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Final Settlement — Episode 9

Final Settlement E009: Corporate Bitcoin Adoption with eBay's Mason Carter

June 18, 2024 · 01:13:57
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Final Settlement: a biweekly podcast presented by Onramp which explores the breadth and depth of the Bitcoin thesis, focusing on the underlying mechanics of the protocol, its ongoing development, and real-world applications of the technology. Hosted by Brian Cubellis (Head of Strategy & Research at Onramp) and Michael Tanguma (Co-founder & CEO of Onramp), Final Settlement aims to go beyond the conventional view of Bitcoin as merely a financial asset, or “digital gold." Discover how

Transcript+
It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared we need to get into. The world of OK this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing. The role of God. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of Final Settlement, a podcast from On Ramp Media. On today's show, we're joined by Mason Carter, a Bitcoin advocate and employee at eBay focused on treasury management. Mason shares his journey of discovering Bitcoin and articulates the challenges of influencing internal policy at a large organization like eBay. Mason highlights the need for companies to adopt Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset and the potential benefits of integrating the technology of Bitcoin into existing businesses. The conversation explores the importance of understanding Bitcoin and its role as a store of value, highlighting the need for better custody solutions and the impact of custody on institutional adoption. The conversation also touches on the flaws in the traditional 6040 portfolio model and the need for a new approach to capital allocation. We explore the challenges faced by businesses in adopting Bitcoin and the gaps in infrastructure and tools that need to be addressed. And now, time for the show, and we're live. Welcome back to Final Settlement, really exciting show today on as a guest we have Mason Carter joining us from eBay. He works in the treasury line of business at eBay and he's also a bitcoiner. He most recently, as I mentioned, has been working in the treasury space of of ebay's business and also has sort of leaned into Bitcoin education on the side as as his personal passion has grown for Bitcoin. So he's got a YouTube channel and is active on Twitter on chain cowboy. If you want to find him and follow him putting out some really good educational content around Bitcoin. But excited to have Mason on the show today because, you know, when Michael and I were first thinking about final settlement this show and and what it would represent, one of the sort of corollaries to to what we wanted this show to be was, you know, identifying individuals who may not be firmly in the Bitcoin space today, but they are at some legacy business, whether it's in tech or traditional finance, that hasn't yet fully appreciated what Bitcoin is. But on an individual level, that person, like in Mason's case, you know, has come to understand Bitcoin has a growing passion for it. And the dynamic of, of being at a large corporate entity or an org and trying to influence the will and minds of, of other colleagues around you can be a very challenging, difficult process. And, and ultimately, you know, one I think is, is, you know, something that I experienced back when I was in the traditional finance space, I worked at Brown brothers for, for eight years before leaving and, and working at Coinbase for a year before joining on ramp. But so I, I experienced a very similar dynamic first hand where, you know, I was trying to talk about Bitcoin. This is back in 2020-2021 with, you know, my CIO and other colleagues. And it's, it can be a very difficult experience being sort of alone on an island as the the crazy bitcoiner in an org that is trying to get people to think critically about, you know, what this asset is, what the technology is, how it can be applied to a given business. And so, yeah, really excited to have you on the show. Mason, welcome. Happy to be here. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Michael. Yeah, welcome. Super excited to go through the progression of like your background, how you found Bitcoin. The journey to Brian's point feels like there's a very there's an inflection point for everyone that's a professional that goes down the rag hole. I've seen built operate in the space for, you know, three or four years now, if not longer is you find it when you realize your business is probably building an older version or building to an old version of the world. But you naturally have certain obligations when it comes to family requirements, social status and and they've seen it go both ways. It's like a convergence of do you take the path less traveled and figure out how to deliver value? And most try to at least start at their firm, but they usually hit a dead end or like a roadblock. And then it's that natural point you just kind of like, suck it up and stay there. Or do you kind of go And it feels like year over year more deciding as the market matures, there's more opportunities, there's more investment funds to see the capital. And so excited for this conversation here. You know, Mason's journey and then how that's kind of led to what's going on in the US. Yeah. So let's let's maybe start there would be curious sort of Mason, how how you first heard about Bitcoin, how you got interested in it and really what that what that journey down the proverbial rabbit hole was like for you? Yeah, So I discovered Bitcoin when I was a teenager. It was around the 2017 time frame. And I like to start with a prior context that happened to me when I was a kid. So my parents grew up typical American story, paycheck to paycheck. You know, they had some previous struggles with various consumer debt and things along those lines. And one day when I was 11, out of the blue, we had some random creditor come and freeze my parents only bank account. They weren't too financially sophisticated like I said. So it was one bank account, one debit card and it was frozen. We couldn't buy gas, we couldn't buy groceries. It was a horrible experience that took days to hire a lawyer. We had never had a lawyer before and it was just this awful UN American, just invasion of privacy, invasion of freedom, all of that. So I had that prior experience and I grew up on YouTube. So I have probably spent thousands and thousands of hours on YouTube learning anything I want to know about. And it was at some point in 2017. I wish I knew the video. Everyone likes to know or everyone wants to know what the video was. I don't know. But I saw some video on the sidebar about Bitcoin and I clicked on it and usually people talk about, oh, I, I heard about it in 2014, but I didn't get it until 18 or something along those lines. But for me, because of that prior experience, I instantly understood that this was a verifiable monetary network that no one can take away from you. No one can come and freeze and ruin your week, So but even then I was going deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and even then still thought, hey, I'm just a teenager. You know, Larry Fink calls me an idiot. Warren Buffett calls me a rat poison connoisseur, all these people. So you know, what do I know? So I decided to go to college, get a degree in finance, went to Texas Tech, had some various internships that, you know, in commercial real estate, equity research and corporate finance. And ultimately at the end of my, of, of my journey at Texas Tech, I realized I, I think I'm pretty right about this Bitcoin thing. And when I joined eBay, really my goal from the beginning was to bring Bitcoin to eBay in some form or fashion, whether it's a treasury asset or a, a payment asset or a payment technology. Because I think everyone would agree that back in 2017, we never would have thought that we would have dozens of SEC approved Bitcoin ETFs before we have, you know, magic Internet money on the Internet. So that's why I joined eBay. I, I did a program called the finance Futures program. And then most recently I've been working on Treasury and I've been working on Orange, killing everyone I can possibly get in front of for about 3 years now. At Onramp, we believe that Bitcoin will be the most important asset to own in the 21st century. Our Multi Institution custody solution is the safest and most secure way to ensure that your Bitcoin remains in your and your family's possession for decades to come. Multi Institution custody maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, leveraging Bitcoin's native properties to eliminate single points of failure that have historically complicated Bitcoin ownership. Onramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey. For more information, check us out at onrampbitcoin.com. Yeah, no, it's a, it's a super, super interesting sort of personal journey and and interesting that given that sort of prior childhood experience, it kind of clicked for you more, more quickly than than it does for most people. I think that's a very sort of unique trajectory at least here in the West, right. Like, you know, if you