Crypto, Russia and Ukraine
Can Russia use cryptocurrency to evade sanctions? Can Ukraine turn crowdsourced crypto support into something useful? How do we address crypto's illicit financing concerns?
The following is a transcript of Cryptonite’s fourth episode, which aired on March 7, 2022. Subscribe to the podcast to listen to future episodes in real-time.
0:00:11.9 Rich Goldberg: Welcome back to Cryptonite, episode four. I'm your host, Rich Goldberg. Obviously, before our last episode, we had not seen a Russian invasion of Ukraine. We had not seen the explosion of headlines about the use of cryptocurrency, whether for good or for bad, crowdsourcing helping the Ukrainian people, Russian use the Kremlin trying to break US and European sanctions, Russian popular use trying to save people's money as the ruble starts collapsing. We're going to get into all those issues and more on anti-money laundering issues, counter-threat finance, talk a lot about the current crisis. Let's look at the headlines. Fortune Magazine, "Minutes after Russia invaded Ukraine, these crypto safe havens tank. Bitcoin enthusiasts have long touted the cryptocurrencies value as a safe haven to hedge against inflation and other risks in traditional markets, but hours after Russian President, Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine on Thursday, cryptocurrencies plummeted." But Barron’s, "Bitcoin sores as sanctions on Russia breathe new life into crypto. Bitcoin jump more than 15% as the Treasury Department announced sanctions against Russia's Central Bank and froze some Russian assets."
0:01:28.8 Rich Goldberg: CBS News, "Crypto prices jump as the Russia-Ukraine War escalates. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices are jumping following a plunge this week in the value of Russia's currency, a sign according to some analysts that Russian investors are shifting their money out of the ruble as economic sanctions against the country for its invasion of Ukraine take hold. Russian leaders could turn to crypto to help the country prop up its financial sector while noting that digital currencies are unlikely to 'serve as a substitute for corporate transactions over time.'" Okay. Well, let's delve into that question a little bit later. NPR, "Russia's invasion of Ukraine is being called the world's first crypto war. Ukrainians have raised tens of millions of dollars in digital currency to assist in the fight against Russia. Washington aims to stop Russia from using crypto to bypass Western sanctions." A lot of questions right there. How are we going to get the Ukrainians to use that digital currency to help them fight against Russia and how will we stop Russia from using crypto to bypass western stations? Key questions we're going to ask our guest.
0:02:32.7 Rich Goldberg: The Financial Times, "EU seeks to prevent use of crypto to avoid Russia sanctions. The EU is considering new measures to ensure digital assets are not used to dodge sanctions against Russia as the block toughens its enforcement to the financial penalties imposed on Moscow this week. EU finance ministers and other officials discussed in a video conference call on Wednesday the risk that cryptocurrencies could be used to circumvent sanctions, officials said." And David Gerard writes for Foreign Policy, headline, "Cryptocurrency is no fix for Russia's sanctions woes. In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there has been wide speculation that Russia could evade international sanctions using cryptocurrency." Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said that "Blocking all Russian users would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists, but it's unlikely that this can be of any real use for Moscow because there just aren't enough dollars in the crypto trading system to meet the needs of a country of Russia's size."
0:03:32.5 Rich Goldberg: We will ask our guests about that very question because I know it is a subject of hot debate. Let's go to our special guests, Michael Fasanello is an experienced counter-threat finance and compliance professional, with over a decade of experience in the public and private sectors. He served in various posts within the US Department of Justice and the US Department of the Treasury, including the Office of Foreign Assets Controls, as we call OFAC, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which we call FinCEN before joining private sector financial institutions, First National Bank, FNB, and PNC Bank. During his work with FinCEN, he advised the Office of Regulatory Policy in developing and interpreting federal regulations under the bank secrecy act. Before that, he handled global economic sanctions and embargo cases for OFAC's licensing division. At PNC, he was an assistant vice president and manager of anti-money laundering and global sanctions with First National's Money Laundering and Risk Management Department. He oversaw a complete overhaul of the bank sanctions program. He specializes in anti-money laundering, AML as we say, counter terrorist financing, CTF as we say, global sanctions and other illicit finance matters with a current focus on the digital assets and in blockchain intelligence space. This is a great person for us to talk to today. Michael, thanks for joining Cryptonite.
