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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 will soon be developed is a reliable E cash all. Righty gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, March 23rd, 10:37 AM Eastern Standard Time. Wild week, wild weekend, wild morning markets. Whips on back and forth on some Trump comments, Iran rebuttals and then Trump re rebuttals. No idea really what's going on. Hard to believe anything you hear out of either this administration or any other, but markets are reacting nevertheless. Gentlemen, how are we doing? Pretty good, pretty good. But a little disoriented between, you know, running businesses, the AI fever pitch and then geopolitics kind of just shifting every hour feels like something news being released. We're not at war. We are at war. We're opening up oil. We're not opening up oil. There's not enough fertilizer. There is enough fertilizer. It's it's pretty, pretty wild time to be alive right now. Seems seems very starting on purpose. Yeah, exactly. To to really figure out what's going on in the world today. Yeah, I'll just pull up the Bitcoin chart here for a second. You can kind of see this morning there was a jump and this kind of happened across all risk assets, S&P, some other things when Trump tweeted out that discussions were happening to some extent, you know, kind of signaling the war was going to be over sooner rather than later. Iran then comes out, denies that, but then Trump sort of says, well, we weren't talking to the supreme leader. We were talking to some other top official. And then there were some reports that there was back channeling through other countries. So again, very hard to discern what's going on, but we've kind of seen this the past few weeks. We're like literally market hours. Trump says something to basically quell volatility, maybe like, you know, sort of dampen the uptrend on oil in particular. And then after the market closes or on the weekends, that's like when things have escalated. And like over the weekend, there was talks of, you know, boots on the ground, ground invasions of Iran, general escalation. And then it was kind of like market, market open. Let's let's calm things down so that that I mean, it's very hard to believe anything that's being said directionally, but I think what we do know and and this was something we had on the list, but this is just an interesting sort of anecdote from United CEO Scott Kirby saying the airline is prepping for oil that hit 175. They don't think it comes back below 100 till the end of 2027. And so, you know, this is a signal in the sense that this is a a business that is, is attempting to plan for at least the medium to long term. And, you know, thinking that this, this uptrend in oil is here to stay. You know, I think, and there's some credits that in the sense that, you know, part of what happened last week was the actual destruction of certain infrastructure, which has, you know, estimates of into the years of like basically what it would take to rebuild some of that infrastructure. And so there's going to be real constraint on oil. And then Michael, as you reference like that kind of flows through to other things like fertilizer and other petrochemicals. So I, you know, I think it's interesting to see ACEO sort of like what their signals they're sending to the market are relative to like what Trump is saying on any given morning. Because these people are are needing to plan long term where Trump is really just trying to like think, you know, at most 12 hours ahead and like what markets are doing it seems. But curious if you guys think. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, this is obviously the most important topic happening right now as it relates to business inflation. I think there's a a couple key things in that, you know, ACEO coming out, obviously having jet fuel being a big input into the operations, but this kind of to your point transpires across all industries. When you think about inflation, petroleum by products, food, fertilizer. And so you just end up in this world already rocky with inflation and even harder to build a business. How do you think about risk? How do you think about capital outlays? I think one of the big things that's somewhat discussed is like ultimately the end of the the dollar system as we know it, right? We we knew there was rumblings post O eight Russian sanctions, but really when you think about petrodollar and then ultimately to be able to get across the street, they're settling in Yuan. This was a lot of that discussion that's been happening from multipolar world BRICS countries. I mean, this is just laying this like ground and I think it's just important it from a business perspective, a lot of just reducing counterparty risk. And what I mean by counterparty risk is just like thinking about production of the things you need. It's the same thing as an individual, but specifically if you're a business, whether you need chips, you need laptops, like anything that you just like absolutely need. I, I don't hold for for certain that they will be there in the future. I think we've seen slivers of this with COVID when you think about all the shortages that happen. And I'd be shocked because to your point, there was a wonderful podcast from the monetary matters. I forgot. I think their block works pretty spot. But point being is and I don't even remember the guy that came on, but if you go back, it was 2 pods ago with an individual that's very deep in the commodities and oil markets. Just explaining to what Brian was saying is that like this stuff is forward indicating in the sense that once you stop these productions from the refinement to us like slowing things down, it ultimately takes like weeks if not months to turn back on or if not years. And then now when you see some of the destruction that's happening that like this stuff will have ramifications much further into the future than what we know can expect. The last thing it is, as it relates to Trump, it like the reason why I think Growman angles to the Taco situation is like there's nothing they can do for a long period of time that effectively disrupts the global financial system because the whole thing will come cratering, right? You have the bond market pulled up here. We've seen inflation, there's gas, oil, diesel, like all these things are effectively going outside of the bands of normalcy and that starts to break everything with it. And so there's only so long before they can do that unless they're just going to cause a global financial like collapse. And so I think that's really where you see this dynamic of back and forth where something has to happen. As much as things look grim over the weekend, this was kind of my expectation that they're going to start to walk things back because it's the same thing with the tariffs when Trump first got elected. It ultimately like they did it until somebody had to calm them down, was like, dude, you're going to blow up the whole system unless you kind of like pull it back. So I think that's the base case. But obviously that only always works until it doesn't. And then maybe one day he doesn't check it out and we end up in some kind of crazy, you know, event. But until till then, that's kind of like my operating system is like there's disruption and volatility, but then he pulls it back. But it's a peak of what's looking like to come. Yeah, I mean, it's a fair point. I would say the only difference between this and like tariffs is like there are bombs flying at this point. So it's like a little more precarious to just think you can like pull back from a lot of this stuff. I agree with you though that like they need to or everything collapses, so it's like they need to find an off ramp. And I think a lot of the commentary has been like maybe too optimistic in the sense that like, Oh yeah, we know we're going to figure this out. We're going to find a way to off ramp here in some manner or function. But yeah, Liam, any thoughts on that before we we get into the go ahead? Yeah, I mean, without, without sounding conspiratorial, like there's a lot of discussions happening right now from like capital investment, we've seen the sovereigns moving from the West to the East, that there is a real