Silvergategate: The Collapse of Silvergate and the Future of Cryptocurrency Banking – Crypto Critics' Corner

Bennett and Cas go live to discuss the collapse of Silvergate, the bank of choice for cryptocurrency companies and exchanges in the US. Recorded on Wednesday, March 8th, 2023.

Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin discuss the announced liquidation of Silvergate Bank.

This episode was streamed live on March 8th, 2022.

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Other episodes mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 106 – Crypto Banks Give Up
• Episode 44 – Poker’s Black Friday (Feat. Jason Bral)
• Episode 6 – Crypto Capital Corp: the quiet billion dollar cryptocurrency scam
• Episode 70 – The Rise and Fall of Reggie Fowler
• Episode 110 – Tether Falsified Bank Records (reportedly)

Other resources mentioned in this episode:

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English Transcript:

00:00:05:00 - 00:00:12:01
Cas Piancey
Welcome back, everyone. I am Cas Piancey and I'm joined, as usual, by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin. How are you today?

00:00:12:16 - 00:00:14:06
Bennett Tomlin
I'm doing well. How are you? Yes.

00:00:14:20 - 00:00:40:19
Cas Piancey
I'm certainly doing better than our topic of choice. Silvergate Bank, which announced its intent to wind down operations and, quote, voluntarily liquidate Silvergate Bank today. So this is it. This is pretty big news. We've talked about Silvergate before. We've talked about banking and cryptocurrency before, but this seems to be a moment and that's you weren't sure we should cover this at all.

00:00:40:19 - 00:00:50:23
Cas Piancey
But I, I said I think this is a moment and we should probably talk about it. Yeah. Do you want to talk about what what the news was today? What what the and essentially what happened.

00:00:51:23 - 00:01:09:13
Bennett Tomlin
Crypto did an actual bank run and an actual bank like in the real banking system, not a fake bank like FTX which isn't supposed to be running but like an actual bank had an actual real life bank run happen because of crypto and in part because of regulatory intervention and but.

00:01:10:17 - 00:01:45:23
Cas Piancey
Well, and I think it's worth pointing out that essentially what happened was they put a bunch of their assets into higher yields for longer terms and weren't able to access them basically like they Yeah, they've, they couldn't, they couldn't actually deal with the withdrawals and here was their statement today just for anyone who hasn't heard this. The holding company for Silvergate Bank today announced its intent to wind down operations and voluntarily voluntarily liquidate the bank in an orderly manner and in accordance with applicable regulatory processes.

00:01:46:11 - 00:02:11:08
Cas Piancey
In light of recent industry and regulatory developments, Silvergate believes that an orderly wind down of bank operations and a voluntary liquidation of the bank is the best path forward. The bank's wind down and liquidation plan includes full repayment of all deposits. The company is also considering how best to resolve claims and preserve the residual value of its assets, including its proprietary technology and tax assets.

00:02:12:17 - 00:02:26:16
Cas Piancey
And then they get into some details. But yeah, I think a couple of days ago they announced the end end of their little program called the Silvergate Exchange Network, which was an intra bank transfer thing for cryptocurrency depositors.

00:02:29:07 - 00:02:54:09
Cas Piancey
And then yesterday there was rumor that maybe some cryptocurrency companies might swoop in to come help them. Right. Or individuals similar to like how Brenden Blumer of EOS already purchased 9% of the bank. And then today they announced it was all over. All eyes on signature, though, now it seems like, right?

00:02:55:12 - 00:03:24:05
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Though my understanding is Signature has a meaningfully stronger balance sheet than Silvergate does, and they had more lines of business outside of just servicing cryptocurrency companies. And so they're in a much better position. But it is really interesting, I think, to just kind of see the culmination of what we talked about in episode 106, just like the natural effect in these banks from the collapse of FCX and Alameda with these huge amounts of deposits being effectively removed from the system.