0:04:49.2 Michael Fasanello: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
0:04:50.3 Rich Goldberg: Well, let's start with what everybody is watching 24/7, Russia and Ukraine. You're someone watching this space a lot. Give me your first overall impressions of the role cryptocurrency digital assets are playing during this conflict, and then maybe we can go deeper into some of those various aspects.
0:05:05.7 Michael Fasanello: Yeah. So we're seeing two different, very interesting developments in the world of crypto, digital assets, NFTs, things like that. First off is people are very largely leveraging in the crowdfunding, manner of doing things, in order to send aid over to Ukraine. We also saw this recently with the Canadian truckers in the Freedom Convoy. So crypto is very... It's now becoming almost an alternative means for throwing your heavy support and crowdfunding support behind initiatives for better or worse, good or bad, behind these initiatives of interest. And then secondarily, we we are seeing a large focus on digital assets from the flip side of that coin, which is being used basically as an alternative to the traditional financial systems. So as we're gonna talk about in-depth at some point today, the evasion of sanctions, the use of crypto for money laundering and other nefarious acts. So we're seeing some very heavy focus at this point. I felt last year was the year of crypto, the year of digital assets, but arguably this year is shaping out to be arguably more intense, specifically from a geopolitical and conflict basis.
0:06:14.5 Rich Goldberg: On the crowdsourcing side, I want to come back to that first, it's really interesting. We've seen a lot of headlines on that, we talked about it at the top. Do we have a way of quantifying just to how much is going out there? Is that hard to quantify? Or is there a way to quantify that?
0:06:27.3 Michael Fasanello: It's quantifiable in terms of looking at the on-chain activity. Obviously as a blockchain analytics professional, part of what I do, day in day out, is taking a look at transactions when people flag them either as scams or fraud or potential nefarious activity. I can dive in there and use the on-chain analytics and scraping the blockchain basically to make connections, to make attributions, and then obviously to look at it from a the eagle-eyed perspective and really understand what's going on in a broader sense. However, that is limited to on-chain activity so it is difficult to quantify in total because a lot of the activity that does occur in the crypto space is in fact off the blockchain. Or is in less transparent blockchains I should say.
0:07:10.7 Rich Goldberg: Right, and right now just because cryptocurrency is more in the infancy stage still, as far as who's using it, what it can be used for. Especially I would think in Ukraine though actually if you looked at the last few months Ukraine was actually trying to become a cryptocurrency hub so maybe they have more advanced capabilities already. You think about cash right? Somebody has a bag of cash, somebody sends money, they can use the money to buy things. When we're crowdsourcing crypto to Ukraine or to truckers or whoever it is, what are they doing with that? How does that help them out? Are they able to go convert that to something? Do they need the way to still get that into dollars or into local currency? Or are they finding interlocutors that are willing to accept the crypto for payment, for goods and services, arms, whatever it's being used for?
0:08:02.6 Michael Fasanello: You are striking at the heart of the very matter that's being debated in legislations across the globe with regulators as well, law enforcements. Everybody's trying to figure out what the best way is to control, to find these choke-points, these on-ramps, and off-ramps for this activity. So when you're talking about Ukraine, and them receiving these crowdfunding donations or other donations via crypto, they're very, very, likely going to use legitimate compliant off-ramps to liquidate that into dollars or whatever currency they will find best for their purposes and obviously for buying weapons and food and fuel and all sorts of things like that. When it comes to Russia, they're going to be very limited in that type of liquidation because of the various sanctions that the world is now imposing on them. So what they would have to do is then find more nefarious, more obfuscated means of liquidation that might be transferring from wallet address to wallet address. Negotiating with other state actors like North Korea and Venezuela, arguably even China, that are sympathetic to their activities and want to obviously keep Russia around for the long term. So you're going to see more of the money laundering, terrorist financing type of evasion, and type of activity with Russia because they have more to use entirely by using on-ramps that are heavily overseen.
