Bitcoin, AI, and the Credit Air Pocket with Michael Tanguma

Bitcoin 17 years 10 years is a $2 trillion asset and I could kill less with Bitcoin Trace for. It's just a matter of the money. The money. The money is bottom strength. In my view, because his entire mindset based on. Here's a different way to see the world will be owned. All of the good money in the world and you offer it to me for $25. I wouldn't take it because what would I do? Welcome back to Over the Horizon, a Bitcoin podcast. Today I'm joined by Michael Tanguma, founder and CEO at On Ramp. Michael, thank you so much for joining me then. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's late in the afternoon on Friday, so I'm sure we're both excited for the weekend. And so it's a good end of the day. I think Bitcoin hit 78 today at some point, now sitting around 77,000. That's right. Hopefully by the time we upload this on Tuesday, the price is relatively similar. But right now behind me it is 77,006. The S&P 500 just closed brand new all time high. I guess we could we could sort of start there and then we could dive into some of the stuff that we had prepared previously. Like what on earth do you think is behind this rally in in Bitcoin, obviously in the broader market isn't entirely related to the war. Is it something else? Like how do you view what's happening right now? It's a good question. I, I was texting some of the guys early like last week and I had this tweet that was meant to be tongue in cheek around bitlock boom and what was going on and the Spidey senses were tingling and it was relating it to, to Gary Leland having that. And the reason why was because part of that tweet was looking back at 2020 and it was really August that that conference went down. And then everything in 2020, if you think about Q3 and Q4, there were sailors stepping in publicly, there was Ross Stevens, there was NYDIG. And you just saw this left because we had been in this band below 10K, maybe teetered above it, but for years, since 17. And then the price took off and it did its thing and it feels very similar, similar kind of like I don't call it geopolitical conflict, but but the conflict and potential inflation and all the things associated what's happening in Iran. But I personally think what's where the Spidey senses were tingling on like we're ready to kind of like start to move up again was I felt that the price action has been an organic. I don't think it gets talked about enough that the bull run wasn't a proper bull run in all metrics from adoption to when you look at the heuristics. If you talk to anybody else selling hardware devices like usually get these uptrends and it's been down and to the right since 21 or 22, the blow off top that we had there. Another great example is like how many Bitcoin companies are have been like spawned off or new entrepreneurs? Like that's generally A catalyst. You have net new entrance, you have more adoption, you have more interesting products to come about. South point B is we never got the proper bull run. We never got the proper reflexivity for the market to do its thing. So we're not going to proper bear market either. What we're going to get is I think it's not popular to say because it sounds like coke, but ultimately in the same way gold has its version of manipulation. There is a version of pegging that price for a certain point because there's a lot of things that needed to get in place and what are those things? Morgan Stanley launching ETF is one of them. Charles Schwab launching Trading Clarity Act getting in place for a lot of institutions. There's no shortage of stuff with NASDAQ and securitizing tokenized assets every region across the world. Pakistan just came on. You got Hong Kong working on stable coin stuff. You got Switzerland working on stable coins, you have all this market structure in place and then Hyper Liquid is doing its thing and you know, defy or like outside the system, which is fascinating in itself because obviously don't hold any of this stuff. But I do think it's interesting how they're projecting. And I haven't read that colossal piece, Colossus piece on the founder of Hyper Liquid. But it's this idea that Tranfi really is like enamoured by it because of the 24/7 market. So you have all of these markets like commodities and potentially like secondary markets for like SpaceX and others trading on this thing that nobody you know manages. And it gives them insights into markets that are historically 9 to 5 S. Point being is you have all these things coming into place and I think once they were in those pipes were ready to go. Now you start to have to see the inflows and and I think it's going to coincide more than likely with a lot of you know, printing of money and then also interest rates having to lower at the same time. It definitely feels that way, like the institutional groundwork that's being laid. And on my main YouTube channel, I made several videos about this and they did really well. It was, you know, the first it was Morgan Stanley, right, $9 trillion in total global client assets launched their own Bitcoin ETF, clearly trying to start a fee war, 14 basis points undercutting the incumbent with I bet clearly they want to get in on this. Clearly it's for a reason to debt. And then you have, you know, on top of that Charles Schwab launching their crypto trading today crypto we we care about Bitcoin only. And then you've got Morgan Stanley also sort of dipping their toe in, though you're not Morgan Stanley rather, but Goldman Sachs sort of dipping their toe in the water with this premium income ETF. I'm of the belief that this is sort of like a trial balloon, if you will, a travel balloon isn't the right word, but testing the water to see if there's appetite for an eventual spot Bitcoin ETF of their own. So really it seems like the institutions are flooding in. You couple that with probably a little bit of insider trading or you know, Washington DC type trading. Sherry Biggs, representative from South Carolina, I believe today about 200th of Bitcoin or she disclosed a purchase of $250,000 worth of Bitcoin. So in my mind, chances are that tells me that this institute or this clarity out of Washington that we've been looking for as far as regulatory clarity is, is on the horizon here. So to me, it does feel like a pretty big move is coming up. You pair that with the Iran war. I was just talking to Lawrence Lombardi yesterday and we uploaded that show this morning. And he tends to think that what's happening right now with Iran is deliberate in an attempt to erode the value of the dollar, which to me 5050 not exactly sure, but in his mind, what he knows And, and you know, I'm, I'm sort of the same belief here that Trump and his base, he sort of, you know, by going to war with Iran, he, he went against the best wishes of his base. And now really all he has left heading into the midterms is markets. And so he's going to try to juice markets to the best of his ability. You also had Hank Paulson come out say that the Fed needs to have a backup plan in the event that demand for U.S. Treasuries dries up. I'm not sure if you've seen that clip, but that's pretty insane. He went on Bloomberg Wall Street week and, and talked about that. He was the guy engineer the response to the great financial crisis. So it seems like everything's really coming to a head now. I guess the one question for me, and I guess I'll pose it to you too, do you think that between now and when we see new Bitcoin all time highs, there will be sort of a zero to one event where we do see some sort of massive crash, a big print as it were? Or do you think that like a melt up rally now that the Iran war seems to be coming to an end as the path to least resistance? It's a great question because I think this maybe ties into the first part about without going into the geopolitical, geopolitical situation in politics, there is a real reality of what Larry's saying who's a good friend of we get trapped. And I think it's the same thing with the sailors and Shrek. Stuff we'll talk about later is there's 1D solution, there's 2D solutions or 2D takes, and there's three-dimensional. And generally the real world operates in the third dimension. But most people that we talked to that listener on Twitter or the second dimension, it's just enough to think you're clever, but not enough to actually know what's going on. And then the Dunning. Kruger. I guess I don't necessarily know what that is, but the first dimension is like CNN, right? And the second dimension is you go on Twitter and then the third dimension is like the actual truth. And so the angle there is like Elon Musk never understanding Bitcoin. It's like, so the guy that is the smartest, wealthiest person never understood proof of work and all that's like that. I don't believe it in the same way that so Trump doing what he did wasn't going to stop start this whole situation on round movement of commodities like oil and what that would have been from the lubrication of the whole global financial system. It's like doesn't make any sense. So I do think that there's a process in play there. Now the 2D3D layer on, do we get a crash before the run up? We saw that in 2020. So that was kind of the day's case a couple weeks ago where everything starts to seize up and you're like, this feels like it's going to hit a tipping point and we're going to get that real like March 2020 and a deleveraging moment before things really rally. I feel like that might be the 2D and I was in that camp. That might be the 2D logic versus the three-dimensional is like everyone's waiting for that. We don't see it. I don't, I truthfully don't know. What I do know is that if you look at the silent hand, the machine right is the commercial way. There is things that guide the global. You see ETFs launch and then everyone across the world starts to adopt digital assets and frameworks and and green light it in the same way that I've always felt with a high degree of certainty where I make a bet that clarity was going to get passed ultimately because everything you describe that the machine, it needs proliferation of dollars. They need demand for treasuries from a socio economic perspective in the US. They need an asset or assets that behave like sponges for liquidity that don't have the reflexivity of real estate inequities IE gold and BTC. Hence, ETFs getting launched because if you go back to the history of ETFs, there was back because I don't know how much you know about my history, but I've been in the space building since 2019-2020. And so you get very close to private clients that work at large institutions, large institutions. And people really forget from 2020 to 2022 when FTX, Celsius and all those firms fell apart. When you talk to people at Citadel, BlackRock and Coin and Fidelity and all these