Weekly Roundup 10/16/26 (OCC debanking report, Google's quantum advance, Ledger spy chips, Richard Heart apprehended)

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.

SPEAKER_5 (0:42)

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

We're coming off flights, not a lot of sleep, both you and I, past couple of days. We're down in the great state of Texas.

Nic Carter (1:03)

Yeah, you know, Austin, I got to say, Austin is less worse than it was. I'm not going to say it's great, but it's less worse.

Matt Walsh (1:11)

I love Austin. I've always loved Austin.

There's great weather. It's nice to go down there in the winter from Boston, I'll say that.

Nic Carter (1:20)

There were fewer homeless encampments this time.

Matt Walsh (1:23)

I didn't see any.

Nic Carter (1:24)

And there were many more robotaxis and Waymo's. Wow.

Matt Walsh (1:28)

It really blows me away going to these cities like Austin and San Francisco, where you have these driverless cars. I don't think we're ever going to have those in Massachusetts.

Nic Carter (1:37)

Kind of tough.

Matt Walsh (1:38)

Yeah.

Nic Carter (1:38)

We even have them in Miami. It's not a city known for being technologically progressive.

Matt Walsh (1:43)

I don't know if it's, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of political reasons, I guess, up here, but maybe it's also the roads and a lot of potholes up here.

Nic Carter (1:50)

I must say, after having owned a Tesla for about a month now, I can't ever go back to a regular car.

Matt Walsh (1:58)

Really?

Nic Carter (1:58)

It's that good? Levels better. Levels better. Yeah.

I'm very impressed and I feel like it's underhyped, which sounds crazy to say about Tesla, but I think it's actually underhyped.

Matt Walsh (2:10)

Self-driving is just one of these technologies where you're like, I cannot believe that we figured this out. It's remarkable.

Nic Carter (2:15)

I'm very impressed by that. Yeah. I mean, driving is very hard. And they finally solved it. I know people will say, oh no, it sucks, whatever. But 14 or on 14.3 or whatever, it's actually solved.

SPEAKER_2 (2:28)

Yeah.

Nic Carter (2:28)

Like they did it and nobody baked them a cake or celebrated it. You know, it's very anticlimactic.

Matt Walsh (2:35)

I know. It's kind of like passing the touring test. It just kind of happened and no one paid attention to it.

Nic Carter (2:39)

But it changes your life because you don't have to worry about driving anymore. You're just totally relaxed.

Matt Walsh (2:44)

Yeah.

Nic Carter (2:44)

And it's amazing.

Matt Walsh (2:45)

You just can't text when you're driving.

Nic Carter (2:47)

Yeah, it does. Yeah. All right.

Matt Walsh (2:48)

So Castle Island Content, you were on the Converge podcast this week talking about quantum risk, talking about AI driven advancements in math. I feel like we've been talking about that stuff a lot and we will continue to do so.

Nic Carter (2:59)

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to talk about this week. So we'll get to that shortly.

Matt Walsh (3:03)

Let's do the deals of the week. First one up in the Castle Island portfolio, Miao, which is a business banking platform. They raised $31.6 million from Stiefel and Archetype. Congrats to the team over at Miao. Cranking over there.

Nic Carter (3:15)

Yeah. We've been with the team for a long time. So big congrats to Bryce and Brandon. Next up, Multiliquid. That's a settlement platform for tokenized assets. There is $8 million from Polychain, Strobe, CMT, MetaLayer and others.