Final Settlement: Bitcoin Is Money for Enemies

What's the form of money that you don't have to trust that will always do what you need? Make a mistake about it. We're in a bull market for all that. What else will be settled in that? And what else will the market wake up to that this asset really has? This spokesperson says Bitcoin payments can't be traced, which isn't exactly right. They can be traced on chain. Pseudonymity is different than anonymity. The take away there is like that, actually. That doesn't stop it from being seizure resistant, right? Like you can still use Bitcoin in this context, have it be censorship resistant. Nobody can freeze a Bitcoin transaction mid settlement, can't reverse the transaction. So even if those funds are being traced, you know nobody can really do anything from do anything about it. From a sanctions perspective, 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 righty gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, April 13th, 10:35 AM Eastern Standard Time. Middle of the hour, not top of the hour. Gentlemen, how are we doing? Lots going on in the world. I would say just to start, like the amount of things that have happened that I would consider massively bullish tailwinds for Bitcoin just in the past few weeks. Like if you, if someone was in a coma for the past three years, you woke them up, told them the things that happened the past few weeks, many of which we'll get into here today, and you asked them what the price of Bitcoin was. I think they would say like half, half, $1,000,000 a coin, which isn't to say bitcoin's broken, it's to say that markets are inefficient and information not evenly distributed around what Bitcoin is, how it works, and what a lot of these tailwinds mean. I would say the biggest one from the past week is that there's been various reporting around what's happening in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, the closure that the sort of toll system that's being implemented by Iran. Originally about two weeks ago, there was reporting in Bloomberg that both stable coins and Chinese yuan were being used to pay this toll. And then about a week ago, the Financial Times reported something similar, but with a slight twist in that Bitcoin was specifically reported as being used to pay these tolls. So we can get into some of the details, but maybe just at a high level, the significance of this in the sense that Bitcoin being used for settlement, particularly for, you know, oil tankers in a conflict zone, I think it speaks to a lot of the use case that Bitcoiners have talked about for a long time. And when someone says, you know, Bitcoin has no use case, it's it's pretty hard to rest on that case at this point. When you see something like this emerging, whether or not it's happening, you know, at scale or not, just the fact that it's even being thought about or considered in that context, I think is significant. So, thoughts, gentlemen? How are we doing today? Doing good, crazy world. Maybe we'll get into the price action or non action. I think just leading up to this, we forget all the weird inorganic or just interesting things from the October 10th that nobody's ever been able to explain to kind of maybe the potential front running of this Iran conflict with the retrace. And then I think what supports that is the price being relatively strong with what's happened. But independent of that, going back to the IRA and stuff, I think it's easily one of the most fascinating angles that have happened over the past year, like right up there with Morgan Stanley. And the reason why is because to your point, Brian, these are the things that have been talked about forever. When you go back to even, you know, a lot of the blog post and writings from health any there's a lot of things that are being described around banks and E cash, but it's been widely understood from the beginning. If Bitcoin is going to work, it has to be censorship resistant. You have to be able to anybody can trade with it. And I think it's a fascinating dynamic where I was just thinking about the the enemy of my enemy is my friend is the money of my enemy is my friend and that anybody can use this. And something as geopolitically significant as oil and energy, you were always going to end up in this state where you needed from your enemies to transact in any kind of trade in a form of money that you can receive and you can't, you can't reverse. And there's a lot of properties that tie into Bitcoin that allow for this to be done in even more dynamic way. We talked about multi institution net settling, having different custodians holding the keys. And as you validate that oil or whatever it is moves out, you can tranche out via real governance that you just don't have in the traditional world or with gold. But there's also really underpins the whole dynamic of why you want to hold the underlying because like this is obviously on the most hyperbolic extreme example. We still don't know for certain if they are or if they're trolling the the government, but I can promise you that this will continue. It already has continued or occurred for the 1st 17 years of bitcoins history is people that needed things were transacting in with Bitcoin when they couldn't use dollars. And so this idea, whether it's AI agents, compute, transacting and trade in a world that starts to breakdown with trust, what's the form of money that you don't have to trust that will always do what you need. And it's exactly that. And there's no shortage of like conversations out there of like, why do you want to hold Bitcoin? Don't you want any ETF? Don't you want proxies? And independent of like all of the counterparty risk and risk associated, you're going to want the money that you can actually leverage when you need it most. So you and your family can eat or you can get those resources. And we just live in such a especially Western because it shows predominantly US based, but we live in such a the, you know, comfort. And we just haven't seen all the things that emerging markets have seen around sanctions, bail, insurance, just where our money is needed to. It's always worked effectively. We'd had little blips with like the OA crisis or SDSVBI, call it little blips, GFC. But the point being is we just don't really feel the need for this notion of like outside money. And I think we all agree here and, and the market needs to to to pay attention to this is that like where we're going is in this very volatile period in place where you there's going to be a appreciation and a premium on that, especially because it's, it's the obvious thing to us, but it's not obvious to the market. And so the paper wrap around Bitcoin is the in vogue thing right now. But as the market gets more volatile, counterparty risk and just trust breaks down in the society we're and make no mistake about it, we're in a bull market for all of that. And so, yeah, I just thought that this is a very like Canary in the coal mine of where this is all going. And if people are selling oil and that significant of a commodity in Bitcoin or even the discussions there, what else will be settled in that and what else will the market wake up to that this asset really has value? Well said. I think the aspect of just using it for oil and agents using Bitcoin in in a long time frame is definitely something that is going to happen. It's going to happen very, very slowly over time. It's uncertain how much has actually been transacted