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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 and we are live. Welcome back to final settlement. We've got a great episode for you guys today, but first and foremost, boys, we are living in interesting times. The timeline of the past few weeks has been astounding. It appears that things are accelerating in terms of bitcoins adoption. It's relevance in sort of the the zeitgeist of the financial world and and politics. You know, we've got Trump embracing Bitcoin. He's speaking at the national conference next week. He named AVP, who is not only a millennial, the first millennial on a presidential ticket, but also has some very forward, forward thinking thoughts around crypto. Personally owned, owns Bitcoin himself. And then you have, you know, perhaps Jamie Dimon pivoting on Bitcoin slightly. You have Mark Cuban pivoting on Bitcoin. You know, four years ago he was talked extremely negatively about Bitcoin, said he'd rather own bananas than Bitcoin, which was strange. But now he's calling it a potential global reserve currency. So things appear to be accelerating, as I mentioned. And wrapped up in all of this is also a a tighter focus around Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset, something that whether, you know, it's an individual to a corporate balance sheet to a small enterprise, Bitcoin is increasingly being recognized as something that can really bolster a balance sheet and and really provide, you know, store value to help propagate wealth into the future and really fortify businesses. And, you know, we've seen Michael Dell tweeting about Bitcoin pretty regularly over the past few weeks. Now, Dell hasn't announced a Bitcoin treasury strategy just yet, but yeah, lots of lots of things happening and it feels like feels like things are accelerating. But on the show today, we are happy to welcome Mason, Carter and Joanie to the pod. You guys may remember Mason. He was on the pod a few weeks back now formerly an employee of eBay and now devoting his full attention to the Bitcoin space, joining early riders as a principal and Co founding a new business that we'll talk about today. And alongside Mason in Co founding that business is Joe who previously founded a Bitcoin advisory business and is now purely focused on building this new business full time. So welcome to the show boys, But any thoughts on on the craziness of the past few weeks? The only way in here is to play. That's right. I mean, it's it just feels like a great dream. It feels like the craziest timeline to just be alive during this and be operating in this space. It just is really exciting. Yeah, it does feel pretty surreal when you think about it. It's like watching the dominoes fall, like someone like Larry Fink change his opinion on Bitcoin. It's like you you know that there's going to be future ones coming. You don't know when. And when they do. It's like, well, yeah, eventually he had to capitulate. But when it actually happens, it's just kind of surprising. Oh, wow, we're doing that now, huh? Yeah. So it's an amazing time. It's it's going to be fun to watch. Gets under was under discussed Was this past week with Jamie Dimon that the context of that came from Forbes him and Trump. There was a a closed door session or or group of 80 executives and where Trump is referencing Jamie Dimon has switched positions are taking a more favorable stance. Part of that group was called out in this Forbes article, the CEO of Citibank, a Bank of America, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. So when you think of this notion of treasury reserve from a sovereign perspective or an individual, you know, an individual company, everyone's coming around to kind of looking at this and wondering like, what is happening here? Curious what the real intention is from a lot of it, because it's always sometimes too good to be true. But the end of the day, like, it doesn't really matter if they're adopting Bitcoin, it's good. For, I mean, I, I think part of it is the inherent game theory associated with Bitcoin adoption, which we've, we've talked a lot about, you know, even just some of Trump's comments around, you know, China being into it and, and what he, what he really understands that to me and is, is a different question, but I think he recognizes that, you know, despite the China mining ban, there's still a good amount of hash rate in China and a good amount of mine share just from entrepreneurs in that region. And so just even looking at that one small example, I think he sees it as, you know, there's a lot of people that own Bitcoin in America. There's a good amount of hash right here. It makes sense for us to lean into it. And it's just, it's that game theory of adoption playing out in real time. But Michael, I, I, I want you to, you know, help us frame this discussion with, with Mason and Joe and maybe tease out sort of what, what we're announcing. So this will, this will, we're recording this on Thursday, but this will come out on Friday, July 19th and we got some big news. Yeah, I appreciate it. So I think I think it's important to remember how we got here. We cumulative to cumulatively as a group, whether it's on ramp or early riders haven't had significant experience in the traditional markets along with building Bitcoin infrastructure. And one of the largest gaps if not the largest gap is custody. And so we we went out to build on ramp and work on multi institution custody, which is a pivotal point in this discussion that we'll get to. But to go back, you think about a sovereign holding Bitcoin and treasury. We talked about this on the last episode of last trade. We just finished recording of like, well, what do they do? Like, how do you even manage that? It's like you're parking at Coinbase. It's like, sure, maybe it makes it easier to take all the assets because they're all sitting at Coinbase like jokingly. But the reality is like custody ultimately hasn't been figured out. We all know single points of failure. But then on the other side of it, most haven't really picked up on the fact that when the price appreciates to the numbers that we're headed to, it's going to be very uncomfortable to hold plastic devices underneath the desk drawer, underneath your bed. And that goes from an individual all the way to a company. And it's ultimately what in our opinion and thesis has kept either individuals out or treasuries from business, treasuries from opting in because you need traditional financial controls and all the assurances that the asset will be there when your company needs it. So in building on ramp, that was the the lens of the world. We took a a stance from a company perspective of building on a Bitcoin standard. We, you know, opted to spend our Bitcoin to build the business. And what we really found was a lot of prudence and prudence, first principles, thinking about opportunity costs. And it's not to say you don't spend the asset, it's just that when you do spend the asset, it comes through the clearest lens of I'm spending the Bitcoin today to make more in the future. And so we, we saw a lot of success and foundational ways to build businesses through that. And so that was where the launch of early riders started. A sound capital. We don't like the term venture capital, even though it is a venture capital firm. It's a sound capital business run with the idea of Bitcoin. It's a unit account and all the way from the LP's to the GPS to the ultimate allocators, which are the entrepreneurs. Bitcoin is the benchmark. With that, we understood that when you have something like this, that's a radical idea, you naturally have to start in the inner side with individuals that recognize this. We spot a lot of inefficiencies