Ep 37 - February 19, 2025 - SEC: XRP not a security
Welcome to another episode of the weekly crypto check-in recorded on February 2025. I'm your host, Robert Swartan. I'm the chairman of my cohost, Andres Sundate. How's it going, Andres?
Andres Sandate:Good, Robert. Hope you're well. Busy, week we find ourselves in and
Robert Swarthout:Yes.
Andres Sandate:Feels feels like winter again outside. Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:This is Georgia. Yes. Unsurprisingly, we were, not ready for spring, as much as people wanted it. Mother nature always reminds us.
Andres Sandate:That's
Robert Swarthout:right. He's the boss.
Andres Sandate:Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:Well, we have
Andres Sandate:Hopefully, we're not, sorry. I was gonna say, hopefully, we're not gonna be entering and talking today about, the crypto winner. I feel like, is is is sort of lurking out there with respect to crypto prices over the last week, but, lots of headlines to cover.
Robert Swarthout:Yes. I you know, I I'll say upfront, I don't think we're headed towards a crypto winner yet. We still have more of this bull market to go. The sentiment on Twitter is that we are headed towards one, but, that's generally a good sign. When everyone thinks it's going down, it's probably gonna go the other direction.
Robert Swarthout:So
Andres Sandate:Right. And these these aren't the worst buying opportunities too. Right? So Yeah. Yep.
Andres Sandate:So many people that you talk to say, oh, I I invested in crypto once, and they're referring probably to a cycle or two ago. And Yeah. They think that maybe they've missed out on a chance to to get in. But, yeah, lots to cover and break down.
Robert Swarthout:Yep. So let's just jump in here. The first topic is, more of a question. Is Trump rethinking his crypto council? And, again, this is the council that was gonna be head up, or chaired by, David Sachs, the crypto czar, and bring in different people.
Robert Swarthout:You know, the rumor is is he wants to get rid of the council and do more of the summits where he had a more open, which I think is inclusive in many ways, which is great, because you end up with more industry participants to be able to have, at least a a small voice. But the again, the rumor is is he's tired of the infighting. I I'm not surprised crypto has a good amount of infighting. And it typically, comes at least in these kind of scenarios comes from the Bitcoin crowd. To them, it's Bitcoin and Bitcoin only.
Robert Swarthout:And you've been getting that sentiment a lot. A lot of hate towards some of the other companies that might have been included in that council. So kinda don't doesn't surprise me. I don't, I'm not surprised Trump may wanna switch his strategy here, but it's just sad. Like, you know, you think the industry could come together, and try to get some stuff done, but we're back to the old ways of fighting.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Yeah. There's a there certainly, a couple of months ago, if you'd asked people, there was all this excitement and momentum and and jubilation. Mhmm. Cautious optimism probably by more, level headed folks around where we would become mid February.
Andres Sandate:I would say it's probably safe to assume that the shine is coming off a little bit and that where we are today relative to where people thought we would be, you know, when election night happened
Robert Swarthout:Right.
Andres Sandate:It's there's a there's a bit of a gulf. Right? So Yeah. I think realists are are gonna, are are gonna probably weigh in now and say, this is gonna be messy, because if if the legislation or the audience is too tilted one way or the other, like, too much Bitcoin, too much of this or that Right. You're gonna end up with infighting, and then the industry will just be paralyzed.
Andres Sandate:So Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:You know, I think you're right. I you know, the honeymoon phase is over. Reality is setting in. And at the end of the day, like, it's still you know, we've talked about this before, but it still surprised me every time I think about it is, you know, election night happens, you you know, or leading even leading up to the election, crypto world was like, oh, we're gonna come together. We need regulations, all this stuff.
Robert Swarthout:As soon as the election happened, it turned into, oh, we need a a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It became very much all about one particular group. And now that it may not happen that way, they seem to be getting grumpy and causing problems. So, not exactly pointing fingers, but kinda pointing fingers here. I I mean,
Andres Sandate:I think there's a I I I take an approach of there's there's multiple things that are causing a lot of this. I think the meme coin frenzy is not helping. And and the fact that of the matter is, like, the players that are involved in that that are out front, whether they're gonna acknowledge it or not, the Mhmm. The faces of that, there's there's no disconnecting the dots. Right?
