NYC Bitcoin Investor Week Recap

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 gutless 1974198792972000 and whatever we want 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. All right, and we're back. Yeah, Welcome back to the Last trade. This is our first ever in person recording, so it's really nice to see big Tim. Of course, we got the long tie, long orange tie over there, got Michael Tanguma and Brian Cabela. So, gentlemen, it's nice to see you in person. Tim, you finally got the chance to meet Michael. You didn't think it was going to happen this week, but it did. I thought it was AI Michael the whole time. Yeah, I'm glad we did this on Friday because we have a whole week of ammunition to talk about. There's been some incidents across the board, good and bad, and we obviously have a pretty suppressed price at this point. So there's a lot to talk about. Yeah, you wouldn't think that at 3:00 in the morning someone be trying to break into your hotel room, Tex. Jackson, where are we? We're in New York. Oh, right, Yeah, so. Why are we even together in the 1st? Midtown. It's a good point SO. Beautiful Midtown. We have Bitcoin Investor Week was this week, which I would say in terms of conferences that at least I've attended, very well done. The people that decided to show up were more serious, I think both as individuals and as institutions. I tended to, you know, just be bouncing around the room chatting to a lot of people and I think it's just a higher caliber of individual that made the intention to show up here. So I want to say kudos to Pomps team. They they did a great job. And also he's he's kind of an animal up on the stage in terms of just moderating all these discussions one after another. So it's. Back. It's been good, really good. What do you guys think? I think it's been great. I think he's done a great job. To your point of curating a, a crowd that isn't just, you know, Bitcoin enthusiasts or what you would typically see at a a Bitcoin conference, it's very much really bridging the gap between Bitcoin and and traditional finance space. And so a lot of interested folks who are curious and trying to learn more. So yeah, I think it's been, it's been a great week. Yeah, agreed. From the start of the week, we did something with Pomp and the Strive folks. And on Tuesday there was a very buttoned up crowd full of probably closer to 30 wealth managers, asset managers. Interesting to see a group like that on the middle of a Tuesday show up and very lively. It went on for like a closer to a little over two hours. Going into Wednesday, there was he had a session, but then there was mining and a component around like business, treasury and then going into Thursday, Friday more of a panel session. But to your point, definitely an animal hustler, like just working his ass off. Pretty impressive actually. And Caroline too, she get a shout out. She's done a lot of work behind the scenes to get it up, pull it all together. The things that have stood out obviously like because we're closest to it, the two like themes are the business treasury stuff and strive in the GameStop. I don't want to call it activist approach, but they did write a letter and they're trying to get them to put Bitcoin, that's what. That's what they're calling. It so I guess it's an activist, activist approach that's increasing. There's a lot of conversations. I know Tim gets excited, we can talk about that. And then the other one that I, I found fascinating was just this notion of like there are sophisticated participants in the crypto ego system here and they are talking about like the way you like buy bit is a big topic, security and then also like just Ledger and kidnappings and all that. And the solutions are like specifically on the buy bit custodial problem is just like it's just assumed you just have to diversify across all these different exchanges or custodians if you're going to operate in this space. And I think it's kind of funny because it's just like, in my mind, I always just anchor back to FDIC and like a sign a broken market structure that you can't leave too much money in a single bank. Like that's not a good sign of a Society of like a market. And it just happens to be in Bitcoin. You just have to like spread your shit around everywhere because you're not sure who's going to rug you. And everyone assumes that's just like how we're going to operate. And we're only at 80,000. What happens? We're at 800,000 like the wrist, just it doesn't 10X it, almost like 100 to 1000 X's and nobody really has solutions for that so. Yeah, the market structure is totally broken. A lot of the conversations in this week, people notice the on ramp vest. So I think the branding people noticed that this week. But a lot of people still don't fully understand what we do. So a lot of people just come up and ask about the company. And the way I started a lot of the conversations was that just point to the numbers. There's $600 billion of losses in Bitcoin and crypto custody. And so Michael, that ties into your point where there's this broken market structure where if you're an individual or more so on the institutional side, as corporates or institutional investors, they diversify various custodians because they don't want to have the chance of losing, having a permanent loss of capital of their total allocation of Bitcoin. And So what we've seen then is because of this broken market structure, it's either you park it with one institution or you manage it all yourself. There's been such a tremendous amount of losses. And a lot of the people that attended, of course, there are people that were representing institutions that notice a lot of, I'll just quick side note, I noticed a lot of quantitative crypto funds. I don't know how many quant funds need to exist to underperform Bitcoin, but there was a lot of them at the conference. But anyways, you know, a lot of these individuals recognize that existing solutions are insufficient. So I thought that was a great place to anchor to because everyone kind of if you've been in the space long enough, you recognize it's kind of a it's a challenge to manage the asset for the long term. Like Michael, you've mentioned about plain hot potato with it, right? You don't really know where to go with your Bitcoin for the long term so. Yeah. I think the one aspect though that where there's a big gap with everyone here is it makes complete sense that it is a gap because on one side of the quote, UN quote sophisticated working in the market, you are working generally for someone and you assume this is like what the market provides. So you use it like that's what you do. And then if you're a custodian or exchange like to do anything like what we're doing, you can't even fathom it because you have to think about, well, the not the fallacy that they believe like custody goes to 0. So how could you like aggregate enough partners enough to coordinate and work together and then have enough fees to go around? So it's just like an impossible thing for them to think about On the other side of it, and this sounds like super like maybe controversial or whatever, but it's like everyone's really, really short Bitcoin. Like if there's a reason why it's only 80,000, there's a very few people have material wealth, meaning like something that's substantial to them, including people here. And so if it's an individual, they, if they've got material wealth, they end up in the point you describe to take in custody and then they're very uncomfortable. And then what we do makes complete sense. And they're like, tell me more. And then the thing that you and I have seen, and maybe you guys as well as like we talked a lot of family offices, a lot of people managing significant increasingly like people reaching out to us. The problem with it is that they're managing other people's capital. So it's, it's like a big leap. You have to have a strong pain point or you're going to get fired, which probably