think about someone in Africa or some other, you know, more emerging market, I think that that chasm for understanding the importance of Bitcoin is much smaller, right? Because you're, you're living in a world where, you know, maybe you're financially oppressed or your currency is hyperinflating. So you have more touch points that allow you to see the value prop of of Bitcoin more clearly. But I think, you know, something that we just take for granted here in the West is like dollars relatively stable, at least, you know, relative to all these other Fiat currencies. So that sort of chasm of understanding typically takes some time. I mean, I know it did for me at least, you know, and I, I sort of came to Bitcoin similar time frame as U Mason 20/17/2018 And again, I was, I was still in the Tradfi world. I was still sitting at, at Brown Brothers and, and was fascinated by this thing, but I, I didn't fully understand it. I knew it was important. I knew sort of in my gut, this is a important technology. But even at that point, I, I hadn't yet discerned why Bitcoin would specifically was different. So, you know, I went down the, the altcoin rabbit holes as well for those first couple years there. And it took me a while to, to really get to the point of, OK, now Bitcoin is very different fundamentally in, in its architecture and, and, and how it works. And so I think that is a, a very interesting journey. I'm curious, you know, when you sort of were graduating, you were entering the workforce, was there any thought of I'm just going to go right into Bitcoin like you mentioned, like, you know, I, I think I'm right about this thing. Did it just seem like it was going to be too difficult to jump or too risky of a jump? Like why the why the route to eBay I guess generally. So I've been very entrepreneurial since I was very young. Like I flipped my first iPhone when I was in 7th grade on eBay. When, you know, I probably shouldn't have an eBay account. I was selling all kinds of things, flipping them on Facebook marketplace, eBay, everything. So I've always been very passionate about the platform. And like I said, I I think we should have magic Internet money on the Internet. So I thought it was a very good opportunity to potentially make an impact being just a person graduating out of college, because the, the program I joined was a very intimate program. It's just five people that are taking every year. And we, we sort of got the freedom to do side projects to do things that we were interested in. And I thought eBay was both a good size and scale. You know, back then there was a lot of hype in, in Bitcoin and crypto in general. And I, I think I was just scared to join one of these companies that didn't really have any legacy to it. And in joining eBay, you get both the brand recognition of a big brand, but we have the resources of also a big brand. I, I like to compare it because I interned at Dell Technologies, the computer company Dell, at least when I was there, they did. And I'm just going to do round numbers here, somewhere around 100 billion in revenue and close to 3 billion in profit, if I remember correctly. And they do that with over 100,000 employees, they're absolutely giant company. And eBay does somewhere around 10 billion in profit and close to 3 billion in revenue with about 15,000 employees. There was there was much more of an opportunity to make a difference as a young guy. So I think that's why I ultimately went with it. But yeah. One thing, Mason, that I found interesting and is like, if you really take a step back, like what what you did, I didn't know the story about in 7th grade using eBay and already like having this affinity or you know, just understanding the marketplace and always being interested in it. It's like thinking about going into Bitcoin and then naturally going through internship and then landing at eBay is one thing. But then to the extent that you've been involved at the highest level with figuring out quote UN quote digital assets internally and what does it look like is a is a pretty while I don't know if do you ever appreciate, I don't know if you fully appreciate it. Like when you explain to me the things you're working on there from being at larger companies. This is generally like something that somebody has been around a few decades, has seen the inner workings of, you know, operationalizing and integrating new tech. Just curious like how you were able to like go from internship knowing you want to work on Bitcoin to basically working with the largest marketplace in the world and try to integrate Bitcoin because that's like no small fee. And we never really chat about it. And just curious like if you if you got to appreciate how far fetched that sounds? Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. Like I used to meet periodically with the, the CFO of eBay and teach him about Bitcoin, just what is a block, what is a hash? What is a, you know, having how, how do all these things work? And in the very beginning, I would like sweat through shirts and I'd be so nervous doing it. And I very much appreciate and, and see it as a, as a rare thing. I'm just not scared. You know, I see people as people and everyone wants to learn. And if someone comes up to me and says, hey, I'd like to learn about Bitcoin, you know, I'm not afraid to pursue that. And I just, I think it's the most important technology of our time. And I think my time is best spent advocating for it and teaching people about it. So whatever it takes, if I have to be annoying to some VP or some C level person at the company to talk about it, then you know, I'll do it. I'm I'm not afraid of that. Yeah. I mean, I think one thing you just mentioned there is, you know, Bitcoin is a technology, right? And this is something that we talk about a lot at on ramp and and sort of more broadly just in in casual conversations. But it's like, you know, if you think about the Internet or even, you know, more recently AI tools, these are just technologies and companies are going to integrate these over time. And if they don't, they're going to fall behind like that. That is what happened with the Internet in the late 90s into the early 2000s. If you didn't create a website, like you just got out competed, right? If you didn't leverage the new technology, the new tools, you get out competed by those that do. It's I mean, it's sort of classic game theory in a sense of you have to adopt the new technologies which make you more efficient, more productive. And so AI is another example of that. But I think one thing that people are missing is like Bitcoin is just a technology, you know, that I think most people on the outskirts of this space view it as a speculative investment or an asset, when in reality, it's just a piece of technology that can make both an individual or, you know, a large enterprise more efficient, more productive. And, and, and sort of the lowest hanging fruit way to integrate Bitcoin into a Business Today is what we've started to see on, on sort of the corporate treasury adoption side of things. So I'd love to talk through like, you know, when you were thinking through, you know, how am I going to get executives or, or C-Suite folks at eBay to think about Bitcoin? What were the ways that you thought about integrating? Because I mean, you mentioned like you should be able to use Bitcoin on the Internet, right? So it's, it is kind of shocking to me that like you can't buy goods on eBay in Bitcoin today and you can't receive Bitcoin as payment if you're selling a good on eBay that that feels like a natural, you know, first order of business. If you're going to integrate Bitcoin into your, your business, that's a marketplace business. But beyond that, you know, I think what we've, what we've seen more adoption of recently is what obviously MicroStrategy and, and Michael Saylor pioneered in and just adopting Bitcoin as a, as a treasury asset. And I think that that part is very interesting because like with all Bitcoin adoption, I think it starts with individuals, right? You know, it's it's an individual that understands Bitcoin more deeply, has done the work, has done the research and realizes, you know, their entity, their corporation, they need to think about it more critically. And then it's a matter of going in, convincing the board or, you know, other colleagues. I think sailors kind of the anomaly or the outlier in that respect in that, you know, he had basically enough unilateral control of his of his corporations to just make the decision saying, you know, we're doing this. He let people get out if they weren't on board with it. But I think going forward, it's going to be more a matter of the former of, you know, you need to actually go and convince people. So I'm curious, you know, how are you thinking about it initially in terms of getting eBay to think about Bitcoin critically? And then, you know, how did that evolve over time into what you were doing on the Treasury side specifically? Yeah. So when I was looking to integrate Bitcoin at eBay, we were really, you know, we had a group of folks that had someone from engineering, someone from design, someone from product management. And we all got together and thought all the way back