If you're interested in stablecoins, I highly recommend you follow @CampbellJAustin. He's got more experience in this area than almost anyone else in crypto, and unlike many crypto-wunderkinds, actually has a long career in finance to contextualize the current moment.

This case has been so sloppy by the government so far it that it really calls into question if our agencies and law enforcement personnel even have the talent required to handle this space? I wonder if something happened in the last four years to turn the entire space against the gov't, which stopped helping them and instead regard them with incredible distrust, because it's hard to believe this is how the DoJ is proceeding if they had anyone even half-assed competent willing to work with them. I mean, I'm literally an advisor to a firm that took 10 minutes to verify that almost everything the gov't said is a combination of wrong, malformed, or outright false. But the gov't seems not to have known (or did know, and proceeded anyways). Huh. Funny, that.

The prosecutor interjects at 1:30 by the way Actually fucking surreal

You don't get to pretend you are a firefighter when you were the one who started the fire, Graham.

0/ Genius passed. In this newsletter, we talk about how it happened (politics is messy), who the winners are, but also what you care about the most: Who is a LOSER?

Update from U.S. v. Storm with @davidzmorris. Roman Storm's defense team has raised the spectre of a mistrial after an FBI tracing expert failed to confirm that the prosecution's first witness' stolen funds had in fact been sent to Tornado Cash.

Read that again. In ten years, the average age of the viewer went up by eight years. That means that there are almost no net new TV watchers. We are witnessing the slow-motion death of TV and traditional media.

Today I am learning that censorship is when you can't keep your $20mm per year job while your show loses $40mm per year but not when the government forces your bank to close your accounts because a senator doesn't like something you said or your (legal) business. #OCP2

Trump signs Genius! Grateful for @CampbellJAustin's tireless work championing sensible regulation for stablecoins and blockchain technology. As a longtime friend and recently his partner at Zero Knowledge over the past year, I've had the privilege of working alongside him while advising some of the industry's most influential companies. After nearly a decade of hitting regulatory and banking walls with crypto and stablecoin payments, this feels unreal. The US will finally provide the clarity needed to build solutions that scale and unlock the technology's potential—including bridging the financial systems of the Global South and Global North as other's take note, the very reason I got into this space. This is a massive step forward.

The Genius act has passed. 306-122 with 4 NV remaining on the R side. 102 Democrats in favor after also bringing in massive support from the Democratic side in the Senate. This is the most important piece of bipartisan financial legislation since Dodd-Frank. A new era begins.