Onramp Institutional Series | James Lavish & David Foley

Thanks for joining us. The On Ramp Institutional Series is a monthly webinar geared towards institutional allocators looking to better understand the merits of the Bitcoin investment thesis. In this inaugural session of the series On Ramps, Jackson Mikaelic and Brian Cabela's host James Lavish and David Foley from the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. The discussion delves into the macroeconomic landscape, the implications of the growing debt crisis, and the role of Bitcoin as a store of value. The speakers highlight the increasing institutional adoption of Bitcoin, the impact of regulatory developments, and the technological evolution that positions Bitcoin uniquely within the digital asset landscape. They also emphasize the importance of understanding Bitcoins fundamentals and its potential as a hedge against inflation and economic instability. James and David also walked through the strategy of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and their efforts to capitalize on the growing interest in Bitcoin, particularly among institutional investors. The discussion also covers the challenges of educating skeptics about Bitcoins value and the evolving landscape of institutional allocations towards Bitcoin as a legitimate asset class. If you'd like to attend future sessions of the On Ramp institutional series or access any of our research reports or educational materials, please sign up for On Ramps weekly newsletter by navigating to on rampbitcoin.com, clicking on the subscribe button in the top right hand corner. If you'd like to learn more about multi institutional custody or any of on Ramps Bitcoin centric financial services for both private clients and institutions, please schedule a consultation with our team via the link in the show notes. And now, time for the show. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for On Ramps inaugural institutional series. We're extremely excited to host you and are honored to be joined by James Lavish and David Foley of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. David James, you guys are looking good in the studio. You all settled in there. Yeah, we're on the road here in New York City for a bunch of meetings last few days. So we were lucky to have to borrow the studio here for for this meeting. And thank you all for for having us of. Course excited to have you. So we'll go ahead and get things kicked off here for today's webinar. So this will be the first installment of the on Ramp institutional series. We're excited to kick this off with James Lavish and David Foley of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. I've enjoyed getting to know both them over the course of the past year or so and excited about the work and strategy at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund and see quite a bit of overlap with the work we do here at On Ramp. Both David and James have an excellent framework and approach for viewing the broader macroeconomic forces at play and how to capitalize on the Bitcoin opportunity in both public and private markets. But before we get into that, I just want to do everyone's favorite part, which is disclaimers. So the information discussed in this webinar is for educational purposes only and should not be interpreted as financial, legal, or tax advice. Opinions shared by the speakers are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of On Ramp. Nothing presented here constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security of digital asset, nor is it intended to endorse any particular investment strategy. Any mentions of regulatory matters are provided as general discussion and should not be interpreted as personalized advice. All investment involve risk and any forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and assumptions which are subject to change. So with that, I would first like to hand it over to my colleague Brian Cabela's here at Onramp. He's the Chief Strategy Officer. Brian, if you could just share some opening remarks on the Onramp institutional series before handing over the floor to David and James, that would be greatly appreciated. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jackson, and welcome everyone to the first session of the On Ramp institutional series. We're we're very excited to launch this monthly webinar series really dedicated to helping institutional allocators gain a deeper understanding of Bitcoin and its evolving role within the financial landscape. And over the course of this year, we'll cover a a comprehensive syllabus, if you will, of various topics exploring Bitcoins fundamentals, the investment thesis behind it, the macroeconomic challenges in traditional finance and how Bitcoin can really address those challenges. And we'll also dive into some practical considerations such as strategy implementation and, and different custody solutions, ensuring that you have a complete toolkit for evaluating the Bitcoin opportunity. And you know, here at on Ramp, we, we believe education is really a cornerstone of any Bitcoin business and really of effective institutional adoption. And that's why, you know, we think these monthly webinars will be, you know, not only keep you informed, but also serve as sort of a, a repository of high quality media content and, and serve as a resource that you can revisit in the future and share with your your team and other stakeholders at your firms. And so this is a key aspect of sort of what we're doing on the advisory front, part of our broader institutional offering, which includes tailored guidance for investors seeking to integrate Bitcoin into their portfolios. So I should also note, if you would like a more bespoke or in depth session tailored specifically for your organization, our team would be happy to work with you to to structure an event that meets your specific needs. As mentioned today, we have the pleasure of hearing from James Lavish and David Foley of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. They'll provide a a first hand look at how seasoned allocators with deep Bitcoin expertise are viewing the investment landscape today. And yeah, we're we're thrilled to have you all here with us as we kick off this series. And one final note, if anyone has any questions throughout the webinar, please submit them in the Q&A chat box and we will save some time at the end to cover as many questions as possible. But without further ado, let's turn it over to James and David to share their insights. 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. Apple 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. Thank you. Thank you both Jackson and Brian for having us, and we're happy to be here. For those of you who don't know us, I'm James Lavish and I've been an institutional investor in traditional institutional investment landscape for over 30 years now. Pains me to say that, but I've been in, it started out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange trading anything from ADR arbitrage to convertible bond arbitrage to distressed debt. And I've, I've done deep value micro cap and small cap investing, private equity, some venture capital personally done a lot of, of different types of investments as well. And so I come to this space with that mindset and that kind of that experience and training and, and David has a similar background. Yeah, for me same similar 25 plus years started out in investment banking down here in New York. We're doing that recording this from and then the last 20 years have been in the hedge fund and and doing venture capital, private equity as well. And then we've kind of entered the Bitcoin space here just the last five to six years. We've started investing in the space and started our Bitcoin Opportunity Fund just two years ago. Yeah. So just from a really high level, you know, Dave and I come like, like we just said, we come to to this world, this space and, and with a particular set of, of experience and, and background. And so we're bringing that to this world with that lens. You some of you've heard me talk about it quite a bit. So if you just look at the macro landscape and, and how we, how we approach Bitcoin, why we think it's so important, you know, we're, we're seeing the ramifications of an endless stream of borrowing in this world. And starting at the sovereign level, we, we've seen it gravitate all the way up the, the debt has been pushed from, from the individuals to the, the banks and then up to the central banks and, and the government. And so we have a problem. And that problem is debt. And, and that debt growing so large is requiring the debasement of the US dollar. And so that is, that is the underpinning thesis to, to our belief in Bitcoin as the number one store value asset and the way to protect yourself from, from this possibly in the future catastrophic, you know, development. So, but if you just look at like we, we just got numbers yesterday morning or the morning before we, we have been on the road. So the, the days are kind of blending together, but we just got some numbers out of the government and they reviewed