in Bitcoin to this point, mostly because a lot of the straight seems to be closed. But there's no confirmed reports this at this point, although it is confirmed that Iran's head of oil and gases is specifically requesting to be paid in Bitcoin as well as yuan and stable coins. But you can see where everything's going with all this. And it is very, everybody always feels like they're going to be able to get out of the proxy or ETF wrapper and get into actual Bitcoin at the last time that they need it. But I think it's just more prudent probably to hold the actual underlying just it when you see where the world's going and how quickly. Things are shifting 100%. I wrote about this in in the on Ramp newsletter last week because I did think, you know, as we're discussing it is pretty significant like and, and part of what I caveat in the roundup was, you know, even if not a single toll has been paid in Bitcoin, just the fact that it's even being considered in that context I think is meaningful. And just a few other details from the reporting from the Financial Times. Now if you're familiar with the Financial Times, traditionally, historically not a very good Bitcoin related source. They've been pretty anti crypto and Bitcoin historically and have done some pretty terrible reporting on the topic. In this in this instance though, they are, Liam, as you referenced, quoting an Iranian official, the spokesperson for Iran's Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters Union, that's who the quote is really coming from on specifically the Bitcoin side. Now there's a few interesting things to pull out that may give us some insight to whether this is, you know, really happening or not. And those would be basically in that quote, this spokesperson says Bitcoin payments can't be traced, which isn't exactly right. Of course, they can be traced on chain. Pseudonymity is different than anonymity, but the the take away there is like that. Actually that doesn't stop it from being seizure resistant, right? Like you can still use Bitcoin in this context, have it be censorship resistant. Nobody can freeze a Bitcoin transaction mid settlement can't reverse the transaction. So even if those funds are being traced, you know, nobody can really do anything from do do anything about it from a sanctions perspective. Now compare and contrast that to if they were using stablecoins, which could much more easily actually be censored or seized. And we've seen literal examples of that over the past year or so where US Tether, tether funds that are associated with Iran have been frozen. So you're seeing sort of this play out in real time that people are realizing, Michael, to to sort of how you describe it, like what is the rail that if you can't trust anyone, what, what can you trust? You can trust this completely neutral settlement system that can't be seized, can't be stopped effectively. And you know, even if it can be traced, even if you, you know, your enemies know that you are using it, it actually doesn't matter. What's what's actually protected is the, you know, the property rights, effectively being able to transact in it, being able to accept or receive funds along those rails. And, you know, just at a high level, the other thing I called out in the piece is like, none of this is like pro Iran or like pro sanctions evasion. And you know, the common trope in Bitcoin is like Bitcoin is for enemies. And you sort of spoke to that a bit, Michael, But like, that's just the reality. Like no one's rooting for this necessarily, but like this is how it was always going to play out. When people realize what this thing is and, and how it can be used is it's going to be used by enemies. It's going to be used by North Korea, by Iran, because it's a tool. At the end of the day, it's, it's open source software that no one controls and people are going to use it as they see fit. And so, you know anything else there, Mike, before we move on? Yeah. I mean, I, I think the the only other part is there's no great timeline on how much transactions will happen on Bitcoin, whether it's via lightning, other layers for AI agents or specifically for geopolitical global commerce. But you can squint and see where this is the future. The best example of this is. There's. Probably a convergence of things happening. My understanding is part of the US and energy independence started being an exporter of oil that kind of change the dynamic with Saudi and what they were, you know, buying the petrodollar effectively started selling to China via gold yuan. The point being is that, and Growman talks about this a lot, where China, it makes zero sense if we need China's rare earths in manufacturing for our military industrial complex and they're holding our money. And so we can see that, you know, like you could see it just does not track. So you need a neutral form of money. And so to your point, I kind of bypassed it. I'm glad you brought it up. But it's like, because we're supportive of gold doesn't mean we're supportive of like XY or Z. It's just a tool. It's just money. But the point being is if you were to see this at that scale where people are moving to neutral assets, you can start to look in the businesses that need to exist. This is something that again, you've been thinking about for for basically half a decade at this point, but it will come about where whether it's Morgan Stanley and letting you hold spot because you need to move that back when and move it somewhere else or different products and services, the one that it seems so transparent. We're early but around this notion of governance within the custodian layer. When you move it like almost like an escrow service, because at the end of the day, you still have a problem with somebody has to send the Bitcoin, somebody has to send the tanker. What happens if you sent the Bitcoin, then you shot the tanker. You need to like start to create trust in layers with that. And so there's going to be services that get built out because when we talk about stable coins and we talk about payment rails on a long enough time horizon, these things will happen where your, your sensor, your funds are seized or there's just better. When you think about how do you pass like information along with payments over the, over an AI agentic world, you're going to have better program ability and tooling in an open permission less protocol versus all these others that are effectively walled gardens. And so this will just like start, I think it'll happen probably faster because AI is moving so fast that we're going to just see this like converge at the larger scales. I think we talked about this last week. There's like the barbell. So you're going to be net selling on these large assets and that's on chain. And then you're going to start to see all these other things proliferate because you need microtransactions. And I know we're not sleeping on it and the Bitcoin camp isn't, but it's really interesting to watch like in Silicon Valley and a lot of these other places, this is going to like hit them over the head because they're still living in kind of the web three world. Yeah, that's that's all well said. And, and it speaks to kind of what I allude to around like even if even if this hasn't, even if not a single toll has been paid in Bitcoin, like the message and the narrative that it sends to someone who doesn't deeply understand Bitcoin, it's value prop, it's mechanics, like just the fact that they're