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Final Settlement — Episode 12

Final Settlement E012: MENA's Synergistic Embrace of Bitcoin with Ralph Gebran

August 27, 2024 · 01:16:49
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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 (Chief Strategy Officer 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 this gro

Transcript+
It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the. World of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing. The role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Welcome back to the next episode of Final Settlement. Been a few weeks, we're back in the horse. Michael and I were in Jackson Hole, Wyoming last week. I'm back home. I think Michael, you're back in Texas now. And we're joined by Ralph Gibran, who is actually in Cyprus right now, normally domiciled in Dubai, but is managing partner of On Ramp, sister company On Ramp MENA. And so really excited to have him on the show today and do a little inside On Ramp episode, talk through some of the opportunities in the MENA region, maybe talk through some of our takeaways from last week in Jackson, Michael. But gentlemen, nice to chat with you. Welcome back to the show. Yeah, welcome. Welcome Ralph and excited Brian to be back. I know it's been a little bit of spotty this summer. We had some special episodes that dropped and in place. Ralph had a really awesome episode. If anybody hasn't listened to with Harris Efron advisor honored Mina and Seifa Dean, but excited to get this humming back around into the fall, which should be which should be pretty exciting. We have another special guest in a couple weeks. So excited to be here. And Ralph, thanks for joining us today. Hey, thanks for having me guys. It's a pleasure to be here and yeah, really excited for this conversation. I think we can take this in multiple different directions, but maybe a good place to start is for folks who haven't been introduced to you yet, Ralph, as Michael mentioned, you also host a new podcast called The New Frontier with Harris Fran, where you guys are specifically taking a look at, you know, the Bitcoin opportunity in in the Middle East region, MENA. But maybe for the audience, it'd be helpful for you to kind of go through your background, how you got to Bitcoin and just sort of, you know, what you've seen on the ground, living in the region mostly. Yeah, for sure. So Ralph Jabran, managing partner on Ramp Mina, I've spent most of my life in the Middle East, so I'm originally from Lebanon. Sadly, we don't get, you know, good publicity in Lebanon with the current economic system, hyperinflation on official capital controls, but we'll get to that in a minute. But I am professionally and academically trained in finance. My entire career has been in traditional finance. I've worked as a trader on a brokerage desk, traded commodities, equities, fixed income, gold. I've also worked on a treasury desk of one of the biggest commercial banks back home in Lebanon, managing their foreign exchange reserves and exposure. On top of that, the last seven years, eight years I've been in Canada, based in Montreal, where I spent the most of my career in the institutional asset management space, specializing in sales enablement and institutional sales, working with two top five asset managers with a combined AUM of almost 900, nine, 150 billion assets under management. And the last five years, I've been slowly grinding my way down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And one of the triggers really was a personal one. So I mentioned earlier that I grew up in Lebanon, and while I was away, the economic crisis hit. The bank basically wiped out everyone's savings. So myself, my family, my friends, all of us have been affected, some more than others because of this. There's a tendency in Lebanon where, you know, the vast majority of Lebanese people are expats. There's more Lebanese outside of Lebanon than there are in Lebanon. And all of them were incentivized to send money back home. And the reason being is because the interest rates on term deposits were, you know, extremely high. You're talking about 8 to 10% when the US dollar interest rate was zero to 0.25%. So people rather than, you know, invest in equities, etcetera, you were getting comparable return in a supposedly very safe banking system. As Lebanese people, we had a lot of pride in our banking system. Our central bank governor at one point in time was on CNBC. When the great financial crisis hit, the Lebanese banks were unscathed. So they dealt with it extremely well and everyone thought it was the safest place to park your money. And Paine, as I like to say, is the best educator. When you see the system collapse onto itself, you start to question certain parameters. I mean with a 15 year track record working in finance, educated in finance, I never stopped to question the system. I was just part of it, and I thought that was just the way things worked. But when something as big as what happened in Lebanon effects you, effects people you actually care about, you start to question things, even things that you thought were real. And that's what really pushed me down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And you know, you mentioned the episode with Say for Dean. So Say for Dean actually played a huge part in my Bitcoin journey. One of the things I picked up with the Bitcoin standard and I haven't looked back since. One thing about Saifuddin that a lot of people in the Middle East relate to is that he is from the region. He ironically, he was actually a teacher at the university where I got my banking and finance bachelor's degree. Sadly, I couldn't take a class under him. We, we didn't coincide in terms of I graduated before he started teaching there. But really that's what drove me to Bitcoin. I had unanswered questions. I wanted to understand what was wrong with the system, how could this happen? And also I was looking for alternatives because the way things are in Lebanon right now, we went through a black market on the US dollar. Lebanese # maintaining purchasing power was extremely difficult. Everyone has a high time preference because at one point in time you would go to the supermarket one day, two days later prices would change up until the point where now we've reached full dollarization. So the Lebanese pound is barely used at all. So all that to say that I found purpose. I found a reason to look for Bitcoin and it was a personal one. And that that's really how I got into Bitcoin. And I thought, you know, Lebanon is basically what's happening all over the world, but it just happened at hyper speed. Whereas in the West you can see the same kind of trend happening, but it's in slow MO. Bigger institutions, control over the reserve currency of the world, and all that kind of stuff really helps slow down the process of deterioration and hyperinflation. At Onramp, 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. On Ramp 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 set up. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, no, it's it's a fascinating story because as you're sort of alluding to, I think it's something, you know, at least sitting in the West, sitting in the United States, we often take for granted. And obviously, you know, Alex Gladstein's of the world talk about this and our financial privilege living here. We still, you know, deal with the Fiat currency, but it just happens to be the global reserve currency at present. And so we have to look a little bit harder to to, you know, identify those issues with Fiat money. Whereas, you know, growing up in Lebanon, like yourself, like you just have this visceral connection to money and how it can go really, really wrong in a, in a, you know, expedited fashion. And so I think, you know, it's always good to remind ourselves that, you know, as bad as we think the dollar is like we, we've got a pretty good relative to the slew of other Fiat currencies out there. And yeah, it so it's, it's always a refreshing point of view. Can you can you share, can you share where the realization for you with the frame of reference of having ties to the Middle East seeing what happened? But then I think if, if I'm tracking the timeline, you were in the West and safe on that pod had this interesting realization. I don't know if it was in real time or I think it was. Well, while you asked in the Middle East, in certain regions, because they suffer from hyperinflation, they don't necessarily have the disposable income to find Bitcoin. And then in certain other