Digital Asset News host explains selling charity crypto and covers AI doomer funding, security hacks, and Fed rate hike outlook
A solo episode from the Digital Asset News channel covering the sale of charity fundraiser crypto, claims about AI doomer funding, recent crypto security breaches, and Federal Reserve rate hike probabilities.
Summary
The host, Rob, explains why he sold the majority of crypto raised during a 20-hour charity livestream — approximately $50,000 raised for an animal shelter — citing uncertainty around an upcoming Federal Reserve rate decision and an imminent land purchase deadline. He then covers a claim made by David Sacks, formerly the White House AI and crypto advisor, that Vitalik Buterin and other effective altruism billionaires funded hundreds of astroturf AI doomer groups to create negative public perception of artificial intelligence. Rob also covers two significant security incidents: 4,000 wallets drained through the XRP Healthcare mobile app secretly sending seed phrases to a remote server, and a 4,000 Bitcoin ($320 million) white-hat hack on the Liquid Network. The episode closes with an analysis of Fed rate hike probabilities, showing a 60/40 split favoring a rate hike on September 16th, and the likely negative market reaction if that occurs.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Selling the Charity Crypto
Rob: The time has come for me to sell a bunch of crypto — and it was the charity crypto that was donated by you and everybody else for a good cause, which is an animal shelter. We're going to briefly talk about that, but the big things we're going to talk about are some influencers who have been paid a boatload of money to be essentially doomers. This was actually the prospect put forth by Vitalik Buterin — and that's not me saying that, that's the AI czar David Sacks, formerly of the White House AI czar position. Then we'll take a look at a couple of hacks, and last we'll round it out with a little Fed rate hike potentially.
As we talked about last week, we had a 20-hour live stream. Actually, it wasn't as bad as you would think — it was a fun time. We raised roughly around $50K. Now, you will notice that if you still have access to this part, you'll see all the crypto is gone. What the heck happened? Well, it's because I had to sell it. The reason why I had to sell it is because I don't know what's going to happen this week.
We could go in certain directions, especially if Kevin Walsh, the current Fed Reserve chair, says, "You know what? We're not going to hike rates — we're going to keep everything as is and that's it." You'll probably see a big pump. But what are the chances he doesn't do that? What if he comes back and says, "You know what, we want to actually hike rates because it's the stringent thing to do given where we're seeing things economically"? We'll take a look at the CPI numbers. If that happens, I don't want to be caught short. We have a goal, and that goal was about 25% hit. I'm pretty happy with that.
Today I had to sell it anyway because the funding for the actual land — which is right here — was due today, to the seller. We told them, "Hey, it's a holiday, so good luck," and we had to renegotiate that until tomorrow. I sold this off and used Kraken, one of the only exchanges I actually use now, and I have that being sent to the bank. The banks are closed because it's Labor Day, but that's what's going on.
So if you take a look and you're like, "Why isn't there much in there?" — it's because we had to sell and I don't know which way things are going, but I need these funds now to move forward.
I will just say — little tease there — shout out to Ivan on Tech. Ivan came on the show. He was our first guest, and I think the first ten sentences he said were, "Hey Rob, I'm going to give you $10,000 for this charity." I was like, "Man, that's awesome." I'm happy that Ivan was on there. I consider him a friend. He's a great guy and one of the few that actually does what he says he's going to do. So shout out to Ivan. They'll probably be naming one of the dog containers after him — Ivan on Tech dog or something like that.
So that's what's going on with the fundraiser. We're selling some crypto, we're already done, left a little bit in.
Bitcoin Risk Levels and Market Outlook
Rob: Let's talk about buying, because right now as far as price action goes — look at this, 78,730. As far as risk levels go, we're in the same risk levels we were last week. Every Monday without fail, the Cash App fires off a buy order. I get up around 4:30 in the morning, it actually hits around 6:30. I always check these risk levels. If they had gone down to like the 39 levels, I would have doubled what I bought today. But it's not there. I played this pretty conservatively. As the risk levels go down — meaning the price goes down — I double up. If it goes down even further, I quadruple up. So far an all-time low hasn't happened, but I've been spending a good amount, and I'm glad I've done that.
Speaking of Ivan, his Bull Mania fund line last night — we can see that bullishness. Let's change this to weekly. Bitcoin has just flashed bullish as of 15 hours ago. Now it's down 1%, but things are going to work out pretty well, I think. If we just take a look at the daily: bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish — except for Tron, down 2%. Bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish, bullish. And they actually match up. Crazy.
