The Commoner

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Sup, freaks.

Google wants to custody bitcoin for banks, and the NYSE's parent wants to bring Hyperliquid perps onshore. Here's what you give up when you let Google hold the keys.

WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Google previews a bitcoin-compatible MPC custody system for banks.
• No, you don't have unilateral control of your keys with Google's MPC. Here's how it compares to multisig.
• ICE and Stan Druckenmiller back trade[XYZ] to bring 24/7 Hyperliquid perps onshore.
• coolerwave's iPhone audit, Warsh's new Fed calendar, Google's search inflection, bitcoin loans vs. HELOCs and Keonne's Letter #8.
• Wasabi 2.8.5 hardens itself against malicious servers.

Marty's Bent

Google and the NYSE's Owner Are Rebuilding the Rails

If you want to know where the incumbent financial system is headed, look at what two of its biggest players did over the last 24 hours. On Wednesday, Google hosted bankers at Pier 57 in New York to preview a custody system for digital assets. This morning, Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange, announced it's bringing 24/7 perpetual futures built on Hyperliquid to the United States, and Stan Druckenmiller announced he's an investor in the company it's partnering with. This is a tale of institutional adoption, and it's moving faster than the people in Washington who were supposed to write the rules for it.

Let's start with Google. The product is called Multi-party Compute. It's a threshold signing service. Instead of one private key sitting on one device, the key is generated in pieces, called shares, that live in separate hardware enclaves. No single machine ever holds the whole key, and transactions get signed when enough of the shares agree. According to CoinDesk, it's in private preview with design partners and major financial institutions, and Google is targeting commercial availability in early 2027. Speakers from Morgan Stanley, Citi, Wells Fargo and OKX were on the program, per Cointelegraph.

It's very interesting to see this level of institutional backing. And it does look like Google made sure its MPC works with bitcoin, which is good to see. It supports the signature scheme bitcoin uses, Google wrote a dedicated guide to institutional bitcoin custody and its policy engine can read partially signed bitcoin transactions. That said, I think Google will probably lean into asset tokenization on chains like Ethereum and Solana. Alphabet's own internal use of the system is on Ethereum and Solana, not bitcoin.

Now for the trade-offs, because everybody should understand them. I wanted to confirm whether you have unilateral control of your funds with Google's MPC. You don't. In the preview, per Google's architecture documentation, the key shares sit in enclaves on Google Cloud. Shares held in enclaves that customers run outside Google Cloud, like AWS, and shares held on users' phones are listed as planned for later releases. Every signing request goes through Google's API, and Google's coordinator orchestrates the signing. The coordinator holds no shares, but the system is built so the complete private key is never assembled in one place, which means there's no seed to back up and no key to take elsewhere. Keys can't be deleted, only disabled. If too many shares are lost, Google warns that "the system eventually loses the shared secret permanently," and the feature that would let you replace a lost share is planned for a later release. To be fair, Google says it has no access to unencrypted key shares. But the key doesn't exist anywhere outside a system Google runs.

Compare that to native bitcoin script. A 2-of-3 multisig puts the quorum on chain, where anyone can verify it. You can hold those keys on hardware from different manufacturers, in different places, and fire any vendor without asking anybody for permission. An MPC key looks like a single signature on the blockchain. The rules about who can spend live in Google's software. Even then, the automated policies are only advisory. In Google's own words, "a transaction that the automated transaction policies deny can still be executed if enough Signers approve it."

The line in the bitcoin guide that tells you everything about how institutions view this is the one about seed phrases. Google writes that BIP32 "was designed around the constraints of individual self-custody before threshold cryptography and hardware enclaves became widely available," and that "a human-readable root mnemonic seed isn't required." That's the institutional worldview in a sentence. The trust moves off a seed you control and onto Google's code, its hardware partners and your Google Cloud account. This is obviously not the ideal way to secure bitcoin if you want to eliminate trusted third parties from your life.

However, Google getting into the custody game is very interesting. It's validation, and a clear fundamental signal that there's a ton of room to the upside for bitcoin to grow.

Then there's ICE. This morning's announcement is a definitive agreement with trade[XYZ], which runs perpetual futures markets on Hyperliquid referencing stocks, indices, commodities and currencies. ICE will be the exclusive operator of trade[XYZ]'s regulated markets, and the two will build a new market and clearing structure on Hyperliquid aimed at retail traders, subject to regulatory approvals. ICE is also making a strategic investment in trade[XYZ], and the contracts are expected to be offered through ICE's joint venture with OKX. ICE says its participation today is more than 99% institutional, so this is a big push into retail. According to trade[XYZ], its markets on Hyperliquid have done more than $650 billion in volume in just over a year. Druckenmiller put it simply:

"I am excited to be an investor in trade(xyz) as they partner with ICE to bring 24/7 perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to the United States."

Everything is pointing toward a re-architecting of the incumbent financial and banking system, particularly around trading. This ties into the thesis we've been running for a long time on the Ten31 Timestamp, and the case John Arnold has been making all year. There's no stopping this train. The CLARITY Act failed a procedural vote in the Senate in September, 49 to 50, and passage this Congress is now widely viewed as unlikely. It doesn't seem to matter. Google is building custody for banks, the NYSE's parent is building perps on Hyperliquid and the CFTC has sent its own crypto rulemaking to the White House for review. Everything is moving ahead full bore.