countries, it may be too nice. And so they don't also. But there's just like a nice middle ground where like in the US, maybe Canada, where you have some disposable income, but you have the opportunity to learn. Can you share like if that had any influence on you being able to see it versus others that may be right in the middle of it? Because I think that's kind of the common knowledge outside of a very on the margins. It's still not understood in the region, even though theoretically it should be understood very easily given the monetary policy of the local currency. Yeah. So it's ironic in a way, because the places that need it the most are the ones that adopt it last. And Safe made a really good point about that balance. So having that disposable income and that stability, not just financial stability, but geopolitical stability also factors, factors into play. So I was lucky to be in the West when this happened. So I could quickly shift and I had a stable job, I had a stable life. Everything is, you know, we take these things for granted in the West, having stability. But someone, for example, in a conflict zone or in a very tense geopolitical area like the Middle East, their their time preference is very different than someone in the West. Being in the Middle East, you're constantly worried about war, you're constantly worried about corruption, safety. There are bigger issues at play. So taking the time to go deep into something like Bitcoin, which fairly does take time to comprehend and to assimilate, you don't have that time in the Middle East. And people have a tendency to especially in areas such as Lebanon, not all Middle Eastern countries, but countries that are suffering like Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, etcetera. There is an issue of time preference. So they have bigger problems is how I would say it. They have bigger problems than to worry about how am I going to store my wealth. Most of them will just revert to old school habits, which is real estate, buying gold or even just keeping U.S. dollars under their mattress. So the US dollar is considered kind of the prime currency over there. It's the most liquid. You can take it across borders if you are immigrating outbound, even better than gold, because gold is difficult to move across borders. If you're immigrating or leaving the country really fast, most people would rather have U.S. dollars. Easier to hide and it's easier to carry and bigger amounts. So it is something that very few people take into account. Where you are actually does matter and the stability of your environment makes a huge difference in how you perceive Bitcoin. It's just a matter of whether you have the time and you know, the, the, the free conscious to think about it. In these countries, things are happening so fast. You're I'll just tell you the problems of Lebanon. You know, there is no electricity. So they have all generators. They need to make sure they can get oil for the generator. Sometimes they don't import enough oil. So there's like this problem of acquiring oil and then people have to ration the oil they have and sit there with no electricity for longer periods of time. A lot of imported things don't make it anymore because the exchange rate just too weak. People want things, you know, upfront. Not everyone can pay. Real estate has become a cash economy. You can't buy a house on credit. You can't take a mortgage. You have to carry 100,000 two $100,000 in cash to buy a property in Lebanon. Paperwork is extremely difficult. If you need to update your passport, if you don't know someone, you're not well connected or you don't have enough money to actually pay for the service, it's going to be a problem. So water, there's no drinkable water in Lebanon. You have to buy actual bottles of water. So the infrastructure is just not there. You have way too many things that are basic needs that you need to fulfill before you can start thinking about, OK, I need to save for the future, Yeah. That's really helpful context. And you know, I'd be interested to get your thoughts on how that sort of compares and contrast to a place like Dubai where you've been living recently where little different circumstances, but still, you know, right next to right, you know, a neighboring neighboring area of the region. And, you know, I'd like to hear a little bit about what's going on there. And, and you know, we've talked about in the past, you know, we were in Dubai earlier this year visiting you and, and just getting sort of acclimated with the region and, you know, thinking about our strategies, sort of trying to, to move in there. But what what's, you know, was one of my sort of core takeaways is that they've been very forward thinking, both from sort of a regulatory perspective and also just trying to attract, you know, generally businesses to come domicile and Dubai and and being very open sort of towards crypto digital assets. And so in some sense that feels like it's sophisticated. It feels very forward thinking and innovative. But my take away was really like, it's almost, you know, too forward thinking for their own good in the sense that they sort of go down the path of these other protocols, which and this was, you know, something that was really sort of codified and solidified for me last week at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium in Jackson Hole. It's like all of these other protocols are still sort of searching for why they exist and and sort of the best that anyone can really come up with on that side is stable coins or, you know, tokenizing real world assets. And so I think there's this interesting sort of progression that's occurring at least on the edges that a lot of people in the sort of quote UN quote, digital asset crypto space are coming to terms with. Like, you know, why do these things exist? They're sort of looking for that product market fit, you know, looking for ways to explain, you know, sort of the utility, the different narratives at play and sort of trying to rationalize why these other protocols need to exist. And I think that is something that we saw on the ground in Dubai. And I think it's just a function of trying to be a little bit too forward thinking and too innovative when like someone wants to sort of admit to themselves, if you're in either like the VC or venture space, that like, it could just be as simple as buying and buying and holding this one asset. And so they try to sort of overcomplicate things and push these other these other protocols. But you know, I think there's some merit to, you know, maybe just curious your thoughts on like why that distinction sort of exists and why, you know, they're still sort of viewing this entire bucket as this super innovative risk on type of venture where has like just focus on Bitcoin. It's the most risk off asset you could own. Like it's just that, I guess, why hasn't there been as much of that realization? Is it just a function of, you know, wanting to attract people to the region so they feel like they have to be this sort of very forward thinking innovative place or, you know, curious your thoughts that made me about. Yeah, so Dubai and the UAE in general has really transformed over the last 20 years. I mean, if you've visited 20 years, you wouldn't recognize the UAE as it is today. They've taken a lot of good decisions. They've made a lot of good decisions, especially when it comes to incentivizing smart individuals to come live here. The system allows you to be forward thinking because you don't have to worry about almost anything. The service level is amazing. I've never seen anything like this. The digitization of government is something that's also super impressive. Everything can be done through an app, through WhatsApp, and it happens really fast. So they've really made it so that anyone who wants to come here is incentivized to do so with no income tax, with incentives to start companies here with free zones that facilitate and that hold your hand throughout the whole process to actually set up the entity. They've really made themselves a poster child of, you know, forward thinking innovation now up until the whole Defy craze and blockchain. That was a good thing in my personal opinion, because it did grow. Every big, you know, traditional financial institution, every big tech company wanted to be here. Because if you look at the current trends, a lot of people are leaving the West to come to Dubai or Abu Dhabi, the UAE in general, because conditions here, standards of living are much higher. There's no poverty, there's no crime. It's extremely well regulated. It is