Liquidity Flood Incoming: Bitcoin’s About to Explode

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of darkness, 1974198792972000 and whatever we're going to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when. We sell. Hey, OK, I say when we sell. We only have one more week in October. The Bitcoin price is not looking too great. The four year cycle is over. But the good thing is that it means your patience is going to be rewarded. We unpacked on this episode our expectations going into 2026, how ultimately the liquidity conditions are improving greatly. That will be supportive of Bitcoin, Gold and scarce assets. We discussed as well how the spigots from the traditional finance system have really barely been turned on and you have now the largest players in Wall Street starting to get involved offering products and this really won't even start until 2026 in a greater scale. So while the four year cycle looks to be dead and I think a lot of people are disappointed, it does mean that this cycle is extended. It may mean cycles cease to exist or this asset class, we will see. But I do want to say if you view Bitcoin as a generational investment opportunity, you need to have a generational plan, you need to have an inheritance plan. And so it on ramp, we're one of the few places that you can have a secure, seamless plan for your family to inherit your Bitcoin wealth. Now, we never want to think about what could happen to us, but it is best to plan ahead. And especially if you're taking Bitcoin seriously and it is a material position for you. If it is something you cannot afford to lose, you need to have an inheritance plan. So get in touch with us. We just piloted out flat based pricing through the end of this quarter. And so if you've spoken to us before, it's worth another conversation. And if you haven't spoken with us yet, get in touch. My e-mail is Jackson at on rampbitcoin.com and you could also book a consultation directly on our website on rampbitcoin.com. All right, we're back. I think my audio is better this week. Joined by Michael and Brian, my Co host and Gustavo Flores from Arroyo CEO. What's going on? Gustavo, how are you? I'm great, Jackson. Thank you for having me. How are you? Yeah, doing well. Thank you. It's been a busy week. Nice to have you on the show. Big news that was announced with your company this week. We'll speak to a little bit later in the episode. But yeah, gentlemen, Brian, Michael, how, how are things on your end? Everything go OK. Doing well, Doing well. Yeah, lots, lots going on in, in the markets the past few weeks, not only in, in crypto, but the broader macro picture and, and people coming to various realizations around the unsustainable debt load and what's being called the debasement trade really now in vogue. Even though, you know, I think we would all say it's, it's not really a trade. It's a, it's a structural fundamental shift in the monetary order that's occurring. But that is that is sort of pervading, you know, all aspects of financial markets in the sense that you have, you know, a Triadfi incumbents and you know, hedge fund folks who have really never thought about gold for the past, you know, call it 30 years. If they did, it was a very small allocation to now talking about, you know, where gold and really sound money. So either gold or Bitcoin or some combination of the two where that fits in a portfolio in a world where people are finally coming to grips with what basically gold bugs and Bitcoiners have been saying for a long time around debasement and Fiat currencies in general, stealing purchasing power from people over time, slowly but surely. And as those forces accelerate, more people notice, more people effectively awaken to these these realities. And I think we're just starting to see that play out. Gustavo, what's your favorite liquor? Tequila If you leave tequila. Good. I was hoping you're going to say that I like tequila too. So I feel like what we're in is this we're we're in a we're at party, right? And the party started, you know, let's call this is a kind of normie party. So for adults, professionals at 536 after work and everyone's talking and hanging out and there's this punch there. And the punch is like completely non alcoholic. And everyone knows in some way either they know directly a few people it's about to be spiked and then others just don't. And they're just sitting there and they're just, you know, having regular conversations. And there starts to be like friction and just natural tension that starts to build because it gets like real boring. And it's the same you for whatever reason, they're locked there to like past midnight. And that's where the past year has been where everyone's kind of around. There's gold running, there's a debasement trade, there's equities running, there's the debt continuing to increase, there's macro forces or things around Ubi. People are getting checks for inflation and Bitcoin is that tequila that is just being wait. So we just waiting from small subset of the party that it's going to get dropped in the punch and it's going to lubricate the whole party in all these different directions that nobody actually knows. And that's where we've been at and where we continue to be. Is this weird lol. We've been kind of like, you know, playing around between 90 to 110 or whatever, 100 to 120 for over like roughly a year while all these other things are happening at that in the backdrop. And we know that the punch is going to get spiked at some point and then the party's really going to get started. And so that that's kind of how I feel like we're we're at right now, especially coming off the James check episode of last week, which was really good, but it was catching up everyone on their work day. We haven't got the like actual party started yet. Yeah, and some news would support your your thesis, Michael. That's that was a good one. Good work with that. I wasn't sure if you were cooking that up before the show or if that just came to you. But it's a good analogy. And I think this supports it because JP Morgan, one of the members of the Federal Reserve Bank, expects the Federal Reserve to end quantitative tightening next week. And so in layman's terms, quantitative tightening just means letting assets roll off the balance sheet instead of expanding the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And we all know that Bitcoin tends to be very sensitive to liquidity conditions. And so two things are important to me. First is you guys might remember in 2021, probably in particular and into 22 with the Fed starting to hike rates, that all these commentators were saying that Bitcoin was toast, right? Because Bitcoin had only existed in a 0 interest rate environment. It only existed when the Fed was adding to the balance sheet the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And we peaked out in I think 2020, three, $8 trillion on the Federal Reserve balance sheet. And it's been tapering off for the past two years. It now it's 6 and change. But what this signals to me and I want to get the rest of the group's thoughts is that we've been in a really tough market for Bitcoin. It maybe doesn't feel like that for people who are newer to the space and Bitcoin sitting above $100,000. But if you look back at the price chart, we really have not moved in almost an entire year. If you look back in December, we were sitting about a hundred 110 going into the new year and that's exactly where we are today. And so despite all of the bullish news, the developments from, you know, political and regulatory perspective, all the ETF demand, all the banks that are going to be stepping into next year, we really haven't moved at all. And part of the reason is because we haven't actually seen the liquidity conditions ease up yet, which is typically one of the biggest drivers for the asset class. So the first point was Bitcoin's been incredibly resilient through interest rate hikes. It was the fastest interest rate rate hikes that ever happened. And now we're finally at a point where it's been resilient. It's held above $100,000. And I think, you know, Michael's going to be breaking out the tequila for the rest of the year and into 2026. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's great overview of kind of where we're at. I mean, it, it makes me think about, you know, and we sort of touched on this with James Check last week, but like the notion of cycles in general, right? Like, I think, you know, in Bitcoin specifically, we've had these, you know, four year cycles that, you know, at least on the surface how they've been perceived is that they're driven by the halving, the subsidy halving. And now the, the, the natural sort of understanding of that is that the, the impact of the halving matters less overtime, right? It's, it's less newly created bitcoins that are no longer being created as, as the subsidy halves like that amount, that magnitude of that amount, you know, halves over time. So there's less of an impact. But I think what we have seen is that even going back to bitcoins origins, there's been these sort of a parallel or overlapping cycle that is more related to macro forces and business cycles and liquidity. And so if you actually go back and look at Bitcoins for your cycles, like yes, there's obvious relation to the halvings, but there's also a, a pretty clear relation to actual liquidity conditions and the business cycle. And so I think what we're we're now seeing is like we're in this transitionary period where the halvings are becoming less meaningful and maybe the business cycle, our business cycle and liquidity is actually becoming more meaningful to some extent and, and being the primary driver of bitcoins quote UN quote cycles. So I think that's just a very interesting sort of dynamic to see play out because again, you know, people think, you know, we're at the end of this proverbial 4 year cycle, but like we're just at the beginning of a liquidity cycle. And so that is very different than past quote UN quote tops for Bitcoin where the liquidity conditions are actually turning in the opposite direction. And so we're just in a very different place in terms of, you know, what people have perceived these cycles to be and what the what the actual macro backdrop is. Yeah, it's a good, it's a good summary recap because there's two things that I think we're tying in here that don't often get discussed and specifically together. 