firms, they looked at Coinbase like a web three company. That's the way that they would discuss it. They would never trust them. This is pre Coinbase IPO and pre ETF and this is part of why EDX markets was stood up. It was a consortium between between Charles Schwab, Fidelity and Citadel. And that was the narrative and the atmosphere. And then 23, it all flipped and a lot of people likened it to or they referenced the GBTC and what was going on in the legal aspect, but it never fully sat right. Because when that flip the ETS for green light and Coinbase was the base for all of effectively all of them. The the two that aren't using them, I don't think they have any flows. But the point being is that there was a lot more embedded in my view with the ETS being launched, which was the understanding of a lot of the things that are going to play out. And you can even marry this back to, there was all these offshore derivatives exchanges that were really demonized. And then once we had this new administration and the new framework, everyone came into the fold, right? You look at Darabit was acquired, you look at like a lot of the market structure, everyone's cool with the way things are because the apparatus can wrap their arms around it from a legal, from a tax perspective. So what I'm sharing with you is you look at just all that pattern recognition and framework and you can see how this is a tactical strategic lever for the financial system. Still a small asset class compared to everything else. Like Bitcoin, 1.7 trillion, gold sits at 34 trillion. And there's a bunch of other things happening in the administration and very smart people's minds that need to be in place. So it's similar when Trump got into office, like we wanted all these things, but the reality was that there was an order of operations. And so I think that's what's just been playing out and that's why we didn't get the exciting 25 that we all wanted. But I do think nobody knows timing, but I think within the next 12 to 24 months we do get that kind of real exciting kind of like reflexive loop where you get the the real bull run. Yeah, it's certainly wager. You know, if I if I were a betting man, I'd say that that was the case because it just seems that all this groundwork is being laid. It has to have been laid for a reason. One of the things I want to ask you about, particularly about obviously, you know, you, you run on ramp and so self custody is a major, major aspect of of your day-to-day and what you're thinking about. How do you, how do you think about these new ETF launches? Right? Morgan Stanley coming into the fold, launch their own ETF. What do you think the role is that Bitcoin ETF play? I have long said for a couple of years now and now we're sort of starting to see it because Charles Schwab just launched spot Bitcoin trading at the ETFs are sort of the inroad for large pools of institutional capital, but also people who who just are just normal retail investors to get into Bitcoin. But over time, there's going to be a demand from those same people for spot Bitcoin exposure. Once they learn what the asset is, I've said that they'll come for the number, go up, they'll stay for the self sovereignty. Is that how you view ETFs or do you view them a little bit more adversarially? No, I think it's a really smart take. I think we're going to enjoy this combo because we haven't really discussed, I don't know how much you've heard, but we're I think aligned in and I'll give you, I'll add some more ammo or more wood behind that arrow in the sense of it's less on the sovereignty. It's ultimately the economic practicality of why you don't want to pull vehicle on a single party exchange. So if you, if you humor, humor me for a second, I'll give you some context into how and why we do what we do. So my background, I was actually maybe where some of these takes are interesting or different is I had a background in traditional tech. So I was like at like big companies like Google, YC back companies. I was with Adam Newman at Wework lighting money on fire in New York City while I was learning about money. That's kind of the joke is in 17 I was finding out about Bitcoin. I was reading the standard nights and weekends while I was just working in 18 hour days with Adam Newman. So I was learning about money while I was lighting on fire. And the point being is I adopted a material position meaning like majority of my wealth. And I had to realize or come to the conclusion, well, if I do this and I did this, I couldn't leave it on the third party exchange. At the time I was using Gemini, I was in New York. And you come to that conclusion because it's it's rational that you can't get knocked out of the game because you wake up the next day and it's gone and it can be gone because they don't like you. It can be gone because your phone was intercepted. It can be gone because they lost it. All right, so that led me down the journey of custody. I ended up becoming good friends with Parker Lewis joined Unchained and I built basically multi state collaborative custody for a few years. And there was a lot of learnings there. The main one was when FTX Celsius block file collapsed. It was this real like visceral moment of, oh God, not only did I see the like ceiling of self custody where people, I think that it's obviously what makes the system work, but I think that at the meta level, custody is a reason why people think Bitcoin is speculative at best and a Ponzi at worst. And what that means is because if you tell anybody about it that isn't, that just thinks you're crazy, it's because they're subconsciously understanding you're giving them a problem, not a solution, because you're first telling them there's a new form of money and a new thing to, to protect you. And now you're putting the agency on them to go figure it out and then manage it. When all they've ever heard is it ends up in landfills and ends up in North Korean wallets. It ends up re hypothecated FTX, like all these things. My grandma, God bless her soul, she texted me after knows very little what I do, but she texted me after FTX like, are you OK? It's like, I'm perfectly fine, but nobody understands that, right? So the core ideas, this is where the custody layer is the main focus. Because if you can figure that out and you can figure it out at scale, you have generational business to be built, but you also can really help people because the way I look at it is like Bitcoin is the best savings technology and then honor and provides the best savings account because you have to harness that technology. It's almost like nuclear. And if you just like get it and you don't know what to do with it, you can really blow yourself up. So where this ties into what you asked was built on chain 22, the market collapses and I started to look at the market structure and the market structures effectively the thing that's existed for thousands of years, you either have a third party custodian that holds the asset, which is existed for thousands of years. Somebody holds the horse and you got to go give him the gold if you want the horse. And that's similar if he's Coinbase holds the, you know, BTC metaphor gold, you got to send them the money. So there's nothing different there. It's just digital and then Bitcoin is a bearer instrument and we've had bearer instruments forever, but nobody tells anybody to take all of their gold or their dollars home. Yes, you can hold more of it in your hands, but you still end up with the same problems and why you needed a bank. Whether it's because you get cancer and pass away, whether it's inheritance, planning, dynasty, trust, E access to financial services. You don't want to get your family killed because somebody learns about your Bitcoin. All the things that are going to happen as the price runs to hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is what leads people to ETFs or other products that are easier. The point being is that if you look at that trajectory, you start to be concerned about an existential crisis for Bitcoin because worded gold failed. Anybody that really has a material allocation of Bitcoin, I would imagine had to underwrite gold and where gold sat on a global scale and how it underpinned money. And so you start to learn well it centralized and that was ultimately the problem. So you look at the trajectory, the trillions of dollars that we're going to come in our business was founded in 22 pre ETFs. So but it wasn't possible to forecast. You already saw what Grayscale had done in their trust pre ETFs that what happened in what or what was going to happen happened in that you're going to have trillions. I think the number in the past 24 months, we went from 2% to 12% of all that coin is now held by Dats or ETFs and it was going to continue to happen because there's no other solution because those institutions aren't going into coal card ledgers and trezors. So that's how we thought about, that's how we funded. That's why we created on right now to your point, the most bullish thing for anybody that wants to build and what what I think we're building is Arthur Hayes was on a recent podcast. He's a little bit of a, you know, kind of out there, but he has some really good takes. He's been around for a long time. Is he referenced how he doesn't care about clarity or genius or all this crap. And he basically said because we don't need them. And he's saying that this is a retail driven phenomenon. It's been a retail driven phenomenon. And if you think about it, this is the part that gets missed by Triad Phi is because individuals are consensus of one. They don't need a board to figure out how to buy that coin and get into it. Retail holds the empirically the vast majority of Bitcoin in self custody. They're the most sophisticated because they knew they couldn't trust a third party custodian, but that was over time, education. And if they did trust a third party, more often than not, they lost all their Bitcoin block by Celsius, FTX, Genesis. You know, you can go down to the Mount Gox, Quadriga or you can go forever. So you see where I'm going with this, that like the entry point for retail, whether it's Strike Cash App or if the reason these institutions like Morgan Stanley and Fidelity and Goldman Sachs is because there's demand at the retail level. Now, retail is different for everything. It's not like crypto retail. This is like family offices and high net worth individuals that sold businesses. But the point being is retail drives this market. Institutions are building products for other institutions which are omnibus pooled wallets, No assurances, no insurance that covers it, all these things. But they're buying small slivers in the same way somebody buys a small sliver on cash App or strike right off the bat. When somebody gets serious about Bitcoin, they have to do what