their first quarter 2025 fiscal year spending. Then at this first quarter today, you know, because remember that the United States starts it, it's an October fiscal. So they they just started and they've spent so much money this first quarter that they've run a $711 billion deficit. And so if you just annualize that, that's about $2.8 billion and 2.84. A trillion. Dollars and so comparing that to last year, so this is the first quarter annualized $2.8 trillion compared to last year, last year they ran a deficit of $2.1 trillion. So it's 35% higher run rate already this year and they have $700 billion, seven trillion dollars, excuse me, $7 trillion of debt coming due this year, plus the deficit they're going to run. And we know that there's only there there only so many solutions that the government has in order to deal with all that debt. You know, you've got basically three main solutions. You've got the and I'm going to and I'll talk a little bit about this high level and what and why, how we see this whole world and why we're doing this. And then kind of turned over to David to talk about why and how we're using Bitcoin and the fund to to capitalize the opportunities that we believe are coming from this. So, but you know, there's three main ways that they can deal with this. You can either cut expenditures, you know, have some sort of austerity. We've heard about the Doge Commission and Elon and Vivek and under the, the leadership of Trump are going to try to cut expenses in the government. The problem is that there's so many expenses that are mandatory that are signed into legislation that you just can't cut enough. So if you just look at all of the spending that we have in the government and we look at the full year of last year, let's just look at that full year. You know, we, we took in $4.9 trillion of taxes on a, on a record year in, in the stock market. You know, they took in $4.9 trillion of taxes, they spent over $7 trillion. So already you, you, you can see we've got $2.1 trillion deficit. So where can you cut to, to balance that out and get into a surplus? Well, you've got a, the first line item includes all the entitlements, which these are all things that are signed into legislation. They're mandatory expenses. They're, and they all add up Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, they add up to $4.1 trillion. So already now you only have $800 billion left to spend before you go into deficit. Well, defense spending is $800 billion that we know of there. It's probably, it's likely closer to a trillion, but $800 billion of defense spending and that's not mandatory, but we know they're not going to cut that, at least not significantly. And those are long term contracts are they're, they're committed to. So they're likely going to be paid out. And so now you're already you're, you're at net zero and now you haven't even paid off any interest on your debt that is coming due. So, and that has added up to over a trillion dollars of, of interest net net net, it's about 900 billion dollars, 850, nine, $100 billion of net interest because there's intergovernment interest expenses that they, they basically pay each other. Ridiculous, but that's the way it works. So now you're already almost a trillion dollars in deficit and you haven't, there's nothing you can really cut except maybe some administrative costs out of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. And it's it's doubtful you're going to get a trillion dollars out of that. So you can see that the problem is not that we need to, we need to make more money. We need to somehow we need to cut expenses. But there's no place to really cut. OK, The second thing you can do is you can raise taxes and that's not going to happen under the Trump administration. They're already fighting to keep those tax, the tax breaks extended so they don't expire. So that's not going to happen. And even if it did, for those of you who, who remember back in the Reagan era, the Laffer curve that you can raise taxes only up to a certain point until it, it crests and, and it you top out at the amount of revenue that it, it creates. And the reason for that is that it winds up crimping on productivity in the, you know, companies, they, they stop spending on R&D, they don't expand on profitable business lines. They don't hire people. So your profitability goes down. Your tax receipts are going down South. At some point it doesn't even work even if you were going to raise taxes. So that's the second and third thing you can do, which is the obvious thing, which we keep doing that everybody knows about. And This is why we have over $36 trillion of debt now, is you just issue more debt and you borrow more money. And that's what we've been doing. The problem with that is that we have so much debt that we have to we have to borrow more because you just heard all the expenses. We have to borrow more this year just to pay the maturing debt, just to just to make sure you pay off that maturing debt and the interest on that debt. So if the United States was, and some of you heard me say this before and describe it this way before, but if the United States was a company on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, we would call the Zombie company. And the reason for that is that they have to borrow, they have to, they have to issue debt and they have to borrow money just to pay interest on the old debt. It's basically dead man walking. And that's the situation we're in in America. And so all of that gets to the whole point, which is the only way that they can deal with this debt is to allow for high perpetual structural inflation. And that will cause GDP to go up. Nominally that'll create more dollars in the economy, but those dollars would be worth less to consumers. However, they'll help pay down the old debt that is based in those old dollars. And so you have these new dollars that are worth less. There's a whole lot more of them. They print money. They, they, they just create liquidity. They expand the, the balance sheet of the Fed by printing money with the Treasury. And they use those dollars to create more GDP nominally and pay down the debt. And we all know that the main driver of inflation is basically the expansion of the money supply. And that is how we come to Bitcoin and why we think it is so important in an investor's playbook in the future. Yeah. I mean, I don't have a lot to add. I think you captured it. I mean, other than, you know, this is just a, it's a global problem as well. It's just not just the United States, it's, it's, it's, you know, China even that has had such a great growth run over the last 20 years since they joined the WTO. And this is a real issue. And This is why it's going to probably be a lot of friction. I don't think we'll be able to develop kumbaya in the world because everyone's going to be fighting tariffs, bigot, more tariffs back against the US and currency wars and and those type of things play out. And I think that as James said, I mean, ultimately deflation's the devil, right? I mean, if you have a debt based system, deflation will crush you. That's why you see China quickly stimulating. I think that that's why the US has always had to go bail out, whether it was O 8 bailing out the banks, whether it was quickly, you know, going to 0 low rate levels by Greenspan after 2001's recession in 9/11. I think it's Jeff Booth points out in a debt based system and you have this technology that is deflationary and his price of tomorrow book, you know that you cannot have that. You have to offset that by money printing, you know and, and the money supply has grown at 7%, almost 6.8% a year for the last 54 years since we went off the gold standard 71 in the US and it really jacked out in 2020 and over 20% per year. We think again, those things are coming whether there's a crisis or not, but certainly in any crisis, you will see those repeats of the 2020 print in the next one like that, whether it's repeat of O 8. We think that those money printers will go so berserk and that everyone in the world is more aware now that it will no longer be the flight to safety in the US Treasuries. It will be into neutral reserve currency, which are really gold, silver, Bitcoin. Gold and silver in the 70s were big beneficiaries. Our view is the Bitcoin is going to be the sound on this form of money, digital money, digital gold, digital monetary property. That's what will be the off ramp. That will be the flight to safety. It's a non counterparty money. It's a non debt money. I'd encourage people to read Ray Dalio's LinkedIn post that he's had this week on that. As he lays out in this world, it's gold and Bitcoin that are likely going to be those off ramps that people there are those safe harbors rather that people have run to in that event. I'll pause there, but that that's at a high level. And, and so now you, we talk about Bitcoin, we've got a new administration that's coming in and we've got a lot of tailwinds that are that are pushing Bitcoin. And, and they started almost two years ago when you had Fazbee, they adjusted accounting rule. So this is kind of the first thing that kicked everything off