Weekly Roundup 07/17/26 (Teleprompter insider trading, the AI DeFi apocalypse fizzles, NY's datacenter ban) (EP.730)

Gabriel Perez, described as Trump's teleprompter operator of roughly a decade, allegedly used advance knowledge of speech content to trade prediction markets and made over one hundred thousand dollars. He reportedly backed out of bets mid-speech when Trump deviated from the script and is now negotiating with the CFTC. Speakers characterized the conduct as effectively insider trading regardless of legal label, and Matt Walsh argued that prediction markets structurally incentivize employees to steal employer information, meaning similar scandals will recur as long as prediction markets exist.

Polymarket odds on the CLARITY Act peaked near 75 percent, fell to the low 30s, and had recovered to around 45 percent at the time of the episode. The ethics provision was originally drafted to target Trump's sons, and Lindsey Graham's passing and Mitch McConnell's hospitalization were cited as factors weighing on passage odds. Speakers believe the market movements reflect information from insiders close to the negotiations.

Strategy raised 467 million dollars last week through at-the-money common equity offerings. Its preferred stock remains below par at 85 dollars, though speakers see no immediate forced liquidation risk. Michael Saylor introduced a self-defined metric called Bitcoin rating with no publicly documented methodology, scoring STRF at 11.0x and rating both iBit and MSTR at 1.0x. Speakers suggested the chart is designed to promote Strategy products over BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. Bitcoin itself rallied on a positive CPI print during the week, and traders respected by the speakers believe the cycle is turning, though the speakers reject the four-year cycle framework while acknowledging that metrics may suggest a bottoming.

Crypto.com raised 400 million dollars from Citadel Securities at a 20 billion dollar valuation. Nick Carter noted the company survived a period when lending was very risky, which few exchanges managed. Matt Walsh cautioned that later-stage rounds led by Citadel tend to be highly structured and may include put rights on preferred shares. Stripe and Advent International submitted an unsolicited bid for PayPal at 53 billion dollars, a 28 percent premium to market cap. Speakers described PayPal as horribly mismanaged over 15 years and suggested the deal could give Advent a large stake in Stripe ahead of its IPO. Orange Juice raised 40 million dollars from EgoDust Capital and Ricardo Salinas, but Matt Walsh argued its model of acquiring cash-flowing businesses and installing Bitcoin treasury strategies effectively zeroes out the balance sheet because Bitcoin has no yield and cash is neither reinvested nor returned as dividends.

Hasib posted data showing annualized DeFi hacks in 2026 running at 1.89 billion dollars versus 2.5 billion dollars in 2025, suggesting the anticipated AI DeFi hackpocalypse was a false alarm. Speakers acknowledged the improvement but noted that 2 percent of total value locked being hacked annually remains intolerably high. Ostium was exploited for 18 million dollars during the period, likely due to an Oracle bug triggering payments out of the vault.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul is signing a moratorium on new data centers in the state and announced plans to slow self-driving car rollout. Speakers traced the data center action to a pattern beginning with a Bitcoin mining moratorium linked to activist campaigns against a Seneca Lake power plant, where a permit denial was later found wrongful because the official had been pressured by grassroots groups. Speakers believe the new moratorium is largely ineffective because no one was building data centers in New York anyway, and argued that slowing self-driving cars will statistically result in more deaths with no defensible benefit.

The DTCC began limited production trades for tokenized securities, converting Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs, and US Treasuries into blockchain tokens carrying the same legal rights as the originals, with 40 firms participating including JP Morgan, BlackRock, Goldman, and Vanguard. The run used DTCC's private Hyperledger Besu chain and Canton. Speakers called this more serious than prior decade-long pilots but cautioned these tokens are not the same as tokenized money market funds trading on public Ethereum rails. CBDCs are now federally banned in the United States until 2031 via a clause embedded in the 21st Century Road to Housing Act. T. Rowe Price launched its first multi-token actively managed crypto ETF under the ticker TKNZ with 15 million dollars in AUM, a 75 basis point fee, and exposure to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Binance, Solana, and Hyperliquid, though speakers noted very few crypto hedge funds have persisted five or more years, making active management in this space extremely difficult.