I talked about in 2018 that I did. I had to figure out the custody aspect because it's rational. If you're going to buy large amounts of Bitcoin, you got to understand how those keys are protected and you have to make sure you don't get knocked out of the game. You can't have a single point of failure. So all that's to say a long way is the ETFs are very bullish. It's they get people in. But the economically rational thing is the ETFs will leverage something like multi institution custody. The individuals will move over those assets, whether it's in kind, which will be allowed, or they'll just sell their shares, have to take the tax head, and then they will go into something that provides better assurances. I've no question that's the trajectory of the industry, because once your economic value is tied to that, the rational thing to do is to participate in something that you can't get knocked out of the game the next day because somebody effed it up. Fantastic. I think that's a really, really good pitch for multi institution custody just for those who are hearing about that term for the first time. I, I highly doubt people listening to a Bitcoin podcast haven't heard of you guys or multi institutional custody. But what, how does your setup differ from traditional collaborative custody setups that people may be more familiar with? And then, you know, what do you think is going to drive wealthy clients based on the conversations that you've had with them? What is the dominant reason that they're choosing you guys over allocating their capital to an ETF? Yeah. So most individuals are not at this stage if like we work with ultra sophisticated individuals, meaning and these are people that work at like the largest stratified firms that lead their research teams to people that hold thousands of Bitcoin. And so when I consider somebody's ultra sophisticated is the person that basically played hot potato, because I don't think there's anybody that's been in Bitcoin this long that still holds the underline in some form of custody that hasn't had to move it around because everything's failed them. Whether it's a third party, whether it's a data leak, whether it's a the Bitcoin price rose or their family grew and they can't get knocked out of the game for their wife has to be able to find it if they get hit by a bus and everything under the sun dynasty, trust, all of that. So the point being is we're like that end state. And it kind of makes sense because I was there, I had to live through it. I use this because I need my wife to be able to manage it. And so the notion of multi institution is really straightforward. It's multi sig, which is interoperable. It's whatever it's, it's the hardened infrastructure that almost powers almost every large custodial exchange. Think about Fidelity, Coinbase, Bitco and it's the same technology that collaborative custody providers would do like a Casa or Unchained, right? It's the only asset that has it built into the protocol. So it's not a smart contract. There's nothing that's proprietary about it. And that's very important because for anybody that does anything in Bitcoin, when you move over to a custodian, you ultimately want to know not only the reputation of them, but you want to know the architecture and you don't want to be proprietary. And if it's new, you need years of like battle testing and hardness before you go and adopt it because you don't necessarily know if there's anything wrong with that. So all we did with the difference between collaborative custody, the easiest way I describe it, and where we're at in bitcoins phase. And this is probably not popular, but I think we're like in a very much hobbyist phase right now. We're 17 years into this big thing. And what I like in the meetups, which have been a big part of a Parker and Austin and all things, I love all the bit corners. But I think of the meetups very similar to a parallel in 1970s and late 70s where you had a bunch of quasi nerds and they were all get together and they would fight over what does a hard drive look like and what does a motherboard look like and what does a RAM look like. And they were developing APC and we still have that. And that's more power to anybody. But the reality is to cross the chasm, something happened where you had commercial individuals and the easy people and there's compact and others, but the fun ones are like Gates and jobs. They said, well, what if we just ship the computer to the individual? Because there's an infinite amount of value that they get, They open it up, they do their thing, they close it and go back. And so that's what I think about on ramp and multi institution custody is it gives you like 10 to 100 acts, the security and assurances without any of the complexity. And we just ship Mac books. They just work. There's no viruses and the core idea is that those keys are held by multiple institutions that cannot unilaterally ever move the assets. And then you have the lead. So you have a technical construct, which means that no institution can move or lose. But then you have a legal construct, which means that the title of the bitcoins always yours. And then you have a legal relationship with each of the custodians. So we have this nice unified experience. It takes a couple minutes to onboard. Used to take Me 2 to 8 weeks to onboard. People, everyone listening here knows you got your seeds, you got your hardware device, and you got your wallet config files. You got to separate them all. You end up with a problem them because if you put them all in different places now, who has access to them? What if you travel, there's an attack service and you put them all in your room, You have that. I'm not saying it's not for everyone or there's not a nice barbell approach. It's just our approach has been that for a vast majority of people, as the price rises, they're going to run into the fact that inheritance, dynasty, trust, lending against it, access to financial services. And then also there's a real market structure problem that everyone doesn't like to talk about, which is nobody kidnaps Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg for their equity portfolio. But everyone knows you can go after crypto or Bitcoin holders because they're very close to the asset, whether they have it in multi Sega, they have it on Coinbase and multi institution doesn't solve that right off the bat because you can put time locks on a 7 day or 365. It's more of a legal time lock. There's nothing like technical. It's just you're saying that some of our clients say I don't want to move this for 365 a year and then I have to go meet you if I want to move it before then. But the point being is that you can. It's not until the market has this as a standardization layer, which I believe this is how the market will kind of standardize. And then you this is how you cross the chasm because then you never have the question of what if it's lost because I got hit by a bus or the custodian went down. The analogy like to positives or the example like to show is Bitcoin has such great product market fit from storing value that I got to $2 trillion without anybody credibly knowing tomorrow if it'll be there with 100% certainty. Phenomenal. I really, really like that analogy because ultimately those are the things that that really changed the world, right? Personal computing didn't take off because we were able to develop a hard drive that could do its job 100 times better. We we put it into a package that was end user ready and we shipped it. And ultimately that's sort of what you guys are doing. I really like that analogy. Speaking of which, what you guys are doing in on ramp, You guys have a major announcement today. Well, actually, you know, I'm, I'm learning about this in advance. I'm a lucky guy, but when people are hearing about this, the announcement will be live on ramp finance. So you're announcing that for the first time here. I'll go ahead and share my screen as well. I've got something to that you sent over, but for the viewers at home, what is it? I I pass the mic off to you. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that in the sentiment around the crossing the chasm, because I truly am like the ideological crazy, you know, Bitcoiner in the sense of if you look behind me, I'm sitting on this property, you know, worried about all the things everyone's worried about. But the thing I kept running into is 99.9% of the world isn't there and they think we're all crazy and so we can wait for the market to come to us. And I believe as the market, you know, price appreciates and good things and bad things happen, it will come. A great example is in 22, I think we were sharing before we started recording or maybe it was the previous call. I've had a lot today. But it's this notion of out of all the AUM, the billions of dollars we brought into unchanged walls, 75% of it happened when FTX, Celsius and Block Fi. So it's the thing that people miss is liquidity is such a great thing in the sense of Bitcoins price, but all this risk gets inserted whether it's rehypothecation, physical attacks, digital attacks, insolvencies, all of that. And so we could wait for that to happen and then the market to understand it or we can go play offense and help to bring people into the fold into our platform. So the launch of Andre Fame and it is really to bring and bridge the gap to the rest of the world. It's bringing in dollar accounts earning up to 5%, earning cards where you can earn up to 1 1/2% to spend lowest cost Bitcoin brokerage, Iras lending basically a unified financial platform for existing clients. Anybody that's been thinking about multi institution, but then for everyone else that's not ready for multi institution, they can still get access to all this at no cost. And so we're incredibly excited about it because I think that all the platforms in Bitcoin do something really well, but it hasn't really been tied in and unified together. But the real kicker where our real ambitions are is how do we cross the chasm for the other 99% that aren't even in Bitcoin that need access to dollars Bitcoin. And then we're also inserting Argo apartment bars or Spock family firm to get Spot gold exposure where you can take delivery if you want serial numbers. Because I think this is the big part that we miss on the Bitcoin side is as gold or liquidity comes in and inflation, the equence price does its thing, but gold is moving and it's going to continue to move. And everyone has their own risk profile and trajectory. This is the narrative of Stretch and MSTR and all the things that they can't handle the volatility. The way I see the future working, and this is the stuff we talked about with banks and I think our platform works, is you have your dollars, you get your interest on it, you get your rewards, you have low