0:09:29.7 Rich Goldberg: Yeah, let's go deeper on that side. Obviously, we talked a little bit about the crowdsourcing for the support of Ukraine. You're starting to get into some of the Russian evasion and activity. We saw cryptos take a nosedive right after the invasion began, now going back up with many attributing that to US and EU sanctions cratering the ruble. Some sort of a jump in Russia onto crypto. Two, maybe sides of the coin so to speak, no pun intended to look at. The Russian people looking to save their money before it's gone, moving to crypto, and the Kremlin looking to stabilize the Russian economy, looking for those off-ramps you're talking about to evade sanctions. Let's take the first part, are we seeing a flight to crypto inside Russia? Are you seeing that in the blockchain, how much is that happening, and do we think that that is actually something of a lifeline for the Russian people who are seeing the ruble just crater?
0:10:24.8 Michael Fasanello: So that type of attribution, the data that you're asking basically to be synthesized there is something that's being currently worked. The Treasury Department and the Justice Department have went out there and given us a list of the oligarchs that they want focused on so the blockchain analytics companies are working with the exchanges and trying to use the open-sourced intelligence and other methods to flag addresses that might be affiliated with those now sanctioned individuals. But arguably, the type of activity that we're talking about, you're not going to see that on a blockchain. The amount of money that needs to get moved and the liquidity that needs to be leveraged, and I'll get back to that point of liquidity, because a lot of detractors, and even subject matter specialists, I don't really call it subject matter experts because we learn something new every single day in this field because it's still nascent. So my fellow subject matter specialists are going out there and saying there isn't enough liquidity to really leverage crypto.
0:11:28.7 Michael Fasanello: I disagree. I think that although the market cap or the total ecosystem may be smaller than the amount of money that Russia, in and of itself, Putin and his cronies need to move, that may be off-kilter as far as the ratio, but what they're not taking into account is this is a recurring system, it's an assembly line. As you're cleaning money then once you're liquidating that or once you're getting what you need for it, it's going back into the system. So it's a cycle that perpetuates itself. The amount of liquidity... It's not like everybody is trying to do this on the same day in the same hour, that would be problematic.
0:12:07.2 Michael Fasanello: We're going to be seeing this type of activity or arguably not seeing it as I was saying earlier, it's going to be occurring over days months, and even potentially years depending on how much of this money needs to move and how quickly they need to move it. But when you're looking at blockchain and crypto, you're taking a system of transporting money across borders. Things that used to take days and weeks is now taking minutes. I think that we would be fooling ourselves to say Putin and his cronies or other nefarious actors that are sanctioned can't use crypto to evade the sanctions. In fact, riddle me this, why is the Treasury Department striking so quickly and so heavily at the crypto industry and at other rails, human rails and other things that are being used in traditional finance, why are they striking so hard at that, if they in fact aren't also usable by the other side.
0:13:00.2 Rich Goldberg: Talk about hunting down oligarch assets. That was an announcement joint between United States, Europe, other countries joining this coalition, this task force to track down Oligarch assets belonging to these Russian oligarchs. How do you do that, what does that actually look like in the cryptocurrency space?
0:13:17.2 Michael Fasanello: In a larger space, not just crypto, but in a larger space, it's just a matter of tracking down all of the tangible assets related to these individuals. In the crypto space, it would be a matter of taking wallet addresses that contain... Which should be large amounts of money in the case of oligarchs, and somehow being able to attribute the PII-the personally identifiable information, the name, address, date of birth, etcetera, to those addresses. And that is what takes a substantial amount of time and very careful curation of data because you have to really be looking through the touch points between basically compliant entities where these people would have to have given their true identities and then the touch points with those entities, with those KYC and other things like that with crypto.
