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It all. Comes. Down to computers communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of money? Does is it creates a single. Network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. We are back. We got Jackson joining. This is maybe my first second time. I think back in the day when Marty was ripping with us, he might have had to get a quality mess and I had a lead and it was it was a first timer, but I don't think Jackson's job is that hard. So I figured I'd host today. Brian is out. We will share. We're not going to docks why Brian is out. It's pretty exciting. We'll let him when he comes back share the updated news. But Jackson was kind to join us and we have no shortage of things to talk about. The world's kind of changed over the weekend. Obviously, there was a lot going on from geopolitical perspective, but the show's not necessarily about it. We may touch on that, but I figured first just want to hear how Jackson's doing, how he traveled back. If anybody listens to the show and also listens to the last trade, Jackson was a little he's a little perplexed after the Uber ride our Wednesday night and there was a lot of tags on Twitter asking, you know what, what was the conversation? How did it happen? And just curious, Jackson, how are you doing? Is your mind clear? Do you feel good? I feel great, Yeah. I was able to be able to recover over the weekend and wipe my memory clean of whatever Michael had shared with me last week. So we're we're ready for the week ahead for sure. My job isn't so hard. I didn't even say what show this is. Michael, what are we recording right now? This is final settlement. It is March 2nd, it's March 2nd, and this is the show that covers what we've been writing about and talking about for years now. The convergence between AI, Bitcoin, doing more with less, and there's no shortage of topics. We're going to talk about one of the big things that like one of the main topics and there's three pieces that will go into this like first segment, which is ultimately Friday afternoon, Jack drops a huge Jack sea of square blocks drops a huge Twitter post effectively sharing that he's laying off. I think it was 40%, close to 50% of their total headcount, which is something that I think most people have been expecting across the sector with whether it's AI, whether it's margin compression. There's a number of things that people have been concerned with job jobs being dropped. So we'll talk about that. There was also Citrini research that came out. Really, I don't know if you got a chance to read Jackson, but ultimately the piece was a fiction, non fiction, basically breaking down what would happen in 2028 post this bullish thesis on AI, how even the most bullish thesis on AI is ultimately the most bearish on capital markets, meaning the number of people that get fired, the amount of debt that can't be repaid. And there was just a lot of volatility in the markets after that. And then also Claude, I think the convergence of all those things happened last week around the doing more with less and just volatility where Claude has launched multiple products in the past coming week, past couple of weeks and different respective spot stocks have completely taken a nosedive. This last week was a bunch of security features that Claude had released. And I think I forgot the name of the main one, Liam, you might be able to help me there. But there was a number of stocks that completely just got wiped about 10% plus. And so we'll start there. OK, I mean, I can, I can jump in real quick. I do have some initial reactions to the Dorsey news. So my main thought was maybe less about the the news which Michael you shared a little bit. I think most people listening will have the context, but it was yeah, over 40% of the entire workforce site of the business is strong. But typically you know, layoffs happen when a business is not doing well. He sites a business is still growing, it's strong, but he kind of sees around the corner what's happening as it relates to just AI going to consume a lot of the white collar workforce. And so he pretty much had two options. It was either do gradual layoffs over time, which a lot of companies choose to do, or just kind of RIP the Band-Aid off, let people know that you're either staying or you're not. Gave them I think a pretty generous severance package and give them time to kind of think about what will be next for them. So the main, you know, the main take away is that look, whoever is sugar coating this about, it's not going to be that bad. It is going to be bad. It's going to be very disruptive, but it doesn't mean it's going to be. It's not all negative that that's for sure. I mean there's a lot of opportunity and I've spoken about this on the last trade for the past couple of months at this point. I think what my mind immediately goes to from a market perspective as you we all saw how the stock price reacted after the news. It was up about 20% or so. And so I think Jack Dorsey just gave the rest of gave other CE OS founders, executives pretty much the green light to start deploying this strategy in mass. Because what I think ends up happening next is these AI layoffs become the next sort of financial engineering. Because you all remember that stock buybacks were wildly, wildly popular for executives to boost their stock price. And now what they saw on the news of the block layoffs was 20% off on the day. It's going to really helped the bottom line is going to help the fundamentals of the company long term. And what I think will happen next now is we're going to see a, an influx of these types of decisions rather than doing those gradual layoffs that most executives do, which is kind of an uncomfortable thing, right? Once you, if you're at a big company and you see some of your colleagues started to be laid off, you're kind of like thinking about, well, is am I next? Am I on the chopping block? It kind of changes your relationship with work. So you just pulled the Band-Aid off and the stock price reacted quite well. And I could see definitely in the coming months more of this where it's going to be just like markets ripping higher or individual companies ripping higher in the coming months and years just by pursuing a similar strategy. Now, that said, it gets a little dicey longer term because I don't fully know what to expect because in the short term that could be bolstering stock prices. Asset prices go up, but over time, we know the US is largely a consumer economy. So what does that mean for the stock markets? You know, what does it mean for these companies longer term if they're dependent on consumer spending and there's less and less people who have reliable streams of income. So