Strategic Reserves, Fiscal Insanity, and the Bitcoin Explosion Ahead with Alex Thorn

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of darkness. 1974198792972000 and whatever we 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. Washington is quietly counting its Bitcoin, and when the White House finally publishes that number, estimated to be about 200,000 Bitcoin, it could be one of the biggest catalyst of the year. That is what Alex Thorne, head of firm wide research at Galaxy Digital, said on this episode of The Last Tree, really a sign that there is far more juice and catalyst left in the cycle. We've heard a lot of bullish things in 2025, but many haven't materialized yet and so that's exactly what we discussed. Ultimately though, none of this matters if you cannot secure your Bitcoin for the years to come, which is exactly why On Ramp exists. It's why I work here and I use On Ramp for my family's Bitcoin Nest Aid. On Ramp was built to help people like you secure their Bitcoin with confidence and achieve Peace of Mind with multi institution custody, baked in inheritance and insurance from Lloyd's of London at no extra cost. Whether you're safeguarding family wealth or corporate treasury or client assets, head to On rampbitcoin.com, book a consultation or you can get started in 10 minutes. Now. I hope you enjoyed the episode. All right, we're recording. We're back. It's the last trade and we're back. I'll say we're back because of our loyal audience because people decided to show up last week. I did not get fired. Alex. We can we can tell you later in the episode, but Michael has been threatening to fire me for several weeks at this point. And because of our loyal audience, the last trade, not only did I not get fired this week, but we were also able to bring on Alex Thorne, who is the director of firm wide research at Galaxy Digital. Alex, thank you for joining us. How you doing? Yeah. Hey guys. Great to be here. You know, first time caller, long time listener. Actually director, Director of research and memes, by the way. Like you have some memes, I spend a, you know, that's that is research. OK, My memes have a research quality to them. Absolutely. And well, funny enough, you were on the podcast one time before and it was actually when the ETFs were approved and launched January 10th, the price of Bitcoin was $46,000. We've come a long way. Yeah, we've come a long way. We're looking at 103 today. So we're going to pull up. We are going to pull up the price just very quickly because I have a question that's been top of mind is the top in is, but did we already see the top this cycle? Did we double peak AT110K? Alex, what? What do you think man? Am I too bearish right now? Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think we have topped. That's a a blanket statement. Look, there are fears of a double top pattern, right? Everybody saw that in 21 and and then you're looking at it here and you only got to what like 1-12 the other day or last two, you know, two weeks ago wanted to see that go to like 120. Like I think to feel like it definitely wasn't a double top. But The thing is, is like there, there, there haven't been that many catalysts actually have happened. There's plenty of good stories, right? People in the government saying nice things about Bitcoin and stuff. Most of it hasn't even happened. Retail's not really here like I, I don't see a lot of reason for Bitcoin to go down and I see plenty of reasons that it for it to go up, but I also see plenty of reasons in the near term. I mean, I, I'm basically sort of targeting mid-july to maybe sort of restart this when the presidential working group delivers its report to the White House. And then maybe there's some a catalyst there. But you're in sleepy early summer here and I think now you're sort of just trading on macro headlines for the near term. But I don't see a huge, I don't see a reason for a, a big drop in the near term. It's widely owned, to be clear, like whales have been selling like they're the, the corn that's being sold is being sold by like people that bought in like the 15K and lower range an enormous amount, right. So apparently they all made money and they're not huddling anymore. And not all of them, obviously, but like that you've had an enormous amount of selling and we're still over 100K. Like it just seems I, I, I don't know where from, where else, like more corn to be sold is going to come from, you know, so like, I feel pretty sturdy here. Yeah, it would be a very, it'd be a very interesting, uh, top if retail never showed up because I think anecdotally you see retail hasn't come in. It'd be kind of maybe bullish for them. So they don't get rugged by whatever is going to happen because there's going to be no shortage of mousetraps when this thing really takes off that they just got to bypass a whole bull market. But that's never happened in bitcoins history, that retail hasn't come in and droves and then also probably gotten rugged along the way. Here it is. Here's the yeah. Maybe we pull up some of the exceptional research that Alex has been doing. We have a great meme that he shared yesterday on on Twitter or X maybe retail is here, but they're buying Bitcoin, treasury companies. Alex. Can you can you walk us through this meme here? What's going on in? This, yeah. So basically I'm just sort of cataloguing some of the eras metas, the big narrative metas since 2017. I've been working on Bitcoin and crypto full time since 2017, like first at Fidelity, now a Galaxy. And this is just what we came up with remembering sitting around and obviously IC OS that's easy to to remember and was a huge deal. It created tons of new altcoins. It separated people from their Bitcoin. Many of them failed. Some of them are still around like Cardeno was a 2017 ICO right Tezos they exist not all of them literally were frauds. Some of them might just be, you know, crappy networks that did actually launch, but it was the fraud and scam from that that then led to which I don't even have on here. The like the later meta of VC coins right of of doing these private token deals through VCs and then releasing them through secondary sales rather than primary sales to the retail. Then I don't know, 2018 was a bit tough to come up with one, but we do recall bit Max trading on leverage and bit Max was like that was like the first time that everybody was doing that and then 2019 also a bit of a lull. I remember being at the Bitcoin conference in June 2019 with Bitcoin, you know, after the depths of this post 2017 bear, it was rallying from like 8 to 13 K and we're like, oh, are we back and then it it failed to consummate and later we all learned that it was a giant Ponzi scheme in China called plus token that you had to buy into with Bitcoin. That was probably the reason for that rally defy summer, the food yam finance sushi swap like algo stables big big in 2020 when everyone was locked at home. Then remember Elon in January, they said Tesla was buying Bitcoin for their balance sheet. It was super bullish. Then later he said, wait a SEC, I didn't realize that Bitcoin uses electricity. I'm rugging. And then Bitcoin. And then that was also right around when China supposedly yet again banned mining. And so we dropped from 60s to to, you know, 25 and in in the spring of 2021. And then obviously Dogecoin hit $0.69 with Elon on the on SNL and blah, blah, blah. And then yeah, 22 is when all the yield stuff came to a head, right? With all the lenders going bankrupt, I should probably have in 22. Also the GBTC discount was a big, big part of that year. And then 23, Bitcoin opens the year at 16 five. Great, great to buy there by by March on the collapse of SVB, it runs all the way to like 2627. So it's the bank failures. Then it was BlackRock in June announced that they were doing a Bitcoin ETF and then Grayscale won the US District Court of DC, the federal, the sorry, the US appeals ruling at the appeals court in DC in August of 23. That ultimately paved the way for the ETF, which launched in 24. Basically the story of last year was like ETFs and meme coins and then later Trump embracing Bitcoin. I think that's pretty much the whole narrative of last year. You, you had that barbell market where it was like the the lowest quality, low cap penny stock cryptos, meme coins were rallying and pushing Solana up with them and Bitcoin and everything else in the middle, like sat it out. He's had a terrible year last year, while Bitcoin, you know, doubled practically or did double ultimately. And then I'm saying like, I think the meta right now is Bitcoin treasury companies. We're tracking like 35 of them. It is getting blown out. There's now I, we saw there's a Chinese limousine company that's going to start an XRP strategy. So it's starting to go down the, the shit coin waterfall a bit. But that's, that's a huge part of the story, right? You've got Cantor, SoftBank, Tether, you've got obviously micro strategy. You've got now Bitcoin magazine, right? You've got BTC Inc with Nakamoto, you've got ones that are geographic based in Hong Kong and China and Japan and, and, and South America, right? Like there is a whole range of ways to do it now and you've got like 20 to 35 of them at least. And that seems like a huge part of the story this year. It's a excellent montage to run through, had eerily resemblance of a TFTC back in the day that I think Marty owes everyone a montage through Bitcoin or crypto's history. I think actually there's a lot of alpha if we ever clip this up and share it, because most people coming into these markets have no idea of half of those narratives, let alone all of them. And ultimately, I think that the meta to the meta is that there's always a contraption to take people's Bitcoin, and some people maybe make a little bit more Bitcoin, but a lot of people in the past 10 years have ended up with a lot Bitcoin. So TBD on where this all goes for everyone. Yeah, and, and, and like when I made that meme, like I'm not explicitly, I hadn't intended it to be. All of those were bad things. Like I was just trying to recall like what what the the big story was of the year. It turns out though, that like pretty much outside of owning Bitcoin, like most of the other things that have happened in crypto just haven't panned out right. So I, I feel bad because I'm not actually saying that sailor with his laser Galaxy brain is equivalent to like food based finance. I'm not saying that, just saying like that's the current story. And