Brandon: Well, hello, hello, everybody. Happy Thursday. Welcome to Good for Bitcoin, your weekly pulse on Bitcoin innovation. we're recording this a day early, so thank you to everybody for tuning in live who might be here. And yeah, a bit of a lighter news week as well, but still a few interesting stories that we're gonna cover. Kate, how was your week?

Kate: Hey Brandon. Yeah, it was a good week. Thanks for doing the show early with me this week. And I mean it was a it was a f good week, except we got a little hate on the timeline, which we're gonna get into. We've been called out. I know. I guess like that's part of putting yourself out there is like you gotta be willing to be exposed to some haters. And I mean it wasn't so bad and I mean it's a it's a non account, so like I don't take it too personally, but

Brandon: We sure did. More toxicity than I'm used to. Yeah, you have to you have to think like

Kate: That's funny.

Brandon: every time that I see like people acting really dumb online, you have to think that they're either usually just like usually they're kids. Usually they're like kids. They're like kids that like don't yeah, don't know how the world works and they don't read and they just read a like a headline and then they react and they don't actually watch the thing that we posted or anything like that. but yeah, we're we're referring to last week we covered BIP one ten and we received some hate mail.

Kate: Yes. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon: That we're gonna we're gonna go through. yeah, it'll be it'll be fun. and we'll we'll wrap up our BIP 110 coverage. I I feel like after after this, probably the next time that we'll talk about it is when it fails and we'll just mention it. because cause that's definitely gonna happen. but but yeah, let's go through public companies that are buying Bitcoin.

Kate: We'll address Yes. There you go. Okay.

Brandon: We'll start with Strive. They bought eighteen BTC. they now hold nineteen thousand and nine hundred Bitcoin.

Kate: Nice. Then we have Orange Bitcoin. They bought eight in total and they now hold three thousand nine hundred and twelve.

Brandon: And Canon Inc. added forty nine BTC to their treasury this month, which are part of the proceeds from their mining operations.

Kate: And then we have strategy. They didn't buy Bitcoin again this week, but they did increase their USD reserves by $450 million. And they now have three billion in their reserves. So it gives them a little over 20 months of dividend coverage at current prices.

Brandon: Yeah, I have a feeling that they're gonna continue kind of doing that week over week until they can get STRC back up to around a hundred dollars. They just need to like continue to inject confidence in that product and maybe they'll sell more Bitcoin. We'll see. but yeah, they haven't bought any Bitcoin now for quite a while. It's been maybe like a month, which for them is a very long time. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It is, yes.

Brandon: MetaPlanet, speaking of STRC, MetaPlanet also announced that they will begin to offer their own version of Bitcoin backed digital credit in the future. I didn't see a specific date yet for that, but MetaPlanet is gonna, you know, take a page out of strategies playbook again and offer like an STRC equivalent in Japan.

Kate: Nice.

Brandon: this is kind of cool. I'm gonna share this photo and we can we can take a look at it. in more strategy news, they released this Bitcoin bank adoption index. Let me go back to actually sharing my screen so we can take a look at it. And basically what this index is doing is tracking banks' adoption of Bitcoin and crypto-friendly practices. we can see here there's things like stablecoin participation. ETF participation, whether they offer custody, over a dozen other aspects. on average, they found that banks are currently at around a 32% index score. So certainly some a way to go until they get to like 100% coverage across the board. in their findings, the best was Fidelity at 71%. And the worst is the Royal Bank of Canada at 13%. What's going on?

Kate: Not surprising in the least. Canada's suffering up here, Brandon.

Brandon: Ha ha ha. I was I was surprised that JP Morgan Chase was so far up on the list. I was expecting them to be like down there. you know, down there with Canada, I guess. But they were like number number three, number four, on their on their index. So they're at what what's the forty three percent? So I mean compared to Fidelity 71%. That's still quite a a big jump, but still was surprised to see that.

Kate: Yeah, it's funny because we approved like the spot ETFs years before you guys did. But I don't know. It's just not picking up here.

Brandon: Yeah, I know. Yeah, the regulatory you know acceptance there was certainly a lot better, a lot earlier.

