PROOFOFCUSTODY
Scores
Incidents
Learn
About
Get the Report
PROOFOFCUSTODY

The independent scoring system for Bitcoin custody. Every platform scored and ranked.

$1B+ in assets under custody expertise

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.

PLATFORM SCORES
All ScoresCompareMethodologyIndependence StandardDataCustody Assessment
LEARN
Bitcoin 101Custody GuidesCustody InsuranceIs Your Setup Safe?Custody TimelineIncidentsFAQQuiz
COMPANY
AboutAuthorsEditorial IndependenceChangelogCorrections
RESOURCES
PodcastPressReport
CONNECT
Twitter / XLinkedInYouTubehello@proofofcustody.io
2026 Proof of Custody. Published by Onramp Bitcoin. Editorial Independence.PrivacyTermsproofofcustody.io
All Episodes
Final Settlement

Animal Spirits, A Very Stable GENIUS, & Mispriced Execution Risk: Why Bitcoin Wins

July 21, 2025 · 01:13:26
Listen NowSpotifyApple Podcasts

Connect with Early Riders // Connect with OnrampPresented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media...Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering bitcoin applications, protocol development, broader capital markets and early-stage venture.00:00 - Introduction and Current Events in Crypto02:56 - Regulatory Developments and Their Impact05:50 - Stablecoins and The Shift in Market Structure08:49 - The Role of Banks in the Crypto Ecosystem11:46 - Disintermediation and the Future of Banking1

Transcript+
It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing. The role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. All right. Welcome. Back Welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday July 21st 2025. As always joined by my Co host Liam Nelson, Michael, Tim Tanguma. How we doing boys? A lot, A lot happened last week. Doing good. We won't we won't say who, but maybe some people are getting married, engaged, things are happening behind the scenes. And it reminded me of like podcasts where like before you, you do it, you RIP it. It's like there's a little anxiety or you're like, man, I got to do this again. And then when it when it once it starts, you're like, oh, fuck, I'm glad, I'm glad we're here. Like it's going to be a fun, you know, 60. So that's what that just remind me. I'm ready to lock in. There's a lot of stuff to chat about. So excited. Big show, lots going on. We're going to start nice and simple. This is just, you know, setting the stage for a lot of things we'll talk about. But just the president of the United States tweeting out over the weekend the greatest Bitcoin explanation of all time. If you've been following Bitcoin for a while, fit in the space, you'll recognize the guy on the screen right now works at Coin Center, Peter Van Valkenburg. And this clip, I think, you know, is originally from like 20/17/2018 where he's doing some testimony in Congress and he's just very cleanly, concisely explaining Bitcoins value prop and why it matters for the world. And the president of the United States is, is tweeting this out. I would, I would, you know, position this as sort of a more buttoned up approach to as if Trump had tweeted out like Sailor saying there's no second best, like just a very long standing memetic clip that describes Bitcoin that's sort of been circulated for many years that the president of the United States is sharing. So I thought we'd start there. And that kind of dovetails to everything that happened in Washington last week. Yeah, go ahead, jump in. So a few things we don't have to play, but I encourage it because I think there's a lot of new people that haven't. I, I, I could be wrong, but I think this is from the 20/18/19 Libra hearings. And this is part of this is part of it. But if anybody hasn't, it really is an incredibly concise, incredible, concise clip of Bitcoins value problem where it plays into, you know, global money movement. It does remind me of the Baron memes that were coming out when Trump was, you know, in the process of running for president where this is like, you know, barren whispers is like father, right? They need to know you. You understand. Shipped the Von Vostenberg clip. Shipped the Von Bachman clip. You need to speak to the people that you actually understand what the orange coin is like. You know, we know Trump doesn't really get it, but somebody gave him this clip and was like, ship it now. Especially because Trump media apparently just bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin and related Bitcoin securities this morning. And so that going out Sunday night right before is related I. Think we need to be careful. We're gonna get more and more listeners in this show. I think what it said and I maybe I'm wrong so I have to be careful as well. But I think it was saying that their their their mark to market holdings are currently over $2 billion. If they didn't buy, they didn't open like the market buy $2 billion worth of securities in Bitcoin. Your journalist now, Liam, you're going to have to Fact Check yourself before you know, coming because people are going to hold us to a higher standard. No, but I am just joking. But I I think that's what what's going on. But you know, you, you mentioned bags pumping, lots of people's bags are pumping over the weekend. It may in fact be all alt season as as Michael has been alluding to for several months now. We might be there and it might be related to, to again, you know what, what we alluded to around what happened in DC last week. So stablecoin bill, the Genius act signed into law and the two other bills that are sort of still in in process pass the the House and will now go to the Senate. And that would be the clarity Act, just sort of the market structure bill delineating, you know, what's a what's a commodity, what's security, what's the token, etcetera. And then also the Anti CBDC surveillance State Act. And so on the back of this, you saw Ethereum I think is up like 50% in the past two weeks or something crazy. Solana is also a pretty large. And so now you're starting to see perhaps some of this follow through from just, you know, positive sentiment, regulatory clarity, etcetera. What do you make of this voice? I think maybe splitting them and maybe starting with the bills and then we could talk a little bit of crypto because I think I think there's a lot more meat on what's happening here. I think one of the big ones is for the first time and you know, it's kind of an insane proposition when you think about Bitcoin, the $2 trillion asset or crypto digital assets, 4 trillion and had never had regulatory clarity or formal policy is pretty, pretty interesting. I mean, I think just based on that anecdotal loan, you can imagine how this thing eats everything you get to $4 trillion, like 4 trillion is an insane number. I think the way maybe Bellagio recently talked about of a trillion is if 1 billion Chinese bought $1000 iPhone, which is about, you know, $1000 iPhone is an expensive thing for an individual purchase. You have a billion of them, you know, 1/7 of the world or one anyway. So 4 trillion is insane number and we've had no regulatory clarity. So I think that's a big component of it. I think breaking them down, the stable coin bill, a few notable things. So one of them was the protection of state oversight, because I think that was a that's always a ongoing battle between federal and state regulation and policy. And so I don't know how much that actually was a win because if you go deeper into it, you can see that. So it allows for stable coins to be created for bank banks, non banks and credit unions. But then the devil's in the details around there's guardrails for banks and non banks. There have to set up separate entities, separate capital ratios and then the second you go over you get to any substantial like flow or any substantial amount which is $10 billion, you have to get regulated by a federally chartered regulatory body which is the OCC. So I thought that was that was interesting. I think the other one that nobody really hasn't been talked about enough was this is the first time that the US has had a global framework for anything, which is a big deal in the sense of whether it's in custody or specifically stablecoins. When you go to run businesses internationally. Whether I think a reference like Libra was set up in Switzerland because they already had some regulatory body when it came to digital assets and financial services. You see this Mika, Singapore, UAE, there is no system or set up for the US formally. And so it ends up really hard for people in and out of the states to offer services and then what is recognized. And so I think that is a big deal. And then the only other thing that I think kind of plays into all this with the stablecoin bill, it looks like Clarity has a more likelihood, Pat, given the previous passing this past week of getting approved provides the right framework from a yield perspective. Because I think one of the big things that makes sense is like with Luna, in a lot of the blow UPS that happened in 22, there was a lot of stablecoins issued out there that didn't have any kind of framework when it came to 1 to 1 backing and where they were governed. And so once you have the stable coin legislation, well, the next one is kind of market structure. So you can start to understand, you know, what is a security versus what is a commodity. I'm not saying it's right because there's a lot of things that we probably would agree are commodities that are going to be recognized as securities. But the point being is more from I think their vantage point, if they have stablecoin legislation and then they have market structure, understanding