1 is the liquidity cycle and Bitcoin doing whatever a 5X with the highest tightening or highest level of going from, you know, whatever two to five 6% interest rates. So that's already kind of incredible in itself. But then the other side of it is the supply overhang, which we've seen with that like 100K mark with a lot of Ogs and people selling. And that that ties back to the retail market coming in because retail has been basically tapped out for a number of reasons. And as that liquidity cycle loosens, then money flows across the markets and then they naturally come in. And that's really where we were chatting last week with James Check. And I wasn't able to like communicate it effectively. But the way I think about Bitcoin cycles is really built on reflexivity because they having mattered, because you had this supply shock and then as more demand increased, the price can't absorb it, it can't create more. So you have the price move, which brings more people in, which creates those kind of like fervor, you know, the the blow off tops. And so maybe with they're tempered in the future, but we just haven't seen that yet because that reflexivity hasn't been there. And there could be a subset of retail tapped out. It could be a subset of liquidity not coming in interest rates, but you start to move back into where we're talking about and Brian just alluded to, and now you can start to see that trend. And then that trend will just bring what a lot of the communications got on Twitter about gold and Bitcoin and all this stuff. It's like people look at these charts because once you get to that cycle and the reflexivity, that's when you get gold, a Bitcoin outperforming gold, but you need the right macro conditions and they're still just not in place yet. And that doesn't even tie into like all the stuff we'll talk about today. When it comes to trad, fine. Turning on the spigots into this asset class, they're barely been getting started. Yeah, 100% Michael said before, before we hit record that don't talk about the debt because the debts always going up. But I think it's important to call out what we have some nice new round numbers that are introduced. And I just also want people to be aware of just the magnitude and how silly these numbers have gotten. Because the US debt just crossed $38 trillion for the first time in history, which marks a $500 billion jump in this month alone, which means $23 billion of debt that's added per day. And so I always just want to contextualize in the long term because it took 200 years for the United States to accumulate the first trillion dollars of debt, and now we're adding a half a trillion dollars in a month. And so I think for a lot of listeners of the show, this is old news. But for people that haven't fully contextualized just how, yeah, how much scale there is here and the magnitude of what's happening. And ultimately, it's why this podcast is called The Last Trade because everything is going to be absorbed there. Everything is going higher as the the debt, the money just continues to flush out asset prices. And I think that's what people don't fully comprehend because, you know, a decade, 2-3, there's even the debt clock, Brian, right in New York. I think it's like near Union, Union Square Park that was probably introduced like 20 or 30 years ago. So people are concerned about this a long time ago. And it's persisted much longer than people expected. But we're at the point now, we're just like none of the numbers make sense. I think Luke Roman's like one of the best analysts in the space and sort of pointed this out probably a decade ago when you look at their true interest expense. And so not just the interest on the debt, but also all the entitlements that the government just cannot default on it. Literally just there's no other way out of this. And that's why $100,000 Bitcoin might feel expensive to people who are newer in the space, but in reality, it's incredibly cheap. Yeah, I mean, it's also, you know, the writing is on the wall in some sense. Like, I think, you know, I I take everything from the government or the administration with a grain of salt, but I do think that Scott Basent has been some real signal it in the past several months, probably even longer than that. You know, before Trump even won the election, investment was on TV talking about his days as a gold bug and his reverence for sound money. And now just this week, like you, you you have him making comments to the effect of like gold price going up is very good for the United States. Like he literally said that. And so that is indicative and relates to some of his prior comments around we're just going to let this thing run hot. We really have no other option. And we're going to continue to debase the currency, but hopefully it's all good. We'll still have reserve status because we're going to spread stable coins all around the world. Like that is the playbook. They're they're pretty much saying it out loud. And the extension of that is like, OK, if gold going up is good for the United States, digital gold going up to the United States is also very good and beneficial to us as a country in our national security interests. And so I think we just basically doubled the US government's holdings of Bitcoin through that seizure from last week. So, you know, it all comes back to Jackson. You like to talk about the incentives. Like they're being very upfront with their incentives around gold. Like they are enjoying this RIP in gold and they want it even higher, realistically. And the same thing is going to come from Bitcoin at some point. Yeah, for sure. There's a couple of pieces of news as well that I wanted to call out quickly. The first being in supports, just what you said there, Brian. The first being that JP Morgan released a report where they said that gold, the gold price could exceed $8000 per oz by 2028. And so this is an asset class. I want people to remember that this is an asset class that has largely been ignored by traditional finance. Like this is stuff that we've seen first hand. Five years ago, nobody was talking about gold, nobody was talking about, you know, forget about silver, other precious metals. But these asset classes have been ignored. They've been under owned and these firms historically haven't made a lot of money. Maybe JP Morgan has. They've had done some sheisty things in the gold markets, the precious metals markets, but they haven't made a lot of money and their clients have been underexposed. And now it's certainly a shift from the highest levels, like to Brian's point with the US Treasury Secretary being a large advocate for gold all the way down to people starting to own it in a retail manner. We could talk more about that with early riders a little bit later today. And then the other thing I wanted to call out too, back to incentives is I did see this piece of news here from the Kobe SC letter. The Trump administration is outperforming almost all hedge funds. Every investment is up at least 80% with two investments nearing 150%. And this does not include soon to come quantum computing stocks. So at the end of the day, like these people, it goes back to Nancy Pelosi, right? Everyone, you know over the past couple years loved to track Nancy Pelosi's portfolio, and she was out competing every money manager on Wall Street. And now you have the Trump administration doing the same. And these people are not in the business of losing money. And they also have access to way more information that any of us do or the listeners of the show do. And so you can always just look at what they're doing with their money. And if you have the children of the president that are involved in Bitcoin mining, you know, taking board seats at Bitcoin Treasury Company is like, I think that's an indication of just how the incentives have aligned for this asset class to be really be entrenched into the financial system and go much, much higher than where we are today. Yeah, I mean, it's a good point in that like this lull, you feel some of the friction and spice that exists in the community or whatever and and Twitter it, it ends up because a lot of people a are short Bitcoin. This lull that has existed has shaken a lot of people out because people just inherently are looking for action, especially in a market where you're looking for volatility and a lot of this capital that's being absorbed, whether it's ETFs, trump, SPR accumulation, that's Bitcoin going into stronger hands. And when that's complete, that's when this price will start to move along with the liquidity cycle. And a lot of people are just going to be a very short Bitcoin. That's where a lot of the salt comes from. I don't even know if it's crypto Kobe or whatever, but like, you know, long time crypto Twitter poster, he was breaking down how a lot of people that you think were in early to Bitcoin or crypto have very little Bitcoin, especially like your local again, favorite Bitcoin podcast. You're like, individuals just get shaken out. It's very hard to have a