but it turns out a lot of the current stories end up, you know, being short lived, gone through a lot of them. It's an epic saga of, of crypto. It's been an epic, continues to be an epic saga. I don't know how we keep coming up with these new things. I. For one, am excited about K Wave Media, which is the prominent K pop group that is planning to raise $500 million for a Bitcoin treasury strategy. You know, it's a music based Bitcoin product. Who knew? Yeah, I'm. Curious, like to your point, Alex, it's not inherently a bad thing that these Bitcoin treasury companies exist and it's still, we'll still see how it pans out in terms of Bitcoin obviously plays a massive role in corporate adoption from just a vanilla, let's accumulate some Bitcoin on the balance sheet, preserve our company's cash for the long term, etcetera. And then there's of course, these other companies that are using capital markets, equity, debt, etcetera to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible. And to your point, I mean, there are companies out there that are viable and have a strategy, but then there's also just going to be a lot of excess that we're just starting to see in this cycle pan out. I'm curious from, from your point of view, as you've done research at Galaxy in the space here, just like how do you think about assessing the Bitcoin treasury landscape? I mean, what, what excites, what are you excited about, if anything, in this, in that part of the space? Well, one thing I'm am definitely excited about is the rising prominence of talented Bitcoin evangelists, and there are many now and the these companies, if nothing else, give them a strong platform right to explain and promote Bitcoin in equity markets, and that's a positive. I look, I'm an operating company maximalist. I believe in owning equities that are companies that build stuff. I don't need to get a tiny little, you know, bips on my M NAV at a Bitcoin treasury company. That's not I'm not interested in that really personally, I simply don't care. I mean, for that way, I basically no opinion, I'm fine with it. I, I think the big question that people have is do these end up like looking like a closed end fund? And what happens if they end up trading at a discount to their Bitcoin holdings? And I think David Bailey's been very straightforward and transparent about this. He says they will sell Bitcoin and use the proceeds to buy their stock back, right? Which is, by the way, that's what they should do, right? GBDC couldn't buy their own stock because they weren't public like there was no way for them to close the gap. And because you couldn't redeem, there was no way for anyone else to close the gap. Now you can't redeem here in a Bitcoin treasury strategy, but the issuer themselves can close the gap. So the fear is that if they end up having to sell some Bitcoin, if it's a lot of Bitcoin, then that can create a vicious cycle in the market, not just in spot Bitcoin prices, but also in with the other Bitcoin treasury companies. But but there's not that much. There isn't a lot of debt like it's not really that big of an issue. It's just that like people should know that most likely if these trade their, their stock prices trade below the value of their Bitcoin, a prudent executive would sell Bitcoin and use it to buy their stock back. So then you're going to, and you really just don't want to see that, particularly from somebody like Michael Saylor. Like imagine if Michael Saylor has to sell Bitcoin, right? And that's why he doesn't say this. I, I'm, but I'm quite confident that he might do it if he had to, right? And so it's just a bad narrative if someone like, you know, if any of these people who are hyper bullish Bitcoin end up having to sell Bitcoin, it's to me it's more about the signal that that would send to the market that like, well, I thought these were the most diamond handed people in the world, right? It's just it's just a strange vehicle. And in general, like I feel comfy in spot, you know? Yeah, it's it's strange. And it's also not like it's not long standing in the sense that if you really extrapolate into the future, let's say these all went up into the right. Well, ultimately everyone's journey maps pretty similarly. Once you find out about Bitcoin, you naturally end up in wanting spot, you learn about counterparty risk. So you have to assume that all these never lose any asset, never get too far on the risk curve and blow themselves up, which I think we all agree is not going to happen. And then once that happens to the first one, everyone starts to wonder, well, like what am I actually holding? And it's the logical progression from the micro individual to the pension that's the most sophisticated. Wait, why don't I just hold the underline? And so it's just like it's a trade and anchoring back to the montage or that you shared. Like the plus token stands out because I remember specifically in 19 when the price went from like the bottom, it was like that. It like bottomed in like March or April and then went up until like that November up to 1213. And everyone was super long, thought we were going into a market. And then literally it all fell apart and everyone lost a shit ton of Bitcoin because they were either levered up that was like a holder or just part of the deal. And so that montage I think is just like the first innings and what we're going to see in the next decade because everything we're seeing like it's been done in the like off channel, non tratify way. We're just going to see that like basically in the new world and people aren't prepared for that and they're just going to get wiped out. That's at least especially why this business was started, because what happened in 2022, we're like, Oh my God, the same thing is just going to happen again with the lack of transparency and counterparty risk that existed in 22. Yeah, I mean, it is a new class of counterparties that have emerged, right? And, and it's not just in Bitcoin or crypto, but in in all of finance. Humans make the same problem mistakes over and over again. Like we've seen this story before. When you mix leverage with volatility, like it's highly risky, right? Like so and that's what this is, this is that's expressly what it is. Like these companies are harvesting the volatility in their own stock, you know, like, and it's quite clever. Like you have to admire the financial engineering that someone like Michael Saylor is, is doing. It's, it's truly historic in some ways. I mean, when his, his company, when his stock was running in the fall like this, MSTR was the talk of all of Wall Street, like everybody was standing in awe of what he pulled off like in this crazy thing, right? He announced in summer 2020 that he was buying Bitcoin for his long running, mostly obscure and pop probably failing software company. And and four years later it was worth $80 billion. Like he was right again and again and again, like it's, it's, it was epic, right? But, but not everyone is as smart as Michael Saylor. Not everyone's as good as financial engineering. And this this hasn't existed before. So we don't know exactly how, when or why it could blow up. But everything can blow up, right? You know, the only certainty in life is, you know, death and, and you know, and 10 minute blocks. Basically when you start putting stuff into weird financial structures, it's you just don't know. I mean, it's the thing we put out a report on crypto lending and we're showing how we got a bunch of the centralized lenders that are alive like Galaxy to give us their data. And we we're showing the aggregate loan and the aggregate like loan book, outstanding loan book size of the centralized lending markets. Plenty of other stuff in that report to including a bunch about this leverage in the Bitcoin treasury companies. But that yeah. So this chart though, so it's last quarter, Q1 was the largest since the top since Q122, right? But The thing is, is like the companies that are doing it now or that made it through, like they, they learned a lot of those lessons. Like it's a significantly more mature lending market than what was happening in 21 and 2. So and one of the criticisms and constructive feedback I got about this report was somebody saying, Alex, like if you're looking back at the way it blew up last time, you need to be looking for the way it's going to blow up this time. And a lot of people are are worried that it's these treasury companies that are the new, you know, X Factor that if there is a cascade liquidation cascade blow up that it could come from them. I think I think that's intuitively right to worry about. But like, again, we also pulled the data like there's not a lot of debt. Like it's not really that it's not nearly as big as people think. And honestly, it's mostly just micro strategy. Most of these other ones are just super small. Like even if it even if the K pop one does 500 million, that's nothing like that's not remotely big enough to like cause a huge problem. But yes, if like, you know, if the K pop company isn't, you know, good enough it managing it and they have to puke their Bitcoin and then that causes another slightly small one to also have to puke their Bitcoin and then then, you know, then that's the that's the fear, the positive feedback loop. But we're not there yet. But this is the I think this is like still the top story of the of the year. And and like I said, it's not just Bitcoin anymore. There's soul, there's several soul ones. Joe Lubin is launching an ETH one. I said there's a Chinese limousine company launching an XRP one. Like I don't know how far this goes. He's actually a good question because something Brian and I have been, you know, battling for the past few months is about Bitcoin dominance and he kind of sees he going up and to the right. And I feel like it's the opposite. Obviously over a long enough time horizon, I think up and to the right. But because of this, like this, there's an unforeseen bid for altcoins. And I think this is the play as you're going to wrap securities around other assets and the market doesn't really recognize it. Where do you do you have a stance on either way? I mean, I on Bitcoin dominance, yeah, I would say his store like in a long enough time frame, it should go down and not even because bitcoins importance doesn't go down, but you can launch unlimited altcoins, right? So like eventually, like even if it's orders of magnitude bigger than the others, there's still unlimited numbers of those that can