in 2021, how can we integrate Bitcoin into eBay in a way that's compatible with our risk framework, in a way that enables growth and, you know, is actually solving a problem instead of creating problems, as you know, so often happens in crypto. And what we did was we thought, what if we gave sellers the ability to get paid in Bitcoin, which may sound familiar because that's exactly what Square and Block ended up watching. We we thought, imagine if so today there's there's three ways to acquire Bitcoin. You can either acquire it with your disposable income, which is, you know, with inflation, you know, most people don't have that much disposable income. You can mine it at scale, or you can sell a product or service in exchange for Bitcoin. And theoretically you can do the third one Today. You can sell an item on eBay, take an old pair of sneakers. You sell it, you receive your proceeds in cash. You transfer it to your favorite Bitcoin exchange. Then you receive the Bitcoin. And eventually, if you'd like to spend that, if it's gone up in value enough, you'd like to purchase something, you'd have to cash it out, take the tax implications of that, send it back to your bank, and then ultimately spend it on eBay. We thought, what if we could? Just eliminate that entire middle process and give people directly the ability to sell on eBay, receive Bitcoin in return. And then maybe you get a notification in the future that says, hey, look, Brian, you're the Nikes that were on your wish list. Now your Bitcoin is worth enough to purchase that. And you know, we pitched it for for years to at every level of the company and they ultimately decided to focus more on NFTS. We acquired an NFT company, which in hindsight was wasn't the right choice. But I think this is becoming more clear and it makes sense from ebay's perspective as the place that you go to, to look for collectibles and, and trading and buying and selling. It makes sense. But what I've been really advocating for all the all these years is how Bitcoin can fit into, you know, giving sellers the ability to receive it. It can fit into payments. It can fit into treasury. And yeah, I'd be happy to talk about what I've been advocating for in Treasury. Yeah, maybe maybe before we get to the Treasury stuff, I'm, I'm curious if you were Privy to any of the conversations around the the investment in the NFT company. Because on the surface I see what you're saying, like collectibles that sort of the the niche that NFTS presided in. And I could see the link to eBay thinking like we need to do something in the NFT space. But what was and and you know, if you have any sort of Intel on this, but like, what was the real rationale behind that as opposed to something that seems just much more simple, like what you're describing of just integrating a Bitcoin as a payment method, like buying an NFT company to do what? Like are they were they going to issue their own NFTS? Were they just going to be a market, you know, try to basically compete with open C in some way? Because that, that's the part that doesn't necessarily make sense to me is that if you're going to embrace NFTS to some extent, you would probably need to like build a separate on chain marketplace for those NFTS, right? Like, and so you are then directly competing with an open C that already has a massive sort of first mover advantage. So curious if you, if you have any details on like what the thinking was there? And, and maybe was it just a, a function of like that was the hype that was part of the hype cycle at that time. 20/21 was like, you know, if, if, if you were thinking about the broader quote UN quote, crypto use cases, like that was the hot one at the time, right? Like how, how are you going to think about NFTS? Curious if you have any thoughts there. There was definitely a lot of hype. And back then, I remember reading an article about, you know, Open C is the new eBay and Open C was doing this insane volume and they were making so much money and they hired a new CFO. And, you know, everyone is open C, Open C, open C. So I can understand how eBay felt threatened. And I think the angle was not only just trading collectibles and trying to integrate it onto the site in a more Web 2 fashion instead of a Web 3 fashion, but also there's some angles on authentication. You know, eBay is really big right now on authenticating as much of the site as possible so that you know, what you're getting is legitimate. And there are some NFT use cases to help enable that. And then the other thing was fractionalization. I think it's really obvious that, you know, some of the, some of the use cases touted in NFT land was, hey, you can fractionalize something that's super expensive that typically only one person would have been able to own. But hey, we're going to, we have this technology where we can split it into all these tokens. And I think or I know that some of those capabilities are still being worked on, but I really, really have been an advocate for focusing on Bitcoin first, at least figure out Bitcoin payments, figure out some sort of Bitcoin product and and treasury strategy before that. But you know, I don't, I don't call the shots. Yeah, I think this isn't like an important. This is like where we started the show on talking about the convergence and inflection points with companies and individuals because this might be a bearish take, but I don't know of any company yet, especially at scale, which would be like publicly traded that didn't come from top down leadership in anything Bitcoin adoption related. Which effectively sends the signal that like unless longer term, you know, it's always generally the thought like stay at the company help because it's not only like it's the maybe easier path, but a lot of people have loyalty to firms that gave them positions. So they're like, maybe I have a chance to go through it. But when you really look on a long enough time horizon, we all know Bitcoin's super multidisciplinary, it requires all an intentional amount of like focus and thought to understand it. And the easy out is NFTS and like, but to be about somebody at a senior position, they're naturally gravitating towards AI, the latest tech. So NFTS are the natural version to go down or something like it versus Bitcoin. And so that's where we've historically seen a large company has to come from a Jack and Square Michael Saylor seminar. I would imagine senior leadership. I don't know, Macy. Does that resonate 1. 100% there's there's so many counterparties you have to think of the people in finance, how do we how do we buy this? The people in accounting, how do we account for this? What are the FASB rules? Are they changing? Think about the people in legal, the people in product, the people I mean, there's, there's just so many counterparties that not only need to understand it fully, but they need to understand the value proposition and how it will actually benefit these specific departments, boards of directors, you know, VPS there. There's so many different people that you need to get in the ear of and it's difficult when you're not Michael Saylor and you don't have, you're not running the show and have controlling shares and you have the ability to make these unilateral Bitcoin decisions. And I, I think a, a lot of people in the S&P 500 traditional tech see Michael Saylor as this crazy guy. They still see him as this, you know, one off crazy guy, you know, he'll, he'll end up crashing and burning like the rest of them like SPF, but they don't understand the difference between SPF and Bitcoin. So. Yeah. No, I think that's that's a good point. And and Michael, you sort of hit on this and that just the NFT thing as an example, it's like, yeah, if you're, if you're a person sitting in an executive position at a large entity and you haven't done any like critical first, you know, first principles, thinking about these things, you've read the headlines, right? Like, and so the headlines you've read are Bitcoin bad Bitcoin used by terrorists, NF TS, crazy volume NF TS, like all these celebs have these board ape profile pictures. So if you're just reading these surface level headlines, like, yeah, I could actually see why the corporate decision making process would go down the path of like, yeah, we got to buy an NFT company. Like that just seems like the sort of I don't feel like putting in real work into this. This is the lazy option of like this seems like the hot thing right now. Let's just go buy, let's go acquire an NFT company and see what happens. But I think the, the sort of moral of the Story, 3 or so 4, you know, three years later, is that like he bet he doesn't have any like integrated NFT options, to my, to my knowledge at least. And so it's like, what really came of that? Like you just kind of made a, a reactive decision without doing a lot of diligence on where the actual asymmetric value lied in this new technology. And, you know, if, if you had put in the work, maybe you would have just come to the conclusion that, hey, we, we should probably integrate this, this Bitcoin thing as a, as a payment method because it's the most ubiquitous cryptocurrency out there. So the most likely to be used for commerce or payments. And so I think that's