Brannin McBee (Core Weave) on Greening the Grid, the Texas Meltdown, and Bitcoin Mining (EP.183)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Release Date: 02/22/2021
Weekly Roundup 07/17/26 (Teleprompter insider trading, the AI DeFi apocalypse fizzles, NY’s datacenter ban) (EP.730)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with the deals and news of the week. In this episode: Nic licks his World Cup wounds Do Bitcoin Treasury strategies make sense? Trying to make sense of Saylor’s “bitcoin rating” Trump’s teleprompter operator has been trading on what Trump is going to say in his speeches Why do people keep insider trading on prediction markets? Clarity Act odds are trickling down Strategy shores up their balance sheet Is the Bitcoin cycle finally turning? Stripe bids for Paypal The AI DeFi apocalypse didn’t happen Kathy Hochul’s AI datacenter moratorium Why is Anthropic...
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 07/09/26 (BonkDAO exploit, Choke Point 2.0 extended to audit firms, Kraken v Mazars) (EP.729)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: Strategy sells $216m worth of BTC Where does Strategy go from here with STRC? Kalshi’s case faces the ban of sports contracts in NY TeraWulf signs a massive lease with Anthropic BonkDAO’s legal hack Vanguard hires a head of digital assets Kraken wins arbitration against Mazars for de-auditing them in 2022 Vitalik lays out a new four year plan Polymarket’s 5 minute BTC markets are being manipulated Content mentioned:
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 07/03/26 (OpenUSD announced, Binance leaves the EU, Strategy’s new framework) (EP.728)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: Saylor releases Strategy’s “Digital Credit Capital Framework” MSTR stabilizes for now though STRC is still discounted Is Saylor transitioning MSTR into a Bitcoin hedge fund? Is Strategy doing anything tricky with their mNAV calculation The OpenUSD consortium is announced Is the Tether and Circle duopoly broken? Can stablecoin consortiums work? What could cause OpenUSD to fail? Trump's 2025 diclosures include a lot of crypto Binance leaves the EU for now The K-pop DAT ends its digital asset...
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 06/26/26 (Quantum EOs, STRC's selloff, more MSTR) (EP.727)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Our recording snafu STRC's depeg explained Saylor's path forward Why Strategy's issue is the converts Polymarket's questionable marketing Trump's Quantum EOs
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 06/19/26 (STRC under pressure, Illinois’ crypto tax, Open weight AI vs the AI boom) (EP.726)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back for a week of news and deals. In this episode: The Tartan Army takes over Boston Europeans are shocked that American infrastructure works STRC falls into the low $80s STRC’s liquidation cascade mechanics What are Saylor’s options now? Is the US right to put the brakes on Fable? Will open weight models puncture the AI boom? Are we living in a vulnerable world? Kristin Gillebrand’s son raises $30m for a perps exchange Make sure your tokenized equity provider has the equity Why aren’t publishers doing pay per content Content mentioned: Nick Bostrom, ...
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 06/12/26 (Strategy survives, Zcash Orchard bug, the thin model hypothesis) (EP.725)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with a new week of news and deals. In this episode: Spanish soccer club Osasuna hedges their relegation on Kalshi Strategy shocks people by buying the dip Is Strategy sacrificing MSTR to save STRC? Saylor bolsters his cash position What factors are dragging on the BTC price? Zcash fixes a scary inflation bug SBF formally applies for a Presidential pardon The CFTC proposes banning a subset of prediction market contracts Polymarket thinks that Kalshi is spying on them European fans in America for the World Cup are discovering Buc-ees The DATs are struggling Hester...
info_outline
Omid Malekan (Columbia Business School) on Private Money, Financial Systems, and Crypto in Geopolitics (EP.724)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Wyatt sits down with Omid Malekan, a Professor at Columbia Business School, author of several books, and "Explainer-in-Chief" of blockchain technology. In this episode, Wyatt and Omid discuss: Why do stablecoins carry a persisent sense of being "dangerous" or "ungovernable? Are stablecoins truly private money? How do we define private money? Who owns our current banking and payment systems? Why do banks vocally oppose stablecoins? Who will own and control digital money networks? Are blockchains the right medium for digital finance over the long term? Is digital trust a problem?
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 06/05/26 (MSTR wobbles, Polymarket’s MSTR market, Andrew Left convicted) (EP.723)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: FIFA’s World Cup ticketing scandal Andrew Yang is now a crypto and telecoms entrepreneur Are Strategy’s woes responsible for the Bitcoin pullback? Will Saylor defend STRC or MSTR? What are Saylor’s options here? Polymarket has another market resolution SNAFU How UMA could be used to exploit Polymarket BitMine considers a perpetual preferred security Google’s quantum circuit is Galaxy launches OTC trading for prediction markets Treasury sanctions Iran’s largest digital asset exchanges Andrew Left of...
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 05/29/26 (Was debanking real, SoFiUSD, WSJ gets free banks wrong, trouble in ETHland) (EP.722)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: The CEO of Lead bank says debanking was made up Which aspects of debanking were real? The SEC scraps its 50-year-old gag rule The WSJ gets free banking history wrong in their attack on stablecoins What does history tell us about decentralized monetary issuance Why stablecoins aren’t vulnerable to the same issues as free banks SoFi launches SoFiUSD and mixes a stablecoin with a tokenized deposit Sentiment is bottoming in Ethereum David Hoffman sells his ETH Are stablecoins parasitic to L1s Can L1s accrue value...
info_outline
Weekly Roundup 05/22/26 (AI and power bills, SpaceX IPO, Prime Trust clawbacks, USG invests in quantum) (EP.721)
On The Brink with Castle Island
Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode: Are AI datacenters better or worse for the environment than Bitcoin miners? AI is not responsible for your power bills Why AI could actually drive down residential power prices Is AI less popular than crypto ever was? The negative societal effects of tech companies staying private for longer We analyze the SpaceX S1 OpenAI solved one of the Erdos problems The US government is taking equity stakes in quantum computers Jane Street is still dealing with the Terra fallout Prime Trust is trying to claw back assets...
info_outlineCore Weave chief strategy officer and former energy trader Brannin McBee joins the show to talk about the grid meltdown in Texas and the impact of renewables on the grid. In this episode:
- Brannin's history in energy trading and energy analytics
- How his firm survived a 95% collapse in the price of natural gas – and how that presaged his work in the crypto space
- How Brannin's firm Core Weave alternates between mining ETH and monetizing GPUs through high-performance compute
- How wholesale power trading works – and how it provides valuable informational signals to the grid
- How the US grid is arranged – and how the energy mix has changed in the last decade
- How coal has been marginalized in the last decade through natural gas and renewables
- Why energy is not globally fungible
- Why forecasting wind is so difficult – and how that complicates including wind into the grid
- How renewables trade off reliability against carbon impact
- How increasing the share of wind and solar destabilizing the grid
- Why increasing units of wind requires new units of gas on the grid
- The confluence of causes behind the Texas grid failure last week
- How Core Weave selected their location on the grid – and how they took political risk into account
- How much energy Bitcoin consumes – and where that stands relative to the energy consumption of the US
- How flaring natural gas to mine Bitcoin works – and whether it's economical
- Does Bitcoin work as a load balancer for grids?
- Can you compare Bitcoin's footprint to that of entire countries?