chance that outside of this, the Middle East ends up stronger, the East ends up stronger, oil trade, dollar dominance ends up weaker. That a lot of these things like there's there's bombs falling, but there's a real reality like this all ends up in the next couple months or weeks in like, OK, we did what we had to do. Oil production goes up, which is a net positive, right, If you're producing that oil. And also, you know, I don't follow geopolitics closely, but there are very smart people saying that potentially regime change already took place in Iran before this. And so like there was just questions of like how much obviously it's different than the tariffs, but I, I mean more from like the market optics and the financial market optics of like we just saw what happened in the volatility. And then with gold as well. I don't think it's like a foregone conclusion that there are ways to just like start to pull back from the financial from like the stock market perspective, not from inflation, because inflation is going to continue to RIP, but I think from the equity markets, which basically the whole financial system's levered to, to be able to like come back with it. Yeah, yeah. I mean the rates are related. Though, right? Because the go ahead, go ahead. No, just going to say it's wild sea just after the US trying to support Ukraine for a very long time and then going in and doing what it's doing in Iran. Just unsanctioning both Russian and Iranian oil over the past few days is definitely a telling sign that they are pretty concerned about just the impact from inflation. And just where the bond market has gone, as well as oil prices right ahead of a midterm election is just not something that I think the administration is willing to let continue for any prolonged period of time. And then it yeah, in addition to that, it's, it's interesting to see the United CEO really try to plan for $175 oil. I think that they were the one that was actually prepared for COVID or getting ahead of all the other airlines and understood that this could be prolapsed or prolonged disruption to everything. And so I think that they're just similar to everything out there. There are folks who are planning for how the world is going to continue to change over the next few years and months. Both related to this, what's going on on the ground this week, as well as just how the world in general is shifting away from the existing power structures. And the fact the the US is allowing bombs to fly into, you know, UAE and, and some other countries that are it typically has been able to protect in the past. Is just a telling situation of how the global world order and defense is, is changing pretty significantly over time, which has implications for clock across cross national corporations and and where they really want to store their capital in, in terms of dollars versus other assets out there too. Yeah, I agree with all that. The only other thing I was going to say was that interestingly, sort of the bond market is now effectively pricing in an interest rate hike, one interest rate hike for 2026, which I think tells you all you need to know about inflation expectations. And, and sort of where market participants think that, you know, even if we do sort of find an off ramp for this war, like there's going to be a lasting implications around the cost of, of goods and services and, and sort of knock on effects of a lot of what's already happened. Even if we were to sort of neatly tie this up some now in the next few weeks or months. But we're going to move on. We have a, a big list, big list of topics to get into. Mike, I'm going to kick it to you to talk about this news from last week around the CFTC joining the SEC to clarify the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets. What does this mean and why is it relevant? Yeah. I mean, I think there's really a mosaic of things that are going on in this segment. There's obviously this that's been up for grabs forever when it comes to clarity on what is a security and then what is a commodity. Historically, anybody that was conservative or I don't want to say conservative, but just understood production and and registered securities or unregistered securities would call most crypto assets unregistered securities because they have a central issuer. They don't pass the highway test. And then commodities would be really tied to physical production of like creation in the real world aspect. And you know, where Bitcoin has that example is via proof of work. But this clarity and I think a lot of individuals saw it coming was putting a whole basket of things into the commodity field that traditionally weren't. So I believe Solana Ripple or yeah, Ripple and a bunch of other assets are in that structure. I think the main angle here in before we go, if you guys have thoughts, we'll go some of the others because I think they fit nicely with this is ultimately that this is a lot of the like groundwork before the market participants. The Morgan Stanley's, the Fidelity's and others that are stepping in in a big way needed to be in place because they do need clarity if they're going to offer these securities or commodities to the market. They need clarity on like what they are before they can go out and start positioning them among other things. So it's obviously, you know, bullish in the sense there's market structure coming that will allow institutions to have clarity into these things. It's also very bearish on obviously the gamble Fication and the speculation that you know, persists right now. Yeah, I'm fortunate in the sense that I think these things are securities and they're going to basically bend the rules to allow a lot of this stuff to proliferate, which was probably always going to be the case. But the the bigger take away or tell to me is effectively, yeah, I put a higher likelihood that we get the Clarity Act passed sooner rather than later. If the CFTC and SEC are going to kind of sing Kumbaya Kumbaya here and like say we need to get something done and have this almost joint responsibility in in terms of agreeing on on what architecture could or should look like. Like that tells me we're we're closer to getting something passed that not. And then this is another like we wanted to share Elliott Terret saying that effectively characterizing some progress in terms of the specifically the Clarity Act talks and what's going on there. So remains to be seen. I mean, we've kind of been going back and forth on this for a while now, it seems. But yeah, anything else on this, Mike? Yeah. I mean, I think tying in a few just related to and then we can riff on whichever direction you guys want to go is to your point. I didn't think about it in that way, but that actually makes sense. You get clarity on, no pun intended, on the CFTCSEC ruling on commodities versus securities. It looks very close. So I think Lamas, in that tweet somebody was referencing as close to like 99.9%. My understanding of the angle is that you will be able to pass back quote UN quote yield, whether they call it that or not. It just can't be in a one to one relationship. So what that means is let's say you're a Coinbase Prime or whatever, one client, you get exposure maybe based on your tier on the amount of yield you get back. It can be tied potentially to some of the balance you have, but it's not going to be like you have $100,000 and you're getting exactly proportion of that, that capital there, which sounds like a decent middle ground. It helps because when you have it directly tied that really. It feels like a good. Compromise if somebody is not deep in the weeds here and they're looking at do I go to Wells Fargo, do I go to Coinbase and they're going to be 5%. There's a bunch of other stipulations on that 5% theoretically, so that at least gets them to not apples to apples. So that feels very positive from the clarity act. I've I've long held clarity act will be that kind of last moment before I think the the machine is ready to roll when it comes to, you know, Bitcoin flows turning on and just like a lot of the things turning on with Morgan Stanley and others. The other two things just to call out was randomly. I mean, it's not randomly. I think it just shows where we're going in this tokenization