strict, it's open. They've, you know, opened up to accommodate foreign cultures as well as long as people are respectful of the local population. Keep in mind there's only 1012% that are actually locals. The vast majority of the UAE is foreign expats that come here and a lot of them are specialized labor that come here to build businesses and to help the economy. So they are extremely forwarding. It is just. That is their strategy with to buy Expo and, you know, just wanting to be the top at everything. A testament of that is Burj Khalifa. They made sure they had the tallest building here. And that was just a testament to showcase their ingenuity. And you're talking about building skyscrapers on desert land that is 10 times as hard as building it on, you know, your typical landscape that we are familiar with in the West because we have to build foundations way deeper. It just takes more engineering to get it done properly. And they built the tallest building on sand, pretty much. So now that's great and all, but when the blockchain craze happened, the Middle East, especially countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, which are constantly in competition with each other, Bahrain, Qatar, everyone's trying to be better than the other and they're also trying to be better than the West at something. So they were some of the first to actually create regulatory frameworks for the whole blockchain crypto space. And what happened is that incentivize so many companies from the West, the east to come set up shop here because you could go through it and you'd be on the right side of the law, even though from a regulatory point of view, they just looked at it, you know, point blank without really looking into the potential repercussions of this. So they were the first to do it and they're quite strict in the way they do it. But what has LED what this has led to is vast majority of people will be traders, short term thinkers. No one really questions money. Everyone's trying to get into the most trendy thing, whether it's NFTS, web three projects, tokenization, all that kind of stuff. It's just something that will take time. Typically, what happens in the West takes five to six years to transfer over into the Middle East. That is my experience at least from living in the Middle East. Certain trends, cultural trends, ideologies take time to be imported here. And over time, you know, the Middle East is looking more and more like the West. So I think what the West learned with the Defy bubble and the blockchain craze, all that pain, slowly but surely they will learn it here. I was on a call today with someone actually who works with a lot of locals. He's somewhat of a consultant, and a lot of them have felt the pain from the last cycle in altcoins. Some of them are holding on to, you know -200,000 losses because they have a portfolio filled with shit coins, really, projects that promise to deliver certain solutions. But that never came to fruition. And some of them are actually turning over slowly but surely now. They want to learn more than just jump on the bandwagon and hope for the best. SO from that point of view, forward-looking is, you know, a double edged sword. If you go too far, you might actually hurt yourself. It's somewhat of a balance and I think we'll adjust back to a mean where things will be revisited. And the problem is they've bucketed Bitcoin under digital assets. So Bitcoin is categorized the same way as all the other tokens. So when you look at it from that point of view, people here will see Bitcoin, as you know, first of all, unit bias, it's too expensive. They see its performance slowly erode over time. They, they don't see it as something that's going to make them really rich. And one thing that's prevalent in the region, people like to make a quick buck. And that's, that's a common Middle Eastern trade. So that's, that's currently where we stand. And those are my thoughts on it. Yeah, thanks for for sharing that, Ralph. Maybe, maybe. So I guess one statement and just thought is, and it could be wishful thinking, but I think we when we talk with a lot of financial institutions here in the US, whether it's an RAA or or a, you know, bank. The. Notion of having not been in like being behind sometimes can be a positive versus a negative in the sense of you, you, if you can skip the defy summer, right? If you don't have to catch up to that, then you may have an opportunity. And so I think part of like what our hope is that there's some learnings we can, you know, basically transmute over that. Maybe there's individuals still have to touch the stove, but can kind of leapfrog. And I think that's what we see a lot in like Africa, in certain parts of Africa when it comes to like fintech, right? There's this notion of you even have to like go into, you know, if we're at, you know, towards the tail end of the alphabet, consider the Fintech applications and it took us a while to get here in the West. It's like we can we just jump directly to mobile banking and different things like that. But going back to your the market structure in the Middle East. So we'd love to hear kind of where how in the Middle East how assets are stored, what does the market structure look like from a generalistic point of view? Where do people with wealth park assets? How is the relationship with stocks, equities and other alternative investments? And then basically how did that tie into you? You've seen what we're doing with on ramp and seeing multi institution and how that fit or into why now for the Middle East? Because like your backgrounds very you have a lot of accolades similar to Brian and being in traditional finance, seeing the market structure, realizing the brokenness. But also there really hadn't been a lot of institutional grade options for investors to be able to reduce counterparty risk, have the education and all the things to get you to a point where you can actually materially allocate. So just curious on like how does the landscape look today? And then where do you see what we're working on and what had you gravitate towards MIC Multi institution custody and specifically for the region and why right now is a good time? Yeah. So overall, the region from a asset allocation point of view, they have their local markets, their local stock markets, which have been growing over the years. More and more Western traditional asset managers have been investing in Middle Eastern stock markets just because countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have kind of proven themselves as legit, safe and secure for them to, you know, import assets into them now from a high net worth individual. For example, a lot of Middle Eastern people, especially the wealthy, will park a lot of their assets, for example, in Switzerland, just because of the nature of the economies and the structure of the country itself. I mean, you have to keep in mind that Middle Eastern people have one through a period where they were viewed very negatively as well, especially after what happened in the United States. So a lot of them were worried that their accounts might be associated with something that was off. So there's a tendency to park money in Switzerland due to their privacy laws. They are one of the most secure. So a lot of wealthy Middle Eastern people will park a lot of money there and they'll park money in real estate, especially for example, in Europe, London. And the reason being because a lot of these economies, what they will do, they will subsidized education for locals. So for their national people, they will send their children purely subsidized to London to get an MBA, to get a master's on the condition that they come back and work locally to build the country. So they've been really pushing for high levels of education and that's why you see this huge development taking place. They don't need to import as much foreign talent now they are producing that talent themselves. So when these individuals have worked abroad, have studied abroad, their lens has expanded. So they diversify their holdings and some of them will buy real estate in foreign countries such as London, Paris, etcetera, and really high quality real estate. You're talking about luxury real estate in, in, in surrounding European countries on the Western Front and Switzerland. So a lot of them will hold commodities, actual gold, and they will hold a standard portfolio of public equities. I would say the vast majority of their allocations would be in international equities more so than local equities, just because you know you won't get the fangs in UAE or Saudi Arabia in