Digital Asset News covers FBI disclosure failure, Robinhood AI crypto trading, and Tether freezing Tron wallets
A solo crypto news host covers several breaking stories across regulation, AI trading tools, stablecoins, and Bitcoin treasury companies.
Summary
The host of Digital Asset News covers four main stories: FBI Director Kash Patel's failure to disclose a six-figure MicroStrategy stock purchase within the legally required timeframe; Robinhood's announcement of AI agentic accounts for crypto trading; Tether's freezing of 131 Tron wallet addresses linked to ISIS-K; and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino's explanation of why Tether is withdrawing from EU MiCA compliance. The host also covers MetaPlanet's continued Bitcoin accumulation, the launch of OpenUSD as a new stablecoin competitor backed by BlackRock, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google, and Google's AI Edge app as a private, offline LLM option. The episode closes with a live Q&A session covering Cardano's exclusion from OpenUSD, Circle's stock decline, and broader market sentiment.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
FBI Director Kash Patel's MicroStrategy Disclosure Failure
Host: It looks like the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, got caught red-handed. He has been doing some investing and not reporting it. We're also going to talk about Robinhood and their new play, which just dropped today — they're going to be rolling out AI trading for cryptocurrencies on their app, and it's going to happen this month. And then last, we're going to talk about stablecoins, and it looks like Tether is freezing Tron.
MetaPlanet and Strategy Bitcoin Treasury Updates
Before getting into all that, there is some good news around Bitcoin besides the Robinhood story, and it's about digital asset treasuries — MetaPlanet specifically. I have to tip my hat to these companies. They just do not stop.
MetaPlanet buys 2,800 Bitcoin, surpassing 43,000 in Bitcoin holdings. MetaPlanet — they're a Japanese company, primarily in hotels and such — they are putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Not a big surprise; we've known about this for quite some time. But they added 2,800 Bitcoin during the second quarter at a price below their average purchase price, as their holdings surpassed 43,000.
I don't know who is over there at MetaPlanet, but maybe you could talk to Michael Saylor and explain to him why it's kind of important to buy low and, when you're going to sell, sell high. Just kidding — but not really.
Looking at the chart, that was Q2 — so April, May, and June. The price they paid wasn't spectacularly fantastic. We're looking at around $68,000 to $74,000, and on the 9th of May, $82,000. I guess not too bad. But of course, if they had just waited — like a lot of traders do — and waited for the 200-week moving average, nothing's going to happen, it's going to be okay. The 200-week moving average sits at around $62,000, and we're actually below that right now. Great time to load up. Maybe they're doing what I do, which is dollar-cost averaging dynamically, loading up as things go down. So that's great. I can't speak to their full strategy, but again, if they were loading up above the 150 or 100-week moving average, that's not too bad. I have to tip my hat to these companies.
As a reminder, I know we make little snide remarks against Strategy, but Strategy is propping us up. 847,363 Bitcoin — that is updated as of last week. This might be slightly off, maybe that 32 they sold wasn't in there, but Strategy is doing pretty good. Marathon is a Bitcoin mining operation that has also pivoted to AI — just putting it out there if you want to invest in something like that, not financial advice. They've only got 38,000. Things just drop off after Strategy.
People give shade to Saylor a lot, and I get it. I didn't like the remark about "never sell your Bitcoin" when he then sells his Bitcoin. But in the grand scheme of things, at the end of the day, Strategy bought a bunch of Bitcoin and he's still holding on to it.
Tether Freezes Tron Wallets Linked to ISIS-K
Host: Tether has been doing great things as far as stablecoins go — moving out there, getting alliances, actually being adopted. And I have a question for everybody in the audience.
Tether just froze 131 Tron addresses linked to ISIS-K. According to Chainalysis, the wallets allegedly received over $1.4 million and transferred more than $880,000 since 2023.
So here's my question: are you okay with this actually happening? Or are you in the belief that decentralization is what it means and is supposed to be — which is you don't touch it, you don't do anything with it, and if something happens, that's on them, and we shouldn't be able to step in?