What's the end game? I think it's an Indiana Jones move. Swap out the idol and hope the trap doesn't spring. Thrust stablecoins onto the market to drive demand for U.S. Treasuries as the foreign buyers begin to wane, and use that to extend dollar hegemony. On this week's Timestamp, John walked through why Bessent compared the GENIUS Act to Lincoln's National Currency Act of 1863. The San Francisco Fed laid out the math in September. Stablecoin issuers' Treasury holdings have grown more than tenfold over the past five years, largely surpassing the growth in foreign governments' T-bill holdings as China's holdings declined. If the trend holds, the SF Fed says their demand for short-term Treasuries could nearly double to about $400 billion by the end of 2030.

So yes, the incumbent tech class is more fascinated with stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization right now. That's okay. I strongly believe bitcoin will be the reserve digital asset of the digital age. Eventually it will be the medium of exchange, and potentially even the chain that real-world assets are delivered to, if they ever find product-market fit. The rails are being rebuilt either way. Make sure you hold the asset that doesn't need any of these companies' permission to exist.

SIGNAL

Your iPhone may be keeping more of you than you think

Over the last week, an X user named coolerwave posted two audits of his iPhone run with Claude Code. The first claimed 145,763 photos and videos he'd permanently deleted were still sitting in a hidden thumbnails cache. The second claimed 12,847 images of his face, each with a timestamp and GPS coordinates, in a Face ID system cache. Nobody has reproduced these findings yet, and RuntimeWire notes Apple says Face ID discards images captured during normal operation. But Apple had to ship iOS 17.5.1 in 2024 because deleted photos "could reappear in the Photos library."

Even with Google validating bitcoin custody, this should be a reminder that big tech can bend us over a barrel. They've built products so convenient that we hand our lives over to them, and regardless of the marketing about privacy, it isn't always respected. This is the double-edged sword of AI. It can be used for surveillance, and it can be used for counter-surveillance, as coolerwave did. Hopefully it leads to more people watching the watchers.

Warsh is changing how often the Fed decides rates

The Fed held rates at 3.75% to 4% yesterday in a 10 to 2 vote, with Lisa Cook and Beth Hammack dissenting in favor of a hike. The more interesting news came at the press conference. Warsh announced the FOMC will change its meeting schedule starting next fall. "In 2027, one meeting will focus exclusively on broad monetary policy strategy, with neither a vote on the federal funds rate nor a policy statement anticipated," he said. In 2028, he expects two strategy meetings and six rate-setting meetings. Same eight meetings a year, with fewer chances to move rates. His reasoning is that the Fed needs time for "strategic deliberations," for "thinking anew about big questions." A new chair is changing the institution's calendar on the go. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of meetings with no vote and no statement, and who gets to see it.

Has the LLM hit to Google search finally arrived?

People have wondered for years when Google's ad business would take a real hit from people using LLMs as search engines. I think Q3 may have been that point. Search revenue rose 12% to $63.35 billion, down from 14.5% growth a year ago. Google's chief business officer blamed "lower monetization we were seeing in AI Mode," and the stock fell almost 10%, per The Register. Free cash flow was negative $9.07 billion, the second negative quarter in a row, as capex hit $51.4 billion.

Max Anderson, who says he's spent $500,000 a month or more on Google Ads for years, has a thread worth reading from July alleging that Google dropped its second-price auction, loosened "exact match" targeting onto garbage queries and let $1,000 daily budgets spend $2,000 or more. "This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes," he writes. Those are his claims, not Google's. Either way, this is a pivotal inflection point for Google's business model, and for how humanity interacts with the internet.

Bitcoin loans need to beat HELOCs

On TFTC 804 with Matthew Mezinskis, I said I'm seeing more competition in bitcoin lending and that it could catalyze the next adoption wave. Bitcoin-backed lenders should be competing to drive rates below HELOC rates as quickly as possible. Once that happens, bitcoin becomes irresistible for a large swath of capital. The average HELOC is at 7.36% per Bankrate. Per Ledn's October comparison, its own loans run 9.25% to 11.49% APR at 50% LTV, and SALT advertises 8.75%, or 7.49% if you borrow only 30% of your collateral's value.

Bitcoin is better collateral than a house. It trades 24/7, it's marked to market every second and it can be liquidated in minutes instead of a year in foreclosure court. Rates should come down as lenders compete. Just know your liquidation price before you borrow.

Keonne Rodriguez's Letter #8: 29 days in transit

Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez published Letter #8 from prison this week. It covers his transfer from FCI Morgantown this summer: 13 days at the federal transit center in Oklahoma City, then 18 days at USP Lewisburg, locked in a cell 23 hours a day, where he learned his grandmother had died. In Oklahoma, "no drinking cups were provided nor were any drinking water fountains, so I drank water from a lukewarm tap by cupping my hands and bringing them up to my mouth."

He arrived at FCI McKean in northern Pennsylvania on July 9. "Twenty nine days after I first set off I had finally arrived, four hours away from where I started." All of this for writing privacy software. Read it, and sign the petition to pardon him and Bill Hill.

⚡ FREEDOM TECH CORNER

DATA SNAPSHOT

Spot price, block height and hashrate estimate: October 29, 2026, 9:29 a.m. ET. Bitcoin Lab daily series: October 28, 2026. U.S. spot ETF flows: October 28, 2026.

Sources: Kraken spot quote, mempool.space block height and hashrate, Bitcoin Lab daily metrics, and TFTC ETF flows. Daily metrics use the provider’s October 28 observation, not live intraday estimates.

Talk tomorrow, freaks.

Marty Bent · TFTC · Nostr

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