was and there's and there's a bunch of tailwinds. So it's just kind of walk through them. But the first one was was Fazbee. They adjust this accounting rule. The accounting rule was if you're a company and you bought Bitcoin and you held it on your balance sheet, you had to either hold it at cost or the lowest it got to in value in the market. And so if you bought it at $50,000 and it traded down to $22,000 like Michael Saylor did, then you had to hold it on your balance sheet at $22,000 until you sold it. And there was no way to mark it up. So they just, they just adjusted that and said the new rule and they, they called it an impaired asset, like you had to hold it as an impaired asset on your balance sheet. And the new rule for a company to buy Bitcoin is you buy Bitcoin, you market to market just like any other asset. So it's a really big deal and it's going to open the door for these companies who've been fishing around, looking at it, trying to figure it out, and now they can buy it and not worry about it being impaired on their balance sheet. That's a, that's a big stand that just went into effect this past December. And so we're going to start seeing companies hold Bitcoin and we have seen companies start holding Bitcoin because of this. That's big deal. The second thing was, as we all know, the ETFs launched last year in last January, so one year ago. And they were by far the most successful launch of, of ETFs in the history of ETFs. And the, the one you can point to that the, the metrics are so far over the top, it's just, it's almost mind blowing. But the IBIT, IBITETF, the spot Bitcoin ETF from, from BlackRock raised $50 billion of, of AUM in less than a year. And it, it blew away the records of anything, anything that has been launched in the last 10 years. It's not even closed. So that's a really big deal. Now, why is that so important for institutions? For those of you have not heard me describe this before, it is. And for regular bitcoiners, it's a difficult thing to get your head around because you think, well, I just take cash out of my bank account. I can go buy Bitcoin. I put it in the, you know, use a signing device, the wallet. I put it in cold storage. I'm good to go. Now imagine an institution, an endowment, you know, a, a foundation pension fund. Yeah, that would that wants to buy Bitcoin. So you have this portfolio manager who's super excited about, he's orange built, he understands, he's got an analyst, a young analyst and they're all gung ho. Let's go. We're going to buy some Bitcoin. We're going to put it on our balance. We're going to put it, we're going to put it in our portfolio. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the the CIO and, and say, this is what I want to do. The CIO is going to go, hold on, wait a minute. We got to go talk to the general counsel, you know, our compliance officer and see how are we going to do this? Because who's going to hold the keys? Is that going to be you holding the keys? Are we going to hold it multi sig solution? Are we all going to hold keys? What's the hierarchy there? Then what's the fiduciary risk? What's the personal risk of doing that? That's first a huge hurdle to get over, right? So that's just #1 then secondly, who's going to custody it? You know, who's going to actually custody that Bitcoin? We're not going to just put it in cold storage. And who's, so how is that key? You know, multi 6 solution going to work. Are we going to have a third party custodian as well? Because our Brian broker doesn't do that. You know, JP Morgan's not going to hold it for us. Who's going to hold it? That's the second thing. The third thing is, you know, what were you going to trade it? Are you going to trade it on, on Coinbase or Kraken or you know, Binance? Like how is that is, are they regulated? Like how is this going to work? And then where are you going to market? Are you going to market to market on the close of the New York Stock Exchange? Because the thing doesn't close ever. Like these are all operational headaches that you've got to get over. And so, but when the ETFs were launched, in one fell swoop, you could buy it with the same broker, trade it on the same exchange, settle it with the same same prime broker, custody it with your prime broker and market to market on the New York Stock Exchange. close. And one fell swoop, they took care of everything and simplified it down to the being able to buy Bitcoin, a spot ETF Bitcoin just like you would any other stock. It's a really, really big deal. And that's why we've seen this adoption kind of accelerate over the last year. I was going to say, I mean, I, I think that there's no doubt like we're seeing more and more institutions or in particular family offices, like when we were raising our fund to at the Bitcoin Opportunity fund, when we were raising our fund one a couple years ago, you couldn't get institutions. Bitcoin was at 1920 thousand. You could barely get family offices to warm up. Whereas right now we're out raising our fund too and you're seeing the family offices engage more. The institutions are slowly coming around for sure. But it it's, it's the family offices that are more engaged I think is what we're seeing this. Yeah, definitely they're asking more questions. They're they're asking for, you know, there are asking for capacity because we, you know, our first fund is closed. And so they're, they're asking how they can get exposure to this rather than just buying an ETF or rather than just buying Bitcoin, like how can they get exposure to the space and so. And I think those ETFs were kind of that blocking fullback to open that up. And obviously, you know, the Trump administration victory, laying out regulatory clarity and that's coming and, and, and possibly strategic stockpile and strategic Bitcoin reserves, those things are kind of waking people's eyes up that this is a real asset class. And, you know, and we, and we've seen that and we believed it and, and we think it's starting to become more widely understood. Yeah, those are huge tailwinds the the the Trump administration winning not just because of, you know, their favorable stance on it, but we're we're we're getting pro crypto, pro Bitcoin SEC chair, CFTC chair, like we're getting some regulatory clarity this this year is my is my thinking and that that's going to be another tailwind, not just the pro Bitcoin tweets that we get from Trump and and Eric and you know, like this is real. Then you've got the just the discussion of having Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset like that. This is it may, it has to run a gauntlet to get through legislation and get there. But between Senator Lummus out of Wyoming and her bill, the Bitcoin Act and Trump talking about an executive order just to get Bitcoin on the balance sheet, these are really big deals. And it gets a conversation going and it and it continues to validate Bitcoin as that that pristine store value asset. That's another thing. And then also the, the repeal which we believe is going to happen of SAB 121, which will allow banks to hold Bitcoin on on their balance sheets instead of having to hold as a liability, which will open up a whole new set of, of, of, of avenues for commercial use and for, for, for the banks to offer products to their customers for customer use that aren't available right now. So that's a really big deal. Also you, you, you'll start seeing in the next few years, you know, Chase and, and Citibank and Wells Fargo and, and Bank of America, they'll have the ability for you to take your Bitcoin and, and either buy it through your bank custody at your bank. They'll, they'll come up with lending products against it, you know, possibly insurance products against it. Like these are really like, this is a big development and we think that's going to happen this year. So these are all these are all tailwinds that are happening in the Bitcoin space that we believe severely undervalues Bitcoin here in the market. So people are talking about the macro landscape and worries about the macro landscape. We have so many tailwinds for Bitcoin that we think they far outweigh the any any macro headwinds that we may be seeing. Yeah, and I just one other quick thought that comes to my mind is, you know, if anyone's out there that's kind of thinking about this space, you know, I feel like all of us that are in the Bitcoin space, we, you know, for me it was probably back in 2015, sixteen where you're like, I don't get it. I, I understand gold. I don't understand Bitcoin. I I think a few things key geopolitical events in the last few years have have impacted it that one you know, when the when the US and and NATO, I would already took the Russian reserves and and kind of their cash and gold. That kind of woke everyone up to OK, if I'm China, Russia and you, you know where all these places that we in the United States import from and and send our dollars to to get plastic widgets back of whatever Walmart good it is. And they're forced to take those dollars and that they, you know that they get for their oil in Saudi Arabia or Russia and they have to plow that back into usually U.S. Treasury bonds. I think