what is a security and what is a commodity. When you start playing with those interoperability, now you can start to break down how do you actually build robust solutions that produce some kind of like yield that you at least can point back to where the smoking gun is versus like these crazy things that were built. So I think that's how we inevitably get into yield. I know there was a lot, but that was just kind of my like looking, looking into this, trying to understand and then see how it's going to play out for the Bitcoin space. But yeah, Liam, I'm sure you have some thoughts there. Yeah, I, I think that the most interesting by far is I, I try not to spend as much time as possible on on the Clarity Act and and it's it's great to see. One other thing that you didn't point out which is very helpful is the protection for the free and open source developers related to they are not money transmitters. I believe it is based on this, this Clarity Act and they would not be pursued as money transmitters. I know that the Tornado Cash case is still ongoing and so I may not have everything exactly correct there, but it's, it's definitely great to see for those court ABS and others working on on the space. Other than that, I think that the, the most important aspect of all this is the the stable coin side of things. And there's going to be money that flows into Bitcoin regardless, just because regardless of the amount of times that the other side of the trade is actually can not settle. We've talked about this before, whether it's, you know, banks that close on Friday at 4:00 PM and have to settle up Monday morning or stable coins that can trade throughout the weekend. 24/7 365 and never closed for bank holidays. But I mean, maybe I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. We're going to see a really interesting divergent on how the different players look at the space that are trying to get into the stable coin aspect where, you know, Tether has been in the space for a super long time. They want to just be accessible to everybody and, you know, not have to deal with as much friction as possible. And we're already seeing others that are not quite as familiar with or not not trying to get quite as much market share in terms of number of different participants like JP Morgan already rolled out their their played fees for different crypto companies that want to get access to their customers data. And I think that we're going to see a number of different strategies. I think most are gonna just try to get as much market share as possible go and how run negative gross margins at the beginning. And just because it's kind of like a an Amazon warehousing play where you know, you, you get as much of the customer as possible. And then you figure out profitability a little bit later on. Rather than JP Morgan trying to just extract fees at the beginning. Because they probably don't understand how transformative this is related to the flow of capital and how people don't necessarily need bank accounts if if they trust Tether versus JP Morgan, which, you know, the counterparty risk is it's a little bit different, but not too different overall. And I think that there's just enough, there are a lot of different players with different views on how this is going to play out. But ultimately it's just all going to, it's going to be very interesting to watch. And and there's going to be a lot of different regulatory plays in order to get as much Moat and figure out how they can be governed, especially once they get to $10 billion like you said in in total flows. So just kind of watching right now how how this is all going to play out. Yeah, and you, what you alluded to here in here was a, an article that Michael you'd shared from, from Fortune talking about JP Morgan's plans. What? What are the implications of this and? Yeah, go. Ahead. Well, I don't know if you any thoughts, Brian on the stable coin stuff before going into, I think before jump into this, I think we should talk about what I wanted to jump into is a whole second part which is the disintermediation of banks. But before that, any thoughts on or stablecoins? I know we talked about them a lot, so we don't have to go. Yeah, nothing really on the stables. It's something, you know, we've reiterated overtime. It's it's medium to long term, I think very net positive for Bitcoin. There's obviously these other crypto protocols that are seeing some value accrual based on the, you know, the trajectory of stable coin growth that is expected going forward. And then just on the clarity act, like I do think, I do think there's some stuff in there that like, you know, you, you sort of alluded to this, Michael, like the classifications of what might be a commodity. I think there's some language in there that is questionable to say the least around like what does, you know, trying to quantify like what does decentralized actually mean? And I don't, I don't think that what the language currently in there is like super applicable to like just saying something is decentralized enough or like having certain thresholds. So I think there's, there's work to be done there in terms of, you know, understanding what all of the the language inside those bills mean. But yeah, go go ahead on this one. Yeah, I mean, there's a there's a clip that was surfaced last night. I don't know how they got their hands on it. I think there's like open laws or whatever that Bitcoin open laws that I don't know if it's formal or if they're making up the charts, but it's one of those sites that show the different States and what they're doing. And I guess they've kind of like commercialized it and they show it was like a clip from the Clarity Act and it showed the two different parts. I couldn't find the hard copy because if I pull it up now, it's really blurry. But point being is it's like we would all agree with any shadow of a doubt that the commodities that they're going to deem a commodity are securities. But this is what we talked about a few weeks ago. It's just who's governing the grift and who gets paid because that's what that's what's going to be blessed. Like commodities are that have certain properties to them. You don't create them in a in a program and then let them out and then be able to change the code. We know all these things including Ethereum have been rolled back. But before we go to the the banking, this specific thing, I think that there's like an overarching theme that the this act is kind of like a backdoor CBDC. And the reason why is because ultimately the banks have been concerned. And This is why it's going to be interesting to see how they play with Bitcoin is the commercial banks are going to be disintermediated by stable coins. And the reason why is because the stable coins are effectively you're just going directly to either assets sitting on the Fed balance sheet or treasuries. So you don't need the commercial banks to issue them. And furthermore, like to what you were sharing, Liam, I think that the stable point stuff is bigger than Tether or will ultimately where we'll start to look at like, and this isn't a perfect analogy, but I think about it like the Internet and how encryption was outlawed for a very long time. And then it finally opened up because you naturally needed to send information over and secure information. And I think about this for like thinking about some of the largest retailers, Amazon's a great example. You want to get closest to the clients like wallet and affect like the real wall. Like we say it in metaphor terms like their their bank account or their their wallet. And then you can actually, you know, get them to spend more, do more. So imagine that they're able to link up, whether it's their account, however it's managed, they convert and now you have it sitting there and then you can interact within their version of the universe versus like Google and then, you know, Walmart, whoever else people have their relationship with. And that's what this is going to allow these these entities to do. And that opens up just a lot of different ways that capital will flow, who will look like a bank. But then also for the fintechs, and I think we've already seen this before, like so it's tokenizing deposits are fundamentally different than stablecoins, right? Because if you tokenize a deposit, you also have the counterparty risk of the bank that could fail like the other one is backed by the sovereign, you know, government and the treasuries versus the standard token. So I think that's where you're going to see a lot of disintermediation, a lot of different like business models around how you can actually build. And we'll talk about some of those later today. And then I was looking into it and I think that this is actually a growing trend that we've seen for 30 years with market makers, mortgage firms, the fintechs have been doing this, uh, leveraged buyout firms, Jane St. Apollo, Like there's all these different firms that have like taken it out and just kind of, it's almost like the Craig was thing where Craigslist with the bank and then individuals start and build their own businesses, Airbnb as an example, or rideshare. But it seems pretty dark for where banks are going and rightfully so, because they've really haven't innovative. And so I wanted to share that. Let's get some thoughts. And then that ties into like what JPM and Jamie Dimon issued out and he hasn't issued it yet. He hasn't even said the numbers. Yeah. Well, I mean, one thing you said earlier that I wanted to touch on till because you, you brought out a lot there. One, these