both won't happen because it's such a small percentage of the family offices. Again, they're severely under allocated for what we know where this market's going. And also just like as it relates to other assets. So it's on Coinbase and like to get them to leave it off Coinbase, you have to not only have a step function improvement, you have to help them mitigate some disasters like point in their professional career. And that's all coming. We know it, but it's just still very early and people just really have it. With all this boils down to people don't feel the pain because they don't have enough Bitcoin. Yeah, that's definitely part of it. I think Jackson that's it's always good to reference the losses because it is just a stark reminder of like how different this asset is from a custodial perspective. And how it's, you know, been the the largest pitfall of owning the asset over the 1st 16 years of its history is securing it in a way where you don't get knocked out of the game. The other way that I've spoken to folks this week, you know, because you have a 2 minute conversation with someone and you have to sort of, you know, why does Onrep exist? Effectively the way I like to, you know, imparted on people is like you need fault tolerance, you need redundancy and multi institution custody is the only way to get that real fault tolerance in a setup where you don't have to just spread it out and hope that, you know, hope and pray that your custodians don't get rugged. You spread it out in a way where it's actually possible, where you know something could go wrong with a single custodian and you're not knocked out of the game, you're not losing 2030% of your assets. And that that resonates with folks because I mean, they've just never heard that that was even possible. Because even if they know what multi sig is, and this goes back to the the buy bit hack stuff. If we want to get into that, it's like, yeah, great. You know, putting aside for a second the differences between Ethereum based multi sig and Bitcoin multi sig, but like, yeah, it's great. They were using a form of multi sig to secure their Ethereum. But you still have the single entity risk, right? And so if something goes wrong, whether through malfeasance, negligence or or whatever else multi CIG doesn't, you kind of defeat the purpose of multi CIG if if the entity itself can be compromised. And that's why you need to. You need to spread out the keys across distinct entities. Yeah, that was the thing that like kind of blue pumps brain when we were chatting about before we did the preamble at this lunch was describing what we did and it was breaking down that as the price appreciates, the ROI increases at the individual level when it comes to attackers. Yeah, for attackers, whether it's an individual and staking out your house and putting together how you manage your multi CIG or your individual custody all the way to the buy bit situation. Like it's written, it's there's reports on this that Lazarus embeds themselves in organizations and it's very similar with Coinbase. If they manage 700 billion a day and it's 1.4 and then 2.1 and like as the value increases, it just makes sense to play the longer game to infiltrate. Tim, I'm curious how this ties into the business stuff because it just hit me like we talked about it and obviously sounds like talk in our book about and we said this at this lunch. It's like it's all great. Everyone has their business strategy, increase equity value, all all the stuff everyone's excited about. But the second one, treasuries lost their assets. All that shareholder value just gets wiped away. But what just hit me when Brian was talking was that that's going to be like whenever that does happen, every other business has to use what we do or figure it out because they can't afford, right? Like there people are like, why would you just leave this at X exchange? So curious, like how you think about that? Because I know you're in those circles and like, I don't think custody, we were talking about it last night and it's kind of interesting where like everyone gets, they talk about the strategy of getting exposure and then how are they going to like pump it and market it. But they like bypass the execution of like the acquisition coupled with custody that never gets talked about. And I'm pretty confident, like some think about it, but they're just like, oh, we're just going to go Coinbase. Yeah. So it reminds me of when I was interviewing Eric Semmler and he said, of course we're very happy with our custodians, but we're also very excited for additional institutions to enter. And of course, he meant traditional institutions. But yeah, I was sitting at the conference yesterday, an individual came up to me, introduced themselves and said, hey, I have a private company. We're going to flip it public, We're going to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. And I'm not just excited for, you know, starting as a Bitcoin enthusiast, but now being more in the space and, and business and career wise. In that instance, I was able to say, yeah, however I can help. Let me know. She's saying I'm talking to investment banks. I'm doing this, I'm doing that trying to prepare. And I said, you know, if I can introduce you to on ramp, you know, for custody to Acropolis for a Bitcoin treasury solution, let me know how I can help. He's like, oh, maybe. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just throwing it out there so that if and when something happens, like, hey, I like, like that's just a natural part of the conversation for me now, which just makes me feel like I can at least do my part to try to move everything forward in a responsible way. Yeah. I think part of that too is we haven't seen that many companies actually deploy the Bitcoin treasury strategy. And I think it's the same reason why we why we haven't seen a lot of investors actually allocate in a meaningful way to Bitcoin because you you can't really wrap your arms around an asset class that you could lose permanently because you didn't actually secure it the right way. That doesn't exist in traditional finance. I think that's almost worse to make the allocation. So be right about Bitcoin over the long term, but then not actually be able to enjoy that wealth however you want it later down the line or, you know, increase the value of your company in the the business case. But that's certainly something that I noticed. I went to a breakfast yesterday morning at Alliance Bernstein in their Hudson Yards office. And so I just recognized I hadn't been in one of those rooms in a while when I was at Stifel. Brian, you know, Brown Brothers as well. There's always weekly or monthly strategy update calls from various groups. And so Bernstein had a breakfast that was obviously open to some external people as well, hence me being there. But they were talking all about, they're really talking about all these things that were incredibly bullish for Bitcoin, but Bitcoin wasn't spoken about once, but it was about tech and kind of the future of, of investing in all these things. And I just find it so fascinating because when I got there a little bit late, probably 15 minutes into the presentation because of the incident that happened at my hotel, which we'll get into, but I got there a little bit late. And immediately they're talking. They had that they had kind of their own branded slide of the projected federal debt, right, that you've seen used I think by the Congressional Budget Office. And so they were talking about federal debt. They had a cool chart. I want to get the full slide deck, but they had a chart that showed pre and post debt levels GFC. So like at the state level, consumer level, I think that's been pretty flat pre and post GFC. But the federal government debt is obviously gone parabolic since the great financial crisis. So they're talking about all these macro themes. And then they went into things specific to a lot