they've woken up over the last few years to hey, this is a real problem, this debt cul-de-sac that James laid out of this debt doom loop that the US and every government's in. And I think as Alton Pozar, really good strategist out there, has written a lot about this that, you know, that, you know, things like gold and, and, and again, in our words, Bitcoin is now being more understood as that digital gold. These are those safe harbors again, that people are running to. You've seen a natural bidding gold since that time. You've seen it in Bitcoin as well. And, and I think that that's just going to continue that. So those for anyone that thinks like, wow, this is temporary, Maybe the Trump administration will fix it. Look, improvements can be made. We're all rooting for them. I think that the thing that's probably misunderstood is that the debt genie out of the bottle is hard to solve. It is is James laid out in the math upfront that this is going to be a challenge no matter what? You will break the economy if you try and do a $2 trillion cut in spending like Doge had once time talked about. I feel like Scott Besent through his 333 plan is laid out more like round numbers, roughly 400 billion a year of cuts. He testified today. I saw in the headlines and was talking about these challenges fiscally that we face. But you can't kill the patient. And there's this is brain surgery. This is not resetting a broken bone here to fix this fiscal problem. This is brain surgery. You got to be really careful trying to remove the cancerous tumor. And I don't mean to be, you know, cavalier about that by the way, it's sensitive ish, but it but it's an analogy. You got to be careful the patient and I think that this one's really hard and it it I think that again, non debt money is Dalio calls it or posed or talks about two, it's gold and Bitcoin. They're going to have these macro bids. And so I think that that one tailwind, the macro tailwind for Bitcoin where it's a $2 trillion asset class in a world of 900 trillion of assets. And again in 1979, eighty, the sound money assets were about 8 to 10% of global financial assets to the end of the period. We are, you know, well less than 1% of Bitcoin as A and gold collectively of global financial assets, right? I mean, our view is when you count just the tradable goal, they've got Jesse Meyers chart here and on the screen hope we can see that, you know, that, that, you know, our, our views that tradable gold actually might even be lower. It's more like, you know, if you take away the antiquities and things on women's necks and what's in the Vatican, assume that's not for sale, it's less than $10 trillion of gold, gold value. So collectively you're, you're just around one or just below 1% of global financial assets. If we get some period like the 70s or something worse, you know, we think this could be back to 8 to 10% over the next 5-7 years. That's, that's a massive wall of money of over $90 trillion in today's dollars chasing this $2 trillion asset class Bitcoin. That's why on a macro, we're very bullish. The the second thing is technology side blockchain growth. You know, more and more AI is coming at us fast, right? We're, we're at conferences this week talking all about agent AI, right? Where you're going to call a brokerage firm, plug in your information that you're willing to share and have them be able to replicate a portfolio for you in a matter of seconds as opposed to days. Based on your what you've identified as your key menu items that you want for as an investor, 6040 bonds, stocks, whatever it might be, ESG focused, whatever it might be. And I think that that that as an example is key. Now, importantly, in an AI world, the large language models need data and we the consumers have that data and we can get monetized and paid for that data, but you're going to need block chains to securely send and share that data as one example of AI. And so we think again, as this chart shows in the far right, we were in the past, look, we've gone from, you know, the cypherpunk era where it was an electronic cash system to now where it's the the store of value that 100,000 Bitcoin. It is the dominant store value. I feel like even the crypto folks that you'll talk to will admit that. We think this next phase though, over the next five years is where Web 3 integration, the AI economy drives then this as the digital monetary settlement layer. I think that, you know, people will say, well, wait, what about crypto? And, and I think the challenge, I think crypto's got some really interesting technologies, but I think the challenge is there's no sound money there and that you're going to have to see things like 0 knowledge roll ups that come on to the Bitcoin space to get validated. And so that's that Michael Saylor analogy that if you own the scarce asset Bitcoin, it's like owning Central Park West real estate 1900. And what are you going to do with your land there? Are you going to build an apartment building in your, with your Bitcoin or this land you have on, on Central Park West, it's scarce, are you? And you're going to get streams of cash flow. If you need to open lightning channels, perhaps you need to do that with Bitcoin. You'll get paid rent for that Bitcoin that you own. This is your Central Park West apartment building through the Bitcoin you own. And I think that this AI is James said this, this macroeconomic catalyst that will catalyze a space, but we also think it's the AI convergence and this is what can really catalyze this. The way in the early 2000s, finally the Internet and e-commerce began to kick in and you started to see real interesting businesses like the Googles, the Salesforce dot coms, the Amazons. That's our hope that at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, we're trying to, you know, again raise our fund to to take advantage of those opportunities both from a store of value standpoint of Bitcoin and the technology side and we're very excited about it. Yeah, gentlemen, if I could just jump in here real quick. I really appreciate all of what you've laid out so far. You've you've made a really compelling case in the context of the macroeconomic and fiscal situation. You've made a strong case for several of the drivers of 2025 as it relates to Bitcoins adoption and price appreciation for the year. And I'm excited to talk about the Bitcoin opportunity Fund. And before we do so, I I think for people, because I don't want to assume that everyone listening has the same level of understanding of the Bitcoin fundamentals and its merits as an investable asset that we do. So if maybe we could just take a step back because I'm sure a lot of folks listening, this may be redundant to them. But we also want to recognize that for family offices, pension funds, endowments, foundations that are just starting to come up the curve and maybe have questions about what makes Bitcoin unique within this digital asset landscape. Why is this a neutral or a political asset that benefits from the fiscal situation not only in the US but globally? Could we speak to a little bit more about how you think about Bitcoin within a broader portfolio context? Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, so Bitcoin is the original crypto and it's the only one that is a decentralized protocol, right? Sitting on top of, you know, original. Successful thing. The original successful one, right? In other words, Etherium and salon and all these. Things there were there were a few that came before Bitcoin that just were not successful, but this is the one that really that took off and grew organically, properly and. So with proper decentralized, proper protocol set in place and it sits on top of the Internet layers, it's the Internet money. And what's important is it would take 51% of the, you know, 19,000 plus global nodes to change the protocol. And, and it's not in there in the key thing that Nakamoto and them created is it's not in anyone's incentives or interest to want to change it because you're economically hurting yourself if you own Bitcoin and wanted suddenly vote down and dilute the asset. And so between nodes and miners that secure the network and codify and manage the block process, this has become a a network. And, and probably in the early years, there were challenges. In 2010, for instance, there was once a huge Bitcoin bug print where I think it was like 180 billion Bitcoin was printed and it took Nakamoto about 5 hours to patch it. There were risk of the government, there was risk of, you know, all the Silk Road stuff, but ultimately the network effects have carried through. And here we are 15 plus years later and, and this network of fact now has grown and, and, and we, we've, it's been battle tested. There's been soft forks, there's been ICO wars. Yeah, the the the network has operated and settled transactions continuously without a hiccup since 2011. Is the last minor hiccup. And so it's it is operated continuously without a hiccup since then. It's easily the strongest cryptocurrency network out there. It's not even close. And so just to get an idea of how how much energy is securing this network, there's 175 terawatt hours of