I think it's like short to medium term positive for stocks, but I don't know really what happens in after that period if, if that all makes sense from a just a broader economical impact perspective. Yeah, I would 100% echo exactly what you mentioned as it relates to any publicly traded company who gets paid through stock options or stock in the company is going to see that going their stock going up 24% and think I need to do the same exact thing. But two things can also be trail 1. I think that this is a little bit of narrative framing by Jack as AI related cuts because I do think that there was a lot of over hiring during COVID. Jack is a phenomenal entrepreneur and foundered, but also you saw what happened when Elon came in and cut 80% of the Twitter staff and continued to run that business. And that was before AI was where it is today. So while it has definitely accelerated massively, it the company can also be a little bit overstaffed. And there was something out there about them having a $30 million party for employees last quarter. So it's not necessarily like like they're is the closest eye on cost controls now they're they have title and everything like that. So they have some reason to have a big employee party, but that's kind of beside the point. I do think that at the same time kind of looking at all of this disruption, it is going to be massively bullish for these tech stocks where a lot of us have either been at these firms and know that, you know, 10% of the people really contribute to 90% of the output. And some other folks are kind of a little bit more relaxed, but it's more difficult to actually track which ones are really, I'll put in quite as much as as the other folks. And it's going to be a lot easier to track with AI just who exactly is the best performer at all these companies. And that will lead to a little bit more layoffs as well. But it insanely bullish for tech stocks in the short term. But agreed, longer term, it's it's not great for the employees. Yeah. So I think there's a lot happening here to unpack. You know, it's just like all the things we talked about there. There's lies and truths. There's truth and lies. And I think this whole situation is very nuanced because there was AI. Don't call it a precursor, but there is a subtext to all this that most people never recognize. And maybe they instinctually knew, which is what Liam was alluding to, that all these companies were overstaffed. And there's a product of, there was multiple reasons for it. One of them is the natural golden handcuffs, like Google as an example. I think when I was there, there was 100,000 FT ES and then 100,000 contractors. I think that's ballooned much greater than that. And it was understood that Google was effectively handcuffing you so you didn't go and compete against them. And so you have that angle. You have the angle of these large tech companies have these basically public private partnerships with large sovereigns, including the United States. So you're providing economic value and there's other things that were happening in place that were inorganic 0 interest rates. When you think about that and you think about 2021 was a nice microcosm of the amount of growth and destruction of capital. And then as the cost of capital go, you saw a lot of the margins compressed layoffs happen. So you take that already inorganic, call it past 20 plus years and then you layer in inflation, right? That's the margin compression. You layer in AI coming and then you layer in having to get ahead of it independent of if it's for stock or if it's just you trying to protect your balance sheet. A great example of this is Amazon because it's something that we talked about previously. But you know, I believe for the past five years, Amazon's had whatever year over year growth, but their headcount has remained flat because they've been investing in automation because they've kind of understood this already. It's less on the AI side. It's more that as inflation grows, they can see that there's less purchasing from the consumer. And so you ultimately have to figure out how do you get rid of some of your cost center so you can maintain those margins, You can maintain and grow that revenue. And so you take all that together and then you enter in what we're talking about with the AI stuff and you start to just like accelerate that the other side of it though, or maybe I'll pause there. Any any comments or thoughts? Because I do think it's worth talking about the the dumorism with the Citrini research and some like takes on where I think this all goes. No, I would agree with all that. I think one thing to note that on the situation in general too is just the opportunity that founders have versus some of these large incumbents. Jack sent out a tweet after this too, saying that a lot of the reason for potentially having too much of an in headcount was running Cash App and Square as two separate businesses. And he understood that in 2024 and realized that he needed to combine these together. And now it's 2026. And so it just shows kind of the length of time that it takes to do anything at large publicly traded companies a little bit more bureaucratic in that if you're a founder, you just have the ability to move so much quicker with and kind of iterate on all these processes at a much faster speed than some of the publicly traded companies out there. Yeah, I think this is a super relevant post to pull up in from Balaji because ultimate a paraphrase he's talking about this is the first AI cut. It will send shock waves ultimately like doing this now protected him in the future. Because what he's laying into is that if he had not leaned into the AI transition, he might have had to lay off more people slowly over time and faster competitors went after his market share. And so I think that this is just ultimately where the market's going. We talked about it before and blodging his tweet talked about, and this is what Jackson was alluding to is right now is the time to become indispensable. The way to become indispensable is play with these tools, leverage that, make it known internally at an organization that you're becoming more efficient and you're helping others with that because you can't get rid of those type of people. And that's ultimately going to be the type of people that I think Liam alluded to, which is a great point that with better analytics and AI tool, and you're also going to be able to discern how many tokens are used by an employee who's actually building the stuff. And you're going to just really have better analysis on who's the top performers and who isn't. Where this ties into this a Trinity research piece and where I think that it's like maybe short term bullish, mid term bearish, long term