0:14:04.8 Michael Fasanello: So you're trying to basically find where the pseudo anonymity involved in crypto gets tainted by the true KYC information when those crypto addresses go through or flow through compliance services. And that's why this is so difficult, and this is also another reason why I argue, you know, people are fooling themselves if they think crypto can't be used to evade sanctions. You can set up wallet addresses, you can set up addresses on a ledger Nano or things. You don't have to go through the exchanges. You can work with crypto, you can get into the system, you can place your money. We've talked about money laundering, placement, layering and integration. You can place your money into the financial system very easily without using exchange, so I'm just... It bewilders me when people say crypto can't be used for Putin and his cronies in a sense.
0:14:56.3 Rich Goldberg: When the EU says, "We're going to take measures to counter Russian sanctions of Asian and digital assets", and when Treasury puts out a letter to ask for help from the industry, what steps can you take actually, that could curtail sanctions evasion? What rules, what regulations could be imposed on wallet providers or exchanges that would actually prevent a lot of this from happening? Or is it just not possible, given just how the technology works.
0:15:26.2 Michael Fasanello: Well for the on-chain activity and for the compliant exchanges, it's very easy. It's things that we've been... The industry has been arguing in favor of this type of appropriately scoped regulation for years now, and it's been debated in Congress as recently as a couple of weeks ago. Working towards implementing the very anti money laundering sanctions and counter... Was it finance regulations and compliance obligations that have been in place for traditional finance for decades? And it's been perfected for decades in traditional finance, and that's where we should be looking to develop that foundation for compliance in the digital asset space. And if it's done carefully and if it's narrowly tailored and appropriately focused, we won't be stifling innovation and a lot of things that the crypto purists sort of fear. When I say crypto purists, or crypto evangelists as we like to call them also, these are the guys that want to be free from all government surveillance, all government control.
0:16:28.7 Rich Goldberg: Truly decentralized, truly anonymous, yeah.
0:16:31.6 Michael Fasanello: Correct. And they're never going to be truly satisfied with a mainstream crypto system because for crypto to go main stream, to be able to order a cappuccino from Starbucks, it has to be regulated because Starbucks isn't going to get into it, and big banks aren't going to get into it if it doesn't have the type of credibility and the type of oversight that governments can bring. But looking at what those crypto evangelists are hoping for out of digital assets, there's going to be two different parallel financial systems in crypto. You're going to have the compliance exchanges and the more traditionalized financial payment rails, and then you're going to have, not really a shady, it's not going to be like privacy coins in the dark web, but just an alternate rail where people are using decentralized finance because they want to do with their money what they want to when they want. Now that is definitely a payment rail that people like Vladimir Putin and his oligarchy can use to evade sanctions. They can't do it through the compliance and the more on chain transparence payment rails, but they can do it in the DeFi space, they can do it through laundering NFTS, they can do it through transferring large amounts of crypto from one un-hosted wallet address in Russia to another un-hosted wallet address in Venezuela as payment for, receiving payment for example, barrels of oil.
0:17:54.5 Rich Goldberg: Is the only way to deal with that... So I understand if more exchanges, if more wallet providers go mainstream as you say, embrace regulation, embrace robust compliance procedures, really sort of strip away the purist anonymity that crypto is supposed to have in the name of counter counter-threat finance and anti-money laundering. But you have this other rail as you're talking about, does the other rail just need to get banned? It needs to be sanctioned hard? Did anybody who was attached to it needs to be fined, in prison or whatever it is? How do you deal with the fact that Vladimir Putin, Venezuela, Iran or North Korea is going to use that other rail?
0:18:38.0 Michael Fasanello: I laugh but I'm not laughing at you or at that proposition, I'm laughing at the absurdity of people generally thinking that they can control the DeFi space. That's almost like saying, "Tomorrow we're going to shut down the internet." Unless some gigantic worldwide energy crisis happens, we're not shutting down the internet any time soon and we're not controlling the DeFi space anytime soon. You can ban them all you want, you can put them on as many black lists or grey lists as you want, you're not going to be able to fully strike a death blow essentially to the heart of people using DeFi and to the DeFi space itself. I never want to be out there encouraging illicit activity or putting, throwing my support behind these types of regimes and these type of wars of choice and things like that. But you have to step back for a minute and acknowledge the beauty of the system that enables... Now realize, it works both ways, these illicit actors can use this for all types of nefarious purposes and to evade sanctions to basically shut out the rule of law, if you will.
