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It all comes. Down to computers communicating the information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational. Technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Good morning, gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, June 23rd. Last week we put out an episode a little late in the week. Shout out to Riverside for some technical difficulties. It was supposed to come out on Monday, didn't come out until I think Thursday. So hopefully we get this one out on time so we can remain topical. But because we recorded early in the week last week, we missed a few news items that probably it seemed like we just didn't talk about them on Thursday, even though it was because we recorded days earlier. But a few big news items I want to start with were the genius act. We've been we've been talking stables almost non-stop every week on the show. Stable coin proliferation is real. This administration is behind it. The genius act has been approved by the Senate. Trump is demanding it get to his desk immediately. He said no delays. He wants to sign it. And then in addition to that, Texas got through its strategic Bitcoin reserve legislation as well at the end of last week. So two things sort of on the regulatory administration side of things, we can go in either direction, guys. But I'm just going to also while you give me some thoughts, I'm going to pull up the chart of circles IPO, which we referenced a couple weeks ago. It is just on an absolute tear. It's basically 10X from its IPO price. Yeah, Something we've we've just been cognizant of is like people want to express a view around stable coins. And it seems as you know, at least for right now, the way people are doing that is via circle. It's at 280 right now, up another 16% today. I think it opened at 31 a couple weeks ago. But either direction you guys want to talk SPR or or Genius act stable, vibes stable stable, coin stable. Coin vibes. This is kind of related different topic for we'd probably touch on later, but I guess this morning it came out Pomp has like a new SPAC billion dollar Bitcoin. I don't fully know, but you know, I like Pomp. He's an opportunist, He's a hustler, but he has high vibes. Like I was thinking about like, well, how do I feel about Pomp's back? I was like, well, he's like he's a vibes guy. You know, he's like, he's probably going to do pretty good because, you know, he brings the energy. And if I was going to look at, you know, a treasury vehicle, I'd like a strong. Vibe. The vibes are. And a. Core part of diligence on Treasury companies. And yeah, and where I bring that up is this reminds me similar to the Circle stuff. It's like stablecoin vibes. You like it's hot. You know, it's very similar to AI and that we know it's overheated, but you just if you're an institutional alligator, I mean, this is like Liam's world. And, and kind of we've talked about this more and more, but the more liquidity in the system, just expect the more of a clown show and circuit show when it comes to just like whether it's the regular world and whatever you see on the news all the way to the valuations of companies. And so if again, going back to AI, if venture capital, you know, 20/20/21 vintage is underwater illiquidity, all the things happening, well, AI was their way out. AI was the way to return that capital. And so you've seen these crazy valuations and then very similar with stable coins. If you recognize that the, you know, global markets are going to be on these rails and there's quote UN quote, a bunch of like modes or regulatory like friction to get in and in circle was the one to get there. And they have first mover advantage and every other thing, whatever rest of vibes that could be true or untrue. Well, then, of course, it makes sense that you need to have some kind of exposure to this new digital era, especially with the genius bill passing. So anyway, it's it's vibe vibes all the way. 100% it's we'll, we'll invest now, we'll try to get as big as possible and then we'll figure out pricing and everything else later on is pretty much the thesis right now with, with both AI and to an extent stable clients too. Because you know, AI, you, you can see everything related to, you know, the, when you used it two years ago, it was, you know, 50100X less valuable than what, what it is today. And it's going to be the same thing with with stable clients. I think it's probably not as helpful or you know, just people living in the US that already have access to dollars. It can be, you know, marginally more efficient in terms of completing your transactions and settlement finality, but it's significantly more impactful and helpful for banks, every financial institution. I think I just saw Pfizer was launching one this morning. It's going to be just an acceleration, just cost reduction across the board. It's it's just a hot topic right now and the regulation, I'm curious if if either of you guys have have really done a ton of work as it relates to the market structure of stable coins in particular and circle versus Tether US adoption there and any implications on the competitive landscape as well? I mean, I saw a couple things last week from Paulo of Tether. I think he was doing some interviews and he's basically saying they're going to be launching effectively like new versions of Tether. I think there's one that's going to be more specific to institutions and banks in particular. And then they'll probably be more of like a retail focus one. But it's all, it's all very interesting because I think the other thing that is in the bill at current is that you can't pass along yield from the underlying treasuries. And so that's always been in my mind, the way that this all develops is like that's how you ultimately compete. So I don't know if there's going to be like loopholes or workarounds where we kind of mentioned last week of like, well, if it's like an Amazon, maybe you get some Amazon credits for holding cash and they're stable or you get reduced prices on things. So there's I think there'll be other ways that people get like cheeky around like, well, how do I differentiate my stable coin versus the rest of the stable coins? And then I think at some point that the Genius Act or whatever the legislation looks like probably does change at some point down the line to allow more explicit forms of yield from whatever the underlying is backing the stables. But yeah, so, so those are a few things that I saw just last week in terms of how this all might play out. The other thing to mention is with Circle where it is, its market cap is nearly 70 billion and it's basically about to flip Coinbase, which is kind of just hilarious. So it's like one of these valuations is wrong. Like, yeah, it's then that goes back to the vibes. Like it sounds joking, but you can't. You can only really when things are so like so much nonsense. It's where we've had multiple discussions on the show where kind of like can't really address it. I feel like it maybe wasn't even this one was with Braun, but it's like you can't acknowledge it because then you're given it some level of validity. It's just like it's just, does it make any sense? And Coinbase in Circle, I mean circle. It's my understanding Circle derives like 50 plus percent of its revenue from Coinbase for the other distribution. The other way. What do you mean? No, Circle derives most of its revenue from