that's probably the trap that a lot of entities fall in today in that the average person is not willing to put in those, you know, hundreds of hours of work to deeply understand this stuff. And so also, Michael, to your point, like, yeah, I would agree. I think the corporate adoption we've seen to date has been what you would expect. So like the Jack Dorsey squares of the world, the people with enough unilateral control, like sailor, I think, you know, similar scientific, which is wasn't, you know, a a month ago made their Bitcoin treasury announcement. I think that's a similar situation where the CEO is effectively orange pelled and and he had enough control and and unilateral, unilateral power to make that move. So yeah, I think it's it's an interesting dynamic, but yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And like, I think this is an important thing to recognize of. So there's a lot of value destroyed and capital destroyed in the sense of like chasing every cycle. There's the NFT, the IC OS, there's all these different things. And I think what happens now is everybody with the ETFs is looking again back at digital assets, but they're trying to ultimately figure out like, what is, is it Bitcoin? Is it digital assets? What's their strategy? And we're going to see another, you know, I think it's securitization, right? Tokenization is probably the next run. And I think what happens is it's very similar to like personal Bitcoin adoption. It's very like intimate kind of, it's very like nuanced thing for an individual to really get it. We all know the people that get it and we tend to like gravitate towards them. And there's a lot of people that don't. Most people don't say this out loud, but they're not actually really worried about the people that don't because they usually aren't really aligned with them. It's like a very, it's a kind of talk about, it's like not AIQ test, it's a common sense test. And I think something similar happens at the corporate level. And it's kind of sad to say, but I think most won't see it and it'll be too late because there's two things happening that are like cyclical or like they're two sides of the same coin. They don't seem like it at the point at the same time, but it's like Mason was working on payments and payments or we're talking about payments and accepting that store value may be opening up the total addressable market. So there's a value prop for a business to do that, but then there's the other side with margins, compression and flesh and all the things happening. And then there's a treasure reserve and being able to hedge against that if you want to, you know, actually be alive as a business. And what we've seen historically from the group at on ramp, the the investment company we found in early writers is that there's a bridge when you're had built infrastructure for so long being at large companies and banks to recognize that the incumbents really probably aren't going to adopt A lot of us. Some will and like a square with you have the leadership, but others won't. And so it's going to be individual builders or or entrepreneurs sitting at these companies that understand what we're talking about here. Just part of what we get of this pod is to work through these ideas to share with individuals and also businesses if they are trapped in that loop and they want to like break out of it. Because it's entities that understand this, that start building for the new world and adopting this stuff that will eventually be able to lap the old incumbents because they're just, they're, it's just the games change. And it really like wouldn't feel confident in saying that until post COVID with the amount of money that's been injected in the system. And we see this with restaurants closing businesses, like all the union economics, everything happening is just like going in One Direction. And I'm always convinced that if people do not adopt Bitcoin from a treasury perspective, their businesses, ultimately there's only one way it goes because the numbers don't shake out, because as you increase prices, you lose margin, but also market share because people may actually can't afford it. And then you actually have to do layoffs and to doom that most people haven't really picked up on yet. Yeah. With that, I'm curious to dive a little bit more into the, the Treasury component of what you've been working on and, and sort of any thoughts there? Just, you know, given what Michael just alluded to, it's like, and this goes back to what I was saying before around adopting new technologies, right? Like, even if it's just as a treasury reserve asset, it behooves any business to adopt A better form of money to better store their value and energy that they're creating, whether that's, you know, creating a strategic treasury off the bat or, you know, cycling some amount of new cash flows every quarter into Bitcoin. It's it's to Michael's point, like if you're not doing that, then you are getting debased by the currency that you're attempting to save in. And yeah, you might be able to like keep up on that hamster wheel of, of inflation if you're doing, you know, a fantastic job of, of remaining competitive and, and still, you know, generating revenues to the point where you can at least keep up with the rate of inflation. But if you actually want to outpace that or compete with the people who are adopting the better form of money is like the critical part as this accelerates, it's like, well, then you really get lapsed by anyone who's actually taking advantage of this new technology, this better store of value. So yeah, how how is how are you thinking about the Treasury component from from an eBay perspective? For at least, I mean, I've been officially on the Treasury team for roughly a year and even before that I've been meeting with various folks on the team and I've been advocating for, it's just a small percentage. I don't think I can say what exactly the eBay Treasury holds, but I like to say it's 100 different ways to earn 5%. There's so many interesting vehicles to do that and I think people just fundamentally don't understand the problem at hand yet. They see Bitcoin, but they don't really see how Bitcoin would fit on the balance sheet and how even to get it there. Obviously the ETFs are helping, but I know, Michael, you talk about this a lot and with on ramp like eBay is not going to have just a Ledger or a cold card to get Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And I think so having clear solutions in the market for that. I've been advocating for a small percent and just starting there. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's similar to what we see, you know, even on more of the institutional allocator side, right is, is starting with a a smaller percentage sort of dipping the toe in if you will. I think, you know, it's, if you just look at the Wisconsin State pension fund that that allocated a couple weeks ago, I think they did 0.1% of their over $180 billion endowment. But that's still meaningful, right? Because you're getting off of 0 you're, you're taking, you're taking the plunge into an allocation that given what we all know about this asset, they're going to look back in 246 years and that 0.1% is likely to be a, a larger percent, right? And so if you just play that out, I think it, it naturally gets you to go deeper down the rabbit hole. And this, this, this is something that is mirrored in the individual journey too, right? Like you buy a little bit of Bitcoin, maybe it goes up over a couple couple years over maybe a full cycle. And then you kind of re examine it. At least this is what this was my sort of part of my journey was like, OK, this is like arguably the best investment I've ever made from just a sheer return perspective. Like maybe I don't fully understand this thing because I, I couldn't, you know, at the time, 5-6 years ago, I couldn't necessarily explain why that happened. And so it actually, the performance is actually a trigger to say, maybe I need to understand this a little bit more deeply. Maybe I need to understand the fundamentals at play here. And then, you know, I think what that also leads you down the road to is something we talked about in on ramp is like that ultimately leads you to a better form of custody, right? If you learn more about this asset, you understand the issues with, you know, getting exposure through an ETF and and having a single point of failure or single third party custodian. So I think you know, sort of secondarily to all of this is the custody component in that, you know, our view is that something like what on ramp does in in terms of multi institution custody really opens the aperture for corporate entities or just institutional allocators to get comfortable with, with meaningful exposure, right? Because you can actually have a little bit better assurances that the bitcoins going to be there in 1020 years when you need it as a reserve asset or or whatever it may be. So I think as the sort of infrastructure gets built out to, to allow these entities or these institutions to have a more, just a better form of exposure, I think that is also going to sort of coincide and converge with that education process where now that