Before you answer, remember that this might happen to you. This might happen to your mom. This might happen to your family member. This might happen to your poor grandpa who gets shaken for everything — his entire life savings — and you have to sit there and tell him, "Grandpa, I'm sorry. You did the wrong thing and you're going to have to live on the street now."
There is a big, huge divide between what people think should be done for decentralization and what should not be done. I personally don't like to say this, but I agree that we should be freezing some accounts. I know that goes against everything, but it is what it is — because I still get the emails every single week: "I lost my entire life savings. What can I do? What should I do?" There's only so much training we can do. That's just how it is.
Tether Withdrawing from EU MiCA Compliance
Host: Speaking of Tether, I think this is a bigger play. This is Paolo Ardoino — he's the CEO of Tether. It looks like the stipulations of MiCA in the EU, which essentially allows people to transact within the banking system, are something Tether is going to forego.
When I read this, I thought to myself, well, Tether is probably doing this because they can't get audited, or the audit they do is in some offshore country and they don't want to be exposed. Maybe that's the issue. But Ardoino made some really good points. Take a listen to what he says — it's about a minute and a half. He could be right. The EU could be on the teetering brink of just collapsing.
Paolo Ardoino: "The problem that I had with MiCA is that the MiCA license is very dangerous when it comes to stablecoins. And I believe it is even more dangerous for the small and medium banking system in Europe. I think that what will happen in the next years is that a few banks in Europe will go belly up because of the requirements of the MiCA license — 60% of reserves has to be kept in uninsured cash deposits in European banks.
Imagine a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. You have a stablecoin that is 10 billion euros. You have to keep 6 billion euros in European banks — multiple banks. And the big banks, like UBS, are not banking stablecoins. So you have to turn to small banks in Europe — at least five small banks — in order to keep those reserves, because there is also a constraint on how much you can keep in each bank. So you have to find small banks in Europe that will keep 6 billion euros.
What will happen is that these banks, as uninsured cash deposits, will take these euros and lend them out because they can do fractional reserves up to 90%. So 5.4 billion euros will be distributed to people that want to buy a car, a house, start a new business — and 600 million euros will be kept by the banks. Imagine that you have a 20% redemption. You need 2 billion euros back. You go to the bank and they only have 600 million euros. So the banks will go bankrupt because they cannot fulfill your requests, and you as a stablecoin issuer will go bankrupt."
Host: I have to agree with him here. I was around during the Celsius time and we would hear about this term called rehypothecation. Of course, people would say, "Ah, it's only for the banks, this is just ridiculous." And of course, as we come in now, we realize just how bad that actually is. With the banks in the EU — and these are not just big banks, these are unfortunately small banks that he was talking about — could this actually go through and could this happen? I can see why they're not playing ball.
OpenUSD: A New Stablecoin Backed by BlackRock, Visa, and Google
Host: On stablecoins, OpenUSD — we covered this a couple of days ago — it looks like Tether and Circle have a new competitor called OpenUSD, a US dollar-backed stablecoin overseen by the Open Standard Consortium of over 140 companies. BlackRock is the biggest one, but it's also backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Google, which is pretty enormous in and of itself.
We had been talking about the best chains for Tether and USDC — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, and Tron — those were the top four as tracked by Visa. But now the chains being chosen for OpenUSD look like Polygon, Aptos, Solana, and Stellar.
What do you notice between these two lists? What is the commonality? Well, I think we all know it's Solana. So maybe that could be the winner. But just because Solana is being chosen for stablecoins via OpenUSD, that doesn't mean the price is going to go exponentially higher. As a reminder, it's super cheap with Polygon, Aptos, and Solana to actually do transactions, even at trillions of volume. I think where things go up in price is speculation — if there are new tokenomics, if they start burning tokens, locking up tokens. That's the way. Even though stablecoins are a big play and represent a massive amount of transactional volume, I don't think this alone will be the core value driver. As usual, it'll just be speculation.
Kash Patel's Undisclosed MicroStrategy Investment
Host: Kash Patel and MicroStrategy. It looks like the FBI director forgot to disclose how much Strategy he owned — and it wasn't chump change.
