Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: The CEO of Lead bank says debanking was made up Which aspects of debanking were real? The SEC scraps its 50-year-old gag rule The WSJ gets free banking history wrong in their attack on stablecoins What does history tell us about decentralized monetary issuance Why stablecoins aren&#x27;t vulnerable to the same issues as free banks SoFi launches SoFiUSD and mixes a stablecoin with a tokenized deposit Sentiment is bottoming in Ethereum David Hoffman sells his ETH Are stablecoins parasitic to L1s Can L1s accrue value sustainably? The DATs are troubled Is AGI here already? AI cost discipline Content mentioned in this episode: Nic on Substack, Stablecoins are private money. There&#x27;s nothing wrong with that

Weekly Roundup 05/29/26 (Was debanking real, SoFiUSD, WSJ gets free banks wrong, trouble in ETHland)

On The Brink with Castle Island

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** On The Brink with Castle Island

## Participants

- **Matt Walsh** (Castle Island Ventures)
- **Nick Carter** (Castle Island Ventures)

## Transcript

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All views expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep! The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On The Brink, I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nic Carter.

We have a busy week of just people having bad takes. Wall Street Journal, bad take. CEO of Lead Bank, bad take. We had some bad takes to talk about this week. Yeah, the Lead Bank one is confusing because you'd think she would know better because she's right in the middle of all this. Yeah, so to set this up, the CEO of Lead Bank came out and said that deplatforming from the banking sector did not happen. But she said it in more aggressive language.

Yeah, Jackie Rises. So she was attacking debanking. She said in no uncertain terms she doesn't think debanking is a thing. I kind of get what she's saying that like banks were firing clients as they're allowed to do. They can fire a client due to their own assessment of the risk.

So I think her view is that what we call debanking is kind of this case by case thing where banks might fire a client for reputational reasons, risk reasons, and that that's kind of valid under accepted banking practice. However, that's not actually what we're really complaining about with the whole debanking thing. So and now Lead, I don't think they're really known for banking a lot of crypto firms, were they?

Well, I think they started getting into the industry by being the back end to some of the stable coin players, right? So weren't they the back end of Bridge? Yeah, famously. And now I think a few more. So I think maybe they weren't serving crypto firms directly in during the heyday of the debanking. Definitely not. 24. Yeah. I never really heard their name much. I think they are known more for doi...

Weekly Roundup 05/29/26 (Was debanking real, SoFiUSD, WSJ gets free banks wrong, trouble in ETHland)

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Weekly Roundup 05/29/26 (Was debanking real, SoFiUSD, WSJ gets free banks wrong, trouble in ETHland)

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.