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We are so early. We'll talk about some things and things we're looking at investing and building that if you're ever looking to build, join a company like this is really the truest of the time because the noise will come again as the price appreciates. And then that's what everyone's looking for jobs and all this stuff like this is really the time while everyone's not paying attention. It's but it's also the hardest time because looks like, you know, we're going to be in a bear market for four years. We're not going to be in a bear. Market for four years. It all comes comes down to computers communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the roller gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. All righty gentlemen. Welcome back to Final Settlement. Today is Monday, February 9th, 10:38 AM Eastern Time, Michael said. I'm in a tunnel. I'm actually at an equinox, having some Internet problems and you know, we must, the show must go on. So we are here. Got a weird blur that looks like I'm perhaps in heaven or somewhere else. Gentlemen, how are we doing today? I'm good. I mean, I appreciate you sharing that. You're at the Equinox in the shower recording this pod. I mainly wanted you to share it. So if you need New York listeners want to meet up with you for a coffee after, not in the shower, but just for a coffee, you know, you can reach out to brian@brianandhonorbitcoin.com and he'll beat up. Yeah, good, good time to plug actually. Anybody that's in New York and going to be at Bitcoin Investor Week too, please reach out, call either Brian or myself too. Yeah, we'll be around all week in New York. What are we before we lose Brian, just in case, what are we kicking off with that? We you know, we launched this one hot it's been a wild weekend. We got mold bots, clawed bots flying around. There's a lot a lot going on. We. Got we got a big. Price action. Big list price action. I don't know if we're going to talk about the price action. You know, we're, we're hanging out around 70 K, you know, big dump last week, but you know, fundamentals have not changed. We had Eric Balkunis on the last trade last week. He had some great commentary around Bitcoin is is like rocky. You know, you expect him, you expect him to die in the next movie. No, he's going to get beat down and he's going to come back even stronger the next the next time around. And so nothing's changed in my mind before we get to the list. I, I think there's a lot of tether news. So I, I was thinking we'd start with sort of a tether roundup, but I was curious if you guys saw the, the Coinbase commercial last night during the Super bowl. Not great, not a great. Look, I didn't, but I saw Fred Ersham. I didn't. I saw Fred Ersham and Bryan Armstrong with like a, a selfie with their like little like, you know, bopper jackets, like from the 50s Letterman jackets. And I assumed that the commercial was as cringes that and yeah, I didn't even like look. For it was it was cringe beyond your your wildest imagination. It was basically a sing along to a Backstreet Boys song. And then it it's like, oh, it's a Coinbase ad at the very end. And the reaction on Twitter, I saw multiple like reaction videos of like normies sitting in a room who are like super excited about the sing along part. And then when they see Coinbase at the end, like vicious booze, like people flipping off their TV's vicious booze. So I think it's just, you know, it's important to put in context like the damage that the broader crypto space has done to what people think of in normie land when they think of Bitcoin and crypto, because for the average person, they they can't disentangle Bitcoin from crypto because they haven't seriously looked at the space, understood what you know, these assets are. And so just a reminder that we're still pretty early to all this stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's a good call out in the sense of the reality is, you know, there there's a discussion that happens around retail traders and they really the reflexivity specifically right now with commodities being interested in that market. And that's just what they they're, you know, that reflexivity and just getting involved. And the point being is that we just haven't had that kind of market come back even from the the 17 lows in 22. And so if you're listening to this, like, I know it feels like we're late and there's all this stuff happening, but we're so incredibly early based on like just Brian's anecdote that most people just think this whole thing is a grift. And think about people that got in between, you know, acts in 124 and watching it just crawl back down to 60 K and have no understanding of why you don't watch assets do that, right? With no fundamentals with potential ties or whatever they're touting out with Epstein and all this other crap. And so to the where that's relevant here is that is we are so early. We'll talk about some things and things we're looking at investing and building that if you're ever looking to build, join a company like this is really the truest of the time because the noise will come again as a price appreciates. And then it that's when everyone's looking for jobs and all this stuff like this is really the time. Well, everyone's not paying attention, but it's also the hardest time because you know, the, it looks like, you know, we're, we're going to be in a bear market for four years. We're not going to be in. A bear market for four years. The only thing I I wanted to mention was. Famous last word. Given, given the what happened to Price last week, it was, you know, on cue, you had the the haters and the dunkers, of which there are many coming out writing articles in the Financial Times and other places, one proclaiming Bitcoin's dead again for the 500th time. But there was one in particular that caught my attention that was basically saying like basically saying we're late like it it's late stage on this whole crypto thing. So if they don't have a use case or a new catalyst, like it's over. And I thought that that really missed the mark in the sense that what he was saying was that we are late in terms of access. Like, yes, everyone's heard of Bitcoin. They probably know how to get exposure to it, whether it's via Coinbase or via an ETF and their brokerage. But we're still extraordinarily early to people's actual understanding of Bitcoin. That's where the big gap is. That's where the opportunity is. And the Coinbase commercial and people's reaction to it is an example of that. But people need to disentangle access versus actual understanding of what's going on here. So that was the only other thing I had on that note. But maybe we'll go to the links here. Yeah. Well, maybe this will yeah. And this will tie, this will tie into the the to the links. It's just the notion of access and the version of like companies having to become Internet companies and we know companies having to become AI companies. Everyone's just going to utilizes these tools. It's the same notion of like, no, every company is not going to be a crypto company, but every