emerge. You only need, you know, 5000 like $10 million ones to to challenge dominance, right. And that's like to me that it actually should go lower over time just naturally, even if it's absolutely dominating. In fact, I think this looking at that chart like I think it's pretty remarkable given like that. I mean, you, you really did have a Bitcoin native and Bitcoin only, excuse me, Renaissance over the last 18 months. Like even with the ETF's, if you look, I mean, it's paltry compared to the Bitcoin ETF's. You know, I think it's like, you know, a couple 100 million in net flows. I think they're they're actually, I think ETF's are minus a billion net because of because of what do you call it? Whatever, what was the GBC one called? I forget whatever the Grayscale 1 is. Whereas the Bitcoin net flows in the USETPS are 60 billion, right. So it's just not even close. And you know, I just having been in this market a long time, like usually the historical thing has been Bitcoin runs. If the altcoin runs, then you have a giant outside the risk curve, all of the shittiest, all coin runs and then the whole thing collapses and then you get a bear market. Like that's that's how it went in 17. It's basically how it went in 21 and just hasn't played out like that at all. You don't have a parabolic move. You have a pretty nice slow and steady rise basically. I mean, you know, if you watch every day like we do, sure there it's felt volatile at some points, but you know, Bitcoin crashes to one O 3. It was the price that it was like 3 months ago. It's five months ago. I mean, basically Bitcoin is the same price it was in mid-december, right? It's like it's almost like nothing happened at all in six months, right? So it's like we're just sort of grinding and and I think there's a lot of positives for Bitcoin in particular that are still playing out right. So it's like, I don't know if the all I mean, maybe the stable coin legislation will be buoyant for like Ethan soul because the stables probably move on Ethan soul. And if you get like some giant like explosion of these stable coins, maybe that's a catalyst. But sort of like the other metas in altcoin land, you know, the metaverse gaming like NF, TS, etcetera, defy, like they're just not resulting in coins going up. Not not mostly right. And so, but while Bitcoin grinds higher, so that that dominance chart has just been grinding, but even like ebtc is like I've been, I'm a long time ebtc watcher and I think we bottomed recently in like the point O1 8 range, which is super low, to be clear, like historically low, almost basically at, at the historic lows for that chart. And you know, it's rebounded a little bit here. It's like point O2 four or something like that. Point O2 three. That's still super low. Like that's still super low. It's, it's reasonable, I think just from a pure market standpoint to say like, well, it probably will rebound probably, but it hasn't. And it's part of this Bitcoin, you know, I still think it could go lower. I mean, it's, it's like you look at the ETFs and it's just just orders of magnitude. I mean, the Bitcoin ETF flows are more than 60 times more than the ETH ones. Bitcoin is a lot bigger than ETH, but it's not 60 times bigger. Like the the ETFs are skewed heavily way above the market, like market share of the two assets in favor of Bitcoin. Yeah. I I think that tells you something about the demand for Bitcoin as an institutional asset versus these other cryptos. Yeah, absolutely. That that's sort of been a key point of my thinking around dominance in general is looking at those ETF flows and just assessing the appetite from larger pools of capital for all of these other assets X Bitcoin. And I think, you know, part of what we're also saying is like, well, the question is, is that moving out the risk curve is now, is that now just Bitcoin treasury companies? Like does that sort of replace that demand for some form of leverage or more risk effectively? And I want to go back just briefly to the point around like the actual indebtedness of these companies. And, and I think, you know, sailors been very intelligent, like intelligent leverage is, is sort of a phrase coined from, from this. But like, I think that right now you're totally right. Like it is muted. But where my concern or question comes in is like, OK, so for for all of these other imitators and latecomers, yeah, it's, it's not like excessive right now. But ultimately how do they compete? How do they try to catch up in, in my mind, like it probably involves taking more, taking on more leverage because I think there's, you know, in your mind, is there a point of saturation where like do you need 12 dozen tickers of proxy Bitcoin exposure or like 'cause otherwise, like how do they, how do they differentiate? Like obviously there's jurisdictional differences like Metaplanet has its, has its niche and I think that'll that'll sort of replicate across other jurisdictions as well. But like, how do you, how do you think about that point of saturation? We're clearly not there yet. And like, if I'm being honest about it, it probably could persist longer than, you know, I anticipate. But is there a point of saturation where like in order to differentiate, they will take on more leverage? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know the answer. I think you're right about the differentiation problem. If if we think of it as a problem, why do you need all these? And I I don't know, you start to I mean, part of what you're part of what they're the suggestion is, is that you pay the premium on Bitcoin because you get the intelligent leverage, the management there in particularly in strategies case like 25 year old stock, like deep and liquid options market, right? I mean, at sometimes it's been like the highest traded equity on the entire in the entire U.S. stock market and you get the intelligence of the team there, right, Michael Saylor, Cherise Jodia, like Ed and like right there are talented financial engineering talented like these are truly epic types of new securities that they're creating like that. Just they're super interesting if you're a nerd for financial engineering, right, That is everyone as good at that? I don't know. So maybe that's one way that they differentiate. But again, is the average person that buys these capable of evaluating the financial engineering talent of the man? No, probably not. So then you're talking about like, oh, is it the spokesperson, right? Like, you know, got like a Jack Mallers, for example, or David Bailey, right, who's they're both talented marketers, right? And, and, and let alone Michael Saylor, who's probably the most famous person in the world that likes Bitcoin over the last like 3 years at this point, like he's sort of the, I was, that's what I loved about the fact that Trace Mayer is back on the scene a bit because I was like, dude, Trace was pretty much the most famous Bitcoiner in a prior era and he kind of left the public sphere right after Michael Saylor came on. So it's like you've never really had the monetary philosopher balance to the Michael Saylor, like hardest asset in the human history balance. I don't I think there has to be a point of saturation. Even if you just look at like convertible debt markets, like there's there's a lot of money there. But like, I mean, how much, right? Like at some point it's like, do I buy MSTR debt or do I buy this other one's debt? Like presumably there's not an unlimited source of buying there, right? So yeah, trace ticker. Yeah, we need a trace ticker now. Like maybe it's too, it's too, too much coincidence. I think if you had like, I think the jurisdictional 1 is interesting. It's very similar to like in 14151617 doing venture investment in crypto exchanges. Like there were whole firms that did very clear strategies like invest in the next coin base in this jurisdiction, in that jurisdiction, in that jurisdiction over and over again. Like tons of them. You know, like a Filipino exchange, Indian exchange, a South American exchange, like that was done excessively and, and eventually many of them like failed as companies because like there's only so much trading, right? Like at some point you just go to the one that has the most volume and then you're done. Like, and, and you could see something similar happen here. But I still again, like there are plenty of capital markets that have enough, that are big enough, I think to support one of these companies. And that's people are doing that. They're going around to every jurisdiction to launch them. But, you know, beyond that, like, I don't know how many can. How many. I think there is a point. And I think you're right, Brian, to worry about the fear that when that point is hit, if you're facing like death or, or something, what is that something that you end up doing? Yeah. And and Jackson, I'm sure you probably want to move on so we can transition. But one, one final thought on all this stuff is like, it is, it is, it's all very nuanced because on one hand, like, I think it's entirely rational for basically every business on earth to want to store some of their value in Bitcoin, use it as a reserve asset. And I think that's the trajectory we're on is, is every company realizing that over time? The core distinction though, is that that doesn't make every company that decides to do that a wise investment for the individual. And I think that's what's being lost in this broader discussion is like people just chasing these returns and and not necessarily recognizing that these are trades versus owning spot Bitcoin is savings technology and and those are two just very different things. Yeah, I, I agree with that. I think look, the empirical data is quite clear like the owning some Bitcoin in any in a portfolio basically almost no matter how you construct it. And we've done research on this and basically the single best benefit to the Sharp and Sortino ratios of our portfolio with Bitcoin goes from just adding any from zero to 1 basically, right. I mean, there have been times when the optimal amount was to have 100. But like from a pure mathematical standpoint, but that's true. The benefits that Bitcoin can bring to a portfolio or has brought historically is true for individual portfolios. It's true for institutional investors. It's true for endowments and pensions. It's true for why it could be true for a company. That's fine. Owning Bitcoin is a has been a smart move. It has been a smart move, right? I continue to believe it will continue