power that every every year that that is securing the network, which is the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactors running at full kilt all year. So it is, it is literally nation state level resistant to tampering or manipulation. And so that's why it, it is an absolute trustless network that you do not have to worry about your counterparty. It's not like back in, you know, Dave and I traded back in 2008 and, and the housing crisis and, you know, Lehman. Brothers. We were concerned. I mean, I had, I was working at a big hedge fund, you know, at and we, we were concerned that our is, does we're not going to hold up. Our counterparty was not going to, to, to hold up the, the bargain. The the, their deal that our agreement, which was just a piece of paper is when you know that that is the agreement. It's just a piece of paper. It's a derivative and a legal agreement to pay, you know, the other side. Well, we had to trust that the counterparty was going to be there if the trade went against them. Well, in this situation, you don't have to trust the counterparty. There's no counterparty risk. It's riskless because it's settled on this immutable blockchain that cannot be changed. And so that's what's so important about Bitcoin as a standalone store value asset. And that's what sets it apart from all of the other cryptocurrencies, which are nowhere near as decentralized as Bitcoin. This is the only truly decentralized asset out there that's secured by all of that energy. There's some of the crypto rails can be faster than the Bitcoin rails, although the Lightning Layer 2 network is trying to grow to solve that and it is growing. We can get into that. The only thing I'd add is that, but Bitcoin is more secure than any of them and decentralized more than any of them. And I think that the other thing is scarcity obviously, right? The fact that there's only going to be 21 million coins, the fact that the having cycle happens every four years, meaning the US money supply, as we said grows at 6.8% on average over the last 50 plus years. And gold roughly supply grows around 1.8% to 2% per year, which is that's why gold's had value for 5000 years. It's a scarce asset. Well, in a world where they're printing that much U.S. dollar money and globally money supply growing fast, Bitcoin now at less than 1% of your growth. And going down every four years, it will be less than 1/2 percent year growth in in the next having cycle in 2028. It is the scarcest asset we could even get in a more scarcity. The fact that most of Bitcoin, 63% of all Bitcoin was huddle last year, meaning it was held longer than six months. People who are in Bitcoin in this space, some people joke it's a cult. It's more just that people understand the store value, the nature of what we're talking about here right now. And so very few of his on exchange, there might only be as little as of the 19.8 million or so Bitcoin that have been mined to date out of the 21 total approximately you'll hear estimates three to four million of those maybe more Bitcoin have been lost Back when no one paid attention to this asset class 20/20/2011, you know, it was maybe trading for you know, 50 bucks. No one cared. So many of it has been lost on exchange. Bitcoin, he's really probably call it three million, 4 million coins. Obviously at higher prices, hodlers begin to sell. You're seeing that recently in the last few weeks, a little bit of trimming, but in general, it is a scarce asset for the cap, the having cycle and just what's on exchange because most people are dug in here. And so I think that that's what sets up for, you know, whenever this big print happens, you know, in the next crisis is Larry Laporte's book talks about the big print. We we think that this is a a massive opportunity from the macro side. And and this is, as James said, the most secure decentralized network out there. I think other cryptos, again, like for instance, in Etherium's case, the top five guys own 63% of the money supplied Etherium. It's not sound and, and, and again, I think that that's an important caveat that while certain Kryptos and anyone out there's a big crypto person out there, I'm not trying to denigrate it, but it, I think it's got those challenges from just a store of value, sound money principle. And I think these are the things that are most important to Bitcoin. And in our view, at the end of the day, the sound money is where the people run when the stuff's hitting the sand. And that's what continues to grow this network and will continue to and those network effects are going to be massive and continue to be a massive. So I don't know if that answers your question, Jackson, but that that's kind of how we think about it. Yeah, that that's fantastic context and and appreciate you guys walking through that. You know, I want to get to sort of some more information on the fund and the things you guys are seeing in the market today. But maybe before that I just wanted to pull back to that global asset landscape that we had up on the screen earlier. Question for both of you. I'm curious where you think from which buckets is capital most likely to flow towards Bitcoin in the coming 5 to 10 years? I think some people would say, you know, they like to to play that narrative of, you know, Bitcoin is demonetizing gold. But if you go back to what and I'm glad you brought up Zoltan Pozar, you know, he was very formative and and sort of getting loud about a lot of these concepts four or five years ago. But you know, there's an argument that, you know, gold's probably going to go up in this environment too. So maybe the capital isn't coming from gold. In your view, which of these buckets is is most likely to see capital towards Bitcoin? Yeah. I mean, when we talk about the the problem that this that the sovereigns are facing with just the sheer amount of debt that they have and the need to debase those currencies in order to pay down that debt or just keep up with this charade of issuing more and more debt, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing more money. The problem is that you that bondholders are starting to wake up to the fact that they're getting a negative real rate of return. When you're seeing it right now, you're seeing that the Fed has lowered rates from 5 1/2. the Fed funds rate has been lowered from 5 1/2 to 4 1/2 at the same time that they were lowering the rates from 5 1/2 to 4 1/2. And that's the, that's the, the, the underpinning of the whole yield curve is where the Fed funds rate is what the same time they were lowering rates by a full percent. The 10 year treasury, the benchmark treasury of the entire world, the 10 year U.S. Treasury, the yield rose by over a full percent. So it went from like 3.6 to 4.7% in the same period. And why is that? Well, there's some concern over inflation in the future because, oh, now that the Fed is lowering rates, that means that there's going to be more inflation is going to be more consumer inflation. I need to be protected by that. That's part of it. The other part of it is just the in bond investors are realizing that there's a massive amount of debt that's going to that is going to be dumped on investors. We just talked about how the the deficit is running at 2.8 trillion, 35% more than last year already this year. And so that they understand inherently that there's going to be a lot more debt that's coming to market, which means that there's going to be more debasement, which means that my negative real rate of return is going like it's getting bigger, which means that I need to get what's called term premium, which means that the further I go out on this yield curve and and the the longer dated my bonds are, the more interest I need to be paid on those bonds in order to get in order to protect myself. So that all means it all gets down to the point that it's not going to happen today, but you're seeing it happen slowly. You're seeing, you are seeing Bitcoin not demonetized, but take some market share from gold. It is, it is, it's seen as a younger, for the younger generation as a superior form of gold and for a number of reasons. You know, it's, it's portable, it's it, it, it's very easily verifiable. You know, it's hard to count it. You can't counterfeit Bitcoin like you can gold. And that's not, that's not a joke. I mean, even JP Morgan had $50 million of gold bars sitting in a, in a vault that were actually just gold plated nickel, you know, like it, it's like these things happen. It can't happen with Bitcoin. So that's that's the obvious one as you pointed out that demonetizing gold or just taking market share from it, but they will both grow in this environment we believe. The second thing is obviously risk assets. The Bitcoin will take market share from risk assets as, as as institutions adopt this and they do understand it fully and they do start using it as a store of value. They put it on their balance sheet, they put it in their treasuries. They're not getting them. They're not going to have to use it as and they're not going to mark it down as an impaired asset anymore. The volatility will start coming down as more and more institutions buy this and