bullish on economic value and coordination. There was a good quote on the all in pod and it was from somebody else, but it was ultimately referencing how technology is a garden, not a pie. Because when you think about when you're trying to get equity out of business, you're thinking about it like total addressable market. Usually look at a Tam that's a pie and then you're how do you split it up? But ultimately technology as a garden is this notion that as it rains greater technology, you're growing that garden. Where think about like an example that I think you'll appreciate Jackson, is that the capital expenditure for IT not including just tech, just IT from Fortune 500 companies is only 5%. So you have technology that's like insanely high leverage thing that we've all come in to, you know, grow up with. It's still only being, you know, from a CapEx perspective, let's call it just 5% from Fortune 500. Think about everything that you interact with from the restaurants to the construction, whatever you do in your like local life has not touched by engineers and technology. And a big part of that is because engineers are scarce and they were working at these large tech firms. So now you take these engineers that maybe are open for jobs and they're able to go start things. Or now anybody can start a company with the tooling and you can start to layer in more efficiency, more technological innovation that I think long term, it's all insanely positive for humanity opposed to the central research thing, which is looking at it from 1 angle. And by the way, they may have like been shortening stocks and other things, but the point being is that I think that doesn't get widely explained is that this is bullish long term, but there's a change that's happening and the change is happening so fast that it's ultimately going to be very disorienting for a while. Yeah, I think that's what most people miss because in my opinion, there's not really much of A point of dooming, you know, think if things get worse, then there's not too much you can do about that. But I would say that we're in a point right now where everything that you guys said is true and it's still not widely understood at all. Like, Michael, you keep going back to the fact there's the 1% or so of people that actually pay for some sort of AI at the moment. That's just pay, right? So like that could mean you pay for it and you still barely use it or have any like sort of proficiency about how how to use it to leverage for work or for personal for whatever it may be. I saw I saw numbers that were even lower than that. So like, I think the whole point that we're trying to make here is that it's actually going to be really bullish for stock prices. I mean, the number always goes up. The number always finds a way to go up. And I think that's partially because there's incentives for the stock market to always be going up, whether it's nominal or real returns. But then also most people don't have a clue about any of this. And so I like Michael's point as well, where I'm trying to think about here at On Ramp, I'm trying to leverage these skills to make myself more efficient, more valuable at the company. But I also want to help colleagues and peers at the business as well, because if we can all get on board on, on this train, we're going to be well ahead of any competitors in the space. And so look, this is a really exciting time to be alive and be paying attention. It doesn't require a lot of time and, and attention though. And so it's really just like many things, figuring out how to have good time management, how to kind of structure your day around all the responsibilities you have with work and outside of that and find time to be like spending at least a little bit like 30 minutes, an hour, two or three, whatever may could be in your schedule to start leaning in and looking for efficiencies here. Because then Leah made another another point earlier in the episode. If you, if you've ever been at a large company, I know I felt this like I can, I cannot even comprehend how slow people moved at large companies relative to how quickly we move at a company like on ramp. And those people are really going to be the ones that are jeopardized. I'm less concerned about the people who are like in their 20s or 30s that are willing to learn these things. I would be more concerned to be like 40s, fifties, kind of tail end the career like somewhere middle management where maybe you've been at a point where you're kind of coasting. You're, you know, you're doing your work, but you're not going above and beyond. Like those are the people I'd be most concerned for, especially if there's no willingness or even ability. Like sometimes, you know, technology favors those who grow up with it. And if you haven't grown up with this and you're toward the tail end of your career, you may not even see an incentive or even know where to start with some of this stuff. And that's probably the most concerning from, you know, just from who gets impacted by this all. And that's also concerning from an economic perspective too, because those people tend to have a lot of, you know, consumer spending. They have families that they provide for. And so look, there's a lot of uncertainty out there, but I still think that it's a wildly bullish time to be building any business if you are really willing to lean in and and spend the time to learn. Yeah, I, I think it's fascinating that it's basically the same. We keep talking about AI and Bitcoin and they're, they're running right parallel to each other. Because what Jackson was alluding to was a, a stat we threw out which was ultimately that only 10% roughly of like the global population is using any kind of AI tool. And then only 1% of that 10% is paying for it. And then what he was alluding to is there's a subset of that 1% that is actually utilizing it, even though they're paying for it. And I look at that stat, it's very similar to Bitcoin. And like you have a certain, you know, call it one, it's probably 120th to 130th that have any exposure nominal, call it $10 in a cash app wallet. But then how many are really putting their life savings in this asset? It's as smaller if not smaller than the AI side. But the point that Jackson alluded to is because of all of this, the guys have been referencing bullish on stocks. I don't necessarily, I think long term or middle term it is because they're also going to have to print. But I can't help but see that when this level of deflation and disruption happens like that, engineers can one shot certain applications that will just eat a total addressable market or an app that and you see this right now with a lot of the open source models that are coming out. How many people are leveraging those