and gaps in the market at on Ramp. You ultimately can't build them all because you have to focus. And so part of the thesis and mandate at Early Riders is having a, you know, incubation style focus. We call it build where we'll help and support putting a groups together, but then we also have a traditional venture lens where individuals will approach us with the same thesis. And we're seeing a lot of it. And we encourage anybody that's interested we're seeing we'd like to see more when we have our partner meetings. We looked at the board. We have all these ideas and all this interesting stuff. And the one that kept ringing out was treasury, because the, the, the thought experiment or exercise that I referenced to the team was what's the one thing that if somebody else built that we didn't, would we just kill ourselves? Like, God damn it, why weren't we there 1st? And treasury is the thing everybody knows businesses need it. We're all very passionate on the Bitcoin side in this group here about inflation, how hard it's hitting every business, the SMB, everybody knows going to the restaurant, the degradation of quality of experience or shutting down all the way up the stack to the corporates. And so we're just proud to announce after our second, our first on ramp or our first early writers build was on ramp Mina, which you'll be hearing more about. We have some exciting stuff happening there and then Acropolis. And so I'll let the guys, the Co founders talk about it and the team they assembled. But that's the core lenses that treasury from SMB, mid markets, enterprise need to exist. Multi institution will be an underpinning of that is foundational. But at the end of the day you need a stand alone business that focuses on all the ancillary services that corporates need that that require a dedicated focus. At On Ramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. Onramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it, as a compliment to your existing self custody setup. For more information, check us out at onrampbitcoin.com. Yeah, Mason and Joe would love to hear from from both of you around maybe even just, you know, before getting into your thoughts around Acropolis and and sort of the strategy there, Maybe just give, give the audience a bit of a bit more context on both of your backgrounds and and sort of how you arrived at this at this stage of your journey. Yeah, absolutely. So career started off in banking as a finance analyst at Keybank's headquarters. They're I think by assets, I think they're about the 20th largest bank or so, so one of the larger regionals and, you know, learned a lot of technical skills there that have translated throughout my career. Got to work with some really talented people, but I had about an inch 2 1/2 years or so in to scratch more of the entrepreneurial side of my, my interests. It was during that time that I very fortunately stumbled into Bitcoin and you know, like most people took three touch points. And like most people, I hadn't looked at it as to Michael's earlier point, a unit of account at all yet. I hadn't looked at it as a, you know, as the new cost of capital. I hadn't looked at it as the new hurdle rate right, not even close to those thoughts yet. But then so I left there. I joined a technology startup, spent six years as director of finance and operations and then eventually the CFO very capital intensive business. It was real time stats and analytics for sports with the first primary product being basketball. And you know, this business, I got to give a little shout out to all of the generalists out there working at startups with the finance, operations, accounting hat on. You know, it's it's a really critical role that often times is a thankless role. You know, if you do your job, no one notices. If you make a mistake, then you know, you can ruin the whole year type of scenario. So it's high stress, but that's the type of scenario that I I really enjoy working in. It's fast moving on something that's never been done before. So left that opportunity at the end of 2020 and I've really been working in Bitcoin since then on a number of different endeavors. The one most relevant, Brian, you mentioned is an advisory business that I committed full time to last March and announced in September, so not too long ago and about nine months ago. And the long term vision for this business was all about Bitcoin treasury and advising businesses on how to best accumulate or incorporate it into their particular circumstances. Took a step back a couple years ago and said where's the most green grass? You know, ETF was the logical answer, but the second that domino fell and you know, we got to see those flows for a month, it pretty quickly transitioned to, you know, Treasury seems to be the area that there's a lot of interest in buzz and talk. And so just trying to get out ahead of that, you know, that's where I see so much opportunity and it aligns with my past experiences. So before we jump further into what we're building, I'll hand it over to Mason. Thanks, Joe. I'll keep it short for those of you that heard me on this pod a few weeks ago, but got a degree in finance, did a few different things in college and found my way over to eBay to join their finance Futures program, which was a really great experience. I got to rotate through different areas of the business from payments to risk, product, technology, investor relations, got a bunch of different roles and experiences there. I spent the last year or so working on treasury and my main focus was doing share buybacks. So I did over a billion dollars in share buybacks at eBay and every single day that I did a buyback, I wished that I could put a small percentage into Bitcoin. And I spent every last spare minute orange peeling our head of treasury, our CFO, anything I could do to help, you know, bridge that gap. And but there was never really, even if I could convince everyone all at once that we were going to buy Bitcoin for the company, there was really not a proper solution until on ramp came around. And that's why I'm just really excited to do this with Joe and leverage their multi institution custody because it's really a game changer that will allow the corporate adoption and small business adoption of Bitcoin. Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for those, those intros. I think you guys both mentioned a few things in there that I were I think are worth teasing out. And one is, you know, when I think back at sort of how this has evolved in terms of people rocking or recognizing that Bitcoin has a place in sort of treasury management. You know, I think we we'd be remiss not to give a ton of credit to Sailor. He was sort of a first mover in the sense of putting Bitcoin on a balance sheet. I think how I really think about it is, you know, you know, if you think about the individual, you know, this is how people have been adopting Bitcoin over time. Like if you think about an individual and their personal about their personal balance sheet, you know, that's kind of how I view the Bitcoin that I hold is that's my strategic Bitcoin reserve of my personal finances, right? But Sailor was really the first one to take that to the corporate level. And I think there's a few interesting sort of things to pull out of that in the sense that for years he was looked at as a crazy guy. And I think part of where we are today is a function of his success through a full cycle. So I think he, he instituted that strategy and, and sometime in 2020 and went through a full cycle now more than a full cycle of bitcoins, you know, price movement and volatility and has come out the other side And it's been, you know, an extremely successful investment in the way