that it's being suggested you that kind of sort of that can prompt someone down the rabbit hole to understand why, why why maybe they wouldn't want to use stable coins, why it's not super feasible to use gold, why they're not using Ethereum or Fartcoin to do this. I. Don't, I don't think it's like 75 or 80, but I would say it's greater than 50% that it's true simply from the fact that if you said 510 years ago, it'd be like maybe not. But the reality is a, they've been mining, right? A lot of these sanctioned countries like Venezuela, Iran, North Korea have been leveraging natural resources to use this. It's also my understanding that the IRGC, the different like a there's, they're going into the geopolitics like IRGC has had to create a very sophisticated and orchestrated level of financial connections across the world to bypass all the sanctions that have happened in a banking system. So they deeply understand how Bitcoin works. And so if they were one of the sovereigns that were going to do this or accept it, it would make complete sense. And they don't even have to hold it. Not necessarily saying that they don't want to hold it, but they would have a way, given the liquidity profile to go back into whatever currency or gold that they needed. And that would have already been set up. That's not something they have to like spin up after doing this. Yeah, I agree. I think it's, I think it's pretty likely as well. I just wanted to caveat it because there hasn't been a lot of like hard evidence that it's actually happened outside of this one spokesperson saying it. Liam, anything else before we move on? No, just say that the obvious thing is if this actually does happen at more scale, there are going to be other counterparties that just need oil and want to transact a Bitcoin as well. And they're going to have to go deeper down the rabbit hole, you know, figure out how to mine, hold or buy Bitcoin for the first time to get up there and get their own infrastructure set up. It was always necessarily going to happen this way where it's, you know, small scales at 1st and kind of almost testing and then there would be these different rails set up for different trading counterparties and it would just inevitably like seep out further and further across the world. So yeah, makes sense that that it's playing out. That's why. And completely agreed on, yeah, the point that we're, we're not necessarily rooting for this, but it was just always inevitable. Yeah, while you while you transition that, that's worth calling out like this whole maritime law and the fact that there's asymmetric warfare with drones re everyone has to rethink ports and movement and you already see this with the blockades that supposed to go into effect or when in effect an hour ago that that could change. Of. The blockade, yeah, the blockade of the blockade that really effectively could change a lot of the dynamic of settlement and movement and into the the overarching point is like regardless of its if they did it or not, it's the fact that it's into the like zeitgeist and people are talking about it that naturally has second of the ramifications. For sure, maybe a nice transition you, you briefly mentioned Morgan Stanley ultimately, ultimately getting to the point where they offer spot. But right now they're in their, they're in their ETF wrapper phase. And as we've talked about on the show in past weeks, they were gearing up for the launch of their spot Bitcoin ETF, which went live, I believe on Thursday of last week, did about 35 million in volume on day one, and I think a little bit less than that on on Friday. But overall, near sort of 50 million in trading thus far. And Morgan Stanley's head of digital Asset strategy was on Bloomberg towards the end of last week talking about it. So I'm going to play the clip and then we can kind of discuss significance and and takeaways. But let's hear from Amy Oldenburg here. Day of trading for any of our, I have to tell you in terms of the pick up we saw yesterday, the first day of trading, our best first day of trading for any of our ETFs since we've started the ETF product line a couple years ago. So I think that speaks to the demand that's still out there for the Bitcoin ETF. Almost 1.7 million shares traded yesterday and at 12:00 today, we are already having another good day. Today, as you said, there's a. It's a nice it's a nice week in the market, a nice day in the market for some pick up in Bitcoin and the markets to help us out there. But I have to tell you in terms of the. So just, you know, talking about the success of it relative to anything they've done in the ETF space historically, as we've talked about, like they're not a big ETF shop, so it's not like they have a huge track record of launching ETFs. But even relative to the ones that they have done, super successful. Great first couple days. Michael, maybe I'll hand it to you. When are we going to have Amy on the show to discuss? We need to have Amy on the show. We definitely get Amy on the show. I think I don't, I don't think I personally fully appreciated the Morgan Stanley stuff. I was listening to James Safer, who's also been on the show. We should have him back on and Eric, but he was talking about a few things that you've called out and love maybe to get your thoughts on a like just a notion that Morgan Stanley really doesn't launch ETFs. They definitely don't go for the lowest price, right? So that signals strategic like imperative to go for like a market share and pull assets there. As Amy called out and it was referenced, I think it's like top one, like global or however, you know, public markets on ETF, just day one, top 1% and flows best for them. But I think that there's another angle that's really interesting here, which is I heard it was Arthur Hayes where you can find some Nuggets. He's just been around so long and his his angle was like, I don't care about the ETFs. I don't care about the Clary Act. It was interesting because it kind of ties into a lot of things. We've talked about how this is an emergent asset into retail asset and retail needs a better form of money. They've shown that. That's why they had to jump through, you know, a bunch of hoops and hold these hardware devices with large amounts of capital and that the banks aren't getting in here because they see it as a Wall Street necessarily trade and that they're going to, you know, two hedge funds are going to be trading against each other. It's that they're going to make a shit ton of fees from their clients in distribution. And because it's a retail asset. And I say retail in a like a broader sense that, you know, Morgan Stanley has X number of high net worth individuals and family offices that leverage their services and those are the individuals that will be buying this asset. And so that, that is where this asset grows and how it moves is through retail distribution. And so seeing that they're, they're seeing that they're really leaned in, they understand when you think about equities in the 6040 and where that's going. And, and a lot of the things we talked about the administration, even the ETF getting greenlit in the very in 2024, I guess 2023 at this point, 23 was approved and then 24 went live. Is that right? January 24. Yeah. The fact is that inflation is going to run and outside of gold and Bitcoin, all these assets, the reflexivity prices everyone out of the market. So real estate, we've already seen what's happened from a socio economic perspective. We see kind of like the stock market, the multiples that these guys know it, they're sophisticated and they know this asset fixed supply is going to be this vehicle, this battery for people to store their well. So very bullish for what's happening there. But also just an interesting take that at the end of the day, this will be like a retail driven phenomenon because it's a better form of money. They'll be able to move in much greater size and institutions and it's good to see Morgan Stanley recognize that. And these banks all compete with each other. So it's just a matter of time before others do. And then the the last thing is about the fees. It was referenced that on the margins, if you're at Black Rock, I think there are 2425, you may stay there. There's a deeper like option pool and like it's more liquid. But if you're a long term buy hold like financial advisor, you're trying to get those that lemon bits eats into that underline over time and that it can really be a mover for financial advisors and others to move flows their way. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. It'll be interesting to see how BlackRock responds if they do and then others. But I think like the, the embedded subtext to all of it is that and something we've been talking about, there's only 21 million of these and there's really there's much less than that. That the real game here long term is how do you wrap your arms metaphorically your financial service business around those underlined because as it appreciates that's when the financial services will start to come about. And I think that is embedded in a lot of their strategy. For sure. Yeah. Lots to pull out there. I think just to sort of add a little bit of nuance around the the notion that they are not a big ETF provider. It kind of goes even further than that in the sense that the ETFs that they have historically launched, they do it under sort of sub brands, so Calvert Parametric to name a couple, where they're basically managing and and issuing the ETF, but it's through a sub brand investment management business that is distinct from Morgan Stanley. So in terms of like actual ETFs that have the Morgan Stanley name on them, I think this is the third or fourth ever the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust. And so that is super significant just from the perspective of, yeah, they they're serious about this. The other thing that tells you they're serious is, is undercutting the entire complex on fees. And I think part of the notion there is like they also know that, you know, they played it a little slower, a little closer to the best for the past two years as these things existed. And now they're, you know, they have some, some ground to make up in terms of I bit, you know, haven't looked at the numbers in the past week, but anywhere, you know, 60 to 70 billion of assets in in I bit as we sit here today. So they've got some ground to make up. And so in order to do that, you've got to you basically had to undercut on fees. And then I think the the second prong of their strategy is, is going to be active solicitation across their network of 16,000 advisors. And so that's the other unique part about this, that it's not just another asset manager. This is a bank with a massive, if not the biggest wealth management client base in the world. And about a year ago, they had sort of a recommended allocation for crypto digital assets of 0 to 4%. So you can do the quick math and, and say that, you know, if if they get any, any, anything in that range for any sort of subset of their, you know, 9 plus trillion client base, it's going to be meaningful in terms of flows. And so I think last week is a a drop in the bucket in terms of what what we could see into that product over the next few years. Yeah, to that point too on just lower fees, I think it's also baked in there that they're going to move over the custody to their own in house custody that they're developing as well. I know that that's something that they've at least said that they're developing and planning to launch later this year. And would imagine that to Michael's point on just a competitive nature of where this is going, BlackRock, I, I'm going to go ahead and say that they're probably not going to lower their fees just because they have 97% of options volume. They may, but I could see Fidelity doing it because they aren't there and they have their own custody in house. They probably have the margins to support it. And then everybody else is still outsourcing to Coinbase. So they're going to be in a little bit of a tougher spot on where they actually go with these. But to to the broader point too, I think this is just we're going to see similar to what we saw with Larry Fink after the initial launch of their Bitcoin ETF. There's this is just a much broader slew of people who are going to go out and just really start to educate the market in general and have massive distributions on really the benefits of Bitcoin. And these are going to be some of the largest, you know, folks who who can educate people with serious capital. They have built in distribution, super serious high net worth clients in their network. So definitely going to be going to be big for Bitcoin as a whole. Yeah, that's a great call reading into the the pricing strategy that they'll ultimately own that custody. So that's, you know, embedded margin and also really the fact of how fast they moved. I think that is a big aspect to this because rather, regardless if it's a traditional ETF in the amount of time, you know, generally taking two to four years for somebody to turn it on, once they've done the diligence and understand, understood it Bitcoins a little bit different because it's just it's just holding BTC, but you still have to get comfortable with it to push it to your clients, let alone launch an ETF. So to move so fast into the ETF space, undercut the market, work on custody and other assets really puts them in a different lens. When you think about similar to Fidelity owning that vertically integrated approach where a lot of these other firms are going to send this stuff out to Coinbase. Now TBD if firms are going to really lean in and develop their own custody. But I know we agree here. It's like it makes complete sense why you wouldn't want to be disintermediated and send that underline to a third party. There's like the business case around what you want to do with that asset, the logistical kind of asset management level. But I think that second order, the 1st order is like, well, if you're sticking your neck out there and something happens to the third party, that's your whole business, right? That's all the trust into, why would you want to put the trust into a third party? It just signals a deep understanding of what's happening there, right? And Fidelity's already understood that for a long time. And so I think that's what we're going to see more and more. You'll start to understand who really appreciates and understands this asset class because they'll think deeply on the underline. We don't have to go deep there. But this is always like been the premise on the digital asset treasury trade is we can talk about all the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th order effects on why they may not make sense. But the first premise and the base lever is the custody. Because to assume that the custody will always be there is a flawed assumption because it hasn't been