yield savings, which is your gold, you have it secured. And in this instance it's Royal Canadian. It will have other events and that's your low yield for people that are old that the guys love to talk about, people that are 80 years old. Well, I think gold's a lot better than holding, but we'll talk about the unsecured claims later. And then you have your high yield, which is your Bitcoin, and you go through that. And I think truly when this asset in this narrative understands of savings versus investing, this will just be in the background like that MacBook. It'll just be behind the scenes. You'll know it'll work because 3 is better than one, IE multi institution versus single custodian. And this is how you can just kind of help people preserve their wealth because I think that's the thing that gets lost in all of this is there's a fundamental difference between savings and investing. And that's the big lie and the big like dark matter that lives here. Everyone needs to go out and then they believe they have to invest. But you've already gone out and invested in risk your capital, meaning your personal time to make the money. It was just supposed to compound for you and in preserve your wealth. And so that's what really what we think of as the money platform of the future is how do we unify all that, the three forms of money, dollars, gold and Bitcoin. Dollars golden Bitcoin, I like you and you know, ultimately I really like that you guys integrated gold in there because a lot of older folks or even just general sound money advocates who may be younger on the Bitcoin side. One thing that I've found we were a lot better at than the gold bugs is the gold bugs love to integrate the bitcoiners about a lot of Bitcoiners. You included Larry Leopard myself as well. Like it's very clear if you're just an honest clear at a person that gold performs a very similar monetary function to Bitcoin when global liquidity expands, gold is a tremendous absorbent of that. Bitcoin just says that better. So the fact that you guys put that onto the platform really is a testament that what you guys are doing is trying to integrate sound money directly into people's day-to-day experience without excluding gold. What means you want to pursue this? What made what made this the next step for you guys instead of just going deeper into Bitcoin custody? It's a great question. One thing on this platform and on the website, shout out to your buddy Matt Ball. He joined on the design side. He worked incredibly hard on this, I call him Matty ball game because sometimes you start off, he starts off a little slow, but he always shows up at the end and he he crushed it on his design. So appreciate all the work he did on the the going in this direction. So this will be a nice trip down memory lane. I've wanted to do this for like 5 years. And the reality is one part, and I think this ties back to just being in traditional tech and like really seeing growth and scale is that it made rational sense for an individual and also just market adoption that you need to put dollars in a world where we have dollar denominated liabilities next to Bitcoin. Like that's amazing. And the reality though, was the administration in a lot of the, you know, like stigma around digital assets, specifically Bitcoin banks weren't willing to touch this. So I had this really interesting experience where because there's stuff we can go into if you want, we're like you can build a lot of products within a multi institution vault around lending. The product that I had this idea for was you can effectively have in multi institution like a loan, but you have a card issued against it. So we got accepted because I was connected with Kai Sheffield who leads Visas team and we are going to build that product where you can have Bitcoin in a multi institution vault. You can have a card and then so you have that collateral sitting there. You can run up that balance and then you can either pay it at the end of the month or roll the juice over, because it's kind of plain that our, well, inflation's running here. The interest is here. Maybe I don't spend my dollar to sack more Bitcoin, collateralize it. The point in sharing that is that took years, millions of dollars in compliance, all this stuff. And it all blew up because FTX blew up. And then all the banks got scared and all the banks that were willing to do this because there's a whole slew of issues about primary issuers and the bank merchant service and how you develop the car. So I had been thinking about that for a long time. Well, with the new administration, specifically with the Genius Act, knowing that the there's a green light around stable coins, new financial settlement, infrastructure strike. Getting into this, we developed a partnership with Stripe to basically power all of this infrastructure with clicks of APIs. And I mean, it's obviously a little more complex, but it was something that we could put together in months time that would have historically taken years and millions of dollars into. Once I found out we could do, it was like, Oh my God, we have to because we are already planning to launch trading in the accumulation because a lot of Bitcoin holders want to start just on accumulation before they get ready for multi institution. Felt like we got to pause this because the reality is we can embed so much more value for somebody when they can get dollars next to their trading and IRA and multi institution blending against it and then also being able to spend. And so it's just a rational thought. The only thing I'll share, and this is kudos to River because River just announced something on being able to offer cash yield or earn. And then also I think they'll pay is that I have no doubt that the companies of the future, there's a convergence that's going to happen with Travi naturally adopting these services because they want to retain client deposits and revenue. And then on the other side of it, if you're native to the space, you're going to have to meet them with similar products and build bit better and natively. Because the rational thing for those other 99% of people is if you have a mortgage and you have all these other things with the bank and they offer Bitcoin, even if it's marginally better or less better, it's not as good as a river. The rational thing for most people is to stay with that firm. So you really have to increase the experience, whether it's money movement or something like multi institution. And so we're coming in at both angles. What's funny now is not all the large institutions we talk with because when you're just a Bitcoin custody provider, they look at you a little funny like, oh, that's niche and cute. The second you bring in dollar deposits, there are ears perk up because that's what they're all trying to retain the client relationship in those dollar deposits. Fantastic, I love it. What? What? Why do you think that so many players are converging on this right now? Tether launched something very similar river in the app. Now I, I haven't done the bill pay thing yet. I don't think my wife would let me because she doesn't want us to, to sell any of our Bitcoin. But all of all of the major players in the space, all the smart people are suddenly converging on this architecture where you've got dollars, you've got gold, you've got Bitcoin. At the very least, you're, you're integrating traditional banking functions into your Bitcoin experience. Why do you think that's happening? What do you think it says about the future of finance? And also, I guess in the flip side too, I just, it just made me think of this at the same time that you guys are sort of becoming an everything app, Coinbase is also becoming everything app and a couple of other shops have done it, but in a different way. You guys are becoming more of an everything app for sound money and, you know, low time preference, whereas Coinbase is now added like prediction markets and sports betting. And same thing with Gemini. I get notifications because I have the Gemini credit card, which I might drop soon for this about like, you know, oh, the New York Knicks are up and I'm like, I don't care, right? This is an app that's supposed to be used for for investing in Bitcoin, But it's showing these things to me. I guess speak a little bit to the the the disparity there between like the direction that the Bitcoin and sound money firms are headed and then the direction that sort of these these crypto firms are headed. Yeah, I think this ties into like the notion of what's obvious is obviously wrong and also why there's very few like principles or Bitcoin only companies are companies with like Bitcoin centric financial services. It's because like there's been this real bar rail because we're so early to Bitcoin where you had the ideological principled individuals, but generally you had to have a couple screws loose to to get into Bitcoin that early. And so maybe those screws loose also probably didn't have you working at big companies and and thinking about commercialization. You're thinking about like got my citadel, my guns and I'm good to go. My cold car, I'm ready to rock'n'roll. And so you got the the story and even the book ends right. But it's like, how do I get from here to there and make money and meet the market? And then the other side, which you're referring to is like the Wall Street crypto Bros, the dab Bros, all the stuff on that side. It's like they read the Ford to the Bitcoin standard, but they never opened the book right and so or they never read gradually and suddenly there was like a tweet about the Bitcoin's the great de financialization. Everyone do real well in 2026. You go read partners graduate suddenly or just like that specific article, because when you break down from 1st principles, like if people just preserve their wealth, there's not a need to go speculate and that fundamentally is going to re architect a lot of how the system works. Not to say credit and financial services shouldn't exist. It's just the reality is going to look fundamentally different. And in that monetization phase, you don't want to get caught off sides, not holding the underlying. So that obvious is obviously wrong, leads to all this craziness because the only way to get funding, if you think about it, if you live in this world, that's incentivizing velocity of movement, diversification, private credit, and all the things associated with the SpaceX stuff in the secondaries and SP VS. That is all just a proxy for the amount of liquidity in the system that people have to go further and further out on the risk curve to justify the management fees or justify existing or justify how do I get a return above what inflation is because you're a sucker if you hold the money. And so that's what you have when you have Coinbase and you have Polymarket, you have