terms of growth and maintaining purchasing power into the future. So they will invest in the leader of the technology, etcetera, some of the biggest banking names as well, just because they're more comfortable. There's more trust there that these companies have been around for a while. So we're just going to stick to what works. So that's kind of from a asset allocation point of view and where people park their monies now from a Bitcoin point of view. So one of the hurdles I would say is that traditional family offices, high net worth individuals, even sovereign wealth funds because of the way Bitcoin is categorized as a digital asset. So it's viewed like all the other stuff. So, and there needs to be this breaking of the noise, cutting through the cloud to kind of explain the actual value proposition of Bitcoin and to showcase it more like it is a actual portfolio asset. Similar to you having exposure to gold, You would have exposure to Bitcoin. No different than that it's a bearer asset and it's a commodity. The problem is these family offices design it with individuals. They are conservative in nature, so they won't just take risk on it. What happens is, you know, once you build that trust within the region, you explain Bitcoin the way it needs to be explained and the way it needs to be viewed within a portfolio, things will change. And here when something change, there's a lot of word of mouth in the region. So if you manage to secure one aspect, one big family office, others will be curious to understand, someone just needs to take the first leap of faith and then others will start to follow. That is my personal view and that's based on my cultural experience back home. So that's just how we are. Someone takes a leap of faith and if it works out, people will start to question and follow. So that's the general idea. Now also from a security point of view, so they need to feel comfortable to hold something. Now a lot of them will look at just getting a little bit of exposure through, for example, an ETF. But I believe a solution that will allow Bitcoin to scale, especially within the region that I think would fit perfectly is the multi institution custody solution. And the reason being is because once you have multi institutional and multi jurisdictional capabilities, they'll feel more comfortable as being conservative as long as no one can freeze their assets. You give them redundancy and where the assets are being held and you give them comfort that they can move the asset whenever they want. That's a solid product market fit within the region, especially from a cultural point of view. And that's excluding the fact that also there's a lot of people here who are Muslim practitioners, they are seeking alternatives not just from an asset class point of view, but also from a custody point of view to reduce counterparty risk, to share risk among various counterparties. So from that lens, I think once the market groks Bitcoin as an asset, not as a digital asset, but as an asset like gold equities, etcetera, they understand it's risk return properties and the value that it can bring if stored the right way. Adding the fact that you have control over it. I think we'll see a lot of adoption trickling, but it is a lot of work to breakthrough that noise and, and, and, and, and help. But that's why we're here, right? So we talked to a lot of people and they understand it. They understand the model, but also from a regulatory point of view, there needs to be a lot of conversation to explain why this is a better alternative. And I believe we can achieve that just because it, it aligns so well with the cultural element, you know, reducing risk. People in the Middle East, they've dealt with so much, you know, things out of their control geopolitically, all that stuff that inherently we try to reduce risk where we can. If there's an option that is less risky but doesn't reduce return, we're going to take that and we're going to spend more time learning about it. So that's how I see multi institution fitting into the region and Bitcoin being a part of a traditional portfolio. Yeah. One quick thing just to call out is there's a there's a thing that we don't talk about enough about the inevitability of what Ralph just said on multi institution and risk. It's in the same way we think about Bitcoin and the dollar. If the dollar stopped printing and we had a conservative fiscal and monetary policy, maybe Bitcoin wouldn't be needed. The problem is that's impossible and that will not happen. And when I think about multi institution custody, if all things considered, there was never another loss in in digital assets, there was no more rehypothecation. There was no, you know, trickiness behind whoever was holding the asset. There was transparency, segregated wallets and ultimately there was no hacks that occurred. Then there's a case to be made we we would not need multi institution custody, but because that is nearly impossible, if not impossible for the next call it 24 months, let alone 24 years and on to the future. That is why it's necessary if you want material exposure. So I think it's just an important part that feel very confident to hang back because the market will take care of the rest. We're just kind of putting, you know, gas on the fire. We're having conversations. And I think the biggest just to add on that, Michael, one thing that's underestimated within the multi institution setup is the reduction in geopolitical risk. I mean, how many times do you see tags World War three has started or all the stuff that's been happening, The world is moving in, you know, in a very tense direction. Everywhere between what's happening in the Middle East, between what's happening in Europe, Russia, Ukraine, there's just this tension around the world. And if you have a solution, and I think this is the first time ever where you have a solution that allows you to reduce counterparty risk because if you invest in U.S. stocks, well, your counterparty in terms of geopolitical risk is the United States. If you invest in Middle Eastern stock, your counterparty risk in terms of geopolitical risk is the is the country like people who invested in Lebanese stock market got wiped even though it seemed great. But if that custody of the asset, if it's a decentralized asset, it just makes total sense that the custody of that asset is also decentralized, not just from a, you know, institutional point of view, but also from a geopolitical point of view because the asset allows you to do so. So multi institution custody in my view is really the next generation of custody in general, not just, you know, and it's suitable for Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a, it's a really good point in that, you know, Bitcoin is this decentralized asset, the value prop is inherently tied to its distributed nature. And you know, the fact that by and large over the past 15 years, we've sort of just been OK with the asset centralizing both at a, you know, a single entity, but also to your point, Ralph, in a single jurisdiction. It's like, well, that kind of that kind of goes against that value prop at its core, right? It's like you shouldn't have any geopolitical risk necessarily with this global asset that is Bitcoin. It's an open protocol. Anyone on earth can participate. You shouldn't necessarily have your ownership of the asset be inherently tied to anyone particular jurisdiction or any geopolitical risk in a region. So I think it's a really good point. And I think, you know, going back to what you were saying about, you know, sort of the, the region and it's, you know, it's proclivities for understanding an asset like this where, you know, whether it's moving assets to Switzerland or just being generally aware of counterparty risk to a greater extent than, you know, someone living in the West. I think that's a really interesting dynamic that would, you know, the 1st order thinking is like, OK, that, that would mean that, you know, this region should, should see the value in Bitcoin more readily, but maybe that maybe it hasn't fully clicked yet. So I'm, I'm like trying to drill down into why that hasn't clicked. Is it because of the distractions, the noise that we've referenced of these other assets, these other protocols that, you know, on the surface seem like potentially higher returning, but also, you know, inherent in that is higher risk. And, and so I'm just curious, like, you know, how do we get people over that hump? And, and maybe part of it is, and you just put out a report about this, but you know, Bitcoin and its relation to Islamic finance and being