David Sacks on AI Doomer Funding and Vitalik Buterin
Rob: Now let's go to David Sacks. Someone sent this to me and you can tell there's a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt — we call it FUD here. But this was an interesting piece, especially about the doomers that are talking about AI. As we know, the traditional market right now is being propped up by a large sector that is artificial intelligence. But there's another piece to this where people are saying, "Nope, AI is going to collapse. Nope, it's going to be a big huge catastrophe. Nope, there's a big bubble coming and it's going to pop any time soon." Take a listen to what David Sacks says, because this is directly in relation to Vitalik Buterin. Listen to this.
David Sacks: "There's a writer named Nerret Weisslat who writes a blog called AI Panic, who a couple of years ago traced that there were hundreds of these astroturf doomer groups that were basically funded by three EA billionaires in Silicon Valley. It was Dustin, Yan Talon, and Vitalik Buterin. Remember, Vitalik gave $600 million of dog coins to the Future of Life Foundation. And then they've been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on these campaigns to make people be afraid of AI. And they see data centers as a good target. You really can't underestimate how much of a difference a billion dollars of donations from these EA billionaires has done in terms of the public perception of AI. And to the point earlier — we are going to have probably a hundred new EA billionaires as a result of the Anthropic IPO. And as those people find their way into politics, it will be like George Soros times 100 or a thousand."
Rob: I'm like, wow — Vitalik was a part of that. Now, this could be directly or indirectly, but there are a lot of things being put out there that create a lot of negativity moving forward in the space and make people a little bit nervous. I remember Michael Burry just a couple of years ago put out a very famous tweet — or post — that just said "get out." And after that, the S&P 500 has been ripping to all-time highs, all-time highs, and all-time highs. I'm not saying he's a part of this — I'm just saying that not everybody gets it right every single time, and that's just pretty much the way it is.
Crypto Security Hacks
Rob: Just because we're positive here doesn't mean that things aren't negative in our space. There is a big problem that I see, and that is hacks. This is from the Keystone hardware wallet — this isn't about them. This was a wallet called XRP Healthcare. 4,000 wallets were drained in three hours on September 3rd. I'm just hearing about this right now. Who's the culprit? XRP Healthcare's mobile app stored wallet data insecurely, and its staking feature was silently sending seed phrases to a remote server.
We were just talking about AI, right? AI can be used greatly for bad or good. Why are these developers not using AI to find where their actual structural incompatibilities or problems are? They could just run this 24/7, 365, and say, "Hey, take a look at all our code, take a look at problems, take a look at where we fall short." It seems like they could do this and move forward and not screw over their customers.
This is what most people miss when they talk about non-custodial — it doesn't mean your keys stay on your device. People say, "Well, it's a cold storage device and I generated these keys, so I'm the custodian." But in this situation, your keys were sent all over the place. Some apps claim self-custody while handling your seeds in a way you never expect.
Two things to verify — and this is good information. Where is your seed generated, and where is it stored? This is why I like Tangem personally, because the seed phrases, the mnemonic phrases, the seeds, the private key — it is stored in the card that you generated. You can do a mnemonic phrase and go that route, but I just don't like doing that. I want to keep it in the card and that's it. You get three of them. Works like a charm.
Lastly: if your seed ever touches a server, treat it as compromised and do not import it into a hardware wallet.
That's story number one. Guess what else? We just had 4,000 Bitcoin — $320 million — hacked from the Liquid Network. Now, this one isn't as bad because these are white-hat hackers who said, "Hey, you've got a problem with how you're doing things." I'm unaware of the exact mechanisms of how they actually got into it, but they essentially took out 4,000 Bitcoin. They'll probably give it back — probably for a fee. But again, I'm thinking to myself: couldn't AI have done this first and flagged it? I'm not a developer, so correct me in the comments section where I'm wrong about using AI to develop these types of safeguards so we don't have to deal with this stuff.
These are just two of many, many hacks that are going on. If you're going to diversify your investments, I would like you to diversify your storage. I use iTrust, I use Tangem, I use Ledger, also ETFs. It works out great for me so far. I did get hacked on a MetaMask wallet a couple of months ago — it's a hot wallet and it didn't really have much in there, but it's still disheartening when these things happen.
Paranoia as a Security Strategy
Rob: Going back to the story at the very beginning where I said I sold all the crypto and moved it over to my bank — one of the things I was thinking about as I was going through this, even though we used Tangem and I felt very comfortable with that, I'm paranoid. I'm paranoid I'm going to lose everything. Because of that, I'm like, I gotta sell this fast.
So I sold it, put it on Kraken. And as soon as it hit Kraken, the first thing I thought about was this story about a cold card user. There was a gentleman who used a cold card, he said, "Oh, there's a big hack," and he moved everything to a centralized exchange in Australia — he was from Australia. And then as soon as he moved it over there, within minutes it was gone. What had happened was hackers had gotten access to his email account — I think it was a Gmail account. He didn't have two-factor authentication, didn't have an authenticator, and they were able to get in there, go to the exchange, and pull it as fast as he put it in.