Kate: Mm-hmm. This is cool though. I like this.

Brandon: Yeah, I I think I I guess I haven't been paying too much attention. I don't know like how often strategy is doing these types of like research based segments, but would love to see more of this type of stuff from them. It's pretty cool.

Kate: Yeah. I wonder if it'll incentivize them at all once they see like they're being called out.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's certainly some ones on here that that yeah are a little bit surprising that they're as low as they are. I I feel like we talk about standard chartered quite a bit and they're kind of lower down on the list. and yeah, again, I'm surprised to see see Chase up there so high. considering how much Jamie Diamond hates Bitcoin. you gotta watch what they say, not what they do, I guess. Yeah.

Kate: Mm-hmm. That's true. Very true.

Brandon: Anyway, we'll follow up from our from our last episode. We got we got some hate mail. I figured we could rapid fire through some of the comments that we received. I think a lot a lot of these came from YouTube, but I got a couple couple of Twitter mentions as well. first one is ill informed on BIP 110 from the both of you. It's all about Bitcoin as money, not spam. I was considering subscribing, I'll pass.

Kate: Let's do it.

Brandon: Ha ha.

Kate: Too bad. The next one, a couple of simple minded people leaning on Lord Sailor in his oversimplified take. Thank you.

Brandon: Too bad. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I guess so. I liked this one a lot. It just said stupid thumbnail.

Kate: You should go back and look at all of the other ones because this one was pretty good actually.

Brandon: Yeah. It's a good point. for those for those that didn't see, it's there's like that classic meme of like the the guy and there's like two castles in front of him and one is like a light castle and one is a dark castle and there's a path and it's like, you know, which which path are you gonna go down? And obviously the Bip one ten was the dark castle and yeah, I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was a pretty well executed adaptation of the meme, but you know, not everybody thought that way, so that's okay.

Kate: Me too. It's cute. Yeah. look. Another cookie cutter podcast prop up. They make you people in a factory or something? That one was good. Yeah.

Brandon: I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we've been doing this for over two years now, which is pretty crazy to think about. But yeah, we didn't just prop up just for BIP one ten, I guess. That's the the rebuttal there. I mean, yeah, we you know, we talked about it up front on last week's episode. Like part of the reason that we avoided covering Bip 110 was because there is so much controversy that it's like the the conversation is just not productive and

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon: It's just not like worth covering in a lot of cases. But I did figure it was at least, you know, the the the time for the fork is coming up pretty soon and I felt that like we should probably talk about it. but I think we gave it like a pretty fair shot, you know, like we we read straight up portions from the actual BIP. Like, you know, we can we can disagree on on the implementation, but I think we gave it a pretty fair shot. But yeah, I don't know.

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: I was initially kind of angry reading some of the messages, but now I just kind of don't care because like I just know that this thing just has no chance of passing and these people are all just gonna lose and just tail between their legs kind of vibe. So yeah.

Kate: Yeah. I agree. And also like none of them engaged with anything that we said. Like, did they even listen? I'm not sure if they did. Like they didn't really have anything useful or critical. It was I mean, it was personal attacks kind of. And like again, it just like they didn't really critique anything that we said. So I don't know. As quickly as it come it goes for me.

Brandon: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, well. Yeah, thanks thanks to the haters. Thanks for the engagement. it was our most streamed podcast since May. that's literally was the title of like the the episode last week was if we talk about what BIP one ten, will you tune in? So I guess the answer was yes.

Kate: Yeah. Nice.

Brandon: Anyway, we'll talk about BIP one ten one more time when it fails in a few weeks, but that's probably all for now. Yeah.