00:03:24:10 - 00:03:57:18
Bennett Tomlin
And then the less natural Nic Carter calling it what Operation Choke Hold 2.0, the Fed, the OCC and the FDIC issued a statement on January 3rd that we talked about back in episode 106 when we were talking about these crypto banks and all the banking regulators basically came together to say cryptocurrency has these unusual risks. You can have these deposits pulled out really quickly in a way we think affects the safety and soundness of these banks and that this is not consistent with banking practices that are trying to achieve safety and soundness.

00:03:58:03 - 00:04:18:23
Bennett Tomlin
And so we're seeing kind of both of those effects here in Silvergate when just the natural effect of losing that money, when the FTX and Alameda collapsed and to how the further constraining of liquidity and like their inability to recruit new cryptocurrency deposits because of some of these new regulatory limitations left them in the midst of a bank run.

00:04:19:14 - 00:04:40:21
Cas Piancey
Yeah. And I think there's so there's been some questions online about like what happens now. Right. Like we're talking about a liquidation process. We're talking about a bank no longer being a bank. I think some of the questions swirling around regard like the MicroStrategy loan, I think there's questions about the ability. Right. That's that's what I'm.

00:04:41:01 - 00:04:42:20
Bennett Tomlin
Going to be. Everything's being sold.

00:04:43:20 - 00:04:56:02
Cas Piancey
Right. And it doesn't matter what kind of price it gets sold at, because ultimately the loan will be passed on to someone who will effectively keep getting payments from MicroStrategy. It's just not.

00:04:56:21 - 00:05:05:13
Bennett Tomlin
It's still meaningfully overvalued to realize it's an under collateralized loan. So I imagine, like that loan specifically will probably sell close to power. You know.

00:05:07:03 - 00:05:28:12
Cas Piancey
A agreed. Agreed. I don't think there's much concern about that. Also, I, I think, uh, protest has done an article about this, but there are different levels to what occurs with these banks. Like you. First you get a warning and then you get a cease and desist and then you get there's like all these different levels to what can happen to you.

00:05:28:19 - 00:05:45:04
Cas Piancey
And it seems like voluntary liquidation is actually a level that regulators push on to banks. Like it's like, hey, time for you to liquidate. Like, it's over. It's game over. Either do it yourself or we're going to do it for you. And I think.

00:05:46:01 - 00:06:07:18
Bennett Tomlin
And broadly, that's kind of what we saw. The reporting yesterday was that Silvergate was in talks with the FDIC. Right. And so and we know what was it like a week ago, they paid back all their FHB loans. And so, like, clearly they've been looking at restructuring and trying to figure out if there is a viable path forward for Silvergate the bank.

00:06:07:18 - 00:06:19:09
Bennett Tomlin
And there wasn't. And so, like the best thing they can do and what the FDIC is going to push for in these cases is doing everything they can to make depositors whole and then I buy silvergate.

00:06:21:12 - 00:06:48:04
Cas Piancey
And you brought up the Federal Home loan banks just now. We talked about them for a long time in the last episode, but in episode 106. But I do want to just quickly bring this full circle in that I think you mentioned to me right before we went on air that Silvergate was established, I think it was in 1986, is it 1986?

00:06:48:22 - 00:07:25:01
Cas Piancey
Silvergate is established, 83, 86, something like that, right before the savings and loans crisis in America. And they were a savings and loans. They weren't like a traditional bank. They were a savings and loans bank. And they those relied heavily on the Federal Home Loan Bank structure, the system there. So like they started out needing FHB help, they ended essentially getting FHB help and then having that all rug pulled from them, having to pay that back all at once and that helping to insure the collapse of their bank, I think.

00:07:25:18 - 00:07:42:11
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, and that is something we talked about briefly in episode 106 and we were talking about the Federal Home Loan Bank system is because of the way their structure exists, because they get like such a high position in the stack. They're ahead of the FDIC and stuff in this. So they'll just got these banks to get their money back out.