Andres Sandate:Like Right. Again, I think that there's a lot of variables, that are causing the slowdown. I think the reality now is, you know, what voices will emerge in order to try to get some of the things that we talked about, you know, over the last few years, like stablecoin legislation, and reform around custody, etcetera. So, yeah, there's a there's a lot to work through. It's, it's not gonna be simple.
Robert Swarthout:I wouldn't say it's a saving grace here, but maybe that line of thinking in that having a crypto czar in place kinda helps keep these things marching forward versus it just kinda falling to the wayside if it was just, like, a priority that, no person that was specifically in charge of it, would be so may maybe we still get to move forward, albeit it's not as fast as everyone wants.
Andres Sandate:Well, if you go back and look at Trump one point o, the first presidency, there was this, you know, all star CEO council that was organized. I mean, it had Steve Schwarzman, and it had everybody, you know, base I mean, all these folks. And and many of them came before, the lights, camera, and action of of DC and said, we're gonna sit there and work with, you know, this new administration and be all about creating jobs and prosperity, and it disbanded a month later. Yes. So, I think those folks realize, like, there's the camera, the photo op will be there for it.
Andres Sandate:But then the private jets wheels up, and it's back to, like, dealing with shareholders and dealing with, like, real issues. And Absolutely. I, yeah, I mean, I think that these councils a lot of times are photo ops. And and so, you know, if you look at the headlines around the health care industry, I mean, Trump came out and said he raised half a billion dollars at that summit. And I don't know really what that means in the context of, you know, lowering health care costs or reducing, you know, the cost of prescriptions.
Andres Sandate:I'm not sure where that money's going. So I don't know. I the jury's out on is it the czar? Is it the council? I think you and I would just like to see, you know, some legislation promoted in congress.
Andres Sandate:Just actually put a stake in the ground.
Robert Swarthout:Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. So I guess moving on here, this next topic I found pretty fascinating, albeit we don't have tons of, meat behind the headline here. So Mastercard, did its quarterly result, reports recently.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. And, you know, some of the big headline numbers that are not crypto related at all is their annual transaction volume was $8,100,000,000,000. Obviously, Visa is bigger, but Mastercard is still obviously quite good size there. 70% of their transactions are contactless now, which is, I would have loved to have known this number, prior to COVID. Right?
Robert Swarthout:Because there were so much businesses that accelerated their contactless payments during that period. But what we're getting, at here is, the tokenization of transactions. They claimed 30% of their transactions were tokenized. They didn't say which blockchain. There's there's rumor that it's Algorand or Hedera, but I think it'll take time for more of these details to come out.
Robert Swarthout:Maybe it's a private version of these right now, like, obviously, they're not moving the funds on the blockchain yet because, like, regulations need to probably be in place for that. But I think that they're testing. And they're testing more outs in the open, albeit not tons, than, say, a Visa or someone else's. But it's, you know, this this is one of these, oh, it looks like it's coming soon and we're gonna wake up the next day and poof it's gonna be here, type situation. Yeah.
Andres Sandate:Well, it speaks to the utility, right, of of the blockchain technology that we, you know, we're we're we are at least excited about, here at Tetons. So Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:And, you know, it speaks to part of the thesis that that we hold that, you know, I it's gonna be the businesses that adopt this stuff first before retail. Retail gambles on crypto right now. That's all they really do with it Yeah. Or speculate. Now it's, businesses trying to replumb, and make things more efficient.
Robert Swarthout:So hopefully, we'll learn more about this sometime soon, but, it's, it was a cool headline when I when I saw it come across my feed.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. No doubt about it.
