Transcript+
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode, episode 3 of the Bitcoin for Businesses podcast. I'm joined as always in studio with Michael Tanguma, Liam Nelson and Matthew Ball. And I'm your host, Chase Palmieri, and this group here are folks that are actually operating in the world at the intersection of Bitcoin and business. So Michael here is the CEO of On Ramp and managing partner at Early Riders. Liam is also a partner at Early Riders. And Matthew Ball here is sharing time between product at On Ramp and Acropolis. And I'm the CEO at Acropolis. So this podcast is for actual builders and operators in the Bitcoin space or CEOSCFOSC suites that are looking to integrate Bitcoin into their balance sheets and other areas of their business. So we've got some really important news stories that we're going to start off with, but then we're going to tie this always into practical implementation for folks that are listening. One of the big stories this week was Square overnight allowing merchants to now accept Bitcoin as payment through their point of sale platform. This is obviously a huge unlock, incredible news for kind of the medium of exchange argument, but I think we would all agree that it's equally important for these businesses to consider what they do after they've accepted Bitcoin as payment. So who'd like to take it first? I'm happy to to jump in. I think it's very interesting and unique the timing of it because I think we're going to talk a little bit later, maybe we need to have a component of this for gold. I don't know how businesses would get their gold, you know, treasury, but it's about to hit $4300.00 an ounce. And the point in that is that that notion of debasement trade the past couple weeks has picked up steam, basically inflation and businesses are feeling it. And so I think it's really timely and interesting the timing that they launched this because obviously they've been working at it on it for a while. If there was somebody that's going to win in the existing space, whether it's technology or tratify space around Bitcoin and full stack, it feels the closest that Square would be able to do that because they have both sides of the the market. When you think about cash app in the number of users and the ability for somebody to buy, hold, start their relationship with Bitcoin and then the amount of merchants on the other side of that when it comes to the point of sale system, but then also the right tooling. So it's, it's a really cool thing to see, especially when you think about millions of people getting exposure that now you still have to. I think it's, it's a long road for payment use case for Bitcoin just naturally, because individuals that are purchasing Bitcoin are generally using it to hold and protect their wealth. But I do think overtime the use cases will grow, whether it's merchants requiring it, giving discounts, and then obviously for certain payments, it makes more sense to pay over Bitcoin versus traditional like, you know, Fiat rails. So it's really cool to see. And I would imagine we're going to see more of this between PayPal and other competitors. Yeah, it's going to be great to see because it's a lot of small businesses too. I mean, in the V1, I think it's primarily just going to be a lot of merchants that are seamlessly moving a certain amount of their revenue over to Bitcoin just by buying it directly through cash app and then using their exchange. But it's also a telling sign of just Bitcoin getting more in the zeitgeist. Having those Bitcoin stickers at every single pay like register for small businesses too, just kind of puts it more into the zeitgeist of everyday people in Americans that are like, OK, well, wait, people are actually using this Bitcoin thing. And so it's going to. And then it's, you know, less just, you know, the scammers and the president that just only think about Bitcoin too. But it just gets into everyday life. And it's also going to be great to see because small businesses are the ones that need this most. You know, we're going to go into this a lot later on too. But it's also going to be great to see a lot of the challengers who are relatively small businesses understand the impacts of being able to just save their money in a better store value as inflation does kind of RIP out of control, especially for those who don't necessarily have a massive amounts of capital and cash flows in order to protect their business for the long term. Yeah. And one thing that we talk a lot about at ER and on Ramp and at Acropolis is the idea of these large businesses that have existing corporate treasuries coming into the Bitcoin space and allocating, you know, a risk manage percent of that a corporate balance sheet into Bitcoin. But when it comes to smaller businesses, they don't typically have those big reserves in place to convert into Bitcoin. And so this is really a great way for small businesses, as you're mentioning, Liam, to start acquiring their initial Bitcoin treasury. Yeah, this is a huge unlock for small businesses. I think Liam hit on it well and just the fact that they're able to use Cash App and Square in just such a good company with, with wonderful user experiences and designs. It's going to sort of demystify Bitcoin for so many people who are interested in kind of getting involved. And I think it's a, it's a really great thing for the space to have this company in particular kind of leading that, leading the flagship of the businesses, being able to get that exposure to, it's a, it's going to be a really cool to see who, who begins to pick this up. So, Michael, now there, there's going to be millions probably of businesses in the next 12 to 24 months that have some amount of Bitcoin on their balance sheets. But it looks like a lot of that, you know, they're going to default to just letting it sit on their square dashboards. What do you think about what they need to consider next? