Bitcoin's Surprise $46B Bid Starts Today

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Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.

Michael, Liam, and Brian open on BitGo acquiring NYDIG's institutional trading business for a reported $42.5 million, and on Russia's largest bank moving to accept Bitcoin, ETH, and USDT as loan collateral while forecasting $46 billion of regulated crypto exchange trading in year one. They get into why a sanctioned, energy rich sovereign is the one recollateralizing first, Blockstream's new post quantum signature proposal, and the SEC sending a crypto custody overhaul to the White House with the Clarity Act stalled. The back half is market plumbing: why settlement is the real prize, the tokenized GLD that spiked to $2,000 on Robinhood over the weekend against $400 for the underlying, bank tokenized deposits, and Robinhood's chain now out-earning every Ethereum L2. They close on Hyperliquid, trading Anthropic shares on entropy.io, the Singularity Stack report, NVIDIA buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, and a $400 robot duck that talks over Nostr.

Chapters

00:00 - Bessent, Warsh, and the bond market

03:32 - BitGo acquires NYDIG's institutional trading business

07:47 - What BitGo actually gets: liquidity, scale, and stickiness

11:24 - Russia's largest bank moves on BTC, ETH, and USDT

12:56 - Recollateralizing the global financial system

15:34 - Energy rich and sanctioned: why Russia goes first

18:14 - Is the US behind, or already through the door?

20:58 - Blockstream's quantum fix and the Shrinks proposal

24:14 - The SEC preps an overhaul of crypto custody rules

28:35 - Why settlement is the prize: DTC, IOUs, and T+0

33:10 - Tokenized GLD spikes to $2,000 on Robinhood

35:04 - Tokenized deposits, bank consortiums, and JP Morgan

38:31 - Robinhood chain now out-earns every Ethereum L2

43:54 - Hyperliquid, Trump, and 24/7 commodities

47:16 - Trading Anthropic shares on entropy.io

51:12 - The Singularity Stack report and Onramp is hiring

56:13 - NVIDIA buys Hugging Face, and a $400 robot duck on Nostr

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