Marty's Bent

Sup freaks. I was on vacation at the end of last week and a lot has happened. We've gone to war with Iran. There's been a ton of news hitting the tape as it pertains to bitcoin. Things are very chaotic, very uncertain right now, but I will tell you one thing. Nothing is more certain than bitcoin and the value prop for bitcoin right now. And I think that's being expressed in the price, which is up $5,000 today, 7.31%, sitting at $73,500. Started the day below $68,000. There's a lot going on in the world. Wars popping off. And I don't think there's ever been a stronger case for bitcoin.

Let's start with the big bullish news of the day. Kraken became the first bitcoin firm in history to access the Federal Reserve's payment rails. They got a Fed Master Account, a narrow Master Account license, announced today. This has been something many companies in the space have been going after for years, most notably Custodia, which got into a legal battle with the Fed for being denied one.

Kraken now settles directly on Fedwire, the intra-bank system moving more than $4 trillion per day. No more routing through intermediary banks. No more middlemen with the power to pull the plug. The same leverage legacy institutions used during Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is significantly weakened. If you were around during the 2023 banking crisis when Silvergate, Signature, and Silicon Valley Bank went down, you know how bad it was for bitcoin companies trying to hold bank accounts. Now Kraken doesn't have that problem.

The banking lobby saw this headline and immediately took to the airwaves saying they were very worried. As we know, the big banks and Coinbase are in a battle right now over the ability to share yield produced by treasuries held in stablecoin reserves with end users. Banks don't want that competition. It looks like there's a chink in the armor of the banking lobby's stranglehold on access to these accounts.

Another bullish headline came out of the CFTC. Chairman Selig said they're going to sprint towards fast tracking approval of bitcoin perpetual futures contracts in the US, targeting approval within the next month. Perps are the single most traded instrument in crypto. Binance alone handles over $50 billion a day in perp volume. Since 2017, regulatory uncertainty has forced virtually all that liquidity offshore. Selig said plainly, we've got to bring that back to the United States.

Now here's where things get interesting on the other side. While Kraken is getting a Fed Master Account and perps seem to be coming back to the US, the traditional monetary system is experiencing some hiccups. We bank with Mercury at TFTC and I opened the app yesterday to a notification: the Federal Reserve is currently experiencing a service disruption delaying ACH payments across the entire US banking system.

Bitcoin is a separate monetary system running on a separate protocol. It has 99.999% uptime since it launched in January 2009. The traditional system runs on ancient technology, particularly COBOL, that craps out from time to time. Bitcoin doesn't have these problems. And this matters more than ever right now because we are at war.

I'm going to go ahead and ignore the fact that Trump administration wants to get into the semantics game of whether or not this is an "operation" in Iran or a war, if you're bombing a country and they're bombing you back, it's a war to me. Most onlookers are treating it as a war and trying to prepare accordingly. US banks are on high alert for cyber attacks after intelligence assessments warned of Iranian attacks on critical banking infrastructure as the war escalates.

Bitcoin is not subject to cyber attacks on centralized systems like the Federal Reserve or the US banking system are. It runs on a distributed protocol of geographically distributed nodes. It would be orders of magnitude harder to disrupt the bitcoin network with a cyber attack compared to the banking system. Holding bitcoin in cold storage has insane amounts of value if a cyber attack materializes. I find it relatively low probability, less than 20%, but ~20% is material enough to make sure you have money outside the system.

The Strait of Hormuz is another factor. Tanker traffic has plummeted 90% after Iran shut it down over the weekend. Global oil markets and supply chains are on edge. This could lead to inflation, particularly of energy assets, which are the base assets of everything we do throughout the global economy. Higher energy prices will lead to higher prices for goods, and then the third order effect: the need to stimulate markets to support the war efforts and reorganize supply chains, which means printing money. I believe many people are looking at what is currently unfolding and they are beginning to price in monetary stimulus.

I'm not going to prognosticate about how things will play out in Iran. The information war has never been more aggressive. Everyone is in the fog of war right now. I'm going to focus on what I can focus on: taking care of my family, producing content that helps people seek the safety of freedom tech, making money, saving it in bitcoin, and being a good member of my local community.

With this in mind it is important to remind everyone that freedom tech in the form of bitcoin, dispatchable energy infrastructure, distributed communications protocols and private and sovereign AI tools is more important than ever. This has been my focus at TFTC for almost nine years, it has been our focus at Ten31 for almost six years, and its importance is increasing at a rapid pace. In a world of increasing chaos, uncertainty, and a lack of trust in centralized institutions, a distributed, hard capped, digitally native internet money makes a lot of sense. Having the ability to have reliable energy makes a lot of sense. Being able to communicate with others outside the confines of centralized companies that act as surveillance proxies for the state makes a lot of sense. Leveraging AI tools in a private way makes a lot of sense.

That's Bitcoin. That's modular energy systems. That's Nostr. That's AI tools like Maple AI.

Stay frosty. Stay vigilant. Stay liquid. There's never been a more bullish setup for bitcoin and broader freedom tech. Focus will be key as we wade through the chaos.

Open Source AI Models Reach Parity With Proprietary Competition

The landscape of artificial intelligence has reached a pivotal moment where open source models are no longer playing catch-up to their proprietary counterparts. Mark Suman argued that models like Kimi-K 2.5 have achieved performance levels that match what frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are producing. This development fundamentally challenges the long-held assumption that open source AI represents a compromised, second-tier experience.

"The gap is now in tooling rather than model capability" - Mark Suman

According to Suman, the real differentiator has shifted from raw model performance to the ecosystem and tools built around these models. While proprietary solutions may still have advantages in user experience, infrastructure, and specialized applications, the core intelligence capabilities are increasingly comparable. This parity opens new possibilities for developers, researchers, and organizations who can now access high-quality AI without vendor lock-in or hefty licensing fees, potentially accelerating innovation across the entire AI ecosystem.

Check out the full podcast here for more on AI infrastructure, model training costs, and developer adoption trends.

Headlines of the Day

White House Nominates Pro-Bitcoin Kevin Warsh as Fed Chairman

Kraken Becomes First Crypto Bank with Fed Master Account

Trump Says Iran Would Have Had Nuclear Weapon in Two Weeks

Morgan Stanley Files for Spot Bitcoin ETF with Coinbase Custody

Brian Armstrong Calls Elizabeth Warren a Socialist

Bitcoin Reaches $74,000

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Final thought...

I want to live the snow bird life.

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