long time, low time preference and just go back and using this as a better savings technology and then go back to delivering value to the world. Most people are glued to the screen, try to trade around and try to get into dats, try to do all these weird things. And that's really the sad part of what we're seeing here. And there's some other tweets we'll bring up later about, you know, about Kunas and the capital going into ETFs. There's just a lot of money that is going to move from like less even people that think they have strong hands to weaker or weaker hands to strong hands. And then that market's going to take off. And it's going to be very hated for a lot of people because they're not going to be holding as much Bitcoin as they were holding in 21 or 17 specifically even when this market started because they've just been basically lulled asleep or maybe they took some leverage out and like 2 weeks ago and that micro that crash wiped them out. And there's a lot of good anecdotes with this where we've seen like the 2020 crash and something like here where the market takes off within three months. And it's always the way Bitcoin works is it's just the path of most resistance. So the net of is don't sell Trump your coins, just hold on a little longer. Just play with your Bitcoin while you have them still. Michael, one thing you brought up that was interesting was the train analysis report. And I think it just ties back into what we've been speaking to the past 10 minutes because the United States is really leading and interestingly enough, India as well. I didn't expect that, just given we've had some conversations with some family offices, some high net worths based in India. And I know it's very restrictive there or at least as my perception in terms of accessing Bitcoin and just kind of capital controls more broadly. So I was surprised to see that United States and India are leading per chain analysis report. Michael, this is something that you flag. So I was curious, like, what stuck out to you, why you wanted to cover it on today's show? Yeah, I think it was mainly just a flag that this study just came out today. Actually, no, that show September, I don't know why it was referenced today, but the core concept was, to your point, adoption in the US and then specifically Asia Pacific Pacific and then India, even though they've had these draconian controls, I think a symptom of that growth has been the notion and understanding of like hard money and gold. And then because they have such a large, you know, demographic, I think it's like 1.2 billion people that you're inherently going to see that come out, whether it's via VPNs And then even recently, I, I think it's Coin DCX or Coin DX. It was a company that Coinbase just acquired. It's one of the only brokerages in India. So you can see how that started and become a strategic positioning. But Gustavo, I'm curious on your side because it's specifically with, you know, India, global adoption within Latin America, how you think about like just different pockets. And in that report, it talks about whether it's higher net worth, but then also demographics, but then also stable coin proliferation, USDT. Just how do you think about like that report and just what you see in Mexico and El Salvador? Yeah, for sure. So I mean, I think the the biggest take away, it's really Brazil. Brazil has been an example and in Latin America in in old France, whatever it's from the government or or banks, there's even banks that have adopted like the ETAL bank, one of the biggest banks in Brazil already custodies and sells Bitcoin. So a lot of developments there on in Mexico, you have seen a lot of crypto retail adoption, mostly because Mexico and a lot of these countries, not only this is a moment where they're adopting Bitcoin, but also this is a moment where they're finally adopting just financial technology as a whole, right? So how many people have got got in a debit card or the bank account or, or credit account in the past couple years? It's it's kind of lapped at the same time as as Bitcoin adoption. So all this Fintech growth is strictly related to just financial and and Bitcoin adoption all comes together. So I think that's an interesting way to to perceive at least Mexico and Colombia and and Peru, the the stable mid to large country sizes. Brazil as well, just Brazil just had an extra leap. And then you have the category of Argentina, Bolivia and that, that are not as marked in this report because I believe that this is more like street level adoption you're seeing in these countries where they just trade USD cash for, for stable coins or Bitcoin. So it's not as easy to, to portray in a report. But then you have that other category, which is also accelerating, particularly this year, but has, has and, and more countries are also joining that category, right? Because you see less stability in, in monetary and financial markets in, in this region. And you just see Venezuela continue with the leaders, but now Bolivia is joining the rank and there's speculation that others will too. So that's that's the model of how I perceive it in in Latin America. So it that's super interesting, Gustavo. I'm curious, like going back to what I was saying around Besson and the US government's plan around stable coins, Like do you see, I guess is your perception that that plan can and will work in the sense that people are just going to adopt U.S. dollar stable coins all around the world? Because I think in the past few weeks or months, we've seen other reports from certain countries that kind of see that playbook and they're like, well, we don't really like that if you know, all of our citizenry are just using U.S. dollar stable coins, like that kind of threatens our own Fiat currency and, and how we want to go about things. And so I would imagine there's going to be some push back to a lot of this stuff. But like, I'm curious your view because I, I also have heard, like anecdotally that, you know, in a lot of these countries really outside the United States, that the sort of first intuition or gut for most people is just to like access stable coins like predominantly Tether and haven't really gone down the path of Bitcoin as savings and dollars for spending. I guess where are we on that continuum? And like, do you see the the US government's playbook working out for them? Honestly, I do see it working out. Obviously you'll see way more exaggeration on Twitter. It's not true that every corner shop in Bolivia accepts Tedder, but it is true that in the main airport prices are are shown in in USD T. So there there is definitely an exaggeration, but there's truth to it as well. So I think that, yeah, you don't, you don't see people rushing towards Bitcoin when they they have capital controls or hyperinflation in their country. But of course they're aware of it, right? Because the second, the, the first question you ask yourself is how can I get my hand on these digital dollars? Because there's a scarcity of dollars. But the second question you ask yourself is what is this, this Bitcoin thing, right. So in, in Bolivia and Argentina and Venezuela, these countries, there's no doubt that at this point everybody's familiar with Bitcoin. They they just have to out of the necessity to be familiar with, with digital dollars and Bitcoin is just a follow up question. So I do see it play out. There was like Bolivia is I think the most interesting case because 18 months ago all cryptos were completely illegal and they had been illegal for multiple years. And now they were not only legalized, but they are now. There's now a lot of political parties in Congress pushing for an El Salvador type law in Bolivia. And now there was an election path last week where the right wing parties got in power after 20 years. And now they're going to push this already even further. So yes, they can try to resist it, but at the end they they just, I think they understood, they understand, like Salvador understood that given their small position, it's just incentivized to, to play in favor of this instead of trying to resist it. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know the dynamics down there in Bolivia, Gustavo. So thank you for sharing more about that. And yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, I guess like it's all relative, right? So USDT solves a problem relative to local currencies in many of South American countries, just like Bitcoin solves a problem relative to everyone in the world. But like in the United States, for example, we have a little bit more of a stable currency to the extent that people don't even realize, like most people still don't even realize that the dollar is actually being devalued. They certainly do more so than 10 years ago as true inflation or, you know, inflation's really creeped its way into the real economy rather than just in financial assets. But still, we're at a point where it's like people are just trying to figure out, well, why is this even happening? And if I check one news channel, they're telling me it's because corporations are greedy and they're price gouging. And then if I check another news channel, they're telling me it's because, you know, the administration is doing XY and Z. And so it's just interesting to hear that you know, how quickly things have changed as well. I think you mentioned 18 months and one from just being like outright banned and very aggressive, aggressively negative toward the industry. And then within less than two years actually starting to embrace it is is pretty impressive. Yeah, exactly. You know, and for them some sometimes in these countries, you know, we, we tend to think in like in the United States or or Canada where where I grew up that like