there for 17 years. And so if one thing goes wrong at any of the custodians, all of it goes away. And that is just lost in the whole sauce of the of the thing. So if somebody who's deeply understood that they would start there and then they would start to layer on above that. And so again, Morgan Stanley, kudos to them for understanding and and working on the like very base level of the Valley prop. Check out early riders.com for all the latest in Bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show 100. Percent maybe moving on here the other big headline from last week again, if you woke up from a coma from three years ago would be pretty wild to see the US Treasury Secretary writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal basically clamoring to get legislation passed that gives the digital asset crypto Bitcoin industry more clarity. The Clarity Act that is. So this was written by Scott Percent last week, basically calling on Congress and, and everyone, everyone in the mix who's kind of held this up to some extent to get this across the line. And So what are your guys thoughts on this? I know we've talked about the Clarity Act and sort of the back and forth on stable coins, the yield stuff, but what do you make of this Scott's op-ed? Is there a TLDR? Did you read it? I didn't read it. OK, so I didn't read it either. But I mean, I think we can surmise that you wrote an op-ed pro digital assets, pro clarity of the clarity. I think we forget because this happened when Trump was elected. You know, there was a lot of things he promised and this is definitely not pro Trump. This is just more of the status of things and the way they turn out is Bitcoin is still a very small asset. Digital assets are still very small as compared to global finance. And it's specifically gold, which is really the the sovereign reserve currency, right? And so I think that the understanding was back then and a lot of BPI and you know, shout out to Matt Pines called a lot of this is no longer there. But it's really the realization that there's a geopolitical weapon in Bitcoin and digital assets in the sense of the proliferation of the dollar and the debt, that this is geopolitically strategic for the US to really lead here from dollar dominance. But also because Bitcoin has, you can go into speculation on how the the genesis of it, but the point being is that empirically a large percentage of the Bitcoin sits here, whether it's the hash rate or it's the actual underlying from Americans. And now you have the publicly traded companies that are holding it along with ETFs. And so in a world where we don't know how much gold China is stacking and Russia, but we can see this world where we're going into a multipolar world where there's different reserve currencies and, and you have these dollars and maybe you want and stable coins that are moving around to transact, but the underlying is really not settling gold at this point. Well, what better way to counteract that than to create the right construct for Bitcoin to proliferate and grow, especially if the US is holding X and then U.S. citizens by proxy are holding Y. What does that mean for GDP dominance in a digital world? And so I think you Add all that together and A, it makes complete sense why percent so pro here BY clarity was always going to get done. We've been talking about that for the whole year. And then C, why you just got to hold on tight that hold the underline and Bitcoin will do its thing. It's just a matter of time, a matter of if not when. And again, it's not a popular sentiment because it sounds like coke, but I just feel like the price has been in this band because it's meant to be in this band. And when it's ready to rock'n'roll, it'll be ready to rock'n'roll not a second before. Yeah, I, I think that's, you kind of said. The quiet part that I think the Senate can't really say too loudly here in like a piece like this is that they're going to want and allow Bitcoin to monetize, act as a sponge like gold has for liquidity for the money that they're going to have to print. I think the way he frames it in here, just doing like a quick three read through, it's like this line that I have highlighted here, the promise of genius can't be realized without clarity support. So it's, it's much more stablecoin focused, I think outwardly and how they're talking about the need to get clarity done. Because if you want to tokenize the world, if you want to do all these other things on these new rails, basically you need these broader green lights from government to to be able to enact a lot of these things and force things that have already been passed like the genius Act. And so I think that's how they're they're sort of outwardly talking about it is like it's stable coins, it's tokenized assets, It's, you know, tokenize real world assets getting, you know, the stock market on chain, however you want to phrase it. But I think behind the scenes, you're totally right. It's like we need clarity on all this stuff, no pun intended, in order to allow basically Bitcoin to be normalized as the premier store value for U.S. citizens and allow them to preserve their wealth in this new sort of multipolar digital world. Yeah, it's it's. Go ahead, I was. Just going to say like it also we don't have to overcomplicate it. I mean, this is really where I, I kind of turned very bullish on stablecoins is realizing Tether, when you look at it from a correlation from the amount of Tether you printed to the amount of Bitcoin, right? Like you're effectively creating this bridge into Bitcoin from a physical world and dollar being physical. And that in the same way, if you're going to create this Clarity Act, you're going to bring this bridge into digital assets, you're going to proliferate even the stock market via tokenized assets to anybody in emerging markets to get exposure. And then that flow will move into a hard asset with a fixed supply. It's really that straightforward. And so it's just again, the function of time and also the function of like he writes us op-ed. I would imagine some of it is because there's naturally different factions within a government, they're dissenting, there's problems. So you have to go and appeal to your constituents into the broader market to put pressure on those individuals to get this done in a in a time frame that is palatable for what their goals and objectives are. Yeah. I think similar to the banks trying to get as much of their arms around the Bitcoin and in their own custody as possible. I think that the US is trying to get as much Bitcoin into the US as possible. Trying to get all businesses back in the US domiciled and show that they're friendlier to what is actually going on to both businesses and individuals who will ultimately invest their Bitcoin into businesses too and then just grow GDP as you mentioned. But yeah, in addition to that, obviously this would be a big boon for stablecoins because it's the other side of the pair of all digital assets. And having any more digital assets in the US and and tokenized assets, it's going to be good for both stablecoin volumes and, you know, total outstanding balances. And then inevitably it will all flow into Bitcoin. It's just that simple. Well said. OK. We've got a few headlines around sort of similar to to what we're just been discussing around the convergence of traditional banking and crypto and Bitcoin. I think the regulatory side is, is not just AUS centric sort of narrative or