are backdoor CBDC's, which is I agree. And they are essentially CB. They're all CBDC's. It's just are they issued by like sovereigns or not like so they're not central bank CBDC's, but they're centralized. They're just, you know, they're essentially a bank in terms of it's how you store your money. And the issuer on the other side, whether it's going to be circled tether, whoever it is, they can just freeze your account and you're going to have to rely on them in order for you to have the right flow of capital. And so sometimes it's the enemy, you know, which is, you know, the Fed or or whoever is your local central bank has, you know, at least some reliance on, you know, doing public good. Otherwise they'll be shut down by the public versus, you know, the outlaw stable coins to come. So. So that's one aspect. The other component there too is just like even if it's a, you know, stablecoin that's issued by someone other than a sovereign, the ultimate underlying counterparty risk like those, you know, those freezes will occur at the direction of the sovereign, right? So it's like it's just an indirect form of CBDC. Exactly. I think, yeah. So where this ties into and I, I think this is fascinating and went completely under the radar. So this came out July 16th. It's a pretty meaty article and the title is JP Morgan. I don't know what the title is. JP Morgan plans to charge for data could cripple crypto and fintech startups. I didn't encourage anybody that's interested to listen it's by fortune or read it. But the gist of it was that ultimately Plaid in a few other aggregators have really created very large business models to effectively integrate from the large banks into, to think Wells Fargo, JP Morgan into crypto fintech by making like pull requests effectively from the exchange to the bank and they take in the middle like middleware to get that client's information and data to be able to process it and move it over. I don't know what the exact fee structure is, but I can guarantee you it's nominal compared to what they're proposing here. The example they use is if Coinbase wanted to move capital from JP Morgan. If Coinbase wanted to pull capital for JP Morgan and let's say do $100, you know, movement of dollars to USDC or Bitcoin, it'd be roughly $10 just to do that pull. It would make a lot of crypto and and also fintech business models either obsolete or very hard to run. Jamie if you stay right there. Jamie Dimon has a great quote as I expect to win to help me God Diamond sitter and call all the time. Diamond singled out Plat, a Wiley service that helps consumers quickly connect apps like them out of their bank account, saying there are people who and probably use the data and that's been given that's been given them like Plaid. It's a super fascinating article. These guys are are very smart. I would imagine this is for not like they call it a choke point. They talk to a lot of execs in the space from crack in among others. I think this is more of like Trump and tariffs. It's a it's a bargaining tactic to to bet a better the economics and then figure out like I'm sure JP Morgan's going to call the stable coin. That's not a deposit coin and a bunch of other things. But the thing that I find the most fascinating is like the Internet, you can't ultimately control it on a long at a time horizon and the way and they don't get it yet there's a few that might banks are going to compete in this world is nothing to do with stable coins. It's all going to have to do with Bitcoin because anybody listening to this and I know we all agree all this stuff is going to net settle to Bitcoin and the real moats are going to be around how much of the BTC wallet share of your clients and of the market you can maintain and then what are the structure products? Rather it's lending stables, you know, yield generation. We'll talk a little about some products that were funded this week, but that's the real game. Not not how you can move dollars around. In the beginning, it'll look like dollars, but at the end of the day, like all those dial dollars like Liam shared can be seized, censored. But the thing that cannot be and can be managed properly is Bitcoin. You and then that can have a further differentiated product in this banking world that's ultimately going to get commoditized out. And there's very few that see it. And I think it's just amazing because you don't actually have to build a quasi banking or you can build a bank by helping people hold their Bitcoin, which is not is a commodity. And so it's like an it's an arbitrage right in front of everyone and everyone's focused on crypto Devi or telling everyone to stack sats and go into self custody when nobody really wants to do that. So it's what do you think? What do you think the? Timeline is on that recognition though that it's not just about dollar movement. It's not. About they've already know that. I think, I think that they already know it. And I think that the bargaining chip that you that you talked about, Michael, is getting all of the flows of the prime brokerage to, from all the large hedge funds, etcetera, who have a significant amount of capital that want to go back and forth from stable coins into Bitcoin and and vice versa. And I think that that's what they're looking forward to getting with the relationships with these banks. They say, OK, we're going to, it's, it's like Trump like saying, OK, China's going to pay 150% tariffs or whatever. And then so 30% seems reasonable. It's like, all right, well, here's this massive fee. Well, you know what? We'll bring it down significantly if you give us a lot of your flows and volume and send a lot of your clients our way. Yeah. I think what that makes sense. I think what Brian was referencing is like when new banks realize that and maybe I'm wrong, but tell me like that banks realized that Bitcoin from a leaning into it is the Moat versus playing this other game. And I think, I think it's going to be the sophisticated ones because we're talking with some of them. But really it makes sense from an order of operations that the interest is with stable coins because that's the thing that we talked about with VJ before is I think that's how we get to $1,000,000 Bitcoin before we all really truly expected is because the amount of flows that will end up in Bitcoin via stable coins are we cannot comprehend. And so you needed stable coins to be there, not only just for that, just to interact in a digital world. There was something that came out around a fantasy football crypto company like being serving. It's like it's fucking genius. Like it should be built on Bitcoin or with stable coins because everyone knows how hard it is to move money around and like all the things issued with it. But like it's just, it's a so small and innocent. But like once people have access to stable coins and movement of that capital, it's just going to create much more GDP on the Internet by itself, but without restricting those flows. But that's the first order because that's easy for people to comprehend it. Nobody in comprehends Bitcoin as this thing that's outside. Most people don't cover in Bitcoin as a thing that is more than a speculative asset. Very few people, if you're listening to one of the rare people that think of it as a true store value with a large percentage of your wealth. It's taking me like two years running this business to really realize that because when I was in the old world and it's with all the hardcore people and like you're thinking about self custody, the only way I'm going to shoot somebody if they take my Bitcoin, you're kind of like everyone's smelling each other's farts and like this is the only way. But once you like step into the real world where trillions of dollars moving around, there's the largest companies in the world. Like nobody thinks like this. Nobody wants to die for a trade and nobody's going to put all their money and magic Internet beans that could just potentially go away. It's also why it's asymmetric. But you have to get into the mind of how these people think if you're going to really be opportunistic and make money. And this is just how they go. It's the first order is dollars. And then the smart people will start to realize, well, nobody's paying attention to this Bitcoin thing. It keeps growing. And maybe I want to help in custody because I can generate revenue on trade and custody and it'll just take time. But that's the beauty of this whole setup. It's like it's the same thing as everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. It's like every financial institution is going to adopt Bitcoin at the price that they deserve. Everyone, welcome back to another episode of final settlement brought to you by on ramp and early riders. It was a really fun and fascinating conversation this week. No shortage of things happened in the digital asset in Bitcoin space. We touched on a number of deals that were announced last week, including Mara investment in two prime. Some of the interesting things happened around the pub Co's, including Cancer launching with Adam back their new spec and then everything happened in the digital asset stablecoin space. You know all the way to JP Morgan and Jamie Dimon coming out and referencing choking off some of the integrations with their banks as it relates to crypto access and being able to trade. A quick word from On Ramp. As you all may know, On Ramp provides best in class multi institution custody. The thing that most folks might not know is we offer other products and services as well, whether it's multi institution custody, underpinning