0:19:42.6 Michael Fasanello: But in the same sense, this, the beauty of this activity and the structure and this technology is in countries where these types of rulers are oppressing their people, this is a lifeline for the general citizen, for the average person, provided they have access to the internet. Provided they have access to a mobile phone or a computer or some sort of on and offramp, they can use this to bring some freedom and some normalcy into what would otherwise be a very daunting situation under their governance.
0:20:13.8 Rich Goldberg: It's an interesting concept you bring up, I've heard other people talk about this privately. It needs a lot more flushing out clearly, but the idea of some sort of Treasury Department OFAC licensing for the use of cryptocurrency to support freedom democracy movements, resistance movements, maybe covert actions at some point, I would imagine with the CIA others. If Ukraine falls into Russian hands, as we fear it may in the coming days and weeks, could this be a path to supporting a Ukrainian resistance, for instance?
0:20:47.7 Michael Fasanello: Yes, absolutely. If people think that we haven't been, for example, paying confidential informants, if they think that CIA hasn't been paying people that they want to do certain things in certain countries and not get caught paying them... This has been arguably going on for years. I never usually like to speculate, but I think that to speculate otherwise would be probably very impossible. Regulatory agencies are already looking at the potential for paying whistleblowers in crypto and accepting payment for fines in crypto and so if they're looking at it from that aspect, I think that shadow agencies like the CIA and NSA aren't using it to facilitate their operations, they're cloaking our operations overseas. I think people would be a little bit naive.
0:21:35.5 Rich Goldberg: You spent a lot of time in the counter terror finance world, sanctions compliance world. We've seen some wallet seizures announced, some sanctions announced, Treasury has had a couple of the sanctions actions, the Israelis have seized wallets. I think that belong to Hamas, there was a Wall Street Journal report a few weeks to go on the Taliban looking crypto... How concerned should we be on the terrorist network use of crypto... We talked a lot about state actors right now, what about the terrorist networks and how we should think about coping with a world of sort of crypto terrorism as well?
0:22:12.9 Michael Fasanello: No, it's a really good point. Then that's exactly why I think the Canadian government, and I'm not going to throw a support or a detraction away from, in one sense or another, politically, that situation, but the fact that they weaponized anti-money laundering statutes and their financial intelligence units and their regulators, and they weaponized that against people that were exercising civil disobedience and one side of a very political argument, as far as the health concerns and things like that, so to see that type of leveraging of this technology by governments, against people that are arguably not terrorists, they're maybe considered domestic terrorists in one sense, or another by certain parties, but we know there's a very stark difference between people blocking off Our borders and using trucks to block through ways and things like that, versus people blowing up buildings and blowing up IEDs in the middle of squares where women and children are shopping in the Central Market, okay. There's a large... There's clarity between those two things, and so to see the Canadian government operationalizing and weaponizing these types of tools against citizens, and it worked to an extent so that the same thing can be done, so for other types of foreigner terrorism on domestic soil.
0:23:40.7 Rich Goldberg: The industry's line you talked a little bit about KYC before, know your customer, for those that didn't catch that earlier, the industry's line has been... This is in the US. We're subject to KYC rules just like everybody else, we're complying. But the question I think a lot of people ask that you don't get a better answer is, are you actually building the compliance infrastructure internally inside your company to be able to flag a list of transactions to be able to have the resources to bring to bear to actually interdict before there's a problem, the way the banks have been doing for years now, especially post 9-11... What's the answer to that?