or will spin up, you know, services that that leverage them if they have the infrastructure for others to use and undercut the competitors? That it ends up where, you know, the, the example is like a lot of these tech stocks that we all know their multiples are overinflated and now their margin for error has reduced. So you're seeing these sell offs and people would rather just hold cash or bonds. And so you're going to see some of that and that ultimately causes the real disruption where liquidity has to come back in. And then that goes back to real versus nominal. And it and then it ties back to holding commodities like gold or Bitcoin because there's only the math just isn't math. You need hard assets if you're going to protect yourselves, especially if you're going to get laid off. Can I just jump in? Just I want to clarify one thing and then I want Liam. I know Liam has a lot to say, but I did say that I think it's bullish short. But at this gate, I said short, short term, medium term it's bullish, but I don't know long term because it does impact the consumer side of the equation quite a bit and that's 6070% of the economy. So I really don't know what happens longer term, but I do think that these layoffs will be the next leg of financial engineering to keep asset prices humming. One thing that's extremely important to see what this Sutrini report, a report and somebody was talking about it online. There's a fantastic report by Michael Mobison who's like one of the best equity research investors from the 90s talking about comparative advantage period and how long that could really last. Where there are companies out there that can generate above market returns. And I think what Michael and a lot of people are describing out there is the the the fact that the technology sector was the one that was pretty much generating all about market returns. I had the highest price to earnings ratio across every sector because a lot of the biggest constraints to providing more value in the economy was engineers that were really high quality and can generate amazing products. Now the cost to do that has come down significantly. There are reports out there about how much more efficient like Stripe employees are and their AI generated code would have cost them about $150 million annually in terms of the amount of new engineers they would have to put in, etcetera. And it just makes people extremely uncertain. Like every time Cloud announces a new plug in, people are like, oh shit, maybe that company doesn't necessarily to have a big Moat anymore. And so with that, you've seen the price to earnings ratios of all these software type companies come down significantly and now trade below the market in general. Whereas at the same time, they're going to be natural winners. And there have been like Walmart and Costco that aren't necessarily if you can't go out and buy code, something like that, they have a massive comparative advantage knowing that that company is going to be out there for the long term into the future. And so I think that there is just going to be extremely different areas of the market that do well. And it's a little bit tougher to determine, especially in kind of the software and technology space, which ones are going to be in a fantastic position over the next few years as this changes rapidly. Check out early riders.com for all the latest in Bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show. Yeah, well said. And maybe that's a good transition because one of the things that I do think we didn't talk about is ultimately, you know, we know that interest rates rising, there's been layoffs, that you go and take 4050% of headcount of a tech company and let's call it pre COVID or even 21 and maybe 50 to 100%. Fifty to 90% of those individuals find a job in this job market. It's going to be 10 to 50% probably at best. And so there is going to be a lot of disruption. And that's where I think a lot of people have been alluding to and we end up in some form of Ubi. And what better way or more streamlined way for Ubi than stablecoins. And so there's a lot that's happening right now that I think we we continue to talk about, but most people, most people in the world aren't talking about and most people even in Bitcoin necessarily aren't talking about. And one of the first ones to kick it off from last week. And I think is an insane like kind of just news that's coming to the market because is Mark Zuckerberg Meadow is planning their stable queen comeback the second-half of this year. Stable Meadow's probably the they are the biggest sovereign in the world. They have 3 billion users. So that's three billion wallets just like that, ultimately having access to dollar accounts. And if anybody's familiar with this space, they had to try, they try to do something back, You know, I want to say 2019 with the Libra DM plan that went away. They've housed, they shelved that, they sold off the assets. They've been in the background. I think in this article from Coindesk, they're rumored at potentially partnering with Stripe and their new Tempo blockchain and then bridge with its issuance product. But that's still, I think speculative. But I think that you ultimately look at what's happening from consumer finance and then also users and even from what's this will tie in and then I'll pause to get your guys thoughts is the second aspect, which is Stripe and everything that's come out the past two weeks, whether it was Stripe came out with their shareholder letter, They referenced stablecoins multiple times. They referenced the new blockchain Stripe at their recent funding valuations of $150 billion plus. Their last funding round was about $100 billion. And it's not all tied to that and adding $50 billion in equity value, but a large percentage of that really was tied to acquiring Bridge. And then this knowledge of stable coins proliferating across agentic commerce, agentic AI and then the notion of just tragified merging with neo banks and fintechs where ultimately anybody can spin up virtual accounts globally and kind of further that dollar. So there's a lot happening there. I'll pause there and there's some other links to pull up. I just want to get you guys thoughts. Yeah, I think one of the most important ones is just in this new world where the cost to essentially create anything software or Internet related is trending extremely close to 0 or near 0. It's going to be the distribution that wins. And Meta has a ton of distribution. Think about all the amount of users of what's out there global. I could see them essentially becoming the new kind of we chat not like all across the world. And I could even see them being the ones who go out and actually make an acquisition offer for some are all PayPal