Weekly Roundup 08/14/26 (Anti-Datacenter sentiment, dinosaur fossil investing, SEC is DIYing Clarity) (EP.734)

Anti-datacenter sentiment has become politically popular across party lines, with Tucker Carlson and Sherrod Brown both voicing opposition. Brown is running again in Ohio on an anti-datacenter platform, a shift from his prior anti-crypto positioning, and Ohio has seen significant power price increases tied to PJM capacity auctions partly driven by datacenter demand. Nick Carter argues this sentiment is largely an expression of anxiety over tech wealth inequality and Silicon Valley asset price booms rather than factual concerns, and identifies political risk from this sentiment as the primary threat to the AI capital expenditure buildout.

The Clarity Act did not pass before the Senate went on recess. Senate Majority Leader John Thune scheduled a cloture vote for September 15th, though a successful cloture vote requires 60 votes and only allows the Senate to move the bill forward for further debate rather than passing it outright. The bill probably does not have the requisite 60 votes as of the recording date, with Trump's financial involvement in crypto and ethics language remaining central obstacles. Senator Mike Lee of Utah has been pushing to eliminate the filibuster for months, arguing the Clarity Act would already be law without it. A no vote is expected to carry political cost for senators given the crypto industry's influence heading into the midterm elections.

The SEC announced an open meeting on August 14th to consider proposing new rules for a tailored offering regime for investments involving crypto assets, effectively taking the rulemaking path to enact parts of the Clarity Act rather than waiting for legislation. Because the SEC currently has a pro-crypto balance of power at the agency level, the rulemaking process may produce language more favorable to the crypto industry than the legislation itself. Key areas expected to be addressed include clarity for protocols issuing assets, how a token achieves commodity status, the process for launching layer one and layer two tokens, and clarity on tokenized real world assets. The rulemaking is expected to incorporate concepts from SEC Chair Atkins's March speech titled Regulation of Crypto Assets, A Token Safe Harbor.

The SEC granted Franklin Templeton a no action letter clearing the way for its funds to custody shares of their on-chain money market fund Benji through an affiliate transfer agent for cash management purposes. Coinbase won a license in Abu Dhabi from the financial regulator to build an international tokenized securities hub that will issue equities fully backed by underlying shares, with token holders receiving dividends and voting rights and requiring only a wallet rather than a brokerage or bank relationship. The Abu Dhabi model was described as the type of market structure the Clarity Act and better SEC rulemaking are attempting to create in the United States.

FinCEN ended beneficial ownership reporting under the Corporate Transparency Act and will delete ownership data already filed, cutting the number of companies required to identify their owners from 32 million to 20,000. The CFTC invoked emergency authority to order Kalshi to keep operating in New York after the New York AG sued to shut it down. The CFTC also charged Goliath Ventures and its CEO Christopher Delgado of Florida with running a Ponzi scheme, alleging the firm took 397 million dollars from 1,600 customers for Bitcoin and Ether trading and misappropriated all of it. The episode noted that Ponzi schemes generally cannot be gracefully wound down, referencing Ruja Ignatova of OneCoin, who ran a scheme in the billions and remains missing and possibly deceased, and Darren Robinson of FX firm QYU Holdings, who raised 100 million dollars over 13 years and has been on the run for approximately two and a half years after cutting off his ankle monitor.

Marathon Digital sold roughly 23,000 Bitcoin worth approximately 1.6 billion dollars in the first half of the year to invest in AI. Bitcoin mining is characterized as a thin margin business because adding any new miner anywhere in the world worsens existing miners' economics, while AI data center and power hosting businesses offer far greater margin opportunity. The more successful domestic Bitcoin miners are described as those that pivoted to AI data centers sooner, with Core Scientific cited as a small miner in 2021 that is now a large AI company.

North Korea's state-backed group Kimsuky was identified as using offline local AI models to generate polished phishing documents targeting crypto. The episode argued that major AI labs will eventually have to loosen restrictions on model access because current limitations cut off too much legitimate security capability. Natural diamond prices have collapsed significantly due to lab-grown diamonds that are visually identical to natural diamonds, severely harming Botswana, where natural diamonds represented approximately 30 percent of GDP. The Lakers were acquired by Kushner and Bob Iger for over 12 billion dollars, up from approximately 10 billion dollars the prior year, with sports franchises described as a good barbell strategy against high-growth tech exposure because of physical world cultural resonance regardless of how technology changes.