00:07:42:15 - 00:07:57:10
Bennett Tomlin
And so that kind of seems to be what happened here. Like they really, like you said, kind of accelerated the end of Silvergate because they have such a high ranking in terms of their like primacy in the creditor STACK.

00:07:58:01 - 00:08:18:05
Cas Piancey
Yeah. It seems as soon as soon as there were questions about the viability of Silvergate, they said, okay, give us our loans back. I don't care how long they were for. Those advances are no more. So that that is fascinating to see. To see that play a role. Essentially, it seems maybe not, but it seems like it played a role in the collapse of Silvergate.

00:08:18:05 - 00:08:44:00
Cas Piancey
We talked about signature. I think there's other there's other movements happening with other banks and it isn't all. For instance, I don't think all of this cash is getting moved directly to signature. So I don't think this has fully played out yet. And I think it's going to be a fascinating process here as as these banks play hot potato with these billions of deposits.

00:08:44:00 - 00:09:08:03
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, No. Well, I think really the more fundamental thing and we talked about this back in episode 106 two is there's a lot fewer options for cryptocurrency companies like Kraken has basically started moving some of their customers off of signature already and Signature has made clear they're leaving the digital asset field Coinbase pointed to was it customers or was it a different bank?

00:09:09:13 - 00:09:14:08
Cas Piancey
I thought JPMorgan is still banking Coinbase, right? Isn't that?

00:09:14:08 - 00:09:34:04
Bennett Tomlin
Maybe they are, but like basically every other exchange can't even necessarily point to who their banking partner is as of next week, you know. And so because of that, we're starting to see some of those same constraints we saw in the cryptocurrency ecosystem back in late 2017 and 2018. And you can feel some of the people starting to get desperate.

00:09:34:04 - 00:09:54:18
Cas Piancey
It's this is this is what brought us into this realm. So I think it's fascinating. We are certainly coming full circle here where like the reason we started getting into this is because of the trouble the banking troubles will call them for bitfinex and tether like. That's what drew us into cryptocurrency fraud. We'll say cryptocurrency.

00:09:55:19 - 00:09:56:20
Bennett Tomlin
Malfeasance.

00:09:56:21 - 00:10:19:20
Cas Piancey
Malfeasance. Yeah. So so what drew us into the darker aspects of it? Even than the surface level? Like, oh, it's for drugs or whatever, like going past they're going to corporate stuff and all this other these weird intricacies. So, so we're, we're getting there again. It feels like it feels like we're getting back to that exact spot where, oh my God, everyone's having trouble finding banking.

00:10:19:20 - 00:10:46:17
Cas Piancey
And the reason we're saying this is not simply because of the death of silvergate our IP, but also because there's now rumor and I'm going to say rumor, even though I think Ian Allison is one of the best journalists in the cryptocurrency industry, period, and that's who reported this. But the reporting was that Gemini has lost banking, uh, from JPMorgan.

00:10:47:18 - 00:11:07:14
Cas Piancey
Gemini then refuted this publicly and said that they had not lost banking with JPMorgan, but then Reuters right after that reported that yes, they indeed will be losing their banking from JPMorgan. So it sounds like they haven't lost banking with JPMorgan yet and that's how we'll leave it.

00:11:08:21 - 00:11:28:18
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, and like I made an allusion previously to Nick Carter calling this Operation Choke Point to point out and it is kind of like that. And I think the other thing it's kind of like is some of the restriction we saw on banking access for poker companies pre Black Friday. Black Friday was the culmination where we finally saw the indictments.

00:11:28:22 - 00:11:50:02
Bennett Tomlin
But well before that, we started seeing increasing restrictions on the banking system and the ability for these gambling sites and these like poker sites to access the banking system, because effectively the regulators had started communicating to these banks that, hey, we're very suspicious of you if you're doing this. So just decide whether or not you want us to be suspicious of you.

