Weekly Roundup 08/07/26 (Coldcard hack continues, Ethereum mulls an issuance tweak, ai16z winds down, Clarity deadline looms) (EP.733) – On The Brink with Castle Island

Weekly Roundup 08/07/26 (Coldcard hack continues, Ethereum mulls an issuance tweak, ai16z winds down, Clarity deadline looms) (EP.733) – On The Brink with Castle Island — Transcript

Market views

Bullish

CASA— Multi-device multi-sig solutions like Casa remain a safe way to do self-custody after the Coldcard hack, providing security through vendor diversification.
YELLOWCARD— Yellow Card raised $40M from major investors including Standard Chartered and Sony Innovation Fund for their global stablecoin infrastructure platform.
CLOUDFLARE— Cloudflare is forward-thinking on AI agents, stablecoins, and quantum computing, launching programmable stablecoin wallets for AI agents to pay for APIs.
ANTHROPIC— Anthropic has exceptional talent density, attracting founders of billion-dollar companies as employees, and may shift to a superior business model of internalizing AI outputs for drug discovery rather than selling tokens.
BTC— Bitcoin's fixed monetary policy is superior to Ethereum's constant tweaking, making it more compelling for the sound money use case.

Bearish

COLDCARD— Coldcard hardware wallets had catastrophic entropy failure leading to $100M+ in losses, destroying trust in the product and potentially the company.
MSTR— Strategy continues selling Bitcoin and MSTR stock to shore up balance sheet, indicating financial stress in maintaining their digital credit franchise.
ETH— Ethereum's proposed EIP to cut staking yields to zero is getting major backlash from DeFi projects like Aave and Lido, with constant monetary policy changes undermining its viability as sound money.
GAMBLING— Normalization of gambling over the past 10-15 years has been bad for society with negative consequences on households, and speakers expect a backlash in the coming decade.
CANNABIS— Recreational cannabis normalization has negative societal impacts with bad aesthetics and makes users lazy and boring, with expected backlash coming.
SELFCUSTODY— The Coldcard hack marks the end of self-custody as the ordained correct way to hold Bitcoin, with average Bitcoiners likely shifting to ETFs.

Not investment advice.

Mentioned

Market views