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think there's a certain component around it sounds funny, but the reality of when you recognize you want exposure to Bitcoin and then you want material exposure once you get to a certain threshold, you get really uncomfortable no matter how you custody it when you first get in, you either leave it on exchange, Maybe somebody helped you set up a hardware device, maybe didn't necessarily do everything you needed to to fill rock solid with it because it was a nominal amount. Call it something immaterial to that individual. And this is relative to whoever. And so in this use case, whether it's because it's a gimmick or the company has a, you know, barista that wants to do it and says, hey, let's put out the sign. Eventually the numbers start to grow or the conviction or confidence starts to grow or a number of other things. Somebody gets hacked and he starts a really question like, what are we doing here? And so I've always been able to reconcile. The only way you can end up in material, if not all of your wealth being stored in this asset is understanding how keys work. Like just full stop. Because once you get that the keys don't just, you know, plug themselves in and like walk over the computer. If you're doing self custody or multi institution, however, it's frame, you start to really get confidence because if you understand the monetary properties, how consensus works, why there's 21 million. The last part is ultimately just deeply understanding what your custody solution is because that allows you to hold more and more Bitcoin. So I think it will naturally a progression whether it's Square opting into something like multi institution, having a more robust setup, because I would imagine, well, there's a lot of great security with the Square. And however they're custody and back end, it still opens up when you have single custodial risk like social engineering and everything under the hood that exists at Coinbase and why people move assets off a coin base into some form of cold storage. And so I think that'll naturally be this progression for businesses to start looking deeper. How do they buy it? How do they hold it long term? But to Liam's point, right, yeah, it's a Liam and man balls point. Like there's such a great brand and it's, they have such huge exposure not only in the individual side, but in like Silicon Valley that I think it's a great starting point. And then you naturally just have to go through. And that's why this is going to be such a long game because some will end up maybe buying or holding 2 larger positions and then they'll lose their account and we'll get it closed because that does happen at cash up to as great as they are. I mean, I've had my cash app flat things, old cash app account flag for, for whatever reason. And then he just locks your funds. And I've actually never got him out of there because it's almost impossible to get a hold of them. So there's a number of reasons why you literally wouldn't want to leave large balances on any single custodial relationship. And I so I think it'll be a natural progression as companies get into the space that they will look for best in class ways to store and, and also interact and integrate with other, you know, offerings and kind of Bitcoin and stable coins. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. And I think of this exactly as pretty much Coinbase in the V1 instance of just the fact that prior to them you essentially had to figure out how to buy Bitcoin non custodially and there just wasn't a setup. And Coinbase, especially in it's very early days was just almost, it just had a great UX and it felt like an online brokerage. And so people who just saw Bitcoin as another asset, they're like, OK, this is easy. I can just go there, I can buy Bitcoin and it will just show up in my account. And that's great for V1 for people who are curious about the asset and, you know, just maybe want to invest, then investigate on what that set actually is and how to store it. And they'll figure all that later on. And even if there is anything later on, because sometimes people buy it and they don't necessarily have a really high level of conviction or thesis around it too. But you know, even naturally, if you just don't rebalance overtime and just allow yourself to DCA just from an individual or a business perspective too, it's just naturally something you're going to want to figure out as long as that's the last thing that you sell. So it's just kind of like a great V1 and there's just going to be more competition around the space because cash App is not the only person trying to do this. They're probably going to be the one who's best at it from like kind of a merchant base, small point of sale system. But on the business to business side, like there's, there's a bunch of other payment companies that are