The Chopping Block: The CLARITY Act Endgame with Patrick Witt + Gauntlet's $125M SBI Raise + Balaji's Malaysia Exodus

**Patrick Witt** (0:00)
We met with the president on Thursday of last week, again, yesterday morning, to get final sign-off on the first of its kind ethics provision that would apply a conduct restriction to the president of the United States. This is the first time ever that a president, the White House has ever agreed to submit to an ethics provision that would restrict the president's conduct.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:21)
Not a dividend.

**Tarun Chitra** (0:22)
It's a tale of two clans.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:23)
Now, your losses are on someone else's balance.

**Tom Schmidt** (0:25)
Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:28)
I mean, the trading firms who are very involved.

**Robert Leshner** (0:31)
I like that either of the ultimate on the DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:37)
We're coming at you live today. Obviously, all of you know, every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day.
So joining us today, we've got Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we got Tarun, the Giga Brain and Granpuba at Gauntlet.
We've got Robert, Crypto Connoisseur and Tsar of Superstate. Good morning. We will have joining us today, but they're not here yet. We will have Patrick Witt, who is the presidential point man on policy at the White House. Now, today is a very important day. That's part of the reason why we're doing this live stream, is that we're in the final running, supposedly the clarity bill language is supposed to drop today. Patrick just called us right before the show is going to go live, telling us that he's running around trying to make sure the language falls on the right place. So he will be dialing in before the end of this episode. But just FYI, we're going to be opening with other topics and we'll get to clarity once he's able to join us. I'm Haseeb, of course, the head high man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Lisa Chopping Block at XYZ for more disclosures. Okay, so, boys, first, before we get into any of the meat, it's been a very crazy couple of weeks. I want to first congratulate Tarun. Tarun, this is a couple of weeks ago, we were a little bit late, but Tarun raised $125 million from SBI Holdings, sole investor.
I think these are the biggest raise by far. For those of you who go to SBI, they're like the SoftBank spinoff, it's an enormous public company in Japan. They're like the crypto OGs of Japan. Huge raise. Tarun, what are you going to do with the money?

**Tarun Chitra** (2:20)
Yeah, thanks. You know, I think one thing I've realized, being both in crypto and a little bit in traditional finance, I would say the interesting thing is, historically, everyone always thinks about VC as their fundraising method for growing a company from the beginning. But I do think, like, as crypto has matured and is becoming more sort of TradFi adjacent, used by TradFi, inevitably, I do think people kind of go back to more traditional, big companies investing in small companies type investment versus a kind of like syndication VC style investment. And I think, you know, in the process of kind of thinking through institutional expansion, building products for sort of traditional finance entities that want access to DeFi liquidity, as well as being able to provide liquidity to different types of needs to make the DeFi versus TradFi thing a lot more smooth.
The natural thing was like, hey, the natural source of capital to actually really kind of look at is people who are in the traditional world, who are really looking at crypto. And SBI has sort of been around crypto for a long time. I think they led the Series A or C of Ripple Labs a long time ago. That was their first thing. They also own a bunch of crypto exchanges in Japan. They own like three exchanges. I think they're consolidating another one. So they'll be the top exchange in Japan soon.
But yeah, they're kind of, a weird conglomerate in the sense of like in the US, and you don't really find this type of holding company that owns a ton of different entities. They, you know, one way of viewing them, I think the thing they're most successful at has been like their online brokerage, no fee Robinhood like product, which launched in a similar time as Robinhood, but focused on Japan. But yeah, they own a bunch of banks. They own tons of companies.