and movement of capital into 24/7 markets. We talked about a six months ago hyper liquid was out there to quote UN quote decentralized blockchain. They've been, you know, public right now really running with a lot of the commodities trading because of the 24/7 markets, but then also S&P 500 just licensed ability to trade at perpetuals of 24/7 on hyper liquid. And then the only other thing is around the SEC approving NASDAQ to be listed on tokenized securities. Why that's probably the most interesting is because it's treating those stocks like fungible tokens, the fact that we have the same QSIP, so they're recognized across the spectrums versus being like on the outside periphery. Why am I talking about this? Why do I care? Because we're, you know, a Bitcoin company, Bitcoin Focus podcast. The reason why is because I think that a lot of these things needed to naturally get in place before, again, that machine starts running. And also in reality is most companies if they're going to survive in the future, they don't have to become crypto companies, but they're going to have to start looking more like traditional banks, Oregon traditional fintechs. That means that traditional banks and fintechs are going to be adopting these assets in the same way that native companies to this space will lose market share sees to exist will not be acquired unless they figure out how to provide other services next to Bitcoin. And that's just pragmatic and rational because if somebody's offering you trade as an example, and let's say the best Bitcoin only exchange offers you 45 bits on trade, well, if Bank of America is offering you 35 and you have your mortgage, any of your bank account there, the rational thing to do is just stay there. I'm not saying that's for everyone, especially native people of space that have an allegiance to a certain company, but when you think about 99.9% of people coming into space, that's just rationally going to do. So we've been thinking a lot about this. We have a lot planned on the ARM side related to this stuff, but I thought this was really bullish long, middle to long term simply because this is the changing of the financial system for better or worse. And we're just going to have things trade 24/7, tokenize, and it's going to come with a lot of volatility, a lot of rugging, but also a lot of that capital is going to flow into Bitcoin. Couldn't agree more. I also, there are a few things that are interesting too, just to point out on this as well. Like all this groundwork has been laid for a really long time. But ultimately, I think a lot of the Clarity Act getting across the line is ultimately going to depend on just what's going on right now in like, Iran and in the popularity of the Republicans, regardless if we wanted or not, like a lot of this. You know, digital asset ecosystem is just associated with Trump at the moment and Democrats don't like it. And so, you know, the popularity of the Republicans will probably impact when and if this gets over the line. I think it's it's more of a question of when, not if. The yield piece is interesting too. It seems like the banks probably got a lot of what they were looking for too. Just the fact that if you are larger, you're able to capture a larger part of the yield means that like we've been seeing over the past, you know, 50 years or so, the discern mediation of small credit unions and smaller financial institutions because there's probably going to be some B to B to C deal that the larger primes, it can actually pass along to their customers on the other side. So thought that those two pieces were really interesting. But in the end, yeah, I mean, in order to have Citi, Bank of America or Morgan Stanley, all those folks really start to offer strong products to their clients. They want it to be regulated. And and we'll touch on some of this later too, but essentially everybody right now is just, you know, CYA game as it relates to digital assets because it's such a nascent industry and there's been so many bad actors in the space to date. So it really just does need to have some of these regulations before there's just a flood of more capital coming into the space is kind of a a catalyst. Yeah, that's all. Agree with all that. I think the what stuck out to me around the S&P Hyper Liquid story was there was a status all last week that and you sort of alluded to this Mike, But like on hyper Liquid, like the the majority of volume is now actually more traditional assets as opposed to like what really what that platform started as was a way to trade perpetuals on crypto token. So like whether it was Solana or Ethereum or other things. And now it's like it's, it's oil and copper and like commodities that amass the, the mass, the the majority of trading volume. And so I think this is just another step in that direction of sort of like, you know, maybe it was always going to play out like this, but these these digital asset blockchain rails are really being, you know, more and more used for traditional financial activities as opposed to like the crypto native token stuff, which is interesting in the context of what we just talked about around like the clarity and the market structure and people wanting to know if these things are securities or not. It's like, well, are people even trading that stuff anymore? It kind of seems like not they're just using these rails for, you know, tokenizing the world or what not. But we had a few other links we want to get to around stable coins in particular. This is this is Big Mike's, Big Mike's stable coin roundup. I'll go to the the Stripe headline first. Michael, what's going on with this that the machine payments protocol that that Stripe is talking about? If the Bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that. And I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns that is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me. Yeah. So I mean this past week Tempo obviously been in the knees with Stripe. I mean Stripe when you think about it and their foresight in scale has been pretty incredible. I think they just raised at $150 billion valuation. They did the Bridge acquisition which in Tratfy Fintech might be one of the the if they can execute on this and the markets going where we think it is one of the greatest M&A acquisitions for a company that Bridge was only a few years old at a billion dollars, but the idea is so Tempo had raised $500 million at I think a $5 billion valuation close to a year ago. The idea was to really build a protocol for stable for really just stable coins, fast movement. It's my understanding that other like cryptocurrencies can be settled on there, but they're incentivized not to via the fee structure. And so I believe MPP stands for multi path payments. It is effectively using Stripe in their tooling for different both sides of the market, right? So if you're paying over this, it's not just tempos or whatever stablecoin they have. So any asset can settle here, USDC stablecoins, but also they have an integration with light Spark to be able to net settle BTC. But the core idea is that you can inject this via into like HTTP pages, anything that you would be natively on the Internet. There's subtle differences between what you hear about in like X4, O2, which is what Coinbase's protocol for injecting, you know, value into HTTP, and then L4-O2, which is like Lightning's implementation. The net of it is that if you're using Stripe and, and MPP, you're effectively using their tooling. So when you go and set up a Stripe account, you have your own business onboarding, you have your own processing around it. But the core idea is whether it's AI Agenta commerce or just native payments online, this helps provide the tooling and infrastructure to seamlessly accept digital value, which I think we've talked about heavily here that we're just going to increasingly see more agent to commerce. The last thing we say is like, well, why would you want that? Like, why wouldn't you put your credit card in there will always still, you know, for a long time. In the same way I think of like the the example here is like early Internet days. Very few people wouldn't even put their card online because they were worried about phishing, social engineering, all the things