Coinbase, like Coinbase being being a distribution channel for them, right So. Coinbase like almost a billion dollars a year in order to like list them. Yeah. But where I was going with that was, oh, back to your point about the notion of like yield and all that stuff. Like I think there, I haven't dug deep. I've seen some like notable things about the market structure having to do with banks and just like sinking their, you know, kind of teeth in to be able to control or abrogate this. I think the overarching of you I've held is because of this stuff is interoperable and it lives on the Internet, lives natively on the Internet. It doesn't really. Like, sure, it matters in the short term what happens, but long term it doesn't. And the example I was thinking about when you were talking about was encryption, when the Internet came about and how historically encryption was used like during the Cold War for munitions and like just being able to trade secrets. And so it was looked at and it wasn't highly illegal, but it wasn't illegal explicitly, but it was like it wasn't embedded into a lot of things. And and naturally that started to move because you have to encrypt data if you're going to, you know, manage a lot of sensitive info online. And it's very similar with all this. Like I think they're going to come out and try to put these different constructs of the traditional world that you could before you had these things living on different rails. And then that ultimately is just going to be like, you know, a false kind of like action. You're not going to be able to do it. And so, yeah, I think whatever they try to do, like whether the yield is a great example, you're going to have offshore dollars, even the notion of like stable, like the the pegging like E cash to the dollar, like eventually somebody's going to get that right. I know Bob was pretty sit strike and I don't know if he's still doing his Boardwalk cash. Like there's all these different angles that'll come. And those are just fundamentally independent of any kind of like I guess they're tied to the stable coin, which is tied to the treasury, but they're not actually like tied to the Ledger of the stable coin. And so they're definitely tied to the KYC, a melody of that. So there's just a lot of ways this is all going to move that have independent of any regulation that gets put into a document. Yeah. The other thing I referenced around legislation was Texas. Michael, I don't know if you want to speak to your home state's movement on their strategic Bitcoin reserve. I don't know why this is not coming up. Yeah, I think so a lot with a lot of these things similar to this one, I don't necessarily know like how fast these things will happen. I know there's certain explicit like provisions that have been in place for a while that, you know, it's, it's not specifically just for Bitcoin. It's any asset that's over $500 billion market cap, I believe. And it looks to be the first tranche, I want to say like in the 10s of billions of dollars. And, and Lee's quoted as saying that in the grand scheme of things, you know, that's relatively small, even though some individuals not, you know, understanding Bitcoin be like that sounds like a lot of money. For context, if Texas was its own country, it'd be the 8th largest economy in the world. So it probably needs a little bit more than $10 million of Bitcoin. But yeah, I mean, this ties into a lot of this stuff that's going to be coming out this week with the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And you know, we've been on the honor and multi institution side, been lending a helping hand across the board with States and on the federal level. Just thinking about a framework. You know, we're so early to space that you still hear people talk about proof of reserves and self custody and Coinbase is all these like even coherent or potentially logical things to hold sovereign BTC. And anybody that's been following us or a client or understand multi institution custody, there's only one way that this can fundamentally go because you ultimately need to reduce counterparty risk. And so that's the beauty of multi institution custody independent of using on ramp is you get fault tolerance and redundancy. And because Bitcoin is interoperable or multi sig is open source and it's native to the protocol, it's very much interoperable, meaning you can add 7 institutions if you want. If you're going to be holding, you know, trillions of dollars in the future, maybe you want, you know, an ETF to hold three or five, five or seven. So I think that was one of the biggest things that we've been paying attention to is even if it's not today, over time the market will just naturally realize that if you're going to be holding your citizens capital, you're going to want redundancy, fault tolerance into the underlying or what else would you be doing there? Rather just hold gold or give them back their money so they can figure it out themselves. Yeah, 100%. And we see examples of, you know why it is precarious to hold this asset with a single counterparty. There were two examples last week, both in Iran. So a crypto exchange was breached by pro Israel, Israeli hackers. They then burned the coin, allegedly. And then similarly, one of the largest banks in Iran was also hacked, and people were then unable to withdraw cash from ATMs. And so both of these instances, while they are, you know, certainly Exus and, you know, it's easy for people living in the West to think, you know, we're just going to trust Coinbase. We're going to just trust the single counterparties. It's like, well, that it speaks to a fundamental issue is that you then have a single point of failure. And so I think, you know, while we haven't necessarily seen a full awakening to that reality in the West, there's just generally more institutional trust. But I think the trajectory of institutional trust is is downwards, not upwards. And so I think, you know, as you continue to see these things X US, it means, you know, effectively, you know, all custodians around the world are not immune to these types of single points of failure or hacks or any sort of compromises. And so, yeah, like you said, we've been close with the guys at BPI who are are doing great work. They have the summit coming up this week, Liam, and I'll be down in DC for that. And at least on that front, you know, I think there is increasing recognition of exactly what I just just described in that for a digital bearer asset, particularly if you're holding it as a sovereign reserve asset, whether it's at the state or federal level, the most important thing to consider is how you custody the asset. Because you could be totally right on the thesis Bitcoin goes up and to the right. But if you have some sort of compromise at the custodial level, it's all for naughty if you can't hold the asset sort of multiple decades into the future. Yeah, that's exactly right. Obviously the most sophisticated parties in this are the individuals who have been holding Bitcoin for a very long time because they've been able to you know, withstand the volatility, continue to add to or or at least maintain their position over a long time period. And they've been rewarded for that. And all of those individuals or most of them have learned throughout the history of Mount Gox, FTX Block by etcetera, that it's important to sever the Internet connection and, you know, maintain your own