coming into this too, everything from Stripe and, and they're going to try to, you know, get some of this business as well. Yeah. One thing we're just adding, this is really I think important for why we do this podcast. We're Acropolis on Ramp Shine and also River to give a shout out to a business that operates not only the right way, but offers client services. Like we're so early in Bitcoins adoption and people forget that it's money and money requires financial services and those are generally relationship driven to start. And so if you start to build any kind of position or investment from your business, naturally need to talk to a human, you know, all the things we're talking about here, you need to have contingency planning. You need to be thinking about it in a very strategic way. Easy example is if you start with one franchise or business that starts to accept it and then they collect, they talk. A toast is another great example of some family members that work with them. And you think about like when you sign up 1 doesn't mean you sign up all 13 of the accounts. So eventually gets to the lead account or whatever region, they need somebody to talk to, they need somebody to explain this, all of this stuff. And then like what happens if the balance gets too great? And how do you think about it? And you know, I think we're going to talk about what happened last week and the deleveraging. It's like, well, is this crypto or is this Bitcoin? There's a lot of value and still a lot of businesses and opportunity. And my favorite thing in building businesses and especially early stages is counter positioning the incumbents because the incumbents can't do this like cash up full stuff like cannot handle the amount of demand or requests that will be needed to educate in the same way Coinbase can't. And that leaves a huge opportunity and gap to build things, do things that don't scale and then you ultimately can build the workflows and processes that can get to a larger cohort base. It just gets really hard on the other way to do it, but if there's anybody that's going to do it, I do think Cash App and Squares simply because of Jack's leadership and this they seem like they're playing a long game when it comes to Bitcoin adoption with within everything that they do in their product met. Yeah, I think it's probably worth calling out that cash app Square, the parent company Block, is a holder of its own Bitcoin treasury and is doing it the right way, where they're using a percentage of free cash flow from their Bitcoin line of businesses to basically DCA into their own Bitcoin treasury. So really an eater of their own dog food here. And what I'm kind of hearing is maybe a take away to put a pin in the Square news is that, yes, this announcement makes it incredibly easy for merchants to accept Bitcoin. But perhaps so easy that they're going to take their eye off the ball and almost not pay attention to what it really means to be holding and accepting Bitcoin until they see a material enough amount on their balance sheets that they actually start to dig in and learn and start to consider taking it into cold storage. One of the things we know that business owners are probably more likely to be thinking about now as opposed to Bitcoin custody is how inflation is affecting their business. We're seeing gold start to rally, which you can take as a signal that the the debasement trade is on, that dollar is weakening or that folks are trying to flee out of a Fiat based currencies into hard store value assets. Michael, I'm not sure if you wanted to kick us off, but you kind of wanted to touch on how the gold Bitcoin denomination is breaking. Yeah, I think the the biggest thing here is especially for listeners like we know the thesis, I think it makes complete sense. If you just look at the past 50 years, it can be 30 years or it can be the past five years or the past year. Gold and Bitcoin related to the the dollar specifically this past year with the dollar depreciating, it's actually by now more than 50% given gold like at 4300. What I think though is change and what's most important is whether it's somebody listening that has to get their internal team because that's really the problem with businesses and institutions in general is that there's a governance process. So you really have to get the buy in to realize there's a problem, right? If we're all, you know, Alcoholics on inflation, like the first step is we got it. We got to realize we got a problem here and that we're losing money, you know, via the basement. And I think this is a really interesting time, which ties back to squares launch because of the fact that it's now into the ether. Travi has blessed the the name with the debasement trade. Now it can be discussed and now people can recognize it because before the gold bugs were kooks and then the bitcoiners were kooks. But the reality is like this is now just being understood that inflation is here. It's running rampant. The thing that gets widely under discussed and visually felt is we've kind of hit the the event horizon post 2020 where like more monetary units and more debt just increases the amount for needs of the need of debt and more capital be inserted, which increases inflation. So it only goes faster from here. It doesn't like temper out. There's no transitory. And I think that's the important function here where people can see their goods, they