storyline. We had this headline late last week out of Japan that they are moving to classify Bitcoin and crypto as financial instruments under a new bill. Anything on this one? I think, yeah, this is to be expected as as again, sort of regulators and governments move to again, provide no, no pun intended, more clarity around what these things are, how they can be used, how you can build businesses around them. Then you get headlines like this where Standard Chartered is waiting, integrating Zodia custody with their corporate banking arm. You, you have this continued convergence. And so, you know, some people are not going to wait for that quote, UN quote, clarity. They're going to start building ahead of it, but I think once you do get more and more sort of regulatory green lights in stone, you're going to have a a mad rush for people to catch up to a lot of these people that have already been making moves. So any thoughts on either the Japan headline or what we have up up here? Yeah. I think the other one, just a tie in, we don't have to pull it up was I think there was 5 Swiss firms and then UBS looking at dollar or state making a stable coin around the Swiss franc, which it's my understanding Swiss franc's pretty appealing globally just given the, I think their, their conservative level of like debasement and the backing of it. But to your point, I think it's really interesting that the US from a capital markets and regulation really leads. I don't know how much of that's game theory and how how much of that is just, you know, like military force and and functions of the past 50 years. But regardless, like post ETF, you saw this move instantly and it's just continued the drum beat around across the world. The recognition of digital assets, the recognition of this is going to go in One Direction. I thought it was really savvy with Standard Charter because Standard Charter set up Zodia, I would say at least like four or five years ago. Zodia was this like extension arm's length. Think of it as like a skunks skunk work to like labs because it was out there operating on its own, but backed by standard charter. So you got like the Intel and the business was building and creating in in in operating before all this stuff was was live and blessed. And so now they're looking to pull it back into the firm standard Charter is interesting because if you look at their global footprint, I mean, it's everywhere outside of the US, right? You look across the world when it comes to like just the rails and the onboarding from Fiat and where they sit, the banks from Hong Kong all the way to London. And so you naturally now you have this global bank that's bringing in custody and digital assets. I think it's just again, really a signal for where this is going globally around the movement of capital. And then also the largest firms really thinking about how do they vertically integrate and then obviously custody is that the base level of all this? So they're looking to bring in Bitcoin into their firm. And then they would more than likely Standard Chartered custody sits underneath a lot of other firms in the same way Bitco sits underneath other firms. So the bank would be able to not only get those assets, but they're right there next to the dollar rails to be able to cross collateralize, offer other financial services. So I think they're going to be in a really good spot from a global perspective. Yeah, it's a lot of what we've been talking about like Morgan Stanley vertically integrating in order to drive down costs. And Morgan Stanley went out and they actually invested in 0 hash and you know, I think tried to buy them at one point in time. And there are so many synergies across both the wealth management side and then them owning E*Trade to just offering the the trading platform to clients. This is obviously something that's going to happen more and more as all banks and large financial firms get more and more into digital assets. When you really start to see other firms go out and make investments, start to, you know, have these companies spin out of large banks, I think that's a sign that they're actually starting to take this seriously. Right now it's just Standard Charter and and Morgan Stanley, at least to a large degree, because any time that these initiatives are inside, large organizations are just going to get buried, buried with just so many layers of bureaucracy that it's going to be very difficult to actually create it inside and, and get anything to market and a manageable time frame. And so building them stand alone or investing in them stand alone is just going to allow them to have a little bit more way to see what's actually going on in the industry from the arm's length without actually just stifling innovation and speed from a lot of this too. So definitely expecting a lot of this to get ramped up, and I think that the Clarity Act will probably be a pretty good catalyst for this to start in mass. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not, probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys. But are your loved? Ones billions of Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan with on ramp inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyd's of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me. Yeah, another headline sort of along these lines. And we've seen seen examples of this over the past several years where there's sort of an intermingling between governmental roles and then basically people leaving the government to work in the industry. So this latest example is Securitize appointing former SEC official as their new president. This fellow Brett Redfern confirms who's the former SEC markets and trading director. He's going to be the president of Securitize who's securitized just I think also last week announced a non binding agreement, New York Stock Exchange to settle tokenized securities on chain. So this is the real tokenization push. You know, you make a nice partnership announcement with the New York Stock Exchange and then you hire the former SEC markets and trading director and it's it's all a go. So thoughts on this one? Yeah. I thought it was interesting. I listened to something, I think it was from the securitized guys where I think that their premise and it makes sense. I think everyone's premise, even mine was like you're going to securitize and digitize like private markets assets because they've historically been like inefficient or illiquid and that was how they started. But they realized you still have that case of liquidity. And so they kind of pivoted and found the value of product market fit in the hyper liquid assets. I think A, because of the demand, but B, because of what we'll see around cross collateralization. And I'm not saying on pro this, because I can see a lot of velocity in transactions moving and then a lot of funds lost, but it's just the reality of proliferation of US equities and then also financialization. That's where everyone makes their money is in the, the velocity and in transaction these fees. So that makes sense. One other thing I want to pull up, and I'm sure let me have some thoughts. If there's a link for Valinor, if they got the, the funding came out last week. They're former Blackstone folks, but I didn't get a chance to look into them. So I, I recently listened to a pod that they were on breaking down what they're doing. They're former Blackstone guys or in gals, I guess related to private credit, but