associated with when the Internet first came about. Similar here is there's going to be better tooling and better permissioning. But when you think about forget about like AI hitting AP is and having the right permission set to go. And it's less of a clunky experience than having to authenticate with a different platform, putting credentials to get the API load up your credit card. I think about more seamless transactions of when you're. This is a funny example, but it is still worthwhile of like in your home as you start to get more digitized. Think about your refrigerator as an example. There's going to be automatic fulfillment where you realize that because the weight in the door has the milk lower than expected or whatever it's going to send to Amazon, we need to buy this. And then you're just going to have it programmatically paid for. And this is going to exist across Internet commerce, whether it's via your shopping habits for anything that you're after or Agenta commerce when it comes to leveraging AI. And so they're being they're prepared for this. They're looking at it and there's a real opportunity for them. This ties into another segment or a topic we'll talk about with Mastercards acquisition, but there's Visa, MasterCard and Stripes Plain to be in the middle of that mix and they're just coming at it from a completely native angle versus these other incumbents and it's really interesting to watch. Yeah, you mentioned the MasterCard BB and K deal. This is fascinating in the sense that, you know, this was talked about last year in the context of of Coinbase potentially doing a deal for BB and K that sort of fell through. And now it comes out that this $1.8 billion deal for MasterCard to acquire BB and K seems to be getting across the finish line. And this comes after, as you mentioned, Stripes deal, which I believe the numbers there were. Yeah, here 1.1 billion per bridge. So price is going up for stablecoin infrastructure effectively. And so interesting dynamics here. Maybe, Liam, I'll kick it to you. Any thoughts on on this deal? This was announced last week. Pretty pretty large news. Yeah, I mean, it's massive. It's despite the bear market in digital assets as a whole, stable coins are definitely a bull market right now. Just the amount of tooling that's coming out across the Stripe bridge side and the amount of demand that's coming for Sable coin orchestration platforms. I think that you know, this, this will continue to increase. I'm really surprised to see, you know, the fact that the Coinbase acquisition fell through and they they got a deal done with MasterCard because I think MasterCard obviously wants to be in the space. I think they were trying to go for the acquisition of 0 Hash a few months ago, but that ended up falling through. So obviously, all of the payment providers are making their mark, understanding that this is going to be where the enterprise value of the industry is going longer term and they're continuing to put their stake in the ground. Yeah, I mean, other than that, no, nothing necessarily that's really standing out here. Not surprised that this deal ended up getting done just because there's there's really so much demand for infrastructure. But there's really just like a massive mismatch between the amount of legitimate companies in the space and the amount of acquirers as this legislation starts to turn. Yeah, One thing that's really interesting, I like this is this is a statement to be a little hyperbolic, but it on it, I believe it to be directionally true is they're not even acquiring them for their technology or their clients. They're acquiring them for their team. Now obviously they have technology and they have clients, they have revenue. But to Liam's point, there's really two big bottlenecks. Like when you think about the how we started the segment, maybe that's the the the key meta to explaining that is the land is shifting beneath us. We talk about all the time on the AISA, but similarly in the way money moves and the value they'll be delivered to these fintechs and incumbents. And there is only so much infrastructure to buy. That's one part. But even more importantly, in my mind, there's only so many brains that are building at scale in this space and have a lens into the future. And so when you look at like what bridge in their revenue and where they're at probably pales in comparison to the value that they got Stripe by buying that brand, but getting that team that understands the space. And Stripe probably already had some of that internally, right, because they are, you know, probably what is it 15 year Old Firm or whatever. So they're they're native to just like very different profile than a MasterCard and Visa. So they were looking at this, but they still needed people that had operated in this world to go acquire them to build this new future. And so that MasterCard angle to Liam's point, they were looking at 0 hash and other native firm that fell apart and they knew they had to make a play here if they're going to be relevant. And this is something that I talked to a lot of banks about when we're talking about potential partnerships is like it's more of in a partnership, it's really an alliance because there's bi directional support. Like when a bank, especially regional bank turns these assets on, they really have two choices. They can go do the PNC route and go sign up with Coinbase. And then they effectively are like, in my view, and I've talked to them about this, it's almost like sealing their fate because there will get disintermediated on a long of time horizon. In the same way most banks have been disintermediated because there's four large banks in the US that control and hold most of the assets that if you're just going to give Coinbase that flow and you're going to operate there, you're effectively just kind of like signing, in my view, again, a death wish in that like you won't be around for the future because now you have no client relate. You have the client relationship in some ways, but then the asset, the underline is just getting pushed off to a third party provider. And so when we talk with banks, it's very similar in that lens of there's a bi directional relationship. They have the licensing, they have the reputations, they have the brand. But on the same side, if they're going to turn on Bitcoin custody, lending stable coins, they need the support and leverage and understanding where the market is going. Anybody listening here, I would imagine has a, a bent towards BTC winning out long term over other assets. We look at Bitcoin in that same way, along with stablecoins. There's still very few people on the planet earth that are going to talk to these large institutions with that lens. And so our our goal and our job is to find those firms because we think with those firms building with that focus are going to outcompete others that are going to get caught chasing the shiny objects. And so I think that's just an important part of the BBK acquisition is MasterCard really needs somebody that's looking at the world through their lens to help them build that future. Yeah, I mean, this is something we've talked about for probably over a year now, the show of like there's not too many paths for a company like MasterCard. You either partner with Coinbase or you go out and and Apple hire effectively the brains to to your point Michael, to be able to at least be sort of on the forward foot in terms of thinking through how how this world is going to play out. One other stablecoin headline I did want to get to was this gold backed stablecoin. Mike, I'm sure, I'm sure this tickled your fancy. Tokenization platform VO plans to introduce gold powered stablecoin which is set to generate yield from 2 independent sources. I don't know what that last last part means. There yields from 2 independent sources. We'll maybe we'll find out here. Yeah. Oh, something to do with Hyper Liquid? Great. So this this caught my favorite part about it's not my favorite. It's one of my favorite parts of that building is like in general, there's very few people I make happy because as much as I'm I've like have all my money in Bitcoin. I just see the world for what it is. And like I told Brian about this thing was coming. Hyper liquid was coming. Like