can see the eggs, whatever they're buying going up and them having to increase purchase of the cost or redo, or they're seeing the reduction in volume and revenue. But they haven't been able to feel confident, whether it's themselves personally or going to their board or their team to say, hey, we should be looking for external options. And I think this is the time, if there's ever going to be 1, The tooling's right, the price is right. When you look at these alternative assets, specifically gold and Bitcoin. And then now you can point to no shortage of publicos, social proof, and also just your favorite macro economist or JP Morgan or Larry Fink explaining that this stuff's out of control. Yeah, Liam, I'll kick it over to you next. But the story here is, according to Axios, 47% of Americans say that groceries are harder to afford than they were last year. And at the same time, we're seeing the Fed begin its interest rate cut cycle, which you would assume that if inflation is still persisting or on the horizon, that they wouldn't necessarily be doing so. But I think to Michelle point, we kind of have this problem where it's inflationary whether they cut or it's inflationary whether they increase interest rates at this point. Yeah, that's right. And I would just say it's it's getting out of the bottle. Now, just to Mike's point of all the different products and services, the central banks know that this is going to be a problem and they see the writing on the wall of inflation coming down the pipeline and they're trying to acquire as much gold as possible. And there's probably some counterparty risk being understood in the background. If gold's going up over 60% in a year, just shouldn't be going up that quickly for an asset size this big unless there's something that's very, very wrong in the background. And I would just say, yeah, I mean, inflation's, you know, continually been a problem. It's really accelerated as the information just kind of become more clear on everything from grocery prices being online and everything like that to actually being able to understand that there is massive deflations in in certain sectors of the economy, everything from TV's, technology, AI, etc. But in everything that is, you know, non discretionary goods or everything that they actually take out of core inflation of the housing, food and energy costs, which we all need are the only things that are core to living are actually taken out of the inflation bucket. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that it's, it's very well known that there is a problem and some people are still denying that the solution is gold and Bitcoin because everywhere that you see people are saying then why aren't we all allocated to gold, to Bitcoin already? It's just like, well, you have a different mental framework of the world that you have essentially just put your career on the line of being allocated to equities and bonds. It's very difficult for you to change your mind unless you actually are forced to be forced to change your mind. And so we're seeing it happen on the margins, but it's only going to accelerate as the products are now right as well as just it increasingly goes into the mainstream. Yeah. And you touched on counterparty risk there, which is obviously an important aspect of holding actual physical gold or Bitcoin in cold storage. And perhaps all the more important during something like what happened last week with kind of the deleveraging and the Bitcoin flash crash, if you will. Michael, do you want to speak to maybe how counterparty risk plays into a volatile Bitcoin price like what we saw last week? Yeah, I think this is easily one of the most discounted reasons to hold Bitcoin and one of the highest. The value problem is the greatest because number go up is great, but the reality is we used to pitch Bitcoin is the most asymmetric bet and the general term would be asymmetric and its purchasing power increases relative to dollars. And then the downside is if you're not holding it, you're holding dollars that are depreciating. And I still think that's true. But I think the thing that gets discounted for is what else are you going to be holding and where does the risk lie? And so before going into what happened last week in deleveraging, I get in a little trouble because I'm not supposed to show screens, screens here. But I'm going to pull something out because there's a market dip in equities, but also Bitcoin. And part of its coming on the back of it says US regional bank stocks hit as Zions charge off fraud allegations. It's effectively a bank. And I believe the Southeast, maybe Georgia, but the point is that there was a $50 million loss via like a fraudulent claim on some kind of like loan relationship that somebody was extending loans and they were fraudulent. But the point in this is the bankruptcy of auto parts maker first Brands and subprime blender chart color and recent fraud allegations. They put a spotlight on risk controls of banks and OPEC credit market where complex loans and new facilities have made it harder to gauge participants exposure. This isn't happened in a vacuum. This is fundamentally part of the system is you have more monetary units, you go further and further out on the risk curve and you make more loans. And this happens in the traditional system. And then this is just gets mirrored and kind of like exponentially increased