he's sort of leveraged financial tooling as well and debt markets to enhance that strategy has been fascinating to watch. But I think we needed to see the successful implementation of it for people to grab on to it and say, OK, this is, this is maybe something that has legs. So, so curious what you guys, your thoughts are there in terms of like sort of why now in, in some sense for this business Acropolis to exist? You know, how, how have we progressed over the past few years in terms of people being ready to, you know, integrate Bitcoin into their business in a, in a material way? Yeah, his his unshaken confidence has played a huge role the past four years. I agree. I think you can make an argument. I don't want to downplay the the role and responsibility of a number of people that helped lead to the fasby change of the accounting treatment, but you could make an argument that Sailor pushed up the fair value accounting standard a full cycle, you know, because you really, it's hard to know behind the scenes how much he was pushing for that. But I know that he was heavily involved in the process. So that was that alone was enormous. And that decision of like the first public, you know, founder LED company to really step in with conviction. We're not, you know, we're not talking about 5% of their assets that could have gone sideways in so many different ways. And yeah, I, I agree with you. I mean, depending on, you know, every, everyone's spectrum of like their beliefs in terms of what Bitcoin is and what should be is different. But regardless of if there's always going to be some detractors or some criticisms based on the way you look at and talk about the space. But when you really think about it, like it could not have gone better in terms of who you could have picked to be one of the one of the people constantly speaking out to sophisticated institutional players. So to your point, it's it's been huge. It could have gone could have gone sideways in so many different directions with someone else. Mason, on your side, I'm curious what you saw with your experience at eBay because there was obviously you you talked about on the last pod five different ways to make 5%. That's it sounds like effectively like everyone's strategy, whether it's an individual and their RAA or their financial advisor helping them or at the corporate level. And we all know that that's not outpacing, you know, the hurdle rate of that is inflation and purchasing power. But you obviously saw also the hiccups there. And so how do you think about adoption and where it comes from and how something like this Acropolis effectively participates in the transition? Because like there's a key thing that most people don't talk about is anybody that plays in the space is an educator first and then they offer their products 2nd. And so that's ultimately where this has to start. So just curious like how you think about all that? When I think about the 500 different ways to earn 5% or whatever I said along those lines is it's never about diversifying your assets forsake of diversifying the assets. It's about diversifying the risk. And once you have a custody solution that allows you to do so. And it, it really, I think is going to happen gradually. Then suddenly I think there's going to be, we've been talking about this accelerated timeline of Donald Trump and Jamie Dimon and and Larry Fink and with these people coming on our side, I think it's going to happen gradually. Then suddenly, I mean. All the way back when I first got into Bitcoin, it was actually Larry Fink and Jamie Dimon was the reason why I didn't go all in, because they made me, you know, being those Mount Rushmore Titans of finance. It, it made me question everything. And having those guys come on our side, I think it's just going to accelerate everything. And yeah, from a corporate perspective there, Michael Saylor talks a lot about how if you want to grow, you are looking for an acquisition partner or to be acquired. And he talks about how Bitcoin is that perfect partner for whether you are a a large corporate or you're a medium sized business looking to grow market share. Bitcoin is the perfect acquisition partner is the perfect merger. It is. I'm very bullish on the corporate adoption, what we're seeing soon. Yeah. Maybe maybe we could start to tease out a little bit around, you know, sort of what Michael alluded to in in some of his contexts and framing around, you know, the opportunity set here for for a business like Acropolis. Because if you think about, you know, what Saylor has done or even more recently similar scientific adopting Bitcoin strategy, you know, in those instances there was a founder or, you know, a head of the board who had enough unilateral control to make a decision like this. And also, you know, was willing to sort of figure it out themselves in terms of how to do it, how to custody the asset, have a strategy around implementation. But I think as we're all sort of referencing here, if we're at this inflection point where the average business recognizes they need to do something like this, they're going to need a toolkit, They're going to need advisory on how to actually implement this all the way from from custody to, you know, the timing of, of different deployments of capital and, and how you manage that Bitcoin on a balance sheet. So if you guys could just sort of tease out, you know, really the the the strategy around Acropolis and why something like this really needs to exist. Yeah, absolutely. We're, we're at an exciting inflection point when it comes to the corporate adoption. And when you, you look at the market, the different products and services that are built out, there's a lot of fragmented offerings. Some people focus mostly on custody, Some other businesses, corporations focus on maybe it's payroll services. There's some that you could potentially go to for advisory. What we're really excited about with Acropolis is we're going to build out the first comprehensive treasury, treasury solution for the Bitcoin age. The it's really 3 pillars to the product. You have the custody piece that Michael did a good job of teasing out. It's really multi institution custody. In our view. It opens the door for wide scale Bitcoin adoption. It's advisory, so the role of a Bitcoin strategy officer. There's a significant shortage of hirable talent. So it's really Acropolis is playing that role of outsourcing that key function so that A, you don't hire the wrong person or that, B, you don't have to try to bring out a full time resource when if you're a small or medium sized business and you just really aren't in a place to do that. And then lastly, it's ancillary services. So Bitcoin, the settlement layer, the technology, there's an infinite number of services that can be built out that businesses are going to want to tap into and use exciting opportunities around benefits for employees. You know, the list is really endless. One example that I'll share a personal anecdote on is escrow. So previous, previous role, I was consulting for an investment bank and got pulled into the back end work. They were kind of understaffed and it was unbelievable the friction in the escrow process of the Fiat system. There was so much manual work and the bank was physically moving with their keyboard, these escrow wires from the, the general account into sub accounts, but we had to like call them and, and tell them names and amounts that we were expecting to come in. And it was just fascinating. All I could think of is how bitcoins are going to completely eliminate this. That's just one example of, you know, the ancillary services that bitcoins going to allow. Going to touch back on the advisory piece really quick, just because we