Weekly Roundup 07/24/26 (BTC Security Consortium, Genesis' Terra trade, DAT departures, Farewell to BitMEX, Network State drama)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Matt Walsh and Nic Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:28)
Federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:35)
The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

**SPEAKER_5** (0:42)
The Bank of England has pumped $75 billion more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of constitutive easing.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:47)
You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

**Matt Walsh** (0:53)
Welcome to On The Brink. I'm Matt Walsh.

**Nic Carter** (0:56)
And I'm Nic Carter.

**Matt Walsh** (0:57)
And we're both recording this in suboptimal conditions, but hopefully this will come out tomorrow.

**Nic Carter** (1:02)
Yeah. I'm in the middle of nowhere in Spain. Wi-Fi is not great for either one of us. I was just doing a Galaxy Digital show, and Alex said he listens to our show every single week. I heard that. So I didn't know he's been doing Galaxy Brands for five years now. This show is almost at its eighth year, and he said he listens every week. In that moment, I thought to myself, well, you know what?
Maybe we should keep doing it.
There's at least one guy out there that listens every week.

**Matt Walsh** (1:36)
There is. There's a stable of listeners that listen every week. I'm always surprised at who comes up and says, thank you for doing the podcast.
Yeah, that's what makes you battle through when you have suboptimal Wi-Fi. I feel like we're in, I don't know, 2001 right now with our Wi-Fi connections, but we'll power through.
I listened to that Galaxy Brains podcast when I was on my morning run today. Quite a good podcast.

**Nic Carter** (2:01)
What the one I did yesterday?

**Matt Walsh** (2:05)
Yeah, the one you did yesterday talking about AI, talking about quantum. Some good points in there about AI. I do think that these labs who just are basically making a business, and obviously they're building frontier technology, but they're just monetizing inference.
They're going to try to kill the open source community.

**Nic Carter** (2:26)
Yeah. I think it's funny because everybody got it in their heads that being a token merchant, you can just make hundreds of billions of dollars just selling tokens.
Maybe that's not true. Maybe it didn't turn out to be that way, and maybe the frontier models aren't as defensible. You don't have as much of a moat as you thought. That doesn't bother me that much. But I think it really offends people because maybe everybody's exposed to opening up an Anthropic on the capital side. But nothing is ever promised. You're not guaranteed a business model. If it turns out that being a frontier lab means you have to monetize in some other way, I think that's fine. I think it's actually good, frankly.
My official view now is that the Kimi did the world a favor, actually.

**Matt Walsh** (3:24)
I think the question is, what is that business model? So if it's not just seat-based revenue for the Anthropic and OpenAI's of the world, what is it?
I suspect that pushing into the medical space, drug discovery is going to be part of Anthropics go forward. But I am curious where OpenAI goes. I mean, you think about it, it's like, look, if you build this frontier technology, you can either rent it out or you can use it for your own good, and you can see what type of business model you can build on top of it. And I suspect there's a lot of them.

**Nic Carter** (3:57)
Well, if the model layer ends up being thin, like, you know, we had the FAT protocol thesis, right? Now we, and then we had the FAT model thesis, which maybe that's not true. If the model layer is thin, you can still own the infrastructure. You can still actually manufacture the tokens, right? And that's kind of what OpenAI is doing. They're verticalizing. So they, much more so than Anthropic, are verticalizing.