for whatever reason, there's people telling me dude, I. I didn't tell you, didn't you didn't. You didn't tell me about Hyper Liquid. I knew hyper liquid was a thing long before. I didn't tell you about hyper liquid, but I was explaining how like you didn't the case. The point is that 12 months ago you would have laughed if you thought like SMP was going to be licensing and the volume of gold in commodities. Like that was the point. That was the point. It's the same way of like the stable coin or the gold stuff. It's more just like the angle here. That's fascinating. Hey, I didn't even know this was on the radar. This was Liam and Nick. They had this. If anybody's not subscribing, you should subscribe to. I think we're gonna change the name, but it's still early writers. The open range. Open. Range open. Open Range newsletter like and subscribe. But why this really caught my eye is because something that I've long held as we we go to this free banking style, which are kind of already there when you think about it, like why would somebody try to hyper liquid is because they expect them to fulfill what they're promising. Similar with finance, nothing stable coins ultimately go in that direction and they start today backed by treasuries and then people are going to start backing them with other things. I think this has long been tethers play and they've long seen that. And so they don't necessarily do it exactly today, but their balance sheet reflects that and that gives them the air of credibility if somebody's going to put real significant flow there. So where this caught my eye was that a, gold is a lot theoretically less volatile than Bitcoin. In the past, you know, 12 months, it's been a little bit different. But that a, they were having a stable coin backed by gold. I think where you're sending 2 independent sources, they're doing a little bit of like their long spot and then they're trading the futures to hedge out some of the volatility. But that we will just naturally start to see other ways that you're going to back a stable point. Now I didn't go deep enough and I don't know if Liam did in that if this is only available, I would imagine to you outside of US investors. But I thought what was most interested here wasn't even the hyper liquid stuff. It was just mainly the aspect of more and more the design surface is out there and people are going to have really interesting ways to peg a dollar to different assets. And then that free banking style reputation in Lindy is what's going to allow significant flow and reputation to ultimately go there. And so TBD at this actually works out, but I expect to see a lot more of those. And then, you know, give or take two to 10 years from now, I do think we're going to see dollar stable coins backed by a bunch of other assets outside of just U.S. Treasuries. I think that's right. I think the yield mostly just comes from the cash and carry trade where there still is, you know, some amount of dollars within this as well. But to your point, I think that over the long term folks are going to increasingly look like Tether in terms of diversifying their assets across both treasuries, maybe some amount of private assets that are long term investments. That's a smaller portion of the portfolio, but primarily gold and Bitcoin and maybe a little bit of land in there too. I think despite what they're we're seeing right now with the the recent sell off in gold just shows that right now there are a ton of folks out there who can't necessarily make the jump all the way from, you know, dollars or gold backed stable coins. And gold really is just the center of money. And as we digitize money, there are going to be more and more ways in order to try to create gold backed stable coins and gold backed money, including tokenized gold and tethers. Obviously doing a lot there. But yeah, I think that we'll see more attempts to do it. Who knows if this ends up being successful or not though. Yeah, 100%. Paulo and Teller have been all over this for a long time. This was an interesting line that just from this, this headline here saying we're a better market for crypto now we're starting out with risk off assets, whether that's T belts or coal. So you know, maybe that's just part of the calculus here too. And it relates to what I wanted to jump to next, which was Kraken freezing its multi billion dollar IPO plans due to difficult market conditions. I guess not totally surprising, but I think you know, there's been basically Gemini, we have that go. We had some other sort of large IPO plans. Bullish was the other one that I mean I haven't looked at their stock charts recently, but I'd imagine they're trending downwards since their IPO. So I think this is just sort of some cautionary footing from Kraken, who as recently as four months ago said it was planning to go public. And so now it's sort of shelving those plans. So maybe maybe later this year happens. But any thoughts on this one guys? I mean, the biggest one is I do think there's the market conditions, but I do think there's just internal dynamics that aren't discussed here, specifically their CFO. I don't know if he got ousted or left about 30 to 60 days ago. And so cracking is like a a darling in the crypto sense. They've been around for a while, but they're also just an interesting organization that, you know, I'd be very interested to see what their financials look like. We know what Gemini's look like. Gemini had had 30% of a head force headcount reduction the past like week or two. That market conditions also with just like internal dynamic. I think it's probably just there's, there's a component of like internal, I don't know what the right word is, but like I don't know if they have their shit together as well. If you're lose your CFO in the middle of trying to go public, that is not generally a good sign. Not a great sign, yeah. Yeah, that's definitely something that is just going to be a red flag that makes a lot of institutional investors not touch the company. But Crackin is one of those companies out there that actually does publish their financials. I just put it in the chat here, there adjusted, I mean it sounds like these are audited. I forget where exactly they are audited from, but it seems like in 2025 they made 2.2 billion in revenue, almost over 500 million in Adjusted EBITDA. So they are one of the companies who's been around for a longer period of time and and has been profitable and and they did raise I think it was 2 like $40 billion or out of $40 billion valuation with participation from Citadel and some other folks ahead of this too. So I think there honestly be maybe more to deal with just internal. And I wouldn't be surprised if there is also a little bit of rumblings that they can hear about what's going on with potential legislation or other internal dynamics out there that we aren't just Privy deal. But yeah, they, they are one who at least based on what they've provided with their financials is profitable, unlike the Bitco and and or Bitco is profitable. But Gemini is getting crushed. I think they're down 80% since listing and Bitco just is is down a bit because the the bull market is kind of turned since the listing of those two stocks. So not to put you on the spot, but I'm generally curious if you know like their revenue profile versus a Bitco and specifically at valuation because that's significantly obviously it's private markets. But if they were raising at a 40 billion Bicco went, you know, IPO D at a few billion dollars, I think their value probably now I haven't looked, but recently with the drawdown at a billion and 1/2 that 50 billion in revenue is a little bit of a accounting when you think on the on the Bitco side, because of the trading volume, I think it was closer to like, I don't know, I don't want to be unfair to them, but it was much less than that. When you look at like custody fees, Obviously we love Bitco, they're a partner. But I'm just thinking about like that valuation compared to here. What's the revenue mix that's that's different that gives them a greater valuation at? Least, I don't know if it's necessarily revenue. I think it's the Adjusted EBITDA, I don't know, it goes off the top of my head in terms of EBITDA, but I think that their net profit is something like 15,000,000 or was last year and these guys had over half a billion in Adjusted EBITDA. And so that's they have almost 50 billion in terms of assets on the platform. I think they've just been around longer. They've been a little bit more customer facing and that's kind of why the the companies out there have been, you know, valuing cracking into a little bit higher than than a folks like that go. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting because they, I believe they integrated Alpaca on the back end for stock trading and that that goes back to the point of like market optics and looking more like a client, not only client acing firm, but also offering different products that are going to cross that bridge when it looks like a traditional like finance firm versus more of an infrastructure play. And so again, I don't even know how much is warranted in evaluation, but we all know the stock market is more of a vibes and momentum game. So that that would make sense because I think they've been actually don't know how long they've been letting people trade traditional equities, but I feel like it's been at least a decent while versus I think Coinbase just turned that on. Yeah, you got to imagine that Citadel is getting some sort of data sharing or or sweetheart deal, especially as they turn on equities on the platform too. And I'm sure that Citadel, especially their quant team is trading digital assets and like probably a non hyper liquid and stuff too. Yeah, Cracking's OTC in trading is a more of a trade, a trading venue than Bitco. Would be Check out earlyriders.com for all the latest in Bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show. OK. I did want to move on. I was going to bring up the investor survey that EY and Coinbase put out. I think there was some interesting data in here. We could take it in a number of different directions, but basically this was a institutional investor digital assets survey put together by EY and Coinbase. There's a lot in here primarily focused on sort of stable coin adoption, tokenization, real world assets, general allocation frameworks, how people are thinking about their exposure to digital assets. I will before I I kick it to you guys, the the most interesting thing in here to me was slide 20 around custodians. 61% of respondents currently invested in digital assets use more than one custodian, while 36% use a single custodian and 56% have a multi custodian model and plan to continue. 24% have a single custodian model to continue with that. And then there was some amount here that, yeah, 12% that have a single custodian model but plan to switch to a multi custodian model. I just thought this was interesting because it's very logical in the sense that more is better than one, even if you're just diversifying custodians. We've seen this in the mining industry for some time where firms that hold a lot of Bitcoin tend to spread out the custody of their assets because if something were to happen to one of them, at least you retain the assets from the other custodians. Now how this relates obviously to to on ramp and what we do there in in the sense that multi institutional custody is fundamentally a different architecture than just distributing assets to multiple custodians. It actually provides redundancy and fault tolerance with the quorum model to say, yes, we're going to spread this out, but in a quorum structure where if one, if something happens to one, you're not losing 33%, you're actually losing 0%. So this was encouraging to me in the sense that at least directionally people are thinking about this correctly in the sense that there's a recognition that just having a single custodian, his dad, particularly for an asset like Bitcoin. Curious what else you guys pulled out of this survey or if you have any thoughts on this one in particular. Yeah, I didn't I didn't have a chance to look at this. So I don't have much to add outside of what you just called out here, which is really fascinating on the multi custodial model. You know, there's, there's a business world or business idea in the crypto world where somebody should launch something related to what we do, except for just go and like figure out the relationship to manage with the other custodians. And then you give the right legal assurances from the the owner of those assets. So you obviously having to deal with them and you give them a unified platform because we often get this. I just got this the other day from sending an e-mail out and the individual was asking, he was moving his IRA over, but then also asking, you know, are you guys looking at gold? And then what would it be in multi institution as well? And I think that's a big part of the barrier. Like we know we see this end state where Bitcoin settles in multi institution. Most people don't actually understand that multi sig native multi sig is only available to on the Bitcoin protocol. Everything else would have to build some kind of smart contract. We've obviously seen the problems with those smart contracts and multi sig, the most famous one or infamous one is the buy bit hack. But the point being is that the market to your to your point, Brian understands risk, at least sophisticated investors do. They're saying they want to split it around. We see Sailor doing this, but it's still obviously inefficient. You have multiple counterparties, multiple white lists, multiple levels, and then you also still have a single counterparty that can lose a percentage of those assets. But this really highlights that how not only early, but like the lack of education because most people will see multi custody and they'll think that you're just separating the asset in three different custodians. But it made me think it's not a bad idea if we decide to, you know, bring gold to the platform that you could offer to be able to split that gold, the physical gold in that, you know, deal. So it's at least some level of diversification. But yeah, it's, it's fascinating to see that people are asking about that. Yeah. The other aspect that I thought was interesting too is Page 3, Brian. It's just the fact that, I mean, you can't necessarily blame everybody because they only have limited amount of time to think about digital assets and Bitcoin in general. But it sounds like 2/3 report looking to get their first exposure to digital assets through ETFs and 81% prefer spot exposure through a registered vehicle. So it's just natural that like we've been talking about, especially at the top of the episode of all the kind of changes to regulation and you know, Morgan Stanley lining up their new Bitcoin ETF and essentially more clarity, bringing more assets into the industry as a whole. A lot of these folks don't necessarily have the time or bandwidth, especially if they are not necessarily the largest platforms in the world to really do detailed due diligence on every single custodian and and platform that they're working with. And so they are by, you know, having registered exposure via ETS and other products like that, that's just going to be the natural on ramp to to folks who are looking to get exposure for the first time in the space. And then they'll continue to do more and more due diligence on that front. So, yeah, I mean, I think that we're still in the very earliest stages of where the digital asset and Bitcoin space is going. And, you know, we're, we've just really barely started to scratch the surface. Yeah. The only other thing I'll say is I obviously did a control F for the word Bitcoin throughout their support. And unsurprisingly, it's mentioned twice and it's on this slide, which the framework is effectively like, what are you holding outside of of Bitcoin and ETH? And so you can see here, like still, you know, the vast majority of these institutional allocators are holding either Bitcoin or Ethereum and sort of, you know, half are are sort of venturing outside of Bitcoin or Ethereum. But just, you know, again, unsurprising this coin base, this is, you know, likely to be more focused on stable coins, tokenization things outside of of Bitcoin. Do we want to move on to AI corner, robotics corner? Michael, you brought a lot of links. Tell me where? Tell me where to start. Yeah, I can. One thing just to to fill here and