Andrew Ross Sorkin

You just need to do it with transparency, without the leverage, without the manipulation efforts and the charlatans and the frauds that invariably emerge every single time we have one of these booms.

And I would say right now, you look at what's happening in crypto, and yes, there are frauds and charlatans everywhere.

You know,

There was this thing called a SPAC boom, a blank check boom, just a couple of years ago.

Everybody said, oh my goodness, I can get access to the lottery ticket early.

This is amazing.

And invariably, most of those investments went bad.

And so every time we have one of these sort of like innovative moments, if you will, I think you just need to really be super careful.

Okay, two-part, almost three-part question.

First of all, I would argue that Trump's flip on crypto was almost 100% related to the fact that the entire crypto community decided to effectively back his campaign and buy him.

That's what happened.

I mean, let's just call a spade a spade.

This was a demonstrable effort by the crypto world to say, look, if we can get on this guy's good side, he will get on our good side.

And it's as transactional as anything else.

That's putting aside, that's even before you get to the issues around his family and getting involved in crypto and all of those things.

Interestingly, you know, I had a conversation with Eric Trump, this is a couple of weeks ago, I think about this.

One of the reasons that they got engaged in crypto or were interested in crypto beyond the moneymaking opportunity was because they thought, and they were probably not wrong, that they were being, quote unquote, debanked, if you will, after the.

election in 2020 and January 6th.

Now, I would argue they were being debanked because the banking system has rules and regulations about customers, and they were looking at what happened after January 6th and all the investigations and trials and everything else going on and said, maybe we're not supposed to do business with this individual in this moment.

But as a result of that, they then go hard on crypto because that was where they could effectively bank their money.