of things around AI and talking about how the businesses that one in software over the past decade were not the businesses that built the infrastructure for the software, but the ones that were able to capture the value of the networks upon that infrastructure. So I was then thinking about, well, like Bitcoin really ties into all this, right? Because it's building on the network effects of social medias and the Internet, of course. And but it's just remarkable to be in a room where you have successful people, sophisticated people, they know, they knew their, they knew their stuff about equities very well. They, they were very well researched, but they're not talking at all about Bitcoin, which I think is remarkable. So just goes back to I think, A, there's confusion. B you see CNBC, Wall Street Journal, you see the buy bit hack. You're like, well, you know, I don't, I don't want to be, I don't want to lose my assets that way. You don't want to be diving through a landfill. So there's all these structural issues that exist. And so that's why a lot of people haven't invested. I think it's just like it's, it's too daunting. It's it's too different. Yeah. And, and going back to Michael, what you're saying around like, you know, all these companies that have a good idea around we need exposure of Bitcoin, let's put it on our balance sheet. I think the reason they're not thinking about custody is because it's just a sort of a short termism thing. Like in their mind, it's probably still a trade to some extent. I don't think they're thinking about it as a 50 to 100 year plan. And if you do have that perspective, then, yeah, you, you start to think about, well, how do I protect this into the future? How do I make sure, to Jackson's point, I don't get kicked out of the game? Because from a fiduciary perspective, whether it's a company running a Bitcoin treasury strategy or, you know, an investment advisor allocating the Bitcoin for their clients, like that's what gets you fired is if like you got the thesis right. But hey, the allocation is now 0 because you picked the wrong custodian. So that's what that's what gets people fired over the next decade. Yeah, I what's interesting is like you've brought this up Jackson and Pod recently about counterparty risk and like the lack of conversation counterparty risk and like trad Fi and it ties to like Bitcoin just having accelerated, you know, whatever we call it, business cycles where we just see whether it's the uptrend and then downtrend, the volatility or exchange hacks. Like the Bible thing, while it's a big deal, it's the largest hack in the history of like humanity, right? Like it's kind of like ETH, like it's some, you know, Asia, Asian Pacific exchange. It's like, it's not that. Big it's also crazy, like not crazy, but like another take away for me from over the weekend was like they actually did a pretty remarkable job of communicating what was going on in real time and then also having like pretty, you know, not a not a difficult time plugging the hole, which also just speaks. Well, that's AI mean. That's a different conversation of like how they actually plug the hole in. Is that part of this downtrend? But where it was going was like that. You can have a hack and it kind of gets glossed over in this space and we're on to the next thing. And where I'm going is that most people just do not assume like they're going to lose their money when they invest. So if they get past to your point, that keeps a lot of people out. But the second that they're in, like we talked to family office or corporate treasury, it's like whatever you would imagine can't happen. The best one that I think of is the dollar. So everyone here, we just assume the dollar will always exist. And we all know that you can go down the laundry list of currencies that have, you know, basically hyperinflated. But when we're here, it's like impossible. COVID was another kind of example of it. Like when you saw it having like, holy shit, I didn't think this could happen in the United States. Point being is that people just like inherently do not believe that an exchange or their custodian will collapse and they forget that 22 was just there. And it's just like embedded in the psyche that like it couldn't happen to me. Like I can't get like somebody kidnapped my family for my Bitcoin or all these things. Even though we know there's like lists and lists of people that documented and then some that haven't. And so it's just an interesting thing. And I think it's AI think it's because we're US based because in all these other markets, like when we, a lot of our European clients say they ask for seven day periods between the two key signings because of the exact like kidnapping situation that they just unfortunately have to deal with. And so it's just a very much Western counterparty trust in the system. The problem is like we generally have the best rule on you should trust people, but Bitcoin has that accelerated business cycle of counterparty risk because it's so it's it's digital, like you can take it. People go and re hypothecate in the volatility shakes people out. And so it's just like a learning curve. To your point, people need like better education. They need to be able to find you, ask you about their business strategy, and then you'd be like, Hey, maybe you should actually like look into custody because this isn't this thing that just figured out that you should assume. And the word assume. I was literally just thinking people must either be absent minded, meaning they've got lives, I understand that, and or they're they're assuming the best. Like when I order, when I engage with an insurance policy, you just, you know, it's a trusted institution. And so I think if a couple additional things come into play, you'll see people say it kind of have that light bulb moment because you don't see any of the larger named custodians to my knowledge doing any education on security or why people should trust that everything's fine. Yeah. I mean, it's just like no information out there, at least not that they're promoting or marketing and trying to make that part of the conversation. The other aspect, and This is why we focus on education on like the asset is simply because everyone's like speculating on it. Again, not everyone is over generalizing, but majority of people stepping in like it's a, it's a ticker in the same way like something on Robin Hood that's the latest meme stock or meme coin, like Bitcoins, like a form of a meme for individuals. So they're never really allocating more than maybe 1% because to Jackson's point, they never know. Like if it you leave it on exchange, it's known to be hacked or you put it on a Ledger and it could end up in a landfill. So we're so still early that people don't look at this asset as just a way to preserve their wealth and like just DCA and then go about their lives. And it's going to take still time to like that permit because when that permeates, then it just becomes natural. It's like, well, if I have 3, five, 10%, I can't afford to like have this mess up. Yeah, I think it, I think it comes back to other people's money to OPM. Like you don't really care about other people's money, like, like you do your own, right? So if you're allocating on behalf of other people, you want to do the thing that doesn't get you fired. Yeah, everyone is self interested, right? So you're going to do the thing that looks best for your career, doesn't get you fired, gets you the promotion, you don't really care. But it's also, it's also like a, a, a herd mentality crowd thing for sure type thing where it's like, and you saw this pretty explicitly with like the ETFs. And it was like, you know, as soon as BlackRock put forth that they were going to use Coinbase for their custodian, everybody used Coinbase for the custodian. So it was just a pure like, OK, that worked. That got through the SEC. That's what we need to do. So let's do it. Let's not overthink