they, you know, are more comfortable with the custody, they can actually increase that allocation to 1% or 2% or 5%. And you know, Michael, I don't know if you had any thoughts there because that's something we've we've talked about a lot on our side. Yeah, I think there's, there's multiple things happening which makes it hard for to like diagnose where what's like causes prevention. I think the custody obviously is a big part. I think it's so big in the sense of it, it feels like the second part, but it's actually like subconsciously the 1st in the sense that I was joking on like any other asset, you may have concern on the performance, but you don't have concern on it if it'll be there, IE it evaporates via FTX, Celsius, whatever in 12/24 or get hacked right from, you know, somebody hacking it. And so this idea of multi institution custody, it's still early days, but the idea of its battle test that it's been leveraged from it's it's interoperable multi sig that all the custodians use. You just take the hands out of the custodian had the, you know, unilateral control. But the vision and we're talking with them is this notion of like banks sitting there. So you have familiarity with banks and then banks sitting there holding a key and multiple other banks holding a key. Now you get to this almost like bulletproof version of wait, I understand and trust banks. And now even if a bank goes away and we've seen what happened with SVB, you're not reliant on them being able to lend out the asset and move it. I think that helps with the custody layer. But to go back to the how this is nuanced, there's multiple things, Mason, what you said is like really critical because there's something like really in Brian, you have a background in this, you'll know better than you, but it's like there's something really entrenched in the 6040 and this notion of allocating anything outside of like 1% or anything outside of that alone is just so taboo. And I was having a discussion with my mother-in-law talking about her financial advisor and like why she's paying, you know, her ex and then what the portfolio is. And it's basically that in similar to Mason, every which way to make 5%, the messed up part is, and nobody says this and nobody's incentivized to say it, but they're losing that money because everybody benchmarks on nominal returns, not real returns. And so even the pensions that are like quote UN quote funded, they're funded at what they're explaining to the client, which was historical and where inflation is or where they do 2.5% plus the return on inflation. It's not where inflation has gone and is going because it's only accelerated just given the math of the debt load. So that is like another common thing is like people are trying to get the 5% when they're still losing like 10%. And it sounds insane. But I think if you back into the numbers, we're probably at 15% real inflation and loss of purchasing power year over year at this point. And again, I don't think it always was like this, but after COVID, I think with the acceleration of, you know, money supply. Yeah, I saw, I saw an interesting chart on Twitter the other day that was basically showing the would be inflation rate if you were using the methodology or like the framework from 1983. And so today that rate would be in the high teens. So it's like, OK, they've clearly, like purposely changed the methodology, sort of manipulated this measure that we call CPI. And everyone, you know, runs all their models based on this specific metric, which is clearly heavily manipulated and has changed over the past several decades to swap in inferior goods. Like the easiest example is, like, you know, 30 years ago it was a steak in the basket, and now it's a McDonald's cheeseburger. So it's like, yeah, the price hasn't changed a ton, but like, the quality of the good has changed. And that's just one example. This has happened across the board in this methodology. And so it's like, yeah, Michael, to your point, like people are people just have the wrong sort of guideposts in their heads of like, oh, yeah, if I'm getting 5%, I'm good because inflation is only two and a half 3%. It's like, no, you're completely missing the mark here and you're you're being diluted. What was it that they took out? What was it that they took out last month? It was coffee, right? The thing that 90% of Americans drink every single morning. And they're like, let's just, let's just take it out of the basket. Doesn't count. Yeah. I think, I think where this has really gotten, I've always been interested in the space and like building and it's just fun. But I've really like started the past couple of months into like feeling existential threat to businesses and individuals because of how fast this stuff is happening. And like this whole notion of when inflation happens, economic activity starts to break down, coordination of it. And I was supposed to travel Friday and had these like 3 like back-to-back incidents where I think Southwest people in Dallas were on their picketing or, you know, whatever. They're basically on strike for 17% increase in wages. So that, you know, kind of messed up just like all the travel. And I was trying to explain like think about how many different like flights or the amount of people that had diverted and you're travelling, you get up at 8 and they're like didn't land in my destination till like 1:00 AM. And you take that across scales. And then as I was driving, the person I was driving with was explaining how her friend was supposed to go to like what's it's, it's it was a place, it was like some coastal area because I don't want to mix up because the other one's like a crazy place. And then one's like really nice. But the point being is like their baggage and luggage ended up in the place, but their flight got stuck and they didn't leave from Miami. And they sat like they got, they deboarded the plane four times and eventually they just never left. And so then on the way home, because we're, you know, going back to wait. And then I stopped at a coffee shop that had just recently opened and it was, it was no longer there. It was closed. And this is like in, in the span of like, you know, call it two hours. And if you, you know, kind of pull that forward, it's like if the the cost and the inputs are consistently changing, well, then you know, at the most high level, right, this is an airline which is effectively nationalized. Like you have to think about what does that look like? And then all the way down to a micro level to a coffee shop, you're getting hit on both sides. One has a longer runway. Like there's only one path that this this goes to. And we've seen this year over year, everybody knows all the restaurants like there's a degradation of experience and then that experience eventually just like closes because if people feel it and they also have less purchasing power, so that closes. And so anyway, this is like whole idea of helping, whether it's SM BS mid market or on the like highest level, it's such an important issue. And so whether people are going to build the right businesses that are built on like foundational principles, like a better form of money, just like it's a better form of technology you need, or providing the tools. It's just like imperative to be able to like discuss this stuff and like share it with individuals because everybody knows there's something wrong and they just can't like pinpoint that it's just the money. And it's actually not that hard once you figure it out because if somebody helps you, then you're just like, oh, I just put a little bit of my like savings in this and then any of my cash flow that I can put in there. And then I'm kind of like Hedge. Whether you've been buying Bitcoin for years or just getting started on your journey, our multi institutional custody solution is the safest and easiest way to custody your Bitcoin with On Ramp and our partners at Bitco and Coincover. You can sleep soundly at night knowing that your Bitcoin is safe from exchange failures, the loss of seed phrases, and broken hardware devices. On Ramps Multi Institution Custody solution eliminates any single point of failure, distributes counterparty risk, and minimizes required trust, all while providing greater assurances that a client's Bitcoin is secure and auditable on chain. As a client of On Ramp, your assets live in a multi sig vault controlled by three distinct entities, none of which have unilateral control. On ramp provides products and services that honor our clients ownership and control of the underlying asset. To learn more about multi institution custody, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, I think all really good points. I think a good a good place to start to get, you know someone sort of out of the proverbial matrix in terms of thinking about purchasing power and money is WTF happened in 1970 one.com. I, I always like to just shout that one out as, as a, a really great resource to get a handle on what has been happening over the past 50-60 years in terms of money, inflation, purchasing power, and even wages. Because if you know, you'll see the charts in there that wages have been pretty much been stagnant while the price of everything has gone