halal and being Sharia compliant. I think that's maybe that's how we more directly make that linkage to this is the most conservative asset you could own. It is actually risk off if you think about it deeply and own it in the right way. And so it's actually very sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum as something you could own in the Fiat denominated world, whether it's a, you know, a stock or a bond or something that's inherently credit based. So maybe you could talk a bit about that report that we'll we'll link in the show notes. But maybe that's a way, at least in my mind, to sort of get people going down that path of realizing this is actually the most conservative thing you could own. Yeah. And before I touch on that, just one thing I'd like to add. So why do people put their money in Switzerland? Like people don't think about it really. Is it because it's neutral? Is it because the governance is decentralized? Is it because it has strong privacy? Well, Bitcoin is the asset class that is, it's it's the Switzerland of asset classes when you compare Bitcoin to Switzerland. All the reasons why people put their money in Switzerland apply to Bitcoin, and I think that's what people struggle to see. People don't question why they put their money in Switzerland. They just know Switzerland has been neutral, has not participated in any wars. Even the governance is really a citizen democracy where it's a country that is built on nodes and nodes make decisions. So Bitcoin is the same thing. So I think getting that message across, explaining Bitcoin in a different way, more so aligning it with things people can relate to is, is how we get the message through before we get into how it maintains its neutrality, how it stays decentralized. Just getting the message through that it is these things and then working through the technical side is is the right way to go. Now what you just said about the report is Bitcoin halal is what it's entitled. So we're lucky to have Harris Irfan as an advisor to unwrap Mina to make sure, you know, we are always saying things that are accurate and respectful towards Muslims all over the world. Full disclosure, I am not Muslim. So this was something that we worked on together. Now, it's not just about Sharia compliance. As the Muslim community, if you really take out the word Islamic finance, you can replace it with moral finance, basically Islamic finance. If you take out some of the Muslim component, it could be really just honest, transparent and fair finance because those are the foundations on which Islamic finance is built on being transparent, having no asymmetry between, you know, the borrower or the lender. There's no rebar, so there's no risk is shared. It's not a symmetrical risk where one person or one party carries more risk than the other or one party has guaranteed returns and the other does not. So it's really a moral, ethically honest form of finance. Now, I think from a conservative point of view, it would appeal to a lot of conservatives and the Muslim community in particular, because Saifuddin gave a really good example on our previous podcast. There's an argument to why people use Fiat and, and, and Muslims use Fiat. And the reason why is because there's no better alternative. Living outside of the Fiat standard before Bitcoin was almost impossible and it it affected your survival, affected how you take care of your family, it affected every aspect of your life. But now that there is a more honest, transparent, fair alternative, then I think over time we'll see more and more people who are Muslim, even Christians, all religions, people who are founding their life on sound principles of morals and ethics. And you know, doing the right thing will transition to Bitcoin. It's something you notice. People who are more attuned to the religious beliefs tend to find Bitcoin easier and understand it easier than those who don't. I'm not saying that they won't, but it's just because when you understand its foundational principles of honesty, transparency, fairness, and the fact that there is no one who is manipulating it or using it to take away your energy and the fruits of your labor by taxing you indirectly, subtly, then you realize that you know what? Maybe I do want to allocate a larger and larger portion of my assets to this asset that is actually protecting my, protecting my wealth and protecting the generate, protecting the wealth of my, of my future generations. That that's just how I view it. And it's a really interesting take when you start reading about Islamic finance, it, it really does make you think. And I think we don't, I think it's a, it's a, it's a different lens to look at Bitcoin through because in the West we hear the same kind of narrative over and over again about, you know, it's decentralized, it's a store of value. There's only 21 million, no one can control it. But I think when you look at it also from a religious point of view and you dive deep into Islamic finance, because there's no other religious finance, there's only Islamic finance, it makes it clear it, Ashok, is a lot of the deeper values associated with Bitcoin as well, which are appealing to a vast majority of people. Yeah. Yeah, there, there's a lot to unpack there. I think Harris of Ron, there's a few podcasts he's recently done that I think are worth you going and taking a look at because what Ralph just outlined is really spot on in multiple fronts. One of them is like I joke around and say whether it's individuals coming into on ramp. We invest on the early writer side, acquaintances and I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have experiences when you meet somebody that really deeply groks Bitcoin and it's it's need to be the substrate of effectively humanity when it comes to, you know, capital allocation, formation, social allocation or formation. Once they understand they just want a form of money that they don't want somebody else to take from it. Everything else on the is on the margin. Like you can figure out the rest you already have like this nice alignment and this notion of Islamic finance, as Ralph mentioned, it's like it's ethical finance. It kind of reminds me of Austrian economics. It's like when anybody looks at anything related Austrian economics, it's just like common sense. There's, there's nothing like, I think they even come back to it wasn't necessarily foreign in Austria. It was just more of like some of the academics that were kind of codified there. And so when you look at that and then you start to think about how you've been living, you know, Harris is working on some interesting products on the ethical finance side. And we looked at what we were doing with early writers and our Bitcoin denominated fund. And you know, this notion of profit sharing and risk sharing are inherent into ethical finance that the there cannot be an asymmetry when you allocate capital that you have to be in it together or there's some form of misalignment that will ultimately occur at any kind of product. And we see this in the traditional debt based system and the Bitcoin denomination is important because if you have a dollar denomination, well, you can know it. Returning dollars is the easy part. They make more of them. And so you have this asymmetry where you can participate in the upside, but the downside. And so that ultimately leaves a misalignment from the general partner and where the allocation goes versus if you don't get paid, if you don't return more of the underlying. It's very nuanced, but it's fundamentally different. And that's part of that risk sharing and alignment that is just been it has not occurred. So I think it's just fascinating that what Islamic finance has been trying to get back. It's it's the perfect asset. And I think that's part of this excitement from Harris and where we see the region really adopting Bitcoin. Does your? Bitcoin custody setup keep you up at night. Maybe you still have coins sitting on an exchange worried about hackers. Or maybe you've set up your own self custody. But don't feel safe with your Bitcoin savings stashed on a little plastic device in your desk drawer. 