it. Let's just get it through the door. Of course, but it's also like people treat their own finances differently than a company or a client's. I mean, if you're acting as a fiduciary, you should be, of course, doing the right thing by your clients. But even if you work at like a large company, right, and you go on a trip, you're probably going to spend the money of the company differently than you would spend your own. Like if you're just like you have unlimited budget, you work at like Google or you work at BNY, whatever, right? And you're on a business trip. That's why you stayed at that really nice hotel this week, right? So yeah, should we talk about that? Might as well briefly. I mean, Jackson was Jackson had a visitor in the middle of the night. Yeah, I mean, we don't have to get into the details, but I had a very poor hotel experience. So I just anyone who's listening, do not stay at The New Yorker at Penn Station. I mean, you, if you come to New York, it's just generally not a good idea to stay in Midtown. But I stayed caddy corner to Penn Station in The New Yorker Hotel. Do not stay there. I woke up in the middle of the night, about 2:30 in the morning to someone belligerently banging on my door. I looked, you know, you have a little peephole. You can see what's going on out there. It's like, at first I didn't think it was someone at my door. I just thought it was the wind blowing my door or something. But I got out of bed. I look and there's this large dude just banging on my door. He's curly, under the influence of something. Long story short, he, he did some inappropriate things. He, he pulled his pants down and relieved himself on my door. I had to call the security of the hotel and the police had to come. And so there was this entire incident that took place at The New Yorker Hotel this week. So it's why I'm a little bit fatigued. I also think that you know. If you want the rest of their details, book a consultation with Jackson. Exactly. Exactly. I think it actually came out that this guy was part of a larger ring that was following people at the conference and he pretended to be belligerent, but he was actually trying to get Jackson's Bitcoin. And so possible it was it was the thing that we found on when Jackson was telling the story was that he opened the the the door at 2:30. And yeah. Wild move to open the door. I was half asleep. I, I, I gave him listen. I, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I cracked the door and I was like, man, this is not your room. He was incoherent though, so didn't understand that. So of course, close the door. But yeah, more point of the story. Don't stay at that hotel. Also, don't travel with your Bitcoin. That's you're kind of in a predicament. If you're doing self custody, probably don't want to bring it with you because you're not going to have the same security being at a hotel and you're also not gonna want to be carrying it around a city or wherever you are. But then it's also like, well, if you're leaving for a prolonged period of time, what do you do with the assets? So it's just like this chicken or egg thing, I don't know. So there's a lot this week. ETF outflows the price ADK arch partnership, the buy bit one when you maybe just go into the buy bit because I was thinking about. It's not a buy bit partnership to. Be no buy bit partnership. We don't, we don't we don't do anything like that. But I was thinking. Some rumors get started. I was thinking about, so we can't we can't go into the mechanics of the buy bit, but at the end of the day they were playing with these plastic devices. This is like ultimate what they were doing. They were playing with these like plastic devices and if anybody has ever used, and it's funny because people have to because it's the largest, I don't know if you know this, but it's like roughly 60 to 70% of all the bitcoins held by individuals. But then they hold it. 70 to 80% of market share is with Ledger. And people don't generally upgrade because it's just like you park it there and it's really scary to upgrade. So you're using this like little? Everyone's scared to touch it you. Just hope it's there and the old ledgers if you have you ever played with the Ledger? Oh, we got to get you on. They're they're amazing devices. The. Mickey Mouse device. Yes, it is. It is a phenomenal thing to experience because the user experience experience is horrible. It has two buttons. You the first part is when you get A to put in the pin. If you do it twice and fail the third time, if you mess up, it wipes the device completely. So unless you backup the words, you're just like lost all your Bitcoin. And but then this thing back in the day for like the so the screen is only, you know, call it like an inch and 1/2. And so a Bitcoin address, if you think about the length of it on a screen is probably like 3 inches, if not longer. So you can't ever see the full thing. So it just like goes back and forth. And when you have to do multi second, it gets a little more complex just in regular Bitcoin, but you can at least like view the address. Where I'm going with this is I'm thinking about the buyback hack and like just watching people manage billions of dollars and plugging this like plastic. And we joke about this on the show, but it's just like these people are managing significant wealth and they're just like clicking the button. And like in part of the hack with the theorem deal is that like because it's a smart contract, because Bitcoin doesn't have native multi sig, that you never can verify the address on the device because that's just like a known thing. If you're going to manage your own keys, you got to be able to verify on the physical device where you're sending it. You don't want to trust an Internet connected browser or you know, your computer in general. So it shows a hash, it doesn't actually show the address. So the few persons just click clicking and they're just busy and they have like shit to do and probably liquidations, whatever happening. So they're just clicking addresses that aren't actually sending the 1.2 bill into their own wallet. And that's how this happened. And I was just thinking about like, it's just a wild like setup that we're at, you know, a serious market, 100K of all these things happening. And that's how people are managing crazy amounts well. I mean, I will say for myself personally, yesterday was the first time I saw an executive at the conference with a security guard with them, with a bodyguard. I mean, I've heard stories of like the crypto ball, like in the VIP area, like every single note like person that had security with there's like 3 or 4 security guards for every person. It just makes it very uncomfortable and not a great vibe, right? So like, I guess that's where we're going. If you want to just, you know, let's do that. Yeah, next time I stay in Midtown, I'm going to have a security guard at all times. No, but I, I agree, Tim, I, I think it's actually remarkable that where we are, I mean, right about 80K right now. So it's, it's a, it's a hurting market. But to your point, I'm surprised we haven't seen more of that actually, because you would think like some of the more high profile people, both, you know, host of conferences, but also a lot of the speakers are very high profile as well. And to your point, some of them I guess have security with them, but others don't. And so I've been thinking about this for a while. Pretty much reminds me of the conversation we had earlier this week where we were speaking to someone who wanted to do self custody, right. Michael like wanted to run their own multi Sig wanted to do it in non KYC way. We talked through it. Michael's kind of like poking holes in it. But ultimately this guy works at a crypto company. So it's like all that doesn't matter. You work in the industry. It doesn't matter if you do all this non KYC stuff, people know that you're earning potential and you're likely saving your money