reality or the perception of of markets is, is where they just go through similar cycles than than we do. But sometimes they're just in, in their own cycle, right. So you could have a slow adoption like this maybe has been a slow year in the United States, while in Bolivia has been the most important Bitcoin adoption year for them in history. So they they just go through a different pace because they have their own financial and and and monetary cycles. But yeah, definitely an interesting thing to watch and something that new new developments happen every every month, basically. Yeah, it's a great point as well. Like, you know, adoption happens at different rates in different places and it also happens in different, let's say like different avenues or different products because there actually is still a lot of adoption happening in the United States this year and last year. But it's not the same adoption that we saw four or five years ago, right? A lot of the adoption that's happened in the US has been through the ETFs and through financial products. And it was actually something that we wanted to discuss today where a lot of the largest financial institutions are starting to have, are, are starting to roll out products. But it's still going to take them probably 6 to 12 months, if not longer to even get like some of the the bare bones set up here. There was this Barron's article, Michael, I think that you flagged. And yeah, at the end of the day, the adoption is happening. But people are just like, yeah, they, they see the tickers and they have a Charles Schwab account or they have a brokerage account or they have a financial advisor. And they say, Oh yeah, put me in, you know, put me in $10,000 to buy better. You know, I'll have a buy a small position there, but in terms of like real adoption into Bitcoin and at scale, it hasn't happened yet because most of the people are not like us. They actually don't venture out into Bitcoin native companies and they don't, you know, figure out how to use a hardware wallet. They're waiting for like their relationship they've had with their financial advisor for two decades to be knowledgeable on it and to have a product that they can offer. Yeah, this is going to be an interesting thing to follow because ultimately the the thing that Jackson pulled up was Citibank last week came out that they're going to turn on custody for clients in crypto, Morgan Stanley allowing all clients now to get exposure. There was a few other moves with banks, fintech stepping into the space and then there was another tweet. If you can maybe pull up piece of ties into this overarching theme of products that Arrow Belkuna has had, which was ultimately that he heard that there's certain large whales or holders of Bitcoin being able to create in kind or be able to park their Bitcoin to get exposure into the traditional, you know, markets when it comes to like margin accounts. The tweet is some Bitcoin wells are doing custom creations of I bet for very variety of benefits after discovering try 5 as its perks. I think that this goes back to it's not good or bad. It just is in the sense that there are incentives that allow for what Jackson said of like going with the familiar brokerage bank account, also going into IBAD, getting margin that you know exists at a 4% interest rate versus 11 or 12% and lending against the existing kind of capital markets on Bitcoin back loans. But the core concept here is that the vast majority of people look at Bitcoin as an investment, not as a savings vehicle, savings technology and hold a vast proportion or material amount of Bitcoin for themselves. And I think that's important to talk about. And maybe it talks if if we go to what Gustav was working on. But the core idea is the winners in the future will be the companies that treat Bitcoin as money because ultimately that's what the most sophisticated Bitcoin investors have done, meaning that they wanted cold storage. Generally they take it offline via hardware device. That's where still about half of the Bitcoin sits because they, it's not because they're crazy and ideological, it's because they understood that it's the most prudent pragmatic thing to do is not trust a single entity because historically they failed. And so I think over a long enough time horizon, we will see these products and services not fulfill the needs for these investors because somebody that did what that person just did that Belkunas reference, either they only had a small percentage of their total net worth. So it's play money and something happens to the ETF, it's like no sweat or you're generally that's the case. And what will happen is as that price appreciates, it'll just naturally grow into a larger percentage of their net worth or their and their understanding will increase and they'll realize, oh God, what did I just do? Because if this thing is money, I may need it outside of this wrapper for a whole slew of reasons we can talk about. And so if you look at all this stuff is gravity that these companies are adopted. Like we're so early in this process that the companies, the ETFs, they're absorbing the mental models of how people traditionally work with these assets. But on a long enough time horizon, all the things that happened with Mount Cox and the ICO boom and FTX are going to repeat because they're just like fractals. And we've had such small percentages of adoption when you think of the grand scheme of Bitcoin that the market doesn't understand these concepts that we talked about here in the last trade and why we build the products the way we do. And so it's bullish in the sense that it's increasing adoption awareness of Bitcoin. It's a little bearish and that probably people are going to lose their money in certain products because that's just how this works. Bitcoin private keys are just data. Data on a long enough time horizon ends up getting leaked. You can look at any PII that ends up hacked on any account. Your favorite broker just probably lost your information. And so once people recognize that, then it makes zero sense to leave it with a third party custodian. But then the other side of that obviously is as asset goes to hundreds of thousands of dollars, it gets really untenable to keep millions of dollars underneath your mattress. So we're just very early and with early opportunity or with being early comes wholesale of opportunities as well. Yeah, there's a few other things embedded in that as well. I remember Eric Beltrinus also tweeted something probably over the summer at some point before we had spoken with him, to the extent of whales moving into ETFs to an extent because of the physical risks that they bear by managing a significant portion of Bitcoin in their direct custody. And I wanted to call that out because, yes, there's an aspect of people may want to move it into the financial rail so they can borrow against it. But we all know that you can borrow against spot Bitcoin as well. And so I think there's also an implication here that wasn't mentioned in this tweet, but I've been mentioned before that a lot of the existing solutions put people in a situation that quite frankly, they just don't want to be in and they don't want their families to be in. And so this is like a reality that the industry doesn't talk a lot about because both of the prevailing ways to manage the asset have just a lot of discomfort. Like for example, I am now getting probably like 30 spam calls a day. It's it's gotten to the point where it's just like I can't even have my phone next to me because it's just buzzing, buzzing non-stop. And if I'm not someone who was a little bit less aware of Bitcoin and you know that the types of attacks that people, you know, try to perpetrate, I would and I was a little bit more naive and maybe I had less wits. I was older then maybe I would fall prey to some of these scams because I have answered the phone a couple of times before because I'm just curious who's on the other end of it. And it's like 50% of the time it's someone claiming to be from Coinbase or another exchange. And so my point is that on one side of the spectrum, if you've had, if you have a current exchange account or you've had one in the past, your information has been leaked and now you're just constantly being called or getting emails. I get emails too. I get texts, I get all sorts of stuff non-stop. The flip side is if you're managing the asset in your direct possession, well, then you have other set of problems as well. Because if your bitcoins material or it's material five years from now, well, then you have to start worrying about, well, what if someone comes after, you know, my wife or my children? Or maybe it's just like, I don't actually feel comfortable managing $10 million in my possession. I think maybe I, it's just time for me to put that into an ETF because I don't know what other options are out there. And so I think this speaks actually more to just broken market structure and a lack of solutions that have existed natively. And ultimately it's ties into what we do at our firm and, and maybe Gustavo as well. I, I curious to hear your thoughts just on the risks that I described and you know, the work that you're doing at a rail. Yes, Jackson, thank you and thank you for that. Well, I mean, I think not only is Latin America a step behind, so not only you, you have to tell people about Bitcoin more than than you do in the United States, but securities is even more a concern, right? Because it's not just about loss, It's not just about scams, which which are very prevalent, but it's also about physical, physical dangers, right? Such as extortion, kidnapping. Like just in the city where I live in Mexico City, you have about two wealthy families