in digital assets. When you think about all the different levels that it's duct tape and you hear about perpetual features and all the just craziness that happens, the derivatives. And the main take away my mind is most businesses are going to be thinking about, you know, short term, you know, cash equivalents, money market funds, how they're thinking about risk because they have to plan and everything looks great until you see an SVV pop up or you see whatever. If you're in a 12 month duration, some kind of credit facility, you don't necessarily know where that risk lies. And as the market gets more and more volatile, it'll only happen because the amount of debt in the system, you don't know where those air pockets where you potentially could be holding zeros. This exists for everyone, institutions, individuals, but for the sake of this businesses. And so this fundamentally goes back to the reason why you don't really want to play with crypto because crypto and in general and that deleveraging event. The reality is it's only a few market makers. They're not really high volume assets because nobody really wants them. And the second that the market dries up, the market maker Start Stop trading. And then you see this crazy reflexivity where some went to zero and margin calls and the auto deleveraging and all the other craziness that goes on in crypto happens. But that's really where your counterparties matter. Why you don't want centralized custody because you also don't know the liabilities at a central custodian could have. So even if the assets are secure, you may never get them out because they have other claims on them. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's really the Wild West right now. When you think about the financial markets and the fact that there's so much leverage built in, you don't know where things are secure. That's why eyes or hands or keys on the underline in transparency matter most if you're going to, you know, protect your wealth into the future. Yeah, IA 100% echo that. And the point or the small differences between, you know, the traditional system and the digital asset system as a whole is like in the traditional system, there is continual debasement and perpetual bailouts just through the fact that there are additional monetary units coming into the system. But that's not always the case in Bitcoin. And there are just no bailouts. So they're just these accelerated business cycles. And so if you lend out consumer deposits by just putting the existing framework of how you should, you know, maintain client assets like a bank and craft it over to the digital asset space, it just doesn't necessarily work out. You know, we've seen in the past, every four years there are bodies that, you know, wash up on the beach that have been, you know, lost because there's a ton of just a ton of leverage that goes into the system. And then events like these happen. And then people are, you know, almost like, you know, dead in the water, but other everybody hasn't realized that yet and they still have their assets on the platform. And then there is a real risk off movement and a lot of those digital asset bodies come to the future. I'm not saying that that's where we are today, but you know, this ties back into a lot of those companies out there trying to get yield on their Bitcoin. You know, it just hasn't been done over the past four years and you know banking on everything such as relatively well functioning market in order to get that yield just doesn't necessarily make sense. And so we definitely advise against that especially just you don't want to be the first person and to try to do it especially it hasn't been done on scale yet. Every business will hold Bitcoin. Some already do. Others are developing a plan. Acropolis is how smart companies take action today. 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Bitcoin is reshaping corporate finance. Don't get left behind. So we see this all the time at On Ramp, you guys see it with individuals a lot. And at Acropolis we see it with businesses where they get the thesis right. They know that they need to own Bitcoin, but then they get a little, you know, too cute by half and they start to pursue too much leverage or they start to pursue yield. And that's when they take on that counterparty risk. That's when they take on a Bitcoin price volatility risk. If you can be early to Bitcoin and write about the thesis, but you can still lose your position over the long term if you if you engage in these activities. Let's see. So maybe next we can speak to the gold Bitcoin denominator being broken. There was something I think you wanted to tease out there, Michael. I think we kind of touched on it earlier, at least from that lens in the sense of just like in the market understanding like there's something wrong, they've known it, but now it's being called out. And so I think that's what makes a lot of these discussions easier moving forward. Specifically, if you're listening, you work at a business. If you're a founder or a partner at a business and you're looking for that air cover, there's no shortage of opportunity now to point directly to what the problem is. And then really naturally, once you get the problem, it becomes a lot easier to recognize the solution. And Liam, I know you wanted to touch on some of the new multinationals that are entering the space thanks to