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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 onrampbitcoin.com. Yeah, all great points. You know, I did want to maybe we can talk a bit about, you know, as I mentioned, Michael and I were in Jackson Hole last week. We were there for the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, Senator Cynthia Lummis was there, Senator Tim Scott, were there a lot of other sort of notable speakers? And you know, Michael, I'm curious to get your thoughts. We haven't fully unpacked and, and caught up on it, but you know, some of my sort of core takeaways are related to what we've talked about on this call already and that, you know, I think there's this huge sort of. You know. Call it just the broader digital asset industry that is has grown very large, you know, heavily VC funded, but I think they're struggling to to really rationalize product market fit and why these protocols need to exist. And that was, you know, one of my large takeaways from watching a lot of the panels of the conference last week, you know, there was, I think there was 24 panels total. Five of them talked specifically about Bitcoin. The rest of them were about broader crypto. Tokenization was a hot buzzword. Real world assets was a hot buzzword. And I think, you know, there's there's just not a ton of great ways for these folks to articulate why these protocols exist. I think the best that they've come to is people like the dollar. And so we need stable coins and stablecoins is really just the first instance or first example of tokenizing real world assets. And so that's sort of the the narrative path they've gone down. People on various panels like even admitted like nobody's really interested in Defy anymore. Vitalik had a tweet, I think a couple days ago where he was actually just like sort of outing himself being like, well, where's the yield come from? Like a a question that Bitcoiners have been asking for many years. The Dalek, the, you know, founder of Ethereum kind of just put that out into the world is like, yeah, like this all of this defy activity. These protocols are just based on basically degenerate gambling and trading. Like that is where the yield yield comes from in theory. So I think there's this slow realization that, you know, it's really this barbell of use cases for broader crypto, right? It's pure degenerate gambling, meme coins or stable coins, real world assets, which like if you break it down, it's not all that innovative. Like do you really need a decentralized blockchain to issue existing assets on a faster database? Like probably not. And, and realistically, a lot of these issuers would probably rather do it on private block chains as opposed to public block chains. And part of. That is just because, you know, the public blockchain has a native token. It's like, well, why does that token exist if you're just recreating other assets on this blockchain? So I think there's, there's a lot of open questions that were sort of solidified for me in terms of, you know, as I watched these panels play out, I could tell that the people on them didn't feel super confident about talking about, you know, really the, the reason that these protocols exist and, and the best they could do was we're going to recreate these other assets on a faster database. And it was just, you know, it was sort of, you know, it's something I, I sort of knew inherently, but just seeing it play out on stage with a lot of these panels was, it was interesting to see. But Michael, I'm curious if you had similar takeaways or you know, I talked, I know you talked to a lot of different folks last week. Yeah, this will be an interesting tape for, I think I shared a little bit with Brian for Ralph for you to hear. This is what's kind of fun. It's like some of this stuff is maybe meant to be talked about behind closed doors, but I don't. You get on these pods and you just start kind of going. I think what Brian just described is ultimately a feature, not a bug of all of this. And what I mean by that is the whole notion, a lot of these things and tropes that we talked about in Bitcoin, I think have these underlying real important implications. And, and the one that I'm referring to is everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. And ultimately there's been a lot of misallocation of capital and movement of assets for the past hundred plus years. And this idea that people are missing, the most obvious thing is, is very beautiful part of the whole setup. And so it's it's something that we have to like embrace. It's this notion of Bitcoin being a get rich slow scheme disguised as a get rich quick scheme. In the same way that we, we are picking up what is happening here while others are missing it in digital assets lets you build it's a, it's basically the, the corollary from a reputational perspective is Bitcoin is a, is a, you know, get wealthy from a personal, from a reputational slow scheme just dressed up as a, as a get wealthy, you know, from a reputational personal fast scheme. In the sense of like people burn their relationships, they burn their business reputation by doing these things, by going in and tokenizing, doing all of it. But the reality is those firms are probably not going to exist in 10 to 50 years because of all the different tailwinds in the market structures just fundamentally different, right? When you think about if it's not growth at all cost, if it's not all of these things that have been baked into the system, well then it makes kind of sense that they're not going to pick up on it first. And the ones that maybe our family owned is an interesting dynamic. You start to see them picking up because actually have more to lose versus like an academic nature building that doesn't really have an allocate, doesn't have any material exposure outside of, you know, some of this equity that they have investing or being granted. So that's kind of like the the overarching take, I think where this ties into you asked this question to Ralph about the Middle East and its adoption. And while I think Islamic finance is a component, what I think is more. I think. Important or from my experience is this is all just like a very slow methodical like blocking and tackling game from what I've seen, because when I got into space right there wasn't, you know, back in 17, there's a few podcasts and the market structure starts to evolve. I moved back to Texas. We were part of a very small meet up that had a couple people in there and naturally grew a lot of covet things macro forces had people moved to Texas and we, you know, on the road just hustling right driving around all over the country, all over the state. We like to think of it as a country, but the US still recognizes the state and and you know, up early in the morning, sleep, wait, do it again and again. And you're just building reputation. You're you're, you're telling people that it's, it's a slower round, right? You're going to hold your keys, you want them offline, you want Bitcoin only. And everybody looks at you and some get it. And the real, the sound money, the people that understand opportunity, understand counterpart risks, the things that are inherent to just like civilization that existed. They're like, OK, they get in, others don't. And some take a little bit slower, but that compounds year over year. And whether it's your business or your reputation, it grows until you're naturally like the default. And it just takes time. And I don't think you have to get more than call it 5 to 10%. It's just that entrenched minority. And so that ties into the middle the Middle East and how our initial exposure got out there was there were diligence in us from the region. They were setting up an advocacy group. They knew, they went and, you know, talked to a bunch of people. They didn't not only need Bitcoiners, they needed people that had some kind of professional experience and all the things associated. They looked at us and and we looked at an opportunity. We're like, look, maybe this, this is interesting. I'm obviously like accelerating the story, but we went out there and realized that similar to Texas in most places that you're starting at 0. And so you have to have the vision that this has an opportunity to grow here, that the market, there's a market need. You obviously do not want to be too early because being too early is wrong. And then you need to find the right individuals to go out and and help grow that. But I think that's a that's a key component that there is no real like silver bullet. It's more of like building education, reputation, having the right products that map to it. And then it's just everyday, you know, like putting 1 foot in front of the other, one relationship in front of the other until over time you're naturally like now competing with the forces of wool as a crypto, as a defy is at the next hot thing. Or do we separate the two conversations and one is a store value similar to how Ralph spoke of gold real estate in these other assets. And then the other is this speculative asset