we've talked about the, the custody piece earlier in the call and the advisory piece in, in my view is really what's going to lead the next few years. MicroStrategy is extremely exciting to track and follow and to watch hopefully some copycats come out here soon. The vast majority of companies, they're going to start with two percent, 5%, maybe 10% of their reserves, right. So for those businesses, they're not going to on day one change their treasury management tech stack. That being said, as that 5% naturally because of Bitcoins performance and because of the growth in their conviction, once 5% becomes more like 20 and 30% and then 50% will have much more of a desire for adding in an infinite number of Bitcoin related products and services. Yeah, I think that's a great point. We talk about this a lot of we were still so insanely early. We can't even, Brian, like this would be a great one. I talked about it on the previous pod. But it's what makes these podcasts really effective in my mind is that we're building weekly, week over week until we have these conversations that are fresh. And one of the ones that's very fresh is that we've been going and talking with some of the largest institutions in the world about our custody first, because that's a differentiator. And we've kind of understood that like, wait, they don't appreciate the form of custody because they don't actually appreciate Bitcoin because they're not actually allocating the appropriate amounts. They're thinking of it as a risk asset in the sense of a crypto bucket. And so they're OK with living on a third party exchange. And to Joe's point where that's insanely relevant to this is like the first and second step or advisory and understanding the asset and how do you scale into it and why is it different than other crypto assets, right. So with custody and advisory being key pillars for the next few years in parallel, the rest of the market will start to catch up from ancillary services, escrow, remittances, payroll benefits, There's no shortage of different attributes that the asset has that allow for a better experience across the board with treasury. The problem, what we've seen in having allocated and worked in the space for close to half a decade now is that individuals haven't really built with the lens in mind of there's an order of operation. So they try to jump to the end. And naturally, education and custody are the, the, the foundations. That's, you know, hence Acropolis, like the, the notion of you have to have a strong foundation before you can actually go out. And the foundation stems from protecting somebody's wealth, storing it, and then you can grow from there. And so I think that Joe really hit the nail on the head of like advisory and, and why it's so important is you need to be able to meet people where they're at and you can't tell them to have fun staying poor. You got to be able to, you know, forecast the, the kind of capital that they're bringing in. Look at the revenue. Think about how do you size manage volatility? How do you sweep? We're having this is probably a, a good transition or at a certain point, Joe and, and Mason to talk about the advisory group, because it's some of the best people in the world. And one of the examples that they brought up was is effectively they've been doing this for the largest multinationals already trying to explain these concepts to them. And one of them is effectively taking your treasury yield and plugging that into BTC as an initial kind of first legging in, right? So you're, you're effectively taking not the principal amount, but any of the additional, you know, capital coming out from that treasury and then starting with that strategy. And it's very savvy when you think about that. And so I think that's just a key component to this whole thing is how do you actually advise for individuals to get in and then feel comfortable with how it's going to be stored? Yeah, we're blessed to be. We're blessed to have an incredibly talented advisory team. And what you're referring to is a conversation we had with Glenn Cameron, who has a long illustrious career and institutional asset management. And he brought up a great point that for these businesses that are on the fence and maybe they don't have a comfortable amount of free cash flow every month, you know, maybe they're basically breaking even since COVID because of all their inputs increasing, they may be really hesitant to step in, but they may be utilizing sweep accounts for their their checking accounts. So like the lowest hanging fruit is for a business to just take the yield on those sweep accounts. Last few years it's been about 5% pre tax and then just accumulate Bitcoin with that as a starting point. So you're not even really using the capital or the working capital, you're just using the small bit of interest you're earning on that. That's just a way that there's so many different ways for a company to step in which with what's comfortable for them, right? That's just that's probably the lowest hanging fruit. Does your Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night? 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If you believe your Bitcoin is going to be worth a lot someday, don't jeopardize that future by exposing your coins to hackers on exchanges, $5 wrench attacks in the real world, or perhaps most importantly, the risk that you might screw something up with a highly technical self custody set up on ramps. Multi institution custody eliminates single points of failure, reduces your personal attack surface and technical burden, and provides access to financial services that allow you to confidently secure your Bitcoin, including inheritance planning, insurance backed warranties for all balances and transactions, low cost trading, and more. Bitcoin is a once in a species asset, secure it right. Learn more at on rentbitcoin.com. We've been able to put together a really strong group of advisors from Rich, who Rich Kerr who worked at Charles Schwab for 30 years and people like Grant Switzer at PwC and KPMG for I think 3536 years. We've got a really talented team of advisors from everything from venture to investments to treasury to accounting, traditional finance. I think the group of guys that we've been able to put together really makes me especially bullish and especially confident that this is the right time and we're able to lean on them when it comes to any question that we have in any of those areas. We are big proponents of leveraging others experience where we don't have it and really happy to have that group of guys together. Yeah, I think, I think the rich, every advisor on that board looks incredible. Rich stands out because of his experiences on the RAA side of the business and approaching Raas and working via channel partners to establish those individuals are working with entities, preserving their wealth that own businesses. And so there's a natural synergy with having those kind of channel partnerships and relationships established. As an example to what Mason was describing is there's going to be different avenues to really find the right time for these businesses that are already keen to understand the asset class and how to preserve well for their own personal side. And now is that naturally falls into their corporate or their person. It didn't have to be corporate too, because I think we're talking about corporate. I personally have like that's going to happen. It's going to happen. It's like the SMB and the firms that just naturally need to stay alive is where we'll be able to support and more than likely focus on earlier simply because of the notion it's like bitcoins emergent and there's no shortage of small. Brian, you mentioned the the