🚨 @tZERO officially registered as a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) by the @CFTC. A DCO is a CFTC-regulated clearinghouse that manages the clearing and settlement of derivatives transactions, including futures, options, and swaps. Next up: approval of pending Designated Contract Market (DCM) license. With both, tZERO could list and clear prediction market and event contracts in-house, on one integrated platform. 👀

Going for a #RidewithMarcus is like packing up your home ($OSTK) and hiring a moving company to drop you off at your new house in a new city ($NXH). The truck driver is new, but he has an expired RV license and also works as a newsman. You’ve been on the road for a while (almost 3 years), but your destination (cashflows, organic growth, profitability!) is still always justtt at the next exit coming up: "we don't lose money. Period. End of story" (company "mandate," Q2'25 call). The driver shows you his map to get there (Q1'25 call): $1.2B revenue, 25% GM, 13% S&M. He says he's about to speed up, "sixty days away" from becoming a growth company (Q1'25 call), with Q4'26 "getting to zero or above" (Q4'25 call)! He tells you your new home will be "asset light but asset smart" (Q1'25 call). You pull off the highway to take a new route (#pillars). He tells you he’s not just here to drive trucks. He calls ahead to have additions installed at the house: a helipad (mortgage brokers), a moat with a drawbridge (F9, $150M), a hot tub (credit union), and a strip mall in the backyard ($TCS, $KIRK, storefronts), and a robot butler named Norm. He has the house repainted ($BYON > $BBBY > $NXH) and moved to a new foundation (NYSE->NASDAQ). He demands a new rate because of how much work the house needed. None of his colleagues are listed on the moving company site and the directors are out to lunch. The truck is now packed with hitchhikers & other people's stuff (shares out: 97M Q3'26 vs. 46M Oct'24). The Zestimate on your new home is down ~90% (share price ‘24: mid-$30s -> $3). He sold your car (Midvale HQ, ~$52M, Dec '24). There's a $137M bill for the strip mall. The moat is off bc of "disciplined capital allocation" (F9 PR, 9/8), but he still needs another ~$50M for gas to keep driving (the company "does need to raise working capital," Wedbush, 9/9). The moat company sues. You check the map: Q2'26: every turn was made correctly (revenue $361M, GM 26.8%, S&M 11.9%), but the GPS says you're still $12M short that quarter (Adj. EBITDA). There's a new ETA: "can become cash flow positive at a point in 2027," once the inventory is on the shelf (Wedbush, 9/9). There's a stranger on the side of the road next to a scooter with its hazards on holding a sign that says $FTHM. The driver tells you to hand him your watch (tZERO) and the "hidden gem" (GrainChain, Wedbush 9/9) that you got from your grandpa. He tells you he won't pawn them: "they're not up for sale" (Wedbush, 9/9). But the stranger knows mortgages & titles, so the "tremendous value" that's "difficult for the market to see" (PR, 9/24) when you it's on your wrist will be easier to see when the the stranger is wearing it on his scooter ("trackable public equity stake"). He doesn’t promote your watch on his website, but sometimes he comments on other watch company’s posts. He proposes a trade: your watch and the remaining bag of gems (the hitchhikers have already taken your other watch and half the bag) for a controlling stake in the scooter. He says it’ll be worth $130M minimum, pending due diligence. Oh, and the stranger gets to keep ~20% of it too. You ask him how this pays for the gas, why you need a scooter, if the stranger will sell it when he needs gas money, how its value suddenly appears on stranger's scooter, why the other cars on the road are shouting don’t do it, why he doesn’t talk about the watch on his website? You don’t hear a response, but he tells the watch company they aren’t selling watches fast enough and he won’t pay to have it serviced like he committed to unless someone else agrees to buy it. Your wife calls. She’s already at the house, but it was graffitied with INTELLIGENCE signs and now everyone in the NEIGHBORHOOD thinks she’s a fed; all she wanted to do was sell towels online and take care of your watch. Time to get $NXH back on the highway, or find a new driver @marcuslemonis.

Update: @tZERO strikes back (9/18) tZERO highlights @Securitize S-1 claims its tokenization tech is "a fundamental shift" that will "materially improve efficiency" and "accelerate innovation." Now that tZERO says that same tech infringes its patents, Securitize tells the court it's just generic "escrow." Patent highlights: '996: requires a two-part cryptographic proof. The destination address and its public key must both be mathematically derivable from the private key that signed the request, preventing transfers to addresses the sender doesn't control. '802: requires compliance rules to live in a smart contract separate from the token itself, so rules can be updated without touching the token's code. Securitize's motion relies on a representative claim that skips this limitation. tZERO also notes that whether these elements were conventional is a factual question, not one a court can decide on a motion to dismiss: 4 of 5 patents already survived Section 101 rejection at the PTO. courtlistener.com/docket/735…