to be a smart move. That doesn't mean you have to run a company that is 100% capitalized with Bitcoin and whose only job is to issue new shares or debt for the purpose of buying Bitcoin. That is a different thing than just, you know, using Bitcoin for its saving technology. And the other thing I would say too about the saving technology and it kind of plays into not just the treasury companies, but game stocks, meme coin, game GameStop style meme stocks, meme coins, sports gambling. Like there is a malaise among the global youth about the state of the economy, a fear that their life won't be as good as their parents was, that their prospects for making it in the world are dim and, and diminishing further right? That they, they'll never be able to buy a house that, you know, decades of corruption and wealth inequality and, you know, an economy that is not designed for, you know, young people has created this global fear and, and, and, and deep seated malaise that has led to the rise of much more speculative Fiat activities. And in that spot, people, a lot of people, particularly young people, would rather gamble than learn about the savings technology that is Bitcoin. And that's sad. Yeah, I mean, that's that's fundamentally why I keep and won't stop about the whole treasury stuff is because it effectively plays on the naivete of the traditional 6040. And most people don't know where to put Bitcoin in. So at best they're looking at 1 to 2%. So that's where the treasury, the publicos come in. And then on the other side, because we hear this all the time, people feel like 100K Bitcoin, they missed it. And so now you're looking to make that back up and that's where the speculation comes in and attend to 100 bagger and that's where it ends up being kind of like a pervasive set up for people. Yeah, everybody wants. I mean, look, you've been rewarded for buying stocks basically every single day since 2008, right? Like that's the it's been up and to the right. Retail is conditioned to buy the dip and it's and it's been it's worked in stocks, right? It's also worked in Bitcoin. And so there is this idea that you need fast gains. And, and I think the reality is, and I think we all know as, as you know, Bitcoin believers in Bitcoin that like, look, I believe life is about working hard and saving and growing your money and, and working right. And I think people are jaded because a lot of the employment opportunities in this world aren't paying enough. They're not that you're declining in real terms, right? Like the, the, the, the, that's what I mean about the economy not working. So they have to like, they feel they have to look for these fast gains and easy money. And you know, it's I, I, I, it's a symptom of, of the, the way the economy, you know, but the boomers, man, they really screwed this thing up. They did. They screwed up the economy and we're all paying the price well. Now they're aping into MSTR, so like, somebody's gonna have to pay somewhere. Well, they should also buy some Bitcoin. That's what, yeah, yeah. We were chatting last week about the housing market in the US and I saw something. You could just pull it up quickly. But then I want to get Alex your thoughts and some other things. But the concentration of wealth, I think it's probably obvious to all five of us on the call and maybe a lot of our listeners, but this chart really puts it into perspective. I mean, this is about 3 decades. And the amount of wealth it's been concentrated in the hands of people who are over the age of 70 has moved from about 19% to about 31%. And so to your point, Alex, I mean, it's really hard to get ahead. Like we were joking on the last podcast, my wife and I went to a few open houses and just getting crazy outbid by boomers with unlimited Fiat money. But anyways. Houses basically exactly no. Utility just store a value homes. But point being is, yeah, if your wage is increased by like 2 or 3% per year, money's debased 8% or so per year past couple of decades, it's pretty bleak for people generally my age. And so it's not surprising to see just, you know, whether it was the D5 summer of 2020 or now, it's just speculating on the next Bitcoin treasury company. People just kind of are grasping at straws, trying to find something that maybe they can get ahead with and not really recognizing that Bitcoin is something that you'd get ahead with, but you just need to think maybe a decade or two out. Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is a devastating chart. That is a devastating chart. And you know, I, I don't, I don't know how this gets fixed truly in the, in the long run. I mean, I guess maybe if the, if young people can harness Bitcoin and or be the leaders in the AI boom, like maybe you need like an industrial revolution basically of some type, I think to, to really reverse this. Otherwise, you know, the status quo is always standing in opposition to revolution. That is why it's called the status quo and that's why it's called a revolution, right. So like the, the, the, the powers that be always want you to believe that, that, that nothing can change, that everything's in its right place, that it's all been thought of already. And I think the, you know, the young, every generation has to try to rethink it and come up with a way to change the world. And we're still, I mean, look at I'm, I'm looking on the other side of the screen here watching the Senate waiting for the stable coin vote to happen at some point. It's not going to happen today probably. But and like, dude, I mean, it's like the Jackson pull up the chart of the average age of a member of Congress. I mean, it's the same chart. That's the same chart. It's just up and to the right, like right. So I don't know, someone's got to give hope. You're enjoying the episode. If you could do me a favor and leave a like comment or subscribe that would really help me out. You heard at the start of the episode, Michael is going to fire me if we do not get more likes more comments, more subscribes on the podcast. So please do me a favor if you liked the episode if you're excited and looking forward to tuning into these episodes each week really would mean a lot doesn't take much of your time or effort. Leave a comment throw a like it goes a long way now I hope you enjoyed the rest of the episode. Thank you. That's a good segue to just talking about what's going on in the United States from a policy perspective institutional appetite. I did see that chart. I tweeted about it earlier this week or quote tweeted and shared it on LinkedIn. But fascinating chart you put together, Alex, on the success or appetite rather of particularly Bitcoin ETFs in the United States versus the rest of the world. And I'd love to get your thoughts on what what is driving that. There's obviously been a remarkable shift in the Trump administration and how they're far more favorable than any other, any other cabinet White House administration that came before. And then there's of course, to your point, there is legislation on the horizon that I think will allow for just institutional allocators to come in more confidently know the rules of the road as it relates to this asset class. But I mean, this is insane, right? Like 60 billion inflows in about 18 months in the US and then about 2 billion about flows in the rest of the world. Why is the divergent so so massive? Yeah. Well, and I should say I said that ETH was net outflow, but actually I was thinking of this rest of world number. I think ETH is like plus 900 million versus the 60 billion of Bitcoin. But yeah, at the at the nation's level, I mean, look on the one hand, you have I think a huge part of the story about US versus the rest of the world is just our capital markets are so much bigger and deeper and better. So you can invest in the US stock market from abroad, like that's totally possible. So like, why would you own like the Swiss one when you buy like FPTC or BTCO or IBAD or whatever in the US, right? So there I think there's a, there's a flight from some of the existing vehicles that had existed publicly tradable vehicles in Switzerland and France and Germany and Australia, right? Like you'd rather just again, it's the same story. Liquidity gets liquidity rather be in the US version once they launched. I do also think though, if we go back and look, there wasn't 60 billion in those foreign vehicles. So like this is net new demand coming to Bitcoin vehicles in general and crypt. I mean there's ether is in there too. I think in a couple sole well known. That's the US. We don't have sole ones yet. But you know, the, you know, you look at a river, Sam Baker at river puts out great research on this, though, like something like, you know, 19 of the top 25 hedge funds in the world, almost all of them basically American have bought the ETFs. You know, I mean, they're they trade, But so, you know, it's there are wide, you know, is the state of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Investment board, there's foreign sovereign wealth funds buying it, right. Like it is significantly easier for an institution to buy a pure Bitcoin ETF, spot based ETF than it is for them to buy spot Bitcoin. Like that's just they they are already set up to do that. They can buy any, any stock trades on like the NASDAQ or the Nyze is very easy for people able to buy, right? There's a reason for that. It's decades of like financial infrastructure, right? You can buy it from your Fidelity account, your Robin Hood account, you can buy them in your cash app account. I mean, obviously you can buy Bitcoin in cash app too, which I recommend. It's a good experience, but like it they're that they did unlock significant capital, right? And, and so I think it's a combo of, I think the main reason US versus the rest of the world is just that like our capital markets are so much bigger and deeper and, and we have a better rule of law and you know, than than most other places. And that and that's that's why, but I do think the US being supportive is also a big part of the story. I mean, being not hostile. I mean, those ETFs launched in the last year of Joe Biden's presidency when his administration was extremely hostile and they still did great right last year. So, you know, it cuts through and and those I mean, it's just so funny though, that like you spend years calling for these ETS rightly so. I mean, I am a firm believer that, you know, Bitcoin should be available everywhere in basically every vehicle, right? You want to buy