Lindia or Mason or Joe as well on MicroStrategy living through a cycle. It's like there's probably been for every MicroStrategy, there's 1000 plus businesses that have lived through the cycles. And all those businesses are going to need better forms of custody and are going to need additional services and they'll step in much faster than anybody on the corporate level. Yeah. One, one element that I think is worth teasing out that we've sort of alluded to here is like in order to implement a long term Bitcoin treasury strategy, you need to have ownership assurances over the asset. And, and so, you know, if you think about what some, some companies or some individuals might feel is, is the easiest route of getting Bitcoin exposures. Now these ETF that exist, well, you don't actually own the underlying asset. And so that's where it sort of ties into what what Joe was talking about around the ancillary services and the other things that you can do from a settlement layer perspective where you actually need to own the underlying. And so, you know, part of part of what opens up the opportunity to do that is multi institution custody, which which we've referenced. But I, I would like to sort of pull on that thread of, you know, the ancillary services and why it's actually necessary to have custody of the underlying in a way that, you know, you can be, you can have greater assurances that you're going to have access to the asset 1020 thirty years from now, because there's not a single point of failure. And you know, you're not relying on individuals internally managing private keys themselves, but you're trusting experienced entities that you know, their business is key management. But again, those, those entities don't have unilateral control. So it gives you, you know, greater assurances that that Bitcoin is going to be there. But yeah, I would like to like to tease that out a bit. Joe or Mason on, on, you know, some of the other things that you guys sort of have in the pipeline of, of services around that that Acropolis will provide and, and how that ties to the actual settlement layer of Bitcoin and, and why that's super important. Yeah, sure. Speaking of advisors, we're excited to have Bobby Shell help with marketing and sales and he's also going to be Co hosting a podcast with me. We're going to be dropping it weeklies. It's going to be called new foundations. The reason why I I bring this up is Bobby does a great job talking about the intersection of Bitcoin and small businesses. So one of the things that he likes to talk about is how you're going to be able to pay and receive bills in real time as the value is being exchanged. This is going to make an enormous difference for small businesses especially. He had some. You'll have to tune into the first app. It's going to be dropping soon. Again, that's new foundations. He has some alarmingly high percentages of the number of invoices that go unpaid for small businesses. And part of the reason why is because it kicks off a Daisy chain of when one business is waiting for an invoice, well, then they may be slow slowing down on paying their bills. And then the next business is waiting for them to pay in order for them to receive that money and then pay their bills. And it I was just shocked at how high of a percentage it is. But when you really think about it, I guess it's really not all that shocking, especially in times like right now where, you know, everyone's sitting around looking for this recession to come. But really it's felt like we've been going through a recession for a few years and it just because the nominal recession hasn't hit, people's expenses are going higher. And you know, these small businesses, they're kind of in the compressor, right? Their costs are increasing, but then on the bottom side, their customers are also getting squeezed. So increasing your, your, your sales prices, you can't do it 1 to one with their cost increase in a lot of cases. So factoring that in sorry call coming in. So you know, back to your point, implementing AP and AR in real time, that's not possible without Bitcoin settlement layer. That's one exciting area for us. I want to go back to what you were saying about the the small business and their cost going up. I know we're talking about the ancillary services, but when it comes to S and BS, there's never really been a complete necessity for you to have a treasury strategy whatsoever. And we've even heard some stories from preliminary talks about people who are S and BS who are leaving millions of dollars in single bank accounts not having any regard for the FDFDIC insurance. And it's just they're really not sophisticated in this state. But as you have rising cost of Labor and rent and everything, as Joe said, you need to own an underlying protection for that. And we're really excited to help S and BS in that area. Going back on some of the ancillary services we're building out, we're tinkering with a bunch of interesting ideas, one of them being a ability for you to pay your employees and Bitcoin with a vesting schedule instead of Rs use, which only public companies can utilize Rs use to retain talent. Now you can be a medium sized business issue sort of Bitcoin Rs use on chain and allow those to vest over a period of time and you could drip those in daily. You could drip those in weekly as people work for you and you know, give you give you their labor. There's a lot of exciting things that we're working on, but really the the foundations of the custody, the advisory and then everything that we can do in the future is really exciting. Yeah, no, that's, that's really fascinating and thanks for thanks for walking through some of those those ideas. I think it might be worth taking a bit of a, a step back and, you know, wanted to reference that, you know, there will be certain collateral that that folks can go view on the Acropolis website, a white paper and A and a playbook. And some of the things that you you guys talked about in those documents is kind of, you know, the status quo. So thinking about traditional treasury strategies and why, you know, those are in some sense fundamentally broken because they don't have a sound unit of account. But would be curious to to to sort of tease out how you think about transitioning to this new world where Bitcoin is, is, you know, a core component of a treasury strategy and how that, you know, the sort of. Distinct differences in terms of what that world looks like versus the sort of status quo of traditional treasury strategies. And, you know, is there any sort of anecdotes or, you know, stories you can tell from people that are waking up to that realization that something is broken in terms of, you know, this is sort of sailor story to some extent that he recognized. He had this massive melting ice cube of, you know, whatever it was, 500 million cash just sitting on his balance sheet. So, so how do we transition to this new world and how do we get people to recognize that, you know, the old strategies are just not going to work going forward? Yeah, absolutely. Status quo, I would say is the most important section of the white paper. You really can't appreciate Bitcoin and and what it's going to be doing to the treasury function without understanding why exactly we're in the situation we are for. I'm going to break it into two segments. One is small businesses in mid market and then the other is enterprise. So with small businesses it's very common to have really no treasury strategy at all. They either sit in cash or they sit in the sweep accounts like we mentioned earlier. If you have a small business sitting in $5 million in cash for one year and you assume, you know, there's a lot of different ways to look at inflation. What