00:11:50:08 - 00:12:22:04
Bennett Tomlin
And most of the banks decided, no, we don't want that, so we're not going to have that. And so they stopped banking. The poker companies poker companies started doing some really wild things, like we talked about when Jason Bral was on here. And it is yeah, it's deteriorated. And and eventually then we saw the indictments, the whole industry get basically destroyed and Black Friday and yeah that's that's the other analog besides operation Choke point that I think fits here.

00:12:23:11 - 00:13:09:04
Cas Piancey
I was going to say like the counter argument here is that all of this money, whether it's good or bad, whatever you want to call it, is going to be driven out of the system entirely and be pushed into places that another place that got us intimately involved with cryptocurrency, like crypto capital, core Core crypto Capital Corp, which was a Panama based for anyone who doesn't know it was a Panama based shadow bank that was helping to bank Bitfinex like BitMEX, like everyone, everybody, everybody in the Who was somebody in cryptocurrency was using these guys and they they weren't a bank, they weren't even a real payment processor.

00:13:09:04 - 00:13:28:19
Cas Piancey
They were nothing. They were just taking in hundreds of millions of dollars at a time and moving them around all of these banks throughout the world and not hoping that these banks weren't performing proper KYC or asking all the right questions and they got away with it for a while. And you wonder, right, like, is this where we're headed again?

00:13:28:19 - 00:13:31:16
Cas Piancey
Is this the same exact place that we're going again?

00:13:32:07 - 00:14:19:01
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and we should be clear, the thing that was crypto Capital Cap's undoing was an international coordinated sting into what is an alleged money laundering operation for the Colombian cartels. That was like what actually ended crypto capital core because that's what all the cryptocurrency exchanges were using. This thing that also seems to have been used by the cartels in in kind of a similar way, like the little bit of reporting we got out of Poland when even Manuel Molina was taken into custody there suggested the allegation was related to laundering from the Colombian cartels and several pieces of news coverage said through bitfinex like and related specifically to their.

00:14:19:01 - 00:14:45:08
Bennett Tomlin
And if we go back to the recent Wall Street Journal reporting about tether falsifying their bank records, the part involving the Hamas, whatever the group that they were supposedly laundering for sounds almost identical to the described Colombian cartel laundering scheme involved crypto capital core, an unnamed payments processor holding funds for bitfinex and tether, also having an account on the exchange in which funds were moved through.

00:14:46:14 - 00:14:57:18
Bennett Tomlin
That was interesting to me too, and I don't know that I talked about that necessarily when we talked about that before. And so that's another interesting parallel here, since we're talking about crypto Capital Corp.

00:14:57:18 - 00:15:26:21
Cas Piancey
Yeah, I think we're we're I don't know what is the phrase for every for every two steps forward. You take one step back. This feels like two steps forward. Two steps back, like this is not I, I definitely sense that we're heading in that direction. And I think you already see it with these weird intermediaries, right? Like we can talk about how Deltec is like Deltec is a bank.

00:15:26:21 - 00:15:32:21
Cas Piancey
It's just a bank, right? Like, I think that's it's a fair assessment. Like it is a real bank in the Bahamas.

00:15:32:22 - 00:15:36:15
Bennett Tomlin
That it is a bank. I don't know about just a bank. It is a bank.

00:15:37:04 - 00:16:12:03
Cas Piancey
Sure. And I and it it's a but it's a real bank that does real banking business in the Bahamas. Right. And so I think there's like, there's all these weird it's it's banking is purposely difficult to comprehend, I think and all of these companies are going to take full advantage of that, whether it's using like weird we only know about this because they like Bitfinex lost banking with Wells Fargo and then and they didn't have banking with Wells Fargo to be clear.