Director Kash Patel got caught sleeping on a required disclosure of a six-figure MicroStrategy purchase. Patel supposedly purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of Strategy on November 21st, but didn't report the trade to regulators until May 26th.
I don't see a massive issue with that personally, but apparently this falls under the STOCK Act. Executive branch officials need to publicly disclose individual stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days of the transaction. And you know what happens if they don't? Pretty much nothing. I think they get like a $200 fine, maybe a thousand. I'm not sure. But if I were a senator or a congressman, I would be doing this all day long and be like, "Whoopsie, sorry, I messed up. I must have forgot. What's that going to be — a thousand bucks? Okay, I'll be alright." And that's the same thing that's going to happen with Kash Patel.
Although I have to tell you, November 21st — that's not good for Kash, because the price at that time was around $237. And now it's worth around $100. Well, I wouldn't report it either. I'd be embarrassed. Just kidding. So Kash just made a little error. Not a big deal. There are senators and congressmen and women doing this all day long, so we'll see how it goes.
Robinhood Launches AI Agentic Accounts for Crypto Trading
Host: This looks pretty good. Robinhood is rolling out AI agents for you to trade crypto. Let's take a listen.
Robinhood Presenter: "Today we are going one step further and we are announcing the launch of agentic accounts for crypto trading. Now, why is this important? As I'm speaking, on the screens you're seeing just an example of the pricing data, news, and order book for Bitcoin that could happen over the course of just a few minutes. Institutional giants have the ability to use algorithms and rooms full of analysts to scan all of these data points 24/7. But the reality is no single trader has the bandwidth to process this volume of data and have the same advantage. However, where humans drown, that's where agents thrive. With the launch of the Robinhood MCP and agentic accounts, your agent can act on patterns you would have otherwise missed."
Second Robinhood Presenter: "As you may know, we've already seen over 70,000 agentic accounts open in just the first few weeks. And today, I'm excited to share that soon we will introduce agentic trading for crypto as well."
Host: Let's see how that rolls out. I know there are a lot of people looking at that going, "I can do that. I can use agents to start trading on Robinhood." Look, I'm just going to warn you right now — the agents sound great and it sounds like it could be the big thing. But as with everything that is new, the pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs. So I'm going to let all of you guys get out there and try that with Robinhood first. It sounds promising. I just personally wouldn't do it in the very first go.
Private AI and Google's Offline LLM App
Host: Speaking of AI, today on the Coin Bureau podcast, Ben and I went over a couple of different things. One of the things that Guy asked was whether anybody is using private LLMs or private AI structures — something you can run locally instead of using Perplexity, ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, or whatever else.
We actually took a look at Palantir CEO Alex Karp and what he said. I'm not going to play the clip, but I'll give you the TL;DR. He pretty much said that what Anthropic and OpenAI are doing is essentially giving their AI product away relatively cheap, even though people are burning through their tokens like crazy. And as they do this and waste tokens on compute, Anthropic and OpenAI are essentially capturing IP. He said software-as-a-service is going to go away, and people should really be concerned if they're not using some type of private LLM.
That got me thinking, because I've actually tried this. I tried it with Open CLAW and it was a disaster — I just could not get it to work well. Hermes was kind of okay, and then I just settled on Claude, but it's through Anthropic, and that's a big issue.
On the video I didn't really explain myself too well. I talked about Artificial Analysis AI and mentioned you can use things like Gemini 3.5 Flash and other models, some of which are private. But what I'm going to show you today is an app from Google called Google AI Edge. Essentially, it is a private LLM on your phone. When you download it and let it run, you don't need any internet access. The data stays within your device. It's a private LLM.
To really sum it up, here's Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. Listen to what he says in the first 30 to 40 seconds.
Sundar Pichai: "What's amazing about Flash is how it delivers frontier-level capabilities at less than half the price of comparable frontier models. We've heard that many companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets and it's only May. If companies used a mix of Flash and other frontier models, they could save a lot of money. To put this in perspective, top companies on Google Cloud are processing about 1 trillion tokens a day. If they shifted 80% of their workloads from other frontier models to 3.5 Flash, they'd save over $1 billion annually. That is real savings they can pour back into their company."