company will be a stable coin business, meaning that they will use stable coins for money movement because it's just fundamentally better rails. And so those are the angles that I think a lot of cryptos coming to towards. And this ties in a tether. But then we'll talk about how some of cryptos dying with Somani leaving and others. But I think that that's the good mental model to use and why a lot of crypto natives are leaving is because they came for this like version of decentralization, which ultimately was always only Bitcoin. And so now they're like, oh God, this is just going to be corporate 2.0 closed loop networks, which it always was going to be because there's only one asset that sits outside that system and tethers obviously gone very deep there. Yes, very well said. So this first link here tethered largest stable coin issuer in the world retreats from their $20 billion funding ambitions after investor push back we and maybe I'll I'll kick this to you. And and if you could just give some context around, we talked about this a few months ago when these numbers came out around their forthcoming raise and the valuation and what happened here with some investor. Push back around that. Yeah, I think that now that they're now they're looking at a $5 billion fundraise, their valuation I believe is still $500 billion. So that puts them off there. It's, you know, I think one of maybe top 10 or top 20 companies in the world globally, which I think, you know, maybe a little bit aggressive, but I don't necessarily see anybody going out and unseating them anytime soon. You know, everybody's going to seemingly try to issue their own stable coins, but the Heather has really done an interesting job. And we'll go into this more later into the show too. But they just have strategic investments and almost every single company in the digital asset space. And they will, despite having to have to bootstrap USAT, they have investments in pretty much all the companies in the space, whether you think that's a good or a bad thing. And so they're going to be able to get distribution because they have a vested interest in all of their partners, you know, using them. In addition to that, like they've just really done a fascinating and great job of really becoming the the, the sovereign company of using gold, Bitcoin and land in order to just really have the essentially Wildcat bank that will allow them to, you know, monetize the reserves even as U.S. Treasuries really do start to lose a little bit of flame. I think that those will obviously last a lot longer than we really think, but they've done a really nice job of diversifying. Outside of that. I am surprised that no folks have really come in and invested yet. That probably shows that there is something that, you know, everybody knows they have some of their skeletons in their closet and maybe just the fact that they aren't quite trading at par or there's probably something else that's coming up on the DD side there. Yeah, I think there's two aspects to the which you described, like there's a version that we talked a lot about and this is a good just again, from an investor joining the space mental model is there's two sides of the barbell that are converging and there's the crypto natives, Bitcoin natives, whatever you want to call it, Tether, Bitfinex or one of them. A lot of them died, some others didn't. They got stronger, they were nimble, they moved, Tether was one of them. And then you have the other side. Think of it as Fidelity is a great example. There's no shortage Morgan Stanley and they're coming at it from the other side of the barbell and ultimately their have their distribution, they have their portfolio ratios between bonds, equities and how they're thinking about the landscape and money movement and new administration. And then you have the other side, which is coming at it from new design surface, new way to issue dollars playing outside of the the bounds. You think it like Tether and Uber, like being offshore and they coming back on shore and playing within the apparatus once you get to a certain scale. And so to Liam's point about where people haven't come in, I can imagine that takes a big component of that because you're looking at this firm and you're like, are they strategic or are they going to eat me? And till to Liam's other point, I do think it's interesting because it's not like they have this quasi feel of are you a tech and financial service company or are you a sovereign? Because if you're a tech and financial service company, then you look a lot more accretive and strategic versus if you're a sovereign, because if you're a sovereign, you start issuing your own currency and you're competing with everything else that it looks like a dollar. But the interesting part, as we know, without going too far into it, is their relationship from Bo Heinz to Lutnick. Funny, funny random note, Bo Heinz suppose he had like 20 plus offers that he was contending for when when he when he joined Tether. So, yeah. And then the last part is on the strategic opportunity. Like, these guys are savvy, you know, if you look at their equity profile and who owns it and what they do and the need for capital, they went for a grab, the price tanked. You know, it is what it is. But yeah, it's fascinating to see what they're doing. I don't know either. The Tether is an interesting dynamic of like mass market commercialization appeal that I think in the USI. Still, I don't actually see it having a real viable path long term as compared to USDC, Stripe tempo, Fidelity, like from an American perspective, it'll be interesting to see what airborne and we're going to talk about who they're going to predominantly push. I think it would be Anchorage, right, because they have a lot of ties to Anchorage, but I guess Anchorage has USAT, but they also have their own version. So it's going to be fascinating to watch the the angle. I would say the last thing I would say for Tether though is that they are actually like get Bitcoin. So that that's helpful because a lot of these stablecoin companies don't and they don't realize, I think that Tether realizes on a long enough time horizon, you're going to need your stablecoin backed by hard assets like gold, Bitcoin and potentially other things. Yeah, I mean, frankly that's that's why I've always been interested and impressed by Paolo and the team at Tether is because at least he does seem to have a real understanding of Bitcoin and it's been sort of a part of their treasury strategy since day one. And to William's point, they do have their hands pretty much all over the ecosystem when it comes to the broader crypto space. And so this was a headline from last week. Tether announces $100 million strategic equity investment in Anchorage Digital. Anchorage, as we know is a a leading digital asset platform focused largely on custody. They serve a lot of institutional players, but any, any thoughts on this, this component of of what was announced last week around Anchorage? I mean, they, they also partnered with Anchorage to introduce USAT if if my understanding is correct. So they're sort of US