with multiple institutions managing and working on behalf of the individual client or institution and move those assets all segregated on chain. Backed by Lloyd's of London with $100 million insurance policy to the ability just to buy Bitcoin at the lowest cost rate in the ecosystem. And also if you want to lend against your assets. Towards the end of the show, I'll have another update as it relates to other financial services we'll be launching later this week, but you have to tune in to to find that out. All right, on to the show. I, I completely agree with you, but you know, honestly, there are very the, the use case for stable coins, especially for banks is just trading counterparties and there isn't much demand because bank, especially large banks can settle with each other at the end of every day. And you know, their existing system works fine. It's only really just the fact that Bitcoin trades 24/7 365, which is why they need stable coins. And so stable coins, you know, Bitcoins made trading pair of stable coins, but other than stable coins, still the main trading pair is Bitcoin because that's the only thing that really needs to settle 365 or 24/7 365. And so if they want all the trading volume around it, they're going to naturally understand that bitcoins on the other side and need to have at least some experts about how the market moves and, and really what's the value proposition, etcetera, and everything like that. And I think that they've had to be doing that in order to deeply understand why they want stable coins at this time. Yeah. I think we're both saying similar things, but for different areas of the market. So what you're saying makes sense in that like they understand Bitcoin from flow of funds and movement of capital. What I'm, when I think me and Brian are talking about are more from like a client perspective and how do you win market share as a bank and client deposits of the BTC versus like from a trading perspective, 100%. And that ties into also how the products will be built because what you're referencing is right. But those people would never develop anything close to what we talk about with on ramp or other products that are like segregated accounts on chain verifiable because it when they build it, it's going to be very similar to the prime model you're discussing, which is an omnibus account. They're going to say, trust me, bro, I got your 3000 Bitcoin. It's all insured. I agree, but yeah, it's at least like a good top of funnel. And they're going to just, you know, do the same exact. They'll probably look at Coinbase and try to understand what they've done both what the banks have done in the past, what Coinbase has done and you know, where the the good parts of both of those. And they won't try to think about it in any different way. Like, you know, what people in self custody have thought about Bitcoin or, or anything like that. They'll probably just try to merge the tail. Can we talk about one thing really quick? Curious to get your guys thoughts on the ties into this is how big a role in Triadfi like insurance really plays it it I've personally, I've always had this fundamental understanding that like the best and the only real insurance for your Bitcoin is the way cryptographic materials hold. Well, it's in self custody. It's like how you manage that. And then if you have a third party counterparty, whether it's bit go Coinbase or if you're using something like multi institution, is how are those keys secure? Because if it's just one entity, like you're kind of, you know, not in a good spot. And maybe it's because we've been in this like immature, like not not fully developed asset class that I just assumed it would always be like this. But now everything's changing so fast. And so we all know that like Coinbase, Bitco, Debbie's, Omnibus wallets, Lloyd's will only insure them up to like call it 250, five, 100 million. And I think that's market standard. It's not to pick on them too. It's everyone and everyone knows, it's educated that like if there is a large loss, you'll never be Maple. And then most people are hacked all day long from their phones and they're never Maple. Where I'm getting that is, I didn't realize this is was a big thing in the gold industry. So like a lot of the gold industry ends up with either fragmentation or segmentation because the bullion depositories or where they're safe housed Lloyd's will ensure a certain amount. And then you have to kind of like move around. And we had Josh Fair from the Wyoming reserve on last week. It's going to come out this week. And he was referencing there's just like the size of the concrete and all these things that you naturally need. And then you kind of like have to move to a different location geographical to diversification. Why I'm bringing all of that up is because you're point Liam, like this asset class is going to grow and there's no credible way to like insure it and there's just there's none that's like economically feasible. And so we're so busy, but like this is going to be a very interesting model for early writers to look in the, you know, to go further until we've done a little bit. But it's going to naturally occur where I don't see the two things that I think are objectively true for multi institution because every person can have a subjective risk profiles. But the two objective ones are enterprise, pubco, anybody managing other people's capital because you're a fiduciary effectively and you have to distribute that risk. And then also from an insurance perspective, because the asset is being held, whether it's an ETF Pubco with 100,000, whoever it is, there's no insurance on the planet Earth that can cover them. So you have to diversify that risk. And it's not to say put it at 5 custodians, it's to say there's five custodians holding the keys. They're all insured at a certain amount. And the market isn't really keyed in on this. And that's going to be an interesting way it is, I think, to see how MIC proliferates in the banking sector. Well, yeah, you, you kind of alluded to the, I think what hasn't been fully grassed by the market is that the, the, the key here is, is fault tolerance and redundancy. It's, it's mitigating that tail risk of total permanent loss. And so, you know, whether it's the omnibus structures at a Coinbase that have a, you know, a de minimis amount that's actually insured, you know, it's even, it's even worse than that because as the asset appreciates, like these aren't, these policies aren't denominated in BTC either. So like the, the dollar amount doesn't scale with the appreciation of the asset. So there's sort of multiple layers of, of issues with insuring crypto assets. And so to your point, like you actually have to go to the protocol level to mitigate the risk before, you know, before the loss happens effectively. Like that's how you actually mitigate tail risk is by just going to the protocol level and, and, and implementing some form of of fault tolerance where you don't get knocked out of the game and you're not having to insure against this massive amount that you, you know, you don't have the coverage for. So I think that's that's the biggest gap to me is like people just not recognizing that there are protocol level solutions to to this issue that aren't just, you know, get more dollars to ensure the omnibus accounts. Yeah. And it's it's so beautifully elegant, like multi sig in the notion that it's all interoperable because there's this stuff's been tried like you can try in a proprietary implementation like fire blocks to create a private key and Shard it, but you still have to trust their implementation of multiparty computation. Or even if it's like something like Miniscript, like somebody'd independently creating some implementation that you can't audit, you have to trust. And the other part is even if that's better tech, which it generally isn't, or it isn't like multi sig is the standard for a reason. The market coalesces around standards, not around better tech. This has happened for for forever that there's a notion of like liquidity that gets more liquidity and as more market participants leverage multi cig, it's a click of a button to export an expub and participate in that quorum and actually scale appropriately versus get plugged, you know, have to reconstitute, recreate. So that's a going to be a very fascinating thing to see as a market grows because most people that are know what they're doing are using multi CIG. And so for them to export one of their private keys or the public key to private key and then participate in a multi institution quorum is it's work, but it's it's it's incremental work. It's not like you have to build a whole new tech stack. I think we lost Brian. Well, should we should we pivot? What do you what do you got? I got a list but anything top of mind? Why don't we why don't we go to the crypto aspect side of things? I think that there was another name of a bit go said that they're going public today and it essentially is just like I think that the clarity act is like the this second coming out party of all of these crypto firms of, you know, this is their opportunity to go public. They now finally have the validation of the public markets that they've been waiting for, for, you know, the past decade plus for some of them. And they are seeing all of these instances of whether it's strategy or the Dogecoin treasuries or whatever it's going to be. I think that they're seeing that there is never been more public markets interest in the space. And just wanted to get your thoughts on on the news of BICO