keys because that was pretty much the only way to do that. And with the but that's that's primarily the best way to do it if you're maintaining just your own cash. And you know, some people want to be their own bank, but you know, some people just want an actual secure money warehouse where their money sits there. It isn't re hypothecated. There isn't a an aspect of just like mismanagement of funds and you know, multi institution can mitigate that by allowing your keys to, you know, not be hacked by one single party or or etcetera. And so there's, there's now just multiple options rather than just holding it yourself, which is especially important as it relates to, you know, being a single point of failure yourself with, you know, these French attacks heating up as well as when you're managing capital on behalf of others. Yeah, I think one thing just to call out here, because we don't probably do it enough and people wonder what we do at early riders is so early riders, you know, we we're across the ecosystem looking at the market and, you know, building companies, taking bets on companies. And and the way I look at it is if you have the vantage point of what Liam and Brian just shared specifically around custody, you look at it as like, well, maybe it might be some angle of custody ends up in multi institution. It looks like the majority of Bitcoin ends up there. And the question would be like, well, how does that happen or why does that happen? And you can start around custody is like the base layer of all financial services and you need to get that right. But then ultimately when you think about like trade or other products and services, what was OK, maybe $10.00 for 10 Bitcoin or $1,000,000 for 10 Bitcoin, whatever the number breaks down, the amount becomes untenable to have a single counterparty. That's when you'll ultimately end up in multi institution custody. So whether it's you hold material amounts of your own exposure or let's say Bitcoin's $1,000,000 and then there's an Iranian exchange and now they just got hacked and lost all their clients wealth. The, the market just naturally will wake up to like this can't happen to my money. And it doesn't matter if it's here in the US, if it's in El Salvador or if it's across the world. So when we look at the market, we're like, oh wait. So not only can this exchange build a Better Business model, it's fully differentiated, but can actually have a better long term value or lifetime value with the client because it's reoccurring revenue and they can also, you know, offer other financial services. This is fundamentally what underpins it all is that the market will eventually wake up to this. And so the idea and investing is you want to be non consensus, right? You want the whole world to be wrong, you be right because that's where all the money is going to be made. And so like Bitcoin is a form of like non consensus, right, because most of the world still has not woken up to this is going to be global money. So there's still a lot of room to run. But in that same vein, we make the case that multi institution people look at it as like, it's nice. But when you really kind of break it down all the way from a micro example, an individual that doesn't want their kid kidnapped for their wealth to be seized or to be taken from them to a sovereign that's going to. And this can happen in the US where Iranian hackers or any hackers can go and get anybody's servers, including on ramps. The beauty of that is that there's multiple institutions that are backing up those keys and backing up those databases and have the provenance in title of that asset. And these are all things that the market doesn't fully appreciate yet. But as these continue to happen, that's just naturally what we'll go. And it sucks because it's coming at both angles in the digital world are getting more sophisticated in the physical world are getting more sophisticated to to attack people. And this is that convergence where the rest of the price will take care of the rest when it comes to what we're talking about here. Yeah, the the trajectory of these attack vectors is, is one way. I mean, we at last week we saw a massive data breach that was announced, 16 billion, which is more people than exist on earth of accounts and passwords that were hacked or or leaked onto the dark web, etcetera. And so this is only going one way. And so you kind of have to work under the assumption that if you have a single point of failure, it will be exploited at some point. And so in order to prevent against that, you don't just spread it out. You spread it out in a quorum where then you have redundancy and fault tolerance. And so I think that's the the real key unlock. And and to your point, Michael, it's across the spectrum, it's individuals to sovereigns and even all these treasury companies in between. I don't know if we want to do our weekly treasury update. No, but before that, I think I think you hit on a great point. It's it, there's just like trends, right? And there's a lot of trends that I, I think what's happening, it kind of reminds me a little bit of like conspiracy theories, where people historically thought conspiracy theories were crazy because they didn't have access to the Internet. And then as the Internet proliferated, you could just get more and more data. You're like, well, well, this conspiracy was just me doing my research. And it's very similar to like these concepts we continue to talk about. I think worked for a very long time in Bitcoin for two main reasons or one main reason the price wasn't $100,000, because with $100,000 means increased awareness. And with increased awareness just means that there's increased risk and attack profiles. And so ultimately there's a notion of you have to be super secure and no KYC and all this stuff and Bitcoin, it's like, yes, in a digital world, it's looking, it is looking very Orwellian in the amount of oversight that's coming. So everyone should have really good hygiene. And this is like table sticks. This is like just brushing your teeth and like taking a shower. Like yes, you need to have this in place in a digital world, But at the same time, you shouldn't fear for your life because you buy an asset. And you shouldn't have to like be ultra protective of wherever you store your bank statements or your balances. Because ultimately, like all that data will come out and it's data, it's ones and zeros. And it doesn't matter if it's today or 50 years from now, it's more than likely going to be out there. And this has always been the case. Why we reference between the dark web and what Coinbase is doing and all these, again, it's an insane #16 billion, double the amount of people in on the planet Earth. Credentials were stolen across, what was it, Google, Apple, Amazon, just like an insane, like we were all just basically, yeah, everything. And you take all of that and it just feeds on the data sets of chain analysis and all the other things that have already been leaked. Almost every favorite Bitcoin company has had their data leak. We haven't yet. But I don't like to, you know, dance on glass houses because ultimately it will probably happen to everyone. So the idea is you have to build resilient products and services that bad actors know they can't attack or there's no vector. It's the same thing we talked about it why people don't go steal. You know, I think Liam, he hasn't been able to shake his trad fight