up over the past 50 years. And so for the average person, the average individual life has just gotten exceedingly harder over the past 50 years. And I think given the, the shocking amount of, of money that was printed in 2020, it's, it's just accelerated over the past four years. And I think you're starting to see that whether it's like on Instagram or on Twitter, on, I'm not on TikTok, but I see Tik Tok's reposted on Twitter of people just really struggling with staying alive, like literally putting food on the table. And part of, I think the 2nd order effect of that is the services start to decline, as you're mentioning, Michael, right, because the worker is not getting paid enough, They're feel disenfranchised. They feel like they're not going to get out of this doom loop. So maybe they don't show up to work on Monday or they do a worse job because they just feel lost and helpless and like anything they're doing is not going to be enough effectively. And, and, or they just go on strike because they need, they need that raise in, in wages, right? So I think we're starting to see this percolate more and more. It's becoming harder and harder to ignore. And it's just frustrating because then at the same time you have like our government and administration saying literally Biden tweeted the other day, inflation in May was 0%, Mission, mission, mission accomplished, which is just completely disingenuous. And and if you're measuring inflation on a month to month basis, you've completely missed the point. And so it is, it can be frustrating. I, I wanted to go back to what you were saying about the 6040 portfolio because I think that is also part of this part of this sort of gap in understanding. And we've talked about this before, Michael of like, well, what bucket do I put it in, right? And where does it fit into my 6040 portfolio, which I'm so comfortable with and familiar with, right? So it has to, it has to come from something, right? Does it come from equities? Does it come from my real estate? Does it come from my fixed income? And so I think that's a natural friction to adoption, whether it be from a pension fund or a treasury of a corporate is, well, where does it fit? What is this thing and, and how do I rationalize it to my board or or our shareholders in this new allocation to this new asset? So I think that is also part of the inherent friction of Bitcoin adoption is that it doesn't fit neatly into the 6040. I think, you know, we all are incredibly bullish on this asset and think it ultimately eats up all parts of the 6040 over time, right? Like it's, it's just a better store value and all these other assets in one's portfolio are some form of a store value. That's all investing is, right? You're trying to propagate your value into the future because you know you can't save in dollars. If that's conscious or, or subconscious, you know you can't just save your your value in dollars because they're being debased. Even if it's two or three percent in 50 to 75 years, you've lost half your value, right? So like, you know, you can't save in dollars, so you're forced to go out the risk curve, invest in equities, invest in real estate by treasuries, buy our government's debt. And so that's part of it too, is like you have to sort of rationalize like, OK, like this is this is something different and maybe we need to make a new bucket for it because it's a very unique asset that has some features that kind of look like a commodity, but it's digital. So it's kind of not really a commodity. It's kind of money. It's kind of this high, you know, high tech growth asset as well. So it has all these characteristics that are kind of blur the lines for for like where you would potentially bucket it. So I think that's just another friction that has probably prevented more wide scale adoption of this thing is because people just don't know what to do with it. Yeah. And we're working backwards. So the finance part of it I think is interesting. I think like it's probably, it isn't land with everybody, but I think there's something to this notion of especially boomers of like the new 6040. And, you know, this is like gonna be controversial, but it's like gold and Bitcoin because in a, in a world that we all know everything's mispriced, then the counterparty risk of the mispriced could be zero because it's just so inflated. And so I just like the idea that I rather like at least know what the asset is and that it's real and tangible and I can take delivery. And I think that's like, even if you like, you know, reduce the upside, you, you dampen the downside ultimately. And that's why I've always liked if somebody can't get too exposed to Bitcoin, you at least have gold there. So I like this idea of like a gold, you know, and then maybe some equity sprinkled in. But that's like maybe one of the angles just working through your the model explaining. But I think going back to tech, something that we should riff on is like this notion of a like it's very, we shared the doom side of it or the sad part of it. But there's, I remember very specifically having Gary Broad on the last trade and he was also working through a lot of the kind of things that are happening on a macro geopolitical scale with any reference. We have to remember that this stuff happens all the time. It's cyclical. And that when there's there's kind of, you know, downside, there's always opportunities in that. And in that, I think of like, especially with like individuals that are in tech, there's all this ideal ideology and like caring baggage around money and what it is versus like when we talked with Cam Duty and it's like this, this real notion of like the dollars analog and bitcoins, digital in the sense of AI and software are digital and snail mills analog. And if you want to succeed, if you want to thrive, you leverage software tools because they're deflationary. And it's like this podcast. How much would it cost 2 years ago, let alone 10 years ago to produce versus today it cost basically nothing. In the same way that you can do more with software, you can do a lot more withholding a better form of value and how you can rather than it's like making it about money, it's making it about technology. And I think this is the the idea around, you know, for those that don't know, we launched the investment fund early riders. Brian and I are partners and there's the natural version of there's a lot of Bitcoin tools that aren't built out after being in building for for very long time in the space where there's Bitcoin or outside of it that naturally needed to. We think multi institution is like kind of the bedrock of all of that because until you understand like how keys geographically will need to be split from a long term scale, most individuals are still, you know, graphing to Oh, this either lives with Coinbase, which we all know is a big, you know, existential threat if all the Bitcoin sits at one or two custodians. But the other notion that plastic devices in self custody or long term solution really don't account for, you know, multiple things like coordinating economic activity and people going in caves with plastic devices. The idea that people are going to break into people's homes. They already do. Now they're ready to take people's watches off of them in London and other big cities. Like imagine when it's just known that a plastic device with $150,000 sits in your house, let alone 1.5 million and majority well, just haven't fully been thought through the long term. So we think multi institution plays into that. And to Mason's point, it also on the business treasury side. So businesses as they need adopted custody needs to be a second thought. They shouldn't, it shouldn't be the first thought which it is today. Like how can I actually hold and preserve my wealth? And so the, the positive side, I think about this is once a lot of that infrastructure is in place that we're investing in building out, It's the notion of all these companies that have basically built their businesses with a bunch of fat built in, because that's what the existing system provided. When you think about, you know, Twitter laying off X amount of people, like how many companies have all these people entrenched from number of employees, all the tools that they're not leveraging. And the individuals that are kind of tired of sitting around trying to explain to their, their firm, this is how you build, this is what you should do. And they're like, why don't I just do this myself? And why don't I leverage all the tools from AI to software to Bitcoin and I can just rebuild this at 110th the cost at 10X the speed and reduce the margins because you can because you're due at 110th the cost. And so I think this is a very exciting part. Like we're, we're aligned that this is almost the only way to build, if you think about it from a resilient perspective. And so this is a big thing that I think will be positive as it comes out of this, as individuals picking this up will realize they don't actually have to go build the old way and have to go do all this crazy stuff or deluding themselves and raising all this capital. They can think about Bitcoin from a first principal perspective, build foundationally, and then maybe