Weekly Roundup 09/11/26 (Liquid hack, AI x-risk, Silvergate revisited, can AI leak MNPI?)

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)

The 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.

Matt Walsh (0:42)

The Bank of England has pumped $75 billion more into Britain's ailing economy.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

The new round of quantitative 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 (0:54)

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 back to our original music. Man, did we upset some people by running a fresh intro last week.

Nic Carter (1:04)

So the new intro, that was not popular. I don't think anyone liked it.

Matt Walsh (1:09)

No. I mean, did you, but you made that song. So do you take offense to the fact that people universally panned it? I mean, I'm getting emails, just go back to the old music brought down by bad mortgages.

Nic Carter (1:19)

The old music isn't good. It's like a generic guitar riffs taken from some library somewhere that was like free of copyright. It's not good, to be clear. You all like something that's not good.

Matt Walsh (1:31)

You've gotten sick of it, but we've been running it since 2018 I mean, that's what people know the podcast by.

Nic Carter (1:37)

Right. But that doesn't make it good just because it's old. I think it's good.

Matt Walsh (1:41)

I think it's Lindy. I think it's good. And we hear you. We hear you. You like song number two and you like the intro.

Nic Carter (1:48)

Yeah. I mean, I've been strong-armed into changing it back. That's fine. I mean, I'm not married to this new song I made in 30 Seconds on Suno, which is cool, by the way. I do recommend you try out Suno.

Matt Walsh (2:00)

Suno is cool. Yeah. Bad Boys song one was made on Suno as well.

Nic Carter (2:04)

Well, you know, we'll go back to the old artisanal handcrafted. We had a human being make that one. So we're going back.

Matt Walsh (2:11)

Back in the day when you could use Fiverr and now you just do everything on AI.

Nic Carter (2:15)

Well, I mean, I guess if you went to Fiverr, they would just use AI. Yeah. Probably.

Matt Walsh (2:20)

I guess that's right. Man, we have a lot to talk about this week. Bunch of AI stuff, too, which was interesting. But before we do, why don't we hop in to the deals of the week? First one up in the Castle Island portfolio is TRM Labs, which is a blockchain analytics company.

They announced a new fundraise valuing the company at a two billion dollar valuation. Congratulations to Esteban and the team at TRM. Crushing it over there.

Nic Carter (2:43)

Payward, the parent company of Kraken, they've raised $100 million from Nasdaq as part of a push to bring tokenized stocks to the exchange in 2027

Matt Walsh (2:52)

So does that guarantee that Kraken goes public on Nasdaq? I would think so.

Nic Carter (2:57)

It would be a pretty strong inducement. So this brings the valuation of $21 billion apparently.

Matt Walsh (3:04)

Kraken is, you have to really tip your cap to them. They have been growing very aggressively via inorganic acquisitions. They're up to some interesting things over there. I'm looking forward to when that company is public.

Nic Carter (3:16)

Next up, we have Latitude, a stable coin infrastructure company. They raised $35 million from Oak, HCFT, Coinbase Ventures, NEA and others. Congrats to Cyril and the team over there.

Matt Walsh (3:28)

And then here's the last one of the week. Circle, they have announced that they have acquired TazaPay, which is a cross-border payments company for $400 million. I think this is a very smart move by Circle.