0:24:17.0 Michael Fasanello: I think the answer is that regulators need to start understanding the technology and understanding the ways their regulations and guidance and enforcement needs to be tailored to this technology such that they understand the difference between having a compliance program and having an effective compliance program. You can check boxes off all day long, I have a vendor that provides blockchain analytics, yeah, I have a compliance officer. Yes, we have a compliance team and we train them on a regular basis. But if those things aren't done efficiently and effectively, what's the point in having it? Right? So these regulars, they want to be looking at the quality of the vendors in compliance, they want to understand who's the best in the field, who's the worst in the field, if you're checking out the boxes and you're using the cheapest, and arguably the least quality vendors... Is your compliance program really as effective as it can be? And the answer is no. So in those cases, I think that the onus is on regulators to really narrowly tailor these obligations to the point where entities and institutions that we want to regulate for one reason or another aren't just complying, they're actually being effective in national security and informing all sorts of various activity.
0:25:28.7 Rich Goldberg: We talked a lot in our last couple of episodes about the Federal Reserve eyeing the Central Bank digital currency concept. Other countries looking at this as well... Obviously the opposite of DeFis, as we've learned on the show so far, truly centralized cryptocurrency, but I would imagine if that became mainstream, that would provide enormous power to government regulators to use existing government resources to help track the use of a digital dollar in the money laundering space.
0:26:05.5 Michael Fasanello: Yeah, absolutely, and that's arguably... That's why the Treasury Department and the White House have been so focused on stable coins and CBDCs in the last month or so, because I think they're realizing that two things, one is the more people that they can get to convert from the dollar system Fiat currency system to a central bank, digital currency, or a highly regulated, stable coin, basically approved by the government... The more people that use those, the more control those governments can maintain and exercise over its people. If people start to use true cryptocurrencies in the DeFi space, they're losing a substantial piece of control in the financial system that they enjoy today and years before crypto came into existence.
0:26:53.6 Rich Goldberg: You were in government treasury at FinCEN, OFAC. You probably have a lot of contacts still in government. When you look across the various government bureaucracies that are responsible traditionally for interdicting money laundering, for monitoring, for preventing, for responding in law enforcement, in the Treasury Department, in the intelligence community, do we have offices set up at this point that are crypto specialists, as you call them? Do we have crypto teams now? Do we have bureaus that are just crypto focused? It feels like that's necessary, that there needed to be a lot of money put into recruitment of people with the specialty to say, "Okay, here's how we've done it for banks. Here's how we've done it for everything post 9/11 till now. And here's how the way we do business needs to change for crypto." And if you don't have that resident expertise in there always learning, always looking at things, if they're just in the industry, then government is just never gonna get it.
0:27:55.0 Michael Fasanello: Yeah, and I totally agree with you on that. And they have been implementing task forces in tips of the spear. FinCEN, a year ago, 2021, they announced their senior virtual assets, chief senior advisor. The justice department has come out with their own virtual currency task force, so these things are building. It's just that I think that the ships need to all be sailing in the same direction. And so what we were waiting for, in fact, last week or weeks ago, before all the Russo-Ukrainian conflict just exploded, the Biden administration was supposed to be releasing an executive order to basically give clarity and guidance to all the different regulatory and enforcement agencies involved in the digital asset space. I think, arguably, that's now been put on the back burner, but the more crypto becomes a concern in the evasion of sanctions and things like that, I think that they'll realize how we need to get that executive order out there. We need to get these regulatory agencies and enforcement agencies all working together on this. And so what you really wanna see is after 9/11, and we saw the great weaknesses that were prevalent and the data gaps and information sharing gaps that were prevalent in the IC community, in the intelligence community.
0:29:12.0 Michael Fasanello: And so, thereafter, the United States Congress implemented, of course, the Director of Digital National Intelligence, the DDNI. And so we need that in the digital asset space. We need to have somebody like Gary Gensler, for example, who comes from a technology background, who understands the ins and outs of this technology, but isn't shackled by the regulatory and statutory parameters of the jurisdiction of their office. He is in the SEC right now. We've seen him obviously flexing his muscles day in and day out with regulating quasi-securities and crypto assets by enforcement, because Congress hasn't acted on it and because his agency hasn't developed policies and procedures and the rules to provide that kind of guidance. He's been left with the enforcements aspect of it. So to take him out of that, and then you put him in that tip-of-the-spear role where he can work with FinCEN, he can work with treasury, he can work with OFAC with sanctions, and the CFTC and all these different stakeholders in digital assets, I think that's what they need. They need, pun intended in this case, they need a crypto czar. They need a digital-assets czar to be able to really refine their regulatory and enforcement approach.