and the price goes up and there's just more money in the in the Bitcoin network that that will dampen volatility just naturally there you'll be able to move in and out of the protocol without as much trading friction. So that's another thing. But as that happens and it becomes a true store of value and institutions are adopting it will when they want to come out of risk assets, they typically would go into gold and go into bonds. Well, now they're going to gold and Bitcoin and bonds. However, the problem with the bonds is that eventually these investors are waking up to the fact that I'm I'm losing money. Like in real terms I'm losing real return because. Inflation is greater than the yield. Because the inflation is greater than the yield. So they will start to take money out of that bucket. And then an obvious bucket that it'll start taking money out of is real estate as an investment. You know, if you're a real estate investor, you've got to, you've got to deal with tenants, you've got to deal with taxes, you've got to deal with upkeep and maintenance. And you know, you may have a like no joke. And it's been an awful, awful thing to watch out in California and to know people who've lost their homes that couldn't even get insurance on them. And so, you know, now you've got you've lost that asset, you've got the land, but you can't build on it. You've got regulations from California. It's just a nightmare. So it's a whole lot easier to just buy and hold Bitcoin than having to deal with that if you want to have a store of value. And so we believe that it's going to not just take from one bucket, it's going to basically take from all the buckets as the number one store value asset in the world. I think the only thing I'd add to that is, Brian, I think it's bonds, right? That's definitely at a massive risk. And I'd say there's 2 examples in U.S. history that come to mind on that. One is the 1970s, right? Yes. You know, kind of Burns and Volcker, we're trying to do what they could with the yield curve. Ultimately, as everyone knows the story, Volcker in early 1980 had to take interest rates up to 20% on the federal funds rate to really break the back of inflation. Some of that, though, was not just Volcker, right. If you look at the market curves, the market itself was saying, I sell bonds, I need a much higher yield given this massive inflation of the 70s. And that's when gold went on its run in the 1970s, you know, making a massive run with the. Bond vigilantes. Because the bond of July is 2820 X returning cold during that decade And and that's that's one number two is 1945 post World War 2, the United States had the same debt to GDP that we have now. So we had to borrow up the Gazoo to to fund the war after borrowing up to help fund England during World War One. And they had to do yield curve control. The same thing that the Bank of Japan is having to do right now in Japan of print money to keep yields pegged on the yen. And the reason why the US would need to do that or, or on, on the yeah, on on the Japanese bonds, the, the, the reason why the US would have to do that is because as James stopped at the beginning, this interest burden on the overall deficit is massive and the debt is growing and growing. They cannot afford to let rates go up to 10% in the United States to fight inflation or to let get to a market clearing price where people will buy the bonds. This becomes a real challenge that yield curve control is very likely just like we had to do in 1945. So I think, you know, this isn't just crazy talk. There's plenty of examples in just the US history in the last 80 years that that show you that. Excellent, Appreciate that. So how, how is the Bitcoin Opportunity fund capitalizing on the Bitcoin opportunity? So we talked about today $2 trillion asset exists within a $900 trillion asset landscape. Talked about things for investors to think about for 2025 as relates to catalyst for appreciation and adoption. So what should investors know about your strategy? What makes you unique? Look, person just to understand the Bitcoin opportunity fund, Dave and I, when we, when we started this, it was in a, it was a real rough period in the, in the, in the market, in the Bitcoin and crypto market. And so we saw the landscape and how difficult it was for investors to, to kind of navigate that landscape. And we realized that one of the things that we didn't see out there, we saw hedge funds doing some things here and there. We saw a couple of funds just kind of dabbling in, in, in the whole landscape. But we realized that there was a, there was a, there's a need in the market for a vehicle for people to invest in that could take advantage of anything in the, in the Bitcoin landscape, not just venture capital, not just early stage private deals, but some of that, but also some of the public deals, some of the public opportunities, possibly some of the distressed asset opportunities. We So we decided that we wanted to create a vehicle that would allow us to invest anywhere in the landscape. And it could be early stage, late stage. We could do public, we could do private, we could do anywhere in the capital structure from common equity to preferred equity to convertible bonds to unsecured debt to secure debt. And we've done the pretty much all of that along the way in just the first year and a half save for convertible bonds. We have not done any of those. However, we, you know, we've been, we've been able to also on top of that, we could use derivatives, you could use options and, and hedging strategies in order to kind of manage the risk around the portfolio as well. And so that's how we, that's, that's our philosophy and how we invest and personally. And so we decided to create a vehicle that would allow other people to come in and join us and invest the same way. So. Yeah. I guess just add on to that. I mean, as James said, we're traditional finance guys, value equity and growth equity backgrounds and and private and public distressed debt backgrounds as well. In our view is look how do we bring that experience to this great growth space and try and have kind of a value mindset here trying to create good risk adjusted returns in this Bitcoin space. And So what we've done is a lot of the public companies obviously on our in our hybrid fund, hedge fund and venture fund, we are roughly about 8020 invested on the public side, 20% on the private side. As the portfolio matures and we look for private deals. And and we'd expect overtime that will do, but but our view is that will grow rather the privates. But what we're doing is trying to find opportunity that's asymmetric in the short run. And what we do is we live in a Bitcoin standard and and we are benefiting our LP's that say, geez, well, why wouldn't I just hold Bitcoin itself? Well, we, we can hold that for you. And then as we find interesting opportunities, we can deploy to those. So if you know micro strategy, you know has been cheap and over the last year and a half. And so we built positions there. There've been other public companies that have adopted a Bitcoin treasury strategy play that the Bitcoin mining space. We've tried to focus in on the ones that have optionality to being just data center, future data center and power owners of power that's going to be so in demand from the AI trends that are coming where these companies are trading at, you know, 13 times cash flow and, and ultimately will probably become data center REITs that traded over 20 times cash flow. And so those type of opportunities that we feel like we can unlock in the public side, we go after and on the private side, trying to be picky because there's we're trying to find businesses that can generate cash flow sooner than later. So for instance, you know Anchor Watch, for instance, is a property and casualty Bitcoin property and casualty insurance business that will ensure your Bitcoin through Lloyd's of London. Their cover holder for Lloyd's of London protects you against everything, including a wrench attack or kidnapping. And that our view is, geez, that sounds like a Warren Buffett GEICO insurance model. If they can get the flywheel growing and get adoption of customers, you're going to have massive profits there. I think Lloyds of London saw that the loss rates are likely low in the Bitcoin space given the public nature and the transparent nature of the Ledger and the security of it. You saw, for instance, in the Colonial Pipeline hacking a few years ago, the vast majority of that Bitcoin was recovered because the nature of the public Ledger of Bitcoin. And so I think a lot of criminals realize that Bitcoin's actually a terrible asset to try and hijack that, you know, they're bound to lose it in that case. So I think that you know that that type of stuff where we can find private businesses that can generate cash flow quickly. We were finding Bitcoin miners that there's a company Corman in West TX that mines Bitcoins, One of our first investments, they mined Bitcoin using excess solar and wind renewables in West TX out near the Permian. And they are able to mine it at about 2.1 cents a kWh, which is about 45% cheaper than the industry average. They're