that people can always trade and whip around if they want, but they're just fundamentally different versus right now in the West or the East are still inextricably late. And this is again, our greatest asymmetry is that we know that they're not. Yeah, Yeah, it's really well said. Go ahead, Ralph. Yeah, just. To add on that and I think what you mentioned Michael about the timing is spot on. Now there is one thing that is, you know, to, you know, Bitcoin's advantage in the Middle East. So I mentioned earlier, things happen a bit later in the Middle East. They get imported from the West. But what got hyper accelerated in the Middle East is all the blockchain and all the crypto stuff. But there's a silver lining to that because now the conversation is less technical in nature because you don't need to understand. Most of the people here, especially the ones we deal with, are crypto savvy. They understand blockchain, they understand hashes, they understand mining, certain concepts that you know are usually time consuming to get through with. So the idea here, the priority is just to, like you said, detach them. Like you can't say Bitcoin is crypto the same way you can't say a blue chip company is equivalent to a penny stock. Both of them are stocks, but they're they're not the same things. So even though they're digital assets, Bitcoin is in a category of its own. And even I wouldn't even call the other digital assets. I call them, you know, tech companies, unregistered securities, whatever you want to call them. But at the end of the day, they have a very different profile than Bitcoin. And I think the messaging over time as we educate, as we showcase that Bitcoin is different from multiple angles, whether it's to from Islamic finance, ethical finance or as a commodity asset, as a portfolio asset, it changes the dynamic. Rather than categorize, categorize it as this tech play that you're that you're playing with, it's, it's more of a legit brand. So that's the idea. And I think, yeah. Well, there's one one thing to call out that well, the the other side to the token of, you know, there's no silver bullet is if there is one region, and I think we all believe this to accelerate and jump past everyone is the Middle East because there's the the cherry on top. The gasoline is the religious nature and what we talked about, but the underlying part is the energy money because they're a commodity based civilization in the of the the amount of assets that they hold is disproportionate from an energy perspective to the rest of the world. And in this is speaking from experience, because if you look at what happened with Texas and the amount of hash rate that exists there, because ultimately, when you're taking your energy and you can transmute it into local currency or or a digital currency and go back to local currency, that crosses a barrier versus any altcoin or anything else. Because you can't mind that you can't turn real world energy back. And what generally happens is individuals with that energy just want to get into the unit and then get into dollars or their local currency. But then that's just the first like little taste of it. And then you naturally start to question over time. And this is like, it's no, you know, it's no coincidence. Brian brought up the the event he was held in Wyoming, which has been one of the most forward, if not the most forward thinking. I think they are the actual most forward thing to say so far. And there's a lot of reasons similar going back to the energy side. And Texas is probably second there. And so I think that's the the interesting part about the Middle East is the energy nature and the conservative nature, which is I think also underscored or under appreciated that there's just this notion of conservatism across the board maps very nicely to Bitcoin. And between that and the religious side, now you're really prime to for growth. Yeah. And I think just spot on conservative side of cover, but the energy side in itself, the amount of sun that there is in the Middle East and the amount of oil that is being dug out of the ground, all that can sync up with Bitcoin mining and allow development, subsidizing huge projects within the area. I mean, it's just like a matchmaking heaven. It's it's something that hasn't been fully explored. And we don't know. There are rumors that there has been projects that are underway. But maybe in the next 2-3 years, everyone's going to be surprised and we might take the lead over Texas. So something to look out for. I think here, if the right people are talking to leadership and those who are ruling the country, I think we can see a really bright orange future for the Middle East. And it's just it's just geared for Bitcoin in every aspect, like you said. So that's why we're here, and that's why we're pushing the Bitcoin message not from a get rich quick, but more from a conservative energy and ethical lens as well. Yeah, I think the, I think the global hash rate wars have already begun. But to your point, Ralph will probably have a better sense for how that's actually playing out in a few years. I mean, I think the one, well, we sort of get little pieces of information or evidence beyond an some of the anecdotal evidence that you that you reference. But, you know, I think it was king of Bhutan that was like, referenced in some litigation, the bankruptcy of Celsius. And so that sort of forced their hand tip their hand to say, oh, yeah, by the way, we've been mining Bitcoin for a while now, accumulating sats. So, yeah, I think there's going to be more examples of that and then sort of, you know, just some of it playing out behind the scenes. But yeah, it's fascinating times. And I think I agree with everything that that both of you said in terms of just the inherent alignment of Bitcoin culture in the region and, and the proclivity to understand energy, money and you know, just this ethical form of investment more or less. And there's one component we didn't really touch on, sorry Michael, to interrupt you. But one thing from a cultural point of view is inheritance, which is a big factor in Middle Eastern culture. You have extremely wealthy families and even the non wealthy families, it's a top priority for them on how they're going to inherit their assets to their children. So it's a big component and there is no other solution that will make anyone feel comfortable in transferring asset. I I mean, it's unrealistic. I know there's some people who constantly say, you know, self custody, not your keys, not your coins and all that stuff. But when you're talking to a royal family or a family office from this region, you cannot expect them to, you know, put their wealth and then to rely on their children to be able to go through a treasure map to pull it out. One thing that I mentioned at the start of this service here is huge and things get done through efficient service. And to add to that, I don't see any other custody model that solves the risk sharing, reducing counterparty, minimizing single points of failure because they can put it at a custodian, but that's not the most efficient way for them. They're not solving for the problem. Even from that point of view. I'm not sure how inheritance would be facilitated, but multi institutional custody, multi jurisdictional custody, I think will be extremely appealing for family offices. Once they understand Bitcoin as a value proposition, I think it will be very quick to transition from I understand Bitcoin now and I want to hold it the right way to. I don't want to do it multi institution custody versus, you know, for them qualify custodian ETFs, probably the same thing or keep it on and exchange the same thing. And the reason why is that because they don't understand Bitcoin properly. But as soon as they understand it, I think it will automatically click the jump from I want to own Bitcoin to multi institution custody makes sense for me. It's going to be really fast simply because of the risk sharing and the cherry on top, which is inheritance, because it's seamless. Yeah, 100% inheritance is like one example. The one that I've been having fun with is, you know, when you explain what we do or multi institution, whether you're in Wyoming or the Middle East and you're like, oh, so you hold your own keys, collaborative custody. Did you bring your keys? And they're like, well, that's a problem, right? And then it's like, did you did or if you did, you bring keys? If they didn't bring, it's like, well that's a problem, right? It's like just it's you're kind of damned on either side and where it's funny, but it kind of isn't. It's like