domiciled version of Tether. They partnered with Anchorage to do that. So I didn't. Can you confirm that because I didn't see that. I mean it would make sense. The issue the the conflicting area there is that Anchorage has their like consortium play. OK. So they are introducing it. I mean there's multiple things happening here like Anchorage has their consortium with I want to say it's like Paxos and a bunch of other firms to like issue stable coins. Anchorage is an interesting business because of their banking charter, which is now kind of, you know, slowly being commoditized where others have had it, but they still have that inertia. And then on an institutional space, they're right there after Coinbase and bit, I'm sorry, Coinbase and Fidelity from a real institutional level, like obviously Bitco plays there. But Anchorage, they've always had interesting technology and they they're obviously multi asset. The dynamic around they push their stablecoin, but USAT is going to get pushed is interesting. There's like a full circle when you go back to Kevin worse was on the board there and now he's, you know, incoming fed chair and then they got Bo Hines. He was whatever he was doing on the crypto council sitting in there like you, you can kind of see like I'm taking the other side of what I said, contradict myself. Like you can see how they're going to try to push the USAT, but it's just going to be interesting to see like what kind of actual scale they're able to get and how fast they can go. But yeah, I don't know, Like it's, it's just contradicts what like they were initially doing Anchorage. Well, I think part of the part of the USAT deal is that basically they needed a Genius compliant version of Tether. And so I think they have some lead time, right? Like it's 12 months or so from when Genius was signed for them to get compliant. So they do have some lead time to sort of start bootstrapping USAT specifically. And you know, I think this announcement of the strategic investment is, you know, probably one of the first steps to doing that. I was, I was kind of surprised Tether didn't have a Super Bowl commercial like that. You know, I would have expected them to maybe go that route in terms of getting some more interest in in USAT because they've had some some advertising and marketing just, but mainly on like socials. But if you really want this thing to be like mass marketing people using it instead of, you know, dollars like you got, you got to make people aware of it. I think 2 notes on that. I mean, they're generally been pretty, pretty savvy on ROI, right? You probably are. Super Bowl is the least ROI. It's very like just regular and versus like they put up the AI slot that cost a couple tokens and they throw it online. That's just more their speed. But this also is really highlights the, the true kind of like, you know, economic or monetary space race that's currently happening because the thing you were mentioning is they needed genius compliance stablecoin. They needed a bank, right? And so they needed a bank that was strategically sound or strategic, made strategic sense for them to partner with. It's interesting because it's double, if not like triple now where Bitco stock is in their valuation, because Bitco is like I think 1.31 point 5 billion now where it's trading versus this is a $4 billion valuation. But it's also interesting because they partnered here and Fidelity had just come out two weeks ago or a week ago with that where you can really see like there's a lot. We talked to banks, There's a lot of just momentum with people trying to figure this stuff out and who's gonna issue and who's gonna go and get that like flywheel around the network effects of the movement of this. And so that's kind of where I think the consumers will end up winning. And also a lot of the companies, because a lot of companies you can expect to start to integrate stable coins across whether it's adding value to their end clients or for their own B2B because the economics are going to get eaten here. All this capital getting thrown around is very similar to like the model you would think about. And when Uber or DoorDash first came about, it's like they paid you to use it effectively. So the end consumer I think wins a lot. The people that don't win are the the traditional banks, which I think is also by the zombies. This all these dollars are just going to go into treasuries and just intermediate a lot of what's happening at the Fed and that doesn't get talked about enough. Yeah. The other Tether related headline from last week was another investment they made strategic investment in gold.com 150 million expanding, expanding global, global access to tokenize and physical gold. Very interesting again in the context of is Tether of banking, financial services business or it is this or is it a sovereign? I forget the number of tons of, of gold that they own, but it's pretty enormous, you know, on par on scale with other sovereigns. And so I, I actually didn't know a ton about gold.com specifically. So I'm not exactly sure like the impetus for this strategic investment, but I think it's it's really more just about again, expanding that base of reserves outside of U.S. Treasuries. Like Paulo is a bitcoiner. He understands the writing on the wall for the basement treasuries in general and real yields sort of, you know, compressing over time, you know, rates are likely to come down with Kevin worse being implemented in in May, I believe. And so the sort of the backing of Tether is increasingly looking more like, you know, a hard asset act stablecoin as opposed to just purely U.S. Treasuries. And so I think this is is part of that story as well. Yeah, Just just one thing to call out here is, I think like the same thing that's happening to money is very similarly happening on the AI side. And I think a lot of people listening in here get the AI stuff in the sense of just how fast it's moving and then companies that incorporate that and how they'll benefit. It's the same thing with money movement. Like I think there's a component of. Backing treasuries, that's a long term play as a viability of the dollar and treasuries or backing the the stable coin that tether issues. But I think in the shorter they just understand that the same way AI is moving and they will converge, but like money's moving. So gold is appreciating and generally most people, it's the same reason why we invested in Argo is gold is changing. There's not really best in class ways to have SMA style products where you can view, think about it in the same way you would think about an on chain address title to yourself, take delivery. All these things just don't exist because of the way the system was set up and GLD was just a de facto way people got gold. So from a global perspective and then you're going to digitize that because you're naturally not going to want to move gold around. So they have tokenized gold and then stable coins and then obviously Bitcoin. So they're just plain at the, the race of like, we're going to build this infrastructure. We're doing these things because the market's going there and