Robert Swarthout:Our next topic, the SEC has started acknowledging, some of the altcoin ETFs. Obviously, there's already a, Ethereum ETFs out there, and they've had a good first six weeks of the year, from everything I was reading this morning. But, kinda more focused on the ones that have applications pending, XRP, Doge, Litecoin, and I believe Hedera is the other one, if I'm not mistaken. But the SEC has been moving much quicker than people would have expected even from the old administration, which was basically they wait till the last day and say no. They're doing this ahead of time and acknowledging doesn't necessarily mean they're launching it.
Robert Swarthout:This is a saying we accept your application and I think it starts at like a two hundred and forty day clock, that they would have to approve or deny by that point. My guess is it happens much sooner considering they're already doing things sooner here, and this SEC is a very different stance. So exciting days ahead for, the Well, they're working,
Andres Sandate:you know, they're working it over there at the SEC. I have a question, for you, Robert. Is DOGE in as in Elon Musk, Doge? Have they got into the SEC yet?
Robert Swarthout:They I don't know if they formally gotten there. I you know, as this, I guess, a way to try to answer this question, Doge, the organization did set up a bunch of separate Twitter accounts. So that Doge SCC, Doge, you know, DOD, all the different I think there's, like, 40 different ones they set up. So people online can, send messages specifically to the one that they feel like, oh, you need to look into this here. Oh, got it.
Robert Swarthout:Trying to help. Yeah. I was just,
Andres Sandate:yeah, I was just asking because, you know, the budget for the SEC is always, a big topic, right, in Yeah. Appropriations in congress. And so I think if you ask a lot of lifers at the SEC, they would say, well, we need more resources, and then we could do more. We could offer a quicker turnaround. We could offer, you know, blah blah blah blah blah.
Andres Sandate:But I don't know if it's it's dollars or, you know, what DOSA's initial analysis of of their budget is, but there are a lot of cuts happening at a lot of agencies. Yes. So but it doesn't appear that they're slowing down the attorneys at the SEC if they're cranking out responses and acknowledging applications.
Robert Swarthout:Correct. Maybe it's the, a different division of of attorneys. Right? It's the, not the enforcement division anymore. Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. But, you know, it's, a tweet that I did see that was from Paul Gravol. He's the chief legal officer of Coinbase. He tweeted at Elon when he when Elon was mentioning, the SEC at one point saying maybe there should be a rule in place that if the SEC loses a lawsuit that the SEC pays the, the other party's, legal fees. And then Brad Garlinghouse retweeted it, obviously.
Robert Swarthout:So both Yeah. See we'll see a legal officer and a CEO of two different, battles at the SEC. I mean, can you imagine, the SEC going from thinking they got a hundred and $25,000,000 judgment out of ripple to all sudden having to pay close to $200,000,000 in legal fees. Because it would be the other way. I I can't do that.
Andres Sandate:Paying those legal fees, unfortunately, as taxpayers. So
Robert Swarthout:Correct. But the FCC does have a budget, but I think a good portion of their budget comes from Settlements and fees and settlements. Fees. So It's kind of the mob shaking people down, so I'm not quite sure if anyone
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Well, be careful what we wish for.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. Yes. So who knows? I can't imagine that that, suggestion Let's
Andres Sandate:just check them all on the, meme coin promoters out there, that are, sniping everyone, and, that'll raise a bunch of money. Well, let's move on. We've got a, we've got a ton of of other headlines. Yeah. Yeah.
Andres Sandate:SEC once again declares XRP is not a security. Now we would not have had this headline in here, three months ago. So this is, you buried the headline, though.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. So it it was just kind of like a one and a half page kinda document the SCC put out. Basically, they're saying under these circumstances, not not security. It's something that many people in the industry outside of the Bitcoin community in Italy have long fought, long fought for. I think that in some ways, XRP is paving the way for a lot of the other altcoins, and the just a general rethinking at the, administration and the SEC.
Robert Swarthout:So, not tons of meat here, but it's beyond, like, to me, this paves the way for this lawsuits that is an appeal, to kinda just get, cleaned up and be done with.
Andres Sandate:Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:And, I would imagine that that that the lawsuits aren't cleaned up formally until, Paul Icons is actually, voted through the senate. So but we, I don't know when this is gonna happen, by the way. Have you heard, when the I haven't. No.