in Bitcoin and crypto. So it's like anyone who's I think works in the space or frequenting conferences. A lot of these people that I met this week, they go to conferences like several conferences a year. Yeah, like. And there's a sad thing that we just like for better, worse, we get the tail end of like the bad stuff that happens, right? Like we export inflation, the like misery or whatever you want to call it. Like the disparity in wealth has increased. That's like unquestionable in the US as far as outside. And so this, this conversation Jackson's bringing up happened to be with somebody that was from the UK. And so he's describing how fundamentally his like experience changes when he goes to the UK versus here in New York simply from like keeping his phone out. He was referencing you just never take your phone out on the streets because they have spotters. And it's very elaborate for a phone. And he's just breaking down like how in the US the, the like criminals are more, you know, higher end or whatever. And I'm like, well, it's not really true. It's just like, it's a, like where you're at, but B, that ultimately gets exported over time because more people here, the disparity increases. And where I'm going with this is that like, so it's known in Europe and other places, you just don't talk about this stuff. You don't do a lot of these things we just assume you take for granted here, but we're in a bull market for crime for all these things. And because it doesn't matter what administration or folks that come in or DAS that come, at the end of the day, if there's an increasing disparity from people with money and not, that's where crime starts to breakdown. That's like how society, that's why you need a good form of money. So this doesn't end for a while. Like bitcoins, price appreciation helps and protects individuals, but while that's happening, people are going to continue to have their money debased. And so all this stuff is just going to be even more pronounced. And it's sad and scary because like I think about it personally, what you're describing, it's like the security guard for the individual is actually probably the less. It's like the 2D version of security. It's the family that is probably more susceptible to having bad things happen because that's like, you know, childcare wife, you know, you're lucky enough wife works from home or doesn't work and is out and doing things. And like those are the easier targets because like, you know, that's the one you're just going to be like, take all my Bitcoin. I don't care. Like I want my family back. So anyway, I think it's this goes back to just a sign of broken market structure because you don't kidnap like Jeff Bezos or people that have large equity positions because like the amount of controls to roll out of that position take weeks to get it and you're caught by then. But in the crypto world, it's like go get it from Coinbase or like tell me where your multi sig setup is. And that's the reality of like needing controls and all the authentications that we work on to like we're just building a world for 250K. Bitcoin and that the other component she alluded to is like, I think there's some cognitive dissonance where people see the stories of the kidnappings, the crime. And it's, it's kind of similar to the, you know, the, the custody situation where they're just hoping and hoping and praying and that it doesn't happen to them. And that's, it's just not the way, the right way to look at it because to your point, like this stuff is going to accelerate. Like if you think about Bitcoin adoption, you know, how many people across the globe even know what the hell Bitcoin is like? The same goes for criminal networks. And so as more people around the world learn about Bitcoin, so will criminal networks. And so you would expect all of this stuff to, to accelerate over time. And I think there's a large cohort of people who just assume, one, it's not going to happen to them, or two, it's, you know, we're good and it's not going to accelerate. And dumping in the ETF isn't the play docs who said it, but we're talking to somebody very notable in this industry and they're like, yeah, I'm thinking about A, getting guard, a security guard and B, just putting like they were serious. It wasn't like a marketing deal. It was like just dumping all like my back point in the ETF and because of this exact deal. So you could like, that would be our ambition, right? Is that like, oh, I'm just an honoured client, you can't rob me in the same way I'm going to have my assets in an ETF. Like it's very hard to move this allocation. Yeah, I mean, what's what's more important, that you own direct Bitcoin exposure or that, you know, you and your family can't be killed for your Bitcoin? Like it sounds hyperbolic, but for some people, if that's the decision they're weighing, they're just going to be like, well, all right, I'll just have the financial product in my brokerage account because it saves me a lot of trouble that I otherwise might have to deal with. Yeah, that's just kind of messed up that we even have to talk about this. I think hopefully at some point it's it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out because I think there will just be more solutions that naturally we'll have to protect against this. But then also the bounty, of course increases over time. For me, it's becoming more and more clear that like I already use on ramp for over 50% of my Bitcoin, but I want to be probably at 100% or like 95% because I just don't have to deal with any of this shit. I also don't want to own an ETF though, but I like just thinking through this in real time. It's, it's crazy that, you know, these are real things we have to consider because, you know, if I never went into Bitcoin, I stayed in traditional finance. Well, I wouldn't actually have to think about any of these like personal security issues. You probably own Solana too, but that's a different story. Let's go. Can I can I put my Solana with on ramp? No, we don't. We don't have the the Ledger safe or whatever will it? Maybe we can get the on ramp swag store up because instead of hiring a bodyguard you can just wear the on ramp vest and then you're good. That's something that's something I really when you talk to to Peter McCormick, he talked about like if you put like on ramp on your, your like brinks or whatever where it's like this house is secured by when it comes to like. By one ramp, Yeah. It's just like a in your front yard, that little sign. Yeah. Bitcoin custody is evolving and as institutional allocators increasingly look to incorporate digital sound money into their portfolios, risk management and operational excellence are paramount. Self custody and single third party custody expose institutions to significant vulnerabilities. That's why Onramp is pioneering a new standard, multi institution custody, which eliminates single points of failure, adding fault tolerance and redundancy to Bitcoin custody. With Onramp, Bitcoin is secured in a segregated cold storage multi stick vault guarded by three independent institutional grade custodians, none of which have unilateral control. Funds are fully auditable on chain, cannot be rehypothecated and can only move or be withdrawn at the explicit direction of the end client. Multi Institution Custody removes the operational and technical burdens of private key management, providing an institutional grade custody solution that meets the stringent demands of family offices, Raas, endowments and pension funds. We recently launched Onramp Institutional, a dedicated segment of the business designed to provide secure, innovative Bitcoin custody and advisory solutions for institutions worldwide, providing allocators with robust security without compromising on accessibility and allowing them to tap into a comprehensive suite of financial services, from trading to lending and more, all built to institutional standards. Discover how On Ramp