all these things. They're being told that and they don't get funding, they don't get the traction, they don't get the narrative. So but the problem where they miss it, and this is really what I hold dearly, and a lot of this was learned from building before. This is financial services at the end of the day. And everything happening here is not technology based. It's not even necessarily money based. It's it's relationship based and if you don't have the relationships, you don't have brand, you don't have credibility. And This is why we're so adamant about the preservation and taking a conservative view to this because for 17 years, if you didn't, you lost all your Bitcoin. So we're willing to be wrong once in a while if that's the case. We probably don't think we are, but it's still OK because you're preserving the capital and Bitcoin's going to do its thing either way. And so really that's the view. And I think Leishman hold him in a high regard because he's always held that and he comes from that Silicon Valley background. So I think that's a testament to like what is embedded in a lot of what Rivers done. And then the only other thing is like tethered TBD on their intent long term. But from a sophistication level, they're easily one of the most sophisticated market participants. Like when you look at their balance sheet alone, being a head of the gold real estate, AI, compute and then BTC. And so it's rational that if they're that sophisticated, they developed this wallet you're referencing, it's a little bit different than what we're doing in the sense that this is more from emerging markets because it's the mobile phone itself, custody, it's tokenized gold, it's BTC in a hot wallet and then Tether. But it still serves an insane amount of value for a lot of people that don't have a banking relationship with ability. And where I think a lot of this goes and they know is that we end up going more to a free banking style world where the credibility of the institution underpins a lot of the relationship. But then also think about stable coins. If we end up in this world where stable coins are out there and there's going to be this credibility that's tied to them based on what's backing them and treasuries are backing them today. But if the dollar's cooked and treasuries are moving around and volatile, Tether understands you're going to have to back them with other sound assets. I the kicker goes all the way back full circle to how do you custody the BTC? Because if the credibility and the free floating of that stable coin is tied to the underlying bull. If it's lost now the credibility, this is the whole issue that goes, and maybe this is a good deal for your the DAT DAT area is like the very base layer of the DAT is like it all goes. It's all faulty because the custody is faulty. And so the second one DAT lost the custody, everything's because of the market. Retail market doesn't necessarily understand that the custody is a problem and it's been a problem for 17 years. I think there's a lot of people that weren't around in 22 or you just assume because we appeal to authority that like now Coinbase and Fidelity are and they just are infallible and you can't lose it. And it's just fundamentally like a false premise. And so anyway, that just, I think that's the angle around where the market goes. And then the beauty of what's obvious is obviously wrong, is that if you're right, it's the whole notion of, you know, hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. If you take the harder path, on the other side of it is where the rewards are, because that credibility in the relationship is what drives the market to you if you've been doing things the right way the whole time. Beautiful. When you guys were developing this, my last question on this and then we'll we'll move into some of the other stuff we've got slated here. When someone hears like this is all in one platform. How do you how did you develop this in such a way where like you weren't adding a whole bunch of counterparty risk by integrating dollar deposits, by integrating your your multi institutional custody and the gold functionality as well. How did you sort of retain the no single point of failure ethos while you're developing this additional functionality for on ramp finance? It's a great question because it comes up a lot in like money movement. Naturally when you look at a lot of the proliferation of these new settlement layers for finance and dollars, you have this notion of money's going to start floating like I think all banks will have to offer similar what we're doing and passing back the interest and then better money movement. The example I use is like Mercury. Mercury is a multi billion dollar business. They didn't do anything different. They provided a better user experience for banking. So now you have these new rails that are just one to 1 backed. I would take the case that they're at least at par, if not more secure than a bank deposit, simply because a bank deposit, it's not yours, it's rehypothecated multiple times. These just sit in treasuries, right? So if we're ever going to offer dollars, we either had to become a bet, a bank or become a primary issuer like a circle to offer this. So we were always going to have a counterparty where we have to have the dollar Sitting in treasuries with the way we think about it is multi institution is the base level of cold storage for the money of the future. And so we started with the hardest part first, which is effectively how do I take those keys, segregate them with different institutions, take them offline. If anybody goes away, those assets are still secure. And then the idea is as capital comes into our system, it's to migrate it over from dollars to BTC or GLD. And the gold instance, the best you can get with gold is sovereign mitts. You can't multi say gold. A funny trail is this is the difference between Bitcoin and gold. It's not in my view, 2220 million 21. That's arbitrary. Fix supply. Not advocating for more inflation, but you can make the case you get inflation and still have a global reserve asset. The thing that will make Bitcoin successful is that you can insert governance at the asset layer. You can distribute those keys. And so gold can't do that. So the best we can do is have sovereign mints. I'm in the great state of Texas. We have our own bullying depository here. I would like over time to be able to park gold in the bullying depository there have cameras on isolated vehicles of that. So we can think through from a Bitcoin lens all of these properties. And I think that's what will make us different because everyone knows, like it's the same thing with AI where there's this dark forest component where there's all these bad actors online doing all these prompt injections and crazy things. Bitcoiners have had to be living in that world from an OPSEC perspective. So we take that Bitcoin centric view of security with the Bitcoin and then we layer it into any counterparty or anything else. We do I like it. I like that the ethos remains consistent throughout. I want I want to talk briefly about Oh yeah, go ahead, I. Just want to share one thing because this ties into you, you mentioned I think offline and then for anybody. So this is coming out right at the time. So there will be a slots available. I don't know if you saw this, but we have Genesis, which is the 210 first sign ups to get access to the highest reward tiers. But also anybody that's loves Parker Lewis, there's sign graduate and suddenly book a whole like swag packet, a bunch of other stuff that's on the landing page. I won't go through, but just something worth calling out because we wanted to make sure it's exciting for the market when we launch those. Perfect. Yeah. So the link to that will be in the description, Michael, if you just want to send me that after this, the link that will be in the description below. So be sure to sign up if this is if this is of interest to you. So you can get those exclusive parks and read more about that on the landing page there. I appreciate that, Michael. That's good, good marketing. So the one thing I, I, I do also want to touch on pivoting away from honor and finance is last week he got into a bit of a heated exchange with Matt Cole on X specifically talking about digital credit or what did what it's been dubbed right. It began last year with strategy. They have a huge balance sheet where the Bitcoin and began issuing preferred stocks and the 4th preferred stock that they'll end up issuing. Stretch has proven to be wildly successful. They've had several days last week where they were above a billion dollars in volume before the ex dividend date. Clearly it's proven to have a great deal of demand. You have a lot of folks who are doing the same thing. Strive has launched SATA here in the United States, paying I think 13% now at the time this recording. Metaplan is looking to do something similar. How do you view digital credit or just these preferred stocks generally in relation to Bitcoin? Are they a net positive for the space and that negative? Are people just misconstruing what they are? Sorry, I can't. I can't hear you. No just kidding. It remind me of I was talking about it yesterday wrong. Remember during the the COVID crisis where the guy was on that was. Hilarious. What does the company do? And he said I can't hear. You. Yeah, no, yeah. So maybe going back to how this started is there's two components to it. One of the main 1 is that because this is a retail driven phenomenon, like full stop, it's easy to get exposure. Individuals that a lot of the individuals that were influencers for these dads, they're all underwater. They targeted retail. No matter what they say from capital pulls, it's inconsistent because they'll reference volatility, but then their stocks are insanely volatile. And then you mentioned it before, I didn't know it was 82%. This the stretch is, is 82% driven by retail and retail if they're concerned about volatility, will there's other instruments that there's risk associated and I don't think you're getting compensated for the risk. That's the thing. I think it's fundamentally interesting. But where I take where I don't like the products and where I spoke out was ultimately wasn't even about any of the products. It was that I think that there's a better risk adjusted way, which is ultimately put out a tweet that you can park, you can pick your profile in whatever pool is volatile or concerning, and you can put that percentage in money market funds or now something like what we have here where you can earn up to 5% and then you can sweep the earn the rewards or you can take some of that percentage and put it in spot Bitcoin. And when you and we have a calculator now on the website, you can blend those rates and you end up with not only more USD or BTC