day. So he probably still owns some bond somewhere. And so, you know, nobody would go to Liam's apartment and and rob them for his, you know, 5% coupons. And it is because of the understanding that there's controls in place. He has to make calls or get online. He has to liquidate positions. Those positions have to eventually settle. They have to settle back into the account and then into his cash account. And then he'd have to go to the bank and get that duffel back. He's not gonna wire to the bad actor. And the point in sharing that is there are controls in place that mitigate this and people don't do that. And so rather than the market will tell you got to be quiet and not talk about this, it's like it's going to be money for everyone. So that makes zero sense long term. It's like, rather than do that, you build products and services. And it's not just like, OK, here's some plastic devices and you get some insurance in case you get killed. It's like, well, that sounds kind of terrible. If my family member gets killed or I get killed but I still got insurance on, it's like, no, you prevent the person from ever attacking you. And so that's how we think about products and services that we build and invest in. It's just with this long term view that you shouldn't be scared to get exposed to this asset. You should feel confident your counterparties that they're going to prevent you from even having that happen. Yeah, and, and the reality too is like Bitcoin's price would be much higher if these risks didn't exist. And it wasn't scary for the average person to think, oh, I've got to figure out how to hold this in my house on a plastic device or trust Coinbase. Like those historically haven't been great options. And once a once an individual starts to look into it, they realize like that is the biggest pitfall of owning this asset is securing it in a way where it could be compromised with the single point of failure. It's, it's a great point because it, it goes to the transition to why it's important, why we continue to talk about this is because it's very nuanced and complex. And most people believe they have to go into an ETF or buy some treasury strategy to get their exposure because this is what people really do. They don't want their family harmed and nobody wants to die for a trade. So they're either like, well, I just got to get out of this and go into something, you know, highly more volatile and speculative. And so that's the important part of once people understand they can do this pretty seamlessly, it really is going to further adoption. Yes, and that is, you know, we we've harped on the treasury company stuff a good amount. I think, you know, we're only seeing more and more of it. But the concerning part about all of it is, is exactly what you just described, Michael, is like people viewing this as the solution to avoiding the risks of holding the asset. It's like, oh, no, just let a company do it. It's like, well, you're just transferring the risk to a corporate entity that has a management team full of humans that are prone to making bad decisions. And ultimately all of these companies are using single counterparties. So you're you're not really mitigating the risk. You're just transferring it to someone else and hoping that everything goes OK. And so, you know, we're going to see more and more of this stuff, but go ahead. This makes complete sense. What's happening here too? Like I don't think this should even be like a speculative. I think what most people are doing at best today is saying, oh, like there's two sides of the corporate treasury strategy. It's this is all super speculative, it's going to blow up. Or there's another side saying this is all like great financial engineering, this company's going to be big and they're not coming at it from any angle outside of that. And what I want to reference is there's a book that I heard for like 10 the past 10 years. It's called Technological Revolutions in Financial Capital. The Dynamics and Bubbles, the dynamics of bubbles and golden ages. It's by Carlotta Perez. And it was just like, I'm still going through it, but I went and picked it up because I started thinking about what's happening here and how, like, there is nothing really new under the sun. And ultimately, when new technology comes to the legacy world, the market has a very hard time in figuring out like how to perceive it and how to effectively like infuse it into the traditional market structure. And so it makes complete sense that people would latch on to public companies that live in the existing equity world and insert BTC and call it innovation and sell it to people because we're so early like that, it makes complete sense. And then naturally, as these things happen, capital flows in. And this is all technological revolutions, railroad, Internet, fiber optic. And then similar to what we're talking about here, the money will come in and these things will naturally the market will wake up and the animal spirits will come and then we'll look back and, and then the, the right products and services will be built. So when you look at it through the lens of like something like that, it makes sense. The best angle that I was thinking about, there's probably a better one. And I texted you guys over the weekend was like, it'd be the equivalent of like the Internet coming about. And then you like got excited about the e-mail and you were, you were sending emails to people and they were saving you all this snail mail and like licking your stamp and putting them, you know, in the mailbox and waiting a couple days for the correspondence to get through. And then somebody's like, oh, you can actually take that e-mail contents that you're whipped up real quick in your head. So it's like you got it in the type you typed it, but then you print it out. You can put it in to the snail mail and then you can mail it. And that's like innovation because you don't have to write it or like it's that notion of inefficiency that would be like seem insane today, but at the time felt and it's very similar. It's like you're taking this pristine asset and to Brian's point, you're just looping it in with some like, whatever company, let's not pick on anybody today. And then you're just like selling it to like people, sadly. And they're like, I see these pictures floating around. Again, not picking on anybody. We see these pictures floating around of like middle age people in there, like, you know, passing croissants and tea and and getting sold on communities. It's it's kind of, it's kind of sad because we're only at $100,000 and it's happening. What's going to happen AT250K? It's yeah, it's going to be weird. Those two ends in the the sort of spectrum in terms of perception what's going on I think are right. And I think the reality is, you know, like always, like somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, you know, I don't think all of these companies are going to fail or blow up. I think some of them will probably be OK and some of them won't be. And and there's nuance there. And the reason for that is what I always come back to about all of this is like you are you are necessarily reintroducing various risks that historically are not core to Bitcoin. Like Bitcoins value prop in and of itself is interesting and has merit because you've stripped out a lot of risks of traditional assets. The main one, the easiest one to sort of think through is going