getting kidnapped every day and and which you often just resolves with from 48 hours. Or what you see a lot is people getting like brother gunpoint on on on the highway. And immediately the first thing they tell them is like, get out your your bank app. You know, like the equivalent of like GP Morgan chasing in Mexico, because they know that's where you have your money. How long is it going to take until the the guys on the street that that are doing that know about Coinbase as a brand, right, Or all these other into exchangeable exchange brands. Or even if you have like a big wallet that everybody knows of, you have a treasure app in your phone. That's, that's an easy to know, right? So, so it's, it's, it's only the next step for, for, for people to get targeted for, for Bitcoin holdings. So I think it's, it's more relevant than ever for us to arrive in this region that has only have been exposed to like crypto casino type of offerings with a, with a different approach. And that approach is and multi institution custody vision where people can have a actually a secure experience, something that the that they they've been looking for and also access all these new financial services that come with it, right? Insurance related to that credit related to that, where, where the credit perspective is also a very interesting one. I think we were talking about this in, in the the final settlement podcast we did earlier this week. But interest rates, if you want to get a business loan in Mexico, you're looking at at least 20% annual interest rate. And Mexico is one of the good ones in Latin America. We're not even talking about Argentina or countries like that where, where we're, it's actually near 100%. And and then you tell people no with with Bitcoin and collateral you can actually get a lower rate without any credit score history. Then you can in, in, in Mexico as one of the wealthiest families. So then that, that's another very big point of interest. So, so I think it's the moment is right and the, and the region is, is, is the right market for, for such a solution. So when we want to build that audio is, is, is a more serious offer where not only we've, we solve the security first challenges that exist in the region, but also we provide an alternative to the casino altcoin vision that that is so relevant. And, and I couldn't be prouder to, to partner with you guys to, to be able to do that. And, and I'm very excited about what's coming next. Yeah. It's really well said Gustavo. And maybe to take a step back. So Jackson set up really nice and Gustavo colored that earlier this week we announced our venture arm early riders to date, still the only Bitcoin denominated venture and we can probably talk about when we get to some of the golden debasement denominator being, you know, broken thesis started a relationship with Gustavo actually known Gustavo for a few years now, since the days of verify and then bull Bitcoin and and now with audio. Previously Swapito was building best in class Bitcoin on ramps in Latin America and was looking to grow and scale that. And we started discussing what we're very interested because we recognize Bitcoin as money requires localized financial services. So we expect it to get more and more specific over time because it's just how banking works. But then ultimately what we view as a category or category winners will be built on multi institution custody because a lot of the listeners we hear from, they're increasingly interested in what we do. We've been working on, you know, reducing our costs even more to flat rate structures. I call that out because a lot of people have reached out about interest and continue to because you're getting opted into the, the, that pricing before we make it public. But the point being is that the most sophisticated people have had to go through everything we're talking about, right? Like I got into a brokerage and then I, my phone got hacked and then I got a hardware device and now my wife doesn't know how to deal with this. And so now let me figure out multi institution custody. This is kind of like the end state, not the beginning or some like niche aspect of it. And so when we look at category winners, it's like, well, if we're investing and have to return capital to ourselves, investors, we need to make sure that they are the winners. That market in our view was that they would be built on multi institution custody because it's just a more sound infrastructure for business building when you can have reoccurring revenue by way of custody, offer more value by way of security. So people can buy actually more Bitcoin, which is this inherent thing that precludes people from buying as much as they want because they don't actually know if it'll be there tomorrow. And then ultimately just gives a competitive advantage because as we talked about, it's like, well, do you have no competitor if you have multi institutional Latin America because your client will want that. And then what who's bit so going to do it is the Latin American firm is Coinbase that offers it not so you you basically get to stand in the league of your own and credit to Gustavo because he was working with a group and deciding like the different directions and went back to his brain trust and they were really positive and thought it was a great idea because the all the different things that we've talked about. But then also that are inherent to the climate of Latin America and Europe. We see this a lot with our clients already where in the US outside of certain cities, it's relatively pretty safe. But as you start getting to international markets, the themes of kidnappings, hacks, you know, break insurance, home invasions increasingly are occurring and they will occur on every in every place. I think that's the thing that we like to think that we're insulated in the States. It's the same thing with like the local Fiat. And then we think the dollar is different. It's like on the same curve. It's just so it's a longer time horizon, but that volatility is coming whether it's dollar to basement or just the notion of crime increases as kind of the dollar in in capital controls or capital kind of, you know, debasement increases because you know, people get more desperate. And so yeah, you know that kind of presents this opportunity to partner and where audio is looking to really build best in class infrastructure. We couldn't be more excited to partner with you guys and also really looking at winning that market and the opportunity to expand our key network as we go for kind of global adoption with keys in every continent in in a lot of different countries. And then you guys being based in Mexico City and El Salvador opens up a lot of opportunities as well. Totally. And I would just like to add to that point of like things are always looking at things from a like a relativism perspective, like you, you're saying the US was coming for you. Well, people in Mexico also think that way in some sense. You know, it's like in Mexico, we're not, we're not Venezuela, we're not Argentina. We're, we're very close to the US, We're in a different category. But over the past year, there's, there's been new talks in, in mainstream media in Mexico about just the monetary growth, like, like the monetary mass growth, like why is the government spending so much money? Why, why is the, the monetary mass growing at, at this rate? And so, so you start to see a, a narrative change in, in mainstream media and in just regular conversations around where, where the next logical step is, is Bitcoin, right? And, and so, so I'm expecting that to happen more and more as we get closer to, to the next couple years. But also, and then the next question after you, you've completely, you understood the, the risk of your country and of, of global markets is not only Bitcoin, but how do I hold Bitcoin securely and how do I face these challenges and in the proper way? So, yeah, definitely the the right moment and the right place to, to be in. And I think well, we're, we're going to start solidly with Mexico being the largest Spanish speaking country in the world. I think that that that's the the ground works of Ground Zero. But we'll, we'll go down South as soon as we, we have AI mean we're we're going to be open for, for all the region from day one. And we, we can already talk to customers everywhere. Our license in El Salvador, which we announced today allows us to bring in customers from anywhere in the world. But we're we're very focused on Mexico, that's the the main market and and we'll be opening local branches in other countries after that. Yeah, Congrats, Gustavo to you and the team. It's really exciting news. So sneak peek for listeners of the last trade we're going to be launching on ramp Iras very shortly. But you have a first look here. Multi institution custody, long term tax advantage, access to Bitcoin, something that has not been done in the market before. So if you're looking for a solution for your IRA, your 401K, if you want to roll over, you want to own Bitcoin or you own Bitcoin already, but you're looking for a better solution, get in touch with us. You can reach out to me directly Jackson at on rampbitcoin.com or you can book a consultation on our website on rampbitcoin.com. We are piloting out flat based pricing, which means your fees will not increase with the price of Bitcoin. So if you haven't heard about that yet, you haven't spoken to us yet about that, reach out to us. Happy to have a conversation whether it's about the pricing, Iras, inheritance, loans, custody, you name it, we can help. So looking forward to speaking with you. Hope you enjoy the rest of the show. 1 of the things that I wanted to make sure we covered as well was another