00:16:12:03 - 00:16:40:18
Cas Piancey
Right. Like they had banking with a small Taiwanese bank that had Wells Fargo as a correspondent bank and Wells Fargo said, you either drop this client or we're not going to allow you to have access to U.S. dollars anymore. And I think that that people it's this weird. It's weird. Like, I don't know. I know that I'm getting it's sounds basic almost the way I'm describing this, but it's like it's purposely obfuscated on just the most basic level.

00:16:41:00 - 00:16:43:11
Cas Piancey
And here we go. Like, here we go again.

00:16:44:16 - 00:17:12:18
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Pay attention to which crypto exchanges start using weird payments processor which exchanges get extraordinarily cagey about being talking about how they're doing deposits and withdrawals. And I would not be surprised if we saw another international exchange start, another kind of like a wireless system like Bitfinex was using for a while. I mean, I guess Binance's still kind of has that with Binance's peer to peer rate, which is like the only way to get dollars on there.

00:17:12:18 - 00:17:22:19
Bennett Tomlin
That's basically like Bitfinex is hold up the wireless dial system where you're withdrawing and depositing to like other Bitfinex customer accounts, which is hilarious.

00:17:23:01 - 00:17:50:23
Cas Piancey
Yeah, sorry. And for I, I don't know how to describe this in proper terms because I'm not sure everyone is familiar with hawala, which is the term you're using. It's a it's a, a way to transfer. I'm just going to go with the Google definition here. While it is a way to transmit money without any currency actually moving, it's like pretty common in the Arabian Peninsula, I believe is like the main place where this occurs.

00:17:51:05 - 00:18:24:05
Cas Piancey
And just to give some context here, the reason it occurs this way has to do with like not handing out loans, so to speak. Right. Like that is haram. Like you shouldn't be loaning anyone money because loans are bad, like they're evil. You're not supposed to be just making money by letting money sit. And there's essentially these are like ways around banking laws and loan laws and stuff that is traditionally not looked kindly upon.

00:18:25:18 - 00:18:49:17
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, And I mean, largely like what you're talking about there is it's a lot like shadow banking in that regard, where you've got entities set up in two different places. You mark that transactions have occurred between them, but you don't necessarily settle between the two entities very regularly because when the money actually moves is when you get caught is when you went into the capital controls, is when you run into the money laundering police is when you run into whatever.

00:18:49:23 - 00:19:08:02
Bennett Tomlin
And so like that's how it's how this system for effectively kind of remittances works. But it's also how like shadow banking between like China and Australia for Chinese nationals living like in Australia works here in Vancouver or anything like that. It's that same kind of system.

00:19:09:10 - 00:19:46:00
Cas Piancey
Right? Right. It's about keeping liquidity in the system without like without having to deal with banking laws and regulate. It's yeah, it's, uh, it's a life hack. But anyway, yeah, I think the, the curious question here is what happens, what happens to banking in the US for cryptocurrency companies and these middlemen, essentially these exchanges, etc.. Right. I think so far it seems like Coinbase has been fine.

00:19:46:19 - 00:19:53:21
Cas Piancey
A good bonus for them today was that the US government moved a bunch of coins on to Coinbase, so it seems like.

00:19:54:08 - 00:20:22:22
Bennett Tomlin
They didn't actually move. I can't. I looked at those transactions, I don't think most of them actually went to Coinbase. They glassnode indicated 9000 or whatever, but that actually went to an address that then sent along a much smaller amount, like a hundred grand or something worth of bitcoin to Coinbase and most of the rest went out in 98 Bitcoin chunks to a whole bunch of new addresses along with a couple of other weird amounts to other exchanges and stuff that were involved as part of that protest.

00:20:22:22 - 00:20:38:09
Bennett Tomlin
Had some reporting on that earlier today. If anyone wants to check in the details for that. But yeah, most of it actually didn't seem to go to Coinbase unless it was like Coinbase custody and Coinbase was helping them manage the coins and that's why they were then split into like the equivalent chunks.

