The SEC finally wrote the rules down. Citi is about to hold your Bitcoin. Thirty-nine state banking associations are building their own blockchain. And a $3 billion short squeeze shoved Bitcoin through $71K — right before Joel disappears on his honeymoon until November.

On August 18, the SEC published a 402-page proposing release called Regulation Crypto Assets: two registration exemptions plus a conditional safe harbor that can finally retire the "investment contract" label once an issuer permanently stops the managerial efforts it promised. For eight years this industry was regulated by lawsuit. For once, nobody had to get sued to find out what the rules were.

Meanwhile Bitcoin ripped more than 20% in a week — and is still down on the year. Joel says zoom out: $81K keeps rejecting price, that's a double top, and the four-year cycle still points at a bottom somewhere between late October and early December. Which makes this rally a bull trap until proven otherwise.

Also in this one: Open USD and its 140-partner consortium taking aim at Circle and Tether, the BankChain Alliance putting 3,283 banks on a chain of their own, Arthur Hayes coming out of retirement to sell food for AI agents, 512GB Macs that run frontier models on your desk, Anthropic's $65 billion run rate ahead of its IPO, and the guy calling the entire AI industry a con.
This is the last one until mid-November. Joel's getting married.

Full show notes: https://badco.in/815

Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com

Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The SEC stopped waiting for Congress. Harmony minted four billion tokens out of thin air. And on Robinhood's new chain, AI agents moved $200 million while the humans logged off.

Joel and Travis cover the SEC's August 14 vote on Regulation Crypto — the first formal crypto rulemaking of Chairman Paul Atkins' tenure, landing days after the Senate left town without moving the CLARITY Act. Then: Harmony's empty-block exploit that minted 26% of ONE's total supply and the chain rollback the team is now weighing; Goldman Sachs buying NEOS Investments for $2.25 billion and inheriting a bitcoin income ETF; Tether becoming the 17th largest holder of US Treasuries on Earth; Anthropic watermarking everything Claude writes to satisfy the EU AI Act; H100 Group's world-first bitcoin-for-bitcoin acquisition; Hyperliquid's absurd $106 million of revenue per employee; and Anthropic's $9.1 billion, 20-year lease with bitcoin miner Riot Platforms — signed at a moment when it costs more to mine a bitcoin than a bitcoin is worth.

Joel demos three AI builds including an America Online time capsule frozen in August 1996, and Travis walks through FourthWeb's agent swarm scraping 150-plus news sources every fifteen minutes. Plus: 52% of Gen Z investors have moved money earmarked for investing into sports betting, and 26% now call it part of their long-term financial strategy.

Programming note — this is our second-to-last show before a hiatus. Joel's getting married. We'll be back in late November. We're not quitting.

Not financial advice. Stay bad.

Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A five-year-old firmware bug quietly turned "cold storage" into a guessing game, and roughly $88 million in Bitcoin walked out the door without anyone touching a device.

Joel Comm and Travis Wright open year ten of The Bad Crypto Podcast with the Coldcard entropy flaw: a March 2021 build error routed seed generation through a predictable software fallback instead of the hardware random number generator, leaving affected seeds with about 40 bits of entropy instead of 128. Galaxy Research mapped the first sweep — 1,196 addresses drained in 41 minutes — and later waves pushed the total past 4,500 addresses. Updating the firmware does not fix a seed that was already generated.

Also on this episode: BitGo CEO Mike Belshe posts a wallet holding 100 BTC and dares Anthropic's Claude to take it.

Strategy sells another 1,638 Bitcoin to cover STRC preferred dividends while sitting on $10.9 billion in unrealized losses.

Trump's executive orders move the federal post-quantum deadline to 2031, and BIP-361 raises the question of what happens to Satoshi's coins.

Truth Social starts selling early access to the President's posts.

And American Bitcoin posts a $57.2 million quarterly loss while growing its treasury to 8,002 BTC.

Then the hosts swap notes on what they've been building. Travis is turning the marketing canon into installable AI skills at MRKT.NG, finished two screenplays that sat in a drawer for twenty-six years, and rebuilt his site around a news-reading audio agent and a council of nine AI advisors.

Joel made a short film, wrote and produced an original song with AI, and makes the case that "slop" is a skill issue — the work is in the directing, not the prompting.

Closes with a practical tutorial on building character reference sheets so your AI-generated characters stop changing faces between shots. This episode is for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only. It is not financial, investment, or trading advice.

Support the show: https://badcryptopodcast.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.