back to like management risk. Like when you invest in a company in equity, there is execution risk, management risk. Will these people do what they say? Are they competent? Is there going to be turnover in five years? Are they going to be able to continue to make good decisions and continue to compound value for me and my investment? The beauty of Bitcoin historically has been like, that is completely stripped away. You're not trusting a management team. You're not trusting anyone to execute on a vision. And so all of these treasury companies are reintroducing that risk to their Bitcoin exposure. And it's just, I mean, I think people know this, but they're not talking about it in that way. They're talking about it as if this is like, better Bitcoin, which is completely, you know, disingenuous. I mean, the whole, the whole thesis of Bitcoin is essentially more people are going to adopt it. It's going to be the global reserve money. And that's just not the case with these companies. And so the reason why people invest in them is because they want to feel early and be able to get more Bitcoin at the other side for the most part. And then when you do that, unless your your strategy or maybe the second biggest one or the biggest in a different market, you necessarily have to do something else in order to compete with the bigger players. And so it just like incentivizes you go further out on the risk curve because you don't have the same liquidity as the other players in there. And so with that it just incentivizes management teams to to get a little bit to be less to follow up less risk procedures then they would have otherwise if they were at the larger companies. And that's kind of how, you know, I think that some of these go with the unsecured debt or, and just like end up kind of losing them their investors more Bitcoin. And, and this has always kind of been the same thing with crypto. You know, you, you either invest in Bitcoin or you want to get the new shiny token that, you know, more people are going to understand the strategy later on and wake up to. And yeah, with that, we saw the, the hyper liquid $600 million raise to, to get, you know, Suey and, and Solana and, and hyper liquid and they're all kind of going back to the same strategy. There's going to be like a new BNB 1. It's pretty much like we we've been talking about this as the new ICO for a while now and this is pretty much exactly the same playbook now, just in the public markets. Yeah, I was, I was going to contradict myself on all this and like saying I can see how this is ends up like being I don't want to say positive, but it's it's the truest funnel for Bitcoin without maybe being the right funnel. But it will end up because I was thinking like most trades are 0 sum because somebody like I think it was like gambling like you're you're selling. Especially if like the, to Brian's point earlier about unless Bitcoin goes up into the right or the, the, the company's profile goes up into the right forever, then somebody's trading somebody else's note for something else. Because they're, and the reason why I don't believe they can go up into the right forever is simply because once somebody gets enough exposure to it, they're going to just deeply look at what's happening. And then nobody in the rational mind would want all their wealth tied to somebody else's counterparty risk. So that naturally causes a deleveraging event. So these are trades like if you come at it from just that premise that it makes zero sense to take money full of counterparty risk or that can be taken out counterparties and put it with some counterparty risk that this is a trade. And so then the thought was like, OK, well then it's 0 sum and somebody has to trade to somebody else. And I still think that's the case. But the reality is if they're always trading to somebody else coming in, if somebody's like coming into it thinking they're getting, you know, like they're going to be able to out compete or outperform gold. And the person that like has been outperforming BTC sells to that person. It might be like the perfect Ponzi like to get people into Bitcoin. I could. But here's the kicker. Why why it's still not is because it's disingenuous, because to to Liam's point, they're all selling everyone that this is better or easier exposure to get you more BTC and they can't prove that and they don't know existentially like what's around the corner for a number because of the execution risk. And so people are buying that on assuming. And so it's still is like I'm just trying to work through like how this possibly could be good or there's an angle through it. And to be like, you know, super kind of like objective. And that's kind of like the one angle is if somebody comes in, they get their exposure, they're going to sell to the next person that comes in because I guess you know, like that's going to go in. Bitcoin, we do know goes up on the right because if Bitcoin didn't go up on the right, then it would definitely this would be what a Ponzi is. But because Bitcoin goes up on the right, and if these companies can stay alive, more and more people will be allocating to them because they want Bitcoin exposure. And then over time they'll wake up. And as long as I guess too many people don't do that, but that's the risk maybe is like too many people sell their shares or want just Bitcoin. And if that happens all at once, the reflexivity of that volatility is going to just call us. So I guess that's the counter case to this. This won't ever get to that point because these things will blow up or deleverage before that. Yeah, unless I mean hopefully. That makes sense because that's like me working through this in real time. I'm trying to like fucking make this. You're describing the nature of the trade, right? Like somebody has to get out at some point. If they if they wake up and they realize they want the underlying, they don't want the execution risk, they don't want the counterparty risk anymore. They want the Bitcoin so that there has to be a moment in time where people get out of these things. Exactly. And it's going to happen. It's not like if it's like, why would you hold Smarter Web for all? Well, I'll throw this out. I'll throw this out, Michael. Like does it change your view or your perception if these companies adopt multi institutional custody? Like then does it become a longer term trade in your mind? Not necessarily because I think the premise, I mean, it helps in the longevity and will help differentiate the companies versus others when the other companies kind of like blow up because of custodial risk, but in and then also the transparency on the balance sheet or understanding where the Bitcoin is would be cool as if some of these contracts let you take the Bitcoin out. Now that'd be interesting. But where I was going was like, at the end of the day, their whole business model, the shell companies exist to create more Bitcoin. So if the market wakes up that they just want the underlying and that's the thing that I'm not smart enough to know. We should probably like eventually do some research on is, I know if the if it trades below MNAP, they can buy back their shares. But at one point does that like just cause a complete cascading of that business? And then we talked about like, you know, whatever it called like firms that are going to go try to like not buy out but take over, start to aggregate like it's just. You would