The Senate's Crypto Vote Could Change Everything

**Scott Melker** (0:00)
Well, good morning, everyone. And welcome to another day of watching to see what our dysfunctional government will actually do.
And I can't look at it any other way. I don't know that anybody else can. It's, I kind of wanted to know, wonder if this is all a head fake, if, you know, people are betting on prediction markets. Probably a bunch of Senate staffers are doing that. And, you know, some of them will get rich because they know what the hell is going on. But the reality is the most important framing of the entire clarity, I don't know, story, theater, call it whatever you want, is that it's becoming more and more obvious to anybody who has any intelligence that the status quo of zero regulation and zero legislative intent is a really bad idea, because it is the worst of both worlds.
It allows more theft, more scams, more everything bad, but actually discourages real innovation. So that is slowly becoming into the zeitgeist. And as long as that's the case, we'll eventually get where we want to go. It's just painful in the short term. That said, the crypto market certainly seems to be sniffing it out. I mean, you're seeing all sorts of interesting stories. There's a story this morning that I do want to talk about, that S&P, which is interesting, because S&P effectively, and I didn't see the whole interview with Kathy Clay, who I know and like, so I do want to give her the benefit of the doubt here. I suspect I know what they're doing, but they came out with a crypto digital asset index and didn't include Bitcoin, which I actually agree with, because I think Bitcoin is more or less is the denominator by which everything will be measured. So why should it be in an index of digital assets? The digital asset index, there's no gold in the S&P, and gold is a $30 trillion asset, bigger than any individual asset in the S&P. So I don't really see the issue, but a lot of people are up in arms about this. So curious what people here think. I know we're trying to get a few people up on stage, but it feels to me like it is appropriate to have an index of non-Bitcoin digital assets that are quote, based on utility and productive. And all of this makes sense if you actually have a regulatory structure in the US where people can invest on it. So that's sort of where I'm at this morning. Gaurav, I haven't seen you up here for a while. I mean, are you enjoying your summer?

**Gaurav** (2:38)
A lot, a lot. And then you haven't been holding topics that would entice more spicy topics, you know? People like me, these are very US centric topics.

**Scott Melker** (2:54)
Let's bring Tao. Let's ask the question, because I tend to agree. I don't know what the spicy topics are. I mean, you know, what do you think we should be talking about?

**Gaurav** (3:02)
Robinhood chain, memes rising again. Where did the liquidity come from? Why on earth do we have new projects bumping to $200 million valuations in seven days? Seemingly all algorithm are organic and so on.
I think that's spicy enough, right?

**Scott Melker** (3:24)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I think that it's really well, Robinhood chain is different than those. Those are two very different things. We could talk. Which would you prefer to talk about first? Because Robinhood building on Arbitum for their own corporate use is a trend.
There's a trend here that companies want to be able to manufacture excess value. Right? So if you can create something of value that you own a huge piece of, companies will always do that. That's just that. That's logical. Whether it will succeed or not, who knows? I mean, you know, the fact that Coinbase did base without a token, you know, I'm sure that that's that they're unhappy that they did that, because at the time they would have been worth a lot of money.
You know, who knows where that will go or where that goes? I mean, what are your thoughts on it?

**Gaurav** (4:14)
I think a much bigger game that these exchanges are looking at, especially the fully regulated exchanges, is what Binance recently played. You get a clearing house to get, you know, stocks, US stocks on your books, and then you tokenize it on your chain. I mean, and those tokens now, which are obviously under your custody and under your clearing house are traded 24-7, 365 days on a crypto platform through global audience. I mean, that's the game I don't think any exchange would like to miss.