because it's in cold storage. You don't have to use on rent for this. You can use anything you can go time for, you know, on your finance and take it into cold storage. But the point being is that you end up with a better risk adjusted return than putting it at risk in any of these theoretical products. And so when you mentioned digital credit, I think all of these things are theoretical at best. I think they're worse, but I won't, I won't say here. It's that in 17 years, you can effectively close your eyes and and put all the things you described and then all the things that have existed that Al for any kind of credit on top of Bitcoin and you could throw a dart and you would hit one that went belly up and everyone lost the money. So it's not to say that it will happen, but it's to say that it's not risk free and they're marketed at retail. And if you go back to the beginning of the pod, it's insanely hard for people to understand Bitcoin. It's really impossible. So when you take individuals that understand that that were thought to be influencers and then they they propagate and promote this thing. And The thing is that most people forget Bitcoin is this Platypus, this alien tech that doesn't fit within a 6040. It's not a it's not a bond, it's not an equity. So the market forces are always going to go in the favor of whatever the wrapper I can buy that looks more of what is like that. So you take this version of, oh, it's like Bitcoin, it's amplified Bitcoin. All these things are insane. They're not true. They're going to end up in a lot of misery. They're going to end up with a lot of people not holding any Bitcoin or less Bitcoin. And the beauty is if I'm wrong, adopt the thing and then Bitcoin was still going to do its thing. It's just like, do you want to be on that side? And specifically a capital at risk. So that's how the basic wing started was just effectively saying, look, you're not getting compensated for the risk. Take whatever you want. If you're concerned with volatility, park it in high yielding treasuries, take the rest in Bitcoin and cold stories. You reduce your counterparty risk. You still have a counterparty. It's the US government, but ideally they don't default and you just end up in a better position. And then that's effectively how it started. And we have a pretty sophisticated team. We have people we were on board of the first UK pensions. Glenn Cameron is a rock star. He sits in the United Kingdom. If anybody ever wants to like talk about it in like put together their thing and you can go on Twitter and see all this. It's pretty straightforward. And then he was going, I don't even understand it, but effectively last night explaining the arbitrage between the X division. And then when it goes up and like how it's not sustainable long term. I think we're going to put out a bunch of reports on this. It's just not propagated. And I guess the last thing is it's a retail driven thing. It's a inconsistent to say like the pools aren't there and then you go on Twitter and you have AI slop ads. That's a, you know, ad and it's like whatever sailors promoting or to whatever the next thing. That's why they spend all their time on Twitter. The funny part about that engagement is I don't really spend much time on Twitter. I was supposed to be on vacation, so I had my phone in front of me. So I was able to actually like be on be on Twitter and go back and forth. But it's just funny because I was like, I know Matt's all day long. That's what they do is they're out there like promoting the deal. And I was like, this is what they do all day. It's it's a sign when you had to get all the influencers to come promote your dad because it's a retail driven deal. If it was for an institutional market, you would go higher institutional people to sell the product. Gotcha, gotcha. You know, it's a it's a sensible take. I think it's balanced in my view. And curious to hear what what other folks think. And also if this gets clipped, because this podcast typically does get clipped. So if and when it does get clipped, we might get get reposted and have some people challenge you for a debate or something like that, which could be interesting. So, so to you, I mean looking at strategies website, one of the things that sticks out to me is that they have something like 42 years worth of dividend coverage across all of their preferreds with the current outstanding if Bitcoin did nothing to me, the premise of being able to package bitcoins typical CAGR, which over the last couple of years has been pretty disappointing, but it's pretty rational to say 2025% potentially over over a longer time frame into a fixed income product. To me that seems like a reasonable take. What you're saying is it's just a function of counterparty risk and not marketing this in good faith I suppose. Well, it's not even a good product when you think about like there's a lot of Fed speak, we talk where we have a lot of traffic guys, world class people from B&Y, Stifle, Brown brothers across the world, Goldman. And so we have a podcast and we talk about this stuff and I always have to like caveat or when we talk about two percent, 3% inflation, because everyone understands inflation is anywhere between 10 to 25% if not greater, specifically COVID, like post COVID event horizon from the amount of capital injected and everyone that knows anything understands it structurally, it has to increase and the velocity is only going up. So at best stretch or any of these products are keeping you right at par with inflation or maybe going backwards or maybe 1% above. So you're not getting compensated, you're staying static. So the notion is that a, you have, you're not keeping pace with where the market's going. When you look at everything layered into this, it goes to the same point of the ETFs where rationally, when you have real money, you don't park it into the system. It's contradictory move because you effectively take this asset that's in its monetization phase. You get all the aspects of private credit, gold and whatever, but you get the upside of all that. So the only thing to do is like make sure you preserve that capital at risk and you want the optionality. The Iran thing was one of the biggest movements because you look at the utilization of it to settle sovereign oil, which every sovereign needs. That's showing you that in the future you will need this, whether it's a gente, commerce or any other reason. So to give an offset, you can't eat your Strat, your Strat or whatever it's called, your stretch or your MSTR in this. But you can transact in dollars, you can transact in gold, you can transact in DTC if locally you need those units. So you're giving up the downside protection of any kind of air pockets in a system. Like a lot of the conversation last night was talking about global financial collapse or hyperinflation of the dollars. It's like, good luck with your dollar denominated liabilities in that ish in that situation. So you give all that away, you give away the ability to increase your purchasing power. Like Bitcoin already just moved up 10% in like 24 hours. So you give that upside, you're you're barely keeping pace and if inflation is going to continue to have to ramp, you're going to be working backwards on whatever percentage when you could have put your liquidity profile in treasuries, got some of those dollars and then you could have parked the rest in cold storage Bitcoin. And then if you're afraid of Bitcoin, well then that's a way you have to market and educate. But it's not to say like the market is going in this asset because they just look at people love Fiat. This is why the speculation works. And so if you tell somebody you get 11%, like I love it. And so that's like the the whole like I think trade off for the way it's not really articulated is there's just better products to effectively preserve your wealth. Got it. Thank you for giving your perspective. I really appreciate it. We, we have limited time here. We didn't even get a chance to touch on AI. But I suppose I'll ask you about about a couple of things before you have to go. Can I, can I share one more thing just on that? Is that the thing that's not, and this is honestly the, the biggest issue is you can make the case that MicroStrategy holding their assets at three different custodians is riskier than holding it at 1:00. Because the reality is that all of this becomes mute if any custodial situation happens. And this isn't crazy to say because for 17 years we took this whole podcast has been around custody and that the problem with it. So if you have 3 custodians now you have an attack surface 3 different ways it could go South. And if any of them are lost and any assets are lost, not only just confidence in the whole that whole system, any debt, but specifically that whole trade goes out. That's just the first level that never gets addressed and never gets talked about. If it was sound, all you would take is your 60 billion in your darling and you would park some capital in the same way they parked it for the stretch dividend and go develop a solution, put it on chain and verify it. That should be the red flag to start with everything because that false premise is built into it. Everyone else builds the dots and the narratives built on like what I effectively think of micro strategy is fundamentally different than everything else happened in that space. It's like the Immaculate Conception for Bitcoin. That's what MSTR is. And so you create a maze from bitcoins pristine thing and then Michael Saylor did this first thing and then everyone else is making that grift off the top and they make some money while everyone else is underwater. The problem is when you're underwater, it's like if you've ever played poker, when you get into a hand, there's at some cost balance. You keep throwing good money after bad, hoping that that amplified Bitcoin is not going to just keep amplifying to the downside. So the fact that custody doesn't get talked about tells you everything because if somebody would address it, build a better product, if they really believed in like what they were selling. Got it. Like so I want to ask you specifically about something that you mentioned you wanted to talk about this credit air pocket and you just mentioned it a moment ago and in your last, your last answer, AI is obviously extremely deflationary for the real economy. You know, you and I both know we live in this credit based monetary system where they need to continue extending credit in order for growth assumptions to hold true. Given that AI is deflationary for the real economy, what is the market missing? Right? It's kind of ironic that the market is, you know, celebrating a potential end of the war in Iran. It's at all time highs, but you have this force behind the scenes. Claude just launched a brand