there's just speed to it. That is important because whoever's first here and they have like best in class from the custody all the way to the interoperability and AP is and the ability to like just work on A on AB to B perspective for other clients, consumers, they just get it and they they see that there's a window here to operate. Yeah. Liam, any any other tethered tether related thoughts before we move on? No, I just think similar to the AI piece, I don't know how much of this information they actually got in general too. But there's so much that they can get from investing in all these companies in the space and then getting the information around either like, you know, investing in digital asset lenders and understanding where people are taking out loans and when understanding where the actual like who, who's buying, who's selling, understanding the flows of capital, etcetera. And being invested in many companies across both the gold and digital assets space in general gives them a lot of that information asymmetry that just like not everybody has access to. And in an age where, you know, the AI is starting to get incredibly important in terms of using it to train data, they're just going to have a lot more data points in order to actually understand and and front run any kind of moves globally, which is kind of what you want if you're a sovereign like or, or pretty much acting as one. Yeah. Well said. All right, moving on, Michael, you alluded to this earlier. The Palmer Luckey backed Erebor receives AUS national banking charter and this is sort of, you know, a broader story around what a bank is is in real time changing by the day in terms of being able to spin up stablecoin, Access Bank accounts through a few API clicks. And Erebor I think is going about in a little bit of a different way, but they've very quickly received National Bank charter. So add them to the list that we mentioned a few months back of of I think Ripple, Paxos, Bitco, maybe a couple others that received national banking charters that were more sort of crypto native in nature. But Michael, maybe I'll hand this to you to talk about Aramor. Yeah, I think this is really fascinating. I mean, TBD on the success of this firm, but I think from a Meta example, this is something that we've been looking at, been thinking deeply about for a while now is the convergence of both sides of being native to the space and then the banking and fintech side. But then there's just this realization that most of traditional finance and DCS do not know is that fintech fundamentally was just lipstick on a peg of like a real fat nasty pig, which is the banking rails. Like they just do not work. It's hard to become a bank. They were an issue and I think there was like before, well, I forget what it was, it was like 2020 when when Anchorage was approved by the Trump admin. But like since then there was never another banking charter that was like issued. So that's like 5 years, right of stagnation. And then before then you've seen like this crazy kind of like drop off and you mean net new banks. The real, the reality is in the same way decentralization and nodes and private keys are good for Bitcoin is the same thing as banks. And the number of banks that exist because they're fundamentally banking in its truest sense is being able to take deposits, safeguard them, and then somebody else that needs that to go and build a business or whatever they do. You're creating this economic connectivity. And when you see that centralization go away, you're ultimately just disintermediating kind of like the lifeblood of an economy. And this is really where like, I think I'm just talking about this out loud, but we should probably do some work on this is like the direct correlation around the amount of banks, like the US has the most banks and people look at is that as a bug? I think that's a feature where you look at some of these other countries, like I think Canada as an example, only has like a certain level. So point being is what it looks like to be a bank is fundamentally shifting because of whether it's the genius act. And then they're working on some stuff where you can have like a narrow account with the treasury, so you can issue like stable coins. So you have like a narrow bank access. But then the other side of it is this realization that most people, and I just took it for granted until you kind of like take a step back, do hate their bank. Like when you think about Wells Fargo, look at Mercury. Mercury's the best example of their growth. They don't do anything really special except like think about the client and offer a better experience from a user interface to how they manage fees. And they had a issuer bank that we're partnering with. I don't know who it is now because I think it's evolved. I think they're actually got a banking license for the process too. And so in the same way, Mercury started with startups and grew what Arabor is attempting to do. And they're backed by obviously the ABC's and Palmer Luckey's and I think Joe Lonzo sits on the board. Peter Seal is working with three key market segments that had not been served or really underserved, which was defense contractors do firms and then AI companies. And that's not only from like banking and then also lending, because when you lend against these assets, you have to fundamentally understand them. You know, you IE Nidig and whatever happened in 21, there's crazy amounts of loans lend against the depreciating assets and minors. And when the market falls out, you have to go and figure that out and you can really lose your shirt there. So when you think about lending against that and then also money movement because these firms are operating at the bleeding edges of this stuff. SpaceX is a great example with their global growth and having to pay out the, you know, borderless money like stable coins. And so you had that all together. And I think we're going to see a lot more of this makes complete sense. And it's funny because this industry is so small that there's a guy that I knew, there's two guys I knew. I went back in the day in 2018 when I first got into space, I interviewed with Genesis and they were had a small shop. It was only three people that had spun out of, I forget what it was like Genesis Prime or it was Genesis and it was Michael Moro who who had since left. And then it was this guy Roshan Patel and then Matt Mullins way who's at Pico now leading their OTC team. And I just saw Roshan on my LinkedIn. He just joined Airborne. So I reached out because this industry is so small that once people get in, like, you know, you're just stay around the puck long enough. And so, yeah, it's going to be fascinating to see where they go, but it's pretty cool. Yeah. Similar. This similar headline that are going headline. No, I was just going to say very interesting, especially just their focus on digital assets sounds like they're going to be the what they say that they're going to be the most conservative bank in the industry when it comes to lending rehypothecation. Like they say that they want to have 60% in cash equivalents and other liquid