we'll talk more about it. There's a lot we can really write about is ultimately it's, it's, it's, it's hard the industry building here because when you think about it, we just had the conversation on crack in and trading and their valuation compared to infrastructure and custody, which is a lot more prudent, pragmatic. And you think about Coinbase like the market's reward, high velocity gambling, it's just the state of where things are. And so that's an opportunity, but on the other side of it, because there's still a stigma from different angles, whether it's individuals looking at Bitcoin of like, well, what is that? It's speculative to there's not a lot of things to do with Bitcoin in these markets outside of like buy and hold and and so you end up in these weird parts across the board. And that's why I longed and talking about this and think about it from our business building and also investing. If you want to have the underlying thesis of Bitcoin is the best money treated in the best way, but then you have to meet the market where they're at. And that's different ways that's offering other services that aren't like, you know, Ponzi's, but things that add value to the individuals. But then also how do you change that messaging that bridges that gap? Because I think that's the thing that like I've naively like really just missed is that big Bitcoin still has this insane stigma when you bring it up with individuals that there's something to building a like, you know, almost you're building a fintech. When you talk to people, it's like, I'm building a fintech. It's powered by the best savings technology. I'm not saying that's what we do, but there's a lot there that still can be unpacked, unraveled. But it it does take a level of nuance, sophistication because you're basically coming at it from like 10 different angles that you understood it, you understood the market not really being the most palatable. And then you have to wrap it all together. And we're still so early in that when you haven't seen that chasm get crossed per SE. And that's really where I think of our job at Onramp and even on an early writer side is how do you power all this by the best technology, the best asset on the planet Earth, but also meet the market where they're at and like Trojan horse them into it without you having to hit them over the head with like, you're buying that coin, it's the best money. The dollar's going to 0. Yeah, 100%. I mean, Bitcoin still seems so, so alien and almost radical to, to the average sort of layperson, particularly in the traffic world, that it's, it makes sense that there's been, I guess, a lot more interest and sort of follow through on whether it's stablecoins or tokenization rolled assets, because it's just like it's much more easy for them to wrap their arms around that. It's like, OK, these are newer, faster, cheaper rails, but these are assets I'm familiar with. There's a reason why people would want to own these. And as we've discussed, like Bitcoin is so different than all this stuff. It even from just like an asset perspective, but also the network perspective, you know, multi sig as an example that you that you talked about it is it is just harder for people to wrap their minds around. So you're totally right like the the companies that are able to effectively bridge those worlds I think are going to be the most successful going forward. But. And that's a little pot while we talk about this stuff because I know some people may end up getting turned off or wondering why we talked about crypto. But I think that what's really missing in the landscape is, and we see this in like macro, most people that follow this space really gravitate and resonate with somebody that understands Bitcoin and then looks at the world through that lens. Because they're at least just coming from a fundamental understanding of not only money doesn't grow on trees, but this is the best form of money. And that gives you just a better lens to look at different sectors of the market. And this one is that the world it's going to be changing. It's objectively true. What you said in the sense of like, look at how much money, forget about crypto, just has gone into stable coins. Look how much movement has happened in the traditional financial system and in the like tech world. You know, Stripe straddles that. But we've seen YouTube, we've seen Google, we've seen these other companies, Meta now doing it. So there really is an angle to come at the market with understanding Bitcoin, but then explaining where these other assets sit within them. I think we'll, it's a smaller part of the market, but it will continue to grow as smart people recognize what's the signal, what's the noise. So I put a couple things here, I'll just riff on them. And then we related to robotics. I think the robotics stuff is really interesting for, for a number of reasons. One is it's obviously coming, but really because of like there's another component of demographic changes specifically in the United States. And we know that there's just not enough people growing up having to deal with a lot of these roles. What does it look like long term? What does it look like from an inflation with human capital versus having to pay for robots? And so there was a number of things that came out this past week related. There was Bezos setting up 100 billion, a $100 billion fund to effectively go and invest in building more efficient systems with robotics in manufacturing. There was Amazon also acquired a firm called River that this is interesting if you click on that link because it's they call them stair climbing robots or it's this angle of like delivery on wheels, because this is where Travis Kalanick and Adams are really coming into play. Is that like there's a notion of humanoid robots that are being built, but there's just a lot of forgot the term that's called that's that's called where there's a term where like if you're going to thread a needle, the amount of like robotics and sophistication with the movement is fundamentally different than when you think about just manufacturer delivery. And so the understanding of like wheels and delivery are a lot closer than these other types of robotics. So they just did that. And then yeah, I would say those are the two big ones related to robotics and outside of AI because there's some other stuff in AI here. But I know Liam might have some thoughts on the the Bezos for. Fun. I mean those are just obscenely large numbers. I think it's time for like the largest fund that's been out there going investing in what I think are kind of the hottest sectors right now in the what we'll call like more legacy industrial space of trip making defense and aerospace. Everybody knows that these three are critical infrastructures. So are critical industries to US National Security. And I don't think many folks are betting against Bezos. So that'll be really interesting to see how that ends up playing out. I think that there is a ton to that. Like he's going to be able to develop the best teams to join him as well. But yeah, not, not a ton outside of that. Just these numbers are getting so absurdly large and having these, the, this amount of capital behind you is going to allow for a lot of consolidation in these industries where there are going to be folks who are a little bit slower to adopt these new technologies versus I'm not going to bet against Bezos. Yeah, I mean, there's an insane amount of tribal knowledge and scaling Amazon for a robotics perspective to be able to end in connections to make those allocations. The other things just related to AI was, I thought this was really fascinating because you're we've talked about this before. So Open AI is in talks with TBG and Bain Capital for a $10 billion joint venture and then Anthropic with Blackstone. And I don't know who Hellman and Friedman is, but on a similar type deal. And it's this idea that they're effectively building like PE slash consulting arms because this technology is so impossible for these large firms to figure out how to leverage. And how do you integrate it into their systems that it's just like symbiotic relationship that you have these firms that are in the game of allocating capital and and and coordinating accumulating capital. And