Host: Google has actually doubled in price over the last year or so. But going back to Google AI Edge — if you guys want to try that, I linked it in the description. You don't need internet. You don't need to have anything tracked. You just download it and the LLM just works.
Let me show you something. I'm going to do something I usually don't do — I'm going to show you my phone. So check this out. There's Edge Gallery. You'll notice I actually have my connection on — let me turn that off. So now my phone is not connected to the internet, just my computer. Go to AI Chat. Let's try it: "What are the top five cryptocurrencies I should be investing in today and why?" And look at that — it just goes and tells you different things. You can ask anything. If you're out in the wilderness and you're stranded and need some life-saving skills, there you go. Or if you're somewhere without internet access and want to ask questions, you can put it in there. If keeping your queries off Anthropic's or OpenAI's servers is something that interests you, that would be the way to do it, and it's pretty easy to download.
Live Q&A
Host: Now let's get into the best part of the show — Q&A. I'll answer all your questions.
Aristotle says, "I invest in crypto and now I sleep like a baby — wake up every two hours." Yeah, two hours like Saylor does.
Robert says, "Charles Hoskinson is also part of the problem. Instead of promoting Cardano and what things can do to benefit integration and collabs, he just live streams drama and reacts to all the negative." He was kind of a lightning rod, that's for sure.
You know what that reminds me of — some people were saying there was some kind of connection with OpenUSD and Cardano. I had to take a look at it, and I did find this from the Cardano Foundation. They said, "We welcome the announcement of OpenUSD and our partner at Brale XYZ as a launch partner. We are exploring other integration options and will share more in due course." To me that just sounds like a foundation reaching, hoping they get included. But I don't think they actually are.
Dave Lou essentially confirmed: not on the list. And to further drive this point home, Hoskinson responds to criticism over OpenUSD stablecoin exclusion, saying DReps can't reject Cardano commercialization and then complain about it. He says, "We put hundreds of hours carefully proposing direct routes to commercialize Cardano. We brought it to a vote and you voted against it. It's your fault." Essentially, that's what's being said. I think they could have done a better job of getting things adopted. Look, sometimes things don't work out. That's business. You can make the best product of all time, the best restaurant, and nobody comes. It's just how it goes.
Wisdom says, "Tether freezes Tron." I should have written that better — it should have said "Tether freezes Tether and Tron wallets." That's what it should have said. You can't move that Tether in those Tron wallets. That's the big thing.
Christine Lagarde from the IMF hates crypto. That is true. A lot of politicians hate crypto, quite honestly. That's why the Clarity Act probably won't pass.
Robert's right — Circle got slaughtered this week. I think it's down 14%. Looking at the chart, the big slump came on June 29th, just a couple of days ago. It was at $76. Yeah, but it held up pretty well overall. Not too awful. I don't have a lot of Circle, so it's not a big deal for me.
Waffles is right — I haven't heard about Polygon in a while either. Pretty amazing. And now they're going to be part of OpenUSD along with Aptos, Solana, and Stellar. Who would have thought? I know the XRP people cannot be happy with that. Or maybe they're ecstatic — maybe they own both. I don't know.
Gone Wolf says, "The one thing you know after seven years in crypto is that you know nothing." That sounds like a very stoic thing to say. Maybe that was Aristotle.
Look, in the bull markets it's great. We feel the exuberance. It's really nice. We get to reap the rewards of buying when nobody else would buy, getting made fun of, being called morons — the good times in the bear markets. The problem with the bull markets is that I get the most obnoxious tourists ever, and they all think they know everything. So when we crash and we're down 50% on Bitcoin, or 90% on the rest of crypto, and 99% on memecoins, I appreciate the people that are here because those are the real ones. It makes my job a hell of a lot easier. That's just how it goes.
And Donald Trump revealed his earnings out of crypto — you don't think the opposition is going to look at that and be like, "Oh, he did so well, that's where we want to go, that's where we want to pass the Clarity Act"? They're going to fight. Whatever brought riches to Trump, they want to tear that house down. And I just don't see the Clarity Act passing. But I could be wrong.