think that micro strategy would just buy up a lot of those in that type of scenario. I think although Sailor has said like he's not interested in doing that, but I mean he can change his mind in a in a proverbial bear market and say I'm going to buy these Bitcoin treasuries for less than the Bitcoin is worth. It seems logical. Yeah, I also would, it would be the most interesting if you could just do this trade and and I don't blame Sailor for doing it. I would do the exact same thing if I had like a business that didn't make a ton of money and, you know, buying Bitcoin is, you know, the most rational move, maybe not levering up quite as much. But I I'm not going to pretend that I spend all my day reading these balance sheets. But the most interesting aspect would just be like during the trade until it trades below. I'm now because of essentially all these treasury companies are the same trade and they're the same counterparties because everybody's watching the same thing. Eventually things will go the other way and then just say, OK, party's over, take your Bitcoin back because we're trading below the value of our Bitcoin. Yeah, I know. I think the thing that I like independent of like we can work through probably 10 different angles how this goes S I've always come at it. It really reminds me of COVID. But we'll go, we won't go there is I just go back to if you guys remember, and maybe you don't, because this is like there was a weird period where it stopped. It was like money doesn't grow on trees and if it's too good to be true, it's too good to be true. And Parker Lewis had a great gradual and something called Bitcoin is the great, I think D financialization, right? We all understand this, we all know this. And so somehow some individuals that understood financial engineering and capital arbitrages figured out how they can get a bunch of Bitcoin with free money and they lived in the Fiat world, They understood it very well and they're bringing in dollars to buy Bitcoin. To assume that all that capital is going to centralized and it's just going to be great and everything's going to end up good is completely nonsensical because they didn't earn the Bitcoin. They don't understand how they got it fundamentally outside of financial engineering and so and they definitely because another case for this is that these are going to be the future guardians or the future like, you know, kings and rainmakers and that is 100% not true. Like because somebody can financial engineer to get a bunch of Bitcoin has nothing to do with the longevity or the opportunity that business. And like the best example is somebody that mined Bitcoin in 2009, probably doesn't have it anymore and they probably bought a bunch of pizzas and that was great for the network or whatever, But like they didn't know what the hell to do with it just because you have capital and the best example, this is like winning the lottery. Most of those people, if you go look at the studies, give it away. So there this is like it only goes one way from a pure like congruence with the universe world that you can't just like accumulate all this capital for free and then just assume it's all going to end up. And that's been my thing with Saylor strategy. It's like I don't know how it ends but I just know on a long enough time horizon it probably doesn't end how everyone expected or wanted to. That's all vibes though. Well, on the the counterpoint is they've been the best performing stock last year and with Bitcoin meeting a new all time high again, obviously there are a lot of public markets investors that are focused on Bitcoin and this treasury aspect as well. This was an interesting slide from CO2 manages $70 billion in assets, no Bitcoin exposure, but showing that Bitcoin is significantly less volatile than where it has been in the past and seeing less drawdowns volatility relative to big events like the Powell pivot, COVID hangover and tariff scare. I think that's because there's a ton of new institutional adoption that's come into the space. The proliferation of the ETFs have just brought more capital into the space. And similarly the trade between micro strategy and Bitcoin and all the other treasury companies and the underlying asset. I think future contracts are at an all time high and extremely tight with where the two-month realized volatility will be. So we're seeing a lot more capital come into the space because in one part to these treasury companies, whether they're they're good or bad, Jim Chanos has been extremely loud on Twitter fighting with all the plebs. And so I think this is just a deeper realization of we can make money on the asset and we're going to make money on the asset and we'll figure out if this is a real long term viability in terms of its, you know, long term purchasing power. But right now we can just make money on it. And so why wouldn't we? Yeah. Was there anything else worth pulling out from that CO2 with with Bill Gurley? So he they don't have exposure at CO2, but does it sound like Philippe Lafont of CO2 has personal exposure, perhaps because it sounded like he was somewhat constructive on the asset? So I didn't listen. I want to go back and listen to the pod. Bill had two recent pods, one was the invest like the best and then the other one was I guess he does a bi weekly with Brad Gerstner and they referenced Bitcoin I think briefly there and then stablecoins. Did you listen? Yeah, I listened to it. They didn't have any position, but they've been, you know, they haven't ever had a position in the past and they're going back and trying to understand what did I miss and to that's exactly what what I did a couple of years back and it was just like, all right, I messed it. There's something going on here. It's big. It's not quite as volatile as it used to be. Why is that? And there I think that's what not just them, but a ton of different people are, are understanding with the reduced volatility. And that's why, you know, every time this Bitcoin goes down a little bit like it did over the weekend with, you know, the, the, what was going on over in Iran, like they're, it just gets bought up because people that don't have exposure right now, they don't want to buy the top, but they're interested in, you know, coming in and getting some exposure opportunistically. And they were also super interested in state coins and went off on do they want like essentially how this is how the government can monetize their debt longer term by just tokenizing all their treasuries and getting it out into the to find buyers at, you know, banks and just anybody who uses digital dollars will, you know, have treasury exposure underneath. But the, the Bitcoin aspect was a lot more and they, they understand how networks and platform shifts change, You know, money is, is definitely changing right now too. And they're just interested, but they're green. Yeah, this is my favorite part of everything we're doing. And we were talking before this podcast about potentially doing this every other week, just given the amount of use that comes out. So Jackson's done an interesting thing on the last trade. If we get some likes and comments about what people like here, maybe we'll we'll keep it going weekly. If not, we'll do it bi weekly. But with that, I think this is the most probably in my mind, like most fascinating thing to work through is the notion of the money cannon. This is kind of like been a thing since