short term assets on their balance sheet and just get, I think it makes sense. The people are really underestimating the amount, the velocity at which money is going to move with AI agents increasingly becoming a larger part of the economy and how that will necessarily make it more difficult to plan for long term cash and assets on a balance sheet of banks. And on a related note to this one, I, I don't know if we got to talk about it last week, but there was that paved bank that raised $39,000,000. And they, they're doing something similar right now that they're only based over in Singapore, but they have plans to expand to the US. They are going to be, they're primarily catering to digital asset firms and specifically a lot of those that are OTC desks, market makers of yeah, investments by like Wintermute, Tether, Excel, like a few other interesting BC firms. But if you go down a little bit, Brian, it's essentially doing everything that you would want from the bank, like deposit accounts, international payments, foreign exchange, liquidity card issuance, treasury management, digital asset management, instant settlement, over the counter trading in a single asset. And they're not going to be lending out client assets at all. Which, you know, if you're somebody who's in the digital asset space and saw what happened to SBB, so Silvergate, Signature, all those folks like you're going to want to work here. And it's not to say like people will inevitably come here overnight because there's information asymmetry and things will only happen on the edges. But it's you can see a world where banks are going to really have to kind of change and, and be cater to less or more conservative lending out of client assets, as well as the ability to offer stable coins and and be digital digitally native first, just because I do think that the speed of which all this is going to change is really going to just accelerate from here. Check out earlyriders.com for all the latest in Bitcoin investment research. Now back to the show. Yeah, just to call out, there's a few things like at the end of the day, all this actually is tack and it's AP is like you could throw 80% of what we said related to all these banks and it's just AP is like banks have historically when it comes to their like Cobalt and all their architecture. Most banks don't even like run their own kind of front and back and they leverage like the Pfizer's and the, there's a few others the names are escaping, but there's like 3 large like core systems that will help. And so these APIs into spinning up virtual accounts and everything that's related haven't existed. And it reminds me of a quote Nick Carter using. It actually comes at two sides. It's apartment around stable coins are effectively just like Starling, right? Because you're taking like these rails because the dollar and this is the fundamental like deals like the dollar is the, you know, you travel globally and it's generally accepted everywhere. And so now that you don't have the legacy rails and you can connect, it makes sense. And you're seeing these arbitrages take place. Pave, I think it's Pave, but maybe it's Pave bank. You have Slash that we didn't cover last week, but Slash is another company doing more business to business. I think they're like at 150 million in, in AR, they leverage bridge and then there was rain that we talked about about a month ago and they're effectively letting people use these stable coins and, and have payments and they've gone from a million to, you know, 150 million roughly in 15 months. And so it reminds me very much of the telco industry, because the telco industry had this like legacy kind of inertia with the infrastructure because you basically had to have the rails. So you had to like lay that fiber. And it was very expensive to go retrofit in a city. And then I was part of Google and Google Fiber. So I just remember specifically how hard they made it from a bureaucracy to go into the city and get access to the telephone poles, blah, blah, blah. Point being is they needed to do that because it showed the market, like it put the market at it's heels of, OK, we need to be competitive again. And so they went in kind of further. That's why you can get, you know, 100 megabytes, 200 megabytes up to gigs now for relatively low cost. But then Starlink completely changed that game where they effectively just went to space. And now you can anywhere in the world get access to like Gigabit speed at kind of 50 to 70 dollars. And it just you know, when you look at like I haven't looked at their stocks, but I would imagine like spectrums in the Comcast's of the world have not done well the past, call it 5 to 10 years. And so it's very similar with banking where banking has had these historical walled gardens that exist, have existed with very little investment in CapEx to compete. And now that's what's happening so fast. And that's why you see a lot of this kind of like growth across the the sector. And it's only going to increase because, again, I think a lot of this stuff's more by design than just happenstance that regulation changes at the same time that the US government needs more demand for sovereign treasuries. Yeah. And you, you'd mentioned Rain, I thought this was interesting in that context because Rain partnered with Visa. I forget the the nomenclature for what their relationship is, but they're basically, yeah. So, so they're actually, you know, that designation is historically been for banks effectively. And so RAIN I think is the first sort of non bank entity to get that designation. And then this was just some some data from Visa with stable coin volumes now up to 4.6 billion run rate of 4.6 X from just September and 18X from the start of the year. So, yeah, this this stuff is accelerating fast. And I think I also wanted to show this. Let's see, it sort of speaks to, you know, what we've sort of been discussing at a high level here is that a lot of the crypto space has effectively just turned out to be financial services focused. You know, I think over the past five to 10 years, there's been a lot of stories and narratives told around the broader crypto space in terms of decentral decentralizing everything. When ultimately like you're a lot of this stuff is at the end of the day, just making centralized systems more efficient, cheaper, faster, using stable coins, tokenizing the world. And and so this was some data from Alex Thorne of Galaxy saying Q 4/20/25 was the biggest quarter for crypto VC since 22. But most of that capital went to late stage private companies with some plans to go public. So many early stage narratives have failed over the years. With few exceptions, nearly all companies to reach late stage are financial services firms. So that kind of speaks to a lot of what we've discussed here is that like a lot of what the crypto space has has sort of transformed into is effectively making the traditional financial services ecosystem more efficient. And so you could say Tratify sort of eating the front of crypto space in real time. Any thoughts on this guys? I mean, I think it's the same for for Bitcoin. I