Kate: Yeah. okay, let's this next one I saw on the timeline this morning. maybe if you just like wanna pull up the graph, it could be fun to look at. But it was written by Chamath and it was just like a deep dive on why. not I guess why, but which tokens are up in the crypto winter? And it's really only one category of tokens. So if you look at the chart, you can see like everything is down this year. Bitcoin was down 40%, Ethereum down was down 30%, Meme Coins, DeFi, they're all in the red. except for the one on the right, and as you can see, this is privacy coins. So they are up 127% this year, and this comes after 73 exchanges. Actually delisted and kicked most of the assets off their exchanges. So even though it's basically kind of a banned asset on a lot of exchanges, it's it's the top-performing asset in crypto right now. And so Chamoth was just getting into why this is the case. so I thought I'd recap his posts a little bit because it is kind of cool. so yeah, he's basically saying like every Bitcoin transaction is public forever. you know, the coin has its entire history written on the blockchain, you can follow it. and what happens is if you're ever caught up in maybe a scam or some kind of like I don't know. ill-advised transaction. you can be rejected or basically, you know, your transactions won't go through. so it kind of like breaks this basic rule of money, which is a dollar is a dollar wherever it's been. Gold doesn't remember where it's been, but Bitcoin it never forgets. So it's the same thing, you know, with wallets, like it is not anonymous. Obviously your name isn't attached there, but everything is public and verifiable on Bitcoin's blockchain. So if you're ever you know in a legal to database or yeah if an exchange can like trace that your account or your wallet has been risky like you could you know have your transactions blocked but with privacy coins A lot of this gets fixed and a lot of this comes from zero knowledge proofs. Basically, the network can confirm you own the coins, you're not double spending, but you're not seeing who paid or how much. And so it kind of verifies the payment without needing to see the payment. So he's getting into like, is this bad for Bitcoin? And he's saying no, because transparency is what one institutions over and want a lot of people over. He's like, you can't, you know, run an ETF on a chain that nobody can see. and with ZK proofs coming through V Bit VM and and stuff like this, it'll also create private payments and an auditable base. So basically, bottom line was that privacy coins didn't beat Bitcoin this year. They just kind of showed what should be added in the future. And so it is kind of good for Bitcoin technically. you don't need like an entirely new money, but you just kinda need this feature added on top of Bitcoin and you know, money can keep and Bitcoin can keep its monetary premium, monetary asset. So yeah, I thought it was a good read. But it I was crazy shocked to see how high up 127% that privacy coins were. Yeah.

Brandon: That's a that is a pretty crazy chart. I haven't thought about this in a long time. and this article kind of reminded me of it back when I used to work at at BlockFi. So this was like 2020. this was kind of back when, you know, regulation was still really running rampant, or or like over regulation was still running like really rampant in the space. And I remember because I was like doing socials for BlockFi, You know, I would see people DMing us, like looking for support, saying that like, like my account got flagged because, you know, maybe I was transacting with this other person that used like a mixing service and then their account had gotten like flagged as a result of that. And it just reminded me of of of that fact. Like, even if it you weren't necessarily I mean, I was taking them for their word. Maybe they were actually the one that like used it and you know, you weren't supposed to at the time. but

Kate: Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon: But like, yeah, even if you know, your f your friend, you know, used like a mixing service, or maybe your friend like transacted with North Korea or something. I don't know. I'm just trying to think of a really extreme example. you know, even even though it wasn't you, the fact that you are associated with, you know, these other wallet addresses, put you on a list as well. So yeah, that it just reminded me of of that. I haven't thought about that in in a long time.

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: It's pretty crazy how far we've come with with that type of stuff. I feel like I don't hear stories of that nearly as much as I used to.

Kate: I know. Yeah. No, no, no, certainly not, but yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. I guess I can take the next one. it turns out Vibe Watch might be good for Bitcoin. I I I don't really talk about VibeWatch on the show too much. I don't really like to do like a ton of self promotion, but I think I did talk about it when when I first announced it publicly. And it's been you know just something that I've continued to to work on ever since. And the really exciting thing is I've secured a ten thousand dollar grant.

Kate: Yes. Mm.

Brandon: from the Stacks endowment to create this Stacks sentiment index. So first, what is VibeWatch? VibeWatch is a community intelligence tool for Web3 teams. So I've been working in the social media and community space in crypto for over five years now, almost six years. And it's something that I've kind of been building. this VibeWatch tool is something that I've been building since the beginning of this year. After wishing that I had a tool like this. for all the different social media tools that I've used in the past, they all have just fallen short on many things related to crypto. a few of them are like the fact that most of them don't support like Telegram, most of them don't support Discord, like most of them don't support the native tools that we use in crypto. And a lot of them treat like any conversation about crypto as spam.

