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
Bullish and bearish opinions expressed in this episode, paired with supporting transcript quotes. The quote confirms what was said—not whether the opinion is correct.
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.