things like the Genius Act and the attraction of things like stable coins for cross-border payments across these multinationals and and all their various subsidiaries spread out over the globe. Where do you want to go with that? Yeah, I was more so Erebor Bank, founded by, you know, Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale from ABC got approval to operate today. I think it's the fastest bank ever to get approval. They came in after the wake of SVB. We all know what happened there. There's so much, there's too much loan concentration on a certain industry as well as just the fact that they were over the skis on their lending capabilities. Guys have pretty much they're very smart and well connected. So I've, you know, know, like they'll definitely be incredible successful. They said that they're only going to be lending out 50% of the loan to deposit ratio at the launch rather than, you know, the typical 90 ish percent for a number of different players out there. And so that's pretty much like, okay, we solved it. We're the adult in the room now. There's we're going to be very safe with your actual deposits, but most people don't actually want that. There are some instances where you do want to be able to get a loan on your assets, but just because, and they'll be specialists in everything from defence tech to stable coins and things like that. But at the end of the day, especially for Bitcoin related to you really want just your assets to be held in your own vault where there isn't going to be liabilities and defaults should anything happen to the custodian. So I think that just kind of goes into the fact that like the existing system thinks about counterparty risk but and there are being marginal improvements on the sides, but they haven't really thought about it necessarily in the complete correct way. Yeah, I think I have two different they're they're they're opposite sides of where I find this stuff interesting because on the air war, however you pronounce it, those guys love like their fiction. What is the other one? Lord of the Rings rings. There's the angle of there's something there and will persist around efficiencies of cross-border stable coin usage, whether it's from payments to payroll. I think the, the quote was like Stripe as big as they are, only manages 1% of all B2B payments. So there's something definitely there from a business perspective, whether it's dollars a stable coins or Bitcoin. But the other side of that, and this came, you know, confidentially from somebody within the industry was referencing how like Coinbase as an examples looking for this trust charter and said, well, why do they need a trust charter? And through their view, it's because they want to become a bank and because banks can effectively lend out fractional reserve assets and client deposits. And so that ties into, I think a little bit what Liam was alluding to with some of these trust codes. They're going to be allowed to do this. And we obviously know that that's where risk starts to get inserted in the system. And I think that's worth calling out because you want to be careful. You know, that's the sad part about all of this is it's already hard enough to get back when it's already hard enough to get your firm to allocate. And then there we, we naturally as humans gravitates towards social proof. So there's all these companies that have the right backing or groups and people will go there and then they won't realize the counterparty risk. And we saw this first hand with Block Fire personally just was like, you know, Peter Thiel's back in this firm. I think it was Valor Ventures but they always use Peter Thiel's name. It's like man, even if they got caught offsides like they'll get bailed out, their equity value will be worth something because they were, you know, multi billion dollar firm at its peak. But the reality is, and this just really doesn't get felt as the math is the math and if you have enough losses from the underlying it doesn't matter. Like including BlackRock and Fidelity, if Bitcoin gets to trillions and trillions of dollars from here in market cap and they're holding trillions of dollars, they don't have the equity value to get bailed out there. Makes zero sense. So you just end up with a loss. And that's one a long enough time horizon. It doesn't make any sense for any custodian to have full unilateral control or title to that underlying asset. So we have a long ways to go from here. And I think it's not until we'll see some really sizable losses that people will wake up. But that's, you know, the point of this podcast. Yeah. And we saw Sony also apply for their bank charter, which probably comes to as a surprise to some folks that haven't been following their previous work in the space, but they actually had previously launched A Ethereum layer 2 token. So they've been kind of doing some things with one of their subsidiaries. What do you think about this? Is this just a way for them to have stable coins and can kind of control that from top down or is there more to the play do you think? Yeah. I mean that that was what I touched on just a second ago. I think it's mainly from like B to B. If you have a Japanese based firm that does you know, payment, they accept payments, but they're also fulfilling obligations via vendors. It probably makes a lot of sense there, but TBD on how close they've been to, you know, the banking