00:20:39:13 - 00:20:59:14
Cas Piancey
I guess I'm, I'm just pointing out that of all the companies in the US that don't seem to have many banking issues at the moment, despite all of this craziness happening, it seems to be Coinbase and I don't know what to think about that. I'm not like the world's biggest Coinbase fan, so I don't know what to think of that other than, you know, they're publicly listed.

00:21:00:00 - 00:21:20:17
Cas Piancey
They have a lot of easy capital. They've been around a long time. Maybe the government is cool cooler with them than most of these. I don't know. I don't know what to say about that, but it does seem like a lot of these other companies are like super struggling because all of their banking partners are not dealing with cryptocurrency anymore.

00:21:21:07 - 00:21:28:03
Cas Piancey
And I don't know, like I don't know what the I don't know what happens next here. I don't know what we're headed for when it comes to this stuff.

00:21:28:11 - 00:21:55:06
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah, I think really the most interesting question that it comes down to is do enough new banks step in to fill the gap so that all of these companies can have reliable banking or most of these companies can have reliable banking, Or is it instead we go back to some of the stuff we saw before. Do we go back to there being more stablecoin only exchanges?

00:21:55:16 - 00:22:15:12
Bennett Tomlin
Because like for a long time, Binance didn't have U.S. dollar banking, right? That's a more recent thing. They used to be tether only. Are we going to see more exchanges go back to something like that? Are stablecoins going to be able to maintain banking? Wasn't usdc still its signature? Who's cutting off basically all their digital asset activity signature?

00:22:15:12 - 00:22:17:04
Bennett Tomlin
You're going to keep servicing Usdc.

00:22:18:17 - 00:22:40:23
Cas Piancey
I'm interested to find out if, like there's a level of allowing allowing deposits domestically or something like that, right? Like weird, weird protocols that they're like, you can't service international clients if you're doing cryptocurrency or something. I don't know why that would be the rule. I don't know why they would do that, but well, that's presumably.

00:22:40:23 - 00:23:07:04
Bennett Tomlin
Because they've got very little confidence in these exchanges, KYC. And so they make something like that, like where they the other metal level thing here is we talked about this back in like the ETF episode with James Safer is what the FCC has really wanted from cryptocurrency exchanges is surveillance agreements with the FCC gets to see all the trades and stuff happening at these exchanges and that's what they've been trying to go for.

00:23:07:12 - 00:23:30:18
Bennett Tomlin
And so I wonder if that still the thing that's being like held out as part of the leverage, like maybe someday, maybe there'll be a release of some of this regulatory pressure if you guys agree to be surveilled, maybe the banks will be allowed to continue servicing you. If you're an SCC, so surveilled exchange registered and domiciled in the United States, I think it's plausible.

00:23:30:18 - 00:23:43:12
Bennett Tomlin
There's still some kind of goal like that that they're trying to achieve and the rest of this is kind of leverage. And so they're giving, say, Coinbase Kraken's at Gemini an opportunity to seriously consider that option before there's further restrictions.

00:23:44:05 - 00:24:15:21
Cas Piancey
So while I might agree with that on a large extent, like to a larger extent, I do, I am curious because like Silvergate was clearly the bank of choice. Why wouldn't you just do everything you can to allow Silvergate to survive and just do that same thing? Go like, fine, we get to totally surveil every single thing about the Silvergate exchange network, about the exchanges, utilizing it, about the individuals using it, like fine, but right.

00:24:15:22 - 00:24:20:00
Cas Piancey
Like why wouldn't they just do that now as opposed to letting this thing fail completely?

00:24:20:10 - 00:24:34:05
Bennett Tomlin
I think it's just like separate systems, you know, like the FDIC came in and did their assessment and thought it was structurally too weak of a bank. And so they went under their next step, which is we recommend you voluntarily choose to liquidate this and pay back depositors.