I like to think of as a base is that 7% monetary expansion per year. Now is there actual inflation? They're feeling double that possibly, but I think it's conservative to at least just go with that 7%. So on that 5,000,007% is $350,000. So if you assume average salary of 70,000, that's the productivity of five full time resources just slowly, quietly getting stolen away from them each 12 month period that they just sit in $5 million of cash. Now, sweep accounts are a popular way to try to combat this. You know, the last few years you've been able to get a 5% on a, on a money market fund. Previous decades it was much, much lower than that. But even in best case scenario, you're getting 5%. Well, it's only 3 1/2 percent after tax and you're only making it halfway to that 7% monetary expansion. So you're slowing the drip, but you're still dripping value. So this is combined with the fact that the Fiat system places significant burden on small businesses and mid market businesses strictly just by its design. With the monetary expansion required in a credit system, it pushes us all out of savings. So that's whether it's individuals or companies. And this promotes this thoughtless investing into the stock market. So all of this capital is flowing into these public companies that these small and mid market businesses don't have access to. This makes the large companies more quote UN quote financeable. Get preferred interest rates and it just really helps them with their economies of scale to continue to gobble up market share. You couple this with the fact that the vast majority of market participants, rightly so, they think the stock market just always goes up. If you just, you know, wait out the one or two years where it it's dropping, right? They're not looking at the denominator whatsoever. So this thoughtless investing into the public stock market, it's almost like the de facto Piggy Bank along with real estate the past few decades, this really places a significant burden on small and medium sized businesses. So when you couple that really with all the technological disruption we're seeing with the artificial intelligence, it's hard you get to this conclusion that, you know, it may seem hyperbolic if you don't walk through that progression, but it's hard to picture a lot of small and medium sized businesses surviving another few decades without incorporating Bitcoin into their treasury strategy. I'm not saying they necessarily have to go all in, right? But even just 5% of your monthly cash flow you're generating could end up making an enormous difference. It really helped by embracing a scarce asset that's really long term oriented capital. You're putting yourself in a position to operate with more flexibility and with more strength. Mason, I'll throw it to you over for some thoughts or comments before diving into the enterprise side of the equation. Actually, so before, before the enterprise, I think it's just worth reinforcing like this stuff is so foundational to transitioning from whatever we know is going on that like it has to be built. I think about all this stuff is like first principle. We looked in the market from custody, it's like nobody talked about custody. They would talk about hash rate and being distributed and it's like the keys need to be just as distributed as a hash rate. When you think about it from a game theoretical perspective, in a similar way, like there's only increase in monetary expansion to service the debt levels or a collapse as we know they're not going to let it collapse on itself. They'll inflate it away. And if that's to be true, then these experiences that we all feel in our daily lives when it comes to going to the restaurant to to getting laid off, you know, nobody says it, but like the quality of experience in going to restaurants. It's just like just taking a turn like the quality because they're getting squeezed at all at all corners. So whether it's the amount of people they can hire or the actual ingredients and that goes across the products across any industry. So there's only one way out of this is you have to be able to preserve your wealth. And we talked about liquidity profile education tailwinds like it is Bitcoin. And so this is the like the essence of this, this kind of stuff. I think we're all here for this the advisor list. And when individuals ultimately have to come in, it's very Darwinistic. It's like you got a surprise. If you're going to survive in a future state, you're going to have to have a better form of money. You're if not, you're going backwards and your product may help you because of your margins out run it for a while, but ultimately it's going to catch up because it catches up with everybody. And so I think This is why it's so foundational. Yeah, and I'm glad you stopped us Michael, because we have so much just passion and motivation in the small and mid market space. So, you know, when you think about just the cornerstone of a neighborhood, a family owned restaurant that's been around for 60 years, them incorporating Bitcoin into their strategy, even a relatively modest way that can make the difference in that restaurant surviving another several generations or not being able to make it another five years. Like that's so motivating to me to to, I know there's a lot of different offerings out there that are going to try to approach this, but to build this holistic, comprehensive solution that's going to reach some of these businesses. I mean, there's just what, what makes me so like fired up about this topic is really just the general misunderstanding of that denominator of, of even the situation that they're in because it is really complex. It's really complex. And helping distill that down, helping those businesses kind of rewire the way that they're looking because they're usually so busy and they're trying to outrun the cost inflation that they just think if I just got to run harder, I just got to run faster. And that's really not the solution. You have to embrace a better form of capital, a better form of savings. Yeah, no, that's, it's a really good point. I think one, one element that you guys included in the in the playbook document that I think is worth digging into is, you know, something that comes up outside of of treasury adoption. But even just when I talk to individuals who are looking to, you know, incorporate Bitcoin into their, you know, personal finances, the one of the first questions is always, you know, well, do I just buy a bunch right now? Do I DCA like what is the strategy around that? And I think that'll be a very pertinent question for these smaller mid market businesses and thinking about how to go, you know, how to go about this, whether you know, they're it's a break even company, maybe they can't, maybe they can't make a bulk purchase at first. So like I'd be curious to tease that out a bit around, you know, how you're thinking about strategies and how they, how they really apply to, you know, different businesses in terms of where they are in their life cycle or their free, free cash flow generation. And just put some finer points around, you know how you would how you would advise certain businesses depending on their circumstances. Sure. Yeah, You, you, you touched on a lot of the reasons why advisory really is needed, particularly for businesses. There's so many different circumstances of cash flow, capital positions and cyclicality. You know, ideally from the high level, you buy a lump sum when you enter and then you also have recurring purchases every month. And there will be a lot of businesses that can do that. There's a lot of other businesses that may have to make more periodic purchases. Really the the key point is you want to have more