side. Like this is a subsidiary of IT. And so obviously you think of Sony as a electronics business, but if they have any kind of, you know, different areas of their business that have focused anywhere near financial services, they might have been doing diligence in the same way Stripe has been doing diligence for years on crypto. And now they fully went, you know, head it, head into it, because like Stripe as an example, has gone past 24 months, executed pretty wildly and fast when it comes to the whether it's the launch of like the purchase of bridge, they had another wallet they acquired. I think they're actually going for a license. They're going to let people like a banking license. They're let people launch stable coins. So I think there's a lot there if somebody sees it where we're still early enough that there's going to be multiple winners in that kind of like whole field. Hey guys, a quick word from Early Riders. If you like concepts like Bitcoin is a hurdle rate, as well as following along with everything across Bitcoin infrastructure, Bitcoin startups today, I highly recommend you check out Early Riders and everything that we're doing there. We're putting out a ton of research, so please subscribe at earlyriders.com/research and please reach out if you're ever interested in how to get involved. Thanks. OK. Maybe wrapping up the show with one last question that's maybe on the boring side for us, but a little bit practical for business owners and operators. Let's let's pretend we're talking to one of these new merchants that has begun accepting Bitcoin as payment. Do they need to think about hiring the specialized CPA or tax attorney now that there's Bitcoin involved on their balance sheet and in their business? Or is it simple enough that the average CPA that they already use for their normal tax returns can kind of quickly get up to speed on best practices? How do you think they should treat it when tax season comes around? I'm happy to take this one. I think it's pretty straightforward and most Cpas, as long as they have even some understanding or willing to learn about Bitcoin, are able to do that. I mean, there are certainly some edge cases if you're like business on Noster accepting like a ton of, you know, notes like that and just like a ton of payments. I think that's like one that's a little bit different. But you know, and in general it's going to be 99.9% of businesses I think should just be able to use current tax people in order to help them just put their business as is. Yeah, I would take a little bit of a different lens in the sense of a lot of things in Bitcoin are relatively straightforward. The problem is that the market doesn't know that there's a lot of stigmas to them. So anything about inheritance, you can go to like a trust lawyer and a lot of them won't touch it. And our A's have historically been like this. There may be moving a little bit more into the middle, but I would imagine how a lot of Cpas would either feign like that. They can't touch it, they don't feel comfortable. They may build, you know, greater amounts. So I think like there are a number, the one that comes to mind is Satoshi Piccoli as an example of somebody you can reach out to and then get a good lens. So then you can even educate your CPA and reference them. There is some a little bit complexity in the sense of like, what are you accepting? Is it being converted? Is all of it being converted? And really it's the, the, the gain on that. And then if you're selling, it is really where you have to like manage it, right? Because if you accept Bitcoin and let's just say one Bitcoin, you sell a car or whatever and it's 100,000, the car's 100,000 will, if you accept the dollars, the dollars are just getting marked there versus if they're appreciating Bitcoin and it's 150,000 and then you're selling. We effectively have your cost basis you inherited at the time of the sell. And like that just requires some minutiae, but it's nothing that's unachievable, especially if the plan is to, to, to like buy and hold versus if it you're just taking it on the payment side that you're just like, you know, converting the dollars. Because I think a lot of these people may accept Bitcoin, I would imagine, and that's part of like the Square announcement until 2027. There's no interchange fees, there's no merchant fees. So if a lot of these people are like, hey, this is cool, but I'm going to convert it all to cash, then there really is no there should theoretically not be a big tax headache there. Yeah. And I would imagine with Square that they've got things like reporting and exporting accounting statements pretty well baked into the product at this point. So I think that's a wrap for today. I'll kick it around for maybe some closing thoughts on just what we saw in the past couple weeks. I'll, I'll go 1st and then Matt, I'll kick it over to you next. I just think we saw a lot of volatility in Bitcoin price action. But I want to remind, especially business owners who get maybe turned off by that level of volatility, that what you're actually seeing there is people who needed to access value, access economic wealth during a time when market hours were closed. And the only thing that was there for them in that moment was Bitcoin. And so yes, a Bitcoin was sold off. Bitcoin was able to come up with that economic value that those individuals needed, whether to meet margin