new product today. It seems like every single week it's launching a product that's destroying an entire sector of the US stock market. And it seems like nobody cares. On top of that, you have the credit component that that I'll let you speak to. But how are you thinking about AI as it as it plays in the US economic growth in the current credit based economy that that we reside in? Yeah, I think it happens to do with like the pattern recognition more of instincts and that if you've ever imagined, I know you have is like what would Bitcoin look like at $1,000,000 and like where are we at? And it's always felt instinctually right that the, the, the world be a little crazy, it'll be a little chaotic because just, regardless if it's 12 months or 12 years, that if that was happening, a lot of things are breaking or the market sentiment around this digital bare acid that came out of nowhere got to $1,000,000, that the, the zeitgeist in the atmosphere would be different. And so when I look at that or believe that and you see the acceleration of AI, it feels like that fills into its narrative of just the amount that you can do with less the ability where I think of like we talked about wanting to hold Bitcoin, I really think there's going to be a convergence of the store of value narrative and then the technology component and the store of value. The corollary or the tie into that is like settlement of sovereign commodities and oil and need for that. And then just bigger things, what regardless of what it is, you just need a mutual form of money that's, you know, easier to transport than gold. And then on the other side of it, I think in the next 12 to 24 months, it's going to accelerate where Bitcoin sits with these ingenetic layers because it's just better tooling and it's interoperable and it's not permission like a stablecoin is, even though I think stable coins will take the lead to start. And so you tie that into AII think it's just your point with Anthropic, the acceleration is just insane. I know you and most people listening, you're probably playing with it and we're all just barely like touching the surface. And so you tie that into what already was forecasted. When you hike up interest rates and you already have this over levered market that there's air pockets everywhere. You see the private credit seizing, you see what has happened to SVB like it's all over the world bail in's that we're not in a normal world where counterparty risk doesn't exist. And this is that whole notion around good. Speaking of which, I'll bring this quote up on screen. I'll actually share the screen, but it says, and this is from Apollo Global Management, chief economist. And he says that hedge funds now on roughly 8% of the entire 31 trillion U.S. Treasury market, up from 3% just five years ago. And it's been fueled by heavy borrowing with combined financing by repurchase agreements and prime brokerage is now exceeding $6 trillion. So this levered U.S. Treasury trade is another sort of pocket here where it's getting a little bit dicey. And you've also had, you also have Hank Paulson saying that the Fed needs to create a bailout plan for demand once it drives up in the US Treasury market. It seems like we're markets are sort of balancing on the head of a pin right now and they're more fragile than ever despite them being at all time highs. Yeah, it's exactly right. I mean, there's a little bit out of my domain and expertise, but if you go look at what's happening from a geopolitical perspective with oil, that if sovereigns need to find the capital for higher oil prices, they have they have to dump treasuries. That causes the Treasury yields to spike, which breaks everything. And I think the, again, going back to pattern recognition, you look at COVID because I think most people listening in the Western world, we said in the US, you could never have fathomed that they would lock everyone in a box and everything would just go completely haywire. Like everything is on the table. And so you have this world getting increasingly more chaotic and we just have lived in this random situation over the past X number of years where things have been stable, they've been relatively consistent. Larry Laporte's probably been the loudest cheerleader to where I think we love him begin. He loves us because sure, he talks about all the time, it's like he was fighting this fight all alone. And the gold bugs have one part, but they're almost like the the libertarian, like they love to lose where he wanted to win. And so that whole adage, he understands why gold is money. I had this article today. Gold and money and Bitcoin are money. Everything else is credit. That's been understood forever. But the reality is in this Fiat world, you layer in all these things and everyone miss prices. The counterparty risk. I've long held this, I've told me and Marty would go back and forth. It was around SVV specifically, but knowing what you know about everything in the financial system and the value of Bitcoin, what would be the number where you would take less Bitcoin in dollar terms, but Bitcoin versus a dollar sitting in a bank? Not to say and you have to sit there for 36 months or whatever it is. So like I like to just say, is it $1,000,000 in cash sitting at SVV or is it 500K in some outside way to hold your Bitcoin? Right, because that's the thing that gets mispriced. It's asymmetric in the truest sense that it's not only the upside you're getting, it's the downside you're protecting yourself against. And that's again, goes back to all the stuff we talked about before is it's just not rationally discussed that we live in this fragile time. And if you're going to take the inside money approach in a world where there's all these air pockets, it's the thing that makes your thesis right about inflation. Why Bitcoins valuable and where this digital credit narrative goes, It's the thing that also kills why you want the money in the system because all of that deleveraging, you don't want to be inside of that when it happens. Hence going back to bitcoins of great de financialization, we're going to get a lot worse and you're going to want to hold outside money before it gets better. And so I have no problem and idea that they'll be capital markets and credit that forms in Bitcoin. But do you want to be the first person doing that? Because you don't want to be the first person to block by Genesis, Celsius, FTX and whatever. Talk about AI. One thing that I've noticed is that it it genuinely, I wasn't really to Bitcoin for your reference, I came into Bitcoin I think 2021, so very, very late in the year. I had heard about it in 2020 when we had cratered. My friend who now works at BTC Inc had told me all about this thing. I had ignored it. Price went from 3000 back up to 10,000 after the crash. I, I had my eye on it and then it went from 10 to 60 made its first run at 60. And so that's why I came in. I came in quite late, but right now it feels almost like in AI. It feels very similar to what I imagined it felt being in Bitcoin in like 2011, 2012, where you have such a small portion of the population actually utilizing these tools effectively or even paying for these tools. Whereas it, it seems like .001% of the population is, you know, geeking out on the weekend, buying several instances of cloud credits throughout the day because they're running out. And at the same time, in tandem, you have Bitcoin adoption, right? So how do you square those two tracks happening at the exact same time? Where do you think we are as far as AI adoption is concerned and how do you think AI is going to inform the next wave of Bitcoin infrastructure over the next 5-10, twenty years? Yeah, there's a lot there. I think the one thing I'll share with you is you came at the perfect time. I truly believe the best time for somebody to get into the space and for the long term longevity of it is to go in on the upswing. Because when you're going in, as the price is running up, specifically closer to the top, if you write it on the way down and you're getting educated, you're prepared for everything else that comes out of it. It's generally where somebody buys at the top, they sell on the way down and then they're just, they're just burnt across the board. So, and I definitely don't think it's early. I know you hear the people say it, but it's, it's, we're still insanely early on the Bitcoin and AI front. You know, I've been doing this for a while and have a lot of thoughts and, and one of the articles I just need to start doing more like writing or, or talking and, or rating out with these tools is there's this notion of like Moore's law and Metcalf's law, where Metcalf's law is like X ^2 or whatever R-squared. And it's just the notion of like Ethernets and the amount of connectivity, the network. And Moore's law is like the inverse of that where you're like reducing semiconductor capacity and so reducing the cost. And that's really what caused the proliferation of what the society and technology we live in today, right? Because you connected people with computers and then you also added the ability for everyone to hold it. And now you can have an iPhone and, and all the stuff associated. So, but the kicker is that took like 30 to 40 years. We're living through that. Like whatever that law is squared with Bitcoin is the Metcalf's law in that world because the connectivity in the borderless perspective of like anybody can transact and move. And then that's Metcalf law. And then the Moore's law is the AI because you can do more with less. So you can bottle up more and more of that like nuclear energy of the intelligence. And so think about when you tie those two things on top of like technologies already existed and you could you let go together, This is what's going to cause it to move so much faster. And so I don't know if you know this, but we have a venture arm that's Bitcoin denominated. It was based on this whole premise. It's called early writers. It's the only Bitcoin denominated firm, but it was based on this premise because AI had saw liquidity in dollars just kill all businesses because you make you raise too much money and then it kills all the soundness and strategy in the business. So we built our business like bootstraps with my own balance sheet, my own Bitcoin. But we started this was right at the AI wave was starting to take off in 22. So we started to do a lot more with less leveraging all these tools because the whole game of this business has been to be a Bitcoin positive flow business to like print Bitcoin to build that scale. So we took the leanest approach and everything we did to the most like conservative and how we grew. And that gets you to the most like rational, inefficient way to build a business. And I think that this is really the biggest opportunity that exists, like on the