Bitcoin in two years or in five years than you do today. Where I think a lot of people get held up is and a lot of businesses get held up is they're worried about they don't want to purchase today and then price drops 20% tomorrow, right. And that that hesitation usually leads to inaction. On our white paper, we laid out a scenario analysis for a business initial accumulation of 300,000 and then monthly accumulation of 15,000. And what's really interesting in the numbers is after two years, they're actually slightly in the red based on the assumptions. What we assumed is, you know, it's always difficult to project the price of Bitcoin. But if you just use history and you look at most logical place for the next peak would be mid to late 2025. And the most logical through after that would be 12 months later. Well, if you steadily accumulate Bitcoin from now until then, you actually may be in the red in terms of your dollar value of Bitcoin a year or two in advance. But if you have the conviction and the education and the understanding that it's not about having a a dollar value of your Bitcoin being higher in two years, it's about for five years from now when that price is higher that you were able to build up a physician. They're trying to wait and time it perfectly for especially for businesses would be a fool's game for two reasons. One, if you're first stepping into a business and you think you're going to make that purchase at the absolute bottom, then you haven't been paying attention and understand how much blood is in the streets at these moments and how difficult it is to purchase for the first time then. But even if you do, let's just assume that you do that and you and you have that conviction at the right time, your business might not be lined up correctly to take advantage of it. Maybe your cash flow is not as healthy those months as usual or six months ago, you just invested in a new factory or a new R&D project, right? So all of a sudden you've been waiting to buy Bitcoin and now's the perfect time. And it just doesn't quite line up with everything. So steady accumulation is is really critical. And you know, with that there, each situation is so unique that we look forward to helping people, asking the right probing questions to help them get to their final strategy. I, I think it's really important because I think like most individuals listening, because we're still so early in this bull cycle that people have been here a while and the group here, it's like we discount what we know as DCA and, or, you know, the timing and, and, and sizing appropriately to manage volatility, which historically keeps people out. So the ability to meet people where they're at and explain this, but that's just not enough. Because if they understand that, it's like, well, I keep hearing that the asset gets lost because I leave it on a little plastic device or I leave it somewhere else. So you mirror the consultation coupled with the better form of custody and now you literally have something that can is, is a game changer. And we discount that because we're so close to the mark. We're like, yeah, this is easy to do with both. It's like nobody's there yet. That's why the price is still one, you know, one 100th of where it's going or one, one thousandth. So I think it's just important, like the way you just described it, there is important part of it. And it's not an easy thing because usually, you know, like you go out and scream at people and like, but you know, have fun seeing horror number go up and they're like, what are you talking about? I got to go back to work. It's a really, it's a good point in the sense that, and you, you sort of brought this up earlier, Michael around, you know, in terms of some of the, the conversations that we have on the on ramp side and, and just sort of foundational education around the asset. And what's always been sort of top of mind for me when I talk to, you know, prospects on the on ramp side or even just friends and family. It's like the first thing I start with is like, you need to be thinking about this long term, like this is not a 123. You know, you have to have at least you know, if you're, if you're just thinking about it in terms of historical cycles, like you need to have at least a four to five year outlook on this deployment of capital, right. And so given that what you're referencing, Michael, is like for the uninitiated business that might be thinking about something like this, they need to have that long term orientation. But historically they haven't been able to because of the custody. And because you couldn't just trust that, you know, the exchange that you held the coins on was going to be there in five years, because we've seen countless examples of that not being the case or, you know, you, you mismanage the keys yourself within that five year period. So I think part of part of the really, you know, interesting point that we're at right now is that we, we now have the tools, we have the, the foundations to be able to properly think about this long term. And so I think that is a, that is a turning point for us where you know now, now that you know, the, the companies and the people that need this can actually go out and implement it in a real way because they can have better assurances that the bitcoins going to be there in 5-10 fifteen years. Mason, I'll cut you off. Go ahead. Yeah. I just want to encourage everyone to head over to our website, acropolistreasury.com/whitepaperor/playbook and go through this. Joe did a great job at going over the highlights, but in the playbook, we go over the accumulation strategy, the purchasing strategy, the custody, insurance, accounting. We go through each one of them individually and I think it's a great resource for businesses of all sizes and we're excited to have everyone check it out. Yeah. And I would encourage also to, to share this because I think like the the demographic again that that listens to this. I think because we're earlier already kind of knows a lot of these concepts, but their friends and family don't. And I think they want to protect them and their businesses and multi institution custody has a lot of areas that if it's in the market, I can't think of 1 better than businesses. And the reason why I share that is because previously building Unchained, one of the big form of big highlights or reasons we're on ramp came about was once we got into businesses outside of two brothers running a, you know, a company and holding a Ledger each or a treasure or whatever it was just like, you guys are nuts because it's like, what do you mean? You know, and they some didn't say you're nuts like they would say, we'll go to our board and then you go to a board meeting and you're like, realize you lost a deal. And it's like because you just can't as a fiduciary manage capital on behalf of a group of 2050 a hundred, whatever size of the business. And so this is really where it comes at like core infrastructure that all Acropolis clients get as part of, you know, working with us and early riders from whether it's multi institution to the insurance that Joe was talking about and understanding that there needs to be, you know, fault tolerance and redundancy built into this. And so for friends and family that are have been looking for something like this to finally dip their toe in. And maybe it's they're not ready to like start buying Bitcoin, but they want to learn more. They understand that there's a problem. Everybody knows there's a problem with the rising cost. They just haven't heard from anybody or somebody else too, which is the nice part. It's like sometimes consultations are great because you just get to let somebody else talk to your friends and family because