calls or, or, you know, right size their plans for the next week. But that that is part of the value prop of Bitcoin is that it is liquid 24/7 and that is actually a very big positive. It will create near term volatility, but it's a huge positive for any business that kind of understands that we have really rocky, WAVY landscapes ahead. Yeah, Well said, Jason. I think it's important for us to highlight us on the call. Is that on Ramp just released On Ramp business, which allows business clients to go from consultation to a secured allocation in just days. And so this offering that we're releasing and we have released comes with multi institutional custody, enterprise controls, a proof of reserves and just a business native interface that we've worked really hard to put out for our clients and super excited to get this product out there. I'm not sure, Michael, if you had anything you wanted to say about the product, but we're super excited, especially in relation to this podcast to just begin taking on clients as we already have, but in official capacity as we've rolled out on ramp business. Hell yeah. I think when you get Matt Ball on the sales side, no, I appreciate the the call out there. And yeah, Matt was instrumental in getting this out. It's huge for a number of reasons. One is we've been we've been working in onboarding businesses, but the reality is there's additional controls that are needed. It's kind of crazy when you think about it for 15 years including the past year with funds, I think it's this past year 1.2 million Bitcoin, maybe more than the past year. But between pub Co's and the the ETF's are securing 1.2 million plus BTC and it's generally secure to the single custodian. And then generally those custodians don't really have enterprise grade control. So you may get one person, maybe multiple people, and then there's very little governance when it comes to how many people need to move it, which generally these exists in the traditional financial system when you think about moving of wires as an example in the amount of control that take place. So really excited about that. And I think it really stems from the entire conversation of we have a lot of podcasts and we do a lot of work. The reason we're here is because the importance of this, that it's really binary in the sense that if businesses, the backbone of any economy, don't protect their wealth, they're going to go out of business. And so it's a really important thing to just kind of do the diligence, look deeply, and then I think we're chase hit it earlier was about leverage. Leverage is just a kind of form of like cutting corners and not doing the work because reality is like bitcoins, enough leverage and enough risk. If you get it to size it appropriately and then park it and then deal with the volatility, which is never fun, but at least you've been educated to understand why structurally will go up into the right because of its monetary properties versus the easy way out is, oh, I want this, Maybe I can make a quick buck. And that's when people lose all their money and then they get like kind of burnt by the industry and they never come back. And so human nature is human nature. But ideally we can help with, you know, the former and then really get people doing it the right way. And as we build a bigger and bigger brand across all the portfolio companies will be understood as kind of like the folks that are helping people because it's just naturally the right thing to do. And if you do the right thing and provide value, you end up making money. Yeah, I'd just say, you know, despite any volatility, the debasement trade is well within the zeitgeist of public opinion. It's seeming like Bitcoin or gold almost went up like another 100 bucks during this call. And Bitcoins, you know, certainly been a little bit more volatile just over the past few weeks, but just, you know, generally up and to the right over the long term. So it's just like Bitcoins not going away, hard assets aren't going away and you don't necessarily need to figure it out all today and the long term strategic plan to how to align yourself with, you know, the sound money and scarce assets. But it's a good thing to learn about because it's a it's going to be a great tool within your toolbox And you know, you're you're going to want to have it because you're sure that your competitors are trying to identify what these tools actually are in the same time as you. So it's valuable to do the work yourself as well. Yeah, well, well said gang. Thanks to everybody that tuned in to episode 3 of the Bitcoin for Businesses podcast. Please share this episode or any previous episode with a business owner, a founder, an entrepreneur that you want to protect from what is bound to be a lot of new monetary units coming in over the next decade. And if you want to protect them and their business and their family and and their employees and their employees families that they support, this is really a lot bigger than just making a buck. This is about making businesses sustainable over the next decade. So give us a like a share a subscribe and TuneIn for the next episode where you get to hear from folks like us that are actually builders and operators, Bitcoin space trying to pass down best practices to the next round of business operators coming in behind us. So thanks again.
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