0:30:29.6 Rich Goldberg: DDNI is what I just heard. A DDNI, the Director for Digital National Intelligence.
0:30:35.7 Michael Fasanello: There you go.
0:30:36.3 Rich Goldberg: They just invented a new role, I love that. I love that.
0:30:39.2 Michael Fasanello: You heard your first books. [chuckle]
0:30:42.2 Rich Goldberg: Alright, well, let's move to the lightning round here. We ask these of all our guests as our regular listeners know, so we're going to hit you with... They're really sort of binary questions, but if you feel a binary answer would not suit, then you are welcome to expand briefly. Okay, cryptocurrency...
0:31:00.2 Michael Fasanello: What's a binary answer? No, I'm just kidding? [chuckle]
0:31:02.6 Rich Goldberg: Well, yeah, yeah. Well, we're in the digital space, ones and zeros, ones and zeros. Okay.
0:31:07.8 Michael Fasanello: There you go.
0:31:08.4 Rich Goldberg: Cryptocurrency, future or future footnote?
0:31:14.0 Michael Fasanello: Future.
0:31:15.6 Rich Goldberg: Opportunity or threat?
0:31:18.7 Michael Fasanello: Both.
0:31:20.2 Rich Goldberg: Long, short or stay away?
0:31:25.0 Michael Fasanello: Long.
0:31:25.8 Rich Goldberg: More regulation or less?
0:31:29.2 Michael Fasanello: A blend would be great.
0:31:30.4 Rich Goldberg: And do you know who Satoshi is?
0:31:34.7 Michael Fasanello: Yes, Satoshi is me. [laughter]
0:31:35.2 Rich Goldberg: Oh, I'm Satoshi. Excellent.
0:31:38.9 Michael Fasanello: If you can be... If you can be anything, I'd like to be Batman, right? No, I wish I was Satoshi Nakamoto and I could control this whole beautiful experiment, but, no.
0:31:47.2 Rich Goldberg: There is The Batman now, and so there should be The Satoshi.
0:31:51.9 Michael Fasanello: There you go.
0:31:52.6 Rich Goldberg: Well, that was a very timely conversation, obviously. I send my prayers, me and my family, to the people of Ukraine as they continue in this fight against Putin's invasion, really thinking about them. But great opportunity for us to dive into the cryptocurrency angles of this conflict, what it means for cryptocurrency for good and for bad, extrapolate into other parts of the world into the future, and what it means for government regulators right now in the United States, also Congress for what they might be thinking of doing next. I would note that we actually have a Substack now set up, so if anybody wants to subscribe to get the actual transcripts of these podcasts in real time as we post, make sure you go to cryptopod.substack.com, cryptopod, just as you would think it sounds and spells. You also can leave comments, if you like, on the Ricochet home page for Cryptonite, ricochet.com/series/cryptonite.
0:32:55.5 Rich Goldberg: You can tweet at me on Twitter @rich_goldberg. Please, we want to hear your feedback. We want to hear your ideas for future episodes. We have a lot more content coming your way. There's so many issues here involved, and I'm already getting great feedback from people who say, "I've been listening to your episodes. I listen to episode one. I'm sending it to everyone I know as the primer on crypto. Keep doing this. It's different than any other podcasts we're listening to. It's getting into the issues in a deeper way to really talk to policy makers, to talk to the community of experts who need to understand what to do next in the world of cryptocurrency." If you're still excited, make sure you're also subscribing on your favorite podcast app. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and most importantly, tell your friends because that's the best recommendation we can get. Until next time, I'm Rich Goldberg, and this is Cryptonite.