think ultimately you could have narratives in crypto pre administration and make up why Like, you know, there's a lot of notion that people will leave in crypto that it was a regulatory apparatus and blah blah, blah. That didn't let us and then you know this new admin and there was still no growth in that sector because the reality is it was just mainly speculation and and gambling. But then when you take the other side, specifically around Bitcoin financial services, you got to really goes back again to that barbell and convergence that if you offered a Bitcoin native by brokerage, well, you can yes, definitely create a better experience. But if Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, where everyone else keeps all of their wealth, has it there, you got to look differentiated, hence behind, you know, multi institution and having that focus because everything wraps around that, because it's ultimately where we think that the end state is for all these institutions. So it's a differentiated view, but not only that, it's still margin. I mean, it's, it's a step function better, but for a lot of people that aren't deep in the weeds, it's like, OK, I get how this is better, but I can get a loan or leverage against my ETF or I can just buy it through Fidelity who already is holding my IRA and they have, you know, my 4 or MY4O1K. They have my traditional assets. So I really want another account. And so for some people that the answer might be yes, but the reality is that for mass market adoption, you're going to have the large institutions that are going to incorporate these assets. And here's a kicker. And they can actually undercut most of the market because they have other ways to monetize the client. And so then on the other side, if you're going to be a Bitcoin native firm, you fundamentally have to offer a better client experience and offer other traditional financial products if you want to stay alive long enough, even from an M and a perspective, because if you have this singular view, a lot of these firms don't understand that it's only Bitcoin and it really isn't only Bitcoin, it's at least Bitcoin and stablecoins. And then in a future state, there will be security tokens that are, you know, tokenized securities. And so this is just something again, as we look at the space and we look at investments, I mean, there's a reason why we went into a gold firm, while we obviously focus on Bitcoin infrastructure and then we're looking at very heavily at stablecoins is because that whole profile, it's not theoretical. We already talked about what tethers doing best in class, where the market's going. So I think this applies across the the space. And you see this in crypto VC, where the winners in digital asset VC will be generalist people. There will be people that fundamentally like have experience in the real traditional like tech or financial service world and then know where those like gaps are, like the Cobalt, like we talked about and and then understand how best in class example background was previously in like traditional tech had built that Unchained understood that there's a market dynamic where when people hold material balances, they will not trust a single entity. So they have are stuck holding a hardware device that doesn't scale traffic doesn't know that yet, but they will. And so we built solutions for that. And over time, as Morgan Stanley, Fidelity and other clients recognize that will they have an opportunity to partner and then retain the client relationship and balance or they'll leave. And so that's our thesis. That's the bet we're making. And it's contrarian right now. But if it's right, that's how you actually get returns and build, you know, generational businesses. And so like that little angle is they're, they're all over their pockets everywhere. The problem is that you can't just be AVC that went to like worked at a private equity firm and launched AVC. He's like, what do you know that's different than the market other than Bitcoin's cool. You have to fundamentally like understand the industry and then it have like gotten your hands dirty. So that's why we get excited what we're building and it's a huge opportunity right now, yeah. Very well said, Mike. This was a late, late add to the list. I hadn't seen this, but this is pretty interesting. CME Group says tokenized cash coin developed with Google to roll out this year for crypto collateral. How is this any different than a stablecoin? Why are they saying it's a tokenized cash coin? And what is CME coin? So maybe this is after this, unless there's something big we can do, you know, some open claw stuff because I was late to putting links in because my brains like fried because open claw took over, which is very wild. And and I'm sure a lot of people are following what's happening there. That would love to hear, you know, how we're thinking about it or looking at it. But so this is I think I didn't fully understand. So the difference between tokenized deposits in stablecoins is fairly straightforward. I'm sorry. And like genius act in in treasuries, genius act and stable coins are backed one to one. It's part of it. U.S. Treasuries where banking whether it's 10, do I think like airborne can use like 70% leverage, I'd have to hold like 39%, but either way. General banking, you can hold like 1 to 10% of dollars and then you're basically lending out the rest. That's effectively what tokenized deposits are. So tokenized deposits are effectively taking the banking deposits and then making them. And there is some, I would imagine optimization and productivity that's gleaned from moving those dollars, whether it's through investments, money market funds to other banks. So that's the just delta between when you hear tokenized deposits and like what JP Morgan's doing. The problem is that, again, if people are smarter, why would you want a tokenized deposit that you're effectively only have $250,000 insurance versus something that theoretically should always be there via U.S. Treasury in the back end of the government. Now what CME coin is doing, I don't fully know. I thought it was interesting because it sounds like, again, post Fidelity they launched this. Could imagine that whether I don't. Yeah, I would literally talk more to like if he knows the traditional flow of funds from any like cash settled there, held leverage for margin, I would imagine that's the plays. It's just giving you more efficiencies on like leverage and margin. If you have cash equivalents in your registered broker dealer using the CME overarching notion is that everyone again is going to get here because it's it's just like turning on the Internet. Why wouldn't you not turn on the Internet versus like go and write the letter and put it in the mail. That's effectively what the difference is between having to send a wire versus sending assets. And you brought up rain, that's a great example. So rain in traditional issuers and credit cards, you have like 3 or 4 days worth of deposit settlement because you have like a loan, right, effectively against what the person's using on credit where. And so now you have