going public that that went out on Twitter this morning. Yeah. So I personally love it because Bitco has been one of our earliest partners. Mike Belshi and the team, they're one of the first to believe in multi institution custody and participate. You know, I believe they manage over $100 billion in assets. They've been around for a very long time, probably second after Coinbase. And to your point, the clarity has been there now to really access the capital markets. But then also, you know, from a personal selfish level, I'm excited because, well, Bitco's world class, the market like our clientele and high networks and family offices, don't really know of them. And it's really kind of an interesting paradox because the way we reference is the best key holders today won't necessarily be the best ones in the future, but the worst ones today. Like it's basically this notion that nobody really knows who most of the crypto firms are from the trad 5 high net worth perspective, but they know who Bank of America is or JP Morgan. But the thing they don't understand is you don't want any of them holding and participating in anything technical at this point because they don't know anything. And so it's just an interesting dichotomy where people have to reconcile that these these firms. And that's that's also the scary part about the disintermediation because I think bit goes in the firms like that there's only so many custodians to buy and some of these large banks are going to buy these firms. And so you end up with more consolidation. But overall, I think it's super positive for the industry and seeing like these the demand we saw for circles probably going to, you know, go to the custody's place because again there, you know, it's not as rare as Circle, but there's only so many reputable custodians that exist in the market. Do you think that some big bank makes a big splash and tries to like go acquire them from like a public perspective just because they have so much data from like the, I know Bitco is essentially the custodian for a lot of other custodians in the space and like they have a big B to B to C model. What do you think about potential interest from banks? Yeah, I think B&Y has always been the rumoured 1 Bitco. It's, it's, it's there's data, but there's just assets, right? Like it's the same concept around buying those treasury companies that start to dislocate from the NAV is if you can buy a lot of that infrastructure and assets and client relationships. You know, it's interesting because Robin Hood bought Bitstamp and Bitstamp was built on Bitco. So yeah, I, I definitely think that happens. I have other thoughts but I'm curious Brian because I'm sure he has some on Bitco going public. Yeah, the biggest thing to me is, is kind of what you stated, which is like, you know, we have, you know, sort of an intimate knowledge of, of telling people about Bitco as they're one of our key partners. And and it is kind of shocking that most people have have never even heard of the firm and sort of tried by Normieland. And so I think that's, that's sort of the, one of the more positive signals to me is like, as these companies go public, like they just become more normalized, more ingrained in the public consciousness. And to your point, it'll be interesting to see as like more and more of these do come public. Like it was, it was fascinating to watch Circles IPO and then basically like 10 acts in a few weeks. I I think that'll be, you know, not all of them are going to, to have that level of performance because I think Circle and and USCC was a sort of a very particular thesis that want people wanted to express that view broader sort of like crypto custody is, is a little bit more of a, a broader thesis. And there are there are more, many more players. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. One other Go ahead. Well, so just to, because this rounds out back to some of the crypto stuff you referenced and it ties into one other thing. We'll just like lump it. And then and then transition is Charles Schwab, you know, announcing they've been talking about crypto and you know, selling and buy, sell. There's been a friendly like, you know, competition or discussion around Bitcoin dominance. And I think this ties into what we're talking about here because ultimately like Bitcoin and all the things we're talking about has been such a small sample size. And it's kind of why you see grift year over year or recycle after cycle, just kind of grow and still stick around is because think about the people that got burned, probably 20 set pre 2017 and then 2017 bubble and 21. Like there is some like notion of it that sticks in some people's minds, but the majority of people have no idea about like the Ponzi nomics and all the craziness we've all seen. So it was always kind of crazy to me to believe that like we were and I would be, I wish it was the case, but that we were just going to go and bitcoins going to run and everyone's not going to pay attention to crypto. Why I'm bringing that up is mainly because it's going to be interesting. And this is really what ties into what we do at Early Riders and how we believe. Like if you look at Bitcoin as a North Star, and there's a lot of reasons to look at it, because I talked with a lot of these infrastructure providers and it's an insane amount of workload to manage digital assets and all the craziness when they update protocols and accounting and everything that you need as a bank. It's just an insane like endeavor. And so I think Biko will be successful. I think Robin Hood or Coinbase and whatever they do in the cycle be successful. But if we all believe that over time the market's going to grow, the market's going to understand that all this stuff is a grift and there's no value, it's going to be very interesting to see who actually ends up as winners and losers. And one of the big winners I would look at is ultimately like how much Bitcoin are you able to aggregate? And then what kind of financial services you are you going to be able to deliver there? Because if you're focused on 101 crypto currencies and not focused on best in class custody and you're building other yield bearing products and all these things without first principle understanding of what you're doing, it's going to be a short term gain. But long term you're going, and we've seen this, this isn't like theoretical, we've seen this cycle after cycle, people get blown up and and you know, there's no shortage of examples, so we won't go into them. But I think that's a that's a foundational fascinating question, whether you're a long term equity holder in the public markets on who's doing things like blocks, a great example to express your view and Bitcoin probably done right on a long enough time horizon. But then what we do in the private sector is the same thing as look at the market from what we're doing, what we're building. And then and how do you get into it companies that are building the right way? Because on a long enough time horizon, they're on the other side, and then they're the ones that are going to reap a lot of the rewards. Funny enough, Bitco actually did this. They were one of the last people standing in the crypto industry back in 21 and 22, and they were able to do a lot of aggregation. So yeah. Yeah, I agree with all that. I think, you know, a lot of this deal making and and people putting their chips on the table will look smart or savvy in the short term. And then over the medium to long term, it'll be there will be a reorientation around Bitcoin as the thing that you need to focus on. Was it worth playing this Charles Schwab CEO clip or do you want so right? No, you don't need to do it, but essentially just real quick, it's essentially the CEO said that he wants to compete with the crypto native firms like Coinbase and they are just launch looking to launch spot Bitcoin and eats trading over the medium term or or short to medium term. And you know, it makes sense that they want to compete with the existing firms because this is one of the few times when, you know, Coinbase and the people who aren't on the inside are actually, you know, the most sophisticated players because they, you know, regardless if they have done things right or wrong, like they just haven't blown up yet. And so they have all of the trading volume thus far and, and everybody needs to compete with them. So it's just everybody wants to get into the space. And to Michael's point earlier, like we were talking about like custody being done right. And I think honestly, it's just more so than that the trading volume is going to be more important just because they can figure out things later on with respect to custody, as long as they don't have all their customers leads all their funds in, in terms of their Bitcoin. But I mean, they, they may or may not be able to get that right, but they they're going to be able to iterate over time as long as they kind of get the flow of capital from Bitcoin to stable coins and vice versa. Yeah, I think they have, they have distribution. I think the thing that custody will matter sooner than later because it's like that whole notion of it's such a crude or morbid example, but like at Uber or Walmart, at any night somebody's killed somebody that's an Uber driver, Walmart employee. Because of sheer numbers by the proximity of having larger surface area of people servicing people in this industry, more people are going to get hacked and lose their assets. And then everyone's going to wake up to, oh, this whole thing of like, well, now I understand why people took