Kate: Mm-hmm.

Brandon: which is like obviously not helpful if you're a crypto company. so a lot of like the tools for filtering out spam just don't work if you are a crypto company, which is super frustrating because in crypto we get a lot of spam, right? And that basically filters out all of the legitimate conversation that's happening in the space. So I've tried all these tools. Yeah, none of them have understood my brand or my community. So it just meant like a ton of sifting through noise and spam, trying to find actual messages. And usually that meant just just not using any tools and just using the native platforms and and having to do that. And on the other side, it was also difficult to take kind of my own like internal knowledge and internal understanding of like how the community was feeling. And on like a very consistent basis, on like a weekly basis, taking those feelings and distilling them into like a report that the rest of like my team could

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: read and would actually want to read and appreciate reading and and not just focusing on like vanity metrics like impressions which are so easily gamed. So also the reports aspect was was a big thing that I was looking to solve for. So VibeWatch does those things. but what this grant is paying for is a few things. for one, it's giving basically free VibeWatch subscriptions to everyone in the Stacks ecosystem. So

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: if you represent a brand in the stacks ecosystem, whether it's a meme coin, a DeFi project, like whatever, send me a DM. I have a free subscription for you. we have 30 that are budgeted, but I'll probably end up allocating more just to ensure that we have full coverage. And also wanted to shout out the companies that have been early and and quick to get on board with doing this. So official stacks, also JingSwap, Hermetica, and Bitflow. and I'm working on getting Zest and Stacking Dow on very, very soon. so we'll have a lot of the a lot of the big ones already covered, which is is really cool. and yeah, we're getting getting, of course, more. so I gotta do that and have pretty much the entire ecosystem on board by the end of this month. So please send me a DM if you are in the Stacks ecosystem. And after we have everybody using it, for one, for me, it's gonna be really helpful to like just get more feedback about the tool and

Kate: Nice. Heck yeah.

Brandon: And continue to improve it. But the main thing is creating sort of an aggregate sentiment dashboard for the stacks ecosystem. So we use tools like you know, the fear and greed index, crypto fear and greed index, right? That kind of sources public uses public sources, right? It maybe it scans X, scanning just like what people are saying on on public sources, but it's not going into the telegrams, it's not going into the Discords, it's not, you know, getting kind of the full picture. So I thought there was an opportunity to, you know, if you were capturing let's take, we'll take Zest as an example, right? So Zest has a Discord. they have a Telegram, they have X. if you are, you know, not capturing their their Telegram and their Discord, you're only capturing like, you know, a third of the conversation that's happening in their community. so all of these tools, all of these sentiment tools are Are doing just that, right? They're they're not really giving you the full picture, the full story of what the community is saying, how the community is feeling. And I think VibeWatch has that opportunity to potentially offer like certain APIs, like sentiment APIs and stuff in the future. and this is the test is is can we do this for the Stax ecosystem? so that's phase two is to create this aggregate sentiment dashboard for the ecosystem that Anybody will be able to go on and access and see what is the health of the community, what is the health of the ecosystem. And also, because we need to keep things on chain, we'll have an X402 layer as well that'll allow AI agents, you know, AIBTC agents. There's over a thousand of them now to access this data. And then they can use it in, you know, their trading strategies or for news reporting or whatever else these AI agents think might be useful. So super excited for it. if you're in the Stax ecosystem, again, please send me a DM so I can get you set up with a free subscription. And if you're not in the Stax ecosystem, I mean VibeWatch is available to anybody. So we still offer free trials. if you would like to go to vibewatch.io, you can check out more information there and and sign up. And yeah, super excited for it. There's my pitch.