Andres Sandate:No. I I haven't. I know that, you know, they just got through, several prominent cabinet positions over the last week, right, with the, you know, with with
Robert Swarthout:just yeah.
Andres Sandate:I think with just just the importance I wanna take away from the importance of the SEC, but just with the you know, you gotta get the secretary of defense. You gotta get, you know, the person running the CIA. You gotta get the person running, you know, the the government, health and human services. So I would say we'll start to accelerate some of these appointments over the next couple weeks.
Robert Swarthout:Absolutely. So our next topic, pump and dumps. This kinda goes back to what you were alluding to, with just some of the craziness that's happened. You know? Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:I so the first one that comes to mind is the the Trump and Milani meme coins the weekend before, the inauguration. The inauguration. I as someone in crypto, I appreciated the publicity a little bit. It's a double edged sword, but it it it was not a good look in my opinion.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Right. It foreshadowed where we're at now. Well, congrats
Robert Swarthout:a
Andres Sandate:month and a half later. Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:Right. And then you had this last weekend, you had the, the token what was? I'm trying to remember. Libra. Libra.
Robert Swarthout:Yes. The Argentinian president. The Argentinian. Yeah. And then you have Dave Portnoy wrapped up in this one again.
Robert Swarthout:We talked about him last week.
Andres Sandate:Yep.
Robert Swarthout:It's just like I this seems like a bad commercial break in the middle of the crypto bull market that we just need to be over with. Yeah. We
Andres Sandate:need to know We should up we should bring everybody up to speed because, again, we we often don't know who's tuning in for what part of the show, but effectively, what's going on is you have this meme coin frenzy going on where, literally, you and I can spin up a meme coin and call it Teton. We can go and hire effectively a team. We can put it out in the market, and we can if we have the right promotional strategy, we can effectively see the market cap of our Teton token. Again, not real, just theoretically. We could see it go to the moon.
Robert Swarthout:Right. Thousands or into thousands of a percent. Yes.
Andres Sandate:Right. We, on the back end, and this is what's happening, have an ulterior motive, right, which is what we would call sniping, where people are going in and they're making a quick profit. In the case of one of the, I don't know if it was the Melania coin or the Trump coin, there was a hundred million dollars made really on the backs of I don't know if you'd call them volatility traders, retail investors, whoever bought that token in day two, day three and realized, like, the market cap went from 3 or 4,000,000,000 effectively down 9095% in Yeah. A matter of hours. Right?
Andres Sandate:Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:The part of what I was reading, and it seems that this is true
Andres Sandate:Really, really bad look.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah, is the, the same group that helped launch the Melania token, not the Trump token, but the Omani one, also is tied to this Libra token. So they they're good at what they do. Whether it's legal or a good look is, you know, debatable. But it's, it's just it's just tough. I mean, this is this is the kind of stuff that gets us bad regulations.
Robert Swarthout:Like Yeah. And the all all the, anti crypto people, they use this to point to for all all their ammunition, but it's, this unfortunate. Yeah.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. I'm looking here at my Twitter feed and it's just, yeah, it's just it we're, like, in the eye of a storm with what's gonna go down in Argentina, and I don't know if that's gonna lead to, you know, more of a slap on the wrist. There's definitely folks that are, licking their financial wounds as a result. And, of course, I don't know all the folks that are behind the scenes, but they know who they are. They know they're out there.
Andres Sandate:And, I mean, the this is how we got the SEC. Right? Like, if you go back to how the SEC got started, it was because of what happened with the great, you know, financial crisis of the twenties, nineteen twenty nine, I think. And what we saw was just all this just outright fraud and all this outright, what we would now call just crime, financial crime, led to the SEC being created. And, and so, yeah, we're we're on a slippery slope.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. On a slippery slope.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. It's, yeah. I I look forward to the day where we don't have to talk about this, and this is not a news item. But, it it is part of what the cycle is doing now. So yeah.