just have to raise capital once and build, you know, very long standing infrastructure. A. 100% I think the other, the other key component of our thesis on on that side is, is by using a a better store value, a better unit of account, it actually makes you a better capital allocator. It makes you a better decision maker because you're comparing anything you could go spend that money on to the opportunity cost of just holding the unit, the currency unit, in this case, Bitcoin. And so if you just think about, you know, a conservative case of, of what Bitcoin's performance looks like over the next 10 years or so, I don't know, anywhere from 25 to 75% CAGR, I think is a, a reasonable conservative estimate. So anything that you're going to go deploy capital towards needs to outpace that. Otherwise, you're not making a sound economic, rational, logical decision. And so it's, it's more about that framing of, you know, by by integrating Bitcoin into into your treasury or just, you know, using it as effectively the opportunity cost of any capital allocation decision you would make. It naturally makes you better make better decisions. Like all else equal, you will waste less money. And the, the reason you see capital get destroyed, as you're alluding to is because the money is free. The money is printed infinitely right. And so you are incentivized to grow at all costs, burn cash over hire. Really just lean into any and all excesses to drive that you're, you know, top line revenue, which on a medium to long term scale, like actually doesn't make a ton of economic sense. And you end up with what we see today, which is like a ton of zombie corporations, which like, you know, have have basically been guided by that free money grow at all cost mantra. But now they've stagnated. They've probably over hired and now they're just, you know, they they can't react quickly. They're they're very bureaucratic and it's very hard to shake a large organization out of that and actually effect change. I think what's interesting about the Bitcoin treasury component is like, it's actually like a relatively simple fix to like catalyze a business out of that, like being stuck in that zone, right, Because like I said, it, it, it flips your your methodology behind allocating capital. So can it actually, can, you know, really shake up the pre-existing, you know, how you got to that zombie state of just burning cash is now UK, OK? We have this better money, this better store value, this technology that we're going to leverage into the future. Anything we do going forward is going to be compared against just accumulating more of that better store value. And so it flips it on its head. It flips, you know, the process of capital allocation on its head from what we've seen for the past three decades. And I think like, you know, that phenomenon of burning cash and all these, you know, huge VC rounds, like that's only the past. I don't know, 40 years or so. Michael, you, you worked for we work you, you saw this first hand. Like is that you know what, what did the world look like prior to that? Like was it a little bit more disciplined? Was it, where did we lose our our way in terms of the VC landscape? Well, I think, I think the notion of venture was always supposed to be a small like cottage industry. It's always meant if you go back and look at like you know, is it not Microsystems, but there's a semiconductor back in like fifties, 60s in the East Coast, West Coast and then Sequoia ultimately coming out. It was, it was builders allocating capital and they infused and provided real guidance and real nuance understanding of it was allocation from a first principles basis of like how they would want to allocate or build their own business and provide that feedback. So there's a lot of value added. And then as it grew and it's actually started in the 70s and then I was like, you know, money supply grew, you naturally see more people going out on the risk curve. And it's the whole notion that everybody kind of knows it's a little weird that nine out of 10 bets and and venture go to zero. It's like that seems very like wasteful in itself. And I think about, so as more money comes in naturally, you just see more misallocation the the angle that you reference. There's two big things that really don't get talked about. It's like the idea of aligning on a unit of account just makes fundamental sense because there's LP's, there's allocators, and then there's the business owner that's ultimately allocating the capital. So if the LP has dollars they need to get rid of. Then they naturally are deploying and they're not being as discerning as they should be into where they're going to give to the manager. If the manager has dollars and their whole purpose is to allocate so everything, they have a hammer and everything needs to look like a nail because they got to go get into different opportunities and this goes across the landscape. This isn't even like this is Bitcoin venture, this is any venture space. So you have dollars, you have to go invest. Then those unit economics get blown up because there's only so many companies to invest in so that their routes, you know, get overinflated. They have too much capital. The problem that nobody woke up to is that capital has always been the ultimate barometer of like signal or success. So people that's bring in the capital haven't fully woken up to like, oh, maybe I'm not doing anything right. Maybe there's a system with the system because if you knew there was something right, they would actually go by the Bitcoin, hold it and then still be discerning through that lens. But instead, that's where you start to out hire, you start to outrun what your growth is, and then you effectively have to go through layoffs. And we saw all the layoffs that happened in every firm, whether it was 2021-2022 was tech just as much as Bitcoin companies all went through layoffs because you naturally aren't building with the constraints in mind of, well, why don't I just hold Bitcoin? I like to joke that like a lot of Bitcoin companies are maybe like Fiat companies with a Bitcoin theme because they naturally like raise dollars on the idea that like you're raising a pre seed seed Series A series B. When the reality is like, if you really map to what you want, it's like you'll want to hold as much equity, generate Bitcoin. And then that allows you to, to defer Bitcoin back to your investors, your, your own self. And then you can use that to like, you know, further growth rather than have to delete yourself and like from just an efficient perspective, it's pretty wild that you'd have to consistently raise money every 12 to 18 months versus just like focus on your business. The point on Wework is very interesting because I joke around and it's so true. And like until you go through, it doesn't make much sense. It's like if we all in this call had a business idea and somebody gave us $1,000,000 or $100 million, we would 100% build a Better Business on probably shorter middle and long term time frame. Meaning like how we think about scale hiring and all the things we saw us at on Rep and some of the things we do. And I go back and think about Wework And so Wework was went and they had a model. It's undisputable like they had a model. It was Co working. It was not even arbitrage. It was leveraging aggregating footprints and key markets and parsing out because people don't need full pieces of real estate. And then you can put branding community, you know, conference rooms like it was a model. The problem was that it they didn't even go buy a bunch of real estate they didn't need to. They could have gone asset light. If I think about in retrospect, like they could have raised the money, they could have let all the capital allocators do it through this lens and then they could have allocated a portion to BTC. If you think about like raising 16/17/18 the price of bitcoins anywhere between 1005 thousand $10,000 and you play out the notion of partnering with real estate investors and real estate holders. They were looking for people to lease the properties at a 30% premium. So they would have gladly taken a 30% and go into partnership. Because if you're looking at through the lens of holding more Bitcoin, you have been stacking, you have been generating some revenue. So your unit economics would have been better. Maybe you wouldn't have scaled as far, but imagine having anywhere between 100 million and 4 billion, whatever number that because I think they over the course raise over $21 billion and any amount of that goes into BTC. So now you're generating, you're generating flow through BTC and years later now you're sitting on a treasury that's probably worth anywhere between 510, whatever $40 billion if not more. And you're a key maker. So you're basically now buying the buildings, you're buying the real. Estate you could go then buy the best buildings you could be discerning about. OK, these are the over the past five years, these are the properties that have been the most lucrative. Let's go actually buy those properties. But yeah, in the absence of that strategy, we've seen what happens. It's exactly right. I'm curious, Mason, like on some of the stuff we've been chatting about