Kate: awesome. Yeah. I'm so excited for this. I think this is gonna be so useful and like I have been using it for the last month or so and it has genuinely I've like caught comments that I otherwise wouldn't have also it's like also giving me a lot of content ideas because it's pulling, you know, some of the biggest topics that were talked about recently. and Yeah, I've I've just like found it super useful. It's like a very, really useful pulse on just like what's happening. And, you know, sometimes like if you are in this role of like community or content lead and you know, your executives are they'll often just pop in and say, like, what's community sentiment? How are people feeling? It can be really challenging to put that together in you know, a very simple visual, And so this has been very useful. because yeah, because we've been launching a lot of things and there's just been some like comments and feedback that like have been caught through your dashboard that I've been able to flag and escalate and and you know make a move on. So very cool. I'm super proud of you. This is like such a cool tool that you've built. And yeah, it's gonna be awesome to have you like more integrated into the ecosystem again.

Brandon: Thank you. Couldn't have asked for a better testimonial. Could have to just clip that and put it on the website. thank you. That's that's super nice. and yeah, I yeah, I'm excited to, you know, continue yeah, being in this ecosystem, continue building in it. I joined I didn't I didn't talk on it, but yesterday the Stax Endowment featured had this Twitter space and you were you were co hosting as well. that

Kate: Clip that's

Brandon: That invited all the previous cohorts, winners. and they were talking about their projects. And just it's really cool to be like in good company with all these people that are all really talented and they're all just trying to build really cool stuff on Bitcoin in the SACS ecosystem. And yeah, more to come. I guess I'll continue to talk about it probably a little bit more because I'll have more of an excuse to now that we're a little bit more on chain, I guess, than we were before.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. yeah, we can get into the next one. I saw this this morning, and then I saw that you had already written about it, which I think is super cool. So we have the notorious Bitcoiner Lynn Alden, she announced orange juice. It's an alternative to a private equity. and they've raised $40 million to launch a company that is going to acquire, improve, and permanently hold cash flowing businesses. And this is all going to be backed by a Bitcoin treasury. So unlike traditional. Private equity, they're not buying these companies in order to flip them and sell them. They're buying them because they want to own them. They want to improve them, own them, and then use any cash that's just generated by these businesses to buy new companies and basically build up this long term Bitcoin treasury. So orange juice was found by partners from Egodeath Capital, which I love. Jeff Booth was probably one of the first. Bitcoiners, he's Canadian and he like really his book on the price of tomorrow like really sold me on Bitcoin. It was like one of the first things I read when I was going down the rabbit hole. and I just feel like he's such a sound bitcoiner. So he's joined in on the venture. Then we have Lynn Alden, Nico Lachuga, and Andy Pitt, along with Adrian Steckel Rubens Wybon as operating partner, Ricardo Salinas. He's a Mexican founder and chairman of Grupos Salinas. and is also an anchor investor. So yeah, pretty, pretty cool.

Brandon: It is pretty cool. Lots of big names behind this.

Kate: I'm excited to see how this yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's quite legitimate. so they're initially going to acquire stable cash flowing generating businesses with one to ten million in annual cash flow across a variety of different sectors. and you said here they were able to acquire orange juice.com domain, and they say they do plan to go public in the future. So this is gonna be one to watch.

Brandon: Yeah, how did they acquire orange juice.com? Like you gotta think that like Minute Made or one of these other, you know, actual Orange Juice companies would would be owning that already. That's surprising. yeah, pretty cool.

Kate: I don't know. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I just click their link, it looks awesome. Yeah.

Brandon: They they do have a cool website, yeah, orange juice dot com. yeah, super interesting. It'll be yeah, really cool to I just yeah, I feel like this is it seems so obvious that there would be this type of company that would be like kind of backed by Bitcoin. but it just I don't I don't know if it's really been done. So super, super interesting. yeah, super cool. all right, couple couple small quick headlines to round it out. Eric Trump's Bitcoin mining bet.

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: has erased more than $600 million from his family's fortune. shares of American Bitcoin have plunged from a peak of $140 last fall to under $6 now, leaving the company down more than 95% from its high. That's a lot.

Kate: Yeah, yeah, that's that's a lot. and then we have which I thought was pretty cool. Bitcoin is now available on TikTok shop. never thought I would say that, but Fold is selling e-gift cards through TikTok shop, basically allowing users to buy Bitcoin in dot denominations ranging from $25 to $500.

Brandon: Wow.