So as soon as I sold this and it went right to Kraken, I'm like, I'm not going to take any chances. As soon as that happened, I converted it to dollars. And as soon as that happened — which didn't take more than a couple of seconds — I moved it right to my bank.
People say, "Rob, cash is trash." Cash may be trash, but guess what else? It's got FDIC insurance. So if I send it over there and for some reason the bank gets hacked, they're going to back me up. I don't have that proposition if I have it in cold storage or hot storage. Obviously you can tell I'm a little paranoid and I get a little nervous about these things, but I think only the paranoid will survive moving forward.
Fed Rate Hike Outlook
Rob: The last piece is rate hikes. This is the Fed Watch Tool and we're sitting at a 60/40 split. 60% are saying that Kevin Warsh is going to hike rates on the 16th of September. If that's the case, you'll probably see — I don't know if it's short term or long term — but in the short term, you're going to see the market react negatively.
When I take a look at the data, just like Kevin Warsh is doing — you take a look at the PPI, the producer price index, how much producers actually have to pay for goods and services across the board. We can see it's been on a nice upward trajectory since October 2025, when we had a nice all-time high with Bitcoin and then of course that big sell-off. So: 2.8, 3.1, 4.0, 3.4, 4.3, 5.7, 5.9, and now it's coming back down a little bit. But this is one of the issues. That's the producer price — that's the first part. Once it gets to the consumer, that's us.
Also, going back here: down to around 2.7, down to 2.4, 3.3, 3.8, 4.2, and now just a little bit down from 3.4. But the thing that the Fed usually looks at is the core personal consumption expenditure index. It was obviously pretty high in 2022, but since around 2025 when things were nice and low at 2.61%, we've seen a little bit of an upward trajectory, then a little bit of pullback, upward trajectory, little bit of pullback, upward trajectory, little bit of pullback. In all honesty, I'm just going to say it — maybe a rate hike might be on the table. Inflation's not the greatest thing in the world, but let's see if they can control it. If that happens, expect the markets to react negatively price-action wise.
Q&A
Rob: Now let's get to the Q&A. I'll answer all your questions and then we'll get out of here.
Togo Forever says, "I own Zcash but sold the bottom. All the other dog shots." Yeah, Zcash — I'm sorry. It's been doing pretty good lately. It's down 7% today, but one month it's up 129%. That's nice. Let's do max. Well, that first one in 2016 we can forgive. Look at that — 588 didn't do anything, didn't do anything, and now all of a sudden here it goes. So did something change with Zcash? Was there some new functionality? Was there a massive amount of adoption somewhere? Someone will say, "Yeah, there's a group in Finland or whatever." But honestly, I think most of these projects, it's all speculation. Maybe they get a little bit more utility and people go crazy. That's where we're at with Zcash. A lot of the big players in the space — it's like all of a sudden you're like, "Yeah, Zcash is the best thing of all time." And I'm like, "Oh really? Where the heck were you this whole time?" Unless something miraculously changed, I have no idea. Correct me in the comments section.
Someone asks, "Isn't it manipulated?" Well, that's what people say. When it goes up, nobody really says it's manipulated. When it goes down, everybody's like, "That's manipulation." For this one, I just think there was a nice narrative around it, a lot of people rallied around Zcash, and this is the fruit of those labors.
Someone mentions CHKN — let me see if we can find that. It just launched today. That's right. We were talking about this over the weekend — we talked about Chicken, which is a gamble. All investments are gambles. I said, "Hey, I'm probably going to put some money on this one," and I did. It's up a lot — for me it's like a 20% type of thing. But we also talked about PONDS and how that is also a gamble, and it sure is because it's down 12% in the last seven days. These are just memecoin nonsense — just for funsies. You put in like $20, see what happens. It's like putting $50 on the Cowboys and watching the game. It's not like, "Hey, let's take Johnny's college fund and put this on Chicken because it's going to be the greatest thing of all time." No, no, no. Just for fun. Put a little bit in there and see if you can make some gains or lose everything. One of those two things will happen — I'm sure of it.
Rusty has an interesting view: "Rate hike or hold equals Bitcoin sideways. Rate cut equals to the moon." I think a rate cut would definitely help. I wonder how Kevin Warsh would rationalize that for the people — saying, "Well, the core PCE is going up, but we'll be okay." I'm not a macroeconomic expert, so someone will say, "Rob, it's because of this and this and this and the alignment of Venus as it comes in retrograde with Saturn." But sure.
Someone says, "Buy high and sell low — become the OGs' exit liquidity." Exactly. We're trying to do the opposite here. Let's focus on that and go from there.