announcement from the Early Riders group and on Michael's on the topic of Michael's favorite shiny yellow rock. Michael, could you speak to the Sound Money Index and some of the work that you guys have been doing at Early Riders as relates to getting gold, you know, best in class gold exposure and providing investors with vehicles to securely own it own physical very similar to the work that's being done here at On Ramp, but in an asset class that we spoke to earlier has been historically under owned and typically just owned in portfolios with kind of paper, you know paper exposure. Yeah. I think as with a lot of the different themes and products and research we talked about, there's a a number of angles to come from. But one of the main metas is the inertia that exists, whether in gold or Bitcoin is counter to the value prop, meaning that specifically with Bitcoin, it's been looked at, you know, even this past week with Tucker saying Tucker Carlson coming out and saying it's made by the CIA and, you know, don't buy it. That there's always somebody out there describing it as rat poison and doesn't make sense because it's counter to the structural market of the 6040 and people needing to hold negative yielding bonds. So we don't kind of blow up the system in the same way that gold has been looked at as a taboo asset and it's for gold bugs and nobody's really holding it when reality for the past 30 to 50 years, it's basically kept pace with, you know, the S&P 500 specifically the past five years, gold and Bitcoin have been the best performing assets and then also obviously this year. But the problem is that individuals still, there's so much inertia built into, OK, I get it, there's only 21 million, but it ties back to why custody is so important. It's not widely understood. It really is the substrate of why people look at this as speculative at best and a Ponzi at worst is because all they hear is people keep losing the money. And so they don't even know how to really treat it as anything over as speculative investment. And that's why multi institution is so important. And also just from a strategic perspective of building a business as you can offer a credible way for them to buy more and more Bitcoin without having to park it on 12 words. The same thing kind of exists with gold, right? The inertia in the research doesn't exist for anybody to tell the story about that. The denominator is broken and sound money is a solution to base any kind of returns, Bitcoin or gold, because you can't make more of them. But then as you get to that, it's becoming more and more apparent, the narrative with debasement trade, the numbers are the numbers, right? Like you cannot refute how gold and Bitcoin have performed and will continue to perform in an era of monetary debasement. But then now once you get that, it's like, well, now what? And that's kind of embedded why a lot of people don't even want to see it because I like to joke. It's like, well, then now you have a problem. It's like, OK, now I get that bitcoins to trade, but what do I do? Like now I've got to do it a Ledger. Now I got to go to ETF. They get rugged, I heard last trade. So that's not the best vehicle. It's like what do I do? And so that will continue to persist with gold because gold has historically been for sovereigns with the site slight caveat that GLD has been the product. You go into an ETF and GLD has no shortage of issues. You can go to more sophisticated gold individuals to recognize why all the way to you can't take deliveries, you're buying paper exposure, you're not getting the full benefits of the monetary asset. And so we started looking at this trend for a few years now. And from a selfish perspective, I think it's a huge opportunity for Bitcoin companies and specifically on ramp to look and get closer and more favorable and friendly to gold because they're the same trade, just expressed a little bit differently. And one has a higher upside in our view. But it completely takes the position out of it looking as speculative and looking like crypto, especially as we go more and more into the awareness that gold and Bitcoin or money and everything else is effectively credit. And so we met the Argo team, world class guys, they built out of the Sprott family, which is a world renowned, you know, family building investment products in the gold space. And they're building these SMA styled insured products for Spot gold where you can take delivery for individuals all the way to institutions. And that same world is going to exist as debasement happens. People are going to be still missing. How the hell do I get this without getting rugged? Because it doesn't even mean just individuals. Think about all the fintechs. All the fintechs have no plumbing into how do you get best in class gold and Bitcoin exposure and they're all kind of tapped out because they're all competing over the, you know, basically casino that is Robin Hood and how do I get as much margin and perps trading and all the craziness that exists there. And so there's just a huge opportunity to build timeless wisdom sound products for the market. And so that's ties into the Argo investment, the partnership with them taking a board seat. And it really just goes back to how do you return more Bitcoin to investors. That's our goal as a Bitcoin denominated fund is you have to deliver value to the market, like full stop. And the way you deliver value to the market is basically, there's probably in my mind there's no way to deliver more value than helping people retain their purchasing power because if they can do that, they can do everything else after that. That's like the first principles basis and the rest of the market doesn't really see that. So they offer these casino type products. So yeah, really excited about that. I'm sure Brian has some thoughts to share, but that's going to be a huge opportunity for us as we grow and just create more institutional research to tell this story. Yeah, really great overview. I think one thing to pull out or reiterate there is that, you know, historically there's been, you know, really since Ethereum launched, I guess 20/16/2017, as altcoins and other crypto assets have proliferated, there's a natural inclination to group Bitcoin in with cryptocurrencies. Obviously there's a, a technological similarity there, right? Like, and we can debate the credibility of all these other assets, but that is why it's been historically lumped in with broader crypto. And so you still see this today. They persist in the sense of look at all these trad 5 firms, these fintech incumbents that, you know, the vast majority are not focusing solely on Bitcoin. They're focusing on the entire digital asset landscape. They're super excited about stablecoins, etcetera. And really what a lot of this comes down to is that's just the incorrect frame. That is the incorrect compartmentalization of what Bitcoin is. It's not venture tech. It's not, you know, a bet on some competitive dynamic. Who's going to be the world computer? Who's going to decentralize XYZ? No, it's just money. It's sound money, it's digital sound money. And so the correct classification, the correct correct grouping is with gold. And you know, also historically, like there's been, you know, and part of this is just like behavioral and human psychology of, you know, Bitcoiners can be very dogmatic about things, right? Like we talk about it all the time on the custody side of people being very dogmatic about not your keys, not your coins. It's a very similar dynamic where, you know, even just this past week, you see a lot of Bitcoiners, you know, basically shitting on gold like this, discrediting gold in some way. And I think that's just like a natural version for for some folks to be like anti anything that's not Bitcoin, right? Like there's no second best, but like there is a second best sound money like it is gold. Like, yes, we can. We can caveat all of this by saying that Bitcoin clearly does improve upon gold's monetary properties. It's a better version of gold, but it only has a 16 year track record and you can't discount the multi thousand year track record of gold. And the idea that Bitcoin is just going to demonetize gold in some short time frame, even short to medium term time frame is just nonsensical. 