then you have the other side, which is Anthropic and open AI needing to get these licenses and get this like enterprise change management in these organizations. I think it's it's I personally think it's an interesting race because I'll always take the bet of the net new emergent company that will be able to out compete these firms even in the like regulatory Moat bases like health and legal on a long enough time horizon. Because I do think that people will figure out where those moats are and how do you like capture that? They'll be other capital that comes in with like net new emergent companies. But I think it's just going to be a fascinating place to see play out over the next decade on like who wins? Is it the incumbent second partner with these guys and if you use this stuff and cut their headcount, or is it going to be net new players that just step in and, you know, outrun them because they're just leaner And they come from that, that bridge analogy where they're just native to the space and they know kind of where the bodies are buried because they built the Old Firm in the wrong way. Yeah, right. As we've been recording till there's an article that came out that said Open AI is lowering these private equity firms with 17.5% guaranteed report returns for. So Open AI is offering TPG and some of these other firms out there, according to Reuter to Reuters that they'll like pay them and offer them the ability to access the latest models ahead of everybody else. So I mean, Anthropic is done very well as of late. I'm not necessarily saying that Open Eye AI is done for sure, but it's becoming a more and more complex capital structure. When you think about all of their deals that are, you know, essentially paying for tokens with other firms out there and then trying to offer 17.5% guaranteed returns and starting to get into something that's, you know, the, the more complex and away from a typical financing structure there is, there are obviously a little bit more red flags that folks need to be raising. And so I don't think that you necessarily offer this. It's if you don't have to. So it's just going to be interesting to continue to follow the different financial engineering structures ahead of these companies likely going public next year. Nothing like nothing like guaranteed 7 and a half, 17 1/2 returns. No, no red flags there. Sounds sounds legit. Anything else you you guys wanted to hit? We're right around an hour, so that was good timing today. Just other two big ones they're just looking at related to Cloudvare CEO reference that human traffic by 2027 he expects agentic traffic AI to be leapfrog that bots have the ability 1000 times over hit as many websites. And then kind of related is Walmart. It came out that they secured a patent for AI tools to just prices based on demand and elasticity. I think those are kind of intertwined in the sense that a like from a privacy perspective, we talk about stable coins and the growth of it and that's going to happen. But at the same time, I mean, these are effectively private CDC's. And so they're going to have along with your identification a whole slew of problems when it comes to, we see this already. If you go try to get a flight or whatever you're trying to do, you can even go to a name cheap and you know, you try to like put in a domain and then you'll get sniped, you know, a few weeks later by somebody else because there's all these different like ways to track on like what's being looked at. And then those prices will surge. So I just see a world where you end up with more surveillance and it looks like it's a positive for the net consumer, but it ultimately ends up not. And that's really where Bitcoin long term wins out. Specifically on the native Internet side of things, yes, there will be bought still be more AI, but if you're able to build in finite scarcity into the Internet via Satoshi's, you're just going to end up with I think the long term way how the Internet unravels. But again, we're still decades, I think, from that. Yeah, the the Walmart deal just reminds me of like, you know, when you hear stories of hyperinflation in other countries where they don't, they can't update the prices in the aisles fast enough. Well, now they can't because it's just going to, you're going to have real time updates. So this is great for the hyperinflationary future. Good stuff, gentlemen. I got one more for you, Brian. Just just look because I'm waiting for our guys. I need them down in Texas and I don't know what do we got? I'm not able to. Disparaging. Disparaging about the Northeast, No, I'm. Not I'm not going to be able to show it, but the, the the thing I wanted to pull up was because it's honestly been shocking to me to see the amount of gravity that's come to Texas. It came out, Musk had it's actually right across from where you used to live. The C home district of Austin came out with a new prefab that's going to be built in Austin, right where I believe it's going to be the same place EE Austin where they have their their Tesla plant. But it's a merger or a collaboration between XAI SpaceX and Tesla on this manufacturing chip manufacturing facility. But then I was going to pull up was tongue in cheek was Travis Kalanick posted on on social this anybody wants to look it up. It's on the top of his deal. It's him water ski because he's just out there like having his time of his life, you know, on the deal. So yeah, we're waiting for you guys and if anybody's listening that wants to come down, this will actually be relevant stables. So we have in, it'll be Q3Q4. We got to lock down the date. It'll be cooler to come out. We we'll have more coming out on socials. But there really is something as it relates to the MPP Agenta commerce, we got to get Ryan Gentry on because he had something that came out this past week monitoring that of there's a huge opportunity. I've been thinking about it just too busy of like you have these tools now you can effectively integrate Spark tempo, whatever you want to really embed value into a native page online. Like there's no shortage of things that now people can come up with that will provide value to this cohort of the market that's going to continue to grow, that can just start stacking, whether it's stable coins or dollars or BTC that I think now's never been a better time to be building, especially if you see AI layoffs and you're hanging out at your job and I know who you are because most people are there. I was there where you work, you know, 20 to 40%. The other 60%, you're playing around or pretending that you're online. Start messing around with this stuff. Listen to the previous pods. We're going to be putting out more research. I think there's just an incredible time, very low capital spend. We're going to be investing on that side. And so reach out to us at our emails or early writers.com in the inbox and take Foreigner because it's just never been a better time. As much doom as there's out there, like the tooling to just like turn on and Exchange to turn on different ways to accrue value in this new world, it's going to be exciting. Well, so stop. Stop doom scrolling, start building. Reach out to us if you want to get involved. Hard. That algo, That algo. It's hard. It is hard that that is fair. Brian has it on here. The end is the speaker of Iran's parliament says he's holding that holding treasuries makes you a target. I don't even know what that means, but it got him excited. So we'll we'll probably talk about it more on last trade because I don't want to scare people right now that their bonds are going to make them a target of the IRGC. But maybe they do. I don't know Brian. We'll share more on on Thursday, Thursday morning all. Right boys, thank you as always. See you guys next chance. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys, but are your loved ones? Billions of Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan. With on ramp inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyds of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at onrampbitcoin.com. Onramp secured by three controlled by me. 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 Onramp 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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