after it was rumored that Strike pulled out of that. And so I think, yeah, I mean, like as you look across the world, it's going to become, it's going to shift really, really quickly. Just the fact that agents are using these stable coins. The velocity of money is going to move a lot faster as more and more folks give these people tools. I think that Facebook is likely going to be a big winner. And you can see almost every company that has distribution, I think in one way or another will become a payment company as quickly as they possibly can. And yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of what my opinions on the the space. Do you have any thoughts there, Jackson? Yeah. I mean, what do you say distribution wins? I think that applies to many facets of what we're discussing currently. And when we talk about what's being distributed, we're talking about the US dollar being distributed. So I think the reason why one of the main reasons why we're seeing such a concerted push from financial institutions, from technology companies is because they are playing now a critical part in extending U.S. dollar dominance, which there needed to be a solution to do so from the US government's perspective. And it's really the perfect solution, right? Because now you're able to proliferate dollars globally, not just in their physical form, which we know in a lot of emerging markets, the physical dollars are more favorable than the local currencies for a number of reasons, of course. But now it'll be even easier to spin up and distribute dollars globally. So I think it makes a lot of sense in the context of the broader macro picture. And there's those are fundamentally why the incentives exist, right? Because like everyone in the United States is coalescing around how do we continue to have dollar dominance, which is benefiting us for a number of reasons, It doesn't really benefit other countries as much. And so, yeah, I think distribution, when we talk about distribution, that's really what we're talking about is the dollar. Yep, and just a couple other things related to it. There's been no shortage of news this article I've popped up with Stripe Co founder predicting torn of AI agent commerce powered by stable coins and then also recently Stripe partner paradigm, one of the largest crypto funds in the space, you know, slowly pivoting over to expand into AI and robotics. I think those are both, you know, super relevant to the stable coin proliferation because the stable coin product market fit has multiple like access points to Jackson's point, you know, proliferating the dollar globally giving and changing the dynamic between banks and the treasury and where those dollars actually sit. And then when you just think about the Internet in general from the big thing we're not really talk about on this pod, but it's hanging out there is around how these companies like Open AI, Anthropic, they have such heavy CapEx, How are they going to be able to monetize that, how they going to be able to grow that into the future? And I think the play has always been that this they end up being like Public Utilities. They end up in this private public partnership because they are end up as a national security issue when it comes to not only us keeping ahead of other sovereigns, but also when you think about the the web, the web is starting to not only like fragment from a digital ID perspective, but then also how you monetize and spend on it. And I think you're just going to see that confluence of things happening and it's already happening. It's just at a pace I think most people aren't paying attention to. Yeah. I'd echo that. And I think that unfortunately as it relates to some of these AI frontier models and providers becoming Public Utilities, I have a feeling that, you know, unfortunately everything that's going on over in the Middle East and Anthropic not necessarily wanting to comply with anything that's related to national security for the US or perceived national security could be a, an impetus to kind of start that trend. Yeah. So transitioning to the other pretty big segment is the banks this past week. So there's been no shortage of news when it comes to just the, I mean we already had it before this kind of like leg down with different news coming around from like banks coming in developing custody. But last week Morgan Stanley, they had applied for National Trust Charter specifically related to digital assets. So let me see if I can zoom in here. If you look at the bottom, ultimately they reference custody. Certain digital assets, conduct certain activities incidental to business of banking, including purchase, sell, swap and transfer digital assets, staking on a fiduciary basis. This came on the backs of also Citibank coming out saying they want to make crypto digital assets more bankable. So they're bringing in lending, lending, purchasing custody of digital assets. And then even further, they had Amy Oldenburg who is the head of now Morgan Stanley's digital asset arm, also referencing that she's looking at custody, trading yield and lending across the board internally building out all of these mechanisms from custody to the full like vertically integrated products. So while the price is down, we continue to see all the largest institutions developing all, and this is Citibank right here, $2.4 trillion assets taking the same playbook as what state St. BNY Mellon are doing. And when we talk about like bullish or under like the underlying catalyst for where Bitcoin adoption and digital asset adoption is going, it's happening right now. It's just not fully like baked into the price. And specifically because you can't buy any if you're a retail investor, you can't buy it through any of these brokerages or banks that you already have your money at. But that will soon not be the case. Yeah, I think this is extremely exciting because every single time that Bitcoin is declined something like 50 ish percent in the past, we've seen a lot of these shelvings of projects like this and them coming out and doubling down last across the board saying that they're going to continue to offer these products. I think that they are all planned for later this year too. It's it's just insanely bullish. And I think that there is a large amount of the population out there who is willing to wait just until they can actually buy it through their preferred bank rather than just, you know, go out on an exchange that they may or may not be familiar with. There is uncertainty or there's been untrustworthy relationships of or actions of some folks in the industry in the past. And so they'd just rather go with somebody that they have a trusted relationship with. And so it's extremely exciting to that point. Yeah. I mean to tie