Institutional can elevate your firm's Bitcoin strategy. Schedule a consultation with our team to learn more at on rampbitcoin.com. Can we go to Jackson's loan Chronicles and how how's that happening that maybe ties into arch and how are you thinking about leverage I. Think it's a good time to love her up? Is that your plan? Yeah. So I I need to I need to get out of New York 1st and. Help us understand why getting out of New York helps with your loan position. I need a clear head using. A much leverage to to take I. Need a good night's sleep. I need a day without any alcohol. I need to just, you know, sober up a bit tomorrow, over the weekend. Think through this in a bit more detail. But I mean, the way I think about it is I would never, I would never want to put a client or recommend something to a client that I haven't used myself. So that's why a, I'm considering or I will be taking a loan for sure. I just haven't decided what size I'm going to take a loan because if I'm speaking to people about it, then I need to use it myself. That's just kind of how I operate. And then the second piece is think Bitcoin at ADK is cheap. I mean, am I the only way to look at it? It's down from what 109 is the all time high. So it's pretty considerable drawdown. And so I think if it's done responsible, responsibly in terms of, you know, how we have it collateralized with Arch in their product, how the custody is managed from a bankruptcy remote perspective, being able to view it on chain 24/7, that all gives me confidence in terms of how the product is set up. But yeah, I mean, I would like to buy a little more coin. I looked at my Chase account. I told Brian, I looked at my Chase account last week. I, I have no, no dollars to buy any more Bitcoin with. So there's only one way I can solve that problem. So yeah, Jackson's alluding to this past week, we announced a partnership with Arch lending. Really great guys. We spent a lot of time this week with Dhruv and Himanshu, the the Co founders super excited for that product. There's a lot more to come. At the end of the day, there's been a big void since 2022 with the collapse of all the the lenders and lending really isn't kind of like think about it like going to the gym. It's not really like complex. It just takes work and being very like discerning and and actually getting it done and lending you. It's not complex, but it takes work in being conservative, having low loan to values, having segregated wallets that are titled to the individual's name, the ability to on chain all the things. Jackson alluded to the bankruptcy, remote nature. And so they're doing things the right way. They have a lot of big plans when it comes to the capital market side, bringing in more liquidity. So we've had a lot of interest from our clients and it'll increase. We have things coming about bringing it in, in the application, building on multi institution custody. They offer lines of credit, which I think is really interesting less from the leverage side and more of just like if you're very long Bitcoin, any dollar liquidity. I think the term is like a lifestyle loan where you can like actually run the numbers. And if you have an asset that's appreciating at whatever percentage on an annual basis, you can do that math of taking the loan out. And then as the asset appreciates, you can always take a larger position. So you don't have to sell the Bitcoin, but you also have a steady flow of liquidity. So it's exciting times. If you want to reach out to learn about it, reach out. We'll talk about it. We won't talk about leverage. We'll we'll just share like how to conservatively keep your Bitcoin while it's getting some dollars. Would it be correct to say there's like a loan product and then separately a line of credit product? I think so the, the line of credit is interesting because it's kind of like a, it's like on top of the loan product. So like let's say roughly 50% loan to value. So for every dollar that you want to borrow, you're posting $2.00 in Bitcoin. And let's just say you took a $10,000 loan out. That means you put $20,000 in BTC. Well, let's say the price appreciates to 25,000 or 30 and you need some extra dollars. You could actually increase that amount of dollars you're taking from the existing position or if you want to top it off and then you want to just have that like line you're not having to read. Usually like loans, you have to go create another origination fee, which is generally like 1 to 1 1/2 percent. It's a general like you. Have to sign everything. Yeah. It's in your process versus just like extending it, which is super slick when you think about like as the price appreciates, you come into an on ramp dashboard, you have your different, you know, wallets, you have your long term custody and whether it's you need to buy a diamond ring because this is like true story. Like I sold a Rolex because I wasn't going to sell my Bitcoin for my wife's diamond ring. Like, well, maybe you don't have to do that. If you need some liquidity, you just like press a couple buttons, you get dollars wired to your bank account and then you wait for your you know, we work a lot of Tragify folks to get their quarterly or end of year bonus. You get your bonus, you pay it off, you have your Bitcoin appreciated, didn't appreciate. You didn't have to spend those SAT's. There's a lot of reasons we're big loans are an important part of the market structure. So it's an exciting part to add to our financial services. Yeah, So what about the price House? View Brian Cabela's. Housing house view, this is very normal. So from the, the top that you mentioned like one O 9 to where we sit today, I think it's like a 2728% decline. It's not even the worst dip of this cycle. So if you go back to August of 24, there was a 33% decline from like 74 down to 50K. And if you just look back at the, you know, the history of, of Bitcoin bull markets, there's several instances of bull market drawdowns that range anywhere from 20 to 60% average is probably around 3035 for, for a given bull market drawdown. And so this is to me like very normal sort of what you would expect. And so I also think this particular draw down, there's a lot of factors, right? There's a lot of sort of conversations at the macro level, you know, and really what I think is less understood is like, you know, there's some data you can look at, OK, like what coins are being sold, right? And so the vast majority of cell pressure right now is from people that have been holding Bitcoin for one to six months. So these are short term holders who realistically probably are not the most sophisticated Bitcoin holders, don't really appreciate what they own and so are more likely to get shaken out by broader macro turbulence, conflating Bitcoin with other risk assets and thinking that, you know, if we're going to if inflation is sticky, you know, I don't want to own risk assets when in reality, like the thing you want to own is Bitcoin, if you think inflation is going to continue to RIP. And so it's it's one just, you know, sort of less sophistication from more of these short term players. I think it's also probably related to a lot of hedge funds that are just again, trading this as a macro risk on asset. And so all of that is to say, I think this is super normal expected and to your point, probably a good, good place to buy good entry. Yeah, good point on the trading. I spoke to a number of fund managers with quantitative strategies this week, and they all probably underperform Bitcoin, but they're probably the ones trading right now. So yeah, I guess it's nothing really to worry about. If anything, it's just an opportunity for people who want to add more to their position to do so. But with human psychology, it's always people are always chasing the price when it's running high. The best, the best. Meme that illustrates all this is like the the huge line of people to buy at 100K and no one's in line to buy AT80K and it's