Robert Swarthout:Anyway So, you
Andres Sandate:know, buyer beware.
Robert Swarthout:Yep. Absolutely. Or speculator.
Andres Sandate:Speculator beware.
Robert Swarthout:There you go. Gamblers beware. Yeah. Next topic is, Trump, posted last night. So we're recording it on the nineteenth on, Truth Social on his account that he, will basically reposted a couple, links.
Robert Swarthout:They were all about Ripple and XRP. So that caught a lot of people's attention, good or bad, depending on what type of fence you're on there. But, basically, one of them was saying Donald Trump effect bumps Ripple Labs US deals and XRP gains. A bit self serving for Trump here in Italy. Like, he's trying to say, look look what I did.
Robert Swarthout:In some sense, this is certainly viewed as a positive, if you're from the XRP community. There's, you know, again, this might be What's
Andres Sandate:the meat of his post about?
Robert Swarthout:It was just reposting this link. It was just kinda like, hey, look at this. Yeah. And, you know, he he actually posted two different links. Basically, they're both saying effectively the same thing.
Robert Swarthout:And, you know, it's again, if you're in the XRP community, this is viewed as a good thing because Brad Garlinghouse, if if the crypto council still stays in place, he was likely to get the rumor to be on that. My guess is he still has influence even if it shifts to something else. That is that is my, read on the situation. But the, there's other communities, specifically the Bitcoin community that, probably, were frothing at the mouth when I saw this. This is the type of thing that they just can't stand, and it's just, it again, it's the infighting in crypto, and this is kind of fueled in a different way.
Robert Swarthout:And you couple that with, Don Junior, actually starting to follow, the Ripple Twitter account the other day. So it's like there's like these, you know, maybe not bright lines between these things, but there's starting to be some dots you can connect.
Andres Sandate:Oh, yeah.
Robert Swarthout:So who knows?
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Yeah. We can't be naive. Right? I I, you know, I thought a tweet that came out this week, and and and what resonated with me is this crypto executive basically said, effectively, if you wanna be in the crypto game as a bigger company, right, as a, you know, player, you've gotta have an ear in you gotta have a voice in Washington.
Andres Sandate:You've gotta have a seat at the table. You've gotta be on the inside. And the the counter to that is the whole reason crypto and DeFi came about was to get away from the centralization Yes. Of power, control, influence, etcetera. So it's it's like when you put those two ideas, you know, one after the other, we just, again, we just find ourselves at this really interesting time.
Andres Sandate:Now we do have a very pro crypto president, but what seems to be very clear if you just follow just history and the patterns is, like, what's popular in November may not be the approach come mid February. So, like, the idea of a crypto czar and a crypto, mandate and David Sachs, like, now we find ourselves, you know, is he in? Is he out? Is he hot? Is he not?
Andres Sandate:It's a it's a lot to follow. It's a lot to keep your head around.
Robert Swarthout:Yep. Absolutely.
Andres Sandate:So Yeah. But I put these next two in here. Yeah. Yeah. Because, you know, Coinbase quarterly results and Robinhood, you know, we're seeing a lot of, you know, the 10 k's are coming out.
Andres Sandate:So we're seeing q four numbers and we're seeing, you know, year end results, coming out over the last week or so now that we're in earning season. And and one of the things that came out with Coinbase, and this goes back to regulation and SAB one twenty one, is Coinbase and they have there's an explanation behind it, but they reported a change in assets from, like, over 300,000,000,000 to, like, 20 some billion. And on the surface, you read the headline, you'd say, oh, wow. What's going on? The company's going away.
Andres Sandate:But reality is it comes back to the central question of custody. And these are customer assets. And so when you think about Coinbase as the custodian for assets that you and I and other investors opening up a Coinbase account. Like, the whole central idea of whose tokens are those Mhmm. Is an important It's a technical issue, but it's an important issue because in the event of a bankruptcy An illegal issue.