it back to Michael, an earlier point you made about how many people actually have material exposure to Bitcoin. It's nobody, right? I mean, it's, we know a lot of the people that do and it's a very, very small microcosm of the global financial system. And so I think the thing I like to go back to in many cases is just about the incentives. And right now, there's still not a lot of incentives for these banks to be pushing the narratives that would support Bitcoin and digital assets. It's certainly greater than it was three years ago because ETFs exist, some structured products exist and you're starting to see it on the margins with wealth management firms that now can solicit clients to sell these products. But the main rollout hasn't happened yet. And so Liam, that's a great point too. I didn't really think about that just in terms of in previous cycles we see, we started to see some of this. I think BNYI forget what when and where that was was 11 firm that initially was getting a lot of this off the ground and then it was tabled. But you make a great point because these the moment momentum is continuing despite the bearish price action. And you can imagine sentiment would be remarkably different in 12 months from now assuming the price continues to chop around here. Maybe it goes slightly higher even like the bearish situation. And then by that time you'll have all the incentives aligned for these firms to really get big about it on both like the institutional client base and then also retail. And then you're going from these 10s of trillions of dollars of capital even in like the United States alone that has close to 0% exposure to incrementally 123 percent really moves the needle for small asset classes like Bitcoin. When it comes to holding Bitcoin securely, Peace of Mind starts with architecture on ramps. Multi institution custody distributes control across three independent regulated key holders in a two of three quorum. No single point of failure, no pooled or omnibus exposure. Segregated client titled faults. You retain full legal ownership while On Ramp coordinates security, compliance and operational workflows behind the scenes. It's strength of money delivered through the simplicity of 1. Multi institution custody is the foundation for everything. We build sound infrastructure that distributes counterparty risk and provides fault tolerant resilience with clear audits and institutional controls. And now On Ramp is piloting flat, predictable pricing, making best in class Bitcoin custody and financial services more accessible now than ever on ramp strength of many simplicity of 1. To learn more, check out on rampbitcoin.com. Yeah, I mean this, this reminds me a lot of again, going back to agency in the AI stuff. Like it's not a coincidence on the Bitcoin digital asset side, there's a natural like convergence on, you know, Twitter of the same individuals interested in those same fields. And it ties back to just agency curiosity, somebody in it. The anecdote is I didn't fully appreciate this for until like the past two years of most people understand or you talk about nobody wants to catch a falling knife. So wealthy people, whether whatever you see a downtrend, they will always generally wait for that like first leg back up before they're going to buy it because they're not trying to like catch the bottom. They're just trying to get a nice entry point. And the corollary to that I think about is buying Bitcoin or digital assets like their version of catching a falling knife is if I have to go to some third party platform I've never heard of and move $1,000,000 over, it's just foreign to them versus it gets, it sits right next to their equities, it sits right next to their bond portfolio, it sits net right next to their cash account. And in the case of a consumer bank account and then you can just buy that. And so this is just consumer behavior. I think we just discount that our behavior to move money back in the day was inorganic. And the organic way for people to do this is literally just to buy it through their brokerage. 100% agree with that. I think that the BlackRock ETF is something that everybody's paying attention to, obviously, and they all want some product that can be close to like anywhere near as successful as that. And one thing that this probably does is not an adapt perspective. But I can see a lot of companies out there, when the Bitcoin price does end up coming back up, put, you know, 1 to 3% of their corporate treasury into Bitcoin as it's just kind of right next to all the other financial products that they already have with the company. I think it's just going to become a little bit more of a product out there for companies that have existing relationships with some of these large banks. Nice. A couple of quick hits as we round out this show. One of the things I thought was pretty interesting and I don't know if Jackson, you saw it, I know you did, Liam, was Tether invested in a firm about $200 million at $1.6 billion valuation. It's called WOP. I was not familiar with WOP, but as I was like doing some research or thinking about it over the weekend, my understanding of WOP is ultimately like a, it's like a thing about an agent marketplace, but for human, for human goods and services or tasks. And so if you went there, you could find somebody to whether it's spin up audio work on a, you know, whatever, kind of like contractual basis, but it's generally for like Gen. Z. And I thought this was interesting because I don't know if this is their angle, but it if if it was me that the angle would be that you need a marketplace for agents. So right now they're human agents, right? They're humans that are taking tasks, but you would need a place that agents can go find other agents. But really right now it's humans finding other like whether it's AI agents or humans that would be accepting stable coins. Naturally, we talked about earlier, stable coins are going to be proliferating on the Internet. You're going to be paying them. Everyone's going to have a wallet. And you would need a mechanism for like a marketplace to be able to find that because there's so much out there right now that anybody's paying attention to Claude and open Claw. Like there's all these different ways to provision. Like a lot of the value in alpha is in the prompt, but also in the skills and how you like effectively set up the construct to execute on these things. And a lot of people again, just will not do that. They rather go pay for somebody to already give them that file or go execute on their behalf. And so I don't know if this is actually their plan, but it feels very apartment for you need a global marketplace for this like new way of commerce and connectivity to happen. And then what