like operational capital constraints that you have to deal with. This is like Amazon's, you know, fundamental reason they were able to scale is the way they, they played with those economics. Point being is rain only has one day settlement because everything that they're working on with Visa and that relationship. So you can just start to extrapolate the efficiencies when you do not have these legacy rails that exist on, you know, Friday the wire doesn't hit and then you're waiting till Monday morning before any money moves. Interesting. So my would I be understanding this correctly is basically like sort of leveraged or marginable stablecoin like that's the that's the distinction is that they can create these give them as margin instead of them being fully backed. Yeah. I think it would just basically optimize and bring efficiencies to their already existing flows, which again is pretty scary because if you think about bank runs and movement of flow funds. But yeah, I mean that's effectively what a tokenized deposit is. So without I didn't fully dive into this, but I would imagine that you're taking the existing like leverage and then you're just you're just making it move faster. Got it. Makes sense. All right, Mike, you want to do a deep dive on on your bots, on your Droid army that is coming together? When it comes to holding Bitcoin securely, Peace of Mind starts with architecture on ramps. Multi Institution Custody distributes control across three independent regulated key holders in a two of three quorum. No single point of failure, no pooled or omnibus exposure. Segregated client titled faults. You retain full legal ownership while on ramp coordinates security, compliance and operational workflows behind the scenes. It's strength of many delivered through the simplicity of 1. Multi Institution Custody is the foundation for everything. We build sound infrastructure that distributes counterparty risk and provides fault tolerant resilience with clear audits and institutional controls. And now On Ramp is piloting flat, predictable pricing, making best in class Bitcoin custody and financial services more accessible now than ever On ramp strength in many simplicity of 1. To learn more, check out on rampbitcoin.com. It's not necessarily AD dub. I can I'll I'll it probably better if you guys give the the questions. The thing that I will share is really got a glimpse into the it's very similar where I think like crypto and Bitcoin and people have latched on to this because there's an area of something in your brain. There's poker too, where like a lot of people play poker were in a Bitcoin, but there's an area of the brain that's on the like fringes of being interested. But then where it goes a step further is the like sovereign aspect of now a fully grok where like at the end of the day, the commodity or the this kind of ties to what we were talking with bro offline, like the real currency is attention. And so we know this with like ads and the monetization of Google and Facebook. But when you think about like all this BS happening at the model layer, I don't think it's like speculative to say that like a lot of this stuff ends up compressing very little from like the open source models even to the ability to, I think the understanding is you'll be able to host a lot of stuff on your phone. So the point being is like, well, what's where's the value? And the value is like in your prompting, in your memory and all the information you're giving. And so when people try to discern what's the difference between, you know, open claw versus just prompting, well, there's this brain that you're effectively storing all that memory because these prompts don't hold all the memory because of the amount of tokens it requires. So not only do you get the memory and you own the memory that sits there, but then it's compounding and it's growing and it's understanding you and then it's able to work on your behalf. And you got to be very careful with this stuff and park it completely isolated. It's kind of crazy to me. A lot of people saying you're setting up virtually because just parking it on a separate computers and setting all that up was already like, there's a lot of gaps you can mess up. So I can't imagine if you're using your daily driver and then getting a cloud server and then you have to connect all this stuff, you'd also be significantly limiting like the things you're able to do. So there's that component, but then there's the form factor component, which is that you can effectively integrate it into almost any app. So I did Telegram and so you're just like in real time, prompting, getting stuff done, having it done back at home base, which is whatever you're running it on, and it has access to all these things. So you're able to like, you know, I created this unique and there's a, there's a guy if anybody wants to shoot us an e-mail, I sent it to the team because you're going to see the crazy amount of efficiencies gleaned from individuals leveraging this. And I want our whole team to effectively get there. And This is why I had to do it because I just want to know where the market's going because you can't really understand how you scale a business if this is the tech that exists. But the point being is that the, the, so you have it, you, you create these different profiles like Gmail, even phone numbers. But then you can give it shared authentication. So it can start to go create other accounts for you. And then that's when things get really interesting because you can start to create your folder structure, can start to build things. You can start to like park a lot of the data that it's already servicing. It can go build those accounts. And then the beauty is that you don't need any technical component because you're it's teaching you in real time. So a lot of the way that a lot of the data works is you need API tokens and API tokens are generally available, but then you need the way to speak to it. And so it's able to go get that and then build what you need in real time to start to bring more connectivity. And so it's, it's super fascinating. It, it, it's going to be, it's, it's wild. Yeah. It's a wild, it's a wild new world. I'm curious, have you have you given it any Bitcoin yet? Because that's the other, I think big talking point around a lot of this stuff with the bots and the fact that they often prefer to use Bitcoin because it's a native currency of the Internet and they don't need a bank account and they can just transact, use noster, things like that. So curious if you if you've gone down that route as well. It's a great question. So I think of it in the same respective, it's a long game and that you're going to have the traditional incumbents and that convergence where you're just going to have platforms, businesses that are native that will adopt Bitcoin and make it more preferred because of the movement. But then the reality is everyone doesn't understand Bitcoin. Everyone's going to get pushed into stable coins. And so that plumbing and tooling is more than likely going to be like dollar stable coin wallets before it gets to BTC. But an example