1, the liquidity dynamics of the two assets are just very different. So central banks can't just like flip overnight 100% into Bitcoin and just ditch gold. Like it's just not realistic. So there's going to be this interim period, call it 10 years, call it 30 years, where this sound money trade, again, call it a trade. If it's 30 years, it's not really a trade. That's a structural shift, but that's going to persist. Then it's going to be gold and Bitcoin. And so I think what's really exciting about this to me is like there really hasn't been a firm that has gone after this, this sound money sleeve and providing, you know, best in class products and services, because it's one thing to just have proxy exposure, but it's another thing specifically when we're talking about outside money reserve assets, like counterparty risk is part of the value prop of the thing. So if you reinsert counterparty risk into the asset, you're, you're doing yourself a disservice. So you really do need best in class access to these things. And there really hasn't been a firm that's that's gone after this. And there's going to be an interplay between these assets over this transitionary period, whether it's 10 or 30 years, there's going to be an interplay between these two assets. And those rails really don't exist today. And so that's what we're also really excited about because, you know, people also take for granted age and demographics when thinking about these things. People like to say, you know, volatility is so high for Bitcoin when you know, in reality, it's kind of similar to mag 7 stocks at this point. But even if you want to take that view, it is true for older individuals. You know, if you're in your 70s eighties, maybe you don't want the volatility of Bitcoin because you're doing some planning for the rest of your life and and your children's life. And you want to have some allocation to, you know, an analog form of sound money, which would be gold and some percentage of Bitcoin for that larger upside, that asymmetric upside that you mentioned, Michael, But there needs to be the rails to have that interplay and and they don't really exist today. And you know, I think just in the news, like you're starting to see some of this get picked up. Like, you know, if you just look at tethers balance sheet, right, how they've held gold for a long time, you see Cantor Fitzgerald coming out with Bitcoin gold products. So you're seeing it at the edges, but no one's really owned this space and certainly no one's owned it with best in class products in Access. Yeah, it's a great point. I I definitely see the alignment there. I think they're complimentary for a number of reasons you guys both spoke to. I also always thought that the whole demonetization thing was just kind of like nonsense. You know, like, for three or four years ago, there was this meme that would go around if you just, like, take everything and divide it by 21 million. And just like, you can't, Ryan, like to quote Tim Robinson, you can't do that. But yeah, I mean, like, it doesn't make a ton of sense. And unless there's some big technological breakthrough, I don't see gold. I don't see gold, like going back to like Lowe's that we saw decades ago. I understand that it's commercial use is quite limited, but it is a form of money. It has great store value properties. It has thousands of years of track record. And I always thought it was very naive for this industry to say that, oh, Bitcoin just has perfected monetary properties. So, you know, gold's going to go to 0 or it's just going to be used for like watches and that's it. So I'm excited about this. I, I think you know, Michael, you in particular have been excited about ways to have these assets sit alongside each other, how to find a way to you advocate for ownership of Bitcoin and gold in portfolios, especially given everything that we see from the, the macro picture. And so I think you guys did a really nice job. The Argo team, you know, is, is impressive. The Sprott family is obviously one of the most respected families in the precious metals industry. So really excited about that partnership. Yeah, thanks Jackson. And Jackson's supporter advisor to the fund and and saw the division early. I think one of the key concepts here and hopefully that listeners find value is we're actively building in this space. And that was part of like the show is to show not only what's happening behind closed doors, but actively as we're learning and getting feedback from the market. Because a lot of these concepts are revealed as you're building where I was not even thought gold, you know, you wanted to, you know, 21 million, whatever. But as you Start learning, you just realize market forces, market structure just preclude for something like that happening. And it's the running joke. You want to make money or do you want to be right? Because like being right, maybe gold demonetizes Bitcoin, demonetizes gold tomorrow and everyone's to hold the hardware wallet. But that's just not practical. It's not realistic. And in the same way that the traditional market won't tell the story of gold and Bitcoin and they're not incentivized, it's the same reason why the Bitcoin or like can't tell the story of like not self custody and then can't tell the story of gold. It just doesn't fit within a mental model of either A, how they did they understand the world or B, if there's incentives. And now obviously we have incentives, like we see the market going this way, but it doesn't prevent it from being right. That's obviously for the market to determine and people do the research. But you know, Luke Groman, he's just created some really fantastic recent podcast and he's talked about them with us too, about this notion of like structurally gold has to lift. It has to lift from the way the trading pairs are working and having been priced in oil, has to lift from the way the Treasury account will be monetized and managed. And so these are structural things that have a liquidity profile like gold. It's insane that gold's a $30 trillion asset and most of our family members would have, including us, but have no way to understand how to get it in a material way that you don't get killed in fees and you know you'll be able to take delivery. And so that's really where I think the line of demarcation, Brian, happens when it goes from a trade to savings is when people are actually concerned with their counterparty because people when it comes to trades are just how do I get in and out of my brokerage? How do I get the best margin access? And they're not thinking about volatility that Gustavo. And in Latin America knows when the bank just says, hey, sorry, your money's not your money or in Cyprus and all these other countries. And that is coming like full stop, that is coming because there's too much debt and there's not enough dollars and there's air pockets within the whole global financial system. And slowly people will wake up that their money is not theirs. And then what's the decision? We'll hold a bunch of Bitcoin and deal with it and, and learn everything we had to take 10 years to learn. Or what if that person understands gold and says, OK, I want best in class exposure to maybe gold, maybe some local currency and then a little Bitcoin. And then it can naturally prevent, protect themselves from what we're talking about here. And then they can go down the rabbit hole and increase their position in BTC or still be shielded from the basement with gold. Like that's just just rational, pragmatic solutions to market forces versus just telling somebody like it's easy, put 100% in a hardware device and go back to your life like that. Is it just an insane proposition for like 99% of people that this is just kind of the the value of when you're in the day-to-day, you get to see it. And if you're, if you iterate and are, you know, just open minded, I always go back to the quote and it's not actually not the great, the greatest person that quoted it. So I like to say the person you got it from, because it's John Maynard Keynes, which doesn't have the best reputation. But it's like when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? You know, like most people just get so they have the confirmation bias to get the mental model of how the world has to exist. The local again, podcaster told them it has to be this way. Gold's a shit coin. And it's just like, good luck if that's the way you're going to, like, build your framing of where we're headed, because where we're going is it going to be a completely different world. Look, I have to do it. I have to ask you, please, if you're enjoying this show, please leave a like comment, share the video, subscribe rate 5 stars, you know the spiel. I ask every single week and I am grateful every single week for those who support the show. If you want us to continue to do the show, if you want me to show up next week, all you have to do is leave a like a comment is excellent as well. And we'll continue to do the show. So thank you for being here. Really appreciate your support and hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Well, look, we're, we're coming up on an hour here. I think we got through a lot of the topics that we wanted to discuss, but I always like to make sure that we cover everything that we absolutely must. So curious, we'll give it to any one of you guys. If there's anything you really want to discuss, we could talk about. I got 1 you got a good one is can we please pull up the video of the Paxos Prince 300 trillion because I think I think this is important because this ties into something I don't know if we got a chance to to touch on or how much with the deleveraging flash crash that happened because it's all the same side. It's like the the casino has no circuit Breakers when it comes to a crypto or just tratify and it feels like these suits. Well, Jax is pulling it up. It's effectively like a hearing around. I think the market structure bill into these gentlemen look very dapper, handsome in the sense that like they look like they could be fed governors or chairs, but they're actually, you know, crypto, you know, managers. It's Kyle Sumani from Multi Coin and then Charles Casarella from Paxos. And the ideas they're getting I guess questioned about a week ago there was 300 trillion minted and Paxos dollars and this is their response to that. Yeah. And we'll just go on the record that Michael thanks Fed chairman are are very handsome week. What what went wrong with the minting process? Did the blockchain work as expected? And I guess for context for those that don't know, I think last week PayPal for 24 minutes or they're about printed 300 trillion U.S. dollars and and then unprinted them. We printed it, actually. Don't cast aspersions here. The mistake was entirely ours. Certainly we didn't operate at the standards that we expect of ourselves. You know, there is an interesting situation where you try to determine where does it make sense to be fully automated and what it where does it make sense to have manual interventions in order to be able to create additional levels of security. And in this case, our operational manual processes were put into place