't know if there's anything else. We asked you this last time and it was very interesting because you basically put on a radar the idea of the house hearing from a couple of weeks ago of things to be watching. I don't know if there's anything else this week that you're excited to be watching outside of the lead up to#
those hitman documents next month, but anything else you have here on your own before we let you go. I was going to say there's no significant house hearings this week, but yeah, I mean, apart from the ripple documents and I actually liked the way we ended those app because you brought it full circle and we started the way we ended
the way we began. So I think that's a perfect place to wrap it up. It is full circle. It is full circle here. And I also just want to thank you again for coming on as usual. Everyone listening, the ability to call on what we're doing here at Coinage as a community on show, backed by the co-founder of Netflix, serving a new model in media. Eleanor Terrett, thanks again, coming on, taking
time out of your day to chat all these topics with us. Would love to also extend by the way. We did this last week with Voshi, one of the guys building an interesting project in crypto. You've been on enough times now, I think, to where everyone who owns this with us would be honored to have you as a co-owner of this too. But anyone listening, coinage.media, the spots to learn more about our
project in building a decentralized future for media. For Eleanor, thank you again for taking the time to come on and thank you to everyone for listening. I'm the host of Quenna Zachouismon signing off. We'll see you again later this week.