it at your bank, you should be allowed to. You want to buy it in an ETF? You should be allowed to like, you want to buy it on the street? You should be allowed to. You want to buy it from on ramp and store it in multi sig custody. Like you should be allowed to. Hey, like, I don't think it's bad for Bitcoin that like ETFs exist, but the fact that we spend so long calling for that and now people are doing the treasury strategy. Rather than just buying ETFs. Like it's, it's crazy to me that like, that's where this is gone, you know, but you're constantly surprised. I do think the US stands alone when it comes to capital markets, and that includes Bitcoin capital markets. Yes, Speaking of that makes a lot of sense. And Speaking of the research report that River put together, I don't have it in front of me, so I won't pull it out. But I want to get your general thoughts just on the state of the US economy and the fiscal position. I thought it was. I just can't take it at face value. But Elon talking about how he needed to be a part of DOGE and then recognize that the interest expense was larger than like he obviously had to know that before he got involved, but then he's talking about it on an interview. And so why it's interesting now that in the zeitgeist you have people like Elon Musk, insane amount of wealth and influence talking about the fiscal position of the United States maybe being at a point of no return. And I'm curious, like what you make of that because dollars down about 9% this year. Yields are spiking. Other nations are accumulating gold. the United States is looking more favorably at Bitcoin with SBR, states are passing legislation. Just how do you think about what's going on from a fiscal perspective? How does Bitcoin from a policy and just more of a strategic perspective fit into the US playbook now? Yeah, it it fits in well and I think it really does. And and look, it used to be like the swan song of doom saying gold bugs that like the debt was going to be too big or whatever, like that used to be. And then it was limited. Then it was like, OK, I'm a couple hedge fund managers here and there, you know, Ray Dalio, like ringing the alarm bell. The secret is out. Like the the world is net buying gold and net selling treasuries. Like that is a fact, right? You can see that in the data. You can see Bitcoin all time highs, you can see gold all time highs. And you see like, I mean, not literally all time highs for treasury yields, but you know, bad like it's like a beach ball underwater, right? Like you can't, they just can't get those rates, those yields down. And that that signals A declining appetite for U.S. debt, which makes sense. Like because we continuously as a country show an inability to spend wisely and maintain a healthy budget. It's not possible. There hasn't even been a budget in like a decades. Like, dude, they just keep passing continuing resolutions and stuff, right? Like they've they've never, they're not even doing the budget. OK. And and you know, look, Elon has a long history of pretending he didn't know something obvious like as with the Bitcoin proof of work, electricity use, which he obviously must have known. And, and, and I would say and using that as a smokescreen for something that is self-serving In the case of Bitcoin mining, while he needed to be pro ESG and he was probably getting pressure, right? In the case of the big beautiful bill, it doesn't include EV tax credits. And like, he's probably pretty upset about that since almost most of Tesla's revenue over the years has been from selling those tax credits to other companies, right? So, but he's not wrong. He isn't actually wrong. He's definitely right. I think more people know it than ever. I think, you know, it's like pretty much just during this podcast, we'll have added like, like, you know, $300 or something of debt for every person in America, right? Like the the number just keeps going up. And I think it's not just it's not just the macro in the fiscal, but it's also the geopolitical one. Other countries don't we're, we're clearly in the packs Americana of like post 1991, even if it may even have ended, you know, on 9/11, it's certainly basically ended now. We no longer have the ability to unilaterally project for us all around the world. We, we have strong ability, right? But like the dollar is no longer the de facto thing. You've got Russia and China settling trades and rubles and, and, and maybe instead of in dollars, you've got an increasing amount of that continuous chatter about whether there'll be a bricks currency. You're clearly entering a more multipolar world. And I think in that spot, non sovereign commodity monies like gold and Bitcoin should do quite well. I, I, I think, I think it's a little tricky with the US government. I think just like I said, I mean basically any portfolio should own one of the best performing assets in the history of the world, especially one that has these. I mean, Bitcoin is perfect to be a strategic asset, right, because you know, it's yes, it it lacks obviously certain functionality. It's hard on the L1 to send small amounts or it's a little bit slow 10 minutes. I mean, it's orders of magnitude faster than traditional system, right? It's it's transparent. It's not very private, but like for like reserves or like international trade, those don't really matter. This has non sovereign issuance, no issuer, right, no liability to any issuer at all. It's able to be held cryptographically and securely. Can't can't really. I mean, if it with good custody and multi sing and you know the the standards of custody can't really be stolen by your adversary. And if you want to spend it, you know, I can send a billion dollars across the Bitcoin network in 10 minutes. If you want to send a billion dollars of gold, you have to send a literal warship, right? It's just simply not useful, right? Gold. Gold's biggest transactional use over the last like 50 years has been one dude taking it out of a cage in the basement of the New York Fed and rolling it across the floor and putting it in a different cage. That's literally how like a foreign country settles with another foreign country. They just call up the New York Fed and be like, can you just like move those gold bars from that room to that room? Like that's the only way it works as a settlement vehicle. So that it sucks as a settlement vehicle. Now it is really good because like it's been around for, you know, all of all of time and has, you know, multi millennia of establishment as this, you know, non debasable commodity money. And it's got all those features, right. It's it's scarce, but it's not too scarce. It's like just just right, right. But Bitcoin, just like Satoshi said in that early post about what you know, imagine it's a thought experiment, like a weightless, colorless, odorless version of gold. I mean it, it's just really good and I think Jackson like, I think that's why countries states like sovereign wealth funds like it's, it's, it's useful. It's undeniably useful in that world and we are heading towards it. But yes, not just the macro and fiscal, but also the geopolitical, I think all point to growing Bitcoin adoption and. Maybe maybe to extend that sort of like strategic strategic plan or concepts of the US, we are talking a bit about this before we hit record. But like where do stable coins fit in into that strategic playbook? Because I think there's this notion of maybe you can continue to exert dollar dominance across the world if you allow stable coins to proliferate. And I think you're seeing that in sort of the order of operations of the legislation, right? Like Genius Act comes first, then we'll do some market structure, then we'll get to the SBR. Like how do stable coins fit into And Groman, Luke Groman has talked about this a ton as well of sort of, you know, this tacit sort of, you know, admission or, you know, allowing the citizen to invest in Bitcoin or hard assets while still transacting in dollars. So spread stable coins, allow citizens to save in Bitcoin, sort of remove the toxicity from Bitcoin. You could even go back to the approval of the ETFs as like the first signpost of like this is OK now. Yeah. So I guess all that is to say, where where do stable coins fit into this strategic playbook? I think that's right. Luke's point is right, That is obviously the way to for the government, probably the government's, but certainly the US government to allow the proliferation of Bitcoin is in that way as a store of value asset, not as a money, right. And I think this is an interesting contradiction here with the US strategic Bitcoin reserve concept, which is like a lot of the ideas of funding it, I think are totally unpalatable to the government because like any acknowledgement that the dollar needs further backing, right? Like people have talked about using this thing, the exchange stabilization fund at the Treasury, which is a fund set up literally to let the secretary of the Treasury like basically buy and sell FX in order to help protect the dollar, right? In general, they, I don't think, I don't know the last time they've used it, decades probably, right? But it's sitting there and some people said, well, they should buy some Bitcoin with that. And I'm saying if you buy Bitcoin with that, you're going to collapse the dollar. Like people are going to say, wait a second, I thought the dollar wasn't backed by anything but the full faith and credit. Now you're like backing it with something like it wouldn't matter if they bought popsicle sticks in that thing. It would spook markets, right? Same thing with bit bonds, like, you know, have the treasury issue, like some fixed income securities that have a Bitcoin element. Everyone in the that could, that could spook the debt markets badly and harm the dollar, right? So they got to figure out for the SBR how to fund it in a way that is that doesn't harm the dollar, if for no other reason than that the president for whom they all work has called for the dollar to remain the global reserve currency, right. And so transitioning a little bit closer now, Brian, to your question, like at the crypto round table in the White House on what March 6th or March 4th or whatever day that was, Scott Basson literally said we will protect and grow the US dollar reserve status and we will use stable coins to do that. It's what he said. And I think they have a strategy here, which is, look, you don't want to buy our debt or you don't want to own as much of it