just like, you know. If except Jackson. Except Jackson, yes. And just like in my. In my rewound, if you if you rewound 6 months or or less than that, it's like, yeah, people would be loving to buy AT80K if they knew where the price was going. So it's just like it's, but again, market psychology. It's funny because like, this is, it's not even a retail behavior. I just remember seeing this years on Wall Street too, where everyone just wanted to chase performance. It's like, Oh yeah, no, I I just want to allocate my money to whatever the best hedge fund was last year. Like, right. It's just. And it's almost never the better. The best performing fund the next year? Yeah, almost never. It's a, it's, I mean, obviously like having all your net worth and business tied to it. Like it's not fun seeing the the price run or like drop, but it's also a little invigorating like to feel something again because it's like, it's just like, I forgot what it feels like to really, you know, you start plotting the streets, we start tickling like 9079 K and you like start feeling a little little worried. You're like, what's going on here? The last time that was like really that significant was the March 2020 like seeing that just dropped to three Ki swear. I just sat there and I was like buying, but it was like the cognitive dissonance of like clicking. I had two phones because I was like got my wife's phone because I had maxed out on everything I had on this phone. So I'm like, and she was just like I was up for because I'm like managing like I had leverage. This is why I always tell you about managing leverage. The point being is like I was like, holy shit, like could this go to 0? Because we went from like 12:00 to 3:00 in less than 36 hours and you're watching it fall. And so you're still buying usually like, well, I guess I've just put everything into like, we're just going to ride this thing down to 0. But at the same point you're like, it's so we're nowhere near that. Yeah. We will experience something like that though, like we will in this next, As long as this isn't over and the price is coming and all these people look in, their chops are going to come in, all the leverage that's going to come in. We're going to see whether it's like 800 to 200 or whatever it is. We're just going to see an unwinding of like effort proportions because the dollar amount always goes great, which we didn't talk about. But I can't help but feel the $1.2 billion largest hack of all history has something to do with a little bit of the price as well. While it's not the same asset, it just I feel like there has to be some connection. Well, part of it, part of it could just be again, back to the more, you know, less sophisticated short term holder. They see this massive hack, the biggest in history, and maybe they're hold, maybe they're holding their Bitcoin on a different exchange and they say screw this, I'm out. I'm selling the Bitcoin like. You don't really contagion as yeah, like what's going on? Exactly, so that could be a factor as well. Timbo how? How much is like chops? Chops. How much is Sailor looking as chops right now? Just like seeing 79 Ki. Mean. He literally tweeted. Oh yeah, sell your kidney. Sell your kidney but keep your Bitcoin. So I think he's still in. Yeah, there was a funny Magoo tweet about that last night. Just wondering what kind of drug seller was on? Yeah, definitely sends the right message to huddle your Bitcoin, Yeah. Yeah, One thing I thought was interesting at the conference was Pompe brought out some controversial takes, which I appreciated for some of the few talks that I heard bits and pieces of. He actually mentioned it at the lunch as well that we had on Tuesday with Strive about. He asked people, you know, raise your hand if you think that the budget will be balanced this year and like 5% of the people raise their hands. And then he's like, well, I, I believe with over 50% confidence it'll happen this year. So then it went into a discussion of like, you know, this is bad for Bitcoin, blah, blah, blah. If the federal government's more responsible with their finances. And the thing the way I think about this is that at least for the foreseeable future, Bitcoin will always have some correlation to the responsibility of the federal government to monetary conditions. But I do think that that's going to just become more and more muted over time because it's kind of a very dollar centric or US centric view to think that if the government gets it all under control, which they won't, there's a number of reasons why over the long term won't happen, but it could happen in a in a given year potentially. I guess it wouldn't be a 0% chance, but so it's AUS centric view to say that oh, government, you know, balanced budget that happens for a couple years. Bitcoin, you know, there's no, there's no reason to own it anymore because people outside of the US don't own it only because of debasement. I mean there's a lot of other reasons why you'd want to owe it just in terms of being able to send it anywhere in the world, not have it be confiscated etcetera, etcetera. So I think ultimately what's happened is the 1st 15 years are more driven by liquidity. It's kind of this like post QE, post GFC environment where just tons of dollars and other currencies floating around 0 interest rate policy. I think that'll come back. It inevitably has to just given the debt based system. But I do think with more institutional investors coming in, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, etcetera, you know, those will that'll still be part of I guess the reason to own Bitcoin, but it won't be the majority reason to own it. It kind of bothers me like the whole framing of it because it doesn't make any sense to me. We didn't get a chance to. I didn't bring it up at the lunch because there was a lot of people. But like, it doesn't matter if they balance the budget or not for bitcoins price for a number of reasons, like 1 is you have, you know, whatever the total addressable market of like value that exists. And then you have this little asset and there's value at a neutral store value that has a finite supply and it's still so relatively small. So as long as a that's still maintained, that still maintains independent of balancing the budget. But that's just one position that a bigger part of it is at the end of the day. And this is the thing that like people just don't get is what gives the dollar value has nothing to do with guns or law. It all has to do with people have debt obligations independent of federal debt, like they have their own personal, their business. If they're an independent credit cards like they owe and they will never be able to repay that debt because of the amount that has been created, it will be destroyed. Commercial real estate's probably one of the best examples of this. So when that has to delever, there's too much debt and not enough dollars, you have to inject liquidity or everything falls apart. So unless we're going to go into complete anarchy, they're going to have to continue to debase the currency to keep the system alive. And that's ultimately what drives Bitcoins value. So independent of any like balancing a budget, like they're just have to increase the supply, however they do it, however they mention it. And that's what will ultimately Dr. Bitcoins price appreciation because people protect themselves from it. It's really that simple. But people get caught in a lot of this like minutiae of like global macro. It's like at the end of the day they have to make more dollars because if not, the whole system just collapses. And I think what's probably most likely, and I think James Lavish and Sam Callahan mentioned this when Tom sort of posed this question to them, it's like, yeah, I guess theoretically it would be possible, but like it would be on a nominal basis, right? To your point, Michael, like it would be the, the currency would still be debasing at at an excessive