Andres Sandate:Not the yeah. A legal issue. The courts recently, in the case of several of these bigger, call it custodians, FTX and others over the last five years in crypto, the courts ruled against, you know, the individuals, to say, actually, it's the estate of the failed company that actually now owns the crypto, and we'll go through a liquidation process to distribute those assets. And so, all that to say, that doesn't mean Coinbase is is not is not gonna be here. It doesn't mean that they're in financial trouble.
Andres Sandate:It just means that we've got a lot to sort out still.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. Because, I mean, again, regulations. It's financial yep. But, like, at
Andres Sandate:the end
Robert Swarthout:of the world, in the traditional finance world, you don't have a, a a custody provider or a, like, someone like a, BNY Mellon.
Andres Sandate:Right. Or an order for us.
Robert Swarthout:Right. You're you're not also the brokerage. Like, they are separate entities. And crypto, those can be functionally commingled right now. Yeah.
Andres Sandate:I'm
Robert Swarthout:a big believer in that they should not be commingled. And we need to kind of, get the regulations or laws in place to, basically make them do that. It seems like Coinbase is trying to, not only, I guess, walk the walk with for the talk that they've been saying. They've been saying that their customer has this for a while, but you kind of treating them that way on your on their books probably is a great signal. Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:But it's it's it it is Yeah. It's an accounting yeah.
Andres Sandate:It's an accounting clarification, and I think what when you go in and read the comments from the CFO, effectively, what they're saying at Coinbase is, yes. We may be opening ourselves up to a new era of competition with banks and brokerages getting into custody of crypto assets, but, there's a pretty high bar now because you're gonna be a regulated institution. And just like policies can change for the benefit of a company that wants to get pro crypto, get really big in crypto, they can also change in four years or in eight years. So companies have to make these strategic decisions. But I think at the end of the day, again, more institutions getting involved in the space, to me, is a net is a net good thing in the sense of the safety of customer assets.
Andres Sandate:Say what you will about it centralizing and the big get bigger, at least the safety of your nice dollars when we invest in crypto, that that that should be sort of sacrosanct like it is with the stock market.
Robert Swarthout:Absolutely.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Yeah. And then Robinhood, yeah, just moving on to the Robinhood quarterly results. I just I thought this was interesting because, again, we we've seen this with the market, but largely a retail trading platform or investing platform, but they're starting to do a lot more in crypto, and their revenues, coming out at $12.31 last year indicate that, you know, they're active in Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana, but they're also starting to get more active in some of the meme coins right or wrong. And, a lot of retail speculation happening.
Andres Sandate:So so Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:When I when you posted this one about Robinhood, the and the huge revenue jump. Right? 490% quarter over quarter is pretty crazy. Obviously, that, coincides with the election and crypto taking off in early November. The first thing that jumped to mind there for me was, oh, I wonder if this includes their purchase of Bitstamp, the crypto exchange.
Robert Swarthout:Is that revenue starting to show up in there. And I, looked it up, and that transaction hasn't closed yet. So I'm guessing that is not in their results yet. So it could even more magnify that, you know, 40% of their business is quarter, crypto related will jump at some level, once the Yeah. Transaction closes in the first half of this year.
Robert Swarthout:So
Andres Sandate:And just to give, listeners, like, a perspective, Coinbase is about six x the size of Robinhood when it comes to trading volumes, of crypto. So they're, yeah, but they're a real player. I mean, I think it indicates that, you know, people are looking at them as a place to do crypto transactions and more retail investors getting involved in the space or choosing to transact with them.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. Coinbase also has, like, probably multiple orders of magnitude more tokens that are tradable than Robinhood. My guess is Robinhood is less than two dozen, would be my guess. My guess is probably 200.
Andres Sandate:So Yeah.