or you don't want to transact in our dollars, fine, we'll just dollarize the smartphone of every one of your citizens. Like it is a subversive and powerful American empire play. And it should be seen as that. It's not a crypto bill. Like watching some of the, you know, long time antagonists like Senator Elizabeth Warren rail against the genius act like it's some kind of handout to crypto. It's like, hello, we can all issue these today. We're not the ones that need this. I mean, there's 200 billion of of U.S. dollar denominated stable coins already in circulation from crypto firms, right? Like it's not a handout to crypto. It it should be seen as a dollar dominance bill. That is the plan. I think it's a good idea. I think it it is a powerful idea. Like, it is a big, big, big idea. And yeah, I mean, look, in the end, every global reserve in the history of the world has failed. Like, I see no reason to believe that the dollar, you know, will for it until the end of time when the sun engulfs the Earth will still be the global reserve. It's just you have to believe in the end of history to think that's true. But that doesn't mean that you should give it up willingly, right? And I don't believe any rational country would, no matter how much they like gold or Bitcoin or whatever, Like it's practically the core of what being a sovereign is, is the ability to issue money like, and, and you'll never get the US or any other country that has the ability to be the reserve to willingly give that up. It's funny, like, you know, when the president was saying that the trade imbalances that we have were unfair, right? And, and I'm like, Sir, not only is it not unfair, it's explicitly what we signed up for. Like that is the triff and dilemma like you, the global reserve has to, it has to be a net exporter of currency and a net importer of goods. And by the way, it's great. We basically get to trade depreciating paper for a bunch of good stuff that other people make. Like it's actually a it is a privilege, right? Like it's a but it naturally results in a trade imbalance. And the, the idea is that, and this is what's so perplexing, There's a, there's a contradiction between tariffs and being the global reserve. Because when you're the global reserve, like I said, you have to net export dollars. When you add tariffs on imports to your country, you are increasing the cost of global exporters buying your dollars with their goods, right? You don't want to be increasing the cost. You want to be streamlining it, making it super easy to have people have wallet dollars in their wallet, right? So countervailing that is how I look at stable coins. The idea as well, we're doing tariffs here and and the other stuff that's multi polar trends and whatever is an impediment, A headwind to dollar reserve status. How can we put a tailwind behind it? And I think that to me, that's how I view stable coins as strategic, which is that we can just put dollars everywhere, right? We can just doesn't mean that the dollar, the DXY is going to go up, probably not probably just continues to go down forever the value. But but like it's reserve status is different than the strong dollar, right? Like you were talking about distributing the dollars, not so much like how much they are valued versus other things. I think the US needs a weaker dollar like to help us pay our debt, right? Like that's obvious. But I think I see stable coins as highly strategic. I also see them as benign in the face of Bitcoin. I don't see, you know, I know a lot of Bitcoiners, right, who want Bitcoin to be itself the global reserve currency. Like I, I, I really don't think that will ever happen. And I think that's OK. Like you can, I think Bitcoin can win massively and will win massively. It doesn't need to be the, the global reserve. I, I don't think. And I'm not saying I'm not offering a qualitative assessment. I'm saying I predict that there will never be a Bitcoin backed dollar. There will never be. We're not going back to the gold standard. You're not going to get the Bitcoin standard. I don't believe that will ever happen. So in the face of that, you may as well. I'd rather have it be the dollar with us allowed to buy and hold Bitcoin then, you know, Chinese renminbi or like bricks, bricks currency. Like, I mean, still the best of the, you know, what was the Winston Churchill like? Democracy is the the worst one except for all the others. Like the dollar is the worst one except for all the others. So why not upgrade the rails? It's an upgrade to the dollar. To me. This shouldn't be controversial. They should have done it years ago. I don't know, like if there's any better technology, if you could, you know, if if there's a new type of physical wire that will make it easier to be the global reserve, they should do it. I mean, it's just purely logical and strategic. Yeah, a few. A few things to call out. We had a podcast earlier in the week with Jacob Shapiro and there was a little bit of, I don't know if it was an antagonistic, but it was a little bearish on like Trump strategy. And it was referencing pulling forward like 20 years of what was going to happen to today. And we had a conversation this morning with Brahman the way I was able to the time I wasn't able to. But today think about like the US is running a startup playbook and basically trying to disrupt themselves effectively. There was innovator's dilemma and that's where Bitcoin adoption and the stable coin proliferation comes into play of like how do we actually, you know, prolong this? And one of the things that doesn't get talked about is the structural demand for, for stables at the banking level, if they're going to hold Bitcoin, because we're talking about the proliferation outside the US. But if banks are going to start custody in this, which I think we all expect they will be, there's going to be some standard, at least we believe in that was set up where they have to hold some amount of dollars or treasuries, which would be, you know, the demand for treasuries, not stable coins. But then the other one to call out is the banks. I, I think like I got really bullish on where the price of Bitcoin goes once I saw this bill starting to to look like it was going to get passed because of what Tether and BTC end up being in that trading pair. And I think we under appreciate once the notion of a digitization or a digital dollar exists in everyone's bank account and how that can be traded into another digital currency and what that looks like and then how that proliferates to get through capital markets through the Internet. Like I think that's super bullish for Bitcoin long term. I will make a bet to Alex on whatever he wants that Bitcoin will eventually. We don't say this a lot because it's not commercial, but you were so emphatic that it won't be as the, the reserve. It's just an inefficient way for like us to transfer between 2:00. Because this is something that Parker, I think keyed in on is we've never had a, a currency and a a currency and a commodity, right? Like Bitcoin is like gold is a commodity and then you had to shave it off into creating a currency and that's where you ended up or you had to like create dollars and 2nd layers. But Bitcoin is a commodity and as a currency, that's what gets hard to, you know, via Satoshi. So at the end of the day, like Satoshi's will be priced in there because it's just the most efficient way and people will want the SAT versus the the dollar. Now, what is that time scale? Is it 100 years? Is it 20 years? I don't know. But I would feel fairly confident Bitcoin wins. It ends up being the thing that people want. And so that's what naturally would be the most efficient way to transact. I think there's that. That's true. I, I think, but I think here's the other thing, like, you know, you're, you're talking about sort of like, I'm thinking more of like a Gresham's law concept here. Like yes, we all want Fiat. You all want the unshaved coins, not the shaved ones, right? But The thing is, is like, I'm sorry, we all want Bitcoin. You don't want the shaved coins, you want the unshaved coins, right? That's why the orders have the ridges on them because you could shave off and then meltdown the value of the coins. And I can't now because our coins aren't even valuable in a in a metals sense. I think this though, like I don't want to spend Bitcoin on anything that's not hard. I don't want to pay. I personally like I'll buy a house out of stone and brick with Bitcoin, but I don't want to buy Amazon fucking credits with Bitcoin like you need. There is a need for I believe and not just in a like a anti Bitcoin standard way for fast crappy money like because there are. But the kicker is, let's pretend like the zero to 1 is finite scarcity. The layers will figure out, right? Because if you can figure out finite scarcity, the easy part is how do you make it fast? The kicker is whatever you want, somebody's going to want Bitcoin for. So you have to make the decision that's actually how you fix everything else. That's the counter like. Possible, but I mean again, think about it, we're it's not just layers now there is no gold backing the dollar. It's pure Fiat. Like we so like you're talking about a devolution back to a commodity money based world and I just feel like the world is not going back. We might all want Bitcoin, sure, but like, well, I don't know, I guess. Yeah, theoretically if everyone refuses to accept anything but Bitcoin for goods and services, then yeah, it will. That's what being global money will mean, right? I mean that is what it is. I don't I don't think it's going to happen, but you know, power to it. I mean, I'm I'm long Bitcoin, you know, have you guys have you guys not seen? I mean, I sure I'd love it. I just feel the main reason I make this point, though, is to tell people that it doesn't have to happen. You don't have to believe that happen to be bullish Bitcoin. That's my main take because I I talked to a lot of institutional investors and they're like, oh, I heard this. I'm not going to name any many of them my friends. I heard this Bitcoin influencer saying that like everything will be Bitcoin. I just think that's crazy and I'm like, oh, you don't have to agree with him to be bullish Bitcoin, though, like there's a whole other world where you know it takes out gold, right? Gold now is what, 25 trillion or something? It's up a lot since we used to say 20 trillion, right? Like dude, that's a that's a 12 bagger from here. If Bitcoin's as valuable