for deliberate reason in terms of being able to create very secure cold minting processes. But it's something that we rarely use. And so that led to an error in how much was minted. We knew within, you know, a minute or two, it all was contained on our system. It never left our system, which by the way, should never diminish how seriously we take this. But it did of course, lead to there being an over mint of a fantastically large number and and of course, the unwind of it. I think that, you know, the importance of this to me is it underscores the value of the blockchain. It actually shows the transparency that you can immediately have into what's going on. And so in this case, an operational error that was entirely internal to our systems is now immediately visible to everybody. So I'm sitting here, of course, talking about this and making it really clear about what we could do better. But that's important because that means you can have this level transparency throughout the entire financial system over time. That's a really positive thing. You know, it's of course painful to go through, but I think you could just imagine having a world where you would be able to see exactly what's happening in real time and being able to have that level of transparency to understand how firms are functioning. And that can create confidence in the financial system in a way that the opacity that exists today has really limited. And that's why you get accelerator effects and that's why you get run on banks, is because you don't know what you don't know. And so you're never going to have a perfect world where everything is completely transparent. But the more transparency they have, you have, I think the better the financial system will be over time. OK, the power of the blockchain, ladies and gentlemen. So I'm curious your guys's take from this. The biggest things that stood out was a how there wasn't any canned response or policy like PR that was like, hey, maybe just like be a little self deprecating, you know, don't try to acknowledge like the the there was a part in there where he referenced that it was very clear what he was explaining, which none of it was clear by way of seeing the lady turn. Like what was he saying? He like printed 300 trillion. But the other side of it, which is more practical, is that a, those people in there are running the economy that are listening to him. And then those are the future people that will, for better or worse. There's a reason why Trump's long all this stuff is this is where we're going. We're going to digitize stabilize, tokenize the world and the flash crash from 2 weeks ago that wiped out a lot of people is not prevented. He's talking about you know bank runs being prevented. This is only going to increase as you can move capital. We could print 300 trillion with a click of a button like and give it to everyone because he said it sell said contain Well what happened if it didn't wasn't contained. I still don't understand that and it just ties into again, counterparty risk and where your assets set in the notion of outside money versus inside money. If you're want your money inside because you don't understand this stuff, you're afraid of self custody or you have a small percentage like that's your choice. But the rational decision as people adopt material positions in gold or Bitcoin, they're just not going to want to be participate in this because this is where it's going. If these are the people running the set up and there's historical context to this, we've had 1929, we have all these different deleveraging points and we're setting up with all of this capital interest rates going, liquidity cycle coming. This is going to come and it's going to be more pronounced now that we have everything tokenized. And so, yeah, it was just fascinating to see it and like, and it just seemed like nobody really recognized the the how preposterous the whole setup was. Yeah, just say a shocking word salad from him on on that response to your point, like you got to imagine this question is coming and just just have a better response than that because the and you sort of alluded to this, Michael, But the most disingenuous part of the whole answer to me is like referring to it as an internal issue when the reality of the situation is like those tokens were minted, they subsequently burned them, but they were on chain. And the only reason it was quote UN quote internal is because they obviously control those wallets. They control the minting wallet and wherever it was deposited after after the minting. And so, yeah, it was quote UN quote contained in that respect, but there's nothing to say that it, you know, it it for say, for example, there was a bad actor involved with what occurred. Well, maybe it wasn't, you know, wouldn't have been contained necessarily. Maybe they don't burn all, all 300 trillion of it. And some of that leaks out. So the the broader take away to me is like, this is the this is a sort of a peek behind the curtain moment of all this crypto shit and real world assets. And, you know, the power of the blockchain, as he says, like the reality on the ground is like the fact that this even has the ability to occur tells you a lot about what crypto and what the broader digital asset space actually is underneath the surface. Because at the end of the day, you know, there is a point of centralization and that centralization will be manipulated. And so, you know, even though this was a quote UN quote, you know, inadvertent mistake, the fact that it could happen points to the flawed nature of proof of stake networks and really everything outside of Bitcoin. Obviously, you know, that's not proof of work. You can't just spin up new bitcoins. You have to provably exert energy in the real world in order to do so. And so I think it's just sort of a mask off moment. And and it's, it's funny because like they don't even realize it. Like they're laughing to each other about this when it's like, no, you are. You're, you're telling on yourself here that this is all bullshit. I'd just like to add that, you know, and what, what if those coins going out on the wild? Well, they could have just froze them, but that just adds to that, to that narrative that actually so yeah, well, yeah, you can freeze them, but that's that's that's our point. And you can just print them and freeze them and, and, and what's the difference with with the Fiat system anyways, right. So this just means that, yeah, there there's stable coin adoption happening, but you, you in the end, you, you haven't solved the the initial issue, which is why Bitcoin will ultimately win. Gustavo, on that note, just curious how you see your business and just like Bitcoin only businesses and the related to like what's happening in Latin America, like it is, as an example, the Middle East and specifically the UAE is like ultra sophisticated in a funny, in a kind of ironic way on on crypto, right? They have really great regulations and they love kind of everything from real world assets to just everything that exists in that system. But they have no fundamental understanding of Bitcoin. And it's been this haven for people to go out there, specifically when the US markets were antagonistic. And obviously, there's a huge opportunity there because the large percentage of the world's wealth sits there and then they understand commodities and oil and they're doing mining. But how do you think about Latin America and the proliferation of like crypto and all of that as it relates to individuals and just trying to preserve their wealth? Just any color you can do? Because in Latin America, I'm less familiar with how, you know, the markets work when it comes to like crypto and the different people that are down there. It's the same story people don't don't have. I haven't actually yet made the difference between crypto and Bitcoin in except in El Salvador. You, you are from the government. But everywhere else it's, it's the same story. We're, we're still in that. I, I think we, I, I really see it like that you have a difference of view of, of those in, in the US, maybe in Canada, but everywhere else in the world. I kind of put it in the same boat. However, I do think like that there's more awareness of hyperinflation risks of bank run risks probably in Latin America than than in UAE just because it's a less stable region. So there there's definitely pockets of people that that understand the value of Bitcoin in in that perspective, right. But most, but what we always say that like memory, like collective memory is, is isn't that long. So you, you I would coming, I grew up in Canada, although I was born in Peru, but coming to Mexico, I was expecting more people to be aware of, of, of these risks. And I have a longer time horizon. Like you guys went through hyperinflation in the 80s and the 90s. You should remember it more. But then you're like, no, only a few buckets of people do most, most collective memories very short in the end, right. So, so I think it's in the same boat as the UAE, although there's, there are a few people that that remember their history better. It is it it, it is there. That shift hasn't happened yet. Well, gentlemen, it's been a good episode. I have to run for another call, but I enjoyed the conversation. One last question for you, Jackson, It's a big one. Do you like tequila? I do. OK. Just making sure. All right. Well, thanks. Everyone watch out for the punch ball. I've had my fair share. I'm not worried about it, all right? Jackson's prepared for the spiking we'll. See you. Later, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Gustavo. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com Contact Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.