Robert Swarthout:That wraps that one. So the next topic is we talked about it last week how the SEC or maybe two weeks ago the SEC had rescinded SAB one twenty one, but it's coming back up just because people are trying to put more thought around it. And you have brought this one forward just how, you know, it's gonna make competition with the traditional banks, or custodians to be custodians of crypto. And the the part of the headline that I went back and found that was in my feed was State Street and Citibank are looking to launch custody services. So here they come.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. I mean, I think the question becomes, like, when you think about net capital rules, there's so much that was being put in place at these big, too big to fail institutions, around what's called Basel three and Basel Endgame. It sounded like, you know, sounded like movies. But a lot of that is now up in the air because, of the new Trump administration and some of the relaxing or at least the language around relaxing regulation at these highly regulated financial institutions, or at least they feel they're highly regulated. And so the question is, will we see more institutions feeling like they can go on their front foot to start to do, you know, crypto for their institutional customers.
Andres Sandate:And we're gonna get to one of those institutional customers in the next headline. But it speaks to just, I guess, the business confidence, from the the banking and financial community around what they are perceiving as signal that, okay, you know, crypto, we're open for business. One and the same.
Robert Swarthout:And, you know, prior to the election, they may have been thinking about this, but there's no way they were gonna publicly say it. I mean, just the idea that they can publicly say something is a huge change, in just the sentiment, generally.
Andres Sandate:Well, yeah. Imagine if you're a c level executive and you're bonused on, you know, P and L, and you're in charge of custody and trust services at a giant financial institution. I mean, what are you trying to do? Where's the growth happening? It's happening in alternatives, and it's happening in crypto.
Andres Sandate:Right? So so those are the areas where you're going to try to go grow your business. Right?
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. Absolutely. Our next topic, is I don't mean how to say this correctly. CalSTRS.
Andres Sandate:The California State Teachers Retirement System. So Okay. It's it's the it's the cousin to what most people know as CalPERS, which the California Public Employee Retirement System, which is the largest public pension plan in the country. But these are gigantic pension funds in California given the size of their economy. And they came out in their recent, I think, 13 f filing that they own 83,000,000 in now strategy or formerly MicroStrategy.
Andres Sandate:The they're the second largest pension, and they own over 5,000 shares of the, of the company. So this is a big institutional investor that people follow, and
Robert Swarthout:Right.
Andres Sandate:They obviously see something in strategy in their business plan. It's not a huge amount of money in the scale of how big they are.
Robert Swarthout:Right.
Andres Sandate:But, nevertheless, I thought I wouldn't have them.
Robert Swarthout:Yeah. Makes makes total sense. Our last topic here is Binance dot US resumes USD trading. So why are we talking about this? I guess is, a question that someone may ask.
Robert Swarthout:So Binance.US is The US version of Binance.com, and they've been around since, I wanna say, 2018, '19, something like that. They initially had the ability where you could send money from your bank account into your account on Binance.US to buy, crypto as part of the turning of the screws that, from the old SCC and from the Fed and part of choke point two point o and and the crackdown generally that happened on Binance globally, in late twenty two and twenty three. They were forced they couldn't find a US bank. Shocker. And, they, had to stop USD trading.
Robert Swarthout:So if you wanted to do anything, you had to have a stable coin that you got somewhere else so you could come there and trade. So obviously, that was not good for their business. It was way down. But as of today, they announced that you can, now send ACHs in from your bank and do USD trading. So, again, the the the tide has shifted.
Andres Sandate:Yeah. Yeah. It is. Well, it's not all doom and gloom in in crypto and digital asset land. I mean, like, there's so many different vectors through through which you can look at this whole space.
Andres Sandate:I mean, yes, I think if you looked at, you know, the price of Bitcoin and some of the bigger, crypto assets by market cap, like, prices are down a little bit. However, there is a lot of stuff happening in the background. And I think you said earlier in the show that it's your personal view. Again, we're not offering advice that, you know, we're not quite at the end of this, this current cycle. Is that your take?
Robert Swarthout:That that is my take. I think we're, I've been using the analogy lately. We're on a commercial break, and we will be back for the, I guess, the bit of a finale of sorts. So
Andres Sandate:Okay. Alright.
Robert Swarthout:Yep. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the weekly crypto check-in. To stay updated on future episodes, you can find us in podcast player by searching Teton Crypto Capital or the weekly crypto check-in. Take care.
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