as gold, right, And and there's plenty there, like beyond whether it's used his money. I definitely. Agree there, because that's like literally the founding of this whole business is meeting the market where they're at. And there's a difference between being right. You want to make money or you want to be right. And making money is what you just said is like meeting the market. Nobody wants to hear. Nobody wants to hear the dollar is going to end and we're going to use it, but just be on the record maybe. That's right. I mean, I agree with you. It's totally possible and I'm fine with it. But the reason I like to be hyperbolic with that statement is so that there's somebody out here saying you don't have to agree with that. And you can still be mega bullish on Bitcoin in its adoption as as in a variety of different things. And you are right, by the way. You know, gold is a commodity money. You did have actual gold coins. There wasn't always layer twos, right? Like, I mean, the Romans themselves probably recapped and debased the the coins like 3 on three different occasions, major occasions over their long empire. And it was true gold coins. But you don't have to believe that like it's going to be, you know, the only money in order to see a world where Bitcoin is widely adopted and useful and not just useful like a store of value could be useful in some other way. Maybe it's the money, but only for big giant purchases or big long distance purchases. Or maybe it is an interbank money. Or maybe it is closer to what you're saying, Michael, And it's like what half any sentence Bitcoin banks and it really is the foundation of a of a new layer. All of those are possible. Any one of them, I think, means Bitcoin can win. So, Alex, please entertain me. Let let me operate under the assumption that the top is in. The. Start of the episode the top is in. I want to hear why the top isn't in. I mean, we you said something I think at the start of the episode where there's like a lot of bullish things have been announced, but actually haven't happened yet. Yeah, I. Don't actually believe the top is in. I just, I don't, I want to say it to say it, but yeah, we have seven months left. Against the top is in, yeah. I want to hear like we had seven more months of the year in theory cycles. Maybe they don't need to happen anymore to the same extent they have in the past. But I just want to hear your unfettered thoughts, like what are you paying attention to? What's exciting for the the rest of the 2025? Business and market cycles will always exist, right. I think that sort of Bitcoin having and crypto Bitcoin having driven crypto market cycle, I think probably doesn't exist anymore and and it really shouldn't exist. I mean to the extent it was ever the halving actually causing that, like the halving is an immaterial supply difference now versus daily Bitcoin float. Like it's not material whether you go from 900 to 450 coins per day on average like that does not matter. Bitcoin trades 10 to $50 billion a day of Bitcoin, right? But I think I think why? So you still have many shoes to drop on that, that ETF story. And I had forgotten that I was on the IT was like a year and a half ago, I guess at this point, But I'm sure I talked about it in January 2024 when I was on the show of the wire houses, the RIA, like the family offices. There's still an enormous amount of technical unlock that still has to happen like just today or yesterday said JPM said they'll start allowing you to margin your Bitcoin ETFs, right? There's still a lot like that to happen. And so and, and it's we're finally like a year in now. And so like it's going to actually finally start happening with the big banks. The big asset manager is actually finally allowing people to buy the Bitcoin ETFs. So there's that benign sort of passive story on the underside that I think does lead to more ownership over time. You, you have basically all of the like state or national level SPR related stuff. And like literally right now think about what the USSPR ordered in March to buy, to hold and try to buy Bitcoin and to hold or sell if they want all altcoins, literally Bitcoin put in buy only mode, literally every altcoin put in sell only mode, they're actually prohibited from buying altcoins in that executive order. 30 days after that, they had to deliver an audit to the president of how much Bitcoin the government thinks it owns. Actually much, much more complicated than people think. And then 30 days after that, so 60 days after the EO deliver a a list of possible budget neutral strategies to require more. None of that's public OK has not been released publicly. We don't know how much BTC the government thinks it owns. We don't know what they are thinking of as possible budget neutral acquisition strategies. We don't know. We we think we might find out in July when the other EO mandated Presidential working group report is released. But technically there's nothing about the SBR in that EO and therefore it doesn't have to be in that report. There might not. Who knows if we'll find, if you read the EO, it doesn't mandate that those strategies or the audit be made public. It mandates that Treasury and Commerce deliver that to the White House. So I do think there is a point, at a minimum, forgetting whether we buy, OK, just when we get the number, when the US government says we officially own, you know, 100,000 BTC, that's going to be a huge catalyst, I think, whenever that is. And I think it will happen, I mean, at some point, like, dude, they've got to tell us. It's actually tricky because so many of the coins that the government has are encumbered in various legal or civil asset forfeiture states of being, right. And the government, there is federal law that says the government can't just take stuff like and make it and move it into its own account, right. So they got to go through all of those US attorney districts, 94 of them, and be like, do you guys have any Bitcoin? What's the current state of it like? Oh, do you owe it? Like for example, Razzlecon's bit Fenix hacked coins, right? Like it's a lot. It's like 100,000 or something, I forget. We think the government has about 198 K Bitcoin. That's what we think. That's what the market thinks. That's what Arkham shows these explorers think a huge portion of that is recovered stolen funds. And it's not like the victim is dead, like they presumably will be returned to the victim, right? And or they'll be like creditor, like bankruptcy proceedings in a lot of these. So we don't know. And it's actually pretty hard, like just laborious for the government to figure out like what the current status is of all these. But at some point they will and at some point we'll learn it. And that's not talking about hopefully at some point they'll, you know, follow the president's order and actually buy some, right? So those are obvious catalysts. I mean, I think everybody knows that. But merely finding out the audit results, I think would be highly positive. Then you've got all the macro stuff, right? That is, I think, uniquely supportive for hard non sovereign assets. And then you've got a bunch of crypto stuff that I think ultimately is still positive for Bitcoin, even if it's only tangentially related, right? People normalizing the use of public block chains and public key cryptography around assets is naturally going to lead to more Bitcoin adoption. Like now it's probably going to lead to a lot of altcoin adoption too. But again, like, you know, it's a free market. Hester Purse told the Bitcoin audience in in Vegas, like Bitcoin or stop asking for the government to arrest shit corners. All right, like it's a free market like just you have the best asset. Just exalt it. It's literally what Hester Purse from the SEC said to the giant audience in Vegas. And I've always believed that like I don't need others to lose so that Bitcoin can win. I think Bitcoin can win on its own and that's fine, but I I actually think Bitcoin benefits long term from the institutional use of things like stable coins of something like defy. We also look now here's some some more cute ones I'll throw out here Jackson one Bitcoin credit cards like Gemini's card right. They have to buy Bitcoin. If those become widely adopted, think about how nice it is for a turbo normie to just go about their life and be acquiring Bitcoin in pieces. Like I think it's actually a very, very powerful retail product. And if they get big, they have to buy Bitcoin every day, right. So like those could be an interesting catalyst. I think also the Bitcoin layer two-story is a big positive catalyst actually, and you know, we're we're an investor in one Citria, but you know, there's alpen. These are ZK roll ups. I think that's powerful. Like I I don't know where Bitcoin Maxis have landed on this. You know, for a long time it was like don't do it on my L1, do it on the L2. Then some of them are like, well, we don't like the L twos either because they're going to be filled with shit coins. And it's like some point like we just need more block space and people want to do stuff on Bitcoin and, and some of these are really, really powerful. Like I also like arcade and arc and and light spark spark L2 and like there's a bunch of interesting layer 2 stuff being built that like could could really drive a lot of usage. And ultimately I think it's very likely not just with Bitcoin, but basically we think this for almost all layer one block chains, they end up being like solely filled with like proofs for layer twos, right? That that is what drives the block space demand and you know Bitcoin less likely to get there soon than something like Ethereum because like bitcoiners like to hold L1 Bitcoin in their self custody and I get that I do myself right That's but like I think it is the best network. Also, it's the highest fidelity blockchain in the world. It's the most transparent, most predictable, most secure. So like they're there, there's data anchoring that people want to do on it, right? And those are going to start coming pretty soon. The the, the, the, these new one. I mean, the, this is literally like what a lot of people said where it was like all coins or test Nets like the Alpin and Citri are literally taking the bet. There have been enormous developments. I don't Bitcoiners may not realize this if they don't follow block chains. There have been enormous advancements and cryptographic ledgers enormous way beyond anything that we do. Even Lightning the, the rest of the world