their keys offline, but then also that doesn't work long term. It's this. And that's where like it'll really matter upfront. But the other thing is just distribution. Like there's two sides of the coin of like, you know, Coinbase as an example, has to be a casino because that's what they made their business in. And so they're going to be a good casino, better than Schwab. But Schwab's going to go down this route and we already see this. And so they're kind of like stuck because they have no view. They're not telling you anything that the market hasn't. So they'll win up front on distribution because they have, you know, markets, they have clients. But at a certain point the it's just similar JPM, like the market's going to go to the native firm that's offering better differentiated products and that's just never going to be Schwab. Yeah, no, that all makes sense. And where my mind also goes is like, you know, there's, there's obviously still a massive amount of conflation that exists between crypto and Bitcoin. And I think part of that just is sort of it stems from or it's a function of the administration's stance. So the other probably noteworthy thing to pull up from last week was an executive order changing 4O1K plans. And this was, you know, the way it's phrased and the language inside of it. You know, none of this is Bitcoin specific, right? Like it's opening up these channels, the 900 trillion or or whatever the number is in four O 1K plans to broader crypto. And so my, my point is like, I think there is some sort of flow through from the administrative, the administration stance, the bills that they're pushing through to basically give air cover to all these other assets. I think flows to the Charles Schwab's of the world that are basically taking their cues from the administration and saying like, OK, what areas of this can we play in? And the the unfortunate outcome of that is that it's still all being conflated as sort of the same thing, the same asset class. Yeah, I think, I mean we've talked about this before, but unfortunately the investment management world, sometimes just the majority of them are not very sophisticated because the majority of them had just underperformed. The S&P are their benchmarks for a very long time. And so I think a lot of those people will be interested in the narrative of the day, whether it's, you know, buying ETH or Dogecoin or hyper liquid or whatever that they can get their yield on. And you know, that's why there will may or may or may not go to the same degree as it has in the past, but not betting that the altcoins are going to 0 because of that, that just kind of market structure and how those people operate. But it's and so there will be more people that just continue to by these alternative tokens. But at the same time, the amount of smart money, which is, you know, private businesses as well as public businesses that have been run well, that are run by founders, you know, very smart founders that continue to attract more capital for their business to have sustainable long term businesses. They're just going to, in my view, if they've been decent at allocating capital in the past in order to, you know, continue to run a business there, those are going to be the ones that continue to just buy bitcoins. It's just going to be a much broader funnel where a lot of people don't know what they're buying for the first time, just like the first time you download the downloaded a Coinbase app or heard about, you know, broader crypto from a friend. Yeah, which has been my base case that like, ultimately everything gets inflated and so people can't discern what's meeting the real hurdle rate of inflation. That's where like Bitcoin is a hurdle rate has a lot of different meanings and tokenized, you know, I think it came out today like a few large companies putting a theory on the balance sheet in the same way a retail investor looks at unit bias is the same way that treasury companies will. And also the thesis, like it's just a crazy proposition to believe that people just wake up and like, oh, bitcoins, the blue chip, especially because, as you referenced, I think last podcast lamb of the unit bias with I bit like you just see that ticker going up and you mark it against, you know, your, your portfolio versus you're not looking at $120,000 Bitcoin, which is pretty bullish for Bitcoin, right, Because like Bitcoin could be $450,000 and people aren't going to be shying away from I bit or the ETF. They're going to be looking at its performance. Or they just start measuring it in SAT when it gets above a certain threshold as well. Yeah. So we're just going to end up in grift for for for a very long time. Is that the net? I think that's fair, and it's an idea. I'm coming around here, Michael. The grift will persist longer than than I can imagine. I'm not. Even going to harp on it because I was just being ashamed that you, you, I had to try to convince you of it. But we'll, we'll, we'll transition from there. I was too, too rosy and optimistic. Do we want to go to some deals? There's a lot of, a lot of deals to cover Mike, I'll go to. Your. The Dakota one, if you want to talk about that one. Well, before the Dakota, I just want to pull up a few things I'll share. Let's see. So I think this ties into the grift a little bit is let's see, here we go. So I thought this was interesting because I think there's a growing theme here. Wrong screen. Michael's having a boomer moment. We'll see if this works. Yeah. So there was 2 notable deals that happened this week where MARL LED a $20 million investment into Two prime. They took a minority stake. The ultimate thing. I don't know much about two Primes, like full yield generating model. My understanding they've been pretty I don't want to call them blue chip, but they've been around for a while and Mara has leveraged them for their existing balance sheet to create more Bitcoin. But it but ultimately the headline is Mara leads to advance institutional Bitcoin yield strategies. And then there was another one that came out by function. The firms function raises 10 million to bring yield to Bitcoin gets back in from Alex a Galaxy digital and telephone mantle. No, it's it's less about the core businesses. It's more about in general as the market comes back. We still in a world where people believe you're a sucker for holding the underlying and just letting that generate the the nominal yield on purchasing power. And so people naturally will start to develop products and services that will look to generate alpha and yield. And I'm not saying it's impossible and can be done, but that you should always be wary and, you know, don't trust and verify in the sense like, let them stick around for a while. Let them see what they bring to market, especially for the retail side because a lot of these products are fundamentally different from like what they do at institutions and versus the risk curve. They put you out as an individual. And so I thought it was just interesting to call out because it was 2 in the same week. And this is, again, I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, but this is what happened in 21 where a lot of people just got outside their schemes on where Bitcoin got caught naked and the market ultimately delevered. 100% I think it it can be said by just like Bitcoin is a hurdle rate, not Bitcoin plus 2% yield or whatever it is. It's a hurdle rate, like if you lock up your Bitcoin or give it to an alternative party that it can be transparent with, you know their exact strategy. But there also can be leveraging it out like I think Marathon is, is set on some of their public, past public filings that they are lending out their Bitcoin. There is risk in that. And even if you know, you are shown exactly what the counterparties are, you don't know who those counterparties are within this yield generation strategy as well. And so as Michael said, I think it's just, you know, always prudent to wait, wait everything out and understand that there could be potential that falls it like you don't quite understand it because you may not understand. Even if you understand the counterparty risks, you know you may not know who their counterparties are or how those businesses are structured. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other just on that, the other thing I would say is like Bitcoin is a hurdle rate, not only because it's, you know, best for me As for the past 15 years, but it's because when we say that we're viewing it for its inherent risk off properties. And so when you start to layer on other execution risks, custodial risks to that, it no longer becomes a, you know, a quote UN quote risk fee rate or the opportunity cost, like you're, you're layering on additional risk factors there. And so I think, you know, we had VJ Boyapati on on TLT last week and we, we spoke a lot about this in just in terms of like, you know, market psychology and greed. It's like this is just, this is just what's going to happen, whether it's Bitcoin yield strategies or all the crypto stuff, like it's just people, it's just not good enough. You know, Bitcoins CAGR is just not good enough. When you get in these euphoric hype cycles that people think that they are late to Bitcoin, they have the unit bias and they need to catch up in some manner. And so, you know, I think we're just scratching the surface of sort of the extent of this type of greed that we're going to see over the next 12 to 24 months. Yeah, and I think it's it's worth calling out. It's not to say people shouldn't spend their Bitcoin or invest it invested my Bitcoin in building on ramp. We invest our all everyone here our Bitcoin in building early writers. The idea is what Brian Keaton on anybody ever making invest in me, you're always trying to reduce the amount of assumptions that have to be made. So one assumption, probably you're you're OK, two assumptions. You start to move a further out. As you start to get further out those assumptions, you're effectively taking too much risk in any endeavor, whether it's with your Bitcoin or your life. And so the way we mitigate that or we think about it is you ultimately you think about self custody. That's the hurdle rate or multi institution like it's parked in cold storage and then well, if an entrepreneur understands that and then understands bitcoins proposition well then theoretically if they understand that if they're spending it, they need to create more Bitcoin. You start to get closer to being able to return that Bitcoin where you see a lot of people get blown up or lose the monies they're ultimately trying to make more dollars and they're also don't fully appreciate Bitcoin for the understanding of its its trajectory as global money. And so that dislocation seems so obvious, but fundamentally just fills the return profile. And so that's why we feel confident what we're you're building is because if you find the right minded people, there's a lot of them you can build really amazing businesses that can return that that capital profile. So I think that's something that we'll be discussing more. I know Liam working is working on a paper that will come out talking about it. A few a few quick things. So the other one that was really I thought was interesting was Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company to go public through business combination with Cantor Equity Partners one. So I think if I'm mistake, if I'm not mistaken, there was Cantor Equity 2, which was the Tether SPAC. This is a separate 1. So it's interesting, it'll be interesting to see what that looks like. This one has some really interesting notes in it. One is it's led it's led by Adam Back, but it was interesting to see how they leaned into it. So they talk about the amount of capital that have been raised the in kind. So here there's a comment about long term OGS for the first pipe funded entirely through in kind contributions from Bitcoin community 25,000 BTC to be contributed by founding shareholders advised by blockchain capital. That was interesting. And then the other side was so net first season we use acquire additional Bitcoin and build suite of Bitcoin native capital market products and services. The other side was transaction highlights one of the largest pipes innovative capital structure Bitcoin community first funding, first Bitcoin denominated pipe funded entirely through in kind contributions from Bitcoiners. Bitcoin native leadership action will grow strategy intense, develop Bitcoin denominated capital markets and provide advisory solutions. This is something we talked about a lot. We'll be doing more publicly about, but ultimately it just goes down to yes, you can make money on Bitcoin, but you basically you should have you probably needed to prove the market you could before before launching a you know, billion dollar plus endeavor to do it. It's very rare if has ever existed in 15 years where somebody just comes to the market, offers Bitcoin A to financial products that require leverage, right building, you know, making money on your Bitcoin and it hasn't ended up in misery and tears. And I think that's something that most people aren't talking about. It is all these pub codes are referencing. They're going to build Bitcoin native a creative strategies and nobody's done that at scale. And so anyway, I'll leave it there. Yeah, everyone's, everyone's kind of talking about these the same idea. The issue is the the sort of distorted order of operations as you alluded to, it's like you, you kind of need to build a track record of providing trusted financial services and and doing these things. Whereas you know this, you know, this proposition sounds very similar to the one that Cantor is also involved in with 21 Capital where there is basically future plans that are unspecified, not many details around like we're going to provide all these services and and Bitcoin capital markets type stuff. You would naturally hope that like you had build a track record doing those things and then raised on the back of that track record as opposed to doing it the opposite way. Yeah, I think. I have a quick question. How do you feel about the market structure as it relates to Bitcoin price and these treasury companies with it makes sense a lot of the flows now into these treasury companies, I would say at least 50% is just Bitcoin moving from cold storage into these companies. Well, this one in particular, right? Like it's, yeah. This one, but I think a lot of them, I think a lot of their trade like that's the whole, you know, other like I think that's a lot of the trade is people are going and sourcing existing Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, I would, I would 100% agree. I mean, you know, there was just that $80,000 or 80,000 Bitcoin movement like last week or two weeks ago. I would assume that's, you know, going into this product because you know, the market hasn't really moved, you know. Most of the people that I talk to, especially ones that are new for this quote UN quote cycle of at least you know, half of their exposure through different Bitcoin public market views of of of what they expressed Bitcoin to be. So like, you know, MSTR and similar products, but I mean, taking a step back, like I don't think that the strategy is right that, you know, it's just like, all right, let's do the financial engineering and acquire as much Bitcoin as possible. Then we'll, you know, use that Bitcoin in order to develop new products and services in order to get more Bitcoin. It's there's, you know, I've, I've kind of been harping on this point for a while and I think that I, I may be the one taking crazy pills here, but nobody else is starting to talk about the fact that, you know, one of the few things that will grow faster than bitcoins CAGR over the next, you know, 10 or so years and, and into the foreseeable future. It's just like the number or the growth rate of the products and services around Bitcoin, whether it's create custody, lending, IRA, financial services, Trust Company exposure to Bitcoin products. You know, we've seen explosive growth in ETF, et cetera, different structured products. And if you don't start those now, it's not going to have any of the liquidity and and Lindy around those different financial services and products, which will ultimately, especially if you understand Bitcoin as the hurdle rate and operating with lean strategies will be able to get you more Bitcoin in the future. And I mean starting those when you know, when you are like, all right, well, well, the speculative attack is, is done a good enough job. Now we can start to build different products and services that help or that are needed in the Bitcoin space. Like it's, it's going to be too late in order for you to have the suit, you know, Lindy, that you need for financial services around Bitcoin. So I, I think it's, it's not very smart of a lot of these companies to, to just say we have plans to do it in the future and not actually try to, to do it now. Hey. Everyone, I hope you're enjoying the podcast. There was no shortage of updates happening in this space. Really got deep into a lot of the new bills that are happening and regulation and legislation coming down the pipeline. But quick note, exciting news on ramp is formally launching its IRA product built on multi institution custody with one of the largest banks in the country. This isn't public yet. So if you're listening to the podcast, we appreciate it and this will be announced later this week. But if you're interested in in rolling over any Bitcoin that's do with an existing IRA provider or if you're just looking to move over from a traditional legacy equity or bond account and want to move into Bitcoin, we will be able to process those rollovers and built on multi institution custody. If you have to wonder why, I can assure you that multi institution custody from a long term perspective is the best in class way to hold Bitcoin. You can make the case subjectively for personal holdings, maybe cold storage, self custody, third party custody could make sense for you for a number of reasons, but I would make the case objectively for Iras, tax advantage holdings that are going to be held for anywhere between 10 to 30 plus years. Self custody really gets hard and cumbersome specifically because the device generally isn't going to last for 30 years. So opens up a bunch of complexity there and then a third party custodian. We've never seen one last that long. And so multi institution custody is perfect for this type of financial product built on Bitcoin. We're really excited about this. We've been rolling people off the wait list and so would love to work with you. If you're an existing client holder, you can set up an account. If you're net new and just want to have an IRA account, there's actually no cost on the rollover than setting up accounts. So that's really awesome. If you want to learn more, you can shoot me a note. Personally, I'd happily introduce you to the IRA team or you can reach out Michael at honor@bitcoin.com or hello at honor@bitcoin.com. Now on to the rest of the show. Hey guys, hope you enjoyed the podcast. No shortage of fascinating