better way to do it to also have everyone, especially if it's a global marketplace. Do you want to really set them dollars wires? No, and they're not really ready to accept Bitcoin. So you're going to naturally need some, you know, level of a dollar to be able to move between them. Yeah, I think that's well said. They can figure out how to get off off ramped from their local stable going into dollars or whatever currency that they have. Yeah, I think that we're going to see a ton of demand for stable coins from online native companies first, marketplaces where people are getting paid globally. And naturally, I think I would assume he's probably going to put their tokenized gold next to it too as part of the investment and, you know, maybe even incorporate Bitcoin, especially if they come out with a Bitcoin wallet as they are rumored too. So I think this is just going to become more and more common, having all these assets natively next to each other. I think that, you know, we're going to see a rapid adoption of USD as the currency by everybody depending no matter where they are globally and digitally. Native money is going to become just as like it's going to become the de facto currency out there. And offering AI agent tasks right next to human ones is going to become the de facto is I would imagine that, you know, a lot of my work is done by AI rather than myself at this point, just prompting it myself. So I would imagine that, you know, most of these tasks are are done by them in the future as well. It's just a natural place for an industry like this to go. I. Don't have too much to add here, but it'll be interesting to watch how these Asian platforms and marketplaces evolve over time. The one kind of half joking thought I have over time is just how much reputation for these agents will matter on marketplaces because you can imagine like some of them are just going to go rogue and and rug in a number of different ways. And so similar how human relationship and work is a lot about trust and, you know, following through with what you've committed to and doing the work that you said you would. It'll be interesting just to watch how like that model will evolve in a world where more and more work is taken over by agents. But yeah, I mean, I haven't dug into a ton of this, but it's an interesting development and investment nonetheless based on what you guys described. Yeah. And one thing I thought about and it ties directly what you just said, Jackson, is there's it's like the unknown unknowns, they're hard to forecast. It's what entrepreneurs do. It's what creativity is embedded is how do you like come up with the use cases that don't exist today? And one example of what you just said is like historically on platforms like up work, either some level of trust involved because you have to like lock some money up and they have to go perform and then you have to like unlock, you know, tranche it out where you can imagine whether it's it'll start manually, but then it'll be programmatic where you'll stream your payments based on task completion, right? So that trust level starts to like go down a little bit. It's not to say it's infallible from error or rugging, but you can start to see how this the dynamic of payments change for those tasks and this kind of ties into it because I thought this was super relevant. Circle really crushing it in the past week, adding about 30%. I think it was 30 old. So it beat earnings by 30%. But I think their stock was up closer to like, I don't know, Liam, do you have it in front of you? Their stock took we'll pull it up, but their stock doing insanely well. There's one aspect of from the US just being able to access, you know, stable coin equity exposure, but there's also like a real fragmentation starting to be built out. You can see where circle USDC, the institutional inertia tying into that, that most regulated firms, they have circles, I believe it's called CBPN. It's a circle banking private network. It's a, it's ultimately where you can as a bank and you have your endpoints into Fiat currencies loop in and then you know, manage cross-border finance. They're not going to Tether like Tether is more of this like groundswell, grassroots international aspect to further the dollar. And you see Circle really being the play. It'll be interesting to see how USAT, if it, you know, is able to gain any kind of market share in the US But I thought it was interesting to see this because you're naturally seeing the USCC layer going to be embedded I think in the US, Stripe 4-O14-O2 wallets and then obviously on the banking side and then you will see on the other side USAT proliferate. Yeah, I'd agree. I mean that a fantastic quarter. They are crushing it right now. I think that they're in an interesting time where they're almost the only US stable coin that that maybe they're the only one that is compliant under the genius act, but I think that a lot will be fought fast follows. I don't know if it has the is genius compliant, but they just launched anybody with distribution is going to be a big challenger here. It's going to be fascinating to see if they can actually keep this or if boats will just go to, you know, city USD or or whatever other tokens there are out there. I think that right now they have a ton of interest from institutions that are using stable coins to track transact versus other digital commodities and securities, but longer term as well as some payments for the US. But to be honest, right now, a lot of the B2B type payments is still from, you know, those folks who are almost like tinkerers or you know, cross-border and startups rather than really large established companies unless they have like super forward first founders. So I think that it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out. I think that this is just kind of telling how how much demand there is for stable coins in general though from US institutions. Yeah, Right now it's measured at least according to Visa, that they own 50% of the stable, stable coin transaction volume. As Liam alluded to, you can see this with the like frontier companies. Uber is a great example. They're multinational, they're leveraging stable coins, R Link as well. When you think about their global firm, whether it's people paying or their contractors or employees, they're leveraging stable coins. But these anecdotes are still early from large incumbents, but you'll start to naturally see more. I do think it's going to be interesting to watch like FID with Fidelity stablecoin and others that have distribution. And really the tech is commoditized at this point. What the angle is outside of distribution is really regulatory modes and also brand and trust because USDC is kind of like the darling right now in