they're tired of hearing you. So just to echo what Mason was sharing is like, you know, feel free to look, but consultations and get a hold of the guys because that's really the the game is like education, talk about these concepts and then when people are ready, they'll ultimately make their move. And if you're really excited about it, we're going to be in Nashville next week during the conference and we're going to be booking meetings all week. We want to talk to you whether it's a small business, a medium sized business in enterprise, OR even an individual just wanting to introduce your friends. Like Michael said, we want to talk to you. So reach out to us in just go to acropolis.com, acropolistreasury.com/contact. Yeah, Joe's on an exciting panel. I think it's what what's the the group Sam Callahan is, is moderating Dylan Leclair, Chris Kiper from Fidelity and Joe talking exactly about this stuff, Treasury asset, Bitcoin being a treasury yet reserve asset. Yeah, the Thursday Institutional Day event going on, we're really excited for that. It's going to be a great discussion. It's. Going to be awesome. We've we've put together an incredible lineup. Can't wait for that. Maybe, maybe before we wrap, I wanted to just get some thoughts from the group around a rumor that was going around this morning that that Trump is going to announce at the national conference during his keynote, a Bitcoin Treasury reserve strategy for the United States. Do we think that's real unsubstantiated rumor as of right now? Where would you even put the probabilities that that actually happens next week? Anybody. I think it's real. I think it's happening. I don't know if I'm just naive, but I think it's happening. We absolutely live in a simulation. Larry Pink is on our side, Jamie Dimon is on our side, Donald Trump is on our side. 1 by 1, everyone will capitulate. And I am a little bit worried about other countries being able to front run the US if he does make that announcement. But in the end, it's great for Bitcoin, it's great for the adoption. It's great. I mean, the United States does own 207 some odd thousand bitcoins, so we'll be all right. But I think it's happening. I'm, I'm kind of on the other end of the spectrum. I think it's possible, but he's obviously there to be very supportive, right? And he's going to be talking about how he sees a future for it and how it's going to play a strategic importance. I don't think he's going to announce any sort of, you know, official decisions. If he does get elected, I think that would come after. But, you know, hopefully I'll be surprised. And to Mason's point, I'm not even sure I want him to just yet. Maybe I'd rather. Theoretically, game theoretically probably wouldn't make the most sense before he's, you know, in a position to actually enact the the change or the the strategy. But yeah, I mean, he said some other things that that would indicate he maybe doesn't fully appreciate that. Like he's going, you know, we're going to mine the rest of the Bitcoin in America Like so I think he's, you know, he's still, he's still coming, he's still coming up the curve in terms of his education as well. So someone needs to get in his ear and say maybe you don't want to announce this until we actually do it. That would be the bowl case. I kind of fall in the middle, but I think that would be the bowl case to why he would say something like that because he doesn't understand. Right. Like, you know, it's seriously, we talk about it a lot. It's like sometimes you counter position the ability to not fully understand it is a is a like in a, in a way that can benefit everyone And the fact that they don't fully understand it because if they did, to Brian's point, they wouldn't say it and they would be accumulating, but it's more probably from a, a token, you know, novelty thing, which is perfectly fine. So that would give that would make it more favorable at least to like the Mason side of, you know, they do come out and say something. Well, we will see in a little over a week it will. Is he? Do we know which day he is giving this keynote or is that not? Probably the last day, probably the last day. Well, but but the maybe just one thing to reference is like we talk about a lot of these concepts is they sound like theory and they sound, we sound very sure. And I think we're all here very confident that at least directionally how this plays out. And every year it it's just accelerating, right? Because the idea of Trump, we're talking about Trump saying this the, the front running future president of the US, the United States. Three years ago, you had a small, you know, sovereign nation announce it as their reserve currency or their currency. So you add, you know, what was RFK last year, This is what this looks like playing out in real time. The price is setting around $70,000. You know, a couple months after the having like this only goes in One Direction. And and so, you know, again, when it comes to sharing this and looking at it just makes sense to at least get a get a little educated, look a little bit further. Take time to research, listen to other podcasts because it's important, especially from a business perspective. Joe like it's really good anecdote of if the restaurant doesn't adopt it, like they go away, like all that lineage is just done and it doesn't come back. And so this is kind of like the stakes are really high. And so it's important to like kind of take these things and while we joke around, kind of, you know, it's it's serious stuff and so excited to have this out there and then seeing everybody next week can. I just say one more thing on the businesses. I know we got a wrap, but I'm really excited to help give businesses of any size the ability to do more long or or more high time preference things, or I mean low time preference things, you know, like beautiful architecture, amazing businesses that that last for generations. These things are slowly being lost in our society and giving a solution for businesses of all sizes to own Bitcoin and and get back to that is something that's I'm really passionate about completely outside of Bitcoin. And yeah, I just wanted to mention that here at the end. Yeah. Now we're we're helping pull forward a future where capital deployment becomes more disciplined. Like that is, if you're, if you're embracing Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, you fundamentally understand that it's a better form of money, better store value, and that influences a lot of your decision making and, and how you go about building a business, building a strategy, whatever it may be. It really does start to influence everything you touch once you have that flip and thinking that that allows you to Orient yourselves more long term because you know, you have this, you know, this fortress balance sheet that is going to appreciate over time. It allows you to think more strategically about different opportunities and not just be constantly caught up with, you know, chasing that, you know, chasing on that wheel of you got to keep up with the debasement, right? It allows you to think a little bit more clearly when you don't have to have those worries constantly. So super exciting stuff. Joe Mason, thank you very much for imparting some wisdom on the folks and introducing Acropolis. Really excited to hear everybody reach out and we're going to be in Nashville as mentioned. We want to talk to you whether it's about this on ramp early riders, we want to hear from you. So thanks everybody. Thanks, Brian. Thanks, Joe Mason. Yeah, thanks for having. Us Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Rat 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.
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