What a win-win for #crypto & Wyoming! As of **NOW** Kraken has a US bank charter—a 100% reserves-required, audit required (w/ #ProofOfReserves), custody via legal bailment, no #rehypothecation type of bank!🤠
2/ The vote of #Wyoming's Banking Board just concluded & it was UNANIMOUS! It took 27 months for the first #Wyoming SPDI to obtain a charter—congrats to the dozens of people who made it happen, esp @GovGordon, @TylerLindholm & Wyoming legislators & the Wyoming Division of Banking
3/ I’ll be back w/ more analysis later. Next applicant in line for #Wyoming SPDI is @AvantiBT later this Fall (more are on the way). But today is @krakenfx's day. As a shareholder, I'm so happy for @jespow & Kraken team! Applications for this charter opened a yr ago--took longer
4/ ...than expected but the outcome is just as sweet! Congrats again @krakenfx & #Wyoming!!!
@nic__carter @PirateWires THIS BOMBSHELL HAS BEEN AN OPEN SECRET in Washington for quite a while--so much so that it wasn't really a secret anymore. *FINALLY* someone put it in writing:
🚨**Elizabeth Warren had de facto control over Biden's economic & financial regulatory team.**
Historians, have fun...
@nic__carter @PirateWires AND LOOKY HERE...a name that insiders also surfaced when the White House & Fed went after @custodiabank, using the press to try to intimidate us into withdrawing our Fed applications by telling us the Fed Board would vote down our application--2 days before the vote happened:
1/ WE TOOK TERRITORY by issuing the first bank-issued #stablecoin on a permissionless blockchain & it's not what you think. 🧵 below. The real impact is on #tradfi--yes, #crypto took regulatory territory, but #tradfi is the real story in what @custodiabank did w/ @Vantage_Bank.
2/ Background: Fed Governor Waller's #stablecoin speech a few wks ago distinguished btwn "real" dollars & "synthetic" dollars, noting stablecoins are synthetic. Only the Fed + special types of entities legally authorized to take demand deposits can issue *real* dollars. federalreserve.gov/newsevents/spe…
3/ Crypto doesn't care abt that distinction, but to #tradfi that distinction is EVERYTHING. Why? bc tradfi must care about legal, accounting & tax rules. I can't give legal, accounting or tax advice, but when a bank authorized to issue a dollar issues a dollar, it's a dollar.💡
1/ Prime Trust's bankruptcy Plan Admin recommended that its #crypto custody customers--who thought they owned the custodied assets--take a haircut. Amount not clear yet (Celsius custody customers took a 27.5% haircut). These situations were sadly avoidable. courtlistener.com/docket/6769170…
2/ Context: bankruptcy is a process designed to maximize the recovery of assets for a bankrupt company's estate, while a bank's receivership is a process designed to protect a bank customers. When a non-bank fails, it goes to bankruptcy. When a bank fails, it goes to receivership
3/ So, the Prime Trust discussion is only a bankruptcy discussion because Prime Trust wasn't a bank.
Prime Trust went bust and has an asset shortfall, so a bankruptcy judge must decide whether its custody customers will get all their assets back or will take a haircut.
1/ NEW BLOG: "How To Keep The #Bitcoin Strategic Reserve From Morphing Into A Bailout Fund." Did you know SBF publicly advocated for a crypto bailout fund just 1 month before FTX failed? Story 👇Lesson: don’t let future Sams hijack the SBR for a bailout!!! caitlin-long.com/how-to-keep-bi…
2/ In the blog I analyze #bitcoin as a reserve asset (key is its favorable inflation rate differential)--but condition my support for a BSR on drafting legislation w/ 4 specific prohibitions to prevent insolvent-but-politically-connected people from ever using it for a bailout:
3/ The favorable inflation rate differential between #bitcoin & US dollar + strategic benefits make bitcoin worth considering as a reserve asset, but the consensus mechanisms of other #crypto can be too easily changed to permit higher inflation so I don't support including them:
🚨HUGE NEWS on #debanking & #OperationChokePoint2.0: a little birdie told me that @FDICgov Vice Chair Travis Hill just spoke at an ABA meeting & said there is no place at the FDIC for those who explicitly or implicitly supported its debanking initiative. Transcript not avail yet
Travis Hill is a Republican & is vice chairman of the FDIC—has been outvoted by Biden/Warrenites on the FDIC board, but that will change on Jan 20 when Gruenberg steps down.
It'll be soooooooo interesting to see if Hill went off-script. Don't forget Gruenberg's people still control the FDIC (head of comms is allegedly trying to silence online critics of #debanking, so I doubt such remarks would've made it thru official editing of his speech, which should be posted at this site soon): fdic.gov/news/speeches
1/ 🚨THE FED'S DEBANKER-IN-CHIEF IS OUT! Michael Barr, the last remaining Biden/Warren appointee who architected #OperationChokePoint2.0 at a federal financial agency, will resign as vice chair for supervision in Feb (see @nic__carter's March 2023 map👇). federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…
2/ It was an open secret in DC that Trump was likely to fire him. He had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad reign as Fed Vice Chair for Supervision--the WSJ covered only some of why 👇, calling him "a favorite of Elizabeth Warren" but omitting a lot: wsj.com/opinion/a-fede…
3/ Barr siloed information within the Fed, as of Oct 2022 sending Fed supervision staff a memo prohibiting them from talking to other Fed governors unless they’d spoken with him first👇