things we talked about. Quick word. If you're ever interested in learning more about our investment thesis, how we're building in the ecosystem and looking to get more involved, I'd encourage you to check out early writers.com and let us know if you are building in the space. Want to learn more about our companies, what we're working on? As you listen week after week, you get a better view and lens into how we're thinking about the ecosystem, what we plan to build, where we see the gaps and opportunities. There's on our portfolio page a number of companies that haven't been announced. We're really excited to share with the market. We'll be sharing with our private network first, but if you'd like to learn, you can sign up for our research at early writers.com or you can just reach out and then we'll put you in touch. liam@earlywriters.com is the best contact for that. Appreciate you guys listening in and hope you enjoyed the podcast. Yeah. I mean, I think it's smart in the sense of it's they're going to fake it till they make it, right. So it's a set. It's the reason kind of going through that business or that PR release in particular was it kind of exemplifies the whole notion of vibes, right? Like it's we're going to pull an OG that you know has his name in the white paper and we're going to reference it as the first Bitcoin denominator and all whatever was in there. And it's going to be that differentiated version versus the Tether one. And then that'll have its own kind of thesis and people will trade around it and it'll have its own messaging and marketing into your point. Then they'll try to figure it out. But this, but trying to figure it out is kind of a, is a tough endeavor in Bitcoin because it's usually people's money. I know we're coming up on time, but one thing I didn't want to call out because I thought it was insanely fascinating, because it tied into it, randomly tied into the other week, was the other conversation. This firm, Dakota, I'd encourage folks to look into it. I didn't know about a DA the CEO of Tetra had shared with me a few months back. It says they raised $12 million in Series A to power the future of global business banking. This just came out this past week, but it's really one of the most interesting business models I've seen in a while because the idea is so on their websites business banking for the digital age, a modern banking platform powered by stablecoins and backed by U.S. Treasuries to make global finance seamless and secure. This started with like you'll see trusted by and it's really a lot of digital asset firms and the core idea is you can have a bank account anywhere. I think you get access to like an IBAN and everything you would need to be a like SWIFT, but there it's, I think they still have a partnership. It shows here with lead. So I think there's still some component they need to use through the banking system. Not clear. But the core idea is what we were talking about before with the disintermediation of the large banks is you have this like narrow banking version of your depositors or holding assets and money market or treasury funds. You can move between them. You still get the insurance and credibility of the US, but then you're able to effectively like not even disinter it, but like the term like dissolve any of the like barriers or lines between where you sit from a state regulated, federal regulated country regulated financial entity and you can just have infrastructure to take those dollars. They don't. I don't even know if they do Bitcoin custody yet, but this is kind of how I've been thinking more and more about what the like banks will look like in the future. It'll it'll be all just kind of like dissolving away anything physical and you'll have dollars BTC. This firm probably is going to manage crypto rails, but it's just a fascinating model where they started with businesses in the digital asset space that had trouble getting banks. But I think they're going to back into something much larger where anybody globally or even if you're just here in the States and it's like you think about Mercury and how nice that experience is versus the traditional bank. This looks super slick and they'll just continue to aggregate more services on top, including being able to take a loan out from those dollars, I would imagine. And they also pass back year 4% because they're using money markets versus traditional bank deposits. Any thoughts? Yeah, there was 1 related deal that I'll pull up as well, which remind me of of of this one a bit. I had never heard of this company, but Spico raised 22 million and it's similar in the sense that I think there's going to be these like workarounds like you saw in the prior page, like the 4% rewards, right? So like based on what's in the Genius Act, you can't necessarily pass on the yield from the treasuries backing the stable coins, But there's going to be these other methods and workarounds, whether it's, you know, just calling them rewards or having them structured in funds, which it sounds like this company Spiko's doing where it's they're not actually offering like stable coin yield necessarily, but they're offering exposure to funds, which then they pass along treasury yields too. So it reminds me of this one in a sense of like, there's just going to be all these different ways that people try to work around these things and and give people access to tokenized yield effectively. 3% the cat's out of the bag lasting a share. Is this note from this past weekend? I thought it was so funny because we've been talking about this is a tweet for me. Basically establishes proof reserve still gets hacked, loses 45,000,000 a client funds. There's an Indian firm called coin DCX. They, I think this was the most recent was May pulled up a proof of reserves at a station. It shows their total holdings and then it shows their BTC holdings in the total amount. And then it came out over the weekend. The CEO blamed a server breach for $44 million exploit. And I think this is just the core, the core idea. You know, I appreciate the building, the space and trying to do it the right way, but there's just a notion of like multi institution doesn't get acknowledged or understood or talked about when in reality it's there, it's better and it will be the standard in the same way that proof of reserves gets like a nice like pat on the back because historically, like you had FTX and all these firms and yes, it would have helped from complete like, you know, corruption. But at the end of the day, it's like almost a fallacy in place because you can prove anything one day and the next day if it's all gone, well, how does that make anybody whole or help in anything? And this is a clear example and we're going to just see more of them. And so this is just like the market. Either it's what's the whole term, It's like either they're ignorant or they're or stupid. Either way, it's still bad. Like you don't want somebody running exchange like not acknowledging like because it goes to personal perspective of like I could never sleep at night if on ramp held everyone's like assets. Like if we as a company had to manage cryptographic material and I can't be managing it. So I have a team and God forbid they either are corrupted, their families kidnapped, it kidnapped, they want to steal the money, whatever it might be. Like it's just no way that I'd be able to sleep at night. And there's also other reasons where you don't want to hold all the client assets. And so I've never understood if somebody deeply understood Bitcoin, why they would want to be in that position. And also look at something like that where if the government ever came, I can't move, we can't move the client's assets, they're not ours. And so I think it's just important to call out because this is a small blip. It's only 44 million. Eventually it'll be 440 million, that'll be 4.4 billion. And over time the market will just naturally wake up to understanding why multi institution, the fault tolerance or redundancy Brian talked about earlier will be the the standard for a large, you know, for holding this asset. Yeah, this is the problem with unilateral control, effectively proof over proof of reserves, you know, is like you said, you said it, you said it's a nice little pat on the back, like good job. But like, yeah, it could be there, you know, could be gone tomorrow. It's the South Park meme and it's gone like you did proof of reserves yesterday and it's gone like it's as long as there's a vector of unilateral control. It doesn't really solve the underlying issue of eliminating a single entity failure. Yep. Anything else boys? Good place to wrap. Great Rep. Let's get out. We'll get a nice tagline. Beautiful, beautiful thumbnail. I think everyone likes the thumbnail. If you want Brian to keep doing the thumbnails and you don't want Liam too, because you should see some of Liam's please like and subscribe. You appreciate it or you'll you'll get some of the the thumbnails that Liam likes to chill out. I can't talk because I I don't even know how to use Soros. So there's a boomer so, but that's by design. All right. Thanks, boys. All right, see you next week, guys. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com Contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.

Transcript source: fountain

More from Final Settlement
April 14, 2026 · 01:01:08
Final Settlement: Bitcoin Is Money for Enemies
February 17, 2026 · 01:00:42
OpenClaw Takeover & the Agentic AI Revolution
February 10, 2026 · 00:55:22
Tether's Sovereign Empire, Collapsing Bank Barriers, & AI Bots Using BTC