of where to your, to your question is when you get the, the bot going out to create a lot of these accounts, there's a lot of capture to like make sure that it's not a bot. So you either have to go login or you have to do like screen share so you can help it. But then there's these third party platforms that will take Bitcoin to do it. I think they pay a human to go do it. And so while it was doing it, he's like, hey, like, you know, that's going to take some time. I can build you the wallets, but maybe you should just, you know, set it, set it up real quick because that takes you 30 seconds. And so then I was like, OK, we'll build me, let's download Bitcoin Core and then let's also set up a Bitcoin wallet and then a Lightning wallet. Go look at the SDKS that exist. And then it started to like build that. And so I haven't gotten to it yet, but I just need to get the addresses and I'll go deposit a little bit of BTC and those addresses and then let it go run. But yeah, and anybody that does this one big learning is really just do a prompt to understand optimization because like for a lot of people listening to us, we use clawed and really clawed is at the very like highest levels of the frontier models. By the way, I knew nothing about this shit. Like I'm just like one weekend to any of this. But so anyway, so like the clawed at the frontier especially like I think it's 4.6 opus. Point being is like you don't need all that and you don't need a lot of like it'll spawn sub agents and those sub agents you can just kind of like calibrate the, the way that it spins these things out that you can just save on the amount of tokens you're using. Because I like flew through API credits yesterday and then I was like, oh shit. Because I, I was just like in this other mental model of using clod for just regular like searches. So anyway, that's just something to call out. Fascinating. Liam, anything you're thinking about there that you, I think. What were you saying, Michael? No, I just didn't know if you had anything that you had a question or any notice. I just figured that'd be easier if you guys had thoughts on like experience versus if I had a because it's just too much. I wouldn't even know where to start. No, I think it's a fascinating thing. And yeah, I, I don't know if they'll actually like, I would like to just be a complete optimist and say that they're only going to use Bitcoin. But the reality is it's probably, it may be a little bit of a jump for them to only be sitting in Bitcoin just given its volatility over time, especially when it has like only a certain amount of capital. So I really am interested to see how often it will go in Bitcoin and stable coins or other just native currencies of the Internet. And well, it will really use in order to go hold and spend money over time too. I'm really following this closely. Yeah, real quick before you wrap, I don't know if you had anything else Brian, but there was there was basically the D pen. I don't know if you guys have followed this and I just thought it was interesting because I saw, I saw this a couple weeks ago. It was a fun for $62 million and effectively D pen is like just a centralized tokens for like real world infrastructure. So it's like this blending of like tokenomics, but for like real world is like Helium was an example of this. And I thought, yeah, if you go Google, what was that? Is it like telescopes and other like decentralized infrastructure? I think anybody like following the space already knows that you don't need to put a token to any infrastructure. Like Bitcoin is the token that would provide the incentives to run it. And there's a lot of really good writings that I do think the, the meta analogy is the centralization around servers, whether it's like Facebook and you can see how like Noster plays that role or like even Netflix on the centralization. You're paying somebody to like route that data to different servers and then having a route it back to you where it does make sense on a long time horizon to push the data as close to the edges because that is the quickest, most efficient way to route that data. And then you can incentivize that via payments. And then it's it's calibrated via tokens, not having to pay via monthly. Like this is understood. It's just topography and Internet. And we're, you know, probably decades because the internet's relatively new. What I mean is in that world of understanding, it's understood that like, yeah, Bitcoin will just do that because that's the natural money. But it was funny because Deepen raises funds. And then with Simani stepping down this past week, he had to leave with like one of the things he's still interested in is like Deepen. And it's just like fascinating because while the world is still under waking up to like crypto BS, they're just going to replay these like different tokenomics and things that you're attaching it to. I just thought it was fascinating to to see it in 2026. People still get excited about something like this. No, I mean, and this is kind of been around for a while. Like I remember back in 22 when I was still a Coinbase, like it was kind of heralded as the next narrative in the broader crypto space, like after deep by summer, like it was like, oh, everyone's going to be interested in deep in all of these different networks. And I was always very skeptical of it because all of them had a token. And there's a line right in this article here. A lot of what you've seen in the last three years are deep in projects that have launched tokens before they have anything. They're launching tokens on the basis pipe and on the basis of an idea. And so, yeah, I think you're, I think you're spot on that if people build these types of infrastructure networks that just use Bitcoin as the base layer, as the unit of value, I think that could make a lot of sense. But I don't know if anyone's gone down that path yet, or if people are still just yeah. Or just dollars like stable coins, because I think that's the big problem is like if you're, how do you like meter? Usage and then how do you? Use. It is an. Interesting sort of mental. Model, sorry, I think we, we kind of overlapped, but I was basically saying agreeing with you and effectively saying like, it's the streaming of capital, whether it's stable coins or Bitcoin is what you need and they built tokens because they think that's what people want. But you're effectively just meeting, metering the financialization and utilization, right? Because like some of these things, I think you're capitalized with these tokens and then some of them are paid for it. It's all comes back to incentives, but it goes back to like, well, what are the things of money that everyone accepts? And like, it's just a funny, it's a crazy thing where $62 million woke up and said, yes, we're just going to like need tokens for every piece of infrastructure. It's it's very interesting, like so all right, good stuff guys. Fun one. Brian. Good luck. Good luck in the shower. We'll see you later. Thanks guys. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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