rate even if you nominally balance your budget and you nominally have some GDP growth, like that will be a function of a debasing currency. And so I put it on a very sort of low probability that that even happens. But you know, for all the good that that Doge and Elon can do, like you're not, you're not fixing the entitlements issue. You're not fixing 36 trillion. Yeah, I mean, Luke Grumman, I wish I got to re listen to this because he references it's always good to like bring contextualize all this stuff. And he referenced like the Afghanistan war and like from 2000 to 2020. It was like, imagine if we all just went on some Bender in Vegas and like they we the US, like we as a society went on AI think it's like $2 trillion vendor where we have nothing to show for. Like we even left the like the the weapons, yeah, the equipment like it's there. So we like gave it to them. So somebody has to pay for that. Like that debt exists. It does the all this stuff in a vacuum, like from all of the bad fiscal monetary policy. So it has to pay come to roost. And if this exists by way of loans all the way down to the micro example of somebody took out a loan, lost their job because that's what's happening today. Well, somebody has to pay that debt all the way to the largest macro, whether it's a sovereign that that debt exists and is being defaulted on every minute because it's just bad. It's just bad economic decisions. And so you have to print more dollars or if you default, you just again cost like a mass cascading. And so like that's just a function of how this whole system is set up. It's why it's the the whole bull case for Bitcoin. Yeah, you could hear them cheering for the bull case. Yeah, there's, there's literally cheering right outside the door. Which like, I don't know, it's probably running up on time. But this ties into the second part of that conversation at the lunch, which was it comes up all like inflation or deflation and is like Bitcoin and protect you. And it's like, well, it protects you both because inflation, obviously your currencies debase, but deflation very similarly, like as a corporate or business or individual, you need to hold something to preserve your wealth. Because the micro example of an individual losing his job, that's like kind of like deflation, like you just lost your income. But on like corporate level, if software and these other tools are increasing, well, that's a form of deflation because now your margins completely collapse because now you can't charge for open AI, you know, until you need something to preserve your wealth. Like it goes both ways. Speaking of understanding or thinking we even understand Bitcoin, does anybody have a hot take on what Jeff Park is kind of popularized Popularized. You can't say that word and I don't think a lot of people agree with this, especially the pundits on mainstream TV that as the Bitcoin price increases, the volatility is going to increase and that that I. Think so I think the common theme and I see Brian like Grimstein's like, I think the common theme is that people think like as a price appreciates the volatility maybe like historically dampens a bit, but you you're just increasing the liquidity pool, amount of capital, the size of capital. They're still humans that manage all this. They don't just like long term, we see this now. So there are going to dump positions, there's going to be exchange hacks. They're not going to know where to pinpoint the risk. And so they just like exit. Like there's a lot of things that will just factor. So that only increases as adoption. There's more people involved. I think it, I think it depends on what time horizon you're talking about because I think in my mind for sort of called the next few cycles, I would expect volatility to continue its downward trend. But that being said, there's a point at which something flips And what I mean by that is effectively the dollar begins to hyperinflate. And so that would then, you know, you'd see much more volatility in Bitcoins price obviously, and it would probably break that historic historical downtrend. But it's very hard to say when that happens, whether it's five years from now or 50 years from now, it's very hard to say. One, one thing you just made me think of though, and this is something that we'll see and I didn't, I didn't thought about it was like, so there's all this liquidity and it's unsophisticated. And so you get 510 whatever more corporates come in to buy Bitcoin and their stock performs and the price is running. There's all this capital that's going to want businesses to deploy a similar strategy, but they're going to want them to do more leverage, more leverage. They have less sound economics from a cash flow perspective. And inevitably, like there's people out there, you know, seeing target points to like find liquidation and all the things associated. So you have like on the other side of that risk comes back deleveraging and then now all these companies have to like and there'll be other firms that do this, there'll be even individuals that take out credit card loans to to buy Bitcoin. So your goodness. Yeah, it's more dollars. More dollars come in for leverage, right? Because even in 22, there wasn't like that much liquidity to come in compared to what's coming with Cantor 2 billion facilities. So point being is like on a short enough time horizon, you can imagine you see even more volatility because the market's just unsophisticated. All right. I mean, anything else we didn't touch? I know we got to wrap up here shortly, but was there anything else that stood out either from the conference or just conversations before we? Call one one thing I had a conversation last night at our dinner and I think, you know, it's it's very easy to get caught up in pessimism of the moment, you know, and and that really stems from again, less sophisticated players who look at Bitcoin quote UN quote crashing down to 80 K. Not only is it a very normal sort of bull market correction, but the other thing I was talking with some folks about last night is like, say what you will about Trump and everything he's done since coming into into power, the meme coin stuff. This is by far and away the most friendly administration any Bitcoiner could have ever asked for. If you rewind a couple years, you know, having this level of enthusiasm from cabinet members, personal interest in the assets from cabinet members, it's a completely different paradigm then then has existed in Bitcoin's entire history. And I think it's easy to lose sight of that when, you know the price doesn't skyrocket immediately to 250 K. It's like, OK, yes, but like all of these things that we've been, you know, wishing for and hoping for from just, you know, letting Bitcoin businesses operate, letting people self custody the asset if they want to, letting people run a node mine Bitcoin. Like we're starting to see those protections be put the basics. The basics. The basics, we're starting to see that stuff be protected at both the state and federal level. And there's general enthusiasm and optimism for reassuring a lot of the innovation in the space. And I think that's just incredibly positive. And it's, it's important to keep that in mind when you know, you see people on Twitter saying it's over. Is it over? We'll find out next week on the last trade. Good to see you guys. A lot of fun hanging out this week. Yeah, I guess being called action here would just be don't stay at The New Yorker Hotel or at the city ever. And yeah, get in touch if you want to discuss any of this. We didn't have the on ramp terminal pulled up today since we were recording in person, but that's always a good one if you want to just pay attention to what's going on beyond the price. So yeah, we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are in your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit on rampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client advisors.