this idea of like six or seven years stuck with me. Ralph, you mentioned early about it takes a few, you know, a while before it gets over to Middle East, which kind of like tracks and makes sense to, you know, a Bitcoin only company being there because I think, you know, honor it mean is probably the first while, you know, six years ago, this was probably just about the same time that, you know, the unchains and different firms like that were really standing up on a Bitcoin only side or even on the like multi sig side. That multi sig, you know, started it was used 10 years ago from an enterprise perspective, but it wasn't until about 6-7 years that it was built for like consumer grade usage in collaborative custody. And there's this idea that or not idea was very important to keep assets off of Celsius as the block fest of the world. Multi institution didn't exist. And you can make the case that it was path dependent. Multi sig needed to be more kind of used by individuals. But where I'm going with this is to your point now, do you need to go and go through all the pains and troubles of figuring out harder devices and see phrases and all the things like that in this next wave of adoption? Or can you jump directly into a more resilient form of custody where ultimately if a bad actor goes down or something happens, they can't move your assets. So the worst case scenario is assets are moved. I think that that's one of the areas where we go back to maybe not being first is a is a positive in the sense that you can go and talk with these individuals and explain why the case for Bitcoins existed, why it's been the Wild West. And you've been right to maybe look at it a little bit slower because you you ultimately could have ended up on, you know, a slide that had $500 billion or $400 billion worth of losses. But now here's a solution. I think I think it's a very compelling discussion point that we find success with. And I think you're finding success as well in the Middle East. Yeah. And I think, I think to get to that level, Michael, I think we need it like you said, the vast majority of people to start considering self custody because I think Bitcoin adoption happens in two opposite ways. So in traditional finance, for example, usually they label it the smart money does something and then retail follows. And Bitcoin is taking on a different approach where retail took self custody, started testing multi sig, etcetera. And then institutions were late to the game and then they had to follow a new approach. Because the reason why they're late to the game is because when you look at investment committees, pension plans, endowments and foundation, people underestimate the amount of bureaucracy and the amount of checks that you need to go through. Like without these large capital allocators, Bitcoin will not scale in my opinion and will not grow to what most people expect it to grow into a multi $1,000,000 per coin type of asset. You need that large capital flows. And the problem with these, a lot of what's happened over the years with centralized exchange, it's left a bad taste in their mouth. So it's extremely difficult for them to be like, sure, let's invest 5% into Bitcoin or even 1% into Bitcoin. So when multi institution comes along now it starts to makes more sense for them. They don't have to manage private keys. They don't have to be concerned about one single custodian. And you have to keep in mind that most custodians qualify custodian within the ecosystem haven't been around for much. I mean, Bitcoin's been around for 15 years. No one is a BNY Mellon who's been around for 100 years, 150 years. So when you you talk about a traditional custodian, you know they're going to get bailed out if they need to, but they've been around for so long. So as a pension plan, like even the term, most of them go through Coinbase Prime, right? But what Coinbase hasn't been the best company. They have constant tech issues, etcetera. So you're relying on that single entity and it's not a brand name. Coinbase is associated with a lot of ship coins, with a lot of coins that get unlisted, relisted, etcetera. So it's not a clear cut approach. Whereas multi institution will solve that problem for them because they have more security. If one of these is fraudulent, mischievous, or doesn't know how to run a business, well, there's two others. And on top of that, if you're still not comfortable with the model, then at that point you can do kind of a code red type of emergency where someone in the investment committee has been given the authority to actually move from the vault to a separate wallet or someone on the tech side, chief tech officer to their tech personal hardware wallet until they resolve these issues. So I think multi institution custody will facilitate pension plans, endowments and foundation to enter the space. And once they enter the space, that's when we're going to see Bitcoin scale because there's going to be so much money in it. It's going to allow the ecosystem to flourish. It's going to allow more investors to come into the space to build on top of Bitcoin layer one rather than distract from the noise. When Bitcoin hits 120, a $150.00 per coin, there's going to be a lot of eyes on it and it's going to become an institutional asset class and no longer, you know, a grass root asset class. Yeah. I think just hitting on one point that you mentioned in there in terms of the custody itself, you know we just put out a report, a report on the on ramp side called the the evolution of Bitcoin custody. And and you know, one of the things that we speak to in that is how multi institution custody shifts the incentives. So not only to your point, does it create a more fault tolerant and redundant approach to custody, which allows you to think longer term about the asset, but it actually materially shifts the incentives of the participants, right? Because if you're a coin base, if you're a single entity, it's pretty easy for you to act unilaterally with the assets, whether that's re hypothecating the coins or just mismanaging keys. And and maybe that isn't even purposeful, but it could happen. The concept in the framework of multi institution custody that allows other participants to come in, none of which have unilateral control, just naturally shifts the incentives of those players to be better actors. And so I think that's something that's going to play out over the next decade or two is, is people recognizing that this is just a better way to to store the asset. But we are coming up on time. Any, any final thoughts from either of you? Ralph, where can people find all the work that we've referenced? I'll put I'll put those reports in the show notes, but how can people follow you in particular? And any other final thoughts before we wrap? Yeah, so people can follow us across all social media platforms. The website onrapmena.com, we're on LinkedIn, we're on X as well at onrampmena. Make sure to follow us. We post three to four times per day, a variety of types of content. Also have a newsletter, the Bitcoin Observer, that we send out on a monthly basis. It's your quick recap of everything that's happened. Bitcoins if you're a professional, you don't have time to dive deep into Bitcoin. This should do it for you. Takes about an hour to fully read. And the New Frontier, make sure to follow Harris Erfan as well. And we have an upcoming episode as well this week, so stay tuned. Awesome. Yeah, I think I think on my side is one of the core tenets that Ralph and Brian focus on and that have been transformative for the for the firms is the education. A lot of the stuff we talk about, it takes a lot of time looking at the space even to rock why multi institution custody would matter. So there's a lot of great content coming out and I think reaching out to Ralph for us, if you're interested in getting involved in the region, there's a lot of market structure that's going to have to develop as Ralph hit the price hits, you know, greater than 100 KA, lot of this stuff becomes more obvious and then more products services are going to be needed. So whether it's we're hiring or you're thinking about building a project in the region, we all want to speak with you. I know Ralph always has a time available to figure out how we can get involved, so please reach out. Very well said. Well, thank you, boys. Thank you, Ralph for joining us today. Great conversation as always and we'll see you guys next time we're having a settlements. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.

Transcript source: fountain

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