Kate: and they can be purchased with pretty much any major payment methods. so pretty cool. I don't know if anyone's gonna go on TikTok shop and buy Bitcoin, but you can now.

Brandon: I mean, I feel like anytime I'm on, you know, TikTok, I, you know, I always get the people that are trying to like shill products on there. So I'd certainly I would I would watch whatever somebody was trying to say if they were, you know, trying to shill Bitcoin and offering cards for that.

Kate: Yeah. I would go on there and try and buy them at like a discounted price. I don't know if there's like you know there's like those gift card website sites where you could like list your gift card and you would sell it for less than what it was worth, but at least you didn't have the gift card. Like maybe that's an arbitrage strategy. Yeah.

Brandon: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's a good point. I feel like TikTok also like they do a lot of like promotional things to like try to to get you to buy more things from their shop. So maybe I don't know, we'll see if these are eligible as part of those promotions, but we'll see. lastly, I thought this was super interesting. I'm curious your thoughts on it. Zach XBT, who is like the famous on-chain sleuth that like finds like these people that commit hacks and fraud and stuff on chain and

Kate: Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon: helps, you know, government entities to locate them. He made this post basically saying that all hardware wallets are quote, complete garbage, and does not advise using them for tasks like signing transactions or for storing funds. And instead he recommends having a separate iPhone, with its only purpose being to use as your hardware wallet. And I'm very curious what your thoughts are on that.

Kate: Is that just because he thinks that like companies have like behind the scenes access to your information? Or like you don't really know what's in the hardware?

Brandon: Yeah, he cited he cited like a few things. Like there's there's that, and then there's also like he just doesn't like how ledger ha like kind of at at a whim will like update their software or like update certain things and that you know they've made certain decisions in the past that I don't know, people weren't weren't happy with. So I think he's kind of like grouping all of these hardware wallets into like ledger. I saw like some, I think.

Kate: Yeah.

Brandon: Maybe it was like the CEO of like Trezor or something, came out in response saying, like, hey, hey, we're not ledger, like we're we're we're doing things a little differently. but yeah, I think it's I don't know. I don't know how I feel about that. I feel like I mean, especially for something like me, like I use I use BitKey, I have a cold card, I have like some of these options which are, you know, much more open, I think, than something like a ledger. and I don't know if like having an iPhone is would be better than those.

Kate: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think so either. There's like something about that that like goes off in my head is like I yeah, I don't necessarily agree with that. Like I would probably have more confidence and trust in I I could maybe understand the ledger piece. I mean I feel like they've had some

Brandon: Devices.

Kate: I don't know, some like PR stories that like weren't amazing, but there are a lot of great companies that like are producing super sound hardware and I just feel like looping all of them in together as one is not super well thought through, which is yeah, kind of an interesting take from him because he goes super into the details on everything. but I don't know that I agree with that.

Brandon: Yeah, I'll I'll use like cold card as like a very extreme example. I don't know how familiar you are with that one, but it's yeah, okay. So yeah, I mean the cold card is like a completely offline device. Like you can use it without ever connecting it to a computer. It doesn't have Bluetooth, it doesn't have like I don't think it even has like NFC, like it doesn't have any kind of wireless connection in it. It's like truly a cold, yeah, exactly. so like

Kate: Yes. I have one, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a completely air gapped. Yeah.

Brandon: The iPhone obviously doesn't have any of that, right? It's like a completely connected device. so you know, a connections introduce risks. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, certainly it's not as user friendly, maybe as an iPhone could be, but but yeah, if you want like the most safe hardware device, I I don't think I would say iPhone as as my recommendation.

Kate: Yes. Nope. Bring back the pen and paper.

Brandon: All right. Yeah. The yeah. You yeah, you can have like the what is like people do like the washers and they like they like stamp the washers and yeah, the the the cold steel things. Yeah. Yeah. Those are good. Those are cool. okay. thank you. I think that wraps up the week. Thank you everybody for tuning in. we will see you I think next Friday we'll we'll be on at the regular time. thanks everybody for tuning in early today and

Kate: Yeah, with the steel, yeah. Yeah, it works.

Brandon: Yeah have a good weekend.

Kate: Awesome. See you guys.