the Uber Lyft wars. And we saw this with Wework and Masa. And it's ultimately this notion of if you don't take the money, then I'll invest in your counter, your competitor, and then they'll take it and they'll blow you out of the water or whatever. And I, and these guys believe this to be true. They think about this in the AI space across the board. And I would, I don't, I'm not 100% there, but I'm like directionally 7080% that it's not true. Because ultimately it just kind of goes back to if somebody's going to force you to like basically pull the trigger, play Russian roulette. If you have an option not to play it, you always have an option, right? Like, unless they're going to shoot you. And so the idea is, and this is, was underpinned the Wework report or rework, whatever we're calling it, where if they put Bitcoin on their balance sheet instead of all their real estate and what would they've been able to do? And I think that's the, the idea is like, we all know constraints breed creativity. This is just a like a fact of the universe and we know that, you know, we, we talked about DeepSeek a few months ago and their constraints and some of the ways that they were able to do things. And, and the idea is, if you don't play the game and you stay constrained and you counter position against the competitor, and maybe it means you grow a little bit slower, but you grow with a basically like a tree that's going to be like a stronger foundation on the other side of it. You won't be able to, you won't blow with the wind and you'll have strong principles and then you'll be able to really flourish And you can, you know, big, big build with a Bitcoin treasury. You can accept your revenue, you can raise capital and then hold Bitcoin. So you're naturally, you know, at least extending your life. And then over time, if once you understand those principles, if you want to go play the public markets and let them give you a billion dollars and then you don't go spend that and you know, hire a cat cost and do all these crazy things where reduce your margin, you actually store it at BTC and stay with those fundamental ethos, you actually are building the competitive advantage remote. Nobody's talking about this today. We want to hopefully get Mike Maples and some of these other guys that kind of get Bitcoin. But this is the exciting thing I think for us is as we grow and talk more about these concepts, the traditional venture capitalists Cam duty gets this. We know some other folks that as well, but as this, because there's a lot of things in the, the podcast with Bill and Patrick O'Shaughnessy that were pulled out about like the, the Swenson model is kind of broken because everyone's now in privates. And so there's just not a lot of alpha left in there. Well, it's like, oh shit, man, maybe you should rethink about like the notion of privates were valuable because they're like small axis at the time. And there was, you know, these, these long high upside bets. Well, if everyone's there, it's this notion of like private capital, private debt, you're just pushing people further on the risk curve, which further dilutes the opportunity set, which further dilutes the return profile. If everyone's in there, well, it makes sense that everyone's upside down on their portfolios and nobody takes a step back and like, well, maybe we should play a different game because all the money's telling you to do something else, which is the ultimate video of Bitcoin because you can just play some of your own game if you, if you can't get rubbed because you have the money. So anyway, it's just a fascinating concept. I think we're going to try to explore more. I don't know if you guys have thoughts on any of that. Yeah, I know. I think that's super important to pull out of all of this is like where my mind goes. And this, you know, speaks sort of directly to our entire investment thesis at early riders of like just buying Bitcoin is sort of the most, this is going to sound crazy to normies or other people, but like, it is the most conservative use of capital that exists. And so you're not forced to go do all these crazy things with the money like you just stored in a better form of capital. And you wait until that continues to fortify your balance sheet, allows you more optionality into the future. I think that, you know, these concepts are starting to emerge. I think people have, you know, somewhat Co opted them in terms of like the, you know, Bitcoin is the hurdle rate. All these treasury companies are now saying that and it's become part of their marketing arm of well, why would you buy this pub Co? It's like, well, you need to outperform Bitcoin because it's the hurdle rate. It's like, yes, but like where that's really important is like internalizing as a business, not like from an investment perspective of a pub Co, It's the business itself looking at Bitcoin as the hurdle rate, as the opportunity cost of deploying capital. And so yes, I think that's those are all very important concepts that we need to keep talking about and keep talking about in a nuanced way because it's not just buy my Pub Co to outperform Bitcoin like that. That's sort of a distortion of the core idea in my mind. Yeah, that's, that's definitely right. And there there's kind of two counters or ways to go with this one. I can get like force feeding capital to the Ubers in the list of the world and like some of the AI models. AI I'm not so sure about but like those you have to create your own internal network where you need scale. Same with like Amazon in order to outcompete the other players in the space. But with Bitcoin and Bitcoin infrastructure companies, that's not necessarily the case because you can plug in to just or not necessarily plug in, but depends on the business model. But you're just accessing an open network of you know, anybody who wants to hold Bitcoin, trade it, lend against it, custody, etcetera. And the using Bitcoin as a hurdle rate is a great thing to do and need to do some more work on this. But like, if you are able to provide differentiated products and services while the Bitcoin price appreciates, they're going to be rewarded to an outsized degree because the demand for all the products and services that you're offering just increase accelerates at a rate faster than Bitcoin. Like Coinbase was started at when it was $6. And like, you know, if the price of Bitcoin went down, it would be worth nothing. But it's grown in value over time. And they've made, you know, definitely mistakes along the way. And, you know, if I started a company when Bitcoin was $6, I would have too. But it's only increased substantially in value because of the value of the underlying asset and the demand for all those different services as as well. Yeah, I think that's true like, but I would say it applies to everything because the the counter is like if you look at any corporate treasure that holds like MicroStrategy is a great example. The thesis is MicroStrategy can go build any of the best companies that they want to because they have that much money. And it's just not true because they don't have the confidence. Like I'll take the other side of the person that knows can hire, can build, connect counter position, hold a better form of money and then infuse it into their system no matter if it's financial services or not. Like that's the thing that I think the changes from like real world application versus like theorizing