one of the best unit economics in the space. We were able to buy Bitcoin at around $26,000, lend it to them on a fully secure basis, three-year secured loan covered by all their assets. In our estimation, the company had gone bankruptcy the next day. We've been 3 1/4 times covered by their asset value. So real safe, secure loan in Bitcoin. We were able to buy it cheap and we were getting 10% Bitcoin yield back on those bonds and then we got equity in the business and the warrant value of the business at their Series A round. Happy to say that we're beginning to get paid back on our Bitcoin loan early. It's probably generate 159% IRR on just the debt on the Bitcoin alone, the Bitcoin debt alone keeping our equity value marked at basically cost at at 0 because it was an equity warrant. We don't mark it up at all on the equity side. So we're excited about those type of things that we can take advantage of public and private opportunities in the space where it makes sense to kind of take those shots on goal to hopefully outperform, you know, in this space over the course of the cycle to fund so. And so just structurally we we, we draw the capital upfront like a typical hedge fund and we can get the money to work pretty quickly in that in the public market and just. Want to interject? Importantly, we can take Bitcoin, U.S., dollars or stable coins into our fund too, and we can take IRA capital or regular capital. Right, right. And, and, and so it really important for it to be really easy for people to to subscribe. So, but we can get the money to work quickly in the public markets and especially in the second fund, we can allocate the same way we have in the first fund just to get it would be it'll be allocated per rata just like any opportunity that we find will be allocated per rata. But what's important about that is that we don't feel pressure to just take shots on goal, on venture deals or private deals or just get the money to work and call capital to get money to work because because we don't we don't feel the pressure to get the capital in the door to get the management fees to get the capital. Like that's not something we have to deal with and we have to worry about. Because of the Bitcoin standard. Because we're on the Bitcoin standard and we can get the capital to work in the in the public markets without having to, you know, drive those quick shots on goal. And so we can be like David said, super picky, super choosy on those private investments and really get to the point where we can trust the, the management team, understand what the, the company and their, and their business understand the road map and, and, and their, their map toward revenue generating, earning, you know, in creating earnings. And bottom line, we can, we can be super choosy on those. And so in our funnel, you know, me being out there all the time and our other advisory partners between Mark Moss and Larry the Pard and Greg Foss, we get a lot of deals that come to us. So we can be super choosy on what we actually allocate to. And it's an important distinction to me, I think. Just one thing out there is I think all of us being in this space for over six to seven years being investors in the space, you know collectively on the team. Not only has it led to that deal flow like James is talking about from the network effect these, you know, all of us being out there in pods like this or to have you. We're our Twitter followers and James's case and others. I think that it's importantly built relationships with important diligence providers where we can make the phone call to people in this space that are smarter than we are to cover our blind spots. To me, that's a superpower, knowing what you don't know and knowing how to go figure out to get the answer. We're pretty humble that way. We don't we don't have all the answers. This is a fast moving space developing and I think a lot of our family office LP clients have trusted us to say let us go out into the field and hunt for you to find a good value in this great growth space. Excellent. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. It's been an hour. If you have 10 more minutes, we could do some Q&A before we whisp up here. So for anyone who does have questions, feel free to submit them. In the meantime, have a couple to work through. Maybe the first one we can we can discuss is from an education within an institution, what has been your most effective tool or method for overcoming skepticism for from CI OS and CF OS and moving them toward allocating the Bitcoin? So I guess how of your, you mentioned when you started the first fund, it was a tougher market environment. There is more skepticism around institutional investors and family offices. How have you seen that change and what do you think that you've done in those conversations to help affect that change? I'm, I'm sure some of it is due just to the more regulatory clarity, more support within the within Wall Street and within the US government. But what do you think like you guys have done at the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund to help demonstrate the credibility and the institutional nature of Bitcoin as an asset class? Yeah, I mean getting people to understand why the money is broken is paramount. Just I don't, when I talk to people and try to explain to them why I am so confident and I believe in Bitcoin, I don't really even talk about Bitcoin. I don't talk about the mutability of that. I don't talk about the, you know, the scarcity. I, I first talk about the money. And the first thing you ask people is, and it's a pretty simple question, is what should the inflation rate be and why? And nobody has a good answer, not even Powell, you know, and he was on 60 Minutes last year and he was asked this exact question. What, why 2%? What's the magic number of 2%? Like why do you have? And he gave a word, solid answer that had to do with our, our, the, our star and neutral rate. And it just had made no sense. And but the answer is there is no reason. I mean, it was just, it was, it was adopted by the Bank of New Zealand back in the 80s and it just became the standard for the rest of the world. Then that answer is why 2%? It's because they can get away with it. And so once people understand, they can get their head around, wait a minute. Yeah. Why is there inflation? And you start talking through the reality of the deflationary forces of technological advances. You know, being able to have 10s of 10s of millions of songs available to me on my phone for 999 or 1399, whatever it is now with Spotify rather than just one album of songs for 1399 when I was a kid. You know, that's a deflationary force. The same thing with with photos. I mean, I have 10s of thousands of photos on my phone and that would have cost, you know, many thousands of dollars to just have the film for that. So when I was a kid, now I'm showing showing how old I am that I had bought Kodak film when I was a kid. But you know, those are deflationary forces. And so when you start to beg the question, which is the whole premise of Jeff Booth's book of the The Price of Tomorrow, you have these forces that that are battling each other. Why is inflation winning out? It's because of the manipulation of the money supply. And once you understand the manipulation of the money supply and how that's not really benefiting the consumer, that their house isn't going up in value, that the stocks aren't going up in value, that it's just the dollar that's going down in value, then they start to wrap their head around it and they understand, oh, sound money, sound money. OK, gold, but then you can go through all the limitations and and and and the challenges of gold and that's when they start getting to the OK, the digital age and you just walk them down that path. And ultimately the ones who have who I have successfully orange pilled, they get to the answer themselves. I don't have to give it to them. They say, oh, OK, now I understand now I get it. But the hard part is to look at a system while you're inside that system and try to figure out what's wrong with it. It's almost like you have to pull yourself out of the system and look at it to understand what's going on. And if you can help them along that path and get them away from the money to look at it really objectively look at it and critically think around why the money is is is acting the way it is and how it's being manipulated, then they get to the answer by themselves. Yeah, I think the only add to that is just so you know, like I think there's been a lot of great educators we talked about whether it's the ETFs themselves, the black rocks of the of the world, Larry Fink talking it up. Obviously Michael Saylor, you know, this, this has gotten more well known. It's not just simply price went up in the last two years, but family offices for sure. And we're seeing it now on our fund to fundraise that again, these family offices are dialed in here and wanting to talk. So it's it's, it's a different environment. Totally. Awesome. Could you speak at all to the return profile of the first vintage and how do you typically position the fund to investors? Like how should