for for like blockchain or or stablecoins. And what it means is it actually makes a lot of sense. The the example they use is if you're familiar, we've talked about rain. Rain is a primary issuer of the only one that's a non bank that allows you to issue these debit cards that are on stablecoin rail. So you can manage those balances. But what happens is there's like an inefficient amount of capital that has to be tied up. If you like, let's say you are on ramp, we're not using it, but let's just say we were and we our clients had balances and they wanted to leverage them via the cards. We have to lock up some of that float so they can use it. And then you like net settle on a daily basis. And so there's this world where Ballinor's stepping in understanding these like credit markets on stablecoid rails, where they can fund that they can get visibility into, you know, the assets that are sitting there and then they make a small bit small premium. And I think you're going to see more of this. The easiest example is on the Bitcoin back lending side. If you're lending in stable coins and you're able to see the underlying, the custody, you can get real familiar. I think that's where a lot of the private credit market has been dislocated with Bitcoin understanding the collateral, but also the security profile of the custodian. You see these high interest rates and you hear that a lot from the market participants like why are they fleecing me? Why is it so high? Whether it's let in arch whoever, but the reality is because there's no fed window stepping in to provide those dollars, it's private credit and private credit historically hasn't understood the underlying. So if they're going to put their capital at risk, they have to be paid that premium. And I think Valinor and other firms like that are going to step in understand the movement because that is key. You have to understand the movement and velocity of this and the risk profile or you're going to get hosed if you're moving around stable coins for credit. And so I just thought that this was really interesting and I have some ideas on things we can do with them. So anyway, I, I thought this was a cool one to pull up because it sounds like at face value, like what is it? Where's the value? But I think there's going to be a lot of value in bringing dollars on chain in a like institutional way that you can underwrite properly. Interesting. So it's essentially a marketplace for private credit to where Valinor will offer securitized private credit offerings to anybody who's on the platform as well too. It's a great question. I don't necessarily know if it's full marketplace. I would imagine a lot of the value is in their underwriting. And so it's probably looks more like a Blackstone model where you have these different funds and you're effectively offering different, you know, durations and premiums on the capital. And then they're the ones, you know, funding and managing that versus like tying it together. But I, I could, I mean, I could see maybe a marketplace, but I think the marketplace aspect in this world always, it's not that there's not a need for it. It just kind of breaks down in financial services because it reminds me a lot of of Airbnb early days or like Craigslist, a great example. It's like Craigslist had some value because you can aggregate like two sides, but you still have the quality mismatch and on both sides, right, of the quality of the capital and quality of the, the person issuing in the loans. And so if you have somebody in the middle that takes that expertise and effectively even takes their premium, there's a lot of value. If you have excess dollars and you have the intermediate intermediary that understands private credit but also understands the risk that's embedded in this ecosystem, you can make a nice business. If you can basically take those that, that that's where the value is, right? You're taking that, that margin is baked into like you being native to the space, but also understanding the institutional landscape and what those private credit people need. Because just being in the space, that's a big problem where historically, if you have hobbyists or people that are very native to understanding multi sig and a lot of intricacies of Bitcoin, they don't necessarily speak the best language to private credit folks. And so you always have this like mismatch of like, well, maybe it's a sound product, but if you can't actually package it up, you're, you're, you're still missing out on getting that liquidity into the market. I interpreted that headline maybe a little bit differently in the sense that it reminds me of what I brought up on the screen here is that, you know, it's kind of conspicuous timing to one launch credit default swaps on private credit for the first time ever. And then also let's bring it on on chain for the first time ever. To me, it just seems like people want to get out of this stuff. And by basically allowing either you to short it if you own a ton of it or just opening up these, you know, marketplaces, I think people are going to get wrecked If you if you're if you're looking to go long private credit on any blockchain. Yeah, it's like to me this this is just signaling how bearish private, private private credit markets are right now. And not, not a ton much more than that. Yeah. I mean, I would listen to the podcast and then have that take, especially if I said I listen to it. The being in the space there was a the easy example, which is if you started a Bitcoin back lending firm today and let's say you got the licenses, your biggest problem is how do you get the dollars right? So that's like an easy example of like bringing it on chain. It's not necessarily like crypto or some kind of crazy Ponzi. It's literally like, OK, I'm going to do 5040% loan to value, but I need an intermediary to help me source that credit. And then if you take it a step further and you have more banks like airborne, other firms that are going to be effectively banking dollars. I'm not saying like people won't get wrecked in the velocity, but there is a need for firms that actually have the acumen to speak to the institutional investors on the private credit side. And then also understand deeply like the value prop of a firm that is taking a very conservative approach to lending IEA Bitcoin back alone. And then there is a spread there because again, if you go to an Archer letting, if you're taking out a smaller loan, it's in the 10 to 12%. If there's private credit markets that are looking to get 8% on their money and they can issue it at 9:00, they can meet that fee. That's where I'm going with like the value proper where I see something needing. Now we're going into like farming out and everything that happened during Define summer and all that like of course, but I think that they're taking a more institutional lens into bringing dollars into a growing stable coin market. Yeah, that's at least my interpretation of no. I think that's I think that makes sense on like a go forward basis, but I think there's like, you know, in terms of like net new loan creation. But I think in terms of if we're just going to put like, you know, more what this this hot, this headline is describing like more so existing loan books, just like having them be more tradeable, like I I don't see. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean. I agree with what you're saying like net net new having a a better connectivity and liquidity that that I could see as as that's. What they're doing, I mean, that's what they're doing, yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. It's not I don't think there's anything related to yeah, that's a complete other side of a coin of like private credit and all the things we've talked about why bullish Bitcoin and air pockets that there's all this money that's dead that hasn't been marked to market yet to bring that on chain and give it to, you know, the bags to somebody else. Like, yeah, definitely bearish on that. Exactly, Michael, credit to you. You called this a few weeks ago, Gemini takeover rumors you you had forecasted within the next 12 to 24. It happened in two weeks. Thoughts on this Stock jumped 10% on takeover rumors. Maybe they'll break it up. Pieces of it will be acquired. Yeah. I mean, I think we'll see where it goes because my understanding is the interest is in some of the licenses outside of the US. The reality is like all this stuff is scarce. This is where I think we're bullish on what we're building and the firms we're investing in is that whether it's the talent OR infrastructure, there is a lot of things in place that these firms have done over the past five to 10 years when they were, you know, contrarian and not popular. And so it makes complete sense that you have these assets. And when you're a large firm, whether you're Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Standard Charter, go down the list or firms that maybe can go get banking licenses, it's really symmetry to like tie in digital assets, especially now with his arbitrage that almost anybody can be a bank. If you're going to embed stable coins and account access, that a lot of this infrastructure is just going to have a premium even over what their multiples are on revenue. So I, I, I think this makes sense. We'll see where it goes. If the Bitcoin price double tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it. Move it or. Use it Lloyd's of London Insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com On ramp secured by three, controlled by me. Agreed, nothing else. OK, a few minutes left. You guys want to talk about Go SAT's? Can you pull up the anthropic one? Because I think that I think this one's going to be interesting to watch play out because you click on that chart, it's just pretty insane when you think about Anthropic getting to roughly 30 billion an RR. And I think their bottom was or not bottom. But last I think it was like Q4 last year was at either 3 or 9 million. I think it was 3 billion. And this chart showing Meta to get to that same level as 86,000 employees versus Anthropics 2500 that it's, it's this notion of like total addressable market for intelligence is effectively infinite, right? Because it's the angle of it's the unknown unknown of like what can people use this for? And then what does it increase? And then also, I don't know how true this is, but my understanding is like them and open AI only using total data center capacity is like 1.7 gigawatts of power. It's not like an insane amount and they're still have capacity coming on. I think that I know obviously it's getting shortened with a lot of the energy crisis, but I think this year was supposed to be like 2 to 3. But, and I actually might have a order of magnitude wrong. It might be megawatts. But the the main point is that they don't have them limited capacity still and they're getting more efficient with time as the inference cost goes down. And so I just think it's a fascinating model to watch play out. We've been super bearish on getting to some level of profitability and the cost, but if they can get this scale where every company is reliant on them. And I know there's a lot of positives with open source, but I don't think it's either or. I think that a lot of firms will keep proprietary data and they'll still need these firms to figure out how to even like, you know, calibrate open source for their own internal org. But if you're going to have this need for frontier models for some of your output, there's only certain firms working at this level. And I thought it was just fascinating to see how fast they're moving. Yeah, this is a fascinating chart. What I guess I have a question for you, Michael, Maybe you know the answer. But like because I've sort of also thought that there's going to be this push and pull between maintaining some sort of like enterprise account and also, you know, building locally open source. But correct me if I'm wrong. Like there's always going to be some lag in terms of like the most frontier model that Anthropic is putting out and then what can be run locally open source. And so I think you're right that maybe there is that sort of like you don't abandoned one or the other, but there's you're almost required to use both. So you have the frontier, the latest and greatest, and then you're also sort of like, you know, building your own internal repositories as well. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, and the other aspect of it is like, I believe roughly they're leading in the code space, right? They took this understanding like the code is the base level because the code can just go recreate agents and the directional understanding is that right now global production of code is 5% anthropic. So you should you still have and the estimates are that most engineers in whatever the time horizon and call it 2 to 10 years, it'll be 95% of the code is created by these models. So I think it's just a fascinating lens to look at. It reminds me a little bit of the Uber analogy when people looked at total addressable marketing. It was just tabs and or black cars when it was much greater than that. So it'll be interesting to watch play out. I think the thing we know no matter what is whether it's coordinating economic activity online via Satoshi's will win out. But also as these firms really start to get to profitability and their costs go up with inflation, how quick they are to start putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet and see that flywheel spin and then that becoming an economic advantage, competitive advantage against the other income, the other purchase events or competitors. Yeah, well said. I think that the Tam is going to get so much bigger. I mean, I've written a lot more code this year and I never had before like 12 months ago. The Tam is everybody's going to be writing code. And there's a great article that popped back up on my radar. It was from like 20 years ago about the fallacy of the law of diminishing returns and how it only applies to resource based manufacturing and, you know, products in the real world and how they're actually laws of increasing returns and knowledge work. It's a it's a really fascinating article and well worth a read on how this can really apply to and Tropic other AI companies and just generally the type of economic world where now it really went into how teams are going to shift significantly to and kind of lines up with how Jack rebuilt block. And so I would recommend folks check that out as well. Who? Who wrote that? It was W Bryan Arthur, we can link to it in the shoutouts. Link to that. That sounds good. All right, like all the jumps. So maybe we'll we'll save those couple other links we had for next week. Liam, thanks for joining me as always. Thanks guys all. Right, see you. 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 Onramp 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.