on just building a sustainable, better, slower business. At first they can go do their game, play their game they want. But then over time it reminds me similar like the honor and Bitcoin trust versus the ETFs. Because it's like you can't really compete with Fidelity or BlackRock. So the only way you can play with it, compete with them is to play a different game. As long as you're non consensus, right? Knowing that the market will eventually demand the ability to take delivery of the underlying and also reduce the counterparty risk because it just makes sense if you're going to hold billions of dollars or trillions of dollars. So that's where I think it takes it ties into and also the best people want to work for the people that understand all of that. They, they, you can get somebody 500 billion. It's, it's a greatest heuristic, honestly, because if someone is like, hey, I want to work it on ramp, but I'm looking at micro strategy. It's like, well, you've got a decision, right? It's like, well, if you understand like where this is going, that's who we want. And that person is willing to do anything and take less capital than the other side. That's how you build great businesses and that's the thing like the people that just have never built anything don't fundamentally understand because until you're in the seat, you can explain that to somebody and you see how it works out with the two different people. It always seems like the money will matter, but the money actually doesn't, especially in a world of full of abundance and capital will be infinite. When it comes to dollars and being able to spray an AI, anybody can be able to create anything. It's going to be the actual vision, understanding to being able to recruit the resources. And money can't buy that, including network effects because, like, the money can buy the network effects for a while. But like, you know, I guess Uber got it. But even Uber is a weird case study because of the public markets and having to oust Travis and, like, what that business opportunity was because you can make the case that Uber's like 5% of what they were supposed to be Travis. Yeah. You could also make the You could also make the case that their network effect is about to be infringed upon by Tesla and robo taxis potentially if there's just a fleet of people using their Teslas as Ubers. Yeah. So there's always that competitive risk as well that you could throw as much money as you want at it, but that, you know, doesn't necessarily get get you where you need to be in 10 years. Yeah, I just think it's the wrong game to play regardless. You know, you can't really compete with an Uber by, you know, spending one 100th of the amount of capital as they will. So it's just like, play a different game. Yeah, and but the game doesn't have to be like not doing ride sharing. It's just a different value proper, a different area of the market that you would target. I think. Yeah, it's an interesting deal with the robo taxes because I don't like this isn't even fully baked out. But you can imagine a world where if you were building ride sharing, this is just real time, you know, thinking like, well, if you can remit the payments right after the share, you could do that with Bitcoin theoretically. So you maybe get better drivers, but you can also give somebody back for their in their wallet already if they're held a cabin. That could be like a differentiation. And and a lot of these things maybe don't matter if Bitcoin at a $10,000, but if the bet is I'm building the business with a better treasury that's letting me extend my lot. Again, this goes back to the tree example, deeper roots. And I know where the market's going at 100K and 250K and 500K. Well, then it naturally makes sense to go there. And I think that's the other angle of like the treasury is from the purchasing because a lot of these founders never had any liquidity or any kind of wealth. And so if you're there, the natural thing would have been Uber to buy you because you had some of like this value prop for the client base. But you're just like, well, what I sell, if I'm really happy building what I want to build. And, you know, so it's just, it's a, it's going to be fundamentally it goes back to the being on a different planet, whether it's venture investing or company building. Like somebody that's always just like, gotten a budget in marketing and just said, like, oh, spend off. And, you know, I don't know, half of it's getting, you know, wasted. It's going to be just completely changed when the cost of capital is 21 million. And most people are kind of like ready for that. In the same way most people aren't ready to leverage AI tools and compound them into like, being, you know, doing the work of 100 people. And that's where this whole like Brave New World's gone. Yeah. We're coming coming up on an hour. We want to keep these tight. But one, one headline that you shared slight pivot here, Michael, this pulling this up this gold headline that you shared. What are what are the implications thoughts on this gold politics heat up as Germany and Italy rethink US storage. So it speaks back to, you know, what we're talking about about counterparty risk. It's not just specific to Bitcoin, but gold is the the analog comparison to to think about. Yeah, I mean it, it goes back to what probably you got a coin is like, you know, long volatility and short counterparty risk. You like, the world's going to get more and more chaotic. People are going to be more and more polarizing, and you want to reduce the risk of where your assets are stored. And so it makes complete sense if you hate Orange Man and he says things and he's, you know, in his country or the country you know, he's governing is holding your money. And you seeing what's happened in the past couple of weeks, you saw it happen with Russian treasuries, you're just going to want the asset closer to you. So this makes it makes complete sense. I think like the gold bugs were right this whole time when it came to holding your own gold, taking, you know, the Sprott family positions of being able to take delivery because you want that call option. It's just the it's like that same notion of being too early is the same as being wrong. It's that like the world wasn't, it was more efficient to trust everyone because you could have these paper notes and you could whip them around, But as the market starts to wake up and ask for delivery and people aren't going to be made whole, they're going to demand better products and services. And it's very similar to the treasury stuff. It's like eventually somebody's not going to be made whole or somebody's going to lose the asset, and then everyone's going to wake up and be like, why the hell did we do it this way? Yeah, well said. Anything else boys, before we're up? I think it's it. I think we'll see what the comments look like. Liam loves doing this. What? Did we miss? What did we miss this week? What, what would you like to hear us talk about? If we get no comments, then we know that they they spoken for us and won't be here next week. Then we're we're we're good to go. They'll have to just listen to us on the last trade. Maybe any part parting words. It might be the last last time ever. Any feedback is appreciated and we'll see you next week or two weeks. Sounds good, thanks boys. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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