how you see it through the lens of, you know, being it from an external perspective. Like, you know, to the extent you can chat about the notion of just this existential need from a margin and market share for a larger business on the Bitcoin side. And almost like it's not a matter of if, but when. And then what we just discussed kind of riffing from a more macro example from a publicly traded company. Got a micro, you know, person starting or trying to run a business in this old way of like raising multiple rounds and all the different things that just don't make sense anymore. You know how you how you see the world in that view, if you align with it or if you see any gaps on what we're talking about, I think. I mean, a lot of the attention these days is on the corporates and the nation states adopting Bitcoin, but I think all the way down to mom and pops noodle shop is going to need a treasury strategy, ideally with with Bitcoin at the center of it. And there's a huge gap in terms of the tools to actually put that into play. You know how how do they store it? There's on ramp, there's multi institution in custody, there's Unchained ETFs, you know, how are, how are they going to actually store the Bitcoin and and manage it? There's a huge gap there because as we're talking about earlier, there's never really been a need for there to for, for these mom and pop noodle shops to have a treasury management strategy. And now with rising cost of rent and insurance and labor and food and everything, they're closing left and right. And I think the only way to really protect from that is to is to buy Bitcoin. So I don't think it's just for the corporates and the nation states. I think it's for literally everyone and which is sort of a meme, you know, Bitcoin is for everyone. But I truly believe that's the case. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's totally accurate. I mean, I think this strategy of preserve better preserving your value with a, you know, a better form of money spans from the individual up to the nation state and every entity in between of, of any size. And to your point, I think we do need to work to build out that infrastructure to make it easy for whether it's a, a corporation or a mom and pop shop down the street to easily integrate this technology. Like, I think we're just scratching the surface of that being like a friction free, you know, way to actually adopt this this technology. Like I think, you know, if you think about just the micro strategy example, like, I mean, Sailor put in a shit ton of work to deeply understand the asset. He diligent, you know, multiple custodians and ultimately decided to, you know, split up their treasury allotment across a couple different custodians in the space. But it's like, you know, he put in a lot of work personally. He committed company resources to it. The mom and pop shout down the street like doesn't necessarily have the resources to be able to or the time to like deeply understand it to the level where they can actually implement the strategy themselves. So they're going to need a specialist basically to come in and say, here's the playbook, here's the Bitcoin treasury strategy playbook. Here's how you're going to custody it. Here's how you're going to integrate it into your stack. Here's how you're going to accept it as payment. If your employees want to get paid out in Bitcoin, here's how you're going to do that. There needs to be sort of just an end to end sort of seamless way to integrate this stuff that that is kind of a one stop shop. So that's that's something that that Michael and I have been have been trying to think critically about is what does that business look like? And you know, what does it need to sort of get to the point where we canmore easily going back to what we were talking about earlier. It's like if that business exists, then that chasm or that gap for entity XYZ adopting a Bitcoin treasury strategy is is minimized, right? It it's gets shortened, whereas, you know, to date you've needed the Michael Saylor of the world. You needed the I forget his first name, but the guy from similar scientific to be a bitcoiner. Put in the work, figure out how to get it done. If there is an entity out there that can actually help, just accelerate that process and give you the playbook. Then that opens the aperture of of this of people implementing the strategy without having deep domain expertise or knowledge. Yeah, Capital. Go ahead, Michael. No, I was, I was just going to say capital, capital markets as well. Like the idea of like the idea the, the asset can sit there, but at a certain point the financial products and the things required to just make it make sense from a business perspective. You mentioned like integrating payments, but then ultimately you can imagine a world where you can have some kind of like debt exposure or advisory. It's not Michael's Saylor level, but like businesses have cash flow that have things they can underwrite, whether it's Bitcoin that they hold or the cash flow. There's a lot of different ways to to manage that. But obviously Bitcoin has volatility. And so to Brian's point, that naturally needs to exist. I think a big part in all of this is if you're out there looking at the space, if you're looking to build, you should reach out. If you reach out to anybody, you should reach out to us because we're actively, whether it's at on ramp or other businesses that were standing up on the early rider side. Since we launched, there's been no shortage of just like world class individuals looking to get involved. And that was always kind of the assumption because that building previous Bitcoin companies, there's really world class talent sitting at the best companies. The problem with it, our problem is that there's only so many Bitcoin companies and and there's only like, it's like brokerage, right, Which is effectively the most. And so then it's like, well, am I, do I want to work for a buy sell company? It's not that there's anything wrong with it. It's just like, does that map to the expertise of the individual? And so by being able to pull individuals from those, I think there's a lot of interesting things that we're looking at. So just would encourage, you know, reaching out to us, you know, whether it's to the website or any way you can get in touch because a lot of the stuff needs to be built and this is the time, you know, the price running six figures is going to put a lot of awareness and targets in the industry and and naturally businesses and solutions that are ready for larger market share are going to be. Required. Yeah. And I was, I was just going to say earlier, I I love the square product. I love the ability for anyone with a square terminal in the US to do 10% of their proceeds into Bitcoin. Let's say they've been doing that for a year. It's been going into their cash App and it, Bitcoin continues to go up in value as we think it will, and it's worth hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. What are they just going to leave it on Cash app? I mean, I love cash app. I, I'm not saying they're FTX, but what do they do? How do they manage it? How do they, we talked about the volatility, how much, what percentage there? There's so many questions to answer and there's so many tools that just aren't there because I don't think anybody would recommend that anyone keeps $1,000,000 of Bitcoin on Cash App. That's doesn't sound like a very good idea to me. So yeah, there's there's a lot of gaps there. A lot of gaps, a lot of tools to be built, a lot of infrastructure to be built. And I will reiterate what Michael just mentioned. You know, if you are, you know, have a similar story to Mason where you have understood Bitcoin yourself and you're sitting at an entity in Oregon, the legacy world cranking away at at your desk job, reach out to us. We want to talk to you. We want to hear your insights. We want to hear how you think your expertise, your domain knowledge and whatever it may be could map to the Bitcoin landscape because that's a lot of what we're we're trying to accomplish at on ramp and at early riders and, and just really want to talk to talented individuals. And that's what we've, yeah, that's largely how we built on ramp genuinely is, is individuals reaching out who saw the vision of what we were doing on the custody side, had some amount of expertise in, in something that they were doing in, in Fiat world, if you will, and realize that they could add value. So highly encourage anybody to to reach out to us. You can go through our website or just send me an e-mail at Brian at on rampbitcoin.com. And yeah, where can where can people find you, Mason? I'm on X Twitter at on chain cowboy tweeting occasionally make some YouTube videos here and there. Like you, I'm not on Tiktok. I'm still from the very beginning refused. So yeah, you can find me there. Awesome. Any any final words, Michael? This is a great conversation, Mason. Thanks for joining us and look forward to the next episode. Yep, thanks for having me. All right, later guys, take care. 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 Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.

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