move beyond state channel payment channels like 7 years ago because they're not that good. They are good in some ways. They're good because they're they're they're more private. They're good because you can be more self sovereign. There's no, but there's no global state. You can't do any type of that. I mean, I'll be stunned and I and I love the teams at Lightning Labs and Tether, but I will be absolutely stunned if USD UT on lightning becomes remotely big at all. Lightnings not made for that, right? It's so easy to do tokens on a different type of blockchain, but there's a bunch of interesting ones coming. And these Citri and Alpin are ZK roll ups and like this is an enormous advancement in distributed ledgers, right? And and I think it would be fascinating to see what happens if if people start doing those. I don't think it's just going to be monkey pictures. I think there is going to be some interesting finance that can be done with Bitcoin as the base asset in a highly secure L2. And so that that's one that I'm excited for. Don't know exactly when those are really coming, but and then again, the DLC based ones and these, I don't even know how arcade works yet. I've got somebody who's looking into it to explain it to me. There's a lot of interesting stuff on the L2 front, on the dev side. And then sort of I said the cards, the institutions, the states, the where do you help? I was going to say where do? You where do you put just global liquidity generally? Because we've all seen the charts of M2 versus Bitcoin on the leg. And I think that's the, to me that's the biggest difference. If you're trying to compare the, what looks like a similar double top is like, well, back then we were about to enter the fastest rate hike cycle in history and constrain liquidity. And now we're sort of entering the opposite we're. Probably going to enter a lower interest rate environment probably, although I would say the Fed is and and power to them by the way, like keeping rates high. Is the Fed like being an adult in the room, Like to be honest, right. Like it's, it's every time they cut rates, they're being, you know, profligate and every time they keep them high or hike them, they're being conservative and like that's you got to respect that. But yes, I think we're much more likely to have rates come down than we are to have them go up. So you're right. I don't I think when it comes to like global M2, like I'm not a huge fan of this metric. It's not really a good measure of money, but it but also like bank bank reserves might be better. But like, you know, but it but it is also kind of the same. So like I think the chart actually works. It's just probably not the actual right instrument to measure it against. Yeah, I mean it's same thing. That's the other reason I say an even more sort of crass reason why Bitcoin or should be fine with stable coins. Like dude, the dollar is a the dollar depreciating means Bitcoin appreciates against it. Like, like, you know, OK, so Bitcoin doesn't go to Infinity because it's the only asset, but like, it's perfectly fine trading it against a perpetually, you know, debasing dollar. And that's what we have. And we know we have to debase it. We know liquidity, like an issuance of the dollar has to go higher. Cannot afford to pay off this debt. It is truly impossible. I, I look back to Elon on that too. Like, I guess look, he's throwing up his hands. Like I tried. I knew it was a problem and I just didn't realize like how big of a problem it was and like whatever man, good for him. I mean, if he didn't actually know, like he learned like everybody else, eventually everyone gets there. The odds of this government are our government design coming up with a way to save this fiscal and debt situation. Extremely unlikely, right? Extremely unlikely. Most likely in five or ten years we have 100 trillion in debt almost. I would like that's a safe bet, I think, right? Way more likely than we actually reduce it. And Bitcoin looks great in that way. And it's not just us. The Chinese are printing a ton. Like, there's plenty of printing going on. And yeah, you probably enter a more printing era pretty soon, I would think. I mean, this is the big question with macro is like, look, stocks are almost at all time highs still. They're like a 1 1/2% off all time highs, right? Like we're back. I mean, April was, you know, April 7th Liberation Day was like the bottom it turns out. And we basically have done a full V like we were up at the start of the year all the way down a bunch. I mean 20% or something in equities down then basically all the way back. And so stocks look OK, inflation is low. I think core PCs 2.1%, like CPI is 2.5%. If you told the, and employment's like like 4 1/2 or unemployment's like at 4:00 somewhere in the forest, if you told the Fed like 2 years ago that they'd have two point 1% core PCE and 4% unemployment, they would literally be standing up cheering. It worked. They did it quote UN quote, right? So why aren't they cutting like that? That's the question. Like they're, they're having the stiff upper lip about it. And I think the, the, the fear is there's a lot of sort of like latent indicators that the employment market is going to crack and it's going to get bad. And housing is a great one to look at. It's like totally drying up. Like it's, there's like virtually no transactions like, and, and it's so tight. Like if that turns, then you'll see then, then, then what would he do in that response, right? It's like when the asteroid comes down and the dinosaur turns to the other and he says quick print money, right? Like, I think that's, it's, it's more that's the reason they're not doing it yet because they worry that they might do it later, right? And I think that's, but again, I don't think there's like 0 likelihood of higher rates anytime soon. So you're right, Brian, when that the liquidity is going to come back at some point, I think they're trying really hard not to, you know, jam inflation, right? Because also tariffs are going to be inflationary. I think the trade deficit numbers came out and it's like, oh wow, our trade imbalance declined a lot. Well, yeah, that's because people stop shipping us stuff over the last couple months because they're worried about tariffs, right? So tariffs are inflationary by design by definition, right? Like goods will become more expensive. You know, it's not structural so much as it is trade. But like they, they're really, I mean, inflation is like the, you know, it's like the, it's like the devil to a central bank and, and to a country and a people. It's a terrible, terrible thing that hurts everybody and hurts the poorest people the most. And they can't, they really are afraid. And I think otherwise, you know, they're just kind of like battle scarred or like a, they have PTSD from the inflation that happened under COVID that they're just being super cautious. But they will open the printer soon I think at some point. Yeah, that the juxtaposition. I know we got to wrap up here in a few minutes. I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition about Trump and Senator Warren agreeing on scrapping the the debt ceiling or the debt limit. Meanwhile, we have Trump, they both said. Wow, we both agree. It's, yeah, it's remarkable, right? So then you have that. And then on the flip side, you have the Trump family is Uber bullish on Bitcoin. They're attending the conferences. They're involved in mining the was like last Week 2 1/2 trillion they were looking to raise through equity and debt financing to. The Treasury strategy, yeah. The S1 as well for a ETF product too. So I think it's just interesting to watch how that plays out where you have Trump. I mean, they did a lot of deficit spending in the first term as well. 45 out of the last 50 years the US has run a deficit. So it's a. Populist. I mean, they're populist. That's, that's, I mean, you don't get elected telling people you're going to give them less and tax them more. And that's the problem. I mean, that's, that's the issue. So we're going to give people more and tax them less, which is bam, there's the problem. That's the debt. Maybe Elon will come back and be become an advocate for Bitcoin since he's a little upset that he doesn't get his tax credits in this new bill. Close. I don't know why he hasn't like revisited his 2021 love of the, of the Bitcoin because like he's so close. Like his stuff about the debt dude, like hello. Like that's what we've all been saying for years. You know, I don't know, Maybe in like 20 years he'll fly back down from Mars and grace us plebs with his presence. And, and you know, he'll, we'll be able to leave this debt collapsing nation and hop on the Starship with him and live gloriously in the stars forever. That's my hope. Well, yeah. Before we let you go, is there anything Alex you wanted to touch on with Galaxy now trading on NASDAQ? I'm not sure if you wanted to discuss anything there or better. Well, we're just. We're we're super happy. It's been a long road. Galaxy has been publicly traded since it launched in 2018. But in Canada, the unit we know we love our Canadian friends, but the United States, as I said earlier on this pod is the premier capital market in the world. We're just really proud to tell our story. I mean, we're about to be, we, we think we're going to be one of the biggest data center providers in the world. And so you got a data center business with a giant crypto capital markets business on top. And I think we're a leader in both. So we're, we, we think it's a very interesting company. I mean, we, I've been at Galaxy for 4 1/2 years at this point and this was a huge milestone for us and our, our employees and our investors. So we're just happy to be here. But you know, the, the game is the game doesn't stop like the, the show must go on. We have a lot of exciting things that we're excited to do and announce over the coming, you know, months and and years. Congratulations Alex. Thank you for your generosity with the time. It was a fun conversation as well. For those who are not following you, where do you want to point them to? Do you want Twitter research? Follow me at Intangible Coins on Twitter GLXY Research on twittergalaxy.com/research You can read all our reports there and get your. Daily dose of memes. Yes, and see my memes please. Please like my memes guys. Thanks, Alex. Thanks. For. Having me. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that 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.