the US But again with Fidelity stepping in, Stripe is a very big business. That's where I think the PayPal acquisition may make take place where you have a lot of baked in, like consumer like efficiencies, where you're already having to move capital between different payment providers and if you can bypass that with a stable coin. Jackson, if you unless you have anything, I'll go to the last segment. OK, sweet. So River, I haven't, to be truthful, read the whole report, but I did pull up some key moments from it. River put out what's driving Bitcoin adoption 2026. It's a long form report. There's a lot of anecdotes that have been floating around, so I'll tie into what's shown here and then if the guys have anything else. So there was a couple key anecdotes in this image I'm showing in 2025, Bitcoin bought by institutions was close to 700,000 of the top banks building in Bitcoin, 60% right now are they're actively building the top 50 RIA firms have some Bitcoin allocation. And then the inflows were close to 17 billion, a little over 17 billion in 2025 into ETFs and then over 3000 at least on Riverside. So just River anecdotally have exposure from a business perspective. I think the biggest take away from here that's making the rounds and I and I think we're, I don't want to say there's issues, but there's just kind of like natural contention is the amount of Bitcoin that was sold from individuals historically moving into the pockets or wallets of institutions, large businesses, publicly traded companies, ETFs obviously falling in there. And I think that was just always going to be the case. It's a natural dispersion that was going to, you know, take place from early adopters that want some liquidity. But I thought this was worth pulling up for anybody that hasn't seen it or heard anything about it. We can talk a little bit about anything that stood out if you guys have taken a look. I haven't looked at it yet, but I think this does reinforce some of the themes we've discussed today, because while those numbers are, I guess somewhat impressive, right, or at least they're impressive in the context of a lot of these solutions didn't exist a few years ago. So you mentioned over 50% of the Rias, the top Rias have some exposure, 60% of the banks are building solutions. So I think it does reinforce the main theme here where it's incredibly early to Bitcoin in the sense that, yes, these institutions may have some existing exposure or we'll have some soon. But again, we're in playing in a totally different field at this point where the three of us, the people that we work with have material exposure to Bitcoin, right? And so that means that they have some amount of Bitcoin that is important to them that they cannot afford to lose. For most people, they're not anywhere close to that. It's a Coinbase wallet that they have a couple 100 bucks and probably a bunch of shit coins sprinkled in there as well. And then for the people experiencing it through the brokerage on the ETF side, it's still in most cases, a single digit, low single digit allocation. So, yeah, I haven't dug into this to have a lot of insightful takes here, but it does reinforce again, like there's just not a lot of adoption and it's going to take, it's going to take time. I think people always are a little bit impatient or have expectations that are just not realistic in terms of how this will all play out. It's just going to be a long, drawn out process, but it's still going to continue to move up into the right over time. Yeah. A couple things to just really quickly highlight to it. And they report that over a million BTC was purchased by governments in 2025 and then nation state adoption accelerating with 23 nation states now owning Backcoin 5 new owners and in 49 countries have improved access through regulation since 2020 compared to the four that have restricted access. I think that's a big story that's not really discussed is for better or worse, the price action is a benefit. I believe long term from if we believe, if we understand that you need liquidity and institutional adoption and regulatory clarity. That can happen when you have these insane volatile draw downs like FTX. Because a lot of the people here and we know this anecdotally have been working to integrate digital assets for Bitcoin, Bitcoin custody buy and then FTX happens and they just can't get it across the board from their boards to investment committees to investors across the board. They had to pause on any kind of activity in this space. And now you have the regulatory clarity with the Genies Act, There's clarity coming, the new administration being favorable and the ETFs really, I think as that big moment that now they all need a plan and they're working on it. And there's no boogeyman out there that can basically put the genie back in the model. And so as Jackson said, though, it's just this is a game of attrition and they just don't die. You got to get like, get your allocation, increase your allocation, produce value, understand the AI tools, stack Bitcoin, and then just go back to your life because the price will trend up into the right. But it's really just a function of time and adoption. Agree and I think that's well said. I think the big take away is there was a lot of selling by folks who have been in the industry for a very long time. There is still a lot of net new adoption happening. And to Jackson's point about how under allocated we are to this industry, there's one great slide about how 146 trillion of U.S. investment advisors allocated and the recommended portfolio allocation to Bitcoin. So Fidelity, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, JP Morgan, they all say between 1 to 5% of your portfolio should be in Bitcoin. But currently the investment advisor money that is allocated to put Bitcoin is 0.008%. So there's a big gap there. And from the institutional advisor side, there is a ton of room to grow there. Yeah, that's amazing. That's a. That's incredibly low allocation. I love it. Well guys, this was a good RIP. Anything else you guys want to touch on before we we wrap? Anything top of line that you're paying attention to? No, let's go back to playing with our droids. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity out there. And it was, it was good. Thanks for making some time for me to join Final Settlement. Thanks for joining, Jackson. We'll we'll see you in a few days on the last trade and hopefully you have some spicy stuff ready for us. Got a good guest for Thursday so stay tuned. I love it. Thanks. All right. Thanks guys. 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 onrampbitcoin.com Contact to. Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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