planet earth is when the Bitcoin camp and the people that work at these firms with all the bureaucracy and all the fat that exists, when they lead those firms because they've been disenfranchised, marginalized, because that's what bureaucracy, everyone listening as I know this, I've hired the people I was that you know, where the world's going, you try to change it. I call it the carrot or stick. You first start with the carrot because you're trying to help the firm, try to get them to put their coin, the balance sheet, whatever it might be. And then the stick is OK, now I can RIP these shackles off, these golden handcuffs because I have a better form of money. I have a parachute to actually go and try something and you know where all of the dead bodies are buried so you can run back the playbook and you know the competition and you can build 10 to 100 X better and faster with 110th to one 100th of the cost. But the kicker is now you have a better store value on your balance sheet while everyone else is inflating away and they're having to increase their costs, reduce their margins. And you're playing with like the nuclear reactor of AI plus the nuclear reactor of money and Bitcoin. And that's the most interesting, like honestly, like business opportunity that exists because that's going to touch every industry across the world. And that's effectively like what we invested. I don't know. Did you know we did that or or no? No, Yeah, I know. Yeah, I'm aware. Of OK, well, I didn't know. I, I you set up the question really nicely, so I didn't know, but yeah. Oh, you're good, you're good. That's why that's it really is fascinating to see one of the one of the topics specifically regarding AI being a disruptive forces. All of the jobs that is going to destroy and all of the different companies is going to destroy being I suppose, like what is what? What sort of businesses or sectors in your mind are most at risk of being disrupted to the point of being completely? How do I phrase this correctly? I suppose you can think of it in one of two ways, right? One being like it's going to be this massive boom to productivity. It's going to invent entirely new sectors of the economy, which is true. But there's another school of thought that like in tandem with that, it's going to destroy areas of the economy, certain businesses, certain sectors in your mind, like how, how do you think about those two things? What sort of productivity gains is this going to bring about? And then also, if you've put any thought into it, what industries is this just just going to completely dematerialize and remove the need for entirely? Yeah, I don't, I maybe can get specific here. I think that the notion that I can add value or insights is like we I think believe in a maybe utopian version of there's some angle where everything's perfect for everyone, right? And I don't think we're in that. I think the way society evolves and technology evolves, it's like a fractal where it's centralized. You go back to wherever in the beginning and then it just naturally expands and expands and like the printing press is a good example and you open up the aperture for intelligence and education and that grows out and you get more and then you get like, you know, the Internet and you get money. And it's this notion of like, I think one of the parts is like, well, Bitcoin solves the this version of K shaped economy. Like it's a travesty, but it's also was always going to be a reality of that. There's people that have a lot of money. There's people that don't. I think that you get a democratization of the ability for more people get more like asymmetric power. The gun was a great example of it, encryptions another great example. So you're going to get, the point is like with AID material dematerializing jobs, you're going to get more people with agency, the ability to do more things. The problem is that I think it's Pareto distributed like all things in life, where you get more people that didn't have the opportunity, a chance to do something. But a lot of people are just not going to take it. I think it's a sad state of where you end up with Ubi and all this. And a great example that I like to think about that doesn't get talked about is the Western aspect of it, right? Because we've like offshored and sent out a lot of like key infrastructure and things to other countries. And then we had these jobs and we've had, you know, the product manager from COVID that, you know, was at the pool. Like that person's probably in a rough spot because she maybe didn't have the agency, didn't learn and have that grit. So we look at it from a Western lens, but think about it from the other side, where now those jobs are open to anybody. You add Starlink so you have an Internet connection. You had a global form of money that anybody can have. You have a form of intelligence that anybody can have that compute on their phone in the future. And what does that mean from a societal perspective? We're just going to like kind of change the shifting of power and who has that, And they'll be winners, they'll be losers. I think on the net, net, you end up with more winners. And that's just how society forms. But we don't end up in this world where everyone's like living with hot universal high income or whatever. Right. Yeah. It it's sort of you see this bifurcation accelerate where you have high agency, high IQ individuals, you know, building digital cathedrals as it were, and then low agency, low IQ individuals or just people who just, you know, don't have that get up and go per SE, who just don't use the tools in front of them. And then as a result, we have massive productivity gains over here. But then for some people, they're just as destitute as they are today. It's unfortunate, right? You can lead a horse to water, you can't make them drink. You can create literally the best product market fit tool of all time clawed, install it on somebody's machine. And if they don't have the willingness and desire to learn about it and learn how to improve their life, learn how to build a business, then nothing will come of it. I think that's exactly right. And I think that's like the sad part of stable coins and centralized issuance of things that it reminds me of like encryption in the Internet. It's like you have this technology that's super asymmetric, but a lot of people won't necessarily think about how many things we do and knowing the things we do that we shouldn't when it comes to Google and all that because it's convenient. And so it's similar going to be with the money. But on the net, net, it gives more power, but at the same time, it can be used as the thing against you. Just to give you an answer to your question, I think financial services is an easy angle to look at and how this gets disrupted because you have two, a confluence of things happening. One is you can do a bunch more with less. When you think about research, analysis, everything that goes into what is a traditional fight, compliance, regulatory, like there's a lot of things that you can automate and then have humans in the middle of the loop on. But then the other aspect, if there's a true essence of wool, it's all just math, right? Like you have these two fixed supplies where Bitcoin has its thing and then gold has its relative fixed supply. And so from a mathematical perspective, those things will outpace inflation because they're sponges for everything else in the universe, right? And so the point, and you can look at copper oil and maybe they do its thing, but you can't eat them, you can't transact them. It's Barber. So that's why you have any money instruments. So if that world goes there, that's the bet we're making. Well, then what's the need for a financial advisor taking 1% when they're underperforming those things? It's another idea that I'd love if he was listening to. It's like I want asset management firms. I want products that are gold and Bitcoin. Whether it's you hold gold Bitcoin, I make the case that gold BTC would outperform in whatever ratio you want, 80202080 almost any active passive manager, any like fund because you're taking these two instruments that are on the right side of history around inflation. And so point being is when that transpires and that becomes understood in the zeitgeist, well, Travis kind of like cooked when you think about it and you're kind of seeing this around like how many bankers and people does JP Morgan have and is it, are they needed? So I think that's going to be an easy industry. And he's kind of seen this with a lot of the fintechs that are launching and offering kind of like better rails and better money movement with a fraction of the team. Michael, thank you so much for coming on. I I suppose as we wrap up here, any parting thoughts on anything we discuss, like anything that you hadn't spoken about that you want to leave viewers with as we go off into this week? No, you, I mean, this was, this was probably one of my favorite pods. You asked a lot of great questions. You can tell you well researched and yeah if anybody's interested reach out love to talk about any of the stuff we talked about we have a podcast book of consultation. You want to learn more. I think maybe the biggest thing is we truthfully just look at ourselves as the safe guardians of our clients capital. And so we look at it we take it upon ourselves to at least identify risk and then share them because historically for 17 years in Bitcoin, there's always something out there that it's the notion of a shout out to Michael Goldstein. Bitstein is everyone's a scammer and there's only 21 million of them. And so we just take a very ultra conservative approach because we've seen everyone blow up and we don't want to be on that side. And we're playing the long game. So hopefully you take that from this podcast and a little bit of commentary. That was fun. And we'll, we'll do some do some clicks on, you know, I'm sure Matt Cole will appreciate it. Most definitely. Michael Tanguma, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you if they want to find more of your work and check out on Rev Finance? Honor and or honor bitcoin.com and you'd probably buy that URL and then M take you on Twitter. Shoot me a note DM if you want to come check out what we're doing. Have ideas and then early writers.com. If you're looking for capital in your building in this space. We'd love to talk with you if any of this resonated because they're probably not going to resonate with a lot of people. But if it resonate with you, it's you're our kind of client. Fantastic, Michael. Thank you so much for coming out then. Yeah. Thanks, Joe. Which does not fit a Bitcoins should be like that. Bitcoin 17 here 15 years is a $2 trillion asset and I could kill less with Bitcoin trace for it's just a matter of. The month. The month of the month.