00:24:34:12 - 00:24:49:05
Cas Piancey
But I want to be clear here that the SEC also has some sort of leverage because Silvergate is a publicly traded company, right, Like they are reporting to the SEC. So, sure, I would suggest that the SEC has some sway.

00:24:49:14 - 00:24:52:14
Bennett Tomlin
And yeah, but they're not like the primary regulator here, you know.

00:24:54:10 - 00:25:04:20
Cas Piancey
So you're saying that the Fed and the FDIC were like, we don't care. We don't care about a honeypot. Like, you're done, dude. Like, get your get your shit together, sell it off and we're done.

00:25:05:10 - 00:25:27:14
Bennett Tomlin
Well, and that is kind of the other wrinkle here is we know there's an ongoing department of Justice investigation into Silvergate. Right? And so I am. And Silvergate apparently knew about that investigation. And so like, the dynamics here are getting really tricky for Silvergate, right? You've lost most of your deposits. You now have this pretty serious duration mismatch on your balance sheet.

00:25:27:15 - 00:25:55:16
Bennett Tomlin
There's no place you're going to get new deposits from because you've so pivoted your bank so hard towards this one thing. And there's these new risks coming down the pipeline in terms of possible similar criminal penalties. I think looking at that, the most responsible thing they could have done was probably liquidate and pay back depositors. And so my intuition and what happened here is the FDIC came in, assessed it and basically said, yeah, it's it's time you guys.

00:25:55:16 - 00:26:17:03
Cas Piancey
And I think I think that pretty much covers it. I mean, to me, there's not too much we needed to say today. Just cover this because I do think similar to the collapse of FDX, we're having a moment. It's a moment that is going to change the path of banking for cryptocurrency companies in the United States. And we've heard we've heard that regulators are looking at this stuff.

00:26:17:03 - 00:26:43:11
Cas Piancey
We've heard that all of this is coming down the pipeline. We've heard that this was going to spur action from from law enforcement and regulators. And, you know, here we are. I think there's been a general malaise. I think there's been a kind of even a copacetic attitude where it was like, whoa, the collapsing has stopped and now here we go again, like, okay, maybe it's not over.

00:26:43:11 - 00:26:55:17
Cas Piancey
Maybe the contagion isn't done. And we've we pressed on that point a few times as well. But I think that's that's what we wanted to drive home here and I think we, we succeeded in that.

00:26:57:04 - 00:27:11:10
Bennett Tomlin
Yeah. Remember when people thought the contagion was contained after terror when three AC blew up, they're like, whew, that was it. It was just three. O's Capital isn't that wonderful? Everything else is going to be okay.

00:27:12:18 - 00:27:39:14
Cas Piancey
I remember in December, January, people saying like, Oh, look, everything is kind of like done. And I'm not we're not to be clear, we're not talking about price of bitcoin or something like we are talking about. Yeah, who cares about that? We're talking about all of these companies failing and having to fire employees and having like we're talking about a liquidity crunch, we're talking about all this craziness and it not being done yet, which is I think that's where we're at.

00:27:39:14 - 00:27:50:02
Cas Piancey
So, uh, yeah, I don't know. Let it begin. And I mean, enemies at the silver gates, as a friend said.

00:27:51:06 - 00:28:03:15
Bennett Tomlin
That's a good one, though. Don't no one be worried? The cascading reserves are probably fine. Don't worry about it. We can't tell you where they're at. It would threaten the entire digital asset ecosystem if we did.

00:28:04:05 - 00:28:24:02
Cas Piancey
Also, we don't have access. We don't have access to the data because a solvent and crumble like literally won't let us see the data, which is total bullshit. I don't even I don't remember my password for the CAS coin reserves, so I can't like I need them to tell me the password and they won't cooperate. So it's been it's been a struggle, but we're going to get there, guys.

00:28:24:02 - 00:28:30:10
Bennett Tomlin
And these didn't safeguard it. In the most important part to emphasize there is safeguard.