investors think about allocating to the Bitcoin opportunity Fund versus deploying a buy and hold strategy with Bitcoin? I know we spoke in depth about the strategy and there's a lot, you know, there's quite a distinction between what you're doing versus buying Bitcoin. But I guess how do you typically communicate that to an institutional allocator? So I mean, the first thing we say is you need to have your believe in Bitcoin or understand enough that you'll trust that we'll, we'll make those investments for you. But most importantly, to have your core allocation of Bitcoin for yourself 1st. And you have your core allocation of Bitcoin and you want more exposure, you want more exposure, more exposure to the, the space, to the ecosystem, to Bitcoin itself. That's where we can come in and help. And so and our objective is, you know, we don't explicitly say, oh, we're going to, we're going to go out and beat Bitcoin. That's not the objective. The objective is to deliver strong risk adjusted returns for investors to make money for them in this space and have exposure to the space, which we believe can be extremely beneficial to anybody's portfolio. Yeah, I think just to answer your question too and build on what James is saying, you know we since our inception we're up about 65% net of all expenses. That's an estimate through 1231, not an outlet yet. It's in the process of being outlet. We you know that's net of all expenses. And again keep in mind that our private deals are marked at cost, right. So it's the public side that's been generating it also it generates it too is we portfolio hedge right at from time to time we've hedged with put spreads for instance on market indices that correlate with Bitcoin or Bitcoin itself. We're able to do certain call option strategies where we're able to write calls up at prices where we would maybe trim some of our positions and some of the public names to generate yield and income for the portfolio on that. So that, that's something that we've been able to do. And in our view then is that these privates over time, if we do our jobs well and, and, and get, you know, have some good success with some of those privates, then over the life of the fund, you're going to start to see those paying returns into the pool, if you will, in the next 3-4 years time frame. So we're, we're again, we're excited about it and we think the space is just going to keep growing. Appreciate it you have time for one more or. Please. Yeah, we got time. Sure. So how quickly do you think the perceived career risk has changed with institutional allocators? Has has changed or is going to change? Has changed so far and I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts would be for for this year as well. I mean, it's slowly changing. It has not changed fully yet. At the institutional level. Yeah. At the institutional level, it's slowly changing. The career risk has been up to this point, it has been if you own Bitcoin, you're way, way out there on the risk curve. But with all the tailwinds that I just described and especially with the ETFs and it's all been taken away. There's so much of that's been taken away. So now you're kind of on that edge of if you don't own it, then My Portfolio is very likely going to underperform in the future to anybody who does own it. And so now the IT, it's getting to be career risk as an allocator, you have to look at this and say, oh, OK, what wait a minute. If I have a traditional 60406040 portfolio, getting tired the end of the day here. If I have a, a traditional portfolio like that, then if I allocate 1%, five percent, 10% Bitcoin to that portfolio and, you know, reallocate from both those buckets, I suddenly realized looking back 10 years, that not only are my returns greatly augmented, but also my draw down isn't that big. It isn't, it isn't. It doesn't create a much larger draw down in those market shock periods #1 #2 because of those returns. And with that limited draw down that's that's created from adding bitcoins to your portfolio, it actually raises your sharp ratio, your risk adjusted return by adding Bitcoin to your portfolio. And that that's what's blowing peoples minds that they add bitcoins to the portfolio and my risk adjusted return goes up. I say yeah. And there's a lot of resources out there, including stuff that you guys on ramp put out there that explain and educate. I'll, I won't name the university, but it's a very good academic school in New England, liberal arts school with a billion dollar plus endowment that I recently had a conversation with one of their folks that reached out and we had the conversation. He said, look, I, I see it, I've been trying to educate our CIO on this and you know, he played around with some of the things on the website and saw what James is talking about around the web that saw what James talking about, about the better risk adjust returns by even having a 2 to 5% allocation to the space. But he was very honest. He said, look, you know, but but there's a little bit of career risk, like we're going to look like an idiot. And I said, well, hold on, what if we're right? If you had a 2% position and if you thought that you know, we're idiots and wrong and that this 15 year network effect growth suddenly just ended tomorrow, even though that probably feels incredibly small, you'll never miss this 2% position. If we're right and this takes off, given the asymmetry of this asset class, you will far outperform every other benchmark university endowment that you're talking about. And so who will be the first to take that chance? And so I think what we're seeing is, in my opinion, very few institutions are ready to do it, but they're warming up in the bullpen. If we use a baseball analogy or they're on the on deck circle, they're they're they're getting ready. What we are seeing again is family office inbound calls to us as we're out there for raising fund to here at Bitcoin opportunity fund. And, and that that has definitely dramatic change. And I think the difference is the family offices are in more control. There's not that career risk. It's it's the directive of the wealthy family or this that that are saying, hey, we want some of this asset class. Let's start looking at ways. And I think our traditional finance background is what brings them to us saying, look, you guys know how to handle playing and and and doing portfolio hedging and trying to do risk management as I enter this frontier, can you shepherd me through and so that that's what we're seeing out there. Yeah, it's exciting. I think part of that too with the career risk inversion will be with companies like MicroStrategy just being one working their way into the NASDAQ 100, right. And you have been Bitcoin companies or at least companies that are deploying Bitcoin treasury strategies in indexes. So then if you're an active manager and you're benchmarking against an index and you continue to be underweight those companies and it's showing up as negative attribution on your quarterly performance report, then you're going to get some calls from your investors. So that's kind of a nice positive flywheel effect too. I think we'll. Yeah. And it it's a little like to your point Jax, it's almost like what happened NVIDIA, right. Once that thing got bigger and its assets are going, if Bitcoin takes off and MicroStrategy now is growing massively weighted wise in that index, well then it's a flywheel again because indices need to step in the index funds rather need to step in and keep buying it and buying it and and and you know it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy that way and and rebalancing so. Excellent. Well, I know we're up on time, James and I said you're tired as well, so good place to. Close. I know, I get it so well. Thank you both for the time. What would be the best handoff for folks who are interested in the strategy? Yeah. So if, if, if you're interested in the fund, then in Fund 2 then just go to www.bitcoinopportunity.fund and you can just put in your, your name, your details and check off your accredited investor. And you can, and we'll send you information. We can set up a call or whatever you you know, whatever is best to to communicate the answers that you need. Excellent. And for those who are interested in joining future on RAMP institutional series, you can find more information on our website on rampbitcoin.com. If you subscribe to the research newsletter, we'll be publishing those on a go forward basis. I think today was a great inaugural session to really understand what's at play here as it relates to the fiscal situation, macroeconomics, What are some of the key drivers for Bitcoin in 2025? And so James and David, really grateful for your time today. Thank you for bringing such a clear and concise and compelling strategy forward and pushing forward Bitcoin adoption within both the institutional family office and high net worth segments. Thank you, Jackson. Brian, appreciate it and thank you on ramp. Thank you guys. Thanks gentlemen, Appreciate. It thank you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Ramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client Advisors.